I’m going to The UK Focus Internet Business Building Seminar in London on 17th-19th October.

Here’s a link http://www.focusmarketingseminars.com/ukevent/

I’ll be honest and say I’m going for two reasons – firstly it’ll be extremely good for networking and meeting new contacts and potential JV partners.

But secondly and most importantly, I’m meeting up with a couple of IM mates for a few beers in the bar.

I’m flying down from Yorkshire on Saturday morning and returning Sunday afternoon so it’s quite a way to go for one night but it’ll be worth it.

After driving up to the Scottish highlands the other week, which cost me around £140 (almost $300) in petrol I decided flying would be considerably cheaper and I got a flight for £150. Not quite cheaper but easier than a 4 hour drive.

If you’re going to be at the seminar feel free to tap me on the shoulder and say hello – It’s always nice to meet other marketers, and especially subscribers or readers.

Should be fun. And if any ‘top marketers’ get a bit worse for wear and end up running round the hotel bar in their boxer shorts with an ice cooler on their heads I’l llet you know. Even if it’s me.

Likewise If the whole thing is just a pitch-fest or is about getting people excited then spending £3,000 on their credit cards I’ll let you know about that too.

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Before I went online I was (surprisingly) offline.

I was in direct mail. In fact there are a few people who kindly read my blog and can remember the early days when I used to write for business opportunity publications.

I had some stunning successes and even more glaring failures and I’d like to share one of the successes with you because it applies just as much to internet marketing as it does to offline marketing. I know because I use this technique in some of my niche sites.

It’s possible that some of you might question the ethics of this method. I’ll leave that up to you. I have no problem with it at all.

Back in the nineties, at least in the UK, people with less than great credit records could have difficulty in obtaining loans and mortgages, (Interestingly it seems as though things are going down the same road at the moment).

I’d noticed that there were one or two publications on sale that offered to show people where they could go to get credit even if they had poor credit records. Once I’d noticed the publications I spotted more and more ads for the same kind of thing. It seemed that there was a market for them.

So I bought a couple. I remember the cheapest was £9 (about $20) and it was 10 roughly photocopied sheets of A4 folded and printed into a small booklet.

All it contained were adverts for small loan companies, offshore banks and details of larger banks who would look at mortgage applications for people who had previously been blacklisted. I phoned a few of these ads and sure enough it seemed as though they did in fact offer sub-prime lending.

After chatting to a few of these people (some of whom were not nice and I got the impression they would ‘send the boys round’ if you missed a payment) I decided to do some of my own research.

Taking the publications I’d bought as a starting point I spent about a week (and over £100) phoning round various organistaions and asking about their policies on sub-prime lending. I went through the Yellow pages and when I’d finished I had enough contact information to publish a decent sized booklet. What’s more the information was up to date.

In essence I’d back engineered an idea after reading through a few publications (which I’d bought legitimately) and improved on their work. Nothing was plagiarised or in any way stolen or misappropriated from the original except the idea, which can’t be copyrighted or ‘claimed’ by an individual.

So I’d seen a good idea and pinched it OR I’d spotted a niche with a few sellers in there already and entered the market alongside them. You decide.

If you’re in Internet Marketing you can’t cry or sulk when this happens to you, because happen it WILL at some point. I had a very nice little income stream coming from an ebook I’d produced about setting up a profitable hobby newsletter from home for a couple of years.

Then suddenly someone came along, bought my book, rewrote it and published the information for free on his website. What hit my business hardest was that he got a higher place in the search engines so my sales dried up. He monetised the site with Google ads and offering a printing service for people who wanted to publish their own newsletters. I was impressed. Very clever – even though it had buggered up my income stream.

I could have tried to do the same – publish the info for free, monetize the site and try to SEO my own site higher in the rankings but it wasnt worth it. I seem to remember banking around $600 a month from the book, but had other streams and genuinely valued the lesson.

So what am I saying about Internet Marketing?

Well I don’t believe the old saying that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’, but I don believe that finding it can be damn hard work.

