Much like one of my other favorite posts, You Might Be an Internet Marketer If…, this post was taken from a message board thread.  This one, however, comes from the awesome eWealth.

So, here we go, some motivational quotes to keep you going when you’re feeling down!

• You can do anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be. - Robert Collier
• Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows. - Michael Landon
• Rarely is anything a matter of being able to do it, yet more often than not it’s a matter of just doing it. - Miles Baker
• “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt” - Bertrand Russell
• Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. — Donald Trump
• “success Is 90% Starting And 10% Not Stopping” - a.d. Kessler
• “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it”  - Goethe
• “Never give in, never! Be it concerning large things or small things, never, never, never!”  - Winston Churchill
• “Only those who risk going too far can possibly know how far they can really go.”  - T.S. Eliot
• Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary Oliver

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So, I had the interesting experience a few weeks ago of meeting Dean Kosage, a guy who is pretty high up in Quixtar, which is a network marketing business. A lot of people would probably know it better as Amway.

It got me thinking - Dean is in a business where he distributes physical products and builds a network of people. Are we, as internet marketers, really that different? We distribute, or link to people that distribute, digital and physical products, and if we are on top of things, we are also building networks - otherwise known as lists.

The truth is, making money in any venture is about meeting people where they are and filling their needs. We meet them on the internet and other people meet them in the physical world, but either way, it’s all about fulfilling their needs. The money definitely IS in distribution.

PS - Check out this video of Dean showing off his house if you want to see who he is!

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For a lot of newbies starting out, the question of whether you should purchase your own domain name or use a free solution like Blogger is a serious one. When you are in the initial stages of starting on IM business and you’re not sure if it’s going to make money or not, laying out cash - even the $10 for a domain name and $8 a month for hosting - can seem like a big leap of faith, one you’re not sure if you should take.

Still, my recommendation is to purchase a domain name and hosting. First of all, it’s a relatively small outlay of cash. $20 is the cost of a dinner out, in most cases. If you’re not willing to invest $20 in yourself and your new business, it sends a serious message to your subconscious illustrating how serious you are about the success of your new venture.

Having your own website makes you feel like a business owner. You’re not a person who has a Blogger blog. You’re a webmaster who owns a valuable piece of virtual real estate. It changes how you think about your business as a whole.

It also changes the way other people feel about your business. With your own domain name, you have branding opportunities. You have your own email addresses at a domain that belongs to you, you have zero design restrictions, and a web address that is completely under your control.

Also in your control is the content. When you use a third party hosting service for your content, you can wake up one day and find it’s gone. POOF! They deleted your account. True, the chances of this happening lessen a great deal if you’re not doing anything shady, but whitehat blogs sometimes get caught up in the spam-fighting net, as well. No algorithm is perfect, including Blogger’s.

Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. For instance, I have a friend, Susi, who keeps a highly respected, high traffic, PR 5 blog on Blogger.com. Her blog is the industry standard in her niche, and she has accomplished a highly successful branding campaign despite being hosted by a third party.

Not long after we first met, our friend Brandy, who introduced us, made an offhand comment about Susi’s John Mayer blog. I said, “Oh, does Susi keep a John Mayer blog?” and Brandy responded, “No. She doesn’t keep A John Mayer blog. She keeps THE John Mayer blog.”

For Susi, there are definite advantages to using Blogger - it’s simple and it’s free. We, as niche marketers, generally receive smaller amounts of highly targeted, purchase ready traffic. Or at least that’s the plan. But we can make a very nice living with a network of sites that get a steady stream of a few hundred uniques a day. For a blog like Susi’s, which averages ten to twenty thousand uniques a day and experiences spikes of over 100,000 uniques in a day - yeah, hosting could be pricey.

Also, even though this drives an Internet Marketer like me crazy and I just want to scream “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY YOU COULD BE MAKING WITH 100,000 VISITORS A DAY? PLEASE LET ME SHOW YOU SOME METHODS!!” lol, the truth is, Susi blogs for passion. So, to her, it’s not important to do things that further her mindset as a serious business owner.

What it comes down to is this - stories like Susi’s are the exception to the rule. Susi is a BLOGGING GODDESS. If you, however, are NOT a blogging god or goddess, but rather just an internet marketing mortal like the rest of us - do yourself a favor. Invest $20 in yourself and your business. You’ll love yourself for it.

PS - You can check out Susi’s masterpiece here - http://TryJM.blogspot.com.

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This, from a recent article on Yahoo Jobs:

Internet Marketer ($53,000) — from Internet Marketing Specialist ($43,000) to Internet Marketing Life Coach — $203,000

Online marketers, also called eMarketers or Internet advertisers, work in a lively business sector that changes every day. One of those changes, according to the BLS 2008-09 Occupational Outlook Handbook, is continued growth. “Advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales manager jobs are highly coveted and will be sought. … In particular, employers will seek those who have the computer skills to conduct advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales activities on the Internet.”

 

Which has me kinda wondering…what is the actual difference between an internet marketing specialist and an internet marketing “life coach” and how can I hook up a gig as the latter?

I have good advice, people!  I have flipping GEMS to share.  To anyone that has almost a quarter of a million dollars to shell out.

Tags: internet marketing, jobs in internet marketing

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I have a ton of articles published at Ezine Articles under various niche pen names, and they’re great.  For the most part.  The traffic generation and search engine weight can’t be beat.

But, as of late, they’ve been denying articles for truly no good reason.  It’s extremely frustrating.  Granted, it’s only happened twice to me, which - out of hundreds of submissions, is not a bad track record.  And I did have one article genuinely denied for a good reason - I had cut and pasted the wrong article’s title onto it!  WHOOPS!  haha.

