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What Would you Like me to Talk About?

March 27th, 2008 | 20 comments

With so many different business models within the Internet Marketing field it’s easy to go “off track” with the interests of your viewers. What is important for my business model may not be as important for your business model and vise versa.

With that in mind and at the advice of a good friend of mine, Victor Edson, I’d like to ask you what topics would you like me to cover on the blog?

Just let me know in the comment field of this post. I can’t promise to cover every request, but I can promise to keep them all in mind!

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20 comments

Ryan (5 comments.)
28th March, 2008 at 1:13 am

Hi Josh.

Since you have a few years under your belt and are doing this full time, it would be cool to hear you talk about what you’d do if you were just starting out right now — knowing what you know now.

Thanks!

- Ryan
Charlie
28th March, 2008 at 5:42 am

Josh,
I’m in learning mode right now, so I’m more interested in some of the technical aspects of marketing. One thing I have recently come across is this thing with php redirects for affiliate links. I think I get what this is, but it’s not very clear and I think it deserves a nice detailed post. Also cookies, how do these work and why are they important when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Thanks.
wale
28th March, 2008 at 11:00 am

Josh,

how can one starts ebay affiliate program?
Vern (15 comments.)
28th March, 2008 at 3:54 pm

hey Josh! sorry for the initial waste of blog comment space. Just wanted to drop by and say ‘HI’

I’d wish that webdiggin and perhaps chuck or caroline or mark mason should ask here.

So, I can avoid duplicate questions from the guys. Would love to check this from time to time.

Cheers,
Vern
Mark Mason (29 comments.)
28th March, 2008 at 8:39 pm

Well, my question would be what is your pick for the Final Four?

Seriously, I would like to see some posts on the following topics:

1. What do you mean by ethical marketing, why is that important to the industry, and why is that important to you personally?

2. The AMD and SEO products are excellent. Both document well the importance of backlinks. What about Link Directories? Are they useful for backlinks? How can we be sure (is there some data or a way to study this)?

3. How will LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) impat article marketing. Will google derate the importance of backlinks?

4. I wouldn’t mind hearing some off-topic stories about the 3 I.D.

5. I’d like to understand 3 things that your readers could do to help you. You do a lot to help others. If you had 3 wishes, what would they be? Your readers (me, at least) appreciate your helpful nature.

That’s all I have for now.
Josh Spaulding
28th March, 2008 at 9:12 pm

@ Everyone - Thanks for your input. I’ve taken some ideas and written them down for future blog posts.

Below are a few questions I can answer right now. If I skipped your question that means I’ll be writing a blog post about it in the future

@ Wale - Unfortunately I’ve never ventured into Ebay other than for personal auctions, so I won’t be able to give a good answer to that. However, you can read about their affiliate program here.

@ Vern - Hi

@ Mark - IU Since they aren’t in it I guess no one lol

1. There is a trend with Internet Marketing and marketing in general for that matter of lies and deception. There’s nothing that gets to me more than a shady salesman who will tell me anything to give him money.

I’ve always believed that honesty will bring in more sales, but more importantly it will HELP people! I’m not perfect, but I’ve never understood how so many people in this world can hurt people and still sleep at night.

So my choice to do things ethically was decided due to both of those points.

If something may hurt someone either directly or indirectly I strongly believe it should be avoided.

In regards to ethical Internet Marketing; telling people a product is the best thing since sliced bread because it has a good affiliate program is unethical.

Stealing other people’s content and work in an attempt to prosper is unethical.

Creating and selling a product that you honestly wouldn’t recommend to your own family is unethical.

etc. etc. the list goes on and on.

Like I said, I’m not perfect and if someone looked hard enough they could probably find old traces of things I’ve done online that were unethical, but I’m lived and learned and always try to do the right thing and at least correct those wrongs I’ve done in the past if possible.

2. Thanks for the compliments on the reports, I’m glad you found them useful!

Now that you mention web directories I remember your email…sorry I completely forgot about that.

I don’t think web directories are completely worthless, but most of them will not do you a whole lot of good in my experience.

Obviously there are a select few (DMOZ, Yahoo Directory) that will provide some solid backlinks and votes of authority, but a good majority of them are only good for the indexing of sites/pages.

I haven’t personally done any extensive testing of this theory though. It would be interesting to see the effects and strength of links within web directories with a brand new site and document it’s growth/rankings.

3. LSI is something I did quite a bit of research on last year and I truly believe that it is one of the best things to be implemented by Google in a very long time.

