Josiah Mackenzie

I recently had the chance to read a book with an interesting title: 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People. The book is very easy to browse — each page contains a “secret” and an anecdote to back it up.

Here is are some of the ones I found helpful. Some of them have been modified to include my comments!

• Write down your plans, goals, and ideas — define them
• Resist the urge to be average
• Seek input from people opposite to your way of thinking
• Do things in the order they need to be done
• Get experience any way you can (even if it doesn’t pay well!)
• Speak slowly — smart people speak slower and choose their words carefully (this helps the listener understand)
• Don’t second-guess your decisions
• The past is not always indicative of the future
• Be efficient — never tolerate waste in any form
• Learn from your losses
• Make change count
• Don’t make material possessions your goal
• Avoid roller-coaster emotions
• It might get worse before it gets better
• Think about what’s next — plan for the future
• Money isn’t everthing
• Know what you are looking for (in your job, life, etc)
• Take action
• Failure is not trying

Customer testimonials can be a key component of your product sales strategy. They help reassure a potential buyer that your product has been successfully used by others and will work for them.

This article provides tips for collecting testimonials that can be used in sales letters, websites, and advertising campaigns.

Provide a Good Product
The best form of marketing is word-of-mouth. Customers who have a positive experience with your product are your best salespeople. And for customers to have a positive experience, you need a good product. Money spent developing products that have exclusive features is well spent.

Ask Grateful Customers for a Testimonial
If you spend resources developing a superior product, customers may contact you with positive comments – really an unsolicited testimonial. Even if all they say is, “Thanks, your product really helped me!” – you can ask for permission to use it in your marketing. I’ve never had someone say no! But often these people will say more if you ask them. Direct them to a product survey you’ve created — more on that later.

Automatically Ask for Feedback
Of course, the majority of people won’t take time to send you positive comments. You have to ask for them. Right after an order is processed, automatically send an email asking for the customer to complete a small survey. Many times the response rate can be increased by offering a coupon or other incentive in exchange for completing the survey. This doesn’t have to be large – but it shows you appreciate the time they spend filling out the survey.

Offer Free or Evaluation Versions to Influential People
Consider offering a free copy of your product or service to people with influence such as bloggers, journalists, editors, and webmasters – in return for a review of your product. This is one of the very best forms of free advertising. Think about the promotional opportunity a positive magazine article about your product would provide.

Now you know how you can ask for testimonials. But how exactly do you collect their feedback? My suggestion is to create a short survey. A survey will help the customer stay focused and provide a clear, helpful testimonial. What questions do you ask in a survey? In my experience, you’ll want to ask several categories of questions: personal information, positive comments, and things that could be improved.

Personal information is important for using the testimonials. You’ll want the comments to appear like they came from a real person. If you place the first name, state, and website address with a testimonial, it will help show the testimonial was not just created by you. However, keep in mind that any time you request personal information, you should only ask for what you need. For example, you probably won’t need the customer’s email address — so don’t ask for it.

Positive comments will obviously comprise the body of the testimonial. You may want to ask questions such as: “What did you like about our product?” “How did our product help your company?” “Did using our product save you any time/money?” These questions will help draw out specifics – which make for an interesting, compelling testimonial. The best testimonials do not simply say, “You’re product is the best!” – but tell why and how it is the best.

Questions asking how your product can be improved will not be used in the testimonial, but rather for improving your product. Negative feedback is very useful, and an essential part of product evaluation. It can be used to tweak your product to perfection.

Also, be sure to include a legal disclaimer at the end of your product survey. Ask the customer if you may use his comments in your advertising, and if you may make minor changes to his feedback for clarity, length, etc. Often, it is helpful to be able to make minor changes in style – keeping the same content — in order to match the rest of your sales letter.

By using these techniques, you will be able to collect a number of quality testimonials. Keep them stored in a database, because in the next article I’m going to show you how to effectively use the testimonials in sales letters, advertisements, and other marketing material.

According to Technorati, there are over 15 million blogs as of July 2005. And during July, an average of 80,000 new blogs were created each day. If you own a blog, how are you going to promote it in order to stay ahead of the competition?

