Are you on Facebook? I am. Everyone I know is. I also know businesses that on Facebook.

Facebook gets TONS of traffic. Seriously. If you aren’t doing some sort of advertising on Facebook for your business (or providing a Facebook service for local businesses in your area), you are missing out. Take a look…

• 45.5 Million Uniques in May 2010
• 245 Million Video views in May 2010 (5.4 video views per viewer)

…and growing. It’s something you just can’t ignore.

To top it off, businesses have seen the value of Facebook in their marketing – and it is something that smaller, local businesses can’t ignore either.

So, here’s a tip: Start offering Facebook Fan Page services to small businesses in your area. They don’t know how to do this stuff, they just want more business to come through their doors. Fortunately, my friend Jason Fladlien put out a video series on how to make cash with these fan pages. And it’s cheap…and you can take the knowledge and make money with it.

Grab the videos now!

Seriously, for less than 10 bucks you can’t go wrong.

In the light of the continued discussion of the Dave’s Cool Little Website post, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about potentially bad business models. Dave’s Cool sites is one of the lessons, and another one is Louis Allport’s “99 Minutes To Internet Success” videos, later Reprint Rights Every Month.

1. Dave’s Cool Little Website

Dave’s Cool Little Websites were a hosted website service, that provided a templated combination eBay-Clickbank website. All you needed to do was pay the $97 bucks for a site, and register a domain name to point to their server. Once all this occurred, you had your own website and received 100 percent of the sales revenue. You could also make affiliate income promoting the Cool Little Websites. You should already see the pattern here – your only investment was the one time site purchase. There was no more revenue going to the Dave’s Cool team. If they had a month with no sales, they were eating the cost of hosting and maintaining the sites. After the “hot” factor dies down, sales die down, and so does the money. Bad news for the developer, and it became bad news for the site owners as all the Cool Little Websites were shut down, with no prior notification to the buyers.

2. Reprint Rights Every Month

Louis Allport is one of the internet pioneers in video based infoproducts. His “99 Minutes To Internet Success” video series was (and still is) an incredible series of products, and I think Louis was quite ahead of his time. His Reprint Rights Every Month site was a monthly membership site where you could purchase these with resell rights. I sold many copies of videos from Louis in my day. But there was a problem…

When you purchased the videos, you didn’t actually receive videos. They were EXE’s (and later PDF’s) that linked to the videos hosted by Louis. These packages came with resell rights; once you bought you could resell and keep 100 percent of the money. Louis’ licensing stated that you could NOT resell the videos unless you were a member of Reprint Rights Every Month, but unfortunately that was hard to enforce and his videos spread all over the ‘net like wildfire. The videos became devalued, eventually ending up as the infamous 99 cent eBay auctions. More and more people were getting these videos, and the only income Louis had was the first layer, the Reprint Rights Every Month subscribers. I would hate to see the hosting bills Louis had once the bandwidth vs. income chart went the other way.

So, take these business models into consideration should you plan to pursue any kind of ongoing service or info product. Such a business can prove to be quite lucrative, even the businesses above; but you will want to make sure that your business will continue to provide for you down the road, not just for the short term.

I’ve had people ask me what the deal is with Squidoo. Why create a Squidoo page? Well, take a look at this screenshot. It should be self explanatory.

I created a Lens not too long ago with a review of Traffic Drill, a site by John and Matt Rhodes. I had full intention of actually using Traffic Drill to boost this lens at least on to the first page in Google. It turns out that Squidoo did this all by itself, for the most part. I posted the lens, waited a couple of weeks, and I was number 7. Several days later, number 5. After that I briefly jumped to number 1, and now I’m sitting steady at number 3. I’m not a Squidoo expert by any means, but this clearly shows that a Squidoo lens combined with good articles with your target keywords in them can rank well in Google.

So, that is why you should Squidoo. More on this very soon…

If you have owned any domain for any length of time, no doubt you’ve gotten a renewal notice from the Domain Registry Of America (or Liberty Names Of America, another name they operate under). I get these all the time, and my wife now knows that it isn’t mail that I want anymore. It’s a shame that CAN-SPAM doesn’t include postal mail, since that is exactly what these notices are. You’ll get an official-looking “courtesy letter” that urges you to renew your domain name by enclosing payment. If you take the time and read these letters carefully, you’ll realize that;

1. You are transferring your domain away from your current registrar;
2. The prices to renew are quite uncompetitive ($30 for a year? That is SO 1998);
3. They got your contact information by harvesting WHOIS information.

