Jumat, 11 Juli 2008

1. An Introduction

 It’s hard for us online marketers to get anywhere when we put questions to our colleges only to be presented with a long winded, complex and hard to understand answer.
It’s also hard for us online marketers to provide the answers to some of the biggest questions on our colleges lips when the answers themselves are not straight forward in any way. Both sides breed annoyance and frustration. That’s why we’ve put together the top 15 questions that we get asked the most often, and answered them in the most straight up, non messing around way possible, everything from resource building to provide a solid earning foundation for your businesses, to getting visitors and producing the most sales and profit from them, to specific reasons that some succeed and some don’t.


2. Goals Of This Section

● To go straight for the throat and answer the most frequently asked questions by online marketers and to solve these problems right here and right now so that you never have to ask them again.
● To lay down the big question of 'How do I get hits to my site?' and answer it in the most straight forward way.
● To lay down big question number two 'How do I build my list?' and answer you in the most straight forward way.
● To solidify and embed the concept of resource building and how they snowball and build themselves in your mind, the number one key to success.
● To lay down big question number three 'I've bought X amount of guides before and they didn't work for me. Why is this one different?' and to answer in the most straight forward way.
● To lay down big question number four. 'How do I get my affiliates to actually promote something, they don't seem to ever make any sales' and of course, to answer in the most straight forward way.
● To talk through each of the above questions in a discussion format to lock tight all the exits so that you can quickly, easily and thoroughly understand the answer to each one of them.
Greetings, and welcome to the top fifteen quick-fire question and answers section. Throughout this area we're going to take fifteen of the most popular questions asked by online marketers, put them in a list, and answer them in the quickest possible way. The reason I wanted to get this in here, is because in many cases, it's not rare to see people who haven't reached their goals relating to online business, going from guide to guide, posting in forums asking these very general questions. More often than not, they're either ignored, people try to sell them stuff claiming this to be the big answer they've been looking for, or the answers they receive are just not straight forward enough and go off on tangents, don't give the full story or even deviate from the original question altogether. I remember when I first started out, I was asking a lot of questions, gaining as much insight from anyone I could find. The frustrating thing was not only did I rarely get an answer of any substance that I could act on, but I can see now that half of it was total waffle anyway. It was almost like nobody actually knew the answers to what I was asking. And so, I present you with the top fifteen quick fire Q&A section, which will remove all the frustrations of not getting straight answers about, what are in my eyes, a mix of the top fifteen needs of marketers, coupled with what seem to be the most asked and least best answered questions. I hope this will make things a lot clearer for you.


4. Question 2: How do I build my list?

Another of the most frequently asked questions, in the online marketing scene, that comes especially from people who haven't created their own products yet is how do I build my list. Everyone has grasped the concept of building your own media outlet, that you can promote to again and again without having to pay a penny, that usually consists of the most targeted people, and those who are going to buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous work.
And that right there is the key to it all. By the time you have your own list that stretches over the five thousand mark, you should at least have one product, and the majority of people should have come from the promotion of that product. Avoid anything that asks you for cash to put subscribers on your list, because, if you haven't tried them already, let me assure you that compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer although not necessarily it's size. As we talked about above however, it's the quality that matters for both your current promotion and your future promotion.
Size is definitely not everything here. The ways in which we're building your list don't involve direct methods. Something that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to. Agreed you might end up with a massive list but they'll be far from responsive. Concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your sites, make sure that they end up on one of your lists. If we look at things this way, all it takes is for them to either buy something, signup for something, jump into some follow-up, join your affiliate program and so on. Never create anything that allows customers to go through the sales process on your site, or any process at all for that matter, and then lose contact with them. This is not the way to do things. Of course, speed is also an issue for many people out there. I'm sure you don't want to be hanging around only to find a few years later that your list has only reached two or three thousand subscribers. You want a lot, you want a big list and you want it quickly. I understand how it is and I hate waiting for things to build up over time too. This is exactly why we make sure that everything you do, related to your site, involves collecting names and email addresses for your list at some point or another. Let’s look at some numbers starting off with the simple joint ventures. Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. Now with standard e-zines I can understand how you might not see this as being much, as the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit,
can indeed be lower than you expect. But through joint ventures, with these quality lists, I've seen subscription rates top one in three, and it's not unusual for at least 25% of your visitors to subscribe to something if your sales copy is doing it's job. That may not seem like a lot right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5k, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem if the quality of your JV's is nice and high and you get a good number of visits. A 5k list is all great, and you'll also be making money through sales on those joint ventures. Although when you start to couple in your affiliate commissions that you make sure are real high, in fact, so high that you may not even be making a direct profit, the resources will sail in. This is your profit. Not the money from the sales, but the resources that you're building. This is why you gave up $50 per sale, and it's your affiliates coupled with joint ventures that are going to, if you'll excuse the cliché, set your list building on fire, not just numbers wise, but speed wise. Every single time you release a new product, you're going to be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you. It's another snowball effect, which is great because this means that you know the more you put in, the more you're going to get out, and every single product that you release will increase your resources, your list size included, and will add to your promotion power for future products. Thus you'll make a whole load more cash than you would have done by other means and methods.
Before we move on I want to make one hundred percent sure that you understand how this works. People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists. This is great, it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, it kind of makes me a little bit angry sometimes, for the simple reason that they're not giving you the whole story by far. It's ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, along with building affiliates, customers, long term customers and joint venture prospects, but for it to be successful, you have to integrate it into your other marketing methods, and this is what most fail to tell you. Once you've mastered this and understand, again, how each of these resources tie into each other, and cannot be seen as separate entities, you'll start to see bigger and better results, and they will come more quickly too. Now if you think about what I've just told you, and step back, you should be able to see immediately how this isn't a case of go out and get as bigger list as possible, as quickly as possible, on your own. This is what many guides teach, but as with the success of the whole system it's tying resources in together through the launch of your own products.


