When it comes to trying to build your business and making money, it all comes down to giving your visitors and prospects lollipops and cookies!

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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Give Them Lollipops And Cookies

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If you’ve ever tried to generate new product ideas and come up dry, this podcast is for you! Today I’m lining up three killer idea generators to help you create the perfect product for your niche or business.

Here’s my notes from this podcast:

1.  Harness the endless supply of targeted information in trade publications, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines to create your next product.

These are ideas that are ready-made for your target audience and waiting for your to exploit!

2.  Compile the expertise of respected experts in your niche or industry.

This is the fastest and easiest way to create an ebook that I’ve every come across.  All you have to do is let others create the content for you!

3.  Let Uncle Sam do all the work for you.

You can get your hands on hundreds of pages of completely free, high quality, already researched content to build your next information product on.  It just doesn’t get any easier than this!

It’s really easy to come up with new ideas for your next product if you open your mind up to the possibilities.  I have more ideas right now than I’ll ever be able to act on and so can you!

Discover How To Find, Re-Package And Sell Public Domain Content As Your Own Moneymaking Information Product — Click Here Now!

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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3 Awesome Idea Generators For Your Next Product

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1. Legally Steal Traffic

Welcome to Arvada’s Answers on this Podcast Wednesday!

Today I want to tell you about a ridiculous joint venture offer I recently received, show you a quick traffic tip for stealing traffic from other people’s sales letters, give you a review of a crappy product I bought this week, and play you an amusing subliminal advertising clip.

The whole podcast only runs about 10 minutes and I’ve posted my notes from the podcast below in case you’d like some to follow along.

Joint Venture Debacle

• I get JV offers frequently, but this one was absolutely ridiculous!
• The product was aweful and the offer was unprofessional (I explain in detail during the podcast)
• If you want to succeed in offering your own JV’s, you’ve got to sell it.  “What’s in it for me?”

Quick Traffic Tip

• Your search engine ranking improves when you have one-way backlinks.
• Most websites won’t give you a link unless it’s in their best interest.
• Submitting genuine testimonials is a great way to get one-way backlinks if you follow my guidelines.

Product Review

• I bought Magic List Bot, but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
• Find details of what it does and why I don’t recommend it in the recording.

Subliminal Messaging Gone Wrong

Sorry, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear this clip.  It’s a cute spoof of how advertisers use subliminal advertising.

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

If you'd like to get more answers to your online business and internet marketing questions, subscribe to Answers eMagazine now!

Legally Steal Traffic

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1. Domains, Taxes, Upselling and Farts

Welcome to Arvada’s Answers on this Podcast Wednesday!

Starting this week, my plan is to produce a weekly online business and marketing podcast. The idea is to provide you with quick marketing tips, news that affects online business, and a little food for thought to get you thinking about how to turn your website into a money-making machine.  I’ve posted my notes from the podcast below in case you’d like some to follow along.

Now let’s get started!

Really Bad Domain Names

I came across a list of really bad website domains and thought I’d share a few of the least raunching ones.

• chooses pain.com

A tourism site for Spain: choose spain.com

• children slaughter.com

Children’s charity: childrens laughter.com

• dollar sex change.com

Currency trading site: dollars exchange.com

• expert sex change.com

Computer advice site: experts exchange.com

• got a hoe.com

Lake Tahoe tourism: go tahoe.com

• the rapist finder.com

California therapists directory: therapist finder.com

• molestation nursery.com

Plant nursery: mole station nursery.com

I guess that just proves that you really need to think about those domains before you buy them!

Amazon Standing Up Against Taxes

Apparently North Carolina is trying to pump up their tax revenue and they’ve decided to require out-of-state digital retailers who sell within North Carolina’s borders to be subject to state sales tax. As a result of this new sales tax, Amazon.com severed their relationship with all their associates in North Carolina.

A friend of mine sent me an email he received from Amazon that went out to their North Carolina affiliates. Here’s what it says:

“We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date…

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.”

I say good for Amazon. Taxing people for online purchases is going to hurt us all as both consumers and online businesses. I hope all the “big boys” of online retail do the same thing and force state goverments to leave online purchases alone.

