Action Today

Action Today #6 March 20th 2008

Welcome to your new issue of Action Today.

In this issue:

Lead Article – Why Information Marketing?

Also including;
Thought for the day
Exercise your mental muscle
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Hello,

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.

******

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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If you enjoyed Action Today feel free to tell your friends. They can sign up for their own free copy at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com

I welcome your comments at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/forum

***********************************************************************************
Action Today is published by Trevor Greenfield, Karlingford Close, Canley Gardens, Coventry. CV5 6QF

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Action Today #5 March 5th 2008

Welcome to your new issue of Action Today.

In this issue:

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

Also including;
Thought for the day
Exercise your mental muscle
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Hello,

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.

******

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.

******

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.

******

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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If you enjoyed Action Today feel free to tell your friends. They can sign up for their own free copy at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com

I welcome your comments at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/forum

***********************************************************************************
Action Today is published by Trevor Greenfield, Karlingford Close, Canley Gardens, Coventry. CV5 6QF

Action Today #4 February 29th 2008

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.

******

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 quite significant.

I’ve been marketing online now for a little 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.

******

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 Napoleon 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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If you enjoyed Action Today feel free to tell your friends. They can sign up for their own free copy at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com

I welcome your comments at http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/forum

***********************************************************************************
Action Today is published by Trevor Greenfield, Karlingford Close, Canley Gardens, Coventry. CV5 6QF

Hi and welcome to this weeks issue.

This issue contains;

1. Should I start a blog?
2. Affiliate Marketing - the quickest way to get started online - Part 2
3. Tip of the week

1. Should I start a blog?
Wherever you look today people are talking about blogs. If you believe all that you read, if you don’t have a blog these days you might as well forget about making money online. There’s so much information and mis-information being spread today it’s difficult to know what to believe. Over the coming weeks I’m going to explore every aspect of blogs as they relate to business and hopefully help you decide whether a blog is right for you or not.

So let’s start at the beginning and clarify what a blog is. The word blog is short for weblog and as the name suggests is a log. At its simplest it’s effectively a diary where entries are made in chronological order. Todays entry starts at the top. Tomorrows entry is then placed at the top and today’s entry is moved down to second place and so on.

Blogs, unlike normal web pages, don’t require any web development knowledge to maintain. Entries are added to your blog using something similar to Word in a specially prepared admin area. You simply type what you want to say and publish it. Because of this blogs have grown in popularity at a phenominal rate. There are now literally millions of blogs worldwide on every topic you can imagine.

There are even blog search engines now, Technorati being the most well known and probably the biggest. The majority of the blogs on the web are used for fun only. They are used by people to connect with like minded people or family and friends and a host of other reasons.

Having said that only a very small percentage of all the blogs are used for business purposes and an even smaller number of those are actually making any money at all.

So do you need a blog to make money online? There are still many thousands of websites making lots of money for their owners without a blog in sight so, no, you don’t need a blog to succeed online now, but they are a useful help.

Good search engine ranking today relies largely on good, relevant , fresh content and lots of quality inbound links. Blogs can and do provide lots of both of these elements and so are excellent for good search engine positioning.

Whether you should have a blog though is dependent on other factors more specific to you. We have said that a blog is all content, lots of postings. Someone has to write these postings into your blog. If you don’t like writing or can’t get someone to write the posts for you, you could do well to forget creating a blog. Keeping a blog up to date requires lots of consistent effort. If you don’t think you can cope with this it would be better to forget a blog - for now.

I say ‘for now’ because when your business reaches the stage where it can fund some of the grunt work you may want to pay someone to maintain your blog. Secondly, do you have enough spare time to keep your blog up to date. There’s no question that making regular entries to your blog takes quite a bit of time. If you are not going to have the time your blog will soon dry up and people will stop visiting.

Assuming that you can overcome the limitations that I have outlined above, you are happy to write to your blog or get someone to write it for you and you or someone working with you have the time to keep it current with fresh content, the next question is which blog solution should you go for.

