Instead, anytime you think of buying the next “big thing” that gets stuffed into your inbox at a rate of 40 e-mails per hour I want you to follow this link to the Salty Droid. You can read his whole blog when you have the time but for a rough idea of what it’s all about you might as well just read this post. Read it, digest it, then decide if you still want to spend your money on the next big internet marketing thing?

You’re probably thinking this Droid is a f***ing nutter right? Not quite.

What’s that above, it can’t be a list subscription box, Paul wouldn’t be building a mailing list after slagging them off for so long would he? Yes and No.

Yes I am building a mailing list, but no it’s not for the traditional reason (i.e. to have a bunch of people I can send the latest crappy offers out to). Suppose I’d better explain.

From time to time I get a really good idea for a niche website. For example about 5 months ago I had this one brain fart, bought a brilliant domain name, did very little link building (a couple of directories and 1 or 2 from my own sites just to get it indexed) and it’s already pulling in good figures from 100% free traffic – it’s averaging a couple of hundred dollars a month. It’s not hundreds of visitors a day, it’s not Google traffic, about 85% of it comes from Yahoo. It concerns high dollar real world merchandise, I’m not making my money flogging e-nonsense! We’re talking serious Amazon/High street retailer type stuff. In other words it’s just a nice simple legit niche focused website that performs. Perhaps an even better example would be this post from the very earliest days of this blog – “A Niche For Free“. 2 people I know off did follow up on that, 1 seriously and has made a lot of money! You’ve got to be in early.

The trouble I have is that I don’t have enough time to build all these sites. I’ve got 3 sites right now that I haven’t even started. No matter what anybody tells you there is no such thing as a hands off profitable website. My local affiliate marketing is far too profitable and I’ve more than got my hands full with other projects. The idea is that as and when I get a niche idea (I can’t say when it will be, day,week,month or year ) I wan’t to give it to one of my readers. I don’t see the point of doing a post about it because all that is doing is wrecking it for everybody. I need a list of keen people that I can pick one from at random and say “Here you go mate, look at this phrase and if I was you I’d be looking to buy this domain name”. This is where my e-mail list comes in. See it as your ticket into the “niche” lottery.

I’m not saying that I won’t be doing any mailings, the liklihood is that I’ll perhaps do a once a month newsletter. If I do it will be on the same day each month and absolutely 100% will not contain any sales hype. Seriously how could I after some of the things I’ve written about list marketers? I’ll only write about what I’ve been doing in the month. If nothing has being going on web wise I might tell you about how annoying my neighbours are being or something! The other good thing about my list is that I doubt it will get to more than 100 people. I hope not anyway because otherwise I’ll have to start paying GetResponse!

In short the benefits to you joining my list are:-

• The chance to get my next great niche website idea handed to you, complete with the domain name I’d buy
• A monthly newletter type thing (perhaps) where I’ll likely write more openly about some of the things I’m not so comfy having published online
• You get to say you’re part of the most exclusive mailing list on the web

The benefits to me in having the list are:-

• When people keep on asking me “do you have a list” I can finally say yes

Roll up, roll up.

I was working till gone 2am the other night when this message hit my inbox from one of the list marketers I have accidentally subscribed to:-

“It’s just been a few hours since the launch of Turbo Profit Sniper.

That’s right… Now you can log into the unheard of free traffic software
that has been producing a minimum of $50,000 in profit each and
every month for the last two years… “

Because I was bored I decided to have a look at the sales page, it all looked promising. New software, lots of money, where do I sign up? At the bottom of the very long sales page surprisingly enough. What puts me off these sales pages more than anything is that you know they have been created by people more interested in marketing their product than in creating a product worth marketing. Does that make any sense? All of the best products I’ve bought (Market Samurai, MAS etc) have come from simple pages where the software is the passion of the person selling it.

Anyway, I bought Turbo Profit Sniper. The first thing to hit me was the number of up sells (at least 3 I can remember). If what you’re selling in any way resembles what is on your sales page then why the hell do I need all this other stuff? I’ll be swimming in money in a month. I passed on these, I wanted to download the software and get to work with it, it was getting very late by this time. Eventually I got through the fluff, created my account and logged in to what I assumed would be the download area, except it wasn’t. I’d logged into the application. Web application would have been a more honest description (see over hyped shitty list marketer message above). An even more honest description would have been a real half assed web application.

