Without further ado, here are the top lessons learned in 2011:

Change of Objectives

At the beginning of the year, my plan was to focus on product launches. It’s a common model, especially with information marketing. Create a product, put together a launch with as many affiliates as possible and (hopefully) make lots of sales in very little time. Then, start working on the next product.

SECockpit, the keyword research/SEO tool that I spent probably most of my time working on in 2011, changed this plan. Originally Sam (the developer of SECockpit) and I were planning to do a big launch for SECockpit. We wanted to create a course on niche marketing as a front-end product, offer it at a low price and integrate SECockpit as a back-end product. A low-priced front end product like this would have mass appeal and would get more potential customers on board for SECockpit.

As we were working on this plan, we soon realized that if we actually did put together a big, successful launch like this, it would likely only hurt us. SECockpit is a cloud-based application and it’s very resource intensive. More users equal higher demand on our servers. A typical “big launch” would lead to a huge spike in usage and required resources. High costs and technical difficulties would be almost inevitable and could lead to long-lasting damage to the brand. This kind of thing has happened before, in the IM space, when products were launched only to be followed by a slew of complaints and refund requests because neither the technical team nor the support team can keep up with the sudden surge of new users.

What we need for SECockpit is not a massive launch, what we need is steady growth. That way, the resources can gradually grow with the user base and we can continually keep adding new features, refining the existing features and quite simply keep making a better and better product.

This experience made me realize that the product launch doesn’t suit every business model and it opened my eyes to a longer-term view of creating and delivering a service. This long-term view is one that I now apply to all branches of my business.

Stunted Growth

For SECockpit, the plan of gradually growing the user base has been working out and it is the most successful product I’ve ever worked on. For my own projects, including products, niche sites and this blog, things didn’t go so smoothly.

At the beginning of the year, my income was increasing rapidly and I was hoping I could keep that momentum going. I couldn’t. In fact, it’s almost as if my income hit an invisible ceiling at some point and wouldn’t progress from there.

The reason is simple: I was doing everything myself. I was writing all the content, creating all the graphics, building all the links, making all the videos,… I was a one-man-show. I need to learn how to keep increasing the scale of a project and take myself out of the equation. I need to learn about outsourcing and team management and I need to learn to say no to new projects, at least once in a while. And I’m still working on all of that.

It’s fair to say that I’ve mostly failed at my attempts to scale up my various business projects. Sure, there were some successes, most notably my “throw money at it” case study, but there was also a lot of time and money lost on attempts at scaling that simply didn’t work out.

Even if you are an avid follower of this blog and my newsletter, there’s always a bias towards noticing success only. After all, you’ll never see a product that I invest thousands of dollars and countless hours in, but failed to ever complete (yes, that happened). And if I publish a boring blog post that nobody pays any attention to, then… well, you probably didn’t pay attention to it.

The reason I mention this is just as a simple reminder: even in a successful business, it’s often a matter of “failing forward”.

The Year Ahead

I have many plans for 2012 and just like last year, I expect many of them to change or fall by the wayside, as time progresses. That’s a good thing. My outlook on marketing and my career a year ago was much less mature than it is now and I hope to be able to say the same thing again, one year from now. What I know for sure is that I will keep working hard, I will keep experimenting and pushing myself to grow and I will keep sharing as much of what I learn as possible, as directly as possible, through blog posts, emails and webinars.

I will keep biting off more than I can chew and then do my best to chew it. If you’ve been following my progress for a while, you know that can get messy sometimes, but it ends up working out.

Most Important Posts

Finally, here are the most important blog post published on im impact in 2011:

• By far the most important must-read post on this site is this one about how to start with online marketing. If there’s only one thing of mine you ever read, it should be this.
• This blog network roundup review is the biggest, most comprehensive review project I ever did and it’s also the most popular post of the year.
• This early post about the meaning of Google Panda still rings very true and covers something I’ll keep focusing on, going forward.
• And finally, this post contains everything you need to know about speeding up your WordPress sites.

I always find it quite difficult to answer these questions, because there is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer. In this post, I want to give answers that cover as many bases as possible.

If you’re on square one or feel stuck with your online marketing ventures, here’s everything you need to know to get started in the right direction.

Want to “Make Money Online?” Watch This First!

If you don’t relate to the phrase “make money online”, because you own a business or want to build a business, feel free to skip down to the next video. If, however, you somehow found your way here from the “Internet Marketing”, “Make Money Online”, “Get Rich Quick” type of angle, please watch the video below:

Download Video

What it Takes to Succeed

This video contains the most important message on this page and perhaps on this entire blog. This is what you need to know if you want to build a successful online business.

Download Video

Startup Business vs. Online Marketing

If you have a specific business idea along the lines of: “I want to sell the best blue widgets through an online store!” or “I’m creating this awesome online service for blue widget owners!”, then you will have to focus on branding, awesome customer service and utilizing some of the methods outlined below to get more customers.

