Hello and welcome to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason and this is episode 11. Thanks for coming onboard with us for this 11th episode. I want to thank Zachary, my awesome three year old, for that introduction. You give your three year old the podcasting and slice and dice with Audacity and you get a really fantastic podcast introduction. Thanks for that, Zachary, I really appreciate that.

Of course, this is night internet marketing, so Zachary is in bed, but I’m going to go ahead and continue on with a show without him. I’ve got four great things for you today. Thing number one is a new segment I’ll be introducing called Internet Marketing Motivator. It’s going to be a regular feature on the podcast where we talk about an issue of motivation as it relates to your internet business.

Secondly, today I’ll be taking the time to give a shout out to all the great people who have been leaving us fantastic reviews on iTunes. The third and the fourth thing today are related, I’ll be talking a little bit about how you don’t have to sell things to people who want to make money online to make money online, and I’m going to give you a great example of that as the fourth thing.

I’ve got an interview with Pat Flynn. Pat is a good friend of mine and webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog. Even though he talks about making money online on his blog that’s not how he got started. We’re going to talk about his other internet businesses today right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

I wanted to start off today by thanking all of you that have taken the time to go over to iTunes and leave a review for the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Boy, the reviews have been fantastic and it really helps me out because the reviews are part of the system that Apple uses when deciding how to rank the podcasts. It helps people find the podcast by ranking it more highly in the search results and so forth, so I really appreciate those reviews.

If you’ve got a minute to go on over to iTunes and leave a review you can do that at MasonWorld.com/itunes and that will take you over to where you need to go. It’s a little tricky, you’ve actually got to be in the iTunes app. iTunes is a free download and if you don’t use that MP3 player I think it’s pretty cool, you might like it. You can get that Apple.com/iTunes.

Since these reviews are so valuable to me I thought what I do now and in future episodes is I’d try to call out some people who left reviews on iTunes and give a shout out, maybe call out their URL and so forth. So, if you’ve left a review for me on iTunes or if you do decide to leave a review for me on iTunes be sure and drop me a ticket at MasonWorld.com/support and let me know that you left me a review on iTunes, leave your name and your URL in that ticket, I’ll go over and take a look at the review and give you a shout out right here on the podcast, maybe send a little traffic your way just as my way to say thank you for leaving me that review in iTunes, I really do appreciate it.

We’ve had a couple of great reviews in iTunes, and one of the very first guys that left me a review in iTunes was my buddy Josh Spaulding over at EthicalIM.com and he’s had some really nice things to say about the podcast. You can check out his review over at iTunes, again that’s MasonWorld.com/itunes, and while you’re at it go check out Josh’s blog. I think you’ll like it a lot over at EthicalIM.com.

The second thing I wanted to cover tonight is a standing segment that we’re going to be adding and we’re calling it Internet Marketing Motivator. The reason that I wanted to add this segment is because I know that to be successful in online business it fundamentally takes two things.

I’ve been at this several years now and it’s pretty obvious to me that the first thing that you need to have in order to be successful in online business is enough knowledge about online business in order to be competent and successful. If you’re not competent you don’t know what you’re doing you’re not going to be successful and that’s obvious.

Most information marketers out there on the internet that are in the internet marketing niche are trying to attack that very problem. There’s tons of ebooks and audio and podcasts like this where people are trying to teach you about internet marketing. So, that’s thing one and obviously there’s a glut of information out there about internet marketing.

The second thing that you need, I think, is a proper mindset in order to be successful with internet marketing. You’ve got to have the proper motivation to see it through. Most of the people that I’ve seen fail at internet marketing failed because they quit too soon and because they lacked the proper motivation to really get things done to be successful. So, that’s something I want to address in each and every episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Now, the first thing we’re going to talk about, the very first motivational tip that I have for you with regard to your internet business is simply that you need to set goals. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “Mark, I know this. Everyone tells me that you need to set goals and they tell me that you need to write them down and so forth.”

