As we enter the middle of January 2017, it’s worth looking back on the past year.

More importantly, if you’ve been reading my content, you’d realise that the last entry was Jan 7, 2015.

So what’s happened over the past 2 years?

The last couple of years have been hectic ones, as I received more gigs to do project management and marketing in-house for various clients. While this meant less freedom as an affiliate running my own campaigns and developing and promoting my own products, it’s also given me an opportunity to work on projects with a bigger scope than I would work on.

As an online marketer working for yourself, there’s a tendency to work sufficiently to provide for your living expenses, buy a nice car and if you’re inclined, purchase a home and/or office and start paying down the mortgage on them.

Being involved in managing existing online businesses where the challenge is managing feature development, dealing with vocal (and sometimes irate) users, growing revenue and profit numbers, is sometimes a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants business. Even growth hacking (which seems to be the new buzzword for marketing) is a process of continual split-testing, pivoting to find validation, then starting the process over again.

In the process of trying to start a new venture about 2 years ago, I almost lost this blog and 9 years worth of content. But that update will come in a future post.

So what’s there to reflect over the past 2 years –

1. Always think and plan before you act: All of us have the impulse in us to want to do something immediately. What’s more important is to take a few minutes (or more), thinking through the issues, mapping out the project on paper, figuring out likely outcomes, and perhaps more importantly, figuring out contingency plans if things go south. So what is you see a terrible take-up rate for a new product or service? Can you recover from the initial launch? What’s your “Plan B”? Is there a “Plan C” if Plan B doesn’t work out?
2. Keep working towards the Big Picture (even in a crisis): Mistakes are part of the learning process, and whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,right? Sounds nice in hindsight, but it doesn’t seem like a “learning opportunity” when you’re in the midst of it. On one of the projects, we rolled out site updates on a Friday morning. Bad idea. The service started showing system instability on that afternoon and the site crashed that evening. The bad news was that Friday and the weekend were the peak hours for the site (no, it’s not casual dating) and I spent most of the weekend managing the business’ social media accounts, giving updates, doing minor troubleshooting. Through the crisis, the users recognised our efforts at site recovery and giving regular tech updates and in the process, I believe we built a number of lifelong customers through pro-active tech support and customer service. So as a comedian once said, the word “problem” is also the same word for “opportunity” in Japanese. With that said, there are so many people out there with credit card “opportunities”…
3. Do what you say: So in the business world and in everyday life, people say lots of stuff. The fact is that 90% of it probably never gets done. When you say you will do something, then just do it. If you don’t know, or can’t deliver on something, then don’t make promises, especially if it’s beyond your control. If you say stuff just to make a customer happy, then imagine how UNhappy they will be when you can’t deliver on it. You’ll look like an idiot. If you can’t commit to a solution now, then be upfront and say that a solution is being worked on and that you’ll provide regular updates. Be sure to provide the regular updates. People are not likely to forget something (or let you off the hook) if the issue is bugging them.
4. Making mistakes and moving on: The surefire way to avoid mistakes and messing up is to do nothing. But the fact is that you can only learn something and build something by finding out what’s not working, then not doing it again (or at least not a third, fourth, fifth time…) Conducting a post-mortem, analysis, and deciding how you can do stuff better the next time is part of the growing process. Besides, if you bid $10 per click, instead of $1 per click on a traffic campaign, the lesson is likely to stick with you for some time.

So in summary, I’m back and will be posting stuff more often. Stay tuned.

Every entrepreneur and every business will hit this point.

Facing something that hits you like a punch to the heart.

It could be getting your websites indexed, go dark, invisible off the face of Google.

It could be seeing your Bing PPC quality scores drop to 1/10 for your keywords.

It could be Facebook suspending your Facebook Ads or Facebook profile (also cutting off access to your ads account).

Recently I was following developments in the Kindling forum, seeing a writer who had shut off most of her successful online business to focus on writing.

The sad reality is that the amount of effort is not always awarded a proportional amount of reward.

So I could understand the woman’s range of emotions – frustration, anger, disappointment – coming through her posts.

I could empathize seeing as how I’ve spent almost a year and about $60,000 worth of capital and lost opportunity developing a social game, which failed to launch.

I don’t think it’s easy to come out of the experience feeling positive, but I’ve taken lessons from the experience in project management and planning which I’ve then used in future projects.

The thing with the wall is that it’s often an invisible obstacles. Possibly existing in cyberspace, it could be a string of formulas in a ranking or pricing algorithm that seems to be pushing you to the wall and making your life an agony.

But here’s the thing. The wall doesn’t care.

It doesn’t care if you’re sad or depressed or experiencing any other emotion.

The market works according to its own formula, so you can choose to either deny or ignore the problem, or you can deal with it.

The wall exists in every business, and is present in every business model.

So some of the strategies I’ve seen – switching from affiliate marketing to domaining to writing kindle ebooks to adsense publishing – these are not productive ways of dealing with the situation.

Even if you push the wall away momentarily, it is going to come back and hit you in the stomach when you’re gaining some traction in the other niche.

If you feel the situation is unsalvageable, then sure, exit it and do something else, but also go in with both eyes open. Watch out for the walls and prepare to deal with them.

Here’s what the late Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon professor, known for his “Last Lecture” has to say about walls:

So the question is do you want something badly enough to work through it and break through the wall?

Here’s some steps to work your way past the wall:

1. Gather Intel: If you don’t know what’s going on, then you won’t be able to deal with it. Understand what’s happening around you. Use Google to find out more. Talk to peers in the same situation and the same industry. However special you’re feeling, you’re probably not the first person that this is happening to. Learning from others’ experience is just as good as messing up yourself.
2. Figure out a plan of action: You may or may not be able to reverse the consequences of the situation you’re in. Look at the outcome you’re trying to achieve. Then work out the steps you need to do to overcome the problem, or the steps you need to move on. Have a specific action plan, detail out the steps you need to work through. Set a deadline and schedule to get everything done. And, no, procrastination and wallowing in pity don’t count as actions.
3. Get it done: The best plans are useless. Unless they are acted on. Life is a series of ups and downs. The faster you work your way through the “downs”, the faster you can get on an up. Everyone will be pumped and happy when things are looking up, it’s what happens when the chips are down that a person’s true character shows itself. Want to know why people succeed? Look at professional athletes.

So there you have it.

3 simple steps.

The magic is in the execution.

Now, go get it done!

Chances are you need you need your digital fix.

Here are some tools that can help boost your online business.

Free Images: Formerly known as sxc.hu (Stock Exchange Hungary), the site’s parent company Jupiter Images was acquired by Getty Images and rebranded as “Free Images”. The user experience is largely the same and even though I have memberships to Deposit photos and other photostock sites, I usually head to Free Images to check out the available options for this blog or other campaigns. Take note that some images require seeking permission and including other attribution info. I usually go for the ones with the standard terms and conditions so I can use the images immediately.

Canva: Web/Cloud-based photo editing sites have been around for some time, including Google’s Picasa. What I like about Canva is its easy to use interface, plus a set of predefined templates for Twitter banners, FB Ads, ebook covers, etc. So while I still have Adobe Photoshop, Gimp and other photo utilities on my computer, I usually head to Canva and get it done within a few minutes.

Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs?): I’d include a screenshot, but I do so much stuff on there now, it’s not easy to take a screen without showing the client projects I’m working on. With Internet access, I’m putting together project proposals, marketing plans, writing ebooks, archiving blog posts/bookmarks.

I’ve also shifted most of my expense and accounting to the Google spreadsheet. It’s an easy way to get a remote admin support to enter my expenses into a shared doc, then ping me when it’s completed.

Forms are also useful for collecting feedback and data for projects you’re launching or in the middle of a course to get suggestions for enhancements. In a pinch, linking out to a Google Form also serves as a ghetto contact form, with feedback going into a spreadsheet for review.

The calendar is also a great meeting coordination tool. By inviting others to your events, you can get RSVPs for meetings as the system sends them an event invite which they can then confirm. since Calender replicates itself over iOS and Android, it’s a good way to stay on top of your schedule.

Pamela call recording software for Skype: I’ve tried a bunch of free call recording plugins/software, they usually don’t work as well as I’d like. I’ve gone to the extent of using Techsmith Camtasia to try recording calls. No dice. I’ve finally gone back to using Pamela which had been a mainstay when I was doing podcasts more regularly. It’s a paid offering, but if it works well, it’ll pay for itself many times over.

Google Hangouts: I’ve using Hangouts more often for project meetings and consultations. If you use the Hangout On Air broadcasting function, it records and posts the call to YouTube, which means no messing around with third-party recording software.

You can also make free phone calls to the US and Canada for free by following this tutorial, though I haven’t tried that out yet.

Online-stopwatch: Keeping on task can be a challenge unless you have a taskmaster to watch what you’re doing. Especially with a tight project deadline looming ahead of you, tools like Online-Stopwatch, which is an online countdown timer, can be helpful. And it’s useful if you play any online games with countdown timers for mob spawn rates…

Dropbox: Possibly the first online file storage service (or at least with the largest critical mass), I’ve been using Dropbox since its beta and have grown my mailbox from the default 2gb to 16.4gb through referrals and its bonus storage options. I manage data across an Intel Atom machine that I use as a file server and the various desktops and laptops (Mac and PC) that I use for work. If you use it for sensitive data (or your cryptocoin/bitcoin backups) be sure to enable 2-factor authentication.

iCloud: Apple’s accompanying web interface for its iCloud surface, the data across the web interface can be synchronised with your iOS and Mac OS devices. Just be sure not to post any naked selfies to the cloud surface. Unless your last name is Kardashian or Hilton. Anyway, I like to update long-ish notes via the Notes application via the desktop interface, then pull the update on my iPhone. The most useful function probably is the “Find my iPhone” function, which despite its name can be used to find that missing iPhone, iPod, iPad and Mac device…

Voluum: I’ve tried various conversion tracking software and the ones I like best are CPV Lab and Voluum. CPV Lab’s more efficient than the free alternative Prosper202, and more feature rich and user friendly. I’ve been using Voluum more regularly since it’s being hosted makes it an easy option to use without having to deal with a VPS or dedicated hosting the software. Some will have concerned about your campaign data being shared, especially since ZeroPark is a sister company and Voluum themselves might also run lead generation campaigns. I don’t think your data being shared when you’re a smaller affiliate is an issue. And if you’re concerned about protecting your data, you could always develop a custom solution for about $10,000 or more when you’re doing bigger numbers.

A friend had his Dropbox cloud storage account hacked into a couple of weeks ago and lost a lot of data.

Depending on how actively you use the service, you might have:

• Marketing plans
• Financial accounts, business expenses
• Campaign data
• Business presentations
• Logins to various other online services like PayPal, affiliate network logins, business tools

So the idea that someone hacked into your account and make a copy of everything and/or wiped everything is a nightmare.

Password Security

In a blog post, Dropbox has said it’s security systems weren’t compromised, but rather hackers used a list of logins and passwords obtained from other services and tried them on Dropbox and other websites. The lesson is that if you use the same login/email and password on your Internet banking/PayPal/Bitcoin account as you do on a Flash arcade site and the arcade site gets hacked into, then your accounts are very exposed.

The workaround for this is, sure, use that “SuperBaller” login and “Password123? logins for throwaway sites. But you should use unique passwords, preferably containing a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers and have a unique password for each site. Note that some password storage services like LastPass may be vulnerable if you’re using the same login/password combination for those accounts too.

Once you’ve come up with something unique, you probably don’t want to have it sitting in your Google Drive or webmail account. Some might prefer to use a password storage app on their desktop or cell phone. Writing it in a diary (the dead tree kind) also works. Keeping multiple copies of the password in a locked drawer with your ID and bank documents also works well.

2-Factor Authentication

The other recommendation, to enabled 2-factor authentication, is also a good one. This is where you need to authenticate yourself on a second channel (typically via email or mobile-based text message) when you’re adding a new machine or change payment settings for some of your accounts. Lifehacker did a pretty good feature on 2-factor authentication (http://lifehacker.com/5938565/heres-everywhere-you-should-enable-two-factor-authentication-right-now). And you can also read Dropbox’s instructional post about enabling 2-factor auth for it’s services here (https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/10/have-you-enabled-two-step-verification/).

The more sensitive data for an Internet marketer will include

• Banking/e-payment payment accounts
• Financial accounts – related to Bitcoin/cryptocoins, stock, forex, options trading
• Affiliate network accounts
• Ad network accounts

Importantly, if you have accounts at game networks like Kongregate, Newgrounds, etc, you should use your throwaway account (unless you’re spending a couple hundred bucks there each month, in which case, you might want ot have your own special account too).

Losing access to stuff you do business with majorly sucks, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

There is a saying by motivational speaker Zig Ziglar that goes “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

For most of my 20-year career (most of it spent online, thought the same principles of relationship building and business building apply as much to virtual business as much as brick-and-mortar ones), I’ve focused on a couple of values:

• Say what you do when you teach, but more importantly do what you say.
• Understand the expectations of your students/customers, then go beyond it.
• Always aim to be better.

A mentor, who owned about 20 lifestyle brand stores in Singapore, explained the concept of value this way: “I watch how my employees work. Some will work at parity. You pay them $2,000 and they’ll put in $2,000 of effort.

“Most will put in half the effort of what you’re paying them. They’re the underperformers.

“I look out for those who work as if they’re being paid twice what I’m paying them. These are the ones who become the store managers and executives at the head office.”

Some of you may know that I’ve been in “retirement” mode for the past 8 years or so, about the time my older daughter was born.

I had built up my Internet business which was generating passive income, leaving me to spend time with my older daughter, and later my younger daughter when she was born.

Online marketing gave me the opportunity to have the ultimate liberty – the freedom over my own time and the freedom to work from my home or at the recreation room at my apartment. (I’m not really keen on drinking coffee at Starbucks all day…besides I’ve had better java elsewhere).

So whether it was managing affiliates in Asia or in the US, I’m fortunate to have had the flexibility to create my own consulting gigs and build my business around my lifestyle.

I still don’t subscribe to the idea of building and running a business in an hour a day or doing a 4-hour workweek. If you’re driven and passionate about what you do, you will probably end up doing more than an 8- or 10-hour workday. You just have the freedom to take a 2-week vacation after a long project.

Since turning 41 last month, I’ve been in the mode of working on projects which keep me engaged and are also projects that I can see myself doing a year, 2 years, 10 years from now.

