After the launch of Affiliate Masterclass back in January, my team and I started straight into working on our next project, a “done for you”, soup to nuts SEO Services business.

It has been a busy couple of months for me and it has seriously impacted my blogging… For those of you who follow this, I’m sorry.

The new business, RapidAction SEO has been running for a few weeks now and everything is going great.  We’ve been focused on getting the processes right, building up our project and customer management facilities and really looking at delivering the goods.

SEO Services Done The Right Way!

We’re really proud of this new SEO Services business because the focus is on delivering high quality, contextual backlinks.  Every link we deliver will be via blogs that have High PageRank and/or Properly Aged domains.  We’re using some of the most private and elite blog networks to deliver these SEO services and we’re in the process of building out our own networks exclusively for this service.

I funded and built this business because this is what I wanted to use!  I’ve seen this kind of thing delivered elsewhere to mixed results and I knew I could do a better job, so I did!

The thing I love about this service is that it will get you results no matter how old or new your blog is.  We have packages tailored for everyone – if your blog is new, we have our SEO intro package which is designed to gently nudge your blog into the rankings all the way up to the SEO gold package for the hard to compete in niches.

We’re still tweaking the site and stuff at the moment, but the basic packages and processes are all laid down and going well.  Over the coming weeks we’re going to have a few more product offerings which will be exciting.  We’re also going to be doing some very special things for the people who join our mailing list on that site over the coming months – we’re going to deliver those people exceptional value.

This is part of a bigger overhaul of the business that we’re doing.  I’ll probably talk about that more as we deliver a few more things, but for now, if you have any SEO services needs, I highly encourage you to head on over to RapidAction SEO and let us help you get the rankings you deserve!

I was just reading an interesting article by MG Siegler over on TechCrunch.

MG talks about how Google has become a natural monopoly in Search and how it keeps “bring the meh” (delivering average or below average products) because it needs to keep extending its revenue base to meet shareholder expectations.  The problem that MG points out rightfully so is that Google keeps using their Search product to do it, so they muscle into new categories with their monopoly product.  Where this gets them into trouble is that this can often be seen as what lawyers call, “predatory behaviour” – using your dominant position in one area to enter another and undermine competition intentionally.

Clearly, Google are on a course where the US Government or the European Union Competition watchdogs are going to come for them.  Realistically, it has to happen, Google have gotten so big that they seem to not care for anything else other than Google’s interests.  That’s when things go awry.

I think there’s a simple business answer here and while the Google Boys might not like it, I personally think for shareholders it could be an absolute winfall.

Preemptively break Google up.

There, I said it… I would split Google into four business units, all publicly listed and totally autonomous from one another.

I would start with Google Search.  This entity would include just the search assets, all of the profile, social network and app stuff would go elsewhere.  Google Search would be focussed entirely on building THE BEST search engine in the world – making sense of the world’s ever growing information.  It would generate revenue from selling ad space in the search results.  The catch is, these ad spaces would be auctioned off via a system like AdWords, but it would be open to other Ad Companies and individuals.  This would be a ridiculously profitable business.

The next one would be Google Advertising, maybe go back to the DoubleClick brand, who knows.  This company would own the content network and be able to compete for AdWords space for their customers.  Effectively, this would just be a very good digital advertising firm.  Again, this would no doubt be a profitable business.

The third unit would be Google Apps.  This would be Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger, all of the profile information and the social stuff.  This business would have to stand on its own two feet.  Gmail could probably make good money having their own AdWords style ads (again open to everyone to bid) next to mail results and by charging a fee.  I think this is an area where Google Corporate has wasted a bunch of money on “me too” projects that don’t make sense.  Ultimately this would be a nice little business if someone ran a sword through the crap and focussed on the game at hand.

Finally, you’d have the mobile business.  This could include the App Store and the mobile Ad companies Google has acquired along with Motorola.  Again, I think this could be a profitable business, but that’s up to how it’s run.  Right now, there is a stench around Android over copyright theft and whether or not Google are just doing this business to hurt Apple and keep their Search product on handsets no matter the cost.  Like I said, this could be a profitable business if it focussed on delivering customer value in the mobile space and stopped being cuckolded to the other whims of Google.

