The Problem With The Make Money Online Niche

In this extract from a comment on Perry Marshall’s blog, he sets out the problem with the make money online niche:

The problem is you’re selling “how to make money on the Internet” information, and that’s how you’re attempting to succeed online.

There is a whole host of problems with that:

1) If you do this the way you’ve probably been taught, it’s nothing but a glorified chain letter.

2) You haven’t succeeded yourself, so you have no business teaching others how to succeed.

3) This general ‘get rich on the Internet’ topic is one of the most competitive categories in e-commerce, period. Telling a regular guy off the street he can get rich on the Internet by showing other people how to get rich on the Internet is like telling your grandmother that she can go down to the local martial arts dojang, take on 3 black belts at one time and kick their ass.

Fat chance. This particular niche is a game for razor sharp, A-level marketers. Not for entry level people.

All that happens to entry level people is, one way or another their money ends up in the hands of razor sharp, A-level marketers and you have nothing to show for it. All kinds of razor sharp, A-level marketers take advantage of this fact without the slightest twinge of guilt.

(Their rationalization for exploiting peoples’ ignorance is: “Well if I don’t take their money they’ll just waste it on some other equally stupid thing.” Well hey, it’s not like they’re exactly wrong about that…even piranhas have their rightful place in the food chain, right? Hey pal, I’m just saying, if you’re not a piranha, don’t swim with them. Find a pond that just has regular frogs and dragonflies and hang out there.)

4) Carbon copying other peoples’ product is a doomed strategy, no matter what niche you’re in. Sure you might try to be the guy who makes El Cheapo knockoff products in China and sure, some people make a lot of money doing that, but the bottom line is: If you don’t have a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) then sooner or later you’re dead.

My advice to you:

Abandon this niche entirely. Stop selling “get rich” stuff. Stop selling “how to market stuff on the Internet” stuff. Do a thorough inventory of yourself and your knowledge and your skills.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Find some OTHER niche (hey, there are only a MILLION other things you could sell on the Internet – yes, literally a million). Find some other product to sell. Find something that has NOTHING to do with making money on the Internet.

Maybe you’re familiar with specialized motor parts or some sort of industrial equipment or maybe there’s some odd thing you collect, like pink flamingos or wrought iron furniture. Or you grow orchids or collect 16th century romance novels or movies from the 1930’s.

Or maybe you can go to a trade show and find manufacturers in some market where most people are clueless about marketing, and build them an online presence. Work out some kind of profit sharing deal, or get them to put you on retainer. Sell that product.

(That’s a real useful tip I just gave you there.)

Or sell some kind of information about that topic. Like I said, do a thorough inventory of what you know and where you’ve been and go into a niche you’re intimately familiar with.

My nephew Josh asked me advice about starting a home business and here’s what I told him:

Josh,

1. Don’t get into a pre-packaged business. There are LOTS of them out there. Network Marketing deals, Internet deals, etc. You should capitalize on your individuality.

2. Doing something online…. boy I deal with that ALL THE TIME. Is is VERY competitive. An at-home online business is the white picket fence of the 21st century. Super great – if you can pull it off. Most common things are things like selling ebooks or selling things on ebay. If you do something like that you have to specialize in some particular niche.

The people who do best at that 1) know their subject and their customers EXTREMELY well; and/or are 2) very in-tune and comfortable with the whole online scene and culture and websites and everything.

The more nichy your topic, the more you can rely on #1 instead of #2.

3. Anything you know how to do – like plumbing or handyman stuff or swimming pools or repair hang-gliders… or knowing how to cook or take care of kids or organize a house… as soon as you have a way of advertising and getting customers, you have a business. Might not necessarily be an “at home” business, but it’s a business.

Oh, and by the way if you do a business like handyman stuff or repair or remodeling, all you have to do is show up on time, answer the phone, tell people the truth, finish projects on-time and on-budget, and you’ll kick everybody else’s ass in town. In a business like that, half the secret to success is literally “showing up.” You’ll get lots of referrals, customers will love you, and you’ll make a good living. Even in an economy that sucks.

4. If you know what you want to do, then I can advise you about promoting it. Let’s take plumbing for example… to advertise yourself as a plumber you need all the certifications and everything. Doesn’t keep you from doing it when people need it and getting paid for it, if you’re a ‘handyman’ instead of a plumber.

5. Any business that is going to work for you is based on the gifts and skills that you mostly already have. So it’s actually kind of sitting under your nose all along. You just need to start taking inventory. Asking other people what they see you being good at. Listing your skills and looking at all the things you’ve done etc.

Here’s something I sent to a personal friend of mine, Anita, last summer when she asked me pretty much the same question:

Anita,

OK, here’s some things I’d like you to do… Good stuff to do over your morning coffee or whatever.

BTW what we’re ultimately looking for here is intimate knowledge of various microcosms in the world, where you may have sell-able skills.

BUT….. right now I don’t want you to think in terms of selling or jobs or all that while you’re doing this. That would be a limiting way to think of it right now.That can fall out of it later. For now, just crank out the list o’ stuff.

-List every magazine you’ve ever subscribed to for any length of time

-Same for newsletters & various publications that you consistently enjoyed reading

-Every job or industry you worked in long enough to become really familiar – even if you’ve been out of it for a long time

-Every “group” that you’ve been a member of. Examples could be – golf, Presbyterian church, girl scouts, cancer survivors support group, bowling league, pottery making class, David Hasselhoff Fan Club, horsemanship, stamp collecting, backgammon, owning rental property, investing, chess club, etc.

-Every major schooling / training / educational experience you’ve had (like travel to Africa or airplane mechanic school or nursing degree)

-Every hobby or fascination you’ve had

-5 topics you know a lot about, that most people don’t know you know a lot about

-Specific products, services or experiences that you have great familiarity with (like a washing machine that broke down so much, pretty soon you knew how to fix it better than the repairman)

-Topics you own more than 5 books on

-A story of 2 major personal victories from each of the following: childhood; teen years; early adult; recent adult. Tell what happened and what made you feel GOOD about it.

Why don’t you chunk on that for awhile and let me know what you come up with. I bet somewhere buried in that list is a marketplace that would pay money for your skills.

From that you can form a USP, determine something unique to sell, have a ready-made understanding of the customers who buy that sort of thing, and have a MUCH easier go of it.

If you in fact do have a solid grasp of basic direct marketing principles, then I DARE you to do this homework assignment – and I mean, do *everything* I just said to do right here – I dare you to do that and not have some kind of successful business that you are really proud of, 1 year from today.

Perry Marshall

This comment was made in response to a frustrated make money online marketer after Perry had looked at his website.

What he is advising is to take the marketing skills learnt in the make money online niche and use them to promote products and offers outside that niche, preferably in an area that caters to your strengths, because the competition will be weaker.

Focus on Changing Lives

Placing the focus on changing lives when creating your business is where it’s at in the opinion of Sean Mize… and I agree with him. Here is his latest email to me:

What would happen if you discovered that what people wanted to know – wasn’t what they needed?

You’d stop teaching it immediately and start teaching them what they need, right?

Over the course of the last year, it has become crystal clear to me that folks who want to get started online with nothing, and just want to “find that silver bullet” that will change their life . . . what I teach doesn’t work for them.

What does work . . . .

I have found that when the following 3 things occur, success can happen:

1) when someone has an idea about changing lives in a particular way and they determine they are going to focus on learning how to change as many lives as possible

2) when they focus on building a rock-solid foundation in their business that simply supports #1 above (not a zillion other things that big marketers tell you you have to have)

3) and this is a bonus . . . the most effective business model I know of, I have taught, and I have seen, in online marketing, is the coaching model, the one I teach in my book, Anyone Can Coach.

When I see folks who do those 3 things, I see success.

When folks try to do any of these things:

look for a perfect system

focus on traffic

focus on the money

copying what they see others doing to make money

get involved in fads

think they can game anything

or anything else not directly related to #1, #2, and #3 above . . . they spin their wheels relentlessly.

So with that said, I’m changing my own focus to teaching those 3 things- the things that have had the MOST impact for my clients over the last 10 years.

The question is ‘what can you and I do to change other peoples lives?’

5 Internet Marketing Planning Questions To Answer

This is the text of an email from Sean Mize.

One of the biggest challenges I see when working with folks who are trying to build something from scratch but they keep spinning their wheels is that they aren’t real clear on who they are going to help, and how they are going to charge . . .

And last night I thought of a 5-question process that can help you do that . . .so here it is, I hope it’s helpful to you!

Take out a sheet of paper (yes, do this old-school)

Write down the answers to each:

1) What is the thing that you teach (for example, how to use youtube, how to quilt, how to blog, how to think confidently, etc)?

2) Who is your target market (aka, in normal spoken English, who NEEDS what you teach? for example, people who want to use youtube for traffic, people who want to quilt, people who want to blog, people who want to think confidently)

3) How will you teach them? For example: write books (like on Amazon), record videos (like on youtube), create pictorial manuals (like pdfs with pictures)

4) How will you sell your teachings? (for example, on Amazon [books], udemy or similar new sites [videos], from your site (pictorial manuals)

5) How much will you charge? For example, $10 per book, or $97 per video course or $50 per pictorial manual, or something like $30 a month for membership access or $97 a month for coaching?

This might take some time, to drill deep and figure out what you want to do , . . but once you have it, it’s like it drives your business

Because right now you may not even know what you are supposed to be working on, you are just working on a part here, a part there.

BUT . . . once you have taken the time to determine the answers to these questions . . it’s like you have a compass point to point towards, and you have something solid you can build, instead of some ethereal concept of an “im business”

Seriously . . . take the time to dig deep and find the answers to these questions for YOU and you will be amazed at your new-found clarity!

I did this exercise and here are my answers:

1) What is the thing you teach?

A: How to make money online, working from home. I am seeking to simplify and systemise systems and processes that lead to the goal of generating a reliable income for those seeking financial freedom.

2) Who is your target market?

A: People who want to quit their job or who simply want to supplement their income.

3) How will you teach them?

A: I will use all modalities including text, audio, video and coaching/consulting

4) How will you sell your teachings?

A: I will build a list and seek to create a relationship of trust with that list . I will use paid advertising, the warrior Forum and JV Zoo to build my list

5) How much will you charge?

A: I will have a variety of product offerings including, free, low ticket ($4.95 -$17), mid-ticket ($27-$97) and higher ticket ($97 – $4,997)

In answering question 2, it may help to write out an ‘avatar’ of your perfect customer. This is what I wrote:

Customer Avatar

George is in a job that is stressful but reasonably well paid. He commutes to work every day and the commute is getting more and more difficult as the amount of traffic on the roads increases.

He cannot afford to just give up his work because he has commitments such as a house mortgage and all the usual monthly bills to pay.

Whilst his job is reasonably secure, he realizes that he is now only going through the motions to earn money. He has lost his initial passion for his work and he now looks forward to the weekends so he can get away from the stress of work.

