Ethical Internet Marketer – Make More Money Online… Ethically!

“The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.”

Oprah Winfrey

Be a specialist

At school you had been taught that you needed to know as much as you could about all kinds of topics that you were probably not even interested in (e.g. for me the horrors were math and physics…). It would not have made sense to have been focused on just one of these subjects because if you had done that, you would not have made it to the next grade.

In Internet marketing it all is a little different. Here, you should NOT try to be the ‘Mr. or Mrs. Knowitall’ but the specialist, the go to guy/gal, in ONE area of Internet marketing. This can be e.g. an SEO expert, the software developer, a Google Adwords specialist or a copywriter or more recently, the Web 2.0 guy/gal.

Personally, I would brand myself as the software developer since that is where my expertise is. But more recently, I have also become very experienced in creating VRE (virtual real estate) websites using WordPress so I can also say that I am a blogging specialist.

Whatever it is that you do, make sure you learn as much as you can about your area of expertise. Strive to become the best you can be. Just like a doctor or a lawyer learns everything he can about his medicine or laws, you need to do the same in your area.

And it never stops. If you have a passion for something, you will like it to learn more and more about it in order to become the best.

Give me crap and I’ll let others know…

Personally, I love to educate myself about all the new ways of making money online (this is a treat of all the top Internet marketers – they never stop educating themselves!). I am the kind of guy people want to have on their lists because I am constantly buying their stuff – presupposed it’s not just rehashed material (and if it is, I’ll get myself a refund).

As long as I am getting at least one good idea from a product which can make me more money when implementing it in my own business, I won’t be asking for a refund. But give me crap and not only will I be asking for my money back but I’ll let my list know about it as well so they can avoid it and not waste their hard earned money…!

Focus on one project at a time

When I was attending the Internet Millionaire’s Bootcamp in London in October of 2006, Mike Filsaime said something on stage that I’ll never forget: “You need to focus on one project at a time”. Even though it sounds so simple, most people do completely the opposite.

Focusing on one project at a time will bring you income much quicker than trying to get multiple projects finished at the same time – something which can almost never be achieved. So the key to success is just to focus on the one project that will be bringing you the greatest revenue within the shortest amount of time.

You know, even I, as a very experienced Internet marketer, sometimes made the mistake of wanting to achieve too much at the same time. Instead of working on one project until it was finished, I was trying to handle 3-4 projects at a time. And the result was that nothing got finished in time and my income was suffering from it. Because not being able to finish a project means less income.

In Internet marketing, you better come up with new products quickly because you will soon be forgotten if you don’t. You must be the innovator, the one who is coming up with new, helpful products that your subscribers and customers want to buy from you.

(For example, that’s why I relaunched my Niche Content Websites – membership site because I saw that my business wasn’t different enough from the businesses of others who were selling the same kind of products. I wanted to get a better USP – a unique selling proposition which was better than most of my competitors by selling UNIQUE websites to people who are interested in making a living from niche type of VRE websites. This has become the solution for people who can’t design their own websites or don’t know how to implement monetization modules – now everything’s done for them…!)

If you don’t know what they want, ask them! Your products must become the solutions for their problems.

Outsource everything you don’t want to do yourself

And you don’t even have to create these products yourself. That’s what outsourcing is for. No one is expecting from you, if you e.g. have a great idea for a software tool, that you need to create it yourself. Just hire someone on Elance.com or ScripLance.com, tell him or her what you want to have done, and they’ll do it for you – at a very reasonable price.

For example, I had my AffiliateTurbo software programmed by a programmer which I found on ScriptLance. I paid about $400 for it and I made more than $10,000 from this tiny investment. And the same was the case with my Blog Promoter software. (in the meantime, I’ve sold both businesses for several thousands of $$… they simply were too work intensive as they required a lot of updates on an almost daily basis).

By knowing what you want to achieve and what your goals are, you’ll actually get there much quicker. You simply need to be the one who plans it all – it’s not necessary that you are doing everything yourself. And all the steps which are needed to get there, will fall into place almost automatically.

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(This article is an excerpt from my Revenue Blueprint ebook. If you liked the article, then why not get yourself a copy of the complete works at www.revenueblueprint.com/ ?)

If you are good at developing products, may it be E-books or software, selling Private Label Rights to these products can be suitable for you. Private Label Rights have a high perceived value because it allows your buyers to put their name on a product which they haven’t created themselves. It can save them a lot of time.

In case you already have an existing digital product which you have created and sold in the past and you are looking for additional sources of income, you can consider selling the Private Label Rights to other Internet Marketers.

