Over the next few weeks I plan to write quite a bit on this blog about cold-calling. I know a lot of people are totally against it and I can respect that. However, I’ve found it to be a good way to reach a certain segment of customers in a certain niche and so I’m pushing forward with it. In this article, I’ll discuss the trial-and-error process I went through to find the most efficient and least expensive way to make hundreds of phone calls in a small(ish) chunk of time.

Quick disclaimer: I did not purchase leads and the leads I’m calling are all at least luke-warm; meaning they have at some point agreed to be called about this specific service. This doesn’t mean they’re all gung ho to hear about it when I call, but I’m not just opening the phone book or using some crackpot’s “super-list” of phone numbers. That said…

I started out my cold-calls using my personal cellphone because I don’t have a dedicated business line. I’ve always done most of my prospecting and selling on the Internet and my cell phone was fine for a small amount of in and outbound business calls. Since my cell has unlimited U.S. minutes I figured it was the obvious choice.

It wasn’t until a friend pointed out to me that I was broadcasting my number to hundreds of people a day – some who might not be so happy to hear from me – that I realized that using the cellphone could present several problems. I considered adding a dedicated business line to my cell account, but decided to give Skype a try first.

I’d used Skype a fair amount for Skype-to-Skype calling (both audio and video), but hadn’t tried calls to landline or cell telephone numbers. As it turns out, there really isn’t much difference and I’ve been really happy with it.

First of all, you can’t beat the price: for $2.99/month (less if you play quarterly or yearly) you can make unlimited calls to phone numbers in the U.S. and Canada. I have a super-nice headset for interviews and other audio work, but it’s the double-ear monster kind and I knew I wouldn’t want to wear it all day long. So I picked up a single-ear headset (Cyber Acoustics USB – AC-840) for $30 and was pleasantly surprised by call quality. No echo, no popping, solid sound.

The problem I started running into was one of efficiency. Skype has some great keyboard shortcuts, but once you bring up the “Call Phones” screen you can only make a single call before you have to close it and then click “call phones” again. This meant closing call windows and opening new ones, then dialing – extremely clunky and quickly annoying. I figured I was cutting my calls by at least 1/3 with this process so I went hunting for a solution. There is apparently a Skype option that automatically turns all phone numbers into links you could click to engage a new call, but for some reason this wasn’t working with my database.

After a quick search (How much do I love Firefox add-ins?), I found a beautiful little Firefox add-in called Telify to solve that problem. It worked like a charm, turning my numbers into links and automatically resolving country code issues as it goes. A few clicks and my call is in process. Excellent!

The last issue I am having will also be easily resolved. Since I’m calling from Skype, my number comes up “unknown” on the caller ids of everyone I call.” This not generally a good way to get folks to pick up. Honestly, I send “unknown” and “restricted” calls straight to voicemail, so I can’t expect my leads to pick up if I don’t have a real number. Luckily, I can purchase my own incoming Skype telephone number for less than $8/quarter. Then my calls will show an actual number rather than “unknown” and I should see an improvement in my pickup rate.

So there you have it. My powerhouse plan for using Skype + Telify* to reduce my cold-calling cost and increase efficiency. How about you guys? Do you cold call? What’s your method? Share!

*Telify was created by the obviously awesome Michael Koch and can be downloaded for free via the Firefox add-on site or Michael’s own site. Or you can just:

download Telify here

Michael also has another cool add-on for Firefox called FlexBar that gives you added control of all those toolbars that take up important browser real estate.

So you let your domain name expire. Whether you ignored the email, missed the letter or just plain procrastinated until it was too late, you no longer own the domain that you had so lovingly filled with well-written content. Now your domain has reverted to a registrar or already been snapped up by someone else and your content is gone.

Oh, but it’s not. As you may have heard, the internet is forever. Even if your blog as it was is no longer, that information is still floating around there somewhere. More specifically, it’s most likely easily found using the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. In a few simple steps, you’ll be able to view, copy and even use a free website-to-PDF tool to get back all your hard work.

Case Study: Choose a Niche Dot Com

This was a small-ish blog I created outlining seven steps to building a niche blog and reviewing a few tools that could help along the way. I didn’t spend too much time with maintenance or updates, keeping the site mostly static once all the information had been added. However, I’d spent many months prior to this creating the content. I had some of the posts saved, but not the final copies and nothing was well-organized (that’ll teach me…).

When the site suddenly disappeared and I realized I’d let it drop, I was extremely upset. This was several months ago and I’d finally come to peace with it. Then I suddenly realized that the Way Back Machine – which I’ve used many times in the past for domain research – could most likely help. And did it ever. By pulling up the most recently archived version of the site, I was able to retrieve all my articles in a nice, organized manner.

