James is one of the best Internet marketers I know of when it comes to getting things done quickly. His stuff isn’t always the most polished in terms of presentation, but it’s quality content and unlike many people, he doesn’t let perfectionism stop him from getting to market.

His speed of implementation is the reason why he is so successful, and in my opinion, that is the number one thing to emulate from James.

You can learn more about James and how he does what he does so quickly, in an interview I did with him – What Does James Schramko Do Differently To Succeed Online?

Gideon Makes Video Production Quick and Easy

Another example of getting things done quickly, is Gideon Shalwick’s recent teachings about how to rapidly record, edit, publish and profit from online video.

Video sounds complicated, and it can easily become so. The equipment options alone are enough to confuse you, then you have all the editing software, doing the editing itself and then publishing your production to all the websites (getting the file format correct is hard enough – trust me, I’ve struggled with this myself!).

Gideon did a great job of narrowing down the options and presenting an affordable equipment set-up and straight forward methodology for using the videos you create to build an audience. For me, taking away the options and showing a simple path, is the core strength of what Gideon does.

If you haven’t yet had a chance to study Gideon’s training or you couldn’t afford his course when it opened a few weeks back, you have another chance to learn from him live.

Gideon is running a webinar with Tyrone Shum, an expert on outsourcing (I’ve previously interviewed him on my blog too). They have combined forces to teach how to hire other people to handle much of the video production process, so all you have to worry about is sitting down in front of the camera and presenting.

Imagine if you didn’t have to worry about editing and uploading – you just hit record and then hand over the file at the end to someone else who does the production work for you.

This is possible – and it can be done very affordably if you outsource – which is exactly what Gideon and Tyrone are teaching how to do.

You can learn more about the webinar with Gideon and Tyrone right here -

How To Outsource Your Video production – Live Webinar

During the live webinar Gideon and Tyrone will share -

• The whole process of how they outsource video production from start to finish
• The exact tools and technologies used to outsource even the editing of videos (and no, it does not involve sending large video files over the internet – we’ve “stumbled” upon a MUCH better solution)
• Where exactly to quickly find the right people to start taking care of your video production process for you

The webinar will be help on Sept 14 at 8pm EDT (USA). So if you want to be on the call, make sure you register here before it’s all over –

How To Outsource Your Video production – Live Webinar

How Quickly Are You Getting Things Done?

It’s critical you take a blunt look at how quickly you get things done.

Often there is no weakness in your system or your knowledge – you know what you have to do and how to do it – but for reasons, usually mindset issues, you don’t get the work done.

I’ve talked to so many people who know what they want and are clear about how the Internet could help them get it, yet they don’t even have a website.

How can you expect a result if you don’t implement the basic tool you need for success online?

I believe the most common fault is a lack of clarity, often due to too many options and confused motivations, which leads to analysis paralysis or lots of started, but not finished projects.

What James does so well with his entire product creation system, and what Gideon does with his video creation system, is cut down the options and focus 100% on getting something out the door.

This must be your goal as well. Get something out the door.

I recommend right now you take a look at the projects you have on the table, how long they have been on the table, and what you are currently working on.

If you really want to take a hard look at your situation, review the previous three days and what activities you undertook and ask yourself…

• How many of the activities you did during the last three days that contributed to moving closer to getting your project out the door?
• Were those activities related to more than one project? (that’s not a good thing)
• Did you start something and not finish it because you started something else?
• Did you spend more time studying and thinking about what you want to do rather than do it?
• Were you trapped in a process of ongoing research, forever finding new options so you never feel comfortable enough to make a decision?
• Did you actually produce anything and give it to the world during the last three days?

Every day is split up into chunks of time, most of which is not spent moving you towards what you want.

That’s ok – life isn’t about just doing work related tasks – but there should be some time every day that is devoted to productivity. This is just a very small chunk of time and thus must be used very wisely.

Focus on the lowest hanging fruit jobs that relate to one project and get them done one at a time until that project is done.

Don’t worry about perfect presentation. Understand that you will never have complete information and there is no perfect choice. When too many options are presented, the right option is the one that gets a result quickest.

You can always adjust later, which becomes much easier once you know what needs to be changed based on real market feedback. All success is born from action.

Yaro Starak
Blogging Quickly

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For example, my proofreading business was able to generate a salary level income – sometimes as much as $15,000 in one month during peak season – from barely 100 unique visitors a day to the website. My card game site made $500 to $1,000 a month on 500 to 1,000 visitors a day, although this was before Google Analytics, so the “real” traffic numbers are likely less.

So what’s the secret to making money with blogs and getting the best return given less than stellar traffic? Read on and find out…

How Do Blogs Make Money?

Let’s look at how blogs make money. Whenever I’m asked that question I answer with the following three methods –

1. Advertising
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Selling products and services

You can make money with your blog by placing advertisements on it, by selling products as an affiliate where you earn a commission for each sale you refer, or by selling products and services of your own. There are many derivatives of these three methods, but at the top level, this pretty much covers it.

To break that down into more practical ideas, here are some of the ways bloggers currently make a living online.

• You can place Google Adsense advertisements on your blog
• Allow sponsors to pay you money for placing banners on your blog
• Go to a site like Clickbank and find a product you can write about and promote as an affiliate
• Create an ebook, set of audio or video CDs or DVDs, or home study course you sell them from your blog
• Launch a membership site and promote it via your blog
• Conduct a series of live webinars that you charge people money to attend
• Host your own seminar or workshop and sell tickets to it on your blog (and record it to make a DVD product you can sell)
• Add a shopping cart to your blog and source physical goods at wholesale you can sell at retail
• Provide consulting or coaching services and charge by the hour for your time

Other options to earn a return from your blog that doesn’t directly result in money in your pocket, but can eventually, and are definitely a benefit, include…

• Generating a well known brand, creating mass exposure for your name or what you do – and possibly become famous
• Invitations to speak at conferences and seminars
• An opportunity to publish a print book or several
• Consulting to large companies resulting possibly in employment opportunities or large retainer fees
• Free products to sample and review on your blog
• VIP or press access to industry only events and parties

Now you know how blogs make money in terms of concepts and some practical ideas to implement the concepts, next let’s take a look at some case studies of bloggers I’ve personally met or interviewed and how they have made money from their blogs.

