Thank you to all the people who've asked if everything is okay, and where I am. Your concern is appreciated, I've just been lying low.

Well, actually I've taken a little time out to take stock and decide which direction I'm going in this next financial year. I've now decided what to do and hopefully you'll come with me for the journey.

This last few months I've deviated from what I know works, and I've been doing a lot of experimentation.

First of all, what do I know works? The answer to that is right at the top of this blog, "Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation."

You create a product, you get some traffic to take a look at your offer, you build your list, and then you automate the whole process.

Cool. I'll carry on doing that this year.

In fact I'll be concentrating more on list building than anything else this year, and I'll be implementing it in everything I do. I've decided to make list building my "hedgehog" concept from now onwards. ie no project is pursued unless it builds a list.

Secondly, what have I been experimenting with?

At the beginning of November I was introduced to IPK. I immediately saw the untapped potential and so off I went full steam ahead and created the Price Comparison service together with a method of quickly building sites thrown in for free.

This also captured my wife's imagination and attention and she started building mini sites to take advantage of the huge empty market that was out there. She also focussed on creating some hub sites, and two of those have just begun to pay off, with two of the sites making her a total of around £65.00 ($97.50) in the first 10 days of this month.

When the children go back to school next week she'll be concentrating on adding more content to those hub sites to get them onto page 1 of Google.

Which raises another interesting point.

She's made that £65.00 ($97.50) from just a few visitors a day – around 30-35 average – mostly from Yahoo, MSN and some ISPs own search pages. Google so far has hardly been in the running at all, sending only 1 or 2 visitors a day.

When she gets her sites off page 5-ish of Google and onto page 1, traffic will kick in big time and her earnings will soar.

She's never done anything like this before, and I've been really pleased that 1) she really got to grips with the whole site building thing (the Site Builder makes it easy) and 2) she's making money from it and can see that her income will grow in time as long as she sticks at it.

As a result of what's been going on with the mini-sites I've also been experimenting with autoblogging, with some very pleasing and exciting results.

It's funny. You know how some things just bubble around and are there in the background but nothing happens? And then suddenly they "come of age" and everyone's paying attention to them?

Well, it's autoblogging's turn to stand in the spotlight.

I mentioned automation above, and autoblogging is a perfect example of this.

You set up a niche blog, you set up a pile of relevant articles from a free article site to be posted, and push the button. From that point on you forget the blog and move onto the next one.

Here's a great and recent example. I set up an autoblog 5 weeks ago about petrol lawnmowers. I grabbed a load of articles and queued them up for gradual release over 6 weeks to see how it would do.

There's no advertising on that site yet, and I'm due to revisit it in the next week to put on a huge pile of articles and also some monetisation. (No, I WON'T be using AdSense.)

So far there are 84 posts and with no links from anywhere I'm now getting 4 or 5 visitors a day for the exact search terms I want people to find the site by. Google has indexed 75 pages but the site isn't yet in the first 10 pages.

Not a lot of visitors yet, but my plans are to shortly apply a linking strategy which will boost the number of back links and traffic to the site.

The next steps for that site are:-

#1 – Queue a whole load more articles which will appear over the next 12 months.
#2 – Apply a good linking strategy.
#3 – Monetise the site with a few "lawnmower reviews" and Price Comparisons, and also a few ads using AdSpurt and Amazon (and maybe eBay) widgets.
#4 – Link to my REAL petrol lawnmower site.
#5 – Forget about it.

Okay I won't completely forget about it, as I'll probably make changes to it as I like to experiment. Experimentation and a bit of thought and applied logic is what will make the site really pay off.

At the end of the day, this autoblogging site is disposable. Notice I said that I'll be using it to link to my real site. Google likes it when related sites link to other sites. Not reciprocal links mind, just one way.

So if I apply a good solid linking strategy to both sites, and then link the autoblog to my real site, then the real site should do quite well. Especially if I create a couple of other related sites via autoblogging.

Finally, I'll be automating the creation of my mini-sites by farming the work out to staff in the Philippines and Manila where the employment costs are much lower.

(I'm reliably told that there's a technical college in Manila where the undergrads speak good English, are well-educated and like to make a bit of cash doing web work.)

So there we have it. My strategy for the next 12 months.

#1 – Continue to create new and useful products for my own business and sell them. Make list building my "hedgehog" concept.
#2 – Create niche mini-sites (monetised with Price Comparisons) using a combination of WordPress and my Site Builder service. (Build niche lists.)
#3 – Create niche autoblogs where I both monetise them and also use them to link to my real niche mini-sites in #2. (Build niche lists.)
#4 – Pay other people to do #2 and #3 for me.

