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I am a firm believer in continued education. This includes the Internet Marketing field BUT do you really need a coach or a mentor?

Before I answer that question let me first tell you that I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on coaching from people like Michael Cheney, Mark Hendricks, Sterling Valentine, Mike Filsaime, Alan Bechtold and a few others. So, I am speaking from experience.

In my case it was money well spent because I have earned a lot more back then I spent.

That doesn’t mean that coaching would be right for you. How much you get out of coaching will depend a lot on YOU!

• It depends on what your expectations are.
• What level of marketing you are at.
• How well you relate to your coach.
• How much you work at it.
• And believe it or not how much you BELIEVE in the program will make a big difference.

Your Expectations – Your expectations must match your level of knowledge. You can’t go into an advanced coaching program, not knowing anything, and expect to be profiting next week. Your coaching program needs to reflect your level of experience and move you on to the next level.

If you are a true beginner you need to find coaching that will take you by the hand and get you going. It isn’t going to do you any good to learn advance strategies until you know how to take the actions to implement them.

If you are just starting out I would recommend for coaching that you find a coaching program with a low price point that lasts 3 to 6 months. This will be long enough for you to learn a ton of information, but more importantly, to put it into action while you are still in the coaching program. By taking this action if you have any problems you should be able to ask your coach and by all means if you have a problem ask your coach, that is what they are there for.

Relating to Your Coach - Before you join any coaching program check out the person or people running it, sign up to their list(s), read their blog(s) and review their products and sites. Make sure that your prospective coach is some one that you can relate to, by this is should be someone that you respect, admire, has the same ethical view point as you and is further along in the process then you are.

Remember your coach doesn’t need to be a “Guru” but they do need to know enough to move you up to the next level.

How Much You Work At It – That’s right I said that dirty four letter word, “Work” there is no magic button that will take you from nothing to rich, you have to put in the time and effort to succeed at anything.

In your coaching program you will be given assignments or at least you should be given assignments and if you don’t do the assignments you will never learn. If you are given an assignment do just do it, over do it! If you are asked to create a squeeze page create 3 squeeze pages and decide which one fulfills the requirements of the assignment the best. Just like with most things in life the more you put into it the more you get back.

Believe – Your mental approach to coaching is more important than any other aspect. You must believe you are going to get the results that you set up in your expectations.

If you think you will earn $5,000 by the end of the coaching program then you need to BELIEVE that you will have $5,000 by the end of the coaching program and take all the steps to achieve it. If you don’t truly believe then you are better off not spending the money on that coaching.

This also applies to the hype that you hear from the coach when you are signing up. If the coach tells you that you will have a five figure income per month at the end of the coaching then you need to believe that. If you don’t believe what they are telling you, and I mean believe 100% of what they say, think twice before you spend the money on coaching.

It also helps if you understand what type of student you are.

The Natural
The naturals are people that can just read the book and have it all down pat and know everything in the book with just one reading. The naturals are usually self motivators and don’t need a lot of supervision or hand holding as long as the information is available. This is a very rare category but if you are in this category then a home study course is good for you and you don’t need the hand holding you get with a coach.

The Repeater
Repeaters are people that read the book but won’t absorb the information until they read the book again. If the repeaters are self motivated they will read the information again but a lot of them won’t do so unless they are motivated by some outside force, such as a coach or a teacher. If you are some one that needs to go over the material multiple times (like me) but won’t do it on your own then a coach is a good thing. If you will review the information until you understand it without any outside forces urging you to, then again a good home study course should get you started.

The Almost There
These are people that will read the book and understand most of the concept that is being presented but will need some kind of one on one interaction to get them to comprehend the entire process. The almost theres are trying to grasp the information to the best of their ability but either the way the information is presented or written leaves them missing one dot in the connect the dot drawing of success. By simply asking a question they have find that extra dot and comprehend the entire process. If you are an almost there you want to have a coach that you have access to.

The Know It All
Know it alls won’t read the book because they think they know it all already. They are either already wealthy people or they are going no where. This is where a very high price coaching program might, I will repeat might, get them motivated enough to study and take action. But a vast majority of them will say they already knew that and it doesn’t work. And they do this without ever learning the information or taking action on it. If you are a know it all don’t spend your money on coaching, but then you already knew that ?

The Co-Dependant
Co-dependant people won’t read the book until they have to. These are people that must have a structured system with a coach or teacher that will hold them accountable for learning the material.

There are a lot of people like this and it is actually fine if you realize that you fall into this category. If you do fall into this category and have a tendency to put everything off until the last minute you need to be in a program that will get you going. You could also get set up with an accountability partner as I described in the Make Money Online By Staying Focused post.