Yes, I’d lost the domain name and the Google page rank, but I still had my articles and I know exactly what I plan to do with them. Since keyword research techniques and tools are always changing, I’ll be carefully combing through the articles to edit and update them. The steps will be fleshed out and the tool reviews will be added to and become a “Resources” section.

Do you see where I’m going now?

I’m going to create an ebook. I have a clear outline, a great head-start on quality content and a topic that is just as popular now as it was when I created the site two years ago. With a bit of copy and paste to a Word document, I’ll have my ebook ready for additions and edits. I had originally considered using videos on the site to clearly illustrate some of the tasks and I just may add that to create either a full-blown info-product or a membership site that is constantly update with fresh content.

If you were going to purchase one of the two, which would it be? As always, I greatly appreciate your input.

photo credit: Mykl Roventine

This is just a quick information post for those of you who use the Build a Niche Store (BANS) application to create Ebay stores. A coding change made by Ebay has created errors for all the redirection links created be BANS. In short, each time a visitor clicks on a link to Ebay from any of your BANS sites (this applies to all countries), they will be directed to an error page.

Translation: unless you correct the code in your index.php file for BANS, your sites are all essentially useless. The good news is, a wonderful coder named Tao has created a fix. He posted it on the Niche Site Building site. Here is the link:

Fixing BANS URL Cloaking Issue

Yes, this fix involves opening two PHP files and changing a bit of code, but Tao’s post shows you exactly what to do – for all countries. Here are the steps I would follow to make these changes, just to be extra sure that you don’t break your BANS sites:

• Use an FTP application to download the index.php and frontcontrol.php files to your desktop. The index.php file is in the main BANS folder and frontcontrol.php is in the cont folder.
• Make copies of the files and save them just in case something goes wrong.
• Alter the PHP files according to Tao’s instructions.
• Upload the files back to the BANS folder on your server.

And you’re done. That’s it. If you have a lot of BANS sites, this could be a bit of a pain, but once you have a correctly altered the PHP files you can use them for all your sites. This will work because – although BANS is all about customization – the primary php files are identical and stay that way for all BANS sites. All you have to do is FTP in to each of your BANS sites, overwrite the index.php and frontcontrol.php files with the ones you’ve already corrected and you’re good to go.

Make sure you check each site after you have overwritten the files to make sure none of the pages are broken and all the links to Ebay are functioning correctly. If you have any major problems, the Niche Site Building forum is always a great reference or you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll help or point you in the right direction.

The bottom line is, this is a huge deal that is – thankfully – easily fixable. So go to it.

photo credit: jontintinjordan

It’s not as if I didn’t know that Google Analytics was a super-powerful service. However, up to this point, I’ve really only used the surface features. As I’m not an expert myself, I knew I couldn’t write an in-depth article myself so I decided to do a bunch of research.


Instead of consolidating what I learned in one article that just touches a few bases, I have instead linked to some of the best articles I have read during my research. The following list includes 27 excellent articles (and a few videos) about Google Analytics. I also highly recommend you read through the comments on many of these – they are often just as helpful and interesting as the original article.

• Google Analytics Blog
• Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation
• Advanced Techniques in Google Analytics
• 7 Advanced Google Analytics Tricks
• The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips
• Pattern Recognition with Google Analytics
• Five Lesser-Known Google Analytics Features
• 27 Features that Make Google Analytics Best of Breed
• Get Detailed PPC Keyword Data from Google Analytics
• Google Analytics WordPress Plugin
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Getting to Know Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Video Tutorial Series
• Google Analytics 101 from Search Engine Watch
• Google Analytics Tips for your Blog
• Google Analytics Tips and Features for Sales and Marketing
• Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking
• Five Google Analytics Fails
• Top Five Google Analytics Reports for Bloggers
• Google Analytics and SEO
• Top Ten Myths about Google Analytics – SEO Edition
• 30+ Google Analytics Tools, Goals, Segments, Filters, Hacks and Resources
• Campaign Tagging with Google Analytics
• How Google Analytics Tracks Bookmark Visits
• Viewing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics
• 7 Google Analytics Filters to Help you Understand your Visitors
• Google Analytics Offical Website

I know this is just brushing the surface of the huge amount of fantastic articles written about Google Analytics. So, please, use the comments to share your favorites. This blog is do-follow so feel free to link.

photo credit: Photos8.com

Many online marketers find great success creating websites and placing Google Adsense advertisements on them. There are many resources out there that can teach you the tricks and methods to maximize your Adsense profits. You can find training ebooks, membership sites, podcast and just about any other media you can imagine. There is no doubt that – once you find a system that works – Adsense can be a very lucrative endeavour.

