Often people end up on a never-ending quest to seek out the many and varied components they want… web hosting here, auto-responder over there, membership management somewhere else, customer support way over there… You could easily end up using so many different vendors you actually get lost trying to bring it all together.

From that perspective, one vendor who can achieve that - i.e. bring it all together - would be a godsend in this industry!

And that’s exactly what the Ultimate Marketing Center can do for you! Provide practically all the major tools you need to run your online business, offer them in the one virtual toolbox, and do it at what is such a ridiculous price that you can’t help but be pleasantly surprised.

What’s it worth? Well, if you priced all the “tools” separately, you could be paying around $100 or more every month. With the Ultimate Marketing Center, it’s only a surprising $19.95 a month.

See… told you it was ridiculous

I’ve been using Kavi Kodai’s Ultimate Marketing Center since September 2007 - that’s almost two years at the time of writing this review - and I have to tell you that, out of all the hosting services I have used over the years (since 1995), this would have to be close to being THE most reliable one!

Sure, there have been a couple of (very minor) issues over that time.., some actually caused by my own ISP as I later found out (and my belated apologies for “swearing” at you at the time mate) but you know that Kavi will respond quickly to your support tickets and get any issues sorted… toot de suite!

So… waddyaget for your $19.95 a month from the Ultimate Marketing Center (UMC)?

Of course, there’s cPanel hosting (with Fantastico), with provision for 20 add-on domains, unlimited sub domains and emails, and plenty of hard disk space and bandwidth! Now while this isn’t a reseller setup as the one login applies to all domains… it’s the next best thing! Many hosting companies would charge twenty bucks a month just for this setup by itself!

The next essential Internet Marketing tool you need is a high quality list management and auto-responder service so you can follow up with your leads and customers whenever you want! With UMC you get an unlimited number of auto-responders, with no limit to the number of messages you can send. Right now I’ve got 25 auto-responders set up, with a total of only 4845 subscribers, so I’ve still got plenty of room to grow before I reach my 30,000 limit!

The ad-tracking facility is something I’ve only recently started to use. This allows me to attach different tracking id’s to different ad campaigns, email promotions or even referral links in articles like this one on web sites, so I can see how well each link is performing.

For example, check the links within this post for the Ultimate Marketing Center - mouseover the link and you’ll see the tracking code which actually “uses” my domain, making it appear a lot more professional! Also the UMC advertisement in the right hand sidebar also uses a slightly different tracker!

Sure it’s a bit time consuming setting these unique id’s up for each promotion, but when you absolutely need to know what’s working (or not) then it’s worth it!

I’ve also got an affiliate program running for a couple of specific products I promote. Naturally, UMC is looking after the affiliate registration, management and tracking for me.

And when you’ve got products to sell, you can tie it all together so your affiliates get credit for the sales they send you, the customer gets signed up to the right list, and UMC can even help set up usernames and passwords so you can establish and manage multiple membership areas.

The other great feature I’ve used right from the start has been the customer support section which UMC allows me to set up. This is a register/login/submit ticket deal which operates extremely smoothly, and ensures that your customers get the support they deserve!

Look… there’s probably a LOT more I can tell you about UMC, like some of the free training that’s included… Right from the get go, I found the David Vallieres 7 Week Online Training Program “You Can! Make Your Living Online!” essential reading! This $287 course is included with your subscription!

Kavi’s got lots more for you, so go find out why he calls this service the Ultimate Marketing Center!

Whether you are a total newbie to online marketing, or a seasoned veteran, I thoroughly recommend it to you!

And don’t be put off by the bargain price! It’s fair dinkum a top quality service!

Cheers
Stephen Spry

I’m not going to bore you with the usual stuff, like “go to ClickBank to see what’s hot”, create a Blogger Blog or Squidoo lens, write articles that link to those sites acting as landing pages. No, this article goes beyond the normal regurgitated stuff you’ve probably heard or read a thousand time already.

To make money with niche affiliate marketing or even with Adsense, a simple method for doing this would be what I call trend marketing or traffic surge marketing.

