I took the bait and followed the link.

What I came to was a squeeze page that had a very short
promotional video on it telling me about the benefits of the
‘free’ video. But to watch the free video I had to give them my
name and email address.

Okay, I have no problem with that. I’m a marketer too – I
understand about squeeze pages and list building. No problem.

But then I was taken to an upsell that was trying to sell me
something I had no idea what it was, and had no interest in
finding out.

I was there to see a free video, after all!

Eventually I found the ‘No Thanks’ link and so settled down to
watch the video I’d wanted to see five minutes ago.

But no. There was another sales page trying to make me buy a
cheaper version of the first upsell. I didn’t want it then and I
don’t want it now! Enough already!

Finally … finally … I got to the page the original email had
promised and watched the video. It was quite interesting, as it
turned out, although not quite as ‘new and revolutionary’ as the
author seemed to think.

What a palaver! Four clicks, two upsells, a name squeeze and a
promotional, pre-video to sit through. All to watch a short free
video.

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

I know it is marketing. I know that the gurus teach this stuff. I
know that it is effective. Heck, I know that the guy running it
is probably making ten times what I am.

But despite all that, it is still bloody annoying. Surely there
is a better way?

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I told the story of a roofing contractor who came to fix my
gutters. He told me that he buys ten leads every week from a
company that gets them over the Internet. He pays £33
per lead (a bit over $50) and he is quite happy that the company
selling them to him sells the same leads to two other
companies as well.

That company is making more than $150 per lead, and have told my
guy that they can supply up to 60 fresh, unique leads each and
every week if he wanted that many.

And that is just in the very small market of people looking to
have a new flat roof installed.

Judging from the roofer – and the manager of a
conservatory-building company I also spoke to the other day –
selling these leads is the easiest thing in the world! Companies
are lining up to buy.

The particular lead company I saw offers leads in dozens of
different building-related specialities: driveways, windows,
conservatories, plumbing, decorating, you name it, they can
provide tradespeople with leads for it.

Imagine how much they are raking in!

I wish I could remember the URL of their website – you would be
amazed at how simple it was.

When I wrote about this in Kickstart back in September (I think)
I got loads of emails from people asking for more information.

One of my good online friends, Mark Vurnum, has been incredibly
successful with exactly this business model for the past few
years. He makes simple websites that suck in leads for all kinds
of businesses, which he then sells on for a considerable income.

Of course, Mark doesn’t restrict himself to the building
industry, and neither should you – there are all kinds of
businesses out there who are crying out for leads, and who are
very happy to pay a significant amount for each one.

A year or two ago, Mark created a training course on lead
generation, called Lead Generation Videos, and it was a big hit.
He followed up with a second, updated course called Lead
Generation Videos 2, which was equally popular.

Those course now form the basis of his Lead Generation Blueprint
membership site – and very good that is too!

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Just this week, Mark has come out with Lead Generation Videos 3.

Don’t be deceived by his spectacular lack of imagination in
naming his products! Lead Generation Videos 3 takes the whole
process to a completely different level.

Make no mistake, I could have started 2010 by
recommending any one of a dozen hot new products, but having
looked around, I really can’t think of anything that has the
potential to start this year with more impact.

And guess what?

It is free.

Well almost. You can get Mark’s Lead Generation 3 video for just
the cost of the postage (it comes to you on a DVD). I’ve just
finished watching it – it is 66 minutes long – and can tell you
that there is no fluff at all. Mark explains very clearly and
comprehensively how to create very high ranking websites that you
can then ‘rent’ out to local businesses.

It doesn’t replace his lead generation strategies, but does
provide a very easy to put-into-action alternative method of
profiting massively from local offline businesses.

You also get a free trial to Mark’ Lead Generation Blueprint
membership site that does give you everything you need to know
about the core lead generation business plan.

It is well worth getting the new video just to see inside the
membership site!

There are all kind of high ticket launches going on this month
and you will be bombarded with emails about them. There are also
several ‘giveaways’ where you can get a ton of stuff you don’t
really want or need in exchange for your precious email address.
100 free products just means 100 more people who will incessantly
send you junk.

But you won’t hear about any of them from me.

My number one aim has always been to tell you about the best
stuff out there – the products that can really make a big
positive difference to your life. Lead Generation Videos 3 is my
selection for the very first thing to tell you about in 2010
because it is something you can easily, cheaply and effectively
put into place right away and see great results.

Oh, and don’t worry that the product comes to you on a DVD – it
is great to have a hard copy to put on your shelf and refer to
later, but you can access the video instantly too.

In just over an hour from now you will be able to start building
your own rental websites – there is no skill needed and Mark
guides you through every step of the process.

In case you are wondering, even if every single Kickstart reader
started using this strategy today, the chances of anyone being in
competition with you is minimal – and not a problem anyway. This
is a vast market with massive potential.

Lead Generation Videos 3 is yours for the small price of postage.
Order your copy right now: http://urlnex.us/leadgen3

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Not surprisingly, he was asking if he should give up and go try
something else, or if it really is possible and he has just been
doing the wrong things.

The replies were somewhat polarized. Some people said to carry
on, but to focus more. Others said that Internet marketing
clearly isn’t for him and that he should give up right away.

My own view is that if he truly has only made $100 in two years,
he is doing something radically wrong. There must be something
about the process of online marketing that he simply hasn’t
understood.

Of course, without more detailed knowledge of what the guy has
already done, and how he has done it, no advice can be of use to
him.

In general though, while I accept that there is a learning curve,
I can’t see any reason why somebody shouldn’t be able to make
regular income within 6 months of starting out.

The trouble is that many people secretly don’t believe that it is
possible. They subconsciously put up barriers in their own minds.
They over think and over analyze everything to the point that
they either don’t do the things they need to do, or they spend so
long on the unimportant trivial stuff that they forget to take
action on what really counts.

I was just the same. It took me a while to ‘get it’ when I
started out and I remember the frustration of thinking that I was
doing everything right but still making nothing, when all around
me I could see people apparently doing the same things that I
was, but making a fortune.

In the end I learned the most important thing of my online life:
that if I thought I was doing the same things as other people and
they were successful with it but I wasn’t, then the problem was
that I didn’t understand the process properly. Somewhere along
the line I was doing something differently and success would come
when I identified my own error and corrected it.

Making money online is simple, but it isn’t necessarily easy.

None of the steps you have to take are particularly complicated –
so long as you don’t over think them – but there are a lot of
steps and the potential for doing them wrong, or in the wrong
order, is high.

Internet marketing can be defined like this:

Learn what problems people use the Internet to solve and provide
them a solution.

Everything you need to know about online marketing is contained
in those 14 words, but most importantly, in their order.

First comes learning what their problems are.

Most people who try, but ultimately fail to succeed online don’t
start in the right place. They start out by listening to the
worst advice anyone ever gave: go with your passion.

Your passion is only of value or relevance if it solves the #1
question: what someone else is searching for an answer to.

I might be the world’s leading expert on snail mating behaviour
and think it is the most interesting subject known to man. But
despite my total enthusiasm, the chances of anyone ever wanting
to buy my latest ebook on how to breed snails is slim. There
might be a handful of French food enthusiasts, but not enough for
me to start an online empire from!

No. Forget your passions and look for other people’s problems.

Problems come in all shapes and sizes – from curing a disease to
finding a good price for a camera and our objective is to find
one that lots of people share that we can find or create a
solution to.

That is the #1 principle of marketing, whether online or off.

How do you find the problems people have?

Simple – Use Google’s keyword tool. (Google “keyword tool” and it
will be the #1 listing.)

Enter “How to” or “How do I” or “Where can I” and you’ll
instantly have enough problems to last you a lifetime!

The next trick is to decide which ones are worth pursuing! But
that’s a question for another article.

One thing I will say now though is that you must get common sense
on your side and think like a marketer.

For example, one of the top questions people are asking is ‘how
to kiss’.

With hundreds of thousands of people searching for the answer to
that particular problem, you might think that there is a huge
market ready to buy your latest practical e-guide. But think
about it for a minute and you’ll realize that the vast majority
of the people searching for that are going to be teenagers – and
kids don’t generally have credit cards or PayPal accounts.

Even offline marketers make that mistake all the time. I worked
with a company once that gave reward points that could be
redeemed for discounts on CDs. Their fatal flaw was that their
audience was 12-16 year old boys and the redemption could only be
done via a credit card purchase. Wasn’t going to happen!

But carry on down the how to list a little way and you’ll find
that ‘how to make pancakes’ is a very popular search.

Sure, there are endless free recipes online, but you can say the
same thing about chocolate cake too – and there is an ebook that
has been selling well on ClickBank for at least the last 6 years
on how to make the world’s best chocolate cake. (I bought it and
the recipe is almost impossible to get right!)

Could a report or video on how to make the world’s yummiest
pancakes sell for a few dollars? It might be worth a try – and
won’t cost much to find out.

It is a real problem for millions of people and maybe you can
provide (or appear to provide – which is what marketing is all
about) a unique solution.

So, to wrap up, whether you’ve been failing online for two years
or have just started out on this exciting journey, success will
come by getting all the simple steps in the right order. And the
first simple step is to put the other person’s problem at the
very beginning of what you do.

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Stuff that works today, might not work tomorrow, but the next day
there will be something even better to test.

At least, it used to be like that.

I don’t know if my finger has slipped off the pulse, or if the
pool of creativity is running dry, but for the last few months I
haven’t really come across anything that I could class as a new
idea.

Every new product launch I’ve seen has been a rehash of existing
ideas, with very little that is new and inspiring inside it.

There have been some well written and nicely thought out
strategies, but hardly any have been based on really new
thinking.

Does this mean that Internet marketing has at last grown up?

In some ways it is a good thing. Information overload has long
been a problem and new stuff hitting the streets every day hasn’t
helped ease the confusion. But if I’m right, it is also a pity.
Creativity is the lifeblood of this business.

Without it, we’ll all stagnate.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ll email me to tell me that I’ve
simply failed to notice some startling new ideas. Actually, I
hope you do – in this case, I’d love to be proved wrong!

