The second installment of Jo Han Mok and Matt Bacak’s Internet Millionaire Incubator hits Singapore this Friday.

It’s a 3-day event with some of the top Internet Marketers giving you their strategies and tips to succeed online.

In particular, these 2 guys alone are worth the ticket price:

eBay Specialist Adam Ginsburg and Internet Marketing guru Kirt Christensen

Adam Ginsburg: I travelled to Atlanta, Georgie earlier this year to listen to Adam speak and I’d rank him among the top 3 eBay experts around. He talked about how he’s sold $20 million worth of pianos on eBay and has now moved on to flipping properties (houses and buildings) on eBay.

Additionally he had one of his students who enrolled in his program a year ago, a single mother with 4 kids, talk about how she now generates more than $10,000 a month from her eBay business.

Adam has also appeared in master marketer Dan Kennedy’s programs, together with the likes of Yanik Silver, Bill Glazer and John Carlton.

This is the perfect opportunity to get tips from Adam on starting up your eBay marketing efforts or bringing it to the next level.

[Adam’s actually the reason why I’ve been focusing on eBay recently and have sold a number of items using his techniques]

–

Kirt Christensen: Kirt’s a very Internet Marketer having been in the industry for some time. If you’ve listen to Matt Bacak speak, you’d probably heard about the Internet marketer who runs his business from his swimming pool. Matt was refering to Kirt.

If there’s one marketer who’s just about done it all, it’s Kirt. Besides his info products, Kirt’s also been successful at PPC affiliate marketing, membership sites and video marketing and training.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Kirt a number of times because we’re in the same mastermind and he’s given me a number of techniques to enhance my video marketing efforts.

–

I guess one concern some might have about the event is: “Will it be a pitch fest?”

I attended the first Internet Millionaire Incubator last year, and the sessions were very content heavy, especially the ones by Keith Wellman and Warren Whitlock.

If you’re a newer Internet marketer or eBay auction specialist and your income is less than $5,000 a month, you should take advantage of this opportunity and attend the Internet Millionaire Incubator which runs this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 9 am to 7 pm at the Singapore Expo center.

The other speakers include:

• John Childers
• Frank Garon
• Chris Moreno
• Mark Anastasi
• Randy Charach
• Jarl Moe
• Patric Chan
• Debra Thompson
• David Cavanagh
• Matt Bacak
• Jo Han Mok.

Tickets are $288 and available at the Internet Millionaire Incubator site.

I have a limited number of tickets available which Jo Han offered my list at a substantial discount. I’d like to offer them to my list members and if there’re any remaining to my blog readers.

If you’re interested, drop me a mail at the contact form with your name, email and contact number, and we’ll contact you if you qualify.

I was looking through my blog and got tagged by Dawud Miracle for the Goal Setting meme originally started by Alex Shalman and have gone through eMom Wendy Piersall (winner of the recent Elite Retreat ticket)

Having taught life skills and goal setting specifically, I’ve noticed that many don’t include the following criteria: goals have to be:

• Specific: Include a measurement, so you’ll know when you’ve achieved it (a net worth of $x million, rather than merely “really rich!”)
• Time Specific: You need a timeframe. Theoretically we could all be millionaires, even if we’re earning just $1,000 a month. The problem is that at that rate, you might need to work till 305 years to achieve it. So goals don’t mean much without the time factor.
• Realistic: I use a “reality check” factor. If you’re a complete computer idiot, and you’re gunning for $1 million in your first year in Internet Marketing and you can spend 30 minutes a week on this. You might get slammed hard against the wall when you meet Mr Reality.

There’re other criteria too, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

So here’re my goals:

Goals:

• Professional Goal 1: Develop and have ready for launch one of my products by end June 2007. Shooting for 10,000 units sold by Dec 31st, 2007.
• Professional Goal 2: Launch and build a 1,000 strong social community by Dec 31st, 2007
• Professional Goal 3: Achieve a net worth of $5 million by December 31st, 2010.
• Family Goal 1: Continue to work on growing my family to 3 kids by 2009 (I’m 33% there…)
• Family Goal 2: To spend at least an hour of quality time with my wife every evening. (We’re both usually working on multiple projects at the same time.)
• Financial Goal 1: Grow my finances by 10% each year.
• Personal Development Goal 1: Spend at least an hour boning up on my IM knowledge each day.
• Personal Development Goal 2: Spend at least half an hour sorting out and outsourcing the paperwork each day. (It never ends…)

If you choose too, you can set goals dealing with the social, spiritual and other aspects of your life too.

Continuing this meme, I’m tagging:

• Michelle MacPhearson
• Michael Ono
• Richard Ball
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
• Kris Jones

Keep the ball rolling, guys…

PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones and Andrew Wee at Affiliate Summit West, Jan 2007

If you’ve been reading the PepperJamBlog for any length of time, you’d discover a treasure trove of information and can bump up your Internet Marketing efforts.

