Internet Marketing Center - On Tour

"IMC Leading The Way For Online Marketers - 2007"
Detroit, Michigan March Review

I always get excited when I hear that Derek Ghel is coming to America. The Internet Marketing Center is THE premiere online marketing resource to smart entrepreneurs abroad. Ghel is one of the founding brains in the powerful nerve center that is IMC. This Canadian Internet marketing group is the brainchild of the late Corey Rudl who masterminded an online marketing presence that generated 50 million dollars in online sales in just ten years. They are most famous for creating unique software that can not only garnish attention from online traffic but also burrow deep into tight niche markets.

These guys have been hitting the road now for the second consecutive year. I was lucky enough to catch them in Chicago last March and in Detroit this year. They appeared at the Crown Plaza in Novi, Michigan. They came here for two days and hit the crowd with enough marketing tips to fill up an entire three subject notebook. The staff was about a third of what was offered in Chicago as the venue in Michigan was significantly smaller in size. But this didn't have any impact on the powerful workshops and no nonsense seminars that held the audience spellbound for hours on end. The seating was tight as it was near a sell out crowd.

We covered:

• Ebay secrets
• Copywriting strategies
• Joint Venture and Affiliate Program secrets
• Email marketing
• Direct to Desktop tips
• Online Affiliate programs
• Web site makeovers

and a whole lot more......

The days begin early at 8am and go straight on until 4:30 pm with time for questions and answers at the end. If you really care about online marketing and want to get more presence for your site you definately need to connect with this tour. I have been to a lot of these and cannot recommend these guys highly enough. They were there from the beginning of serious online marketing and are still there today creating 6 figure incomes for their customers in many countries including Canada, North America and Australia. The group is very entertaining and you should try to catch them if they come through your area. Future city stops include New York City, Chicago and there are dates in Texas and in California.

You can find out more about them here....
http://www.marketingtips.com

Check out their software packages. These guys really do think of everything. They are worth getting and perform like the way they are supposed to. Viral marketing has been perfected and they have mapped out strategies and sure fire ways to get traffic and give your site more action onilne and off.

Cantu writes for the WebCrunch blog, and can be found at www.1seomichigan.com
and resides in Walled Lake, MI and Chicago. This entry was created on March 20, 2007

What Ticks Off Venture Capitalists Most?

TEN THINGS NOT TO SAY WHEN YOU WANT TO GET FUNDED !!!

The recent rush to get your idea funded is astronomical. The rate at success in this recent rush is tighter than before. This is in vast comparison of the late 90's Gold Rush that destroyed many hopes of future businesses. Simply said, many of these companies failed to turn a profit. VC's are becoming tighter than ever. The following list comes to us from Entrepreneur.com

1. "Our projections are conservative."
2. "(Big-name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010."
3. "(Big-name company) is going to sign our purchase order next week."
4. "Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded."
5. "No one else is doing what we're doing."
6. "No one else can do what we're doing."
7. "Hurry, because several other vc firms are interested."
8. "Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat to us."
9. "We have a proven management team."
10. "All we have to do is get 1 percent of the market."

I've heard every single one of these lines in the past 12 months so I think this is worth mentioning. But here is the killer -- there is NOT ONE venture capital firm out there interested in getting 1% of an entire market -- not one. And according to the Money Exchangers they can tell when stories like this are bogus and ill-planned.

Projections are far fetched -- usually in the tens of millions... even billions. There are other issues too with building costs and dealing with contractors. The later is a troublesome bunch according to Trump. These predictions for powerful growth to your company can be over exagerated. This causes VC's to repel to you like oil and water.

This list is very humorous -- but then again, maybe not so funny to others.

Ted Cantu has posted this entry on March 2, 2007. He is the creator of www.1seomichigan.com and lives in Novi, MI

Redefining The Web: Post Venture Capital Years

In the early days of the Dot.com era it was somewhat difficult to get all the elements in place. You had to get various programmers, talented people, strategy planners and get large host servers to create your own position online. Things have radically changed since then.

In fact, it is getting harder to get financed this time around. In a recent meeting with a venture capital group and money finders association in Michigan we learned the following. Not only was it getting more difficult to secure funds for new ventures but the dynamics of such have become even tighter. This firm gets 6 proposals that are sent in this venture capital firm only accepts 6 qualified applicants for the entire year.

The good news is that it no longer takes 120k + to get your dot.com off the ground. With all the template sites that are out there the ability to go out and create a variety of new sites is practically unlimited. There are built in search engines, google analytics and a multiple of calculators built into the software that can take a business straight to new heights.

The so called, "NEXT LEVEL" with animation and other fluffery is nice but the ability to attract and maintain customers is of utmost importance. There are other factors to consider as well..... Such as the ability to sell and distribute your products and create your own distribution channels. The back end of your overall marketing structure should be considered. This includes your strategy about how you intend to draw the indexing bots back to your site from the search engine - this falls into your seo plan.

The state of SEO in Michigan has been challenged with conventional means of getting top search engine rankings and ignoring new conventions that have received proven results -- in this case, podcasting. This is something that needs to be addressed at the deepest level. If any of these new upstarts are going to stand a chance at achieving a market - let alone -- sales.... Then the new wave of Interactive communication and ecommerce firms should accept these incredible innovations that are entering the marketplace. These include Web 2.0 tools and software that can enhance the overall users performance and bring back a secure market eager to partake in the consumer process.

This post was created by Ted Cantu on March 1, 2007 at 11:09 pm. Cantu writes for the Fascube network and has served as a direct response marketing expert and lives in Novi, Michigan.

