OK, now we begin to get into the real stuff.

As I said last time the biggest mistake most people make when starting a business is that they create or find a product first and then try to find people to sell it to. Despite popular belief (and teaching), that is completely opposite to the way that successful people operate.

The only sure way to success in any business is to pick the market first. However, not just any market. For you to be really successful you need to identify what we call a hot target market.

OK, so what is a hot target market?

We describe a hot target market as a group of people who;

• Have a good level of disposable income
• Are passionate or fanatical about something (a hobby, interest etc)
• Are insanely passionate to the point that they will pay higher prices for things to do with their hobby
• Are repeat buyers. They buy stuff to do with their hobby or interest over and over again.

Let’s look at a real-life example of what I’m talking about here. Let’s take one of the most popular hobbies/sports today, Golf.

People who take an interest in golf are usually fairly well off, they have a well paid job or business and are not afraid to spend money on anything they develop an interest in, after all the fees to join a golf club aren’t cheap and neither are the green fees (the fee you have to pay to have a game). Then there is the cost of all the equipment, special clothing etc.

So they qualify on the grounds of disposable income.

They are passionate about their hobby. When someone decides to take up golf they go to their local bookstore/newsagent and buy just about every golf magazine on the rack. They go to the pro shop at their local golf club or a main golf stockist and buy a set of clubs, golf bag, maybe a trolley, golf shoes, golf balls, tees and all of the little bits and pieces that go with playing golf.

Maybe they buy a tuition book or two or tuition DVD/video. They look into the cost of lessons with the golf pro at the club that they are thinking of joining… and so it goes on. They are passionate about it. That takes care of our second criteria.

Do you think that they buy the cheapest, discount, no-name brand clubs or do they go for a leading brand? Of course, they go for the leading brand – they need to be seen with the best. What about the balls? You can buy reclaimed balls in tubs quite cheaply but do you think they start out buying discount balls – no way.

You see what I mean, they are irrational, they are insanely passionate about their hobby. That ticks our third point.

Finally, they buy over and over again. Every time they go to play golf they just have a ‘quick look’ in the pro shop and always buy something whether they need it or not. That takes care of point number four – they buy over and over again, they are repeat buyers.

Now, before you all rush off to start a golf-related online business let me say that the general term golf is way too broad, too high level. If you were to look at a golf related business idea I would recommend that at the very least you should drill down to a much smaller niche within the overall golf market.

You could look at women’s golf, left-handed golfers, junior golfers or any smaller niche within golf where you would have much less competition. Don’t get me wrong, you need competition. If your chosen niche has no competition, it’s almost certainly because there’s no market and no chance to make money in it.

There are many really big players in the general golf market with very big bank balances who could easily price you out – if you even managed to get started. To be successful in any niche you need to study the overall market and find a very small niche within it that has a lot less competition.

Markets versus Niches

Before we go any further I think I should cover the difference between Markets and Niches, why people often get this wrong and what you should be looking for here. When I started niche marketing several years ago it was standard practice to create lots of websites in lots of different niches. We would research for a popular topic, identify a niche around it and build a site. Then we would go off and find another comletely different niche and build a site around that.

There were programs available, like Directory Generator, that could throw up a site for you in minutes so getting your sites created wasn’t a problem. The problem was, and still is, that when you have those type of niche sites you are starting from scratch every time. Each site has a completely different audience, so each time you start with no list to market to. What’s more when you have the site up and running and have created a list, you can’t market anything else you have to them, their are only interested in that one topic.

That’s why you should first think of markets. Find a big market that has potential and identify a niche within it. That way when you’ve built a list of buyers for that niche, you can identify another niche within the same market build a list for that product and then cross sell your product to your first list. In all probabability they will also be interested in your new product because it’s the same market. Do you see what I’m saying? Another key point here is that you would have a hard time competing for the keyword ‘Golf’ when you’re starting out but once you’ve built a list of buyers for a niche within ‘Golf’, you can then market anything about ‘Golf’ to them.

What if I already have a business that I want to develop?

If you run an existing business, the best way to identify a common requirement among your existing customers is to devise a short questionnaire and ask them what they want. What is their most pressing need or problem right now, what would they buy from you if you sold it.

If you run a hotel or guest house ask them why they are visiting the area, what are their interests and hobbies and are they associated with your area. Look for ways that you can supply them with more of what they are passionate about. Consider doing joint ventures with other businesses in your area that offer products or services that would be of interest to your visitors.

In fact, too few offline businesses consider doing joint ventures with fellow businesses that supply the same market. It seems alien to them to work with other companies, maybe because they are afraid the other company will steal their customers.

I have some bad news for you, they are not your customers. They already buy from lots of people. In many cases they buy similar products from lots of suppliers. Don’t you think that if you expanded what you were able to offer them by working with other companies on a commission basis you would build more loyalty?

When we change our thinking from just making money to how we can serve our customers better, we find that the money comes as a by product.

OK, back to where we were.

