You can imagine I was (to put it mildly) pleased about this because, on a personal level, I love the site and read it avidly, and on a professional level, it shows my content and my message matters to some people.

The benefits of having my article mentioned on Marketing Profs had some additional benefits, quite a few extra visitors and some kind people even hit the retweet button at the top of the article.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with ‘the pursuit of perfectionism‘ so let me get to my point.

The article I wrote was about trying to game spam filters by intentionally misspelling words in the email subject line and body text. This encouraged someone to leave me a comment along the lines of:

“If misspellings challenge credibility, Karl might do himself a favor by checking the word ‘flair’.”

Now, I did misspell flair (I used flare by mistake) and I have corrected that now so “thank you” for pointing that out.

My content had a minor error, it was not intended to ‘game’ anything unlike what is happening with how some marketers’ are writing their email marketing campaigns.

Why did this compel someone to leave such a comment?

Maybe the message I was putting out tapped a raw nerve, maybe ‘he’ engages in such email marketing activities and doesn’t know any better, maybe he is on a quest to rid the world of misspellings and feels this to be another personal victory, or maybe he just didn’t get the point!

If you are engaged in content publishing of any kind, and you get any type of buzz, you will get attention. The attention you get will turn some people into fans who grab your RSS feed, retweet your work, add you to their bookmarks, sign-up to your newsletter and may even tell people about your website.

Some people will come and leave again unaffected by your message, neither liking or disliking your work.

Others will feel the need to throw a bit of negativity your way.

I’m not perfect, I make mistakes but I will not let the fear of NOT being perfect stop me from sharing content that is of value to my readers.

There are 101 very successful product launches in the Internet Marketing realm that would never have seen the light-of-day if the product creators had to check everything was ‘perfect’ before sharing their content, sometimes good-enough really is good-enough.

Please do not let the fear of someone’s criticism or negativity stop you from sharing your content.

Making sure your content is 100 percent perfect all the time will slow you down and decrease your productivity, ’so just get it our there’!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Disclaimer: No words were intentionally misspelled in the making of this article.

Monthly Products

Everyone knows that one of the best ways to make money online is to have your very own digital product that you can sell over-and-over again.

How would you like to create instant audio products with some of the world’s leading marketing experts in just MINUTES!

Audio recordings are some of the most popular digital products around and can usually fetch a much bigger asking price than a typical e-book or report due to the extra perceived value.

So how do you create your very own high quality audio products that you can sell in just a few clicks?

With a BRAND NEW site called Monthly Products.

Just imagine having access to brand new interview materials every month that you can use to create even more products.

Here’s the best bit, you keep any money you make selling the products.

When I say it’s point and click, it really is and you can see how simple it is for yourself by clicking here and watching the short video.

I have to admit, I’ve never seen a way to make such a high quality product in such a simple way.

Go watch the video now and see exactly what I’m talking about www.MonthlyProducts.com.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

If you have come to this page looking for a free viral tell-a-friend script then you won’t find a recommendation here! What you will find is a warning that you should probably take the time to read.

I’d never knock anyone for trying to save money in their business but there are just some things with a free price tag that may end up costing your business so much more.

Here are the fundamental flaws to using a free tell-a-friend script and why you should avoid it:

1. Security

Security is one of the major concerns of computer owners and Internet users alike. Having a website that is safe and secure from any type of attack may become a security risk due to using a tell-a-friend script. Here’s the problem, even some high-profile and heavily promoted paid-for scripts have vulnerabilities that could leave you and your email address book open to attack; you can ‘Google it’ for more information about the security issues and I recommend that you do.

2. Script Updates

This is an issue that affects the Wordpress plugins scene and is not exclusive to free scripts but it is a major concern when security, your website, and your integrity are at risk.

You see, you download the script, you install it and it works great. You start getting visitors to your website like never before, and then, SNAP, something breaks. You now need to contact the developer for some quick support and when you visit the homepage you discover that the developer has discontinued support due to ‘a lack of time’ or ‘new ventures’.

What happens if your main source of revenue is from your website and the tell-a-friend script needs an update that is NOT forth-coming and it ends up causing a misconfiguration of some kind, taking your website offline.

You see, no matter what way you look at things, if your website is attacked due to a vulnerability in the script or your email address book is used to send out mass spam email, or the script causes your site to develop errors and not load properly, you will only hurt your…

3. Reputation

Yes, your integrity and your reputation is explicitly tied into your website and service. If you are attacked by hackers or spammers that use a vulnerability in the script, then your customers may turn to you for an explanation.