I hope you can see that having a good strategy and knowing just what you're going to be doing and how, is well worth taking some time out to decide.

Maybe you'll decide that my strategy or at least parts of it are good ones and will work for you too.

I'll share more with you as it happens, IF I get feedback that's what you want me to do.

-Frank Haywood

Simply it's the number of exact match search multiplied by the number of phrse match search, and then dividing it by the number of competing pages in Google to come up with a number you can use to make your decision. I've called this the x-factor as I'm feeling a bit unimaginative at the moment.

(exact match x phrase match) / competing pages = x-factor

It seems that if the x-factor is more than about 50, then it's a good choice. This method isn't perfect and could do with a little work, but it seems good enough to make most decisions on until I can come up with something better.

I've posted a good few examples on the Unoffical IPK Forum and gone into more detail too. Here's a selection of them:-

#1 – ( 3,600 x 9,900) / 18,000,000 = 1.98
#2 – ( 2,900 x 14,800) / 201,000 = 213.53
#3 – (22,200 x 110,000) / 399,000 = 6120.30
#4 – (33,100 x 33,100) / 101,000,000 = 10.85

I'm very interested in what you think about this, so please go check out the forum post and either leave a comment there or here.

http://www.vendiva.com/forum/index.php/topic,249.0.html

-Frank Haywood

Personally I think it's a stunning bit of software and will cut your creation time of IPK style sites dramatically. My wife has started using it and has given it a double thumbs up which believe me, is no mean award.

Until last week she'd never built a web site in her life.

We have plans to add in some other little bits and pieces too, but I don't want to spoil the fun.

The price of the unlimited price comparisons and sites has now gone up to $30 / month as I said it would do. Congrats to those people who took it at the early bird reduced price.

-Frank Haywood

We reckon it will cut down the time needed to build an IPK style site to around an hour or less.

To give you an idea of how it works, last week my wife started putting up sites using the best web editor around – Dreamweaver – under my tuition. She put her first site up in around 4 hours using my own personally tweaked template which is designed for speed. Her second site took around 2h 30 to do. And she's been getting faster since.

Today she sat down with the final version of the Site Builder and put up a site again in about 2h 30. She said that even though it was new to her yesterday, it was far easier to put up a site with it as most of the keywords etc. were already filled in. All she had to do was add some text around the pre-filled links and amend a couple of graphics.

What slowed her down was me talking too much.

Now I know that's not much of a testimonial – it is my wife after all – but bear in mind only 3 people have even seen the Site Builder at all so far.

Tomorrow we'll be enabling it for everyone using the Price Comparison Service. I'll say it again, it's a beta. It's a VERY GOOD beta, but there may be one or two niggles. We've squashed most of the bugs in the last few days and it would be naive of us to expect we have them all.

In a few days time when we have all the bugs out, we'll take it out of beta.

As I said earlier, it's free to everyone using the Price Comparison Service.

It won't stay like that forever though. Shortly we'll be raising the price of the Comparison Service and the Site Builder will become a separate paid for service. That isn't a scarcity tactic to get you to sign up now, it's just the way we decided to do things all along.

Anyone who already has the Site Builder as part of the Price Comparison Service will continue to get it for free as long as they remain subscribed.

If you're umming and ahhing, stop it.

Grab the Price Comparison Service now while it's at its lowest price and get the Site Builder included for free.

Now that's what I call a bonus!

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven't done so already, come take a look at the forum and say hello. http://www.vendiva.com/forum/

It's worth mentioning that the Link Share API seemed to be broken and was returning intermittent data, but they've now fixed it. I bet their merchants were none too pleased with that happening just before Christmas…

As an example of how very useful the price comparison service is, since Amazon ran out of Jumperoos (my example product), I've still been making money through the site.

This is because people have been able to pursue and purchase their Jumperoos from different sites which is just what I wanted. When Amazon get some more stock back in, I'll benefit from their very nice 7.5% commission, but for now I can live with 2% to 5% commission from other online stores without any effort as the prices are updated automatically each day.

Great stuff!

We've now also added a few more affiliate networks to the price comparison service and are planning on adding even more. The current networks we have in the system are Affiliate Window, Amazon UK, Amazon US, Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, and of course Link Share mentioned above.