Having identified your market niche, pick a product or service that those people are searching for. In other words, instead of trying to find customers to sell your product to, find targeted customers and then ask them what they already want to buy.

Don’t even consider starting a business until you know exactly what your target niche market is. You must identify targeted customers first. Then, when you know your niche and what they already want to buy, you can come up with a product or service for them that you know they are already looking for.

Remember, it’s not the number of visitors your site gets in a day that matters it’s the number of targeted visitors that you get that is important. A smaller number of visits from people who are desperate and willing to pay any price to buy your product or service are far more important than thousands of general visitors who are just browsing.

Let’s get started

This is where the work starts. Yes – that’s right I said work.

Did you think that you could start an online business without doing some work? Listen, let’s get one bit of BS out of the way first – you can’t start ANY business online or offline without putting some effort in. You will see lots of ads these days saying that you can buy their business opportunity and sit back, do nothing and the money will roll in.

I know what you’re thinking – you got this email from someone telling you that he is making a fortune online and he doesn’t get off his rear end all day. Well I’m sorry to be blunt but he is almost certainly telling you a pack of lies.

Most of these people aren’t making any money at all. They are trying to sell you on an idea so that they can make some money but in most cases they aren’t doing it themselves.

The biggest reason for failure on the web today is because people don’t focus on one thing until they have it making money on auto-pilot before considering anything else.

There are just so many opportunities being presented to us today that staying focused is very, very difficult. My advice is to not allow yourself to get sidetracked. Follow the steps in this series and stick with it until you have it running like clockwork.

I’m sorry if this is not what you wanted to hear but I believe that what you really want in the long run is someone who will tell you the truth and hold your hand until you gain the necessary experience to go it alone.

There is some good news though, starting and running a business online is MUCH easier than it is offline. So take encouragement from that and let’s get started.

Next time we’ll look at identifying your niche market. How you decide which market to target, which one might be profitable is the area that prevents most people from getting going. That why it’s important to make sure you look out for the next part of this series.

Until then remember,

“Nothing Happens Until You Take ACTION”

Trevor

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You may have heard that one before and maybe not. Either way it does have relevance to what we’re going to be covering here.

In my last post I asked how prepared you are for tough times. Too many people are only one pay day away from real suffering if that pay day was suddenly removed, something that is happening to a growing number of families at the moment. But it needn’t be that way. People all over the world are discovering some very simple ways that the Internet now provides for adding some extra income and even replace that 9 – 5 merry-go-round that they’re on.

Today I want to start you on the road to financial freedom so that you are not reliant on a regular paycheck coming in.

So, why am I asking you the question ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ and what the heck does it have to do with your financial freedom? Well, I’m going to tell you but first we need to cover some key points that most Internet Marketing coaches shy away from. The reason that the majority of teachers of Internet Marketing do not cover these points is because people don’t want to hear them. They are often feeling acute pain from mounting bills and diminishing income and want a magic bullet, a cure-all pill to take the pain away.

… and I can understand them feeling like that, I’ve been there myself not that long ago so I know how it feels. What I found though was as soon as I changed my approach, my attitude, things started to change for me and I haven’t looked back since.

So to begin with I want to talk about mindset, your mental attitude. Now bear with me here, I know this isn’t sexy like social networking or driving traffic or the latest greatest way to get on the first page of Google but it is crucial to your success in anything – online or any other way. I know it isn’t included in most Internet Marketing courses that you buy and I believe that it not being there is responsible for the many failures online.

So what am I talking about here. When you start any business there are some key things that you need to identify right at the beginning.

What do you want to achieve?

It is really important to have a very clear picture of what you want your business to look like when it’s done. How much income per month does it need to provide. If it needs to replace your current income identify what that is and write it down. If it needs to provide some additional income alongside your job write down what that is. Some people enjoy their job and don’t want to give it up but some additional income would provide a better lifestyle. The most important thing here is that you need to be specific. ‘More money to pay the bills’ isn’t specific, ‘I want to be rich’ isn’t specific. How much you need to pay the bills is, it needs to be $x per month (or pounds or whatever your currency is). If you want to be rich, identify what rich is, what does that mean in terms of income, money in the bank etc. what is it.

When do you want to achive this by?

Having decided how much money you want to generate the next stage is to identify when you want to achieve it by. Now I know if you are struggling you want to achieve it by NOW. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen despite what many of the emails you receive tell you. It can happen very quickly but I don’t want to sell you a line that it can happen overnight when the truth is it will take some time if you’re starting from scratch.

Set realistic goals and you will achieve them quicker than you could ever imagine.

Stay focused

The biggest problem we face today is overload. We are bombarded with one offer after another of the latest greatest thing that’s going to make you money overnight. When you need money NOW it is very difficult to stay focused on one thing. So you identify a product or system that will provide you with a route to making money, buy it, download it to your hard-drive and are determined to get going with it.

Then you get another email that promises faster, better results and off you go again. All too often I find people who just end up going round and round this money-making merry-go-round like a hamster on a wheel, and 6 months, 12 months or years later they are still where they started but more broke, more dissolutioned and sick and tired of trying.

