This is a true story about a musical friend, an internet marketing guru, me, a major holiday, a talking monkey named Charlie, a Christmas music CD, and some kids in Liberia, West Africa.  OK -- I'll admit there is no talking monkey in the story, but it is still worth reading.  It's a bit of a long post -- I hope you'll stick with me to the end.

Lions and Tigers And Scumbags, Oh My!

One of the things that really bugs me about the internet marketing industry (if you want to call it an industry) is the total sleaze factor that I see from so many internet marketers. There are so many people out there making unrealistic claims, trading on people’s fear and taking advantage of people’s hopes and dreams.

It just drives me absolutely crazy to see all the sleazebags that are promoting junk products in the internet marketing space.

Now, having said that, there are some internet marketers that base their entire business on a platform of ethics and helping other people . A short list of those includes people like John Leger, Nicole Dean, Lynn Terry, Andrew Hansen and Josh Spaulding. There are many more out there like them (sorry if I left you off), but you have to know where to look.

My most recent favorite good guy is Pat Flynn, by the way.

Case In Point:  Nicole Dean

No, Nicole is not a sleaze ball.  She's not quite sane either (but that is a topic for another post).

As it turns out, a post of Nicole's from the other day is actually what motivated this post. A couple of weeks ago Nicole published an Expert Brief (Is Marketing Good or Evil) and asked people how they used internet marketing to help other people. I loved this post, because actually this is the magical secret of internet business.

Everybody is always asking, “What’s the secret? What’s the magical product I can buy to drive traffic? What’s the special product I can promote to really make a killing in the marketplace? What’s the magical niche that I can choose and make a killing in two weeks?” The answer is there aren’t any magic bullets except to make sure that you’re always helping people in your business.

Zig Ziglar said it best,

“You can get everything you want in life by giving other people what they want.”

This is true in internet business. If you focus your business on helping your customers get what they need without worrying too much about the money, the money will come. This has been proven time and time again.

But, in Nicole’s case she was asking a different question. She was asking,

“What do your internet marketing skills allow you to do outside of your business to help people?”

Problem:  My Answer Was Totally Lame

The problem with my answer was that it was totally lame.   I mean, my internet business is built around helping people, but Nicole was asking a different question.  Essentially, she was asking what I was doing outside of my business to help people.

My answer:  Not all that much.

Then, as if by magic, an opportunity fell out of the sky.

A friend of mine needed help with a charity project.  My buddy Phillip is an incredibly talented musician who made a Christmas CD about two years ago.  He needed some help with some "internet stuff" related to his project.

Now I would have helped him anyway, but with Nicole's post fresh in my mind I was highly motivated to make some quick progress.  I embarked the a project as a favor.

Turns out my friend is doing some great work with a missionary school in Liberia, West Africa.

The Christmas CD that he made is absolutely fantastic and the great thing is that 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the CD go to support a missionary school in Liberia, West Africa.

Phillip started supporting the school after a trip there in 2007 and he’s been sending them money ever since. It turns out that you can pay for one year’s education for a child in Liberia with a mere 100 dollars. That means for every six Christmas CDs that Phillip sells he is able to put a child through school for a year.

Internet Marketing Help Wanted

Now, this is an amazing thing and Phillip has sold a lot of CDs, but he’s mostly sold them to family, friends, and acquaintances. In fact, he had about 300 CDs sitting in a box in his office.

Of course, knowing some internet marketing I was able to offer to help Phillip by creating a website to showcase his CD, sell it online, and take money via Paypal. We launched the website this week and we’re hoping to simply make it easier for people who know me or know Phillip to purchase the CD and help these deserving children in Liberia.

This is just one example of how internet marketers can work to change their reputation by adding value to the internet, by helping people in their community, and by doing the right things to create an industry image that’s worth having.

I’m particularly sensitive to this topic of professional image because I come from a very respectable background in engineering and have worked for 20 years at a company that is known for it's ethics.  We just don’t have image problems.   So, the image problems that are present in the internet marketing space really bugs me.

Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now and encourage you to go over to Phillip’s new website and check out his Christmas CD, it’s absolutely fantastic. It makes an excellent gift.

Buy all of the copies you want and all the proceeds will go to help a child in Africa who could really use your help.

And -- My challenge to you comes from my friend Nicole.  Do something this month to make the internet a better place.

Thanks!

P.S.  -- No, I don't make any money if you buy the CD.  Sheesh.  All the money goes to the kids.

Now, one of things that I do and one of the things that I think it is absolutely critical for part time internet marketers is that you need to work on your business every day. Habits that you form as a part time internet marketer are the most important tools that you’ll have in your business.

The first habit that you develop should be that you work on your business every day. Not a day goes by literally that you don’t do something on your business. Now, maybe you make an exception for Sunday, because of your religious preferences, but what I mean is there’s not a day that goes by where you go, “I just don’t feel like working on this today. I’m going to just watch Grey’s Anatomy instead.” You have to avoid that.

You need to make consistent progress and stay motivated. One day will turn into two days, and before you know it a week and a month will have gone by and your dream will be sitting on the couch with you watching the latest episode of Private Practice.

The other reason, and this sounds very much like a Tony Robbins thing, but I absolutely promise you this is true, if you keep the project that you’re working in front of you in your conscious mind you’re subconscious mind will offer you up solutions. This is where these ideas come from that people have in the shower and while they’re brushing their teeth.

You put these ideas in front of your conscious mind all the time, whatever problem it is you’re working on in your business, whatever course it is you’re trying to develop or information product or website and you run into problems that you’re conscious mind can’t solve, your subconscious mind will continue to work on those even when you’re not aware of it and it will present solutions for you.

If it’s out of sight it will be out of mind and you won’t get that benefit of having that subconscious mind working for you. A lot of research on that, don’t take my word for it, go check it out. That’s a really powerful way to get work done.

Another thing that I tell people that’s really important is internet marketing is a marathon, it is not a sprint. You need a strong steady consistent pace for a long distance in order to win in internet marketing. It’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint.

If you adopt this very important habit of working on your business every day without fail, one thing is that you’ll accidentally accomplish more than you think. There will be a couple of days in there where you’ll intend to work a little bit and you’ll work a lot, or you’ll get lucky and be online at the right time to get something accomplished. Whatever it is, I don’t know what it’s going to be. Things will land, as we say in Texas, jelly side up. It will be good for you to work on this every day.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Another thing you need is you need routines. I live in Allen, Texas, there’s a famous Olympic gold medal gymnast that lives here and she grew up in a gym down the street from me and I know these gymnasts they have these crazy routines and they show up at the gym every day.

You need to have similar routines. At the same time every day if you can you need to be working on your business. For me, that’s every night. That’s why my branding is around this idea of late night internet marketing. I’m recording this at 1:46 AM and I got started around 10:00. I got a head of steam, so here I am still going at almost 2:00 in the morning.

I also like to catch a little work on my internet business while I’m getting the kids ready for school between 6:00 and 6:30. That’s an excellent time for me to answer email over breakfast and do a little social media promotion.

The other thing I’ll say to you in terms of routines is you need to establish the routine of balancing your business activities. This is another thing that Jimmy D. Brown taught me. You need to make sure that you’re not only working on the easy things or the thing that you like.

Maybe you really like creating content, but you hate promoting. Maybe you really like social media, but you hate article marketing. Maybe you really like this and you hate that. The thing about internet business is that you need to have a balanced approach.

The thing about part time internet marketers is it’s really easy to fall in this trap of, “I’ve only got an hour, so I’m going to pick the thing that I want to do, not necessarily the thing that I need to do.” So, it’s very important that you have this balanced approach. The example I have here is that you don’t need to just create content or products, but you also need to drive traffic, so that’s kind of an idea of having a balanced approach.

