There are many ways to generate traffic. Pay-per-click marketing such as Google AdWords is the quickest way to start getting targeted traffic to your site. The problem there, of course, is that it’s paid traffic. If your offer isn’t converting well yet, or if you’re brand-new to internet marketing and simply want to build a list for future affiliate promotions or product launches, paying for traffic today isn’t going to work out for you.

That’s why I love WordPress blogs to generate free traffic.

WordPress is the blogging platform you’re reading right now – it’s what this site is based on. There are many reasons why I love WordPress:

1. WordPress is free. You download it, install it on your site, and you’re off and running.

2. There are numerous WordPress themes. I use beautiful yet inexpensive themes from StudioPress. There are also plenty of alternatives out there including free themes.

3. There are thousands upon thousands of plugins for WordPress. Plugins are bits of software you install to give your blog added functionality and features. Most are used on the back-end, where you’ll see them and edit settings, etc., through the WordPress admin panel. Many can be used to expand your site’s reach, such as plugins that automatically announce each new post on your Twitter feed.

4. WordPress is search engine friendly. Not only do Google and other search engines favor WordPress as it is, but many plugins let you customize how your site is seen by the search engines. This further allows you to gain high search engine rankings.

5. WordPress is professional-looking. Your site visitors will be impressed by the quality of the site and the layout.

6. WordPress is easy. It’s extremely user-friendly on the back-end and really anyone can figure out how to use it intuitively.

In all, WordPress is the way to go when it comes to putting up sites that generate free traffic for you. It really simplifies the process and opens up advanced blogging and SEO capabilities to anyone, for little or no money!

I’ve recently been doing massive amounts of testing to increase opt-in rate on my top site’s home page. I made it a short-term goal to really test every possible idea and variant I could come up with – no matter how crazy – and find the best possible combination to generate a huge opt-in rate.

I succeeded!

The final version increased opt-ins by nearly fifty percent! Incredible! This was a big deal for me because I’ve always been surrounded by internet marketers who achieve seemingly impossible opt-in rates, while I continued to bang my head against the wall trying to improve upon the much more modest opt-in rate I was stuck with.

So, here I was over the past week, watching my list explode in size, and laughing out loud in joy at the amount of leads I was capturing daily.

Except for one big problem: While my opt-in rate exploded, my sales conversion rate tapered off dramatically.

Why?

Because in the process of creating my new mega-successful squeeze page, I forgot about the fact that the instant a site visitor lands on the page, the sales process begins.

Most internet marketers separate the opt-in and the sales letter. They see them as two separate steps: First, capture a lead. Then and only then, the sales process begins.

Wrong!

The sales process begins the instant someone finds your site. (In the case of a JV, it begins even before then, in the form of the copy that your affiliates mail out.)

My new squeeze page, while capturing leads at an unheard-of rate, failed to build the interest and credibility necessary to make site visitors actually want to read the sales page. Instead, all it did was entice them with a great download, and instead of reading my sales letter and buying my product, they were happy with the freebie.

So, I’m going back to an old rule of mine that I somehow forgot about: Whenever I split-test an opt-in page, I’ll always include a second outcome in the test in the form of sales conversion rate. After all, what good is a big pile of opt-ins if they’re not buying your product at the end of the day?

Remember that quality always trumps quantity. For years, internet marketers have always been in a contest with each other to build the biggest list. Now many are in a big pissing match to get the most social media followers. Both pursuits are a fruitless waste of time, for the simple fact that neither focuses on the only thing that puts money in our pockets: Sales.

Don’t make the mistake I make and forsake sales volume in exchange for worthless list building. Always, always, always measure the impact on ultimate sales conversion no matter what kind changes you’re making!

The problem is that reports filed on RipoffReport.com are not verified, and so it has become a tool for scam artists and other types of problem customers to libel and defame honest businesses and their owners.

I’ve gotten a handful of RipoffReport.com complaints in my seven years in doing business online. All of them are completely groundless and posted in bad faith. For the most part, they’re posted by scam artist customers who make an unreasonable demand, such as for a refund without returning the product in question. When their bogus demand isn’t met, they retaliate with a Ripoff Report.

(Some customers will threaten to file a report if they don’t get what they want. What they don’t realize is that such a threat constitutes felony extortion in almost all states, and they can get in some really serious legal hot water for making such threats.)

