Monday, December 29, 2008

Our Internet Marketing Rockstar Tee on ShoeMoney.com


Pretty cool one of the top 100 blogs in the world featured our Internet Marketing Rockstar t-shirt! Check out the post and charity auction which also features the t-shirt by clicking the pic.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas and a Status Report

First and foremost let me wish you a merry Christmas! I know if you are reading my blog you are probably a highly educated, very savvy, and most likely very attractive person, so I’m sure this holiday season will be wonderful for you. Ok, just a little inside joke because I don’t have stats for this blog, and I highly doubt people are seriously spending their Christmas Eve reading it! But since I literally have nothing else to do I’ll pretend like someone is, and write my obligatory update post.


This is a pic of my tree a few days ago, there are now a few presents under it. I know it's pathetic, and it's sitting on top of a wine barrel. That's so these 4 dogs won't get at it.



How's work? Funny you asked....

The Guru Manufacture website is almost done, and it’s going to be incredible. This is one of those sites that takes awhile to build, but once you have about half of it done you start wondering why you didn’t build it sooner. When I reflect on how many people have come to me wanting to be THE go to person in their niche, how thick headed am I for not figuring out what they were really telling me is they wanted a SINGLE service that turned them into a guru overnight? Anyways, I’ve got the message loud and clear now, and the site should meet that need for those that wish to become a name brand. With luck it’ll be up right around the end of the month.

My new book Strange Business is almost done, although I started it in October it seems like the writing started to really pick up pace around Thanksgiving and has not let up since. I know the editing, page layout, cover art, and all the rest will take months which sucks since I’m so ready to get this thing out now, but that’s the nature of the business. I promise it’ll be worth the wait, this book truly details why unconventional internet marketing works so well online, and how you can implement it into your daily business practices. I give a whole heck of examples from my own business, and even let out a few dirty secrets I’ve never shared with anyone, in business at least, until now!


Finally, thanks to this bum economy, or our growing email list, or some other force I remain unaware of my book The Definitive Guide to Writing Online for Profit has jumped to 40,000 overall in the Amazon ranks for paperbacks twice this week. Prior to this week it had never eclipsed the 50k mark, so while that sounds mildly lame for book sales, it’s actually a book accomplishment. The book is currently in its second printing and will go to a third hopefully in the next few weeks. Pretty cool stuff, and absolutely a sign that my next book, this one most likely exclusively an e-book, will be on making money online in this dismal economy of ours.

Monday, December 22, 2008

***Holiday Hours for Rufus Space***

We will be closed 12/24, 12/25, and 12/26

We will be closed 1/31, 1/1, and 1/2

Thanks and happy holidays to all!

Best,
Clark

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Monday, December 15, 2008

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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Ahhhhh Tempting

********New Stuff Coming Soon*************

Every now and again I feel the urge to update everyone on every little thing I'm doing, then I remember the cardinal rule of blogging, only post what is relevant to those that read your posts interests. As in, it's about THEM not YOU stupid! Ok, I get it. So here is a few new things coming soon that might boil your crawfish as my dad likes to say from time to time.

-Video blog coming soon
The time has come to blow the dust off this JVC Enviro HD video camera and accompanying studio kit. My friend Jordan and I are going to be doing a weekly video blog that deals with internet marketing and the always popular subject, weird stuff that works when trying to get peoples money online.

-Guru Manufacture

Yep, the Guru Factory is coming to town! I had not one, but two of em email me today about ghostwriting some e-books. Got to love the holidays, when all the info marketers try to score as much cash as possible off those that just got their bonuses. No, I'm kidding, I mean, sort of. Anyways, a new site is emerging rapidly that promises to make YOU or anybody else for that matter an ONLINE BRAND like no other. The site should be done in a week or less and will set two records. First it'll be the highest ticket item I've sold online to date. Secondly it'll be the first service that truly integrates most of my 701 websites.

-Local SEO

Still working on a concept for local SEO, most likely will try to get the fundamentals down first and then see if any existing clients want to rep a territory. Kind of like affiliate marketing meets franchise model type deal.