He often works long hours and even takes work home in the evening, sometimes just so that he can keep on top of his heavy workload.

Whilst he would like more holidays, holidays are really a problem because he has to work hard to get away on holiday and there is a huge backlog of work to go through when he returns from holiday. This means that any good the holiday could do him in terms of relaxation is soon dissipated by the stress on both ends of his holiday dates.

Just booking holidays is difficult because he has to fit in with the holiday dates of his colleagues at work and often George finds that he is taking holidays on dates where holiday prices are at their peak.

Sometimes George wonders if he will live long enough to reach the retirement he is saving for, particularly as retirement dates seem to be extending as pension funds realise that people are living longer than before and investment returns and interest rates have reduced.

His long hours at work means that he is physically and mentally unfit. He often has headaches from stress and, because he forgets to look after himself, and so does not drink enough water, this gives rise to chronic constipation.

He is over-weight and generally unfit.

There is an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach – he knows that he needs to change the way he lives his life but he is trapped by his commitments and the fear of not having enough money to pay his bills.

He is often given to bouts of worry because his thoughts are unhealthy.

He thinks about the fact that his life is gradually ebbing away and he has not fulfilled all the dreams that he had when he was younger and full of hope.

Whilst he can afford some of the material things that he dreamed of, like a good car and a nice house, somehow these have not satisfied him spiritually. He feels trapped on a treadmill that is gradually grinding his life down.

Perhaps he set the wrong goals in life for himself?

Perhaps he is in the wrong job?

George asks himself how long can he hang-on in his current job given that he is finding it increasingly difficult to motivate himself to achieve the work goals that are set by his employer who always want more than was achieved last year?

Whilst George is getting no younger, there seems to be a well of youthful up and coming talent in his business who could soon replace him if he doesn’t perform to expectations.

In an over-crowded work market, George knows it would be difficult to find another job. The competition for jobs is fierce and George is not as young, confident and energetic as he once was.

George has a friend called Mark who lives locally…

Mark works from home and is an internet marketer. Whilst George doesn’t know exactly what Mark does, he knows that he regularly sees Mark walking his dog in the morning, usually when George is waiting impatiently at the bottom of the road in his car in a long queue of traffic!

Mark looks like he has all the time in the world, whilst George only has a feeling of rising impatience to get on his way to work.

Mark works from home, so George knows that he doesn’t waste time and money every day trying to battle through the traffic to work.

For George that would be at least 2 hours per day commuting – across a working year of say 240 days that amounts to 480 hours or 20 x 24-hour days simply spent trying to get too and from work. Assuming George works 10 hours a day that amounts to 48 working days commuting!

George wonders what he could do with the time if he had 48 free working days in a year available simply by not commuting to work!

Mark has also told George that one of the things he discovered was that his monthly budget reduced a lot when he stopped going to a job. He saved on petrol/fares, lunches, expensive suits and his car mileage dropped to a couple of thousand miles a year. This reduced the depreciation and maintenance costs on his car.

Because Mark works from home, he could also carry out most home maintenance jobs himself without the need to call in expensive contractors. Tasks like looking after the garden, painting the house etc are easy to do when so much time is saved from the daily commute.

Mark is always available for his family to help out with things like looking after his grandchildren when his daughter needs some help or simply picking them up from school.

Mark and his family can go on holiday when they want to – he is not constrained by fitting into the holiday dates of others. In fact Mark says that because every day is like a holiday now he doesn’t feel the need for holidays much – in fact he prefers to take time out to explore his local area and really have quality time enjoying nature, tending the garden and his hobby of photography.

Mark has confided to George that he threw his mobile phone away when he quit his corporate job. In his former job he was always at the beck and call of customers, staff and his boss, who would leave messages if he did not answer immediately. This was another cause of stress as Mark felt that he was constantly at everyone else’s beck and call according to their agenda.

The same held true for his email inbox. As soon as he answered an email, it seemed like two new ones had arrived. He could never get ahead of the game.

Since leaving his job, Mark looks at his inbox for just 30 minutes each day and his help desk is outsourced to a virtual assistant.

Marks health has improved dramatically since he left his job – he has much less stress, no worries, he is kept fit by walking his dog 2 hours a day – time when he can also take pictures with his camera to indulge his hobby.

Mark has time now to really connect with his family and friends because he is not pressed for time.

As far as his work is concerned, Mark works around 4 hours a day. He says that since he set up his initial business, he spends most of that time writing emails, creating content and driving traffic – no onerous deadlines. He is simply building and maintaining his business one step at a time.

He has no stock-holding cost, no creditors to keep sweet, no premises costs, no transport costs, no staffing costs (although he occasionally uses freelance contractors who get paid only when he is satisfied by their output) – his overheads are low compared to a standard bricks and mortar business.

Mark originally realized that, if he could grow his internet marketing business to a position where he could simply cover his adjusted monthly personal spending budget, he was effectively free from his job.

Mark tells George that to do that he worked evenings and weekends to establish his internet marketing business and it took him about 6 months to get accumulate the skills and get to a position where he was earning enough money to safely quit his job without worrying too much about whether or not he would make it.

Of course, he was worried about making the leap but he also realized that when he quit his full-time job he would have more time to grow his online business. Mark also said that he had around the equivalent of 3 months personal expenditure as a safety net in his savings in case things didn’t work as expected.

Overall, Mark never regretted the decision to leave his corporate job – he soon appreciated that the decision could extend the length of his natural life and the quality of his life experience had also increased dramatically.

Mark quickly realised that many of the material trappings that most people think are important are actually more of a burden. We simply desire them because marketers tell us that we need them. The satisfaction of owning stuff soon fades after purchase and we are quickly yearning for the next shiny object.

By distancing himself from ‘normal’ society Mark’s common-sense soon returned and he set himself on a course that would give himself peace of mind and deep satisfaction from things that are essentially free – nature, knowledge via the internet, doing things with his hands, creating information products using text, audio and video – a small legacy of work that was tangibly his small way of making a positive difference to other people’s lives.

Mark now simply shows other people what he did to replace his income and they reward him well for his knowledge.

After all, Mark asked, what price would George put on gaining his freedom from his stressful and unsatisfying job?

I hope these 5 internet marketing planning questions will help you to plan your business.

Building Your Business in 2017

Thinking about building your business in 2017?

It’s different for different folks, depending on what you already have in place.

If you do not have a clear picture of who you are going to help and how you are going to help them, the most important thing you can do to build your business in 2017 is:

–> to clarify your purpose, who you are going to help, and how you are going to help them
(Selling stuff you don’t care about to people you don’t care about, doesn’t count.)

If you have a solid picture of who you are going to help, the most important thing you can do to build your business is:

–> build a list of people who are the people you want to help

If you have a solid picture of who you want to help AND you have a list of people you can help, the most important thing you can do to build your business is:

–> Find out how you can help them best and get paid for it, and start helping.

That might mean:

a free layer (daily email, blog posts, youtube videos),
paid layer (like $97 – $997 training programs, a membership) and /or
a coaching layer (coaching program, mastermind program, etc)

So . . .based on where you are at in the 3 – phase process of building your business, do YOU need to:

1) figure out who you can help them most

2) build a list

3) build a 3 layer delivery system

This is the way to start building your business in 2017! And a Merry Christmas to all my readers.

The 7 Components of a $100,000 a Year Business

The 7 components of a $100,000 a year business (or a million a year, or $600 million a year like Agora is purported to do):

visitors who have the need you solve–>
squeeze page to get folks on your list –>
thank you page that builds credibility–>
sales page for product –>
delivery page for product –>
sales page for membership –>
delivery area for membership

For $10k a month (roughly $100,000 a year) it might look like this:

10,000 visitors who have the need you solve–>
squeeze page to get folks on your list (get 2,000 subscribers per month) –>
thank you page that builds credibility–>
sales page for 1 product –>(sell 50 units at $97)
delivery page for product –>
sales page for 1 membership –> (have 200 members at $30 a month)
delivery area for membership

Looks very easy doesn’t it! The devil is in the detail.

You need to drive targeted traffic at a reasonable cost (if you could get targeted traffic for 3 cents a click, which is low, it would cost you $300) to a squeeze page that converts at 20% (not too difficult), convert 2.5% of your subscribers to buy a $97 product and 10% of them to a $30 a month membership.

These latter two goals require a good offer and excellent conversion skills including some skill with copy-writing.

Also, you might have to pay $3-5,000 for 10,000 clicks if you are using solo ads.

The key would be to start with a low cost test of your funnel and then gradually scale up using split-testing to optimise your sales funnel.

The 7-components above do not include the fact that in order to optimise your returns you will need to follow up with subscribers and buyers using email marketing.

Whilst the system above is one strategy, there are many others. For example, you might start with lower cost products at the front of your funnel to increase conversions and recover the upfront cost of traffic before trying to convert them to your higher priced/recurring income products.

Hopefully by illustrating the 7 components for a $100,000 a year business, it gives you a flavour of what is required to succeed in this business.

How To Be A Leader In Your Niche

I have just been reading a 25 page report by Jeffrey Davis called ‘Write To Lead’ which is really about how to be a leader in your niche. Here are a few of the key points in the report..

He says that in order to lead, you do need some grounding of expertise gained through one or more of the following areas:

Experience – what you have produced or created with your own customers or clients
Skills – what skills you bring to bear in your business
Knowledge – what you know to be true in your niche
Research – what you are willing to discover through reading, interviewing, viewing and testing

He then gives ’10 Kickstart Actions’:

Claim Your Content Influence Areas – this is an exercise where you draw a circle on your notebook. Outside the circle you list words or phrases that you do NOT want to be associated with. Inside the circle you list words or phrases that you want to write about, research or discover. You refine these down to 3-5 topics that will become your Content Influence Areas.
Take Your True Stance – you have a point of view and certain values. You examine your niche and contribute your own ideas and critique
Get Obsessed and Get Devoted – gives you the courage to surmount unpredictable difficulties. Your words line up with your choices and actions.
Give Your Readers a Slice of PIE – consider the purpose of what you write – there are 3 purposes:
Comment on and add to the big picture – dare to ground your ideas in a greater context than your personal experience. Examine trends and conversations in your niche.
Test it and ship it – the act of writing clarifies your ideas on your topic. It doesn’t have to be perfect – you learn by shipping and testing your ideas in public (possibly on social media). You are a mad scientist in a laboratory of your own making.
Fashion Your Voice – consider your ‘tone’ – it’s not what you say but how you say it. Create a writing persona.
Ask & Listen – be curious and ask questions e.g. at the end of an article to get comments, on social media, crowd-source an article (i.e. get different peoples opinions on a subject).
Search Again – research to see what is currently going on in your niche – top 5 books, 3 current experts etc
Tell stories rather than sell stuff – tell stories to illustrate why you are writing what you do- use experiences gained by you, your clients or other people.

