When Only The Best Will Do...

Are you looking to cut to the chase and simply get the best learning material out there?


I have to say ... that does make you kind of unusual. One thing that appeals to a lot of people about Internet Marketing is that it is relatively inexpensive to develop an income stream (or better, streams) for yourself, and  relatively inexpensive even to develop and run a full business (not the same thing at all).

But if you’re prepared to pay for the best, the leverage is huge. If it gets you up and running PROPERLY just a little earlier, or makes a tiny difference to your traffic, or your list, or your conversion ... the investment can be recovered in a week, even days.

For example, some of the people buying the List Profit Secrets course already have a List. They’ve already invested time and money. But it isn’t producing effectively. The leverage you get from the course is, you get it MUCH better the first time out. The impact of good copywriting can be to DOUBLE the opt-in rate, or the sales rate. Understanding just the one tactic of using others' web sites to bring you traffic can pay for John Reese’s course in no time at all. And that’s just one tactic.

The beauty of the ‘Net’s potential is that even if you invest in the best learning material, the expense is still trivial compared to the expenses of setting up a business. And a single idea can pay for the whole course in days.

When a friend asked me to name simply the best of the educational material out there, even if it was on the pricey side, this is what I came up with; and, I’ll stick with it until I find a reason to change it.

The Best Soup-To-Nuts Practical Course

I'm a big fan of the course that has probably got more people into Internet Marketing than any other; Corey Rudl's Insider Secrets. I own it, and I paid to update it.

But reluctantly I think I have to say the absolute best “Step by step, take me by the hand and walk me through every aspect of Internet Marketing” guide I’ve encountered ... manuals, videos, audio, it’s a physical product shipped to your door, and it’ll probably take you the best part of a day just to browse through everything in there ... is Online Marketing Secrets Uncovered by Yanik Silver, Cindy Kappler and Jeff Grant.

Yanik is one of the most successful Internet marketers alive, Cindy and Jeff were in his apprenticeship program, and they sold more than $15,000 in their first 6 weeks online. So what you’re getting here has the advantage of Yanik’s long standing expertise and the fresh insights of people who have literally just applied what they’ve learned, for themselves, extremely successfully. So it’s very powerful. Very practical. One thing I particularly like is that effective copy writing is often more of a block to people than the “technical” skills of marketing ... and they have included an impressive “swipe file” in here with e-mails, autoresponder messages, and EZine ads from more than 30 top Internet Marketers. That’s probably worth the course, right there.

Now as I say, this is a soup-to-nuts course. And in it you’ll find Traffic Generation, Copy Writing, and List Building are explained with clear examples.

And with good cause – they are the three building blocks. Get the traffic ... use good copy to convert visitors into prospects and customers ... use List-based techniques to have customers (and an income!) for years, even for the life of the prospect. 

But a soup-to-nuts course can’t be as advanced on each topic as a focused course can be. So, if you want to step each of these three areas up to the very best the Internet has to offer, if you want to move from an understanding to a level of mastery that places you in the top fraction of a percent of Internet Marketers ... go for the next level.

The Best Traffic Generation course, bar none ... being updated for summer 2007

John Reese’s Traffic Secrets - currently off the market until it's updated launch in summer 2007 - has been in a league of it’s own until now. Here’s one of the best of the best, making his knowledge available in depth. There are a bunch of DVDs containing sessions from a workshop that OTHER gurus paid thousands to attend; this is where concepts and ideas get thrown around at a dizzying rate. Then a bunch of CD tutorials where he walks you through the detailed mechanics of doing what they’ve been talking about. In the workshop DVD set you can see that some of the things he (and others) reveal were secrets even to the gurus in the audience until that time! Then they can’t resist chipping-in some of their own ideas ... it’s entertaining, to see these guys goading each other on to reveal material ... you can almost see them regretting making it public even as they do it. 

He covers keyword research. Pay-per-click advertising (which has a lot of advantages over free search engine traffic, incidentally – which is counter-intuitive to many newbies). He gets into web and e-mail advertising. Search engine domination (the free search engines). Linking strategies, and viral marketing. How to get traffic from other people’s sites, and many other free traffic sources. And his bonuses cover a lot more areas, too.

I still consider this one of my “treasures” and I’ve been through it all more than once, some of it more than twice. And I’m still paying this chap a hefty monthly fee for a newsletter, so you KNOW I’m happy with what he can teach me.

I don't know what his new sales page will be like but his old one was a doozy ... about 100 printed pages long, and 90% of it was testimonials from people who bought the course when he first released it. I have never seen a sales page like it! People talk about this course increasing their income by $1,500 A DAY, for heaven's sake. A day!

Ok, so you have the overall view. To the point where you have a direction, perhaps even a plan.

And now you have traffic, and thanks to Mr. Reese’s know-how and your do-how ... it’s growing.

At this point, effective copywriting will do three fairly useful things for you.

  1. It’ll persuade some visitors to buy whatever you’re selling. That’s kind of nice.

  2. It’ll persuade many more of your visitors to join your opt-in List. That’s even nicer.

  3. And it’ll persuade many of your List members to buy from you again, and again, and again. And that’s nicer still. In fact, that’s Internet Marketing Nirvana.

So, this is a skill that converts to pure gold. And while there is competition, I think the gold-standard course in copywriting is Yanik Silver’s Ultimate At-home Internet Copywriting Workshop.

This is the 30lbs package I mentioned in the “Fundamental Skills” section, with 3 huge 3-ring binders, 12 DVDs, and a pile of CDs and least 1400 written pages of material. Now, the value isn’t in the weight, of course. That just makes it sound impressive to people who value “money’s worth” in terms of volume.

