• @Chris_Vendilli Congrats to your Penns – I’m pulling for em! #

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In the last few days I have expanded my web 2.0 marketing presence.

I am now using the Twitter tool – Twhirl. Twhirl is a cool desktop tool that makes it easy to monitor tweets without having a browser open, in an unobtrusive way.

Once installed Twhirl sites in the system tray, and will popup a little twitter notification in the bottom right of the screen for a few seconds. You can see who twittered, and what was twittered about and then decide if you want open the small Twhirl window and follow the tweets.

Twhirl also makes it very easy to reply to followers from your desktop.

I really wasn’t sure if I would like Twhirl because I have tried several Twitter related apps, and never ended up using any of them. However, I am finding myself being dependant on Twhirl so this is probably one I will keep long term.

I have also registered with a great new free service – FriendFeed.com. FriendFeed is an online community service, that creates a page for you with several of your favorite web 2.0 service feeds.

It’s like a personal feed mashup that you can use to display all of your feeds in one place. It’s a place where people can really see all that you are doing, or you can see all that others are doing.

For example, you can see my FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/ecompeak and see my Twitters, my Blogs Posts, my Stumbles, my Diggs, my Youtube videos and favorites, and more.

You can also follow other members and see what they are doing. Get signed up with FriendFeed and add me as a friend.

One thing that is really cool about Friendfeed, is that it creates a feed of your Friendfeed compiled feeds. You could use this feed on your other websites, on your Squidoo lens and anywhere else you can submit feeds – like rss feed directories

Submitting your RSS feeds to RSS directories is a great way to build high quality backlinks, and backlinks are good for SEO.

I love RSS feeds – I’m sure you know that all of your blogs have RSS feeds. All of your Wordpress blogs, Squidoo lens, Hubpages, YouTube videos, Flicker photos – they all have RSS feeds that can be submitted to RSS directories.

The thing is, you need to know what RSS directories to submit to, and it’s time consuming to submit them.

A guy I’ve been watching online for a while, has just developed a tool that will automatically submit your feeds to over 20 feed directories. Okay, I’m not a fan of the name Badassrss, but the rss tool saves a ton of time.

The best part is, you can try it our for a $1. I suggest you give it a try for a buck, submit the feeds from your favorite blogs or services and see if it’s something you need long term.

You can get the $1 Trial Here!

These are 3 tools that I have added to my Web 2.0 arsenal and will be using on a daily basis.

Mike

• @suziecheel Thanks for following. You can find out more about me here: http://www.ecompeak.com/blog #

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• Wow – a wild weather day. Had a big tornado hit Windsor, CO – about 15 miles east of here – very unusual! #

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It’s almost time for the second year of the 30 Day Challenge

For those of you who haven’t experienced the phenomenon of the FREE 30 Day Challenge, let me give you a little history lesson.

A couple of Aussies, Ed Dale and Dan Raine, decided to put together a training course on how to make money from home using the internet. The idea was, they were going to give you training, ideas and tools to help you make a minimum of $10 in 30 days.

I don’t know how I ran into the 30 Day Challenge last year, but I decided to join. I had already had quite a bit of internet marketing experience prior the 30 DC, but their “challenge” was intriguing, so I joined.

The training was some of the best free training I have ever had online. Most of the training was done via podcasts and videos.

We were taken through the process of identifying and testing niches that might prove to be profitable. Their simple plan made the most sense of anything I had previously tried to identify niches. I still use their techniques almost a year later.

We were then taught how to create quality content (you must have quality content to succeed online), taught how to create free content sites, and taught how to get traffic to those sites for free.

Another highlight for me was learning more about social networking – web 2.0 stuff. Ed Dale of the 30 Day Challenge probably knows more about social networking that anyone else I know.

You may have heard of this web 2.0 tool called Twitter? If you haven’t heard of Twitter your internet marketing education is lacking, and you definitely need the 30 Day Challenge. Ed introduced us to Twitter almost a year ago, before it became the “talk of the town” that it is today.

The 30 Day Challenge exploded – I know Ed and Dan were blown away on how fast the 30 DC grew. In fact the explosive growth caused a few problems for 30 DC participants, like the Tumblr thing.

What’s even more amazing is that people are still joining the 30 DC, and going through the training program (It’s still online) almost a year later. And, I know Ed and Dale aren’t even promoting it.

