For a moment I thought somebody had hacked into my sales system and changed the pricing on one of my products to get it cheap…grrr..but that wasn’t it.

No, there was a note in the PayPal comment box promoting a product launch. I think they were trying to get JV partners.

Now, what you’re meant to think here is that these people are just paying you 10 cents to get your attention. But in fact, there is something a little more manipulative going on.

Gifts like this – in fact, any promotional gifts – exploit the psychological expectation of reciprocity that almost all human beings have.

What does that mean in simple language? It means that if somebody gives you something, you have a deep – almost instinctive – feeling that you should give them something back. And if you don’t reciprocate because you don’t have anything to give them, you feel that YOU OWE THEM.

Like any kind of debt, this is an uncomfortable feeling. In most cases, you will try to get rid of it by repaying them in some way, either with a gift or by doing something that you think they will like.

This is why we feel so bad when somebody unexpectedly gives us a gift at Christmas and we don’t have anything for them.

Marketers play on this to get us to buy stuff. You receive a gift (whether it’s a free pen in the mail from Cancer Research or a free ebook you download from somebody’s site) – you feel you owe them – so you are more likely to buy whatever they are selling.

And this applies whether or not you liked or wanted the gift. You might even HATE the gift. It doesn’t matter. Most people will still feel bad if they cannot give something back.

I’m saying ‘you’ for the recipient here, but of course YOU are the marketer as well. You are probably already benefiting from this human response by giving something away for free on many of your sites. But with the free download, we are just offering a gift that people can take if they want. We are not giving them something whether they want it or not, like my 10 cent emailer did.

Have you ever thought about doing something like that? You could. You only have to click on marketers’ Buy Now buttons to see their PayPal emails, then send money. These guys either did it with Mass Pay or as a gift in PayPal, because I wasn’t charged a fee.

Would you think it’s worth trying for some product launches? Of course, you would need to check PayPal’s terms. But if they are OK with it, would you do it? Or is it too sneaky…or too risky financially?

Vote now (you can pick up to three options):

P.S. You may be wondering if I clicked on the link in that email and joined their launch. The answer is no, but I did have that nasty indebted feeling…

…so I refunded the payment, and sent them a link to MY site in the comment box

Like most marketers, I try to stay up to date on developments in SEO, especially when they relate to Google.

One piece of information that has come out of the Panda update from earlier this year is that it is now very important to have a low ‘bounce rate’.

In other words, the Google bots know how long visitors stay on your site (because they track them) – and it matters. It seems clear that if you can keep your visitors entertained for longer, you will be rewarded with higher search engine rankings – at least in Google.

Gone are the days when all we wanted was for a visitor to click on an Adsense ad and disappear as fast as possible! Now, we actually want them to READ our content first.

So what does all of this mean for you as a user of PLR articles?

It means that you should be looking for PLR articles that are LONGER and BETTER QUALITY than the average PLR, right? Because that is what is going to keep your visitors on your site.

And so I am making sure that I provide exactly that: PLR articles that are longer and better quality than many others.

Most of my articles are over 500 words. Some are considerably longer.

What is more, you can easily make them even longer and make them unique at the same time, by adding a few more words into each sentence.

Check out all my current packs at Flamillion PLR.

So here goes…

I had to laugh today. I received an email from GetResponse headed “How to avoid the spam folder”. And guess where it was?

Yes…in my spam folder.

I have two accounts right now, but I was thinking of closing one. I think I will be sticking with AWeber.

They mention one thing that is quite useful and not everybody knows about it. That is to check the domains that you are linking to at Blacklist Alert.

You need to check the domain of every link that is included in your email, and if you are using redirects to affiliate programs, also check the final destination URL. If any of them are on the blacklist, many email providers will automatically block your email.

This can be pretty serious. I had this happen to my main PLR site once and it was stopping customers from receiving their download links. I had to spend a lot of time re-sending download links and probably lost some customers too.

