I’ve just finished working on a brand new Special Report that you can pick up as a blog visitor for absolutely nothing!

It’s an in-depth 14 page report which shows you exactly how I made $638.68 in 60 Minutes (and am actually still using this technique to make even more than that month after month).

You can get hold of your own personal copy for free at:

http://www.nononsensejohn.com/638.html

I would love it if you could comment on how you found the report, ask me questions etc.

Come on let’s start some dialogue here!

Have a great day

John Hillage

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

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

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

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

Wembley is a hugely impressive place and to top it all off we won and are now promoted.

Apologies to you non-football readers of the blog and also anyone who has absolutely no clue who or what Stockport County is!

Anyway back to the world of internet marketing and today I want to talk about researching hot niches with no extra work for less than a Dollar.

What I am talking about is no “Secret” resource but taking the age old offline tradition of reading the newspaper (I know it’s SO last Century!)

Whilst Google Trends, super dooper keyword tools and the like are great…one of the best ways to find hot trends is in the newspaper.

I was reminded of this last week when I saw an article all about the relatively new phenomena of “brain training” and “memory exercises”.

With growing fears of Alzheimer’s and similar problems connected with the brain in old age there is a huge industry developing in trying to help combat them.

I am sure most of you saw Nintendo’s Brain Training software adverts at Christmas which bears testament to this (in the UK they featured Nicole Kidman so clearly a pretty big budget affair).

So having located such a “gem” in the newspaper what could the internet marketer do to get into this niche, even without an Aussie actress and tons of cash to promote their products?!

Well some obvious ideas that spring to mind are:

Software products to sell directly to consumers which offer all kinds of brain assessments, brain training etc.

A review site where you review the various products out there and make money through affiliate links to them.

Interview products where you interview some of the experts in this field and grill them for their “top tips for ongoing brain power” and release them on DVD or CD.

Membership site - which could offer access to some or all of the above products on a monthly billing basis (kerching!).

You could also look at selling vitamins and other mineral supplements as a back end to people in this market too.

So as you can see there are a whole lot of ideas that can come out from just one simple newspaper article, if you know what to look for and use a little imagination.

So spend a little time each week flicking through the newspapers for inspiration you’ll be surprised what you can find (do it in the bookstore or library if you are very low budget).

It shouldn’t take up much time as I tend to only read the weekend papers to be honest, but you will find some great stuff to spark your creativity.

Enjoy your time in the crazy world of “old-fashioned” newspapers…

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

So this week I’m cheating as I am a bit pushed for time!

This week’s post is on some basic affiliate questions that I answered earlier this week from one of my subscribers.

I hope it’s helpful…

Here’s the question:

“I went into Clickbank and signed up as affiliate for a couple of sites I was subscribing to and then to reg.co.uk and got a domain-name because I thought I could have one domain name and one website for all the affiliation.

Someone told me I needed to have different websites and I realised it was going to cost me a fortune, so I just left it.

So I have never sold a single book. I have been looking again for proper information on the subject of affiliation but it’s all the same; do this and do that………sure, but HOW, and in WHAT ORDER, that’s the questions I can’t find answers to.

Ok, first I find a theme/topic/subject and then I look at clickbank to find a good book to sell. HOW do I know when a book/website is good? And once I’ve decided on the website, what do I do next?”

Here’s my answer:

“I would do things 1 at a time.

Find 1 niche market and then 1 good ebook in that market.

On Clickbank the ebooks are ordered in what sells best - so if you want to sell on “dogs” I would use one of the top 2 or 3 products on there for example.

Then drive traffic to it (e.g. Adwords, free articles etc.)

It is better to have just one website per niche (e.g. mydogsite.com) as the site fits with the niche better - but it’s not essential.

You could have a general website e.g. www.informationon.com then have lots of pages on it in different niches e.g. www.informationon.com/dogs www.informationon.com/cats etc.

Test each one though - if you are spending time/money on it make sure you are getting some monetary return.

If you pick one and it doesn’t work - move on and try the next one (not everything I try works believe me!)

The best way I have found to sell affiliate ebooks is by doing an honest review of them yourself - which makes it look less salesy.

For example - http://johnhillage.com/product-reviews/free-traffic-voodoo-by-george-katsoudas/

Also check out the Warrior Forum (www.warriorforum.com) for some more great free help on being an affiliate.

Hope this helps

John

PS - Don’t use co.uk use .com for websites (it’s more universally recognised).

