Internet Marketing: What Tools Do I Need to Get To $5k Per Month

If you are starting out in internet marketing, you may be asking ‘what tools do I need to get to $5k per month’.

The problem with this question is that just about every marketer will give you a different reply to this question, particularly if they are trying to make money out of you by selling their own product or even someone else’s product or service.

It was refreshing therefore to receive an email from Sean Mize that sets this out clearly and simply (and truthfully)!

It’s sad, really.

And it’s not their fault.

One guru after another has told them, you need this $20 a month tool.

Another says you need this $40 a month tool.

All the way until they are spending $300 A MONTH on tools . . . .

And not making $100 a month, if that.

I talk to several folks a week in that boat.

It’s not their fault.

They’ve been told they need them.

Want to know the tools I personally used to get to $13k a month in one year?

Here goes.

Prepare to be disappointed.

1) a squeeze page

2) a way to make sales pages

3) an email autoresponder

4) good old word docs

That’s it.

$13k a month.

No bells.

No whistles.

That’s right.

ALL you need to get to $5k – or $13k a month

is:

a way to make squeeze pages

a way to make sales pages

a way to make download pages (to deliver)

and an email autoresponder

a word processor

And here’s a secret – you don’t even need a website to have squeeze pages and salespages and download pages.

Just some service that allows you to create them.

You could use mine . . preneurpages

or any other one that does the same thing

and you need an email autoresponder . . I started with aweber and still have my account

That’s it folks.

If you have $300 in tools and no revenue . . .

please, something’s wrong.

How would it feel if you only had $20 a month in expenses . . .

would that make it easier for you (and your wife) to relax

and just focus on selling something

instead of worrying about how to make $300 a month in payments one more time?

Do something!

In this email Sean is promoting his page builder ‘Preneurpages’ but there are plenty of page builders that you can use. Here are 5 other page builders you might consider (- I own all but the last one listed):

Thrive Content Builder plugin by Shaun Melaugh – this is my favourite from a design perspective and is constantly being improved
WP Profit Builder by Keith Dougherty – some good page templates within this plugin
Convertri – this is a hosted service – provides a very fast loading platform for landing pages and an infinitely customizable page builder. There are only a limited amount of page templates unless you buy a monthly subscription to their Pro service but if you are happy to design your own pages, is a good option.
For a cheap but good page builder, you could try Instabuider 2.0 that you can have installed on your WordPress site for $5 through Fiverr.com
Launchpages.co is another page builder that has just been launched as I write this article.

These page builders are a great way of developing landing page templates as part of your system for selling and promoting products and services. They are useless unless you have something to promote, a method of driving traffic to them and a method for monitoring your results.

However, in answering the question ‘What tools do I need to get to $5k per month’ Sean is exactly right and, if you do not already have a page builder system, his page template system ‘PreneurPages’ is worthy of consideration as he will be sharing his own sales page templates that are proven to work.

How To Finish What You Started

My grandson, Daniel, who has finished reading his book!

How to finish what you started is the subject of the email that I received from Sean Mize today.

I think the essential skill that Sean outlines here is having clarity about what it is we want to achieve and then holding onto the ‘picture’ of what that is for long enough in order to achieve it.

The process he outlines is simple.

Personally I would use a mind-map in order to get my ideas into some sort of logical order and then tick off each element of my plan as I progressed. A mind map enables me to move things around easily and to add and subtract ideas as they occur to me.

The other important element of any plan is to put a deadline on its accomplishment.

Here is what Sean says:

It’s easy to fall into a pattern of just doing one thing then another in this business, but the parts never fit together to make a finished product.

Here’s how to out of that trap:

Create for yourself a solid picture, draw it if you are creative, write it out if you are logical, do it the way that works for you

But make a picture that tells you what you want in the end.

Like this:

I want to change the world by helping (name who you are going to help) and helping them do (what you are going to help them do/teach them)

I will use the following medium to do it:

For example, I will create 10-15 information products that will sequentially teach them

And/or I will create a coaching program to teach them and then coach, support, and encourage

And/or I will create a membership that gives them access to my teachings

Then maybe flowchart it out like this:

10-15 standalone trainings –> 1-2 coaching programs –> 1-2 memberships

Then once that’s done, make EVERYTHING you do be a part of making that happen.

You commit to not doing anything that doesn’t lead you close to the fulfillment of that flowchart.

And then just fill in the blanks.

A product one month.

A membership the next.

A product the next month.

Another product the next month.

A coaching program the next month.

A product the next month.

Just one step at a time, filling in the empty places, the spots in your dream that aren’t done yet.

This works, it really does.

This is the kind of process successful people use to realize their dreams.

It WILL work for you.

It’s practically a law of nature.

Sean

As you get into the process of creating your content:

create an outline for that content (again I would use a mind-map)
turn on your video recorder and teach that particular topic
write an email to your subscribers about what you taught
write an article, or get the video transcribed on Fiverr, and add it to your blog or membership site

I hope this simple process will help you to finish what you started in order to earn an income from it. Please sign up to the free offer on my blog if you want to receive more tips like this.

Research Content With Google

This article will help you to research content with Google. We are in the information marketing niche and finding top-quality content to offer to subscribers is vital. Use these tips to find what you need.

Top Tip: If you are looking for random content ideas then Stumbleupon is also an excellent tool.

How To Be A Google Power User [Infographic] by the team at NeoMam

Please join my list if you wish to receive more great information and tips on how to improve your information marketing business.

Work For Yourself First

Work for yourself first is a mindset that feels totally wrong.

Usually the advice is to concentrate on giving your customers the best product or service and success will surely follow.

However, in my consulting business I learnt a valuable lesson that may help you.

I found my consulting income fluctuating wildly simply because I was so focused on giving my current customers exceptional service that I did not give sufficient time or resources to marketing to find the next job.

It’s the same in internet marketing. If you are building a list, then the #1 task in growing your business is to grow your list and communicate with it by offering fresh value and offers that will grow your income.

Sometimes we get swept up in all the distractions of working online such as Facebook, our email inbox, surfing the internet etc

However, the smartest thing we can do is to set aside time at the start of the day to consistently market our business.

This means working on growing our business is the first and most important job before helping others to grow their business.

For internet marketers with a list, writing and sending a daily email to existing customers and prospects should be the first task of the day before we move on to other tasks.

Ideally, these ‘other tasks’ should be directly targeted at work to grow the list either through creating and selling new products or marketing the products or services that we have already created.

We all have 24 hours in any day, the difference between success and failure is in the art of allocating how that time is used.

Make sure that you set time aside at the start of the day to work on tasks that specifically grow your business before you move onto other work.

‘Work for yourself first’ may be a game-changer for you if you can consistently adopt this habit – register on The Sky Inside to get many more important tips on improving the mindset for success.

My Website Has Been Hacked!

My website has been hacked!

This realisation hit me just a couple of days a go and it made me sick to my stomach.

I found that I couldn’t login to my site and then I noticed that the hackers had changed the favicon on my login page.

My immediate reaction was panic and to ask myself ‘what do I do now’.

I had my first website hacked some years ago and I immediately deleted it from the server, even though I had literally put several years work into the site.

It felt like I was just about to revisit this experience.

I immediately checked whether I had a backup of the site, only to discover that the auto-backup system had not worked and there was no current backup of the site available. My brain began to boil at that stage.

I just don’t know what the hackers gain from their behaviour. It seems such a pointless exercise.

This time I managed to calm down sufficiently to create a ticket with my hosting company, Hostgator…

After around 30 frustrating hours of waiting for a response, I decided to contact them on their Chat support.

[boxibt style=”gray”]The world offers many flashy distractions, yet behind their flash is mostly nothing. Rather than rushing through empty diversions, seek the substance that comes from extended, focused attention.[/boxibt]

Hostgator Chat Support enabled me to once more login to my website and I changed the password immediately.

I was then in a position to start deleting the malware from my site and to start making some new security precautions.

I started off going through the files on File Manager in my cPanel and immediately spotted a lot of erroneous files which I started to delete.

