Joel Comm Presenting Now at AffCon 2010 in Denver

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jun 21, 2010

Here’s Joel Comm presenting at AffCon 2010 in Denver doing a great job of introducing the group to iPhone apps and being more of a Babe Ruth kind of Internet marketer….either go big or go home as the saying applies.

I originally saw Joel Comm speak at Big Seminar a couple of years ago. He’s the author of Twitter Power and The AdSense Code.

So far, he has a pretty softball speaking gig going on here showing a bunch of pre-made videos about what he’s done. Hopefully we’ll get to some actual to-do’s but that doesn’t really matter. Joel Comm is the keynoter. Joel is the one to kick things off. Joel is the one that AffCon really needed last year to kick off the conference.

Ah! There we go…Joel is starting to talk about Mobile Marketing; a hot topic. If you’re in any kind of marketing, you should be at AffCon 2010 in Denver, Colorado. Still two more days to go! You could be here today or even tomorrow. Join us!

I’m on a panel at 12:45 talking about the challenges of blog platforms. It’s called the Blog Builders. Hope to see you here!

Join Me at the BlogWorld Conference 2010

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jun 10, 2010

The BlogWorld and New Media Expo and Conference 2010 is going to be the most important and opportunity-generating show it’s ever had. If you think my 3-hour workshops are “educational,” or you enjoyed watching Joel Comm speaking at AffCon 2010 in Denver, well, multiply that by about 100. The networking, the learning, the ability to talk with Internet pioneers is enough to keep you full of cutting edge tactics to try for the next six months!

Register Now through my affiliate link and use the discount coupon EBIRD. The reason you want to use the discount coupon (good only through July 15) is to get the best deal of course. The reason you want to sign-up through my affiliate link is because you will have the best experience at the conference! Here’s what will happen.

The show is on for 3 days, October 14, 15, 16. After each day worth of sessions, I will hold a one-hour group meeting with those who have signed-up through my affiliate link. Together, we will go over highlights from the sessions we attended and share contacts of interesting people we met.

It’s impossible for one person to absorb everything at a multi-day conference. And, I’m lucky if I meet more than about 20 people at an event like this because I get in such lengthy deep conversations with people that I forget to move onto the next contact! By sharing networking connections together, we will multiply our connections and network exponentially!

So, checkout the details, and
just sign-up. You’ll thank me later. Take advantage of the earlybird special discount and make sure to sign-up through my affiliate link. Then send an email to me that you have done so and I’ll add you to my list.

[Note: Yep, as an affiliate I'll be getting some commission for this sale, but I'll be putting that money to use...for you! More details later.]

See you in October at the BlogWorld Conference 2010.

Zakary Barron of Constant Contact Presenting Email Marketing Best Practices

Posted by Marty Dickinson on May 5, 2010

Zakary Barron is doing a great job presenting best practices of email marketing. Focus on email marketing is a great follow-up to what I was presenting to the group, which was social networking on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Highlights include:

1. Email is not dead: Proof: Didn’t you check your email this morning?
2. What are your goals?
3. Your welcome email is gold! Include your logo, salutation, welcome sentence, privacy reinforcement
4. Keep your list current
5. Provide link so people can change their profile
6. Ask for feedback
7. Survey customers to understand interests then target messages & offerings
8. Expect 15-30 open rates for emails sent out

Zakary told me our workshop was closed off to registration at 120. We had a couple of walk-ins that we managed to squeeze in, but we’re definitely going to do this again. Zak says there were 40 on a waiting list. So if you missed it, look for another workshop day to be scheduled soon! Great job Zak!

Free Internet Marketing Workshop in Denver Colorado May 5th, 2010

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Apr 11, 2010

Using the Internet to grow your business has dramatically changed over the past few years. If you’ve been misled into thinking all it takes to be successful online today is getting a few hundred followers on Twitter, spending hours a day “Facebooking” or gaining top placement on Google for only your business name, we’d like to offer you a reality check…and a path for hope.

