eMarketWorks on the Internet

You sometimes wonder what the difference is between bullshit and marketing, especially internet marketing and beer  commercials. Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, has a little book out entitled, "On Bullshit", and I think a few of his comments are very relevant to marketing in general and internet marketing in particular.

"Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensibly distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that.

The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him … He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

You don’t really believe that those buxom hotties in the beer commercial are salivating over you because of the beer you drink, but your reptilian brain does. Bullshit marketing is aimed squarely at that part of your brain. That’s what makes you click that BUY NOW button when your rational brain is screaming NOT TRUE NO WAY WASTE OF MONEY at you.

Here’s the perfect example of bullshit marketing. How many sales pages have you seen that blast this claim at you, "I GUARANTEE THAT ANYBODY (EVEN A DOLT LIKE YOU) WILL MAKE MONEY USING MY SYSTEM." Then in that obscure part in the footer labelled, "Disclaimer", it says, "I don’t guarantee that anybody will ever make any money using my system and you will probably even lose money for any or all of the following reasons including that you spent money to buy my stuff."

So what good is that make-money guarantee in the sales letter? It’s not meant to be good or bad, just bullshit that suits the bullshit marketer’s purpose.

Have you ever wondered what an internet marketing guru looks like? Of course you haven’t because you’ve seen plenty of their pictures.

But have you seen Michael Green? Michael keeps a low profile when it comes to his image to keep his internet business separate from his "real life" because his real name is Grant and he is also a member of Parliament.

I thought I would share this picture with you because Michael came to visit me when I was a student in one of his mentoring programs.

Yes, he flew in from England. I can’t say that he came just to see me - I’m sure he had several students in the United States that he visited on that trip. But here’s the point - he took the time to come and help me personally, not meet me in a gathering of internet wizards in some big hotel where you are competing with hundreds of others to get someone’s attention.

While I feel that Michael is a business friend, there was one thing that was wrong with the mentoring he gave me. Because he has mastered internet marketing and can sell ice tea to eskimos, he forgets that things are not so easy for the likes of me. So he left out the part about doing market research and guided me into writing a book that no one wants to read. Now I bet he could sell lots of copies of my book to people who aren’t even interested in gardening, but I can’t. Especially not about gardening with native plants. Oh well, live and learn.

The bottom line for you? Do some research to determine that there is a viable market for your ebook before you write it.  There’s a good chance nobody really cares what you have to say about your "passion".

If you are an eBay affiliate, you will want to be aware that the eBay is changing its affiliate program. This note is particularly relevant to those who are using Jeff Mulligan’s eBay Quickie Profits strategy. You will no longer need a Commission Junction account to apply this strategy.

We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction.  Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform. 

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New to internet marketing? On a tight budget? All the gurus telling you to buy their stuff?

Wait!

There is a goldmine of free products and information on the world wide web. So before you buy anything expensive, look for the free stuff. The simplest approach is to use a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Just search for: free fill-in-the-blank; for example: free website builder.

The only problem with this approach is your time. You have to do the searches, then you have to try out whatever comes up to find out if it is what you are looking for. On the other hand, you can’t beat the price.

Begin Planning with free business plan software

I’ve made a point about using planning as a step-by-step how-to guide for developing your business so here is where you can get a free business plan template and a free pdf guide book bundled with it from planware.org. 

"… Free-Plan registration is completely free and there are no strings attached ! You will not be added to any email list as a result of registering. Check our privacy policy at <www.planware.org/privacy.htm>.

To register, simply e-mail <freeplan@planware.org> quoting within its body the serial number displayed in the table/box located in the middle of the first page of the Free-Plan Template file (FREE-PLAN_TEMPLATE.DOC).

You will be e-mailed back a password with simple instructions to unprotect the Template. Once unprotected, you are licensed to use it as an outline structure & guide for your business plan. It can be freely modified and there are no restrictions on how and where you distribute your completed plan based on the Template. (A little mention would be nice <g> but that is at your complete discretion)."

Freeplan is comprehensive so don’t feel like you have to do everything that is suggested. Start with a Short Plan. The idea is to familiarize yourself with the elements of a business plan and use those parts that are most relevant to you personally. Let me know what you think of it.

I try to keep in mind that a plan is nothing, but planning is everything - in other words, plans are meant to be revised as you get new ideas and information, and as your knowledge and skills grow.

More Free Stuff Later

From time to time, I’ll point out places where you can find other items that are both free and useful. Please add any suggestions of your own.