Tip: If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing now, even if you hire employees later, it won’t make it anymore enjoyable. It can be quite painful. So tread carefully.

Earlier this year, I wanted to launch one of my “backburner” projects – the lifehacking books which would eventually become the Mindware Recode and the other books that Tamar Weinberg and I have written.

It’s time to bring it to the next phase.

I’m starting a training program which will focus on 2 areas:

• Life Hacks: Strategies and stuff you can use to enhance the quality of your life – your health, your relationships, your personal productivity.
• Biz Hacks: Whether you’re a business owner, a solopreneur or an employee, you can take some of the techniques I’ll be sharing to help improve your effectiveness in the business world.

If you want to think of it this way, it’s taking the system and techniques that I’ve written about in the Mindware Recode and using it to “recode” yourself to become better, fast and achieve more!

Interested?

Here is the thing.
I am aware of product launch strategies, having big-bang launches, working with joint venture partners, having them mail to their 100,000-strong mailing lists.

Think of this as the anti-product launch.

I plan to work with small numbers, I plan to have an application process, I will be reviewing each person, possibly doing a further interview/discussion over email or Skype. This is to make sure that I can help you.

I’ll be focusing on sharing the systems I have developed which tend to be more “slow burn”. It will take some time to build it, it will take some effort, you won’t make a million bucks overnight. I think that stuff only works with lottery tickets.

What I want to do is find 5 people who would be a good fit for the group and kick the project off that way. If I can’t help you, I’ll let you know and I’ll make a recommendation if there’s a book or other resource that might help you.

As of 2.49pm, Monday, 13 Oct, I have shortlisted 3, so I have slots for another 2. This is not a scarcity ploy, I want to work with a small group with whom I can help make a difference. There will be no miracle “oh, we’ve opened up x slots”. It will be just the 5 slots.

Maintaining a good reputation and delivering quality have and will continue to be important for me, so this will be where the bulk of my time will be spent. I focus on specific, actionable strategies, so if you’re a believer in making dreamboards, then doing nothing to make it come true, this won’t be for you.

I’m structuring the program so that you can participate whether you’re in Asia, Europe or North America. I’ll also be organizing monthly online meetups via voice conference, Google Hangouts or some of the new services I’ve been testing out.

If you’re interested, you can fill in this survey.

I read all responses (just like I did for the Mindware Recode survey) and reply.

If I feel you’re a good match, I’ll ping you with info about the program.
It’s an ongoing program, you are welcome to stay as long as you like and leave when you want.

You are welcome to message me with any questions or post in the comments below.

–
Questions:
-> What are you working on now?

My main areas of focus are:
I’m writing ebooks which I publish on the Amazon Kindle platform, which tend to be in the humor or fiction genre.
I’m planning to write more often at WhoIsAndrewWee.com and build up the list and focus more on email marketing.
I’m building up affiliate campaigns (usually more cost-per-sale offers which have a much higher payout than cost-per-action (CPA) offers)

-> How does the training program work? How much does it cost? Is there a money-back guarantee?

It will work like a monthly membership, there’s a monthly fee.

The first 5 will get an attractive price and will be “grandfathered” so your membership fee will be locked in, unless you quit.

There will be a “no-questions-asked” money-back guarantee. Maintaining a community is important to me and selecting the members via a screening/interview process will help ensure the community remains high quality. I’ve also run my own membership sites before, so I’ve got a pretty good handle on moderating the community.

-> Is this a money making thing? Can’t you help me for free?

Yes, it’s a profit-driven venture. I have to feed my family too. I’ve always focused on making a business viable, else it becomes a charity. I’ll show you how I build my businesses, so you can replicate the same techniques in your own business. The main factors in how successful you will be tend to rely on how consistent and focused you are on doing what you’re supposed to do. (You’ll get what you’re supposed to get).

The “help me for free, I’ll give you half my profit” request comes up quite often, especially at entrepreneur start-up events. I’ve also spend time giving someone career advice for 1-2 hours for free. What I’ve found is that people value something based on how much they paid for it. Specifically, if you’ve personally invested in something, you’re more likely to take action. You can read up the analogy about the farmer eating eggs and bacon, then telling his son that the chicken is invested in breakfast, but the pig is committed… I’ve done free stuff, the experience has not turned out to be positive. If anything, think about how much you should be investing in yourself.

–

Here is the survey link.

And if you have questions, drop me a mail via my contact form.

Foie Gras

I also unlocked a new achievement, gaining about 5 lbs over the course of a meal. Here’s the evidence.

This post should have been posted then, but stuff came up, writing was delayed, so this happened.

At the same time, I was thinking back on what I’ve been doing over the past 15+ years.

Back then I was 23, the year was 1997 when I started doing “Internet stuff”. My first gig was as a web team leader at one of Asia’s largest media companies.

It was also the same year that Yahoo! started.

Besides building a couple of content portals from scratch, I also updated hundreds of web pages every day, primarily through cleaning up BRS format files (not “bank reconciliation statement”) but a type of text file, then FTP it into a server where it’s be formatted for the web.

I later moved to tech reporting where I had the chance to interview the founders of various startups, as well as IT majors like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Red Hat Linux’s Bob Young and Seagate’s Al Shugart. It also helped to be on a coordination committee of Accenture’s dotcom startup awards, where I had the chance to grill tech entrepreneurs on their product and marketing strategies.

This was all pretty useful background, especially when I went on to start my own biz consultancy in 2003, focused mainly on strategy and marketing for various brick-and-mortar companies going the online route. Though I was brought in to come up with strategy, there were more than a few times where I ended up running people’s companies. It was good experience and pretty hard to duplicate via attending seminars or conferences.

Creating my own infoproducts and getting involved in lead generation and affiliate marketing seemed like the next step in 2006, which is about the same time I joined Azoogle and Neverblue. My affiliate ID number is in the 40k range at Neverblue.

This “Internet stuff” has done well for me for the past 8 years or so.

Although I’m still promoting my own products and running affiliate campaigns, I’ve been working on the life hacking aspect of the business since the start of the year. Some of the stuff you might have seen like the Geek Hackery books I worked on with Tamar Weinberg have turned out well. I’m looking at moving things up a notch in the coming month.

I’m also starting up my email list and sending out idea for growing your business and achieving that quality of life that comes with a healthy work-life balance

I’ll be sending out weekly updates (unless I’m heading out of town, in which case it might drop to every 2 weeks).

And if I get discount codes, free trials, beta codes, etc, I’ll be sending them to the list first.

Here’s the TL:DR version:

1) Doing internet stuff = good

2) Doing more life hacking stuff in the coming month = stay tuned.

3) Stay tuned = opt-in via the form below.

4) Expect weekly, unless I’m falling behind, in which case, maybe one email every 2-3 weeks?

5) “Sign Up” is pretty horrible button text. Don’t do it. It’s almost as bad as “Submit”. I think “Give me access” would be better. (putting it on my to-do list).

UPDATE: The email list is being, er, updated. Will post it later.

If so, stop reading this and head elsewhere.

If not, read on.

The following steps will help if you want to be successful in business and/or your personal life:

• Having goals
• Having a way to reach those goals
• Reaching those goals

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? I guess most of us know what we need to do. But we don’t do it. The execution is a different thing.

I’ve worked out some steps that help me get what I need to get done about 95% of the time (I’m human after all).

Let me break them down.