On Wednesday, May 5th, from 9am-noon, Zakary Barron of Constant Contact and I, Marty Dickinson of HereNextYear, Inc., and co-author of Web Marketing All-in-One for Dummies (Wiley, 2009), will team-up to offer a very unique 3-hour Internet marketing training live workshop called “Profit Again in 2010.”

First, I will cover:

• The new evolution of websites and why it doesn’t make sense to use anything else for your business
• Hot strategies that are working this month for converting more of your website visitors to leads and paying customers, including less text and more video
• Updates on Google’s organic search mix and how real-time search and video is impacting your traffic today
• How the Internet marketing “heavy hitters” get more traffic to their websites using my “Traffic Triangle” process (You won’t hear about this at a Meet-up group!)
• How to get 300 minutes of benefit from every 30 minutes you spend on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin

Then, we’ll switch gears and have Zakary present the enormous power and process of more effective email marketing, including how to:

• Use best practices and winning strategies in your email marketing
• Get and keep quality subscribers
• Increase your deliverability and open rates
• Create more compelling content
• Integrate video into your email campaigns

This is your opportunity to learn the true cutting edge online strategies for today in simple step-by-step sequences you will be able to apply immediately to your own business promotion efforts.

Learn from valuable case studies of how other businesses have effectively used these important Internet marketing and email marketing techniques to boost their business.

Join us on May 5th at the Grand Hyatt Denver (Downtown at 17th & Welton). You must RSVP to this free event and we are sure to fill the room before the date arrives. So, do not hesitate.

Don’t wait. Click Here NOW to Sign-up today and get ready to Profit Again in 2010!

Copywriting Tips: Writing Features and Benefits of a Product

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Mar 15, 2010

My most challenging part of copywriting has always been writing features and benefits of a product. I could come up with stories, headlines, price offers in minutes and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page. But, it was the benefits list that always drove me crazy; until I discovered an important point about benefits lists. People don’t care about the features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits.

Then I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. They’re action items, right? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, why not start out all benefit statements with verbs?

A few days ago, I had to come up with a benefits list for a coordinated Amazon book launch we’re involved with. I knew I needed at least 10 benefits for the sales page where we hope to inspire the authors of the book to pay my team a package deal special to help plan their bonus giveaways. So, when someone buys a book during the booklaunch period, the purchaser will get access to bonuses.

Within only 20 minutes, I came up with 20 benefits of having a bonus during an Amazon campaign. Here are five of them just so you get an idea:

• Clarify what exactly a “bonus” is and what people expect from it
• Discover what your market or audience really needs and why YOU are the best person to provide the solution
• Conceive a bonus idea that will be of essential value to your audience
• Define the objective and purpose of your bonus
• Regulate the information you can give away versus up-selling for more

Notice how each benefit statement starts out with an action verb. This is the secret to writing benefits lists in under 20 minutes. Now all you need is a good list of verbs to use in your writing. That list, I use several times per week. Bookmark it so that you can refer to it often and enjoy your newly found method for writing action verb benefits lists.

Yahoo Adopts Real-Time Search

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Feb 23, 2010

It’s all over the news. Yahoo! has finalized a partnership with Twitter to incorporate Twitter’s tweets into Yahoo!’s search database. When someone adds a tweet about a topic and it immediately displays in a search on Yahoo! based on the keywords used in the tweet, that is called real-time search.

Some people believe real-time search will overpower regular search on main search engines, thereby forcing people to be active on Twitter and other social networks if they ever hope to generate traffic from search engines.

But, that doesn’t make sense for two main reasons:

1) It will be too easy for hackers to game the real-time search system so that only their massive quantities of tweets will drive the content generated for search engines to post.

2) Standard search content will always be a necessary component of search engines because tweets can still only be 140 characters in length. And, people expect that when they do a search, that a page will display with enough content for them to be informed.