As a shareholder you’d end up with shares in four pretty damn good companies.  A couple would need some serious hands on management to get them through the troubled times, but the Search and Advertising businesses would probably become more profitable away from each other than together.  Imagine if Google’s AdWords were available to any Ad Network to bid on based on Keyword Price?  You could see people advertising on say Bing and having their ad appear in Google’s AdWords.  The competition for that real estate would be fierce and very lucrative.

You might also have one or two of those businesses bought out at a premium price which again, as a shareholder would be exceptional.  The Apps business would immediately be in play for some of the bigger companies who’ve missed the boat entirely on this wave of innovation – Oracle, IBM and others.  Imagine being able to own Google Search and getting bought out for cash at 3x value for their App Business – it’s like all your Christmases have come at once for an investor.

And think about the hordes of millions in cash locked overseas.  Google could offer investors a one-time cash dividend on break up.

Unfortunately, this plan will never come.  Ego and stubborn management will step in and they’ll end up locked in some ridiculous battle with government regulators for years to come.  The only loser will be shareholders, just like Microsoft’s over a decade ago.

I am going to go on record as saying right off the bat, I HATE just about every change Google makes to their search product.  Just about every single change they make is shrouded in a pathetic cloud of marketing rhetoric either about privacy or providing better value to customers when the truth of the matter is, the vast majority of changes are Google doing what’s best for Google at just about any expense.

Today they announced “Search Plus Your World” and for people who are logged into their Google account they are now going to see “personalised” results that take into account things that their Google+ friends share or post.  Really, this should just be called “Search Plus Google+”.  They have stepped up the profile war with Facebook, they want everyone to use Google+ as their preferred account profile and identifier of social networks.

One part of the announcement today that caught my attention was Google “selling” everyone on the idea of encrypted search results and how its such a good thing for you.  Their message is that because they are now providing private information you and your friends on Google+ share with each other in your search results, that encrypting it is very important.

Frankly this is a laughable ruse.  First of all, Google has created the problem by integrating search with your Google+ account.  Secondly, the encrypted search results for logged in users was introduced a few months back.  Finally, the most worrying thing about it is that Google is now providing your referrer information ONLY to paid advertisers.

So you see the problem there?  They’ve opened up your private and personal social network information that you share via Google+ to their search results which now by default makes referral information from that private and personal data available to their advertisers!  They created a problem, have jeopardised your privacy and are calling it progress and good for you.  Scary stuff.

For me though, the worst thing about this is the flagrant abuse of their monopoly position in search.  Microsoft were dragged through the courts for years doing the same thing with their OS.  Every time someone stole the march on them in a new market or a new niche was created that showed promise, Microsoft would somehow find a way to integrate it with Windows.  Ironically, one of the biggest complainers back when the US Justice Department and the EU Competition Watchdogs were going after Microsoft was a small little company called Google.

However, there is a further lesson to learn from the Microsoft anti-trust debacle.  Microsoft’s monopolistic behaviour was an early warning sign of them no longer being in any kind of leadership position, they’d become a slow, dull-witted elephant trying to tap dance.  They also made Windows so bulky and hard to maintain that it forced many of us to escape to the Mac world to get away from them.  Perhaps this is what we’re seeing with Google now.

Facebook has beaten them in terms of “social” and I don’t care what Google do, I’ve got way too much invested in Facebook (as do my friends) to either migrate to Google+ or start using both.  Social is not that important to me, it’s something I do a bit of to keep in touch with people – if I have to start maintaining those relationships and that content twice, forget it, it’s not worth it.  So really this is a big waste of resources for Google when it comes to someone like me – first chance I get, I’m going to turn that stuff off.

The thing is, Google’s core search product isn’t GREAT anymore.  It is still better than Bing for sure, but for the most part, it has become harder to find what I’m looking for on the web and the results Google give me over the past two years have gotten worse.  If they were really interested in providing customers a great service, why not stop adding all of this irrelevant crap to search like meaningless videos and images that only serve to promote other Google properties and get absolutely laser focused on providing the absolute best search experience ever.