Well, there’s a couple of things that I want to tell you about your internet marketing goals that I think will really help you. The first thing I want to tell you is your goals need to be reasonable, it’s very important. I told you just a second ago that most people I know that have failed in internet business failed because they quit too soon. The corollary to that is one of the reasons that they quit too soon is because they were expecting results too quickly.

So many of the headlines that people read out there talk about how you can make 27,000 dollars next week using this magic formula or you can be making money with this technique in a week or you can be killing it with Adwords in 47 minutes or whatever it is. The truth of the matter is building a real internet business that adds value to customers and creates value for you in the form of profit takes awhile.

So, you need to have goals that recognize the fact that it’s not going to happen overnight. Now, it’s certainly possible that you will put up a web page and become rich overnight and I hope that happens for you, that sounds fantastic. But, the reality is that it’s going to take you some time and some work and so your goals need to reflect that. So, my first recommendation is that you have realistic goals.

The second recommendation is, of course, not only that you write these goals down, but I’m going to make the very simple recommendation that you put them on a sticky note in front of your monitor. Internet marketing is one of those funny things where almost every time you’re working on it you’re in front of your computer and if you’ve got your goals in front of you and you feel that need to go check Twitter or your email for the 700th time or your Clickbank stats for the 800th time that day or your Adsense revenue stats for the 900th time that day, if you see that little PostIt note sitting there saying that, for example, you have a goal that you wanted to make three sales of your information product this month then you know that you can look at that and it will help you stay focused.

So, my second tip for you is to get that goal written down or those goals written down and put them on your monitor. Then my third tip for you regarding goals is make sure that you have some short term goals, some medium term goals, and some long term goals. Your long term goal may be that you want to make 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 dollars a month from your internet business so that you can quit your job. That’s a fantastic goal, especially if you know really what you want your business to be like and if you know why you’ve set that goal those can be fantastic goals.

But, you really need some intermediate goals. You might need to have a goal, for example, to get your first blog up, or you might need to have a shorter term goal that has to do with making 100 dollars a month online or 1,000 dollars a month online before you get to that 10,000 dollar a month goal. So, it’s really important to have short term, medium term, and long range goals.

The problem with only having a long range goal is that sometimes it can seem so far away that it can actually become a demotivator for you in your business, so you want to make sure that you have something that you’re striving for really to get done this week. Those are the best sort of near term goals. What’s your goal for this week? So that you can stay motivated and focused in your business.

So, those are my three tips regarding goals. I hope that’s helpful to you in your business and you can look forward to internet marketing specific motivational tips every week here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

For the last piece of the podcast today, episode 11, I wanted to address a topic that comes up periodically so you can know where I am on it and that’s this topic of whether or not it’s possible to actually make money online without resorting to the business of teaching people how to make money online.

In fact, internet marketing marketing to other marketers can be a little bit of a sleazy business. If you look online you see a lot of sales letters that are targeting people that are looking to improve their life situation, looking to make a little extra money and they’re making unfair or unfounded or unreasonable promises about how this person can solve all their life problems by just buying this ebook or whatever.

That’s fine and some of those are perfectly legitimate products, but it could lead you to ask the question, “Hey, is it really possible to make money online without selling people make money online stuff?” That’s a lot of times what you see. The answer is absolutely yes.

I think the two best business models for this are business models that we’ve discussed previously in the podcast. One business model is the business model that I like to talk about a lot and that we’ll focusing this podcast on in future episodes and that’s the business model of affiliate marketing where you provide valuable content or other kinds of helpful information to people in order to help them select a good product that’s right for them. That’s the kind of affiliate marketing that I like to do, there are certainly other kinds of affiliate marketing.

The other way you can make money online that’s an excellent business model is take some expertise that you have and package it up into an information product, either an ebook or a series of videos or an audio, and sell that product online. While you may see a lot of those in your daily internet travels that are related to internet marketing, you can make an absolute killing doing this sort of thing outside of the internet marketing niche and a lot of legitimate marketers do exactly that.