So, yes, real-time content will be an important factor of search going forward, but that doesn’t mean stop making blog posts, adding pages to your site and optimizing both of those for search engines. Search engines including Yahoo! will still need your content beyond 140 characters.

Profit Again in 2010 Workshop

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jan 7, 2010

Using the Internet to grow your business has dramatically changed since the beginning of 2009. If you’ve been misled into thinking all it takes to be successful online today is getting a few hundred followers on Twitter, spending hours a day “Facebooking” or gaining top placement on Google for your book title or business name, we’d like to offer you a reality check…and a path for hope…for the new year!

Throughout 2010 I will be offering a new workshop called, fittingly, “Profit Again in 2010.

If you’re not familiar with me, I’m a 15-year Internet marketing “lifer,” co-authored of “Web Marketing All-in-One for Dummies” (Wiley 2009), and I’ll be using this workshop to update you on the radical progression of WordPress websites, blogs, traffic building, social networking, rss, podcasting, Federal Trade Commission restrictions and Google banning since just a year ago.

I don’t just “write and speak” about Internet marketing. I create and promotes my own products, manuals, and membership sites, with more than 100 of my own websites. Myself, along with a team of 7 at HereNextYear, Inc. have serviced more than 300+ clients nationwide.

For just one of those clients this past August, we launched just one website that enjoyed 99 product pages indexed on top of Google within 3 days. By the end of the first week, the site brought in more than $3,826 in sales. By Thanksgiving, the site delivered its first $100,000 in revenue.

Coincidence? No way. It’s the same process for any business, author or speaker…every time. All you have to do is find where you are in the process and plug in.

True success of any financial measure for your book, product or business will be no accident or stroke of luck. And, in today’s economy, you can’t afford to shoot darts at a wall in the dark!

You won’t find overnight riches or make that elusive “money while you sleep” with a casual, ho-hum approach.

And it won’t happen by changing a few meta tags on your home page.

What’s the answer? P.T.A.

1. Plug-in
2. Team-up
3. Accelerate

That’s right, just three simple steps.

First, you must identify where you are in the Internet marketing process and “plug-in” to that process. The success plan online is almost exactly the same for every business, author or speaker and hasn’t changed in almost 15 years! All you have to do is discover the process, find out where you are in that process and plug-in.

Second, team-up with those that can help you implement the process. Hiring a random website designer from Craigslist or someone from a foreign country just because you can get services for 20 cents on the dollar might have helped five years ago, but outsourcing today only helps you if you are an experienced Internet marketing project manager. You need to start now to form a devoted team that will be at your side for years to come to help you with technical challenges and smart and calculated marketing planning.

Third, only after you know the process and have a team to rely on can you expect to accelerate implementation and see the rewards.

Specifically, here’s what I will cover during any Profit Again in 2010 workshop, seminar, full-day training, or 20-minute speech:

-My 3-step process to predict whether your product or book can even be sold online or whether you should just throw it in the trash and move on

-Why Google has banned more than 150,000 websites for life in just the past month…and how to avoid being next!

-The FTC’s crackdown on misuse of testimonials and affiliate marketing and what you need to do to protect yourself from being accused of false claims…The CAN SPAM Act was only the beginning to this!

-Why every business owner, author and speaker should have “5″ websites or more…even if your competition already does!

-What keyword phrases the human population is searching online for and how you can stand in the way and benefit from that traffic

-The “new” evolution of websites and why it doesn’t even make sense to have anything else

-The secrets of social networking automation that only those with 2,000 Twitter followers or more even know about.

-How to get 300 minutes of social networking benefit for every 30 minutes you spend

-The Article Marketing Underground Triangle: How to write an article once and use what you’ve written for explosive reach to more than 30,000 websites, video directories and bookmarking sites for obscene traffic flooding whenever you want it.

-Plus, I will reveal my most closely held secret to managing what should be 10 hours a day of promotion productivity that gets accomplished in less than 60 minutes…every day.