Why other Internet marketers? Because they are constantly on the lookout for new products to sell. There are only so many products they can create themselves in a month so buying the rights to products they can start selling as their own seems to be very attractive to most of them.

Making Money from Selling Private Label Rights products

The following are ways you can make money from selling Private Label Rights products:

• Upfront Sales. This is the most attractive part of selling Private Label Rights. Private Label Rights can range from a few dollars to even thousands of dollars, depending on the quality of the product, its demand and how proven it is (aka how many sales you’ve made for the personal use version…).

• Selling Basic/Master Resell Rights to the Private Label Rights product. You can sell the Basic/Master Resell Rights to the editable, raw format of the product separately. If your buyer wishes to resell the Private Label Rights, you can charge him 4-5 times the normal price of the product and up 10 times if the buyer wants to have the Master Resell Rights, allowing him and his customers to resell the Private Label Rights to the product, as you are doing.

Pros

• You can make a lot of money from selling Private Label Rights, as these are some of the most expensive rights you can buy in the Internet Marketing field.
• Your customers will mainly be Internet Marketers, and savvy Internet Marketers are usually busy people and they prefer to focus their efforts more on marketing than product creation and setting them up. Thus, they do not have any problems with making purchases on Private Label Rights products, as long as you give them good reasons to buy from you and presupposed you help them to save their time from having to create their own quality products from scratch.

Cons

• There is often no residual income in selling Private Label Rights products. This is because your customers, who are mainly Internet Marketers, will edit your product and use their own affiliate links in it. Unless you start a Private Label Rights membership site, you’ll make your money solely from upfront sales.
• Selling Private Label Rights products means that you cannot take the credit of authorship. One of the main benefits that make Internet Marketers buy from you is because they want to have the privilege to put their name on the product as the author. You remain anonymous.
• Creating your own Private Label Rights product demands a high degree of expertise, talent, thorough research, programming (for software) and writing skills on your part. If you do not have any of these traits, creating your own Private Label Content can be a difficult challenge.
• Creating your own Private Label Rights product is effort and time consuming. Unless you are using the product yourself, it may not be worth your time and effort in the long run even though there is a lot of potential income to be made from selling Private Label Rights.

What You Need Before Getting Started

You will need the following before getting started on creating and selling a new Private Label Rights product (if you don’t have an existing one):

1. Word Program

If you are going to create a Private Label Information Product (E-book), you will need a Word program to create your Information Product in .doc format. If you are using MS Office, the Microsoft Word program should already be installed on your PC.

Alternatively, you can use your free NotePad program to create your Information Product in its raw format, though Microsoft Word is preferable, since you’ll be able to add different formattings to the text.

2. PDF Converter

You need a PDF Converter program which will convert your finished Word document to PDF format (the PDF format is the best format out there because it allows you to offer your product to MS Windows users AND Mac users – .exe files can only be opened by Windows users…). If you do not have any PDF Converter program installed on your PC, you can get a free PDF Converter software here.

3. Graphics Program

You’ll need a program to design your product’s E-cover. I use Adobe Photoshop to design my E-covers (in combination with some nice plugins). Adobe offers a free trial version (30 day usage) here.

4. Good Salesletter

This is a very important element of your Private Label Rights sales success. If you cannot convince your prospects to buy from you, you cannot make any sale – no matter how good your product is. If you don’t know how to write a good salesletter yourself, then outsource that part to places like Elance.com or Scriptlance.com. They have a feedback system there which is similar to Ebay’s system so you can choose the freelancer with the best feedback/price ratio.

5. Web Hosting and Domain Name

You’ll need to register a domain name for your product (at e.g. Namecheap.com) AND you’ll need web hosting for it. These are not the same things. Registering a domain name simply means that you have a www.yoursite.com address registered in your name.

In order to let other people come to your new website, you’ll still need to rent web space on the Internet so you can store the files for the salesletter, Thank You page and your digital Private Label Rights product (the PDF file). Basically, you rent this space from a web hosting company which specialises in making servers available with a direct connection to the Internet.

6. Auto Responder

You need an Auto Responder to:

• Follow up with your prospects who do not buy from you for the first time, and

• Build your mailing list. By having your own mailing list, you can make your money from your customers within a short period of time.

Personally, I’m recommending Aweber as it has the best delivery rates for emails on the Internet. It’s the one I’m using to send out my own newsletters and it’s a service which comes highly recommended by all the top Internet marketers.

7. Credit Card Payment Processor

You will need this to collect the payments from your customers. If you don’t expect a too high sales volume, you could go with Paypal since most Internet marketers who are going to buy from you will expect this payment solution. You can use it in combination with some script so you can automate the payment and delivery process and protect your downloads.

