Choose your Mentor carefully

Another phenomenon this year is the appearance of mentors who in my book don’t qualify. To me a mentor must have more than a few gray hairs and have years under his belt as a successful entrepreneur. Writing one or two books that sold reasonably well and then offering mentoring services for a $1000 per month just doesn’t cut it.

The worst type of mentor though is the one who has the experience, offers his services and then gets an assistant to deal with the personal email contact. The whole point of being a mentor is that if you are charging $1000′s then the contact must be personal and not handled by a junior assistant.

You can usually tell that this is happening when the email reply to your questions consists of the original message split into paragraphs and one line or even one word answers between the paragraphs.

I have spent sometime looking at mentorship programs this year as they do offer a fast track to success if you are prepared to spend the money BUT they can be very expensive.

The best example of successful mentoring has to be the story of the late Corey Rudl who invested in a mentorship which I believe was with the legendary Dan Kennedy. I would assume it was very expensive but Corey made millions with his pioneering Internet Business.

It all boils down to choosing the right mentor and in the case of Dan Kennedy he was no spring chicken but had a wealth of experience which only comes with time. This doesn’t mean that all mentors have to be “old and grizzly” as there are some some very successful young ones but they are few and far between and a bit of a rarity.

Another quality you need is empathy with your mentor that is someone you feel comfortable about working with and investing your time and money. The easiest way to “get a feel” is by reading  email from different mentors. Some of them I find really smarmy and over the top.       I wince every time I think of one individuals web sites and adverts. I get a buzz when I press the delete key on his email knowing I will never buy anything he tries to sell me.

Yes! I know its sad but everytime I see his name in my inbox it winds me up.

On the other hand I really look forward to another mentor who is very talented and has a very low HI ( Hype Index ). The other thing I really like about him is that he is straight down the line and tells it like it is. He is one of the very few IM experts who regularly criticises new products and hammers them if they are rubbish and praises them if they are good. And he buys them all before he reviews them. I believe he has spent over $30,000 buying and testing Internet Marketing products over the last few years. He is a real Pro!

If you are thinking of using a mentor the cost can vary from $10 a month to $1,000′s a month and I think I have the best deal at present with someone who is very experienced and at a very attractive price. I’ve just started on his program to help me launch my new project and I’ll report back on how it all works out over the next few months.

The New Season Starts

The holidays have finished and it’s the 1st of September. As you may have noticed I haven’t written anything for most of the year. 2009 has certainly been different from any other year that I’ve been online. Normally my inbox would have been full with IMJ – Internet Marketing Junk. This year all the real garbage has disappeared, that is email from people who send anything that crosses their desk without even bothering to look at it.

The result of the economic situation has virtually removed the snake oil salesmen because nobody is going to buy their garbage anymore. People want real value for money and who can blame them. I find it quite refreshing that there has been a real shake up in the Internet Marketing business and for the better.

Summer is traditionally a quiet month as people are on holiday and have better things to do than working with their computer when the sun is out. But late summer is the time when the marketing machine kicks back into action and the inbox gets full again. But no there is very little coming through at the moment and it tends to be extremes from Dime Sales to high priced software and courses. None of which has any interest to me as it is just a rehash of old ideas such as keyword research and list building. The current products follow the same route saying that everything is new….but it isn’t.  One piece of software says that they have built a revolutionary new system when in fact the idea is about 5 years old. Some of the products being offered are literally products that were offered at the beginning of the year then renamed and redressed with a new coat but basically the same as before.

Where have all the professional writers gone? You know the ones who created professional quality products which don’t sell for $7 and actually do what they say ? Personally I would rather spend $97 on a system which actually made money than buy ten $7 reports that just sit on your hard drive gathering the digital dust.

Last day of 2008

It has taken a long time to logon today. Having got here I’ve found another new layout which is probably why the system is so slow because everybody is finding their way around.

Personally I find these constant changes annoying to say the least. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

Anyway 2008 has certainly gone out with a bang and a nightmare for many people.

Although the gurus are saying that business on the Internet is growing this doesn’t mean that profits are growing as well. Over the last couple of months everybody and his uncle have been offering discounts on their products.

Whether this will continue in 2009 we will have to wait and see. The question that must be on many peoples mind is whether it is a good time time to start a business on the Internet.

The Alpha Project 2009

During the last year I’ve looked at many different ways of making a living online and the biggest problem as usual is the sheer amount of information you have to wade through to make sense of it all.

If you read enough though you find recurring patterns and ideas that all successful marketers use. These will form the basis for my Alpha Project 2009 which I intend to run for 12 months, see how it works out and review it as I complete each phase.

One thing I had looked at was Affiliate Marketing which is where many Newbies start, because on the surface it is the easiest route to take. There is one problem though. It is regularly stated that 95% of affiliates fail in their first year. Why is that? I think I know the answer but I’m going to look at that in more detail next year.