Now let’s talk about the possible coaching program.

Beginner Marketers
If you are a beginner I suggest a low cost coaching program that is mostly a home study course. One I can recommend is Mark Hendricks internet success system. It is low cost to get the course and it covers everything you need to know to get started. It is twelve courses that cover everything from mindset, copywriting, website mechanics, upsells, joint ventures and more. It comes in both pdf and audio formats for a one time price. If you have questions you can get them answered on the teleconference calls lunch with Mark Hendricks this is a great place to start if you are serious about learning what you need to know.

Intermediate Marketers
If you are an intermediate marketer you probably don’t need a high end coaching program yet. Let me give you my definition of an intermediate marketer. This is a person that has a website up and is making some money but not enough to live on.

In this situation you want to find a coach that can take you the next step and show you how to maximize your online income. In my case I was lucky enough to get in to a coaching program with Michael Cheney and Sterling Valentine but there are a lot of marketers out there that can help you get ahead by looking at what you know and giving you the one key element that you are missing.

The best place to find coaches like this is at events like JV Alert Live, Big Seminar and many, many more. These types of group coaching programs will usually be for a set period of time like three months and will usually cost you from $1500 to $5000 for the program or they might have a monthly program with a price range from $100 to $500 per month.

Advanced Marketers
Advanced marketers are marketers that are making enough money online to live comfortably. In this case you have a good grasp on the internet marketing systems but you might be able to use some help in expanding or applying advance techniques. This is where the high end coaching programs come in to play. These programs can cost you up to $10,000 per month but if you are in the right position you can definitely profit from this cost.

I, myself, have never been part of one of these programs, yet, but I do personally know a number of people who have gone through the programs and I have seen their income soar.

I have also seen beginner marketers fork over the bucks for this type of coaching and the only thing they got back from it was an emptier wallet. I not saying they didn’t learn anything but you have to progress in steps.

I seriously doubt there is anybody that thinks you can go from pedestrian to world class grand prix race driver in one step. The same is true for internet marketing, you have to take the steps and you have to be ready to take the next step instead of trying to leap to the end.

Always keep the end in sight but make sure you know the steps it takes to reach that goal and take those steps and only those steps that move you toward your goal.

This is response to a comment on the Tell Me What You Want post.

The main request was how to get the products that you already have on your hard drive on to the internet.

This takes a number of things such as:

• Unzipping the product
• Editing the sales page
• Accepting payments
• Providing the download links
• FTP the information to the site

And quite frankly to type out all this information is a fairly big job.

Instead what I did was create a video of me taking a master resale rights product and getting it online.

In the video I only used free tools for all the editing and other purposes, so that any one that watches the video can do exactly what I did.

You can watch as I take the product from the downloaded package to the final version on my site in almost real time (I did pause the recording while it uploaded and while I was sneezing) it took under 25 minutes to:

• Unzip the product
• Edit the sales page
• Edit the thank you page
• Create an encrypted payment button through PayPal
• FTP the information to the site

Yes, I am probably a little faster than someone that hasn’t done this before but still it is under a half an hour to get a product from download to finished sales page on my site. If it take you twice as long then you will only spend an hour at it.

Think about it how many products do you have on your hard drive that you could be selling right now?

I recorded this video at 800 x 600 pixels then I realized that it would be too big to fit into this area that I have on this blog so I changed it to 480 x 360 but I didn’t like the way that looked, it was too hard to read. So as a final compromise I published it at 640 x 480 and put it on a different page at here at the site.

You can see it by clicking the link below (it will open in a new window)

Resale Rights Online Video

Please remember that this video is unscripted and not a product quality video. It is just me taking a product, editing it, putting a payment button on it and uploading it to my site, while I talk to myself. It isn’t edited, except for a zoom in and it was paused during the FTP upload because my internet connection is not that fast. You will even hear me say a file is 20 Gig when it is only 20 Meg in size and you will hear me having trouble saying PDF Profitlock. But it does provide all the information you need to get a resale rights product or a master resale rights product on your site and for sale all in under 30 minutes.

This isn’t the best way to sell a product. There a numerous other things you should take into account when you put a product up for sale on the internet but this is a starting step that will hopefully get you to take some action and get your products out there.

Some of the extra things that you should do that aren’t done on the video are:

Repackage the download so that it tells them it came from your site. You can see my post, Using Your Products To Create Website Traffic that will give you a little more information on repackaging the product.

You should have some method of getting the customer on your list. You can do this by offering a newsletter that covers a related topic to the product.

You should be offering an upsell or affiliate products or your own products on the download page. These products should be related to the one that was purchased from you.

