I’ve just got access to this material after a trusted friend called it:

“…what I consider to be one of the most important Internet Marketing courses available – I know that it’s the one that really got my online career on track…”

I’ve been darting in and out of the membership area, reading through the instructions and watching the videos – there’s lots of really good instructional material here.

Well worth the low price.

However, I wanted to mention this today because it is currently on special offer – but only until this Sunday.

Usually full lifetime access to “You Can Make a Living Online” is $197 as you can see here:

[link no longer active]

But – don’t buy from that link!

From today until Sunday it is part of the Weekend Super Deal and is on offer for a whole lot less than that.

I highly recommend this course, and warrant it as a “must-have” at this bargain price.

Check it out, before it’s put back up to full price!

[link no longer active]

In one post on this blog (Advertising Offline to Drive Traffic to a Website) I moaned that an advert in the Exchange and Mart didn’t perform for me.

However, this past week I received some advice from an expert in driving sales from classified advertising, Tim Lowe.

He said that I could publish the advice so here it is:

“Hi Ben

I saw you were doing this and wondered how it would turn out.

For what it is worth I have, occasionally, made out OK with Exchange & Mart but not for a couple of years.

The major nationals are my favourites.

Just picking up on your comments about visitor numbers, I wouldn’t dismiss 50 or so visitors as not enough to do well. My experience, with a good offer, has been sometimes over 20% conversion ‘visitors to sales’ so it is possible to make a decent profit from small numbers of visits. In fact if I get 300 – 400 visitors each week in total I can make a nice living.

Of course, the key is a good ad and sales letter – what may pass muster with SEO traffic, just through weight of numbers, may not do well with offline ads.

A key point that you may not have noticed is the need for hard copy follow ups. I have always offered people a few links to order an “information pack” in the post, which is essentially just the website in printed format. This is surprisingly popular as people dislike reading screens for very long and it also gives people a hard copy which they seem to like, maybe to read in bed or on the train. Whatever the reaons, I know that this brings in a huge amount of extra sales. Just recently I have been having trouble with the data capture service that I use and have not been able to send out these follow up packs, sales are literally half the normal volume as a result.

I do feel for the people that you describe who all tried selling the same products with the same sales letter. There is no question that having what looks like a unique offer will always outsell a “me too” product. Common sense tells us that 3 people selling the same thing with the same advertising will only get one third of the potential sales each. One of the things that I have been teaching people at workhops is how to make yourself stand out from the crowd with unique offers and approaches to selling similar products. It is essential to give potential customers reasons to choose your offer over other people’s, otherwise you cannot expect to sell much at all, but this is such a simple point that it is often overlooked.

I hope this is helpful, if so then please feel free to publish it.

Kind regards

Tim Lowe”

Some interesting and helpful advice there – thanks for taking the time to email me!

The Weekend Super Deal has just opened and this week David Allen is offering resale rights to 12 quality products.

Don’t miss out on this one, these products would make excellent stand-alone or bonus offerings but you have to get in there quickly because this deal is removed on Sunday:

http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.co.uk

Domain Name Speculation

Back in August I wrote a short blog post about domain speculation, in particular 4 lettered dot com domains.

You can read that particular post here:

LLLL.com Domain Name Availability Decreasing Quickly

I wish I’d followed up on that particular post as they have now all been registered.

If you did read my blog post, I hope that you took the opportunity to register a few of these types of domains when you had the chance because it just got a lot harder to get hold of them.

As of last week every 4 letter dot com is now taken, all 456,976 of them.

This means that if you want one now, you have to buy it in the aftermarket – you can’t just pop over to GoDaddy and register one.

Over the past couple of months the number of available so-called LLLL.coms has diminished rapidly as domainers across the globe have added a few to their portfolios.

It’s all complete speculation, of course.

LLLL.coms have sold out but there is no guarantee that they will ever be worth a significant amount of money.

However, I have been able to make a little profit out of this sell-out event.

In fact, a domain I won at auction a couple of weeks ago for $70 was snapped up for $200 within 20 minutes of me listing it.

And I’ve got another 18 to sell!

Could be an interesting couple of months!

Lazy Lay Profit System aka “The Coffee Break Millionaire”

After I mentioned this system last week I decided to give a test.