There are really only two solutions to choose from and they are Blogger (www.blogger.com) and Wordpress. At the time of writing both of these solutions are free so let’s look at the relative merits of each one.

Blogger is owned by Google and is one of the many free resources that they provide. In my opinion, Blogger is fine for a hobby site or personal blog but for business purposes I would recommend that you get your own blog installed on your own domain.

There are a number of reasons why I recommend this approach. Firstly, blogger domains don’t do much to help your keyword branding efforts. All Blogger domains look the same and all contain the word blogspot. This might help Google but doesn’t help you. One of the basic principles when it comes to driving traffic to your site or blog is to have your main keyword in your domain, preferably at the start of the domain.

Secondly, Blogger is outside of your control. If Google change the rules or remove the Blogger facility your hard work in creating the basis of your business has been wasted.

For a business blog I recommend Wordpress. This is open source software (which means it’s free) and is offered as part of your hosting package by many hosting companies including my own hosting company, Niche Market Hosting *.

Wordpress is a one-click install and takes less than 15 minutes to have a working blog. There are lots of different themes (the theme is the template that dictates the look and feel of your blog) and plugins for lots of different purposes that have been created for Wordpress and these take a little longer.

I’ll cover customising your Wordpress blog in a later article. Wordpress was built especially to list well in the search engines. Every time you write or edit a post Worpress pings all of the different blog search engines through Pingomatic. Pinging is a process where a little message is sent to the search engine telling it that an action has taken place that it should look at.

Wordpress is very flexible. It can be used to drive traffic to another traditional website or it can act as a website in its own right. The variety of themes and plugins that are available for Wordpress allows you to really customise your blog to serve almost any purpose.

There is even a plugin that makes your blog a membership site. It’s not an option that I would recommend to anyone looking to create a serious membership site but it can be done.

In the next article in this series I’ll cover setting up your blog and the various themes and plugins that are available.

* Niche Market Hosting - All the hosting you’ll ever need (including Wordpress) for just £9.97 a month. Visit Niche Market Hosting for more details or to request an account.

2 Affiliate Marketing - the quickest way to get started online - Part 2
Last time we looked at the basics of making money with affiliate programs, the two main affiliate networks - Commission Junction and Clickbank and the top ten mistakes that new affiliates make when getting started.

This time I’m going to cover those top ten mistakes in more detail and how to overcome them. I’m also going to cover the mechanics of getting started.

OK so let’s start by analysing what most people do when they get started with affiliate programs. As we covered last time, it’s relatively easy to sign up for Clickbank, choose a program that you would like to market and start driving traffic to the merchants site via your affiliate link.

If you do this successfully and the merchants web copy converts well you will start to make some commissions. However, you will almost certainly be missing out on a lot more money by doing it this way. You see, when you drive prospects directly to your merchants site you might get paid when they buy but you don’t know who they are. You have no way to approach them again with another offer in the hope that will buy that product too.

There is another problem with affiliate marketing that people don’t generally consider - people steal your commissions. Shocking but it’s true. You see people can spot an affiliate link a mile off. It is usually quite long and contains all sorts of funny characters like ‘/?aff-link=12345/’. It’s even worse with Clickbank because all Clickbank links look the same, they all contain your hoplink. Other clickbank affiliates know this and when they see that a product that they intend to purchase through you is on Clickbank, some of them will replace your id with theirs and get their commission off the product instead of you getting it.

Not only that but for some reason that I have never been able to understand other non affiliates seeing that the link for the product that they intend to buy is an affiliate link will simply chop off all of the affiliate information and go directly to the merchants site robbing you of your commission.

They don’t get the product any cheaper, they just seem to want to stop you getting anything for it. So does this mean that we might as well forget trying to make money with affiliate programs? Well no, but we do need to change our approach.

This brings us back to last time when I spoke of driving traffic to your website. The answer to both of these problems is to have your own hosting account. Then rather than sending people directly to the merchants site you send them to a page on your site instead. The link you send them to looks like an normal link because it is!