Fortunately, there is a simple, yet very effective method: RSS directory submission. Submitting your RSS newsfeed to specialized news directories benefits your site in several ways.

RSS directory submission increases your readership. When a person is looking for newsfeeds to add to their RSS reader, it is highly likely they will visit an RSS directory to find newsfeeds on their subject of interest. I recently visited a directory looking for personal business blogs. I subscribed to several, and now read them via RSS on a regular basis. Someone else may have an excellent business blog, but since they weren’t listed in the directory, I was unable to discover their site.

RSS directory submission enables your content to be duplicated and linked to from other sites. One of the key benefits of syndicating content through RSS is that it increases your reach. You can publish an article, then have excerpts of that article placed on hundreds of other websites – with links back to the original on your site. Many webmasters want to have fresh content for their visitors, and embedding an RSS newsfeed is the easiest way to do that. You’ll want to make sure that you are listed in RSS directories when a webmaster visits looking for website content – or your competitors may get the free promotion!

RSS directory submission provides immediate link popularity. RSS directories are similar to other web directories – you get a free, one-way link back to your site when you are listed. Think about this. Most RSS directories carry a pagerank (PR) of 5 or higher. When you multiply that over 50 RSS directories, that is a lot of links back to your site – meaning increased search engine rank and more visitors.

There are several ways you can submit your RSS newsfeed to directories. The first, obviously, is by hand. You can get a list of the directories, then go to each website and add your feed manually. Since there are many RSS directories, this can take quite a while. To save the webmaster time, two ways of automated directory submission exist.

The first one is RSS Submit, a program that automates the directory submission process. All you have to do is open the software, enter the URL for your feed, and RSS Submit will instantly send the feed information to approximately 40 directories. You can also manually submit your site to another 25 directories using RSS Submit’s auto-fill function.

The second method is appropriately named: RSS Directory Submission Service. This service is similar to RSS Submit – you give them your feed URL, and they submit it to over 50 directories. The difference between the two is price: while RSS Submit costs $44.95 for a personal, non-commercial license. RSS Directory Submission Service charges $8.95 per feed submission. And since sites usually only have one feed, the RSS Directory Submission Service is more economical for most RSS publishers.

Regardless of the RSS directory submission method you choose, make sure to do it! You will find the effort small compared to the benefits you receive.

As RSS news syndication gains popularity among users, new ways for publishing RSS are emerging. In this article, I examine the three most popular methods, and help you decide which one works best for you.

1. Blogs
Weblogs, or “blogs,” as they are commonly called, are the primary reason RSS gained popularity. In fact, one of the earliest uses for RSS was for bloggers to monitor other blogs for updates.

Most blogging systems will produce RSS newsfeeds automatically. All you need to do is enter content, and the blogging software will build a newsfeed based on the information you enter. No extra work is needed. Just add content to your blog, and you have a newsfeed.

But there is one major disadvantage to using a blog for publishing RSS: you do not have complete control of the RSS output. Most blogging software will simply take an excerpt of your blog entry (eg, the first 15 words), and use that to create your RSS item. As you can imagine, this can lead to problems. The first 15 words of a blog entry don’t always capture the essence of that article.

2. RSS Publishing Software
Because of the inadequacy of blogs as a reliable and accurate RSS tool, new stand-alone software was developed. This software has one purpose: to provide the user with an easy way to create and publish RSS newsfeeds from their desktops. No longer do you have to write a long article in your blog to produce RSS feeds. All you have to do is enter a title for your news item, and (optionally) a couple sentences to describe that headline – and your feed is better than the blog-produced feed.

Examples of RSS publishing software for Windows include FeedforAll and Newzalert Composer. Mac users have their own tool in Orangebox for Macintosh.

3. Online RSS Publishing Systems
While subscribers to feeds generated by RSS software enjoyed the simplicity and clarity of the new feeds, some publishers began to run into problems that came with the publishing software. They missed the convenience of blogging’s online publishing that allowed them to add news — regardless of whether they were at their home computer.