In his latest post “Affiliate Marketing – Thinking Outside the Box“, Kris dishes out the dirt on how he recently executed a campaign grossing $30,000 in sales, netting $15,000 in profit. And while some Super Affiliates may net six or seven figures in income per month, consider that Kris spent 15 minutes setting up this campaign.

So Kris has made a killing off UGG Boots.

How would he further enhance his efforts?

Using a psychographic approach to define the profile of the customers, perhaps they’re outdoor adventurers.

I’m sure most of them would need socks to go with that. Perhaps a speciality padded sock which minimizes Achilles heel injuries. If they love the great outdoors, they might be looking for a quality compass, or what about a set of walkie talkies?

If they’re buying the boots for winter use, would something like the Oakley Razor Blades be a complimentary product? Or a stylish Thinsulate clothing accessory or jacket?

By profiling your customer base and crossselling and upselling related items to them, you can effectively double and triple your profile, with ZERO acquisition cost (you’re already ‘acquired’ and pre-qualified them with their first purchase).

If you do a survey and collect their preferences, you can get the basis to develop an information product, which address their questions with pinpoint accuracy.

Perhaps boots aren’t your thing?

It’s an easy matter to use a tool like Google Trends to scope out trend hotspots and prepare your campaign to monetize the trend easily.

If nothing else, focusing on the core business basics will keep you very comfortable and if you’re look for inspiration for your next campaign, check out Jo Han Mok’s Internet Millionaire Code.

Help is at hand.

If you’ve been struggling to make money online, and have yet to see your first check arrive in your mailbox.

Or if you have collected a check that is nowhere near “Day Job Killer” category, you really owe it to yourself to bone up your game and move closer to the big leagues.

You might’ve read some of my previous posts about Internet Marketing Maestro Jo Han Mok. In case you missed them, check out:

• Is This the End of WhoIsAndrewWee.com?
• Planning for your Internet Marketing Success and Avoiding Failure

Following the recent success of our group consultation “The Blood and Guts of Social Traffic and Generating A Torrent of Traffic“, Jo Han has put together a new workshop, “Warp Speed Internet Wealth” which will showcases successful Internet Marketing models and he’ll also relate some of his experiences on the path to Internet Marketing success.

To give you a taste of Jo Han’s typical day:

I’ve seen Jo Han step into his office late in the afternoon and the first thing he does is walk into the gym and work out, or go swim for an hour or so.

Jo Han at his recent 28th Birthday Party celebration

Then he sit down and works for about an hour. Then he heads out for a cup of local coffee. He practises his magic act, talks about the latest UFC bout he watched recently, then he heads off to dinner (wagyu beef is his favorite), and goes home to watch a bunch of DVDs.

The few times I’ve gone out partying with him, we’ve been out till 3 in the morning (and that’s early in the week…)

Another day brings Another night of hard partying for Jo Han Mok and friends

Despite the obvious fact that he’s hardly working at all, he’s doing very well for himself.
What I’ve found most impressive is how he’s systematized his business, so that it runs very much on autopilot.

I mean, who doesn’t want to wake up every morning, log into your payment processor and check out a swath of transactions that were done while you were sleeping…Take a look at Internet Millionaire Code if you haven’t done so yet.

I called around to some of my contacts this afternoon and just about all the people I dropped an email to, sent a reply within 5 minutes asking for tickets for themselves and their friends. They were demanding that I confirm their seats and a number have even offered to buy me dinner!

I’d spoken to Jo Han earlier and asked for 50 slots for my blog community, so if you’re reading this now, I’ve actually pre-empted the ads appearing in the major news and business daily, The Straits Times and The Business Times tomorrow.

Quite a number of places have already been taken up earlier this afternoon, and I have a limited number of seats left.

If you are in Singapore, and would like to attend this free workshop on Friday evening, you’ll need to drop me an email via the contact me form ASAP. You’ll need to include your name, email address and a contact number.

PS: seats will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis and subject to availability

“You’re not updating your blog as regularly as you used to. Sometimes you skip entire days.

Are you giving up blogging?

What happened?

Please continue blogging, I enjoy your style and your (sic) explain things in a way I understand easily”

I appreciate getting emails, especially when concerned readers write in.

It is true that I am not blogging as regularly as I have been. I don’t see anything ending anytime soon.

The truth is I’ve been working on a very interesting project over the past month, which will culminate in an interesting session this weekend.

I’ve been hanging out with this dude:

That’s me on the left with Internet Marketing guru, Jo Han Mok

Jo Han’s one of the best minds around when it comes to product creation/development, copywriting and traffic generation and he has been in the Internet Marketing game for some time.

If you haven’t already checked out the Internet Millionaire Code, you’re missing out on a goldmine of information.

—

But back to my blogging.

I’ve been developing new blogging and social traffic generation strategies and testing them out.

As you know, the new traffic generation strategy (which some call Traffic2.0 – although I personally dislike that term),can be brutally effective.

It goes way beyond the rudimentary “go to the most popular forums, insert a signature link, and post often”. If you’ve used that and have generated traffic in the hundreds of uniques, you’re already doing well.

What I’m talking about, is the ability to hypnotically attract hordes of qualified, laser-targeted traffic to your blog or website.

