In the internet marketing  ‘make money online’ niche it’s really easy to get stuck behind the thinking that unless you’re creating and launching products you’re just not building your business.

This is balls. Bouncy ones.

It’s what goes on behind the scenes that REALLY builds your business.

Get used to encouraging your readers to contact you with ideas.

Let it be known that you offer different levels of consultancy packages or personal coaching AND more importantly, that you’re open to listen to their business ideas and proposals

Work with people in different ways

Behind the scenes in my business, away from the launches and the ‘public’ face of things there’s a lot going on.

I have partnerships with a LOT of marketers – percentage ownerships of websites and products that have developed from my personal coaching OR from just being approached by a reader, customer or subscriber asking for some advice

Apps, software, websites, products, books, WordPress plugins and offline businesses

All this comes from being approachable and encouraging my peer group, business mates, customers, followers, subscribers and readers to get in touch with me about pretty much anything

Yes it involves hiring email support of course, but I don’t have ‘Rottweilers’ on my desk, everything that needs to get through to me DOES get through and you’ll get an answer.

Product launches are great fun, profitable and a good way to get new subscribers and customers on board…

…but by letting people ALSO know that I’m also coach, consultant and business investor…

Well that’s where the REAL profit, growth and potential comes from.

My advice? Build this into your business (WHATEVER niche you’re in) from day one.

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You don’t have to be a millionaire to dump 95% of the things that you’d rather be free of in your life.

If you earn enough from your online business to cover your current salary you can walk away from your job.

That’s a shedload of freedom you’ve just acquired right there

Sure, working for yourself brings other pressures but they’re different, more invigorating pressures.

Make a little more money and you can clear all your debts and your mortgage.

Depending on your debts you can do this quite easily again without needing to be a millionaire

Just a 50% increase in your income can lead to you clearing all your debts and paying off your house in a relatively short amount of time

And an online business that brings you $2,000 a month can be increased to bringing you $3,000 a month without too much trouble

Remember you don’t have to ask for a raise, you just have to work smart and find a way to increase the sales your business is making just a little.

And once those debts ARE paid off, even if you don’t increase your business income any more, it means that because yon don’t have those debts to pay, you keep more of the money for yourself, to invest or to do what you want with

Suddenly you find you can buy stocks, or gold or property as an investment.

All without being a millionaire, and all by just matching the salary you currently earn, then increasing it another 50% through an online business.

Now you’ve got a debt free, time-rich millionaire lifestyle without needing to be a millionaire.

Is that a good enough reason on it’s own to start an online business as soon as you possibly can?

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Well it’s certainly good for the ego. I know a number of marketers who pride themselves on being inaccessible to their customers.

You MUST go through their support desk or PA to get anywhere near them.

Now I’m not posting this because I’m some sort of ‘my door is always open’ marketer because I’m bloody not – I value my family and private life far too much for that

But if you’ve been around me for a while then the chances are you know that you can always get in touch with me. I have a ticket desk that my support teams answer because otherwise I’d spend all my time dealing with lost download links, login URLs and testimonial requests

But the stuff like interview requests, JV offers, partnership offer and the like ALWAYS get to me and most of the time you’ll get a personal reply.

This isn’t always the case with online marketers though…

Some years back I was going to invest several thousand dollars for personal mentoring from a well known guru dude. I was pretty sure he was the right person to guide me through something I was setting up and contacted him to request a five minute chat.

It was like trying to contact bloody ELVIS

I was fobbed off by his support woman (a bit lower down the food chain and she’d have been living in a friggin’ POND), and then after a week when I did get some response he told me he wanted a non refundable $500 to speak to me on Skype for five minutes

I decided he was an ‘up his own arse’ tosser and the coaching thankfully never came off

I say ‘thankfully’ because I later heard bad tales of how he has a rep not being too accessible for his paying clients either

There is a school of thought that recommends getting paid for ALL your time, even the five minute consultations with prospective personal clients. I can see why that might be a good idea

But I don’t agree with it.

Instead train up your support to ask a few questions that will weed out the tyre kickers. And don’t forget that spending five minutes chatting to prospective clients allows YOU to know if you want to work with someone too. So it’s not all one sided.

The moral of the story?