The other question that constantly crops up at this time is how is the economic situation going to change Internet Marketing over the next few years. The “guru” opinion is that it will get better because more people will be looking to make money on the Internet. BUT they would say that wouldn’t they.

I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that at this time so you just have to get on and do it and find out for yourself. In 12 months time I will definitely know where my Alpha Project stands!

What is your budget?

Since the last post I received a flood of emails about the latest super hyped product Traffic Fusion from Mike Filsaime. I deleted all the messages because I don’t think anything he produces is going to interest me. The simple reason is that he is a top marketer and the level he is working at is way above “normal mortals”. So what is this level where the top marketers are and what sort of money are they spending to supposedly generate millions of dollars?

As I pondered this question a message appeared in my inbox promoting a course for Adwords/Adsense. The cost was $2000 for a collection of DVD’s.

The once popular Adwords and Adsense opportunities seem to have been dropped since the Google Slap and the miniscule earnings, $1 per day, admitted by a lot of Adsense users. So how can somebody be asking for $2000 to go back on the Adwords/Adsense bandwagon?

There was a video link in the email so I watched it and everything became clear. The guy promoting the course showed evidence of his earnings and unusually his costs as well. He admitted to spending $100,000 PER MONTH on Adwords which as you can see is $1.2 MILLION PER YEAR

In his screenshots you could also see what he had to do to generate the income. It involved creating hundreds if not thousands of websites related to specific keywords.

The image the gurus like to convey is that they are a small business working from home and if they can do it so can you. Do you really think that somebody making millions of dollars a year is working from home with a couple of computers and an assistant? These are multi million dollar corporations.

The guy in the video I watched admitted that he had employed specialist companies to do his marketing in the early days and now had his own corporation. This corporation could have a 100 highly trained specialists just doing Adwords campaigns, which is why they can spend the sort of money shown above and create thousands of specialized websites.

I don’t think Mike Filsaime, John Reese, Frank Kern or any of the other hyper gurus are banging away at their computers everyday doing the “manual work”. Do You?

Just out of interest I did some research on Traffic Fusion to see what it involved

The idea of the software is that it allows you to put product offers on other peoples download pages. You can then control them and keep track of these offers. You can tweak them and split test them to make the maximum conversions. BUT to make it work you need a little black book full of partners with multiple sales per day. In other words it is a Joint Venture type setup.

That is fine if you know a lot of gurus with huge mailing lists but what about the ordinary guy who knows a handful of marketers who only sell a few products a week and have small mailing lists?

That’s why I said at the beginning I don’t think Mike Filsaimes products are of any use to the rest of us, although I’m sure he’ll make wads of cash from the guys who have an advertising budget of
$1.2 Million per year.

What sort of year is ahead?

It’s the first day of September 2008 and the start of the main season for “Internet Activity”. For years the best period for new products has been September to November. Summertime is usually very quiet due to people going on holiday but this year has been completely different.

There has been a stream of new product launches over the summer to the point where I am sick of cleaning out the junk from my inbox. There may have been some good products in there but the majority of it is just rehashed crap. It is also clear that most of the promoters of these products, who in a lot of cases use the same emails as everybody else, have never even looked at the products they are promoting.

I thought it was just me who was getting hyper critical with the so called “life changing products” that were being thrust at us until I received an email from Jim Edwards. Jim is a well respected Internet Marketer so it’s worth listening to what he has to say. In his latest newsletter he had a couple of rants about the way Internet Marketing was going and in particular about the “Floggers”.

These are the people that will sell anything that crosses their desks. They just send the promotions to their mailing list telling them that it is the latest wonder product that will guarantee their success. Of course it doesn’t because in reality they don’t want you to succeed. Why? Well if you succeed they won’t be able to sell you the next batch of “secret” garbage products.

The latest “slight of hand” is the review site. These are sites that will look at a particular product and then write a review about it for potential buyers. To do a review properly you need to buy the product test it throroughly yourself and then write a report covering what it does and its advantages and disadvantages. In other words an independent assessment.

What the floggers do is use a review that has already been written by someone else. They certainly don’t bother to buy and test it themselves.

The second point Jim made was the way some guru marketers are getting to the point where their only interest is relieving you of the maximum amount of cash for literally garbage products.

In the summer there were a lot of critical comments about a product launched by one very famous marketer, which was just a rehash of his first product which made him famous.

Personally I think Internet Marketing will see some major changes for the better over the next year or so because people are just getting sick of the all the hype and poor products.

Are blogs the answer?

In the last few weeks there have been a lot of promotions for blogging packages and building Blogging Empires, as the next best thing for your Internet Marketing efforts. But is it true?

Well as with a lot of computer subjects the answer is Yes and No! There is no doubt that search engines love blogs because they want fresh content and a blog is after all a web log or diary that is regularly updated

But here is the rub, you have to be constantly updating the blog to keep it in the search engine results. Ideally you should be posting daily which is OK for one blog but if you have several or many blogs it can be a real chore keeping everything up to date.