To me, ignoring the technicalities it means we need to concentrate more on providing informative content and less on a set keyword density. I don’t believe LSI will cause backlinks to be looked at any differently. Link analysis is a very effective way in determining the authority and relevance of a web page. However, I’m not a tech junky and don’t know the exact workings of the SE algorithms. I just know what I’ve seen with my own articles and content and that is that “natural” content seems to do just as well as keyword stuffed content and in some cases it does even better.

4. Here’s one

5. I don’t expect anything from my readers. I earn a good income indirectly by helping them. I’m just happy to have the opportunity to help others and do well for my family as a result.
Abhishek (3 comments.)
28th March, 2008 at 11:15 pm

Josh,
Having read your seo report, i would like to read advanced seo techniques on your blog.
Either on site optimization or off site optimization. You choose or both!
Webdiggin (12 comments.)
29th March, 2008 at 8:22 am

Wow, Vern. Appreciate that you thought my questions might be good.

Wow, Josh. This is a dream come true. It’s like a private consultation coaching session as an open classroom. I can’t wait to tuck a few years under my belt before I can start to follow in your footsteps. (I can’t wait to hear the questions that your other readers have, to eavesdrop on the learning.)

K. Topics that I’d love to hear your perspective on…

1. Using PPC search engines to drive affiliate marketing campaigns a la Affiliate Millions by Robert Borelli (sp?). Are they still effective? Which converts better - direct linking from a PPC ad or landing first on a presell page? We’ve only managed to get one “profitable” search marketing campaign… and the most we can squeeze out is around $40 per month.

2. I hear a lot about white-hat and black-hat techniques. Could you talk about some of the black-hat techniques? I would assume scraper sites would be on the dark-side of things. I’d hate to do evil, but sometimes I wonder whether some of the things I see are considered “bad”. Spam? Bad. But, what about buying misspelled domain names to 301redirect to the advertiser’s affiliate link. Is that a no-no? Can I create a 100 free blogger accounts to link to my blog and artificially improve my technorati rank? (Not that anyone cares about technorati other than feeling good.) What’s kosher? What’s not?

3. What’s a day in the life of Josh Spaulding like? Caroline’s got some great posts where she articulates her strategy and schedules, and income too. How do you break down your day in terms of blogging / social networking / mini-sites / article domination / projects / family life, etc. (Quite frankly, I don’t know if I want to see your dollar amounts ;). There are days when the going is tough and it’s just discouraging when it seems like everyone else is succeeding. Ahh, those are the days when you need to step in the motivation.)

4. Just bought your article domination ebook. By the way, you did a great preselling job, providing me with all sorts of free information first through your SEO ebook and then through your blog. (By the way, this is the first ebook I’ve been convinced to purchase.) I imagine there’ll be a lot of similar content between your ebook and your posts on this blog / articles on article marketing, but I’m looking forward to reading through and finding the nuggets of key information that you’ve held back. On that note, when is too early to write your first ebook?

5. Contests. Caroline had that great Easter egg contest, but as a new guy, I don’t have an ebook to offer as a carrot. Nor, can I match your $50 top up! I saw MoneyNoob did a contest for $5 to leave comments, so that’s something we’re doing to test the waters ourselves. But how good of a (cash) prize do you need to offer to get people to jump through hoops?

6. Where do you see yourself expanding into the future? What sectors do you anticipate money making opportunities growing? And, like Ryan asked… what would you do now, if you had to start over again… knowing what you know now.

Sorry for the lengthy comment. Appreciate all of your help. Sincerely.
Vern (15 comments.)
30th March, 2008 at 9:54 am

Hi Webdiggin,

I know that you will crank out much better and technical questions than I can do this is my intention.

But I do have a few under my belt.

SGT Josh,

I read up on your article on your deployment in Iraq.

Gosh, Its so surreal reading what you wrote there. Its like watching a movie in my head as I read it.

I guess, this is what really made you into the marketer you are today, all those training and intense moments and prolonged long distance communication with your family.

Ok, now my questions:

1. In terms of generating money online, would you encourage one to initially go for niches and affiliate sales, or adsense , then moving onto building a business on top of those niches that you are making a bigger profit on?

2. How would you approach a 1 year plan in terms of an Internet marketing business ?

- setting goals, schedules, business plans, traffic strategies, outsourcing, tools needed, expenses.

- do include for me how you did it when you were in your army days …. tell me if you do not wanna share this, I’ll understand.

3. Who were your initial mentors or marketers that you really felt a connection and then decided to really learn from them?

Why?

4. what are you most profitable tasks , by priority? how long do you spend on each tasks?

5. how do you stay focused and dedicated to your plans when things are not working right ?

6. what is the most important thing to you ?

