My confirmation of attendance for the Entrepreneur Weekend in Birmingham arrived in the mail yesterday and I am really looking forward to attending.

The organiser of this event is Steve Foley, the man who ran a very successful seminar in London last year called the UK Internet Entrepreneur Conference.

Steve has changed the format a little this year so it isn’t just internet marketing that is covered but also property investment.

According to the site (http://www.UKIECSeminar.co.uk) he has lined up a whole load of experts to speak over the two days, concentrating on property investment on the Saturday and then internet marketing on the Sunday.

If you are free on the 28th and 29th of April then I highly recommend you take a look at the site for more details.

Steve has fixed it so that you do not have to attend both days, you can choose one or the other and pay a reduced attendance fee.

I’ll be there both days so let me know if you are going and we can meet up for a drink and a chat!

http://www.UKIECSeminar.co.uk

Make sure to check out the Entrepreneur Weekend Seminar, I can’t stress enough how beneficial it is to get out from behind your PC and meet fellow marketers!

I’ve just paid a freelancer $300 (about £160) to write me 10 articles of around 500 words each on a specific topic.

Now, I do realise that it is possible to have articles written for far less and that certain websites offer to write 500 word articles for just $3 or so. The problem with buying cheap articles is that they often need to be rewritten before they make any sense!

When I purchased Mark Warren’s Ultimate Wealth Package it was funny to discover that some of the sentences in his eBooks made little to no sense whatsoever – probably the result of using cheap ghostwriters whose first language is not English.

The following is an example of the poor quality of writing present in one of his books called “Making Money with An Opt-In List“:

“Not a lot of people use email

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays simply because virtually almost all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms needed in processing different transactions. A person without an email address is tantamount to a person without an online home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.”

Strange, muddled writing that contradicts itself in the first 2 sentences!

Writing articles for inclusion in special article directories can be a good way to increase traffic to a site and if you don’t want to have to do it yourself it’s easy to find plenty of people who will do it for you.

The freelancer I used is quite expensive but I know that any work she does will not need to be rewritten and will also be of a very good standard.

10 articles on a subject I know little about would take me, probably, around 15-20 hours to research and write which is time that I am not willing to waste.

Getting someone to do this work for me for just £160 is a bargain because if I didn’t hire someone, it would never get done!

If you are thinking about using freelancers on sites like Elance and Rentacoder, make sure to ask for examples of previous work before committing to using that particular person.

I got a load of truely crap articles written for me recently and had to cancel the project. This is an example of what someone wrote for me:

“Broker is there other person who is the property investment expert in the market type place. They might be helpful in this venture. Their experience and opinion is always fruitful. But the situation keeps changing time to time.”

Outsource boring stuff that you don’t want to do and projects that require skills you do not have – which could include programming, web design, article writing, keyword research, audio transcription etc.

Spend a little money outsourcing jobs so you can save time and concentrate on the things that you can do well.

It pays more to be a marketer and hire in people to do your techy stuff…

The idiots have been out in force today unfortunately.

You see, there seems to be a selection of complete morons who continue to run automated blog comment spam software.

Today they have been posting loads of comments to this blog yet not actually realising that their comments never appear on the blog.

If you also run a WordPress blog you will probably have come across this problem; useless comments which simply point to junk sites about certain pharmaceuticals and “adult” websites.

Well, here’s a little message to anyone who uses comment spam software:

Your comments will never, ever be posted on the Biz Opps Blog. It just simply won’t happen.

I moderate every single comment which is submitted. If a comment has something stupid or irrelevant written in it, the url is added to the “blacklist”. This means that any comments containing that website address are automatically deleted without even going into the moderation queue.

Words such as viagra, cialis and other more “adult” phrases are flagged and the comments deleted straight away.

Even if your comments did somehow get onto this blog, they will not increase your page rank when it comes to Google or any other search engine. All URLs which are not include in actual blog posts have a “no follow” tag attached to them.

Good, informative comments will always be approved so please do feel free to contribute but comment spammers will be investigated and blacklisted.

