The Biggest Scam in the Internet Marketing Community: It’s Not Your Fault!

Posted on March 30, 2012 by kaleb

Lie #1: The Rich Have Been Hiding the Secret From You!

I would say it has become common place for sales pitches to throw the “you are poor because you don’t know the secret” line at you, but honestly that’s underselling it. At this point in time it’s the industry standard. I’m sure you’ve heard it yourself. “I’m going to reveal the secret that the gurus have been hiding from you all this time. I’ll finally unlock the key to untold riches. Just pay me $49.95 and it’s all yours.”

This works for quite a few reasons. First and foremost we live in a blame society. People always want someone or something they can point their finger at and say “that’s the cause of my problems.” In some cases they are right, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes there really is nothing to blame at all.

Secondly a person wants to believe that even though it has to be someone’s fault it isn’t theirs. Whether this is true or not isn’t relevant to them as long as it gives them the emotional solace of knowing the negativity they are feeling came from circumstances outside their control.

The third major reason this works is because people love mystery. In many cases a person may buy a product without knowing anything about it simply, because they are curious. I’m sure you’ve seen one of the nearly limitless sales videos where some guy spends 15 minutes talking about this product that changed his life but never makes a single statement about what the product actually is or does.

Lie #2: The Gurus Are Keeping the Secret Because they Don’t Want You to Succeed

What kind of sense does that even make? Let’s examine this statement for a minute. Assume for a moment that I’m a major marketing guru (I know it’s a huge stretch but just bare with me). Now if I’m so excellent at selling products, and I have the ability to figure out a market’s needs and then produce a new product to fulfill that need adequately why would I care if someone else had a similar skill set? Well the only real possibility is that I might be afraid that they create a better product and then my product doesn’t sell.

There are a couple reasons this can’t be true. First off the most important thing in marketing is brand recognition. If someone sees a certain brand of product that they recognize there is a much higher chance they’ll buy that product. People don’t like to leave their comfort zones, so even small decisions like buying some off brand food that no one has heard of is too much for some.

The second most important part of marketing is having a quality product. If everyone knows your brand and knows that you make complete crap then you’ll probably end up going under. If I’m a cell phone company that makes a phone that drops 97% of all calls and has a six minute battery life it probably won’t sell well. Beyond that if enough people heard about it they probably won’t buy my next product either. It’s the exact opposite if my previous products have been of phenominal quality. A perfect example is Apple. Yes they do tons of marketing and their campaigns are fantastic, but think about the following:

If Apple were to produce a new I[insert trendy product name] without any further specifics how many people would buy it? A LOT. Why do you think that is? BECAUSE THEY HAVE A TRACK RECORD!!!! They produce quality and everyone knows it.

So to put it simply. If an internet marketer creates a product that teaches other soon to be marketers and it isn’t of high enough quality for people to succeed then it’s going to cost him a lot more in the long run in bad reviews.

The Bad News

So the point is this. Even though in many cases there are marketers out there creating sub par products just to make a buck, the actual gurus are creating products that DO teach people how to create sustainable income. What’s the real problem then? Well the common denominator here is the consumer. The main issue is that people buying these products don’t actually implement them. They aren’t failing because they don’t know the secret to making money. They are failing because they are too scared or too lazy to take action.

In many cases someone will begin to take action and after a couple days they’ll give up if they don’t see results. Sadly if they just kept going they would have found success. I would almost go as far as to say this is an absolute. If you don’t give up you’ll continue adapting until something works, but most do call it quits far too quickly. They didn’t fail because their system was poor or their mentor’s training was poor. They failed because they quit.

It isn’t the Gurus fault. It isn’t the fault of the elite rich. It isn’t that faulty product. It wasn’t because the economy blew up and now no one is spending money. There is only one person that can be blamed for lack of success, and that is the person that stopped trying… or never started.

The Good News

So now that you know it’s your fault if you have been unsuccessful there is some absolutely fantastic news. You can change things. You control your own destiny. Find a system that makes you $1 and then scale it up until it is making you $10 million. People don’t want to believe it’s that simple, but it really is. Yes, it will take time. Yes, it’s going to be hard. Yes, you are going to meet obstacles, but with determination you’ll never run into an obstacle you can’t overcome.