Alternatives are Clickbank (one time fee to register as a merchant – it has Paypal integrated now), 2Checkout (one time fee to regsiter as a merchant, too – Paypal has been integrated, too) or 1Shoppingcart (monthly fee).

Conclusion:

Once you have all of these things in place, you can start driving traffic to your salesletter. If you already have a list, this can be as easy as sending an email to your list. If you don’t have such a list of prospects and customers, you’ll need to contact other list owners who have potential customers on their lists (also known as JV). But this also means that you’ll make less per sale as you need to pay them a commission for each sale (usually between 50-100%).

Yes, some people even give away 100% commissions just to get customers on their own list. Later down the road, they can start selling their own stuff to them and they get to keep everything – which is the whole purpose of giving away the full commissions. The other reason is that they might have a One Time Offer behind it, on which they make 50% so they can still profit from a high number of sales when giving away 100% commissions…

I balance the two. SEO is more of a long term strategy for me, PPC a short term… among other marketing strategies like JVs (although I have seriously cut back on them).

Sometimes PPC is actually a good way to get traffic until the Search Engine traffic does finally barrel in…

AND you don’t always have to wait 3 months. With the proper niche research and some luck, you can draw traffic in days… Once your site is crawled regularly, you can put a page up and be indexed within a day.

I don’t think SEO is a waste of time unless you don’t plan on being in this game for a long time. I plan on being here in 5-10 years. So I’ll be patient.

SEO is a tough game no matter how you look at it. You can be at the top of the SERPs one month and drop out the next… I’ve seen people who have held number one positions for years and suddenly disappear all together.

It’s a dangerous thing having 100% of your efforts in one area and depending on one form of advertising… diversification is a good thing.

SEO and PPC aren’t even the only way to market online… some people do neither and make a ton of money.

Really… There is no predicting Search Engine’s… they will always mess with your head. Sandbox or no sandbox. The algos always changing… Their index is updated frequently. Google’s PR is always in flux…

After the last major update there was a lot of talk if there is even a randomization factor involved now… maybe even certain industries being treated differently… Outbound links becoming a factor also.

What I experienced could have easily been something I did… It’s the closest thing to a Sandbox I’ve had. One day I have 50 keywords ranked high the next day they disappear. 2 months later I see visitors from those keywords back in my logs and sure enough they came back…

SEO has changed a lot since the beginning of last year. It is not as predictable as it once was. A webmaster would be a fool to rely on Google for 100% of their revenue. I’ve seen it happen… huge revenue generating websites dropping out of the SERPs completely… what a rush that has to be!

LET ME be honest. Like I said. The sandbox could have been something I did or some random shift in the index… who knows… I can’t explain it so I call it a sandbox… but I’m always tweaking my sites… and most importantly:

I’m always trying to get new one way links pointing to my sites. Either by means of article submissions, directory submissions, social bookmarking, blog comments, article/content submission to sites like Digg.com and lots of other things… Links are still an important factor in your rankings.

Some new webmasters think if they follow the book they should find themselves at the top of the SERPs… when they don’t, they automatically call it a “sandbox” if they can’t figure it out…

Reality is… it might be that there are 10,000 websites that were there first with more inbound links and experience. You have to earn your spot…

Bottom line. Sandbox seems to occur, but it will only occur for crowded markets… you need to work much harder than in a niche market with no competition… If there is no competition and your site is relevant, it will certainly rank well… That’s why keyword selection is so important. Choose the wrong keywords and you will get ranked nowhere, choose the right keywords and you’ll find your site on top of the SERPs a few weeks later…

Until recently, if a new IM eBook came out, and I placed it on my website… you simply had to do a search for the title and there I had been… but I am not focusing on ebooks and courses anymore. I want to help you to get your first websites up and running – that’s where I personally find more satisfaction in.

I’ve been on page one or two for e.g. the phrase “Automated Cash Formula” ever since I placed a review on my site about it (5 months ago…)… It was instant because my site is being crawled daily and in the beginning, there was hardly any competition for that phrase…

PPC? Sound familiar…

SEO? (Search Engine Optimization) not to discourage…

It’s not my intention to discourage anyone from practicing SEO – I probably made it sound very difficult. It’s not as long as you’re staying away from the hyper competitive niches. Choose a niche in which your site could really help other people and where not all the SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) hang out and you’ll rank well quickly because other people will be linking to your great content.

SEO is certainly an incredible way to get free traffic – and lots of it. Any free traffic is good traffic…

I make money with the traffic. Absolutely… it’s interesting to see a commission show up for something odd… then look at your logs and see someone had landed on a page you weren’t promoting with anything.

