I just received my latest Market Leverage American Express gift card yesterday, for my June earnings through their network. So when I saw their latest promotion, I thought it would be fitting to announce. During August, you can earn more money with Market Leverage than ever before. The ML network is holding what they call a “Double Play Triple Pay“, which means, if you can double your affiliate earnings from last month (July 2008), then you will receive Triple ML Rewards based on your commissions for August 08.

Market Leverage already has the best rewarding Rewards program, which is a 1% bonus of your monthly earnings. If you are able to double your previous month’s earnings, you are looking at a 3% bonus at the end of the month. This may not sound like a lot, but in the end, it all really helps with your marketing numbers. If you earn $20,000 this month, you would receive an additional $600 ML American Express Bonus Gift Card on top of your earnings. The gift cards can be used for personal use, or to put towards your marketing efforts.

The winner of the Apple iPod Touch from the Market Leverage promotion will be announced early next week.

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!

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Alright I can see this may be a lengthy post, so if you want the cliff-notes and don’t want to read the explanation :

General access into UberCamp is now free. The forum is still invite only, and you still have to apply in order to be accepted. Applications will now all be looked at again and if you make the cut, you’ll be sent an invite. If you get an invite, you have access to the forum an all it’s content for free.

There WILL be a single Premium Private forum ($99/month), which will include :

-Discounted access to one of my landing page designers. He normally charges $99 for a page, but if you’re a member of the paid section you’ll get pages 50% off, at $49.

-Landing page designs. I hired one of my designers to work for UberCamp designing pages at the users request. He’ll whip them up and we’ll release them publicly.

-Unique affiliate marketing tools. I’ve teamed up with a really awesome programmer and he’s designed some tools that will make your lives easier and more efficient. These tools haven’t been released before and are being saved until the new launch.

-Any other perks that I feel paid members should get.

So there is the short version of what’s going on. So get over and apply. Now for the explanation why…

So when I first started UberCamp, I wanted to make a really tight knit community of smart guys that could all brainstorm together and would have some awesome conversations. That definitely happened. We have some GREAT guys in the forum that give away a ton of the tips they’ve learned, and I’ve participated in almost every thread, helping where I can.

I made a post a couple days ago about opening up applications again and getting a new designer. After really thinking about how the forum was growing and the general reactions to it, I decided to pull the post and go a different route. If things were so great, then why the sudden change? A couple things influenced it :

• Time constraints and pressure. This was probably the biggest factor. In order to run a huge operation like this all by myself, I needed to invest almost all my time into it. I tried my hardest but I had so many of my own things going that ate up time like a mother, working on UberCamp just felt really pressured. I don’t want people paying and not getting what they expect, that’s bullshit and the main reason why things are going to be free.
• Thoughts and opinions from other people. Although most people have a retarded way of getting their point across, others can be constructive and I took all of the opinions into thought. I can’t count all the hours I’ve spent on this blog writing for you guys, and I don’t make anything from it (aside from the few bucks I make from selling my cheap ads). A lot of people just saw UC as a little project I started to take advantage of all the people I’d influenced through my blog. Stupid reasoning but if I truly want to give and help, it should be free or partially paid like it is now. The setup we now have is MUCH better for everyone.

I don’t want to drone on about it because it doesn’t really matter. I created UberCamp and ran it wrong from the start, the setup we have now is how it should have been from the beginning. Enough said.

If you’re wondering about the members that have already paid for the first couple months, they’ll all be getting lifetime access to the premium forum at no charge, as well as some private AIM time with me to talk about campaigns and whatnot.

If you haven’t noticed yet… A lot of this Internet Marketing business is about research. This is one of the most critical steps in selecting a site to use for a Media Buy. Remember, a media buy is buying advertising space on someone elses website. Whether it be a blog, forum, or general information filled website.

The blog post at Convert2Media that talks about finding the right site to advertise on with Alexa has brought in some excellent points. We want to find sites with high traffic so that we know our banner impressions will not be put to waste. At the same time. We need to be careful on the sites that we prospect out to so that we don’t find someone that wants $5000 for a month long banner ad placement.

Jump on over to the Alexa Category pages and find yourself a nice little niche to hit up. Three of the top earners online are Health, Wealth, and Relationships. If you can find something to advertise in one of those three niches you are sure to make some money.

I’ve jumped into the “Health” category. From here I browse for an even more specific section or health related niche. Eventually I’ll be lead to a list of websites that I can begin to research even more.

Alexa is just one way to find websites. You can also search through DMOZ, Google, Yahoo, and even MSN. Just type in a keyword and there you will have a huge list of websites HAHA.

