If you are trying to hire someone to write you a book, article or something else, how do you know whether or not they’ve copied any material from other people?

This is a valid question because you don’t want to get into trouble with the original author and furthermore you don’t want to damage your reputation. After all, word spreads fast over the internet.

Typically, when you are dealing with companies such as Elance, it’s pretty much stated in the rules that it is going to be their own creative thought. However, that doesn’t guarantee that they will check each piece for plagiarism. So, what you can do instead is say something like this in your ad, “To avoid plagiarism all writing will be verified with Copyscape.” or you can make it very clear that you’re going to be double-checking the content to make sure that it is truly their content. The one thing that you’ve got to remember that’s really going to help you out with using something like Elance is the fact that they are in the middle of each transaction making sure that things are run smoothly. Not only that, but the freelancers on Elance don’t just want the money, they also want positive feedback.

One thing you want to look for when you’re identifying individuals to work for you, is finding people that have good feedback and have done multiple different projects. You’ll come across something they call a five-point scale. This is very helpful for me because it is one of the criteria I use to judge whether to hire someone or not. Typically, I don’t hire anybody who rates under a 4.8 and they have to have done multiple jobs. You don’t want to hire some newbie that only has one person that gave them a 5.0. That’s not good enough. Look for people that have been on there for a while. Those people are not going to do that kind of stuff because most of them understand that feedback is king and the only way they’re going to continue getting paid is if they don’t get kicked off the Elance network. If they get kicked off, they’re going to lose their income stream.

I actually had distributed an article that was written by a freelancer back in 2003. I had hired somebody who took somebody else’s work and put it in an article and gave it to me. I didn’t find out until the next year and by that time I couldn’t do much about it because there was no way I could take it off all the article locations I had distributed it to. However, I did take it down from all the locations that I could find and I reported it to Elance as quickly as I could. I also let my friends know never to hire that individual. As a result, they got kicked off and were taken care of. So, it’s something to think about.

If any of this is still not comforting enough for you, you can always find a contract or have one written up by your lawyer to help you to protect your rights, but really I wouldn’t worry too much about it. But basically letting your freelancer know you can check if the work has been plagiarized is a good deterrent in stopping it from happening to you.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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When you want to distribute an audio file over the web you need to shrink it down considerably in order for individuals to listen to it in a reasonable amount of time. How many times have you visited a site and clicked on the audio presentation only to find that it took forever to load even though you had a fast connection? When this happens the majority of people give up and end up leaving your site.

So, you’ll want to reduce your audio files as small as you can without sacrificing too much of its quality.

If you’re creating a recording and want to give people the option of downloading it to their computer, the first thing you want to do is save it on whatever software you are using. I personally use Sony Sound Forge.

Next, when you save the file, for example inside Sony Sound Forge, use a preset template. They offer low quality, stereo or CD quality. The CD quality audio is going to take up the greatest amount of space followed by the stereo quality. Typically, when you’re saving your audio files, even for a CD, I would suggest not saving it as a stereo file. I’d recommend saving it as a mono file.

The reason I say that is not only because the file is going to be a little bit smaller, but believe or not, many people will only have one functioning speaker. Their right speaker will work, but not the left or vice versa. You will get customers calling in and saying, “This doesn’t work” and then you will have to come up with an excuse as to why it doesn’t work. When one of the speakers stops working, they’ll typically only hear half the conversation. So, for this reason I always save it in mono format. That’s just a little thing to do to save you from wasting time and to cut down on the couple of people that do this.

Now, the other thing is, when I shrink the file down I typically try to get it to 24 kbps and then 22 Hz. I think that’s the smallest file size I’ve found that works the best. If you’re using something like Sony Sound Forge, when you save it as an MP3, you can shrink it down from there. My recommendation is to try to take it to the smallest bit rate that you possibly can in the mono format. However, make sure that when you do it, that you also check it when you’re done because if you hear it and it sounds like you’re Mickey Mouse or something, you might want to raise it up a little bit. Also, before you do send it out to anybody, make sure it works properly.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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You Rock!

Matt Bacak

Frontier Marketing Intl, LLC
1140 Old Peachtree Road, Suite D
Duluth, GA 30097-5121
Phone: 770-271-1536

Pay-per-click platforms like Google Adwords is a great medium to advertise your products. But you may be wondering if there are any other ad platforms you can use right? The answer is yes, I personally do use a few other places that don’t really get a lot of publicity but work very well.

One of the places that I use is MSN. I like MSN Ad Center. You can get a lot of clicks, leads and make lots of sales through Microsoft, so don’t rule them out. I think getting started is about five bucks and then you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad, just like with Google. It’s really easy to use. The URL for MSN Ad Center is www.AdCenter.Microsoft.com. Check it out.

Another place that I use that’s pay per click is Yahoo Search. Yahoo still has millions of users each day and is a great place to put your ads. I just go to www.SearchMarketing.Yahoo.com. If you go there right now, they are running a promotion. You can get a credit of $50 for signing up, and then you can begin placing your ads on there, same exact thing as Google and MSN.

Then there’s another one I also use besides Yahoo, Google and MSN… I use AdBrite. Their site can be found at www.AdBrite.com. They’re an excellent advertising network to use because they allow you to run text ads, banner ads, video ads and lots of other cool stuff. It runs a little bit differently because they don’t really have a search network. They actually put the ads on websites. They have a network of 67,574 registered sites that is bound to contain your niche. You just say, “Here’s my target audience, here’s the people that I want to see it,” like “Here’s the age that I want to see it, here’s the gender that I want people to see my ads, here’s the keywords I want people to see.” Basically, you really narrow it down and say, “These are the actual individuals I want to see it.” They will then find websites that match your criteria and then put your ads on them. AdBrite’s pretty good. However, you will want to test it out for whatever market you are in because for some markets, I have found, it really sucks. Yet, in some other markets it really works very well.

