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Dear Web Business Newsletter Subscriber,

Since the birth of my daughter back in January, life has gotten pretty busy. My online business has had some great successes, but most of my energy has gone toward my growing family.

Needless to say, projects have been piling up and I have been looking for ways to double and triple up what I am working on to try and get as many projects done as possible. I think I have come up with a combination that you will profit from.

MY INGENIOUS MASTER PLAN

One of the members of this newsletter, Walter Scheu, has created an amazing course on importing products to sell on Ebay. Walter asked me to help promote his new product as an affiliate and I quickly said YES! The product is excellent, the price is very reasonable, and the exposure levels are low enough right now that the marketplace hasn’t been saturated with his product already – there is an opportunity to offer something unique.

My excitement for the project got swallowed-up by daily life as a new daddy and I still haven’t gotten this promotion done. I could have just cranked out a quick promotional email, sent it to all of you, and called it done. But, this newsletter is not targeted at eBay sellers. Sales would be low (if any) and there would be little benefit to you. Plus, this is just not a good strategy for selling products. So I decided to do something a little different.

Over the course of the next few emails, I am going to go step-by-step through my plan to market Walter’s eBay Importing course. I will explain every aspect of how I will market this product with enough detail that you can swipe the whole idea and steal my profits for yourself.

WHY WOULD I DO THIS?

I have a few reasons. The first is that I want to help Walter recruit new affiliates and make some sales. It’s a good product.

The second, and most important, reason is that I think you will gain valuable insights into online promotion strategies by following along with a real life example. Even if you are not interested in promoting Walter’s product, you will benefit from seeing the thought process behind planning an affiliate marketing campaign. Effective promotions need more effort than simply dashing off an email (which requires you to already have a list of prospective buyers.) The steps I outline will help you with any online promotions you are planning.

HERE IS WHAT WE WILL BE DISCUSSING IN THE UPCOMING EMAILS:

• Audience Targeting
• Choosing Your Angle (What’s Your Story?)
• Selecting Secondary Promotional Products
• Building a Promotional e-Course (Telling Your Story)
• Creating a Squeeze Page and Setting Up Your Auto-Responder
• Generating Traffic

In the next email we will look at the nature of Walter’s ‘Importing for Ebay Sellers‘ course and decide who our target market is for promoting this product.

To prepare for this, visit the sales page for Walter’s course and familiarize yourself with what he is offering and the tone of his sales message. If you are considering promoting the product yourself, I recommend you purchase a copy and review it carefully – but this is not necessary for you to follow along with this series. Follow the link below and bookmark the page for future reference:

Importing for eBay Sellers, by Walter Scheau

Until next time, have a profitable day!

Andrew Seltz
The Go-To Guy!
www.AndrewSeltz.com

P.S. I actually want you to steal my plan and out promote me. I’m being very specific so that you can apply what you learn and see the results in action. Plus, I want to see Walter’s product jump to the top of the best-seller list.

P.P.S. If you have any questions about the project that I don’t cover, hit the reply button and send me an email. I will do my best to cover it in the next email.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EMAIL

Importing for eBay Sellers

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There is nothing like having a specific goal to help focus your work. I want a Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor! I also want to get it using money I earn online using nothing but my computer, freely available Internet resources, and my writing skills. Lastly, I don’t want to work for peanuts and wait forever to make this happen. I want the monitor now and I want to earn at least $20/hour for my efforts.

I posted a personal challenge on the 5 Bucks a Day members forum today. That, and this post, are my official proclamation to the world that his will happen – I will have a new Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor!

Dennis Becker, the author of “5 Bucks a Day” and owner of the members’ forum for owners of the book, has recently been adding a number of free download resources for the forum members that are related to article writing and selling articles. (Membership to the forum is included with the purchase of the “5 Bucks a Day” e-book.) Two specific e-books added to the members download area are Content Speed Writing and Increase Your Associated Content Profits. I plan to apply what I learned from these books to getting the money for my new monitor.

