Selling your home? Do you want to sell right away, for top dollar? You can benefit from using Internet marketing tools.

Selling your home? Do you want to sell right away, for top dollar? You can benefit from using Internet marketing tools.

Internet marketers know how to play to the reader’s problems and motivate them to buy a solution, without delay. How do they do this? Internet marketers tell the benefits to the reader–not the features of the product. This happens because Internet readers want to know, within seconds, “What’s in it for me?”

Use these Internet marketers’ sales techniques to sell your home.

Real estate agents number two sales tool–just after the yard sign–is the sales flyer. Most real estate agents use a sales flyer template which showcases their listings using archaic marketing methods. For some reason, agents don’t follow successful Internet marketing sales-copy templates. Listing agents list the home’s features in detail, put an attractive home picture in the middle, and then add a big picture of their face. Buyers don’t care how pretty your agent is! Home buyers want to know how your property beats every other property in the area. Buyers want to know what your house can do for them!

Make your flyer motivate home buyers to look at your home and to remember it. This requires that you spend some time thinking about what’s in it for your buyers. Why would they like living in your home? What makes your home better than the other houses for sale in your area?

Marketing Psychology turns features into benefits.

Think about why your large back yard benefits the buyer. Instead of saying “large back yard,” give a reason to care, such as: Room to play in your large back yard. Why is your patio unique? Does it have a built-in barbeque? Then list the feature as a benefit: Entertain in your private park with built-in barbeque. Why does a buyer care about paint? No work needed, fresh paint throughout. Why does a buyer care about new kitchen appliances? No worries, all new kitchen appliances under warranty. What’s great about your neighborhood? Easy walk to great schools and downtown shopping district.

Take advantage of the marketing research done by the Internet sales masters. Create a benefit-driven sales flyer to sell your home, now.

Copyright (c) 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

About the Author: Jeanette Fisher teaches Design Psychology college courses and real estate seminars. She is the author of Design Psychology and real estate investing books. For more information on Design Psychology, see http://www.designpsych.com/ For a full report on sales flyer marketing tools with a template to sell your home (or investment houses), visit Jeanette Fishers http://www.sellfast.info

Have you ever been horrified and intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-reliant information about Internet marketing available on the Net?

Often it results in many companies becoming confused and therefore reluctant to put
into practice what would be a valuable and simple business resource when understood
and applied correctly.

Market Research consultant for Inteltab, Gordon Goodfellow, who is also an English
literature graduate, decided it was time for a change. Part of this desire to make
Internet marketing more accessible may be due to his past experience as a teacher.

“I was sick of all the gobbledegook that surrounds the Internet, even today,” he
explains. “Marketing on the Net isn’t rocket science and should not be presented as such.

Everyone should have access to it. That’s the beauty of it.”

Having spent four years researching and assessing the best way of getting an effective message across on the Internet, he began to design a basic introduction to Internet marketing. The result of this hard work is Applied Web Marketing. AWM is a comprehensive beginners guide to marketing on the Internet, covering everything from
domain names to e-commerce and merchant accounts, and written in plain English. This is designed for the small business user and the home business user who does not want to spend a fortune on outside “experts”.

The key to most of Internet marketing is search engine optimisation. The key to good
search engine optimisation is keyword research. In other words, knowing which keywords or search terms people are using to find what theyre looking for on the Internet. If keyword research is done properly then there is no doubt that you will get highly targeted visitors to your website. This is obviously the professional way of going about things. It is the antithesis to the “spam” approach (unsolicited commercial emails) which achieves extremely poor results and simply annoys anyone unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end.

But which search engine should you optimise for? The search engine of choice at the
moment is Google. There are two good reasons for this. Firstly, Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet today. It is known for the quality and relevance of its search results, and so people trust it. Secondly, over the last couple of years Google has joined alliances with other search engines and directories. Yahoo, the worlds most popular directory, uses Googles database, so if you have a first page listing on Google you are likely to have a first page listing on Yahoo as well.

AOL and Netscape also share Googles search findings, so youll have similar search
results on the AOL and Netscape databases. Other lesser databases also rely on Google,
so that if you are well represented on Google, then youll be well represented on over sixty per cent of Internet search facilities.