Recieved an email this afternoon from Mark Warren, the creator of the “Ultimate Wealth Package”.

Nothing unusual about that you may think except that 2 minutes prior to that I got exactly the same email from “Danny”, the liar behind Danny’s Scam Review.

The whole email was an elaborate story about visiting the Rich Jerk at his mansion and going out for dinner with him. The purpose of this mailing was to promote the Rich Jerk’s new software.

Apparently both “Danny” and Mark Warren did exactly the same thing when they went to visit RJ:

“I actually know this guy and a few months ago I went out to dinner with him. Here’s what happened, first I fly out to California and rented a car….”

“Danny” seems to get out a lot.

When he was trying to sell the disappointing PDX-Factor course, he claims he went round to see Craig Richards. Of course, he can’t just “pop round” because Craig is in the UK and “Danny” is allegedly in Phoenix in the US. He also claimed that he went around to see Chris Cobb, another UK marketer.

All of it is completely rubbish, of course, “Danny” seems to be Mark Warren in disguise or vice versa.

I realise that people use pen names and it has gone on for years. The problem with Mr Warren and his “Danny” alias is that he uses this pen name to shamelessly promote his own material, creating false testimonials and making up fake statistics. He’s a shill.

Unfortunately he isn’t alone, it seems to be a regular occurrence now that certain internet marketers create alter-egos to promote their own products and appear as satisfied customers.

Their major weapon in this type of scam is domain registration protection. They can register domains without revealing who they are and con plenty of people without being found out.

That is, of course, as long as they are careful. Mark Warren is so desperate for cash that he shoots himself in the foot by sending out the same email both as “Danny” and also as himself.

It’s pathetic and gives other internet marketers a bad name…

At the moment I am doing an experiment with a new product and trying to drive as much traffic as possible to the sales page.

In order to try and drive this traffic I am posting articles to specific directories.

The idea is that I get 10 articles about a specific subject onto article directories where they will be indexed by the search engines and also picked up by webmasters.

So tonight I decided to watch some vintage footage I have of Jim Edwards explaining how to write articles.

The DVD is 2 hours long so I managed to make 9 pages of notes on the subject. It was pretty exhausting but will be well worth it.

As Jim explained, imagine you publish an article which is picked up by 100 sites who each send 5 visitors per day. It’s over-simplified, I know, but on average it could work out to about 500 visitors per day.

500 visitors a day is 182,500 per year. That’s a lot of traffic from just one article. Plus, providing your article is related to your product, it is also qualified traffic – the very best kind.

To drive the same amount of traffic via Pay Per Click advertising would cost $18,250 at $0.10 per click.

Anyway, a couple of hours after finishing the DVD, and with an aching hand, I receive an email from Martin Avis.

Martin has just released a new report called:

‘You CAN Write Articles’

Great… absolutely brilliant…

Fantastic timing Martin, thanks for that!

Wait for me to make a load of notes and then release the shortcut two hours later!

Anyway, I grabbed a copy and sat down to read it, and this is exactly the kind of thing I need to be able to increase the quality of my articles and, hopefully, get some serious traffic to my site.

OK, this report is brand new, 43 pages long and gets to the point. There’s no padding, Martin gives you everything he knows about writing great articles.

The topics covered include:

* 12 different types of article, and which three are the best for beginners to start with.

* A foolproof template that makes writing How-to articles a snap.

* A multipurpose template that takes all the guessing out of planning any article.

* The 5 vital elements that can make or break your articles – and how to get them right every time.

* 9 pointers for writing killer headlines that will suck your readers in.

* 5 powerful ways to end your articles for maximum effect.

* The 5 myths about article writing that you must ignore.

* 6 rules for writing articles that people will love to read

Check it out at:

[link no longer active]

Now, a report like this from a specialist like Martin really should sell for $29 to $49 but he has decided to sell it for just $7.

Yes, at today’s exchange rate that’s only about £3.80.

It’s ridiculously inexpensive and so I recommend that you grab a copy while you can.

If you want to get people to visit your site then it really is a must.

Just go here:

[link no longer active]

You won’t regret it!

Best regards,

Ben