Marketing Mockups

Marketing mock-ups are great for branding businesses.  These are graphics that enable us to quickly and easily brand our businesses by placing our own logo or branding material into the image.

Here are a few examples for a potential new customer I am working on:

Food_Mockup_Scene_1-web Food_Mockup_Scene_2-WEB Food_Mockup_Scene_3-WEB Food_Mockup_Scene_4-WEB Food_Mockup_Scene_5-WEB

Work For Yourself First

Work for Yourself

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.

5 Vital Parts

feral-horses-1374031-Antiq Guilloche

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?

Monetization

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:

  1. A squeeze page and free offer to create a list
  2. A daily email to the list
  3. Creating a new product that improves other peoples lives
  4. A sales letter
  5. 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
  6. Rinse & Repeat

So what does monetisation look like in YOUR business?

Mans Search For Meaning

Mans Search For Meaning

I have been reading ‘Mans Search For Meaning’ by Victor Frankl.  Victor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz and also a psychologist.

Here is my favourite passage from the book – I will cover how this is relevant to internet marketing and running your own business afterwards:

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.  There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.  Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make.  Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers that threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological  conditions.  Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man , even under such circumstances, can decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.  He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”  These words frequently come to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behaviour in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.  It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.  It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

 

Business Lessons From Mans Search For Meaning

As you can see I have emphasised certain words above:

  • man does have a choice of action – when you start your own business, you greatly increase your choice of action.  Many people start their own business because they no longer wish to limit their choice of action to carrying out the wishes of their boss or company.  Even in a job we always have a choice of action but if you do not conform, chances are you will not last very long in your job, particularly if you make a mistake whilst not conforming.  So the reason for starting a business in the first place is the freedom to make choices.
  • to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.  This is a powerful lesson for people in business.  For example, if you fail after taking an action, can you view it merely as a test that failed and begin again more intelligently or will it completely destroy your motivation to try again?  The choice is yours to take and it will define your ability to succeed because all businesses will test your attitude and fortitude.
  • there were always choices to make – the same is true in running any business.  Will you ‘become ‘the plaything of circumstance’ or will you fight to shape your circumstances?
  • the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision – I would suggest that the sort of business you create (and the sort of person you become as a result) are the result of an inner decision.  This is why having the right mindset for business and life, is critical to your success.  Success is usually the result of an inner decision rather than circumstances outside yourself.
  • any man, even under such circumstances, can decide what shall become of him – this reconfirms that YOU decide what will become of you so you don’t need to seek anyone else’s permission.
  • It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.  The freedom to choose one’s own way will give meaning and purpose to your life, particularly if your goal is to improve the lives of other people through your actions.   Making money is not a factor in any of this but rather follows as a consequence of making the right choice and adopting the correct attitude.  (Of course, you could decide to make money through some criminal act but this may ultimately kill your spirit and potentially limit your freedom!)

Mans Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl has many insightful lessons learnt as a result of extreme human suffering.  Whilst we do not have to go through such extreme life and death suffering, it is inspiring to know that we ultimately make the decisions that give purpose and meaning to our life and therein lies our personal responsibility.   Sign up to my free ‘Sky Inside‘ offer for more mindset insights.

Start Small – End Big

Start small

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.

I Believe in YOU

I Believe In You

I Believe In You – the message that Frank Kern sent to me!!!

He went on to say…

Let me tell you something about YOU.

YOU can do anything you want. YOU are in control.

YOU can achieve as much success as you want to.

YOU can and will pick yourself up when life knocks you down.

I BELIEVE IN YOU.

—————————————————–

HERE’S THE POINT
——————————————————

If you’re looking back on the past year and
you’re NOT happy with where you are now,
IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER.

Not if you keep doing the same stuff that’s
gotten you the results you’re not happy with.

So if this is you then let me do you the
same favor my Doctor did for me.

—————————————————–
LET ME SHOOT YOU STRAIGHT
—————————————————–

Look man, you gotta change what you’re
doing.

It’s not working.

If it was, you’d be thrilled with your progress
since my message to you a year ago.

But if you’re not, then it’s time to change.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Get absolutely focused on what you really want.

Do this by TURNING OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER
and just writing down the answer to this question:

“What do I REALLY want?”

Screw what the emails tell you you SHOULD
want.

Screw what your wife, husband, parents, kids,
or anyone else WANTS you to want.

This is about YOU.

What do you really want?

Want to sell training plans to cross-dressing
MMA competitors?

Great. If that’s your thing, go for it.

Wanna run off and play guitar in coffee shops
across South America?

Good. You only live once. Be happy. Play
“Freebird” at least once. For me. Thank you.

Whatever you do, get clear. Otherwise you’re ripe
for falling into someone else’s agenda.

2. Dump The Crap Out Of Your Brain.

You do this by writing down a huge list of EVERYTHING
you THINK gotta do to in order to do what you REALLY want.

Just doing that will kind of “clear it from your brain”
and free up space in your “mental computer’s”
RAM.

3. Decide what’s doable.

You know that big list you just made that’s probably
freaking you out?

Go through it and put star by all the stuff you can
actually do.

4. Decide what you can do NOW.

Now. You know all the stuff with stars by it?

The stuff you can actually DO?

Go through all of it and find the stuff you can do
in the next 30 days.

Put two stars by those items.

5. Screw the other stuff.

All the other stuff can be dealt with later.

Now – let me address critics in the audience who
want to debate whether or not that’s a good strategy.

“Isn’t that procrastination?”

“Isn’t that other stuff important?”

The answer to both questions is …PROBABLY!

But here’s the deal.