Here’s a little tips when selecting a site to buy an advertisement on. There are websites out there with “Unknowledged” webmasters and there are websites with “Knowledged” webmasters. We essentially want to advertise on a website with an unknowledged webmaster. That way we can get the cheapest cost possible. Here’s another tip. Most webmasters that have adsense on their site will be more than happy to drop the adsense for a month and use your banner in its place. Look for these types of websites to advertise on.

As marketers, we see it all the time… BIG RED LETTERS on landing pages to grab our attention. Different colors make people act differently. RED is usually seen as a “danger” or “warning” color… while BLUE or GREEN is more “soothing” and “trusted“. An excellent example of this was how in Star Wars, Darth Maul is RED and BLACK (representing his evil), and Yoda was GREEN… showing his “stability” and “safety”.

In today’s post I wanted to focus on all of the main colors and how they should be represented in your advertising efforts. Believe it or not, the colors you place on your landing pages or web sites can drastically change your overall conversions and the user’s thinking process. Below is a break down from HP, on the main colors we use for marketing and how they are often looked at by others.

Primary Colors:

Red is a very emotionally charged color. It tends to increase the respiration rate and can even raise your blood pressure. It creates excitement and can be associated with danger, war, power, strength passion, desire and love. It can even increase your appetite.

Yellow is the happy color… it is the color of sunshine. It creates a sense of cheerfulness and helps to stimulate mental activity. When yellow is very bright, it can attract attention. It can also provide a very sharp contrast to dark colors. Yellow can have the appearance of being brighter than white if over used and can be disturbing if used too much.

Blue is a trusted color. It can provide a sense of tranquility and security. It tends to symbolize loyalty, wisdom, trust, faith, confidence, and intelligence. While red can help to increase the appetite, blue tends to have the opposite affect and can actually suppress the appetite.

Secondary Colors:

Orange is the combination of the happiness of yellow and the energy and strength of red. It symbolizes creativity, determination, enthusiasm and success. In addition orange indicates affordability. Because of its similarity to red, it is great to promote food.

Green tends to suggest endurance and stability. It represents harmony, growth and freshness. Green indicates safety. Obviously, it is associated with money and wealth. With the interest in “green” products, it is the only color that can promote organic foods and products effectively.

Violet or purple combines the energy and strength of red with the stability of blue. It represents nobility, ambition, power and luxury. It symbolizes extravagance and wealth and is often associated with dignity, independence, wisdom and magic.

Others:

White is purity, goodness, light and innocence. It is considered perfection. White is generally positive and simple. Often it is the color of charitable organizations, low-fat foods and dairy products.

Black is elegant, powerful and formal, but can also be associated with death. In marketing, it is dignified. In certain contexts, black is very negative (blacklist, black humor, etc). It can also denote prestige.

Next time you are working on your landing page or new web site, step back and look at your color scheme and see how your colors are targeting your audience.

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!

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I wrote a bout a new service last week called 12 seconds which allows you to record only 12 seconds of a video. The site also has some nice networking features.

Anyway the founders contacted me and have given me 100 invites to give out to Shoemoney.com readers. Just leave a comment with the words “invite me”.

I was reading this morning on the BBC website about a 22 year old gamer who purchased a Island in the game Project Entropia for $26,500.00 dollars. Back when I used to play MMORPG games (Everquest, DAOC, WOW) the companies used to be VERY MUCH against you selling an in game content. But lots of people got away with it anyway. I was the first druid in the game of Everquest to reach level 50 (I know I am a nerd) and promptly sold my character on eBay immediately for $2400 wayyyy back in May of 1999. It had taken me about 1 month of hardcore playing (living in the game pretty much) to get to that level so fast. I kept buying accounts… building charectors and selling them on eBay. Sometimes the auctions would get canceled but even when they did I would get offers. I never got as much money as I initially did for that first character.

A.D.D. MOMENT: Sometime I should write about my addiction to MMORPG games.

So what did he get got his 26k ?

The virtual island includes a gigantic abandoned castle and beautiful beaches which are described as ripe for developing beachfront property.

This game is very different because it actually has a exchange system which converts the in game currency to real money and back again. Pretty slick.

Back in my Everquest days my biggest competition in selling in game content (swords, armor, characters) was N. Koreans who were basically working for slaves wages for companies farming equipment for their boss’s to sell in real marketplaces.

Everquest took place in a virtual world called Norrath and I remember a article one time that talked about how if Norrath was a real country in the world based on estimates it would be one of the top 10 richest countries in the world.

Project Entropia is just getting started already has 200,000 players. I think this is going to be huge.

Over the past several months, I’ve found myself working on new projects and focusing my efforts elsewhere… and slightly moving away from what I know makes the most money and what I should be working on. It’s not completely a matter of being lazy… it’s more about where I would much rather spend my time, and lately, that’s been playing 2-4 hours of basketball several days a week. While it’s great to get out and occasionally set yourself apart from your business, you need to keep things in perspective, and do what’s necessary.

