Yesterday, Josh and I had a pretty in depth discussion about something that everyone needs to implement in their business. You may not need this immediately… But at some point, you will find that you can no longer grow unless you follow the advice in this call.

Anyway, I’ve posted the call below. There’s nothing for sale, I’m not looking for opt-ins and you can feel free to download it and share it with whoever you want. It’s just pure content and nothing more. The call lasts a little less than 40 minutes and we drop some really good tips at the end. By good tips, I mean NOBODY else is doing this yet.

So check out the call and please leave your comments. Your feedback has been amazing and I love to hear what you think about this stuff.

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1. The Fastest Ways To Grow Your Mailing List

Do you have any cool tricks with G-Mail? I love G-Mail and I want to start posting random posts about how to get the most out of it. What are your tips?

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It is scary because if I hadn’t have taken a few certain actions a few weeks ago, I would have been unable to recover my blog. I figured that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there that may not know how to backup their blog or how to recover their blog from a backup. It is really scary because your blog CAN go down at any time for no apparent reason whatsoever! Read this post and maybe you can put yourself in a situation where a database crash is nothing more than a 5 minute fix.

The very first thing that you should do is download and install the WP-DB-Backup plugin for wordpress. It’s a free plugin and can usually be searched for and installed from directly inside your WordPress Dashboard. Get that installed today. Once it’s installed set it up to backup daily and send you an e-mail with the backup. By doing this, you can jump back to any point in time and recover all the information that crashed. If you don’t update very frequently, you can also opt to backup weekly. I prefer daily because I know I can restore comments from the previous day as well.

Now… If your blog ever goes down and you have been doing a good job of backing it up, here is how you restore your blog.

1. Login in to your CPanel account and scroll down until you find phpMyAdmin

2. Find the database that your blog is installed on. The backup files that are sent to you from WP-DB-Backup will share the same name as the database you need to recover. So if you are unsure of which database to open, refer to the filename of your backup file.

3. Click on the tab that says import at the top of the new screen that just opened.

4. Click on “choose file” and find the backup file that you are going to use to restore your blog.

That should do it. Your blog should be back in all of its glory. Having a database failure can be extremely scary! Fortunately, if you take the right precautions from the beginning, it can be a very quick and painless fix. If you only have one plugin installed for your blog, make sure that it is a backup plugin. It will save you someday!

Please feel free to make comments. Have you had your blog crash? Do you have any questions about making sure you are protected against your blog crashing?

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Today I want to explain how I build my list so fast.

About eight weeks ago I had no mailing list. I had zero subscribers. I made it my 100% focus to build that mailing list as fast as possible. In a period of about seven weeks, I went from not even having an Aweber account to having a mailing list with over 1,000 subscribers. The cool thing is that I know for a fact, that I will double my list in less than one more month. My list grows at a rate of about 50 new subscribers per day. So it really should only take about 20 more days to completely double my list.

Why has building my list been my number one goal over the last several months, you might ask… You may also be wondering why I made the statement that building a list is the fastest way to grow an internet marketing business. Well, to answer both of those questions, internet marketers much wiser than myself have said over and over again that one subscriber on your list is worth one dollar per month. So if I am growing my list at a rate of 50 subscribers per day, I am growing my business by about $50 per month! If you do the math, I should have about a $3,000 per month business in no less than 40 days time at the rate that I am going.

So now that you know the importance of growing your mailing list. Let me share with you the top 3 techniques that I have used to grow my mailing list.

JV Giveaways - This was the absolute first thing that I started doing after I had a free product created. You can enter your free product in to these JV Giveaway events and every single person that has submitted a product, promotes the JV giveaway. This causes a massive flood of traffic to the JV giveaway and some of that traffic finds, and opts-in for, your product. JV Giveaways usually have an option to upgrade for a price. I tend to like to upgrade as well. Upgrading gets your product in front of a lot more people. I have done about 50% of my JV giveaways without upgrading and about 50% with upgrading. When I upgrade, I usually get about four times as many subscribers from the event than if I didn’t upgrade. JV Giveaways are the best way to start building your list before you really have many people on your list to leverage. For the sake of?convenience, I have started to compile a list of current JV giveaway events. I will make sure to keep this list updated as new ones come up and old ones shut down. You can find JV Giveaway Events Here. Bookmark that page because you are going to want to access these JV giveaways as soon as they come up.

