I hope you are well. We’ve just had a public holiday here in England and the weather was nice enough for us to have a barbecue over the weekend. I have to say that having friends over and eating good food outdoors is one of my favourite things to do. And no, not all English food is bad!

Unfortunately it’s back to cloudy and rainy today so I thought it would be a good time to write my next issue of my newsletter.

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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You may well have heard that commenting on blogs can bring you traffic. There are two ways that it does this:

Indirectly by creating links that point back to your website (these links will help your web pages rank highly) and directly, by people clicking on your link when they see your comment The method that I am going to tell you about today is related to the direct method. This is what you have to do:

1) Find the high traffic, influential blogs in your market. You can do this by using Google Alerts (free) to report on the sites that are triggered by your keywords. If certain sites keep popping up, these are the ones you need to make note of.

2) Download a free program called Comment Sniper. Enter your blogs into Comment Sniper and it will immediately tell you when a post has been made. It can even notify you on your phone.

3) Go and comment quickly on the blog post. Make sure that your post adds value and try to make it intriguing.

If you are one of the first to comment, you can get traffic this way as well as good backlinks. Simple but effective. Read the rest of this entry

Hi fellow readers,

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Marketing Tip of the Day
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Some of you may be aware that articles are an incredibly effective technique for driving traffic to your website. Not only will each article drive traffic when people click on your link in the resource box at the end of the article, but the article itself will also create a backlink to the site that it links to.

This backlink will strengthen your site in the eyes of the search engines and will be useful for the purpose of Search Engine Optimisation. Another great benefit of articles is that they will help to establish you as an expert in your niche.

I want to take it one step further though. When you write an article, you can do many things to get it OUT there. You should repurpose the article into a short video, a podcast, a slide presentation or perhaps an Instructable.

There are sites on the web that you can then freely submit your repurposed content to.

Each time, you should provide a link back to your site. You can then distribute your article to the best article directories using an article distribution service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard.

You can also submit your article to free Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and many many more. Don’t just write one article and forget it. It’s a waste of all your creative effort! Read the rest of this entry

Okay, I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while.   What I really want to do is describe in one short post exactly how the internet gurus make their money.  Not a whole load of waffle and complicated theory.  Just one post that outlines all the main elements of a successful internet marketer’s business.

Not a newbie.  Not an intermediate level marketer but one that is at the top of their game.

The only problem is, I’m setting myself up to fail. Read the rest of this entry

This morning I recorded an interview with John Thornhill who is a well known, well repected and well liked U.K. internet marketer.  John cut his teeth on Ebay and has since gone on to greater things.  In this interview John openly discusses how he started in internet marketing and provides some really excellent advice.  Here are some of the points that we cover:

• The three traffic generation methods that John would choose if he had to start again from scratch
• Where most people go wrong and what to do about it
• How not to damage the relationship with your list
• The most important activities to focus on when you start out
• How he uses a blog to generate traffic and to brand himself

and much much more…..

If you’re a subscriber, you will already have been sent a link for the interview.  If you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s your chance.  Fill in the form on my sidebar and as soon as you confirm, you’ll get immediate access to the interview.

Please feel free to comment on the interview and post any questions you may have.

Last weekend I attended a great Internet Marketing seminar in Bristol.  I came away buzzing and full of enthusiasm and ideas.  I also met some great people.  Some of them were already very successful, some were on the way and some were just at the beginning of their journey.  If you ever get a chance to attend one of Robert’s events (he holds them every year), then I strongly recommend it.

One of the hardest the things to do when you’re starting out is to maintain a posistive mindset, especially if you’ve been trying for a while without success or if you are feeling overwhelmed with all the information that you’re trying to get your head around.  When you meet other people that have been through the same experience as you but have made it, it really lifts the spirits and reinforces your belief in what is possible. Read the rest of this entry

I have recently taken on Alex Jeffreys as a mentor. For those of you that don’t know him, he’s a very successful internet marketer based in the U.K. He has a great reputation and one of the reasons that I was keen to have the benefit of his wisdom is that he in turn was mentored by Mike Filsaime and Rich Schefren. Those guys have multi million pound (dollar) businesses and are some of the most highly regarded businessmen and marketers around. The reason that I mention all this is that I have just listened to Alex talking about the importance of setting goals, plans and task setting.

