When you are at a 3 day event which you know starts at 9am each morning, it pays to get an early night and a good bout of sleep. Of course, that is easier said than done.

Friday night was another late one with lots of the Focus 4 the Future attendees staying up for a few drinks and several impromptu “brain-storming” sessions.

So, a little worse for wear, I proceeded from breakfast to go into the seminar room again and watch the first session of the day – a hot seat.

This time around another Dave, owner of a eBook-producing software product, displayed his site on the front screen and then braved the chair.

Although this was technically a hot seat session, the experts agreed that there wasn’t too much wrong with Dave’s site but were still able to offer plenty of constructive critisism.

The content “above the fold” i.e. where the site naturally lies on loading, the part visible without scrolling – was fine.

Advice included that he should remove the company name, emphasise the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and quote the number of users of his product in the headline.

The big suggestion though was that he should remove the clickable links from his testimonials as it is a customer leak. By all means mention the URL but do not allow users to navigate away to someone else’s site.

On visiting the site today, it looks like the victim has actually took to heart the suggestions and changed the site!

As of September 2006, EasyeBookPro has actually sold 12,000 copies which is proudly displayed in the headline.

You can view Dave McGregor’s site at:

http://www.EasyeBookPro.co.uk

By now we are up to the afternoon spot on the first day of the Birmingham F4TF seminar and the spotlight landed on Martin Avis.

Martin’s subject of choice was Private Label Rights or, as it is usually known, PLR.

If you didn’t already know, when you buy PLR material you have the right to change anything about the information in order to make it your own content or product.

Private Label Rights material is usually delivered as simple text files which are ready for editing into unique products such as eBooks, articles, newsletter content or website content.

As Martin pointed out during his presentation, the hardest part of marketing on the internet for most people is actually getting started. With PLR material, however, you get almost everything done for you.

You get market research, keyword research, commissioned writers already working on your behalf and professional content for your products. And you can get this regularly through membership sites.

It is quite possible to be able to output 2 or 3 quality eBooks per month using just the material you receive from a $30 per month subscription to a Private Label Rights membership site.

Perhaps the biggest bonus of using PLR is that the saleable material is provided for you so that you can concentrate on the profitable part – selling your products.

Martin covered a lot of ground during his 90 minutes or so – I managed to make a whole load of notes.

His talk included details about 11 ways to use PLR books, 18 ways to profit from PLR articles and a new plan he is developing for a technophobe relative called the “Kickstart, Quickstart Plan”.

He even spilled the beans on how profitable using PLR can be. When he first stood up to talk at around 2.20pm, he mentioned that, on checking his stats 5 minutes before, he had made around $500 since breakfast!

The point he made was that it isn’t hard to make a website using Private Label Rights which could bring in $10 a day – but $10 a day is $3,650 per year. Make 10, 20, 100 sites and you are talking about a huge income.

It was a great session from which I learnt a lot about a subject I hadn’t really researched before and topped off a very interesting day.

You can buy Martin Avis’ book:
“Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks”
from the following site:

http://www.PLRSecrets.co.uk

Following on from yesterday’s account we come to the mid-part of Friday.

After Robert Puddy’s “speech” the speakers and one guest took part in a very useful feature which is a trademark of the Focus 4 the Future seminars – the “hot seat“.

The hot seat is a great idea and a very useful experience for all attendees.

The basic idea is that one member of the audience volunteers to have their site put up on the screen at the front of the room and then the expert speakers “rip it apart”.

They go through the site and point out all potential problems – from likely visitor leaks to useless links and features. It’s brutal but fascinating – a superb source of ideas for everyone, no one’s site is perfect afterall.

Of course, once they have ripped the site apart they help the owner to repair the “damage”. He gets a thorough make-over to assist him in optimising the site for its primary purpose.

What I found was that I was making a lot of the same mistakes as many of the volunteers – so soon after the seminar I fixed the leaks.

Results?

Well, my subscriber rate is now around 50% where it used to be around 28% so I certainly got my money’s worth 🙂

The victim for the first hot seat was David, the owner of:

http://www.TheNettle.com/index.php.

I’m sure he won’t mind me outing him as a volunteer for the hot seat – soon after the seminar I signed up for his subscription-only member’s site and newsletter. Although he hasn’t made the changes suggested by the seminar speakers yet, I do know that he has almost finished the new look to his site, which will be implemented soon.