They remind me of Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft a couple years back.  He was utterly hell bent on beating Google.  He was so single minded in this endeavour that he didn’t stop to think that Google weren’t really his competition.  Google had a search engine and made advertising revenue.  Microsoft made operating systems and productivity suites.  Ballmer drew this long bow that somehow Google could turn its search advertising revenue model into the OS and office suite market and take significant share from Microsoft.  Meanwhile, Apple were changing the game by introducing a whole new paradigm for interacting with computing devices and Microsoft got caught watching the wrong competitor.

Google is doing the same thing in many respects.  They are so fixated on the data that Facebook is able to collect and therefore the advertising experience they can provide that in some respects, Google is corrupting their own core strengths to compete in something that doesn’t matter.  Nobody is going on Facebook to do broad searches, people go to Facebook to share info with friends and family.  Facebook is a walled garden.  Google on the other and has the vast, expanding universe of the internet as its playground, but yet they seem to want to forgo that, or probably more true to the point, they want to make everything else their walled garden.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  I wonder if this is going to be a big mistake for Google.  Like a few years ago when it became apparent that Twitter had become the preferred way of news breaking virally.  Google, in an effort to “compete” built their “Caffeine” updates so that fresh content had extra weight in search results.  What happened was aged information that had weight and gravitas was being superseded by unimportant “news” and things became more difficult to find.

I anticipate this will end badly for Google.  Their going to have the Justice Department stepping up their probes, the EU will no doubt be the same and ultimately, I think users will not like the new changes and there will be a bit of a backlash which will force Google into reconsidering these changes.

Its been a long time between posts,  but that’s largely down to this product launch I’ve been working on!  I have spent the last two months nearly full-time working on this information product almost exclusively – it has become a really big part of my life.  In terms of internet marketing, this is also the most stressful thing I’ve ever done without question.

The Product Launch Process

I’ve been through a number of real life product launches for software, services and even whole companies, but this one is entirely different.  In my previous business experience, managing a product launch was really just a part of the over product lifecycle management.  We would create some software or a new version, put together some marketing, go out to our customers and partners beforehand, get everybody excited and then when the thing was ready, we’d turn it loose on the world.  It almost always worked out really well.

This product launch though, is a little bit more complicated.

First of all, its in the very competitive internet marketing space.  I’ve learned the hard way about how political and competitive this niche can be over the last few weeks.  Getting partners on board to promote your product, building up some mind share and buzz and navigating the very crowded launch calendar so as not to overlap with some massive guru has been a herculean task.  Every single time I thought I’d overcome the issues thrown up, something else got plunked down in front of me.

Its been a really super learning experience about myself.  I’ve so far just busted through every single obstacle that’s come up so far.  Sometimes I’ve done so knowing that the launch may not be as big as it could have been prior to that obstacle coming up, but hey, the alternative was not overcoming at all.

Secondly, this product launch process has given me AMAZING stories to tell and frankly new information products to create off the back of this one product launch!  I’ve learned so many “truths” that its been amazing for that reason alone.  Once this product launch is out of the way, I’m really looking forward to sharing some of these findings with everyone!

Finally, I’ve learned something about quality as a result of working on this product launch.  I’ve always been someone that likes to build and deliver really good things.  On this product launch though, I’ve taken that to a whole new level.  I am really seriously focused on delivering people the absolute best experience with an online course they’ve ever had.  Not only that, I want to help create winners – I want the people who take this course to succeed and have positive change in their life.

I’ve always been huge fan of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, when I first took it, I felt that I’d had an awakening and learned something.  The truth is, nothing can properly prepare you for what you are getting yourself into when it comes to creating and launching your own product.  I know for sure that it gets easier because we’re already talking about our “next” product launches, but that said, it is a massive learning curve on so many levels.

The funny part about it is, its so mentally and even physically taxing that you need a vacation, but unfortunately, the actual content delivery starts the day after the shopping cart closes, so the launch itself is like the 25% mark in the race!  I’m pretty excited though, teaching is the part of internet marketing I like the best, so I can’t wait until we get this product launch out of the way!

If you believed everything you read in the internet marketing circles these days, you’d think that setting up shop in the local marketing space automatically entitles you to a free pile of money delivered to your door monthly.  The truth is, this couldn’t be more wrong in most cases.

