There are many advertising sins you can commit online - you can focus on features instead of benefits, you can try to promote too many things at the same time and diffuse your message. But, there is one sin that is unforgivable.

Before I start, I must make a confession. I have committed this sin. I am guilty. But I am doing my best to “Go forth and sin no more!”

So, what is this horrible sin?

Failing to Capture Email Addresses

When the first thoughts of Internet profits dance in your mind, people (like me anyway) rush out and start trying to drive traffic to affiliate sites or their latest Adsense niche sight. In all of the excitement about starting a new venture, new marketers often miss one of the first truths of marketing:

Attracting a new customer is the most expensive and least profitable portion of your business.

Attracting New Customers

Think back to the days of the first Internet boom. Companies were spending thousands and millions of dollars trying to get their names “out there.” In many places you could not buy ad space. I remember seeing signs posted along highways (like political campaign posters) and taped or tied to every imaginable surface. Getting your name “out there” takes time, money, creativity or all three.

People who are new to marketing often get focused on the advertising side of things. There is a lot to think about and you can spend months and years studying and practicing the art and science of advertising. But, to get the best results from your advertising you must know why you are doing it.

The Primary Purpose of Advertising

The primary purpose of advertising is not to sell products, it is to acquire customers.

The customers you are acquiring may not buy from you initially, but they will give you permission to contact them again directly. Eventually, many will buy your products or services and you can send follow-up messages that build on each other and lead people through the buying process.

Most purchases are made after the sixth or seventh time a person is exposed to an advertising message. Repetition is key. The first time they see your message, you are a stranger. By the sixth or seventh time, you are familiar. If you have provided trustworthy and valuable information inside every one of those messages, you may even be a trusted friend.

Of course, you need to sell products and your products will attract customers. But, you must remain focused on customer acquisition so you do not waste your efforts and money.

To acquire customers, every advertising effort should include at least one way for a potential customer to subscribe to a newsletter or email course. If they are not willing to give you money, but are intrigued by your advertising copy, there is a good chance they will give you their email address and name in exchange for a sample of your product.

How to Build a Mailing List

A common way to build mailing lists is to give away a free course or e-book as a thank you for joining your list. I used this technique to begin my own marketing and e-business mailing list.

Another approach I used was to include a sign-up check box on an email form. One site where I used this technique had an “Ask an Expert” feature where people could get personalized answers to their questions. They had already agreed that the site’s authors were experts by taking the time to write, and it wasn’t a big leap to request more information. The plus side of this approach was that the newsletter subscribers were “pre-screened” which resulted in a very low un-subscribe rate on future mailings.

Information marketing expert Fred Gleek uses something he calls a “bounce-back” with everything he does. He creates a sign-up system that only requires a person to send a blank email to one of his email accounts which adds them to his list. He then forwards them a special gift of some kind. He includes text that says, “For free gift on [subject] worth $35 send a blank email to [email@address.com].”

That line goes on every item Fred Gleek publishes and is included in every joint venture project he participates in. I bought two of his books, sent in an email (the “bounce-back” was printed at the bottom of every page) and hear from Fred on a regular basis.

Go Forth and Sin No More

If you do not have a mailing list, stop everything and set one up. There are a number of online services like *Intellicontact, Aweber, and *Get Response that will provide mailing list management for a nominal fee.

There are other software solutions that you can use on your desktop, or server to do the same. *My Autoresponder Pro, *SendStudio, and *Follow-Up Mailing List Processor are just a few of the commercial applications available. Infinite Responder! and PHP List are free mailing list managers that run on your server. PHP List is very feature rich and Inifinite Responder is a simple program for managing auto-responders.

Managing a mail server is a big job (it takes a lot of work to ensure that marketing emails do not get filtered out before they reach your subscribers.) Plus, most of the hosted services, to protect against spam accusations, will not allow you to upload a list of addresses to your account. So if you use a do-it-yourself solution and change later, you will have to ask your subscribers to re-subscribe (and you WILL lose subscribers in the transition.)

