Well, we made some rumblings that a change was coming and now here it is.  No we did not really "sell the company" so much as I and Mark purchased Ben's ownership in it.  This has freed Ben up to do some other things he wants to pursue and will allow Mark and I to make some really cool changes.  We have some immediate plans such as opening up the forum so free members can have access to it, we also plan to introduce new lower pricing that will let anyone participate.

Existing paid members will experience no changes to their accounts.  All that may happen at some point (and probably will) is your monthly fee will go down.  We also have plans to do "something cool" for our lifetime members for the initial capital they provided. The other big change will be a commitment to at minimum 8 new videos a month (again at minimum) which will begin in February.  We will also be redesigning the site to make it easier to use and easier for you to find videos as you want them.

We never meant for Marketing ICE to be just a group of courses you took once and done.  There is that aspect of course but we also want the list of videos to be huge and to become basically support on demand.   We want if you are trying to say do something in blogger or word press for you to be able to go strait to the video about that to refresh yourself.

What we really want from you is tell us where you struggle the most, what you most want to learn how to do.  What sites you want to learn to use better?  Etc.  

One cool site we just found is a new site to release press releases.  You may not know but now both PRWeb and PRLeap charge for any distribution of releases.  Unfortunately this new service does not yet allow "anchor text" links but you can do up to three http links in each release.  We tried it out with our Press Release about the new change in ownership.  You can see our Press Release here…

SEO Training Company Announces Changes in Ownership

I will be doing a video on using this new PR Service (called PRLog) very soon.  I want to again reassure our members (both paid and free) that this change will not have any negative impact on your service. We have great things in store for you, give us just a week or two more and hold on tight!

Jack Spirko 

There has been some questions lately about ICE and new content for our video training.  We have been in low gear in producing new content for a few months and we apologize for that.  There were a few issues that came up along the way, personally I spend two months dealing with my wife having brain surgery and we have had a few other issues to deal with.

What I can tell you is new things are coming very soon.  We are currently making some changes that will let us do a better job of growing and serving our customers.  New cutting edge content, a more active forum and easier to use layouts are all coming.  There will be an announcement with in a week that will make things a bit more clear and give a better view of what is to come.  One thing we can promise is every bit of the existing training, content and service will remain in place.

Please bare with us just a few more days until we can tell you a bit more.

Jack Spirko

One of the things about Marketing ICE that really sets us apart is our community.  Paid members get access to the community where they can ask questions about videos. The really great part is that this information is available to you when you become a member because you can read through the old forum postings and search the forum.

I thought this was a particular important post.  One of our members is asking about "affiliate marketing" and wants to know if he is wasting his time with this affiliate program or not. 

I just realized that I set up a couple old blogger blogs back when I was just playing around. But, they have both been around for a while. They probably don't have any page rank, but I can at least set them up with a domain name etc http://internetmarketingsecrets.blogspot.com/ http://whoisfabiomoro.blogspot.com/

I'm still working on trying to change my descriptions on my site to make them original. Honestly, I feel like I'm not getting anywhere. But, then again I was told that Google puts new sites in the sandbox for about 6 months. I've been at it for just under 3. I dunno…do you think a site like mine…www.healthdynamite.com has potential? It doesn't have an integrated shopping cart. Instead it goes to the vendor page when you hit the buy button. So, because I am an affiliate, I only get a small percentage. I wonder if that percentage will add up to anything significant? Then again, I've heard that people can make good money as an affiliate.

Oh well, enough babble. I'll try to work on setting up those blogs for pay per post so I can make a buck…maybe rent. Do they have Google page rank? How do I tell? Wow a lot of questions.

The sandbox is real, but it is also entirely possible to get a site ranking well even if it is a new site. You just won't get it ranking well for a phrase that has a lot of competition, because the sand box will hurt you. (Jack and Mark can comment more on the Sandbox)

As far as checking the page rank simply go to the home page for each blog.  If you have the SearchStatus extension for Firefox? It will show your alexa ranking and google page rank.  You can see a picture in the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox web browser which shows your rankings graphically, and you can hold the mouse over a ranking to see the numeric ranking:

As far as making money as an affiliate… It's pretty easy to figure out.

What is the percentage you get paid on your sales? Simply figure out how much you want to make…

So if you make say 5% on your sales. And you want to make $1,000 a month. You'd need to do $20,000 a month in sales in order to make $1,000 a month from your affiliate commissions.

Want to know the DIRTY secret about affiliate marketing?

