Creating my own custom HomePage for Internet Explorer and Firefox has been one of the best things I have done to increase my productivity. In addition to being a complete control panel for all my sites and keeping all my most valuable resources right at my fingertips, my homepage is also a daily motivator which keeps me focused on my goals.

Watch the video and you will discover exactly what my personal homepage looks like. You may also find some ideas for your own homepage that will not only inspire you, but actually improve your productivity and keep you focused.

Two tools I also use that are mentioned in this video are Furl and Roboform.

New - Get The Template That I Use for Free.

Ijust received an email informing me I am entitled to receive some money from a lawsuit against Overture/Yahoo! Advertising for Pay Per Click ads I placed with them between October 1, 2004 and June 1, 2005.

From what I can gather bidders who exhausted their daily/monthly budget were not removed from the bidding panels so it looked as if they were still advertising which means I would have bidded less had I known their budget had run out.

Looks like they are dividing up $750,000 in credit and cash. $600,000 to those who did not use their budgeting feature, and $150,000 to those who did, I am part of the $600,000 group. I didn’t spend a lot, however it was well over $1000 so I wonder how much they will award me.

If anyone knows any further details feel free to make a comment and let me know or correct me if I am wrong about what Yahoo! / Overture was doing. I will keep you posted if I actually receive credit or a check.

I received a video in my email today from Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon, it’s about Search Engine Marketing. Usually I don’t watch, nor recommend the many videos I receive however this one is definitely worth watching. It outlines a few of the techniques Brad uses for his wedding favors website which makes over $500,000 in sales every month! Watch it here.

Finally, now you can get those full screenshots of your website instead of manually piecing them together with Fireworks or Photoshop. The program is called Webshot and it’s free! Credits have to go to MoneyClicking as that’s where I found out about it, thanks Kidino!

Matt DeAngelis of Affiliate Blog writes about how a human presence on your website can increase conversion rates. Makes sense to me!

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine today and we got to discussing the issue of trademarks in domain names. An example would be I-Love-My-Ipod.com. It is against the law to use someone else’s trademark in a domain name and the trademark owner can legally force you to relinquish control over your domain name. Ipod has issued threats to several websites forcing them to change their name. According to Wired, earlier this year, one of the web’s leading iPod-focused websites, iPodLounge, changed its name to iLounge.

Well, the question of sub domains came up. Do sub-domains count? Could I legally have a domain name called ipod.buyithere.com? Thus my research began and I discovered that the presence of a trademark in a web page’s URL post-domain path does not violate federal trademark law. Well, that’s good news, I could definitely own a site called MySite.com/ipod/ipod.html But what about a sub domain, otherwise known as third level domains?

According to Apple “You may not use an identical or virtually identical Apple trademark as a second level domain name.” So at least in the Ipod scenario I could have a site called ipod.buyithere.com as ipod would be the third-level domain. Of course they could always change their mind, take Jews for Jesus for example.

Back in Dec. 2005 Jews for Jesus filed a complaint against Google claiming that jewsforjesus.blogspot.com violated their trademark. The site had some negative remarks about Jews for Jesus which was belief for the cause of the suit, I doubt they would sue if the site had positive things to say about them. A dismissal was filed and both parties ended up settling their dispute out of court. Now if you go to the site jewsforjesus.blogspot.com you get a blog with links to the official Jews for Jesus website.

So you never really know if using a trademark in a subdomain is going to get you in trouble or not. However, if your site is fordtrucks.suck.com you could be totally safe. Sites like Paypalsucks.com and Lockheedsucks.com have been able to get away with using those domains due to free speech and there are exceptions to the trademark/copyright law that allow for use such as satire, parody, criticism, etc. Just be ready to defend yourself if you have a site like that as you may have to.

What did I learn from all this? Unfortunately, not much. Anyone can sue you for anything they want. However, if you use a trademark as a page or sub-directory of your site you are okay, but as far as a subdomain (third level domain) it’s probably best to avoid it and be on the safe side.