If you watch a T.V. show or know of a movie coming out, or are aware of when the next Oscars event is going to be, then head on over to Google Trends to see what the hottest terms are right now for those events. Find out what the most popular search terms are for today, yesterday, and even the past few days. Then make the perfect synergy of a landing page promoting a product, a content piece with just Adsense on aside from your content, and post these articles on a free blog that will rank quickly like Blogger or Wordpress. Many people are successful with this business model and putting up quick, dirty ugly sites like this to capitalize on the “surge traffic” also known as “trends traffic”.

You can be a super affiliate by anticipating what the demand and what the trends are going to be so you can get ahead of the surge of traffic.

How do you get ahead of the surge of interest to position yourself ahead of the crowd and ride the wave of traffic?

Read a newspaper, watch some television, or just take a general birds-eye view towards what is popular right now.If Oprah recommends a book on her talk show, then you should make a review page or post about that book and then sell some of them through your Amazon affiliate link.

If you possess any marketing skills at all, then you’ll know what might be of sudden interest for certain niches you may already have sites built for.

Here are 2 examples for how I did this for my niche sites:

I have a website about home brewing and one day when I was at the movies with my son I saw a trailer for the Beer Wars Movie.As I was sitting there, it occurred to me that this would be interesting to visitors to my home brewing site. So I went to YouTube and found a trailer for the movie, which I embedded on my site. After that little post got indexed, I reviewed the trailer and did some research on others’ opinions of the movie.

My second post was a review of the actual movie.I accomplished all of this in less than a half hour, largely by reading other peoples’ opinions on the movie. When the movie went live, there was suddenly a lot more people searching for “Beer Wars Movie Trailer” on the search engines.

In anticipation of the sudden but temporary traffic surge, I decided that I would make sure that I was page 1 for those terms so I used Backlink Solutions to quickly catapult my site to page one for those terms. When the movie went live, I was already on the first page for the search terms that I wanted.

Example #2 of how I anticipate a surge of interest and increase traffic for my niche sites using offline resources.

I was reading the newspaper one day and saw something about an antiques show where people were bidding on a 300-year old birthday cake. I reasoned that since this news item made it to the offline newspapers that it would be interesting to visitors to my site on antique furniture.

So I wrote the post about that antique birthday cake, but the Adsense earnings and traffic spike didn’t come like I thought it would. Granted, I still got a lot of traffic for that particular post but I was a Johnny-come-lately with that bit of news and it wasn’t totally relevant to a site about antiques furniture but since the site was about antiques some visitors found the birthday cake post of interest.

However, I saw an upward surge for those sites’ Adsense earnings for a few days.

One of the best ways to do SEO for your niche affiliate sites is to understand your niche and write newsworthy articles, in other words, to write about newsworthy items of interest to them. If you understand your niche and your target audience, you really don’t need to rely on keywords lists to get traffic.You can often receive a lot of traffic just by writing about is really interesting to your visitors.

Daniel McGonagle runs the Niche Affiliate Marketing newsletter, a Free publication for niche affiliate marketers. His newsletter is brimming with tips like the one you just read, so head on over there and pick up a free copy.

Looking at my various email accounts that received spam (16 main POP accounts, with multiple aliases for each one), I tried to decide whether I could kill off any of them that I no longer use… When I found one that was responsible for 365 of them, that old alias was promptly deleted!

But that STILL leaves almost 100 spam emails a day for me to deal with!

THEN I remembered my Gmail account… and found yet ANOTHER 300 odd messages that had been trapped by Google’s spam filters in the last week alone…

But what REALLY excited me about this was that NONE of these junk emails made it to my email client!

Google was sending me ONLY the good stuff!

Perhaps here is the answer you need…

So here’s what I did (and this assumes you already have a Gmail account established AND configured on your email client to send and receive messages):

1. For starters… pick just one of the email accounts you are using. Take note of the username, password and POP mail server settings, then DISABLE this account in your email client. Turn it OFF so you no longer check for mail from your email client (you are going to set it up on Gmail instead, and let THEM look after everything, including the spam)

2. Now, login to your Gmail account and click on SETTINGS (top RH corner)

3. Select the ACCOUNTS tab, and from that, click on the “Add another mail account” link.

4. I entered my email address, and then Google asked for the server settings (from #1 above)… I also marked the “label” option to make it easier to see where mail comes from when I am using Gmail,

5. And that’s it! Once I set it up, it checked the mail!

And the good thing?