You can’t do anything about it right now, and if you
worry about it then you’re just taking away focus
and energy from the stuff you CAN do.

And that’s not going to get you anywhere.

Also – actually DO the “immediately doable”
things for the next 30 days, my experience
tells me that your momentum will be so great
you’ll actually be able to easily do a lot of the
things from your list you originally thought
were impossible for you.

You’ll also have new clarity and will probably
find that much of the other stuff on the list
isn’t even needed.

6. GET TO WORK.

Listen.

If you get all caught up on the little details,
you’ll be in the same place a year from now.

Don’t let that happen.

7. ACCEPT REALITY

You wanna know something?

This is NOT gonna be easy.

Remember how I told you I lost 20 pounds
of fat?

Man, that first week in the gym was a
NIGHTMARE.

And to make matters worse, my trainer
(who is a terrible person) would make me
display my physical weakness in front of
GIRLS!

So not only was it hard, it was embarassing!

I was failing in public.

But that’s what it took so I did it.

And in the end, it wasn’t so bad.

So if I can muster up the gumption
to struggle through my first few pushups
in front of a room full of pretty girls,
you can break through you comfort zone
too.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the wise
men of Kool And The Gang:

“GET DOWN ON IT (If you really want it).”

You can do it. I believe in you.

No Products = Nothing to Sell = No Revenue

woman-863122-ES-Watercolor-web

No Products = Nothing to Sell = No Revenue – I received a email from Sean Mize with this headline.

Frankly, that subject line says a lot . . .not all, but a lot!

So often I see folks who are struggling to get their business going online and make money and I see them doing all of kinds of things well-meaning (hopefully) gurus have told them to do . . .

  • like run facebook traffic
  • do click flipping
  • buy and sell things

And then those things don’t work and you get stuck surfing, reading emails, and generally getting lost . . .

But it all comes down to basic economics:

in order to make money, you have to sell something to someone

Reminder: no products = nothing to sell = no revenue

What is your solid plan for creating products to sell and telling the right prospects about them?

(Yes, that’s part 2: you need a list of people who desperately need help and build a relationship with them so that they trust you enough to buy your products)

So many people get half of this equation right – either half – and never make a penny because they don’t have the other half.  (Truth be told, I mastered the craft of creating products long before I mastered the ability to send targeted traffic to them!  It took a long time for me to wake up to the truth that simply creating products was not enough to succeed!)

Making money online is essentially very simple – having something valuable to sell and sending people who will appreciate that value to a page that offers them an opportunity to buy it.

It is better that the ‘something’ you sell is your own product but it doesn’t have to be.  It can be an affiliate product.

In both cases, you should aim to capture the buyers email address so that you can continue to offer further value to your customer.  A buyers email address can be worth much more than the initial sale if you nurture the relationship properly.

So the two essential skills of internet marketing are:

  1. mastering at least one traffic source (preferable a paid source that is scale-able) and
  2. conversions i.e. creating or sourcing valuable products and services, copywriting, sales funnels and other conversion skills like list building, email marketing, re-targeting, creating scarcity etc.

One thing is for certain, if you have no products and nothing to sell, you’ll have no revenue.  If you have a product and send targeted traffic to your offer page, you might just find you are in business!

Are You Marketing or Teaching Your Passion?

P1000424-Dgas MAv1

So . . . are you marketing or teaching your passion or craft?

This is a copy of an email sent to me by Sean Mize and I think it is great advice.

 

So many folks I talk with are spending hours each day trying to “market” or “sell” or something like that.

 

But marketing isn’t really your passion is it?

 

Your site topic is your passion.

 

So catch this: if your topic – the topic you teach is your PASSION – why not spend 80% of your time on THAT TOPIC instead of marketing?

 

What if you spent 80% of your time teaching YOUR TOPIC, and writing articles about your topic, and recording videos about your topic, and writing emails like this about your topic – like if you are a knitting coach instead of marketing for 4 hours a day, why not do knitting videos and knitting emails and knitting instagrams and knitting emails (can you teach knitting in an email? oops – maybe a video email!)

 

I mean, live your passion.

 

And ALL you have to do is put at the end of each piece of knitting training, the following words, with a link to your squeeze page:

 

Do you want to learn more about knitting? If so, download my top 10 knitting videos here: (then put a link here to your squeeze page which when they sign up you are going to send them to your download page with 10 5-minute knitting videos)

 

If you do this, you will spend the bulk of your time teaching your PASSION – and people will be coming onto your list in droves and you just write a daily email and then tell them about your knitting course and your knitting membership . . .

 

By the way, this works for karate, and crocheting, and woodworking, and blogging, and tight abs, and lose weight, and get happy and ANY niche you are in!

 

Live your passion!

Get Good Enough At Anything…

basketball-1432683-Fracturex1.jpgWebI 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’!

Envato Graphics Competition – My Entry

I have entered the Envato graphics competition where there is $2,000 in prizes up for grabs.   The competition is based around the Flex Photoshop Action.

Here are my entries:

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woman-912367_1920 [Optimized]Home woman-912367_1920-Flexx1 [Optimized]Home

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[before-after viewer_position=”center” is_wiggle=”true”]

male-1291996_1920-webmale-1291996_1920-Flex [Optimized]Home

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Why I Want To Leave The EU on 23rd June

Leave The EU

Here are some of the reasons why I want to leave the EU on 23rd June:

Institutional Fraud

The EU has not had an audit signed off since inception.

Each year billions of euros wash through the hands of the bureaucrats in the EU.  In my previous experience in the banking industry, any time that the accountants could not sign off an audit meant that there was a serious mis-allocation of funds.

