You know what I love about WordPress? I can change the future.

Right now, it’s Thursday. You’re reading this on Monday. (Well, maybe you’re lazy and not paying any attention to your feeds. Whatever, that’s cool. You get my point.) Right now, on Thursday, I’m in a wonderful mood. I’m casually sipping a glass of wine. I’m looking around my still fully furnished apartment and thinking, oh well. I’ll deal with the packing and moving later.

By the time you read this, it will already be later. I will be considering burning down my new apartment just to get the insurance money and move to Bali. I will subsequently be realizing that my insurance won’t have kicked in yet and burning my apartment down will bring me no financial benefit. I will likely be drinking wine anyway, but it won’t be quite so casual. Think nice thoughts for me. I think I’ll be needing them.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is to lead into the exciting news that:

SEO School now has a public affiliate program

(Give a girl some big red header text and she goes CRAZY.)

You can now get 50% of the purchase price of this book, just by whoring it to your readers, friends, and loved ones. If you consider that Amazon gives you something like 40 cents a book, $19.50 ain’t a bad deal.

Knowing that a lot of you are new to blogging and the internet and stuff and would just like to FINALLY MAKE SOME FUCKING MONEY, I figured y’all would dig this. I also figured I could turn this self-promotional blog post into something useful even if you hate me, hate my book, and wish us all ill. Therefore, I unveil:

5 Ways to Suck at Affiliate Marketing

1. Don’t own the product.

Check out ClickBank and look for the stuff with high payouts. Write a quick review telling your readers how awesome it is when in fact you know fuck all about it and it could be porn for all you know. Make sure you don’t make actual business decisions. Say, “I don’t want to pay for it!” to save yourself money in the short term and ignore the fact that doing a shitty sales job will lose you far more than the purchase price in the long term.

2. Don’t review the product.

Look at the advertising section on your blog or website and realize that nobody’s paying you to advertise. Figure it would be a good idea to fill that space with something, and plop a few pretty affiliate banner ads in there. Don’t tell your readers about it — just plop in the ad. Whatever you do, make absolutely certain those banners link directly to the advertiser’s website, not to your review. Do not presell, just let the advertiser do all the work. Cross your fingers that you’ll make some sales.

3. Be a big fat liar.

Review the product and make ridiculous claims about how wonderful it is. Say it can do things that it can’t. Forget that most electronic products and software have return policies and assume that any sale made through your link is one that will make you some cash, regardless of whether or not the customer keeps the item. Do everything you can to ensure your readers will never trust you again.

4. Pay no attention to returns or return policies.

Make no inquiries as to the return rate of the product, or what the advertiser’s return policy is. Think your readers are too dumb to care about return policies. Think the advertiser is dumb enough to pay you even though the item is returned.

5. Ignore your ads and anchor text.

Pay no attention to Advertising 101 — ad blindness. Grab your favorite banner ad, slot it in, and never move it. Ensure your readers ignore your ad, always and forever. At the same time, don’t link to your review from within your blog. If you do get it together to link to it, use lame anchor text. Whatever you do, DON’T use anchor text that could result in search engine traffic — and therefore sales — like “SEO School Review” or “review of SEO School”. Use something like “Click here” instead.

***

(If you don’t do snark or are more literal minded than I am in your sense of humor, I’ll tell you now that the foregoing was sarcasm. Don’t totally screw it up and then tell everyone Naomi told you to do it that way.)

Anyway, onto my shameless self-promotion:

1. Our top referrer has sold 25 books since SEO School was released. If you’re not math inclined, that means they’ve made $375 from one blog post, and I have a feeling they ain’t done.

2. After nearly 200 sales, SEO School has not been returned once. Even still, the return policy is 100%. We won’t screw you.

3. If you want ads, there are ten 125×125 banners to choose from. You can choose based on what works with your site, what contrasts with your site, or you can switch them up (very highly recommended, by the way) to reduce ad blindness. (While we’re talking about this, I’ll give you a little general advertising advice. Switch up your ad placement regularly. If SEO School is at the top, then Tadoodlist, then TLA, switch them up every now and again and you’ll see higher click throughs on all of them.)

