Posts Tagged internet marketing

10 day giveaway

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If you’ve been reading my blog much over the past few years, you probably already know that I’ve made my living doing Internet Marketing and web design for the most part. I made two very successful membership websites with a buddy of mine named Chris Vendilli.

Chris lives in Pittsburgh and I’ve actually never met him face to face. We met online in an internet discussion forum about eBay, started a project together, got incorporated and made some money together. We made another site a year later…and that’s our history.

Over time we continued to do our own projects and recently Chris put together an awesome promotion. He’s actually a police officer for the city of Pittsburgh, and if you go to this link
10daygiveaway you’ll learn more about what he did, and why he did it.

Entrepreneurial Spirit: Alive and Well

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Wow, I’m almost embarrassed as I see I haven’t posted to my blog in 2 months. Of course it was the two busiest months of the year. Not just for me, but for most of you too I’d imagine. We went from Halloween, straight into Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas and then shortly thereafter New Years.

During that time I launched a highly successful website with my partner “Mr. Black”. We’re Black & Blue Marketing Corp., and the site is www.SpaceHogs.net . It’s an entire membership site dedicated to teaching others how to market to the Social Networking crowd – a.k.a. MySpace.

My eBay Education Specialist Certification has been put the test as I’ve been teaching literally 2-3 private lessons a week lately. I have a new Trading Assistant client, a new car dealer to list cars for, another new site of my own I’m working on, developing more tools for magazine sellers … what else. Ah yes – I’ve started importing products from China too. People always ask me how I keep track and I have no good answer. I just do. And sometimes… I just don’t :o )

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll probably recall a previous post about what I called EADD, or Entrepreneurial Attention Deficit Disorder. Well I was reading an old Forbes magazine today….June of ‘06. That alone should tell you how many directions I’m headed…I’m reading 6 month old magazines ’cause I can’t keep up!

Anyway, in the Forbes there was an article by Rich Karlgaard. He writes a regular article called Digital Rules for Forbes. He also has his own blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or you can check out his homepage at www.karlgaard.com . ANYWAY, he wrote a great article called “Blessed Are the Hypomanic”.

I won’t go into the whole thing, but I wanted to quote a bit of it…that explains so very eloquently what I feel about myself and this whole EADD thing I’ve tried to explain to others, but feel I muddle through.

Rich writes:

Last week our Preacher spoke about Spiritual Gifts. She identified a dozen or so, Leadership, evangelism, empathy and faith were at the top of the list – just what you’d expect in a church sermon. She surprisingly also mentioned entrepreneurial personality. “Some people are gifted at starting things,” she said. “Sadly, we anal-retentive types are too quick to come along and criticize entrepreneurs for not finishing their projects. That’s wrong. The entrepreneurial gift isn’t to manage and administer. It’s to start things.”

Very true. Some entrepreneurs I know are good at managing and administering, but not many. Most are a mix of visionary and hustler, with a dash of attention deficit disorder thrown in. They see opportunities the rest of us overlook. They are driven by a breathless energy to assemble resources in pursuit of those opportunities. Then soon after their baby is toddling, they get bored.”

Rich goes on to explain more about where some people feel that entrepreneurial spirit comes from, but I won’t quote the whole thing. I just really felt like he was talking about me in many ways…and it felt good to not feel like I was the only one who gets things going and moves on to the next…

Anyway, that’s my thought for the day…actually my quote of someone else’s thoughts, but I still recognized the brilliance in his writing, right? :O)

I’ll try to get some more regular posts going here shortly. Have a great week, and try and stick to those dang resolutions you made a week ago!

Updates…Updates…Read all about it

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Wow, time is flying! It’s Halloween already and before you know it, New Years Day will be here!

So updates are in order…

Let’s see, LowPricedMags, my primary eBay user ID…we just hit 13,000 total positive
feedbacks…almost 9000 unique positives. I’ve got my eye on that big 10k…the flying star.

Our other eBay store All_that_and_More! where we sell just about everything, but mostly sell Adidas Golf Clothing, has been doing very well, very consitant.

We have a few other user ID’s we’re working on some different projects with, and will keep you updated as things progress on that front.

Let’s see…other sites…

Well, my site www.HookupyourMySpace.com is literally busting at the seams with traffic. Checkout out this screen shot from my awstats page in cpanel…

Can you believe the growth? Would you like to have nearly 30,000 unique visitors to your site this month? Of course you would. It’s MySpace marketing folks.


I’m using MySpace to drive this traffic and the traffic I spoke about in my last post, for Vtag…is continuing to grow week after week.

With that success on the MySpace resource site, I decided to expand on that success and I started and/or bought 5 more resource sites. I now have www.RapRnBlayout.com, www.SpaceTagger.com, www.ClearSpaceLayouts.com and a few others I’m still tweaking.

