Get yourself out of the fishtank you might be surprised..

 

As Internet marketers we can be very insular, We go to the same forums, read the same blogs, buy the same products and as a result we tend to do the same things and believe the same crap as everyone else.

 

Broaden your horizons and read blogs and listen to podcasts from people outside of IM. The very best brains in the online marketing business don’t spend their time writing posts on Digital Point or the Warrior Forum.

Listen to and read stuff by people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin, Read blog posts by people on the bleeding edge of SEO. Read Techcrunch and follow what Y-combinator are investing in.

Get a subscription to a site like Mixergy and see how entrepreneurs got to where they are today.

Set aside a day where you do nothing but watch videos or listen to podcasts by people not in niche marketing or affiliate marketing.

There is a whole different world out there and you can learn from it!

It really is very easy to become focussed on what you are doing and what people in the same line of business to you are doing.  One of the things I try to do in Wp Goldmine is to bring in ideas from other areas. There are hundreds of startup companies that are basically trying to market themselves and build their brand that have never seen the Warrior Forum or Digitalpoint. In many cases they are using or creating sophisticated tools and starting from a blank canvas.

How many of you have looked at what Buzzstream are doing?  If you have have you either used them or tried to create a similar system for yourself. If you’ve not seen them they build back link networks via relationship building and provide the tools to do it. You could probably create something similar (albeit at a lower level) for your own use by using google and a relationship management app.

Thats it for today I have a brilliant interview I did with a Personal Branding coach in tomorrows  podcast so keep your eyes peeled for that…

Have a great week!

As ever I welcome your comments so let me know what you think, Also if you like what you read on the blog please consider subscribing to my newsletter and get you hands on some of the free reports I produce on a regular basis

 

I am sure you can think of many more so please feel free to comment and leave me some of the ways you can spot a Guru!

Over the last few years there has been an incredible number of new “guru’s” appear in the world of internet marketing. Amazingly this has coincided with a whole host of very poorly though out products that offer very little or no value to purchaser. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

It could be that you are already an internet marketing Guru and you don’t even know it yet. Just to help you out here is a list of 10 (ok It’s more than 10 now!) things that will help you work out if you are in fact an Internet Marketing “Guru”

12. You refer to everyone as “My Good friend” despite the fact that you’ve never met them.

11. You start brand new emails with…. Re:-

10. Every family event, Birth, Wedding, Christening or Funeral is seen as a potential source of sales and the ideal opportunity for a webinar …hurry seats are going fast!.

9. You approach the local paperboy and offer him 50% of your sales to your new product in return for use of his “list”

8. You start to use words and expressions like “Skyrocket” and “Explode your Income” in day to day conversations

7. You write your wife a note to tell her you’ve taken the dog for a walk and it stretches to 8 pages

7b. Alternatively you leave her a 60 minute video and a note saying watch my 17 minute video (especially if your first name is Ryan)

6. You phone your local Wal-Mart and ask If you can get your shopping “even if it’s 3am”

5. You and your friends’ idea of fun is seeing who can sell the most number of $1997 products BEFORE you even write the product.

4. You get embarrassed in the showers when you find your friend has a bigger list than you.

3. You decide to sell your car but won’t tell anyone the price until they are in the bank and ready to pay

2. You take your middle kid to a new school and then try to up sell to your oldest kid and tell the headmaster that he will never see this offer again.

2a. If he says no you offer him your youngest kid as a bonus.

1. You can’t see the irony in the previous reasons

What do you do If any of the above apply to you? If you recognise that more than 1 of the 10 are applicable then I am afraid you are probably beyond saving.

If you haven’t  then you’ve missed a a big trick, and it’s all to do with the buying dynamic.

Spend a moment to think about what happens in the first 11 months of the year, we generally buy online for ourselves. We know what we want, we are looking for the best deal and we are looking for information about the products and what they will do for us.

Now consider buying for christmas, what are we looking for now?  Ideas for gifts, we don’t really care about what they will do for us and we aren’t all that interested in information we just want something that will be appreciated by the person who receives the gift.