As a member of the forum I have learned a number of ways to earn money online. One of them is writing content articles and selling them to sites that pay authors for original new content. Usually, forum members focus on building projects that will earn them $5/day continually. But, one of the discussion threads introduced a way to sell articles for a quick profit.

Since I want my new monitor now!!!! I decided to use this short term article writing/selling strategy to earn the cash for my new monitor. I outlined the details of the plan in the original forum post. Basically, I think that I can write 30-40 articles in 20 hours which will earn me between $600 and $800 (enough to buy the monitor on eBay.) My target hourly income rate is $40 per hour. I would also like to have the work completed and the money in my back account within 4-6 weeks.

Bookmark this thread, or sign up to the RSS feed, to keep an eye on my progress. I will be posting updates of my progress.

The Go-To Guy

P.S. Of course, I will have plenty of pictures and video of my new monitor when it arrives!!!

Seven Years to Seven Figures is Michael Masterson’s latest book on the topic of generating personal wealth. He set about looking for seven people who had built up a seven figure annual income and interviewed them about the steps taken to reach this goal in seven years or less.

The book is aimed at baby boomers who are waking up to realize that they do not have enough money to fund the retirement they want and they do not have enough time to save the money in a conventional retirement plan. But the book is not just relevant for baby boomers. It offers valuable information on wealth building for anyone interested in a fast track to a high net worth.

Masterson claims to have thought up the idea for the book and then pitched it to his publisher before determining if it was even possible to find seven people who fit the profile. He ended up finding eight.

The principles involved in every person’s story track with the recommendations Masterson made in his earlier book, Automatic Wealth. The process involves:

• Increasing your income
• Saving most of the extra money you earn
• Investing in real estate, stocks, and bonds
• Starting your own business in your spare time

The stories are inspiring and illuminate the concepts that Masterson introduced in Automatic Wealth. They are not tales of genius programmers or reckless risk takers. They are stories of individuals like Monica Day, a middle class wife and mother of two who went from earning $26,000/year to $134,000/year in only two years by learning the skill of copywriting and starting a freelance business with her newfound skill.

As a fan of Mastersons earlier books and regular reader of his Early To Rise newsletter, I also admired how the stories that are told connect to the informational training products that Masterson creates and promotes. It is impressive how, in the later stories, the keys to each person’s success was to engage in the learning skills that Masterson teaches in his business. The writing course that Monica Day took is the same one that you will find regularly promoted in the Early To Rise newsletter.

I guess it is logical that the successful people that Masterson knows would also be the people he has personally helped through the businesses he has created. Still, it is a very clever cross-promotion and extremely well done. The book never feels like a cheap sales pitch for something else.

Seven Years to Seven Figures lives up to the hype of its promotional copy. The stories ring true and offer powerful insights into the steps required to build wealth quickly.

If you have already read Automatic Wealth, I highly recommend this book. If not, I suggest you start with the earlier book and then read this one – or buy them both, I’m sure Amazon will offer you a discount!

The Go-To Guy!

Article marketing is a low cost strategy to direct traffic to a website and begin to develop one-way backlinks to its pages. For new online ventures it offers a great way to build traffic to a site and to establish its authority in a particular niche.

Article Marketing is also an excellent strategy to quickly get a new site listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo!

The basic process for article marketing is this:

• Write a series of short 350-700 word articles related to the content of your website
• Add an author’s resource box to each article that contains links back to one or more pages on your website
• Upload the articles to various article directories like www.EZineArticles.com or www.GoArticles.com
• Wait for other publishers to reprint your articles and resource links
• Wait for search engines to index your articles (and the links back to your site) from the article directories and also from the websites that reprint them giving you relevant inbound links and new visitor traffic

The process works. I wrote my first small batch of articles over a year ago and continue to see traffic from them today. I even make a dollar or two every now and then from ads on the pages that the resource links are pointing to. If I had more articles out there, the overall traffic would rise. But those first articles were a test to see if the process worked and were not well written for the task of making me money (or even getting me good search engine ranking.)