I’ll leave this with you, but if you do use a free viral tell-a-friend script then make sure you thoroughly research the offering before installing it onto your website.

There is an alternative and the fact you’ve read this far probably means that you are seeking a solution. Karl recently wrote about a secure tell-a-friend script that was used by the StomperNet guys in a recent launch and it is the only one we would recommend you use.

Best wishes,

Kelly-Anne

photo credit: tranchis

Email marketing can be one of the most profitable introductions to a business.

Even bricks-and-mortar businesses can see an increase in profits from collecting emails and then emailing promotions from time-to-time.

What if I was to tell you that you could:

“Triple your open rates, quadruple your clicks and skyrocket your sales from all your email promotions – using pre-tested headline templates – ninja mental triggers and voodoo graphical tricks – and build your lists by 1000’s per week”

This may sound like a ridiculous claim but not when you know the guy behind it, you see, Ryan Deiss has been making a lot of money online and email marketing has been a big part of that.

What I like about Ryan is how methodically he is about testing. He tests, re-tests, and tests again, until he can conclusively say what works and what doesn’t.

Ryan has put together the results in what he calls his ‘13 Sneaky Little Email Tricks‘.

I have to give you a word of warning, if you leave here and purchase 13 Sneaky Little Email Tricks then please use what you learn in moderation, don’t go into overkill as you will dilute the affect of what you learn, it is powerful stuff!

Oh, did I mention that the tactics you will learn are totally ethical, nothing spammy or black hat here.

Here’s the link again Sneaky Email Tricks

To your success,

Karl Foxley

One of the best blogging solutions is to attach a self-hosted Wordpress blog to your existing website. In the past the only way to do this was to download the Wordpress files to your desktop and then upload them using your FTP client followed by playing around with the configuration options; this was enough to prevent the non-techie-type from jumping into blogging with a self-hosted blog.

A real simple solution has come along that makes those manual upload days seem like something from the Internet dark ages, that solution being Simple Scripts. This guide will walk you through the installation process.

You will need a hosting account that gives you access to Simple Scripts. We use Host Monster to host the majority of our websites as they use cPanel in the user back-office. CPanel has revolutionised the ease of configuring your website, managing email clients and domains etc. The other reasons we use HostMonster is because the customer support is top notch, exactly what you need when something goes wrong with your site and you need to get back online quickly. Oh! Did I mention they are very affordable, with HostMonster you are not compromising on service either, making this a win win for you.

Head on over to HostMoster and register for an account here.

After you have signed up for an account simply follow the instructions to set up your domain etc. Assuming you have done this and have a website already with HostMonster then you’ll want to log into your cPanel area.

Now, how to easily install your self-hosted Wordpress blog.

Scroll down until you find the Simple Scripts icon under the heading Software / Services.

For this example I am going to attach a blog to a squeeze-page of mine for a report about how to use Joint Ventures to generate targeted traffic to your websites and promotions.

Inside the Simple Scripts area scroll down to Blogs and click on Wordpress.

Now click on Install.

Step 1 – select the latest stable install and where you would like your Wordpress blog to be installed.

If you have an existing site that you want to attach a blog to then type ‘blog’ as the subdomain or whatever else you wish to call it (blog being the most logical).

In the image above you can see that I am installing Wordpress to the subdomain ‘blog’ on the GuruTrafficSecret.com domain.

Now you’ll want to select your login details, password and blog name. You’ll also want to tick the check box where it says ‘automatically create a database’.

Lastly, accept the terms and conditions.

Now click ‘complete‘.

If your installation is successful you will see the above screen. Your login details will also be emailed to you.

To login to your new wordpress site just add /wp-admin to the end of your URL. The login for GuruTrafficSecret is now at

http://www.gurutrafficsercret.com/blog/wp-admin

Log in to your website to configure your blogs information.

To make your blog stand out from the crowd you should install a new theme at the first opportunity.

Visit the Guru Traffic Secret blog to see a live demo of a Wordpress blog and the first and only post.

I hope you found this post informative and easy to follow.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. To get the most out of cPanel and your website I recommend you sign-up for Discover cPanel as soon as you can. You can visit the site now and get instant access to a free video packed with information that you can put to use straight-away.

