Now you might be thinking to yourself, whats a parallel VPS (Virtual Private Server)? OMG its the best thing ever.

Here are just a few things you can do with a parallel VPS?

• Run resource intensive programs 24 hours a day on a superfast internet connection anywhere in the world without disrupting or taking over your home computer
• Record webinars with 99% accuracy and reliability without worrying about internet connection dropouts
• Privacy, super important for creating multiple accounts with google, ebay, other affiliate programs you may have been *cough* banned *cough* from without them linking and thus disabling (badly) for repeat offending

Now let me explain what a parallel vps is exactly.

Basically its a completely seperate computer somewhere in the world (mainly US) that you can remote control from anywhere in the world and have it act as a completely seperate windows box for you. The best part is that if your using windows you already have the software installed on your computer, search for “remote desktop connection” on Windows 7

Why I think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread is that I was able to take a very mundane task that was reliant on me having a strong solid internet connection (that I routinely forgot to do) and combining with macros to have this task completed for me without fail everyday with or without me resulting in an instant $150/day+ increase in my business.

In the past I have literally setup new computers to do the kinds of things these servers can do and let me tell you it was not easy or fast for that matter.

You can also use VPS as a kinda dedicated host for any resource intensive websites that you may have or any that you care about having an increased uptime.

How do you get one?

Thats the best part, they are super cheap considering what they can be used for. My favorite right now is VPSLand who can get windows 2003 servers for as little as $18/month and you can do anything you want on a win2003 server, win 2008 is not needed.

Now there are a few tips I can give you for getting setup with VPSLand first being that they are used to getting applications from spammer and bad people so your application has to be flawless. It took me three attempts and over a week to get my first one. Make sure that your internet connection and your address on your application are the same, perhaps use proxies to make this easier. If you login from Vietnam and say you live in Australia it will be rejected (ask me how I know). Also pay with paypal and you will avoid any credit card issues as I did.

Let me know with a comment how you can use parallel vps to help automate your life

What do I think of Trey Smith’s new PPV/CPV course called Penny Traffic? Not much.

This course is for the uber newbie and if you have never seen the inside of a CPA network or TrafficVance (the super secret source of penny traffic) then you will get something out of this.

However if you have never seen the two used together successfully then you might actually be inspired to go on and make a business out of it. But be warned, PPV is no easy battlefield and uses a completely different way of serving ads to the customer than PPC and banners anthough they do have some similarity.

What disappointed me most about this course is the lack of reference to free tools available on the web right now.

Anyway we will be coming out with a much better PPV course sometime soon so stay tuned and we will show you how to make a real profit with PPV.

It’s Me,

Mike McMahon

There has been a lot of talk of the merger between YSM and Adcenter so here are my thoughts on what it will mean and how it will effect the industry. Here is what I think it will do…

Piss a lot of people off and generally suck.

I hate adcenter, why? Its a bitch of a thing to use and quite frankly sucks compared to YSM or even Adwords for that matter.

Adcenter requires and heavily promotes stupid bid pricing and for the looser of the search engine wars should be the cheapest. When I first started using Adcenter many many years ago I managed to overspend my $20 budget with 2 clicks! And this was 3 years ago!!!

From my current testing it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better.

Originally I thought that it would be Adcenter migrating into YSM which I was very happy about but it seems that Microsoft had other plans and with most likely be a huge let down.

Another stupid thing that will most likely happen is the lack of ability to separate between advertising on Yahoo or Bing they will probably just make it one big “search” option which is just stupid and allows for no split testing. I say this as Yahoo is saying it will increase your traffic by “69%” yeah right if you pay Adcenter’s stupid prices…

In theory its great two big boys teaming up to compete against the Google monster but in reality they will probably skrew it up with the Adcenter platform.

Nuff Said

Mike McMahon

Have you ever been spot on with your goals yet feel an underlying sense that your still not fulfilled?

Well I just finished watching a fantastic interview between Tony Robbins and Marie Forleo as part of the New Money Masters series and felt there was a lesson in there worth sharing with you.

In this interview Marie talks about a book called “Working on yourself doesn’t work” which she describes as changed her life virtually over night. Why this one book was so profound to her is that it talked about the idea of not paying as much attention on future goals like for example owning a house, making $10k a month or finding your soul-mate but instead engage with every moment of your life 100%, in other words get out of your head and into the moment.

