For all my American readers, I hope you had a suitably good Independence Day.  Naturally it’s not something that we celebrate over here in the U.K. but neverthless I hope you had a good weekend.

Here in Bristol  we had an Afro Carribean street carnival called St Pauls Carnival.  It’s only been going for about 42 years and only attracts about 60,000 people but it’s still quite a unique  event.  People open up their front gardens (otherwise unknown  over here) and there is all sorts of reggae, ska, rap and all  sorts of loud music blaring out of every possible corner.

There’s plenty of fantastic food, including jerk chicken and  curried goat and it’s a real celebration of the cultural variety of this city.

I took the wife and children down for a few hours and then met up  with a friend who kept me company for a few more hours.  As  usual, I was in real pain from my sciatica by the time I went  home but it was definately a great day.
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Marketing Tip of the Day
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Today I want to talk to you about what I believe is one of the  best online business models that you can have.  That is publishing your own ebooks.  I know that many of you will be immediately put off by the thought of actually having to write  the material yourself.  So, before I go on to list the many benefits of publishing info products, let me reassure you a  little.

You don’t have to be a professional writer at all. To begin with your style of writing can be much more informal and casual when writing for an online audience.  If you really don’t want to do the writing yourself you can easily hire someone to do the writing for you via a service like Elance or Odesk.  There are people that are full time ghostwriters and if you are careful to vet your writer properly you can have some really excellent material written for you.  This is actually a very common practise and there is nothing unusual, shady or illegal about it.

Some of the benefits to this business model are:

*  You don’t have to worry about physical stock
*  If you pick an evergreen topic, your ebook can go on to produce income for many years
*  Your overheads are extremely low
*  You can sell an ebook for more than the equivalent physical book
*  You can recruit other people to sell your ebook for you by offering a generous commission

There is a process that you have to learn which includes finding a niche, seeking out joint venture partners to help you launch your ebook as well as setting up an affiliate program.

Once you have been through the process though, it is not that difficult and the rewards are plentiful.

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Today’s Recommendation
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A couple of weeks ago, I recommended a product that I myself have bought and use called Web Traffic Genius.  If you didn’t have time to read that e-mail, it’s a wordpress plugin that automatically posts RSS feeds for all of your posts to many of the RSS directories.  This gets you backlinks and traffic on autopilot and it definately works.

http://gregoryhyne.com/recommends/webtrafficgenius

I ‘m writing about it again today because they have added a new module that teaches you how to use web video to help you get web traffic and google rankings using all the latest and best video strategies.  They show you how to create a video in minutes even if you have never created a web video before.  It’s also free.

If you’ve already bought Web Traffic Genius, you will now get FREE access to this new material.

If you aren’t already using video, you should be.  More people use Youtube to search than Google now and video is growing all the time.  Don’t miss the boat!

http://gregoryhyne.com/recommends/webtrafficgenius

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Quotation
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William Arthur Ward said,

Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work.

That’s it for today.  Take Care

Greg

Andrew Murray is through to the semi-finals of Wimbledon and so the nation holds its breath once again.

Bristol is decidedly windy and I can help but feel that it’s going to rain quite heavily soon.  Normally that wouldn’t be very newsworthy but it’s been such a hot and dry summer here that the grass is actually going brown.  I don’t think that’s happened  since 1976!

I’m off to London again tomorrow for an event called “The London Lunch” which is hosted by an English internet marketer and friend called Martin Avis.

It’s a great chance to meet other internet marketers and takes place at the Strand Palace Hotel.  I’ve never been before but I’ve heard great things about it and I’m looking forward to it already.

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Free valuable Audio – Web Business Setup Secrets
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Instead of a marketing tip, I’ve decided to give you a free gift.

http://webbusinesssetup.s3.amazonaws.com/Web_Business_Setup_Secrets-FULL.mp3

This gift is an audio file called “Web Business Setup Secrets”.  If  you’re thinking of making a living online then this is essential information.  It was created by a friend of mine who’s a very successful, honest and down to earth marketer that has built a 6 figure business helping people make a living online.

I had to twist his arm a bit but I managed to persuade him to let me  give this to you, my subscribers. Here’s the URL:

http://webbusinesssetup.s3.amazonaws.com/Web_Business_Setup_Secrets-FULL.mp3

Please do not give it away.  If you would like the transcript, pop in to my blog and leave a comment and I’ll e-mail it to you directly.