Finally, some hosting providers (like the one I use for this site - *1and1.com) also provide a newsletter tool as part of your service package.

However you decide to manage your mailing lists and newsletters, make sure you include a sign-up method in every advertising campaign you create. Always find something valuable to offer to people who are interested in your product but not ready to place an order. And then, follow-up and build relationships.

Happy Marketing,

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Would you like to gain free access to a large and growing collection of e-books that you can use as bonuses for your mailing list subscribers? Sign-up for Platinum Access to the Go-To Library today!

* Denotes affiliate links.

Plastic Comb Binding (also known as Comb Binding) is an inexpensive and readily available method of book binding. The spine edge of the paper stack is punched with a series of rectangular holes. The Plastic Comb, which is a tube of flexible plastic with a series of teeth cut into one edge, is threaded through the holes. The loose end of the teeth is tucked into the straight edge to finish the binding.

This binding is often used for cookbooks, manuals, documents who’s content is regularly changing, and reports.

One benefit of Plastic Comb Bindings is that the books open flat. Another is that the total cost of supplies is very low. And a third is that books can be bound as needed.

Heavy card stock or plastic sheets can be used to create sturdy and attractive covers to finish the book.

The binding comb can be re-opened to allow pages to be inserted or removed with minimal difficulty.

Up to 425 sheets of 20 lb. paper on a 2″ comb. Smaller combs are available for shorter books. Standard page sizes for this type of printing are 8.5″x11″, but custom sizes can be done.

Plastic Binding Combs come in a range of colors, and if needed, can be custom made with text printed on the spine.

Inexpensive Plastic Comb Binding Machines can be purchased for under $50 USD and heavy duty machines range from $350-$500 USD. The primary differences between the low and high end of the price range concerns the number of sheets that can be punched at once, the total thickness of the document that can be bound, and whether the machine is manually powered or electrical.

At the very high end of the price range, Plastic Comb Binding Machines also include the ability to create Coil Bindings as well.

Because of the low cost of Plastic Comb Binding Machines, it is possible to keep the materials on hand to print books as needed. This ensures that the most current information is always included in your books. It also means you can print and bind what you need when you need it - a huge benefit when you deal with low volumes of books.

If you don’t wish to buy the hardware, copy centers provide Plastic Comb Binding services very cheaply as well.

The major detraction of this method of bookbinding is that it looks and feels inexpensive, so it is not appropriate for applications that require a high-end expensive look.

The Go-To Guy!

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Craftsmanship and professionalism, at first glance, seem to go together. Being a professional means doing your job better than anyone else does it, right? Professional programmers spend as much time as they need making their programs perfect, and professional actors dedicate themselves 100 percent to portraying their character - or do they? I had a long talk with Mrs. Go-To Guy about this topic recently and came away with a different view of the relationship between craftsmanship and professionalism.

Mrs. Go-To Guy is an actress. She has a great deal of training in the craft of acting. She studied in college, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England, and with many different acting coaches in New York. She takes her craft very seriously and is very good at it (I first met her when she was performing in a show and was impressed with her talent.) She has honed her craft and prided herself on her acting craftsmanship. But, very recently she realized the enormous difference between being an excellent actress and being a professional actress.

The word craftsman often conjures up the image of a woodworker painstakingly fitting together the parts of a piece of fine furniture - taking care that doors and drawers open smoothly and the finish is perfect. People become nostalgic for this sort of ‘old world quality.’ The reality is this: if the carpenter spends 80 hours making a shelf that will only sell for $300, bankruptcy is just around the corner. A professional carpenter has to make enough money to run the business and earn a salary.

Professionals make money from their labor - that goes for acting, carpentry, or anything else. Mrs. Go-To Guy’s big realization was that a professional actress must focus as much on marketing and promotion as on breathing exercises and characterization. A professional actress knows how to promote herself and also works hard to promote the projects she is in. This means spending time thinking about the sorts of interesting stories you can tell on a radio interview that will be entertaining and also get people to buy tickets. The professional knows that their paycheck comes from full houses of happy patrons - great attention to craft doesn’t fill the seats by itself.