So start taking action. Action is the ONLY thing that can bring success.

Your actions today define your tomorrow!

Getting your article out there: An Article Directory is worth a thousand words

Posted on March 11, 2012 by kaleb

My Article Directories Bring All the Boys to the Yard

As I stated before, article marketing is about getting a high quality piece of content in an area where other people can grab it and drive traffic to it for you. This is done with an article directory. I see people taking a piece of content and throwing it on 1200 different article directories. The kicker is that not all article directories are created equal. The truth is that 95% of your traffic is going to come from the top 10 article directories.

Think about that for a second.

You are doing that last 99.2% of the work to submit articles to directories to get 5% of the results you got for the first 0.8% of work. Does that really make any sense?

OF COURSE IT DOESN’T!

It might seem far fetched, but it’s true. There really are only about 10 or maybe 15 article directories that are even worth your time. When a website owner wants some content for their site they aren’t trying to find the most out of the way article directory possible. They need quality content and they need it as soon as possible so they start looking to the tried and tested directories.

The directories that everyone knows about. That is where your article or articles should be. Then once the owner of jimboscustomcarmods.com finds your article about adding a cool new body kit to your 1995 toyota, he can post it on his site and in doing so you’ve just gotten your name and your site out to that many more people.

And They’re Like “It’s Better Than Yours”

The bottom line is this. You should be looking up the top article directories and custom tailoring your article submission process so it focuses on them. Once you’ve played your cards correctly and you are getting some really polished material submitted to the big hitters you can outsource the article spinning and submitting to smaller article directories if you really feel the need to cover all of your bases.

Personally, I never subscribed to the whole leaving the money on the table idea. Ya maybe you did lose an extra couple hundred bucks not submitting your article to those last 300 directories, but don’t be part of the 99% that get this wrong. The thing is that if that time you spent submitting to those last directories could have been spent making a new article which you can submit to the “better directories” you would probably have made A LOT more than a couple hundred dollars over the course of their life.

So I guess the last thing to cover is which article directories are the best. Well in all honesty it depends. I could write an entire post, maybe even an entire product on choosing the correct article directories, but it’s getting late so for right now I’ll leave you with that. I believe in the near future I’ll try to dive further into specific article directories that I like and why I like them.

Article Marketing: Why 99% of marketers are getting it wrong

Posted on March 10, 2012 by kaleb

An Issue For Article Marketers

On the surface article marketing seems pretty straight forward. You create a piece of text content for your target audience. They look at it and near the end they are directed to your site through a link in your resource box. Currently a lot of new article marketers are failing to have success and this is causing them to believe article marketing is dead.

Well I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that article marketing is actually very easy and very straight forward. It is also VERY MUCH ALIVE! The bad news is that most marketers completely misunderstand it and are failing miserably with this method because of it.

So if it’s so simple why are people screwing it up?

I think one major issue is that there is a misunderstanding in what you are trying to achieve with article marketing. I see many marketers creating a piece of content or having it created for them then taking that content and using an article spinner so they can place unique versions on as many article directories as possible. People believe that more article directories equals more views and that’s just not the case.

Another major issue I’m seeing is that some writers are trying far too hard to stuff keywords into their articles. Yes there is a place for keyword research in your articles and yes they should contain a keyword here and there, but you have to remember to write for people and not for computers.

In my opinion it is far better to have a complete, coherent, beautifully written, well flowing article with a certain keyword placed strategically one time throughout than it is to have a mildly above average article with keywords sprinkled everywhere. You might get a few more readers on the article directory, but they won’t perceive your article to be worth as much.

The final issue I’m seeing is that many marketers are advocating articles of length 300-500 words for an article. The truth is that from what I’ve found the articles that get grabbed and reposted on websites the most often are more often than not over 800 words. These posts are filled with fluff either. It’s good, hard hitting information. It’s truly usable and it really does help the reader. They find the answers they need and because of that they are ready to follow the link at the bottom of the article because they want to see what else you can offer them.

The fact of the matter is that when submitting an article to an article directory you are not doing it so many people see it on the directory. You are trying to create a quality piece of content that website owners will want to grab and reuse on their own site. This way once a very polished article that you have created is on a high traffic website you will have an avalanche of new visitors that have already been pre-sold on your material because your article was so great.