Too much to do

The volume of email that we’re getting now all telling us the techniques we must use to be successful have another impact. … and that brings us back to our elephant. How do you eat an elephant – well one bite at a time is the answer. Faced with a mountain of things that we feel we need to do to be successful it’s too easy to do nothing. We freeze like a rabbit in the headlights of an on-coming car and put off getting started on our road to financial freedom.

Getting started online is actually very easy, if you take it one step at a time. When I coach my clients I teach them the one-step at a time method.

Next time, I’ll begin taking you through the simple steps you need to take to get started.

Until then Remember,

“Nothing Happens Until You Take ACTION”

Trevor

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Many areas of the developed world are really suffering with the economic down-turn at the moment and things look set to get worse.

When things are going well we tend to think they always will and live up to our limit. It’s a sad fact that most people are only one pay day away from disaster.

Here in the UK the new Government has begun the first of what will be very hard cuts in public spending that is already costing hundreds of jobs.

Yet those of us who have been quietly working away on our Internet businesses have little or no impact from the economic climate.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to take you through the steps that I would be taking now to protect myself from what may be ahead if I was just starting out.

Be sure to come back tomorrow when I’ll be looking at why so many people don’t get started and how to overcome it.

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How are you going to put tires on a car you don’t even have?

For that matter, How could you add a room onto a house you haven’t even built yet?

Or give a frog an enema if you don’t have the frog?

Here’s the thing… if you’re like soooo many marketers, that’s basically what you’re doing.

I’m guilty of it, too.

We buy program after program on how to do a certain technique that’s supposed to make us
moolah by Sunday…

But we don’t even have a proper business up and running yet.

I’m talking about a business that will take care of us for the rest of our lives no matter what the economy does or what bone-headed mistake we make or whatever.

No matter what. Rock solid, steady income for years.

I think maybe we’ve forgotten what it is we truly want. It’s not a quick buck today and then broke again tomorrow.

It’s permanent long term no-one-can-take-it-away-from-us SECURITY.

I know a man, ONE man, who scoured the earth for the info that would provide him with EXACTLY that kind of business.

This isn’t how to build a site or write a salesletter or do SEO kind of stuff. Heck, you can get that for FREE on the net.

This is covert ops, only the rich KNOW this stuff, secretive HUSH HUSH knowledge that YOU and I need to be successful today, tomorrow and forever, no matter what we decide to do.

And this is the SAME info MARK JOYNER, the Godfather of Internet Marketing recommends you get your hands on ASAP…

…along with the secret TOOL that will take you further, faster than you ever thought possible.

How do I know that?

It’s been PROVEN time and time again by people who have already used it and gone from small incomes to five, six and seven figure incomes.

Be sure to become part of the team – until July 6, 2009 / and save money.

Find out how to finally start making consistent money here

until next time,

Trevor

“Remember, NOTHING happens until we take ACTION”

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It is also becoming harder to sort out the good stuff from all of the hype, thinly veiled sales pitches and rehashed PLRs that we get.

A short while ago, my friend Ewen Chia, sent me a very useful report that he had created that may end up becoming the start of a regular newsletter, where he provides his thoughts on some of the most frequently asked Internet Marketing questions.

I think you may find it useful so I’ve provided a copy of it here for you. As a refreshing change there are no sales pitches here, just good solid advice.

http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/ewen/ewenletter.zip

Incidentally, if you arrived here other than being one of my valued subscribers, then why not sign up in the box over on the right and get my exclusive interview with Ewen.

Staying on the subject of newbies getting started making some money online, I got some good news from Mike Filsaime today that will also be good news for you.

Mike has taken one of his original products and with the help of colleague Omar Martin brought it right up to date to take account of the major changes that have taken place affecting marketing online. Now, rather than sell this product he has decided to give it away to a few lucky people. All you pay is post and packing. There aren’t going to be many of these available which is why I’ve got this out to you right away. I’ve ordered one, I always respect anything that Mike puts out and always learn something from him too. Mike is one of my mentors, I have a lot of time for him.

The product is now called ‘Internet Selling for Newbies’. To be honest for just the cost of post and packing I’d just go for it.

http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/mf

That’s all for this time,

To your online success,

Trevor,

Remember, nothing happens until we take action.

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I stayed at The Park Hotel on Clarke Quay. The Park Hotel is a new hotel, only open for 3 weeks when I got there, and a really nice hotel at that. The service and facilities were excellent. Since it was new it didn’t seem to be too crowded making my stay so much better.
	Singapore is a very picturesque island and one of the best ways to see the main city area is by taking a river boat cruise along the Singapore river. The cost of the cruise is very reasonable at around S$15 and it takes you from where you get on out to the harbour where it turns round and travels back up through the city past Robertson Quay and back again in a seemingly endless circuit. At various points along it’s journey it stops at landing stages to put down and pick up passengers.
There a many boats like this plying their way back and forth along the river. The river winds its way through the city back and forth and while most of the passengers are tourists their are a few locals getting a lift to another part of the city.
You can see a whole gallery of photographs on my Facebook page here

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Since then I’ve been attempting to re-instate it back to where it was. Unfortunately they appear to have deleted all my previous content in the process so I’m starting back from scratch. This time I’m doing all I can to ensure that I have all of the loopholes plugged and daily back-ups of the database to go back to.

