Overture, when their keyword tool worked and showed number just like Google does now, inflated their numbers. Why? Well, why not? When you have a new advertiser come in, it is nice to be able to point them to the numbers and say “you see, you can have all this traffic. All you have to do is sign up with us”.

Now Google is doing the same thing. How do I know? I’m an Adwords advertiser and have been for awhile, so it’s not hard to figure out.

Let’s say I was at an average position of 2.3 for the keyword [keyword] (original – I know). Let’s say I was not budget, geographically, or schedule limited, which I was not. Let’s say that I had 1 keyword, [keyword], in 1 adgroup. Let’s say that in my Adwords account, they stated that I was getting 21,748 impressions every month. Let’s say that the Google keyword tool was showing that there are about 37,000 searches for [keyword] every month.

Wait… huh?

Am I saying that my statistics for my Adwords account was showing for every single search for [keyword]? I don’t know – I thought it was.

Am I instead saying that Google’s numbers are inflated? I don’t know – Overture’s was.

So somewhere something fishy is going on in the land of Mountainview. Why aren’t I showing up for almost half of the searches? I have no idea. Unfortunately I’ll probably never know. That’s the way Google works. Just be mindful of their numbers. They may not be the truth.

Here’s a very quick tip on how to write headlines that magnetically draw attention toward your sales letter/blog post. These headlines are 100% proven to drive people to click on your ad or read your sales copy. It’s sort of like the ultimate swipe file.

1. Go to EzineArticles.com and go to the home page. Click on the category that your niche is under. If your niche doesn’t have a category, I’m sorry, but this will not work.
2. Click on the first article in the category.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom. Look under the articles titled "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the…"
4. Take any one of those article titles. They are, by far, the most viewed articles in that niche. That means that someone has seen the article headline and clicked on it. It has drawn their attention and curiosity enough that they wanted to read that article.
5. If you’re curious, you can even click on the article, scroll down to the bottom and see how many times the article has been viewed. You’ll be very surprised as to how some articles draw a lot better than others do.
6. Change it very slightly, or even use it "as is". Your headline will now magnetically attract readers, no matter what the niche.

What you have there is pure gold. You can use those headlines to study which words work and which do not in your niche. You can use it to come up with product ideas, blog post ideas, article titles, and a few more things less obvious (use your imagination)

OR, try this… before you write your next sales copy or ad, write 3-5 very similar articles and use different headlines in each one. Submit them all to ezinearticles.com. See which one outperforms the other. This is a free way to test your headlines before you lose money due to non-performing sales copy.

I hope this tip helps you out a little bit. Any questions?

Ohh and happy 4th of July Americans.

For those who don’t know, network marketing is the business model in which independent representatives (sometimes called distributors) are the primary method for a company to market products. Think of Pampered Chef, Amway, Avon, Discovery Toys, etc. How did you hear about those products? Probably not from a Super Bowl commercial, but instead from a friend or family who is trying to sell them.

The Business Model

The business model runs off the extremely successful theory that the best type of marketing is word of mouth, or endorsement marketing. It has been around for decades and will be around for a long time to come. The commission structure is different for every company, but usually it is a multi-tiered commission structure.

For example, if I sign up under my sponsor, Person A, for every sale I make, not only do I get paid, but my sponsor (Person A) gets paid a small portion as well. If I sign up you, my reader (Person B), every sale you make will pay me a commission, and for some companies will also pay my sponsor, Person A, a commission as well. Terms such as upline, downline, "team", roll-up, one-up, two-up, residuals, and many more are used to describe the payment structure.

Network Marketing vs. MLM

Multi-level Marketing, or MLM, is a type of company that has multiple levels of commissions. Like the example above, if you, Person B, makes a sale, I get a commission, my sponsor (Person A) gets a commission, his sponsor gets a commission, and so on. For your first sale, everyone gets a commission except, well, you, the person who made a sale. Some companies (called 2-ups) even have the policy that you won’t get paid until after your first TWO sales.

