Marketing With Miles The Marketing Edge: Internet marketer Miles Baker interviews successful online marketers, finds out what they do, how they do it, and what gives them the marketing edge.

If you don’t have an autoresponder up and running you’re missing out on lost sales. An autoresponder allows you to follow-up indefinitely and automatically with your customers through email. Not only can you build trust, rapport, customer loyalty and confidence, but you can increase your profits! The autoresponder service I use is Aweber and you can read ‘5 Reasons Why I Love Aweber‘ if you don’t already have an autoresponder and are looking for one.

Here are 5 reasons why you absolutely must get an autoresponder…

1. More money. The more offers you send out to your list the more money you’ll make. Not rocket science here.
2. Less work. Contact thousands, even millions of people immediately, on-time, and without any extra effort!
3. Make friends. Imagine being able to actually bond and connect with your readers on auto-pilot!
4. Build a reputation. The best way to brand your product or service is to keep yourself in front of your customers and over time develop a relationship with them. Sending out emails in an auto-responder series is the perfect way to let people know what you or your company stands for, who you are, and what you are all about.
5. Get customers for life! People stay on your autoresponder until they buy, die, or unsubscribe. In fact, even if they buy they should stay in some kind of autoresponder series making them your customers forever!

If you don’t have an autoresponder go to Aweber right now! If you have one then write ONE additional message in it right now, then resolve to write one message every week. Over time that one message turns into 50 messages in your autoresponder series and every day you’ll be increasing your customer loyalty, brand perception, and income!

Right now is the PERFECT time to revitalize your goals and get organized. Something that has helped me tremendously is my custom homepage. Anytime you open Internet Explorer or Firefox you are presented with a page, so instead of having your homepage as Google or MSN, why not make your own? That’s what I did, I put my goals on it, my websites, and many other important links, as well as pictures of my family and inspirational quotes.

I believe my custom homepage has been responsible for much of my success. Everyday I see my goals several times, they are there, directly in front of my face. I’m a firm believer that what you focus on expands, and seeing your goals keeps you focused on them. I have already achieved several of my goals on my homepage and have to replace them several times.

Another great benefit I have noticed about having my own custom homepage is that I can easily login to any of my sites, I don’t have to go looking for links, everything is right there, fast, easy, and within a single click.

If you want to see what my custom homepage looks like take a look at a video I did about it, you can watch the video here.

After the release of the video a lot of people asked me for my template. Well, you asked and here it is.

My custom homepage template is now available for free download. The template is ready to go and has places for your goals, website links, other relevant links, rotating quotes, and a unique way to monitor your websites and make sure they are up and working.

So if you want to get motivated and organized I STRONGLY recommend setting up your own custom homepage, whether you download my template or create your own it’s one of the best things you can do for your online business.

Usually when a blog hasn’t had any posts for quite a while either they’ve given up, or they got busy and swamped beyond belief! I’ve been swallowed up by the latter. The new year rang in with a bang of high sales, lots of work, and many great opportunities. So many opportunities in fact, that I’ve had to become very selective about what I can and cannot participate in anymore.

I hired my first employee this year and it looks like I am going to really charge full steam ahead in 2007! Having someone help you in your business can make a world of difference, I know it already has for me. I will also be outsourcing as much as possible this year so I can have time to do things like write on this blog.

So for those of you who wondered if I would return, I am still here, working hard, ready for a great 2007!

While I was watching ‘The Secret‘ I remembered something I had done that is similar to what is mentioned in the movie. Back in October of 2001 I wrote a check to myself for $100,000.00 and dated it for two years in the future, Oct. 2003. I had no money in the bank, no plans to make money, and no real ideas for making any money. However, I knew I wanted to have $100,000 in my bank account. I filed the check away and almost forgot about it.

Over the next two years I began to make a substantial amount of money online. Eventually, my bank account had over $100,000 of available funds in it! Only until I got close to $100,000 in the bank did I remember I had written that post dated check. I pulled it out and guess what, it was ONE MONTH before the date on the check! I had over $100,000 in my bank account and reached my goal a month before the date on the check!

Here is a copy of that check which I keep framed in my office today.

Oh, and yes, I have written myself another post-dated check!

Last night I was watching Larry King Live. Larry had a panel of five guests talking about how to get what you want out of life. Many of the guests mentioned a movie they are in called “The Secret“. I had heard of the movie online and never really thought much of it. I figured it was a lot hype, some ‘secret’ they made up to get you to watch the movie. Well, then as I was surfing online tonight I came across an ad for it. Coincidence? I think not! I decided to check it out. Wow, I was completely blown away, what a fantastic movie! You’ve GOTTA WATCH IT!

