One-Stop Techincal Solutions for Internet Marketers

Dec200925

Do you currently use your hosting company’s email system for your domain email? I used to do that, too. I was usually very frustrated by the lack of features for sorting, creating filters, and sometimes getting bombarded with spam. I have always enjoyed the features of my Gmail account, that I used for personal email, and wished I had all of those features for my domain email addresses.

At first I attempted just having all of the email forwarded to a standard Gmail address, which worked fine, until I pointed about 3 different domains to it. Then I started getting lost in keeping my niches separate, and replies were going out with a different email address.

When I started looking further, I found that it is very easy to setup your domain’s email on Google’s Apps for Domains. Giving you all of the features of Gmail, but for your niche domain names. Once I setup my domains on Gmail, I was able to create email addresses in my domains easily, filter emails, and use all of the great features of Gmail. To personalize my emails I’ve even used Gmail’s feature of attaching my contact picture, and using the signatures. One other feature I really enjoy is the vacation responder. I usually don’t use it for vacation, but for sending a simple reply back letting the client know I’ve received their email and will be looking at it shortly.

I was able to handle all of my email tasks much faster, and easier, plus I could find what I wanted using Gmail’s search. If you want to simplify your domain email usage, and have all the great features of Gmail, you can setup your domain by following these instructions:

Go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html and click Get Started.
Choose Administrator, Enter your domain name, and click Get Started.
On the second page, put your informations on all required fields and click “Continue“.
On the last page, setup an administration account by putting a new username and password. Then, press “I accept. Continue with Setup” button on the bottom page.
On the next page, choose one of the option that you have an access to. In this tutorial, I will use the CNAME record verification. Click “Continue” to proceed.
Open your hosting control panel or domain management account (The place where you can add a custom CNAME record. If you are not sure with it, you can contact your hosting provider to do it for you)
Add the provided unique string and point it to google.com. See the image for the example.
Go back to Google Apps setup page. and click “I’ve completed the steps above“.
On the next page, you can follow the setup guide. To proceed with setting up your mail, click “Skip Guide“.
On the next page, click “Active E-mail“.
Open back your hosting control panel or domain management account and remove the existing MX records of your domain. (Note that removing these MX records will make your email service down on your hosting side, you probably need to consult this with your hosting provider first).
Add these MX records for your domain. (If you are not sure with it, you can contact your hosting provider to do it for you)
Once you are finish, click the “I have completed these steps”.
It may take up to 1-48 hours for the MX records change to take effect and on that time, you should be able to receive emails. To test your new Google Mail, you can visit http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com
To create a new email account, go back to your Google Apps dashboard page, and click “Create new Users” (If you accidentally close your control panel before, you can logon to your Google Apps Dashboard page, logon to your account using your administrative account, click “Manage Domains” on the top right of the screen)
You could also set your mail.domain.com to be used as email access, pop3 and smtp by setting up a CNAME record to be pointed to ghs.google.com

You will spend a little more time setting up your email on Gmail, compared to the very fast setup in CPanel, but you will save more time over the coming months by being able to manage your email quicker and easier with the Gmail interface, and features. I highly recommend using Gmail’s service for all of your domain accounts.

Dec200922

robson

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Cancel Your Paypal Subscription

Most of us internet marketers buy training online, and sign up for membership sites, if we feel they can help us expand our business. But have you ever experienced the problem with getting on a membership site, that even though you have requested they cancel your subscription, they keep pulling money out of your PayPal account every month, just like clockwork?

Whether the site owner has disappeared from the face of the world, or is simply ignoring us, doesn’t really matter. We don’t want our money disappearing for something we don’t want any longer. Usually, by this time our anger is starting to boil over. Sometimes getting a subscription cancelled can be extremely difficult.

If you can’t get the sites owner to cancel the membership payments, then luckily Paypal can come to your rescue. Paypal will allow you to easily cancel a subscription through your account, and block further withdraws from that subscription.

To unsubscribe to a subscription through PayPal is fairly easy, just follow these steps:

To cancel your paypal subscription, logon to your Paypal account.
click on “History” as shown in the picture below and select “Basic Search“.
Change the date to some time before you registered your subscription and click “Select“.
Click “Details” on the service that you like to cancel your subscription to.
Then press the “Cancel Subscription” button at the bottom of the new page, then again on the page that follows.

