Of course, this is night internet marketing, so Zachary is in bed, but I’m going to go ahead and continue on with a show without him. I’ve got four great things for you today. Thing number one is a new segment I’ll be introducing called Internet Marketing Motivator. It’s going to be a regular feature on the podcast where we talk about an issue of motivation as it relates to your internet business.

Secondly, today I’ll be taking the time to give a shout out to all the great people who have been leaving us fantastic reviews on iTunes. The third and the fourth thing today are related, I’ll be talking a little bit about how you don’t have to sell things to people who want to make money online to make money online, and I’m going to give you a great example of that as the fourth thing.

I’ve got an interview with Pat Flynn. Pat is a good friend of mine and webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog. Even though he talks about making money online on his blog that’s not how he got started. We’re going to talk about his other internet businesses today right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

I wanted to start off today by thanking all of you that have taken the time to go over to iTunes and leave a review for the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Boy, the reviews have been fantastic and it really helps me out because the reviews are part of the system that Apple uses when deciding how to rank the podcasts. It helps people find the podcast by ranking it more highly in the search results and so forth, so I really appreciate those reviews.

If you’ve got a minute to go on over to iTunes and leave a review you can do that at MasonWorld.com/itunes and that will take you over to where you need to go. It’s a little tricky, you’ve actually got to be in the iTunes app. iTunes is a free download and if you don’t use that MP3 player I think it’s pretty cool, you might like it. You can get that Apple.com/iTunes.

Since these reviews are so valuable to me I thought what I do now and in future episodes is I’d try to call out some people who left reviews on iTunes and give a shout out, maybe call out their URL and so forth. So, if you’ve left a review for me on iTunes or if you do decide to leave a review for me on iTunes be sure and drop me a ticket at MasonWorld.com/support and let me know that you left me a review on iTunes, leave your name and your URL in that ticket, I’ll go over and take a look at the review and give you a shout out right here on the podcast, maybe send a little traffic your way just as my way to say thank you for leaving me that review in iTunes, I really do appreciate it.

We’ve had a couple of great reviews in iTunes, and one of the very first guys that left me a review in iTunes was my buddy Josh Spaulding over at EthicalIM.com and he’s had some really nice things to say about the podcast. You can check out his review over at iTunes, again that’s MasonWorld.com/itunes, and while you’re at it go check out Josh’s blog. I think you’ll like it a lot over at EthicalIM.com.

The second thing I wanted to cover tonight is a standing segment that we’re going to be adding and we’re calling it Internet Marketing Motivator. The reason that I wanted to add this segment is because I know that to be successful in online business it fundamentally takes two things.

I’ve been at this several years now and it’s pretty obvious to me that the first thing that you need to have in order to be successful in online business is enough knowledge about online business in order to be competent and successful. If you’re not competent you don’t know what you’re doing you’re not going to be successful and that’s obvious.

Most information marketers out there on the internet that are in the internet marketing niche are trying to attack that very problem. There’s tons of ebooks and audio and podcasts like this where people are trying to teach you about internet marketing. So, that’s thing one and obviously there’s a glut of information out there about internet marketing.

The second thing that you need, I think, is a proper mindset in order to be successful with internet marketing. You’ve got to have the proper motivation to see it through. Most of the people that I’ve seen fail at internet marketing failed because they quit too soon and because they lacked the proper motivation to really get things done to be successful. So, that’s something I want to address in each and every episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Now, the first thing we’re going to talk about, the very first motivational tip that I have for you with regard to your internet business is simply that you need to set goals. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “Mark, I know this. Everyone tells me that you need to set goals and they tell me that you need to write them down and so forth.”

Well, there’s a couple of things that I want to tell you about your internet marketing goals that I think will really help you. The first thing I want to tell you is your goals need to be reasonable, it’s very important. I told you just a second ago that most people I know that have failed in internet business failed because they quit too soon. The corollary to that is one of the reasons that they quit too soon is because they were expecting results too quickly.

So many of the headlines that people read out there talk about how you can make 27,000 dollars next week using this magic formula or you can be making money with this technique in a week or you can be killing it with Adwords in 47 minutes or whatever it is. The truth of the matter is building a real internet business that adds value to customers and creates value for you in the form of profit takes awhile.

So, you need to have goals that recognize the fact that it’s not going to happen overnight. Now, it’s certainly possible that you will put up a web page and become rich overnight and I hope that happens for you, that sounds fantastic. But, the reality is that it’s going to take you some time and some work and so your goals need to reflect that. So, my first recommendation is that you have realistic goals.

The second recommendation is, of course, not only that you write these goals down, but I’m going to make the very simple recommendation that you put them on a sticky note in front of your monitor. Internet marketing is one of those funny things where almost every time you’re working on it you’re in front of your computer and if you’ve got your goals in front of you and you feel that need to go check Twitter or your email for the 700th time or your Clickbank stats for the 800th time that day or your Adsense revenue stats for the 900th time that day, if you see that little PostIt note sitting there saying that, for example, you have a goal that you wanted to make three sales of your information product this month then you know that you can look at that and it will help you stay focused.

So, my second tip for you is to get that goal written down or those goals written down and put them on your monitor. Then my third tip for you regarding goals is make sure that you have some short term goals, some medium term goals, and some long term goals. Your long term goal may be that you want to make 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 dollars a month from your internet business so that you can quit your job. That’s a fantastic goal, especially if you know really what you want your business to be like and if you know why you’ve set that goal those can be fantastic goals.

But, you really need some intermediate goals. You might need to have a goal, for example, to get your first blog up, or you might need to have a shorter term goal that has to do with making 100 dollars a month online or 1,000 dollars a month online before you get to that 10,000 dollar a month goal. So, it’s really important to have short term, medium term, and long range goals.

The problem with only having a long range goal is that sometimes it can seem so far away that it can actually become a demotivator for you in your business, so you want to make sure that you have something that you’re striving for really to get done this week. Those are the best sort of near term goals. What’s your goal for this week? So that you can stay motivated and focused in your business.

So, those are my three tips regarding goals. I hope that’s helpful to you in your business and you can look forward to internet marketing specific motivational tips every week here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

For the last piece of the podcast today, episode 11, I wanted to address a topic that comes up periodically so you can know where I am on it and that’s this topic of whether or not it’s possible to actually make money online without resorting to the business of teaching people how to make money online.

In fact, internet marketing marketing to other marketers can be a little bit of a sleazy business. If you look online you see a lot of sales letters that are targeting people that are looking to improve their life situation, looking to make a little extra money and they’re making unfair or unfounded or unreasonable promises about how this person can solve all their life problems by just buying this ebook or whatever.

That’s fine and some of those are perfectly legitimate products, but it could lead you to ask the question, “Hey, is it really possible to make money online without selling people make money online stuff?” That’s a lot of times what you see. The answer is absolutely yes.

I think the two best business models for this are business models that we’ve discussed previously in the podcast. One business model is the business model that I like to talk about a lot and that we’ll focusing this podcast on in future episodes and that’s the business model of affiliate marketing where you provide valuable content or other kinds of helpful information to people in order to help them select a good product that’s right for them. That’s the kind of affiliate marketing that I like to do, there are certainly other kinds of affiliate marketing.

The other way you can make money online that’s an excellent business model is take some expertise that you have and package it up into an information product, either an ebook or a series of videos or an audio, and sell that product online. While you may see a lot of those in your daily internet travels that are related to internet marketing, you can make an absolute killing doing this sort of thing outside of the internet marketing niche and a lot of legitimate marketers do exactly that.

In fact, one guy that I’m very impressed with I have on the podcast today. Let me tell you a little bit about my relationship with Pat Flynn. Pat is the webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog, SmartPassiveIncome.com. He’s also launched a brand new podcast that competes with this podcast actually called The Smart Passive Income Podcast. It’s an outstanding podcast, there’s plenty of room on your iPod for both of us, I recommend that you go over to iTunes and give that a listen. It’s fantastic. In fact, in episode two of that podcast you’ll find an interview with yours truly, Pat and I exchanged podcast interviews.

What you’re about to hear is an interview with Pat where he’s going to explain how he got started in internet marketing. Now, unlike a lot of people he didn’t get started in internet marketing trying to teach people how to make money online, he got started in internet marketing by selling a wildly successful information product.

He’s going to talk all about that and subsequently he started a second business, not including the SmartPassiveIncome.com brand, but he started a second business selling iPhone applications. So, there’s two great examples of ways that you can make money on the internet without having to resort to teaching people how to make money online. I think it’s a really important point.

A lot of times people will come into internet marketing and expect that they should be working on teaching people how to make money online, after all that’s the example that they have in front of them. They’ve bought a lot of ebooks and they’ve purchased all these things and they think, “Well, I’m going to create my own ebook.”
You can certainly do that, I’ve done it, that’s what this podcast is all about, that’s what the MasonWorld.com blog is about, but I will say that you may find that the competition in non-internet marketing niches is considerably less. It’s hard for me to make a recommendation to people not to pursue internet marketing, after all I’m in the internet marketing niche in addition to my other niches, so it would be disingenuous for me to tell you that you shouldn’t be in internet marketing.

Certainly it would have been crazy for me to recommend to Pat Flynn that he stay out of internet marketing, because he’s had some crazy success with the Smart Passive Income blog, he’s doing really well over there. So, I’m not recommending that you not pursue internet marketing as a niche in your internet marketing business, just understand that I think there might be a lot better opportunities for you out there depending on what kinds of things that you’re interested in.

That gets us into the interview with Pat Flynn. Let me tell you, I’ve known Pat since he lost his day job. Pat will explain in the interview how he was caught up in this kind of crazy economy thing as an architect and came out with his first information product as part of his activities in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, that’s where I met Pat. I hope you enjoy this interview. Pat is awesome, the interview is great. Without further ado we’ll get into it….

I’ve been following Pat almost since the beginning of his internet marketing career. We hooked up early in his internet marketing life on the Internet Business Mastery website. I saw him build an amazingly successful information product business right before my eyes inside the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

He then went from that to launching a successful internet marketing blog, something that is incredibly difficult to do with so many people in such a crowded niche. Then turned right around and launched a successful iPhone apps business. This has just been a hat trick, really amazing to me.
Pat, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing this evening?

Pat Flynn: I’m doing excellent. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to your podcast and it’s just really cool to actually be on the show now, so thank you.

Mark Mason: Well, you are joining quite a distinguished list of guests that I’ve been able to coax to come on the show, so I really appreciate having you here. How are things in San Diego?

Pat Flynn: Things are good. Actually, today was a pretty crazy day. It was lie 97 degrees, so it was really hot.

Mark Mason: That sounds like Texas.

Pat Flynn: It felt like Texas, but then in the evening it started to rain, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Mark Mason: I’m glad you didn’t wash away. I saw a tweet from you that you thought maybe you were in Australia or New Zealand based on the weather.
Pat Flynn: Yes. Melbourne, Australia, one of my favorite places, just four seasons in a single day basically.

Mark Mason: There you go. So, it’s really great to have you here. One of the things that I’ve been talking about on the podcast, as you know, is trying to build people up to this idea of how you can make money on the internet, how you can build a business.

One of the questions that I get from time to time is… Is it really possible to make money on the internet some other way besides teaching people how to make money on the internet? I always laugh about that, because the businesses that I really admire on the internet are businesses that don’t have anything to do with internet marketing.

One of the best examples I could think of and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is your green architecture business, the place that you very first got started. I was wondering if you could just start off the interview just by giving us a little brief history about how all that happened and how that’s an example of how people who have some domain knowledge can make money with information products on the internet?

Pat Flynn: Sure, no problem. What’s funny is a lot of people ask me that same question. “Can I make money by not telling people how to make money?” I always tell them my story because it’s exactly that.

From the beginning, I went to school for architecture at the University of California Berkley, loved architecture. I graduated and got a great 9:00 to 5:00 job, I loved what I was doing. I was traveling around the U.S. meeting with high end clients, designing Hilton Hotels in Vegas and whatnot. I was just loving life.

I could see my whole life planned out, 401k, retire at 65 and enjoy life then. Then all of a sudden the whole economy thing happened and one by one everyone in our office was getting laid off and eventually it was my turn.

That was a pretty dramatic moment in my life and it was nearly impossible to get another job in the architecture field just because no one was building, there was no credit available for builders or anything like that. So, I looked for a solution.

I thought about going into another field or something related to architecture like engineering. But, I had been listening to a podcast, The Internet Business Mastery podcast, and those guys, Sterling and Jay, inspired me so much. I really always wanted to do internet business, I heard success stories and these guys just inspired me.
I was like, “That’s so awesome.” I was kind of living vicariously through what they were doing and the guests that they had on the show. My only experience doing something online at the time was a blog I created for myself.

So, what I did, this was before I got laid off, I was taking this test called The LEED exam, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and I created this blog to keep track of my notes for me. I knew how blogs worked, content management systems, and it was really easy for me to study on the computer. When I was traveling I could just go to any computer or take my laptop and study instead of carrying around a whole notepad.

Also, I must confess that my handwriting is like chicken scratch, so that’s why I created this blog. I passed the test, all my notes were on there still, and when I just for fun checked the analytics, the website visitor statistics, thousands of people were visiting my site from around the world. I freaked out.

I freaked out at the beginning, because I was like, “Whoa. This is like an invasion of my privacy.” I didn’t know how the internet worked with keywords and Google and stuff like that, but apparently I had been writing content that was related to keywords that people were searching for related to this exam.

So, they found me, they were using my notes. I later enabled comments and people were commenting and asking questions and I would help them out. I just became this authority, this head figure in this niche, the LEED green building exam niche.

I wasn’t an expert, I didn’t think I was an expert, I still had to look up stuff all the time to give people the correct answer. But, I knew more than they did and because of that I think they trusted me. That really helped as I started to build my website and actually take it a step further.

This was after I actually passed the exam, I took it a step further and made sure that all the content on there was perfect for people who were studying for the test, because I knew exactly how hard it was. I knew the lack of resources that were available for the test at the time, so I wanted to be that resource and help people out.
That’s exactly what I did. Right before I got laid off I was helping tons and tons of people pass the exam for totally free and I never planned on making money from this website at all. Until I got laid off, then I was like, “I guess I’ll do something online. All these people I’ve heard about are making money online.”

“Let’s see if I can do anything with this blog I have. I know I have traffic and I heard that if you have traffic you can do things with it to make money.” So, naturally the first thing I did was put Adsense on my blog, a little link text and little banner ads. I think the first month after that I had made 35 to 40 dollars.

I was blown away, 40 dollars for doing nothing basically. All I did was put some code on my website and let it run and I had 40 dollars in my pocket. That just seemed amazing to me. Unfortunately, at that time that wasn’t even enough to fill a tank of gas. I was in Irvine, California at the time.

Mark Mason: Right, especially not in California.

Pat Flynn: During summer it was like five dollars a gallon. So, from there I did more research. I asked a ton of questions from different gurus, I joined Internet Business Mastery Academy, just trying to figure out everything that I could do to make more money online, because I knew it was possible, I had 40 dollars and I wanted it to be more.

So, what I did from there was I sold private advertising on my website, little 125x125 pixel ads on my sidebar of my blog. My first deal was for 50 dollars for the first month. That was amazing too. So, I had the 50 dollars from this one company for one ad and 40 dollars coming in from Adsense, so I had almost 100 dollars. That was pretty amazing to me as well.

Then from there I added more private advertising, but still it wasn’t enough for me to sustain a living. I was getting married in just a few months and I had to figure out something to do. So, what I did was I gave myself an ultimatum.

I said, “Pat, you have three months to actually make this into a sustainable business. If you don’t then you’re going to go look for another job.”

Mark Mason: Three whole months? Wow.

Pat Flynn: Three whole months, I didn’t know if that was too long or too short, I just gave myself a time and wanted to make sure I got it done in that time.
So, from there I had read about people creating their own products and I learned about ebooks and how to write them. I created a study guide for the LEED exam, totally elecrtronic, I wrote it in Microsoft Word and it was just a PDF.

That took about a month and a half, so I was half way through the time and I was really scared. I didn’t know what to expect. I would have been happy to sell one copy. Well, the first month I launched that ebook on my website, my existing blog, I made 8,000 dollars in the first month.

That was more money than I’d ever seen in two or three months of work at my normal job, way more than that. That just blew my mind. I knew it was possible, so I took it a step further and I created an audio guide to go along with it.

Again, these are just tips and tricks from internet marketing friends that told me, “You should do this. Check out this guy who did this.” So, I’m just following people’s examples. I created an audio guide to go along with the ebook, so I had two products, an ebook and an audio guide.

I sold them together for a discount price. After I launched the audio guide, that month I think I made 20,000 dollars and I peeked in March of 2009 with making 30,000 dollars in one single month just from one product, one study guide. 30,000 dollars, I couldn’t believe it, I pinched myself.

I still pinch myself because I can’t believe it happened. But, now that I’m into internet marketing and in business I know exactly why that happened and that’s why I created the Smart Passive Income blog, because I want to show people that it is possible to make money online without having to tell people how to make money online.
I’m sure most of your listeners have never heard of the LEED exam before, it’s such a small tiny little niche in the corner of the world, but just selling an ebook for it gave me half my salary working as an architect in one month.

Mark Mason: I work at a company in my day job that has a LEED certified building and I had never heard of LEED before, so there you go. It’s a pretty obscure niche to be making 30,000 dollars in one month.

That’s just an amazing story and I remember it like it was yesterday, because I was there. All of this was happening inside the Academy essentially. It’s just shocking.

Pat Flynn: Lots of credit goes to the Academy. They helped me out a lot, you helped me out, and Sterling and Jay and everyone else in there. There’s a lot of people in the Academy too who also make a good living not talking about making money online.

Mark Mason: Yes.

Pat Flynn: Shawn Newnann I think he has a site where he teaches people how to speak Indonesian. There’s a guy who has a site that teaches people how to play the guitar and they’re making a killing too.

Mark Mason: Yes. With great products that help people at a fair price. They do this thing that my friend Nicole Dean always says, they make the internet a better place and they help other people profitably. That’s another way I like to say that.

Pat Flynn: I love that.

Mark Mason: That’s such a great thing. But, you didn’t stop there. The Smart Passive Income blog is one of the top blogs that I recommend people go read. I recommend all my listeners go over there, sign up for your list and download your excellent resource on ebook creation.
That’s very good, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to mention that to you. That’s outstanding.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate that. I just wanted to tell people exactly how I created the ebook that had generated all that income, so I laid it out on the line right there.

Mark Mason: If there are people listening to this that want to know how to do that, that resource is just outstanding to get a real perspective on exactly what it takes.
You didn’t stop there, right? You’ve now launched this other business where you’re creating sometimes it’s like five or six iPhone applications in a month. Is that right?

Pat Flynn: Yes, that’s right. I don’t do it myself, I don’t program, I don’t even know where to start with programming iPhone apps. In case you’re wondering how it all works, my buddy and I just come up with ideas and we outsource them to people who are good at creating iPhone apps.

My business partner knows how to program, but we don’t choose to do it, because there’s people out there who are experts in iPhone programming only and we outsource our ideas to multiple programmers at the same time to act like there are four or five of us that are working on it at the same time.

We can get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time, the quality of the products are much better than we could ever do, and we’re doing maybe four or five iPhone apps a month and that market has just taken off. We’re doing pretty good with it, so it’s a lot of fun.

Mark Mason: It’s amazing. Did I see that you have a breathalyzer application?

Pat Flynn: Yes. That one just came out. For those of you who don’t know, my iPhone app company is LOLer Apps, which stands for Laugh Out Louder Apps, and they’re all gag apps. I’m sure you’ve heard of iFart by Joel Comm.

Mark Mason: Yes, by Joel Comm, right.

Pat Flynn: That thing made on Christmas Day I think it was 2008 he earned over 25,000 dollars in a single day.

Mark Mason: A dollar at a time, right?

Pat Flynn: A dollar at a time. He has other apps and there’s other people. I think there’s an app called Doodle Jump right now that was done by two independent developers. They just cleared the 3.5 million dollar mark.

Mark Mason: Yes. The Words with Friends guys are from here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: Really?

Mark Mason: Yes, they live right here in Dallas. I haven’t met them, but they live in one of the suburbs here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: I’ve got to talk to those guys.

Mark Mason: Absolutely. I’ll try to set it up for you.

Pat Flynn: I was going to say because my wife got kind of mad at me because I played that game for too long.

Mark Mason: So, that’s just been another successful thing for you. Do you do anything special to promote an iPhone app?

Pat Flynn: A few things. We run what’s called AdMob Ads, it’s kind of like Adsense for iPhone.

Mark Mason: I see.

Pat Flynn: You can do both ends of it. You can create ads to click over to new applications or you can put code into your existing application for ads to automatically generate and show there and you get paid per click.

So, we have a number of free apps that have AdMob Ads running, kind of like Adsense. Whenever we come out with a new app usually with a paid app we’ll pay for advertising, which is equivalent to doing Adwords.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: So, we do that. We do a little bit of article marketing and going out to different review blogs.

What’s been really helpful is we’ve noticed with a lot of other iPhone app developers, especially ones who have multiple iPhone apps, on each of their applications they have a “more apps” button, so people can click on the “more apps” button and see the other apps that are available. That’s been helping out tremendously.

Mark Mason: Right. I’ve seen that and I buy those other apps, because I’m already invested in what I know is a good app, so I’m expecting that those same developers are also going to deliver something of a similar quality on their other apps.
Pat Flynn: Exactly.

Mark Mason: So, that works really well. That’s really smart. Well, that’s amazing. I hope everyone who is listening to this is convinced that it is possible to make money on the internet without teaching people how to make money on the internet. It’s important that that point is clear.

For people that are starting out on the internet, a lot of my listeners are trying to get started, they have a 9:00 to 5:00 job, they’re trying to get things going or they’ve lost their job and they’re trying to get things going, so what I ask every guest is…

Can you tell me the three things that you wish you had known when you started or the three pieces of advice that you would give someone who is starting out about internet business? Three things that somebody really needs to know, either technical things or technique things or mindset things or whatever you think is important.
If you could only pick three things what would they be?

Pat Flynn: Sure, that’s an excellent question. I might have to take that question for my own podcast.

Mark Mason: And you’re welcome to do that. As long as I get 100 dollars on every download you can use it.

Pat Flynn: Okay, for sure. Three things. The first thing I really wish I knew was that it was really possible to create a successful business online. I think not believing in it slowed me down at first.

Although it may seem like things happened pretty rapidly for me, I do know that I could have done things a lot earlier. Maybe before I even got laid off I could have started my internet business, I didn’t have to wait for that to happen in order for me to do it.

Not believing in it slowed me down. You have your doubts and you’re scared and because of that you don’t take the action that’s required for you to see the results. It’s huge. You have to take leaps of faith almost.

Although you can do research and try and make sure that you’re taking the right steps, you’re eventually going to have to take a leap and you’re going to have to take bold actions in order to make things happen. Just stepping out of your comfort zone, that’s a huge thing.

Tim Ferris in 4 Hour Workweek, I remember specifically this one exercise that he has. After each chapter he has different exercises to help you with the mindset of being a successful entrepreneur.

One of the things he suggests you should do is to go to a crowded area like a mall or just in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere on a busy street and just lay down and look up and just not worry about what everyone else is thinking, because it’s training you to step out of your comfort zone and do things that you might not normally do.

That’s kind of what it takes in order to be successful online. You’ve just got to do it. My best teacher for everything I know, although I talk about Internet Business Mastery and I learned so much from them and from you and everyone else, all my mentors online, my best teacher is experience and just doing things. I can’t stress that enough.

Mark Mason: Yes. You miss every shot that you don’t take. Right.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. It’s like in golf when you stroke a putt and you don’t even reach the hole. Well, you didn’t even give yourself a chance to sink it.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, your advice to everyone listening is to rush out to their local shopping mall and lay down?

Pat Flynn: Yes. Well, no. Just understand that you’re going to have to things that you might not be comfortable with. You’re going to have to take risks. You won’t see the rewards until you take action.

Mark Mason: Okay. Very good. So, thing number one is take action, accept the risk, don’t worry about failure. What’s thing number two?

Pat Flynn: Number two is all of my success has come from helping others first. Before when I was trying to make money off of Adsense and stuff those ads didn’t really do much for the reader of my blog. I was trying to make money for myself, just getting people to click on the site.

What really skyrocketed my income was providing a product, the ebook or the audio guide that I created, that was really helpful. Because that was really helpful and people appreciated that they were happy to pay for it, happy to recommend it to their friends and their coworkers.

I say this all the time. Karma online totally exists. I don’t know if it’s just like a spiritual thing or if it’s actually technical and Butterfly Effect type of stuff, but it really exists. If you help people, like you were saying the Nicole Dean quote from earlier.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: That was just an amazing quote that sums it all up. Making the internet a better place profitably. That’s the other thing is just understanding that your first priority should be helping others and as a side effect you will make money doing that.

Mark Mason: Yes. The quote that I shared with you before, but that I learned actually when I was selling knives door to door, which is a story we’ll have to get into on another podcast.

Pat Flynn: It’s not Cutco is it?

Mark Mason: Actually, yes.

Pat Flynn: Okay, yes, we can talk about that later.

Mark Mason: We’ll have to. I did some sales training with Zig Ziglar and what Zig says is that you can get everything that you want in life by helping other people get what they want.
Pat Flynn: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: I really believe that. That’s what I do in my day job and it’s what I do on MasonWorld.com and I know it’s what you do on Smart Passive Income, because that blog rocks.

Pat Flynn: Thanks.

Mark Mason: People should pause this recording and go over to your website and check it out. It’s just really fantastic.
So, I got thing two. Thing two is help other people first. I like it. What’s thing three?

Pat Flynn: Number three is, and this was hard for me because I’m a control freak, I like to make sure that things are happening and that I’m doing them the right way, the way that they should be done or the way that I want them to be done, but the truth is you don’t have to do everything on your own.

Actually, you shouldn’t do everything on your own. We’re good at certain things and we’re not good at certain things. For those things that we’re not good at we should definitely find those people to fill those gaps, people who are good at those things that we’re not good at to take care of it for us.

They’ll be happy they’re doing things they want to do and then you’ll be happy because you’re not doing things and you can spend time doing what you enjoy or doing what you’re good at. In other words, I don’t want to blatantly say “outsource it,” but that’s kind of what it is.

It’s understanding what your strengths are and focusing on your strengths and not focusing on things that you shouldn’t be focusing on. For instance, when I first started that blog to help me pass the exam I didn’t know anything about WordPress or hosting or anything like that. It took me a month to set it up the way I wanted to. Literally, a month.

Mark Mason: I understand. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Pat Flynn: I really wish I just knew that there were people online who did this thing for a living who could do it in five minutes and I would pay them 10 dollars or whatever, or however much they’re charging.

On the flip side of that, I’m glad that I went through all that hardships and learning everything because now I understand how some of those things work. Although I would never take on those things as primary jobs I understand how they work.

So, if there’s something that needs a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done on my website, for example, I understand how to do that. I’m not totally lost. Even when I created SmartPassiveIncome.com, which was my follow up website to GreenExamAcademy.com, I knew the process of how to create the blog, but I just outsourced it, I paid someone to build it for me.

I think that helped out a lot, because I have a custom template that a lot of people like and it’s unique and I think that’s been helping with pushing the traffic and new subscribers and getting people excited about the website.

Mark Mason: Yes, your website is beautiful. Again, people should pause this recording and go check it out.

What you just said resonates with something I heard you say earlier with your iPhone apps business. Your partner is a programmer, he doesn’t program, but he can speak intelligently to programmers that you’re hiring and that’s really important.

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, I love that. I love those three tips, they’re excellent. I’ll give you the best example, I think, of that. You came out with, as you often do, one of these amazing in depth tutorials about Facebook Fan Page landing pages.

I read that and I understood what I wanted, but I didn’t really want to learn FBML, which is Facebook’s markup language. I looked at it for five minutes and I thought, “I’ve got something else to do.”

I sent the URL for your page to my developer and I said, “Go read Pat’s post and then make me one of those, please, and send me the bill.” I got something that was very nice.

Pat Flynn: I remember your landing page, it is quite nice.

Mark Mason: I had nothing to do with it other than being smart enough to send my developer to your website. To be honest with you, besides expressing what I want I can’t add value to the landing page design process. No amount of me messing around with Photoshop is going to get a good result.

I just don’t have that skill, so that’s just wasting everybody’s time for me to work on graphics and positioning some sign up box. That’s not what I do.
So, that’s great advice. People need to do that and they need to do it sooner rather than later. I know it’s very hard. The reason that resonates so much with me is because I tell people exactly the same thing.

They need to start small, but start outsourcing the stuff either that they don’t like to do because it’s sucking out their life force or that they’re not good at.

Pat Flynn: Right, exactly.

Mark Mason: This has been absolutely fantastic.
Pat Flynn: Mark, we’ve got to do it again sometime.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate you being here, I’d love to do it again. Let’s talk a little bit about how people can get a hold of you. The internet is a big place and there a few things that I recommend to my readers that directly compete, if you want to use that word, with what I do here, but it doesn’t bug me because, as we talked about before, I just want to help people.

Reading your blog will help people, so tell me a little bit about how people can find you on the internet.