After showing a number of Internet Marketing inner circle members the results of my tests, the reactions I got ranged from amazement to pure disbelief and one even went to the extent of calling me a liar…till I showed him my web stats and he became a believer.

—

Are you working hard?

Wouldn’t you prefer to work smart?

Internet Marketing is a long haul game, and if you’re not using strategies and tactics to help you get what you want…Internet Marketing will honestly become another job, which will have you enslaved to the Internet and your computer, instead of getting you what you want.

—

I’ve been spending more time with my daughter, Bianca too.

Bianca Wee

It’s a great feeling to watch her growing day by day, and though she’s only 10 months, it just seems like yesterday when she was just a small baby that I cradled in my arms.

Just applying some of the strategies in the Internet Millionaire Code has given me the opportunity to triple my income in the last month AND spend more time with my family.

It’s ironic that many new Internet Marketers write me and complain that they sometimes work 14 or 16 hour days, but they’re not seeing returns from their marketing efforts.

If only they knew…

Which is why if you’re serious about moving ahead in the Internet Marketing game, and you are in Singapore this weekend, you owe it to yourself to check out the workshop small group consultation that Jo Han and I will be conducting.

We’ve kept the group really small and will be working individually with each of the participants on getting their sales pages (with consultation from Jo Han himself) optimized for maximum income generation, and I’ll provide some traffic generation strategies through new (and proven) traffic systems I’ve developed.

This is run as a small group personal consultation, geared specifically to your product or service, rather than a workshop where we’re actively teaching material. It’ll be the first and might be the only time we conduct it.
We’re aiming to close the registrations within the next 24 hours, so if you’re interested, you will need to drop me an email through the contact me link, including a contact number.

Had something happened?

I have been reading some of their emails, visiting their site regularly and have even bought a number of their products.

Had they moved to the “dark side”?

I looked at my screen again:

And even when I looked up another screen:

There was no getting away from this.

Frankly, his site gets more than 1,000 visits a day (It might be as high as 2,000), and I would wager that the effect it would have on one’s reputation would be immesurable.

If you’ve been working hard to put out content, build a reputation, credibility and rapport with your readers, it could be blown out of the water by a fatal mistake like this.

Let’s look at the reality of this.

Blogging is obviously hot, and almost every major Internet Marketing guru, or aspiring guru has jumped on the bandwagon.

Sure there’re lots of advantages:

• Unprecendented repuation building in a short amount of time
• Near unlimited scalability with the syndication of RSS feeds and the employment of surge traffic tactics on Digg and del.icio.us
• Unlimited versatility of media. It’s not just “text marketing” anymore. Welcome to the world of graphics, podcasts, vodcasts, interactive presentations and who knows what else?

But the dark side is that if you’re not properly managing your blogging, you will be opening a Pandora’s box.

There’s massive good, but there’s potential for major mishaps too.

This isn’t the problem for 90% of bloggers out there because they have the misfortune/good luck to use blogging, just as they’d use a static HTML website. They don’t see and aren’t able to use the power of blogging and only see a miserable 100 visitors a day. Even if you mess up your blog, open the floodgates to porn peddlers, it doesn’t make a difference. If no one’s there to see your mess, I guess it doesn’t matter.

Employing the first mover advantage with traffic generation via blogging means you need to:

• Have a traffic plan in place
• Establish realistic and achieable metrics
• And most importantly, have the strategies to execute your plan

Missing some of these components will mean you likely will miss your target altogether.

If I sound like I’m off my rocker, you’ll have to excuse me.

It’s just that I’ve seen so many self-professed expert bloggers and Internet Marketers peddling their sub-standard blogging products that it made me angry enough to team up with Jo Han Mok to offer our customized workshop I mentioned in my earlier post: The Blood and Guts of Social Traffic and Generating A Torrent of Traffic.

If you are in Singapore and you are serious about generating traffic, and more importantly monetizing your blog, the customized workshop is something you come for.

The crowd has been expecting some blogging tips, but sadly I had to disappoint.

Instead, I’m getting a number of positive vibes about the traffic strategies I’ve developed over the past couple of months.

It has been a funny experience, just seeing the traffic surge every month by between 50% and 100%.

January was an especially good month with more than 7,500 unique visitors heading over.

This month looks like it’ll bust that fairly easily.

I think one major difference between what I’ve been doing with my Social Traffic Generation and the Spike/Surge strategies used by other Internet Marketers, is that the traffic I generate is very sticky and sustainable.

To be honest, I couldn’t really care about the effort to generate the “one off” traffic usually associated with a Digg spike.

Once I’ve established my traffic baseline:

At between Alexa’s 20,000 and 40,000 mark, it gives me flexibility to focus on marketing or branding efforts.

In addition to being free or low cost, my social traffic generation system brings traffic that is:

• Highly Targeted and Qualified
• Sustainable over a period of time
• “Sticky”

As you might have read in “Why 90% of Internet Marketers Fail“, failure can be attributed to not having a plan in place.

