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There’s lots of ways to make money on the internet. One of them that is used by experienced and successful marketers is the upsell. This is offering a potential customer another product or service after they get something from you as you raise the price a little bit.

Sometimes this goes from product to another product to a coaching program to a membership site or whatever else they feel would logically follow. Since each step is a small increment in price it can increase your visitor’s chance of buying. These are also sometimes used with One Time Offers(OTO). The upsell also takes advantage of your potential customer(or customer if it lands after buying something) being in a buying mood.

An Upsell offer can be nearly set on auto-pilot if it’s attached to an auto-responder. By offering them something free(an ebook, service, etc.) then offering an upsell after they get the free product, they have a better chance of buying that upsell from you. Whatever niche you’re in or product you upsell to make sure it’s something your niche would be interested in. Youalready have their attention, so upsell to them something you know they would be interested in.

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John Reese recently posted to this Income.com Blog and to all BlogRush members his plans on what to do about people cheating the system. He clearly plans a full fledged counter-offensive on users abusing the system as well as purging the network of all non-English and junk blogs.

Below is a copy of the letter he sent:

TO: All BlogRush Members
FROM: John Reese, Founder of BlogRush

ARE YOU READY? Because *everything* is about to change. Forget everything else up until now…

PREPARE FOR *BIG* CHANGES! (TWO MAJOR CHANGES ARE NOW LIVE.)

BlogRush CAN’T EXIST if we’re not sending you a lot of ongoing, targeted traffic. We fully recognize this and that’s why this is our ONLY FOCUS.

The BlogRush team has been hard at work making major improvements for you and we won’t rest until BlogRush is running 100% smoothly and sending you tons of targeted traffic! This is OUR MISSION. Please know that our entire team is working around-the-clock to make improvements and fix any problems AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

(We sincerely appreciate your patience.)

We’ve encountered some problems since our historic launch just over a week ago, and we fully recognize that we’ve made some real ‘goofs’ with the system for our Public Beta release…

For example, our data center provider (one of the largest in the world) had a short, temporary outage (they had to replace a network switch) two days after our launch. We had no control over this outage but want to SINCERELY APOLOGIZE to those that saw this message on their blogs (where the widget should have been):

“We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes.”

We were completely *EMBARRASSED* when we realized this happened. That simple message was part of our application code and was meant to appear only on *OUR* WEB SITE PAGES if we ever experienced an outage. This was accidentally ‘marked’ to be a global error message for ANY outage — including if our widget ever had a problem loading. This was a major GOOF and we’re willing to admit it. Our code was planned so that in the case of a problem with our widget, NOTHING WOULD LOAD in its place. So a visitor to your blog doesn’t see an error or anything wrong should the widget ever have any technical issues.

This was quickly corrected and is now working properly. Should the widget ever have any problem loading in the future, your blog will be served a transparent space (which will show whatever background your blog design has) and your blog readers won’t really notice anything.

Again, our sincere apologies for our major goof. It was quite embarrassing.

NOW ONTO SOME SERIOUS ISSUES…

We also realize that we completely underestimated the number of unethical people that would sign up and proceed to CHEAT and try to ‘game’ the BlogRush system. These cheaters ruined the click-rates of many of our members (and burned through a lot of their credits using automated ‘exploit’ methods) and hurt BlogRush’s ability to send maximum traffic to our honest members’ blogs.

BUT ALL OF THAT IS ABOUT TO BE ERASED… LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.

In the next several days to come, we’re going to be rolling out MAJOR changes to BlogRush. BIG changes. And these changes (again) have just ONE primary purpose — to drive more ongoing, targeted traffic to your blog.

We’ve listened to your valued feedback and constructive criticism and we have been working in TURBO MODE to make the changes you want ASAP…

—– HERE’S WHAT’S COMING IN THE NEXT 48 HOURS —–

100% MANUAL BLOG REVIEW.

Our team is going to be manually reviewing every single new blog that registers to participate in the BlogRush Network.