They do though work very well at getting you listed in the search engines. My fastest was making a post in the morning and it showed up in Google in the afternoon. So it works but needs quite a bit of work to keep everything up to date. You can either do this yourself or recruit someone to do it for you.

Although blogging has been relatively trouble free for a couple of years it is now starting to get bogged down with the spammers. My first blog had no spam for about a year but now it is getting it every week. The spammers use “comment spam” where you can leave a comment on someones blog and put a link in it to your own website or blog. This shows up as a backlink to the search engines. So in theory you can blast 1000 comments out into the blogging world and create 1000 backlinks.

Last year there was software that could post thousands of comments a day BUT as time has gone on the search engines have learnt to recognise these automated mass comments as spam and block them

The latest “comment” software does a similar thing by searching for blogs related to a keyword you type in and then finds suitable blogs to leave comments at. Looks like a good idea until you look at the detail. You have to find blogs which don’t have “no follow” on the pages. This basically tells the search engines not to link back to any websites or blogs. WordPress automatically inserts “no follow” on its pages so leaving a comment on a WordPress blog is completely useless, unless the owner has removed the tags which is rare.

WordPress is considered by many to be the best software for “professional blogs” simply because it offers so many add ons to the basic program. This allows you to customise your blog with all sorts of useful tools to help with your marketing efforts including anti spam software.

Another thing you will find is that the blogging packages will tell you how to build a blog BUT very few tell you how to generate an income from it. In 12 months I only found TWO!!!

The best one is currently being revised and updated to version 2 and we will write a report on it when it becomes available.

Back to the project

Having completed my unexpected project that appeared in April, I can now get back to my  Alpha Project which is to generate a starting income of $2000 per month and build it into a long term sustainable business.

I looked back through all the information I collected last year and focussed on a few publications and techniques that I think are the best of their kind. I’ve ignored all the “hyper product” launches with various authors offering multi million pound “Secrets” for literally $1000′s.

The IM marketers who are making this type of money are quite exceptional as are Bill Gates and Richard Branson. The chances of you copying their methods and having exactly the same success are almost non existent.   I read somewhere that less than 10% of people who buy these products, which will cost $1000′s , actually do anything with them. Probably less than 1% actually make any money. These “magic bullet products” are not all useless but you will need a good working knowledge of Internet marketing techniques and are definitely not intended for newbies.

The best way to make money online is to first learn the basics, build something that works then copy it so that you have multiple streams of income. It is far easier to have 100 websites producing $100 a month than start trying to build a 6 figure income with one business. When you have a regular income and proved your system works you can then look at the hyper products and see if they have any relevance and benefits for your business.

I’ve decided to start literally from Square 1 and write up the various steps, which assumes no previous knowledge or experience in setting up an online business. The series of articles will appear over the next few months starting in June and be published at www.peter-rudd.com

The best laid plans….

I’ve just completed one of my products for the Alpha project, which I had intended launching at Easter. Just one problem I’ve got to go back into the real world and do another project which is going to take about 2 – 3 months so the Alpha Project will now be a part time project. It’s annoying at times how real life and “work” get in the way but that’s the way it is.

It will however give me time to look at “Blogging for Profits” as part of my overall plan. There are lots of ebooks about setting blogs up and almost none about how to monetize it. And yet you hear all the time about people making money using blogs and affilliate programs. The last one I read about made $20,000 in 6 weeks. I’d like to know more about how to do it!!!

I’ve started off well this morning by finding an excellent software program that automates the setting up of niche blogs and a system based on WordPress that also creates niche websites. The latter one is expensive, $200,  so I’ll start with the other one which is much cheaper and you can download it for a FREE trial.

The eBay Slap

If you haven’t already noticed there has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth recently due to eBays action to stop the sale of digital downloads as from today. It is almost a repeat of the Google slap where they effectively closed down thousands of online businesses due to a tightening up of their own policies to get rid of “spam” type junk web pages geared to Adsense. In eBay’s case they objected to the Feedback system being manipulated.

For digital booksellers on eBay this has obviously come as a shock as effectively their online stores have been closed. Some of the more enterprising marketers have just accepted it and got on with working to the new regulations.

John Thornhill the UK based owner of the Planet SMS ebook store has been looking at the problem and is now intending to convert his digital products to a physical CD. He has written an interesting report and produced an audio discussing the problem which can be downloaded from Here

John has commented on the fact that there will be some people who will try to cheat the system and find another way of selling downloadable products. Sooner or later eBay will find them out and shut them down. There is just no point in trying to cheat the system. A better approach, as suggested by John, is to look at as an opportunity as there will be a big hole left for “information” products which somebody has to fill.

The lesson you can learn from all this is to never have all your eggs in one basket.

In the long term it can only lead to better products and higher profits for the people able to create the products people want. So its not all doom and gloom.