Posted on 02 June 2010.
Hello Stompers!
Welcome to “This Week In StomperNet”! This week, let’s talk about SEO Pro Consulting. Let’s face it, whether you do consulting as a business model or not, once the word gets out that you know how to make things happen with the search engines, people will come to you for help. It’s inevitable! Let’s look at how to do it intelligently.
Posted in Blogging Software, blog traffic, blogging, blogging for money, search engine optimization0 Comments
Posted on 28 May 2010.
I just wrapped up watching the third video from Eben Pagan, as part of his Guru Blueprint launch. You can watch it here now -
Guru Blueprint by Eben Pagan – Video 3: Content is CASH
(You will need to enter your name and email to access it.)
Eben’s first video focused on the potential of selling information, especially if you can marry the convergence between what you know and what people go looking for information about.
In his second video, he went into much more detail on what niches represent the best potential for income online, highlighting the mega-niches of “health”, “money” and “relationships”.
He also provided a great report that revealed 29 sub-niches within the three mega-niches that represent excellent profit potential (things like raw food, alternative weight loss methods, dating advice for population segments, or credit debt elimination, etc).
The third video begins with a fairly rudimentary introduction to information product creation, where Eben shows you how to record a screen capture video to create a presentation. This was very basic stuff, but if you’re not familiar with screen recording programs, you will be very excited to see how easy it is.
The second half of the video was much more interesting for me because Eben presented a “formula” for converting your offer into content that is of premium perceived value, hence you can charge a premium price for it.
It’s pretty obvious if you have higher priced products you make more money. That’s not an absolute rule, but in most situations you will make a lot more money selling a $1,000 product over a $10 product. The challenge is how to justify and convince people that what you offer is valuable enough to warrant the premium price.
Prospects need to perceive that the outcome your product offers is of such value to them that they are willing to spend that much money on it.
This is also relevant for lower priced items, because the greater perception of value, the more product you will sell, especially given a competitive market.
If you’re product is perceived as incredible then you’re going to sell more of it – but how can you do this?
Eben, in his usual clear presentation style, was able to teach the following process to demonstrate high perceived value.
Process One: Create a “Magic Formula” and then give it a name.
Eben laid out the following simple process to come up with a Magic Formula. Remember this applies to whatever you are selling in your chosen niche (if you’re still not sure about your niche, Eben’s second video is a must-watch).
These are the steps…
Coming up with steps is compelling because it chunks down the system into a sequence that everyone can grasp, and then giving it a name increases the perceived value significantly. This is similar to what I wrote about if you create a “language identifier” and what that does to your perception as a leading expert.
Process Two: Link the formula to the three most important human values.
This is really killer stuff, so read carefully…
Humans need to have the value of something (your offer) explained to them and connected to what we value most in life. Eben recommends you focus on the following as the most important life values when it comes to your information products –
Eben explained how three of the most important human values are “money”, “time” and “work”. In other words we want more time, or less time doing things we don’t like, more money and less work.
Simple right?
The clever bit is how you link it to your Magic formula.
You need to ask yourself how you can save your prospects these three elements based on what you currently do for your people.
For example, if the problem your prospects have is too much fat and you solve it with a special diet that reduces fat quickly, then your system can… “show how to reduce fat in half the time of leading diets, without wasting money on useless supplements, and you don’t have to do anything special besides eat the food provided to you… or something like that.
Eben recommend you use a special phrase to link all this together, but you will have to watch the video to learn what that is 
.
Perception, not reality, is what matters in marketing, whether you like it or not. That doesn’t mean you have to lie, but you can learn how to phrase the best parts of your product using language that enhances it’s perception.
This really is all about good copywriting, and good copywriting is all about understanding the psychology behind, well, us – human beings.
If you don’t understand what I explained in this article or you want a more detailed visual breakdown, go watch the third video from Eben, and include the first two as well in case you missed them -
Enjoy these free videos and if you want more, look out for the opening of Eben’s program next week.
I’ll offer a bonus for this program to reward you for buying through my affiliate link, however you will need to be on my email list to find out what the bonus is and claim it.
Yaro Starak
Watching Videos
Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here
Posted in Blogging Software, blog traffic, blogging, blogging for money, search engine optimization0 Comments
Posted on 22 May 2010.
Jonathan Beebe recently contacted me asking to submit a guest article. Normally I say no because it is tough to find good writers with good content, but Jonathan did a few things right that convinced me to give him a shot. His email was short, to the point and he came across as a nice guy. He explained how he knew me as a long time blog reader, and here’s the most important bit – stated that he makes a living online, enough to support himself and his family of four.