ListJoe – ListJoe is a cool little site that I found that I don’t think is very well known yet. Basically, when you sign up for ListJoe (100% Free), you will be able to send out a mailing to 2,000 people immediately. That’s right, you will mail 2,000 people within 10 minutes of signing up. From that point on, you will begin receiving e-mails from other ListJoe members. For each e-mail you open, you will receive a certain amount of points. One point is equal to one person mailed to on your next mailing. You will receive a lot of e-mails per day but you can build up your points and send out to a list of about 3,000 per week. You might think that this doesn’t sound too effective because you are just sending to other ListJoe members. However, I have only sent 2 mailings so far and it has accounted for over 150 new subscribers. I would definitely not downplay the ability of this service. If you are interested in playing around with ListJoe check it out here.

Adswaps – Adswaps are probably the absolute fastest way to build your list up. However, adswaps are difficult unless you already have a little bit of a list built up. Basically, you are telling someone that you will promote their opt-in page to your list if they promote your opt-in page to their list. Most people will only do adswaps with people who have similar list sizes to their own. Adswaps are basically a way to leverage the list that you currently have. I have, however, asked people with lists much larger than mine to do an adswap and been surprised that they had accepted. So I would say that even though your list may be smaller than someone else’s, it never hurts to ask. You might be surprised at some people’s generosity.

Because I have made list building my complete focus over the last several weeks, I have decided to dive in deeper and explain some of the advanced techniques that I have also learned that I have used to boost my list exponentially. I want to teach people how I manage to grab about 50 new subscribers per day. To do this, I have created a two-week course that dives in to list building. The course is 100% free and each lesson is delivered to your e-mail. There is no site to log in to and you can save all of the information to your hard drive as you go. The course digs in to everything from the initial setup of a mailing list all the way in to super advanced techniques that can potentially build your list by hundreds of subscribers overnight. I also cover several resources to find things like adswaps and JV partners. You really don’t want to miss out on this free opportunity to explode your list over the next 2 weeks. To get started with the first lesson today, simply enter your e-mail address in the form below. Otherwise, please leave a comment with your list building tips or your thoughts on my list building tips.

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You can actually schedule posts for later. A lot of times, when I know I am going on vacation or something, I will write several blog posts and then que them up to post over the next several days. This allows me to be “hands off” on my blog while making it appear that I am constantly updating.

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your WordPress dashboard, click on “Posts”, and then click on “Add New”. Then go ahead and write one of your posts like you would anyway. Now, under the “Publish” area on the right hand side of your screen, there is an area that says “Publish: immediately”. Click on the link that says “Edit”.

Now you can change the date and time that you want this post to update.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You can do this as many times as you want to schedule up as many days as you want.

It is something that is really quick and simple, yet a lot of people ask me how to do this. So there you go. That’s how it is done.

Do you have any burning WordPress questions? I can probably help you out with any questions that you have or anything that you’ve been trying to figure out how to do. I want to get back in to doing a couple of blog posts a week. Post your WordPress questions and what you would like to learn and I will make more tutorials on how to do them. But first, don’t forget to check out my free WordPress video tutorials at The WordPress Classroom.

Ask your questions in the comments below and I will help you out if I know the answer!

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I hate SPAM – Your email address will be kept 100% secure and you can unsubscribe at any time!

So I have finally done it. I have finally opened up the video tutorials that I have been talking so much about. I have called my program The WordPress Classroom. It has videos about setting up the blog all the way through installing various plugins and hiding affiliate links.

All of the videos are not done yet so I will upload more as they are finished. I just wanted to get this online and going so people can have access to them now. I know a lot of people from Alex Jeffrey’s course will get great use from these.

Please give me your feedback in the comments below!

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I don’t know why I call these sneaky marketing tricks. They are really tricks that help you earn commissions but add value to your customer.

Offer a complement.
The main trick that I like to use involves adding a complement to the product that you are trying to sell. If you remember in my previous post about how to make a WordPress theme, I offered to personally create the theme for anybody who signed up through PowWeb. This little technique can be used for so many different products. I am a fan of the theme creator Artisteer, so I offer free tutorials and personal help to anybody who purchases through my link. If you can think of creative ways to complement the product that you are trying to sell, you can gain an upper hand against the competition selling the same product.

In the past, I have also pushed products through Clickbank. This method works extremely well for digital products as well. The trick that I like to use is that I look for areas where the e-book or digital video product may be lacking a little bit. I then explain to my readers how this product lacks. But then I offer a complement to the product to offset the deficiency. It is an insanely powerful marketing method. The whole idea behind this method is that you are grabbing people who would buy the product anyway but convincing them to purchase it through you instead of somebody else.