The next network we have targetted for inclusion at users request is the Pepperjam Network – we're just waiting approval ourselves before looking at their API.

Even better than this though is that Paul and I have been discussing in more detail the topic of adding a site builder as part of the service.

This means you'll be able to start a project, select from a range of pre-done site templates, upload your graphics and add some text, enter your FTP details, click a button and your site will be published directly to your domain.

We're also going to include some "boiler plate" text that you can use to pad out a site so it doesn't hurt your brain too much by having to write everything from scratch. And also have a "notepad" area where you can copy and paste all your notes while creating a site.

That means you'll be able to do the bulk of your site creation within the site builder to begin with, and our plan is you'll be able to eventually do everything including graphics.

We know that the graphics part of it might be a bit difficult to envision, but we think that with a bit of forethought and some clever programming, we can allow you to resize images and add text in a range of fonts and position it, and then apply some simple styling to it such as drop shadow and glow etc. by using GD and ImageMagick.

A bit of a tall order we know, but that's our final aim.

What we thought was the best route was to go for it ASAP and then build it up from there. Paul tells me we have a lot of the code already written, and he thinks he can have a prototype up and running in a couple of days…

Wow!

As soon as we've had a play with it ourselves and we can see it's working okay, we'll release it to everyone that's currently enjoying the price comparison service.

Anyone joining at a later date will be charged for it as a separate service, price TBA.

Everyone that was smart enough to pick up on the price comparison service will get it included at the current low rate.

I say current because there are still some places left for this first phase. Once all 80 slots are taken then the price goes up, but for now at least all prices are 50% off.

If you've been umming and ahhing about taking up the service, well my advice is grab it now before it goes up and you end up also having to pay for the site builder too.

Yes, I'm still including access to the site builder when we release it.

Go take a look at the details at the link below, it's a one dollar one month trial.

http://www.vendiva.com/subscribe-price-comparisons.php

-Frank Haywood

I weighed myself a couple of days ago, and while according to the scales I haven't put any weight on, I definitely feel a little plumper – ha-ha. It will all tighten up in the Spring when I'm out and about more and I get more exercise.

I always celebrate Christmas by taking a couple of weeks off and spending some time with the family, but all good things come to an end and the kids went back to school yesterday with some very glum faces to be seen and a few tears too.

If it wasn't mandatory to send the kids into school we probably wouldn't do it. We've had some serious conversations about home schooling in our house.

It's a bit of a crash after the build up to Christmas and it can be a glum time of year if you let it be.

Maybe you feel similar to me, and maybe that started a few days ago for you if you started work earlier than I have.

Okay hands up, I don't take the entire 2 weeks off over Christmas, I just pick and choose what I do. I can't help it, I've sort of become a bit of a workaholic completely unintentionally.

Yes I have the odd off day and sometimes it's more than a single day, but I can't help thinking about work in quiet moments. If you run your own business from home like I do, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I'm now officially back in the saddle and I've surveyed what needs to be done ASAP, and also what plans we need to make for the beginning of the year.

The first thing I have to do is something I've already started. I'm slowly working my way through all the support tickets that have been raised. There's a lot, but after a quick scan through, apart from 5 or 6, most of them seem to be fairly straight forward answers.

Next is catch up with the forum which is getting interesting – I know I have at least a couple of PMs there I need to read and answer.

And then, I have to get the written docs for SmartDD out.

With one thing and another I've found I've had to push them to one side. It's like a really annoying re-run of what happened when I released v2.

I've got to fix that soon or it's going to drive me nuts.

And while I'm working my way through those tasks, I've also set myself another regular task.

At the end of 2008, I discovered IPK and confirmed to my own satisfaction that it was a good way to make some additional money online. More importantly though, using the IPK method means a few hours work for a semi-permanent income.

If you've missed any of my last posts and not yet bought IPK, I'll just repeat that.

You do a couple of hours work and get paid repeatedly for it.

Ahhh… The Dream…

It's ideal for anyone who wants to work from home but aren't sure about what to do and where to start. And it's also ideal for people who already make money online and want to add a new income stream.

I don't know about you, but I like new income streams.

IPK is so good that my wife has jumped on it too and starting yesterday is now putting up a site a day for four days a week.

We ran through the first site together yesterday, with her doing all the work and asking questions while I talked her through it all. Today, we did the market research for a cluster of sites and took out three new domains. Two of them are "baby" sites and the third is the "mother".

