"The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance - and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning."

Oprah Winfrey

Be a specialist

At school you had been taught that you needed to know as much as you could about all kinds of topics that you were probably not even interested in (e.g. for me the horrors were math and physics…). It would not have made sense to have been focused on just one of these subjects because if you had done that, you would not have made it to the next grade.

In Internet marketing it all is a little different. Here, you should NOT try to be the 'Mr. or Mrs. Knowitall' but the specialist, the go to guy/gal, in ONE area of Internet marketing. This can be e.g. an SEO expert, the software developer, a Google Adwords specialist or a copywriter or more recently, the Web 2.0 guy/gal.

Personally, I would brand myself as the software developer since that is where my expertise is. But more recently, I have also become very experienced in creating VRE (virtual real estate) websites using Wordpress so I can also say that I am a blogging specialist.

Whatever it is that you do, make sure you learn as much as you can about your area of expertise. Strive to become the best you can be. Just like a doctor or a lawyer learns everything he can about his medicine or laws, you need to do the same in your area.

And it never stops. If you have a passion for something, you will like it to learn more and more about it in order to become the best.

Give me crap and I’ll let others know…

Personally, I love to educate myself about all the new ways of making money online (this is a treat of all the top Internet marketers – they never stop educating themselves!). I am the kind of guy people want to have on their lists because I am constantly buying their stuff – presupposed it’s not just rehashed material (and if it is, I'll get myself a refund).

As long as I am getting at least one good idea from a product which can make me more money when implementing it in my own business, I won’t be asking for a refund. But give me crap and not only will I be asking for my money back but I’ll let my list know about it as well so they can avoid it and not waste their hard earned money…!

Focus on one project at a time

When I was attending the Internet Millionaire’s Bootcamp in London in October of 2006, Mike Filsaime said something on stage that I’ll never forget: “You need to focus on one project at a time”. Even though it sounds so simple, most people do completely the opposite.

Focusing on one project at a time will bring you income much quicker than trying to get multiple projects finished at the same time – something which can almost never be achieved. So the key to success is just to focus on the one project that will be bringing you the greatest revenue within the shortest amount of time.

You know, even I, as a very experienced Internet marketer, sometimes made the mistake of wanting to achieve too much at the same time. Instead of working on one project until it was finished, I was trying to handle 3-4 projects at a time. And the result was that nothing got finished in time and my income was suffering from it. Because not being able to finish a project means less income.

In Internet marketing, you better come up with new products quickly because you will soon be forgotten if you don’t. You must be the innovator, the one who is coming up with new, helpful products that your subscribers and customers want to buy from you.

(For example, that's why I relaunched my Niche Content Websites - membership site because I saw that my business wasn't different enough from the businesses of others who were selling the same kind of products. I wanted to get a better USP - a unique selling proposition which was better than most of my competitors by selling UNIQUE websites to people who are interested in making a living from niche type of VRE websites. This has become the solution for people who can't design their own websites or don't know how to implement monetization modules - now everything's done for them…!)

If you don’t know what they want, ask them! Your products must become the solutions for their problems.

Outsource everything you don't want to do yourself

And you don’t even have to create these products yourself. That’s what outsourcing is for. No one is expecting from you, if you e.g. have a great idea for a software tool, that you need to create it yourself. Just hire someone on Elance.com or ScripLance.com, tell him or her what you want to have done, and they’ll do it for you – at a very reasonable price.

For example, I had my AffiliateTurbo software programmed by a programmer which I found on ScriptLance. I paid about $400 for it and I made more than $10,000 from this tiny investment. And the same was the case with my Blog Promoter software. (in the meantime, I’ve sold both businesses for several thousands of $$… they simply were too work intensive as they required a lot of updates on an almost daily basis).

By knowing what you want to achieve and what your goals are, you'll actually get there much quicker. You simply need to be the one who plans it all - it's not necessary that you are doing everything yourself. And all the steps which are needed to get there, will fall into place almost automatically.

———————————

(This article is an excerpt from my Revenue Blueprint ebook. If you liked the article, then why not get yourself a copy of the complete works at http://www.revenueblueprint.com/ ?)

Tags: adsense, adwords, affiliate, ebook, google adwords, internet marketing, mike filsaime, seo, seo expert, vre websites, web 2.0, websites

If you are good at developing products, may it be E-books or software, selling Private Label Rights to these products can be suitable for you. Private Label Rights have a high perceived value because it allows your buyers to put their name on a product which they haven't created themselves. It can save them a lot of time.

In case you already have an existing digital product which you have created and sold in the past and you are looking for additional sources of income, you can consider selling the Private Label Rights to other Internet Marketers.