Case Studies: These Bloggers Make Money

I’ll be as brief as I can with these explanations as I want to show you how diverse the ways bloggers make money by providing lots of examples. I’ve included some monthly income totals where possible, but the accuracy of the figures is very likely off, so don’t quote these as concrete numbers. Here we go…

Yaro Starak

Income: $20,000 to $50,000 a month
Niche: Blogging, Internet Marketing, Entrepreneurship
Blog: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

I’ll start with my own example, since I know it best. I first started making good money with sponsors paying me to place banners and text links on my blog, which continues to this day (see my advertise page for details). Next I did affiliate marketing, initially starting with Perry Marshall’s products like his ebook and renaissance club, since I was studying his materials at the time. This led to promoting all kinds of affiliate products and services, from Aweber to 1ShoppingCart, and then the big launches that occur in the Internet Marketing niche.

After two years of blogging I launched my own course, Blog Mastermind, then another Membership Site Mastermind, and another in partnership with Gideon Shalwick, the Become A Blogger Premium video course. Just this year I started doing elite coaching at a minimum of $5,000 a person.

You can hear more of my story from a presentation I did explaining my history via audio or video.

Frances Kerr

Income: $4,000 to $8,000 a month
Niche: Alternative Health, Skin Care, Acne Treatment
Blog: www.highonhealth.com

I worked very closely with Fran, helping her to grow her alternative health, acne treatment and skin care blog. She made money first with Google Adsense, though it wasn’t much. Next she started selling banners to sponsors and then reviewing affiliates products like ebooks and DVDs. After about 18 months she wrote her first ebook on acne treatment with food, which resulted in a steady income stream, which has continued to this day. Next she launched her own online store with a shopping cart and started selling physical goods like skin care creams and chocolate. She added a coaching program and membership site, a second ebook and does private consulting for an hourly fee.

You can hear Fran explain her entire story in this podcast interview I did with her.

Alborz Fallah

Income: $100,000+ a month
Niche: Cars
Blog: www.caradvice.com.au

Alborz and I used to work a part time job at the local university computer help-desk. This particular job had the luxury of lots of spare time, which I used to write some of the very first articles on my blog. Alborz saw me blogging and jumped on the bandwagon, leading to the creation of Car Advice.

I spoke to Alborz consistently over the years as his blog grew. It took some pestering, but I finally managed to convince him to try Google Adsense on his blog, which immediately resulted in $20 a day and quickly grew to over $100 a day, then $200. Next he started adding banners from car companies who sponsored the blog because they could see how well it was doing in search engines for terms related to their cars. A big change occurred when he took on investors, helping the site reach car manufacturers to test drive cars, which has led to Alborz driving some of the most exotic cars on this planet, including the Bugatti Veyron. With investors, next came staff writers and then corporate sponsorship deals, which is like selling banners on your blog, but instead you are cutting $30,000 campaign deals with a car manufacturer, rather than $100 a month for a small banner.

Car Advice is now much more than just Alborz, but continues to derive the majority of its income from advertising, though merchandising like DVDs and even possibly a television show are likely extensions of what started off as just a humble blog. You can hear more about the early days of Car Advice in an interview I did with Alborz back in 2008.

Miami Mitch

Income: $15,000+ a month (this need updating, I’m waiting for confirmation from Mitch)
Niche: Sports (began with College Football)
Blog: www.sportschatplace.com/

Mitch joined my Blog Mastermind coaching program during the very first intake in 2007 and immediately stood out as an action taker, attending virtually every coaching call we held, which he does even today three years since the program first opened (that’s value for money!). Mitch began with his passion for college football, starting CFBPlace (College Football Place) where he quickly established his authority at picking the winners of matches.

Like Alborz, Mitch was hesitant for a very long time to attempt to make money from his site, but recently started monetizing his blog. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know Mitch’s site earns income from affiliate programs, especially in relation to betting on sports (his site now has a team of writers who pick the winners of games). Advertising banners, some of which go to affiliate programs, are his main source of income, however he is going to launch a premium sports picks membership site, which will no doubt ramp up the income significantly.

When Mitch first got started I interviewed him to find out how he was able to rapidly increase his traffic in such a short period of time.

Leigh Peele

Income: $10,000+ a month (This is data from 2009, so she is no doubt doing different numbers now)
Niche: Fat Loss
Blog: www.leighpeele.com/

Leigh was also one of my very first Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind students, who really took my training and ran with it. Leigh monetizes her blog by selling an ebook via Clickbank called The Fat Loss Trouble Shooter and by offering members only sections on her blog. Access to parts of her blog are for members only, which she charges money to access.

Back in 2008 I interviewed Leigh when she was just starting to implement what she learned from my programs, where she explained how she went from $20 to $4,500 a month from her blog.

Will Hamilton

Income: $15,000 a month
Niche: Tennis
Blog: www.fuzzyyellowballs.com

Will Hamilton is a professional tennis coach who turned his knowledge and passion into a six figure income, combining his blog with an email list and using YouTube as the main source of marketing. He creates videos, uploads them to YouTube, drives the traffic from YouTube back to his blog (he puts the videos on his blog too), some of them opt-in to his newsletter, and he sells his membership site to make money. Last time I talked to him he had over 600 paying members who pay $25/month.

You can hear Will explain exactly how he does what he does in this in-depth interview I did with him in audio and video.

Tyrone Shum

Income: $10,000 a month
Niche: Outsourcing
Blog: www.tyroneshum.com

Tyrone Shum is another person who participated in both my Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind training programs. He was such a good action taker, he virtually copied whole parts of what I did – and it worked. Tyrone uses his blog, which is almost entirely made up of video blog posts (he puts them on YouTube as well of course), gets people to sign up to his newsletter by giving them an entire video course on outsourcing, then sells a monthly coaching program. He makes money from the coaching program, selling affiliates products and from banners sold on his blog.