It is sad when we run across a site that does not live up to their customer service responsibilities, but is a good reminder for us, to always take care of our readers, and customers with the best customer service possible.

Thankfully when we get caught in a situation like this, PayPal allows us to unsubscribe, quickly and easily, without a lot of pain.

Dec200918

robson

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Get a Custom Icon on Your Browser Address Bar!

Internet marketing in a busy niche requires you create a unique brand, or identity, so your readers remember you, and will come back to visit your sites. Taking a little extra time to customize little details, can help your site stand apart from the others. Have you noticed when you visit or bookmark some websites, you get a custom icon in your browser address bar, bookmarks or favorites? This special little icon is called a FavIcon, short for Favorite Icon. It is one of the small things you can do, to make your site stand apart from the others, and is very simple to create and use.

I have not noticed a great increase in traffic using FavIcons, but I have noticed the percentage of visitors returning to my site from Favorites and Bookmarks goes up, when I add a FavIcon. It varies between sites, but even a small percentage change in repeat visitors can increase your profits. Returning visitors buy more consistently and usually higher dollar items than new readers. Taking a few extra steps to increase your repeat visitors, and help them identify your site in their bookmarks is a good investment of your time.

Creating a FavIcon, is very simple if you use the right tools. Here’s the way I do it:

One of the example, you can visit/use this site to generate a FavIcon. (http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/)
Click “Browse” button, choose an image file to be your FavIcon and click “Generate FavIcon.ico” button.
To customize the way your FavIcon looks, click “Customize” and define your setting. Once you are ready, click “OK” on the setting and click “Download FavIcon Package” to download the FavIcon
Open the FavIcon package, upload favicon.ico and animated_favicon1.gif to your web site root folder. These files are in the favicon package you’ve downloaded.
Add following HTML tags to your web page after the <head> tag but before the </head> tag:<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/gif” href=”animated_favicon1.gif”>
Kudos! Your FavIcon is ready and should be displayed on your browser address bar.

The one catch to a FavIcon is getting it installed properly on your website or blog. If you don’t install it properly it will not appear. To add it to your site follow these instructions:

Taking these few minutes to create a FavIcon, to use in branding your site, can pay off in increased return visitors, which results in more income for your online business.

Dec200915

robson

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Personalize Your Twitter Page!

Twitter is one the best new communications tools for marketers. It gives you a great opportunity to share news, and updates with your followers very quickly, and to share links to guide your followers to your offerings. Twitter gives your followers a way to communicate back to you, and for you to learn what your market really wants, all in 140 character snippets of text. Twitter is amazingly effective in creating conversations with your market, and is the primary communications tool of many marketers. Becoming a leader of the conversation in your niche within Twitter can bring you amazing leads, traffic, and sales.

Twitter’s default look may be OK, for most people. But a marketer needs to create a unique persona, one that people enjoy hearing from, and sharing with. If your profile looks like everyone else’s you won’t be remembered. Making sure people remember you, and your sites, is critical to have repeat sales within your niche. If you want people to remember your Twitter profile, you will need to take a little time and modify your profile from the standard themes used by most people.

Making a custom background, maybe including your picture, or photos from products in your niche, can make a big difference in creating interest in Twitter users. When they check out your profile through a Twitter search, or by following your profile for a message they saw from you, they will see a highly polished, unique Twitter profile. This conveys to your followers you are serious about using Twitter, and being a professional in your niche.

Let’s take a look at the steps to customize your Twitter profile:

Prepare a background image for your Twitter profile. The images must be smaller than 800k. GIF, JPG, PNG.
Logon to your Twitter account and click “Settings” on the top of your Twitter page.
On the tab that appears, click “Design“.
Notice that there are some available skins which ready to be used. But you can also create your own personal background by uploading your background image. To do it, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Change Background Image” button. Click “Browse” to find your background image on your computer. Check the “tile background” if you want to tiled your background. (repeating image)
Click “Change Design Colors” button if you like to change the background, text, links, sidebar or sidebar border color.
Just click “Save Changes” when you are done with your setting.
Kudos! You just get your new personalized Twitter page.