As far as internet marketing strategies go, local marketing should be very low down the list of businesses to get into unless your existing structure is very well optimized and has exceptional systems in place that are not entirely over leveraged.  That’s a mouthful, so let me explain.

Leverage in Internet Marketing

Leverage is a VERY IMPORTANT word in internet marketing and is really quite misunderstood.  To put it simply, leverage is the level of return you get from the assets you invest on in your business.

So for example, in most internet marketing businesses, people may eventually employ teams to do something like SEO work.  A highly leveraged team will be getting great results for the expenditure on salary, a poorly leveraged team may have too many people or too much cost and not getting adequate return and finally, an over leveraged team may just not have the resources required to achieve the maximum return possible (ie. not enough staff to do the necessary work).

Obviously leverage is related to many things in business, not just staffing – you could have a mountain of cash sitting in the bank getting a 1% return via interest and compared to a 4% return a term deposit might bring you, you’d say that cash is massively UNDER leveraged.

Anyway, I think you get the point – you need to have some spare capacity to handle the increased workload.

Internet Marketing Strategies Require Systems and Structure

The other points I made were about systems and structure.  These are critical issues for internet marketing entrepreneurs who want to expand into local marketing.

Put simply, most people fail at internet marketing because they don’t have the right systems in place.  This failure is probably just in the arena of affiliate marketing where your goal is to drive traffic and get them to buy something.  That’s actually a fairly simple business model and one of the reasons I like affiliate marketing so much.

The problem is, a drowning person will cling to anything to stay afloat.  So what happens is, the internet marketing person who’s not succeeding at affiliate marketing, hears about this panacea known as local marketing and decides to give that a whirl.  The problems that plagued this person in the online affiliate marketing space have not been addressed and they are now compounded by adding REAL CUSTOMERS into the mix.

Local Marketing Requirements

The first thing any internet marketing entrepreneur needs to know when embarking on a local marketing strategy is that you MUST change the way you do business significantly.  You now are entering a world where real people are involved, they’ll want to call  you on the telephone, maybe even shake your hand at a meeting in person and they may be sceptical of your internet marketing magic.

Most people online preaching the local marketing mantra probably don’t even do it themselves.  It sounds nice in theory – a local butcher is paying $x,xxx/year for a full page ad in the local Yellow Pages that nobody reads anymore, so you just need to “enlighten” them on the glory that is the web and let the checks start rolling in.

The fact is, you need to have a whole offline, local marketing sales funnel in place that introduces the potential lead to the value that internet marketing can deliver to them.  That’s one system.  You need a customer management system to keep track of your (or your sales staff’s) interactions with customers so that you maintain consistency.  You need to establish local credibility – the local butcher doesn’t care that you rank #1 in Google for “invisible panty lines”, he wants to understand how the local community will see his message through your efforts and then buy his meats.

Most importantly, you need to be able to execute the work.  One thing local marketing requires above all else is great execution.  Customers want results and you need to be able to show them what you’ve done.

The last thing, don’t be a total hype internet marketing machine.  Telling the local butcher you’re internet marketing strategies will triple his foot traffic and quadruple his sales will make you look like a tool.  Talk about facts and be humble.

Internet Marketing is such a large field of business with so much potential, you need to be careful when “experts” are espousing internet marketing strategies that venture into areas you may not be familiar or comfortable with.  Local Marketing is one such area – unprepared internet marketing entrepreneurs stand to lose alot of time and momentum, so give it some serious thought before racing off into ti.

I’ve posted on the WSO market a fair bit recently because I see such unethical behaviour from people who’ve had no success in IM over there.  I’ve already talked about people openly admitting having ZERO success selling WSO’s on how to do what they were unable to do.  I suppose that isn’t really unethical in so much as it is stupid.

However, there was an absolutely howler today.

Over the last couple days I’ve gotten a number of emails from what I call the “WSO Posse”.  This is a small group of marketers who rabidly support each other’s WSO’s with free bonuses (included in the WSO), a constant barrage of emails to their lists and other such behaviour.  Well, this one WSO that was going to change the way I did Amazon marketing smelled bad from the beginning.

Immediately people began reporting issues with software.  For some people it just didn’t work, but probably more importantly, it didn’t conform with the Terms of Service for Amazon.  That’s a big problem in my book – why lose your associate account because your theme doesn’t suppor the API properly.