Arvada’s Answers

Here’s a question that I recently received from a blog subscriber:

“Arvada, can you explain the difference between upselling, cross-selling, and backend selling? Are they all really just the same thing or are they completely completely different? I’m confused.”

Based on a lot of the email and questions that I get, I think a lot of people are confused and don’t understand the difference between upsell, cross-sell, and a backend sale, so here’s a quick and dirty explanation of each term.

The upsell works like this:

After a visitor makes a purchase, but before they’ve actually paid for it, you attempt to upgrade them to a more expensive or more profitable product.

McDonald’s is a perfect example of the upsell when they ask you if you’d like to “super-size” your order. Most people go for the upsell, that’s why a lot of businesses use it.

A cross-sell works like this:

After a visitor makes their purchase, but before they’ve actually paid, you attempt to sell them a complimentary product. Think of the whole, “Would you like fries with that?” thing and you’ll understand the cross sell. Fast food strikes again!

Lastly, there’s the back-end sale.

Back-end sales are when you follow up with your customers at a later time and offer them additional products. In this case, it could be a complementary or related product to something they’ve already purchased from you. For example, if you sold a software program you might want to sell special DVD’s that provide unusual or additional ways to use the software.

When it comes to backend sales, you can also offer products that you believe customers would be interested in, even if they aren’t directly related to the original purchase.

Using any and all of these marketing tactics will improve your income if you learn how to set up your campaigns effectively. You can even use affiliate products to supplement your own offerings.

Comic Relief

I thought I’d end this edition of Arvada’s Answers on Podcast Wednesday with an audio clip that I thought was really funny — although it’s got a little bit of basic schoolboy humor in it.

My nine year old son absolutely loved it!

It’s a spoof advertisement for National Bean Month. I bet you can figure out where we’re going here.

Just imagine how many customers you could gain if you could figure out a way to get their attention. This ad would certainly do it!

[You'll have to listen to the podcast above to hear the clip]

And that’s it for Arvada’s Answers on Podcast Wednesday. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll take the time to post a comment and let me know what you think of this new podcast format.

I’ll see you next week!

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

If you'd like to get more answers to your online business and internet marketing questions, subscribe to Answers eMagazine now!

Domains, Taxes, Upselling and Farts

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1. Legally Steal Traffic

A lot of people who get into article marketing seem to be a little fuzzy about what they are trying to accomplish through this awesome marketing technique.

I hear people talk all the time about selling more, building rapport, adding credibility, etc. but most article writers fail to realize that all those things are simply part of the bonus plan… they’re not the real goal of article marketing.

Don’t get me wrong – more sales, better rapport with customers, and improved credibility are really terrific fringe benefits to article marketing… But that’s not the purpose behind writing articles.

The goal of article marketing is to generate traffic!

Article marketing is simply a free marketing method designed to attract targeted visitors to your website, newsletter, or product.  That’s all… everything else is a bonus!

Article Marketing = Traffic Generation

So if the goal of article marketing is to generate targeted traffic, how does that change the way you go about writing and distributing articles?

1.  Know your target audience and write specifically for them. Of course it makes sense to write articles that will appeal to the people that you’re trying to attract to your website.

For example, if you sell parrot cages you’d want to write articles that speak to people who own or want to own parrots.  Articles about the care of cats wouldn’t really appeal to your target audience.

2.  Don’t forget the keywords. We all know how search engines work and how important it is to use keywords in your website content.  Well, it’s just as important to use keywords in your article marketing.  How do you expect your targeted visitors to find your articles if you don’t use keywords?

It’s like going fishing without the bait!

3.  Give targeted visitors a reason to click through to your site. Even if you’ve written a really great article that’s loaded with keywords that directly appeal to the targeted traffic that you’re trying to gain, they won’t click through to your website if you don’t give them a good reason to!

Spend some time creating a really great resource box for your article that includes an incentive and a call to action.  Give all those targeted visitors a compelling reason to click through!

Article marketing is a really great way to generate targeted traffic to your website… if you keep your eyes on the prize!

