What’s up with all this PLR garbage crap. Are people so lazy they can’t string together 300 coherent words on a topic to come up with a unique article?

I get it that there are folks that have created content site business models around using PLR and loads of sites. I also think that tends to be a risky business model since it can be shut down overnight.

The search engines may not be able to pick up on your rehashed garbage but people do. Do you see high quality sites, magazines and newsletters re-use the same article over and over again? Think about that.

Seriously folks. If you can’t write, talk or create a video then you don’t belong in business. I have a suspicion that 99% of the people who come online are fully capable of writing there own articles. But I think the answer is people are just plain lazy. Let me explain.

On a very rare occasion I wander over to the 4HWW forums. Actually I don’t go there anymore but that’s not the point. But what you used to frequently see are threads of people asking the same question: how to hire an outsource person to create a product, market it and everything else in between. As if.

Having a successful business is actually pretty formulaic. But it also requires YOU to do some heavy lifting and work for it. I think PLR is a shortcut so people can be lazy. Plus if you are going to purchase a dozen articles that you have to re-write anyway you might as well have started from scratch.

I read Marlon Sanders weekly ezine. I also own some of his products and think he is one of the rare folks in the “internet marketing” circle that has more or less stuck with the same message all these years and does what he says. Now one of the things he talks about doing  are “evergreen” in business, meaning staying away from the current fad or trend because it only yields short term results.

Article marketing is definitely evergreen, in fact I can’t think of anything more evergreen. Let me explain.

You see the Internet as we know it was built on day one from written content (even in the Gopher days) and that is still true today with the web. Yes there are videos which seem to capture peoples attention but they don’t seem to be replacing written content and I don’t think they ever will, at least not entirely.

People still go to book stores and read magazines for subjects they are interested in. And if your fanatical about a subject typically you buy books or own several books on the subject. At least to begin with before branching out into other forms of information such as videos, audios, magazines, newsletters and so on. For people who are really fanatical there is no limit to how much information they will consume on a subject. Claude Hopkins proved this with his Schlitz beer ads.

In article marketing (and later with information products) you simply step in to fill that appetite with good information in the form of articles. And that model is going to be evergreen for a very very long time. The day you see all book stores closing, industry magazines fold up and the search engine results showing something other than written content is the day article marketing will no longer work.

Now it’s time for the down and dirty secrete: there is no secrete to article marketing.

Write lots of good articles and submit them for publication. Rinse and repeat. No fad involved. No tricks. No BS

Back in the day it used to be really difficult to get published since you had to basically work through mainstream media channels and you still can. But today, if you look around there is actually a lack of good quality content. And a good portion of the content you see is syndicated. A great place I am finding to publish my articles are on blogs dedicated to the market I am in.

One thing I have learned about business success is it takes massive action. It’s pretty tough to create a sustainable business off one product. Likewise your not going to see very good results with one article, you need many. Dozens, even hundreds(!). Most folks will peter out after writing a handful, but that’s a huge mistake. A dozen articles is just the very starting point where you will begin to get _some_ residual traffic. This is the point when you need to BE CONSISTENT and keep writing more.

So now that I have hammered the virtues of article marketing to death, what’s next? Simply go and write an article and submit it with iSnare. Yes, iSnare does cost a few bucks but I think they do a pretty good job of distribution and I have seen decent results from using there service. If you are dead broke don’t spend the money on iSnare. Go find some blogs or forums and start posting your articles there, and even if you are using iSnare you should be doing this as well.

I have written before about Grizzly Brears (or bears or whatever) as a guy who knows how to get top search engine ranking positions on the search engines.

A funny thing happened today when I wanted to go see if Grizzly has posted a new article. Let me explain.

For the life of me I can never seem to remember what the URL is to Griz’s blog that details how to make money online by building sites, even free blogger type sites, that can rank well for competitive keywords and turn a profit from them with organic traffic instead of trying to get social media people to buy.