Of course the muppet promoting the WSO product is spewing the usual, “Its with my coder.”

That doesn’t stop the idiot fringe over there continuing to pour in the testimonials for how great this thing is.

Then the attached video clips are shutdown by YouTube for violation of their Terms of Service.

Then the moderators provide evidence that the guy is SELLING his website, his Warrior Forum account and his WarriorPlus account WHILE he’s promoting this WSO.

I can’t make this stuff up!  This is the second time in the last two months I’ve seen someone put out a WSO while selling their site on Flippa.

Just stay away from the WSO market, its such bad news and its bad for Internet Marketing in general.

One of the most delicate topics in internet marketing is pricing.  Right now the middle ground has been totally abandoned – you have the high end of the market still charging $1997 or $2997 and the low-end of the market has moved even further down with the WSO craze into $7 – $17 territory.

Everyone has their own internet marketing strategies when it comes to pricing, but one idea that is somewhat uniform is that “discounting” and having “sales” are looked down upon.  Very few marketers come out and say, “Hey, I’m having a sale this weekend because I would like to move a bit of product and bank some extra money.”  No, they tend to have some kind of elaborate ruse or cover story to generate a purpose.

And for the most part, these back stories are just stupid and insult the intelligence of the buyer.

One of the biggest proponents of not discounting your prices without a reason has been Frank Kern.  In a number of his training products and speaking appearances, Kern has openly stated that he never discounts.  Well, that was true until recently.

A few months back Kern sent out a series of emails to his various lists telling people that he had a few “review copies” of his Mass Control 2.0 product and he was selling them at a discount.  His back story was that instead of originally ordering just five review copies, he added a zero and ended up at with fifty copies.  These copies were black and white and not as finished so that reduced price made sense.

That all sounds great of course, until you realise that Frank’s lists are in excess of 100,000 people and it would be impossible for him to JUST sell fifty copies.  Frank fulfilled the orders with “full copies” of Mass Control 2.0 because that was the “cool thing to do”.

Well, until you think about it.  The discount was only about 25% which means Frank made more money per sale than he would have had he done a wider launch and had to give partners 50%.

Of course it gets better, it wouldn’t be Frank Kern if it didn’t.

Frank then creates a few videos and some emails telling his list how he did this “experiment” and made such an amazing amount of money.  Then he goes on to pitch a fully digital version of Mass Control 2.0 at a discount again.

For someone who doesn’t discount his products, Frank’s been doing it a fair bit lately.

The truth in internet marketing right now is that $1997 price tags are hard to swallow for most financially hurting customers.

The cool thing with Frank Kern is that he’s pretty transparent about the whole thing.  Some other people who’ve been discounting recently, well let’s just say its been ridiculous.

A few months ago I got a bunch of emails from a couple of marketers who were excited to tell me that all of their products were on sale because one of them just celebrated their baby’s second birthday.  Not long after that it was another marketer telling me everything was on sale because their baby just took her first steps!

Today’s emails have been great, one marketer got sick and had to go in an ambulance, so everything’s on sale to celebrate life!

Well, it just so happens that this same marketing pair are in Vegas this weekend and didn’t do their weekly webinar where they flog more products, so obviously they needed a reason to keep the sales up.

I’m a big believer in truth in marketing – if you want to top up your cash flow and decide to have a bit of a sale, good stuff, win/win.  I’m even willing to accept the Frank Kern “story” model because at least it doesn’t TOTALLY insult my intelligence.

But babies walking, having birthdays and people getting sick are not reasons to have sales.  By using such poor cover stories, you damage internet marketing as a profession and you lower yourself in the eyes of your customer.

Over the past few months we’ve seen a noticeable decline in major Internet Marketing niche Product Launches.

Many people are attributing the decline in launch numbers to a variety of factors:

1. Loss of Faith in the “Gurus”
2. The rise of cheaper products (WSO’s in particular)
3. More savvy buyers

Loss of Faith in the Gurus

Too many times in the last few years products have been released by people with big reputations for big ticket dollars in the internet marketing niche only for the poor customer to enter the site and discover that the content hasn’t even been written and recorded yet.  In some cases if there was content it was literally copied and pasted from another course the same individual was selling only a few months earlier.  In fact, I was given access to one product by a big name marketer where both statements were true: the content wasn’t done and when it was added it was the same content from his last course.

