A quick hello to my US readers – thanks for not telling me it was Thanksgiving. I spent a whole day going through my website stats trying to find the reason no one was coming to my sites or buying anything. I now know you were celebrating instead. 

The very best of belated good wishes from the UK for your Thanksgiving holiday 🙂 

If you’ve been in Internet Marketing for any length of time you’ll be pretty familiar with the concept of the ‘tuesday launch’. Some expert somewhere who tests much more than me decided that Tuesday is the optimum day for launching a new product.

Incredibly – in my village that’s the day the shops shut for half a day so everyone is home at their computers! Now THAT’S extensive testing – this expert mush have checked loads of factors to make sure the most people possible were not doing anything else on Tuesday except waiting for a new product launch. No wonder they’re called experts.

However a couple of months ago I sent out two promo mailings, about 3 weeks apart – one on a tuesday (as recommended by Internet Marketing geniuses (genii?), and one on a Sunday evening (UK time).

 You know what I’m going to say don’t you?

The Sunday evening one outsold the tuesday one by about 3:1

Now the products were different I admit but I have an idea how much I’ll usually sell from a mailing and let me tell you I’ll be sticking to Sunday evening mailings.

 On tuesday afternoons my inbox goes a little crazy as all manner of weird and wonderful offers plop into it, and I often wonder why the experts stick with tuesdays because obviously as more and more people do the same thing on the same day the competition goes up.

So I think I’ve found the answer.

A Christmas Day launch!

I reckon that no other Internet Marketers will be launching a new product on that day so I’ll have the whole Internet to myself.  I’m not sure what I’ll be offering yet but I expect to wake up a millionaire the day after!

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I’ve just released ‘Become A Squidoo Guru In 24 Hours’

http://www.24hoursquidooguru.com

It’s 80+  pages long, comes with fully rebrandable master resell rights, sales page and graphics. It’s a great tutorial – you can be building profit pulling squidoo lenses in 24 hours – so can your list or your subscribers.

My rebrandable master resell rights packages are usuallu only offered to my newsletter subscribers, but as an experiment – (I’m testing!) – I’m opening it for a limited time to readers of my blog.

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If you type ‘Tony Shepherd’ into Google you’ll sometimes find me at the top of the rankings and sometimes some DJ bloke from London with the same name.

 At the moment it’s him – I’m fourth.

If however you type ‘Tony Shepherd Internet Marketer’ not only do I have the top position, but I also have second, third fourth …. in fact every single Google position on the first page is mine. Pretty good .

But I’m still fourth if you type in my own name. Not too bad because my name is relatively common, which in IM is not always a positive thing. If I was called John Smith I’d be happy to get on the first page but if my name was Byron Rocketboost III I’d pretty much expect poll position.

My point is that it doesn’t really matter. When people search for you or your products in an Internet Marketing sense, they’re happy to look all the way down the first results page. And from (a bit of) research I’ve also found that if they don’t find you the first time they’ll refine their search by typing in an additional phrase or the name of one of your products or whatever.

So I think Internet Marketing (and male) ego are what constantly makes me try to get position number one for my name, even if the entry is about how I defraud little old ladies or steal children’s Christmas money (both of which I’ll be giving up as a New Year’s Resolution)

But now I’m delighted to report, both my Internet Marketing ego AND male ego is happy, because my name is now being used as a keyword for Google Adwords! More than that, when you type in ‘Tony Shepherd’ it’s MY adwords ad that appears above that of my DJ nemesis’

Does this mean I’m now more famous than my DJ rival?

Possibly. And I was happy with that for a while…until curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on his link. And now I have a new crisis on my hands because not only is he better looking than me, but he’s younger too!

So now I’m desperately (beer in one hand, mouse in the other) scrabbling round the Internet trying to find out how much a Capital Radio DJ earns…..

And if it’s more than me, I might have to change my name to Rufus Ganglehorn…

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Idiots – you know – the sort of people who are going somewhere to do something but get distracted by something shiny on the floor.