If, on the other hand, you don’t have such an idea, if there isn’t something like an “invention” at the start of your business, your focus can be entirely set on one of the methods listed below. In many cases, you will be able to use a specific online marketing skill to work together with people who have an “invention”-based business and offer them services.

A Path to Take

There is no “best” way or method to start earning online. There’s no absolutely superior business model and there is no “easiest” way to get started. Instead, there are many ways and many things you can do to build a business around. And that’s a good thing, because it means you can find something that suits your personality and your interests.

I believe there are two factors that need to be in place for your business venture to succeed:

1. What you do must suit you personally, otherwise you’ll never get truly good at it.
2.  You must be sure that there’s a business in it. The easiest way to make sure is to check if there are already other people/other businesses doing the same thing or something very similar successfully.

Quite simply: find something that’s already working for someone and that you like doing. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of options available to aspiring online marketers (the list is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect any preference or hierarchy):

Affiliate Marketing

Technically, anyone making affiliate commissions is an affiliate marketer, but the term is most commonly used to describe someone who is sending paid traffic from various sources to CPA and lead-gen offers. There are many advertising networks such as Neverblue, Copeac or EWA, that you can quite easily join as an individual and that have many offers in many different niches that you can start promoting right away.

Essentially, affiliate marketing is about traffic arbitrage. You get traffic in whichever way possible, from whatever sources you can get your hands on and you make sure that the traffic is costing you less than the payouts at the end of the offer are bringing back in. The reason this is typically done with paid traffic sources such as facebook ads, banner ads and popover/popunder ads is that many CPA offers are seasonal or depend on trends. Paid traffic sources give the affiliate the flexibility to react quickly.

Tracking, testing, tweaking and more testing on your campaigns is crucial to successful affiliate marketing. Find the perfect traffic source matching the target demographic of your offer, then test and tweak until you have a winner.

Blogging / Creating an Authority Site

Successful blogging hinges on creating highly remarkable content and building a strong community. The same is true if you intend to build a true authority site. Good, original content is not good enough. You need to have a unique voice and you need to brand yourself or your site.

As a blogger, you also need to be a social marketer to some extent, reaching out to your readers on twitter, facebook and perhaps further channels. Most bloggers end up also selling some type of product or service and many authority sites are monetized with display ads and affiliate offers.

Content Creation

There’s always demand for good online content and offering a content-writing service is a fairly easy way to start generating some income. The challenge is to scale it upwards. It is possible to scale such a business, of course, as several million-dollar content providing services attest to.

If you have a more-than-basic understanding of Google and can create content that’s optimized beyond “we repeat your keyword a lot”, you could establish yourself as a premium source and set yourself apart from the competition.

Conversion Rate Optimization

There are many great split-testing tools available, but not as many people who actually know how to use them properly. Conversion rate optimization is complex, as soon as it’s taken beyond “test different headlines”, but it also has the potential to make a huge difference for an online business.

With a good understanding of marketing psychology and knowledge of as many successful and unsuccessful split-testing case-studies as you can get your hands on, you can start building your own expertise through simple trial and error.

Copywriting

If you can write copy that makes sales, you’ll be very popular. Copywriting is a very complex art and science and everyone who sells anything needs good copy. Also: most people hate writing sales-copy.

There are many underlying principles to copywriting and even more possible applications, ranging from writing product-descriptions for e-commerce stores to creating all of the content for an online service provider. While the skills necessary to be a good copywriter aren’t easy to acquire, putting in the necessary work can put you in a great position. You’ll be able to offer a service that makes people more money than it costs them to hire you. This is a great position to be in.

Email Marketing

There are two aspects to email marketing. The first is list building a.k.a. getting people onto your mailing list and wanting to receive emails from you. The second is sending out emails that people actually pay attention to.

From my personal experience I can say that the vast majority of businesses have no idea what they’re doing with their email marketing. There is clearly not an abundance of email marketing experts around. Since follow-up marketing can be insanely profitable, there’s a lot of potential here. Teach yourself effective email marketing (through lots of trial and error) and you’ll be in a position to transform someone’s online business. Or you can just run your own mailing list(s).

Information Marketing

Selling your own information products can make for a very lucrative online business. A business that encompasses many of the methods and elements discussed here, such as email marketing, SEO, video marketing and more.

Be aware that not every niche is suitable for information products. You need to find a niche that’s suitable to you personally and where there are willing buyers spending money on information products already. A lot of your success with info marketing hinges on starting with the right idea. Also make sure that you understand the basics of online product delivery and memberships, as well as follow-up marketing. Whether you build many small info-products or one single product or membership that you continually grow or promote is up to you. Both methods can be lucrative.

Media Buying / Display Advertising

Online media buys (= banner ads, in most cases) can be incredibly fruitful traffic sources, if you know how to utilize them. A key to making them work is to understand the demographic of the people visiting the sites you are advertising on and the demographics of the people most likely to buy your offer.

You can either monetize your media buys directly, via affiliate, CPA or lead-gen offers, or build a media buying service for online businesses.