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Thought For Today
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When we set our goals, it is natural to aim for the summit. We  look for the highest point that we can imagine.

That’s wonderful – all achievers have a clear vision of their ultimate target – but it is only a part of the goal-setting  process.

A true goal, one that has any chance of being realized, comes in two parts:

1. The top of the stairs

2. The next step.

Imagine a person with arthritis looking up at a flight of stairs.  The task is immense. The flight of stairs may as well be a  mountain.

But the first step isn’t so bad. Grip the handrail and haul – not  too difficult, not too painful.

The second step is just as easy as the first one – and so on all the way up.

Pretty soon, the top is reached, but it wasn’t a mountain climbed  – it was twelve simple steps.

Every goal that you set should stretch you beyond where you are right now. It should be something that is beyond your current abilities to reach IN ONE STEP.

But right underneath where you’ve written down that huge objective, you must also write down the first step that you will  take on that journey.

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Quotation
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Quintilian said,

“A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.”

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A Moment’s Inspiration
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Take a minute to try this exercise today:

Think about everything you’ve done in the past week and write down one thing that was harder or less enjoyable than it should have been.

Now, under that one item, brainstorm five ways that you could have done it better, made it easier, enjoyed it more or generally have performed more effectively.

That’s it. You don’t have to go back and do the work over – just make yourself aware, on paper, of ways you could have improved.

If you make a habit of doing this every Friday, in time, all  those ‘do it better’ ideas will form part of your awareness.

Every job you do will over time be easier, work out better and be much more enjoyable as you will subconsciously use the brainstormed ideas to give yourself a helping hand.

How about that – an easier life for just five minutes work a week.

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This Week’s Quick Tip
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What is your point of difference?

We all hear about how businesses should develop a USP (unique sales proposition) but how often do we develop one for ourselves?

Modern business is trending towards a numbing sameness. Visit almost any city looking at the shops you would be very hard pressed to identify where you are – the Starbucks, McDonalds, Gap, Next, Bodyshop, Bennetton stores could be anyplace. They are certainly everyplace.

Against this backdrop of increasing corporate sameness, it is becoming even more important to stand out.

Find a point of difference for yourself and your business and you are guaranteed to get noticed.

That’s it for today.  Take Care

Greg

Hi all,

Happy tuesday.  For all my fellow Englishmen, commiserations on the footy.

My eldest son Oliver went to the dentist today for the first time in his little life (4.5).  He wasn’t scared at all but then I guess he hasn’t got any reason to be, yet.

He needs a couple of fillings though so I guess I need to improve his dental routine and cut down on the sugary things.  At that age there’s no-one to blame but me and my wife (probably me).

Anyway we’ve agreed to try harder and he’s booked in to have the work done next monday.

God knows how he’s going to react when he sees that first needle though!

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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Does anyone know about RSS feeds and how they can be used to bring you both traffic and backlinks?

I know that RSS seems like one of those really complex subjects but actually they are really quite simple.

Blogs and Web 2.0 properties have a facility for distributing their content via RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication.

On most blogs there is a simple button labelled RSS or Subscribe by RSS or something similar.  When you click on that button you can choose to have that blog’s content sent to your Feed Reader of choice.  This means that you can have all your favourite blogs’ content delivered to you in one central location on autopilot.

From our perspective, RSS feeds are another great way to distribute your content.  All you have to do is submit your Web 2.0 RSS feeds to the best RSS Feed directories and anyone searching for feeds that match your content will be able to  subscribe to your feeds and receive your articles.

There are two main benefits to this.  The first is that by submitting your content to the RSS directories you will be getting backlinks to your original post and the second is that you will receive traffic from those people that use RSS Directories to find content that they are interested in.

The thing is, it’s a pain in the a*** having to submit a feed for  every post to each directory.