It’s got nothing to do with buying the latest “product du jour”, and everything to do with having a system in place that produces results.

In response to demand from the event’s participants, Jo Han and I will be offering a highly customized workshop geared at establishing your online presence and generating consistent and sustainable income. The takeup rate at the workshop was very encouraging and it’ll be in a small group setting, so you’ll get personalized attention.

Some of my blog readers have asked about workshops to accelerate their Internet income generation. I checked with Jo Han yesterday and we can take a limited number of participants. Applications will be strictly reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

The workshop will be held in Singapore in March and you’ll receive hands-on consultation from Jo Han and myself.

If you are serious and committed about your online income generation, you should drop me a message, including your contact number, at the Contact Form now.

Increasingly over the last couple of weeks I’ve received emails along the lines of:

“I earned a couple of hundred dollars over the past few weeks using XYZ adsense system from XYZ guru. All of a sudden, the product doesn’t work anymore. What happened?”

Or

“I used this affiliate marketing product and surprised myself by racking up 30 sales in my first month. Now I’m getting 1 sale a week. I’m never going to be able to quit my day job and go fully into Internet Marketing”

It’s a constant refrain and I can understand the situation that many are going through.

During my first couple of months in Internet Marketing, I was pretty psyched too, especially when my sales were doubling every month, from $1,500 the first month, to $2,500 the next month. And it just seemed like sales were set to continue doubling every month. Each time I sent out an email, it was just a matter of waking up in the morning and refreshing my payment processor screens to see the sales flying in.

I was really feeling happy till three days went by without sales.

Then a week. I was getting really concerned.

Then a couple of sales came in, but nowhere near the phenomenal level I had seen starting out, where seeing $500 a day in net profit seemed to be business as usual.

Going from my high earning days to consecutive days of zero sales was demoralizing.

It was only when I discovered Internet Guru Jo Han Mok’s Internet Millionaire Code that the pieces of the puzzle started coming together for me.

Here’s where I think every Internet Marketer and Direct Marketer stands to learn a lesson or two.

If you want to build a sustainable business, forget the reigning product du jour for a moment, instead it’s worth focusing on the business fundamentals (rather than Internet Marketing technology) and go from there.

More important than the ebook or snazzy technology is the mindset, which will position you for success.

Having a plan and a strategy in place will bring you a step up from other marketers who’re stumbling from one product to the next, making a couple of hundred dollars till the product lifecycle runs out.

Instead of “fumbling in the dark”, you can check out some of Jo Han’s success principles.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit:

–> Internet Millionaire Code

Hi Andrew,

I’m just starting to get my feet wet with internet marketing and your website was 1 of the first I had visited through a chance of luck about 2 weeks back. Since then I had hummed and hawwed, tried to focus amidst the mountains of information set upon me, setup PPC campaigns that just netted me 1 sale and I still couldn’t focus on 1 plan of action with that much options swirling around me.

Fast forward 2 weeks later and I find myself back at your blog and I decided.. why not see how you did when you first started and I went all the way back to dig your posts back in July 2006. Thats when I realised that it was all about focus and hardwork at the start which I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so far. I’d just like to ask, was it that tough for you initially?

Cheers
Darren

—

The short answer is that everyone always starts out hard before it becomes easy.

This sounds counter intuitive to computer game players because we’d usually set a game to level 1 before progressing to higher levels.

But if you think about it, the most difficult part of any task is to build inertia from a stationery starting position.

If you have an idea of where you want to be (your goal) and you want it badly enough (your motivation and determination), then you can develop a plan of action and implement it.

Sound simple, doesn’t it?

But the difficulty is that there’s often a disconnect between our goals and our motivation.

If achieving your goal means you will be financially free, able to take 6 month long vacations if you chose to, and buying things you liked without having to calculate if a new car fit into a budget, the question becomes: How motivated are you?

You may have seen that I recommend various products and services which I’ve personally felt were very good, such as the:

• AutoBlogIncomeGenerator
• SecretBlogWeapon
• And lately, Jo Han Mok’s Internet Millionaire Code

But underpinning all these tools must be the desire to succeed.

I just had a conversation with someone in the WickedFire chatroom.

If your motivation to play World of Warcraft is stronger than your thirst for Internet Marketing, you’re not likely to get very far.

If on the other hand, you’re doing very well at Internet Marketing, it would give you the freedom to spend most of your time playing WoW without regard for not being able to meet your living expenses, wouldn’t it?

If you can bridge the connection between your goal and your motivation to achieve that goal, it will be more a leisure activity, more than a job.

My topic area was on blogging and blog monetization.

As a followup to the call, here’re my notes for the participants.

Blogging at blogger.com and wordpress.com

It’s ok to test out the blogging waters when you’re starting out, however, do note that these services are targeted at hobbyists and recreational bloggers.

You’re subjected to their terms of service, which unsurprisingly prohibits promotion of adult, gaming, pharmaceutical-related niches among others.
Violation of their terms of service means they may forcibly take back the domain if you happen to violate their rules (inadvertedly or otherwise).

