Well James D. Brausch is a man of his word. The prize for the contest I won last week arrived and it was Christmas in July here in Edmonton.

100 copies of James’ DVD product called “Earn An Income By Creating Your Own DVD” which sells on Kunaki for $100 each.

$100 x 100 = $10,000.

Actually, $10,000 if I sell them for full price, but if I can use (or leverage them) for contests or give-away’s or trade for services, then potentially I can get a lot more value than that from them.

I love this gift/prize. Not only do they perfectly tie into what I know and preach is the best way to make money online (by creating products) but it also messes perfectly with The Four Hour Work Week, which I read daily and consider to be my current business bible.

[In case you haven't read the book Tim's promotes the idea of a "muses" which produce a $10,000 a month income with very little hands on maintenance required - he suggests that selling information products, is the easiest way to accomplish this, and even gives an example of someone who achieves freedom creating her own Yoga DVD.]

I haven’t had a chance to watch the DVD yet, and I’ll get a review up as soon as I do.

Thank you James, I’m blown away.

Jon Symons

P.S. Wondering why Mr. Brausch would give out such a generous gift. Well it does make good business sense and I would normally tell you all about it, but it was Christmas in July at Terry Dean’s house too and he already wrote a great post about using the law reciprocity in your business.

$10,000 Box Arrived is a post from: Art of Money

Below is one of my virtual swipe files (def).

It’s a Google search of a bunch of the Early to Rise (mulitmillion dollar info product and newsletter publishers) sales letters.

These ones are all financial related pages, but the you’ll get the forumulas and hooks that they are using and be able to transcribe the techniques for everything from blog post titles to sales letters.

Financial Headlines Swipe File

Have fun. Make your next post a Digg magnet!

Steal My Swipe File – Improve Your Headlines is a post from: Art of Money

Last week I was doing a bit of business self-reflection and I listed all the current and recent ventures that I’ve done to make money online.

What’s scary is that there was 11 of them, but that’s another story.

I put them all in a spreadsheet and gave them all rankings for a bunch of criteria.

• Most personally satisfying to work on
• Home run potential (could it be sold for big bucks some day)
• Ease of fully automating
• Potential to quickly make $100 a day
• Time & money required to start and maintain
• Earnings

There were a couple other ones as well but these were the key factors I wanted to evaluate. Then I worked out a metric which was meant to indicate which method of making money online had brought me the most money for the least work.

The winner was the information product I created (Real Blog Videos). It took me about 10 hours to create, with a couple emails I had some great affiliates on board and in the year it has been online I’ve sold about 200 units, with very few support emails. The result is about $200 an hour in earnings and admittedly I’ve slacked a lot on the promotion; this number and the total return could be higher.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Products

1. Having affiliates working for you. Clickbank makes signing up and paying affiliates a piece of cake. You can turn A-list bloggers and other high profile website owners into your sales force.
2. You can capture email addresses and build a list of people already willing to spend money with you. These are the easiest people to sell your next product to.
3. You can sell related affiliate products to support the products you are offering.
4. It’s very rewarding when people send you unsolicited testimonials telling you how much your product helped them out (check out the testimonial for my videos on ClientK – top right side).
5. Leverage and scale. If you are an affiliate you are one person marketing one product, if you are the product owner you can have many affiliates selling your one product. You can also leverage that product by creating related products.

Possible Downside of Info Products

Yes there is more responsibility when you make your own products. You have to make sure the information you are providing is true and reliable.

Support can be a nightmare if your product is not clear. If you understand how to anticipate questions and then document the ones that do get asked in an FAQ system, this potential problem can be reduced dramatically. I have heard other info product creators complain about it, but in my case, even with 200 units sold, I receive less than 1 inquiry a week for support.

Resources

I’m currently reading The Four Hour Work Week and it is not surprising that he recommends product creation as the easiest way to achieve time/money freedom.

Tubetorial has a very good set of tutorials called 7 Steps for Creating and Selling Niche Information Products.

Here’s my review of the home study course that I used to create my first information product.

Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Products is a post from: Art of Money

This post begins with a confession: creating and following systems is something I truly suck at.

That’s why, in a desperate hope to free myself from the constant pain in my shoulders (from carrying the weight of my online ventures solely on my own back) last summer I picked up James Brausch’s Freedom Business Systems home study course.

I hated it. Too simplistic, too basic, not clever enough for me.

Then a couple weeks ago, after yet again realizing that I had created a non-scalable system (ie. the business needed me to do almost everything, therefore growth and success were limited to the number of hours I could work) with my blog network.

I’m Determined to Reform my Ways

I ordered a copy of Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week, and while waiting for it to arrive I decided to give James’ home study course another look.

Much to my surprise, it had improved dramatically in the 10 months that I have been neglecting it

What is a Business?

A good place to start is with a definition of a real business. This is what I want:

A company that produces a profit; and if I was to be exiled on a deserted island for 12 months, when I returned to civilization, the company would be thriving and worth more than when I left.

Freedom Business Systems Review

The question is then whether or not James’ course can provide a framework and guidance to achieve that goal?

Or at the very least a bit of hope in that direction for a die-hard control freak (the real reason folks have trouble with business systems and outsourcing.)

And yes, I do think a blog or a simple website can be a business system and be fully outsource and done by trained staff.