You can make this work in your favor by adding images  and test that say things like  “Perfect Gift for Grandma”  “What every Woman wants This Christmas”

The buyers aren’t telling us what they want to buy they are relying on us as online sellers to tell them. So tell them that head massager that you’ve sold 1 of in the previous 11 months is a great gift and will be treasured, tell them what to buy, give guidance and advice.

Change the wording on your site and target different keywords,  words like Gift,Present and Christmas should be liberally scattered around,  guest posts , press releases and articles should target the christmas period and nothing else. If you have testimonials or reviews , try to find ones that mention how the gift was received and mentions the christmas keywords.

Also allay fears, what does everyone fear about online buying at christmas?

Non delivery before christmas, so tell them it’s guaranteed delivery in 48 hours or 72 hours.  Tell them they can order up to December 20th to guarantee delivery or what ever day is the deadline.  If it’s a downloadable product tell them they can even buy it on Christmas day if the need to.

Don’t forget to include items like gift vouchers, whats the perfect last minute gift for someone you forgot to buy for?  I don’t know  but  tell the shopper it’s a Digital gift voucher!

If you’ve built a list… you have build a list haven’t you ?…ohhhh please tell me you have! Well now is the time that all those people who bought nothing throughout the year are going to thank you and become a customer for life because you are going to remind them via an autoresponder series that they need to get started with their christmas shopping and that you have some great gifts and you are also going to send them ideas for gifts …along with the links

Consider a few simple changes to your product review sites and you’ll reap the rewards.

I’d really appreciate your ideas for marketing over christmas and comments so leave a comment below and don’t forget to make use of the comment luv feature to get a link back to your latest blog posts.

What! They go to the trouble of setting up a company, getting investors, creating a service or products and they haven’t realized that there is no market! Unbelievable… or is it?

Hands up who has started a website and without doing proper research and finding out if there is a viable market.. be honest now I know I have…

Ok here is another one… how many people HAVEN’T done a site because they can’t find a market? Bet you are feeling smug now aren’t you, well don’t because as far as I am concerned thats just as bad!

As far as I am concerned doing too much market research is just as bad as not doing enough.

The lines between IM and Startup companies is blurring, good Internet marketers are adopting startup techniques and startups are adopting More IM techniques.

The King of Startups Noah Kagan who has several very successful startups under his belt (Appsumo, Mint etc.), he has one simple Formula called the TAM formula (Total Available Market formula) he simply tries to find $1 million worth of potential customers , he looks at google trends, Facebook, potential competitors and the google keywords tool, if he finds his $1M worth of customers he then validates it and goes with it.

I’ll add a link to an article about building a $1million business in a weekend at the end of the post. He usually starts by looking at best sellers on Amazon, completed sales on eBay etc and uses places like craigslist to get ideas.

How familiar does that sound?

If a multimillionaire can do this in a few hours then why do some of us spend weeks looking for the right niche or set of keywords.

There is an alternative, basic research and then testing. Find enough customers to earn you the income you want from the site then build and test.

This dear reader is what a lot of successful Startups do. They identify their market then they test, test and test again. If it’s good enough for people who have to be accountable to investors then why isn’t it good enough for us?

Seriously when was the last time you tested a landing page or the open rate of various email subject lines? Or even the location of adverts on your sites? I bet 95% will answer Never!

If you listened to the interview I did last week with Rob Stafford you’ll have seen that we both mentioned AppSUMO (One of Noah’s companies) they provide daily special offers on useful tools for startups.

Split Testing software used to cost an arm and a leg now you can do it for free or for a low monthly cost, the same with good quality conversion tracking software there is no excuse not to use it.

If you search around on appsumo there you’ll find that Noah has turned the interview below into a course, with videos and explanations of the steps to take, thats a little more of the blurring of the lines between IM’s and Startups. I am not recommending it but if you like the interview he did and want lots more detail then consider it.