Get yourself good support as soon as you can afford it to free you up for the important things, and spend time communicating with your readers. You’ll pick up some high value customers and you won’t take yourself so bloody seriously either

Comments welcome

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You wouldn’t believe who’s selling, sharing or being extremely careless with your email address

Here’s something that will wobble your wellies if you get results anything like I did

Create a ‘catch all’ email account. You can do this in Cpanel in your hosting account

A ‘catch all’ is the kind of email account that lets you put anything you want in front of the @ symbol and treats it as a separate email address, but it still comes into your inbox

So for example if you sign up to The Warrior Forum your could use the email address:

warriorforum@yourdomain.com

if you signed up to my list it could be

tonyshepherd@yourdomain.com

if you sign up to another marketer it could be

billybigballsguru@yourdomain.com

You get the idea?

Make a note of which email address you used for signing up for whatever site

Then wait until the emails start coming in

All will be fine for a while but then you’ll probably notice how you start getting unsolicited emails from other marketers and companies.

I have email addresses that I only ever used ONCE to sign up for someone’s list, that is now being sent upwards of TEN emails a day from some spammer or another. This has happened to a worryingly high number of email addresses that I’ve only used once and mostly in the IM arena

And some are being used several times.

If anyone can answer WHY this happens please drop me a line at the ‘contact Tony’ tab at the top of the page because I’d love to know

Remember all that ‘we will never share your email address’ bollocks that you still see on opt-in forms?

Yeah right, as safe as a nine pound note

It might not stop the spam coming, and the lists you sign up for might not be the ones actually responsible for the leak, but it’s bloody interesting to see who is ‘safe’ to sign up for and who isn’t.

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I just got off the phone with a potential new coaching client.

One of the scariest things he had to say was how hard it was to actually contact any of the previous mentors he’d hired, some of which he’d paid up to $9,000 to work with.

See how instantly you can get a potential client onside just by being willing to chat to the and answer any questions they might have?

Make yourself available

I know we’re supposed to be running ‘automated’ businesses that are ‘hands-free’ and on ‘autopilot’ but sometimes it’s nice to pick up the phone and chat to another human being.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with the chap this morning and we managed to put together a personalised coaching plan for him that I fully expect will take his business to the next level and beyond.

It does you good to know that the people who spend money on your products are REAL people not just metrics on a spreadhseet.

Lot more fun too

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You know when you have an enema?

(I’m not speaking from experience but I don’t rule out the possibility)

I’m told it makes you feel like a new person.

Cleaned out.

Lightened.

…sort of….EMPTIER but in a good way

And I serious need a mental enema at the moment.

I’ve always been really good at focusing on the project in front of me.

I always make sure they’re SHORT projects so I don’t lose interest. One or two days max.

And I can usually shut out any external distraction from the internet marketing world as I focus on what I’m doing.

But not this last month

Bloody Hell my delicate little head is absolutely CHOCKA with ideas, snippets of things I’ve seen from other marketers that I think ‘Ooo that’s a good idea I’ll try that’

…with new sites and products that I really must incorporate into my business at some point

…with new product ideas, new partnerships in development, learning the basics of new technology we’re mucking about with

…with freelancers, JV partners, Aweber playing silly buggers with deliverability rates, and a TON of other things, both large and small that ALL need sorting out

And I’m totally overwhelmed.

Fortunately I know exactly how to deal with this because it happens a couple of times a year, EVERY year since I’ve been involved with internet marketing

I need a huge DUMP.

That’ll unblock the works

I’m talking about a brain dump of course

This is how I’ve always cleared my mind, got my focus back AND created a six-month business plan to follow so I know exactly what I’m doing on a day to day basis

(And it usually brings in a chunk of money too)

It’s simple but it works for me so I thought I’d share it

1. I buy a new notebook. Actually a filofax type thing (can you still say filofax now it’s not the 80’s any more?)

The reason it has to be this sort of note book is that it needs those little rings in it so you can move the pages about without having to rip anything out

Dump the diary section if it comes with one. You just need blank, undated sheets. You might have to buy a refill to get enough.

2. But some coloured divider cards. You usually get some of these with the filofaxy thing, but if not buy some. I usually use around 6 or 7 of them

3. Dump every single one of your ideas down onto one sheet of paper.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a product idea, an URL for some new software you want to check out, the name of an evergreeen product you want to promote, a book you want to buy and read or a full spec for a new site you want to build, get it all down onto ONE piece of paper per thing.

