They discuss why a good niche in PPC is not necessarily a good niche for article marketing (and vice versa).

After today’s video, you’ll never have to guess whether a niche is any good for article marketing.

The video is absolutely free and there is no registration to watch it.

AffSphere is an article directory that pays you for submitting articles.

Most Interesting Gainers

• One of the most popular article directories, goarticles.com is back from pagerank 3 to well-deserved pagerank 6.
• Several directories reached pagerank 5:
  • ArticlesFactory.com
  • FreeSticky.com
  • ArticleInsider.com
  • TheAllINeed.com
  • ArticlesBase.com

Most Noticeable Loosers

• ArticleWorld.net and IdeaMarketers.com slid down from PR5 to PR3.
• The following article directories lost one point each and now have pagerank 4:
  • Certificate.net/wwio
  • ArticleManiac.com
  • Marketing-Seek.com

Article marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach expert level in your niche. With the list of the Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic, Pagerank you can concentrate your efforts and save your time by submitting articles to the most valuable directories only.

Checkout By Amazon

Checkout By Amazon is a complete checkout solution. It lets web site visitors sign in to web sites using an Amazon Account login and buy items using the familiar Amazon’s 1-Click® button. Checkout By Amazon service provides tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions, and post-sale activities including refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks..

Amazon Simple Pay

Amazon Simple Pay is a service that allows consumers to use their Amazon account information to pay for purchases on other web sites. It is for those merchants who don’t need sophisticated checkout and order management capabilities, but who would like to incorporate Amazon’s customer login system to sell products.

Amazon Simple Pay differs from Checkout by Amazon in that Checkout by Amazon provides additional capabilities to support real-time shipping and tax calculation, promotions, and order management-tasks including order cancellations, order reports and shipment tracking. If you don’t need Amazon’s end-to-end checkout pipeline and order management capabilities, but still want to enable your customers to use their payment information already on file at Amazon.com, use Amazon Simple Pay.

Amazon also offers the Amazon Flexible Payment Service, a developer-oriented money-transfer API, which is currently in limited beta testing mode.

Checkout By Amazon competes with PayPal and Google Checkout. The Amazon service costs 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for transactions of $10 or more. Transactions less than $10 cost 5% + $0.05 per transaction.

Google Checkout costs 2% + $0.20 per transaction. PayPal charges on a sliding scale, starting at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for monthly sales up to $3,000.

The key differences between Checkout by Amazon, Amazon Simple Pay, and Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service are summarized in this comparison chart.

Questions like:

• how to find profitable niches in the market
• how to make money with a blog
• how to select a price for your product
• when starting, what would be the most effective way to drive traffic
• how to select a mentor to learn from
• how to keep track of business’ progress?
• and many more…

The list participating marketers includes:

• John Reese
• Stephen Pierce
• Yanik Silver
• Mike Filsaime
• Willie Crawford
• Armand Morin
• Frank Kern
• Eric Graham
• Donna Fox
• Brett McFall
• Clayton Makepeace
• Craig Perrine
• Dave Bernstein
• Frank Deardurff
• Heather Seitz
• Jeanette Cates
• Jeff Walker
• Jim Edwards
• Joel Comm
• John Carlton
• Ray Edwards
• Ryan Deiss
• Stu McLaren
• Tom Hua

To attend the call, all Sylvie asks is that you pledge to make a donation to her favorite Breast Cancer charity.

This teleseminar will be delivered in the next 30 days. Each marketer will take 5-10 minutes to answer one of these questions.

Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com published the Pain Avoidance article template that can help you speed up the creation of your next set of quality original articles by addressing this time-proven principle:

Pain problem solving can become a new angle in your article marketing, or you could “re-package” your old articles with this new template.

In his blog post, Chris provides The Pain Avoidance Template simple four-step layout and tells why this article template idea works.

The Pain Avoidance article template

One involves bringing traffic to your website through redirects. You’ve probably seen these programs sold online. You can get 100,000 people to your site if… you use their tracking tool because any tracking you have in place won’t notice them and… you don’t care about sales because these phantom visitors come and leave without buying anything.

But let’s assume you want to bring targeted traffic to your website.

Most people start (and end) at pay-per-click. But there are at least 20 other ways to get hordes of traffic to your online business.

My friend Stephen Pierce has created something quite unique.

