Hi all,

My word doesn´t time fly? I cannot believe that it´s been so long since I last posted.

I am sure that after writing this post I may well get a lot of  flack but, in the words of Clark Gable “quite frankly my dear I don´t give a damn”.  Since the end of the Alex Jeffreys training course I have been beavering away at quite a few projects and I´m pleased to say that they are all coming along quite nicely. The thing is only one of these projects is remotely connected to the IM niche. 

The main thing Alex´s course brought out in me was the ability to focus and , as he describes in his own words, not jump on and off the chaos wagon, i.e. stick with one method.

My main reasons for working predominantly outside the IM niche are as follows:

1.  Whilst we all know that the IM niche is a burgeoning market, it is one of the hardest nuts to crack and the percentage of new marketers who are actually able to break through is tiny.  Obviously there are exceptions to the rule and a couple of the students on the course appear to be breaking eggs with big sticks, i.e. Dean Holland and Garry Parkes, and all good luck to them.

2.  My main gripe, and its a very big gripe about the IM niche, is the fact that it is almost solely information based.  Taking into consideration  the plethora of new products which are hitting the market virtually on a daily basis makes one wonder how many more spins you can give to setting up the basics, a hosting pack, your autoresponder, and driving traffic?

 Fair enough each one of these new packages may have a slight twist on a specific point, but if you were to run them all through Copyscape I doubt very much whether more than 10% of them would pass as original content.   A prime example of this was a product which had a huge fanfare launch yesterday, but after reading a few reviews from various forums, the concensus of opinion was that it was 99.99% the same as another well known product with just  an extra traffic module.  

This is what annoys me about the IM niche.  Thankfully I have a bit of experience now and am able to recognise, after myself purchasing a number of different products, what is new and what is re-hashed with a Sunday bonnet, but for the thousands of newbies entering into the bear pit who know no better, will only see a very enticing sales page with funky music and videos and will think it´s the best thing since sliced bread.

 I am not naive enough to think for one moment that these tactics don´t work as it is patently obvious that they do and they are able to produce some fantastic financial returns for the authors of these products.  It just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth seeing the number of people taken in by the promises of quick and easy money, i.e. the promise of $52,000 in 48 hours!!  As anybody who has been in internet marketing for a while and knows the score, will readily know that there is no feasible way that as a newbie this can be atained.  I for one am working on my own non-IM niche sites a huge number of hours each day and all of them bar one are selling visceral products, ranging from kitchen appliances to guitars.

 I know that there are only a few IM products at the moment that I will ever feel comfortable promoting, one of them being Alex´s course because as I said, he really has set the wheels in motion for me, the other couple are Sarah Brown and Tony Shepherd´s  Kickstart course, because this, in my opinion, is probably one of the best internet marketing starter programmes.  No fluff, no flashy sales pages, no wild promises of overnight wealth, just pure content.  The other main starter product is Chris Farrell´s membership site, again, no bloated promises just a very genuine sincere guy who has made the membership site for newbies to learn the basics. There are a couple more, one being Andrew Hanson´s Firepow system, again a  superb programme for niche blogging.  I realise that by writing this post I am probably committing commercial suicide because you would have every right to question me if I ever come up with another product to promote, but I would hope after reading this, you would appreciate that whatever I do promote I believe in wholeheartedly. 

Don´t get the impression that I am sitting here seething because I am not.  As Alex pointed out in the course if you can use the IM niche as a proving ground to hone your skills you can pretty much guarantee success in any other niche.  To prove this point less than a week ago I set up a blog based around a very well searched keyword phrase for a well known brand of kitchen appliances and my blog is on  page 1, out of 1,300,000 pages.  Now this last comment isn´t to brag, its just to prove that if you are able to get the basics in place this kind of ranking is possible.  As a lot of you know my main passion is video marketing and I run in conjunction with the building of the marketing sites, a video campaign, but funnily enough with this example, I didn´t, maybe a lucky strike, I don´t know but I am not complaining.  The point I am making is that after learning the basics, if you put them into practice properly, and when I say put them into practice, I mean take proper action.  You don´t actually need to purchase every conceivable product that hits the market, because as my Mum says, if it aint broke – don´t fix it.

Hi all,

 I just want to talk about giveaways –do they work ?

 I have been doing some split testing as to what piques peoples interest and have offered two different free giveaway packages.

 I took on board what Alex and Linda Carol said about what to offer and what not to offer.

 I have offered on the one hand, a very good package of 30 different quality PLR and MRR products, and on the other hand, a single product of my own.

 The 30 product pack certainly attracted interest, but unfortunately there was a downside.  A significant number of people de-subscribed almost immediately after downloading this attractive and good value package.

 I was able to ascertain from their email addresses that they were more than likely taking the 30 product pack to split up and use themselves.

Quite a number of people seemed to take no notice of the double optin request, even though they must have realized that they would not be able to get the free offer without doing so.

After editing the optin form and making it clear, in huge red text, the necessity for the double optin, there was a slight increase in people doing so, but there was still a large number who didn’t.  Why?  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason, why complete only part of the process if you want the free offer?  Surely you do what you have to do, to get it?

 Then I submitted a single product, and whilst the take up rate was significantly lower, the upside was that the retention and open rate was much higher.  This surely goes to prove that it is not such a good idea to offer such a large number of products at any one time.  You will only attract freebie seekers!

 This proves the point that Alex made that it is far better to offer one quality product of your own than somebody else’s batch of 30 products, albeit quality ones.

Hi all, firstly a big apology for the time between posts.

I think everybody within the student body will agree with me that these post-course weeks have been extremely hard work, but at the same time extremely exciting times.  Since the end of the course I have been looking at various methods of communicating with members of my list on a different level than the bog standard text e-mail.  I signed up to a fantastic service run by Jive Systems.  Basically Jive Systems have come up with a video e-mailing system that as far as I am concerned is the bees knees.  I have done a lot of research in this particular medium because as a lot of you know I am very interested in  video communication.  In my research I have found that there are lots of companies offering video e-mailing but I discovered the price of these programmes to be quite prohibitive inasmuch as they would set you a figure based on how many e-mails you would send out per month and beyond this you would be charged a tariff based on each extra e-mail sent.  The beauty of Jive Systems  is that there are no extra charges, you have one fixed monthly payment and it doesn´t matter how large your list becomes.  As you can probably tell I am really excited about this product as I am becoming more and more comfortable talking to the camera and I do feel that it is a far nicer way to communicate with the people on my list and one of the other fabulous points about this system is the fact that within each of the 40 templates they have to offer you are able to include live links to wherever you point your customers.  Be that a link to your blog, a video, a pdf or in fact anything.

I have joined virtually every giveaway event that has been advertised at the moment.  I am really pleased to say that they are actually working for me.  My list is growing daily.  It is quite incredible how much work you can actually fit into a 16 hour day! (not every day but nearly. Ha.Ha.)  Inbetween outside commitments and the need to give this business the input that it needs to grow, I find my once burgeoning social calendar has taken a nose dive, but it´s all good.  Apart from producing videos for Clickbank products, I have been beavering away at my own first product launch for the IM niche.  (My Journey So Far – Version 12!!).

I feel really bad for not getting round to see any of my fellow students blogs but even as well as I manage my time, I am just finding at the moment that extra hour to do this is just beyond me at the moment, so my apologies to all but I promise I will be visiting again as soon as everything starts to calm down.