We’ll be applying some quality guidelines and criteria to our decision-making process. (We’ll be publishing these guidelines very soon.) If a blog does not meet our guidelines and criteria, THEY WILL BE REJECTED from the network and not allowed to join — i.e. they won’t be able to serve our widget, refer other users, or have their blog posts distributed across our network. They will have no access to any BlogRush services.

Our members, like YOU, made it LOUD AND CLEAR to us… BlogRush needs to only have members that have quality blog content — not blogs filled primarily with ads and other spammy looking JUNK.

The only accurate way we’re going to keep these junk blogs out of our network is to REVIEW EVERY SINGLE ONE BY HAND. And we’re willing to do it to protect the integrity of our network. I don’t care what it costs us to hire more people (if we need them) to review 100% of any blog trying to join our network. We will be reviewing ALL OF THEM from here on out.

* We realize that several non-English language blogs blatantly ignored our “ENGLISH BLOGS ONLY” warning on our Registration page. Rest assured, though, they’ll all be PURGED from the network when we do our QUALITY CONTROL AUDIT over the next several days (you’ll read about it in a moment).

As I’ve said several times before, BlogRush isn’t some passing “fad” or short-term service. We’re dedicated to building an incredibly valuable resources for bloggers FOR MANY YEARS TO COME.

We’ll also be doing a QUALITY CONTROL AUDIT of all of our existing member blogs. We’ll be reviewing every single blog that’s currently in our network (or that registers before the Manual Review Process becomes active.) And we’ll be completely *REMOVING* any blogs in our network that don’t meet our quality guidelines and criteria.

As you can probably tell by now, we’re not messing around. We have put a lot of hard work into the development of this service and we will continue to bust our butts to make it one of the best Internet services in the world. COUNT ON IT.

We’re also deploying several new Anti-Cheat measures to SHUTDOWN AND WIPEOUT the cheaters and unethical users that have abused our network. Sorry, crooks, but THE FREE RIDE IS OVER.

We’ll be dedicating an entire department to stay on top of any abusive behavior in our network. We believe that our new measures are going to instantly eliminate most, if not all, of our system abuse. It’s going to take us a few more days to roll-out all of these measures (and to complete our entire QUALITY CONTROL AUDIT) but rest assured, BlogRush is about to go through a major TRANSFORMATION.

And a quick word to any ‘cheats’ that might be reading this letter… it’s very possible that you may come up with something extremely creative that temporarily gets by us, but you should know something… IT’S NOT GOING TO BE WORTH YOUR TIME. And I’m not just talking about the tiny amount of traffic that you’ll receive before we shut you off.

You see, we have other plans in the works…

If you attempt to cheat or abuse our network in anyway, shape, or form, we will not hesitate to come after you. Our company is well funded and has plenty of resources. And we WILL use them to punish you to the fullest extent of the law (and civil court process). Oh, you think you can just hide behind some anonymous proxy IPs? Sorry, it’s not that easy. ANY reason you’d have to try and cheat the BlogRush network for traffic and any attempt you make to monetize that traffic will lead directly to your front door — whether it’s AdSense, any affiliate program in the world, any online pharmacy, porn site, casino… ANYTHING. We will follow the trail and it WILL eventually lead to you.

Our hard-working company provides the income for MANY families. As the CEO of our company, I take this very seriously. I HAVE TO. People that attempt to abuse or cheat BlogRush are affecting the livelihood of all my employees and their families. And I will do everything in my power to protect them — it’s MY DUTY.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun. And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity… quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened. I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.

* If you’re one of our valued, HONEST users, I’m very sorry you even have to read stuff like that. I know it’s a waste of your time. Unfortunately, there are unethical people in this world that attempt to abuse and take advantage of others.

MOVING ON…

—- ALSO COMING SOON! —-

**** A LOT MORE CATEGORIES! ****

You asked for it, and you’re getting it!

