An Indepth Look at the PIPS Power Group

Would you like to be mentored?

Mentoring can make a huge difference to your success. It can help you when you are stuck, guide you in the right direction, give you ideas that you hadn't thought of before and motivate you when you are down. Most of the top internet marketers had a mentor at some point in their career. Having access to someone that has been there and done that before can help you to see things differently.

Usually mentoring can be very expensive, with online coaches charging hundreds of dollars per hour!

It is for these reasons that we created the PIPS Power Group (PPG) - an affordable mentoring group to guide you on the road to success.

The PIPS Power group was founded by Ken Troyer in February 2008 and we have a total of 4 staff members/mentors - Cynthia Minaar, Jeff Casmer and myself (Suzanne Morrison). The PPG staff are all Plug-In Profit Site owners and are all successful in their home businesses, making a good income online from the Plug-In Profit site and other affiliate programs. We are all different ages, have different areas of expertise and live in different areas of the world including the USA, South Africa and Scotland.

The main purpose of the PIPS Power Group is to mentor our members and teach them how to make money from their websites. Our mentoring is done primarily from a private forum, but we also include three free optional phone consultations and we work closely with members with a whole host of different areas including:

- how to cut down your marketing expenses - what is essential and what is not
- helping you to choose good keywords for your website and optimizing it for the search engines
- critiquing your website and suggesting improvements for it
- how to modify your website
- how to add extra income streams to your website
- help with blogging
- answering all the questions you have about traffic, HTML, SEO, article writing, tools and more

Because the forum is private, you can say and ask anything you like without fear of Google indexing your forum post for everyone to see for years to come!

We also provide

- A step by step plan for achieving results and making an income from your website. This is split into 8 parts and you follow the plan and let us know if you get stuck or need help. This plan is the Level One plan for beginners and we are also working on a level two and level three plan for more experienced members.

- A weekly challenge - each week we publish a downloadable PDF with 5 tasks that will help your business in half an hour or less. This is great for people who are short of time and all the tasks use free marketing methods and will help you to increase your traffic.

- Monthly articles - we provide unique PLR articles every month from Jeff Schuman's article writing service. You can use these on your blog or website.

- A critique of the 30 days to Success - I personally followed the 30 days to Success when I started with PIPS and it is a great guide. However there are a lot of recommendations in there that cost money, so in our critique we offer our advice on what we have found works and what doesn't work. We also offer free or low cost alternatives for those people who are on a budget.

- A massive list of article directories, blog directories and link directories to submit your website to.

- Monthly bonuses - we provide videos every month to help you learn how to promote and updaate your website successfully. We also provide a PLR or resale rights ebook that you can keep and provide as a bonus or resell.

- Discounts - there's a 30-50% discount on my website update services and a 30% discount on Jeff Casmer's SFI co-op.

- Competitions - we have friendly member competitions to help your business and give you the chance to win some great prizes.


The staff members of the PPG also carry out case studies and reviews of products and services so that you don't have to risk your hard earned cash on things that you don't know enough about.

As a staff member I am thoroughly enjoying being part of the PIPS Power Group. I am in the forum a few times a day helping people and answering questions. Our members seem to love it too. Our "Success Stories and Testimonies" section of the forum is brimming with tales of success, increased traffic and improved income and our forum has a great sense of community and friendship.

The PIPS Power Group is currently accepting members and you can find out more about it on the PIPS Power Group website.

If you have any questions feel free to drop me an email or post your comment on my blog below and I will be happy to help!

Review of PIPS Co-op - Plug-In Profit Site

Should I join the PIPS Co-op? This is a question that I have been asked many times by members of my downline or fellow PIPS members.

As a staff member of the PPG one of my jobs is to review products and services on behalf of members so they can make an informed choice as to whether or not to purchase something. My first assignment was a review of the PIPS Co-op. An advertising co-op run by Dustin Cannon.

