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

 

If the answer is no then why not?

I understand that you might think that you have nothing to say but by starting a blog you do start to track your online journey and leave a record there for the future. The more you blog the better you writing skills become and the easier you’ll find it.

It doesn’t matter if you only talk about how you only made $10 and spent $40, lay out your successes and your failures. Talk about the tools you use and what works and what doesn’t . Believe me people are interested and 2 or 3 years down the line when you have a few hundred posts and are making $500 a day before you get out of bed people will be reading your blog for insights and inspiration.

I regularly look back at my posts from the past and marvel at how much i’ve learned, when I made that first blog post on August 4th 2006 did I think i’d still be blogging 5 and a half years later .. NO!  But a blog is more than just a collection of posts It’s actually like having your own Psychiatrist, putting things on a public blog focus’s your mind and helps you realize what you want to do and what you want to achieve.

Internet Marketing is all about dropping seeds everywhere, some never sprout but others grow into fruit bearing trees, and a blog and your blog posts are just a few more seeds that you drop. I could bore you with long lists on people who make money online who wouldn’t be where they are today without their blogs.

A blog can also be a stepping stone to a much better place.  It can open doors for you that wouldn’t normally be opened.  Do you think that Pat Flynn thought to himself  ”If I start blogging I’ll be asked to speak at Blog World”  when he wrote his first blog post in 2008  http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/why-i-will-quit-my-job-for-a-passive-income/ ?  When he was writing that first blog post do you think he thought that he’d be earning $60,000 a month in January 2012.

I am equally sure that if you asked him he would say that updating his blog regularly has kept him on track and driven him forward, and it’s without a doubt the corner stone of his current business.

It’s the same for me, A personal blog helps to keep you focused and make you accountable to yourself and your readers, and future readers.

So get out there and start a blog,  at the end of the post you’ll see links to some of the members of WPG who have created blogs and who are documenting their progress…check them out you’ll be wiser for doing so!

Finally  huge congratulations to everyone who has completed month 1 of the 2012 challenge ($0 to $10,000 a month with a new business) The first target was $100 and a big lump of Kudos must go to Paul Nicholls who more than doubled this months target.  Next months target is $200 and I am sure we’ll have some great results to report as several income streams are starting to come online.

If you have a personal Blog then why not leave a comment below and make sure to click on the comment Luv button, that will then dispaly your last post for everyone to see…  Don’t bother if you are a spammer, I check each comment personally!

http://theseaworthymarketer.com

http://www.MikeFromMaine.com

http://PaulNichollsBlog.com

Broon Dog Internet Marketing

http://www.thenewbiehelper.com/

http://www.commissionclassroom.com

http://imDeanMartin.com

http://johnlenaghan.com

But perhaps most importantly I talk about some of the process I use that help me get tasks completed on time even when i don’t really fell like working.

I round off the podcast by talking about comment spam and by outing the company that spammed me this week.

Download this episode (right click and save)

These guys are masters at building AdSense sites on an industrial basis then flipping them a few months later for up to 25 times the income. A quick glance at their Flippa account shows multiple $2000-$3000 paydays.  If you think thats impressive well there is more, they are happy to share their techniques and methods with everyone.

If you have even the slightest interest in Adsense then make time to listen to this interview you’ll hear several tips that will help you earn money and avoid problems no matter what level you are at.

Download Podcast

Never Miss a Podcast subscribe on iTunes

Well this is what happened to me earlier this week. On over 100 sites Not 1 AdSense ad was appearing.

How did I feel?

Elated! Yes seriously and that feeling shocked me.

I felt elated because the first thing that went through my mind was that I was finally free of having to update my sites, free of having to worry about what google was doing. That feeling shocked me as I had never thought about my beloved AdSense sites like that, I’ve had some of them since the first week I started in IM.

Unfortunately that feeling of joy and release didn’t last…. the ads came back along with an email from AdSense

This morning we had a brief outage for AdSense for Content that affected a small amount of publishers, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Our engineers worked diligently to identify and fix the problem, and all ad serving should now be resumed for your websites. If you’re still having issues seeing ads on any of your websites, please feel free to reply to this message and I will be happy to help you investigate.