Over the past couple of years, a cottage industry has surfaced of SEO companies who promise to make your Ripoff Reports disappear by “burying” them in search results with hundreds of new listings that make your business name, or whatever other phrase you choose, dominate the search results and push the Ripoff Reports so far down that no one will ever see them.

Well, I have some good news: It appears that Google has “slapped” RipoffReport.com’s page rank to such an extent that the negative publicity they cause may soon be a thing of the past.

I was pleasantly surprised one day when I noticed that the few Ripoff Reports that dishonest customers have filed against me seemed to have magically disappeared from Google search results. I investigated, and quickly learned that RipoffReport.com’s home page rake is down to PR 4, and the actual reports themselves are showing PR 0 or PR 1.

This means that Google has finally gotten wise to their game, and is turning off their gravy train.

This is great news for internet marketers who have been defamed by jerk customers who post bogus and untrue reports whenever they don’t get what they want. Now that Google has apparently learned the truth about RipoffReport.com and put them in their place, safeguarding your reputation has just become a lot easier.

Update: I’ve finally made the decision to walk away from the publishing world, despite strong interest from a major publisher (larger than my previous publisher, Wiley), to publish my next book concept.

To shed some light on this decision, and why traditional book publishers are becoming irrelevant and obsolete, I’ll fill you in on a conversation I had with a friend a few days ago.

This friend is another well-known internet marketer and has a large email list. He was in talks with a major New York publisher to do a book deal. That is, until the conversation took a bad turn. Here’s what the editor he’d been working with had to say:

You will need to guarantee that you will promote the book to your list hard. On launch day, you will need to have at least 30 of your largest JV partners promoting the book, and they’ll all need to run contests and give out bonuses to get people to buy. You’ll need to guarantee a #1 best-seller day at Amazon. Put all of that into writing, and then I’ll take the book proposal to my board for approval.

In response to that very brazen and totally unreasonable set of demands, my friend said this to the publisher:

“If you require me to do all that, what the hell do I need YOU for?”

And that’s exactly why publishers will continue to lose large list owners as authors, and will lose more and more money as their antiquated business model continues to lose steam.

Here’s the singular concept that publishers do not understand:

To a successful marketer like myself who already has a large list, a published book is just another marketing tool to get people to my website and get them to opt-in. That’s it. Nothing more.

So, with that in mind, the goal of a book is to get it into as many hands as possible. Not only will that maximize the number of people who eventually land on one of my sites as a result of the book, but the more people who have it, the more people will talk about it and the sooner and more powerfully it will go viral.

With that end in mind, does it really make sense to sell a book with a $20 cover price? Wouldn’t it do it’s job as a viral marketing tool much more effectively if it were even cheaper… or even free?

Yes, it would. And that’s why I’ve made the decision to make my next book – my biggest, most comprehensive, and dare I say it, my best book – a free e-book that I will give away 100% free. With an option for people to buy a traditional hardcopy version at cost, say around $5.

The truth of the matter is that we authors really don’t make any money on our books. We make the big money selling products and courses online, and doing seminars and paid speaking. And that’s exactly why it no longer makes sense to work with publishers who do zero promotion (except for celebrity authors) and expect us to do 100% of the marketing.

To illustrate this point, let me tell you a true story: A few years ago, someone emailed me a copy of an e-book he’d bought for $30. (Yes, I know, I accepted and read a pirated e-book. My bad on that one.) This is an e-book that I would’ve never purchased on my own for $30. It just didn’t get my attention.

However, as a result of my friend emailing it to me for free, I read it, and as a result I purchased an advanced $300 course from the author, and several months after that I attended one of his seminars at a cost of $500.

So, as a result of getting the e-book for free, instead of paying $30 for it, this author eventually made $800 from me. If he would drop the $30 price tag on the e-book and make it a free download, he’d probably become a multi-millionaire rather quickly.

If I’m going to do all of the hard work in promoting my book, not only am I going to skip the publishers and deny them the lion’s share of the profits, along with an unreasonable amount of control over my book’s content, but I’m going to give the world access to my books absolutely free from now on. That’s what will really get the word out, make the books viral, and maximize my back-end profits.

Now that corporate tax time is over (March 15th rather than April 15th), I cleared the stacks of paperwork off my desk, boxed them up for storage, and started the day with a clean slate and fresh mind. My first order of business was making a list of potential new product ideas, and the list quickly got long.

But what excites me most is how quickly and easily I can act on those ideas and cash in on them!

My last post was a rant against the publishing industry. One of the things I hate about traditional publishing is the sheer slowness of the process. Most published books were written a year or more before they ever hit bookstores or Amazon!

