I’m not taking anything away from Kim’s IPD, it’s still a great product but this new one is something else!

It’s the Niche Profit Classroom by Alen Sultanic and Adam Short and I’ve not seen anything like it in the last two to three years.

I signed up a few days ago and have spent most of the time since watching their videos. There is so much great information in there that it’s hard to tear yourself away.

I thought I knew a lot about niche marketing, I know a helluva lot more now and I’ve only scratched the surface of the information in there.

I’m finding it really difficult to describe this because anything I say is going to sound like hype BUT it really is amazing.

If you’ve ever struggled to pick a niche and great keywords for it or struggled to create a highly optimised site and get highly targeted FREE traffic to it then, seriously, you need to look at this.

AND for another couple of more days you can check it all out for just $1, yes ONE DOLLAR!

You can check out a couple of videos here Niche Profit Classroom Video

It’s not just the 400+ videos of pure, nothing-held-back, step by step instruction on how to generate income online, or the 5 amazing pieces of software you instantly get access to, or the buzzing community with like-minded people who are there for you when you need them.

It’s all this plus

- The MoneyWord Matrix Keyword Tool – Yep, better than about 99% of the keyword tools out there, automatically pinpoints the sweetspot keywords, high search volume low competition.

- Market Scorecard – Tells you if a market and product is going to be profitable, before you even consider going into the market. Let your competitors burn dollars on losing markets while you cherry pick the profit pulling markets.

- Market Profiler – Let’s you *Profile* a market and know exactly who’s doing what. You get a bird’s eye view of the entire market in a single snapshot.

- Market Checklist – Lets you milk every single dollar out of the market (you don’t miss a beat when it comes to generating profits online with this tool).

- 15 Minute Sales Letter Wizard – Let’s you create a converting sales letter in minutes…yes minutes…and it’s better than what most *professional* copywriters would charge you an arm and a leg for.

- How to to create a whole profit producing info-product line for pennies on the dollar (70% less than anyone else is paying). Plus these products are such high quality that your customers will be practically begging to buy more stuff from you. This gives you a HUGE advantage over every single one of your competitors.

- How to cherry pick the most profitable markets out there (using information that other companies spend millions of dollars to collect – that you can use for FREE). You just have to know where to get it..

- How to tap into an unlimited source of FREE traffic from the search engines and slip right under the radar so that *NO ONE* has a clue as to how much you’re really raking in.

- How to set all this on autopilot so that that the *ONLY* thing you have to do is check sales and collect profits (you don’t even have to spend a single minute on customer service).  Plus, a little place to ‘outsource’ your customer service that all the gurus use, yet none talk about…

If you’ve been struggling at any level, if you’re only just getting started or wanting to get started this is the one product that will get you there. If this doesn’t do it then nothing will.

There are a lot of great products out there but they all leave you, in the end, to do it on your own. This one holds your hand every step of the way. I know that I’m going to be successful with it.

Niche Profit Classroom

As we all know the single most important factor in getting your site ranked is backlinks. However, we also know there are backlinks and then there are backlinks. Some are worth a lot more than others!

That really translates to the higher the page rank of the site linking to your site then the more valuable that link is in Google’s eyes.

To get to the point, Chris Rempel ‘The Lazy Marketer’ has just brought out a piece of software that gives you the ability to locate those sites and place your links on them.

This is the most powerful – and simple – linking software and it’s just gone LIVE…

It’s phenomenal.

It lets you place your link on thousands of MAJOR authority sites, who would otherwise NEVER do so without this “exploit”…

Check it out here: The Authority Loophole

Oh – and I think you’ll like the price

Short post but that’s it, all the info you need is on the link page you’d be mad not to check this one out!

Gareth at youshouldreadmore.com  advised me that he had been warned that the use of iframes was against Clickbank’s TOS. Now, I couldn’t find it in their TOS or policies but it is in the Hoplink FAQs items 10 and 11.

10. Will I get referral credit if I hide HopLinks by making them open into a frame, iframe, layer, applet, image, or other sub-window object?

No. These are illegal HopLinks. For security reasons, and to ensure proper tracking of your referrals, all HopLinks must be targeted to the top level of a new or existing window.

