Wednesday December 19th, 2007: Issue #873
The countdown to Christmas continues…
If you haven’t finished your shopping yet, Lord help you! The shops are crazy busy and people in them are acting mighty strange. You’d think that we are all preparing for a six month siege rather than one day of over eating.
For goodness sake! Why does everything become so manic?
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If you are a new subscriber to Kickstart, you can read all the more ‘normal’ back issues at the archive website at http://kickstartarchive.com
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In Victorian England postmen were often nicknamed ‘robins’, This was because they wore a bright red uniform. The postal service was called the Royal Mail because it was originally set up to carry royal dispatches, and as red was considered a royal color, everything about the organization was themed in red. To this day, British post boxes are still painted in Royal Mail Red.
Christmas cards from the Victorian era often showed a robin delivering cards.
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I promised you a biographical account of how I got involved in Internet marketing. For some reason, when I sat down to write it, my mind insisted on doing it in the third person. It seems odd writing about yourself as if you are someone else, but that’s just the way it turned out. Goodness knows why! There must be some deep-seated psychological reason - perhaps I’m going crazy.
Anyway, here is part one of ‘Martin’s Journey’.
Let me tell you the story of Martin the Internet marketer.
Martin had just been made redundant from a job he’d held (and mostly hated) for 19 years. Being laid off hurt like hell. His ego was bruised, his pride was hurt and his self-confidence was shattered. Worst of all was the realization that he’d lost his job because he was too old. At 41 years of age, Martin was washed up. The advertising industry just didn’t want people like him around anymore. They were expensive enough to threaten the bean counters and experienced enough to threaten the new blood coming up the ranks.
It had always been that way. Many years before Martin a much younger Martin had told his wife that he’d be lucky to last in advertising beyond the age of 40. She’d thought he was exaggerating, but one extra year wasn’t much of an exaggeration!
Five people around the same age as Martin were laid off in the same week. That was some comfort, but it was cold.
So it came to be that Martin set up shop as a marketing consultant, and, surprise, surprise, he did quite well. Business was good and Martin found himself earning a lot more money than he’d ever made in his life before.
One of Martin’s consultancy jobs was at another advertising agency. Ironically, they too had laid off most of their experienced, over-40 staff and now they had a bit of a crisis. The youngsters couldn’t cope with the workload of pitching for new business and running their existing accounts at the same time. Experience does count for something!
Martin stepped in and ran the day-to-day business while the keen young grads wrote their (mostly awful and mostly unsuccessful) new business presentations.
This was the time of the dot.coms. Investment bankers were lining up to throw money at Internet startups. Big money. Tens of millions. The trouble was, neither the Internet startups nor the investment bankers had any idea how they were going to get their money back.
Martin worked on five or six Internet accounts and was dumbfounded at the lack of basic marketing sense that most of the people had. The advertising agency folk tried their best to bring sound marketing thoughts to the process, but mostly it was ignored - or scorned.
Once company, which had burned over $70 million already, had its entire business plan based on the idea of getting 12-15 year-old boys to collect points by visiting websites (and offline businesses). The points could then be used to secure discounts off of online purchases. It was slick, it had a huge salesforce out there selling the idea to participating businesses. It was viral. It was doomed to failure.
The sales team proudly signed up companies like BMW to give points to people who test drove cars, and online record stores to give discounts in exchange for the points.
The snag that neither the client or the fools who were throwing money at them didn’t spot? 12-15 year old boys can’t test drive cars and they don’t have credit cards to buy things online with.
More than $70 million went down the drain.
In fact, virtually all the Internet startups that Martin witnessed in those strange days disappeared without trace. Deservedly so.
Looking back, there was only one thing from that time that Martin can look back on with pride. The Financial Times was launching its new online presence, www.ft.com and Martin was tasked with finding innovative ways to promote it and build the userbase. The annual UK budget was approaching and Martin hit on the idea of advertising the website during the television news programmes. Nothing particularly innovative there, except that the twist was that he want to advertise in every single news broadcast on every single channel that accepted advertising for the entire budget day with a 10-second ad saying ‘For the latest news on the budget visit www.ft.com’
It took a lot of negotiation with a lot of TV contractors, but in the end the deal was done and the first (and probably still the only) total saturation of news programming came to pass - at a cost that was amazingly low!