Your page that you send them to serves a number of very important purposes. First you use it to pre-sell them on the product by creating some web content that emphasises the benefits of the product. You use this page to warm them up a little bit more before sending them off to the merchant.

Secondly you include an op-in form on the page and entice visitors to give you their name and email address by offering a free report of some sort. If you do a search on Google for ‘product niche’ free plr or ‘product niche’ free resell rights you will get lots of products to choose from to give away.

I recommend that you use Aweber to manage your lists. Their system is easy to use and allows you to have unlimited lists for as many niches as you want. You can also send out as many autoresponders as you want and broadcast messages to one or many lists.

I’ve used them for a long time now and so do just about all of the top people on the net. They get your emails delivered and make a good job of looking after your lists. All in all I think it’s an excellent service for the price and an absolute must if you want to build a real business that is going to pay you on into the future

At this point I know many of you will be thinking, “well that cuts me out because I can’t create a website even if I get sorted with the hosting”. The good news is you don’t need to. If you’ve read item 1 this week you will have seen that this is where your blog comes to the rescue.

You can set up a Wordpress blog very quickly and can create your content by just typing it in. Your blog can also include your opt-in box and anything else you want although I would suggest that you want to keep your page very sparse. All you want on there is your warm up content and your opt-in box. When people sign up to your list they are added to your autoresponder series the first of which is the link to their free gift. They are also redirected to the merchants site by Aweber without them seeing your affiliate link.

This solves both our potential problems in one easy step. We get their name and email address and we hide our affiliate link. You can also send them to a redirect page on your hosting account to hide the link even more if you wish. If you want to know more about redirect pages sign up to this blog and add a comment.

Finally for this week let’s look at my top ten mistakes to avoid again.

1. Thinking people will just click on your affiliate link. As an affiliate your job is all about pre-selling and pre-selling involves more than just displaying the affiliate links. It also entails encouraging people to click on them by outlining the benefits they can get from the affiliate merchant’s products, giving good recommendations about using the products or services, and providing an irresistible offer that would entice readers to check out the package. This is covered by our opt-in page on our site that we send them to first.

2. Believing that there’s such a thing as organic traffic. Organic traffic, or traffic that is naturally generated by a website, is a myth. There is no such thing! If you’re hosting your affiliate links in one website, you can’t expect people to find it just like that. You have to make them find it. This can be done through effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques and efficient marketing strategies. I’ll cover these in more detail next time. Marketing strategies don’t have to cost you lots of money. Article marketing, essentially writing articles based around your niche and submitting to free article directories, is one of the most successful marketing techniques I know.

3. Believing that employing one marketing strategy is enough. Some people actually think that submitting one article to the article directories would give them the amount of traffic they need. This is a fatal mistake. Limiting yourself to a single, or even a couple, of marketing tactics would be limiting the number of visitors you could generate for your website. Also, you’ll fail to tap into other segments of your targeted market if your tactics aren’t flexible enough to expand. Well look at marketing strategies next time.

4. Failing to study your campaign’s performance. Most affiliates merely check on how much they have earned per day, and if such an amount remains at low levels, they fail to make corresponding adjustments because, well, they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need improving. It is important to study every facet of our marketing strategies. How many visitors are we generating for our website? How many of them are unique? How many are returning? How much time do they spend in our pages? Where are they coming from? Where are they exiting? These are the questions that can be answered by an excellent visitor tracking software program, and these are the questions that could help us improve the performance of our marketing endeavors. By combining the stats from a good package on your hosting account (I provide AWStats on Niche Market Hosting)with the stats you get from Aweber you can build some good stats about your campaigns. There are other tracking products that you can get when you become more established that will track all of your ads.

5. Failing to find an affiliate program which actually offers sellable products. Some affiliate programs may offer as much as a 95% commission per sale. But if the products are impossible to sell, you’d never realise the profit the program promises. Check the stats for the program on Clickbank first and don’t be afraid to contact the merchant and ask how sales are going, get then to provide some stats.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction. The credibility of an enterprise depends on how people view it. If the affiliate program has established great relationships with the members of its target market, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service. You’d have an easier time pre-selling such an affiliate program’s products. Again ask the merchant for some references.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry. There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of Internet marketing where everything is moving at such a rapid pace. You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge. It is important to treat this like a business not a hobby. Like any business you need to train yourself in new technologies as they come along.