The 30 Day Challenge became so popular because of the quality of training that was provided. No matter how much, or how little, internet experience people had going into the 30 DC, I’m sure most learned a great deal.

So, I’m getting ready for the next 30 Day Challenge. Pre-Season starts June 1st, and I want you to join us.

One thing that is really great about the 30 DC is you are encouraged to work in small teams. So, I want to put together a team, and help my team members as much as I can.

Ultimately, I would like to find a group of people who would like to form long term business relationships in the internet marketing arena.

I don’t really care how much, or how little, internet marketing experience you have, since we all have unique gifts and talents we can bring into the team.

Just get signed up for the 30 DC here, and then let me know you want to be part of the team. So, here is what you need to do:

1. Sign Up for the 30 Day Challenge

2. Let me know you want to be part of the team by adding a comment to this post.

3. Get signed up with Twitter

4. Follow me on Twitter

5. Let me know if you need help by using my Helpdesk – be sure to choose the 30 Day Challenge department.

I look forward to working with you and getting to know you!

Mike

As a Clickbank vendor I have always known that a real weakness with Clickbank is their thank you page requirements. Because of those requirements it’s possible for search engines to find your Clickbank thank you page. Then anyone who does the right Google search can find your thank you page and download your product for free.

This has lead to a lot of Clickbank thank you page theft.

I thought I was immune to this since I because I used cryptic names for download folders and download file names. Plus I used the robots.txt file to keep the search engines from finding my download page.

I knew there we download protection scripts that were supposed to protect your Clickbank downloads from theft, but I didn’t think I needed them.

Well, while checking my web site stats in cpanel, I noticed a large number of search terms that lead me to believe that people were searching for my Clickbank thank you page.

I took those search terms and typed them into Google and then looked for my Clickbank product domain name. Sure enough, there was my download page for anyone to find, to goto, and to steal my product.

It’s hard to say how many people actually went to the page and downloaded the products. Out of around 70 searches, how many stole my products? It’s hard to say, but I’m sure I lost some money and could have potentially lost a lot more.

So, to remedy this, I did a couple of things.

First, I changed my download folder.

There is a standard bit of text that Clickbank likes to see on your thank you page. That required text is part of the problem. I’m not going to mention that text here, because I don’t want people searching for it.

So, I took that text from my thank you page and turned it into an image instead of text. I then changed my thank you page to use the image, so search engines can no longer find that text.

I need to find a good thank you page protector that works with Clickbank for long term protection, but hopefully the above will work for now.

Since my old thank you page was now listed in the search engines and people were going there to get a “free” product, I decided to try to turn that page into something good.

I turned it into a lead capture page. Basically, I tell them they have been caught trying to steal my product. Then I explain I am not angry and to reward their resourcefulness, I offer them a real free product in exchange for an email address.

You can see that page here:

http://www.affiliate-payday.com/hlg-dn/

We’ll see how that goes.

So, I can think of a couple of lessons to be learned from this incident.
1. If you are a Clickbank vendor, you need to be aware of how insecure your thank you page could be.
2. Check those web stats at least monthly and look for unusual activity.

Mike

In the past month I have seen two different internet marketers offering intern programs.

Here’s how they were presented.

You sign up for the free internet marketing intern program, and the internet marketer would teach you how to market. As an intern you would be given marketing tasks promoting the internet marketer’s products. In return the intern would learn how to market and then could move on and market anything they wanted.

Sounds like a win-win. Instead of buying an internet marketing course, the intern gets the training for free. The internet marketer gets help promoting their products.

Plus, at the end of the program, the best intern would have the opportunity to work closely with the internet marketer in the future.

I signed up to one of these program to see what it was really all about.

The internet marketer had a series of emails setup, directing you to perform certain tasks. The interns were required to email the internet marketer certain pieces of information related to the task.

That kept the interns on task and accountable, plus it helped the internet marketer know who was working and it helped to monitor results from each intern.

The intern tasks I received were reasonable and valid. The only reason I didn’t stick with the program was because the tasks were nothing new, knowledge wise, for me. Since I had the knowledge it didn’t make much sense for me to spend my time building a business for someone else.

If the internet marketer let me be an intern and promote his products as an affiliate, I may have stuck with it. But, since I wasn’t even going to make a commission it didn’t make sense to me.

So, I got to thinking about this whole intern process, because it really is a great idea.