Did you know audio can destroy your sales and make your visitors leave your website faster than ever before? Even if you think your audio is good and you’re doing everything right you could be making a huge mistake. What I have seen first hand, and what I am about to share with your may save your website from total disaster.

Based on real world experience working with web audio, I have seen countless examples of great web pages with audio and horrible web pages with audio. By selling a web audio software program I have had a chance to learn behind-the-scenes information on what really works, and what really doesn’t work.

Therefore, I would like to share with you these 10 mistakes you must avoid when placing audio on your website.

Mistake #1 - Volume

Yeah, your audio may sound good on your computer, but no one is gonna listen to your audio using your computer. You need to make sure the volume level is set at a level so it’s not too loud or too quiet on your listener’s computer. This is one of the most common mistakes, and there’s no bigger turn-off than going to a site and listening to an audio message and you can’t even hear. So how do you correct this? Your best bet is to set all your volume levels at a medium setting, then compare your audio to other streaming online audio. How does yours compare? Then, go to a forum, or ask your friends for feedback. Get about 5 to 10 people to listen to your audio message and critique it as well as tell you what they thought of the volume level. This will give you great insight to your message as well as the sound level you should be using.

Mistake #2 - Your Voice

You may think you sound great, but in most cases you don’t sound as good as you think you do. Not only could your voice turn visitors off, but the way you talk can also be a factor. If you talk like you’re 102 years old, or you have a heavy accent, it’s not going to work to your advantage. In fact, you may think it sounds good, but if you really want to get the most out of your audio then you need to hire a professional. I thought I sounded great when I had my voice on my site AudioMakerPro.com. However, I realized it wasn’t as good as it could be. I decided to hire a professional. After doing so my conversion rates skyrocketed! It made all the difference and gives your site a professional sound that you just can’t do yourself. If you want to take your audio to the next level and do it right, then hire a voiceover pro. There are many instances however where you need to record your own voice, such as a personal message from yourself. When you must speak it yourself keep it brief, to the point, and do your best to make yourself sound professional.

Mistake #3 - Not Using A Script

When you write out what you are going to say before you record it you have a chance to correct errors, re-write things more efficiently, etc. Your audio will come across much more polished and professional if you aren’t going “um”, “and”, or “uh” every other sentence. If you hire a voice-over professional to do your audio you will have to write out a script for them to use, so why not do it when you’re recording your own voice.

Mistake #4 - Saying Too Much

Keep your message brief and too the point. In most cases an effective audio message can be one minute or less. Companies spend thousands on commercials that are 30 seconds long and extremely effective. You should think of your audio as a short commercial and keep it to the point. People’s attention spans are short, you don’t want to lose it by talking about something your listeners don’t care about.

Mistake #5 - No Call To Action

When using audio to help sell your product isn’t the point to get your visitor to do something? You may have a great message, but so what, if you’re visitor doesn’t act on it, it’s worthless! Make sure you tell your listeners what to do, even if it’s only to read the rest of the page. Engage your listener and make it loud and clear what you want them to do.

Mistake #6 - Involvement

You need to get your listener involved in your web audio message. If you can get them to scroll, click, think, or do anything, you’re that much closer to getting them to buy. A great way of getting listeners involved is to ask questions. Anytime you ask your listener a question they have to think about the answer. Don’t you agree?

Mistake #7 - Not Maximizing Audio Placement

Whether you want to build relationships with your website visitors, sell them something, or just connect with them, there are many places where audio adds to the overall experience. Unfortunately many of these audio opportunities are neglected. Here are a few ways you can use audio to your advantage… Popup windows, a perfect place for audio, especially if you want to capture email addresses. Thank-You pages, the pages people arrive on after they purchase your product or subscribe to your newsletter are the greatest places to simply say “Thank You” in your own words, in your own voice. Email messages are fantastic opportunities to use audio also. When a reader clicks on a link inside your email they can be taken to a page with your audio playing automatically, your picture, and links to products or services. Anytime you have something you want to say that’s very personal or needs to be as effective as possible try using audio.