If you build up the Google PageRank or traffic to the domain, you don’t have the option of selling the domain (which could be value in the hundreds of thousand or millions for a high value, high traffic domain). The blog service provider owns the domain. Good luck trying to sell it!

My recommendation: Hosted WordPress

Having your own WordPress blog on your hosting account beats all options hands down in my option.

Here are the benefits in my opinion:

• You are free to develop any niche you desire (provided it doesn’t contravene homeland security or national interest restrictions).
• You can choose to sell your domain should you choose to exit the niche.
• You have stronger branding associated to your own domain (compared to having domainname.blogspot.com).

Having your own hosted domain is analogous to using a domain specific email, rather than a hotmail.com or yahoo.com for your business email!

If you don’t already have a web hosting provider, I’d recommend BlueHost.

And a blogging tool which has been very useful for me has been SecretBlogWeapon (SBW).

SBW runs thorugh the keyword research and blog setup process with lots of illustrations and graphics. In addition, it helps you optimize your blog to generate traffic and the basics of social traffic generation (which generates immediate traffic, compared to search engine traffic which can takes weeks to get your site indexed).

Killer WordPress Plugins Roundup

Once you have your blog set up, here’s some of the plugins which have helped me step up to a new level:

• Killer WordPress Plugins Part 1
• Popularity Contest WordPress plugin
• 10 Ways to a Killer Blog (a short series)

And if you’re like to do remote blog posting, w.bloggar is useful.

This isn’t pretty, but you can download some useful WordPress plugins.

Does Affiliate Blogging Work?

If you’re like to see the efforts of my affiliate blogging, here’re some screenshots from last year. (Yes, the results are only from blogging. I don’t use articles or press releases)
Several new bloggers who purchased the Auto Blog Income Generator have given me feedback that the instructional videos were very useful. (Site may occasionally be inacessible due to high traffic. Please try again later)

And don’t forget the free Robert Allen books when you join my list. (You will get a short blogging guide too).

PS: If you’re planning to do affiliate blogging, I’d strongly recommend removing Google Adsense from all your pages. A $20 affiliate commission is much more valuable than a $0.50 clickthrough!

If I left anything out, leave me a comment below.

2006 was an interesting time for me as I plunged into Internet Marketing.

Although I didn’t have a clear idea in the beginning, it was very clear that the path of least resistance would be to go with blogging.

In the course of the last 5 months, I’ve had a series of interesting experiences and the questions I’ve dealt with appear to be common with all new bloggers, whether the questions originate from a blog, a forum, a blog network or a social networking site.

Here’s 2006 in retrospective in a FAQ format with money making tips and 7 Reality Checks for bloggers and internet marketers.

• Blogging Reality Check 1: Making Money from Blogging is Evil

I’m not sure of the intent of this often heard objection.

I guess some might have ‘pure/purist intentions’ and expect that blogging is some form of ‘cathartic release’ for heavy/philosophical/ponderous thinking.

I see blogging as a form of personal journalism. And journalists have to eat.

Like it or not, the reason why your newspaper or magazine doesn’t cost $100 a copy is because it’s sponsored by advertisements and the classifieds. Likewise, blogs can be financially self-sustaining through adsense, affiliate marketing and other monetization strategies.

Expecting bloggers to provide free content is akin to expecting musicians to provide music free of charge.

It takes time and resources to produce blog content and there is a measurable value to it.

In a utopian society, writers, artists, musicians would be able to freely practise their craft without fear of finding their next meal. We don’t live in that world yet.

• Blogging Reality Check 2: I Will Make Millions Overnight

On the other extreme, I have spoken to bloggers who expect to make huge sums of money overnight.

It’s unlikely to happen unless you are some sort of celebrity, likely a mega celebrity if you’re planning to bring in the megabucks.

If you are not however, it’s time to face a reality check.

We’ve also heard about products or software that can automatically build blogs by the hundreds every hour, and we’ve also heard about how if each blog earns a dollar each day, you’d be earning thousands of dollars in your sleep.

While you might have some degree of success using these blogging-related “quick buck” schemes, it might not necessarily be sustainable (ie you are ‘de-indexed’ and disappear from the search engine results, or your ‘innovative’ monetization exploit is soon negated.) It then becomes a mad rush for the next “black hat template” or the next automated, broadband-enabled, stealth, power-enhanced, web2.0-enabled, ajax-enhanced, php-powered widget.

Rinse and repeat until it gets disabled by one of the higher power. (see above paragraph)
If you are a serious blogger for which blogging is a long term strategy to help you achieve your goals, here’s what I would advise you to do.

Think of your blog as a business tool. Consider:

• How does it fit in with your adsense or affiliate marketing plan?
• How would you go about establish trust and credibility for your business.
• Who would your strategic partners be.
• How are you building your “me” brand?

• Blogging Reality Check 3: Free Tools and Services

New Internet Marketers ask me this all the time: “What are the free tools we can use besides blogger/blogspot to growing our blogging efforts.”

I’d add to the list of useful tools such as GIMP, PingOat, Squidoo.

What troubles me however, is that some who aspire to earn online income aim to do it only using free tools.