Offer your product for free.
The other technique that I commonly use is to flat-out offer a really great product for free. Give the people who are going to be reading or using this product extreme value. When somebody accesses your product and they see what great value you offer, they are going to want more, and they are going to want to purchase your follow-up products. This technique also relates to list building. You offer your product for free in exchange for an e-mail address. Once people realize the great value that you are giving to them for free, you will have them on a mailing list to offer your follow-up products. This technique only works if your free product is truly a great product. If you offer the people a crap product, they are going to think that your paid product is crap as well.

Only promote products that you feel strongly about.
Many online consumers have an ability to see past insincere product promotions. It is important to promote products that you have used and that you feel strongly about. This works in two ways. First, it is so much easier for you to write about it because you feel strongly about it and you understand its worth. You can honestly recommend this product and feel confident that the people you are recommending it to will enjoy it as well. Besides, if you are offering a complement to the product, how will you know what to offer or how to offer it if you do not really know what you are promoting? The second reason this is important is because most online consumers can feel your passion and your sincerity towards the product. It is so much easier to sell a product. When you know exactly what you are promoting and exactly how your customers will benefit from it.

Use some of these “tricks” and watch your commissions grow. Have any other tricks or want to let me know how these have worked for you? Please leave your comments. I love the interaction.

Be active in your niche’s community.
I can not stress this enough. This is the biggest thing and the fastest way to build free traffic to your blog. Find as many other blogs as you can that are in your niche, read the posts on those blogs, and leave good, relevant comments. Don’t give them the crappy “great post” comments. Those will usually get tossed out as spam. Read the post and try to add a comment that will add to the topic. Give input or more information that the readers of that blog will enjoy and get something out of. People will come to your blog if they think they can learn something from you.

Jump in to the forums that are related to your niche. I guarantee that there is a forum for your niche, no matter what the niche is. There’s always a forum. Get in to that forum, put your blog’s address in your signature, and make helpful, useful comments. The more valuable and relevant your comments are, the faster they will convert in to traffic. Once again, stay away from comments like nice post or good idea. Give people something that adds to the conversation. You are much better off not commenting at all than leaving a plain, boring comment. People will get irritated and will be counterproductive.

Another method of giving to your niche’s community is to write guest posts. Find blogs that are in your niche and write a post for them. E-mail them before you write the post, give them compliments on their blog, and ask if they would be interested in letting you write a guest post for them. Give them three or four ideas of things that you would like to write about. Let them pick the topic. Using this method, you have the opportunity to grab the readers of that other blog. Unlike comments, your guest post will go out to their RSS subscribers and it will sit on their front page for a few days in most cases. It is an excellent way to get a quick boost. Want some examples of guest posts? Here is a guest post that I wrote about how to make money with Clickbank. Notice also, Bill Romer made a guestpost on my blog. When it comes to guest posts, use your best ideas. You want your absolute best material in these guest posts because you are trying to grab new readers. You need a great first impression.

Article marketing
Article marketing works because sites like ezinearticles and GoArticles are more popular than yours. It’s the truth, Google likes them better. Basically, you want to write an article about your niche and post it to one of those sites. At the end of the article, toss in your blog’s link. When people stumble across your article, if the content is good, they will find you blog.

Using websites like HubPages and Squidoo, you can generate the same effect. Leveraging the fact that these sites are very popular and Google likes them, you can create quick, relevant sites that link back to your blog. My typical technique is to create a squidoo lense with about three articles and a couple relevant YouTube videos. I then throw my blog’s link in at the bottom. People like what they see at my lense and come to my blog to get more.

Social Networking Sites
This is a pretty quick and easy way to help generate traffic. Post the address to your blog on all of your social networks. Make sure you have a link in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social network you can think of. People find you and are curious about your site. It’s quick and easy.

Social Bookmarking Sites
This another powerful way that could potentially generate massive traffic. Every time you create a blog post, submit it to places like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and any other social bookmarking sites that you can think of. I have had blog posts that went viral because I submitted them to one of those sites. The next thing you know, your blog that receives 10 views a day, has over 600 in one day. It happens all of the time. Use these sites. They have the potential to explode your site’s traffic.

Link Exchanges
I like to contact as many other blogs as I can that are in my niche and offer to swap links. I’ll give them a shout out in one of my posts if they sneak one of my links in to one of their posts. This is beneficial in two ways. First you can snag a little bit of traffic from their blog and second, Google loves to see your site linked from other sites. This will help your search engine ranking.

