Just in case I haven’t bragged about it enough, I currently sit on Network Solutions Social Media Advisory Board. They haven’t given me my going price of $2 million to buy my unwavering allegiance, so I wouldn’t sing their praises if I didn’t truly believe in them.

And today, they’ve gone up another few notches in cool points with me.

I got a notice about a week ago, asking me to give up my physical home address so they could send me a Christmas gift. Not one to give up access to goodies, I happily obliged.

Today, the box got here. As soon as I saw it, I opened it.

And when I saw the box, I stared at it for a long time, trying to decide if I hoped, desperately, that there was, in fact, a bacon tuxedo in the box, or not.

Here’s the rear shot of the box that came, because the front picture above isn’t funny enough on its own.

Oh yes, boys and girls. That does, in fact, say that there are bacon tuxedos available in kid sizes.

Finally, after many howls of deliriously excited laughter, I opened the box. Alas, inside, there was Not a bacon tuxedo. However, there was something even better.

That’s right folks. Cookies.

And everyone knows that cookies, in addition to cupcakes, are in fact, Love.

Network Solutions sent me cookies, cookies are Love, ergo, Network Solutions does, in fact, care.

(And yes, I know that’s not how that works. But they do care. These folks have been super nice to me, very accommodating of the issues I have with my back, not to mention how they’ve helped advance my career – which isn’t exactly part of the arrangement we have.)

And I cookie them right back. If you see Shashi Bellamkonda, Susan Wade, Rosalie or Priya on Twitter, around the DC area at tomorrow’s breakfast meetup, or anywhere else, be good to them. Those folks know how to treat people.

What kind of Christmas wishes/gifts/cards have you been getting from other businesses and business people?

These are the moments I hold sacred.

So beautiful that I can barely bring myself to respond. I think about how the biggest part of the dream I once had is reality – that through these lessons, I could make a difference to someone’s life.

What I am babbling about: one of my clients, left a comment to tell me about the results he’s getting from following the directions in my various collections on blogging, and social media marketing.

He hasn’t taken advantage of his one-on-one time with me yet, but has already made a great start on his own.

Here’s the note he left me.

The words aren’t big enough but I’ll use them anyway.

THANK YOU!

My newest blog incorporates everything I have learned from
your ebooks and articles on blogging.

At only 3 mos old it now generates an average of 550 VERY
targeted hits a day and has been doubling every month.

The one varience is that I don’t use the actual blog software
comments section provided because of spam. My shoutbox
serves the same purpose and gets far greater response than my
comments sections ever did. PLUS NO SPAM!

Take a look when you get time; http://www.footologist.com

This is strictly an “affiliate promotion” blog and “scores” on
the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN for dozens and
dozens of keyword phrases and is fast becoming THE
AUTHORITY SITE for it’s niche. All of the first page results
are in the 1 to 3 million indexed page category and now it
is showing many returns on first indexed pages in the 18 to
34 million indexed pages. Two first pagers were in the 74
million indexed pages! WOW – THANK YOU!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Lare

That’s what it’s all about.

If I had as much money as I could ever spend, I’d be just as happy as long as I could still spread knowledge, entertainment, and enlightenment to people through the written word. It’s times like these that I realize I was born at exactly the right point in time.

What other than the internet would have made this possible?

Thank YOU Lare, Knowing you’re doing well, that I was able to help you in a real way, makes my day, month, year, century, life.

CREAM for all you non-hip-hop fans means Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

< rant > And by hip-hop, I don’t mean most of the often violent, sexist or unimaginative crap that mostly on the air today. If you think that is hip-hop, Happy Belated Birthday and congrats on being one day old. </ rant >

Typically I don’t write about making money online because I think most sites about making money through online marketing or other means miss the point entirely.

That point being that no matter how great your invention is, if it’s not popular, it won’t sell. You’d be better off doing something mediocre and selling it really cheap. Or even something really great, really cheap.

Which brings us to the purpose of this post.

A long time reader of this blog and my newsletter, EJ Cooksey, wrote a post about the latest George Pluss sale on her blog about Making Money Online that I found when I was doing my daily work on my current StumbleUpon experiment. Here’s what she said:

Over 700 folks downloaded the BUM System and they are still coming in. Do you know why and did you take advantage of what they found there?

The explanation is simple: In this new Dime Sale he is sharing THREE proven methods to go from $0 to $100 in a matter of 30 days. And it will only take your time investment, nothing else.

And that clicked something in my head about why a dime sale make so much sense.

So many people are trying to make $10k online per month that they forget to try and make $2K a month first.

You may think, as I did, why should you have a dime sale? If you do 700 in sales a day, if each copy was ten cents, if the price never raised, that’s only $70. (It’s my understanding that the price goes up with each sale, but stay with me for easy math.)

If you could keep that pace up for 30 days, even at ten cents that’s $2100. And 21,000 people on your list that you could sell something else to later.

Even at 100 sales a day, that’s 3000 more people on your list- 3000 leads who have been through your sales process. What if you sold them something for $1?

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I’ll put together a simple traffic plan and put it on sale for ten cents too. Great job EJ!