Guess what though.  There are tools that can do everything for you.  All you do is make your blog post as usual and assuming you have set everything up, your feeds can be autosubmitted and you can get an immediate 30 or so backlinks.  Now until recently, I was only aware of one decent service for doing this: RSS Submit.  A good service but a bit costly!  Strangely enough this leads me  to my recommendation of the day.
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Todays Recommendation
_________________________________________________________

Web Traffic Genius is a superb bit of software for generating backlinks and traffic on autopilot.

http://www.gregoryhyne.com/recommends/webtrafficgenius/

It will take any Wordpress post and create a feed for it and submit it to all the main RSS directories.  You can even set it to go back through your old posts and do it for them.

Better still you can even get it to mix your submissions with other submissions so that yours look like they have been submitted by a person.

Make no mistake this stuff works and there aren’t many tools out there that will bring you backlinks and traffic with no extra effort.

http://www.gregoryhyne.com/recommends/webtrafficgenius/

You’ll need to set aside 2 or 3 hours to configure it properly but the videos are very clear (4 of them) and I can honestly tell you to go out there and get it.

If you type “traffic” into the coupon code, you will get a 20% discount.

The short answer is yes!

Forum marketing is an excellent way to get the word out about your business for free.  But there are a few tricks to marketing on forums without getting penalized.  You have to be careful not to do any blatant advertising or you’ll probably get banned very quickly.

The first thing you should do when you’re new to a forum is create an interesting profile.

Add an avatar, such as a picture of yourself, or a picture related to the niche.

If you’re in the dog training niche, for example, you might use a picture of a dog – preferably your own.  In the golf niche, it could be a picture of your favorite golf club or course.  You get the idea.

Next, start making posts that answer questions.  You should never push your website or product outright at this point.  Being a member of a forum, you’re there to give people helpful answers to their questions and post an occasional thread of your own to spark a discussion or provide helpful tips.

The point of this phase is to start establishing yourself as an expert in the niche first.

By giving people valuable answers, you’ll be seen as the go-to person in your niche.  As forum members start to recognize your contributions, they might even start looking for your posts. This is a great way to develop a fast following.

Check the rules of the forum to make sure they allow links in signatures.  If they do, be sure to add a link to your site.  You might prefer to link to a squeeze page, so you can start building a list of forum visitors that you can market to later.

Don’t do anything to draw attention to your signature – such as continually telling people, “I have more information on the site in my sig file.”  Just keep posting as you have been, giving out helpful information.

Let your helpful posts do the talking for you.

After you’ve built up a very good reputation at the forum, people may start searching for you on their own.  Make sure the name you use on the forums is featured in the name or text of every project you promote, because you need to make it easy for people to find your products if they start looking for them on Google.

You might even be able to JV with the forum owner after you’ve become rather well-known around the forum.  You could offer a standard JV, or you could just ask the forum owner to be your affiliate.  You might offer them a special deal, with a higher percentage of commission than normal affiliates – or a discount reserved just for their members.

Respect the forum boundaries. Don’t private message people and ask them to check out your site unless you already have some sort of previous relationship with them.  The only time you should ever draw special attention to a project of yours is if someone makes a post that specifically asks for recommendations about products.

For example, if someone asks, “Does anyone know of any good books that can help me housebreak my puppy?”  You could probably get away with posting, “Actually, I wrote a book about how to housebreak a puppy recently.  If you’re interested, you can find the link in my sig.”

If it’s an invitation to provide a product link, it’s probably okay – but otherwise, let the forum traffic funnel in on its own.

I survived my weekend in London and had a fantastic time.  I even went to nightclub that I haven’t frequented for almost 10 years.  I had a good boogie and stayed up until the small hours catching up with my friends and generally having a good time.

I’ve got this weird thing at the moment though where a muscle deep in my left buttock is causing me quite a lot of pain.  For those of you that are medically inclined, it’s called piriformis syndrome.

Anyway, that was giving me a bit of trouble the next day, but apart from that I didn’t suffer as much as I was expecting to.

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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Link cloaking is a very important part of affiliate marketing.  In a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen.

How do people steal affiliate commissions?  Well, have you ever hovered over a link and noticed that the link was an obvious affiliate link?

Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale.  They falsely believe that if they buy from an affiliate link, they’ll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.

Other people actually do it for a different reason.  If you’re promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what’s usually a 50% or more discount on the product.

This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than just making sure you don’t get it.  Most people don’t do that, of course, but it happens.

