Before you get too concerned I should point out that luckily it was a remote controlled helicopter and no passers by were injured although the cat has taken to living in a cardboard box.

The terminal failure was cause by a very small screw working itself loose. I suspect that it was the cheapest part of the whole helicopter, yet it turned out it was one of the most important and something I’d never given a moments thought to.

Not once did I think, “I’d better check that really important small screw isn’t loose”

If I had I would still have helicopter in one piece and not one that looks like it was designed by Picasso.

Aaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnddddddd your internet business is a lot like my Helicopter only as strong as the weakest part. (do you see what I did there!)

We can all spend hours every week making sure that our business is working well but if you overlook one small thing then you could open yourself up to potential disaster.

Last week, I found that due to my own stupidity the signup boxes for 500 buyers that you see in the sidebar and below this post weren’t working and I hadn’t noticed it (it wasn’t a good week all round was it).

I usually get 10-20 signups per day from those and they had been down for over a week it doesn’t sound like much but take into account the lifetime value of subscribers and it could add up to a 4 or 5 figure loss over time.

It doesn’t matter that I have multiple backups of the site, a resilient server, protection against hackers and the best conversion tracking money can buy..if I don’t pay attention to the stuff that matters.

The point of this post is to point out the need to know what your priorities are. At the moment mine is generating traffic and subscribers. I should have made sure that everything was in place and working properly on a daily basis.

I’ve now complied a check list of what I need to check everyday, and I urge you to do the same.

What’s the most Important thing in your business?

If you are relying on AdSense then you need to ensure that the ads are running on your sites everyday.

If it’s affiliate marketing then make sure that the links are still working everyday.

If it’s list building make sure that your signup boxes work and that people are getting access to what they signed up for.

It’s great knowing you have a 30% open rate but pointless if you aren’t getting new signups.

Focus on the small things it’s the stuff most likely to hurt your business if you get it wrong. It’s all well and good having backups of your sites but if they have a fundamental flaw then the backups mean nothing.

Look after the small things and the big things generally will fall into place

Do you know what the most important part of your business is?

If you are one of the people unlucky enough to have been hacked you’ll know how much of a problem it can be.

It’s not just the problem of restoring access to your blog, you may have to scan it for malware so that google and various browsers don’t block access to it.

You may get extra bandwidth fee’s, This blog was taken down last week not by being hacked but by the attempt, it used up a months bandwidth in about 14 hours. Luckily I have my own server so I could adjust it as soon as i knew about it. Hackers were using a brute force method of trying the Username Admin with a millions of different passwords.

If i’d have had a limit to the number of attempts in place they wouldn’t have been able to even try to access the blog continually

You can secure your blog very easily and block the 5 most common hacking methods

1 Change Your username

DO NOT use Admin as your username anything is better, so if you log in using admin go and change it immediately

2. Change the database prefix

Most wordpress installations use the prefix wp_ for each database, because of this it’s something that hackers can exploit. Change your prefix to something random

3. Remove the WordPress version Number..

If a hacker knows what version you are using he knows the vulnerabilities, removing the version number stops him targeting specific exploits

4. Change the login page

If a hacker knows that everyone uses the same login page then he knows where to attack. On the other hand If everyones is different he once again is at a disadvantage

5. Set a maximum number of login attempts.

If i’d have done this last week then my site wouldn’t have been down. Once set you after 5 attempts the site it locked down for 30 minutes

Making these changes will help to protect you against many types of hacking, it’s the same as protecting against burglars if your house is well protected they will go elsewhere and look for easier targets. Very few hacking attempts are directed against specific sites . Hackers tend to cast a wide net and then target the areas they know they can exploit.

If You are a technophobe then you are probably having palpitations now.. never fear…

The video below shows you how I protected a blog in under 2 minutes if you can use a mouse you can secure your site.

Solo ads used to be a really good way to build a list until someone realised that you could make more money from your list if you sold solo ads … Ohh OHH see whats happening there?

People are building lists with solo ads to sell solo ads.

Solo ad cannibalism I like to call it. The quality of the leads you get are quickly reducing as more and more people are getting onto solo ad sellers lists. Open rates of less than 1% are common on some lists. To put that into perpective I have a 4 year old list that get a 20% open rate

The problem is not just that the quality of the leads are poor and open rates atrocious it’s that the real cost of building a list with SA’s is much higher than people think

Here is how it’s portrayed.

You spend $50 and get 100 clicks, so you immediately think ok that’s only 50c a subscriber not bad.

Wrong

Of those 100 clicks you’ve paid for you might, if you are lucky, and have a great offer get 40 signups, a 40% conversion rate.

So now we are over $1 a click….it get’s worse.

Some of those signups won’t verify their email address and some will get the free report or give away and then unsubscribe.

For example last week I tested a solo ad supplier with 40 clicks for $20

For that $20 I got 49 clicks and that resulted in 21 subscribers.

Of those 21 7 didn’t verify their email address and 5 immediately unsubscribed.

In the end I got 9 subscribers the real cost is over $2 per subscriber.

That sucks.

Compare that to 4000 subscribers that I got for a few hours work or the 53 subscribers that we generated yesterday with 20 minutes work and zero cost

Which would you prefer?

The problem with solo ads is that people are building lists to sell solo ads by buying solo ads the result being a large number of people getting offers 3 or 4 times a day.

This leads to poor open rates and low quality leads.

I recently ran a small test, I joined the list of a well know solo ads seller.

What follows is not for the squeamish!

9am Joined List – Marketer 1

10.30am Received Solo ad for marketer 2 – signed up

11.10am received solo ad from marketer 2 sending me to marketer 3….. Plus links in the P.S. for marketer 4, 5 &6!! Signed up to them all

12.10 email from marketer 1 with link to Marketer 7

12.30 received email from marketer 5 with 4 links to different marketers

I could go on but in under 5 hours I was on 17 lists…..

Still think solo ads are a good idea?

Whats The Alternative Mark?

The Alternative is to be creative and build list quickly using methods that others are using.

After a bad experience with solo ads I spoke to a friend of mine and we put our heads together to see if we could build lists using different methods that were either free or very low cost (below 10 cents per subscriber)

The idea was the subscribers would be cheap top get & wouldn’t be based on solo ads or facebook..(too obvious!)

We came up with several methods. which we’ve tested, 149 signups in out first test..that works for me!

We’ve put them all together into a short report, if you want to build a list then just 1 of these methods each week with build you a big list in no time… a list leads to profit.

Check out NO BS Listbuilding

The methods we’ve covered are :

Method 1 The Shout Out

Method 2 The Triple Win 2013 Version

Method 3 Mutual Appreciation

Method 4 The Hunter

We’ve also added a bit of also secret sauce to tie it all together and make your list building really rock.

NO BS Listbuilding

I don’t need to tell you that there were huge differences in the 2 figures.

The figures quotes had slight variations but they were all pretty similar to other stats I’ve seen

90% of people who do internet marketing earn less that $500 per month

90% of people want to earn more than $2,500 per month (25% want more than $25,000 per month)

I really find it surprising that so few people earn less than $500. That’s $16 per day or less than $1 per hour.

I say I am surprised but I’m not sure if I really am, I’ve seen so many people jump from one method of making money to another without giving any of them a proper try.

I’ve seen marketers constantly market different products, this week it’s facebook next week it media buys, the week after it’s webinar software.

It’s time to stop the madness.

Sellers, help your subscribers and buyers focus on one thing and keep at it until they build an income, stop offering the next big thing and the latest shiny objects. If you create a product that helps them to earn $20 a day they’ll happily buy your products that help them earn $50 or $100 and pay more for them.

For buyers. Focus on building a steady income, don’t let your dreams of earning $1000 a day get in the way of reality. You’ve first got to earn $20 a day, then $50 then $100 before you can even think about earning $1000 per day.

Apart from the whole shiny object syndrome one thing that holds people back is that they don’t really want to be Internet Marketers. Don’t get me wrong they love the idea of it, creating a site or a product and earning money while sat in their pants…. What could be better?

Time to be honest with yourself (the truth can sometime hurt!)

What did you do yesterday to build your IM business?

Did you watch TV ? Did you work until 3am?

You can watch as much TV as you want and you can get as much sleep as you want.

But surely if you want to make money using Internet marketing then you’ve got to do everything possible to achieve that.

Remember just $16 a day will get you out of the 90%

If I said to you I can guarantee you’ll make $16 a day but you’ll have to work hard would you do it? (by hard I mean every hour you can, no TV & just 5 or 6 hours sleep)

If I said to you I can guarantee you can make $100 a day but you’ll have to work hard would you do it?

If I said to you I can guarantee you can make $500 a day but you’ll have to work hard would you do it?

If I said I can guarantee that you can make $1000 a day but you’ll have to work hard would you do it?

Have I got a yes yet?

I guess that I got a yes at the 2nd, 3rd or 4th option. Which is a real shame because success starts with that first $16 day.

When you learned to read did you start with a bit of Shakespeare or Janet and John Go to the park?

Do you see what I am getting at.

I added a link to the video below to my 500 buyers product and it resonated with a lot of people I still watch it everyweek and have the audio on my iPhone, for those moments when I can’t be bothered working!

How Bad Do You Want it?

If after watching that you have decided that you really do want it but think you need some guidance than check out my Inner Circle. I guarantee I’ll do everything I can to help you to succeed. But you’ve got to want it… Deal?

First let me preface this by saying that I love Internet marketing, I love the fact that I can sit at my desk have an idea, create something and earn money. I love that I can find a great product write a review and make commission. I love that I can have an idea for a website and within an hour have a site up and ready to make sales.

I love that the there are very few barriers to entry and anyone can make an income. Viva La Revolution!

I honestly still get a buzz from opening my email and finding I’ve made a sale of $9.

