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

 

 

Hi everyone - this week’s been a pretty cool one for me so far. I had my first trip to Wembley Stadium to see my football team the “mighty” Stockport County on Monday in the Play Off Finals.

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

 

 

Hi everyone – I am currently in the midst of changing things around a little and plan to provide an ezine as well as regular blog posts too.

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).

 

 

Hi - This week’s post is short and sweet as I am wanting to check out exactly what kind of information you hope to read on this blog.

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

 

 

 

 

After a lot of blood, sweat and yes a few tears! I have finally completed my new internet marketing resource “The Proven Internet Profit System”.

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

 

 

Hi - I’m back again with the latest extract from my brand new product “The Proven Internet Profit System” which is due for release in the next 7 days (and if you want to be one of the first to know when it’s released - make sure that you use the sign up box on the top right hand side of the blog).

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

 

 

In my new product “The Proven Internet Profit System” (due for release in the next 2 weeks) I teach all about using Google Adwords for maximum profit.

But I also reveal my five favorite other traffic methods that I will outline below:

So here’s what I use……..

1. Other pay per click programs namely Yahoo and MSN …

For Yahoo go to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/index.php?&abr=2022403519 and for MSN go to https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

They are similar to Adwords in their basic concept but the set up can take a little learning - but both have good support and tutorials for you to learn this stuff pretty easily

They don’t get anywhere near as much traffic as Google but are the “best of the rest” in my opinion.

A quick and simple way to use them is just take your top 5 keywords and throw them into Yahoo and MSN campaigns.

Don’t worry so much about your big keyword lists as the relatively low number of clicks you will get on them means that often they are likely to be more hassle to set up than they are worth with Yahoo and MSN.

Remember you are looking for the “best bang for your buck” when looking at traffic sources - not to do all 77 perfectly; there simply isn’t time in the day!

2. Articles

Articles are a great way of establishing credibility in a niche and driving traffic for no money to your site (notice I don’t say free as articles cost you time to write and post so very clearly not FREE traffic).

You should write articles about 600-800 words long with the following 3 step formula:

• Tell them what the articles about
• Give Them The Content
• Tell Them What You Just Told Them

And don’t forget to have your web address in the resource box as that’s how you get “paid” for writing the article.

You may have heard of bum marketing which is a way of a writing articles to hopefully get on to the front page of Google for your keyword or phrase and is very clever.

Go to www.BumMarketingMethod.com to get a great free course on using this.

Some of the best sites to submit articles to are:

www.GoArticles.com

www.ArticleAlley.com

www.ArticlesBase.com

www.ArticlesFactory.com

www.EzineArticles.com

www.IdeaMarketers.com

www.SearchWarp.com

www.Squidoo.com

You can do this manually OK but there is a great tool that I highly recommend called http://www.submityourarticle.com/

This will automatically post your articles to all the top directory sites on the web – it does up to 8 per month - and if you can post that many articles per month you will be doing very well.

3. Forum Marketing

This is not a million miles from article marketing but a lot quicker -

Go to popular forums in your niche and submit helpful answers and interesting questions (but don’t spam).

Make sure the sites allow you to put your web address in the signature box when you post - otherwise it’s a wasted effort.

People who like your answers may well check your site out - giving you more no cost traffic.

But be disciplined and don’t spend 3 hours reading posts and call it work!!

4. Joint Ventures

This is a great and very lucrative way of getting traffic.

Find other webmasters in your niche who have lists of subscribers and get them to promote your product as a JV partner.

Contact them by email first - explaining the great benefits of your product to their list and also the healthy commission they will make.

If they don’t reply to email get on the phone and speak to them.

My best Joint Venture took about 2 months to set up (with emails and phone calls just to get them to send 1 little email that I pre-wrote for them!)

But when it converted to literally hundreds of sales and new subscribers I was double pleased I made the effort.

And that’s another great tip - provide JV partners with pre-written emails to save them time and make them more likely to say “yes”.

Just Google on your various keywords to find the top websites then list their details off methodically and make contact - it’s that simple!

5. Blogging

Having your own blog is a great way to drive traffic and keep your prospects interested.

You can put tips, ideas, articles (that you have already written!) on there and tell people to go take a look and add their comments.

Pretty soon you can get quite a community feel going on there which ultimately means loyalty to you (and $$’s in your pocket when it comes to selling product).

