First of all if you don’t have a lead capture mechanism on your site you’re missing out on potential sales and leads.  A lead capture mechanism can be as simple as an opt-in box to your mailing list.

Now for the technique.  Let’s assume you created an opt-in box to get people on your mailing list.  Why would I want to sign up for your mailing list?  Normal reasons are coupons, exclusive discounts, more information, etc…

In addition to that we can also give out a free report or ebook.  I know you don’t want to write an ebook.  I don’t either.  That’s why I’m going to tell you how to create an ebook in 5 – 10 minutes.

First things first.  Fire up Word or any word processing program you might have installed.

Second go to article directories.  There are tons of them, but here are a few to get you started:

Ezine Articles

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

Third:  Search for your topic.  For example you do plumbing in Wall, NJ, so you search for plumbing.

Here are some of the great articles I’ve found:

Plumbing Basics

A Short Guide for Plumbing Emergencies

Plumbing Tips – From Thawing Frozen Pipes to General Pipe Repairs

Plumbing Problems and Solutions

Inexpensive Bathroom Remodeling Secrets

Electric showers: Making your bath economical

Emergency Plumbing Service: How To Choose The Best

Plus there are literally hundreds of other articles.  I found these articles in literally two minutes.

The good thing about these article directories is you can use their articles, all you have to do is leave the author information in.

Fourth: Create a cover page in Word (make sure to include your contact information).

Fifth: Pick your favorite articles and copy and paste them into Word, right after your cover page.

Sixth: Use a PDF converter to convert your document into PDF format.  Here are a few free PDF converters:

PDF 995

Primo PDF

Open Office

Seventh: Relax and take a nap.  You’re done.  You’ve created a good ebook with tips you can give your future clients in literally five minutes.

You don’t have to use this technique to create ebooks and reports, if you get stuck on what to write to your mailing list or are in a rush to get a mailing out you can do the same thing for your mailing list.

You can also use the articles on your sites for fast, keyword rich, free content.

I have a friend that wants to buy a revenue producing site.  He’s doing his homework before he buys, but I’ve been telling him over the last couple of weeks don’t believe everything you see.  A lot of those “gurus” out there and sales pages are complete bullshit.  From the screenshots down to the videos.

Testimonials a lot of times are faked also and even if they’re not the big internet marketing guys play the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” game.

Another thing PayPal fees vary by transaction.  When I see a screenshot of PayPal transactions and the fees are exactly the same for every transaction, that raises a big red flag for me.  PayPal charges you different fees depending on what kind of transaction it is and what kind of account you have.  Usually you won’t be billed at the same rate for every single transaction if you have a ton of transactions.  For more information get it straight from PayPal.

Here’s a quick tutorial for everyone.  You can take this as a warning or you can take it to become a scammer.  Either way it’s up to you what you do with the knowledge.

There are a few ways to get the desired effect.

Technique one:

Go to your favorite website and save the page.  Open the page up in your favorite WYSIWYG editor.

Change the names and numbers.  Save, open up in your friendly browser, get a screenshot.  Done.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Look who's PayPal account this is!

See How Easy it is to Manipulate any of the Fields?

And that’s just one technique.  We still have the Firebug technique.  The javascript code technique.  I haven’t even mentioned videos.  You get the point.  I don’t think the other techniques are necessary.

Pay attention to detail and verify as many details as you can.  There are too many scammers out there.

A favicon is a small 16 by 16 pixel image that shows up in the address bar for a website.  For this site you’ll notice the favicon is a scientist with glasses.  A favicon is good for your website because it can help people remember your site and if they have your site bookmarked they can find your link quicker since they now associate your site with the little icon.

Because of the small size of a favicon you can’t really use complex images or long logos.  A simple image is fine.  You might even have to cut your logo down or redo it to be favicon friendly.

Favicon’s aren’t your standard image.  They are .ico files.  A quick google search should find you an online favicon generator to make one easily from any image.  You don’t have to bother paying for a program or for a site access there are tons of free online favicon generators.

A favicon is normally installed at the root of your website (meaning right in the public_html section, not in a separate folder).  Then you add the following code to the <head> section of your templates:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"/>

A favicon will help your site stand out from the crowd and gives your site a subtle memorable aspect.