You have to do it even if you don’t want to. One strategy for that is do the thing you don’t want to do first, so you get that out of the way. Then when you’re running out of steam you can turn your attention to the thing you really wanted to do anyway and a lot of times that will have the effect of helping you work a little bit longer.

The other thing I’ve got to tell you, social marketing is a business killer if you don’t manage it correctly. So, limit your social marketing to specific time windows. Do not spend your entire day on forums, reading blogs, and tweeting about what you had for breakfast. Don’t do that. Have a plan for those things, spend a finite amount of time, get it done and get out.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

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.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 4.

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.

Several months ago I posted that I would be working on my sales letter for Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress.  You probably remember that this was one of my very first products, and that I am always learning by doing.  Man, that first product seems like a lifetime ago.

Edit -- See my special guest post invitation to real copy writers in the post comments.

Since I was "learning" on that product I did a "toss" rather than a launch.  What I mean by a "toss" is that I did not do a full court press trying to get anyone and everyone to promote the themes.  Rather, I worked with a few friends to do an initial promotion:

• Josh Spaulding and Garry Conn promoted the themes to their lists and blogs.
• Josh featured the themes in his excellent eBook $5 Formula.
• Caroline Middlebrook featured the themes in her excellent Niche Site Video
• James Jones sent my Micro Niche Finder Video to his list

The Results Of My First Attempt

Well, I learned a lot about having a product.  I thought that you might be able to learn some stuff too.  I actually made lots of sales.  From my perspective, it was a huge success (and continues to sell).

But, as usual, there were lots of opportunities to improve.  Here are some highlights (and opportunities to improve):

• Highly targeted traffic from a list that was expected to convert at 5% or more only converted at 3.5%.  What's worse,  less targeted list traffic converted very poorly.
• Less targeted traffic from blogs in the make money online niche converted at much less than 1%
• Traffic from ClickBank affiliates was converting at a very low rate.

Increasing Sales Page Conversions

So, I decided that based on that information, that I needed to look at the sales page.  Since I am a glutton for punishment, I posted a request for feedback on and criticism of my sales page on both the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums.  Well, as you can imagine, I got some.  You need flame-retardant undies to withstand the comments I got.

Note to new Internet Marketers out there -- don't get your self-esteem wrapped up in your sales copy if you are going to ask for feedback on a forum.  And, be prepared to hear from people that have no idea what they are talking about.

I also got some very helpful feedback from of my very own readers.  That was awesome, and I really appreciate it when readers take the time to comment.  Here are some feedback highlights:

• Work on the headline and sub-headline. It was described by one guy on the Warrior Forum as a "confusing wreck." The great thing was that he offered me a couple of much better alternative headlines that really illustrated his point.
• Work on the copy -- let it breath. Again, a member of the Warrior Forum supplied new copy to illustrate the point.  I got similar feedback from a reader of the blog.
• Make the site look more professional. The one comment from Digital Point pointed out the fact that a website that was selling wordpress themes needed to be "very professional looking."   I agreed.  Josh actually made fun of my graphics (several times).

Taking Action

So, based on all that feedback, I changed the sales template to something more professional, I changed the headline, and I re-did the copy.  Conversions are up considerably.  You can see the new Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress sales page here and you can compare it to the old sales page.

What do you think?  Did I make it better or worse?  Time and split testing will tell (I will be making a post on how to implement split testing next week).

