Month: November 2008

Why Info Products Are Rubbish

I can’t keep this to myself any longer and nor do I want to.

I am VERY excited about this, and you will be too.

What I’m going to show you can change your life – I’m really not kidding when I say that.

This is incredible stuff. Simple, obvious, brilliant.

Before I jump to the chase, I want to give you a bit of background.

I’ve been in pursuit of truly passive income. Yes I know some people have said there’s no such thing, and well, I say that’s nonsense. I have to brand those people as unimaginative and not looking outside the box.

For a while now I’ve been looking at methods that anyone can use, and I’ve been approaching it from a software angle, because that’s what I do. So I’ve been researching methods of putting sites up that bring in a trickle of money consistently.

This ISN’T what I’m going to show you, but it’s good background…

The theory is, you put up enough mini sites and sit back.

You know what? It works.

I have a friend who now has over 3,000 sites that he’s monetised in a number of ways, usually with AdSense (ptui!).

Long before he had those 3,000 sites – when he only had a fraction of what he has now – he was making an average $100 / day combined across all of them. Some sites bought in a few cents a day, and some of the more successful ones bought in a couple of dollars a day, and of course some just didn’t bring in anything at all.

Once he’d put them up, he didn’t have to touch them, they just kept bringing him in an average $100 every day.

As he added more sites, his average daily income grew.

Simple eh?

The problem is, it can take a long time to set up even a single site, and then there’s no guarantee of seeing any income after your effort.

(I have two developers looking at ways of putting up microsites very quickly, and automatically. That’s another story for another time, but I wanted to mention that to set the background for what I’m about to show you.)

How about putting up a site that doesn’t bring in just a trickle, it brings in a river of money instead? A site that might bring in $10 or $30 a day or more?

Now that’s worth looking at it isn’t it? It’s worth spending some time on a site that will bring in some decent cash. You can afford to set the site up carefully by hand rather than use a script to generate it for you, because you know the rewards are going to be high.

So this is for you.

I’ve finally stumbled across something that I could so easily have missed. And the shock of knowing I could have missed this scares me. No joke.

Last weekend I bought a product on a recommendation that I immediately realised after purchase would make me a potentially hefty income stream. I didn’t think so before purchase, in fact I read the sales page and I was quite sceptical.

After all, we’ve all read sales copy with wildly exaggerated claims of income haven’t we?

(Sidenote – In a fury a few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post that I never published, because I think it’s a bit over the top. I’ll tone it down a little and release it one day. I was angry after seeing a site promoted that I knew would do well but the product was complete and utter over-priced BS. Sadly, the over-hyped sales copy would make all the sales though.)

So anyway I read the sales copy and I wasn’t convinced, but I knew the guy who told me about it was one of the good guys, an experienced marketer, and I could see he was excited to the point of nervousness about it. (That’s if it’s possible to convey that level of excitement in words…)

And that was what convinced me, and I bought on his recommendation.

The thing is, I’m now as excited as he was when he told me about it…

I am SO glad that I bought, and I’m also SO happy that I can tell you about it. I was tempted to selfishly keep it to myself, and I’m sorry I felt that way – I’m only human – but I realised I didn’t have to.

The reason is, the market is so big, and there are so many products to promote, it won’t matter if there are 10,000 people actively using this method. In fact while I was doing my market research I kept coming across sites that are using this same under-used method, because now I know what to look for and I can see what they’re doing.

Did this dissuade me? Did this put me off in any way?

Of course not. I know I could easily go into competition with these sites, but what’s the point? Another few minutes of research and you can turn up another niche easily, there are thousands of them limited only by your imagination.

And you can do this in multiple countries if you want to. In fact if you live in a non-English speaking developed country like France or Germany, you probably have an advantage of knowing you have ZERO competition. Better than that, if you have foreign language (and English) speaking friends online, you can go into business with them and clean up just by duplicating sites across countries for a double whammy on the same site content and design.