All the other sites are hanging in there…holding their own.

What else…the eBay car business is steady…still shooting cars for dealerships and posting around 100 listings/month for them.

Oh yeh, just remembered something else I’ve been working on ( of course… ). I had a custom checkout built for my magazine business. The problem is that when people order magazines on eBay, they typically want to send them to multiple addresses as they’re a very popular gift item.

Well the challenge is that neither eBay or PayPal, or ANY other checkout system on the market allows the user to enter more than one shipping address. Then my customers send emails and leave notes in PayPal and at the end of the week, you end up with literally a thousand emails and notes to reveiw…not a good scenario. So, I solved the problem and had a solution built.

Here’s a link to the main page https://www.search4mags.com/checkout/ though you can’t get in much further without a transaction pending.

I had to outsource it to a company from India and it took several weeks, but the result is awesome! Now my customers can enter as many addresses as they want, and they can select new or renewal for each title as well. Then they can pay through PayPal or by Money Order. It gives them a receipt and gives my customers all the information I’m trying to convey to them in automated emails.

It is more efficient, and more accurate. Better for me and my customers.

The checkout had to be certified by eBay, which it was and I’m now in the Solutions Directory and in the Developer’s Program.

But the big plan is to spend a bit of time using it, work out any potential bugs and then I’ll offer it to other magazine sellers for a monthly fee. It’ll save everyone time, trouble and make a bit of money for mui!

MySpace Marketing

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Ok, I promised an update on what I’ve been up to. MySpace

I know you don’t have to look very far to find someone who will tell you “I hate MySpace”. You’ll have to look even less to find a concerned parent when MySpace is mentioned.

These are valid positions to take…though neither affects me or what I have to do with MySpace.

I started using MySpace around 8-12 months ago. Using it, meaning exploring it. I actually got involved helping my kids work on their profiles. My teenagers were ‘pimping’ their profiles, and I thought I could either forbid it, or get involved and try to understand it and keep them safe. I’m more the educator type, so I got involved.

A few months later, I had my own MySpace resource site, www.HookupyourMySpace.com. It’s a site that gives you all the tools to ‘pimp’ your profile for free. I was trying to drive traffic to the site, but was having a bit of trouble. I figured that MySpace itself had to be a the place to find the intended users of my site, but how to reach them was another issue.

So I started doing some reading. I searched the Internet high and low for MySpace marketing information. I read any blog post or discussion forum thread that had to do with the topic. Eventually I found the Warrior Forum where Internet Marketing is the mainstream, and I ran into some savvy marketers. Turns out they had been doing the same thing. Trying to figure this MySpace thing out.

Well I bought and absorbed anything and everything I could find in the next few months, and tried out a hundred different tactics and ideas for marketing on MySpace. Some worked great and others…well they just stunk.

But after that many months I had some great successes as well. Along the road I had learned how to market effectively on MySpace. Well as fate would have it, others were looking for someone who had done what I did. Someone who knew even a little about how to get traffic from those 61 million registered users to their site or products.

I was contacted by many and have worked with a handful of great companies creating marketing campaigns for them, and implementing and executing those plans. And again, success was had. The Vtag company that I spoke about in my last post was actually one of them, and I continue to work with them.

You won’t believe how their traffic has EXPLODED!

Literally in 6 weeks we took their site traffic from less than 100 unique visitors per day to nearly 150,000 UV per day! I wish I could take all the credit, but this is truly the perfect product for MySpace an completely viral (spreads from user to user “like” a virus). Their great product coupled with our marketing efforts has launched the product nicely.

Remember the MySpace site of mine I mentioned before… www.HookupyourMySpace.com ? Well I was getting about 5-10 visitors a day 3 months ago. Now, I’m getting around 2500 unique visitors per day. And I don’t have a viral product persae.

The marketing tactics work. So, a partner and I decided that with all the poor information out there, we could do better. And www.SpaceHogs.net was born. Spacehogs is a whole members site built around MySpace marketing. We have a huge eBook full of marketing tactics and “secrets” . We have over 8 videos showing you how to do what we do…not just talking about it, but walking the talk. We’re having our own adder bot built and it will be included too. But probably the best part of the whole site will be our members discussion forum, where you can get coaching and help with your MySpace marketing. And you can share with others what is and isn’t working for you. The forum will be invaluable.

The cost? Not enough in my opinion. My partner… Mr. Black has it set at $47 right now I think. That’s a 1 time lifetime membership. I think it should be like $9.99/month but we’re working on setting the price. Bottomline, if you want to learn about marketing on MySpace, there is NO better resource.

If you want to hire someone else to do your marketing for you, then drop me a note and I’ll get back to you.