Pat Flynn: Sure. When I’m not at a mall laying down face up you can find me on my blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com, that’s the hub, that’s where everything happens. I talk about everything that I do online, even my income reports down to the penny exactly where it all comes from.

If you just want to say “hi” or “hello” probably the best way to find me is on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/smartpassiveincome and we have a growing I guess you could say fan base there, I don’t know what they call them anymore.

There’s a great community there. If you even have a question there’s a lot of people there who will answer before I do. So, come say “hi” on Facebook if you have time.

Mark Mason: Very good. I really appreciate your time. I really encourage people if they have any interest at all to go to your website and download your ebook on ebooks, it’s really a fantastic read. Great job.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

Mark Mason: Okay, sir, thank you very much. I wish you all the best and I will be in touch.

Pat Flynn: All right. Let’s do this again soon.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Bye.

That wraps it up for this episode 11 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode where we have another interview with a guy that’s killing it online without selling stuff that teaches people how to make money online. Until then, we’ll see you soon. Thanks.

My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.
If you really liked this podcast there’s two great things you need to do. Thing number one, go on over to MasonWorld.com and sign up for the Mason World Internet Marketing Newsletter. I send out all kinds of information to that newsletter that goes along really great with the podcast and you’ll learn about new podcast episodes there.

The second thing you need to do is go to iTunes and Apple.com/itunes and find the Mason World Internet Marketing Podcast and leave us a positive review. We love that and it helps us tremendously rank in the iTunes media library. So, go on over to iTunes and give us a great review and two thumbs up. Thanks!

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Finally, last, but certainly not least, we have a fantastic interview for you today. We caught with Geoff Smith, music legend, author of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast jingle, and accomplished entrepreneur, and asked him to tell us all about his tips for successful client relationships when you’re outsourcing creative content.

All this and more today on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

It’s really great to be back on the mic. Hello, it’s Mark Mason and I’m really excited to be here to talk to you about internet marketing and all the stuff that’s been going on at MasonWorld.com.

I hope you’re digging that new jingle. I’ve got a great interview for you later in the episode with Geoff Smith, he’s the incredibly talented musician, really famous in podcast circles, that put that jingle together for me. Shout out to Geoff, it’s just really awesome. You guys are going to enjoy hearing from him later in the show.
Before we get to that I wanted to cover a couple of things. The first thing is this is episode nine of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. In the first eight episodes we spent a lot of time talking about all of the different business models that we decided to cover.

There are an infinite number of business models on the internet, but we decided to cover several of the fundamental business models to kind of help people get an idea of how you might make money online.

I got a couple of interesting pieces of feedback regarding that. One of the overwhelming feedbacks that I kept getting was, “Hey, Mark, keep going, we really like that.” That’s why I’m back here with episode nine.

We’re going to really kind of push this forward and talk about some of the business aspects that are fundamental that cut across all of the business models that we talked about by focusing down on affiliate marketing in the next several episodes.

Now, the reason we want to focus down on affiliate marketing is because the things you need to do as an affiliate marketer, build websites, drive traffic, identify products, convert traffic, test, land and convert, measure sales, all of these kind of things retain visitors, email marketing, all of these things that apply to affiliate marketing apply across all internet marketing.

So, if you can learn to be an affiliate marketer my claim is that you know enough about internet marketing to do a lot of different kinds of business models on the internet, so it’s a great place to start. In the next many episodes we’re going to be talking about the different fundamentals of affiliate marketing and really kind of teaching affiliate marketing right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Of course, this kind of content goes hand in hand with my work over at Niche Profit University, which is one of my other main activities right now. So, if you’re interested in really starting to get an in depth knowledge about affiliate marketing Niche Profit University is where you want to go.

Now, before we get into some of the details of affiliate marketing in the future episodes I’ve got three really special things planned for you. The first thing I’ve got for you is an interview with Geoff Smith. Now, I’m putting Geoff Smith in this episode because I’m rolling out the new jingle, you just heard it at the beginning of the podcast, and Geoff has some interesting things to say about internet marketing and about how to deal with clients and creative media relationships on the internet when you’re outsourcing your creative media. I wanted to get this to you, because it’s fresh and to celebrate the roll out of the new jingle.

In the next episode we’re going to answer one of the other feedbacks that I’ve gotten, or questions that I get all the time and that’s the following. “Hey, Mark. I see that people are making money on the internet teaching people how to make money on the internet. But, can you really make money on the internet helping people do something?”

So, to answer that question I’ve got an outstanding interview for you from Scott Tousignant, the guy over at FatLossQuickie.com who is going to tell you all about how he is successfully making money on the internet helping people change their lives, literally helping people change their lives.

Then the week after that I’ve got a really special interview for you that I’ve had in the can for a long time and that’s an interview with Sterling from InternetBusinessMastery.com. Sterling is going to talk to us a little bit about how to get our mind right with having a purpose for our internet business.

I think if you can really have a purpose for your internet business and you can really have an internet business that’s trying to help people you’ve really got the key elements of a successful internet business almost no matter what internet business model you decide to go after.

So, that’s the plan for this episode and the next two episodes. After that we’ll start getting into some of the fundamentals of affiliate marketing and we’ll carry that on for a long time. As I’ve described in some of the videos that you can find over at Niche Profit University, there are five basic pillars of affiliate marketing that we’re going to be covering on the podcast over the next coming months.

Those include identifying niches, creating a web presence, driving traffic, identifying products and converting sales, and retaining visitors. Those five main pillars of affiliate marketing are the kinds of things that we’re going to be talking about in the coming months on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

As I mentioned before, I got a lot of feedback from listeners over the last few months after thousands and thousands of downloads of previous episodes of the podcast asking me when the next episode was coming out. It really told me people were resonating with the kind of content that I was generating here on the podcast.

The other thing that really motivated me to get going again on the podcast is that I’ve been spending some time with Jason VanOrden, also from InternetBusinessMastery.com. As many of you know Jay just released a new course called Traffic Attraction Formula and I’ve been going through that course.
That’s a course all about the creating of magnetic media. That really got me fired up to bring back the podcast in its full glory. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing, that’s the reason for the new jingle, we’re just getting everything ship-shape over here so we can push through the end of the year.

That reminds me that the other point I wanted to mention to you today is a very important one. You may not feel great about everything that you’ve been able to accomplish so far this year. I hope you’ve had a fantastic year, but I’ve talked to several internet marketers, some of whom I really respect, who have told me they just felt like they haven’t gotten everything they wanted to get done accomplished yet this year.

They really feel like they’re off to a little bit of a slow start. To that I say, “That’s great.” Water under the bridge, it’s an opportunity to excel in the back half of the year. So, I really want to challenge you to think about that.

At the beginning of the year, or maybe even as recently as last month, you may have had some goals. You may be behind on those. It’s no problem. Tomorrow is another day. The best thing you can do for your business is to buckle down and get after it tomorrow. It’s a fresh day and whatever you can accomplish tomorrow will be moving you closer towards your goals at the end of the year.

I really want to challenge you to think through that and identify some goals for the end of the year, even if you have to tweak your original goals from earlier and push through to the end of the year really strong into Christmas.

Look, there’s one thing I know for sure about internet marketing. Most people that fail in internet marketing fail because they give up too soon. So, don’t be one of those people. Push through strong to the end of the year, work hard, and you’ll like the results.

That leads us to what is my favorite part of any podcast and that’s the interview. I’ve got a doozy for you today. You see, when I decided that I was going to revamp the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, one of the things I knew I wanted to do was get a really polished and professional front end for the podcast, the new jingle. I hope you love it, I absolutely love it, I’m thrilled with it. In order to do that I decided to go get the best in the industry for this sort of thing and without question that is Geoff Smith over at TheGeoffSmith.com.

Geoff is awesome. When I worked with him there were two things that I noticed right away that I knew would make a fantastic interview for you here on the podcast. Thing number one is Geoff has taken his passion, which is music, and turned it into this fantastic internet online and offline business opportunity that is just amazing.
It really just goes to show you that if you can combine passion with internet business you can really kill it. Geoff is providing podcast jingles for people, including very famous people, he runs in very famous circles in internet marketing, he’s got a ringtone business, which is a pure play internet business based on his passion in music, and he’s able to establish a fantastic web presence.

The media and stuff that he has on his website is truly shocking to drive his offline music business. It’s really a nice little trifecta there of internet business melded with passion that really comes through in the interview. That’s thing one.

Thing two in the interview is when I interacted with Geoff as a professional his ability to understand client requirements in an outsourcing situation was truly impressive. So, at the end of the interview I pin Geoff down and ask him, “Hey, what makes a good client? What can my listeners do to be better outsourcing clients so they can get more for their money and get better results when they outsource?”

Those two things make this a fantastic interview. I hope you enjoy it. Geoff is an awesome guy and I encourage you to check him out at TheGeoffSmith.com. Here’s Geoff.

Mark Mason: I am very excited to be on the line with actually The Geoff Smith. Now, Geoff is this multitalented amazing guy that I’ve recently come in contact with.
All of you today heard the fantastic new introduction to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, that’s all thanks to Geoff and his amazing talents. But, I’ve been blown away not just at Geoff’s musical talents, but his talents as an internet marketer and his talents as an entrepreneur.

So, I wanted to get Geoff on the phone and talk about some things that I thought would be relevant to internet marketing and the kind of things that we talk about here on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Geoff, how are you?

Geoff Smith: I’m great, Mark. It is late at night, it’s awesome. This is my time of night.

Mark Mason: I knew that about you from our previous interactions, which is something that I want to talk to the audience about here in a little bit, because I thought it was such a successful example of content outsourcing.

I just thought you run such an excellent business and I wanted to get some tips from you for the audience on that. But, before we get to that, I’ve been going through your video resumes and all of the stuff that you’ve done and I’m just shocked.

How in the world did you get started with all of this music business? It’s just amazing all the things you’ve been able to do.

Geoff Smith: Thanks. Where do I start? Well, my dad is a musician, so right off the bat I’ve got that going for me where music and being a musician is not frowned upon, but encouraged. So, we had a lot of cool records playing around the house. My dad used to play with The Temptations and Marvin Gaye, and he backed up a lot of bands.

So, he’s a huge influence in my life and basically I got into music because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and that’s all I really want to do. I act and I write and I do a bunch of stuff, but it’s all kind of based around music.

All the different gigs I’ve had up until now have been quite numerous. I started out doing theme parks. I grew up here in Nashville, so Opryland was one of my first jobs. That got me to Texas, which got me into playing in bands, which got me into piano bars, which got me into a steady gig where I could actually make music and afford rent, then pick up some gear and start dabbling in studio production.

Then through the course of just time, I guess, podcasting came around and I of course jumped on listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, because I knew who he was and also I just thought, “This is one thing I should kind of connect with.”

Immediately I was listening to him “outsource” content, which he’s got listeners who would be providing feedback. Whether it be emails or voice recordings and in my case I decided that my type of feedback should be a little jingle for a segment that he always talked about, which at the time happened to be a biodiesel car.

So, I wrote a little song and then he loved it, which blew me away because then I had the thumbs up from a guy who had a huge audience. Then I proceeded to whenever I had free time write more little segment pieces for that particular show. Pretty soon some of his listeners would say, “Could you get me in touch with that guy to do a segment piece for my show?”

I started doing them just for, “Give me an iTunes card,” or whatever. Then I realized, “Hey, this could be like a gig that I could tweak and make money at. Cool!” And at the same time become better in the studio.

So, a long story even longer, I kept that contact list going. I was fortunate enough to run into many other great internet names like Leo Lapport, who got me to do some music, and Kelly Lewis, and our great friend Paul Colligan, who is also just an visionary in internet marketing.

It really encouraged me and opened up the door to not only be a part of entertainment media content, but there’s a lot of marketing people and people who aren’t doing shows about entertainment, but also doing shows about marketing. This is kind of what you and I have found. You’ve got an amazing thing to tell and to teach people and the variety of content that you can have and the variety of media to do so, to catch people’s attention is highly important.

But, most people, from what I’ve seen, in this kind of podcast world they’re really good at talking and really good at maybe even marketing, but creative musical content I was fortunate enough to be kind of remembered. I found that volume, the more I kept doing more and more and people just kept saying my name, it seemed to be kind of a windfall.

I still have to work at. I’m rambling, I hope that’s okay.

Mark Mason: That’s okay.

Geoff Smith: So, I get up to this point where now I’m hashing how I want to do this type of thing, because through the many years that I’ve been doing this I’ve learned how to interact with clients. I would 99.999 percent has always been real easy, because I like to communicate.

One thing that you and I did that I do with all my clients now is really get as much information and as much personal interaction before I get started, so not only do I know what direction I need to be going in, but kind of the vibe of the person.

Our phone conversation probably directed more than the email questionnaire that I sent you just because we figured out each other’s kind of vibe. You could sort of feel how I am and I liked that, because I think one problem with the internet is that we’re hidden behind these little ones and zeros and little words and I like to hear the person’s voice.

Mark Mason: Yes. That’s kind of the magic of podcasting is that you get to break down some of those barriers. I guess in your business the client interaction and the jingles themselves, they really go a long way to tearing some of those barriers down. I really like that about it.

Geoff Smith: Well, I think I’ve been fortunate enough to make stuff that most people like, at least for this genre of jingles. I do have an original sort of career as well.

Mark Mason: You sing Motown too, right? Aren’t you doing a Motown gig right now?

Geoff Smith: I co-produced and engineered and wrote the title track to The Impressions Christmas Album that was released last year.

Mark Mason: That is so cool.

Geoff Smith: These are the guys from People Get Ready and Curtis Mayfield and those kind of things. I used to work at a studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is the studio out there where James Brown and Johnny Cash, a lot of people did definitive records out there, so it’s got a lot of history.

A lot of those old guys still go out to that studio to cut records and I happened to be an intern, actually not an intern, but an assistant engineer at the time and they said, “Hey ,Geoff. We’re going to do The Impressions record this week.”

Mark Mason: Wow.

Geoff Smith: It was all covers, it was them doing their really cool renditions of great Christmas songs, but there was nothing original. So, I wrote a song and they liked it and cut it, which is cool.

Mark Mason: Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty cool, dude.

Geoff Smith: I was talking to my great friend Neil Campbell and I said, “I’m just making jingles.” And he said, “You’re writing art no matter what it is.” So, I look at the creative process of writing a jingle versus writing a pop song for pop radio or a piece of background music as all the same thing.

The great thing about a jingle is that it gets to the point really quick. I think that’s a good thing about pop music, and I kind of like pop music. When I say pop music I mean anything from the Beatles to the Beastie Boys really. Stuff that just gets going and you’ve got to get to the hook really fast.

But, the interaction part I’ve learned a lot through the years and I think I’m hitting a little point where I really like where it’s at and I like the trickledown effect. I just did one literally a week before that you heard a rough mix of and immediately were like, “I’ve got to get in touch with this guy.”

Mark Mason: That’s right.

Geoff Smith: This sort of viral thing still keeps going.

Mark Mason: We’re going to try and keep that going here now. So, I want to encourage people to actually check out your website, because particularly your video resume on the biography page of your website is just shocking.

You’re not just running a music business, you’ve got some internet marketing stuff, you’ve got this ringtone business, you’re into a lot of stuff. That’s TheGeoffSmith.com.

Geoff Smith: Right. It’s TheGeoffSmith.com. I also registed the one with the J just in case people spell it wrong.

You mentioned the Ringtone Feeder business. That has been quite an amazing ride and still is. It’s become one of my major kind of outlets as well.

I have a really good, he’s my business partner now, but a guy who had heard my jingles on This Week in Tech or Geek Brief or Daily Source Code and said, “Hey, you could make ringtones. Why don’t we work together and I could help you with backend things?”

So, what we came up with was a unique way to do ringtones. There’s a million ringtones. A) the unique thing, part of it is the delivery, because you sign up to get ringtones every week and it’s 1.98 a month.

Mark Mason: And they’re delivered directly to your iTunes via RSS, right? Then they just show up on my phone.

Geoff Smith: Right. Yes, they will. We’ve definitely been focusing on the iPhone at the moment. We have partnered now with Verizon now for some other things, but the iPhone market was really what inspired me, because the amazing backend of how iTunes and RSS all this stuff works.

It’s basically a premium podcast in a way. You sign up and stuff downloads right to iTunes, and because it comes already completely created in the ringtone format it immediately syncs to your ringtone folder. You just plug in your iPhone and you’ve got ringtones.

It’s neat, it’s simple, and people like it. I have no idea what people like half the time. Sometimes I have no idea if people are going to like stuff. So, it’s my kind of take on a ringtone. It’s not like chopped up pieces of pop songs or dirty sound effects.

What you get each week once you sign up you get a dozen or so that are the most recent and then you start getting new ones every week. One of them is like a rock song, or whatever genre I do that week, and the other one is more of a traditional instrumental ringtone for people who might be embarrassed to hear a loud rapper saying, “Pick up your phone,” or me doing a Beatles type of thing.

Then the other one is something a little bit more traditional, very Apple-y. I tried to kind of make creative hip kind of sounds. I think I’ve got a really neat catalog. I think it’s the best deal to get it from subscribing to our feed. You can also buy one ringtone off of iTunes.

Mark Mason: I noticed you had a 25 pack now. I looked at a bunch of those ringtones, I thought they were really cool. I thought it was very interesting the way you’ve also got a video component and you’ve actually added a bunch of production value into the videos.

I love the French one, and the Beatles ones are awesome. I was just shocked by all this stuff that you’re doing. It’s really neat.

Geoff Smith: I know my family is just wondering how much time I can take away, but I manage to fit it all in. But, yes, those videos are so when I make a ringtone every week as part of the marketing kind of example instead of just letting people listen to it I make a music video to the ringtone.

So, when you go to the website you immediately see the latest updated video of the ringtone and sort of following in that little video is sort of how to subscribe, or how to sign up, or how to get it and any other pertinent information that we want to deliver that week.

We were holding quite a high ranking in iTunes for a long time on that thing. That actually is almost more fun than making a ringtone, because I get to put costumes on, I get to animate. Speaking of outsourcing, I don’t do all of that animating that’s in that video.

I have a partner, a guy who you’ve probably seen his work all over the place, he’s done a lot of pretty high tech podcast intros. He’s my go-to animation guy. When I’m doing a jingle for a client who also wants to have a video opener I basically work with him.

Mark Mason: That’s awesome.

Geoff Smith: I’m doing a mew thing now for a company in England and I’m the music portion and I’m going to have him do a 10 second video intro and then we kind of piece it all together, and then I finally mix it down in my little studio here. I’m doing probably too much stuff.

Mark Mason: But, that’s the greatness of genius. Let me bring you back around a little bit, because now that my listeners have a great idea of just all the stuff you’re into I was wondering if we could close out with a few tips.

You’ve got so much experience with dealing with clients on the content creation side and my listeners are often outsourcing to content creators or other artistic people, whether it’s graphics or audio. I was wondering if you had just a couple of tips you could leave people with.

What makes the best client? If I want to be really effective as one of your clients what are a couple of things that I can do to sort of get the most for my money when I’m outsourcing creative work?

Geoff Smith: I think one of the first things, and it’s probably one of the first questions that I ask people, and that’s, “How did you hear about me?”
Then sort of building off of that question is maybe I would hope that my client would have done a little homework to look at or listen to some of my other work to kind of get an idea about me, because I may not be the best Bulgarian folk singer they want.

Not that I’m stereotyped as this pop jingle guy, but that is a good chunk of what people know me for is the sort of catchy commercial kind of song thing or the kind of snappy production type of things. So, I would hope that would save a lot of time, and I do the same thing.

When someone has agreed to work with me I want to go and check out what they’re doing, because I don’t want to waste their time either. So, when you and I started talking I went and listened to the links that you gave me.

I think the more information the better. You can’t give enough information to me and I hope that I can have enough background information on my website for you to figure out what you may want from me.

So, for people to say, “Hey, just do whatever, do your magic.” That’s cool too, because then it’s a lot of freedom. Hopefully their idea of my magic is the same idea as mine.

Mark Mason: Right. It sounds like the two keys that you’re pointing out there though is if you want to be a good client you should do the due diligence to make sure you’re working with the right person. Then you should do the guy you’re hiring the courtesy of giving them enough information to get it right the first time.

Geoff Smith: Yes. That’s really it. The cool thing is that even the people who aren’t musically inclined and they have no idea what they want, I just recently in the last year and a half to two years started sort of a phone conversation with my clients, it used to just be all the web and I think most of the time that’s all I really need.

What I find with a lot of people who when I say, “What’s your favorite type of music?” They say, “Well, I’m not really into music.” Most people are, but there are a lot of people who are just like, “I have no idea.” I try to talk through them and sort of give them examples of, “Listen to this. Is that kind of where you’re going.” And then yes or no.

I think I can cover a good particular genre. For example, the one I did right before you was definitely much more of a upbeat younger more modern rock kind of sound, and you definitely liked but you said, “I would prefer more of a acoustic contemporary rock thing of sort of our age,” which is the late 30’s or whatever.

Mark Mason: It’s cool to say it, because Lynn Terry is a friend of mine and she is launching her new podcast. We’re definitely encouraging my listeners to check out Lynn Terry. I’ve had her on the show before and everybody who wants to hear another Geoff Smith intro needs to go listen to that podcast, because you’re right, that one is completely different and it kills too. It’s just fantastic as well, so kudos to you on both of those.

Geoff Smith: Well, thanks. I can’t really think of too much. I’ve been so blessed to have people that are just really cool to work with. I think a lot of it has to be with this community of new media we kind of sort of already know each other a little bit.

Mark Mason: Right.

Geoff Smith: Just you mentioning a few people’s names, Paul Colligan, Lynn Terry, all these people that I know and then some of them I’ve actually already worked with before. It’s like, “cool.” We may not take too much of a conversation to get in the right head space together, because we’re all kind of in the same kind of “new media club.”

Mark Mason: Well, Geoff, I can’t thank you enough. I can’t tell you all the great feedback and reactions that I’ve already gotten off of the jingle, even before it’s released. You are incredibly talented and I admire not just your musical talent, which is clearly God given, but your business acumen is very impressive.
I can’t wait to work with you again and I want to encourage all my listeners if they’ve got audio needs you are the guy. Thank you so much.

Geoff Smith: Thanks so much.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the call. Remind everyone again how they can find you if they need you.

Geoff Smith: You can go to TheGeoffSmith.com, you can just click contact me and it will email me directly. You could tweet me, I’m at Twitter.com/GeoffSmith, I love tweeting. I’m on Facebook somewhere.

My website is sort of the stepping off point, so TheGeoffSmith.com, there’s an email address right on there and you can follow my tweets. I have a new album coming out that I just produced and head mastered.

I’m probably going to hit the road, I’m kind of planning a major city type of stop off, Dallas is one of them. So, as soon as I get some stuff ironed out in the fall I’ll be tweeting some actual live performance.

One other thing, I do a pretty regular Ustream show. I haven’t done it in about three months, but if you follow my tweets, if I’ve got a wild hair in my head a lot of times I just fire up Ustream.tv/GeoffSmith and I just sit in front of the camera and take requests from the crowd. It’s a fun little show.

So, follow my tweets, go to TheGeoffSmith.com and we’ll rock together.

Mark Mason: That is so awesome. Geoff Smith, thank you so much. It’s my distinct pleasure. I can’t wait to hook up with you in Dallas. I’m here and I’m looking forward to it. Thank you very much, sir. Have a great evening.

Geoff Smith: You too.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Bye.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. That about wraps it up for this episode. Remember, get back out there, reassess those goals for 2010 and recommit yourself to getting some stuff done by the end of the year.

My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.

If you really liked this podcast there’s two great things you need to do. Thing number one, go on over to MasonWorld.com and sign up for the Mason World Internet Marketing Newsletter. I send out all kinds of information to that newsletter that goes along really great with the podcast and you’ll learn about new podcast episodes there.

The second thing you need to do is go to iTunes and Apple.com/itunes and find the Mason World Internet Marketing Podcast and leave us a positive review. We love that and it helps us tremendously rank in the iTunes media library. So, go on over to iTunes and give us a great review and two thumbs up. Thanks!

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW009 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 8.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, and welcome back. My name is Mark Mason of MasonWorld.com and you’re listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you’re having a fantastic day.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been on the mic, I have been incredibly busy. On November 21^st, I had my fourth child, Morgan. She is absolutely beautiful and she completely blew the wheels off of my podcasting schedule. That’s my excuse anyway.

Actually, when I first started podcasting I talked to the zen guru master of podcasting about my plans, Jason Van Orden. Jay told me, “Beware of pod-fade.” Sure enough, it’s hard to fight that pod-fade. You’ve got to really watch that. Whenever you have a podcast it’s really easy to let a week, and then two weeks, and then a month go by. Then all of a sudden you’re not podcasting anymore.

I’m back and I’m excited to be here. One of the main reasons that I’m back is I got a lot of email from people asking, “Where’s the podcast?” We’ve had thousands and thousands of downloads, lots of great feedback in iTunes, and people have really been encouraging me to bring the podcast back.

I really appreciate that. There is no better feeling than to get an email from someone telling you that they appreciate what you’re doing and that you’re helping them. That’s the point of this podcast, so I’m really glad to be back.

We’ll be talking about a lot of different things today, including a recap of the first seven episodes where we went over a bunch of different business models for internet marketing. I’m going to pull all that together for you today to kind of give you an idea of where we’re headed with this internet marketing adventure.

First, I wanted to tell you about a few things that I’ve been up to. Last week I was in Atlanta attending the Niche Affiliate Marketing System seminar. That was a fantastic seminar, unbelievable amount of people that I met. Of course, I met Lynn Terry face to face for the first time, which was a super huge highlight of my trip.

Nicole Dean was there, and I got to eat lunch with her. That was really exciting. I met Willie Crawford and stood side by side with him and talked to him about internet marketing. There were other really cool people there that I had never met before, like Mark Hendricks. I got to spend 15 minutes one on one with Mark. I talked to Kevin Riley, I even spoke Japanese to him for awhile.

I just really had a fantastic time. Kathleen Gage was there. It was an amazing list. I encourage you to go over and look at it. The cool thing about that for you is I’m going to try and get each and every one of those people on the podcast to do interviews. I made a lot of great contacts there and had a lot of fun at the Niche Affiliate Marketing System seminar. It was really a great time. David Perdew puts on a cool gig.

If you’re looking to get into internet marketing, that’s a really great place to go and meet some heavy hitters. It’s really a neat event, because the way it’s structured there’s no pitching and no sales from the back of the room, so there’s no real pressure to buy anything. None of the speakers are paid to be there, they’re all sort of volunteers. They’ll sit down with you.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with Bob the Teacher, Bob Jenkins, who is just an amazing speaker and was helping people left and right. Scott Tousignant from Fat Loss Quickie. There were just a ton of people there and I had a great time. Atlanta is a great city and it was just time and money well spent. So, I encourage you to get out to an event like that if you ever have the opportunity.

Well, I’ve been working on some big projects. Of course, you’ve probably see the facelift over at MasonWorld.com, we’ve got a tweaked blog design there. I have been working on a membership site that I’ll be announcing later this month.

I can’t quite announce it yet, but I’ll tell you that it’s going to be something I’m certainly very excited about. I think you might be excited about it too. So, that’s where a lot of my time has been going. I will tell you that it an internet marketing membership site and it has to do with the very kind of things that we’re talking about on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

With that I think what I’d like to do now is move into the feature segment and talk to you about how the six or seven business models that we’ve talked about over the last several episodes roll up into what I think is one ideal business model for internet marketing. Let’s get right to that.

It’s time for the feature segment.

Okay. Over the last several episodes we’ve been talking about the various business models available to internet marketers. We certainly didn’t cover them all, but we went through two important works that are available to you. One is the great book by Yanik Silver, and that’s available to you at MasonWorld.com/silver.

Then an excellent white paper by Jimmy D. Brown, I just love Jimmy D. Brown. That’s at MasonWorld.com/10ways, where Jimmy describes 10 ways that you can make 10,000 dollars a month or more from internet marketing. He describes some valid business models in there.

We went through a lot of those, and basically what we talked about were things like affiliate marketing. That was one of the big things that we talked about. You’ll recall that’s where you match offers with buyers and you get essentially what amounts to commissions on sales.

We talked about information products, which is an outstanding business model on the internet. It’s a way you can take things that you know, topics that you’re an expert in and sell them with very low overhead and very high return on investment.

We talked a little bit about eBay. We talked about membership sites. We talked about ecommerce. In the last episode we talked about blogging. Those were all the major internet marketing business models that we chose to cover. There are others that we won’t cover here. These are the ones that I feel are important.

Here in episode eight I want to talk to you about a business model that I think is approachable by everyone listening to this podcast. That is a niche affiliate marketing business model that combines all of the above business models, with the possible exception of eBay. We’ll have to talk about that a little bit. It combines blogging, ecommerce websites, it potentially can combine membership sites and information products, and it certainly takes advantage of affiliate marketing.

In this last business model let me describe to you what I think is really the ideal business model, particularly for beginning marketers that are coming into internet marketing, because it gives you an opportunity to showcase whatever skills you do have that you can bring to bear and develop a lot of new skills.