It turned out to be caused by another user of my shared hosting account who was spamming. Hostgator closed the spammer’s account and I had to apply for the IP to be cleared on the blacklisting sites. That takes time but it’s worth it.

Click here to visit Kickstart PLR now

Kickstart PLR Bonus

Here it is in a nutshell: if you join via my link you get to choose any free product that you want from Flamillion PLR.

You’ll find that some of Martin’s article packs are in the same niches as some of mine, for example back pain and diabetes from the packs that are available right now*. So you might want to pick one of those as your bonus pack, to give you extra articles to build out your site in that niche.

Or if you prefer to choose one of the ebooks or newsletter packs from my site, that’s fine too.

Just email me with the date and time that you joined, plus your name of course, and let me know what you would like for your Kickstart PLR bonus. You can email me at: info (at) the-success-project .com
(substitute @ for (at) and remove spaces)

Click here to visit Kickstart PLR now

*There’s a new pack uploaded at Kickstart PLR every10 days, and at the same time a current one is removed, so there may be different niche article packs available at the time that you join.

Click here to visit Kickstart PLR

Here’s why.

First, after being a member of several PLR article membership sites in the past, I always used to feel they were too likely to sacrifice quality for quantity.

To attract more members, they tried to cover every niche under the sun. They competed to offer the most articles for the cheapest monthly fee … and you can guess what the result was: the quality dropped like a stone.

Of course, we don’t want huge fees. But I’d rather have a small number of good quality articles than 1000 useless ones, and I hope you feel the same.

So from time to time I have considered setting up a membership site that offers truly high quality articles. You’d get 30 or 40 top quality articles every month … articles that you could truly use.

But … I like my freedom. I like to be able to disappear for a week or two to places where there’s no WiFi and only a patchy phone signal. So I prefer not to commit myself to a certain amount of writing every month.

And now I’m pleased I didn’t, because Martin Avis has come up with a PLR membership site that is exactly what I would have liked to create, and more.

Click here to visit Kickstart PLR

More about this site …

Martin is running this service with his wife Delia. They are producing top quality articles every month with a very smooth delivery pattern. I’ve met Martin several times at the London lunches that he organizes for internet marketers in the UK, and I know that he has personal expertise in many of the subjects on the list.

He is also a marketer of high integrity who has a lot to teach. And what’s more, he likes creating software and has produced some useful tools for article marketers that you get for free when you join. That’s where he’s gone the extra mile and given you more than I could have.

One of the tools is a ‘theme surveyor’ which pulls up LSI keywords related to your main keyword. This is great for rewriting because you will find not only synonyms but other words commonly used in that niche that can spark ideas or just help to make your article unique.

There is also a tool that converts TXT files to HTML code for static web pages, and several pieces of software that will help you rewrite your articles or analyze the competition.

All in all, Martin has gone the extra mile here and provided amazing quality while still managing to price the membership within everybody’s reach. That’s why it gets 5 stars from me in this Kickstart PLR review. I’m even offering a Kickstart PLR bonus through another post on this blog.

Click here to visit Kickstart PLR now

I hope you’ll find they still have room for you …

Every 2 days until December 23rd I am giving away a PLR item of some kind. They’re not all going to be the same and each one will only be available for 2 days.

So what do you need to do to get these gifts? Just sign up to my main PLR subscriber list and you will start to receive the emails. Just go here and enter your details:

Free PLR

Remember to enter an email that you check often, because each link will only work for 2 days!

(You get free weight loss articles when you sign up, too.)

Hostgator Discount Link

The promotion starts at 12.00 midnight CST on Friday, November 26th. For most of the day you get 50% off your first payment on ALL new Hostgator accounts …

but even better …

… from 5.00 am to 9.00 am CST you get a MASSIVE 80% off (while supplies last – numbers are limited).

Then for the rest of the day it goes back to 50% (still an amazing deal).

That means if you order a 3-year hosting deal at the right time (see below), you get 80% off the whole 3 years! You could actually get 3 years of hosting for just $35.64 TOTAL!

