There's a new social bookmarking site vying for your attention, links and votes (or as this site refers to them, "bullet points").

The site is Elistic and it doesn't call itself a social bookmarking site–it prefers "social link-listing site" (gotta get the "list" from its name into its description, you see.)

However you wish to describe it, it's got an interesting twist to it. Unlike most other sites of this kind, Elistic analyzes the ratings you give to linked sites, and then makes recommendations of other links/sites you might like based on that analysis. It sounds something like a cross between Netscape and Stumbleupon.

Because the site is new, there isn't much activity yet. But it does include a discussion group element, and the buzz is starting to grow.

I suggest you add Elistic to your list of places to promote your articles, posts, sites and/or blogs. With less competition at the moment, your links are likely to get more attention.

Of course you'll want to list links and vote for sites that are NOT yours, as well. You know… like this one!

If you're new here and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for my free email updates. Thanks for visiting!

There's an excellent FREE magazine called "Deliver" — you should be reading it.

It's for marketers, published by the US Postal Service. It focuses primarily on direct marketing and snail-mail campaigns, but also covers online marketing.

In this month's issue, for instance, there's an excellent interview of Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More." Here are a few gems from that article:

"The big thing for marketers right now is how to take the powerful medium of video advertising and evolve that model so that it works in the very niche-centric medium of the Internet."

And…

"Today, marketing is hugely influenced by word of mouth… The question is how can you, as a marketer, do less of pushing messages out and more of encouraging consumers to do the marketing for you."

And…

"It's all about trying lots and lots of things, measuring their effectiveness, and building on what works."

To subscribe, go to http://www.delivermagazine.com

Here are a couple of Strategy Snippets you might find interesting:

Lipsticking offers some great strategies for marketing to women. Here's a snippet:

DON'T try to sell to us on your homepage!

On your homepage, your work is to show us you care. Show us we mean something to you as people. Show us that we're more than 'consumers' to you. Then, offer us more information by including links to other areas of your site. Please have some pages that will educate us, inform us, and offer us solutions. Don't just launch into a sell, sell, sell voice.

We need to make friends with you first. On the web, you have a better chance of doing this than anywhere else. You can reach out to us with support of non-profits, with pictures of families and kids and pets and gardens. Regardless of how those things truly integrate with your products. They're important to us, and if they aren't important to you, too, well… we're off clicking to a competitor.

Read the entire article here: When Marketing to Women

Michel Fortin provides strategies to overcome a lack of focus on sales letters. Here's a snippet:

If your copy is too generic, or if it speaks to several people in the same copy, people will think that you don’t have their best interest at heart, or that the product is truly not for them. Instead, make your copy intimate, personal, and conversational. And stick to no more than one core audience.

Read the entire article here: Going Nuts Over the Lack of Focus

Here's a fun way to market to women:

Chris Garrett recently answered the question, What is a Blog Meme? with details and examples… and then invited his readers to experiment by creating their own Meme:

"I have an experiment and an offer for you. If you think you would like to start a Meme, tag me along with anyone else you want to take part. The best ones I will complete and tag some others and let’s see how far it will spread. As well as the obvious benefits of links, if I like your Meme and take part, to sweeten the deal I will send you a free preview copy of my much-delayed next ebook."

I'm definitely taking him up on it, so here's my Meme…

Instead of just limiting my Meme to one question that people may–or may not–be interested in answering, I'm going provide FIVE questions and let the participants PICK ONE.

Here are the five questions — just pick one:

What book or movie had a positive impact on your personal or professional life?

If you'd like to participate in this Meme, consider yourself "tagged."

Just answer the question of your choice in a post on your own blog, provide a link back to the originator of the Meme (that would be me), and then tag five other bloggers. (I think it's best to individually notify those you tag, in addition to linking to them from your post.)

Here are the bloggers I'm tagging for this Meme:

Chris Garrett
Jeremy Palmer
John Wesley
Yvonne DiVita
Jane May

There ya go… now go Meme yourself!

