Get Good Karma, Baby! (…)
OIO Publisher Keeps Getting Better - Upgrade Available!
OIO Publisher has released an updated version of it's great ad managment plugin for selling adspace directly from your blog - to the wider world wide community without the proverial middleman (or woman) keeping a cut. I love this plugin - and use it on a small selection of niche sites, (including this one) and while it's had a few hiccups from the standpoint of a business model ( first was free - absolute steal - then a charge for secondary adopters of $37 - still a steal - but no longer free - and now looks to have a retroactive free version again sans a few of the premium features the more robust paid version pulls).Rather than sort of enunerate all of the great modifications Simon has made to this most recent release - I simple cut and pasted his newsletter email from this morning below. If you have a niche blog, or any wordpress install that you simply want to monetize to the general public without having to have a Donny Duetsch understanding of the ad space metric market to get moving - I recommend you take a good hard look at OIO publisher. I recommended it when it was free months back on here - and several of you have already thanked me for the heads up. It's not free now - but that doesn't negate the value, and the tremendous potential going forward. Remember - with this simple plugin - if you are blogging about tupperware for example ( I really hope you aren't though) and Jane Doe from Somewhere Town, USA finds your blog at 3 am after drinking one caffe latte too many for dinner she can buy an ad directly from you while you are snoring and slumbering away - simply by paying for ad - uploading her ad copy (there aren't men who sell tupperware, are there?) and the transaction is complete. Easy, seamless way to profit from your blog, set your own budget baselines and be big buck blogging in a hurry.
Check out the features by reading the developers email below - and jump if you think it matches YOUR monetization model.
Dear ian -
Apologies for missing out the December newsletter entirely, but I decided that during the Holiday period, there would be little point in sending it out. (…)
How To Write Better Online Copy:
I wrote this article earlier today for one of the online article directories…and while I dont usually do this ( post these sorts of articles on my blog) I re-read this a few times and decided I liked it enough and might be useful to enough of you that it was worth sharing here. I do get a lot of questions about copywriting courses, recommendations, etc - and I really recommend nothing other than striving for continous self improvement. While I've never been much of a joiner (probably to my own detriment) and am trying to play well with others these days - I will tell you this. Most of the copywriting courses, ebooks and other stuff that is being sold around the willowly web is absolute shit. There are a couple things that I have seen hyped in the last week or so as the next big "must have" course, or video, etc - and the truth is you will be FAR better off ignoring it all and simply staying focused on your own learning process then being distracted by the hype. If you really want to swim in the slimy sea of the VERY best direct response copywriters in the world - and want to save yourself $97 - $497 - $997 - or whatever the pompous price points many of these pointless putzes are charging for their stuff - go out and buy a NATIONAL ENQUIRER and read the whole thing top to bottom, cover to cover - week in and week out. The folks who write - and sponsors who shell out the big bucks for this copy is a much angrier animal than the relative ce la vie world of low cost internet marketing mania. For an 8 buck domain and a few days of time - I can fail plenty without too much worry online. But if you are shitting out 50 large for a full page ad - well, lets just say your margin of error just shrunk a wee bit in case you put up a major league whiff.
One more quick note - if you want to really learn the psychology of what drives people to make buying decisions, how they process these things internally, justify their decsisions, etc - do yourself a favor and very simply go out and buy the book - the exact same source that 99% of the "gurus" are refrying for their own enchilada and serving it as their own. "Influence - the power of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini - has been around for 15 or 20 years and is the seminal source for all the stuff that you see being used to "humbly" help you on your way to buy something else you don't need - from someone else you don't know - because someone else you might - did. Or something to that effect anyway. Go to Amazon and pick it up for 4 bucks used - and if you find ANYONE online who has added to this in any remarkable way, please do let me know and I'll rescind the above.
Here is the article I wrote this AM - I'm suprised I sound so angy - cause - I am wasting away in Margaritaville as Jimmy Buffett once so aptly said. You can take the man out of the snow - but you can't take the cold out of the man..;-) Enjoy - and if this helps you in any real way - let me know and I'll post more of these here. (…)
Blog Building Bonanza: A Boatload of Ways to Build a Better Blog
This is a great post on building a better blog - or at least, helping to monetize and expand the reach of the one that you currently have. elements - ie - comments, polls, interactivity and so forth.
Adventures in Article Marketing: Easy Ways to Amp Up Your OutPut!
(photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/aturkus/)
Article Marketing Mania: More Adventures in Free Traffic
It kills me how many people I talk to overlook articles as a useful and skillful means by which to generate buzz, backlinks and big bucks from their online marketing efforts. And I say this with no intended disrespect…but I have done a few free consultations with people over the last few weeks ( all of which I hope are/will be reading this) - via email and telephone - every one of these very nice folks acknowledged they weren't making one prickly penny with any of their marketing machinations…yet every time I would recommend, urge, prod and just a slender shred short of PUSH them to simply write a few articles to pump up their promotional process - they would balk quicker than Roger Clemmens does at showing off that spot on his ass where he liked his decadurbolin shots on game day. For you non baseball fans - it means they just said no ( not to the 'roids - to the articles..:-)
And with even a bit more restraint I will share…I even had a few people sort of intimate that writing articles was BENEATH them - or too TIME CONSUMING…or they HATE TO WRITE and other excuses to avoid picking up the proverbial pen. More people spent many moments of our precious time together talking about article spinners, mass blogging tool, RSS re-writers and every OTHER bad worthless euphamism for getting out of creating ORIGINAL content. (…)
Fate or Fugazi? Mybloglog Love Affair with "Megan Fox"
And I thought her name was Bonnie. I knew this looked suspicous.….I've been Im'ng with this chick for like two months after hooking up on Mybloglog! I had no idea that she was a) a Movie Star or b) really a guy named Frank from Dayton, Ohio. They really need to monitor the little author image/gravatars more closely - or, I've got to get out more - or at least watch TMZ every once in a while. I feel violated. And to think I was planning on flying out to see "her" in Paraquay early March and have been trackbacking all of her posts on the "Earth in Crisis" since August. What a disappointment. Looks like it's back to the lonely hearts Craigslist club for me.