His Instant Traffic Expert System consists of 21 Process Maps that walk you through each way to get traffic to your site. Plus, he has also created videos that walk you through each of the steps.

See what John Reese, the author of mega-successful Traffic Secrets course, says about the system:

“Stephen, you never cease to amaze me with the QUALITY of your teaching products. Your process maps are ROCK SOLID yet so simple anyone can just follow the steps to generate a ton of traffic from each method. Well done!”

21 traffic methods

How many of these methods do you want to start using the right way, to generate the right traffic, right now?

• Blog Traffic
• Directory Traffic
• Forum Traffic
• Article Traffic
• Joint Venture Traffic
• MySpace Traffic
• eZine Traffic
• Pay-Per-Click Traffic
• Classifieds Traffic
• Squidoo Traffic
• Search Engine Traffic
• Banner Traffic
• Craigslist Traffic
• eBay Traffic
• Facebook Traffic
• Social Network Traffic
• Podcasting Traffic
• Social Shopping Traffic
• YouTube Traffic
• Link Traffic
• Press Release Traffic

How about using all 21 starting today?

Says Jimmy D. Brown, the author of Traffic Virus software:

“This is AMAZING! I’ve been browsing around inside the member’s area, watching the videos and downloading the process maps. Very cool stuff!

I kept thinking to myself as I was scrolling through the titles, “I bet he didn’t cover… wait a minute, it’s in here too!”

This is an incredible resource.”

If you are serious about being successful online, you’ll need traffic to your site.

And there is no one in the business more qualified than Stephen Pierce. I urge you to study what Stephen has to say… all the way to the bank.

We now provide the most cost effective, reliable, secure and convenient way to automatically back up your mission critical data offsite every night.

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PayPal

They offer a downloadable software utility that is called PayPal Secure Card. The utility automatically detects when a customer visits an e-commerce checkout page, generates a unique MasterCard number, and then helps fill out the payment form. This is done through a partnership with credit card issuer MasterCard Inc.

“From a merchant’s perspective this looks like any other MasterCard transaction,” said Chris George, director of financial products for PayPal. “And it’s just another PayPal purchase to the customer.”

Secure Cards work on Windows computers running either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Users of Apple’s Safari browser have only partial access to the service for now, George said.

Secure Card has been tested by 3 million PayPal customers in the past year. Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, one of them, tells about his experience:

You install and set up the software, and on your taskbar, you have a little PayPal icon. When you want to generate a random credit card number, you double click on it. A little “virtual credit card” pops up on your screen, complete with randomly generated MasterCard numbers, expiration date, and CVV. All payments made with the information are directly and immediately made from your existing PayPal account

The form fill seems to work decently in Internet Explorer, but if you’re a Firefox user, don’t expect it to fill out any forms. It has a Firefox plug-in that seems to do little more than really slow down the browsing experience (and I recommend removing the plug-in as soon as you install the application). It is, however, handy to have, especially for folks like me with a debit card so well worn that the CVV numbers are no longer visible.

The plug-in will be available to U.S. customers on Tuesday, November 20, 2007, with international customers to follow.

But the truth is, after a publisher has placed Adsense ads into the web page, the ads’ formatting and placement is seldom tested and altered to get more clicks. As a result, the ad’s true earning power is never realized.

YieldBuild is a new service that provides automatic yield management for Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) and eBay AdContext. Their software algorithmically changes ads format and place to analyze what can be done to maximize text ad revenue.

They created an optimization system that allows for ongoing testing and improvement with minimal involvement on the part of the publisher. The system automatically determines what should be the best placement and appearance of your ad. A process called behavioral formatting is used to optimize the layout of ads. Behavioral formatting automatically adjusts the ad’s placement and appearance according to the characteristics of the visitor.

The system continually switches layouts, color and networks, looking for the highest performing configuration. According to YieldBuild, it takes about 100,000 impressions to train the system. As users become unresponsive to the ads, the system is supposed to switch in a more profitable combination of layout and networks.

YieldBuild is free to try for 30 days. After that, YieldBuild’s share is 3% of impressions.

What’s your market? Hire a consultant to help you with your Web-business problems and one of the first questions he or she will ask is, what’s your market? How about eighteen to thirty-four year old, single male college graduates with a dog named Spot; or maybe forty-five to fifty-nine year old married women, who hate their husbands and can’t get their adult children to move out of the house. Maybe, just maybe, they’re asking the wrong question.