PS You don’t have to be a beginner/newbie to make good use of free stuff!

If you are like me (and are easily distracted), you have tons of ebooks, mp3s, videos, blogs, urls and other internet detritus cataloged on your computer. And you never actually use that stuff because there is always something new coming down the pike that you just have to explore.

It would take months and possibly years to read, listen, and view all the stuff you have accumulated in your hunt for internet marketing magic.

There’s only one cure for the packrat syndrome - choose a mentor (guru if you prefer) and ignore everyone and everything else not specifically recommended by your mentor until you are making so much money that you have time on your hands to explore other things.

Give your mentor 6 - 12 months to get you into money making mode, and by that I mean you are making about the REASONABLE PROFIT you were aiming for. If you were going for $ millions, you shouldn’t be here reading this.

If you haven’t gotten in the profit zone in that time, and you are the persistent type, you need to get another and hopefully better mentor.

There is also the possibility that you are not cut out for this kind of work, and you should definitely consider other options. There’s no shame in a steady job.

I’m not going to recommend a mentor to you (unless you ask). Use your best judgment and stop being an internet marketing packrat. By focusing your training and actions around the advice of a  single mentor or consulting service like Stompernet, you will have a better chance at doing something that actually makes money.

One place that you can find products to promote is the ClickBank Marketplace. If you are not familiar with ClickBank, all the products there are electronic, meaning that they can be downloaded directly to your computer once the purchase is completed.

Typical products are ebooks and software. At last count, there were about 27,000 products available.

The majority of sales at ClickBank are made by affiliates. Once you have set up an account, you can pick one or more of the huge number of products that you would like to promote (i.e., advertise).

You earn a commission on sales that come through you affiliate link. Affiliate links are generated automatically for you so you only have to copy and paste them. An affiliate text link looks like this:

http://AFFILIATE.product_ID.hop.clickbank.net

You also get a copy and paste link that you can use on your website that looks like this:

<a href="http://AFFILIATE.product_ID.hop.clickbank.net" target="_blank">Click Here!</a>

Replace AFFILIATE with your ClickBank affiliate name, and you can also replace the Click Here! text with any text that you like. The text will appear as a clickable link.

Both these link formats take your prospect to the sales page of the product you are promoting, and the AFFILIATE part of the link tells ClickBank that you get a commission if the prospect purchases the product.

 Did "they" tell you that you can make a fortune with internet marketing even if you don’t have a product? If so, they lied.

Here’s the mathematics: No Product = No Sales = No Income

Consider for a moment what a "product" is. It’s anything that someone else wants. I can’t make it simpler than that. They don’t even have to pay for it, they just have to want it.

We can describe products in a number of ways, but for our purposes here, we’ll just call them items that you get paid for. Those items can be real physical products (for example, a CD or a car), virtual products (for example, software), information products (for example, ebooks), and others.

The main point today is that either you are selling your own products or you are selling someone else’s products. This is one of those rare times in life when the choices are simple.

In internet marketing you generally have two ways of earning money. You can be paid directly for a product and get 100% of the sale price, or you can be paid a commission and receive some fraction of the sale price. Again life is simple. So here are the ways you can be paid.

1. Sell your own product - you get full price.
2. Get  someone to sell your product for you - you get less than full price, they get a commission.
3. Sell someone else’s product - you get a commission.
4. Get someone to sell someone else’s product for you - you get a smaller commission.

Nevertheless, complexity lurks around every corner and that’s why you need to start with a business plan, or go back over what you have already done and frame it into a business plan.

If you don’t have a product or don’t plan to create your own product, then where do you get a product? Many gurus recommend that you start with affiliate marketing and look for products at ClickBank. You can include that strategy in your business plan. We’ll talk about that and other strategies in another episode.

I think it was Dwight Eisenhower who said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." 

Do your planning!

Your labor is one of your most basic and intrinsic products. When you sell it, we most often call that a "job". When you work for nothing, it’s called either charity or sweat equity. When you are new to internet marketing or don’t have a lot of experience (that means you aren’t making much or any money), your product is sweat equity - the time and energy you put into developing your business without being paid for it.

You probably noticed that people who want to sell you internet marketing products don’t like the term "sweat equity" because it sounds like work, and they are selling you the easy way to riches. Forget that - if you don’t work at it, it ain’t happenin’.

I just wanted to let you know in case you have been following the launch of Armand Morin’s new internet marketing course that after hearing Armand’s final teleseminar training, people were extremely excited.

