Internet Marketing Strategies and Marketing Tips by Neil Shearing

I got the millionaire next door as a birthday present and just finished reading it.

It basically reaffirmed my thoughts on getting ‘rich’… “Earn a lot, spend a little. Avoid debt, build wealth!”

I did like how the entrepreneurs and business owners described in “The Millionaire Next Door” had a hidden advantage over the high-income “professionals” such as accountants, lawyers, doctors etc etc. That hidden advantage was that the professionals were under social pressure to live an expensive lifestyle… they were expected to be seen, in their professional capacity, in suits, ties. They were expected to live in a “wealthy” neighborhood, with expensive cars. Their children were expected to go to private school. Whether they desired these things or not, the social pressure was there to fit in with what was expected. After all, if your accountant meets with you wearing jeans and a T-shirt, you’re not going to be impressed, are you?

On the other hand, entrepreneurs can wear pretty much what they want, when they want. I certainly do!

Business owners, on the other hand, have the reverse pressure. If they wear sharp suits and drive luxury cars, their employees could very well resent their display of wealth. So it’s better for the business owners to act like one of the employees.

That “hidden” benefit may help explain why the high income professionals struggle to accumulate wealth whereas the entrepreneurs and business owners seem to succeed. 

To accumulate wealth, you need to earn a relatively high income and spend wisely. Know the value of a dollar. Make each one work for you.

The book is well worth reading, but after the initial point is driven home (to accumulate wealth you have to earn a relatively high income, spend frugally and live quite a long time) along with another good point (minimize your taxable income and grow your non-income producing assets) I felt the book ran out of steam. It talks about “how the wealthy buy their cars” and “inter-generational transfers of wealth and what it means to the recipients” for what seemed like most of the second half of the book.

If you’re interested in seeing how effectively blogs can be used to market online, check out the Entrepreneur’s Journey by Yaro Starak. You’ll immediately see that, even though it’s run using Wordpress, it has been heavily customized to look unique.

Not only is it very attractive, but it’s very usable too. There’s a navigation bar at the top, complete with search box, a link to popular articles and a sign up box for his “traffic tips”. There are several quality audio messages introducing different aspects of the site… and that’s all before you get to the blog posts!

What’s smart about this system is that it’s a blog not a website.

Unlike a regular website, each blog post get posted to the main page, its own post page and a separate archive page… creating three pages with one new post. The sitemap is also updated automatically, and new posts are “pinged” to several blog search engines… so a blog really helps you market your content effectively. Plus, people can easily and quickly leave comments… which adds yet more content.

So in making his blog his website, Yaro has done himself some huge marketing favours. When you add quality content to that, the results are spectacular…

Unique visitors: 110,000+ per month
Page Views: 450,000+ per month
No of Articles/Pages: 500+
PageRank: 6
AlexaRank: 24,000-19,000

(data taken from Yaro’s blog.)

Check it out if you’re considering starting a blog. It’s a great example of how a dynamic blog beats a static site… especially when you harness the blog advantages with great content and presentation.

Thanks to everyone who posted a comment in my Birthday competition. And, to the cynic who questioned whether or not it really was my birthday… erm, yes, it is…

Picking winners was difficult because there were over 100 comments… most of which were of high quality. In this case, I’ve gone with two poets because I like a bit of poetry at the blog.

The two winners are: Marcus Owen-Henson and Randy Smith.

Congratulations you two! I’ve sent emails to the contact details on your website. Please reply and let me know where to send your goodies. If you don’t get my email, please open a support ticket letting me know how to contact you.

If you didn’t win, I still strongly recommend checking out “11 Days To List Profits” to help you on your road to Internet success. Many thanks to Michael for generously donating two copies of his platinum version for the competition.

(by the way, my kids helped decorate the cake, if you were wondering!)

OK, here’s a chance for TWO lucky people to WIN a copy of Michael Cheney’s hot new product, “11 Days To List Profits” plus my own products, “Internet Success Blueprint”, “Internet Success Diamonds”, “Internet Success Spider” and “Internet Success Interviews”.

Michael was incredibly generous and offered the PLATINUM version of his product which includes these extra goodies worth $716…

“Michael Cheney & Joel Comm Go Head To Head On List Building!”
“Michael Cheney’s List Building Jumpstart”
“Michael Cheney’s List Secrets”
“Michael Cheney’s Traffic Explosion”
“Michael Cheney’s Ultimate List Building & Traffic Masterclass” with Stuart Tan & Simon Grabowski
“‘Michael Cheney’s Fortune With 500′ With FULL MASTER RESALE RIGHTS!”
“Michael Cheney’s Advanced List Building Strategies”
“Confidential Conversation With Michael Cheney”

… that’s on top of everything you see at this page ”11 Days To List Profits”

When you add in the value of my products, you’re looking at several thousand dollars worth of products which will be given away, for free, to TWO lucky winners.

So how do you enter the competition?

Easy. Just post a blog comment below including…

1: What winning this package will mean to you.

Don’t forget to check back to see if you won… I’ll pick two winners and will announce them at 2pm EST tomorrow (Friday). Good luck!

Oh, and don’t forget, there’s 30 minute consultation with Michael thrown in too, just to ice the cake!

I’ve finally got around to reviewing Michael Cheney’s “11 Days to List Profits“. Yes, it’s taken me a while to review the videos because there are 43 of them!

OK, hand-on-heart, I haven’t reviewed all of them… hey, I have a wife and kids!