To make matters worse, it’s a needlessly tedious process. The manuscript must be submitted to the publisher’s specific requirements, then a first edit is returned that the author must go through and either approve or disapprove each change, and finally a few months later the printed page proofs arrive, for more error checking. This is all done for a total amount of compensation that is embarrassingly low compared to the typical internet marketing product launch.

In the world of internet marketing, however, I can create a product in a matter of days or weeks and launch it shortly thereafter. This is particularly true with digital delivery, since I don’t have to wait for printing/replication and warehousing to take place before I can launch. I have a professional video production facility in-house, and the magic of screen video makes creating products even easier.

Another nice thing is that a high-quality internet marketing product is typically sold for several hundred dollars at a minimum, and frequently two thousand dollars or more. This is a far cry from a $20 published book that pays the author a dollar or two per copy, and no commissions to third-party promoters.

The best part about launching a product via the internet marketing route, instead of a traditional publisher, is the ease of getting affiliates and JV (joint venture) partners on board. Book launches were big a few years ago, but marketers with large lists are increasingly refusing to participate in them, for no other reason than the absence of affiliate commissions. With an actual product, however, top affiliates want to promote it! They know it’s easy money to send out an email or two promoting your product, then watching the big fat commissions come rolling into their PayPal account a few weeks later.

Right now I’m looking at a whiteboard on the wall beside my desk with seven solid new product ideas on it, all able to be created quickly and fulfilled digitally if I choose to do so. Once I decide what order to put them in, I can get started on product creation and have them completed in no time at all, and ready for launch to the world. That is what I love so much about internet marketing!

The issue I’m talking about here is the failure of the mainstream publishing industry to embrace the Internet and the Information Age.

I’ve been agonizing over what to do with my next book concept. It’s a killer concept, totally groundbreaking, and is sure to sell a ton, probably even more than my best-seller Never Cold Call Again has. My choices are to go with a traditional book, through a traditional publisher, or to release it myself, perhaps as an information product or an online course.

I’ve made the decision to skip the publisher and do it myself.

Why?

Because the Internet has made publishers obsolete and increasingly irrelevant now that we’re fully in the Information Age.

My logic is very simple: Years ago, if you got a book deal, your publisher would promote your book. After all, that’s what a publisher is for. They’d do promotions, set up media tours, and get the word out about your book.

Today, with the exception of celebrity authors, publishers don’t do that anymore. They way they operate now is to seek out potential authors who have a large Internet platform, presence, and mailing list, entice them with a book deal, and then rely entirely on the author to promote the book. (That sounds frighteningly similar to companies who order their sales reps to cold call in order to avoid marketing expenses, doesn’t it?)

Now, this obviously makes sense for the publisher – it allows them to all but eliminate their marketing budget – but it’s a foolish choice for anyone who has a large Internet presence, as I do.

The problem comes down to the very fundamentals of what publishing entails: Giving up the lion’s share of profits from your book in return for a small royalty percentage. In consideration for keeping the bulk of the profits, the publisher is supposed to spend their money to promote your book. That’s the very basis of the legal doctrine of “consideration” – if you give something up, you must get something of equal value in return, or a court can declare the entire contract void.

Sadly, publishers just don’t get it. They’ve been in business for so long that they can’t understand just how much the Internet empowers those of us who know how to use it to publish and sell our own material and keep 100% of the profits. I had a chat with a literary agent the other day who told me the industry is getting downright dismal and editors are more grumpy and unhappy than ever. Yet, it’s their own fault for ignoring the threat of the Internet and believing that they can continue their antiquated business model in the Information Age.

To make matters worse, the amount of quality information that goes into a book with a cover price of, say, $19.95, that ultimately sells on Amazon for around $11.00 and pays the author a dollar or two per copy, could be translated into an information product that would easily sell for $97, $197, even $497 by someone with the Internet presence to do so. (To be totally honest, my published books took more time and work to create than my high-dollar info products, largely due to the publishing industry bureaucracy.)

Looking around at Internet marketers who I know, a shocking truth becomes clear: Some of those marketers who have made the most money have exactly zero published books out there. They know they’re better off selling their knowledge directly, in the form of information products, seminars, and coaching programs. That’s where the real money is. I even heard an Internet marketer, who has made well over twenty million dollars online, openly mocking published authors for their foolishness!

So, for those of you who always ask me how to get a book published, my advice is this: The Internet is making publishers irrelevant. Skip the publisher and learn Internet marketing, because that’s where the real money is!