She built the first page of one of the baby sites in about 15 minutes before having to go out. She'll finish that site tomorrow in about 90 minutes I reckon.

In about 2 weeks or less, she'll have the entire skill set to research and build web sites from scratch.

Yep, she's never done anything like this before and is only going to allocate 2 hours a day, 4 days a week to it. My estimate based on my experience with the Jumperoo site is that each site she builds will earn payback after 3 weeks and anything after that is pure profit.

After reading what several people have said about using .com and .co.uk domains, we've decided to use .info domains only as a last resort. Our initial target market is the UK so all our domains will be .co.uk to begin with.

But watch out, eventually we'll be looking at the US and Canadian markets too.

Only kidding – realistically the truth is we'll probably never have to look outside the UK.

Looking again today and seeing the HUGE amounts of products that are getting lots of search and few competing web sites, we know the selection process for the UK alone is never ending. There must be hundreds of new products being released every week and it would be extremely difficult to catch all of them.

And I guess that's the main reason why Craig released this information in the first place. He knows that the market will never become saturated because it's so damn big.

For me though, there is one worry about IPK.

Reading some of the comments in the forum, I can see that some people aren't getting the process quite right just yet. I've tried to fix that by offering my own advice and critiquing a couple of sites on request.

I've come up with my own market research critical success factors to complement Craig's OPSEO critical success factors. I'll repeat them here on this blog in a later post.

I (and I guess maybe Craig had too) made the assumption that people would easily understand the market research part of it and would struggle with the OPSEO. But of course the market research part of it is just as important in making a site pay, and if you get that wrong, all the OPSEO in the world isn't going to help your site make money.

It's one of those things where the more you do it correctly, then the more you'll get a feel for it and be able to do it correctly – it's a bit chicken and egg.

I can see though that some people might get turned off if things don't pan out immediately. And that's bad because IPK is one of the very few systems that I know will work well for most people.

It would be tragic for people not to be able to make it all work, and I really want everyone to succeed with IPK, so I'll be doing my bit to help however I can.

Announcements about that as they happen.

IPK aside, I'll also be running a couple of WSOs soon, and I'll announce them here and on my other mailing lists as I launch them.

I also intend to do a few how to videos, and finish off a couple of books that are almost done. One of them is 99% done and it's just silly for me not to make that final effort and finish it all off. Freebies to blog subscribers I think.

So those are yet more tasks I have to do.

*sigh*

Back to the grind.

I sincerely hope that 2009 will be a good one for you. Take good care of yourself and your family.

-Frank Haywood

In this first phase, I'm only taking 80 people and then closing it off.

When it re-opens, the price will double. This trial service is a one month one dollar trial.

There's also a very special bonus for those people canny enough to sign up in this phase.

This is going to blow your socks off, so close the door and sit down.

The next phase will be to offer a site builder as part of your membership.

I'll let that sink in.

…

…

This will mean you'll be able to choose a site template, paste in your keywords and some text, set up your comparisons, and the site builder will build a fully SEO'd site for you and FTP it to your domain.

This will dramatically cut the time it takes you to build an IPK site. In fact my estimate is you could sit down, do the market and keyword research, register a domain, source the content, edit your graphics and have your site live in about 60 minutes.

And if I know Paul, he'll be able to do something about the graphics for you too. He's been doing some real time graphics manipulation in PHP recently, so I'm sure this is a distinct possibility.

So… As an extra sweetener for the price comparison service, when you sign up to this first phase now, you'll get the site builder thrown in for free when we build it.

That's what's called a clincher I think.

A warning though.

We're only going to take 80 people in this first wave.

You'll be getting second "dibs" at it – the first people are already signed up and enjoying the service.

After a few hours of you reading this blog post, I'll be sending emails out to my other mailing lists until the few remaining spots are filled.

We figure we can just about handle that amount of people in this first wave and be able to deal with any issues that arise as we go.

Once you're logged in you can read about how it works, and there's a video or two to follow.

We're limiting the initial phase at 50% off (forever) to just 80 people. You'll kick yourself if you miss this.

You can find out all the details and subscribe for a one dollar one month trial here:-

http://www.vendiva.com/subscribe-price-comparisons.php

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven't already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.

We have it working with Amazon UK, Amazon US, Affiliate Window (UK) and Link Share (US). The Link Share feed is a bit dodgy as we get it from Link share, so we'll be looking at ways we can improve that.

If you haven't already signed up to my IPK mailing list, or otherwise haven't spotted the message from me elsewhere, then you won't know that I'm letting those people who signed up for notifications first "dibs" at it.