For the carpenter, web designer, painter, writer, programmer, and many other lines of work, professionalism is knowing how to balance your desire for excellence with your need to make a profit. It is spending time learning the marketplace where your work will be sold and understanding the needs of the customers who will buy it.

Is there a place for pure craftsmanship? Sure, it is the world of your hobbies and personal passions. There you can spend a lifetime writing one book, or painting one picture.

If you decide to become a professional, however, start looking at what the professionals in your industry are doing to improve their craft and their profits.

The Go-To Guy

Don’t give me the final say, leave a comment and tell us what you think.

How do you lead a group of people to make decisions?

This thought jumped into my head as I rode the subway home this evening. I came up with two answers that point to two very different results.

I work with a theater company that is part of the church I attend. There is a finite amount of space in the church that must be shared between the theater, a preschool, Sunday and mid-week services, and every other church activity (like weddings, choir rehearsals, etc.) that arises. As the church’s activities grow, it becomes more challenging to schedule use of the building.

On my subway ride I was imagining that one day we might have to start saying no to very good programs or projects because there isn’t room in the schedule. Decisions like that would require agreement from a group of people - some of whom would be choosing against a project they created or loved. I was imagining people making hard, and sometimes painful, decisions.

Churches and other non-profits are usually run by volunteers. They are involved because they believe in the mission and not because they need a paycheck. How do you make decisions and not drive away your volunteers?

The General and His Cadre of Wise Counselors

One school of thought about making tough choices declares the person in charge to be the ‘decision maker’ and the rest of the group to be advisers. The General leads the Counselors through a discussion and debate about the best course of action. The discussion may get heated and opposing viewpoints may be expressed, but at the end of the process, the General mulls it all over and declares a decision. The choice, ultimately, belongs to the General.

This is a seductive option (who doesn’t like the feeling of being the most important person in a room?) The line of authority is very clear. As long as the General is decisive, decisions can be made quickly. It also seems fair - particularly if the group ‘elects’ the General from their midst. But a subtle shift happens in the Counselors once the General is chosen.

Having a General absolves the Counselors of responsibility for the decisions made. Regardless of what was said during the discussion, they don’t own the choice. They are disconnected from it. They may even suppress their opposing opinions because ‘it’s not up to them to decide.’ This subtle removal of ownership undermines the whole process.

Another temptation for the General, in the name of decisiveness, is to bully the Counselors. If the General is the sort of person who forms opinions quickly, opposing viewpoints may never be heard - even if they are spoken. In extreme cases the General may act like a ‘little dictator’ and undermine the whole organization.

The Cat Herder

Cat Herder is a much less impressive title than General, but it is a much more impressive skill. The Cat Herder is given the task of guiding a group of people, who naturally want to wander off in different directions, and nudging them toward a decision.

The Cat Herder has the authority to direct the group’s discussion, but not to render a decision. The Cat Herder can call for a vote and announce the results, but not make the decision. The group owns the decision and each individual owns their opinion and vote.

Many people avoid this approach to group decision-making because it can be frustrating. When she can see what the ultimate decision is but the conversation just won’t end, a Cat Herder can long for the authority of a General. A skillful Cat Herder, though, can use personal accountability and social pressure to push, pull, and steer the group to a place of agreement.

I was witness to an expert Cat Herder. This woman was given the role of Chairperson at a corporate board sub-committee meeting. One purpose of the meeting was to finalize the language of a new document that re-defined the mission of the sub-committee. If you have spent any length of time in the corporate world you know that is a recipe for disaster - an eternal nudging and tweaking of words and phrases that would make even a lawyer cry.

This expert Cat Herder used a technique she called ‘fist or five’ to steer the discussion and keep everyone moving toward a decision. When debates arose and the group seemed about to wander off without finishing the work, she would ask for a ‘fist or five’ to take the ‘temperature of the room.’ Every member of the group would hold up a hand and rate their level of agreement with the decision at hand. If you held up a fist, you were signaling total disagreement and all five fingers extended signaled total agreement.

