Pedal to the Metal?

We're heading interstate today for a couple of weeks, and contrary to the norm, we haven't spent more time planning it than most people spend on planning their lives.

There's a demand to be there, but somehow, the planning has never got a look in.

"Oh darn - we've got to be there when?"

And in such a mindset, it's amazing how much work just has to be done before heading out the door.

Things that will toddle on by themselves while we're away - if we can get them set up before we go.

I guess that's the nature of the beast when you're building a home business. At some point it will be up to critical mass and the actual daily input will be almost irrelevant.

Until then, the mental and physical pedalling takes priority. Whether we like it or not.

Bottom line? Enjoy it!

Long Term Values Shine Forever

Listening to an audio interview between Peter Twist and Ken McCarthy today as I waited ... and waited ... and waited ... for one of my servers to come out to play.

Thankfully, the pair of them are always a great counter-balance to the vagaries of the technology, so the time went smartly.

Ken is one of the quiet masters of Internet marketing, having cut his teeth in the entertainment and direct mail industries before going online in 1993.

Yes, 12 years ago!

His perspective is refreshing, to say the least. His horizon is so far off he'd make a number of high profile marketers and their fraudulent pressure activities so irrelevant they wouldn't even be missed. Unless, of course, they'd milked you of more than you could afford to escape with.

He's wonderful value. Attending his System trainings remains a goal I refuse to shake.

I suggest you do a bit of digging, and at least get on his free pre-seminar email training list.

You will be glad you did.

Focus, or Onion?

Some of the work I've been doing lately has involved quite steep learning curves.

Enjoyable, frustrating, enriching, demanding ... lots of adjectives. But along the way, two schools of thought have alternated.

One is that you should focus - get one step right, comfortable, unconsciously competent, and then move to the next step

The other is that if you scan through at a high level, quickly getting the lay of the land, then scan back through a number of times, each time you'll pick up a deeper understanding and competence at the task. Like peeling away the layers of an onion.

The techniques are diametrically opposed. And yet both are effective.

One comes easier, the other requires more discipline. Or does it?

I'm afraid I alternate between the two, which is probably a deadly mix.

How about you? Which works best for you?

A Twist on Customer Service

I'm on multiple lists belonging to one marketer, and he tends to send the same emails to each list.

It gets a bit annoying to have inboxes clogged with essentially the same stuff, but there is no apparent way to figure which list belongs to what. Some were created from freebies he offered, others from products I bought.

Now, logically, his 'customer' list should be the more valuable - to him and to me. And occasionally they are.

But I seem to forget to note which list they came in until too late. So I'm loathe to unsubscribe for fear I hit the wrong one.

In other words, he's irritating me, rather than nurturing me. Now it's probably my fault, but by simply adding a clear indication to each list, he could help me to help us both.

Lesson: look at customer service through your customers' eyes - however distorted they may be!

List Profits? Maybe!

For a short time, the remarkable webcast Craig Perrine did on List Profits is available free ... along with a bundle of related goodies.

Apparently more than 14,000 people packed onto the call, which was crammed with usable information.

Craig is one of those marketers who walks his talk. I had the pleasure of being part of some of the preparation webinars he did as he fine-tuned what would eventually be launched as the List Profits Secrets course.

It was like old home week. Not just a spouting of theory, but - under attack from participants who had skun their knuckles in the real world - he produced.

I haven't seen the final course, but based on the content I was a part of, it will be worth every penny of the asking price.

If ... and this is a big IF ... you do something with it.

If you just want something to decorate your bookshelves, go buy a book. It will be a lot cheaper.

But if you want to build and profit from the awesome power of effective lists, have a good hard listen.

A special price is available until midnight Friday.

Choosing With Your Gut

I received material today which set me thinking.

It was very well crafted, innovative, useful, even eye-opening. And the product at the end of the tunnel may be superb.

But alarm bells are ringing in a subdued manner way in the back of my head. Or perhaps that should more precisely be in my gut.

There are two principles involved in the project, each with outstanding track records. And each with clouds of insincerity surrounding their entries in my memory.

I won't be buying their offering, even though it would be very useful if it does what they claim. Or appear to claim. Because at this stage, you can't even pin them down on what they're claiming!

Mixed messages from people who claim to be the masters of clarity.