My average day is waking up sometime between 8am and 10am, then working on the computer till around 3pm. Around 3-4pm I usually head over to the gym and run basketball til around 6:30pm. If I don’t hit the gym up that day, then I will probably be working online til around 6… so the week evens out a bit.

It really is quite amazing how much time you can spend online, and how little work you can get done. Between keeping an eye on Twitter, chatting with others on AIM, looking at stats reports and going over new ideas… some days just fly by and it feels like you have accomplished nothing. All too often we hear from others, that they get so much more work done when they simply turn everything off and just work!

In addition to better time management, when you are focusing your full efforts on work, make sure you are working on what matters and what will actually make you money. I’m sure when you are spending time setting up new FaceBook campaigns, or setting up landing pages for a new ppc campaign, it’s probably not top priority on your list of fun things to do… but it will make you money and give you more time down the road to do whatever you want.

Not only am I possibly preaching to the choir, but I am also preaching to myself. I must better self manage my time and efforts in the right areas. I have a lot of ideas and project that I want to work on, and that have become half completed and “sitting” projects for months or even years. Focus your efforts on your main income producing ideas and you will succeed that much more.

Are you currently making money online, and know you could make “that much more” if you just started to focus your full efforts in one area… and not half ass everything?

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!

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Yesterday Jen and I did the first show in like a month! I still suck at doing all the live video stuff but its getting better. We talked about lots of topics everything from the Top affiliate Challenge to everything that has been going on in the search industry to the obligatory twitter talk.

Stream videos at Ustream

So UberCamp has been around for almost 2 months now, and so far it’s going great I think. Of course there have been criticisms and people that think it’s not worth it, but I guess that’s not up for me to decide. I haven’t let in any more members since it’s first launch, but I’m not opening up applications again, primarily because of the newest addition.

I always want to think of ways to make it worth the $199 monthly fee so that even if you hate the content, you’ll still get the value out of it. Now I guarantee you won’t hate the content, but I’ve brought something pretty valuable to the table.

UberCamp gets a designer.

I’ve hired one of my designers to work full-time for UberCamp, and there are some AWESOME benefits to be had. Here’s an example of one of the free pages he’s done, to see his quality of work.

1) He’s going to design pages at campers requests all month long. He’s already designed 4 in the first week I’ve brought him in, and everybody loves the quality. Everyone gets them along with the .PSDs just for being an UC member.

2) He will design private pages at only $49/page! That’s pretty insane and you probably won’t find pages that cheap anywhere else, especially at the quality they are. Sure you can find designers for cheap, but this guy is VERY quality and will work on your page until you’re satisfied…he works for me I know from experience . A member started a thread about it and said the following :

Let me tell you, not only is this guy talented, but he’s fast as well. Had my LP done within a few hours. As many of you know, I tried one of the most poplular LP designers around, waited weeks, paid a fortune, and got crap. Tyler responded quickly to PMs and was VERY reasonable price-wise.

So even if there’s no content on the site, you’re paying $199 and getting 10+ free landing pages every month, and access to private page design way cheaper than anywhere else.

Forum Update

Now how are things going in the forums? The only thing I’ll do is be completely honest. We had a TON of posts in the beginning and activity from guys excited to get tips, and it was great. After a month, activity slowed down. People had less questions, they were working on their campaigns, there was nobody new, etc. We ran the first case study and the offer was breaking even, but it simply wasn’t worth it to continue. There was a pretty big delay on the second case study, but I just built the page and that’s going to start up late this week.

I ditched the private mentoring thing, it was way too expensive for people and would have hindered my available time to work on the main forum. Bad idea I can admit it.

Excluding the off-topic forums, there are 1,882 posts in the affiliate sections. There truly are a lot of great tips and advice, not just from myself but from other members. I’m opening applications up again because as expected we had people drop out, and then everybody else got kind of busy so the posting died down. With a fresh group of guys, activity should shoot back up and especially with the addition of our designer we should be cruising.

Anyways, things are looking pretty cool and if you haven’t applied, you can do so now. I’m also working on getting a keyword tool produced, it’s not going to be your conventional scraper but it will definitely be cool. Anything that adds value to the forum.

The PurposeINC SEO Think Tank 2008, one of the most anticipated SEO events of the year just added a very interesting component – Mixed Martial Arts Training.

On site at the event will be Xtreme Couture trainer Shawn Tompkins. Shawn has trained the best of the best including current UFC Champion Randy Couture and now he is unleashed to train a bunch of SEO’s EEEEEK!

Sure Hits is sponsoring the MMA training. Shots out to Jon Kelly.

To learn more about the 2008 SEO Think Tank or to see who is already booked check out the page here.