Before You Act ...
Free Internet Marketing Tips

Some things to think about; they'll save you time, or hassle, or money.

1. Concerning the e-mail address you give to Internet Marketers

If you dive into Internet Marketing, you will inevitably give your e-mail address to a lot of different people, to subscribe to newsletters or to get access to free reports or similar. Not only will you (because they are experts in persuading you to do so!), but you should, too; there is a lot of extremely valuable information in their “freebies,” not the least of which is to simply watch them in action – scrutinize their sales pages, look at how they use pop-ups or the equivalent, examine what they say that creates a sense of “I must have it!” inside you, or even better “I must have it NOW!” Observe how they get your e-mail address, and why you decided it was a fair exchange. See how they use autoresponders, how their subject line on e-mails is crafted, what they are doing to prevent e-mails being killed by Spam filters, how their e-mails are framed in terms of content and offers, and so on.

BUT! Do not, DO NOT, give out your “bread and butter” e-mail address to everybody. While 100% of the real professionals won’t dream of “selling” your e-mail address to Spammers, and while their “unsubscribe” links really do work if you choose to unsubscribe… you don’t always know who you’re dealing with. So don’t take a chance. I signed up for a lot of freebie stuff in a promotion managed by a solid professional last year and my Spam mail ballooned within 7 days. One of the participants wasn’t as ethically clean with his practices as the others.

So here’s what you do.

Either register one or more free addresses with Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com, where you can have unlimited accounts; or else do what I do – pay a small (very small) monthly fee for the privacy services at Cotse.com.

Their e-mail service enables you to have unlimited aliases at any of a wide variety of e-mail address domains, and you can make the alias up on the fly! So, for example, say you choose your user name to be “grunge1212” when you join Cotse; and say you choose one of their domains to be your main one, I’ll make one up called wobbledegook.net.

Your e-mail address can then become (for example): anything@grunge1212.wobbledegook.net. (You are actually offered a variety of domain names that sound more business like than “wobbledegook.net,” incidentally.)

This way, when you give your e-mail address to a guru called Fred Bloggs, for example, for a product called “Instant Billions,” you can give him any of the following e-mail addresses;  bloggs@grunge1212.wobbledegook.net or  billions@grunge1212.wobbledegook.net.  Or fredbloggs@ etc or fredsbillions@ etc. And so on. Different for every subscription you make, different for every offer you check out. All you have to do is go into your cotse account and set up the e-mail forwarding so that anything whatsoever @grunge1212.wobbledegook.net gets forwarded to your regular e-mail address.

This gives you the ability to set your filters to junk incoming e-mail from that address, or to go into Cotse and “turn off” any incoming e-mails from that address, if someone becomes an unwelcomed mailer, and you find you can’t unsubscribe. You can also see who sells or passes on your e-mail address to others, incidentally.

By the way … most of the professionals would remove a soft and dangly component of their body with a dull knife before they’d sell your e-mail address. From a purely commercial perspective your value to them is waaaaay greater than what they can earn by selling your name to a spammer. When you trust them, your value is greater still. And they know they’d be stupid to do anything to violate that trust. And at a purely personal level, these guys hate Spammers with a passion; their profits are seriously hurt as a result of the consequences of the proliferation of Spam.

2. Concerning e-mail addresses on your web site

If you include an e-mail address on your web site you’ll soon find it’s been “harvested” by a “bot” and you’ll start getting floods of Spam.

To avoid this, you have two common approaches.

1. You can use a graphics program to create a jpeg or gif file with your e-mail address on it. This way, it cannot be harvested by a “bot.” 'Bots can’t (don’t) read the text on graphics files.

For example, here’s an e-mail address for  . It’s in the form of a graphic, it can’t be harvested by a 'bot. The negative is, people can't just click on your link to e-mail you (only a negative if you actually want people to contact you!). They have to physically key-in your address.

2. The alternative is to code your e-mail address so it’s unrecognizable to a ‘bot. You can get the code here: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html. This is one of many websites providing a similar service, all free. You just plug-in your e-mail address and you get the code to cut and paste onto your site. (Incidentally, I tested this using a Cotse address to confirm it wasn't a trick to harvest some e-mails for spam purposes.)

3. Concerning domain name Registration

When you register a domain name, you have to provide a great deal of information including your name, company name if appropriate, address, e-mail address, etc. This information, too, can be harvested by a ‘bot; or, looked-up by anyone who wants to know the details of the ownership of your site. All they have to do is go to (for example) http://www.whois.com/ and enter your web address and they can see all the details.

This might be perfectly OK with you. But, if you want to retain privacy, choose a domain registration service like GoDaddy or 1&1 where you can have your domain registration protect your personal information. You become anonymous. 1&1 don't charge for this, which is great; they are much less expensive than GoDaddy, and therefore a great deal if you are only managing a handful of sites. If you are managing a lot of sites, registering 50 or 100 domains at a time then mass-setting nameservers to point to a different host, then GoDaddy has advantages that justify the expense; they handle mass-management better than 1&1 ... although I hear 1and1 are heading in the right direction in the near future.

However, be aware, there MIGHT be a negative to the anonymous registration. It has been rumored that Google penalizes anonymously registered domain names with lower rankings … no-one outside of Google knows for sure whether this is true or just one of many Google rumors. On average there are about a gazillion new Google rumors per day.