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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Article Marketing: What’s REALLY the Goal?

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A few days ago I was lurking on a popular marketing forum where someone asked for autoresponder tips and what they should include in that first autoresponder message after someone signs up for a report.  Apparently, this person already had the rest of the messages pre-written through PLR or some other means and they just didn’t know what to write in that first email.

Surprisingly, one particular person answered the call for help by posting a very long sales letter type email template where they repeatedly asked to be whitelisted, were told that they would be receiving many more messages about a particular product, and where they were given a very detailed pitch for their product.

This template was just dripping with pushy salesmenship.

But the guy who posted it claimed that it worked very well for him… go figure!  What do I know?

Anyway, the post prompted me to create a post of my own where I outline how I usually go about the whole autoresponder/free report thing…  As you might imagine, I go about things a little differently.

Autoresponder Tip #1

I like to keep my email short and sweet.  Generally speaking, I keep my email messages as short as possible. I rarely read one of those long email messages and I figure most other people don’t either.

If you want to know the truth… I usually just click on the links if it looks interesting.

Since that’s the way I look at email as a reader, I approach it in a similar fashion as an email sender.  I write a quick sentence or two along with a link to the rest of the article, online report, etc.

The actual giveaway is where I try to build rapport with my reader… not in the email.

If my teaser sentences in the email are strong, then they’ll click on the link and be interested in what’s being offered. After all, the click through is what I’m after.

Autoresponder Tip #2

Forget about pitching in the email.  If you want to build a long-term relationship with your subscriber, you want to soft-sell or pre-sell them… don’t go in for the kill in the very first message!

That’s one sure way to get them to unsubscribe immediately!

Think of it like this…  You meet someone new at the gym one day and strike up a conversation with them because they look interesting.  Within the first five minutes that new “friend” tries to tell you about the really great product they have to sell and tries to get you to buy one.  How quickly do you think you would run out the door to get away from them???

If it were me, I might even check the parking lot to make sure my new “friend” wasn’t there before I went in for my next workout!

Remember I said in Autoresponder Tip #1 that I’m after the click?  Well, I also want to build a long term relationship with my subscribers… not just get a quick sale.

Autoresponder Tip #3

In the original forum post that prompted this article, the poster was planning on sending out the initial email with the free report and then one message every 15-30 days.

That’s not the way I do it.  I think you have to keep in frequent contact with your new “friends,” otherwise known as subscribers, in order to build a lasting relationship with them.

The first couple of weeks in this new relationship are the most important.

Generally, I send out autoresponder messages for at least the first few days after an initial signup, depending on the niche and the freebie offered. The general idea might look something like this:

Day 1: Here’s your report
Day 2: Did you get your report? If not, here’s the link again.
Day 3: Do you have any questions about the report?
Day 6: You’ve had time to read the report, what do you think?
Day 8: Offer some supplementary information (free) related to report like an article. (Of course there is a product pitch hidden in this supplement)

From there, I dwindle my email messages down to at least once per week… two or three times per week if I can find enough stuff to send out.

So that’s how I think an email campaign should be set up for a free report.  I know there are lots of other opinions out there on how it should be done, but that’s my take.

How do you set up your autoresponders?

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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3 Autoresponder Tips: How Do You Do It?

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You probably never really thought about all the pre-selling tools that are available to today’s online entrepreneur, but technology makes it possible to connect with your potential customers in tons of new ways!

I’ve written about what pre-selling is before, so I won’t go into the details again.  Here’s a short definition to make sure we’re all on the same sheet of music:

In the online world, pre-selling is the art of warming up your visitors, building trust, and putting them in the frame of mind that they want to do business with you.

If you need a more in depth explaination, check out the article, “What is Pre-Selling?”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s start talking about the actual tools you can use to pre-sell your visitors and turn them into customers.

Of course you already know that basic written content is one of the best pre-sellers.  In fact, you probably already write and distribute articles, load your website up with relevant content, and send your content out in a newsletter.  That’s kind of the “standard internet marketing” that everyone does.