ALL the top affiliate marketers all have built their own mailing lists (usually) from having some of their own products, like ebooks, or whatever. The ebook helps them build a mailing list of qualified leads, within the ebook they have affiliate links, AND they have built an email list they can continue to market to over and over again and sell more affiliate products to.

So you can be a top affiliate but usually you also need to develop your own products…  All the guys making $100k or more a year all have mailing lists. (And the ones who make 1 million or more a year have their own mailing lists to recommend other people's products AND they launch their own products and partner with the other top affiliates.)

The good news is we have an entire video series on using sites like Rent A Coder where you can hire someone to help you create your own special reports, ebooks, etc to help you build your mailing list.  We also have begun a series of videos on how to use Aweber to host your mailing list.

- Ben Fitts 

We have had a lot of request to add some basic skill sets to the video library.  These two are the next steps in building out what we are calling Newbies Corner.  

The fist video teaches you how to use a Cpanel Host to install a Wordpress Blog.  While we have a video that shows you how to download the software and FTP it to your server and do the install in a manual fashion, if you have a web host that uses Cpanel and Fantastico it is MUCH easier to do and much faster to do.  The video is only about 6 minutes long but you will be able to actually do the install in about 60 seconds once you watch it.  That video is located at,

• Setting Up a Wordpress Blog with Cpanel and Fantastico

The next new video teaches you some really simple photo editing skills with MS Paint.  We provided this video primarly because most web marketers need to edit images at times and anyone with a PC has MS Paint, this video is located at.

• Resizing, Cropping And Text Editing Images With Microsoft Paint

I also wanted to let our paid members know that the video on Wordpress with Cpanel video is going to be very valuable to you in the future.  I am doing some "black hat experimenting" with a few really cool Wordpress Plugins.  I can't and won't really explain that on our public blog but this will be one of the first new things we will be teaching in our other new area.  We are calling that area the "Dark Basement - Beta" for the time being.  All I am saying is if you don't have a host using Cpanel you might want to pick up some cheap Cpanel (with Fantastico) hosting some time soon.

One thing we are really trying to do at Marketing ICE is teach the exact things we do in our own efforts.  As our members know there are a ton of blogging lessons on Marketing ICE and there is a reason we started there.  Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get started fast, make connections and get links there is.  While we are going to do more and more SEO, Black Hat and Advanced videos we will still keep doing more on blogs and Social Networking.

I wanted to take just a moment to show our members a project I just launched on my personal blog Comtech News.   I won't go into the full details here, you can just read the post called

Top Bloggers - A Call for Guest Posting

to learn all about it.

Basically it is pretty simple though I made a list of my 25 favorite bloggers who talk about business, marketing, internet marketing and sales.  Each has an opportunity to submit a guest post to my blog.  Some are huge name bloggers and some lesser known.  The beauty of this post is

1.  I am seeing some of these big name bloggers on m blog already, getting even a mention from some of them can really do a lot for your blog.

2.  Those who submit a guest post will add unique value to my blog

3.  Some of the lesser known bloggers are now associated with some big names 

4.  I will forge new friendships and relationships 

5.  My readers now will learn about new and really cool blogs

The key to this is I listed 25 bloggers but I am only accepting 15 guest posts.  So those listed have an incentive to claim a spot.  Additionally I did contact any of them directly, I simply put their blog names and proper names in my Technorati Tags and gave them a link.  Many people monitor thier links and own name in Technorati and like Google blog alert.  So I am relying on that to reach my guest bloggers.

So far as I know I am the first person to do something like this.  That makes it also creative and opens up things like Digg and PlugIM on that note if you read the story please consider plugging, bumping or digging it.  There are buttons for that at the bottom if you would like to.

So the bigger lesson here for everyone is about creativity!  Think about the techniques and skills we teach at MarketingICE, everyone is learning the same one, the key is the creativity you bring to the table, what ideas does my project give you or what ideas can you apply to our other training videos?  

Try to think of some creative things you can do that have never been done before.  Many times it is nothing more then using an old concept in a new way.

Again you can read my post about Guest Bloggers at Top Bloggers - A Call for Guest Posting. 

One very important thing to understand though is this, that list I made was not trumped up to get big name folks.  They are all actually blogs I have read for a long time, I find them all to be among the best there are available.  So if you try anything similar to this remember don't do it as a marketing thing only, be genuine.  The internet can seem like a big place but its communities are a lot like a small town.  If you are sincere you will do very well if you try to trump thing up, well, word gets around and fast.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog, social networking, digg, plugim, bumpzee

OK members we heard you!  FTP is a very basic skill that any webmaster or anyone doing any work with a web site needs to have.  We have had a great mix of new users sign up from rookies, to amateurs, to novices and even experts.  We have tried to keep the blend of material right for everyone with our production schedule but we seem to have be a bit light on teaching the basic skills that many very new marketers.