Mobile Marketing

More and more people are accessing the web through a variety of mobile devices. On the one hand, many businesses could use some help with mobile-optimization for their sites and on the other hand, there’s a whole world of mobile advertising and mobile follow-up that lacks real experts, because it’s all so new. New territory = big opportunity for pioneers (along with big risks, of course).

Of all the methods listed here, mobile marketing is the one I know least about myself, but it’s clear that many opportunities await.

Niche Site Building

A very popular and well known form of online marketing that goes something like this: find good, profitable keywords, build sites optimized for those keywords, get them ranked in Google and monetize them with contextual ads, affiliate offers or anything else you can think of.

To make this work, you need a very good understanding of keyword research as well as some expertise in search engine optimization. Many aspects like split-testing, understanding market psychology and even site speed optimization can be important, but they take a back seat to finding the right keywords and being able to get pages ranked for them.

Offline Marketing / Consulting

What’s often called “offline marketing” is actually online marketing consulting for small businesses. You work together with a business owner and help them search engine optimize their sites, help them get better conversions, show them how to follow up with their customers, start, run and tweak marketing campaigns with them etc.

There’s still a big demand for this kind of service as many business owners are clueless about online marketing and a good consultant can be the best thing that’s ever happend to their business. Plus, since there was an “offline marketing is easy” fad in IM not too long ago, there are probably a lot of incompetent amateurs shilling their services. Build some real skills and you can easily establish yourself as a company that stands out from the rabble.

SEO Service

Most people don’t like building links, which is why link-building services are so popular. The same can be said for other, “deeper” aspects of SEO, such as on-page, on-site and speed optimization. The latter belong mostly into the category of “consulting” above, but even with a backlinking service along, you can build a highly profitable business.

There’s a large range going from “tons of very cheap crap-links” to “a few super-backlinks that cost you an arm and a leg” and services all along this range seem to be prospering. You could do anything from to running some link building tools 24/7 on a VPS to build links for your customers all the way to building your own network of high-quality, aged, PageRank websites to sell individual links from. Chances are, you’ll find eager customers, provided you offer a good service.

Social Media Marketing

Disclaimer: I am the opposite of a social media expert. Nonetheless, I know that such a thing as social media experts exist and it’s clear to see that for some businesses, social media is a big deal.

As with many examples here, you can build your own business around social media, or you can offer services to business owners. With social media, it’s all about building a brand that people like to identify with and creating buzz by giving your followers things to talk about and share. One of the reasons I’m not a social media expert is because doing this right demands a significant time investment. Business owners may not be able to make that investment themselves, so there’s demand for people who could do it for them.

Despite the “soft-skill” nature of social media, don’t neglect the importance of testing and analysis in this field. Even a social media marketer is a performance marketer.

Video Creation / Video Marketing

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, online video is becoming increasingly important. Videos are useful marketing tools all along a funnel: they can help you build a brand, get more exposure and get more traffic, they can help you engage users on your website, educate them about your brand or business or product, they can be used as sales-videos to turn visitors into customers and they can be part of your support, in the form of tutorial videos.

You can build a whole business of your own, based on videos, or you can offer a valuable service to businesses, by offering video creation for them and/or by offering to help them out with the technical aspects of setting up video delivery and analytics. As with email marketing, there’s a lot of potential in the field of online video marketing, because it’s new and not many experts exist. Not many businesses are split-testing conversion-videos and properly utilizing video-analytics, because those things are complicated and time-consuming. They’re also potentially very profitable.

You Are Fortunate

You are fortunate to be alive now and to be part of the world’s population that has Internet access in some way or another. While it’s not easy to create a successful online business, it’s also not nearly as hard as it could be. The great thing about online business is that with all of the examples above, you can get started by investing mostly time and keep spending to a minimum.

You can get all of this started with a minimum of risk and almost no start-up capital necessary. You can buy a domain for less than $10, get hosting for less than $10/month and start building a website or a blog using only free resources. You can do all of your SEO and link-building manually, to get started with. You can use free screen recording software and the webcam on your notebook, start making videos and generate traffic from YouTube. You can use a free HTML editor to create simple landing pages, start off with small amounts of paid traffic and run split-tests using free software. You can get in touch with small businesses of all sorts and offer to write sales-copy for them, create videos for them, run split-tests for them or provide any number of other services for them, for free, just to gain experience and many will be glad to take you up on that offer.

And even starting with so little and with no formal business experience, it’s not unlikely to start earning some income within a few months and maybe even generate a full-time income within a year.

If you have that entrepreneurial spark and you are not afraid to challenge yourself, to see how far you can go and how much effort you can make in the face of (inevitable) adversity, now is the best time to get started.

That was a lot of text. Congratulations for making it this far. Here are the two things you need to remember:

1. Provide an insanely useful product or service to a specific audience.
2. Become really good at what you do, through repetition.

All the best,

This post is not about declaring the death of anything, but it’s also not a post to reassure you about the future of online business. Instead, I want to talk about the reality of online marketing and the big mistakes that come with too much optimism as well as too much pessimism about it.