This has been a very interesting exercise for me and has demonstrated how easy it is for people to gain access to your site and really screw it up if you are not careful. So much so, that I’m going to create a section on here all about protecting your blog so that other people don’t suffer the same fate.

Tomorrow I’ll update you all on my recent visit to Singapore.

Take care & keep blogging,

Trevor

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To start this week I need to apologize for the gap between the last issue and this one. Quite surprisingly for me I managed to contract a dose of flu that knocked me off my feet for about a week.

I say quite surprisingly because I don’t normally get colds or flu. I try to keep myself very positive in everything that I do, see myself as healthy and tend to stay healthy. This time something obviously went wrong.

Since the last issue Neil Shearing has launched his latest product ’10 Day Cash Secret’ and since I’m into niche marketing myself I’ve decided to evaluate it. I’ll let you know how I get on in a future issue.

It’s amazing how something like a dose of flu can really screw up your week. Now that I’m back on my feet again I’m running around to get back to where I wanted to be in the first place.

It also brings home how important our health is and how we need to look after it. I think it’s very important to take as much regular exercise as possible and to get away whenever possible to re-charge our batteries.

Although I walk for 30 minutes to an hour each day I’ve not taken a real holiday for getting on for a year so maybe my body is telling me it’s time to book some time off.

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Thought for the Day
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.

In my view there are 2 key elements that decide whether you achieve your objectives or not. One of them is Focus and the other is Action

I’ve proved to myself in my business that had I focused on one thing at a time rather than trying to work on many projects at the same time I would have made much quicker progress and achieved a lot more.

It’s too easy to think that this extra little activity won’t have any real impact on whatever else I’m doing. I can run this alongside my main goal without much effort. This is the sort of thinking that winners don’t entertain.

The only way to achieve what you want and more is to work on one thing through to its conclusion, get it running on autopilot so that it takes little effort to keep it going and only then move on to something else.

Focus is the one area that more and more people are falling down on these days because of the growing amount of opportunities coming our way on a daily basis. Many of these opportunities are capable of making us a fortune, if we just stick to any one of them and see it through to a conclusion.

Having decided which opportunity is for you then it’s time to take action. It’s time to do whatever you have to do to make it a success or decide that it isn’t for you and move on. But only move on when you have got it to the point of running on autopilot or you’ve proved that it doesn’t have the potential to produce the results you expected or were promised.

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Why Information Marketing?

Well there are a number of reasons but the key reason is it provides the potential for residual income. If you think about it the plan that we are all sold when we are at school, the one where you get good grades at college or University, get a good job and work at it until retirement, is all based on exchanging time for money.

You give the boss some of your time (usually a lot of your time!) and he or she gives you some money in exchange for it. If you are unable to continue giving your time for whatever reason, they stop giving you their money.

Even if you see through that plan and decide to work for yourself, if you are in any type of service business you only get paid when you provide the service. Let’s suppose you run a carpet cleaning business you get paid when you clean a carpet, just once. You clean the carpet, get paid end of story. Until there is another carpet to clean you get no money.

The same thing applies to all service businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you are a web designer, accountant or even a coach/mentor. You tend to exchange time for money, either directly by the hour or by the price of the job which still equates to so much time when you analyze it.

The problem with this type of earnings model is that there are only so many hours in the day to exchange. Once you’ve exchanged all of the hours you can your earnings potential is capped.

With the information business you can create a piece of work once and sell it over and over again. You are not restricted by the time/money trap. With the Internet it gets even better because you are able to supply your information digitally and do not even have to be around to supply it yourself.

If you create the information products yourself you also eliminate any competition. You decide who can sell it and who can’t. If anyone copies your work you are protected by law and can sue them. You also have the option to create your own affiliate program and build an army of affiliates selling your product. This is the real key to the information business.

You can start with little or no up-front capital and if you are struggling to get started with your own product you can start by selling someone else’s product for a commission and don’t even need to have any of the products in your possession.

You can sell digital products through Clickbank or physical products through Kunaki.com or Commission Junction (cj.com).

Creating your own product

The key to creating your own product is in identifying a hungry market first. The biggest mistake that people make in all areas of business is to start with the product first. Having created the product they then have to try and sell it to someone, someone who may not actually want what you have.

All product creation starts with research. You need to brainstorm ideas, markets, to find one that is desperate for a solution to their problems. Once you find a good sized market of buyers that are rabid for a solution that they are prepared to pay for you have the basis of a successful product.

Research ideas

The first step in the product creation process is to research ideas. What hobbies do you or your friends and family have? Are you an expert on a particular subject?