Creator’s Depth of Knowledge on the Topic

James gives some example of how he came to learn the importance of business systems from working in corporate software development and seeing the huge advantage that the systems provided on many levels.

Not only did the business systems that he witnessed provide ways to dial in on continuous increases in profit, but they created freedom for the owners and they increased the scalability and sale-ability of the business (it is next to impossible to sell a business that depends on you to run.)

The Difference Between a System and a Project

One of the fundamentals of the Freedom Business System course that I like is the re-framing of the concept of a project. In my mind I wondered how can a business ever run without me; won’t there always be one-off projects that need to get done?

The goal is to STOP the PROJECTS, the only projects should be to create the systems so you no longer need to have any more projects. Then your are free and your business can continually improve without your involvement.

The Meat & Potatoes

The course, like I said is very simple. It explains what the goals are with each component of a business system.

You start at the top with an overall diagram of your business (there is a good example provided). From there you outline all the processes used to perform every task in the business.

Then you create procedures, which are just step by step walk-throughs of all the tasks needed to complete the high level processes.

Metrics

Each procedure must have a metric that is used to measure it’s success. For example the overall metric for your business would most likely be “profit.” But each procedure that someone performs should also have a metric.

In the course, the example used is “article promotion” a procedure for submitting articles to article directories. The metric for this procedure is backlinks as a result of the article being distributed.

This metric should, of course, relate in some way to the overall goal of profit, but it may not relate directly.

Continuous and Never Ending Improvement

The other really important factor (if you look at my desert island test from above) is continuous improvement. Each process must have a method that insures it is reviewed and new ways of performing the same task are tested to try and improve the metric.

The course provides two ways to review processes and procedures looking; for increases in quality or reductions in costs. This is known as ratcheting your systems.

Other Factors Touched On

• Document management – the need for centralized repository of business records.
• Creation of spreadsheets to manage and review metrics.
• How to handle possible staff objections to being part of a business system.

What’s included in the Package

3 main screen capture videos that walk through the entire methodology and explanation of setting up a systematized business.

4 example processes, including the procedures in step by step text documents and screen capture videos that an employee would follow to complete the task.

The Cost

$100

In Conclusion

Like I mentioned it is a very simple course. That is the strength of it. You will get it; why you need to do all this documentation, and how to do it so that your business (or even just a simple website or blog) can run independently of your involvement.

If you’re like me and come from a long line of job slaves, you probably will find that you’ll start out creating these systems and then when you experience pressure or get I-can-do-it-better-than-anyone-else-itis you’ll probably revert back to doing things in the business rather than creating systems for others to be able to do the work.

At least then we can crack out the course and get back on track. That’s what it’s been like for me, maybe you’ll have an easier time at getting out of the do-it-all-yourself mindset. I know I’m not going to give up on my dream of having a constantly improving business that can operate without me breaking my back at a computer all day.

I think of the Freedom Business Systems (yes the sales page is butt ugly – James is an avid tester so the version I’m seeing currently has fluorescent green headline text…yikes!) as the blueprint for how things need to be in order for me to create that dream business and life.

Can I Work Less & Still Grow My Income? is a post from: Art of Money

While by no means a complete list I’ve begun to select the products and services that I want to promote on my blog. Since my general topic is “make money online” the stuff I’m going to sell is tightly related to my topic.

It’s important that at least some of these selections are made before you begin (falls into the category of do as I say rather than do as I do ) so you can build your blog’s structure around these money making items.

I’m not going into any details about the products at this point, I’m only sharing this list to give you an idea of the next step in the process of the $100 a day blogging project.

Search Engine Optimization

optiSpider
SEO Book

Market Research

Keyword Elite

Education

Perry Marshall – AdWords
E-books (eg: Day Job Killer)
Building Profitable Websites

Business & Systems

Freedom Business Systems
Business Processes and Procedures

Books

Four Hour Work Week
Cashflow Quadrant
E-Myth

Monetize Your Site

Text Link Ads
Adbrite
AdSense

Tools

Real Blog Videos
Link Cloaker
aWeber
Nemeas

Outsourcing

eLance

What’s important about this list is not so much the products, but the categories that they fall into and the overall vision that has been defined.

Notice on my list the lack of “get rich quick” type crap like survey filling, or paid to surf stuff. I’m beginning to define my competitive advantage and my site’s unique offering compared to other sites in my niche.

Notice also the emphasis on sources of information about scalable and freedom-based (your business can run without you) business systems.

Those are my goals and I only want to promote products that align with my goals and my beliefs. It would be really bad business for me to start “selling” tools or products just because I can make a few bucks from them; they have to be a fit on a deeper level.

Products are the Profit Center Pages

The other important thing about this list is that the pages that I create to promote these (and and any others that I add to it) products will be the profit centers of this site.

The goal of all the rest of the pages on the site are to drive traffic to the profit pages, so we want to have them identified so that when we begin to design (re-design in my case) the structure of our site, that it is aligned with that goal.

If you’re following along, have you identified a list of profitable products that align with both your site’s theme and your personal visions and beliefs?

Who Are You? You Are What You Sell is a post from: Art of Money

While doing some of my market research for the $100 a day blogging project, I compiled the following list of sites that deal with the topic of making money online by taking my targeted phrases and tossing them into Google and then sifting through the results.

