Avoiding Copyright Infringement On Work-For-Hire
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
It seems like a good idea… Hire someone to do some work for you. Whether it’s creating website designs, having website content or graphics created, having someone write an ebook or articles for you, it’s a way to get more done in less time by leveraging the work of others.
The problem: How do you know the person you’ve hired didn’t steal or plagiarize the work they’re passing off to you as their own?
2nd Problem: If you pay someone to create a website for you, and they just go out and copy a competitor’s site, complete with graphics and text, you are the one responsible.
What to do:
1) Have anyone who does work for you sign a written statement that they did the work themselves and that they didn’t plagiarize or steal the content. That can deter some people, but if you’re hiring people from other countries to do work cheaply, they may not care.
2) Grab snippets of text they’ve written, put it in quotations, and run Google searches on the exact phrases. (Not entire paragraphs, but sentences, or 1/2 sentences, etc.)
…You may quickly find a website(s) with that exact content on it, in which case yours is plagiarized, or at best, was created with PLR (Private Label Rights) content that is not unique. If you discover this, inform the person you hired that it is not acceptable, and either cancel the job or have them do it right.
When it comes to graphics, it’s not quite as easy to determine, but do your due diligence.
The problem is even worse if you’re having a product created for others to re-sell. In that case, you have to be even more careful, because not only do you open yourself to copyright infringement lawsuits, but you open up those you’ve sold the product rights to as well.
There are many horror stories about these types of issues. -Be careful.
Topics: Oops (Bad Move) | Add A Comment » Trackback URL
How To Earn $36/Hour Selling Hugs
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
People are always asking how they can charge money for things that others are giving away for free… The video below is your answer: Sell The Deluxe Version.
Want to start a simple business that requires no skills, no training, and virtually no startup cost? Get started in the rewarding field of professional hug-giving. Why give away what you can charge for? Initial tests averaged $36 an hour.
Added benefit: It’s hilarious. (Note: Does contain some profanity)
This video is funny, but the take-away is: Add value, create a deluxe version, charge more than your competitors, and promote the bejeezus out of it. -And try to have fun along the way.
Topics: Funny, Marketing, Video | 3 Comments » Trackback URL
Tips For Avoiding A Scam, Ripoff, Misleading Offer
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
As the economy sours and times get tougher, scams and “shady offers” will definitely be on the increase. When it comes to finding out if something is legitimate, the Internet is your best friend.
I can recognize most scams on sight, but even I did a double-take earlier this week when I received an official-looking mailer that had misleading information about property taxes and… you guessed it… asking for payment to lower those taxes. (There was even a penalty fee for not returning payment by a cutoff date.)
How To Find Out If It’s A Scam In About 10 Seconds
- Type the name of the company into Google (in quotes)
- Type the headline of the offer into Google (in quotes)
Usually, that’s all it takes. In the above example, the company name turned up the entire scanned-in letter, with comments from others about how misleading it was.
Don’t get scammed, check it out!
-Tim Gross
Topics: Marketing | Add A Comment » Trackback URL
Download This Free “Need To Know” Marketing Training Ebook
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
Paul Myers has released a free ebook called “Need To Know” that I strongly urge you to download and read from start to finish. It’s a full 112 pages of valuable info that both beginning and experienced online marketers alike will benefit from.
Paul is one of the few fellow online marketing experts that I listen to without reservation… He provides very valuable info and you never have to worry whether he’s going to “pull a fast one” or do something squirrely.
Note: You do need to subscribe to his (free) newsletter to get the ebook. You should do that because:
1) It’s one of the most valuable free marketing newsletters, period.
2) You can trust him with your subscription… Again, no funny stuff.
3) You can always unsubscribe immediately after downloading the ebook
if you really want to (but really, that’d be kinda dumb.)
I’m going to say the same thing about Paul that people always say about me: “He should be charging money for this stuff!” …So make sure you download it now while it’s still free.
To your success, Tim Gross
Topics: Marketing | Add A Comment » Trackback URL
So, Uh, Don’t Copy The YouTube Business Model…
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
It currently costs Google $711 million a year to operate YouTube, and it only brings in $240 million in ad revenue… Which means it’s costing Google $471 million dollars this year to run YouTube.
Ouch.
