This is undoubtedly the first question any aspiring blogger needs to answer before they release the brakes and get going with a new blog. So, what are your choices of blogging software:

1. Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) - this is the blogging software I’ve used for many many years now and the best thing about it is that it’s free. However, unlike many free products, there is a large and fantastic user support community and I’ve never had a problem sorting any problems out when visiting the forum. There’s also a great range of additional functionality available through accessing free plugins at the Wordpress website. You can also get a great range of free Wordpress Themes and Templates there although if you want something a little more special then I can recommend visiting Michael Pollocks Solostream website. His themes and templates are truly excellent.

2. Movable Type (www.MovableType.org) - for most uses this software has a price although if you want to write a personal non-commercial blog then it’s free. However, you will pay for support however you use the blogging software. At the time of writing the a commercial license is close to $300 and you can also have them install and host it for a fee as well. This feee also includes 1 year of support. In terms of functionaility I would say that Movable Type has very little that Wordpress does not and from a personal standpoint I prefer the ease of use of Wordpress. However, there’s very little in it and if you are looking to the long-term and are a business or corporation then Movable Type may be a better fit - and more preferred by your IT and IS departments.

3. Typepad (www.Typepad.com) - this is a product owned by Six Apart Ltd, the owners of Movable Type. The good news is that it’s a cheaper product offering starting at $4.95 a month running all the way up to $89.95 per month. You can also get a decent discount if you sign up for the annual plans. The fees also include support and hosting so you don’t need to bother finding a suitable web host provider. In my opinion Typepad offers a solid mid-tier blogging solution although not providing as many features as Wordpress or Movable Type. However, you can start small and then upgrade to get more features as you require them and a number of top bloggers use the software very successfully.

4. Blogger (www.Blogger.com) - owned by Google, it’s free and probably the easiest and fastest way to get started by getting an http://blogtitle.blogspot.com domain name and free hosting. The downside is that you do get limited functionality and also you do run the risk of your blog being taken down if you inadvertently upset the guys over at Blogger in some way. However, you can download the Blogger software and install it on your own webhost if you so choose although you can also select your own domain name and still keep the free hosting if you so choose. I wouldn’t describe this blogging software as a solution for serious bloggers but it is great for absolute beginners to learn some of the ropes.

Some other blogging software services that are free include:

: Yahoo 360,
: AOL Journals
: Xanga
: Live Journal

I’ve missed out a number of other free options but the above list is more than enough to be going on with and the majority are very well supported.

Colin McDoughall came out with The VEO Report a little while ago now and I have been meaning to kick the tyres and give it a good run around the track. I have spoken with and indeed interviewed Colin over the years and I know him to be a genuinely successful affiliate marketer. However, I also know many smart people who are pretty useless at teaching others the basics of what they do and many of their products leave me cold.

OK, so what’s the VEO Report all about? Colin has coined the acronym of “VEO” to stand for visitor enhanced optimization. What the heck does this mean? Well, as opposed to some of the more mechanical approaches to Search Engine Optimization, such as writing content with a fixed structure, keyword count etc. and revolving largely around the website owner’s wish to gain good rankings, Colin turns this on it’s head and demonstrates how catering to the needs and wishes of your target market and your visitors is a far better long term strategy to gaining good search engine rankings than adopting a artificial and somewhat contrived approach. Hallelujah to that! I can’t tell you how many websites I come across on a daily basis that are filled top to toe with absolutely useless and almost unreadable content designed solely to rank well and gain a click on an ad or an affiliate product.

In fact everyone should know that if you want to succeed for the long term online then you want to build your sites for the long term and avoid any manipulation strategies as far as Google is concerned for example. Colin makes this point excellently in the book when he says that any website deemed to be too perfectly optimized will undoubtedly be penalized by the search engines since it will flag as being too “optimized” and hence manipulated.