4. Payout is monthly by PayPal, and there’s no minimum. None of this “we pay you when you’ve earned $100” bullshit. (That is a sneaky way to get out of paying affiliates what they’ve rightly earned. Most affiliates never make the minimum payout and the advertiser keeps the cash. I joined Amazon in October and haven’t seen a cent.) We don’t go in for that shit here. If you sell one and make $19.50, we pay you $19.50.

5. This is the interesting part. You have today and tomorrow left to buy SEO School with the coupon code “MovingDay” (no quotes) for only $30. Then you’ll go and sell it for $39. You only have to sell like, one and a half copies to make your money back. If you can’t sell one and a half copies, you might want to rethink the whole affiliate marketing thing.

If you’d like to get in on this, go to the SEO School Affiliate Program page and get this party started.

Oh, and one more thing. UK people? I KNOW you just got paid. That’s why I left the coupon code up till the first of the month. Just for you guys, cause I’m cool like that.

By Naomi Dunford - Jun 30, 2008 in Marketing - 22 Comments
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Regular IttyBiz readers will know that every now and again, when I do something really fucking stupid, I’ll write about it here and teach you a valuable business lesson at the same time. Because I’m cool like that.

If you were paying attention and actually read the monster home business resources post, you’ll have seen my warning about Skype. If you haven’t, I’ll recap here and say that Skype is WONDERFUL. It took me forever to suck it up and get it but it has totally changed the way I do business. I heart Skype. It has saved me a boatload of money and hassle and is generally awesome.

Except. (You know how they say, “there’s always a but”? Not true. Sometimes there’s an “except”.) If you’ve read any of the must read books/magazines/blogs about home business, you’ll know that the first order of business when you go out on your own is to treat your home office like you would treat a real office. Take it seriously, they tell you.

Wear work clothes.

Put shoes on.

Don’t drink before noon and if you must, do so out of a clean glass.

Never one for following convention, I have blatantly disregarded this advice and that disregard has served me well. I run a pretty successful little IttyBiz. I have clients and book sales and money. All is generally well.

Yesterday I got to talk to a client for the first time. (My first time talking to THAT client, not any client.) Since this client lives in Australia and neither of us wanted to give up on the opportunity to send our children to college just to pay for long distance, we used Skype.

The conversation is going well. We are getting to know each other. We are discussing USPs and target demographics and sales strategies. Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation:

Client: We should do video. I don’t know what you look like, except for that you have a shaved head.

Me: Cool. How do I do that again?

Client: Click the little video button.

Me: (clicking aforementioned little video button) There. Is it working?

Client: [pause] I love that you’re wearing lipstick but no shirt.

Here’s a little quote from the home business resources post I mentioned earlier. It’s important to note that I WROTE THIS POST and I did so only a week and a half ago.

“My only issue with Skype is that people keep asking me to video call with them and I generally prefer to work topless while smoking. You can imagine how well THAT goes over.”

Moral of the Story: Beware technology. It will fuck you.

If you’re new to Moral of the Story, check out these similar tales of woe:

Moral of the Story: Operation Iraqi Freedom Edition, wherein I try to sell the residents of Guantanamo Bay at half price via AdWords.

Moral of the Story: Violent Snuggling Edition, wherein I am caught by my husband in a compromising position.

Moral of the Story: Neocitran Edition, wherein we find out why I am no longer a freelance writer.

Moral of the Story: Marketing to Alcoholics Edition, the one that made Moral of the Story famous.

By Naomi Dunford - Jun 21, 2008 in Marketing - 33 Comments
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Somebody I don’t know was recently given the unfortunate and God-given responsibility to publicly inform me that I am a shitty copywriter. (Sadly, this means I will have to quit my life’s work and become a perpetually temporary switchboard operator, but there you are. C’est la vie.)

The reason that this is coming up today is that I have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of days thinking about the blog post I will write to introduce my ebook. When you write a landing page and promote it — and therefore your product — through Pay Per Click advertising, you have the luxury of anonymity. When you write a blog about marketing and advertising and copywriting and you’re trying to sell your shit to the readers of that blog, well, the pressure’s on, isn’t it?

Therefore, I have decided to write this blog post while high. I mean, I’m not high high. Just cold medication and sleeping pills. But I’m high enough that my inner short-copy-versus-long-copy, features-versus-benefits, which-of-the-four-key-personality-traits-is-my-target-customer dialog has been temporarily silenced and I’m just going to wing it. Wish me luck.