Of the thirteen messages that were waiting, Google put 11 in the spam folder straight away, and left 2 good ones in my Gmail inbox.

Next.. over to my email client, and clicked “get mail” from my Gmail account to see what happens…

And the two messages that were destined for me, actually arrived in my inbox… and NO SPAM!

Yay!

Google allows you to do this with up to FIVE pop email accounts. If you have more than that, you’re going to have to do a little fiddling (i.e. email redirecting/forwarding) at cpanel level to send the email to a different address for Gmail to collect it… in fact, why not just forward it straight to your gmail account?

Once your email client checks your Gmail inbox, the messages are transferred to the “trash” folder at Gmail, and held there for 30 days before automatic removal. So if you need to go back over some recent history, these archived messages may be useful…

WARNING - VERY IMPORTANT STEP - DO NOT MISS THIS!

Check your Gmail spam folder regularly after you have done this - at least once a day for the first few weeks!!! Look for any GOOD email that might “slip through” the filters… If you find any, mark it as “Not Spam” so that Gmail can learn what is good!

Now I’m off to set up a few more of my busier accounts!!!

And as soon as I do that… I will have stopped over 900 of those spam emails from getting to me in the first place!!!!

So there you go… a VERY effective way of combating spam!

At the moment it seems that you can't escape stories about the latest social networking phenomenon, Twitter. With all the hype and celebrity endorsements, lots of people are asking “how do I use Twitter?”.

There are plenty of sites out there that will tell you how to use Twitter, but not so many to warn you of the pitfalls.If you take a minute to learn from this list of handy Twitter tips then you'll be Twittering away with the best of them.

DO remember to hold your tongue. Unless your updates are protected, anyone can see what you are Tweeting.Bear in mind the story of the girl who managed to Tweet her way out of a new job because a hiring manager read her thoughts on the position she had interviewed for.

DON'T confuse Twitter for a chat client.No one would like their screen full of irrelevant Tweets from a conversation they're forced to eavesdrop on.

DO make sure that you retweet other people. This can be a good way to build up a following of likeminded Twitterers.

DON'T endlessly try to sell things.Okay, we get it - you have stuff to sell.Twitter isn't a one way street - talk back!

DO follow users back, but….

DON'T be offended if someone doesn't follow you back. Users with thousands of followers are unlikely to see your Tweet through the noise anyway.

DO try to be funny, entertaining, informative and creative with your tweets.

DON’T auto-DM. This is the Twitter equivalent of spam and a faceless “hi – thanks for the follow” is impersonal and off-putting.

DO use it to ask other people for help.Once you have built up a reasonable following you’ll find it easy to find answers to your questions quickly.

DON’T tweet if your message is likely to go over the 140 character limitation.Spreading messages over multiple tweets is just going to confuse and irritate your followers.

These handy hints should be enough to start you off. If you are likely to spend a significant proportion of your online time on Twitter then there are plenty of guides on the net telling you how to use Twitter effectively.

Instead of having
» affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net
as your hoplink, you can now ALSO have an encrypted version which would look like this:
» a6af6wg3z2bjruenjfsb3v0o9l.hop.clickbank.net/

According to ClickBank,

“this adds an extra layer of privacy and anonymity to HopLinks, keeping affiliates’ promotional efforts and techniques hidden from others.”

According to me…

This means YOU have to be even more meticulous with your record keeping, otherwise you are going to have no friggin’ idea what vendor/product is associated with your links - and compounding one of the biggest problems facing affiliate marketers!

So what’s the point of all this cloaking of affiliate links?

Is is such a huge problem that you need to devote more of your energy and resources to dealing with it?

I’ll use ClickBank as an example… the very “obvious” link of
affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net
does have its problems…

To those of us “in the know”, we know it is an affiliate link, and we know that you are trying to make money from it (shock! horror!)

But the the “average” Joe Blow - or Josephine Blow - out there in Internet land… they have NO real idea that it is an “affiliate” link… to them, it’s just a link!