So what is the next must-do strategy? Where are the next untapped
traffic sources? Who is the next ‘uber-guru’?

Or, heaven forfend, have we got to stop chasing rainbows and
start actually using the stuff we’ve already bought?

Now that would be a novel concept.

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It is often said that the only people who make real money online
are those who create their own products. I don’t happen to
believe that this is necessarily true, but we’ll let that ride
for a moment.

If we do accept that creating your own info products is the way
to riches, why then, are there so many people who have gone to
all the huge effort to make products but still struggle to make
any sales?

The answer is the order in which you do your work.

Years ago there was a successful offline book published (long
before the Internet) called ‘Is There a Book Inside You?’ that
taught the process of turning your own pre-existing passions and
knowledge into a real-life book.

The very idea of ‘writing a book’ seems to be a dream for many
people. We naturally hold authors in high regard, and have a
strange feeling that writing a book puts a person on a different
level.

The book is the end result. Seeing your name on the cover is the
real objective – the concept of actually selling it comes a
distant second.

The vanity publishing industry has grown up to service this
desire to be a published author.

Getting back to the order of work, the old way starts with what
is inside of you – what you know about (or can research), what
you are passionate about and what you will feel proud to put your
name to.

After that comes the process of writing and in third place (if at
all) comes the vague notion of selling it to other people.

For many people that last step is ignored completely – especially
the vanity publishers. To them, having a single copy of their
book on their bookshelf is the end in itself. Selling it to other
people is actually a bit embarrassing!

If all you want is a book on your shelf to make you feel
important in your own eyes and that of your family, fine. This
order of work is no problem. But if sales are on your agenda, if
your real objective is to eventually make money from your work,
then you must order your work completely differently.

The secret is in the word that describes what we are: marketers.

A ‘marketer’ is defined as: One that sells goods or services in
or to a market.

Note that the definition is in two parts:

a. One who sells goods or services
b. In or to a market.

You can’t have one without the other. If you are ‘a’, you must
have ‘b’ – otherwise you are not a marketer, you are a dreamer.

You can write the best book in the world on your chosen subject -
the one that everyone says you have to be passionate about – but
if that subject doesn’t have a pre-existing market, you will be
an author, but not a marketer.

So if you want to be an information product producer who actually
makes sales – and fulfils that promise that info product
producers make the real money online – you must first and
foremost find a market.

And you do that by answering what I call the ‘Five Marketing
Questions’:

1. Are there people out there who want to know what you know?

2. Are there lots of them?

3. Are they hungry for your information or just casually
interested?

4. Will what you have to say satisfy one of the basic human needs
that drive us all: money, health, love, security, self-esteem,
entertainment?

5. Are they already proven to be prepared to spend money on
information products?

These five marketing questions are not optional. To write a
successful information product, it has to tick all those boxes.

The fewer the ticks, the less successful the product will be. It
is as simple as that.

Many, many books (and nowadays ebooks) tick none of the boxes at
all. The author has just gone ahead and written something that he
or she is passionate about in the vague hope that someone will
share that view. But it doesn’t work that way and those many,
many authors end up bitterly complaining that Internet marketing
doesn’t work. All they have to show for their often considerable
efforts is a deep regret over the time they have wasted.

I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t write about things
you are passionate about – only that you need to explore your
subject to find an angle that will make it hypnotically appealing
to as many people as possible.

Before you commit yourself to the hard, and often frustrating
task of writing a book, first ask yourself if there are plenty of
people who might be interested in buying – and why. Ask the five
questions and only start work when you can satisfactorily answer
them all.

Let’s look at a simple example.

If, for instance, your passion is the history of the Roman Empire
in England and you yearn to write a book about your beloved
subject what should you do? Assuming you are not a well-known
academic, it is unlikely that you’ll readily find a paper and ink
publisher, so self-publishing is your only option.

Does your subject tick any of the five marketing questions?

Well, no. Probably none.

But wait a minute – how can you repurpose your subject to satisfy
both your longing to share your knowledge, and stand a better
chance of finding a market and making sales?

How about ‘A Tourist’s Guide to the 25 Most Exciting Ancient
Roman Sites in Southern England’?

Now we have a real possibility. There are lots of tourists and
they are proven to buy guidebooks by the thousand. A good sales
letter can make it appeal to the desire for self-esteem and
entertainment, there is a long history (pardon the pun) of
successful guides to historic sites and tourists are generally
well motivated (hungry) to buy the latest stuff around.

Boxes ticked. And as bonuses, note that the notional title
specifies ‘Southern England’ – leaving the option there for a
sequel or upsell on ‘Northern England’. And how about the next 25
sites? I smell a series!

Rather than seeing the subject as a dry historian, we are now
looking at it like a marketer.

So in summary, selling your own information products is a great
way to make money online (not the only way, but a good one
nonetheless). But it is only a good way if your focus from the
outset is on selling, rather than writing.

My five marketing questions will help you assess your ideas and I
suggest that you vigorously filter all your ideas through them.
Work on your ideas until you have five ticks: anything less and
you’ll be selling yourself short.

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Info Product Killer

For the last few days I’ve been completely distracted from my normal Internet marketing routine. Something happened that has made me set almost everything else aside to concentrate on something new.

The real reason for my current state of distraction is a new Internet marketing product I’ve been reviewing called Info Product Killer. It has got me more fired up than almost anything I can remember for a very long time.

As you probably know, I review a lot of products and recommend a few of them in Kickstart. Some I put into action and generally do well as a result. But on Wednesday morning I got hold of this new product called Info Product Killer – a series of pdf files and videos that teaches the exact process the creator used to make over $100,000 last Christmas, and a lot more than that so far in 2008.

What is this thing that has got me so excited?

What’s nice is that it is Internet marketing, but not to the usual Internet marketing crowd. It is about how to sell real products to real people through real vendors. and make a very healthy profit in the process.

The system that Craig, the originator of the Info Product Killer concept, has developed is a very streamlined and efficient mini site idea. Mini sites are nothing new. Phil Wiley wrote about them seven years ago and several people have brought out new versions of the concept over the years.

What Craig has done is to boil the whole thing down into a very effective system that capitalizes on proven on-page SEO techniques.

The number of people buying stuff online is growing all the time – in fact, the current credit crunch may even accelerate the growth as more people look online for bargains.

Craig’s Info Product Killer shows how to build sites that the search engines love to send free traffic to – traffic that is really targeted, and highly likely to convert into sales. And every times a sale results, you get money in the bank.

I don’t say this lightly, but I am really excited about the idea.

So much so that I’ve already bought a bunch of domains (.info ones that only cost a dollar each) and have built my first Info Product Killer website.

Would you like to see it? It isn’t completely finished, but as near as makes no difference. You can take a look at Baby Born With Magic Potty

Don’t laugh at the subject matter – that is one of this years hottest toys!

The site looks pretty good I think and it was based almost entirely on the template that is supplied.

You will need a bit of HTML knowledge to make a fast start with the IPK system, but quite honestly, even if you don’t have that yet, you’ll soon pick it up.

There is nothing that a newbie couldn’t tackle – there are a huge number of videos in the members area of IPK to help beginners get going quickly, and Craig is awesome at customer service (that’s a word I don’t use very often).

The basic principle of Info Product Killer

I’m not giving a away a secret to tell you that the idea behind Info Product Killer is to tap into the millions of people who are searching online to buy specific products – from my Baby Born With Magic Potty site you can see that I’m concentrating on toys this Christmas, but there are any number of other categories that could just as easily be used – gadgets, book, video games are just a few possibilities.

You build a series of websites, according to the precise details that Info Product Killer provides, to attract a share of those hungry and eager searchers. IPK’s secret is the way you are taught to use on-page SEO to make your sites very attractive to the search engines so they naturally send you plenty of free traffic.

That free traffic is then monetized by sending them on to big merchant sites, like Amazon, who pay you a commission on each sale.

Info Product Killer works all year round – at Christmas the earning potential is concentrated into a smaller timeframe, but people are eager to buy bargains at any time of year – and your IPK sites make those bargains easy to find for them.

A fast process

My first site took me about six hours to build. Now I’ve got the idea, the next one I do will take a lot less. I reckon that I should be able to put whole sites together in under two hours each.

I just got off the phone from Craig, and he tells me that he can create entire sites and have them up and earning in under an hour now – and I quite believe him.

The secret to success with this strategy is to keep building more and more sites, and so getting them up quickly and efficiently is paramount.

The current sales focus of Info Product Killer is on making a killing for this Christmas. Now is exactly the right time to get started – if you can get your IPK sites up by the middle of November you should be well placed to make a good return by Christmas.

But if you want to move a little slower, no problem. IPK is actually based on two strategies – one for Christmas and one for the rest of the year. The year round method is, I’m told, even more effective at raking in commissions!

Did I say how excited I am about this? I can’t remember a product that has made me drop almost everything else to put it into action before. It really is that powerful.

Special Kickstart Offer

The sales page (there are some videos to watch there that are worth taking the time to view) is at http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

As I said earlier, I’ve just got off the phone from a very long conversation with Craig – what a nice man he turned out to be – and he has kindly given me a very special coupon code for Kickstart readers to use to get a huge discount.

When prompted, type MAV777 into the appropriate box and you’ll get IPK at a fraction of what it is really worth.

A final note…

Craig is based in the UK. His earnings for last Christmas – $100,000+ in a few weeks – were entirely from UK traffic. His sites were not aimed at the American market at all. If he could make those sorts of earnings from the relatively small UK visitor numbers, imagine what the much bigger US market would produce!

The IPK concepts are 100% international. They will work almost anywhere. He stuck to the UK last Christmas because, quite frankly, he didn’t need to expand his operation.

The US is wide open for this and those who jump on it fast will make a killing.

No matter where in the world you are, IPK will work for you.

http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

But don’t delay because the time to act is now.

Update: Questions and Answers about Info Product Killer (first published in Kickstart Daily Ezine)

Hi,

This is an extra message that is aimed mainly at the many
Kickstart readers who have recently bought the excellent Info
Product Killer strategy.