We've opened 80 slots, and we think it's fair to let those people who have shown an active interest get first shot at getting them.

However, in a few hours if there are any slots left, I'll post a link to the service sign up page here, and after another few hours if there are any remaining spaces left, I'll send it out to my general mailing lists.

Here's the deal.

We've set it up as a one month one dollar trial and we've also set what we think you'll agree is a very fair price.

Because you'll be one of the first people to try it out, we've also reduced the monthly cost by 50% and when you sign up you'll get that price for as long as you remain a member.

Anyone signing up outside this special offer will have to pay the full price right from the beginning, so it's a good idea to get in now while it's really cheap and save yourself half the cost forever.

I'm VERY confident that once you've tried it out and felt the benefit of having price comparisons on your site, you won't want to give it up.

If you're serious about your business, and you're serious about IPK (why wouldn't you be?) you'll see the extreme advantages to be gained by what I'm offering.

And to sweeten the deal, Paul and I have been discussing the next phase after we've taken on board all the other affiliate networks.

We'll be offering this as a special bonus to those who sign up in this first phase for the price comparisons.

I don't want to spoil the fun by telling you what it is here and now, but make sure you're sitting down when I reveal it.

Watch out for another post with the link to the service later, and if you haven't been there already why not go visit the forum and say hello?

http://www.Vendiva.com/forum/

-Frank Haywood

You may already be a member, so you might want to check first.

This forum was in use about 12 months ago by a group of beta testers. If you were one of them then there's every chance you have a membership set up on the site and you'll just need to reset your password.

If you can't be bothered, just set up a new userid, nobody's going to cry about it.

You can get to our private little IPK Forum by going here.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven't already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.

We've also included the ability to manually add a comparison and affiliate link which is a good stop gap until we get more affiliate networks added. However, the prices won't automatically update of course, so you'll have to keep an eye on them if you're that bothered about it.

I say that because the whole point of this exercise is to steer buyers towards Amazon.

Typically, Amazon have the lowest price including shipping. They will almost always make the sale – Craig quotes a figure of 80% – in fact it's the good old 80-20 rule if you think about it.

So if you have a couple of manual prices and links for a smaller supplier that are out of date… I say, so what? It's extremely likely that the visitor to your IPK site is going to click on the lowest price which is almost always Amazon.

If they click any of the other links in curiousity, then they're going to get cookied, and if they buy from there, great! If not, it will likely be from Amazon, which is where we really want people to go.

Okay?

That means we now have Amazon US and UK, Affiliate Window, Link Share, and the ability to add affiliate links / comparison manually.

The Affiliate Window API (Application Programmers Interface) has also let us add the ability for you to select merchants who don't stock the item, but who may well do in the future – it's your call whether you use this or not. In all, the Affiliate Window API is so far the best we've come across and is very well thought out.

However, there's always a few problems isn't there?

We've written to Trade Doubler (UK and US) to ask for details of their API. Apparently they have one, but we can't find it. We can't do anything with them until we hear back.

The Link Share API seems to have an intermittent random glitch. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it returns zero results for the same search. We cache everything returned in any search for 12 hours, but it's not ideal.

It also has a habit of returning bad results with good. So we'll sometimes get details of merchants supposedly stocking products, but if you click through there's either no stock or no details of the product on the merchants site.

Not a big deal, but NOT right. There's not much we can do about dealing with that at our end, we have to rely on the data that Link Share send us.

We're going to write to them to ask what's going on, if Paul hasn't already beaten me and done it.

As we go along and we find new affiliate networks and they have (hopefully working) APIs, we'll add them to the service.

Just bring it up in the forum.

And as I've mentioned the forum, I'm hoping to supply you with the details of that later today.

Just one thing though – it's NOT a support forum. Any support requests will be closed and / or deleted. The forum is for discussion and sharing and raising issues. I know there's a fine line between raising an issue and making a support request, and I'll see if I can't come up with some guide lines.

Tomorrow, we'll open the Price Comparison service.

We think it's as ready as it will ever be, but we have to do a few bits and pieces first to make the site presentable. We'll do that today and open the doors tomorrow.

Remember I said the other day that it's a one dollar one month trial. After the first month, the price goes up to the regular price, but you'll quickly realise it's worth every penny once you start using it.

At the moment, all prices are 50% off.

It's a good deal.

More information later today and then tomorrow the service is live.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven't already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.