Most people don’t like being “salesy” and pushing products on people. Ideally, we could run a business that makes us a lot of money, without having to promote stuff all the time. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with IM Impact.

How can you promote stuff and make money, without being salesy? Read on to find out!

IM Impact Business Model

Watch the video below to discover what you can take from the IM Impact business model and apply to you own business:

Here’s the post you need to check out, if you aren’t yet familiar with the New Traffic Paradigm.

Direct Promotion vs. Service Based Promotion

As mentioned in the video, one of the keys to what I do is that I focus on providing the most useful possible service to my readers. One of the consequences of this is that I sometimes promote stuff and you might not even notice.

As an example, let’s use my recent post about the two most important factors that determine the success of a website. This post contains an affiliate link for Visual Website Optimizer, which is a split testing tool. However, I doubt anyone looks at that post and thinks “eugh, Shane is pushing products again…”

The crucial factor is that the post was written to be as useful as possible. The idea for this post came from a combination of some comments I read on this site and some books I recently wrote. I felt like the lesson, the message in this post was a crucial one and that many could benefit from it greatly.

That’s why I wrote the post. Now, in any discussion about optimizing websites and optimizing content, split testing has to be mentioned, because it’s so crucial to the whole process. As you’ll see in the post, I mention that Google Website Optimizer is free to use, but that I personally prefer and use a different solution. And that’s where Visual Website Optimizer comes in.

After I published the post, I sent out an update about it to my subscribers. You could say that I indirectly sent a promotional email, since the link in the email went to the blog post and the post contains an affiliate link.

Compare that to the way products are usually promoted in the IM space: you get an email with a subject line like

“MUST HAVE Marketing Tool Revealed! If You Don’t Get This, You’re Leaving MONEY ON THE TABLE!!”

The email is all about how you have to sign up for this service right now and the affiliate link is repeated a couple of times. The next day, you get another email, reminding you that the “Offer is About to Close! Get in NOW!!!” along with more hype and several further repetitions of the affiliate link.

What’s worse, the typical promotion wouldn’t be for a tool like VWO in the first place. It’s kind of an advanced tool and it’s extremely high quality and in continued development. This is reflected in the price, although you can’t call it expensive, by any means. Still, it’s a lot easier to talk people into buying some “magic button” that costs only $7-$37, than explaining the merits of a subscription based service like VWO.

The Inconvenient Truth

Okay, so the above is an outline of how IM Impact can be profitable even if I’m not directly promoting anything for months on end. If you look at my previous posts, you’ll see many examples of posts that are 100% focused on providing valuable information, but also contain the odd affiliate link, if it makes sense in the context.

But let me be very clear about something: direct promotions are far more effective.

We generally don’t like parting with our money. The most effective way to get someone to make the buying decision is often to add a sense of urgency and to prod them on, a little bit. A message in the vein of “hey, here’s a nice and useful thing” just doesn’t pack a lot of punch.

As I said in the video: I could easily make more money by doing more direct promotions. But what’s important to me is your actual benefit from what I do, as well as your involvement in and engagement with what I do.

If you look at your subscribers and fans as walking credit cards, you can get a lot of money out of them, right now. If you treat them like the human beings they are, you can get an immense amount of value out of them and you can earn. Possibly even in the long run.

And long term, sustainable, service-oriented business models are what I’m all about.

What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you know examples of businesses that sell extremely well, without being salesy? Let me know by leaving your comment below!

The good news is that there is one simple factor that will contribute to you standing out from the crowd more than anything else and in this post, I’ll tell you exactly what it is.

Watch the video below to see what I mean:

What if You Just Don’t Feel Like It?

One thing about drive is that you can’t really force it. If a project or niche is unappealing to you, it can be difficult to get any kind of real ambition going.

If you are involved in work that you cannot get yourself to feel a personal drive for, then it’s a sign that you need to start doing something else.

I used to be very attracted to the idea of “uninvolved” income streams, like building up small niche sites that generate affiliate income, while I myself would remain anonymous and behind the scenes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model and I think you can be truly ambitious and passionate about something like this: becoming better and better and building up and optimizing these sites, targeting them for very specific keywords and niches and seeing them generate income can be quite a rush.