I’ve not had a job in the past 33 years of my working life that has brought me as much pleasure on a daily basis as IM, yet not a day goes by when I don’t find something about it that makes despair for the future.

So here are 7 reasons why I think Internet Marketing is broken.

1. Jumping On The Merry Go Round

Twenty marketers emailing you promoting the same product and trying to differentiate their offers by adding more and more valuable bonus’s .

It’s really time to do the maths on this one, if you are competing to make sales with almost every big name marketer with a list then you might make some sales and earn $150 commission per sale but it you put the same effort into marketing a product that paid you far less commission and had far fewer people promoting then 2 things would happen you’d make more sales but more importantly you wouldn’t lose subscribers.

Hands up who unsubscribes from multiple lists if you get multiple promotional emails from different marketers.

During the Easy Video Suite launch I had emails from marketers who had never created or sold a Video related product promote it to me. WHY?

If I can look at it and decide that it’s not a particularly good fit for my subscribers who have bought videos related products why can’t they?

2. Lack of originality

Marketers do what they see other people doing, they completely disregard trying anything new. A great example is a marketer who builds a list then see’s other more successful marketers emailing offers everyday. So they start to email offers every day even though they complain about getting so many email offers.

3. Failure to build a proper business.

This is related to number 2 . If you aren’t creating products and just promoting other peoples products you haven’t got a business. Relying on short term income over long term profits is a recipe for disaster.

4. A Fundamental Lack of Original Thought

Rehashing other people ideas and products. A few weeks ago I explained how I had done something in a private group within 3 days I was being asked by another member to promote his product about exactly the same method. Coincidence?

5. JV partners Dictating the Sales Process

When Jv partners want 100% commission on the front end and expect you to have a high process backend One Time Offer then something is broken! Have a look through the warrior forum and look at what buyers ask in every thread .. is there an OTO. Customers don’t like it yet marketers feel like they have to do it.

I actually don’t believe there is anything wrong in offering an OTO that compliments a product, but you should be forced into having one if you don’t want to have one. On the other hand an OTO that provides a missing pecs of the puzzle that should have been in the original product is totally wrong.

6. Stupidity

Sellers who don’t give out review copies but still want you to promote their offer… nothing more to say on this one apart from .. Muppets!

7. A complete and utter lack of common sense.

Too many marketers are focussed on the making quick cash and not planning for long term income. They view their subscribers not as customers but as cash dispensers. This is what bankrupts businesses in everyday life and IM is no different.

In fact everything i’ve written here can be attributed to not having a grasp of basic business practices. Wouldn’t it make IM a much better place if you were forced to complete a course on basic marketing skills and customer services before they were allowed to set up a website or create an email list.

Most of the things that are wrong with this gloriously inclusive business would be solved by marketers asking themselves ..

“What would be in my customers best interest”

Try it it might transform you business.

Recently I was sat having a coffee while my wife was shopping and I started to list what I loved and hated about Internet Marketing.

I split a page of a Moleskine notebook in half and on the left I wrote Like and on the right I wrote Hate.

My idea was simple eliminate as much as possible in the Hate column and focus on what is in the Like column. That way I should adjust the balance of what I am doing firmly towards what I like doing. That way i’ll stay motivated longer, I stay focussed longer and I’ll get more done as I strive to work on the likes rather than the hates.

Some of the stuff in the hate column is easy to reduce or cut down on. For example one of the things I had in there was support calls. It’s not that I hate doing support it’s the fact that I often get calls late at night about the same things. If I had a proper knowledgebase or provided proper instructions wouldn’t be in issue.

I sent out a link to a password protected page along with with the password last week, people copied and pasted the password which introduced a whitespace so the password didn’t work a simple note to type in the password would have eliminated all the calls.

Often people can’t find their products in their product dashboard so they understandably log a call, I know this is caused by them not being properly logged in so a simple log out and log in will fix it.. I must have written that fix in about 20 emails in the last month… DOH!! Why don’t I just add it to the Knowledgebase at the help desk?

So with a bit of focus and time I can reduce support calls to a bare minimum. Hell I could hire a support desk team and train them up so I’d only need to check what they are doing for about 10 minutes everyday!

Another thing is serial refunders, It just so happens that serial refunders are usually come from one source of sales and 1 or 2 specific affiliates, there is a simple cure for that, don’t allow those affiliates to promote my products and anyone who refunds more than 3 products blacklist them.

The Like column had things like freedom in it, the freedom to go and play golf when I wanted, the freedom to turn around and take my wife to Barcelona for a few days and run my business on an iPad. So I am going to focus and making everything I do manageable on the iPad. If there is an app that allows me to work away from the iMac i’m buying it!

It also had networking and seminars in there, I’ve been to 3 seminars 2 I ran myself and 1 I spoke at, the buzz was amazing so I know I want to do more of those. Even if I am not speaking I should attend more as the knowledge that’s passed around and the ideas that you get are so much worth the journey.

Freeing up time from doing what I don’t like will allow me more time to visit or run more seminars and brainstorming sessions.

Networking is so much more than just meeting people face to face, I am a member of several skype groups and Facebook groups and once again it’s an amazing way of learning, getting ideas and sparking the creative juices. By reducing some of the things in the hate column..bing more time to network

If you don’t talk to fellow marketers on a regular basis then make an effort to do it it will make you business stronger.

How many times have you said, I don’t have time to do X,Y or Z? I am sure you get the idea with this list work on removing or reducing the time you spend on the hate column and focus on getting on most of your time spent doing whats in your like column… Sounds simple doesn’t it?

In order to help you I created a very basic PDF for you to download print out and fill in just right click and choose save as DownLoad The Pdf or just use a paper and pen!

Let me know some of the things that you will be adding to your Hate and Like Lists and what you’ll be doing to adjust the balance.

Don’t forget my 500 Buyers report is still available , so if you fancy stepping out of the IM rat race and just focusing on your customers and subscribers check it out.

Have a great week!

Today I went to lunch 2 fellow marketers (Tim Goodwin and Paul Mort) who focus on non Make Money Online niches, in fact their niche is a pretty small one in the scheme of things, they work with Fitness Professionals who want to run bootcamps in the UK as I said not a massive niche.

Size Doesn’t Matter

The size of the niche doesn’t really matter what matters is knowing your customer and knowing what they want. Put yourself in their shoes and think like your potential customer thinks. Does that customer of yours in the dating niche really want to settle down and get married or does he want a pretty girlfriend so he feels good about himself? Market to him the wrong way and he’s not a potential customer anymore. Market to him the right way and he’s going to be happy buying products from you for potentially years to come.

I gave you details of Paul and Tim’s niche because I want to show you that you can make a good living online with almost any niche if you provide quality products and give that niche what they really want and not what you think they want.

That’s Tim on The Left and Paul on The Right

Back to Lunch.

I turned up and Paul said.. We’ve just launched a new product a few minutes ago. By the time we paid for lunch (well Tim paid to be more precise!) they had sold around 20 products at $97.

The product didn’t exist a few days ago, it had been something they had planned for a while but never got around to creating and releasing. So on Monday Tim travelled down from Portugal to Marbella and they filmed the content in various Cafe’s and Restaurants in the area, created the sales page, created the delivery method, put it on clickbank and then launched it a couple of email…. SIMPLE

Lets for a moment pretend that they only sell 40 copies of this product and we’ll do a bit of rounding up so they make $4000, that in itself isn’t bad for a few days work but even i’ll admit that it’s not life changing.

However Paul and Tim are the real deal. This product is their new entry level product, they already have recurring income products, physical products and high ticket products.

They are passionate about their Niche and they create high quality products that deliver value and turn buyers into repeat buyers.

I am not trying to hype these guys up they are no different than you or me they just make sure that they take action and COMPLETE projects.. completing projects on a regular basis has allowed them to earn a good living and to do what they enjoy.

This is just some of what Paul & Tim have achieved over the past few years…

• Attracted over 110 trainers to the most talked about fitness event the UK has ever seen sold at £347 a head
• Sold 50 copies of a £997 ‘hard copy’ product
• Made over 30k on my online product WITHOUT a website or e-book
• Sold over 200 copies of my own DVD’s for fit pros
• Researched, developed and sold copious amounts of my own supplement – Lean Greens.

You don’t do that without taking positive action and following through.

Check out that last Item on the list…”Researched, developed and sold copious amounts of my own supplement” How many times have you thought wouldn’t it be a good idea to…….. then forgot about it? As I have already said they aren’t any different to you and me, I am sure they have had lots of failed projects that have been consigned to the ..”Well at least I learned something pile” They just make sure they complete all the stages of successful product creation.. Research, Create & Market

Taking Action

I said at the beginning that talking to these guys was a kick up the backside for me, I’ve had an idea for a new product outside the MMO (Make Money Online) niche but i’ve been thinking of lots of reason why I shouldn’t do it… That’s Changed

Within an hour of returning home I had purchased a domain and hired a graphic designer to create some branding for the product, I’ve got wordpress installed and the theme I usually use has been uploaded. Finally I’ve created an outline of the product.

Tomorrow I’ll start to write it and I’ll set myself the target of creating at least 1 video a day and writing 2000 words each day. If I miss a day then I’ll do double the next day.

I’ll keep you updated via the blog in the next few weeks about how I am progressing and I’ll share any tips or strategies I come across on a daily basis via facebook so if you’d like those tips either like the Facebook page or check it regularly.

Why not commit to completing a project this month?

JUST DO IT

Seriously stop making excuses, Just do it. It’s really not that difficult, outsource what you can’t do and set yourself a daily goal… then maybe I’ll be writing about a lunch I had with you in a few months time!