11. What happens if I do make illegal HopLinks?

The short answer is that if you make illegal HopLinks you will lose money.

HopLinks targeted to frames or iframes are automatically retargeted to fill the top level of same window, with full affiliate referral credit awarded. Note that this retargeting may have the unintended effect of displacing your entire web site.

HopLinks targeted to images or other invisible html objects give you no affilate referral credit at all. In some cases they will also prevent you from receiving affiliate referral credit for legal HopLinks on the same page.

Accounts that are found to be abusing the HopLink system may be terminated without notice.

I don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting their accounts terminated so I mention this here as a disclaimer and I guess you use iframes at your own risk. On the face of it though, it doesn’t seem to be a good idea as the implication is you won’t get paid anyway.

So, going on from this, if you still want/need to cloak your affiliate links then you could do worse than look at a site of Jonathan Leger’s Offto net. This is a free service and converts your long links into this http://offto.net/wed6vk/. There is an added benefit of Offto links that helps you to get additional traffic.

Here’s an excerpt from Jon’s blog (15th April 2009) on the traffic that Offto gets and how it can benefit you.

“The site has cloaked over 4,500 new links in the last 30 days, and has delivered 9,616,267 raw clicks in the last year and a half. It’s averaging 200,000-300,000 unique visitors per month, and has built my email list by more than 4,600 opted-in users.

That’s all great, but how does it help you? I’m getting to that part.

You see, more than 20,000 of those visitors each month are coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. At first I was scratching my head about this, asking myself why on earth the site was getting so much love from the search engines (not that I was complaining, mind you!)

So I started taking a look at the keywords the site was ranking for, and it only astounded me even more. Only about 10% of that traffic was coming from keywords relating to the name of the site — people just looking for OffTo.

MOST of the traffic was coming from keywords ranging everywhere from “free tee shirts” to “hypoglycemia diet”.

That’s when it hit me — the thing about OffTo that should motivate you to use it when cloaking all of your links.

You see, ol’ OffTo has racked up a HUGE number of links to its pages (76,259 according to Yahoo! Site Explorer). That massive number of in-bound links has given OffTo a lot of authority in Google’s eyes, and so its pages are ranking very well for the keywords the engines are finding on those pages.

It’s the same kind of effect that causes the pages of Wikipedia to rank for so many different keywords. Tons of links means the pages will rank for just about anything.

How does this benefit you?

In case it’s not clear yet, this benefits YOU because when you cloak your links using OffTo, your cloaked links will often end up ranking for the keywords on the cloaked page (especially if you choose a link name that has your keywords in it). That means EXTRA traffic from the search engines, for free!

In order to benefit from this extra traffic, you want to be sure the “Hide links to affiliate program on landing page” box is checked when you create the cloaked link, since that’s what causes the page to get cached and ranked in the engines.

So the next time you need to use a link cloaker, I strongly recommend you do yourself a favor and get some f.ree traffic by using OffTo.net.”

Here’s the Link

Offto.net

This is becoming a long post but there is one more thing I HAVE to tell you about.

You know I like to try and bring you Free stuff and this has to be the freebie of the year!

The one thing that will help you make it on the net is traffic and/or subscribers, preferably both.

Socrates Socratous, the creator of MyDD digital download software is releasing a new site, Resell Rights Fortunes but he has just released a free video showing how you can get a 3345 subscriber list completely on autopilot. He also points you to a free version of the software that he uses to do this ($47 value). Free video

If you don’t grab this then you aren’t serious about building a business and making money on the net! I’ve already watched this and implemented it in less than two hours! I will do more. Imagine the results from one a day for a couple of weeks!

Seriously, this is, without exception, one of the most useful things I’ve ever seen, paid stuff included. Grab it while it’s still there. Free video

Oh yeah! I was talking about stolen commissions and affiliates in the first half of this post.

Do you like sneaky? I like sneaky! Not black hat or anything nasty, just sneaky.

I’m referring to the use of iframes to link to other peoples products. Using iframes totally hides where the link has come from. It does way more than just that though.

With an iframe you basically display the target site within your page this means that you can put your own page title with keywords of course. Talking of keywords you can also put your own keywords into the page and therefore go after your own ranking in the SERPs.