Mistake #8 - Background Music

In many instances, especially in introduction audio messages you will want to add a bit of background music to your message. If done right it can make a great addition to your message and make it more engaging. Done incorrectly it’s going to overshadow your message and your listeners will miss your point. Adding background music to your audio message in an effective manner is really going to depend on your audience. This is when you use your five or ten friends I mentioned in mistake #1 to give you feedback. If you decide to use background music keep it simple, don’t have a 5 to 10 second musical introduction before you start speaking, keep it short. Your background music should add to your message, not take away from it.

Mistake #9 - Not Engaging Curiosity

A great audio message invokes people to take action, it gets people excited, it builds a bit of desire, it makes them want to find out more. Even the simplest of messages can invoke curiosity. When creating an audio message for your main page or for your newsletter subscriptions make sure to invoke some curiosity, lead your listener, give them enough information to get them to take action, but always leave them wanting more.

Mistake #10 - No Tracking Whatsoever

If you’re using audio to increase results you need to test to see if your message is actually helping your efforts. If you aren’t tracking it’s like throwing darts at a wall with no bullseye, you’ll never know how close you are getting to your target. A simple split-test is enough to determine whether having audio or not is helping. Believe it or not, sometimes it won’t, and if it doesn’t it is usually your message that’s the problem. Either way, you need to test, plain and simple.

I guarantee that if you avoid these mistakes and follow the advice given your audio messages will increase your bottom line. I hope you realize that simply using audio isn’t going to help your site. Like anything else, you need to put forth the effort into creating a great audio message to yield great results.

After months of research I’ve decided to move all my email lists and auto-responders from Autoresponse Plus over to Aweber. There are several reasons for the move, the main one being time. You see, Autoresponse Plus (ARP for short) is an auto responder script that is installed on your website and you manage it yourself, you have complete control over everything. On the other hand, Aweber is a hosted and managed service that you pay for monthly, no installation and no hosting required.

I love Autoresponse Plus, the flexibility it gave me was priceless, however the time I had to spend on upgrading it, writing custom scripts, and concerning myself with email deliverability was just too much for one guy to handle.

So if you are looking into an autoresponder or you’re unhappy with your current one here are some advantages and disadvantages of both ARP and Aweber.

Auto Response Plus Advantages:

• Complete control over your list and all aspects
• Ability to import and export unlimited subscribers without verified opt-in
• Beautiful easy-to-use interface
• One-time cost
• Flexible with ability to sort, change, and mass edit your subscriber data
• Unlimited autoresponders AND Email address

Aweber Advantages:

• 99% deliverability rate
• Flexible plug-in scripts for capturing ClickBank, Paypal, and other customer data
• Toll-free phone support
• Professional dedicated company handles everything for you
• Unlimited autoresponders
• Very easy to use, no installation required
• Reports and Graph Section
• Templates for HTML emails
• Built-in spam Analyzer for your messages

Autoresponse Plus Disadvantages:

• You are responsible for everything, if something goes wrong you have to fix it yourself or hire someone
• Pay to have custom scripts developed for things like ClickBank or Paypal automatic customer import, aka (parse emails)
• Limited and costly support, you’re mostly on your own
• You get any and all spam complaints directly
• Rarely updated with new features, no clear parent company supporting script

Aweber Disadvantages:

• Limitations for mass editing subscriber data
• Any imported subscribers must verify their subscription before being added to Aweber

Both Aweber and AutoResponsePlus have several great features in common such as personalization of messages, tracking, time-sensitive offer creation, unlimited autoresponders, built-in form generators for web page forms. etc. Both definitely have unique features I wish I could have in the other, however Aweber wins my vote. Having a dedicated company whose sole focus is email deliverability and autoresponder management just can’t be beat, especially when they have a long successful track record.

Since my last article about FURL I have had several remarks and questions about it. One of the questions was if you could export all your sites and save them on your PC and the answer is yes, you can! You can even import them into your Internet Explorer or Firefox favorites if you want to.