4. Write down these headings on your dividers:

Priority
Spare Time
Outsourced
Delegated
Research
Future

Now we’re going to fit every one of the items you’ve written down into one of these categories.

I’ll give you an example…

I need to split test a new product I’m working on with two different price points. I just need to create the buttons, dupe the page with the new button on, create a split test in my tracking software and that’s it. Should take me about 20 minutes tops (so it’s not worth outsourcing). However it NEEDS doing before I can go live with this product so this task goes into my ‘Priority’ category.

These ‘Priority’ tasks are the tasks that will make up my ‘to do’ list

What’s next?

I’ve got two books and an MP3 I really want to check out so they go into my ‘spare time’ folder. I’ll read these when I’m waiting in the car to pick the kids up, sitting on the loo, taking a break in the garden or whenever I have a few minutes spare. The MP3 will go into Dropbox so I can access it on my phone on iPad or wherever. Again by chipping at these a few minutes at a time I get through them really quickly

My new salespage can go into the ‘outsourced’ section. I’ll send over the rough copy I’ve written and my freelancer will make a pretty salespage from it

Slightly different is the ‘delegated’ section. These are tasks I can pass onto someone else without outsourcing. So for example if I’m working on a joint product and we need an affiliate page, we’ll agree that my partner creates that. Likewise if I need a list of people who’ve subscribed to my newsletter from the UK then my PA will sort that out for me.

‘Future’ is a bit like my ‘ideas’ book I’ve told you about in the past but I put anything in my ‘Future’ section not just product ideas. So bits of code that might be good to try with some of my pages but aren’t essential, checking out white label supplements for another business idea would go into this, buying some clone software for a site I want to try out would go into this too. It’s all going to happen, but not yet because it’s not urgent.

And finally ‘Research’ is the category I use to include tasks such as checking out new niches, seeing if a certain ‘clone’ software exists for an idea I have, following a certain super-affiliate’s CPA campaign to try to get an angle on how he’s working it, and stuff like that. I like the research category so have to discipline myself to either delegate or outsource most of it, or wait until it’s entirely necessary

I find that doing this in an actual physical book works far better than setting up files on categories on my PC. My guess is that too much computer rots your brain and getting away from it with a pen and paper does you lots of good from time to time.

This has always worked really well for me, and I’m due a session sometime this week to clear the mental clutter out.

After I’ve done this I feel a lot lighter, as though I’ve given myself permission to stop thinking about it all because it’s safely down on paper.

The only time I DO involve the PC is to make a corresponding folder that I use to swipe URL’s, affiliate links, emails and everything that is clickable.

I tried writing these down in the past. Never again. Include everything clickable in a folder on the PC for obvious reasons 🙂

Anyway hope you like this – let me know what you think by commenting below

Try it – have a good dump.

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You know it’s a bloody weird thing…

The more things I offer for sale, the more money I
make.

It’s as though there’s some kind of crazy
connection between offering a product via a
salespage with a huge sweaty payment button on
it…

…and me seeing more numbers in my bank account.

Almost like selling things and making money are
somehow RELATED?

YET rumour has it that there ARE some people who
think the green stuff will magically appear in
their accounts if they leave forum posts under
their pillow for the sales fairy

Continue reading →

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Get some personal coaching or get a mentor

You need to be able to work with someone on a one
to one basis.

Group coaching, no matter how good or expensive
will NOT give you the same results as working
with a mentor who can look at your individual
business and tell you how to make more money from
it

I’ve worked with mentors and coaches and it’s
made a BIG difference to my business

Sometimes you just need a short sharp kick in the
arse to motivate you…

Continue reading →

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This is short and sweet.

As soon as you’ve created your own product or found
a product you’d like to promote…

STOP EVERYTHING ELSE YOU’RE DOING AND THROW SOME
TRAFFIC AT IT TO MAKE SOME MOOLAH

The big guys in the industry don’t mess around with
SEO and fr-ee traffic

That’s for newbies

They’re fine with selling you shedloads of PRODUCTS
about how to drive traffic for fr-ee but they don’t
do it themselves

…because it doesn’t work.

Not in a cost effective way anyhow

Continue reading →

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