Tyrone has an interesting entrepreneurial history, which you can listen to along with how he set up his current six figure business (in under a year!) in this interview I did with him for my podcast.

Pat Flynn

Income: $10,000+ a month
Niche: Architecture and Information Marketing
Blog: www.smartpassiveincome.com

Pat Flynn’s story is very inspirational. He lost his job as an architect during the global financial crisis. His blog was originally used simply as a store house for notes he was taking as he studied for a specific qualification called the LEED exam. Strangely enough, the blog took off because other people were searching for information about the LEED qualification and his notes showed up in search results. Eventually this lead to releasing an ebook, which was just a collection of his blog posts that Pat then sold from his blog. He quickly found himself making six figures a year. He used his success to start another blog about Internet marketing called Smart Passive Income and started making money by promoting affiliate products and later creating and selling iPhone applications.

Pat explained how he was so quickly able to go from newly fired from his job to making $200,000 a year online in this interview I did with him.

Robb Sutton

Income: Full time income (he lives off it, but I don’t know how much)
Niche: Bikes and Blogging
Blog: mountain.bike198.com and www.robbsutton.com

Robb Sutton is seriously into mountain bike riding. He translated his passion into a blog, then a full blown community website of mountain biking die-hards. I don’t know how much Robb makes, but I do know he scores plenty of free stuff – even free mountain bikes worth thousands of dollars – thanks to his blog. He has sponsors who place banners on his blog and I suspect he also uses affiliate marketing as he recommends bikes and bike parts on his blog.

Robb’s specialty is scoring free goods thanks to your blog, which you can learn how to do in this interview with Robb.

David Risley

Income: Six Figures a year
Niche: Computers and Blogging
Blog: www.davidrisley.com and www.pcmech.com/

David Risley, like many people who teach how to profit from blogs, first learned his craft by starting a blog in a different niche – in this case, computers. David monetizes his computer blog, PCMech, with sponsors, Google Adsense and a premium members area. His DavidRisley.com blog is focused on selling David’s training programs, with a little affiliate marketing thrown in. David has done a great job integrated his blogs as membership sites, adding premium sections available only to paying members.

You can listen to David explain how he started making money with blogs in this interview I did with him.

More Bloggers Who Make Money

This is just a small sample of the people currently using blogs to make significant income online. On top of the list above, there’s a few others I didn’t mention as you probably know them already, for example -

• Katie Freiling, who uses her blog as a branding and community leadership tool and she makes well over six figures a year selling her training products and promoting other products as an affiliate. You can listen to the interview I did with Katie here.
• Jeremy Schoemaker who runs a multi-million dollar online business with 12 staff, has leveraged his Shoemoney blog for selling his products, promoting affiliate products, landing speaking engagements, building his email list and cementing himself as one of the most well known Internet marketers. I interviewed Jeremy to get his full background story.
• There’s also Darren Rowse, John Chow and Brian Clark, who all rose to prominence teaching how to profit from blogging and all are multiple six figure earners, or millionaires.
• Darren also has a hugely successful blog in the photography niche, which he monetizes by selling ebooks, affiliate marketing camera related products and through sponsorship.
• Steve Pavlina has one of the most basic designed personal development blogs, but also one of the most popular, with millions of readers. He makes as much as $100,000 a month promoting affiliate products, using Google Adsense and this year has been running live workshops in Las Vegas, which he fills to capacity at $500 a head using his blog for promotion. You can find an interview I did with Steve here.
• Tim Sykes specializes in penny stalk trading and earns over a million dollars a year from his blog teaching others how to do it. He sells DVDs, CDs, a membership site and all kinds of penny stock trading related materials. I interviewed Tim, which you can listen to here.

What Is The Best Way To Make Money With Your Blog?

As you can see by all these amazing examples, plenty of people are earning a lot of money using blogs, covering all kinds of different niches, and using all kinds of methods to generate the income.

At the end of the day, the answer to the question of what is the best way to make money with your blog is a combination of what you can gain the most leverage from, what level of work is required to make it work, what are your personal preferences, what goals do you have, how clear are you on how things work, what are you afraid of and what situation you are in.

Your blog traffic obviously plays a huge part in your success, but many bloggers earn a lot with comparably little traffic, so don’t think you have to be the next Car Advice delivering millions of visitors a year to make it work. Pick a good niche, find the best points of leverage given your traffic and style, then get to work going after the dream.

In my experience, the majority of bloggers who break the six figures a year mark or better, do so focusing on a combination of money making methods. You need to test different advertising formats, combine that with some affiliate marketing, maybe some pay per lead campaigns, or do product launches and consulting. Build out a product funnel and foster a huge email list to sell it to and keep testing until you find what works and what delivers a level of income you are happy with.

If you enjoyed this article, please tweet it, you can share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

Here’s to you building a profitable blog.

Yaro Starak
Professional Blogger

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& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
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Darren Rowse managed to get me a spot on his problogger training day at the expo that he and co-author Chris Garrett are running on Thursday October 14th. I’ll be speaking at 4pm, very likely on the subject of blog monetization.

Alborz Fallah And I Are Going To Do A Full Day Workshop In The USA

When traveling to the USA I like to visit my family in Toronto, and stop in Hawaii to keep my flights shorter and because it’s a lovely place to be. I may also visit New York and LA for fun and to meet up with some Internet marketing friends I’ve never met in person.

My close friend Alborz Fallah, who you may recall I interviewed back in 2007 when his Car Advice blog was first valued at over a million dollars, is also going to travel. However he had one condition before he agreed to come with me – he wants to teach a live workshop to share what he knows about building a multi-million dollar blog with you.

Alborz’s blog has continued to grow incredibly since the original interview three years ago. It’s now valued at…well let’s say multiple millions – MUCH more than it was, with over 10 staff, offices in Sydney, a board of directors, CEO and investors. It’s become a fully fledged business and it all began with him sitting at home, writing about cars by himself.

