With all of the complex Internet marketing strategies that we online marketing entrepreneurs have been pursing in the last several years, it is easy to forget about the basics.

When you get frustrated by the amount of effort and the steep learning curve that goes in to certain strategies, it’s refreshing to be reminded of something that is easy, stable, and free to start.

I have to send my gratitude to Matt Bacak, whose e-book that came out this January caught my eye for the first time in a long time.  While his strategy for selling books on Amazon.com is something I used to do when I was just starting a couple of years ago, I had stopped.  Goodness knows why – I have shelves and boxes-worth of books from the last two decades that are quickly losing their sentimental value as dust-collectors.  There are people out there who are interested in reading these titles now – so I’m doing the public a favor by making them available to be adopted by another reader who actively desires them.

Amazon.com makes selling easier than any other service I have encountered, due to the convenience of the ISBN on each published book.  If lack of technical skills and lack of confidence in your ability to write sales copy are holding you back, this is a great place to begin.  Not just begin, but to continuously bring in income in one of the fastest, most reliable ways that there is.

I wouldn’t dream of asking Matt for my money back for the e-book I bought this week, even though I already knew the strategy that he featured.  What he provided to me was an extremely valuable reminder that the basics still work, we can all do this, and there is no excuse not to be generating income online – especially when it is this easy.

Thanks, Matt. 

To everyone else – GO GET STARTED, AGAIN!  You can do this!

In internet marketing, if your targeted audience can’t find you, they can’t buy what you’re selling.  Plain and simple.

These days, the competition for the eyeballs of paying customers is more fierce, even though the number of internet users has grown.  But what if you could provide content for your own blog, with all of your affiliate ads on it, and make money in a third dimension by providing traffic to another website willing to pay you for the publicity?

There is a site called www.ReviewMe.com where you can open a free account to have the opportunity to provide blog posts for advertisers, and get paid for doing it!  If you have a website or product that is taking off, you can post offers to bloggers to write original blog posts on your behalf.

If you’re blogging anyway – and so many of us are – it could be a lucrative addition to your business to provide reviews and unique content that you already know interests your audience. 

Bloggers – Earn between $20 to $200 with Reviewme.com

Advertisers – Get your site traffic, viral buzz, and invaluable feedback with Reviewme.com

The savviest marketers are always looking for ways to make money on the front end, the back end, and in the middle.  This is an ingenious way to maximize your effort and add another angle to your money-making endeavors.

How many e-mails did I just delete that were trying to sell me the next big Internet Marketing Strategy?  How many new Online Marketing Tools will I have to read about and decide whether or not each one is “the one that will make me a millionaire”?

I have finally come to the realization that I don’t need anymore.  I need to use what I already have.

I have over 32 GB of saved ebooks and articles, access to over a dozen software packages, my name on some prestigious lists – but have I followed any one strategy from start to finish?  Probably not.  I continue to take bits and pieces from dozens of plans that clearly worked for the person that wrote about the plan.  I have had varying degrees of success with hybrid strategies and using tools in creative ways, but I don’t think I have ever followed one all of the way through. 

There is an obscene amount of information at my disposal – if you have been in internet marketing for a while, following the most successful and persuasive marketers in the business, I’m sure you do, too.  Many entrepreneurs have made extraordinary amounts of money using the very techniques saved onto my expanding USB drive collection.  It is time to pick one strategy and see what I can do with it – all of it – just the way the author recommends.

As I prepare to do a new backup of all of my Internet Marketing materials gathered over years of being professionally sold to, I will have to select one to study and implement from beginning to end.

Have you decided which strategy you will focus on, or is your standard marketing strategy still scattered to the wind?

Yesterday, my husband was talking about conversations that he had with old buddies that he worked with at a very famous company.  The stories they tell always make them shake their heads, and arrive at the conclusion that they should write a book about it all.  They’re right.  When I research his niche and see the kind of interest and money that is invested in it, he would undoubtedly have a very successful product.

When I read the experienced advice of my most relied-upon internet marketing gurus, they all eventually get around to this:  to make the BIG money in online marketing, you eventually need to create your own product.

This will be a goal of mine to complete before the end of 2009, and you can do it, too.

Online Market Maker Ed Dale counsels, wisely, that you should test your market first before putting effort into your product.  Create a blog, test some affiliate offers, make sure you’re tapping into a market that is hungry for new content and willing to take out their wallets.

Then, there is the matter of how to create your own product.

You can try to leverage Private Label Rights (PLR) material – books and articles written by other people that you can buy the rights to use.  You can piece together relevant pre-written segments of these books and articles to create something that is somewhat new.

However, if you are passionate about your industry/niche, and you have an interesting enough angle on the subject, the best way to contribute usefully to that niche is to create your own product from your own imagination.

Online Market Maker Chris Guerriero has a fantastic strategy for getting your product going:

• Create your bulleted list of topics to cover – make them your tentative chapter headings.
• Write each chapter heading on a separate piece of paper and post them up on a wall, in order.
• Using a voice recorder of some type, speak a stream of consciousness on each chapter topic, moving from one topic to the next.  Don’t edit yourself – just spill what you know, what you think, and what you want to share.
• Transcribe the recording – you can have a professional do this quite inexpensively, or you can do it yourself (but it will take awhile if you’ve never tried this before).
• Once you have a written transcription, edit the chapters.  This can be out-sourced to a professional, too, quite inexpensively.
• When your content is finished, make sure you give it a title that includes your keywords so people will be able to find your product easily.