In fact, one guy that I’m very impressed with I have on the podcast today. Let me tell you a little bit about my relationship with Pat Flynn. Pat is the webmaster over at the Smart Passive Income Blog, SmartPassiveIncome.com. He’s also launched a brand new podcast that competes with this podcast actually called The Smart Passive Income Podcast. It’s an outstanding podcast, there’s plenty of room on your iPod for both of us, I recommend that you go over to iTunes and give that a listen. It’s fantastic. In fact, in episode two of that podcast you’ll find an interview with yours truly, Pat and I exchanged podcast interviews.

What you’re about to hear is an interview with Pat where he’s going to explain how he got started in internet marketing. Now, unlike a lot of people he didn’t get started in internet marketing trying to teach people how to make money online, he got started in internet marketing by selling a wildly successful information product.

He’s going to talk all about that and subsequently he started a second business, not including the SmartPassiveIncome.com brand, but he started a second business selling iPhone applications. So, there’s two great examples of ways that you can make money on the internet without having to resort to teaching people how to make money online. I think it’s a really important point.

A lot of times people will come into internet marketing and expect that they should be working on teaching people how to make money online, after all that’s the example that they have in front of them. They’ve bought a lot of ebooks and they’ve purchased all these things and they think, “Well, I’m going to create my own ebook.”
You can certainly do that, I’ve done it, that’s what this podcast is all about, that’s what the MasonWorld.com blog is about, but I will say that you may find that the competition in non-internet marketing niches is considerably less. It’s hard for me to make a recommendation to people not to pursue internet marketing, after all I’m in the internet marketing niche in addition to my other niches, so it would be disingenuous for me to tell you that you shouldn’t be in internet marketing.

Certainly it would have been crazy for me to recommend to Pat Flynn that he stay out of internet marketing, because he’s had some crazy success with the Smart Passive Income blog, he’s doing really well over there. So, I’m not recommending that you not pursue internet marketing as a niche in your internet marketing business, just understand that I think there might be a lot better opportunities for you out there depending on what kinds of things that you’re interested in.

That gets us into the interview with Pat Flynn. Let me tell you, I’ve known Pat since he lost his day job. Pat will explain in the interview how he was caught up in this kind of crazy economy thing as an architect and came out with his first information product as part of his activities in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, that’s where I met Pat. I hope you enjoy this interview. Pat is awesome, the interview is great. Without further ado we’ll get into it….

I’ve been following Pat almost since the beginning of his internet marketing career. We hooked up early in his internet marketing life on the Internet Business Mastery website. I saw him build an amazingly successful information product business right before my eyes inside the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

He then went from that to launching a successful internet marketing blog, something that is incredibly difficult to do with so many people in such a crowded niche. Then turned right around and launched a successful iPhone apps business. This has just been a hat trick, really amazing to me.
Pat, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing this evening?

Pat Flynn: I’m doing excellent. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to your podcast and it’s just really cool to actually be on the show now, so thank you.

Mark Mason: Well, you are joining quite a distinguished list of guests that I’ve been able to coax to come on the show, so I really appreciate having you here. How are things in San Diego?

Pat Flynn: Things are good. Actually, today was a pretty crazy day. It was lie 97 degrees, so it was really hot.

Mark Mason: That sounds like Texas.

Pat Flynn: It felt like Texas, but then in the evening it started to rain, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Mark Mason: I’m glad you didn’t wash away. I saw a tweet from you that you thought maybe you were in Australia or New Zealand based on the weather.
Pat Flynn: Yes. Melbourne, Australia, one of my favorite places, just four seasons in a single day basically.

Mark Mason: There you go. So, it’s really great to have you here. One of the things that I’ve been talking about on the podcast, as you know, is trying to build people up to this idea of how you can make money on the internet, how you can build a business.

