Product creation can be a difficult and confusing process for many entrepreneurs, however, by realizing what makes products successful, we can better ensure our own success. In this post, I’m going to share the four pillars that almost all successful products have in common.

1. Balance

Good product execution depends on balance. Getting this right can mean being number one in your niche; getting it wrong can mean failure. Balance involves making all of the aspects of your product equally good.

There’s a reason why the Honda Civic has been one of the top-selling vehicles here for the past 15 years or so. It’s because it’s so perfectly balanced in so many areas – from driving dynamics, to fuel economy, to price.

Employing Honda’s formula to success is simple: balance your efforts equally across the board. Don’t spend all of your time and money developing an incredible product without putting equal effort into writing a
good sales copy and generating traffic. Doing so ensures that almost nobody will and your product, and the few people that do will be turned-off by a mediocre sales page.

At the same time, don’t spend all your time writing a great sales copy or generating server-crushing traffic without putting the same effort into developing a killer product. Neglecting your product will result in a high rate of refunds, which is almost worse than making no sales at all.

2. Functionality

Quick and shallow success can be built on flash and style, alone. However, if you’re looking to build lasting success, your product needs to be functional, first and foremost.

One of the many factors that set the original iPod apart from its competitors was its uncanny level of usability. It’s minimalistic design made it easy to know which buttons to press, right out of the box, and its straightforward
menus put apple on the map for intuitive user experiences. Finally, it’s simple design proved robust and functional for a wide variety of different customers.

If we can learn a thing or two from the iPod, it’s that functionality trumps features. What the iPod and most other Apple products lack in pure technical superiority and features, they more than make up for in end user experience.

Often, products that attempt to be a jack of all trades end up doing nothing extraordinarily well. Conversely, products made to serve a clear purpose do a single task incredibly well, and become the product of choice for a select audience.

In your business, try not to develop products whose purpose gets lost in their list of features. Instead, build products that do one thing remarkably well. …Click to Continue →

2 weeks ago, I was taking a rest in the billiards room. I checked my email on the phone as usual,  and suddenly, I found a shocking email from Google that my Google Adsense account has been disabled!

Holy SHIIIIIIIIT! All my $2700 dollars in the account are gone.

Here is how the email looks like:

I’ve joined Google Adsense publisher program since 2006 and never got a problem with it for 5 years until now.

My problem was neither invalid clicks nor encouraging clicks like most Adsense publishers are facing.

I can’t believe that Google disabled my Adsense account because I didn’t  follow the Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines!

They banned me simply because I didn’t provide “original content” and “good navigation” on my sites, as they stated in the email. And they even didn’t give me the exact sites or pages that violated their policies. The truth is, I pay qualified writers to research and compose original content for my sites, and I use premium templates to build my sites.

One of my friends implied that “a $3000/mo Adsense income is too much for individual Adsense publishers”, especially for China-based publishers.

I also heard that if your account is disabled because of violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, it could be some Google Adsense employees looking for a kickback to boost their part time income.

While click fraud can be detected by measuring the conversions, for compliance with their “Webmaster Guidelines”, it is entirely at the discretion of the Google employee.  If anyone wants to get your Google Adsense account disabled, they only have to complain about a website repeatedly and  if they receive the same complaint a number of times, the account is disabled by the Adsense algorithm, even though there is no problem with the website.

Here is what you should do if your Adsense account is also disabled by Google:

1. Submit Appeal Form to Adsense Team

As far as I know that very few lucky people reinstated their Adsense account by appealing to Google, however, this is still the very first step to do when your account is disabled.

Don’t be panic, write your appeal in polite and professional way. Dig as much information as you can to prove that you are innocent and willing to make changes to your sites.

Depending on which situation you are in…

If your account has been disabled due to Invalid Activity, fill and submit the invalid clicks appeal form.

And if your account is blocked because of Policy Violation reasons, you can submit this policy violation  appeal form.

Although Google claims that a second appeal is useless, it did work for some people.  So give the appeal process at least 3 solid tries before giving up.