In the past 3 weeks I’ve got copywriting guides, conversion tracking tools and split testing tools all of which allow me to test and improve various parts of my business. These aren’t tools or guides knocked up quickly to just look good and get Joe Marketer a few sales, they are high quality industry strength items.

I am using the same tools that the New York Times, Techcrunch, Reuters, 37 Signals and a whole heap of A list companies use.

In the next few weeks i’ll do a video of how I use some of the tools to create and test highly optimized landing pages,

Until then check out the link to read the  Noah Kagan Interview…

I had several positive comments about the theme of providing more and consuming less, so I thought it would be good to expand it some more here.

First off the email will be at the bottom of the post, it was the 2nd of a 2 part email.  It did go on a bit too long and I had to cut it so i’ll flesh it out a little here.

Firstly what do I mean by Provide More Consume Less, If you’ve been in Internet marketing for more than a few months you probably know most of what you need to know. There really is very little new that you need to know. Granted things do change , For example what worked in SEO 3 years ago doesn’t work now and Facebook Marketing wasn’t a blip on the horizon 3 years ago.

However the basics are just the same.  You need to know 3 things

How To Create

How To Market 

How To Monetize 

Whether it is an Adsense site, an Amazon site or a product on Guinea Pig Racing the principles are the same.

If you become a provider you are creating the sites, you are selling things or facilitating the sale to the consumers.  Recently I sold 5  Clickbank products about creating a specific type of business that earned me $90 each in commission.  That is  $450 was simply on the back of me spending time  and creating the environment where people would buy the products.

They are the Consumers – You are the Provider. At least thats how it should be.

To start to make more money today is simple

1. Provide more ,

Give consumers more opportunities to pay you money.  Add more sites, Add more products, Add more free reports.  If you create products they don’t have to be award winning huge products. In the past year I’ve made much more by simplifying things.  Got sites that make you $100 a month?  Tell people how you do it. If their sites make $75 a month they’ll be interested.  Look at what Bethany did in the email below, 2 months to make enough money to be a full time Intent Marketer, just chasing the stuff others assume isn’t profitable

I was chatting with a group of about 20 people today who had a challenge to make $50,000 in 3 months  One smashed that figure into oblivion, one doubled it and several broke it or are close to breaking it… Nothing they created or sold was for more than about $17.  The ones that are succeeding just got their heads down and did it. They aren’t superhuman, they are no different to anyone of us.

You can do it as well….

2. Consume Less

Just buy what you need, even if it’s just something that will refresh what you already know it will be of far more value than if it’s a shiny hyped magic button that will just sit on your hard drive. Focus on what will make your sites/projects make more money.    (Maybe that should have been buy more wisely)

Thats it,  2 steps only and it will work. I guarantee it.

Now Go and Do it…. Set yourself a target to provide more before friday.

 Yesterday I told you about how I read a report and how the

things that work now are exactly the same as the ones that

worked when I started out 7 years ago.

 

Despite all the hype and magic buttons that get hyped

Internet marketing is no different from the marketing thats

been done for centuries.

 

There are 2 classes of people providers and consumers

your target should be to become a provider not a consumer.

 

If you create a website with information and someone buys

from you you are a provider. If you create a product and

people buy it, once again you are a provider.

 

Now this is where things get sticky!

 

When you start out in IM you are a consumer, you buy products

that teach you how to become a provider. When you are a

provider you buy products that help you become a better provider

 

Believe it or not people who we look up to as guru’s

(is that an Oxymoron? ) even at times buy products from those

higher up the marketing food chain.

 

The Secret  = Consume Less Provide More

 

So what should you be doing to make money today?

 

There are 2 things that you can start to do today that will have

an instant impact.

 

 

Provide More

 

Look at your business and work out where you can

provide more.

 

If you have a site that getting 1000 visitors a month.

Build a list around it.  Create products a round it.

 

If you are selling a clickbank product, commission your own

 

20 sales a month of a $7 report might not seems much

but when you have 20 sites running on autopilot doing

similar sales..it soon mounts up

 

In yesterdays blog post (mjthompson.net) I talked about

people making $30,000 a month as affiliates from low cost

products.