THE MONEY MACHINE - FEB FREEFORM TALK

Click here to get your own player.

Check The Sincerity Of Your Social Networks

"Creating Mountains Of Wealth Begins With PRE-QUALIFIED PROSPECTS!"

When I first read Robert Allen book about, "Multiple Streams of Income" I got to admit I was somewhat smitten. This was the guy who jumped up to 24k in one night on the Internet. The rest of the book reads like a fairy tale. You walk away from the experience with this unshakable belief that you can do this too......

Like I said, I was smitten.

But when you break down the math of how the income relates to the actual numbers that are involved the "landslide profits" it loses something. It loses a little of the magic that you once felt. You see Allen had a sizeable number to play with in the first place. He had a phenomenal audience OPT IN list in his customer database. The actual number was around 23,000 opt-in emails which meant he had permission to market to them. They knew who he was and he had developed a relationship with them.

He managed to score 1% of the money from this group of people. That is the MAGIC number that got him on a television show where he released an email to informed his list how to order an ebook that he wrote.

This sort of takes the fun out of it a wee bit -- doesn't it?

THE PROBLEM WITH THE YOUTUBE.COM PHENOM

Every one with a little budget suddenly wants to become the next www.youtube.com. They want to get awarded the next 1.65 billion dollars, (this was the amount Google paid for the network). Some of these social networks online are pretty good but most of them are just average. There are many people on these sites that are looking to hook up with other like minded people.

Podomatic, where I have a podcast show by the way, (http://www.911copywriter.podomatic.com/) has a lot of people who can join your friend network. After they join it you may or may not have a lot of contact with them. I know I don't on a general basis. Oh sure, they may come by to see if I have a new show posted or not. But that about as far as our friendship goes. Thats not much of a friendship.

I certainly could use their personal email addresses.

But what about groups like WWW.LINKEDIN.COM the quality of people there are matched on profession and where you went to school etc. I am not particulary convinced that this is a sincere networking tool either.

And MYSPACE.com. What can I say about this one? This site is based on who is hot or not and its somewhat of a dating/stalking site. Again. I am not convinved that the people who join your friendship database online give a royal hoot about you or not. Its very unlikely.

Here are a few more courtesty of TECHCRUNCH.COM

TRUSTED OPINIONA new social network named Trusted Opinion came out of private beta over the weekend. It has the single worst logo I’ve ever seen ( a circle with a check mark and some unreadable text), and a name that suggests they are a bland reputation based service like TrustedID. But actually they’re a new recommendation-based social network that has integrated both Flash and Ajax components very nicely.Your network of friends is viewed through a rotating, solar-system like visual module built in Flash.

JYTE
Jyte is a new service that leverages OpenID to allow users to start a discussion on any “claim” they care to make. Other users can then vote and discuss those claims.

TEXTMARKS
TextMarks will announce a new product tomorrow that allows publishers to charge people to receive breaking news and other information via text messages. It’s available now under a new “monetize” tab on the home page of the site.the battle rages on with

PHOTOBUCKET
Users are restricted from uploading their own audio files (copyright concerns drove this), but Photobucket says they may add a record button to allow a narrative of the photo/video stream in the future. For now, a selection of licensed stock music is available. Users can also add transition effects, text bubbles, frames and other effects to the mashup.

There is another video system that was just released that we tried to log onto over the weekend. This thing didn't seem to work. There was another mishap over the weekend as someone on the Myblog.com site spammed a bunch of its members......... I got 50 emails from people who I didn't know and some of them were in other languages that I don't speak... such as French and Chinese.

This takes me all the way back to Robert Allen once again. I respect what he has done and accomplish. However I do not think that marketing to your own extended database is much of an achievement in the grand scheme of things.

............. But how likely is it that you will ever top him or equal him using these frivalous social networks like the ones I've outlined.

Try to go for more sincere efforts and find genuine people in your niche.

Cantu writes for the 911copywriters.com blog. This entry was written on 10:16 pm on Feb 19, 2007.

Dreamweaver Users: Beware You Don't Get

"DREAMWEAVER USERS BEWARE: You Must Be Careful You Don't Get Blacklisted"

A friend of mine recently had his entire site blacklisted from the search engines. He managed to overlook a very simple and basic mistake on his pages. When he was copying and pasting his text into his web page he forgot to change the color on some of it. This type was the same color of his web page background color.

Can you guessed what happened next?

This resulted in his web pages looking like a SPAM attempt to trick the search engines with hidden keywords. Worse, because the hex numbers were the same he did this one three of four of his pages. This can actually happen to anyone.

Using Microsoft Word is important when you check your spelling and its also a great tool for gramatical errors. But when you copy and paste directly into a Macromedia Dreamweaver page you got to make sure that the type and the background color differ in contrast. If you fail to do this you are looking as if you are trying to pull one over on the search engines.

"Bad Magic Hat SEO Has Earned Its Name a Name For a Reason"

Up until just a few years back, (although it seems a lot longer) there were all sorts of "tricks" like this -- mini keyword stuffing being one of them. The search engines blew up and drew a firm line in the sand that nobody was to perform these unsavory tactics in order to get high search engine rankings.

Then of course is the issue of link farms..... etc.

Now, my friend made a very honest mistake. But in a heartbeat his site tanked from view in the search engines due to a very minute detail. And it can happen to anyone. Working under tight deadlines and staying up late at night its easy to miss one or two critical details.

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Ted Cantu has written this article at 10:00 pm Feb 18 2007. He can be found at SEO Search Quest in Farmington Hills, MI