Maximize Results

Highly Recommended Training Product

It’s VERY RARE that I come across a product that I feel is absolutely fantastic when it comes to internet marketing.

I bought a product called Commmission Blueprint on Friday afternoon after reading some good reviews about it. I was curious to see what the fuss was about.

Expecting it to be rehashed nonsense like most internet marketing products, I began watching the training videos Friday around 4pm.

I got sucked into the videos and watched all of them non-stop, finishing at about 10pm Friday night. I think there were about 18 videos total and each one was pure meat, no filler content.

He talked in depth about things like “here’s how to find a profitable product to promote”, “here’s how to track your advertising spending”, etc.

I’ve been marketing online for several years and I even learned some pretty interesting things I didn’t know about tracking in adwords.

Almost everyday someone asks me to recommend an internet marketing training program that is good. Unfortunately, there are not very many good one’s out there to recommend.

But, commission blueprint is by far one of the best values I’ve come across as far as training programs go.

The content in this course blows away most of those $1,997 “home study courses”, no joke.

I’d highly recommend you check out the videos. They are only $97 and the videos that talk about tracking your adwords traffic are worth 10 times the cost of the course.

Even if you don’t buy from my blatent affiliate link here, you still need to get this course if you are looking to make money online. It’s just good stuff that you need to learn…

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One Of My New Businesses

Wow, time is really flying!

I haven’t had a chance to post in a while because I’ve been so busy building my 2 new businesses. Both are taking off nicely, and since I’m no longer in the “guru business”, my life is much more relaxed and enjoyable…

I figured I’d share a few ideas with you that I’m working on right now because I think it will help you make money and that’s what this blog is about.

When starting a new business, there are a lot of thoughts and emotions that run through your head. Things like:

- Will this business make money as I put in all this time and effort?

- How much money will this business make?

- I don’t want to risk too much money in case something goes wrong.

and any number of other self doubt questions coming from the “voices in your head”.

I’ve started more than 50 businesses from scratch and purchased of 100 websites in the last 6 years, and I STILL have these questions coming up in my mind.

The fact is, there is never a guarantee that any business you start is going to make money. If anyone promises that to you, they are lying. But, as long as you are willing to put in the effort and stay focused, you will have a much greater chance of success.

One of the two businesses I’m working on right now was purchased. The other I am starting from scratch. I’m much more passionate about the one I’m starting from scratch because it is my own idea and I’m creating it from thin air.

The site I bought is making money and chugging along nicely, but I don’t have that connection with it. It almost feels like I’m just working on someone else’s project. That’s the downside to buying a site vs building a new one.

Anyway, the new site I’m building is a hybrid of an offline service mixed with a website and internet marketing aspect.

I really think this is where the money is right now. By focusing on your local market, you can avoid 99% of the competition online. The fact is, the MAJORITY of people in your local town or city have NO IDEA how the internet works.

Since I’ve been working online full time the last 6 years, I am an extreme expert compared to the offline business owners in my city. Compare me to experts who focus their businesses teaching people online, and I’m probably considered an “average guy who makes money online”.

Many of you reading this blog already have more knowledge than people in your area with offline businesses.

So, rather than being a small fish in a big pond online, you might want to consider being a big fish in a small pond offline like I’m doing right now.

Here’s why I like helping offline businesses with their online marketing:

1) Offline companies are used to paying lots of money for stuff.

Yellow page ads are $25,000 per year. Leases are up to $8,000 per month. TV commercials are $300 a day and typically generate little to no results.

Compare that to people online who are used to getting everything for free and where you can literally start a business for $15 including a domain name and hosting. There is a completely different mindset between these two types of people.

If you want to sell a training program to people online, you have to struggle to convince people to pay you $37 for your ebook. Offline, businesses will literally throw $4,000 checks at you for basically the exact same information (and not complain or ask for refunds either!).

If you can provide a do it for them service, those checks increase even more.

2) You can actually help them improve their business and feel good about what you are doing.

When you come across companies who spend $100,000+ per year on various ads and then you find out they have no way to track the effectiveness of these ads, you can have a life changing impact on their business.

Since everything online is trackable down to the penny, you can help local businesses put together ads online and show how these ads are working. Also, you can use the internet to help track the effectiveness of offline ads for these companies.

If the business is doing radio ads, simply buy a new domain name and use that in that one specific radio ad. Setup a simple hit tracking on that new domain name and you can see exactly how many people are responding to the ad.