We’re going to be greatly expanding our directory of categories to increase the relevancy of post links appearing in the widget on your blog — this will also increase click-rates (and traffic) for all members.

* Stay tuned over the next several days for more news about the addition of new categories.

AND…

**** IMPROVED REPORTING! ****

The current Dashboard stats are being under-reported for all users right now. This is the reason that users show discrepancies when looking at Google Analytics data (or other stats packages). We’re currently sending more traffic to our users than we’re reporting in the Dashboard because we are giving all users bonus credits everyday. We’ll soon be reporting all bonus credit activity so all the numbers will be accurate.

SPECIAL NOTE TO ALL LOW-TRAFFIC MEMBERS: In the near future we’ll be giving our low-traffic members (those that need more traffic the most) the BULK of our bonus credit allocations. You’ll get a ton more bonus credits than high-traffic members because you really need it. It’s only FAIR!

* Also we apologize to anyone that has seen a “negative” credit balance for their account. This is a minor bug that we’re taking care of. It doesn’t mean anything and you can just ignore it for now. We apologize for any confusion.

**** IMPROVED NETWORK DISTRIBUTION ****

A few of our users have noticed that they’re building up credits faster than the system is using them. This will eventually balance itself out as the network continues to “adjust” to the growth levels and traffic patterns of each category — because our network provides syndication distribution based on daily average “cycles” and then adjusts moving into the future; so it’s able to accurately predict how fast to use a certain user’s credits, etc. — as compared to just using them all “as fast as possible.”

—- AND HERE ARE *TWO* BRAND-NEW ADDITIONS THAT JUST WENT LIVE!!!! —-

**** BLOGRUSH “FLAVORS” ARE NOW ACTIVE!

You can go login to your account, click the “Settings” tab and then select “Flavors.”

You can choose from (13) different widget colors. You no longer have to only use our original “black” widget design that many users thought was ugly! (Hey, just don’t let our lead designer hear that… he thought his black design was “really cool.”)

Now you can select a color that more closely matches the look of your blog. Our users have been asking for this since we launched our Public Beta, and we’ve taken action to offer these new options.

* We have future plans for further widget customization but we’re working on one “stage” of improvement at a time! Please bare with us. We’re fully aware of the request for a more narrow widget as our current one doesn’t fit on some blogs. We’re trying to produce a solution and should have some news soon.

HERE’S THE BEST PART…

You don’t have to copy and paste new code to your blog. Just go to that “Flavors” section for your account, select the flavor you want, then hit the “APPLY FLAVOR” button. That’s it! Reload your blog in another browser window and take a look.

And if you want to see what a different flavor might look like, just pick another one, hit the “APPLY FLAVOR” button and reload your blog. PRESTO!

AND LAST BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST…

***** BLOG POST CONTROLS *****

Under the “Settings” tab you’ll also find a new option called, “My Post Control.” Here’s what this awesome new feature does…

You can create POST FILTERS for your blog posts…

For example, you can add a keyword or phrase and create a new post filter. If you ever create a post on your blog (while you have that filter active — and you can add/delete them at anytime) that contains one of those keywords in the TITLE of your blog post, that post…

WILL *NOT* BE SHOWN ACROSS THE NETWORK. And you won’t use any of your syndication credits!

All bloggers post “off-topic” stuff from time to time, or short posts that don’t have a ton of great content. Well, now you can easily keep any of those types of posts from using your valuable syndication credits and from being shown across the network!

This is GREAT for you because now you can control exactly which posts of yours will be syndicated. This can help you maximize your CLICK-RATES and, ultimately, the traffic you receive from the BlogRush network. AND it can help retain NEW READERS for your blog (your ultimate goal that can grow your blog’s traffic on a day-to-day basis.)

Here’s Why…

By selecting which posts get syndicated (by simply adding filters right BEFORE you publish a post on your blog that you don’t want to be used; or having setup one well in advance) you can make sure that you’re only syndicating your BEST POSTS. The ones with top-quality content. Your posts that a new visitor to your blog will enjoy and be much more likely to make a “YES!” decision to become a regular reader for you!