So, those are all the different pay per clicks that I am using right now and really have no complaints. I’m getting the clicks, generating the leads and most importantly making the sales. The other you have to remember when venturing outside of Google Adwords is that you can save quite a bit of money. I’ve really noticed this and I know the reason is because my keywords may be cheaper and my competition may be less on these other networks.

So if you’re using Google Adwords now or considering it, don’t overlook other networks as these networks may be able to bring you a lot of traffic with a lot less competition.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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Testing your site on a continual basis is essential to finding out what works and what doesn’t. By doing this you’ll be able to ensure you’re using the right strategies, designs, headlines, ad campaigsn etc., to continually grow your business. If you’re investing a lot of time and energy into having a sales page written, a design made, an ad or having simple changes done to your site, you need to know if it’s worth your time and effort. The only way to find this out is through A/B split testing.

To do an A/B split test using Google AdWords, you’ll first need to log in to your Google AdWords campaign. Now, once you log in to Google.com/ads, you should see your campaigns, if you’re running campaigns. You need to click on whatever campaign you want to run this A/B split test on.

Once you click on that campaign, you will see which words you’re running in that campaign. If you have ad groups you’ll want to click on your ad groups because you’re going to have to do an A/B split test for ad groups. Perfect.

When you pop into your ad group, it will show you the actual ad that you’re running in the upper left-hand corner. Where it says “view all,” click on it. That’s going to show you all the ads that you’re running and the ad variations. Then on the right-hand side, you’re going to probably have three tabs. One is going to be a summary tab that’s going to be a summary of everything that’s going on in your campaign. It’s going to tell you your click-through rate and your average cost per clicks.

Next to that, up top, you’re going to see another tab that’s going to say “keywords,” and it’ll show you all the keywords in the campaign. Then you’ll see “ad variations”. Okay, so when you get in ad variations, it’s really easy. If you have one ad in there, well, then you need to add another ad. So then you click on “Create new ad” and that’ll be over in the greenish gray area. Underneath where it showed ad variations, you’re going to scroll your eyes to the left-hand side. You’ll see “text ads.” You click on “text ads” and create your new ad that will run inside your campaign. Now, once you do that, you save the ad, of course.

When you go back to your account, go to your campaigns and click on whatever campaign you want to do. You need to click on “edit campaign settings” in the campaign area. There is a function I want you to change so you can do a true A/B split test. Inside there, there’s a thing called advanced options and underneath advanced options, it’s going to say keyword bidding, ad scheduling, position preference, and then ad serving. You want to make sure it says “Rotate, show ads more evenly.” You do not want it to be “Optimize, show better performing ads more often.”

The reason for this is so that your ads will run more evenly. If you have it at “Optimize, show better performing ads more often,” what that’s doing, is whatever ad is just really kicking butt, it’s going to run the one that’s winning more often, and therefore you’re not going to get a true A/B split test. You don’t want it to do that. You want it to rotate more evenly.

Try this strategy to decide which ad outperforms the other.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven’t signed up for my
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An excellent way to expand your business is through joint venture (JV) deals with others, but you can also share your expert knowledge by holding your own seminars.

So, how do you go about finding these JV partners? Well, the best way to JV and find people to do joint ventures with is going to be through multiple channels.

The first thing you can do is go online to Google. For demonstration purposes do a search for the term “real estate newsletter” and see what pops up. Now, you can either go to the sites listed in the natural search or you can also click on the tiny little classified pay per click ads on the right-hand side of the page. When you click on those links and go to their pages, look to see if they’ve got an opt-in box or anything like that. The reason for this is because you’re looking for people that have lists in the real estate world. You’ll look for contact information to start a dialogue with them.

You’ll also want to search for “real estate tips, real estate lists, real estate ezines, real estate ezine, real estate e-course, etc. Basically, you want to search for terms that may require visitors to opt-in because that’s what you’re looking for are people that have lists like that.

Doing a quick search myself I see that there are 2,830,000 different things out there. There’s a realtor newsletter – now, if you’re into real estate investing that might not be for you. There’s another one that says marketing newsletter tips, real estate newsletters, ready to go real estate newsletters, free newsletter trial, Real estate newsletters, email newsletter service, real estate newsletter, free catalog and samples of real estate marketing supplies. So, as you can see you kind of have to search through there and find things that really look like they’ll really make sense for you.

Here’s one: Free newsletter ezine, it’s the ultimate step by step guide for beginners and real estate entrepreneurs to get a great start and grow their business. I’m going to click on that link and go to their page. The site is called RealEstatePromo.com. What I find there is that the owner of the sites name is Richard Flint. It looks like he’s got a bunch of stuff. He also seems to be into internet marketing by the way his site is. He lists under contact information the name of his company, his address, office phone and fax numbers as well as an email address. You’ve got everything you need to be able to contact him.

So go do a search online, put in your niche and then type in things after it like newsletter , ezine, e-course and things like that after that and you’ll be able to find some joint ventures.

However, let’s say you couldn’t find any contact information about the individual. In this case, a little trick that you can do in order to find that information is by going to DomainTools.com. When you go there, right at the top it says “DomainTools.” Underneath that, it says “Whois Lookup.” Input the URL of the individual into the Whois search box and then push search.

From the previous example I can see that he registered at GoDaddy, the same street address, his personal email address and his phone number. His site’s been up since February of ’02, so he’s been around for a while.

These simple research strategies are a great way for you to begin finding JV partners. Good luck!

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven’t signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I’m doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt’. It’s now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com