Nobody is doing this kind of simple tracking offline, even though it is like marketing 101 online for the rest of us.

3) Little to no competition.

Since everyone wants to live the “internet lifestyle”, people are flooding strictly to the internet because they think that’s the easiest way to make money. When these people start trying to make money online, they are immediately hit with fierce competition and quickly give up their dream of making it big online.

Over the last 6 years online, I’ve seen the changes taking place and I see how much more competitive it is to work strictly online compared to a hybrid of offline and online mixed.

4) You get to work with real people.

One thing that can be hard when working online is you don’t have the personal interaction with real people.

Sure, you might have some instant messaging friends or have your buddy “supercool98″ from a web forum that you chat with, but you hardly ever talk with real humans. You spend all your time typing messages that are just words on paper.

When you work with offline companies, you get to meet some great people. Business owners in the town you live in who have lots of local connections. Some may be very wealthy business-people who want to partner with you on a new business idea.

I guess my main point is, when you think about wanting to make money, don’t limit your mindset to only setting up “adsense websites” or selling ebooks. That stuff is pocket change compared to what you could be making by doing internet marketing for offline businesses or combining your online knowledge with local business problems.

Anyone else tried this hybid model before?

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Complicated Businesses Suck

Since I announced my retirement from teaching the buying & selling websites training class, I’ve been hard at work on my 2 new business ideas.

The two new businesses I’m starting are in the travel market and the toys market, neither of which I have any experience with, but are both proven and profitable markets to get into.

While doing my market research, I decided I needed to find partners who were both smarter than me, and have lots of experience in these markets.

I met with a couple guys yesterday to discuss my business ideas and realized something very important.

The main reason I’ve been so successful in my internet businesses is because I always keep them SIMPLE.

I never realized this until talking with these partners. I basically gave them a rundown of what I wanted to do, which was very simple and straight forward. It took all of 5 minutes to explain the entire business plan to them.

Almost immediately, the guys I was chatting with were throwing out ideas left and right.  Each “brilliant idea” was more and more complex and I knew in the back of my mind that:

a) trying to do all of these things would be too overwhelming and probably never get done.

b) these ideas would most likely confuse the customers and result in them not taking action on my offers.

c) would be 3 times as expensive to do and half as profitable as my simple idea.

I didn’t want to tell these potential partners that their ideas sucked because they were so excited about them.  Yes, they were sexier ideas than my plain jane version of the business, but 9 out of 10 times it’s the boring businesses that make the most money.

After talking with these guys, I realized that many of the mistakes people make when trying to make money online are because people over complicate things.  The easier the business, the more effective you can be at doing the things that actually make money. If you are so caught up in complicated technology or constantly trying to be innovative and cutting edge, you will be stuck in a never ending rat race.

Have you figured this out for yourself yet?

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Who Is Your Mentor?

I’ve talked about mentors a bit in the past and how I believe you need to have a mentor if you want to achieve success in making money online.

When I announced my “retirement” from teaching how to buy and sell websites, I got a ton of emails from readers who were sad to see me go. A lot of the emails read “Please don’t stop teaching, you’re one of my only mentors that I can trust”.

It really got me thinking…

It’s true, many people who teach methods of making money online are in it for one thing, the money. And when you have that motivation, you can be sure the mentor you are following has THEIR best interests in mind, NOT YOURS.

While it’s also true, I’m retiring from teaching the buying & selling websites business anymore, I think its important for you to know what to look for in a good mentor so you don’t get burned.

Find A Mentor You Can Trust To Help You make money online

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1) The mentor you are following should have a defined path to success.

In other words, your mentor should be someone who has made most of their money DOING whatever it is they are teaching others to do. If the person made just a few bucks using the technique and now makes the majority of their money from teaching the “how to”, STAY AWAY.

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2) The mentor you are following should help you stay focused.

Have you ever been on someone’s email list and you get offer after offer after offer to buy different products? This is one SURE SIGN that the mentor doesn’t care about you. All they are looking for is their affiliate commission, so they try to shove offer after offer in front of your face hoping you’ll bite on one of them.

It is impossible to be successful with an internet business if you buy a new training program every single week. By the time you learn the technique you bought, the next great “product of the week” comes out and you move on to the next one. You never have a chance to implement anything.

If you get emails from a mentor who offers you many different ways to make money than what you originally signed up for, chances are the mentor is abusing their relationship with you for affiliate commissions.

