Micheal Savoie

I don’t know. It seems that everyone is becoming polarized by the buzz going around. Either you are with them or against them. Middle ground is hard to find anymore.

I am of course referencing the Death of Adsense Special Report being circulated all over the web. Most of the people circulating it are just doing so because they get $0.50 for each person who downloads it.

Which tells me that Adsense is not dead, just the idea of making money with it.

The people who are still making money on their Adsense are those high traffic webmasters who have content and traffic with a strategic placement of Adsense ads throughout their website. Mom and pop operations will typically not get more than pennies per week unless they have done the work necessary to create a successful Adsense website.

Which really brings me to the actual topic at hand…

If you want to make money with Adsense, you have to work at it. Many of the gurus who tell you they are making boatloads of money with Adsense have been working at it for long periods of time. The most important thing to do is to test your pages. Make one change and split test your Adsense pages and see if you better clicks on one over the other. See the results over time, and once you have a clear winner, make another change and split test that one. You will succeed at Adsense and other marketing much better with a clear testing strategy in mind from the beginning.

So we are testing our pages. Do we want to trust our income only to the Adsense Gods?

Affiliate links are a good way to diversify the monetizing of your traffic. Yes, you want Google Adsense links, but you want to place strategic affiliate links throughout your web pages, so that you are earning money from more than just one source.

Feel free to let me know how you feel about this controversy by adding to the discussion.

Our technologically advanced society has forced us to go into isolation to get a break from the onslaught of information bombarding us from all sides. Radio, television, email, printed media (such as newspapers, books and magazines) and the Internet are all methods that people are using to get their message to each of us. Even in your car you get signs, billboards, bumper stickers and car decals shouting at you about someone`s message. If you were to undergo hypnosis and be made to read back everything you have read during the course of one day, you would be amazed at how many things were recorded by your brain.

The fact that our minds are steel traps for information is not a new concept. Scientists for years have told us that our minds are amazing, that we can store unlimited amounts of information and that if we could harness the full potential of our brains, we would not need computers. Unfortunately, the retrieval process is the key factor in our inability to spout off what we know at critical moments (like during that Chemistry Test, or on our wedding anniversary). As people age, this process is even more challenged to the point that we forget more than we know.

What does this have to do with your message? What is it that you want people to do when you write sales copy? If you answered “buy my product” you are correct, but the more correct answer is “take action.” While every message is a sales message, what you are selling is not always a product or service that requires a customer to exchange money for it. Sometimes the message is designed to get someone to click on a link, fill out a form, write your congressman, or stop smoking cigarettes. The end result of the message can be someone “buying in” to your way of thinking.

What about if I am not writing sales copy? An article is sales copy, even if there is not a product at the end of the story. You still are creating a situation where the buyer (reader) is either going to agree with your view (thesis) or disagree (you did not make the sale). When you successfully craft your message, the reader will agree with your line of reasoning and you have made the sale! Congratulations.

I write to let my mind release the pent up intelligence that it often does not have a chance to let out in my day to day encounters. Not everyone agrees with my way of thinking and I accept that. In fact, my goal is to reach people who may not think the way I do and to potentially allow them to see a different perspective. I would be elated if that resulted in turning someone from “the Dark Side” when they initially did not agree with me, but I am fine with the idea that I may not have influenced anyone with my musings. My hope is only to touch people with kindness or at least positiveness, and to give a little of that experience that my fortysomething years on this planet have taught me.

I know, that last statement makes me sound like an alien. Technically I am not an alien, because I was naturalized back in the 1980’s, so now I am non-alien. Almost human. My wife would happily tell you that I am very much human, too human. But I love her anyway.

When you write, how are you putting your thoughts across to your audience? Do you go for shock value? Do you entertain? How much of your personality comes out in your writing? Again, I will repeat that you will not relate well to everyone who reads your writing. Just make your message as palatable to as many readers as possible without watering down your content. You want to inform and at the same time touch each reader with your personality and give them a chance to get to know you. If you follow this strategy, you will develop a group of people who will eagerly await your next article or book. Some will eagerly await your emails if you are just sending out newsletters.

Plan out your message before you get too involved in the writing. Outline as much of your message as you can before you begin fleshing out the details. Think of an outline as the skeleton of your message, and the words you use to blend each section together are the muscles, organs and tissue of your story, e-book or novel. I remember reading Piers Anthony`s comments at the end of one of his books and how he said he never wrote a book until he had sold the story to the publisher. He said he would completely outline the story and send that to the publisher, and after he got the nod from his publisher, he would fill in the details of the story, following his outline as the guide for the adventure that he created for his readers. His success using this formula is proof that you should be planning your writing so that you can keep yourself as organized as possible.