 

Thats something to aspire to!

 

 

Target the Easy Money.

 

How many here would not bother with a keyword that

has 500 searches per month?  Probably most yet you’ll

rank easily for it, and 2 or 3  pages of easy ranking 500 search

keywords, sure beats struggling to rank a term that lots

of people are targeting

 

In fact the report I read yesterday is about just that.

It reveals how one of the members of WordPress Goldmine

(yes i did buy it!)  went from a J.O.B to Full time IM in just 2

months , by just targeting easy to rank keywords.

 

It’s currently selling at less than $6 and comes as a report and

a check list to follow

 

 

http://www.warriorplus.com/linkwso/2tvrps/5319

 

 

Even if you don’t buy it look at how Bethany marketed it,

How she took exactly what she was doing and created a product

 

It embodies everything I would like to see everyone who is

reading this do.

 

Be a Provider

 

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see

everyone reading becoming full time IM’ers.

 

 

http://www.warriorplus.com/linkwso/2tvrps/5319

 

 

Sorry that went on a bit long!

 

Mark “Just Do It” Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve heard people say “Internet marketing is just a scam, the only people who make money are the guru’s ” There are a whole lot of reasons why people are getting disillusioned. But let me tell you something this is not new!

5 years or so ago I had  about 200 sites that were earning me $5000 a month de-indexed from google overnight One day I was earning $170 from Adsense the next I was lucky to get $17 (Thanks Yahoo!)Yet 5 years later I am still here and earning much more why?

Because I simply refused to give up!

Have you ever watched the Shawshank Redemption, It took Andy (Tim Robbins) 19 years to dig the tunnel with a small rock hammer. Me,  I am more practical I’l use a sledgehammer and keep hitting that wall until it comes down.

Internet marketing is a wall a big thick wall that often seems impenetrable , you just need to keep pounding away until you break throughout keep working at it and it’s impossible to fail. Keep pounding away day after day and You will succeed , it’s impossible not to.  It’s like having 5 dice and trying to throw 5 sixes, you might get it on the first throw or the tenth or maybe the one thousandth…but sooner or later you will get it if you stick at it.

Here is an example of how I failed and stuck at it even when I was despairing of ever making sales or even giving away stuff for free!

I’ve sold some products via The warrior special offer forum in the past 2 years.

The first I gave away for free (big mistake btw!) I gave away about 20 copies….  Failure  But I didn’t give up

The second I gave away for free again (Didn’t learn my lesson)  I gave away 40 still a failure But I didn’t give up.

The 3rd I sold 114 copies and made over $1000.  Not so much of a failure this time. I’d learned from the last 2 (this was actually a repackaged version of the 2nd wso i’d done)

The 4th I sold 463 copies.  I added to this from what I learned from the previous 3 WSO’s

The 5th that I launch just over a week ago has so far sold over 640 copies (List building Debunked )

It’s the same with whatever I try, for example email marketing when I started using email to market I struggled to make any money from my lists, but as time went on and I saw what didn’t work I started to zero in on what did work, after a while emails that might have earned me $50 were suddenly earning me $500. I’ll never stop learning because i’ll never give up.

Try to keep learning and constantly improving what you do, model yourself on other marketers and try to improve on what they do.

The key to being successful in Internet Marketing is often not to go and buy everything marketers try to sell you, (Hey guys look ..Mark’s committing IM suicide!) But to watch at how they try to sell it to you, this will often be more valuable than the product.

If you find they do it in a way that you don’t like then don’t do it like that, if you like how they do it then see if you can use that method on your sites. very often methods used in selling products will work well on your own websites.

If your site suddenly drops from ranking 3rd in google to 303rd don’t sit there telling the world google hates you (they probably do BTW!) go and look what is now in 3rd place what has that site got that yours doesn’t what are they doing differently.

Don’t give up, success might just be around the corner

Let me have your comments, I would love to hear about your successes and failures or how you turned failure into success, it will help someone keep on track.