-This Dog's Got Bite
Here's jack taking a chunk out of my arm, I'm training him to greet the family for the holidays.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Economy Sucks People Get Creative












As much as an optimist like me hates a news cycle that is constantly dominated by negative gut wrenching stories of business failure after business failure, I can’t help but smile on occasion. X bank filed for bankruptcy, Y retailer is going out of business, Z company’s CEO just soaked himself with hot maple syrup at the opulent holiday brunch in response to questions about his inevitable golden parachute. What’s this world come to, I feel like I want to hide in the bathroom all day and read only the strangest of direct mail pieces I get each day in my already stuffed to the brim mailbox…Wait that’s what I do in a good economy. Ok, you get the idea, the economy is in shambles and the only good thing I can see coming from it is this, people get real creative when all else hits the fan.

I was working on direct mail piece for a consulting client today and realized in order for it to be picked up by even a single recipient it had to be so outlandish it would stand out in even 1,000 pieces of junk mail. A piece so perfectly absurd people would have to open it, read it, and tell their friends about it.

If there is one thing great to come from economic downturns it is innovation, creativity, and that added motivation that if you haven’t done your darn best by 6:30 pm Brian Williams is going to tell you not to expect any business tomorrow, because al l the world’s consumers are hiding out in their bathrooms reading a direct mail piece that was so outlandish, they just had to take a peek inside.




Friday, December 5, 2008

You Can't Say No To This Face


My favorite dog breed....

Staying Busy

It's been an interesting week, full of getting caught up on a number of fronts. Finished chapter 10 for my new book, saw my girl off to Hong Kong, and did a rough outline for about 11 new sites. This is the time of year I dislike the most, maybe just because of the lack of focus on internet marketing, or marketing in general, or for other reasons I won't get into here.

On a better note I continue to get emails from that site that went viral, we're over 5,600 now which should probably have me thinking about WHAT, WHEN and HOW we can turn that group of people into money making fools. If I can figure out how they can make some money, that'd be a huge feat...

Clark

Monday, December 1, 2008

We Hit #1 on Kindle Chart


















It's my life story, we hit number 1 earlier today, but I was not able to take a screen shot for a few hours, and now we're at number 2. Well if you take my word for it, we were number 1 earlier today. Pretty cool nonetheless to be ranked at/near the top for the writing category on Amazon. Guess it's my lucky day.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

One of My Sites Went Viral

Here is a copy of an email I sent out to my customers yesterday...

Hi,

I had something happen to me Sunday that had never happened to me before. A site of mine went viral. For all the internet marketing stuff I personally do, and advice I give, I’ve never had one of my own sites go viral. I’ve helped clients get their sites to go viral in big ways, and paid money via AdWords, and other advertising methods to promote something, but I’ve never had an offer that caught the attention of people and spread like wildfire before, till Sunday.

Taking a step back, anybody watching the Today Show on NBC this morning would’ve seen the shrimp that runs on a treadmill live in the studio. It’s also apparently all over YouTube, and was invited for a demonstration because it has received so much attention online. This is one recent example of going viral. In other words, going viral happens when something that people see or experience is worthy enough for them to pass on to friends, and then their friends tell their friends, and the chain begins.

Typically viral campaigns emerge from interesting, funny, or shocking type things. Think Paris Hilton’s notorious skin flick, or the Mentos and Diet Coke experiment video, those are examples of viral campaigns that people just have to see, and more importantly talk to their friends about.

Since internet marketing services aren’t as sexy as the Hilton video, or as funny as exploding bottles of Diet Coke, I never felt too upset about not having one of our company Web sites go viral. Yet, low and behold, this seemingly normal Sunday evening one of my niche Web sites did just that.

Those that know me well know that I’m a morning person, and am usually asleep before most of you night owls are logging into your Gmail accounts for the first time in the evening. So imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I open my inbox and find over 600 emails from a site that usually gets 1 or 2 email inquires a week!

I immediately started to clock the rate at which the emails would arrive in my inbox, and to my astonishment I was getting three to four emails for every minute the clock ticked off. In short, some website with a massive audience told people something that made them visit my site.