Imagine the time savings of putting your outline in front of you and then writing your article based on your outline. You will not be deviating from the course you set out, because every time you pause to see where you are, you get a reminder of the next topic, and you can flow into the next section from one paragraph into the next.

While I did not want to get into the mechanics of writing (I have to follow my outline), the flow mechanism mentioned above is a great method for keeping a reader intent on your message. If you can hold a reader’s attention for long periods of time, you can cash in by having them devour your other works in the future. Who doesn’t want a loyal following of prose-starved readers?

Are you ready to reach out to the world with your message? The Internet is a canvas, and your words are the paint, and you are the artist who can take the plain, vacant canvas and turn it into a work of art that people will want to tell their friends about. And after all, isn’t that the end result we are trying to get for our message anyway? Your words, being passed from person to person virally, infecting more and more of your intended audience as though it had a mind of its own.

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Your message. Especially if you hear someone else passing it on to their friends. So what is your message? I’d really love to hear it.

Micheal Savoie can be found at his blog: http://michealsavoie.com/welcome when he is not setting up his Viral Attitudes Seminar Series. If you want to be updated on the next location and date of Viral Attitudes Seminars, sign up for his informal newsletter at http://viralattitudes.info/notify so you can be the first to know. If you are speaker and would like to join the Viral Attitudes Tour, post a note to Micheal on his blog, and he will get back to you straight away!

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I know, you hear that all the time. But really, how many times do you see the reality of it? If you are observant, you will see it every day. Look around you. See everyone that you come in contact with every day.

If you were to take the time to take only one person that you meet during the course of your day to lunch and listen to them tell you their story, you would hear a long string of settle-fors. They were headed to college, but had a car accident and couldn’t pay the medical bills and had to settle for a life of cashiering at the local supermarket. Or the woman who did not think highly enough about herself, that she settles for the alcoholic husband who beats her when he is out of beer.

I am not putting these people down, because they have already done so to themselves. Not only do they put themselves down, but the hold themselves there.

When kids are in school they have a mind full of wonder and big dreams. Then life smacks them around, or the teachers in their schools let the air out of their dreams a little at a time, until they graduate (some will deflate too quickly and drop out completely) where some will still have enough of a dream to get to college, while the majority will settle for the job they got while in school.

What do these things have in common? The ideals that they once held are slowly chipped away by the life around them. A parent telling their kids that they will never amount to anything. A teacher calling a child stupid. Some schoolmates calling someone ugly. These things all put nicks in ones dream. And if it continually gets chipped away, soon it will completely crumble.

So what can we do about this? Should we be like the school guidance counselors who tell all of the teachers that they need to pass everyone, or not fail anyone, because it will hurt their self-esteem? Or should we allow the kids to take the punches so that they can build character?

It is my opinion, and I have seen evidence of this in many stories of successful people, that we should not pull the punches of life’s hardships, but rather, allow life to do the character building, but then you follow up with some dream inflation. Why can’t school kids be exposed to motivational speakers? Why can’t teachers, for that matter? The motivational speakers of this world are by nature filled with the very essence of dream fulfillment. They do not falsely fill peoples’ heads with fake self-esteem, rather they tell people that they have what it takes inside to make it. They do not have to settle for the situation that was handed to them.

Every time I have seen or heard a motivational speaker, I was given the one thing I had been lacking up until I attended the event: confidence. Can you imagine if everyone went to a motivational seminar every week? There would be no limit to the accomplishments of the average joe on the street! People would no longer be average!

You have probably been hearing the buzz about Viral Attitudes, and the seminar series that will begin in the spring of 2007. I am personally getting more excited as the time approaches, because the entire goal of Viral Attitudes is to reach as many people as possible, and make these seminars available to everyone!

What would it be like if every week you would get a phone call from a motivational speaker that would tell you a story that would make your day a little brighter? What if once a week your email would contain a quote from a book or DVD that would lift you up? What if once or twice a year a seminar would come to your area and help pump your dream back up to its full potential, so that you could go on rebuilding your life, increasing your income, trying harder to get that promotion?