I’ve got the manual now and have studied the exact system I need to use. It’s all remarkably simple to follow and so I am putting some seed capital aside and following the plan for 30 days.

When I am finished, I will publish the exact results for everybody to see. Hopefully I will be well in profit and will have a new “cash cow” to milk.

The plan is to start with £200 and risk 5% per betting opportunity.

(The system says 10% but I am extra cautious.)

If/when the £200 doubles I will remove £200 and play with the winnings.

Last night was a mixed night – two races, one win one loss but the second horse lost by a mile – it was never actually in the race really.

So, fingers crossed that this one works and I can make some money!

Sunday Times Biz Opps Ads

Call me sad but I have a large collection of the “Business to Business” pages from the Sunday Times going back about 2 years.

It all stems from first discovering Tim Lowe’s method of selling biz opps – I wanted to keep track on which adverts constantly appear in the paper.

My reasoning is that if they are appearing week after week, they must be working. They would then be the ones to model an advertisement on if I ever decided to sell through a small classified ad and website combination.

It’s very interesting looking back from the first ads I have to the ones featured this Sunday just gone.

Looking at the adverts from July 31st 2005 I can see two particular opps which have stood the test of time:

(1) Vince Stanzione’s Spread Betting Opp and
(2) the “NHBusiness” newsletter

Both are still advertising in the paper – Vince’s advert is almost exactly the same now as it was in mid 2005.

Unfortunately, over the two years I have been watching these adverts, I have seen a lot of people appear for only one week and then disappear forever.

One particular week I saw no less that twelve people advertising exactly the same opporunity on the same page of the Times.

No doubt that was a great week for the Times but a terrible week for everybody advertising those particular DVDs!

I’ve never took the plunge with an advert in either the Times or the Mail on Sunday but I did have a go at advertising in the Exchange and Mart.

You can read about that unprofitable experience here:

Advertising Offline to Drive Traffic to a Website

Unsubscribe Comments

If you run a newsletter through a service like Aweber, as I do, it automatically questions somebody who unsubscribes from your list.

Basically it says “Please can you take a couple of seconds to let us know why you have unsubscribed“.

Many people don’t bother writing anything but there are some kind people who take the time to let me know why they decided to stop receiving these newsletters.

For example, here’s a great one from Thursday:

“Mainly because I cannot keep up with so many emails reaching my inbox, when I seem to be moving house frequently and can’t do justice to anything extra.

Thanks, Ben, and the other reason really is that I lost such a wedge of money to [name removed] and also [name removed], that I am disillusioned with practically everything which tells me I can make some money.

You’re a good man. You wanted my reasons. Sorry!
Regards
[name removed]”

I’m very grateful for his constructive comments and sorry to see him leave the list.

However, the second unsubscribe comment I got on Thursday was far less constructive. It simply said:

“rubbish”

Well, you can’t win them all!

Your Emails

I’ve got a fair few emails to reply to so please bear with me if you have written to me in the last week or so. I will try and catch up over the weekend.

A few people asked about the same things from last week so I will try to cover those topics here:

First of all, the RentaCoder person I used who did such a good job on my friend’s website goes by the username “abha” on the RentaCoder website.

He’s got a great rating and is apparently in the top 25 of coders worldwide as rated on RAC.

The other opportunity that people have been asking about is the “Information Entrepreneur’s Circle” from Streetwise.

I did write a little about my thoughts on this one on a blog post which you can read here:

The Information Entrepreneurs Circle from Streetwise Publications

If you have signed up for this one I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Finally…

Don’t forget to check out this Weekend’s Super Deal from David Allen.

He is offering a load of quality products with resalerights but only until Sunday so go and look now if you wantin on the deal!

http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.co.uk

First of all, I want to remind you about this week’s “Weekend Super Deal” from David Allen.

David has packaged together a load of high-quality information products and is offering Private Label Rights on all of them. This means that you can edit them in any way you like to form your own products. Perfect if you are struggling for something to sell.

Check it out here:

http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.com/latestdeal.php

And don’t forget, the doors close on Sunday so be quick and grab it now whilst it’s still available!

Out-tasking – it works!

A few weeks ago a friend came to me asking for help in setting up a website for his wife’s new business.