My own story of recently cracking the million dollar mark contrasts interestingly with Alborz’s as I have done it with a very different model, no employees or investors and much less traffic, though of course his blog is valued at much more than mine.

Together we have a very wide range of experience when it comes to building million dollar blogging empires, which we want to share with you in the form of a one day workshop.

I Need Your Feedback

Rather than guess what you want, I’ve created a survey that I’d appreciate you fill out if you are interested in attending our workshop in the USA.

I’m asking you to nominate your choice for preferred city to have the workshop, topic, cost and format.

Here is the link to the survey. There are only four multiple choice questions so it will take you about ten seconds to complete. Please click the link and then make your choices.

Survey Questionnaire For Yaro and Alborz Workshop

Once I have the data from you regarding what you want, Alborz and I will put together the details and create a registration form for people who want to attend to fill out. It will be strictly first come first served and we are planning to limit numbers to a very small group.

We plan to hold the workshop sometime in late October or early November.

I look forward to reading your survey responses and possibly meeting you at our workshop!

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
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Back during the early days of this blog I used to write income reports on a semi-regular basis. John Chow made the idea of reporting your blogging income popular, and before him guys like Darren Rowse and Shoemoney would show pictures of checks they had received from advertising programs like Google AdSense or affiliate programs. Today guys like Pat from Smart Passive Income keep the trend going, though most of the other guys have stopped reporting now.

There’s no doubt people are inspired by seeing how much money others make (I certainly was before I started earning much online), and for the person sharing their details, it’s great for the ego to talk about how well you are doing. It’s also beneficial as a practice to report income to monitor your trend growth rates and also see if you can sustain a level of income significant enough to live off long term.

I’ve often had people, especially those who work “normal” jobs, question the practice of revealing your income online. How much money you earn is considered one of the most private things you don’t tell even your friends or family, let alone the entire planet through the Internet. I personally don’t think income levels should be hidden, it could be a force for better wages if the knowledge was public, so I’ve never had a problem talking about how much money I generate. Plus it’s fun to report back your successes when you have them, even if it does seem a lot like bragging, which I think it is, but it’s great for social proof too.

How I Made A Million Dollars

It’s amazing for me to write this, but during the last two years I’ve generated over a million dollars in revenue online. What’s even more amazing is I did this without any full time staff and only one regular contractor.

In Australia the tax year runs from July to June, and in the 2008-2009 tax year I made over half a million dollars in revenue doing what I do online. I was expecting the next year to be less because I wasn’t launching as many new things, but it turned out that I actually surpassed the previous year (just), though the profit was less (I bought a new BMW – that tends to hurt your profit a bit!).

Obviously profit is different from revenue, so I didn’t keep the million dollars I made over the last two years. For my business, tax compliance (the cost of setting up a new tax structure), outsourcing to contractors and affiliate commissions are the largest “expenses” I incur. In general I make about 70% profit (and tax comes out of that), which is incredibly high compared to most offline businesses. That’s what is so good about online business – the low cost structure.

Before the last two half-million dollar years I was making a solid six figures a year, so I actually surpassed a million dollars earlier. I feel comfortable saying now that I’ve made more than a million in sales and kept more than a million in profit in the last five years running my current online business.

How You Can Make A Million Dollars

Obviously it’s nice for me to be in this situation and I’m incredibly grateful I can live the life I do, working on a few hours a day, make what I make and do it by helping others through sharing words, but I know what you really care about is how can you replicate my result.

There’s no simple answer to that question, however I’ve met enough millionaires to notice what they do differently, not to mention had my own experience becoming a seven figure blogger.

Here’s some key points as I see it to help you reach your own million dollar result –

And one last tip –

Bonus Tip: Many millionaires are created when one significant event occurs - you sell your business.

You might spend the entire life of your business making a low and steady income, but if you can turn your business into a machine that keeps that income coming without much input from the owner, then you’ve got a sellable asset.

Create a business that makes a few hundred thousand a year using a smart, hands-off business model, and you’ve got yourself a million dollar asset. If that’s daunting, consider starting by creating a five figure business and then selling it for six figures. Do that a few times over a few years and you’ve made your million.

The options are there for you to take any time you decide to go after them. Just spend a little time reading the archives of this blog for a blueprint of a million dollar blogging business, if you’re willing and able to do the work. If blogging is not your thing, then keep researching and testing until you find what works for you.

If you enjoyed this article, please tweet it, you can share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

Yaro Starak
Million Dollar Blogger

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
Download Here

Leave comments on other blogs.

Yep, it’s easy, it’s quick, and because of that, nearly everyone does it wrong. However because so many use blog comments to pretty much just leave spam, if you use blog comment marketing the right way, you really stand out from the crowd and can enjoy good results.

Watch the video and I explain how to more effectively use comments to market your blog.

If you enjoy this video, please tweet it, you can share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

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"How To Start An Internet Business
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In another article I explained the distinction between your grand vision, versus your guiding strategies and your every day tactics.

I taught you that the key word when it comes to understanding your customers and your own process, is “why”. Ask why your customers behave how they do so you can best work to meet their needs and communicate in a language they understand. Ask why you make decisions and take actions so you are clear about how your every day actions relate to your overall strategy and vision.

The final piece of the puzzle, which I will explain to you in this article, is all about execution.

It’s great to conceptually understand these ideas and know the why behind human motivation, but if you fail to execute then you’re not going to get a result. At the end of the day, if you want success, it’s what you do, not what you understand or assume, that will lead you there.

Why People Fail

Many people when they start new businesses fail because they don’t have enough knowledge. Knowledge is the first step because knowledge gives you clarity and clarity give you purpose.

At the end of the day, businesses fail because the people behind them stop doing the right actions or continue doing the wrong actions (usually a combination of both). The key to success is to figure out what are the right actions AND determine what is the right order to complete them in.

You need a clarity of purpose and enough motivation to keep working. The human being, or beings behind the business are the most important variables, and if you as the business owner, or your partners, contractors or staff don’t remain motivated, then you’re heading for failure.

