Here's How I Became A Successful Marketer

Now, if you are just starting out today you'll want to do things a little differently, but maybe not so much different.

First I'd find a good host for a BIG web site. Hostgator dot com has my nomination from personal experience. I've never had a better host at a lower price.
Next I'd get a domain name better than the ones I picked out.

Tale Wins? Does that mean anything? No.

Share Your State? Does that mean anything? No.

Browzer Books is a little bit better, and

insurance roundup is just a tad better than that.

I'm getting a little bit smarter now and came up with Granny's Book Store and Read Em Free. YOU need to be smarter to start with in creating domain names for yourself. Get one that WORKS.

Decide where you want to fit in. Make a place for yourself at the trough.

If you aren't a writer yourself you need to create products that are unique. Letting someone else do all the writing is so much easier. Play the part of an editor. Compile articles from various authors into a book of unique and well written information in your chosen field.

Where do you get those articles? Well, I hope you'll go to http://www.talewins.com/poster.htm where I've listed dozens of my friends in the same line of work.

For a book compiler I'd use Open Office because it will convert your files into pdf and it is better, and it is free. http://www.talewins.com/software shows how to pick it up. For more beautiful work I'd use the Activ E book. And for a real book feel I'd use Exe Book.

I'd offer MY books for FREE.
Browzer Books has this motto Free Books That Are Priceless.
I love that motto.
You can have that idea -- but leave the motto for me.

Can You Become A Writer?
Sure. There's a ton of help for you at Tale Wins,
and most of it is yours to use, absolutely FREE!

Now we come back to the web site set up. The front page should tell people what you are up to and where to go next to get what they want most. Next you want to build landing pages that TELL people about each book, piece of software, or tool that you have. Let all your advertising send people to the landing pages to read more about your books. Forget about your front page. It is too general. Focus on landing pages.

I wrote an aphorism one time that has a solid ring to it. It says: "A wise man never pretends he is any smarter than I think he is." All you have to do to make that true is turn it around; find out what people THINK you are smart about.

You do that with a thing called STATS. That is just an esoteric word for statistics. Web Stats tell you how many people are coming to your site. Some people fool themselves with stats. In fact, some people go to great lengths and expensive software to fool themselves in more ways than one with their stats.

Here is how to be smarter than that. Don't pay any attention to how many people are coming to each page. Don't even pay any attention to how many people download your offers. Don't even pay any attention to how long people stay on one of your pages because s/he might have five other browsers going and in the fogs of time only you are measuring, that surfer has forgotten you even exist.

You can fool the search engines into putting you at the top of the heap. You can fool the various counters on the web that measure traffic. You can trick or bribe people into telling their friends about you. You can win a hundred awards that have you strutting the barnyard and beating your chest. You can even make sales that don't make people happy and yet don't leave a burning of satisfaction either. But you can't fool the surfers themselves into personally lauding you with fame.

Therefore, what you want to count is the number of requests for your favicon, how many people are so satisfied with what they find that they mark your page as a favorite to come back to. Them's the only honorary degrees that count. When people mark one of your pages as a favorite you KNOW you are on the right track. That's the direction people will let you go. Secretly you wanted to go that way all the time, RIGHT?. All you have to do now is solidify your position, and advance.

Design and Layout MUST be different according to purpose and content. For example: IF your landing pages are SELLING something you get paid for, stick to the subject. Let nothing on your page interfere with that sale.

On the other hand: IF your specific landing page is giving away information -- and http://www.talewins.com/Browzer/novels.htm is a prime example of that -- then you also want to SELL something from that page. You'll notice that I divided the page up with tables there. MY ads are on the right and banner ads break up the space BETWEEN tables. Between the tables IS the right place for banners. Putting a SMALL banner between tables OPENS the page up and makes it more inviting. A TALL banner opens the page up even more, but I wouldn't exceed 242 pixels tall as you don't usually want too much space showing up. My artistic eye says the perfect banner is more than 1.75 times as long as it is tall. It also says to make that banner about 200 pixels tall.