This is simply a short summary of the report I read but it does give you a place to start when you are considering how you can create thought leadership in your niche or you are thinking about how to become a leader in your niche.

Choose Your Goals Carefully

In this article I want to discuss the topic of choosing goals.

I was watching a TV programme last night called ‘How The Other Half Lives’. The programme specifically covered the lives of billionaires living in New York (which apparently has more billionaires than any other city in the world.)

After watching for a while I turned to my wife and said ‘I honestly don’t think that they have anything I really want‘.’

In fact their lifestyle slightly disgusted me because of the excess consumption. It was almost as if they really didn’t know what to spend their money on.

We were introduced to $4m plus ‘sneakers’ covered in diamonds, a picture that cost $3m which was a black ‘V’ on a white background, watches costing $400,000, a city apartment on sale for $54m (reduced from $60m) etc. Most of it looked like worthless, over-valued junk. The owners no longer knew the value of anything in my honest opinion.

One of the wealthy widows lived in an opulent apartment inside an exclusive hotel at a cost of $38,000 per week, excluding room service! The apartment looked somewhat cramped because it was over-filled with ‘priceless’ objects. The main advantage to the apartment was that room service was on call 24/7 and the lady had security. In fact,from the outside, it looked like a gilded cage to me!

The latter profile introduced the idea that having wealth was in fact a huge security problem. In other words, these wealthy people needed to secure themselves from other people that wanted to steal what they had.

Also, it occurred to me that in our relationships with other people, we would never know whether they liked you for who you are or because they wanted something. This suspicion would infect every human interaction, no matter how innocuous.

In fact, having wealth carries it’s own high price – firstly in acquiring it and secondly in keeping and spending it.

Perhaps we are all guilty of over-looking the things that truly have value:

Time – such as the time we have left between now and when we die. Queen Elizabeth I said on her deathbed ‘My kingdom for another moment of time’. If someone said to me, ‘you have a week left to live’ suddenly each minute would have a much higher value than it had before – would we really spend it chasing after more money and more ‘stuff’?
Living in the moment. Most of us live our lives in our head, worrying about things that happened in the past or may happen in the future. This means that we don’t live properly in the present moment and appreciate everything we already have in the current moment. We are looking for life satisfaction at some time in the future through the acquisition of more things, which only provide a short-term pleasure before we soon start looking for the next ‘fix’.
Peace of mind. Without peace of mind, we cannot truly enjoy anything. I don’t believe that the constant desire to acquire more stuff and the effort required in keeping and maintaining it securely from other people can really deliver peace of mind. Too many possessions, beyond the necessities in life, can in fact be a burden (- buying, insuring, storing, organising, maintaining, repairing and selling are all necessary actions that absorb our valuable life.) My wife and I have two garages full of surplus junk – a huge burden to us because we cannot summon up the energy or motivation to deal with it.
Maintaining health – both physical and mental health. Ironically, we usually take our health for granted until one day we have a health problem. Then nothing else in life can be enjoyed until we recover. Whilst it is true that we can purchase better health care if we are wealthy, perhaps we need to ask ourselves to what extent the pursuit of wealth impairs our physical and mental health?
Our connection with nature. I walk my dog for at least two hours every day – in the early morning and early evening. These are my favourite times of day – on many days it feels almost like a meditation as I try to enjoy the present moment in nature. Sometimes, I get lost in wonder, simply watching life around the river or staring vacantly up a tree. (Nothing gives me more delight than walking past a long line of commuter traffic with people staring out of their car windows as I amble slowly past with my dog on my way to the river and the park.)
Doing what I want to do. Simply having the time to do what I want to do – whether its working or simply reading a book or watching a video or gardening or visiting my grandchildren – without someone else dictating what I do with my times is priceless to me. I don’t think that I would have the same time freedom if I was super wealthy, even if I employed others to do what I didn’t want to do, (because I would have to employ them, pay them, monitor their performance, meet with them, lead them, train them, sack them etc etc)
Relationships with others. Often the time and effort required to accumulate huge wealth means that we have less time for loving and caring human relationships. Is this a price that is worth paying? On your death bed, you may not think so…

I think the secret to living is largely embodied in the teaching of Eckhart Tolle and the degree to which we can live our life in the present moment. This enables us to connect more deeply with life – even the simplest of things have increased value and piquancy. It is a way of savouring life as it already is without craving satisfaction at some time in the future or the need for anything more than we already have.

I have a theory that the reason why people are constantly travelling and going on holiday is that they are constantly looking for something more in life – some satisfaction that can be acquired by going somewhere else.

The problem is that wherever they go, they take themselves and their faulty thinking.

It’s true that we can sometimes get a new perspective by changing our circumstances, but often, as soon as we return to every day life, we are back in the same way of thinking and living– worrying about things in the past and what the future holds, always looking for satisfaction at some future indeterminate time and date.

I wonder how many people take the time to sit down and really think through what they want in their life. Even if we do this, it easy to think superficially and put down a lot of stuff like houses, cars, boats etc

The reality is that those that actually achieve goals like this often find very little satisfaction (or at least only short term satisfaction) and quickly need to strive for something more to make sense of their life.

What if personal freedom was the goal? Or helping others?

This means setting a goal that delivers a reasonable quality of life without having to surrender personal freedom of choice.

This might mean that we look at what is essential to living a comfortable life and giving up excessive desires.

For example, having a fast super-car may be struck from our list of goals when we consider that our existing car essentially does the same job i.e. gets us from point A to B albeit with less speed or comfort.

Setting a goal to make a million pounds in our business may be a goal that is abandoned in favour of a business plan to deliver enough to live a simpler, more connected life – a life where we don’t have to give up enjoyment of the present moment in order to strive excessively to achieve a goal that ultimately delivers a superficial benefit without real value.

Projecting forward to our death bed, what is it we would want to say about our life? That you made a huge pile of money and bought a lot of man-made stuff ?

Or… you savoured each moment of your life and connected deeply and gratefully with what you already had?

Perhaps you would want to say that you enriched the lives of everyone you interacted with? That you lived a life that added some real value to their lives?

These are questions that we all need to answer when making our life choices if we are not to lead a life of ‘quiet desperation’. Sifting through choices and selecting what is truly important is time well-employed but you will need to connect more deeply with yourself in order to do this effectively.

I hope that this article will help you to reassess your personal and business goals and to think about what you really want to achieve in your life.

You may even find that you already have everything you need in order to live a happy and fulfilling life! How amazing would that be?

5 Vital Parts

There are 5 vital parts to your information marketing business, regardless of the income level to which you aspire, and the skill you teach your clients, members, buyers, and subscribers.

1) The thing that you teach that changes lives, that solves problems, or relieves challenges.

2) Traffic – A way to get people who have the problems you solve or the challenges you relieve, to your website and ultimately to become a subscriber so that you can communicate with them, discover how you can help, build trust, and ultimately sell to them your solution.

3) A List – A way, or ways, to get them to join your list as a subscriber i.e. a way to ‘put their hand up’ to show that they are interested in what you have to offer. Usually, this is a squeeze page that gives them something of value in exchange for their contact details.

4) Email Marketing – Daily communication with your subscribers such that it builds trust through teaching (to show that you are a trusted expert).

5) Products or Services – The delivery agent and medium of the information or skills that you sell. The delivery agent could be products, coaching, or memberships, and the medium can be print (ebooks, manuals, etc), audio (mp3s), or video (mp4s or movs)

To summarise, you have a solution to a problem that people online, who have that problem, are already searching for – a solution at some place online, be it a blog, a forum, a search engine, social media, and you invite people there to come to your site, they join your list, you send them a daily email to build trust, then offer them access (for a price) to your training, join your membership, or enroll in coaching.

These are the 5 vital parts to an online information marketing business.

What Does Monetisation Look Like in YOUR Business?

What does monetization look like in YOUR business?

This is the topic in Sean Mize’s latest email to me and he went on to say:

Sometimes I feel like when I see folks working on their business . . . they don’t know WHY they are doing what they are doing.

They don’t have a purpose . . .a big why . . a why what they are doing is changing lives.

Or they have that, but they are just doing parts in their business . . .but nothing fits together.

They are writing articles . . . but they aren’t pointing them to the right places.

They create one product, and somehow think it will do the work of 100.

They send out sales emails when they see something converting well . . but rarely send out training emails to improve lives.

Ok, I’ll tell you my business model for years:

Irresistible offer in the form of a squeeze page that gives them something valuable –> daily email (like this) to teach and to train –> create products or trainings that change lives and sell those trainings –> create more training and sell it –> create more training and sell it

Of course, one effective part of my business is creating training I put on Warrior Plus, people promote it and tell others . . .and those buyers join my list. So those are buyer subscribers. And I have a mix of both on my list.

And the KEY to having people buy from you again and again is that they learn from you when they buy once – then they WANT to learn again and again.

So . . what about you? What does monetization look like in YOUR business?

When you look at your model of monetization, does it make sense?

Is it working?

What needs to change to make it work better?

In case you missed it, notice how simple this business model is.

It consists of the following simple actions carried out consistently, day after day:

A squeeze page and free offer to create a list
A daily email to the list
Creating a new product that improves other peoples lives
A sales letter
Driving traffic to the sales letter from:
- the list by email
- Warrior Special Offers i.e. taking advantage of the traffic already on the Warrior Forum
Rinse & Repeat

So what does monetisation look like in YOUR business?

Start Small – End Big

How to start small and end big

Part 1 – Starting Small

Seriously, I see people so focused on making a million dollars tomorrow or their next big $10,000 campaign . . but they haven’t made a penny in the last 30 days.

If that’s the case with you, the question is: ‘what are you doing TODAY to make $10?’

Or $100, whatever your next step is.

–> Even if you have no list, could you:

post a $1 manual you wrote on Facebook and 10 people buy?
could you post a $10 manual on Facebook and only one person buys?
could you offer a full hour of coaching for $10 on Facebook, how many people would take you up on it?

Now, I can hear you now, well, I don’t want to work for $10 an hour.

But the thing is, right now, if you are working 30 hours a week online and making say $100 a week or less . . .you are only making $3 an hour right now.

And if you have no products and aren’t selling anything you are making $0 an hour . .

Why not start at $10 an hour and then next week raise to $15 an hour, then the next week raise to $20 an hour and so on?

Why not hold a live training next week for $10 and tell everyone you know on Facebook, LinkedIn, Warrior forum or anywhere else people are hanging out online?

Seriously, what can you do TODAY to put an extra $10 in your account?

Part 2 – Getting Bigger
Now, I want to push harder.

What can you do in the next 2 days to tell 100 people about your offer?

What if you posted it on Facebook, on LinkedIn, YouTube, or any one of the other zillion places online?

What if you offered a $10 coaching gig, or a $10 eBook, or a $10 live class and for one weekend, instead of sending folks to your squeeze page, you sent them to the sales page for your $10 offer?