8. Failing to invest in knowledge. Knowledge evolves and you have to evolve with it. It is important to accept the concept that we have to invest in ourselves if we are to be successful in business. Buy informative eBooks, special reports etc… those that would teach you the latest trends and techniques to help you keep up to date. Go to seminars or join a membership site based around your chosen niche. I’ve been marketing online for over 10 years now and I still buy lots of ebooks, go to at least 2 or 3 seminars each year and constantly research and review information online - not to mention the selected emails I receive each month from other marketers that I respect. As with point 7, this is a business, invest in yourself.

9. Resting on your laurels once you’ve achieved a level of success. Success is not guaranteed to last. You have to sustain it. If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure. I can remember some years back making this mistake. I had built my list up to over 8000 and thought I was all set so I began to slack off, look at other markets and neglect those subscribers that I’d worked so hard to get in the first place. I finally sent out another mailing to that list after a break of nearly 12 months and most of them had either changed their email address or unsubscribed and I had to start again. I think I’ve already made the point here.

10. Believing that affiliate marketing is a “get rich quick” scheme. It is not. You have to invest a certain level of commitment, a lot of time, some financial resources on occasions, and a whole lot of effort if you want to truly realise the many wonderful things that affiliate marketing can provide.

Part 3 of this series will be devoted entirely to getting traffic.

If you are keen to learn all you can about running a successful affiliate business without waiting for my weekly series then you need to get Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. It covers everything that she does to make a consistent 6 figure income year after year from affiliate programs.

Super Affiliate Handbook

3 Tip of the Week
Everyone is talking about web 2.0 these days but very few people know what it is. Simply put it means the people are in control now. Through the use of the new technologies ordinary people can now and do make a real impact on what happens on and offline.

These new social media will have a major impact on your web marketing efforts in the months and years to come so now is a good time to start to learn all you can about them.Some of the main ones to consider are technorati, Digg, deli.cio.us, Reddit and Stumbleupon. People are already using these to drive masses of traffic to their sites so this is your chance to be in at the start of something big.

Well that’s all there is time for this week. I have lots to pack in next time so be sure to look out for that.

Trevor

Remember - Action is the Key

Hi and welcome to this weeks issue.

This issue contains;

1. The Legendary E.Joseph Cossman & What I Learned From Him and Never Forgot About Having Your Own Exclusive Products — A Vitally Important Message To Online Marketers — Especially If You’re 40 years or older.
by Marlon Sanders

2. Affiliate Marketing - the quickest way to get started online.

3. Tip of the week

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1. “The Legendary E.Joseph Cossman & What I Learned From Him and Never Forgot About Having Your Own Exclusive Products — A Vitally Important Message To Online Marketers — Especially If You’re 40 years or older”By Marlon SandersYou may or may not have heard of the legendary E. Joseph Cossman. But if you’ve ever seen one of those “ant farms” in a store in the U.S., I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe’s son Howard STILL isn’t getting a royalty on them.In 1963, Joe wrote a book that is STILL at bookstores — “How I Made a Million Dollars In Mail Order.” You would be hard pressed to find a library in the U.S. that doesn’t have a copy on the shelves.

E. Joseph was a man among men. He once wrote this book “The Virile Male.” And he was. Here I was, aboard a cruise ship to do my first speech on marketing (coincidentally, about how I did a 12-product survey on AOL). Tag Powell was generous enough to allow me to speak, even though I was a total nervous wreck and could barely hold onto my transparencies.It was also the first seminar Mizel and I did together. Anyway, Ted Nicholas, Dan Poynter, E. Joseph and others were the big name speakers.

Well, Joe at the time was 79 or something like that. He was still muscular and tan as heck. He oozed charm like you wouldn’t believe.

