Mindless Distractions: Taking a Break From The Internet Marketing Game

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfIpOXxZV8k

Internet marketing causes insomnia.

I know there are more than a few of you out there who suffer from this addiction I have (financial and mobility freedom via making money online).  Some nights I just simply can not turn my brain off.  It’s almost as if when I lay down to sleep, my brain turns on.  Occasionally, in the midst of domain names, methods and tricks flashing rapidly through my head, I will hit something that is genius.

Most of the time it’s a pain in the ass and stresses me out.  I’ve never been a good sleeper – natural born insomniac.

When I know I need to get to sleep sooner than later, I will stop all work related stuff and randomly watch videos on good old YouTube to distract me, empty my brain and help bring me down.

Tonight was flipping through the recent hockey fights on HockeyFightsDotCom tube channel.

Say what you want… lol.. I’m Canadian, I love hockey and fighting is what we do when the passion is high or someone cheap shots a team mate of ours.  It relaxes me.

WHAT DO YOU DO TO TO RELAX BEFORE BED?

Internet Marketing Causes Insomnia

Internet Marketing Causes InsomniaIt’s 4:46 am here in Toronto, and after 3 and a half hours of laying in bed with my eyes closed I have given up on trying to fall asleep.  I’ve been a night owl since I was a child, always making a fuss when it came time for my mom to put my sister and I to bed, and as an adult I go through these periods of insomnia usually caused by the obstacle of not having enough hours in the day to get things done – even when I’m unemployed and at home.  It’s a known fact that excessive amounts of time in front of a computer can put serious stress on your eyes, and cause your brain to have troubles “shutting down” at the end of the night and I’m sure most bloggers and Internet marketers can attest to that, especially if you haven’t reached the 4 hour work week pillar in your online career as of yet.  I know we’ll all get there eventually…

The quest to make money online is an addiction.  It goes hand in hand with crack, small children and Pringles – once you pop you can’t stop! I bet every one of you can remember that first moment when the veil was lifted, and you came to realize that beneath all the sales hype and push-button promises there was an actual industry of people making a living online, using the same business foundations and marketing fundamentals you were taught in the real world – and that these people were cashing in on something very real, and very possible.  That moment when you discovered search engine optimization and what a “spider” was, or the very first time you heard about affiliate marketing and how people make an income promoting products that they don’t even own – it was a beautiful moment indeed!

I can also bet that once the blinders were removed you didn’t sleep for a few days, or months…

I just came up with an amazing idea for a niche product – Dealing With Insomnia: An Internet Marketer’s Guide.  Included will be audio tapes of CPU noise, or the soothing sounds of a keyboard typing away with the occasional instant messaging notification.  Joint venture anyone?

For real though, I need to snap out of this going-to-bed-at-all-kinds-of-crazy-ass-hours slump that I’m in.  Not only is it hindering my productivity and time management, but it’s also not good for my mental and physical health.  Regulated sleep is vital for any home business person and is just as important as having a good accountant and getting fresh air on a daily basis – which is another area where I’m lacking.  Yes I’ve actually made enough money this month to cover my half of rent and call Visa’s collection department with a payment confirmation number, but at what cost?  I’m going to bed between 4 and 7 am and usually waking up between 10 am and 3 pm on a semi-regular basis.

Not good.

Time for a much needed change.  Valerian Root Extract here I come!

Cheers,

Elijah

Finding A Profitable Niche For Local Success

Wasaga Beach BumsI spent the last week or so helping two good friends of mine, Mickey and Alistair, move from their recently sold condo to a cozy apartment in the trendy Bloor West area of Toronto – I absolutely hate moving, but that’s another post on a whole other blog!  Anyways, Mickey and myself have always shared a passion for computers and technology, and whenever we get together for 37 beers and a bottle of scotch the conversation usually leans towards business ideas and world domination tactics.  3-5 times per year a whole crew of us travel north of the city to a very popular cottage town called Wasaga Beach, where Mickey’s father John lives and plays.  This is usually our time to relax, build a fire, eat awesome food and spend some quality time together, as most of us don’t hang out as often as we’d like now that we’re all getting older – and more consumed in our individual careers.

This past summer we stumbled upon the realization that there isn’t a central location on the Internet for our demographic (male/female aged 19-30, future alcoholic millionaires) relating to what’s going on in Wasaga Beach.  This discovery lead to the obvious discussion of building a web 2.0 social network style community, that would utilize our individual skills (Mickey is a Computer Programming Ninja, and Alistair is Night Club Manager/Promotion Sniper) and provide the Wasaga Beach party people with a go-to spot for events, contests, and intoxicated gatherings.