You should also think about actually getting a script to handle the payment processing and the download areas.

There are other things you need to get your product online like a website and if you need help with things like a domain name, hosting, etc. then I suggest you try my Marketing Beginners site. It is free to sign up and there are a ton of videos that will get you started.

This is another requested post from the Tell Me What You Want comment section.

The terms tag and keyword are quite often used in the same context but they have different purposes.

Keywords are individual words or phrases that describe your page and that you are trying to get indexed and placed in the search engines.

Tags are basically categories that describe your page and used mostly to get your web page found on Social Bookmarking sites, which work like directories instead of a search engine.

What’s the difference between a search engine and a directory (Social Bookmarking site)?

The difference is how the information is obtained and delivered to the end user.

In a search engine there is an algorithm that reads the page and tries to decipher how relevant the page is to the keywords that you are searching for. The more the algorithm thinks the page is relevant the higher weight is places on the page and the higher the page turns up in the results.

Directories work with categories (tags) when you do a search it looks for a category that matches your search and then selects all the sites in that category. Once all the sites are selected either an algorithm, of sorts, is run on the site in that category, they are given weight and then displayed or they are shown by some other standard, such as the number of votes they received by being bookmarked or just by the date they were entered.

It is a subtle distinction and if done right your site should turn up in both searches but since I am a SEO guy I usually concentrate on my keywords where as a Web 2.0 guy would concentrate on the tags.

The question was specifically about keywords and tag in blogs now before I go into any details here I want make sure you know that I have only used Wordpress to create blogs and I am not familiar with any other blogging platform.

One of the things you do when you create a blog is create categories that you post to. These categories should be keywords and since they are categories they usually end up being tags as well. The main purpose of the categories is so that the viewers can navigate your blog easier.

The added advantage is that the categories will add your keywords to your post URL if you have you blog set up to do a mod rewrite. You set this the admin area under options – permalinks select custom and add

/%category%/%postname%

This will put your category and the title of your post in the URL. (You will have to upload the .htaccess file to your site but you have instructions on how to create that on the permalink page.)

The next thing is you want to do is use your keywords in your title for your post. This does a couple of things the most important of which is to get your keywords in your title tag for the page that displays the post. You have seen from my previous posts that this is important for search engine optimization.

Since most wordpress themes also put the title of your posts in the H2 tag this also helps with your optimization.

You also want to make sure you use your keywords in the content of your post. Don’t over do it, yes you can have problems with the search engines by using your keywords too often but more importantly you will usually loose your reader before that happens. When you try to force in the keywords you end up with a page that annoys a human. Just use your keywords where they would naturally appear but try to use them in both singular and plural. Believe or not with all the technology in search engines they still consider the singular and plural different words.

Use your keywords as your Blog Title. Again you can set this in the admin section under options – general. The Blog title goes into the title tag for every page (at least in most themes) and this will get your keywords where you want them. Remember depending on the theme you are using these might also turn up in the header section of your site so you will have to decide which is more important to you SEO or site appearance. Or you can edit the theme and put in a graphic in the header or just different text in the header. This will require a little HTML and CSS knowledge. If you don’t know HTML or CSS you can hire some one to do this for you from places like RentaCoder.

OK, that covers the search engine optimization part of tags and keywords and will help with your search engine rankings but all of the above won’t help you in most Social Bookmarking sites. This is where your tags come into play.

The purpose of tags in social bookmarking sites is to create categories where like minded people interested in the same topics can share information and interesting web pages.

For this reason you want your tags to be something that describes your post. For example for this post I would use the tags:

• Tagging
• Keywords
• SEO
• Search Engine Optimization

Because that is what this post is about.

Now to cover your post title and tags. Having the tag in the post title for social bookmaking isn’t as important as having a title that people will respond to.

Remember in most social bookmarking sites when you are show the sites in the categories you are shown either the title of the post or the title that was entered when the post was first submitted to the site and a brief blurb or comment.

In these cases the title works a lot like a headline on a sales page. If you don’t get the viewers attention they just skim by you and don’t go to your post and if they don’t go to your post and read your post then there is no way they are going to like your post.

Since I am creating this post for some one that goes by the name, “The Anti Hype” I will add this. You don’t have to hype your title but if it is about the content of your post then it will have better drawing power.

Take this post, my title for the post is “Tag or Keyword, Which is it? Do they affect SEO?” It’s not hype but for people looking for information on tag, keyword, SEO it has that in the title and it will get their attention and possibly get them to read this post. Isn’t that the main purpose of creating these posts to have other people read them?

This is another post from a Tell Me What You Want comment.

First let’s define what a retail site is.