You should also obtain a listing on the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) which is not much known about but very well respected in the search engine optimisation industry. The Open Directory does not use the normal search engine “spiders” or robot searchers; instead it uses over thirty thousand volunteer human editors who are ostensibly experts in their own fields. The theory behind this is that it ensures relevancy, accuracy and quality of all listings. A listing in DMOZ will therefore ensure a listing on Google and probably earn you an enhanced ranking there. Then all the others, like Yahoo, AOL, Netscape and the rest are bound to follow.

Optimisation is everything. The Applied Web Marketing website itself has the number
one position on Google out of 1.47 million search results for the search term “applied
web marketing”.

After optimisation is the submission process. Perceived wisdom of the moment says it is best to submit manually. Manual submissions to dozens of search engines and
directories can be very time-consuming, however. There are some good automated and
semi-automated software packages available out there to do the submissions for you.
But for the major players do find the time for manual submissions. Some search
engines, for example Alta Vista, make it impossible for automated submission by
software programs, because of individualised text codes that must be entered by hand at the start of the submission process, so you have to submit to Alta Vista manually as well. But that just takes about three minutes.

Dont bother with ads that say that they can “blast your web site to 500,000 search
engines”. There arent that many search engines; theres only a few hundred in total, and only about a dozen of any major importance. Youll just pay your money and be very disappointed. Most of these so-called search engines are link farms, FFA or free-for-all sites, which nobody every looks at, and which are responsible chiefly for sending out spam. If you link to such web sites you risk being penalised by the bona fide search engines.

The next thing to have lots of is patience. A listing on Google should probably appear
within a couple of weeks if you have optimised your pages properly (incidentally, if you have multiple pages on your web site, as is mostly the case, it is important only to submit the index or home page, and let Googles spider “Googlebot” to find and index the other pages itself using the links that you should have set up on your site.

The Applied Web Marketing guide has useful links to many resources, lots of them completely free, and to the submission pages of the major search engines and
directories, making it a perfect site to begin your journey into the world of Internet marketing.

Gordon Goodfellow is a market research consultant and practising Internet marketer and teacher.

www.appliedwebmarketing.com
gordon@apppliedwebmarketing.com

How to get big results with super-cheap fliers. Kevin NunleyRita started her home-based business after a long illness. Her insurance wouldn’t cover all her medical costs. She figured she could bridge the difference by selling her popular gift mugs.

Friends and the hospital staff had been delighted with them. She found herself busily filling orders for her customers’ relatives and associates.

“Wow,” she thought. “This could be the answer to my prayers. Selling my gift mugs could earn the extra money I need each month.”

One problem remained. In order to make the plan work, Rita needed lots of new customers. Word-of-mouth from friends and past clients was wonderful, but she needed a more powerful way to get the word out quickly.

A man at an ad agency told her to have nice brochures printed, mail them to hundreds of businesses, and place a weekly ad in the Sunday newspaper.

“But you don’t understand,” she protested. “Anything I spend on marketing has to come out of the grocery money. I can’t afford any of the conventional marketing options you’re talking about.”

It’s a situation that most of us have been in at one time or another. All the wonderful marketing ideas the experts talk about–radio ads, mass mailings, card decks–all take money. They require more money than we can spend without sinking down the debt drain.

Here’s one of my favorite solutions to the “no money” marketing crunch. For about 20 dollars you can have your corner copy shop print up 1000 fliers. A cheaper, more effective way to market has never been invented. A well-designed flier is like a full-page ad delivered directly to your carefully targeted prospect. No multi-thousand dollar newspaper ad can make that claim.

Keep your flier copy simple and to the point. Your prospect may only glance at it before tossing it in
the trash. You must make your offer within the first three seconds as her eyes run over the page. Start with a banner headline that sells the benefits your product, service, or organization will bring the prospect. Let them know how their life will be easier, happier, or more successful after they have bought from you.

Instruct the potential customer how to buy what you sell. A short “call me today!” or “stop by our store at lunch!” greatly increases your response. Include your name, phone, fax, email, website, location, hours–and anything else that makes it super easy for the prospect to contact you.

It costs no more to have your flier copied on colored paper, so choose a color that grabs attention but won’t make your copy hard to read. Lighter colors are best.

