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What do Seth Godin (author, marketing cult-figure and notorious bald guy) and the Google Panda update (change in Google algorithm that left a lot of sites in the dust) have to do with each other? Watch the video below to find out:

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I need to ask you a question. A very important question. But first, I need to get a rant off of my chest.

Check out the video below to see what I’m talking about:

Important:

What’s really important to remember here is that I am not talking about your typical, hypey ClickBank crap products. You know the one’s I’m talking about. Newbie traps, basically. To me, these are a completely different category. What I’m talking about are legitimate products from highly reputable marketers. Not the big Gurus (Frank Kern & Co) either, by the way.

Also, while I gave one concrete example, I’ve seen this general thing over and over again: Products with very little in the way of concrete examples or instructions, very lackluster presentation, next to no structure etc. I personally hate this, but I’m not sure if I’m just being way too picky.

I’d love to hear your own take on this kind of thing: Am I just over-rating the importance of structure, nice membership areas, examples, slide-shows etc? Or are you annoyed by the same kind of things like I am?

Cheers,

The IM Impact/SwissMadeMarketing affiliate program is now officially launched! Why SwissMadeMarketing? You’ll see in the video below. This is the affiliate program where you can promote all of my products and all joint products I have with business partners and earn tons of money for it. And I mean that. This program was built with one goal in mind: Make it ridiculously lucrative for my affiliates. Because what’s good for my affiliates is good for me.

Check out the video below to see the recording of the launch webinar, where I explain all the details:

This post is a rant. It’s a rant about one of those things that are going on in Internet marketing that are all kinds of bad, but everybody does it because they’re all lazy and greedy and they can get away with it. What I’m talking about in this particular case is people selling products that don’t exist yet. As a customer, that’s just a slap in the face, when you are presented with a completely empty members-area, after you’ve handed over substantial amounts of your hard-earned cash.

But, instead of only complaining about it, I also offer some suggestions of what to do instead.

Check out the video below:

Let me know what you think, in the comments!

Cheers,

Today’s question is not one specific question, but a topic that I get asked about quite often. I’ve decided to mash all the questions together and answer them in one video.

Whenever you see high PageRank backlink building services or link packets and aren’t sure whether they can be trusted, the video below is what you need to know about. When it comes to high-PR backlinks, much of what you read is misleading. Some of that is deception-for-the-sake-of-marketing, some of it is ignorance and some of it is just due to habit and convention of how we talk about links (i.e. we use the wrong expressions out of habit, even though we’d know better).

The video below should clear up some of the confusion caused by all this:

Let me know if you have any follow up questions or comments!

Cheers,

“Build a Mailing List” is an almost universal piece of advice given by successful marketers to aspiring marketers. Anyone who’s done any of it can attest to the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. The biggest issue with it is often getting people to sign up to your list in the first place. The two products I’m reviewing and comparing in this article, PopUp Domination and Digi List Builder, are both designed to help you with that. Both are primarily created to work with WordPress sites (although there’s also a non-WP version of PopUp Domination) and both give you a variety of options for presenting visitors to your site with you opt-in box and whatever your sign-up incentive is.

Read on to learn about how these two products are different and see which one comes out on top.

Overview

What the two products have in common (apart from the fact that all the developers involved are British) is that they let you create an aesthetically pleasing opt-in form that “pops up” in one way or another, when someone visits your site.

Let’s take a step back and look at what is necessary, in principle, to get someone to sign up to your mailing list. There are two main factors that come into play:

1. An Enticing Offer
   It goes without saying that if you don’t have an enticing offer, a good reason for people to sign up, then your list-building efforts are almost certainly doomed to fail. That’s not to say that a “sign up to my newsletter” message never works, it’s just that a “sign up to get X” usually works far, far better.
2. An Effective Presentation
   The second factor is how this offer is presented and that’s where these two plugins come in. And it’s also where the two plugins are most different.

Video Comparison

Instead of trying to express what these two programs do in writing, it’s a lot more effective to just show you what they do, on video:

And here's a recap and overview of the two products:

PopUp Domination 2.0

PopUp Domination is all about delivering an enticing and attractive presentation. It creates lightboxes which are large, eye-grabbing and beautifully designed. You can use images and bullet points to create very professional looking opt-in forms, without needing any design-skills yourself.

There are seven different lightbox-designs to choose from and for each one, you can select a theme color and a button color. All of the text in the lightboxes (headlines, bullet-points, button-text) are customizable, but there are hard limits to the text. For example, if you choose a lightbox that supports a one-line headline and three bullent-points, then that's exactly what you get. There's no way to add a fourth bullet point. This is not a huge drawback, but it is something you should be aware of.

Here are just a few examples of what the PopUp Domination 2.0 lightboxes can look like (click to expand):

Digi List Builder

Digi List Builder has less emphasis on making the opt-in form look good (although they still are well designed) - you can upload a custom image (like an ecover image or a visual call-to-action), upload a custom button and input some text.

The focus with this plugin lies on how and where you can present your form to the site visitors and Digi List Builder offers four options:

• a lightbox that appears every X number of pageloads (you can set the number of pageloads)
• an opt-in box that appears at the end of each blog post, before the comments section
• a footer opt-in area that scrolls with the page (i.e. it's always visible)
• an option that allows you subscribe people who comment on your blog to your list (can be unticked by visitor)

See the four variations below (click to expand):

Two more things are worth emphasizing about Digi List Builder: First of all, you can use any combination of these opt-in forms. Potentially, you can have all of them running at the same time, hammering your visitors with opt-in forms relentlessly (not recommended, but possible). Secondly, and this one is brilliant, anyone who subscribes to your list through Digi List Builder will henceforth no longer see the forms when they visit your site. This is extremely cool, as it allows you to crank up the "annoying" factor somewhat, without it turning off your subscribers.

Note that if you implement Digi List Builder on your site and you already have subscribers on your mailing list, they will still see the forms. The forms only vanish for those who opt in through Digi List Builder.

Conclusion

So, which one is better? Both of these products are very good in their own way, so I can't make a recommendation for one over the other. The way I see it, which of these plugins is better suited for you depends on how you want to utilize them.

If you have a site that is purely built as a traffic-magnet, to get people on your list, then Digi List Builder is the better choice. On a site like this, you don't have to worry about annoying people with the lightbox or footer opt-in, as you really want visitors to either sign up or leave, anyway.

If you have a blog where you are doing personal branding, then PopUp Domination might be the better choice, as it is easier to adapt to your site's overall visual style and has more of a "wow-factor". More advantages are that you can use PopUp Domination 2.0 on non-WordPress sites, you can specify specific pages and categories, if you don't want the lighbox to appear everywhere on your blog and you can use it as an exit-popup.

Here’s a (long) video-presentation on the topic of “Funnels”. Whether you use an autoresponder, a multi-page website, a series of content like in the typical product launch or even one-on-one follow-up with your prospects on the phone or face-to-face (in the offline world), you’re using a sales-funnel of sorts.

And if you aren’t, then your conversions probably suck…

Watch the video below to get all the details on why funnels increase conversion dramatically, how to set them up and what the essential components are, that make them work.

Sales Funnels Video Presentation

(Full-screen 720 HD resolution is available on this video)

Click Here to Download the Video

Many of the principles discussed apply to affiliate marketing, but all of this stuff is especially important for product creators. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic!

Cheers,