So let’s think out of the box a bit and take a look at some of the pre-selling tools that you may not be fully utilizing…

Pre-Selling Tools

1.  Blogs

Well-done blogs go beyond the basic website and take pre-selling a little more seriously.  Generally speaking, blogs show a little more of the personality of the owner than websites do because they’re less formal, more spontaneous, and friendlier.

When you visit some blogs, you feel like you’ve entered the inner sanctum of the writer… this can be a great pre-seller when it’s done correctly!  A great blog that welcomes visitors with a smile can go a long way toward turning visitors into customers.

2. Reviews

It surprises me how few people take advantage of the great pre-selling power of writing reviews.  Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the kind of candy-coated reviews that claim every product is excellent and worth buying or the bogus reviews pre-written by merchants for affiliates.

I’m talking about buying a product and writing a genuine review of what you liked and didn’t like about the product.  Believe it or not, I often sell more of a product when I write a less than stellar review!

People appreciate and reward honesty.

3.  Commenting

I kind of lumped this one all together to mean several different things so this article wouldn’t be soooo long.

Any time you leave a comment on someone’s blog, on a forum, in a message board, at YouTube, etc., you are pre-selling youreself.  It pays to make your comments useful and timely because visitors will often follow the links in those comments to learn more about you.

It’s kind of like pre-selling them on YOU, inviting them to your little part of the world (your website), and then using other pre-selling tools at your disposal to pre-sell them on products that you promote.

4.  Newsletters and Ezines

Newsletters and ezines are a really great pre-selling tool because they give you the opportunity to build rapport with potential customers over the long term.  This long-term relationship with your subscribers allows you to pre-sell them on a wide variety of products and services over the lifetime of the relationship.

5.  Freebies

There are soooo many freebies that you can put together to pre-sell whatever you want to recommend to your visitors.  You can create ebooks, audios, videos, reports, ecourses, or just about any other freebie that you can think of.  Each free product that you create helps to establish a relationship with potential customers and increases your pre-selling potential.

6.  Podcasts

Podcasts are a great way to instantly build rapport with potential customers and establish an immediate relationship.  There’s just something about hearing another human voice, no matter what they’re saying, that establishes an immediate connection.  All you need to do to use this great pre-selling tool is to provide great information.

Just remember, it’s not a radio commercial!

7.  Videos

Just like podcasts, videos are also a great pre-selling tool.  Not only can visitors hear your voice as you’re helping them solve a problem (that ultimately leads to a product available for purchase), but they can also see either you or your visual props in the video to help solidify the message in their minds.

In addition, well-done videos go a long way toward promoting you as a professional who is credible… all worthy goals when you’re pre-selling!

8.  Social Networks

This is probably the most important pre-selling tool in your toolbox because of the very nature of a social network.  Pre-selling and social networks fit together like hand and glove.

In a social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Twitter you’re building a social relationship with others online… the very definition of pre-selling.  In other words, you become friends with others through these social networks, pre-sell them your products, and your “friends” buy the products that you’re pre-selling because you have an established relationship with them.

And that’s my short list of the best pre-selling tools available to online entrepreneurs.  If you aren’t taking advantage of these options, you really owe it to yourself to start taking a look at how you can integrate some of these pre-selling opportunities into your business… especially social networks.

If I’ve missed a really great pre-selling tool here, I hope you’ll let me know!

I can virtually guarantee your pre-selling success
with this one tool… read more.

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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Do You Use These Pre-Selling Tools?

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Recently I received this question from the Ask Arvada Question Line:

“How do you make an ebook from your own PC?”

I figured a video was worth a thousand words… so I created the video below to show you how it works step-by-step:

The Steps…

In the video I assumed that you would want to create an ebook that was in PDF format… which I highly recommend. PDF files can be read on any kind of computer, the reader is free and usually already installed on most computers, and it’s a format that most people are used to using.

Here are the steps that I lay out in the video for those who don’t want to actually watch it:

1. Create your ebook in Microsoft Word.
2. Print your document to Cute PDF Writer.  This is the program I use and I love it.
3. Open up Cute PDF and add your links and other enhancements.
4. Save your changes to the PDF file.
5. Open you ebook up in Adobe Reader and make sure it looks the way you want it to.
6. If you want to make changes, go back to Cute PDF and make the changes.
7. Get your ebook out there!