The crux of the Turbo Profit Sniper system, the big bad free traffic secret that was so different to everything else, the thing that was going to change your life forever – was in fact nothing more than old fashioned article marketing. How had Turbo Profit Sniper revolutionised this process? They hadn’t, they gave you a web application that simplified it, the same as any number of other systems before. Tools for keyword research, article writing and article distribution. What made this worse and the reason this product broke my all time record for how quickly I asked for a Clickbank refund was that a lot of their “tools” were actually just links to external free services. Even the content spinner was taking advantage of another resource on the web. How hard is it to write a content spinner? A couple of hours work in my experience. The keyword research “tools” included the Google Adwords keyword tool!!! Honestly.

Having given everything a quick once over I ran away crying, straight to Clickbank. It is very very rare I ask for a refund but there was no way I was leaving my money out there for this crap. I have no doubt that the person selling it could be making a fortune using article marketing, it is a great way of getting traffic. What it isn’t however is anything new, secret or revolutionary. In the same way that a web application isn’t software.

So overall then would I recommend you buy this, what do you think? Enough to say that you’ll not find an affiliate link in this Turbo Profit Sniper review. If you still want to go ahead and buy in to it then I don’t want to have to feel guilty!

ps Just to add insult to injury this has just dropped into my inbox this very minute:-

“I just wanted to give you a very serious warning.

Ian just confirmed that, although the 200 customer limit has been met,
he’s going to allow just a further 50 lucky members through the doors
before they shut for good.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Never ever ever buy anything that is being promoted by a list marketer.

Of course some of the time something has changed. For example one of the ClickBank products I promote has changed their model. They are now offering a free version of their service, it has limits and the aim is to get users to upgrade to the full software when people find out how useful it is. The trouble from my point of view is that those upgrades don’t make me a penny! Affiliates are only tracked up to the initial sign up. A simple change like this by a merchant can cause massive problems for affiliates and in the last 2 weeks it has cost me around $600 in commission. I’ll have a look and see if I can source an alternative offer but if not then I’ll just have to get on with it – the joy of using free traffic is at least I’m not having to break out a spreadsheet and do lots of ROI analysis. Everything is profit with free traffic.

If there are no obvious changes and it’s just a quite period then you’ve got to have patience. That doesn’t mean you have to do nothing though. When things get a little tight 2 jobs I love to do are cost analysis and keyword research. The second you should be doing all the time anyway but a lull in sales can be a great motivator to find some new traffic rich keywords. In terms of cost analysis I love cost cutting, is there a possibility of joining domains under a hosting account and cutting hosting costs? Are there any old domains auto renewing that I’m never going to do anything with? What services have I signed up for and never used? These are all things that you and I should be doing ongoing but it’s very easy to be complacent when the money is flowing. Right now I’ve got over $120 coming out of my Paypal account each month for services I don’t use. Not that clever really.

The trick is to first establish if anything has changed and if not just carry on with your link building and content creation. Making money online is all about percentages, things will balance themselves out. From a personal point of view my biggest issue during the quite times is not having anybody to share the self doubt with. We all get it don’t we? It’s very hard to explain to your family WHY things have gone quite when you can’t explain it yourself. I guess that’s why blogs are so popular, it’s the perfect opportunity to vent a little and even tell yourself off!

2. Go with the flow. Look at what is popular amongst the a-list bloggers at the moment and sell that. At one time it was domaining, then Adsense, then PPC, then media buys, now it seems to be mailing lists promoting Clickbank products. Make your product about making money with lists and Clickbank. Remember though, YOUR product IS different to all the other shitty products out there.

3. Pictures speak a thousand words. There are loads of Clickbank earnings screenshots out there so why not just use them? It doesn’t matter that you’ve never made sweet FA with ClickBank, that’ll change when you start selling your Make Money Online product through Clickbank and then you can swap out the earnings images. (Tip, just promote your own product as an affiliate – bingo, some affiliate earnings to show people)

4. You must mention how you have some shit-hot traffic secret. This is a must have in every product. Don’t worry if you don’t have a traffic secret, instead just mention some of the same old backlink junk that gets seen everywhere. Blog comments, forums, article marketing. On top of these add one web 2.0 site that people can use for links. I like Ning, mentioning Ning gets you real kudos amongst the 10% of internet marketers who have never heard of it.

5. Scared people won’t be impressed with your massive traffic secret. Don’t worry, just offer them an upsell that shows even more traffic secrets. Go for broke with this one, make up some really impressive numbers “Find Out How I Got An Extra 500,000 Hits This Month From Just 20 Minutes Work”. Your upsell product should of course just be some junk that mentions a really popular website that COULD deliver huge amounts of traffic but in reality actually doesn’t. If all else fails talk about using YouTube videos.

