Dan’s Blog

Ever since I first started online I’ve struggled to be consistently productive. I think I have what you might call ‘lazy ass syndrome.’ Sure, I have certain days when I get absolutely everything done and there’s no stopping me, but the trouble is that after this I’m then left feeling so pleased with myself that I hardly get anything at all done for the next couple of days.

Sound familiar at all? I think it’s something most people can relate to actually.

Recently however I’ve been forcing myself to be more productive each and every day, so I’ve written up some of the strategies I’ve been using in this blog post.

Make a to-do list the night before

One thing I absolutely hate is turning on my computer in the morning and then deciding there and then what I’m going to do. The problem is you start checking your emails which have come in overnight and looking at your Google Analytics stats – all essential things to do I agree but not very productive in terms of moving your business forward. By writing out my to-do list as the last thing I do each day I can turn on my computer the following morning and immediately get to work.

Don’t try to be a perfectionist

The truth is perfection simply doesn’t exist – and one persons ‘perfect’ is very different from somebody elses. I’m as guilty as hell of tweaking things to the point where I never actually finish them. Don’t get it perfect, get it out there.

Don’t overload yourself with work

One of the biggest reasons why you might not be very productive is that you have too much work to do. If you sit there and you feel like you’ve got a mountain to climb before the end of the day then it’s pretty unmotivational to say the least. Make sure that you allocate yourself a workload each day that is manageable and realistic – How much better would it feel to get to the end of the day and know that you’ve gotten everything done that you wanted to in the morning?

Do the things you hate doing first

It took me quite a while to figure this one out but by getting the tasks you dread done first thing in the morning you are lifting a massive weight off your shoulders and you’ll find it easier to do the rest of your tasks.

Think about what working environment suits you best

I personally like to work with the radio on but I know other people who prefer to work in absolute silence. Try out different working environments and find out which one suits you best.

Have a change of scene

I have a lovely big office at home – but funnily enough I don’t work from it every single day. If you’re ever sitting there and feel like you’re lacking a bit of inspiration it’s amazing what getting up and working from a different room can do. It gives you a whole new take on things and I find that new ideas come to me and I can focus much better.

Realize that you can’t do it all yourself

I don’t like outsourcing because I’m a picky sod and usually end up feeling dissatisfied with the work of others – but I have to force myself to outsource because you need to realize you can’t do everything yourself. If you want to become more productive you need to outsource the things you don’t enjoy, aren’t good at or simply don’t have the time to do so that you can free yourself to do other more productive things.

Give yourself a deadline

I like to give myself a deadline for everything and I tell myself I’ll turn my computer off at a certain time and it MUST be done by then. I got this from my days as an employee. You know the sort of thing – you were working on a report for your boss which you thought was in by the end of the week. Then your boss comes in on Wednesday morning and says there has been a change of plan and he needs the report by the end of today instead. You can bet your bottom dollar you’ll have finished it by Wednesday afternoon but if your boss hadn’t have told you that you would still have been working on it until last thing Friday afternoon.

Do you have any productivity tips of your own? Let me know by leaving a comment now.

Wow – where did the time go? Everything went so fast and I see it’s two months since my last blog post! Pretty shocking and I shall do my best to rectify the situation

So what have I been up to recently?

Well quite a few things actually and I have a number of new sites and projects in the pipeline which I’ll keep you up to speed on.

My latest site however is ready TODAY…

Introducing DirectPLR.com – Top quality PLR content, as and when you need it.

(Click on the screenshot on the right to check out the site)

I started writing and selling my own PLR because I’ve bought lots of PLR myself over the years and I’ve usually been left disappointed. Lots of the PLR you find online is very poor quality and often contains spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and even outdated or incorrect information. I knew I could do better and so Direct PLR was born!

Some of you are also members of my FirstPLR.com site and this sits along side it nicely.

All of my PLR content is:

• Unique PLR – You won’t find the same PLR for sale on other websites.
• Limited-release PLR – I usually limit each PLR pack to just 50 or 100 people, meaning you can be sure that only a strictly limited number of people have the same PLR content as you.
• Written to a high standard by a native English speaker qualified to Degree standard (ie. little old me!!)
• Interesting, informative and relevant today – No more PLR containing incorrect or outdated information!

Click here for more info.

Thanks – and I’ll be back with another blog post very soon.

Daniel

I’ve just returned from a short break to the Central/Welsh borders.

It was mainly a “chill out, away from it all” kind of holiday (vacation) with the family and involved a little walking, a couple of trips around local museums and some wine and good food in the evenings (the most important part of course

The picture on the right is at Ludlow Castle, and the other one is at a Victorian museum – which was VERY interesting.

We didn’t do anything especially exciting…

Yet AMAZING things happened whilst I was away.