I soon realised that, whilst I could probably delete most of the files, I was in danger of missing some of the malware.

I therefore installed one of the security scanning plugins – there are a number in the free WordPress Plugin library. I tried two – Wordfence and Quttera. These helped me to find and delete the remaining bad files. I carried out another scan to check that they had all been deleted.

These two plugins provide additional security for the site – I now have 3 security plugins installed, which is a bit over the top but understandable in the current circumstances, don’t you think?

I was already running a security plugin called WP Sonic Defender which protects against brute-force attacks but clearly this was not enough to defend against all malicious attacks.

I still do not know whether I have done enough!!!

There are plenty of firms willing to help you clean your site and keep you protected but they mostly want a monthly subscription – the ones I looked at wanted to charge in excess of $100 per month and required a commitment of 6 or 12 months upfront! (Talk about profiting from other peoples misfortune!)

My next move was to create a new backup of my website.

I normally use a plugin called Backup Creator to automatically back my websites up to Amazon S3 but it appears that Hostgator have changed the server settings so that my plugin will not work. I was back to Hostgator Chat Support! It turns out that they couldn’t help me.

Backup Creator is my insurance policy against my websites being hacked so my confidence in this software has been shaken by this major failure in my systems!

Just at the time I needed my backup, the cupboard was bare!

I’ve therefore raised a ticket with the support team at Backup Creator to see if they can identify the problem. It is $49 per month to access the support at AWS Amazon.

In the meantime, I am doing manual backups of each site and uploading manually to Amazon S3 for storage purposes. I have over 30 websites, so this is very time-consuming but I will sleep easier knowing that I have a backup copy of each site.

As I am reaching the capacity with my current hosting package at Hostgator, I think strategically I would be better off trying another host like Bluehost or Liquid Web for any future web development because the support at Hostgator is not as good as it once was. i.e. I will spread my hosting across two companies to compare their performance.

I have written this post to document the process that I have gone through in the hope that it will help you.

I guess the lesson is to ensure that you have a system for backing up your websites and that you check to make sure it is working.

Also, spend time and/or money on securing your website as far as possible because, quite apart from the investment in time trying to rectify problems, you will save yourself a lot of stress.

Believe me, the realisation that ‘my website has been hacked’ is not something that I would wish on anyone else but they do say that, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger and, hopefully, this experience will do that for me.

The Systems Mindset

Extracting a boat from the river is just a system

I’ve just read a ebook called ‘The Systems Mindset’ by Sam Carpenter. This is his second book – his first book was called ‘Work The System’. Both books are well worth reading.

As I read The Systems Mindset. I decided to note down a few quotations from this 164 page book to give you a flavour of what is covered:

Your whole existence and all the world around you is an immense collection of independent systems and subsystems.

Via a host of separate processes, our lives are spent in a constant quest for control.

Here is the simple foundational premise of the Systems Mindset: Your life is not a chaotic swirling mass of sights, sounds, and events within which you must incessantly fight for survival. Rather, it’s an orderly collection of independent processes, many of which you can quietly adjust so they will deliver you the life experiences you want. I call this perspective the Systems Mindset.

Your life is a collection of individual systems!

A system is a linear sequence of steps that execute over time, leading to a result.

Systems want to execute properly to produce their intended results.

To get desired outcomes, you must direct the machinery that produces the outcomes.

In this moment, every condition of your life was preceded by a linear process that executed over time. Consider the following, what I call the Universal Formula for How Things Happen: 1+2+3+4 = Result.

The systems of your life are executing all the time. You can’t turn them off. The conditions of your existence are the products of these relentlessly executing individual machines—machines that will remain invisible and unmanaged—or, through the Systems Mindset, machines that you will choose to see and then direct.

This is the absurdly simple blueprint: If you put consistent effort into system improvement; you’ll reach your goal of living the exact life you want.

And so it makes sense for you to immerse yourself in performing system improvements, to spend a lot of time doing it.

Here’s what I want to hammer home: Since it’s incontestable that every future result in your life will be preceded by a linear process that executes over time, you must spend focused, deliberate effort—in this moment— managing those processes.

How much time should you spend managing the systems of your life? I’d say, a lot. The more time you spend in this system improvement place, the more you will get what you want in your life.

And if you feel that sometimes you’re beating yourself to death to live the existence you want, here’s what’s up: Your world is unsatisfactory because you are not deliberately and intensely controlling the machinery that creates your life results.

So to achieve success, stop trying to rearrange the bad results of unseen and therefore unmanaged systems. That’s fire-killing. Instead, see and then manage your machinery so it produces the results you desire.

First, the mechanical processes of your life must improve, and after that occurs, your emotional state will improve. So, be a mechanic, not a psychologist: Get mechanical control first and then, I promise, the emotional control will follow.

Here’s how to use Ockham’s law in everyday life: When there is a decision to be made and one of the solutions is more complex than the other, and you really, really can’t decide which solution to take, pick the simplest option.

To paraphrase Sir William: “The simplest solution is invariably the correct solution.”

Successful people—the people who get what they want out of life—spend their time observing and then managing the systems that produce their results. Unsuccessful people—those who never seem to get what they want—spend their time fire-killing, constantly trying to untangle the random results of their unmanaged systems.

Expend your energy in quietly building and adjusting the particular machinery that will lead to freedom and life success.

Your life can be what you want it to be if you see it for the mechanical marvel it is, and then take action.

99.9 percent of life’s systems work perfectly. Consider the countless processes that execute with amazing efficiency: plants, animals, oceans, businesses, airplanes, bicycles, cities, whole societies, and six billion human bodies.

And so this life you live is composed of a countless number of perfect linear systems, many of which are under your control. These systems are the invisible threads that hold the fabric of your life together. If there is an outcome that doesn’t suit you, you can change that outcome by making an improvement within a system, adding a system, or eliminating a system.

And again, what of those things you can’t fix because they are out of your control? Relax and move on. If you can’t adjust something, don’t worry about it.

If you would like to read The Systems Mindset by Sam Carpenter you can get it for free in return for your email address at this URL:

http://www.thesystemsmindset.com/get-the-book-free/

Website Planning Questions

I have set out some website planning questions on a mind map. These are questions that I need to cover to scope a website design project before quoting a price.

I thought that I would add this to my blog because I am certain that I will think of additional things to add to this mind map over time:

This article has 6 very incisive questions to ask the client before you undertake any project:

http://lostandtaken.com/blog/2015/4/7/the-6-most-important-questions-you-must-ask-before-you-take.html

9 Drivers of Business Growth

Is Making Money Online As Easy As THIS?

My Top 5 WordPress Plugins

12 Smart Ways To Increase Website Conversions

The Critical Importance of Systems in Business

In this article I want to discuss the critical importance of systems in business because everything we do in our business needs to be systemised for several very good reasons:

we need to provide a consistent customer service experience – without systems their experience and contact with our business would be chaotic and unreliable.
we need to free ourselves from working ‘in’ the business. Delegating work to others would be impossible without creating systems and processes for staff members to follow.
it is difficult and risky to scale a business without systems for the same reason above.
if the business relies too heavily on the input of the owner, it is unsaleable as an asset – in reality the business’s value largely resides in its systems
systems bring stability and control to the business which enables us to test and make improvements based on previous experiences in operating the system.

Everything we do in internet marketing is a system. From writing a blog post, to creating a product, to email marketing, to setting up a website, to driving traffic and so on – all are systems.

Software programmes are semi-automated systems – products like WordPress themes and plugins are ALL systems and processes.

The mix of systems and processes within our business, and the way we implement them, is what differentiates our brand, products and services.

Every system or process has a series of inputs and outputs. We put in time or money at the front end in setting up and operating the system and get a result of one sort or another at the back end.

Ideally all these inputs and outputs need measuring and improving.

In reality 20% of our systems and processes produce 80% of the results. If you can identify the these critical success factors then you can prioritise these systems as key performance indicators and prioritise their measurement and improvement.

This means that having a good management information system is critical to the success of all businesses because it enables management to make better, more informed business decisions.