6. As part of your product you absolutely have to mention the difference between a normal Clickbank affiliate and the Uber Clickbank affiliates that your customers wan’t to become. Bonuses baby! Make it clear that in order for your system to work best they have got to be able to offer bonuses. Doesn’t matter if your customers don’t have any bonuses of any value, just chuck a load of PLR crap together and say it’s worth thousands. Don’t have any PLR stuff? No worries, just recommend that they offer one to one telephone calls and value these at at least $800. In fact ignore this last section, simply mentioning that they need to have bonuses is enough, don’t even give them the first clue of how they can create or source a bonus product for the offer they want to promote.

7. Your customers are going to want to know what Clickbank products to promote as part of your mega system. This is really easy. Just make up a load of shit combining the $Sale, %Refd and Grav figures that Clickbank provides. Make up a formula, doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, what really matters is that it makes you sound like you know more about this stuff than the person buying your MMO product.

8. Do people need money in order to use your product and start making cash? Of course they don’t, that would be ridiculous. All they need is some hosting, images, mailing list management software, bonuses. No mention of money there.

9. Have other people that have bought your product made a fortune using it? Damn right they have. It doesn’t matter that this is its launch day and you are my first customer, I have a list of people that are already retired at 25 just from buying this product. It is very important to not only point out just how much they’ve made but also 1. How easily They Made It and 2. Just How Great They Found Your Traffic Secrets. If you really want your product to be a success then you need a house wife previously on the bones of her ass to have made a real turnaround in her life using it. It’s even made her kids better behaved!

10. Price Point. Lets face facts here, your product isn’t just some random crap you’ve knocked out over a weekend. You’ve spent between 2 and 3 years developing this, not to mention the 6 figures you’ve spent “perfecting” it. It demands a price to reflect that value. Lets price it at $1997, no lets make it $497, nope, to get those impulse buyers lets offer it at a limited time only for $47. (And if that fails, fuck it, chuck it out at $9.97!)

Anyhoo, back to the point. The beginning of this year I bumped into an old friend who owns a local financial services company. We got talking and it turns out that he was spending serious amounts of money with Adwords ($50,000 a month) and getting no real ROI on it. I knew I had a website that was in the same rough (very rough) market and with some adjustments I could rank for various phrases that would attract potential clients for him. 10 minutes later and a deal was done, I would gather leads for him and take a commission of any that went on to use his services. The joy in all this for me was that:-

1. None of the hassles of dealing with a client
2. Total control over the lead gathering website
3. I know they offer a quality service
4. Their clients tend to do repeat business
5. I get to help a local business and the local economy (what I always wanted to do in the first place)

I knew they were competing with several other local companies as well as a few more based in different parts of the world but I was 100% confident in being able to provide a better ROI than Adwords (The fact there was no risk to them helped). Having total control over the website I am trying to rank is a big boon for me and 2 months later I had the 3 rankings I really wanted. I was using a really simple enquiry form to gather the least amount of information I’d need to forward the enquiry on (name, email, telephone, how they’d like to be contacted, anything else they’d like to tell me). Once I had my site setup correctly to convert I dabbled a bit with Adwords, they were even happy to pay for the Adwords spend because by now they were seeing serious results from my enquiries. Some investigation did reveal that it was always the natural traffic that converted best though, the real key to my local affiliate marketing was getting the natural rankings. I know there are lots of people like me out there who can do that bit for fun, even if you’re not so hot with your SEO skills remember this – it is much easier to rank for industry specific long tails that have a local element as well.

Six months after that initial conversation and they are very much a local business on the up. Personally I’m very happy to share in their success. If all carries on as it is by Christmas this year the relationship will be generating enough income for me to sell all my other websites and retire from any active involvement online. I’m not saying that I will but it’s always an option.

As you learn more and more about making money online you tend to forget just how much more than the average business you do know. There are very likely businesses in your area that provide a top notch service that would love to make more of an impact online but don’t even know where to get started. What my initial attempts at running a web design business taught me was that most businesses are very risk averse so you need to offer something risk free. Commission is a great way of doing this, I’ve never met a business owner yet that didn’t understand that 10% of something is better than 15% of nothing.

How I’ve Adapted My Local Affiliate Marketing Approach

All the above is great but the only reason I got such a quick return for the business was because I already had a site that was in the same ball park as what they were doing. I’ve learnt from this and have gone on to build several other websites relating to markets where other local businesses could benefit. It’s an ongoing process for me and once the traffic builds up I then approach the business to let them know that I’ve got XXX traffic, how would they feel about doing a deal to get access to those potential customers. It also helps if you have an enquiry form in place so you can show them some example exquiries. No risk for them. I’ve not had many turn me down

I see this as a win win situation for all involved. I get to have the satisfaction of ranking pages plus the extra income from a business I know nothing about whilst the company gets access to a lot of potential new clients. The local economy gets a boost in the process. If it’s money that motivates you then I have no doubts that there is a mint to be made in helping out your high quality local businesses.