Pay Per Click
This is the first of my paid traffic generation methods. I don’t tend to recommend this for blogs because, at first, you won’t make that money back. It is, however, the absolute fastest, easiest, way to boost your traffic almost instantly. You pick some keywords in Google AdWords and every time someone searches for your keywords, your ad will show up for them. Google will charge you every time someone clicks on one of your ads. As you can imagine, the cost can build up quickly.

Purchasing links
Another option is purchase links from other, more popular, websites. This may be slightly more suited for blogs because I tend to think it will bring more relevant traffic. However, this method is a risk as well because you are paying for that link to appear, not for the clicks on that link. You might purchase a link for one month on a website for $20. If no one clicks that link all month, you just lost $20 and have nothing to show for it.

There are so many more traffic generation techniques available. For a blog, I would stick to free methods. It will take a long time to see a return on a paid ad investment at this stage in your blogging career. I will post a follow up in a few days with more ideas to generate blog traffic.

Stick around! We are just getting started!

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As you can see it’s a real simple process. You are going to log in to your WordPress dashboard, download a plugin called GoCodes, and use that program to hide your affiliate links. This will keep people from stilling your links and throwing their own code in them. It will also give readers the impression that they are just clicking around inside of your blog, as opposed to clicking on affiliate links. This plugin has worked wonders on my other sites. Like I said, I keep the link hiding to a minimum on this site. (Full Disclosure… Remember?)

Anyway, please comment below if you found this helpful at all. I really do appreciate all the interaction I have been receiving from people. I like to know when people find what I’m giving them valuable. Please comment. Share your thoughts, questions, better ideas, etc. below!

Tomorrow I will be giving you some awesome free tools for internet marketers. I will also give a progress report on my coaching with Alex Jeffreys. Trust me, good things are starting to happen!

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To begin with, we are going to focus on affiliate marketing. I was going to really go in depth about PPC advertising with adsense but decided that affiliate marketing is probably a better way to start. I don’t think that posting Google Adsense ads on sites about internet marketing is the best strategy. The main reason being that people who visit internet marketing sites tend be a little more web savvy. They tend to be more blind to adsense type ads. Promotion in the internet marketing niche is much better and much more profitable when you affiliate your self with products and companies that you like to promote.

What is affiliate marketing?
Basically, when you are doing affiliate marketing, you are promoting someone else’s product. When the product sells, you get a cut of the profits. I believe CDNow was really the first company to start affiliate marketing on a grand scale on the internet. Nowadays, Amazon.com and eBay use affiliate marketing heavily. Each company that you sign up for has their own process of bringing on affiliates. I can’t really go in to the process of how to sign up for each of them on this blog.

How can I make money with affiliate marketing?
First let me give you an example of affiliate marketing in action. My blog has a recommended reading section. You’ll notice that in this section, I am talking about all of my favorite books. If you click on one of the books and decide to purchase it, Amazon will give me something like 4% of the sale. As you can see, it’s not huge money. 4% of a $15.00 book is $0.60. I need to sell a lot of books to make real good money. Another example of an affiliate is PowWeb. My blog is hosted over there and I am a huge fan of their services. Every time someone clicks on their link and signs up for an account, they pay me $77! It only costs someone $45 per year to sign up! They are counting on the fact that people are going to sign up and hang around and continue to renew. As you can see, I do not need to get a whole heck of a lot of people to sign up over there to make a good income. This is the power of affiliate marketing! There’s some good and some bad but if people trust you enough and value your opinion, it can all really add up quickly.

Another great place to find affliates is called Commission Junction. They have a whole bunch of different companies that you can promote with all different types of offers. This is where you can find any product from any niche to promote. If promoting eBooks is more up your alley, I recommend Clickbank. Here you can find all sorts of eBooks that offer up to 75% commission.

Here’s what you should do.
Signup for the affiliate programs at Amazon.com, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Find some products between those three companies that you think you can promote and that your readers would enjoy. The companies will give you a special link with a unique tracking code. Use that link every time you talk about the product. People will click through the links and, hopefully, buy the products that you recommend.

Tomorrow I am going to teach you how to cloak the links. This will make the URL that people see in the status bar look different from the actual link you are sending them to. Psychologically, people may respond better when they don’t think they are being sent to an affiliate link. I don’t do much cloaking on this site (It’s called Full Disclosure Internet Marketing for a reason) but I do want you guys to understand how to do it. It will definitely come in handy.

Until next time, you should now have the tools to get a blog set up and start making some dough.

If you have any questions, comments, or better suggestions about affiliate marketing, please leave them in the comments! I will thank you for it and so will the other readers that would greatly appreciate more advice!

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