The primary purpose of a co-op like this is to provide a share of advertising and ultimately sales. Sales are not guaranteed in an advertising co-op, but they are the main measure of success and should determine whether or not you continue to invest in such a co-op.To ensure that my co-op test was fair I opened a brand new PIPS account, separate from my original one, used a reliable and independent tracking link, set up a new autoresponder and set up SFI keycode tracking.

Here are my findings:

I spent $99 for two months - a total of $198 on the co-op and in summary for this money I received the following TOTAL number of sales, subscribers and visitors:

Total Visitors - 63
Total Subscribers in GetResponse - 34 (NOTE - all India email addresses)
Total SFI Affiliates - 14
Total EAs from SFI Affiliates - 0
Total Sales - 0
Total revenue made as a direct result of spend in co-op - $0

So in summary, as a result of my investment of $198 in the co-op I made $0 revenue. The number of daily hits was poor and it was odd that all my new subscribers in GetResponse were from India since it does not say anywhere that the advertising for the co-op is not restricted to India.

There are also a number of bonuses available for co-op members. These include a video for your website, Success University sales page and system, Myspace template, monthly PLR articles, an article submission service, ghostwritten articles for $8 for a 400-500 word article and a toll free internet marketing hotline.

There are some good bonuses in there, but in my opinion not enough to make up for the zero sales for my $198 investment.

Customer service on signup and when I ordered some articles was very good, However, when I made a complaint about something, I found the customer service to be very poor. I sent three emails and 2 PMs over the course of one week and received a combination of unsatisfactory responses and no responses at all.

The cancellation policy is laid out on the co-op website and seems to be fair, but it omits one very important fact. Your account with the co-op will be cancelled as soon as you cancel your next payment.

I was caught out short when I decided to be organized and cancel my co-op payment a week in advance. Not only was my payment cancelled, but my link was removed from the co-op rotation and I was no longer able to login to the co-op back office. In short I did not receive the final week of a month that I had paid in full for!

Usually a memberships allow you to continue enjoying the membership benefits until the anniversary of your payment date after you have cancelled, but not the PIPS Co-op. I complained about this a total of 5 times over the course of a week and was either ignored or not given a satisfactory response.

UPDATE (27/4) - I have now received an email from a co-op staff member expaining that there has been a misunderstanding (on their part) about the cancellation policy and I should not have had my login disabled. Hopefully this should not happen again to other people, but it is good to be aware of this if you do cancel.

Overall Verdict - I was disappointed with the lack of targeted visitors and my problems with cancellation. Personally, I would not choose to invest in this co-op myself as I do not feel that the results justify the cost. However, I will let you form your own opinion based on my report.

Disclaimer - these figures are based on my own results using a second PIPS account and independent tracking link. Results may vary for different people and of course the quality of this co-op may improve or get worse in the future.

You can find the full review of the PIPS Co-op at the PIPS Power Group, where we test products and services so you don't have to take a chance with your money!

Editing Your Plug-In Profit Site - Video Instructions

The majority of people want to make changes to their Plug-In Profit Site, whether it is changing the words on the page, adding or removing images, links and banners, changing the color, optimizing the site or adding new pages.

If you are considering changing your site, don't let fear hold you back. As long as you make a backup of your website before you start, if you screw up, you can always recover again.

If you are just looking to add a new banner, a downloadable PDF file or an image to your website you will find some instructions on how to update your PIPS site here.

However, if you are looking for a more detailed explanation with examples you may want to consider watching a "how to" video. I had actually thought about creating my own "how to" video, but when I discovered that Darrin McLauglin of PIP Site Help had already done this, I decided to download his videos and take a look at them.

His PIPS Instructional Video Series include four separate videos and are quickly and easily downloaded in a zip file which you can then extract on to your PC.





His First video lasts for just over 10 minutes and is an introduction on how to get to your HTML code, download it on to your desktop and edit the code. Darrin talks you through all the basics, without assuming any knowledge, so this is a really great video for complete beginners. He talks slow enough for you to actually follow along with him in the video and do changes as he explains how to do them. In this video you learn to change:

- The text that appears in the TITLE bar of your page
- The meta keywords of your website

And Darrin also walks you through the code on your index page (home page), explaining all the important parts.