The movie is about getting what you want out of life, and for us Internet marketers, entrepreneurs, it’s a definite must see, I couldn’t recommend it enough. It really makes you think, and I already did some things after watching it that I know will change my life for the better. Many of the concepts I have heard, or read before, but the movie really motivated me and makes you rethink what you are doing in your life.

You can watch it directly online for only $4.95 or buy the DVD. I chose to watch it online and now I am going to buy the DVD. Yes, it’s so good I want to watch it again!

Have you seen this movie? Share your thoughts and leave a comment, I would love you know what you thought of it. If you haven’t seen it yet come back after you watch it and let everyone know how you liked it!

Over on Shoemoney’s Blog he has a coupon for a free $50 when you sign up with MSN Adcenter. If you don’t know, Adcenter is basically Microsoft’s version of Google Adwords. Since I didn’t have an account with them yet I decided to give it a try and claim my $50. There are some limitations however, it’s only good for new accounts and those based in the U.S. You also have to pay a $5 signup fee.

When I signed up though something caught my attention. Look at the screenshot below, this is a tiny one inch box and you are supposed to read their entire terms and agreement through it! No way to enlarge the box, nowhere to click and read it in a new window. What the heck!!!! I selected everything in the tiny box and pasted it into Microsoft Word and it’s 6 full pages of thick text! Now if that doesn’t make you trust Microsoft I don’t know what will.

You’ve probably seen James Martell mentioned on this site a few times, his best selling Affiliate Marketers Handbook is one of my Top Recommended Picks. Well, James has done it again and is now offering a full eight-week online course for those who want to learn how to build profitable money-making websites.

Affiliate Marketers BootCamp Online “Night School” Edition will begin sometime this November, with Martell coming into your home “live” through an engaging, real-time online conference room. The 8-week curriculum will be delivered every Thursday evening for eight weeks, each night-school style course is dedicated to one of the eight steps outlined in Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook.

The BootCamp materials and live instruction have been further broken down to ensure online BootCamp attendees fully grasp each of the eight steps, and will have time to ask James questions in the live question and answer sessions held at the conclusion of each evening course.

What’s more, online BootCamp attendees will be able to access and review more than 10 hours of NEW video shown recently at Martell’s offline BootCamp held in Canada. Attendees of the offline BootCamp held in Martell’s hometown paid $3400 to attend this event and now online BootCamp attendees have access to this video instruction, and view the videos any time.

The online BootCamp is targeted to new and experienced affiliate marketers alike, to those who already have Martell’s newly released Affiliate Marketing Handbook – “2006″ (THIRD EDITION), and are looking for the extra push they need to get up and running, and to “newbies” looking to break-into a profitable web business.

For more information, and for class schedules just visit the Afilliate Marketers Bootcamp website.

If your a regular visitor to my blog you may have recently noticed the child on the right hand side of this page. This is a child-sponsorship program I have decided to participate in and it’s a great way to contribute to something other than our bank account or the the latest Internet marketing package. You can get full details on the Child Sponsorhip page. For everyone that decides to sponsor a child I will place a link to your website on that page. Together we can make a huge difference.

Looking for great free fonts? Look no further, Font Freak is your new font source. With thousands of free fonts from over 300 different authors ready to download you’re sure to find what you’re looking for.

WordPress 2.0.5 is in the works. Mark Jaquith of MarkOnWordPress.com lists some of the upcoming changes. I always look forward yet also dread the new updates as sometimes they conflict with plugins. Minor updates usually aren’t so bad so we’ll see.

If you’re like me you look at your site several times a day, when I am designing I do 100 to 200 pageviews sometimes, this could really mess up my statistics in Awstats (standard statistics reporting in Cpanel). Well, there’s an easy way to block your IP address from being logged.

In your home directory of your website (this is the directory above public_html) you will see a file named awstats.yoursite.com.conf.

Download the file, open it, and find this part…

# Do not include access from clients that match following criteria.
# If your log file contains IP adresses in host field, you must put here
# matching IP adresses criteria.
# If DNS lookup is already done in your log file, you must put here hostname
# criteria.
# Note: Use space between each value.
# Example: "127.0.0.1 163.84. 201.101.51.1"
# Example: "localhost abcxyz"
# Default: " "
#
SkipHosts=" "

Simply insert your IP address in between the quotes for SkipHosts then upload the file back to where it was. You will also need to CHMOD the file to 444 so your changes won’t be overwritten the next time your server updates.

That’s it! Now when you view your own site you won’t be screwing up the stats and will get a more accurate reporting of your pageviews. You can find your IP address by visiting this site.