So while we are about to really ratchet up some of the more advanced and more black hat techniques on one side we are also trying to add some very basic videos for rookies to get a good start and foundation with.  The most requested skill we have been asked to teach thus far is basic FTP.

So I have done a video on How to FTP and How to CHMOD Permissions with SmartFTP.   As I write this Ben is adding it to our table of contents and to our navigation menu.  This video is of course available to our paid members.

If there are other basic skills you would like to see us add to our rookie skills section, please let us know what they are, just comment below or suggest them in the members only forum.

~ Jack

Technorati Tags: smartftp, ftp, webmaster skills, chmod, marketing, web design, seo, sem, search marketing, seo training

I just wanted to take some time to direct you to some posts across the web that mention MarketingICE.com.  Recently, PayPerPost had a post on their blog featuring our site.  The guys/gals at PPP were pleased to see our videos on how to use their system and wanted to share that info with their readers.  Thanks to everyone at PayPerPost for recommending our videos to your readers - and to any posties that found us at PayPerPost, thanks for joining!

Also, I ran across a few other sites that have given our videos some love.  The Fit For Freedom blog passed along our Wordpress Upgrade video for all of their readers to use.  Francis Simisim also referenced our video for using PayPerPost on his blog which is about how to make money online.

I am sure there are many others, and thanks to everyone who has spread the word about Marketing ICE.  Keep spreading the word so that our community can continue to grow!

Also, I wanted to let you all know that I recently added a video explaining how to use Trackbacks and how to use them to increase your traffic as well as your search rankings.  Check it out and let us know what you think. 

Jack is on vacation so I thought I'd answer a few more questions today.

When is the price going up? 

We're not sure, but we have an idea.  We have some membership goals in mind, and once we hit that goal and are satisfied with the site, satisfied with the number of videos, and content, then we will raise the price.

Will my existing subscription go up in price? 

No. Your subscription will remain at the current price so it is a good idea to KEEP your subscription active.  Don't let it go inactive or you may have to resubscribe at the new higher pricing. 

Can you do a video on X? 

Of course! If you need a video on a specific topic you can just ask in the forum.  As long as it is something we use we'd be happy to do a video (or expand on an existing video) for you.  However if you want us to do a video just because you don't like the software we use, we probably won't buy new software, learn how to use it, and create a new video for you.  I hope you understand?

How does the affiliate program work? 

With the affiliate program you are given a special link you will use to promote our site.  When you use this link we track the visitor. We also write a cookie to the web browser. The cookie is actually good for several YEARS. We want to make sure you get credit when they signup.  As long as they don't delete their cookie your referral will be tracked.

- Ben

As we are growing we are getting a lot of questions about Marketing ICE.  Here are a few.

1.  What is the difference between the free and paid memberships.

Answer - Well, there really isn't a "free membership" at all.  We simply understand that our form of interactive creative education is hard to understand with out experiencing it so we have 12 videos that anyone can access with a simple password.  We ask you to join our mailing list for that but it doesn't make you a real "member", you have no userID that way just a password.   You don't get access to our affiliates program, our members only forum or our conference calls or coming MP3 downloads.  You get access to 12 videos and nothing more.

Now paid members get full access to the site and benefits that include

• Access to about 20 hours of video training that is growing
• A members only forum with a thread for every single video lesson
• The ability to request new video subjects
• A great affiliate program and a coming awesome contest
• Site Critiques
• Conference Calls and MP3 Audio Lessons
• More!

It is pretty simple right now we provide this for 19.95 and one benefit to our customers is knowing what others do not.  To keep the value of what we have very high we limit access.  So free members, you are not actually members you just have access to some amazing videos.  Honestly we may be giving away to many videos free and may cut back on that number soon.  Many of our paid members have actually suggested that to us.

2.   Do you have an affiliates program?  and How do I join it?

Answer - Well if you are a paid member you already are an affiliate.  Just log in to your account and click on Affiliate Program to get your affiliate link. There are also some nice banners under promotional tools.  We have been testing the program with some select Joint Venture partners to be sure it tracked accurately and everything worked so we have not really pushed the program yet.  Everything has checked out so feel free to refer others to Marketing ICE.

Some have asked if you have to be a customer to be an affiliate, the answer is yes.  This is to limit the program to affiliates that actually use the product themselves and reduce competition.  It is another benefit of being a paid member.  We currently have no plans to change this policy in any way.