Many successful fliers have no pictures. Line drawings are easily copied. A photo needs to be half-toned first to give a clear photocopied reproduction. Your copy shop can prepare the photo for you. Also pay attention to the quality of the copier. Some of the newer, better maintained machines turn out photo copies that look as good as offset. The better copy shops often charge slightly more, and you may find the increase in copy quality well worth the slight increase in price.

Many shops have machines that staple rubber bands to each copy. This makes it easy to attach your flier to door knobs at homes and businesses. Be aggressive, but polite, when distributing your flier. Leave no stone unturned. Drop the fliers off on car windshields, under doors, on counters, light poles, community and office bulletin boards, and at schools.

Enlist the help of young people and youth groups to go door to door for you. Tell others with fliers that you will pass their’s around if they do the same with you.

I once put one of my fliers on a light pole in San Francisco. A year later a friend called in hysterics. “You’re in StarTrek IV!” While shooting on location, the movie crew had left my flier in the background of a scene. There was my photo and flier displayed prominently between Spock and Kirk. My message reached millions world-wide for the cost of a single copy–2 cents.

And that’s my two cents about fliers–one of the world’s cheapest publicity weapons.

Kevin Nunley Associates is located at 54 Ponemah Road Amherst NH 03031. We answer email fast. Call us 603-249-9519. Online since 1996. Feel free to use Kevin’s articles on your web site, in your ezine, or in your sales materials.

www.drnunley.com
kevin@drnunley.com

Copyright 2005 Mike Adams

I’ve never been much of an automobile mechanic, but about 25 years ago an old friend instructed me in the mysteries of how to find out why my old car wouldn’t run.

“You see,” he said, “when an engine won’t run, it’s got to be one of three things. It’s not getting enough gas, air, or spark, because that’s all an engine really needs.”

He taught me to check simple things, like pull a spark plug and see if it sparks when the starter turns over. Or pull off the air filter and see if I could smell gas in the carburetor. (That was before most cars were fuel injected!)

I can’t count the number of times over the last 25 years that those simple words helped me during times of car trouble, especially in younger days with cars that were old “beaters.”

If you think about it, Internet marketing is just as simple. All you really need is gas, air, and spark:

1. Targeted traffic – the fuel that powers an Internet business.

2. A product that people really need or want – something you can present as being as necessary as the air they breathe.

3. Sales copy that will sell – the spark that makes the targeted traffic want that product as badly as the air they breathe.

Okay, so maybe that still sounds a little tough, but hey – it’s only three things! Even though I’ll probably never be a skilled auto mechanic, I can comprehend and check three things. And you can catch on to just three things too.

Number 2 and 3 are probably the easiest to master.

There’s no shortage of great products and great ideas for things that people really want. It’s easy to find out what people really want with tools like:

- Wordtracker – find out the most-searched keywords

- Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

- Ad Word Analyzer

- Keyword Equalizer

Once you decide what keywords to focus on, you can check out what other people are selling successfully for those terms, and look at what affiliate programs pop up when you search for those terms. If you want to focus on affiliate sales, chances are there’s some great sales copy already written or that you can modify to fit it to you more individually.

Overture’s Maximum Bid tool will give you an idea what’s working successfully for other people, or Adword Analyzer can really speed that up by showing how many Overture and Google AdWords campaigns there are for various keywords.

Now you just need targeted traffic to send to read that awesome sales copy. If you don’t mind paying today’s gasoline prices for some high-octane gas, and you used Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool or Adword Analyzer, you already have a good idea what keywords would be good to bid on at Overture or Google AdWords. That will get you out of the driveway initially, then you can start building keyword-rich pages around the theme of your website and getting links from web sites that fit your theme.

Now you know the secret of how Internet marketing is like a car engine. So when that Internet marketing campaign won’t run, you know you only need to find out what it isn’t getting enough of:

- Not enough targeted traffic?

- Not enough of a market that really needs what you’re trying to sell?

- No spark to ignite the traffic and demand into a sale?

Because just like a car, that’s all an Internet marketing campaign really needs to run.

About the author:
Mike Adams has been building web sites and playing with Internet marketing since 1996. Visit his site for Internet marketing tips, tools, news, articles, and resources:http://www.timberway.com/

Selling your home? Do you want to sell right away, for top dollar? You can benefit from using Internet marketing tools.