So I suppose what I am saying is don’t try to be too different. We publish ebooks about how we make money – we give examples, proof of income – the lot. That’s something that’s hard to do unless you’ve made money from IM or unless you’re lying to your readers. There are ways into IM without making a penny as Sara wrote about in a free report some time ago, but if you’re looking for a way in to niche marketing then take a long hard look at what other people are doing.

I’m not saying buy their books and copy them. I AM saying that ebooks are a legitimate source of information if you’re looking to compete in a niche.

Some people have a strange view – that buying a book from a bookshop for research purposes is fine, but buying an ebook with the purposes of entering the same niche isn’t. I think that’s plain wrong.

If you’re looking to get into the viral marketing niche then buy Viral Sneakiness and use the information in it with my blessing. Plagiarise it and I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks but use the information to create your own product and that’s cool. See the difference.

So if you’re interested in tropical fish, buy some books, some ebooks, read some sites and talk to some people. If there are people in that niche already then COMPETE. Make your product better – make it eaier to read or better value. But don’t be put off by people who think they OWN a particular niche because they don’t.

A mate of mine in IM – a talented and clever marketer – told me about how he went into a niche and dominated it completely. In the process he basically wiped out the business of the person who was previosly top dog. Now he didn’t do this on purpose, it was a by-product of him being better at it and offering better products. But his competitor went crazy. Got very angry and pulled a few underhand stunts.

If you trample on someones income stream it’s unfortunate. I don’t think many people would want to do that on purpose. But we are in the business of making money and a sale going to you can mean a sale taken away from someone else.

But with niche marketing your competitiors are providing you with all the information you need to successfully enter that niche, whether they’re aware of it or not. Look at their ads, buy their products, look at what they offer, their upsells – the whole thing.

Your competitors are almost as important as your customers.

Now you might think that’s all well and good but what if you’re the person who’s book is being used as research. Why spend the time and effort it takes to research and write an ebook just for some lazy marketer to come along and pinch your idea?

Well for a start it WILL happen in you’re involved in IM for any length of time. But it doesn’t mean it will affect your business, Many people enter niches and find they either don’t enjoy them or can’t make a profit out of them and leave. Others will enter but won’t be as successful as you. And many more – in fact most people – will never enter any niche because they won’t take action.

But for me the main answer to the ‘why bother’ question is that whether someone pinches my idea or I end up making $10,000 a month from it is that we – you and I – are Internet Marketers. We’re trying to improve our situation – both financially and from a lifestyle point of view and it simple doesn’t matter what other people do. We’re doing this for ourselves and our families, and not for anyone else.

And by doing this we find ourselves in that tiny, wonderful minority of people who are taking responsibility for their own lives (I know you’ve heard this before but it’s true) and are striving to be independent, fearless and just plain BETTER people for doing it.

Comments welcome as always.

Tony

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…and I’m editing a book.

When I was a teenager I could sleep 20 hours a day and still look forward to getting back into bed after a night partying and carousing.

I might still be that way but having small children means I don’t have the chance to find out any more. I was awoken at about 3.50am this morning by my son, who’s not the world’s greatest sleeper, although to be fair he’s still not 2 yet, so I crept out of bed, gathered him up and put him in my place next to his mum in our nice warm bed and padded down to my office to sleep in there. Our house is like musical beds sometimes and not in the way it used to be when I was a teenager!

After about 15 minutes of staring at the ceiling it became pretty clear that sleep wasn’t on the agenda so I fired up the laptops and decided to do some work.

On my desk are two laptops – one running Vista and an older one that runs XP with a slightly dodgy keyboard. I work mostly on the Vista maching but have to swap over when it comes to things like converting a Word doc (although I use Open Office more and more these days) because my version of Adobe Acrobat used for converting Word files to PDF doesn’t run for some reason in Vista.

I don’t have any fancy network between the two, I just email any files to my other laptop as an attachment, do the work I need to do then emai them back.

I use Googlemail to bring all my email addresses together and have more than one Googlemail account for various businesses so partners can log into the email accounts too.

So it’s past 5am now – heading for 6am actually on a Sunday morning and I’m editing a book for http://www.monthlyplr.com It’s not due out until the start of November but I like to be ahead in case anything unforseen crops up. The last http://www.monthlyplrniche.com package was delayed by a day because of technical problems and it bugged the arse off me – I hate not delivering when I say I will. All back to normal now though, and it’s a great package.