During Thank You Weekend, I really wanted to thank some of my long-term clients. There is a modest sized group of people who collect everything I write and tell their friends. It would take me some time to write a thank you note in public to each and every one… so I’m just extended Thank You Weekend indefinitely… I’ll just keep thanking people every weekend, forever.

In that tradition, I have a special one for today.

My friend Marc David runs some really cool bodybuilding and fitness sites, and his tips work. Of all the weight I lost last year and this, his tips have pointed me in the right direction the most. (I lost 40 pounds last year before I got bedridden late last year, and 20 pounds this year since I’ve been up and about a bit.)

About my most recent book, Facebook UnHyped Networking (FUN) for Traffic, he wrote this in Facebook:

Tinu,

I’ve known you FOREVER and followed your advice. You’ve taken me from a website newbie to a person who gets it.. or think they do. Your latest Facebook creation was fantastic!

He even sent me a Public Gift – my first one inside Facebook! (Click the image to see it full sized.)

Now if only I can figure out how to make that cocktail show up in real life… hm…

Big Thank You to Marc for being such a pleasure to work with all these years. Ya ain’t seen nothin yet!

So I come here to post the link to the latest newsletter. And I find this in the comments section.

My name is YS and I am Tinu’s client for around five month.

I never ever written one testimonial in my life. In fact I was never sure if I should trust any of them.

But this is a very special case. I feel so much appreciation for Tinu’s work that I decided to write about my experience with Tinu.

By the time I found Tinu’s website, I already had several successful travel websites. Boy, it took me a lot of time, effort & money to get good ranking. I did not really understand much about the search engines & traffic.

I also have never blogged before and had no slight idea about blogging.

When I have read several Tinu’s articles I suddenly realized there is much more to learn and there is much easier and faster ways to conquer the search engines.

I bought Tinu’s manual “How to rescue your blog…”. I have read it probably 3 times, line by line until I started to understand what to do.

I also asked Tinu to setup for me two blogs. The fist one was related to hair removal. I thought I can make good money with Adsense. In reality I did not like this subject after all. I blogged for over two months. All this time Tinu consulted me on how to do it right.

At the end of two months I decided to start a new travel blog with VERY competitive keywords like VACATION, TRAVEL GADGETS, RESORTS and similar ones. As you probably know travel keyword are the hardest ones to optimize. Since I am involved in the travel business I had no problem blogging. I love vacations!!!

Again I followed Tinu’s manuals 100%. She is the smartest & most knowledgeable SEO person I ever met.

Here’s my results after 100 days:
I am getting around 300 unique visitors per day.
I am making around $30 per day with Google ads.
And get this:
My blog skyrocketed within first 20 positions for my main keywords.

Today I had position #11 for one keyword with 77,000.000 pages.

Another four keywords had positions #19, 25, 27, 29 among 125,000.000 pages.

But what is amazing I am getting most of the traffic via 3-4 word strings. That is exactly what Tinu is teaching -less competition and more traffic.

I do not want to mention the url for my blog in this post. But if you are a member of Tinu’s Traffic Reality you can read a post about my blog there.

This results are 100% verifiable!!!

I would like to say this this: Tinu will give you the best stuff for blog optimization & traffic on the internet BUT you will have to work hard for at least 90-100 days. There is no doubt in my mind that if you follow Tinu’s manual, you will reach very high search engine positions very fast.

To me Tinu is a pure gold! It is up to you to make a right choice.

Just let Tinu setup your blog(s) the proper way right from the beginning.

Do not try save little money here & there. If you do it right, you will get your money back extremely fast!

YS

P.S.
I tried to write this post as good as I could. English is not my native language.

me. <--- Speechless.

Okay, let’s back up for a second.

I’ve been giving you tools for your feed, and what I’m slowly starting to realize is that most people don’t understand just how much of a potential traffic increase they are looking at with the proper promotion of their RSS Feed.

And I’ve been trying to be subtle about it, because truthfully, I love the results I’m getting with my feed, and when people finally catch on… only the people who do it right will see the increased traffic I’m talking about here. I want to remain one of those people.

If you take NOTHING else away from this, realize – you NEED to have a feed. I don’t care what you sell. I don’t care if you don’t sell anything at all.

Forget everything about what you heard regarding how “difficult” it is to have a feed. If you can type, you can have a feed. We’ll come back to that in a few.

Here’s an example – let’s be clear, I’m just speculating here, though I got similar results for my favorite terms. You will have to do the work to get these results. I’ve made the steps as simple as I can, but you still have to do them.

So, say your site is about… Bob Marley.

(I’m trying to be as obscure as I can, but still use a term that everyone can relate to.. )

Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tools states that in July, there were 253656 searches for Bob Marley. Some quick study at Wordtracker and SearchGuild tells us that this term is not the easiest to rank for on the first page. And I’d be willing to bet you that you’d have to pay at least $1 to rank on the first page with a paid listing – and that’s per click.

Imagine that you could get ten percent of those results – that only 10% of those people would do a feed search on Bob Marley and would come to your site. And just 1% of them would buy your $15 poster or whatever it is. That’s 25,365 visitors to your site in a month, 253 of them buy your poster. $3795 to you.