2. Open another Adsense account under a business entity.

You can set up a business entity and sign up a new Adsense account.

That’s what I’m gonna do in Hong Kong this year. You will need to open a business account in the local bank. And a substantial minimum deposit may be necessary depending on your bank.

In my opinion,  using an Adsense business publisher account is much safer than individual account.

3. Try Some Google Adsense Alternatives

When you tried all these and still couldn’t get an active Adsense account, you can try some Adsense alternatives. Some of the popular and genuine alternatives are:

Text-link-ads: Sell links on your site. I think it’s hard to get your sites approved if they are not PR4+.

Infolinks: A new in-text advertising network. Similar to Kontera but a lot easier to get approved. And it also has better payout than Kontera.

Maxbounty: My favorite CPA network.

Ourfreestuff: This one has a lot of CPA offers for international traffic. They also have a function for you to generate Adsense-style text ads.

CBTagClouds: Create tag-style Clickbank ads. I’m testing it out on some of my sites.

Chitika: The new hot Adsense alternative. (Thanks Blake and David 🙂

What I learn from this lost is that you should NEVER put all your eggs in one basket.

You should build your business on various income sources and business models. You can’t depend only on Adsense to make money online.

What’s your experience with Google Adsense? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

In today’s post, I want to talk about referrals. No matter what business you are in, referrals can be a HUGE income generator.

According to a survey conducted by eMarketers.com: “More than half (53%) of Internet users had visited websites referred by friends or family members in the previous 30 days.”

In fact, some businesses end up ending their other advertising efforts because they can keep busy with referral biz. You should always build the kind of online business that relies on different marketing sources.

The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller says, “I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.”

Just imagine “automatic” sales that come to your site without you lifting a finger; targeted traffic stream in your sales page day after day with no effort on your part. The best day of business life is when traffic and sales are completely automatic as other people are doing all the work on your behalf.

Lately, I’ve been getting HUGE referrals on various viral traffic/link building services which give me massive free traffic and considerable commissions each and every month.

I have since stopped the advertising the last few months… but I’m still getting organic results, referrals and repeat income:

(More than 5,000 free links to any web page I want to advertise)

(Recurring income each and every month)

The potential can be endless because there’s good chance that you may recruit  some super affiliate referrals!

In fact, over time many affiliates earn more from their super affiliate referrals than their own traffic converting. The viral referral indeed gives you super earning potential.

ANNOUNCING AUTO TRAFFIC MAGNET!

I’ll be launching a new revolutionary web traffic and viral advertising generator called” Auto Traffic Magnet” on August.

With Auto Traffic Magnet you can:

– Generate viral traffic and advertising automatically

– Earn viral traffic and advertising on all your referrals

– Build your profit list from your downlines with SOLO Email

– Earn monthly recurring membership commissions

And more!

http://www.AutoTrafficMagnet.com/

The good news is, as my thank you to my loyal subscribers, I’m offering Gold Auto Traffic Magnet Membership for absolutely FREE!

You will expect the importance and power of making referrals with ATM – your traffic and advertising will grow exponentially.

So just stay tuned for my future posts!

To your amazing success,

Henry Zeng

In this post, I will show you how I setup 5-figure per year autopilot income streams with a *dirt cheap* web script, and exact how you can copy me.

I make 5 figures selling lots of digital products (mostly resale rights products) online every year. That’s probably not big money in many gurus’ eyes, but it’s certainly easy money consider that when you set the system up, you never need to touch it.

Now get this: the 5-figure is just the money I earned from direct sales. Actually, the commission I make by promoting other people’s products in the backend is far more lucrative.

It’s much easier to build a profitable list when you sell info products online. Your affiliates can drive massive free traffic and even more affiliates for you, and it’s going viral.

Then you can make even more money by promoting affiliate products to the list.

Let me explain what I mean.

