If you need help naming your next info product, check this out:

www.infoproductnamer.com

Basically it’s to help you be lazy.  You can create your next info product name easily.  If you don’t even know what you want your info product to be, it can help you with that too.  It comes preloaded with many different niches for you to try out, or you can enter your own.  All of this value completely free!

The product is currently in beta and accepting feature requests.

What do you think about it?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Be lazy naming your next info product.

Many people think that hitting home runs in business is quite a bit about luck.  I hear all the time that I’m lucky I work for myself and I can live the way I do, making my hours, etc.  My first response is usually: “yeah I make my own hours, but usually it’s 16-20 hour days.”  What really happened is I prepared myself mentally to start a business for some time.

When the opportunity presented itself, I was ready to execute.  I knew I would be changing jobs soon, and so I decided to take a leap of faith and depend on my ability to execute.  It worked.  Since then, I’ve started and joined many ventures with many people, some of which didn’t work out, but others that worked tremendously.  Most of all I learned something from every single venture.

I’ve started or joined businesses making t-shirts, building websites, fixing computers, doing real estate, Internet Marketing, general sales, creative writing, fine art, and some other things I’m probably forgetting.  The first extremely sustainable was my main business, Acute Technology, which started as a hodgepodge of IT support and website development, but is now building enterprise level applications for businesses, educational institutions, and government.  I was able to leverage my clout with Acute Technology to get into other projects that I’m passionate about as well.

Luck doesn’t just apply to the large victories, but the small ones as well.  Just the other day, I heard through Twitter that Brian Brushwood was looking for someone to help with Name That Autocomplete, and was on a very tight deadline.  I was able to make things happen for them and make some friends along the way.  I think the ROI on my few hours worth of work will pay off, and that small victory makes me feel lucky, but really I was just listening at the right time, with the right knowledge and skills (preparedness).

What are your thoughts on luck?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Luck is Just Being Prepared for Opportunity

Here’s my submission for the Shoemoney System Theme Song:

The Rob Hustle video is pretty good, but this is different and makes a better ‘theme song’ I think.  What do you think?

Why did I do this?

Shoemoney is having a contest for a theme song, and giving the winner $1000 plus a trip to the Playboy Mansion for the Azoogle party.  I’m going this year hell or high water.  Check out the contest page.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Shoemoney System Theme Song

St. Paddy’s day is my favorite Holiday.  My birthday is in less than a week, and I still haven’t planned anything for it.  Hopefully someone throws me a surprise party.  Anyways – I digress.

I want to talk about capturing the attention of special days of the year – be them holidays, birthdays, etc.  People are in a purchase-friendly mood when they’re celebrating – especially when alcohol is involved.  When you’re thinking about your next affiliate project, consider what holidays are in close proximity.  You’ll want to be promoting things for that holiday up to two or three months in advance, because people often times buy their products early to get the best possible prices they can.

Brainstorming and Execution

Make sure you brainstorm as many monetization paths as possible when you’re beginning to formulate your first plans.  Here are some of my successful St. Patrick’s Day affiliate sites and how they were monetized:

• A blog for hospitality businesses to brainstorm promotions for St. Patrick’s Day.  I directed people to offers for custom shirts, mugs, guiness, etc.
• A holiday deals website giving out coupons for SPD schwag.  I all of the coupon offers I could find, centralizing a place where people could get discounts for all of their Paddy’s Day needs.
• An Irish music website, complete with funny YouTube videos.  I focused on generating income from Audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon.
• A website with the complete history of St. Patrick’s Day.  I just ran Adsense on this one – I’m not sure why it was so successful.

Conclusion

I hope this helped you decide what to do for your next affiliate project – or at least gave you a little treasure chest of ideas for projects you may want to do in the future.  The other thing that is great about holiday offers is that with a little tweaking, you can run with the same website next year.

Like any other project – the more insight you can give your customers, the better.  If you don’t know much about Easter, you probably shouldn’t build a niche site about it.  Luckily my birthday is so close to St. Paddy’s Day, and I have a little bit o’ Irish in me.  Hopefully this next week isn’t too blurry.

Have questions? Ask them in the comments.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: St. Patrick’s Day Insights

New Website

I just finished the private beta for the New England Landmark Realty website.  Here it is:

New New England Landmark Realty Website

This will be going up at www.newenglandlandmarkrealty.com eventually, but not until after we get enough feedback.

Some of the new features include:

• indexed and indexable MLS listings from both NNEREN and VREIN MLS IDX databases,
• MUCH better SEO,
• new design with slide show,
• 

  Old Website

  featured properties,

• NELR property virtual tours and slide show movies,
• back end analytics so they can actually see how the website is working.

Anyways, head over there and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Project BETA: New England Landmark Realty

I got really lucky with that domain name and put it to use.  I just made a website that tries to be offensive, sexy, and disgusting all at once.  We’ll see how it does.  The system is built on WordPress and is using a free theme for now.  What’s interesting is how low my bounce rate is.  We’ll see if it keeps up.

Here’s a link:

http://www.drunkasshole.com

Note: drunkasshole.com is NSFW.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: New Project: DrunkAsshole.com

I’ve been checking out the Shoemoney System for the last few days, and I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t already know.  I’m hoping that it ramps up soon though.  The videos are basic basic basic, but I’m sure he’s just leveling the playing field for other users.

The sales letter when you first sign up seemed long and annoying.  Why not just do a buy button at the top?  I knew I wanted to try it, but still had to sift through all of that stuff.

The videos and coupons that he advertises are released slowly over time, so you can’t just buy a month, watch and download everything and then cancel (shucks).

It looks like the only complete content is the old podcasts that Jeremy did as Net Income and The ShoeMoney Show on Webmaster Radio, but I’ve heard all of those already.  It would have been cool if the did the work to edit them down into something more to the point.

I also haven’t been impressed by the promise that the first 100 signups for the system get a special bonus, but it’s been like a week and a half and we still don’t know who we hare.  I’m fairly sure I’m in the first 100, because I signed up in 3 minutes, but who knows.

Unfortunately, content is released so slowly that I don’t really have much to say.  One of the videos everyone can watch, because it’s public, and the other three are about things I know very well: setting up a Google account, what affiliate marketing is, and setting up a ClickBank account.

I also noticed that many of the users complained about the same things in the week 1 webinar, so I don’t feel completely alone with this.

My conclusion?  I’ll give it a little more time before I completely judge…

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Review: The Shoemoney System is Meh for Advanced Users.

Front Page of the Vermont Quilt Festival Website

We just finished a project for a local quilt festival.  This is their new website, built in conjunction with Graycat Studio:

Vermont Quilt Festival

The entire website is wrapped around Joomla! template and completely customizable for them.  This was an interesting project, and we still have a lot more work to do for them.  We’re going to be building a registration database as well.  Exciting!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Recent Project: Vermont Quilt Festival

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could highlight weekends in Google Analytics?  I could be missing something and it’s possible, but I don’t know how to do it.  This is the layover I photoshop together for clients:

Google Analytics with a Weekend Layover

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Why can’t Google Analytics highlight weekends?

I just threw this website together for my own use like a year ago.  Right now there are the three most common tools I use.  I couldn’t really think of anything else that I would have used, but the three tools are:

• Creating MD5 Hashes,
• Whois Lookups, and
• Public IP Address Checking

I use it all the time, so I thought I’d tell you about it.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Project: Toolerific.com