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,
Mark

• Watching WordWorld on PBS with my little guy. He loves it! #
• @jeremyfrandsen he rocks, but I did not use John Melley. I hear other people copying you, and I am trying not to be that guy. #
• @jasonvo thanks man. Taking it slow. I am trying to make sure I have a podfade-proof plan. #
• @jasonvo Took delivery of my Intro and Outro today for the upcoming MasonWorld.com Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. #
• @lansa Hey, Other Mark Mason. Are you the markmason.com Mark Mason, or is that a third Mark Mason? in reply to lansa #
• @imtw If you never had a list, why would you know where spam filters get their filter data? So some people are just ignorant of impact. #
• @imtw Agree about spam, but I bet there are many ppl that don't realize that marking email as spam auto sends info to spam filters. #
• Hey - this solves the biggest problem Internet Marketers face http://aweber.com/b/1jxMR #
• @peoplepond I would love an invite code, please #

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I got a question by email this weekend that reminded me that a lot of internet marketers don't know much about web servers.  That's OK.  You don't really need to know much.  In case I am describing you, just know that a web server is the program on your host computer that serves web pages.  There are two main flavors -- Apache and MicroSoft IIS.

Apache dominates the market -- althought IIS has a role, especially in enterprise deployments that interface heavily with .NET and Windows.

Apache is available for Unix/Linux and Windows.  Sometimes, bad things happen and you need to restart Apache on your host.  Now, this can be accomplished via CPanel.  However, I prefer to do it at the command line.  Here is the command:


/etc/init.d/httpd restart


Thank you. This concludes our incredibly dry Sunday night Tech tip.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet marketing programming.

Do you have more tech questions? Be sure to let me know -- I am a certified geek.

Regards,
Mark

Internet Marketing is an incredibly competitive business -- especially if you are trying to compete in the Make Money Online niche.  Obviously, it's so tough because the people you are competing with are experts in critical areas like SEO and the like, so they are able to re-use the tools and strategies that that they are selling to win in the market.

That's why you have seen so many Internet marketers turn to niche marketing.  If you are an expert in SEO or Article Marketing (or whatever) and you want to be the king of Barbie Shoes online, as an Internet marketer, you can win against a Barbie enthusiast with a mediocre website and no SEO expertice almost over night.

Taking It Offline

But what about the olld-school brick and mortar businesses out there?   At first glance, you might think that there is not much opportunity for Internet marketers in that space.  However, that could not be further from the truth.

I am constantly amazed in conversations how little people in the "real world" know about SEO, traffic, conversion, and Web 2.0.  It makes sense, really.  Most people are busy running their businesses.  How in the world can they find time to worry about a web site.  After all, to many people, websites are just one step away from magic.

Filling A Need

So what does that mean for you?  Let's say you frequent an offline business in your area and you notice that they have a poor web presence.  Do you think you could help them?  The answer is probably yes if you know anything about

• How to hire and or build a great looking web site
• How to optimize that site for search traffic
• How to buy ad traffic to that web site
• How to capture email addresses and send a newsletter
• How to establish a Web 2.0 presence on Facebook or Twitter

You get the idea.  Chances are that you know a hell of a lot more about SEO than the guy at the local vacuum cleaner repair shop.  Maybe you should talk to that guy next time you are in.

A Great Example

So, I found a great example of a brick and mortar business that I thought I could show to make my point.  Frontier Labels is a company that sells sitckers.  That's right -- they print and sell stickers.  I am not sure if they have a storefront, but they have a great site.

This is really a nice website, and it looks to me like they have a great product and an awesome business model.

Things that I see on their site that you could learn from

• Great modern site design (easily done by a pro)
• Lead capture (Instant Quote)
• A blog
• A Facebook account
• Testimonials
• eCommerce cart
• Live chat

The testimonals are really great -- check this one out:

"I was blown away by the speed and quality of service with Frontier. All of my expectations were exceeded and then some. The labels pretty much "pop" off of the rolls with the vibrant colors. It only took one week from the time I submitted project to the time I received my shipment to get my labels. I can't say enough about what a great job they did! I will definitely be back for our other brands soon. Avrum Elmakis Owner, Top Dog Treats"

One opportunity I see for Frontier Label is that they could have more SEO-friendly URLs, especially for their blog,

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Frontier Lables has a great site that has lots of fundamental Internet Marketing strategies successfully deployed.  If you are reading my blog, you probably already know more about Internet Marketing that 99% of all small business owners.

