As hard drives get bigger and bigger, so does the likelihood that more and more stuff is collecting dust on yours. Heck, I just looked at my laptop hard drive and saw that, of 70 GB, I only have slightly more than 2 GB still free!
By the way, before I go any further, I want to make sure to remind you to always back up your hard drive on a regular basis. Seriously. As I'm sure some of you have already sadly discovered, losing a ton of data - including mailing lists, products you purchased, half-finished products - can severely damage, if not destroy, your Internet business.
Rule of Thumb: Back up your hard drive - 'dust' and all - regularly, or plan on paying the price eventually. Go do it now!
OK, now that you've backed up the important data on your hard drive, what do you actually do with all that stuff you've downloaded in your efforts to make money online?
1) If you download more stuff, organize it as you download it
2) If you haven't organized older items yet...and can afford to make the time to organize them...do so, even if it's a little bit at a time
3) Use what you have organized to give it your best shot to make money!
Sounds easier said than done, right? Wrong. It is actually fairly easy to do.
What the problem is for most people is that, since they didn't do it from the get-go, they feel overwhelmed.
So, what to do now?
First of all, notice that I didn't list "read" as one of the things you should do. That's for several reasons. One is that, if you're like a lot of Internet marketers, you've read and read and read and read and...the more you read, the less you actually do.
Most ebooks are repeats. Most can be skimmed through. Most add very little to what you already know. Unless you intend to actually sell the book soon and want to recommend it (as opposed to simply posting the sales page included with it), what's the point? How many new things do you truly expect to learn? And when do you intend to apply what you've learned?
Rule of Thumb: Selling makes you money - reading doesn't unless you apply what you read
By the way, if you do read something, don't take the time to write the author about how wonderful it is. You don't know how wonderful it is until you've actually apply the knowledge you've learned. Forget the testimonial = backlink = higher PR nonsense. You need to use your time wisely. Writing a testimonial for someone else's product that has made you no money is a lousy use of your time.
If you actually use the product and it actually makes a difference, become an affiliate and market the thing. Otherwise, let the idea of writing a testimonial gather dust in your brain.
Second, since you are going to be downloading more stuff, start organizing those downloads AS YOU DOWNLOAD THEM.
Organizing downloads can be pretty simple, and the main reason for organizing them at that point is so you know what the heck you've downloaded when you look back at them tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year. Seriously.
Here's an example. You purchase the latest greatest product. Let's call it "The Real Way To Make Money Online Or I'll Personally Pay You A Million Dollars - Guaranteed" This amazing book comes with master resell rights and a sales page with graphics.
You buy it and download it. The ebook download file name is rwmmoppmdg.zip, the sales page file name is salespage.zip, the graphics file name is mmgpix.zip...and they all come as separate files.
If you're like a lot of folks, you've download all these files individually into your My Downloads folder because that's the XP default download folder.
Tomorrow comes, but you haven't had a chance to do anything about this great new product because...well, because you've gotten distracted. Happens to all of us. So you forget. Or you delay. Or you are downloading a lot of other products at the same time. Or...who cares.
The fact of the matter is that that product has been downloaded and, basically, lost.
Should you want to go back and do something with it? How do you find it? And how do you know if it fits your needs at the time?
Well, if you had downloaded it in an organized fashion, you could find it easily.
Since this example product came as 3 separate files, the first thing to do is create a specific folder into which to download all the components. If the product title is short, name the folder with the product's title. In this case, since it's so long, you could call it Real Way Million Dollars Guaranteed. Or, since it's an ebook with master resell rights, you could call it Real Way Million Dollars Guaranteed Ebook MRR.
Or you could set up an ebooks folder and, within that create the Real Way Million Dollars Guaranteed MRR folder. Or, within the ebooks folder, you could have set up an MRR (that's for master resell rights, by the way) folder and then created that Real Way Million Dollars Guaranteed folder inside that.
IIt's up to you how you prefer to organize your downloads, but doing the organizing as you download means you have improved your chances of finding your downloads later exponentially and in a much more meaningful manner.
Rule of Thumb: Make sure you understand that you need to organize your downloads in a manner that provides you with useful information in the future. Don't assume you'll remember what things mean in a week. You won't!
The suggestions I just listed are title, product type, and rights type. Don't just organize by one thing. Don't just download all your files into a "Download Products To Sell" folder. You still won't be able to quickly grab the products you need when you need them, and you still will be overwhelmed by the disorganization.
In addition to identifying the product later on, using the title of the download allows you to easily check to see if you've already purchased it. Otherwise you could easily find yourself paying for something more than once simply because you'd lost it the first time on your hard drive.
Adding the type of product helps those of us who organize our sites by product type, e.g. ebooks, software, etc.) Not only that, but when it comes to creating new products or packages, knowing what type each file is will speed things up noticeably.
And adding the type of rights to the file name (e.g. mrr, plr, resell, giveaway) lets you choose products easily when creating packages or adding something to a giveaway. For example, you want to add a private label rights item to a PLR giveaway...wouldn't it be a lot easier if you could tell at a glance which files were plr and which weren't? Or would you really prefer to have to open each file to see what rights come with them? And have to do that every time you think you might want to use it?
You may not think these little steps will make a difference, but they will. After all, time is money. The less time you have to spend on doing things the hard way that you could have done easily and usefully the first time, the more time you have for doing those tasks that actually bring in the cash.
Other tricks you seriously might want to consider when downloading are:
1) Opening the downloaded zip file to see the date of the actual product and, within your higher level organization, sort by year folders (e.g. 2007, '2003 or earlier').