I discovered, however, that this particular model doesn’t really do it for me, in the long term. It doesn’t keep me interested and in most cases, I just don’t have the ambition to deliver a truly fantastic website on the topic of competitive speed knitting or whatever the niche may be.

If you choose something like niche site building because you hope it to be an “easy way out”, you’ll end up wasting your time. The real shortcut is to find something that you can turn into a viable business, but that you’re also ambitious about.

It’s Not a Money Issue

Whenever I look for a freelancer to hire for a job, I’m always surprised at how many people offer their work for extremely low wages. Of course, these contractors usually work from countries with relatively weak currencies and low living costs, but even taking that into account, it seems to me like most people are caught up in a race to the bottom, as Seth Godin calls it.

I’ve found that the old adage of “you get what you pay for” often holds true and people who are competent and ambitious will usually charge a lot more than people who aren’t. Personally, I’d much rather pay a high rate for someone who insists on doing high quality work only, even though that increases costs, than buy cheap, mediocre work.

If you are offering any kind of service or selling your own product (which you should be), realize that from the perspective of your customers and clients, it’s often not a money issue. Sure, some of them will be looking for the cheapest possible solution, but they’ll get burnt soon enough and will then come back looking for quality, instead. The priority for you should always be offering an excellent service, not keeping prices as low as possible.

Invaluable Marketing

The bottom line is that if you are competent and driven, you become a rare exception and people will seek you out.

Among all the projects I’ve been involved in, the most ambitious ones have always been the easiest to promote, the easiest to generate more traffic to and the ones most often leading to new opportunities.

From the perspective of an employer, it’s very unfortunate that so few people are ambitious and self-motivated. From the perspective of an entrepreneur, service-provider or freelancer, you can rejoice: the fact that most people are setting the bar so low just makes it easier for you to stand out and stand out further from the crowd.

Based on the reaction I got in the comments to said post, as well as in my inbox, I was inspired to dive a little deeper into the topic of success and failure for self-made entrepreneurs (or any kind of entrepreneur, for that matter).

Rough Terrain

What made 2011 a successful year for me was in no way the absence of failure, but rather the fact that the successes outweighed the failures, once it was all said and done. When we look at a successful business or a successful individual, we tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, taking much greater notice of their successes than their failures. That’s just the way the brain works: a few days after a match, no one remembers any of the missed shots anymore, but everyone remembers that one amazing slam-dunk.

It’s important to remember that everyone misses shots, everyone stumbles and falls and everyone fails. Watch the video below to see why this is such an important thing to realize:

Download Video

What About Positive Thinking?

My suggestion to expect and accept failure might rub you the wrong way (and if it does, I understand). It certainly goes against everything many motivational speakers and Tony Robbins types make their living with. Haven’t we all learned the importance of keeping a positive attitude and visualizing success?

Well, the truth is that positive thinking is not useful when it’s delusional. I completely agree that being overly pessimistic won’t help you in any way, neither in business nor in life. But expecting and preparing for high failure rates as an entrepreneur is simply being realistic and I don’t see why you can’t be realistic and still have a positive outlook. Be positive, but don’t be rainbows-and-unicorns positive by dreaming about effortless success and fancy cars. Instead positive and optimistic about your ability to work hard, to work persistently and to overcome adversity.

Mr. Coolidge says it better than I can:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

- Calvin Coolidge

All the best,

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
• Get firebug lite for Chrome 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!

Read on to see all the details of the new guidelines and learn why it probably won’t make a difference.

The New Guidelines

First, let’s go through the guidelines, accompanied by some comments from yours truly:

Most importantly, please do not significantly alter your Pitch Page after approval. We recognize that some changes are necessary for testing, but if you need to make significant changes to your page (such as earnings claims or images, sales messaging or video content), please notify your Account Manager so we can ensure the new page is also in compliance.