The question I want to ask you, dear reader, is how systemised is your business?

Are you measuring your most important systems and using that information to improve our business?

If not, this is something that you really need to stop and consider NOW! Why, because you will likely not last in business very long if you continue to operate your business by the ‘seat of your pants’.

From my previous career in banking, I can categorically report that those businesses that performed best all had good management information systems, almost without exception. I dealt with medium sized and larger family businesses and to get through the initial start-up phase (and particularly when you want to access other peoples capital) management information was always critical.

To be successful in info marketing online you will require these systems:

traffic systems
blogging systems
email marketing system
list building systems
sales funnel systems
product and content creation systems
affiliate marketing systems
management information systems
productivity systems
planning systems

Each of these systems requires multiple sub-systems and processes. For example, your blogging system will or may require a theme, plugins, linking to Google and Bing webmaster tools, Google Analytics, linking to your social media accounts, ecommerce, secure members area etc and so on.

I am going to be releasing a series of products about these systems & process with check-lists and step-by-step processes to help my fellow entrepreneurs doing business online.

Sign up to my list by subscribing to one of my freebies in my sidebar if you are interested in systemising your online business and realise the critical importance of systems in business. I will advise you as and when I release further content and products on systemisation.

In the meantime, I can recommend 3 great books to read, particularly if you need further convincing of the importance of systems:

The Emyth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Work The System by Sam Carpenter
The Goal by EM Goldratt

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

Why You MUST Have Analytics Data

In this article I want to cover why you MUST have analytics data for everything you do in your business.

You may already be aware of this at some level but it may seem too time-consuming or complicated to set up. I want to address both these issues in this article because this mindset has certainly dogged me in the past.

I’ve even set up Google Analytics on most of my websites but simply failed to login to Google Analytics to look at the stats because the layout of Google Analytics is a bit confusing and the wealth of information provided is overwhelming.

If you set up your products on an affiliate platform like JVZoo or Warrior Plus, then you will automatically get your sales stats and sales funnel conversions but what if you want to setup your sales funnel outside one of these platforms or indeed you want to get conversion stats on a squeeze page on your blog?

Ideally you also need to be split-testing your squeeze pages ans sales pages for maximum conversions. Again you can use Google Experiments or Goals inside Google Analytics but again you are faced with grappling with the interface of Google Analytics.

For this reason, I recently invested in a product called Funnel Trax. But more about that shortly.

First, I want to discuss why you really must have analytics data so you are at least motivated to take this stuff seriously.

Taking action at all is difficult but finding the motivation to take action is even more difficult if you do not get immediate results feedback.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s say that I create a squeeze page and buy a solo ad to send some clicks to the page. Without results feedback, it would be difficult to motivate myself to send more traffic if I didn’t know the results.

If it cost me $35 to buy this traffic and I received no sales from the transaction then my loss is $35 – without further information I might decide to cut my losses.

But if I also knew that, of those 10 subscribers, on average 5 would go on to buy a $47 product as a result of my email marketing follow-up campaign then that would motivate me to buy more traffic and also see if I could increase my squeeze page conversion rate.

See what I mean? Without the right information it is impossible to make sensible and profitable decisions about your business. It is also difficult to find the motivation to take the action you need to take unless you get immediate results feedback – that action might be to cut a loss-making marketing campaign and move your resources into something else that will yield a better result.

You probably know all this at some level already but are you monitoring your stats daily? Probably not.

Do you think this could be the key to making headway in your business?

I think for many entrepreneurs this is the key PROVIDED it is easy to set up the monitoring system and the information it spits out is easy to understand and assimilate.

This what I like about Funnel Trax. It’s bloody simple to set up and use and it enables you monitor all your analytics data in one place.

The key point that you should take from this article is that if you’re not using data to drive your decisions, and paid traffic to help grow your business – you’re in trouble. The writing is on the wall and the people who fail to adapt will only struggle before perishing.

(P.S. With the rise of remarketing/retargeting, one of the key stats is how many pixelled leads you can gather and Cost Per Pixel)

The Next Thing To Do

In internet marketing you often find yourself thinking about the next thing to do.

This is a transcript of an email that I received from one of the most productive internet marketers I know – Sean Mize.

This is how it starts…

I’m gonna share a concept I use in my business to get me more results, and I’ve used iterations of it for years, and it’s one of the key things to which I can attribute my aggressive production (whether it was 25,000 articles on ezine articles, testing ~ $30,000 of solo ads, or running well over 100 wsos) and I use it today to increase my productivity.

And that’s the “what’s the next thing I need to do?” principle.

It works like this:

I know what my yearly goal is, and I know what my next big goal is (they are sometimes the same, sometimes not)

So since I know my goal, and I know the current state of my business, I also know there are a number of things that need to be done to achieve that goal.

But that’s where I think most folks get derailed (is that where you get derailed)? So much to do, so you do . . . nothing on the path to getting where you want to go? I digress 🙂

But instead I ask the question, what is the NEXT thing I need to do to achieve my goal?

For example, if my goal is 100 subs a day, and I’m at 10, what is the NEXT thing I need to do? Is it create another traffic instance? Is it add a new squeeze page version into my testing rotation? Is it to write another article? Record another video? What is my NEXT thing that I need to do?

Here’s another example: if I am creating a 10 hour training program, and I need:

an outline
record for 10 hours
write a sales letter
write 5 sales emails
create a download page
put the routing into infusionsoft

That can be overwhelming and if I just put it on my “to do” list with everything else, everything else gets done, but nothing on this.

But what if I wake up everyday and just ask, what is the NEXT thing to do?

Day 1 I write the outline

Day 2 I record one of 10 hours

Day 3 I record one of 10 hours

…and so on.

In a finite period of time my task is done.

The problem is, when you look at it this way, you might think, but this will take so LONG.

Maybe 30 days.

But in reality, trying to do it all at once isn’t working for you, is it?

I doubt it (you do too, think back on the last month, did you accomplish what you set out to do?)

So . . . what is the NEXT thing you need to do to get to your goal?

The Law of Averages

This article about the law of averages was inspired by a recording by Jim Rohn that randomly cropped up this morning when I was listening to my ipod whilst walking the dog.

If you do something often enough a ratio will appear.

It’s amazing.

Once a ratio starts, it tends to continue.

This information is hugely important to business success.

In baseball or cricket its called a ‘batting average’.

Talk to 10 people and you get one.

Talk to 10 more and get another one and so on.

If you get 9 out of 10 and I get 1 out 10, I can still compete with you.

How can that be?

If you talk to 10 people and get 9, I’ll talk to 100 people and get 10. I beat you.

You will learn more from losing than you do by winning.

I make up in numbers, I lack in skill.

Anybody can do this.

The law of averages can be increased.

The fourth time you talk to someone you get 2.

Why?

You’re getting better.

In baseball if you only hit 3 out of 10 balls you make $4m per year. That means that you can win big by missing 7 times out of 10!

It’s the same in internet marketing. I’ve found that from affiliate traffic, on average I can get a 10% conversion rate when I sell a digital product.

That means that 9 out of 10 visitors don’t buy!

Once you know these numbers you can work on strategies for increasing your conversion rate through strategies like split-testing, improving your sales funnel, using exit pop-ups etc.

The point is that you don’t have to ‘bat a thousand’ to make big money.

When recruiting people to his network marketing business, Jim Rohn knew he could recruit 3 out of 10 people.

His invitation to listen to his network marketing presentation went something like this:

‘I normally recruit 3 out of 10 people. I don’t mind if you come to my meeting as one of the 7 that don’t join. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you just listen. As one of my friends, I don’t want you saying in a years time, when you see my success, why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me and tell me about this opportunity. At least if you listen now I can say I gave you the opportunity.‘

The story of the sower from the bible & how it relates to the law of averages.

The sower was ambitious. He had excellent seed (opportunity).

The sower goes out to sow the seed, some fell by the wayside and the birds got some of the seed. (Some people will not make it to your meeting – the birds will get some.)