Having goals: There are hundreds, if not thousands of books, covering how to define a goal and check that it’s something meaningful, specific and achievable.

So, sure, it’s worth dreaming that you want to have a million dollars in the bank, even if you’re $50,000 in debt now. You’re entitled.

But even if you have that big goal, you probably don’t have the steps to reach it.

So while every other motivational “guru” tells you to “dream big” and “manifest your destiny”, I feel that a lot of it is rubbish.

Sure, some of it may work, if you keep thinking about a whole bunch of stuff every day, a proportion of it is sure to come true because of sheer luck. But most of it won’t. If you do nothing, you get nothing. No amount of happy thoughts can change that.

If you’re dreaming big, thinking big but not grinding big to make it a reality, all those dreams will turn out to be an impossible mountain to climb. Can anyone blame you for getting demotivated? If dreaming about your goals made them reality, maybe you should go around marketing yourself as a genie and making people’s dreams come true.

If you’re in the real world, it takes more effort to make big dreams into reality. Let’s start with setting goals.

What works for me is to have a big macro goal – say to grow my business to $10 million a year and leave $500,000 for each of my two kids in a trust fund by December 31, 2019 – and look at it constantly. That’s my end goal or destination goal.

It also helps to have multiple smaller milestone goals – stuff I can achieve in this month (End August), by the end of the quarter (End September), by the end of the year (December) and within a year (December 2015).

I have this stuff in a Google Doc so I can refer to it from whichever computer I’m working on and I can also access it on my phone. Looking at it, keeping your eye on the end zone is what can drive you to get stuff done. To be contantly moving forward. It may mean the difference between getting some work done during my downtime while waiting to pick the kids from school. Having no goals may mean I goof off instead.

Which leads to the next point.

Having a way to reach those goals: Just dreaming about something, posting Facebook or Twitter updates about it doesn’t mean that you will get it done.

If wishing or dreaming about something made it come true, we’d all be happy, wealthy and contented. But, that’s simply not true.

So once you have a goal, the next step is to work out concrete steps to make it a reality.

When I was more active as an affiliate, I had spreadsheets where I listed the payout per offer, the number of leads I needed to generate, the amount I had budgeted for traffic. This gave me a rough idea how much income an offer could potentially generate before I spent the first cent.

Since the offer payout data is already available on the affiliate network, the traffic cost is listed on the ad network’s self-serve or insertion order, the only moving variables are how much you’re willing to pay for traffic and the number of leads you’re shooting for. With the formulas worked into Google Doc spreadsheet cells, you can adjust variables till you find a model that works for you. If needed, having multiple instances of your formulas allow you to test the viability and scalability of a high payout, low volume finance offer versus the returns of a low payout, high volume download offer. It’s not rocket science, but merely a matter of doing your homework before you get started.

The next step once you have a roadmap is getting down to working out the specific steps to getting what you want to achieve.

I had a daily task list of three goal-oriented tasks I needed to get done by the end of the day to make sure I made progress. Getting the three things done gave me a concrete way to measure the progress I’m making and a rough idea how close or far I am from my goal. I still use the same system in my consulting work and in my own projects now.

Ok, I get that some of you may hate structure, finding it restrictive and may instead choose to do whatever is the most urgent at that point in time, so it might be getting customers, or working on the product or service more, or doing research, or reading.While this may work for a while and seem as productive as a stuctured approach, in the long run, you may lose sight of your goal (or no goal, cos you don’t have one…) I’ve been there and done that.

What works for me now is spending 6-8 hours a day working on your core goal and having a flexible 1-2 hours to take care of unexpected stuff. Try it and see if it works for you.

If you have a defined goal for what you’re going to do during that 2 hours in Starbucks and you get it done, you’ll have a greater sense of achievement and be more motivated to get the next thing done.

One tenet about motivation is if you set yourself a series of small goals and get them done, you’ll have a concrete way of measuring your progress and know that you are moving somewhere. In gaming/gammification times, you’re unlocking “achievements”, even though you haven’t levelled up yet (achieved your core goal).

Keeping yourself accountable is also a big part of making sure you’re on the right track and moving on the right path. That’s one of the reasons why I have challenges like the Kindle writing challenge (still ongoing) where I put $6,000 on the line.

They say that the thought of losing $1 is a much stronger motivated than the thought of making $1, ie: the fear of losing something far outweighs the thought of gaining something. So this is one of the drivers I use to get my goals completed. I hear that a lot of people are trying to overcome procrastination, have difficulty focusing on important stuff. If you have a game plan in place, you’re putting skin in the game and putting in a pain point (ie: financial pain) to make sure stuff gets done, then you will mysteriously see unproductive time spent on Facebook, YouTube and maybe TMZ/RadarOnline melt away.

Reaching your goals:  So you have defined what you want, you know what you need to do, but how do you get it done?

Getting motivated to get something done is a major stumbling block for many. Do you know?

On an rational and intellectual level we know what’s good for us (passing on the hot fudge sundae, getting an hour’s worth of exercise every day, putting a consistent 2 hours each day into writing the book), but we are swayed on an emotional level – procrastinating the task will help us avoid pain, pushing it till tomorrow means we can go to bed earlier, spend time on a fun project, etc.

All that stuff will set up an unhealthy pattern, a habit which will sabotage your core goal.

But it’s not completely your fault. These patterns could have developed because you had a job where you did 6 hours of work each day then had 2 hours to mess around on other stuff. While that works while you are a salaried employee, it doesn’t work as well when you’re working on your own project or working on bringing your business to the next level.

That’s one of the reasons why I wrote my “Mindware Recode” guide. It’s a combination of strategies I’ve developed over the years from the time I started my consultancy in 2003, testing and refining various strategies along the way.

Like it or not, your “inner game” (what goes on in your head and how you feel about something) affects your behavior. Your actions affect the results you get. If you think about it (pun intended), your thoughts affect your actions which affects your outcome. If you keep focusing on the worst possible outcome, testing a whole bunch of campaigns and getting zero leads, it has a higher chance of turning into a self-fulling prophesy.

So what I do in my book is to show you why you are acting the way you are and how you can make some changes to get better results. Whether you are new at something or already experienced, I bet you’re experiencing blockages which you haven’t been able to resolve.

The project came about because I noticed a trend in the types of questions I was getting about how to build a business and check that you’re on the right track.

Being able to overcome challenges  and remove blockages (whether real or psychological) is something everyone has to deal with.

If I can help you get to the next level, be sure to check out my Mindware Recode guide.

PS: I want you to be 100% satisfied. My book comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. If  you don’t like it, drop me a note and I’ll refund your full purchase price within 24 hours.

The PIC scheme provides tax benefits for businesses that invest in productivity and innovation activities and successful applicants enjoy tax credits and reimbursement of their approved expenditure.That means buying items like computers and other equipment to improve their company’s operations can result in full reimbursement of their business expenses.

For the current year ending December 2014, businesses (refering to self-employed persons, including insurance agents, financial advisors, real estate agents, tradesmen), sole-proprietorships, limited liability partnerships, private limited companies can receive up to 160% reimbursement of approved activities.

What this means is spending $5,000 on a laptop means the government will reimburse you up to $8,000 (ie: 160%) if your business and your expense meets their qualifying criteria.

In particular, Internet marketers and those who use technology in their business operations (just about everyone) can benefit from this scheme.