The Web isn’t about markets, it’s about audiences. Audiences need to be entertained, enlightened, and engaged, and if your website doesn’t, you’re never going to achieve what you want.

Time to rethink how you’re delivering your marketing message. Start treating Web-visitors like an audience not a market, and you might just find what it takes to be successful on the Web.

2. Think People Not Customers

You know all those visitors you attract to your website with your brilliant search engine optimization schemes, how many actually purchase anything? Stop treating visitors as if they are already customers and start treating them like what they are - people. That’s right, people. You know the two-legged funny creatures with wants, needs, desires, and maybe even a few bucks to spend.

Customers are always looking for a deal and they’re leery of websites that only want to take their hard earned cash. Treat your Web-visitors like people who can satisfy their wants, needs, and desires with your assistance and guess what? Maybe it will make a difference: one small step for Web-credibility, one giant leap for Web-success.

3. Think Experiences Not Features

Bought any good features lately? Didn’t think so. You would think the way business pushes the whole feature-frenzy thing that features are exactly what people are looking for, but nobody buys features, they don’t even buy solutions - boy doesn’t that whole solution provider nonsense really get to you after a while.

What people really buy are experiences, hopefully positive ones. Whether it’s soft ice cream or a new accounting program, what people are paying for is the experience your product or service provides.

Does your website offer an experience? Does it explain the experience your product or service delivers? If it doesn’t, then you really haven’t got anything anybody wants.

4. Think Emotion Not Logic

Think you’re a logical person, always making rational decisions based on practical criteria, and bottom line results. So tell me what was the functional thinking that went into the purchase of those leather pants you bought last year, or that sixty inch plasma television you bought just to watch the big game?

Let’s get real. You make purchasing decisions based on what you want, and then justify them with seemingly sensible rationalizations, just like everybody else. So stop trying to appeal only to the practical, logical, aspects of bean-counter sales, and start pushing the feel good aspects of emotional marketing.

If you’re trying to appeal to an audience that gets its only satisfaction out of acquiring the most features for the least cost, then your marketing to the wrong audience.

5. Think Memories Not Promotions

Most animals live in the moment, whereas human beings live in the past. Our here and now and our plans for the future are based on our experiences, our histories, and our memories.

We take pictures of our kids, holidays, and special events; we commemorate birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, and milestones of all kinds. Even the significance of our prized possessions is centered on the fact that those mere objects represent memories of the people, places, and events that shaped our lives.

Real marketing, the kind that creates long-term clients and customer relationships, is not about coupons, sale promotions, or deep discounts; it’s about delivering memories.

6. Think Marketing Not S.E.O.

Okay, here’s one you’ve heard from us before: think marketing not search engine optimization. Sure you’ve got to drive as many people to your website as possible, but if your marketing message is so confused, unfocused, and hard to comprehend because of all the keyword density and S.E.O. tricks, then what have you really accomplished other than wasting people’s time? And people really get upset when you waste their time.

7. Think Stickiness Not Hits

It’s not about how many hits you get on your website, it’s about how long people stay. If visitors remain on your site long enough to get your marketing message then you must have said something worth listening to, and if visitors get the message, your site has done its job.

If your website delivers the message, then you can expect the email inquiries and phone calls to start flowing, but it’s still up to you and your sales staff to close the sale: people close sales not websites.

8. Think Stories Not Pitches

Did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter and the search engine optimizer … Stories, everyone loves stories. In fact before the invention of the Gutenberg press, oral story telling was the way knowledge got passed down from one generation to the next, and how news was sent from one region to another.

Now that we have this multimedia Web-environment, we can continue the tradition of real people delivering creative audio and video presentations that capture the imagination and drive home the marketing message so your audience won’t forget who you are. Nothing informs, engages, and entertains, like a good story: sounds to me like one heck of a way to sell to an audience desperate for meaningful communication.

9. Think Focus Not Confusion

There you go again, telling everyone who will listen all the wonderful things you and your company can do. Trouble is, telling them all those things just confuses them.

What is the product or service that is most important to your company, the one you are determined to sell to your audience? That’s the one you want to talk about. That’s the one you want to devote your marketing effort to promoting. That’s the one you want people to think about when they hear your name or see your logo. Focus your communication or your message will just be a forgettable, incomprehensible blur.