Sincerely,

 

I guess that was a bit of a wake up call to me and showed me my real feelings about one of my businesses. Over the next few months I think I am going to bundle up my AdSense sites and sell them off in groups of 10 or 15.

I say one of my businesses because that is how I treat each aspect on my online endeavors. Before this I had decided to change the way I worked in 2012, I am developing and focusing on 1 new  business for the first 4 months of the year, you’ll no doubt here a lot more about that in the weeks to come because it’s big and something completely different.  I talked about it in the podcast I released yesterday which you can find on the blog or on iTunes if you want to subscribe to it.. just go to podcasts and search for “mjthompson”.  That podcast is another key aspect of my new business model.

For me 2012 is going to be the year of reaching out, I’ve decided that I am going to reach out to subscribers and other internet marketers in a number of ways, the podcast is only the start I’ll be sharing the ups and downs of life as an internet marketer in it. I intend to fully document the new business in a series of monthly reports that will tell you exactly how I got the idea and how I generate the income and even what the income is… total transparency.

I really have had enough of some of the directions that Internet Marketing is going, and if I don’t like something I am going to try to do something about it….. stay tuned it could be a Interesting year.

Finally my Friend Andre Chaperon and his partner Steve are releasing their new “Tiny Little Business’s“ training course , It’s only available for 7 days and it comes with the highest recommendation possible from me. Even if you have no intention of buying it I urge you to look at the sales page and study it. You’ll learn more on the sales page than you will in many products I could name.

It really is a great way of marketing a product, the total opposite of the “Magic Button HYPE” type sales pages that most marketers think are necessary to sell their crap products.

Right I am heading back to the Batcave to continue my plans for world domination (sort of mixing my metaphors there!)  How would you have reacted if you’d lost your Adsense? Let me know below!

While i’ve been working I’ve been thinking of more ways of reaching out to my subscribers and readers. One of my major new years resolutions for 2012 is to do a lot more reaching out but to other marketers and anyone who may stumble upon this blog. I also want to increase my social media networking and exposure.

To that end i’ve decided to do a new podcast series, that doesn’t focus solely on internet marketing…yes there is life beyond IM and it’s some of these aspects I want to cover in more depth.

So I am happy to introduce :

 Life & Online Marketing Without Limits

The podcast will shortly be available on iTunes and they will always be embedded here to both listen to and download.

I want this to be as interactive as possible so please post any questions you’d like to ask me about IM, my business or life in general and If i think others will be interested i’ll cover it. I am also always open to interviewing anyone who has anything to say so once again let me know if you wan to chat!

Enjoy the podcast it’s “bite sized” unlike the other podcast series I do with Paul Forcey

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…

Let me say this first as I am sure some of you are readying your negative comments already… I’ve heard it all before … WSO’s are all scams , WSO’s are rehashed crap, WSO’s have no value. Thats like saying all baseball players are fat tobacco chewing hillbillies, or that all women are bad drivers,  it’s a stereotype that is just not true.

I’ll tell you what WSO’s are they are edgy, they are fresh, they are in short the rock and roll of the Internet marketing business. I know you probably all think I have gone mad or been out in the sun too long I can assure you I’m as sane as always and it’s been raining here for the past few days.

In the past year you’ll probably have found more scam products released on Clickbank than in the WSO forum, why do you think Clickbank are desperately trying to clean up house ? Unfortunately It’s a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. People have lost confidence in Clickbank as they ignored all the scam products  and overly hyped ones and were happy to let the crap be sold there so long as they got their fees. For the past 18 months or so people who have released deceptive WSO’s have been removed from the Forum and banned. The WSO Guys have been cleaning house long before any other network even considered it.

Over the weekend a WSO was removed because it was a bit too similar to the vendors previous one, which didn’t deliver on what it promised.

Then you have the Dinosaurs still releasing their $2000 products, I believe Product Launch Formula XIV is due for release soon.  A Product Launch product, about product launches being promoted by people who will all promote each others product launches using methods from the old product launch formula products.  Lazy lazy lazy marketing. There is nothing and has never been anything that you’ll learn in any $2000 product that you can’t learn elsewhere for considerably less.