Whilst I have no absolute proof of fraud, I believe that this is what is going on.  We only have to see the opulence of the living and working conditions that the bureaucrats have awarded themselves to see that something is not quite right.

There are 10,000 EU officials earning more than our Prime Minister and each EU member of parliament is costing in excess of £1m according to Daniel Hannan and Nigel Farage.  The expenses system appears to be a scandal in waiting.

The top rate of tax for EU officials is around 16% only so they are not contributing fully themselves to the system that they have created.

Corporate Fraud

There are thousands of lobbyists in the EU that ensure that big business can influence the EU bureaucrats to make laws and regulations that favour them.  This means that they can squeeze out smaller competitors and competitors from outside the EU.

Who pays the cost of this?  It is quite clear that the consumer is paying the price in terms of higher prices for goods.  Professor Minford of Cardiff University has calculated that consumer prices could drop 8% immediately on leaving the EU if we moved to a system of free world trade.  (We do not need a trade deal with the EU, they need one with us if their manufacturers and farmers are to continue to protect their trade in over-priced goods!)

This is why big business is so insistent that we should remain in the EU – it is a racket that they currently control and we are all paying the price.

Who knows what fraud is taking place to influence decisions taken by EU officials?  Jobs, contracts, deals, bribes, subsidies, quotas, regulations – I bet the total figure is huge!

The Economic Argument

Professor Minford has calculated that we would be far better off outside the EU as we currently absorb the following costs:

  • Net UK contribution to the EU = 0.5% of our GDP
  • Costs of CAP and EU protection of manufacturing = 4% of our GDP
  • Cost of over-regulation = 6% plus of our GDP (-this would probably rise substantially)
  • Bail-out transfers = 2.9% of GDP
  • Effect of EU regulations on our growth = 0.5% p.a.
  • Effect of joining the Euro = would double our volatility

As members of the EU we are shackled to a trading zone that is at best stagnant.  We would be much better off trading with faster growing countries outside the EU including with our Commonwealth partners.

Lack of Control

Whilst one argument for staying in the EU is that we will be sitting at the table when the rules are made and can influence the decisions.  The UK has voted against 72 EU proposals and have been defeated on every occasion.  The truth is that we have little or no influence on decision-making.

Decisions are really made by the unelected members of the commission who are largely influenced by what the Germans want to happen.  The Germans hold the real power in the EU and they control the finances from Frankfurt.  The Euro benefits them as their currency is at least 20% weaker than it would be if they didn’t have all the lame ducks within the Euro.  This enables the Germans to expand their exports and manufacturing base and the UK is their biggest export market!

We have effectively given up our sovereignty and democracy to unelected officials in the EU where the decision-making is remote and opaque.

The EU is also very slow to respond to problems as demonstrated by their incompetent response to the immigration crisis.  The elections in Austria and France have demonstrated that far right organisations are now gaining a foothold in many countries and will continue to do so until control is established.

Over-Regulation

So much regulation is flowing out of the EU that it is impossible for our politicians and businesses to keep abreast of what is happening – much less to influence what is happening.  Some of these regulations are highly damaging to UK businesses.

There are 600 plus regulations relating to coffee alone and every aspect of our daily life is impacted by EU regulations which we have not been able to influence or shape.

For example, the imposition of VAT on digital purchases with no threshold is an administrative nightmare for small businesses like myself.

There is a lot of new regulation ready to be implemented if we vote to remain in EU – this has been held back until after 23rd June for fear that it could influence the way we vote.  If this regulation was truly to our benefit, why would they hold back?

There are taking an arrogant elitist view about the citizens of the EU i.e. that they know what is best for us.

We are the little people who must shut-up, follow their instructions and pay the cost!

Immigration

Lack of control over our borders has meant that millions of people have emigrated to the UK from both inside and outside the EU.  This is impacting all public services to the detriment of the standard of living for the indigenous population.

Schools, roads, housing, health, policing, prisons etc – all are showing huge strain and it is quite clear that there is insufficient funding to keep pace with the sheer scale of immigration.

The possible entry of Turkey into the EU – another large country with a much poorer average quality of life and a largely Muslim population – is reason enough to want to get out of the EU.

I was personally against allowing the Bulgarians and Romanians into the EU for the same reason.  We have seen a huge rise in crimes like theft and pick-pocketing in recent years, as we took in people from these poorer countries.

Vote Leave

It seems to me that supporters of the Remain campaign largely fall into the following Groups:

  • the young who have been brain-washed by the education system to accept the new order, little understanding that they are being enslaved.  They have been sold a vision of integration and freedom of travel and movement but without understanding the cost that this will entail.
  • the politicians, the establishment and bureaucrats who benefit greatly from the employment opportunities afforded by the EU and their regulations.  If I was a politician hoping to get a job in the EU after I had left office, clearly I would have a vested interest in remaining inside the EU – turkeys do not vote for Christmas!
  • big business – as discussed above they have stitched up the system to their benefit through the lobby system and they also benefit greatly from the cheap flow of immigrant labour which holds down wages and working conditions for the general population.  Over-supply of labour effectively keeps the work-force under their thumb.

I have yet to hear a good case being  made for remaining inside the EU as far as the general population is concerned.

The Remain strategy is to scare the pants off these people by threatening loss of jobs, lower house prices, higher interest rates and so on.  Norway says that when they decided to remain outside the EU the same threats were made to them but the opposite turned out to be true for them.

I am fairly certain in my mind that we will find that we will be much better off outside the EU.  In fact it would be truly liberating.

