This edition of the Friday Podcast focuses on possibly pitfalls for the budding Internet Marketer.

Jump across this chasm that faces almost every business owner and you’ll be shooting for the stars.

Detailed notes follow, click on the “more” tab:

As a business owner involved in the process of building your internet marketing business, you will inevitably face the “time and money” dilemma.

The fact is that both time and money are limited resources.

Although money seems like the bigger limiting factor when you start out, you can work around it by using your own time, which seems free. Instead of DIY, do it yourself, you’d probably end up with DEY, do EVERYTHING yourself.

Here’s a problem…

Getting Paralyzed by the “Bootstrap Mentality”

Business develops, you’ll find that time is your limiting factor.
After all, there are ONLY 24 hours in a day.
As you still going to DEY?

Know of a number of experienced Internet Marketers who choose to work by themselves.

They:

• Synchronize their web content by FTPing up and down hundreds of files
• Answer email
• Maintain, clean up, update, archive their mailing list
• Develop their website
• Design logos and graphics
• Coordinate their joint ventures
• Manage affiliates.

They eat their lunch in front of the computer.

During a break, they pop a DVD into their computer and watch a movie.
They spend more than 12 hours in front of the computer each day…

Pretty soon their IM business takes over their life.
They may be making a five figure, or even six figure a month income, but it’s as good as being chained to their computer.
Having to check email every couple of hours, answering emails, talking to partners, writing and creating next product.

Income is also capped, reaches a ceiling.
There’s only so much you can do even with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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Contrast: Super Affiliate Lifestyle

• Go on 2 week holiday.
• Travel halfway round the world to attend an event or perhaps to speak at a workshop,

This means you HAVE to automate your business.
Income comes in, even when you’re out on a night on the town, or at your kid’s birthday party.
But that’s the exception.

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The rule or business as usual seems to revolve around Internet Marketers who haven’t gone on vacation for a couple of YEARS.
How’s that better than working in a regular job?
At least with a day job, you don’t have to check email on Saturday and Sunday and on Christmas Day and New Year’s.

If you can’t enjoy the benefits of your success, then what’s the point in doing all of this?

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A Solution?: From StartUp to SetUp

One key component to overcoming the bootstrap mentality is to move from the StartUp mentality up to the SetUp mentality.

With the SetUp mentality, you GAIN CONTROL of your time.

SetUp Mentality: 3 Principles:

• System:

Process is clear, easy to follow, organized.
System follows rules, principles.
Also allows you to outsource efforts.
Outsourcing is nothing short of a minor miracle.
Pay someone to buy their time to do your stuff.
Pay someone to check your email, do your webpage, even clean the house, so you don’t have to.
You’re converting your cash into time.
You’re buying time.

You can use that time to enjoy yourself.

• Mentor/Role model

Find someone very skilled in their specialized field.
I’ve advanced very quickly as a journalist, to managing people’s businesses, to doing training and consulting, and now Internet Marketing because I’ve had the opportunity to work with the best in whatever field I’ve entered.

Success creates success.
If you learn your stuff from a Top Gun, you’ll BECOME a Top Gun.

Why’s it great? Because there’s a time issue involved.
You can slash the time required to learn a new skill by learning from someone who’s invested the time to go through the process.

Note: you have to be realistic too. If someone’s spent a long time learning something, you can’t expect to master it in an hour or in a day.
That’s just NOT possible.

If someone’s spent 5 years learning and more importantly, mastering a skill and he can teach it to you in a couple of months, or perhaps weeks, you’ve shaved off YEARS from your learning cycle.

If you have realistic expectations and are motivated to succeed, a mentor can bring you far.

I’ve been working with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta to master pay-per-click based affiliate marketing, and based on the initial results, they’ve been nothing short of spectacular.

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When you look at two of the three pillars of the SetUp mentality, you’d realize that the solid business system, and a strong role model give you an almost unethical advantage…

What if you added the third component?

• Mastermind/ focus group

Another way to multiply your progress is to work together with others who are also reaching for the same goals.
Key to a mastermind is keeping in constant communication and learning from each other’s successes, and more importantly, failures.