Traffic to the site rocketed and the campaign was a major success.
Of all the dot.com accounts that Martin worked on in those days, ft.com is the only one still in existence.
This was the year 2000 and Martin thought to himself, ‘Surely making money from the Internet can’t be as hard as these morons are making it seem?’
Oh, the innocence of babes!
Martin was, of course, an absolute Internet virgin. He’d surfed the net (as we used to call it) at home a bit but that was all. However, his many years of marketing experience did lead him to think that there really wasn’t much difference between what people seemed to be doing online and what direct marketers had been doing offline for at least a century. The only real difference was that the cost of entry online was peanuts, whereas testing a sales letter offline can cost thousands.
So Martin thought that he’d set out to become the next Internet millionaire.
But first he had to work out what it was all about, and what people were doing to make money online. So he entered ‘Internet marketing’ and ‘make money online’ into a search engine (probably Yahoo because Google was known much back then) and started browsing the sites that came up.
One of the first things that popped out at him was a website promoting a book called ‘Make Your Site Sell’ by a chap called Dr. Ken Evoy. The book was quite cheap, so Martin made his first hesitant online purchase.
So green and naive was our hero that he printed that first book out. All 1500 pages of it! It filled 7 3-ring binders and used up a forest of paper and a fortune in ink. But he read every word and a spark went off in his mind.
Come back Friday for the next installment to see what Martin did next…
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The original St. Nicholas was bishop of Myra - a Turkish town - the early fourth century. Centuries later, the Dutch first made him into a Christmas gift-giver, and it was Dutch settlers who brought him to America where his name eventually became the familiar Santa Claus.
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Thank you to everyone who has been beta testing my Keyword Hacker LSI tool and reporting bugs back to me. In particular, thanks to Kev Polley and Jos Jongejan who have been particularly helpful. I’ve managed to squash all of those reported so far.
The voting on whether to release this as a stand-alone script or as part of a membership site has not helped very much because an equal number of people expressed views either way.
Here’s the deal that I’ve finally settled on.
For now it is going on sale exclusively to Kickstart readers as a stand alone script - at a pre-launch discounted price.
If you have a domain of your own you’ll find it very easy to install - all you have to do is upload a few files to your hosting service by FTP. There is noting tricky and no settings to change. Just upload and use it straight away.
The pre-launch price is just $27, which will be a lot less than when it goes on general sale.
If you’d like to own this incredibly useful script that finds the words that you must know to write articles and web pages that the search engines will love, please PayPal me $27 to m.avis@ntlworld.com and I’ll email you a zip file and installation instructions.
If you haven’t test-run the script yet, you can still try it out at http://www.keywordhacker.com/lsiplus/
for another day or two - after that the try-before-you-buy- page will be taken down.
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Nowadays it is traditional to eat turkey at Christmas, but it wasn’t always so. Prior to the 16th century, when turkey’s were first introduced as Christmas fare, rich English households preferred goose, beef, or a nice boar’s head.
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There is a ‘truth’ among ezine writers that no individual newsletter should ever try to promote more than one product. Time and again I, and others, have demonstrated that if there is more than one link to a recommended product, the chances of making a sale of any of then diminishes drastically.
Of course, I don’t like to follow my own advice all the time and Kickstart is renowned for breaking the rules. So today, there will be 10 links to products you may like to buy!
Don’t worry though. You may already have a lot of them - and if you do, take my advice and go and re-read them. Even if you haven’t bought them yet, there’s no need to rush out and buy all 14! Just pick one or two that look best aligned to your current needs.
Reviewing all the products, ebooks and services that I’ve recommended in 2007 has proved to be more of a challenge than I first expected.
* Some of the things I recommended were special promotions or one-off price deals that would no longer be applicable.
* Some of the products have changed over the year and may not be as relevant now as they were then.
* Internet marketing has changed of the year, making some products less than perfect for today’s environment.
* One or two have not lived up to my expectations, so I really wouldn’t want to give them any more publicity.
* A couple have never paid my commissions, so I really don’t feel inclined to put any more money in their pockets.
But the ones that are left are superb products that I have no hesitation in telling you about again.
Here is part one of my ‘Best of Kickstart’s 2007 Recommendations’: The Top 10 ebooks.
