Back To Basics – What Is Internet Marketing

I’ve been very slack on my blog posts recently, the month of July seems to have passed me by completely…blog post wise anyway. Back in the “real world” I’ve been busy going to relatives birthdays, going on a mountain walk (note I didn’t say walkS….1 was more than enough), and in 6 days I’m going to Headingley in Leeds to watch day 5 of the Ashes test match between England & Australia. So despite going easy on the Internet stuff, I’ve been having a good time which I suppose is the reason we all decided to become Internet Marketing people.

Anyway, back to business.

It’s come to my attention that a lot of the content I’ve been posting on here for the past 3 years has been going over a lot of peoples heads. So I’m going to go back to basics with this post, and just give you an idea of how to get started in Internet Marketing and what to look out for along the way.

If you already know this stuff I apologize, but in the long run this post should help more people keep up with some of the more advanced things I have written about in the past, and that I plan to write about in the future so bare with me.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to grasp is an understanding of what Internet Marketing is all about, if we are to break it down into its simplest form, it’s about making money by selling things on the Internet both directly, and indirectly.

So you need to decide what you are going to sell, here are the options for you:

1. Create your own product/service and sell directly to customers

Examples of my own: D9 Hosting, Boomerang List Builder

2. Sell other peoples products that come with resale, or private label rights

Examples of my own: El Passo Software, El Passo Books

3. Promote other peoples products as an affiliate (Earn commission for any items you sell)

Examples of my own: DLGuard Review, Resell Rights Fortune Review

4. Create a content site and generate income from advertising

Examples of my own: Tattoo Intel

Each of the above have their advantages and disadvantages. So I’m now going to give you a quick run down of the above points and hopefully make everything a bit clearer for you.

Option1: Create Your Own Product

Creating your own product CAN be a big money maker – it might not be, but if you target the right niche and create the right product then the potential is huge.

Take D9 Hosting as an example, I created it back in 2007 with my business partner Paula Brett when we saw a gap in the hosting market, as far as we could tell there was no affordable, reliable web host out there that knew Internet Marketing like we did – I’m not being big headed there either, we have over 10 years experience between us and I genuinely feel you’d be hard pushed to find a more marketer friendly web host.

So to cut a long story short, we created D9 Hosting, which is now hosting thousands of websites for clients all over the world, the income generated through D9 provides a full time wage for both myself and Paula – all because we saw a gap in a market and created a service to fill that void.

I’m using the hosting market as an example but you can use anything you have an interest in, lets say for example that you enjoy mountain walks. I don’t have any numbers but I’d imagine there’s a lot of people interested in mountain walking that are looking for the best routes and secret tracks up xyz mountain, so why not compile an eBook showing the best routes to take up xyz mountain and sell it to amateur mountaineers like myself!

That may not be the best example, I have no idea what the mountaineers niche is like, but I would have certainly loved a guide I could have used last week, it might have stopped us going up the wrong path and adding an extra 3 miles to our journey 🙁

But hopefully you can see what I’m getting at, if you can find a gap in a market then creating your own product to plug that gap can be very lucrative.

What sort of product could you create?

1. An eBook

2. Some software

3. Training course

4. Video guides

5. A service

6. A membership site

7. And anything else you can think of!

Advantages of creating your own product:

1. Keep 100% of the sales generated

2. If you tap into the right market income potential is huge

3. Have total control over the product you are selling

Disadvantages of creating your own product:

1. Depending on the type of product you create, the costs could be high

2. You may target the wrong niche/market and your product may not sell

3. Can be disheartening to see that people don’t actually like your product (It happens!)

Resources:

Operation eBook – How To Create Your 1st eBook

Option 2: Sell Products With Resale/PLR Rights

This is how many of us; myself included, got into Internet Marketing. Back when I first started Marketing the first thing I sold was a collection of eBooks with resale rights that I purchased from John Thornhill. I sold these on eBay and made around £90 (about $160) each week, which for a teenager was pretty good going!

Back then, the “Resell Rights” market was still very much in it’s infancy, the only products with resale rights you could get your hands on were eBooks, nowadays there are tons of top quality items out there that come with either resale, or private label rights including videos, training courses, software products and so on.

If you buy the resale rights for these items, it means you are able to sell on the items as many times as you like, keeping all of the profits for yourself. With Private Label Rights (PLR) products you can even alter the items and pass yourself off as the author of the product!

I actually still have my very first marketing website online, El Passo Books, and it still makes a few sales every week to this day. All the products you see on the site come with resale rights, in total I paid around £30 for the website and all of the eBooks you can see on it, so when you consider the main package sells for £12.99 each time you can see it has been a wise investment!