I’ve worked with many start-up solo-entrepreneurs, most of whom never realize the success they want. The reason? They give up too soon. They haphazardly do a few of the right things, but always feel slightly lost or confused or impatient or frustrated. They second-guess their actions, get distracted by new ideas, and jump from one project to the next.

The few people who do enjoy success demonstrate something unique – and it’s obvious to the trained eye what it is. These people stand out from the crowd because of their steadfast motivation towards a goal. They still make mistakes, don’t always stick to one path, but they keep moving forward, failing fast and always learning from what they do. It’s the consistency of their execution that leads to the positive outcome.

The Formula For Successful Execution

You can eliminate much of the ambiguity and fear about what you are attempting to do, if you look at your business as a series of processes that must be successfully executed, one after the other, in order to get the result you want.

The fist step is to successfully execute your customer research process. Learn about your customer psychology before doing anything else (go back and read this article if you need reminding what this means: How To Develop A Crystal Clear Understanding Of Your Customer).

The next process is studying what strategies you need to employ, how they fit together and what order they should be executed in.

For example, as a blogger you usually execute a content strategy, followed by a marketing strategy and then a monetization strategy. Although these things overlap, generally you can’t successfully execute a monetization strategy without first completing a marketing and content strategy, as you won’t have any traffic to sell to.

Once you know what strategies you are going to execute, focus on the first one and only the first one if possible. For this strategy, pick the best tactics you need to complete in order to execute successfully, based on your strengths and current situation. For example, if you are at the content strategy step of building a blogging based business, and your strength is writing, you should map out a series of blog posts that you will write, which could be put together into a free report once complete (like an A to Z guide on how to do what your customers want to do).

From there, you take action and execute the tactics, monitoring results as you go along. Do this with a single-mindedness, as if your life depended on it, for best results. Don’t do it forever, but do it quickly. Execute, assess results, recalibrate, then execute some more.

Avoid These Motivation Killers

At the heart of this process working is clarity of purpose. Your motivation is dependent on your confidence. Your confidence is dependent on your clarity that what you are doing works.

When you are confident that what you do delivers the desired result, you do a better job, hence giving yourself a better chance of success. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as Eben Pagan likes to call it – inevitably thinking. If you believe it is inevitable that what you are striving for you will have, then you increase your chances of it happening. If you believe the opposite, then you weaken your potential.

It makes sense then, that you believe what you want to happen will happen. However belief doesn’t come easy if you have little real world experience to back it up. That’s why quick and focused execution is critical. The quicker you learn what tactics work and what don’t in your given situation, the quicker you will become confident in your own ability to get a result.

Be careful that when you do experiment that you do it at the tactical level. If you keep changing strategies or you’re acting on assumptions about your customers that keep changing, you’re probably feeling more ambiguity than you are confidence.

It’s okay to experiment at the tactical level and as a result you learn new things about your customer psychology, forcing you to change your strategy, but this should only be done in response to real knowledge gained from execution at the tactical level. Make changes based on what you learn about your customers from directly interacting with them, not simply because you “think” it’s the right thing to do.

Once you start getting results, you will become more confident. Confidence in execution leads to more execution and it’s quite possible to reach a point where execution becomes effortless. Once you’ve done things a few times and the result is consistent, it becomes part of your innate abilities. You just know it works and can repeat the process at will without ambiguity.

Imagine what it would be like to have this sort of confidence when it comes to making money online. If you knew that completing a few techniques results in a certain amount of money coming in every time, you’re going to feel pretty relaxed about your ability to run a successful online business long term. This is the place you want to get to.

Execute Every Day

Execution is about repetition and testing of tactics until strategy is realized. Once a strategy is realized you know it works and you’re one step closer to what you want. Plus, you gain confidence and thus motivation.

If you want to make this process part of your life so you are successful in business, you need to make execution part of your every day activities.

If you execute in confidence, you can’t help but gain more confidence, because the worst result is clarity of what doesn’t work. Clarity is the path to confidence. Once you eliminate enough of what doesn’t work you discover what does.

If you enjoyed this article, please tweet it, share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

Yaro Starak
Executioner

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I had been blogging for just over a year at that point, and had over five years experience running websites already under my belt, yet I had never created an email newsletter or list of any kind.

Finally, after repeat recommendations from countless internet marketing experts stating that the “money is in the list” and similar comments from successful entrepreneurs, claiming your “business is only as good as your database”, I realized there might be something to this idea.

I went out and did some research on what methods I could use to create an email newsletter. I concluded after reading forums and blogs that using a third party service was the best option if I wanted to minimize spam complaints and maximize deliverability. Deliverability, which means how good your email list service is at actually getting your messages out to your subscribers, turned out to be a very critical component for successful email marketing, so this became my top priority.

Although there were many reputable providers in the email autoresponder market, including GetResponse and Constant Contact, AWeber consistently demonstrated the best reputation based on my research.

I made up my mind and paid the roughly $20 to register an AWeber email autoresponder account, which I still use to this day.

My First Newsletter

My very first newsletter, the blog traffic tips newsletter branded under the blog traffic king name (which I ended up retiring because I got sick of the jokes from my friends), started off well enough. I had my blog redesigned to include an opt-in box, and created my first landing page at BlogTrafficKing.com, coding the entire page myself, making the process much more painful and slow than it needed to be.

My blog had over 1,000 RSS subscribers when I launched my list, and roughly 500 to 1,000 unique visitors dropping by each day as well. This translated into 10 to 20 newsletter opt-ins a day, which I considered pretty good, though at the time I hadn’t optimized the opt-in area of my blog with good copy or video like I have today.

I continued to write my blog posts and started to write one email newsletter a week as well.

Slowly but surely my list grew. At the start of 2007, about a year later after adding the newsletter to my blog, I had 3,000 email subscribers. It was a good start, and I had a platform to grow my business from.