MLM has had a very checkered past and does not enjoy the best of reputations. They have been hit pretty hard by the FTC and rightfully so. It is illegal (in the US) to require someone to join a program in order to sell it. For instance, it is illegal for the a company like the Global Resorts Network (GRN) to make you buy one of their vacation packages before you can sell it. This law came about when people were joining Amway, buying thousands of dollars of stuff in order to be able to sell it, and would go bankrupt because they couldn’t sell it.

The way current MLM companies get away with this type of practice is requiring what they call "qualifying sales". If you do not buy the product or service, the MLM company segregates you from the rest of the distributors who did, and requires you to make even more sales before you start receiving your commissions. It is not uncommon to have to make 5, 6, or even 10 sales before you get paid for your first sale. Even worse, all the people who sign up as distributors will be signed up under your sponsor instead of you, potentially costing you thousands of dollars.

As you can see, this is shady at best. Because of these practices, the MLM industry has gotten a bad name. It is so bad, in fact, that my best advertising ads included the phrase "NOT MLM!"

So the term "Network marketing" was born. Sometimes it is synonomous with MLM, sometimes it means something completely different, but the concept is the same. The MLM business model is slowly dying away but is being replaced with the direct sales model, in which you get paid, from day 1, for every sale you make. In addition, your sponsor will get paid, and that’s it.

The Stigma and How They Get You to Join

Quickly (maybe it’s obvious), I found out that the best people to join your "team" are those who want to start a business and market the product themselves, not someone who wants to buy the product just for the product. This way, you can take advantage of the residual income they make for you by selling the product (no advertising cost for me). I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch: what if, you were to get 5 people to join, and they got 5 people, and they got 5 people. It’d be easy to make millions! (in truth, you may get 5 people to join, but any one of those 5 people may get a total of 3 people, only 1 of which will actually make commissions for you, and it goes on from there)

So for you relatively advanced marketers, it should be obvious that the ideal persona for these companies is a business opportunity seeker with enough cash to spend a significant amount of money on advertising. In fact, the best chance to get someone in your downline is by recruiting them from another company. MLM is extremely incestuous, with the top earners usually coming off a bad experience with another company.

Herein lies the first fundamental problem of running a network marketing/MLM business online. I’ll discuss that in a second, but first I want to get into the basics of who profits from MLM companies.

Who Profits, and How Many Fail?

It should be obvious that the people who profit the most in an MLM company are those who are at the top. Who is higher than the original founders of the company? There are a few sporadic cases of extreme success sprinkled throughout the organization, but by and far the most successful people are the ones who "got in at the ground floor".

The reason behind this is one that not many people see right-off-the-bat. I’ll put it in another light.

What if I, right here and now, revealed that I was making about $100,000 a month in the croquet niche? Then I went on to say that the way I made this money was by selling croquet balls, and I told you who my manufacturer was, what my keywords were in Adwords that I was advertising on, where I placed my banner ads, etc. all for the low price of $39.99. Then I went on to say that you, too can get into the croquet niche, sell the same balls, and make the same amount of money? What would you do? Would you go out and start your own croquet site using all my information? Maybe some of you wouldn’t, but most of you would.

What just happened? I became rich selling croquet balls. Then, I got rich again, selling information on how to sell croquet balls. What else did I just do? I made it a million times harder to sell those croquet balls because my competition just went from 0 or very low to extremely high. The same thing happens over the lifetime of a MLM or network marketing company. As the number of distributors increase, so does competition.

Besides, what USP are they going to have? They haven’t been successful yet, so they can’t talk about that. If you couple this with the fact that most people who start a network marketing business do not have much experience in marketing and have very little time and money to devote to success, you get a failure rate of 98%.

Seriously, a failure rate of 98%

What I personally started to see is that as soon as the company started getting very popular, the top distributors in the company started accepting the fact that they would break even, or even lose money their first sale.