One of the questions that I get from time to time is… Is it really possible to make money on the internet some other way besides teaching people how to make money on the internet? I always laugh about that, because the businesses that I really admire on the internet are businesses that don’t have anything to do with internet marketing.

One of the best examples I could think of and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is your green architecture business, the place that you very first got started. I was wondering if you could just start off the interview just by giving us a little brief history about how all that happened and how that’s an example of how people who have some domain knowledge can make money with information products on the internet?

Pat Flynn: Sure, no problem. What’s funny is a lot of people ask me that same question. “Can I make money by not telling people how to make money?” I always tell them my story because it’s exactly that.

From the beginning, I went to school for architecture at the University of California Berkley, loved architecture. I graduated and got a great 9:00 to 5:00 job, I loved what I was doing. I was traveling around the U.S. meeting with high end clients, designing Hilton Hotels in Vegas and whatnot. I was just loving life.

I could see my whole life planned out, 401k, retire at 65 and enjoy life then. Then all of a sudden the whole economy thing happened and one by one everyone in our office was getting laid off and eventually it was my turn.

That was a pretty dramatic moment in my life and it was nearly impossible to get another job in the architecture field just because no one was building, there was no credit available for builders or anything like that. So, I looked for a solution.

I thought about going into another field or something related to architecture like engineering. But, I had been listening to a podcast, The Internet Business Mastery podcast, and those guys, Sterling and Jay, inspired me so much. I really always wanted to do internet business, I heard success stories and these guys just inspired me.
I was like, “That’s so awesome.” I was kind of living vicariously through what they were doing and the guests that they had on the show. My only experience doing something online at the time was a blog I created for myself.

So, what I did, this was before I got laid off, I was taking this test called The LEED exam, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and I created this blog to keep track of my notes for me. I knew how blogs worked, content management systems, and it was really easy for me to study on the computer. When I was traveling I could just go to any computer or take my laptop and study instead of carrying around a whole notepad.

Also, I must confess that my handwriting is like chicken scratch, so that’s why I created this blog. I passed the test, all my notes were on there still, and when I just for fun checked the analytics, the website visitor statistics, thousands of people were visiting my site from around the world. I freaked out.

I freaked out at the beginning, because I was like, “Whoa. This is like an invasion of my privacy.” I didn’t know how the internet worked with keywords and Google and stuff like that, but apparently I had been writing content that was related to keywords that people were searching for related to this exam.

So, they found me, they were using my notes. I later enabled comments and people were commenting and asking questions and I would help them out. I just became this authority, this head figure in this niche, the LEED green building exam niche.

I wasn’t an expert, I didn’t think I was an expert, I still had to look up stuff all the time to give people the correct answer. But, I knew more than they did and because of that I think they trusted me. That really helped as I started to build my website and actually take it a step further.

This was after I actually passed the exam, I took it a step further and made sure that all the content on there was perfect for people who were studying for the test, because I knew exactly how hard it was. I knew the lack of resources that were available for the test at the time, so I wanted to be that resource and help people out.
That’s exactly what I did. Right before I got laid off I was helping tons and tons of people pass the exam for totally free and I never planned on making money from this website at all. Until I got laid off, then I was like, “I guess I’ll do something online. All these people I’ve heard about are making money online.”

“Let’s see if I can do anything with this blog I have. I know I have traffic and I heard that if you have traffic you can do things with it to make money.” So, naturally the first thing I did was put Adsense on my blog, a little link text and little banner ads. I think the first month after that I had made 35 to 40 dollars.

I was blown away, 40 dollars for doing nothing basically. All I did was put some code on my website and let it run and I had 40 dollars in my pocket. That just seemed amazing to me. Unfortunately, at that time that wasn’t even enough to fill a tank of gas. I was in Irvine, California at the time.

Mark Mason: Right, especially not in California.

