Boomer eZine - The Boomer Entrepreneur Magazine

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Authors Comments

2. Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3. Site Build It (SBI) Revisited

4. Remotely Accessing Your Home Computer

Author's Comments

Wow! A killer week. We put our friends on the plane back to England on Monday afternoon in San Antonio and drove back to Kingsville . I was in the office Tuesday till noon trying to do five days of work in four hours (did not get it done). Off to the airport in Corpus Christi and fly to Oakland , California for sales calls.

Drove from Oakland to meeting in the San Luis Obispo area (it was a beautiful drive). On the return drive, was able to tour the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, which was very impressive.

Sales call in Berkley , CA on Thursday. Up at 3:50AM Friday to catch the plane back to Texas . Plane was delayed. Missed my connection in DFW. Arrived home at 7:00PM Friday.

I wrote most of this issue in the DFW airport as I waited for my flight to Corpus Christi , TX . I do not need another one of these trips in my lifetime.

Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

We received this email from a reader about being an affiliate.

I think that your ezine is such a great idea. Thank you being willing to help others like you do. My questions concerns affiliate marketing. I have only recently known about it, and although I am about 12 years from retirement, I would love to develop income from my computer now and through those years ahead.

I am wondering:

I have heard that only about 3 percent of people make decent money at it. Is that true?

I feel I would need a mentor who is successful - do you know of someone I can connect with? I see other books and ebooks on line, but I'm never sure if they are outdated or worthwhile.

Have you and John developed income through affiliate marketing? Is the effort worthwhile, or should other avenues be investigated? I do have spare time each week and am not afraid of hard work and a little risk if there is chance for reward down the road.

Again, I think that what you are doing is great, and I thank you for taking the time to correspond.

End of reader’s email...

First, thanks for the kind compliments. They are sincerely appreciated. Sometimes we wonder if we are connecting with our readers and your feedback is sincerely appreciated.

The statistic of 3% of the affiliates making decent income is one that I do not have. I expect that the number is a low percentage, but let’s look at why that may be. It is very easy to become an affiliate. If you go back to the article in Volume 1 Issue 11 06-23-06 about affiliates, you can see how easy it is to become an affiliate. Many people do this, build a website, and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. Guess what, nothing happens.

As I have said before, the Internet is not like the line from the movie “Field of Dreams” which said “build it and they will come”. Most people fail on the Internet because they do fully comprehend the concept that they have to plan ways to build traffic to the website so they can then sell the reader on the affiliate product. No traffic, no sales, failure.

Since so many people are still signed up for the affiliate programs who probably have tried to be affiliates and failed, the 3% number may not be far off. On the other hand, 3% (successful affiliates) of the total number of all affiliates is a very large number. If you do your homework and learn how to conduct business online, there is no reason for you to not be one of that successful number. With 12 years to go, you have the time to develop a plan, to work steadily implementing the plan, and to be successful. Hard work and tenacity will overcome most problems.

I do not think that you need a mentor if you will take the time to browse the Net and learn what you can without buying every ebook out there. A mentor will charge you a handsome consulting fee. Twelve years is plenty of time to learn, experiment, build and be successful. If you will go back and read the information about affiliate marketing in the past issues of this ezine (use the site search function on the home page), you can build a good base from which to start. I can recommend a couple of ebooks that I consider the bibles of affiliate marketing.

We have developed moderate income through affiliate marketing, but as I have said in previous issues, since we are not retired, we are not trying to maximize our affiliate income. We are trying to build our readership. If we were trying to maximize our affiliate income, you would see a lot more ads in this ezine for products that we were pushing. However, we do receive income from commissions on sales of Site Build It, Amazon, eBay, Click Bank, and others. These come from referrals in the ezine or on our websites.

I hope that answers the questions that you posed. If you want more info, please ask for additional clarification.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm and give us your input. With your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.

Site Build It (SBI) Revisited

The mascot of Site Build It is the tortoise. It signifies “slow but steady progress”. When I first saw the tortoise was the mascot, I realized that the attitude for SBI was one of reality. I have said in a previous article that “ Rome was not built in a day and neither is a great website”. Many “cookie cutter” websites are sold as being instant money makers, and that is just not true. The get rich quick mentality of the Internet is not the real world.