Which reminds me of a powerful and deceptively simple way to interpret your 'gut instincts'.

You toss a coin. BUT ... it's not just 'heads I do it, tails I don't'.

The key is to notice your reaction to the 'heads decision'. That will speak to you in utmost clarity.

On this occasion, the coin said 'buy' - my reaction was 'You've gotta be joking!'

How Would You Redirect Latent Talent?

There is an amazing pool of technical talent squandered on the Web every day.

It's a bit like graffiti artists, those frustrated Matisses who recolor neighborhoods not - as some claim - to state their independence - but simply to blow off boredom.

I link the two because of the fundamental waste of talent and the consequent cost to society as well as the individuals.

Today I was working in a private membership site, having spent some time creating my own 'masterpiece'. Finally it was 'ready' so I clicked to the next stage - and got a '404', page not found, error.

Unusual, but by the time I'd hunted around and said unkind words for a while I hit the home page - and discovered a black-faced and profane advertisement. Which then redirected to the site run by the idiots responsible.

This time I use the word 'idiots' because of the quality of the content at that site.

Yet technically, the place is quite marvellous.

How much better off would those people - and the world in general - be if that talent could be redirected?

Anyone got any ideas how?

Keyword Research Pointers

Sometimes it's much more useful to know the profitability of keywords than it is to know outright search popularity.

There are manual ways of discovering some sort of working ratios. Basically - the number of searches for a particular term at Overture, divided by the number of results that come up on your favorite search engine for that term.

The result gives you an idea of where to find the 'low-hanging fruit' - the search terms it's likely to be easier to rank well for on search engines.

Unfortunately, it's a very tedious business.

There are tools and services available to help, but keyword research is still time-consuming.

It is also still vital.

I'm aware of 20 or 30 research sites plus more than a dozen pieces of software, all of which can help.

Ken Evoy goes into this in his free ebook, and also provides a valuable free search tool.

Most people are aware of the Overture search tool - soon to go through its third name change, this time to be rebranded 'Yahoo Search Tool'.

For a quick and dirty idea of relative popularity it's probably the best available. Unfortunately, it does a great deal of double-counting, so the numbers are highly inflated.

The relativity, however, is solid.

The best tool is Wordtracker, where you can do unlimited free searches, although the results are limited in a number of ways. Pay for a subscription - from about $8 a day - and you've hit the motherlode.

A free alternative that uses Wordtracker's results is Nichebot - but again, it lacks the full Wordtracker functionality. Sign up for a free membership for added functionality.

There are many more, but those will give you a very good start.

The Promise of Multi-Skilling in Home Business

The niceties of multi-skilling in Internet home work income business - or any work from home activity for that matter - are lost on the people who have never experienced them.

Which is a pity - I mean, think of how much they're being deprived of all the 'character-building' we take for granted.

Is there ever an end to it?

Logically we can all probably sit down and rank the required skills into some sort of hierarchy according to our proficiency.

And there's something about the home business mentality that then shrugs and goes on doing the same old good, bad and ugly jobs.

Yet if we bit the bullet and and actually relinquished some of the tasks we struggle with, our businesses would probably flourish and our health improve.

Yes, I've just spent a day wrangling a web site template to the ground. I won, but it inflicted some pretty bloody wounds.

One day I'll learn. I will.

MasterMind Groups, Noughties Style

Forums are places some home work business people lose their lives.

Not literally, but they spend so much time there they never give themselves any time to actually get on with the work of building and running a web site.

Which, of course, has a certain and predictable impact on their bottom line.

My early experience with them was brief and repulsive. How could so many idiots congregate in one place and behave so badly? So I stayed away - for years.

But recently, some of the programs I've joined have included forums where it is essential to participate.

Not a rule, just idiocy not to.

Now that's a turnaround!

These are private forums - although I know there are some public ones with excellent regulars and quality posts - and I must say I've been blown away.

The expertise and the willingness to share, the networking, and the downright high calibre has been like a breath of life.

Absorbing it has been the hard part. But boy! With an infusion like that it transforms your energy, your vision, and your determination to succeed.

Choose wisely, but Napoleon Hill's Mastermind Group principle is alive, thriving and multiplying in the Noughties! (that's the 2000s for those who are stuck in the 90s!) :)

Long Live the King!