Advantages of selling items with resale rights:

1. Usually dead cheap to purchase

2. Can sell them multiple times and keep the profit

3. Pass PLR products off as your own (Also saves time)

Disadvantages of selling items with resale rights:

1. Lots of other people could be selling the same product as you

2. Sometimes items can be sold very cheaply and are devalued

Resources:

John Thornhill’s Ready To Go eBook Business

PLR Monthly

Option 3: Promote Products As An Affiliate

This is personally my favorite method, as once I’ve set an affiliate promotion up I can pretty much sit back and forget about it. All I need to do is drive customers to the products sales page and watch the commission come in.

I’m sure you all know what an affiliate link looks like, it’s usually something along the lines of:

www.mysupercoolsite.com?aff=funkychicken

If someone were to click on that affiliate link, and then purchase something off mysupercoolsite.com I would earn a commission.

I wouldn’t have to deliver the product to the customer, and I wouldn’t have to provide them with the support!

Some of my most profitable ventures are affiliate websites, and I do plan to write an eBook (option 1!) on the subject so keep your eyes open for that.

If you are starting out and don’t have much startup capital available to you then I’d strongly recommend going for this method. It can be set up for free and even if you don’t make a sale you won’t have lost out financially, and you’ll have gained some valuable experience from the project.

Adavntages of promoting products as an affiliate:

1. No customer service to provide

2. No startup costs (in some cases)

3. If you target the right product it’s easy money

Disadvantages of promoting products as an affiliate

1…..I can’t really think of any to be honest!

Resources:

How I Dominated Google For Resell Rights Fortune

How I Dominated Google For John Thornhill Coaching

Option 4: Create Content Site & Profit Through Advertising

I’ve actually tried this a few times, but to be honest unless you have a really high traffic website you’d be better off sticking to another method.

The idea is to get people to your website by providing them with quality information that they are looking for, you’d then place relevant adverts on that website in the hope that people would click on the adverts and make a purchase. An example site of mine that uses this strategy is Tattoo Intel, it’s a site that provides all sorts of information on tattoos, you’ll also be able to see banner adverts on the page.

I make a few sales from these but nothing like I do from the other sites, if I were able to generate more traffic to the site then I dare say it would be more worthwhile, however at present it isn’t really a viable option for me when the other methods are bringing in more money with less work needed on my part.

Advantages of content sites with advertising

1. No customer service to provide

2. Cheap to setup, only a domain name and hosting needed

Disadvantages of content sites with advertising

1. Need to generate a lot of traffic to see decent results

2. Sites need updating quite often to keep people coming back for more

So there you have it, a brief overview of the main methods Internet Marketers use to make money online. It’s a very broad overview but it should give you a basic understanding of everything and help you understand what I’m talking about in some of my more advanced blog posts!

If you are just starting out, what I’d personally advise you to do is read through this post a couple of times, then decide which plan of action is for you. When you’ve done that, write down what you are going to try and do and do it. Don’t worry if you fail, you won’t know unless you try!

As always thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Dan

Can You Be A Marketer & A University Student?

Before I get into it, let me just point out that I’ve taken this article directly from an email I sent out, but I know a lot of you are on the RSS feed rather than the mailing list so I’m posting it here as well…just ignore any references I might make to “the email” 🙂

I’m going to tell you a really cool story about someone who started marketing at around the same time as me, he’s actually a few years younger than me as well so he must still have been at school when he started. (I was in college)

He’s from the UK (like me), he’s called James Penn and he is currently a full time University Student studying* Psychology, which isn’t anything out of the ordinary for a 19 year old guy, but here’s the cool bit.

He hasn’t put his marketing business on hold, he is actually running a full time business whilst studying* at University.

So how does he manage to do this?

Well, he tends to work in different niches to me. I’m into the marketing and hosting niches, while he’s into anti-aging and stretch marks…must resist the urge to make a joke!

In these “underground” niches he specializes in creating products and building targeted opt-in mailing lists.

By building these mailing lists in all the different niches, he is able to promote related products to the niches whenever he needs more drinking money….sorry – study books.

As an example, he needed to do some revision for an exam that was taking place the following day, but before opening up his revision books, he spent 15 minutes writing an email promoting a membership site in the niche. Four hours later after he had finished the revision, he returned to his inbox and discovered almost $1,000 in sales – that’s one way to pay off your student loan!!

And that’s just in one niche; he is using his targeted niche mailing lists to put himself through University!

The methods he uses to build these lists are what makes him stand out from the crowd, he doesn’t just rely on the tried and tested formulas for list building, he actually looks at different methods, THINKS ABOUT THEM (there’s a plan!) and then makes them better – it’s a simple idea but be honest, how many of us actually do this?