Let’s give them a wake-up call on 23rd June and tell them to stuff the EU where ‘the sun don’t shine’!  I for one would love to show them that we will be much better off by going it alone and deliver a shock to their complacent and arrogant attitudes.

These are just a few reasons why I want to leave the EU on 23rd June 2016.

The Secret EU Agenda

If the people knew the real, secret EU agenda, and we are only part of the way through it at the moment, then, apart from the elite who benefit from the EU, no one would vote to stay in.

That is how extreme, how extraordinary and how fundamentally tyrannical the EU agenda is.

From its own documents and from the statements of its advocates right from the start it can be clearly shown that where we are now is where it was planned for us to be from day 1.

Also, where we are now is where we are now, not where the EU is meant to finish up.

So when they started out there had been a war in Europe to stop the Nazis from creating their version of what’s become the EU – a pan European centralised tyranny dictating to everyone in every country.

If that had been suggested at that time after the war then, of course, people who had just fought, lost loved ones and been maimed for life by fighting the Nazis to stop, in effect, that plan – a European control system coming into place – their response to the suggestion ‘let us do it’ would have sparked outrage.

So instead of that, they have used psychological manipulation – it’s about programming how people perceive situations so that you get people to respond to situations to suit your agenda.

Don’t tell people where you are going but tell them what they will accept. 

Europe was at first a free trade zone called the Common Market.  We were told before Britain went in by Ted Heath, PM, ‘it’s just a free trade area and it’s good for jobs’.  But from the start, that was not the game at all – that was the foot in the door.  The idea was then to pick-off more and more power to the centre until eventually there was a fully-fledged centralised dictatorship with no democratic checks and balances.  We are seeing that unfold.

So what did we see over the years? We saw a ‘totalitarian tiptoe’ – more and more power taken by the centre and yielded up by sovereign states to the centre.  Today 55% or 60% of the rules and regulations that affect the fine detail of lives in this country do not come up for debate in Westminster – it actually comes from bureaucrats in Brussels, beginning the process of imposing their will on the entire European population.

This has many devastating effects on people’s freedom, fairness and justice and even on the political system itself, which is perceived as one person/one vote – the foundation of democracy.   This system is being subverted by the EU.

The Agenda of the Corporate Giants

What has happened is that the EU’s very existence and bureaucratic control system has given trans-national corporations something they could barely have dreamed of (although having said that, those who controlled those corporations planned to do it so, in that sense, it was not a ‘dream’ but a calculated ‘plan’).

What it means for these corporations is this:

Before, if they were to get laws passed in a country that were beneficial for those corporations, they had to set about wheeling and dealing and lobbying in each of the countries they operated in and that took a lot of time, money and effort.

Once the EU bureaucracy was in place, the giant corporations had a one-stop shop.  Now all they had to do was persuade the bureaucrats in Brussels to enact the laws and regulations that the corporations want and they were then imposed upon every country throughout the European Union.

This is fully explained in The Brussels Business video which is about how the large corporations control the EU bureaucrats and why there is an explosion of offices in Brussels of lobbying organisations working on behalf of giant corporations.  There are now 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels on behalf of large corporations.

TTIP is a Bum-Deal!

This has now taken us to a point where we have a secret negotiation going on, which cannot be revealed to the public, even by EU parliament members.  We have this TTIP deal which is being negotiated between the EU (i.e. the bureaucrats) and the bureaucratic equivalent in the US, the corporations and the lobbyists which, if they get what they want, will bring about a situation whereby if a corporation considers that a decision or the implementation of a new law or regulation by a so-called sovereign government could affect their future profits, they will be able to take that government to a corporate court that will allow that court to impose enormous fines on governments i.e. the population of that country, even though all they have done is pass laws for the benefit of the people or the environment or whatever.

For example:

If you look at something like the NHS – this is systematically being run down to prepare public opinion, and to weaken public resistance to, having it privatised – so that people will say ‘I never wanted it privatised but it can’t be worse than it is now’.  (If we weren’t a member of the EU we wouldn’t be affected by TTIP.) But if you are a giant global healthcare corporations, you could go to this court and say the state-owned NHS is affecting our potential profits and it is not a level playing field because the NHS is subsidised by the government.

We are having a situation, on behalf of the global pharma cartel, which generates billions and billions from the ill health and suffering of others, which is seeking to destroy all competition – all alternative methods of healing that it doesn’t control and own i.e. the entire complementary alternative medicines industry.  This is a war on alternative health, which already gets a lot of hassle from the authorities.

If we come out of the EU, we do not continue to be subject to the laws that will destroy the alternative healthcare industry. (To underline this point, it was interesting to see a representative from the pharma industry speaking out against Nigel Farage in a recent televised debate!)

EU Tyranny

To see the political elite standing shoulder-to-shoulder asking the people to remain within such a tyranny, is absolutely grotesque.

However, many people are starting to disconnect from politicians and their opinions and are starting to come to their own conclusions by carrying out their own research.  Many of these people have also been affected by the tidal wave of regulation that is pouring out of Brussels – they are saying we want to come out because of our own bad experience.

We are now seeing the Leave campaign moving ahead – we are seeing a disconnection between what the people think and what the political class are telling them they should do and how they should vote.

Countries Will Be Turned Into EU Regions

It is also planned that we will have a Europe of ‘regions’, not sovereign states.  There will be no nation states.

The preparation for that is the mass migration of people into Europe to break down identification with our nation state.  The massive point of resistance is those people who self-identify with their culture i.e. nations.  There is a major block to breaking up nations because people don’t want it.  What they are doing is diluting our sense of nationhood and culture by allowing vast numbers of people from other cultures to come in from both from outside and within Europe.