If everyone in the group had three or more fingers extended, then the issue at hand was sufficiently acceptable to the group and the discussion moved on. If someone tried to reopen the discussion she could use the group’s vote as leverage to hold the questioner accountable for using the available time to discuss an issue that was considered resolved. Because of the social pressure involved, only people with a strong objection would push the issue.

This expert Cat Herder’s motto was “we’re not looking for perfection, we’re trying to get a good job done!”

Which Method Is Best

I’m not willing to say that the General and Counselors model is never a good choice. I’m sure their are times where it is the best course of action. But, the best Generals I have ever seen use the methods of the Cat Herder whenever possible. These types of Generals use their authority like a Presidential Veto - an extreme measure only to be exercised when all other options have failed.

The best decisions are ones that the group feels ownership over (even if they don’t agree 100%.) They will work harder to support the decision and will let go of disappointments faster when they are meaningfully involved in the decision.

But, without question, it takes patience, humility, and commitment to herd cats!

The Go-To Guy!

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

If you have spent more than 5 minutes exploring the world of Internet marketing someone has told you how important your ‘list’ is. This ‘list,’ of course, is your list of email addresses for people who have opted-in and given permission for you to send them emails.

You may also have heard that the majority of sales come from the 6th or 7th email you send to someone. It can be difficult, expensive, and nearly impossible to get someone to visit your site 7 times but, if you have their email, it is easy to send follow-up emails.

This article is not about email marketing strategies. (I have several e-books on the subject that you can download for free by signing up for my newsletter mailing list.) This article is about my recent experience trying to get people to sign-up for my list.

I Can’t Even Give Away Free E-Books!

I spend a lot of time and energy hunting down useful resources on the web. I have built up a collection of e-books that I think have valuable information in them and also give me resale/giveaway rights. All of the ‘Build Your List’ gurus tell you to create a squeeze page (a webpage whose sole purpose is to get visitors to give you their email address and sign-up for your mailing list.) They encourage giving away a free gift (like an e-book) as a thank-you for signing up. It is essentially a legal bribe! I decided to put my collection to work.
My squeeze page promised more than just one e-book, I opened the vault and gave access to everything I had. (See my sign-up page.) I promoted it through a Pay-Per-Click campaign and also through some traffic exchanges and other sources. The results, 1 sign-up - not very encouraging.

I tweaked the page, updating the copy and polishing up the graphics. I took advice from a couple of the advertising and copywriting e-books in my library and revised the body copy before trying another promotional run. Results - 3 sign-ups.

20 New Sign-ups In Less Than 7 Days

After a couple attempts, I let this whole idea slide for a while. And then I came across a promotion for the Viral Marketing Giveaway 2. The concept is simple, you sign-up as a Joint Venture partner and offer a free giveaway item to the effort. All of the partners then promote the giveaway and, as new members join and download the freebies, you get to gather new people for your mailing list. They land on your squeeze page and then sign-up. I joined the fun and sent people to exact same old squeeze page to get my freebies. There are over 35 pages of offers in the giveaway and mine landed near the end.

Within days I had added 20 new names to my list. Same squeeze page, but now they were signing up (and they had probably signed up for dozens of other offers before getting to mine.)

These giveaways seem to be popular right now. I have received invitations for 3 more in the past week:

• End of Summer Giveaway
• Toolbox4Success Giveaway
• The Halloween JV Giveaway

I signed up for all of them and connected to the same squeeze page. The first went public last week (the other two are still gathering JV Partners as I write this.) My list has added more than 30 new subscribers.

Why All The New Mailing List Subscribers?

My offer, and the content of the squeeze page, has not changed. Why are people signing up now? I have a couple of guesses why this is happening.

Trusted Referrers - The giveaways are promoted by all of the JV partners sending messages to their lists. A known person is making the recommendation and essentially endorsing the whole thing. This kind of social proof that the operation is legitimate puts visitors in a trusting frame of mind before they get to my page. The copy on my site does not have to convince them to trust me, only that I have content they want.