Like any good marketer, he knows when he’s onto something that works, and like any good marketer, he knows you can make a very tidy amount by selling the details…come on, we all know how it works by now 🙂

Thankfully though, beer is still quite cheap at his University, so he hasn’t given it a home study course price, he’s going to show you exactly how he builds these highly targeted mailing lists for just $10.

And by my accounts, you should be able to buy 2 pints of beer for $10 from his University bar, and he aims to sell 1,000 of his guides….I’ll let you work out the rest of it 😉

So if you are looking for different ways to build your mailing list, or if you already have a good sized list and just want to get some fresh ideas, then do check out his report, it’s a steal at just $10!

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

And before signing off, I would like to mention I’m not being serious with all the drinking stuff, I’m being very stereotypical and tongue in cheek – James is a top guy, and certainly isn’t a “layabout” student 😉

Thanks for reading, and as always let me know if you have any questions.

Dan

*Drinking and hitting on girls

$100 Email Competition – Winners Announced

Before I start, you have to promise me that you’ll imagine the Rocky training music from Rocky 1 playing in the background. If you have a rubbish imagination, go to youtube then come back here whilst it’s playing.

It was March 5th and an open challenge had been laid down to Internet Marketers from all over the world.

The prize was what every marketer dreams of, $100 in their PayPal account!

The challenge was immense, an email had to be written to promote a top quality product that was available for $100 less than normal.

/Tempo increase

As expected, hundreds (well, not quite!) of warriors turned out to do battle, they shed blood, sweat, tears and virtual ink, but they all had one common goal.

The knockout rounds were tough and the quality of the entrants was immense, round by round some fell by the way side until we were left with 2 final warriors ready to do battle for the ultimate prize.

In the red corner: Elmer “hurt machine” Hurlstone

And in the blue corner: Pippa “punch you in the gut” Guppy

Who would climb those famous steps and emerge from the competition as the champion.

The opening rounds were close, but in the 12th round the experience of the “Hurt Machine” took the advantage and scored a decisive points decision to claim the ultimate prize, $100!!!!

By now the music track has probably finished, so I can stop pretending to be Ian Darke.

If I translate the above into something you can actually understand, it goes like this:

Last week I set a competition with a prize of $100 to the person that could write the best email promo for John Thornhill’s eBook website business.

There were loads of entries, but I managed to narrow it down to 2 finalists. And before I go on, THANKYOU to everyone of you that sent in an entry, even if you didn’t make it to the final 2, THANKYOU for taking time out of your day and taking part, I’ll see if I can come up with some sort of discount on some of my products as a prize of something!

So…the final 2 was down to Pippa Guppy and Elmer Hurlstone.

Both emails were really good, and it goes without saying that they were better than my attempt, but the winner just had slightly more content in there and just seemed to have the “edge” for me.

And the winner is:

ELMER HURLSTONE!

And also a very well done to Pippa Guppy who finished in 2nd, I’ve sent you a free copy of my Boomerang List Builder as a prize – check your email inbox and it should be there waiting for you 🙂

So congratulations to Elmer, the $100 is your’s and it would be rude not to show you the winning email so here it is:

***Start of email***

“Hi {firstname_fix},

Some things make so much sense it’s hard to believe that anyone could, or would,
ignore them.

If you really wanted to find out how to build beautiful cabinets you’d try to
hook up with a master cabinet maker…

If model railroads and electric trains were your passion you’d hang out with
the folks that make elaborate layouts…

If you really wanted to increase the amount of money you’re making online you’d
look to truly successful marketers for the information and systems that would
put you over the top…

When it comes to using “systems” and online marketing one of the
absolute best people and most experienced is John Thornhill.

If you don’t know about John let me, sort of, introduce him to you.
A few years ago John made his living plunking parts on cars in a Nissan factory
in Northern England. Not particularly exciting work. John wanted more.

In 2002 John discovered how to make a living online. And he hasn’t looked back
since. Using the system he’s developed he currently brings in six figures a
year. And he does all from home. On eBay! Doing what you’re doing or are
interested in doing. Selling information products.

John is both my mentor and friend. Since 2005 he’s shown me how to use the same
system and methods he uses, on a daily basis, to minimize work and maximize
profit!

For a limited time John is permitting me to save you $100 on membership in the
same program I’ve been a member of since 2005. John is not offering this to the
whole world. Just you, because you’re my valuable subscriber!

I personally thank and credit John for my success. His advice, over the years,
has made all the difference to me and my business.

Take a look at what John Thornhill is offering. By carefully reading the
information you’ll make an informed decision that may change your life and
business forever! For the better.

Here’s the link: http://elpassoblog.com/recs/sms_discount.php

(If you prefer you may simply copy the link and paste it into the address bar
on your browser.)