Pat Flynn: During summer it was like five dollars a gallon. So, from there I did more research. I asked a ton of questions from different gurus, I joined Internet Business Mastery Academy, just trying to figure out everything that I could do to make more money online, because I knew it was possible, I had 40 dollars and I wanted it to be more.

So, what I did from there was I sold private advertising on my website, little 125x125 pixel ads on my sidebar of my blog. My first deal was for 50 dollars for the first month. That was amazing too. So, I had the 50 dollars from this one company for one ad and 40 dollars coming in from Adsense, so I had almost 100 dollars. That was pretty amazing to me as well.

Then from there I added more private advertising, but still it wasn’t enough for me to sustain a living. I was getting married in just a few months and I had to figure out something to do. So, what I did was I gave myself an ultimatum.

I said, “Pat, you have three months to actually make this into a sustainable business. If you don’t then you’re going to go look for another job.”

Mark Mason: Three whole months? Wow.

Pat Flynn: Three whole months, I didn’t know if that was too long or too short, I just gave myself a time and wanted to make sure I got it done in that time.
So, from there I had read about people creating their own products and I learned about ebooks and how to write them. I created a study guide for the LEED exam, totally elecrtronic, I wrote it in Microsoft Word and it was just a PDF.

That took about a month and a half, so I was half way through the time and I was really scared. I didn’t know what to expect. I would have been happy to sell one copy. Well, the first month I launched that ebook on my website, my existing blog, I made 8,000 dollars in the first month.

That was more money than I’d ever seen in two or three months of work at my normal job, way more than that. That just blew my mind. I knew it was possible, so I took it a step further and I created an audio guide to go along with it.

Again, these are just tips and tricks from internet marketing friends that told me, “You should do this. Check out this guy who did this.” So, I’m just following people’s examples. I created an audio guide to go along with the ebook, so I had two products, an ebook and an audio guide.

I sold them together for a discount price. After I launched the audio guide, that month I think I made 20,000 dollars and I peeked in March of 2009 with making 30,000 dollars in one single month just from one product, one study guide. 30,000 dollars, I couldn’t believe it, I pinched myself.

I still pinch myself because I can’t believe it happened. But, now that I’m into internet marketing and in business I know exactly why that happened and that’s why I created the Smart Passive Income blog, because I want to show people that it is possible to make money online without having to tell people how to make money online.
I’m sure most of your listeners have never heard of the LEED exam before, it’s such a small tiny little niche in the corner of the world, but just selling an ebook for it gave me half my salary working as an architect in one month.

Mark Mason: I work at a company in my day job that has a LEED certified building and I had never heard of LEED before, so there you go. It’s a pretty obscure niche to be making 30,000 dollars in one month.

That’s just an amazing story and I remember it like it was yesterday, because I was there. All of this was happening inside the Academy essentially. It’s just shocking.

Pat Flynn: Lots of credit goes to the Academy. They helped me out a lot, you helped me out, and Sterling and Jay and everyone else in there. There’s a lot of people in the Academy too who also make a good living not talking about making money online.

Mark Mason: Yes.

Pat Flynn: Shawn Newnann I think he has a site where he teaches people how to speak Indonesian. There’s a guy who has a site that teaches people how to play the guitar and they’re making a killing too.

Mark Mason: Yes. With great products that help people at a fair price. They do this thing that my friend Nicole Dean always says, they make the internet a better place and they help other people profitably. That’s another way I like to say that.

Pat Flynn: I love that.

Mark Mason: That’s such a great thing. But, you didn’t stop there. The Smart Passive Income blog is one of the top blogs that I recommend people go read. I recommend all my listeners go over there, sign up for your list and download your excellent resource on ebook creation.
That’s very good, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to mention that to you. That’s outstanding.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate that. I just wanted to tell people exactly how I created the ebook that had generated all that income, so I laid it out on the line right there.

Mark Mason: If there are people listening to this that want to know how to do that, that resource is just outstanding to get a real perspective on exactly what it takes.
You didn’t stop there, right? You’ve now launched this other business where you’re creating sometimes it’s like five or six iPhone applications in a month. Is that right?