Imagine if you will, entering the internet marketing space, you’ve got the goal of making money online. What you want to do is figure out a way to do business on the internet. As Jimmy D. Brown says, “If you’re doing business on the internet you really only need two things. You need an offer and you need buyers.”

So, what your questions is would be how are you going to get buyers hooked up with offers. I submit to you that one of the best ways to do this is to establish a presence on the internet where you establish yourself as some sort of authority that has a following or is at least getting traffic from passive sources like Google. So, search engine traffic coming to your website, reading value added content that you’re adding to that website on a regular basis, possibly recommending products for which you have affiliate links.

If you’re truly an expert in the area, which I’m going to encourage you to pick an area that you either already are an expert in or you want to be an expert in, then in this website you can not only make product recommendations, but you can start to understand the market, start to understand what’s missing in the market and offer information products.

When you’ve got a loyal readership you can start to collect their email addresses and market to that loyal readership. You can market via email and you can make affiliate offers or offer your own products. If you get enough interest in your website you can certainly think of ways to offer a membership site where you get recurring commissions for members.

All of these things can be pulled together into one cohesive internet marketing model that is around one internet presence that you develop around one website. This website could be something that’s really easy to build on a platform like WordPress and is something that you can literally have up and running in a very short period of time.

Let me pause here and make sure I give a little credit where credit is due. I have been working on affiliate marketing and niche marketing for quite some time, and I didn’t invest any of this. As a matter of fact, I’ve learned these concepts from some of the best marketers in the industry.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Jason Van Orden and Jeremy Frandsen over at Internet Business Mastery. I’ve spent time following Andrew Hansen and his affiliate marketing techniques. In recent memory I have spent a ton of time over with Lynn Terry, who is a super affiliate over at LearningWithLynn.com.

I’ve integrated all of this into my own ideas about how internet business ought to be done, but all of these people deserve a lot of credit for pioneering these areas in their field. I encourage you to follow all of them. They’re all absolutely fantastic marketers and there are more where that came from. A lot of the traffic techniques that I know I learned from Josh Spaulding.

It’s important to me that you understand that some of the things I’m going to share with you throughout this podcast, in fact most of them, are not things that I invented myself, but rather they’re things that I learned from really capable internet marketers.

There’s an important lesson there. There is no reason for you reinvent the wheel either. I’ve got my own particular spin, things that I’ll describe for you that work for me. You should learn from someone who you trust and who you feel like knows what the heck they’re talking about.

That’s it for this episode in the feature segment. Basically, what we’re talking about now is integrating these business models that we learned over the last seven episodes. I’m going to be talking about some techniques to do that over the next few episodes trying to give you an idea about you can start your online business by building a web presence, making affiliate offers, developing information products, and doing marketing.

I’m going to give you a little hint, and that is my project that I’ve been working on aggressively is related to this area. That’s all I’m going to say about that right now.

Having said all that, I’ve got a really special treat for you. I told you that I’ve learned a lot from a lot of internet marketers and I’m about to introduce you to one that I have learned ton from. She is a power house. She describes herself as the mostly-sane internet marketer.

Of course, I’m talking about Nicole Dean. Nicole Dean has been the super affiliate manager for Jimmy D. Brown, she is an affiliate in her own right, she creates very high quality information products, she’s a great internet marketing coach and I’ve taken advantage of her services on numerous occasions. She’s really just wonderful. I’m very excited to present Nicole Dean as our guest interview for today.

And now the feature interview.

Mark Mason: Hi. This is Mark from MasonWorld.com and I am just thrilled, tickled pink to have Nicole Dean on the line today. Nicole has agreed to join us in our quest to find the three most important things that you need to know before you start your business on the internet and start trying to make money online.

Nicole is a marketer with an enormous amount of experience. She’s got multiple different streams of internet income working. She’s probably best known lately for her work as the affiliate manager for Jimmy D. Brown, but she’s also got her own products, she’s got her own websites, she’s got a fantastic blog over at NicoleontheNet.com. I just couldn’t be happier to have her today. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole Dean: I’m doing great. I don’t know that I’ve ever tickled someone pink.

Mark Mason: Well, I think you probably know this, because we talk some over Twitter, but I have pink on the brain because I have actually a little baby girl coming probably this week. So, I’ve got a lot of pink thoughts these days.

Nicole Dean: I’m so excited for you. Do you have names picked out?

Mark Mason: I do have names picked out, but my wife and I have this tradition that we don’t let people know the name until the baby arrives and is safely in our arms, then we announce the name to the family that’s present there. So, the name will be announced over Twitter sometime after that.

Nicole Dean: How exciting. That’s best, because otherwise you get opinions and you don’t always need opinions.

Mark Mason: That’s right. That’s something I definitely don’t need an opinion on, because my wife has made up her mind.

Nicole Dean: How exciting.

Mark Mason: We’re very excited and blessed. Thank you for being on the phone today. I guess you know the story. I’ve been scouring the globe talking to successful internet marketers about really the three most important things that they want people to know or that they would tell someone who was trying to get started that would help them be successful.

I know, Nicole, you particularly could probably come up with a list of 100 things. It’s probably very difficult for you to pick three, but I was hoping that you could at least identify three of the most important things, if not the very top three that you think people really need to know about when they’re trying to get started making money online.

Nicole Dean: This is really difficult, you know that, Mark.

Mark Mason: You know what though? I’ve known you in one capacity or another for a long time and you’re really talented, so I know you’re up to the challenge.

Nicole Dean: Okay. Narrowing it down to three. I think if I was talking to myself back then and trying to give myself the advice that you are looking for I think the most important thing I would tell myself is to stop over thinking and just do.

That’s something that I see as a chronic problem with internet marketers, especially beginners. They’re looking for the one thing to make money online, but there are endless number of things that make money online. It all comes at you at warp speed and it’s, “Should I do this? Will this make money?” Well, yes that can make money. “Will this make money?” Well, yeah that could make money too.

If you’re still looking and over thinking and over analyzing everything a year from now and you haven’t chosen a path and taken action, then you will still be at zero dollars a year from now. That is not acceptable.

When I work with my coaching clients they keep saying, “Should I do this or should I do this?” Yes, pick one and do it. We’re not going to sit and talk about this for the next six months. Which one of these excites you the most? They both have tremendous potential, pick one and commit and do it.

Just to understand that a decision that you make now does not need to be the same thing that you’re doing a year from now, but you have to at least make the decision and throw something out there. Do you know what I called my websites when I first started? I called them petri dishes.

Mark Mason: Petri dishes?

Nicole Dean: Petri dishes, because a petri dish in science class you put something in it and see if it grows. Other people call them seeds, they’re much classier than I am, but I would say, “Let’s throw this petri dish out there and see if some fungus grows in it or not.”

If it did, great, then my experiment worked. If it didn’t, great, then I figured out that doesn’t work so well. Why? Should I invest more time into it to make it work or is it just a dud? Does it need to go in the sunshine and get some more attention? What does it need? Or is it just a dud and it just needs to be shuffled off so I can focus on these other things.

That’s not to say that you should throw up 100 different websites like I did, because that’s what you’ve got. You’ve got 100 websites to maintain and market, and that is another mistake that I made.

Mark Mason: Right, 100 unfinished projects.

Nicole Dean: They’re all finished, they’re all out there making some coin, but it’s still a nightmare. So, I’ve been in the process of selling off a lot of them. But, the biggest thing that I run into with my coaching clients is to stop over thinking. A confused mind always freezes up.

Mark Mason: It’s paralysis by analysis, right.

Nicole Dean: It is. I think it comes down to our basic psychology instincts that are fight or flight. You’ve got all this stuff coming at you and we run instead of fighting through it, we’re freezing and getting eaten by it.

So, it really comes down to just Adsense, does that work? Yeah, that works, and it works quite well in some capacities. Affiliate marketing, does that work? Yes, it works quite well. Creating your own info products? Yes, I get money from that. Getting clients? Yes, you can make a living from that too.

You’ve got to start somewhere and pick one thing and just take action on that one thing until it’s successful. Somebody brilliant coined the term FOCUS, follow one course until successful. So, that is something that I think people need to do and just to put their blinders on and pick one thing, do it until you’ve gotten success, and then you can always expand from there.

Mark Mason: That’s outstanding. Follow one course until successful. I’m writing that down, because I suffer from this. Part of it is people have good ideas and you get excited about your good ideas and it’s easy to get distracted.

I totally resonate with what you’re saying, and I think the listeners will too, particularly we’ve been covering in this podcast various monetization models and so people really very quickly are going to be at that point where they need to pick something or maybe two somethings that are closely related and move forward. So, that’s really good advice.

How about thing two?

Nicole Dean: Well, thing two is that while you’re doing that, while you’re choosing your business and while you’re growing your business you want to make sure, and I preach this all the time, because this another place where I totally bombed when I was building my business.

Mark Mason: I cannot imagine you totally bombed. Do you understand part of the magic is that, and I know you’ve talked about this yourself before, is that people who are listening to this call think, “It’s Nicole Dean, she’s perfect, she’s never made a mistake, she’s a wild overnight success.” They don’t see the years and years of failure. So, tell me about your total bomb.

Nicole Dean: Well, what I did is I planned my financial goals, but I didn’t plan my lifestyle goals at the same time. So, I ended up creating a job where I worked for myself instead of creating a business. I created a job and as Rich Schefren said I was working for a lunatic.

I love that. When he said that I saw him live and he said that and I just burst out. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s true. I created a job and my boss is a lunatic. Who else would do this job that I’ve created for myself working all of these hours, being miserable, being stressed out?”

My head was going to explode, because I had thought that I had to do everything. Learning about internet marketing I was like, “I have to do videos, I have to do podcasts, I have to write articles and submit them, I have to build a list, I have to do all these things.” I thought I had to do all of it and I didn’t understand that I could just pick what I was really good at and do those things, and I could kind of let the other stuff fade away for awhile.

Mark Mason: Right.

Nicole Dean: I was running and running and miserable. I practically glued myself to my swivel chair and I was miserable. My lifestyle goals were not in line with my financial goals at all. Yes, my income was increasing, but I believe it was not increasing as quickly as it would have if I was working less and was more refreshed and had my lifestyle goals in line with my financial goals building my business with those two things being in sync.

They were not in sync. My lifestyle goals are not to work myself to death and be miserable and stressed out and burst into tears because I’m so not happy. That was the point that I managed to get myself into and I was miserable. I wasn’t making as much money as I should, partially because I was stressed out and miserable and I didn’t have those two things in sync.

When I talk with my coaching clients it’s the same thing, “Yes, I understand you want to make six figures and that’s fantastic and we can do that, but let’s look at what you’re going to be doing in order to do that and make sure that earning that money and building the business that you’re headed down this path with. Let’s make sure that’s not going to kill you. We need to make sure that we’ve got this setup and we’ve got all the paths of income and plans and systems in place there too, so that as things are growing you’re not in a downward spiral like I was.”

Those two things really have to be in alignment. If you only want to work 3 hours a day, then your plans need to take that into account.

Mark Mason: Right. I’m very sensitive to that, because as you know, I continue to maintain my day job. So, I’m very sensitive to these issues about spending time efficiently, working on the right things, and not creating projects that cause more permanent work down the line. So, I think that’s excellent advice. You need to think in terms of these kind of things. You know, fundamentally imagine yourself when you are successful what do you want things to be like. Right?

Nicole Dean: Yes, exactly. With your beautiful new daughter coming you’re going to want to be spending time with her, not going through customer support emails or maintaining websites or being stuck on something that you could easily hand to someone else to fix for you.

You really need to plan properly. This isn’t another place to get stuck, but it is something to definitely keep in mind as you’re making plans. There are certain business models that I will never ever do just because they don’t fit with my lifestyle. There are certain other business models that fit perfectly with my lifestyle, so that’s what I choose to do.

I absolutely agree with what you said. I like to always look 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years out from today. When I wake up I try to visualize those and see what I want them to look like, because if I don’t then how I can get there from here?

Mark Mason: Excellent. I understand that, and I think everyone will benefit from that. That brings us to thing three. Tell me about your third thing on your list.

Nicole Dean: Oh, I’m debating between outsourcing and live events.

Mark Mason: I tell you what I’m going to do for you special, this is a one time offer. It’s not available anywhere else, so you’re going to have to decide if you’d like to act now I’m prepared to offer you two additional things for a total of four. But, the value of this offer, you might think this is going to cost you 497 dollars or maybe 297, but actually it’s free for you today, Nicole. You can have both.

Nicole Dean: All right. Then I will start with outsourcing.

Mark Mason: So, you’re sold on the two. I got you over the hump there, you’re going to go ahead and commit to that?

Nicole Dean: It’s an offer I can refuse.

Mark Mason: Very good. Let’s start with outsourcing.

Nicole Dean: Outsourcing is something that I put off too long, and most internet marketers put off too long, because they think they can’t afford it.

Mark Mason: Right.

Nicole Dean: What ends up happening is one of two things, and I teach a course at OutsourceWeekly.com about outsourcing, and I also have a website, Shelancers.com, which is a directory of people that you can outsource to.

Mark Mason: Shelancers sounds like a late night cable TV show. But, that’s not a late night TV show, it’s actually one of your outsourcing resources, right?

Nicole Dean: Yes, it is.

Mark Mason: Okay. Thanks for clearing that up.

Nicole Dean: With outsourcing, as I mentioned, I ended up creating a job for myself and I was working for a lunatic. What happens is one of two things. Either you struggle and struggle and can’t get over these road blocks, and outsourcing should begin then, should begin with when you run into your first road block, because if you cannot get that website up, you can’t get your list up, you’re stuck trying to get Amember installed, or whatever it is, you’re stuck and you can’t make money until you get past that road block.

That’s where you’d be amazed at how cheaply you can get people to do things for you. It’s amazing. I think people have this view of outsourcing that they think they have to invest way more than it really costs.

Mark Mason: Right.

Nicole Dean: There’s that first step. Either you wait too long to outsource while you’re struggling and you don’t think you can afford it, so you keep putting it off and you keep struggling and spinning your wheels trying to figure out everything yourself until you go crazy and either give up or the people around you are telling you this is never going to work. That builds upon that negativity and you keep procrastinating it longer.

When you go to someone and say, “How much is going to cost to fix this?” It may be 25 dollars. Seriously, it can be that cheap to get over this road block that you can be staring at for months.

The other hand, and what I ended up doing too, is I had created a job for myself and I was working for a lunatic, I was crazy, crazy, crazy. The more websites I built, the more money I made, the more customers I got, the more affiliates I got, the more joint ventures I got, the more work I was making for myself. I was punishing myself for my own success.

Mark Mason: Right.

Nicole Dean: Every month that I made more money I ended up more miserable. How unfair is that?

Mark Mason: It defeats the previous thing that you were talking about where you need to understand the lifestyle you want. One of the ways to get to that lifestyle, obviously, which is what you’re headed towards here is by outsourcing the things that you can outsource so that you can have the lifestyle that you want.

Nicole Dean: Exactly. So, as I said, the more I grew, the more work came from that. More spam comments, more emails, more customer issues, everything, more, more, more. Then I got into a problem where I was so busy fighting fires and managing everything that I didn’t have time to train someone to help me.

Then I was stuck and it became much more work for me than if I outsourced sooner. So, that was something that I put off way too long and I see that, again, being a chronic problem with internet marketers. They don’t think they can afford to outsource.

My argument is you can’t afford not to outsource, because either you’re going to be stuck spinning your wheels and that road block is going to be between you and the finished project, which can make you money, or you’re going to end up miserable and at a plateau not building the business that you’re trying to build, because you don’t have the help that you need.

That would be number three. Number four is just how incredibly important live events are. If there’s a seminar anywhere near, go to it, meet people. It’s not even about who’s presenting, the teachers, and the actual rooms, it’s about the networking after the sessions. It’s absolutely priceless.

I wish that I had gone to more events over the years, because every single time I go to an event, like a seminar or conference that’s related to internet marketing it drastically increases my income.

Mark Mason: Wow. So, you see a direct correlation between attendance at live events and your actual bottom line.

Nicole Dean: Yes. Without hesitation, yes.

Mark Mason: That’s very interesting. I’m excited to meet you for the first time at a live event in January.

Nicole Dean: Yes, I am too. I’m looking forward to that a lot.

Mark Mason: It’s going to be so much fun. Of course, we’re talking about NAMS, which I guess is Niche Affiliate Marketing Systems. I heard there are going to be some really heavy hitters there. I’m really excited to be part of that. You’ll be teaching, right?

Nicole Dean: Yes, I am. I’ll be in the advanced room, so I’m assuming you’ll be swinging in there for some sessions?

Mark Mason: I think you may see me in there a little bit. I’m excited about that. Jimmy’s going to be there, Lynn’s going to be there, so it’s going to be very exciting.

We’re talking about the top three or four things, you’re saying really that if you had to make a list of ten things that you wanted to communicate to somebody instead of making me pin you down to four, this is definitely in your top ten things that internet marketers should do is try to have face to face time with other internet marketers and attend live events and so forth. You think it’s that valuable.

Nicole Dean: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: That’s great.

Nicole Dean: You have to go there with the attitude of finding win-win situations, not there to hand out business cards and sell stuff. You go with the goal of communicating with other people and finding ways that you can help each other.

It absolutely, without question, without doubt has increased my income. I’m not even talking about speaking at them, I’m talking about just showing up.

Mark Mason: Right, I understand, from the networking piece of it alone. Neat.

Nicole Dean: Networking alone. Not even what you learn in the room, but that of course helps too. You get out of your regular routine so you just get ideas upon ideas, so it’s fantastic. The networking is where it’s at.

The NAMS event, David attracts fantastic, positive, wonderful people, and that’s why that event is so highly regarded. I’m absolutely honored that I get to be on the faculty there. I’m thrilled. I don’t get paid, heck I have to pay to get there, but I am absolutely honored and excited. I can’t wait.

Mark Mason: Excellent. I’m looking forward to that myself. So, those are four items, they’re excellent and fantastic, and are going to be incredibly high value. My listeners are going to be thrilled with those four items.

I have one more question for you. Any final thoughts and words of encouragement to people that are considering trying to move forward in their online business? What do you say to people that are trying to make this work? Is it possible, can it be done, what do you think?

Nicole Dean: Absolutely. It can absolutely be done. It’s a matter of focusing your energy and doing some marketing every day, and then constantly adjusting and evaluating what’s working and what’s not.

I look back at my website from 2004 and I just about throw up a little, they’re so bad. I’m not talking about design, I’m talking about overall effectiveness. It’s like its leaking money everywhere. If I stopped up that hole, if I moved that there I could make so much money from this website. What was I thinking?

That’s just a matter of learning. Then I go back in and I’m like, “I might as well do it.” I make the changes and then it increases my income.

Mark Mason: More likely now you make a list of the changes and hand them off to someone who you trust to make those changes for you. Right?

Nicole Dean: It depends. I kind of like dabbling in those too.

Mark Mason: You’re a reluctant outsourcer in some cases.

Nicole Dean: It’s not that I don’t trust other people, but I actually enjoy some of that.

Mark Mason: Sure. That’s probably the lifestyle design piece. I know people that are in this and every once in awhile they want to swing a little code. That’s what they want to do, it makes them happy. So, there’s no reason you can’t design your business to include things that keep you happy.

Nicole Dean: Exactly. I can’t record podcasts or write articles when I’m sipping wine, but I can adjust some web code.

Mark Mason: I understand that. I want to thank you for your time and I also want to be respectful of your time. Before we go, I get a lot of benefit from a couple of your resources and I was hoping that you could call them out, particularly your blog which I love. I’ll link to it in the show notes and we can talk about what’s on your blog.

Then a couple of your resources that I really like. One of them in particular, the Easy PLR resource. If you could talk a little bit about those two things real quick, because I think that would really benefit my listeners as well.

Nicole Dean: Of course, and thank you for asking. My blog is NicoleontheNet.com. On there I have my own podcast where I interview people that are successful online business owners and ask them questions about what kind of mistakes they’ve made, what they’ve had to overcome, what tools they use in their online business that they can’t live without, and basically some other questions about overall motivation, productivity, and getting out of our own way in order to get to success and get to earning our financial goals while meeting those lifestyle goals.

Mark Mason: I’ll just interrupt you and say that is one of my favorite podcasts. Some of those interviews are amazing and it’s an excellent companion to this podcast actually, which focuses a little bit more on the implementation and execution side. I highly recommend that to everyone who asks about it. I think it’s fantastic and I hope you just keep doing those forever.

Nicole Dean: Thank you, Mark. That was a whim that I came up with at a live event. Where did I meet most of my guests? At live events.

Mark Mason: There you go.

Nicole Dean: The other resource that you mentioned was Easy PLR. I started that website back in 2006, and we sell PLR articles there, which are basically, the easiest way I can explain it are drafts. You can purchase article drafts that you can use on your blog, on your website, in your ezine, or even in offline publications if you send out a newsletter to train people.

You can edit them, you can put your own name as the author, I definitely always encourage you to add your own thoughts, experiences and stories to them so that they become your own, but it’s a great shortcut for busy marketers. Pretty much all of my resources are geared towards busy marketers, because I think we all are.

Mark Mason: Right. I certainly am, and I use that resource. One of my favorite places to use that is if I’ve got a product that needs an autoresponder series, because you have some excellent ecourse products.

So, what I will do is exactly what you just described. I’ll go to EasyPLR.com, find what I’m looking for, download that, and then load it into the autoresponder, but as I’m loading it I edit it into my voice. I throw 30 percent of it away usually, because it’s not exactly aligned with what I’m trying to do, and I add my own stuff in.

It keeps me from being there staring at that blank screen and trying to decide how to start. I’ve got something I can work with. I’ve told you this before, but the quality is really high. That’s the reason I use your stuff, because the quality is so high.

Nicole Dean: Thank you. You also know that we limit it, so it’s not recycled all over the internet.

Mark Mason: That’s right. That’s another thing I like about it. I will say that one time I needed a copy of something that was sold out and I submitted a ticket to your ticket system and asked if I could buy an additional copy thinking maybe I could sneak one in. The person who answered the ticket said, “No, I’m sorry that’s sold out.”

Nicole Dean: That’s good. We’re very ethical. If I say we’re selling 75 copies, we’re selling 75 and not a single one more.

Mark Mason: I know Jimmy is that way too. When copy number or membership number 1,000 goes, he’s done. It’s not negotiable. I love that about him and I know you’re the same way.

Integrity is a really great point of differentiation. I always tell people if they want to differentiate themselves in the internet marketing space, the easiest place to do is transparency and integrity, because there’s so much other stuff out there that doesn’t meet that criteria. It’s an easy way to get head and shoulders above a bunch of the competition.

Nicole Dean: Exactly. How are people supposed to trust me unless I prove myself trustworthy?

Mark Mason: That’s right. Well, I appreciate your time, you are trustworthy, and I appreciate your time with your trustworthy comments today. I know my listeners really appreciate it too, so on behalf of them I want to say thank you. I’m really looking forward to talking to at NAMS and meeting you live and in person the first time in January.

Nicole Dean: I’ve got a hug with your name on it.

Mark Mason: Very good, I’ll look forward to that. I will bring baby pictures.

Nicole Dean: You better.

Mark Mason: Okay. I’m sure you’ll see some before that, but I’ll actually bring physical pictures. Can you still do that? Can you still get physical pictures or do you have to show them on your iPhone?

Nicole Dean: I prefer physical pictures.

Mark Mason: Okay, very good. I’ll bring you some physical pictures. You have a great day and thank you very much.

Nicole Dean: Thank you, Mark.

Mark Mason: Bye.

Okay. That does it for this episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m Mark Mason, hoping that you have a fantastic day.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

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MW008 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, and welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Mark Mason. It’s really great to talk to you again. I hope you’ve had a fantastic couple of weeks since the last time we spoke.

As usual, I’ve been crazy busy running my day job and playing with internet marketing late at night. That’s why we call it late night internet marketing, because I do it late at night and I really enjoy it.

This is the seventh episode, and in the first six episodes we’ve talked about the various methods for making money online. What we’re trying to do is set the foundation for building an internet business by first understanding the different ways that you can start an internet business. Of course, we don’t cover them all, but basically what we’re doing is we’re going through Yanik Silver’s outstanding book called Moonlighting on the Internet, and we’re talking about Jimmy Brown’s outstanding ebook, which is called 10 Ways to Make 10,000 Dollars a Month Online. Both of those are available on MasonWorld.com. The Silver book is available at MasonWorld.com/silver and the Jimmy Brown white paper is available at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

So, I’ve been working on a number of things over the last couple weeks. I’ve been getting some sites ready for Christmas, I’ve been participating in Lynn Terry’s outstanding forum, and doing some live case studies over there in the private area of her forum. You can find that over at MasonWorld.com/lynn. I’ve been reading up on all the stuff going on with the FTC.

The FTC has come down with some new regulations that have a significant impact, or could have a significant impact on affiliate marketers and bloggers. So, what I thought I’d do today is we’ll go ahead and we’ll cover as planned the next internet business model, and the topic for today of course will be blogging.

We’ll talk about how people make money online blogging, talk about that works into the other models. Instead of doing our normal interview with a guru, I wanted to spend some time in the second segment of the show talking about my opinions on this FTC thing, what it means, what it should mean to you, whether or not you need to worry about it based on my opinion.

I say that because it is my opinion. I’m not an attorney, I don’t work for the FTC, I’m not a government official, I’m not any kind of expert. I have spent some time reading the relatively plain language that the FTC has put out, and I think we can talk about it. I can tell you what I’m going to do on my various affiliate blogs over the next couple of months trying to bring them up to the standard that the FTC has set.

With that, if you’re ready let’s get into the feature segment and talk about making money blogging.

It’s time for the feature segment.

The interesting thing about blogging is that you can be famous without needing to have an agent or any other kind of traditional media support. That’s the really amazing thing. You can see examples of how blogging is starting to equalize the playing field. Once upon a time, media was in control of information and that’s just simply no longer the case.

Everybody is a reporter, everyone can start up a blog, and everyone can start writing about whatever they want to write about. The fact of the matter is if you are popular as a blogger, you can actually make money doing it. A lot of people wonder about this. How can you do that?

We’ll talk about it. A lot of it will involved things that we’ve talked about before, ways to monetize traffic, because after all in internet marketing what we’re trying to do is get traffic however we can get it, however we choose to get it, make that traffic take some action that we want them to take, and have that action be monetizable.

In the case of blogging, we want to create great content on a blog that people care about, get them to read it, and in general take some action that is profitable for us. There are lots of actions that they could possibly take. They could make a donation to support the ongoing maintenance of your blog, they could see an ad that someone paid for, they could click on an affiliate link. We talked about affiliate marketing a couple episodes ago.

The bottom line is we want to get traffic, we want to convert that traffic into some kind of monetizable return. What better way to create traffic than to get a loyal base of readers that care about what you have to say and turn to you to keep up with things.

Of course, the most famous of all the bloggers probably is Perez Hilton, everybody knows about Perez. I don’t actually read that blog, but I know about it because I’m in internet marketing. The most famous blog that I know about that I actually read would be blogs like Yaro Starak, who runs a fantastic blogging course, or Problogger, or Copyblogger.

These blogs have enormous numbers of readers. You can look at them and see how they’re monetized. They’re monetized by advertisements, they’re monetized by affiliate sales, and if you look at the latter two blogs, Problogger and Copyblogger, and Yaro’s blog as well, they’re also monetized by the sale of their own products, by referring people into their own products.

I actually think this is the best use for a blog. When we get to talking about how to use a blog in your business in future episodes, we’re going to be talking about a blog as a way to identify prospects for your other products. We really won’t talk too much about a blog in and of itself.

But, if you’re a prolific writer and you love to write, there’s a topic that you’re very passionate about, it is certainly possible for you to create a blog, start an online business around that blog, get traffic, and monetize that traffic with current monetization methods that are out there available to you.

Before we start with too much information about how to build a blog, I guess we first ought to touch on what a blog is. That’s a question I get a lot of times from people who aren’t familiar with the internet, particularly people like my mom. I’ll talk about a blog and she’ll ask a question, “I’ve heard of these blogs. What are they exactly?”

You probably already know blog is short for web log, which implies this is sort of a journal, an online journal. I’d say the most interesting part of a blog, or the thing that makes a blog a blog is the fact that the content in the blog is organized primarily in chronological order.

Posts come in one at a time, articles are called posts in the blogging world. They come in one at a time and the newest one is always on top. They can be organized in other ways as well, you can usually search these blogs and a lot of times the posts are tagged so that common themes are put together. You can have categories for posts and so forth.

The primary thing that you’ll notice about most blogs is that when you arrive on the first page of a blog, what you’re going to see on the home page is what the author has written first. Now, there are lots of other formats for blogs. You can have magazine style blogs where multiple stories are on the home page.

You can go to MasonWorld.com, that’s an example of a blog that was designed by Garry Conn over at GarryConn.com. You can see my latest post right there on the blog. In fact, if you go to the blog immediately after the release of this podcast, you’ll see that the release of this podcast is the latest story on the front of the blog. That’s what makes a blog a blog.

The question is, if you want to blog, what do you need? First thing you need is you need to decide exactly what it is that you’re going to write about. I recommend personally that you write about something that you care about.

