Hi Fellow Marketers – Here’s this week’s blog post coming all the way from sunny Portsmouth in the UK!

And apologies as it’s my 2^nd contact with you today – following my earlier email about today’s free site launch which you should definitely check out if you want some great freebies:

www.johnhillage.com/viralmarketinggiveaway12.html

So far today’s been a great day for me – my baby (Honey’s) first birthday so we’ve been unwrapping presents and playing by the sea all day.

And as with all kids that age the wrapping paper and envelopes are just SO much more fun that the actual presents!

But anyway we’ve got chocolate cake tonight so today just gets better!

This post follows on from the newsletter last week on the subject of networking; where I gave a few examples of how important it’s been to my online business.

Now last week’s newsletter was my first in the internet marketing niche (although I have been doing newsletters in other niches for nearly 2 years now!)

And I got one or two people moaning that it was just too long for them.

For me personally I like a newsletter that I can get some real value out of – not just a few lines of hype followed by “click here to buy!”

But let me know – because if many of you are in the “short is good” camp then I can change the format for the next one.

Anyway on to networking…

As many of you know I launched The Proven Internet Profit System last month and did it largely through a select few JV deals.

And the JV partners that came through for me and ran promotions that actually sold product – were all folk that I had met in person.

The main one being Mr. Martin Avis (of Kickstart daily fame) whom I met about 2 years ago – and have been in sporadic contact with via email over that period.

I have had little joy with contacting other marketers “cold” via email – so face-to-face contact is so important (ironic when you think of the whole “work at home alone on your pc” nature of online marketing).

So I plan to get to more offline events this year as they are just so valuable, and you should too.

In fact if any of you live near the South Coast of England I have been trying to set up an online marketing group for a little while via The Warrior Forum.

If you are interested go to the post at http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=250081 and add your thoughts – so that I can look at getting this off the ground.

And whilst we are talking about the Warrior Forum – it’s a great place online to go and network and “meet” people.

I am really into the Warrior Forum and regularly post on there – both to help others and also get a little bit of direction myself at times.

I am also building up contact with some great marketers which I know will pay dividends further down the line for them and me – with cross-promotional activities.

But if you do check it out, remember that forums are places to give and receive information first and foremost.

A great by-product of this is that you can build contacts with people and build your list through your signature file etc.

But DON’T go there looking to just “sell” to people as you will quickly (and ruthlessly) be exposed, especially in the Warrior Forum!

The basic rules that I use for successful networking and marketing on forums I learned from George Katsoudas who is one of my favourite no-BS online marketers.

If you want to learn more about his very inexpensive guide to forum marketing you should check out http://johnhillage.com/forummarketing.html

But even without this guide - just be respectful, polite , offer genuine help to people and add an effective signature file, and you won’t go far wrong (it’s not rocket science!)

Well that’s all for now, and I’m about to start giving away my latest internet marketing product for free this week.

So be sure to watch for an email on how you can get your copy in the next 7 days.

Happy marketing

John Hillage

One thing that I find more and more in my online marketing career is that time is so darned precious and hard to come by.

It’s a constant struggle to juggle family and online work commitments on a daily basis.

And I’m quite a workaholic with my online business so find myself constantly trying to squeeze more time out of each day.

The birth of my daughter almost a year ago now has helped me greatly to get a bit better life-work balance.

But I’m still a bit rubbish at it if truth be told!

The thing is though that working harder and harder is a bad trap to fall into.

You end up exhausted and actually you can become less productive.

I can remember numerous occasions where I’ve worked on a project tired – made mistakes and it’s actually taken twice as long.

And wasted so much precious time that could be spent with my family or doing other “fun” stuff.

In the long run constant “work, work, work” online can make you pretty unhappy and can mess up your whole life balance.

I know I’m not alone in this as I started a thread in the Warrior Forum asking other marketers if they ever uttered those fatal words to their family members “I’ll just check my emails for a minute…” and I got a big response.

You can read the thread at: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=249473

The key to beating this is to give yourself at least 1 whole day off the computer per week as it really refreshes you – something I try to stick to (but am not always successful).

Also outsourcing is a great way to cut down on the tasks you have to do – I have just begun to outsource the writing of one of my niche newsletters and my number crunching stats work (which I hate!)

So far the results have been good and for about $70 I have bought back about 3-4 hours of my life each month – which feels great.

Now I wouldn’t outsource my online marketing stuff as that’s my own know-how and another writer couldn’t replicate it.

Plus it’s my real passion and so writing it comes naturally.

But my other niche stuff – sure I outsource and plan to do more of it.

If you’re not in a position to outsource yet – at least do yourself a favour and tackle your most important tasks.

Spending hours messing around with email, Facebook, buying e-books and reading forum posts will not build your online business.

Writing sales copy, researching niches, developing products, making web pages etc. is what will drive you forward.

So try to do something today to get a bit of your time back and make your online business more effective.

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

Hi there – this week’s blog post may be a little shorter than most as I’m pretty pushed for time tonight.

