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.
- It’ll persuade some visitors to buy whatever you’re
selling. That’s kind of nice.
- It’ll persuade many more of your visitors to join your
opt-in List. That’s even nicer.
- 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!
|