If you are an expert at something that has an active buying community you could do very well with it. Having a good level of knowledge on a subject will make it easier for you to write articles, press releases and content on the subject.

This will put you light years ahead of the competition if they know a lot less than you do. You can find niche ideas everywhere you look. What magazines sell well, what topics have popular newsgroups? Do a Google search for subject forum or subject discussion group.

I find it useful to carry a small shopping notebook with me at all times and jot down ideas as they come to mind. You will always say you are going to remember that one when you get home but you don’t, at least I don’t and I’m not on my own.

Develop a habit of being on the lookout wherever you are. Ideas can come to mind all of the time. Once you get into the habit of doing this you will see niche ideas everywhere.

Spend some time browsing around Clickbank.com/marketplace to find products in every niche you can think of. When looking at products in Clickbank the gravity score is what’s important. This tells you haow influential their product is in the overall market.

Another good place to look is eBay. eBay is the biggest online marketplace. Look at the top selling products on there. This could give you an idea for a product for you to sell on a niche site. The places to look are ‘Popular Now’ and eBay Pulse (pulse.ebay.com).

Yet another place to look is PayPal shops. If you look at https://www.paypal.com/shops PayPal will show you how popular the businesses are in each category and they will also let you know how many PayPal transactions the company has. While the company will almost certainly accept other methods of payment this will give you an idea of how popular the product line is.

Look for classified ads in places like Exchange and Mart. Ads that run week after week are paying and indicate a profitable niche. I think you get the idea by now. Look everywhere for potential niches. At this stage you are just making a list of possible niches. Make your list as long as possible initially and keep it growing for the future.

Next time I’ll cover the next stage of our research, identifying the potential of our niches.

I cover the whole process of creating niche income in my book “The Easy Internet Start-up Guide”. Find out more at http://www.getstartedonlinenow.com

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Your Mental Muscle Workout

What’s holding you back?

Maybe you are just getting started online or maybe you’ve been online for some time. If you aren’t where you want to be with your life, your business or your income then chances are that something somewhere is holding you back.

I used to think that I had a pretty good handle on goal setting, where I wanted to go and that I would get there but couldn’t understand why some people get there faster than others and why so many people never get there at all.

I think one of the difficulties is that we often read a book or listen to an audio recording on a topic, say goal setting, and we will read or listen to it once and think we have understood the topic. However, what usually happens is that as we work our way through our mind picks up on some trigger somewhere and off we go on a tangent into thoughts of our own.

Then after a while we return, meanwhile the recording has continued or your eyes have continued to scan the lines, and we have missed the content of quite a section of the piece. We follow along with the content again for a while and then off we go again on another trip.

It’s for this reason that I feel it’s important to work through something that we want to learn everything we can from more than once, preferably many more times. Whenever I’ve done this I have always gained so much more the second, third, fourth time and more than that in many cases.

I’ve found in my own case that it is very difficult to look objectively at my own behaviour and identify if I am falling foul of some of the situations that I’m reading about. I tend to think that once I’ve read about it I am then aware of it from then on and will make the necessary adjustments in my life.

Fortunately I keep reading and analysing and have been able to identify that all is not what it often seems to be. I’ll give you an example.

I read many years ago about our self-image, the fact that we have many mini self-images about every area of our life that combine to form an overall self-image. One of these mini self-images is concerned with the level of income we see ourselves as earning.

As with all of our concepts about ourselves, we build up our concept about our earnings bracket from our parents, people we grow up with, the economic climate during our formative years etc.

Eventually we arrive at an income level that we feel comfortable with and most people rarely move far away from this figure. I mentioned last time that it is known that many commission sales people who reach their earnings concept figure before the end of year go completely off the boil until the start of the next year.

This situation is a lot more common, I believe, than we think. We attract into our lives the people and circumstances that harmonise with our dominant thoughts and this applies to our earnings level, our level of debt and every other aspect of our financial life (along with the rest of our life in general).

I’m more convinced than ever, the more I study this subject, that we can attract whatever level of income we desire simply by raising our ceiling, visualizing a new level of income and through the power of attraction based on our dominant thoughts bring that level of income into our reality.

The problem is that when we first try to do this our old self-image tries to knock us back, saying that this isn’t really you and you should get back to where you belong. It takes some persistence at first but the more you do it, the better you become.

Take a close look at what your self-images are. Where do you really see yourself on the earnings scale? Do you honestly see yourself earning two or three times what you are now or does it need some work

Until next time….

Trevor

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I hope you are all keeping well. I spend a good bit of my time working on my niche sites. Niche marketing is being talked about all over the internet these days and for good reason.

Some of the niches that I operate in are related to my hobbies and while it isn’t essential that you enjoy the niches that you decide to do business in I believe it certainly makes a big difference.

Operating any business online or offline requires a lot of determination, persistence and hard work. When the going gets tough, maybe you have things going on in your life that need urgent attention or you may be feeling off color physically, if you don’t have a real interest in your niche it will be a lot easier to let things slip.