In my company, this was a $2,000 product that we were breaking even on!!

How can you possibly expect a new distributor to get started if they 1) have to pay for a $2,000 product, 2) don’t make money on any of their follow-on sales and instead make money from their residual check.

If you’re a numbers person, here are the graphs from the Direct Sales Association, the guys who want to legalize pyramid schemes:

Keep in mind, these are THEIR number, and they are estimates. (they’re still not good)…

US Sales (Worldwide is worse):

US Sales FORCE…

 From this data, this is what I have determined. Amount of sales, per person, per year (in dollars):

Now here’s the sick part. Amount of yearly sales, per person, after adjusted for inflation:

WOW! Not a very good trend, huh? Would you invest in a company with trends like this? Not only that, but the average person only sells about $2117 a year in the US and $1866 a year worldwide! That’s about $176 a month. And here’s the kicker: commission is usually around 10-20%, so that’s what, $17 a month? What kind of business is that? Do you think that offsets the fact that they had to buy hundreds of dollars of equipment to get started? Absolutely not. The numbers do not lie, folks.

They’re all Liars

So what drives so many people to network marketing? The money. There seriously is a lot of money to be made if you are successful, and the people who make the millions shine very brightly and attract a lot of distributors.

How do the new distributors attract other distributors when they don’t have a great success story? When a prospect calls and says "how much money have you made so far", how do they say, "Well, actually, I haven’t made any money, but I’m sure I will soon."

It’s simple… they lie.

I did it. Everyone under me did it. Everyone above me did it. I didn’t tell them over the phone that I was successful, but I did on my landing page. I joined a marketing company called Carbon Copy Pro. The landing page says "A Realistic $250k First Year Income". It tells the story of Jay Kubassek and how successful he was with this exact same marketing system.

I bet 80-90% of the people who opted into my system thought I was Jay Kubassek. They had no idea who I was until they bought from Jay me.

The Present and Future State of Network Marketing, Particularly Online

Network Marketing and MLM are here to stay. If you don’t think so, just google the term "business opportunity" and see what ads pop up. Advertising, however, is to the point where it is too expensive to compete unless you can make a significant amount of money on each sale. The companies where you make $5 or $12 a sale will not be able to advertise on any sort of bid-based medium (which most ad platforms are now)

The success rate will stay the same – around 2% – because most who join do not have the deep pockets or heavy time commitment required to participate in Web 2.0, pay-per-click, or banner advertising. That’s the statistics I saw in my business and that’s what I believe it will be.

Even though there are successes in this industry, I DO NOT recommend getting started in it. If its purely for the money, there are plenty of other ways to make just as much money online with a much higher success rate and in a much more honorable way.

I personally am quitting the company I’m in because I cannot market something that claims to be able to transform anyone into millionaires overnight and doesn’t deliver. After 9 months, I felt sleezier than ever before when I started to find out that the honeymoon may be over for my company. I would much rather focus on my guilt-free businesses.

Here’s a list of 5 sources of traffic that deliver extremely targeted, extremely low cost visitors to your site. I use them as lead generation/list building sources, and right now they’re very untapped. As I’ve hinted at before, I’m trying to find the time to put together a traffic-getting manual, but that’s looming in the near future. Here’s your good stuff now. I’ve actually seen someone try to sell these 5 secrets for $147, so consider yourself lucky.

1) eBay. That’s right, the 18th most trafficked site on the internet. Why is eBay #1? Because every single person that goes to eBay is looking to buy something. There is no more targeted buyer. From my experience, people are looking to buy stuff at garage sale prices, so when they see a $6 million ebook (or however much you charge for it), they won’t buy. They will, however, buy a stupid $3 report ***UPDATE: EBAY NO LONGER ALLOWS YOU TO SELL DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT. FIND A CHEAP PHYSICAL PRODUCT***. They probably won’t buy a $500 fishing rod (well, they will, but not necessarily all that much), but they will buy $1 lures in BULK.