Most people are pretty honest, and don’t mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them.  But it’s enough of a concern that you should take steps to prevent it.

You can easily set up your own link cloaking system.  You can set up a directory on one of your domains.  Most marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com.  Then they typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/.

Inside of that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each product, like this: bobsmith.com/recommends/productname. In that directory, they place what’s called a redirect file, which instantly takes the visitor to the actual affiliate link without displaying it. You can easily find out how create a redirect by looking it up online. It’s very simple to do.

There are also a number of link cloaking scripts available.  Most of them are relatively easy to install and use.  There’s a big benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself.  Using your simple redirect, there isn’t an easy way to check how much traffic you’ve sent to your link, like scripts do.

Most link cloaking scripts also allow you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link.  If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you’ve sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web server’s stats, which may be difficult to use and hard to understand.

Cloaking your affiliate links is the smart thing to do if you want to be sure you are protecting your hard-earned commissions online.

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Todays Recommendation
_________________________________________________________

Many of you will know that I am a big fan of Ewen Chia’s stuff.  I recommend you watch this video now because it’ll blow you away:

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For the first time ever, you can see REAL CASH Generated LIVE before your very eyes!

This is the *fastest, easiest and laziest* way to make tons of cash ever:

- With NO previous experience
- With almost ZERO money to start with
- With NO product of your own
- With NO email list
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The best part is, this actually works like crazy!

IMPORTANT: SECURE YOUR COPY NOW

There are apparently VERY limited copies available  so grab your copy now before it sells out:

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Do it now or you’ll kick yourself later when it’s gone!

That’s it for today.  Take Care

Greg

The weekend is finally here and I am off to London in about 3 hours for my weekend of fun.

The all day picnic has been cancelled due to bad weather but I’ll still be meeting up with friends and will probably spend the afternoon in a pub garden talking nonsense and generally trying not to bore my friends to death with internet marketing babble.

On the other hand, I’ll have to put up with their football (soccer) babble so I suppose all is fair in love and war.

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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My tip for today is to make sure that you promote high ticket items and recurring items as well as the $20 ebooks that you may have been promoting so far.

Okay, okay, I know you think it’s obvious but give me a second if you will.

It’s very easy to jump to conclusions about your market or the amount of money that they are willing to spend.  If you do that you will be leaving a lot of money on the table.

In fact it is easy to to sell high ticket items to the people that are willing and able to spend the higher amounts of money.

Try to remember that you are not your market!

You should also try to bear in mind that it’s pretty much the same amount of effort to sell a cheap item as a high ticket product.

Remember, all you are doing is connecting buyers with products so you might as well include pricier items for those that are willing to pay.

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What Can I Do For You?
_________________________________________________________

My newsletter is here to help you.

What would you like me to write about?

What type of information would best help you achieve your goals?

Are there any burning questions that you want to have answered?

You can write in to my e-mail as you have been doing or alternatively, feel free to leave a comment on my blog.

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Quotation
_________________________________________________________

G.K. Chesterton said,

“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act;
but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.”
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A Moment’s Inspiration
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Take a moment to pause in your busy life and bring to mind these things:

• A beautiful sunset over a deep blue sea.

• A white-capped mountain range.

• A baby taking its first faltering step.

• A rose.

• The look on an old lady’s face when she first sees her grandchild.

• The tears an athlete sheds when their national anthem plays.

How did each one of those things make you feel, deep down inside?

Now make your own list.

It’s true, isn’t it: the best things in life are free.

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This Week’s Quick Tip
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Don’t allow yourself to become a victim to negative thoughts.

They will surely destroy you.

Your mind is so powerful that it will work to make every thought, when repeated often enough, come true. When you constantly see the downside of everything, that is exactly what you will get.

Karl Wallenda, the famous high-wire performer, fell to his death in 1978. His wife said afterwards, “All Karl thought about forthree months prior to it was falling. It seemed to me he put all his energies into ‘not falling’, rather than walking the tightrope.”

Life is like a tightrope. Keep your eyes up and your mind focused on the positive outcome and you’ll avoid many of the pitfalls along the way.
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Just For Fun
_________________________________________________________

The first CD ever to be released to the public was Billy Joel’s

“52nd Street”. It was launched in Japan in October 1982

I don’t have much to report to you this week as my life has been fairly quiet.  I’ve basically been looking after my children,  trying to get some work done and that’s about it.  I’m going to London this weekend though for a big all day picnic in a park  followed by a friend’s 40th birthday.