A quick check of my emails and I find the usual messages. Weekends are a little quieter in terms of sales but the usual Clickbank and Paypal notifications are there, including an obvious increase in sales from a new upsell I’ve been trying out.

This sells through e-junkie and their stats are a delight to use so I check my weekly income from this one product against the last few weeks and sure enough there’s been a 50% increase. This simply came from changing the look of an upsell page – an one time offer people see when they buy a certain product from me.

So for example they buy product ‘A’ then they when they land on the download page they get the chance to buy product ‘B’ – the upsell – at a reduced price. I’m still tracking the stats (don’t mind testing when it’s with real money) but it looks like around 1 in 10 are buying the upsell. 

The change that I made to this page was simply to remove all graphics from the page. Strange.

6am now. Time for coffee soon. I’ll be working today while the rest of the brood go grocery shopping. We got back from the forest last night and the cupboards are bare.

So internet marketing eh?

Up before 4am on a Sunday morning, planning to work all day sunday and no food in the cupboards. Great stuff!

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I’m writing this from a log cabin in Sherwood Forest.

I’m here with my family for a short break – lots of walking, some trekking then more walking. October is a good time to blow the cobwebs away.

I’ve just come back from sailing in Scotland (you can see the pics below this post somewhere)so found myself sitting in the woods before I’d had time to even lose my sea legs. Which is the whole point of me being an internet marketer.

My business is completely portable. The old laptop on the beach hype is actually true – I could work from anywhere in the world (and frequently do) but hadn’t thought of going into detail about it on my blog until my missus mentioned it would be a great way to show anyone who’s interested how an internet marketing lifestyle (and there are many – but this is the one for me) works.

I thought it might be of value to you if you’re thinking about going full-time as an internet marketer, even if you’re at the early stages (and we have something out soon that could help you go from early stages to ..well wherever you want to go), to see how  I do things and how it fits in with family, kids, day to day life etc.

Many marketers would have you beleve it’s a huge leap from nine to five to five figures a month but it’s not. Not a lot of good me saying that without offering proof which is where I’m trying to go with my blog.

Back to the forest..

To be honest it’s a bit of a working holiday too – my wife has her own business, and has brought some with her and I have my wireless broadband modem with me which will pick up a signal in the weirdest of places and the forest is one of those.

It’s a slow connection here – worse than dial up but for checking emails and posting to a blog it’s not too bad – especially when accompanied by a glass of the red stuff and some good grub. That said I couldn’t pick up a signal in Scotland at all.

So we arrived here on Monday evening. On Tuesday evening I checked my email and found enough Paypal receipts to pay for our holiday. Twice over. So now I’m feeling smug because I’m on holiday for free. I’m only counting Paypal receipts because they’re insant. Clickbank payments take time to arrive although since they changed their payment system I’m about to get paid weekly from Clickbank which is good. Other affiliate payments arrive as and when their owners agree to pay me – usually monthly although weekly isn’t unheard of.

So the reason I can decide to leave it all behind and go live in Robin Hood style is that my income comes from lots of different places. I’ve mentioned before that I have internet marketing income streams outside Laycock Publishing, and it’s these combined with the Laycock business that means I receive money each and every day.

Anyway the point of this series of blogs is to get ‘up close and personal’ with you lot and to try to show you how my life, business and income work. …or don’t work 🙂

The pic above by the way is just before I actually started work.

I’d not yet plugged in the laptop, and my modem was still in it’s box but I had managed to open a bottle of wine and persuade my wife to take a snap of me to use on the blog.

Marketing is all about priorities…

More soon..

 

P.S. If you fancy actually biting the bullet and setting stuck in and building your OWN online business, and earning while you do so, CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS

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Internet Marketing fits round my life. A lot of marketers seem to operate the other way around though.

I’m not saying they’re wrong – I’m the wrong person to judge anyone else about any aspect of their life. But is there a real difference between a million in the bank and ten million in terms of lifestyle?

Maybe there is – It all depends on what you want.

I think enjoying my life and my family before I’m wobbling round on a walking stick with various bags, tubes and bottles attached to my ageing body should be a priority. ‘Do it while you can’ is a bit of a motto for me!