Now I know that everyone has heard about these ideas but I want to take a few minutes to hammer home exactly how important these concepts are and the vital role that they will play in your success.

You often hear people talking about the number one reason that so many people fail online. The truth is that there are a number of reasons that people fail. Read the rest of this entry

There are many hurdles that a budding internet marketer will have to face. Today, I want to highlight a few of the more obvious ones.

Believing with a degree of certainty that you can succeed
Of all the problems that you face as a budding internet marketer the first and in a way the most important hurdle that you will face is developing an unshakable belief that you are going to succeed. For much of the early part of your journey to make money online, you will be operating on blind faith and in order to keep going you will need to truly believe that you can achieve your goals as a financially independent internet marketer. This is clearly not impossible but it does mean that you have to do your research and pay attention to developing and maintaining the right mindset.

Being Overwhelmed by the Sheer Quantity of Information Out There
Even with unstoppable belief, it is incredibly easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity and variety of information, techniques and sales pitches out there. Everyone out there is trying to convince you that their techniques or methods are the answer to your problems. This means that you also have the problem of not knowing who or what to believe.

Not Knowing What is Hype and What is Real Read the rest of this entry

Issue #65

In previous issues you may remember me talking about traffic and how

traffic x conversions = sales

Well today I want to talk about how you can make the most of the traffic that you get and also how you can stop yourself from relying on any particular traffic source. In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I’m talking about the value of building a list. You may have heard about listbuilding and how “the money is in the list”, well let me try and explain.

If a potential customer arrives at your webpage and sees an offer, he or she can either choose to click on the link (or image) and choose to buy or not buy. Unless you are lucky, or your customer is a loyal fan, every person that leaves your page without buying is lost to you. This is far from ideal as it takes an average of 5-7 exposures to an offer before someone will choose to buy. Therefore the best thing that you can do is send your traffic to a squeezepage. The purpose of the squeezepage is solely to get the name and e-mail address of your lead by offering something of value to them. You can offer a free report, a video, an audio interview or anything that will help your prospects achieve their goals. If you wish to collect a list of buyers instead of prospects then you can offer a cheap (but excellent) ebook. Read the rest of this entry

Newsletter issue #64

I hope you enjoyed the last issue and that it wasn’t too long.   In this issue, I am going to assume that, like me, you have decided that the benefits (in terms of traffic leverage) that you can get by creating your own products outweigh the headache of creating digital products or alternatively getting them created by someone else.

If you’re still in doubt, do a little looking around and you won’t find that many “Gurus” that don’t create their own products.  There are some, but they tend to create millions (slight exaggeration) of sites (microblogging) and monetise them with adsense, affiliate offers and CPA or alternatively they tend to create massive Authority Sites with 1000s of articles optimised for the Search Engines.  Oh, I almost forgot. There’s the increasingly unpopular “Review Sites”.  Please don’t get me wrong, you can make a lot of money with all of these techniques, I just don’t rate them as highly as product creation.

The rest of this post is absolutely critical in my opinion and that is market selection Read the rest of this entry

Newsletter Issue #63

In this issue I want to talk to you about the decisions that you need to make when choosing which business model you will you follow in your online business.  By now, you may be aware that there are in fact many ways to make money online.  Some however are better than others, or at least have different advantages and disadvantages.

This “model selection” is one of the most important and sadly often neglected decisions that you can make.  If you start out without going through this process, you will pay for it dearly later.

Everyone goes through phases of doubt and it is during these times that you need to feel sure that you are doing the right thing otherwise you will lose focus.   When you lose focus, you stop doing productive work and you start reading e-mails, researching and generally comforting yourself by trying to gather more knowledge.

First off, you make money online by presenting an offer of either goods (physical or digital) or services to the people that have a need or desire for what you are offering.  The first question that you need to ask yourself is:
Read the rest of this entry