I’m really looking forward to a bit of fun.  The only shame is  that I can’t find someone to look after the children for a couple  of days which means my wife can’t come with me.  The good news is that only one of us is going to be grumpy from overtiredness afterwards.

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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If you’ve been trying to make money online for a while, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of the importance of traffic.  Traffic is the lifeblood of your business.  Without targeted traffic you won’t make sales and without sales you don’t have a business.

The problem is that unless you pay for your traffic (and this requires a steep learning curve) you are initially going to have  to do all the traffic generating activities yourself.  This is  especially true if you are an affiliate.  A product owner at  least has the ability to recruit affiliates to drive the traffic for him or her.

The point is that you don’t want to spend every waking hour writing articles, publishing videos, posting on forums,  commenting on blogs, building backlinks etc etc.  If you do,  you’ve basically swapped your dayjob for another job as a traffic  generator. You need to find a way to put your traffic on autopilot.  This is how you do it.

1) Once you’ve found a method that works for you, document it. Write it down as a step by step process.  Be thorough and clear.

2) Next video yourself performing the tasks.  You can use free software called Jing.

3) Hire an outsourcer from Elance or Odesk and give them your documents and videos as instructions.

4) Track how many visitors, subscribers and sales you get from each traffic source.  Hypertracker is a useful tool for this.

5) Do more of what works best and less of what works least.

Once you have a few techniques that consistently make you a profit, you are well on your way to building a successful online business.  All you have to do is rinse and repeat.

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Strong Traffic Recommendation
_________________________________________________________

Whilst I’m on the topic of traffic I want to tell you about an outstanding product by an SEO expert called Lisa Parmley.

http://www.gregoryhyne.com/recommends/inlineseo/

Lisa Parmley is the real deal.  She has been able to get a number #2 spot on Google with over 300 million other competing sites!!

Another one of her sites went from 22,000 to over 50,000 unique visitors a month, BUT she stopped promoting it when it was at  22,000…and it just keep growing on its own!

…Now that is true auto-pilot earnings.

Lisa has had sites on page one of Google for the better part of a  decade.  She brings in massive amounts of traffic to her sites  all without paying one cent to PPC, PPV or anything else.

The product is called Inline SEO and I wholeheartedly 100%  recommend it.

http://www.gregoryhyne.com/recommends/inlineseo/

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Request for Comments
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In this one issue, I am going to change the layout of my newsletter a little.  I know you are reading and enjoying the newsletter from the personal e-mails that I get.

I’m not getting much in the way of comments on my blog though. Is that because you’re reading everything in the email?

My blog is there for you all to get involved.  Pop on in and leave some comments.  Do you have any questions?  Feel free to ask.

I’ve just had a new header created.  Do you like it?

Tell me what you want me to write about.  I’m here to help you!

Good afternoon to you.  It’s a glorious sunny day in Bristol and I don’t feel like doing much work today.  There’s an event down by the harbour called the Festival of Nature and I going to take my wife and kids down to the harbour this afternoon.

It’s a family event but you can still get a nice cold beer and some good food.  Something for everyone so to speak.  I do however want to tell you about a very effective technique that I have recently been introduced to.

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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Many of you will have heard how ad swaps are a very effective way to build your list quickly.  For those of you that haven’t, this is the basic premise.  Two list owners each agree to mail their list an offer from the other list owner. This is usually a free offer placed on a landing page/squeeze page in exchange for someone’s name and email address. As a result, they are both adding hundreds of subscribers to their lists.

I’ll bet there aren’t too many of you though that have heard about Tweet swaps.  Twitter followers may not be as responsive as your main list yet you can still send thousands of visitors to your website by doing Twitter swaps.

This is where you swap tweets with someone else.  For example, they can promote your free squeeze page gift and you’ will in return promote their free squeeze page gift by tweeting your respective followers.   The key is to find good partners, tweet several times per day and try to make sure that there is an equal exchange in the number of visitors that you send to each other.

If you haven’t tried it yet.  get out there and give it a go.  It works!