A Step Back

There are many reasons to fear the end of various kinds of online business practices. Google algorithm changes are a favorite,but there’s also twitter banning tons of accounts, Amazon no longer allowing affiliates from certain states, rebill-scam offers being legislated out of existence, heavily funded “big fish” companies stomping all over your niche,… the list goes on.

However, it’s too easy to get caught up in self-pity and panic about whatever the latest change is that has affected or might somehow in the future affect online marketers. If you take a step back, you’ll quickly realize that there’s always something to complain about. And there have always been people complaining. When I first started with online marketing, there were already people whining about some Google update or other and there were already people declaring that it was all over for the “little guy”.

I’m sure this kind of thing has been going on since approximately the second day of the Internet’s existence.

The Arms Race

It’s getting harder every day. It used to be that you could buy 1-cent clicks on Google AdWords for super-valuable keywords and send the traffic directly to an affiliate offer. Those were the days! It used to be that if you created a blog promoting a ClickBank product, you’d immediately get top-listings in Google, because no one else was promoting those products, so your site ranked by default. At least, that’s what I’ve been told (I haven’t been around very long).

On the other hand, it used to be that you had to go through a lot of trouble just to register a domain, let alone build a website! It used to be that people were very cautious about buying anything online. It used to be that not many people were online to begin with. It used to be that you had to do everything yourself, when now you can use an enormous range of tools and services that make a marketer’s life easier (content management systems, shopping carts, affiliate systems, payment processors…).

It’s like an arms race. While the opportunities for making a quick buck are shrinking, the tools and systems that can help you build an online business are becoming better, easier to use and more affordable.

Distractions and Excuses

I’m not blindly optimistic about online marketing, even though I do think it’s still a great opportunity, even if you’re completely new to it all. I assume that online marketing and the Internet will keep changing rapidly and maybe everything we do now will no longer be useful or valid in five year’s time. I also believe it’s likely that a global crisis of some sort will thoroughly mess with us and our businesses, within my lifetime.

But that doesn’t stop me from keeping on working on my business. Here’s what you need to realize: while some are complaining, other’s are profiting. Some people are busy writing forum- and blog-posts about how Google has shut small players out of the search results and at the very same time, other people are getting their small sites ranked for lucrative keywords. I can guarantee you that right now, someone with little to no funding and no connections is working on a website, a service or an idea that will make him or her a billionaire in the near future. They aren’t complaining on forums. They’re too busy making stuff happen.

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly faced with a changing environment and there’s always a new challenge around the corner. And yes, sometimes changes happen that pull the rug from under your feet. It’s good to be cautious. But don’t ever buy into the panic and don’t ever let “the death of online marketing” become a distraction for you – a justification to complain and moan instead of work.

And if you do need a pinch of optimism, think about this: while we don’t know what the future holds, at least we know that people who declare the end of online/affiliate/niche marketing have historically been incorrect 100% of the time. Don’t listen to anyone with a track-record like that.

All the best,

This post is partially in response to a question I was asked after publishing my post about fonts and the importance of making your text as easily readable as possible. Of course, it’s nice to know which fonts to use and what size the text should be, but how do you actually change these settings in your own WordPress theme?

Watch the video below to find out:

Download Video

I recommend you watch the video in full-screen mode.

Links and Resources:

• Get the firebug plugin here
• Read about my recommended fonts and text sizes here
• Read about my other design recommendations here
• Get awesome WordPress themes here

That’s all, folks! I hope firebug will be as useful to you as it has been to me.

So, in today’s post, I want to share with you what little I know about selecting and using fonts for websites, video presentations or any other purpose, in such a way that it makes people go “wow, that looks neat”.

Almost all discussion of fonts in this post concerns headline fonts. Those are fonts you might want to use as design-elements, in logos or graphics (such as the one on the top left of this post), on large slides in presentations, or even on billboards and fliers.

When it comes to fonts for larger bodies of text, all that matters is readability. Here are a few very simple guidelines for picking body-text fonts for websites:

• Stick to the Classics
  Don’t get fancy when choosing a font. Some of the most popular choices are Georgia, Verdana (which is specifically designed for on-screen reading) and Helvetica. When in doubt, pick Verdana.
• Size: 14px
  When you look at some well-designed, stylish WordPress themes, you’ll find that they often use a very small font-size for the body text. The problem is that a small typeface looks better and more stylish in many cases. A larger font almost looks crude in a sleek, minimalistic design. However, your site visitors aren’t taking a step back and looking at your overall site design through squinted eyes. They’re trying to read your actual content. So, set your font-size to 14px or even slightly above, to make it more pleasant to read.
• Up the Line Height
  Another readability factor is the line height (i.e. the amount of space between two lines of text). I recommend increasing that to about 150% of your body-text size (e.g. font-size of 14px and line height of 21px), to give your text some room to breathe and make it easier on the eyes.
• Black on White
  Whatever you do, don’t have a dark background with light text on it. Yes, that may look very stylish but it also strains the eyes much more quickly than dark text on a bright background. There’s nothing wrong with deviating from the standard a little, but when in doubt, just go with black text on a white background. It’s a combination that never fails.