If you look at the government website to sign up for the informational briefings, you can expect a 2-month or longer wait.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m helping to organize a series of informational briefings conducted by Daniel Goh, who has assisted in the submission of more than 100 successful PIC applications over the past 2 years.

The 160% reimbursement scheme ends this year, after which it drops to a 60% reimbursement scheme, so if it’s something you are considering, you should do it now.

Fill in your details in this form and you’ll receive information about the free briefings to be conducted in the coming weeks: PIC Informational briefing.

He already has built up a following and was asking the opinion of the group whether he should take up the offer or consider self-publishing.

My advice to him:

It depends on where you see your strength and the publisher’s strength.

Are you interested in writing only, or would you like to get involved in the marketing and selling also?

The more you put in, the more you will get out of it (in terms of experience and profit).

If you are open to building your skillset and a more holistic writing/publishing business yourself, you will do better going down the self-publishing route.

Or if you are more keen to focus on product development and writing, then you would focus on making the prod and handing it off to the publisher to distribute, market. If you do so, note that the publisher will take the bulk of revenue and profits.

If you’re considering signing with the publisher, here are some points to take note of:

• Look at the contract carefully. What is the duration of the distribution agreement. Do you hold and retain IP rights? Some authors have seen contracts with 10-year lock-ins to the publisher, which is kinda bordering on the ridiculous.
• Some contracts say the publisher have electronic publishing rights, even if they don’t have any plans to publish in such channels. They will have your writing career in handcuffs if you sign that.

So, aside from these issues, getting a publisher deal is a big deal, right?

It will be if you get a deal with one of the big-name publishing houses like Simon & Schuster, Random House, Scholastic, Pearson.

You can take a look at the 56 biggest book publishers in 2014 here.

Behind the scenes though, here’s what I think happens.

Each agent or book rep has a finite amount of time and resources. So like an affiliate manager, he can only service so many clients well.

If you’re in his or her A-list, then fine, you’re settled.

But if you’re in the other 90%, then you have to struggle for their attention in terms of distribution and marketing efforts.

Given the choice, a book agent would focus their resources on promoting the new JK Rowling or George RR Martin book, vs take a gamble on an unknown author.

That’s the sad reality of life, and the publishing business.

One way for new authors to break out of this vicious cycle is to look at opportunities to write AND self promote.

Think of EL James’ “50 Shades of Grey” which started out as Twilight fan fiction, before having to re-brand itself due to trademark issues and benefitting from the buzz on the Twilight forums.

How about Amanda Hocking, author of the Trylle (think trolls going through the Twilight treatment and being re-imagined as beautiful creatures). Or New York Times bestseller author HM Ward, one of the stars of the indie publishing world?

–

If you’ve already started self-publishing or want to but don’t know where to start, I recommend Geoff Shaw’s Kindling program as a good starting point.

Having been in the program for about a year, I think he does a pretty good job at providing a holistic environment for writers to develop plots, write the novels or “how to” books and promote it via Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Those who have struck with it are seeing regular 5-figure monthly incomes from the process. A few of the writers are breaking the 6-figure/month mark, which is a testament to how indie publishing can be a viable and long-term stream of online income.

Kindling is also supported by an active networking group where the community of authors, editors, designers share ideas, promotion techniques and campaign data to help bring your business to the next level.

And yes, when you’re a hit online, inevitably the old-line dead tree book publishers will come knocking at your door.

If you’re hit by the writing bug, you’d want to check out Geoff Shaw’s Kindling.

“If everything is available free on the Internet, why would anyone pay for stuff they can find for free?”. I often hear this from business owners and Internet marketers who’re looking at doing a paid prod

uct or service.

What happens is a long discussion, generally taking 30 minutes or longer. But it boils down to this: Is your stuff attractive and useful enough to get people to pay for it?

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Overpaying?

I’m enrolled in a couple of bootstrap startup programs at the moment, for which I’ve paid a couple of hundred. While I could have bought Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup for less than $15 at Amazon, I chose to pay about 20x that amount for a program instead.

Why?

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

–

The time burn

Let’s look at another example.

I was told about a social network that other startup entrepreneurs are using as a source of market research and populated by an active community. The caveat is that the members are very anti-marketing. If they feel you’re out to game the system, they’ll downvote your stuff and kick you out.

I am new to this network, so I read their entry on Wikipedia and found about 20+ writeups about them on Google News.

As I was going through the information, some of which dated back to 2012, I found that some of the stuff contradicted each other.

Maybe some of the content was superceded by updates. Maybe some authors were more authoritative (ie: knew what they were talking/writing about) than the others. It was sometimes hard to figure out who was giving good advice and who was talking out of their butt.

Unless I was going to spend time to go through each item, verify the author’s credibility and check the background/validity of what they were saying, I would not be able to resolve the inconsistencies.

So while this stuff is free, it is probably great for some, if you are willing to “pay” in time to filter the gems from the trash.

From my perspective, since I can’t use it in its raw form without “fixing” it, it’s not good. Not good at all.

–

Why pay more?

So back to the Lean Startup stuff.

I gladly paid because I wanted to understand the stuff and find actionable strategies to use.

I didn’t want to spend days going through the material then figuring out applications for the model that Eric Ries had outlined.

There were other options too. I could have enrolled in a coaching program/mastermind that cost between $2,000 and $5,000.

I procrastinated about buying in to that.

Besides the money, it would have required quite a bit of commitment in time.

So the program I eventually signed up for, which is self-paced and decently-priced (I don’t have any intention to be startup-certified), made the most sense.

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If the shoe fits

So back to the original question.

There is a lot of free stuff online, probably millions of pages related to whatever you’re looking for.

Even if it is free of cost, it is not “free of time”. If you have to spend hours looking and narrowing down stuff to what you need, then spend more hours testing and seeing which works for you, you will probably end up sending a lot of time on this. Your time has a value. Take your hourly rate (based on your opportunity cost) and multiply it by the number of hours you would spend.

Even if your time is valued at a conservative $10/hour and you spend 10 hours figuring out how to uploading a video to YouTube, insert annotations and optimize it for visibility, you would have “spent” $100 ($10/hour x 10 hours) on this.

If there’s an ebook which costs $10-20 to teach me this, you can bet that I would buy it.

If you want to get the optimal results in what you do, it’s important to use your money wisely AND use your time wisely too.

Of the two, money can be earned and spent easily, but time only flows in one direction (forward) and we all have a finite amount of that (ie: we die one day).

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Having said all this, that’s one of the reasons why I embarked on my life hacking project.

If I can help you become faster, stronger and better at what you are doing and in the future things you plan to do, then why wouldn’t you want to invest in yourself?

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out “How I will make you faster and stronger. Or I will pay you $50”

Go ahead and read it.

It won’t take much time.

Wait for it.

There’s more to the online business than just making money.

So, I often receive questions on my blog, in the forums on social media about how to get more stuff done with a limited amount of time and money.

I probably get many more questions centered around coming up with strategies to achieve your goals, finding ways to keep yourself accountable and importantly, getting the stuff you want.

I try to answer these questions when I can, but like you, I have a limited amount of time to get my own stuff done, spend time with my wife and kids and help others.

So I’ve done the next best things. I’ve compiled many of the questions I receive and identified the issues that affect a lot of people, then narrowed it down to the biggest ones.

I’m in the process of compiling these strategies into a lifehacking guide, or as the project is known the Geek Hackery Guide.

