Now I’m no dummy when it comes to blogging. For a couple of years Wordpress has been my weapon of choice, and I use it for nearly everything, from simple mini sites to complex datafeed driven sites.
 
I like to think I know how to do almost anything with Wordpress and technically I do. Financially I’m not doing bad either.
 
But  I can see already from Yaro’s course that I’ve been missing out on the strategic side, on the overall vision. On the "where am I going with these blogs?"  and  the "how am I going to get there?".
 
You’re probably in the same boat as me. You blog. You do well. But not as well as you know you could.
 
Well, if you let him, Yaro will take you there with his excellent Blog Mastermind training

Here’s what you’ll find in the Blog Mastermind weekly lessons, using text, audio and video to show you:

·        How to set up and optimize your blog for explosive growth from day one

·        How to create blog content that magnetically attracts devoted readers

·        The exact traffic techniques that took Yaro’s blog from 0 to 5,000+ daily readers

·        Super-advanced traffic techniques to really ramp up growth

·        How to make REAL money with your blog - monetization secrets

·        How to turn your blog into a real business (Or, "How to Work Less and Earn More")

·        BONUS Advanced Module: Lessons From Professional Bloggers

And here’s the core training you get as a member:

ü  Lesson 1: Let’s Get Blogging!

ü  Lesson 2: Blog Foundations

ü  Lesson 3: RSS, Social Proof & Plug-ins

ü  Lesson 4: Finalizing Your Blog Structure

ü  Lesson 5: Set Up Key Content Pages

ü  Lesson 6: Content Focus and Structure

ü  Lesson 7: Authentic Content

ü  Lesson 8: Personal Branding and Sourcing Content

ü  Lesson 9: Hiring Bloggers

ü  Lesson 10: Copywriting For Blogs

ü  Lesson 11: Marketing Through Conversations

ü  Lesson 12: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 1 - Forums

ü  Lesson 13: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 2 - Article Marketing & Blog Carnivals

ü  Lesson 14: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 3 - Guest Writing

ü  Lesson 15: Search Engine Optimization For Blogs

ü  Lesson 16: Impact Marketing

ü  Lesson 17: Podcasting

ü  Lesson 18: Publicity

ü  Lesson 19: The Traffic Secret Every Blogger Knows

ü  Lesson 20: The Monetization Process

ü  Lesson 21: Contextual Advertising

ü  Lesson 22: Affiliate Marketing

ü  Lesson 23: Direct Advertisers

ü  Lesson 24: Five Powerful Ways To Make Money With Your Blog

ü  Lesson 25: Email List Profits

ü  Lesson 26: Buying and Selling Blogs

ü  Lesson 27: Blogging As A Business

I didn’t realize it was so few, and I almost feel ashamed about my output.

What it does go to show though, is that unlike the majority of people who write marketing and online business ezines,  I don’t rely on them to make an income, so I don’t have to send you 3 or 4 ’sales pitches" a week J

Probably (and I haven’t done the figures, so this is only a guess) 90 percent of my earnings come from non internet marketing niches. It might be an even higher figure.

To cut what could be a long story short, because I want to give you the chance to get Adrian’s software before they’ve all gone (you’ll never find a lower cost toolset, so grab it) I want to say that things are changing around here and I’m going to start passing on more of more knowledge, and more frequently.

So I hope you don’t get sick of too many newsletters from me

What I’d like you to do, if you can spare a few minutes, is give me some thoughts on what you’d like to see from me, what you’d like to see me write about or do for you.

Do you simply want more newsletters which are a mix of product reviews, news, and advice?

A low-cost member site where I pass on all my knowledge to you?

Ebooks, reports, and other tutorials?

Let me know

phil

Unlike most Internet Marketers who casually write the words "good friend" I mean it. Adrian and I have been writing to each other for more years than I can recall, and I’ve been using his software since before I was born.

Well perhaps that’s a tiny little bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve definitely been using his $67 Easy Clickmate Clickbank software (to power the affiliate program for my Mini Site Profits site, and a number of other sites) since he compiled it years ago.