At the dinner table, he took roses from the vase on the table and passed them out to all the women at the table. They swooned. His wife of many years was with him. But if she wasn’t, he would have had many interested ladies — even though at that point he could barely hear.

Like I say, he really WAS the virile male. And a man among men. He was on all the famous talk shows at the time and a celebrity in his own right. He had the art of dominating a trade show and stealing the attention down to a fine art. He was a master showman.

The products Joe brought into this country were many and legendary. The ant farm. The spud gun. Shunken heads. Spy cakes. Hypnotic kits. The list goes on and on.

My mentor, Lew Williams, produced the first seminar E. Joseph ever did on the mail order business. That goes back a long time ago.

Before that, Lew was trained in copywriting by Thomas Hall who did $5,000 and $10,000 seminars and coaching back 30 years ago.

So to say that coaching, seminars and big ticket info stuff is a recent innovation would not be true. It’s also proof the business is here to stay.

Lew had given me a letter of introduction to Joe. I gave it to “the man.” He looked at my writing portfolio I had brought along. He said, “Son, you have a book here.”

And that’s all he told me. But it was a profound statement you can understand by reading the rest of this article.

Anyway, the way Joe made money is he imported products from overseas and sold them in the U.S. through 27 distribution channels, a list of which is in Amazing Formula as a I recall.

The KEY to Joe’s system and how he made his millions is he ALWAYS got EXCLUSIVE rights to distribute the products.

That is where I first learned that you needed your own exclusive product. Later, when I bought my Harvey Brody course (another old timer), I learned Harvey did the same thing. Mostly he invented products then private labelled them or sold them through master distributors.

I always had this background and knowledge of the benefits and importance of “EXCLUSIVE” rights to a product, at least in the country you’re selling it in.

A lot of people today don’t have the benefit of this perspective. They’re building transaction businesses based on making others rich. Which is fine as a training ground.

Here is my PROOF and point: At age 79 or whatever Joe was when he spoke on that cruise ship, rumor is he STILL had $500,000 a year in passive royalty income coming in from his products.

Well, his son Howard could say if that’s true or not. Joe produced courses you can still probably buy from Howard and I recommend then.

It’s a bit of a shame when someone like E. Joseph passes on and people are so quick to forget that if they stand tall, it IS because they stand on the shoulders of those who went before them.

Giants and titans like Thomas Hall, E. Joseph Cossman. And for me, my mentor Lew Williams. I could add Gary Halbert to that list now. And others.

I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness in today’s market saying, “Guys and gals, don’t listen to songs of the sirens. Have your own exclusive products. Create your own resellers. Create private labels. Go forth and expand.”

The young kids of today are geniuses. Many of them. Like Matt. Age 21. No college. Works for me 2 years and gets a $60,000 offer. Congrats to him. It’s a new world we live in.

A lot of you guys and gals 40 years +. You got retirement staring down the barrel at you. You weren’t born with a computer keyboard in your crib. You got something to lose.

You REMEMBER those ant farms and E. Joseph. For you, I want to recommend you have, promote and sell your OWN exclusive products.

I recommend you then sell those products via an affiliate program as your DOMINANT traffic method.

“Son, you have a book here.” That, I believe, is the only thing Joe said to me. But he knew I needed my own thing to sell. And he thought in terms of product exclusives.

Go and do thou likewise.

Best wishes,

Marlon Sanders

P.S. If you need some ideas for your own big ticket info product, here’s a link I dug up:

http://www.actiongrid.com/23ideas.html

It has 30 minutes of ideas from Action Grid. It’s a good audio to listen to.

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Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy.” If you’d like to get on his mailing list and receive tips, articles and information about online marketing, visit:
http://www.amazingformula.com

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2. Affiliate Marketing - the quickest way to get started online. - Part One

If you have been on the Internet for any time at all you will have read people extolling the virtues of affiliate marketing as the best way to start making money online. There are several ways for newbies to get started online and there is no doubt that affiliate programs offer one of the easiest ways of doing it.