Andy Wibbels wrote an entertaining post recently: "Trimming the Freaks."

He starts out with this statement, which I totally identify with:

"There are some really crazy people in this world. And sometimes I think they all have my email address."

He goes on to complain about people ("Freaks") who don't read instructions, are too cheap to buy his book, yet who expect free personalized assistance.

Andy is apparently fed up and wants a "Freak Filter" — he asked for comments on how others "Trim the Freaks."

I know where he's coming from. On my job interview site (which includes hundreds of pages of content designed to help people get hired and/or promoted, offers a free newsletter and sells an info product called the Job Interview Success System) I encourage people to submit questions. Here are some actual questions I've received:

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I just received an email that is, in my opinion, an example of why some folks think Internet marketers are mostly scam artists.

First, the From block has the name of a well-known Internet Marketer. I'll call him Guru just for convenience.

But it's not really from him… or maybe it is. Here's what it says after you open it up:

Memo From: (Name), Guru employee
Memo To: Bonnie
RE: While the cat's away…
Web site: (Link)

Hi! This is (Name), Guru's favorite employee.

You may or may not know, Guru was in a car wreck a while back.
He was ok, but did bust his knee up a little. He had surgery
yesterday to fix the problem and he's home resting now.

And so of course… while the cat's away, (Name) will play!

I've got a sweet deal for you today. For a very limited time,
you can snag a copy of 1 of 8 of Guru's products - on me.
Guru doesn't know I'm doing this, so this won't last long.
In fact, I'm going to take down this page on Monday May 14th
around 9am Central Time.

Go here for more info - (Link)

Best wishes,
(Name)

OK, besides my skepticism that Guru doesn't know about this (I'm sure he orchestrated it), it's not a bad email… and it's offering something for FREE, right? Good marketing tactic.

So I checked it out by clicking on the link.

It takes you to a sales letter that talks about Guru being out of action and unaware (wink, wink) of this great deal, then describes two products and how wonderful they are. Eventually it gets to the "How do I get my FREE Product?" part, which says:

Now this is why I'm gonna get in trouble when Guru founds out what I did!

For a limited time, you can get a copy of BOTH (Product Name), PLUS the (Product Name) for just $177. That's $80 cheaper than the full price of JUST (Product Name) alone. So that's a great deal already…

BUT - if you order now, I'll give you your pick of any one of Guru's products listed below -

(List of 8 Products)

So that's the deal. Buy the 2 products I created and get 1 of Guru's for free.

Is it just me, or does the notion of having to spend nearly $200 to get something "free" leave a rotten taste in your mouth, too?

The Guru in question has been around for a LONG time, and he's a big name in many IM circles. I hope, but seriously doubt, that he doesn't know about this. If he does, shame on him. If he doesn't, he should fire this "favorite employee" as soon as he finds out… thus making this sentence accurate:

I’m gonna get in trouble when Guru founds out what I did!

One can only hope.

A little over a month ago I wrote that I was going to try Google's new Adsense Referrals program.

I placed Referral ads on three of my most popular pages at my Job Interview site.

I just checked my stats and did some calculations. My regular Adsense pay-per-click ads are averaging 2 cents more per click than my new Adsense Referrals ads.

Remember, with the Referrals ads I only get paid if someone takes a specified action after clicking on the ad. The payment is based on conversions, not clicks.

A typical Referral ad in the niche I'm experimenting with is paying, on conversion, about 50 times more than I'm earning with a similar ad on a pay-per-click basis.

But the Referral ads require visitors to complete a two-step action: first, they must click on the ad, then they must also "convert" by taking the desired action (signing up for a trial offer, for example). About 10.3% of those who click on the ad take the second step and complete the desired action…earning me money. That is a good conversion rate.

With the pay-per-click ads, though, 100% of the people who click earn me money… but certainly not as much per action.

Because the two types of ads are neck-and-neck with only a 2-cent difference after about 30 days, I'm going to continue the experiment a while longer… and will keep you posted.

Please let me know if you're doing similar experiments and what kind of results you're getting.