The people in the country, and those coming into the country, are both pawns in the same game and are being played off against each other.

Germany has the most sense of national cultural identity so Germany has been particularly targeted by opening the doors to millions of immigrants, many of whom are not genuine refugees.  The German people are in shock because it makes no sense to them as they do not know the underlying plan.

There are more countries e.g. Turkey, Albania etc scheduled to come into Europe and the open borders policy will remain in place to dilute national identity so that the resistance in every country to regionalisation is gone because there will be no identifiable culture.

This agenda would have been unthinkable even 5 or 10 years ago, let alone many years ago at the outset of the European project.

Get Informed And Vote Leave

We have seen the step by step attrition of our rights and freedom.

It is critical that people get informed and make their OWN judgment rather than listen to the politicians.  Do your own research online and make your own mind up.

Most politicians don’t understand what is going on and are ignorant of where the EU is going or they are being influenced by vested interests.  It’s a case of the blind leading the blind!

We can easily sleep-walk into staying in the EU simply through ignorance.  Go onto YouTube and do the necessary research and look at the background and documented evidence that the EU is indeed a tyranny.

Ted Heath knew this and even admitted he knew that political union in the EU was the eventual plan. He knew that the regions of the EU will specialise in certain areas – in the UK we are zoned for finance (with London at the centre) financial services and to be a service economy.  Other areas of the UK economy were to be systematically run down e.g. fishing, mining, manufacturing etc.  It is clear that Germany is zoned to be the manufacturing centre of the EU.

If you don’t know what the plan is – the centralisation of power in Europe and specialisation by regions to make one ‘country’ of Europe – it is difficult to make sense of what is going on.

The public are still being hoodwinked even now by Messrs Cameron and Osbourne who are also being manipulated by the vested interests.  They have over-cooked the case for Remaining in the EU – so much so that they are losing credibility with the people.

Hopefully, the Referendum vote will not be rigged.

We Will Be Punished (Remain or Leave) – Prepare To Suck It Up

If we vote to Leave the EU, it will not be the end – it will just be the start!

If you look at the countries and referendums that have voted against the EU e.g. Ireland.  The EU waits a bit, make things difficult for the country in question, does more manipulation and has another referendum to overturn the first one.

If we vote to come out, the political classes in the UK and Europe, will be doing everything they can to frighten people into reversing that decision.  Getting out of the EU is not a sprint but a marathon, so be prepared for further intimidation tactics.  We should not be surprised if they make it as difficult as they can in order that we beg to be re-admitted to Europe.

The referendum is possibly our last chance to throw off the tyranny of Europe and we must be strong.

They are holding back some crucial legislation, such as a European Army, until after the referendum. If we vote to stay in, they will no doubt punish the British people for demanding a referendum and voting in such large numbers to come out.

Once we are ‘in’ again, and we have no other chance to come out, there will be no checks and balances on what the bureaucrats will do then.

The reason why they are now using fear to frighten people to stay in is because there is no credible positive reason to stay in – there is no positive outcome for the people of this country, apart from the elite, to stay in.  That is why there is no positive campaigning to stay in.

If this is the case now, what will the situation be in future?

Vote For Freedom

We have an opportunity now to put two fingers up to the bureaucrats in Europe and assert ourselves i.e. this referendum is about FREEDOM above all else.

Why am I writing this political statement on my blog which is mainly about internet marketing?

I can see that if we remain inside the EU it is very possible that they could enact legislation at any time that could put me out of business and there would be nothing that I could do about it because the legislators are unaccountable bureaucrats.  Indeed, the introduction of VAT on digital purchases by the EU with no threshold is a case in point which put many small businesses into the position of not trading or having to trade through larger platforms that take a commission to handle their transactions.

This affects every person and business in this country and our freedom from EU tyranny is worth fighting for.  This is what is at stake in my opinion.

 

Act Like Who You Are – Sean Mize

Act Like Who You Are

(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

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:

  1. What pressing PROBLEMs did/can they hire you to solve?
  2. 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.)
  3. 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:

  1. Is there a clear perfect client? Is there a clear person or avatar in mind that this is for?
  2. Is there a clear problem that needs urgently addressing?
  3. 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?
  4. 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:

  1. How to get started
  2. The step-by-step path for achieving a result
  3. How to get to the next level
  4. 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!

 

How to Build a Buyers List

build a buyers list

In this article about how to build a buyers list, I want to show you how to build a buyers list by using other people’s product promotions.

Why should we want to build a buyers list rather than a list created by offering a free offer?

The simple answer is that a buyers list will generate more sales than a list consisting of freebie seekers.

Of course, the initial conversion rate will be lower if you are asking your visitors to buy something (i.e. more visitors to a freebie squeeze page will optin) but you will be building a higher quality list.

Of course, a buyers list is usually created by selling your own products but it is possible to create a buyers list from other people’s products.

Here are two possible strategies:

Strategy 1

In this strategy, you first find a product to promote – preferably one you already know about and like.

Usually, the promoter will be offering a discount so you need to take note of the key elements of the offer including the discount.

Next create related bonuses that you can offer to incentivise someone to buy the affiliate product through your affiliate link.

Using these elements, create an affiliate promo page and preferably post it somewhere that already has targeted traffic such as the classified ads on a niche specific forum site.

When the potential buyer clicks on the buy button on the promo offer page it takes the visitor through to a pre-checkout page which reaffirms the key points of the offer and tells the buyer to return to this page to input their email address and payment ID to claim their bonus.

The buy button on this page has your affiliate link through to the affiliate offer.