The electronic cover art, font style, and other elements of getting the product out there can be sorted out afterward.  The hardest part is done – you have an original product in a niche that really wants it.

Are you with me?  Let’s get some new content out there for the people who want it, and move ourselves in a more successful direction as a result.

Just like you (probably), I am on a lot of Internet Marketer and Affiliate Marketer e-mail lists.  Just like you (probably, again), I have also been in the presence of some of the most formidable Online Market Makers in the industry and have only just barely been able to hold on to my seat and not spend thousands of dollars on their mentoring programs. (after all, they do know how to sell…)

Goodness knows that I wish I could be mentored by every single one of them. 

However, I notice that in almost every Internet Marketing guru presentation, I hear how they were able to figure things out on their own.  And then they mention how a mentor took their Online Marketing skills to the next level. 

The math tells me that getting from zero to 60 in Internet Marketing, or in just about any industry, can be accelerated by mentoring.  But I’m also stubborn enough to insist on trying to figure out some of it for myself.    The “figuring it out” part seems to forge a stronger, more motivated type of entrepreneur.  I certainly aim to be one of the stronger ones, in the end.

I have been researching the online marketing industry for years now, dabbling in several strategies, learning the vocabulary, and trying to stay current on the changes in technology.  It’s time for me to learn directly from someone who is successful.  I don’t want it done for me – I want to learn how to do it for myself, and learn how to anaylze what I’m doing with the same degree of skill as the multi-millionaire marketers.

I want to earn it.

Instead of in-person mentoring, I chose to complete Ed Dale’s free 30 Day Challenge, as a way to get into a mentoring situation.  It was so educational, so satisfying, so true to its promise of bringing my internet marketing skills to the next level, that I have taken the plunge to join his 30 Day Challenge Plus to learn more.

Are you at the point where your internet marketing skills need to be taken to the next level?

If so, do you know who you’d like to model your success after?  It might be time for a mentoring program for you, too.

For anyone still not yet confident about getting started on Twitter, I found this page on Squidoo about Newbie Twitter Tips.

By the way, if you’ve never heard of Squidoo, it’s a free site-building website.  Consider using Squidoo if you’re looking to test a new market and with a free website.  It has great traffic in general, and the search engines love it.  Squidoo has a what they call a “Lens Builder” that allows users to design what their free webpage will look like.  Try building a “Squidoo Lens” of your own on the topic you’re interested in. 

While you’re at it – build that Squidoo lens, then come back and tell me about it so I can help get the word out for you!

I splurged on the recent release of Zero Friction Marketing.  You may have, too.

I have to admit – I was more than a little bothered by the sales pitch: it was more about rebellion against the gurus that the creator of the system had idolized than about any particular breakthrough.  If his story is true, then I feel bad for him and I hope that the online market makers that behaved that way smarten up before their own celebrity starts working against them.

What sold me on this program was that it promised to target resources and markets that the gurus like to keep to themselves.  Since my recent experience with the websites that the gurus like to mention is starting to remind me of broken records, I was definitely interested in learning how to effectively use other sites and other strategies in less competitive markets.

Another very attractive selling point was all of the bonuses that came with it.  It will probably take me months to take advantage of all the freebies that came with this package.

I’m not done with all of the tutorials yet in the Zero Friction Marketing program, but so far I really like the information about CPA marketing that is included.  I think it is one of the easiest-to-understand and easiest-to-emulate lessons on that subject that I have seen.

I’m going to enjoy putting my energy into this program to try out this interesting material.  I’m also going to promise that, if I ever reach “guru status”, I will never behave like the ones mentioned on the sales landing page  did on that fateful day.

If you’d like to have a look at the landing page for Zero Friction Marketing Click Here!

Stay positive and start building!

Hi, all.

Sorry for the long space between posts.  I took in a lot of information over the last week and a half, and I’m building something new behind the scenes.

I wanted to let people know some of the things that I learned from my experience at the extraordinary Launch Tree Live Internet Marketing Conference, that was July 23 – 25, 2009. 

My biggest take-aways were not individual quick-cash strategies (although I promise you that I will be trying each and every one that was given to us at the conference, and I’ll post some winners for you). 

There were three things in particular that I learned at the conference – or rather, I came to grips with the fact that these three things are CRITICAL to marketing success.  You and I will never be among the industry’s real Online Market Makers unless we follow these three things.

I hope you’ll watch this quick video that I put up to describe what they are.  Sorry that the audio is not a little louder – I just wanted to make sure I expressed these thoughts so I could burn them into my brain, and share them with you.

JJ’s Online MArketing Lessons Learned at Launch Tree Live

Taking just a moment to peek my head out from behind my work space to mention that I’ve been working with the new PPC/CPA strategies released in free videos by Amish Shah.

To find out what Amish’s buzz is about, find him on Twitter.  Search for his Twitter ID: @amish_shah.

I’ll let you know how it goes.  Unless it’s ridiculously successful for me, then I’ll have to think about it twice before sharing with even more people.

This link is to an interesting article about Twitter Auto-following.

I have a habit of reading disparate reviews of popular tools and strategies, to try to arrive at a net result opinion.  See what you think.

The author of the Sagacious News Blog also makes some specific recommendations about Twitter tools that he uses, and gives a brief summary of what each tool does, which is helpful if you’re new to the world of Twitter.