What I also like about this book is that Colin recants key elements of conversations that he has had with Matt Cutts, Google’s all knowing head of web spam. Matt makes some excellent points to Colin and these alone are more than worth the price of the book. I also liked the advice given on structuring and writing content articles for websites and Colin reveals the valuable tools he uses to this effect. He also gives some very useful advice for gaining the now all critical inbound links to your website and details a list of sites and directories that really are worth submitting to.

So, anything you need to be careful about with this product. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s structured and written for raw beginners but if you dedicated a month to reading and applying Colin’s advice to your own web ventures I believe most people would get up to speed pretty quickly. Admittedly for beginners, there is a lot of terminology that may at first be confusing but after a little reading and repetition you’ll soon pick it up.

I have to say that I really haven’t read another book quite like this on the subject of online marketing. It certainly turns the whole subject of search engine optimization on it’s head and therefore I commend Colin for doing so - particularly since he’s also come up with alternative and more effective techniques you should be using if you want to serve your target market and your visitors in the best possible way. The fact that the premise of the book revolves around the website visitor is excellent - way too often is this forgotten.

Summary: The VEO Report

the good: great ideas, well thought through and high credibility of author
the bad: beginners might well find the terminology challenging

Ideas and Content: 9/10

Presentation: 8/10

Ease of Use: 8/10

Value for Money: 9/10

Overall Review Rating : 9/10 - Excellent

Get it Here

Domain name speculation has been a favourite pastime for me because it got me started on the internet quite by accident when I inadvertently bought a generic domain name that was wanted by a multinational company. These are some of the tools I use to help me secure valuable and saleable names today:

1. www.Bustaname.com - excellent tool although a small minority of the availability results can be out of date.

2. www.Nameboy.com - I’ve used this for years and it has helped me to find numerous valuable names.

3. www.Whois.net - specifically the deleted names search engine. Again an excellent tool

4. www.JustDropped.com - great for identifying domain names about to become available.

5. www.Caught.co.uk - the best drop catching service for UK domains around in my humble opinion. They charge on a no win no fee  basis which I love too.

6. www.dropdates.co.uk - a nifty little tool for identifying the drop dates for .co.uk domains.

7. www.Whois.sc - just a fanatastic set of resources for doing research on domain names and their owners. Scary amount of information available too.

8. www.Moniker.com - some great auctions and a comprehensive set of tools also. I particularly like the multiple/bulk domain search tool.

9. www.Sedo.co.uk -  my favourite domain name marketplace. They have over 11 million names up for sale over there.

10. www.Pool.com - my current favourite drop catching service for .com domains. Again a no win no fee charging basis.

I’m going to be talking about eBay Businesses a fair bit over the coming months.  It truly is a global phenomenon and offers a huge number of possibilities for starting a business. You can get ideas are truly everywhere.  A couple of years ago I started to get involved  with it very seriously.

At that time, Sony Music had devised a very clever marketing campaign with Elvis singles being re-released each and every week in specially limited edition CD singles and also in 10 inch vinyl format.  The campaign truly worked amazingly well, as Elvis was number one in the UK charts for months, each time with a different single.  My mother called me to see if I could get a copy of the “One Night” CD single on the web, as it had sold out in the shops.  I trawled around the web for an hour and noticed that people on both Amazon and eBay were selling this CD single for upwards of £35 (around $65) - the stores were selling it for between £4 and £7 ($7 to $13).  Suffice to say I bought a whole load of them in stores and ended up reselling them on eBay for a very healthy profit.  There are so many opportunities like this around.  Last Christmas for example, there was a huge shortage of Nintendo Wii’s and DS Lites in the stores and people were sometimes more than doubling their money by buying in advance from large stores and immediately reselling on eBay.  I actually know one guy who made almost $50,000 in around 8 weeks doing this.

A good eBay business? There are a number of very profitable eBay businesses specializing in Elvis and Beatles memorabilia for example.  These kinds of buyers purchase largely with emotion rather than logic - and they tend to rationalize the purchase later.  I love these kinds of niche markets.  More later.
cheers,

John

I had an email today from somebody who asked me where to find reputable affiliate programs? It was a great question particularly because a couple of years ago I was cheated out of several thousand dollars worth of commissions because I dealt directly with a suspect merchant rather than with an affiliate marketing network.