Whenever I hear someone makes a living from the Internet and it’s enough to support an entire family, I immediately get curious. Jonathan showed me samples of his writing, which demonstrated he can put words together in an interesting way, so I asked if he would consider telling us his full story about how he became another one of the few who live the Internet lifestyle. This is his story…
As you read the impressive case studies and online success stories out there, it’s easy to get the idea that these select few people are the one’s who simply got lucky. It seems as though they are the “lottery winners”, so to speak, whom you often read about but find it nearly impossible to replicate their success. If you’re currently struggling to see positive results from your online efforts, you may be wondering… Are these people just lucky, or is there some kind of secret to the whole thing?
As a guy who has personally went from being a physical laborer at a local warehouse to working full-time on the internet in a relatively short period of time, I can tell you that becoming an online entrepreneur has little to do with luck, and A LOT to do with persistence and consistent effort.
Today, I’m going to share with you my personal story in hopes that telling you HOW I got started, and WHAT I did will inspire you to find YOUR personal strategy that you can follow day-in and day-out until you finally reach your goal. You’ll soon find out that no luck is required when it comes to becoming a full-time internet entrepreneur, just a decent supply of willpower.
My interest in making money online started while in high school when I came across the term, affiliate marketing. Whatever I read got me very excited to learn how to make money online, so I decided to give it a shot. After an admittedly short period of time, I became discouraged when I failed to see sales coming in right away. I can’t remember what it was I read, but it was most-likely filled with a lot of hype that caused me to go into the whole thing with the wrong mindset.
Although I got nowhere with internet marketing at that point, I consider the experience to be a very important part of my journey because it opened my mind up to the possibility of starting an online business. It would be a long time before that seed would have a chance to grow, however, because after high school I ended up joining the U.S. Military on a 4-year contract. I left home only a month after graduation.
Fast forward two years…
I decided to re-visit the internet marketing world after I got married about mid-way through my enlistment. I didn’t like being in the military and thought it would be great if I could be working at home when I separated so I could spend as much time as possible with my wife. This time I was determined to make money online and so my official journey began.
Remembering my previous try at affiliate marketing, I decided to go at it again, only this time I’d try my hand at pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (Google Adwords to be exact) and quickly found out that getting the hang of it was costing me way more than I wanted to risk. I did manage to make a few sales, but unfortunately, my advertising costs were way higher than what I earned, so it was time for me to start searching for something else.
A little vulnerable at this point, I started searching for online “business opportunities” and came across what seemed to be a perfect match for me (poor, gullible me). It was a network marketing company that I later found out to be a scam, AFTER I had already poured quite a bit of time and money into it. Needless to say, I got pretty much nowhere and was feeling pretty discouraged. PPC or anything to do with network marketing/multi-level-marketing (MLM) was completely out of the question for me at this point.
That’s not to say you can’t make money promoting affiliate products via PPC or getting involved with a legitimate network marketing company, because many people do, but those business models definitely aren’t for me.
At this point I was probably at my weakest state of my online money-making journey (or lack thereof), but I was determined to get somewhere so I didn’t give up. I didn’t really know what to do though, so I just spent some time taking in the free information on blogs, free reports, and I also invested in some eBooks to further my education before diving into something else and possibly getting burned again.
I finally made my first significant online dollars using “bum marketing” techniques to promote affiliate products. This was basically taking advantage of the free web resources to drive traffic to sales pages. My main strategy was to use article marketing in hopes of converting a certain percentage of that traffic into sales.
Although I was very happy to finally be making some money, I felt like the workload was way too much for the few sales that were trickling in here and there. It felt like online grunt work, and that’s NOT how I imagined running an online business would be. I guess it wouldn’t have been that bad, except I had no personal interest in most of the niches I was writing articles for. This left me feeling extremely burned out after a few short months.
But since I was finally making money, I stuck with it but kept my options open to anything else that might be a little more enjoyable for me. During this time I experimented with a lot of little strategies, one being a blog in the personal development field that I began posting to regularly. I also decided to start building my email list in that same niche as well.
Once my time in the military was up (summer of 2008), unfortunately my online income wasn’t at a point where I could support my family with it full-time, so I moved back to my hometown in California and got a job at a local warehouse working 12-hour shifts from 5pm to 5am. This only inspired me to work harder on my “make money online work” as my wife and I liked to call it (hence the current name of my website).