6. Question 4: How do I get my affiliates to actually promote?

An interesting question, maybe not as heavily asked as some, because many marketers out there haven't actually got to this stage yet, even though it's one of the first problems you're going to come across once you start pulling affiliates into your system. Back on the subject, so how do you get affiliates to actually promote for you? Well the first stage is attracting them in the first place. Quite obviously, without affiliates they're not going to promote for you. This is a big part of your intro product and the reason why you should set your commissions nice and high (55% up to 90%), especially when you're starting out. You can't afford to be missing out on affiliates signups because of the massive promotion potential they hold. Now after you've attracted them in the first place, you're likely to stumble upon the big problem of why the heck aren't they promoting my stuff for me? Well, there are a few reasons for this. One of them may actually contradict the question, and the answer for the most part is, they are promoting for you they're just not doing it very effectively. As I'm sure you've figured out already, the number of people that know how to promote affiliate programs and have their own resources that allow them to do so, for little or no cost, is far lower than those who have probably never released their own products before and, therefore, don't have the lists and the power to promote effectively.
There are a few ways around this, but I should warn you in advance, if you manage to get yourself a hundred affiliates signed up, don't be shocked if only four or five of them make any significant amount of sales. Sure you'll get others that maybe make a low number of sales, but high volume requires experienced marketers with resources that have already been built up. So don't be put off, don't be worried or think you're doing something wrong if you're affiliates aren't performing. It's most likely that they don't know how to perform. The real affiliates that you're going to be seeing and that are going to be making you a lot of money, are the ones with the big and effective lists with good response rates, which I have to say are few and far between. This doesn't necessarily mean that none of your affiliates will make any sales, but I want you to prepare for the fact that barely ten percent of them are going to be experienced. Hits can't always be a good indicator of someone’s promotion power either. For example, I remember my very first experience with this. It involved me waking up one morning, and taking a look at my affiliate stats, and seeing that there's one person in there that's had over a thousand hits come through overnight, but not a single sale. Now you can imagine how worried this had me, because when I did my testing I was pulling in one sale every forty to sixty five visits. So naturally, being a little paranoid that my sales letter wasn't up to scratch or something had gone wrong throughout the sales process, I mailed him, and his reply put my mind at rest. He'd actually gone out and bought a bunch of guaranteed hits. By this stage the number of visits happened to go flying up to the five thousand mark and still only one sale for him. I'd been around the houses, and seen my fair share of hit programs and so
on, and I knew that it wasn't my sales process that was at fault, it was his lack of knowledge relating to how to promote affiliate programs. So you see it's not always your fault. The number of visitors brought in by the affiliates don't always reflect on the quality of your sales system. Saying that, it is always best to check your sales system for faults if you start to see an odd number of visitors come through and a lack of sales compared to, the research you did and, your own findings through your own methods of promotion. It can, however, be your fault entirely at times. Again this is when your research comes in and you have to try and figure out what turns your affiliates on. Do they need special offers of some sort? Or are they inexperienced and lacking in knowledge about how to promote in general. The only way to find out is to test. Send them a few offers, a few special deals that involve higher commissions the more sales they make, or even send them promotion guides and a little info about how to promote for themselves if you feel up to writing such guides. Keep in mind though, if you see strange stats, visitors to sale ratios, or people only getting very small amounts of visits, it's more often than not, not going to be your fault. Either hit them with offers, educate them, or keep building and hold out for more of those joint ventures or people with plenty of experience and big lists and resources for promotion of their own. Aside from that, everything else is down to the individual and their skills, and pretty much out of your control, so don't be put off if your first one fifty or so affiliates never make any sales. You'll get plenty more, again snowballing, the more products that you release.