If you have no interest in this specifically, or in Internet
marketing in general, please ignore this email.

A huge number of Kickstart readers have bought Info Product
Killer over the last few days. It is probably the biggest selling
product that I’ve ever promoted – and rightly so.

You may be one of those who have invested in it – or you may be
still considering it. If so, this email is aimed at you.

I’m really not sending this to try to sell any more copies – this
is to try to answer some of the many questions and comments that
I’ve received up to now. On the principle that if one person
bothers to ask, there are another ten who are wondering the same
thing, I think it will be a useful exercise.

Okay, here goes.

1. Can you use IPK with WordPress?

I see absolutely no reason why not, but equally, as the template
provided is about as optimised as you need it to be, I also see
no particular reason why you’d want to use WordPress.

All my sites are being made with the template (or rather a close
approximation of it; see a later question) and I’ve had no reason
to want to use WordPress.

2. Can you use XSitePro?

I actually think that using XSitePro would be a very good idea. I
don’t think the IPK template can be easily imported into XSitePro
(although I haven’t tried) but creating a site from scratch that
followed the template’s look and feel would be quite simple.

XSitePro would make building these sites very fast, I believe,
and should save you time. It would also handle all uploading to
your hosting account stuff, so would be ideal for people who are
less experienced with FTP.

3. I’m in Australia/Canada/India/[wherever you live] – can I
still use IPK?

The IPK sales page and videos talk a lot about America, and
Craig, IPK’s creator uses his UK sites as examples, so you could
easily think that Info Product Killer is only suitable for those
places.

Nothing could be further from the truth. you an use the IPK
methods from anywhere. All you need is an affiliate account with
Amazon – and that can be the Amazon of your country, or of any
other country.

For example, I am in the UK and my current Amazon account is a UK
one – so all the sites I’m building right now are UK sites. if I
were to open an affiliate account with Amazon US I could build
American sites.

Where you are doesn’t matter – it is where your Amazon account is
that determines where you’ll make money from.

As a matter of fact, opening an Amazon.com account (US) is high
on my priorities because then I’ll be able to target a much
bigger audience.

4. Your example site doesn’t look exactly like the IPK examples.
Are you using the template ‘out of the box’ or have you adapted
it?

Hands up, I’ve made a few small changes. Nothing of any
particular note though. My programmer brain just wanted to make a
few bits of it easier for me to use.

In any case, a few minor changes are probably a good thing if you
know your way around a bit of dead simple HTML. Otherwise, using
the supplied template is perfectly okay and will lead you to less
confusion.

5. This all seems like an awful lot of work. Is it really worth
it?

It is a lot of work. Whoever said that Internet marketing is easy
should be taken outside and severely beaten with a birch twig (or
is that just me?)

Each site you build is likely to take you 90 to 180 minutes when
you get the hang of it, and you will probably need about 15 sites
to get the needed link juice flowing.

As to whether it will make money or not, time will tell. The
figures that Craig shows are very compelling – and having spoken
to him on the phone several times now, I have no reason to doubt
them. If anything, he is making more than his sales page
suggests.

It is early days for me. Only one of the seven sites I’ve built
so far has been indexed and it hasn’t floated very high in the
search engines yet. It is getting a small amount of search engine
traffic though, so the structure of the site seems to work.

From my years of experience of Internet marketing, I can say that
the methods are totally practical and look to me to be logical
and consistent.

I have high hopes, but it’ll be another week or two before I’ll
know for sure.

6. Isn’t it too late for Christmas now?

Not really. The Christmas season is certainly upon us already,
but online sales don’t really explode until mid November. If you
can work your socks off and get your network of sites up in the
next week to 10 days, there is every reason to suppose that
you’ll get a good chunk of the Christmas traffic this year.

And there is always next year!

As a matter of fact, the Christmas strategy is only half of the
IPK product. The other part is all about using a very similar
method, but with a couple of extra twists, to make money from hot
products all year round.

If rushing to get your Christmas sites up is too much work in too
short a time for you, and I respect that time is a finite
commodity for many people, then concentrate on the year-round
strategy, which can be taken at a slower pace.

7. Christmas is all about toys, so aren’t there going to be
thousands of people building IPK networks to compete for the same
niche traffic?

To start with, only a small percentage of the people who buy IPK
now will put the effort in for this Christmas. But even if they
do, the sensible ones will look for other niches that are also
popular at Christmas. It isn’t all about toys.

Here are a few suggestions for non toy networks that should do
very well at Christmas – and all year round:

* Playstation and games
* XBox and games
* WII and games
* Cell phones
* TVs
* Home Cinema
* Digital cameras
* Apple stuff
* SatNav
* Audio Equipment

That’s off the top of my mind and already is far more than one
person could cope with. The opportunities are almost unlimited.

Just think beyond the box that is Christmas.

8. Who is the product creator? You call him Craig, but he signed
himself Aaron on the Warrior Forum.

I asked Craig about this on the phone and he laughed. Apparently
he has been called Aaron for years as a kind of nickname. (He
used to live in a country where they could pronounce Aaron, but
Craig gave them difficulties!) Anyway, on forums he has stuck
with the screen name Aaron.

Nothing suspicious – a lot of people (probably a lot more than
you’d think) use pen names online. In any case, he isn’t hiding
behind anything and is one of the most approachable guys you
could ever hope to deal with.

9. Isn’t this too hard for newbies?

Absolutely not. There are a few steps along the way that will
make you ponder, and some that might actually make you think, but
there is nothing really complex at all.

Any time a part of the strategy has caused anyone any confusion,
Craig has simply created a new video in the member’s area to
clarify things. Pretty much everything that you could ask is
covered now – but if you still have questions or confusions (we
all get confused over this Internet marketing lark sometimes)
just send in a support request and I’m sure you’ll be sorted out
in no time.

10. How much is all this going to cost me?

You will need to buy up to 15 domain names and hosting for them.
That COULD mount up to a pretty penny (about $10 per .com domain
per year) but you can save a lot of money by buying .info
domains, which are currently being sold by GoDaddy for $0.99
each.

See next question.

11. Your example site is on a .info domain. Isn’t that bad for
ranking on the search engines?

In my experience, .info domains are just as likely to get indexed
as .com ones. it is what is on your site that is important. I’m
very comfortable buying .info domains and have done so for all my
IPK sites so far.

12. Now that so many people have bought Info Product Killer,
isn’t it getting hard to find decent domain names?

That fear crossed my mind too, but in practice it doesn’t seem to
be a problem.

I bought 17 great domains for each of the best-selling toys this
Christmas and had absolutely no problem finding ones that I was
very happy with.

13. Getting indexed in the search engines takes weeks, how can
this strategy work in time for Christmas?

Google is really fast at indexing when it wants to be. The trick
is to ‘seed’ your site by linking to it from another site that
already has plenty of bot visits.

My www.babybornmagicpotty.info site had a link to it in Kickstart
- which was then placed on my archive. That archive gets several
bot visits a day and the new site was indexed in Google within an
hour or two of it going live.

Once it is first visited, if you have some unique content for the
spiders to see, they’ll keep right on coming back. According to
my stats, in the few days it has been up, the Google Bot has
visited 25 times, Alexa 20 times and Yahoo 11 times.

If you can beg, borrow or steal a link to your first site to get
it started, you’ll soon have a feeding frenzy.

Just concentrate on the content. The search engines won’t like
you is they find rubbish on your site, so give them something to
chew on.

13. Have you made any money yet?

I thought you’d never ask!

With only one of my network sites indexed and the directory ‘hub’
site still under construction, I didn’t expect any sales at all
for a while. But according to Amazon I have already made one sale
(albeit a very small one that has generated only a couple of
Pounds in commission)!

But it has begun!

I think that covers everything I’ve been asked so far, but if you
have any other questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best
to help.

You can view the Info Product Killer sales page and videos at
http://www.urlnex.us/ipk/

Best wishes,

Martin

Update: My directory site is up and running now: Hot Toys for Christmas 2008

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Stock exchanges across the globe appear to have stepped back from
the brink after the disastrous falls at the end of last week.
News of governments agreeing to coordinated support plans for
their countries banks seems to have instilled a little much
needed confidence from investors as markets opened again this
week. One can only hope that the glimmer of hope is sustained.

However, what is certain is that regardless of what the money
markets do in the short term, or how quickly the banking system
stabilizes, world economies are heading into recession for the
rest of 2008 and probably most of 2009.

That means that we all face a year or more of financial
uncertainty.

It means that many jobs are suddenly a lot less secure.

It means that belts will have to be tightened and that for some
people, the future could involve some real hardships.

Why am I writing such doom and gloom words?

The reason is that with so many of us staring a bleak future in
the face, it has never been more important to look for ways to
augment and bolster the household budgets.

With tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people facing the
very real prospect of being laid off at work, there has never
been a more critical time to look for alternative ways to make an
income.

I’m not going to try to sell anything in today’s Kickstart -
let’s get that straight from the beginning. Today I want to talk
objectively about a subject that is of real subjective interest
to all of us, and clouding the issue by attempting to make money
from it won’t help matters.

The subject is clearly on many people’s minds, but it has come to
the forefront of mine this weekend because of an email I received
on Saturday.

It was from a Kickstart reader, who shall remain nameless. In it,
he wrote:

“Martin, I’m turning to you for advice because I don’t know who
else to trust and I get the feeling that you won’t blow smoke at
me like so many of the gurus would. My situation is pretty bad
right now and I have some hard decisions to make which I hope you
can help me with.

I’ve been told that I should expect to be laid off at work soon,
and I know that the prospect of finding something else is slim. I
might be able to get minimum wage work if I’m lucky, but there
isn’t much going on where I live. I have a wife and two kids and
very little in the way of savings. I don’t think we will starve,
but I’m really frightened about the future and feel powerless to
do much of anything about it.

My question to you is this…do you really, honestly, think that
I can make enough money to feed my kids and pay my mortgage
through Internet marketing? You write about this program and that
all the time, but do you really think that any one of them could
be the lifeline I need?”