Let me tell you what Viral Attitudes is not. You will not hear speakers selling their books or DVDs on stage. Granted, the speakers will have books, Cds and DVDs available to purchase at the location and on their websites, because that does defray the cost of these seminars, and the speakers do deserve a cut of the action for helping to bring about change in people’s lives. Viral Attitudes will not be a religious revival, although there will be religious speakers as well as non-religious speakers, and there will be non-denominational services on Sunday mornings wherever the events are held. And this will not be a marketing training, even though many successful marketers will be speaking.

You see, Viral Attitudes is about how these people became and overcame, not the mechanics of how they got there. We may have some breakout sessions with those speakers that want to teach specifics, but our aim is not to just help marketers. We want to touch everyone’s life and make an impression on each person we come in contact, and in turn affect the lives of the people that they come into contact with as well. After all, your attitude is contagious! Will you help spread a good one?

Micheal Savoie can be found at his blog: http://michealsavoie.com/welcome when he is not setting up his Viral Attitudes Seminar Series. If you want to be updated on the next location and date of Viral Attitudes Seminars, sign up for his informal newsletter at http://viralattitudes.info/notify so you can be the first to know. If you are speaker and would like to join the Viral Attitudes Tour, post a note to Micheal on his blog, and he will get back to you straight away!

I recently purchased a program that promised me would increase my affiliate income. I was struggling with making $50 a month using ClickBank and needed to start bringing in some income fast. So when I read the sales letter, I thought to myself, if it will do half of what it says, then I will still at least double my income from ClickBank. Now you don’t have to just use clickbank, there is also a great affiliate system run by Tara Johnson called Low Stress Income that is as good as clickbank.

Do it… Come on… Do it.
So I purchased it, and I printed out the ebook and began reading it and re-reading it. I did not wait until I was done, I immediately began to do the recommended steps.
When you spend money on different ebooks that tell you how to make money, the most important thing you can do is take action on what the ebook is telling you to do. After all, if you aren’t following the directions, how is the information going to help you? I have found myself guilty of this, buying an expensive program and then letting it sit on my shelf and collect dust.

Get back to the point…
So back to my story, I followed the instructions to the letter, I even tried some of the niches the author recommended. While the research that was required is the most time consuming, because anytime you use Adwords to generate traffic, you have to dig into the keywords to find ones that are not overly expensive, and you want to find as many of the close together ones as you can so you can keep your ad groups as tightly knot as possible. So I was finding myself spending a lot of time in front of my computer doing the repetitive task of working with keyword lists. It was time consuming, but it was worth it, because after one month, I had already increased my results. In fact I had tripled my results! The great thing about this, is that once you have invested the time in creating your money stream, that one needs very little time from you again. You just go back to your ads and verify that you are converting well, and make adjustments if they are not.
The cool thing is, if you follow the steps for each niche that you are promoting, you will get a new income stream that will keep working for you. So the time invested is never wasted, because you find yourself getting more and more income from the ads you set up.

So what is this program?
Alright, I will tell you, the ebook I purchased was Adwords Miracle. I highly recommend it to anyone who has been struggling to find a way to bring consisent cashflow from affiliate programs. I do have one warning to you about the Adwards Miracle. DO NOT PURCHASE IT IF YOU DO NOT INTEND TO FOLLOW THROUGH AND ACTUALLY WORK THE SYSTEM PRESENTED. It will be a time consuming process. You will be doing keyword research consistently. You will be narrowing down keyword phrases to get the tightest lists possible for each ad group you will be creating. All of this takes time, and you should not spend a dime on the ebook if you are not going to spend that time doing what the author suggests.

Here it is to save the day!
One thing I did find that has saved me hours and hours of time with my keyword research is a program I purchased in July of 2006. It has caused me to awaken the Adwords monster inside me and now I can spit out 3 or 4 ad groups in under fifteen minutes. I start with a keyword list that the program has researched for me. I remove the 5 words or greater phrases from the list with one click. With another click I sort it by number of words, alphabetically, and whether it contains a number at the beginning. The next step lets me delete any keyword phrases that contain a specific term, like erotic or gambling (unless you are working in those niches…) so that my keywords are not targeting the wrong audience. Then I use the handy filtering tools to break highly targeted keyword phrases out into their own lists. Once I have the 5 or six lists I am going to place ads with, I log in to Adwords, and I use the tool that lets the software automatically type all of the ad text into the Adwords form. That way, if you are using the same ad for multiple ad groups, you can get it done in seconds. And less of a chance of making a typo.