The whole process is surprisingly quick and easy.

If you have a program that you think is better than Cute PDF, please let me know.  I’m always interested in new and better products that make my life easier!

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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How To Create An eBook From Your PC

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Well, it looks like I spoke too soon about the great customer service over at 1ShoppingCart.com when I did a 1shoppingcart.com review a few months ago.  As a matter of fact, I seriously doubt that I’ll ever do business with them again.  Let me tell you what happened.

You may recall that I signed up for their autoresponder service last November (Here’s a link to the previous 1ShoppingCart.com review). I needed the new autoresponder for a list building method I was testing.  To make a long story short, I ended up having to close the 1ShoppingCart autoresponder because it wasn’t compatible with the test… through no fault on the 1ShoppingCart side.

In order to close the account, I had to call them on the phone and cancel.  In fact, I actually called them to cancel the account the same day that I ordered it.

As I said in my previous post, the young man that I talked to was a pleasure to talk to and said he cancelled the account effective immediately.  He also said that I would never even be charged because I cancelled the same day.

Hindsight is 20/20

On hindsight, I should have written down his name, gotten some kind of cancellation number, or asked for some other kind of proof that he had indeed cancelled the account… but I trusted the friendly voice at the other end of the phone and didn’t get any kind of confirmation.

And so I never really thought about it again.

You may remember that I’d been pretty much out of touch through the last half of December and most of January due to the prolonged death of my father-in-law, so I never really looked at my business credit card statements… I just paid them.

That’s why it really surprised me to receive an email notice on February 5th that 1ShoppingCart was about to charge their monthly fee.

What?!?!?  I cancelled that in November! So then I went back and looked at my credit card statement and found out that they never cancelled the account!

Okay, maybe this was an honest mistake.  I like to give people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.  So I called them up and got a very different picture of 1ShoppingCart.com customer service.

The First Time I Called

The first time I called their billing department to find out what was going on, I ended up talking to a young man named Derick.  He seemed very nice… in fact, I think he was the guy I talked to when I cancelled the account, but I can’t be sure.

Well Derick wasn’t actually in the billing department, so he couldn’t do anything for me.  I actually got the impression that he was just answering the phones while the “real” billing person was away at lunch.

Okay, that’s kind of unprofessional in my opinion, especially of such a “big” organization, but I left my name and number so that the “real” billing person could call me back when she returned to her desk.  According to Derick, Ashley was due back from lunch in about 40 minutes and would call me back.

The Second Time I Called

So I waited about two hours… still no call.  Again, really unprofessional.

I called back a second time and Ashley answered the phone (who wasn’t nearly as friendly as Derick when she answered the phone).  According to her, she didn’t know anything about my previous call.  Instead of asking my to explain the situation, she put me on hold for several minutes to go ask Derick (the guy who forgot to leave a note) about why I had called.

Not cool.

So after several minutes on the phone, Ashley returns and says that she’ll cancel my account immediately and I won’t be charged for February… like that’s all there is to it.  In fact, she seemed completely caught off guard when I told here that I’d already cancelled this account and expected the previous charges to be refunded.

Well, Ashley flatly said that she couldn’t do that.  When I asked why, she had no answer.  After going around and around with her a couple of minutes, it dawned on me that maybe Ashley didn’t actually have the authority to refund my money.

So I asked her… she side-stepped the question.

Well, by this time I’m getting a little frustrated.  Clearly I’m not going to get anywhere with Ashley.  So then I asked to speak to someone who has the authority to issue the refunds.  She claims that no one can give me a refund (but no reason as to why).

“Well then, I’d like to speak to your boss,” I say.

Ashley comes back with a “if you really think that’s necessary” and puts me on hold for several more minutes.  So while I’m sitting on hold waiting for the next guy in the chain, I’m imagining the conversation between Ashley and her boss about how ridiculous my request is and how she’s done everything she could do, etc.  I was almost starting to feel sorry for her because I was absolutely certain that 1ShoppingCart would do the right thing and refund those monthly fees that I shouldn’t have been charged for in the first place.  There was no gray area here as far as I was concerned.