I’m a subscriber of many marketers’ email lists so I can keep track of the latest developments across the web or because they send out some amazing content.

Here’s the thing, some marketers send out emails that have messages that look like this to try and get past the spam filters:

Grab your f.ree report…

Your f/ree report is ready…

Start making making m.oney…

They may even include a symbol instead of a word in an attempt to fool the spam filters (I doubt that it actually does and is probably more likely to get your message filtered). I’m sure that you’ve come across a similar emails by now, honestly, I bet they don’t leave you with a good impression no matter who it was from.

Here is my problem with this, firstly, the emails look extremely unprofessional, and secondly, ESP’s like AWeber have built in tools to test your spam score before you send your messages.

I understand how important it is to get your message in front of your customers but if you are sending a message with f.ree or m.oney in the subject line and email body text, then your message may just get past the spam filters but it is going to look like spam to your subscribers all the same.

It does not take that much time to think of alternative words to use in place of words that may trigger the spam filters, sending your message to the spam folder; try using ‘no cost’ instead of ‘free’; you get the picture.

Another trend I have seen is affiliate marketers grabbing the pre-written emails for an affiliate product and sending it our without making any alterations even when the message includes the use of misspellings.

If you are an affiliate marketer, take the time to customise the message and attach your own personal flair. If your subscribers are on the email lists of many marketers you’d be surprised how many of the same message they will get on the launch day of a big product, all with the exact same message.

Remember, every time you send out an email on behalf of your company or an affiliate promotion, it is your reputation and your credibility that you may be damaging by misspelling words or adding extra symbols to try to game the spam filters.

If you would like to test your emails for their spam scores before you send them then I recommend you grab an account with AWeber.

To your email promotion success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you want to learn of the art of writing emails that sell I recommend you take a copywriting course. One of the best courses on the Internet for these economically strapped times is Five Minute Copywriting by Robert Plank.

photo credit: Nancy Wombat

Video Marketing Tips

This post is about video marketing as a way of generating targeted traffic to your website and promotions as well as establishing yourself as an expert in your niche.

What you will see below is a PDF document that is Day 3 of our Website Promotion Success Email Mini-Course.

I recommend you sign-up for the course and to our newsletter as you will get extra benefits that you will not get from reading the blog alone.

The report you are about to read covers the benefits of video marketing, how to create videos and where to submit them for the world to see.

Video sharing sites are amongst the most popular websites on the Internet today and you’d be crazy not to tap into the marketing potential.

The report is short but is packed with practical information that you can start implementing straight away.

If you find the text is too small then use the buttons on the top right side of the document to switch to full screen mode or toggle page size. Enjoy!

Just to give you an insight into the power of video, especially those that go viral (get shared over and over again), this McDonald’s Rap video has been viewed over 10,000,000 times; and no, I’m not saying you need to start rapping!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

It’s my understanding that the Viral Tell-A-Friend scripts came into existence after marketers (and the coders who made the scripts) noticed the effectiveness of sites like Facebook, and other social media sites, that allow you to invite friends to join. This works by accessing your email account of choice, Gmail etc, and then the site pulls in contacts from your address book.

Just think, the average Gmail address book has, at least, a few contacts that can be invited to join a website, with some people having a few hundred contacts (or more); you can see the viral capabilities of this are amazing.

So, of course, Internet marketers see something that works and jump on board to create a similar product that they can use and sell. But not all Tell-A-Friend scripts are created equal and some major vulnerabilities have been exposed. The major vulnerability that was heavily bounced around is Internet was the level of security, or rather, I should say lack of security.

You see, hackers and spammers look for the smallest vulnerability in a anything new and getting access to your address book would allow them to send email, in your name, to all your contacts. They’d probably send a load of spam junk or worse, malware or spyware; and guess who your contacts would thank, YOU!

With this in mind, I came across a secure Viral Tell-A-Friend script being used by the Stomper Net guys.

Octazen Solutions Viral Tell-A-Friend Script

You can be sure if the biggest guys in the World of Internet Marketing are using anything in their business and websites then take note, it will be good. The guys at Stomper Net would not risk their reputation on using a flimsy insecure script. The Viral Tell-A-Friend script that the Stomper Net guys are using is Octazen’s.