A lot of times these emails will “appear” to be genuine. Here are some common ones (since most of these marketers have no originality…)

a) My good friend Bob agreed to share his secrets with you on a FREE teleconference tonight at 9.

b) I just found this new way of making $300 a day, download this free report that explains it all.

c) I just got off the phone with __________ and got him to reveal his system how he makes $5000/month with no list, no website, no money, etc.

There are a bunch of similar stories, but the meanings are all the same….They are going to give you a free teaser, waste 45 minutes of your time, then pitch you on the latest and greatest money making technique for $997.

These are distractions to your main objective, and this type of mentor is HURTING your chances of success by throwing different business models at you every single week.

My advice, if you are on a list like this, unsubscribe immediately.

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3) The mentor should not depend on the income from his training course to survive!

If your mentor is coming out with a new product every single week or every month, chances are they are doing that because they NEED the money from these courses to pay their mortgage.

And if these people are that bad off financially, that’s NOT someone you should be listening to when you want help making money online.

You should only be following people who really don’t need your money because they became wealthy using the technique they are teaching. Sadly, there are few people who fit into this category.

You might ask, if the mentor doesn’t need the money, then why are they charging for the training? Well, one reason is, it’s not right ethically to use someone else’s time, knowledge or experience without compensating them. Do you work for free?

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4) The mentor should not sell “dreams”.

Making money online CAN be easy once you know what you are doing, but don’t let anyone fool you into thinking all you have to do is push a couple buttons and then it’s off to the beach to live a life of luxury.

That is physically impossible.

Anyone who tells you that you can start a business with:

a) no money

b) little effort

c) just a couple hours per month

is flat out lying!

Personally, I don’t think anyone should even consider starting an internet business unless they have at least $1,000 - $3,000 of cash in the bank that is not reserved for living expenses. If you don’t have at least this much, you don’t need to be in business because you are just not ready yet.

Internet businesses are dirt cheap to start compared to any other business in the world, but they are still businesses and have certain costs associated with them (ie - hosting, domain name, development cost, advertising, content creation, software, etc).

Compare this startup cost to a real retail business, where you can spend more than $150,000 just to open your doors, a couple grand for an internet business is nothing.

Not everyone is right for making money online. Lack of capital is one thing that keeps people from succeeding online. If you are always stressed about the decision between spending $50 for a website logo or putting $50 of food on the table, you will not do well online.

Advice - pick up an extra part time job and put all of that income aside for your internet business. Once you have a couple thousand saved up, then quit the part time job and focus on building a real internet business.

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These are the big ones to watch out for. You just have to think about the person you are following and ask yourself, “Are they really trying to help me succeed, or are they just trying to sell me their products and earn affiliate commissions from their friends?”

Sometimes it is difficult to know who to trust for advice and that’s part of the problem.

Personally, I like the school of hard knocks as a learning tool. Just go out there and try stuff. Learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Stop doing the stuff that doesn’t work and keep doing more of what does. Before you know it, you will be making good money online.

A lot of people are afraid of failure or losing money, but if you think about it, why not spend that $997 on testing a new business idea and see if it works rather than pay $997 for a training program. The money is gone either way, but at least if you invest in yourself and your business, you have a much higher chance of success.

So, who do you follow online?

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WHY Most People Fail Online

Ever since I began teaching people how to make money online through my buying & selling websites training class, I’m starting to see why the “make money online guru market” is not a fun place to be.

When I decided to teach people how to make money online, I did so because I truly wanted to help people succeed. Since I’ve been working full time online the last 5+ years, I’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do.

I’ve been fortunate to make over a million dollars online during this 5 year stretch, but it wasn’t an accident. I worked my butt off to get where I am today.

Now that I’m sharing my experience with people, I’m constantly hit with the label of “con artist”, “scammer” and many other names not nearly as nice as these.

Those who know me can attest that I’m probably one of the most generous people they know. I always go above and beyond to help someone out and often push my own desires aside if I can help someone else instead.

I had no idea when I got into this teaching business that there would be so much negativity associated with it. Sure, I get to hear a lot of praise from the students who take my training, but the non-customers who contact me are 90% negative, 5% skeptical and 5% excited to hear what I’m saying.

The biggest problem people have when trying to make money is the negative mindset.

If you are constantly thinking people are out to rip you off, you will never be successful. You’ll spend so much of your time trying to “prove” someone else is a fraud that you’ll never have time to actually make money yourself.

I’m yet to find a successful person in business who is always negative and pessimistic. Success just doesn’t match with this type of personality.