Why other Internet marketers? Because they are constantly on the lookout for new products to sell. There are only so many products they can create themselves in a month so buying the rights to products they can start selling as their own seems to be very attractive to most of them.

Making Money from Selling Private Label Rights products

The following are ways you can make money from selling Private Label Rights products:

• Upfront Sales. This is the most attractive part of selling Private Label Rights. Private Label Rights can range from a few dollars to even thousands of dollars, depending on the quality of the product, its demand and how proven it is (aka how many sales you've made for the personal use version…).

• Selling Basic/Master Resell Rights to the Private Label Rights product. You can sell the Basic/Master Resell Rights to the editable, raw format of the product separately. If your buyer wishes to resell the Private Label Rights, you can charge him 4-5 times the normal price of the product and up 10 times if the buyer wants to have the Master Resell Rights, allowing him and his customers to resell the Private Label Rights to the product, as you are doing.

Pros

• You can make a lot of money from selling Private Label Rights, as these are some of the most expensive rights you can buy in the Internet Marketing field.
• Your customers will mainly be Internet Marketers, and savvy Internet Marketers are usually busy people and they prefer to focus their efforts more on marketing than product creation and setting them up. Thus, they do not have any problems with making purchases on Private Label Rights products, as long as you give them good reasons to buy from you and presupposed you help them to save their time from having to create their own quality products from scratch.

Cons

• There is often no residual income in selling Private Label Rights products. This is because your customers, who are mainly Internet Marketers, will edit your product and use their own affiliate links in it. Unless you start a Private Label Rights membership site, you'll make your money solely from upfront sales.
• Selling Private Label Rights products means that you cannot take the credit of authorship. One of the main benefits that make Internet Marketers buy from you is because they want to have the privilege to put their name on the product as the author. You remain anonymous.
• Creating your own Private Label Rights product demands a high degree of expertise, talent, thorough research, programming (for software) and writing skills on your part. If you do not have any of these traits, creating your own Private Label Content can be a difficult challenge.
• Creating your own Private Label Rights product is effort and time consuming. Unless you are using the product yourself, it may not be worth your time and effort in the long run even though there is a lot of potential income to be made from selling Private Label Rights.

What You Need Before Getting Started

You will need the following before getting started on creating and selling a new Private Label Rights product (if you don't have an existing one):

1. Word Program

If you are going to create a Private Label Information Product (E-book), you will need a Word program to create your Information Product in .doc format. If you are using MS Office, the Microsoft Word program should already be installed on your PC.

Alternatively, you can use your free NotePad program to create your Information Product in its raw format, though Microsoft Word is preferable, since you'll be able to add different formattings to the text.

2. PDF Converter

You need a PDF Converter program which will convert your finished Word document to PDF format (the PDF format is the best format out there because it allows you to offer your product to MS Windows users AND Mac users - .exe files can only be opened by Windows users…). If you do not have any PDF Converter program installed on your PC, you can get a free PDF Converter software here.

3. Graphics Program

You'll need a program to design your product’s E-cover. I use Adobe Photoshop to design my E-covers (in combination with some nice plugins). Adobe offers a free trial version (30 day usage) here.

4. Good Salesletter

This is a very important element of your Private Label Rights sales success. If you cannot convince your prospects to buy from you, you cannot make any sale - no matter how good your product is. If you don't know how to write a good salesletter yourself, then outsource that part to places like Elance.com or Scriptlance.com. They have a feedback system there which is similar to Ebay's system so you can choose the freelancer with the best feedback/price ratio.

5. Web Hosting and Domain Name

You'll need to register a domain name for your product (at e.g. Namecheap.com) AND you'll need web hosting for it. These are not the same things. Registering a domain name simply means that you have a www.yoursite.com address registered in your name.

In order to let other people come to your new website, you'll still need to rent web space on the Internet so you can store the files for the salesletter, Thank You page and your digital Private Label Rights product (the PDF file). Basically, you rent this space from a web hosting company which specializes in making servers available with a direct connection to the Internet.

6. Auto Responder

You need an Auto Responder to:

• Follow up with your prospects who do not buy from you for the first time, and

• Build your mailing list. By having your own mailing list, you can make your money from your customers within a short period of time.

Personally, I'm recommending Aweber as it has the best delivery rates for emails on the Internet. It's the one I'm using to send out my own newsletters and it's a service which comes highly recommended by all the top Internet marketers.

7. Credit Card Payment Processor

You will need this to collect the payments from your customers. If you don't expect a too high sales volume, you could go with Paypal since most Internet marketers who are going to buy from you will expect this payment solution. You can use it in combination with some script so you can automate the payment and delivery process and protect your downloads.

