A little business perspective

Thank you very much for answering the survey earlier this week!

I got a ton of great information on what problems you are experiencing, and how I can best hope to help you in the future.

If you haven't had a chance to visit the survey yet, please do so now at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=554696847.

There's only 10 questions and it will just take a few minutes.

For the first time since I've been publishing this newsletter, I'm actually going to give a title to this issue:

A little perspective - you may not like this.

There is so much hype on the Internet these days that it is unbelievable. This issue I give you some perspective on how you should really look at making money online...and how to go about it.

Enjoy!

1. Affiliate programs - A little perspective
2. Your own products - A little perspective
3. Affiliate and Industry News
4. Thank you for helping me spread the word!
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe information

It includes a step-by-step business plan, Internet marketing tips and secrets, Quicktime movies and bonus ebooks.

In fact, it includes everything YOU need to start an online business!

Click here for more information:

http://www.affmatch.com/internetsuccess

I'm working really hard to make my book as useful and as relevant to making money from affiliate programs as I possibly can.

I'm writing it in my own words, based on my own experiences, and from my own perspective.

A perspective that has come from 5 years of trying everything imaginable to try and make money online.

I've learned many different things during that time, but the most important lesson, and one that I want to share with you, is that it is NOT easy to make money online. Especially from affiliate programs.

Let me say that a different way:

It takes hard work to make money online!

Is it ditch-digging hard? No.

But it isn't point-and-click easy either.

There is so much hype out there. Everyone wants you to believe that you can get rich overnight. And the whole time they are planning on getting rich themselves...from you!

You CAN make a lot of money online, and once you have a plan in place, a system working, then yes it is even easy to make money.

The problem is the 'Internet gurus' don't tell you that part.

They fast-forward their lives ahead a couple of years and show you how they wake up every morning with an extra $500 in their bank account.

This happens, no doubt about it. But it doesn't happen over night. It doesn't happen until AFTER a whole bunch of work has been done.

The WORK part is what noone wants to tell you about. The problem is that you can't get to the easy-money part until you have done the up-front work.

But I can't blame it all on these gurus...they are simply telling us what we want to hear:

We don't want to work to get where we want to go...We don't want to hear that it can take many months, or in some cases years to get to where we want to go.

We don't want to save for retirement...We want to win the lottery.

We don't want to exercise and eat right to lose weight...We want to take a pill twice a day (once preferably) and melt those pounds right away.

We don't want to build a business online...We want to spam, scheme, scam, and cheat our way to becoming Internet millionaires.

There is no magic bullet. There is no guaranteed technique to get you to where you want to be.

BUT, there are combinations of techniques. There are steps that you CAN take, and MUST take to reach your goals.

Let me give you a few examples:

Mini sites are extremely profitable. But they are absolutely worthless if you don't know how to get targeted, quality traffic to them. They are even more worthless if you don't know what to do with that traffic once it gets to your mini site.

Pay-per-click search engines can get you targeted, quality traffic. But they will empty your bank account if you don't know what to do with the visitors that you get from them.

Having your own website is the key to long-term success on the Internet. But you won't make a dime until you learn about website design, website hosting, adding content, and domain names.

Affiliate programs are easy money because you don't have to keep an inventory, ship merchandise, or deal with customer service issues. But you will never take home a commission check until you learn what methods to use to promote them and market them in a manner that will actually cause your visitors to purchase something once they get there.

My book, and future issues of this newsletter are going to focus on these issues and help you to make the changes you need to make to get you on the RIGHT PATH!

Stop writing sales letters the hard way!

Visit:

http://www.affmatch.com/instant

One thing that came out of the survey that I asked you to participate in this past weekend, is that MANY of my subscribers are interested in learning more about creating their own products.

Another very interesting point that was mentioned by several of you was the term:

Information overload.

Now this term struck me as important for several reasons:

1. It tells me that you have read so much stuff that you have no idea what is relevant any more.

2. There is so much stuff out there that you have a hard time figuring out what you should use to learn exactly what you really NEED to learn to reach your goals.

