SUBSCRIBER QUESTIONS PART 8
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You asked for questions and I have one. I just created a new social networking site. Anyone that joins can post blogs, videos, photos, etc.

Its totally free, no paying upgrade option etc. Would you consider joining? Whats in it for you. Another place to share ideas.

http://www.jukeboxtunes.info

Networks that sing!

Anthony

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Question: Would you consider joining my social networking site?

ANSWER:
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Thanks for your question, Anthony…

Here is my detailed review for your site:

1.) I have the impression, the site is rather incomplete so far. I am missing a headline which tells me what the target audience/age group is for your site (the title bar says "adult social network" but what can they expect?) and what your unique angle is. Why should they join your site instead of e.g. MySpace.com / Friendster.com which allows them to do the same things? What makes your site different? Until now, I can only see pictures of you, the blog posts seem to be automated postings of RSS feed content and the layout doesn"t fit together.

2.) The header is not looking professional and because of its" colors, the red navigation links can"t be read. Moreover, the header also is too small (when viewing it in a 1024×768 resolution) and allows people to view a yellow background which doesn"t fit into the site. Maybe, you should put your navigation links below the header so they can be read.

On subpages, the same red navigation links seem to be blue. Why is it changing the color from page to page? Navigational links need to be consistent and should not change from page to page.

3.) The colors of the layout don"t fit together. The background is a complete contrast to the other sections of the index page. The heading colors for the individual sections also look rather unusual.

4.) The Adsense block doesn"t fit in there, either. It looks like a foreign object there and using the banner format makes it look and smell like advertising. People would rather ignore it as they don"t like to click on advertising. It should blend in with the colors of your site (but hopefully after you"ve changed them…).

5.) Because your picture is the only one which appears on the front page, it makes your site look like a virtual ghost town. There doesn"t seem to be any activity apart from your own. You need to change this and start promoting your site after you have found your unique angle and changed the design.

So in order to answer your question: No, Anthony, I wouldn"t join it in its" current state… My suggestion is that you hire a web designer to create a professional header/design for your site. Then it will be much easier to get visitors and signups. Go to Scriptlance.com or Elance.com and put up a project there.

Tags: adsense

SUBSCRIBER QUESTIONS PART 7
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1. Get a personalized website and how much does it cost?

2. Know the best product to sell and how to promote it?

3. Get people to my site that are interested in my product?

Connie

ANSWERS:
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1. How Do I get a personalized website and how much does it cost?

I guess with personalized website you mean your own custom design. I cannot give a general price for something like that. It depends on the web designer and his abilities as well as his experience. Usually, you can get a 5 page website design starting at $100 I would say. You need to go to freelancer sites like Scriptlance.com or Elance.com and put up a project there. Then designers from all over the world will be bidding on your project and you can choose the one with the best feedback or simply the one which charges the lowest amount of money. You also need to take the domain registration ($9) and website hosting into account (starting at around $5.95/month).

2. How do I know what the best product to sell is and how do I promote it?

If that question were so easy to answer all people with websites would be rich. There is no such product as "the best product" to sell. It depends on the market you are in and on the relationship you are building with your potential customers. You cannot expect that people who have never visited your site before will be buying on their first visit. That"s why it"s so crucial to capture email addresses. Without getting their email addresses, you basically have one shot and that is it. Most visitors will never return to your website even if they"ve bookmarked it…

The best KIND of products usually are unique digital products and membership sites. They offer the highest ROI (return on investment) and are usually also the most attractive ones for starting your own affiliate program.

3. How do I get people to my site that are interested in my product?

Please read my articles about targeted traffic generation as I have answered this question more than once in my articles:

5 Amazingly easy ways to get top 10 listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN - Part 1

5 Amazingly easy ways to get top 10 listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN - Part 2

7 Low or no cost ways to generate laser targeted traffic to any website

Tag and Ping is still alive

Detlev

Tags: adsense, affiliate, affiliate program, membership sites, tag and ping, targeted traffic, targeted traffic, traffic, websites

SUBSCRIBER QUESTIONS PART 6
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Hi Detlev,

I'm Peter from Antwerp, Belgium and it's been a while now that i receive your newsletters. i am happy with them because it is not full of crap like so many other ones.

So here's my question: A year ago i started working on cruiseships for Carnival and so i have little internet time available, unless i want to use satellite and that's really expensive. So basically i need to "set and forget" my sites. Of course every site needs maintenance and content building and i am willing to do that.

But my biggest problem right now is that i want to do something for the cruising public, or do something with cruises since i have access to a lot of information there. I don't know what to sell. Usually i am full with ideas, but i guess the ocean breeze is filtering my brain. All i can think of is sunshine and mexican food

So i come to you and see if you have any ideas what people are looking for (it is not necessary for it to be related to cruising, but it helps my marketing efforts since i see 2000 new people every week ?).

kindest regards and keep up the good work. I'm sure you've enjoyed Mauritius.

Peter Sleeckx

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Question: Do you have an idea what products I can sell related to cruising/cruiseships?