For Internet Marketing products: Per the new FTC information, sales material shouldn’t create the impression that customers can easily earn money without putting in much work, and should give specific ideas of how they’ll earn the money (e.g., content marketing, video marketing, social media, etc). Sales pages should also not overstate how much can realistically be made, or imply that earnings are guaranteed.

The FTC also strongly discourages false urgency/scarcity messaging (for example, “Only 3 copies left!”) when there is no actual scarcity. Closing the doors to new customers after a specified amount of time and reopening later is fine.

Any Pitch Page references to ClickBank sales stats need to be verifiable by ClickBank, and need to have been earned by the methods being promoted. For example, selling an affiliate training product using sales snapshots from a vendor-only account is not allowed.

For vendors using video Pitch Pages, if a Buy Now button appears during the course of the video, the price must appear as well. We also request that vendors provide transcripts of video sales letters when submitting a product for approval.

For upsells, the initial product purchased must be valuable and usable on its own, without requiring the purchase of the upsell offers. Customers must also be able to immediately access their original purchase upon completion of their order, before being presented with upsell offers. An access link may be placed on the first upsell offer page, but the link must be very clear and conspicuous (i.e., not hidden or in a small font). We highly recommend that vendors use ClickBank’s official upsell flows to present upsell offers to customers.

Please submit product approval requests at least several days before your launch, so that ClickBank has time to thoroughly review the offer and request changes if necessary. This is especially the case for products with video sales letters, since making changes to these can take time. We may not be able to accommodate last-minute requests.

To prevent customer complaints, vendors should not close refund request tickets or switch tickets from Refund to Tech Support more than once, and the latter should only be used when actually trying to help the customer and save the sale.

What Happens Next?

Does this mean there will finally be peace in the kingdom of IM? The rules laid out would mean that about 95% of all the current make-money-onlin offers on ClickBank would no longer be approved and most of them would have to drastically change their offer pages and entire sales-structures for a chance to pass.

Call me a pessimist, but here are some reasons why I doubt this will make any difference:

Saying vs. Doing

Even before this update, there were regulations in place that should prevent a lot of the bad things that were (and are still) going on on ClickBank. The first point in the new regulations addresses the practice of switching out the sales-pages, after ClickBank approval. This is something that “everyone” was doing and the people at ClickBank knew about it. They were absolutely aware of the terrible sales-pages and scammy offers in their marketplace and therefore they were also aware of the fact that vendors switched out sales-pages. They simply turned a blind eye.

Who’s to say that they won’t just keep turning a blind eye?

No Public Statement

Something that strikes me as peculiar about these new guidelines is that they are nowhere to be found on the ClickBank website. They were mailed out to all (or most?) of the CB vendors. I got the list from Jon Volk’s blog and apparently, the list is genuine. But it’s not published on the CB blog, or in the newsfeed or anywhere else on the site.

I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty strange to me. It’s almost like they want to scare the vendors into behaving, but not put themselves in a position where they’re publicly accountable for the new guidelines.

It may just be too early to tell, though and for all I know, the new guidelines will be published in the coming days.

Nobody Needs ClickBank

Even if CB are absolutely serious about these new regulations and even if they are adamant in enforcing them, that doesn’t mean the scammy offers will stop. There are other affiliate networks. In my opinion, almost all of them are better than ClickBank in every possible way except one: ClickBank has the best name recognition and largest user base.

And even if they all crack down on crappy offers, vendors can still just run their own affiliate programs. In fact, they may just discover how great that can be. Sure, there are benefits to having your offer on an affiliate marketplace. But let’s just say: I’m not exactly a huge vendor, but I’ve already saved five figures in fees by running my own affiliate program, instead of going with ClickBank.

The Bright Side

Whether or not we will see a big difference in the ClickBank marketplace anytime soon is uncertain. The mere fact that these new rules were drafted and sent out is already a good sign, though. It means that there is some kind of a response to scammy offers and some kind of movement against them. There’s hope that vendors who sell hopes and dreams instead of legitimate products will find find themselves in increasingly unpleasant circumstances and may even have to rething their position at some point.

Until then, my universal rule for purchasing IM products remains the same as always: buy from people who’ve given you reason to trust them, not from people making fancy promises.

Cheers,