Listen to the replay yourself and you’ll find out why.

After placing their order, people have started receiving "the" box and their initial reaction has been…

"Holy crap!"

That’s the WOW factor that Armand Morin teaches and he has followed his own advice right down to the tee.

Take a look for yourself here.

During this entire week he’s piled on some of the most talked about bonuses we’ve ever seen and people have been racing to get their own copy of the course.

Here’s a word of caution …

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ALL BONUSES WILL BE REMOVED SUNDAY NIGHT!
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With over $12,373 of value packed into THE biggest course on the Internet marketing, Armand has gone all out and I highly recommend you take a look asap.

He’s going to be removing all the bonuses after this weekend including the Video Resell Rights package, his "Persuasion X" series as well the Big Seminar Audio Resell Rights Package. Although I only mentioned three of the bonuses, it’s worth noting that there are total of 8 with the whole package.

Go here now, listen to the free training and then take a look at all the bonuses that are included with this course.

I think I told you that I was involved with development of this course. I paid a lot of money to take the original training course that was the testing ground for this finished package.

I have to tell you that I am a little disappointed with Armand’s course.

Here’s why. I was working on my own internet marketing course that would be complete from A to Z, and would pick up all the little bits that all the other stuff I bought left out. Well, I’ve been scooped! Internet Marketing Explained covers everything, in detail no less. So I’ll have to move on to some other project. Dang!

I knew the finished course was going to be good, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be this good. But it is. So this course will actually save you money because it’s the one complete course that’s out there.

I recommend Internet Marketing Explained to you because I believe you will get more value out of it than it costs you.

Ed

I really hate it when I see sales letters, ads, emails, and other hyped-up come-ons telling people with no business experience how easy it’s going to be to get rich with internet marketing.

You even hear that from the "gurus", who have, of course, already put in the 5 or 10 years it took them to be the successful millionaires they claim to be.

And most of their income comes from people who don’t have any idea what they are getting into. Could that be you?

When guru Hyper says here’s how I do it, just do what I tell you and you’ll start making your financial dreams come true in 10 days or so, he (or she) really means, "I’ve been doing this for years so it’s easy for me." If you’ve been doing it for years, it might be easy for you too.

But if you are just getting started and are trying to do this in your spare time, take a deep breath, don’t quit your day job just yet, and think about what you really want to do.

And for God’s sake don’t buy any internet marketing programs that cost more than you can afford thinking that you will quickly pay off the debt with your newly acquired profits

If you think you are going to start from scratch with no experience and make $20,000 in 20 days, then I have a bridge for sale that will interest you.

Making money takes work. If you are not willing to or are not capable of doing the work, you should fold your tent right now. Harsh maybe, but that’s the truth. The get-rich-quick scammers don’t tell you the truth because they are pretty sure you don’t want to hear it.

The truth is that you will have to put in a lot of work up front to get off the ground with your internet business to make any money at all, let alone a profit. The payoff is that things get easier after you’ve done the hard part.

If you are just beginning your new lifestyle of marketing on the internet, or you bought that book about how to become an eBay millionaire, ask yourself how much time and effort you are willing to put in to make your dreams of quitting your day job come true. In reality, ‘quitting your day job’ means changing your day job to internet marketing.

Refer back to your business plan often to keep yourself on track. What, you don’t have a business plan? You should really put some effort into formulating a plan. You will find these websites helpful www.planware.org and toolkit.com.

In this timely article, Jim Edwards offers his suggestions about how you can keep your online business profitable even in a down economy. You know the economy (that’s most of us!) is seeing some tough times right now, unless of course, you are rich.

Warren Buffet, ever the Sage, says, "If you can’t afford to lose 50% of your investment, you should not be in the market. " And who among us can’t afford that.

– Ed

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Recession-Proof Your Online Biz

      - by Jim Edwards

© Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved
    http://www.thenetreporter.com
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Ok, unless you live under a rock and get you news by carrier pigeon, most people know the USA currently teeters on the brink of recession.

Though I maintain my own opinions about what this will actually mean to the average person, there’s no denying that the economy may slow down and sales may slack off a bit.

So, in order to prevent this possible downshift in the economic engine from affecting you, I offer the following advice to help recession-proof your online business.

*See It To Believe It*

No matter what you sell, you can use video to demonstrate either what you sell or the results customers should expect.

Product, service, software - it doesn’t matter. You can either use full motion video or screen capture video to "show and tell" people why and how your offering helps them. (more…)