The internet marketing world has been all abuzz with “forced continuity” programs for most of the last year. These are either membership sites, physical newsletters, or simply thin air that marketers make you agree to pay for every month in order to get some once-in-a-lifetime price on a primary offer.

We are free to cancel the continuity membership at any time, but every marketer knows even people that hate the program will take three months to get off their duff and really cancel. In short, it confirms my worst suspicions: Even some really “big name” internet marketers don’t really care whether they are providing value or not.

I posted this question on Twitter the other day, “Which is better, 100,000 clients that pay you $10 each or a single client that pays you $1,000,000?”

I got the usual responses about the lifetime value of a customer, but what I was really driving at is that it depends in large measure on your personality and lifestyle. I have a demanding–but very rewarding–career that I’m not willing to leave yet (if ever).  Because of my career demands, I cannot handle even a few hundred clients that need technical support. I know I could outsource support, but the software I’ve written in the past was low-priced. One tech support call and I’m losing money on that customer.

First, I’d like to point anyone interested in writing better sales copy–which means making more money–to http://salescopyconfidential.com. You need this e-book, and it is a steal at $9.

Second, I practice what I preach: I’ve tested several combinations of page elements and came up with some interesting findings:

1. My old page header drastically hurt response (to the tune of 50%). I created a simple header; perhaps one created by a professional artist would help. But for now, my response rate is much higher without any header at all.

2. The current headline, “How to Sell Anything to Anyone on the Internet”, outdid the old by about 30%.

My friend Jay just released a very set of tutorial videos for Kompozer, an open source (i.e. FREE) web development tool. Kompozer is very powerful, but a lot of that power is tricky to find.

Jay’s videos fix that.

http://kompozervideos.com

I was just about to recommend Joomla 1.5 as the Internet Marketer’s web development environment of choice when my MidnightMarketer.com web site got hacked. As it turned out, I was running an old version of Joomla and this was due more to my inattention than to any real flaw in the current version of Joomla.

But it gave me an excuse to look at WordPress again, and boy, I really like what I see.

This is not a hands-down recommendation, but for most uses I can see for my own web sites in the foreseeable future, I will be using WordPress instead of Joomla.

• I like Joomla as an easy CMS for complex web sites, but WordPress is easier yet, plus it is simpler to optimize for SEO. Thoughts? #