I think you could probably earn $50-$100 per month using free tools, and if you’re good earn maybe $500.

Beyond that could be highly challenging. I guess if you put your mind to it, you could come up with very interesting business models.

For the vast majority of us however, I’d advise counting the value of your time.

Sure you could surf 1,000 websites and gather the same information, or as one participant at the World Internet Summit said to me, I can just google for everything, I don’t need to buy anything (which was weird because he invested in a World Internet Summit ticket…)

To build a sustainable business, you need to value your time.

Is your time worth $5 an hour? $10? $50? $500? $5,000?

If your time is worth more than the cost of the product or service, you’d be foolish not to subscribe or invest in the product.

Even if your time was worth $1 per hour, I couldn’t see how it’d make sense to manually maintain a mailing list of 1,000 and send them emails on a bi-weekly basis.

I use a combination of free and paid tools and you’d generally be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you have the mindset of starting and operating a business, your tools will generate many times their investment for you.

Some of the useful tools which outweigh their investment include:

• Secret Blog Weapon (Blog Optimization)
• Ultimate Affiliate Weapon (Affiliate Marketing)
• Bluehost web hosting
• Autoresponder: Aweber / GetResponse

Once you have these fundamentals in place, you’d find that building your business is much easier.

• Blogging Reality Check 4: It Takes Tough Times

It’s taken 4 months to get to the stage I’m currently at.

Although I’d have preferred to get here within a week of starting up, building a business, blogging-based or otherwise is as much about the process of getting to your goal, as much as merely achieving it.

As you’re building your blogging business you will encounter setbacks, perhaps days in which your visitor numbers or income drop drastically.

Here’s something that people don’t often talk about.

The measure of a mature blogger is not what happens when good times are rolling, but what you do when things go south.

Do you merely throw in the towel? Do you kick your efforts up a notch?

Often the most spectacular successes are built on the backs of the most dismal circumstances.

Look at the rise of Japan after the Second World War, or Apple after an ousted Steve Jobs rejoined and the company’s fortunes turned not once, but numerous times with the launch of the MacIntosh, the iMac and the iPod.

If you’ve watched real life events unfold during 9-11, you’d know that true heroes are forged in the moments of greatest adversity.

A couple of months ago, I blogged about: Are you ready to give up on Internet Marketing?

It’s still relevant now. Perhaps more so.

Some people seek to avoid difficulty and challenges, others actively seek it.

Which are you?

• Blogging Reality Check 5: I Will Make Millions Overnight

Are you an ‘everything under the sun’ blogger?

If you are one of the myriad of blogger who blogs about “internet marketing”, “health and fitness” or “women’s issues”, you could be biting off more than you can chew.

Catchall blogs work best if they’re run by a panel of bloggers (sometimes as many as 10), or by especially prolific bloggers.

If you’re specializing in everything, you’re specializing in nothing.

Finding your niche and entrenching yourself deeply in it means that your position is virtually unassailable.

If you do choose to tackle “internet marketing”, maybe you want to niche it by focusing on “internet marketing for high school students”, “internet marketing for midcareer professionals” or “internet marketing for single mothers”.

The brick and mortar businesses have moved towards speciality stores, rather than general concept stores (with Wal Mart being one of the few exceptions). Likewise, becoming a niche specialist helps you expand from a position of power.

Blogging Reality Check 6: Build A Community

When you’re starting out, you might be working in isolation.

If you’re fortunate, you might be able to tap into a community. By tapping into these resources, you gain significant leverage as you’re expanding your efforts.

“Leverage”, comes in a few flavors. There’s technological leverage that a software or tool can help by automating your efforts. But far more powerful is social leverage or people-oriented leverage.

And social leverage can easily move mountains.

During the launch of Russell Brunson’s Conquer Your Niche Internet Marketing forum, the site’s traffic went off the charts.

Other sites I frequently visit include:

Forums such as:

• Warrior Forum
• Digital Point
• Digital Keiretsu

Blogs such as:

• Shoemoney
• ProBlogger
• PlanetAndrea
• 9rules Blog Network (of which I am a member)

At it’s simplest, I believe build a community is nothing more than making friends, and I appreciate the opportunities to interact with the likes of Ewen Chia, Jo Han Mok, Social Media specialist Michelle MacPhearson, and my buddies Ryan Chua and Rachit Dayal.

Blogging Reality Check 7: Change the World

This is probably the most important step.

Have a focus bigger than yourself.

You don’t necessarily need to choose ‘world peace’, but you want your blogging efforts to mean more than pounding out 300-700 words every 24 hours, inserting a few photos and hitting the publish button.

We need meaning to keep going.

Meaning is the glue that creates our motivation.

We all have 24 hours a day, and we can choose to spend that time focusing on big project, or on small projects.

When you embrace something huge, something weird happens to your thinking too, it expands.

Your world view blows up and suddenly your universe is not just your neighbourhood, or the people in your village, city, state or country.

If you’re seeing and blogging through the eyes of a world citizen, life (business or personal) can only continue to be a rich canvas to blog about.