10. Think Campaigns Not Ads

Isolated one-time advertisements are like one-night-stands: exciting for a while but ultimately unfulfilling and devoid of meaning. Your audience is looking to get married, not a short-term fling. Your marketing has to woo your visitors with long-term campaigns that tell your story and deliver your focused message; audiences expect to be courted and counseled with meaningful communication. And that takes time and commitment.

If you’re spending money on just ads, you might as well be throwing that money down the drain. There is a better way. So if you’re looking for a long-term relationship with your audience, think campaigns not ads.

11. Think Message Not Hype

What message are you delivering to your online visitors? Are you telling them you’ve got the best product, at the best price, with the best staff, and world-class customer service? Is that what you saying? Guess what? Nobody cares, because nobody believes you.

There is only one way to show people you’re the best and that is to prove it, but here’s the catch, you can’t prove it until they become customers. Whoops. Okay, so what’s the solution? How about a real marketing message that speaks to what your audience really wants. It’s not about you it’s about them.

12. Think Personality Not Banality

Does your website just lie there like a lox; you know that cold, dead fish that often comes with a bagel? No personality, just more of the same tedious, dull, dreary, mind-numbing, tiresome, lackluster, monotonous, stuff everybody else has. Boring! This is the new Web, so if you can’t get with it, you’d better get out because you’re wasting your time and everybody else’s.

You’re so worried about downloading times that you forgot to put anything on your site worth seeing or hearing. Check your logs. If people are jumping ship faster than rats on a burning ship, it’s time to try something new; like, maybe some compelling content.

13. Think Branding Not Copyrights

Hay, I love the Beatles. I grew up with them, and I have all their records - ya records, like vinyl dude, not CDs. And guess what, I’ve also got a Mac, in fact I’ve got a bunch of them, not to mention iPods and other assorted Apple gizmos and gadgets. And you know something, I’ve never once got John, Paul, George, or Ringo confused with Steve Jobs. Amazing!

Worry just a little less about all that small print stuff and more on building a memorable brand that people will remember, and that nobody will mistake for some johnny-come-lately imposter.

14. Think Positioning Not Slogan

It’s funny how people have a position on almost everything: you name the issue and people will have a definite opinion on what they think, except when it comes to their businesses. Just because you have a cute slogan that you print under your logo, doesn’t mean you own a position in your audience’s minds.

It seems businesses can’t stand to make a definitive statement about who they are and what they do. Why is that? Afraid they’ll lose a customer I guess, but if people don’t understand exactly what you do, and why they should be doing business with you, then they’re never going to be customers anyway.

No company can be all things to all people and companies that try, never go anywhere. Tell people who you are and what you do and forget about all the other stuff, it just gets in the way.

15. Think Sensory Appeal Not Cents Appeal

Do you want people to sit-up and take notice of what you have to say? Do you want people to actually remember what you’re telling them? While if that’s the case, you better appeal to their senses, and we’re talking about sights and sounds.

Deliver all your juicy, got-to-have content in an audio and video presentation that will stick in people’s heads.

If all you’re doing is appealing to their desire to spend less, then maybe they aren’t the customers you’re looking for anyway. Nobody can afford to sell for less all the time, every time.

16. Think Identity Not Logos

Is your company the equivalent of the invisible man? You’re on the Web, but nobody cares because you’re not saying anything worth listening to, and if they do see you, you are instantly forgettable.

You’ve got to have an identity, a personality, an image, and there is no better way to create that identity than with a video of a real person delivering your marketing message in an entertaining, memorable manner.

17. Think Entertainment Not Biz-speak

Speaking of entertaining, you cannot engage, enlighten, or entertain if everything you present sounds and looks like it came from some b-school text book, or from one of those self-help courses on direct marketing guaranteed to make you a millionaire in only three weeks.

Every business has a story to tell and they can all be presented in a compelling way with a little imagination and creativity. And yes, even b-to-b businesses can rise above the mundane and deadly boring, if only they take the time and make the effort.

18. Think Communication Not Copy

Last but not least, let’s all remember, that websites are about communication. If you’ve got nothing to say, nothing to offer, or are afraid to say what you can do for your audience, then how do you expect to be successful.

Filling your Web pages with keyword density prose and instantly forgettable sale’s copy is not going to win the day.

Whether you are presenting your case in text, audio, or video, it better be interesting and enlightening - even text can be entertaining if written with style and attitude.

When websites fail, they fail because they do not communicate a realistic, believable, convincing marketing message.

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About the Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Tel. (905) 764-1246.