See why I say this is way more than just simple cloaking. There’s no way you could hope to rank for a normal cloaked link and with an iframe no one would even guess that it was an affiliate link.

I’m now going to contradict myself and tell you about another free service for cloaking your links! Why would I do that when I’ve just pointed you to a better way?

Well, this one has a couple of useful advantages that don’t relate to affiliate type links. It’s similar to the old tinyurl in that it shortens your links. It’s also reputed to help with backlinks, never a bad thing.

Where I use it mostly is in emails to my list and in Twitter posts. You need to keep things short in Twitter.

So what is it? It’s a new service from Jonathan Leger. How does he keep coming up with stuff? Offto.net is his latest brainchild. Here’s an example of a link http://offto.net/rufolx/  which just happens to take you to offto.net to find out more, all totally free!

Just drifting off subject for a minute with the mention of Twitter. I have been on Twitter for a while but I’m still not sure that I get it!

I’ve read a few books. listened to a few people so I guess I’ve covered it all but I still don’t quite get it. It seems a bit like a free for all. Like the traffic exchanges where you have to look at everyone else’s links and everyone else looks at your links and you hope  someone clicks on them.

Everyone’s putting links in Twitter with the same hope. Apart from a few people with big reputations and big lists already I don’t think it happens. Still, I suppose, you’ve got to be in it!

On the subject of getting ranked in the SERPs, it’s a well known fact that WordPress blogs get ranked a lot easier than normal sites, Google likes ‘em.

It therefore makes sense to use WordPress to create your sites instead of standard HTML. I’ve been doing this for a while with some good results but in keeping with not wanting to re-invent the wheel and tell you how I do it, last week I found a really handy little guide to doing just that. Caroline Middlebrook has produced this free guide and you can get it from her site at http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/.

While we’re on WordPress I just found a salespage theme for it. It’s template driven and you can create a very professional looking salespage in minutes at $5 it’s cheap as chips.

Without ANY knowledge of HTML you can quickly get one of the 8 styles of the salesletter on your blog. The theme is done very professionally and has lots of nice, neat design elements. You can see it here: http://offto.net/09jiak

Well, this half of the post has gone on a bit as well! I’m sure I’ve given you lots to look at and be going on with. I’ve got a few more but I’ll leave those for next time.

If you have any useful tips or tools you found I’d be glad to hear about them so feel free to post a comment. It’ll get you a backlink and every little helps.

I can’t say that it was the most productive ever but it came pretty close. What it was exceptionally good for was the discovery of tons of free tools that are going to take my business to the next level. And, I want to share them with you! So, grab a drink and sit back there’s quite a bit.

First up. We’re all aware that one of the most critical factors in getting you’re site ranked is backlinks. Generally it’s not easy. It needs you to contact, basically, your competitors in your market and request that they link to you’re site. Very time consuming and frustrating ‘cos you’ll not get replies and you’ll get knock backs.

You can join a service like Linkvana which is excellent but expensive, $147 a month I believe.

What if you could get Linkvana for free? Well, you can’t but you can get something which is practically the same, for free. I’ve never used Linkvana so I can’t say this is identical but I’m told it’s very similar.

The Free Traffic System. Totally free, no hidden costs, no OTOs. It works like an article directory except that your articles are posted on relevant co-operating blogs with your links in your keyword anchor text. There are two links per article and this can get you up to 60 backlinks for each article and no limit on how many articles you submit. Pretty cool, huh?

There’s a lot more to it than that but that gives you the basic idea. Go here and get into it!

Next. Even if you are not into article marketing and you should be, we all have to produce content. Now the duplicate content debate will go on forever, whichever side of it you’re on it can’t hurt to vary your content. I have two tools that will help you with this one free and I’m afraid the other one will cost you a bit, not a lot.

To easily compare content there is a fantastic free tool – Dupefree Pro – I can’t believe this is free, it’s a very classy piece of software.

It’s all for free, get it here Dupefree Pro.com.

Now here’s the one you are going to want to get your wallet out for. Magic Article Re-Writer. As the name suggests it helps you re-write articles, duh! I know, most of them are crap and I’ve shied away from them in the past also, despite having paid over $100 in some cases. I refunded them. One would have been good but it would have taken about a year before it was useful as you had to build your own thesaurus over time!