I first mentioned the Market Samurai software in August of 2008 in this post. First impressions were very good and I’ve since gone on to mention it many more times:-

September 2008
April 2009
September 2009
March 2010

Just those posts should give you some idea of just how much of an impact on my make money efforts this software has had. Besides my own posts I’ve also tried to drop it into the conversation on other blogs where people are raving about the latest system for this and that which are already covered better in Market Samurai. It is absolutely the first tool I look to when it comes to keyword/market research. Every single profitable niche that I’ve discovered in the past 2 years has been in some way thanks to Market Samurai. The really cool thing is that it doesn’t pretend to be doing anything magic, nope, “all” it does is manipulate what Google and a couple of other very well respected data providers give you in a way that turns what would be days of research into a 30 minute job. I love it.

There are many other elements to the software besides the raw keyword stuff but to be honest I barely go near them but just in case you’re interested there are modules for SEO Competition (i use this with the Keyword research module the most), Domain Finder (never used it), Monetization (find affiliate links quicker), Find Content, Publish Content, Promotion and the ever coming soon – Adwords. As I’ve said before 90% of my time in Market Samurai is spent in Keyword Research followed by SEO Competition. They alone are more than worth the money.

On top of being a great keyword research tool Market Samurai also has some great benefits that show you how much its developers understand and appreciate the world of making money online.

For a start it has been written using the Adobe Air platform so it works on any operating system. There are no issues running this software on a Mac. The next is the frequency of the updates. How often do you buy software and then find that 2 months later it’s totally out of date and the data you’re pulling makes no sense? It happens to me on a fairly regular basis. Market Samurai on the other hand has been updated more than any other program I’ve bought since I started making a living online. It is constantly being updated with bug fixes and improvements and the Air platform makes these updates a piece of cake to perform.

The final big thing about Market Samurai is that it comes at a one off price. In a day and age where everybody seems to want a monthly subscription (and keeping in mind what I’ve said about the updates) it’s amazing to get software of this quality at a one of price. On a personal level I couldn’t even keep count of how many times it has paid for itself.

So there you have it. Market Samurai is the most important piece of IM software I’ve ever bought and is a must buy for anybody who is serious about niche marketing. It’s a one of payment of $149 and there is also a free trial version available.

Get Your Copy Of Market Samurai For A One Off $149 Payment

I recently got back from our summer holiday, a lovely cruise around the Mediterranean. We’ve done similar in the past but what made this different was that we were cruising with an American Company with mainly American guests. I’ve been to America before and even 1 or 2 Americans have found their way to living on our little island in the middle of nowhere but I’ve never had the chance to get to know so many so well. Just by observing how they handle different situations the cultural difference in how we shop between us Brits and you guys is massive and I wanted to share some of that.

In my internet marketing efforts I’ve always done much better marketing to Brits and Europeans, I don’t know why that is but it just seems that I relate better to people this side of the Atlantic. Our cruise helped highlight some reasons why that might be.

One great example was a trip we took to see some ruins. As part of the excursion we were also taken to see a leather factory, this is fine and helps offset some of the cost of the trip. We’ weren’t told about this beforehand so it was a bit of a surprise, but like I say no biggy. Once we’d had our fashion show it was then time to look around the factory and buy something if you liked, no hard sell. The first difference visible was the difference between what Turks, British and Americans consider hard sell. The Turks were being pushy, there is no other word for it. “You try this on”, “You like you buy”, “Try them all on and decide which ones you want”. I wasn’t about to spend between €500 and €8000 on a leather jacket on a whim and made it clear that whilst everything was very nice we’d not be buying. If I did want to buy something I’ll ask you about it. Obviously on hearing the accent they knew no meant no and they went off to find some “better” customers. Despite all the initial protests about not being happy about being taken there in the first place and then despite mumblings about not buying anything within half an hour carrier bag laden American after carrier bag laden American ended up leaving the shop. Well if you charge it then its not real money right? I know that some of those people were not in a position to drop that sort of cash on a whim. I should also add that part of the reason I didn’t buy is because I’ve heard this pitch lots of times in the past, everybody claims the world’s best, everybody claims the best prices, everybody claims the most durable leather. I understand it’s their job to try and sell me something that I don’t want or need and I accept that happy in the knowledge that they’ve got no chance. From what I saw the American mindset seemed different, please don’t take this the wrong way because it’s not meant to be insulting but it seems to be that you get worn down? Those horrible yellow laden sales pages I see that I don’t understand how they sell anything now make perfect sense. The most outlandish and implausible claims are not a problem – everything seems to be taken at face value and if you say it over and over you will bag a sale. Guilt them into buying “something” is how I’d describe it.