Regards,
Dan

PS. Please remember, the $100, limited time, discount is only available to you
as my subscriber. It’s not available elsewhere. This offer may be rescinded
without notice.”

***End of email***

Thanks again to everyone that entered, and well done to the winner.

I think the competition went really well so I’ll try and put some more together for you sometime in the future.

Thanks for reading, and apologies for getting the Rocky theme tune stuck in your head.

d d d d d, d d d d d, d d d d d d d d, da da da da, da da da
Dan

My PPC Web Spy Case Study

It’s free, it’s made by Brad Callen, it’s free, it allows you to legally steal your competitors keywords, it’s free, the upsell is interesting, it’s free and…it’s free, so what’s the catch?

Well, there isn’t one really. It’s actually a very cool free tool that can be very powerful – as I’m about to demonstrate, the only questionable thing would be the morality of stealing/spying on your competitors keywords.

I’ll leave you to make your own minds up about the moral aspects of it, but I find it very useful. So here’s a quick case study I’ve done using PPC Web Spy and everyones favourite boring, generic niche – WEIGHT LOSS! 🙂

So the first thing to do (After you’ve installed PPC Web Spy of course) is to do a search on Google for the niche you are working in. In my example I’ll search for “Weight Loss”.

You’ll then see that we get a lot of “Sponsored Ad’s” and under each of these ads is a green “View Keywords” button. If you click on this button it allows you to view a list of all keywords the website is bidding on, how much it is costing them and how many clicks they can expect to receive on a daily basis.

Here are the results I get for the #1 “Weight Loss” ad on Google.

You can see that the site is bidding on loads of different keywords, so from that you can take a closer look at each of the keywords and see which would relate to your site. You can also find even more keywords by searching for one of the keywords brought back by PPC Web Spy.

I’ll show you an example.

One of the keywords the site was bidding on is “Tonalin”; now I have no idea what this is, apologies if it’s something rude, but it’s a good example to use.

So all I’ll do is go back to Google and search for “Tonalin”.

You can see there are a lot of sponsored ads, and we can then view the keywords using PPC Web Spy.

This time I’ll check out the 2nd site, and as you can see from the screen shot below, it brings back even more keywords for me to look through. I’m in weight loss keyword heaven – if only I had a weight loss product I’d be rich! 🙂

So that’s a very quick example of how the free PPC Web Spy tool could help you. I’ve used the weight loss niche but you’d obviously use it on whatever niche you worked in. You could also use it to research any new potential niches by looking at the estimated clicks and the daily costs.

There is also a VERY interesting upgrade available that again, may be slightly immoral for some of you so I’ll leave you to make your own minds up about it!

So now you know how it works, click here to download PPC Web Spy for FREE!

The Results Are In!

Hello everyone, thanks for stopping by on your endless journey through the world wide web! Just a quick blog post for you today, to show you how I did on my last promotion.

If you take a look past the “Snow Pictures” post, you’ll be able to see that I posted an “Action Plan”, showing you how I was going to promote a brand new product that launched a week ago today – Total Web Traffic. The idea behind this was to show you, step by step, day by day what my “Plan Of Action” was to promote this new product. I hoped it would give you a better understanding of how I do things, and I hoped it would give you all some ideas so you can do the same!

My promotional methods were very straight forward and by no means ground breaking, some of you even thought I wasn’t doing as much as I should and the promotion would be a failure. So without any further deliberation, and whilst the snow is turning into precipitation (come on, it rhymes!) here are the results from my Total Web Traffic Promotion.

As you can see, I was the 3rd best affiliate during the launch period, and if you take a closer look at the chart you can see that I finished ahead of some of the “big guns”. That’s not all, take a look at what the creator of the Total Web Traffic Course, Dave Nicholson, said about my promotion:

He thought that my conversions were outstanding, and he didn’t know how I managed it….well Dave might not know how I managed it, but you do!

I did exactly what I said I was going to do in last weeks blog post. I kept everything simple, and guess what – it worked. There’s no reason why any of you can’t do the same!

All in all I’d say I spent around 2 – 3 hours putting the promotion together, and that 2 – 3 hours of work brought in plenty of affiliate commissions as well as a new i-Pod.

And before I go, this is a disclaimer for any of my close friends or family members that may be reading this post. If you get an i-Pod for Christmas, it is PURELY COINCIDENTAL, it does not imply that I’m a cheapskate in any way! 😉

And that’s pretty much it for today. All I’m trying to get at in this blog post is that it’s not always necessary to over-complicate matters. If you get the basics right, then you are on the right track, and I think my results in the Total Web Traffic competition prove that.

As always, feel free to ask me any questions and I’ll gladly answer them for you.

Dan

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