So, in answer to the question, I personally use the following reputable affiliate marketing networks although I do still deal with some merchants directly - not recommended for the beginner. These networks give you a sense of security because they manage and vet all the merchants before they are allowed into their networks. Here’s the list:

1. Tradedoubler.com
2. CJ.com (I love the eBay affiliate program)
3. Clickbank.com
4. ShareaSale.com
5. Linkshare.com
6. Performics.com
7. Webgains.com
8. Amazon.com - **a well known merchant with a great set of innovative tools for affiliates

I personally have never had any problems with any of these providers and can recommend each of them. Combined they have more than enough merchants across all their various networks to cover most niche markets.

cheers,

John

This is an ebook written by Greg Heslin and it covers the subject of profiting from affiliate programs by using Google AdWords. Greg reveals a lot of his own AdWords secrets in this ebook and he claims to be making up to $1758 in a single day this way. Is this product a well presented scam or a genuinely useful guide to affiliate profits? Let’s take a look:

One of my own ever-growing income streams revolves around affiliate marketing and I personally adopt two methodologies with it. Firstly, I test the sales of affiliate products using pay-per-click search engines, mainly by using Google AdWords. I set up a simple landing page backed up by some PLR articles from article directories. When I find a winning product or service I then try and maximize the sales conversion rates using both PPC and natural search. What is a winning product? In my case, anything where I can break-even from my tests. I know from experience that when I tweak and refine a campaign, I can invariably turn it into a winner. Most of the time, but not not always. The advantage of using pay-per-click advertising is that you can reap profits in a very short time.

Second, I take the winning products or services and build substantial content-related web sites around them, so I can capture all the free traffic I possibly can. These days I mainly build blogs. It does take some time before my web pages get ranked by the search engines but you can’t argue with free traffic and if you get high quality content written, it works well.

One of the major reasons people become downhearted with affiliate marketing is that it takes too long to bring in the income using the long-term approach. If income can be realized quickly then beliefs are developed and people persevere and continue using both approaches.

I began looking around for a useful ebook to help me with pay-per-click affiliate marketing. This is when I found Greg Heslin’s Google AdWords 123 product. Like most times, when I buy an internet marketing related product, I was initially sceptical. However, when I delved into the detail, I began to be impressed. Greg initially takes the reader through the affiliate marketing process and lays out the very best sources for finding products and services to promote. He talks about the tools he uses to find the best products and lays out his unique methodology for targeting precise demographic groups across the population who are likely to buy the products he is promoting.

I found this latter section particularly useful because too often, people get locked into just researching keywords relating directly to the products they promote. i.e. if you are selling an ebook on dogs, limiting your keywords to “dog care, dog help, dog book etc. ” instead of looking wider at the kinds of people who are liable to be interested in such a book - and targeting them.

Greg also takes the reader through the precise process you need to go through to set up your Google AdWords account, how to get things organized effectively and how you should get set up to track the success of your AdWords campaigns. If you know how to do this you may well get a little frustrated but hang on in there. It’s worth it.

This latter section is obviously useful for beginners but more experienced users like
myself can also benefit. It is in this section that Greg clearly demonstrates why he became VP of Sales and Marketing for a $232 million company. He’s a very sharp guy.

One suggestion on sales conversion tracking alone is so obvious but it worth the cost of this ebook! It is so simple and obvious yet so powerful.

I can safely say I have not yet seen a better ebook written on using Google AdWords specifically for affiliate marketing. What makes Greg’s success even more remarkable is the speed at which he became successful at affiliate marketing - in just a few months.
Just in the last 3 weeks, using the techniques it describes, I have managed to increase my AdWords affiliate marketing profits by some 40% on just 3 campaigns I’ve applied them to. And this is just the start. His techniques work. Don’t doubt it. I’m using them each day myself.

Success Alert Rating : 9/10

Excellent.

You can check out Greg’s ebook here:

Google Adwords 123