So when I forget the URL (because I don’t bookmark things in IE) how do I find his site? I simply pull up Google and search for “make money online” and up pops his site on page one or page two of the search results. How is that for proof that his methods work? And from the looks of it this appears to be a fairly competetive space.

Grizzly shows everyone how to make money online at his site.

Another guy I see doing the same thing is Fred over on his Internet Business blog.If I ever forget the URL to Fred’s site I simply do a search for “Internet Business” and up pops his site on page one and it is usually listed in the first couple spots.

Fred is one of the top internet business sites in the rankings

Sometimes not, but for competetive keywords phrases I would suspect the rankings to be somewhat volatile and in flux.

Now the question is can the guy your buying the latest search engine ranking strategies from make that claim? Are they on page one or two for seriously competetive keywords (and willing to show them to you?) like make money online or internet business?

Check out this link for the official writeup from Techsmith:

http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtasia/5/sharing/embed-expressshow.asp

But wait, there’s more!

One little piece of important information they failed to mention is how to reduce the playback size so you can actually fit your video into a smaller area.

For example a 640×480 video is going to look a little bit big for a sales page but reducing it down to 480×360 will make it fit better.

Of course you might want to test the different sizes but I prefer the smaller video playback area when sticking on a page with other information.

To do that simply look for the line of code that says

var so = new SWFObject( “excelspoolfile.swf”, “csSWF”, “640″, “498″, “9.0.28″, “#1a1a1a”);

The 640 and 498 are the respective resolution sizes and you can adjust those accordingly. 480×360 is a good small size and makes it look like a video found on YouTube.

I have put together a very detailed course that consists of 8 step-by-step instructional videos, template files and quick start FAQ guide on how to create your own high quality DVDs for fun or profit… in this jam packed course you will discover how to:

• Easily create a DVD on your computer that you can play back on your TV.
• What software you can use to create interactive DVD menus and DVD cover art.
• The proper video resolution and encoding formats to use.
• Creating a professional DVD case cover quickly and easily without using expensive software or hiring an expensive graphic designer.
• How to make a DVD from footage that you took from a video camera.

All of this and more is absolutely free in this step by step course…

But here is the deal.

You get the instructional step by step videos, case cover and menu templates while watching over my shoulder as I put together a DVD from start to finish… All you have to do is give me detailed feedback and a testimonial I can use for the sales page.

How simple is that?

You will receive instant access to my course for free and all you have to do is give me feedback… so go ahead and leave a comment below with your email address.

The business model and method he covers is all about putting together sites and blogs with long (but legitimate and on topic) rambling posts sprinkled with keywords along with good quality and relevant links to pull in traffic from the search engines (Google) and then using AdSense to sell that traffic.

This guy isn’t your normal blogger with a pretty looking theme on a quest for fame and a bunch of RSS subscribers and social traffic although he seems to get them incidentally as part of being in the make money online market. In fact his sites are downright ugly by any measure.

But Grizzly sites are all about making money and showing people how to do it his way unlike alot of the blog owners out there with pretty sites that are selling you some crappy ebook on how to make money with AdSense sites even though they have only made a few nickles with AdSense themself.

So like Grizz says grab a cup of coffee and catch up with some light reading on the following money making sites:

Making Money Online For Beginners
Making Money With AdSense
Make Money Online

Again there are lots of models for making dollars on the net and this is a different kind of business model, one that requires both time, patience and a bit of work since it takes awhile to garner top rankings for competitive keywords in the search engines.

In the past I have railed a bit on using AdSense… creating info products is a different model and certainly takes less time to get something going and paying. And alot of junk sites where springing up all over the Internet just to get people to click on the Google ads because of it.

But Grizz has a different way of doing things including using free blogging sites like blogger which could be a good way to test out new markets and bootstrap a business if your dead ass broke and have a lot of time to build up networks of sites.

Grizzly posts money shots of his online money making venture and he is not selling you anything other than his reputation so go check out his sites.