If you’re going to be a blogger and you’re going to make money blogging, and you’re not using this blog for niche marketing or some of the other things affiliate marketing that we’ve talked about, but you really want to become a well known author on a subject, you really need to think about whether it’s in your personality to blog about something day in and day out that you don’t care about.

I know I personally can’t do that. I’ve tried to do some blogging on topics that I don’t care about, and quite frankly I can’t get it done. That’s my first piece of advice to you.

My second piece of advice to you is to write about something that at least some people are going to care about. Maybe you care about one particular kind of koala bear that’s only found in some jungle in Southeast Asia, and you are some kind of biologist and you’re the world’s leading expert in that.

That might just be fine for you to write about that, but I’m going to tell you as cute as koala bears are, there’s just not going to be that many people that care about your koala bear blog. Especially if it’s specific to one variety of koala bear in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, if what you really care about is the Dallas Cowboys or some other kind of broad topic like cars, racing, weight loss, how to have a happy life, how to fix relationships, how to manage debt, one of these topics that’s very important and big in the news, you have a real opportunity to get a lot of readers.

The flip side of that is some of those areas are very competitive and like choosing any niche in internet marketing you’re going to want to narrow that done. But, the fundamental thing is that you need to write about something that you care about and some number of other people are going to care about as well.

Then once you’ve decided that you’ve got a topic and you are going to have a blog that people are going to care about, you need to register a domain name. My recommendation on the registration of domain names for blogs, where blogging is your ideal target market, that’s really what you’re going after you’re trying to be a blogger is to register a name that people can remember.

You want a name that rolls off of people’s tongue, like Problogger, Copyblogger, or something that people can remember and just type in at the command line, because you want that word of mouth opportunity. Do you want search engine traffic? Absolutely. But, the domain name doesn’t weigh that heavily on the search engine traffic. I know we haven’t talked about search engines a lot, but we will in future episodes. For now, if you’re going to be a blogger, I definitely recommend that you register a catchy domain name to call your blog.

The next thing you’re going to need is some blogging software. Of course, there isn’t any option here that I would recommend over WordPress. There are two versions of WordPress. There’s WordPress.org and WordPress.com. There’s actually a third thing called WordPress MU, we’re not going to worry about that today. That’s multiuser version of WordPress.

WordPress.com is software that allows you to host a blog on the WordPress site itself. So, you might end up with something like redsocks.wordpress.com for your blog on red socks. WordPress.org is the same software, very similar software, that you host on your own domain. I’m strongly recommending that option.

You definitely want to host the blog on your own domain. You need to be in control of your own destiny. WordPress.com is going to limit some of the things that they’re going to allow you to do some of the kinds of advertising that you can have on your blog and so forth. So, you definitely want to focus on a WordPress.org installed on your own domain.

Now, if you need hosting currently I am recommend a special host that has a one penny first month and easy set up of WordPress. You can find that recommendation at MasonWorld.com/host. But, the bottom line is your website needs a place to live, that’s going to cost you a few dollars a month. I recommend that you check that host out at MasonWorld.com/host. That’s my latest and best current recommendation for where to host your website.

Once you’ve got your blog up and running really what you need to do is write. We can talk in some more detail at a later date about how to choose things to write about, how to pick posts that will capture your reader’s attention, how to write pillar content that you can rank for in the search engines that people will come back to and link to, and drive traffic to your site. But, the bottom line is you need to write and you need to write a lot.

You need to create a posting schedule, you need to write regularly. One of the things, just like with this podcast that your readers are going to want to see is the regular creation of content on a predictable schedule. So, you need to write early, write often, but most importantly you want to write on the same schedule all the time. Maybe for you that’s once a week, maybe it’s once a day. Whatever your schedule is you need to kind of fall into it and stick with it.

One thing that you’ll find is that a lot of people start a blog, they find out that it’s not for them, then they fade out and the blog just dies because they never spend time on it. So, really get committed to your schedule in the beginning and get your blog going.

Once you’ve got your blog up and going, you have several options for monetizing that blog. You’ve got what could be described as direct monetization options and indirect monetization options. Now, direct options are the kind of things that you might think of automatically, like advertising.

You can put contextual ads on your blog, like Adsense, where the words that you write on the page effect which ads actually show up. You can put on different kinds of blogging ads and textual ads. There are all kinds of ad systems, and a lot of these are covered in the Silver book. That chapter on blogging is actually written by Darren Rowse, he’s a very famous blogger with lots of good things to say about blogging. Definitely recommend you check out that section in the Silver book.

You can also get your blog sponsored. Let’s say that you have a BMW fan blog where you talk about BMWs and all the things that are great about them. Maybe BMW wants to sponsor your blog.

You can also make money on your blog just by having a donation button. Maybe you’re providing helpful information to people. There aren’t really products to sell, but you’re helping people with relationships, or helping them fix their computer, or whatever it might be. They’re so thrilled that they might want to leave you a buck or two, the sort of “buy me a beer” click button that you can have with Paypal or other service to leave a donation.

There’s other direct methods. You can have merchandise, like CafePress t-shirts. You can even sell subscriptions to premium content on your blog. If you’ve got a blog where you talk in general about most stuff, but then you’ve got a premium side to the blog where people can get even more content if they pay you a monthly fee, that can work as well.

Now, one thing that you can use your blog for is for indirect methods of monetization. Let’s say that you’re blogging, but really your goal is to drive traffic to your consulting business or to get other types of indirect monetization, like other writing gigs or photography gigs if you have a photography blog. That’s an indirect way you can monetize your blog.

That’s kind of interesting, because if you’re already doing something, like you have some sort of business, a real brick and mortar business and you want to enhance that business, you can start a blog in your area of expertise, become an expert, drive traffic to your business and also leverage the information and knowledge that you already have in your online business against your offline business and vice versa.

Nothing says that just because you’re an expert offline in a local market that you can’t become an expert online in a national market, or maybe even in a world market. In fact, the fact that you are already an expert offline can make you a very good blogger online.

That should give you an idea about blogging. If you’re interested in blogging, I recommend that you go to get some hosting. One place is MasonWorld.com/host. You can find out all about that and be up and running with a blog this afternoon. That takes care of bloggings, that’s our next method for making money on the internet. Now, let’s talk a little bit about the FTC.

Let’s talk about the FTC . So, the FTC on the 5^th of October released some final guides governing endorsements and testimonials. You can find a link to this on FTC.gov. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Basically, the guidance is pretty short.

Before we talk about it, let me reiterate the disclaimer just so we’re really clear. I am just a regular person reading the output from the FTC. I am not an FTC expert, I am not an attorney, I do not play an attorney on TV. So, I am not qualified expert to advise you on what you need to do.

If you can’t deal with that, you need to turn off your iPod right now, because I’m not responsible for what impact my advice has on your business, you are. as long as you understand that, we’re cool. I’m going to tell what I think and what I’m going to do. You need to make your own decisions about what you’re going to do. Enough of the disclaimer.

Basically, this guideline really it only had about seven or eight paragraphs. I think eight paragraphs. The first paragraph really just deals with the fact that they indicate that they’re making an announcement. Now, what they’re announcing is guidance to advertisers. This isn’t law that they’ve put out, basically it’s the FTC’s guidance on how to deal with existing FTC regulations.

What they say in the second paragraph is that there are several changes incorporated into the guides for advertisers. Those guides were last updated in 1980. So, that’s a pretty striking thing right there. The amount of stuff that’s happened on the internet since 1980 is enormous, so it’s no surprise that it’s time to update some of this stuff.

Really they only cover three things that impact advertising in this announcement, and only two of them impact internet marketers, in my opinion. One thing that they’ve said is that any time there’s an endorsement by a consumer, an expert, an organization, or a celebrity that indicates that they’re a consumer of a product, any kind of endorsement, “I used this product and I got a result.”

We all use testimonials in our internet marketing products. Any time you use a testimonial that claims a result you are required to clearly state what the user can actually expect. So, let’s say I use a weight loss product and I give a testimonial that I lost 105 pounds. But, my results are not typical. It used to be good enough to say, “These results are not typical.” Your mileage may vary, that’s what the car people say.

Well, that’s no longer acceptable according to this FTC guidance. What must be done now is that you must state what the average user would expect. To me that means that very simply if 1,000 people take a weight loss pill, and one of them loses 80 pounds, but most of them don’t lose any weight, you’ve got to report the average of what those other people are doing.

In some cases it’s not even clear to me how you’re going to ever know that. How are you going to know the average results of what your customers are doing? But, that’s what the FTC is claiming.

Now the question is what is Mark Mason going to do? Well, I’ll give you a concrete example that I’m concerned about. I have a product called Niche Adsense Themes, it’s over at NicheAdsenseThemes.com. I am aware of the fact recently that someone using my themes, they’re themes for Adsense, someone using my themes was able to use those themes to generate some ridiculous amount of money per month. I think 1,000 dollars per month using article marketing and my themes in a mortgage site they were able to generate a site relatively quickly that made them something on the order of 1,000 dollars per month.

This is well documented over at Site Point. You can go look over at Site Point and find this thing. I was going to get that guy to offer me a testimonial that says, “Using your themes I was able to make 1,000 dollars a month.” Well, guess what folks? Those results aren’t typical. I’ve never had a customer come to me, besides this guy and say that they were able to make 1,000 dollars a month using my themes.

So, that’s not a typical result. For me to use that testimonial like I was planning to, I’m going to have to now say, “These results are not typical. The average user that uses my themes never makes any money at all.” Why? Because like with most internet products people don’t use them. They download them, throw them on their hard drive.

You might be able to say the average user who actually does what is recommended in the product and follows the program has a certain results. Quite frankly, I don’t know that result. So, my plan is to not mess with using testimonials that guarantee results or that talk about results at all. I will use testimonials like I have typically used where people talk about how they liked the product, they think it’s wonderful, but I won’t use any testimonials that talk about specific results.

That just opens me up to too much uncertainty. I don’t know other people’s results, I don’t have any way to verify, so I’m not going to use those. That’s my simple answer to that.

The second thing that’s covered in the FTC bulletin has to do with disclosing material relationships. That’s the next paragraph. Basically, what they say is something that should make sense to you. If you’re recommending a product to someone and you make money if they buy it, you need to tell people that, because if you have a financial incentive to recommend a product that can bias your recommendation and people deserve to know that.

Guess what folks? I know a lot of people aren’t doing this and I am not rigorous about doing it on my own blog, although I do have a very clear disclosure page. I’m not sure that’s enough in this case, but we need to be doing this. If I recommend to you, XYZ product, like I have even earlier in this podcast and you buy that product based on my recommendation I make money and you deserve to know that.

So, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to do a couple of things. One thing that I’m going to do is make sure that every blog that I have that recommends a product has a disclosure page prominently displayed for the users to look at that says something along the lines of products recommended on this blog result in the generation of commissions. If you buy a recommended product, it’s likely that I’m going to get a commission.

You can see something like that on the MasonWorld.com blog, I have a disclosure page. I’ll also link to it in the notes. It’s not great. I plan to update it. it was my previous attempt of being transparent, and I plan to put that on all my blogs.

My personal opinion is that that’s not really going to be enough. Just having that disclosure page buried somewhere on your site is not going to be enough. We’re going to have to be more up front. I plan on actually adding something in my signature at the bottom of every post, or something that discloses the fact that I am using affiliate links when I recommend products.

I plan to be completely transparent. I’m going to take any chances on this one, because not only do I think that’s what the FTC is trying to get at, I also believe that they’re on the right track. I think it’s really important for some person who doesn’t really understand internet marketing, doesn’t understand the idea of affiliate links to know that when I recommend a product like FirePow, for example, which I’ve recommend many times, that I get a commission if you buy FirePow. That’s really what I think the right thing to do is.

The next paragraph in the FTC statement talks about celebrity endorsements. I don’t have that problem. Of course, I did have Lynn Terry on here a couple weeks ago, so she’s kind of a celebrity. But, seriously, I think celebrity endorsements are not a problem that most of us are going to face, but it’s covered in there as well.

That’s pretty much, from my perspective at least, all that’s covered in that announcement. You will see some gibberish at the bottom about how this is not actual law, about how this is the FTC’s guidelines on how to comply with existing law. There’s a burden for the FTC to prove that you’re breaking the law.

But, the bottom line is that thing really talks about three issues and those are celebrity endorsements, material connections between authors and the products that they recommend, and the first thing that we talked about, which was the fact that if you have testimonials you need to disclose average results.

Now, let me reiterate that I am not an attorney and I am not giving you advice here. I’ve just told you what I’m going to do. You need to do whatever you’re going to do.

Here’s another thing that I think is true. If you are trying to deceive people or you doing something that is going to cause people to be upset, if you misrepresent a product or you do something that causes people to be dissatisfied with the product that they bought, what are they going to do? Well, they are going to potentially file a complaint with the FTC.

What’s the FTC going to do? One thing that they can do is they’re going to look at your websites and see whether or not you’re in compliance. So, what’s the best way to keep the FTC out of your business? The best way to keep the FTC out of your business is not to do things on your websites that mislead or take advantage of your customers. Who are your customers? Even if you’re an affiliate marketer your customers are the people who come by your websites.

So, that’s the right way to think about this stuff. If you do things that respect the value of your readers or the people that are clicking around your blog you’re a lot less likely to have trouble with the FTC. That’s really the bottom line on this whole mess. You need to look out for the customers of the products that you’re recommending and endorsing.

That wraps it up for today. I am actually getting on a plane and heading out to Asia in a few hours. I’ll be going to Taiwan and to Korea on this trip. I’m glad to have this in the can and out on the website prior to take off on that long trip. I’ll be back in two weeks with another episode. Until then, I hope you have a fantastic day and a great week. Take care.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

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You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, and welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, where we’re talking about how to build internet businesses one night at a time. I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s really great to be back on the microphone. It’s been a couple of weeks since I last spoke to you. Boy, have they been incredibly busy.

Before I get into the details about the busyness that’s been going on, I have to tell you thanks so much. You may have heard that this podcast was recently selected as new and notable in the iTunes store in the business section. This is incredibly exciting news for me. What it means is people have been going to iTunes, leaving favorable reviews, thousands of people have downloaded the podcast. I just wanted to say thanks.

If you’ve not had a chance to go over to iTunes, or if you don’t normally use iTunes, let me tell you a couple of things. First, iTunes is free software that you can download from Apple.com/itunes. It’s a great way to get the podcast. You can download it that way and play it on your PC, you can also use it to put the podcast on your iPod. Of course, if you have an iPod, you know all about iTunes.

Then if you have a copy of iTunes, you can go to MasonWorld.com/itunes and rate the podcast over on iTunes. That’s very helpful to me. If you do that, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you for that very much. It’s a real cool thing to be new and notable in the iTunes store.

Now, back to the busyness. I’ve been hard at work on my latest joint venture project. You’ll recall a joint venture is when you partner up with someone that has some skills that you don’t. This works particularly well in internet marketing, because you can choose a joint venture partner that has domain knowledge that you don’t have.

You can create an information product, and as the internet marketer in the joint venture, you can be in charge of the marketing, bringing the product to market, setting up all of the affiliate programs and promoting the product, while the domain expert is the person who has the information, is able to create the product, and generate that trust on the sales page that this guy knows what he’s talking about, I can sell this product.

That’s a really good way for people to create information products. You probably know someone in your family, or one of your close friends, that’s an expert on something. Everybody is an expert on something. That’s a great way to get a product going in internet marketing is by creating a joint venture information product.

So, I’ve been doing that. I’ve been working on the sales page, getting the payment system set up with up sales, one time offers, and all these kind of things that we’ll talk about in future episodes. That’s a really good way to go. I’ve been incredibly busy doing that.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve had some success exploring internet marketing. I hope you’ve been looking forward to this podcast, because I really have a couple of great treats for you. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about the next piece of the puzzle out of the Yanik Silver book.

You’ll recall that’s available to you at MasonWorld.com/silver. That piece of the puzzle is the piece of the puzzle where we talk about ecommerce stores. Now, if you’ve ever thought about making money online, that’s probably the first thing that came to your mind. I go to the internet, I find something to buy, I buy it and it’s shipped to me.

Well, you can have a business like that. We’ll talk about it in terms of ecommerce stores. You might also be familiar with Yahoo Stores. We’ll talk a little bit about both of those. I’ve got some fantastic stories to tell you, because you may or may not this, Andy Jenkins from Stompernet, that’s how he got his start. I’ll tell you that story as well.

That’s not the best thing I have for you today. The best thing I have for you today is an interview with my friend Lynn Terry, she’s a super affiliate marketer. She’s going to tell you the three things that she thinks are most important if you want to be successful online. It’s a fantastic interview. Lynn is a wonderful person, and I know you’re really going to enjoy this interview. It’s one for the archives.

Having said that, let’s get right to it and start talking about ecommerce stores.

It’s time for the feature segment.

Well, as I mentioned before, when most people think about making money online, a lot of times they will think about this kind of ecommerce business where you put up a website, you advertise a product or a set of products, someone orders the product, you actually take their credit card money or however they decide to order, by Paypal or whatever, and then you actually deliver a physical product to them.

That’s generally what is understood to be meant by ecommerce. There are a couple of kinds of ecommerce sites you can imagine very easily. One kind of site is a traditional site where you put up your own product descriptions and you’re using your own shopping cart, and so forth.

Another way to do it is by using an existing info structure like Yahoo Stores or something like that. If you’re interested in that kind of business, I recommend that you start looking at the different shopping carts that are available.

I don’t actually choose to run these ecommerce stores. There are some downsides to them from my perspective. But, I can tell you enough about them in this episode to help you get started if you’re interested. I’ll tell you a couple of stories that will motivate you. The first one is a guy you’ve probably heard of, the story about Andy Jenkins.

Andy is a really cool guy. If you don’t know about Andy, Andy was one of the gurus behind Stompernet. Andy has recently left Stompernet, but he’s still a guru. He is in addition to being a guru, he’s a turbo geek and he’s incredibly funny. I’m qualified to call him a turbo geek, because I’m a geek too.

It’s interesting, because when you’re a turbo geek, sometimes you have really good ideas. It turns out that Andy was in the movie business, and he was involved with some horror flicks and so forth where swords were being used. Andy actually goes through the story in some detail in the Silver book, but the long and short of it is once he became disenchanted with the movie business, he started looking for another way to earn a living.

He had swords on the brain, because he had been involved in this horror flick, and he had previous turbo geek experience with stuff like Dungeons and Dragons and so forth. So, he tried to make a go of selling swords on the internet, because one of the prop guys in his movie had told him that they had bought swords online for the movie.

Andy was intrigued by this. To make a long story short, he eventually, not on the first try, but eventually figured out how to make a lot of money selling swords and other stuff like that online. Then launched the incredibly, wildly successful Stompernet empire. The rest, as they say in the movies, is history.

So, the thing that you need to know about that you may not be aware of in terms of these ecommerce stores is this idea of drop shipping. One of the key concepts that people usually employ when they’re doing ecommerce stores is they build a website, they list products on the website, and they take orders on products, but they don’t ever touch a product.

When they take the order, they forward the order to a drop shipper. That drop shipper actually ships the product directly to the customer as if it came from you, you the merchant. That’s pretty cool. You don’t have to keep any inventory. You don’t have to have an extra room in your house where you’ve got Dungeons and Dragons swords stacked to the ceiling.

I think that’s pretty important, particularly if you’re married. If you want to stay married, you want to avoid having rooms full of junk that you’re trying to sell on the internet. That’s a whole other podcast episode probably there.

But, that’s the idea of drop shipping. It’s a very important idea. There are lots of things to watch out for when you are doing drop shipping. You want to look and make sure you understand the fees, and you want to understand the different customer service policies that the drop shipper has.

You definitely want to make sure you’re doing business with a reputable drop shipper, because eventually their customer service is going to impact you and your business. You’re going to be dealing with a lot of headaches if you’ve got a crummy drop shipper. So, you want to watch out for that.

The second thing, of course, you want to understand is this idea of how to take money and basically, in order to do that you’re going to want to look into one of the shopping cart solutions that are out there for this purpose. You can get started quite easily by doing Andy did and opening up a Yahoo store. That’s an option that’s available to you.

Fundamentally, when you look at shopping carts and there are many out there, and they change all the time, so I’m not going to make a recommendation here. But, when you look at shopping carts, you want to understand issues like how do they integrate with your payment processor, whether or not they’re able to integrate with your drop shipper, how much work you’re going to have to do to get the information that you need to successfully run your business out of the shopping cart.

Also, is the shopping cart software search engine friendly. I think that’s one of the major things that is overlooked by a lot of these shopping carts. The thing you want to look at is to understand whether or not the pages where your products are shown in the shopping cart obey good search engine optimization principles.

Namely that the text in product description is clearly readable, when I say clearly readable I mean clearly readable by the search engines that come by. That the product images have good names that can also be picked up by the search engines, they don’t have these arbitrary numeric names. If it’s a picture of a toy boat it actually says toy boat in the name of the image.

That the URLs, the web addresses for the pages in your shopping cart actually have the names of the products in the URL, and again, they aren’t these long things that are technically called databases hashes, these long strings of random numbers. You don’t want that.

What you want in your URLs, and your image names, and in your page names are actually the keywords that people are going to be searching for, because Google weighs that pretty heavily when they are deciding what your page is about.

Those are some tips on starting up ecommerce stores. It’s certainly something you can do. It’s well covered by Andy in the Silver book. Again, you can find that at MasonWorld.com/silver.

That’s another business model we’ve covered now. We’ve talked about things like affiliate marketing, information marketing, making money on eBay. We’ve talked about ecommerce stores. The last major thing out of the Silver book that we’re going to talk about in the next episode is blogging.

We’ll talk about these guys like Yaro Starak and Perez Hilton who make money blogging. We’ll talk about how they do that. That will cover the Silver book. Then we’ll talk about a few more things out of Jimmy Brown’s outstanding white paper 10 Ways to Make More than 10,000 Dollars a Month Online. You can find that at MasonWorld.com/10ways. That’s a free report from Jimmy D. Brown, an excellent information marketer.

That wraps up our segment on ecommerce websites. Now, it’s time for our interview with super affiliate marketer Lynn Terry.

And now the feature interview.

I had a chance to spend a few minutes on the phone with Lynn Terry the other night. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this interview, a lot of buzz about it on Twitter and so forth. It’s been very exciting.

I really appreciate Lynn taking the time to speak with me. She’s incredibly busy, but very generous with her time. In this interview Lynn answers the question that I’ve been asking, which is if you talk to somebody who didn’t know anything about making money online, and you wanted to tell them the three things that they needed to know in order to be successful, or the three most important things about internet marketing that you wanted to tell them, what would those three things be?

Lynn answered that question, but if you listen to the interview carefully, Lynn communicates a very important idea. The idea is that you shouldn’t have too much self doubt about whether or not you can be successful with an internet business. You can.

Lynn states it very clearly. You can be successful online. She’s talking about you. Basically, what she’s saying is anyone who is willing to put in the work can be successful online. For me, the formula is very simple. You find people that you trust, that are willing to teach you a particular business model that you believe in, and that you feel works, and that the people you trust are telling you works.

You work hard at that business model and try and learn as much as you can from people that are successful. You avoid getting distracted and you execute to that business model and keep working until it’s successful. The most important thing, almost always, is don’t give up too soon.

Those are the key things that Lynn teaches. It’s one of the key pillars that she talks about in her forum. I haven’t known Lynn that long. I’ve followed her for a long time, but I’ve just recently gotten to know her really well in her Elite Membership forum. Incidentally, if you want more information about Lynn’s membership forum, you can get that information at MasonWorld.com/lynn.

She’s just really a wonderful person. She feels the same way that I do about this. If you work hard, and your follow people with integrity, and you apply yourself to your business, you can be successful online. With that, I give you the amazing Lynn Terry.

Mark Mason: Outstanding. Today for the feature interview, I am just thrilled. I could not be more excited to have Lynn Terry on the call. Most of you will know Lynn from SelfStartersWeeklyTips.com. Lynn has been an affiliate marketer for almost 13 years now.

She is a helper of people. She’s been called the Ralph Nader of internet marketing. She’s got a fantastic blog at Clicknewz.com. I just couldn’t be more excited to have her on the podcast. Lynn, how are you?

Lynn Terry: I’m great, Mark. Thank you so much. I’m over here laughing. I have been called the Ralph Nader of internet marketing. Personally, I prefer the voice of integrity, but you can’t pick your nicknames, right?

Mark Mason: That’s right. Especially not when you’re getting them from Ed Dale and Paul Colligan. I guess a lot of people will also know you from what I consider to be a really fantastic podcast, and one of the podcasts that I consider whenever I’m trying to understand what the right thing to do is with this podcast. That’s Internet Marketing this Week. You guys are up to 15, 16, or 17 episodes or something like that now.

Lynn: We’re in the 20s.

Mark: Wow.

Lynn: We’re in the 20s. We have an iPhone app. We have a Facebook page. We have all kinds of cool stuff going on. IMTW is what it goes by for short, InternetMarketingthisWeek.com. Super fun podcast, cohost Michelle MacPhearson is also in there, myself, Ed Dale, and Paul Colligan.

Mark: I think one of the best kept secrets on the internet, and where you and I really have gotten to know each other really well is inside your Elite Membership Forum. That’s a place where, I guess it was closed for a long time. I know for a long time I tried to get in there. You’ve recently opened that back up. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on inside the Elite Membership Forum.

Lynn: It’s a big secret. I did. We’re about to have an anniversary actually. We’re about to start our fourth year as a group of Elite members. For a long time I had it closed. The last time was more than 6 months that the doors were closed.

The reason is because it is a mastermind and brainstorming group. It’s not your typical “membership site,” but it is a mastermind and brainstorming group. In order to maintain the integrity of that group and have a breeding ground where we can actually do brainstorming, discuss ideas, and talk about details in depth it takes quite a bit of management on my part.

So, I can’t just leave it to open to the public all the time. I’m very particular about that. It’s an awesome group. I’m so glad that you joined in when we did reopen, because you’ve been so much fun. It’s been great getting to know you there. We’re doing some live case studies, and of course we have live brainstorming hours. It’s just an incredible group because of the quality of each of the members and everything they bring to the table.

Mark: I’ve enjoyed it and I’ve been amazed at the quality of the other members. Really, that’s the thing that was shocking to me. It ranges everything from very intelligent beginners to some seasoned professionals. I couldn’t even believe some of the names I’ve seen in there. Really enjoyed that, and have appreciated the opportunity. That was a good decision that I made.

Lynn: Very good. I’m glad to hear that.

Mark: This podcast is for people, as you and I have discussed, who are trying to get started online. Typically they’re people like I was a couple years ago who feel like there probably ought to be a way to make money online. They’re trying to figure it out, trying to understand if it’s truly possible and what the plan is to go do that.

What I’ve been doing is I’ve been interviewing very influential internet marketers like yourself and asking them just a very simple question. It’s just really kind of a basic question. It’s an excellent question for you, because you spend so much of your time teaching people about internet marketing.

The question is simply this. For new internet marketers who are trying to get started online, or who have been struggling to get started online, what are the three most important things that you would want to communicate to someone who is new and trying to get started building an online business, probably while they’re working another job or maybe they just lost their job, or they’re looking for something new. What are the three most important things you’d want to communicate to somebody like that?

Lynn: Wow. What an opportunity. This is great timing even, because just this week alone I met two people offline that were interested, but their perception was completely skewed.

For example, the first person I met I was meeting with on a professional level. He said, “What is it that you do? You do pop up ads and emails?” No. The second person that I met with was a friend of mine, and we met for lunch. Her perception of internet marketing was basically that it’s about selling Clickbank products as an affiliate. For example, that becoming an internet marketer means selling internet marketing information to other people who want to be internet marketers.

Mark: Right.

Lynn: Which is not the case, as you well know. I often say that I sell everything online from backyard swings to bobble heads. So, physical products you can sell online, info products you can sell online, your own or as an affiliate. There are just so many options.

This is a great opportunity. I love the question. I’ll just hit it right off the bat with the first one. I say first of all, there is a difference between starting a business and making money online. Not to dismiss the latter, because there is plenty of money to be made online.

But, a lot of times I see people think that they are starting a business, when they’re really just kind of testing out strategies to make a quick buck. So, there is a difference. That would be the first thing that someone needs to know when they set out to research internet marketing.

Basically, what is my objective? What is it I really want to achieve here?

Mark: Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean, I think, that you’re talking about having this big scary business plan that only an MBA can prepare and that is targeted at your banker.

I think what you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, is what you want to do is treat your business like a business and have business objectives that are sustainable for the long haul. Is that the kind of thing that you’re talking about?

Lynn: Yes, it is. Let me just explain, because I agree with you. That was not the point I was making as far as having a business plan and blah blah blah. My very first business plan was scratched out on a legal pad on my kitchen table.

Mark: Do you still have the legal pad?

Lynn: I probably do. I never took it to the bank, nobody else ever saw it. It was just something that I worked off of personally as far as what I wanted to do.

What I really mean is this. Treating it like a business, that’s a fair statement. I think that’s important if that’s the objective. There’s some people who would just be happy to make 300 dollars online and prove that they could.