AND OH YEAH, ONE MORE THING…

This is only the very beginning for BlogRush. We have so much great stuff in store for you! As I said at the beginning of this letter… we will continue to work VERY HARD to make improvements and add-ons with ONE PRIMARY FOCUS…

To drive more ongoing targeted traffic to your blog.

I want to personally THANK YOU on behalf of our entire company for your interest in BlogRush. We’ve received a lot of criticism from many bloggers on the Internet, and we’ll be the first to admit we’re not perfect and a lot of it was WELL-DESERVED.

But please know, we’re busy working around the clock FOR YOU. You have our word on it.

Now go login to your account and try out some of the new “Flavors” for your blog! And also start setting up some Post Control Filters so you can start maximizing your content syndication.

I’ll be in touch when I have more “news” to share. Thanks for reading this long letter. I had a lot to tell you about.

Best Regards,

John Reese, Founder of BlogRush

Popularity: 31% [?]

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Any experienced internet marketers reading this will probably not learn anything they didn’t already know, or may remember something to do that they forgot while promoting their sites.

A website without traffic will not make any money. You need visitors, prospects, new sign-ups, and potential customers all the time and as many as you get. Many markters specialize in traffic generation since it’s so important to online success. John Reese, author of Traffic Secrets, put it very well saying you get traffic by using any and all means available to you to send a visitor to your site.

This means there is no hard and fast rule to getting traffic or that one method is a magic fix that will keep your traffic coming indefinitely. You need to make use of all forms of traffic generation.

One form of traffic generation commonly used in building opt-in lists is Traffic Exchanges. Sites like Traffic Swarm and Traffic G send your site traffic by putting into a rotation program where visitors have to view your site on a timer to get credits. When your site is viewed you lose credits and you gain credits by viewing other people’s websites. Opt-in lists are perhaps the best thing to use on these traffic exxchanges because your site will have a time limit set upon it and perhaps a visitor who has a short attention span. Most traffic is not very targetted either.

If you go to any message boards to chat with people your forum signature is a great method to bring traffic as well. People interested will click on your link in your forum signature and go to your site. This works best if you’re chatting on a forum within the niche your forum signature is about. You’ll get very few clicks for your body building website while you’re chatting at a forum devoted to movies for example. Since forums post your signature at the bottom of every post you slowly accumulate backlinks as well.

Another well known form of traffic generation is writing articles. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands, or free reprint article websites online. The more popular and powerful of them are EzineArticles, Searchwarp. When writing an article you are allowed to have a Resource Box. In this box you can pretty much put whatever you want. What you need to have in there is a link back to your website. Anyone wanting to use the article on their website has to keep the article unaltered, including your linked Resource Box. If it gets picked up by a big Ezine or website your article can send you lots of traffic by being on their high traffic area. Articles that spread online are natural creaters of backlinks as well since the Resource Box must be left unaltered.

The age of Web 2.0 has brought up Social Bookmarking sites as more forms of traffic. A powerful traffic driver is OnlyWire is a website that lets you bookmark around 20 websites at one time on social bookmarking networks as well. These tools imediately get the word out on your website or new content.

One of the oldest forms of getting traffic, submitting to directories and search engines, is still good today, though not as powerful as it used to be. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the main engines you want your site listed in. The search engines has spiders tha go out and look for sites to index on their own as well, but if you can’t wait that long a manual submission can speed up the process. Google is a bit moody about this type of thing and your site may not get listed even if you manually submit it. A lot of the smaller search engines get their listing from the big players so focusing on them will help your listings with the smaller engines.

Trading links with another website will also get you some traffic. By linking to them and having them link to you will allow each other to ’share’ traffic. This gives both of you a link on each other’s website and you’ll find visitors can find links just about anywhere on a page to get to you. Link exchanging is believed to be becoming weighed less by some search engines, particularly Google, of late. It can still be effective, especially fi you can get your site linked to one of the bigger websites in your niche. Websites exist to make this process easier as well including Link Metro and Link Market.