Add to this the fact that some of the “big dogs” in internet marketing have taken to hammering their mailing lists during launches with ridiculous levels of bonuses and stories of how they are doing in JV Leaderboards and eventually people just lose interest.  If a person ever tells you to buy something because they’re close to winning some kind of prize or contest, leave their list immediately.

Ultimately, people are on multiple lists now and many of the “gurus” in the market gave up adding value to those subscribers a long time ago.  They now think that sending you a link to some pre-launch content where you get cookied with their affiliate ID is adding value.  This erodes respect and confidence and it is clearly impacting certain people’s sales.

Rise of the WSO

I think it goes without saying that WSOs (Warrior Special Offers) have hurt Clickbank product releases.  Obviously some of Clickbank’s own policies that I’ve talked about elsewhere have contributed to the decline in internet marketing niche launches, but the rise in the number, and to be fair, quality of WSOs has been a bigger factor.

Has this had an impact though on the number of “big ticket” internet marketing product launches?  I don’t think so.  The number and type of people who are regularly buying $2000 – $3000 internet marketing products are generally not the same people buying $9 WSO’s or $47 Clickbank products.

More Savvy Buyers

Again, I don’t think this has led to a reduction in the number of internet marketing product launches we’ve seen at all.  It certainly has transformed the shape and style of those launches.  In the higher priced internet marketing product space, the “free line” and bonus offerings have become ludicrous.  I recently saw a “guru” offer nearly $20,000 of bonus products for someone to purchase through his links.  And these weren’t make believe bonuses, there were other products this person had sold in the last 18 months at the price he was listing the value at.

I really don’t think this is causing a reduction in launches, I just think it is reducing the value of the products people are creating.  More worrying, I think it is bad for the buyer.

Buyers are certainly “bonus shopping” at the high end now, but when they get these packages, they often are bombarded with so much information they get overwhelmed.  They end up getting the course they paid $2000 for PLUS two or three other courses and its all too much.

 So Where Does That Leave Us?

I think what’s happening – has three parts, all of which are easily explainable.

First of all, there’s been a case of launch fatigue set in.  For the last two to three years, customers have been bombarded with offers.  As one promotion ends another begins, every two to three weeks someone is running Frank Kern’s “Results in Advance” 3-free videos of content and a sales video gimmick to try and get them to buy something else through “reciprocity”.  The overuse of that tactic has resulted in a customer base who no longer feel the need to reciprocate, they know that just by opting-in that the marketer will bombard them with affiliate offers in the future, so that’s now the trade – email address for free content.

On the same theme, the customers have started getting “launch blindness”.  They know what’s coming and they tune out to sales signals, pickup whatever free nuggets and reports they can and move on.

Secondly, and probably more important is that the economic situations in the US and Europe are now finally starting to bite even the Make Money Online niche and internet marketing.  Early in the downturn people could “justify” spending big bucks on some new internet marketing course to try and build their own online empire because of the general uncertainty in the economy.  Now that things have dragged on for three years without a noticeable recovery, people are still really worried, they are saving more and have less access to credit.  Without a doubt this has resulted in lower internet marketing product sales.

I think the final aspect is really the adaptation of the internet marketing product niche.  At the top end, we’re seeing discounts and more reasonable payment terms.  The price points of $1197 and $997 are the new $1997.  Not only that, but we’re seeing less product launches and more be sold via webinars where there’s more interactivity and the buyers can interact more closely with the sellers – I think this is a direct response to the loss of interest in “Results in Advance”.  The other aspect is that there is now an abundance of low cost information being churned out daily as WSO’s which is easily sustaining the lower end of the market from a price perspective.

The market has reacted accordingly, but there will certainly be more fluctuations in the coming months as the internet marketing space adapts to the ever changing global economic conditions.

One of the first thing you must come to grips with in your internet marketing business is finding a niche market to start working in.  For some people this can be a crippling phase of their business research as they search aimlessly for something.  The simple truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way.