A Moment Of Genius…

A huge factor with pulling this off would be the ability to make the concept “sticky” and branded – because with our age group branding is everything.  If we can come up with a catchy name, tag line and logo that people will recognize all the way from the strip to the line up in front of the keg, not only will the idea explode but word of mouth will take effect – and that my friends is what viral marketing dreams are made of.

All we have to do is funnel that viral buzz towards a fully interactive, multimedia driven social community where people can upload videos of their friend streaking across a beach volleyball court with a Roman Candle hanging out of his ass, and we’ll be in business!  We can combine this with a Profile system, a vibrant choice of locally themed forum threads, photo galleries with tagging capabilities, and an up to date events section providing the inside scoop to everything Wasaga Beach Bums deem important.

We have all winter to get the foundation of the site complete, as well as the necessary traffic generation and link building methods – which is where I come in – and as summer roles around next year we’ll be more than prepared to start spreading the word and claiming our authority within the party scene of Wasaga Beach.  Here’s a few ways I think we can create the viral power we need:

  • Take the entire crew down to the beach at least once every long weekend, all wearing branded t-shirts with the website address and logo on it while being loud and vibrant as usual.
  • Get branded bottle openers and condoms on a stick to give away while we’re out partying.  Making people do ridiculous shit for free stuff and recording it to compile in an online video release at the end of each cottage season.
  • Host a free karaoke party at the beginning of cottage season – with more filming and condoms.
  • Every year in August Mickey has a pig roast for his birthday.  We can charge people $20 a head for a Keg Party Pig Roast – all you can eat and drink with contests and prizes.
  • Once established we can cross over into the winter season and host events at the surrounding ski resorts –  milking the snowboarding crowd.

I’m sure the wheels are all spinning in your heads right now – how can I find a profitable market locally and use the power of the Internet to support it?  Take a look around you.  What do people enjoy doing in your town or city?  What’s popular based by season, or even year round?  How can you position yourself between a trendy tourist spot and it’s visitors to capitalize and provide a resource or service to enhance their experience?

Spend a Sunday walking around your downtown core and keep your eyes open – the opportunities are everywhere! Thinking locally might not be as profitable compared to a global online launch, but on the flip side local niche targeting makes it much easier to establish authority and dust what little competition there might be – especially if you know a thing or two about Internet marketing!

Cheers,

Elijah

Are You Ready For Christmas Traffic?

Are You Ready For The Christmas Traffic?I’m not feeling 100 % sexy today as I seemed to have picked up some flu-like hitchhiker while driving carelessly through the blogosphere this week.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to bank as an affiliate with the gravy boats full of hungry, credit card ninjas that will be shopping online this Christmas – and I’ve also been thinking about what market I’m going to focus my efforts in.

I’m excited because this will be my first Christmas “online” as an imitation money maker, and I really do want to provide some genuine resources for the shopping traffic, rather than setting up a bunch of mistletoe-domains cranked with Adsense and scraped content.  I haven’t started a list of possible avenues yet, so why not start my brainstorm right now as I’m typing this prize-winning post:

Where To Find Christmas Ideas

  • eBay’s Hot Brands section
  • Google Trends
  • Amazon
  • Your nearest shopping mall
  • Ikea
  • Your affiliate managers
  • Your kids

I’m sure you guys could have filled in the bullet points I just listed, but I don’t like assuming that everyone reading this blog already knows how to search for profitable niche markets and products.  Personally I prefer studying Amazon’s marketplace over Ebay, simply because the prices are not auctioned off and it gives me a better idea of what people are willing to spend for something “brand new” online.  You’d be surprised how much you could learn about the marketplace from your kids and the young children in your family. If anyone has a handle on what is going to be hot this Christmas, it’s them!

