I Think I’m Under Charging You

It was my Dad’s birthday last night, so we all went out for a meal – Me, Mum, Dad, Brother and his Girlfriend. As we walked through the stiff creaky door we approached the rather intimidating manager, she towered over us like a menacing menu bearing giant, but it was raining outside so we didn’t mind, all we wanted was to sit down and eat after a hard day.

We were directed to a table, the wooden floor banged as we pulled back our sturdy wooden chairs and sat down to read the menu. Looking around we could see we were the only people sat in the eating area, nobody said anything, but I could tell we were all thinking the same thing – How is Dan going to turn this into a blog post?

Quite easily actually 🙂

Fast forward a couple of hours and we were waiting for the deserts to arrive. On the menu was a very strange “Chocolate and Rhubarb Crumble”…but that’s not important right now. We were all chatting away, well, four of us were chatting away – my brother appears to still be shaking off the shackles of puberty so he managed a grunt every now and again.

Conversation turned towards my brother’s girlfriend, who happens to work for a local IT company that provides web hosting, design, coding and other similar services to schools and businesses across the UK.

With me running a similar venture in D9 Hosting, I was curious to see how the company was run. After a bit of background information, we turned to pricing, where I was amazed to hear:

“We charge £250 to install Google Analytics”

£250 for Google Analytics! That’s almost $500 to place a few lines of JavaScript on a page!

They also charge a similar price to setup Google Docs for customers, and charge an arm and a leg for web design and hosting. Their monthly sales target is £100,000 (about $200,000) and with those sorts of prices it won’t surprise you that they meet it most months.

Now there’s no way we could charge you that sort of price for any of the services I’ve mentioned, you would all probably have a rough idea of how much to pay for that sort of work – and it would be a lot less than £250!

*FYI, there’s actually a couple of Google Analytics “How To’s” on this blog, you’ll be able to find them using the search bar on your right*

BUT, the vast majority of offline businesses are still more than happy to pay top dollar for IT services, be it web design, hosting, script installation or consultation, and what’s more. I think that 95% of you reading this are more than capable of providing these services – skills you pick up on your Internet Marketing journey are more valuable than you could ever imagine.

Just ask yourself if you can install Google Analytics?

I’m sure most of you answered “Yes” to the above question, and I’m sure you know some offline people who run websites, why not see if they’d be interested in having you install it for them?

That’s just one example of taking what you’ve learnt in the online world, into the offline sector, there are many, many more ways to do this. I am currently working on a big offline project with my D9 Hosting partner, Paula, that should be launching in the next few weeks so stay tuned for that.

Nothing much to add, just really made the post to open your eyes to the opportunities that exist away from the PC screen!

That’s all for today, I was going to hold off writing this until Thursday but thought I’d get it down on paper whilst it was all still fresh in my head.

As always comments are my friend and yours, so do leave one if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Dan

P.S. I had a Bacon & Cheese Burger and a Knickerbockerglory (sp?) for desert – 7/10

The Biggest News Story IN THE WORLD…Brings Back Less Than 800,000 Results On Google

I think I must be going for the worlds longest post title, how did I do? 😉

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you will already know about the worlds biggest scientific experiment that started today. I’m no scientist, but in short, scientists are going to re-create the “Big Bang” that created the universe. (Allegedly)

Depending on who you listen to, this will either tell us how the universe was formed and lead to better cancer treatments, or it will go horribly wrong and we’ll be sucked into a huge black hole and spend the rest of eternity floating around in “black matter” whilst hungry aliens feast on our humble remains.

The story is so big that even Google are getting in on the action, if you are reading this post today (Wednesday the 10th September 2008), head on over to the Google home page and take a look at the Google logo.

If you are reading this after the day it was written, here’s a screen shot of the page so you don’t feel left out:

The image around the logo isn’t some kinky S&M device, it’s actually an image of the “Large Hadron Collider” (I think) from which the experiment will be run. If you then click on the image on the Google home page, it takes you to the search results for “Large Hadron Collider”.

And this is where my search engine marketing mind kicked in.

This is the biggest news story in THE WORLD today, no matter where you live, if you put the news on TV you will see something about this experiment. So you’d expect Google to be overflowing with millions of organic search results, and loads of Adwords ad’s selling books and DVD’s on related subjects.