3. Question 1: How do I get hits?

This has to be the number one question asked by online marketers, and I come across it regularly, and for good reason. After all without getting hits to your site you can't sell anything. The problem is not only do most people go about this the wrong way, but when this question is approached either directly or through guides, they're giving incorrect answers too, which, if you've asked it before, will consist of buying some sort of service or some sort of ad that will solve all of your traffic problems. Although this may seem like the way to go at first glance it's actually totally counter productive to your efforts. One thing I want to point out to you first is that your initial aim isn't to get hits to your site at all, and getting a massive amount of them isn't a priority. Understand that you only need to pull ten or twenty thousand hits in total, ever, to your sites to make them successful. Of course this will go up as you progress through your resource building, and that's key here. The resources that are built and that you can use over and over again. (That’s your big 5, affiliates, list, customers, long term customers and joint venture partners). The problem comes when someone tells you to go out and buy ads from wherever it might be, search engines, e-zines, whatever. If you don't have the resource collection methods set up to collect the big 5, you're going to have to be starting all over again with your promotion every single time you launch a product. This is the exact reason that, no matter how many hits some marketers get to their sites, they will never earn more than a couple of thousand dollars a month profit, if that even.
The second problem comes when people assume, or are indeed told, that you need to get hundreds of thousands of hits to be a success. This is definitely not true either, although again I see how it may seem like that on the surface. That's why I always teach intro products and follow-up large products, because lets face it, how many $1200 products do you need to sell in a month to equal your current personal income from your job, if you have one, or to reach your goals of having more free time, more money in the bank etc. Also, lets not lose sight of why we started in online marketing in the first place. It definitely wasn't to spend massive amounts of cash trying to get your website stats to read high numbers. Numbers don't mean quality, no matter what anyone tells you, this is fact. Compare one single 10k list of joint venturing to 100k subscribers of an e-zine ad. I assure you, for a start, you'll get more click throughs from the JV in the first place but put the numbers together and you'll get a far higher percentage of sales through the single quality joint venture. So how do you get more hits to your site? Well first off the question is void because more rarely means you'll get better results. Look for quality, and the answer is joint venturing, building these resources, and having others promote your products for really high commissions to attract the numbers. If you're only hitting a few thousand hits per month from these joint ventures, that's not a problem. Forget guaranteed hits, forget e-zine ads for directly promoting your site and forget search engine positioning. They might bring you more in the way of numbers, but it's big sales we want, not big numbers. In that situation always think quality over quantity, which is what the whole of this report is teaching.
So ask me again when you’ve carried out a couple of joint ventures and have begun to build your affiliates, your customer base, your contacts and your list, how do you get hits to your site? That’s why you’ve been building your resources. That’s where your visits and sales come from. The more products you launch, the more resources you gather, the easier this is. The most expensive time consuming part is getting started. After this, it’s cheap, quick and easy to recycle what you’ve gathered to produce a never ending flow of visits and sales.