These are presented here in the order that they first appeared in Kickstart with the gist of what I wrote:
1. Niche Marketing on Crack, by Andrew Hansen (issue #775)
The system that ‘Niche Marketing on Crack’ teaches is not complicated. That, to me, is its strength. It also is nothing particularly new - and that is a strength as well because it will not teach you silly methods that will get you banned in five minutes, or that are likely to stop working as soon as you try to apply them.
What I especially like is that ‘Niche Marketing on Crack’ takes you step-by-step through the whole process in such a clear way that anyone (and I mean anyone) can follow it. This is truly join-the-dots marketing.
Even though I am supposed to be an experienced Internet marketer who already does a lot of what ‘Niche Marketing on Crack’ teaches, the WAY it is taught is what is important. I certainly learned a great deal from it and can honestly say that I got superb value-for-money from this book.
http://www.urlnex.us/nmc/
2. Lazy Git Marketing by Matt Garrett (issue #790)
This book 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. It offers a strategy that I haven’t considered before, but which 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 reading for you.
http://www.urlnex.us/lazygit/
3. AdWords 180 by Ian Rollinson (issue #802)
AdWords180 explains, very clearly, a method of getting very cheap clicks from Google AdWords that before I bought the book I, quite honestly, didn’t know existed. AdWords180 offers a totally legitimate, but little-known method of optimizing your AdWords campaigns until your cost-per-click can be under a cent per click. And that, believe me, is cheap.
This is nothing to do with trickery. There is no cheating. Google will actually love you for using this method as it is totally, 100% within the rules and will result in better results for them too!
[Note: If you already own AdWords180, my special tool may prove invaluable to you: http://www.keywordhacker.com/contentnetwork/ ]
http://www.urlnex.us/AdWords180/
4. Here is What Works by Wes Blaylock (issue #807)
‘Here is What Works’ is 93 pages of plain-English about what really works in Internet marketing.
As you probably gather. I like ebooks that are well written, easy to understand and based on step-by-step processes. I don’t like to be left wondering about the bits that have been left out. Well, I’m delighted to say that ‘Here is What Works’ ticked the boxes for me.
After a lengthy, but interesting preamble, the book breaks down into 4 main sections:
What Works in Conversion
What Works in Email Marketing
What Works in Visitor Generation
What Else Works
There is no fluff. ‘Here is What Works’ gets right down to it with idea after workable idea that you can use. I’d say that it is aimed at the beginner to intermediate end of the Internet marketing niche, but even if you consider yourself to be more experienced, don’t write it off. I learned plenty.
http://www.urlnex.us/HereIsWhatWorks/
5. Blogging to the Bank 2, by Rob Benwell (issue #819)
The first edition of BTTB didn’t do much for me. It had some black hat ideas in it that I really didn’t like much and the rest of the book left me a bit cool about the whole thing. To a great extent, that all put me off of Rob Benwell too - and as a result I didn’t pay much attention to what he was up to.
That foolish attitude changed when I went to Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar and Rob Benwell was one of the featured speakers.
He hadn’t spoken in public before and was clearly very nervous, but I think everyone in the audience was impressed with the information he imparted. What made him stand out in particular was that unlike virtually all the other speakers, who used the opportunity to sell expensive products and mentoring programs from the stage, Rob just gave everything away. He gave everyone there copies of his books and software. He was by far the most generous speaker of all, and the audience greatly appreciated him.
I had a brief chance to chat with him and got the impression that he is an honest, straightforward young man who is really doing what so many people simply talk about. In other words, he is the genuine article.
So considering all that I didn’t bother to email him and ask for a review copy of his new book, I bought it.
‘Blogging to the Bank 2′ is a good book for people who are new to the world of blogging. It will show you how to set up your blogs the right way, how to create or find content for them, how to uncover niches to blog about, and most importantly, how to make money from them.
If you have never built a blog before, or if you have made one or two but have never managed to make them pay, then I strongly recommend ‘Blogging to the Bank 2′. It will start you out in the right direction without any silly gimmicks that will go out of fashion or get you banned.
If you are already experienced in blogging though, Rob Benwell’s book is probably not for you. You will certainly find one or two ideas that you can use, but overall the book is intended for the less experienced.