That means every article you post should be an example of how fantastic and valuable your content is. I’m not going to make an assumptions about an actual person’s work, but I can promise you if your article is just some respun version it’s going to be crap. There will be grammatical errors, possible logical errors, and even worse there may be spelling errors because it spun the wrong word and has thus misspelled it.

Whether you are a product/service creator or a provider you only give your prospects the highest quality items, so why would you want to start your relationship by showing them a piece of junk? It really doesn’t make any sense.

The Plan Of Action!

So here is a better plan of action in my opinion. Spend more time on your article making sure it is as polished and as valuable as you can make it. This shouldn’t be a big deal since you’ll have more time because you don’t have to spin it anymore. Now once you’ve finished your masterpiece only submit it to the top five to ten article directories as that is where most of the website owners for high traffic sites will be looking anyway. Now you have increased your chances of having a piece of content that the website owner will want AND you’ve cut out all that time wasted spinning articles that are barely coherent and posting them to article directories that no one will ever see.

Freemium: The key to the future

Posted on March 6, 2012 by kaleb

I’ve noticed in the last couple years that many of the leading companies in the world offer or are starting to offer freemium memberships. In the field of internet marketing this really isn’t something new, but it is rather refreshing to see huge companies like Microsoft, Sony, and more start offering something the small guys have had to do for a long time. In case you don’t know freemium is a hybrid between free and premium. It’s when a product or service is sold for free, but in order to use advanced features you’ll have to pay a premium price.

Free is the new black

I first noticed this a few years back with products like AVG and services like OKCupid. AVG is an antivirus software that is free to use but in order to get the advanced protection like email monitoring you need to pay money. This is great because if you just need the bare bones of the program it doesn’t hurt your pocket book and when you need those extra features you can get them from a company that you already trust without having to risk money to find a trustworthy company.

OKCupid is very similar in that they provide a dating service which is free but if you want to be able to more easily find matches and increase your visibility to those and other matches it will cost you some money.

So why is there such a transition from high priced products to completely free front ends? Well I think there are a few factors. First with the age of internet piracy came the idea that people shouldn’t have to pay for anything anymore. While I don’t necessarily agree with that the mindset is there now and the only thing we can do is adapt to it.

Giving away free stuff has always been a great lead generation tool, but now it’s almost a necessity and you can’t just throw a couple small trinkets at your prospects hoping for them to be chomping at the bit to buy. It’s time to realize that people want fully functioning products and services that they don’t have to pay for. Once you’ve proven that you can provide that they are more than ready to open up their bank accounts and start writing checks (a check is what people used to pay for things before the internet and paypal).

So what’s the theme here? Give your clients what they need to solve their problems for free. Make sure what you are giving them is quality and then once they see what kind of quality you can give them it’s time to start letting them know about the extras you can throw in to enhance their experience, for a price of course. That’s how the big boys are doing it and that’s how I think everyone should be doing it from here on out.

Promoting my blog: What’s working and what isn’t

Posted on March 5, 2012 by kaleb

Over the last week and a half I’ve been implementing multiple methods of driving traffic to this blog. Obviously my results may end up changing in the long run, so rather than trying to figure out which method is the best I’m just going to tell you what I’ve done and what it’s done for me.

The list of campaigns:
-Commenting on high traffic blogs in the same category as my blog
-Adding relevant content to forums related to my blog
-Article marketing
-Using traffic redirection services like iliketraffic.com

Commenting on high traffic blogs in the same category as my blog

I’m going to say that so far this method has shown me the best return on investment. More than 50% of my new visitors that come from all these methods are coming from the high profile blog comments that I leave.

As it turns out if you post something with some real value related to the blog post that you’re commenting on then people want to check out your website and see what else you have to say.

Adding relevant content to forums related to my blog

This hasn’t brought me as many visitors as commenting on other blogs but the visitors that it does bring are highly targeted and very interested in what my site is specifically about. I think this might be my favorite because all of these people have at least some type of connection with me in that we see each other every day on whatever forum they are coming from. I like to look at these people as ones who have decided they want to at least in some very small way associate themselves with me.