5. Question 3: I've bought X amount of guides before, why didn't they work?

Wow, well this is a big question. While we don’t claim to be perfect in every way to all people, there's all manner of things that I've seen wrong with other guides, but I don't like to dwell on it, I'd rather talk to you
about why these manuals are different, and as far as I'm concerned they definitely are. I had an idea a long time ago that was related to all the things I wish I knew before I started, and at different stages of my online marketing career. I decided that when I figured this whole thing out, I was going to write the biggest and brightest guide and use every piece of information I've got in my head that I've learned over the years relating to how to become successful in online marketing, and here we are, you're reading it. What I've tried to do, and hopefully succeeded over this and the other 14 manuals, is at the start of each report, give you clear goals so that you know exactly what you're learning and why you're learning it. Also at the end of the reports we've got summary sections that show you exactly what you've learned to do. What I didn't want to happen, was to get this out on the market, and have people come to me and say that they learned nothing at all. This was the reason for this particular style of presentation. The way in which this differs to other reports, is it plugs all the gaps in as many ways as possible. For example, how many other reports have you read that tell you how to do something but not why? How can you adapt and learn if you don’t know why you’re doing something? Or maybe they tell you why you should do something but not tell you exactly how to do it. Maybe they even tell you the how’s and whys but it doesn't work and this tells me that, there is a missing piece of the puzzle somewhere and, they haven't told you the full story.
So what makes what you're reading right now different from the others? Well it's the fact that I haven't left anything out here, and you have my word on that. There are no secrets that I don't want you to know and there's not an amount of money or success that I don't want you to have. In fact, when you get launching your own successful products and have some heavy resources on your own, I hope very much to be able to joint venture with you, and hear about your success stories, and of course for you to tell other people. With this very guide, whilst some will say it's too vague because it doesn't tell them step by step, to click here, go here, buy this, promote that, others, which I'm hoping will be the majority of readers, will say hey, yeah, I've filled in the gaps now and I feel like I'm confident enough to go out and promote my own products that I create. Get my own contacts, my own list and stand on my own two feet. If something changes now you know why and, the details of exactly how everything works and ties into other aspects of this whole system, it allows you to change and adapt the way you do business on your own terms. This is why I believe that you're going to find yourself in a heck of a lot better condition in a years time than if you were to buy another step by step taking you by the hand e-book that only details one input, and one outcome. This is why you're going to succeed using the new knowledge you acquire here, where others have failed, simply because you were only previously given a very shallow look at the world of marketing, and have been told that there is only one best way. Now you know different and can carve your own path using the templates given in each section throughout this particular course.


8. Goals Of This Section.

● To further look at the top frequently asked questions by online marketers and answer them in the most blunt, understandable and straight forward way.
● To approach and discuss the answers to the popular question number five, ‘I don't have my own product, what can I sell?'
● To squash all worries about not succeeding in such a way that your mind is clear to move forwards instead of spending your valuable time and energy thinking about stuff that might or might not happen.
● To talk about how people are making 20k+ a month, and to explain how this is totally achievable given the correct circumstances.
● To discuss joint ventures further in answering the question 'You keep talking about joint ventures, but I can never seem to score any, what gives?’
● To answer the ever popular question; ‘I don't want to create my own products, I just want to sell other peoples stuff through affiliate programs, how can I go about this?’
● To relax you and remove the problems of information overload coming up to the crucial promotion stages for your newly created products.
Greetings, welcome to the top fifteen quick fire FAQ part two, where we'll be answering in the quickest and most direct way that we possibly can, the top questions on peoples lips when they think about online marketing. We covered the top four questions in the previous report and now we're going to move on with the next six, so without further ado, let’s do it.