Mark: I see.

Lynn: Right. But, I think it’s very important to define your objective. What is it you really want to achieve? By that, I mean am I trying to make a lifestyle change? If so, what exactly do I want to change? Then the next question is how am I going to achieve that?

So, you kind of have to work backwards at it, in my opinion. What I did, I really redid my business probably in about the third or fourth year, and I came up with what I called a 10 year plan, which was basically a complete vision for exactly where I wanted to be in 10 years in my life.

That was personal, professional, business, the whole nine yards. A complete 10 year plan. Then I worked backwards from that and created a career, that of course, at this point is taking me there very nicely.

Mark: I will agree. One of the things I like about the way your career is taking your there, is you’re taking people with you, which is one of the kind of cool parts of your business plan that I think works well for a lot of people.

Lynn: Well, it’s no fun to go it alone.

Mark: There you go. So, that’s clear. How about the second thing?

Lynn: The second point that I think is often overlooked is that it takes time. It’s not like you’re going to just click a few keys on the keyboard and then you wake up rich the next day. It’s a process. I’d go so far as to call it an evolving process.

I say that because we’re talking internet marketing. We’re only in basically the second decade of the internet as we know it. So, even if you started tomorrow you would still, in my opinion, be considered a pioneer in the internet marketing industry. Like I said, we’re only in our second decade here, so it is an evolving process.

Just like any small business, investment, or venture you really get out of it what you put into it. Period. I know that seems like an obvious point, but I see people giving up way too soon and I see it every day. I hear things like, as an example, “I’ve been working on this website for three weeks and I’m getting nowhere.”

Here’s another one. “I started this business four months ago and I’m not making a full time income yet.” Seriously. You cannot expect to setup any type of business online or offline and being earning a consistent six figure income in as little as 120 days.

You can setup the framework, you could even potentially earn a nice sum of money in that short amount of time. But, you’re not going to create a consistent income that quick and easy. I think that’s a very important point that people need to come to terms with in regards to what is internet marketing.

It is not a get rich quick scheme, so to speak. On that note, people say there’s no such thing as get rich quick. My response is always, “Define rich and define quick.”

Mark: Right.

Lynn: There’s a lot of money to be made on the internet, but it does boil down to doing some strategic planning, knowing what your objectives are, and knowing exactly what you want to achieve.

Mark: I think you’ve talked about this several times on your blog ad in other places. One of the things that you say that I really resonate with is there are strategies for making money fast. Often times those strategies are perfectly legitimate, they’re just not sustainable.

Lynn: They’re short term. It’s a good point to bring up, because I teach people how to start, build, and grow an online business. So, I stay away from the short term methods.

When people bring them up, I say, “You should do this instead, and here’s why.” There’s a reason that I do that. I’ll just explain it real quick, so people understand the difference between building a business and making money online.

Since I already a had a business up and running, and I had income etcetera, when certain strategies, tactics, or things come along, I test them out. That’s kind of the nature of my work. I test them out.

So, at one point, I believe this was probably 4 or 5 years ago, I can’t recall the exact date, was one of the very first Google slaps that was targeted at affiliate marketers. I was doing pay per click on Google Adwords very heavily at the time. One slap and overnight I lost to the tune of almost 40,000 dollars in annual income.

Mark: Ouch.

Lynn: Ouch, yes. It was side money for me. It was like playing the nickel slots in Vegas. It was fun and it was something I was testing. It was not my base income.

However, if I taught that method, and after three months of consistent income like that someone decided, “Hey, this is it,” and they quit their day job, then in the fourth month they lost it all, I would feel a very heavy sense of responsibility. That’s the reason I don’t teach those methods versus teaching people how to build a sustainable long term passive income that will get you to the lifestyle that you want.

Mark: Right. If you just go out and look at the random sales letters out there, that’s what you’re going find. You’re going to find bright shiny products with fancy graphics that talk about making 200,000 dollars in 45 minutes, or whatever they claim.

Lynn: Right. It’s an important point to make that most, not all, of those people do not make their money doing those methods, they make their money selling the ebook that tells you how to do the method.

Mark: Right. That’s an excellent second point. What’s the third point?

Lynn: The third point we kind of mentioned above earlier on, which was don’t go it alone. There are entirely too many free resources to be sitting out there by yourself second guessing every decision or second guessing every product.

There’s Twitter, there’s internet marketing forums. You basically have hundreds or even thousands of people to tap into for advice and guidance any time of the day, any day of the week.

When I got started, which was back in the late 90s, there weren’t forums like we have today. So, I got onto a mailing list. It was like an email discussion list back then, of people that were like me all over the world that were already kind of doing what I wanted to do.

Another portion of people on the list were like me and they were wanting to do it. That constant open discussion is what helped me get my business off the ground. Every year along the way I’ve tapped into forums, or groups at every single opportunity, because you’ll get creative ideas, you’re going to meet cool people.

You’re going to find out what works and what doesn’t. You’re going to hear about the scams, you’re going to hear about the latest strategies. You’re just going to hear about everything. It doesn’t make any sense to go it alone when you can tap into that resource 24/7.

Of course, that’s going to be your starting point. They’re free and they’re everywhere. The main thing that you really need to do is find a group that you really resonate with or that you really feel comfortable with. If you have kind of an abrasive feeling or a negative gut feeling every time you log on to this forum, or you don’t like the tone, it’s not for you. There are plenty out there. It’s very important to find one that works for you.

Ultimately in the end, you want to find a good mastermind group. You want to find a private forum where you can brainstorm and share ideas openly. A place where the lurkers and the search engines can’t eavesdrop and you can actually talk about your website and talk about your business ideas, or deconstruct your business model with a small group of people, or something to that effect.

That would be my third piece of advice, period. Don’t go it alone. Even if you just get on Twitter and just get associated with people who are doing what you want to do, or find some discussion forums or groups even. There are groups out there all over the place, Ning I think has lots of different groups.

Find a group you like, and make sure it’s a group of people who are going in the direction that you want to go.

Mark: Just along those lines, one thing maybe we should mention is we talked about your Elite Membership Forum, but you also have a very active internet marketing forum that’s free to join. Isn’t that right?

Lynn: I do. That’s at Self Starters Weekly Tips. Interestingly, I just switched to a new platform. This is my seventh year running an internet marketing forum, and prior to that I ran that in my inbox, which was complete madness.

Back in the day I had an email newsletter only. People would reply to it, so the discussions were all me with each individual person. It got so out of hand that I moved it to a discussion forum. That was almost 7 years ago.

That forum grew into insanity. It had over 100,000 posts and over 10,000 members. So, I recently archived it, so it’s all read only, but it is all still there, and moved over to a new forum. You’ll find that while it appears to be a small forum, it’s actually quite active for just having been re-launched on that platform.

Mark: I have to say it’s an impressive resource, and it’s something that I recommend to a lot of people, and I definitely recommend everyone that’s listening to this call go check it out, because it’s free to check out. It’s really a neat resource.

Well, I’d like to impose on you if I can just a little bit. I loved your three items, but I want to ask you about a fourth one, because it’s something you teach that’s near and dear to my heart. I remember when I first got involved in internet marketing, of course the first thing you do is sign up to all these lists. Everyone is bombarding you with different ways to make money online, because there are so many of them.

One of the things that you teach is focus. I wonder if you could just say a few words about whether or not focusing on things is important and what you would recommend to people regarding focus.

Lynn: Yes. That tends to be a big topic in my group, or lack of it. Focus is one of those hard things to define. I wanted to say right off the bat that people come up with all kinds of excuses not to be focused or not to reach their goals. One of the most common things that I hear is the label ADD or ADHD.

Now, if you could see me right now, I’m sitting in front of three computers with four monitors, one of them has dual monitors. That’s three keyboards, plus I have a netbook, and an Acer Mini, and a mobile device with 3G.

Mark: I can actually see you. Look behind you. No, I’m kidding.

Lynn: I turned my head. That’s a good one. Anyway, my point is I often joke when people say that, because I’m working across so many screens on so many different things at any given time. I say, “I think ADD is probably a requirement.”

Mark: Right.

Lynn: Seriously the thing is and the thing that I like to say is that you take one project and you go all the way from start to profit.

Now, here’s what happens. A lot of people will start a project and never finish it. Then they think they learned something, but you do not learn how to operate an online business until you reach profit.

Also, don’t think that it’s a failure. You also cannot know that it’s a failure until you complete it. So, it’s very important, especially starting out of the gate with that first project, that you pick one project and you go all the way with it.

Then you never delete a website. Then if it’s going to run and it’s going to make just a couple hundred dollars a month, you realize you picked something with a low commercial value, or you realize you picked something that doesn’t have a lot of search volume, or something to that effect where it’s not going to make a lot of money. Let’s say it’s max potential is going to be 200 or 300 dollars a month.

So what? That’s done. Set it to the side. It’s done all it could do. Let it make its little money on the side and you start the next project, or you sell it. One of the two.

Mark: So, you’re saying that you’re willing to cash the 200 dollars checks and the 2,000 checks. You’re okay with that?

Lynn: Yes. If you send me a check for 2 dollars I’ll probably cash it. But, yes. To be honest with you, you’re going to have multiple streams of income. That’s what you’re going to end up with within internet marketing.

That’s a good thing. You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket necessarily. Think about having a traditional job, and that is your sole source of income. If you lose that job, you’re screwed right? The whole goal of being self employed is not to be in that position.

I have lots of little niche sites. One for example, the max potential on one of my niche sites is about 500 or 600 dollars a month, because of the search volume and because of the conversion rate. That’s just at it’s peak about the best it can do. Does that mean it’s a failure? No. Absolutely not. It’s been running along making that much for 3 or 4 years now.

Mark: I think there are a lot of people listening to this podcast who would love to have a site that just sloughed off 500 dollars a month in cash every month.

Lynn: Especially if you never had to touch it, but maybe a few hours a month or maybe two or three days a year for maintenance.

Mark: Right.

Lynn: It’s definitely ideal, because obviously you can duplicate that once you learn how to do it. But, you do not learn how to do it until you go all the way from start to profit. Getting all the way to profit is when you know you’ve learned it and you can duplicate it.

A lot of people make the mistake of going from start to well I got a little bit done, and thinking, “Now that I know how to do this I’m going to do 10 more.” That’s just not the thing to do. You need to work your model first.

Mark: That’s right. In fact, we are demonstrating this for people, I guess. You and I have an open case study inside the elite forum where we’re doing exactly that. We started from, “Hey, let’s think of an idea for an internet business,” all the way to “let’s see if we can get some search engine rankings.” We’re going to stay with it until we’re making money and we can stick a fork in it and it’s done.

Lynn: Absolutely. Yes. Very cool case study, by the way. I’m loving that one.

Mark: How many page views on that one now? It’s in four figures now or something like that?

Lynn: It is. It’s a lot.

Mark: Sorry about that server load I’m causing you there. I apologize for that.

Lynn: I’ll send you the bill.

Mark: Very good. We call this late night internet marketing, because, well, I do it late at night. It’s late at night now, and we’re creeping up on midnight here. Is there anything you’d like to add or close with before we let you go?

Lynn: I would. I really want to encourage everyone who is listening in to this podcast to give it a fair go. Seriously. This is my 13^th year in business. I’m a single mother with two teenage kids. They were five months old and five years old when I started my business.

The lifestyle that it’s afforded me is just incredible. I’ve home schooled my children. I’ve traveled all over the world. Of course, I work from a home office, and I absolutely love what I do. I’m telling you, if I can do it, anybody can do it.

Mark: I’m not so sure. I love that, but you’re incredibly talented. Do you really mean that? Certainly, from my perspective and probably from the perspective that a lot of people have listening to this podcast, you say that, but as you said, you have 13 years of experience. You really feel like if you can do it, anybody who’s willing hard can really make a go of it?

Lynn: I think that’s a good note to end on. I’ll give you an honest answer. My honest answer is my 13 years experience is where I am today, but it certainly is not what got me where I am today. I started at square one just like everybody else.

I don’t mind to confess that I had absolutely no college, I didn’t even finish high school. My last real job was in 1996, I basically bluffed my way through the interview. Prior to that, I worked in factories and waited tables. So, yes, if I can do it, anybody can do it.

Mark: That’s just awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here today. I’ll see you inside the Elite Membership area sometime tomorrow.

Lynn: Excellent. Thanks, Mark.

There you have it. This concludes this episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you had as much fun as I do. Get on over to iTunes and review this thing. Give me a great review on iTunes. It’s really very much appreciated.

Come visit me at the blog MasonWorld.com, sign up for the email newsletter, there’s lots of valuable downloads and stuff there. You’ll enjoy that as well. I can’t wait to see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

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MW006 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 5.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s great to be back on the microphone. I hope you’ve had a fantastic couple of weeks since I talked to you last. I hope they were very productive for you.

I know I’ve been incredibly productive over the last couple weeks. In fact, in some ways a little too productive. I tend to get too many tasks going all at the same time. I don’t know if you have that problem. That’s a huge problem for a lot of internet marketers.

I was talking to Lynn Terry about this over in her Elite forum the other day. Her theory, she had a post in that forum about this, is that you really need to focus on something, one thing extensively until that thing is finished to really get the maximum productivity. I’m really going to need to look at that a little more carefully.

I’ve really been enjoying Lynn’s forum. I spend a lot of time over there. I’ve been getting to know Lynn, she’s great. Some of you saw the video on my blog of Lynn opening up the Elvis bobble head that I sent her. That was kind of fun.

If you get a chance to check out Lynn, I recommend that you do that. You can check out the information about her Elite Membership Forum at MasonWorld.com/recommends/lynn. If you just want to kind of get a taste of what that’s like, you don’t need to pay any money at all. You can go over to her blog at ClickNewz.com and check it out.

There are links to the forum over there, and she’s got a free side to the forum too and that’s really excellent. I’ve been having fun over there with Lynn. She’s got lots of cool peeps that hang out with her over there in the Elite Forum, it’s really good stuff.

The other thing that I’ve been working on this week is a site with my nephew. We’re going to talk about that a little bit in the interview. My nephew and I have been working on an affiliate marketing site for the last couple of weeks. I’ve actually got him on the podcast today as the featured interview as a new internet marketer.

He’s going to tell us the three things that he learned from me this summer working on an affiliate site. He actually cleared over 100 dollars on that site in the month of August, which was only one month after we really started working on it. So, he’s pretty pleased with that.

We’re using the phpBay plugin to work through eBay to sell some comic books online. We’ll talk about all of that in the feature interview.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at the feature segment and see what we’ve got going on today.

It’s time for the feature segment.

It’s time for the feature segment today, and we’re continuing our discussion about all the different possible internet business models. We’ve talked about affiliate marketing, last week we talked about eBay, we’ve talked about information marketing.

One thing I wanted to talk about today, because it’s timely, is the idea of creating residual recurring income through membership sites. In order to understand why membership sites are important, you really need to sort of understand the idea of a sales funnel. So, we’ll talk a little bit about sales funnels, and we’ll talk about membership sites.

This, again, points to one of the resources that I’ve provided you for this discussion, and that’s Jimmy Brown’s excellent report, which is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. In Jimmy Brown’s report, item three in that report is tap into the back end automatically.

Jimmy basically talks about the idea that most marketers really are concerning themselves with the creation of the sales funnel. If you’re not familiar with a sales funnel, I can sort of explain it to you like this. When you have an initial contact with a perspective client, you bring that person in to your range of influence and you essentially get their permission to receive your message.

Now, if you’re a person who’s being effected by TV marketing, sometimes you barely even have permission, you just happen to be watching the channel and you see a commercial and that’s sort of your first contact into the sales funnel for whoever is selling something to you on television. In the context of internet marketing, this sort of thing usually happens when you sign up to an email list.

You’re at the top of someone’s funnel, they’ve gotten your permission to market to you, basically. So, you’re at the top of their funnel. Then you might at some point buy an inexpensive product from them. That moves you a little further down the funnel.

You’ll find that a lot of internet marketers spend a lot of time creating more and more products at higher and higher price points to move you further and further down the funnel. You see, there’s a big difference between someone you’ve never talked to before, at the top of your funnel or just entering your funnel, and someone who’s bought two or three products from you over a period of time, who trusts you and understands the quality of your product.

So, that sales funnel should be architected to move you further and further towards purchasing higher and higher end products. That’s a classic marketing strategy. It’s not unique to internet marketing, but it’s used very well in internet marketing in a variety of product lines.

One sort of special version of that, that can replace the sales funnel to some extent, is the idea of continuity programs. One way to implement a continuity program is through a membership site. Now, a continuity program simply means, you can think of it as monthly billing.

Continuity programs have gotten a bad rap over the years, because of various problems, usually having to do with them being deployed in a sneaky manner. You’ll recall that Joel Comm had a problem where he had a continuity program attached to one of his Adsense books, I believe it was, and it wasn’t clearly indicated on the order form. A lot of people were upset with Joel, because he didn’t make it clear that in addition to buying the ebook for 9.95, you were also signing up for his 27 dollar continuity program.

Now, I happen to know Joel, Joel Comm is a really good guy. I really personally don’t think that was something that he did maliciously, but he upset a lot of people. So, continuity programs in general have gotten a bad rap.

Russell Brunson and others, particularly Jimmy Brown, have been talking about several ideas around continuity that make a lot more sense. One of the things that they talk about is micro-continuity through membership sites. Jimmy has an excellent course on this that he calls Membernaire. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Membernaire is an opportunity to create what Russell Brunson calls a micro-continuity program. The way Jimmy does it is he creates courses that are finite duration. It’s one thing if you tell somebody that they’re going to need to pay 27 dollars, or 67 dollars a month for their rest of their lives.

But, what Jimmy says is, “Hey, we’re going to have a continuity program with a finite term. It’s going to be 6 months long, or a year long, it’s going to be 27 dollars a month.” You know the cost up front. It’s spread out over time.

Jimmy actually implements all of his stuff completely automatically, which is really neat. So, if you’re the product creator for a Jimmy Brown style membership site. Then what you can do is you can create these sites one time, market them, and then they run on autopilot all by themselves. It’s pretty interesting.

Now, there really are sort of three kinds of membership sites that Jimmy points out. Maybe four, I would say, Jimmy points out three. The first site that Jimmy points out, or sites that offer a service, if there’s something that you need over and over again rather than paying for it piecemeal you can create a membership site that offers that service over and over again or on a monthly basis. Web hosting is a really good example of that, that Jimmy offers.

There are other kinds of membership sites you can imagine. Help with homework would be an excellent example, or tutoring. Those kind of things you can offer in the form of a membership site. Related to that can be a site that offers lessons on a topic.

You could have 6 month, 12 month, or 3 month courses on how to get an online business up and running. That’s the example that Jimmy offers. How to start a restaurant, how to do home repairs, or how to do whatever it is that you know how to do.

That’s one of the exciting things about the idea of a membership site. If you’re an expert in something, and you can break it up into 48 or 50 or 100 easy lessons, then you can easily create a membership site that just drips those lessons out to your customers at a fixed rate. You just tell them up front, “You’re going to get one lesson a week, and here they come. As long as you keep paying, you keep getting lessons.”

The other kind of membership site that you hear about a lot is a site that offers a new product each month. So, each month you get a new PLR product or each month you get a new something that you need, new templates for a website, new content, new something, new cross stitch patterns, whatever it might be. People subscribe because they want that new fix of whatever it is that they need.

The other kind of membership that I think Jimmy didn’t mention, but he certainly knows all about this, because he does these sorts of things, are coaching programs. I think those are a special kind. They’re sort of like offering a service, but basically you’re paying to have some person on retainer to help you with whatever your problem. Usually those are implemented as a forum.

That’s just a few ideas that Jimmy covers in his book. He says, basically, you need to choose a niche, find out what they’re buying, and what they want, and then go build a membership site around that. I think that’s a really good idea.

The reason that I bring that up in this podcast is two fold. One is these are very, very important. In fact, I had a graphics guy tell me today that I was talking to by email, he’s over in Europe and is the guy who does most of my graphics for my sites, he told me there are four weeks out on graphics because of all these micro-continuity sites they’ve been doing based on Russell Brunson and Jimmy Brown’s sort of programs. So, they’re just swamped with work over all these membership sites that are being created. That’s one reason why I bring this up to you.

The second reason that I bring this up to you is if you’re interested at all in this, Jimmy is offering a webinar, and I’m going to give you the details on that at MasonWorld.com/jimmywebinar. That webinar is currently airing this Thursday. If you’re listening to this in a time shifted manner, go ahead and go to the link, it will give you the current next time for the webinar.

Basically, it’s an hour long tutorial from Jimmy on webinars. I’m going to see it for the first time tomorrow. I can tell you that I can recommend it without seeing it, because Jimmy is just a fantastic guy. If you don’t know Jimmy, it’s worth going over to the webinar just so you can get a sense of what he’s all about.

He’s really a fantastic marketer and somebody that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know over the last year or two. His stuff is top notch. He knows what he’s doing. He has personally created, I know for sure of two, but maybe it’s six of these sites, where he has over 1,000 members in each site. You go do the math. If you had 1,000 members in a membership site, each paying you 27 dollars a month. I think you might like that result.

That’s the main segment for today. I just wanted to tell you about that other income model, which is membership sites. The bottom line is if you know how to do something that people want to learn how to do, and you can figure out how to bust that up into courses, kind of like a Dummies Guide to Tennis, or a Dummies Guide to Fitness, or a Dummies Guide to whatever it is that you’re interested in, you can make that into a membership course.

You can recruit people into that course and have a recurring stream of income. You can set the whole thing up automatically, and Jimmy Brown is the guy to teach you how to do that. So, that’s another way you can make money online, and that’s well covered in the 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. That’s Jimmy Brown’s ebook, and that’s available at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

Thanks. That concludes the feature segment.

And now the feature interview.

Okay. Now it’s time for the standing interview segment that we’ve been having for the last couple of weeks. What I’ve been promising you is that I’d interview successful internet marketers and ask them the three most important things that they wished they had known about internet marketing when they first started.

This has been very exciting. But, recently I’ve been working with my nephew on his first website. He has an affiliate marketing site based around comic books, which is something that he is interested in. He’s a sophomore in high school, very intelligent young man, highly motivated, but didn’t really know anything about how money was made on the internet. Kind of like a lot of us when we first started.

So, I thought, “Wow. Here’s a guy who just learned how to make money on the internet.” He’s made his first 100 dollars, I think his site made 136 dollars in the month of August. He’s very excited about that. We’ve got big plans for the site, because we made that 136 dollars and we’re not even ranking on the first page of Google for our search term yet. So, we’re real excited.

I thought the interesting was 2 months ago he didn’t know anything about internet marketing. He’s done all the work himself. I’ve sort of led him through it, and helped him and coached him, but he’s done all the hard work, and he’s got a result to show for it.

So, I wanted to ask him what were the three things that he knows now that he didn’t know 2 months ago. The things that really stuck out for him. I got a very, very interesting answer from him and I wanted to share that with you.

Now, he’s a minor under the age of 18. Like I said, he’s a sophomore in high school. So, I’m not using his real name. we’re calling him Bob here for the purpose of this interview, which is really hilarious, because that’s not his name at all. So, you may hear us giggling a little bit in the interview about that.

The other thing I’ll tell you, I want to apologize in advance, this interview we did in my study. We had to move the microphone around, and I forgot to put the p-pop filer on. So, I’ve edited the interview to try and cut out the pops from articulating the letter P, which is the world’s most annoying sound.

I don’t quite have them all out of the interview, but I did the very best I could. I enjoyed the interview so much, I didn’t want to do another take. Here it is live, raw, and with the pops, my nephew Bob and our discussion about his internet marketing experience.

…

Mark Mason: Hey, this is Mark Mason. I’m actually in studio with my nephew today. A lot of you who have been following me over on Lynn Terry’s forum know that I built with my nephew a website about something that he was interested in, actually the website is about comic books. We built that website and in the first month were able to generate some revenue with eBay’s affiliate program. That was a very interesting process.

So, what I thought I would do is get some insights from my nephew, who is a sophomore in high school about what he’s learned from his experience making money online. I’ve been telling people, “If my nephew who is a sophomore in high school can make money online, you can make money online too.” I think that’s a pretty straight forward kind of way to think about things.

Now, I’ve agreed since my nephew is a minor under the age of 18, I’m not going to use his name. So, I’ve agreed to call him Bob for the purpose of this interview. Hi, Bob, how are you doing today?

Bob: Hi. Good. How are you?

Mark Mason: I’m doing great. Bob came over, he lives nearby. How long have we been working on this website together, Bob?

Bob: We’ve probably been working on it maybe since the beginning of last school year.

Mark Mason: Yeah, something like that. So, we worked on it for a couple of weeks, then we kind of dropped it, but then we hit it really hard this summer. Right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, my recollection was we didn’t make any money or really generate much of any content last year at all. We really started working on it about in July.

Bob: That’s right.

Mark Mason: We started making money on the website in August, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. So, the website sat idle for awhile, and after about a month we started seeing a little revenue. That’s been really exciting. I guess it’s been exciting for me, has it been exciting for you?

Bob: Yes. It’s very exciting.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, you’re actually in a very prestigious position. I’ve been interviewing internet marketers from all over the world on this podcast and asking them the three things that they wish they had known when they started internet marketing.

I thought I’d turn things around today and ask you what are the three things that you’ve learned over the summer with your first experience in internet marketing that you just didn’t know before, that you’d want to tell someone about your internet marketing experience?

Can you think of one thing that just occurs to you just right off the top of your head, Bob? That’s not your real name, I know, but it’s kind of funny. Something that you learned over the summer, that you didn’t know before.

Bob: Yes. First, is how easy it is to get a website going. If you use a website like WordPress you just pick a theme you like, get it going, and put it up. It’s just easy to make one.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, basically, what we did was we just simply found a theme that worked well with our topic of comic books. We actually found sort of a play on Superman theme, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: We just used that on top of WordPress to create our little kind of ecommerce site. That worked out pretty well. It looked pretty cool?

Bob: It looks really cool, yes. A lot of neat features.

Mark Mason: I think, if I remember right, we asked a virtual assistant to make some small modifications to the site.

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Right. So, we started with a theme that was pretty close to what we wanted, and we had a virtual assistant make some changes. Just a few dollars, literally a few hours work, someone offshore. It’s pretty much exactly the way you want it right now, right?

Bob: It’s perfect. Yes.

Mark Mason: Great. That’s the first thing. So, that point is a really good one. That is that basically anybody without a lot of technical savvy can have a website up and running very quickly by using WordPress. Is that pretty much what you’re saying?

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. That’s thing one. That’s an excellent point. What’s your second thing that you kind of picked up this summer working on your WordPress website?

Bob: Probably number two is if you want to get your website going, something very important to use is keywords through Google. Pick out a keyword phrase, get backlinks to your website to get viewers to come to your site.

Mark Mason: Now, before this summer, did you have any idea, you’ve always used Google, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: But, did you have any idea why pages came up on the first page of Google? Did you understand any of that before this summer?

Bob: I had no clue. I just thought it was random.

Mark Mason: So, we basically spent. I don’t know, about an hour? So, we got you started with the Easy SEO report from Josh Spaulding,that was really cool. Then we picked a keyword with some traffic. Where are we now with that keyword?

Bob: Just by using that one keyword we’re almost to the first page of Google. We’re kind of floating back and forth between page one and page two.

Mark Mason: So, we’re down kind of at the top of page two. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeve, maybe we’ll talk about that at the end of this, where we think that’s going to get us to page one.

Basically, pick a keyword that people are searching for and get backlinks to the website. That’s the offpage SEO part, getting the backlinks, but we also optimized the homepage for the keyword. Right? We’ve got it in there.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Kind of in a natural amount of time. So, that’s just kind of common sense SEO, and you were able to pick that up pretty quickly, right?

Bob: Yes, sir, I was.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, the first thing that you learned this summer was that you can easily build a site with Wordpres.

The second thing that you learned is that once you build a site with WordPress, you can optimize it, both on the website and off the website, so that you’ll get listed in Google for a keyword that’s getting some traffic.

What’s a third thing that you learned this summer?

Bob: The third important thing I learned was if you can get traffic to your website, you can send them to other websites and earn commission off their views.

Mark Mason: Yes. We talked about that quite a bit this summer. That’s affiliate marketing. Of course, for our website, because we’re dealing with comic books, that’s just a perfect fit for eBay, right, because that’s where comic books are being sold.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: And you knew that already. You’d already been buying comic books on eBay. That’s in fact, how we got the idea.

Bob: Yes, I had.

Mark Mason: So, Bob is into comic books a little bit, and knew that there were transactions going on at eBay. All it took was for me to explain to you that you could build a website that drove traffic to eBay and get commissions, and we’re off to the races, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: What we really want is to be on the first page of Google. So, why don’t you tell everybody what you have planned for, I guess we’re hoping to get the first draft of it done this weekend, you’re doing all the work. What do you have planned for this weekend?

Bob: We’re planning to write a press release to put out there to get our website on the first page.

Mark Mason: Yes. We’re following the Google First Page Formula, that’s the ebook that I’ve shared with Bob. He’s going to write a press release according to the Google First Page Formula, and we’re going to see if we can get the same results.