Finding good, free fonts is very simple. First, there are probably already plenty of good fonts on your hard-drive and you can use them directly inside PowerPoint, Photoshop or wherever else you want to use them. Secondly, you can find many great fonts by visiting  DaFont. There are thousands of fonts available there and many of them are free to use, even for commercial purposes.

If you look at the categories list across the top of the site, you’ll find a few under the title “Basic”. That’s where you’ll find most, if not all, of the best fonts to use. Why not go with categories like “Groovy” or “Runes” or “Retro”? Because the number one rule for good font design is the same as the number one rule for good graphic design:

With fonts, subtlety wins. The font-design should never be more noticeable than the text it spells out. On he flip-side, a font that turns heads, an exciting, fancy font with lots of flourishes, a glamorous font that begs for attention is always a bad font.

Here are some examples. Let’s say you are looking for a modern, even futuristic font. What you should avoid is a font like the one below that just screams:

Instead, you should go for something much more subtle:

If you look at that second font and think “that doesn’t look particularly futuristic” then I’ve made a good choice. Whatever’s special about a font should be so subtle that it’s hardly noticeable.

Just like when you’re mixing colors, when you’re mixing and matching fonts, it’s far easier to get it wrong and mess things up than it is to get it right and find a good combination.

Generally, you should stick to two fonts: one headline font and one body-text font. The two fonts you choose should either be matching or contrasting. Matching is when you use the same font, just different sizes and maybe different styles of the same font (e.g. bold and regular). Contrasting is when the two fonts are very clearly different. When chosen well, contrasting fonts create the most visually pleasing effect.

The one thing you need to avoid is picking conflicting fonts. A visual conflict happens when the two fonts are quite similar, but not the same. Even if you don’t register it consciously, there’s just something slightly off-putting about conflicting fonts. Here are two examples:

 

 

In the contrasting example, I also added bolding to the headline, to improve the contrast further.

It’s best not to mix more than two fonts and two different font sizes (one for the headline, one for the body text). Of course, in some cases a third or even fourth font-size can work and make sense, for example when you add further sub-heading styles to a longer document or piece of online content. Just remember that mixing too many different font sizes and excessively mixing text-decorations makes a text look messy.

There’s one way to get away with adding a third font (the only way I know of, anyway) and that’s by using a handwriting-style font. Handwritten text can be a great way to highlight an element and add a personal touch and in most cases, it doesn’t conflict with the other fonts on the same page or slide. An example of this can be found on every one of my posts: at the bottom, there’s an image of my signature. Technically, that’s a handwritten font (it’s my actual hand writing) and it’s the third font on the page. It works, though.

Here’s an example of mixing three fonts on one single slide, taken from a presentation I did for SECockpit:

Segoe Script is a free font, which is already installed on most systems and which is a safe bet if you’re looking for a good handwritten-style font. There’s also an entire category of handwritten fonts on DaFont.

Here are some of my favorite headline fonts. They aren’t the only ones I use, but they’re the trusty ones I always like to come back to:

As you can see, they become a bit more adventurous toward the bottom of the list. Myriad Pro is already installed on most systems, as are Vegur and Trajan Pro. Bebas is only available in all-caps and Code as well as Nevis look best (in my opinion) when used with all-caps.

Here’s a quick video demonstration about my personal dos and don’ts of styling and applying text-effects to fonts.

Download Video

One final thing: whatever you do, don’t use Comic Sans.

P.S.: If you’re wondering why I added a blue highlight behind the sub-headlines on this page, here’s the reason: with all of the font examples, the page was looking quite messy and the sub-headlines no longer stood out. Because of this, they no longer gave the page a structure, like they’re supposed to. The page still looks a bit messy, but at least it’s nicely broken up into segments again, since I added the highlights.

Graphics and design are important to me for all of my websites. The visuals of any site are what form the “first impression” and are therefore relevant to conversions and profit. Just like you dress well when you want to make a good impression, even though you know that your clothes don’t convey your personality, you should make sure that your website is visually appealing, even though you know the content is more important.

How to Enhance Your Site With Images

For any relevant page or post on your site, I recommend that you have at least one image above the fold. Most WordPress themes have the option to display a “featured image” to go with each post, usually displayed either immediately above or immediately below the post title. This makes a lot of sense, because an image right next to the title will help communicate what the content is about and it will help engage visitors.

The best images to use are those that somehow symbolize or summarize what your content is about and images featuring people (specifically, faces). People respond positively to images of other people, particularly images of good-looking people. Advertisers have discovered this for themselves long ago, which is why so many products are advertised with beatiful men or women, even if the product has absolutely nothing to do with them.

The second type of image to use on your site are of the “worth more than 1000 words” type. Whenever you are describing a process or an object, it makes sense to show an image (screenshot, flowchart, photograph…) along with the description.