My goal is to come up with a resource that will help you become more efficient in your work and personal life. My plan is to come up with an easy-to-read guide that provides actionable steps and strategies that you can use to see results immediately.

Collab

When I was asking around my circle for feedback about my project, something interesting happened.

I spoke to my friend, Tamar Weinberg, who’s been a writer at Mashable and Lifehacker, focused on similar issues. And the more we talked, the more I realized how her ideas and stuff she uses herself would be a great match for my project.

It was a natural step to rope in an expert like Tamar, who’s already a whiz at social media and uses technology to achieve outcomes like an email inbox with zero emails. She has, what I feel is, a few secret sauce ingredients in her stuff, which I think others would get a great deal from.

So we’ve been collaborating on this project for a while and I’ve had a chance to look at some of her material she’s been preparing.

I can easily see myself implementing several of the her techniques in my own business and life.

Inner game

On my part, I’ll be focusing on my strength, the area of “inner game” – this is the world of thoughts and emotions that cause us to think and act the way we do.

You may or may not be aware that inner game sometimes acquires a bit of a bad rep, especially when it’s been linked to pick-up artists, who use these techniques to influence the behavior of women around them.

I think inner game is a neutral system, it can help some with confidence issues or procrastination issues to break through those barriers and get the results, or women they want.

In my case, I’m using it for a different outcome: To help you get the results in your work life and personal life.

What I will teach you is how you can hack, rewire and reprogram your “mindware”.

Once you have done that you can hack your behavior. This will change the results you can expect to get.

–

Interested?

Here’s how you can participate.

1) We are launching this at an introductory price of $10.

You can pre-order it and get access to a mastermind group that we will running all the way till the product is released.

2) The product will be released on August 11.

3) And here is the interested part. If the product is not released by August 11, you will receive $50. We are using a number of our own mindware hacking techniques in our project. Part of it involves sending out a reward to you if we don’t meet our target. (How is that for motivation).

4) We want you to be 100% satisfied. If you receive the product and you’re not happy with it, just contact us and we’ll give you a full refund on your purchase.

5) We will close this offer at 100 participants. We have five already in, so there are 95 spots remaining. We are keeping it to this number because I have that amount to pay out in my Paypal account now. Also, it’s financially prudent to make offers you can keep and keep your accountable. But you should not go into debt to fulfil it.

6) Ok, we’ve made our offer. Now it’s time for you to commit. You need to pull the trigger. Take action now.
->(Update: the offer has ended. Stay tuned for future updates).

PS: After you sign up, I’ll add or invite you to a private Facebook group where you’ll get access to some goodies as you watch the project take shape.

Since shifting webhosting a couple of times to my current SSD cloud VPS hosting, I’ve lost a number of my product sites along the way.

Part of the rebuilding over the next couple of weeks is to have them up again.

If your sites are down, then you won’t be able to get sales from a website that isn’t there.

Likewise in the world of Internet marketing, if you don’t have campaigns up, you’ll be earning nothing.

Which is why I like Stefanie Hutson’s threads on SEO (search engine optimization) and building long-term online assets.

If  you’re a member of AffPortal, you can look at “The Asset-based Approach to SEO”.

In the piece, Stefanie talks about the importance of building and owning elements of your own SEO network.

When third-party websites may remove backlinks to your site, link to you but with weird anchor text like “click here”, and do other weirder stuff, it can mess your search engine rankings,

She goes on to mention a couple of third party sites that you can create accounts at, like Blogger, Xanga, Scribd, where you can build your own asset and link to your site.

By controlling the linking asset, you have control over the type of link, anchor text and other variables which would affect your result.

Additionally, the advantage of owning one of these sites is that it has the potential to rank for your keyword in the SERPs. Have enough of these and you’ll see a wall of SEO sites where most of the results on page 1 and 2 are your sites, whether they’re YouTube videos or Pinterest pages or an Ezinearticle.

Setting up these types of sites takes time. It’ll probably take three times as long as setting up a quick-and-dirty paid traffic arbitrage campaign.

However, the payoff is that you’ll continue to benefit from them for years to come, especially if you’re building quality content.

The area I’m spending more time focused on is content strategy and content marketing.

If you’re building something that people want, it gains value.

If it’s something that people refer to often, then it gains even more value.

Can you remember the point at which Wikipedia started to replace encyclopedias, going down to the library to look at microfiche and microfilm? (If you’re younger, you may not know what this stuff is).

Likewise, the same with Google becoming the search engine of choice, and Facebook gradually become our social network of choice. (Unless you’re really young, in which case you’re probably already at Instragram or Snapchat).

The thing is that SEO and asset-based sites take much more effort to build than arbitrage campaigns.

On the flip side, they’re likely to have a much longer lifespan than the average 6 to 12 months for a CPA offer.

So you might want to spend time to diversify your income sources, even if you already are successful.

To find out more about long-term SEO strategies, you can sign up at AffPlaybook via my AffPlaybook discount code link.

Yes, I’ve disappeared from my own blog since about late 2012. No, I didn’t quit the industry or start promoting some weird MLM.

So here’s a breakdown of what I’ve been up to.

2011-2012: Neverblue affiliate manager

I had a good experience working with some of the top affiliates in the industry. Seeing how they systematize their business and scale was a good example of how you can build a business which generate fairly consistent results on a long-term basis. During my time as an AM, I was part of a team which travelled to Bangkok, Thailand, to conduct the first Neverblue Interact event. It was so popular we hosted 200 affiliates over two days.

Also, as part of the development effort, I organized an overnight hackathon-style training with hands-on campaign building in Singapore. We had some Malaysian affiliates ride a coach from Malaysia to come for the Singapore event. That was pretty strong dedication to spend about 8 hours on the bus each way to come for a workshop. At least one of them has gone on to become quite a successful affiliate.

2012-2014: Consulting

After I left Neverblue, I did consulting work for clients, primarily running in-house paid traffic campaigns for various verticals. I had a chance to work with traffic sources that typically only large corporates or agencies had access to, which was quite an eye-opening experience. Seeing how affiliates tend to be overpaying for PPV pop traffic, I was getting a good perspective seeing what would be considered good quality leads at $0.50 CPM. That would give a good ROI for most lead gen campaigns.

July 2014: Back to the grind

With client projects finishing earlier this month (July), I finally have a chance to work on my own projects. Despite the inactivity on this block, the backlinks, pagerank are still pretty inactact and some small tests have shown that the market has only grown stronger, especially in the area of social media stuff. I’ll be working on content-based marketing and some cool social media strategies I’ve picked up recently.

Oh, and in case you missed it, I launched a suite of WordPress-related services with a partner, Siggy Gudbrandsson. It consists of a webhosting service, optimized for WordPress blogs and WordPress-powered e-commerce sites. Our own sites which reside on the platform are showing that they are ultra fast and stable after we’ve made server-level tweaks for performance.

The other service is a hand-tuned optimization service for WordPress sites. Siggy will optimize code on the theme and plugin level to optimize site speed, a factor which Google is including in it’s search engine result page (SERP) algorithm.

You can read about the launch of the WordPress optimization services and WordPress webhosting.

Complimenting the WordPress services is the launch of a new blog, AndrewWeeInside.com (nothing major on it yet) which I’ll be documenting as a followalong campaign on this blog.