I’ve actually got a special link for that ebook, where I’ve got a discount available for the listeners in honor of Bob, since he’s going to be doing that this weekend. You can pick that ebook up for a 20 or 30 percent discount. I’ll be sure and put that link in the show notes. In fact, that will be at MasonWorld.com/press.

That’s great. Bob, I really appreciate you being on the show tonight. Tell me what you’re thinking about doing next. Are we going to build some more sites? How many more are we going to build or what are you thinking?

Bob: We’re just going to keep going until there’s nothing left to do. For all those people that are doing websites, don’t give up. It takes time, but it pays off.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming over. Have a great day.

Bob: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

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You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 4 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Of course, I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s really great to be back on the mic. I’ve had a couple weeks of vacation with some light duty internet marketing activity, as well as some frenzied activity getting kids ready to go back to school.

It’s that time again in Texas, where we’re getting everybody ready to go back to school. That can be very exciting, because that generates a long list of things to go do. Everything from school clothes shopping to school supplies, physicals, band gear, and all of that. We’ve been pretty busy around the Mason World household the last couple of weeks.

I’ve also been busy, because I’ve been spending some time hanging out with guru affiliate marketer Lynn Terry in her private forum, she calls it the Elite forum. That’s really a fantastic investment that I’ve made. A small investment of money, and an investment of time over the last several weeks getting to know Lynn. I tell you, she is really fantastic. I had always heard great things about Lynn, and what level of integrity and customer focus she brings to her business.

Let me tell you, my time with her has exceeded all my expectations. She’s really fantastic. I encourage you to check her out over at MasonWorld.com/lynn, where I’ve a got a link over to her new Elite Membership forum over there. You can also find her on her blog at Clicknewz.com. I’ll provide both of those links in the show notes, you can check her out. She is really fantastic, and I really enjoyed spending time with her.

One of the best ways to learn about internet marketing is pick people and business models that you really believe in, follow them and watch what they do, ask them questions about what makes them successful and try to duplicate those results.

There’s absolutely no reason for you to reinvent anything in internet marketing. The best way to get started is to find somebody who you like what they’re doing, you believe in what they’re doing, and who will be honest with you and help you succeed.

Having said that, it’s time for the feature segment, where we’ll talk about our next internet monetization model. That’s making money on eBay.

It’s time for the feature segment.

In the feature segment today, we’ll be talking about our next internet business model. You’ll recall that we’ve already talked about affiliate marketing, which is when you essentially get paid for driving traffic to other people’s products, when that traffic converts to sales. Information marketing, where you can create information products, not too unlike this podcast, to be honest with you, and find ways to monetize those, usually by selling them as direct downloads.

Today we’re going to be talking about our third internet monetization method. That’s creating a business on eBay. Now, what we’ve been doing to kind of support this discussion that we’ve been having is following along in two publications.

One is the outstanding book by Yanik Silver, Moonlighting on the Internet. Yanik’s book can be found at MasonWorld.com/silver. We’ve also been following the great report from Jimmy Brown, I love Jimmy D. Brown, he’s really a great guy, his report is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 a Month. That’s a 30 page free report that Jimmy offers, where he outlines 10 different things you can do to really crank up your internet income.

Those are both excellent texts for people who are getting started online, or trying to expand their online business. I recommend them both highly.

Today we’re going to be talking about eBay businesses and what you need to think about in terms of eBay. Now, most people when they think about eBay, think about going online and buying some used something, or some antique something that they go and buy and get a good deal. So, the two things that you usually have associated with eBay are used items, that’s what people think of when they think of eBay, or items that they can get for really cheap.

That’s kind of problematic if you want to start up a business on eBay, because you’re starting off in a situation where people who are looking for premium products, eBay may not necessarily the first thing that comes to your mind. Let me tell you, that is the wrong mindset to have if you’re an internet marketer.

The right thing to recognize about eBay, if you’re an internet marketer, is that there is a massive and enormous amount of traffic available to you on eBay. Millions of items are sold on eBay every year. It is a giant company that you can leverage to make money on the internet.

Before I go much further, let me tell you, I am not an eBay guru. I do not have a viable eBay business. Sure, I’ve sold stuff on eBay. In fact, I’ve got a couple of eBay auctions right now. But, that’s not my mainline business. I do understand, however, the fundamentals of marketing that are in play on eBay and I’m going to go over them for you a little bit.

The first one is there are a lot of people there. The fundamentals of internet marketing are find traffic, stand in front of it, and convert a certain percentage of that traffic into some monetized stream. So, you find people and you convert those people into something that translates into dollars. eBay meets the first criteria, which is lots of traffic.

Now, you might imagine sort of a fundamental eBay business, and you can setup sort of a traditional business on eBay by finding products and reselling them on eBay. The things that you usually hear about are people that go around to auctions and buy lots of items, and then warehouse them and sell them on eBay. Or people that setup things where they sell items on eBay, then they have them drop shipped so they’re not actually warehousing anything.

Both of those can be made to be viable internet businesses and that can work just fine. I am not super excited about those, because as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of price pressure on things that are for sale in eBay. I know people are making that work, and you can make it work too probably, but that’s not what gets me excited about eBay.

What gets me excited about eBay is the idea that Jimmy Brown mentions when he talks about eBay, and that is that you can use eBay as a lead generator. Now, if you go through the listings, as Jimmy points out, you’ll see a lot of people that seem to be losing money making sales on eBay. What I’ll tell you is that there are a lot of things that are called loss leaders sold on eBay.

It means that someone sells something, not so much really to make profit on the sale, but actually to get the customer. They know that once they get someone to buy something they’ve got a customer contact with a credit card in their hand, that’s actually willing to use it, and they can sell things to that person again. Essentially, they’re prequalifying the prospect and able to sell to them again. That’s the big thing that Jimmy points out is that you can use eBay as a lead generator.

You can also use eBay to get people into your direct sales funnel. If you’ve got multiple products, let’s say you’ve got a 1 dollar widget that you sell for 79 cents on eBay, and you know that people that buy 1 dollar widgets are going to need the 50 dollar widget cleaner. You can also get them directly in your sales funnel by selling your cheap product on eBay, and selling the more expensive back end to them later directly. Once you’ve got their contact information, of course, you’re able to contact them directly.

Those are sort of the business models that you should think about in terms of eBay. There’s the real eBay store, eBay auction, eBay selling physical products sort of eBay that you’ve thought about. But, then there’s this other thing, the marketing side of eBay where you can use eBay for lead generation or to get people into your funnel. Those are the two ways to think about eBay.

The important thing in eBay, just like in all good marketing, is the copy. That’s one of the things that’s really often ignored on eBay. When you go to write a listing on eBay, you really need to pay attention to your headline, you need to make sure your listing is personalized, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to specialize and feature it, and buy it now.

I’m not going to cover all those things, but there are a lot of marketing options, some of which are very sophisticated, that you can test and try to maximize your response on eBay. Particularly when you’re selling things over and over again. eBay is a great environment in which to split test, because there are so many different options, whether to use pictures or not, whether to use video or not, and so forth. That is a the main thing that you need to think about in eBay.

Don’t just do what all of these garage sale minded people are doing and throw up some sales copy in your auction. Actually approach it like a professional copywriter and think about what you’re writing. Hit people’s hot points, offer a unique selling proposition in your auction, offer risk reduction, make sure they know that there’s no risk for them to purchase through you. Use basic sales copy principles and you’ll be a lot more successful on eBay.

The last thing I want to mention about eBay is that you can combine what we talked about last week, that being affiliate marketing, with the things that you can do on eBay, because eBay has an affiliate program. A lot of people have made a lot of money putting up websites that actually don’t do anything but advertise products that are for sale on eBay.

You might be thinking, “That sounds like a lot of work, because something that’s for sale on eBay today won’t be there in 7 days.” That’s absolutely true. So, what these people do is they set up websites that read the eBay auctions, and when a visitor comes to their website it lists the current eBay auctions for very narrow subjects.

So, for example, maybe somebody might have a website selling coffee mugs, maybe antique coffee mugs that are for sale on eBay. They present themselves as an antique coffee mug site, with maybe some information and an antique coffee mug store. But, the links on the store really go to eBay auctions, so they’re able to sell these things that normally you wouldn’t be able to drop ship or otherwise find affiliate programs for on the internet.

You can check that out. My preferred source for the eBay affiliate program is Pepperjam. I’ll have a link to the Pepperjam Network in the show notes there for you so you can find that. That’s about it on eBay. Couple of business models there for you with eBay, a couple of things to think about when you’re listing your auctions, and finally affiliate marketing. You can mix all these things together. That about wraps it up for eBay today.

And now the feature interview.

I have a really special interview for you today. You know, I’ve been interviewing top internet marketers, asking them what are the three things they want to tell new internet marketers that will help them get started. What are the three things they wish they had known when they were getting started.

Today I have for you the guru of Firepow, the Niche Marketing on Crack author, Andrew Hansen. Andrew is an enormously successful marketer over at AndrewHansen.name. He’s a top choice of mine for integrity and paying attention to what people really need, rather than just be out to try and make a quick buck. His products are fantastic.

I’ve got him on the phone. Here’s what Andrew had to say.

Before we get started with Andrew, just one editorial note. I want to let you know that the recording of Andrew’s voice is a little echoed. It looks like we had a little equipment difficulty on my end. I did some work to clean it up, but it’s still not a fantastic audio recording. But, the information is so great, I didn’t want to re-record it with Andrew, because I didn’t want to miss that first pass raw nature of it. So, here it is in it’s entirety and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks.

Mark Mason: Outstanding. We’re on the phone now, and it’s Late Night Internet Marketing. That works for us, because it’s 1:00 in the morning. I am privileged to have on the phone Andrew Hansen. Andrew is famous for a number of outstanding products in the internet marketing space.

Of course, he is probably most famous for his viral ebook, Niche Marketing on Crack, one of the first internet marketing products that I ever purchased. He’s also got an outstanding free ebook that’s been making the rounds lately called Crap Cutter Marketing.

But, the flagship product of Andrew’s, and the one that I really love, is the Firepow product. That’s an outstanding product for affiliate and niche marketers. Maybe we’ll get to talk about that a little bit with Andrew today.

Andrew, how are you this morning at 1:00 AM in the morning?

Andrew Hansen: I’m really well. I think it’s closer to 2:00 AM now actually, where I am anyway. But, really well. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much for taking the call. It’s 2:00 in the morning on the east coast, 1:00 in the morning in Texas. This is the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, so I guess that’s appropriate.

Andrew Hansen: It’s all good. It’s fine by me.

Mark Mason: I have been interviewing outstanding internet marketers. I put you very high on that list. I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. I have been asking them the question, what would you tell a new internet marketer if you were going to tell them three things that they needed to know, or of you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you would want to know?

But, before I ask you that question, Andrew, I’ve got to ask you another really important question that’s been on my mind for a long time. Can you handle one extra question?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, I think so.

Mark Mason: Your from Australia, right?

Andrew Hansen: Right.

Mark Mason: What in the heck is vegemite? Because in Texas we don’t know about vegemite. Can you just tell me what that is exactly?

Andrew Hansen: You don’t have vegemite?

Mark Mason: No. We don’t have vegemite and I don’t know what vegemite is.

Andrew Hansen: You don’t know what vegemite is?

Mark Mason: I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is and I figured now is my chance.

Andrew Hansen: Here you go. Are you ready? If I give you this description it will sound disgusting, but in fact it’s delicious. It is yeast extract. Now, how that is obtained, I have no idea. But, it’s like a black paste.

You can imagine like peanut butter, but black. So, it looks disgusting as well. But, it’s mega-salty. It’s a very sharp taste, sharp on your tongue, very salty. But, it’s a spread that you put on bread, toasts, and everything like that. It’s actually really tasty.

I didn’t know until I moved that it was really only in Australia and New Zealand, and a southern world thing. We haven’t had any since we left Australia, and we often regret that. So, that’s what vegemite is.

Mark Mason: Very good. Well, now I can rest easy. I appreciate that. So, you’re in Canada now, is that correct? And you can’t find it there?

Andrew Hansen: Canada, yes. Funny story, actually. My mum had sent me a birthday present earlier in the year, and she somehow had researched some things that we wouldn’t have had for a long time having been over here. She sent me in the mail these little vials of vegemite.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent. Very good. I’m glad to know that. You know, I’m a scuba diver, and I’ve wanted to dive The Great Barrier Reef, so now I can add vegemite and diving to that trip. That will be good.

Andrew Hansen: Just not at the same time. That might be weird.

Mark Mason: That’s true. So, the question for you, sir, is if you were talking to a new internet marketer, which I guess actually you do all the time, or if you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you think somebody needs to know about internet marketing to be successful, or shorten the amount of time that it takes to be successful, or to avoid traps, or whatever. What are the three things you want to tell new people that are new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: It’s actually a really difficult question, but it’s a good one, a very important. I don’t know whether I’ll have three things, or whether we’ll just kind of talk about a bunch of things in this time, but I can give you some of my thoughts.

The first thing that I think new people really need to know about is before they get into strategies and specific questions about you actually make the money, I think it’s important to just have an understanding of the industry that you’re getting into. I mean if you’re a new person starting out, and I’m sure you started out and I started out this way as well, you start looking into the different ways to make money online.

One of the first things that you realize is that there are so many of them. There’s as many ways to make money online as there is people trying to make money online, or at least people selling how to make money online.

So, that in itself poses, not a problem, but it’s like an initial barrier to people who are trying to get started, because one of the first things that you have to do is try to sift the enormous amount of information and try to find something that makes sense to you and something that seems like you can implement it.

Not only that, not only the amount of information, but the nature of the information that trains people how to make money on the internet is, as I know and you know, of varying levels of quality and varying levels of clarity in terms of how well they lay out the steps that you need to take. It’s so easy to waste your money, and it’s so easy to fail purely for that reason alone.

To have an understanding, like if you could somehow have foresight at that point starting out, the things that you’re looking at, the sales letters that you’re looking at and the products you’re buying are part of such an enormous, for lack of a better word, pile of information, strategies, tools, and offers trying to get you to spend more money and more money.

It’s a crazy world. That may be the first thing that I would talk about.

Mark Mason: It is a crazy world, there are 1,000 or hundreds of thousands of sales letters out there of different things you can buy. You’re right, some of them are just not very good quality. They’re well intentioned, but not good quality.

Andrew Hansen: Some of them aren’t well intentioned.

Mark Mason: Right. They’re not well intentioned, they’re actually kind of scam type things. What do you advise someone to do about this? Do you advise them to pick someone to follow, or focus their efforts, or do you just warn them?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, a bit of all of the above perhaps. I think one thing [inaudible] to the way I got started that was very helpful, and I know you did the same, was to start out when you start the search for information is to rather than jumping from kind of sales letter to sales letter and learning through the things that you read there, is to become involved in a community.

The Warrior Forum is a great one for people getting started, where you see a little more of the content and a little less of the offers, at least slightly. It’s the kind of place where there’s a bunch of people that are on the same mission that you are, and they’re looking at the same products that you are, and they can advise for or against a particular product, depending on your skill level.

They’re a group of people who definitely have been at the game longer than you have, so they will have made some of the mistakes that you are likely to make. So, you can learn from their experience. Learning from other people’s experience in that way is often a lot better than learning from your own experience, because when you have to go out and make every single mistake yourself, it becomes extremely disheartening.

It’s hard, you need a lot of will to carry on if you’re taking that way. Learning from other people’s experience cuts down the amount of time that you have to spend on everything. So, yes, joining a community is one excellent way to kind of fast track the process.

Mark Mason: Very good. That sounds like outstanding advice to me. How about thing two? What’s the second thing that you might advise someone that was new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: The second thing that I had in mind when you first asked me, and some people listening may find it frustrating to hear, but it’s another sort of a mindset issue. Again, this is really difficult to do, and it’s very rare that people just getting started are able, even if they want to, to take on this mindset.

That is to just approach online business in two ways. Both as a long term venture, and something that you are building gradually and slowly, and that you want to have making you money, not just in the next 3 months, but in the next 3 years.

Then starting from that frame of mind, again is difficult, because all of the offers and all of the material that you read is always promising you that you’re going to be able to make X amount of money, “In the next 3 days you’ll have this stream of income coming next week, and then it will skyrocket from there and suddenly you’ll have an ocean front mansion and a Ferrari just like in the picture.”

It doesn’t take long for most people to realize that it doesn’t really work that way. Nor should you want it to work that way, because a general rule that I have is that the faster money comes to you, the faster it can leave you. You might be able to make 1,000 dollars by next week, but whatever may have brought you that money is almost always such that it can disappear just as fast as it came.

So, approaching it from the mindset of wanting to setup a real business is maybe the smartest thing that you can do. Again, it’s difficult, but if you do it you’ll beat many people.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I sometimes get these heartbreaking emails from readers of my blog, or people that stumble through my blog telling me how their credit cards are maxed out and they’re about to lose their house and they need to make 10,000 dollars tomorrow. There’s just not a lot you can tell those people, really.

Andrew Hansen: I know what you mean. I have the same emails. You’re right, what do you say to them? The truest thing to say to them is that you don’t need internet marketing right now, you need a loan or you need a job or something. If someone was in that situation, would you advise them to start a real business? Would you tell them to start up a Subway franchise and see if you can make money that way? Of course not. They shouldn’t be looking for a business. They should be looking to secure their financial situation first.

Mark Mason: That’s right. Okay. That’s excellent advise, number two. So, do you have a third one for me tonight?

Andrew Hansen: Yes. It’s hard to select a third one actually.

Mark Mason: Well, you’re allowed four. If it’s really coming down to that kind of thing, we’ll give you a fourth one.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. All right. The next thing, and this one is kind of related to your approach also in the pre-strategy stage, I would say. That is because like we’ve been saying, there are so many different methods to being able to make money, the thing is that actually there is also so many working methods.

There’s many ways to skin the cat. There’s a lot of ways that in the midst of all the ones that don’t work, there’s still a lot of ways that do work. What makes one method right for one person doesn’t depend on the method, but it depends on the individual.

For example, if you pick any given person off the street, that person would have preexisting knowledge, and preexisting skills, preexisting likes and dislikes. So, they would be better suited to one business model rather than another.

For example, you might really like writing, like me, I’m someone who really likes to write. So, writing comes easy to me. It’s never a rigorous process, I never begrudgingly start to write an article, because I enjoy it. So, I use that to my advantage by focusing on business models that utilize the skills and the things that I enjoy, and that I already have.

That’s how I got started out. I got started first just writing for other people. That allowed me to be able to make money from home. It wasn’t really a business, but I was able to make money from that. Then slowly as I learned more about actually making money with a proper business online, I was able to use those writing skills to leverage into content for blogs and for mini sites. Then to use the traffic generated from those to promote affiliate programs, and earn commissions and things like that.

The point after that discussion was try to find the method, and firstly, try to stick to one method, because the worst thing that you can do is get started with one method, see another method or offer tomorrow in passing and kind of hop over to that method and do a little bit of work there, and realize that it’s not really for you, so hop onto another method, and then maybe later come back to that first method, because you realized it might be more profitable after all.

That’s the worst thing you can do. That’s opportunity hopping, like I call it, and it’s almost always going to lead to failure. So, the first thing is to stick to one method at least until you get to the point that you realize you can’t do it, because it’s just not fitting with you, you’re not good at doing things that way, you don’t have the resources or the time, or whatever else to perform that particular method.

The second thing is when you are sticking to one method, make it one method that fits with the skills and the things that you like that you already have. So, if you like writing, blogging should be easy for you. You might find it easier to maintain a blog than to sell products. You could blog and to sell advertising on that blog, as opposed to doing all the research and the analytics and tracking and testing that comes with say making money with PPC.

That would be the third thing, stick to one method, and try to stick one method that fits with the things that you already are good at and enjoy doing.

Mark Mason: That’s a great tip. You know, I hear a lot of people, and I’m one of them, tell people to beware of getting distracted by what I call bright shiny objects. Every new email that comes into your inbox is trying to sell you a new method, you need to watch out for that.

But, I think you may be the first person I’ve heard who has really expressed this in this way, where you should take advantage of the skills that you have and try to get a match between what you’re good at and what the method teaches, so that you can leverage the assets you already have. That’s an excellent tip. I appreciate that.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely. Part of it is that you only, and this is kind of unfortunate, but inevitable, that you will only really start to find what you really enjoy doing online and what you are really good at after a little bit of messing around. So, maybe one of the other side note points of the three is just be willing to kind of experiment a little bit with it, and be willing to lose a little bit of money if you absolutely have to.

Take your time and find out what it is you’re good at, because even if you take that little bit of time at the start and you start focusing on a method that you are really good at and that you do really enjoy, the dividends of that will pay down the track, both in terms of how much time it will save you and how much money it will make you, will be well worth the amount of time that you may waste in the beginning.

Mark Mason: Excellent. Did you have one more that you wanted to throw in here, because I’ve got time for you if you’d like one more?

Andrew Hansen: I think I will, actually, because we didn’t really get to talk much about strategy. So, I thought I might throw one little strategy point in there. It’s really hard to pick one strategy point out of everything that you could possibly say that would cover every kind of method and every kind of person who would be looking to start to make money online.

But, the thing that I thought of, and it’s such a recurring theme, and such a recurring thing that I see as the reason for people not achieving the results that they want to with their online business. That is firstly, whatever method or many methods that you will start to make money online with begin with finding a market. Whether it’s a market being an interest group to which you want to write a blog for, or whether it’s a market that you’re going to sell a product to, or it’s a market that you’re going to sell advertising to, whatever it is, many methods start with a niche or finding a market.

Different people have different definitions of what a market or what a niche on the internet really is. If you’re listening to this call, you probably will have already, or will in the future, come across the methods for locating markets on the internet. Like using the search analytics tools to see how many people are searching for a particular term.

A lot of people think, and it’s easy to fall into this trap of thinking, that things like somebody searching for a term is a market or is a profitable market. But, there’s a big difference between searches and buyers. If you want to make money from your online business, if you’re not just doing it for fun or because you enjoy it, you want to make money from it, you need to be in a niche where people are spending money. You need to be in a niche not just where you think people might spend money, but where people are already spending money.

Seeing the term, I don’t know whatever it is, Dragon Ball Z cards, for example, gets searched for 100,000 times, that doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 people who could potentially buy from you in that group, because that’s such a niche of kids and people who aren’t necessarily spending a ton of money. It doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 buyers. You might only have 1,000 buyers, if you’re lucky, maybe 100 buyers more likely.

Conversely, there’s markets where if you look at something like weight loss. People are spending money in that market. It’s an enormous market, not just on the internet, but offline as well. It’s a market where you know people are spending money. I’m not necessarily advocating that you get into the weight loss market, it’s extremely competitive, but I’m providing that as an example of a market where you are certain that people are already spending money.

So, your goal then, almost regardless of what method it is that you’re using, is to try to access and try to put yourself between the transactions that are already taking place and put yourself in the midst of the transactions that are already taking place. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a really increased percentage chance of being able to actually claim some of that cash that’s already changing hands.

Starting with a niche of buyers is my fourth, final, and only strategy tip.

Mark Mason: I know it’s amazing to me that people miss this, but I think you cover it pretty well in some of the materials that you’ve published over the years. There’s a lot of really simple things you can think about. One of the things that you teach is just the keyword modifier, “buy.”

There’s a hell of a lot of difference between the keyword “buy dog food recipes” and “dog food recipes.” One person is looking for a free recipe for dog food, and the other person is looking for a dog food recipe cookbook.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: There’s just a huge difference.

Andrew Hansen: One person has got their wallet in their hand as they type. They’ve got their credit card there and they’re looking to make sure they know all the different numbers so they’re ready to type it in when they find what it is that they want.

Whereas the other group, you can’t tell what they want. Some of them may be looking to buy, but some of them might be looking for a freebie, some of them might be looking for something they can print off and give to their friends. You don’t know. So, the group that’s got their credit card ready, and it’s a no brainer about which one you want to target.

Mark Mason: Very good. This has been incredibly helpful. There are a couple of other questions I wanted to ask you.

Andrew Hansen: Sure.

Mark Mason: I know that you’ve been very gracious and not actually talking about your own products, but they’re so good I want to talk about them. The first thing I want to talk about and want to point people to is one of my favorite ebooks that you’ve released, and it’s free, that’s really great, and I’ve actually sent my readers to it, because I really like it. That’s your Crap Cutter Marketing ebook. Can you give people kind of the 30 second lowdown about what they can expect in that ebook, and let them where to find it, and I’ll also put the URL in the show notes.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Some of the things that I wrote about in Crap Cutter Marketing is the same as what we’ve talked about on this call. In part it’s about locating niche markets of buyers, locating groups of people that are looking to spend money and talking about strategies for putting yourself, your content, your website, or your offers in front of those people.

It’s talking about how to do that in a way that creates as little work for you as possible. There’s obviously work involved, but it’s try to make that as easy as possible for you. It also tries to do that without you having to spend a ton of money. So, it focuses on free traffic strategies. It looks at then leveraging that free traffic by promoting offers as an affiliate and using advertising revenue and using content, or things that you write, as the platform for selling stuff online.

There’s a ton of stuff in that report. A lot on mindset things, to finding niches, to monetizing your content, to generating traffic. It’s a really good free report, and it’s had a lot of good feedback. You can’t argue with free. There’s no cheesy up sell and you don’t have to spend any money in the process. It’s a good one to check out.

Mark Mason: Tell me the URL again.

Andrew Hansen: That’s CrapCutterMarketing.com.

Mark Mason: Have you gotten any negative feedback from people who are offended by the use of the word crap?

Andrew Hansen: No, I haven’t actually. Not as much as people offended by the use of the word crack in a previous report.

Mark Mason: Niche Marketing on Crack was another great one. I told you, that’s one of the first things I bought, so that’s good stuff.

The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly, because it’s your premiere product and I’ve written a lot about it on my blog, is Firepow. I was wondering if you could just give us the 30 second summary of what the Firepow system is, and give us some look into the future about Firepow and give me some breaking news here? Tell me what you’ve got planned over there.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Firepow is kind of like a combination of all the intelligent things I’ve learned about making money online in the 5 or 6 years that I’ve been doing this. It’s a piece of software primarily, but it’s also kind of a suite of software tools, as well as a lot of training materials, like PDFs and videos, that focus on how to create blogs and use those blogs for the purposes of making money as an affiliate.

There’s other forms of monetization as well. The blog is for the purpose of generating really high quality, target, buying traffic that then you can push towards affiliate offers to earn commissions or to advertising on your site to earn Adsense clicks, or to your own products if you sell something somewhere else on the internet.

It’s a suite of tools that helps you to automate as much as possible that entire process. It helps you set up a blog in a matter of 10 clicks or something like that. There’s no HTML to write, there’s FTP programs to fiddle around with, there’s no uploading or downloading. You just fill in the forms and follow the instructions and it will spit you out a nice looking blog that’s not just a normal blog, but a blog that’s optimized to generate traffic for you from the search engines. So, it’s targeted to the right keywords that you’re looking to rank for.

It’s got proper permalinks. It’s got all the plugins and all the little settings that normally you have to learn how to set yourself or the add-ons that you have to work out. It’s got them all set in there for you, so you just click the buttons and you spits you out the blog.

It takes you right from that part of the process, creating your blog, to the generation of your content, which is the next thing that’s enormously important for anyone looking to generate free traffic. You need content. You need stuff to attract visitors that you can then monetize.

It helps you generate content both with ideas and with physically finding content for you on the internet that’s already out there that’s not being utilized as well as it might be that’s targeted to the terms that you’re looking to rank for. So, it helps you leverage other people’s content. Not in any illegal way, of course, just by grabbing content from syndicated sources from elsewhere on the internet.

Right through to the process of actually promoting your blog and being able to generate traffic to it, both through search engines and through social bookmarking sites, through directories, through other people’s private blogs, and building backlinks and generating exposure in as many places as possible to your blogs.

It’s kind of the whole enchilada from the creation of your blog to the cashing of your checks is what I always say. It’s automating that process as much as possible.

In terms of future plans, we’re really just trying to add new features or new tools all the time to optimize that and to automate it more for you. For example, we’ve got a feature coming out next week that’s for people who want to make Adsense sites.

We don’t have time to discuss that model, obviously, but it’s just creating content that gets ranked in the search engines that you position Adsense ads in, when people click those ads you make money. With this new tool, it will be in addition to something that we already have, but that lets you basically create a full Adsense blog that gets updated every couple days, however often you select, with content that’s targeted to the right keywords, that’s relevant and unique as much as possible, and automatically monetizing that for you.

So, you can create Adsense within, again, a number of clicks. You could create an Adsense site on any niche that you choose as long as you’ve got a keyword list that you’ve already researched within 5 minutes or so. So, that’s something we’re working on at the moment.

Mark Mason: Now, where can people find out more information about Firepow?

Andrew Hansen: You can checkout GetFirepow.com.

Mark Mason: That is excellent, sir. I appreciate all the tips, and I’m excited to give people an opportunity to hear about your products, because in both cases those two products are products that I’ve personally endorsed and have done so based on just the raw quality of both of them. I’m happy to give you that time to talk about that.