Momentum - Once visitors start getting some free stuff they get into a feeding frenzy. They start siging up and downloading everything - my stuff is just in the pile with all of the others and the giveaway has created the momentum.

The X-Factor - Maybe there is some other factor that is motivating folks to sign up. If you have other ideas why people are more willing to sign up when my squeeze page is promoted through one of these giveaway sites, leave a comment with your ideas.

What Is The Quality Of The List?

So far the emails and names I have gathered seem okay. Very few people are giving obviously junkmail addresses and bogus names (there have been a few - ‘Pho Nee.’) I’ll have to make a few mailings to the list before I can determine how responsive it is, but my list is growing.

This list is made up of folks looking for online business and marketing opportunities. My current plans are to use it to recruit affiliates for some of the info products I am developing.

The GoTo Guy!

I don’t blog just for fun. This site isn’t a public diary of my life. My goals for AndrewSeltz.com are to share my knowledge and experience with more people than my friends, family, and co-workers and to collect that knowledge in a form that can be reused to create products and services I can sell - help and make money.

I have used a combination of Adsense, affiliate ads, and Amazon affiliate links to try and generate income. I’ve made a few bucks, but not even the minimum required for them to cut me a check.

A few months ago I found a site that promised I could make money by doing nothing but writing on my blog. The company, PayPerPost.com, pays bloggers to write about specific topics that their advertisers want to create a buzz about. You write an article, include a few links, and post it to your blog. After a preset time period (usually 90 days) they send a payment to your PayPal account. You don’t have to get anyone to click on anything and there is no guesswork - write about what they ask you to write about and they pay what they promise to pay.

There are limits to how often you can post per day, but you could easily grab a quick $10, $20, or $30 a day. I have yet to make enough in a month from Adsense to cover my Internet expenses, but 4 or 5 sponsored posts a month would do the trick.

I just received my first payment today for a post I wrote. The system works.

Consider adding PayPerPost.com to your revenue mix. It gives legit advertisers a venue for building buzz for their products and services and gives a measure of control to bloggers about what they promote for money on their blogs.

If you’ve had experience with this company, or made money with a similar strategy, leave a comment and let me know about it.

The Go-To Guy!

Every year there is a state fair near where I live. They have a good old fashioned midway. Huge colorful signs and a fast talking man with bad teeth promise to show you amazing wonders and human oddities if only you will pay a little money and step inside the tent.

I’ve paid once or twice to see inside the tent and it is usually not amazing or wonderful. It is usually just a gimmick - a fake. The Carny Folk conned me out of a little money.

You wouldn’t trust these people to help you with anything important and if you came across a business in your town using similar advertising it would probably make you suspicious.

There are a lot of people on the Internet who would say or do anything to get you to ’step inside their tent.’ They don’t really care what you think about what you see inside. Their sites are full of keyword loaded gibberish and articles that have been duplicated a thousand times on a thousand websites. They use software that automatically generates hundreds and thousands of these useless webpages and then litter the Internet with them.

They just hope to get a lot of folks to step inside and maybe a few will click on an ad or one of their affiliate links - a nickle here and a dollar there.

What Do Search Engines Want?

Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines are in a constant struggle to weed these sideshow sites out of their results and push the most relevant results to the top of the list. Your goal with search engine optimization (SEO) is to get to the top of the results for the keywords that are relevant to your site and not get swept away with the Carny Folk.

Your primary focus should be on making your content relevant to other human beings. Then, use the tools and techniques of SEO to help the search engines better understand what your pages are about.

You don’t have to resort to trickery to improve the search engine placement of your site’s pages. If you keep the topic of each page of your focussed and use good basic SEO techniques, your search engine rankings will improve and you won’t have to worry about being mistaken for Carnie Folk the next time Google upgrades its filtering algorithms!

SEO Basics

Keyword Focused Pages: Each page on your website should be focussed on a small set of keywords. Don’t try to cover everything on one page. Break up your topic into focussed sub-topics and then create seperate pages for each one.