I have several blogs, but don’t consider myself a blogging expert. I’m certainly not as experienced in the subject as some of my friends. As a result, I found ‘Blogging to the Bank 2′ to be a useful addition to my virtual bookshelf - and yes, I have printed it out for posterity!
http://www.urlnex.us/bttb2/
6. The $20,000 in 20 Days Challenge, by Michael Green (issue #836)
This is by far the most expensive ‘ebook’ that I’ve recommended, but it also the most comprehensive. The manual runs to over 250 pages with no fluff at all - just a solid business for you to run. 20/20 gives you a thorough plan to build a successful Internet business that anyone can follow and put into action.
Whether you’ll make $20k in days is questionable, but what is for sure is that you’ll learn the right way to go about making money online that will serve you for a very long time into the future.
http://www.urlnex.us/2020/
7. Passive Income Secrets, by Neil Shearing (issue #842)
[Passive Income Secrets isn’t an ebook, it is a set of videos. I’ve included it here because it fits better with other products that detail usable business plans.]
The best thing I ever learned online is that passive income is king! Certainly it was the thing that changed me from being an Internet marketing dabbler to being someone who can earn a healthy full time income online.
Passive, or recurring income is money that you work once for, but then keeps flowing towards you week after week, month after month without any further effort on your part.
How amazing is that?
Neil Shearing is a family man and a bit of a recluse. He doesn’t do the seminar circuit, rarely pokes his nose into the forums and is unknown to the vast majority of newbies. But ask any Internet marketer with a bit of experience under their belts and they will instantly recognize Neil as being totally straightforward and very, very successful.
Most of Neil’s very substantial online income comes from passive income streams. He really is a guy who doesn’t like to work too hard!
Neil has created a series of fourteen videos called Passive Cashflow Secrets that explain the concepts behind passive income, why it is so important, and the leading ways that you can build a passive income of your own online.
In the videos Neil covers all the major ways to build a great passive income for yourself. There is no fluff and nothing complicated. He has a very calm and clear way of explaining things that makes lightbulbs blaze in your mind.
http://www.urlnex.us/passiveincome
8. Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede, by Chris Freville (issue #858)
‘Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ is a cracking good read.
As I’ve said several times in Kickstart, Web 2.0 has crept up on me while I’ve still been trying to understand Web 1.0 and largely leaves my either confused or cold. That’s all changed. Chris Freville has turned me from being a Web 2.0 dunce to a dynamo in 120 plain English pages.
I now understand things that a short time ago I didn’t even know existed. Things that can bring traffic by the boat load. Now that HAS to be good!
The best ebooks are the ones that you can point to one thing you learned that will make you back ten times the price of the book. With Chris Freville’s ‘Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ I’ve literally lost count of the number of such gems.
Web 2.0 is here. There is no point in being a luddite about it and burying your head in the sand as I’ve been doing for most of the last year. Web 2.0 isn’t going away, so all of us who make money online have to embrace it with open arms and “Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ makes that so easy to do.
http://www.urlnex.us/web2trafficstampede/
9. Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate, by Chris Rempel (issue #862)
By many people’s definitions of the term, I’m a super affiliate. When I decide to promote something in Kickstart or on my websites, I can often find myself in the top ranks of affiliates.
I don’t think of myself that way though. To me, ’super affiliates’ are way above my little online business. They are the guys who make absolute fortunes. I make a great living, but there are no yachts floating around yet.
Perhaps I’m a sub-super-affiliate! 
Recently I bought an inexpensive new ebook. Something about the title appealed to me. I found myself clicking through to the sales page without even thinking. I’m very glad I did. The sales page is refreshingly non hypey. I enjoyed reading it and was amazed to see that an entire business strategy is laid out there before you even have to buy anything.
That’s right - just visiting and reading the sales page can give you a truly workable business plan for free. You don’t see that very often.
I bought the book and was really impressed with what I read.
Some books are written in a way that leads you believe that the author is a theorist - someone who knows what ’should’ work and so sets themselves up as an expert without ever bothering to get the practical ‘hands on’ experience. Right from the word go, you can tell that ‘Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate’ is a lot better than that. Chris Rempel clearly knows his stuff and walks his talk. The book is packed with real life advice and workable examples. If it tells you about a concept, it then goes on and shows you that concept in action too.