I weeded out the spam and the sites that were not really on topic (for example there were lots of sites that were resources for offline businesses wanting to go online, which I removed, as opposed to information about starting or developing a web-based business, which I included.) I also removed sites that sucked of which there was a surprising number, considering that I only looked at the top 10 results for each of these coveted keyword phrases.

In most cases I used the site’s (or the page’s) title tag as the anchor text. This way you can see if they are actually targeting the phrase that they rank for.

Phrase: information products

Searches per day: 12

• Information Products – An overview of e-book and info product creation.

Phrase: Internet business

Searches per day: 952

• How to Make Money on the Internet – an overview at About.com’s online business site.
• Internet Business Blog – James D. Brausch’s site which is the blog for his Internet business products (I own and use many of them).

Phrase: make money online

Searches per day: 1511

• Make Money Online – John Chow’s blog
• Make Money Online – A highly monetized blogspot site
• Make Money Online – ProBlogger.net by Darren Rowse
• Make Big Money Online – A blog about making money online
• Make Money Online – A very informative site with no obvious monetization – should we trust them?
• Make Money Online – A well done Squidoo Lens optimized for “make money online” (an important SEO lesson there.)

Phrase: making money online

Searches per day: 298

• Make Money Online – A nice blog about work at home opportunities

Phrase: ways to make money online

Searches per day: 223

• New Ways to Make Money Online – Web Worker Daily

Phrase: Internet marketing

Searches per day: 2931

• Serious Internet Marketing Services – More a marketing service for established businesses, some nice tools and good info.

Other Notables

• Earn Money Online – Earner’s Blog, a daily read of mine.
• Internet Business Blog – Yaro’s excellent blog about making money online with a Internet marketing bent.
• Niche Marketing – Andy Beard’s very high quality site about online business topics.
• Underachiever Life – Ed Dale’s blog, he rambles off topic,but he’s got $5m in the bank so he’s allowed to be distracted.
• Tropical SEO – primarily SEO, but lots of good online business information too.
• Copywriting Tips – must read for online entrepreneurs…the essential skill of selling with words.

Summary & Omissions

I’ve never spent this much time scouring the Google SERPs on a single topic before and I have to say that the results returned were much lower quality than I would have predicted (I can only guess what the Yahoo and MSN results would have looked like, but I assume worse.)

Either the phrases that I’ve searched on are somehow ambiguous to Google or there really aren’t many high quality resources for these terms.

I suspect there are a lot of other blogs and sites providing valuable information (without just pushing frantically on their own agenda.) If you know of any please leave a link in the comments, as I was really hoping to compile a relatively thorough list of sites with solid “make money online” and “online business” information.

Another part of the cause of the poor results is that a lot of people who do put out good information (Rich Schefren comes to mind, but there is also John Reese, Jay Abraham and others) brand their own names rather than targeting a keyword.

The other angle on this market that doesn’t show up in the list but is a part of the puzzle are the various high profile online business products: StomperNet, Click Flipping, Day Job Killer come to mind but there are many others, which try and target the same audience with a pay for info model.

Top 12 ‘Make Money Online’ Sites According to Google is a post from: Art of Money

I’ve been noticing lately with my Blog Setup Videos that the number of people making purchases without coming through an affiliate link has been going up. I thought this was kind of odd, but didn’t pay too much attention.

Then while hanging out at one of my newly discovered favorite reads about earning money, I discovered a possible explanation.

Apparently Internet Explorer has built into it a list of sites that are blocked from setting cookies (that’s the way that Clickbank and may other affiliate program track referrals) form the clickbank.net domain, which is the domain in Clickbank’s infamous hoplinks.

http://smdaily.realblog.hop.clickbank.net/

You can read the story on Earners Blog:

Internet Explorer 7 Nuking Clickbank Affiliate Links

I just checked the stats on my blog videos site and upwards of 30% of visitors are using Internet Explorer 7.

This means that merchants who use Clickbank as their affiliate management systems are getting a little more love than usual, and affiliates who are promoting products through clickbank could be losing up to 30% of potential revenues.

Ouch!

I recommend telling your friends and then petitioning Clickbank to change the domain on their hoplinks.

Update: It looks like IE7 is not the real problem, it is from anti-spyware applications like Spybot that populate those setting in IE7.
For some more info you can see more details: Spybot Removing Clickbank Cookies

Internal Tags: Clickbank, Earners Blog

Clickbank Affiliates Beware is a post from: Art of Money

You’ve probably started getting the e-mails in the past day or two. Mine have been from Andy Jenkins of StomperNet fame and they are following the latest product launch template to the letter.

Lot’s of free info, with no commitment; get you hooked and gradually seduce you into the sales machine without you even realizing it.

What’s Really Happening?

Let’s peal back a layer of the slightly off-color veneer on this whole Internet marketing product launch process and see what’s really going on.

The latest one to cross my email box is Product Pipeline [go here if you must...I know it's like a car crash, you just have to look - definitely not an affiliate link btw.]

Let’s see who the key players are in this latest drama…well actually they are the same players as in every other product launch.

Them: the guys or gals who have discovered the latest greatest easiest way to make money online…guaranteed

You: the average person, who dreams of a wealth and thinks that a lot of money can be made easily and without significant effort. And that anyone can do it if they find the right opportunity.

