This week I heard from two great, long-time friends of mine out of the blue.

The kind of friend you don’t have to hear from for years but when you connect you realise the bond is strong as ever.

Let me tell you - it feels truly great.

But this week I’ve also been discovering a new friend. I love to connect with people on a deep down, honest-to-goodness, you are you and I am me and we thoroughly enjoy our similarities and respect our differences type of basis.

What’s great about this new friend is that he’s a newsletter publisher that I highly respect. I am constantly in awe of his honesty, with and relevance.

Most important though, I admire his good-naturedness. Some publishers really do have an undercurrent in all they do that makes you feel as though they are simply tolerating you because they need you to make money.

You feel as if, except for the likelihood that you will spend money with them, they’d prefer not to give two hoots about you.

But as I mused over this, I started to wonder. Do I make other people feel like that? I mean, I really do enjoy communicating and sharing with and learning fomr others - whether they will spend money with me or not.

So the thing is, some people are just jerks. That’s the truth. If you don’t know that, you really probably still believe in Santa Claus right?

A lot of us though, even though we care, we let our better nature get over-run by the neediness.

The challenge for me - and you, is to always care for others… and let them know it. In our keep in touch (followup) marketing people respond when we touch them and they feel connected. That’s how I feel about this guy… and I spend money with him.

Stay determined and the business will come. Neediness or greed won’t necessarily make it come any sooner.

Give and it will be given to you.

In his post titled “Different Kinds of Traffic” Seth Godin repeats the lesson that was driven home in last week’s The Apprentice.

Last week’s task was to throw a tailgate party at a college football game. Both teams sold Outback Steak in separate parking lots and needed foot traffic… you would think.

Gold Rush decided that they would attempt to cash in on the testosterone rush… cheerleaders, eating contests, fun events. They had lots of foot traffic… much more than Synergy did, but it was not traffic that converted - it was the equivalent of “freebie seekers”

Synergy however, priced more up market, went to their market (the traffic didn’t come to them, they went where the traffic was.. hint hint) and they sold, sold, and outsold Gold Rush.

Seth’s examples of Amazon and MySpace paint a similar picture.

It’s not the volume of traffic that’s important. So this is the recommended plan of attack after mulling over these lessons.
+ Go where people are buying
+ Entice them to visit you while in buying mode
+ Sell, sell, sell, convert, convert, convert
Will this be your recipe for online business success?

I recently went through the process of listing a product in Clickbank and was reminded of a couple things when I read Ros’ recent post.

She told about how she was searching for a product that she knew was being sold on Clickbank but couldn’t find a trace of it.

Well, here’s a couple tips from someone who recently went through the process for the first time.

1. The process is more manual than I expected. yeah… your first product listing has to be reviewed before you can sell using Clickbank as your merchant account - even if you didn’t want to list in the marketplace. That’s ok I guess , but you may not expect the delay, and… it’s not the case on PayDotCom.com
2. Listing in the marketplace so that visitors and affiliates can see or search for your product is not automatic. When you’re contacted with the aproval, the Clickbank rep should ask whether you want to be listed and then you can request to be listed in two categories.
3. While it costs $49 to approve your first product, you can list any further products free of charge (I think the landing pages have to be hosted on the same site unless you’re using a 3rd party tool that helps you circumvent that.)
4. Speaking of tools, there really is a market for addon tools for most major products and services. You would think that Clickbank would own and offer services that make it easy to do things like ensure secure downloads and minimise theft. I decided to go looking for a tool to manage secure downloads of digital products and came across an exceptional tool - Download Guard.