This method is great, incredible, fantastic, insert your own superlative here…

Let me put this another way. If you had a site that regularly bought in $5 a day would you be happy? I would.

How about a site that seasonally bought in 10 or 20 times that amount for a while? Ecstatic? Yep, I would be too.

I can easily see that being possible.

So what’s this all about?

The idea is that info products are crap and we’re all wasting our time with them.

Woah! That tramples all over my business model! But let’s keep going…

The premise is that every day people are online and looking for physical products to buy. They’re looking for gifts like toys, games, TVs, Blueray players etc. They’re looking for information on the products, and they’re doing searches to find it.

It can often be difficult for them to find what they’re looking for, as there are lots of sites that look promising but don’t come up with what they want.

That’s where you come in.

As an affiliate, you can earn a commission from several large sites of around 5% of the total sale price. All you have to do is pull the traffic to your site, then send it out to the site selling the goods using your affiliate link, and you earn your commission.

There are a LOT of untapped niches, and new ones appear every day as new products are released.

You know what? Some of the products searched for have tens of thousands of searches every month. That’s tens of thousands of BUYERS looking to buy physical products you can earn commission on.

And there’re hardly any affiliates promoting as they’re all too busy chasing sales of info products (and treading on each others toes competing with each other) as the commission payments are higher.

Yes, I’m acutely aware that my own affiliates will read this and start to get ideas…

Think about it though. There are tens of thousands of searches, and little competition from affiliates for many of these products. On the face of it, an affiliate given a choice will go for promoting an info product to earn 50% as that’s a better payout than 5% on a physical product.

But thousands of affiliates think the same and are all in competition with each other for the same relatively meager search traffic. And just a short mental hop away, a few affiliates are raking it in promoting products that are getting HUGE amounts of search, and they have little competition in doing so.

Very few people in the Internet Marketing niche are going to tell you this. Certainly the gurus wouldn’t want you getting any ideas about it and so the same old, same old story is being told to you…

Okay, sorry this has been so long, but that’s the background set.

I’ve been very carefully setting up my first site promoting a physical product. I’ve had to fit in the construction time around other things I have going on, but my estimate is it’s taken me around 6-8 hours to put together.

It’s taken me so long because I’ve been painstakingly following the instructions to make sure my On Page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – called OPSEO – has been done correctly, following a check list to make sure I’ve got it right. I’ll probably tweak it a little more later, but the important thing to me was to get the site up.

My guess is I can do the research and put these sites up in about 2 hours once I get going, so I could easily do 1 a day, maybe even 2 with the time I have free currently.

I just want to make a point here. If you get your site OPSEO right on a product that has little affiliate competition, you don’t need any back links – well maybe just one to get it indexed. If you do it all carefully and correctly, you’ll get your site on page 1 of Google right alongside some of the biggest sites online.

And your site will clearly be all about the product that’s being searched for and so will get the clicks.

So here’s my first site of many to come:-

http://www.jumperoo.co.uk/

I know that posting that link here will cause it to be indexed. I have no idea how long it will take to get on page 1, but I might help it along with a few carefully chosen back links.

I earn 5% commission on every sale of that product which is being sold at GBP £80.00 (USD $125.00), so that’s £4 ($6.25) per sale.

The keyword jumperoo is getting 22,000 searches a month from potential buyers.

There are only 323,000 pages in competition – anything under 500,000 is nothing – so it’s easy to dominate.

DO YOU THINK that I will make some money from that site?

CAN YOU SEE why I’m so excited?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND why I’m telling you this?

Using this method has the ability to change your life. I feel the pain of so many people who write to me asking for advice on how to make money online and who are failing. There’s been no easy path until now. This is it.

I think that’s all I have to say about this for now, other than give you a link to the site, and a discount code that Craig (the guy who’s raking it in using this method) has given me just for you. Yes, I got hold of him and asked if there was anything he could do to make it an easier purchase and he agreed to do so.