Selling your home? Do you want to sell right away, for top dollar? You can benefit from using Internet marketing tools.

Internet marketers know how to play to the reader’s problems and motivate them to buy a solution, without delay. How do they do this? Internet marketers tell the benefits to the reader–not the features of the product. This happens because Internet readers want to know, within seconds, “What’s in it for me?”

Use these Internet marketers’ sales techniques to sell your home.

Real estate agents number two sales tool–just after the yard sign–is the sales flyer. Most real estate agents use a sales flyer template which showcases their listings using archaic marketing methods. For some reason, agents don’t follow successful Internet marketing sales-copy templates. Listing agents list the home’s features in detail, put an attractive home picture in the middle, and then add a big picture of their face. Buyers don’t care how pretty your agent is! Home buyers want to know how your property beats every other property in the area. Buyers want to know what your house can do for them!

Make your flyer motivate home buyers to look at your home and to remember it. This requires that you spend some time thinking about what’s in it for your buyers. Why would they like living in your home? What makes your home better than the other houses for sale in your area?

Marketing Psychology turns features into benefits.

Think about why your large back yard benefits the buyer. Instead of saying “large back yard,” give a reason to care, such as: Room to play in your large back yard. Why is your patio unique? Does it have a built-in barbeque? Then list the feature as a benefit: Entertain in your private park with built-in barbeque. Why does a buyer care about paint? No work needed, fresh paint throughout. Why does a buyer care about new kitchen appliances? No worries, all new kitchen appliances under warranty. What’s great about your neighborhood? Easy walk to great schools and downtown shopping district.

Take advantage of the marketing research done by the Internet sales masters. Create a benefit-driven sales flyer to sell your home, now.

Copyright (c) 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

About the Author: Jeanette Fisher teaches Design Psychology college courses and real estate seminars. She is the author of Design Psychology and real estate investing books. For more information on Design Psychology, see http://www.designpsych.com/ For a full report on sales flyer marketing tools with a template to sell your home (or investment houses), visit Jeanette Fishers http://www.sellfast.info

I think we all cringe and dread when we open our mail box and see that dreaded Refund Request in the subject line. And I guess we dread it for a number of reasons.

1. We know that that person got the use of our product and didnt have to pay a cent for it (and it can be a disturbing thought but it does happen some people are just habitual refunders)

2. Advertising isnt cheap and when youve paid to get that customer in it can feel like a beat around the head when you not only refund the money but it often incurs a fee for the refund purchase, so now youve just paid that customer to have your materials

3. Organizing a refund could be time spent better doing other things

The best thing you can do for yourself and your company is to keep a cool head about it. Getting all nancy about it even if it is a habitual refunder can do more damage for your name in the long run.

Im sure were all aware of the statistics of if someone has a bad experience with your business they will tell 11 people about it, if they have a pleasant experience they will only tell 3 people about it.

Well I think those numbers are a little higher on the internet. People have access to forums, emails, websites etc.. etc.. They will take neither pity nor a second thought to run off to these places and give your name a real bashing if you handle the refund request in an unprofessional manner. Once they head to these type places on the internet you can pretty much be assured they will be telling a LOT more then just 11 people. One bad review is all it takes to lose business.

Thankfully most people in the world are decent and wont take advantage of you or your company and sometimes the best mind set to have is believing they have a genuine reason for requesting the refund. And sometimes not all business is lost even if someone has requested a refund, if youve dealt with it professionally and their motives for the refund were of good intentions (maybe that wasnt the product they were interested in) you could still stand a chance doing business with this person down the track with another offer of something thats more suited to them.

About the author:
Joanne King – http://www.joesy.com
Get your Free book on Affiliate Marketing Quick Start Guide by visiting http://www.joesy.com.

You are welcome to reprint this article on your website or send to your mailing list however it may not be edited and the link in this bio must stay active. Cheers =)

Contextual Ad Networks…The Baby Boom Is Upon Us Kirk BannermanNo, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security

system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United
States, but many other countries…most notably Japan…have an
even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing
the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the
Internet.

One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was
Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google
shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual
partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are
distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of
little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet
and hence the term “pay per click baby boom”.

Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the
computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing.
Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click
search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads are spread
widely across thousands of locations (websites) all over the
Internet.