HIDING it through some sort of cloaking tool, so your referral link now looks like
yourdomain.com/go/greatproductideahere
certainly makes it LOOK a lot better and more professional, and well worth doing in my opinion (see my post about a great plugin for Affiliate Management In WordPress)

But still, to anyone “in the know”, we also know what that means… so if we REALLY wanted to work out what product you are promoting as an affiliate, we still can!

And if we want to be “naughty” and change your afflink to our own so we can buy the product at a discount (and do you out of your commission) then it’s easily done…

But how much of a problem is that? Really?

Is that the reason why you are cloaking your affiliate links?

Or are you concerned about the more likely issue of commission theft by malware/spyware programs that are on your computer? Their sole purpose is to look for “standard” HopLinks and other affiliate links, and automatically change them so some other party gets the credit?

In other words… your site has to send your affiliate link to the visitors browser, where the malware/spyware program on their computer recognises the link and hijacks your code… and YOU miss out on the sale if they buy!

In which case, the ClickBank HopLink Shield will make a difference to that… until these buggers work out how to decode the url and include that in an update to their malware!

Or, are you concerned about people stealing your affiliate marketing ideas?

As we’ve already seen, ClickBank says their HopLink Shield is useful in hiding the promotional efforts and techniques used by successful affiliates.

And that’s a good thing!

Because I know if I’ve got a “system” that I’ve worked out… or paid a fortune to learn… then I don’t want some other wannabe Internet marketer coming along and “stealing” my ideas!

And that happens more than we are prepared to admit.

What are your thoughts on this?

Learn More About Your Audience

Before you start out any online money making method and especially so for affiliate marketing, you need to understand who your audience is. Not knowing who you will be selling to sets you up for failure as you won’t know how you should build a relationship with them, and how you should sell to them. Research is key to being able to understand how your potential target market behaves, think and buys; look at the demographics to determine what direction you have to take before trying to sell them anything.

If your efforts are to succeed, it is important to have inside knowledge so that you can effectively and efficiently communicate with your potential buyers. Being able to effectively send out your message clearly in a language your audience understands will allow you sell the products you are selling a lot easier, and will also help you in establishing better relationships with them. Having good relationships with your potential customers will give you the power to sell to them over and over.

Maintain Transparency

Trust is a key element to someone buying through you. People buy from people or businesses they trust, and this is why you need to be transparent when you are selling though affiliate marketing. If you build a solid reputation, and come off as someone with authority, honesty and integrity, then it is very easy to sell pretty much anything. When you are trying to sell a product as an affiliate, you have to provide as much detail as possible on the product and be honest in telling the potential customers what they are getting.

It is quite possible to make money off them through deception, but in the long term it simply will not work as people will eventually catch on and know. Being able to provide honest information about the products you are promoting will work better as you will be able to capitalize on your reputation to attract return customers who will be looking for your opinion before they buy any other products.

Make The Right Choices

Probably the most important thing to do to be successful in affiliate marketing is to find the right program for you. Do not simply go for the ones that have proven to be effective in allowing others to make money online out of affiliate marketing. Instead, find a program with products you are interested in and truly believe in. Apart from this, take the time to evaluate each of the available affiliate marketing programs in terms of reputation, products, services, and other information that would be relevant to your decision. As long as you choose the right program for you, you can be sure to make money online out of your affiliate marketing efforts.

Conclusion

So if you have decide to try out affiliate marketing as a means to make money online, keep what you have read above in mind and you will have long term success. If you are interested in more ways that you can be successful at affiliate marketing, then perhaps you should consider looking at Portal Feeder. Portal Feeder is a membership based service with all the necessary tools and training that can turn you into a very successful affiliate marketer, and if you want to know more about Portal Feeder click here to read our review of this membership.

It is important to know whether you are marketing the right affiliate programs. If you are already making money in a particular niche with a particular product, why not check Clickbank regularly to find out if there are similar products that offer a higher payout per sale? You can enhance your affiliate income with minimal effort (just by altering a few links) if you are using landing pages for your affiliate promotion.

The Clickbank Gravity of the product (assuming you are using Clickbank) should also be considered. If other affiliates are successfully making sales of a certain product, it is an indication that the product is popular and is the type of thing people are interested in and this will be indicated by Clickbank. Don’t ignore a product just because it has low gravity. The product might just be new. Having said that, promoting low-gravity products could be a gamble as there is no previous track record to go by.