Putting my text ads on the right let's people see the ads but pay attention only if they want to. You'll notice that my ads on the right usually either look like short classifieds -- or they look like navigation links. I even mix them up on purpose. Putting my text ads over there on the right lets me advertise a lot of different subjects on that page. I keep a supply of the little ads on one page so that I can grab the ones I want to place on the landing pages when I make them. You'll see my list on http://www.talewins.com/1adstext.htm My best banners are found on http://www.talewins.com/1ads.htm . When looking at this page please bear in mind that ADS are LINKS too. Ads are meant to sell people on the idea of clicking through, AFTER they have marked your first page as a favorite, of course.

When the little ads turn out to be good enough to drag traffic to one of my other landing pages I try to build BIGGER ads that are BETTER. The way I determine which little ads are working is by watching my LATEST VISITORS trail in the stats. Often enough this tells me where they land and where they go from there. This is where I pick up my notes on favicon traffic too. Ads that work well can be used on other sites to bring in more traffic to THAT landing page. The more landing pages you create, the more traffic you get and the more you can sell. Look at the bottom of any landing page I have and you'll find unadulterated ads designed to entice the surfer to keep on surfing. You don't care if they are up past midnight and fighting sleep; have no mercy, drag them to another page, and another one still. Sure, they may hate you in the morning, but that's after they've marked ten or fifteen of your pages as a favorite.

As I'm going through my stats, another thing I watch out for is a DOUBLE GO. That's where people land on one page, click to go to another page, come back to the first one, then go back to the second one again, then they disappear without marking either one as a favorite. Nine times out of ten that is because my ad leading to that second page has somehow mislead the traffic; s/he wasn't expecting what s/he was greeted with.

By actually going to that page myself I frequently discover the html on that page is messed up, maybe the page is not even loading at all even though it says it is. With a GRRREAT GRRRITING of my teeth I rush to hang a new door on the barn.

Can you quit smoking?
Probably not. Some people try everything, even kicking themselves,
and STILL can't quit. For more insight into this stubborn problem, Click HERE.

That horse is gone, but there'll be another herd thundering through there someday soon, if you're lucky.

If you have a SUBJECT or a CATEGORY people are going to, it behooves you to go through EVERY PAGE in that area to make sure each one is the best you are capable of creating now.

LATEST VISITORS also tells me which search engines are sending traffic to my best selling pages. I'll click on the REFERER search engine and see the actual string the person used to find me. I don't mind being #47 or even #87 IF I am the one long last that makes the customer happy. Sometimes I wonder how I got on the list at all for that search. A good example of that is people searching for racial prejudice articles and clicking on the link that finds my advice on how to clean up a skunk. What possible connection can exist between social hatred and making a skunk look pretty? But there I was, on the top ten. By taking the word BLACK out of the phrase "black skunk" I did finally get off that list, or at least I was put so far back I quit getting traffic.

Hopefully you aren't as scatter-brained as I am and many of your landing pages that work will be on the same subject that people are expecting to find. Your next step towards consolidation is to create articles about the subject material you have. Take the ideas behind the little ads that are working and sew them together into one masterpiece and get it published. Then create another article, and another one. ALWAYS create masterpieces. On each article your bio at the bottom should lead to a different landing page. Remember, that's your ad, your only ad. Everything else is a juggling act that gets people to stop and look at your ad. Once you discover an ad is working, work with it -- but not on it. I don't know how many thousands of dollars I have lost by improving something that worked.

By now you have realized that I have not mentioned SEO or mailing lists, the two things every web expert on earth says you MUST have and do. I don't disagree with the experts, I just don't know how to do either of these things.

Even though I have dozens of pages in the top ten in my chosen subjects and hundreds of pages in the top twenty and almost a two thousand pages in the top 200, I don't have the least idea how I do it. With mailing lists it is even worse: I can't even get people to subscribe to one of my lists, much less know how to make money from my mailing list. Willie Crawford knows how to make mailing lists work; I send people to Willie Crawford. Just type his name into any search engine and pick out the subjects that interest you most.

And one more thing, Lewis. Thanks again for the compliment.

Here's HowI Did It

Here's How
I Did It