Actually, this distributed processing or propagation technique is
not limited to pay per click advertising. For example, Amazon
uses a similar arrangement (called Amazon Associates) to sell the
products it carries on amazon.com and ClickBank has a sales
program called CBAdwords which operates in a similar fashion.

According my trusty Ouija board, it seems likely that most
commercial hubs on the Internet will be shifting to this
propagation concept as time progresses…all of those individual
partner websites that carry the message/proposition will
constitute the vast army of worker ants that keep the queen ant
alive and healthy.

From a pay per click marketing perspective, these programs make
brilliant use of leverage while providing highly targeted
prospects for the paying advertiser.

There are, of course, some interesting things that occur as a
result of all of this stuff. For example, consider what I call
the “cross fertilization effect”: Suppose a person goes to
yahoo.com and performs a search that leads them to one of my
websites that happens carry Google AdSense ads and that visitor
then clicks on one of those ads…the net result is that Yahoo
natural search provided Google pay per click with some revenue!
Aren’t these fun times that we’re living in?

As these programs continue to proliferate, the individual
webmaster needs to exercise a little restraint and avoid the
temptation to go overboard by plastering these ads all over your
website and thereby diluting your own primary message/proposition
and confusing your hard earned visitor. When properly used,
these ads are just ancillary or complementary content that you
are providing to enhance the information and opportunities that
you are providing to your visitor…if something happens to
strike a responsive chord with your visitor, you might make a
little pay per click money.

If properly used, these propagation programs can result in the
classical “win-win” situation. However, if you over do it, this
can quickly turn into a loss for you (the individual webmaster)
and a win for your pay per click partners that are distributing
the ads. As in many things, moderation is important.

The dynamic search engine marketing industry continues to evolve
as users began to take advantage of the steady stream of new
features, tools and innovations provided by the ever increasing
number of search engines offering quality search results (it’s
not all about Google anymore). The evolutionary time line for
Internet marketing continues to run at warp speed.

An example of previous evolutionary periods (which by now may
almost seem prehistoric) would be the emergence of pay-per-click
advertising and the cooresponding rise of search-marketing firms
specializing in AdWords and Overture. As long as there are methods
for finding and retrieving information in digital databases by
using keywords or similar attributes, there will be a
search-marketing industry. How that industry operates in the
future depends on how the search engines operate and how consumer
tendencies evolve.

It’s a constant sea of change, but the good things just keep on
getting better! Stay alert, and light on your feet, and the
opportunities will just keep on coming your way.

The above are just some observations from “the peanut gallery”,
but I don’t think I’m far off the mark about where things are
heading. With that, I’m off the soapbox and wishing you
success in whatever you do online!

About the author:
Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business
and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based
business. For more information visit his website at http://www.home-based-business-team.com

To quote Peter Finch from the iconic 1970’s film “Network”: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

There are so many lies, half-truths, and misguided misinformation out there about online marketing that it’s driving me crazy!

I just finished reading yet another ebook by yet another “successful” Internet marketing guru. It kills me because the only thing most of these gurus are successful at is selling themselves and their “snake oil” to unsuspecting business people.

They don’t know squat about marketing a business on the Internet. But they do know how to push buttons. So these self-proclaimed “experts” LIE to you just to sell you their latest crap books, tapes, and seminars or whatever it is they think they can get people to buy.

(Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised is someone out there isn’t selling the “Color by Number Marketing Kit” that comes with its own crayons!)

These gurus make it sound sooooo easy to make money online. They say stuff like, “You dont need a computer connection” or “You dont need any experience,” or “You dont need a lot of money.”

According to them, you dont even need a brain! You just need to BUY THEIR PRODUCT and you’ll make a gazillion dollars online in 30 days or less.

If you believe in that crap, you need to have your head examined!

I got news for you, Bucko. Marketing is work and successful, bring-home-the-big-profits marketing is HARD work.

That’s because marketing isn’t a crapshoot or a game of chance. It’s a business. And just like any other LEGITIMATE business, you need to invest time, effort and energy to make it grow into a successful enterprise.

And it even takes even MORE ENERGY to maintain that growth and manage your success for the long term.

Now it’s definitely true that the “wonders” of technology make it easier to succeed with an online business than a retail store. And even a one-person operation can utilize email, autoresponders, and the Internet’s global marketing capabilities to grow rich.