How many buyers could you get on your list this weekend?

I know, I know, you don’t want to work so hard for $10.

But unless you are already making much more than that . . . isn’t it better to start at $10 than to keep hoping some system will get to you a zillion?

And by the way – that’s the thing . . .when you sell at a price that is believable for YOUR impact in your niche right now . . .which is low when you are starting out – you make more sales.

Sean Mize said:

‘I remember my first year in business, when I got to where I was selling around 400 eBooks a month at . . $9.77. Just shy of $4k in revenue . . and each time I released a new one, my buyers bought . . .’

What would happen if you made it your 2-day goal to make as many $10 sales as possible?

What would you do to make that happen?

Part 3 – Ending Big
Once you start building a buyers list you have the ability to make additional income from:

selling more products created by you
earning affiliate commissions from recommending other peoples products that you use and recommend.

Create a good relationship with the buyers on your list through email marketing by offering both free and premium information – this is the standard internet marketing model and you can start with making the first sale of just $10.

You should also add additional products into your upfront sales funnel i.e. after the $10 sale offer a higher priced complementary product. Split test your sales pages to optimize conversions and add additional products into your sales funnel.

Also, explore additional sources of traffic and keep scaling your ‘$10 business’.

This is how you start small and end big.

Get Good Enough At Anything…

I was watching a video about selling art and the presenter said ‘Get good enough at anything and someone will pay you to do it.‘

Examine that sentence for a second and feel the truth of it.

This is a profound and liberating truth. It means that you can either pick something you are already quite good at and become excellent. Alternatively, pick something you enjoy and focus on becoming the top expert in that area.

This is the key to success.

It requires focus, dedication and hard work to become the expert at anything.

Some say that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. I don’t know whether it would take 1,000 hours or even 100,000 hours but it does take focus and dedication until you work your way into the top position.

If you are going to dedicate this amount of time to becoming excellent then its probably better to pick something that you enjoy.

However, even if that’s not the case, if you start to become an acknowledged expert in any area, the chances are that you will enjoy the recognition and rewards that flow from that activity anyway.

Bringing your full attention to the present moment and using your creativity and skill in the moment are critical – sometimes this is called ‘being in the flow’ – it’s where you have achieved a state of unconscious competence.

Another artist was talking about how he became an illustrator simply by drawing a sketch every day for 1 year – he shared his results on social media to garner criticism and feedback in order to improve his work. At the end of the year he held an exhibition of his work.

It takes this kind of dedication to become great at anything or to get to a point where it looks easy to do what you do. If you can do it to a point where you are as good, or better, than other people then you will find someone to pay you for your expertise.

Another marketer, Sean Mize, talks about making a goal to change other people’s lives rather than having a goal of ‘making money’ because one will flow from the other. The more you can positively impact the lives of others then the bigger the rewards will be.

Anyone can decide to create a plan to become great at anything. You could decide right now, dear reader, that you will become the top expert on a subject of your choice.

Chances are you could do this relatively quickly if you just decided to focus on achieving a focused goal. Don’t make the mistake of trying to spread yourself too thinly.

Just start by getting really good at one thing that will improve the lives of other people and show them what you can do. They will pay you to do it for them or will pay you to show them how you do it. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

So just decide right now that you will get good enough at something, make a plan on how you are going to achieve your goal and get to work today. It will take discipline and hard work.

Make sure you enjoy the process by working in the moment rather than thinking about your past or what the future might be – the past is over and the future cannot be foretold, so the present moment is all we ever have and the only moment we can be alive in.

When you work in the moment you will be surprised at what your creativity will produce – gold will spring forth from seemingly ‘thin air’ in ways that are entirely unexpected. Your creativity requires you to be in motion, to be engaged in ‘doing’ rather than dreaming of a successful outcome.

Your plan will make sure that you know what you have to do each day. Tackle one task at a time and put everything you have into that task.

If you get stuck then either keep working until the solution arrives or take a break and walk somewhere peaceful – you will be surprised by the ideas that flow from distancing yourself from the problem. Your subconscious will work away to find a solution when you least expect it.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Henry David Thoreau

If you can get good enough at anything then someone will pay you to do it. This is a philosophy for success. You just need to decide what you want to get good at, create a plan and then go and do it. As the meerkats say ‘it’s simples’!

Act Like Who You Are – Sean Mize

(This is an email that I received from Sean Mize entitled ‘Act Like Who You Are’ – I am copying it to my blog because this is a great strategy.)

There’s a fallacy floating around in the im space that says you have to be a “marketer” and learn to “market” and “sell” and “write copy”

But what if there’s a better way . . . .

just act like who you are

You see, if you are a karate coach and you teach karate . . .what if you did this:

Each day, do a 5 minute video of some move and how to do it and post it on youtube and embed it on your site, and send it to your list and post it on facebook and anywhere else you hang out or have followers

(no marketing, just doing what you do)

at the end of one year you have 365 posts on your site with 365 videos in them and you have 365 videos on youtube

how many of your competitors have 365 videos?

no marketing, just doing what you do

So you ask, how do I “make money” then

what if you were to simply offer a live 3 week class on some sub-topic of karate and charge a fair price?

no marketing, just tell them what it is, like this:

Next week I am starting a 3 week live class where I will teach you:

–> how to break boards (or whatever other things karate teachers teach)

–> how to be centered

–> an easy way to defend yourself

the price is ________

You can sign up here if you want to: (link to pay)

Notice that’s all in an email!

You don’t even need a sales letter, nor any “marketing” words or anything like that!

Just tell them what it is.

Now maybe the following week you decide to record a new set of videos on a different topic. Additional to your youtube daily 5 min videos.

Maybe you do 6 videos on an advanced topic.

You add a membership category or custom post type on your website, and make it a membership.

The 6 videos are preloaded, and you promise to add 2 new videos each month, and live streamed karate demonstration.

That’s really easy to do, only takes a few hours a month.

That is your membership.

You send a non-marketing email out that says:

I am starting a brand new membership where you will get:

–> 6 videos on the ______ advanced topic

–> Each month I’ll be adding 2 new cutting edge videos each month

–> Each month I’ll do 1-2 live streamed karate demonstration and you can ask questions and I’ll answer them for you.

If you want to sign up: (payment link)

Notice, once again, no marketing, no marketing words – just telling them what you are doing.

Period.

Now, could you add a “sales page” – sure, but it doesn’t special “marketing words” – just tell them what it is.

And can you send followup emails after the first one that answers questions, tells them more about it, tells them it’s the last day to sign up before it starts, and so on?

Sure.

But notice how natural all of this is . . .very natural.

You just act like who you are.
‘
A karate teacher.

A scrapbooking teacher.

A blog builder teacher

A list building teacher

A “how to write” teacher.

A “how to record a daily video” teacher (yes, I believe there is a HUGE demand for someone to teach that like I teach “write a daily email”)

A crocheting teacher

A woodworking teacher

A Bible teacher (angle: learn to teach the Bible in an exciting way that people really want to learn from, you could have a daily blog post, a membership with new lessons each month, and a weekly q and a session)

A “how to stay healthy when you get older” teacher

Get the idea.

Whatever you are . . just teach that.

You can do it.’

By the way, if I really wanted to demonstrate that you could do it in any niche like the example I gave in karate, I could copy and paste and switch “karate” into “scrapbooking” or “crocheting” or “Bible Study teaching” or “daily video teaching”

I’ll just do it:

Scrapbooking Teacher Example Marketing System

Youtube Video Teacher Example Marketing System

How to Stay Healthy When You Are Older Teacher Marketing System

By the way, I hope you are seeing how EASY this is!

Surely it’s not too hard for us all to act like who we are? After all, it takes less effort than acting like someone else!

How To Create An Irresistible Offer

In order to create an irresistible offer you first have to understand the true value of what you are offering.

It’s NOT the e-book, audio video or even coaching or any of the products or services that you have to offer!

The core value is how what you offer will change the life of your customer i.e. what transformations in their life can they expect from investing in your product or service?

Realising your core value may arise from experience of how you have already changed someone’s life or, if you are still awaiting for success, think about what you can do to change the life of your ideal client.

Alternatively, use yourself as an avatar – what have you learnt from your journey so far that would provide a massive short-cut for someone else like you?

With this in mind, answer the following 3 questions:

What pressing PROBLEMs did/can they hire you to solve?
What RESULTs did/can they get from working with you? (Aim for a long list so go deep with this including how it affected their wider life.)
What would the COST be to them if they did not work with you? (This is a key area so don’t ignore this aspect of your offer!)

You really need to go deep on these questions so that you have a full perspective on why it is an incredible opportunity for them to invest in what you are offering.

At the end of this exercise you should have one core problem that you will solve and then a whole load of results or cost savings that will flow from resolving that problem.

Try to be specific about the outcomes they get – if you could be with them for a day how would it change their life in very specific ways? Would they be eager to turn on the computer to see their sales stats? Would they look have a systemised way of working? Would they be ultra productive and focused? Could they systematically grow their revenues?

If you want to understand their problems, you could look at the opposite scenarios

they are not monitoring their stats at all?
They are not working a system but are working randomly.
They are unproductive and easily distracted.
They have no method for consistently growing revenues.
etc etc

When you have completed this exercise, you need to step back and ask yourself if your market will invest heavily to solve the core problem you have identified that you can solve?

Our basic core needs usually relate to money, health and relationships, so hopefully your core offer will relate to one of these areas.

You need to make a bold claim to help someone with a problem in one of these areas.

Once you have identified the core area that you can help your customers with, run it through this 4 point test:

Is there a clear perfect client? Is there a clear person or avatar in mind that this is for?
Is there a clear problem that needs urgently addressing?
How important will those people, that you’re supporting, rank solving this problem? On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to them?
Do the people within your niche have a history of investing in products and services of a similar nature?

Hot topic areas within the wealth or make money online niche:

Women or men entrepreneurs who want to increase their income and achieve more success. e.g. older people who want to boost their retirement income.
Newbies who want to increase their income and achieve more success.
Information, training and sales skills within a specific industry like, say, accountants or chiropractors.
Help those who want to leave their job to live their passion and make the transition from employed to solo business owner.
How to create a successful business in 20-30 hours / week (work part time & experience success)
Sell information products and books online.
How to get targeted traffic to your offers.
How to convert traffic into leads and sales.
How to create a passive income
How to create a big, responsive email list or a list of buyers.

In the UK, in my lifetime, I perceive that there has been a significant general deterioration in job conditions:

There is a lot more competition for jobs due to high immigration.
There are lot more part-time jobs with zero-hour contract-type conditions which means that many people have a portfolio of low-paid jobs in order to make ends meet.
Employers have diluted many work conditions like pay rates, pensions and benefits.
There is increased job churn so employees have reduced job securityi.e. the everage time ihn a job is 2 years or lower where it used to be measured in decades.