Octazen have a few versions so you can be sure there will be one to fit your needs; they even have a Wordpress plugin. Visit the Octazen website and take a look at the demo to see if this is something your website can benefit from.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

301 Permanent Redirection Frustration

Yesterday I was speaking with a friend about their website and she told me something that got me annoyed. What she told me was that she had contacted her website hosting company to ask them to apply a permanent redirection to her website. I’ll get to my rant in a minute but before I do, let me explain what a permanent redirect is and why you should have one.

Google and the other search engines may view www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two different websites, known as URL canonicalization. A 301 redirect tells the search engines that a page has moved permanently (a 302 is a temporary redirect).

A post by Matt Cutts Explains URL Canonicalization and 301 Redirections in greater detail here.

The main point here is what I have quoted below:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

So, with this point in hand, I recommend that you forward yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com as this is what the majority of Internet users are already familiar with. You should also apply a 301 to any URL that points to the same homepage.

With a 301 redirect in place you are avoiding the spread of authority and your inbound link credit being shared across two websites.

For any URLs beyond your top level domain, example, www.yourdomain.com/page1 you can manually apply a 301 permanent redirect yourself (if your hosting account has this feature) if you change the URL to something different; www.yourdomain.com/page1 to www.yourdomain.com/page-1. Any visitor coming to your page from the old link will be redirect to your new URL without triggering a 404 page not found error message.

However, if you apply this for your homepage you will trigger a permanent loop, meaning that your website will NEVER load (it is redirecting one URL to another and back again making the redirect infinite).

Now, back to my rant. When my friend contacted her hosting account to ask for a permanent redirect to be applied to her site, redirecting the non www URL to the www URL, she was told that they would have to charge her for this. Seriously!

I host the majority of my sites with Host Monster and it takes me five minutes to log-in, get on the instant chat (they use a live chat agent to provide customer support), ask for a redirect to applied to a site and a minute or so later they say ‘it’s been done for you, is there anything else we can help you with?’.

Please, do not pay for a permanent redirect, if your hosting account says that you have to pay for this then I recommend you start looking for somewhere better to host your website. If they are going to charge you for this what else will they charge you for? My friend has already set up her account with Host Monster and is now getting the level of support that she requires and deserves, after all, she is a paying customer. Rant over…

To your success,

Karl Foxley

You can read an article that goes deeper into server side redirects and how to do them; you can read it here.

A business coach is very much like a coach from any of the sporting disciplines. A sports coach will modify training for the individual athlete to optimise sporting performance. A coach provides much needed support, guidance and mentoring to a business owner or entrepreneur.

Why having a business coach is so important?

Accountability! The majority of business owners perform better and achieve more when they have an ‘accountability partner’. A business coach is an ideal accountability partner because they know what it is like to run a business, to reach targets and to meet deadlines.

Being accountable is so important for growing a business because it allows the business owner to focus on the goals that are set and agreed with the coach that is hired for the particular business.

This is such an effective and productive element to a good business as it achieves focus and clarity for the business owner. Too often people focus on being busy rather than focusing on undertaking the tasks that will exponentially grow their business.

Common complaints that many business coaches hear are:

‘I couldn’t complete _______ because the phone didn’t stop ringing’

‘I have had a back log of emails to sort through and didn’t get round to completing _______’

‘I had something that needed completing so I had to do it myself to make sure it was done right!’

A business coach will help you determine what tasks are urgent, important and necessary. For example:

Having the new computer system installed may be urgent but calling the new lead that brings in thousands of pounds worth of new business is important!

Too often attention is focused on urgent and necessary tasks that the all important ‘business growth’ tasks are put on the back-burner. It is the important tasks that will help you grow your business.

A good business coach will also help you find ways to automate elements of your business maybe through outsourcing and out-tasking parts of a business that can be managed more effectively out-house.

‘Do you have an accountability partner?’

Now, an SEO Consultant will do what a business coach does for your business but with the focus being on your website and online marketing strategies; increase your revenue through the optimisation of your website. The optimisation, depending on your website and the goals of your website, may include optimised content, lead capture, copy-writing, search marketing, PPC (pay per click), link building, and so on.

An SEO Consultant will focus on improving the visitor experience on your website as well as increasing the funnel that pulls people into your sales process; remember, the more visitors that find your website through the search engines and through alternative marketing strategies (article marketing, forum marketing, PPC, etc) the greater the potential of making more sales (and generating more leads).

Isn’t it time you hired an SEO Consultant to work with you on improving your online business?

To your success,

Karl Foxley