Create Internal Links: When you break your website up into keyword focussed pages, there will be natural overlaps in the subject matter on each page. Readers will be interested in these other pages too. When appropriate, direct readers to these relevant pages and use keywords in the links. This has the effect of encouraging users (and, by extension, search engine spiders) to explore all of your content.

Use Keywords in Links: Search engines value links. They also look for keywords in the link text. Don’t use ‘Click Here’ as your link text. If you are recommending another article, link on the article’s title (or relevant keywords you use to describe the article - ‘Learn Search Engine Optimization’…)

Title Tags: Make sure that every page on your site has a unique title with relevant keywords at the beginning that relate to keywords in the content of the page. Your site ’s name should go at the end of the title because the words at the beginning are valued more than those at the end when the serch engines rank your page.

Use H1, H2, H3… Tags: These tags identify headlines and search engines expect headlines to describe content (so do humans.) Keywords here have higher weight. (make sure the same keywords are also present in the text that follows.)

Emphasize Important Words: Bold and Italicized words stand out to the search engines as well as your visitors.

Use Keywords in 1st Paragraph: Get to the point quickly when writing your content. Readers and search engines will make a lot of assumptions about your article in the first paragraph, so make sure you give a quick overview at the top that uses your keywords.

Image Alt Tags: Always include descriptive text in the alt tags for your images. This helps people who can’t see your images make sense out of why they are there, and they give more content to the search engines. Do not simply stuff the alt tags with keywords - this is a Carny Folk move and search engines are wary of it. But, use relevant keywords when describing your images.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Cramming keywords into every search engine hotspot is a surefire way to get the search engines to dump or devalue your site. Remember, a search engine’s primary goal is to get relevant results to customers. Trying to trick them into showing a site that isn’t relevant will eventually get you delisted or demoted.

Avoid Duplication: Another search engine no-no is repetition of the same keyword or phrase throughout a page. This sort of repetition tells the search engines that you are stuffing the page with keywords (or worse, the page was created by a program designed to stuff keywords into it) and that they are not a natural part of your page’s content. Use a little variety in your content to avoid repetition - your human visitors will appreciate it too!

Benefits of Honest SEO

Honest search engine optimization has the side effect of making your content more readable to human beings. Since the search engines’ primary goal is to deliver the most relevant results to the human beings who use them, anything you do that enhances the user experience will make them happy too. Stay focussed on providing quality content to your visitors and then optimize the way you present it so that the search engines can understand it too, your site will perform better in the rankings.

When you provide value, other website creators will send traffic to your site to give value to their visitors. The links they create to your site will add value to your site in the eyes of the search engines. They are voting for you every time they create a link.

These SEO techniques and strategies will get your pages high in the search rankings. From there it becomes a game of inches where you will focus your attention on your best performing pages and make subtle changes to try and push them closer and closer to the top. When you get to that level you will have left the Carny Folk far behind you.

The Go-To Guy!

I’ve run this blog since January of 2006 and one thing I’ve become very familiar with is comment spam. Comment spam is bogus comment text, stuffed with promotional links that gets sent by auto submission programs. I’ve seen plenty of hyped up ads for “Blog Marketing Software” whose sole purpose is to generate this blog clogging mess. Web newbies and sleazy individuals, with dollar signs in their eyes, buy this stuff and unleash waves of spam to the blogosphere.

I personally have several barriers in place to block this junk and keep my site pollution free. The only ads are the ones I put there.

A new service called PayPerPost.com allows people an honest way to advertise on blogs. Bloggers, like me, can sign up with the service and earn money by blogging. Advertisers place offers for bloggers to write about specific topics and mention their products or websites. Bloggers can scan the available offers to find something that they are interested in writing about. The offer tells you how much you will earn and what type of post you will have to write.

It works (at least from the blogger’s end of things.) I know because I received my first payment today for an article I wrote a while back. It sure beats counting pennies from Adsense. The advertisers get a custom written article with a link back to their site. It’s a fair trade in my book.