There’s many other ways I haven’t touched on, but feel a few notes are needed. Links from sites relevant to yours will hold more weight. It’s often not the number of backlinks you have but how relevant they are and where they come from. A link back to your site from the top ranking search engine listing to your site will hold a lot more weight than from a site not related at all to yours. You want to get people as targetted as possible to come to your site so they’ll be interested in what your selling, your ads, or whatever action you want them to take when they get there.

I hope this has been helpful. Comments welcome.

Popularity: 41% [?]

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A young girl and Michigan native named Ashley Qualls is a teenager making millions of dollars on the internet. She does it by making and creating MySpace pages. I know the MySpace arena is popular among internet marketers, but what she has been doing may be what a lot of us need to learn or have never learned. This 17 year old has quit school to work online more and is currently schedule to appear on The View.

Ashley is the owner of Whateverlife.com, a website that boasts traffic of over 250,000 visitors PER DAY!

Through a mix of Pay-Per-Lead offers, Adsense, and a unique and original layout it’s no surprise her site is hugely popular among her target audience. Ashley believes in keeping her site free as well and has turned down multi-million dollar offers to sell Whateverlife.com so she can keep creating for her own website, Whateverlife.com.

CNN report and video can be seen here:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/09/21/agar.myspace.million.WXYZ

This method of making money differs in comparison to the way internet marketers usually use MySpace. Products like SpaceBankers can have the same effect as what Ashley Qualls has done, but in a different approach.

Popularity: 47% [?]

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SEO-Blackhat.com has broken BlogRush to get as many credits as you want by exploiting the programming in the system. By slightly changing the user-agent in the file the code requests he’s found a way to break the system.

You can see how he did it, complete with screenshots and coding by going here:
Exploiting BlogRush Big Time

Popularity: 25% [?]

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Surprisingly, this is not an easy question to answer.

Websites give you a lot of freedom. You can upload templates, design perfectly fitting graphics and logos, and have the ability to use any and all software to create them. They are easy to design as well because of HTML editors like Dreamweaver and Frontpage.

Blogs, which are like a Movable Type website, also a lot of the same freedoms. You can use all kinds of templates, use most software available, and also design well fitting graphics. Blogs have different types of platforms as well, with the most nobable being perhaps Blogger and Wordpress.

Currently, I’d prefer to use a blog. Which is against the way I was taught to create websites. I was taught to hardcode HTML, learn tables, frames, the whole nine yards. Blogs and websites can both do normal HTML coding, and even the newer coding of CSS and PHP. So neither one really has an advantage there.

The main reason I like blogs is theri ability to organize a large amount of webpages while being easy to update at the same time. Blogger is a simpler version of the blog platform but they still let you somewhat organize your pages into categories and/or keywords. Wordpress really opens the doors to you with getting as narrow as Meta and Keywords for each page or post. Some of this would need to be done by hand even in an HTML editor.

I think the biggest advantage blogs have over websites is the “blog and ping” method. Where you make a post, ping that post through a web server like Ping-o-matic, and wait for the search engine spiders to come and index your new updated material. Blog feeds(RSS or Atom) are often used on normal websites in a pseudo-way to keep the search engine spiders coming back to accomplish the same purpose. Some blog programs can be set to do this pinging automatically.

Also, something I’ve noticed with the rise of Web 2.0, is that a blog can take more advantage of the tools of this new generation of websites. A blog feed gets your site out to places it may never have gotten before, whereas a website has no access to such a “feed”.

I own both blog sites and normal websites, but the rate the internet is evolving in Web 2.0 technology, the sites that can keep up best will likely survive and continue to get that all-important traffic. Right now, I think blog’s beat websites by a nose, but it’s extending its lead everyday.

Popularity: 26% [?]