The value is in how it creates money. Yanik has used his copywriting skills to sell more than $40,000 of material from a tiny list (4,200 people) in 24 hours. He hit six figures in less than 4 days with that one. Using just e-mail, he sold out two Apprentice workshops, fee close to $14,500 per attendee. He has a website converting at more than 12%. This guy is definitely fairly decent at what he does! And his course gets tremendous testimonials, not saying “I like his course” but confirming the dollar impact of the changes they made to their copy from Yanik’s material. 

Yanik’s guarantee is also something to comment on; you get 3 month’s unconditional guarantee. Then if you stay beyond that ... he guarantees you’ll earn an additional $50,000 profit. (Yes, additional. Due to his material.)

That’s not bad. If you go to his site and hand over your name and e-mail address, you get access to some very useful free material.

Realistically, even though copywriting is a massive leverage point in your income, I do understand this could be a bit too rich for your blood. So reluctantly, because this is supposed to be “cost no object” in this section, I’ll mention a less expensive alternative.

Dan Kennedy is THE copywriting guru; he was a guru before the Internet started. In fact, Yanik Silver was one of his students.  (But make no mistake, Silver’s results are extraordinary and in fact he was recently an instructor in one of Dan Kennedy’s workshops, so no, I wasn’t giving you 2nd best when I recommended Yanik’s material. From everything I hear, Yanik’s course is phenomenal. I am getting more and more into those arenas where more effective copywriting will become my leverage point and I, too, shall be buying the course, based on the recommendation of people I trust. The issue for me is time; I have to clean my decks of some stuff before I can take a solid chunk of time to inhale the material. I HATE taking a piecemeal approach to something like this; this course justifies the time to study it as if my income depended on it. Oh, yes ...  in fact my income soon WILL depend on it.)

Dan Kennedy has a LOT of material out there; but one particular course you might want to consider, if Yanik’s is indeed too rich for your blood, is Mr. Kennedy’s Advanced Copywriting Seminar-in-a-box.  It's still expensive, just not quite as expensive.

The last of the “Big 3” ...

List Building (and List exploitation for profit). As the cliché goes, the money is in the List. Combine good copywriting skills with intelligent List building and management and you have multiplied the income potential enormously.

And as I mentioned in the Tools of the Trade, the gold standard for this topic is List Profit Secrets by Craig Perrine. 

Craig claims that List Building is THE most valuable skill. Funnily enough, the copywriting guys claim copywriting is ... but reality is, the combination is the killer. Great copy to a lousy list gets poor results. Average copy to a good list will get decent results. But good copy to a good list gets you explosive results. And that’s what you want. And when the whole thing is powered by a Traffic generating engine .. that’s a happy place to be. But even if the traffic engine failed ... even a small but correctly-established list can generate income for month after month after month!

List Profit Secrets doesn’t assume you have a single subscriber to begin with (although if you have, that’s great, of course). Craig Perrine then walks you through all the key steps, building you to the point where you have subscribers joining while you’re asleep or on holiday; where you have subscribers actually waiting for your e-mails; and taking the exact action you want when they read it. Routinely.

The bit I like most is the option of being able to go to the list in an emergency; you get hit with a tax bill, or a medical emergency, or simply decide you fancy that new convertible ... your list is a readily available source of very quick income, IF you’ve done it right. “Money on Command” is a phrase with a fine ring to it!

Definitely worth taking a look at the sales page.

Mini-Site Creation Part I

OK, now I’m adding these last two (Parts I and II) because NONE of the above focus on actually building a selling website. In fact, many Internet Marketers will simply hire their web sites built; or else use a template they can just copy from every time.

But if you want to understand the mechanics of building a Mini website from scratch, right through to taking payments on-line through Paypal or a service called Clickbank, then Jim Edwards course Mini site Creator is absolutely without equal.

Mini-Site Creator contains more than 20 hours of pure how-to video, packaged and indexed in such a way that you can hunt-and-peck for odd bits that you need, or watch the whole thing from beginning to end. He built it in such a way that you can do everything he advocates either with free software you can download (he tells you where and how) or with software he gives you as part of the package (for example, a header graphic generator; it’s not great, but it’s good enough).

I watched it for the first time with a complete and utter techno-peasant, and he was enthralled because he actually understood it. Jim Edwards is a very good communicator, and good teacher.

The package includes templates, too, of course, for several different types of mini-site; a sales site, affiliate showcase, Google Adsense landing page, and newsletter subscription site.

Many of Jim Edwards’ peers were blown away by the course; not because there was material in there they didn’t know, because as I say, many of them hire technical help to build sites. No, what blew them away was the incredible thoroughness of the material. He has gone to painstaking lengths to make sure that someone with no knowledge whatsoever can walk away at the end of his course with a fully functional selling web site.

Mini-Site Creation Part II ... and ANY site creation, for that matter

The XSitePro software designed to make it quick and easy to generate web sites of any size intended for Internet Marketing is unmatched in the Internet world. There is literally nothing that comes even close, if you're a newcomer or an expert. I own Dreamweaver and FrontPage and I do 99% of my web page creation on XSitepro.

It's perfect for sites that earn Adsense income, sites that earn Affiliate Income, for Landing pages associated with Googlecash-type transactions, for Mini-Sites as per Jim Edward's course, for Mini-Sites as per Phil Wiley's course, for name-squeeze pages to collect names to build a List, for Content-Rich theme sites, for generating templates used by web site generating software, ... you name it.

So, for now at least ... that's my opinion for the Best of the Best. Good Luck!