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Thought For Today
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Every goal, ambition, dream or target that you have in your life comes ready-made with a fixed amount of energy attached to it.

Once that pre-fixed energy is gone, you lapse into a state of  flux: you neither have the power to carry on towards your target,  nor do you have the will to forget the whole thing.

The result: procrastination. All you can do is think of other  things that you’d rather be doing.

But, that unfinished task acts like a drain on the energy  attached to all the other things that you do instead.

Each task’s energy CAN be boosted, but only if it is topped up  before it runs empty.

The trick is to either plan your jobs so that you finish each one while its energy level is still sufficient to keep you going, or  to deliberately stop before the tank runs empty – so that your  enthusiasm can supply the needed fuel for you to start again another day.

Think of it like a car. All the time there is gas in the tank,  you can go somewhere and get things done. If the needle says that the tank is running low, you can get to a gas station and fill up.

But if you ignore that needle and allow the tank to run dry, you grind to a halt. Odds are that you will come to a full-stop in the most inconvenient place possible, and getting more gas will be a major challenge.

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Quotation
_________________________________________________________

William Shakespeare wrote,
“Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

_________________________________________________________

A Moment’s Inspiration
_________________________________________________________

This often quoted passage by Charles Swindoll is one of those basic truths that should be pinned to everyone’s wall.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance,  gifted ability, or skill. It will make or break a company, a  church, a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace from that day. We cannot change our  past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in certain  way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing that we can  do is play on the one string that we have and this string is,   Attitude. I am convinced that life is ten percent what happens to  me and ninety percent how I react to it. And so it is with  you….We are in charge of our Attitudes.”

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This Week’s Quick Tip
_________________________________________________________

How is your confidence?

If you’re like most people, your confidence quotient could do with a bit of a boost. Here are three things you can do right  away to do just that:

1. Learn to put the past in its place. The past may be gone, but  it can leave a scar. It is okay to remember, but fatal to dwell.  Learn from the past, live in the present and plan for the future.

2. Don’t believe negative people. We are all surrounded by two  types of people – those who hold us up, and those who push us  down. The negative ones are forever trying to tell us that we can’t do things, but what they really mean is THEY can’t. Nobody has the right to tell you what you can or can’t do – that is for you to decide. Decide to be positive!

3. Celebrate your successes. Make a big thing of them – if only in your mind. Reward yourself for doing well and pretty soon it will come naturally.

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Just For Fun
_________________________________________________________

India is the world’s largest democracy.

The Indian election in 1984 was the largest of any country with over 379,000,000 voters eligible to vote at over 480,000 polling  stations.

The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system.  It employs over 1.6 million people.

Almost 3 billion movie tickets are sold in India every year, and Bollywood produces over 800 movies a year to supply the demand  (about double the output of Hollywood).

I wanted to write a short post today to tell you about a recent experience that I had hiring someone to do write some content for me.  I learnt some valuable lessons and I’d like to pass them on.

I wanted to have some articles high quality articles written and I also wanted to have a larger project completed by the same person.  The person that I found is knowledgeable and a well known internet marketer that has them-self published many high quality pieces of work.  In fact, I thought I was extremely lucky to have found this person.

Actually not!

It wasn’t that the quality of the work was poor but the person involved seemed to be completely unable to take on board any constructive criticism or any requests for small changes.   Some of the work was clearly rushed, and not always well organised and the work was not delivered on time.  I politely requested a few changes and this person immediately terminated the project and refunded me the money that I had paid without even replying to my e-mail.

As it happens, I believe that this was a blessing in disguise.  When you hire someone to work for you, you need to be able to do a few things.  The most important of which is communicate honestly and openly about your requirements.  By pure fortune, I had asked to have the articles written first.  If I had jumped straight in with the larger project, then I could have found myself in a very sticky situation.

This is my take away from this experience.

• If you have some an important project with a new person, make sure you try a small project first.
• Pay attention to how well they communicate with you.
• Pay attention to how well they are willing to listen to your requirements.
• Pay attention to their ability to work to a deadline.
• Make sure that the work is done to a standard that is acceptable to you!

If you are thinking of outsourcing I hope that you find this article useful.