Lynn Terry is a full-time, work-from-home Internet marketer. Her ClickNewz blog displays the tagline, "Internet marketing ideas, tips and reviews to help you succeed in your online business," so you immediately know what her blog is about.

I like the functionality and navigation (including the handly links at the very end of each post), the clean, fresh look of her blog template… and the natural-looking yet professional photos of her which change as you change pages.

Her blog categories include Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, RSS & Blogging, SEO & SEM and so on… the usual topics you'd expect for a blog about internet marketing.

But does she know what she's talking about? Look at the following stats and judge for yourself:

According to SmartPageRank, ClickNewz has, at the time of this review:

* a PageRank of 5
* an Alexa ranking of 62,103
* more than 30,000 backlink pages
* and more than 850 blog pages indexed by Google (more than 1,000 indexed by each of the other major search engines).

These are impressive stats. In my opinion, they're adequate proof that Lynn not only knows a hell of a lot about SEO, blog promotion and getting traffic–she practices what she preaches.

Many of her posts are of the "how to" nature, written simply and well in nontechnical terms so even the newest newbies can easily understand what to do… yet also including details on various strategies and techniques so that experienced readers will also benefit from reading them.

While she doesn't go into as much detail as some bloggers (such as Darren Rowse of ProBlogger), you'll definitely learn a lot by reading her posts. You'll learn even more by noticing how she incorporates links in those posts. She uses internal links to her other posts, which guide readers to other useful information and also helps with SEO. She uses external links to affiliate products (monetizing her posts), to her SSWT discussion forum, and to other blogs.

You can tell that networking and building positive and mutually beneficial relationships with other bloggers is one of her priorities. This is what blogging is all about.

Glitches

Lynn changed her blog format recently, and I think it still has a few glitches that need to be worked out. On her About page, I could see at the bottom that there were 13 comments, but the page view was truncated and I could not scroll down to read them. BUT… when I clicked on the barely visible link of the first comment, then went back to the About page, I COULD scroll to see all of the comments. The same sort of glitch plagues her archived post listings. Her Internet Marketing category, for example, shows 182 posts. But I was only able to access about 20 of them–no posts beyond Page 3 of her archived listings for that category–had a link to "Previous Entries" (as there was at the end of Pages 1 & 2). Then I checked the Work at Home category archives and I couldn't get past Page 1. BUT… if I clicked on a post title, then clicked on the Back button, the "Previous Entries" link appeared at the bottom. So clicking on a post title seems to fix the glitch. Other category archives worked fine. Perhaps it's an intermittent problem.

Those glitches could be minor or major, depending on whether her blog visitors will click on titles and links that will then "fix" the problem and allow additional viewing.

In Summary

ClickNewz is a winner. Good design, good content, by a knowledgeable and experienced blogger who is truly interested in helping others to succeed with their online business.

Does your blog or website make the lives of your visitors better?

Do you sell to your visitors, or serve them?

Is your site big on entertainment and education, or heavy on hype?

Those are a few of the questions John Reese poses in his new FREE report, The Rebirth of Internet Marketing.

If you've ever read anything by John before, you know he can get a bit long-winded, but he always includes valuable information and tips… tips that you can follow to dramatically improve your bottom line.

For example, on Page 46 he reveals the exact template that helped him increase conversions on one of his sites by 300%. I'll give you a hint: video.

In my experience, it's very difficult to read anything by John Reese without LEARNING something VALUABLE. This report is no exception. And it's a pleasure to read.

At the end of this report, John provides an update on his highly anticipated new site, Income.com.

You can download John's free report from his new blog. Here's the link: The Rebirth of Internet Marketing.

I've been experimenting with PayPerPost.

I know some bloggers don't like the idea of accepting money in exchange for posting about a sponsored site. If you're one of them, you probably won't be interested in this post, and that's fine. To each his/her own.

If you're here to pick up tips on earning money with your blog, though, this is what I've found so far with PayPerPost.

The top earner has raked in more than $10,000 so it's worth checking out, right?