Now I’m Talking To The Boss

So after several minutes on hold, Steven answers the phone.  He never identified his position in the company, so I don’t know if he was Ashley’s boss, a manager of some type, or a janitor… another point of unprofessionalism in my book.

So I flatly ask him, “What can you do for me here?”

Absolutely nothing.  My account has been canceled and will not be charged again (Oh, I’ve heard that one before!)

This is what he said over the course of a several minute conversation:

1.  Steven tells me that there was no note left in my account in November to confirm that I’d canceled. (I guess I’m just supposed to roll over because some minimum wage customer service rep forgot to write it down!)

I challenged him to look at his logs… I’ve never logged into the account since that day in November.

2.  Our service has been available for you to use since November, therefore we have every right to charge you for it. (I guess he forgot about the fact that I canceled the account and therefore revoked his right to charge me anything.  It’s certainly not my problem if they didn’t follow up and deny me access to the account.)

3.  I can’t refund your money past 30 days. (This is an out and out lie.  Anyone who has ever had a merchant account knows that you can easily post refunds to customers well past 30 days.  I’ve personally refunded money over 90 days because a customer had extenuating circumstances.)

As you can probably tell, I was starting to get a little hot at this point… it was all so ridiculous!  I guess that Steven and 1ShoppingCart think that they’re holding all the cards.

So this is what I told Steven, “Look, you’re forcing me into a chargeback situation if you won’t do the right thing here.  That’s a lot of headache for both of us.  You and I both know that credit card companies usually take the side of customers over merchants if there’s any question at all about the validity of the charge.  So if I request a chargeback, it’s going to cost your company a lot more than it would if you simply do the right thing and refund these charges yourself.”

Steven’s response, “You’ll have to do whatever you need to do.  There’s no need to threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat, it’s reality.  Plus the fact that I will be sure to tell everyone that I can possibly tell about how your company does business and how it treats it’s customers.  That’s a lot of ill-will for your company.”

Steven clearly didn’t care about his company’s reputation.

I asked him if that was his final word on the issue… he said it was.

So Here We Are

So now here we are… spending a lot of time talking about how poorly a company handled a very simple customer problem.  I bet I’m not the first to run into this problem with them… but maybe my post here will make me the last.

I sure hope so.

I’ve disbuted all the charges from 1ShoppingCart.com with my credit card company.  It can take several weeks to hear back on these kinds of things, so I’ll let you know if I get my money back or not.

If I do get my money back, 1ShoppingCart.com will have to refund my money ($29.95) plus they will be charged a $25 chargeback fee for each unauthorized charge.  I’m pretty sure I’ll get part of it back, but my credit card company may not refund my November charges because it was more than 60 days ago… we’ll have to wait and see.

At this point, it’s not so much about the money as it is about the principle of the issue.

What ever happened to “The Customer Is Always Right?”

1ShoppingCart.com has been around a long time, so maybe they think that they can afford to create bad feelings with their customers.

You know the old addage, “A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy one tells 10 friends.”

Now that we have the internet, it’s possible to tell thousands of people about a bad experience with a company… not just 10.  I guess the “customer service” people over at 1ShoppingCart.com forgot about that.

Some Pointers…

1.  Log every call you make to other companies… especially when it has to do with billing.

This is something that I used to do in the old days when more was handled by phone.  I’ve since gotten out of the practice because most of my correspondence is through email.

2.  Always write down who you talked to, their number or extension, and any promises they made.

3.  Ask for a reference number whenever possible.

Following these simple steps will let the person you’re talking to know that you will hold them personally accountable for the conversation and it will provide you with the information you need to back up your claims later if there is a problem.

I sure wish I’d followed my own advice on this one!

So, what do you think?

Am I completely off-base on this one or did I hit the nail on the head?

Should I have just paid their fees and dropped it?

Was writing this post a mistake or a notice to others to use caution?

Arvada on iTunes!