I do have one last question for you. I know you’re an accomplished affiliate marketer, you’ve sold all kinds of crazy things, which we don’t have time to go through them all here today, but now the question I have for you is, are you aware of any affiliate programs for vegemite?

Andrew Hansen: A vegemite affiliate program. You know, I’m sure there probably is one. You might have to sign up to some kind of online store, some Australian grocery store online. I don’t think it will pay out very high, because it’s a physical glass bottle with stuff in it.

After they ship it to you it will cost you 3.75, you might earn a 10 cent commission per jar of vegemite sold. I don’t know too many people that order it in quantities large enough to generate a huge commission. But, if you pioneer it, I’ll stand behind you.

Mark Mason: Okay, very good. Listen, Andrew, I really appreciate your time. The last question I have for you is, if people just want to follow the teachings of Andrew Hansen, where is the best place to follow you online?

Andrew Hansen: Sure. You can check out my blog, that’s at AndrewHansen.name, or you can follow me on Twitter as well, and that’s @AndrewHansen1.

Mark Mason: Very good. I’ll have both of those in the show notes. Andrew, thank you very much. I’m going to get some sleep. It’s creeping up on 2:00 in the morning here in Dallas, and it’s 3:00 in the morning there. I appreciate your time, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Andrew Hansen: My please, sir. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

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MW004 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. This is Episode 3 already. This is very exciting. We had hundreds of downloads of the podcast. I just want to say thank you for that. It’s been really exciting from my perspective. Lots of downloads from iTunes, I really appreciate that.

iTunes is fantastic exposure for the podcast. If you’ve got a chance, hop on over to iTunes, search for Mason World. You’ll find the podcast right away. Mash on the subscribe button, and go ahead and leave us a review. We really appreciate that. That helps get the word out about the podcast far and wide. iTunes is far and wide the best distribution channel for podcasts.

In this episode, episode 3 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we’re going to be talking about our next way to make money online. You’ll recall that we’ve been using two reference resources. We’ve got the Yanik Silver book, which you can find at MasonWorld.com/silver.

We’ve got the Jimmy Brown report on 10 Ways to Make 10,000 Dollars a Month Online, and that’s at MasonWorld.com/10ways. Both of those are information products. What’s interesting about information products is that’s the method for making money online that we’ll be discussing here in episode 3.

Now, this method of selling information products online, interestingly, goes hand in hand with the method that we talked about last week, which was affiliate marketing. You’ll recall last week we talked about affiliate marketing as a way that you take internet traffic, however you can get it, either through organic search or pay per click, or from your website, or wherever, and you drive it to a product.

The clicks that come from your website are tracked in such a way that if someone you send to a product buys that product, you get a commission. It’s basically commission sales. One of the best things to do affiliate marketing with and to get commissions on the internet are information products. They’re really fantastic.

They satisfy the need that people have for instant gratification. Usually that works in the following way. Someone needs information about a topic, so they go to Google, they search for information on that topic, and they hit a sales page for information product.

Let’s say that someone needs information about buying carpet. All of a sudden they find a sales page for a report on the 17 Tips that You Must Know to Successfully Buy Carpet and Save Money Doing It, and that report costs 19.95. Rather than spending the next 17 hours surfing around, reading articles that are disconnected on the internet about buying carpet, the person decides to buy that information product, download it, read it, and in 30 minutes they’re a carpet buying expert and they’re all done.

People are willing to pay for your work and your expertise in collecting together information that you can then turn around and sell on the internet over and over again. There’s lots of advantages to selling information products on the internet.

The first advantage, obviously, is that the overhead is tiny. You create a report, or do an audio interview, or do a collection of interviews, or whatever it is that you are doing to collect information. Videos, any kind of information product on a topic that you know something about, you bundle those together into something that’s actually useful to someone. You put it a price on it, and then you can have it be available for download whenever someone pays for it.

This thing can be for sale 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, any country in the world. You can put that product out there, and if people can find it, they can buy it. You can go to sleep one night, and wake up the next day and have money in your bank account, quite literally.

So, selling information products online is one of the best ways you can make money on the internet, It goes hand and hand with the affiliate marketing model that we talked about last week, because if you can get affiliates to promote your information product, again, these are people that are selling your product for you, you can just sit back and get the sales while affiliates do all the work. That’s kind of the dream of information marketing and information products.

This is covered in the first chapter of Yanik Silver’s book. Yanik is an information marketer, and he’s an incredibly successful seven figure version of an information marketer. He covers what he considers to be the seven most important reasons for why digital information products are the best way to build a fortune.

You can setup a situation where you have no competition. That’s reason one, because everything you create will be copy protected. So, if you have a report, no one can just copy that report and sell exactly the same thing that you’ve got. If you can differentiate it, you can eliminate competition.

Reason two, I already mentioned, the profit margins are incredibly huge, because you’re just delivering a digital download. You’re not printing anything. You’re not shipping anything physically if you don’t want to. So, the overhead is very low.

Reason number three that information products are great is that you can work from anywhere you want to. You can work in your pajamas from your home if you like to do that. Or you can have a big fancy office. Either way you can do it the way you want to.

Reason four is that you can setup your business on complete autopilot. Like I was describing before, you can make the thing run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without intervention. Everything is automatic.

That leads to number five, you don’t need any employees to do an information marketing business on the internet. There’s nothing to ship, there’s no envelopes to stuff, and so forth. So, you really don’t need employees.

Number six is an important one for people that are trying to get started online. That is that there are incredibly low start up costs on the internet. When you start a business like this on the internet, and information marketing business, literally all you need is a PC and some time to type.

Reason seven, which is my personal favorite reason is it scales well. You can do something once and get paid over and over again. You write an ebook once, but you sell it a thousand times, or 10,000 times. You can just keep getting paid for that year after year, without any problem.

Now, there are lots of different kinds of information marketing. We won’t cover all of them. Ebooks, obviously, are one, you can have membership sites, and so forth. But, one of the interesting things about internet marketing and information marketing is the broad range of niches that you can cover when you’re selling information is only limited by your imagination.

I’ve seen ebooks on buying carpet, I’ve seen on the topics of self help, fitness, and natural medicine. I’ve seen ebooks about learning how to sing, believe it or not. The way you can find these ebooks and get some ideas of what’s going on, the best source to see what people are selling is at Clickbank.com. Clickbank.com is an amazing resource for people to buy and sell ebooks.

If you’re interested, as I mentioned last time, in affiliate marketing, you can find things to promote there. But, if you’re interested in being promoted by affiliates, you can create material and have it for sale on Clickbank.com.

That gives you kind of an idea for information marketing. Really, Yanik describes what he says are the top seven information topics that you can consider. So, if you’re thinking about information marketing, here are seven things you can think about as a place to start.

Any kind of how to guide that someone would be willing to buy is a great idea. Any kind of self help or relationship information that people are willing to buy is a great idea. Recently there’s been a big buzz on the internet about an ebook that teaches you how to get your ex back. If you’ve lost your girlfriend or your spouse, you can buy this ebook to learn techniques for getting your ex back.

Lots of financial ebooks. Of course, people are willing to spend a little money if they think it’s going to make them money. Lots of ebooks about business and making money, particularly making money on the internet. That would be the fourth area that he points out.

The fitness, diet, and health niche is a really obvious one. People are always trying to figure out how to lose weight. Anything that people need to read to improve themselves, some kind of skills, improvement, or training.

One of my friends has a very successful information product about how to pass particular tests for project management certification. He’s very successful with that. I have another friend who has a successful ebook teaching people how to program on the iPhone. I’ll show you links to both of those products. They’re very exciting.

Then finally, there’s a successful niche that Yanik points out in the entertainment, travel, and lifestyle area. That’s another niche that he’s real big in and had some success in.

I hope that gives you an idea about our second topic in the area of how to make money on the internet. The first one was affiliate marketing. The second one that we’ve talked about today is information marketing.

Now, information marketing is a huge topic, and obviously, we’re not going to be able to teach you how to do that in a podcast of this length. But, I can tell you that if you want to get a good idea of how to get started, there are two resources that I can recommend. One is the Yanik Silver book. The other thing that I can recommend to you is an ebook that’s about to come out by Josh Spaulding.

He talks about his success in the information marketing area. You can find a link to that in the show notes. I just got finished reading the final draft of that ebook. It’s not even released to the public yet. When it is released, you’ll be able to find it at MasonWorld.com/joshinfo.

Okay, that wraps up our brief introduction to information marketing. That means it’s time for what’s becoming my favorite part of the show. That is the specialty interviews with successful internet marketers that are really kicking it up and making a lot of money online.

This week I’ve got for you one of my all time favorites. I was so excited that he agreed to do the interview. Jonathan Leger. Jon has a ton of products out there, and they’re all fantastic. He’s very famous for his products 3-Way-Links and 1-Way-Links.

In addition to that, he’s had many successful information products. He’s currently got some huge things that are going viral. Including TipDrop.com. If you haven’t seen TipDrop.com, I definitely recommend that you hop over there and check that out.

What I asked Jonathan in this interview was to tell me the three things that he thought a new internet marketer should know. He was kind enough to do that. So, without further ado, here’s incredibly successful internet marketing guru, Jon Leger.

And now, the feature interview.

Mark Mason: Today in our continuing series on trying to understand how we can boil this internet marketing and making money online activity down into something that normal people can understand, we turn again to another expert in the field.

A lot of you have heard of him. His name is Jon Leger. A lot of you have mispronounced it for years, as I have, but it’s correctly pronounced Jon Lejay. Jon has any array of fantastic internet marketing products out on the market.

He’s a self made internet business man, incredibly successful. I’m a happy customer of Jon’s and thrilled to have him on the podcast. Jon, how are you doing today?

Jon Leger: Doing just fine, Mark. Great to be here.

Mark Mason: Thank you, very much. I really appreciate you taking the call. We talked a little bit before the call, Jon, and I let you know that what I’m trying to help people understand is sort of the most important things that they need to know to get started.

As you know, there’s a lot of clutter out there. The noise on the internet about how to make money online is so massive, it’s hard to get a grip on the things that are really important if you’re trying to start a viable internet business.

So, what I wanted to ask you today, Jon, is if you could boil it down to three things. If a new potential internet marketer came to you and asked you for the three things that they really needed to know to get started, or the most important three things, what would those three things be?

I was hoping maybe you could go through three of those with us today and let us know if you had it to do all over again, what are the three things you think are most important?

Jon Leger: Sure, absolutely. First of all, the first thing relates to the noise that you’re talking about, because there is a lot of noise out there. There are no free rides, but everyone is going to promise you one if you’re looking for internet marketing online.

You’ll read headlines promising the world with almost no effort at all from guys who have made a fortune online. But, you know they made that fortune? Selling info products to people that claim to show you how to make a fortune online. So, you could probably see the problem there.

Almost none of the guys you see, the so called gurus out there, have run real businesses selling real products. Look for the ones that have real legitimate offline businesses too, because really an online business is no different from an offline business in this respect. It takes a lot of work to get going and to build a solid business.

So, any time you read a headline or a sales copy that says, “It’s easy. There’s nothing to it. Anyone can do it.” That’s true, but there’s lots of work involved to get there. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is true that once it’s moving, it’s a lot less of a headache than a brick and mortar business. That’s one of the appeals of running a business online.

It’s true that you can make really good money running your business from home, and that it’s got a flexible schedule, and all that. But, it takes a lot of work to get there and anyone who tells you different is a shark. It’s a shame that has to be the number one thing that I bring up, but there’s just so much out there that there’s so many sharks, so many false claims, that I really have to make that the number one thing.

Mark Mason: Well, it’s a good thing. Basically, you’re telling me something that my father has told me all my life, so it must be true. That is you can’t get something for nothing. Doesn’t that pretty much boil it down?

Jon Leger: Yes, absolutely. Now, it does get easier in time, but you have to expect a lot of hard work up front. There’s just not getting around that, whatever kind of business you plan on running.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, that’s an excellent first item. What’s the second item you would want to tell a new prospective internet marketer?

Jon Leger: Second, I’d tell them that you have to find a great product that sells well. You might be a huge fan of classic French poetry anthologies, I’m sorry, you’re just not going to make any money trying to sell that online.

You might be the most knowledgeable person about it, others who care about it might praise your name, but make a living at it you will not. I’m not saying just abandon your passions. You certainly have side projects doing the things that you love, ones that you can use to get away from the hum-drum day to day stuff that you’re not as passionate about.

It does help if you happen to be very interested in something that’s very popular. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. Right? That’s what they say.

I’m fortunate that my products center around search engine optimization and content creation, since those are my passions. But, what’s most likely for most new people starting out, is that you’re going to have a general field of interest that does contain a great product inside of it, but you have to find what that is.

Let me give you an example. My brother sells porch swings 100 percent online. He sells a lot of porch swings. In May of this year, he sold over 42,000 dollars in porch swings. He chose to sell that, because he loves woodworking.

He did some research, he found out that porch swings were popular, and he started to sell them on eBay. This year he’s going to do almost half a million dollars in porch swings. So, he’s doing something he loves, woodworking, with a product that’s popular and sells really well, porch swings.

Whatever you do love, try to find a way to adapt that into a sellable product if at all possible. But, if your passions just don’t have a market, then get into a market that’s popular. Keep side projects going so that you’ve got somewhere to go to get your creativity moving when you lose interest in your main product.

Mark Mason: That’s a really good point. Let me ask you, if I’m remembering right, you wrote a little bit on your blog about some of your experiences with keyword optimization on there for the porch swing activity that you were working on with your brother. Can you just take this opportunity to tell people how to find you online? Where is the best place to hook up with Jon Leger online?

Jon Leger: Well, my blog at JonathanLeger.com, and the spelling, of course, Jonathan L-E-G-E-R dot com. I post a lot of information there, especially on the topic of search engine optimization.

Mark Mason: Excellent. So, that’s a good resource for people. Just so you know, and my listeners know, I think you know this, because I comment on your blog and I read your blog, so it comes highly recommended from me.

Jon Leger: Thank you.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, that’s an excellent second item. What’s the third and final item that you think is most important for people to know?

Jon Leger: Really, running a business online is a simple formula. You have a great product, you get targeted traffic, and you can earn a good living. We covered the great product part. But, no matter how great your product, no visitors means no money. So, you need to get traffic.

The third point I would say is that not all traffic is created equal. It is very possible to get millions of visitors to your site, and make no sales. Just ask the owners of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. They get tons of traffic, they’re great sites with cool “products,” but nobody has figured out how to make any money from those yet.

That’s because their traffic isn’t targeted. By targeted, I mean it’s not people looking to buy something in a particular market. Before you start getting traffic to your site, you have to make sure that traffic is targeted. Again, this accomplished by researching your market first.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you sell a product that teaches people the basics of dog training. So, you buy some ads on Google that show up when people search for the phrase, dog training basics. Or you work to get your site ranked in the top ten of Google for that phrase. That sounds logical, right? Dog training basics, that’s what people type in, they find my product, I make sales.

Guess what? You won’t sell hardly anything to people searching for dog training basics. That’s because that phrase is being typed into the search engines by people who are looking for free information, not people who are looking to buy.

A much better set of keywords to buy ads for, or to get ranked for, would be dog behavior training. Because people typing that into search engines are looking to buy. I happen to know that, because MSN has a free tool available that tells you how likely it is that somebody searching for a given set of keywords is in the market to buy, and how likely it is that they’re just looking for free information.

So, just like you need to research your product in advance, once you have a product, you need to research who is looking for that product and what they’re typing into the search engines when they want to buy it. If you can get those two things right, you’ve got a recipe for a successful online business.

Mark Mason: Outstanding. Yes, that OCI index is an often overlooked thing. That’s an excellent tip. That’s another thing people can learn about reading your blog, because I know that you’ve covered that in the past too. It’s really a treasure trove of information over there.

I’m suspecting, having known you for as long as I have, that you have way more than three items that would be helpful for somebody who is trying to get started. But, of course, we’ve got a finite amount of time on this podcast. So, let me ask you, have you got another resource? Your blog is an enormous resource, but that’s kind of hard to digest in one sitting. Do you have a nice compact place for someone to start who is trying to get started online?

Jon Leger: Absolutely. In fact, I recently released a product with my brother, who like I said, sells enormous amounts of porch swings 100 percent online. We got together, and he actually hammered out everything he does. The details about how he did the product research, what pay per click sites he uses, to get him up to selling 40,000 something dollars a month in porch swings.

I put that together with the details of how I research keywords to rank for. Something we didn’t have time to get into, how to optimize your site so that it shows up in the top results of Google. You can get all of that information at GeekFreeProfits.com. Geek, G-E-E-K, Free Profits dot com. You will find all of the information, including the three points that we talked about on the podcast in much more detail.

Mark Mason: Very good. Well, hey, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate the excellent tips. What I really appreciate more than anything is all of the great products that you’ve contributed to the internet marketing community.

Not just information products, but actually really my favorite are your software products. I know I speak on behalf of a lot of your customers and just say thanks a lot for all your great contributions. Thanks for appearing on this podcast. I really appreciate it.

Jon Leger: Thank you, Mark. It was a good one.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Have a fantastic day.

All right. That really does it for this week. I appreciate your continued attendance here at the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’d really appreciate it if you’d stumble on over to iTunes, just go to MasonWorld.com/itunes, subscribe to the podcast and leave me a review there. That would really help me out.

I hope you have a fantastically successful week. I’ll talk to you again in about a week or ten days with Episode 4. Have a great one.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW003 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason, and I’m here to talk to you about how to build a successful internet business one night at a time. That’s what I do. It’s called Late Night Internet Marketing, because, well, that’s when I do it, late at night.

In the last episode I promised you we would talk about the two special reports that I think are really good. Actually, one is a hard cover book by Yanik Silver, it’s called Moonlighting on the Internet. You can find that at MasonWorld.com/silver.

The other is a free report from Jimmy D. Brown, one of the fantastic internet marketers in the internet marketing space, it’s called 10 Ways to Make 10,000 Dollars a Month on the Internet. You can find that at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

One of the 10 ways that Jimmy talks about, and one of the five ways that Yanik Silver talks about making money is through affiliate marketing on the internet. So, that’s what I really want to start off with as the number one way that you can make money on the internet, with affiliate marketing.

Now, there’s a couple of things that you need to understand about making money on the internet. One thing that you need to understand is how money moves around on the internet. In general, what you do on the internet to make money is you get traffic on the internet. In this podcast we’ll talk about how it is exactly that you can get traffic. There are a lot of ways to get traffic to your website on the internet.

You convince that traffic to take some action. That convincing of taking an action is called conversion. What you want to do is you want to get traffic, and you want to convert it either into a sale or to capture a lead, or some other thing that has value. You want to get people to take action on your website.

One of the things you can get people to do in terms of taking action is you can get them to click on a link that drives them to some other website where they might make a purchase. When they make that purchase, you can get what’s called an affiliate commission.

You can think of this as commission sales, just like someone in a store. If you buy a product that someone is pitching, then that person who is pitching the product can get a commission. On the internet it works the same way in a lot of cases. If I review a product, and you read my review, and you agree with me and like and buy that product, and you arrive at that destination where you buy that product through my affiliate link, that merchant will often times pay me a commission.

One of the reasons that I’m covering this first on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast is that you’ve already been a victim of affiliate marketing on this podcast. I want to point that out to you. If you’re new to internet marketing it’s something that you really need to understand.

When I told you about Moonlighting on the Internet with Yanik Silver, I directed you to the link www.masonworld.com/silver. When I told you about Jimmy Brown’s report, I directed you to www.masonworld.com/10ways. The reason I did that, and the main reason to do that is because on a podcast it’s really hard to give links, so you want something that’s simple and easy to remember, because people are likely driving in their car or otherwise engaged.

The other reason you do that is because when you click through to those links, in the case of the Yanik Silver book, you’re forwarded to Amazon, and in the case of the Jimmy D. Brown book you are forwarded to a location where you’re able to download a copy of the book.

In both cases those transactions result in the placing of what’s called a cookie on your computer that will give me credit for the sale if you buy something. So, that’s something that you always need to watch out for in internet marketing. You need to deal with people that are transparent, that you trust, because the potential exists that someone might recommend a product to you just to get the commission and not because they believe in the product.

Now, in my case, my whole business is based around this idea of transparency and trust. That’s why I’m telling you about this affiliate marketing business first. So, you can understand that there is money to be gained in the recommending of products.

In the case of the Yanik Silver book, what happens is you go to Amazon.com. Again, if you go to MasonWorld.com/silver you can see this in action. You’re taken directly to the Amazon page, and it turns out if you buy that book within 24 hours of having come through my link, I’ll get a few dollars on the sale of that book, or probably even a few pennies in the case of the Silver book.

In the case of the Jimmy Brown report, that’s a more sophisticated technique where Jimmy Brown has links to his many outstanding, excellent products that he offers in the report. If you buy something through one of the links in the report that link will be tracked back to me and I will get a commission for that sale.

That’s using an affiliate technique called report rebranding, which means that report you downloaded is specific to MasonWorld.com, and anyone who downloads that report gets credit.

That’s an important idea that you need to understand. I tell you that for three reasons. One is it’s an absolutely great example of how affiliate marketing can work. You recommend products, hopefully you make honest recommendations. That’s valuable to people. When people buy those products based on your recommendations, you get a commission for the sale. It’s valuable for the merchant, it’s valuable for the customer, it’s win-win when it’s done with integrity.

The second reason I tell you about that is because my business is built around transparency, and I want to make sure that you know that if you buy those products that can result in a commission for me through those mechanisms that I described.

The third reason that I want to tell you about that is because it’s very important that you be aware about this issue with affiliate marketing, because currently the FTC is really starting to crack down on affiliate marketers. Particularly in the spaces like diet pills and Acai Berry, and these other things that claim to be able to sell you magic in a bottle.

These kind of things the FTC is really going to start to crack down on. They’ve got a position paper on how they intend to do this. We’ll cover that in a later episode. That’s a more sophisticated topic.

So, if you’re thinking about doing affiliate marketing, I’m not a lawyer, you should make sure you understand the rules around that as they come down from the FTC. I can tell you what I think, but as with all legal and accounting matters, you should get professional advice, because I’m not a lawyer. But, that’s the third reason. You want to be aware of what’s going on with the FTC.

There is an enormous amount of affiliate marketing going on online right now today. That is not anything that you should be afraid of. Just be aware of it, so you can make sure and run your business like a business in a way that makes sense.

That is way to make money on the internet number one, affiliate marketing. It’s actually number two in Jimmy Brown’s book, and it’s covered in Chapter Three or Four, I think, in Yanik Silver’s book. You can get that and take a look at it. It’s covered really well there.

Now, you might wonder, in terms of affiliate marketing, what is it that you can actually promote? Well, it turns out you can promote almost anything through affiliate marketing. It’s really amazing. Everything from automobiles on eBay to the smallest packs of gum, to anything on Amazon.com.

All kinds of offers where the only thing that’s required for you to get a commission is for the person to actually leave their name and address. That would be a different kind of affiliate offer, but an offer nonetheless that’s available in affiliate marketing.

You can use traffic that you get from search engines. We’ll talk about that in future episodes. Or you can use traffic that you pay for. The bottom line in all these things is for affiliate marketing to work, you need to make more money than you spend to make the money.

It’s just like any other business opportunity. You have costs associated with getting the traffic in some cases. Those costs need to be less than the money that you make when you are successful with affiliate marketing.

If you’re interested in checking out some affiliate marketing opportunities out there, one of the places that I like to recommend is the Pepperjam Network. It’s easy to manage and easy to understand. Amazon.com has an affiliate program. As well as the granddaddy of them all, Commission Junction. You’ll be shocked and amazed at all the things that are for sale and that are available for you to promote on Commission Junction.

Now, these first 10 episodes or so we’re getting an overview of internet marketing, so you can kind of understand what’s possible on the internet. As past of that, I’ve promised you an ongoing series of interviews with top internet marketers about the most important things that they wish they had known when they started.

What I’d like to offer you now is an interview with a fantastic internet marketer and personal friend of mine, Josh Spaulding. Josh runs an outstanding blog about internet marketing and making money online over at Easy-OnlineMoney.com. You can find his blog where he’s writing about all of his experiences at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog.

Josh is a full time internet marketer. He’s incredibly successful. He’s run membership sites, article directories, he does affiliate marketing, he’s an expert at email marketing, he’s an information marketer with a bunch of successful paid and free products. Josh has pretty much done it all.

I got Josh on the phone and I asked him to tell me what the three most important things that he wished he knew about internet marketing when he started, and this is what he had to say.

And now the feature interview.

Mark Mason: Okay. Today we have on the line noted internet marketer, Josh Spaulding. Josh, of course, runs a blog over at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog. He’s also got a viral ebook that I know a lot of people have read on how to make money with Adsense called The 5 Dollar Formula. That’s available at 5dollarformula.com.

Josh has been doing internet marketing for a long time. Josh, how are you doing today?

Josh Spaulding: Pretty good.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate you being here. I think we talked a little bit before the call, and I told you the focus of this podcast is really, at least initially, about how people can get started online, how they can build an internet business, and particularly do it like I did, part time and in the evenings, investing a little bit at a time over time.

One of the things that I’m doing is talking to successful internet marketers and trying to extract those sort of special nuggets of wisdom. What is that you wish you had known, what are the most important three things?

But, before we get to that, tell me a little bit about what’s going on in your internet business, maybe about how you got where you are, just real briefly, and what you’re up to these days.

Josh Spaulding: Well, I started off, as you know, in the Army about 5 years ago. I was a Section Chief in the Army, stationed in Germany. So, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to my business. But, just the dream of working at home and not having to answer to a boss, all of that just attracted me to it. So, I dedicated myself to doing it.

It took a little while. I couldn’t work too much, so I had to really concentrate on what I was doing and really make sure I was doing the right thing and be specific as to who I listened to and what I did. Anyway, I did it. I never gave up. Here I am today, 5 years later, spending as much time as I want with my family , sitting on my butt at home.

Mark Mason: That’s great. Now, I understand that you’ve got several business models going simultaneously. You have membership sites, products, Adsense sites. Can you just briefly kind of go through that list of different business models that you’ve worked with, either now or in the past?

Josh Spaulding: Well, I’ve done just about every internet marketing business model there is, with the exception pay per click. Even that, I know the basics. I’ve done a little pay per click here and there. I do a lot of email marketing, blogging, niche marketing, to include Adsense. Those are probably the primary business models I do.

Mark Mason: Okay, great.

Josh Spaulding: There’s a lot of good ones out there.

Mark Mason: Yeah. Excellent. Let’s talk about that a little bit. There’s so much noise out there, so much stuff going on. I was wondering how you would answer the following question, and this is really the reason why I have you on the phone today.

If you were a new internet marketer getting started, and there were three things that you could know, three things that maybe you wish you had known when you got started, or three most important lessons that you’ve learned that you’d like to pass onto somebody that’s just getting started. What are those three things?

Josh Spaulding: Number one would definitely be pick a business model and stick with it. That’s the biggest problem I think a lot of people face when they’re trying to start an online business, or even offline business.

There’s so many different ways to make money online and offline. You get on all these newsletters, and you follow all these blogs, and each one of these people are doing something different. This guy isn’t going to make his money exactly the same way as this guy.

So, you have to first understand the different business models. Pick one, start off with one, understand it and go from there. Definitely the first and foremost.

Mark Mason: That’s awesome, because the first several, maybe five or 10 episodes of this podcast are going to be all about the different business models that are available out there, just to give people an overview so they can understand what the landscape is.

Then, of course, we’re going to niche down to some of the business models that you and I are more familiar with around email marketing, niche blogging, and niche site creation. But, I want to make sure, as you say, people understand what business models are out there so they can get a feel for the landscape.

So, what’s number two?

Josh Spaulding: Number two, invest in knowledge and tools, but be selective. Just like I said, you’re going to be on a lot of mailing lists, and you’re going to be reading a lot of blogs, and there’s going to be a lot of people pitching different products to you.

That’s another business model, business to business, internet marketers trying to sell to internet marketers. 99 out of 100 people get into that web, and they get sold to all the time. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. It can expedite your learning and your education. But, know what you’re spending money on.

If you’re concentrating on niche marketing and someone is promoting a pay per click product, don’t buy it, because that’s not what you’re concentrating on. A lot of people do that. There’s a lot of good people out there that are good at copywriting, that are good at convincing you that you really need this. It may be a good product, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need it for what you’re doing right now.

Mark Mason: It’s funny that you mention that. I call that getting distracted by bright shiny objects. That’s a problem that I used to have, and I completely resonate with that one.

So, the third one then, what would the third one be?

Josh Spaulding: The third one, never, ever give up. You’re going to fail. It doesn’t matter what you do, if it’s worth doing you’re going to fail.

No one is perfect in this world. There are very few people who are going to start a business and just start making money right away. 99.99 percent of everyone who starts a business, whether it’s online or offline, they fail. Most of us fail over and over and over again.

That’s where a lot of people go wrong. That’s why a lot of people quit. They say, like, 99 or 98 percent of everyone who tries to start an internet business, quits. The reason why is they fail just like everyone else, just like the 2 percent that don’t, but the only difference is they quit where the others didn’t.

You have to understand that you’re going to fail no matter what. You’re going to fail. You just have to pick yourself up and keep going. That’s what makes a difference.