You have two options:

chase birds – if you do this, you will leave the field i.e. distract you from your main purpose.
or just say ‘Isn’t that interesting’ which is the preferred option.

The sower kept on sowing.

There are only 9 or 10 miserable people in the world – they move around a lot. When you bump into one, remind yourself that there only 9 more like you in the whole world (i.e. you need to be persistent in the face of adversity.)

Now the seed falls on rocky ground where the soil is shallow but it is not of your making.

The seed begins to grow but, with the first hot day, the seedling whithers.

(These are people that don’t show up to the second meeting.) The hot weather will get some – not an easy thing to watch.

Just say, ‘isn’t that interesting’ and don’t bother asking why.

Some just don’t stay or get put off by the first obstacle. You can’t change that – just take it as it comes.

If someone says ‘why does the sun come up in the east?‘ – don’t sign up for the ‘why is this’ class – it’s the law of averages!

He kept on sowing – he had to discipline his disappointment.

Some are not going to stay but in the normal course of things this is the way things are.

Some of the seed falls on thorny ground.

As the seed begins to grow, the thorns strangle the seedling. These are the little things that get in the way of making progress. Little things cheat people out of big opportunities. It’s just the way it is – like winter following fall.

The sower keeps sowing the seed.

Finally the seed falls on good ground

If you keep sowing ‘it always will’. Some of your ‘seed’ will fall on good people – it’s the law of averages working again!

Some of the good ground did 30%, some did 60% and some did 100%.

Why? Don’t sign up for that class – it just the way it is!

If you try to get the 30% to do 60%, you’ll just hit your head against a brick wall. Just let the 30% do 30% and 60% do 60%.

Learn the law of sowing and reaping because it directly relates to the law of averages and your success in life and internet marketing.

The Process Of Creating A Website For A Client

In this article I am going to outline the process that I use for creating a website for a client.

This is the process that I have used to develop a website for Astles of Nottingham – this is a new florist and greengrocers shop based in Nottingham that also wishes to establish an online shop for both parts of the business.

Choosing the Domain

Rather than base our domain name around keywords, we chose to use the name of the business – Astles of Nottingham.

We decided not to include the ‘of’ to slightly shorten the domain name to make it easier to put into the browser. Also the keywords are ‘Astles’ and ‘Nottingham’ – these are words that customers will put into the search box when the business is established.

We decided to use the ‘co.uk’ suffix because it is a UK based business but we did also buy the ‘.com’ and redirected this to ‘co.uk’ just in case customers put ‘.com’ into the browser (or a competitor decides to buy it and divert the traffic to their site -this actually happened to me in a previous business!).

Hosting

Establish where the website is to be hosted. I own Reseller Hosting so in the majority of cases I set up my clients on my web host but it is important to ask first!

Hosted Emails

It is important for both branding and professional reasons to set up hosted email addresses and to forward these to my customers normal email inbox as appropriate. (This is in addition to their Google Gmail account which is set up when they create their Google account below.) This is important for the Contact Form on the website.

Competitor Research

I asked my customer who the top 3 competitors are to her business and she gave me about 10 names. Most of these businesses have relatively poorly-designed sites although we did pick up some great tips from one or two of the sites!

It is a great idea to scope out the competition and in particular check out what keywords they are targeting so that you can get more ideas for your keyword list – see below.

Choosing The Theme

My customer wants to make alterations to the site i.e. input products and also blog posts. I needed an easy interface and WordPress is ideal for this.

We decided to use the Avada Theme because this is the top-selling theme in Themeforest.net which means that it will be well-maintained and supported, most of the glitches will have been dealt with and it has loads of design options so the site can be created exactly as my customer requires.

I went through some of the demo design options, of which there are many, before we opted for a simple, clean design that is totally different to that of any of their competitors.

The downside of this theme is that, because it is fully-loaded’ set-up is comparatively complex and time-consuming as you need to track down the correct settings – and there are a lot of them.

Logo & Font

I then discussed the required font and logo with my customer. As luck would have it, they had an old photo with a font on it that they wanted to use. This related to a greengrocery business that had been in the family many years ago.

It is quite hard to track down a font from a photograph because there are literally thousands of font variations!

We eventually settled on ‘QTCoronation’ which has been used to created the ‘Astles’ logo. This took quite a bit of time but was well-worth the effort.

With regards to font size, I increased all the default font sizes in the theme to make the site easy for customers to read.

Colour Scheme

We wanted a colour scheme to run throughout the business. The shop is very ‘green’ in colour so we settled on green. However, I recommended a ‘light’ feel to the site so we decided to use white, light grey, and green as our colour palette but use the green as an accent colour.

The important thing is to find a colour palette that is aesthetically pleasing (- there are plenty of colour-palette sites that can help -) and that the colour palette is used consistently throughout the business to reflect the brand.

One of my favourite sites is the Robert Welch cutlery site which simply uses white and black and shades in between!

Graphics & Icons

Websites are a visual medium and graphics are an incredibly important element of website design. I therefore spent an afternoon with my customer trawling through graphics sites to find a home page graphic that reflected their business and my customer approve of. The home page is critical because it is the most used point of entry for visitors.

The best converting websites are those that do not have a lot of distractions and the customer can easily navigate to find what they want.

For this reason, the front of the website is a simple graphic that reflects what the business sells – vegetables, fruit and flowers. The customer can then do very little else other than to find out ‘About’ the business or visit either the ‘Greengrocers’ shop or the ‘Florists’ shop which is the whole point of the site.

From the website developers point of view, a significant amount of time can be spent on selecting and customising graphics. It is important that graphics are optimised for the web i.e. compressed and sized correctly to improve page-loading speeds.

This aspect of web-design is a major time-consumer and possibly not well-understood or valued by the customer.

Pages Required

I discussed the basic page structure for the site with my customer and we came up with a relatively simple starting structure. Also, with the addition of the online shop, many of the pages created relate to the efficient operation of the shop.

Keyword Research

This is the area where most of the competitors fall down and the reason why their websites receive less traffic than they might otherwise do – poor keyword research. As a result, their websites are optimised for relatively few keywords and often for keywords that they can never rank for.

For businesses servicing a local community, selecting keywords can be systematic as follows:

City Keyword
Keyword City
City State Keyword
Keyword City State
City State Abbreviation Keyword
Keyword City State Abbreviation
Keyword in City
Keyword in City State
Keyword in City State Abbreviation
State Keyword
Keyword State
StateAbbreviation Keyword
Keyword State Abbreviation
Keyword in State
Keyword in State Abbreviation

Using this methodology, and selecting the business name and products and services offered, and even suburbs of a city, it is possible to develop a more comprehensive keyword list with which to work with.

When I showed the keyword list that I developed for ‘Astles of Nottingham‘ to my customer, they expressed surprise at the size and scope of the list.

Google, Social Media and Traffic

Each business needs to create a Google account. Why? Because around 85% of the search engine traffic is generated through the use of Google.

Also, I integrate my clients site with Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools to keep a handle on traffic and to optimise the site.

Also, for local businesses, it is important to create a business profile in Google to get page one rankings in Google. Businesses need to verify that they own the business and fully-complete their profile.

The same process of creating a business profile needs to be followed for Bing because there are still many users of Bing as a search engine and it is important to pick up the additional 10% of traffic.

In addition to Google+, my customer has opted to connect her site to a Facebook page and a YouTube channel so that she can drive traffic through these media. She opted not to use Twitter and LinkedIn may be added in future.

It is important to consider a strategy for getting traffic to a clients website – possible options include:

SEO
offline promotions driving visitors to the website
social media
PPC – including Google Adwords and Bing Advertising

In addition to SEO and social media, my customer will be running a monthly draw for a free bouquet or box of vegetables for new subscribers and registrants to her online shop. Once she has their contact details, she can then send them an email to bring them back into her website or store.

Selected Plugins

Plugins add additional functionality to WordPress. Using the Avada theme meant that I needed to download 4 plugins to make it function properly at the basic level – this included 2 slider plugins, Contact Form 7 and the Woocommerce plugin for the online shop.