I’ve just been playing football (sorry soccer for those reading across the pond) and need to go out and pick my son up from work soon (he works part time at a local store stacking shelves at night).

Anyway I just wanted to tell you about a great e-book that is really helpful for anyone blogging, or anyone thinking about it.

It’s been written by a fellow Brit Rob Benwell and is called “Blogging To The Bank 2.0” and has been out a little while but I only got a copy last month and have devoured it several times, and applied the great and easy to follow advice on several of my blogs.

In the tradition of really good e-books it’s not packed with pages of “filler content” and gets down to the nitty gritty of running your own successful and profitable blog online.

Rob takes you right through from finding a niche, setting up a blog, getting great content, optimizing the blog for SEO (in really simple ways), getting traffic to the blog and most importantly PROFITING from your blog.

Now for me the optimisation section was worth the small investment for the e-book alone (oh and by the way keep on reading and I’ll share with you the sneaky way I got a copy at nearly 50% discount!)

The optimisation section showed me EXACTLY where I was going wrong!

And I’ve been quickly able to rectify that so that the search engines are much happier with my blog now.

For the beginner Rob lays out his “5 Blogging Commandments” that any wannabe blogger needs to know in their quest to become a successful blogger.

And Rob also covers great traffic strategies for your blog of which I have started using a few already.

Overall it’s a well written guide that will appeal to those already blogging, and those who want to.

It’s around 60 pages long which is good news when it comes to keeping the cost down of printing it off (which is what I like to do with any good e-books that I get).

Oh yes and the sneaky trick…

Go to the site which I will give you below and then when you have read the sales letter and still want to buy a copy then click off the site.

A window will then pop up where an “operator” will offer you a copy at $20 cheaper!

Just click that link and you get it for $27 instead of $47.

Here’s the page to go to:

http://johnhillage.com/blogging.html

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

This week post is the “Lonely Desperate Single’s Guide for Internet Dating” by John Hillage…

Only joking of course not - I’m referring to the acronym KISS which stands for Keep It Simple Silly, and how you can use it to profit online.

Now you may well have come across KISS in all kinds of areas; lots of training personnel just love these types of acronyms like KISS, setting SMART objectives etc.

Frankly I can take them or leave them when they are spouted by your average human resources or training personnel officer - but when they are applied in real life to make real money, now that’s different!

KISS was invented by someone but I have no clue who (in fact neither does the all-knowing Google machine when I ran a quick search for it) - so answers on a postcard please!

But applied to your internet business KISS can be pretty deadly.

I’m going to talk about just one area (there are load more besides) where employing this technique is crucial:

Sales Copy - Now good sales copy needs to be simple so that everyone who reads it can understand it quickly and easily.

It should be written at the average level a 12 year old can understand - that’s not to say you should use 12 your old text speak (R U GOING 2 BUY MY EBOOK!) or make it childish. But the basic grammar and vocabulary should be at a level that a 12 year old can pretty easily use and understand.

If you baffle people with long words or write in very academic and formal ways you are going to lose the majority (if not all) of your online audience a long time before they get anywhere near buying from you.

Another area of sales copy to keep simple is graphics and designs.

As you may well know fancy flash graphics that take up too long to load generally have no place on a direct marketing internet sales page.

Most internet users have a real 2 second click-click mentality; if you expect someone to sit whilst your fancy all-singing and all-dancing graphic loads up for 20 seconds you will be sadly mistaken.

They’ll be hitting the back button and buying your competitors product from his Plain Jane site that has much more emphasis on enticing copy than flashy gimmicks.

And also remember that just because you may have the latest high speed broadband internet connection and a super fast flash new computer - Average Joe from out in the sticks may be trying to read your web page through a dial up connection on a 10 year old machine with a cracked monitor!

When it comes to on page graphics then certainly a good image of your product (be it an ebook, CD, DVD or something else), maybe a thumbnail photo of yourself (as long you don’t look really weird or scary!) is really helpful in the sales process - but your sales page certainly doesn’t need much more than that.

I’m not about to go through the various components of copywriting here as there is simply not time.

But as I am sure you know the aim of copy is to sell and online this means getting your web visitor to click the order button.

So make this a simple and painless process too - by providing several payment buttons across the web page so that the reader does not need to hunt for them.

Also make them very clear so use button or text links that say “Click Here to Invest In My E-book Now” or “Click Here To Get Your Copy Immediately”.

And finally don’t them send them through some crazy upsell process that gives them all kinds of different options.

I saw a website the other day that offered 5 different packages all made up of different components which was just too complex to fully understand at first glance.

And if people are confused or have to take time to decipher what you are offering – chances are they won’t be buying from you.

In my opinion if you are going to up sell (which is a great technique that you are crazy not to use by the way) then 3 options is the optimum.

Offer Basic, Deluxe and Super Deluxe versions of your product and your overall profits will be higher.

But make it crystal clear what action the customer needs to take to purchase any of those three options to avoid any confusion.

Good luck and I hope you enjoy some profitable kissing on the internet!

Happy Marketing

John Hillage