After increasing my bandwidth on the site by 10 fold, and asking a few friends at my beach house to pinch me, I went into research mode to find out how exactly this site went viral, which led me to the following conclusion, 10 SEO articles I had one of our staff writers create and submit to ezine a few weeks back had led to this viral explosion.

In fact, after coming to this conclusion I selected a random email from the bunch and replied, asking the person one simple question, where did you hear about us? Within five minutes he had responded, I saw you on that Ezinearticles.com site.

Over 3,500 emails later I am still receiving a new lead at the rate of about 1 per minute. While this site probably will never reach the amount of views the video of a shrimp on a treadmill will, I’ve certainly learned that viral campaigns can be a huge traffic boost. I’ve loaded all these emails into an autoresponder, and already have them receiving emails about opportunities we have for them, in essence what would cost $5, $10, or even $50 to obtain per lead via Pay Per Click Marketing has been given to me for free, thanks to somebody that read one of those 10 articles we did a few weeks back and made a post on a forum where somebody else read it and decided others needed to know about what was going on.

So here is what this all means to you. While I believe most of our traffic did not come from ezine, but from forums and other online sites people posted to after reading the initial ezinearticles.com SEO article we wrote, I believe without the initial distribution this never would’ve happened. In essence, your dumb luck increases dramatically when you put your message on high traffic sites for others to see.
So if you haven’t done so already I highly encourage you to do the following three things.

Step 1-Think of something funny, shocking, or appealing (like a free coffee mug giveaway) that you could put into your articles.

Step 2-Order 10 articles from www.SEOarticlewritingservice.com on the topic of this new idea explaining it, and focusing on your general keywords in the process.

Step 3-Go to http://www.articlesubs.com/getstarted.html and order 10 Ezine submissions, and include in the URL that you want in the resource box someplace that takes the person to the promotion / gimmick / interesting thing you had us write about, and reap the rewards.

While many people think of SEO articles as a way to rank higher in the search engines, which they are, SEO articles should also be viewed as a vehicle for promoting your site in unconventional ways that can get you major exposure for less than the cost of a single print ad, radio ad, tv ad, or any other type of major advertisement.

I hope this email gets your mind stewing a bit, I know the occurrences of the last few days has had mine going like crazy. I’ve got to get back to importing all these contacts into my autoresponder now, so think something up, sign up for some articles, sign up for submission, and watch the results pour in!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. When people ask me what I’m most thankful for, I’ll respond enthusiastically my faith, family, friends, and wonderful group of customers that allow me to live my dream. Thanks for being awesome.
Clark
www.ClarkCovington.com

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Vietnamese Coffee is Strong and So is My New Book



If you haven’t ever ventured to try a Vietnamese coffee I highly recommend you consider it. Made with fresh ground coffee grinds that rival espresso in boldness, and condensed sugary milk, this concoction is an eye opener for even the most seasoned of java sippers. I had one tonight after dinner and spent the next two hours sending payments to our writing staff, 28 to be exact.

My schedule is still a mess since getting back from NYC a few days ago, as I’m headed out of town again for the Holidays this weekend. So much going on, so little time, it all seems kind of strange sometimes. Working in this industry, I’ve obtained a special kind of freedom, the type of freedom where you don’t really have to answer to anyone but yourself each day. It’s as good as it sounds, take my word for it. And if you are after such a freedom, my new book might just help you get there.

The book is going to be called Strange Business, and probably won’t be released till late Feb or early March. I’m going to release it at first as a Kindle only download, just because the publisher takes so long to print the book, and I want to get it out as fast as I possibly can. Plus my other book is near the top of the charts for technical writing on Kindle, so I plan on hitting #1 for at least a few categories on Amazon with the digital release. The paperback will almost be like a compliment to the digital release.

For those wanting a sneak peek, here are just a few of the chapters from the rough outline I’ve been working off of. Note as I’ve been writing I’ve modified some of these chapters, and added a few note listed here, but this will give you an idea of just how cool this book is going to be.