I therefore believe that entrepreneurship and the desire of people to take control of their life by starting and running their own micro-business is a mega-trend that is set to continue. This will fuel a huge demand for anyone that can solve the problems outlined above.

The Top 10 REAL Reasons Why People Buy:

1. To make money

2. Save money

3. Save time

4. Avoid effort

5. Get more comfort

6. Achieve greater cleanliness

7. Attain fuller health

8. Escape physical pain

9. Gain praise

10. Be popular

Here are 4 common problems that they want you to solve:

How to get started
The step-by-step path for achieving a result
How to get to the next level
How to perform a SPECIFIC skill

If you can address these types of problem then it will not be too difficult to create an irresistible offer for which you can demand a high fee in return!

#1 Market Research: Using Facebook

In this post I want to cover how to do market research using Facebook.

Facebook currently has 1.6 billion monthly active users worldwide and they are busy gathering data on all their users. You can access some of the data through Facebook Audience Insights.

Go to your Facebook account and search for ‘Audience Insights’.

Simply input the country or countries you are targeting and then input some primary keywords relating to your niche in the ‘Interests’ box – you can put more than one keyword in to gather data on related keywords. For my niche I input ‘make money online’, ‘digital marketing’ and ‘internet marketing’. (I discovered that a lot more people refer to themselves as interested in ‘digital marketing’ than ‘internet marketing’ – this is useful to know when creating my content.)

The data is gathered under tabs at the top of the page including the most important being ‘Demographics’, ‘Household’ and ‘Purchase’. I am copying and pasting the information from these 3 tabs below:

This information tells me the following about the internet marketing / digital marketing niche:

there are 3 to 3.5 million active people on Facebook interested in this niche in both the US and the UK.
65% are women and 35% are men.
35 to 37% are in the 25 to 34 age group, 23/24% are in the 35 to 44 age group, and 13/14% are in the 45 to 54 age group
Under ‘Relationship Status’ (which is cut off in this screenshot), 34% are single and 66% are either married, engaged or in a relationship.
Under ‘Education Level’ (which is also cut off by the screen shot) 82% are university educated which indicates that the vast majority of my audience is highly educated. This fits with the fact that that internet marketing can be technically challenging.
Under ‘Job Titles’ on the Demographics tab (also cut-off) the main job titles are Management, Sales and Admin.
If I then jump to the ‘Household’ tab, I find that the average income of 76% of my audience is said to be $50,000 or above, indicating that they are comparatively wealthy compared to other niches, and have the capacity to buy products and services.
Under ‘Household Size’, 49% of my niche have no children in the household
Under ‘Home Ownership’, 67% own their own home
Under ‘Home Market Value’, 73% of homes are in the $100-500k price bracket.
Under the ‘Purchases’ tab, 63% of my audience uses ‘Subscription Services’ which indicates that they may be willing to subscribe to something like a membership or newsletter. Interestingly, only 5% say they make ‘business purchases’. This suggests that whilst 100% of the audience are interested in internet and digital marketing, only 5% actually run an online business so there seems to be plenty of potential to convert some of this audience to online business entrepreneurs.

In order to sell products and services into a niche market, it is important to understand who your are in order to communicate effectively with them. This includes understanding what they want and what challenges they face in getting what they want. I will address this in another post.

Suffice it to say, this market research using Facebook gives us a pretty accurate idea of the profile of the audience in the digital marketing / internet marketing niche or any other niche we choose to research.

Improving The Life Of My Customers

I have been looking for a new way to improve the life of my customers because I pretty much became disillusioned with the value I was offering my clients in the highly competitive niche of internet marketing. I needed to find a new way of progressing my business and in order to do that I have taken a long sabbatical.

I needed to rediscover my passion for my business because I felt that it was not nurturing my spirit and, that being the case, it was difficult to convey my passion to my customers and therefore difficult to engage properly with them.

In a sense, I needed to step back from the coal face, look at what I was doing and then move forward more intelligently.

During that sabbatical, I have been steadily honing my skills with Photoshop simply because I love the creative process of creating unique and beautiful images. I wasn’t ever sure how I could use this skill but it is now coming into clearer focus.

At the same time, I have continued reading and watching a lot of marketing tutorials to give background to my research.

I really want to build my business around graphics, in the following ways:

building stunningly beautiful and unique websites.
providing bespoke image restyling services to other people
selling pre-made images

I will be using images, and tutorials on how I create my images, as the model for driving traffic to my squeeze pages and offer pages and I have a membership site almost finished for the purpose of providing outstanding value to my clients.

I am fortunate in the fact that my current income covers my monthly expenses, so income from this new venture will just be the cream on top.

I am following Sean Mizes Membership Blueprint to build this business to $5,000 per month by 31.March.2016.

Here is the outline of the blueprint that I will be following:

[boxibt style=”gray” bordercolor=”#000000″]The primary goal is to change lives both financially and spiritually.

A = 500 new subscribers per month (- need 1,500 targeted visitors to squeeze page each month) 33% conversion

B = 50 sales x $10 = $500 (- sold in email campaign to new subscribers.) 10% conversion

C = 60 members x $37 per month = $2,000 (- need a membership site with lessons.) 12% conversion

D = 20 sales x $37-$97 = $740 – $2,000 (- need a new training each month with 4 hours of training.) 4% conversion

E = 10 coaching clients x $100 = $1,000 (- need a coaching programme.) 2% conversion Plus: Give amazing training to 100% of your list via email (- write 3 to 5 emails to list each week.)

Ideal Daily Activities:

80% of time is driving traffic to my squeeze page

Write a simple daily schedule (-use Action Enforcer?)

Record audio/video for 30 minutes Write daily email – 15 minutes

Create 3 images or articles and post on my blog and social media – 45 minutes

Record 2 YouTube videos – 30 minutes

Add lesson to membership site – 15 minutes

Then some days:

Write sales letters for weekly or monthly product release – 1 hour, or

Write launch emails for new product – 1 hour Any spare time:

Drive traffic using content – 2 hours[/boxibt]

Today I created and ordered a book of some watercolour images I have created and next week I am talking to my daughter who is interested in helping me to build this business.

Thumbs up for my new venture

I feel that I am well on the way to finding increased satisfaction in my business by doing work I love and, at the same time, giving more value to my customers. Whether this new venture succeeds financially or not, I will be enjoying the creative process whilst helping others.

Hopefully, I will be able to connect through the heart rather than the head to make this spiritually uplifting!

P.S. I hope you enjoyed these pictures of my granddaughter acting in front of grand-dads camera!

Internet Marketing Explained

‘Internet Marketing Explained’ is my attempt to explain internet marketing as simply and with as much clarity as I can from the perspective of over 6 years of internet marketing experience.

It is easy to lose sight of the simplicity of the internet marketing model because there are so many distractions and offers that confuse the issue.

In simple terms, you need to send targeted visitors (traffic) to a relevant offer or offers, follow-up and track the conversion rates and profits/losses in order to improve your results.

So lets start with traffic.

Traffic

For a long time I was beguiled by SEO and the idea of free traffic. The problem is that free traffic is often highly competitive and subject to changes in algorithm that are outside your direct control.

It can also take time to get rankings and traffic via SEO.

The best way to get free traffic is to operate in a highly focused niche and carry out keyword research to understand both the potential and competition for the keywords you are trying to rank for.

I have observed that most gurus pursue paid traffic strategies because they are easier to switch on and off, faster to implement and easier to scale.

Paid traffic requires that you monitor your numbers closely to understand you click through rate, cost per click and earnings per click – if you fail to do this then you can quickly run into trouble.

So paid traffic demands that you have a marketing budget, that you know your numbers and holds you to a higher standard which is why most new marketers try to go the ‘free’ traffic route.

But ‘free’ traffic is not ‘free’ – it requires input of time and skill (which requires training). There is also no guarantee of results, so most experienced marketers simply buy clicks and monitor their returns on their paid traffic. Any free traffic is simply regarded as bonus traffic.

The exception to this is affiliate traffic but with affiliate traffic, the cost is that you pay a commission to the affiliate and you know that that customer will continue to be marketed to by the affiliate and any other product owners who that affiliate promotes.

Many paid traffic sources can now be highly targeted to your ideal prospect and paid traffic sources are plentiful so I recommend that you learn how to monitor and track your clicks from source to product delivery as quickly as possible.

Getting the click from your targeted prospect is as simple as using ‘copy’ to make the prospect curious enough to click your link to find out more.

With paid traffic, it is best to start with a low budget and then scale up gradually when you can see a return on your investment.

The Offers

Many marketers direct traffic first to a free offer, usually on a squeeze page or optin form on the page.

The reason they do this is to maximise conversions i.e. they get the contact details of the prospect so they can market to them in future.

Often, after they have the prospects contact details, they will make an immediate low-cost offer and then subsequent upsells and downsells in a sales funnel to maximise sales and conversions.

There are strategies for picking up visitors that try to escape the sales funnel – things like exit pops or down-sells to keep the prospect on your site and reading alternative offers.

Email Marketing

I include email marketing as part of the sales funnel process i.e. you keep sending your prospect back to the offer or to new offers.

To maximise your return from email marketing you also need to build a relationship by offering a combination of free value and paid offers that help them.

Email marketing is a learned skill in and of itself but this is where the majority of money is made if you do this properly.

It requires that you learn to write copy that invokes curiosity to click the link in your email to find out more. You also need to segment your lists so you can send relevant offers to the people on your list which will increase your conversions.

Product Creation or Affiliate Products

One of the skills you need to learn is how to create products that appeal to your market.

Whilst it is possible to earn good money by promoting other peoples products, you first need to get them on your list by offering them one of your own products either at the front-end of the sales funnel or as a bonus for buying using your affiliate link.

Digital products can be delivered via email, a download page or via a secure membership site.

Tracking Conversions

You need tools to track the conversions through your sales funnel from traffic source to product delivery and also to track your email open rates and clicks. This enables you to test strategies for improving conversions – for example, split-testing landing pages or alternative ad copy.

Knowing your numbers and generating more revenue than you spend on traffic is the name of the game. You build your business by creating a list of responsive prospects and customers.

Tracking tools include Google Analytics, proprietary link trackers, ad platform information, affiliate platform statistics etc.

Each promotion need s to be created as a marketing campaign and closely monitored for results.

Niche Selection

You need to operate in a focused sub-niche where there is already traffic and buyers of products. So researching your niche is a pre-requisite to internet marketing.

Once you have chosen your niche, you then need to immerse yourself in it to discover the problems and solutions that you can market to those targeted buyers.

Internet marketing starts with niche selection (and niche selection is another skill in and of itself) but rather than put this as the first item in this article, I thought that I would put it at the end just to be different!

Conclusion

That is the internet marketing business model in a nutshell.

How well you do in internet marketing is a product of taking action and your skill in the execution of the component parts of the model.

For example, being able to write compelling copy is a highly prized skill because you can dramatically increase sales conversions with this skill alone.