But so far so good. Here is my profile:
http://twitter.com/JimSansi

and the profiles of some people I am following:
http://twitter.com/StephenPDean
http://twitter.com/JamesBrausch

I gotta give it to Twitter for simplicity, just log in and start cranking out pointless messages. Next up is investigating why everyone is raving about tweetdeck.

-J

Ben,

I would like to point out a staggering inaccuracy regarding your claim to the free market liability for the current economic crisis in your letter to the editor title “A New Paradigm” published in the February 9th edition of the Press Democrat.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan may make claims that free market forces are to blame for the current financial mess but that is a fallacy at best. The Federal Reserve is a government chartered private institution and can act independently, however it directly plays a pivotal role in influencing market boom and bust cycles by regulating money supply, buying equities and unfettered collusion with other International banks while being influenced by politicians in Washington more concerned by winning votes with constituents.

This influence exerted over the Federal Reserve by political will and not market forces was clearly evident by the Fed’s decision to systematically cut interest rates down to unheard of lows after the phony dot com bull market fizzled and then subsequent cranking up of the printing press buying US Treasuries to fund government backed economic stimulus plans poured massive amounts of nearly free liquidity into markets fueling the housing boom that should have instead gone through a contraction and mild recession following the dot com meltdown.

It is obvious that the investment banks are to blame for securitizing subprime mortgages into derivatives and other investment vehicles labeled with triple A ratings and selling these toxic assets as “secure” investments around the globe but looking back at the root cause of this the focus becomes clear that the near mass hysteria and run up in the housing market which created the subprime industry and securities market was directly caused by government legislation and manipulation of banking policy that allowed individuals with poor or no credit to attain mortgages on already over priced homes that they could not afford further fueled by the Federal Reserve’s reckless monetary policy and inflation of the money supply, neither of these factors is influenced by the free markets.

Furthermore the resultant bust and credit contraction we see today is a consequence of the free market naturally correcting itself as it comes crashing back down to reality from the euphoric high of the housing market and stark revelation that overleveraged sub-prime backed equities are in fact extremely toxic, are grossly overvalued, and will require substantial losses on balance sheets and retirement funds even to the point of bankruptcy for formerly sound banking institutions. But now of course the government is intervening in the market yet again with bailout money materialized out of thin air by the Federal Reserve fueling yet _another_ bubble, this time in the US Government Treasuries market that is going to have untold consequences when it goes bust.

Greenspan and current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke may talk about the collapse of the free markets and cling desperately to con-artist claims of failures in capitalism but they are talking out both sides of their mouths as the Fed is the largest manipulator of the free market.

Misrepresenting the economic picture, even unknowingly, does nothing more than delude the uneducated masses into believing more government oversight and bailouts are the only answer when in fact we need the opposite. How can we possibly look to the same people squarely responsible for this financial catastrophe to now bail us out? The free market is the only force that can correctly re-value and shed these toxic assets but unfortunately that medicine involves some pain and is going to be hard to swallow.

Regards,
-Jim Sansi

Something I wrote about a long long time ago is that true wealth is created by manufacturing products, this was clearly apparent in the run up in the American manufacturing during and post WWII that supplied the world with goods thus creating prosperity and wealth in the US.

Fortunately those of us in the info products business are actually manufacturers, manufacturing information that can be exported and sold world wide. If in fact the dollar is headed for a collapse you can position yourself by selling info products to consumers in other countries as well. Most likely that is going to be english speaking countries like Canada, parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand…

Perhaps it might be a good time to learn Mandarin and Japanese as well?

For more information on these changes and how to upgrade check on this great article on How to Upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 by Ninja Blog. Ninja Blog setup this The Kaizen Business (actually migrated it from an old host over to Hostgator) quite some time ago and did a great job configuring Wordpress with all the right plugins like InstantUpgrade and Backup to make administration hassle free and upgrades a snap.