Craig knows it will change lives, and that’s why he’s released this information and that’s why he’s happy to give some love back. I can’t describe how happy it makes me to know that he feels the same way that I do, and that telling you this will be the turning point for you online.

The product is called Info Product Killer. Don’t be put off by the title or the sales copy. This is the real thing. And there’s a 60-day guarantee, but my guess is there won’t be any refunds.

First the coupon code which knocks a fair chunk of money off the price. Paste it into the box just above the order button and click “Verify” to see the discounted price I’ve got for you.

FHW777

and here’s the link:-

Info Product Killer

Get your research done following the instructions you’ll be given (takes a few minutes) and get your first site set up.

Don’t waste any time.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Christmas Rush

Following on from my post on Monday about tapping into the Christmas sales rush I’ve been a very busy boy.

o I’ve done some learning.
o I’ve done some market research.
o I’ve examined what I need to do in terms of SEO – key words, H1 and H2 tags etc.
o I’ve registered 6 new domains for 2 new products and 2 generic central sites.
o I’ve registered with the UK Amazon affiliate program, and I’ll follow it up with the US one when I get my first 2 sites up.

I know you’re asking yourself…

“WHAT! Is he doing?”

This is all part of a very exciting product I purchased on Sunday night. Boiled down to its essence, it’s a method of selecting physical products that are getting huge search volumes, and then tapping that traffic with a series of carefully selected and constructed sites, which if done correctly very quickly appear on page 1 of the search engines.

The first site is taking me some time, but I want to make sure I’ve got it right before I release it.

I know that after I’ve done it the once, carefully following the instructions, it will become easier to do the second and third and so on sites. It should take me less than 2 hours per site once I really get going.

I already have my two oldest children doing unofficial (non-technical) market research for me, and my wife is getting a little fed up of me talking about it. But clearly my excitement is infectious as she also wants to start doing this. She’s told me she’s ready to do some of the more technical market research, which consists of a bit of browsing and making some notes.

Then I’ll get her on site creation.

I can’t emphasise how easy this is.

The hardest part is to create the sites using the supplied template. And if you’re used to putting up sites and using HTML, then you shouldn’t have any problems in creating them as they’re just simple text and graphic sites. No special scripts involved.

I’ve been told by the product owner that the marketer I heard about this from was converting at 6 to 1. That’s for every 6 visitors to the site, 1 was buying. Or to put it another way, that’s nearly 17% conversion – and I am SO GLAD I was one of the 17%.

The way I see this, if you’ve been struggling to make any kind of money online (yes I have first hand experience and I know how difficult it can be), and you can follow step by step instructions…

…then this is for you.

Treat this as an early Christmas gift to yourself, something that will pay for itself over and over the whole of 2009 and beyond.

As soon as I have my first site up and running, I expect to get my money back on my purchase quite soon. I usually give myself a month (tops) to earn my money back on any purchase and I often do it a lot quicker, but I think with this one I’ll get it back very quickly.

I have to answer some support questions and do another SmartDD video, but right after that I’ll be working on my first site. As soon as it’s up, I’ll show you what I’ve done and why – I hope that will be later tonight.

I don’t want you to go racing off and buying this until you have the facts and know what you’re getting into. It will take some effort, but I believe the rewards for us will be phenomenal.

When I give you the link, I’ll also give you a special discount code I asked for which will knock a chunk of money off allowing you to get it at a fraction of the current price.

More later.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Are You Getting Ready For The Christmas Sales Rush?

I am. And I’m getting a little bit excited as I intend to earn a few commission payments from people who are buying their Christmas gifts online.

I’ve just purchased something that looks like it holds great promise, and I’ve already taken my first steps with it. The principle is both obvious, simple, and utterly brilliant.

Ideally I’d like to be able to test it all out before I told you about it, but really it’s just too late in the day to do so.

But never fear. I’ve spent some time looking over it all (just skimming so far), and I realise that no matter when this is implemented, if you follow the process, then it will work. I have no doubt about that.