Ramp Up Lead Generation

I don’t like the term “lead generation” because it dehumanizes the relationship between you and your subscriber.

People who join your list can be considered leads, and when you talk business talk with business folk, this is the language people understand. However I believe it’s much better if you look at each of your subscribers as a real person who has stuck up their hand as interested in forming a relationship of mutual benefit with you. These people are “members” of your community, not leads.

Regardless of the terminology, you’re going to need to figure out ways to increase the number of people who join your list. This was the challenge I faced, though at the time I was happy that I could simply keep blogging and people will continue to find me and join my list.

In 2007 I launched my first product called Blog Mastermind, which you very likely know about already as it’s plastered all over this blog and promoted by my affiliates on countless other blogs in the internet marketing and blogging industries.

As part of the launch process for this course, I wrote what has become the most well known report on how to make money from blogging, the Blog Profits Blueprint. To this day I continue to receive feedback from people that the Blueprint is the best document they have ever read about the subject of profitable blogging. Considering it’s three years old now, that says a lot about how foundational the Blueprint is – it really stands the test of time.

I wrote the Blueprint in five weeks, spending a couple of hours every single day writing one to two thousand words of the report. Once I released the Blueprint, the number of people who joined my email list ballooned. I went from 3,000 people at the start of 2007, to about 5,000 in the next few months leading up to the release of the Blueprint, to 15,000 subscribers after the launch of Blog Mastermind and the Blueprint.

What I didn’t see coming was the impact after I released the report. Having never done a launch before I didn’t understand the ripple effect post launch. Prior to launch I was maxing out at 30 to 50 new opt-ins a day. After the launch I was up to 100 to 150 a day.

Enter Social Media

In 2007 Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook wasn’t on my radar. Social media as a marketing force didn’t come into play for another year or two. From my perspective I was content simply writing blog posts and leveraging my free report to bring in new subscribers.

Over the next few years the online marketing landscape, and the blogosphere, became a whole lot more crowded. Facebook and Twitter became significant new sources of email subscribers, not to mention LinkedIn and other niche specific social community sites. Social recommendation tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious, which have the power to send hundreds of thousands of eyeballs at websites in a matter of hours, surfaced as powerful exposure tools.

And let’s not forget the mother of all social media sites – YouTube. Video wasn’t common when I started building my newsletter, but today it’s almost a mandatory requirement for every blogger and internet marketer to make use of. In fact it’s so powerful, you can leverage just exposure on YouTube, by publishing a consistent stream of videos and driving the viewers back to your blog to opt-in to your email list, as your main lead generation method.

(If you want more details on how to do this, I highly recommend Gideon Shalwick’s Rapid Video Blogging report and three-part video series. Gideon breaks down the marketing process for you in very finite detail. If you’re not capturing new subscribers from YouTube, this is the resource to check out.)

Did You Read Between The Lines?

It’s now four years since I started my first email newsletter. Today I have almost 70,000 email subscribers and I continue to attract an average of 100 new subscribers every day.

These people come to me by conducting a google search, coming across one of my blog articles and then opting-in for my report and newsletter. Or maybe they get referred by one of my affiliates. Perhaps a friend recommends my blog or report in real life in the traditional word of mouth fashion. Maybe they watch one of my videos on YouTube at my Yaro.TV channel and then come to my blog. Perhaps they read one of my tweets spread by my followers, or stumbleupon my content, or follow a facebook share, or read about my work in a forum.

Online lead generation – or list relationship building – is a very holistic process today. This is a good thing, as there are countless channels of traffic you can get in front of if you’re willing to do the legwork. There are fundamentals you have to lay in place in order for the machine to work, but there’s never a shortage of audience if you’re in a niche people care about.

You truly can diversify your exposure points and construct a very stable source of new subscribers that requires very little effort to maintain. I’m living proof of this concept, as our countless other bloggers who have followed similar content and marketing strategies.

If you read between the lines in this article (actually I made it blatantly obvious), I’ve talked about 14 methods to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter. In case you can’t figure it out, I’ve listed the methods for you below.

14 Methods To Grow Your Email List

1. Register an AWeber account and start your first email list
2. Add an opt-in box to your blog
3. Create a dedicated landing page for your newsletter
4. Giveaway a free report
5. Create a product and promote it using a launch process
6. Recruit affiliates to promote your resources
7. Create a Facebook fan page with an opt-in landing page
8. Build a Twitter following and release great content to encouraging retweets
9. Create a LinkedIn profile and interact in the community to build your network
10. Become a quality user of Digg, Stumpleupon or Delicious to build your reputation power
11. Start a YouTube video marketing campaign to drive traffic back to your blog and newsletter
12. Buy a specific domain name just for branding your videos (like Yaro.TV)
13. Encourage word of mouth and viral distribution by creating content that changes your industry
14. Participate in on-topic conversations in leading forums in your industry

If you enjoyed this article, please tweet it, share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email to join).

Yaro Starak
List Builder

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
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The video starts with a brief chat about how I can easily pack up my video recording equipment and head to the park to record a video like this, all thanks to Gideon’s Rapid Video Blogging set-up, which you can learn more about if you grab his free report – http://rapidvideoblogger.com

In the second part of the video I talk about my trip to Melbourne to talk at the first ever Problogger day, run by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.

At the event during one of Darren’s presentations I was reminded of something I really admire about Darren’s technique as a blogger, which I reveal as a tip in the video. You will have to watch to find out what it is .

Get your bonus copy of my book
"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
Download Here

The Rapid Video Blogging Report by Gideon Shalwick

******

Three years ago I started a project with Gideon Shalwick to produce some training videos on how to set up WordPress blogs. Gideon came to my attention because of how good he was at creating online video and using the medium for teaching.

That initial partnership turned into the Become A Blogger project, which has grossed nearly $400,000 in income.

Gideon has become my go-to-guy when it comes to online video because I know he devotes so much time keeping up with the latest trends, technology and constantly tests different equipment to produce high quality video with minimum fuss.