As time went on, my bum marketing practices became less and less, and the focus I was putting towards my blog and mailing list became more and more. After sticking to a fairly consistent work schedule, I realized that my income had become pretty steady, and it was actually growing as I continued to build up my mailing list. I was amazed at this realization because as long as I kept doing what I was doing, my income would continue to grow to unlimited heights as long as I kept growing my list!
Since I knew I didn’t want to stay in the personal development niche forever (I just wasn’t passionate about it), I decided to create a free report and start building my list in the “internet marketing” niche, which is where I wanted to eventually migrate to. Long story short, I continued on with my strategy and applied my little “formula” (as I like to call it) to my blog and BOTH of my lists and was able to grow my income high enough to quit my job at the warehouse after working there for only a year!
This is the exact strategy that I used to quit my job, and that I currently use to maintain and grow my online business:
As you can see, the strategy I described above is fairly easy to implement, and isn’t at all overwhelming. Since you’re only sending an email to your list every six days, that leaves you with a lot of days in-between to optimize your strategy, focus on creating high quality content, or even work on your own products and services. Also, six days will keep you in the minds of your subscribers, but it won’t be so often that you’ll get on their nerves.
The reason why I refrain from promoting anything two out of every three emails is to make sure that I’m giving my list more than what I ask from them. They appreciate the fact that I’m willing to give so much to them for free, and look forward to receiving my emails and clicking the links inside. Promoting something every third email conditions the list to be buyers, or to at least expect the occasional promotion. Even for those who don’t buy anything, it’s well worth it for them to stay subscribed because of all the free value that is provided on a regular basis.
In other words, the strategy I described keeps your open rates and conversion rates high, and your unsubscribe rates and spam complaints low. It also earns you TRUST with your list, and that’s as good as gold in the online world. Another advantage to the strategy is that with the non-promotional mailers, you are simply directing them to posts on your blog, which means you’ll never be scraping for content to send to your list; you’re already posting new, high quality content to your blog on a regular basis.
As you can see, your blog and mailing list work hand-in-hand to form an income-generating machine that takes a reasonable—but not overwhelming—amount of work to maintain and even grow at a steady rate. This is the way I make money online and so far it has been working GREAT for me. I attribute a lot of it’s effectiveness to the fact that I enjoy this particular strategy very much.
Now, just because I enjoy the strategy I described to you, it doesn’t mean that you will to. The point of me telling you my story wasn’t to get you to “convert” to my way of doing things, but to get you to see that LUCK had nothing to do with my success. It was all about finding what worked for me personally, and then sticking with it until my desired results were achieved.
There are only two things that will cause you to fail as an online entrepreneur, and that’s (1) not sticking to something long enough (lack of persistence; opportunity hopping), and (2) just giving up altogether. If you find something that you can enjoy doing and doesn’t leave you feeling burned out, you will GREATLY decrease the chances of those two things happening… but ultimately, it’s up to you.
If you take some time to find your strategy and stick with it, achieving your goals might just be a lot closer than you think.
Jonathan Beebe
If you want to learn more about the exact strategy Jonathan used to quit his day job for good, grab a copy of his free report called Online Income Formula.
Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here
Posted in Blogging Software, blog traffic, blogging, blogging for money, search engine optimization0 Comments
Posted on 19 May 2010.
I feel blessed (or lucky!) to be born in a time when the Internet gives me the opportunity to take my ability to produce words and exchange access to them for money. I can even do this on autopilot, with technology allowing me to sell my words while I sleep, from anywhere on the planet. If you really think about this, it’s just plain incredible.
What’s particularly amazing is that the vehicle for distributing your ideas has such low barriers to entry. That’s not to say that it’s easy to succeed and profit from an information publishing business, but at least the tools we have to do so require minimal skill to set-up and there are thousands of people who are willing to do the set-up work for little cost.
You can have a blog and email newsletter up and running in an hour for under $100. That’s not bad if you consider these two tools are all you really need to start publishing to a potential global audience. From there the sky is the limit, or if you don’t want the sky, you can make a solid income through blogging and email marketing.
You might argue and say setting up a good website or blog, with a nice design, figuring out how to add an email newsletter, choose a niche, write good content, attract traffic, monetize, etc, is challenging – and yes it is, but most of the answers to these problems are readily available in countless places online and offline. You can even experiment to figure it all out yourself for little cost beyond your own time.
(Hint: The videos at Become A Blogger are a good place to start if you want to learn how to set up a blog.)