Let me know via the comments about whats holding you back and I’ll try to help as best I can via the comments or future blog posts…

I thought for todays blog post i’d try to give you some food for though..Why is the IM niche still selling products at the same prices and in the same way as they have been doing for the past few years which other types of marketing are evolving?

I was recently reading an article about how Nathan Barry and Sacha Grief sold $39,000 worth of eBooks (The article is actually an transcript of a podcast so you can load it onto your phone and listen if you wish) either way it’s a really great listen/read.

What struck me is the sales page Nathan used was the complete opposite of what we are used today in Internet Marketing.

You can check out his minimalist sales page which I think is a work of art. Now compare that sales page which is selling a product priced up to $169 with your average WSO or IM sales page thats full of hype and bluster to try to sell a $9 – $27 product.

I can see copywriters hanging their heads in shock at the thought of all of us IM’ers turning to a simple headline, a sample video or chapter and a series of price boxes. (and maybe some testimonials )

But why not? why do we have to endure the same overly long sales letters that really tell us very little about the product? Think of the time and effort we’d save if you could see almost everything we need on a single page without the hype… ahhh bliss.

Don’t get me wrong Nathan’s sales page isn’t perfect I would change the price boxes to vertical and side by side for a start but it’s so clear and concise it’s refreshing.

So the first question I want to ask you is … Would a simple sales page like that make you more likely to buy or less likely? (use the comments section to let me know what you think)

Tradition

There is a big issue with changing too radically which Michael Christon mentioned to me when we talked about this very topic and that is tradition. He touched on this in the interview I did with him a few weeks ago if you have downloaded it yet get it…it’s a goody)

There is a tradition within every group of people for us marketers the tradition is for long sales letters and just small changes, if you’ve been and looked at a WSO recently you’ll see a lot of them are now large graphical sales pages.

Look back over the past 2 or 3 years and you’ll see that there have been very small incremental changes.

Long form sales letters, ==> Video sales letters where the sales page is repeated on the screen, ==>”live action” Videos where the marketers talks, ==> graphical sales letters. Nothing too radical just a simple change of format that isn’t too different and isn’t going to change the status quo.

All the time that us marketers have been in the IM niche and have been sticking to generally the same methods the “Appsumo Generation” those start ups have been ripping up the manual and testing different things to see what works. They don’t have a tradition of Long Form sales letters and paying copywriters to create psychologycally stimulating content (did I really write that!).

They have been creating what they like and then testing it to see which converts best. When was the last time you heard of an Internet marketer in the IM niche test 2 sales letters?

The worst selling WSO I ever created was the one I did on how to split test sales pages and various sales processes.. The interest in testing just isn’t there and as long as people just focus on churning out product after product and not having a good longterm plan for their sales funnel then things aren’t going to improve.

Pricing

We also have a big issue with Pricing in this Niche.. Is a product that can change the way you do business and make you money really only worth only $9? Which is better, selling 1000 products at $9 or selling 100 at $77? or 50 at $147

Now of course those of you who do the math will say selling 1000 at $9 BUT that usually brings lots of support calls and you’ll have to deal with refund requests, and you won’t necessarily build a list of 1000 as those buyers will probably buy something else tomorrow and give you throwaway email addresses. I know from experience that the customers who buy at higher prices, very rarely ask for a refund and are more likely to invest more time and effort into your products.

There is a lot of value in offering lower cost product If you have higher cost products in a funnel but all too many marketers just focus on one low cost product after the other with no real thought about higher priced products.

If you are going to be a marketer then market.

So hopefully that will have given you some food for thought, can the IM niche change? do you want it to change? Let me know

Final word On List Building …For Now

Hopefully you will have read the last two blog posts and you’ll now have a good idea of what type of emails you should be writing and how to construct them. However all that means nothing if you aren’t building a list.

The biggest regret I have is not building a list earlier and I know that is the same for many marketers. Learn from out mistakes… Start building a list NOW!

Derek Halpern recently did a blog post and in it he said, If you aren’t building a list you are an idiot, I am too polite to say that out loud or in a blog post but I do agree with him 100%. He sent a tweet and an email to a similar number of people the tweet drove 300 people to his blog post the email 2400.

Thats 8 times as many if that was a promotional email that would be 8 times as much money…

Thats the difference between beans and a great steak for dinner tonight, it’s the difference between an apartment and a really nice house. I hate bringing things down to money but it’s what a lot of people understand. If you build a list you’ll make more money it’s as simple as that. I don’t care if you just get 1 subscriber a day thats still 365 a year and I know someone who made over $20,000 for a 200 strong list.

Don’t think about it do it! (I’ve set up a free private email marketing Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/emailmarketingmastermind/ come and join us!)

The Rules

Which brings us rather nicely on to what I really wanted to talk about today and that is “Rules”. Not the type you need a referee to enforce but the ones that allow you to thrive and prosper as an internet marketer. This was brought to mind by a conversion I was reading in a private mastermind group and it got me thinking what rules do I live & work by.

We should all have a set of rules that we market by, rules we are loath to break and rules that guide the way we work. Once you have those decision making becomes so much easier.

1. Money isn’t the driving force

It’s all too easy to think short term in terms of money. You should be thinking in terms of what is best for your subscribers and what will help them to succeed. You need to look long term, which would you prefer a few quick $9 sales or a customer who sticks with you for years and grows and prospers and goes onto buy regularly from you over several years?

Both aims need not be mutually exclusive, I recently promoted Michael Christon’s WAAR report and I got great feedback from people who purchased, I made money, Michael made money and my customers got high quality information that will help them to earn more money on a regular basis (if they Implement what they learned!)

Promote if you feel its a Win Win for both you and your customers.

2. Work from a Stable Basis.

Before investing in tools and programs make sure that you are financially secure, don’t spend your rent on the latest greatest tool… there will be another along shortly. Initially work to ensure that you have enough to live on comfortably, if that means writing for people and charging 1 cent a word or providing a service on Fiverr do it!

Even though I can pretty much afford to get any program or tool that comes out I still use this to this day. I always ask myself

Do I need this product now?

Will I use it in the next few days?

Do I have something that can already do the job?

Will it potentially improve my profits

3. How can I provide the greatest value to my customers while still providing for my family.

This is quite closely related to rule number 1, but there is a subtle difference, in the past I’ve gone months without creating any new products or promoting anyones products, while I am sure many of my subscribers appreciate that I don’t promote everything that comes along Internet Marketing is still the way I make my income. There has to be a balance between promoting too much and promoting too little and thats the reason I try to focus on this rule a little more often than I used to.

Ensure you have enough for sudden disasters and crisis’s … they can happen at the worst possible time!

4. Maintain a Sensible Life / Work Balance

It’s all too easy to put customers first, up to recently I would often be checking emails at 2am and working 7 days a week, I am trying to change that a bit at the moment and try to only work between the hours of 9am and 9pm Monday to Friday, outside those times I do monitor emails and deal with anything important. On the other hand I will happily take an afternoon a week off and play some golf and maybe take my wife shopping or go for a walk or cycle.

You need to have a sensible balance, there is no point in working too hard to build a better life for your family if you never see them.

5. Market to people the way you want to be marketed to!

That goes without saying If you hate getting emails from marketers who promote everything then don’t send emails promoting everything, if you hate emails with headlines saying “Important Open Now” then don’t use them yourself. Just because other people do it it doesn’t mean that they are right!

Be sensible in your marketing and you’ll do ok!

Over to you now..

What Rules do you live by in your business life?

Competition

How is the image I used related to this post?

Simply post the answer as a comment and I’ll pick the first right answer.. I won’t publish the answers until midday tomorrow (CET)

The winner gets one of my products..

If you want a bonus point share the post on FB and I’ll give you 2 products ;) (Ya’ can’t beat a good bribe!)

If you enjoyed this post and learned anything… share it!

Have an awesome week

If you haven’t read it yet than you can find it here.

Be Congruent

But first one more thing about followup emails.. Make sure you deliver what you promise!

I regularly sign up for peoples email sequences to see how they are marketing and how their emails look, many pay a lot of money to have the emails written so studying them is a good education. So this week I signed up for a marketers emails, he’s relatively well know and recently held a seminar in New York.

The signup box promised a report about 7 ways to double your income… Perfect

I signed up and confirmed my email address, what was the first thing I received? Yep a pitch for a webinar replay that sold a graphics product that was released over a year ago.

As far as I am concerned thats a big turn off. No relationship and worst of all he built no trust with me. When you think long term, he has the opportunity to sell me $5000 or more worth of products over the next year or so, thats not counting the seminars I might go to. All that potential income blown because in the first email I get he doesn’t deliver what he promises.

Thats a big lesson learn it!

Broadcast Emails The Work Horse Of Your Business

On to broadcast emails, broadcast emails are all about now, they have information or promotions about what is relevant at this moment in time. It would be pointless me adding the email I send out to my list today about this post into an email sequence. So I sent the email about this post as a broadcast which was sent at a specified time today. Broadcast emails are boring to many people but they are generally what earns you a large percentage of your income. Therefore they are vitally important.

Most of the time a broadcast email will send the reader somewhere else, to a blog post or to a sales page so they need to be pre-sold in that email. To keep to the entertainment business analogy we used in the last blog post your broadcast is the warm up act that gets the audience buzzing for the main star of the show which will hopefully be the offer you are sending them to..

The Elements of a Good Email

Good broadcast emails contain several elements bad broadcast emails generally just contain a call to action.

I have actually received a broadcast email promoting a product that contained just the 1 line and a link.

”Check out this awesome plugin”

No thanks, If you want to screw me at least kiss me first!

Would you walk up to a girl or guy in the bar and just say “grab your coat I’m taking you to dinner”?

If you did and you were the worlds greatest pick up artist then I’d imagine you might get lucky 10% of the time.