Can you help them?  Sure!  Is that worth money to them.  You bet.

So how can you get started?

Well, here are some tips:

• Research the company before you go.  Offer them a free Internet Marketing Evaluation, and bring it with you when you come.
• Don't overstate your qualifications.  Be honest, and when you start out price your services accordingly.
• Consider offering risk reduction in the form of a guarantee.  No results from your work, no charge.
• Do not over-promise on results.  Most Internet Marketing campaigns take longer than you think.

Hope this starts you thinking about new markets for your Internet Marketing skills.

Regards,
Mark

• Hey - read this before you leave another blog comment http://aweber.com/b/WTGx #
• @jarret Oops -- are you watching this too? LOL #
• Watching @GarryConn on UStream -- I have no idea why. http://tinyurl.com/dddbfb #
• @GarryConn Excellent question. Basically "how to build an online business while working a day job". Would target newcomers. #
• Considering starting an internet marketing podcasts targeted a new part-time internet marketers with a day job. Your thoughts? #
• - you need to see this report http://aweber.com/b/1F0i7 #

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One of the time wasting traps that Internet Marketers can fall into is constant checking of stats throughout the day.  After all, it is human nature to want to know what is going on in your business, especially when you are just starting out.

When I first started out, I was always popping over to my AdSense account and checking my stats.  Same with ClickBank.  It totally annoys me that ClickBank does not send email when you make an affiliate sale.  So, I was checking my stats all the time.  That got to be a real drag, so now I use a couple of tools to notify me.

For Clickbank, I use CBNotify.  This little tool lives at the bottom of my Firefox browser and shows the day's Clickbank earnings.

For AdSense, I use a Google Desktop Gadget called AdSense Tracker.

Both of these will save you time if you are addicted to stats.

Do you use tools like this that save you time? What are they?

Have a great day.

Mark

It's Free Stuff Friday again, and time for the Friday Freebie.

I have written in the past few weeks about how to make money writing your own eBooks, and I even published a report on how to write your own eBooks. I published the report using the $7 secrets formula for it's distribution.

But I Don't Want To Write

Don't want to write? You can also make money using Private Label Rights content (content written by other people that you have the rights to use).

To help you understand that, I have a free report from two famous internet marketers that I personally trust available for you this Friday. The title of the report is: Private Label Rights (PLR) Secrets: How To Use PLR Products To Create A Money-Making Small Reports Business.

As always, opt in to my list to get access to all the free stuff (opt-in box in the right hand sidebar). As soon as you opt-in and confirm you subscription, you'll receive instructions on how to log into the members area.

Thanks,
Mark

List, List List.  All I ever hear about are email lists.  Are you sick of hearing about email lists?  Oh, I hope not, because as they say, the money is in the list.

A Week Of Posts About Lists

As I mentioned to you a few days ago, my buddy Josh Spaulding recently released a new eBook about how he manages his email list.  It is excellent, and I recommend it highly.  It's so good, in fact, that it has motivated me to take some serious action.

Starting today, I am posting a series about building lists -- here is what you can expect:

• Today (Thursday) -- This post about the importance of lists
• Tomorrow (Friday) -- A post about how you can use free stuff to build your list
• Saturday -- A post about Jonathan Leger's $7 secrets formula (for building lists)
• Monday -- A post about how you can use quality Master Resale Rights products to build your list
• Tuesday -- A post announcing my new eBook about writing eBooks ($7 secrets style)
• Wednesday -- See what the fortune cookie says about lists

The Purpose Of A Mailing List

If you spend much time around internet marketers, you’ll hear them talk about “the list”.  That term refers to their mailing list, which is made up of people who have requested to receive information from them, usually in the form of email newsletters.

For many internet marketers, the bulk of their income comes from marketing to the people on their mailing list.  A person’s list can truly be their key to success.  I know of several examples of "normal" people making a living on line using their list.