Here's the basic concept for getting paid to post — you register your blog (it must be at least three months old). Once it's approved, you're able to select from a list of posting opportunities offered by advertisers. These opportunities tell you what they'd like you to post about, the links you'll need to include, the minimum number of words for your post, the tone of your post (i.e., positive or neutral), etc., and how much you'll be paid if your post is accepted.

The highest paying opportunities are restricted to the highest quality blogs… high PR, high Alexa ranking, etc.

This makes sense. Obviously an advertiser would pay more to have John Chow write a post about their site than they'd pay me.

Unfortunately, posters with a relatively new blog (like me) do not qualify for as many opportunities. And the ones we do qualify for pay less than $10 per post.

Typically there are about 60 opportunities available… and my blog qualifies for maybe 10 of those, on average.

But I "disqualify" myself from most of them. I'll only apply for opportunities on topics that I would likely blog about anyway, whether I was getting paid or not.

So I will NOT do posts about subjects such as online dating, gambling, mortgage loans, etc., even though those advertisers tend to pay more than those whose topics I am interested in posting about.

Here are the posts I've been paid to write so far:

Handy SEO Glossary — I earned $10.

Blogger's Choice Awards: Awaiting Your Votes — I earned $10.

Do You Backup Your Files? — I earned $5.

But Wait! There's More! — I earned $8.50.

So that's a total of $33.50 for four posts spread out over about a month, on topics that are more-or-less on target with my niche.

Obviously I'm not going to be one of the top earners, but it's better than my Adsense revenue from this site… and I (hopefully) did provide some value in the content.

If you have several sites, high-ranking sites, and/or aren't picky and will post about anything, you can earn a LOT of money with PayPerPost.

If you're more like me, you'll add another revenue source that will likely grow as your site does.

If you decide to give it a try, be sure to read the Terms of Service. I had 2 of my 4 posts rejected (temporarily) because I didn't read and follow the rules. Their site is incredibly slow; I didn't feel like exploring.

The first mistake I made was quoting a bit of info from the site I was posting about and linking to. That's normal for bloggers, but a no-no for PayPerPost. The second mistake I made was publishing two posts on my blog without a non-paid post in between… another no-no. If you make a mistake, they'll tell you about it and give you the opportunity to fix it, which is what I did. Ultimately all of my posts (so far) have been accepted.

One more thing… you might want to consider becoming an Advertiser. I have not done this myself. But if you have a site about mortgages, for instance, you know how much competition there is… and how expensive Pay-Per-Click advertising can be! For the same (or far less money), you could list an opportunity at PayPerPost and pay bloggers to write about your site and services… 200 words per post gets you a lot more bang for your buck than 2 short lines in a typical online ad. And your site will benefit from the incoming links, as well.

Here's where to go if you'd like to sign up: PayPerPost.

I haven't upgraded to Windows Vista yet. I had enough headaches downloading, installing and debugging Internet Explorer 7. I'm sure Vista is very cool, but I'll wait until I get a new computer (probably a laptop) that comes with it already installed… and after it's been field tested by blondes like me for a year or so.

(This is a guest article by Jimmy D. Brown)

How to Pull In As Much Profit As Your Wallet Will Hold… With Opt-In Lists

The fortune is in the list.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that said, well, I'd already have a fortune!

However "broken-recordish" it may sound, it is a truthful statement. The fortune REALLY IS in the list.

Fact is, if you possess the knowledge of how to grow and profit from opt-in lists, you can pretty much write your own ticket.

And, if you'll read the remainder of this article, I'll pass that knowledge right on to ya.

It comes down to getting folks to do four things…

1. REQUEST. First things first, you need to convince people to "opt-in" to your list. That is, get them to join your list of their own free will.

Usually, this involves giving away a mini-course, report or newsletter from your web site. All you need is..

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A few days ago I posted a little quiz so you could find out, "Are You Smarter Than a Newbie?"

If you took the quiz, congratulations! You got every answer right!

How can that be? Simple.

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