To take advantage of this traffic, find a very cheap dropshipped item or fix up a PLR article and call it a special report and place an ad for it on eBay. Include your website. Start out small (like everything else), and optimize your ad so people click through just as much as they buy. Your goal is to break even with this. Let your mind wander with this: if you are selling a fishing eBook, sell fishing lures at-cost. Then upsell them once you have their email address.

You’ll be amazed at how targeted your traffic is, and it’s an extremely effective way to build a list. Just send them to a squeeze page, or place a popover on your home page. Do not underestimate the power of this one traffic source.

2) Amazon. See #1. The only reason why eBay is higher than Amazon is because it is much easier to sell junk on eBay, otherwise Amazon would be higher because the traffic is actually of better quality. I’m not an advocate of selling junk, but it’s a good way to generate leads Just think of all the stupid refrigerator magnets you have of different realtors (or am I the only one). It’s the same idea, except people will pay you for it.

3) Craigslist. I know, it’s getting very hard to sell on Craigslist these days, with phone verified accounts and all. Suck it up. There are ways around it. Sell the same stuff as in #1 and #2, AND even sell your main products. The traffic from CL is OK. It’s not great, but the key is in your posting city and category. Books have been written about it, and I really don’t want to spend much time on it. I honestly think the traffic isn’t worth the hassle for some markets, but others it’s a gold mine.

4) Affiliate Networks. What? But I thought these were secrets, you say? This one actually takes a little thought, so hear me out. The secret is not in the source, it’s how you use it. Let’s say, you’re in a crazy competitive market like, ohh, let’s say… ringtones. Who is the primary market for ringtones? (I haven’t done any market research on this, so don’t shoot me for generalizations) 14 year old teenage girls, right?

While there is no way you’re going to compete with marketers who are firmly entrenched in the ringtone market, you will be able to break into a market like the "how to get a boy to like me" market. Create a cheap (they are 14 after all) product like this and list it on the affiliate networks. The standard rules apply: maximize the affiliate’s cut, ensure you have a well converting page, etc. Then, after you’ve gotten them to give up their email from affiliates driving traffic to your site, send them the ringtone offers.

See, you need to know your market. I quickly found that one of the markets I was in didn’t make much money in the mainstream electronics I was selling. I actually was breaking even. I made my money on the accessories and other products down the line (upsells and cross-sells) in similar, but different markets. i.e. selling Star Wars stuff to people who buy Macs (or vice versa). Is that such a far stretch? Get affiliates to promote you in a not-saturated market and bring them into the saturated (but lucrative) markets you want to.

Did I explain that well enough? If not, let me know. I’m not the best of writers.

5) Offline Advertising. Am I crazy? Is there really a world offline? Yes, there are! And the best traffic you’ll ever get is the one who takes the time to write down your website, come online, and interact with you. No kidding. Postcard campaigns, direct mail, billboard, radio, and to some extent TV (although I would stay away from TV for now. I’m just not sure how effective it is with DVR) create the best leads you’ll ever get. Like always, you have to test and track, but do not overlook the power of offline advertising. At the very least it should be a part of your backend.

So there you have it. Leverage 3 of the top 20 most trafficked sites on the internet and you’ll be doing pretty well for yourself. Any questions?

BTW, even though this will get you some decent traffic pretty quickly, I haven’t told you the absolute best traffic secret I have. And it doesn’t have anything to do with search engines or social media. This secret is responsible for some pretty awesome traffic if you have a well monetized site. By awesome I mean a minimum 1 million visitors a month. Sorry guys, it will remain my secret for now

I’m subscribed to my competitor’s email lists, as you should be too. You will gain great insight into a niche, get great free content, and even better, know exactly who to contact when it comes time to JV with them when you launch a new product.