As Josh points out in New Age Email Marketing, some people mistakenly believe that the bigger list they have, the more successful they will be.  This is not necessarily the case.  There are a lot of ways to “get” subscribers, such as contests, list swaps, and even through list purchasing.  It is possible to achieve a high number of subscribers through these methods... but that doesn’t always guarantee success.

Instead of focusing on the number of people on the list, focus on the quality of the list and how interested the people are to receive the information.  A list of 1,000 very interested people will bring in much more money than a list of 10,000 uninterested people.

More important than that is trust.  Are you offering something of value (usually free information) to your list, or are you just asking them for money all the time?  Do they look forward to getting email from you, or do they hit the delete key without reading your mail?

While you think about those questions, here are some tips to help you build a great list:

Easy sign-up process

If signing up for your newsletter is a complicated process, many people will simply click away.  It’s also important to make sure the sign-up box is easy to see.  You'll notice that my opt-in box is at the top of my sidebar.  The graphics are professional, and I am asking for a minimum of information.  Some people place it at the bottom of their sites and if the visitor doesn’t scroll all the way down, they’ll miss it.  Many studies suggest that placing your newsletter sign-up box on the top right portion of your website will yield the best results.

Here is an example of easy -- an opt-in box right in the middle of a post:

Promote your list to your target market

Knowing your target market is another big key in creating a great list.  The more targeted the people on your list are, the more likely they are to purchase your products or services. That is one of the reasons that blogs are so great for list building.  People are visiting your blog because they are interested in the information there.  In that case, your target market consists of the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.  This is important.  Obviously, if you sell natural baby care products, you probably wouldn’t want to promote your list by purchasing an ad on harleydavidson.com.

Offer a freebie

Many people offer their subscribers a freebie in exchange for joining their mailing list.  I'll talk more about this on Friday, but that is exactly why I offer the Friday Freebie on MasonWorld.com.  This freebie could be in the form of an ebook, a special report, an audio recording of a teleclass or some other information product.  When doing this, it’s always best to stay close to a topic your target market would be interested in.  Going back to the example of someone selling natural baby products, a great freebie would be a small guide filled with natural baby food recipes.

Stay At It

Building a great list, full of targeted readers, will take some time to develop. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen overnight.  Over time, the list will grow and it can develop into one of your best business assets.

Did you like this post?  Why not sign up to my list?  That's the point after all.  You'll receive lots of helpful content and notification about new blog posts.  You'll get the occasional special offer.  You will never get SPAM.

Sign up today.

I grew up in Texas.  I'm still here.

In Texas, if you steal a horse, we hang you. In Texas, people are allowed to carry guns to protect themselves and their personal property. As a child growing up in Texas, I was raised to understand that stealing is wrong. Well, one thing is for sure -- not everyone is from Texas.

The other day, I woke up to this anonymous email message about my product, Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress:

To: mark
Subj: Your Download Page is Unprotected

http://www.nicheadsensethemes.com/thankyou2008-1.html
It is floating in a black hat forum.
Remove it.

Anonymous

And sure enough, download activity showed this to be true.  People were stealing my stuff. (And by the way, thanks very much to the anonymous emailer, whomever you are).

Protecting Your Electronic Downloads

Now, I had already followed all the recommended methods for keeping my downloadable product safe:

• Use a thank you page that is hard to guess
• Use file names that are hard to guess
• Use robots.txt to block searching
• Use nofollow tags
• etc.

The problem is, that just does not protect you against really determined hackers.  There are lots of ways that product security can be compromised.  Some search engines (one in particular) are said to ignore nofollow tags and robots.txt.  This can result in your thank you page getting indexed.  Another problem can be that you customers might accidentally (or on purpose) share your download link with others.

Using Software To Protect Software

My solution was to go out and purchase a copy of DL Guard.   DL Guard (or DLG as it is often referred to) was recommended to be by some other top internet marketers that are happy customers.  At $127, it is not cheap.  However, it is feature-packed and the customer service is highly regarded according to people I spoke with.