I’m pretty good with HTML so I didn’t think it would be a problem but what I found was that I am no designer. I was always pretty poor in art class at school and nothing has changed.

Anyway, the project stalled for a few weeks whilst I tried to sort out a good design which matched my friend’s requirements.

Eventually I admitted defeat and decided to out-task the job.

So, I went over to RentACoder.com and submitted a “bid request”.

What this means is that I posted a listing which described my requirements (design and building of a 12 page html website) and then this was listed on the site where web design experts could compete for the work.

As it happens I got 26 bids on my work – in the first 24 hours. After that I think my job dropped down the list and so didn’t receive any more bids.

The lowest bid that was submitted was $50 and the highest $650!

I got bids from the UK, US, Romania, Pakistan, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka and Cambodia.

Now, what you will find when you start to deal with sites like RAC is that people will just bid on your work without reading your requirements. They simply bid on every job they see to try and snare one or two people – almost like spamming.

What I found is that if you include a little bit of text in the description box of your bid request, you can suss out who actually read your request properly and who didn’t.

Obviously, anyone who didn’t should not be considered for the task because they may not be suited.

Here’s the text I used to stop the “spammers”:

“Please ensure that you add the keyphrase ‘BUTTERFLY’ in all messages you send to me.”

Now, as was looking through the bid requests I simply ignored any which did not mention that specific word in the message.

Straight away, then and there, I knew if that bidder understood the job I needed doing.

I can’t take credit for that little trick as it is something Mike Filsaime mentioned somewhere but it is a technique that I always use.

As for the site, it was done and finished in a little over 5 days. Brilliant work by the coder and my friend was happy.

Out-tasking works and I highly recommend you use it whenever you get stuck or whenever a project requires some work that is outside of your skill-base.

Yes, it costs money to use an out-tasker but in the end it saves a lot of time…

The Brit Pack Live Seminar, October

I recently spent 3 days down in Coventry to attend Robert Puddy’s internet marketing seminar.

What a great weekend!

Over the 3 days, Bob packed in 9 expert speakers, a load of ‘hot seat’ sessions and several ‘Ask the Expert’ free-for-alls.

The speakers were excellent even though I must admit that I hadn’t heard of half of them prior to the seminar. Just goes to show that some of the real big guns stay in the background.

There were only about 70 attendees and it made for a superb networking event with everybody coming down to the hotel bar each day after the presentations.

Unfortunately, I completely missed the Sunday morning presentations due to a ridiculously late Saturday night ‘networking’ session.

A large group of us were still propping the bar up at 6.30am Sunday morning.

Again I have to say that you really should consider attending next year. Everybody was raving about the weekend and I came away motivated and raring to go.

The next one is next October so I will be mentioning it nearer the time.

I’ve already booked my ticket.

Global Pension Plan

Some time ago I mentioned this particular “program” in a newsletter as it had been creating quite a stir.

In response to several requests, I wrote my personal thoughts on this so-called reverse pension plan on the main BizOppsUK site. You can read that report here:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/global_pension_plan.php

Apparently the plan has now finished recruiting new members – it claims to have the 100,000 members it needs and so it can now, in theory, pay out the vast fortunes it has been promising to members.

I’m still very sceptical but I suppose we will have to wait and see what happens.

My guess is that the people behind this scheme will continue to provide excuses as to why no-one has been paid until one day the site goes offline and never reappears.

The blog has been very busy with people posting their opinions on this one. In fact, as I write, it is easily the most commented-on post on the BizOppsBlog by far with 49 comments.

You can read all the comments here:

Global Pension Plan – Do Your Due Diligence

Feel free to provide your opinion on this one. With 100k members (or maybe even more), a lot of people have a huge interest in what happens.

The Lazy Lay Profit System

I have been receiving a lot of enquiries about this one over the past few weeks.

Back in April I wrote a blog post about this one when Streetwise were sending out sales letters offering it.

The Lazy Lay Quick Cash System from Streetwise Publications

It’d be very interesting to hear your thoughts on this one if you have bought it. I know that a lot of readers of this newsletter are horse racing fans.

==========================

Don’t forget to check out the Weekend Super Deal – it’s a bargain not to be missed!

http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.com/latestdeal.php

Have a great weekend!

Thanks,

Ben