I hope ‘Internet Marketing Explained’ has been helpful to your understanding of the internet marketing business model – whilst there a whole host of nuances to this model, this is the essence of internet marketing.

Is Making Money Online As Easy As THIS?

Book | Blog | Podcast -> Amazon | Google | iTunes

Book, Blog, Podcast is a strategy for leveraging the power of Amazon, Google and iTunes and getting your message out into the mainstream.

Amazon, Google and iTunes are the traffic monsters that are always looking for high quality content.

If you are looking to get your message out into the world then you need to consider leveraging all three platforms in order to get maximum coverage.

(This is not unlike Christine Clayfield’s publishing strategy of publishing her books in every possible online book outlet in order to get an average income of $26k in sales per book across over 70 books.)

If you combine this strategy with good SEO execution then this can be a very powerful strategy. It’s a strategy that I picked up from a webinar held by Connie Raegan Green in the 6-in-6 Coaching Programme.

These are the notes that I made as I listened to the webinar – hopefully you can follow what was said in this abbreviated format.

Let’s take a look at each piece of this trifecta…

Your Book

Think about what can you expect if you write a book?

How can you expand on that?

What’s next after you’ve written the book?

There are many people who have created a career based on their book – Robert Kiyosaki, Tim Ferris, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, Susie Orman, to name but a few. These people had a game plan when writing their book.

What are you going to write about?

You can share your personal experiences. Why will people want to learn this from you? Is there something new to share?

What are the challenges and struggles of people in your market?

When you start writing your book, you need to organise your thoughts and prepare an outline so that you can approach the execution of your book one chapter at a time.

You will need to schedule a time to write. Schedule this time when you are sharpest and give it top priority. Say one or two hours a day.

Find out who has already written on your topic and who are the real movers and shakers in your niche. Who is in your niche? Read their books and content. On Amazon, you can take a look inside and view the table of contents to get ideas for your book.

Search for their websites, read their blogs and join their list to see want they are sending out to their list. Do they have anything for sale?

Consider teaching a course based on the content in your book, even before the book is written, and then mail a copy of your book to your course members.

Be willing to challenge the accepted philosophy in your niche. Your perspective is unique.

Your Blog

You want to use WordPress.org and have a self-hosted website with a hosting firm like Hostgator. Buy your domain name from Namecheap.

Build a list by giving something away for free. What do people in your niche optin for? Create your own version but make it simple and easy to consume.

Write your first 10 auto responder messages to send people as soon as they join your list – keep them short but valuable with something clickable in every message.

Always remember why someone joined your list in the first place and what action you ultimately want them to take with you. If you know that you can reverse engineer the process that you want them to follow to reach that ultimate destination.

Share your lifestyle on social media and have fun with it – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram – try to connect these together like a spiders web of content. Let people know who you are and what you stand for.

Get online publicity using Webwire for $30 per submission.

Also, consider getting coverage with local media.

Your Podcast

Base this on your book and blog content.

What is the format? Is it interviews, Q & A’s or ‘edutainment’?

I use a free tool called Audacity and also a premium tool called Audello to create a share my podcasts.

4 Questions To Give You Direction

Why is your topic important?

What is your topic by definition?

What if someone uses your strategies, what would their life be like?

How does your topic work in a step-by-step process.

Storytelling

Storytelling is critical to sharing your message and storytelling needs to be used in your book, blog and podcast in order to connect with other people. These are little stories about your life that enable you to really connect with your audience and illustrate the message that you are conveying.

Creating Your Outline

What is your big idea?

What is your working title?

Who should write your foreword for you?

What is your preface – your story from pain to pleasure.

Introduction – your thesis statement for your book.

Your sections based on the 4 questions above. Create the titles of your chapters and the premise or bog idea for each chapter.

The Order Of Things In Your Book

Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapters
Conclusion

The most important people in the publishing process are the writer and reader – all others are superfluous in the publishing world. This is a complete change in 2015 and beyond. You can choose to use a publisher or not – Amazon has changed the game with CreateSpace.com – this is their Print-on-Demand publishing division. It’s free to use.

You will need to create a book cover or outsource this.

You will also want to use Kindle – kdp.amazon.com. This is free as well.

Create your own author page at authorcentral.amazon.com to get a link back to your blog.

The Order Of Priority

Your book is the first piece of your marketing platform.

The hosted WordPress site is next – post at least once a week on a topic that is relevant to your book.

Podcast on iTunes. Use the free Podpress plugin to add your audio to your blog – talk about your topic, your blog and your book.

Blogging Success Tips

Post consistently – 300 to 500 words.
Use your keywords in your Permalink.
Do original content, guest posts and curated content.
Promote every post on social media
Reply to all comments.

Podcast Success Tips

Podcast consistently.
Have a clear message.
Share valuable information
Turn every podcast into a blog post
Have something for sale

Other Platforms

YouTube.com
Facebook pages and groups
LinkedIn Groups
Twitter Lists
Instagram

How To Get This Done

Start from where you are right now.

You now have a blueprint.

Do this one step at a time, one day at a time.

The next step? Subscribe to my blog in the side-bar 🙂

6 Effective Positioning Strategies

Fixing Website Issues

This article is about fixing website issues using Google Webmaster Tools.

All websites that you want to be indexed in Google need to be set up on Google Webmaster Tools. You will need to verify that you own the site by going through their site verification process and it is also a good idea to submit an XML sitemap.

In the past I have used Google Webmaster Tools to primarily check my search traffic keywords, links to my site and that the pages were being indexed by Google.

I have not systemised these checks and it is certainly a good idea to make sure you check your site with Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis and here is the reason why.

From time to time you will get messages from Google flagging up errors on your website which you need to fix. I have just discovered 2 huge general errors and, because I was not checking Google Webmaster Tools regularly, was not aware of this until today.

Much of the content on my pages was blocked to Google because of a faulty robots.txt file which I needed to correct and re-upload via FTP. I discovered this using the ‘Crawl’ menu within Google Webmaster Tools which firstly flagged up the crawl errors. I was then able to see how Google was viewing the page using the ‘Fetch As Google’ function in the ‘Crawl’ menu. It is easy to use and very illuminating!

These errors were also affecting the mobile-friendliness of my web pages – 22% of my pages were flagging mobile errors including the fact that some of the mobile ‘touch’ elements on my pages are too close together. I may need to change my WordPress theme to correct these as Google has announced that it is de-indexing pages that are not mobile friendly as from 21st April 2015! As mobile related traffic accounts for roughly 50% of all traffic, sites that are not mobile-friendly will be at a serious traffic disadvantage.

This demonstrates why it is important to invest in a good professional theme which is tried and tested by a lot of users i.e. to make sure that all the wrinkles are ironed out. Errors like these will severely affect the amount of search engine traffic you and I will attract to our websites and therefore should not be ignored.

So I recommend that you check out your websites using Google Webmaster Tools and set about fixing website issues that this site flags up for you.

Profitable Niche – The Inch Wide, Mile Deep Strategy

One of the biggest mistakes I have made with my business is my failure to operate in a focused profitable niche and adopt the ‘inch-wide, mile-deep’ niche strategy.

I’m supposed to be operating in the make money online niche which has a number of sub-niches but I’ve signally failed to restrict my activities to a sub-niche or even the make money online niche.

It seems to me that most operators in the make money online niche, if they are making any money at all, are making money by selling courses on how to make money online i.e. their revenue comes from selling tutorials or ‘selling the shovels’ to the ‘miners’ rather than ‘mining’ themselves.

There are somewhat shady practices – many testimonials are created by ‘friends’ rather than actual users of the product and there are affiliate rings operating i.e. I’ll promote your product if you’ll promote mine. Such recommendations are driven by self-interest rather than the quality of the product.

I often listen to my iPod when taking our dog for a walk and Jay Abraham’s tutorials are mixed in with the music files. Whilst he is not really an internet marketer, he is a great marketer and he believes that the best and highest use of internet marketing skills is to support real businesses with real products and services rather selling digital products of dubious quality.

Having had some experience of the info-marketing niche, I am inclined to agree with him. I would say that 95% of the products in the info marketing niche are poor quality and rehashed rubbish and you and I can waste a small fortune buying them before we discover the error of our ways. (Oh dear, that’s bitter personal experience speaking!)

I am therefore tending to move away from info marketing – if I continue to create info products, I am determined that they will be:

in a narrow niche,
well-researched and high quality i.e. deep rather than wide
consumable in an hour or less
systemised for easy action taking

Rather, for the time-being, I would like to work in partnership with a small handful of high quality offline businesses as their internet marketing strategist and mentor i.e. to return to my consulting.

I feel that there is more integrity in helping such businesses who are often scammed by website designers who, whilst they can make websites, have little or no clue about making money online. Things like traffic generation, sales funnels, list building and email marketing do not even make it onto their agenda with their client!

See, once again I am expanding the remit from website design into a lot of other areas. It is so easy to slip into!

Ideally I should be concentrating on one small aspect of internet marketing, say sales funnels, email marketing or list building, and then outsourcing the rest. This would enable me to go deep into the topic and become the ‘go to’ expert for that particular topic.

That is much more attractive then trying to be all things to all people and master of none.

Also, why not segment the market?

In other words build sales funnels for, say, dentists. If I went to a dentist and said that ‘I specialise in building sales funnel processes just for dentists in order to grow their practice geometrically (rather than linearly)’ that would be much more attractive to a dentist than just saying I specialise in building sales funnels for small businesses.

By segmenting in this way, it would enable me to focus on testing sales funnel processes that convert well for dentists.

Once such as process had been developed, if you then went to other dentists and said that ‘I have developed a high-converting sales funnel process specifically for dentists. Here is a testimonial from XYZ dentist where I increased his revenues by a factor of 3 times.’ That is so much more powerful than if my testimonial and case study was from an unrelated industry.

Last night I was watching a programme about Harley Street. Huge sums of money are made by medical specialists – for example, one surgeon just specialised in treating prostate cancer. That’s it! Nothing else.

One of the featured patients had travelled all the way from Norway for treatment and was happy to pay his extortionate fee.

I’ve no doubt that that surgeon could have chosen to operate on numerous parts of the body but he chose to treat ‘men with prostate cancer’ and become a leading expert in that alone. This meant that he had performed thousands of prostate operations in the course of his career giving him genuine experience and expertise. In a life and death situation of prostate cancer treatment, he will always be able to charge more than a general surgeon.

The funny thing about this strategy is that you make it so much more easy on yourself. No need to try to be an expert on multiple topics – your specialism is narrow and you can also narrow your learning and research which is cheaper and easier to do.

Also by narrowing your target market in this way, your marketing becomes easier because you can target it more effectively and you will see higher conversions for less spend.

Before you make the final decision on your inche wide, mile deep niche strategy, just make sure that your chosen niche is big enough and hungry enough for the product or service you want to provide.