Keep in mind that these people should have been through our email sequence and they should know, like and trust us… (unless we screwed it up) so we aren’t pitching them cold. So it’s not like a creepy stranger walking up to them in a bar

However if you actually explained that you knew this really nice restaurant, and they were only open for this one night and they did the most amazing food cooked by a chef who trained for 5 years under the worlds best chef… I suspect that you would get a much higher take up rate on your offer of dinner.

So each broadcast email has several elements the first being the subject line. (I am going to assume that we are promoting a product that updates wordpress automatically)

The Subject:

You should make the subject intriguing and try to include one of the main selling points

”Hacked – WordPress Security Sucks”

If people don’t open your email then you aren’t going to make any money, so you’d better make sure that the subject is compelling and makes them want to open it.

The Introduction:

Next it should have an introduction.

In the introduction sets the scene, explain why you are emailing them and address any issues that are appropriate to the product you are promoting.

Hi,

Last year I had 3 blogs hacked all because of an out of date plugin.

How many times have you gone to the admin area of your blog and found that you have 3 or 4 plugins that need updating and that wordpress have released an important security update?

The worst thing about that is that you know that you have another 40 blogs to wade through and that it’s going to take you a full 8 hours of work. Not a nice feeling but a lot better than seeing your site taken down by hackers

The Introduction is almost important as the subject line you need to grab attention and ensure that they want to read the rest of the email, make it personal to them and try to include some emotional triggers.

The Solution:

Next up try explain a little about the solution you are going to offer and how it will help the reader.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been beta testing a really cool piece of software that automatically updates all my blogs with a single press of a button. It took me 15 minutes to set it up the first time and after that It updated all my blogs in just a few minutes while I was doing more important things. I couldn’t believe it, I’ve tried several tools like this before and they were either too expensive or didn’t work properly.

What about The People Who Aren’t Interested?

One problem is that every offer isn’t for everyone so we want to try to give good value to anyone reading the email even if it’s not something they’ll benefit from. The next promotion you do might be perfect for them so we want to keep them opening the emails and getting value.

”Of course not everyone has lots of blogs so many of you won’t need to do multiple updates, I find that a folder on my desktop with all the new plugins in it that can be quickly FTP’d to my site can really save time if you are updating less than 5 blogs. Set the folder up exactly how your plugins folder is set up and then you just need to click the upload button and your good to go”

The Call To Action AKA The Money Shot

Finally you need a strong call to action, a lot of the time if you can do a video of the product or an interview with the vendor of a product then you’ll get a much higher response than just telling people to go to the sales page.

For those of you who have more than 5 blogs and want to ensure your blog is secure and less prone to being hacked then have a look at this video i’ve done showing you how I updated 20 blogs in under 3 minutes.

An email like that is relativly easy to write and doesn’t (Hopefully) come across as overtly hypey as you are giving some value

The Cardinal Rule

Never ever ever ever ever ever send out a swipe email thats provided by the vendor in the affiliate section , because if your subscribers get the same emails from 3 or 4 people they know that you don’t care enough to spend 30 minutes writing an email. A broadcast email for a product promotion can earn you a lot of money if it’s done right so keep that in mind and actually spend time and effort providing value at the same time as promoting products.

Finally

Finally not every email should be promotional one, create reports and videos you can give away to keep your subscribers interested.

Hope you enjoyed these 2 emails in the next email I am going to look at a simple and effective sales funnel that should allow you to increase your income significantly.

Thanks for reading and i hope you got something from these last 2 posts… remember as ever please share , tweet , like and comment… It really does make a difference!

All too often we think to ourselves I need to do a “quick email” to my subscribers, thats probably the worst thing you can do, a good email takes time, sometimes a lot of time. If you consistently write good emails then your open rates increase and more people see your messages which leads to more sales.

2 Types of Email

There are generally 2 types of emails that you will have to write in an IM environment.

A Follow up email- which is your basic standard auto responder series

A broadcast email which is usually an announcement or a promotion.

In this post i’ll focus on the follow up emails, and in part 2 we’ll look at the broadcast email, as both emails need different skills.

Your Personality In Word Form

First off I want to cover what a good email does. Too many times I get emails that are just words on a page, they don’t press any emotional buttons and don’t have anything of the writers personality in them.

If you can get the reader to have empathy with you then you start to have a relationship.

The 2 examples below say exactly the same thing… If you had acne which do you think would would resonate more.

“Hi,

When I was younger I suffered badly from acne. it was so bad I’d find excuses not to go and hang out with my friends”

Hi,

Do you ever feel like you can’t leave the house because of your bad acne? When I was younger my acne was so bad I’d resort to making up excuses about why I couldn’t go out and hangout with my friends

The difference is obvious, the 2nd talks about the reader first and foremost, but it’s something very few people do. If the reader answers yes in their minds they have had an emotional response… they know you’ve been through the same things you are going through. If they answer no then they probably aren’t your target market.

The Secret Handshake

Another way to start the relationship is to use the same language that the reader does, if you are writing a followup sequence for a skateboarding product then use skateboard slang. Let the reader know/think that you are part of the crowd and one of them.

People naturally relate better to someone who is from the same social group as they are, just like the Freemasons have a secret handshake groups have their own language, If I was to tell you in an email that “I totally fragged King Wee Wee last night” hardly any of you will know what the hell I am talking about but If you did understand it you’d know exactly what i was referring to and you’d know that we had something in common.

Avoid The Urge to Sell Too Soon

All good email relationships should start with a good series of follow up emails. These have one aim , to build a relationship with your subscribers. I usually recommend a 7 email series as that allows you time to introduce yourself and to give some hopefully helpful advice to your new subscriber.

If you have something to promote this should only be done in emails 6 & 7 although you can mention it earlier but not as a sales pitch.

For example

” When I was creating product x I discovered to my horror…..”

The Writing Process

Your followup series should be treated like a script, it’s not something you just create and post up and then forget.

You need to tweak it and rewrite it, I recently changed the subject of one of my emails as I noticed it had a significantly lower open rate that the emails on either side of it. That simple tweak resulted is 4% more opens.

When I write an auto responder series I start off by writing it like a script for a movie. I know what I want to happen at the end , I just need to find a good place to start and then fill it in with various story lines which all lead to the end point.

Once i’ve written it I go back and rewrite it and tweak it until I am happy with what I have at that point it’s still a single script.

Now I need to split it up into 7 parts, it’s like the film producers have scrapped the film project and are asking me to use the script for a TV series

The trouble is if you were to just cut in into 7 equal pieces then It wouldn’t make sense so now the magic begins. You start to weave natural breaks into the emails, you start stories and don’t finish them in the same email, you make people want to read the next email just to get closure.

Leave Them Hanging

I am sure 99% of people reading this have probably seen at least 1 episode of 24… Do you remember how you were desperate to watch the next episode to find out what happened? If you were brought up in the Uk you would have seen Dr Who, how many times did an episode end with The Doctor facing impending doom?

Charles Dickens published ost of his books a series published in newspapers If you read the books now you can still see the breaks where one episode ended. If you read any book by any successful author you will notice how they generally have 3 or 4 story lines running through them and they never get resolved at the end of a chapter until the end of the book.

If you have watched TV or read a book then you know the secret to good emails… so go and use it.

I’ll do Part 2 of this next week as we are almost at 1000 words so far. If you have any questions please post them as comments and i’ll address them in the next post.. If you enjoyed this post please take time to share it … I really do appreciate it!!

“Great I had 400 visitors yesterday.”

You ask them how much money they made or how many signups they got and they are less forthcoming.

People focus on traffic and not conversions… and that is just plain wrong. Here’s Why

Just for a moment forget about traffic.

Imagine the Gods of the internet decreed that there wasn’t enough traffic to go around so to make it fair everyone would be given just 10 visitors a day.

So now you have you 10 guaranteed visitors every day what are you going to spend your energy on?

What will be the main focus of your IM endeavours?

Let me guess?

Converting as many of those 10 visitors to buyers or subscribers as possible… you’d be trying to get them to click that little mouse button and perform an action.

Am I correct? I bet I am

You’d be looking at all your calls to action and polishing and refining them and trying to make them as irresistible as possible.

“Click Here” … would change to ” Read More About The Secret to Beautiful Looking Skin”

“Sign Up for Our Newsletter” would soon enough change to “Get our 7 Part Course on How to Dominate the Competitive Eating World”

“Click here to Buy” would overnight become ” Click Here and Find Out Why 900 people have Taken our Course”

Why Aren’t You Doing That Now?

So the question is now … why aren’t you doing that now? Why aren’t you writing articles and copy that make people click ?

So if you would work your butt off to ensure as many of your imaginary 10 visitors would perform the action you want them to perform why won’t you do it for the 50 or 100 that you will get today?

Doesn’t really make sense does it!

Is That The Sound of The Penny Dropping?

So this week I want you to look at what content you have and what calls to actions you are using and start to change them then compare the stats from last week to next week and see if you can increase your conversions.

To help you along I’ve got a report that contains 7 points that you should consider. It’s written by a guy called Michael Christon

If you read my blog post after I came back from London you might have noticed that I mentioned him a couple of times

“Michael Christon – I had never heard of Michael before the Gathering, he usually runs seminars that will cost you $1800 to attend where he teaches businesses how to sell. His talk was a fascinating presentation on the psychology of sales, Just using the most basic things from his presentation on your websites could increase your income. ”

Michael is really fascinating to talk to not only did he have one of the best presentations at the London seminar I went to(Brad Grosse was even taking notes) but his bio also includes some Tidbits like:

A recent bit of client work was a deceptively simple video script which ultimately resulted in my customer going on to get $2Million in investment

Often get consulted away in “traditional business” (i.e. non-IM) on psychology in sales and marketing. Have a client list that includes monster international firms and even offices of government.