But, just being positive won’t make you successful however…

You have to take action!

It’s pretty sad, but most people never take action and actually put in the work to make things happen.

Usually what happens is someone will read an article or take a training class and store away that knowledge in their brain and never use it. Even if it’s the most valuable piece of knowledge in the world, they just absorb it and move on.

They spend most of their lives searching for more information, when in fact they probably already have enough knowledge to be very successful as it is.

An example of this is from my training class I teach. I just got a refund request this morning from a guy who said he “already knew everything I was teaching”. Yet, somehow he was not successful and still searching for a secret solution to his problem of not making any money online.

Maybe he did know everything I was teaching in the class, but if so, he should be selling websites for six figures like I’ve been doing. The problem may be that he is just an information junkie who never applies anything he learns.

It’s interesting when I hear people say “it’s too hard to make money online”.

That’s a bunch of nonsense!

HARD WORK is digging ditches in 100 degree sunshine for 8 hours per day.

Sitting on your butt writing a few articles is NOT hard work. Getting links to your website is NOT hard work. Spending 3 hours watching Google’s free video tutorials to learn Adwords is NOT hard work.

Yes, it takes time and yes, it can be boring, but it is not hard…

Sitting at a job you hate for 8 hours a day is much harder than an internet business.

Most people get overwhelmed.

A lot of times people are not successful online because they are simply overwhelmed. There are two possibilities here.

1) People are overwhelmed by opportunities.

Maybe you are signed up to 80 different internet marketers’ email lists, and each week you get a new “magic button internet billionaire training program”. So you jump from one idea to the next without actually doing anything. This is a very common problem. The solution is simple though, just unsubscribe from all of those email lists.

Very few email lists, from what I’ve seen, actually provide much value. In most cases, you just get hit with offer after offer of things to buy, which doesn’t help you one bit. In fact, it hurts you more than anything because of the distractions.

If someone truly wanted to help you by making recommendations, they wouldn’t be promoting a membership site coaching program one week and then the following week be promoting a software program that churns out 400 adsense websites per hour.

It’s no wonder you’re not successful, you’re getting pulled in 100 different directions that teach completely opposite business models.

2) People are overwhelmed by projects.

If you do have the ability to focus without the distraction of the “product launch of the week”, another issue you may face is being overwhelmed by the scope of your project.

You might decide to start a website on dogs, but when you are planning your website you think about all the things you want to cover.

You want to cover dog training, but then dog supplies look interesting too, so you plan out that section of your site. Then dog breeding looks like a good topic to get into, so you spend a couple weeks researching that topic. But then you figure some people might want to learn how to start their own dog sitting business, so you think about how you are going to get into that sub niche as well.

After you figure out all 214 dog related topics you want to cover on your site, you look at your outline of things you want to cover and say “there’s no way I’ll have time to do all of this work”.

And since it looks too much like work, you file it away until the next time you are feeling ambitious.

The months and years pass and you still never start your web business because there’s just too much to do.

Resolution to this problem - just break up the project into small chunks. Give yourself a deadline to complete each small chunk and slowly but surely you will get where you want to be. Maybe focus 3 weeks to building the dog training part of your website, then move on to the next part.

So what do you think? Any of these common problems apply to you?

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Millionaire Lifestyle With 2% Profit Margins

What if you ran a website that made a whopping 2% profit per month? Would you be living a millionaire lifestyle?

Most people would say “no way”. If I didn’t know any better, I’d be right there with you…

Basically what a 2% profit margin means is if your site makes $1,000 per month in sale, your expenses to generate that $1,000 is $980, leaving a profit of $20.

Wow, how exciting, right?

Well, this is exactly what a friend of mine does, but on his 2% profit margin website, he is able to fly around the world in first class and stay at 5 star hotels every single month. He is truly living the millionaire lifestyle.

Here’s how he does it…

He has a website that sells kids outdoor wooden playground sets. Obviously by selling these huge wooden playgrounds online, after shipping and all the competition in that market, it’s a very low margin e-commerce product.

But, his average order size is $2,600 per sale. His cost for a $2,600 playground is $2,100 and he spends about $450 to generate each sale (advertising, credit card processing fees, etc), so his “profit” per sale is a measly $50 per playground set.

I didn’t even know you could sell playground sets online, but he does and he sells a lot of them!

In fact, he sells an average of 6 playgrounds per day, every single day of the week.

By running some quick numbers, he is making about $300 per day in profits based on $15,600 per day in sales. His total profit for one year comes out to about $110,000 (about $9k per month).