The email was a lot longer than that, but I’ve trimmed and
paraphrased it to make the core question clear.

And what a question it is!

It boils down to this: does Internet marketing really work, or is
it yet another bunch of hooey from people trying to extract money
from people who can least afford it.

My answer might surprise you.

First of all, there are many people for whom Internet marketing
will never work. It is true. Some people, no matter how much they
spend on this program or that, this latest greatest course, or
that over-hyped ebook, will never in a million years be able to
make more than coffee money online. They are just not suited to
it, and it isn’t suited to them.

Why? Well, for starters, there are always some people who won’t
take advice. They read all the books, listen to all the experts
and decide to go about things in their own sweet way. And usually
that way is wrong.

Then there are the people who, no matter how simple you make it
for them, still resent the idea that they have to do some of the
work for themselves. they constantly fight against the idea of
putting any personal effort in – even to the extent of expending
more effort in their resistance of working than they would in
just getting on with it.

And there are people, surprisingly quite a lot, who seem
constantly intent on clutching failure from the jaws of victory.
These are the people who start out well, follow all the right
advice, but somewhere between making a brilliant start and
reaping the rewards of their success, manage to derail their own
efforts. I feel particularly sorry for these people because they
work so darned hard and then just throw it all away.

Sadly many of those people who have a go and fail are then left
with the view that all Internet marketing is a scam and anyone
peddling ways to make money online are con men and scammers.

The truth is that Internet marketing isn’t the magic wand or the
panacea of all goodness that many who sell its virtues might
promise. It is very possible to fail, and usually because of
faults in your own nature. There ARE bad programs out there and
it is very much a case of caveat emptor (buyer beware) but more
often than not the people selling ways to make money have good
intentions.

Failure in Internet marketing is rarely a costly business. You
might be out of pocket a couple of hundred dollars and a few days
of your time, but nothing like the risks involved in failure at a
bricks and mortar business.

Okay, so we’ve established that it might not work – but look at
the reasons for failure again – they are rarely down to the
marketing principle being at fault. The failures are most often
due to the characters of the people who are half-heartedly having
a go.

Let’s flip the subject on its head now and look at what it takes
to succeed.

But first, let me assure you that with the right attitude, and
the correct success-oriented mindset, success is very possible.

I know a lot of people from all walks of life who are very
successful as online marketers. People who have gone from barely
being able to turn a computer on, to making a full time living
online (and yes, giving up their day job) in a remarkably short
space of time.

It IS possible. I should know – I do it myself. Just yesterday
(which was a Sunday) I made more money in one day than many
families make in a month. It was an exceptional day – I don’t
claim to do that every day (I wish!) but it shows that if a
particularly unexceptional person like me can do it, anyone can.

Success in Internet marketing takes a few basic character traits:

* The ability to listen
* The ability to learn
* The ability to adapt
* The ability to experiment
* The ability to keep going
* Persistence

Then you need some other fundamental traits:

* A willingness to seek advice
* An excitement to turn your computer on each day
* An understanding that you are dealing with a vast global market
* The honest acceptance that just because one thing you try
doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that all Internet marketing is a
scam.
* A healthy degree of realism – overnight riches are about as
likely to fall your way as winning the lottery.

Also, you need to understand that ‘Internet marketing’ takes many
different forms. I like to write, so I’ve adapted my online
activities to take advantage of that. Other people are good at
graphics, or are excellent with detail, or are good dealing with
people and build their online businesses around their particular
skills. There isn’t just one way to be successful online – there
are as many different ways as there are successful marketers!

The trick is to find what works for you.

If you already have those traits, or can learn them, and
understand that despite some of the wilder claims made by people
selling money-making plans, Internet marketing takes hard and
sustained work, then you might just be one of the people who it
will work wonders for.

Because for the right people, with the right attitude and the
right mindset to succeed, making money via the Internet is a very
practical proposition.

So, to answer the question: “My question to you is this…do you
really, honestly, think that I can make enough money to feed my
kids and pay my mortgage through Internet marketing?”

I really, honestly believe it can be done. If you start now,
before you are absolutely against the wall, you will have time,
hopefully, to build a real business that can sustain you – if you
have the character traits you will need.

The good news is that you don’t need to spend any real money to
find out. Buy a domain for under ten dollars and some hosting and
create a WordPress blog. You don’t need to buy any high priced
courses or ebooks just yet. You don’t really need to buy
anything. Learn the ropes, consult the Warrior Forum for ideas
and support – heck, even read up on the details of what you need
to do on my free online course at http://imkickstart.com

If the economy is really about to go to hell in a handbasket, it
seems a good idea to me to build some insurance into your life by
starting an online business that might very well see you through
the recession with a big smile on your face.

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When designing web pages, we try to incorporate as many things that the search engines like as possible. This is called On-Page SEO. But the problem is that nobody knows for sure exactly what factors the search engines actually do like.

And they are not saying!

We can ‘reverse engineer’ the search engines to some extent – my own Keyword LSI Spy  tool does a pretty good job of analyzing the top ranking pages for any given keyword or phrase, but there is only so far you can go because every page is different, and so many factors can come in to play.

What we need is a means of looking at pages where only a small amount of what is on page changes from one page to the next – effectively allowing us to reduce the variables and find out what the SEs really do with a small set of data. But how do you go about finding a whole lot of pages that you can compare against each other in Google (for example) where we know that only a limited number of things change between them?

It is something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, but this morning I had a brainwave.

Forgive me if this is blindingly obvious to you. It is to me NOW, but you, like me, may not have made this connection yet, so the technique I’m about to share may be very useful.

EzineArticles is an online article directory that has many hundreds of thousands (millions probably) of articles. And the great thing from our point of view is that each one is displayed in a standard template. So, effectively, the only things that change on the page from one article to the next are a couple of meta tags and the article body itself. All the other stuff on the page, particularly for articles aimed at the same keyword, remains virtually identical.

In Google we can search for pages within a website. So by using the search string: “acne treatment” site:ezinearticles.com (using whatever keyword phrase we like between the quotes) we are given a ranked list by Google of articles that they consider to match our keyword from the EzineArticles site. Because of the sheer size of EzineArticles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a niche that doesn’t return a good selection. My acne treatment example pulls up 16,500!

Now we can look at the articles that Google has selected for us and see what, if anything, makes the ones nearer the top of the pile stand out.

 Here are a few suggestions for factors that you could check out:

* Meta Title tag
* Meta Description tag
* Meta Keyword tag
* Article word count
* Article keyword density
* Use of LSI words in the article
* Use of synonyms in the article
* Keyword density in the article title
* Keyword density in the first paragraph
* Keyword density in the last paragraph
* Keyword density in the middle paragraphs
* Average sentence length
* Average paragraph length
* Links and link anchor text
* Recency of article
* Style of article
* Use of subheadings

Unfortunately, EzineArticles have software in place to prevent automated scraping of their content, so it isn’t possible (by me anyway) to write a script to do this analysis in a php program, but with some patience you can easily get some good indications manually.

Try it out – and let me know if you find any surprising new insights!

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I’m thinking about business in general and Internet marketing specifically, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply across the board.

For example, in Internet marketing, although there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money, most people struggle. But every once in a while someone comes along who succeeds effortlessly and makes a killing. How come?

Then that successful person writes an ebook on how they ‘Twittered for Gold’, or ‘Craigslisted their way to success’, or ‘Made Five Figures With Video’ or whatever the latest thing is – and everyone with half a brain reads the book and realizes that nine times out of ten there are no big secrets being revealed – just plain common sense.

[Sorry about the extreme length of that sentence - I could seem to find a way out of it!]

You see, I think that there are people – most of us, most of the time – who get confused because we think that ‘it’ should be complicated. So we look for complex solutions, convoluted processes and contrarian systems. Something inside of our brains won’t accept that success really is simple – we have to introduce layers of complexity. And in so doing, we focus so hard on the process that we lose sight of the destination.

Its like driving – as long as we have a map and know where we are heading for, navigating the route is easy: each new road we take is a step towards our target. But as soon as we stop to think ‘oh, this is a pretty road, let’s see where it leads to’ our focus shifts away from where we want to go and on to where we are now.

The result is we get lost.

Psychologists and animal behaviourists tell us that one of the main difference between humans and animals is that our brains have evolved to be able to imagine a future. We have areas in our brain that can extrapolate from our past experiences and our present condition and create an image of the future. Animals, it seems, either lack that facility, or have it to a much lesser degree.

Somehow, though, when faced with business decisions, many of us suppress our ‘thinking forward’ skill and rely on the far more basic magpie mind (ooh, look at that nice new shiny thing…).

That constant jumping from one good looking idea to another draws our focus away from the destination and firmly on to the process.

Destination oriented thinking is absolutely crucial to your success – and mine. I don’t claim any superiority here – I’m just as likely to be sidetracked and diverted as anyone else. Maybe more so.

But recognizing the problem is a big step towards dealing with it.

So, how do those people who write the books find the ‘secret systems’ that they sell – the ones that, as I said, when you read the book you think are actually blindingly obvious (except that you didn’t think so before you read the book)?

The answer is simple to explain but quite difficult to put into action.

What these people have that most of the rest of us don’t is the ability to focus on what it is they want to achieve, and then to look at whatever process they have decided to study (be that Craigslist, Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Article marketing, or any of a hundred other methods of online marketing) with an eye to finding out what people who are already successful are doing.

There are very few original thinkers – and most of those who can and do come up with truly original concepts are too busy profiting from them to want to teach them to other people (even if they have the communication skills to do so).

No, the ones we end up learning from are the people who make it their business to understand what works. The people who have an innate ability to see below the process and to understand the route. In other words, they don’t focus on the shiny diversions, they focus on the entire map.

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that if you want to be a teacher, you will have to learn the difficult skill of seeing an entire journey and understand how each part inter-relates to each other part. It is a skill that we can all learn, but one that is difficult because it requires enormous focus.

The good news is that if ‘all’ we want is to be a success, then our job is really much easier. We have to learn to follow a map and to ignore the pretty roads we’ll see along the way.