Video Sucks

Video can be so darn annoying sometimes. I struggled with it when I was a PC user, making use of Camtasia to create my Membership Site Mastermind training videos had to be one of the most challenging periods of product creation I’ve ever gone through.

I was creating 30 minute presentations for the modules, using my webcam to record my face talking next to presentation slides. Unfortunately after about 5 minutes of recording the video would start to be slightly slower than the audio, with the end result being a delayed presentation.

I figured out a way to solve the problem by only recording small chunks at a time, but obviously I was not happy.

After switching to Mac things got easier, however it has not always been a straight forward process to figure out what combination of software, lights and video equipment to use.

Gideon has been an absolute life saver in this regard as I can cut down my research and testing time simply by tapping his brain. He’s done the research, so I just ask him then go out and by the appropriate tools he recommends.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve bothered Gideon with video related questions, but he’s always had an answer for me, which is why I’m so excited to recommend his latest report and videos to you today.

If You’re Interested In Online Video – Don’t Miss This

During the last few months I’ve rarely seen Gideon in the flesh because in between welcoming his new daughter Lucy into the world he’s been madly preparing a new training program.

Gideon is well aware that he has to prove to you that he can help you with online video before you will consider taking his course, so he has spent weeks and weeks preparing some amazing free resources.

The big release is his new report, The Rapid Video Blogging Report, which is over 90 pages full of information, diagrams and photographs to explain exactly how to get yourself set up quickly to produce high quality video.

In the report Gideon also lays out the framework for using online video, YouTube, blogging and an email list to create a thriving business. Gideon shows you the steps, the tools and the strategy to make this work, so if you want more leads, more affiliates, more sales, more traffic or just a greater online presence, this is a must download report.

Gideon is also releasing three content videos to explain the opportunity that is in front of you, how you can make your own videos and a case study from someone, a close friend of mine, who used video to great success to create a successful online business.

Did I mention that the report and videos are free?

Yep, you can get them all right here after you enter your email address to opt-in…

www.RapidVideoBlogging.com

Gideon is launching his training program next week, which I am of course endorsing because Gideon’s a friend and I know his training will be the best out there if you’re interested in following the blogging video model.

This Is How Simple Video Can Be

Before I wrap up this blog post I have to share with you a snapshot from inside Gideon’s report -

This is taken from page 32 in the report and to me is one of the key sections because it lays out a very simple set-up to create high definition videos with minimal cost.

One of the keys to creating high quality video is actually the audio. Often inexpensive cameras have good quality video, even in HD like the Flip and VADO, but the built-in microphones are not the best.

Gideon came up with an innovative method for recording high quality audio and video at the same time, using equipment that only costs a few hundred dollars. Combining this with simple software like Screenflow and your Macbook, and you have essentially a high quality video production studio, which is portable, affordable and great for bloggers.

I’m using this set up right now with my VADO camera to produce all the latest videos you see on Yaro.TV, and it’s all thanks to Gideon.

You can get a full explanation of the set-up in the report and the second video from Gideon, which you can download right now from here –

www.RapidVideoBlogging.com

Gideon Has My Highest Endorsement

In a world full of skepticism when it comes to online marketing, Gideon is by far the most down to earth person I’ve ever met. He’s also a great teacher.

You don’t have to take my word for it of course, just watch his videos and you will see what kind of guy he is.

When his course opens up next week I’ll be recommending you join so you can enjoy the benefit of having Gideon’s brain to tap for help with your online videos. You won’t need to go anywhere else.

Yaro Starak
Video Blogger

Get your bonus copy of my book
"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
Download Here

Here’s a relevant quote from the Blueprint:

Strategies are in place to educate your mind about why things happen. Strategy helps you understand outcomes and helps predict future outcomes as a result of particular actions.

Tactics are steps you take – actions – to achieve outcomes. Most of the tactics in this book are processes and techniques you implement through your blog that lead to making money, either directly or indirectly.

Source: The Blog Profits Blueprint

Many Internet marketers, especially those looking to make a quick buck, focus on tactics and forget about the strategy. They want to do something and then see the money come back, rather than understand the system and psychology that attracts a customer and converts a sale.

This kind of motivation results in very short term gains, if any, because there is no long term planning, no asset-creation, or customer retention strategies. There’s no sales funnel, or point of differentiation to separate the business from other offers. There really isn’t a business, just a collection of techniques that are haphazardly thrown out there.

I’m all for taking action quickly and testing ideas, but if you’re not thinking beyond that, even if you do succeed you won’t know what to do next. Success can turn to failure in a blink of an eye when you don’t understand why what you are doing is working and how to build upon it.

What Comes First?

In the article I published preceding this one – How To Develop A Crystal Clear Understanding Of Your Customer – I explained how critical it is that you understand, on many levels, what your customer wants, the emotions behind that desire and the real world tangible changes they want to experience as a result of fulfilling their need.

Once you know this, your next step is to figure out what outcomes you want – what do you want your business to do for your life and how can this happen? How much money do you want to make? What roles do you want to perform in the business? What strategy are you going to follow to make it happen? What is your vision for the future?

Clarity is critical. There is a hierarchy of deep understandings you need to break down as you build your business, and it begins before you do anything.

Here’s the structure you can follow. Note each element is derived from the previous element. You shouldn’t be afraid to change these things as you go along as they will need constant refinement as you learn more about yourself, your customer and your market.

1. Vision: The vision is the big picture. It defines everything from the top down. It tells you why you are doing what you do every day in your business. It’s the destination on the roadmap to creating the business of your dreams.
2. Strategies: Once you know what your customer wants, you formulate a strategy to fulfill that need. Strategies are processes based on proven concepts that you know work. A strategy is a map of how to get to your vision.
3. Tactics: The tactics are the steps you take to implement the strategy. Its what you do every day in practical, real world actions, that lead to tangible results. Tactics are the steps you take to follow the map that leads to your destination.

Successfully implement tactics and you will execute your strategy. When all your strategies are complete, you will have reached your vision.