There are clever but simple things you can do like blogging and pinging, “digging” and all sorts to get your blog well-linked and all over the blog.

I learnt a lot of this recently from the excellent free eBook “Become a Wordpress Guru in 24 Hours” by Tony Shepherd which you can get at:

http://www.jobhaters.com/wpg/

Happy marketing

John Hillage

 

 

Hi all and welcome to this week’s blog post.

I’m just getting ready to launch my brand new system in the very near future that will teach you every step that you need to take to run your own profitable online business from A-Z.

So over the next few weeks I will be posting just a few of the subjects that are covered in my system to give you a feel for what it is all about.

This week I will reveal the 3 ways to create an Ebook:

Option 1 Outsource

If you want someone else to write go to www.Elance.com or www.Guru.com and post for someone to write it for you.

I will add below an example of the type of post I made for a recent book that got me loads of great responses, so use this as a bench mark:

Project Description for Report related to X

Description: I need a writer to write a report for me the topic of X that consists of 20000 words (not including titles, headers or anything that is not pure content). This will involve working knowledge of X so ideally suit X, Y and Z individuals with experience in this area. Please use Private Message Board for further info.
Thanks for reading my post.

Keep it this brief and give more details on the private message board - otherwise any snooping marketer can go in and read your post and try to copy your product idea.

Now one thing you may wonder is how big should your eBook be …

Well different people will tell you all kinds of things but in non-internet marketing niches I feel that there needs to be a lot of content - to give people a sense of buying something “valuable” (which will greatly reduce any refund requests too).

I tend to think that an eBook should be a minimum of 100 pages and up to about 250 pages in a niche market.

And pages in an eBook are always double spaced - so in “real world” pages that is 50-125 pages of a Word Document.

In certain niches like internet marketing, investing etc. you can get away with a lot less.

For example some super-duper guaranteed formula to double your returns on Forex trading might only be 2 or 3 pages but sell for $197.

This is because the information can be seen as so valuable (e.g. it will make you $3000 in the first month of using it) that people are happy to pay $197 for such a tiny document.

Now who wouldn’t be prepared to pay $197 to make $3000?

But in most niche markets like model airplanes, wine collectors, yoga enthusiasts it is not so easy to quantify the information in pure finance terms; so you need much more content and perceived value.

So working on the above principles I usually look to have about 20000 words and this gives you a real good meaty eBook.

So that’s a quick blueprint of paying someone else to do it.

Option 2 Joint Venture with an expert in the field

I did this with an expert for my most successful eBook to date.

She wrote the ebook and I took care of the rest - the formatting of the book, building the website and the marketing - and we split the profits 50-50.

This is a great way to go if you are on a low budget as it costs nothing to do and splits the tasks down.

In addition you get to concentrate on honing your skills in the most profitable area which is the actual marketing of the product not the creation of the product.

That is really important learning point for you to remember - the product itself will not make you rich.

It is the skills you develop in promoting that product (through writing effective sales copy, sending emails, mastering ppc, writing great promotional articles etc.) that bring in the cash.

Option 3 Write it yourself

This is the least favoured option as it takes a long time to do.

And when you have finally completed the book you then have to start doing all the marketing too - so it can take some time to get your product out into the marketplace.

The longer it takes, the more frustrating it gets and the less likely it is that the product will ever be successfully created and marketed and make you a profit.

If you are serious about writing your own product there is one really great and low cost eBook that you should consider getting yourself that will wipe weeks or months off the time that it takes to do it:

http://www.proveninternetprofit.com/7dayebook.html

So take your pick and get your eBook created as quickly as possible, so that you can then get to the marketing of it.

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

 

 

Before I jump right into this week’s online business tip about Google I have two words for you …

GLOBAL WARMING!

Seriously what else could be responsible for the absolute freakish weather last Sunday on the South Coast of England?

Thick snow on an April morning (the like of which I have NEVER seen in 10 years of living down here) that was almost completely gone by lunch time due to the excessive sun and heat that followed!

Strange stuff indeed, but possibly not as strange as one amazing “letter to the editor” in my local paper (The Portsmouth News) about global warming.

This obviously well-read respondent wrote in to say that he didn’t recycle as he felt that global warming was pretty much made up and asked the editor the following highly sophisticated question:

“how can me sorting my old tins and newspapers out possibly stop a polar bear from drowning?”

Well with people like that on the earth … quite frankly I’m scared!