This one you can use straight out of the box and intelligently re-write/spin content in minutes, up to a 1000 copies! I’m not sure about that, it could be more but who cares, would you want that many copies? It produces good English no more crappy grammar.

I said I was busy last week, this piece of software is one of the reasons, I’ve been re-writing content and spinning articles like crazy. It really is brilliant and not expensive.

There’s the usual money back guarantee so there’s no risk. Seriously, you have to try it, – Magic Article Re-Writer.

This post is going on a bit and I’ve still got more, quite a bit in fact, so I’m going to take a break, grab a coffee, go to the can, too much information? OK, delete that bit. I’ll be back a bit later and carry on in the next post.

You will not want to miss it. If you operate as an affiliate the next tool will knock your socks off! Ever had commissions stolen? Yeah sure, you’ve heard of cloakers etc. but not like this. This one can also help your ranking in the search engines!

Tune in later, you won’t be disappointed!

Non profit and social sites will get traffic by their very nature. The sites are there to fulfill a demand as people are already interested in what they are about. If you have a business site unless you are a branded corporation no one will know it’s there. So, assuming there is a demand for what your site offers you need to let people know it’s there. You can pay for traffic or work at getting it for free. There are heaps of sources for free traffic.

There are, of course, all the evergreen methods for free traffic. Article marketing, link building (exchanges etc.), Ezines and Newsletters, Forum marketing, SEO, Press releases. All these methods are still valid, article marketing particularly so but the world of Web 2.0 is taking over.

So what is Web2.0? Lots of people have different ideas on what constitutes Web 2.0 but here’s a quote from webtrends.about.com which I reckon comes pretty close.

Web 2.0 is the move toward a more social, collaborative, interactive and responsive web. It is a change in the philosophy of web companies and web developers, but more than that, Web 2.0 is a change in the philosophy of society as a whole.

Probably the beginning of web 2.0 type sites has to be traced back to blogs. In the beginning they were pretty much diaries or soapboxes where people would write about the life, happenings, hobbies or rant about politics and things that concerned them.

Now they cover every subject imaginable, like this one! A few years ago the other type of web 2.0 sites appeared, the social sites. Facebook, Myspace etc. Then Squidoo, Hubpages, blogger and many, many more.

So now we have an idea of Web 2.0 how do we use it? There are reams of books on using these Web 2.0 sites but the basic premise is to be sociable. Join these sites put up your own pages on the subject of the market you are in, provide quality content and interact with other people with the same interests.

It’s necessary to establish credibility before you can start marketing to these groups and even then it should be done in a helpful way rather than an in your face fashion. Direct people to sites, like your blog, that also have information relevant to the subject and of course affiliate links or links to your products.

The idea is to lead people rather than push them.

The one thing about all these sites is that they are free to join and participate and, therefore, so is the traffic that originates from them.

As I said there are reams of books on Web 2.0 and Social site marketing, if you would like a quick, free, informative 5 part e-course on Web 2.0 traffic you can access one at http://web20traffictricks.com. There is also a free report ‘Social Networking Exposed’ which gives a concise but detailed, no fluff, how to get started with the social sites.

As always I am very interested to learn your thoughts on the information I provide so please feel free to leave your comments.

OK, it wasn’t a huge list to start with but never the less you’ve got to be happy with that. I am!

So how did it happen, bearing in mind that it didn’t cost me a cent?

No big secret really, it was a giveaway. I signed up, contributed a gift and the optins followed.

At the moment there are a ton of giveaways on the go. Ordinarily you’d think that they’d be full of the same old stuff. It’s true that some of the same products pop up in all of them, mine will.

I’m going to make the most of this while I can because as everyone knows if you want to really make it on the internet, business wise, you need a list! Although everyone kept saying that, it took a long time for it sink in with me but the last couple of months have proved it’s true beyond any doubt. You need a list!

It goes a little further than that though, in that having a list is how you reach the people you are trying to help.

This is really the subject for another post but briefly your list is the group of people you are trying to help, not just bleed money out of. You make money when you help others with what they want or need. No deep philosophy there, it’s just the way the World works.

So back to the giveaways. As I said there are a lot on the go and I really recommend you get into them. I’ve listed a few that I have checked out and they have a good variety of good products on offer. There’s software, ebooks, templates, graphics, videos….all sorts of stuff.