ANSWER:

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Thanks for the compliments - I"m glad you like my newsletter . Seems we"re almost neighbours… Belgium is around the corner from Germany…

I"m no expert in cruising but I guess that a lot of people would be interested in getting to know how you can apply for a job on a cruise ship. Many people like to travel and if they can combine it with a job doing their favorite thing then the interest should be there. You could be writing about how you got into that job and what qualifications you had to meet plus addresses and contacts where interested people can get more info (not just for the Carnival cruise line but for others as well). This could easily be turned into an ebook/report.

Then you could put it up for sale on Clickbank and try to get JV partners/super affiliates for it by contacting website owners which have top positions in the search engines for your main keywords or by visiting ezine directories and contacting owners which publish travel related ezines. Once you have a lot of affiliates who are promoting your ebook, your cruise job ebook will also be visible in the Clickbank marketplace where it can get noticed by even more affiliates. You just have to invest a little time in the beginning to make it work for you. And once enough affiliates are promoting it, it is a kind of "set and forget" like you want. Moreover, you could be running PPC campaigns which will also deliver sales for you. The profits will be dependent on your price, of course.

Another product idea: Maybe you or someone else from your cabin crew knows something about the best places which are virtually unknown to tourists in the countries where you are going from board. It could be a kind of "travelling guide for insiders". Even better, create videos about the areas you are visiting and put them up for sale (for a small fee) or use them as an incentive to make your visitors want to get there and then have affiliate links to travel related sites below the videos. Let them sign up to get access to more videos so you can follow up with them.

Or bundle a lot of these videos together, create some ebooks to go with them and sell them as packages with private label rights to Internet marketers. Travel related products will work great as a lot of Internet marketers have such sites. I hope, this helps a bit…

Detlev

P.S.: I"m STILL on Mauritius (until next Monday)

Tags: adsense, affiliate, affiliates, clickbank, ebook, search engines

SUBSCRIBER QUESTIONS PART 5
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I have been trying to promote art and artists on the web and have so far had no luck. I have done all the usual things like making sure of my keywords, SEO's etc and still no luck Any thoughts? I have asked several other people but they seem to shy away from this type of thing.

Cheers and thanks…you may use this and my name online

David

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Question: How to sell and promote art and artists on the web?

ANSWER:

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Selling art on the web can be quite difficult (people can"t touch and smell it or view certain details) but it can be done. Your description of what you have done so far doesn"t sound very extensive, though.

Of course, you need to be using keywords related to art but you should also make sure that the keywords don"t have too much competition. The tool I am using for this is NicheBot2. It includes the KEI calculations from Wordtracker but is much cheaper than a subscription to Wordtracker itself ($9.95 a month compared to $27 a week…). KEI gives you the best keywords you should target: A relatively good number of searches against the least amount of competing pages.

Using this competition data, you should be creating pages and writing content based on the keywords with the smallest number of competing websites (if possible with less than 1000 competing pages). Then you need to make sure you"re getting backlinks to your pages using your keywords in the link descriptions. One of the best ways to achieve this is by writing articles and then submitting them to article directories. This way, your pages will gain more weight in the search engines if you can get backlinks with your main keywords included in the resource box of the article. And you also will be getting direct traffic from the resource box of your articles.

Another way of getting backlinks which I recommend is using the network of blogs within Backlink Solution. These are white hat blogs that you can post a short text excerpt and add a link to your own website within the text using your main keywords as the link text. This can give you a real boost in the search engines especially if you"re considering that they give you around 100 blogs on 60 IP addresses to post your links to. Even deep links (going directly to a sub page instead of just the index.htm) are allowed. But you need to make sure you"re making enough posts there in order to make it work for you.

I don"t know what the conversion rate for an art related website is but I guess, in most cases it would be below 1% even for targeted visitors because of the nature of the products. That could be too low to make good profits…

Detlev

Tags: adsense, search engines, seo, traffic, websites

SUBSCRIBER QUESTIONS PART 4
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Detlev,

I'm working on my first website and have run into a problem with editing on Nvu html editor. My url is identitytheft-protectionalert.com

Take a look at it and see if you can tell me how to get rid of the excess space at the top and at the bottom.

I have other little problems like that all related to html editors, working with ftp after the file is uploaded, and cpanel access etc. but will keep trying to find tutorials. Hard to find anything that really gets into the basics. It's easy to see why many people give up or quit. I spent the whole weekend on the above mentioned problem with the excess space believing it had to be trying to change table size, paragraphs, style etc. No progress whatsoever.

Appreciate it if you have any detailed solution.

You can use my name, although it may not mean much.

Thanks
Ron

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Question: how to get rid of the excess space at the top and at the bottom?

ANSWER:

Hi Ron,

Although I am not using the NVU HTML editor myself, this question is quite easy to answer:

Go into the menu, choose "File"/"Page Setup" and click on the tab "Margins & Header/Footer". By default, most editors have a value in there. In the case of NVU, I discovered it"s a standard value of 0,5 cm which they"ve set there. Just set it to 0.0 for the header and footer section and you"re done.

If that doesn"t work and your page is using CSS then the corresponding *.css is the file where you need to look for the solution. Just try to find a section within this file (open it with a text editor) where it is mentioning any page margins at the top/bottom and correct the values. Then save the CSS file and upload it to your server again.

I hope, this helps…

Detlev

Tags: adsense