Once we’ve got some sort of list going on regarding products/markets, it’s time to think about how we are going to enter this market, our advertising budget (if any) and what mediums we plan to use for traffic generation. Here are a few proven methods:

Promotion Methods

  • Pay Per Click (most profitable/risky)
  • Article Marketing
  • Classified Ads (Craigslist, USFreeAds)
  • Squidoo, Hub Pages
  • Forum Marketing
  • Myspace Groups/Facebook
  • Link exchanges

I’m confident that most people within my inner circle of collaborators will be utilizing as many free methods as humanly possible, and keeping away from PPC due to lack of experience.  ***Warning – If you have never made consistent profit using Pay Per Click marketing to drive traffic to an offer, you will get eaten alive if you try to jump in during the Christmas rush! Christmas is when all the big dogs make their big money, and if you’ve only dreamed of big money, stay away from the big dogs and let them do their thing.  I really hate hearing horror stories of how somebody lost their kids college fund on PPC during Christmas… I can see it now “Merry Christmas Johnny!  I got your McDonalds application framed for you!”

Go play in traffic dad…

I’m sure you get my point.  There are TONS of free ways to generate traffic to your Christmas offers, just be unique and find those niche markets before hand – and don’t forget to make money off your friends and people you work with!  It will get more and more difficult to locate profitable keywords, or find good domain names the closer it gets to Christmas, so start to think about what you’d like to do now – and take your time to use the tactics that work for YOU, and make some money to pay for all the wonderful gifts you plan to buy for your friends and family – and if you do super well, you can even grab something indulgent for yourself!

Cheers,

Elijah

How The Rich Stay Rich: An Internet Marketing Reality Check

how the rich stay rich, internet marketing reality checkIn any business regardless if it’s on or offline, it all boils down to one thing at the end of the day… Who you know, and more importantly, Who the FU** knows you.  If you have sensitive eyes and figured out that the asterisks after FU are the letters “C” and “K” my apologies, but I’m feeling very passionate as I’m writing this.

Something dawned on me…

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has an email address set up specifically for your Guru mailing lists – if you don’t please visit your email provider of choice and set up a dummy account for this specific reason.  So as I was doing my normal routine today I logged into my designated email account and noticed that I had 13 new messages, which is nothing out of the ordinary, and while I was sifting through the Aweber generated communications I realized that they all had something in common – they were all promoting Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins’ Stomp The Search Engines 2 release.  Wow.. Immediately I started thinking back to the Mass Control launch and the magnitude of force behind it, and that’s when it really hit me:  This is exactly how the millions are made online.  It’s who you know, who knows you, and what they are willing to do for you.  This financial mantra is no different online than it is with the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners of the world.

You’re going to love this…

Imagine launching a product and having the force of 15-20 of the worlds most successful Internet marketers blasting your launch to their lists every day for a consecutive 2 weeks prior to the release date.  On September 3rd I received a blast from the likes of Yaro Starak, Frank Kern, Jason Moffat and Matt Callen to name a few – and if any of the people I just mentioned are reading this and have an issue with your name being mentioned, I love you all and you’ve taught me tons, but in the next 48 hours you will make more money individually than I have made in my entire working career – so bite me.

Back to my point, let’s hypothetically say that each of the 20 people blasting your launch own 5 lists combining 10,000 hungry ass leads – that would give you a total of 200,000 targeted leads not including your own lists.  Take that number and throw in a conversion rate of 15% on the first day of launch and a product priced at $97 and with less than half the people converting you would have a total of…

$2,910,000.00 in sales

The last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from aspirations of Internet domination, like my man Avon Blake, but I do want to remove the veil over your eyes for a minute and bring to light the harsh realities of gaining “Guru” status in the affiliate marketing industry.  The only way you are permitted access to the inner circle of marketing powerhouses is through money – not by paying your way in, but by becoming a top affiliate.  If you consistently out perform on top campaigns and industry wide launches you will quickly gain recognition just as each one of our Guru’s did.  You will begin getting phone calls and emails with directions to every “secret” roundtable meet up, and as long as you deliver results you too will be bathing in tubs full of money.

Affiliate newbies and beginner bloggers pay attention…

Keep your goals realistic.  Start off by connecting with people who are on your level and create a strong network to bounce ideas in and out of.  If you become over obsessed with what the Gurus are doing, you will be passing up opportunities to form your own roundtable of ninja marketers.  If you are out to make millions and millions of dollars, fine, but don’t fool yourself with dreams of being the next Shoemoney because it won’t happen.  Why waste your time making the Gurus richer by blasting everything they put out?  They really don’t need your help if they truely are as big as we think they are.  Why not concentrate on making your own network richer by promoting your own products, and eachothers?  This is how the rich stay rich my friends.  Think about it.