“SO WHAT TIME IS THAT IN MY TIME ZONE?”

If I have my time zones right, you get 80% off all Hostgator products at the following times:

3.00 am – 7.00 am Friday PST,
5.00 am – 9.00 am Friday CST,
6.00 am – 10.00 am Friday EST,
11.00 am – 3.00 pm Friday GMT (UK),
10.00 pm Friday – 2.00 am Saturday Australian Eastern time.

The rest of the day (midnight to midnight CST) you get 50% off.

So that is still a great deal if you can’t get online at the right time for the 80% discount.

Use this link tomorrow (Friday 26th) for up to 80% off, or any time for the regular Hostgator deals:

Hostgator Discount Link

MY RECOMMENDATION:

If you have been thinking of switching hosts or upgrading to a VPS or dedicated server, now is the time to do it.

I have a reseller account with Hostgator and they have been great … much better than the previous 3 hosts that I tried (even though one of them cost twice as much as Hostgator)!

They transferred all my files and sites from my old host so I didn’t have to spend hours of frustration moving my blogs. (Just ask and they will do this for you.)

All of my PLR sites are hosted with Hostgator, and I’ve had almost zero downtime. This is where most of my income comes from and I have no hesitation in trusting these income-producing sites to Hostgator.

So I use them, and I recommend them:

Hostgator Discount Link

I will get a small commission if you order through that link. I hope that’s OK with you!

You can watch the video without signing up … but if you sign up, you get to download your own copy with PLR rights. So you can upload it to your website or offer it to your subscribers for free, or even sell it.

Sign up here to download your own copy for your website:

Watch the video here:

Please don’t blame me for the typo on the opening screen! I didn’t make the video … as you might guess from the voice

This is the URL you need to get the addon:
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8090

I always had trouble replying because frankly, I thought most of the article spinning software on the market was useless. But I have now found one that passes the strict Rosie-Cottis-No-Nonsense-Articles test!

>>> In a hurry: go to Magic Article Rewriter now

To explain why this software is different, first let’s look at the output of a typical article spinner. This is a random sentence from an actual article found on a financial trading blog:

“Once you possess a reliable arranged of inventory trading principles it’s important to maintain them in mind.”

Uuh … what? Your eyes probably glazed over there, so try reading it again.

See how you have to really think about that to make any sense of it? Would you keep on reading through a whole article of that kind of stuff and then click on the link at the end? No? Nor will your website visitors.

I don’t know which spinner the writer used but you can certainly tell that he used one. His original sentence probably said something like this:

“Once you have a reliable set of stock trading rules it’s important to keep them in mind.”

Then the spinning software messed it up. Because of course “stock” and “inventory”, like “set” and “arranged”, are synonymous in some situations, but swapping them in this context makes no sense at all.

This doesn’t mean that spinning is a bad thing. If we were spinning an article in software that would actually let us choose the substitutes for the different words, we could produce plenty of acceptable versions, e.g.:

“When you have a successful set of stock trading rules it’s vital to bear them in mind.”

If it would also let us spin whole phrases, we could change “to keep them in mind” to “not to forget them” and a ton of other things.

So that is what I always wanted in a spinner. I wanted software that would:

1. offer synonyms to save me time, but

2. let me delete the ones that didn’t make sense in the context of my article, and

3. let me add synonyms that I thought of myself (phrases as well as words) AND

4. let me save my own synonyms in a custom dictionary so I could quickly select them again for my next article in the same niche.

And that is exactly what Magic Article Rewriter does. In my view it is the best article spinner if what you want is hundreds of unique articles that actually make sense. You can find it here:

Get Magic Article Writer – best article spinner

Note you have two options on that page: Rewriter alone, or Rewriter plus Submitter. I have the submitter but I don’t particularly recommend that. I use the Rewriter only, then I submit my spin-ready master to Unique Article Wizard for distribution. (You can copy your spin-ready master including token codes into all three boxes in UAW, and it will do the spinning.)