So the good news is the number of user-generated videos that are uploaded to YouTube is increasing exponentially.
The bad news is that the more widely used YouTube becomes, the more Google will lose.
Why? Because the vast majority of user-uploaded videos are uninteresting, lame, useless, and not worth anything. For every YouTube video that is able to bring in ad revenue, there are almost an infinite number (and rapidly expanding) that don’t, and those costs will only increase.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to YouTube in the future. Eyeballs aren’t enough; At some point you have to make money.
Topics: Marketing | Add A Comment » Trackback URL
Writing Your Sales Page For Affiliates, NOT Customers
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
Here’s a couple of questions for you:
- If you wanted to impress your new girlfriend/boyfriend, how would you act?
- If you wanted to impress your new girlfriend/boyfriend’s parents, would you act in the exact same way?
Here’s a more relevant example:
- If you wanted to write the best sales letter you could you’d write one way
- If you wanted to get your press release about your product covered by the media, you’d write a different way.
Why?
Because if you’re trying to get a press release published, you really need to write it for the media to find it credible, relevant, and non-promotional/hypey. Because if the media doesn’t run with your story, your potential customers will never hear about it from your press release anyway.
Writing Your Sales Page For Affiliates
Here’s why this matters if you’re trying to get affiliate sales.
If your business plan is to make the bulk of your product sales through affiliates, in essence you’re writing your sales letter for the affiliates more than for your potential customers. (huh?)
Here’s 2 scenarios (with very simplified numbers to make a point)
Ad #1 converts at 2% and potential affiliates are impressed with it when they look over your sales process as they decide to promote you. 100 Affiliates sign up and each sends you 100 visitors
(100×100 = 10,000 x 2% = 200 sales)
Ad #2 converts at 4% (yea!) but potential affiliates are turned off by your sales process for some reason (boo!). Only 10 Affiliates sign up and each sends you 100 visitors
(10×100=1,000 x 4% = 40 sales)
The truth is, affiliates would have made more money promoting Ad #2; their own snap judgment about it was wrong. But unless you’re well-know in your niche and have the ability to explain yourself and convince affiliates, that doesn’t matter.
This is especially true in Affiliate Network/Marketplaces, where you’re just “one more offer” out of many that affiliates can promote. These decisions are made very quickly as affiliates scan through potential offers:
- -Nope, affiliate commission percentage is too low…
- -Nope, the product cost is too low even though the commission percentage is high…
-Hmmm, pays out well, let me click through to the sales letter:
- -Nope, they’re aggressively name-capturing right when the page loads, how do I know they’re not trying to circumvent commissions by promoting a different product or doing something sneaky? I don’t want to help them build their list for free…
- -Nope, it looks way to hypey, I’d be embarrassed to send my subscribers to this offer…
- -Nope, it looks too boring, no compelling reason to buy and no call to action, I don’t think it’d convert well…
- -Nope, this product is too similar to my own product, I wish it was focused on a more specific niche or technique so it was more complimentary to my product instead of redundant.
- …and on and on
Look, I’m not saying this is easy to figure out, and to make it harder, different affiliates like and dislike different things. Solution: I’ve actually contacted big affiliates before I set up a new product to ask them their personal preferences on things before I even set it up. Why not try to make them happy? (Example: Do you like a big initial commission or smaller, recurring commissions?)
In Summary: If you hope to do a large portion of your sales through affiliates (which is smart, because you don’t have to risk $$ up-front for advertising costs), potential affiliates are essentially the gate-keepers.
Keep that in mind as you create your offers.
Topics: Copywriting, Marketing | 6 Comments » Trackback URL
Even More Tips: How To Lock In Your Success Before You Start
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
John Reese wrote a very concise blog post about how to confirm a market you want to enter is viable, take a look, it’s very good advise. I like to take it even a step farther when I can, and here’s how:
In old-school marketing lingo it’s called a “dry run”, essentially you write an actual ad for your future product and try to generate sales for it. (This is AFTER you’ve taken the steps John outlined.)
From there, you either actually take orders and fulfill them with the alternate product(s) you’ve put together. (Tip: The last time I did this, I ordered 3 books from Amazon.com that fulfilled on all the promises in the sales letter. It cost me more to buy the books than I was charging for the initial sale, but that’s not a concern when you’re testing…)
If it’s not feasible to fulfill on the sales letter with another product, then capture the beginning of an order form signup and then announce that the product’s not ready yet and that they’ll be notified when it is, thanking them for their interest.