This doesn't mean you have to extract anything or read anything. But, if you open a .zip file, look to see the date of the product. Just because you bought or downloaded it in 2007 or the sales page said "Brand New product!" doesn't mean
the product isn't 3-4 years old.
Then, when it comes time to creating a new product or looking for things to sell or add to a giveaway site, you can look for newer products first as those will be far more desireable.
2) While this can be more time-consuming, you can organize the same item into different folders by topic. This can be done when you're downloading (it's OK to download something twice at the same time, you know) or when you're looking at the dates. By the way, giving full names to your downloads makes organizing by topic much easier.
What's the point of downloading by product topic? Well, since I also have an online real estate business, anything related to real estate goes into real estate folders so I can easily find new freebies to include in my autoresponders or to offer to site visitors so I can collect their contact information, among other things.
Rule of Thumb: Regardless of how you organize, organize. A few minutes extra now will save you hours later and allow you to actually make money with that "dust" on your hard drive.
Part Two of this series is going to show you how you, now that you've organized a little, can take what you've found and turn it into profitable products that other marketers will want to sell for you and other people will want to buy!
"What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork."
~ Pearl Bailey~
Many of you have probably heard the term "Web 2.0", particularly over the last 6 months or so. Some of you may have even bought ebooks on it. And some of you are afraid that the web truly is changing into a new format and you need to make all kinds of adjustments to your website or it was dead.
You can stop being afraid.
Web 2.0 was first used in 2004 as the title of a media conference series covering things like social networking, blogs, and wikis. Since then, much as been made of new technologies like podcasts and sites like YouTube as also being part of Web 2.0.
There's no arguing that other forms of web communication have grown and been wildly successful. But this has been in addition to existing forms, not in replacement of them.
After all, when you go to Amazon, has it morphed into a social networking site? Or Yahoo...is it now a blog? Or, how about Google. Is it now a wiki?
The fact is that "Web 2.0" was created as a marketing term, nothing more, nothing less. It does not describe a new iteration of the web where we have to replace what we have now. What it describes are additions to how information is delivered on the web.
Yes, some of you will definitely be able to utilize these new presentation formats to make money. Most of you won't, and that won't be because you haven't bought the latest, greatest books/videos/whatever on Web 2.0.
If you make a marketing video and post it to YouTube, it isn't going to automatically make you money. People have to find it, then view it. Then rate it and share it. Otherwise it sits there, unseen and unknown.
If you start tagging and listing your sites on, say, del.icio.us, it doesn't mean anyone going to find you, much less bookmark your site.
If you start blogging but don't keep it up, or use the same lame PLR content as everyone else in hopes of getting income from Adsense, no one will find your blog, no one will click on your links, and... well, you get the drift.
This certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't consider trying. You might find that you have the skills to use these new options very successfully.
It just means that, in addition to not fearing it, you shouldn't expect "Web 2.0" to be any more of a magic bullet than the "old" web. In other words, don't jump into Web 2.0 expecting miracles. After all, just like on the "old" web, you'll be competing with hundreds of millions of people.
Making money online is work. Just like making money offline. You can do it, though, and it's wonderfully satisfying to have money coming in on a regular basis because of your efforts as your own boss. I love it! So will you, if you aren't doing it already.
Kendall
Some of you may remember a product called Article Plus Tookit. Well, the Tookit has now been upgraded, revamped and expanded into the new Article Site Power Kit.
The Power Kit is a collection of tools and templates built around something called Article Site Builder, which turns ordinary articles into complete websites with Adsense, Amazon and Clickbank Ads, search engine optimization, and keyword niche videos.
OK...so what makes this different from every other 'site builder' out there? And there are a lot of them.
Well, at first glance you might say "not a darn thing" EXCEPT that it expands on what other site builders do by adding a related products and 'video wall' section.
To see what I mean, you can check out a demo site at http://www.script7.com/articlesite and scroll down.
The point of pages created by site makers is to get you to click on (potentially) paying links, not to actually provide you with useful information. Any useful information is going to be provided by *you*, not the software. (Just think...you could take some of your newly-organized PLR 'dust', rewrite some of the junk to improve its quality, and use Article Site Power Kit to turn it into profit-pulling websites!)
If you look at the bottom half of the demo page, you'll see what makes pages created by Article Site Power Kit different.
Below the Related Products and FREE Videos page break, you get blasted by whole bunches of more 'sales opportunities'. You're given a Clickbank search function, multiple Amazon Buy Now graphic buttons, and a series of niche-related video clips - a 'video wall ' associated with the keyword you've chosen when creating the site.
For those of you looking for more opportunities to make money off 'adsense pages', these additional potential revenue streams may be just what you're looking for.
If you are, and they are, the Article Site Power Kit also has some other features you might be interested in.
(By the way, if you want to view a video on just how easy it is to use the Article Site Power Kit, you can check it out at http://reselling4profit.com/recommends/power/video)
Anyway...the Power Kit includes a script that randomly shows one of the articles on the home page as well as a random cross-linker script, both of which are designed to optimize what are basically static sites.
Additional features include
- One click site content translation, so that your sites are available tomore than English readers
- In addition to automatic Adsense ads, Amazon ads are also automatically generated based on your keywords
- Includes Google and Clickbank search features
- Includes a customised search phrase script to display keyword-search-specifric phrases on your web page
The Article Site Power Kit is only $14.97 and you can get it here: http://reselling4profit.com/recommends/power
With freebies like this, we expect you'll be a subscriber to the Reselling4Profit Newsletter for a long, long time.
Let's see - what shall we cover in the next issue? Oh year. Now that we've talked about organizing the stuff on your hard drive, Part 2 will talk about creating new products from it.
Great success to you and yours!
Kendall Simmons
Reselling4Profit.com - where
YOUR profit is our product