The reason I have no doubt is because I did have doubts, and so I spent about 3 hours today looking at a few of the example sites, and examining their rankings and incoming links.

What I’ve found has made me very excited. These sites are ranking on page 1 of Google with just a few incoming links purely because they have ZERO competition.

The reason they have no competition is because it looks like this market has been almost completely overlooked.

And because it’s largely untapped (oh joy) is why I’m getting really worked up about the potential to earn some FAT commission cheques earned in the run up to Christmas.

So tomorrow I’m putting aside 4 hours to put together my first site based on the methods I’ve been learning about. This will include market research, domain registration, page optimisation, the lot. I may not bother with PPC initially until I know the site is converting using just free traffic.

I know that my next site should take me about an hour or so less, and that eventually I reckon I can get it down to under 2 hours.

You can bet that once I have the one up, it’s already pencilled into my plan to add two per day going all the way up to Christmas. If I can teach my 11 year old how to put them up, then I’ll have him doing them too, and also my wife.

In fact why stop at Christmas?

I can see that the methodology behind this is a true money earner all the year round. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that this will work, but I want to get the first site or two up before I give you any more detail about it.

If you’re not excited yourself, if you can’t feel my enthusiasm for this already, then you must be as jaded as I am.

Because… I was very wary after purchase, thinking I was buying yet another piece of junk. (We’ve all done it, right?)

This is far, far from it and I honestly wish I’d come up with this myself. I have a few experiments running at the moment, but this is better than anything I’ve come up with! Having said that, I know I can use a few of these methods in my own exercises too.

Cracking stuff.

Give me a day or two, and I’ll let you know how I’m getting on.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

SmartDD V3 – Free Sign Ups Video

Following the delay caused by my main PC becoming infected with various bits of nasty stuff, I’ve now uploaded the latest SmartDD V3 video.

This one explains how to use SmartDD with Aweber to both sign up your new prospect to your mailing list and also generate a customer record and an order within SmartDD so that your prospect gets a secure download.

This functionality has been one of the top three asked for features to be put into SmartDD.  It seems there are plenty of SmartDD users who want to give their normally paid-for products away, without allowing global free access.

Well now you can do it.

Although this example uses Aweber (the service I currently use), you should be able to adapt it to any autoresponder service or self-hosted script with a little thought.  If you use another service such as Get Response or Email Aces, and can’t work out how to integrate the form code, then please raise a support ticket and we’ll see if we can’t help you sort it out.

The video can be found here:-

http://www.smartdd.com/videos/free-sign-ups-with-smartdd/

and if you need to you can raise a support ticket here:-

http://www.vendiva.com/support/

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Malware Post Mortem

It seems that my infected PC was nobbled by something new.  To me this is a particularly worrying event because I’m quite careful about what I do online, and I don’t rely on hardware and software to keep my PCs safe, I also use my noggin.

After scanning the other PCs on my network it seems that it was just the one that had the problem.  It became infected while I was away from the PC at about 1.10 am on Friday according to the timestamps on the approx 20 items it left on my PC.  And that’s what’s worrying me.

I wasn’t doing anything with that PC, and according to my browser history, I hadn’t visited any sites I’d consider unsecure.

But the following morning, I turned the monitor on the PC, and it was at the login screen.  That immediately set my alarm bells going as I leave that PC logged in and running jobs when I walk away from it – I reboot every so often when it gets a bit sluggish, but I never leave it logged out.

It’s also behind a hardware firewall.

When I realised what had happened and saw the pop-up in the system tray inviting me to download some additional software to infect my machine under the guise of protecting it, I started to take a closer look.  I’ve already mentioned the typos in the balloon pop-up – here’s the full text for you.

Your computer is infected!

Window has detected spyware infection!

It is recomended to use special antispyware tools to pervent data loss.Windows will now download and install the most up-to-date antispyware for you.

Click here to protect your computer from spyware!