So if you’d like to target the 7 Crucial Elements that drive traffic and get clicks download this free report now (see what i did there? :) ) It’s free there are no signups or hoops to jump through except you might want consider implementing them!

So let me know what you think and why not share this post if you found it useful… Thank you and have a great week.

Over the weekend while checking my stats I noticed something strange, over 10% of my traffic was coming from Facebook. Ok that might be not strange to you but remember that it was only about 6 -8 weeks ago that I actually decided to try to get a grip on Facebook and learn as much about it as possible.

I am sure that many of you feel as I did that Facebook is great for keeping in contact with friends but as a business tool it sucks.

I am not ashamed to stand up now and say… I was wrong. If you take time to go and learn how you use it it can be an amazing resource and a great business tool.

Leave Your Marketing Hat At The Front Door

First off it’s not a place to go and try to make sales right up front. You won’t You might get lucky and make a few sales but the real income is in building relationships just like list building. Having said that I actually made $90 in sales in 48 hours while spending about $40 in advertising while I was testing something…and testing is important.

However 99% of the time selling won’t work because people don’t got to facebook to buy, they go to be entertained and socialize. Consider it like this. When you go out to have fun do you go to Walmart or a nice bar? When you go out to shop do you go to a nice bar or do you go to Walmart? See where I am going there?

Now just supposing you go to that nice bar and you are sipping cocktails with your friends and someone you don’t know walks up to you and say’s ” Buy This iPhone 5 it’s awesome” are you going to buy? Probably no

If one of your friends or someone you know says, “Hey this Iphone 5 is great look at all the stuff it does do you wan to buy it ?” The i suspect a few of you would buy it or at least consider it if you were in the market for one.

Like Me Like Me!

So lets forget about selling on Facebook for the moment the thing we want to do is to build up fans and likes because initially these are all that matter

So first off lets look at why likes are so important and easy to get

No information required. Like trying out new pickup lines in a bar or other public place, nothing’s exchanged. After a participant clicks to like a page or post, nothing else is required. Unlike email or text messages, nothing is pushed to them via a communication channel.

Allure of potential discounts. For most consumers, this is the connection they’re seeking. It’s like wondering whether you’ll exchange phone numbers with someone you’ve just met. For marketers, the challenge is that they need to attract prospects to Facebook in addition to offering lower prices. This is a double whammy! It translates to lower margins and trains customers to wait for better deals.

Desire to interact with other fans. As a marketer, you need to get over yourself. Users fan you to engage with others with whom they share similar interests. In this case, you’re just providing the social media drinks – in a manner of speaking.

Gets them attention. Likes are a way to get enhanced information and other goodies without any commitment.

Makes them look good. When it comes to romance, everyone wants to look his or her best. Depending on your product, a Facebook like may reflect well on how they’re perceived. Yet for marketers this is a zero sum game since it’s not the same as buying and using a designer handbag, for example.

How To Use This as a Marketer

Show up at the Facebook party. Let prospects and customers check you out while they’re in the research phase. As the 800 pound gorilla of social media, Facebook warrants attention. It’s important to stake out your turf for branding and competitive reasons.

Offer valuable content. Provide context in the form of useful content that educates and entertains. Also, ask prospects and customers to contribute to the conversation and content. If you’re too overzealous in your Facebook interactions, they’re gone.

Strike up a conversation with prospects, customers and the public. Contribute to the interaction as you would in any social setting. Also, let visitors talk to each other. In addition to answering each other’s questions, they want this interaction. Just create the forum.

Be ready to seal the deal. Make sure prospects and customers can purchase once they’re ready. Whether you use f-commerce or another option, streamline the purchase process to the fewest steps possible or you risk loosing the sales.

Offer good service to your customers. Consumers often cite this reason for connecting with brands on social media. To this end, have employees engaged on Facebook and other social media platforms who can respond to customer questions via written responses.

Source

Still Not Convinced?

But if that doesn’t inspire you to start using Facebook maybe this will.

I have in the region of 700 Fans, (Thank you!) I recently posted an image on my wall and asked people what they thought was the greatest skill an IM’er should master, that post was seen by over 9965 people. You see on Facebook people share interesting /good information. When was the last time someone shared one of your emails? You can see the post I shared.

It’s All About Perception Baby!

If you email people 2 or 3 times a day , you’ll lose most of your subscribers pretty quickly Facebook is totally different people like to see 2 or 3 good nuggets of bite sized information. You see it’s all about Perception.

People perceive that emails are sales tools , however they perceive that Facebook posts are generally interesting and entertaining, keep within your niche and people will continue to look at your content. Don’t give them a reason to unlike you and you will continue to be able to put your messages infront of them AND their friends.

Development is the Name of The Facebook Game

Facebook is still in development which means things are changing and developing, very recently they changed their notifications API which gives you the ability to send notifications to people who have signed up through and app. You can read about it in their developer blog. However the bottom line is that it makes it potentially easier for you to communicate with people when you something important to tell them.

For example if you look at the 2nd item down in the side bar, at the moment it’s just a simple button and I’ve not added any information or offers around it as I don’t want to draw attention to it yet. However the simplicity hides what is potentially the most powerful subscriber tool on the site.

Think Like a Marketer

Time to put your Internet Marketing heads on for just a short time and think like marketers.

Imagine if you had a simple tool that when pressed added people to your email list,

ok thats cool but not unique.

How about if it also added the email address they used for Facebook which is not some throwaway email address, chances are it’s one of their main ones.

Ok thats a bit cooler

How about if it also connected you to them in Facebook at the same time

Yeah now that would be very cool…

What if every time you wrote a post or had something important to say you entered a message in the back end of your blog and it appeared in their Facebook account under notifications….

Oh yeah now thats ultra cool, and that’s exactly what Leah Butler Smith’s FB Lead Genie does. I love plugins like this as they are right at the cutting edge and allow you to think out of the box and also do things that no one has thought about before…

Round Up

Internet marketing is all about getting your message in front of as many people as possible and thats what Facebook allows you to do.

I promised you a free report for wading through this post, one of the members at WordPress Goldmine Dean Martin (he’s heard all the jokes!) has just written a guide to getting started with Facebook pages. You can download it here.  Stop by his blog and say thanks !

This blog post has hardly scratched the surface of FB but hopefully it will have inspired you to find out more.

Thats it for this mammoth post… I hope you coffee didn’t get cold and you got to the end…

Please share the post and if you haven’t yet done it, click that little box to the left and like this blog on facebook you’ll get some great offers and contests and lots of useful information.

How Fast is Your Site

First up is an App/tool that i hope you are all using and if not I hope you start using it today and that is Pingdoms we site loading speed checker. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ whenever you set up a blog or a sales page then make sure you check it here it takes a few seconds and can show you what’s causing any problems, if your new site isn’t faster than the top 80-85% of websites then do something about it. If you have a long established site with lots of content then aim to be above 60%. Customers and google hate slow sites.

Share & Store Files

I suspect you all have a dropbox account, if not why not? It is by far the easiest way to share files and videos, or even backup your sites. whether it’s sharing videos with business partners and outsourcers or just sending a message to my wife to remind her to buy cheese dropbox is invaluable. I even have all my photo’s automatically uploaded when I plug in my iPhone

Hold That Idea

You know when you are looking at something our are out and about and you have that amazing idea…that you can’t remember the next morning? Well thats where Springpad comes in it goes on all your devices and lets you note and share ideas via a whole host of ways . It’s similar to Evernote but I actually prefer the spring pad interface. Check it out

Collaborate.

Basecamp (30 day free trial then $10 per month) has recently had an update and is really intuitive to use. Set up a project then share it with anyone you are working with, you can add discussions, files, a calendar and a to-do list. If you are working on any projects and use outsourcers or have partners then this is a must have.

Manage Social Media

Hootsuite is a great tool that allows to to manage all your social media accounts in one place post, reply and schedule posts tweets status updates or whatever else you need to do from 1 interface. It also gives you updates on how your social campaigns are going. Along the same lines is Buffer which will post items to your social networks at the best possible time to get the most engagement.

Get Backlinks Easily

Tynt… I couldn’t do a round up of great free apps with out including Tynt. I know i’ve mentioned it loads of time but any app that can generate 48 backlinks (last month) from content that was “removed” from my site is worth having. A simple bit of code in the header is all it needs. Use it!

If you haven’t had enough of all this free tool goodness then I have something you’ll love. Well you will if you are an Internet marketer who struggles to get high quality sales pages and sales funnels created.

A good friend of mine Sally has just released a report that is packed full of really useful free tools and shows you how to use those tools to create mind blowing sales pages and sales funnels. If you don’t want to buy OptimizePress or something similar because they are just too confusing and outside your tech level then you really should check it out.

You can get it all for much less than a Box of Golf Balls/Pizza/Decent Coffee and Muffin/Pint of Beer In London/USB Cable from the Apple Store. Check out WP Theme Igniter.

First off a bit of full disclosure, I’ve had several projects that got so far and then ground to a halt. In fact there have been 2 major ones in the past year. One which cost me over $1,200 in development which failed because of totally incompetent software developers, and a second one that was far bigger than I appreciated when I started it and has had to be put on the back burner until I have more case studies to hand.

I know I am not alone, I can pretty much guarantee that everyone reading this has a few domains they bought and have done nothing with.

So before we go any further have a think about what you have planned in the last year and haven’t followed through on, websites, products, advertising campaigns, etc. If you have less than three then you are either very efficient or you aren’t trying hard enough.

So lets look at how to improve the chances of you fulling and completing a project.

What Are The Goals Of Your Project

Sit down with a pen and paper (yep they still work) somewhere quite and work out what you actually want to achieve with your project. Dig deep. Do you want it to generate $100 a day or $10 a month or even a $50,000 income over a year etc. Now what your goals are before you start.