Now that we’ve met the players in the game, let’s take a look at the game itself.

“How Two Internet Nobodys Pulled In $1,035,081.33 In Just Over 90 Days Using A Massive Traffic Generation System That Delivers Over 10,000 Qualified Visitors A Day!”

If you actually watch the video, you hear them mention that it took only a couple days to set the whole system up to generate this massive wealth.

Let’s recap: $1,035,081.33 in 90 days for only a couple days work.

Is that a tempting offer to you? Of course it is, it would be to anyone. An easy life without financial worry. Spending all your time indulging your fantasies. Right? Maybe you should ask these folks.

William “Bud” Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988 but now lives on his Social Security.

“I wish it never happened. It was totally a nightmare,” says Post.

The Big Fat Problem With Crap Like This

It is complete exploitation. [By the way, complete exploitation is totally okay in this circumstance; it's your job not to fall for it, not their job not to try and exploit you.] The big fat problem with get money quick for little or no effort is that you don’t really want money. No-one does.

You think money will help you and make your life better, but it won’t; you’re just deceiving yourself…which makes you a complete sheep and in serious danger of being introduced to the shears of every slick Internet marketer.

What you want is not money and it is a great and wonderful paradox that just by being seduced by an offer like Pipeline Profits, you are more or less admitting that you are not ready to be wealthy.

The Best Case Scenario

Let’s say you signed up, paid the $xxxx dollars or whatever this “Yes, you can just flat-out HAVE this entire 47 minute presentation for free.” is going to cost and it was really exactly as they promise and you did make over a million dollars in 8 weeks.

Guess what? You’d be screwed because you’d just be a rich person who falls for sucker deals and still has a low financial intelligence. It would be a bit like owning a private jet, but not having a pilot’s license…you’d just crash and hurt or kill yourself.

What Should You Want Then?

Increasing the size of your inner money bucket is the only way to really get wealthy. It really is a very simple formula, but it involves a word that I’m coming to realize is the scariest word in the English language: responsibility.

1. Take responsibility for your current situation. There is a reason you have the amount of money you currently have: you created that reality.
2. Commit to improving your financial I.Q.
3. Accept that you will have as much money as you are willing to pay the price for. If you are willing to let life mold you into a wealthy person, then you can be one.

If all you want is to be free of your problems; sorry, even the rich have problems and probably they are worse than the problems you face. There are a lot of good reasons to be less than your full potential and avoiding bigger problems is definitely one of them.

It was 2 years ago that I read my first Rich Dad book and began to take responsibility for my own financial situation; I constantly played his Cashflow
101 game to begin to increase my financial I.Q. At that time my net worth was about 9,000 dollars. In early December 2006, it was about $68,000 and that doesn’t include my online business. Also, I haven’t had a job for the last 8 months I’ve been living off of savings and passive income.

Sure it isn’t a million in 8 weeks, but I would argue that my 68k is worth more than that Pipeline-Profits million, because it sits on a more solid financial foundation. Work on your foundation because then it really won’t matter how much you have in your bank account, you’ll know that money will never be a problem for you.

Jon Symons

You Aren’t Ready to Be Rich! is a post from: Art of Money

[update Aug. 2009] A new version of Keyword Elite is being released. You can get a sneak peak at Keyword Elite version 2.0 as I take a look at my preview copy (I was a top affiliate for the old version). Lots of cool new features.

It’s no secret that how to posts get attention. When I look at the stories of mine that have done well on article sites and on social bookmarking sites, they usually have a question that is being answered.

I thought it would be interesting to show you how I use Keyword Elite, to generate a list of questions that are being searched for by real humans. This list can be then used to create articles, or even to create actual products.

This 2 minute video demonstrates the technique I use. You can enter a general topic search and then narrow it down to a list of questions related to the topic.

<br />

Here is the list of words that I used as narrowing filters against the broad keyword list that was originally returned:

how
when
what
where
who
can
do
does
is
are
which
?

The same technique can be used to generate product ideas too. Just start with a broad enough initial keyword and crank up the size of the return list [the maximum on is 10,000] and then filter it down to only questions. I’m always amazed at some of the ideas I find in there.

Watch more videos of Keyword Elite’s capabilities.

You may want to check out my orginal review of Keyword Elite.

Jon Symons
Figuring out innovative ways to use keyword research tools…so you don’t have to.

How I Use Keyword Elite to Generate Article Ideas is a post from: Art of Money

A Great Camtasia Video

I was doing a bit of research for a new project [a follow-up to my setup a WordPress blog videos] and I came across this most excellent Camtasia screencast video.

The video is about how to embed flash videos into your WordPress blog posts,

WordPress Kimili Plugin

But what makes it so good is:

1. The level of professionalism of the production visuals and audio
2. The special effect screen tilt that is used to present the information in on screen

The screen tilt is based on applying perspective and I just had to track down how it was done. On this link the author of the video explains how the effect is created.

Applying Perspective in Camtasia Videos

It isn’t that tough to do and the benefit, besides the cool look, is that you can present more visual information in a smaller space. It does require a video editing software as Camtasia itself does not have the ability to create perspective.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Jon Symons
Creating the illusion of 3 dimensions…so you don’t have to.

Best Camtasia Screencast E-v-e-r is a post from: Art of Money

This is the first post in my “Business Development” series which will be appearing every Thursday. I’ll discuss what I am currently learning as I create an online business that takes me to my goal of financial freedom.