But the ones I did watch were very professional and full of “meaty” information. In fact, I was surprised how thorough the movies were. You get spoonfed. Literally. But that’s what most people want. Plain, simple, “do this, then that” instructions.

And the subject material is perfect. How to build a profitable list in 11 days. Yes, you’ll have to review the movies and do some work in the 11 days, but the efforts will be worth it when you’re seeing people added to your list… people who’ll be interested in the offers you send them. As Michael says in the sales-copy, nothing is more important to having a successful, profitable online business than a list you’ve built yourself and have a good relationship with.

Click here to learn more. I think there’s a limited time before the price goes up.

I’ve just seen the second PDF… it’ll answer some of the hot questions from the last post.

When you buy a franchise, you get a hosted site with 5,000 ready-to-sell products. Five thousand and growing.

You’ll earn 30% commission on sales from your website. That’s up to six times more than competitors are offering for sales of similar products. You’ll be able to sign up your own affiliates and decide what percentage (of the 30%) to offer them. It could be a 10/20 split, a 15/15 split. You decide.

You can build mini sites for your affiliates around their specialized niches… they’ll be able to offer products (from the 5,000) which exactly match their audience’s interests… and you split the commission with them.

Of course, you could use your ability to build niche sites to build your own, and keep all the commission!

Sign up at Paul’s site to get your hands on the latest information!

Update: The highest affiliate commissions I saw from a competitor’s site (audible.com, run via Commission Junction) was 12%. As a franchise holder, you could offer your affiliates 15% and still earn 15% of every sale your affiliates make! Or you could focus on making your own sales and earn the full 30%.

By way of comparison, Amazon offer 4% on their “classic” referral fee structure or up to 8.5% on their “performance” structure. Who would potential affiliates want to partner with? Amazon, Audible or you?

Paul Smithson, the talented entrepreneur and the man behind XSitePro has come up with a simply stellar offer.

It’s so good, I want you to just check it out for yourself and see if your jaw hits the floor.

Download this PDF , print it out, read it, and when you’ve recovered, let me know your thoughts.

This may be a bit “out there”, but it has important implications for making money online.

I’ve looked into using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC, primarily Google’s Adwords) to promote affiliate products and earn commissions on any sales.

The principle is simple… pay less to the search engines than you earn in commissions and you’re in business… profitable.

However, you have competitors thinking the same thing.

If you bid for high-traffic words and phrases, you have to pay more per click. Not smart.

So you look for lower-traffic words and phrases to pay less per click. If the words and phrases are highly targetted to the end-product, you will hopefully convert more visitors to sales and be more profitable than paying for high traffic words. Now we’re being smarter.

Guess what? Our competitors are doing the same thing, which forces UP the price per click, even though the traffic is lower.

This is like Spinoza said… “nature abhors a vacuum“… so you won’t find unbid valuable keywords! In a perfect system every keyword would be bid to its maximum value. If a keyword is valuable, it’s fully bid.

It there room in that system?

Yes, but only if you go the extra mile and extract MORE value from that keyword than is currently “priced in”. You could build advanced squeeze pages targetted to each keyword or capture names, emails and demographic data. But now you’re looking at a whole lot of work… will the rewards then be worth the effort? There’s no “easy money” available because the easy money attracts lots of competition… which requires you to work harder for the money, so the easy money becomes difficult money.

It’s like making money online in general… the barrier to getting online is tiny… you just need a computer and a web connection… so millions of people jump onto the Internet wanting to make money online, which raises the level of competition ensuring that there’s no “easy money”.

If you want to succeed as an affiliate, you have to work harder than most other people who want to make money as affiliates. If you want to succeed as a digital author, you have to work harder than most people who want to make money as digital authors.  

Cause and effect.

However, if you think backwards… when Google Adwords first came along, when Adsense first came along, when the Internet first came along, then there was easy money for a short period of time… until the competition arrived. So, seeking out new opportunities could pay off handsomely. For example, finding the first nugget of gold in the Rockies… that was “easy money” until thousands of other gold prospectors turned up… then it became more difficult.

After mentioning Phil Wiley in a recent post, he dropped me a personal email pointing to this post at his blog.

In the post, Phil quotes from an email he got from Cody Moya. The contents are shocking. In order to boost his own affiliate sales, Cody suggests that people who have already bought a certain product ask for a refund and then buy again through his link in order to get his bonuses.

Ouch. That’s taking hard-earned commissions from other affiliates after they’ve been credited to the affiliate’s account. It also boosts the refund rate for the merchant, and costs the payment processor money to refund the transaction… which they’ll pass on to all merchants in higher fees. What’s more, it destroys the credibility of Cody. Can he really be that desperate for commissions to use such underhand tactics?

Definitely a step beyond acceptable affiliate tactics. Thanks for letting us know about it, Phil.

(interesting update to Phil’s post… “After reading my post Clickbank expert Harvey Segal reported it to his contact at Clickbank who quickly responded by suspending Cody’s account”.)

Clickbank said….

–> We have blacklisted this affiliate’s hoplink as well have suspended their account. It does take a few hours sometimes for the hoplink to be disabled after this has been done. They will also be notified that this type of activity is not tolerated by Clickbank. < --

Ouch! I guess Cody won’t be seeing his next commission check for a while. Congratulations to Clickbank for swift, decisive action.

… thanks to YouTube.

Check out how Michael Campbell got those visitors, and earned over $437 in affiliate revenue by clicking here.

Hats off to Michael for getting the traffic, earning the commissions, and sharing the info.