7. Summary

● Greetings and welcome to the top fifteen quick fire question and answers section, where I'll be taking some of the most frequently asked and very general questions about online marketing and answering them. These seem to be the most popular questions myself, and others, are asked, and things that I sorely wanted to know early in my career but no one seemed to have a straight forward answer for me. A frustrating experience, something we'll squash right now.
● Let’s get started with question one. How do I get hits to my site? Easily the number one question asked by online marketers because, quite simply, no hits means no sales. Something that most go about in the wrong way, or have been taught incorrectly on so many occasions, they feel dizzy from the contradictory information they've been presented with. So let’s answer this question once and for all in two parts.
● Part one is to change the question. The aim of online marketing isn't just about getting hits to your site at all, and getting a massive amount of them isn't a priority either. Ten or twenty thousands hits can easily mean $40,000 plus worth of sales for a premium product. So how do you get hit's to your site? Well you don't. How do I get quality targeted hits to my site? This is our new question addressing the more relevant question.
● Resource building is the key. It's about pulling in resources that you can use over and over again. Never letting a single contact or customer escape, keeping in regular contact and making regular deals over multiple products through JVs.
● The most expensive and hardest part of online marketing is getting customers initially, and the problem comes when someone tells you to go out and buy ads from wherever it might be, search engines, e-zines, (which you already know is not necessary). If you don't have several resource collection methods set up. You're going to have to be starting all over again with your promotion every single time you launch a product. This is the exact reason that no matter how many hits some marketers get to their sites, they will never earn more than a couple of thousand dollars a month profit, if that even.
● Problem two comes when people assume or are told that you need to get millions of hits to be a success. Not true, this is why we have intro products and follow-up products, to combat this problem of low conversion rates from people who don't know or trust you yet. The natural flow of free, to cheap to expensive sorts this problem out for you, thus recycling resources you’ve already collected without the added expense of starting again.
● Look for quality not quantity, and the answer lies in joint venturing or PPC search engines (Which is a whole other book in itself.), building these resources, and having others promote your products for you. If you're only hitting a few thousand hits per month from these joint ventures, that's not a problem, if you're pulling in those resources. Not only are they quality, but will provide long term profit and stability for your business. Forget guaranteed hits and forget e-zine ads for directly promoting your site. They might bring your more in the way of numbers, but it is big sales we want, not big numbers. In that situation always think quality over quantity, which is what the whole of this report is teaching.
● Question Two. How do I build my list? Another of the most frequently asked questions in online marketing, because everyone thinks it's the be all and end all of their success, which it isn’t when you factor in the power of building JV contacts, affiliates and repeat custom.
● The best way to build your list is to launch your own products full stop. First, avoid anything that offers to put subscribers on your list for money. They're either paid to land on your list, age old or multiple sold subscribers that get you into trouble with your host or ISP, fake, shoddy quality and just not worth your time let alone your money.
● The way in which we're doing this doesn't involve any direct list building methods, like with all our other resources, it's much a case of launch your product, get the initial few joint ventures out and make sure that you have all your resource building tools in place and pull them in. You're not substituting sales for resources, or resources for sales, it all happens at once, and gets bigger, and bigger, and snowballs over and over, the more products you launch.
● There's no secret it really is this simple, and this is one of the rare cases where a focused train of thought doesn't work as well as working on everything at once. There's no way to separate these methods because they're all connected. Separate them and the supply of new resources that one supplies to another is broken (affiliates building your list through promoting your product for example) and you have to resort to what the majority of the people out there are doing to their detriment. Starting all over again each time they launch a product which is both expensive and time consuming, and not in anyone’s best interest no matter what the business.
● Let’s look at some numbers to back this up, starting with a simple joint venture that brings two thousand visits to your site from someone’s personal list. Two thousand isn't a lot by any means, especially not spread over multiple JV's, and it's not a hard thing to achieve. With the quality of these list types, as we discussed earlier, it's not unheard of for subscription rates to total 25% of visits if your sales copy and resource builders are doing their job.
● This may not seem like a lot right now, but when just ten small joint ventures makes a list of 5k, and who knows how many affiliates, future contacts and customers all working together. It sure adds up. Once you hit that five thousand mark you're set because each resource has already started to build the other, as long as you never separate these ten joint ventures for one product, either with new contacts, current contacts, your customers and your affiliates. Remember we talked about ramping up your commissions to ridiculous levels on your intro products? This is why. How many visits would a measly one hundred affiliates, coupled with JV’s with the top performers, bring you? And how many out of those thousands of visits do we know subscribe to lists and free stuff? When you have some time start to work out some numbers, make them conservative, very conservative, and watch how using this system you can easily pull massive amounts of promotion power and profit from the smallest number of resources and quickly too.