Then make sure that the project can actually deliver. A 5 page AdSense website about exercise balls isn’t going to earn you $5,000 a month. so research your market.

What Metrics Will You Use to Measure Success

How will you measure your success? You may only make $100 a month when you wanted to make $1000 but you may at the same time had generated a 5000 list of subscribers that you weren’t expecting. Your success might simply be measured by converting 2% of all traffic to buyers when you can do this regularly then you just need to increase the traffic.

Wise selection of how you measure your success will help you achieve it

What assets do you already have that you can use

We all have assets that can be used for several projects everything from graphics in .psd format that can be changed in photoshop to plugins we can use to help achieve our goals. You may have subscribers to a list that you can leverage or twitter followers and fans on a facebook page which can be used to help you project get moving.

We all have assets we just sometimes don’t know it!

What is Your Exit Strategy

So we are a few years down the line and your project is successful what are you going to do to leave it behind and focus on other projects or living the good life? I know friends who make a very good living from projects and businesses they created years ago the projects pay for a really good lifestyle but they are tied to them and if they stop developing or working at them the income stops. No one wants to work 12 hours a day for the next 10 years.

Do you really wan to be writing content for a website in 10 years time? Or answering support calls.

Plan and build your project with an exit strategy in mind, even if that means not branding it after yourself… (i.e look at the title of this blog…no exit strategy there unless I just abandon it!)

What is Plan B?

So you’ve created your project, site, product, etc. You do have a plan B don’t you?

Even with the best planned projects things will happen that may prevent you from completing it, so what are you going to do?

You can’t throw away all that work. Well actually you can but there are alternatives…there are always alternatives!

How can your project be recycled or sold on to others? Can you get an outsourcer to finish it for you or convert it for you?

Can you sell it as it is or use it as PLR.

Get yourself a plan B!

However first I need to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who sent us messages and helped out by buying some of my products after last weeks disaster, (it’s official we live in a disaster zone!) The comments and messages were amazing and it really had a positive effect on my whole family.

Another local marketer and friend of mine Mark Acutt has set up a wso to try to help the people who were less lucky than we were, it has products donated by lots of marketers and every cent will go to help someone or some charity you can see it at Charity WSO

One major game changer that occurred in the past week and went pretty much uncommented on what the fact that facebook will be allowing people to import their email lists and customer phone numbers into FB . Now that doesn’t sound like much of a feature does it, until you actually think about what it might mean.

Lets say you own a gym and you have the member’s Phone numbers or email addresses so you import them into Facebook. You can then display an advert offering them a free personal training session if they become a fan of your page.

Now you have lots of fans, facebook allows you to market to friends of fans so now you target friends of fans with another offer (or the same one) if they become fans very soon you have a huge fanbase who see all your posts on facebook. In tests a financial services company doubled their fans in a very short time.

As an internet marketer, if you have a product and you update it what batter way that telling people than to put it on facebook where your customers are, instead of 20% or 30% of subscribers opening an email the update details will appear on their FB walls.

I would love to be in contact with all my email subscribers who are on facebook, facebook is a much friendlier and more natural way to stay in contact. I like to post useful and interesting things on facebook (well I think they are) on a daily basis but if I emailed them out at the same frequency I’d lose subscribers by the bucket load. People just get too many emails. (You can see my facebook page at: MjThompsonIM… feel free to like it!)

This is now being rolled out to the managed advertisers and hopefully it will roll down to the rest of us sooner rather than later. The potential is huge.

Next up is Amazon and the new kindles that are being launched today, there are strong rumours that Amazon will be signing up more authors to create serialised novels. It will be interesting to see how many of our Kindle publishers in WPG take to serialised publishing. The interesting this is that it’s not new this is how Charles Dickens published most of his books in weekly or monthly instalments.

It could be a really interesting development, after all we are all programmed to watch weekly TV serials so why not get a chapter delivered weekly and have a book run over 13 weeks.

Finally I have been watching a development on how affiliates get paid , I don’t want to say too much at this stage until I see how the experiment goes but this week one of my favorite marketers is running a series of webinars, he is offering affiliates $1 PPV (pay per view) for everyone they send, plus commission on any sales now and in the future.

Webinars are a superb way to sell products and generally have a good conversion rate. Considering that webinars can be pre-recorded and played on demand this opens up a whole host of possibilities and new ways of generating income.

Interesting Times. Let me know what you think or your favorite stories I might have missed in the past week.

Do you think that your Mother worries about Pandas or Penguins? Does she even know that Google does updates? I seriously doubt it.

All she cares about is what appears when she types a search into the search bar. Once she does that all she wants to appear is the most relevant search results.

Google also wants the most relevant search results to appear as well.

Only me, you and SEO companies want something different to appear.. We want our sites to appear. So what do we do to try to make that happen? We try to game google and trick them into putting our content as high as possible in the rankings even if it isn’t the most relevant.

It’s all a game and you know what? We are about to lose.

Maybe not with this update or the next but the writing is on the wall google is getting closer to finding a way to ignore blatantly obvious SEO factors and to work out what is the most relevant result.

How easy is to to track the links to a particular site?

I can do it a minute or two and then it takes me time to work through them, But I can usually tell within a very little time what method the site owner is using to generate links. If I can do that don’t you think that googles far more intelligent engineers can create an algorithm to do that for Google? Is the Atomic Weight of Cobalt 58.9? Do Bears do what bears do in the woods?

Last Night Matt Cutts from Google tweeted (BTW you know you are a Marketer if you know who Matt Cutts is!)

Now I’d hate to read too much into that but if SEO companies put out videos showing how to game gogole and google are watching them ..it doesn’t take a whole lot of brain cells to know that Google know pretty much every method of gaming the system and know how to counteract it.

Look guys these SEO dudes are using blog networks built on wordpress… ohh no we’re doomed….

Hang on why don’t we just discount lets say 90% of all the same anchor text links that come from wordpress site..

Yeah that would work.. right who’s next for Air Hockey

Seriously I can see a day not very far in the future where there won’t be a need for any SEO apart for getting the basics right on your site.

Create quality content and make it simple for Google to know what your content is about and then syndicate it (Despite what you might read syndication is not duplicate content!)

Use social media to spread your message. Time spent learning how to get people to see your message on facebook and youtube is time better spent than trying to get ranked on google.

Thats obvious isn’t it?

People spend a lot more time on Facebook and YouTube than they do on Google (or Google+). One of the first rules of business I learned was always check the footfall before you open a shop. In a previous life I would spend hours comparing how many people passed potential shops before we opened one, If you didn’t have the passersby then no matter how cheap it was it was a liability.

Thats just some food for thought…I hope the update doesn’t affect you too much… as for me I don’t care about google any longer.

Over to you now let me know what you think and feel free to share.

Today I got an email promotion for a product, now I don’t for a moment think that the guy who sent the email had any knowledge of this being a scam. He really isn’t that type of person

Maybe a scam is the wrong word it’s definitely someone who has made a very poor decision.

Anyway lets look at the video and lets see how you can spot a scammer;

Here are the steps to take if you are ever in any doubt.

Check out http://archive.org and see if there are earlier versions.

Look for anything unusual in the screenshots, Wednesday 28 July and the GB £ paypal account were enough to raise a red flag.

Think twice before buying products from people who you have never heard of, unless they come highly recommended.

I’ve done my bit now it’s up to you to do your bit, please spread the word and make sure as many people as possible not only know about this but what to look for.

If you are on facebook please go to my account and share this among your friends My facebook page is at http://www.facebook.com/MarkThompsonIM and you’ll find it on there.

Lets get stuff like this stopped… If you know of any others like this let me know.

How many products have you bought and read and not even tried to implement?

How many times have you read something and thought Wow thats good ….and not done anything?

Killing It With Kindle

If you read last week’s post titled Fight Fight Fight and read the comments you’ll have seen people saying that they were making money with kindle publishing what you won’t have seen is the related thread in WordPress Goldmine which is well over 100 posts long where people discuss how they are making money. One of our members sits down each day and writes 4000 – 8000 words which has enabled him to build a 4 figure income in the past 2 months from kindle, why?

Because he realises that kindle publishing is not a spectator sport. You have to take part to make money

Doing The Do

Paul Forcey attended the 1kaday seminar in las Vegas last weekend and in his report about it he mentions one of the speakers (Mario Brown I think) who worked everyday until he generated $4000 a month, Then he hustled even harder until he got to $10,000 a month.

I could sit here every day looking at Facebook and playing Civilisation V and listening to podcasts and I wouldn’t make a single cent. But I know that by writing blog posts , posting daily tips to my Facebook page and promoting my products and researching new products I can make money.

Action = Results

I think you get the idea, I know people who I met 7 years ago who wanted to make money online and they still haven’t managed to make a full-time income from it, yet I’ve met people who started 6 months ago who have made $10,000 in the past month.

I have a really good friend here in spain who is not into IM 99.9% of you reading this will know more about Internet Marketing. He runs a holiday rental company and recently built a website to list the properties. A few months back he was sat at a table with myself and a few of my IM friends having a beer and we were talking about article marketing and driving traffic using articles. He went home and that weekend wrote a series of articles about local landmarks, night clubs and about what to do on holiday here and posted them on his site. Many of those now rank number one in google and drive traffic to his rentals. He’s having one of his busiest years.

Why, because he got out of the grandstand and got into the game.

This is NOT a Spectator Sport

I know you’ve heard all this from me before but it really makes sense, so put down the beer, throw the hot dog away come and join us in the game…. It’s more fun that watching!