I had several business ideas – and a couple of “lightbulb” moments – which I just know are going to make me a lot of money.

Before we went away I had been quite busy and wrapped up in lots of day to day tasks. Basically just ‘running my business.’

I was lacking in ideas and little direction, yet a few days away in the countryside and I could think freely again.

It’s not just holidays away that have this affect on me either. I often get business ideas when I’m lying in bed at night or when I’m taking a bath or a shower in the mornings.

Yet sit me in front of the computer all day and I find I start staring at the screen like a totally lost zombie with no ideas and no perspective.

It’s the same when you’re working full time in a day job. You spend so much of your life just ‘doing your job’ that it leaves little time for thinking of business ideas of your own. You get home at the end of the day and you’re basically just so knackered that the only thing you want to do is curl up in front of the TV and have a beer.

So next time you’re feeling lost or stuck for ideas with your online business – take a break. It’ll do wonders for your business and your bank balance.

By the way I know that this is nothing new. It just one of those things that it does you good to be reminded of every once in a while.

Next weekend I’m off for break with some mates and it’ll be a very different kind of holiday (most likely involving lots of alcohol hehe)

That probably won’t have much of a positive impact on my online business and it will affect my bank balance in a negative way, but there you go

Comments are of course welcome…

———–
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I’ve just spotted what looks like a fantastic new PLR report. It comes with graphics and some pretty cool extras like a 10-part autoresponder series and a ready-made mini site and sales letter.

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It’s a mistake to try and design your product or service so that it tries to appeal to everyone in your market. You just can’t do it – yet it’s a mistake I see people making all the time…

A training course which contains information suitable for newbie internet marketers just isn’t going to appeal to a marketer who has 5 years experience.

It’s absolute vital when you market a product (whether it’s your own or one you’re promoting as an affiliate) that you know exactly WHO you target market is.

I was watching a sales video the other day for an internet marketing training course and within the video were statements such as:

This is NOT for people who want a push button solution.
This is NOT for people without a list.
This is NOT for people who aren’t making money online.
This IS for people who are already making a full-time income online and want to learn how grow their business dramatically in the quickest possible time

The sales video was basically actively excluding perhaps 95% of people in the ‘make money online’ niche.

An unwise move to exclude such a large proportion of the market?

Definitely NOT! It was a fantastic sales video because what it in effect did was shout out to the remaining 5% of people “this is the product for YOU! This is the solution that you need!”

Your product or offer needs to be targeted at a very specific group of people.

You need to know who they are in order to be able to market to them effectively – and this is where I find writing a ‘pen portrait’ extremely useful.

A pen portrait is basically a description of the person who will buy your product; the person you are aiming it at.

It might be:

“David Smith. Aged 32. Has been involved with internet marketing for a couple of years. Last year however David quit his job to run his own online business selling ebooks and video information products. His business is currently earning $2,500 a month profit and he is keen to grow his business and increase his profits to $5,000 a month.”

I reckon that was roughly the pen portrait of the person the product I was looking at the other day was aimed at.

Of course your pen portrait might be completely different. Let’s say you’re trying to sell a product about “how to date more women.”

My pen portrait might be:

“Thomas Jefferson. Aged in his early 20s. Thomas has always struggled with his self confidence. He finds it difficult to talk to women in clubs or know how to strike up a conversation with strangers. He is an intelligent person but lacks self confidence. He wants to know how he can approach women and how to make them like him.”

Of course not everyone who wants to buy your product is going to fit your pen portrait exactly, but I find that writing it down really helps you to define who you are aiming this product at.

Who is going to buy your product? What are they like? What’s their background and where are they now? Where do they want to be? What are their interests? What are they good at? What are they bad at? What are their hopes and fears?

When you’re creating your sales page, you can then talk about the hopes and fears of your target audience. Carrying on the same example, your sales page might say “I used to walk up to women in clubs and practically freeze. I didn’t know what to say and I used to feel like an idiot. Then I discovered the secrets to boosting my self confidence. Now I find it easy to date women, thanks to the techniques I’m going to share with you inside my new product ‘Date More Women.’

That isn’t me btw – and I’m not suggesting your sales page would use those exact words – but hopefully you understand what I’m getting at

By being clear about your target audience and making it very specific you’ll make more sales. The 5% of the wider market whom you ARE aiming your product at will see your sales page and think “Wow – this product is for ME! It’s the one I’ve been waiting for and fits my situation perfectly. They are talking to ME!” Then of course they’ll buy it.

Define your target audience. Know who they are. It’ll help you be a more effective marketer and sell more products.

Comments welcome, as always (in fact your comments and emails are what really make my days

I’ve just returned from a trip to Wimbledon and all in all I had an absolutely wonderful time

Getting tickets for tennis’s most famous tournament is not easy and we had to camp out overnight to secure our seats on Centre Court.