To succeed in the info product selling business, you need to establish your marketing funnels and automate the whole sales process, like:

1. Process Paypal Payments

2. Automated Product Delivery

3. Deliver One-time offers

4. Salespage Conversions Tracking

5. Affiliates Recruiting
…Click to Continue →

For the past a few days, I’ve been celebrating the Chinese New Year with my family and lots of my friends. We play firecrackers on New Year’s Eve, and the holiday nights were all filled with beautiful fireworks and great food!

Chinese New Year is the biggest festive event that we Chinese celebrate. It is “Tiger Year” this year, so I wish all of my readers have a ROARING year ahead! 🙂

And in today’s post, I am going to outline a few things that you need to think about when planning for big profits this year.

This isn’t so much a “how to” guide as it is a way to help make everything you do and think more profitable.

The big guys who make millions already have all of 2010 planned out for their business. So, do you? What is your plan for this year?

This is pretty important and incredibly overlooked stuff. Remember, not planning ahead is planning for failure.

First things first- You need to determine what type of business you want to set up, or if you already have a business, what exactly you are doing with it.

Even if you already have a business that makes money online, you might want to rethink the setup of it.

Here are a few questions you want to ask yourself..

1. How much time will it take?

This is especially important when you are first starting out. You
want to focus on things that are going to line your pockets the
fastest because you need to pay the bills! You also want to make
sure you can do it along side everything else you are doing without
making anything else suffer.

Or you will have to decide if something else should be sacrificed
to do this new project.

2. What will make you the most profits?

Again, money isn’t everything, but it sure helps… especially in
the beginning. You can always do charity work later.

The money is what makes the online world go round. So try and find
a good opportunity and direction for yourself that will get you
from rags to richest in a reasonable amount of time.

3. What are you excited most about?

If you can concentrate on things you are excited about first, that
is optimum. You will find more energy for it and will be more
passionate about it. In turn you will probably get to a positive
cash position faster.

4. How will it affect the big picture?

Will it take away from other things that you are doing? You don’t
want a project to consume you so much that something else that
you’ve worked hard on suffers.

5. Can it wait?

All of us should have short term and long term strategies and
goals. You can’t do everything now. Focus on what will get you
where you want to go fastest now and reserve the other stuff for
later.

You need to determine what is most important and what will get me
there the fastest.

This is so essential in the beginning.

I want you to ask all of these questions because this should determine where you start.

You need to at least have an idea of what you want to accomplish with this business before you start anything.

If you want to build an empire, then obviously you will need more time and resources than somebody who just wants to promote some affiliate programs while they watch TV after their 9-5 everyday.

How serious do you want to get involved? I think just the mindset of this is what holds some people back. If you don’t know and are just bouncing from program to program looking for something to stick, then chances are, you aren’t making money.

The people who know what they want out of this business and are going after it are the ones pulling in the big bucks. Do you want to be that person?

Set goals and strive to achieve them, don’t just wing from day to day.

Write down your business and personal goals and set deadlines to achieve them.

The problem with the Internet is that it is cheap, and it creates a cheap mentality. You can get on the Internet for $20 a month for access, and set up a web site for $10 a month.

This is money that people can flat out waste every month. But if you look at it through regular brick and mortar eyes, where you have to pay full “rent and stock” prices, you may take your business a little more seriously.

If you had to pay $500 per month for Internet access and another $500 for web site hosting, then you had to pay $5,000 upfront for stocking your product, you would probably be much more serious about your business and immediately become the best marketer that you could!

So why doesn’t everybody do that now? Because the Internet is cheap, and they are too comfortable and secure with their current jobs.

But if you really want to make a solid-sizable income from the net, then learn the ropes, take off the gloves and get your hands dirty.

You need to be where the action is, to see any action.

Start now and before you know it, you will be making the kind of money that you want, and will be kicking yourself for not starting sooner… Trust me!

Don’t worry about failing. You are going to fail at some point, everybody does. Nothing is going to be perfect, so stop wasting time trying to make it perfect. Get out there and dive in head first!

I guarantee this will help you get more done in less time and help you make much more money in the new year.

Gong Xi Fa Cai! (Have A Prosperous New Year)!

Henry Zeng