Alternatives are Clickbank (one time fee to register as a merchant - it has Paypal integrated now), 2Checkout (one time fee to regsiter as a merchant, too - Paypal has been integrated, too) or 1Shoppingcart (monthly fee).

Conclusion:

Once you have all of these things in place, you can start driving traffic to your salesletter. If you already have a list, this can be as easy as sending an email to your list. If you don't have such a list of prospects and customers, you'll need to contact other list owners who have potential customers on their lists (also known as JV). But this also means that you'll make less per sale as you need to pay them a commission for each sale (usually between 50-100%).

Yes, some people even give away 100% commissions just to get customers on their own list. Later down the road, they can start selling their own stuff to them and they get to keep everything - which is the whole purpose of giving away the full commissions. The other reason is that they might have a One Time Offer behind it, on which they make 50% so they can still profit from a high number of sales when giving away 100% commissions…

Tags: adsense, affiliate, clickbank, internet marketing, traffic

Sometimes things are not what they seem…

While I had the intention of giving great value to my subscribers with the free CD offer I made on Saturday, it turns out that it wasn't as good as I thought… in fact, it's another nightmare for me because of the way this offer was set up.

Even though the content of the CD itself seems to be very good, their business practices are not. I mean, I knew there was some kind of additional charge involved because this was a CPA based offer. (CPA means Cost Per Action).

But I didn't know that they have the additional charge in their fine print and not just as a one time fee but set up as a monthly subscription at a rate of $49.95 but even worse:

The trial already ends after 24 hours. I now feel really bad to have endorsed this kind of offer!

It certainly does not comply with my understanding of ethical Internet marketing practices :< (

There was no way that I could have foreseen this, though.

Of course, I'm still expecting that my subscribers do their own due dilligence with that kind of offers in the way like several of my subscribers have done, too, and who notified me of the situation (Thanks to William, Hoss & Graham!).

Let me tell you how I found out about this offer: I stumbled upon this offer while doing research on CPA offers for my niches on Primaryads.com and it looked like a good fit for my subscribers - there are not too many courses on making money from Google's services suitable for beginners.

I really can't understand why Primaryads is supporting this kind of dubious business practices, though. But what's even worse: Why don't these guys just sell the CD at $49,95 instead of using camouflage tactics with a "free" CD?

As I said, the content itself seems to be good - I've heard this from several subscribers who already signed up to this offer.

Here's my suggestion if you signed up for this offer and you don't want more CD's/ additional charges:

Cancel your subscription by phone. In case that you already have a charge on your credit card for this "free" offer - do a chargeback on your credit card if you don't agree on this.

There also is phone number where you can call them and have the trials cancelled.

The number to call is the following:

888-362-6221 and talk to them or leave a voice mail. They will email you back that they have canceled your trial after doing this.

Again: I am really sorry to have brought some of you into this situation! I had the best intentions with this offer, though.
Note: In the meantime, Primaryads.com has taken the offer offline after I contacted them and had let them know about what these crooks were doing…!!

Tags: adsense, internet marketing

As you probably might have noticed, I have been taking part in quite a lot of Giveaways recently. That's because I have set myself a goal. And that goal is to reach the 10,000 subscriber mark before the end of March…

And I am really getting very close. I now have 9208 subscribers on my main Internet marketing list. One of the Giveaways I am putting a lot of trust into is the "Free PLR Giveaway" by my buddy Xavier Nelson and Doug Champigny.

But I also realize there will be a lot of "takers" from these giveaways. Meaning, these are the ones who take whatever is being given away without the slightest interest for the newsletters and messages the author / developer has put together.

This is really a shame and one of the reasons why I am getting tired of the Internet marketing "niche"…

FREE PLR ROUND 4 - DOWNLOAD GIFTS WITH FULL AND UNRESTRICTED PRIVATE LABEL RIGHTS

Anyway, week 2 of the Free PLR (Private Label Rights) Giveaway has just started. It includes a lot of new gifts which have gone live on Sunday - incl. my own gift. Grab your gifts here and put your name on them:

==> http://viralurl.com/visitus/61711885

(If you want my own gift, you'll need to subscribe there, too)

ANNOUNCEMENT: MY BUSINESS WILL CHANGE DIRECTION

I also have an announcement to make… As I've already mentioned above: I am simply getting tired of the Internet marketing "game" or "niche".

The same old crap gets republished and rehashed and people, especially newbies still don't know which of the many ebooks and courses will lead them to success.( I will introduce a highly recommended resource to you tomorrow - it's called Mafioso Marketing. You can download some preview chapters from here ).