Linda and I started building our SBI site http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com May 20, 2005 . We followed the advice of the SBI system and built a site with 34 pages (currently). We used the SBI tool “Analyze It” to evaluate each page for its structure and content to make it be what the search engine spiders wanted.

It took a while and a lot of work to generate all the pages and get the final organization and structure established.

In May the site had one visitor and it was probably I when I was testing the site. Each month, I used the traffic analyzer in SBI to monitor the monthly traffic. It grew quickly for the first few months, but it was not listed high in the search engine results pages (SERP) for its Google keywords. The traffic started rising on the SERP on MSN.com, but the traffic growth was slower than we wanted.

This week, when I checked the traffic stats from Oakland , suddenly the visitor count had jumped considerably. I used the SBI traffic tools to see what had happened and when I went to the section, which showed the source of the visitors, Google was the top referrer. This was a radical change from previous months where Google was down the list. I went to Google and searched on the keyword “retirement jobs”. To my delight, www.retirement-jobs-online.com was in sixth position on the first page of the SERP. This is the most searched term in the retirement jobs arena.

Time for celebration!

On checking for more keywords, I found that “jobs for retirees” was the tenth on the SERP. Several other keywords were in high positions on Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines.

I have to admit that I was starting to doubt the SBI sales pitch about take your time, follow the system, build a good content site, and traffic will start to build. Ken Evoy, the developer of SBI, says that traffic builds on SBI sites like a slowly developing snowstorm. A few flakes at first. Then a few more, and soon you have a blizzard. I am still waiting for the blizzard, but being on the first page of the SERP for our major keywords is a great start of the snowstorm.

If you want to develop a true content site and then sell the traffic that comes to it, I highly recommend that you use SBI. The SBI process will lead you through the building of the site and help you build a great site that gets traffic to it. If you do not know anything about the Internet, SBI does most of the planning and structure for you. I am not saying that you do not have to put in hard work. You will, but you can work hard and fail with your own site or some “cookie cutter” site that you buy.

Keep in mind that to be successful, you must get traffic to your website. Without it, you are doomed to failure. I encourage you to use SBI for your site to guide you in selecting your keywords, in building your pages, and in creating the structure of your site. All this will contribute to your site being accepted by the search engines.

A great way to learn more about SBI is to sign up as an affiliate to sell SBI. When you do this, you will be able to access the SBI forums and see what the many people who make money on the Internet with SBI think, say, and do. You will be able to monitor the SBI forum, but you cannot post to it.

To sign up as an affiliate, follow this link http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html. When the page loads, go to the top and click “Affiliates”. Read the affiliates page. The sign up form is about three quarters of the way down the page. Sign up as an affiliate. It costs you nothing and opens the door for you to learn about SBI. The commission structure is attractive and it is very easy to become a Five Pillar Affiliate of SBI.

To conclude this article, I recommend that you go back and read the previous articles in Boomer eZine about SBI. You can find them by using the search function on the home page of Boomer eZine and search for SBI.

Remotely Accessing Your Home Computer

While I was on the trip to California , I was able to continue business as usual by using the remote access features on Windows XP. This allowed me to access my home computer as though I was sitting in front of it.

In fact, Linda was working on our Christmas letter and had trouble printing the letter. I was able to log on to my computer, trouble shoot the problem, and print the letter for her at home.

This feature is included in Windows XP at no extra charge. I recommend that you consider installing it if you travel and need to access your home computer. I wrote an article about this in V1I5. It gives detailed instructions on how to set it up.

I am finishing a video to show how to do this and I will make it available to readers of Boomer eZine at no charge. I request that you view it and set up your computer for remote access. Then let me know if you have any problems in doing so. This will help me validate the video.

I will let all readers know when this video is available.

That wraps up our issue for this week. I wrote most of this issue in the DFW terminal pounding on my laptop. The second flight left on time and I joined Linda at a party at a friend’s house when I got to Kingsville .

I will publish an issue next week. Remember, only 10 days till Christmas. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe

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