Oh and check out List Building Debunked .. I am giving 50% instant commission via Digiresults or Warrior Plus

Along the way he developed a method of problem solving called the 5 whys. The premise of this is if you ask your self 5 questions starting with Why? you will get to the root cause of any problem. The process is still used in many businesses throughout the world and can be very useful in internet marketing.

I can guarantee that if you ask any marketer why their site isn’t making any money then you will get an answer like… “It’s not ranking well”, or “the sales page isn’t converting”. The problem with those answers is that they are just the symptoms not the root cause you have to dig a lot deeper to find the root cause. Very few people do this and so their site will very rarely be successful. However if you can identify the root cause of the problem you can then fix it.

Lets have a look at an example. I had a (Non Im Related) book on clickbank which was selling very few copies so i had a look at it and realized that although it was getting good traffic the conversion rate was terrible. So I went through the 5 Why process.

1. Why Is the website not making sales? – Answer – The sales page isn’t converting

2. Why Isn’t The sales page converting? – Answer The sales page doesn’t engage the Readers

3. Why doesn’t The sales page doesn’t engage the Readers – Answer – The sales page doesn’t address the underlying need of the reader.

4 Why doesn’t the sales page address address the underlying need of the reader. – Answer – I didn’t identify the target market correctly

5 Why didn’t i target the right market? – Answer -I Failed to do enough research

Underlying Cause = I failed to do the correct research to identify my ideal client!
Fix = Do proper in-depth research.

This process took several hours as i had to look at each individual stage in depth to make sure there wasn’t an obvious answer. To be honest I could probably have guessed the reason to start with but by going through the whole process i was able to eliminate other variables that might have been the cause, lack of a call to action, no obvious buy buttons, lack of testimonials, over pricing compared to other products in the market etc.

So if you have a site that isn’t performing well or in fact any other problems that are perplexing you give the 5 why process a go, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much it will help you understand the root cause of the problem

Below is part of a blog post I wrote in August 2006, I doubt that anyone reading this today has ever seen it so no apologies  for  this bit of grave digging.

I actually stopped doing this a few years ago , mainly because I started using Paul Forcey’s Rank Tracker Plugin, if you don’t have it check it out it will make you money if you use it properly. Also that link includes a $7 discount only applicable to readers of this blog, valid for the next week only.  It’s without a doubt the most valuable plugin I use. See The end of the post for more details.

But I think that was a bad idea to stop using this method as combined with the Plugin it is an awesome combination even used on it’s own it’s a very useful way to focus your attention on  sites that need a boost. I just spend 5 minutes scanning the bandwidth chart for last month and i now have 3 sites I can focus on this month.

Here is part of the post I hope you find it useful.

Do you have an end of month routine for your sites?? About 3 months ago I worked out a little routine that I believe has increased my income by a minimum 10-20%. Towards the end of each month I check the bandwidth used and the number of visitors for each site. I then select the worse performing sites and check them. Sometimes you’ll find a problem that you have overlooked at other times the problem will just be down to lack of links.

So far every site I’ve worked on has improved the following month sometimes significantly. The 3 or 4 hours I spend on these sites is worth far more than spending 4 hours building more sites.

Give it a go this month I guarantee it will increase your income!

Don’t for get you can get $7 off Rank Tracker for the next 7 days by using the one of the links on this post!

Here is a demonstration of the power of Rank Tracker, below is a  report from the plugin that was emailed to me today for my Video Creation Mastery site.

These figures tell me,  The keyword used to find my site in google,  The number of times it was used , and the rank. So The keyword  ” Video marketing Creation has been used 137 times to find my site, and it’s ranking in 8th place in google for that keyword.  The plugin has given me a new keyword i would never have thought of and told me where I currently rank Perfect!

video marketing creation 137/  8

video creation mastery      92/   1

video marketing                  76/    3

video creation                       6/     15

1. Use a password management tool. I use Lastpass which is free and I can access my sites from anywhere, no searching around for those elusive passwords and no need to use easy to remember passwords making your site security much easier.  http://lastpass.com

2. Create a “Site build” folder on your PC so you can upload all your regularly used plugins themes and settings when you build a site. If you create it what the same file structure as you wordpress blogs you can upload it all with 1 click of a mouse.