EDIT – 3/15/10 – After posting this, publishers came out of the woodwork with, “Wait! Hear us out first!” So, I may entertain some book offers after all, only if those offers include guaranteed minimum marketing budgets and specific promotional plans.

In a previous post about what I’ve “resolved” to do different this year (I put that word in quotes because I’ve publicly mocked New Years’ Resolutions), I mentioned that the more I email my subscriber list, the more people buy, and, surprisingly, almost no one unsubscribes.

Since I’m a numbers guy and won’t make any business decision without first seeing the hard bottom-line numbers, I of course went about my decision to increase email frequency scientifically, and set up an A/B split-run test to determine what works best. (If you’re new to internet marketing, an A/B split-run test is where two different versions of a web page are served to visitors in equal amounts, and the results are tracked and recorded.)

For the seven years that NeverColdCall.com has been in business, my email autoresponder series has gone out weekly. Week 1 is a Q&A, week 2 is a newsletter, and on and on, alternating between those two formats weekly. It’s worked well for me, but I wanted to try increasing frequency and track sales results.

In this test, version A of my home page subscribed visitors to an autoresponder series that sends emails twice per week instead of once. Version B went to the default weekly autoresponder. (By the way, I managed to confuse the hell out of myself because I typically use ‘A’ as my default.)

After running this test for a full month – which is necessary in this type of test, where the impact of mailing frequency must be measured over an extended period of time – mailing twice per week edged out the weekly newsletter. Not by much, mind you, but every increase in sales counts. I’ve done very few things in my years of internet marketing that really blew my sales numbers wide open in one shot. Rather, it’s been years worth of split testing and finding little things that increase sales by one tenth of one percent. Dozens upon dozens of those tests has resulted in several percentage points increase in sales conversion, which to me equates to several hundred thousand dollars per year in increased revenue!

So, if you’re of the opinion that emailing too often will turn people off, think again. Or, for that matter, subscribe to a few top internet marketers’ lists – many mail daily! Increasing your email frequency will increase your sales without driving unsubscribes, and I have the test results to prove it.

I think the same thing every time someone calls hiring a maid or some other domestic help as “frivolous.” Sure, I could do the work myself, but why would I waste my time when it’s so well-spent elsewhere? Is it really a good use of my time to mop the floors or mow the lawn? The only domestic work I still do myself is detailing my car, and it’s because I really truly cannot find anyone who can do it better or with as much attention to detail as myself.

As true as this issue is with domestic work, it’s even more so in business and particularly internet marketing.

Nowhere else but in internet marketing do I see more people wasting so much time on menial tasks. I’m guilty of this myself – every day I wind up doing something that someone else should be doing, and I’m always making mental notes to outsource that kind of work.

The answer is outsourcing. Outsourcing is a hot topic both in the marketing world and out. Successful entrepreneurs and internet marketers understand the value of time, and not wasting that time on non-productive tasks, whether that means mowing the lawn or building a web page.

Starting out, most new marketers don’t have any choice but to handle their own tasks. From responding to emails to handling support tickets to processing unsubscribe requests – not to mention fulfilling orders – there’s a lot to be done in any new online business, and without solid profits or a budget to work with, the new marketer generally has to do everything.

However, tasks should be outsourced as quickly as possible. When I started out, I had a fulfillment house producing and shipping my products within a few months of making my first sale. I contracted with a call center to handle the phones and support requests, and even hired an outside firm to run my PPC campaigns so I wouldn’t have to. I wanted my time to be free to create new products and work directly on marketing, and nothing else.

Take a look at your days and how you’re spending your time. Time is the only asset that cannot be replaced, and therefore it is the most valuable. Think about whether you’re using your time effectively, or wasting it. If you’re wasting it – and we all do to some extent – correct the situation by outsourcing as much as possible, both at home and at the office!

Most of these plans come from trial and error experience in prior years, as do most of the decisions I make and new directions I try. Here’s the short list:

1. More JV and Affiliate Promotions. There’s a common myth in the internet marketing world that mailing affiliate promotions to your list will encourage unsubscribes, but I have not found that to be the case. If you maintain a good relationship with your list, they’ll pay attention to you and they won’t unsubscribe. Combine that with the fact that open rates are never as high as we all want, and you can see why multiple promos per month won’t hurt.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m going to spam my list with endless affiliate offers. Quite the contrary. When I say “increase,” I’m referring to the fact that I normally send no more than one per month. I’ll increase that to two, possibly three in the event of really good offers that would benefit my subscribers. (NOTE: This is not a request for more JV invites! I already have a closed list of marketers for whom I promote and am not seeking more.)