Pat Flynn: Yes, that’s right. I don’t do it myself, I don’t program, I don’t even know where to start with programming iPhone apps. In case you’re wondering how it all works, my buddy and I just come up with ideas and we outsource them to people who are good at creating iPhone apps.

My business partner knows how to program, but we don’t choose to do it, because there’s people out there who are experts in iPhone programming only and we outsource our ideas to multiple programmers at the same time to act like there are four or five of us that are working on it at the same time.

We can get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time, the quality of the products are much better than we could ever do, and we’re doing maybe four or five iPhone apps a month and that market has just taken off. We’re doing pretty good with it, so it’s a lot of fun.

Mark Mason: It’s amazing. Did I see that you have a breathalyzer application?

Pat Flynn: Yes. That one just came out. For those of you who don’t know, my iPhone app company is LOLer Apps, which stands for Laugh Out Louder Apps, and they’re all gag apps. I’m sure you’ve heard of iFart by Joel Comm.

Mark Mason: Yes, by Joel Comm, right.

Pat Flynn: That thing made on Christmas Day I think it was 2008 he earned over 25,000 dollars in a single day.

Mark Mason: A dollar at a time, right?

Pat Flynn: A dollar at a time. He has other apps and there’s other people. I think there’s an app called Doodle Jump right now that was done by two independent developers. They just cleared the 3.5 million dollar mark.

Mark Mason: Yes. The Words with Friends guys are from here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: Really?

Mark Mason: Yes, they live right here in Dallas. I haven’t met them, but they live in one of the suburbs here in Dallas.

Pat Flynn: I’ve got to talk to those guys.

Mark Mason: Absolutely. I’ll try to set it up for you.

Pat Flynn: I was going to say because my wife got kind of mad at me because I played that game for too long.

Mark Mason: So, that’s just been another successful thing for you. Do you do anything special to promote an iPhone app?

Pat Flynn: A few things. We run what’s called AdMob Ads, it’s kind of like Adsense for iPhone.

Mark Mason: I see.

Pat Flynn: You can do both ends of it. You can create ads to click over to new applications or you can put code into your existing application for ads to automatically generate and show there and you get paid per click.

So, we have a number of free apps that have AdMob Ads running, kind of like Adsense. Whenever we come out with a new app usually with a paid app we’ll pay for advertising, which is equivalent to doing Adwords.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: So, we do that. We do a little bit of article marketing and going out to different review blogs.

What’s been really helpful is we’ve noticed with a lot of other iPhone app developers, especially ones who have multiple iPhone apps, on each of their applications they have a “more apps” button, so people can click on the “more apps” button and see the other apps that are available. That’s been helping out tremendously.

Mark Mason: Right. I’ve seen that and I buy those other apps, because I’m already invested in what I know is a good app, so I’m expecting that those same developers are also going to deliver something of a similar quality on their other apps.
Pat Flynn: Exactly.

Mark Mason: So, that works really well. That’s really smart. Well, that’s amazing. I hope everyone who is listening to this is convinced that it is possible to make money on the internet without teaching people how to make money on the internet. It’s important that that point is clear.

For people that are starting out on the internet, a lot of my listeners are trying to get started, they have a 9:00 to 5:00 job, they’re trying to get things going or they’ve lost their job and they’re trying to get things going, so what I ask every guest is…

Can you tell me the three things that you wish you had known when you started or the three pieces of advice that you would give someone who is starting out about internet business? Three things that somebody really needs to know, either technical things or technique things or mindset things or whatever you think is important.
If you could only pick three things what would they be?

Pat Flynn: Sure, that’s an excellent question. I might have to take that question for my own podcast.

Mark Mason: And you’re welcome to do that. As long as I get 100 dollars on every download you can use it.

Pat Flynn: Okay, for sure. Three things. The first thing I really wish I knew was that it was really possible to create a successful business online. I think not believing in it slowed me down at first.