I’m very excited about this book - can you tell? I already know how to sell products as an affiliate, but after reading it just once, I know a whole lot more.
http://www.urlnex.us/lazysuperaffiliate/
[Note: even though I only mentioned this book for the first time on November 23rd, it has already outsold all the other books I’ve mentioned this year. Deservedly so.]
10. Licensed to Quit, by Tony Shepherd and Sara Brown
Last, but by no means least, I have news of a very special deal for Kickstart readers.
‘Licensed to Quit’ by Kickstart reader and forum regular Tony Shepherd and his business
partner Sara Brown is very, very good.
Part one of the book talks about the importance of having your own product to sell, how you can quickly and easily get one without having to do very much work, and how to create a system to get the maximum revenue from your work - even if you give it away for free!
It is good, solid, tried and tested advice from a pair of seasoned Internet marketers who only describe
systems and strategies that they have tested and proved for themselves. There is absolutely no fluff and no vague theory. This stuff works.
Part two of the book gets into the meat of the system that Tony and Sara actually use to launch their own
products and create hundreds or thousands of dollars of income - even without lists to market to. Once again, it is real-life information that works.
This is a limited time special offer. The discount will only apply until Tony and Sara put the book on ClickBank at the full price, so if I were you, I’d bite their hands off!
http://www.sara-brown.com/invitation
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The earliest known published collection of Christmas carols dates from 1521.
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I finally bit the bullet yesterday and went out to my local computer superstore to buy a new PC.
After examining all of the machines on display I ended up choosing a Compaq machine that, for the money, was particularly well specified. 3Gb Ram, a big hard drive, a pretty good graphics card, a very nice 22-inch widescreen monitor and the ability to run a second monitor without adding any new cards.
It is a Vista (home premium) machine, but I figure that I have to make the changeover eventually, and I’ve got a good XP laptop if I need to run any programs that won’t play ball under Vista.
That was settled then.
Ah … have you ever been shopping with me? I can make buying a newspaper complicated (and did the other day when an old lady thought I was about to attack her!)
When I finally found an assistant the first thing he asked was “Is this for business or home use, sir?”
“Business,” said I, not knowing how I’d come to regret that one word.
“Oh good,” he said, “then I think I can save you about 20% of the price.”
Never one to turn down an unexpected deal like that I followed him to his desk where he tapped on his computer for about the next 45 minutes.
It seems that the store had bought a huge shipment of very low spec machines from Hewlett Packard, which they would then upgrade to much higher specifications by adding all kinds of new components. He assured me that the end result would be assembled in store, tested by their own techies and delivered to me next day. The resultant machine would be at least as good spec as the Compaq I’d decided on, and probably better.
On that basis I was happy to twiddle my thumbs while this very helpful young man played on his computer for 45 minutes.
Except that I don’t get that lucky.
When he’d finished working on his masterpiece, the computer told us that it would indeed save me money. Nearly 25% in fact. I was happy. He was happy. And then he said “I’d better just call the technical department to make sure all these new parts are available and compatible.”
After a few whispered exchanges on the phone he sheepishly looked up at me.
“I really sorry, sir, but I’m afraid it won’t work. Hewlett Packard have limited the base machine’s motherboard so that it can only take a maximum of 2 Gb Ram, can only run Vista basic, and can’t take the graphics card we’ve selected.” (I didn’t notice any ‘we’ doing the selecting, but I let that pass.)
The end result was that after all that I was back at the Compag machine I could have bought nearly an hour earlier.
So I guess you’d assume I bought it then?
No I didn’t. For one very good reason. My new best friend, clearly full of remorse that he’d wasted so much of my time, let slip that the PC World sale starts on December 26th, and that there is every chance the computer, or one even better, might be in the sale.
So what could I do except walk out and wait for another day.
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The first time Santa Claus was depicted with a sleigh and reindeer was in a Thomas Nast cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly on January 3rd, 1863.
The cartoon was captioned ‘Santa Claus in camp’ and showed him delivering gifts to soldiers fighting in the American Civil War.
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At over 5000 words, this has turned out to be the longest edition of Kickstart that I’ve ever sent out. I hope you managed to get to the end!
There’s more to come on Friday … see you then!
Martin