There are tons of things that can make your email go into a spam box especially with the large email providers like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc… Certain titles and text raise red flags and get your emails sent straight to the bulk mail folder.  I’m not going to tell you how to write correct emails (at least not at this point) to avoid the spam box, but I will let you know about a few things you can do on your server to make it less likely you will appear in the spam box.  You need a dedicated server, VPS or a host that will help you with this to do this.  If done properly most of your email will make it into the main inbox without a hitch for the big email providers and get through spam filters.

Note:  I’m using CPanel so this is a CPanel tutorial.  The steps may be similar with other control panels but might not be exactly the same.

First thing you need to do is setup reverse DNS or rdns.  A lot of hosting providers will take care of this for you.  If they won’t, here is a very good tutorial on how to do this (you need to login or create an account there to view the tutorial).

This is a very important first step and you should get this done before worrying about anything else.  Even if you can’t do the other steps for whatever reason just this will improve your deliverability.

Second step setup SPF and DomainKeys.  An easy way is just to log into each CPanel account and in the Mail section go to Email Authentication.  Click Enable for SPF and DomainKeys.

I was stuck on the second step for a while because I was using the old CPanel X theme.  I ended up having to go into WHM and using the X Skin Migration Wizard to switch to the X3 theme for this option to show up.  It took 2 seconds to do this.

Another way of doing it is by running these commands in SSH:

For SPF:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/spf_installer username

For DomainKeys

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/domain_keys_installer username

Where it says username put in your CPanel username.

That’s it.  These quick steps can drastically increase your email deliverability rate.  Yahoo is still a pain, but after your domain has been around a while (if you’re using a new domain) they’ll start letting your emails in.

MySQL (pronounced my sequel) databases are the foundation of many PHP based scripts.  If you are into using commercial scripts or even custom built scripts knowing how to create MySQL databases is a very important step.  The databases do exactly what the name implies, it stores your information within the database.  If you have customer lists, an online store, a mailing list, etc… these are all usually stored within some type of database.  MySQL is one of the most popular due to the fact it’s a free and open source database.  It comes standard with most Linux hosting accounts.

To create a database is very simple.  Since I usually host with CPanel (one of the most popular hosting scripts), I will show you how to create a database with CPanel.  It’s very similar with other hosting control panels so don’t worry if you don’t have CPanel.

Also keep in mind I use the old CPanel X skin although my CPanel is up to date.  The images might look different from your version but it’s basically all the same thing.

Click on MySQL Databases to start creating.

Your admin panel for MySQL should look something like this.

The first thing we'll do is create a database name. I chose test for this demonstration.

Click Create Database.

This is what it looks like once you create the database name.

Now Go Back.

This is where you'd input your username and password for the database. I used test for both of these fields.

Click Create User.

Success. Our database username and password have been created.

Now click Go Back.

Our database, username and password have been created.

Now we have to add the user (username) to the database.  So that we can use it.

99% of the time you will pick All. If you have to pick something else, the programmer or script install file will let you know.

You will almost always pick All.  There are very few times (if ever) where you’ll have to select something else.

Click Add User to Database.

Success. You have created a database with your chosen username and that username now has permissions to manipulate the database.

Now Go Back.

This is what you should see if you successfully followed the steps.

Since we have successfully installed the database I might as well add some generic tips that will help you install a large bulk of scripts quickly and easily.

A lot of scripts have a configuration file (sometimes called config.php but it can vary) or an online installer.  Some of the information it will ask is host, database name, username, password (for the database).

The host is usually localhost.  That’s it.  You just type “localhost”.  It will work a good portion of the time.

For database name it depends on what hosting control panel you are using.  Since we already have my screenshots up and you can see my username, we’ll use that as the example.  If you look closely at the final screenshot you’ll see all my info that I put in earlier.  So my database name is my CPanel username; deduct underscore test for the script it would be deduct_test.  If you’re not using CPanel it might just be test.

For username it will be deduct_test also.  Remember if it’s not CPanel it might just be test.

For password it will be test.  There is no underscore or control panel username in this.

That’s about it.  All the other information should be pretty easy to figure out.  It will probably include username, password and things like that.

With just this information you should be able to install a good chunk of scripts you find online.