Researched and written by Internet marketing consultant Michael Campbell and dubbed the “Ultimate Heatmap“, this amazing report shows with screenshots where on your page to place your ads for maximum clicks and hence maximum income. Michael spent his money and time to perform this research, gather the data and write up the results and has generously provided this amazing report for free on his blog.

After reading through, we made just one little change with one of our ads on Gizmos for Geeks, and found an immediate increase in the CTR on that block that went from 0.5% to over 1.0%. That’s essentially double and nothing to sneeze at.

Please also check out Allen’s business, Reboot Fulfillment, which will take your info product and turn it into a printed book, DVD and/or CD. Data has shown repeatedly that you can easily turn your ebook or other digital download into a physical upsell that is almost purely profit, so it’s worth checking out.

I wrote a guest post over at Famous Bloggers on why we decided to toss out OpenX, what we chose and why. It’s broken down into easy-to-digest lists of pros and cons. Enjoy!

Just in case you’ve decided to give up on your ‘untethered dream’ and re-enter the corporate world, then you could pick a worse place to work than Google. But getting hired by the big G isn’t exactly a piece of cake.

Googler Don Dodge wrote a detailed blog post on the hiring process, including what to expect before, during and after the interview.

Does your ClickBank account look like this image? Are you bleeding those few hard-earned dollars away bit by bit. If so, then your account is dormant. No activity after 90 days leads to dormancy and then fees go up the longer it stays that way (up to $15/month after a year of inactivity).

Well here’s an easy way to solve that problem, while making a little additional income in affiliate revenues, although that’s not the important part. The important part is getting your account out of dormancy.

ClickBank for Newbies, written by Harvey Segal (Mr ClickBank) is a quick easy read, written without hype and not littered with annoying links.

And the cost of this book ?

It’s free !

And it ends with an amazing idea for making you money from the book itself.
So don’t quit ClickBank or affiliate marketing just yet. Rush and get this book now.

By the way, don’t be fooled by the title. Many ClickBank veterans will learn from this book.

About Harvey Segal
I’ve been reading Harvey’s SuperTips newsletter for years now and there are 2 great things about it: 1. it’s not a daily annoying sell someone-else’s-stuff type of newsletter and 2. it’s really comes with tips, useful marketing and traffic information. I still learn valuable information from Harvey to this day.

Wow, time does fly by when you’re <insert verb here>. Yup, so you really need to be on a plan/schedule. Boy am I glad I did. So am I on schedule? More or less. Ok, honestly, less. The big honking lesson is that I definitely underestimated how long tasks would/will take.

Anyone who ever says just a few clicks will get you to ‘done’ is exaggerating. Not lying, because in all likelihood they’ve done it a hundred times and know what it takes to perform a few clicks confidently knowing that they’ve done it correctly.

So what did I do in the past few days (Tue-Thur)? Well, I stood up a site, a WordPress blog actually, wrestled with my domain registrar a bit (but they, NameCheap, are great and totally helped me out), wrote a sales letter, created a mailing list (using Aweber), put together a bunch of bonuses to give away to my mail list, and wrote a wicked cool little htaccess file that I’m very proud of (I’ll leak that one later )!

Whew! Actually, I’m pretty happy to have written all of that down, because it demonstrates that I’ve been working hard and accomplishing tasks. Sure, not as quickly as I would have wished, but it’s still progress.

And there is a bright side – there’s a fair amount of this material that I can replicate faster the next time I put together a similar program/site. I just need to document ASAP.

Day 5, here I come!

Here’s what we learned, which you can use in many ways when looking for a new VA:

1. Know what you need going in. Estimate exactly what you want your VA to do and estimate how long it will take. Knowing what you want them to do will help in picking the right VA for you. Many VA companies (like GetFriday) are best doing relatively simple tasks, like making phone calls, booking appointments, and basic Web research. We found out the hard way that they’re not exactly programmers or sys admins, although GF did have some of those on staff.

   Estimate how long a task will take and then up it by a factor of at least 1.5 (could be 10x depending on the complexity of the task). Fact is you’re good at what you do because you do it all the time and have experience at it. A newbie isn’t going to get it right away.

2. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time either writing a detailed e-mail (or recording a video) of the task at hand. Be too vague and you will bear the consequences! Don’t fret if you have to send follow-up e-mails.
3. Be firm with them. You are after all paying them for a service; they should get it right. If they’re pushing back on you, push back or fire them.
4. Ensure that their English is good. Interview your VA first. If you don’t wish to do this over the phone or a VoIP service like Skype, exchange a few e-mails with them. [This point could arguably the #1 one in this list.]
5. Speaking of English, India isn’t the only place you can look for help. Luckily for us Yanks, English is a growing language and everyone wants to know what crazy stuff we’re writing about the Internet and saying in YouTube videos. So that means you can easily look for help in places like Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Philippines.
6. Don’t overlook homegrown or VAs in other Western countries like Canada and the UK. The economy being what it is, not to mention more people wanting to work from home on their computers means there are lots of opportunities for folks who wish to get a VA.

That’s it. Please add your own thoughts if you’ve had experience with a VA. While it wasn’t perfect, we learned a great deal and have used other VAs since because in the end a going concern can’t function without some sort of help, and a VA is a great way to get that help without the cost, overhead and commitment of a full-time employee.

If you’re running a blog, that is based on WordPress for example, then you can use the power of Google search on your site. While Google has decent documentation for how to do this generally, there don’t have specific docs on how to do this on a blog. Canadian blogger Maki who runs Dosh Dosh has put together a pretty thorough tutorial with screenshots that walks you through the process.

About the only thing we would emphasize some more in his tutorial is embedding the search box code in your site. This is the code that creates the search box and button.

You may also be interested in the Google Custom Search WordPress plugin. It redirects all searches to GCS and automatically creates a new search results page in WP. Our advice is to take the time to learn about GCS and create everything yourself. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. The plugin is nice, but doesn’t allow for easy customization.

We ended up picking IntenseDebate, which by the way is made by the same company (Automattic) that produces WordPress. We won’t go into all the reasons why we picked ID, because your reasons will end up being different from ours and it’ll be worth the time to research them properly and understand what they can do.

Instead, here are some useful references that we used to help us decide. Good luck.

1. IntenseDebate vs Disqus
2. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
3. BackType’s Co-opetition with Disqus, IntenseDebate

And if those aren’t enough to help you decide, then you can hit up Google to find additional discussions. How apt.

It’s pretty simple what this says – plan for seasonal events. Traditional vendors do it, and so should you.

It’s pretty simple what this says – plan for seasonal events. Traditional vendors do it, and so should you.