So out comes this message from my #1 competitor stating he has something big coming up. Then he goes on to explain what the new product will entail and to watch out for it on Tuesday. Wouldn’t you know, the description matched my product concept, almost word-for-word.

What was going to be a decent, $20-30k a month product that was rediculously easy to create and market because there is no direct competition will now require me to find a better USP, charge less, have a few less JV partners (because he has already partnered with a few others), etc.

The worst part? In my short list of maybe 15 different JV partner possibilities, I’m absolutely positive that at least 7-10 of them were going to accept a JV with me because my product was different enough from theirs that I could easily convince them to help me launch this product. Now I’m probably down to 3-4 at most.

Instead of being able to say, "it’s the only one of its kind online", my USP now has to be something like "it’s the least expensive of its kind, or best of its kind or has the most features" or something along those lines.

That is how business goes. I could just as easily switch directions and scrap this product. Instead, I am just going to make it much better and be able to market it better.

That, IMHO, is the difference between the super successful and the semi-successful. Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome.

What do you think?

I will make the disclaimer that the two products I link to, Terry Dean’s List Building product and Brian and Tony Clark’s Teaching Sells, have both made me lots of money and they are two of the best products I can recommend.

I am working on something to give to you for free, though. Something that I get a lot of questions about:

Traffic.

John Reese is going to re-release his Traffic Secrets course. Let me ask you this: what do you think is his "secret"? There is no secret. It’s pretty simple, and the ways to generate traffic, I guarantee you already know about. I’m going to write them down and explain in general terms how each one works, and then in the blog I’ll expand. If you think it’s incredibly hard to get over a million visitors a month, after you read this book I’m going to write, you’ll ask yourself, "that’s it?"

I would like you to realize what John Reese is doing: it’s taught in Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, and they even talk about this specific tactic: he just released a "spy" photo of his product, Traffic Secrets 2.0. Even though it’s months away from being released, he’s starting to generate buzz.

Then he goes on and talks about the box, how pretty it is and it was specifically designed to help you return it if you need to. What does that sound like? A USP (Unique Selling Proposition), maybe? It’s also a reason to release the photo to generate buzz. He can’t just say "I released this picture of the box because I want to generate buzz so more people will buy this overpriced product", can he? Nope, instead he has a reason for the photo.

What other reasons does he have to come up with?

• The reason for scarcity when it comes time to launch the product, like he’s only going to sell 1,000 products, or at midnight he’ll shut the doors forever and you’ll never get a chance to buy the product again, or perhaps he’ll have some dumb bonus that will only be included for the first 50 purchases.
• The reason for relaunching the product. Can anyone say "my server crashed?"
• The difference between Traffic Secrets 1.0 and 2.0 and why those who bought 1.0 need 2.0

You see, launching a product is really standard. Once you do it yourself, you can spot the tactics a mile away, and they’re the same story over and over. That’s because it works, and works extremely well. You should think about incorporating this into everything you sell.

Ohh, and I just bought a new house My wife and I are very happy.

According to the stats, for the last week, I’ve actually been up to 103,212 and even at one point last week I think I saw 90,300. I’ll tell you this: I’ve doubled my traffic since last week, so my stats should be better, not worse. Strike 1.

According to some comparisons with some other internet marketing blogs I read, I surpassed Marcus Hochstadt and John Cow at the end of April with reach (I used reach because rank was unreadable and cow has since surpassed me last week) and caught up with the famous/infamous James Brausch about 10 days ago. James ranks in the top 10 for "internet business" (well, his .com site does), Marcus ran a great big promotion right about when I supposedly surpassed his ranking, and John Cow is presently running a big promotion. Strike 2.

This is obviously my first internet marketing blog. While I run a few other sites, this is my newest one (until next week), and none of them are internet marketing/business related. They get 10-20 times the traffic this blog gets, yet every single one of them is ranked lower than this 2-month-young blog. Strike 3.