I’m currently testing a membership site that offers an all-encompassing Adsense system to get you started making money regardless of your level of internet marketing expertise. I’ll be reviewing the program within the next few months. As I work with the system, I will undoubtedly come across some helpful resources and I will share them here. The one I’m going to tell you about today is Top Paying Keywords Database.

Top Paying Keywords is a site that tracks the amount of money you will get paid when someone clicks on an Adsense ad for a particular keyword. You can research keyword PPC (price-per-click) yourself, but if you have the money the databases offered by Top Paying Keywords can save you a lot of time. By purchasing access to their databases, you can find hundreds and hundreds of keywords with high PPC rates.

When you are choosing a topic for a blog you wish to monetize with Adsense, it is important that you find a topic and keywords that have high PPC rates. The average Click-Through Rate (CTR) for pay-per-click advertising is 1.5%. This means that 1.5% of visitors to your page will actually click on an ad. With such a low CTR, a high PPC is critical to the success of your site.

Despite the fact that many newbies start out in the make money online/internet marketing/how-to blog/social networking/etc. niche, it is one of the most difficult in which to make money. I don’t think I’m allowed to share exactly how much money I make with Adsense on this site, but let’s just say I might be able to buy a meal on the dollar menu at Burger King every three months or so if I relied on this site alone for my Adsense revenue. The only reason I even have Adsense on this site On the other hand, I have a site in a financial niche that brings in several dollars per click.

A bit of math to illustrate the importance of high PPC rates:

Blog #1 – General, Broad Niche

• PPC Average = $0.05
• CTR Daily Average = 1.5%
• Average Daily Visitors = 1,000

With these numbers, an average of 15 people would click a 5 cent Adsense ad, giving you an average of about 75 cents a day in revenue. Multiply this by 30 and you’re approximately $22.50 a month with Blog #1.

Blog #2 – Highly-Targeted, Super-Specific, Long-Tail Niche:

• PPC Average = $2.25
• CTR Daily Average = 1.5%
• Average Daily Visitors = 100

Blog #2 has far fewer visitors because it is a highly targeted, narrow niche site. Advertisers are willing to pay a higher rate for clicks because super-targeted traffic means higher conversion rates. In this case, the CTR would most likely be higher because visitors searching for long-tail, ultra-specific keywords generally know exactly what they want to see. However, for control reasons I made the CTR the same as Blog #1. With these numbers you are getting less than two clicks a day, but the PPC is so high that this averages around $3.37. This gives you over $100 a month in revenue ($101.25 to be exact).

If you had twenty sites that brought in similar revenue to Blog #2, you’d be clearing approximately $2,000 a month. The great news is that once you have figured out how to choose the right niche and get the targeted traffic, you can usually duplicate your system across other niches. So having 20 blogs is not at all extreme. In fact, many internet marketers make boatloads on Adsense by replicating their systems with hundreds of small, highly-targeted niche blogs.

Even though Blog #1 gets a lot more traffic, most of those visitors aren’t sure what they are looking for exactly and they are less likely to be enticed by the broad topics of the Adsense advertisements placed on that blog. On the other hand, the visitors to Blog #2 might not be great in numbers, but they have carefully chosen their keywords and the ads on the blog (if you’ve optimized correctly, but that’s a whole other article or ebook) will provide precisely the information or products for which they are looking.

Top Paying Keywords currently offers a free report of 25 keywords that have achieved high appreciation percentages in the last year. This report can give you an idea of what Top Paying Keywords databases have to offers as well as help you find some topics of rising interest to search engine users.

The database offered by Top Paying Keywords costs $199 and features the PPC rates for nearly half a million keywords that pay at least $1.00 per click. The database is updated quarterly and, once you have purchased it, you can receive updates for $50 each quarter. By correctly using this information, the database will pay for itself very quickly and your profits will increase exponentially.

The Top Paying Keywords database even includes over a hundred keywords that pay more than $20 per click. The data is delivered in Excel format so you can sort and organize the data however you like. You can even import it into Microsoft Access and create endless reports – if you have the skills to do so or the money to outsource it.

I have made it a rule since I started this blog not to promote products or services unless I have tried them myself. I do plan on purchasing the database soon. I keep a list of products I plan to purchase and review and it is now on my list. The reason why I feel comfortable recommending the top paying keyword database to you before trying it myself is two-fold.

First of all, the free appreciating keyword list is an excellent resource and I have no doubt the top keyword database is of the same caliber.

The second reason is because this is a risk-free purchase. If for any reason you are not satisfied with the data, your money will be completely refunded – no questions asked. You have nothing to lose and – potentially – a ton of profit to gain. If you run niche websites or are interested in getting started, I highly recommend you visit Top Paying Keywords Dot Com right away and purchase the Top Paying Keywords database.