It’s well worth it though because whilst it’s great to watch it on TV there’s definitely nothing quite like being there.

The only not so enjoyable moment was waking up at 3am to a rather soggy pillow and water dripping on my head.

It was bucketing it down outside and the tent was leaking. Great!

My niece, who was in a separate tent next to us, had no such problems of course.

It’s all good fun though because once we were into the grounds and sat in our seats we could really sit back and enjoy the electric atmosphere generated by the thousands of fans.

It’s not just about the tennis though. Wimbledon is as famous for it’s strawberries and cream, jugs of Pimms and the rather unpredictable British weather, as it is for fluffy yellow balls being walloped over a net at circa 100mph.

If you ever get the chance to go, I would highly recommend it. We normally camp each year for tickets and it’s great fun.

So you might be wondering what this has got to do with internet marketing?

Well when you think about it we can learn a lot from the world’s top tennis players.

Anyone who steps onto that Centre Court hasn’t got there by chance. They have worked hard for years, training day in and day out in the gym and on the practice court. They have had to spend years playing tiny tournaments with no facilities (and being watched by the proverbial one man and his dog) before they step anywhere near the big tournaments like Wimbledon or the French Open.

It’s the same in internet marketing. Despite what some of the more ‘hypey’ sales pages out there might have you believe, making lots of money online doesn’t just happen overnight. There’s no push button solution or instant cash machine where you press a button and money falls out. You’ve got to work hard at it and put in the work to consistently make money online.

But that’s not the only thing we can learn from tennis.

You’ve probably heard the expression ‘the ball’s in your court’ and that definitely applies when you work online. As internet marketers we must make decisions each and every day. We must try things out. Experiment with different style squeeze pages, products and autoresponder sequences.

It’s what I love about internet marketing and it’s why I feel motivated every day when I get up in the morning.

It’s also a little scary, especially when you’re not used to it.

Just as tennis is an individual sport, internet marketing is pretty much all down to you. Nobody’s going to do it for you. You must decide what shot you’re next going to play and where within the court you’re going to aim.

Making decisions is hard but if you want to succeed online you must get used to doing it each and every day.

There’s also a fine line between success and failure online. Even professional tennis players make mistakes and have days when it seems like they can hardly hit the ball into the court. The best players however seem to have the knack of ‘finding a way to win’, even when they aren’t playing especially well or their back is to the wall. It’s the ability to be two sets to Love down, face a match point and somehow come back to win in five sets which separates the great from merely the very good.

As marketers we make mistakes all the time. Things don’t always go as well as you expect them to and some days you sit there and think ‘I’m never going to succeed online.’ You need to learn from your mistakes, fight back and have the drive to carry on. If you send out a promo to your list one day and it absolutely bombs – don’t get too downhearted. Just put it down to experience, learn from it and carry on.

I’ve also always believed that as an internet marketer you’ve got to aim for above the net. The best marketers do things just that little bit better and aim that bit higher than marketers who fail online. If you provide fantastic value to your customers and market in such a way that you are always providing great content to people – content which is better than other marketers offerings – then you will succeed.

Finally, in order to succeed online you need to have the right equipment. It took me quite a while to realise this myself but you need to have the correct tools in order to build a solid business. You need to have a quality autoresponder account from a company such as Aweber and you need to have graphics on your websites which make you look like a professional and not just a dodgy amateur. You need to have decent web hosting and not some freebie account which will make your website crash on the day of your product launch. Tennis rackets used by the top players are pretty expensive and are customized to the needs of the player. You wouldn’t see Federer, Nadal or Murray walking out onto court with a $20 racket and strings which break every few games – so don’t make the same mistake yourself in your online business.

So there you go. Quiet please – ready – play. Go and build your online business!

Comments welcome, as always…

Right from when I first started online people have been telling me that ‘the money is in the list’ and that ‘you must build a list.’

I’ve been agreeing with them and saying it myself for years – yet the funny thing is that it isn’t until the last year or so that I’ve actually seen for myself why it’s so true and the results that you get from sending a promo out to a decent sized email list of responsive subscribers.

My sales from a typical promo are usually nothing earth shattering, but even if it’s just a product priced at around $10 and you make 15 or 20 sales that’s a pretty decent return for sending an email.

I still find it exciting that I can send a promo email out to my list and see sales landing in my inbox within minutes. My Mac makes a ‘ping’ noise when I get a new email and as silly as it sounds I get a rush of adrenaline every time I hear this noise and rush to my laptop to see if it’s another sale

As my list grows and my relationship with them grows too I know I’ll make more money on each promo.

In my opinion as an internet marketer your number one priority should be building your email list…

So how can you start building your list today?

It’s actually pretty simple. All you need is:

1. An autoresponder account (I use Aweber)

2. A simple squeeze page offering a free product

3. Traffic to your squeeze page

Let’s deal with each one in turn.