So let’s briefly recap the reasons for choosing an inch wide, mile deep niche strategy:

you get really very, very good at serving the needs of your customers in your niche by specialising
you have a deeper understanding of your target market and their needs which will help you greatly with your marketing and copywriting
you can increase the range and depth of the specialist knowledge, products and services you provide in your niche
you can become an expert and thought leader in that niche which will again add power to your marketing

This is what is meant by a profitable niche – the inch wide, mile deep niche strategy – have you chosen yours? For that matter, what is mine? I’ll let you know when I decide – it’s not an easy decision for me to make.

The Martha Lane Fox Richard Dimbleby Lecture

I watched the Baroness Martha Lane Fox Richard Dimbleby Lecture last night and was struck by the coolness and cleverness of Martha Lane Fox of LastMinute.com fame.

I can’t help thinking that in the musty, fuddy-duddy atmosphere of the House of Lords she must shine as a beacon of energy and light in an otherwise moribund and bellicose culture.

Her first main point in the lecture is that we need a national institution to coordinate Britain’s development of the opportunities available from more creative use of the internet.

Creating an institution to develop the internet seems like an oxymoron to me. ‘Institution’ and ‘internet’ seem totally incompatible.

I wonder whether a small core leading group leading a community of digital leaders throughout the country would not be a better model – similar to the way that WordPress has developed. There is a core team of developers who are assisted by a community from around the world.

I could see that a small core team could lead and guide the agenda for the community and would be much more agile than an ‘institution’ that conjures up a vision of institutionalised, time-serving civil servants who simply wouldn’t have the creativity and vision to develop the countries response to the myriad of opportunities and threats that have opened up as a result of the internet.

I do, however, agree that leadership is required to guide the national agenda and that this agenda could then be studied and developed by sub-groups of the internet community. Someone who has an overall grasp of the internet and the energy to lead multiple projects in sub-groups is required to electrify the debate in this country.

Where the ‘institution’ idea might contribute would be from a compliance perspective particularly when setting the moral and ethical code for our online activities. I just don’t think an institution is the right model for exploiting commercial opportunities.

I personally believe that we have an incredible opportunity to radically improve the education system simply by delivering online tutorials. Digital technology gives us the opportunity to get THE very best leaders and educators in every subject and field to create tutorials that our children and adults can all access on our desk-top.

This would mean that EVERY child (or adult) no matter what their background could learn from the very best in their field and at their own pace i.e. they can slow-down and re-watch tutorials until they understand what is being taught.

Such a change in education would radically reduce the costs involved in education, improve standards massively and transform our education system to make it the very best in the world and at the same time produce an educational platform that could be sold throughout the developed world.

In reality online tutorials can be delivered anywhere, at any time – no need for a classroom, why not a park bench? With the congested traffic on our roads we are getting to a point where driving our children into a school location with limited classroom sizes and restricted premises sizes, is getting increasingly problematical and costly. Online tutorials could be accessed at any time 24/7 so why restrict school hours or attendance times?

A more creative way of teaching our children is needed. However, the vested interests of our educational establishment will no doubt block the way to progress!

As Martha Lane Fox pointed out, I am sure that every other public service would benefit from a much more creative and connected use of internet technology. The technology could be developed by getting the customer involved in giving feedback and suggestions on their user experience.

Martha went on to discuss the lack of women in digital jobs. I find this difficult to comprehend because this is surely an area were there is no bar to women getting involved if they wish to. There are no physical or mental barriers other than prejudice. I think that the more diverse and the more people that contribute to developing our internet technology the better.

I wonder whether men’s love of gadgets and technology is part of the reason why women do not get involved. I can only speak from experience with my wife, sister and daughter. All are to some degree technophobic and impatient with technology. They do not seem to have the same problem-solving mentality that I do.

That sounds sexist but we have to acknowledge that we are all different. I have no interest in clothes but my wife does. Our differences are what makes the world go round and we should all play to our strengths. I think that more women should get involved in technology but only if they are passionate and interested in it because without that it is a hopeless ambition.

I also agree that we should debate the moral and ethical issues involved. The internet is like the wild frontier at the moment – it is being used for good and evil purposes and we need to set the agenda for the moral code online. Whilst I would hate to see the internet controlled by any government, it does need regulating with a clear set of rules for engaging with people online.

Personally, I think that there are many media activities that require investigation. For example, is it right that the ‘loan-shark’ companies who charge 1,000’s% are able to advertise on television? Personally, I don’t think so.

I also feel that the alcohol and tobacco industry need to bear the full weight of the health problems that they cause and their right to advertise severely restricted.

We need to take a common-sense approach to the internet – what sort of society do we want to develop as a result of the opportunities that have arisen with the internet?

One thing I am certain of is that the establishment and old government institutions ALL need reforming and the costs of the public sector dramatically reducing in favour of a more dynamic, entrepreneurial culture driven by the internet.

There are a lot of ‘sharks’ in technology who are willing to exploit the ignorance of others by over-charging for their products and services. These providers also need to be exposed and prosecuted for their mendacity. The best way to deal with them is to but up government projects for tender to drive down costs.

These projects should be carefully planned and payments only released subject to achievement of milestones in the project to avoid the crazy situation where huge sums of money are paid out for technology that is not fit for purpose. Government mismanagement of technology projects is a major reason for our lack of progress with important national technology projects like the computerisation of the NHS.

I whole-heartedly agree with Martha that the opportunities afforded by the internet are huge. We need a visionary leader (like Steve Jobs) who can guide our nation to exploit those opportunities

The Martha Lane Fox Richard Dimbleby Lecture has at least opened up the debate and now needs a strong push from our online community to get behind this initiative – I for one would like to get involved because I have positioned myself at the forefront of technology and the internet.

Internet Marketing – The Bare Essentials

In this post I am going to cover what I see as the bare essentials required for internet marketing success.

The problem with internet marketing is the number of distractions that wil blow you off course. Once you get onto a few marketers lists you will often find that you are smothered in a blizzard of offers. Without experience, it is difficult to find a path through the maze of advice and information.

That’s why I was motivated to create the video below. It’s a getting back to basics kind of tutorial and all the tools are free or at least very low cost. There is literally no barrier to entry other than lack of focus and not knowing the basic system.

The truth is you are probably fully aware of the system that you need to follow but you have simply failed to implement and simply moved on to the next shiny object because it seemed too difficult to implement a part of the system or you lacked a tool that you thought that you needed like a link tracker or a method for split-testing your pages.

You see I understand your problem and the reason why you have so far failed to much, if any, money online. I understand because I have stood in your shoes.

What if I could show you a system that gave you all the tools for free. Your only task is to send traffic to the squeeze page and watch the results.

What’s that you say? You don’t know how to drive traffic? Well there is free training on how to do that too as part of the system! So you really have no excuses now.

Watch this video and I will reveal the bare essentials of internet marketing and where you can find this free system I am referring to:

If you can’t be bothered to watch this video then click this link to get the system and training that literally gives you the bare essentials of internet marketing – everything you need in order to succeed for free:

http://marksalmon.link/?i=2467

How To Get Your Offline Business Noticed Online

In this video I briefly cover the burning issue ‘How To Get Your Offline Business Noticed Online.’

In the video I cover:

how potential customers find your business online
an example of an actual client
the importance of keywords and keyword research
on page optimisation
off-page optimisation
paid advertising
the importance of having a clear call to action and value proposition
the importance of optimising your website for mobile devices

If you need any help solving the problem of how to get your offline business noticed online, then please feel free to contact me

Classified Ads Website Completed

I’ve just completed a classified ads website for a client.

The site is called Homestay Pals and is specifically to enable anyone with a spare room in their house to advertise for paying guests – a small home business opportunity which is quite common around the world.

The difficulty in creating this site was creating a secure registration process that enables both Homestay Hosts and Homestay Guests to upload their own information and contact each other through the website.

Rather than hire a coder, I’ve used an off-the-shelf solution called Classipress Theme. This has a lot of settings and functionality which makes it quite difficult to configure but it is far easier than starting from a blank piece of paper and coding the site from scratch.

My main concern, which has been voiced to the customer, is how he intends to get traffic to the site and how does he get the site up and running with a critical mass of ads that will drive and engage visitors.

Also, there are clearly security issues in inviting strangers into your home as a Homestay guest but Homestays are quite a common business model around the world.

Despite these reservations, my client wanted to proceed as he intends to put his own house on the site and invite friends and family to join him.

He is a Christian and believes that prayer and goodwill will assist him in his endeavour to help other people to earn an income from the spare rooms they have in their homes. It also provides the guests with cheap and affordable accommodation so that everyone is a winner.

If you would like to see this classified ads website that has recently been completed, then click this link or you can view some of my other website projects at Salmon Web Design.

$6.5M For A Photograph!

Peter Lik has received $6.5m for one photograph.

Here is a link to his website.

Here is a link to the article, which also reveals that he sold 2 further photographs to the same collector for $1.1m and the other for $2.4m. That’s $10m in total!

Having looked at Peter Lik’s work on his website, I can’t say that I am terribly impressed by his portfolio.

It seems to me that he over-saturates his photos with colour i.e. that he is using a photo-editing programme like Photoshop to do so. In doing so, he loses the natural tonal quality and the colours become somewhat harsh and even garish.

Of course, art is very subjective but, personally, I cannot see anything very special in his work and he reminds me of artists like Damian Hirst.

So why would someone pay so much money for a photograph? And why has he sold upwards of $500m of his work?

I think perhaps Peter Lik is a better marketer than he is a photographer (although I have to say that his website is less than impressive – my images site is better in my opinion).

Firstly, he has clearly been in the industry for quite a few years and has won a number of awards so he has become something of an authority in his niche. The more that he has social recognition, and particularly from the experts in the niche, the more people are likely to pay for his work irrespective of how good the image is. This is called ‘social proof’ (- something that Van Gogh failed to acquire in his lifetime.)

It has Lik’s name on it, he has been recognised by the ‘establishment in the photo art world, and therefore he commands a premium.

He has also appeared on television and carried out a number of photographic stunts that have attracted publicity so that he has become a household name in the US.

Next, he limits the number of prints that he creates from any particular photo to less than 1,000 to create artificial scarcity. In practice, there is nothing to stop him from creating unlimited copies of his images. I imagine he agressively defends the copyright to his images to maintain that scarcity.

He prices his work starting at $4,000 and increases the prices as the prints sell so that buyers end up paying a huge premium for the last few prints. The high prices means that there is a perception of higher value, which together with his social proof of being a photography expert, gives instant cache to his work and commands the attention of buyers.

Here’s how one article describes his pricing strategy:

Most photographs are offered in very limited editions. A large format print is often limited to ten or less. And they all sell for the same amount. This is the typical business model for galleries. Lik’s approach is very different. His editions are in lots of 995—950 limited editions and 45 artist’s proofs. Each print is identical but the proofs have a bit more prestige to them so they start at $10,000. His business model is that as a print is selling, the price will increase. Once he has sold 10 percent of a limited edition, the price increases. So, an image that would cost $4000 if you bought the first one, could reach as high as $200,000 when it’s down to the last few. All being said, each photo can gross more than $7 million.

