The Nams4Kids Giveaway is in full swing but you only have until August 27th so no lolly-gagging! Not only do you get some uber cool stuff from top-notch marketers like Kevin Riley, Nicole Dean, Peggy Baron, Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins, yours truly, and others! The goal of this giveaway is to not build our lists but to raise 10K for Dr. Mani’s foundation which saves kids lives by giving them heart surgeries they can’t afford for free!

I recorded a video tour inside the giveaway including some of the gifts I recommend you download right away…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Start Downloading Gifts Here

I dig PLR. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you know that. I did a PLR Case Study on it’s use and my latest product is on how to use PLR. Since I’m known as a PLR guy one of the questions I get asked often is where do I find “quality PLR”. Well there is a great offer going on right now by the Godfather of PLR, Jimmy D. Brown. He has re-opened the famous Profits Vault. Let me show you what you get…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get Quality PLR Here

I’ve harped on the whole “Catch-22″ of Internet marketing before…

You need to sell something to make money online. This can be your own product or selling stuff as an affiliate (other people’s products, eBay, CPA offers, whatever). But just because you put a slick-looking website or squeeze page online doesn’t mean you should go running to check yourbank account just
yet. You need traffic.

And there is your Catch-22. No Traffic. No Money.

There are a million and one products selling you all their strategies and blueprints but I just break it down to paid
and free traffic.

Over-simplified? Maybe. But it keeps me sane and making money online.

Paid traffic is stuff like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) the most popular being Google Adwords. You can also strike deals with email
marketers. Pay them to send a mailing to their list for your offer. You can pay them up-front for a solo-mailer or offer them a
commission of 50% and up for any sales they make from the traffic they send you.

You can get free traffic but it takes some elbow-grease by doing some stuff to ensure your website/offer appear in the search engines. That “stuff” is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So lets focus on free traffic and SEO.

In my over-simplified world, SEO breaks down in two areas:

On-page and off-page.

On-page SEO is the stuff you do on your website. Using your target keywords in your content, title tags, domain name, having
internal/external links on your site, etc.

Then we have off-page SEO stuff and there are a lot of ways of doing this…

• Article Marketing
• Social bookmarking
• Blog commenting
• Forum marketing
• Social networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Press Releases

If you’ve been studying Internet marketing online you know that list could go on and on, and on and on.

And that is part of the problem. There are so many traffic techniques that you’ll drive yourself mad trying to master them all. In the end you’ll end up  frustrated and you’ll end up with little traffic and no money.

That’s the reason I recommend focusing on 2 or 3 strategies and then stick to them.

What I use and recommend…

• Article marketing.
• Social bookmarking.
• Press releases.

Once you start getting traffic then go ahead and try other things but just stick to a few strategies at first.

In the next few blog posts, I’ll talk more in depth on my three favorite ways of generating free web traffic to my my web properties so stay tuned for the next blog post.

Last month the small community of Wadena, Minnesota was ravaged by a tornado. Some people lost the roofs off their homes. Others lost everything except the clothes on their backs.

Here is a video of the destruction left behind by the tornado:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What does any of this have to do with Internet marketing? Just this…

A group of two dozen of the internet’s top marketers and writers have joined forces to create two fundraisers to help the people of Wadena clean up and rebuild. And because these marketers are trying to raise as much money as possible, they’re offering their products and services to you at never-before-seen prices!

There are two ways for you to get yourself some great deals:

1. Bid on internet marketing products and services from some of the Warrior Forum’s most respected marketers, including Paul Myers, Kevin Riley, Marlon Sanders, Steven Wagenheim, Bryan Kumar, Jim Straw, BIG Mike, Dennis Gaskill, , Mike McMillan, Kim Standerline, John Schwartz and Mark Andrews.

You won’t believe what’s up for auction – the opening bids are dirt cheap! Check it out here:

http://helpwadena.com/auction/index.php

Be sure to register and bid today, because this benefit auction ends July 31st!

2. The second way for you to get your hands on a great deal is by grabbing your internet marketing PLR package. This is a package of IM reports and articles created by the Warrior Forum’s top writers. You won’t believe who all contributed. See for yourself here:

http://www.helpwadena.com/plr.html

My father was born in Wadena, MN so this hit close to home for me personally so please check it out and hit the “retweet” button. You won’t find a better IM PLR package around, so grab yours today… but hurry, this offer disappears July 31st!

100% of the proceeds go to benefit the people who’re working to rebuild their homes and their lives. But I’d jump on these sales even if they weren’t for a good cause, because these deals are too good to pass up!

I have my eye on a few of these great deals my self so I’m off to grab my PLR pack and browse the auctions – hope to see you there!

I’ve mentioned it before that you shouldn’t use free hosting for any of your websites. It’s too risky to lose control of your web properties that way. And this is a lesson being learned the hard way by 73,000+ blogs that were wiped out overnight. They were hosted for free with blogetery.com. It appears that there were some illegal activities going on (the details are murky at best) but the fact is the U.S. Government shut blogetery.com along with the 73,000+ “free blogs” they were hosting.