3.  Is there a JV (joint venture) program for people with large mailing lists, etc? 

Answer - Yes we pay a higher JV commission along with some other benefits to JV partners.  A JV partner must have a verifiable large mailing list or be able to organize a teleconference with a minimum attendance of at least 100 people.  We'd love to help you promote our site by hosting a teleseminar or webinar with your list. We have the software to host webinars up to 1000 users and teleseminars up to 250 users. If you can guarantee at least 100 users on the seminar we are more then willing to set you up as a JV.   We do expect JV partners to produce sales so we generaly give a reasonable quota for the first 60 days for our JV's to maintain the higher commissions and other benefits.  

4.  How often will you be adding new videos?

Answer - In the last two weeks we added about 8 new videos for another 3 hours of training.  We try to add a few videos a week and have no plans to change that.  Figure on 4 a week and consider there are about 26 weeks left in the year and we will be adding  over a hundred new videos just this year.  Honestly we may do far more.

The important thing to understand is Marketing ICE will never be a static system.  From the interactive forum to the new videos each week we will aways grow, expand and adapt.  Much of what we produced initially was pretty basic, that was to lay down fundamentals.  We are moving into more and more advanced topics as we go forward.  We will always keep Marketing ICE useful for the new user as well as the most advanced users. 

5.  Do you teach Black Hat Techniques?  If so why?

Answer - Yes and because they work!  Honestly there is a bit of stuff on the site now that is black hat depending on how you define black hat.  We don't do anything illegal and don't teach anything that is illegal either.  Some people think that is black hat it is not.  We don't spam and that is not black hat either.  Black hat is "manipulation of systems to artificially influence the search engine results".  That means when you take any specific actions to try to drive your rank up you are getting into the black hat relm at least the way a pure white hat would define it.

Now those in the know, understand that real black hat is much more systificated then that!  We have as I said in the last question started with a lot of basic fundamentals.  We are going to be adding some real black hat techniques very soon.  Some things like rotational content, rss feed manipulation and more.  The reality is a lot of gurus and experts claim to be white hat, they teach white hat, etc.  Yet any SEO worth the salt in his body knows all the shades of SEO, be they white, gray or black!

Honestly lots of people would prefer that we not teach this stuff, not because it is bad but because it works and they want as few people to know as possible.  Our mission is to make our customers the most successful marketers in the world and we can only do that by telling you everything we know that WORKS.  So white, black, gray, what have you, if it works, we will teach it.

Now we will tell you when we are showing you a real black technique (not that it will be hard to tell).  Black hat is like a gun , it is a tool, it works and at times there is nothing better for the job at hand.  However, like a gun you can hurt yourself with out proper training and safety.  So we will teach you black hat techniques and how to mitigate the risks as well.

If you have any additional questions just post them here, we are happy to answer them.  However, it will be Ben and Mark answering for the next week because I am taking a well earned week at my vacation home in Hot Springs Arkansas.  A full week with no internet access!

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: seo, blackhat, black hat, seo blackhat, marketingice, internet marketing, arkansas, jack spirko, affiliate programs, affiliate marketing

About a year ago I heard about a social bookmark site called Diigo.  I saw it as another Delicious clone but figured I would look at it a bit deeper it just seemed to be more.  It was a good decision!

Since that time I have been using Diigo and their tool bar every day.   I use it to keep sites I want to find very easy to find and sort and search.  I use it to market my own sites and to put my sites into all the other top book mark sites including delicious.  I also use it to improve my daily productivity and the beauty is once set up it takes up no extra time to use it.  It becomes seamlessly integrated into your daily efforts.

I just did three training Videos on Diigo for our paying members, they are called,

• Social Bookmarking With The Diigo Tool Bar 
• Using Diigo To Mass Social Bookmark Web Sites
• Cool Marketing Productivity Features With Diigo

If you don't know about social book mark sites these videos will teach you what you need to know.  If you do know about them then these videos will take your efforts to a new level.  The social bookmark sites are going to become the Google, Yahoo and Ask.com's of tomorrow so now the time to get into them and build up your presence.

These videos add another 45 minutes of training to Marketing ICE, Mark Barrera just uploaded a few more as well.  We are continuing to grow and get better, remember we make videos based on your needs, if there is any subject you want to see let us know, just comment on the blog or in the members forum. 

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: diigo, delicious, del.icou.us, social bookmarks, social bookmarking, social networking, social media, seo, sem, internet marketing