That said, it is not without its’ difficulties. After all there are many thousands of people trying to make money with affiliate programs but only a small percentage of them are making more than a few dollars a month.

Incidentally, I mention dollars here because the vast majority of affiliate programs operate in dollars. As far as I’m concerned the currency doesn’t bother me, it’s the getting paid that matters. So why is it that so few are actually making any money running affiliate programs and what can you do to avoid some of the mistakes.

First of all let’s look at what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate Marketing involves you selling someone else’s product for a commission. You are acting as a commission only sales person and only get paid when you sell something. Not only that but you also bear all of the costs of sale – something which many people starting out fail to appreciate.

It therefore makes sense that if you are going to have to bear some cost of sale, that you should be looking to make the maximum amount of commission possible. Commissions paid to affiliates vary enormously from as low as 5% to 75% or more.

As a general rule physical products (shoes, clothes, electronics etc.) pay lower commissions than digital products (ebooks, membership sites, coaching etc), which is why most affiliates sell digital products.

Although it is possible to find affiliate programs for just about any product or any niche market by doing a search on “affiliate product/niche” affiliate (e.g. “Golf Shoes” affiliate) in any of the major search engines you will find that many companies that sell through affiliates use one of the big affiliate networks.

The two most well known of these is Commission Junction that sells both physical and digital products and Clickbank that sells just digital products. I recommend when you are starting out that you begin with one of these networks.

The big benefits of using a network like the ones mentioned above are that they pay regularly, you are assured of getting paid (not always the case with companies that operate their own affiliate program unfortunately) and you have a wide range of programs to choose from.

Clickbank now has in excess of 11,000 programs to choose from which gives you as an affiliate lots of choice.

Becoming an affiliate is free.

In almost every case, joining an affiliate program is free of charge. Another benefit of joining an affiliate network like clickbank is that you only have to join once. Your clickbank ‘nickname’ as it is called is used for all of the programs available through clickbank.

This means that as soon as you have joined you have 11,000 products or more to sell immediately. Good merchants will do everything they can to help you sell their products. Many of them provide a sales web page, sample classified and solo ads and some even go as far as researching suitable keywords to use.

Getting started often involves little more than deciding on a niche that you would like to work in, searching through Clickbank for suitable products and using the sales material to drive traffic to the merchants site.

Despite it being very easy to get started, however, there are some techniques you can use that will ensure that you are more successful than most newbie affiliates. There are also some pitfalls to avoid and I’ll cover those in this issue.

My top 10 affiliate mistakes to avoid

1. Thinking people will just click on your affiliate link. As an affiliate your job is all about pre-selling and pre-selling involves more than just displaying the affiliate links. It also entails encouraging people to click on them by outlining the benefits they can get from the affiliate merchant’s products, giving good recommendations about using the products or services, and providing an irresistible offer that would entice readers to check out the package.

2. Believing that there’s such a thing as organic traffic. Organic traffic, or traffic that is naturally generated by a website, is a myth. There is no such thing! If you’re hosting your affiliate links in one website, you can’t expect people to find it just like that. You have to help them find it. This can be done through effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques and efficient marketing strategies. I’ll cover these in more detail next time. Marketing strategies don’t have to cost you lots of money. Article marketing, essentially writing articles based around your niche and submitting to free article directories, is one of the most successful marketing techniques I know.

3. Believing that employing one marketing strategy is enough. Some people actually think that submitting one article to the article directories would give them the amount of traffic they need. This is a fatal mistake. Limiting yourself to a single, or even a couple, of marketing tactics would be limiting the number of visitors you could generate for your website. Also, you’ll fail to tap into other segments of your targeted market if your tactics aren’t flexible enough to expand. I mention driving visitors to your website here. Although it is possible to make affiliate income by sending visitors directly to the merchants website, you will not be building a long-term solid business unless you are capturing visitors email addresses and building a mailing list. More about how to achieve this later too.