There are also other great features about this free tool that made me fall in love with it. Imagine being able to access all the favorite websites of Friends and other fellow Internet marketers. Well with Furl you can. Now what’s special about this is that as you bookmark sites you can choose to have them shared or private. What this means is you can share all your favorites yet still keep some sites private so only you will see them.

If you’re like me and come across countless sites a day that you want to get back to then Furl is a must. I notice I have bookmarked 5 times as many sites as I used to now that it’s so easy. Okay, enough raving about Furl for now.

After looking through many new products on ClickBank it just boggles my mind how many sites have major leakage! What’s worse is I’ve seen it other places also, not just ClickBank. If you’re are a vendor and want any affiliates to promote your products you MUST understand what leakage is and why it’s critical for your success to eliminate it.

Basically, leakage is any link on your sales page that leads your visitors somewhere where the affiliate will not get paid. The most common form of leakage I see on sales pages is Adsense. Now ask yourself, why would an affiliate want to promote your site if the visitors they send your way are going to click on links that profit you but not them? The answer is they wouldn’t want to and they won’t! Top affiliates simply don’t promote web pages with leakage.

Anytime I see a product website with Adsense or banner ads it makes me cringe. If you are letting affiliates promote your product and you can’t make enough money without having adsense on it, redo your sales letter or quit selling it and sell something else!

Leakage is also not only a turn-off for your affiliates, it could be a turn-off for your sales as well. Every website that sells something should have one thing, it’s called ‘focus’. If you’re giving your visitors too many options they sure aren’t going to be focused are they?

It’s a common newbie mistake, but trust me, the money you make from Adsense or other leakage will never compensate for the affiliates and sales you will lose.

For the longest time I’ve been wanting a cash register sound to play whenever I get a sale notification from ClickBank. After months of searching I finally found a program that would allow me to do that. Okay, I admit, things have been a little slow this month and I may have been a little bored, but it’s very cool and motivating every time I hear my ka-ching! This is how I did it…

First I needed a really cool cash register sound file. I discovered a very useful site called FindSounds that searches the net for all types of wav files. I simply typed in “cash register” and found over 50 sounds! This sure beats that $10 CD of sound effects I bought from Best Buy! The sound I decided to use was kaching.wav, click to hear it.

Thunderbird comes with plenty of email filter options but unfortunately sound isn’t one of them. After months of searching I finally gave up for a while. Then today after searching for it again I came across MailBox Alert. MailBox Alert is a free extension that installs into Thunderbird and they recently added sound as one of their options! Now I could finally start hearing the sweet sound of money every time I made a sale!

So once I installed the extension I set up a filter to sort all my ClickBank sale notifications into a separate folder. Then I simply set my Mailbox Alert settings for that folder to play my sound file evertyime it receives an email! KA-CHING!!!

If you’re a serious ClickBank user, have more than one account, or just want to easily check your stats on a daily or hourly basis then you will love CBStatz. The program is hands down the best tool for downloading your ClickBank sales information and allowing you to manipulate it in a variety of ways. There are also some very functional aspects of the program that will help you run your business.

I personally use the program for monitoring sales, watching my refund percentages (especially important when testing new products as an affiliate), and looking up customer data. I love the ability to easily search my history for the past several years in search of a customer. I can also use it to lookup and quickly process a refund for a customer, I don’t love doing that.

The program is straight-forward, easy to use, updated often, and from what I have experienced 99.9% bug free.

I’ve been in close contact with the owner/creator Mike Lacoursiere, he’s been extremely supportive and open to suggestions. He’s even included a few suggestions of mine in his most recent update. His determination to make sure CBStatz is the absolute best tool for ClickBank users leaves me no doubt that it will continue to lead the pack in ClickBank data management tools.

The program includes a ton of other features such as graphing of your sales by day, month, and year, the ability to monitor and find your best affiliates, an easy backup process, and too many more features to mention here.

CBStatz has two types of licenses, you can either purchase and own it outright, or you can purchase a monthly subscription for only $24.95.

Right now there is a free trial which allows you to use the program without limitations for 3 full days. Visit the CBStatz website or download the free trial.