Flash over to Compete.com, where I’m not even on their radar yet. YET:

Wow. Much better. It’s like someone removed the wool from our eyes. It’s ridiculous how Alexa relies so heavily upon their toolbar to get statistics. They just changed their algorithm from "bad" to "bad". Good change.

If you advertise at all, which you should, there is really only one way to figure out if that site is good for you: test. Quantcast and Alexa give you some good demographic data. If that matches your target demographic, throw up an ad and track it. After 2 months, if you aren’t in a seasonal business and you can justify an ROI, continue, by all means.

And publishers, please stop touting your Alexa rank. It just makes the new advertisers skiddish, excited, and scared all at the same time.

Before I get started, I want to make this very clear. This is one way, the quickest way, to launch a business. It is not the most profitable way, but if you follow these steps, you will come out with a targeted list, a few hundred dollars, and the knowledge on how to expand your business and profits. Without further ado, here is the sequence.

1. Sign up for a Clickbank.com and buy an account at Aweber.com.

   Before you start to tune me out and assume that I’m going to teach you the latest and greatest affiliate marketing technique, I’l just say this: the first product you sell will be someone else’s. The second, third, and hopefully fourth product you sell will be yours. If I told you to originally sell your own product, you’d have to spend days or even weeks researching and producing it. That’s not what we want.

   I use Aweber, and that’s what I recommend. Without getting into a debate as to which autoresponder is best, sign up for one. That’s the important one. You NEED one and won’t build a profitable business without it.

   I used Clickbank as an example. You can also use CJ.com, Paydotcom.com, Neverblueads.com, Shareasale.com, etc. Any affiliate network will do. I actually recommend you sign up for all of them to compare offers and products, and eventually you will sign up for most if not all of them, but for now just one will do. I’ll use Clickbank throughout the rest of this example.
    

2. Pick a niche and find 3 products in that niche.

   Any niche will do, really. I recommend a niche you’re at least interested in. We’re building a business that will grow and be around for awhile, so if you are not at least interested in the niche, it’ll get to be very hard to work the day-to-day aspects of it. There are a few niches that will always make more money than others: anything having to do with making money (stocks, FOREX, make money online, etc.), weight loss, fitness, nutrition, and markets similar to those. I caution you not to get into these markets if they don’t interest you… yet. They are good to get into later when you’re a little more experienced, but not right now. Plus, they’re pretty competitive markets and require a good amount of work and internet marketing prowess to make it work.

   Pick 3 relatively similiar products on Clickbank. Go to CBTrends to see a historical chart of the product’s gravity and other statistics to determine its growth. Find one that has gaining popularity, gravity, and earned per sale, meaning the product is popular and people aren’t returning it. These 3 products should have been around for a while.

   Ideally you will buy these products, however, right now, we’re looking to start quick. You can read the products while you’re making sales and adjust accordingly.
    

3. Use pages.google.com, Page Breeze, or www.weebly.com to build a mini-site.

   Most hosting companies offer free site builders as well, so you can use them to create your site, but those three will also do. You MUST host your own site. Do not use something like wordpress.com or blogger.com to host the site you are building. You need to create your own domain and your own brand. End of story. Without your own domain, you will not be able to build up your own brand and products, etc. Just trust me: you need your own domain.

   To build your site, take about 30 minutes to an hour and do research on the three products you found. Type up honest, unbiased reviews and recommend the product you think is most valuable. It doesn’t have to have personal experiences in the review. It can be subjective like a business article would be. Be sure you recommend one over the other and do not include negative things about the other products. For instance say something like "the blue book has 5 ways to make money online and a better bonus, whereas the red book only has 3 and no bonus, that’s why I recommend the blue book. The red book does work very well, however, the blue book is more thorough". Notice: no negativity, just emphasize the positives.

   Some may call this unetical: you’re endorsing products you haven’t tried. That’s up to you to figure out. I actually only endorse products I use and find useful. If you have a little more time, you want to evaluate the product fully. Your endorsement will reflect it.