Creating your Twitter identity to show your personality through your messages and your unique Twitter profile, will help you move into a leadership role within your market. Become the person people remember, by having a great looking, informative profile on Twitter.

Dec200911

robson

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Put Flickr on Your Facebook Page!

Are pictures and photographs part of your marketing strategy? Sometimes a picture can grab interest quicker and draw a person into your marketing funnel faster than anything else. Many of us use Flickr to store and share the files we want to share with our market. It’s a great idea to share our pictures with the widest audience possible. I like to use a wide variety of my pictures on my social media sites, as do many other internet marketers. I do most of my photo sharing on Flickr, the most popular photo sharing service, and on Facebook.

What I don’t like is uploading photos repetitively to two or more sites. Time is precious to an internet marketer, there are so many places, and so many different social media sites that we need to use in communicating with our market. If we can eliminate any repetitive work it pays great dividends. That is why I like to embed my Flickr photos into my Facebook Pages, to eliminate the need to always upload the same pictures two different places. It saves me time, and also gives me the opportunity to have my readers and viewers move back and forth between content on two of my sites. Engaging my readers in my circle of sites, helps to increase their trust, and interest in what I have to share, which helps in closing more sales, and making more profit. I am able to easily choose which photos I want on my Facebook pages, by choosing which tags, or photosets I want displayed.

If you would like to starting embedding your Flickr photos and pictures in Facebook, you can follow these steps:

Go to your facebook account and type “My Flickr” on the search field.
Click “Authenticate” to authenticate My Flickr to your facebook account
Click “OK, I’LL AUTHORIZE” button
Click “Search for photos” on the next page (Configuration page)
Type the keyword that you want to search on the “Full Text Search“, the photo tag that you know on “Tags” and click “Preview Your Search” button.
The search result will appears on the bottom page. Choose the options that you like to put your photos to, and click “Save Search” button.
The successful message will appear. On the right top page, click “Configure“.
Click “Add to Profile” if you want your photo to be displayed on your profile box. New window will appear, click “add” to complete it.
To add My Flickr on your profile tab, on the bottom side of “Profile Box“, choose the search result that you did before, and click “Save and Generate” Tab.

After that “My Flickr” tab should appear on your profile.

Using your time and content to your greatest advantage, across multiple sites, will help you create a great social media funnel, increasing your traffic, and increasing your market share.

[...]

Dec200908

robson

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Embed Your YouTube Video into Your Facebook Page

Two of the most important Social Networking sites for every marketer should be Facebook and YouTube. Facebook and YouTube dominate the social media sites with the highest volume of active visitors, and searches. Video content is important in your marketing efforts, while some people love to read information, many people prefer the visual learning from video content. Some of the top Internet Marketers use video as their primary sales tool, with even a few using only video, instead of traditional sales page.

Creating different video content for a wide variety sites can be overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be great if you could leverage your video content easily to both sites, giving you the highest potential number of viewers? By embedding your YouTube videos into your Facebook profile or Facebook Pages, you not only give your Facebook followers great content, but you also increase the potential traffic to your YouTube profile, to see more of your videos.

By embedding your YouTube videos into Facebook, you also reduce the amount of video content you need to create. Instead of creating unique videos for each site, you can leverage your videos across both sites. You can embed YouTube videos into Facebook by following these easy steps:

Logon to your Facebook account.
On the status sharing box, click the tiny arrow that says “More” and click “Link”
Put your YouTube video link on the field box and click “Attach“.
You will see the video preview, description and link after that. Click the “Share” button if you are ready to share it.

While embedding your YouTube videos into Facebook saves you a lot of time, and leverages your content, it currently is not possible to add your YouTube feed to Facebook. That would give you even more leverage, and hopefully this feature will become available in the future. When this becomes available, we will be sure to let you know.

Using video for teaching and marketing in your niche will help you catch and hold the attention of more people. Leveraging your video content by embedding your YouTube videos into Facebook, you extend the reach of your videos, and your potential sales opportunities.

Dec200904

robson

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Distribute Your Blog Post to Facebook!