… Someone just did a search on Google.

You just have to be smart and spread your risk by using other traffic generation strategies as well… just in case your SEO efforts are NOT paying off.

First of all, Google Pagerank has nothing to do with Adwords… although indirectly I suppose it does. One of the reasons Adwords is so valuable is because you can go around this important factor that Google has… And it also might be a good thing if the website you are promoting has a high PR, because the visitor might see that website as being more important and more of an authority website… etc.

This is related to Search Engine Optimization and Organic Results…

Google uses PageRank to measure how important a website is. It’s based on a few factors, but the main factor is how many inbound links (and the quality of those links) you have pointing to your website.

PR is combined with Google’s Algorithm (other factors like the quality of your content and the number of times your keyword appears in the visible text etc.) to determine your position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)… if you notice the sites at the top of your search results they usually have more inbound links than the ones below them.

Sometimes, it’s close because the quality of links are important also. If you have a PR8 website pointing to you, you are in better shape than if you had a PR3 website pointing to you… in essence, it makes your website more important…

If you install Google’s toolbar… or if you visit:

www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/

…you will see a bar that says “PageRank”. That bar ranks a site from 1 to 10…

9 or 10 are very difficult to get. Google.com has a PR10… W3.org has a PR10… DMOZ has a PR9…

Those are websites that have a lot of links pointing to them. W3.org is considered an authority website…

It takes some effort to get to a PR5… generally, I think PR5 and up is really good. A lot of people when they are out looking for people to trade links with, like to focus on websites with a good PageRank…

Check this out… One of the biggest things PR is used for these days is determining the value of a web page and selling ad space based on the PR:

www.linkadage.com

There is a lot of controversy as far as the true importance of PR goes. I’ve noticed most people that are against it are people that can’t seem to get it right.

In the beginning, PR was designed to be an indication of the importance and popularity of a website, but in true Webmaster fashion, a lot of community members were looking for different ways to get Inbound Links in order to manipulate Google. And from there the Link industry got a start… link exchanges, renting links, selling text links etc, etc….

I just saw a guy last week that spent over $650 to get PR3 or better links from 50 different websites…

One of the problems with it is that PR alone does not provide you with traffic…

You still need to have a well optimized website, have done your keyword research and considered the other 100+ factors (some known, some unknown) that Google uses to rank a site in the SERPs… PR might be an important factor, but it isn’t the only factor and it certainly hasn’t the weight anymore which it used to have.

AND ON top of that, getting 100s or 1000s of UNnatural links doesn’t give PR a good name AND can get your sites penalized quickly (PR bar will be greyed out or reset to 0!).

Some more info:

www.google.com/technology/

I was at the CeBit 2008 in Hannover (the biggest computer exhibition in the world) last weekend and it was really very interesting – especially because they had an online marketing section as well. And the other reason I went there was that I wanted to bring my PC knowledge (processor speeds, max. HD capacities etc.) a little up to date. I went there with an old friend of mine …. no, not Dirk Wagner this time…

When I visited Hall 4 with the online marketing sections, I spoke with some of the developers of an online CMS (Content Management System) platform which has a lot of great features included like an integrated Forum, Tag Clouds, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) & Newsletter modules etc. etc. which could make great Web 2.0 Websites.

But it turns out that this system is VERY expensive. The basic version costs about EUR 4500 which is about USD 6300!

I think, then I’ll rather stay with WordPress, though. It’s free and scalable + I’m familiar with it which is a big bonus because if you’d invest in something like this, there also is a steep learning curve…!

The other thing which caught my interest was an online conferencing system with a camera which could provide the participants with a 360° view of a “round table” for web meetings.

The system could handle up to 250 participants which could take part in a web based conference. The admin would then be able to share his desktop with the participants and show them e.g. Powerpoint Slides or an Excel Table or whatever.

And this one comes with a one time fee in contrast to all the web based services which are charging quite a lot of money for this.

I couldn’t see a lot of things at the other marketing related stands anymore since many of them were abandoned ahead of time (I was there at about 16:45 PM and it usually ends at 17:30 PM).

But I took a lot of booklets with me which I am going to read in the next few days. Especially with regards to the German Online Marketing Scene in which I have started in January of this year (I still only have a very small list, though).

I have a tip for you regarding a good niche which I discovered there:

The car navigation systems hall had very much interest. That’s nothing new. But there are new car navigation systems which can show buildings and sights in 3D! This will be in high demand and a lot of visitors to these stands were absolutely fascinated by this – myself included.