Cheers,

Elijah

9 Ways To Pimp Private Label Rights Products

Private Label Rights PimpingI know you love the title – and you can thank me for the smile later.  I’ve recently made connects with a super-innovative blogger over at ImWithJoe.com, and while reading through his posts I stumbled upon a great video he did describing private label rights and resale rights with some unique, but effective examples.  You can check out his post and video here.  While we’re on the topic, I want to introduce the newer bloggers and affiliates to private label rights products and how you can use them for article marketing, e-courses and various other content driven applications within your online ventures.

What Are Private Label Rights?

To put it plainly, PLR or Private Label Rights products are nothing more than e-books, articles and reports that you can purchase, manipulate, brand and use as your own.  There are individuals who make a decent living authoring e-books and reports for licensing to other webmasters and Internet marketers – as well as licensing the right to sell those exact same rights to someone else, which is known as Master Resale Rights.  I know it might sound confusing, so let me give you the definition of Private Label Rights and Master Resale Rights from our good friends at InternetMarketingDefinitions.com:

Private Label Rights – Content, particularly articles, written by a 3rd party and made available for several purchasers to buy and use.  These articles can then be used as-is or edited as the purchaser desires – within the guidelines of the PLR company. Guidelines will differ with each company.

Master Resale Rights – If you have a product with “Master resale rights” this means you can resell the product and keep 100% of the profits. You cannot alter it in any way but it’s yours to sell as is.

How Can I Use PLR Products To Make Money Online?

  1. Create a report to attract new readers to your newsletter – You can compile a report using a single, or several rewritten Private Label Rights products and give it away to entice new readers to your websites newsletter.
  2. Use the PLR content to create a squeeze page to build your list – Rewrite portions of several related PLR products to generate a free report and content for a squeeze page in order to acquire email addresses and build your list.
  3. Create an autoresponder email course – Again, editing Private Label Rights products and using the content to provide a free “how-to” course which you will feed to the list you compiled from your squeeze page.  Are you starting to see how these methods are becoming intertwined?
  4. Create and sell an e-book – For this method I would suggest combining the rewritten PLR content with your own to strengthen your e-book, but to also ensure your e-book remains unique and up to date.  If you’re simply rewriting a PLR e-book you purchased and then selling it, think again, because your e-book will essentially be the same as the orginal regarding the content it contains – therefor providing little value.
  5. Rewrite the PLR content and submit it to article directories – This is a great way to get links and hopefully boost your page rank.  Edit PLR content and split it up into keyword focused articles that you will submit to high traffic article directories – putting your domain of choice (blog, niche site, or squeeze page) in the resource box to funnel that traffic and hopefully make some sales.  This method is one of my favorites.
  6. Use the content for niche marketing – Whether you have niche sites like Build A Niche Store or Squidoo lenses, PLR content is great for adding content to these type of affiliate sites.  Since most PLR products are niche focused anyways, this is a great way to get keyword focused traffic and start to earn revenue via mediums like Adsense and CPA affiliate offers.
  7. Use the content for your blog – Instead of doing 5 posts a week from scratch, do three posts and edit some PLR content for the other two.  As long as you remain focused on your particular niche, you will be providing your readers with great value.  Imagine spending a weekend editing an entire PLR product and breaking it up into a series of posts on your blog – this means more time generating affiliate income and forming joint venture projects.
  8. Apply keyword research to your PLR content – Editing your purchased content is one thing, but doing some keyword research using a tool like Wordtracker to find low competition/high demand key phrases will ensure you have prime positioning in Google’s search results – which means more organic traffic.
  9. Use PLR products to populate satellite blogs – If you’ve never heard the term satellite blogging, it’s basically having a ring of blogs all pointing back to your main blog, within various niches.  This is a great time to utilize the content within Private Label Rights products.  Edit the content and set a schedule for updating your outer blogs, which will keep Goolge happy, and in turn get those smaller blogs indexed quicker so they can start funneling traffic to your main site.

A Word Of Caution

While there are several high quality Private Label Rights portals and membership sites, make sure the content of the product is informative, and more importantly, up to date.  There are so many dated sales pages and membership sites floating around the inter-web that you want to make sure if you are purchasing the license to use someone elses content for your websites – that the content is up to date and current.  Another tip – it’s always good to use products that have a limited release, so you know the content you are using is only in the hands of a selected few.

Here are a few PLR sites you might want to consider:

www.EasyPLR.com

www.YummyPLR.com

www.Niche-Content-Packages.com

www.PLRPro.com

www.Niche-Health-Products.com

Cheers,

Elijah