Stay tuned for some interesting stuff!

So, here’s what I feel doesn’t work for long-term email promotion – continually sending pitch emails to the list, consisting of messages asking people to buy something. I’m pretty sure most people didn’t join a list so that they’d get ads all day.

Unless you’re sending out massive amounts of email, the promotion is likely to tank, whether it’s for a CPA (cost-per-acquistion/lead generation) offer or a  CPS (cost-per-sale) offer.

Eventually the list will burn itself out, with members unsubscribing from your list, flagging you as a spammer (sending you to the spamhaus doghouse) or probably both.

With a slightly longer term view, some marketers may use an article spinner, buy PLR articles, or hire a cheap writer to knock out articles for maybe as low as $1 apiece, and post an article or mail that article out to the list. Sending low quality content to a list is better than sending ads, but not that much better. It still won’t build your long-term online business.

If you’re doing either of these approaches for some time, you’ll likely find that it’s not work.

You might find yourself trapped on an ever-spinning hamster wheel of doing stuff that gives you a poor return on your time and money. You might either end up buying email data, spend most of your time doing email swaps with other list owners, or running paid ads to replace leads which have burned out (mainly due to what you’ve done).
But what’s killing your business is not the quality of your email list, but what you’re doing with that list.

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I don’t really like the “churn and burn” routine of building a list, then hammering it with offers and abandoning it a year later to build a new one, so in the course of looking for long-lasting strategies I came across Jimmy D Brown’s Promo Payoff, which he recently launched.

What attracted me about his resource of “75 email starters” or conversation starters is that you can also use them for blog posts, how to guides, landing pages.
That’s because he skips a lot of the BS marketing that most ebook marketers use and instead focuses on teaching the core principles he himself uses in his business.

Key to that is a heavy dose of attraction marketing – getting your prospective customers interested by appealing to something that THEY are interested in (rather than what you’re promoting) getting them engaged in your angle and importantly, making them want to take action.

I like this approach. I’ve used it in my dating life (in a previous lifetime). It’s always easier to make the girl come to you and give you her number…I noticed that a number of these conversation openers could also be adapted to the dating/pickup artist (PUA) vertical, so if you use them, do report back on how they’re working for you.

But, back to the product itself.

I bought a copy last week and got down to reading it early this week.

Officially it consists of 4 guides in PDF format. They average about 35 pages each, and module 1 is geared towards newer marketers (as mentioned above, the techniques apply whether you’re using it for an email sequence, a one-off or series of blog posts, adcopy for offer landing pages, etc). Because it’s not based off of some weird trend or loophole, you’d find that the techniques help you build a solid foundation in content-based marketing.

Here are some highlights.

In module 2, angle #51, Jimmy goes into the “What else are you missing?” promotion angle.
By hooking on a development in your market, you can build immediate interest, then dovetail your offer into that.

Let me give you an example.

Say you have a Google News alert set for a specific keyword like smart phones.
Once you get the news alert, you get to work, crafting content themed around it.

If there’s a malware-specific alert (like the Heartbleed bug), you focus on the key questions:
1) What’s this issue about?
2) Why is it important and how does it affect me?
3) What can they do about it and how does the thing you’re promoting help with the solution.

The “thing” (solution) you’re promoting could be a mobile CPA offer, a CPS product, a paid guide.

If you’ve done your work correctly, you’ll have a decent conversion.

Why?

Because they’ve already bought into your angle – they’re read through the content, they agree with it (if they didn’t they’d stop reading).
So when they get to the recommendation, they are already pre-sold into you and the next step is pulling the trigger.

You can do some damage if you’ve set this up right.
Use your power responsibly.

And if you need specific pointers, Jimmy goes into some detail in his guide.

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Module 2, Angle #60,
I call this the “cat shit” angle.

Have you heard of “Kopi Luak”?

It’s a special coffee found mainly in Sumatra, Indonesia.

Civet cat eating coffee berries

The Asian Palm Civet feeds on ripe coffee berries in the forest.

Since only ripe and the tastiest berries are eaten by the civet cat, the seeds it swallows also end up in its stomach.
So organically, the cat has “curated” the best coffee beans. This is in contrast to normal coffee harvesting where machines gather coffee beans, regardless of whether they’re ripe or green and unripe, leading to an inferior flavor.

But to havest the coffee beans from the civet cat, the harvesters look for civet cat poop, then dig the undigestible coffee beans from it. They wash it and package it, selling it for a premium.

A cup of Kopi Luak can sell for $40 to $75 at speciality coffee shops.

But if you were to send out a mailing for ‘cat poop coffee’ you’re proabbly going to see poor response rates, and maybe a number of unsubscribes.

Instead, the marketers have decided to focus on the taste profile of the coffee and how rare and exclusive it is.

Both realities are true –
1) The coffee comes from cat poop
2) It has an excellent taste profile and is (pardon the pun) a pain in the butt to harvest.

But picking your angle and working it through fully (ie: not just a few random bullet points) is what’s going to get you the conversion.

Every product/service/offer has it’s positives and negatives, if you as the marketer are dwelling on the negatives, you’re pretty much sunk.

So while Jimmy gives you a massive swipe file of what works, the important thing is not just to clone and blindly use the templates, but to study them and figure out why they’re working and the key principles involved in getting the conversion.

–

On the content marketing front, Jimmy covers strategies in module 3.
Take angle #33 for example.

He describes and decontructs the “Top (number) tips for (getting a good result)”

For example:
“Top 5 tips to lose 10 lbs in 2 months”
“Top 9 ways to attract the woman of your dreams”

There’s a sequencing involved in presenting the pre-sell, you want to emphasize that it wasn’t something you just banged out in 5 minutes, so showing the effort with an opener like
“It took me a lot of trial and error, but I’ve work out the best way to (name the goal).”

Here are:
(top 3 to 10 tips to do _____)

There’s some other stuff you need to include to make the message work as a whole, so you can check it out for the step-by-step.

–
He also shows you how to embed a relevant targeted call to action in the mail.
There are 50 samples of formatting content to embed these calls in your messages (again, it works equally well in emailing, blogging, landing page adcopy).

–

In modulet 4, there’s a list of 52 promotion methods to boost conversion.

These include:
1) Testing coupon codes, how to structure your bonus/incentive for offer conversion
2) Payment plans, – how to structure and present them
3) Loyalty programs – why and how you should implement them
4) How to effectively use scarcity strategies in your campaigns.
5) Tying a promotion to a popular culture reference, how to boost boost virality by incorporating elements from YouTube and Vine.
6) How to reactivate and entice inactive customers to come back
7) Tips to edge out competitors by making minor tweaks to your promotion, especially their blindspots
8) Packaging promotions – multiply the effect of a promotion by these bundling strategies.
9) Creating an “Everyone wins” promotion (page 28)

–

In additon to the core course, Promo Payoff also comes with 4 bonuses

There’s a

• “Fast action bonus”: a 158-page report on how you can monetize high competition verticals.
• Bonus 1: 31-page report  – how to incorporate 6 additional revenue streams into your existing or new promotions
• Bonus 2 (18 pages): 5 email structures that you can customize for the vertical you’re in.
• Bonus 3 (36 pages): System/framework for mailing, mechanics of how and why 5 different structures works. How to incorporate social and reciprocity elements into your email campaigns

–

Hey, are you still here?