As we roll out this essential program, look for specific dates and locations to be accessible through our main website at HereNextYear.com on our Workshops page.

Get Started with Web Video at My New Website VideoCameraUser.com

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Dec 30, 2009

It’s finally here! My new website at VideoCameraUser.com for those just getting started with web video launched last night. For the entire year of 2010 I’ve challenged myself to conceptalize, create, edit, produce and promote a web video every single day.

Quite a commitment there and I could only even expect myself (as unorganized and crazy busy as I am) to pull this off if I followed a simple, step-by-step process.

That process I will be following is available for free as a free whitepaper I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks called 51 Essential Essential Getting Started, Do-it-Yourself, Web Video tips for Business Owners, Speakers, and Authors.

Go check it out at VideoCameraUser.com and have a great New Year!

Keep Your WordPress Plugins Current

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Dec 12, 2009

Want to know what happens when you don’t keep your WordPress plugins current? I discovered what happens just a few minutes ago when I made a blog post and one of my team told me he saw the new post hit Twitter.

Of course, I have it setup so that my blog posts automatically turn into tweets and the first sentence is added as a Twitter post. But, when I didn’t have my Twitter plugin up-to-date, it just spewed a bunch of random HTML error code to my Twitter tweet.

So, this post is a test in one sense to see if I have the problem fixed. But, it’s also to inform you of the importance of keeping your plugins current and that you should go right now to see that they are current.

New FTC Regulations Take Effect December 1 for Affiliate Marketers

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Nov 8, 2009

I can’t say it better myself than this article about how the
new FTC regulation will impact affiliate marketers everywhere. If you’ve heard about the changes but they just didn’t make sense to you, check it out.

Personally, I believe the FTC will go after the heavyweights making false claims. But, then, the other part of me figures they will go after some small time affiliate marketer and fine them like $50K just to make an example out of them.

Although it sucks, hey, this is America. And, the FTC staff are not marketers. They’re made up of salaried employees who HATE the fact that entrepreneurs make money by referring valuable products to others. Next, they’ll have door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales people giving their prospects a written disclosure of how much commission they will make on the sale before the sale is made.

I don’t know about you, but my dad taught me to never ask someone how much money they made for a living. And, therefore, I don’t talk about it myself. I mean, who cares? Why would it be important for people to know that you’re getting a commission payment for a referral?

And, why would anyone be against that? I mean, I have gone through days and sometimes months of evaluation and use of a product before recommending it to clients for use in their own business. Isn’t that time worth something? Don’t I deserve some sort of compensation if I’m going to save someone a thousand dollars next month?

The FTC doesn’t think so apparently.

My answer to this thing that so many are talking about that “will take down affiliate marketing as we know it” is simple.

1. Go ahead and post your earnings or whatever makes you comfortable that you are meeting FTC requirements.

2. Offer something in addition when someone buys the product through your affiliate link. I’ve been doing this for years. When someone subscribes to 1ShoppingCartFree.com where I get a commission every month or to BestEmailSystem.com for managing your newsletters and eblasts, I give a free document featuring a page full of tactics and strategies to use that not even those companies will tell you about.

3. Use the products yourself so that your referrals are genuine.

I find it interesting too that the FTC is targeting “bloggers.” Anyone that’s anyone online these days know that blogs are websites and websites can certainly be blogs. My main company at HereNextYear.com has produced dozens of new or re-designed websites for clients that look like “websites” but use blog software.

So, are the “blogs” or “websites?”

Will the FTC come after them just because they have blogs attached? According to the regulations, it appears they don’t care about main websites…just blogs. So, fine, disguise your blog as a website and enjoy the CMS benefit of your blog software and you’re safe.

I dunno, I just think the FTC has gone too far with this one. But, fine, I will conform but will beat them at their own game by making MORE affiliate recommendations and offering more bonus tips and getting even more affiliate sales as a result.

That oughta really get ‘em going!