Then again my idea of fun might not be the same as yours.

Here’s what I’ve just been doing….

Now Scotland is hardly Barbados, espcecially in late September / early October but I try to get afloat at every possible chance so I was happy as a pig in muck as my Gran used to say (although she didn’t say muck!)

The big hairy thing checking the rigging is me, and although I might look as though I’m praying in the next pic

…I’m actually trying to ignore the Germans in the next mooring who had just arrived on the biggest, loudest and ugliest motor cruiser you’ve ever seen.

 And while most marketers show you pictures of their sports cars and luxury cruisers in the Med……I’m more than happy with a simple 6.30am breakfast before casting off.

In the last few days the wind dropped

So it was time to return to Internet Marketing. I’m still pretty amazed when I come back from a holiday because I recognise that I should be feeling that horrible ‘back to the grind’ feeling that most people get on return from a break, in fact if we’re honest, most people feel the same way from Sunday lunchtime onwards knowing they’ll be back at work on Monday.

Smug me eh?

It’s NOT like that. I could work much harder than I do, but if I’d brought in 13 million already this year like one of the top US marketers, would you feel that you could even come to close to my earnings?

Exactly – but following your dream – and one of my main ones is sailing – can be far more accessible than you think once you’ve got more time. Unfortunately this is something you have to do for yourself because your boss is never ever, in a MILLION YEARS going to give you as much time for yourself as you want, need or deserve.

The other thing you need is more money than your employment will happily give you. And you need to set that figure yourself  – not your employer.

And what about other internet marketers?

Well can you replicate the earnings of some of these people when they’re working 16 hours a day on their business full-time, employ staff and spend thousands a year on Adsense or hiring copywriters?

No chance.

What you need is a lazy marketer who works three days a week tops 🙂

Seriously – you need acheivable goals. Setting out to earn a million in a year is possible, but when you’ve got a family, bills, debts and a full-time job? That’s a hell of a task.

On the other hand an achievable goal of a couple of thousand in income a monthly and quitting your job is VERY achievable – it really is – and at the end of this post I’ll be telling you how we can help.

I’ve just been cruising the lochs and islands of the Scottish Highlands. I could have been on a beach in 40 degree heat for 3 weeks if that was my thing.

Next week we’re all off to wood hut in Sherwood Forest for a few days. It’s not as basic as it sounds – there’s a hot tub included!

These types of ‘minibreaks’breaks happen very frequently because that’s the lifestyle I’ve chosen – we take a lot of time off, whether it’s in the UK or abroad because we want to.  And my lifestyle wouldn’t change much if you dumped 100 million on my desk tomorrow morning.

 My IM business is portable, as is my family so we can up and off at a moment’s notice. Again this is a choice. Your ideal lifestyle will probably be different, but that’s the beauty of freedom.

The breaks I’ve mentioned above however were well deserved because we’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to something that I think is the most important thing we’ve ever released.

I won’t be giving you any details for another week or two – sorry – because some things have yet to be decided upon.

We want this to be totally accessible to everyone who needs it….

If you’re a subscriber you’ll get an email telling you more in 7-14 days. If not you can subscribe at the top right of this page or at www.sara-brown.com

So start thinking about your ideal lifestyle..

Sailing is one of my main ‘things’ at the moment. If time and money weren’t an issue for you – what would yours be?

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Over the years hundreds – REALLY HUNDREDS – of people have asked us how to make money online. There are of course a shedload of answers because there are different methods ranging from genius to near insanity. Contrary to what many people believe, most of them work too. At least for some people.

There’s an easy and cheap way to make money online. It’s how I started and I still do it today……ready for this? (drum roll please) …..

Find someone you’re pretty sure is making money and watch what they do.

With the exception of competitive niche marketing, most  IMers don’t bother to hide what they’re doing., so it’s easy to watch them.

But there’s a problem with this.

We were testing a system recently, which worked beyond our wildest dreams. We obviously had to test it in the marketplace because there’s really only one way to know if it works, and that was to make sales – which we did – a lot of.