(One caveat: I’m not a lawyer, and there are certain legalities to “dry runs”, like you can’t take someone’s $$ before you’ve created a product if it takes more than xx days to deliver the product… That’s not what I’m talking about.)
Why do I do this? Because creating an information product is time-consuming. I once spent a solid month writing a book/manual that I never tested first, and it was a huge failure. Since then, I write my sales letters first. No sales letter - no product.
Happy hunting! -Tim
PS -Writing your sales letter before creating your product also helps you tailor your product to fit in advance. When you think if a killer bullet-point for your sales letter, you add that point to your product. If you create the product first, you’re stuck with whatever you can squeeze out of it to create the sales letter.
Topics: Copywriting, Marketing | Add A Comment » Trackback URL
Roboform Review: Password Management Software Saves Time And Frustration
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
One of the keys to online success is productivity.
It’s also important to keep your online passwords secure… Do NOT use the same password for multiple website logins, that’s just asking for trouble.
If you’re running a multi-faced online business, you most likely have lots of passwords to keep track of: Email, FTP, affiliate tracking, stats, blog, article directories, social network logins, press release site logins, forum logins, and that’s just getting started.
Forgetting a login a wasting 10 minutes trying to do a password retrieval or find what email or scrap of paper the password is on is unacceptable. 
(And my added problem: To fight spam/phishing, I use many multiple email addresses for different functions, that way if I receive a large amount of spam to one email address, I can just close that email forwarder… It’s hard to do password lookups when you don’t even know what email address you signed up with in the first place!
The solution: Roboform
It comes with a 30-day free trial, and it’s completely free if you use it for 10 passwords or less.
It stores all your passwords, so every time you get to a login screen you just click the Roboform button and it auto-fills.
It’s very addicting, a huge time-saver, and a great way to avoid smashing your coffee cup against your computer monitor in frustration.
Give the free trial a whirl, highly recommended.
Topics: Cool Tools | 2 Comments » Trackback URL
Is Internet Marketing Harder Now? (Guess…)
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
Several people have asked lately if doing business on the Internet is harder than it used to be. (Indicators they use are “there’s more competition now”, and “all the niche markets seem like they’re already taken”).
While that seems to be true, in one sense, I firmly believe there’s never been a better time to start (or be involved in) an Internet business.
There are cash generators in place now (where you do A, B, and C and make money) that simple didn’t exist before.
For instance, my newly updated article marketing training course
reveals one of the easiest ways for a “newbie” without any real
business skills to start making a legitimate income without the
normal headaches and challenges:
(In the example you’ll see on http://www.articletricks.com I spent about 7 minutes writing a simple article that you could easily copy that started getting me free traffic and sales immediately. I highly recommend that you take a look at it.)
The Bar Keeps Raising
I’ve been successfully doing business online for 15 years, so I’ve
got a better perspective than most.
In the olden days, if you just HAD a website with something for sale, you had a certain credibility that helped you make sales. What newbies don’t understand is that it was much harder to set up a website and process orders at that time, so to even have a functional order-taking website really was a hurdle.
Trust me, for people trying to do business back then, they thought it was “hard” too… Not hard that there was too much competition, but hard in that there weren’t near as many potential consumers online to buy your product, and there was a huge distrust of putting in your credit card information online, etc.
I live in California; It’s kind of similar to someone living out West saying, “Boy, the original settlers had it easy, they could stake out some land and call it their own.”
…Forgetting, of course, about the rough conditions, the outlaws, and all the other hardships the original settlers faced.
So take my word for it, while it always takes some experimentation to see what works, there’s never been a better time to have a good idea online and be able to turn it into a profitable venture by plugging in to existing systems for getting traffic and sales.
Right now there have never been more people online to potentially buy from you, it’s never been easier to set up a website and start taking orders (for step by step video, go to http://www.internetmarketingcourse.com), and eCommerce continues to grow and steal sales away from brick-and-mortar businesses.
You’ve got no excuses to get started now if you’re not already in business.
Topics: Marketing | Add A Comment » Trackback URL