● Moving onto question three. I've bought X number of guides already, why didn't they work? This is a huge question, and the people that ask this often don't realize that a whole book could be written about why other guides didn't work for them. This is why it's such a hard question to answer directly to the frustration of the person asking and the person trying to answer.
● I had a brainwave back when I started out. I just couldn't figure out why I wasn't being a success. I said to myself 'When I become a success I'm going to write a book, or a guide, answering all these questions that I can't find answers to and make sure the readers have the answers that I don't'. This was the first ever idea in my concepts folder. Six or Seven years later, you're reading one of those very manuals.
● I believe that many reports fall down for several reasons although there is, without a doubt, some amazing information out there, along with the not so amazing. Most lack clear goals for one. If you don't know where you're going, how do you expect to get there. It's like asking for directions over the phone and getting a reply like 'It's over there'. It just doesn't work.
● The second thing. Summaries. Easier to commit to memory by far. Information is no good if it's not easy to remember. These are all basic things that I've seen many guides lack and something that, I found from my very first site, can be the difference between a reader learning, understanding, committing to memory then taking action, or falling down at any of these stages stopping them from being a success.
● Next. Poor information, but not just incorrect information, worse. Ever seen those reports or bought a guide that says 'Do this, this then this, click here and then do this' and so on? Everyone comes out with the same business. Without options and only a set path to follow, and information that doesn't talk about why things happen, they don't give the reader the space to adapt over time to create their own business and carve their own path.
● Let me ask you something else. Name one thing that we've already discussed that contributes to the downfall of many marketers and blocks them from success. Anything at all. Ok now, tell me why that blocks them from success. What’s the reason that this factor stops them from being successful? How can you avoid this? Do you see how you've already gained something very important, not just information about stuff that happens, but why it happens, and by knowing why it happens, you can draw your own conclusions about how to fix it. The why question is so important but under used.
● For this reason, some may say this guide is vague, but watch closely, because what you're gaining here is not just knowledge, but the ability to understand the intricacies of each technique. This in turn shows you how to do something, why it happens and in the end, will present the conclusion to you in such a way that you can adapt it to your business rather than just being a clone of anyone’s business.
● Ok lets move on to question four. How do I get my affiliates to actually promote something? Not as heavily asked as some other questions, this is true, but that's because many don't know how to get affiliates through intro products and high commissions in the first place. Now you do, however, this question becomes very relevant.
● The answer is you can't, not always. There are two situations in which I'd like you to be careful of. The first is when an affiliate has thousands of hits but no sales. This may not actually be your sales letter or your sales process, but an affiliate without the correct resources to promote effectively, maybe spending on guaranteed hits or something to that effect. The second situation is the affiliates themselves not promoting. Don't fret if only five or ten percent of your affiliates ever actually get any hits. Again this could be due to lack of resources, the lack of knowledge
or the lack of effort on your affiliates’ part. It's not a strange phenomenon so don't be worried when you come across it. It's quite normal for myself, and all the other marketers I remember quizzing about it when I first got a little worried after coming across it for the first time.
● You see it's not always your fault and the number of visitors brought in by the affiliates don't always reflect on the quality of your sales system. However, saying that, it is always best to check your sales system for faults if you start to see an odd number of visitors come through and a lack of sales compared to the research you did and your own findings through your own methods of promotion. It can be your fault entirely at times. Again this is when your research comes in and you have to try and figure out what turns your affiliates on. Do they need special offers of some sort? Or are they inexperienced and lacking in knowledge about how to promote in general?
● The only way to find out is to test. Send them a few offers, a few special deals that involve higher commissions the more sales they make, or even send them promotion guides and a little info about how to promote for themselves if you feel up to writing such guides. Keep in mind though, if you see strange stats, visitors to sale ratios, or people only getting very small amounts of visits, it's more often than not, not going to be your fault. Either hit them with offers, educate them, or keep building and hold out for more of those joint ventures or people with plenty of experience and big lists and resources for promotion of their own. Aside from that, everything else is down to the individual and their skills, and pretty much out of your control, so don't be put off if your first one to fifty or so affiliates never make any sales. You'll get plenty more, again snowballing, the more products that you release.
● That's all for this section. We've got another two of these FAQ sections coming up focusing on increasingly important questions. All there to make sure you get the low-down in the most direct way possible. As you can see, there are so many aspects to each question, that's not always the easiest thing to do. See you in the next section!