Lets Make This Tangible

To help make this tangible, let’s look at a basic example to help understand the interconnection between your customer psychology, your strategies and tactics.

Let’s say you’ve studied your customer and you know the one specific tangible result they want the most, which you plan to help them meet, is to give up smoking because they want to be able to play with their kids at the park without being out of breath.

You have a special process combining some NLP exercises people can do to stop the mental addiction and some natural herbs to reduce the impact of the physical addiction.

Your strategy is to create a blog and email list to specifically sell this process as a package that is sent in the mail in the form of educational DVDs and the natural herbs.

Here’s what we need to know.

1. How to sell to this customer group.

We need to know the language to use, what sort of offer to make, what specific information do people in this market look for and where do they currently find it.

The customer psychology tells us these things.

2. What strategy to implement to sell our product.

We know a blog and an email list can help us reach our target customer group, but before we can successful execute this strategy, we need to know exactly how it works and why it works. If you don’t know how all the pieces fit together, then you don’t understand the strategy.

In other words – do you understand how the blog gets traffic? Do you know how to get people on to the email list and what emails to send? Do you know how these tools can sell the product? …and countless other questions like this.

Most of these questions can be answered through research. My two courses cover much of this (Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind), however the answers are also buried in the archives of the blog you are reading now, and countless other blogs and internet marketing products and resources out there. You can also learn it through trial and error.

3. What tactics do we need to implement to realize the strategy.

Once we know the concept behind how a blog and email list can help us sell our product, we need to make it a reality by taking action steps.

Simply put, this is doing things like…

1. buy domain name
2. buy hosting
3. set up wordpress
4. buy an email autoresponder service like aweber
5. set up your first email list and create opt-in form on your blog to collect subscribers
6. plan a series of emails to send to your list, then start writing them
7. plan a series of blog posts to publish and start writing them
8. start testing marketing techniques (go to forums and leave content posts to attract people back to your blog)

…and so on.

A Lack Of Clarity Will Kill Your Business

In the article I wrote about customer psychology I took you through a basic questioning process you can ask about your customer in order to break down the core motivations behind their behavior, as it relates to their need your business fulfills.

The key word in the process is “why“.

Why is also the most important question to ask yourself when it comes to deciding on strategies and tactics for your business too.

If you don’t understand why you are doing what you are doing, then you’re missing pieces of the puzzle. When you have clarity behind why you are making the decisions you make, choosing certain strategies and executing the tactics to get you there, you understand what is supposed to happen.

This is incredibly powerful because it means you have the necessary awareness to adjust and respond based on the results you get. If you don’t know why you are doing something, then you don’t understand how it connects to the next step, or possibly even what the next step is. Then there’s the step after that, and the one after that, all leading to the outcome you desire.

The more ambiguous you are about what you are doing, the more mistakes you make, the longer it takes to get the outcome you want, and the harder everything is. Most people give up before they succeed because they don’t understand how what they are doing really works. Once you know the path and experience it, then your confidence sores and you don’t give up prematurely.

Doing is born from knowing, and although experience trumps everything – so you should always focus on action – if you’re actions aren’t coming from some form of knowledge based on your customer psychology, proven strategies and tested tactics, you’re going to walk into closed doors rather than through open ones.

Ask Yourself Why

Recently I’ve been helping my mother learn how to do basic things with WordPress and aWeber, so she can publish blog posts and send emails to her list (she runs a Brisbane counselling service).

She has been typing up her articles in the word processor in Open Office, then copy and pasting them into the WordPress editor, and then publishing them.

Many times she has had to learn new skills, like adding hyperlinks, or changing the format of text. Needless to say, my mother is not a tech person and isn’t what you call a natural computer user. She is capable of learning, it just takes some practice to get there (which requires some serious patience on my part!).

Watching my mother learn how to do these things is interesting for me because I could observe her struggles and how she overcame them.

My mother takes notes down, writing steps to repeat what she does in the future. I noticed by doing this that she didn’t learn nearly as quickly because it was more about rote memorization, rather than real skill acquisition. She was copying down what she did, then looking at her notes to repeat it when she needed to.

The problem with this method was that she never understood why she needed to do what she needed to do. Each time she faced a problem she has to find the notes that match that problem. This meant that she didn’t see the process from start to finish or how the tools worked to help her realize what she was trying to achieve.

To help her I told her to stop using the notes and instead, when she faced a problem – like needing to make a hyperlink in her article – she asked herself why she was doing what she was doing and how the tools can make it happen.

Simple things, like understanding the difference between a live blog post and the editing screen in the admin in WordPress, was challenging for her, as was understanding how to get the URL of the page she wants the hyperlink to point to.

With some practice came familiarity with the tools, giving her the necessary awareness to not rely on notes. Then, each time she was stuck, I asked her – why are you on the page you are on now?

After asking herself that question, she realized, slowly, that the editing page was for editing, the live window was for viewing and testing changes on the live blog, and that she needed to go to a browser window and find the URL of the page she wanted to link to.

She came to understand how the tools worked, and what the outcome was of doing things. Then, when facing a problem, she could ask herself why she wanted to do what she wanted to do, then determine which tools to use to make it happen.

This may seem like a basic example, but it’s representative of the importance of understanding why you are doing what you do, at all levels of your business.

Whenever you are making a decision or looking to realize a result, ask yourself why what you are doing or about to do is important. How does it fit into your strategy and vision? Do you even have them? Does the tactic you are applying make sense to apply right now given your objectives?

Why is a fantastic question to ask if you want clarity. A lack of clarity is possibly the most common cause of failure, so becoming comfortable with challenging yourself to know more about your customer and what you are doing is a smart idea. If you ever need help, grab a friend or colleague, show them what you are doing or explain what you are going to do, and have them ask you why. Tell them to keep asking you why until they understand.

Forcing yourself to explain what you do to other people is one of the best ways to gain clarity, or at least point out where you lack clarity. If you can’t explain it to other people, how are you going to understand what and why you are doing to the person who matters most – yourself.

Yaro Starak
Eliciting Clarity

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
Download Here