I’m one.

I’m not distressed by being aware of my idiocy, nor am I proud of it. It’s just there, like my nose or the frog that’s currently hibernating under the barbecue in my garden (I think he’s an idiot too).

But in order to be successful at what you do – in my case Internet Marketing AND be an idiot, you have to come up with little ‘idiot aids’ to help you.

One of these is my ‘always to do’ file on my PC. Sometimes when I come to the end of a project I’m at a bit of a loose end. Once something is completed I struggle a bit deciding what to do next. The problem isn’t that I have nothing to do – it’s that I have a bloody great list of ideas, projects and businesses that all need work. The hard part is deciding what to do.

I know from experience that if I try to actually think about what to do next I end up staring into space, looking at websites I shouldn’t or emailing people who are higher up the idiot tree than me. None of these gets any work done. Not too bad if I had a real job where someone would pay me to stare at the wall, but because of what I do, if I don’t work I don’t eat.

So the folder on my PC is a bit of a lifesaver because it allows me to do small, relatively quick tasks that serve two purposes:

1. They bring in money

2. They allow my brain to decide ‘what comes next’ because it takes some time off from wall-staring doing something which doesn’t involve TOO much thought so it can plan for the future at the same time.

One of these ‘folder’ tasks is to create a small viral report then set if ‘free’ on the net.

Thus it wanders forth and periodically sends money back into my Paypal account. If you want to know how to create these have a look at http://www.viralsneakiness.com

The other things in my folder include stuff like adding autoresponder messages to my sequence, posting on my blogs and writing reports. All of which give the reader some kind of way of sending me money, which of course is what working online is about.

So I was thinking the other day about income streams and what percentage of my income arrives from where. And while the big launches, high profile JV’s and flashy sites obviously generate cash, a very healthy proportion – very healthy – comes from small repetitive tasks like viral reports, stocking up the autoresponders, OTO’s (one time offers) and giveaways with upsell.

It’s small stuff that drives the big bucks in IM.

And I’d be an idiot to forget that.

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This is an email that went out to our subscribers (my own and Sara Brown’s) a couple of days ago. I’m putting it on my blog for a limited time.  If you want access to subscriber offers like this, subscribe to my newsletter using the form on the right

You’ve probably noticed that at Laycock Publishing we’re keeping our blogs much more up to date at the moment – probably more than we ever have done before.

That’s because we’ve had a shock – a bit like someone throwing an
ice cold glass of water into your face – and the shock is this:

Blogs are UNBELIEVABLY profitable.

So to follow the WordPress Guru ebook we gave you some weeks back,
have a look at:

http://www.blogyourwage.com

I’ve mentioned before that we (Sara especially) came to blogging –
serious blogging – much later than I should have and now I can’t
believe how well it works.

Not least because of the income it brings.

And we’d like to offer you a product that explains how we’re doing
it.

The BEST news of all is – it’s free.

This subscriber freebie shows you how to put up and profit from
simple – REALLY simple – blogs even if you hate writing and you
don’t know the first thing about blogs

I won’t take up your time – you’ll see the value in this
immediately.

We expect this to get a lot of traffic so here’s a second link in
case the first gets clogged up.

http://www.sara-brown.com/blogyourwage

Best Wishes

Sara Brown
Tony Shepherd

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People are much more interested in how I fell down a 12 foot hole while heading toward the pub (it would have been much more understandable heading home after a few beers) than they are in how I first went pot holing in my early teens.

They’re more interested in how I got arrested by the police while illegally putting posters up around town advertising my band’s up and coming gig than they are by the fact that I was first published as a writer at the age of 12 (a very short piece I’ll admit, but I did get paid for it).

So I came to the conclusion a log time ago that failure is just as important in life as success – perhaps more so, because you can’t enjoy one without the other, and in terms of learning a lesson from the ‘University of Life’, failures are like being awarded a doctorate, but without the fancy hat.