The Woocommerce plugin is quite complicated and time-consuming to configure as there are a lot of potential settings to consider. For this reason, it is important to run through the settings with my client to ensure that they understand and agree with the settings that I have applied. For example, some products are zero-rated for VAT and others are not.

In addition to these plugins, I am adding the following plugins:

‘Regenerate Thumbnails’ to resize thumbnail graphics (free)
‘SEO By Yoast’ to SEO optimise the site – this is currently the best free SEO plugin available in my opinion but it takes some time to set up properly.(free)
Backup Creator – this is a premium plugin by Robert Plank that enables me to automate the process ofbacking up the site on a regular basis.
WP Sonic Defender – this is a premium plugin that moves the -wp-admin’ page to a new location to defeat brute-force attacks and has a number of addional security features.
WP Legal Pages to create the legal pages for the site (premium)
Google XML Sitemaps (free)

Plugins need to be selected with care as too many plugins can slow down the page load speed. On the other hand, you need the site to do what it needs to do!

Trade Associations

I asked my customer whether she was affiliated to any Trade Associations as adding these to her site will potentially lend more authority and credibility to her business.

There are many online trade directories – adding my customers business details will improve search engine rankings over time

Content Creation

There are a number of options for creating the site content:

I create it
my customer creates it
outsource it
a combination of the above

The ‘About’ page will be written by my customer as she wants to cover her families long history as greengrocers in the Nottingham area. This will include some vintage photographs to illustrate this history.

The ‘Delivery’ page was created by researching competitors sites – it will need refinement in the light of operational experience.

My client wants to be able to add and delete products from the online shop. To enable her to do this, I will create a video showing her how to do this so she can create most of the shop content although I will support her with graphics etc.

Blog posts – I suggest that my client creates these (another training video will be created) to cover the following:

promotions and special offers
new products and services
market news such as ‘in season’ produce and price variations
forthcoming events such as valentines day, mothers day etc that relate to seasonal product sales
winners of the customer monthly draw
the initial shop launch

Some of these articles will be created around the targeted keyword list that I have created for my customer to drive SEO traffic to the site and to notify existing customers by email to drive them back to the site with a view to purchasing more.

The point about ‘Content’ is to agree with the customer who exactly will create it and to agree deadlines for completion – for many customers, this may mean that I end up doing the majority of the work to ensure that it gets done.

Delivery Deadline

My customer is opening her shop on the 5th February, in time to sell flowers for Valentines Day.

Understanding my customers expectations for delivery of the website is important because if the time-scale is tight, it enables me to prioritise my work e.g. in this case create the Valentines products in the online shop before anything else!

Conclusion

As you can appreciate from this article, to set up a business website requires quite a bit of work if your purpose is to build on strong foundations. Unfortunately, many so-called website designers skip some of the necessary steps – particularly those that relate to invisible benefits or are deemed future ‘upsells’ to the customer.

In my opinion, 95% or more of business websites are not for for purpose, receiving little or no targeted traffic and poorly designed. Without traffic, a website is just so much digital dust and almost completely useless to the business owner – web designers know this but do not explain this to the customer. Without results, a lot of websites become stale and out-dated because the website owner has no incentive to invest further time or money.

By covering the rigorous process that I use for creating a website for a client, hopefully this has been helpful for you – this is for a small local greengrocers and florists i.e. a local business rather than an authority blog, sniper site or membership site.

Josh Bartletts 10-Step Process

I’ve just been listening to a podcast by Josh Bartlett in which he revealed his 10-step process for creating his products.

Josh is a very successful internet marketer and has created two highly successful products:

Easy Video Suite (formerly Easy Video Player)
Audello which is podcasting software

He was formerly an Ebay Power Seller but gave up this business model to create software and he has a team of talented software engineers working for him although he says that he does not have a lot of coding experience himself.

This is the 10 step process that he recommends:

Pick a niche about which you are passionate
Research the niche and offer as much value as you can before you begin to sell anything
Make a high-quality free product and then ask your prospects to answer a short survey – incentivise them to complete the survey with a relevant prize – preferably physical as this has higher perceived value
You will see a pattern from the survey – research the answer to the main problem and build a product to solve the problem
Follow up and offer more free value BEFORE you release your product to show that you do things to a higher level
Release your paid product to your list of people who opted into your freebie and listen to their feedback
Recruit them as affiliates for your product and educate them about how they can make money with your product
Use those affiliates to do a full launch
Follow up with great after-sales care
PROFIT

What came though in the podcast is that Josh has a desire to offer genuine value – his podcast is called Beyond The Hype – and his attention to customer service which is beyond what most marketers offer.

So his business model has integrity – he create a limited few products based upon careful market research, listens to feedback to improve his offering and offers exceptional customer care to make them the best in the marketplace.

Speaking personally, I was eager to purchase Audello based upon my buying experience of Easy Video Suite – both of these are high-ticket products but price is never a factor if you receive value and greater customer service – I am sure you agree!

Josh Bartlett’s 10-step process has a lot of integrity built into it and it has been highly profitable for him. You can listen to Josh’s full story here.

Lead Generation Funnels For Local Businesses

How do you create lead generation funnels for local businesses?

If you are a local business looking to generate leads from the internet or a consultant to local businesses, then you may wish to follow the system that I outline below.

These are the components that you will need to assemble in order to get leads:

a free report or a free gift to give away in return for the contact details of your prospect – the more enticing that this is the better.
an ecover graphic of your free give away to make it more enticing
a server to store your give away so that it can be downloaded
a video to sell the idea of downloading your free give away
a series of automated email messages to follow up with your prospect after download to increase the chances of them contacting you by ‘educating’ them about why it would be a good idea to do so.
an autoresponder to enable you to operate the above system
a website or web page to offer your give away
a method for driving targeted traffic to your offer.

To give you an example of some of these components – in this case a Handyman – here is a video, the free report, the ecover graphic and the email messages.

You can probably produce something even better but at least it gives you a good steer on what you need to put together.

Most of this can easily be outsourced if you are thinking that this is a technical challenge:

Ecover:

Download example Report:

Download example Autoresponder Messages:

I do not pretend that this is a sophisticated sales funnel or that the example is something that you should necessarily follow but it is a lot more than the majority of local businesses currently have in place.

In case you are wondering why you need a system like this, then let me explain. Most visitors to your website will never return. Only a very small percentage of visitors will be ready to buy on their first visit. Without a method for capturing their contact details and following up with them, most of your website traffic will be wasted.

By capturing their contact details and keeping your business in their mind through follow up communications, you increase the chances of converting them into a sale and thereby reducing the risks inherent in online marketing.

There are many strategies for increasing conversions – squeeze pages, exit popups to offer an alternative product, split-testing, increasing traffic, improving the offer, improving your copy, increasing the length of your sales funnel etc etc.

Lead generation funnels are an essential component of online marketing for local businesses and also for any other business – hopefully this gives you some ideas for your own business.

Tips For Optimizing Warrior Plus To Increase WSO Sales

Sales Funnel Training

We are shortly going to launch a sales funnel training product because the importance of having a sales funnel in your business cannot be under-estimated.

If you do not have a well-designed sales funnel in your business then you will be leaving a lot of money on the table.

However, it is one thing to know this in theory but, in practice, creating a sales funnel can seem technically difficult to put together. The purpose of our new product, which is called Honey Trap Funnels, is to demystify the whole process of how to build a high-converting sales funnel.

Generally, the longer your sales funnel, the more money you will make.

Also, you may need to redefine the meaning of ‘sales funnel’ to extend to all your marketing after the initial sales have taken place i.e. to include your back-end marketing. A sales funnel like this requires careful planning and execution.

Creating the web pages for a well-executed sales funnel can also be a barrier but with sales funnel template software like Optimize Press and WP Profit Builder (which I reviewed recently) building these pages quickly has become a lot easier with their fully-featured templates.

I also notice that the Thrive Content Builder is moving in this direction too as they have started creating Landing Page Templates with a view to creating many more page templates in future.