The Truth About the 4 Hour Work Week
-Hard work is the key ingredient to success
-The internet never sleeps so neither should you
-It might take 50 web businesses to get that diamond in the rough going
-Internet marketing is about test, test, test
-Internet marketing rewards perseverance

Storage Unit Office
-The cheaper the better
-Why today you don't really have an excuse for a big nice office
-Store everything on the web for round the clock access
-Your money must go into marketing and marketing collateral like newsletters (icontact), sales letters, etc.

Why I spent $38,000 on AdWords Last Year
-Keep it simple
-Kill contextual ads
-Geo target if you must
-Try all hours
-If you sell business solutions pause on weekends
-Trust the phrases you think people will search (newsplex pet friendly example)


Article Marketing for Knuckleheads
-It's Ezine Stupid
-More is Merrier
-No Spin Zone (articles that read well perform well)
-Look towards your competition (top results)
-Syndication Isn't Just for Love Boat
-Leverage Team Members
-Be Consistent

Banner Ads Suck and So Does Your Facebook Page
-Social Media is a flawed marketing tool, stop wasting your time
-Image ads are useless on most sites, impressions are no good b/c they just waste your money faster
-Video ads have yet to be proven, lower your ad to the lowest possible technology for the best reach
-Flash and Java clog up your site, use them sparingly
-This isn't art class, this is make money time, so stop with the big site budget and spend your money on seo and pay per click
-Video on site, fake live chat, and other deceptive ploys are not only useless they are insulting

Bikni Babe Usability
-Make your site as noticeable as a girl in a bikini
-Keep it simple, and predictable
-Give them every reason to get in touch (phone, live chat, email, everything)
-Get Started Not Buy Now
-Smile Till it Hurts (you need to put your picture and preferably bio on there. People like buying from other people, they want to feel like they are making a difference)
-Why the Olympics Got Value Right (Bronze, Silver, Gold strategy works wonders)
-The lower the cost the higher the acquisition rate will be

Ruthless Email Marketing
-Email them once a week whether they like it or not
-Add people that email you, buy something, or even think of you to get your list built
-Create products that are low cost or free just to get interested people on your list
-Use icontact
-Write conversational emails, not boring promotions
-Dare to discount
-When in doubt, ask your list
-Become a email marketing champ with practice
-Give them plenty of chances to opt-in
-Think of What YOU want in your inbox, then put it in theirs

Why Services are Better Than Products
-Services are more in demand
-Services are easier to sell
-Services typically have a higher margin of profit
-Services are implementable even in product heavy businesses
-Services often have no or little competition (The trash guy shortage)
-Services are for those with a pension for making money often

Let Your Personality Do The Talking
-In Your Ads
-On Your Site
-In Your Emails
-At Speaking Engagements
-Around Your Employees

Internet Marketing is More Fun with Friends
-How to Recruit Affiliates (link connector example)
-How to iron out partnerships that will benefit all involved
-How to get paid to partner
-The Leverage of Cheap Allows for Unlimited Partnerships Online
-You Need Help

Why You Need a Football Team to Run Your Business
-Only do what only you can do
-Your outsource heaven: The Philippines
-Your Momtastic Solution
-Your Project Management Dream: Basecamp
-Create Your Own Systems
-Hire Locally If Possible
-Let Your Team Tell You What to Do
-Treat 'Em Well
-Your Greatest Asset

Do This Now
-Create a vision list
-Write out a list of all sites you want to build
-Sort by cost / possibility for success
-Find a cheap website guy or gal
-Sign up start AdWords the day your site goes up
-Research and Register relevant domain names (domain name bonus)
-If you plan on branding yourself get your namesake domains
-Get IN Touch with Your Higher Calling

……


Strange Business: The Unconventional Guide to Internet Marketing coming to a bookstore near you soon!

Sunday, November 16, 2008

3 Sentence Update

Just got back from a long weekend in NYC, it was J-U-S-T what I needed. Got 500 toys and a dozen displays in the mail while I was gone, all are piled in my living room right now. Shot the pic with my iPhone, how’s that for a clutter free home office?