 Which must be why of all issues of my newsletter it’s issue 5, where a bad Internet Marketing business decision left me out of pocket by $1,000 is the most re-visited newsletter on the whole site. Yes it makes interesting reading , but I’m no Milton – instead there’s one HUGE reason why people like that particular newsletter – people can relate to failure.  

And that’s the reason why no marketer, no matter what level they’re at should ever try to hide or gloss over their cock ups.

As marketers this should be obvious to us. Most of us haven’t made a fortune from a pottery factory but I can’t think of many people who haven’t dropped a plate at some point.

Your subscribers/readers will get tired pretty quickly of hearing about how you earned $100,000 last month from this or that deal, especially if you leave them with sketchy details or miss out some vital information. It’s boring.

Yep – making $100,000 a month is BORING if all you do is read about someone somewhere in some gold plated office somewhere is doing it and you’re not.

 How useful is ‘I made $100,000 over the last 30 days through affiliate marketing’?

It’s not – unless you tell your subscribers and readers exactly how you did it.

Don’t leave out the detail (we all know that’s where the Devil is but it’s also where the DOLLAR is) because every piece of the puzzle, no matter how small contributes to success.

I try and leave in every detail of my successes and failure in my newsletter – (you can subscribe and get instant access to the back issues using the opt-in form on the right) and that’s why I have both a loyal readership and a lot of egg on my face.

New marketers especially who think they have nothing to contribute because they haven’t yet started earning online, listen up-  your failures, are you best marketing tool.

Start a blog documenting how you tried to make some money using ‘so and so’ method, or by promoting whatever opportunity. Then set down in detail what you did and why you think it didn’t work.

Blogs/websites/reports like this are GOLD DUST in an industry where too many people try to ‘fake it till they make it’. Be honest with your readers – they’ll opt in to your newsletter or list to find out how you’re going on, and when you do finally pull in that elusive first hundred dollars (and you will) they’ll be there to buy the ebook or report you write about it, because they trust you, they want to know your methods and they can relate to you.

Just never forget they were attracted first of all by your failures.

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Not that I’m obsessed with being 40 of course – no mid life crisis here although I’m aware I mention my age a lot…..BUT….you’re a lot easier on yourself as you get older.

I always think there are a lot of people out there who are all too eager to give you a hard time so why do it to yourself too? I’m rather lenient with myself – more like a friendly, encouraging schoolteacher than a drill instructor. I sometimes buy myself beer too.

But it took me a while to work this out.

From birth we’re getting certain messages from all sorts of places, and by the Gods they don’t half stick with us through the rest of our lives. I once remember reading something by of all people Billy Connolly. He said that you don’t realise how much ‘baggage’ you carry round with you until someone lifts it off you.

I went for an Indian head massage a bit back. The clinic was on a busy road, and I’d parked my car just round the corner on a sidestreet – maybe 50 yards away.

After the massage I came out into the sunlight and the weirdest thing happened. I burst out laughing – SERIOUSLY cracked up, tears rolling down my face almost wetting myself hysteria. I could hardly get to my car and as luck would have it there was a huge line of cars all waiting for the lights to change, ALL staring at me. I must have looked insane.

When I finally got home I phoned the clinic and they told me it was a common response to massage, reflexology etc. Some people laugh, cry or file for divorce. It’s due to release of stress I’m told. It was a wonderful feeling.

This ‘baggage’ or whatever you want to call it can affect your online business too and I seriously believe it is why some creative, intelligent people fail online.

I get emails from people who want hand holding every step of the way and their most frequent question is ‘is this right?’ or they tell me they didn’t ever launch that website they were telling me about because they were scared of ‘getting it wrong’.

Let’s put this into perspective – if a bomb disposal expert ‘gets it wrong’ then he’s in deep poop. If you don’t quite get the font on your new website correct – you get a second chance.

I’m stopping this post here because I have a free report for you that explains it far better than I’m doing here. it’s interesting stuff – it could explain why you’ve never had quite the success online you think you deserve (and you DO deserve). It’s certainly worth a read anyway. http://www.laycockpublishinglimited.com/youtheguru

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You can skip this post if you want – it might bore the pants off you.