The book is about SEO for people who don’t know piss all about SEO. It’s for people who are like, “I have a website and I’d really like some traffic but fuck knows how I’m supposed to do THAT”. You can read more about it on the SEO School page.

A Brief History of IttyBiz

I am a home business marketing consultant. I charge people a relatively low sum of money to help them with their business plans and marketing because I believe that really fucking great businesses go under every single goddamn day because they can’t afford decent help. They’re trying to navigate this new world of online marketing and they don’t know anybody who’s done it before. They don’t know who to turn to because there are so few people who have succeeded in this arena. The bad guys win and the good guys lose, and I find this tragic.

When I was very small, my parents ran some businesses. Some were very successful. Some, not so much. I saw how hard they both worked — separately, of course, as they divorced before my first birthday — trying to make a go of working for themselves so they could have more time with their daughter. I heard my father typing late into the night, sometimes crying and raging and throwing things and crying some more. I saw my mother bringing work home and doing her design work long after the kids had gone to bed. There were no weekends in either of these houses.

One night when I was about four, I got up and asked my dad what was wrong.

My father, so big and strong in my mind, wiped his eyes and looked at me. “Just trying to make it work, Sunshine. Just trying to make it work.”

Because I was very small, I couldn’t do much to help. I tried to make him tea but I was afraid of the kettle and I usually fucked it up. I tried to stay out of his way when I could. I tried to make sure I wasn’t being too much trouble because I knew how hard he had it. I tried so hard to make it easier for him, but I was only one little girl and I could only do so much.

I knew he was sad because he had to go away on long business trips. I remember the days before I started school when we had a night-time nanny so that he could work all night and hang out with me all day. What little sleep he got was during my naps. When the time came for school, I know my father was devastated that he couldn’t homeschool me because he had to work.

Flash Forward 20 Years

When I grew up, I realized that the internet was making it easier for people like my parents to run businesses from their home. I realized that there were literally millions of people out there, desperate to go home and be with their families and make a decent living. They don’t want to be millionaires. They just want enough so that they don’t have to spend another Christmas hoping the babies aren’t disappointed by what they find under the tree. Enough to take the kids to see Mickey at Disney World and stay at the good hotel this time.

Finally, I could help. I couldn’t bring them tea and I couldn’t make their mortgage payment for them and I couldn’t find their kid the last Tickle Me Elmo in the store. But I had a pretty good knowledge of why people buy and I knew that marketing was the single most important factor in a small business’ success.

So I learned marketing. I learned everything I could. I had a baby too young, married the wrong man and promptly divorced him. I couldn’t go to school and be a decent parent at the same time so I learned at night. I read everything there was to read. I wanted to be the best fucking small business marketer on earth so I could make sure all those people who just wanted to be with their families could get what they needed to make their businesses work at an affordable price.

But it’s all a means to an end. When I have enough money, I’ll be doing this pro bono. I don’t have enough money yet, so I’m selling ebooks. I’ve started with SEO School.

It has recently come to my attention in the comments of my first SEO School post that SEO is snake oil. Thank you to that commentator, because you just gave me a new selling point. Those of you who know me know:

IttyBiz is all about the snake oil.

Hopefully I’ve created a resource that will help you. Hopefully you’ve gotten enough information out of this blog to know that somebody has finally written something about SEO that ISN’T snake oil. Hopefully I’ve made it a little clearer for you. Hopefully if you read the book you can do some stuff to get your business in a better spot and still look at yourself in the mirror with respect in the morning.

Since I didn’t want to create the world’s longest sales page, I held off on the who-needs-this-ebook for this post. Let’s face it, more of you are reading this anyway. Therefore:

* If you’re thinking about starting a website someday and have heard that Google favors older sites but you don’t know what to put up there

* If you’ve started a website and you feel like you’re drowning

* If you’re not really drowning but you hear that people are getting all this search engine traffic and you’re just, well, not

* If word of mouth referrals will not keep food on your table and you don’t know what else you’re going to do

* If you know you should be doing something about SEO but you don’t know who to trust

* If you think SEO is for people who “get” websites

* If you were thinking of hiring me but can’t afford it

* If you think you might need an SEO consultant one day but don’t want to pay $500 an hour to learn the basics. You’d rather learn the basics on your own and think about consultants later.