Not bad, that’s for sure, but that’s not really that much money to be taking trips around the world every month like he does. So what’s his secret?

Credit card points!

You see, he has an American Express card that allows him to earn points for travel. For every $7,500 he puts on his AMEX card, he “earns” $100 in free travel.

Since all of his playgrounds are dropshipped from the manufacturer, he is able to pay for all his inventory using his American Express card. Also, his advertising is put on his AMEX card and whatever other expenses he has.

His business spends $465,000 per month on his American Express card. That means, his card is earning him $6,200 in FREE TRAVEL every single month. He earns almost as much credit for free travel than he does with his entire business…

It’s a pretty neat concept. His passion is traveling, so rather than spending his own money on flying to Paris for the weekend, his business expenses allow him to do it for free.

Imagine what you could do if your business generated $74,000 worth of free travel for you this year. You could take your entire family on multiple vacations, all fly first class and stay at the best possible hotels, all completely free. Now that’s a sweet benefit of starting your own business…

How hard would it be to make $2,000,000 per month in sales if you were spending $1,980,000 to generate those sales? You would be making a whopping 1% profit of $20,000 per month from the website, but you would also be earning $26,400 PER MONTH in free travel if you used your AMEX card.

Crazy…

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May 2008 Income Report

It’s that time of the month again for the income report of this blog (and the spinoff business created by leveraging this blog)

If you read the April income report, you’ll notice that in one short month, I’ve transformed this blog from a modest $1500 per month profit to just under $5,000 per month. This was largely due to the new product I created on buying and selling websites, where I used the traffic of this website to launch that business.

My “goal” for May was to hit $6,000 in profit for the month between this blog and the new spinoff business.  Did I reach the goal?  You’ll have to read below to find out what happened (like the annoying commercial breaks in American Idol..)

The sales of the premium wordpress themes slowed down a bit this month, but the other income streams improved, so it was a pretty interesting month to say the least.

Income

Here’s a look at May’s income. I’ve included the figures from April in the parentheses for easy comparison.

Private Advertising: $0 ($0)
Sponsored Reviews: $0 ($0)
Affiliate Sales: $1,643 ($871)
Theme Sales: $450 ($750)
Buy & Sell Websites Training Class: $10,058 ($3,400)
________________________
Total: $12,151 ($5,021)

Expenses

I did put up a couple ads for the training class and had some sales from affiliates, so let’s look at my costs…

Advertising: $850 ($0)
Affiliate Payments: $680 ($25)
Contest Payments: $25 ($25)
________________________
Total: $1,555 ($50)

So, when all is said and done, I had profit of $10,596 this month which is $5,625 more than April’s income.

Analysis

Well, it didn’t take nearly as long as I originally thought to turn this website into a $10,000 per month+ full blown business. The nice thing is, this “investment” we made in blogging experiment has COMPLETELY PAID FOR ITSELF in just 3 short months.  Every drop of income this website makes from now on will now be pure profit, which is good.

Hopefully you’ve learned a lot from what I’ve been teaching on this blog and can use my real life case study to do the same thing in your niche market. This project was no different for me from any of the other websites we’ve bought and sold over the last 5 years. I just applied the same business model (buy site, fix it up & add revenue streams, make it ultra profitable, enjoy the profits and/or sell the site).

This is the exact same strategy I teach in the full blown course at Buying And Selling Websites if you want to learn more about how I do it. You can join the current class for $200 off by using coupon code 1D28

Up Next

This will likely be my last income report that I publish on Blogging Experiment. You’ve already witnessed a huge transformation of this blog in just a couple months. In the future, I’ll keep ramping up these businesses, and I’m not sure I want to be publicly sharing how much the sites are making when I reach my next income goals for these projects…

Am I going to be selling BloggingExperiment? No, at least not for a while.  If you’ve taken my training class, then you know it’s a dumb idea to sell a site you’ve only owned for a couple months. So, you’ll be stuck with me for quite a while yet, at least another 10-11 months.

During this time, I’m still going to be providing as much valuable content to you as possible. Ben also has another 15 or so posts to turn in, so you’ll be hearing more from him shortly as well.

I’m not sure what the focus of the blog will be since I’ve pretty much met all the goals for this project already, so it will likely just be a continuation of what I’ve been writing about for the most part.

So, have you learned anything from me whatsoever in the last couple months? I’d be interested to hear your feedback and takeaways in the comments below…

(image source: sehgal asad)

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