Starting any business is challenging, but an online business has to be one of the easiest by far to begin, especially if you focus on information as your currency, which online, it is. The real “hard” part, like any business, is the ongoing commitment to action that is required to succeed, especially in the face of self doubt.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always excited by the idea of being able to sell ideas. You don’t even need to have new ideas, just be good at sharing your unique view on old ideas and you can get very far. The key is to be willing to share and go out of your way to turn what you think and know into information for others to consume. That’s such a simple idea, which is why it is exciting, but of course more people fail than succeed, when it comes to profiting from it.
Last night before going to sleep I watched the latest video from Eben Pagan on the subject of selling information online. It’s thirty minutes long and you can view it here (this is my affiliate link) –
(You have to enter your name and email to watch the full video.)
Eben is doing a prelaunch for his next program teaching how to start a business selling what you know as information products online. This video is the first in his free series as part of the launch process (I hope you’re not getting tired of prelaunch videos!).
It’s no secret that Eben is a marketer I’ve studied for a long time and respect. He was the very first internet marketer I learned from when it comes to email marketing, although at the time I didn’t realize it because it was his alter ego, David DeAngelo, whose emails I read on a daily basis during my early twenties. You can read more about my introduction to email marketing and David D in this article here – The Sales Funnel Explained.
I especially like Eben because he is an introvert and has a very low key, some would call boring, style of presenting. I don’t consider him boring, but I can see for those who don’t like the stand behind a table and talk style of presenting, he might not keep your attention.
I’m an introvert myself and find Eben’s achievements inspiring and his style engaging. I always learn something from him, if not from his content, then from how he delivers it.
I believe Eben has succeeded because of two core things -
It’s people like Eben and Rich who give me the belief that anyone can succeed online if you have the right mentality focused on action, constantly educate yourself and learn how to manage resources well.
Eben’s video includes many of the common elements you’ve come to expect in launch content.
I like videos that show a glimpse into the private life of the person behind the video because I enjoy learning about people and their personality. This aspect is something you see in nearly all launch videos in our industry.
Whether it’s Frank Kern down by the beach, Jeff Walker on his mountain bike, John Reese in one of his cars, Rich Schefren playing tennis with his CEO Brian Johnson, or Eben showing you his apartments, you get to see a more personal look at the character behind the launch. This is a sound marketing technique to capture attention – remember that when you do your own videos!
One part of Eben’s video I found particularly interesting was when he broke down how much money he made from his launches in the business and marketing niche during the last 12 months, including his Wake Up Productive product (which I purchased and found beneficial), his Guru Mastermind products and Ignition training course. It was very interesting to see how much each of these launches grossed, especially considering nearly every one of them did a million dollars in revenue or more, and I experienced how Eben launched each one.
Eben made over ten million dollars in sales in the business niche, adding more than 200,000 new subscribers to his mailing list. That’s more than double the number of subscribers I have in total, and I’ve been in this game for years. He also did more than twenty million in the dating niche in the same period and his company has grossed almost $100 million dollars in the last nine years, according to what Eben states in the video. Needless to say, as an information product company, Eben’s is one of the best.
Towards the middle of the video Eben shows a sample of how many sales are made each day – even each hour – in his business, which is interesting, especially seeing the timing for sales (there’s a lot of sales made at 8am for instance). I know some people think this is just hype to make you buy his product – and yeah, it is, but it’s exciting too (maybe I’m falling for the hype).
You can make money while you sleep and plenty of people do so already. Most don’t to the degree that Eben’s company does of course, but making a few hundred each night is a realistic goal. I’ve enjoyed that experience now for many years thanks to blogging.
A good chunk of Eben’s video is about showing how well he is doing. Then he further demonstrates his credibility with some name dropping of the people he has shared the stage with, like the Dalai Lama, Richard Branson and Tony Robbins, and then hits us with a bunch of stats about how great an opportunity selling information online is.
In other words, this is one amazing business model that Eben clearly knows really well and is tremendously successful at, and you should get into too, right?
Okay, sure, but how? Where do you start?
Step one: Niche Selection
The only piece of actual training Eben offers in the video is a beginning look at how you can choose a profitable niche for your information product selling business.
He lays it out like this -
Rocket science this is not, but of course it’s not *that* simple either.
Eben ends the video with an exercise, including a PDF you can download and print to help you determine your niche.
What I found interesting was how Eben recommended you focus on information products in what he terms the three “mega-niches” – the most profitable industries for information products online.