If you create an atmosphere where success and failures are openly shared, you are tapping on experience gained on someone else’s time to speed yourself along the learning curve.

Although there’s a fair amount of cross-learning when you visit a blog or a forum, nothing comes close to forming your own mastermind group.

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I’ve experienced this, and I’ve seen this, that having all 3 components – the proven business system, a strong mentor and a mastermind gives you tremendous progress.

If you’re missing one of these components now, work on that aspect and you’ll see your business fly.

PS: I’m working on something with Amit that will top our bonus for Anik Singal and Jeremy Palmer’s PPC Classroom: Super Affiliate Accelerator, it’ll be announced about Friday noon, EST.

Stay tuned.

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A major grouse I have with “shopping comparison sites” is that there’s often no “comparison” involved. They’re usually just a bunch of scraped data from affiliate datafeeds. There’s no “opinion” or comparison of the pros and cons of the product. Just a pile of digital trash on the information highway in my opinion.

It’s frequently the same case with Internet Marketing product “reviews” too…You know those ads that go:

“Is Product XYZ A Scam? Check here to find the facts!”
OR
“Don’t Buy Product XYZ Till You Read This Review”
OR my favorite
“An Honest Review of Product XYZ” (yeah right…)

If you head over to the page, you usually see a regurgitation of the marketing material, or just a listing of the product’s specifications, the price and maybe some bogus “bonus”…whoopee…

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In my past vocation as a tech journalist, I used to evaluate product and service offerings from the likes of Microsoft, Iomega, Diamond Multimedia, Creative Technology among others. The product reviews were subsequently syndicated on the newswires and online tech portals, so I’ll use the same methodology here as well.

What’s good and bad about PPC Classroom?

First off, the product is pretty comprehensive.
From the product graphic, it looks like:

• 4 manuals
• 7 discs (probably a combination of CDs or DVDs)
• At least 8 handouts
• Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer’s “top secret” software tool for tracking ad campaigns across various pay-per-click search engines (a necessity once you are spending large amounts on PPC on a daily basis).

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Regarding the course structure, it’s geared towards newer affiliate marketers with topics on:

• An introduction to PPC and affiliate marketing
• Keyword matching
• Understanding PPC stats
• Finding niches and identifying hot demand
• Evaluating your competition and building your USP (unique selling proposition)

And the bread and butter of the PPC-affiliate marketing trade, affiliate marketing monetization strategies including:

• Direct linking
• Arbitrage/direct merchange linking
• Landing pages
• Opt-in (a hybrid PPC->email marketing approach)
• and evaluating the different categories of offers.

Intermediate level affiliate marketers will likely benefit from more advanced topics like:

• Complementary keyword strategies
• The keyword buying cycle
• Long end of the tail
• How to find emerging/undiscovered products
• Geo-targeting/time-based campaigning/day parting
• Keyword trigger/content trigger/hybrid strategies
• And a dissection of landing pages

Jeremy also chips in with his advanced tips and techniques, and emphasizes topics like ROI and bidding and positioning strategies.

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Although there’s lots of material to go through, it’s laid out in an easy-to-understand manner.

Is PPC Classroom a complete product?

Not likely. If anything, things change so quickly in the Internet Marketing arena that no single product will be able to contain “everything”.

Which is why Anik and Jeremy have set up a series of webinars and have a forum in the works.

If it’s anything like Anik’s previous Affiliate Classroom program, you can expect to have a flood of content and continuing updates.

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What I liked about the course content is that they’ve got a crack technical writing team to put the written materials together.

The concepts are explained in an easy-to-understand and sequential manner and are a stark contrast to the barely comprehensible manner in which most “make money online” books are written.

If you’re looking for a few quick and dirty tips to make a few quick bucks from your typical $47 or $97 ebook, PPC Classroom will not be your cup of tea. In fact, you’d probably find that there’s way too much reading involved…

If instead, you’re looking for a great resource to start building an online business, PPC Classroom is certainly worth a second look.

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I’m not directly promoting PPC Classroom.
If you’re interested, you might like to check out this bonus package that my buddy, Super Affiliate Amit Mehta has put together.

Note: The “bonus package” promo was for the last PPC Classroom promo. You can visit the newest review.