Hi,

I hope this Wednesday finds you well.  My wife has a day off work  today so luckily I don’t have to juggle my newsletter with the care of two energetic and loud young boys.  Oliver is 4.5 and  Magnus my youngest is 2.5.  Having said that, it’s not exactly  total peace and quiet as I sit at the kitchen table.  They are  currently climbing all over each other, pulling in each other’s  ears and laughing like maniacs.

If you’re looking to make money online the you will probably be  aware that an excellent way to start is by promoting other  people’s products; otherwise known as affiliate marketing.    Affiliate marketing has many advantages.  You don’t have to have  a product, you don’t need to provide customer service (the  product creator does this) and you don’t need to learn how to  write sales copy that converts.  For that matter, you don’t even  need a website.  On that note, I thought I’d help you out by  providing you with a free ebook on this topic.  There’s no optin  required, just download and enjoy:

http://www.gregoryhyne.com/ebooks/AffiliateMarketingMaster.pdf

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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You don’t need to have lots of technical skill to be successful online.  In fact, so many people get hung up on things like learning HTML, CSS styles, PHP….  when it’s completely unnecessary.  In fact, most of my successful sites are quite simple.  Your money is made on the offers you make and not on how flashy your site is.

Fact 1:  Simple Almost Always Outperforms Stylish.  The more cluttered that your site is, the more distractions you are providing.

Fact 2:  There are many easy to use tools for building websites.  Wordpress and Xsitepro are two good examples.

Fact 3: You can buy technical skill but not effective marketing.  Let me put it this way – it’s pretty hard to make a living as a  freelancer, even if you’ve got outstanding technical skills.

What you should really be focusing on is, identifying hot markets, finding or creating hot offers to put in front of them and getting the people in your market in front of your offers.  There are marketers making millions form the simplest of sites and they almost always hire the technical talent because this is the best use of their time and resources.

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Thought For Today
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Here is a business idea that I know from personal experience can save huge amounts of wasted time.  Meetings, when held in formal office surroundings, have a way of  dragging on. However good the chair person is (if you are lucky enough to have one) or how detailed the agenda, something always seems to get added to the end that makes you sit, bored out of  your brain for much longer than you’d like or need.

Well try this next time you have a meeting arranged with a small number of people. Change the location to somewhere casual.  Starbucks is good, the car park is better! Without the enforced formality of the office surroundings, people tend to stick to topic. I don’t really know why, but it does work.

If you are all sat in Starbucks, for instance, finishing your coffee is a psychological trigger to get up and leave. There just  isn’t the urge to stay for the sake of it.

Car park meetings are even better. Nobody want to hang around there for too long, but everyone can briefly say their piece before they all go their different ways.

Meetings can be one of the biggest drains on the most valuable resource you and your company have – time. Try and find ways that you can use to keep them to a minimum and you will have a massive advantage.

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Quotation
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Charles William Eliot said,

“All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.

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A Moment’s Inspiration
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When we aim at success, we often focus out eyes as well as our thoughts on the target at the end of the road, adopting a tunnel vision that blocks out everything else.

That is a shame because there are some wonderful views to take in on the journey.

When you take a road trip, you have usually have a clear destination in mind, but part of the fun of the journey are the things you’ll see along the way. People, places, funny events,  strange sights.

Our road to success is a road trip. But we have to remember that very often it is the things we pass en route that smooth our passage.

One of my friends and I talked about how we both love to occasionally leave our desks, walk out into the garden and just enjoy the day. That may not seem, on the face of it, to be a  productive thing to do, but believe me, recharging your batteries and getting back in tune with the world is a VITAL part of your  journey.

It is good to have you destination firmly in mind, but never forget to turn your head once in while to enjoy the view.

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This Week’s Quick Tip
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Today is a good day to start breathing.

Oh, I know you can already do it with your eyes closed, but how  about really closing them for a moment and concentrating on each breath.

Breath deep down into your stomach. Draw in each breath slowly and release it even slower, letting all your tensions waft out  like so much used air. With your eyes closed, completely experience ten deep, relaxing, cleansing breaths.

What a lovely way to start your day.

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Just For Fun
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Everyone knows what a Danish Pastry is – except the people in Denmark. Over there, they call them Vienna Bread.

That’s it for today.  Please feel free to leave a comment.