Posted by peter on June 25, 2008 | No Comments
When you can’t think of anything else to write about, a list of something usually helps you through a writers block.
Here’s my list.
You Know You Are An Internet Marketing When…
- You buy any product offline or online outside of the internet marketing arena and develop a nervous twitch when you are not presented with an upsell, downsell or one time offer.
- You see the words free report, and you instantly think “how much is the OTO going to be”
- You are confident that you can buy any product you want at 2am in the morning
- Every sales page you read has apparently been written the same day
- You expenses to earnings ratio is 10,000:1
- You have at least 73 unfinished projects
- 90% of your hard drive is filled with ebooks and courses that you have never read
- You find yourself constantly explaining to your friends and family what an ebook is
- You’ve advised your real world boss to change all the product prices to end in 7, but you are not sure why
- You can read a 15 page sales letter in 19.4 seconds and make up your mind whether you are going to buy the product
- You’ve had to hide the credit card bill from your significant other
- You know you have all the qualities and information to succeed, but haven’t taken action yet
- You feel slightly guilty about buying that $997 home study course given that the 5 others that you have ordered are sitting in tha garage. Unopened.
- Armand Morin has invited you to a conference
- You can reel off a list as long as your arm of names of great internet marketers, but you struggle to remember the name of your mother in law
- You know PayPals TOS backwards, forwards and damn near sideways!
- No one understands “what you do” on the internet and most assume it’s something to do with porn
- The only emails you ever receive are also being sent to 29,000 other people
- You did your first email campaign and a school boy error caused the ‘name’ token to not work properly, so everyone got an email that said “Hi %firstname%”
- You bought a product based on the promised rebate of the affiliate after 3 months and completely forgot to redeem it
- You’ve written a ’scam’ review to try and promote it
- You lost your shirt on AdWords but it wasn’t a total failure because as soon as you make another $99.28 in clickbank, you’ll get your first cheque
- You want to be like Joel Comm and be an AdSense God
- You also want to be like Mike Filsaime and be a Viral Marketing God
- You also want to be like Andrew Fox and be a Clickbank God
- You also want to be like Gary Ambrose and be a Email Marketing God
- You also want to be like Micheal Fortin and be a Copywriting God
- You also want to be like Brad Fallon and be a SEO God
- You also want to be like Ewan Chia and be an Affiliate God
- You also want to be like Edmond Loh and be a PLR God
- You also want to be like Russell Brunson because, well, he’s younger than you
- You don’t want to be like Armand Morin because he’s just too cheesy for words
- You have tried to see if you can get away with submitting PLR articles to EzineArticles
- You think PageRank is how your websites are ranked in the search engines
- You can think of a dozen more things to add to this list
That’s my attempt, there are probably hundreds more, so submit your suggestions as a comment!
Posted by peter on June 6, 2008 | No Comments
A while back I spoke about whether internet marketing will see a growth over the coming months. According to Google Trends, so far the answer is no.
But, what about in niche markets? With the slow down in the US economy, petrol (gas) prices hitting an all time high, it opens the road for the savvy internet marketer with the time and resources to start making some products that really solve the need of not just the internet marketing arena, but possibly 80% of the population of the US.
Off the top of my head I came up with the following…
- How to save money at the gas pump
Kinda obvious I know, but with gas prices making some American’s think twice about a car journey, everything possible should be done to reduce the costs. Create an ebook on how they can reduce these costs with simple, practical advice.
- Alternative fuel consumption
Most people don’t know that car engines built in the last 10 years are built to be ‘dual fuel’. This means that they can take other types of fuel besides gas, like bio-fuel for example. Creating a product that shows people how to convert their vehicle to run alternative types of fuel will be a hot topic!
- Grow your own food
With stockists reporting record growth in seed sales, it’s obvious that the average American consumer is looking at ways to cut the grocery shopping bill to pay for the gas. To most people, growing your own food is as foreign as the Rupee, so a how 2 guide on growing your own vegetables is a guaranteed best seller
- Make Your Own Soap & Detergent
More sort of a home crafts type product, this could follow on from grow your own vegetables because it helps to cut down on costs. Often, natural cleaners can be as effective as their chemical counter part. Lemon juice is great for removing grease, vingar is good for removing limescale and so on.
- Coupon sites
A site that can give people coupons to print out and use at their local grocery store will grow in popularity. Entire coupon hunting sites could spring up
- Ebay Guides
As people tighten their purse strings, many are going to be yearning for the latest gadgets still. Ebay is a fantastic place to get the latest gadgets and gizmos at knock down prices
- Cash in the Attic / Basement
Again, as people tighten purse strings and look to find more money, an obvious reaction is to start sorting through all the old ‘junk’ one has acquired over the last few decades. All over America there is going to be big sort outs. Remember, one persons junk is another persons gold.
That’s just a few that I could think of, but I’m sure there are hundreds of niches that you can start profiting from, even as America tightens it’s purse strings.
Posted by peter on June 2, 2008 | No Comments
I wanted to revisit a post I made earlier about creating some sort of group or network which allows people (specifically IM’ers) to get in touch and do a collaborative project.
Having given it some more thought and chatted about it with some online and offline colleagues it’s clear that some people are excited by the thought and others are a lot more cautious. The downside is obviously that someone may not pull their weight, or some might do more than others, in which case how do you decide how to split the profits?
I thought I should elaborate a bit more on how I saw the whole concept working.
First off, I see this as a social network / freelancer type project. Everyone who signs up would have their skills for other people to see. For example, my skills are:
- Writing
- SEO
- Access to quality programmers on demand
Now, either someone could approach me, or I could approach someone and say, hey, are you interested in my project? Would projects be listed like on scriptlance? I don’t know. Maybe you could have some sort of status which says “available for projects” or “not available for projects”.
You could network with people who have similar skills or areas of interest as yourself to create the foundation for a product. For example two guys that were in to SEO could record an interview together and work together on an SEO home study guide (which I don’t think has ever been done, btw).
There are then loads of collaborative web tools, like gantt charts, brainstorming tools, task lists, to do lists, milestones, whiteboards etc. that people can use to do the project.
The idea of doing a collaborative project instead of outsourcing all the bits you don’t like doing or can’t do (like graphics for example) is that it could help keep you motivated and focused. I imagine an awful lot of people could make tens of thousands of dollars (like me for example) if only they would focus and concentrate on doing just one small part of the project.
Anyway, more musings from someone with more time than money on his hands 