News publishers wanted the accessibility of online blogging with the accuracy of RSS publishing software. The new demand lead to the emergence of online RSS publishing systems such as FeedServer RSS Hosting . This new format of RSS publishing allows webmasters to login to an online control panel and publish their news – without having to worry about restrictive software licenses. Since most online RSS publishing systems run on a subscription basis, you can make use of the free trial or subscribe for one month and evaluate if the service meets your needs.

So which system should you use to publish RSS? It depends on your needs. If most of your readers manually visit your site to get new information, a blogging system may be sufficient. However, if you plan to take advantage of the full capabilities of RSS news syndication, you would do well to use a stand-alone RSS publishing system. RSS publishing software will satisfy your needs if you plan to use one computer only. But if you’re looking for flexibility and a lower startup costs, look into the new online RSS publishing systems.

Recently, I purchased Dell’s new budget laser printer.

I’ve been very pleased with the performance of the 1100. Previously, I used an inkjet printer — laser ones are so much faster. Also, they are more frugal on ink. The cartridge costs more up front (around $60), but can print 2,000 pages.

The downside is that the 1100 works only with Windows, and does not support networking. But for under $100, you can’t beat the value!

If you look to the left side of this page, you’ll see a module containing latest quotes from my stock portfolio.

I’ve made that into a portable PHP script: PHP Stock Quote Tracker. With the script, you can display the latest stock quotes on your website.

Check it out:
http://www.josiahmackenzie.com/php-stock-quote-tracker/

The last few days I’ve been busy creating information websites.

My goal is to have several dozen of these small, niche sites. The reason? Another stream of passive income. Once created, information websites earn money by just sitting there — through affiliate sales and Google Adsense.

My two latest creations are RSS information websites:
RSS Software
RSS Marketing Information

Those two websites are simple, but contain a substantial amount of real information. I wrote all the pages by hand so I don’t appear to be a search engine spammer.

I’ve learned quite a few valuable lessons creating these sites. Maybe I’ll share them with you later…..

Today I was optimizing a couple new websites for search engines. I went through my list of optimization techniques. Keywords in page title? Check. Keywords in page headings? Check. Keywords in page file name? Check. Keywords in offsite link anchor text? How could I accomplish that?

Since I usually don’t control if or how a website links to me, I began thinking for a solution.

Part of Google’s ranking algorithm includes analyzing the anchor text of links that point to your website. Anchor text is the text that comprises a hyperlink. If I placed a link from my website to eBay’s laptop auctions — and used “discount laptops on eBay” as the link text - “discount laptops on eBay” would be the anchor text. Google takes the anchor text of a site’s backlinks, and uses it to determine how that site ranks for a given keyword.

When you search for many well-known companies, they are at the top of the search results. Why is that? Part of the reason is because thousands of other websites have linked to them using the company name as anchor text. For example, if I wanted to link to eBay, the word “eBay” would most likely be the anchor text to my link.

Aside from that fact that you know eBay is an online auction site - why would you search for the term “eBay”? Most of startup companies do not have the name recognition advantage eBay has. It is doubtful that people will search for your company name.

That’s when an idea hit me.

Why not include one or two industry keywords in your company name? That way, every time a website links to you, they will include those keywords in the anchor text. Even if they don’t search for your company name, you’ll still receive the same effect.

Time for a real-life example of this. I am working to create a Hyundai Tiburon performance and accessories information website that makes money off affiliate sales*. Instead of naming the website “Tiburon World”, I could name it “Hyundai Tiburon Performance & Accessories”, and use the domain “hyundai-tiburon-performance- accessories.com.”

By including keywords in the title of my new Tiburon website, every time a website links to me, important keywords - “Hyundai Tiburon,” “performance,” and “accessories” - will be automatically included in the anchor link text.

Of course, you may want to create a more memorable name if this company or website is going to be large and advertised offline, but small information sites and directories can achieve higher search engine position using this technique.

* Note: the Tiburon website example was just an example. I am working on something similar, but on a different topic.