See my post on how to speed up WordPress to see how you can add images to your posts without it slowing down the loading times too much.

Where to Find Images and Graphics

First, there are some premium sources of images. iStockPhoto is one of the most popular image sources online and it can be very useful. Whatever you need, they likely have a whole range of suitable images. Plus, for the web, you only need relatively low-resolution files, so the images come fairly cheap.

Finding free images that you are allowed to use without violating any copyright is a bit tricky, but not impossible. My favourite sources for free photographs are MorgueFile and Creative Commons Search. In the latter, I like to search flickr for images that I’m allowed to edit and use commercially:

I also really like to use icons, as web-images or as images for my slideshow-videos. You can find icons to match pretty much any purpose or topic, using icon search engines such as FindIcons. You can apply filters to find icons that match the style and color you are going for and to only show icons that are free to use, with or without attribution necessary.

It’s quite rare that an image is free to use for commercial purposes and also doesn’t require attribution. When an image requires attribution, simply link back to the source, either directly below the image or at the end of the post.

Finally, you can make and use screenshots, where applicable. To quickly create screenshots and even add simple annotations, I recommend Jing.

Less is More

In many cases, you’ll need to edit images to make them suitable for your site and you can do so using Photoshop, GIMP (which is like an open-source Photoshop) or any other image editing tool. At the very least, you’ll need to crop and resize many images, to make them fit in with your content. Of course, you could just upload the image in it’s original size and then shrink it by defining a new, smaller size in HTML, but that’s not recommended. Your site performance will be much better if you resize the image first, then display it at it’s full size, on your site.

When you are picking and editing images for your site, the most important rule of design to keep in mind is this: less is more.

Actually, that should be “less is better”, but you know what I mean. As a non-designer, the best way to make your graphics look good is to keep them simple. Fewer colors, fewer effects and a smaller scale almost always work in your favor. Here’s an illustration of how to and how not to add a square frame to a simple icon image:

Graphics for SEO

Apart from the engagement/conversion factors mentioned above, images also benefit your site in terms of SEO. On the one hand the alt-texts of images are an SEO signal that Google seems to pay some attention to and on the other hand, from my own experience, it seems like “media rich” posts are easier to rank than plain text posts.

To SEO your images, simply make sure that they have an alt-text defined, which includes a relevant keyword or two.

If you can’t find suitable images for your post and don’t want to spend money on professional stock images, you can also just use typography as an image. For example, you can have a headline or a quote and display it as an image, along with your optimized alt-text.

Here’s a separate post with more information about how to use fonts and typography.

Non-Designer Video

Here’s an off-the-cuff video of me creating a graphic for a blog post, applying some of the principles discussed in the post above:

Download Video

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you have any questions or want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment below!

In fact, online marketing is the perfect remedy against high-pressure selling, because it offers better alternatives.

Buy, buy, buy!

Internet marketing gets a bad rap and it’s often associated with scams and endless spam messages flooding inboxes. And it’s no surprise, either. The IM niche is full of cowboys and scammers and if you sign up for half a dozen ClickBank product launches, you’ll quickly lose faith in humanity.

Unless this is your first visit to my site, you probably know that I’m not a big fan of high-pressure selling. I don’t like hype, I don’t like fake scarcity, false promises and “selling the dream”. I don’t like constant sales-pitches and fake enthusiasm masking greed. But I also realize that the IM cowboys don’t represent Internet marketing. They may be the loudest and most obnoxious proponents, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Internet marketing = IM niche. Here’s an illustration of what I mean:

Think of e-commerce retailers, service providers, authors and entrepreneurs creating an online presence for their offline businesses and you’ll quickly see that there’s a heck of a lot of actual marketing happening online, that has nothing to do with the IM niche or IM niche typical practices like creating affiliate sites or driving traffic to CPA offers.

Having said  that, I don’t condemn the IM niche entirely, of course. That’s where the overlap comes in, in the above graphic. There are genuine marketers and teachers in the IM niche. And I for one am very thankful for them and the opportunities that this small sliver in the IM niche offers for entrepreneurial bootstrappers.

The Better Alternative

Apart from the above rant, I do have a point to make in this post, which is that there’s a better alternative to high-pressure selling available online: precision targeting.

High-pressure selling is applied when limitations are in place. Limited time and limited potential customers. Example: some guru (doesn’t need to be an IM guru, by the way), holds a seminar and then tries his best to pressure everyone into buying his super-expensive home-study course or “mastermind” membership. Being more persuasive and/or applying more pressure is the only thing the guru can do in this setting, to increase his profits, because there are a limited number of people present at the seminar and there’s a limit to how many seminars he can run.

Online, limitations like those are close to inexistent.

As previously illustrated in this post, the growth of the Internet and the growth of any given target market is staggering. There are likely more potential customers for your product out there than you can ever reach. And new ones are coming in at a greater pace than you can keep up with. You are not a pitch-man in a room with a finite amount of prospects. Your goal does not have to be to push your product on to as many people as possible. Your goal should be to make sure you can actually reach everyone who’s already interested in what you have to offer. Those who would be happy customers already, if they only knew about your existence.