Sightseeing has its place, but not on the road to success.

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I’m on a crusade and I don’t even own a cape.

Everywhere I look there are businesses who have had websites built for them by flashy high-priced designers who are saying ‘We’ve got a website, but quite honestly, it doesn’t do much.’

What do they expect?

A website isn’t a family portrait that you go to a studio to have taken and then proudly look at on your mantelpiece.

A website should never be built ‘because we’d like one.’

A website should and must be an integral part of your business and a fundamental element of your marketing strategy.

See that word ‘strategy’. It’s important.

I have nothing against design and designers (please don’t send me hate mail!). What I do object to is the blind leading the blind.

Unless you have a clear and defined strategy for the Internet side of your business, your website might as well be a flyer tucked at random into the 20-volume encyclopedia in your local library.

Nobody will see it – and the rare person who does will have no idea what it is there for.

In my offline life I deal with businesses who are often in this position. They jumped on the website bandwagon a few years ago, spent huge sums on the latest (then) flashy intro screens and wacky graphics, approved everything because it ‘looked’ so cool and then waited.

They waited for something to happen and it didn’t.

Nobody flooded them with orders. No search engines bothered to list them. No customers said how good the site was. No-one in the business had any idea what to do about it and so the site floundered.

And the CEO is now convinced that it was all a waste of time and effort.

And it was.

But it needn’t be that way if they had bothered to think like marketers and entrepreneurs and not like over-awed design junkies.

I believe that all of those bad websites can be turned around. Sure they will need to be redesigned and rewritten (at a significantly lower price than they originally cost, I expect). But with the application of sound marketing ideas – and a clearly defined Internet strategy – ANY business can and should benefit from an effective online presence.

A hard-working website can be your window on the world. It is such a shame that so many companies keep the curtains closed.

There is an enormous opportunity for you here. When you have built a few websites for yourself and learned the ropes of Internet marketing, your level of knowledge of what makes a website work will be orders of magnitude greater than the general person in the street. And for local business people who are much more interested in the day to day running of their businesses than in learning new skill about the Internet, you will be a shining star. You will literally be their savior.

A book I read (and highly recommended) recently tells you all about how to turn your online experience into offline income. It is called Offline Gold, by Andrew Cavanagh and it is well worth studying. There really is a fortune to be made in helping offline companies make better use of the Internet – and you could be perfectly placed to grab your share. http://www.kickstartdaily.com/offlinegold/

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Okay, I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to spread it around. This is how the big players make real money on the Internet.

It is called selling to your back-end. Does that sound painful? Well, believe me, pamper your back end and you’ll make piles – piles of cash! Learn about this and you will feel no pain.

The term ‘back-end products’ is jargon that simply means selling additional items to existing customers.

The traditional mail order business, and more recently, Internet selling, depend largely on the power of leveraging (that magic word) existing customers to make maximum profits.

How does it work?

The first point is that there is no rule that says you have to have back-end products. There are many people online who sell a single product and make good money at it. But, in truth, they are wasting a valuable resource, and making a lot more work for themselves, as we shall see.

Let’s look at two examples of how back-end selling works well online.

There is a lady I know online who sells a fantastic topical cream that helps eczema sufferers. She spends time and money targeting her advertising to the right audience so that she can sell as much cream as possible. But she is a one product company. She only sells that one cream and has no plans to introduce new products.

What is her back-end?

More cream. Everyone who buys becomes part of a new ‘super-targeted’ audience. She can email them special ‘repeat purchase’ offers at virtually no cost to her. So she makes these existing customers feel special by giving them great cost savings – and ends up making a higher profit-per-customer than she would have done otherwise. Along the way, these ‘super targets’ also recommend her to their friends and family, so she makes even more sales.

That system works for her because she sells a consumable product, that is effective, and is not available elsewhere.

But what about one-off purchases that do not have a repeat function built in?

As a second example, let’s suppose you want to sell information products, or ebooks. Having created your first book, take a moment and think how you can expand it to add interest to the type of people who would buy. Perhaps a special report, another book on a related topic, a video, a member’s site – the list is almost endless. Only after you have created this second-string product should you launch the first one.

How might this work in practice?

In order to sell anything on the net, you need to invest some money. Don’t believe the people who tell you that it can all be done for free. it can’t. Maybe you need less to start up a business online than in the ‘real world’, but you still need some seed capital. You need money for advertising, web hosting, domain names and so on.

If you are clever and well advised, you will waste as little of your cash as possible. But, spend you must.

Suppose you spend $500 on PPC and you get 5,000 targeted hits to your web site. If you have written a really good sales letter and have a clear message, you might be very lucky and convert 3% of the visitors into sales (very lucky!). That would mean that you sell 150 items and each sale has cost you $3.33.

If your ebook sells for $9.99 you are looking at a healthy 200% profit.

Now, here comes the magic.

You have not just created 150 happy customers, you have also created a list of 150 ‘super-targets’. People who have shown themselves to be predisposed to buy from you.

The next step is to send them an email saying that as a valued customer, you would like to make them an exclusive special offer – a prelaunch special deal on your new ebook – instead of the normal price of $24.99,which it will cost when it goes on general release, they can order it right now for just $17.97.

Your conversion rate against these super-targets should be much higher than before. Perhaps as high as 20%. So you may sell 30 copies and gross $539.10 from these customers that you would not have otherwise got.

At zero advertising cost!

Instead of making $1,498.50 for your $500 investment, you have made $2,037.60. 308% return on investment instead of 200%.

And that is just the beginning, because you now have a loyal following to pre-sell your next product to – and the next.

The lifetime value of your select band of ‘super-targets could be enormous.

I have done a lot of mail order marketing in my time (I worked in the advertising industry for 25 years) and have seen back-end marketing make companies millions. I even did it myself when I ran my own mail order company. We advertised a ‘free’ bottle of aromatherapy oil, which customers just paid carriage on. Thousands responded. We then sent a sales letter with every free bottle selling a great value pack of 6 oils. That sold a lot. Then every customer got a regular order form with additional products on it.

It worked well, and everyone was happy, but believe me, it works even better on the Internet. Repeat contact of customers (often called relationship marketing) offline still carries a considerable cost – paper, printing, envelopes, postage, fulfillment.

Online, all of these cost just melt away.

Leaving you with that lovely, cuddly six-letter word: PROFIT.

So back to the title of this lesson: yes, your back-end does look big. Wonderful, isn’t it?

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I thought that today I’d try to briefly dispel some of the myths that surround this mysterious state of being.

The ‘Internet lifestyle’ has come to mean making loads of money by doing very little. Countless hype-filled sales letters allude to it as a kind of transcended state that only the top Internet marketers can ever hope to reach. Of course, if you buy their book/course/mentoring program, you’ll learn the secret of making money while you bask on the beach too.

That’s the image that the Internet lifestyle conjures up in most people: a tanned, relaxed beach bum who taps on his laptop while rocking in a beach hammock, sipping a pina colada.

That is the Internet lifestyle that we all refer to.

Except, er, it isn’t.

Yes, as an Internet marketer you can make money while you relax on a beach, or do your gardening. You can (and often do) make money while you are asleep. I made more money after I went to bed last night that I ever earned in a day when I had a ‘real’ job. And that wasn’t just a display of gratitude from my wife!

Internet marketers can – and do – make money while they are on vacation. Or while they take a bath.

I went to the gym for a sauna this morning and was nearly $100 better off when I got home.

But all that really has nothing to do with the Internet lifestyle.

When you make your money is a red herring. Making money while you sleep is a function of geography, nothing more.

What the gurus who want to sell you on the dream don’t tell you about is the hours of work they put in before heading off to the beach. The late nights and early mornings. The hours they spent making their eyes bleed by staring too long at their monitor, or the endless emails and telephone calls they had to put in to get JV partners on board.

No – they don’t tell you that Internet marketing is hard work because it is a lot more alluring to sell you on the Internet lifestyle dream.

Am I just being a killjoy then? Am I bursting the bubble and squashing the dream flat?

I hope not – and that certainly isn’t my intention because, you see, I believe that the REAL Internet lifestyle is way more interesting, FAR more exciting and a TON more inspirational than the idea of getting sand between your toes and grit in your laptop can ever be.

The Internet lifestyle that I live, and that most of the people I know who make their livings online live, is not about earning loads and doing little. It is about doing what you love, when you want to fit it in and making a fair income as a result. It is about freedom of choice and freedom from the endless drudgery of a job that you hate.

It is about being able to spend an hour in the garden when you want to – or heading off to the gym for lunch. It is about you being in charge of what you do – not being beholden to the whims of someone else who hates their job as much as you do.

Is it all it is hyped up to be? Probably not, but is it worth aspiring to?

Absolutely.

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In other words, if you can build a good email list, that is responsive to your recommendations, you should never starve.

How you make your list responsive is beyond the scope of this report, (hint: be personal, be personable, be unique and be prompt), but one way of building your list in the first place is what this report is all about.

As an Internet marketer, your email list is your most treasured possession. It needs to be nurtured. But how do you get people onto that list in the first place?

You can set up a website with a name capture form on it – you’ve seen them many times, they usually say ‘Subscribe here’ or something similar.

You can also put a pop up on your page to remind people to subscribe.

Both are effective strategies, but there is one method that is much superior – so good in fact that from the same number of unique visitors to your site you could easily get two or three times the subscribers.

It is called a name capture, or name squeeze, page. Its purpose is to entice your visitor with the promise of great content in your website, or other lovely incentives and then block access to all that good stuff until they have given you their name and email address.

That is the key difference between name squeeze and other type of ‘requested’ email address capture: the visitor has no choice. They must hand over their details or they have to click away.
Not just about building a list.

While building an email list is the end result of a name squeeze page, email marketing isn’t necessarily the objective. For many people who successfully use this technique, the objective is to make their website more responsive.