10. Question 6. I'm worried that I won't succeed, that people will say no or not like my work. What do I do?

 Moving on now to question number six. If you're worried that you won't succeed this time, or that people won't like your work, have no fear because you're not alone, and I believe that this is healthy to an extent. As far as my experience shows me, there are three types of people out there. The first type are those who don't really care. They just want to
make some money so they throw any old thing out there as quickly as they can. This is surely unhealthy, and we can't be doing with bad quality products. Then there are type two, who are indeed bothered about what people want out of a product, what the reactions will be and so on. For this reason they make sure everything is up to scratch and the best they can make it before it's released. As far as I can tell, the majority of good marketers are at this stage. That doesn't mean anyone who isn't doesn't have the ability, but it could well mean they're stuck in a rut, and going nowhere fast, and this is where things get damaging. Type three, the marketers that want everything to go smoothly, just as the above states, but have a problem getting anything done because either, they've failed before and have a problem coming back from that, or they're worried what people might say to them, which some of the time will be things they really didn't want to hear. For example, a straight up no I'm not interested in your joint venture proposal and on the lighter side of things, and the odd strange customer that decides to send abusive mails. (We all have one no matter how good the product, let me assure you, in which case a cool, polite helpful reply often does the job to fix the situation). What you mustn’t do is let your past experiences get you stuck in a rut, and get you all worked up about not being able to succeed in the future. Everyone makes mistakes, and you can't please everyone all the time even though it would be nice. So no matter what you do with online marketing, or any other business for that matter, don't let past
experiences stop you from moving forward. If someone doesn't like your stuff, that’s fine, as long as you're comfortable with it, give them a refund, or just take it on the nose, say ok then and move on. Don't let this type of thing hold you back. I solidly believe that this is one of the big reasons so many people out there can't succeed, because although they may be working long hours and putting everything into their business, they're avoiding the things that they really need to do because of past experiences. Don't fall into this trap, keep moving and be true to what you're doing. Don't hide from it. If what you're doing isn't working, you have to make a conscious effort to look at what you need to do to move forward, then do it, because when you do, you'll find yourself with a lot more cash in your pocket, a lot more spare time on your hands, and a business that is moving forward not standing still. This is a hurdle everyone needs to get over if they're going to get anywhere in online marketing. The thing is I can't do anything from here to change that. It's totally in your hands, so be aware of what you're doing all the time, and make sure you're moving forward. Going around in circles or standing still doesn't count, and if you do find yourself knocked a little by someone’s reaction to you work, remember, it's nothing personal, it's just business, and hey, you're the easy one to pick on, because they've never met you. You can bet someone, somewhere is going to take out their frustrations on you because they can't achieve what they want, and place the blame on the product that in all actuality does work, and you can be proud of.


9. Question

 5. I don't have my own product, what can I sell? A good question that comes up on many occasions, even many of my close friends who see me sitting here working away whenever I feel like it. They often ask me, ‘How can I start my own business?’ The response comes that you need an idea first for your own product. After a quick pondering look towards the sky, they turn back and reply, but I don't have my own products what can I sell? Well, the simple answer is if you don't have your own product you're going to have a hard time selling anything, online or offline. There's so much raw promotion power that comes with having your own products. Look at it this way, without them, you can't joint venture, you can't have an army of affiliates promoting for you, you can't control the sales process and gain new knowledge through your research, you can't build up your resources for future promotion, in fact, there isn't much good to come out of not having your own product.
So make one. The longer time you spend looking around in your target market, the easier it will be to come up with ideas for your own product. I don't expect to plant this guide in front of a random person who thinks all we do is send e-mails out all day and scam people (which seems to be the usual joke when I mention to someone that I'm in online marketing) and then tell them to create a product out of the blue. In much the same way, if this was literally your first day in the business I wouldn't expect you to be able to go out and create your own online marketing product. You need to have the knowledge first, even if you're not creating an info product. Once you've found yourself mingling with the crowd and getting down and buying products and talking to people, it's very rare that you can come out of a situation without coming up with a new idea, even out of the simplest of situations. A good example of this is a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with a fellow marketer. He'd just written a shed load of reports and wanted to do something a little special with them. Unfortunately he had to go through each one manually and do this by hand. We just could not find a piece of software to do this for him (Sorry, I can't tell you exactly what it is, because it sounded like that would be his next venture). But as you can see, just by living as an online marketer, it's real easy to come up with product ideas that are solutions to problems you might have. How about revelations? I've had these too, not necessarily with online marketing, but when you're trying to figure out how to do something, and after a long while thinking, it comes to you, you try it out, and it
works like a charm. That's valuable information you have there that could easily be sold. Remember that when you come to creating a product, it doesn't have to be a piece of furniture or something that costs hundreds of dollars to manufacture, it can be something as simple as information contained within your head that people will want to buy, or a piece of software, that also generally has low overheads, as you can pay someone to complete the build and then go off and sell it. The choices really are endless, and the more ideas you come up with, the more ideas those ideas will spawn. It only takes one idea to create a five or six product venture that could last you a whole year. Whatever you do though, don't skip over this. Don't say ah well, I'll just promote other peoples stuff, because you'll find yourself in the same position this time next year going about things like that. It's all about creating products that allow you to build your resources, and starting out not creating your own, is out of the question.