The problem is: Most people don't want to try and apply the knowledge to niches but to Internet marketing itself which makes tens of thousands of people flock to Internet marketing - instead of the niches where the easy money is…

While IM might be an option if you have years of personal experience in this area under your belt, it is usually a way which leads newbies to nowhere land as you can only make it there with very innovative ideas and products and not by publishing and selling the same stuff as thousands of others.

I have written an ebook which does not make empty promises but tells you what you need to do in order to make money online - step by step and up to $9,183.21 in one month.

People have been thanking me for having written like it is:

==> http://hopurl.com/41142

Personally, I will be going a different route, too. I will continue to serve my subscribers and customers but mainly with complete, turnkey niche businesses and niche products.

BONUS FOR NEW NICHE CONTENT WEBSITES MEMBERS - PLR TO IM PRODUCT BUDDY!! PUT YOUR NAME ON ONE OF MY TOP LEAD GENERATORS…

I think, the real money is in: NICHE MARKETING.

My Niche Content Websites membership website is a perfect example of what is needed in niche markets: Products (e.g. ebooks and audios) and content websites.

If you're dreaming about multiple streams of income and you want to go the easy way by not having to create your own products in these niches then look no further than here:

==> http://hopurl.com/41143

Sign up for free and if you like what you are seeing then get yourself a full membership - this allows you to tackle up to 13 different niches (you'll get 13 UNIQUE content websites with income streams like Adsense and Clickbank ads for up to 75% commissions have already been integrated).

The next 30 members who are getting a paid membership at Niche Content Websites will receive THE FULL PRIVATE LABEL RIGHTS TO MY "IM PRODUCT BUDDY" SOFTWARE. This means, you'll be able to put your own name on it and start giving it away as your personal lead generator/list building tool! I'll even add my personal squeeze page to the mix (which you can see at http://www.viraldatabases.com/ …).

NOt only that but the PLR gives you the source code, the Filemaker Pro files which allows you to change the whole look and feel of the software.

You can even "nichify" the whole software and create e.g. a "Golf Product Buddy" or a "Bass Fishing Product Buddy" where people within these niches can save the details about products they have purchased. Even in those niches, you'll be able to use it as a lead generator…

You'll receive the complete package after you've made your second (2nd) monthly payment for NCW. And then you simply go to:

==> http://www.ethicalinternetmarketer.com/helpdesk

and enter your subscription ID so I can verify your payments. I'll send you the download link directly after this.

That's it for today… Have a great week!

Tags: adsense, clickbank, ebook, internet marketing, websites

This weekend, I've been taking some time off and went skiing in Austria (Hochzillertal) together with Joerg, a buddy of mine (he has nothing to do with Internet marketing, though). It was a great trip and we had excellent weather over there. I had to take the easier slopes because Joerg isn't that experienced in skiing and I didn't want to let him ski all on his own all the time:

But I took one of the more difficult slopes at least twice so I could get a little more speed and have some more fun since I really love skiing.

You can see some more pictures here.

It had really been time to take another vacation even it was just for a weekend. It's of no use to keep working and working and sitting in front of your PC all day long. Besides that, I'm really getting overweight because of not being active enough. But I am working on melting some of my pounds again but that's another story…

The point I'm trying to make is: Don't lose sight of why you are building your business. You're certainly not building your business in order to slave away like if you're an employee again. Have something to look forward to - something that helps you to break away from your business. And I don't mean watching TV or playing video games. Get active and cultivate some hobbies of yours. Make entries into your calendar for private things you're looking forward to.

If you have a wife/husband and children, don't neglect them because you are trying to build your online business. Most of the times, working 18 hours non-stop won't get you anywhere near success. You need to work smarter, not harder! Only spend most of your time on revenue generating activities instead of reading dozens of salesletters for the latest "must have" products or lurking into forums without posting anything.

You need to know WHY you are building an online business. Is it because you want to be financially independent or because you want to be able to spend more time with your family or on activities you love? Whatever it is, don't lose sight of it and for every 20 days you work, take at least 1-2 days off without any distractions. Do not get in front of a PC at all during that time. If you have a business which is flourishing and you think you can't leave your business for even 1 day, then you're doing something wrong.

Hire someone to take care of your customer support. Don't be the person who is responsible for everything. Outsource everything that can be done by others so you can be stress free again or at least reduce your stress. One of the great advantages of a web based business is that these kind of online jobs can be done by anyone with a computer so the person you're hiring doesn't even have to live in your own city…

Simply have fun again and enjoy life. It is too short to just waste it in front of a computer!

Let me know what your opinion on this issue is…

Tags: adsense, internet marketing