3. Use a site management tool to upgrade all you sites at once, I hate having to go to all of my sites everytime WordPress do an upgrade or an updated plugin is released. I use WordPress Mass Updater to update all my sites at one. This can literally save me hours.

4. Focus on the Sites that make you Money this is an old one that I’ve mentioned many times before and is a bit more longterm that the other 4 tips. If you have a site that makes $3 a day in adsense or one that makes $30 from clickbank sales 5 days each month work on the Clickbank site. Doing so will generate more cash for you that you can then invest in promoting the less profitable sites.

5. Outsource your backlinking, seriously life it too short to spend hours getting hundreds of backlinks when there are so many places and ways to get good quality backlinks. Good backlinking tools are usually expensive so instead of spending $150 to buy the tool find someone with the tool already to do the backlinks for you.

Sites like Fiverr and the Warrior Forum are full of people offering backlinks cheaply, whether you want high PR links .edu links profile links, links on a private blog network, blog comments or any of the other myriad ways of getting backlinks there will be someone willing to do the work for and provide you with the reports cheaply.

I know that I get far more links when I pay someone else to do it than if I try to do it myself.

I recently bought a Wso by Mark Hess called Never Build Backlinks Again which goes into lots of ways of outsourcing your backlinks cheaply, using his methods I found the following gig on fiverr “I will build you 1500 backlinks from a private blog network of 500 sites each with unique IP for $5″ You tell me is that a good use of $5 or would you rather spend 3 hours doing the same thing?

Thats it for today, A Big Huge Thank You to everyone who bought Smart Virtual Assistants during the launch this weekend, now you can use tip #5 to get those under promoted pages buzzing

I am sure you have better tips, please share them via the comments and i’ll sort out something as a thank you for the best tip!

Over the past year or so i’ve been moving away from keyword research as I believe that it’s fundamentally flawed, although there is one exception which i’ll mention later.

Most keyword tools get their resuts from google, the problem is google is seriously flawed when it comes to giving accurate statistics for monthly searches. For example lets look at some old favorites “Get your ex back” according to google there are 135,000 searches a month for this phrase I am prepared to bet that well over 100,000 of those are Internet Marketers researching the niche.

Even for niches that aren’t the meat and potatoes of internet marketers there are more often than not spurious results. I’ve got sites that google tell me will have 800 searches a month but I find that ranking #4 I am getting over 1500 visitors each month and other where there are supposedly 50,000 searches a month but at #1 I am lucky to see 5 a day.

Before I go any further and tell you the solution i’ve found I have to make one point, if you are new to IM use keyword research as the basis for your sites, it’s the best way to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. I used to follow keyword research exclusivly but then I got a feel for the keywords and niches and found myself going for keywords that the tools and google indicated weren’t any good.More often than not my “gut instinct was right.

Below you’ll find a video about how I find some of my niches and keywords I still do a bit of keyword research but don’t pay any attention to monthly figures. It’s also worth mentioning that I pay no attention to how many competitors there are in a niche.

I am only interested in the first page of google so I have 10 potential competitors. That’s all I worry about, if they all have good on page seo and thousands of quality backlinks I’ll walk away from that niche. But if I see, amazon, ezine articles, ehow , etc ranking in the top 10 or the sites have poor on page seo and only a few hundred links I dive straight in because I know I can outrank them 9 out of 10 times.

Below you’ll find a short 10 minute video where I do some keyword research on a potential niche. I originally created it last week as part of an occasional series I am doing for WordPress Goldmine about how methods are changing in IM but as I had such positive comments about my last post I thought it only right to share it with a wider audience.

I’d love to know your views , I know a lot of people will probably disagree with what I say in the video but healthy discussion is what drives research so please leave comments good or bad!