And over the years it’s worked perfectly and helped make me a lot of that ‘m-o-n-e-y’ word that we’re not supposed to use in emails these days because email filters don’t
like it.

To cut a potentially long story short, because it’s quite late at night here in Australia and I was up very early, Adrian has just put together a sale of his products (the first ever) at
the very-much-a-bargain price of $49.97 (for the lot)

http://philwiley.com/recommends/summerbargain/

The main product offered (well ‘I’ think it’s the main one but you might think the others more important) is the $67 Easy Click Mate which is an essential Clickbank management tool.

The biggest problem with Clickbank is that there are no stats provided. Now, with the EasyClickMate (just updated to a new 2008 version) you can see exactly how many visitors individual affiliates are sending your way, and see the hits to sales ratio, and other useful stats. Plus other benefits, of course, like it allows you to mass email all your affiliates, and unlike using the standard Clickbank setup affiliates will receive an email each time they make a sale - which is important for helping motivate them into making more effort to make yet more sales.

This software is great if you have a product of your own that you sell through Clickbank.

One excellent thing it does is make it harder for people to cheat your affiliates out of their commissions (by substituting their Clickbank nickname in place of the affiliate who sent them to your site). Making your - all important - affiliates more faithful to you.

I’m probably not explaining this too well because I’m so tired after being up for over 18 hours now

But believe me, it’s much simpler than I just tried to explain, and twice as useful

You’re better off looking at the sale page that Adrian has put together, where you can see that he’s also offering the $47 Easyclick404 script, and his $67 Easyclickguard tool (a download protector to stop people pirating or sharing your product), plus some unannounced bonuses.

All for a grand total of under $50.

http://philwiley.com/recommends/summerbargain/

I use all of these products, and they’re all something I wouldn’t want to do online business without.

$49 something is a real bargain, because the usual price for the 3 products (plus the 2 unannounced bonuses) is $325.

Actually I’ll tell you what the bonuses are because they’re not mentioned anywhere on the sales page.

You’ll get the very useful $47 AffiliateShield (delivered to you 30 days later) and the $97 Power-RSS (delivered to you 61 days later). Look them up on Google

They’re both very good products, making this package an incredible bargain.

You can get it here:

http://philwiley.com/recommends/summerbargain/

BTW the offer is only running for 2 more days only, or until 300 packages have run out of the door - whichever comes first. So you should get it right now ,or face missing out.

But what I found more disappointing was the behavior of the crowds who had turned up to see it. After queuing to get in, I found myself repelled by the orderly queue inside the gallery, where everyone just shuffled along patiently waiting their turn to view the next piece of art.

Some people were pontificating over the flimsiest of sketches, analyzing each slash of the charcoal to educate, or more likely bore, their companions. And the people behind them in the queue, waiting their turn in front of the sketch, stood in placid  acceptance. Not me. I lasted about 2 minutes before breaking ranks and walking into the middle of the first exhibition room. I just ‘couldn’t’ join in with the masses. To me it seemed almost the opposite of art, or perhaps the queue itself was a surreal piece of artwork escaped from the brush of Dali, or flown in from the Tate Modern in London to stun the Australian’s into submission.

Two rooms on I found that the queue had dwindled, as people had lost patience or come to the conclusion that they were acting like sheep, or lemmings.

Meanwhile, I simply stood in the center of the rooms I wandered into, and scanned for something which grabbed my attention (perhaps a bold use of color, or the way that the eyes in some portraits seem to latch on to you) and I went over and looked at it.

This meant that I’d finished looking an hour before my companions, so I sat down on a central bench to write this.

And my main though was that Picasso would probably have been amused, even laughed out loud, at the docility and lack of life on display in the queue.

This can - sort of - be related back to Internet Marketing. Well I’m going to try anyway

Here’s my attempt. And my true thoughts:

Don’t join the placid queue (the masses) and shuffle along.

But later today (30th June) they’re closing their doors to new members for 3 months and when they reopen the price will double.

If you get in today though, you’ll be "grandfathered" in and you will get the new stuff at the current low price.