The reason being that I have been posting for a little while now and had literally ZERO feedback!

So I am wanting to know is the content what you expect?

Is weekly posting too often for you?

Is what I write even relevant to you?

So please just give me 2 minutes to let me know so that I can help you more effectively in growing your own online business - just post your thoughts on the blog.

And on the subject of helping others I just posted a new post on The Warrior Forum (the Number #1 Internet Marketing Forum in my humble opinion) showing step by step how I made $638.68 in 60 minutes.

If you are interested just go to:

http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=244026

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

PS - My New Product is now available - www.ProvenInternetProfit.com

It is a complete A-Z blueprint teaching how I made $3284.34 in just 30 days and have been banking similar sums over the past 18 months…from just one little niche alone!

You can find out all about it at www.ProvenInternetProfit.com

But as promised last week - here’s the final exclusive extract from The Proven Internet Profit System

It covers the topic - How to choose your domain name…

There are several points to consider in getting a domain name:

• Get a .com – No matter where in the world you live if you want to sell
information products online - the best way to succeed is by selling to
(potentially) the whole world.

Now everyone knows .com it’s the standard of the internet – what’s the
phrase that is universally known about the first wave of internet
companies to appear?

The Dot Com Boom; not the online boom, the internet boom or the
.co.uk boom - which kinda tells you something.

.com gives you more instant prestige and credibility in virtually all cases.
Now if you are selling a specific UK product to a specific UK crowd then yes
.co.uk may help.

But I would never personally advise such an approach anyway in
information marketing online - the Number 1 biggest market of internet
users and purchasers of information products online is the USA.

So why the heck would you want to exclude the country which can give
you the most customers with simple access to credit cards in the first
place?!

But pick a .com as they are universally recognised and more respected.

• Get something that describes your product/service best; I often use part
or the whole title of the eBook I have written.

So for The Essential DJ Resource Guide which I co-wrote with a DJ friend we simply boughtthe domain www.EssentialDJGuide.com

It’s an essential guide for DJ’s and that is clear from the title of the
website.

If it were a more sub-niched product like “How to get gigs at the hottest
clubs as a DJ” I may have gone for something like
www.howtogetdjgigs.com - Get the idea?

Having your keyword like DJ in the title also helps when using Google
Adwords to drive traffic to your site.

• Make it short and easy to spell – As you want people telling others about
your site and also people typing in your web address into their browser
you want to make things as simple as possible.

So avoid hard to spell words, long domain names and words which can be
spelt 2 different ways.

So for example these might be bad domain names:

www.PsychologicalandClairvoyantTraining.com (too long and hard to spell)

www.Thereleadtoalready.com (all of the words can be spelt 2 different
ways – and also it makes no bloody sense!!)

• Free domain and hosting – I am not dwelling here other than to say you
can get them at places like http://geocities.yahoo.com/ but they yell
“AMATEUR” and you are unlikely to sell much using them. So don’t!!

That’s all for this extract today but don’t forget to check out my new resource today:

www.ProvenInternetProfit.com

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

This weeks exclusive extract asks the question:

“Why bother with follow up emails at all?”

There is an oft-quoted statistic that it takes a prospect at least 7 contacts with you to become a customer.

So the bottom line is that if they only see your product and sales letter once the chances are that they won’t buy from you.

But if you can communicate on multiple occasions and keep sending them back to your website to see your sales letter then you have a much better chance of selling to them.

So how you do this is by capturing their email address and name on your website so that you have their permission (no SPAMMERS here please!) and details to keep contacting them.

Now there are various ways of doing this which I mention in more detail in Chapter 8.

But for the purposes of your understanding please go to www.ebookcashsecrets.com which is one of my affiliate sites.

There is a grey “hover-over box” on the page which asks for people’s details in exchange for a free internet marketing course.

Once they sign up … BANG they are in my auto responder and get email messages every other day from me which give them great free information and give them a link to send them back to the website.

Beyond this one product people are also now on my email list for as long as they choose to be.

So I can send them information on my new blog posts, promotional offers, I can send them surveys (so I can understand better what they are looking for), a newsletter and the list is endless.

All of these things help me build a relationship with my prospects and customers and in the long term they get lots of great free valuable information and I increase my sales considerably - a definite Win-Win situation!

But here’s the big note of caution – you need to be careful with email as if you send untargeted, poorly written or overly promotional email to your list they will soon get fed up with you and unsubscribe from your list.

That’s all for this weeks tip.

Happy marketing

John Hillage