Mark Mason: Very good. That’s good advice for anything, I think it extends far beyond internet marketing.

Josh Spaulding: Yes, absolutely.

Mark Mason: Very good. I’ve told people this in the past, but Josh, you’re one of the internet marketers that I was following when I started out and I still follow you. How can people find you? Where’s the place to go if they’re looking for you on Twitter or on the web?

Can you throw down a couple of places where people can seek you out, or maybe even some of your products that you think could help people that are starting out online.

Josh Spaulding: Sure. Twitter, it’s getting so popular these days, I’m Josh_Spaulding. That’s twitter.com/Josh_Spaulding.

Then, as you said at the beginning of the podcast, I have a blog at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog. From there you can find all my products and all my free information, and basically everything.

Mark Mason: You’ve got a number of free products. I know I’ve read each and every one of them, they’re outstanding. I’ll be recommending those on future podcasts as we get to those topics, like SEO, and some of the other things that you’ve done.

I really appreciate your time today. I know you’re a busy guy, so I’m going to let you go. I appreciate it, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Josh Spaulding: No problem at all. Thank you.

Mark Mason: Thank you, very much.

All right. That wraps it up for the second episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Just as a reminder, we’re very interested in your feedback and questions. Please give us a call on our digital voice line, we’d love to play your call on the show. The number is 214-444-8655.

We’ve already got a question from Tony. We’ll be looking at that on the next episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Thanks, and have a fantastic day.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 2.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason, and I’m here to talk to you about how to build a successful internet business one night at a time. That’s what I do. It’s called Late Night Internet Marketing, because, well, that’s when I do it, late at night.

In the last episode I promised you we would talk about the two special reports that I think are really good. Actually, one is a hard cover book by Yanik Silver, it’s called Moonlighting on the Internet. You can find that at MasonWorld.com/silver.

The other is a free report from Jimmy D. Brown, one of the fantastic internet marketers in the internet marketing space, it’s called 10 Ways to Make 10,000 Dollars a Month on the Internet. You can find that at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

One of the 10 ways that Jimmy talks about, and one of the five ways that Yanik Silver talks about making money is through affiliate marketing on the internet. So, that’s what I really want to start off with as the number one way that you can make money on the internet, with affiliate marketing.

Now, there’s a couple of things that you need to understand about making money on the internet. One thing that you need to understand is how money moves around on the internet. In general, what you do on the internet to make money is you get traffic on the internet. In this podcast we’ll talk about how it is exactly that you can get traffic. There are a lot of ways to get traffic to your website on the internet.

You convince that traffic to take some action. That convincing of taking an action is called conversion. What you want to do is you want to get traffic, and you want to convert it either into a sale or to capture a lead, or some other thing that has value. You want to get people to take action on your website.

One of the things you can get people to do in terms of taking action is you can get them to click on a link that drives them to some other website where they might make a purchase. When they make that purchase, you can get what’s called an affiliate commission.

You can think of this as commission sales, just like someone in a store. If you buy a product that someone is pitching, then that person who is pitching the product can get a commission. On the internet it works the same way in a lot of cases. If I review a product, and you read my review, and you agree with me and like and buy that product, and you arrive at that destination where you buy that product through my affiliate link, that merchant will often times pay me a commission.

One of the reasons that I’m covering this first on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast is that you’ve already been a victim of affiliate marketing on this podcast. I want to point that out to you. If you’re new to internet marketing it’s something that you really need to understand.

When I told you about Moonlighting on the Internet with Yanik Silver, I directed you to the link www.masonworld.com/silver. When I told you about Jimmy Brown’s report, I directed you to www.masonworld.com/10ways. The reason I did that, and the main reason to do that is because on a podcast it’s really hard to give links, so you want something that’s simple and easy to remember, because people are likely driving in their car or otherwise engaged.

The other reason you do that is because when you click through to those links, in the case of the Yanik Silver book, you’re forwarded to Amazon, and in the case of the Jimmy D. Brown book you are forwarded to a location where you’re able to download a copy of the book.

In both cases those transactions result in the placing of what’s called a cookie on your computer that will give me credit for the sale if you buy something. So, that’s something that you always need to watch out for in internet marketing. You need to deal with people that are transparent, that you trust, because the potential exists that someone might recommend a product to you just to get the commission and not because they believe in the product.

Now, in my case, my whole business is based around this idea of transparency and trust. That’s why I’m telling you about this affiliate marketing business first. So, you can understand that there is money to be gained in the recommending of products.

In the case of the Yanik Silver book, what happens is you go to Amazon.com. Again, if you go to MasonWorld.com/silver you can see this in action. You’re taken directly to the Amazon page, and it turns out if you buy that book within 24 hours of having come through my link, I’ll get a few dollars on the sale of that book, or probably even a few pennies in the case of the Silver book.

In the case of the Jimmy Brown report, that’s a more sophisticated technique where Jimmy Brown has links to his many outstanding, excellent products that he offers in the report. If you buy something through one of the links in the report that link will be tracked back to me and I will get a commission for that sale.

That’s using an affiliate technique called report rebranding, which means that report you downloaded is specific to MasonWorld.com, and anyone who downloads that report gets credit.

That’s an important idea that you need to understand. I tell you that for three reasons. One is it’s an absolutely great example of how affiliate marketing can work. You recommend products, hopefully you make honest recommendations. That’s valuable to people. When people buy those products based on your recommendations, you get a commission for the sale. It’s valuable for the merchant, it’s valuable for the customer, it’s win-win when it’s done with integrity.

The second reason I tell you about that is because my business is built around transparency, and I want to make sure that you know that if you buy those products that can result in a commission for me through those mechanisms that I described.

The third reason that I want to tell you about that is because it’s very important that you be aware about this issue with affiliate marketing, because currently the FTC is really starting to crack down on affiliate marketers. Particularly in the spaces like diet pills and Acai Berry, and these other things that claim to be able to sell you magic in a bottle.

These kind of things the FTC is really going to start to crack down on. They’ve got a position paper on how they intend to do this. We’ll cover that in a later episode. That’s a more sophisticated topic.

So, if you’re thinking about doing affiliate marketing, I’m not a lawyer, you should make sure you understand the rules around that as they come down from the FTC. I can tell you what I think, but as with all legal and accounting matters, you should get professional advice, because I’m not a lawyer. But, that’s the third reason. You want to be aware of what’s going on with the FTC.

There is an enormous amount of affiliate marketing going on online right now today. That is not anything that you should be afraid of. Just be aware of it, so you can make sure and run your business like a business in a way that makes sense.

That is way to make money on the internet number one, affiliate marketing. It’s actually number two in Jimmy Brown’s book, and it’s covered in Chapter Three or Four, I think, in Yanik Silver’s book. You can get that and take a look at it. It’s covered really well there.

Now, you might wonder, in terms of affiliate marketing, what is it that you can actually promote? Well, it turns out you can promote almost anything through affiliate marketing. It’s really amazing. Everything from automobiles on eBay to the smallest packs of gum, to anything on Amazon.com.

All kinds of offers where the only thing that’s required for you to get a commission is for the person to actually leave their name and address. That would be a different kind of affiliate offer, but an offer nonetheless that’s available in affiliate marketing.

You can use traffic that you get from search engines. We’ll talk about that in future episodes. Or you can use traffic that you pay for. The bottom line in all these things is for affiliate marketing to work, you need to make more money than you spend to make the money.

It’s just like any other business opportunity. You have costs associated with getting the traffic in some cases. Those costs need to be less than the money that you make when you are successful with affiliate marketing.

If you’re interested in checking out some affiliate marketing opportunities out there, one of the places that I like to recommend is the Pepperjam Network. It’s easy to manage and easy to understand. Amazon.com has an affiliate program. As well as the granddaddy of them all, Commission Junction. You’ll be shocked and amazed at all the things that are for sale and that are available for you to promote on Commission Junction.

Now, these first 10 episodes or so we’re getting an overview of internet marketing, so you can kind of understand what’s possible on the internet. As past of that, I’ve promised you an ongoing series of interviews with top internet marketers about the most important things that they wish they had known when they started.

What I’d like to offer you now is an interview with a fantastic internet marketer and personal friend of mine, Josh Spaulding. Josh runs an outstanding blog about internet marketing and making money online over at Easy-OnlineMoney.com. You can find his blog where he’s writing about all of his experiences at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog.

Josh is a full time internet marketer. He’s incredibly successful. He’s run membership sites, article directories, he does affiliate marketing, he’s an expert at email marketing, he’s an information marketer with a bunch of successful paid and free products. Josh has pretty much done it all.

I got Josh on the phone and I asked him to tell me what the three most important things that he wished he knew about internet marketing when he started, and this is what he had to say.

And now the feature interview.

Mark Mason: Okay. Today we have on the line noted internet marketer, Josh Spaulding. Josh, of course, runs a blog over at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog. He’s also got a viral ebook that I know a lot of people have read on how to make money with Adsense called The 5 Dollar Formula. That’s available at 5dollarformula.com.

Josh has been doing internet marketing for a long time. Josh, how are you doing today?

Josh Spaulding: Pretty good.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate you being here. I think we talked a little bit before the call, and I told you the focus of this podcast is really, at least initially, about how people can get started online, how they can build an internet business, and particularly do it like I did, part time and in the evenings, investing a little bit at a time over time.

One of the things that I’m doing is talking to successful internet marketers and trying to extract those sort of special nuggets of wisdom. What is that you wish you had known, what are the most important three things?

But, before we get to that, tell me a little bit about what’s going on in your internet business, maybe about how you got where you are, just real briefly, and what you’re up to these days.

Josh Spaulding: Well, I started off, as you know, in the Army about 5 years ago. I was a Section Chief in the Army, stationed in Germany. So, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to my business. But, just the dream of working at home and not having to answer to a boss, all of that just attracted me to it. So, I dedicated myself to doing it.

It took a little while. I couldn’t work too much, so I had to really concentrate on what I was doing and really make sure I was doing the right thing and be specific as to who I listened to and what I did. Anyway, I did it. I never gave up. Here I am today, 5 years later, spending as much time as I want with my family , sitting on my butt at home.

Mark Mason: That’s great. Now, I understand that you’ve got several business models going simultaneously. You have membership sites, products, Adsense sites. Can you just briefly kind of go through that list of different business models that you’ve worked with, either now or in the past?

Josh Spaulding: Well, I’ve done just about every internet marketing business model there is, with the exception pay per click. Even that, I know the basics. I’ve done a little pay per click here and there. I do a lot of email marketing, blogging, niche marketing, to include Adsense. Those are probably the primary business models I do.

Mark Mason: Okay, great.

Josh Spaulding: There’s a lot of good ones out there.

Mark Mason: Yeah. Excellent. Let’s talk about that a little bit. There’s so much noise out there, so much stuff going on. I was wondering how you would answer the following question, and this is really the reason why I have you on the phone today.

If you were a new internet marketer getting started, and there were three things that you could know, three things that maybe you wish you had known when you got started, or three most important lessons that you’ve learned that you’d like to pass onto somebody that’s just getting started. What are those three things?

Josh Spaulding: Number one would definitely be pick a business model and stick with it. That’s the biggest problem I think a lot of people face when they’re trying to start an online business, or even offline business.

There’s so many different ways to make money online and offline. You get on all these newsletters, and you follow all these blogs, and each one of these people are doing something different. This guy isn’t going to make his money exactly the same way as this guy.

So, you have to first understand the different business models. Pick one, start off with one, understand it and go from there. Definitely the first and foremost.

Mark Mason: That’s awesome, because the first several, maybe five or 10 episodes of this podcast are going to be all about the different business models that are available out there, just to give people an overview so they can understand what the landscape is.

Then, of course, we’re going to niche down to some of the business models that you and I are more familiar with around email marketing, niche blogging, and niche site creation. But, I want to make sure, as you say, people understand what business models are out there so they can get a feel for the landscape.

So, what’s number two?

Josh Spaulding: Number two, invest in knowledge and tools, but be selective. Just like I said, you’re going to be on a lot of mailing lists, and you’re going to be reading a lot of blogs, and there’s going to be a lot of people pitching different products to you.

That’s another business model, business to business, internet marketers trying to sell to internet marketers. 99 out of 100 people get into that web, and they get sold to all the time. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. It can expedite your learning and your education. But, know what you’re spending money on.

If you’re concentrating on niche marketing and someone is promoting a pay per click product, don’t buy it, because that’s not what you’re concentrating on. A lot of people do that. There’s a lot of good people out there that are good at copywriting, that are good at convincing you that you really need this. It may be a good product, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need it for what you’re doing right now.

Mark Mason: It’s funny that you mention that. I call that getting distracted by bright shiny objects. That’s a problem that I used to have, and I completely resonate with that one.

So, the third one then, what would the third one be?

Josh Spaulding: The third one, never, ever give up. You’re going to fail. It doesn’t matter what you do, if it’s worth doing you’re going to fail.

No one is perfect in this world. There are very few people who are going to start a business and just start making money right away. 99.99 percent of everyone who starts a business, whether it’s online or offline, they fail. Most of us fail over and over and over again.

That’s where a lot of people go wrong. That’s why a lot of people quit. They say, like, 99 or 98 percent of everyone who tries to start an internet business, quits. The reason why is they fail just like everyone else, just like the 2 percent that don’t, but the only difference is they quit where the others didn’t.

You have to understand that you’re going to fail no matter what. You’re going to fail. You just have to pick yourself up and keep going. That’s what makes a difference.

Mark Mason: Very good. That’s good advice for anything, I think it extends far beyond internet marketing.

Josh Spaulding: Yes, absolutely.

Mark Mason: Very good. I’ve told people this in the past, but Josh, you’re one of the internet marketers that I was following when I started out and I still follow you. How can people find you? Where’s the place to go if they’re looking for you on Twitter or on the web?

Can you throw down a couple of places where people can seek you out, or maybe even some of your products that you think could help people that are starting out online.

Josh Spaulding: Sure. Twitter, it’s getting so popular these days, I’m Josh_Spaulding. That’s twitter.com/Josh_Spaulding.

Then, as you said at the beginning of the podcast, I have a blog at Easy-OnlineMoney.com/blog. From there you can find all my products and all my free information, and basically everything.

Mark Mason: You’ve got a number of free products. I know I’ve read each and every one of them, they’re outstanding. I’ll be recommending those on future podcasts as we get to those topics, like SEO, and some of the other things that you’ve done.

I really appreciate your time today. I know you’re a busy guy, so I’m going to let you go. I appreciate it, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Josh Spaulding: No problem at all. Thank you.

Mark Mason: Thank you, very much.

All right. That wraps it up for the second episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Just as a reminder, we’re very interested in your feedback and questions. Please give us a call on our digital voice line, we’d love to play your call on the show. The number is 214-444-8655.

We’ve already got a question from Tony. We’ll be looking at that on the next episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Thanks, and have a fantastic day.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW002 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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• Moonlighting on the Internet with Yanik Silver (Review) (3)

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hi there. You have successfully found and downloaded or otherwise turned on the very first inaugural episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m really glad you found me. On this podcast we’ll be talking about why we’re doing the podcast, who the podcast is for, who I am. I’ll talk a little bit about the podcast plan for several episodes. Finally, I’ll talk to you about the three most important things that new internet marketers should know.

Who am I? I’m Mark Mason, I’m your host and I’m also the webmaster of MasonWorld.com. I’ll tell you a little bit more about myself in a minute. The first thing I wanted to cover was a little bit about why I’m doing this podcast and what it’s for.

When I first started in internet business several years ago, I wanted to learn more about internet business. So, I turned to my mobile University on wheels, my iPod in my car, to try to find some information about internet marketing. I was successful in doing that.

I found a fantastic podcast that I still listen to to this day, called Internet Business Mastery. You can find Jay and Sterling over at InternetBusinessMastery.com. Those guys really opened my eyes to the whole issue of lifestyle design on the internet. In fact, they inspired this podcast. That’s a fantastic podcast.

There are other podcasts that I really like for different purposes in the area of internet marketing. Internet Marketing This Week is one such podcast. They talk about trends in internet marketing that really address the macroscopic economics. The big stuff that’s going on for internet marketing, the big launches, what the heavy hitters are doing, big trends.

Lately, they’ve been talking about issues with the FTC and taxation. They have some cool tech tools that they cover. But, these are kind of heavy hitter topics. While it’s very interesting for new internet marketers, it doesn’t really address this whole issue of how to get started.

Then there are other podcasts that I like, SEO rockstars that are highly technical regarding things like SEO. There are other podcasts that deal with the general area of marketing, like Dishy Mix, and other good podcasts like that.

Again, they’re not really about making money online with internet marketing. So, there’s this gap for new people that are starting out and how they might get started. That’s gap one that this podcast intends to fill. It’s a new podcast for new internet marketers to try and communicate information about how to get started in internet marketing without actually trying to constantly sell something.

The other angle that this podcast takes is it tries to focus on people like me that are trying to start internet businesses part time. That’s how I got my start. I’m still working my internet business part time while I maintain a day job. This is possible, and this is what this podcast is targeted at.

So, this podcast is for new internet marketers who are trying to get a start part time. We’ll also some advanced content in this podcast that will appeal to a broad range of internet marketers. So, if you’re not a new internet marketer, stay tuned, I hope to hold your attention.

Now, as I said, I’m Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com. I’m a family man. I have three children and a fourth one on the way. I have a demanding day job. That day job can run anywhere from 50 to 70 hours a week, and I run my internet business almost completely at night. So, this podcast therefore, is going to be a short podcast.

You’re busy and I’m busy. I’m not going to lay a 45 minute podcast on you every week. On the contrary, these are going to be 10 to 15, maybe at the outside 20 minute episode that you can enjoy and consume quickly in your iPod or while you’re sitting at your PC without a lot of worry about having to schedule a big chunk of time to listen to it.

I’ll keep the episodes short. In the first several podcasts I’ll cover the business models that are possible on the internet, at least a bunch of them. The way I’ll do that is I’ll use two resources. The first resource I’ll use is a resource that you can get on Amazon.com, Yanik Silver’s book Moonlighting on the Internet.

There will be a link to that at MasonWorld.com/silver. That’s a great book if you’re getting started in internet marketing, that goes over five of the main business models that are available to internet marketers that want to get started making money on the internet.

The other resource that we’ll use is a report by one of my favorite marketers online, Jimmy D. Brown. It will be his report 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month on the Internet. We will cover most of the 10 ways in the first several episodes, and we’ll tie it into Yanik’s book. You can get that free download from MasonWorld.com at MasonWorld.com/10ways. You can spell it out or use the numbers, MasonWorld.com/10ways.

So, two options if you want to get started quickly. One is Yaniks’ book, which you can buy on Amazon.com through the link MasonWorld.com/silver. Or you can download the free report from Jimmy D. Brown 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. I recommend them both, I’ve read them both, and they’re fantastic.

Our plan is to go through those business models, talk about them a little bit to give you an idea of what’s possible on the internet. Then really niche our topics to affiliate marketing, and specifically niche affiliate marketing. So, that’s where we’re headed with the podcast is start to have a series of episodes about how to build successful niche affiliate marketing business in your spare time at home.

How to pick a niche. How to establish a presence in the niche. How to do affiliate marketing. We’ll talk a little bit about Adsense and how to build Adsense sites as a way to diversify your business model. Also, how to build affiliate sites where you’re selling affiliate products.

Now, if you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, don’t worry about it. We’re going to cover it. We’ll talk all about it over the next several episodes, maybe 10 or so episodes.

One thing I want to do in this series is talk about the three most important things that internet marketers should know. What I’ve done is I’ve started a series of interviews. I’ve got two interviews in the can already, as they say in the film industry.

One from noted internet marketer and author of the viral eBook, The 5 Dollar Formula. His name is Joshua Spaulding. He’ll be telling you about the three most important things new internet marketers should know in the next podcast episode.

Then I’ve also been able to score an interview with Jon Leger. He is the famous software author of systems like 3 Way Links, One Way Links, and My Way Links. Jon will be talking to you about the three most important things that new internet marketers should know. He also an exciting new eBook that’s specifically targeted at internet marketers. We’ll get to that in episode three.

My three most important things an internet marketer should know are as follows. Number one, the first thing a new internet marketer needs to realize is that it is possible to make money online.

All the standard disclaimers apply. Your mileage may vary. You can fail to make money online. All of those normal disclaimers. I’m not promising you that you can make money online. But, it’s my contention that anyone that really works hard and follows a proven system can make money online. I really do believe that.

The second thing is that you should find a business model and find someone you trust. Follow that business model and stay focused. Avoid getting distracted. One of the issues about internet marketing is that internet marketers are really good at selling things to other internet marketers.

You need to avoid the temptation to follow every bright and shiny object or to buy everything that comes into your inbox. You need to find a business model, find someone you trust to follow in implementation of that business, and go do it. Stay focused and you’ll like the results.

Then the third thing I would say, and this kind of goes without saying and this applies to a lot more things than just internet marketing, and that is you should never give up. You will fail. The faster you fail, and the faster you learn from your mistakes, the faster you will be able to correct those mistakes, get on with your life, and be successful.

One of the great things about internet marketing is that the investment to get started is really low. So, you can afford to fail and the cost to you is not much more than your time in a lot of cases. Never give up. You will be successful. That’s the only way to be successful is to keep at it until you are.

That wraps it up for the first episode. It kind of gives you an idea of where we’re headed. I hope you enjoyed getting a sense of where we’re going.

Two things you can do for me. Number one, I have a digital recording line available to take your questions. We’ll be addressing questions from the audience on every episode. First questions are already starting to come in. You can reach me on that digital recording line at 214-444-8655.

The other thing you can do to help me out if you enjoy this podcast, drop us a review at iTunes. Go to MasonWorld.com/iTunes and go ahead and leave us some comments there and give us a thumbs up over at iTunes. We really appreciate it.

Of course, there will be some show notes on the blog at MasonWorld.com/podcast. You can come over there and leave comments about the show as well.

I hope you have a fantastic day. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you on the other side. This is Mark Mason with MasonWorld.com and the MasonWorld.com Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 1.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hi there. You have successfully found and downloaded or otherwise turned on the very first inaugural episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m really glad you found me. On this podcast we’ll be talking about why we’re doing the podcast, who the podcast is for, who I am. I’ll talk a little bit about the podcast plan for several episodes. Finally, I’ll talk to you about the three most important things that new internet marketers should know.

Who am I? I’m Mark Mason, I’m your host and I’m also the webmaster of MasonWorld.com. I’ll tell you a little bit more about myself in a minute. The first thing I wanted to cover was a little bit about why I’m doing this podcast and what it’s for.

When I first started in internet business several years ago, I wanted to learn more about internet business. So, I turned to my mobile University on wheels, my iPod in my car, to try to find some information about internet marketing. I was successful in doing that.

I found a fantastic podcast that I still listen to to this day, called Internet Business Mastery. You can find Jay and Sterling over at InternetBusinessMastery.com. Those guys really opened my eyes to the whole issue of lifestyle design on the internet. In fact, they inspired this podcast. That’s a fantastic podcast.

There are other podcasts that I really like for different purposes in the area of internet marketing. Internet Marketing This Week is one such podcast. They talk about trends in internet marketing that really address the macroscopic economics. The big stuff that’s going on for internet marketing, the big launches, what the heavy hitters are doing, big trends.

Lately, they’ve been talking about issues with the FTC and taxation. They have some cool tech tools that they cover. But, these are kind of heavy hitter topics. While it’s very interesting for new internet marketers, it doesn’t really address this whole issue of how to get started.

Then there are other podcasts that I like, SEO rockstars that are highly technical regarding things like SEO. There are other podcasts that deal with the general area of marketing, like Dish eMix, and other good podcasts like that.

Again, they’re not really about making money online with internet marketing. So, there’s this gap for new people that are starting out and how they might get started. That’s gap one that this podcast intends to fill. It’s a new podcast for new internet marketers to try and communicate information about how to get started in internet marketing without actually trying to constantly sell something.

The other angle that this podcast takes is it tries to focus on people like me that are trying to start internet businesses part time. That’s how I got my start. I’m still working my internet business part time while I maintain a day job. This is possible, and this is what this podcast is targeted at.

So, this podcast is for new internet marketers who are trying to get a start part time. We’ll also some advanced content in this podcast that will appeal to a broad range of internet marketers. So, if you’re not a new internet marketer, stay tuned, I hope to hold your attention.

Now, as I said, I’m Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com. I’m a family man. I have three children and a fourth one on the way. I have a demanding day job. That day job can run anywhere from 50 to 70 hours a week, and I run my internet business almost completely at night. So, this podcast therefore, is going to be a short podcast.

You’re busy and I’m busy. I’m not going to lay a 45 minute podcast on you every week. On the contrary, these are going to be 10 to 15, maybe at the outside 20 minute episode that you can enjoy and consume quickly in your iPod or while you’re sitting at your PC without a lot of worry about having to schedule a big chunk of time to listen to it.

I’ll keep the episodes short. In the first several podcasts I’ll cover the business models that are possible on the internet, at least a bunch of them. The way I’ll do that is I’ll use two resources. The first resource I’ll use is a resource that you can get on Amazon.com, Yanik Silver’s book Moonlighting on the Internet.

There will be a link to that at MasonWorld.com/silver. That’s a great book if you’re getting started in internet marketing, that goes over five of the main business models that are available to internet marketers that want to get started making money on the internet.

The other resource that we’ll use is a report by one of my favorite marketers online, Jimmy D. Brown. It will be his report 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month on the Internet. We will cover most of the 10 ways in the first several episodes, and we’ll tie it into Yanik’s book. You can get that free download from MasonWorld.com at MasonWorld.com/10ways. You can spell it out or use the numbers, MasonWorld.com/10ways.

So, two options if you want to get started quickly. One is Yaniks’ book, which you can buy on Amazon.com through the link MasonWorld.com/silver. Or you can download the free report from Jimmy D. Brown 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. I recommend them both, I’ve read them both, and they’re fantastic.

Our plan is to go through those business models, talk about them a little bit to give you an idea of what’s possible on the internet. Then really niche our topics to affiliate marketing, and specifically niche affiliate marketing. So, that’s where we’re headed with the podcast is start to have a series of episodes about how to build successful niche affiliate marketing business in your spare time at home.

How to pick a niche. How to establish a presence in the niche. How to do affiliate marketing. We’ll talk a little bit about Adsense and how to build Adsense sites as a way to diversify your business model. Also, how to build affiliate sites where you’re selling affiliate products.

Now, if you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, don’t worry about it. We’re going to cover it. We’ll talk all about it over the next several episodes, maybe 10 or so episodes.

One thing I want to do in this series is talk about the three most important things that internet marketers should know. What I’ve done is I’ve started a series of interviews. I’ve got two interviews in the can already, as they say in the film industry.

One from noted internet marketer and author of the viral eBook, The 5 Dollar Formula. His name is Joshua Spaulding. He’ll be telling you about the three most important things new internet marketers should know in the next podcast episode.

Then I’ve also been able to score an interview with Jon Leger. He is the famous software author of systems like 3 Way Links, One Way Links, and My Way Links. Jon will be talking to you about the three most important things that new internet marketers should know. He also an exciting new eBook that’s specifically targeted at internet marketers. We’ll get to that in episode three.

My three most important things an internet marketer should know are as follows. Number one, the first thing a new internet marketer needs to realize is that it is possible to make money online.

All the standard disclaimers apply. Your mileage may vary. You can fail to make money online. All of those normal disclaimers. I’m not promising you that you can make money online. But, it’s my contention that anyone that really works hard and follows a proven system can make money online. I really do believe that.

The second thing is that you should find a business model and find someone you trust. Follow that business model and stay focused. Avoid getting distracted. One of the issues about internet marketing is that internet marketers are really good at selling things to other internet marketers.

You need to avoid the temptation to follow every bright and shiny object or to buy everything that comes into your inbox. You need to find a business model, find someone you trust to follow in implementation of that business, and go do it. Stay focused and you’ll like the results.

Then the third thing I would say, and this kind of goes without saying and this applies to a lot more things than just internet marketing, and that is you should never give up. You will fail. The faster you fail, and the faster you learn from your mistakes, the faster you will be able to correct those mistakes, get on with your life, and be successful.

One of the great things about internet marketing is that the investment to get started is really low. So, you can afford to fail and the cost to you is not much more than your time in a lot of cases. Never give up. You will be successful. That’s the only way to be successful is to keep at it until you are.

That wraps it up for the first episode. It kind of gives you an idea of where we’re headed. I hope you enjoyed getting a sense of where we’re going.

Two things you can do for me. Number one, I have a digital recording line available to take your questions. We’ll be addressing questions from the audience on every episode. First questions are already starting to come in. You can reach me on that digital recording line at 214-444-8655.

The other thing you can do to help me out if you enjoy this podcast, drop us a review at iTunes. Go to MasonWorld.com/iTunes and go ahead and leave us some comments there and give us a thumbs up over at iTunes. We really appreciate it.

Of course, there will be some show notes on the blog at MasonWorld.com/podcast. You can come over there and leave comments about the show as well.

I hope you have a fantastic day. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you on the other side. This is Mark Mason with MasonWorld.com and the MasonWorld.com Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW001 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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