They are -
There’s many sub-niches within these top level niches, but in terms of cash, this is where the big money is at. Eben’s company targets dating and business – in other words, money and relationships, so he practices what he preaches.
This was interesting to me because often it’s taught that you can go combine your passion and look where the money is within that market, no matter what it is, assuming your passion is shared by a large enough, money-spending audience online.
Eben has reduced the margin for error and said here’s the big money, let’s stick to these areas. His next video is apparently going to look closer within these niches to see where your knowledge fits, so I’m looking forward to that one to see how he can find a way for everyone to fit within the three boxes.
One last point before I offer the obligatory second download link for the video.
Eben explained an important mindset shift away from, and I quote, “one of the biggest mistakes newbie information sellers make” is to not focus on selling yourself as the expert, or your expertise, but instead to sell solutions or outcomes or benefits.
Marketing 101 you might say, but worth repeating again and again and again – so many people focus on themselves and not the benefits for their customers, which is what people care about – what is in it for me.
Ironically, this video was mostly about Eben and his expertise, success and credibility, so he’s violating his own rule somewhat. I think in this case, with the first video, he wants to establish trust, and I expect the rest of the videos will focus more on how other people can succeed at selling information (in other words, an outcome for the potential customer).
If there’s one thing Eben’s good at, it is reinforcing the fundamentals and teaching what’s most relevant for success.
Make sure you watch the full video for all the details as I’ve only summarized what was presented. Once you’re on the list you will also get notified when the next videos in the series are released. Like most launch content, what Eben gives away for free is worth studying, especially if you are new to information publishing as a business model.
Here’s my affiliate link again for the video –
Eben Pagan’s Guru Blueprint Video
I enjoy Eben’s presenting style so much that I’ll watch the rest of his videos just to see what he does, even though I don’t expect the content to be new for me. It’s worth learning how he does what he does, no matter how experienced you already are as an information publisher, because clearly Eben knows how to take things to the next level.
Yaro Starak
Eben Pagan Groupie (in a non-sexual way)
Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here
Posted in Blogging Software, blog traffic, blogging, blogging for money, search engine optimization0 Comments
Posted on 12 May 2010.
The key to a successful online business is a steady stream of targeted traffic in the form of relevant visitors. After all, without those visitors coming to your website and viewing your offer, then you’ll find it difficult to generate the kind of profit you’re hoping for. However, the key to success is finding the right kind of traffic from the right sources. The point is attracting traffic from the right sources that you know will convert into paying customers. While having great ad copy and keyword rich content is important, if you have the wrong type of visitors to your site, then you won’t be converting them into profits. This is why, when you’re building an email list, it’s important to get clear on what kind of subscriber you want to add to your targeted list. Find out what all the internet marketers are talking about right now at this Affiliate Gameplan page. Where they are going to come from and if they will be interested in what you’re offering. For example, if your site is promoting ‘make money online’ ebooks, then your subscriber list needs to contain people who are interested in learning how to make money online. So if you want to build a responsive list that pays you for your efforts, your focus should be on target markets that will be able to buy what you sell. This article will be looking at various strategies you can use to help build up your mailing list the right way.
We all know that controversy spreads really fast on the Internet. Not all controversy is negative; some of it might simply be one person’s opinion or ideal that people either agree to or they don’t. It’s possible to harness the power of controversial marketing to develop your mailing list with the right kind of subscribers to suit your needs. It’s all about trying to invoke a shock factor within people that encourages them to forward your report or article out to others within their friends network, which spreads your message even further. While it might look on the surface as though you’ll be going against popular opinion with this type of marketing, the truth is you’ll be attracting attention from the exact people you want on your targeted subscriber list. This can bring about an excited discussion within the social networks and forums within your niche about your report or offer.
Another unique way to boost your list building is to create a fun, shocking or a controversial video and upload it to video sharing sites like Youtube. The traffic that Youtube gets is massive, which means you can get a share of it with your video. Do you want a new way of making a living online rather than the same old affiliate marketing methods, then have a look at this Affiliate Gameplan page. Video is great for creating viral messages, as people who watch your presentation will feel compelled to forward it to their own circle of friends. Your video should feature a water mark of your site’s link somewhere, so people who enjoyed your presentation can visit your site easily.
In conclusion, if you intend to succeed in the world of online marketing, then you will need to spend time building an email mailing list. Take action, be persistent and work consistently on simple ideas and you’ll soon find you have a huge mailing list before you know it.
Further Reading:
Clickbank Pirate
Posted in Blogging Software, blog traffic, blogging0 Comments