In Honey Trap Funnels we will cover:

how to select products and services for the funnel
how to plan your sales funnel
how to create your sales funnel
how to move traffic through your funnel and how to recover traffic at the drop-off points
how to test and monitor your sales funnel for higher conversions
some examples of simple funnels
and much more

There will also be an upsell where we cover all of this in more detail including examples of some actual funnels that you could build for yourself.

In the meantime, whenever you buy a product, it is worth watching how the vendor has constructed their sales funnel.

Alternatively, simply look at product vendor JV pages to see what they are doing. However, don’t forget that after their initial product sale, they will be taking their customers through their back-end marketing system which is an extension of the front-end sales funnel so you may not get the full picture.

If you are a customer, however, you will be exposed to their full sales funnel and this is instructional.

To execute sales funnels effectively requires that your business is well-planned and organised about how it executes the process of putting a sales funnel in place.

We think that this sales funnel training will therefore be very instructive to many online business owners who may fail to understand how important sales funnels are in making money.

Build Your Database

Why is is important to build your database?

This is an important question because unless you have a good reason to build a database, then nothing will happen. After all, database management is a really mundane and boring task so we need to be highly motivated to do it.

Like many small and mundane tasks, this is really critical to your long-term success.

I want you to imagine that at some time in the future you want to sell your business – it could be just a few years from now or even many years into the future.

What are you going to sell? If you are an online business, you may have some digital products but that is probably not where the true value in your business lies.

You may have systems and processes such as proven sales funnels and membership sites etc but that’s still not where most of the value lies in your business.

Most of the value lies in your customer database and the relationship that you have with that database.

If you have taken the trouble to create a comprehensive database and to nurture a good relationship with that database then you have a ready made revenue source.

In internet marketing, most marketers think that it is sufficient just to build a list and send out emails. However, it is likely that you you know very little about your customers and prospects other than their name and email address and perhaps which products they opted into or bought.

This makes it difficult to build a solid relationship with them.

The only way that you can build a solid relationship with them is by gathering as much data as you can about them i.e. really take a genuine interest in them and find out who they really are.

What if you took all buyers of your products and put them into a CRM system and gathered more information on them such as website, social media profiles, birth date, and so on and reached out to them personally?

In most offline businesses, this kind of data is gathered through a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) but I wonder how many internet marketers consider running such a system? Most of them seek to gather email addresses in huge quantity rather than trying to improve the QUALITY of their relationships by taking a genuine interest in their prospects and customers.

Could this type of approach revolutionise your business – I think it could.

It would certainly differentiate you from most other list builders.

If you did this, you wouldn’t need a large list in order to succeed now would you?

So how could you go about deepening your relationships in this way?

Nowadays, I think that if you could invite your prospects and customers into a Facebook Group, or Google+ community or your social media community, it would give you the opportunity to engage directly with them and gather more information that could personalise your approach.

But you could be more direct by simply asking them or incentivising them to give you the information say through a poll or questionnaire.

Rather than just pure list building and email marketing, perhaps you should also be operating a CRM system alongside?

What if you also adopted this approach when recruiting affiliates? It would make an enormous difference, don’t you think to your success in getting them to mail for you?

Here’s a video by a real estate business that does an excellent job of explaining the value of building your data base in this way and how to do it manually – as internet marketers there is plenty of software available to automate this process. (Whilst this video is dated, it is extremely important to learn the message and then create your own system. You’ll thank me later that you took this advice and did something with it.)

It’s called ‘Build Your Database with Gary Keller’ and it is 28 minutes well spent:

http://kwconnect.kw.com/connect/user/GetCourse.do?memberId=2962

You are going to do something with it, aren’t you? Stop right now and implement this today before you forget about it. And don’t forget to subscribe to my list in the sidebar if you want to stay informed and don’t forget to look me up on Facebook 🙂 because I really want to know more about you!

I really hope you build your database along these lines rather than in the normal ‘scatter-gun’ method – I think you will find this approach much more valuable and Microsoft Outlook (or something similar) has plenty of tools to enable you to set up a simple CRM system of your own until you can afford a system like Infusionsoft.

Sonic Reply: My New Help Desk

I have just acquired the Sonic Reply plugin which is a new piece of software for creating a branded help desk.

The plugin was launched on 23rd July 2014 and I am one of the first customers to test it out.

The video below gives you a review of the plugin and you can see my new support desk here:

You can get the Membersonic Theme here. (This theme is great value for money and I use it a lot for my membership sites.)

This is the link to the Sonic Reply plugin..

Later:

In view of our impending launch of Hangout Cash Code, I have co-branded the Help Desk with Chris Cole. We have plans to create at least one product per month in partnership and it makes sense to run all support through one help desk.

I am pleased to report that the Sonic Reply plugin was battle-tested during our successful product launch whewr we sold around 550 digital products and received around 20 tickets. Sonic Reply enabled us to keep on top of our customer service response times and to answer the tickets in the order received – it has great analytics that really help us to manage our tickets effectively.

My Website Was Suspended!

My website was suspended by my hosting company for CPU abuse for 24 hours.

I did have a warning a couple of weeks ago and thought that I had addressed the problem by caching my site and deleting a plugin that was causing problems. It turns out that that plugin was not properly deleted??!!! and was continuing to use resources. This has now been addressed by adding code to the .htaccess file.

I have contacted the plugin crator to inform him of the problems I have experienced – it looks like he has removed this plugin from his current product range.

The really annoying thing about this is that there is no way to monitor CPU usage so I don’t know if the amendments I have made have addressed the problem adequately. I am happy to sort any problem out, if I can understand the root cause.

In my experience, this is just one of the costs of doing business but the timing could not be more embarrassing because my whole business revolves around my website. I now know why it is a good idea to have your own dedicated server but that is relatively expensive. Of course this expense has to be measured against the potential loss of business.

The real problem is that the technicians speak in code – here is an example of just one line of code thrown at me – of course there were at least 100 more lines of code – what do you make of this:

CPU Usage: 183.8% (warning)

MEM Usage: 9.5% (warning)

Processes: 25 (warning)

LimitPHP: Limit file exists. (warning)

markc 6298 1.2 0.4 287056 67076 ? SN 14:59 0:02 /opt/php53/bin/php-cgi /home/markc/public_html/index.php ……………………………

So from this code, I am supposed to work out what is wrong. I’m sure it means something to someone but which business owner has the time or knowledge to decipher this?

My website is somewhat plugin intensive which does not help with CPU usage but I use all the plugins on my site and deactivating some of them will cause problems with my content.

My host recommends that you use only 5 plugins but I am currently using 23!! If the problems continue I may need to prune this number radically but I don’t want to do this if I can avoid it.

These sort of incidents always make you stronger in the long run because they are a learning experience but in the short term they are extremely painful, embarrassing and frustrating.

So much of life is like this when you are growing!

Anyway, if you were trying to access my site within the last 24 hours, I apologise for the fact that my website was suspended. For the time being, normal service has been resumed.

Update

I have been informed of a method for monitoring CPU usage and I’m setting this up now. The only question in my mind, is will I understand the output so I can address any further problems?

How To Create A Video Playlist in Easy Video Suite

I recorded a short video showing how I create a video playlist in Easy Video Suite.

If you know how to do it, it is easy but if you have never done it before it can seem daunting. Hopefully this video will remove the mystique from this process.

The product for which I am creating this playlist is The No Cost Income Stream.

Please post any questions or comments below:

P.S. Apologies for the heavy breathing – I had the microphone in the wrong place!

The No Cost Income Stream

Yesterday I purchased a reseller package of 89 videos called The No Cost Income Stream. These tutorials basically outline 5 models for making money online without investing money.

They came supplied with a professionally written sales page and download page. It appealed to me because it is what most people are looking for in the ‘make money online’ niche.

However, a download page for videos really sucks – particularly when there are 89 of them! So I have decided to create a video playlist for each model and put these onto a membership site to improve the presentation of the material.