Then you might like my book.

If you think you might like my book, you might want to buy it soon. I’m moving in like, fourteen days and I could use the cash before I move more than I could use it after. Therefore, what’s normally $39 is now $30. It’s good till July 1st.

Use the coupon code “MovingDay”. Get it? Cause I’m moving?

If you want to read more about what’s actually in the book, here’s the SEO School main page. Read the P.S. — it’s about you.

I would really be honored if you’d buy my book. Thank you.

By Naomi Dunford - Jun 16, 2008 in Marketing - 35 Comments
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Hey everybody,

So it’s 1:30 Monday morning and Jamie and I are going to bed after successfully launching our ebook SEO School. If you would like to check it out, click here. If you don’t want to read all the sales copy you can just scroll down to the bottom.

Thanks all, more on this later when I am more lucid.

PS- If you do decide to purchase the ebook, when you get to the page that asks if you have a discount code, enter “MovingDay” (no quotes) to get $9 off. I’ll explain later.

By Naomi Dunford - Jun 16, 2008 in Marketing - 13 Comments
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First, some administrivia.

I got some email feedback after the 45 Home Business Resources post from people who were stoked about the Site Build It! thing but were spazzing about the price. I just got a ping about an hour ago from SBI saying they were doing a special until June 21st that let’s you get a second one for another hundred bucks. (Are they reading my email?)

I said to myself, “Self, you should tell your readers about this.” Then I responded, saying, “If they can’t afford one, they sure as shit can’t afford one plus an extra hundred bucks.” I commenced ignoring the email.

But then Jamie decided to buy a couple for himself and it occurred to him — because he is smarter than I am and FUCK OFF I’M TRYING TO GET AN EBOOK WRITTEN HERE!!! — that two people could split it. (I checked with SBI and this is totally legit. They’re actually recommending it themselves.)

So if you’re on the fence, see if you can find someone else who’s on the fence and you can each save yourself some cash. From Steph in the comments: “My husband is already using Site Build It now and he swears by it. It’s totally incredible how much they prepare you before you even start and how detailed the steps are. The money is very, very worth it. I’m quite impressed!”

Site Build It info is here.

Site Build It info specially for WAHMs is here.

Now For The Social Media Stuff

Speaking of cool shit that happens in the IttyBiz comments, remember the other day when we talked about how social media sucks? If you were paying attention, you’d have noticed the charming and handsome Mr. Copyblogger himself say this:

The “conversation” is not between seller and buyer, but between buyers. And buyers are now media participants and producers.

Now take a look at this comment thread about InMotion Hosting from the home business resources post:

Thanks for the recommendation for InMotion!! I have been using GoDaddy and they have been great, but InMotion looks less expensive and if it’s great too, then wa-hoo!

Thanks!

blume

@ Blume - I fully recommend In Motion over GoDaddy. I also believe In Motion is in the top five of hosts.

James Chartrand

Thanks for the InMotion recommendation. I was leaning hard toward them thanks to James & Harry’s recommendation, but knowing of two businesses who like it is even better.

Sandie Law

In Motion hosting allows hosting for 6 websites on their $10 Pro account. I called for clarification and they really mean 6 separate sites, with unique domains and separate content. Quite different from other hosting sites that promise the same, but it’s actually just 6 domains pointing to 1 website.

Which beats the hell outta GoDaddy. The In Motion Power Plan hosts 6 sites for what I pay GoDaddy to host 2-3 sites. Upgrading to the In Motion’s Pro Plan, it’s 16 sites on one account for $20.

Yah. That’s what I said.

Crystal

Wow!! That is just awesome about InMotion. I am so excited I could pee my pants! I am switching today. I just looked through all of their info last night and it sounds incredible. Thanks again, you guys just made my week!

blume

When was the last time your hosting made your week?

How about “so excited you could pee your pants”? Huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought. THIS is how to “harness the power of social media”. I have a feeling the very nice people at InMotion are digging this newfangled social media craziness.

By Naomi Dunford - Jun 11, 2008 in Marketing - 10 Comments
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