Go get your copy of Payoff Promo at the 50% off early bird launch price now.

And when the books were good, they usually offered a “trick” of some sort, usually a loophole that Google, Squidoo, YouTube had left open.

Depending on when you bought the ebook and how fast you took action, your mileage on being able to generate earnings from the technique would range from a week to a few months.

And that is for the good ebooks. The bad ones would just suck, and some newly-published ones would cover techniques that had died the previous year.

Buying this stuff left a bad taste in my mouth, so I quit the “make quick money online” niche for some time (About 2010).

What I decided to do was focus on training that created long-term, sustainable income. It helps me build out several products and sites that continue to generate regular monthly income. Note that the level of earnings is usually lower than something geared towards making quick cash. But if you factor that I’m making that amount or more month-after-month, rather than seeing good earnings for a few weeks/months then seeing a “quick cash” campaign die, it’s not too difficult to make the decision to focus on the steady income stuff.

Which is why I’m happy with promoting and still recommend training resources/sites with a longer term focus.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve liked the training provided by Internet marketer Jimmy D Brown.

I bought one of his training programs which helped me to plan, launch and operate a subscription-based site which generated a steady monthly income and it continued to grow as I applied his step-by-step techniques to generate new signups. What I especially liked about it was that he provided easy-to-follow instructions, so that even if you were new to a traffic source or script, it’d be an easy process.

I sold off the site as I went on to do more consulting and affiliate management work in recent times. With young kids and focusing 100% on the consulting business, I didn’t want to do a half-ass job on the membership site.

It was kinda in synchronicity with what Jimmy was doing in real life too, as he took a hiatus and on October 2012, he posted “I’m starting on a journey that will hopefully culminate in raising over a million dollars for needy orphans in Reynosa, Mexico”.

He later moved to Omaha, Nebraska, to serve full-time in ministry at Redeemer Church and mentioned last month “I’ve been there almost two years now and am loving every bit of it!”

Now back “part-time” in Internet marketing, Jimmy is getting back into the Internet marketing game and re-launching his products. One of the first products is his “Imfoproducts package”.

Looking at the salesletter, it sounds like a bargain. At $20, it’s at a 95% discount off their value.

I went ahead and bought it and here’s a review of the products to help you decide about getting it.

The reports are in PDF format, which means you can access it on your desktop/laptop or tablet or phone.

I’m reviewing the products in the order it appears on his sales page.

Report #1: “More Orders on Autopilot” (20 pages)

He shares emailing strategies and provides formats which you can customize to your vertical/niche. When you’re using an integrated and systematic approach, using the principles that Jimmy shares, you’re more likely to see the results you’re shooting for.

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Report #2: “Productimity Lost Issues” (2 issues) (Single 47-page report)

The strange name aside, it’s a product to improve your personal and business productivity. He goes into what your might be experience in your personal and business life now, how you should deal with these sticking points, then gives you a series of strategies to unblock the stuff holding you back with specific examples.

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Report #3: “Traffic that Pays for Itself” (35 pages)

Guides you step-by-step from planning a campaign, putting the marketing bits together, setting up the paid traffic element (even if you’re a paid traffic noob), launching, optimizing the traffic campaign and monetizing the backend. If you’re following this detailed guide, you’d easily make many times what you paid for the whole package.

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Report #4: “Big Ticket in 24 Hours” (18 pages)

No-nonsense guide to launching a big ticket online business within a day. Gives samples you can follow.

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Report #5: “More Buyers at your Site” (25 pages)

How to use content marketing strategies to generated pre-qualified leads to your offer (physical or virtual). Gives multiple angles so you have many different ways to promote a product and lengthen the longevity and also find opportunities to reboot and relaunch the campaign.

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Report #6: “Secret to Great Ebooks” (24 pages)

How to beef up the quality of information-based products like reports, courses. This’ll help improve conversion rates, lower refund rates and increase retention rates.

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Report #7: “Free Social Media Promos” (18 pages)

If you’re only posting content on social networks, you’re missing out on marketing opportunities that they also give you. Goes into how you can use various networks’ built-in functions as well as third-party service providers which can boost the reach of a new or existing social media campaign.

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Report #8: “Blogging Course PLR”

Blogging package which contains blogging-related course material, marketing creatives, salesletter. Probably about 50 pages of material.

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Report #9: “Two Additional Report” (37 pages each)

Since these are not named on the salesletter, I won’t break the silence either.

They are each 37 pages. One of them is geared towards newer marketers, or experienced marketers who are starting new online projects. The other report is geared towards intermediate to advanced marketers and is like a detailed project management plan to launch an online business with recurring income.

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Report #10: “IM Report membership site” (13 reports)

Issue #1: How To Get Your First Affiliate Sale In The Next 7 Days (26 pages)

Issue #2: The Simple Way To Build A Long-Term Affiliate Business (20 pages)

Issue #3: 27 Ways To Promote Affiliate Programs At Your Blog (38 pages)

Issue #4: 3 Ways To Turn Ezine Articles Into Autopilot Income Streams (23 pages)

Issue #5: How To Write A Solo Mailing That Gets Attention And Results (26 pages)

Issue #6: How To I.M.P.R.O.V.E. Your Information Writing (28 pages)

Issue #7: How To Make Money Offline In Your Hometown (21 pages)

Issue #8: 101 Ways To Build Your Business With Business Cards (22 pages)

Issue #9: How To Create Your Own Mini-Membership Site (24 pages)

Issue #10: How To Get Fresh Site Visitors Without Buying Ads (23 pages)

Issue #11: 8 Ways To Get Top Affiliates To Promote Your Offer (18 pages)

Issue #12: How To Promote Your Offer With Free Webinars (23 pages)

Issue #13: (Bonus) How To Get Your Customers To Spend More Money (20 pages))

I don’t mean for this review to go to 2,000 words, so here’s an overview about these reports.

They cover the basics of building an online business, from creating email opt-in pages, landing pages, how to encourage return/multiple visits to your sites, incorporating multiple marketing channels to increase user stickiness.

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Is the package worth it?

Let’s face it, if a product is no good, paying even $1 for it would be too much.

Fortunately, this isn’t the case here. The Imfoproducts package is packed with solid info that both new and experienced Internet marketers can benefit from.

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for a couple of years, you would be familiar with these topics. What Jimmy does well is cite case studies, so even if you’re already doing the stuff he covers, you might pick up a couple of tips or additional strategies to incorporate into your current campaigns.

If you’re new to this, I would encourage you to focus on one of the reports and working it through from start-to-finish and measuring the results you get. Once you had a handle on how a technique works and how you can get more mileage out of it, then move on to the next report.

The most important element out of all of this is to take consistent action. If you’re only doing one or two steps of the process, you probably won’t see the results you would compared to following through.

It’s a system, so you need to follow it from start to finish to get the results you are shooting for.

Tip: Jimmy gives you multiple samples and case studies you can follow in the material. I would not try to copy/clone the same products and campaigns he’s doing because you will probably not learn as much as doing it yourself and going through the research and brainstorming process he guides you through. If you’re just copying his examples, you will very likely crash and burn at some point and not be able to troubleshoot your way out.

The biggest takeaway you will get is learning a system and framework you can follow and use to see long-term, sustainable and more importantly, profitable results.

You can check out the Imfoproducts package here.

(Note that he mentioned it’s a time-limited offer).