You can get a free trial of The Nettle by going to:

http://www.TheNettle.com/freetrial.php

Next time – Friday’s afternoon session with Martin Avis…

On Saturday I made a 130 mile round-trip to attend the monthly “BritPack” mastermind meeting in Wakefield.

I won’t mention who was there but there were 7 of us in attendance this time around including a couple of very successful marketers. The group was set-up by Robert Puddy, the UK internet marketer behind the new membership site product called “Launch Formula Marketing”.

Whilst I was there I got chatting to one of the people who I met during the Focus 4 the Future weekend seminar in Birmingham back in September. We’ve both been busy making use of the techniques and tips that the speakers divulged to us over the three days (1st, 2nd and 3rd September).

It was during this chat that I remembered – I haven’t written a report about the weekend yet. So, over the next few days I will be covering the event including my notes (which were very extensive!)

This was my first seminar. I went down to Birmingham straight from work on the Thursday, getting to the Aston Business School at around 8pm. I dumped my bags and made my way down to the bar to mingle a little. It turns out that getting there one night early was a great idea – I got chatting with some of the speakers and some of my fellow attendees and picked up a load of extremely useful info before the seminar had even begun.

Come Friday morning I was up early for breakfast and then we all registered and went into the room for the first session which was on list-building and given by Robert Puddy, the seminar organiser.

Robert gave a 90 minute talk on the importance of creating a large subscriber list with the aim of turning these leads into customers. List building is a must for any business and he covered the various methods of creating a list including using traffic exchanges, safe lists, free for all (FFA) websites, offering free eBooks, articles and more.

His parting shot was excellent when he asked – what is the number one thing you want people to do when you send them to a website?

The answer: whatever it is, make sure that the whole page is geared to that one action… which I have been trying to do 🙂

Check out more about the BritPack at:

http://www.BritPackUK.com/members/index.php

I always like to take a long train journey simply because it gives me chance to read a load of magazines.

When I went to Robert Puddy’s “Focus 4 the Future” seminar in Birmingham last September, I picked up a copy of the Small Business Opportunities magazine for the train journey.

On the front of the November 2006 edition was the following:

– YES! Make $4000 a day in no-work biz
– Top 50 shoestring start-ups
– 25 New biz ‘dynamos’ you can start for as little as $50
– Grow A Fortune: Make a whopping $107 million from office plants
– Auto-matic riches! Clever car-share biz drives home $10 million

In reality, the magazine contained around 140 pages with 35 pages featuring stories and articles and the remaining 105 focusing entirely on adverts!

The magazine is a US publication and so it is very hypey in nature. There are some gems though.

For example: “If I could show you a way to put $58,000 in your pocket by investing just $395, would you watch an 11 minute video that explains how?” – from a mortgage reduction company.

There are lots of adverts for vending opportunities, MLM schemes, pyramid schemes such as the now defunct Prosperity Automated System, envelope stuffing scams, mailing lists, real estate companies and more.

People say that we in the UK lag behind the US so, technically, I should be able to see what will be big over here soon.

Unfortunately, I can’t see any big opportunities which aren’t already in the UK, just lots of people with cheesy smiles advertising over-rated schemes.

One advertisement which did catch the eye was one from Mr T.J. Rohleder who was offering a free book called “How to Make $900 a Day Without Doing Any Work!”

T.J. Rohleder was one of the people whose products were included when Stuart Goldsmith did some retirement seminars in 2005.

The classified pages threw up some seriously naff adverts, many featuring people pushing the usual pyramid schemes – PAS and the 1-Step System.

Perhaps the worst examples of shifty adverts are those which make a big deal of being “christian”. In one example, the promoter makes the headline read “A Christian Home-Based MLM” and continues with:

“Become part of a company that will help you reach Financial Freedom, the opportunity to spread God’s Word and the opportunity to help other do the same.”

Maybe it’s just me but trying to sell a multi-level marketing scheme based solely on your religious beliefs is rather strange and also smacks of desperation.

Although an interesting read, I won’t be buying Small Business Opportunities magazine again but you might be able to find it in WHSmiths for £3.50 if you are interested.