I want you to be able to take part as a contributor. For that you need a product. It doesn’t have to be your own, anything that you have giveaway rights for can be used.

It’s better if you have your own for obvious reasons. You won’t be competing with someone else with the same product. It’s not hard to do that, rework a PLR product it’s really not that hard and shouldn’t take that long. Open Office is free and you can open word documents in it and output them as PDF’s.

Turn a PLR PDF into a slide show, make the slide show into a video and give that away. It will definitely be yours and unique. Again Open Office has a Powerpoint type app that creates slideshows. You can get a free copy of Camtasia 3 here. It’s not the latest version but it works fine. In fact it’s the version I’m still using.

Anyway, here are the giveaways:

Back To Basics Giveaway

I really like this one. It’s being run by Scott Case and Scott has stipulated that all products for the giveaway have to be less than six months old. So no chance of it being full of old rehashed stuff. Last I heard there were over 200 products. It starts on the 6th April.

100% Giveaway

Another great givaway. This one runs until 20th April. The link above will take you to the contributors signup if you just want to join to get free stuff go here.

Easter Giveaway

Some really good packages in here too. This is open until the 21st April. Again if you want to sign up as a contributor use the link above, otherwise you can just join here.

I’ll leave it at those for now. Try and join as a contributor, with a unique product if you can. It really is a great way to increase your subscribers.

Hence the long collection title of this post.

 First thing. I just posted a new video to the member’s area at http://gimpvideos.com. It’s not an epic just a quick guide to where the disappearing menus from the toolbox in Gimp 2.6 went. Now when you move up to 2.6 you should be able find everything.

Next – Brad Callen (of Keyword Elite), is offering at *NO-COST* one of the most powerful pieces of software imaginable to find out what “keywords” Adwords users are bidding on. (I explain why further down)

You can do the following with this free tool:

1. You’ll be able to quickly and easily uncover any Google Adwords advertiser’s keywords in only a few seconds

2. You’ll be able to see critical Adwords data relating to each keyword:

- The actual Adwords ads your competitors have written for each keyword

- The Cost Per Click

- Your competitor’s Adwords rank

- The total daily amount your competition is spending on Google Adwords

3. You can use PPC Web Spy to generate your own huge list of keywords based upon any of the individual keywords your competition is using.

4. You can also generate a giant, targeted keyword list by inputting your competitor’s domain name, allowing you to build an even larger, more targeted keyword list!

5. You’ll be able to immediately see which Adwords advertisers are people promoting products from CB, PDC, and Amazon.com.

6. You’ll even be able to see the landing pages.

7. This all happens seamlessly while you are in Google search!

http://learn-graphics.net/PPCWebSpy

Why is this no-cost?

I’ll tell you the reason Brad did this.  He has the most amazing *viral* upgrade I think I’ve ever seen.

Apparently, those that upgrade for only $47, will always have THEIR AFFILIATE LINKS for Amazon, Clickbank, and PayDotCom products pop up at the top of Google Search. This happens whenever the person who downloaded the software from you does a search for ANYTHING.

(Bottom line, if the person you give the free software to (or someone else in the downline) buys a Clickbank, Amazon, or Paydotcom product, you may very likely get the sale.. leaving you with huge passive income potential)

I can also confirm that this does work on a Mac – OSX 10.4.11 + Firefox 3.0.5

I bought the $47 upgrade on the spot.. BUT the free tool is worth $97 or more in itself!

Watch the video explainers (both for the free product and for the viral upgrade)

http://learn-graphics.net/PPCWebSpy

Thirdly, if you really can’t be bothered mastering graphics software to create your own graphics but still want to or need to, there is an easier FREE option.

It’s Instant Banner Creator. You can create banners, buttons, headers, footers, animated GIF’s and Peel away ad graphics. There are some OTO’s, the last one is pretty good value and gives you access to a lot more. The free version is adequate for most circumstances and you can upload your own designs ie. free graphics that most of us seem to accumulate, to add effects to, so it’s quite flexible.