A business….what it is not.

When I had my picture framing company I used to think I had a business. I would tell people proudly that I owned my own business. But when I saw that they would be jealous of my so-called freedom from having a job I had a true “joke” that would illustrate just how free I really was.

I would say, “Yup, I am completely free to do whatever I want….as long as I work 12 hours a day.”

Michal Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited [a book that I'll reference a lot in this section] calls being self employed in that manner worse than having a job – because your boss is a lunatic

A business…what is it?

My new definition of a business goes like this:

A set of profit producing systems and procedures that operate without my involvement. As the owner, I could be trapped on a desert island for 6 months and when I was rescued and returned to civilization my business would be worth more than when I left.

Think it’s impossible? Martha Stewart became a billionaire [for the second time] while she was in prison!

That could only happen because she had a business system.

I Know I Need a System, Now What?

Good question. Don’t forget this is not being written by someone who can claim to have pulled this off; and Martha declined my interview request.

I have to admit that the idea of systematizing everything that I do just to create one simple info product seems completely overwhelming. Without enough startup capital to last for a year or so, I doubt that it is really possible to do it fully at the same time as trying to actually get profitable ASAP.

What I think is important in the beginning is not to get it perfect or even close, but to just begin to create system blueprints for what is happening in my business.

Train Your Brain

…to work, not only on the product, but on the business at the same time. Right now it may only be 20% on the business and 80% in the business but at least the seed is planted and you have opened the door for the business system design to take root and grow.

In my experience, if you take the attitude that you’ll work on the business system design after you start making money…you won’t ever do it. That’s what I told myself with my framing business [which I owned for 11 years]. You know when I finally got around to doing all the process designs and operations manuals?

When I sold the business and they were part of the purchase agreement! Yikes, how silly is that.

The silver lining was that I discovered that I really loved doing that stuff and I saw how valuable it would be to the new owner. I was able to write documents and create pictures so that the new owner could take over and hit the ground running without having any other training.

Everything from how to find clients to collecting overdue accounts and creating the products to sourcing supplies was written down; and it worked. I think the new guy called me twice to clarify things from the documents.

The Power of the Business System

With a little bit of lateral thinking at this point I could have leveraged the real power of my documents and, rather than sell the business, I could have hired a couple people to run it and continued to own it and have it generate an income for me…hands free. Or, I could have sold the document as a franchise prototype.

That’s the real power of a business system. It takes the dependency on people out of the money making equation.

For most entrepreneurs this is the factor that determines the level of success they can achieve.

Success Level = how well the business functions – [without] the entrepreneur.

The take away for me, and hopefully for you too, is to at least devote some energy each day working on the business systems level…with an eye towards being able to walk away from it all and have the business continue to improve in my absence.

You may just be surprised, if you’re like me,and find that it is just as enjoyable and rewarding to work on the business as it is to work on the products.

Jon Symons

Got Business? is a post from: Art of Money

This morning I’ve been working on an outline for an eBook that I’m planning to use to promote my Blogging videos.

The eBook will be free and the intention of it from a business point of view is to give something valuable away for free, as a traffic generation and promotional tool.

During one of my many ADD moments I wondered over to Biz Opps blog and found a cool story about a free eBook called “What You Must Know Before Hiring An SEO Company.” Not wanting to waste a moment that I could be not working,
I downloaded and read the book.

The effect of the eBook surprised me. Now I had no intention of hiring an SEO company, it is already something that I think I’m pretty good, but if I was going to hire someone it would probably be Jonathan, who wrote this ebook.

Why?

After reading the book I trusted him. The book wasn’t obviously trying to sell me anything…I really believed that he had my best interest in mind and was giving me information to help me avoid having bad things happen to his readers businesses.

If you’re going to try this approach the trick is to give great information but not let the agenda of generating business get involved in the information presentation. So to try and keep myself on the straight and narrow with this [I admit that sales in this manner is new to me so I can come across like a used car salesman sometimes] I developed a technique.

Let’s Play Make Believe

I learned this technique when I was four and, too bad, haven’t used it too much since. For the eBook, I’m writing it as if I was going to charge for it. By pretending that I will want people to pay money for it I know it should accomplish both the primary goal of giving high quality information in order to let prospective customers get to know me and in the long run, increase sales.

I really like the strategy and technique, especially if you are in a area [like Jonathan is with SEO] that is filled with misinformation and crooked practitioners.

Okay, back to surfing Blogging working on my eBook.

Using eBooks to Promote Your Product or Service is a post from: Art of Money

- Sales is sometimes about timing.

Thanks primarily to ProBlogger in the last couple days I’ve had hundreds of visitors to my sales page and it is converting visitors to customers at a rate of about 1.5%, which I have to say is a little bit less than I had hoped for.

Rookie Mistakes

Of course, it is the first time I’ve ever written a sales page

http://www.RealBlogVideos.com

and it’s my first product so it’s really not worth being to tough on myself for a mediocre conversion rate.

Do Sales Pages Suck?

I’ve been considering running a split test, but I’ve also considered scrapping the “sales letter” approach entirely and going to more of an e-commerce type of product presentation. I find the sales letter with the tiny scroll bar a little bit distasteful and my usual reaction is,

“oh, crap I’ve landed on some BS page trying to sell me something that has a price ending in 7 and has no real value so I’m going to get $4100 dollars of freebies to prove it.”