In reference to helping you create your own product, I'm going to help you out in two ways:

1. I'm going to ease your fears by telling you that you don't have to worry about writing something that is as thick as a dictionary.

2. I'm going to compare two books that are both quite popular in showing you everything you need to know to create your own info product.

Your visitors don't have the time or desire to read page after page of filler trying to figure out what is really required to solve their problems.

This goes against what you would normally think in that you should put everything including the kitchen sink into your product to make your customers feel they have gotten their money's worth out of it.

The problem is that most people don't have the time or desire to spend the next month sifting through all of that data to get the nuggets that are really useful to them in the first place.

When someone buys your book, for example, they aren't going to consider it money well spent because it has 1,000 pages in it, but rather if they can get useful, helpful info in quick, short, easy to read steps.

Everyone is in a hurry these days, and they don't want to wait around for you to build massive scenarios and fill in all kinds of background (read useless) information to get what they really want.

Spend your time and efforts creating a truly useful product and don't worry about how many pages and how much extra data you can throw in there.

This seems to go against the idea that you should over- deliver on everything you do. I agree completely with this, and would not want to steer you away from this thinking.

But my point is that you don't have to be afraid to create your own product because you feel that over-delivery means creating 1,000 pages.

Over-delivering with your products simply means providing much more than what your customers would expect from your products.

Provide them with useful information that they haven't gotten anywhere else, and you will have happy customers.

Now I want to mention two products that are BOTH superb in their ability to teach you what you need to know to create and sell your own product.

They are the Internet Success Blueprint by Neil Shearing:
http://www.affmatch.com/internetsuccess

and Make Your Knowledge Sell! by Monique Harris and Ken Evoy:
http://www.affmatch.com/myks

Internet Success Blueprint:
I was really impressed with this book. I liked the fact that Neil covered all the necessary information, in an easy to follow format that kept me interested throughout.

But I also like the fact that he kept it short and simple. Even though the book has 279 pages, it flows very well and I didn't find a bunch of filler that you would expect to find in a book of that size.

He starts out by telling you his own story to show you how important it is to have your own product, and to help you to feel more comfortable that he knows what he is talking about.

He then spends a little time explaining why you should create your own product (which if you are reading the book it seems that you already know this is important!) and the long-term benefits of doing so.

From there you get a step-by-step guide from the very basics all the way through the advanced stuff of how to create and sell your own products.

He also included some Quicktime movies to help illustrate a few of the points he wanted to make. Personally these didn't do anything for me, but they are there if you need a more visual look at the processes he is explaining.

Overall I really liked this book, and am using some of the information that I learned in the creation of my own book.

Make Your Knowledge Sell!:
This book is written by a dynamite pair of Internet experts; Monique Harris and Ken Evoy. Both have obtained great success online and are more than qualified to teach on this subject.

I really enjoyed this book as well, but my only problem with it is that it fits the topic I mentioned earlier: Information overload.

It has 337 pages, which is not much more than Neil's book, but it is jam-packed with information. For me, it was more difficult to go from start to finish with this one and I found myself skipping around reading about the topics that were most interesting to me.

Other than that, it makes one heck of a resource for me to refer back to over the months ahead. Whenever I need to learn more about a particular aspect of promoting and selling my book, for example, this is the first place that I will go.

Like Neil's book, you will learn just about everything you could possibly need to know to create your own product.

I did find that it has more details on how to figure out what you should write about. This is the most difficult part for most people, and this book gives you some great exercises you can follow to make this process easier.

So, if you want just the meat with very little filler, you should consider Neil's book:
http://www.affmatch.com/internetsuccess

If you want a more expanded version that gives you ALL the details, then Monique and Ken's book is the way to go:
http://www.affmatch.com/myks

If price is an issue (which often times is) you might like Neil's book at only $27. Make Your Knowledge Sell! is about twice that amount.

Discover this tested, proven system to help you create your own products in a flash and roll them out successfully via two-page websites.

Click here to find out how:

http://www.affmatch.com/gimme

3. Affiliate and Industry News
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Internet Boom Could Just Be Starting, Says U.S. Economist
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/16637.html

Global Internet Worm Set To Explode
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/16641.html