The second video is a bit longer at 20 minutes and concentrates on adding a left box to your website with some text, a link and a vertical clickable banner. He also explains the difference between a standard PIP site and one that has had changes made to it such as a color change or a Mega site upgrade. In the video you will be able to follow Darrin as he edits the HTML code and adds a new box on to his site, just under the Dotcomology box.

The third video is just under twenty minutes long and explains in detail how to add a big central box onto your website. This is handy if you want to add an article on to your home page, or perhaps some information about other affiliate programs. He also explains how to add a link or a horizontal banner and how to center, bold or italicize your text.

The final video is just over 14 minutes long and covers how to remove content from your website, how to upload files to your website and very importantly, how to backup files. Removing content from your website is something that you may want to do if you are not a member of one of the standard programs that are part of PIPS and want to remove the banners and links for this program. As an example Darrin shows you how to remove all the Empowerism promotional links, text and banners from your site. The same could easily be done for Success university or any other program that you are not interested in promoting.

There is also a very handy text file included with the video series and this file contains simple code that you can copy and paste then use for creating new boxes, links and banners on your website.

Overall, I was very impressed with these videos and I would highly recommend them for anyone who has a standard PIPS website and wants to make changes for themselves. Darrin's voice is easy to listen to and if you have a fear of HTML, your fear should certainly lessen after watching these videos!

Find out more about the videos here.

If changing your own website is not something that you want to do, then you can find a wide range of services specifically for PIPS here:

- Website Update Services
- PIP Site Help

If you get stuck, just pay a visit to the PIPS support forum where there are many people who are always happy to help.

Stuck with PIPS and don't know where to start?

Have you just started out with the Plug-In Profit site? Or have you been plugging away for a few months now and just don't know what to do next?

I am going to keep this post very simple and recommend concentrating on two things. These two things will help to increase the visitors to your website and bring you free traffic for years to come. You need to do both of these things as they are not as effective when done on their own.

(1) Article Marketing
Commit yourself to writing one article per week on the topic of your website i.e. on business opportunities, how to start a business, website marketing, working from home etc. Your article should be around 500 words or so and informative rather than blatently advertising anything. At the end of the article add an Author resource box. Here is an example:

Suzanne Morrison works full time from home and is the webmaster of Home Business Ideas. Visit her website to receive 6 free work from home ebooks and learn how to start your own online business.

If English is not your first language, or if you suffer from writer's block (I know the feeling), then you don't have to write the articles yourself. Consider getting your articles ghostwritten for you.

Once you have an article ready submit it to article directories. You can either do this manually, use article submission software or use an article submission service. Have a look at my Article Directories, Software and Tools page for some suggestions of where to submit your articles and what tools to use.

Commit yourself to doing this at least once a week and you will see a gradual increase in visitors and you could also improve the ranking of your website if you follow the search engine optimization steps below...

(2) Search Engine Optimization
A lot of people are concerned with changing the look of their site so that it doesn't look like other PIP sites.

For me the first and most important thing that you should do to your site is optimize it. Changing the color, adding banners and flashing bells and whistles is all very nice, but it doesn't bring you any visitors. You may want to do some of this stuff later on, but there is not a lot of point in making your site look fancy if nobody is going to see it.

For this reason I recommend optimizing your site for the search engines. This is the process of:
- choosing keywords for your website
- placing these keywords in the right places on your site
- getting links back to your site using a method such as article marketing

For an introduction to keywords and SEO please read:
- Choosing Keywords for your website
- Search Engine Optimization Introduction
- How to Improve your Search Engine Ranking

If all of this bamboozles you, you may want to consider my PIPS Search Engine Optimization Service

Commit yourself to Article Marketing and Search Engine Optimization and the benefits of both of these techniques will pay off for you, with free targeted visitors to your site for years to come.