To make a long story short: I believe that those businesses that take targeting, tracking and segmentation seriously will lead the pack pretty soon.

What are your thoughts? What are you doing in your business to make sure your message reaches the right people? Leave a comment and let me know!

Too Much and Not Enough…

The biggest problem most IM’ers face can be summed up as “information overload”. That is, information overload and everything that follows from it.

Typical symptoms include, but aren’t limited to:

Any of the above seem familiar?

Focus & Action

Getting organized and being productive is one of the toughest things about running your own business. Having a boss around to tell us what we should do next does have it’s advantages, after all. Personally, getting productive and getting rid of the symptoms described above was one of the biggest challenges I struggled with, when I set out to build my own businesses. I read tons of books on productivity and management to try and get a handle on it all. Some of the advice was useful, some of it just sounded nice, but wasn’t practical.

After years of experimenting with different productivity tools and techniques, I had created a system for myself that helped me get things done and I even found ways to overcome procrastionation, almost entirely.

What it all boils down to is focus and action. I found that anything that really mattered, any technique that really made a difference, did so because it either increased my focus or helped me take more action more immediately.

Action without focus is when you’re treading water, when you feel like you’re in a rush and working your behind off all day, but don’t actually get anything done. It’s frustrating and stressful and it’s something I suffered from a lot.

Focus without action is… well, it’s meditation, I guess. All the rage to some people, but not very suitable for building businesses.

It’s only when you focus (focus on one task, focus on one method, focus on one goal) and apply massive action that things start to really move.

Focus and action is what matters. Everything else is noise.

Also, I made this product where I teach everything I know about being highly productive. You can check it out here.

Cheers,

1) Marketing Matters

At the beginning of this year, I was already an entrepreneur and (almost) completely self-employed. In fact, I had already been entrepreneurial for several years and it had been a long time since I’d had a job. However, while I was doing ok, I certainly wasn’t doing great. I sometimes worried about having to pay the bills, is what I’m saying.

I had always been a content creator and a product creator, but never much of a marketer. Sometime in 2008, I began taking marketing a little more seriously and pulled something of a personal branding stunt that landed me an interesting contract. But still, I was mainly a content creator. I believed that people would see the value of what I offered by themselves and I thought of marketing as somehow wrong and manipulative.

It wasn’t until late 2009 that I got serious about marketing and started really digging in and learning about it. And I quickly realized that marketing was much more significant than I’d ever imagined. Not only is it a hugely important driving force for any business, it’s also an almost fundamental human skill. Marketing is about the ability to get a messag across in an effective and powerful way. And marketing is also about listening and relating to people, because unless you offer something that someone needs, the best campaign in the world will do no good.

Without marketing, there is no business. And marketing is fundamentally about effective communication (although few internet marketers make it seem so).

2) Systems Are Important

Let me repeat that: Systems are important. And what I mean by systems is anything that handles a recurring process in your business. Signing up new contacts, receiving payments, refunding payments, labelling packages, shipping packages, following up with customers, gettin the paperwork right,… anything recurring.

Here’s how I learnt this: Above, I mentioned an “interesting contract”. Without boring you with too many details, I basically got an exclusive drop-shipping contract with a large retailer of a niche-product in Europe. I got this thanks to some personal branding (and a lot of hard work) that I’d been doing in the niche. Consequently, I was in charge of an online store for the past two years. In many ways, the store was a huge success. Mainly thanks to a need in the market, combined with the brand I had built around myself, business took off quickly and kept growing at a steady pace.

There were two problems: The first problem was that while revenue was very high, profits were minimal. There were too many costs associated with shipping and handling and all that. The far greater problem, as I soon discovered, was that the systems this store was built on (e-commerce system, warehouse-management and shipping etc.) were rubbish. They were poorly implemented and lacked flexibility. When working on the orders, I had to have up to five different windows with different programs, spreadsheets and applications open and do a lot of manual processing, even for the simplest tasks.

This meant I was spending hours a day, every day, doing what a few good automation systems could have handled in seconds. And it also meant that there were more problems and support tickets than necessary (lots of human labour = lots of human error).

Bottom line: the business was run sub-optimally, wasted my time, didn’t make enough money and didn’t leave enough time in the day to do the thing that would have increased profits: Marketing.

Automation systems were the difference between this business being a stellar success and me quitting after two years, having given up hope.

3) Some Things Are Worth the Wait

After a very good run with my first free products offered in the IM space as well as my first paid product, Backlink Battleplan, I got stuck. And I remained stuck for months on end. If you’ve been following along, you probably noticed this: There are several products that I talked about, but still haven’t released and I’ve been mentioning “technical difficulties” more often than I like to admit.

You maybe also noticed the epic post about membership site software and know that my own solution for memberships, product delivery and affiliate management has been pending for months.