Update on 2/11/09

When I checked my email this morning the little gem below was waiting for me.  I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Michael from 1ShoppingCart.com emailed me this note:

“Hi Arvada,

I looked into your accounts on 1ShoppingCart and found the source of your account closure problem.

It looks like you actually had 2 active accounts on our system as of November 2008, one registered as an affiliate account, and the other as an autoresponder account (actually, I found 3 others that look like yours also, two opened at the end of 2003, and one in 2005, all expired or closed)

On November 13th, Derrick closed the affiliate account and either didn’t find, or didn’t know about the other account, which stayed open and continued to bill you.

I have verified that your AR package account has now been closed, and I’ve refunded the latest transaction on the account. We will have to mail you a check for the first $29 payment though, and will send it to the address you have on file.  Unfortunately it’s true that we can only refund within 30 days from our application and anything beyond 30 days we have to send a check for.

And while either of us could be at fault for the confusion over the multiple accounts, you should never have received the experience you did when calling in to follow-up with this issue.  For that I’d like to apologize and assure you that our management team will be taking this up with the staff involved.

If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know.”

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

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Complete hype.  You now that, but that’s what got my attention in the first place when I was browsing the Warrior Forum yesterday.

So of course I clicked on the forum post and found out that the post was meant to be sarcastic.  Then I started reading the responses from other Warriors and was completely appalled with the lack of integrity of some of the posters.  The video below is my rant on the subject:

And here is the Podcast of the video (so you can take it to the gym or something instead of being tied to the computer! )

And for those who don’t like audio/video (or the sound of my voice totally annoys you), here’s a rundown of what I had to say:

1.  If you want to make money online, you probably shouldn’t be in the internet marketing niche.

Internet marketing is used in every niche to promote websites, you don’t have to promote internet marketing in order to USE internet marketing.  In fact, every business on and off line is actually in the business of marketing, whether they realize it or not.

In my opinion, it’s much better to be a big fish in a small pond by applying yourself to a small niche rather than being a tiny fish in an ocean of competition… as you are in the internet marketing niche.

Real money is made online by everyday people who find a niche, completely dominate that niche, monetize that niche, profit from that niche, and then move on to a new niche and do the same thing over and over and over again.

2.  Long term income and longevity online comes from being original.

It’s not okay to copy other ebooks and rehash them to make your own product… but you can use other’s work as the inspiration for your own original products.

Rehashing old ebooks isn’t working as well for “gurus” as it used to because the online community is finally starting to wise up.  No one wants to pay $50, $60, $100 for a twenty page report that contains the same information that they could find online with a little searching.

3.  You can’t just throw in the towel when it gets tough!

If what you’re doing isn’t working, you’ve got to track it, analyze it, research it, study it, until you figure out why.  It just doesn’t make sense to repeatedly throw in the towel, start over, and move to something else when you don’t immediately make thousands of dollars online.

Proactive Steps You Can Take:

1. Track and analyze everything on your website so you can determine what’s working and what isn’t for your business.

2. Master a marketing strategy before you move on to another one. In article marketing, for example, you wouldn’t do five or six articles and then move on.  You’d need to do hundreds of articles over months before you could say that that marketing method doesn’t work for you.

3.  Realize that earning substantial revenue online takes time.

4.  Don’t be schizophrenic with your business. Make a plan, stick to your plan, and be consistent with your marketing.  You can’t jump around from idea to idea… you need to focus on one goal at a time.

5.  Find a mentor. Mentors can be extremely helpful in helping you fix whatever might be broken in your business.  In addition, if you can find a mentor in your niche you may be able to piggy back off them and become successful more quickly.

6.  Believe in yourself and don’t let yourself get negative. The world is full of people who try something for a week, claim it doesn’t work, and then tell everyone who will listen that the idea is crap.

Don’t let yourself become one of those people.  Those kinds of people spend their entire lives being victims and blaming others for why they aren’t happy and successful.  Life’s too short for that!

So that’s my big rant for today… what do you think?

Post from: Arvada Yates at iMarketingWatch.com

If you'd like to get more answers to your online business and internet marketing questions, subscribe to Answers eMagazine now!

“I know the secret to internet marketing!”

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