I also know that it usually isn’t wise to try and re-invent the wheel, until you have a bit more experience under your belt, but the idea of trashing the sales page is certainly in the back of my mind. I think it is important to present products, and represent your business in general, in a way that resonates with who you are and what your beliefs are; and the sales page is a bit of a discord for me…that said, I do routinely buy stuff from them.

Timing The Buyer Cycle

Besides the obvious conversion factors, I have thought about who my target customer is and have uncovered an interesting factor that would definitely limit sales.

My product is targeted towards beginner bloggers. Most of the people who read ProBlogger.net already have blogs, so my product has a timing element to it. It is necessary to catch prospective customers at just the right time in their blog set up cycle. [Or entice them off of Blogspot.com which is probably a bit tougher sell but one that I will focus on too.]

Target the 90% Rather than the 10%

If we compare that limitation to my next product…

http://www.SetupAlternateAds.com

…there is a huge difference in potential because rather than targeting customers entering the market, it targets the bulk of the market, which would be people who are already using AdSense. My expectation is that this product will be easier to sell because of this reason.

I’ve learned something that is important when creating products. Of course it is essential to know your customer, but what are the buying triggers is also an important factor and it is worth considering that some buying factors can really limit or expand the potential for sales.

Information Product Buying Triggers is a post from: Art of Money

Heart of Glass

As my newsletter readers will already know, I had the first return of my Real Blog Videos last week.

I guess ClickBank requires or requests people making returns to give a reason, so I did get an explanation for the dissatisfaction.

To summarize they said that they could find the same information for free elsewhere on the web. Fair enough I guess, but there is the large amounts of my own personal experience and tips that are also present that are not available elsewhere.

Since ClickBank issues the refund I didn’t, luckily, get a chance to argue. A no hassle guarantee is supposed to be easy for the consumer [I'll grow up soon I hope].

Today, as my wife was leaving the house I asked her where she was going, “just doing a few returns,” was her reply.

Mmmmmmm.

You see my wife is virtually a professional shopper…luckily for me it is for her work and the return policy often is a deciding factor in where she shops. Due to the nature of her business it is much more efficient for her clients if she buys a big selection and then returns the leftovers.

Hassle her about returns and you’ll lose a big hunk of business.

All this to say, I guess, that I’m glad I had ClickBank handling the return. It amazed me how much my confidence in my product was shaken by the one simple return!

Here’s the punchline to the story…

While obsessing over my stats today…I noticed the person who requested a refund [they were from a rather obscure country...with a bit of a reputation for not exactly being totally legit when it comes to copyright issues and they were my only sale to that country so it was easy to tell who they were] and they have been watching the videos every day since the return!

Now I didn’t know whether to be happy or angry. I guess they couldn’t really find the info anywhere else! I ended up feeling both anger and relief.

Lots of business reality lessons in this one:

• A no hassle return policy is essential in the sales process.
• Returns hurt when you’re personally involved in the quality of the product, but the reasons are really worth listening to.
• Theft is a reality of doing business.

I sent this person a polite email asking for them to please pay for the videos but needless to say they have not. I don’t think it is the best use of my energy to do anything other than just let it go at this point.

Just felt like sharing some of the ups downs and downs and lessons learned of the Info Product Business…thanks for reading along.

Jon

The Return Policy – Friend or Foe? is a post from: Art of Money

Real Blog Videos Ads On Google

No, one of my old niche sites didn’t all of sudden end up on top of Google for the term “Home Equity Loans” [which would be worth minimum 6 digits A DAY btw].

It’s not quite that sweet. Well actually it is much sweeter, but not in a get rich quick kind of way.

The reason I’ve rediscovered my love for AdSense is that now it is working for me, rather than me working for it.

Last night I was checking the logs on my new Create a Blog videos site and found referrals from Google. That’s weird I thought, I’ve never had a site that is a week old get organic referrals from Google.

Then I looked more closely and in the link was:

landing page:
www.realblogvideos.com/?hop=affiliate&gclid=CKTXzJHWtIYCFSZpGAodelCrNQ

referral page:
www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=website blog&btnG=Google Search

I’ve marked the important bit in red. That means that this visitor came to my site from an AdSense click from a Google search results page for the search term “website blog”

Okay, what’s so special about that?

What’s special is I DIDN’T BUY THIS AD! Someone else did. Someone else thinks the product can make money and paid to put an AdWords [the buyer's side of AdSense] campaign in place to promote my product and send traffic to my site.

How cool is that. Now the Internet’s sweatshop is working for me rather than me working for it.

That’s called moving up the food chain.

I’m also seeing numerous referrals coming in directly from people who are promoting the link on their site.

Leveraging other people’s time and money…the magic formula of the wealthy, if I remember my Rich Dad books.

I don’t know if my product will make me [and the affiliate] any money or not, but I do know this way of doing business is a lot more likely to product positive results than my previous opportunistic methods.

Okay, I Love AdSense Again is a post from: Art of Money

The launch of my first actual product has finally happened. Many tears, one broken keyboard, 4 re-dos and a ton of lessons learned and it only took me 21 days. Rich dude says it should take a month to launch 6 products…so I’m just a liiiittttllle bit behind schedule.So Jon tell us about your “Real Blog Videos” product?So glad you asked!