I use Aweber because they seem to have good delivery rates, I find it easy to use and I like the ability to track my stats in detail. There are free alternative autoresponders out there but in my opinion the investment in a quality service like Aweber is absolutely essential.

The second piece of the jigsaw is a little harder but still pretty easy.

To get people to sign up to your list you need some ‘bait.’ You need to give some sort of product away for free (whether it’s a report, eBook, video etc) to persuade people to opt-in to your list.

Crucially it must be something which people really want and are prepared to swap their email address to get hold of.

The mistake most people make is to think that just because you’re offering something for free you can give away any old rubbish.

What you need is a quality product, something which you would opt-in for yourself or which people would actually pay money for. If you can do this it becomes a real no brainer for people when they see that you’re offering it for free!

Ideally it should be something unique – but it doesn’t have to start out that way. You could use PLR for example and then change the name of the product and the graphics to make it unique to yourself.

I do this a lot and it works very well.

Putting on my other hat as a PLR provider, one of my squeeze pages gives away a report with private label rights, including all graphics, editable sales page, squeeze page – the full works. This is an absolute steal for people who want to get hold of PLR because it is of the same quality (if not better ) than PLR you might pay for.

Give people something they can’t refuse and they will opt-in to your list.

You’ll also need a squeeze page. Now some people will disagree with me here but I’d say it doesn’t have to be the best looking squeeze page in the world. The most important thing is what you’re giving away.

All of my squeeze pages convert at around 50% and sometimes as high as 75%. The reason is because I offer top quality freebies and my squeeze pages make it clear why people should opt-in (although I have to say that whilst they are ok, they could be improved and I’m currently testing different squeeze pages to see if I can up my opt-in rates even further.)

Just find out what your target audience craves. Look at paid products that are selling well and create a free version. Look at forums, blogs etc and see what people are talking about. You should be able to find out what’s hot and come up with an idea for a freebie product pretty easily.

The third element of list building – getting traffic to your squeeze page – is where most people go wrong.

I’ve used various methods over time to get visitors to my squeeze page. Some have been free methods and some have been paid.

I’ve blogged before about how effective WSOs (Warrior Special Offers) can be when you’re promoting a freebie. They just plain work and will send you an instant surge of targeted traffic to your squeeze page.

Most recently I’ve been doing a lot of solo mailings.

A solo ad/mailing is simply where you pay someone else to email your offer to their mailing list. If you choose the right person to buy a solo ad from (ie. it needs to be someone who is in the same/similar niche as you and who has a responsive list) you’ll be amazed by the results you get.

I’ve been working recently for example with someone I found over at the Warrior forum who has a REALLY responsive list. For $80 he will send out a solo mailing to his list and he guarantees you 200 clicks on the link in his email. Last time this resulted in me adding around 130 people to my list within the first 48hrs of the email going out – which is pretty cool – and you’ll find you get similar results from other solo mailings IF you choose the right person.

Yesterday I sent out an affiliate promo to my list and my stats show that 3 of the buyers were people who had joined my list as a result of that solo ad. Another 2 came from another solo ad I recently paid for.

Tony Shepherd is an expert on this area and I’ve learned a lot from him on the subject.

If you’re using paid methods like the above to drive traffic then it’s a good idea to stick a paid offer behind your freebie in order to monetize the process and draw back the cost of paying for the advert. Do it right and you’ll make a nice little profit on it too, so you’re effectively building your list for free.

Your paid product could be an affiliate product or your own product – but it must be something which is related. For example if your freebie is about blogging then offer another product or course about blogging which goes into things in more detail.

Other good ways of driving traffic to your squeeze page which I’ve found effective include adswaps (like a solo mailing but instead of paying for the email you simply offer to return the favor and email your list about your partners offer), blogging/blog commenting, forum signatures, article marketing and viral reports.

I’m a particular fan of viral reports for example because you can put them out there with your links inside and you’ll get traffic from those links for years to come without you needing to do anything further. It’s one of those methods which just plain works but which people tend to dismiss because it’s not particularly sexy.

I don’t know about you but I’d prefer simple and effective to sexy but a waste of time!

So in summary – the key to building a list is to offer a quality product which people want to get hold of – something they’d even pay money for – and then give it to them for free.

From there, drive traffic to your squeeze page using the techniques I’ve talked about above. Use WSOs or solo ads to get you started and drive an instant surge of traffic to your squeeze page. Doing each a few times over the course of a few weeks should get you your first 2,000 subscribers.

Once people are added to your list you can work on building a relationship with them (remember it’s not just about how many subscribers you have but the relationship you have with them), sending out promos and adding messages to your autoresponder sequence (that’s how you make money in your sleep).

Just build your list!

I hope you found this post useful.

Comments welcome…