If you are a member of WordPress Goldmine check out this thread and tell me what masterclass training you want and we’ll start next week http://wpgoldmine.com/Forum/threads/choose-your-training.12315/

If you aren’t a member this is your time to join it will cost you $1 for the first 7 days and then just $19.95 a month… There are now almost 100,000 posts in WPG so not only will you get awesome training you also have an incredibly useful resource at your finger tips. Try WordPress Goldmine

Finally watch out for a Video post tomorrow… You’ll see something cool that is going to change the way I do my marketing.

A good friend of mine Paul Nichols who is also a member of WordPress Goldmine wrote a blog post yesterday about how people who try to make money with kindle are basically making a mistake.

It’s an interesting article and does make some valid points however I do think that paul may have missed the “Big Picture”

You’ll find a link to Pauls post at the end of the article but here are the main points I took from it

Let me tell you why doing this is a complete waste of your time and effort.

When it comes to creating a business online you need to be spending your time wisely and by that I mean spending your time on things which are actually helping to (build your business).

Things like:

• Creating more leads into your business

• Improving conversion rates

• Improving opt in rates

• Writing new follow up emails for your leads and customers.

• Creating new products

• Creating new content for your blog

• Creating new content for your subscribers

• Finding new affiliates

On that point he is correct and I agree with him that is a great way to build your business. However what he missed there is that this is exactly what people who publish books are doing or at least should be doing.

There are a number of emails that I open as soon as they come in and those are ones from the authors whose books i read, every book should have a link to the authors website and on that site they should have a newsletter. I always without fail sign up if I’ve liked the book i’ve read as i want to know when the next book is coming so I can buy it.

A new Kindle book is nothing more than a new product, a good book and a good author will achieve everything that he’s listed above except that instead of getting new affiliates you’ll be getting new readers via word of mouth.

One of the Authors I follow is Julian Stockwin you can see him home page below:

If you look at it you’ll see a newsletter signup box, details of the latest book, details of upcoming book, a shop where you can buy related merchandise and a the option to sign up for a membership which will cost $10. All of which is linked to in every book.

That, my friends, is marketing

Now…. let’s take a look at what you are doing when using kindle

• You are spending time trying to create an income on a platform which you have absolutely no control over what so ever.

• It does not matter which way you spin it, look at it, or say it, when you upload books to kindle you are running a massive risk and using a very risky and un-stable business model.

• Just think for a moment if you had lots of books on kindle which were ranking high and bringing you in some money each day and then suddenly…Boom, Amazon decide to disable your account.

How would you feel?

You would feel sick right after putting in all that hard work?

And it does happen believe me.

Normally I would agree with Paul on the points he makes above, I would never tell people to build a business on something they can’t control. However Even if Amazon were to ban someone tomorrow they still have a physical product that they can use elsewhere. The book can be added to the main amazon store via Createspace. It can be added to any number of alternative digital platforms including apple books.

It’s not like Squidoo or Hubpages closing down a site as you still have the product available and you will have built up followers if you have done it correctly.

The final main reason I disagree with Paul is that Amazon have a vested interested in getting as much content as possible onto kindle.

“For every 100 print books sold through the site, Amazon said it sold 114 titles for its Kindle e-reader device.”

The quote above is from a recent BBC article about Kindle sales in the Uk I have no doubt that it’s probably a higher figure in the US.

Kindle isn’t just a flash in the pan it is a very relevant business model and another way for Marketers to either get their message out or to make money it’s here to stay and it will only get better.

So to conclude I disagree with paul on a number of points, I think that Kindle marketing if done correctly is a potential goldmine and I know several people In WordPress Goldmine who are making more money with Kindle than they have with any other method.

Go and have a look at Pauls article then let me know what you think, Feel free to stand around chanting Fight! Fight! Fight! (BTW if you comment on both posts you’ll get 2 links as we both use comment luv :) )
Pauls original Article is At:

Are you Trying to make Money with Kindle- Stop Following The Herd

Right off to calm down the members of the Kindle section at WordPresss Goldmine

There was a time in America’s history when the west opened up and thousands of family’s who had a relatively good life on the east coast headed west to seek a new life. They went from a place where there was law and order, rules and regulation to a place where there was pretty much no law, and it was every man woman and child for themselves.

It was sink or swim time… (That’s enough of the mixed metaphors for today)

The guys with the most guns generally won and also set the rules and regulations if they then decided that they didn’t like them they just changed them, because they could and there was no one to tell them that it was wrong.(Disclaimer ..this history lesson has been bought to you by The High Chaparral and Bonanza.. If you haven’t heard of them …get the box sets!!)

This is very similar to what we are going through in the world of internet marketing at the moment.

Why did you spend the last few years getting hundreds of backlinks to your sites?

Let me Guess because Google said that what they wanted?

Now that google have changed their mind and too many people were doing what they originally wanted they decided that it was time for new rules.

They aren’t alone in this Facebook is just as culpable and in fact maybe even more so.

Facebook has spent the last few years telling businesses to set up fan pages and drive traffic to them, this was a great idea all your fans would see your content on their walls and be able to stay connected with you.

Now they have decided that they will only show your posts to a selection of fans if you want more to see them then you’ll need to pay.

Let me go over that one again…. I now have to pay so that the people who said that they wanted to see my posts can see my posts!

Does that sound just a bit wrong to you?

If you want to know more about that little doozy then check out ed dales excellent post “There is Something Wrong In The State of Facebook”

Personally I don’t mind paying something after all Facebook is free, I do object to them encouraging us to get fans then making us pay for the privilege of getting out content out there. Charge me $10 – $50 per month for a fan page I’d be happy to pay

The algorithm that controls this Edgerank is a good idea as it is supposed to help keep our FB walls keep relatively free of crap but it’s not perfect, far from it, It relies on other people to give FB input on what it should display

I like to keep upto date with IM stuff and SEO stuff so i’ll happily read anything on my wall about that but the problem comes when my friend and fans like cute kitten pictures .

So my friend Sarah has a cute cat picture and she posts it and all her feline loving friends think it great so they “Like It” and comment saying things like “awwwww cutuuuuuutttttteeee” Facebook’s algorithm thinks wow that’s popular look at how many people commented and liked it in the last 3 hours I had better share it with lots more people.

At the same time my friend John shares a really important report on how Google are changing how the deal with link spam. 3 people “Like It” the algorithm thinks that it must not be of much interest so I won’t share it as much.

The end result is that we all get lots of cat pictures and very little important information… It’s a lot like news stations who believe that Lindsay Lohans latest escapade is worthier news than hundreds of people dying in Aleppo over night.

Right that seemed to go off track a bit didn’t it!

The point is that a few big companies are making the rules and changing them when they want, they are big enough to do whatever they want and no one is going to stop them. There is very little law and order in the internet at this time , it will come but until then we have to regulate ourselves and do the right thing.

So what are you going to Like Today? A picture of a kitten or some good content?

So lets start to try to bring a bit or regulation to the Wild West by becoming our own regulators it’s simple to do and doesn’t take much time:

If you like something then share it (yes even cat pictures )
If you like it or don’t like it and agree or disagree then comment and give your reasons and opinions.
If you come across spam then highlight it
If you don’t like the emails someone sends don’t just ignore them unsubscribe (yes even mine, I’d rather you unsubscribed than ignored them)

It takes very little time and most of the steps above will indicate to Google and Facebook that the post/video/cat picture has value .

For cool pictures of Kittens check out my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/MarkThompsonIM and of course Like it….if you like it!

1. They know you can can take an idea from someone else for example a book and expand on it to create a top selling product. Many of the top marketers have never had an original Idea in their lives but know how to bring a unique spin to an idea and promote it to a wider audience. Bad marketers will try to do this but just end up copying another product.

2. They know there is high value in sites like Mixergy or Udemy that publish content from some of the best brains in other businesses. What works for a silicon Valley start up may also work for you

3. They know that investing in good quality staff pays dividends 10 times over. It’s tempting to hire that $2 an hour outsourcer from the Philippines but the impact on you business will be minimal compared to the 10% you pay your JV manager or the $5,000 you pay for a sales page.

4. They know that there are more ways to sell products than clickbank and wso’s , once again Udemy, Mixergy, Mindvalley and even Appsumo give them access to new markets and new ideas.

5. They know that you need to test , test and test some more, in fact they test everything. They split test emails, and landing pages, they’ll split teat price points and download pages. If it’s part of their business they’ll test it. I’ve not met a top name marketer who didn’t know his most recent conversion rates.

6. They network as if their lives depended on it, I’ve not met a “guru” who hasn’t be happy to spend time with people who they don’t know and they are genuinely interested in what you do. They realise that the guy who just sold 30 copies of his first WSO may well be the same guy who sells 10,000 copies of a similar product in 18 months time.

7. They take action , if they are in the office they are working, even if it’s just 2 or 3 day’s a week thats their work time and they they work and don’t leave until they are finished. If they have to do a promotion or record a video they do it

8. Some of you may not believe this but they know that good customer service is paramount, they have teams of customer service reps who work to ensure that your questions are answered effectively and efficiently

9. They know not to take negative comments personally and that refunds are just part of the “game’

10. …. I’ll leave this one to you, let me know below what you think separates the top marketers from the rest of us

Last friday I purchased a product on Facebook Ads by Brian Moran, it cost me $197 and I actually think it was a pretty good deal. But thats not the point of this post.

I was on the verge of refunding even before I had finished the purchase process because of the OTO’s (One Time Offers.) I had to sit through 5 OTO’s before I could get to my purchase. I am not sure of how long it would have been if i’d sat and watched all the sales videos but I’d made an Impulse buy and I wanted to get my product there and then not sit through 30 minutes or more of additional sales videos.

In my eyes this is totally unacceptable and really got our relationship as Vendor/Customer off to a bad start.

So today I want to start a discussion about whether One Time Offers and related deals are a good thing or a bad thing, so I’d like you to give me your feedback.