In short, this is the system:

  • Find a product to promote
  • Create or find your offer-related bonuses
  • Find a place to post the affiliate promo page
  • Create the affiliate promo page
  • Create the pre-checkout page
  • Set-up the web optin form and deliver the bonus with your first email or send to a download page with further affiliate offers on it.
  • Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.

There is a purpose built wordpress theme for creating your affiliate promo page with a 3 step process for your buyers to follow – I own this theme and it is excellent for this strategy but you will still have to find a way of sending traffic to your promo page to make it work:

Strategy 2

Find new upcoming product launches using a site like Muncheye and contact the product vendor and offer his/her buyers a relavent free bonus within the download page or membership site.

The product vendor has more value to offer to buyers and you get their buyers on your list when they claim your free bonus.  This is a win/win!

The system in short is:

  • Identify upcoming product launches
  • Create or find high-value related bonuses.
  • Approach the product vendor and say that you are willing to promote their product launch as an affiliate and could you also offer their buyers your free product-related bonus within their download area.
  • If the vendor agrees, send him the free offer copy and image to put his download area with a link to your optin page where his buyers can claim their bonus and then deliver the bonus after optin
  • Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.

Conclusion

Both these strategies are simple, proven systems for creating buyers lists using other people’s product offers as the primary offer source.

Finding relevant bonuses to offer is not difficult if you either look around your hard disc or purchase a high-quality PLR product for a few dollars. Bonuses can be re-used with other promotions so the costs can be spread.

Hopefully, these two strategies show you how to build a buyers list through using simple strategies.

Print on Demand With Redbubble.com

I’ve found a good print on demand site at Redbubble.com and I am selling my graphics through this site.

Below are a sample of a few of my products:


Although I tried to set up a print-on-demand shop through Photobox I did not like their solution. They then decided to outsource their solution to a third-party provider who wanted to charge a monthly fee.

With Redbubble their is no charge to start selling your graphics and you can decide the profit margin over their manufacturing cost.

There are two other print on demand sites like Redbubble that I currently know about:

  • Design By Humans
  • Society 6

I am sure that there are plenty of other sites.

Whilst these sites provide a solution for selling your graphical skills they do not provide much in the way of traffic – that is your responsibility.

Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are ideal free traffic vehicles for what is a very visual medium.  Also, doing short YouTube videos showing before and after demonstrations on how the graphics were created would work.

I chose print on demand with Redbubble.com  because I like how they have set their site and service up and it is very simple and easy to use.

My Website Has Been Hacked!

My Website Has Been HackedMy 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.

 

 

 

What is a good Squeeze Page Conversion Rate?

Squeeze Page

You may be asking yourself what is a good squeeze page conversion rate?

The truth is that this is a bit like asking ‘how long is a piece of string’ because there are a number of critical factors that will influence the conversion rate of any particular squeeze page:

Quality of the traffic

The ‘quality’ of the visitors coming to your squeeze page is definitely an important factor.  Have they been properly profiled and targeted as prospects for what you have to offer?

Are they coming to your squeeze page on the recommendation of someone they trust, like a JV or solo ad?

Have they been pre-qualified somewhere else by reading your book or an article you wrote or watching a video or listening to your podcast?

If they are simply random visitors to your site versus highly targeted traffic, then you can expect entirely different conversion rates.

Quality of the offer

One of the top internet marketers says that the quality of the offer is much more important than copywriting.

If your offer is irresistible then it doesn’t really matter if you are a poor copywriter and your script has several typos.

Visitors will always optin to get your offer if it is attractive enough so concentrate on solving a problem that everyone has in your niche and you will be golden.

Quality of the copywriting & page design

Once you have selected your offer, presenting it in the most effective way is also important to your conversion rate.

Your squeeze page headline will be critical to conversion rates.  Does it invoke curiosity?  Does it create a ‘pattern interrupt’ in the mind of the visitor such that they have to satisfy their curiosity?

Does it address a pain or fear that they are experiencing or offer an irresistible benefit that they are searching for?

Is the design of the page appealing, easy to read and have an image of what you are offer such as a book cover or product mock-up?

Clarity and simplicity are usually the key to success – your visitor needs to immediately understand what you are offering and it has to be highly relevant to the reason that bought them to your squeeze page in the first place.

There really needs to be no distractions on the page that will encourage the visitor to click away from your offer.

Quality of your testing

Once you start getting results from your squeeze page you have a ‘control’ result that you can then use as a benchmark for split-testing alternative squeeze pages to see if you can improve on your conversion results.

In reality, many marketers split-test right from the start and keep trying to improve on their best results.  There are plenty of plugins and tools that can help you with this process

Quality of your lead capture process

The quality of the lead capture process is also important.

For example, conversions usually reduce the more information you ask your visitor to input which is why many marketers normally just ask for an email address.

On the other hand the quality of the optin may increase if your visitor is willing to offer more information to demonstrate their commitment to what you have to offer i.e. aim for quality versus quantity.

Exit pop-ups may also improve your conversion rate by making an alternative offer to your visitor before they leave.

Retargeting visitors to your page by using a retargeting pixel to enable you to bring your visitors back to your offer at a later date may also improve your ultimate conversions from traffic.

Other marketers use a two-step optin process to improve conversions.

All these processes need to be tested to find the optimal formula for maximum conversions.  Sometimes simply split-testing two radically different offers is the best way to start.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a number of factors that determine what a good conversion rate is for any particular situation.

I suppose the best answer is that any conversion rate is good if you are able to make more money than you are spending on traffic generation because this will enable you to stay in business long enough to improve your conversion rates through testing.

