After a long hiatus, during which I accidentally deleted this blog in a spurt of hard drive purging, I’ve decided to get back on the blogging bandwagon.

The time away has been fun. I’ve taught my son how to read. I’ve read some wonderful books. I’ve built an igloo, gone horse back riding, flown kites, put up some new bookcases, slept in on Tuesdays, and learned to love my iPod.

But events have transpired to draw my attention back to Internet marketing and online promotion.

I can’t say I’m sad about it. There is something incredibly exiting about the immediacy of online sales. But now I’m a little behind the times with a lot to accomplish, so I think I’m going to miss sleeping in.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I can write lots of things quite well, but when it comes to sales copy, I tend to hire a pro to do it for me.

Why?

Sometimes it’s because I’m too close to the project. Other times I just can’t find the right combination of words. There’s a balance that needs to be created between hype and salesmanship. There are words to stress, and words to avoid. And usually, my brain is too full to remember all those things when writing a sales letter.

But, today I downloaded a fascinating application called ScribeJuice that might just change my habits.

Within an hour of installing the program, I’ve improved three of my existing sales pages immensely, and begun a complete rewrite of another.

It’s like my regular web page editor, with all the features I need to create a nice looking page, along with tools to analyze all your copy, a scrolling bar filled with power words, and a way to measure your hype and power ratios.

And then I thought… does this just work for sales letters? Would it work for articles too?

So, I started a new page and pasted in a PLR article I was planning on using.

I ran the suggestion tool on the article text, and within minutes, I had changed the article for the better, and made my signature block zing. Not only will this help avoid duplicate content penalties in the search engines, but unlike other content spinners, this will actually improve your writing, making your articles more effective, and increasing your chances of receiving links from your signature or embedded links.

I know it’s cliche to say this, but I DON’T promote a lot of products. I NEVER promote anything I don’t think will be useful six months from now.

I KNOW ScribeJuice will be useful today, six months from now, and even years down the road. I’m certain I will be using it on emails, sales letters and articles every week.

Take a look. Give it a try. It’s got a solid guarantee, and some reputable folks behind it.

And it might be the most useful product you’ll buy all year.

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space page. Squidoo calls the sites “lenses” and the people who produce the sites are called “lensmasters.”

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”. Squidoo has dozens of modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens. Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50. You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it’s a great chance to build some backlinks to your primary site, or promote a variety of Clickbank links on a given topic.

Check out Tiffany Dow’s “Social Networking on Squidoo” for the best information on using Squidoo to capture leads and make sales in any niche with Squidoo.

Click here!

In my little town, we’re in the middle of election campaigning. Hopeful mayors and council members are going door to door and dropping off pamphlets and flyers at an insane pace. They’re desperately trying to get in touch with everyone.

Yet, with all that footwork, one mayoral candidate made a surprisingly dumb move over the weekend.

You see, on Saturday, all the stores and offices on the main street downtown had a ‘mini-halloween’ celebration, with kids and their parents going from store to store to get treats.

The candidate I’m writing about has his campaign office right in the middle of that downtown strip. Yet, during the three hours of the downtown trick-or-treat, his office was closed. He was out going door to door, when hundreds of parents and their kids were filing right past his door.

Dumb.

And then I thought… tomorrow, hundreds of kids are going to be coming to my door. I’m going to give them candy, but why not package it up in a small bag with a marketing message on the front? Or staple it together with a business card if you provide a local service? If you don’t have a product or service that would appeal to a broad range of people, why not make a quick ad for a ‘work at home’ course or product that you’re an affiliate of?

Most of the time, you have to go to the people Every once in a while the people will come to you. Take advantage of those times.

Earlier this month, if you recall, there was a bit of a scuffle between the owners of Private Label Montly and Joel Comm about his Instant Adsense Templates.

The resolution involved giving a copy of the $200 adsense package to every PLM member. So, I decided to bite the bullet and renew my defunct membership in PLM for two months to get the template packs for sixty some odd bucks.

On Thursday I uploaded 23 of the adsense sites, completely unedited, to an unused PR4 domain, and worked some tag and ping magic, and roughly 48 hours later I’ve made $30 and change from those sites.

Not at all bad. It looks like I’ll easily make back my investment.

What I was wrong about, though was this:

I didn’t buy Instant Adsense Templates because I read that they use tables instead of CSS, making their claims of being perfectly optimized false

While this may just be an anomoly, my CTR for those sites is well over 30%, which makes them pretty darn well optimized for Adsense.

And I don’t know how much better I’d be doing for SEO with a pure CSS site, but I do know, thanks to my existing PR4 domain, I’m already ranking in the first page of Google’s SERPS for several work at home type terms, which is also bringing me traffic.