Fresh from finishing an intensive two day workshop with Copywriting Guru Jo Han Mok, I went for a 3 day vacation to paradise with the family. (thanks to my buddy Rachit Dayal who helped with my blog housekeeping while I was away)

Indra Mani Villa, Bintan, Indonesia

We headed out to Indonesia in choppy water, akin to 5G roller coaster ride. (I’d later discovered that Singapore had been subjected to 24 hours of rain and flooding).

The ocean ride was tough. I couldn’t keep my lunch down. Neither it seemed could about 80% of the other passengers.

But we were rewarded with a picturesque view of the sea, with the waves lapping below our villa, barely 20 meters away.

When it was raining heavily, it was a pure delight to soak in our personal pool and gaze out to the sea.

I drifted off to sleep every evening, lulled by the ocean waves splashing on the sandy shore.

It was much needed therapy after the past four months of relentless internet marketing. And it was a good opportunity too, to make plans for the next couple of months.

I’m back, energized, all set to reply to the 300 emails which’ve just come into my inbox. And I’m raring to go.

While money always seems to be the prime motivator for a lot of people, my experience has shown that you really do need to find a stronger motivator to keep you going.

Guy Kawasaki has mentioned several times that starting a tech startup and having the aim to “change the world” is a much nobler purpose than merely to make money. (I’d suggest going over to Guy’s blog and searching for “change the world” as he has numerous excellent posts on the topic).

While we all don’t necessarily need to effect a social revolution or remake reality, instead it’d be a good time to find inside ourselves that driving force, which will keep us going at 3am in the morning, while beset by migraine attacks. Perhaps for a primal driving force which will bring us one step closer to that goal, not merely just the gold.

If we can unclock that motivation, which moves us up to that next step, wouldn’t that be worth spending a couple of days searching for?

Here’s my motivation:

My daughter Bianca and wife Kar Ling

What’s your motivation?

• “What will pay the best?”
• “What works the best in Internet Marketing?”
• “Can you recommend something to me which will make me a lot of money?”
• “How do I make $100,000 a month?”

Here’re my replies:

• “What will pay the best?” / “What works the best in Internet Marketing?”

I think people who ask this question, expect a ‘silver bullet’ type answer.

Perhaps hearing “eBay Auctions” or “Adsense Publishing” will answer their money woes.

But the reality is that lots of people are making good money on the Internet.

And there’re at least ten basic ways to make online income, and probably 100 variations of that.

So the best way is the way that works best for you.

The “You” factor plays a big part in your success.

You determine your business model, you decide how you want to position your product or service. You determine the action plan and you take action on it.

I’ve heard that click arbitrage is dead.

I’ve also been to a number of online communities recently where they practise it on a daily basis, with some making upwards of $5,000 a day.

Is click arbitrage really dead?

Some would like to think so. I’m fairly sure that their detractors have their own business model (together with accompanying products and service) to promote.

I honestly believe that one business model is just as good as another, provided you put in the time and effort to make it work.

If you have a personal interest and stake in it, your chances of success are very much higher.

I personally don’t find creating 1,000 adsense income generating blogs that exciting, nor innovative (but that’s my personal preference), so I’ve decided to go ahead with this blog.

Most of my income has come from this blog, and people seem to be upset with me when I say that.

Perhaps they wanted to see my entire ‘network’. Or “all my websites” (I’m not sure what they want to see).
Sorry to let you down, folks.

—

Next question:

• “Can you recommend something to me which will make me a lot of money?”

Sure. Pick something you’re interested in, then run with it.

Interested in Dogs?

• Create a dog niche site, maybe dog care.
• Sign up for dogfood affiliate programs.
• Commission an ebook on a niche area.Create a dog community site, a forum
• Create a viral dog campaign (hold back the rabies though).
• Go on the road, give dog-related talks
• Join an animal rights political party.

Have fun too! (actually that’s the most important element).

Unfortunately, most people don’t see the behind the scenes work behind every success story.

If you want good money fast! Expect to put in 8 hour days building up your business.

Except for lottery winners, I haven’t seen many make huge incomes overnight.

Even when watching Super Affiliate Ewen Chia and Copywriter Jo Han Mok, pull their $65,462 affiliate marketing campaign over 2.5 days during the recent World Internet Summit, it’s easy to overlook the fact that they’ve been at it for the past 3 years.

Can you pull the $435,000+ that Super Affiliate Ros Gardner did in her first year?

Possibly, but are you willing to put in the same effort?

I don’t know exactly how much time Ros put in that year, but I’m fairly sure it’s something substantial.

When you make the decision to go into Internet Marketing, it depends on what your goals are.

• If you’re doing this as a hobby and putting in hobby type time, expect hobby type results.
• If you’re planning to build a business, and an Internet Marketing business is as much a business as any, expect to put in time and effort in the beginning to master the basics and you can expect to see the returns coming in.

—

Final question:

• “How do I make $100,000 a month?”

When you’re actually in the business, you can see how systematic everything actually is.