The first mistake that people make in finding a niche market is listening to that old internet marketing chestnut, “Pick something you love doing”.  To me, this is total nonsense.  Sure, for some people their secret passion is playing guitar or learning spanish, but the truth is, for most people, when asked that question they stare off blankly not being able to come up with anything.  I’d say most people I’ve spoken to can’t come up with anything when put into that position.

The other group of people, they easily pick something they love and that’s their biggest mistake.  They get so engrossed in sharing their hobby with others for money that they “fall in love” with their own ideas and no matter how much it fails or how bad it is, they can’t get past their own ideas.  This is the quick road to frustration and failure.

The first question I ask people is, “Are you an Affiliate Marketer or are you looking to monetize a hobby?”  If they are a hobbyist, then I wish them well.

If the person is an affiliate marketer, then its easier to work with and really its just a matter of finding a niche market that suits their experience.

I often encourage people to start with easier things to move, either Amazon or Clickbank products.

With Amazon products its a matter of looking through the various categories, finding best-sellers and seeing if there is something that catches your interest with a reasonable commission.  Many things in Amazon only offer 4% (escalating as you sell more), so bear that in mind.

Once you see something you can promote, then head over to Google or whatever tool you use for researching traffic volumes when finding a niche market and test it out.  Check for competition as well.  If you’re happy with that, then you’re off.

With Clickbank products, I recommend a slightly different attack vector.  I use CBEngine and look at the top three or five products in terms of gravity for each category.  Then I check to see traffic volumes and competition levels.  This is a really nice way of finding a niche market that is profitable and one you can compete in.

Like anything, there’s a requirement to know your own limitations and have some patience, but finding a niche market for your internet marketing business really should be motivated by research not passion.

Earlier in March this year, I was on a webinar with my friend Amish Shah and he kept saying, “Automate and measure everything you can about your business.”  It was a little pearl of wisdom that I grabbed ahold of with both hands and thus began my fascination with Internet Marketing Automation Strategies.

From my previous business experience in Cloud Services and Software-as-a-Service technologies, I had a good understanding of scale and leverage, but it wasn’t until that webinar that the jigsaw pieces clicked together with how they can apply to internet marketing.

The key to all of this is knowing how and what to automate and getting the right tools to do the job.  I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking into this for my own business recently and have come up with a few ideas.

Internet Marketing Outsourcing

There’s a whole cottage industry in Internet Marketing around outsourcing to the Philippines.  My experience with this was absolutely terrible.  The level of management overhead required far outweighs actually doing the work yourself sometimes.  Don’t believe the hype!

Hiring Local Staff

Most internet marketing entrepreneurs believe that one of the fastest ways to grow your business is to setup an office and take on local staff.  Again, this can be a struggle.  Without proper guidance and direction, staff can just be a more expensive versions of ineffective offshore labour.  People seem to believe that just having an office will make everyone more accountable and productive – which couldn’t be further from the truth.  That said, once my business gets large enough, this will be the route, but remember, I’ve got experience in doing this, I’ve run staff and an office before!

Process Mapping

The key to Internet Marketing success begins with having a system and process mapping is the piece that puts what you do on paper.  The moment you find yourself with so many things on your plate and whole days going by without getting any of it done, you need to stop, sit down and map out your processes in your business.  This step does a couple of important things: first of all, it starts you on the path of regimenting what you do, but secondly it also makes it easier to spot potential automation targets.

Internet Marketing Automation

By working in your Internet Marketing business and doing everything yourself, you almost instinctively know what needs automation and better tools.  Right now, for my business its Article Marketing.  I take backlinking very seriously and do it in a very prescribed way.  Unfortunately that part of my system is very slow and labour intensive.  I’ve mapped out how I want my article backlinking structure to work and over the last two days I’ve played with several different tools until I got the setup I want.  It literally allows me to work with a couple tools in minutes to do what used to take me hours by hand.  Once this automation process is bedded in and working, then I’ll move onto finding my next automation target.

The key to ongoing success is not to take on boatloads of people who’ve not bought inro your vision, instead spend your time learning the ropes, documenting process and getting a feeling for what’s worth spending time on to improve how you do things.  The more things I automate well, the better my results and the more time I have to do other things or grow my Internet Marketing business.