These are people who had AdSense sites, review sites, and more but in order to save a buck they decided to use a free hosting service which is a big mistake. It’s also amazing how clueless blogetery.com’s owner was about how to run a hosting business. You can learn more about that from the thread he started at Web Hosting Talk. This guy was clueless and totally oblivious of his responsibilities as a host. Anyone can lease a dedicated server and open shop and you don’t want to trust your business to someone like that.

But as Internet marketers you should also stay clear of more established companies like Google Pages, Blogger, and WordPress.com. Blogger has shut down very popular blogs without notice.

These type of sites don’t like or understand affiliate marketing so it’s just best to go the self-hosted route so you can have more control over your web properties.

It’s also easy to backup your sites this way so if something does happen you can easily be back in business. Installing a WordPress blog on your own domain is very easy with cPanel so make sure you use a host that offers it (especially if your not techie). I recommend Host Gator. In this video you can watch how easily I install a WordPress blog on my own domain in about a minute.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My "office" in the lobby of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN

It’s a beautiful thing. I’m here in Rochester, Minnesota helping my Mom with her medical appointments. She had cataract surgery on her eye. Now, that’s not the beautiful thing but the surgery went great. But as I wait in the lobby of the Mayo Clinic I’ve gotten a ton done for my online business.

It still amazes me how all we need is WIFI and an outlet (I’ve been here for a few hours so my battery can’t take it) and we can work on our business from anywhere.

I love to travel and I was just thinking, in the past few years I’ve worked from France, Thailand, Canada, Costa Rica, Panama, and a few different states here in the good ole USA.

Now that on it’s own isn’t that big of a deal. Most folks working now days have the option of doing this but working on my own business while I’m here, help out my Mom, and not even miss a beat is a beautiful thing.

I love not only being able to work remotely but work remotely on my own business! The only drawback is the muzak playing through the speakers thank goodness for headphones and iTunes.

Hey, I even have time to stop and write up this blog post.

Video shot with my new and first “smart phone” I’ve had the EVO (I’m so new to these phones that it recorded side-ways). I usually check my PO Box twice a month but I skipped all of June so there were a lot of commission checks from ClickBank and a couple other affiliate programs that I still get checks vs. direct deposit. So you can make money online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a lot of memberships sites out there offering “AdSense ready” sites. Every month they provide you with a zipped file which you add your AdSense ID, upload the files to your server and make money.

Sounds good but is it too good to be true?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I recently upgraded to WordPress 3.0 so I wanted a WP 3.0 compatible theme. Not only did I find one but I think I’m in love. After about 2 years of using the Clean Cut theme I’m now using the Magazine Basic theme and it rocks! Below is my video review of the Magazine Basic theme for WordPress 3.0.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download Magazine Basic 2.6.7 WordPress 3.0 Theme for free here.

There is also a Premium Basic Magazine WordPress Theme that looks super cool! I’ll be ordering that bad boy since it has more rich features and it’s only $39.97 and can be used on multiple websites which rocks. I’ll have a video review of the Premium version of Basic Magazine theme in a few days so stay tuned for that.

Check out the low-down on the Premium Basic Magazine Theme here. And hey if you buy it in June you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free iPad! Hmm… I should wait until July 1st to tell you about this so I have a better chance of winning that iPad. I kid. Get the dealio here (he has other cool free WordPress themes to boot):

I upgraded to WordPress 3.0 yesterday. This blog is hosted by DreamHost and they make really easy (I click one link). Once the upgrade was done my site was up but it was re-directing to my latest post. So instead of going to www.IMNirvana.com folks would land on http://www.imnirvana.com/30-hours-2-mins-45-secs so that was a problem.

I messed around with the settings making sure the “Settings|Reading” wasn’t the culprit (it wasn’t). I even changed themes. Nada. I looked at it from behind the scenes via FTP to see if anything jumped out at me. Nope.

So I opened a support ticket with Dream Host and they got back to me right away:

I checked this and it looks like you’re using a plugin that’s not
compatible with WP 3.0. To test this, I temporarily renamed your plugins
directory to “plugins.removed”. After doing that, your site was able to
load normally. Once I renamed it back, it redirected to that page again.

When upgrading to a new version, it’s always a good idea to first check
with the developers of your plugins to make sure they’re compatible with
the new version. Or, barring that, disable them all first, upgrade, then
re-enable them one by one, checking your site in between each one so you
can see if a plugin has issues with the new version.

I hope that helps!

Thanks!
Chalise

The good news… I now know what was the problem. The bad news… I have to go through each plugin to see which one is the culprit. The first one I deactivated was “Action Slider” and that gave this huge php broken error message. Not good. So I had to delete it but that was not causing the problem.

Needless to say I tracked down the problem child and it only took about 5-10 minutes. It’s a plugin called “redirection” (go figure, huh). I deactivated it and vioala problem fixed!

Two of my plugins were toast due to the WordPress 3.0 upgrade and neither are plugins that I was using a lot anyway so no big deal losing them as a casualty of the latest WordPress version.

That’s the one big draw-back of plugins. As much as I love using plugins it’s best not to rely heavily on them because you just never know. Especially if it’s a free plugin like most are but I’ve even had paid plugins bite the dust when the developer stopped developing it.