2. More E-Mail Frequency. Last month I moved to a very high-end email server solution, and in the process of tweaking the configuration, my server admin had me sending numerous email broadcasts out over and over to monitor performance. I was convinced I’d piss off my lists, but to the contrary, sales volume was explosive for those couple of days.

From that experience I learned not only will my interested subscribers not unsubscribe, as I pointed out in #1, but they want to hear from me more often and more frequent mailings will encourage them to buy sooner.

3. More Diversified Traffic Sources. When I was “Google Slapped” last month, there wasn’t a disastrous drop in sales and opt-in volume for the period of time that my AdWords account was off. It made me realize that my primary focus on Google AdWords was distracting me from many other quality traffic sources. Therefore I’ll focus much of my energy in 2010 on diversified traffic sources, particularly free ones.

Keep in mind that I’m in the anti-SEO camp due to the fact that I optimize my sites for conversion only and refuse to screw that up by altering my copy to please search engines. However, there are many ways to exploit SEO using other sites that drive traffic to your main site (this blog being just one example).

4. Less Work, More Fun. Having spent all of last week on Mike Filsaime’s Marketers’ Cruise and then spending the first 3 days of this week at home getting over being sick, I hated coming to the office today and would have much rather stayed at home or done something fun with my bride. As much as I love my “work” – if you can really call it that – hobbies and recreational activities are still more preferable. So, as much as I openly criticize most interpretations of “time management,” I’ll have a clear and concise list of things to do each and every day, and will not come to the office unless I have a full days’ worth of activities on my schedule. No more coming here just for the sake of coming.

For the first full year after I became a successful internet marketer and quit my last job ever, I didn’t work at all; contrast that with my time living in California, where I was in the office constantly looking for new ways to make money in order to justify CA’s outrageous cost of living. Neither were healthy; balance is.

This underlines the importance of balance and why it’s so necessary to have a true balance in life if you expect to succeed in business.

5. More Focus On Opt-Ins. I’ve always tracked PPC and other traffic sources for sales conversion, but have recently put a stronger focus on opt-in conversion. Why? Well, first of all, no one is going to buy if they don’t first opt-in. That’s a no-brainer. Second, there is a greater value to opt-ins than in just selling my own product. Like those affiliate promotions that frequently put five figures into my pocket with the sending of an email or two. Just because a subscriber isn’t going to buy one of my products doesn’t mean they won’t buy someone else’s product that I earn commission on.

There you have it … my main new focuses and shifts in direction for 2010. I’ll keep you posted on the results!

Fast-forward to today. The place was PACKED. And we all know why.

It’s the New Year’s Resolutions crowd.

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing inherently wrong with New Year’s Resolutions. Resolutions are just another form of goal setting, and setting goals is a good thing. After all, you can’t get something unless and until you define what it is that you want in the first place.

The problem with the New Year’s Resolutions crowd, however, is that few of them, if any, will follow through with their resolutions. This will be obvious in the gym two or three weeks from now, when they’ll have all but disappeared.

Most people I know who come up with New Year’s Resolutions are the type of people who don’t follow through with things. They’re not consistent, and if there’s anything I’ve learned on my own journey to success, it’s that consistency is everything.

Whether you want business and financial success, or you want to get in shape, or you want to improve your relationships with others, the key is to work on these things consistently.

I’ve explained in the past that top sales professionals don’t care what day of the month it is. They don’t change their activities if it’s the first day of the month, or the last. They consistently do the same things each and every day, and that’s why they’re on top.

And that’s what the New Year’s Resolutions crowd needs to understand. Consistency = success. Lack of consistency = failure.

People who are in great shape know that you don’t do a diet or exercise program for a few months and then go back to your old ways. It’s a permanent lifestyle change.

People who are successful in business know that you don’t work hard for a few months or a few years and then reap the benefits. You make permanent changes instead.

People who are in wonderful relationships (as I am) know that you don’t woo someone for a few months and then get lazy and indifferent, as all too many couples do. Those who are in happy relationships know that you love someone with all your heart forever, not just at the beginning.

Remember, consistency is everything. Without consistency, you have nothing. So forget about those silly New Year’s Resolutions, and instead resolve to make permanent changes in your life to improve!