It’s 8.37am on a cold Yorkshire morning and I’m going to tell you about ‘a day in the life of an Internet Marketer’ – the glamour, the sex, the parties….

Actually there’s none of that but there ARE bird nuts and filling the dishwasher. This is a potted history because I’ve only been up an hour or so.

7am ish. Wake up to realise my son (9 months old) has slept through the night – a rare happening – rare enough for my wife to listen to the baby monitor and shhhhhh! me every time I breathe in. Rushes to his room to find him beaming happily at her. He just fancied a full night’s kip.

Daughter wakes next and we go downstairs for breakfast, passing my office where I longingly look at my laptops and PC’s brightly lit and buzzing and want to rush in and check the mornings email. Family must come first depsite the fact that THEY won’t have brought in a single sale as they sleep unlike faithful PC’s.

Coffee, waffles and toast later my daughter finds some peanuts we’ve bought for the birds to eat over winter. Depsite being half dressed and it being bloody cold in the garden we go out and put the bird buts on the table. They wait for us to get back inside and swoop.

As brekky continues I escape to my office and start my morning ritual. Plonking my coffe on the desk in a position that could wipe out all three computers with one spill I go to my email page.

I always make sales. Every day without doubt. This is the result of constantly putting up new websites, blogs and recently, lenses. Internet Marketing is all about numbers. The more sites you have out there selling things, the more money you’ll make. So my income comes from my niche websites, my IM-type websites, affiliate sales, royalties and books under license.

I have a target – an amount of money that I like to make in a day – it’s an off the top of my head target but I don’t really relax (if I’m being totally honest) until I’ve pulled that in. This morning I have – most mornings I do.

The ClickBank cheques arrived a few days ago so it’s nice to see the CB receipts starting to come in for the next cheques in 2 weeks time. I get CB cheques every 2 weeks.

In my inbox is a proposal for an ebook partnership. Some are great, some aren’t but this is an ebook I would buy myself. I’ve swapped emails with the author and now he’s sent me the actual book to read. A quick glance and it looks well written. This is a non-IM type book so will be marketed via a blog that I’ll put up today to get indexed ASAP and then it can be changed accordingly when the books ready for market.

A couple of emails from some IM mates – a bit of gossip (didn’t know HE was in trouble!) and some from the mailing lists I’m on providing great content, and some ‘buy me buy me buy me’ ones.

An email from my business partner telling me that a site I promised I’d finish for the end of the week isn’t finished, and another saying I’d had a product accepted for a big ‘giveaway’ type launch done by a well know IM’er. That should bring in a few subscribers to my newsletter.

My wife then walks in and instructs me to ‘shred something’ because she needs some packing for a parcel she’s sending out. She’s also planned a trip for us to buy an antique kitchen rack thing and a new desk for her workroom this afternoon.

Two emails I’m waiting for about meetings next week for new projects I’m involved with don’t arrive. I’ll wait until tomorrow. I write my ‘turd do’ list (dunno why I call it that) and think about a coffee refill. It’s 9am now and I’m wondering whether to actually post this on my blog or does it seem a bit anal?

I’m going to post it because it proves a point – and this is it. I’m 40 years old and I made more money this morning than some people do in a week. Just by waking up and checking my email. Obviously that’s not true – I had to set up an awful lot of websites and do a lot of work to get to this point, but Internet Marketing is LIKE THAT.

Prepare for capital letters – THE MORE WORK YOU DO, THE EASIER IT GETS. Because every new websites piles on top of the last one, and they all keep trickling money into your bank account. And you get to a ‘criticial mass’ stage where you don’t need to do much except take on the role of a gardener and tend to your money plants every once in a while to make sure they don’t die.

I’m not a guru – I dunno how you got to my blog but I bet a fair old percentage of you don’t have a bloody clue who I am. And that is COOL – I like it that way. Gurus work hard to preserve an image and maintain quality. I can sit down and watch the rugby instead.