The price alone gives instant exclusivity to his work.

He has also reinvested his profits in creating galleries around the world to showcase his work. This also provides instant cache for his work as no doubt these galleries are located in places where there is a wealthy client-base living locally. I imagine that he holds events at his galleries where only the wealthy are invited to exclusive shows of his work.

However, the fact that he has sold the 4 most expensive photographs, more than almost anything else, means that the rest of his work automatically acquires a higher perceived value even though there are probably many better photos available. This is an example of how value is completely subjective in the art world (and in many other spheres).

You can imagine the conversation with a buyer…

‘I am offering this print for ONLY $200,000 which is a massive discount on the $6.5m that I sold one of my pictures for – get it now before the price rises or I completely sell out!’

There are lessons to be learnt here for any business – perhaps having the highest prices in your niche mark you out as the ‘go-to’ expert in your industry and the lowest prices mark you out as a relative loser even though you offer a good service.

Isn’t perception a wonderful thing?

People will value you and your work according to the value you place on yourself and your work – remember that when you are marketing your business and you will make more money and be able to command higher prices. This will in turn enable you to invest in the kind of marketing that maintains the perception of higher value – things like presentation, packaging and marketing events.

$6.5m for a photograph – he’s having a laugh all the way to the bank but I also applaud him for being a master marketer!

How to Genuinely Change Lives With Your Internet Business

The problem with trying to make a living online is that it can become all about making money rather than genuinely changing lives. After all, we all have bills to pay and there is a pressure to make money!

So how can we change lives without losing our integrity through the imperative to make money?

If we’re selling training that we want other folks to consume, it needs to fit in with our persona, our character and our life. This is being authentic and genuine to who we are. We don’t need to pretend to be someone else because who we are will resonate with other like-minded people and we can be consistent with who we are i.e. our business needs to be an extension of ourselves.

So we need to know who we are…

If you believe in a God, then you may believe that he/she has a plan for you and your God will direct your path so you may feel you can submit your purpose to him/her.

I’m not a religious person but I do believe that destiny and intuition can direct our path. Being true to our ‘gut-feeling’ and what we feel deep down inside is what is truly important (- you could say that God put those feelings within us.) For example, deep down inside I believe that I was meant to be an artist and writer.

In this I am similar to my grandfather who was in banking but his hobbies always reflected the fact that deep down inside he was an artist – painting, photography, calligraphy were what he truly enjoyed. The sad thing was that the imperative to make money meant that half his life was wasted in banking because he had bills to pay.

I find myself drawn to internet marketing because it is a visual medium that involves, writing, graphics, video, audio and making digital products. It is important to me that these are presented and packaged well and so I love creating graphics and visually appealing work.

So our business needs to be a reflection of who we are and it may be that our failure to date reflects the fact that we have not yet found our unique purpose and who we are meant to be.

So what if you don’t know who you are and what your purpose is? How do you uncover this?

There is a generic purpose – a call on your life that we all share.

We are all given an ability (or at least an ability to get the ability) that we need to fulfil our purpose. This may mean that we need to get some additional training in order to fulfil our purpose. For some of us we have the ability to do something great but we haven’t yet been trained so it is just ‘babbling rather than talking’ at this stage.

We each have a gift – in my case English was always very easy for me at school. English Language and English Literature were always a breeze to me and, when I chose to exercise my creativity at school, I excelled.

I subsequently buried my creativity because of the need to conform to the banking system that did not encourage or reward creativity because it only wanted you to conform to a rigorous set of rules and regulations. 9 hours of reading per week was necessary just to remain up-to-date with all the rules and regulations!

This is what running our own business is about – the freedom to exercise our creativity and give expression to our gift and your purpose – who we were really meant to be.

This is why employing someone else to create our brand does not really work in my opinion – it does not truly reflect who we are.

This is why creating a website for someone else is so difficult – it is probably a million miles away from what the values of the business really is and the message they wish to give to their customers. So at best, their website is a compromise and does not truly reflect their core business. This means that a veil of obfuscation remains firmly in place as they withhold that information from their customers.

This means that you are not truly helping your customers with your gift or your purpose.

We all have the ability to create some generic information or training that can help our customers or prospective customers.

We probably have an obligation to help them because this is our purpose and your gift – the reason that we are doing what we are doing. We have the ability to offer something valuable to everyone who visits our site. That is quite a thought.

Some people will not take advantage of your gift or the opportunity you are giving them to learn something new – that’s OK but it doesn’t remove the obligation that we have to share our gifts.

The work we do is to change other peoples lives. We have a responsibility to share our good works and this is directly tied to the money we earn. As we help others we will be rewarded and blessed and the degree to which we can do this will determine how we are rewarded.

This means that if we write an article on our website but no one reads it then we are not really sharing our gift. So we also have an obligation to share this with as many people as possible i.e. to get traffic to that article. If we do that part i.e. generate eyeballs to our content (in other words, the marketing of our content) and share our gifts and content then by the law of averages we will be rewarded for doing so.

This is where software can help to semi-automate the process of sharing your content.

Here’s a simple business model for success:

Write a daily blog post on your website – it could just be a tip. In one year you will have 250 blog posts working Monday through Friday.
In addition write an article that you put on someone else’s site – it can be on the same topic – and link it back to your website.
Do a daily video about your blog post – this can be on your phone, or a Google Hangout or a screen-share presentation – then refer back to your website. (You could also strip the audio of that video and share it as a podcast.)
Send a daily email to your list – send them to your article or post. (Give some free training away on a squeeze page to get their contact details.)

This simple method will get you traffic and visitors to enable you to share your gifts and content – what you have that is unique to share with other people. You can then start to answer their questions and help to change their lives with the thing that you have inside yourself that you can share – your knowledge, skill, experiences or whatever it is that you can teach others to improve their lives.

How do you work out what to talk about?

Simply open up some free mind-mapping software like Freemind or Xmind, come up with 10 main topics in your niche and then 10 sub-topics under each main topic and start creating your content. This exercise should take no longer than 30 minutes and if you really know your stuff, probably a lot quicker. You will then have 100 related topics to create your content around.

So how do you make any money?

Well you might survey your readers and your list to find out what else they need help with – a handful of people will respond and tell you. You then create the training that people can buy from you. A new little plugin called Stakk can help you to do that by enabling you to put a popup survey onto your web page or you can simply link to a survey created on Google Docs – it’s free to use. You can even offer an incentive for readers to share their needs with you.

What if someone can’t afford your training?

Could they offer you a service or something in exchange for your gift? Ultimately it is all about sharing your knowledge and gifts and then charging for more detailed trainings, consultations and coaching sessions. These can all be supported by the information that you have created from your normal daily routine.

This is essentially what the info marketing model is all about. The simple process above has built into it

a traffic source,
a product source (by combining content together) and
the potential to make money, as well as
genuinely changing lives with your internet business.

Is Lack Of Focus A Problem For You?

Internet Marketing Snake Oil

Internet marketing often feels a bit like dealing in ‘snake oil’.

It’s often sold as the cure all remedy for those that want to work from home and make a lot of money at the push of a button.

Whilst you can make money by simply sending emails, getting people onto your list in the first place requires a well-executed strategy.

In an interview between my friend, Matthew Houghton, and John Cornetta, this is what John had to say:

In internet marketing, in the make money online niche, the best way to make money online is to sell training on how to make money online!

But it’s a little bit like ‘chicken & egg’ – how can you sell training on how to make money until you have made some money online?

The way around this is to leverage other people’s results by interviewing other people who have had success (-this is exactly what Matthew is doing in this video.) When you sell that product, you can then prove that you have had a positive result and you can leverage that result by showing other people how you did it and you then leverage that result and so on.

Alternatively, you can sell the internet marketing ‘tools’ – plugins and software, skills training and so on – you’ve heard the gold rush story where some people selling the spades made more money than the miners digging for gold!

Internet marketing only begins to make a lot more sense when you move the skills and strategies that you learn from the make money online niche into other niches where you are selling other products and services. Many of these niches are easy to penetrate once you have acquired the cutting edge skills that you have honed in the make money online niche.

So whilst internet marketing in the make money online niche can seem a little bit like selling snake oil, you will learn skills and strategies that can be applied to almost any business.

Lead Generation Using Warrior Special Offers

Warrior Special Offers are a great method for lead generation. You pay $20 for a WSO sales thread and you can put your special offer in front of the traffic on the Forum.

I have noticed that a number of Warriors create free WSO’s – these convert at around 50% or better. If you were then to add a low-priced upsell after the free offer, it would not take much to recoup the expense of your thread and you would have a list of prospects and buyers to market to.

The only problem with these leads is that these prospects would be comparatively low value because it is likely that they are being bombarded by offer after offer and some of them will be freebie seekers. Also, most people do not value that which they get for free so they may not even consume your product!

I was doing some research in Warrior Plus and I noticed that some marketers are using this method frequently and here are their results:

Product /	Launch Date	Sales	Visitor	Visitor	Avg.	Comm	Refund	Niche
Vendor	Launch Date	Sales	Conv.	Value	Price	Rate	Rate

	22/11/2014	250+	59%	$0.18	$0.30	0%
FREE WSO: Fiverr Informer							Fiverr
barbling

FREE WSO: The Basics of Internet Marketing	13/11/2014	100+	47%	$0.00	$0.00	0%	IM Basics
Reed Floren

	11/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: 9 Surefire Traffic Strategies
Reed Floren

Done for you sales and list building funnel Version II	11/11/2014	1000+	51%	$0.61	$1.19	0%
net66

FREE WSO: The 7 Internet Businesses You Can Start Today	10/11/2014	250+	56%	$0.00	$0.00	100%	0%
Reed Floren

	04/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: How to Make Money as an Affiliate Marketer in 48 Hours							Affiliate Marketing
Reed Floren

	31/10/2014	100+	50%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: The 3 Pillars Your Internet Business Needs							IM Basics
Reed Floren

Easy Online Profits	12/10/2014	1000+	8%	$0.00	$0.05	0%
webmarke

As you can see from these stats, some of these WSO’s are getting a 1,000 plus leads.

I notice that Barb Ling tends to create products around breaking news whilst Reed Floren is attracting newbies with products that cover the basics of internet marketing. Both these experienced marketers will be montetising these leads on the back-end like crazy.

It may be worth moving the squeeze page offer on your blog onto the Warrior Forum to get the benefit of the Forum traffic – it’s just an idea!

You can keep bumping the thread as long as you keep getting some good leads and can monitor your return from the leads that you generate.

Perhaps this research will give you the motivation to use Warrior Special Offers for lead generation purposes – if so, join my list if you want to keep informed about more strategies for making money online or indeed for list building.