7. If you had a choice of people you’d want to coach to IM success, what kind of people are you looking for in terms of character, experience or time commitment.

8. Lastly, how did you actually gain access to so many talented people by your site to help you when you first started?

Boy, this was pretty long but thought the questions may be short and skinny - I’d give you the most freedom to answer them in your own way.

God Bless,
Vern
Fred (1 comments.)
31st March, 2008 at 2:03 am

Pagerank — it seems like everyone focuses on this, but we still know so little about it. I’d love to read more about it.
Josh Spaulding
31st March, 2008 at 10:07 pm

@ Abhishek - Thanks for the feedback. I post often on SEO tactics (check the SEO category) If you’re looking for something more specific and can’t find it on the blog leave it in a comment here and I may write about it.

@ Webdiggin - lol well I’ll be launching a private coaching forum that I’ll be charging a VERY low fee for ($19) in the very near future. I’ve been working on it for a few days now, just waiting for some outsourcing to be completed. Should be launched within the next week or two.

I always love helping people, but it’s beginning to kind of backfire. I spend more than half the day replying to emails and answering questions, so I have to consolidate them and help only those who are serious, hence a monthly membership.

Thanks for the recommended topics…noted!

@ Vern - Thanks for the compliment. I was in a writing mood when writing that

Thanks for your topic suggestions as well…noted! p.s. Could you do me a favor and stop using excessive hard-line breaks in your comments? Thanks bud

@ Fred - I’ve done one writeup on that here http://ez-onlinemoney.com/blog/internet-marketing/google-pagerank-and-alexa-ranking-explained/

If that’s not what you’re looking for just leave a comment here with details and I’ll add it to the topic list
Mark Mason (29 comments.)
1st April, 2008 at 2:06 am

Wow, Josh. That’s cool news. More info?
Josh Spaulding
1st April, 2008 at 2:31 am

Hey Mark,

It’s primarily a forum where I’ll provide detailed answers to all of the questions my members come up with, but I’ll also be finding good IM products and providing discounts, offering free reports etc.

Full details soon once I have it all ready to go.
Vern (15 comments.)
1st April, 2008 at 6:22 am

Hi Josh,

Oh yes! I apologize about the hardline breaks. You know it kind of catches on after you’ve been conditioned to write like that in your email broadcast for “easier” readership.

Glad you liked my comments there. Those a genuine ones where I also need to know so that at least I could get a 2nd opinion too.

It looks like niche marketing is one of the better ways to go but honestly, people are just screaming to start building your own content and product and whatever.

I’m kind of at the crossroads now so if you could help me in terms of the questions above it would really, really help.

Plus, will AMD subscribers get a special pre-launch privilege for the mentoring club?

Yer Bud,
Vern
Brandon K (1 comments.)
1st April, 2008 at 2:27 pm

Josh,

I would be interested in hearing how you organize and structure your projects. I have found in internet marketing it is hard to stay focused on key objectives and organize all my information into a central place.

Currently I am in the process of writing a business plan based around internet marketing. I am tackling this issue in developing the plan. I am going to use a project collaboration site, such as BaseCamp or something opensource, to accomplish this. This will help organize outsourced labor as well.
Mark Mason (29 comments.)
1st April, 2008 at 2:46 pm

@Brandon — that sounds really cool. Blog looks great too. Looking forward to seeing your progress.
My Internet Marketing History from Then to Now
1st April, 2008 at 7:30 pm

[...] What Would you Like me to Talk About? [...]
Shaun (2 comments.)
3rd April, 2008 at 6:19 am

I’m interested in what you think about article submission services. Are they worth the time? Or should we just submit to two or three? If so, which two or three?

::looks:: ::finds a list::

Do you submit to all of those you listed, or just a handful? To summarize these billions of questions is there any way to submit to just two or three and still get the full effect? I have tons of articles I’ve been saving until I bought an article distribution service (like ArticleMarketer.com), but now I’m just not sure.

Thanks!
Deb (5 comments.)
9th April, 2008 at 5:24 pm

Josh,

I’d be interested in what you do after search engine rankings of articles drop down and most efficient way to then get things back. I know some people will do social bookmarking or else add more ezinearticles or else link from classified ad sites etc. I’d love a plan for this.

Deb
Josh Spaulding
10th April, 2008 at 1:41 pm

@ Vern - I’d be happy to help you out with all of your questions. The coaching forum is live and filling up at http://www.coachingwithjosh.com/ Not just AMD customers, but everyone gets a special privilege…they get 1-on-1 coaching from me for $19/month compared to $1,000 like so many others charge.

@ Everyone - Thanks for the suggestions…I’ve noted them all!