One of the keys to success in internet marketing is putting regular effort into your business. A little regular activity beats going mad for a day or two and then doing nothing for weeks every time.

There was a time when for me the biggest obstacle I had to grapple with was time management. We all have the same amount of time in the day and yet it seemed to me that some people were just able to do so much more with their time than me.

I realised that I needed to get to grips with how they did this and set out to put a routine in place that I could work to. I found a coach to help with it and together we identified where the time was going to and put a schedule in place to correct it.

The biggest time stealer for most people is email, and it was for me. I just couldn’t resist checking my emails every few minutes. Now I spend 30 minutes at the start of the day, 15 minutes around midday and don’t look again until the end of the day just before I finish to sort out any urgent issues that I need to attend to.

This one simple change has really opened up my day and made such a difference. My second biggest time waster was not being able to find things because I hadn’t filed them away properly.

In the rush to get on with the next project it’s too easy to stack things up in a pile until ‘later’, especially when you are starting out and need to make some money. Doing something that might generate some money always seems so much more important than filing.

Over the years I’ve discovered that this attitude is actually doing us more harm than we realise. You see, although we maybe don’t think consciously about the piles of filing, it works away on our sub-conscious holding us back. In the back of our mind we know we still have that clutter to sort.

Worse still often when we need something to refer to, yes you’ve guessed it, it’s in one of those piles and we have to spend even more time finding it.

Incidentally I mentioned there that I got myself a coach. I coach lots of people myself now but still work with a coach myself. I think it is very important to work with someone else that can stretch you and help you grow no matter how good you are at what you do.

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Thought for the Day
“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line”.

How often do you start to do some work on your current project, maybe some keyword research, accidentally stumble across something way off topic and before you know it are going off in a completely different direction to the one you wanted to go.

The fact is that all of the time you are following this tread you are away from your straight line and adding time to the day when you will reach your goal. Successful people keep as close to the straight line as possible and reach their goals in double quick time.

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Making money online, isn’t it too late now?

The Internet Marketing niche is one of the most competitive online. When I started online over 10 years now there were very few people sending out newsletters, a lot less offers arriving in your inbox, no mega launches like Mass Control that you will have received from every corner of the net over the last few weeks.

It is little wonder then that many of the new people starting out say to me that it was fine for me back then but it’s too late now. The Internet is too crowded, the big boys have been there a long time and have it all sown up so there is no point starting now.

It is a big mistake to think that just because you may have been made aware of the potential of making money online from someone selling Internet Marketing tools and books that you have to work in that marketplace too.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are millions of small niche markets that can each bring in $200 – $300 (£100 – £200) a month. On their own they may be nothing to write home about but you don’t have to stop at one.

Imagine having 10, 20, 100 of these. It wouldn’t be difficult to have 20 of these small niche ‘sites’ set up and running on auto-pilot in the course of a year each bringing you in an average of $250 (£125) a month.

By the end of the year that could easily be $5000 (£2500) a month and much more. There are profitable niches everywhere when you learn how to look. Check out the magazines in newsagents or at the airport if you are going away. It is very difficult to make a magazine pay. Those that appear regularly on the shelves must be satisfying a hungry niche otherwise they would go broke.

A good start when looking for a possible niche opportunity is to think ‘How to…’. People are always looking how to do something. Topics like How to speed read, How to write a book, How to manage your time better, How to be more romantic, How to attract the opposite sex … the list is endless.

Remember people buy what they want not what they need so concentrate on wants, that’s why gadgets are so popular. Nobody needs a gadget, they think it would be nice to have it.

Too many people make the mistake of thinking that making money online is a get rich quick business. It is get rich, but get rich more slowly. Having said that 12 months isn’t that slow if you take action.

Action really is the key here. You could just read all about this stuff, feel positive about it, imagine it but not get up off the sofa and in 12 months you will be right where you started. Or you could do a little bit each day for 12 months and may be able to say goodbye to your boss for ever.

Long term thinking and planning is the key to success but long term thinking is hard for many people. We are emotional beings, we want things fast and when someone sends us an email promising that they can get us there fast the temptation is very strong to abandon what we are doing and jump on the new opportunity.

I can speak from experience when I say that all that will get you is broke, disillusioned and way off your straight line. If you can change the perception of thinking short term and instant gratification great things will start to happen.

Look at it this way, if you put aside 2 – 3 hours a day to work on your business you would have spent around 1000 hours by the end of the year. We could learn another language in 1000 hours, just think how your business will benefit from 1000 hours.

Think about doctors and lawyers. They study for years and hardly earn a penny along the way. But when they qualify, they really start to earn. You only have to spend 12 months, even less if you have more spare time and you would be there.

To go back to my earlier point about the Internet being too crowded now, let’s think about that. There are still millions and millions of people who are not online yet. There are billions of people on the planet and more being born every second, there are only millions online, not billions.

Out of the millions online how many are involved with Internet Marketing, in fact, how many are just surfers and not marketing online at all? By just being online and starting to learn your trade, reading newsletters like this one, you are already way ahead of the game.