Non-gurus is where it’s going guys. Quiet, background marketers like me, working in IM and niche marketing and earning a nice amount of money without being an IM rock star. My lifestyle is wonderful. I’ve now done my work for a while. I’m going to go back into the family room now and spend a bit of time with them.

It was a while ago now that I got my business to the point where I could work just a few hours a day and make over $10,000 a month easily. I knew I had to do it before my children were born because I wouldn’t want to work as much once they were here.

I started online with a single website – actually that’s a stupid thing to say because we all start with one – but you see what I mean. Build a website – promote it. Build another. Now build a blog. It’s not hard but it takes consistency. You have to do a bit on a regular basis.

Just got an email from my sis – she’s very successful in medecine. Earns well, lives well. And she drives 100 miles a day round trip and is at her desk from 6.30am until 6.30pm. Imagine what SHE could do in IM with that sort of commitment?

IM is easier than having a full time job…once you get to critical mass that is. 

Easy for me to say now.

But it wasn’t always….

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It’s easy to imagine when you’re reading through forum posts, and contributing to them yourself that you’re in a community that has rules and regulations, and that certain ‘authority figures’ might frown on you if you do something they don’t like. If you’re a newbie you might even have a sense that you could get ‘banned’ from Internet Marketing for not following the somewhat unwritten rules and codes that seem to float about in our business.

Yeah well you couldn’t be any more wrong if you had a degree in wrongness from the University of Southern Wrongville.

There are no rules except one…don’t talk about fight club…..whoops sorry wrong neuron – the ONLY rule you need to follow is to do things your own way and don’t get sucked into what you’re ‘supposed’ to do.

In Internet Marketing the most successful people are rule breakers. the most successful people rub others up the wrong way and basically make a bloody nuisance of themselves. That’s exactly why they’re successful.

If I want to paint my ass green and red and make a Camtasia video of it cashing a Clickbank cheque as proof of my earnings then I’ll do it, regardless of what anyone else in IM thinks or says. Probably won’t make much money mind but it WILL  probably get quite a bit of YouTube airplay. Not that my mother would like though.

And that’s the point. The Internet, depsite many attempts to govern, regulate and even censor content is still the final frontier in terms of freedom today. If you want to try something new in your business chances are you’ll be told it either won’t work or will p*ss people off.

So what?

It costs very little to fail on the net, but the rewards for success are huge. Go try stuff – silly stuff – try making money in the wildest most preposterous ways imaginable.

And when some self appointed referee quietly PM’s you and tells you that you’re going about things in the wrong way and you won’t make much in terms of friends or money, think deeply about his advice, search your soul for the answer…..

Then tell him to bugger off and go try it your way 🙂 

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So it took a little longer to get indexed than I expected – four days actually, but now I’m well and truly indexed.

If you want to find out how I did it, pick up this free publication http://www.anthony-shepherd.com/wpg  – the methods are all in there, and they’re quick and simple to use.

 Kids…..

My children run in and out of my office during the day when I’m working, which is cool – I love having them around and they get to see that Dad actually DOES some work, because the whole concept of work is a bit tricky for them. They can’t quite understand why their friend’s parents have to leave the house to work, and can’t just wander downstairs for a game, a snack or (as recently) to abandon work completely to go and build a squirrel table in the garden so we can watch the little blighters eat peanuts for an hour or so.

I worried about this for a while, thinking they weren’t getting a ‘real’ picture of what work was actually like – my job as a work from home full time Internet Marketer being a little out of the ordinary.

Then I realised that them having a distorted picture of work is a good thing – if they don’t know about having to commute, having a 9-5, working weekends and overtime and basically being out of the house a lot, then great! Let them follow my path (if they want of course) and be the exception to the rule.

Kids often turn out different to their parents expectations though – but as long as they’re happy, who am I to judge if they want to get on the corporate treadmill and work a ‘real’ job for a living?

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