BTW, during the shutdown, current members and people who join today, will still get the regular as clockwork great content.

Plus get all the new stuff when it’s ready.

The private label rights content that Daniel and Marc provide is extremely good value, and they’ve always worked very hard to keep their members happy. And the quality is the best private label writing I’ve ever seen…the Rolls Royce of PLR

Others agree. In fact, Daniel says that the main reason members leave is they just don’t have time to use all the content that PLRPro provides.

So that’s mainly what the revamp is about. Daniel’s shown me what they’ve got planned, and I can see it’s mainly about automating their services by integrating site building tools (including Wordpress) into the system, and traffic generation systems.

Among the new benefits and tools are:

# All content is going to be silo and LSI ready to build perfectly structured sites. (meaning the articles will rank higher in the search engines.

# The overall quality of the content will (somehow) be increased

# There will be a "central bank" of content that you’ll be able  to draw on for reviews on various products, and you’ll be able to automatically pre-fill your affiliate ids into that content (instant affiliate sites)

# You’ll have an option to create a spun version of all content on the fly.

# You’ll have an option to easily rewrite each article yourself from within the system and it will give you important data such as how unique the article has become after your changes.

There will also be an integrated site management system. (as an owner of a lot of sites I know how important this part is. It’s a real drag to manually maintain dozens or hundreds of sites).

With the site building software that will come as part of the new setup you’ll be able to:

# choose between Wordpress and HTML platforms to create your your sites (you can still use the content on your existing sites or sites you build manually of course)

# there will be a "bank" of over 100 templates for each style.

# using drag and drop style features you’ll be able to do things like add Amazon modules, and YouTube videos, etc. (a bit like the way you do it in Squidoo)

And more. But if I keep writing about it you’ll never get there before the deadline which is creeping ever closer. Oh, quick, I forgot to mention the promotion and traffic driving capabilities.

# if you choose to you’ll be able to plug into the PLRpro blog network (which will be significantly beefed up and enhanced)

# use the Web 2.0 bookmarking services - Daniel says nothing out there currently can match the system they have.

# use the RSS Bookmarking and Blog & Ping tools.

# have a choice of using the article distribution service throughout similar sites in the network.

# and you can also choose to integrate with current traffic systems like Traffic Kahuna and a few others.

Enough?  I think so

It’s going to be a knockout. I’ve been using their services for years now and can’t wait to get my hands on the new setup.

http://www.plrpro.com/philwiley/

Even though I’ve done hardly been able to do anything since April my earnings have hardly faltered. This is because:

a) many of the affiliate programs I concentrate on promoting are those which offer recurring income. Membership sites are probably the first thing that popped into your head, but there are many other affiliate programs which offer recurring payouts.

Getting people to sign up for web hosting, where they might stay for many years and you get a monthly or annual cut, is an obvious one. Paid newsletter subscriptions is another. Less obvious are products like food supplements, eczema treatments, genital wart or hemorrhoid creams where people keep buying the product month after month.

——– side note ———–

An offline idea that might work is to cut a deal with a local gymnasium or health club that doesn’t have a site and ’sell’ monthly or annual memberships on their behalf by creating a locally oriented fitness site that heavily promotes their services. Or by developing a web presence promoting the gym where people are made an introductory offer via a discount
coupon which is tagged to you. If the gym later reneges on the deal you simply cut a similar deal with one of their competitors and switch your traffic over to your new partner.

In fact, if you put some thought into this you can probably do a similar thing for lots of different businesses.

——————————-

To get back to what I was saying about recurring, or residual, earnings, when I quit my job years ago, to work online full-time, I took out medical insurance which would pay me around $1k a week if I got sick. But I’ve never been able to make a claim on it because of all the residual earnings pouring in from my web sites.

A couple of days ago I took some time out to look back through years of banking and accounting records. And I can plainly see shifts in where the earnings come from. In the first few years they came from a mix of mini sites and this ezine. Apart from recommending useful books and software here, I also sold advertising, running as many as a dozen ads in each issue.