I think that’s the first real step in building a trust relationship.

Article marketing

I haven’t seen much of a return at all from this method but I think that’s due to a couple key factors. First I”m not using keyword research well to really laser target my articles for those highly searched terms. Instead I’m going the route of creating very valuable articles that may not get as many hits but the people that do read them will; I’m hoping, appreciate them more.

I think after I’ve made a large array of these articles it will begin to create a snowball effect. We’ll see what happens in the future.

Using traffic redirection services like iliketraffic.com

Honestly I really can’t recommend this at all. It gets me a lot of traffic and it’s extremely easy to use, but the fact of the matter is that it’s junk traffic. The people are only on my site to get points for themselves so they can get their own traffic. They aren’t actually reading my material and they aren’t coming back to read my new material. What’s the point of having people come to if they don’t want to learn about internet marketing?

I’m going to keep running this campaign a bit longer to be absolutely sure but I don’t think it will turn into much from what I’ve seen.

So here are my final conclusions

Blog commenting is good for a quick boost in traffic, but does not grow as well as article marketing or forum marketing will. Forum marketing doesn’t grow fast, but I believe it will create a snowball effect just like article marketing, and last and definitely least I’m going to pretty much steer clear from traffic redirect services in the future.

Building Traffic Through Forum Marketing

Posted on March 4, 2012 by kaleb

Social Marketing

All marketing you do should have some social element to it. The idea behind setting a traffic source up is that once it’s created it should send traffic to your site indefinitely. That way you can move on to the next traffic source and the old one will continue to send steady or growing traffic. This allows you to continuously grow your traffic as opposed to working hard to keep your flow of traffic steady.

A great form of evergreen traffic is probably one of the least understood. Forum marketing is extremely powerful when used correctly and almost completely useless if used incorrectly. The first mistake most people make is creating forum accounts in many different places and simply spamming a link to their site. It won’t work for many reasons.

First off people will see right through your failed attempts to try and sell them on your site. Secondly they have no real reason to follow your link. Always remember the golden rule.

W.I.I.F.M. What’s in it for me!

When you have a link to some place that you want people to click you have to remind yourself that every person will ask themselves WIIFM. If the answer is nothing then you will get no clicks. So the first step is give them a reason to click your link. You might ask how does one do that? Well it’s actually much easier than you might think.

The key is to build trust between yourself and the other forum users. If you provide value in your posts on the forum and show that you are genuinely trying to help people they will trust you more. They will see your forum signature and will believe it can help them further. In some cases they may go to your forum profile and they will see the link to your website there.

Either way you now have someone who is going to enter your website of their own free will. This form of traffic is in my opinion the very best because they are viewing your material because you’ve already given them a small sample on the forum and they like it. This means they are already sold on you and it shouldn’t be hard to have them coming back as “repeat customers.”

Remember never to over hype your website. When you post relevant useful information in a forum thread it’s ok to let someone know that you have even more information on the subject at your website (as long as the forum allows you to post website addresses in a thread), but don’t do it in a douchey way.

If someone were to ask about using shading when drawing and you have a website about drawing then you should answer their question directly, and at the end of your response you could also say “By the way, if you have any more questions about shading or drawing in general I created this website to give people more information on the subject at “your website”. Don’t try to be pushy or oversell it. If you content is good enough they will want to check it out anyway.

If you want more information about driving traffic to your site and making that site profitable I suggest you check out a free video training I’ve created at http://www.internetmoneymakingmachine.com

How to get Traffic: Blog Promotion

Posted on February 24, 2012 by kaleb

Ok, so I’ve been busy working on driving traffic as efficiently as I can. The first thing I did was start posting in multiple internet marketing forums and internet marketing related blogs. Both options have shown fairly decent results so far.

The jury is still out since it’s only really been 3 days, but I think they will end up being extremely powerful methods of creating a steady flow of traffic to this site. The replies I posted on related blogs have shown better results so far (at about a 2:1 rate actually), but I think forum traffic is more of a long term thing anyway.

It takes a while to build credibility on a forum but once you have it people will be looking you up all the time as an authority.