If I start an intern program, for free, and have the interns market my products as an affiliate, is it really still an intern program?

This approach seems much better to me. The interns are working to help sell my products, which is good for me. In return the intern is learning internet marketing and has the potential to make commissions.

This seems like the ultimate win-win to me.

But, if the interns have the potential to earn as affiliates, then aren’t I just doing a great job of helping my affiliates succeed? It’s really just great affiliate support – right? Is it okay to call it an intern program?

See what happens when I start thinking too much.

Let me know what you think – maybe I’ll start in intern program, if there’s enough interest.

Mike

Wow, I just did an inventory on the domain names that I own. These are domain names that I have purchased over the last 6-7 years, having plans to do something great with them. Unfortunately, I have more domains than I have time to dedicate to each one of them.

I discovered that I own about 65 domain names. I state “about” because I’m afraid I may have a few stray domains registered with a registrar that I don’t know about. Let that be a lesson, make sure you document domain names you buy and who they are registered with.

I have utilized a number of these domains, but I have also neglected a number and done nothing with too many of them

Some domains were pointed to web pages, affiliate products etc. that are dead. Some domains had absolutely no content on them, or I created and index page that stated “coming soon”. What a waste of domain real estate.

I suggest you take an inventory of your domains. Put their names, registrar service, expiration dates and any notes related to that domain all in one place, like a spreadsheet. I also added which web host the domain was pointing to, since I use a few different web hosting services.

Make sure you visit each domain. If you have more than 20 or so domains, I think you’ll be surprised where some of them point.

If you have domains going nowhere, I have a suggestion on how to easily turn those domains into money making sites.

1. Point the domains to one of your web hosts that has some disk space available.
2. Get the VideoClipMinisite Free Website Builders Software.
3. Easily Create Video sites containing Adsense for income generation.

Here’s an example of what you can create in seconds.
http://adoptionclicks.com/

I will be doing this with domain names that I plan on keeping. But, I also have a number of domains that I think I will put up for sale.

In fact, here are a few that I would be willing to sell. Some of them contain content that may also be for sale. To learn more or make an offer, go to http://mymmu.com/support and submit a support ticket.
Make sure and select “Domains For Sale” for the Department.

http://winmlm.com
http://elitemlm.com
http://elitemlm.net
http://elitemlm.biz
http://easystepsystem.com
http://mybetteruniverse.com
http://websote.com
http://websute.com
http://homebizfind.com
http://investseeker.com
http://adoptionclick.com
http://flipitguide.com
http://cbsellerpro.com
http://knowitalljerk.com

Okay, go get your domain inventory done!

Mike

Have you ever bought a product because of the guarantee? Hey, you can make $xxx in xx days, and if you don’t we’ll refund your money! Or, if you’re not completely satisfied with our product, we will refund your money no questions asked. You have nothing to lose by purchasing – right?

I recently purchased a high dollar product from a big time internet marketer (who shall remain nameless for now) with a great guarantee – or so I thought.

His guarantee was in summary – We guarantee you will make $xxxx in xx days. If you don’t, let us know what you did and we’ll work with you until you make $xxxx or we’ll refund your money. Wow, that sounds like a great guarantee.

But, here’s the problem. I have discovered that after receiving the product and learning more about it, some people realized that this product was just not for them. So, they have asked for a refund. But, this guru marketer is challenging their refund request because the customers have not tried to make it work. Since they have not “tried” to make it work, they are not due a refund.

I am AMAZED at this lack of integrity by this marketer – are you kidding me? People, who after learning more about the product realize that they either don’t want to try to make it work, or think they can’t make it work. They simply want their money back, and to move on. But this internet marketer is making it very difficult for them to get their money back.

I know one such customer decided to give in and try the product, even though he really doesn’t want it. He gave in thinking he would try it for 60 days and then ask for his money back.

But, I got to thinking about this. The guarantee states “after 60 days let us know what you did and we’ll help you or refund your money”. What if this customer does nothing? Or what if I work the program, but not in the fashion this marketer tells me I was supposed to? Will this big time marketer challenge that we did not meet the parameters of the guarantee? Will he then help us, or refund our money?

It’s really too bad that we as buying customers have to read between the lines of guarantees when purchasing online. This type of guarantee will only hurt internet marketing in the long run.

So, be careful when buying a product based on a good guarantee – especially a high dollar product!

Mike