We also wanted to record the process, screenshot the earnings and provide absolute proof that out system did the business. Not only that, but the system was so easy, cost effective and open to everyone to replicate that unless we ‘d provided you with 100% proof you simply wouldn’t have believed us.

And as I say the testing was out in the open for all to see.

I don’t think a single person noticed and replicated the system.

Which is why we put it into a book – Licensed To Quit Your Job. Because people take notice of paid products.

We’re inviting you to grab LTQ because it’s a system that is not only accessible to pretty much all newcomer marketers, but is one that you will read and think ‘Oh my God – I can SEE that they use it in their business’ and that might just be the connection you need to get really moving online.

I hope so.

www.licensedtoquit.com

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Want to know what a $40,000 profit over one weekend, two huge ancient printers and not listening to idiots in forums have in common?

 You should. And it’s FREE.

Grab ‘Laycock Publishing – The Early Years’ from http://www.jobhaters.com/earlyyears

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We’re getting some bloody big spiders in the house at the moment. It seems they’re called (quite aptly) ‘Giant House Spiders’ and while they might not be tarantula-size, they’re big enough to make me swear if one unexpectedly runs towards me. It seems they’re a newish species, and they’re actually good for the house because they keep more undesirable spiders and infection carrying bugs out of the house by eating them (haven’t seen the cat for a while either).

Being the biggest chap in the house it’s my duty to chuck them out when they scare my wife. My 18 month old son could probably do a better job – because he eats them back – at least we think he does – we recently found him in the garden munching happily away with half a slug in his  hand, but my wife insists I get rid of the spiders. I tried to corner one with a pint glass but (ready for this?) it’s legs wouldn’t fit in the top of the glass!

No joke – I’m told they come inside when the weather gets a little colder looking for mates.

Anyway they didn’t have them this size when I was a kid for sure.

But a lot has changed since then.

And in a good way – take gurus – these days you have to actually listen to what people have to say rather than be BSed by big cars and well cut suits for one thing.

A friend of mine recently showed a scruffy looking individual around his business who also smelt a little of booze.

He didn’t really take him seriously and thought he wass wasting his time until he discovered the bloke was in fact a very wealthy businessman. Itr’s the same old thing – if you’re poor and weird you’ve got mental problems but if you’re rich and weird you’re eccentric.

And some of the people I admire and have learned most for drive old cars, look scruffy but are sharp as knives and extremely wealthy.

And I think it’s because they don’t have to impress anyone. Would anyone actually drive a porshe if they were the last person on the planet or would you potter around in a big, comfortable old heap of a car? I’m not sure myself about that one but it’s an interesting thought.

And money gives you the freedom to behave, dress, live, eat, drink or whatever in exactly the manner you want – without answering to anyone.

This is why I don’t respond well to those gurus who show pictures of their yachts, their ferraris and their big houses because they’re pretty much compensating for little dicks. But you show me someone who has built a business because they want to spend the rest of their life sailing around the world, or walking in the Himalayas without having to worry about money then I’m a buyer every time.

The difference?

The first lot – the phallicallly disadvantaged lot with the flashy cars etc are doing it all for other people.

The second lot – the weirdos who want to scruff around travelling through South American for 10 years without a financial care in the world are the people who are doing it for themselves.

Now if your dream is to become financially independent so you can run a fleet of vintage Jaguars then that’s great – then you belong to the second category, but if you have to own a Jaguar to demonstrate to people that you are successful then I think you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

If you work on your business for yourself then you’ve much more chance of success than if you’re trying to live up to other people’s expectations.

So choose your role models well.

Why do you want to be an internet marketer? Do you want to be rich? If so do you want to be rich so you can feel better than other people or because it would allow you to live live on your own terms?

Turning up at school reunions in a big car with a supermodel girlfriend stops being fun after fifty or sixty years (joke – you know what I mean), but there’s nothing anywhere can beat the buzz of ticking off your list a dream that you’ve had since childhood.

We’ve ticked off little things like spending New Year’s eve standing with 200,000 other happy people on the Champs Elysees in Paris watching the fireworks above the Arc D’Triumph and big things like being at home every single day with our kids.

And the people I’ve learnt most from are the ones with the simple dreams, the funny dreams, the ones who are their own person.