The product was inspired by a couple things. The first was seeing people on the Rich Dad forums, where I hang out quite a bit,wanting to make money from blogging but not having the technical skills to create a proper WordPress site, so they would end up on Blogger not realizing the limitations they were putting on themselves.

In essence building a blog on Blogger or any other “free” blog hosting service is the same as spending money or renovations to the house you are renting. Yes you may enjoy it, but the value stays with the owner.

What if you blog got really successful, could you sell it? Nope.

What if you came to your senses and wanted to move to a new “Real Blog”…well you would have to do a ton of work setting up redirects or leave all your traffic behind and basically start over.

It just isn’t wise to start a business venture where the best thing that could happen results in something bad.

The other thing that inspired the product was ProBlogger’s What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? series.

Several of the bloggers, including big time names like Seth Godin, remarked that they would have started on their own domain names. Of course, bad bad bad not to own your primary marketing tool when you’re a big time marketer!

[Seth blogs at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ so all his traffic is essentially owned by typepad.com]

There were 3 reasons I could think of for starting out on a “free” or hosted blog:

1. Ignorance. Not knowing the consequences or ramifications of taking this kind of shortcut.
2. Cost. Wanting to save money and being non-committal towards blogging.
3. Intimidated by the technical aspect of setting up a real site.

Jon to the rescue. Now that I have defined the problem, as I see it the successful product goes about trying to solve the problem on each front.

Issue number 1 will be dealt with on this site, on my new blog [some may find it looks vaguely familiar...aren't I a good student!] that is focused on technical blogging issues and in my other marketing efforts: forums and article writing primarily.

Number 2 will need to be approached in largely the same way as number one…through communication.

There are 2 ways that the cost issue can be confronted: firstly it really isn’t that big of expense, buy almost any standards. In the videos I purchase a domain name for $2.99 for a year and I could of gotten it for less had I been willing to wait for a coupon, and secondly quality hosting can be had for $9.95 a month and it can be shared among many sites, which means that if you found 4 friends you would be in business for $2 each a month.

The second way to approach the cost issue is to break down the potential loss of time and revenue from creating a good site but not really owning it. Compare that possibly huge number, as in Seth’s case, with the small costs of getting started on a proper domainwith ahosted blog and the better choice is pretty obvious.

Also, I’ve kept the price low at $15 to accommodate this concern.

The third issue is solved by the actual product. Over 2 hours of instructional hand-holding films walk even a non technical person through every detail of getting a WordPress blog online and set up properly.

Overall, even though it was trying and I do have a lot of room for improvement on every aspect, it does feel great to have the first product done.

Almost immediately traffic started coming in from the ClickBank marketplace. Then traffic started to come in from affiliates who were recommending the product.

So far it is just a trickle, but I saw the power of being at the top of the productfood chain. All of a sudden there are people in cyberspace doing work to try and help me sell my products!

If you have a site or a list of folks you may like to help kick the Blogger habit, then you can earn a 75% commission by going to ClickBank and grabbing an affiliate link.

I call this new place in business the X^x factor because I see that when I work from this place there is exponential expansion possibilities.

So far 6 sales!

Any tips, feedback or ideas on the product concept, the sales page or my marketing approach would be very welcome.

Real Blog Videos Launched is a post from: Art of Money

If you are into watching movies online or you ever purchase online training videos like these or these [shameless
self promotion and affiliate link stuffing - but good products none the less] then you may have wished, like I did, that you could find a way to download the videos and watch them off line.

For me I love heading out to a local café, laptop in backpack and doing a little work while sipping my grandé Frappuccino. So I went looking for a way to stock up on vids to watch while contributing to Starbucks’ share price.

I found 2.

The first is VideoDownloader Firefox Extension and it is, you may have guessed an extension for the Firefox browser. If you don’t use Firefox, then get it too, because it’s the best.

If you insist on sticking with Internet Exploder, then have no fear I found one for you too.

Flash Saving Plugin works with IE and creates a link so all you have to do is right click and press “Save Flash.” It also includes a player to organize and play back your flash movies.

Happy downloading and be kind to your barista.

Browser Movie Download Tools is a post from: Art of Money

It’s been a pretty wild couple weeks around the Art of Money world headquarters. I’ve been working on my first Info product and want to share a bit with you.

I was making a video called “Keywords Crash Course” as a prerequisite video to my product when…well lets say you need all the letters on your keyboard working….

See Jon’s Camtasia Info Product Creation Blooper

It’s not going to be on America’s funniest videos but if you have ever done any presenting or screen demos, you’ll probably find it amusing.

Scheduled official launch date: July 26, 2006!

Info Product Creation Blooper is a post from: Art of Money

Today I’m going to jot down some thoughts about Information Product Pricing. In a former career incarnation I owned a traditional picture framing business. In that business product pricing had a lot to do with costs and margins.

Now that I’m getting close to releasing my first info product, I realize that the rules for pricing are slightly skewed due to the fact that there are only up front production costs [would be the equivalent to tooling up in my old business] and after that I can produce an endless supply for virtually nothing [the only costs being bandwidth and follow up support].