But although it’s easier online, its still work.

I know it’s work because it’s the work I do! I am the mentor for the some of the most super-successful websites/internet business people on the planet. I’m the behind-the-scene the guy, helping little businesses that are generating $5,000.00 to $10,000.00 a month and “big” businesses with annual revenue figures of $1,000,000.00 and MORE.

There’s one thing they have in common: they all agree with me that it takes dedication, commitment, and hard work to reap the benefits of selling online.

Simply put: you get out what you put it. My clients aren’t at the top of their industries by just pure dumb luck. Their upwardly mobile climb takes ongoing dedication, forward-thinking, and careful planning. Their success demands creativity, persistence, specialized knowledge, a quality product or service plus good old-fashioned, shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone, hard work.

Of course, having a mentor helps, too!

So right now, I’m going to mentor you and tell you the facts behind the big lies told across the Internet by the gurus of “make believe,” not marketing.

Big Lie #1: You dont need ANY money to get started.

Thats just complete B.S. If you’re flat broke and one paycheck from homeless, youre gonna have a very tough time making it. Of course you need money to get started. Whaddya think your smile is gonna pay the rent?

Now you dont need a lot of money to succeed online, it’s true certainly less than it would take to build and open your own Widget Shop on Main Street. But you do need some operating capital and it stands to reason that having a large bankroll couldn’t hurt.

When your pockets are fat and your budget can include more money for smart marketing, you’ll be able to see (and enjoy) the results of your efforts even faster.

In short, it takes money to make money.

It takes money to educate yourself to research the marketplace… and to develop your product or service.

It takes money to get a domain name, it takes money to host your site. It takes cold-hard cash to hire a designer to program your site and a copywriter to write a killer sales letter for you. You even need money in order to get a merchant account so you can accept the money your website generates.

And most importantly, it takes money to DRIVE traffic to your site.

Yeah I know I know! There are all those “free” traffic-generating ideas that you can pursue. I do a lot of them myself but I don’t trust my success to traffic I can’t control.

Most of the time, it costs me money to drive quality traffic to my site, and it will cost you, too. Could be Pay-Per-Click, could be running an ezine ad, could be doing some sort of offline promotion.

But the bottom line is — you need to have a bottom line. Especially in the beginning, your cash-flow will be in one direction: OUT.

Big Lie #2: You dont need a list.

This is almost as ridiculous as “you don’t need money.” Give me a break. Sales aren’t made to the man in the moon they’re made to people on your list. People you have carefully cultivated and “primed.”

You need to build a list because your money is IN the list!

You need to build a herd as quickly as humanly possible but dont purchase one of those deals where you “GET A MILLION EMAILS ON ONE CD.” (That’s not a list — that’s spam-in-the-making.)

And dont do the co-registration deal. With this approach, where people go to a site to subscribe to a particular newsletter that they want, they find a checkbox (or other response mechanism) “advertising” your offer. If they’re interested, they check the box to agree to receive mailings from you.

This sounds like a good way to get traffic because unlike spam, you’ve been given permission to make contact. The problem is these people dont know you from squat. To them, the checkbox is just an invitation for another form of spam.

The online sales game — any successful sale, in fact — is about connecting with the right buyer and make the right offer. The right buyer comes from the right list.

The best approach to list-building is strictly OLD SCHOOL: build it from scratch. That way, your list people are “pre-qualified” from the start. They KNOW you right from the beginning. They want to hear from you. They want to learn more from you. They want to listen to what you have to say.

And with a list of people like that, it doesn’t take long before they’ll want to BUY from you

Big Lie #3: You dont need a product or service.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Let’s try a little role-playing game. Pretend you and I were thinking about starting an offline business together. What if I said to you, “Oh, don’t worry all we need to do to succeed is open our store. We dont need any products or services. But we’ll still make oodles of money!”

You’d think I was crazy, right?

Well, then why in the world would you believe the same line of crap when it’s being fed to you on the Internet by some expert whose credentials can’t be verified?

Commerce is all about products and services and if you want to do business, you NEED a quality product or service to sell. Preferably multiple products and services so that you can back-end sell your existing customers and increase their value to you exponentially by turning them into customers for life.