But the other article, which there was absolutely nothing wrong with, came back with a completely generic rejection code - I don’t even remember what it was.  Figuring it must be a mistake, I just resubmitted, hoping to get a different reviewer.  It was rejected again, but with a totally different generic rejection code.  Figuring the third time was a charm, I submitted again while making no changes, and sure enough, it was accepted.

Then, this morning I awoke to find out that my completely non-opinionated, totally professional, couldn’t be more objective, full to the brim of journalistic integrity report on Shawn Hogan being sued by eBay has been rejected for containing libelous content.  Because when someone’s being sued, it’s not a matter of public record or anything.  No.  Apparently saying it is libel.  Whatever.

I just deleted the article.  When what they’re saying is wrong with it ISN’T actually wrong with it, there’s no real point in trying to fix it.  It just makes no damn sense.

Tags: Ezine Articles, Shawn Hogan

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For people that aren’t familiar with Gears by Google, it is an application that downloads information to your machine and stores it in a database to make manipulating that information online much more functional.

It’s an opensource project, so many people are working on it concurrently, making it more stable and adding lots of cool features.

This is from Google, on the install page - “Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:   Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop,  Store data locally in a fully-searchable database, Run Javascript in the background to improve functionality.”

What does that mean to me?

It means I can now SEARCH MY MYSPACE MESSAGES!

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According to Courthouse News, internet marketer Shawn Hogan - owner of the popular DigitalPoint forums - is being sued by the eBay corporation for Cookie Stuffing, along with two other men, Todd Dunning and Brian Dunning.

For those of you not familiar with what Cookie Stuffing is, it’s when a webmaster, or other person who has the capability to edit the html of a webpage, uses a delivery device (usually an image or a flash file) to drop a cookie on the computer of anyone who views the page.  The end user is unaware of the cookie having been delivered.  Then, if the person at a later time visits the site that the cookie was related to (in this case, ebay) and makes a purchase, the cookie stuffer gets an affiliate commission for that sale.  Highly Blackhat and obviously illegal.  However, people generally just get their affiliate account suspended, they don’t generally get sued!

eBay also recently deleted a whole SLEW of affiliates, sending out a form letter saying that the traffic they were sending to the eBay site was under-engaged.

Personally, I am really happy to see them taking action against cookie stuffers.  As an active (AND HAPPY!) member of the eBay affiliate program, frickin’ cookie stuffers take money straight out of my pocket.

The only thing that concerns me is that it seems the most recent mass bannings also caught a bunch of whitehats up in the nets, and it concerns me that if the large-scale bannings continue, my account may be one of the sacrificial dolphins killed in the pursuit of tuna, so to speak.

NOTE TO EBAY IF YOU’RE READING THIS - I love you, please don’t ban me!

Tags: eBay, lawsuit, Shawn Hogan, Cookie Stuffing

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OK, after having spent about 3 hours sifting spam comments from real comments, and not even being halfway done yet, you can BET that tomorrow the ReCaptcha plugin is getting installed here tomorrow!

I already have it on all of my niche blogs anyway, so why not here?

I love ReCaptcha because you are actually performing a public service every time you enter a Captcha, you are helping to digitize classic books!

Spam protection and literature preservation all tied up in one lovely Wordpress Plugin.  How aweseome is that??

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This was a thread from the awesome Warrior Forum, and I thought I’d share the gems here :). A lot of them are paraphrased, but you get the idea.

So, here we go - YOU MIGHT BE AN INTERNET MARKETER IF…

• It takes you twenty minutes to explain to people what you do for a living and they still don’t quite get it (hint from Melanie - tell them you’re a freelance writer )
• You never know what day it is without checking.
• When you wake up in the middle of the night and feel you MUST check your email on the way to the bathroom.
• When you check your Clickbank and Adsense stats before you check your email.
• You watch more YouTube videos on backlinks, conversion tracking and traffic generation than you do people getting injured.
• When you get more emails from lists you’re subscribed to than people you actually know. And by a pretty wide margin, too.
• You eat all your meals at your computer.
• When you really *DO* “Make Money While You Sleep”
• When you’re looking for the WSO section in Barnes and Noble.
• When you go to a nightclub with at least 100 hot women and you think to yourself, “If I could just get a 1% conversion rate…”
• You have an exotic parrot that’s learned to talk and it just keeps repeating “The money’s in the list, the money’s in the list,” over and over.
• You feel lost when spending more than six or so hours away from your computer.
• You have dreams about off-page optimization and latent semantic indexing.
• When you know what all of the following mean - HTML, WSO, CSS, SEO, IM, PHP, WP, PR, ROI.
• When people ask you how your Weight Loss or Dating is going, and you think they’re asking about your niches.
• When people on five continents know your name but your neighbors don’t.

HERE ARE MINE -

• When your friends tell you how “lucky” you are “not to have to work” and think you’re being petty when you try to explain that it wasn’t luck and it IS work.
• When you actually scream out loud when MyBlogLog shows you that Liz Tomey visited your blog.
• It boggles your mind to think that the population at large has NO IDEA why Google returns the results it does in the order they appear, and you find it difficult to remember when you were part of that population.
• When you only really *need* to work 3 or 4 hours a day, but you spend 4 or 5 more reading and studying because you’re obsessed!

AND LASTLY….

• When you think of all the things you “wanted to be when you grew up” as a kid, and none of them even come close to holding a candle to how amazing your life is now.

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Check out the Jing Project - you can capture photos, capture videos, and share online.  All for free!  You can send the URL of whatever you recorded straight to your list.

Good times!

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