By applying this to her life she was able to take up hip hop dancing at the age of 25 which later scored her a job with MTV which lead to books, exercise videos and a great deal of here external success and more importantly she enjoyed each moment of it so much more.

After a day of trying this out myself it works. So…

What can you engage in right now that will make you feel great?

Leave a comment below

For this split test I blasted an untargeted list of about 8,700 with two different subject lines and nothing else.

The two subject lines were:

“A complete money making system” VS “A complete money making system [{!name_fix}]”

The only difference being “[{!name_fix}]” which adds the persons name to the subject. The body, time, and everything else are exactly the same.

Other things to point out are this email list is old, about 6 months since I last emailed them and these results are 12 hours after mailing.

Here are the Results

The top one contains the name the second one does not.

From these results you can see that the number of opens is 54% more when you add someones name to the subject line.

What totally suprised me was that although the open rate was only 54% more the link clicks are 250% more meaning that those people openning them are 2.5x more likely to read whats in the email and click on the links within.

Also its worth pointing out that this, although scientific, is only a small test and to draw any solid conclusions would be unwise.

Funny Point: Notice the spam rate using someones name nearly doubles the spam rate too hehe so its a double edged sword, luckily this is a double opted in list so not much can happen to this account but I would definately be careful doing this with single optins as once aweber activate compulary double opt-in you have to start a new account to get it turned off and trust me it tried to get it turned off with no success.

It’s Me

Mike McMahon

Have you ever wondered what a business looks like from somebody elses eyes?

Last month was our best month so far (until this month is over hehe) for adsense, it was so good infact I decided to do something I, well, basically never do and share with you exactly how much we made last month (March 2010) from just one of our accounts. Here goes…

Pretty aint it not really its just a bunch of numbers on a screen.

First thing you will probably notice is that it doesn’t say $39,049.31 thats because I am an Australian and we use Australian Dollars or as I like to call them Aussie D’s and my good friend xe.com is telling me that the current conversion rate in US$ is 39,049.31 thus the discrepency.

Secondly is that I blacked out all the details and stuff. This is because back in the day google had rules saying you can’t share sensitive data and after looking as hard as I can could not find this information so better safe than sorry.

Last month I seriously considered writing a course showing people exactly how I do what it is that I do but after a chat with some seriously rich people and some serious consideration I decided against it and for good reason. It was going to be just way to complicated for the average Joe to handle and product launches are really hard work which isn’t my style at this point in my life. Once I find a way to make this easy for the common man (or woman I’m not too fussed) to do I will be sharing this information so *HINT* get on my mailing list if you don’t want to miss it! I can almost guarantee you it will be a private launch to my loyal followers before anyone else.

The last thing I want to leave you with here today is what my future goals are and more importantly state them publically for the record.

My goal is to be earning over $100,000 a month profit by June 30th 2010 which from where I’m standing right now is one hell of a stretch, but I love a good challenge

Let me know your goals by leaving a comment below

It’s Me

Mike McMahon

What these three things have in common?

Oil tycoon makes $150,000,000 fortune in two years

I start $100,000/yr business in two weeks

My friend Chris Cobb mine makes over $100,000/mth in CPA

Stay tuned to find out…

Have you ever wondered which business models have been the most lucrative throughout history consistantly?

I try and answer this question all the time and after about 4 years of searching I think I found it.

Its one of those words that gets thrown around but nobody seems to be able to tell you what it is, ready…

Arbitrage!

WTF is arbitrage I hear you asking, well put simple it is this:

Find a system where you can both buy and sell the same thing (think leads, clicks, stocks, etc), buy it, add as much additional value to it as humanly possible then sell it right back to the same system.

Simple right? Yes, but not easy. The key here is SPEED.

Here is an example:

Imagine there was a big block of vacant land that had just been sub-divided and each are selling at a low price. Now imagine buying up all those vacant lots, matching it with a house then a week later selling the same vacant block of land as a house & land package for a much higher price. Very quickly you can double, triple, 10x, 100x, even 10,000x your money.