Some marketers can get 70 or 80% conversion rates because they are driving quality targeted traffic to a good offer whilst others will get only 10 or 20%.

Determining ‘what is a good squeeze page conversion rate’ for your particular offer will be mainly determined by the factors discussed above, namely:

  • Quality of the traffic to the page
  • Quality of the offer on your page
  • Quality of the copywriting and page design
  • Quality of your testing processes
  • Quality of your lead capture process

 

#1 Market Research: Using Facebook

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:

Audience Insights - Demographics Audience Insights - Household Audience Insights - Purchase

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.

The Internet Marketing Lifestyle

Internet Marketing Lifestyle

In this article I want to discuss the internet marketing lifestyle and specifically what it means to me and how anyone can achieve it.

There is a lot of hype about making vast sums of money from internet marketing – some do but many don’t.  In fact the failure rate in internet marketing is high at around 95% and it may be that many aspiring internet marketers simply set their sights too high initially and get demoralised.

The first goal should be to cover one of your bills – if you can make say £100 a month to cover, say, your gas bill you can start to scale things up from there.

The first dollar or pound is always the hardest to make but when you can get something working, even if only in a small way, you can begin to build from there.

I was reminded of this last year when I was visiting some allotments and I came a cross an old lady working on a sizeable plot of land which was immaculately neat.  She had meticulously dug over the whole plot and planted out all her vegetables in neat rows.

Given her age – she said she was 74 – I asked her how she had created such a beautiful plot because I knew that digging such a large plot alone would be a considerable physical effort, even for someone many years younger and physically stronger.

She said ‘I just do a little bit at a time every day.’

I took that advice to heart with my own vegetable plot.  Previous to talking to her, I would always blitz my vegetable plot and inevitably half kill myself in the process which made me more reluctant to return for another session.  This year I have dug over my plot – which is quite large – in 5 easy one hour sessions.  The whole process is so much more enjoyable.

A simple change in working habits is all it takes!  If you don’t kill yourself in the process, it so much easier to get started on the next working session.

So it is with internet marketing.  Even though there is a lot to learn, if you take the approach of ‘little and often’ you can soon pick up the necessary skills and enjoy the process at the same time.

Also, by lowering your initial goals, you will be motivated to return because they will be more easily achievable.

Once you have achieved that initial goal of covering one of your bills, you can set your goals a little higher – replacing your current salary.  Don’t make the mistake of aiming too high.

What Would It Take To Ditch Your Job?

Calculate what you would need to hand in your notice to your employer.  In my own case £1,500 per month is quite sufficient because I have no mortgage.

Can I live like a lord on £1,500 per month? – the answer is no.  But I CAN live a life of freedom.

I don’t use an alarm clock any longer to wake me up – I wake up when I am fully rested, usually at around 6.30 a.m. but it varies with the light – later in winter and earlier in summer.

When I am walking down my road with our dog in the morning it gives me great pleasure to walk past all the cars stuck in a queue trying to cross the bridge into town in the morning rush hour.

I often wonder what the occupants of those cars are thinking when the see me breezing past them with not a care in the world every morning – I can’t tell you how good it feels not having to conform to someone else’s timetable.

I walk around the River Avon drinking in the silence and watching the simple rhythms of nature – money cannot buy the profound sense of bliss this gives me.  When I had a job, I simply couldn’t slow down enough to truly enjoy my life.

Generally, I return home to start work by around 8.30 a.m. and finish at around 12.30 a.m. for lunch.  I return to work at 2 p.m. or, alternatively, I often go off and do some DIY or gardening before walking my dog again at around 4.30 p.m. before returning for supper.

One of the surprising discoveries I made about leaving a proper job is that it costs a lot of money to go to work.

If you add up the cost of commuting in both time and money, the cost of lunches and work wear etc (not to mention work social events – which I never really enjoyed-) you will be surprised how much you can trim off your monthly costs by working from home and also how much time you can save for more enjoyable activities.

The Internet Marketing Lifestyle = Stress-less Living

The other thing I want to mention is stress… or the lack of it, since I left a job.   I found it stressful to conform to other peoples timetables, deadlines, goals and expectations.

One thing I have learnt is that physical manifestations of success like fancy cars and houses come with a large price tag in terms of the impact on your life i.e. doing things you don’t enjoy, stress and a terrible impact on your peace of mind.

Both my dog and I are totally chilled – in fact my dog is currently lying on my office sofa with her legs on the air dozing in complete luxury.  I think we can learn from this attitude to life.

I used to worry about many things, including lack of money.  Now I don’t because I have learnt that in the present moment, for 99.9% of the time, I have enough to live a good life and for the unexpected 0.1% something always turns up to fill the gap.

Live In The Moment

Living in the moment is the real key to living a good life and Eckhart Tolle is an excellent teacher of this art – I recommend that you find him on YouTube.  It really is the key to living a good life with total peace of mind.

Slow down enough to really savour life and you will never return to your former work life no matter how short of money you are.  Physical possessions and money are not the goal – living a good life can be easily achieved without them.

In one of my lean months, I remember my brother-in-law saying that he could get me a consulting job with a local car manufacturer paying £6,000 per month.

I think he was surprised by my reply when I told him that I would rather live in a box than to take a job like that and I really meant it.

It perhaps surprised me too that I was so passionate with my reply because I well remember how frightened I was by the prospect of leaving my well paid corporate job in 2001.  I suffered headaches with the stress of it prior to leaving and my wife suffered too because she was so tense that she had a frozen shoulder.