So lets get back to WSO’s or Warrior Forum Special offers as they are officially called, don’t let the name confuse you they have long moved on from being solely special offers for members of the warrior forum they have developed into a full blown product marketplace.

Not only does it mean that you can pick up products for a fraction of the value you’d have to pay if it was a product on clickbank you also get ideas and techniques that are generally working today and not a year ago when the clickbank product was first released. Want to learn about Facebook marketing and using a new feature released yesterday? They’ll be a good quality fresh product along very soon, Want to see how to attract offline customers, they’ll be a product by someone genuinely earning a few thousand dollars a month in their local community.

If you want it you’ll be able to find it in the WSO forum..

I often get people comment and say, “But why would anyone share a method that really works?”  There are lot’s of reasons some financial some personal plus creating and marketing your own product is a real Buzz!  Why didn’t Steve Jobs just make awesome MP3′s players, phone and computers for himself and his friends? Why do people In forums happily share methods that work for them?

Another Reason WSO’s deserve your attention is that WSO’s also tend to be less full of filler , if you are producing a $10 product then you don’t need to add a load of filler than is so common in products that need to justify their $97 price. So you get just the facts that are important. There are still things I don’t like, particularly the tendency for too many One Time Offers, this seems to get people very upset but don’t lose sight of the fact that we are marketers (and I mean you too dear reader!)  and what we do is market , so if you don’t like it just click the no I am not interested link and grab the product you just paid $7 for.

It’s been a long time since I saw a WSO that was a scam and a quick look at the comments will usually tell you all you need to know about it,  I generally ignore any comment posted within 4 hours of the WSO going live as they will probably be from reviewers, after that then the comments are usually from buyers.  If I spend $10 on a WSO and it’s not good I generally just write it off to experience and don’t buy from that person again. $10 is a much sweeter lesson than $2000.

You can get refunds of WSO’s although I generally don’t bother unless it’s something that has been misrepresented in the sales page and even then i’ll often not bother if it’s less than $10, My view is that if I buy a WSO thats is as described in the sales letter and I find I know the method I don’t refund. It’s down to me for buying it there are usually enough clues in the thread if you look.

Another reason why you shouldn’t ignore WSO’s is that it’s a way for you to create and market products cheaply, for under $70 you can have a product in a marketplace where thousands of dollars a day are spent on products, and that’s only going to get bigger.  Don’t expect to make money with your early WSO’s they are mostly about building a name for yourself and getting a few subscribers plus learning how to market properly.

I generally don’t like doing Free WSO’s as  you generate a list of people who will expect free stuff in the future but if you are starting out a free wso or a WSO with 100% commission is a good way to get your list started. However if you have no list then give a free WSO a go. But make sure you have a back end sales funnel in place first.

You will find that you can pick up affiliates much easier in the WSO forum than somewhere like clickbank and if one of the affiliates with a big list promotes you thats a few hundred sales and a few hundred buyers on your list. Thats more valuable that you probably realize.

Whether you just need information or learn a profitable technique, or are an affiliate or a product creator then WSO’s can be a valuable addition to your marketing.

As an affiliate you can head to the Warrior Plus site and see all the stats for products that have been released, hunt back a few weeks I guarantee you’ll find products that are converting at 15-20% and earning an EPC of $1.50 or more those are stats that many marketers would bite your hand off for.

Watch how the guys who market WSO’s on a regular basis work and you’ll learn more about marketing than in a week than any $2000 course can teach you, I got an email from Chris Munch last week that was a great example.

He noticed that lots of people were promoting a WSO for PLR videos , so he directed people to another product that no one else was promoting, in the process he explained exactly why the other offer was better, in one email he informed, educated and marketed. Definitely not your typical “Buy This” email and an example of why Chris who emails offers daily has a good retention and open rate on his lists..

These products will also not have been sent to every email list in the known universe. You’ll probably be the only person that will have promoted it to your subscribers, while other less enlightened marketers are pitching the latest high priced crap that everyone is trying to sell you’ll be pitching a good quality low priced product.

So if you haven’t checked out the WSO forum for a while check it out today, whether you just want to learn, or are an affiliate or product creator you will find that it can be if great benefit to you.