Back to out three examples, our oil tycoon found a loophole in the oil market many many years ago where he could buy oil for $30 a barrel and sell it almost instantly for $50 a barrel, he then went on to sell millions of them like this for a couple of years till they figured out what he was doing and promptly fixed the loophole.

In the PPC world today I still use arbitrage to buy from one network or service and sell to another, and Chris does something so complicated in the CPA world with fancy offers that I still don’t understand it (give me time and I might have a special blog post for you)

The big elephant in the middle of the room with this model is you have to have a fair bit of capital backing you as you will be buying the original “thing” and it will more than likely take some time testing before you make it profitable.

How can you start using this information today?

Start looking around the world for opportunities where you can use this most powerful of business models or more to the point who else is already using them… you might be suprised at what you find.

Bonus Tip: If you ever want to join the ranks of the elite in life this is a good way to do it so start today building yourself at least a $30,000 base as they can easily cost you $1,000 a day with good profit margins.

It’s Me

Mike McMahon

Last week some time I watched Joel Peterson’s webinar “How to make money with webinars” and was so impressed that soon I will be flying all the way to the US of A to go see him in person at his 2 day workshop.

Why do I like the webinar business model?

Now you might be thinking to yourself why would I pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to fly from Thailand to USA then more thousands to attend a workshop…

The answer is simple, I love the business model.

For those who know me the key determiner of why I enter a business opportunity or not is how much time of my life it will take and the return on investment, enter webinars.

1. Last year (2009) webinars were they highest converting form of sales online no exeptions making them particularly attractive.

2. Right now the market has I high barrier of entry keeping the average “if its so good why isnt everyone else doing it” types out with hardware and balls required to talk in front of an audience, yet big enough so that everyone I know has been on a webinar at one time or another just like a real life seminar.

3. Every aspect is outsourcable meaning once the system is up and running its a completely hands off business allowing me to continue my lifestyle of world travel effortlessly. Plus this fits in very nicely with my upcoming trip to the philippines where I indend to setup and office dedicated to this particular model giving me experience working with a project manager.

The workshop is on the 23-24th of April 2010 and I know there are still like 3 spots available so come join me and lets explore this together

It’s Me

Mike McMahon

So I am sitting on a flight to Fiji at the moment and picked up the Virgin Blue Voyeur magazine. Id just like to share some of the lessons Richard Branson wrote about.

Richard Branson is a billionaire who loves to have fun. He has hundreds of businesses and is definitely someone to model. He knows how to systemise, gets teams working which enables him to step away from the business and work on other things that interest him.

First off he shares his look on the current global situation. He says billions have been lost and many people are struggling.

Though a lot of good has come out of it, people are spending more time with their family and friends, we have reconnected with life and as we have had difficult times we have realised there are people who are doing it a lot tougher than us.

People Richard Branson knows in charity actually have noticed a slight increase in donations which is great. It’s important everyone helps each other during tough times. Branson mentioned some very important business lessons.

Lesson 1: Know Every Aspect of Your Business

This is something a lot of managers forget, they don’t actually know every little thing about the business. When it comes to internet marketing, marketers usually do know their business very well as most people start to do it themselves.

Though it’s important to remember just because you know parts of the business doesn’t mean you have to do it. For example, I suck at programming I have no idea how to do it. I know how to write a scope, manage the programmer and get what I want which is what matters.

Branson said that the managers who work at Virgin Blue actually work handling bags during their training so they understand the nuts and bolts of what goes on.

Lesson 2: Take A Risk

Branson’s philosophy is to embrace new things and learn from your mistakes. Another big point he mentions is that managers should give room for their staff to fail, so long they learn from the mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You need to take risks, especially when it comes to internet marketing. The great thing about the internet is you can test quickly and it doesn’t cost much to know whether something will work or not.

Lesson 3: Hire For Attitude, Not Skill

This one is interesting because personally when outsourcing I always hire for skill and attitude is second. That being said if I don’t like their attitude I never hire them.

You can’t train attitude so attitude is the most important. You can train a smart person to do pretty much anything. Branson hires people who are positive, smart, like to have fun and take pride in what they do.

Lesson 4: Keep Teams Small

The smaller the team the better. With Virgin Records, every time a team reached 100 employees the company would open up a new branch (using the same accounts).

During this stage Virgin Records ended up with around 20 new companies. This enabled them to keep their team at a suitable size to work efficiently. If teams are too large there are too many communication problems.