Let’s go through the standard pricing factors:

Competition: I guess the less competition the higher the price you could get away with, would be a general rule for this factor. In my case there is no direct competition that I’m aware of. The information I’m selling is freely available on the web, but not in nice neat step by step package like I am presenting it.

Customer Sensitivity: This means how sensitive are your target customers to pricing. If your selling BMWs the price sensitivity is less than with Toyota Yaris buyers. For me this one is an issue. My target market for this product is people who would likely start a blog on Blogger, so they are used to getting something similar for free.

Price Elasticity: This is the simple higher price = fewer sales and lower price = more sales debate. If we take all other factors like “value for money” out of the equation it can be true that it is easier for most people to spend $5 than $50…the reason is simple, more people have $5 as toss-away money and there is much less risk in a $5 purchase.

When we add “value for money” back into the debate things get really interesting. Here’s an example from How Marketing Plans Work:

An established restaurant that had just started getting fresh seafood daily from the coast (which was about a four-hour drive away) and was charging eight dollars for a typical seafood dinner entree. They couldn’t sell it at all. Rather than lower the price or drop it from their menu, they decided to raise the price to $12.95. The fish sold like crazy. The moral of the story is that people are leery of cheap seafood.

Fair enough. If McDonalds sold the same meal would the price need to be lower? Almost certainly. Would anyone buy it at McDonalds no matter how low the price was? Maybe not.

So pricing is a more complex issue than I thought and it really has to do with two factors if I boil it down.

1.) Customer Centric Factors: What is the perceived value or benefits of purchasing the product.

2.) Business Centric Factors: How does this product fit into the overall plan of the business.

I’ve touched on 1 so let’s go into number 2. In my case this is a new product in a completely new direction for my business. Making a profit on this product is almost irrelevant.

A lot of Internet marketers will actually sell a product for $0 by giving affiliates a 100% commission, for the purpose of building up a list of customers. They know that they have more excellent products to sell and that people who have purchase one product are very likely to continue to buy if they are presented with other high quality offers.

The other business centric factor is how good is the business at presenting “selling” or “marketing” the benefits to potential customers. If you suck at selling and marketing then you will likely need to price lower. Currently I’m unsure of my abilities in this area. My affiliate site does okay, but I haven’t sold any of my own products via the web yet.

The other thought that I have and I can hear people thinking it as they read this is “why not split test” a variety of prices. My answer is that it just seems tacky. I can understand split testing to find out which copy converts better, but to split test on price doesn’t seem fair to the customer.

In conclusion, given the factors above, I’m leaning to a lower price. Price sensitive audience and wanting to build a list of customers being the primary determinating factors.

I should have a preview video for you in the next day or two.

Jon

Information Product Pricing is a post from: Art of Money

I’m not 100% clear of the point I’m trying to make with this post so you may be in for a tangent or two…I’m hoping it will work out well in the end.

The famous 80/20 rule…in case you don’t know it…it goes something like this:

20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results

It goes beyond that into many things but that’s the gist of it and all we need to know for this discussion.

I know the 80/20 rule is basically true. My theory is also that it is more of a sliding exponential scale. What I mean by this is that within the 20% of things that you can do that are most productive there is a range of things that go from somewhat productive to the 1% that are magically productive.

My question is, since the 80/20 principle seems fairly intuitive, why don’t I, or we all for that matter, work in the 20% or better yet the 1%, that will produce the best results?

This week I’ve been working on my first real product as an attempt to diversify my business and get a notch higher on the Internet business food chain and I’m getting to see why so many [myself included] are not working at maximum effectiveness.

It’s easier to be ineffective.

Being anonymous and ineffective is easier. As I work on my first product I’m seeing that the potential of being at the top of the food chain is much higher, but so is the emotional intelligence required to be there.

Some common thoughts I’m facing as I go through the process:

“What if it sucks?”

“What if no one buys it?”

“What if you don’t really know what you’re talking about?”

“What if no one can understand you?”

“What if there is no market for what you’re trying to sell?”

These thoughts really are painful while I’m trying to work! And those are just the ones in my own head…I’m sure I had better be ready to hear them for real once the product is released.

Wanting to move up the food chain is a noble goal but the opposition is great. What is interesting to me is the the opposition is all inside my own head! Call it childhood programming or whatever, but I’ve been conditioned to stay right where I’m at on the social-economic ladder.

Working on the 1% that can move me up the ladder is confronting a generations old conditioning that has kept me in the realm of the exploited masses rather than the wealthy.

There’s a reason why you and I are not working in the 20% or the 1% that could really make a difference in our lives.

For me the reason is that I’m holding on to what is safe and known rather than what is growing and alive. The cost of moving up the ladder, for me, may be to experience ridicule or failure, before I get to my goals. Will it be worth it?

Even experiencing ridicule and failure without achieving my goals would be worth it, because at least then I’d be free of the power they have to alter the course of my actions.

I just wanted to share some of the thoughts that have been coming up inside me as I continue to work in a new way on my Internet business. It’s my hope that you’ll begin to take responsibility for your own financial position and to move into more powerful ways of working and to gently let the issues that you face rise up into your consciousness and gradually lose their power.

The real 1% work is done in your own way of being, by moving through the inner barriers that we have put in place to hold us back and limit our experiences.

Take care,

Jon

It’s a Funny Thing about the 80-20 Rule is a post from: Art of Money