You’ll get these urgent-sounding letters well in advance of your domain name’s actual expiration – sometimes up to 6 months before.

What you can do:

1. Write the Federal Trade Commission and complain…and hope they do something about it. (They’ve already been there once before…)
2. Simply rip it up and throw it away.
3. Type up a similar fake letter explaining that their domain, droa.com, is about to expire and send it to them – and that you’d be happy to renew it for $500 per year.

OK, the third one is a touch vindictive. Don’t renew your domain through these people. The more people that know about this, the less will fall for it and DROA will slip silently into nonexistence, or at least straighten up their business practices.

Oh, one more thing…Domain Registry Of America is a CANADIAN corporation. Hmph.

If you have sat and thought about building a custom theme for your Wordpress blog, but the Codex confuses the hell out of you and you just don’t have the wherewithall to spend a day with Google, I’ve got good news for you (and trust me, I’ve already got a copy on order). There is a brand new DVD out called “How To Theme Wordpress: From Blank To Beautiful In 2 Hours“. I’ve not yet seen the DVD, but it sounds like a very good foundation to learn how to build your own templates for Wordpress.

Keep in mind that Wordpress templates are in demand and people are paying for custom templates.

So, go grab it now!

I recently had an issue with my hosting provider, where I lost all of the files in one of my domains. Fortunately, Cpanel makes it easy to run a backup. Here’s a video on how to do it!

Some of you have asked about the difference between “Rights” on a product, typically from an Internet Marketing forum like The Warrior Forum. So, here goes…

There are 4 major types of rights, and here they are, broken down.

1. PLR: PLR means Private Label Rights. this means that you can edit the product freely and claim it as your own. Edit the text, graphics, name, etc. This also means that you can usually convert the product into another form. If it is an eBook, you can put it on a CD and sell it as a physical product, or, you can narrate it and sell it as an audio product. TIP FOR PLR: Change as much as you can to make it look more like your own product.

2. MRR: Master Resell Rights. You can sell the product AS-IS. You cannot alter it in any way. You can allow others who buy it from you to sell it and keep the money themselves (Resell Rights).

3. RR: Resell Rights. You can sell the product AS-IS, You cannot alter it in any way. Your customers have only personal rights to the product.

4. Personal Rights. You can read/watch/listen to/use the product. You CANNOT resell it at all.

Each product that you purchase (especially from the forum mentioned above) SHOULD have a rights.txt file or similar with it, outlining exactly what you can and cannot do with the product. If it does NOT have the rights.txt file, you should request it from the author.

Till next time!

A good question came up earlier on a popular internet marketing related forum I frequent.  To paraphrase, it was a new member who questioned whether or not to promote the forum in a new ebook they were writing.

Would you do it? There’s usually no monetary gain from promoting a forum, unless you own it. You won’t really gain much traffic to your website or your product…or will you?

My answer to the question was yes, I would promote the forum. And here’s why.

While any promotion of a forum is good for the forum, it also benefits you. If you write an information product (or blog post for that matter) that points the reader to a forum you actively participate in, it gives them another place to “see” you and interact.

Forums are more than just areas to discuss topics, they are relationship builders. If someone reads your ebook and then goes to the forum just to see many more helpful posts by you, they are going to be inclined to trust you more. They know that they can drop in to that forum and ask you a question mono y mono.

So think about that next time you write a blog post or ebook. Is there something relvant at a forum you belong to? Link to it, and start forging those relationships with your customers.

I was perusing one of my favorite web hosting forums, and there was a post there about domain name prices and how one of the member’s clients was paying $45.00 a year for a domain name.

*sigh* I see this all the time.

From time to time (especially if you already have a domain name) you’ll get a very nice looking letter in the mail from certain domain registration companies. These letters -look- like invoices, but they really aren’t. They are just glorified advertisements trying to get you to switch to their registration services. I’ll say this once: DON’T PAY MORE THAN $15 A YEAR FOR DOMAINS. I don’t care what goo-gaws the registrar is offering (most of them offer the same thing – free email forwarding, free parking, a free landing page…just like everyone else) .

A long time ago, there was only one place to register domains. Network Solutions. There were only three TLD’s you could register – .com, .net, and .org. Network Solutions was happy to charge 35 bucks a year for the name. And just the name…no fancy stuff. I know of companies who charge $50 a year for a .com. It’s a joke, friends. Stick with the Enom’s and the GoDaddy’s, and save yourself some cash.

-Dave