I have a membership site clone set-up for fast deployment of membership sites – it is almost easier to than setting up a download page and certainly enables you to cross-promote your other products and services better.

The 5 No Cost Income Stream models are:

Product Launch
Freelancing
Video Marketing
List Building
Affiliate Marketing

In addition there are video tutorials covering 16 free traffic methods.

Here is a snapshot of the front of the membership site:

These are high quality videos made by a partnership of 3 x 7-figure marketers. I paid $37 for the package of videos and I’m selling access to the tutorials for $37 – so just one sale will recoup my out-of-pocket investment.

I’ve converted the sales letter onto a WordPress page with an exit pop-up that offers access to each model for $9.95 in order to maximise sales. Seperating the models like this gives me a number of options for marketing each of the models as a separate product.

I’ve also created the website header, video splash image and variors images for marketing the product.

The first module of 30 videos is in place and the rest are being uploaded to Amazon S3 today – 89 videos represent a lot of work, particularly as I had to download each one off the download page. The videos were uploaded to Amazon S3 via Easy Video Suite.

Here are a few more details:

1) What is the course all about?

Eric, Paul, and Jeff aka the Real Guys wanted to give the very best answer that they possibly could on how to make money online without spending money, so they created a comprehensive step-by-step video course showing how to actually build an online business using 100% free tools.

2) This is 2.0 of the product – what’s the difference between the first NCIS course and NCIS 2.0?

They created NCIS 1.0 about two years ago. It basically covered one business model, which was affiliate marketing. NCIS 2.0 actually covers 5 business models: No Cost Product Launches, No Cost Freelancing, No Cost Video Marketing, No Cost List Building, and No Cost Affiliate Marketing.

It goes into a lot more options, more depth with 89 videos, and it is 100% up to date at this time, having been created in the past month.

3) Are there any bonuses included?

There are several valuable bonuses: I’m including some additional courses:

Videos about the various free Video Screencasting Tools available
Video tutorials about how to use free graphics editors

I’m also adding PDF’s of the Powerpoint presentations to each ‘No Cost Income Stream’ model. I may also create a video sales letter and split-test this against the written version.

Of course with 89 videos to watch there is a cost – your time – and time is money! But if you are ‘time rich’ and cash poor’ this is an excellent option.

If you are cash rich then I would also recommend that you sign up for coaching – if that interests you feel free to contact me through my Contact page. Whilst you may baulk at investing in coaching, ultimately, in my experience, it will save you both time and money.

Hopefully, selling these tutorials will add another income stream to my business as I build it into a ‘multiple streams of income’ model. I probably need to create a low-cost or free squeeze page in front of this product and put this product on the back-end.

It’s not a ‘No Cost Income Stream’ but it is a low-cost income stream!

My Latest Challenge – At Least One WSO A Week

I’m preparing for my latest challenge – at least one WSO a week.

That’s quite a challenge for me since I have not launched many WSO’s. (Also, I am babysitting my grandchildren for part of the time in April during the Easter break.)

I first came across the idea of launching multiple WSO’s from Sean Mize when I bought his WSO entitled ‘How you can make a full-time income selling WSO’s in 2014’.

Sean set himself a target of doing 150 WSO’s in 2013 but came up short on his target – he ONLY did 80! However, that was enough to generate $65k in sales.

Was it a coincidence then when two of my online colleagues, who know about my product creation skills, approached me to partner on creating a business where we launch one WSO a week?

I will focus on product creation whilst they focus on traffic and email marketing. We would share the list of buyers.

My first thoughts were that I could be working flat out 100% of the time whilst my partners had the easy end of the stick and would also have time to run their solo ads and coaching business. They do, however, have a large list from their solo ads business!

On reflection, I think that this partnership would be little different to a normal affiliate relationship and I have decided that it would be worth trying for a month or two and then review progress at the end of April or end of May.

The products would of course be ‘one problem, one solution’ type products that can be consumed within one hour and will sell at $5 to $7 on the front end and up to $17 on the back-end. The back-end will be built from existing products and former WSO’s most of which will be taken down after 7 days or the price increased.

Each product will be on a membership site to cross-sell other products and services. I will create a membership site clone for fast deployment and easy branding.

Products will be sold through Warrior Plus where I will also be doing product research. Existing buyers might also tell me what they would like to learn to generate more ideas, if I take the trouble to ask them.

The key to monetisation is the email marketing on the back-end to cross-sell more products. I would like to get up to 2 or 3 WSO’s a week when I have refined the system but it is important not to run before I can walk!

Initially I am thinking in terms of planning my time like this:

– research – 1 day
– product planning & sales letter – 1 day
– product creation & membership site – 2 days
– WSO set-up & funnel testing etc – 1 day
– weekend as a buffer and to enable me to do other things and you to do product quality control.

Compared to what Sean Mize advocates, I am planning to take far too long on each part but initially I want to start off ‘slow’ and then if I can get it up to 2 or 3 a week, try for that rather than saying I can do it off the bat.

I think the important thing is to work out a system i.e.

carry out research for several products at the same time and / or utilise my existing products better by repackaging them
get the planning done in an hour
sales letter written in an hour
product created in 1 to 3 hours
clone a membership site for fast deployment
get familiar with Warrior Plus and membership site and auto-responder integration

This will require extreme focus in order to consistently churn out high-quality low-priced products week-after-week. (Here is a product idea already – showing other people how I am doing it.)

So there it is – my latest challenge is at least one WSO a week.

How To Do Whiteboard Presentations

I’ve just added a new eBook to my library called ‘Super Simple Whiteboard Presentations’ – this is all about how to do Whiteboard Presentations.

It is currently available as a free download at this page:

http://mark-salmon.com/whiteboard

If you’ve ever wondered how to create whiteboard cartoons like this:

Then this eBook will review the current software options available.

It will also give you tips and tricks for creating LIVE whiteboard presentations.

Once you have read the book you should know how to do whiteboard presentations for your business and students.

Honey-Trap Funnels Coming Soon

My latest product ‘Honey-Trap Funnels’ is coming soon.

Sales funnels are a vital part of an internet marketing business but when you are starting out it can be difficult to work out the technicalities of building a sales funnel.

My new product will address this problem by providing flexible sales funnel templates that can simply be uploaded into WordPress and the sales funnel products can simply be plugged into the pages.

However, prior to constructing a funnel, there is an important planning stage. What products to include in the funnel and in what sequence?

Also, how do you use the psychology of selling to get visitors to engage with your sales funnel rather than click away?

The most important part of the funnel is the front-end – if you fail to capture the contact details of your visitor, the rest of the funnel will not be seen and you may lose the opportunity of helping your visitor forever. I will therefore be going into this part of the funnel in a lot of detail.

Then, in order to optimise your funnel, you really need to test and monitor variations of your funnel pages to optimise sales conversions. How do you do this exactly? These are questions that I will address in this new product.

Of course, once you have built your funnels, you will need to drive traffic to the front of your funnel. How do you do this? There are literally hundreds of ways to do this but you only need to master one to start with and then keep adding in new marketing channels.

I will discussing the pros and cons of the traffic channels I favour. As far as possible, I want to systemise the building of sales funnels both for my own benefit and those of my customers by going through a series of check-lists and templates.

It is important to create multiple funnels – I liken this to having multiple fishing lines out in the internet ocean baited to attract specific fish that you want to bring into your business.

(I hope you don’t mind the analogy with fishing but I think it’s a good one except for the fact that when you catch a fish, the rest of the process is quite different – I don’t want you to harm or kill your prospects and customers but instead to help them to solve a problem or in some other way that is an exchange of value!)

All my products have been built to track my own progress in my business. I already have a number of sales funnels in my business but I now want to take my skills to the next level, so this is a very important product in the evolution of my business.

Here is the framework of my membership site – it looks pretty seductive, don’t you think?

I am hoping to release Honey-Trap Funnels within one month so look out for it, it’s coming soon.

How to be More Productive Online

This article will cover the thorny topic of how to be more productive online.