I’ve also created a free trial account at www.onlywire.com to socially bookmark my blog posts for me. For those that don’t know what social bookmarking does, it really has two benefits. First it creates bookmarks on social sites like digg and facebook so more people can find out about the things I’m bookmarking and and it makes my content more visible to search engines like google and yahoo.

I also setup a couple accounts on traffic sharing sites like iliketraffic.com. In the future I might buy website traffic but for right now I want to use only free methods so you can see how to create a following without paying for it. I doubt this will give me any high returns in the end but even a few extra eyes seeing the site can lead to an extra patron or two and in my eyes every person counts. That’s one extra person that can learn from my mistakes so they don’t have to commit them in the future.

Yesterday I setup a twitter account and after following the more recognizable names in the industry like Jay Abraham, Mike Filsaime, Brad Gosse, Eben Pagan and more I started replying to their tweets and making a few of my own. It’s been about 24 hours and I already have 42 followers at the time of this post.

If I can keep that up for a month I’ll have close to 1300 followers. The great thing about twitter is that when I create a new blog post I can tweet the link and I’ll have 1300 people seeing an advertisement for my post by the end of the month. Can it get any better than that?

In the near future I think I’ll do a post on what has been working to generate more followers on twitter. Leave a comment and let me know if that would help you out.

You Can’t Do It All!

The last thing I’ll be looking into today is using the site www.fiverr.com to outsource a bit of my work. The great thing about fiverr is that you can get a countless number of services done for only $5 a piece. From things like keyword research and writing articles to backlinks and even setting up full websites for you the limits are almost boundless.

I’ll probably end up paying someone $5 to take some of my blog content and rewriting it into a spinnable article. Then I’ll pay someone another $5 to spin that content into 100s of unique articles and post those articles on many different article directories. I’m hoping that it ends up paying dividends. I’ll let you know in the near future.

I want to leave you with one last bit of information. Since I’ve started driving traffic I’ve seen a definite increase through my website analytics. The line is pointing upwards and I’m going to make sure it stays that way. Check back soon and I’ll let you know which of my methods was the most successful in getting traffic.

My New(old) Goal

Posted on February 21, 2012 by kaleb

Over the past 8 months I’ve been trying to earn money online. Want to know what it has amounted to? Almost nothing.

Current money made online: $34.87

And almost 95% came from 1 affiliate sale… So let me give you a little back story on who I am and what’s been going on.

I’m 22 years old and I’ve been a professional computer programmer for the past 18 months. After awhile I became disenfranchised with working for a boss. The fact of the matter is I hate not being able to implement my own ideas and having a boss means you can’t do that. 8 months ago I heard about something called internet marketing and the riches it could bring.

So what did I do over the last 8 months? Almost nothing at all. I would jump from shiny new system to shiny new system. I’d start to implement an idea and then I’d find something new I wanted to try.

After 5-6 months I put it all on the back burner when I found a new job as a video game programmer. The job was fun but after that exciting feeling of making video games wore off I realized what was happening. I was working for a boss again. I couldn’t deal with it. I need to make my own decisions.

Fast forward to a week ago. I joined a coaching program by a man named Alex Jeffreys. He has really opened my eyes and shown me that if I want to succeed I need to work hard and be focused with 1 specific goal in mind.

I can’t jump from idea to idea. So now I’m going to make a pledge to myself and to you the reader. I promise that I will follow through with this blog and the career of internet marketing. I won’t give up and I’ll overcome any obstacle. I’m going to document it all right on this very blog so I hope you have time to check in from time to time.

Hopefully this can help any new members as much as it will help me. Now for the good part.

My first goal: To create a list and get at least 1 member on it.

My plan of action: Create quality blog content in each post and then respond to high traffic internet marketing blogs and forum posts with insightful responses that cause readers to want to check the link to my blog because they are looking for more insightful content.

I just want to end this post by thanking Alex Jeffreys for really setting me straight and showing me that anything is possible if you are focused and have perseverance.

Building Content for People not Computers: Downfall of Many Blogs

Posted on February 21, 2012 by kaleb

I’ve noticed a trend recently. A lot of bloggers have been creating posts that are far more search engine friendly than they are reader friendly.