Forcing your visitor to hand over their email address before they can read the content of your site may seem a paradoxical way to make your site more responsive, but it really does work – for a number of reasons:

1. It weeds out the tire kickers. Many people surf to websites without a clear idea of what they want. Yes, they are traffic, but traffic of a very low quality. Their true interest in what you have to offer is negligible and the likelihood of them responding to your offer is minimal. Forcing those people to actively enter your site will do one of two things – it will crystallize their thoughts sufficiently to make them more aware of your message, or it will turn them away. Either way, the people who get through to your site will be far higher quality, and your conversion rate should increase.

2. If you ‘sell’ the idea of parting with their email address effectively you can create a feeling of exclusivity that makes the visitor feel special. This is a powerful emotion which, if carried through into the website itself, creates a feeling of belonging to a special club.

3. Dr Robert Cialdini, in his book ‘Influence, Science and Practice’, makes the point that one of the strongest ‘influencers’ on people’s buying behaviour is reciprocation. In summary, that means that when you give a person a gift before you try to sell them something, they sub-consciously feel obligated. This sense of obligation can hugely increase their likelihood to buy from you when you do make them an offer. You can easily use this concept in your name squeeze page by offering them a special gift – an ebook, a special report, access to a hidden part of your website, an exclusive tip – the potential is almost endless – for which, incidentally, they have to give you their email address to receive.

Name squeeze pages work because you make a compelling offer to the visitor:

• You offer then a free report for instant download
• You offer them the #1 answer to their most pressing problem
• You pre-sell them on the fantastic content that is within your website

Then, instead of just giving them the download link, or the #1 answer, or a navigation button to the rest of your site, you put up a name capture form that they must fill in to get the reward.

If you are really clever you will make it clear that the next step (whether it is the download, the answer, the entry code to read the rest of the site or some other ‘bribe’ that you have devised) will be immediately emailed to them.

Simply by doing that one thing you disincentivize many of the time wasters from giving fake email addresses just to get your information or your ‘bribe’.

This form of reward-based subscription is extremely effective.

Having said that – there is power in that thar list!

There are two additional truths that make the enforced capture of your website’s visitors email address so important:

“People do business with people they like.”

“It takes up to 7 contacts before people feel confident enough to buy.”

These may be generalizations, but they are based on hard-won experience from many successful marketers.

By capturing the name and email address of your site’s visitor, you gain the ability to begin a relationship with them. You can start to show them that you care about them, that you understand their needs and that you are more responsive and generous than the owners of other competing sites that they may have visited.

Your autoresponder can begin to send them regular tips, personal stories and other suggestions. Each one can have a call to action built in that will drive that person back to your website. And every time they follow that call, their return to your site will be with less and less resistance to your offers.

Over time, as you gain their trust and become more of a friend, you will have earned the right to make other offers too – providing you don’t overdo it!

Avoid spam accusations

These days, it has become increasingly important to make your email lists double opt-in.

What this means is that after the person fills in the form to subscribe to your list, they are sent an email that asks them to click on a link to confirm that they really want to subscribe. Only after performing that second action, the ‘double opt-in’, should they be actually added to your list.

The reason to do this is to protect yourself, as far as possible, from spam accusations.

There are lots of reasons why people yell spam. They may have forgotten that they signed up, or their email address may have been subscribed to your list without their knowledge.

When you can prove that your subscribers have double opted in to your list, you can show anyone who asks that the person positively and deliberately signed up, and, because the confirmation email was sent to their own address, that they were not signed up by anyone else.

When you run a name squeeze page it is important that you make the process double opt in. If possible, your name squeeze script should also log the time and date and the IP address of the computer from which the request was made.

These additional pieces of information are captured in the background – the visitor is unaware that they have been gathered, but are often necessary if you ever wish to transfer your list to a new autoresponder service in the future.

If the incentive that you are offering is good enough, they won’t be able to click on the confirmation link fast enough. They will be yearning for your ‘bribe’!
Factors that can make your name squeeze page even more effective.

An effective name squeeze page is a very simple thing. Too much information can just lead to confusion, and any actions for the visitor to take other than filling in their name and email address defeat the object.

Here are a few things that your page should include – but as with any Internet marketing advise, you should test each one to see how it affects responses in your own specific situation.

1. The page should make it clear who is behind it.

This is generally done with a header graphic or a strong pre-headline. Too many sites are hesitant to say outright who they are and what they do, but with a name squeeze page this is disastrous. You need your visitor to get the point of your site the instant they land.

2. The headline has to ‘sell’ a very clear benefit.

The WII-FM (what’s in it for me?) factor has to be particularly strong in a name capture page. Take time over crafting the perfect headline that pre-sells the content of your site and what it can do for the visitor. Make them salivate.

Only then will they part with their email address willingly.

3. Sales copy.

I have seen name capture pages that used very long sales copy, but they are rare. In the main, the copy you need should be just enough to whet the visitor’s appetite for the content of your site (or for the ‘bribes’ you are offering) and no more. Tell then enough to start them yearning for more – and then make them take action to get more.

4. The opt in form.
 
It may sound strange, but there are name squeeze pages out there that make you hunt for where to type in your details. Don’t do it. Make your opt-in form highly visible and impossible to miss.

5. Audio or video.

There is an increasing use of audio or video on name squeeze pages for the simple reason that they work.

On one of my own name squeeze pages (a sign up page for a newsletter) the simple addition of an audio testimonial increased my visitor-to-signup conversion by almost 300%.

6. Only one possible action.

Never, ever give visitors to your name squeeze page any other choices other than sign up, or go away.

There can be no compromise on that. As soon as you offer any other possible action, some of those visitors will take it and you will have lost them forever.

And that means no other offers, no AdSense ads, no tasters, no links of any kind whatsoever.

Name squeeze works because it forces visitors to declare their interest in what you have to say (by inputting their name and email address) or declare that they have no interest by hitting the back button.

Name capture or name squeeze pages, whatever you choose to call them, are the perfect way to ensure that all the traffic your sites get is targeted, focused on the message you have to give and motivated enough to take action to read it. It may reduce the overall numbers of people who move through your websites, but it will ensure that those who do are the highest quality traffic that you can get.

What you do with them after that is entirely up to you, but my advice is to treat them with respect, never abuse their trust, work as hard as you can to build a good relationship with them and over deliver in as many ways as you can.

That way your name squeeze pages will be among your most valuable tools for your long term Internet business.

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Yes, both words apply when the person you are teaching has a little experience, but for someone who has never built a web page, never sold anything online and is totally new to this often arcane world of contra-intuitive processes and seemingly meaningless technobabble, ‘simply’ ‘just’ doesn’t hack it.

So in today’s installment I’ll try to avoid both words.

This part is called ‘a sense of belonging’ because when you first start out in Internet marketing, there are a surprising number of things you need to join. Things that the more experienced of us take for granted.

Note that there is a big difference between someone who has a blog and someone who makes money online. A regular blogger is not a marketer. He or she is a diarist of sorts, a journal keeper, a writer. For many, ‘being online’ is an end in itself. Making money from the endeavour is not required.

But as soon as you want to start making money from your blog (or website) – you have to start joining things.

For example, the fastest way to make a few cents here and there is by putting AdSense on your site. But that entails opening an account with Google.

Want to track your site’s visitors? Google again – this time their Analytics program.

GadgetSpots, the new viral classified ad network that I’ve been using, promoting and profiting from recently is another thing that you may want to sign up for.

Maybe you want to sell a special report that you’ve written from your blog pages? Then you will need to have a way to take the money when people buy. Another signup – this time to PayPal, perhaps.

Do you think other people might be interested in offering your book for sale to their readers? Then you need to sign up for an affiliate program. ClickBank or PayDotCom are the ones that most Internet marketers use, but there are other choices if you look around.

If you are serious about learning the ropes of Internet marketing, you will certainly benefit from joining a few online forums, like the Warriors Forum, for example.

Perhaps you know of a great ebook by someone else that would appeal to your blog’s audience and would like to offer it to them for a cut of the price? That’s called affiliate marketing and yes, you’ll have to sign up to the vendor’s affiliate program. That may well be ClickBank or PayDotCom, but it is increasingly likely to be an in-house private affiliate management system.

Once you’ve done these things for yourself, you know that they are no big deal. None of them is hard and most only need to be done once. But if you’ve never done them before, it really doesn’t matter how many times people like me tell you that they are easy, they still loom in front of you like icebergs in the fog.

I know people with great ideas to offer, who have written superb ebooks, but who never get past first base because the idea of opening an account at PayPal or ClickBank is too hard for them to endure. But note I said the ‘idea’ is too hard. The blockage is often in their own fear of officialdom, and not based on any reality of procedural complexity.

As a well-known sporting goods manufacturer is fond of saying, ‘Just do it!’ (Darn, I used the ‘J’ word!)

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There are just so many ways to make money online that it is impossible for me to list them all here – even if I knew them all myself! But today I’ll try to outline some of the major methods of turning a few pages of text and code into money-making machines that will pump cash into your bank account day after day – even while you sleep!

(Did you like that hype-talk? I was just having fun – I’ll try to keep both feet on the ground from here on in.)

* Active product selling

Perhaps the most obvious way to generate an income from a website is to sell a product that you have personally own the rights to. It could be something like an ebook or report that you’ve created yourself, or it could be something that you’ve bought the rights to because you think the product is good. It could even be something that you’ve paid someone else to create for you (there will be more on outsourcing later in the course).

However you’ve come by the item you have for sale, the chances are that your website will take the form of a sales letter.

The format of sales letters haven’t changed much in over a hundred years and the online versions – now often called sales pages – are just a continuation of a long tradition of tried and tested copywriting techniques.

There is no great mystery – you capture the reader’s attention with a catchy and intriguing headline, stimulate their interest in the product by talking about the problems it can solve and showing how other people have loved it, fan the flames of their desire to own the product by going into detail about the benefits owning it will bring to them, and finally, give them a reason to take action and buy it now. (I’ll talk about copywriting in more detail in a later installment of this course and explain a neat 7-step process that I use when writing sales copy.)

Selling your own products is one of the more profitable ways of marketing online and one that I highly recommend. However, not everyone is comfortable writing ebooks or even special reports – and certainly not everyone can write programs.