You can grab a copy here http://banner.freeinfo-site.com

Finally I’ve put together a free ebook showing how to create a curved ebook cover using Gimp. Which, as you must all know is the free graphics software that rivals Photoshop. It’s not like the action scripts in Photoshop you have to actually do it but once you have your design in place it only takes about 10 minutes to turn it into a great looking curved cover with reflections and shadow. Yep, I show you how to do that too.

If you think about it there are techniques there that you can apply to all sorts of graphics projects as well. So feel free to grab the book, sign up at the link below for your free copy and you will be amazed and more than a little bit pleased with yourself when you see what you can produce.

http://gimpvideos.com/sub.html

Well, that’s all for this time. My New Year resolution is to try and be more regular with this blog and bring you more good stuff for 2009. Please don’t grade me on it but I will do my best.

Here’s wishing that 2009 is as good a year for you and yours as I wish it is going to be for me and mine.

By default all the ‘Utility’ windows, what was the Toolbox, layers and Brushes,Patterns etc dialogues, are on top by default. So any image window that is larger than the gap between them is behind these dialogues ergo you don’t see all of your image. I really hate that!

You can fix it though. Go into Edit->Preferences and then Window Management. In the ‘Hint for the toolbox:’ and ‘Hint for other docks:’ drop downs select ‘Keep Above’ and then OK.

You’ll be told you need to restart Gimp for the changes to take effect and once you do your image window will be the one on top when it’s active.

Now that, I like.

The Toolbox menu has gone and with it the Xtns menu! It took me a little while but I’ve found the inhabitants of the X’d Xtns menu and File menu.

‘Buttons’, ‘Logos’, ‘Patterns’ and ‘Web page themes’ live under ‘Create’ in the File menu in the empty image window that opens on startup. Also in there are what used to exist under the Toolbox File menu ‘Acquire’ entry, namely  ’Paste as New’ now ‘From Clipboard’, ‘Scanner/Camera’ and ‘Screen Shot’.

Other entries from the Toolbox menus have been scattered around. Sticking with the File menu ‘Preferences’, ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ and ‘Units’ are now in the Edit menu of the afore mentioned empty image window. Also in here is the Xtns menu ‘Module Manager’ now just called ‘Modules’.

‘Script Fu’ from the Xtns menu now resides at the bottom of the Filters menu. The last two items from the Xtns menu ‘Plug-in Browser’ and ‘Procedure Browser’ have eloped to the Help menu.

The Dialogs menu that used to exist on image windows has been replaced by the Windows menu and has an added ‘Recently Closed Docks’ entry which is basically a Dialog history.

One major addition to this version is GEGL the Generic Graphical Library which is a programming library under development for image processing applications. It is mainly developed to bring support for images with more than 8 bits per color channel to GIMP. It has been partially implemented in GIMP 2.6.

You can check out the release notes for 2.6 here.

A lot of the changes in 2.6 are in the engine room with the only obvious ones being the change to the user interface, brought about, apparently, by many users complaints.

Personally, I can’t imagine what complaints could have led to this change in the layout. The only obvious advantage is that in Windows it now only takes up one slot on the taskbar and clicking on it will restore all windows and dialogs whereas before you needed to do them individually and Gimp could fill the taskbar all on it’s own.

When I first looked at this latest version I have to admit to having a minor panic attack when I saw the Toolbox menus gone! Checking the release notes confirmed my worst fears, it had been taken away. What I found to be disappointing was that no one had taken the trouble to tell us poor schmucks where all the contents had gone to!

I did quite a bit of searching around forums, user groups etc to see what the story was, nothing! Admittedly it didn’t take too long to find them all again in the new version but to my way of thinking if you are going to change something like that it’s just good user support to document it. Isn’t that a sign of the times? Don’t get me started on that one, a topic for a grump session!

As yet, I believe the latest version of Help is the 2.4 version so you won’t find it in there.

I haven’t yet used this version enough to be able to comment on the other improvements so I’ll have to leave that for another day. One thing I did do though, was to install this version in a seperate location so that I retained my familiar version 2.4(security blanket). I suggest you do the same, at least initially. All your shortcuts, Start menu etc will be overwritten with the new one, just means you have to make a shortcut to the previous version.

Well, that’s my take on it so far. I would be really interested to hear what your thoughts are on it and also your thoughts on my thoughts so, please, feel free to leave a comment.