Later I expanded a few of my most successful mini sites, and later still got into the Adsense site building craze and devoted most of my time to churning out sites. This worked spectacularly for a couple of years before Google turned the screws.

And now, over the past few years, the bulk of my earnings come from a select number of high quality sites that mainly use a blend of rewritten private label articles (PLR) and rewritten press releases.

It’s the first thing that people see, and it either grabs their attention or it doesn’t which means they might move on without even taking a look at the content.

So here’s a big tip. What you should do is try and write article or blog post titles like the stuff on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Reader’s Digest and other magazines with huge sales.

Reader’s Digest cover

Cosmopolitan cover

Notice how both these magazines, Cosmo and Readers Digest, use a lot of numbers in their teasers.

"41 Things doctors Never Tell You."

"25 Great Places to Visit for Free"

"No Hassle Flying: 18 Insider Tips"

"7 New Ways To Be Happy"

"50 Things That’ll Make Him Worship You"

They use them because they work, and a LOT of work goes into creating them. They’re tested and tweaked to get them perfect to attract people to buy/to read the magazine. So if they work on mags they’ll work online too.

So stand in a magazine store and make a note of some of them, or you can see them online at places like

Magazine http://magazine.com/

and Magazine City http://www.ccgdata.com/index.html

Learn from them…and also just adapt one to suit your article or blog post.

But I never managed it.

If I could have written about just one product from everything released in the past eight or nine weeks it would have been this one.

Way back in 2004, I named "Success Alert Volume 1" as my book of the year. And this one carries on where the other left off, with nine in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs making huge sums on the Internet. You don’t just read their success  stories though. These people give you a lot of step by step info on exactly how they do it.

I also like the way that John provides you a neat summary of the most relevant facts after each chapter, making sure that you don’t miss any of the valuable tips.

Highly Recommended: "Success Alert 2 - Conversations with MORE Successful Internet Entrepreneurs " by John Evans.

More on this book some other time, but that’s it for today.

According to research reported in New Scientist magazine I’m not alone: 1 in 29 people have a 50 per cent higher chance of being involved in an accident than the rest of the population, and I’m certainly one of them. Though strangely I walked away without a scratch from the craziest, most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, which  was crouching down in the middle of the Ball of Death (back in my newspaper photography days) while stunt riders raced around and above me at high speed on motorbikes.

In the past 15 years, and this is in no particular order, I’ve been:

# drenched in acid (luckily a diluted one) and raced to hospital where I had the embarrassment of my clothes disintegrating and falling off in front of dozens of people while I stood there screaming in agony.

# bitten by a vicious fish which wouldn’t let go and had to be cut off my body with a knife, and also badly stung by a jellyfish.

# stepped backwards into a freshly dug grave and nearly stayed there for ever.

#  fallen out of a helicopter which was flying almost on its side so I could get better photographs of a crashed fighter jet. Sounds dramatic but I was on a 6 foot safety rope so all it did was jolt me around and terrify me and the pilot.

# attacked by bats in a cave in the Borneo jungle, and had to be tested for various bat borne diseases. Why the bats ignored my companions to zoom in on me is a mystery.

# gassed by fumes from ancient disintegrating negatives in a newspaper office after attempting to carry them out of the building to protect my colleagues (after I collapsed the building was evacuated and it took 3 firemen in full chemical protection suits to remove the negs) and had to be raced to hospital where I was given three sponge baths by nurses but was too out of it to enjoy the experience and spent several days there recovering.

# ended up in hospital yet again when I got my head sliced open by a high-speed ceiling fan and fell to my knees with blood squirting everywhere. Many stitches later, and after a night in bed, they decided I was well enough to go home but I fainted before I’d left the hospital and they had to keep me another night

# suffered severe whiplash while riding on the hood of a speedway car.

# tossed and then crushed by a rodeo bull. This was my worst injury and put me in intensive care for a while, followed by 6 weeks unable to get out of bed.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, why not? :)  And I’d like you to get to know me better

But the main reason is that  I had another bad accident. Just a few days after writing my previous newsletter I fell off a ladder and smashed myself up quite a bit, and I’ve hardly been able to do anything for the past two months.