4. Concerning a 3-dimensional filing system

If you’re a completely organized human being, you don’t need this. But if you’re anything like me, your 3-dimensional filing system means you have piles of stuff all through your office, and scores of slips of paper containing random but valuable notes distributed throughout these piles.

If you get into Internet Marketing, you’ll be FLOODED with many, many more little bits of random data. Useful product names, web sites, people’s names, ideas that strike you, phone numbers of people who interrupt your browsing when you’re concentrating, log-in data to membership sites, and etc.

I could advise you to simply get organized. But I know it doesn’t work. So here’s the next best thing.

Download a free but PRICELESS piece of software called keynote. Install it. Learn it. And from thence forward (I've been looking to use "thence" in a sentence since 6th grade), use it to keep every little piece of data in a single, search-able location. You can open unlimited files, have unlimited notes in each file, have unlimited entries on each note, have indented “nodes” for each topic , etc.

I don’t know how I’d live without this piece of software. Within 48 hours this software became the cornerstone of my professional and personal life. I love my family dearly but if my house caught fire I’d start looking out for my wife and kids after making sure I had e-mailed a backup copy of my keynote file to my webmail account.

• If you use Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, NetCaptor or Opera as your Web Browser, buy a piece of software called Linkstash. The first thing to recognize is, you’re going to discover 100’s, even 1000’s of useful links as you get into Internet Marketing and you simply never know when you’ll need them. I finally got completely ticked off at the appalling lack of functionality in the “Favourites” or “Bookmarks” functions of the conventional Browsers, did a lot of research, and Linkstash is the answer to an Internet Marketers dream. You can capture addresses, create folders, add comments, sort, move stuff around, and search, … all so easily it makes me even more angry that the Browser manufacturers didn’t provide this service. It simply integrates into the Browser toolbar. And it’s inexpensive.
  
  
• Consider buying another piece of software called Roboform. My need for tracking passwords and log-ins exploded as I got involved with more subscription sites, server-side software applications, tracking software, you name it. Now, you CAN keep all these on Keynote. And you can encrypt your keynote file to keep the information safe against computer theft. But Roboform is designed specifically for making password and log-in simple and secure, and it does a great job. It does a lot more, too; it's essential software as far as I'm concerned.

5. Concerning your buying habits

The gurus will tell you that if you want to make a fortune, find a market with the following characteristics:

•  Large numbers of people
•  Irrationally passionate people
•  People with disposable income that
  •  Have their own language
  •  Have their own publications
  •  Have their own events
  •  Have their own celebrities
  •  Have their own subculture or community
•  People that are addictive (and addicted)
•  People that are repeat buyers

Now, if you are here … you are probably a good candidate to be considered one of these people, by Internet marketers! I know I am.

And that makes you vulnerable … because these guys, the pro marketers selling to people who want to make money on the ‘Net, are good. Damned good! And they know how to squeeze your greed glands till you can’t wait to get your credit card out and buy something.

Don’t get me wrong: you SHOULD buy some things. This whole site is aimed at directing you to the various opportunities, for heaven’s sake, and I recommend a lot of good stuff here.

Just be aware that beyond what you need for some fundamental learning, once you’ve identified an opportunity path that appeals to you, if the lack of something isn’t an immediate obstacle, don’t buy it yet!

I’ve tried to be careful … but I probably have more than $1000 of software or services that I’ve bought and still am not in a position to take advantage of. I bought it because the price was going to go up (how often will I fall this? Damn it, I USE this tactic myself yet I'm still a sucker for it) and I knew I’d need it later, or because there was limited availability and no-one else offered anything like this, or because … well, because it was just so darn neat!

But what I’ve learned is that the price MIGHT go up, but it often doesn’t. And even if it does, you might have been able to use the cash to buy something that you DID need right now, that would actually have made you the money to pay the extra later.

And, yes it really MIGHT get taken off the market soon … the pros really do this, by the way, sometimes at least. But most often (there are a couple of big exceptions) it does come back on to the market, later. Or else, someone comes up with a knock-off version within a few weeks that does the job just fine. Or even does a better job.

And yes, it might be neat, but, ... is it, this minute, inhibiting you from moving forward? (Or is it just that we wants it, my preshusss?)

It’s very easy to become a “latest new thing” groupie, and waste not only a lot of money but also a lot of time. It's very common to see the question asked in Forums "I already own Product X but now I see product Y has been launched, what does it have that Product X doesn't?" and the veterans always reply by asking, "Are you using your Product X?" Because 9 times out of 10, they aren't. They're just hooked.

6. Concerning Google Adwords research

If you do a Google search, the ads you see on the right hand side of the results page are dependent on where you are. For example, if you live in the USA and search on "Mortgage Broker" you’ll  get different Adword Ads than someone based in England, for example. In fact, someone in Boston, MA will get different results from someone searching from Buzzard’s Breath, Wyoming.

If you’re not in the USA but want to see US ads, then you need to first browse to what’s called a proxy site; then tell it to take you to http://www.google.com/. It is important to use a US-based Proxy site! This “fools” Google into believing you are from the USA and you see the real thing. I use:  http://www.urlencoded.com/ … it definitely causes US based ads to be shown, but I'm not sure which part of the US this pulls in ads for - Texas, I think.