To be successful at Internet marketing, you need to have your content in many places. Many times the difference between a successful internet business, and one that does not make a profit, is simply getting your story in front of enough people. I’m sure you are constantly busy, making new content, trying to get the word out. You need to be able to leverage your time and efforts, and let people know about your new posts with the least amount of effort.

People want to learn about your new content in their favorite sites, which today is most commonly Facebook. People on Facebook search for answers and advice to their problems on Facebook. Getting your word in front of these people can be very important for your business.

Since Facebook is where over 300 million active users live, it is critical to get the word out about your new blog posts on Facebook. The best way to accomplish this task it to add your blog’s RSS feed to your Facebook profile or Facebook Page. Then whenever you post a new story on your blog, it automatically updates Facebook for you, saving you time, and effort.

Think about how much easier it will be to take a little time to setup your feed on Facebook one time, rather than going back to Facebook every time you post an article to post an update about your new post. Even if it only saves you five or ten minutes a day, that adds up to a lot of time over a month. Time you could be using to create more content, and to communicate more with your market.

To get your feed setup on Facebook only takes these few steps:

Go to your WordPress Administration Control Panel – Plugins – Add New.
Put “Wordbook” on the search field. Once you see the search result, install the one that says, “This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts. By Robert Tsai.”
Once the installation is complete, click “Activate Plugin“.
Now go to your Wordpress Administration Control Panel > Settings > Wordbook and click the Facebook logo with the padlock icon on that page.
Logon to the facebook with your facebook account info. On the next page, click “Get Login Code for” button.
On the next page, click the “Generate” button to generate a code for your Wordbook plugin. On the next page, you should get 6-digits code for your Wordbook plugin.
Copy and paste the code to your Wordbook page setting and press “Submit“.
Click the Facebook logo with the padlock again. On the new windows that appears, click “Allow Publishing“.
Now go publish a WordPress blog post and you will see that the plug-in automatically submits the blog post to your own Facebook wall, with excerpt of the post and images! It will also display a nice WordPress icon next to the Wall title!

Having the RSS feed for your blog on Facebook will help you capture new opportunities from the largest audience on the internet. Spend the few moments to start distributing your blog posts to Facebook, and watch your profits increase.

Dec200901

robson

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Facebook Page : Obama’s Secret to Win the Election

You may already have a Facebook profile, but do you have a Facebook Page? Top marketers, and even public figures like President Obama use Facebook pages. Many people believe that President Obama’s success was largely due to his campaigns use of Facebook pages, and other Social media sites.

What is the difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page? Both allow you to send updates to your friends or fans, but Facebook pages do not require you to approve everyone who wants to add you as a friend. Facebook pages were designed for public figures, performers, bands, and businesses, to have a presence on Facebook, and to allow Facebook users to follow their favorite personalities and businesses. When you are tracking down other marketers, businesses, or entertainers on Facebook, if you see the “Become a Fan” button, you know you are on a Facebook page, instead of a profile.

Currently Facebook has more active users worldwide than the population of the USA. With such a wide audience, you cannot afford to ignore Facebook in your marketing efforts. Imagine your profit potential by carving out only a small group of Facebook users. Your Facebook pages will give you the opportunity to talk to the Facebook user, right where they enjoy spending their time.

I recommend keeping your Facebook profile to share with family and friends, and to have Facebook pages for your business, and market niches. Creating a Facebook page is quite simple, if your follow these few steps you will have your Facebook page ready for your audience:

Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
On the facebook fan creation form, pick the category, name of your business, fill the captcha image verification and click the “Create Page” button.
On the next page, if you already have the facebook account, you can proceed with logging on to your account. If not, you can create a facebook account from this page.
Your facebook fan page is ready. You can start to upload your picture, share your facebook fan page, and interact with them.

Using Facebook pages will let you leverage the power of Facebook, without cluttering up your personal profile with business messages. Facebook pages can be a powerful tool for marketing to your niche, and may be the best tool for creating relationships with your readers.

Follow our simple steps to start expanding your market and your profits with Facebook pages.

Nov200927

robson

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Cloak Your Affiliate Link for FREE!