So when you choose your guru it’s not just about the information, it’s about why they’re doing it too I think. If someone’s motivation is a driving, personal ambition they’re much more likely to find a way to acheive the goal and then they can pass on that info to you.

Makes you think…

I have to go – something big and hairy just walked out from under the fireplace – and it wasn’t my sister.

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If you don’t have Paypal buttons out there on your sites you’re not going to make any money.

There are theorists and doers in Internet Marketing, and quite often the theorists are the more intelligent, but they’re usually poorer.

In my world perfect doesn’t exist, and it’s a good thing it doesn’t, because if I was always chasing it I wouldn’t be able  to work from home, take an obscene amount of time off each year and enjoy being around while my children (and my potatoes) grow.

I write books with typos, websites with mis-alligned boxes and fonts, and blog posts (ahem) that are only half formed ideas in my head when I start writing them.

And it’s lucky that I do, because if I waited for perfection I’d never launch anything, and I’d be working at a job I hate, and quite possibly broke.

I get emails on a fairly regular basis from people wanting to go full-time but who just can’t seem to make any money. One of the first questions I ask is ‘how many sites do you have selling stuff?’

Invariably the answer is one or none.

Which is why they have a few hundred dollars a month – tops – coming in.

I have over a hundred sites, and only slightly fewer Paypal, Clickbank and other payment buttons out there in www land earning money for me.  And my income reflects that.

Even better, the majority of the sites took from a few hours to a few days (tops) to put up and launch. I’m not the greatest at big launches that take a month to prepare. I get bored, distracted and lose track of what I’m supposed to be doing.

It took me a while to discover this, and for me it’s the secret of internet marketing:

1. Do Internet Markety stuff that you like doing and fits in with your personality.

2. Do lots of it and attach a Paypal button to every one you can.

That’s it – the secret to Internet Marketing.

You can thank me later 🙂

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I clean my cars on a Sunday morning.

About once every two years.

I hate it, and to me it’s the perfect example of how to waste some of your precious time on Earth, because in the great scheme of things ladies and gents, we’re not here for very long. The blink of an eye in cosmic terms, and spending some of it hoovering crisps out of the child seats doesn’t sit too well with me.

But it was fun for two reasons. Firstly I wouldn’t have to drive the big one round wondering what that ‘funny smell’ was any longer, and secondly because my three year old daughter decided she wanted to help, which meant it would take twice as long but be a hundred times more enjoyable, albeit wetter when I’d showed her how the windscreen washer worked.

When it was done though, I felt sufficiently satisfied that I’d completed a task I’d put off for so long that I spent an hour at my laptop doing exactly the same.

I tackled boring and repetitive tasks that I don’t do half as much as I should like backing up blogs, files and going through files called ‘to read’ or ‘ideas’ on my laptop that I hardly ever look at.

The result was that I feel a little safer because I’ve backed up imortant data, but also because I’ve re-discovered ideas that I’d long forgotten and some of them are frighteningly good!

If I say so myself I do have some great business ideas, but like most people I forget to act on them, put them off and too often forget about them altogether.

Going back through my ideas book and files on the PC bring them back to the forefront of my mind and start the creative juices flowing.

Which brings me back to the reason I decided to wash the cars.

I have quite a few niche sites which do pretty well and some which bomb and aren’t worth the hosting they cost. That’s fine with me because as long as I make a decent profit in the long run I’m extremely happy.

One of my niche sites recently hit a huge gold vein and I woke up to a very nice surprise in my account. A bit of research, traffic tracking and the rest showed up something interesting – the traffic had come from an affiliate who had suddenly – without any warning or prompting decided to spring clean his site, optimise his adwords and remail his list.

The results were great for me and even better for him because he got 60% of every sale.

So going back and cleaning things up resulting in a few thousand dollars for both of us, for no other reason except remembering to do it.

So I’m now looking through all my sites, which is going to take some time, and clean them up a little to see what happens.

A bit of renovation on long forgotten sites can have similar results to launching a new product (almost). Go back and check out how your older sites are doing and if there’s anything you can do  to titivate them a bit. It’s well worth it.

But I’ll still leave the cars another 2 years.

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