Which brings me to the next method:

* Affiliate selling

Affiliate selling means the process of selling other people’s products. With this method, you are not so much ‘selling’ as ‘encouraging people to learn more; your job is not to close the sale, but to stimulate interest in the reader so that he or she will go to the product owner’s real sales page.

And every time you do succeed in sending someone to a sales page where they buy a product or service, you will be paid a commission by the product owner.

The process is also ‘passive’ because it tends to work best when you don’t appear to be selling at all – merely reviewing and recommending.

Almost any web page can include some kind of affiliate sales process. there are products and services in virtually any niche you can think of that will suit your page’s content. All you need to do is go find them. Affiliate networks like ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and PayDotCom are great places to start.

* Advertisements

An easy way to make anything from a small trickle of income to a flood is to allow advertisers to place their ads on your pages. If you are lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you can make a good income this way.

Perhaps the most obvious way to display third-party ads is through the Google AdSense system.

In case you are unaware of AdSense, it is a service run by Google that you sign up to join (at no cost). Once accepted as a member, Google will give you a snippet of code to place in your web pages. That code allows Google to ‘read’ your web page and determine what it is about. they will then place small classified-style ads on your page that are relevant to your page’s subject.

The process is called ‘contextual advertising’.

Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the AdSense ads they are charged a small amount by Google (the advertisers bid to be displayed, and so the actual amount that each click costs varies hugely. Depending on the popularity of the keyword that your page displays for, the cost-per-click could be anything from a few cents to several dollars. Google then pay you, the site owner, a percentage of the click cost.

A year or so ago, people got rich by building sites expressly for the purpose of attracting high value AdSense ads, but as with many things, the bubble burst and Google cracked down on what they perceived as ‘made-for-AdSense’ sites. Accordingly, the income from AdSense fell to a fraction of its former glory. Many people reported a drop in their income of 90-95%.

But, even though getting rich with AdSense is now a lot harder than it used to be, it is still a good way to generate small sums from your sites with no real effort.

There are many other contextual advertising services, but until very recently, Google has banned you from displaying them on any web page that also displayed AdSense ads. That ban now seems to have been lifted, so it appears you can now mix and match contextual services.

Of course, contextual advertising such as AdSense isn’t the only way to put ads on pages. You can, if you like, sell banner ads (an umbrella term for all kinds of shapes and sizes of ads) on your site. As an example, take a look at the very popular blog http://www.copyblogger.com/ where you’ll see a block of six ads on the right-hand side. They cost $1500 each per month. Build up your traffic and you could find advertisers willing to buy ads from you too.

* Donations

It is even possible to just ask for money.

Many sites nowadays have ‘buy me a beer’ buttons or links and hope that visitors will value the content of the pages or blog posts sufficiently to want to show their appreciation.

I suspect that this method doesn’t bring in much money, but it certainly brings some – and with no more work on your part than placing the link there in the first place.

* Drive customers to offline businesses

Anther frequently seen method of profiting from your website is to use it as a shop window for your offline business – and to drive customers there. My friend David’s site at www.dmwoodworx.com is a great example. it is a high content site that is focused on showcasing his offline joinery business. He can send potential customers and clients there by way of his business cards, email sig lines and letter headings and the search engines will send him fresh traffic because there is a lot of real content for people to see. Both ways, he puts his offline business in front of interested viewers and generates plenty of new contracts as a result.
This short introduction can only scratch the surface of the many ways to monetize your websites and blogs. In future we will look at them in more detail, and at other great systems and methods that you can consider.

Meanwhile, before you can make money from your site, remember that you have to have people coming to view it – and that is what we’ll look at next time.

#~#~#

A Warning about AdSense – and reading the small print!

Although I have AdSense on several of my sites, and bank a nice check from Google each month as a result, I don’t obsess over my stats and rarely visit my AdSense account online.

Yesterday I did visit it and was greeted by a new terms and conditions agreement that I had to agree to in order to keep my AdSense account.

Of course, I did agree – without bothering to read any of the interminable legalese.

Then I got to thinking. I wondered what changes they had made that required a new ToS agreement. A few minutes Googling and I quickly found the answer – and it is something that everyone who has AdSense on any of their websites NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT.

Very soon (25th May) you will now have to display a Privacy Policy on any website (or property as Google now call such things) that clearly informs visitors that third party cookies and tracking beacons will be placed on their computers if the ads are clicked on.

The actual wording in the new AdSense ToS is:

“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.”

Failure to accept the new terms, and presumably to be compliant with them, by May 25th 2008 will put you at risk of losing your AdSense account.

Not a happy thought.

I’d guess that most people who make a few bucks here and there from AdSense have no idea about the need to put up a privacy policy page – or have much of a clue as to how to put one up anyway.

Well don’t panic! It may be a bit of a fuss and bother, but it isn’t hard.

You don’t need to put the privacy statement on each page – just a link to it.

People who have sites containing hundreds or thousands of pages may have a problem if they don’t have their navigation sections in external files. Sites built with older-style site building programs (the old made-for-AdSense site builders, for example) will struggle. But modern, well-constructed websites that pull in navigation from external files, or most blogs, will be very easy to change.

If you have a big website that displays AdSense and have no clue how to put a link to a privacy policy on all your pages, get yourself a copy of a program called HTML Search & Replace. You can find it at http://www.alentum.com/htmlsr/ (not an affiliate link) where there is a 30-day free trial.

For well constructed sites, adding the link will be just a matter of changing one file, or in a blog, making a link in your blogroll.

What to put in the privacy policy?

I’m no lawyer, so can’t offer suggestions in the appropriate language, but there is a very informative blog called JenSense, by Jennifer Slegg, which offers a boilerplate privacy policy that appears to do the job very nicely. You can copy and paste her text and just change your site’s name and URL details – all with her blessing.

http://www.jensense.com/2008/03/05/adsense-friendly-privacy-policy-sample-for-adsense-publishers-to-use/

This is something that is all too easy to overlook or forget, but come May 25th you may come to regret not taking action. I plan to add the privacy policy to all my sites – whether they display AdSense or not – just to be on the safe side.

Better to get into the habit now than forget about it later.

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The answer to that is a resounding ‘YES’!

While selling other people’s products is a great way to make money online – and a method that I’ll cover in a lot more detail later in the course, I don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that creating products of your own is in some way beyond you. In many ways, it is actually the easier option – and certainly it can be the more profitable one.

When you sell your own products, you get the entire cost price – not just the affiliate commission. And that difference can really add up.

In my book, ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ – http://www.plrsecrets.com – I discuss ways to create top quality information products – ebooks and special reports – from private label sources. In other words, you don’t even have to write them – other people will do that for you. All you have to do is shine them up, add a few personal touches and turn them into a PDF file and you’re set to go. It really couldn’t be easier. And the excellent PLR ebook membership site at http://www.urlnex.us/PLRproEbooks/ is one of the best places to get them from.

But even if you do create your ebooks and reports from private label source material, it is very useful to have made a product that is entirely your own first. That way you’ll know the ropes and be familiar with the pitfalls and procedures.

Below is an article I wrote a while ago about how to create your own info products. It is still very much on the money – and describes a process that I’ve used many times to great effect.

Before we get to that though, let’s consider briefly what the difference is between a report and an ebook.

In my mind, an ebook contains a series of chapters that each examine a different aspect of the book’s topic, whereas a special report tends to be just one extended chapter – delving into just one facet of the subject. As to length, there are no hard and fast rules. My rule of thumb is that anything that is less than 20 pages tends to be report material, whereas an ebook would usually be longer. However, I’ve seen reports that were 50 pages long and ebooks that were 10. It all comes down to the information they contain.

Another possibility is a ‘factsheet’. This can be a resource list, a diagram or a bulleted step-by-step guide that gets right to the point without any verbiage to slow down the reader. These can often be just one or two pages, but can still command relatively high prices.

A good example would be the instructions for a magic trick. It could easily be just one or two pages long, but avid aficionados of the conjuring arts would easily pay $20 or more for the information it contains.

Information is valuable. Don’t undervalue yourself!

#~#~#

How to Create Your Own High-Octane Info Products.

Like most things in life, there are ‘secrets’ to being successful. Creating info products is no different. And like most things, the ‘secrets’ are there for all to see.

The first problem that most people face when starting out as an ‘info-producer’ is in coming up with ideas to write about.

Initially, you have to be a thought recorder. Write down every crazy (or not so crazy) idea that fleetingly crosses your mind. Carry a notebook. This not only lets you capture the brilliant ideas that have a habit of disappearing, but also starts to train your mind into an opportunity state.

Opportunities are like cosmic rays: they are everywhere, but most of the time we can’t see them. With the right training, our brains can easily become very sensitive opportunity detectors.

At some point you will start to notice that many of your brilliant ideas are rubbish. Don’t worry. Keep on writing them down. Even a bad idea can sometimes be adapted later.

You will notice that a lot of your ideas fall into patterns. This is your subconscious mind’s way of pointing you in the right direction. If it keeps on returning to a theme, the chances are that somewhere, buried deep inside you, is gold. Now go digging.

When your notebook is growing, start thinking about your ideas bank. Be objective and ask yourself, “If this was the only project that I could ever do, would I be happy?”

Take all your top scoring ideas. Take a little time and expand each one. Write a broad synopsis of each so that you have a concrete idea of what the final product will look like. Don’t try to write it – just outline it.

What do you put in your outline?

Remember the old adage: ‘I take advice from five wise men: Mr Who, Mr Where, Mr What, Mr Why and Mr When.’

Add to those two more: How and How Much.

Make every section or chapter answer one of these seven questions (and you can ask each of them in different ways) and you have the outline of your book.

Now you should have a shortlist of realistic, doable projects – any one of which you would be happy to run with.

Next comes the most important step of all: do your homework. The best product in the world is worthless unless there is a market for it. So how do you find that out?

1. Take your shortlist and talk to 5 good friends. See what they have to say. Do they all favor one over the others? Why? What is it about it that captures their imagination? Would they buy it? Who do they think would buy it?