Your should also consider promoting affiliate products that charge a monthly fee Promoting this kind of product allows you to get automated recurring sales every single month. It has the potential to be a great long-term money earner and this type of payment setup is generally used with membership sites.

If you want to do well in niche marketing, you should check out Niche Blueprint Review to find out how you can create a six figure income from scratch with simple-to-create niche ecommerce websites.

About a month ago, around March 20, someone from Google’s Adsense team visited one of my long established directory web sites, and carried out a little “human initiated” search there… and found some “mature” content was presented in the search results… along with the display of Adsense ads.

The “mature” content was fairly tame (this is from Come On Aussie, an Australian web directory and does include a limited number of listings for adult sites) these search results only showed about one and a half lines of actual “teaser” text from each of four listings. All up… about 6 lines of “mature” content.

And despite the fact that I had deliberately programmed the actual static pages for each listing to NOT show any ads… the dynamic search results page WAS NOT COMPLIANT with the Adsense TOS!

(Technically, the whole site isn’t compliant because you are NOT supposed to have any “mature” content anywhere on a site which shows Adsense ads… thankfully however Google do recognise this site is a useful web resource. But if that ever becomes a problem… you can say bye-bye to the adult listings!)

Long story short…

They sent me a notice to fix the search results pages within three days… which for some reason I did NOT see (I think it got buried in my spam folder) and the end result…

Ad serving was turned off for that domain on 24th March.

It took a lot of to-ing and fro-ing backwards and forwards with the Adsense support team once I realised what had happened and fixed the “problem”, before ads were reinstated in the middle of April, and I missed out on about four weeks of Adsense income from that site! NOT a good feeling when it is one of your better performing sites.

So I’ve been interested in compliance issues a little more since then

And one I discovered that probably 900% of Adsense publishers are overlooking is the requirement to have a privacy policy on any site displaying Adsense ads

And this HAD to be in place by 8th April 2009!

So if you want to run the risk of getting your Adsense earnings turned off, then do NOT modify and include this sample privacy policy provided by JenSense (Jennifer Slegg) on your site.

In fact… you probably ticked a box acknowledging the “new” terms and conditions recently when you logged in to your Adsense account… without actually realising WHAT you had agreed to.

Changes at ClickBank Too

Speaking of changes to terms and conditions… ClickBank ALSO had a very recent change to their Client Contract… and one thing that jumped out at me from a quick scan of that (there’s probably a LOT more I missed) was from Section 2 PROMOTING PRODUCTS:

e. You will not offer, suggest or imply the availability of any rebates, coupons, tickets, vouchers or similar incentives to induce or encourage the purchase of a Product.

Now that’s interesting, because a lot of marketers use a “bonus” as an incentive to purchase through their affiliate link.

In fact, I got one just a few minutes ago…

“When you get XXXX CLICKBANK PRODUCT today, I’m going to send you - as a Bonus - the YYYY Home Study Course ($47 value) as seen at…”

Sorry ClickBank affiliates.. that’s now a definite no-go as far as ClickBank is concerned.

Ignore at your own peril!

First was a 7 day trial run of 3G mobile wireless broadband. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, spending far too much time at the slower GSM speeds (14-20k) instead of the promised speeds possible of up to 3000k speeds.

Now, I’m currently back on dialup at 52k, and not so patiently waiting for my 1500k ADSL service to be relocated (and in following up with AAPT after a week, have only just discovered they have NOT yet submitted my application to Telstra! Sheesh! But that’s another story about poor customer service.)

So what have I missed out on in that time?

Probably lots of stuff… Stuff I couldn’t see… stuff I didn’t want to download (which I wouldn’t think twice about getting if I was on my normal ADSL connection)… and stuff I was not prepared to twiddle my fingers waiting for!

While it’s been happening for a while, I’ve only just really noticed that a large number of marketers seem to have a “thing” for video information - and nothing else!

Come on people…

If you really have a useful message to say, then offer it in OTHER formats as well!

• Those of us on slow connections will greatly appreciate the ability to READ your stuff in text or PDF format!
  