Once I proved to myself that the basic system worked, I next had to learn how to write articles that compel people to click on the resource links and how to optimize those links to improve my search engine rankings. The best SEO in the world won’t help if your content isn’t compelling and the most compelling articles are pointless if they don’t improve your business.

Optimizing the links was easy. I just had to include the primary keywords for the page I was directing traffic to in the anchor text in the link. Like this: Energy Efficient Home Construction information. Every article gets unique words based on the page that is being linked to. When multiple articles link to the same page I make subtle alterations to the link on each article so that the search engines don’t always see the exact same text and devalue it as duplicate content.

Making the articles compelling so that readers want to follow the links and come to my site is more challenging. The most effective articles for this marketing method give readers a taste of the topic and lead them to deeper subjects they need to explore to really be satisfied. The resource box should promise them this next level of information and the links will lead them to the new information.

I realize that this explanation might not be clear enough, so I’ll give a quick illustration:

Say you are selling camera equipment for product photography – cameras, lights, display stands, backdrops, etc.

You write an article about how adding a photo to your eBay auctions can radically improve your profits. Your readers will be eBay sellers who want to make more money and your article leads them to realize that good product photos will improve their income.

In the article you make a special point of the importance of professional quality images to set yourself apart from the crowd. You further explain that with a modest investment in the right tools and some basic training anyone can learn to take the kinds of images that will make big money. If you write this well, the reader will now want to know how to take a good product photo and what equipment is needed to get professional results.

In your resource box you promise them free tutorials for taking product photos they can use in their auctions. These links will land them on pages where they will learn techniques and discover the basic tools they need to take good photos (with ads for the gear highlighted in the tutorials, a newsletter sign-up form, and maybe an offer for an e-book guide to taking professional product photos.) The link text might be something like “Learn 5 Simple Steps to Professional Quality Product Photos.”

Another article pointing to the exact same set of tutorials could focus on showing aspiring catalog photographers how to build their portfolios. Still another would entice model building hobbyists into taking professional quality photos of the models they build to show off their skills, etc. You can find dozens of different ways to approach potential audiences for your products.

The article introduces a need and builds the desire for a solution, then the resource box promises to satisfy this new desire.

Model building websites, photography websites, and auction business websites will all begin to reprint your articles and steer their visitors toward your site. The search engines will also start to recognize your site’s pages as authoritative because of the growing number of inbound links. Over time your search engine placement will also improve.

Creating articles that work at this level takes effort. If your main goal is to simply to gain backlinks to improve search engine rankings, this is overkill. But if you are trying to warm up a new customer for a sale, you have to make the effort.

If you would like to see some of the marketing articles I have published visit my EZineArticles profile. (While you are there, please rate my articles – every little bit of promotion helps.) Hopefully you will be able to see the improvement in my articles over the past year.

Now, get out there and start writing.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t let me have the last word. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

’5 Bucks A Day’, by Dennis Becker – It is better than ‘The Secret’, it’s the answer to your frustrations with your online marketing efforts.

Picture two people standing behind a row of expensive cars. They can have any one they choose if only they can push it 200 yards.

The first person picks a nice black Lexus and starts pushing. The car barely moves, but she just keeps at it.

The second person spots a good looking red Porsche. He digs in behind it and starts to push. When it doesn’t move very far he starts to wonder of the Mercedes down the line might roll a little better and runs over to try that one. When the Mercedes doesn’t roll any faster, he tries the Lincoln and then the Cadillac. He jumps back and forth from car to car hoping that one of them will just roll along effortlessly.

Before long he is exhausted and none of the cars have moved very far. He realizes that, at this pace, it will take weeks to get one of the cars to go 200 yards. He thinks about how much time and effort it has taken to get this far and decides to quit the whole thing.

As he begins to walk away, he notices the first person has moved her car almost 50 yards and it is rolling along pretty fast. She will likely have the car across the finish line within the hour.

Shaking his head in disgust the second person exclaims, “It figures she would get the light car, I never have any luck!” Then he walks away.

This little parable illustrates the problem that many online small business owners face. The first person’s car wasn’t any easier to push, she just continued to focus her energy on it. As the car began to roll it gained momentum until she didn’t have to push very hard to keep it going.