Although it may seem like things happened pretty rapidly for me, I do know that I could have done things a lot earlier. Maybe before I even got laid off I could have started my internet business, I didn’t have to wait for that to happen in order for me to do it.

Not believing in it slowed me down. You have your doubts and you’re scared and because of that you don’t take the action that’s required for you to see the results. It’s huge. You have to take leaps of faith almost.

Although you can do research and try and make sure that you’re taking the right steps, you’re eventually going to have to take a leap and you’re going to have to take bold actions in order to make things happen. Just stepping out of your comfort zone, that’s a huge thing.

Tim Ferris in 4 Hour Workweek, I remember specifically this one exercise that he has. After each chapter he has different exercises to help you with the mindset of being a successful entrepreneur.

One of the things he suggests you should do is to go to a crowded area like a mall or just in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere on a busy street and just lay down and look up and just not worry about what everyone else is thinking, because it’s training you to step out of your comfort zone and do things that you might not normally do.

That’s kind of what it takes in order to be successful online. You’ve just got to do it. My best teacher for everything I know, although I talk about Internet Business Mastery and I learned so much from them and from you and everyone else, all my mentors online, my best teacher is experience and just doing things. I can’t stress that enough.

Mark Mason: Yes. You miss every shot that you don’t take. Right.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. It’s like in golf when you stroke a putt and you don’t even reach the hole. Well, you didn’t even give yourself a chance to sink it.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, your advice to everyone listening is to rush out to their local shopping mall and lay down?

Pat Flynn: Yes. Well, no. Just understand that you’re going to have to things that you might not be comfortable with. You’re going to have to take risks. You won’t see the rewards until you take action.

Mark Mason: Okay. Very good. So, thing number one is take action, accept the risk, don’t worry about failure. What’s thing number two?

Pat Flynn: Number two is all of my success has come from helping others first. Before when I was trying to make money off of Adsense and stuff those ads didn’t really do much for the reader of my blog. I was trying to make money for myself, just getting people to click on the site.

What really skyrocketed my income was providing a product, the ebook or the audio guide that I created, that was really helpful. Because that was really helpful and people appreciated that they were happy to pay for it, happy to recommend it to their friends and their coworkers.

I say this all the time. Karma online totally exists. I don’t know if it’s just like a spiritual thing or if it’s actually technical and Butterfly Effect type of stuff, but it really exists. If you help people, like you were saying the Nicole Dean quote from earlier.

Mark Mason: Right.

Pat Flynn: That was just an amazing quote that sums it all up. Making the internet a better place profitably. That’s the other thing is just understanding that your first priority should be helping others and as a side effect you will make money doing that.

Mark Mason: Yes. The quote that I shared with you before, but that I learned actually when I was selling knives door to door, which is a story we’ll have to get into on another podcast.

Pat Flynn: It’s not Cutco is it?

Mark Mason: Actually, yes.

Pat Flynn: Okay, yes, we can talk about that later.

Mark Mason: We’ll have to. I did some sales training with Zig Ziglar and what Zig says is that you can get everything that you want in life by helping other people get what they want.
Pat Flynn: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: I really believe that. That’s what I do in my day job and it’s what I do on MasonWorld.com and I know it’s what you do on Smart Passive Income, because that blog rocks.

Pat Flynn: Thanks.

Mark Mason: People should pause this recording and go over to your website and check it out. It’s just really fantastic.
So, I got thing two. Thing two is help other people first. I like it. What’s thing three?

Pat Flynn: Number three is, and this was hard for me because I’m a control freak, I like to make sure that things are happening and that I’m doing them the right way, the way that they should be done or the way that I want them to be done, but the truth is you don’t have to do everything on your own.

Actually, you shouldn’t do everything on your own. We’re good at certain things and we’re not good at certain things. For those things that we’re not good at we should definitely find those people to fill those gaps, people who are good at those things that we’re not good at to take care of it for us.