4. Failing to study your campaign’s performance. Most affiliates merely check on how much they have earned per day, and if such an amount remains at low levels, they fail to make corresponding adjustments because, well, they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need improving. It is important to study every facet of our marketing strategies. How many visitors are we generating for our website? How many of them are unique? How many are returning? How much time do they spend in our pages? Where are they coming from? Where are they exiting? These are the questions that can be answered by an excellent visitor tracking software program, and these are the questions that could help us improve the performance of our marketing endeavors.

5. Failing to find an affiliate program which actually offers sellable products. Some affiliate programs may offer as much as a 95% commission per sale. But if the products are impossible to sell, you’d never realise the profit the program promises.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction. The credibility of an enterprise depends on how people view it. If the affiliate program has established great relationships with the members of its target market, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service. You’d have an easier time pre-selling such an affiliate program’s products.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry. There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of Internet marketing where everything is moving at such a rapid pace. You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge.

8. Failing to invest in knowledge. Knowledge evolves and you have to evolve with it. It is important to accept the concept that we have to invest in ourselves if we are to be successful in business. Buy informative eBooks, special reports etc… those that would teach you the latest trends and techniques to help you keep up to date. Go to seminars or join a membership site based around your chosen niche. I’ve been marketing online for over 10 years now and I still buy lots of ebooks, go to at least 2 or 3 seminars each year and constantly research and review information online - not to mention the selected emails I receive each month from other marketers that I respect.

9. Resting on your laurels once you’ve achieved a level of success. Success is not guaranteed to last. You have to sustain it. If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure. I can remember some years back making this mistake. I had built my list up to over 8000 and thought I was all set so I began to slack off, look at other markets and neglect those subscribers that I’d worked so hard to get in the first place. I finally sent out another mailing to that list after a break of nearly 12 months and most of them had either changed their email address or unsubscribed and I had to start again.

10. Believing that affiliate marketing is a “get rich quick” scheme. It is not. You have to invest a certain level of commitment, a lot of time, some financial resources on occasions, and a whole lot of effort if you want to truly realise the many wonderful things that affiliate marketing can provide.

Some people have become so successful at affiliate marketing that they have earned the name of super-affiliate. My good friend Ewen Chia is the super-affiliate of all super-affiliates. I was talking to him recently over in Singapore where he lives with his family and runs a very successful Internet business. I asked him what he thought was the difference between an everyday affiliate and a super-affiliate. He said that the main difference in his opinion was that super-affiliates treat it like a real business. They do all of the things that I’ve mentioned above and although you won’t necessarily be doing all of them from day one you should determine to be working towards them.

Probably the second most successful super-affiliate is Rosalind Gardner. Rosalind lives in Canada and like Ewen is running a very successful affiliate business. I bought the first edition of her Super-Affiliate Handbook some years ago and have used it as one of my main points of reference for affiliate marketing ever since. Rosalind has recently released an updated version for 2007 and I recommend that anyone wanting to get started making money online through affiliate programs to get it. It is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Super-Affiliate Handbook

I’ll cover more in part 2 of this section next time.

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3. Tip of the week

Running a business on the Internet can be a very lonely life if you let it. Remember that working for yourself is all about lifestyle and that includes all aspects of our life. While it’s important to do something towards our business everyday, it’s also important to eat right, exercise to keep fit and take time to do the other things that we enjoy in life like our hobbies.

Most importantly we shouldn’t neglect our family and loved ones. Keeping a balance will actually provide the fuel we need to keep going and in the end will probably have a bigger impact on our success than we realise.

If you haven’t come across ‘The Secret’ yet I recommend you get the DVD and/or the book. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Bob Proctor, one of the contributors to the DVD and it was a fantastic experience and reminded me of the principles that I have been practicing for many years now and put me back on track again.

That’s all for this time. I hope you found something helpful here for you and your business whatever stage you’re at. Feel free to join this blog and post your questions and comments. I’m developing a new membership site at the moment and when it’s ready I’ll have a forum where you will be able to ask questions and discuss your needs and issues with me and fellow subscribers.

See you next time

Trevor

Remember, action is the key