BUT on Google there are less than 800,000 results, and even more surprisingly there are ZERO adwords ad’s! (On google.co.uk, .com had 1 ad)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but can you imagine if you had started to build up a site containing information on the project when this was first mentioned a couple of years ago? With less than 800,000 results on Google, an old website with a good domain name and content would be absolutely overflowing with traffic today.

You could have monetized with Google Adsense or sold related products via the Amazon affiliate program, your main concern would be if your server could handle all the traffic!

I think it’s probably too late now to jump on the LHC band wagon, but you can see how easy it is to miss out on an opportunity. This project has been no secret, yet it seems that very few people had the hindsight to profit from this massive worldwide event.

I for one will be keeping a very close eye on any future worldwide news items!

And to finish off I’ll put your mind at ease by saying that the actual “Collision” that will re-create the big bang isn’t due to happen until mid-October, so there are a couple more blog posts left before the end….and if you want to check the current status of the project to see if it has destroyed the world yet, you can do so here:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to leave a comment!

Regards,
Dan

P.S. The website link in my closing paragraph is an awesome example of a viral website, just a shame they haven’t monetized, they could have made a killing!

A Ready To Go Landing Page With OTO

As you know one of my best selling products is the Boomerang List Builder – The software a lot of you use to build a mailing list, it works great, but there are some situations where it’s not ideal, so you need another way to capture those all important opt-in’s.

One of the oldest and most effective ways of doing this is to create a Landing Page (sometimes called a Squeeze Page). The idea is a simple one, you catch the readers attention and offer to give them something they want, in return for them submitting their email address. When they give you their email address, they get access to whatever you are offering – it can be content, free downloads, anything!

But the problem is that not all of us have the time, knowledge, or technical skills to do this.

I’ll let you into a little secret.

All of the “Fancy” squeeze pages or opt-in forms you’ll see on my websites were not actually created by me – I use a graphic designer!

BUT…why pay over $100 to a graphic designer when you can get a ready to go system, created by one of my Graphic Designers for only $9!

One of my Graphic Designers is Aaron Danker from Harrogate, UK. (About a 45 minute drive from me)

Aaron has built his very own “Super Sign Up System”

Using his Graphic Design background he’s created a ready to go Squeeze page that converts like crazy.

Not only does he provide you with the graphics, he also provides you with the following:

– The squeeze page with text
– The download page
– The ZIP files (That you offer in exchange for an email)
– The “Confirm your email” page
– A OTO sales page so you can earn whilst gaining subscribers
– The OTO product ZIP file
– The OTO download page

So all you need to do is insert your opt-in form code into the squeeze page, insert your own payment button in the OTO page and then upload everything to your webspace Everything else; the page design, the OTO, the download pages are all done for you!

And if you hadn’t already guessed from the subject of this email, you can get all that for only $9!

Head on over to the page and let me know what you think:

https://elpassoblog.com/recs/landing_pages.php

Cheers,
Dan

PLR Monthly Discount

On the 5th August I was going to supposed to send a broadcast email to all readers to let you know that the price of PLR Monthly was going to double on Thursday the 7th.

As you may have noticed, that mail never got sent. I personally blame those pesky voices inside my head that forgot to remind me about it.

My original plan (after I realized I had forgot to send it) was to scrap the email completely, but as part of the promotion I did for Dave and Dan (the other one) I promised that I’d send out a reminder when the price was about to go up, so I didn’t want to go back on my word.

So I emailed Dave and let him know about my mistake, after slapping me around the face a few times he calmed down, and managed to set up a coupon code for my readers (you!) that allows you to get access to PLR Monthly at the launch price of $27, rather than the current price that everyone else pays – $47!

So if you did miss out on the launch price because of my screw up, I apologize, but the good news is that you can still get that price if you use the coupon code below during checkout.

Here comes the coupon, (**sarcasm warning**) make sure you write it down exactly as shown below, it’s a very complicated code so don’t make any mistakes now:

Coupon Code: dan

Enter Code Here: http://elpassoblog.com/recs/awesome_PLR.php

The above code will give you a discount of 50% on the normal price, so head on over to the page via the link below, enter your code and you’ll see the price has gone down to $27 from $47 – enjoy:

http://elpassoblog.com/recs/awesome_PLR.php

As always, get in touch with any questions.

Cheers,
Dan