There are good points and bad points to OTO’s and I’ll try to give a balanced view on both but the first thing to discus is when is a OTO not an OTO. There does seem to be a lot of confusion even by marketers about OTO’s. They should by their very nature be an offer you only see once and shouldn’t be able to get ever again. More often than not if you bookmark the page you can go back to it later and get the offer.

OTO’s – Upsells -Special Offers- Downsells

The other area of confusion is when marketers confuse upsells and special offers with OTO’s so here is a brief explanation of whats what in the world of post sale add ons.

Buy this additional Product you’ll see it only once = OTO

Get an additional 3 licenses for the software you just bought = Upsell

Get 50% off all my awesome products = Special Offer

Ok you didn’t buy my upsell when I offered it, get the Lite version for only $20 = Downsell

When OTO’s Don’t Work

Quite often a marketer will use an OTO when actually an upsell or a special offer would have been more suitable and would have made more money in the long term. The other thing is that you are trying to establish a rapport with your customer, get the sales funnel and process right and you’ll have a customer who likes you, get it wrong and you’ll struggle to have a relationship with that customer.

I have no idea if I needed or could have used the products that were offered to me during my purchase marathon, it might turn out that some of them would have been useful but I won’t know that until i’ve finished going through the product. The logical thing to do would seem to be to offer the products as a special deal at the end of the course or on the download page, that way I could go back and purchase if i needed it. The vendor has my email address so there is no reason why he can’t send me the offer later when I am more familiar with what i’ll need.

I’ve noticed that several times recently I’ve bought products and the OTO has been something that really should have been part of the initial offer, once again this is unacceptable. Surely if you are going to use a OTO then it should be something that will enhance the product not make it function as the sales page says.

A few months back I bought a WSO and almost everything mentioned in the sales page was in the OTO not the main product. That was my first refund of a WSO, I felt cheated and I will never buy a product of that marketer again.

OTO’s Make Money

I don’t think we’ll see an end to OTO’s anytime soon as OTO’s undoubtedly work, go to the warrior plus site and rank all products by conversion and you’ll see that OTO’s are by far the most common products in that list, 35%- 60% conversions aren’t rare. That stat also means that customers don’t mind them.

Could it be that we as marketers are too fixated on them as we see them so much. Maybe the average customer doesn’t mind them because he only see’s them occasionally and views then as a good thing, the chance to get another product at a bargain price. it may be that the customer actually likes your products and is grateful for the opportunity of buying another

Conclusion

My personal view is that I won’t be using them any time soon and I won’t be buying them. However I will place special offers on my download pages as I know that the right one can increase income by almost 50%.

I urge every marketer to think twice before using them, they may not be the best or most profitable solution.

Now It’s Down to You…

I really want to know what you think, do you love them or hate them or don’t you really care. Let me know by using the facebook comments section or the wordpress comments section below. The more feedback I get the better the consensus will be, so please share this post and lets see if we can get a well reasoned debate going.

I had a Dinner at a nice restaurant at the weekend and ordered a Sirloin Steak and Fries, then it all started to go wrong

Would you like sauce with that sir?

Can I recommend a wine to go with that steak?

Would you like a side order of salad sir?

How about some onion rings?

Nooooooooooooooooooo Just bring me the damn steak and fries!

So Imagine my consternation when I sat down to write todays blog post and discovered that I had notes on 3 topics to choose between,

The Rise Of Visual Blogging

Why IM’ers are so Insular

Upcoming Trends In IM

Did I mention I hate choices? So I did what any self respecting choiceaphobe would do and chose something else!

Yep I dug deep into the vault and pulled out an old post from a year ago and repurposed it, I am sure some of you..well one of two might have read it but the vast majority won’t and I do think it’s a doozy of a post that raises several questions that I think we all need to answer.

Roll VT! ……………. (sorry just watched The Newsroom)

One of the most famous scenes from any film in the past 20 years is the Pill scene In the Matrix, (can you believe it’s 13 years old!) Morpheus tells Neo

You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Everyone remembers that part of the script but if you actually look at the script Morpheus has some really great lines that can be applied to Internet Marketing and the art of making Money Online.

“You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.”

“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”

Now if I am not mistaken those 2 lines sum up almost everything thats right and wrong Internet Marketing.

So lets go for a ride down the rabbit hole and see what we can find.

First choice you have to make is will you take the Red Pill or the Blue pill.

Take the Red Pill and you’ll find you have to work , you’ll need to put in the hours and the hard grind. You’ll need to learn all about the business of IM and then when you master it put in into action. You’ll have failures along the way but you’ll have build your IM business on a solid foundation.

On the other hand you can take the blue pill, take the blue pill and you can buy loads of tools that promise to make you money with one , two or 3 clicks. You are allowed to believe the hype and can liberate yourself from the daily grind of working at building an income by trying to buy your way to success. The blue pill will allow you to suspend reality and ignore that little bit of your brain that says .. This crap can’t work.

If you decided to take the blue pill goodbye, we’ll still be here when you come back poorer but wiser in a few months time.

Now that I am talking to you guys who had the sense to take the Red Pill it’s time to move onto another of those quotes I mentioned above.

” I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”

I personally know some of the finest most ethical marketers you could ever hope to meet and when we talk to each other the topic often comes onto the subject of our customers. We all seem to have the same experiences and stories which revolve about people who buy our products with the best intentions , study them but them seem to have a mental block about putting them into action. As Morpheus says .. we can only show you the door …. YOU are the one that has to walk through it.

Everyone of you who are reading this has the ability to make money online ,… YES YOU!… if you are currently making money you have the ability to make more much more. You can do it on your terms and your way.

I know i’ve said this a lot of times recently but, don’t promise the world and then deliver a small island off the coast of greenland, promise that small island off greenland and deliver the world. It’s a far better way too market and to build a loyal core of clients.

Now finally onto the last of the Morpheus quotes

You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.

Fear, doubt and disbelief are what is holding many of us back, even I suffer from them , and I am usually cocky and confident so I can appreciate what it must be like for someone who hasn’t had a lot of success at IM.

End VT Roll Credits……… (back to the present!)

Any lack of success in IM is only temporary if you apply yourself to it, I know lots of people who have made money then lost money online. I know many who almost religiously refuse to be sucessful, they find any number of reasons why they fail but at the end of the day it’s 100% down to you. The internet is as close to a level playing field as you’ll ever get.

If I create a site today, and someone else creates a similar site the reason one will be more successful that the other is down to the work we put in or more precisely, the work we don’t put in.

So let me leave you with this…..

In WPG this week one of our members made a post about his plans and what had gone wrong, everytime he got close to reaching his targets life would jump out in front of him and smack him down.

He separated from his wife and gave her half his online business.

He built his business back up and then had a heart attack.

He had another heart attack and had a quadruple bypass

He’s now back building his business one day at a time, and you know what it’s working,

This is part of a recent post:

June was the best month ever (This, despite Penguin misadventures), and July is shaping up to top even that.

Am I swimming in riches?

Nope.

But business is booming (recession? What recession?), and my “commute” amounts to rolling out of bed whenever I feel like it, petting the cat as I slide into my office chair and boot up the PC, slip on my Rocky and Bullwinkle slippers and go grab a coffee while the computer’s booting up, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

By Christmas, I’m hoping to surpass the income from my old job, and by next Christmas, I’m looking to double it.

After that…we’ll see. Having had two heart attacks now, and a big, chest opening surgery, I’ve taken to not planning TOO far ahead, so next Christmas is about as far as my horizon line extends to these days.

Sorry, what was your excuse for not succeeding?

Thats it for today well almost ….

Lets get Interactive

Whats your favorite Film quotes?

And for a Bonus credit…how does it apply to you your life or IM??

1. Outsource The Things You Don’t Want To Do and the Things That Take Time.

Fiverr can be an amazing time saver, In the past few weeks I have had people create headers and intros for videos for me, I could have spent time and done those myself but they would probably have taken over an hour each, instead for $5 I had people do a much better job than I would have done.

I also know the power of social media and know that I should be making much better use of Facebook, G+ and Pinterest but it takes time to learn to do it effectively, i’ve drastically reduced the time it takes to “get traction” by hiring a Social Media Manager to do a lot of the stuff that takes time and to keep me on track with the stuff that matters. It doesn’t matter how important the task is if you don’t like to do it you’ll try to avoid doing it so you need to get someone who can help you to take action.

I hate the whole process of getting JV partners, I know that I need them to help get the word out about my products but I’ll find 101 things that are more important , like cleaning the fluff out of my microphone. Once that starts to happen too often I know it’s time to hire a JV manager , it’s not the easiest task finding a good one but it’s worth persevering with.

Apart from fiver I tend to now rely on personal recommendations, I used to recommend odesk for hiring staff but the quality of applicants seems to have hit an all time low so now I ask people I know if they know anyone, if you needed a plumber at home what would you do , ask a friend to recommend someone or just get the guy with the nicest looking ad?

(If you know a reliable good quality experienced JV manager contact me!)

2. Use Tools, Plugins and a Process That Makes Promotion Easier

Since Google decided to change the rules on a regular basis getting backlinks can cause more problems than it solves, if you focus on the right keywords then you can often rank without too much back linking. The other path you can take is to use social media to attract people to your posts. There are several plugins and tools that will help you automate the process in general this is what I do to each post I write wether it is on this blog of one of my niche blogs.

Automatically send each post to Twitter

Share each post on Facebook, Linkedin and Google plus

Syndicate each new post to several other niche related blogs with a link back to this blog

Inform all my subscribers of each new post via an email, I’ll sometimes add a few extra tips or Information into the emails.

Find related blogs that us the comment luv plugin and comment on them with good quality incisive comments

Ask people to Like and share the blog posts…..