Think and plan long term, do something everyday and you’ll stay ahead of the game and before you know it you will be financially independent.

I cover a lot of information about getting started online in my book (http://www.easyinternetstartupguide.co.uk) The Easy Internet Start-up Guide and am working on a new coaching course specifically about niche marketing which I will let you know about as soon as it is ready.

If you asked me what the ‘key’ to success was I would say one word – Action. It is no coincidence that this newsletter is called Action Today. Without action we stay where we are. It doesn’t have to be massive action, although that helps a lot.

It is a bit like keeping fit. Doctors tell us that just 30 minutes walking everyday will do it. It’s the same with our business. Plan long term and schedule something to do everyday. Make it a habit and you’ll get there.

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Your Mental Muscle Workout

Are you sabotaging yourself?

I have believed for many years that we are spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body. Now I’m not talking about religion here, it doesn’t matter in my view whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim or whatever we are all working with the same laws, the laws of the Universe.

Wallace Wattles, Napoleon Hill and others discovered over 100 years ago that we become what we think about and do it by attracting to ourselves results that coincide with our dominant thoughts. We are energy fields in a larger energy field, the Universe and thought energy is the strongest form of energy. As spiritual beings we send out that thought energy which in turn attracts matching vibrations to us.

It is easy to forget what the implication of this is if we are not careful. You see from what I’ve said above it is easy to see that if we think we want a certain level of income hard enough and consistently enough we will attract it to us. We think positively and it will happen.

The problem is the same thing works with negative thoughts. Unfortunately, we are surrounded by more negative vibrations than positive, it’s everywhere. Just listen to the news or read a newspaper and you’ll see good news doesn’t sell.

Fortunately it is said that research has shown that a positive thought is 100’s of times more powerful than a negative thought. So being positive most of the time will overcome the negative times. It is normal to have some negative thoughts, things happen, we just learn to spend less time with them.

As I said I have worked with these principles for many years and for a long time couldn’t understand why, when I was thinking of earning a certain income level, my income didn’t go up.

Despite listening to the material over and over again it just didn’t seem to happen. I remember Brian Tracy telling a story about a salesman who if he hit his target in September would kick back until January when he felt he could start again.

He had an income concept that was fixed in his subconscious and he couldn’t seem to break through it. Like me he probably didn’t realise that he did have a concept about his earnings.

It’s very difficult to analyse ourselves, we think we know ourselves pretty well and don’t have such things as self concepts that may be holding us back. Then one day it suddenly struck me, I did have an income/financial ceiling and was sabotaging myself.

I looked more closely at myself and finally saw that when I made some extra money over and above what I would normally earn, I spent it. I didn’t save it or invest it or just let it build up in the bank, I spent it.

I normally just dismissed this habit as wanting to treat myself but I was really sabotaging myself. Successful people take that money, see a bigger horizon and use it to make more money.

They raise their game, aim higher and achieve more. I have an old cassette tape (many of you possibly don’t know what a cassette tape is) by Charles F Abbott entitled the Millionaire Mindset. He talks about millionaires who if their businesses collapse and they end up bankrupt start again and become millionaires again in very quick time.

Some of them, like Donald Trump, have a billionaire mindset. He would probably think he was broke if he got down to being just a millionaire.

It’s really down to changing our thinking, raising our ceiling and attracting higher and higher incomes to us. When we start to replace can I with why not me, should I with I will, I couldn’t do that with who can I get to do that for me we lift the roof off and see a very different horizon.

Winston Churchill, one of the greatest leaders of all time was asked to address a graduating class as the keynote speaker. The students assembled, eager to hear what the great man had to say.

Finally, Winston Churchill moved up to the rostrum, paused for a few moments and said, “Never give up, Never give up, Never, Never, Never”, and then he sat down.

Maybe some of the audience felt let down, I’m sure some sat completely blown away by the profoundness of his words. There are times when a few words speak volumes, for me that was one of those times.

Until next time….

Trevor

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Welcome to your new issue of Action Today.

In this issue:

Lead Article – Beware Burn-Out

Also including;

Thought for the day

Exercise your mental muscle

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Hello,

I hope you are all keeping well. This time of year, especially in the UK, is considered to be the most difficult time for many people. We are coming to the end of the dark winter months and even though winters here aren’t as cold as they used to be we long to feel the warmth of the sun.

It is also that time, after the expenses of the festive season, when the need to earn extra income or finally get out of the rat race becomes a more urgent requirement.

My eldest Son has just joined a US organization to head up their European operation and needed to form a new company. He told me that there was a longer than normal delay in getting it set up because more people are registering new companies at this time of year than at any other time.

As information marketers that is interesting news. It reinforces the view that the first few weeks and months of the year can be the most profitable. This is the time of year when more people are open to opportunities than at any other time.

Of course, experienced marketers both offline and online have known this for years but it is good to get some supporting evidence. It is also a timely reminder that if you weren’t ready to catch the tide this year to put a date in your diary for early autumn (or fall for our US friends) to begin putting a new year campaign together for next year.