   When you write the endorsement, make sure you stress the benefits to the reader, not the features. Example of benefits: only spend 15 minutes a day while the FOREX software makes you millions. Example of feature: FOREX software connects to the broker to automatically make trades. See the difference? Make sure you stress these BIG TIME. That’s what will sell your product.
    

4. Write 4 Follow-up emails, with the 4th one including your affiliate link to your product through a link cloaking tool.

   This is the most important part of this, and the easiest to screw up. Do NOT try to sell the reader on the first email. Span the emails with 2-3 days in between messages, unless you call it a "mini-course" or something of that nature and they expect emails every day.

   You can find the content all over the internet for the four emails that you write. Make it very good and useful content, or you will not convince your reader to buy anything. In addition, make sure your subject line is something you would open. Remember: curiosity = opened email.
   
    

5. Make your Autoresponder

   Put those 4 emails in your autoresponder. Then create a popover script that entices the person to sign up for your course or information. Place that code on your site and sign up for your own autoresponder to make sure it works.
    

6. Send traffic

   This is the fun part. The best 2 quick ways I can recommend you send traffic your way is through article marketing and forum marketing.

   a)  Article marketing: simple enough – write 5 articles and publish them to ezinearticles.com.

   b)  Forum marketing: find a forum related to your niche and create a signature that links back to your page. Start answering and asking questions in the forum. DO NOT SELL TO THE PEOPLE ON THE FORUM. Provide value. That’s the most important aspect.
    

That’s it! Your goal is to start collecting email address and "building a list". Check. And make a few bucks in the process. Check.

Where to go from here: That’s where it gets fun. Create your own product, create a blog for more traffic generation, increase your article marketing, open your site to more marketing methods, cross-sell other related niche’s products to your list, JV and partner with other merchants, and the list goes on and one.

But you’ve started building your list, and that makes it so you will be able to create a relationship with your list (invaluable), and gives you leverage with other marketers so you can JV and create more partnerships.

So there you go. 3 hours, by my estimation, mostly taken up by article creation. About $35 for signing up for Aweber, and paying for hosting. Seriously, if you can’t find $35 to start your own business, you shouldn’t be looking to start your own business.

What is the most valuable asset to your business?

In other words, let’s say someone wanted to buy your site/business tomorrow. What would make it worth more than the next guy’s?

Ask yourself that question. What is your answer? Usually I get answers like "My list", "My readers" (which is the same thing as a list), "Pageviews", "Traffic", "My Brand", or something else along those lines.

I would agree that your most valuable asset is branding, readership, loyalty, or a list, which are basically synonomous with each other. One begets the other. Are we in agreement so far? Hang with me, I have a point here.

So let’s say Joe Visitor happens on your website from Google or some other random link. After they’re done reading what you put in front of them, what are their options ? They can hit the back button, click on a link, make a purchase, or sign up on a form. That’s basically it.

We’re all in agreement that you don’t want them to hit the back button (or close their browser) and the only way to stop that is to entertain and engage the visitor. Check. So that leaves clicking on a link, making a purchase, or signing up on a form. Which of these makes your business more valuable? Both making a purchase, and as we discussed above, signing up on a form. So why then, would you place advertising on your blog where you only get maybe 50% of what the click is worth?

Every once in awhile you stumble upon someone who "gets it" with respect to building a business and advertising. Chad’s post talks about how Adsense will pay you maybe 25% of what you’re actually worth as a blog, and while you may not think so, you can charge quite a bit for advertising. I wholeheartedly agree, and Chad’s someone I think you should listen to – he’s a marketing manager for b5Media.

In fact, I go as far as even saying that you should not place advertising on your site until you have a solid, loyal readership. Why would you send someone off to another site, never to hear back from them again, when you can just as easily turn them into a loyal reader? Is that $0.23 cent click really worth it? Is that how little you value your readers?