2. Pay attention to their advice, but don’t even think of acting on it. Even if they all think every one of your ideas stinks, it could easily be them that is wrong: they may simply be the wrong audience.

3. Write a very detailed description for yourself of exactly who you think will buy your products. Really try to get inside the mind of someone who could use what you have to say.

4. Write down at least ten words (or 2 word phrases) that most sum up each of your possible products. Define your keywords, in other words.

5. Get yourself online and search every search engine you know for every one of those key words or phrases. Check out as many sites as you can that the engines throw up (and don’t just look at the first page of listings either). Get a feel for the market. What you are doing here is trying to find out if there is already a market for your product, and what the people searching for it are being offered.

6. Be brutally honest with yourself. If Google only comes up with 10 sites for one of your keywords, and none of the sites are particularly relevant, then you can bet that right now, there isn’t much of a market. If this is the case, ask yourself honestly if you have the staying power and specialized knowledge to carve a completely new niche. And where would you go to reach them?

7. Find newsgroups and forums that are relevant and lurk. Are people asking questions that your product will answer? Can you discern a need?

8. If you can, you may have the next super-niche product all ready to be written. Congratulations!

9. If you can’t, move on to the next project on your list and repeat.

This might all sound rather long-winded – and it certainly flies in the face of the proponents of ‘create a product fast’ philosophy, but it needn’t take all that long.

At the end of the day, you will have achieved three things. You will KNOW which project to work on, and why. You will KNOW who to target. You will KNOW what your future projects (and backend sales) will be.

And, as a by-product, you will have become a super- powered opportunity magnet in the process.

As you can see, the real secret is taking action. But if you are like 99.9% of people, you will find excuses for not taking action.

Every single excuse is ‘getaroundable.’ For example:

“I don’t know if anyone will be interested.”

It certainly helps to write about your passions – if only because your time spent in research will be minimized. But it isn’t strictly necessary. Do you really think that people who write fascinating fact- filled articles in magazines are all passionate about their subjects? No, they are just writers who are given an assignment.

If you can’t find a subject that YOU are passionate about, find one that SOMEONE ELSE is passionate about. Maybe that someone else is a friend or family member – great! Start a joint project.

Or maybe you don’t have friends who are passionate about anything (hard to believe, but possible). Then go and find a subject that a lot of people are trying to find out about. Do a search on the most popular keywords. I just did that and these seven all came in the top 50:

* Weight Loss
* Jobs
* Prom Dresses
* Travel
* Recipes
* Dogs
* Baby names

Now, I’m not passionate about any of those, but I can clearly see how any one of them could be turned into an information-packed special report that would sell for 10 bucks or more. Can you?

* Weight Loss: What are the most popular diets in America today? Go to newsgroups, find out what people are saying about them. Find two or three people who have succeeded in losing serious weight on each diet. Interview them. Package the whole thing up as an ‘insiders guide to today’s diet plans.’

* Jobs: How about a state-by state analysis of unemployment figures. A regional plan for optimizing your chances to find a new job. A directory of job- seekers resources. A book on 101 thing you can do if you are laid off. A report on ‘home workers guide to surviving the recession.’

* Prom Dresses: Now I know nothing about dresses, and I’ve never been to a prom, but this subject is not only highly important to those involved, it is also emotionally charged, and perennial. What more does a business need? Subjects that could be included: this years styles and colors. How much should you pay? The best suppliers. It is highly researchable and I’d bet, very much in demand. This search term came 28th out of 500 so the market is pretty big!

* Travel: Where do you live? Folks come there. They want to know the best places to go. You can tell them. I’m not going to labor this one, the scope is so huge.

* Recipes: This is a big field, but you can narrow it down. Everybody loves cook books. Take a look in any bookstore. And there is a world-wide market. The secret here is to link it with something else that people want. So, to use our example above, you could produce a series of recipe books for each of the top diet plans. See where I’m going?

* Dogs: Dog lovers are obsessed. If you own a dog you’ll understand. If you don’t, you will be baffled. Yet canine = cash. You can write about breeds, training, behavior, exercise. Just go to the library, or search on Google and facts will fall at your feet. Pick them up and put them in your book.

* Baby names: Okay, there are books in the stores with lists of names. SO WHY ARE PEOPLE SEARCHING ONLINE? There is a market. People want the answers NOW. Not next Saturday when they can get to a bookshop. What can you do that is different? How about a list of all the names celebrities have called their kids in the last 5 years? What about a list of names with all the meanings, plus the numerology forecast for each one?

See what I mean? You may not be passionate about any of these things, but if I told you that when you have finished writing your book 1000 people will pay you $10 each to read it – will that spark a little passion in your belly? It does in mine!

“I can’t write that well.”

That is really just an excuse for not doing it.

It doesn’t matter one little bit if you can’t spell – the software will sort most of it out for you.

So what if you don’t understand grammar? Most ebooks are written in a very conversational style. Can you talk to your friends? Write like that. Totally correct grammar is often a disadvantage online.

When your book is written, give it to a few friends to read over for you. Listen to their suggestions because no matter how good at writing you are, other people will always spot your mistakes. You can even post on forums for people to review/critique your work.

“It’s not that easy. I have been trying for six months or better to find something to develop and cannot seem to find that one big hit-that home run.”

The problem here is that you have paralyzed yourself by wanting to see the end result before you have put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). That is where you have gone wrong. If you tell yourself that you can’t do it, then GUESS WHAT? You CAN’T!

The only way to finish a project is to start it.

To summarize:

# Create your own ideas bank.
# Find out what people are interested in.
# Find a subject that you like (passion is optional).
# Write your 7-question outline.
# Research until your eyes hurt – looking especially for facts that are not easily accessible.
# Write, write, write. Don’t even think about if it sounds good, or reads right. Just get words on paper.
# When it is done, read it over and then put it aside for a week or two.
# When you come back to it, re-read it and then start to rewrite it.
# At the point that you feel you can’t do any more, ask other people to chip in.
# Then, if you have done a little each day, you will have a product to sell.

There is an old writer’s mnemonic: WRITER

Write Read Ignore Trash Edit Rewrite

Do you want to have an information product of your own to sell? Then congratulations, it is right there for you to take.

Or do you want to find more excuses for not doing anything? It is your choice.

Go and get your book started. You know you can.

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Don’t believe everything that you hear.

Internet marketing should be a relatively easy pursuit, but it is, in reality, made much more complex by the secrecy that surrounds a lot of what goes on.

* People like me are secretive about the websites we have – because we fear that others may copy our ideas.

* A lot of the time people are secretive about their real earnings – either because they aren’t making nearly as much as they like others to think, or because they don’t like to brag.

* Successful people are often secretive about their exact methods – often because they don’t want to jeopardize their forthcoming ebook launch.

* But most of all, the search engines are ultra secretive about everything. They don’t want us to know how they rank sites. They don’t want us to work out what their algorithms are. They are not above issuing false information to muddy the waters.

The search engines know only too well that if they were to be open and transparent, everyone would game the system and then their search results would be useless.

All this has meant that an industry has grown up of people who would offer their opinions as if they were secret nuggets of truth.

The purveyors of half-truths, honest misunderstandings and outright lies do so for a variety of reasons.

* Some want to be admired by others.

* Some are desperate for attention.

* Some are malicious.

* Some believe they are helping others.

* Some want to make money.

All that matters is that as far as much of what you read or hear about Internet marketing and the search engines is concerned, take it with a pinch and a half of salt.

Be very careful whose advice you follow and wherever possible, check things out for yourself.

And remember – if it sounds too easy, it probably is.

So should you listen to me?

In this course I will do my very best to tell you about things that I know are true. If I’m not sure, I’ll say so. And wherever possible I will try to check things out for myself.

But I’m not infallible and I can just as easily pass on a half truth or a misunderstanding as anyone else. I will try to avoid as many of the outright lies as I can though.

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In pre-Internet days, if you had a spark of entrepreneurship you had to start your own business out there in the real world. It was tough and it was expensive.

Many people made money from direct response and direct mail advertising, but the entry price was high – thousands of dollars to even test a small campaign – and the failure rate was astronomical.

Even today the number of offline startups who survive and thrive past their first year is tiny. Starting a business offline is truly for the rich and the brave.

The Internet, though, has changed all that.

Now it is possible to start a business online – that has a great chance of success – without breaking your bank, and without the risk of losing your shirt.

You can literally start an online business for the price of a domain name – less than $10 per year – and some cheap hosting ($under $5 per month).

In fact, you can even start an online business for free if you use services like Blogger.com to created your first web presence.

So how does a non-Internet-savvy person get started on the road to effortless overnight Internet riches?

Before we go any further, let’s dispel three thoughts you may be harboring:

To start with, forget the overnight part. Even though starting a business online is easy and cheap, it is still a business that needs time to build up. If you need to make money to pay this month’s bills, don’t pin all your hopes on your fledgling online business. A regular income in three to six months is doable, but three weeks is unlikely.

And put that word ‘effortless’ out of your mind. Anything worth having is worth working for, and an online business is certainly worth having. Be prepared to put in the effort and the hours. This is a business we are talking about, not a miracle!

Finally, throw out the ‘Internet riches’ dream. Sure, there are some people who make six and seven figure incomes – and there is no reason why you can’t too – but they almost never do it right from scratch. Success takes time to build up to. You might strike lucky, just as you might win the lottery, but the reality for 99% of people who set out to make a living online is that those who succeed make a living, not a fortune.

The most likely scenario is that you’ll work 12 hours a day building your online business and not see a red cent in return for several months. When income does start to flow your way, it will be small, and you’ll wonder why you are bothering. But one day, in three, six or even twelve months, you’ll look at your income from your online activities and realize that it really can be a living.

You’ll be an Internet marketer.

Still interested? Good. You just might just have what it takes.

This ‘Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online’ series of articles will walk you through the process from the very beginning. Every detail will be covered so you won’t be left scratching your head.

By the end, you will have all the knowledge and tools at your fingertips.

And if you use the knowledge and wield the tools, you will be an Internet marketer.

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