There are actually THREE typos – “Window” instead of “Windows”, “recomended” instead of “recommended” and “pervent” instead of “prevent”.

At first I couldn’t do a thing about it.  AVG had been disabled by the malware, and I couldn’t browse to anywhere with that PC initially, but after a reboot I could get to any site apart from the sites where I could check up on what was going on and download software to remove it.

If I pinged any of the unreachable domains, they were all showing as 127.0.0.1, ie loopback to my local PC.

I couldn’t see any unusual processes running in Task Manager, but I know that there are lots of tasks that you can’t see in Task Manager as Windows hides them.  Bad idea Microsoft.

I went to another PC, plugged a USB memory stick into it, did a search and downloaded some software.  I first grabbed the latest version of AVG, then Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, then SpyBot Search and Destroy 1.60 and finally a trial version of something called Security Task Manager.  I might buy this as I was quite impressed with it.

(I couldn’t get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware from their site and it still remains unreachable to me, but I grabbed it from Download.com here – http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html.  The same applies to Security Task Manager which I got from here – http://www.download.com/Security-Task-Manager/3000-2094_4-10246545.html)

This is what I did.

#1 – I used the trial version of Security Task Manager to find and terminate the hidden processes that Windows Task Manager doesn’t display to get my PC back into a usable state.  This allowed me access to all the security related websites.

#2 – Next I used regedit (Start-Run-regedit) and searched through my registry to look for the names of the two processes and deleted them so they wouldn’t start up again if I had to reboot my PC.  (Afterwards I realised I could have just used msconfig but you don’t always think of the easiest methods sometimes.)

#3 – Then I installed the new version of Spybot Search and Destroy as it appeared I didn’t have it installed (although I thought I did), and ran a scan with that which cleaned a couple of things up.  I also let the “teatimer” resident process install itself which monitors registry entries, but I’ll likely disable that once I’m certain I’m clean.

#4 – Next I used Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for the first stab at cleaning up, and that found about 17 or so bits of code, all installed at about 1.10 am on Friday.  I wasn’t even at my PC at that time, so that’s a bit worrying unless I was already infected and a task was waiting for the PC to stop being used to install all the other bad stuff.

#5 – Finally I grabbed the latest version of AVG 8 after uninstalling AVG 7.5 which had been completely broken by whatever bits of software were now on this PC.  That scan has so far found 2 bits of js in the Opera cache and an adware trojan in the IE cache.  I’m not convinced that this is where it all started though – there was nothing unusual in my browsing on Thursday, and I don’t believe I even used Opera or IE that day.

It’s all a bit annoying as I’m so bloody careful.  All my other PCs are clean, as I’ve checked them all thoroughly.

Only the one PC that I mainly use has had this problem.  If you get this kind of issue, hopefully you can use this info to clean your PC up rather than have to reformat it.  I was actually expecting to have to do a reformat and re-install, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t necessary.

From knowing I was infected to having researched and cleaned everything up took me approximately 3 hours.  Then another 4 hours to do a complete system scan with AVG which checked every file and has continued to find “threats” for another 36 hours as my system has tried to access system restore points to put back files which AVG had removed…

As each one has appeared, I’ve told AVG to delete them.  It’s now been 12 hours without finding any more of these “threat” files, so that could be the end of it.  I hope…

I won’t mention the names of the two new items of malware that have only appeared since about the 20th October, as I’m worried it will bring attention to my own site here.  The reason is I find it suspicious that two of the key sites that have software that has been instrumental in me fixing this are still currently unreachable.

It’s not just from this PC or network either – I’ve tried accessing both sites using the free version of Megaproxy – and that can’t connect either.  It could be that both sites are currently sustaining a DDOS attack to prevent people from finding out about and downloading the software they need to fix their PCs during these crucial “early days” of being spread and taking a grip world wide.

Call me a chicken, but the last thing I want is to attract the attention of individuals who will DDOS this site too.  Maybe in a couple of weeks or so I’ll update this entry with the name of the malware and its helper file.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business