Anyway, that’s my take on the best article spinner situation.

4. Testimonials

Testimonials are almost always a good thing. Even better if there are photos, audio or video on the testimonials.

If customers mention their results from using the product it can be very convincing and may do great things for your conversions, but it may be in breach of FTC regulations so proceed at your own risk. You may consider that the FTC are more likely to go after the product vendor than a mere affiliate, but who knows. I’m talking here about testimonials that say “With this ebook I reversed my diabetes in X weeks” etc. Personally, that wouldn’t stop me promoting the product but I don’t live in the USA. And I still wouldn’t quote those testimonials on my own website, especially for health issues.

Sometimes testimonials don’t add anything and might even put off some buyers. On one of the diabetes product sales pages, a customer said how much he had liked the author’s ebook on acid reflux. As soon as I saw that I’m thinking, “Hold on, isn’t this guy supposed to be a diabetes expert? Looks like he’s just a hack writer after all … I could probably write the thing myself”

5. Commission

I almost didn’t bother to mention this because it’s so obvious, but check the commission percentage and what the price is, so you know roughly what you will get per sale. I’d look for at least $20 per sale.

6. How Many Products Can You Promote?

If all the products are very similar I wouldn’t promote more than one at a time. I would have one primary product that was promoted on my website and in the first autoresponder messages. Then I might switch to promoting a second product in the second half of an autoresponder series. That’s just to catch people who want to buy, but didn’t like the look of the first one for some reason of their own.

In addition you can promote any product that is very different from your primary product at any time (e.g. a diabetes recipe book as well as a method for reversing diabetes). You can promote this alongside your primary product because many people might want both.

If there are a lot of good products in different aspects of the niche (e.g. in the internet marketing niche) you could follow the sales funnel principle. You promote the cheapest one of your chosen products first and then gradually work up to the most expensive.

Don’t do this with products that are very similar, though. You don’t want your buyers to feel they have bought 6 versions of the same thing. Your ideal buyer should be happy when s/he has bought ALL of the products in your funnel because they complement each other perfectly.

7. Reviews

Assuming you now have a shortlist of 2-3 candidates for your primary product, you can ask the vendors for review copies. If you have a relevant website, you could send them a link to show them you are a genuine affiliate. That’s if you are happy to reveal your site.

If you get the ebooks, go through them imagining that you are a target customer. Even without knowing anything about the subject or putting the method to the test you will probably have a good idea of whether your buyers will feel they received good value. Here are some points to consider:

Is it well written?
How clear are the instructions?
How easy would it be to follow the method?
Does it require that you buy other things that are expensive?
Does it convey enthusiasm to keep people motivated?
Does it build trust so you believe it will actually work?

Note that we are not asking here whether the method actually does work – you’re not going to test it. It’s just whether the ebook builds enough trust that you would be willing to give it a try.

Put yourself in the place of the buyer who is looking for a solution. E.g. for a diabetes ‘cure’, would you want to try the method yourself if you were diagnosed with diabetes tomorrow?

If the answer is yes, the customer will probably feel they got good value even if the method turns out not to work for them. But if the answer is no, chances are they will never even try it and will either think they were scammed or will request a refund right away.

It is very important to be sure that anything you promote will offer value to the customer, especially if you have built a list. A bad product can decimate a list of subscribers that you would otherwise have been able to make more money from later.

Many of your subscribers in non-IM niches will assume that you are either the creator of the product you are promoting, or his/her employee. If you promoted it, and they end up feeling scammed, they will think you scammed them.

So don’t skip this step if you are promoting to a list. Either read the product or find some feedback from real customers on forums – not other affiliates!

Note: If you’re looking for reviews of Clickbank weight loss products with PLR, you’ll find some excellent ones here:

Clickbank Weight Loss Product Reviews PLR

That’s it for my tips to finding the best Clickbank product to promote. Please feel free to add your own tips below in the comments section!