I don't know whether it's just me, or whether there really is a mood change taking place in Internet marketing.

Not so long ago the buzz was all about how to trick the search engines. Special reports, seminars (of course!) and software - all designed to give people a temporary boost in their search engine rankings.

Quite short-sighted when you think about it. After all, the search engines have a vested interest in keeping at least one step ahead of the pack.

And they have the financial and intellectual muscle to do that without breaking a sweat.

So why do people even bother - when with a simple change of mindset they can work with the engines and achieve the same results - long-term.

Much less work, much more benefit - to all concerned.

Ken Evoy has been spouting the 'content is king' mantra since 1999 or before, and gradually more and more are beginning to echo the call.

Even the latest marketing software is recognizing and building on that fact. Traffic on Steroids, Secret Money Generator, Content Desk, Metawebs to name a few, plus all the RSS and blog feast.

It's got to be a healthy sign!

The Great Internet Marketing TalkFest

No, it doesn't exist, and no, it won't cost you an arm and a leg to attend, and no, I don't make a commission on telling you about it.

Mainly because I just thought of it.

Increasingly, our inboxes are full of exhortations to attend yet another guru's seminar. The promises are usually similar - only the speakers' names rotate.

And most usually beat the others over the head as 'sellathons'.

Of course, the real value, they all say, is in the people you meet, the networking you can do, and the jv deals you come away with.

Well ... why not cut out the sales pitches, the high-priced speakers, and the expensive travel and accommodation?

Just tell everyone to turn up at a public beach on a particular day and talk their heads off. The Great Internet Marketing TalkFest.

Lower cost, same result?

I've been working quite a bit with Site Build It! lately.

It's one of those systems that many have heard about but never actually got around to checking out.

Or the sort of system that when people find it they exclaim loudly and shriek "Why didn't anybody tell me this existed!"

Well, consider yourself told.

There's a full Site Build It! review here, along with links to a bigger range of quality freebies and proof than you'll find in most places.

It has a lot going for it. Probably the two primary benefits are:

1. SBI allows anyone to build a business (not just a web site) without having to waste years learning the technical side of things, and

2. The fundamental approach is perfectly aligned with the demands of Google, Yahoo and MSN etc - which means long-term success for SBI owners.

Plus they're also a very helpful company with an amazing community spirit at the forums!

Great for starters, although it can be frustrating for more experienced web masters.

Definitely worth checking.

Sanity Eaters

I have four computers set up, but work primarily on one - my favorite.

It has a 19 inch 'fat' screen that's a delight to the eyes, and enough grunt to do what I want.

But the relentless pummelling it gets is starting to make it fray at the edges.

It's never recovered from an anti-spyware attack late last year. Yes, ANTI-spyware, not spyware.

The supposedly best-of-breed 'fix' to the spyware problem altered an unknown number of settings throughout my machine, and months of attempts have failed to get any response from the company.

In the meantime, most of the time I have to use a secondary machine whenever I want to do any online banking, access a large number of affiliate management sites, and generally do a day's work.

And of course, I haven't time to get everything off onto a safe place and reformat the hard drive - I'm too busy taking 10 times longer than necessary doing the routine tasks.

And we wonder why progress is slow!

A Rare Chance For an Insider Seat

I'm excited to be able to offer you this rare chance to take part - from the inside - in one of the giant sales launches that have brought in as much as a million dollars in a single day.

The promotion is just starting ... and I've arranged to get you in on the actual mechanics behind the launch.

If you're serious about boosting your online success, go here.

http://www.online-home-based-business.info/cgi-bin/track/tracker.cgi?63

and tap in your details.

I will NOT make this material available to my general list or blog readers - just those who signal they understand its importance.

Go now.

Cash Like Clockwork

Marlon Sanders is well known for his extravagant and outrageous marketing style.

And yet few realize that the driving force behind his success in Internet marketing is a lesson he learned a long time ago in the heartland of direct marketing.

The secret is systematization. As hard to figure out as it is to say.

And many times more powerful.

There's a whole new science emerging around this field, and yet it's been proven throughout history - from the ancient Babylonians to Ray Kroc.

Marlon's Cash Like Clockwork e-course (available free here) gives you some idea of how this discipline can change your life.

Unfortunately, most are too busy chasing the mirage of now to realize, and implement, its power. Are you?