If you are looking for ways to earn some money with your blog, give it a look. If you are a marketer wanting to leverage the power of blogs in your advertising, please do this and don’t try comment spam. Everyone will be a lot happier.
The Go-To Guy!

I have a friend who is a fiction writer. We were talking today about ideas for promoting a book she is writing. She writes in a variety of genres, but the book in question is in the ‘chick-lit’ category - at least that’s what she calls it. I came up with these suggestions:

Blog - This one is pretty obvious. She already bought her name as a domain and I’m setting her up with a WordPress blog. The focus of her blog will be on the world of a fiction writer, with news about her projects and signings, etc. I recommend she actively write about the book and drop hints and teasers about the story to build interest.
Book Website - She is also buying the name of her main character as a domain. These types of books tend to result in a series of novels, with fans of the character becoming built-in audiences. For starters I recommended she make this a sales site and offer free advance chapters to people who sign-up for her mailing list. Later she can make it more of a fan site with a discussion forum and ancillary products and content.
Forum and Group Recruiting - I recommended that she start looking for forums and discussion groups with fans of this genre as well as fans of similar books. I told her to offer a sample chapter for people who join her mailing list and to mine that list for possible advance readers who would help generate buzz for the official release.

Blog Recruiting - My suggestion here is to find a number of bloggers who write about the genre (or even specific book series that have a similar tone) and recruit them to become advance readers. Feeding them advance copies of chapters and checking out how often (and what) they write about the book. Following up with those who are vocal fans will help with generating buzz for the release.

Those were some strategies that came to me today. If you have done this type of marketing before, leave a comment and tell me what’s wrong or missing from my list.

The Go-To Guy!

Tired of Internet marketers promising a ’secret technique’ for making money online? How about marketing manuals that tell you to make marketing manuals to sell to people like you? It’s like a dog chasing its tail.

You won’t find any of that junk in “The One Month Magnate“*, by Tony Shepherd. The system he lays out is filled with gimmick-free practical techniques presented in a logical (and profitable) sequence. He chose a real world example to demonstrate his process and leads you through it from beginning until almost the end (he stops detailing his project at the 30 day mark giving an overview of what he planned to do next.)

The sales page for Shepherd’s e-book grabbed my interest and tempted me to risk $27US to find out more. He promised a blueprint for creating a profitable online business that puts money in the bank in 30 days - starting from nothing. I pulled out my Amex card, payed my money and downloaded the e-book. I got my money’s worth.

If you are a seasoned information marketer, or have already consumed as many e-books, websites, and podcasts on creating and marketing information products online as I have, you will find no surprises in Shepherd’s book. I had heard every technique before, but I also spent a lot of time gathering that information. Plus, I still learned something new.

What I found is exactly what Shepherd promised: a sound blueprint for applying reliable techniques to take you from nothing to profitability. He talks about market research techniques, techniques to establish yourself as an expert and build an audience using free reports, how to create an info product, how and where to set up the accounts required to collect orders and deliver products, and how to do it all in 30 days or less.

The book is arranged to take you day-by-day through the process as Shepherd relates what happened with his sample project. By the end of the story he claims to have earned more than $3000US. (You have to take Shepherd’s word on his earnings because he offers no evidence to support his claims. However, the earnings he states seem entirely reasonable.) By day 30 he hadn’t yet created a website or affiliate program (those cost a little money to start and he stuck to his promise of showing how to make money without spending it first.)

“The One Month Magnate“* isn’t likely to be the last e-book you ever buy on the subject, but the quality of the information it contains improves the odds that you will buy the next one with the profits from your new business. You will also know what you need to learn next.

On a scale of 1 to 10, “The One Month Magnate“* is a solid 7. I would have appreciated more samples of the sales letters he created and the free report he used to build his customer base. I also wanted to see some documentation for his earnings claims. However, I got my money’s worth and recommend the e-book to beginning information marketers looking for a clear path through the woods.

The Go-To Guy!

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