DL Guard is really a lot more than just a download page protector (which is all I really needed at the moment).  Cool features of DL Guard include:

• Single or multi-product sales
• Expiring download links
• Limited download attempts
• Integration with many major payment processors (including ClickBank)
• Mailing list automation
• Membership site features
• Many others....I have only scratched the surface so far on this software

How My Product Is Protected

Install of this software was super easy.  It took me 10 minutes to install the software on my server and convert my existing sales page to enable protection.  So, now when you purchase Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress, you get a unique download link just for you.  When you download the product, your IP address is logged.  You have a limited time to download the product before the link expires, and you have a limited number of times you can download it.  The actual URL of the download is never revealed to the user.

Bottom Line:  I'm Impressed

I have not even started looking at the rest of the features -- but the bottom line is that I am really impressed with DL Guard.  This looks like an excellent tool for my Internet Marketing Toolkit -- one that I will use over and over in my business.  So, while I was initially put off by the "high" price of $127, I am impressed with the product.  I plan to keep DL Guard and use it to protect my current and future digital products.  If you are worried about digital product theft, I recommend that you check DL Guard out (their product website is excellent).

Man, did I get a bad case of something this week. I woke up Sunday morning feeling like I had been hit by a truck -- but it was more likely a virus. I got some well wishes via twitter, so for those of you that were rooting for me, thanks!

It was a crazy week last week. The hurricane (IKE) missed Dallas for the most part, but hit my parents in Houston. They are without power, and will be for several weeks. I have also noticed that many internet marketers from the Houston area (and there are a lot of them) are off the air. Their sites are up, but the pages are sparse and their lists are quiet.

Build Business Systems Into Your Business

Still, this reminds me about one of the important things about internet marketing. Internet business gives you the freedom to build income around automated systems that still operate when you are not around. If you have read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, you know exactly what I mean.

In my case, I was away from MasonWorld.com for a couple of days, but readers kept stopping in. People kept opting into my list, and the many people on my list got automated messages that I had preloaded months ago with helpful information that was "evergreen."

My information products (like Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress) continued to make sales. Since the payment and delivery is automatic, this all runs on autopilot. AdSense clicks kept coming, and so did other affiliate program clicks (including eBay).

So, my adivce to internet marketers is to avoid creating businesses that "require" you to be there.  If you are selling a product that requires shipping, automate the order process.  If you are doing consulting, consider creating an digital information product instead.  If your business depends on you to generate content every day, look for trusted people for outsourcing.

In general, you need to look for ways to take youself out of the daily equation.  This allows you to grow your business way beyond what you can do alone, and it allows you to possibly sell it some day.  Who know, you might even find time to get off the computer and spend an hour with your kids.

For the last few days I've been busily at work on the e-book promised in the sidebar of my blog.  The book is an attempt to document the 10 most important things that new Internet marketers should know.  It hasn't been that long since I was new, and I distinctly remember being bewildered by the enormous amount of information available about making money online.  I remember having a hard time even understanding all the words that were being used: squeeze page, WSO, WordPress, search engine optimization, post-slug, etc.

So, this eBook is an attempt to help those who come after me.  I'm making some good progress on the eBook, and I'm trying hard to keep it under 20 pages.

I did get completely distracted today by something I discovered (I learned about it on the Internet Business Mastery podcast) called jott.com.   jott.com is this really cool voice-recognition transcription and e-mail service available for free.  Once you sign up for service with jott.com, you simply dial the toll-free jott number, specify to whom you wish to jott, and leave a message.  The jott system then magically transcribes your voicemail and sends an e-mail to the specified person containing the text of your message.

It works surprisingly well.  I was amazed.

As an extra bonus, jott supports connections to WordPress, twitter, and a dozen other tools.  So, the next time you see a twitter from me in traffic, you can feel good knowing that I am using jot rather than typing and driving.

Best regards, Mark