Many entrepreneurs start looking for a business opportunity and get seduced by a slick sales pitch. They buy a program or the latest moneymaking technique and then try it for a little while. When they don’t wake up to piles of cash, they try another and another until finally giving up and deciding they just can’t make a living online and quit.

The Internet makes it easy to get distracted. A world of information is at your fingertips. Your email inbox piles up with offers from the latest guru who promises to help you make mountains of cash. Many of the offers you find are actually good, but you have to stay with them long enough to get some momentum.

Pick a project you want to accomplish and focus your efforts. Break it down into smaller sub-projects that you can complete easily and then commit yourself to working on each one until it is completed.

When you complete the first project, come up with a second that builds on the work done for the first. Break it into manageable pieces and then focus on getting that done.

Complete and repeat! The power of focused effort will build momentum for your business and before long you won’t have to push anymore – you’ll have to run to keep up.

Dennis Becker teaches the power of focus. His ‘5 Bucks a Day‘ ebook and forum challenges people to focus on building thriving businesses by building a portfolio of profitable projects using whatever system fits their interests and skills.

Read my review of Dennis Becker’s ’5 Bucks a Day’ ebook.

You can also visit Dennis’ blog and learn more about the latest news in the 5 Bucks world.

“Earn enough money through online marketing to pay for the month’s hosting fees.”

That was my goal back in January of 2006 as I decided to try and find a way to earn a living through my own websites.

I had been working online for over 10 years at that point, but never ran my own online business. My income came from working on websites for other people and a full-time corporate gig.

I knew how to manage vendors and build websites and media components, but I had never built my own website with the intention of turning a profit or tried to create and sell a product – I thought about it a lot, but never did anything about it!

Setting a Small Goal

My hosting fees are pretty low (I use 1&1 Internet and my fees are roughly $25/month.) I decided my first threshold would be to make sure that my online activities didn’t cost me money – $25/month!

I set out creating a niche website and writing about it (and other things) on this blog. I read every book and website I could find about building traffic. I learned about Adsense, Adwords, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I ran tests and wrote up my results. I got indexed in the Google search engine and did some article marketing. I made a little money and spent a little money. But mostly, I learned a lot.

The big thing I learned was that the real steady traffic was coming to the articles on this blog – and not just the ones focused on marketing. My niche site gets a little traffic here and there, but currently ads very little revenue.

I also learned the value of focus. At first I tried a little of every legitimate technique I found. But, if you’ve ever tried to make a sandwich with a little bit of everything in the kitchen, you know that the results are usually disappointing.

In the last few months I have started to list all of the different things I want to try and then evaluate which ones will most effectively build on the work I’ve already done. The goal is to continually improve and support things that show promise and not chase around looking for a big overnight score. Sometimes the real value of a work takes time to develop.

A Tiny Seed Grows And Blooms

As the title of this article suggests, I achieved my earnings goal in November – actually I earned 3.5 times that amount! I earned over $20 from Adsense alone, and nearly every penny of that ad money came from visitors to one page on this site.

I wrote a small tutorial last spring that I posted on the site. It was based on a fun little side project I started and I didn’t think much would come from it. After a few months this article was getting low, but steady, traffic from natural search results. While I was busy working on other projects this traffic steadily grew. Other people started linking to the page and more traffic came. Then, one night, someone using the social promotion website www.stumbleupon.com recommended my site. The next day my traffic spiked. It wasn’t thousands of visitors, but much more than usual.

As the traffic to that page kept growing I focused my energy on trying to find ways to revise the page to encourage affiliate sales and ad clicks. I played with the layout and added some resource links and product recommendations. I wrote a few related articles and added links to them too. No major breakthroughs, but traffic keeps coming and I keep getting a few ad clicks here and there.

In the middle of November the page was recommended again at www.StumbleUpon.com and even more traffic has been coming. Those referrals are now the biggest source of traffic to my site, and the other sources are still sending traffic too. The ad money started building and then, in one day, I sold 2 e-books through an affiliate link. This pushed me way past my goal.