I will say, and Chad points out, that Ad Cents has its place. And it does. Just not for new sites, and not at the top of the page. It’s called remnant advertising and you should implement it while closely tracking your profits. It may very well have a negative effect on your readership/profit.

1. He generated most of his traffic through Entrecard.com.

   His most linked-to post was announcing the party in which he was supposed to surpass the 50,000 rank in Alexa. That never happened because Alexa changed their algorithm from bad to bad, but the party went on anyway. He received 1,003 links for that post, which is over 10 times as many as his second most popular post, Back Again, which only had 96 links, and even that was actually about his most popular post, the party.

   What does that tell you? He used a Web 2.0 technology to generate most of his traffic, and he used it correctly. He didn’t just bookmark every one of his posts on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble, Reddit, etc. and go along his merry way. He picked one social networking site and absolutely dominated it. He interacted nicely with the other community members, made friends, and leveraged those friendships to 1) generate traffic and authority and 2) help him pull together the party mentioned above which was a huge contributor to his success. I have always seen social networks as relationship builders, instead of spamming them, and strongly recommend you do the same. Pick a social network, make friendships and contribute to the community, and those friendships and partnerships will help you carry your business.
    

2. He outsources all of his menial and monotonous tasks, and recommends you do the same.

   So do I. It’s Plain and simple. There are way too many things you need to do in order to be successful as a blogger and businessperson to try to do them all by yourself. What will it take for you to start outsourcing? Sure, your first outsourced task may not be 100% profitable and successful, but that’s why you refine them until they are. With unskilled labor so cheap and at your fingertips, you really can’t afford not to outsource most, if not all, of your tasks.

   As I said in my last post, I will never outsource my blog posts, but that’s a personal decision. Marcus recommends hiring a ghostwriter if you’re not good at writing, and that is fine. But I say give it a shot. Blogging is not all that hard, and you’ll only get better if you keep doing it. I personally write my own blog posts because I love doing them. The things I don’t love doing that take up my time, I’m outsourcing. Don’t just blindly outsource, though. If you have been outsourcing something for a few months and you just can’t turn a profit from it, drop it altogether. It’s not worth doing by you nor someone else.
    

3. Hang around and learn from successful people.
   
   This is a mindset thing. If you aren’t doing it now, you should start. It’s plain and simple. It’s been proven thousands of times over again, and hundreds of books have been written about how success begets success. 

   This is my personal weakness. I love hanging around my friends that are stuck in their 9-5 job forever, and they’re great friends. I do, however, know that if I hang around them too much, I get sucked into their "watch 40 hours of football" mentality. That is just not me. I’m working on this. I don’t want to ditch them because they’re my lifelong friends, but they can’t keep sucking the success out of me. I’ve even tried to teach them how to make money online, but they wanted nothing to do with it, even after they saw how much I made myself.
    

4. Build a list and create your own products
   
   What will it take for me to convince you to build your own products? If you’re already blogging or are in a niche, I guarantee you can make your own products. Let’s look at Marcus’s: 2 interviews and 4 DVDs. How long does it take to make a DVD? That depends, but it should take no more than a couple of days with research included. It helps if you have at least a little bit of knowledge of the information you’re teaching, but it’s not required. Don’t think you can make a good DVD? Call up someone successful and interview them. Don’t think you can do that? Then outsource it! See above paragraph for information on how to do that.

What can Marcus do, in my opinion, to double his profits?

It’s just one simple suggestion, but this has lead to between 40 and 70% of my sales, depending on which market and niche you’re talking about: release the power of the affiliate (or JV)!

Marcus should host his products on a separate domain and use something like 1shoppingcart.com to track affiliate referrals. Or perhaps slap up a sales letter and put it on Clickbank. It’s something to look at with regards to growing his business, considering he has outsourced a lot of his tasks already. He can leverage his popularity in the Entrecard community to help him sell his products. That’s really my only suggestion.

In all… congratulations, Marcus. Your stats are nothing short of phenomenal.