Luckily my feet were only about five or six feet off the ground when the ladder tipped backwards, and I landed flat on my back on the lawn (lawns are hard in Australia because of the dry soil). But I still couldn’t get up for about 10 minutes, maybe longer. I guess I’ve got no idea how long I actually laid there. And I couldn’t stand up, I had to crawl to the house.

Even though I landed on my back/shoulders and banged my head, it’s my front that got hurt. I self-diagnosed myself with cracked or broken ribs and didn’t go to the hospital because I know from past experience that there’s nothing they can do about them. A few weeks ago I finally gave in and saw a doctor, who told me off for not getting attention earlier, and  discovered that I’d ruptured ligaments where my ribs attach to my sternum, cracked a couple of ribs, and tore muscles around my left shoulder and in my side. ( my back, strangely enough, has been fine )

Anyway, I’ve hardly done any work since I fell, because of the pain, and from being so tired all the time (whenever I turned over in bed the pain made me wake up).

But now, at last, I’m recovering.

I can see now how people can get killed falling short distances. I’d hate to think what would have happened to me if I’d fallen just twice as far.

So what’s all this got to do with internet business?

Well nothing actually

Except, perhaps, my own theory that I have so many accidents because I’m always willing to try new things. Even though I might not look it, I’m an action man :)  A life is for living, and never say no if I think it will be fun, person.

And it’s the same online, where I’m always testing new methods of earning. Always trying exploring new, or undiscovered, niche markets. Always trying new tools and new techniques. The Internet changes and the bottom line is that you need to adapt with those changes or be left behind.

Important Note:  having said that, I’d also like to add that it’s very important  that you don’t just jump from one new trend to another so fast that you never achieve anything.  So do take time out to try test new methods, but keep your core business running, and only devote part of your time to exploring different ideas or new trends.

We’d just seen a presentation on PPC (pay per click marketing) and you could see in Jay’s eyes that a fire had just been sparked, and that he was burning with enthusiasm and eager to get back home to Australia to start work.

During that presentation, something had just clicked, and Jay already knew that his destiny lay with PPC.

Since then the un-named guru has gone underground, vanishing from the public eye because of his huge PPC success, and Jay has gone from nowhere to a pay per  click millionaire, and creator of SpeedPPC, the best  PPC software in the world.

SpeedPPC was publicly released in the middle of last year to critical acclaim, and a few months later, when Jay flew back to America to a PPC seminar, 8 out of the 9 speakers used and recommended SpeedPPC, most of them openly during their presentations.

Today Jay, and his business partner the legendary affiliate marketer Allan Gardyne, have released the next generation
of the software.

And based almost completely upon user feedback from those PPC masters, they’ve taken it up several notches to previously undreamed of levels of automation and speed.

If you’re already into pay per click (and the vast majority of successful affiliates and product owners are) you’re almost certainly already using SpeedPPC, so make sure you upgrade immediately because it’s got some brilliant new features.

And if you’re new to pay per click, or you want to try your hand at it,  I’d go as far as saying that without the automation and speed that this software delivers you just can’t compete.

It gives you the ability to turn pay per click professional in one swift step. It’s that good.

And this launch week there’s the added incentive of $100 off the price, and also 12 months access to Jay and Allan’s private in-house Clickbank data mining tool.

This is an unreleased tool that they use themselves to follow the trends in CB, to see what products are emerging and getting popular, and then lets you export that data directly into the SpeedPPC landing page datafeed software.

Sounds complicated doesn’t it?

But just about everything in SpeedPPC is automated, and what it means is that it finds the next successful product in CB, sucks it into it’s robotic innards and creates an advertising campaign around the product, and then automatically builds a landing page/squeeze page and puts it all up online for you, while you think of making yourself a cup of coffee but then realize you don’t have time because SpeedPPC has already finished its work and raced off into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

(note: SpeedPPC doesn’t just work with Clickbank products. That’s just a bonus )