As an affiliate marketer, you probably would like to have the links to your affiliate offers appear to be links from your own domain. It’s also a good idea to change the link appearance to make it a little harder for your links to be hijacked. Affiliate links usually have this format: affiliateid.hop.clickbank.net

It looks much better, and many times increases your sales, if the link appears to stay in your site: www.mydomain.com/special-discount

Many new marketers try to use a URL shortener to hide the affiliate links, but to most users they look odd, and make them wonder where you are sending them, and are expecting it to be a big sales pitch. Even though TinyURL, Bit.ly, and other shorteners have gained a lot of popularity, they may not be your best choice for marketing on your blog or website. Their place is in Twitter where you must keep your URL’s short.

You can also buy cloaking programs to change your links, and most of them work great. The problem with them is the cost. Most of them are expensive, and for a new marketer, may be more than your budget can afford.

An inexpensive and very effective way to change your links is to use a simple PHP script. You can create your own, or you can download the script I found and use it for your affiliate links. Here are the steps to download and use this free link cloaker script:

Download the script from this location
Once you have download the script, upload it to your domain FTP and run the installcloaker.php file.
Create a MySQL database for this application on your hosting control panel.
Put your database info on provided field (You can leave the table name blank), and press “Submit” when you are done
You should see the successful message on the next page if you done correctly.
To start cloaking your link, run the newcloak.php file from the script location on your browser. Put your affiliate link on “Link” and your affiliate keyword on “Keyword” field.
Press “Submit” and you should be getting your new affiliate cloaked link.

This script does require you have your own domain name, and paid hosting for your site. This is one reason some people use TinyUrl or another URL shortener, to save money while they are starting out. I always recommend using paid hosting and your own domain name as soon as you can.

Using a PHP script to modify your affiliate links is a great way to make your product offers appear to be from your own site, and increase your conversion rates.

Nov200924

robson

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How to Embed Your Favorite Fonts to HTML Site or Blog

Creating great looking Headings and Titles has been a big challenge for marketers. Many of us have just been happy using the old standby fonts of Arial, Verdana, Times, etc; but that gets boring very fast. The next logical step has been to use a graphic in place of the text. While this looks great, it takes much longer to download, and you can’t edit the text on the spur of the moment. Using a graphic doesn’t work very well for a blog format, where you have a new title every time you post.

Finally with the new features of CSS 3 and support in the newest internet browsers, we can embed True Type Fonts in our web designs, using CSS. This allows us to be creative, and to design pages and layouts that look fantastic, without requiring the painstaking work of creating graphics for everything. This can save us a lot of time. As an internet marketer, you don’t want to be spending all of your time creating graphics, when you should be creating content and communicating with your market.

Setting up to use embedded fonts does require a little work up front. Here’s the steps to start using embedded True Type Fonts on your websites:

Prepare the font file that you want to use in *.ttf file. ( It would be great if you already have the *.eot file)
Convert your *.ttf file into *.eot file using this Web Font Converter (http://www.kirsle.net/wizards/ttf2eot.cgi). (You can skip this step if you already have the *.eot file of your font)
Once you already have the *.eot file, upload the *.eot file into you website.
Define your font on the CSS file like the example below and make sure you define the URL correctly. You could also add another font attribute if you like.
To set these fonts to be used within a specific class or division, there are two ways. One method is to set it normally through a tag rule and the other one is to give the font a class statement so you can use the font on a specific tag or division.
To use the font, you just need to call it using class tag. For example :
<div class=”bradley”>This would be Bradley Hand ITC font.</div>
The result should be showing like this.

By adding embedded True Type Fonts to your sites, your pages are going to load faster, look better, and be much easier for you to maintain. The only negative you need to be aware of is only the newest web browsers support CSS 3’s embedded True Type Fonts. Currently it requires Firefox 3.5, Opera 10.0, and greater, most versions of Internet Explorer have support for the embedded fonts. If your reader is using an older browser, they will not see the format you intended. It would be a great idea to check out your sites with a range of popular browsers to make sure how it will appear. Most times the browser will switch to a default font, and the blog will at least be readable.

You should start using embedded fonts today, so your sites are easier for you to work with, faster to download, and you are prepared as everyone switches to new internet browsers.

Dec200925

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Dec200922

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Dec200918

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Dec200915

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Dec200911

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Dec200908

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Dec200904

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Dec200901

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Nov200927

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Nov200924

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