Do I hear you asking, “Dan, what about those super-affiliates who are making a lot of money promoting others products and services?”

That’s a good question because yes, there are some exceptions to this rule. But the list of exceptions who do well with someone else’s product or service is very short. Plus there are a lot of potential risks to being the middleman.

For example, let me ask you this: what if that company youre promoting products for go out of business? What if they change their products? Where does that leave you?

The answer: High and dry.

And I cant even begin to tell you how many affilia
te “horror stories” I’ve heard. It’s common to hear about vendors not paying affiliates on-time. Or to learn that customers may bypass the affiliate link, so you dont get paid.

Vendors tracking software screws up, there are “technical difficulties” so you dont get credited for the sale and on, and on, and on.

And here’s a killer: more often than not, you dont get to keep the customer, they do. Many affiliate programs are set up so that you only get credit for the first sale a consumer makes. After that, all the profits stay with the vendor.

They keep all the back-end profits.

And when they back-end sell their products and services, you dont get a dime. It doesn’t matter that your links are making the vendor rich. The effort is yours, but the profit is theirs.

When it comes to my income I’m a control freak! But affiliate programs are out of your control. Your financial well-being is in someone else’s hands and there’s nothing you can do to manage your success.

You can’t test different things on your site because its NOT your site. You can’t change what’s not working because it’s not yours to change. All you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best

Hardly a recipe for success, I think you’ll agree.

I am not saying you cant promote other peoples products, but very often you should do it as a back-end, not front-end. You front-end your own stuff, and you can back-end other products and services.

There’s still one more problem with promoting other people’s stuff: when you stop promoting, your income also stops. You have to constantly be on the lookout to find the NEXT red-hot product and constantly be inking the next great deal.

Big Lie #4: You dont need any experience.

Of course, you need experience to succeed online! The only job in the world that doesn’t need experience is “virgin.”

If you want to make money, you need to get hip as quickly as humanly possible. You need to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how you can use all the “tricks of the trade” to build your success.

Thats why having a mentor works. Working with someone who’s “been there and done that” can save you time and money.

Your income can only grow to the extent that you do. You must educate yourself and you must be open to the process.

Be prepared to make mistakes, try new things, and push yourself beyond your safe, secure comfort level. Do whatever it takes to earn your Masters at the School of Hard Knocks. Learn your lessons and develop the skill sets you need to make the kind of money you want to make.

On this season’s The Apprentice, Donald Trump put two teams in a head-to-head competition: book smarts and street smarts. You don’t have to play for one team or another, you can take the best of both worlds for your success strategy.

It pays to be educated and street-wise. Knowledge comes from books and experience.

Big Lie #5: You dont need any technical knowledge

This really is more of a medium-sized lie. It’s definitely true that you can be a master online marketer even if you don’t programming, HTML codes and all that stuff. (Hey, you can watch television without understanding how it works!)

However while you dont need to know the how-to, you DO need to know what needs to be done and what YOU need for your site. If you don’t, you’re as “at risk” for being had as a 17-year old car owner who visits the Bad Guys Auto shop.

I’m the first to admit that before I got smart, I was screwed-over and taken advantage of by several dishonest webmasters. They did a lot of unnecessary programming and sent me a hefty bill. They charged me a lot of money and gave me crap.

I definitely overpaid but I didn’t know any better. But you can be damn sure I rectified that situation with a little “quick study.”

I found out for myself that it doesnt hurt to have a little of technical knowledge. If you’re familiar with basic HTML — at least when you want make changes to your site, you can do so instantly.

There are many things that only a programming professional will be able to do for you. But it’s nice when you dont have to go to your webmaster and pay them per hour for a fix that could easily be a do-it-yourselfer.

If you’re the “exception that proves the rule” and are making money hand-over-fist as a super-marketer, you may disagree that the four big lies are lies at all. Congratulations on your success but take it from me.

For the average even the above-average person online marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Its a business and you have to treat it like a business. So if you’re not yet rolling in dough, but would like to be part of the Internet moneymaking machine

Dont buy into all the hype. Think it through. Use your common sense. Don’t try and get rich quick or you may find yourself in the poor house! BUT you CAN and you WILL make money if youre willing to do what it takes.

Dan Lok

Copyright 2005 Quick Turn Marketing International, Ltd.