People vs Computers: Treat Your Readers Like Gold

For those of you that don’t know what search engine optimization is; it’s basically the process of creating a piece of online content with the end goal of having that content rank is high as it possibly can when someone does a related search in google, yahoo, or some other search engine.

I would love to hear what you guys think. Should search engine optimization be disregarded in any case where it would hurt readability and value or is there a fine line?

It’s a great idea in theory because you can get lots of extra readers to your blog, but in reality I don’t think it works very well.

The key thing about search engine optimization is making sure to stuff specific keywords into a blog post. This means that a lot of the time a post may not read as well as it normally would if the author were to write it like they were talking to an actual person.

Sure you’ll get more readers to your blog posts but your posts won’t really be valuable. If someone searches for the term “dog training” they don’t want to read a post that says “dog training” 45 times. They want a relevant piece of information that helps them and is easy to read. As they say “Content is king.”

At the end of the day I’d much rather have a reader base that is one third the size but they value my posts greatly and are chomping at the bit waiting for my next post as opposed to a huge reader base that barely tolerates almost incoherent ramblings I’m throwing at them trying to get as many new users as possible.

The point here is that your readers are an absolute asset to your site. Don’t treat them like cattle. The truth is your blog would be nothing at all without loyal repeat readers.

I was recently watching a video by Alex Jeffreys when he made an analogy that I think is perfect.

Build a Strong Oil Rig

He said blogs are like oil rigs. Oil rigs are held up by giant metal structures. Over time algae begins to crowd around these giant metal support structures. Soon after the algae is eaten by clams and small fish.

These small fish and clams are eaten by larger fish which are then eaten by even larger fish. Soon enough you have an environment around the oil rig teeming with life including giant tuna, sharks, and lots of other nasty things that you wouldn’t want to meet while taking a relaxing dip.

So let’s look at the oil rig’s support system as your blog posts. If the support system is strong it will attract algae. In this analogy we’ll say algae are comments from readers. So after you get some quality comments due to your initial blog posts having good quality content to respond to you’ll start to get some more traffic stopping in and seeing these comments.

This extra traffic can be likened to the bigger fish. Slowly as this process continues you’ll get more traffic and more quality comments.

So if you look at it in the long run you’ll actually have a much longer lasting and more helpful blog if you build the posts from the ground up with your reader’s needs in mind as opposed to your needs of getting lots of traffic.

W.I.I.F.M the most important question a blogger can ever remember. What’s In It For Me?! Every single reader to your website will be asking themselves this question. If it turns out what they get from the post is not worth the effort and time it takes to read it then you’ve lost that reader forever.

The point is this. While other blog creators may be looking to get as many eyes on their blog as possible that isn’t my plan. Instead I’m looking to create a system where my site is a bit more buried but I’m hoping my readers can see it as a buried treasure.

Making Money Online – Help me to help you

Posted on September 25, 2011 by kaleb

Making money online

I just want to take a minute to give a little bit of praise to my online mentor, and the man that allowed me to have the freedom I currently possess. John Thornhill created a course a little while back that I’ve been following and so far I can say nothing but great things. The course starts at the very beginning from creating your own blog (I created this blog from his course) all the way through setting up autoresponders and making your own product.

It is all encompassing and if you follow it I can’t see how you couldn’t make money from it. I’m a fairly lazy guy and I’ve already made far more than my investment back. The best thing about it is that you can try it risk free. If you don’t like it you can get a full refund any time in the first 60 days. I’m just hoping that my posts on this blog can help someone else achieve the success that John helped me achieve.

If things keep going the way they are going I will never have another boss again and I will be able to do the things I’ve always wanted to do and see the places I’ve always wanted to see. I always knew there was a better way than working for peanuts, but I couldn’t find it until John helped me open my eyes.

Making money online – Taking action

The most important part of making money online is taking action. I think everyone knows this but many people become overwhelmed and just don’t know where to start. That’s the biggest reason why you should get a mentor online. I’m not saying you have to follow John’s teachings. I’m just saying you need to find someone that HAS had success and model your online business after them. Once you’ve become successful you can start customizing to what works best for you.

There really is no better feeling in the world than knowing that for the rest of your life you’ll be making money online and you won’t have to rely on someone else to do it.

Click here if you want to see what John’s course is like.

Kaleb Phillips' blog