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While there is other news in the Internet Marketing world to report about, and I will, the subject of online surveys resurfaced with someone I know. He signed up for a bunch of different surveys from a lot of companies. The normal thing you do.

The question here really is can you make money with surveys? Is it worth your time and effort to sign up and do them?

When I was started out I did this. I signed up, look at, or went through commonly known survey sites as Paid Surveys Online, Survey Scout, and Paid Surveys Etc. I’m sure I still have accounts in existence somewhere for them.

Now, the basis of these sites is that they’ll pay you for taking surveys. Sometimes it’s in money, other times in points, and they all seem to require you to submit your phone number in addition to other submitted information. The reason for the phone number is that they’ll be calling you. A lot. Some surveys are done over the phone, so it should be expected, but depending on how many times you have done this you could be hounded at all times of the day by them survey moderaters.

You should set up an email address specifically for taking surveys as well as it will quickly fill your inbox with mail. In some instances, a separate phone number may also be needed, or at least the screening of calls.

I can’t entirely discount that you CANNOT make money doing this. It’s possible, but it will turn into a full-time job rather than the ease most of them promise. If you’re ready for something like that, sign up for one of the above companies. For someone new into the internet marketing industry this can seem an easy an obvious place to start.

If you want a good outline on how to do online marketing correctly from the start I recommend the free guide at Chimp-Change.com or The Rich Jerk, a $10 guide with a support forum, to start seeing real money in time.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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As Google seems to keep trying to get stricter on changing their TOS people look for alternatives to adsense. It’s true there’s as many of these alternatives that you can shake a stick at, Yahoo even has their version. What we’re going to look at here is a service called AuctionAds.

What AuctionAds does is send live eBay feeds to your website in the form of a pictured Google Adsense looking Ad block. Using eBay’s affiliate system people click through and by either signing up for eBay, winning a Buy-It-Now(BIN) auction or placing a winning bid, you get paid through them using their affiliate method.

This is unique in that it is NOT contextual and can run right next to your Adsense. The potential to make money through eBay increases the payoff depending on your niche as some markets sell better than others. Since eBay gives you a cut of their revenue the more you sell and the more expensive the things you sell the more you can get paid. I’ve used AuctionAds for awhile and have been pretty pleased with it.

EBay itself is a great site to be an affiliate for due to them having their hands in everything. With AuctionAds you can tap into this ability of the site without changing your content. Two different Wordpress widgets are even available if you like using blogs.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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This may be news for you or not, but since this blog’s aim is to focus on the newer internet marketers coming into the game I’m going to tell you anyway.

One factor of this game is getting backlinks. Well how do you do that?

Articles, forum signatures, and link exchanges all do the job nicely, but how about if you want some backlinks right now? In the world of Web 2.0 this can be really easily and simply. The key to this is social bookmarking sites. Sites like Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, and Furl which let users “bookmark” their favorite sites so other users can visit them who have the same interest.

If it were THAT easy I wouldn’t need to do this post about it. The real secret here is a FREE tool called OnlyWire. It will allow you to submit your bookmark to about 19 social bookmarking sites ALL AT ONCE with just a few clicks, and some necessary sign-ups. That’s 19 instant backlinks to high Google PR sites.

You may see them bringing in some traffic on their own, but the real purpose of this task is for the search engine bots to come by and see your site bookmarked at these places to index you. Keep your focus, keywords, and summaries right and it will increase the targeted visitors to your site as well.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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John Reese, the innovative internet entrepreneur, has just released a Wordpress widget called BlogRush as part of his Income.com website.

This tool lets you get and recieve feeds from only relevant blogs to sites in your niche. Although not a full fledged widget yet(it has to be manually put into the code) it’s use is obvious. It ramps up free traffic by way of getting around blogs with the aim of helping every blogger involved. You will get more targeted visitors due to your visitors coming from already relevant sites or being subscribed to the feeds.

Try it out at BlogRush.com. He has videos to help you install it if you are unfamiliar with dealing with Wordpress’ programming.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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