The barriers to productivity are many:

facebook
internet browsing
email
online chat
domestic interruptions
telephone calls

I’ve discovered that after an interruption it can take on average at least 15 minutes to get back into the flow of working, sometimes longer.

Also, often internet marketing requires that you need to follow a process, sometimes quite convoluted if, for example, you are building a new website or a sales funnel.

This therefore means that you can potentially lose your place in the process or leave the process unfinished if you forget where you were entirely. My computer is littered with unfinished projects simply because that when I returned to my computer I have forgotten what I was doing in the last session!

The problem above illustrates why systemisation is so important – if you are implementing a system it should be easy to know how much of the system has been implemented and how much you have left to implement. If possible, lay your system out in the form of a check-list and tick off each step as you complete it.

In the course of my consulting, I have also discovered several other major barriers to being productive online:

slow broadband speed is potentially deadly. Internet marketing often requires that you upload and download files frequently. Some of these files can be large like, for example, videos. This means that you can waste a lot of time waiting for files to upload and download, during which time you can also be distracted. This is a major productivity killer and, in my opinion. You should invest in the fastest broadband speed available. (When I moved house 3 years ago, having access to fast broadband was a major consideration forb me in the buying process!)
I’ve also come across internet marketers that have no proper filing structure on their computer. Files are littered over their desktop and they have no proper filing system and therefore lose a lot of the information on their computer or struggle to access it. This too is a major productivity barrier – lesson 101 in internet marketing is to take time to file everything in a properly structured filing system on your computer.
Also, make sure that you back up all your computer files and have access to the programme software. You never know when disaster can strike:
- house fire
- hard disc corrupts
- computer theft
- flooding
- computer virus
- hackers

It is absolutely essential that you have back-up copies of everything so that you do not lose any of your hard work and you can restore your programmes and information as quickly as possible. I use Carbonite.com to keep an automated real-time backup of all my files on a remote server i.e. away from my property as I have literally years of work and effort stored on my computer

another potential area of lost productivity is not using the right tool for the job.

When I first got married, we had a sloping back garden and I tried to cut our lawn with a hand-pushed lawn mower – it was extremely hard work and I did not look forward to the weekly struggle. Subsequently I bought a motor mower and the job became quick, easy and satisfying to do – to this day I like to mow my lawn. The lesson that I learnt that there is often a tool for every job that makes it comparatively easy – this is especially true in internet marketing. Find out what the big boys in internet marketing are using (take care, this may not always be the same tools that they are selling or recommending for money). For example, you can often ‘right click’ on a web page and view the source code to see what WordPress theme and plugins they are using. Don’t be ‘cheap’ about acquiring the right tools, potentially they will make you far more productive and time is money. An example of this, is using Photoshop Actions to make ecovers and graphics – this will save you so much time and money that the large outlay up front to buy the programme can quickly be recouped within your business. Another example is using Easy Video Suite to make and present your videos – a fantastic tool that I would not like to be without. Take care, however, each tool that you use in your business has a learning curve attached to it – select your tools carefully, learn how to use them, and create systems for them so that you can outsource work when the time is appropriate to do so. Your tools are your productivity weapons – keep them up-to-date and learn how to use them with dexterity to produce elegant and sophisticated work. For example, Camtasia, when wielded by a video-jedi, can help you to produce outstanding video works-of-art.

Time management is also critical but what does that mean? To me, it means that you plan your work and work your plan. It also means that you plan to take regular breaks to rest your eyes and stretch your muscles. One method that works well is to chunk your time down into smaller chunks.

A year is broken down into quarters, quarters into months, months into weeks, weeks into days and days into hours. This enables us to work to an overall framework that achieves an annualised goal. When planning my day, I like to chunk my time down into hours and work through my prioritised tasks for the day. Planning is all about adapting good habits – here are some that you might want to consider:

in the days between Christmas and the New Year, plan your next 12 months – the detail may be a bit sketchy but you will try to plan an overall framework which moves you closer to your long-term goal
I then plan the next quarter in more detail by breaking it down into months and weeks. At the end of each quarter and month and week take the opportunity to review progress and adjust your forward plans as necessary.
On a Sunday evening plan your week ahead
Each evening, before you finish work, plan your activities for the following day
each morning, fire up a programme like Action Enforcer and break your day down into hourly chunks including breaks.

Parkinsons Law says that work will always fill the time available so that if we plan to take a day to complete a task it will fill a day even though if we set a deadline of one hour we could achieve the same result. Setting deadlines is therefore an important strategy for increasing productivity. I like to use a tool like Action Enforcer to break down my tasks into hourly chunks and at the same time set deadlines to achieve them – if you do this, you will be surprised by the amount of work you will get done.
At the beginning of this article, I outlined a number of potential time stealers like Facebook, email etc. Knowing that these are time-stealers, you also need to adopt habits that deal with these problems i.e. only look at Facebook and emails at certain points in the day, turn off chat during working hours, turn off your phone and pass calls to answerphone whilst working if possible or educate staff and customers to only contact you at certain alloted times in the day – they have no automatic right to break your concentration and workflow. Plan to eliminate all interruptions as far as possible.

A free tool that can help you to track how much time you are spending productively online is ‘Rescue Time’. This tool maps how much time you spend on each website and you can determine which sites were ‘business’ related and which were personal or trivial sites that effectively wasted your time. You cannot avoid you lack of productivity if every minute is accounted for re-presented to your graphically!

I also want to emphasise the importance of working to a framework rather than in piecemeal chunks. If we take writing a book as an example, the book is the framework. We break the book down into chapters and the chapters into sub-headings or topics that fit into our overall plan to deliver either a story or a result.

The same is true of anything we do in internet marketing – we need to ensure that all our actions fit into an overall framework that delivers a result rather than being piecemeal or random in nature. The power of working in this way is that everything builds on each other to deliver an awesome result to our customer. When delivering any of our work to any customer, it is important to explain how this piece of work fits into the overall framework that we have planned to deliver although each piece of work also delivers a particular result in and of itself. For example, our product may be all about list building but may not cover email marketing or affiliate marketing strategies. These may be additional products that will be delivered within an overall framework of products that you are planning.

I have seen plenty of marketers that deliver products within a sub-segment of each niche. For example, they produce mainly Facebook products, YouTube products, Webinar products or SEO products – this is more productive because they can focus, go deep and sell more related products to their existing customers. Compare this to someone who is trying to be all things to all men and you will see how effective this is when you can focus your point of attack – it works well on the battlefield too! You also see this with many book authors – they become known as a crime writer or romance or historical biographies – it just makes more producive sense to narrow your point of focus and expertise and become known for something that you are particularly good at or knowledgeable about.

Within any business there are always points of leverage i.e. 20% of actions that produce 80% of results. If you can identify these and work mainly in these areas then your productivity can increase massively It is important to take some time to identify what these things are – for me, they are things like:

Traffic generation
Product creation
Email marketing
Systemisation
Measure and monitoring key performance indicators
Planning
Copywriting
Outsourcing work that has been systemised or where I need to acquire skills.

These are all areas where I can increase my productivity and the financial return on my time.

The one thing that none of us can create more of is time – time is short. I can say this from the perspective of being in my mid-fifties and wondering how the time has passed so quickly. It is therefore important to make every day count towards an overall lifetime of achievement and contribution.

I often hear of people flitting from job to job – this is not really the best way to be productive unless this is part of an overall plan to acquire skills towards some lifetime goal like starting a business. My working career has been dedicated to helping other people to start and grow their own business, in the course of which I have created my own businesses to hone my understanding and skills. I’m still learning new things every day and my skills and knowledge would have much less power if I suddenly decided to pursue a career in say the health sector. My productivity would go through the floor for an extended period of time until I had acquired new skills, training and experience in my new role.

So there is a lot to be said for ‘sticking to your last’ which makes it all the more important that you choose wisely to start with so that you can stay the course. I’ve tried to advise my children to pursue a passion or interest in their career because I truly believe that they will be far more productive by doing something that they really enjoy.

I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to be more productive online and that you will subscribe to my blog in the sidebar to receive more great tips and information.