Now imagine that those visitors were totally, 100% free. Now that nearly four grand of sales is all profit.

That’s one term.

That’s one feed.

That’s results from having your feed promoted on just one site.

Now imagine you had 20 products. Or you had 20 feeds. Or both. On the same site if you like.

With me now?

The present ability we have to get targeted traffic to our feeds is mind-blowing. To conceptualize it, imagine you were the only person listed in Yahoo for your site’s primary keyword, or one of the top five in Google.

Right now, in most markets, there is NO competition for feeds. In fields like internet marketing, there is still, even now, minor competition for feeds. And you don’t get that visitor just once.

EVERY time you update your headlines, you have the chance to bring a new person to your site, or to get that original person back to your site. (Of course you don’t want to harass them into un-subscribing, that would definitely be detrimental. )

But the point is, you’ll get another crack at making that sale, and another, and another, as long as your content is relevant.

The most common reason that I hear for not having a feed is that it’s too hard to do.

Nonsense.

If you can type, there are so many free tools to help you make a feed that it’s truly ridiculous. I tell you all about them in my book. And if that’s still too hard for you, there are sites that will automatically configure and store them for you. You’ll log into the site, type your update and press publish. Your feed will update. Done.

You don’t have to touch a single line of code if you don’t want to – I’m a certified techie and I don’t. Why should I when it’s super-easy to do otherwise? I’m lazy as hell, don’t let the articles fool you. I type them at 8 am in my pajamas when I can’t sleep then I go back to bed.

And if THAT was not reason enough, you can also get better search engine rankings with your feed. I have a customer whose site wasn’t even IN Yahoo. His site is perfect. But there’s just so much competition for his field.

Then he did one thing. Read my book, added his feed to Yahoo the right way.

Three days later, front page in Yahoo. He even wrote his own book about his experiences.

Personally, I’m ranking for terms I didn’t even think of – traffic tips, free traffic tip, free traffic tips – those are just the ones that send me a traffic trickle – I won’t list the major ones for obvious reasons, though I’d be happy to email you about them personally. I picked the name of my feed and this blog out of my behind. But I lucked out. Because I lucked out, you did too, because I tell you all about how to name your feed.

I was nowhere to be found in listings for those terms before I had one.

And when I moved part of my site to a new domain name, my listings were live in a few days – I purposely did not try to get the spider to my site and it found me anyway because I forgot to Not update my feed.

Haven’t promoted my main feed in two months…. It was 7 am where I am, Pacific time- I’d already had 1352 hits from my feed alone when I started writing to you. Now it’s 7:38 a.m. and I’ve had 1455 hits.

Some of that traffic is from being published in Site Pro News today – most of it is from traffic to my feed. I use Feed Burner to track my feed stats, so matching that up to my site stats gives me a reasonable idea of where it comes from.

News feeds haven’t even gone mainstream yet. And I’m almost at the point where I would feel confident totally abandoning my quest for better search engine rankings – because as long as I follow my own guide, I’ll never be hurting for traffic.

Make no mistake, my friend. RSS Feeds are going to be the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the Standard web browser. It is effectively leveling the playing field between you and the major corporations. As far as people who read feeds are concerned, you are being rewarded for the quality of your content – it’s up to you to write the informative headline and have the great content to back it up.

But the supply of traffic is greater than the demand right now.

Even if you didn’t have a site, you could find an affiliate product, and make an information site about it, and make money by never doing another thing but supply information about that area of interest.

With the volume of potential traffic I’m telling you about, you could really just write about your favorite thing, relate it to an affiliate product, and as long as you don’t bore your reader to death by selling to them in every single post, you could make a reasonably comfortable income from providing free content.

I do. That’s my big secret. It’s just like in the old days when I made most of my money from banner advertising. I don’t have to worry myself to death about my conversion rate or whether or not Yahoo and Google still love me – though I won’t lie and say I don’t appreciate the traffic they send. But if they dropped me tomorrow, I wouldn’t be worried.

This moment in time will not last forever.

You have the chance, right now, to get your feed promoted properly, and get a crack at some of this traffic. And people are calling me insane for telling you about this, instead of signing up for every affiliate product I can find and reaping the benefits for myself, or putting together a $200 package, and a few thousand copies very quietly.

I can’t lie. A couple of times I thought about pulling all the information off the server and doing the greedy thing. But even if I am that stingy, how long would it take me to promote every thing under the sun? I’m lazy, remember?

I have my corner of the web locked up, and I expect to retire in the next few years from the income I generate from this one traffic source. True story. Quit my job months ago and never looked back.

Who knows what can happen for you… I won’t sit here and tell you you’ll be a millionaire, because really, if you’ve been reading my column all this time and don’t have this book… who knows what you’re really looking for…. or maybe I just haven’t been explaining it right. That’s what this article was for – and hopefully, it’s crystal clear to you now.

So get to it already!

What on earth could you be waiting for? Take the free five day course on RSS Tips. by filling out the form below. Do it right now. Someone else is reading this column and buying up all the good Marley posters…