Friday Apr 13th, 2007: Issue #790
Are you a paraskavedekatriaphobic or a friggatriskaidekaphobic? If so, you may not have even got out of bed today to read Kickstart!
You see, today is Friday 13th, and paraskavedekatriaphobia (friggatriskaidekaphobia means the same thing) is the morbid fear of this particular day.
Nobody really knows why Friday 13th is considered so unlucky. There are theories that it stems from the day in 1307 when the Knight’s Templar were arrested en masse, but there seems to be no documented evidence that anyone made the connection between unlucky Fridays and fear of the number 13 much more than 100 years ago.
Wikipedia has more information if you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th
Funnily enough, throughout my life, Friday 13th has tended to bring quite good things, so I don’t fear it at all! Perhaps it is like most things in our lives - if we expect bad, we will get it and if we expect good, we will get that too.
Already today I have won £100 and received a check from Google that is two-and-a-half times bigger than I was expecting!
I vote for expecting good things to happen today and every day.
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I’ve been feeling a bit introspective this week and have been thinking about Internet marketing and how I feel about it all.
Don’t misunderstand me - I’m not turning my back on it - far from it - but I am reassessing some of my basic ideas.
The web moves on and anyone who wants to do business through this astonishing medium must move with it. After all, today’s written-in-stone truths are tomorrow’s old-hat has-been ideas.
Take AdSense as a prime example. Many people, me included, made a lot of money from putting Google’s AdSense code on our web pages and getting paid each time a visitor clicked on one of them. It was easy money. Too easy, as it turned out. AdSense is no longer the force it was (from a revenue for you and me point of view) because Google have shifted direction and changed the way advertisers can buy ads. The result is that people who relied on AdSense revenue for their income are seeing a drop in earnings of between 50% and 90%.
That’s a big hole to fill with something else and a lot of the old AdSense earners have become disheartened. They don’t all want to learn new tricks. But those who are moving with the times are finding new ways to generate an income from their sites.
Private label is another area that has changed over the last year. The people who started out right and used private label ebooks and articles correctly (by making substantial changes to the raw materials) are still doing fine, but those who saw PLR as a quick fix are finding that out-of-the-box private label materials are no longer as valuable as they once were. My book, ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ teaches the right way to monetize PLR ebooks - ways that won’t go out of style anytime soon. http://www.plrsecrets.com
Article marketing is another area that is changing fast. Pumping the same article out to hundreds of directories may have once been a perfectly adequate strategy, but it is now seen to be counter-productive. Today, the best strategy is to write many different variations of your articles and to give unique (or nearly so) versions to each of the leading article directories.
My free Article Multiplier tool can help you here: http://www.youcanwritearticles.com/multiplier.htm
List marketing is another area that has changed quite a lot. There are now so many spammy ‘newsletters’ that many people have become sick of the continual content-free pitch-fests that clutter up their inboxes. As a result, people who still produce real newsletters filled with useful and readable content are finding it ever more difficult to cut through the noise. And the wretched spam filters don’t make it any easier.
In fact, sending out ezines is likely to become harder and harder.
Don’t worry though - I don’t plan to stop! Writing Kickstart is way too important to me to allow the difficulties to get in the way. Mind you, the return on time invested is sometimes hard to justify to my accountant (but what does he know!)
Overall, the Internet is changing and anyone who wants to make a living from it has no choice but to continuously re-evaluate and re-educate themselves.
My advice for anyone who is starting out in Internet marketing today is this:
Keep it real. The latest tricks may make you money in the short term, but as most are based on trying to fool the search engines (or your visitors) they tend to die very quickly. That means that you have to find replacement strategies all the time - which pretty soon gets to be a chore.
Residual income is King. Which would you prefer - a $30 affiliate commission today, or $10 a month forever? Having ongoing income streams that were generated months ago is a great feeling - and is much less subject to future changes to the Internet.
Think like a real business. If you make a policy of always asking yourself ‘would I be able to sell this business in year’s time’, you will always tend to build your sites, blogs, and anything else you do online, in a businesslike fashion.
You can’t futureproof your online business any more than you can futureproof your wardrobe but you can at least make sure that you build it on a firm foundation, using sound, tested principles.
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The date for the next London Lunch has been set for Friday 18th May. If you are on the London Lunch announcement list, you should have had an email about it already (unless you signed up in the last couple of days).
There are only 30 places available and several have been booked already, so if you would like to come along this time, don’t waste any time in PayPalling me your £20 deposit (refundable) to book your seat.
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I have a new pdf ebook open on my monitor. I finished reading it yesterday, but there are several things I want to re-read, so I’ve left it open to refer to. I’ll probably print it out later too.
This new book, which I’m sure you’ll have guessed is about Internet marketing, teaches a very simple system for building websites that can earn you an ongoing, residual income. And, bizarre as it might sound, those sites don’t even need to get much traffic to make the money for you.
Sounds too good to be true? That’s what I thought, but I was so intrigued to find out what the secret was that I bought the book - which is called ‘Lazy Git Marketing’ by fellow Brit, Matt Garrett.
I don’t like the title, but I do like the contents. It offers a strategy that I haven’t considered before, but which I can see is perfectly workable.
If you are looking for a new revenue stream that is quite easy to set up, brings in an ongoing monthly income and appears to be based on sound principles (so won’t fall foul of the search engines anytime soon) then ‘Lazy Git Marketing’ will be useful weekend reading for you.
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An Inspirational Thought
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Coincidence is often marvelled at, but seldom acted upon. When things happen that strike you as coincidence, pause and take stock.
Very often the great turning points in our lives are triggered by seemingly coincident events.
The person that we keep bumping into in odd places.
The word that we keep reading or hearing.
The business idea that keeps cropping up in unrelated ways.
Or a thousand other synchronistic possibilities.
Learn to embrace coincidence and instead of saying ‘that was strange!’, start to say, ‘what does that mean?’ It could mean nothing, but more often than not, it could mean everything.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Alfred Crowquill said,
“Do not allow idleness to deceive you; for while you give him today he steals tomorrow from you.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Have you noticed how all the best places have a queue outside?
One of the measures of success is the length of the line.
That sounds like a truism, but there is more going on under the surface.
Think again - is the line really that long because the nightclub is full, or will it be half empty when you finally get inside. I bet that is more often the case!
And how many times have you been forced to ‘wait at the bar’ in a restaurant when you can see that if only the waiting staff would clear some tables, everyone could be seated easily.
And what about those long lines when authors do book signings? If they would sign a few dozen books in advance, the lines would move far faster.
But that would be entirely missing the point.
You see, the lines are deliberate. They are the advertisement that says ‘this MUST be good if so many people are prepared to stand in line.’
It combines two human psychologies: the fear of missing something good and the fear of being excluded.
How can you and your business take advantage of the ’success line strategy’?
Food for thought.
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Fascinating Facts
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It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Go on … save yourself some energy!