If you have a niche blog/site generating $1,000 per month, 10 of those amounts to $10,000 per month. And 100 of those gets you $100,000 per month.

If you have an info product generating $500 per month, 20 of those will generate $10,000 per month. Rinse and repeat.

The key though is refining the system which will bring you the results you are aiming for.

Once it works for one niche, you move on to the next and repeat the process.

—

Seen in that manner, isn’t Internet Marketing full of possibilities?

If you’re building an Internet Marketing branding site, and build the “Me” brand which I’ve mentioned a number of times:

Building the “Me” Internet Marketing Brand

The biggest thing you can do is very simple, and at the same time, the hardest for many to accept. (I’ve had a difficult one with this too).

Almost people will have stiff resistance to this idea. Some may eventually do it especially if they see the logic behind it (but still do it very unwillingly).

But if you want to build your “me” brand, you must do it.

On your personal branding blog, your “me” brand blog, disable all web advertising programs.

Remove every one of them.

This is what Jo Han told me: “If you’re working so hard to bring traffic to your site, are you serious about sending them away when they click on adsense? You want to send your traffic away for a few cents?”

I realized, that it’s seriously stupid to bring traffic to my blog and send them away after less than 30 seconds on-site (And my traffic logs show it too).

On my blog at least, you’ll experience “the Death of Adsense”.

But something more pressing to consider.

During my World Internet Summit Singapore session, the same question went through my mind as I watched Willie Crawford, Dave Cavanagh, Jo Han, Ewen, Andrew and Daryl Grant, Mike Cheney and company do their thing, “What is the
difference that makes the difference?”

Why were they standing on the stage, addressing a crowd of 1,000? While I was sitting in the crowd?

Well, the most obvious factor was the time factor.

The ‘newest’ Internet Marketers on stage were niche site specialists Andrew and Daryl Grant, having been ‘in the biz’ for 2 years.

I’ve worked out what’s the WIS Speakers “difference that makes a difference” too. Which I’ll go into shortly.

So I was thinking, about my big Internet Marketing goal.

My aim is to address an Internet Marketing audience of at least 100 by July 21st, 2007.

Why that date?

It’ll be before my first full year in Internet Marketing.

It’ll be an interesting experience.

I’ve been talking to several Internet Marketers at WIS and several had been ‘blocked’ in their efforts.

I realized that many were banging against the walls I’d mentioned in a previous post.

Too often and too many were facing the same issues and same challenges and getting held back.

It’s sad that the same patterns repeat themselves, and often the same simple solutions would unlock the answers for these poor hapless individuals.

What will ultimately kill a prospective Internet Marketers career is thinking about something too much.

As far as I’m aware, thinking about something hasn’t created any business empires (although if you’re a business consultant you might be able to think about something, but you’d still have to commit your thoughts to paper or translate it into a consultancy engagement to monetize it).

During Stuart’s Internet Money Secrets, I remember people coming up to me, after I related elements of my social proof.

I told them specifically which tools I’d been using and how I’d been using these tools.

I’d just checked up on their efforts.

Guess what?

Nothing.

Although I’ve lost my voice, my refrain will continue to be “If you do nothing, nothing will happen”.

“If you do something, something will happen”

Here’s a post which I posted some time ago and it’s still as relevant now, as it was then:

-> Why 90% of Internet Marketers fail

The question is: If you haven’t taken action yet, will you take action now?

]]> http://whoisandrewwee.com/internet-marketing/cheating-yourself-of-internet-marketing-income/feed/ 2 http://whoisandrewwee.com/internet-marketing-events/clickbank-screen-captures-whoisandrewweecom-social-proof/ http://whoisandrewwee.com/internet-marketing-events/clickbank-screen-captures-whoisandrewweecom-social-proof/#comments Sat, 25 Nov 2006 07:28:38 +0000 http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/207/clickbank-screen-captures-whoisandrewweecom-social-proof/ It’s 630am and shortly, I’ll be heading to World Internet Summit featuring the likes of Jay Abraham (I heard a rumor that he might be doing a video conference in, rather than appear in person – let’s see if it’s true) with Tom Hua, Brett McFall, Stephen Pierce, Jo Han Mok, Ewen Chia, Rick Raddatz, David Cavanagh, John Childers, Willie Crawford (I’m looking forward to meeting him after talking to him a couple of times on the Warrior Forum) , Michael Cheney and Matt Bacak.

There’s going to be a crowd of about 1,000, so it’ll be a fun event.
If you’re one of my regular blog readers, come over and say hi.

There’s a chance I might be called to stage (I still have no idea yet).

So the following will be useful if I get a chance to speak:

Clickbank Sep 06: $908.69

Bluehost Sep 06: $130

Clickbank Oct 06: $700.02

Bluehost Oct 06: $325

PayPal Direct Sales: $340 in 9 Days

WhoIsAndrewWee.com Traffic Ranking

Alexa Daily Ranking: 17,744 (fluctuates between 11,000 and 30,000)

Alexa 3-Month Ranking: 39,967

Be sure to sign up for the free Robert Allen book by filling in your details in the right sidebar.

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