Anyway global politics over … on to Google.

As you may well be aware Google has just begun to enforce its latest changes to Adwords Policy namely that:

“Display URLs for new ads will be required to match their Destination/landing page URLs, without exception.”

If this may affect you I would check out the full details at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=91451&hl=en_GB

and if not then I wouldn’t worry about it!

But my point is not this individual issue but the tendency that Google has to be always updating its rules and the impact that this can have on your business.

Now at the start of April I am about 95% sure that some of my competitors in a particular niche that I work in were breaking these rules; as the number of competing ads in my niche almost halved on Google over night.

This meant some great returns for me in the short term but now these ads are coming back so it’s more like business as usual.

But Google can do this and disable your business for a few days or maybe for good if it brings in new changes that your site does not comply with.

And the tough thing is Google always make it so darned hard to ever know what it wants anyway!

So if all your eggs are in the Google Adwords basket you could be in trouble.

To ensure that Google doesn’t come along and wipe all your income in the flick of a keyboard you need to diversify and not be reliant on just 1 traffic stream.

Since suffering the first “Google Slap” one of my main goals has to been to widen my traffic sources much more and I am doing this every week.

I have used other ppc search engines (Yahoo and MSN), blogging and articles in the main.

And I am now experimenting more with social networking sites and forum marketing.

Because the more different streams of traffic you have the safer you are, and the more profitable you’ll be.

I recently invested in a great e-book entitled Free Traffic Voodoo by one of my favourite “underground marketers” from Greece called George Katsoudas.

George teaches you how to get loads of free traffic with some very crafty techniques.

I’ve written a brief review of this e-book which you can read at http://johnhillage.com/product-reviews/free-traffic-voodoo-by-george-katsoudas/

Check out if you’re interested and remember that whatever you do; it’s essential for you to start working on new traffic sources today.

Happy Marketing …

John Hillage

 

 

I went swimming this Monday as I am desperately trying to win a bet with my wife.

We are both trying to lose 14 lbs in a month and the winner gets … well I’m not sure really maybe bragging rights or a years supply of cakes or something?!

Maybe we should discuss this a bit more!

Anyway as I was walking to the pool I was suddenly engrossed in thinking “what the heck should I write about in this week’s blog post”.

I was getting quite into my thoughts and trying to wrack my brains.

Then it literally him me in the face …

The pavement that is!

I got myself so engrossed in my thoughts that I tied my bike up to a lamp post, walked about a yard forwards and fell flat on my face over a metal knee high boundary fence … crrrrunch!

What an absolute donkey I felt … and to make matters worse 2 other people witnessed the whole scene!

Oddly though they neither laughed or came to my aid, but just carried on walking.

I guess us British folk just don’t like any fuss and to be honest I was bloody glad too!

Anyway I took my crimson face into the pool and then whilst doing a few lengths I got to thinking of a dream I had the previous night …

This involved me teaching my old MLM mentor and lots of other mad MLM junkies how to market using email.

Now I did a catalogue MLM scheme called Kleeneze that was a ton of hard work and made me virtually nothing in 12 months!

It was the biggest “Rah-Rah” hyped-up nonsense you have seen where 95% of the people seemed to make nothing and grafted like hell!

What a waste of time and energy!

But I do have to say I’ve never been slimmer than that time - running around with catalogues and delivering household essentials like washing up brushes and tea towels with “funny” slogans on!

But the dream made a really good point … that there are probably tons of local businesses that could hugely benefit from learning the basics of email marketing, blogging, online surveys etc.

And I am sure that some of them would pay handsomely for the privilege.

So I plan to put up a site some time in the near future targeted at local businesses in my area and run some traffic there via some local newspaper ads.

I’ll probably give away a free report “20 ways to use the internet to boost your business” or something of that nature in exchange for their contact details.

And I will have my contact details in the report to encourage them to get in touch for a free consultation.

I really think this could do well and am sure that if you’ve been around the basics of online marketing for more than 10 minutes you’ll know about 99.9% more than most local businesses about marketing on the web.

Could you set yourself up as a local expert and sell your expertise in blogging, email marketing, pay per click traffic and the like?

I bet you could if you gave it a go.

Think about it …

This could be a great little stream of business to go alongside your other online ventures.

It’s always good to have a few streams of income … just in case one dries up for a while.

Food for thought I hope …. Until next time …

Happy Marketing …

John Hillage