Lesson 5: Offer Customers a Better Experience

It is essential for an organisation focus on their unique selling point (USP). Branson says organisations need to focus on their individual voice to stand out. That combined with giving customers a better experience is a huge key in a businesses success.

So there you have it, some priceless lessons from a billionaire businessman. Think about how this relates to your current business.

Use this information and always remember, have fun!

Ben Brandes

Do you want to be more productive? Do you want to spend less time working and more time doing the things you want to do?

Productivity is a key part of every successful person. I have studied productivity and have spoken to many multi millionaires to find out how they get so much done.

I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned and tested over the years to help improve your productivity.

Secret # 1 Create a routine

I learned this from Eben Pagan in his Wake Up Productive program. Basically create a set of habits that you do every morning. Sort of a ritual…

For me, the first thing I do when I wake up is drink some water and then do 30 minutes of exercise. Then I have breakfast, get ready and start work at 9am. See what works for you.

Id highly recommend doing exercise in the morning. It allows you to start your day out right, keeps your mind active and it keeps you in a peak state for the day.

Secret # 2 – To-do lists

To-do Lists improve productivity by at least 25%. I always do my to-do list before I go to bed, that way as soon as I start work the next day I know exactly what I need to do.

I never have to waste time thinking about what needs to be completed.

Just a tip with to-do lists… Also put the list in order. A couple questions to consider are:

• How important is it that I do this task immediately?
• Which are the tasks that must be completed as soon as possible?

I actually use basecamphq for my online to-do list. If I have a huge set of tasks to complete I will even create a daily to-do list, for each day of that week.

Secret # 3 – Set intentions

One of my coaches really drilled into me the importance of setting intentions. I dont want to go all ‘woo woo’ on you so I’ll keep this section short.

Set an intention for tasks and your day. For example, with the timer I mentioned say to yourself “I am only going to focus on this task and complete it”. That is setting an intention.

Maybe the intention for the day might be “Today I am going to remain super productive and complete everything on my to-do list.” Intentions are powerful, use them.

Secret # 4 Eliminate distractions

It’s amazing what happens when you focus on a task without any distractions. Eliminate all distractions – email, skype, put your phone on silent, even put a sign on your door to stop people coming into your office. ( I have a sign that I put on my door saying “Important work in progress, keep out”)

Eliminate all distractions, when you get distracted it actually takes about 20 minutes to get back to the same amount of focus you had before you were interrupted.

Secret # 5 Dont multitask

Multi tasking is a silent productivity killer. It seems like you’re getting more done, when you compare your results from focused time on one task it’s obvious multi tasking reduces productivity over time.

Personally I loved to multi task – on my pc I had 2 monitors, heaps of windows open doing so many different things at once.

It was a hard habit to break, once I finally did I found I got more done and I was so much more focussed and clear on what I was doing.

Now that I travel the world I have a laptop, I miss the 2 monitors but the laptop allows me to do less multitasking as I only have one screen

Secret # 6 – Take breaks

I’m sure you’ve heard ‘less is more’. Take short every 1-2 hours. Eben Pagan recommends the following:

50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
30 Minute break
50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
60 minute break
50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
30 minute break.

During the breaks make sure you do something that takes your mind off work. You’’ll most likely find you come back with a fresh mind and are more focussed on your task.

Secret # 7 Use a timer/stopwatch

When you use a timer a weird thing happens. When you set time limits, Parkinson’s law begins. For those of you who dont know, Parkinsons Law is basically – however long you expect something to take, that’s how long it will usually take.

For example back in high school students are given like 3-4 weeks to complete an assignment. Most of those assignments wont be complete until the day before. Why? Because you’ve set that time frame for it to be completed. Even if you leave it to the night before it still manages to get done on time…

So set smaller time frames, I like to set my timer to 50 minutes. I then say to myself, during the next 50 minutes I will only do this task and will complete it.

I dont always complete it, but it has helped me work faster by setting timeframes and using a timer.

So there you have it! 7 secret productivity tips that I have learned from multi millionaires. Try it out, change things up, even if you only implement one of these tips it can make a huge difference in your productivity.

Use these tips, have fun with it and get more done!

Ben Brandes