It is amazing how the fantasy horrors that your mind dreams up seem so real and yet they are all an illusion.  These fantasies are what keep most people rooted to a job they really hate.

I recently visited my former employer and was surprised to meet two girls who were there when I left.  They were totally demoralised and just going through the motions of their job waiting for the day when they could get a voluntary redundancy package.  What a sad waste of life.

Don’t let that be you.

If it is, I recommend that you take some time out to design the ideal life for YOU and then work on ‘a little bit at a time every day‘ to achieve your ideal lifestyle.  Set low and achievable goals to start with and once you get something working, scale up from there.

There is no need to leave the comfort and safety of your job until you get something working to replace it.

Work out what you need to replace your job and go for it and you too can achieve the internet marketing lifestyle, if you desire it!  Take it from me (and the little old lady), a little and often is the key to achieving this without undue stress or worry.  Please opt in to my list if you enjoyed this article so I can help you make the transition to a life of freedom and peace of mind.

Here’s What Internet Marketing REALLY Is

woman-912367_1920-Hand-Drawnx1I started internet marketing full-time in April 2009 but it has always been difficult to explain to others what internet marketing really is.  I’ve struggled to come up with a simple explanation but I recently had a moment of epiphany.

I was watching the introduction to one of Eban Pagan’s courses and he suddenly asked the audience if they new what internet marketing was?  He answered his own question… internet marketing is online advertising.

This blog post for example is advertising – it has been written to attract eyeballs and to persuade you to take action i.e. sign up to my list, buy a product or simply keep in touch until one of these events happens.  This is advertising.

Creating videos and audios, or indeed any content, is advertising.  That means that if you are doing any sort of internet marketing it means that you are in the advertising game and you need to study the rules of advertising.

This means crafting headlines that attract attention, structuring your content to lead to a desired outcome and asking for ‘the click’ within your content.  It means that gathering data such as # of views, # of clicks, heat maps, conversion rates and so on is vital to success.

It means that understanding sales psychology – things like scarcity tactics, trust builders such as social proof, authority building, reciprocation etc – is important to include in your content and sales letters.

Sometimes, when we are creating content, we can lose sight of the ultimate purpose of creating the content in the first place.  If you can remember that you are in the game of advertising it will help you to create content that converts.

It will also help you to choose which skills you need to improve in order to get better at internet marketing i.e. advertising skills.

Advertising – this is what internet marketing really is.

Graphics Review 2015: My 2015 Graphics Review

This is my graphics review 2015.  In 2015, I took a different direction with my business.

It started with my interest in creating better graphics for my websites but gradually the process of creating art-work from any photograph took me over with a passion.  Sometimes in life you just have to follow your passion and that’s what happened to me.

In 2015, I have restyled literally hundreds of photographs and I decided to put a selection of these together in a physical 160-page A3-size book that is currently on order.  I decided to video the book on the site of the vendor to give you a flavour of some of the images I have created in 2015: (Click the arrows in the bottom right-hand corner of the video to view full-screen)

I have taken many of the photographs with a very cheap camera and the rest are other people’s restyled photographs. Other images are simply video snapshots from YouTube!

I use Photoshop and Photoshop Actions to create these images.

The purpose of the book is to be able to show friends, family and clients examples of my work and encourage them to think that they can restyle their photographs, if only by hiring me to do it for them.

No matter how good a photographer you are, it makes a lot of sense to edit your photographs in a photo-editor like Photoshop. You can adjust lighting, colour saturation, you can change the background, you can add effects etc You can literally turn your photograph into a work of art.

I have a passion for art that goes back many years. The walls of my house are a testament to that passion. I own a lot of pictures. This is a problem because I don’t have space for too many more. I now own digital images that in many cases are better than the pictures currently on my walls! I therefore need to offer my skills as a service to other people to make any sense of generating more art work.

Other than this, I don’t really understand why I have devoted so much time to increasing my graphical skills. It was just something that interested me so deeply that I was compelled to spend time pursuing my passion whether or not I could find a way to monetise them.

I hope you enjoy my graphics review 2015

The Systems Mindset

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/

 

Playing The Ball Where It Lies

Playing-The-Ball-Where-It-Lies

Playing-The-Ball-Where-It-Lies

‘Playing the ball where it lies’ is a golfing term and the story told in this video extract struck a chord with me, particularly as I used to play golf.

Listen in for 4 minutes to the video below because I think that resistance to ‘playing the ball where it lies’ both in business and our personal lives is the cause of a lot of stress…

The lesson here is that, whilst we can control SOME things in our lives, there are plenty of things that we cannot control and we can easily stray away from what was planned due to factors that are simply beyond our control.

How we respond to this is critical. Most of us will ‘resist’ the situation in our minds and this is the cause of much of our stress.

So its not what happens that is necessarily important, because things will happen that we cannot control, but how we respond to the situation that is important i.e. our willingness to accept the situation and to play the ball from where it lies.

The rest of this video is worth listening to. She goes on to quote Victor Frankel who survived the Nazi death camps in World War 2. He said:
[boxibt style=”gray”]’Between the stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is your power and your freedom.'[/boxibt]

If you are suffering stress in your business or your personal life, you may need  the help of a spiritual teacher to help you to cope with the situation.  The best person in my opinion is Eckhart Tolle – look him up on YouTube or buy his book ‘The Power of Now’.

It is possible to end stress, and the mental pain associated with it, by ‘playing the ball where it lies’ and thereby accepting the situation ‘as it is’ rather than resisting what we cannot control!

Improving The Life Of My Customers

Improving The Life Of My CustomersI 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.

spititually uplifing

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

‘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.

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:

Website Design Quesions

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