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Thought for the Day

“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.

Having a clear focus of where you want your business to go will mean that you avoid the many tempting offers that come your way and take you off course.

Beware Burn-Out

Although in many ways running a business on the internet is not too different to running a traditional brick and mortar business, there are some differences, some of them quite significant.

I’ve been marketing online now for a over 10 years and during that time I’ve seen many changes. The internet is a very different place now to what it was when I started out. The most significant difference is in the number of people online now.

As the internet has matured it has become much harder to get people to join your list, and the activities of a few mindless spammers has made doing business much more difficult.

On the plus side we now have the whole new world of Web 2.0 with the growth of the community sites and the tremendous marketing potential that they offer.

There is one thing that I have seen happening over the years that we all need to beware of and that is what I’ll call burn-out.

Doing business on the Internet is generally a very solitary business. One of the bonuses is that we don’t need large premises and lots of staff to run an Internet business. What that tends to mean though is that we spend a lot of time on our own staring at our computer screens.

This can mean that life can become a very lonely existence. In the early days when you are just getting going, not making any money and working long hours at your business to hopefully speed up the time when the money comes rolling in, you can become so obsessed with your business that you block out everything else.

It is not obvious to you most of the time because you have your head down working away. However, over time the constant struggle to make your business work begins to wear you down. You get tired, frustrated and before you know where you are you begin to lose faith that this thing will ever work.

That is one instance of the burn-out that I’ve seen. There is another variant that I have seen that happens when you finally become successful.

You’ve stuck to your goal and worked hard on your business and at last you do start making some money and life starts to come together. So you ‘rinse and repeat’ if you will. In other words you get one thing working and repeat it over and over. You get a good list of subscribers, put a newsletter together and start sending it out regular as clockwork.

Everything is great – right? Not always. After a while if you are still spending most of your time on your business at the exclusion of a private life you start to feel the need to slacken off. You just need a break from it. You may have been doing it for years by now and again you’re getting tired.

Then if you aren’t careful the frequency of your newsletters drops off, you start to neglect your loyal subscribers and they go away.

I’ve seen this happen to quite a few people, even some of the top people. It can happen to anyone, it’s happened to me on a couple of occasions. I’ve been a subscriber to some newsletters for the whole of the time I’ve been online.

Over that time I’ve noticed that the same thing has happened to them. There have been long gaps between issues at one stage then after a break they have come back stronger than ever.

One of the reasons for this can be lack of focus and I’m going to write about that in a future issue but mainly it is because we just keep going at our business so full on that we don’t allow time for rest and relaxation.

The key lesson here is to build a lifestyle, not just a business. It is vital to have outside interests, a full and happy family life and special time to relax and just think of where you are going with your life.

If you think of nothing but your business and spend all of your time working at it you become too blinkered, your thinking and vision become too narrow and you become much less productive in the process.

If you get out and ‘smell the roses’ now and again, go to the movies or have a nice meal with your partner or family you’ll maintain your enthusiasm and keep your edge and your business will grow faster.

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Your Mental Muscle Workout

What is your passion?

I listen to Bob Proctor a lot. Some of you may have come across him on the Secret – the DVD that is breaking all records for a non-fiction DVD all around the world. However, Bob has been teaching success principles for many years now and when I saw him at the end of last year he looked fitter and more enthusiastic than ever.

For those of you who haven’t come across Bob, he is in his 70’s now and has more energy than many people half his age. I find listening to Bob keeps me on track when life decides to throw you an awkward catch as it does very regularly.

I was listening to one of his messages recently where he was talking about what we wanted to achieve in life. You have no doubt been told that you need to set goals if you want to achieve anything in life. That you need to identify every detail of your goal whether it be a new car, house or wealth.

The problem I have found with this type of goal setting is that it is very difficult to get really excited about these things sometimes. It becomes easier if you put yourself in a feeling place for these things, like test driving the car or looking round the house for example. These experiences go a long way to helping you feel what it would be like to actually have these things.

Something Bob said on the CD really brought home to me where the difficulty really lies. You see, goals are great and we should have them but they can only take you so far. What is far more important is your passion, what Napolean Hill described as your worthy ideal.

As Bob put it a new car is great but would you be prepared to give your life for it? Now if that shocked you as much as it did me listen to his explanation for saying it. Whether we realise it or not we are already giving our life for what we are doing now.

Time doesn’t stand still for any of us and we all have the same 24 hours in every day. The question we should be asking ourselves is what do we ‘really’ want? Deep down inside what do we ‘really’ want? When people look back at your life what would you like them to say about you and your achievements.

If you think about it for even a short while I’d guess it wouldn’t be that you drove nice cars or had a nice house would it?

Think about your passion. Think past making money and get to what your real passion is. Start putting your effort into achieving that and the cars, houses and everything else will arrive as a by product.

I think it was Zig Ziglar who said that if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want as a result.

Until next time….

Trevor

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