The Suspense Is Killing Me! What Is This Tool?
The buzz for this tool has been low key, because the people who are using it do NOT want everyone to know about it and compete with them in the Adwords arena. I personally think that if you are going to get worried about competition, then you shouldn’t be in the marketplace to begin with. I feel that those who are making money will continue to make money, because they will be expanding into new niches all of the time. So there will be some people who will be angry for me telling you about Keyword Companion, but I don’t care. Since they have relaunched this tool, it has been updated and upgraded so that it actually performs more functions than I even know how to use yet. I am in the process of using the tutorials for the new version so that I can use my affiliate selling to increase my list at the same time. I highly recommend you get Keyword Companion even if you don’t get Adwords Miracle, because there are uses for Keyword Companion that go far beyond Adwords advertising.

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Anchored Text Links used in this article:

Keyword Companion – http://michealsavoie.com/presents/kwc

Adwords Miracle – http://michealsavoie.com/presents/AdwordsMiracle

Clickbank – http://michealsavoie.com/presents/clickbank

Low Stress Income – http://www.michealsavoie.com/presents/lowstress

If you want to use this article on your website or in your newletter, you may do so, but you must include the about box including this message.

Micheal Savoie is currently promoting the Viral Attitudes Seminar Series that will begin in the Spring of 2007. You can sign up for his newsletter to be notified of the dates and locations of the Viral Attitudes Seminars when they become available. Just go to http://viralattitudes.info/notify/ and fill out the form.
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I was spending a good portion of my day sorting through keyword lists to find the keyword phrases I was going to use for my Google Adwords Campaigns. You see, if you target the right keywords, the actual cost per click is very low, and you can get a lot of traffic for much less money up front.

I am sure you have seen Brad and Andy’s Going Natural videos, and it shows how they managed to bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from search engine traffic alone. Well how do you get search engine traffic that can make you that kind of money? Optimization. It has become a buzzword in the Internet Marketing industry for the last 4 or 5 years, and Google has done their darnedest to shake up the meaning of search engine optimization (SEO) . After all, there was a time when all you had to do to be number 1 on the search engines was use the keyword phrase enough times on your webpage, and you were a shoe in. In fact an entire industry blossomed of people who could create a webpage full of affiliate links and no actual content that was merely a whole lot of keywords.

Google has now decided that these types of webpages do not serve their customers (the people who search) and has booted all of them off the search engine. Can you imagine how people felt after they had spent their hard-earned dollars on these web pages?

What does this mean to us? We are now in an era where we have to dance around the landmines that SEO of the past has been telling us. We need to be placing our links on link directories and on websites that have similar content to our keywords. We need to make each of our landing pages be as optimized as possible for the keywords that a search engine user has just typed into the search engine. It means we need more pages, more disk space on our hosting accounts and more places to place our links.

In short, the answer is to develop a routine of finding out what keyword phrases are the most popular, creating an optimized page for that keyword, and then placing links to that page on link directories.

So in the long run your traffic will increase if you do these things consistently. I have a website that I have been testing this out on, and it has steadily gained visitors over the last few months, so I know that it works. The problem is while you are waiting for the traffic to pick up from the search engines, what do you do? One of the things that I do, it place Adwords ads for some of the keywords that I have already researched, so that I am getting traffic immediately. This helps to develop the income quickly, and reduces the money I am spending on my website. Of course, Adwords is not cheap, so I also use traffic exchanges, and safelist ads. At least the name of the website is getting around, making the site more popular and helping with word of mouth advertising.

If you take anything from this article, remember that what works for you today can be changed at the whim of the search engines. You should never put all of your traffic reliance on any one source. And link directories are vitally important to your plan of action. And if you set your website up to gather opt-in subscribers, you will have a resource that will outlive your website pagerank, because you can always send your list a message to get them back to your website.

If you need a tool to help you with all aspects of what we just discussed:
http://michealsavoie.com/presents/kwc

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Micheal Savoie operates www.traf-x.info an eBay and clickbank tools website. SOme of his other websites include: www.traf-x.biz hosting, www.traf-x.com Traffic Exchange, www.citrushillslodge.com travel website, as well as www.yourdirectorywebsite.info and www.publicdomainprowler.net among dozens more.
Micheal is setting up a series of Viral Attitudes Seminars beginning in the spring of 2007. If you would like to be notified of the dates and locations of these seminars, visit this link and you will be alerted when the dates are set.
http://viralattitudes.info/notify/index.html