Quit Driving Traffic And Start Building Relationships

At the same time that my site traffic was growing, I stopped chasing after visitors and started building relationships with them.

My primary strategy so far has been building a newsletter subscriber list. I’ve got several hundred people on my first list and I email them about once every week or two.

I let my subscribers know about relevant new articles I have placed on this blog and I can see an increase in traffic every time I send out a newsletter. I also recommend new products that I have tried and that accounts for two more of my affiliate sales this month.

It is amazing to be able to send out a email and see people respond directly to what you have to say.

What Is Next?

Will I make my earnings goal again this month? That remains to be seen, but I am building on the foundation I created. I’m learning more about the people on my mailing list and exploring ways to provide them with the information and resources they need.

I’m planning a project to get to know the people coming to that one super popular page on my site and considering whether to spin that off into a new niche site.

I’m also still exploring new things and writing about them – you never know where that next popular article will come from or where it will lead you.

Oh! I almost forgot – I’m also raising my monthly income target a little higher. I want this business to grow.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t let me get the last word. Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Are you curious about the value of your website? I came across a link in one of the business forums I visit for a website that claims to be able to evaluate what your website is worth. The site is called the Sootle Web Directory. The box on the right side of the page shows their current estimate for www.AndrewSeltz.com. At the time I am writing this they give it a value of $555.00. Not bad for a domain that wasn’t worth anything except the domain registration fee 12 months ago.

This website is worth
What is your website worth?

Their value seems to be based on the number of backlinks coming to your site. This is a reasonable indicator of value as the traffic your site gets (and which can be monetized) is tied to the number of incoming links that are listed around the Internet. Google, and the other major search engines, all use this indicator when evaluating sites.

Just a fun little observation that I thought I would share. It will be fun to see how this value changes over time.

The Go-To Guy! – A $555 value available for a fraction of the price!

Today I decided to fire up my synchronicity engine and see what it would do for my online business efforts. I made a post on Russell Brunson’s Conquer Your Niche Forum in the Joint Ventures and Special Offers section. The gist of the message was this – I’ve got lots of skills and need to work with other people to create products and businesses using these skills.

Within 5 minutes of posting my message I had 3 people checking out my resume online and inside of 30 minutes 2 more. There may be some emails in my inbox when I get home too!

The point of this post isn’t the traffic that the forum post generated, but that the action of announcing my intentions in a public forum has begun a chain of events that has the potential to change my life. Every time you expose yourself to this type of public discussion a new branch of possibilities opens up in your life.

The prospect of people looking over my resume and work and judging me is a little un-nerving, but the possibilities of what ‘could happen’ far outweigh the fears of rejection.

I’m planning to do this again in other forums to try and find people I can work with. There is no telling where it might take me.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Have you started a similar chain of events in your life? Leave a comment and let us know what happened.

“Make Easy Money Online!” “3 Easy Steps To Internet Riches!” “The Secret Money Making System That Google Doesn’t Want You To Know About!”

In Greek mythology the seductive song of the Sirens lured sailors to their doom. Orpheus played his lyre so loud that it drown out the sound and his ship passed on safely. Odysseys had his men stuff their ears with wax to avoid the sound and had them tie him to the mast of the ship so that he could hear their song and resist temptation.

Wading through the world of Internet marketing you sometimes need the strength and cunning of these mythic Greeks to avoid being seduced by the promises of instant wealth.

Yesterday I received an email for a website that promised to show me first hand a money-making site being built and promoted. (they also promised I could make a bunch of money by trying to convince you to watch the videos as well.) A series of videos promised to show me everything step-by step from the keyword research, to building the site, promoting the site, tracking the traffic and profits, and then refining the site for improved performance.

How could I resist such a promise? I look at the stats from my own sites and the slow trickle of income from ads and affiliate sales, and I want to find a new trick that will unlock the secrets of wealth – I watched the videos until 3am.