A retail site is a site that sells numerous products from the site and usually has a shopping cart system to take the orders. The products can be digital but most of the time they are physical products that need to be delivered. Amazon.com is probably one of the best examples of a retail website.

Websites for retail stores have two basic types - hand coded where every page is made by somebody and uploaded to the site and dynamic where a script feeds the information from a database to create the site.

The resultant pages should have the same features when it come to on page Search Engine Optimization.

First you want to break down your products into categories but these categories should be keywords that you are using.

For example if you are selling pet supplies you would probably want general categories of:

• Dog Supplies
• Cat Supplies
• Fish Supplies
• Other Supplies

This will not only be the category but the first part of your title tag for the product.

Once you have your general categories you would then need to break them down to sub-categories.

Dog Supplies

• Dog Collars
• Dog Leashes
• Dog Houses
• Dog Bowls

Then in each category you will have your products. The title tag for the product page should be a chain of categories ending in either a description of the product or the model identification for the product. Whether you use a description or a model number depends on the product for example when you are dealing with electronics people search for specific model numbers. Here is an example of what a title tag should look like for a digital camera.

Electronics – Digital Camera – Sony DSCS 730

Electronics and Digital Camera are both categories on the website with digital camera being a sub-category. You could take this a step further and add sub-categories under digital camera for still and video.

Remember you want your title tag to be clear, keyword related and concise. Google only reads the first 65 characters of your title tag so you want to get all your keywords in before you reach their limit.

Now for some products you will definitely want to use a description of the product instead of an item number. Let’s go back to the pet supplies; if I was going to the search engine to look for a spike leather collar for my dog I would search something like this, “leather spike dog collar”. I wouldn’t know an item number for it. So your product page title should look something like this:

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar

As you can see, that tag would fulfill my search rather well.

Do note that I don’t have the domain name in either of these title tags. Unless your domain name has keywords in it (which I highly recommend) then it won’t help you from an SEO stand point. If you do want to have your domain name included in the title tag and it has no keywords in it put it at the end of the tag so that it doesn’t take away from the 65 characters that Google reads.

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar – From the Curiosity Shop

Also notice that I have dashes between the categories. In recent reports I have read that if you put a pipe instead of a dash it does better for SEO. I haven’t personally tested this yet so I can’t vouch for the effectiveness. But you could try it.

Dog Supplies | Dog Collars | Spiked Leather Collar | From the Curiosity Shop

Then end product page should also have as much content as you can provide about the product on the page and have your keywords worked into the description. Don’t over use them or force them, they should flow naturally because you are describing the item and the item should fit those keywords. If your item doesn’t match your keywords then you are using the wrong keywords.

The next items don’t have the impact of the title tag but every little bit helps.

You page names should also contain your keywords but make sure you put a hyphen or underscore between the words. For the main domain name the search engines will actually break out the individual words but for sub-folders and page names they don’t seem to do this.

Instead of a URL that looks like this:

http://www.site.com/dogcollars/spikedleathercollar.html

It should look like this:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

If you have an image of the product on the product page make sure you use the alt tag to describe the product and name the image something that describes it. For example the image for the spiked leather collar could be name spiked-leather-dog-collar.jpg. This helps if some one does an image search.

It also helps if you can put the product description at the top of the page in an H1 tag. If you don’t like the way the H1 tags look on your page then use a CSS style to make them look the way you want.

Having the content on the product page makes the page more relevant for the search engines. This is why sites like Amazon.com let customers post their comments and reviews for the product on the product page.

The technique described above is a great way to work the “long tail” keywords for a retail website and if your site is hand coded it is fairly easy to implement but most retail websites are scripted.

Most of the big retailers have custom made scripts and they can have their programmers integrate these techniques without much problem. But if you aren’t that big look for a script that will do this:

• You want to be able to make categories and sub-categories
• You want script that will dynamically create the title tags for you but you have some control over what goes in the title tag.
• You want a script that will let you configure the layout of the product page, including changing the way the item name is coded so that you can make it a H1 tag
• You want a script that creates real URL’s instead of just coded links. I will explain this one:

Some scripts use product id numbers to create pages on the fly and you end up with a URL that looks something like this.

http://www.site.com/products.php?id=983794

You don’t want your URL to look like that you want it to contain your keywords. This is usually done with something call a mod rewrite that will take the link above and make it:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

And this will be a valid URL when ever some one comes to your site. This blog works the same way.

But remember all of this is just to get them to your site. Once there you have to convert them and a key factor in that is how easy it is to use your site. If a possible customer comes to your site and gets confused they will probably leave without purchasing.

I recommend a book by Steve Krug called, “Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” You can pick it up at Amazon.com of course.