Another fine example of this was in the art auctions that took place on board the boat, on sea days, when there was little else for the budding arty type going on. There were some nice pieces, I’m no expert but I could see and appreciate the work that had gone into some of the originals. But this was like no auction I’d ever been to before, this was a show, a 90 minute sales pitch complete with audience participation, whooping and clapping. Never mind being caught up in the moment if I’m spending decent money on something then I want value for money and in today’s internet age there are no excuses for not knowing what something is worth. Of all the art sold in those 3 auctions (and there was a good amount sold) I’d guess that probably 5% was sold to non Americans. I took the liberty of looking up the price for one piece that was being sold for bids of $60000 + 15% buyers commission. I could send you to a link now where you could buy that same piece of art for less than $10000. It’s all about the razzmatazz, the pre sell, the hype, of passing on a burdening feeling that make people feel like they have to buy something or feel guilty about it. I didn’t feel guilty. My wife won one piece of art as part of the show and even the postage on that would be enough to get you a decent picture elsewhere.

Of course I realise that Americans going on a European cruise are not going to form a good cross section of the general population, you’d expect them to be more intelligent and wealthier than the average. Even taking this into account it has opened my eyes to WHY so much of the internet marketing stuff that I’ve never understood in the past works. Diet Pills, Teeth Whitening, Get Rich Quick Schemes, how could anybody fall for those sales pages? For my own part I’ll be sticking to building content that is very heavily weighted towards the British and European market, I’m no good at gushing over something that isn’t that great, I’m much happier writing about things in a matter of fact way and I guess that’s why I am the worlds worst affiliate marketer when it comes to selling to the North American demographic.

I started this post by saying that I don’t want anybody to take offence and that’s how I’d like to finish it as well. I made some good friends on that holiday and I’m sure that as likely as I am to call them naive in their buying they would be just as likely to call me tight with money

Jumping back to the more recent past and at the beginning of this year I decided to wade into another niche that I saw had potential for massive affiliate earnings. I had done all my research, bought a brilliant domain name and have to date spent close to $2000 on content for it. In other words it’s been a significant investment. There is very little in the way of advertising in place at the moment but the traffic stats I’m seeing show that the niche has some obvious potential (no I’m not going to share it). However things seem to have hit a plateau. There seems to be a limit to the competitiveness of the search terms that I can successfully rank for. I’m not getting anywhere with the real big hitters – I don’t mind, I expect this with any new project.

Are you still there, I guess this isn’t making much sense yet? This is where it does get interesting though. In the past 6 weeks I’ve started to use my 2003 domain, I started to just post random ramblings related to my other domains and linking back. After FIVE posts my domain sprung a PR2 on the Google PR checker. I’ve done no linking to it. I then wrote a keyword targeted article about my new niche and posted that to it, linking back to an article on my new website. See if you can guess which one is currently ranked number 2 in Google for the target search phrase and getting in excess of 600 unique visitors a day? Is it the new website, all about one general subject, cracking domain name, good link profile, loaded with unique quality content. Or is it the 1 article on my junk domain that was left with nothing but a WordPress welcome page and now contains a random selection of my brain farts? If it was the first then there wouldn’t be much point to this post

I’ve always been a firm believer in the sandbox effect, I never expect much from a new site for at least the first 12 months. You have to dig deep and carry on working on it in the belief that you will eventually get the rewards for your work. It’s clear to me now that Google really is heavily weighting the variables that can’t be played with in the latest incarnation of its algorithm – one of the hardest to manipulate has to be domain age so who can blame them? I should state that this 1 ranking isn’t exactly a lucky one-off either. Just about everything on that old domain does very well, so much so that I’ve now started using another old domain I had sitting around as well. It will be interesting to see if it works the same for sub domains.

There are 2 lessons here. One is that I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have registered domains from donkeys ago and have never done anything with them, if this is you then rather than leaving a holding page with some PPC ads on them you really should think about taking advantage of Google’s current weighting on domain age.

The other lesson is that you are seriously going to struggle to outrank an old domain with a new one. It might be best to start getting into the mindset of planning for what you want to build next year, or the year after now. At the very least register the domains and get a few miles under their asses.