The system appeared to work. The author collected a series of free articles for content and then used an automated tool to wrap keyword rich material around it and plug in Google ads and affiliate ads. He used social bookmarking sites to bookmark the pages in his own site, and then used another automated system to generate a blog that would automatically add new keyword loaded content every day, ping the blog directories, and link to pages in his main site. Within 72 hours he was getting traffic from the bookmarking sites, Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines. He also made more ad money than I did all last month.

It was all so easy. He didn’t have to write a single piece of content – just plug in the keywords and a handful of free articles and push a button. Out popped hundreds of website pages targeting his list of keywords. I was tempted to buy the software tools immediately and sign-up for membership to his website. I knew I could have a site up within 24 hours and be making easy money online! But I started getting a sinking feeling in my gut. Something wasn’t right.

There is only one way to generate thousands of keyword targeted web pages from a handful of articles – it’s called content spam. Even though this website wasn’t full of keyword gibberish or content scraped from other sites using sleazy tools, it wasn’t adding any value to the web. It was just re-directing traffic and grabbing a little toll money along the way. There wasn’t much trickery involved (no bait and switch content, no site cloaking gimmicks) just another duplicate site that lured visitors in without giving them what they hoped for.

I want to find ways to make money online and build my own business. I don’t believe that you have to suffer for every penny to be a legitimate business person and make an honest living. But, I want to add value along the way. I want to point to the work that I’ve done and be proud of it. This type of ‘business’ just doesn’t feel right.

I’m trying to keep myself lashed to the mast so I don’t fall victim to the siren call of ‘Making Easy Money Online.’ But a part of me still argues that it won’t hurt anything just to give it a try. Nothing but my reputation, that is. Still, I’m straining against the ropes.

Thank goodness I’ve got a good day job. Otherwise the temptation might be to great and I wouldn’t take the time to learn a better way.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t give me the last word on this subject – leave a comment and let us know what you think!

UPDATE: In December 2006, Dennis Becker created a newly revised version of this book and also started a members forum for purchasers of 5 Bucks a Day*. But, Dennis didn’t stop there. He regularly purchases resale rights to products he thinks will be helpful to the forum members and gives them away. There are currently 16 products on the download page – several with master resale rights included. Several of the bonuses alone are worth the price of Dennis’ e-book and they are all included, along with new updates and membership to the forum! This has been a great investment for me! Dennis has also created a blog as well – visit the 5 Bucks a Day Blog to learn what’s new in the 5BaD world.
–End Update–

At this point in my online marketing career I do not think I need to learn another technique or system. I am familiar with article marketing, Adsense advertising, affiliate programs, membership sites, information product creation, viral e-books, squeeze pages and more. I make a few dollars every month, but I still have a day job.

So, what is it that I need?

Click for more information.

Dennis Becker claims that what I need is a strategy for applying all of this knowledge and experience. After reading 5 Bucks a Day*, I am inclined to agree with him.

5 Bucks a Day* does not teach a technique or system for making money online. It lays out a strategy for applying what you know in a systematic way by breaking down your goals into manageable chunks. Instead of complex never-ending projects he encourages week-long projects designed to achieve small goals. The small goals, accomplished with regularity, build up to big results.

The title refers to the author’s focus on breaking up big goals. If you currently earn nothing every day, it is a big mental leap to visualize yourself making $10,000 a day. If you try to make a leap that big, often your subconscious mind will just decide that the task is impossible and start sabotaging your thoughts and efforts. It is a goal to far from your experience to comprehend with clarity. If you focus on a more realistic target of $5 a day, the goal seems possible. As you reach these small goals you raise target higher. Before long you will find yourself well beyond your initial ‘impossible’ goals.

5 Bucks a Day* is a well organized, well written and inspiring book. Becker offers specific examples from his own work and provides specific strategies and action steps to help you focus your efforts.

If you are full-up with marketing information and still not making much money, get a copy of 5 Bucks a Day*, by Dennis Becker – and make sure you join the forum. There is a wealth of great advice and helpful people there and you will also get access to thousands worth of additional resources that Dennis has purchased for the community.

The Go-To Guy!

* Denotes affiliate links.