Let me be clear: All of this has been very, very frustrating. But it’s also been necessary. Due to my previous experience with shoddy systems I will not settle for anything less than the best. I want the best product delivery system, the best autoresponder and the best affiliate program. No compromise. I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money on my search for this perfect solution. And while, as of this writing, it’s still not 100% finished, it’s getting there and it will be worth it.

When I create a product, I take longer than most product creators. Because I don’t settle for “ok”. And it pays off, for me and for you.

I’m building an affiliate and product delivery system that will pay off. Big time. For me, but mainly for you.

4) Business Partner Heaven/Hell

In the past, I’ve worked on joint projects with other people and been bitterly disappointed. I can’t even remember how many joint ventures failed because some of the partners involved didn’t pull their weight. And yes, sometimes I was one of the ones not pulling their own weight, too.

Being involved in a partner-project where things aren’t working can be hell. It can be very frustrating and cost a lot of time and money.

On the other hand, if you have a business partner where the cooperation is smooth and dynamic and all partners are equally ambitious and excited about the project, it’s pure bliss. If you can work in a team where everyone can contribute with their greatest strengths while others do the tasks they’d be overwhelmed with, it’s amazing how much progress you can make.

I’ve been extremely fortunate this year, to find several business partners that amaze me with their levels of excellence and ambition and where we have a great dynamic of complementing each other. And needless to say, as a result of this, some very exciting things are under way!

Taking time to find the right business partners is another thing that can be very much worth the wait.

5) Finding My Voice

This is something that’s difficult to put into words. Gradually, over the course of the year, I’ve found my voice in this market. I am slowly but surely becoming more authentic and more confident in my content. It’s not that I ever tried to be anything but authentic, it’s just that it didn’t work right from the start. This is something that content creation of any kind is great for: The more you write, create and record, the more you find your own voice.

It’s very liberating to speak in your own voice and be heard. And if you’re not there yet, just keep creating content and keep digging until your find your own voice.

6) The Human Learning Machine

The human brain is amazing. It’s as amazing as the education system I went through is flawed.

Just over a year ago, I did not know how to build a website myself (I always had to hire people to do it for me), I had limited knowledge of marketing and I knew absolutely nothing about all the systems and technology that drive online marketing. Fast forward to now and I have a portfolio of over 30 sites I built myself, I have a reasonably good practical and theoretical understanding of marketing and I know the technology behind it all as well as any non-programmer can know it.

I was always a barely-good-enough-to-pass student. My grades were never great and I had difficulties learning. Yet, in the past year, I have soaked up more information and gained more practical experience than in all my years in school. So it seems, at least.

The human brain is a learning machine. Get into the trenches and learn-by-doing on a topic that you are truly interested in and amazing things can happen. No matter what your grades looked like.

Gratitude

If I had to narrow all of my journey in 2010 down to one thing, it would be gratitude. Of course, it’s fantastic to have income streams that take care of all the bills and then some. And I’m grateful for that. Much more than that, I’m grateful for the people I’ve connected with, grateful for the experiences I’ve gained and grateful for the opportunity to work with and help people in their marketing efforts.

In other words: Thank you (yes, You).

Watch the video and see the rest of this article to see how you can make sure you’re on the right track.

In this short video, I explain exactly what the big difference is, to me:

Here’s a recap of the main points (also: search engine fodder):

Commitment

People who are looking for ways to “make money online” are the favourite prospects of most online marketing product-creators and even affiliates. Why? Because they are most likely opportunity seekers. They can be sold on the big dream of finding that magical button that will just make the Internet spew out unlimited amounts of money, no work required.

Just take a quick look at some IM forums and at about 90% of IM-related sales-pages. There’s no shortage of people who are looking for a shortcut.

Most people don’t want to build and run a business. Building a business is something that most people associate with hard work, taking risks, management, support and customer relationship management, more complicated tax forms and other boring, un-sexy stuff. Want to build a business and be “the boss”? No thanks!
How about making some money online? Yes, sign me up for that!

Making money online is non-committal and this is reflected in the sales-messages of many products. Just install some software, push some buttons and watch the money roll in. Get automatic traffic. Never mind that those are actual human beings visiting your website. Never mind that the money you make comes out of other people’s pockets.

The most popular themes in online marketing require no commitment on your part: build a mini-site, fill it with auto-generated content, slap some ads or promotions on it and move on.

Investment Management

So, am I telling you that you should forget about mini-sites and affiliate marketing and either get a job or build a “real”, public business with branding and customer service and all that?

No.

I do recommend getting out of the “make money” mindset and consider the following: start thinking of “making smart investments” as your primary goal. That is, in many ways, what business is about.

Maybe you’re just starting out and the only thing you have to invest is your time. That’s fine. It’s also about making smart investments concerning your time. The question should be: how and where can you invest this time, so that you can start making some income fairly quickly? And then, more importantly: how can you invest that income to scale up your operations?

What’s your take on this? Do you think of what you do as building a business or making money? Are you committed for the long-term or is it something you want to get over with so you can go to the beach (in your expensive car)? As always, I’d love to hear your take on this topic.

Cheers,