• Those on faster broadband connections will see the time savings to be gained by reading/scanning rather than being forced to sit through a 15+ minute presentation!
  
• Not forgetting those who are on faster wireless Internet connections with obscenely low data limits who have to carefully watch their downloads!

Another example… slow loading of “normal”, very poorly optimized web pages.

I had cause to login to my mobile account with Virgin Mobile. 155 seconds just to bring up their home page. Then I got my password wrong several times… and tried to bring up their contact page. After 15 minutes and several browser time-outs, I gave up and took my laptop to a friend’s place with broadband.

Do you REALLY need to have a login error page load over 84 items from a (much slower) secure server???

PLEASE… optimise all of your pages! Look at how many graphic elements you might be forcing people to download, when TEXT is so much easier and faster!

E-Mail.

It took over 6 minutes to get my email on dialup first thing this morning. And don’t try to do anything else while you are retrieving your mail… It’s just not gonna happen!

This one’s over to you. It’s probably time to cut down on the number of services you use to eliminate some of the stuff you don’t really need!

A few minutes of trimming here will save you hours every month whether you are on dialup or broadband!

And think of me on dialup for another 5-10 days while my broadband is getting re-connected

Cheers
Stephen Spry

But you probably have not heard much about the totally free service they also provide to people who want to use that content on their own web sites. I’ve been using this free service provided by UAW to “seed” a new site I’m developing with fresh article content.

And boy… has it been an interesting experience!

First up…

How can bloggers and site owners get their free content?

Simple - scroll down to the bottom of the Unique Article Wizard home page/sales letter and look for the Directories/Webmasters link in the bottom nav bar.

You’ll find that you can register to get content delivered to you by email in the categories you choose… in which case you’ll have to cut and paste into your site to use it… It’s dead easy, and you’ll get lots of articles soon streaming through to your in-box using this method.

OR

You can download a plugin to use with your software to have articles “automatically” added to your site - for example, as I use WordPress, they have a Wordpress UAW plugin for me! The effectiveness of this technique however depends a LOT on the category structure and naming conventions used on your site. If UAW can easily identify the categories, it should be able to deliver lots of content for you.

Recommended - I actually signed up for BOTH these services

What Are The Downsides?

There are a couple of things you need to be aware of!

DON’T sign up to get articles from every category!

You’ll quickly find the flood of articles becomes totally unmanageable!

DON’T set the plugin to “auto-publish” as they suggest.

If you do, you’ll be removing quite a few items that are not up to your standards! All the articles that come into my site are saved as draft, and when I get the chance I’ll preview, change keywords, pick a better category… generally clean up the submission, and then hit publish.

You CAN’T CHANGE the content.

These are NOT PLR articles, so you have to publish them “as is”, including LIVE links to the author’s web site in the resource box. Since a few authors go overboard with links in the body of the article, I tend to just kill them completely (the articles that is…)

My “Experiment” So Far

It’s been a full-time job for the last few days just keeping up with the flood of new content! But now, I’ve turned it down to a more manageable level!

My experiment so far with Latest Articles (the article directory I have been seeding with the UAW articles) has seen:

• over 1150 articles sent to my site (using the plugin), which I have manually reviewed
• before publishing just 509 of them to date
• with 120 more currently waiting in the draft folder.

As you can see, I’ve killed a lot - and if you’d like to know what criteria I was using, then please familiarize yourself with 7 Critical Article Marketing Errors You Must Avoid! - an article I felt just had to be written after dealing with the first 641 submissions to this site

I’m still receiving the UAW emails as well, because there’s a totally different set of articles coming out through that source… with extra articles from some of my (now) favourite authors that don’t seem to come in through the plugin.

Conclusion

All up - Unique Article Wizard a great source of content for webmasters - IF you exercise some quality control over the incoming articles.

While some of the “authors” using the service are article spammers, there are a LOT of good authors using it to distribute unique, valuable content!

It’s certainly worthwhile giving it a run to see how it goes for you!

Oh.. and if you are an author…

I’ve seen some very clever people using article marketing through UAW… it’s been an interesting “learning” experience for me watching what these people are doing with this service!

Cheers
Stephen