They’ll be happy they’re doing things they want to do and then you’ll be happy because you’re not doing things and you can spend time doing what you enjoy or doing what you’re good at. In other words, I don’t want to blatantly say “outsource it,” but that’s kind of what it is.

It’s understanding what your strengths are and focusing on your strengths and not focusing on things that you shouldn’t be focusing on. For instance, when I first started that blog to help me pass the exam I didn’t know anything about WordPress or hosting or anything like that. It took me a month to set it up the way I wanted to. Literally, a month.

Mark Mason: I understand. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Pat Flynn: I really wish I just knew that there were people online who did this thing for a living who could do it in five minutes and I would pay them 10 dollars or whatever, or however much they’re charging.

On the flip side of that, I’m glad that I went through all that hardships and learning everything because now I understand how some of those things work. Although I would never take on those things as primary jobs I understand how they work.

So, if there’s something that needs a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done on my website, for example, I understand how to do that. I’m not totally lost. Even when I created SmartPassiveIncome.com, which was my follow up website to GreenExamAcademy.com, I knew the process of how to create the blog, but I just outsourced it, I paid someone to build it for me.

I think that helped out a lot, because I have a custom template that a lot of people like and it’s unique and I think that’s been helping with pushing the traffic and new subscribers and getting people excited about the website.

Mark Mason: Yes, your website is beautiful. Again, people should pause this recording and go check it out.

What you just said resonates with something I heard you say earlier with your iPhone apps business. Your partner is a programmer, he doesn’t program, but he can speak intelligently to programmers that you’re hiring and that’s really important.

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, I love that. I love those three tips, they’re excellent. I’ll give you the best example, I think, of that. You came out with, as you often do, one of these amazing in depth tutorials about Facebook Fan Page landing pages.

I read that and I understood what I wanted, but I didn’t really want to learn FBML, which is Facebook’s markup language. I looked at it for five minutes and I thought, “I’ve got something else to do.”

I sent the URL for your page to my developer and I said, “Go read Pat’s post and then make me one of those, please, and send me the bill.” I got something that was very nice.

Pat Flynn: I remember your landing page, it is quite nice.

Mark Mason: I had nothing to do with it other than being smart enough to send my developer to your website. To be honest with you, besides expressing what I want I can’t add value to the landing page design process. No amount of me messing around with Photoshop is going to get a good result.

I just don’t have that skill, so that’s just wasting everybody’s time for me to work on graphics and positioning some sign up box. That’s not what I do.
So, that’s great advice. People need to do that and they need to do it sooner rather than later. I know it’s very hard. The reason that resonates so much with me is because I tell people exactly the same thing.

They need to start small, but start outsourcing the stuff either that they don’t like to do because it’s sucking out their life force or that they’re not good at.

Pat Flynn: Right, exactly.

Mark Mason: This has been absolutely fantastic.
Pat Flynn: Mark, we’ve got to do it again sometime.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate you being here, I’d love to do it again. Let’s talk a little bit about how people can get a hold of you. The internet is a big place and there a few things that I recommend to my readers that directly compete, if you want to use that word, with what I do here, but it doesn’t bug me because, as we talked about before, I just want to help people.

Reading your blog will help people, so tell me a little bit about how people can find you on the internet.

Pat Flynn: Sure. When I’m not at a mall laying down face up you can find me on my blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com, that’s the hub, that’s where everything happens. I talk about everything that I do online, even my income reports down to the penny exactly where it all comes from.

If you just want to say “hi” or “hello” probably the best way to find me is on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/smartpassiveincome and we have a growing I guess you could say fan base there, I don’t know what they call them anymore.

There’s a great community there. If you even have a question there’s a lot of people there who will answer before I do. So, come say “hi” on Facebook if you have time.

Mark Mason: Very good. I really appreciate your time. I really encourage people if they have any interest at all to go to your website and download your ebook on ebooks, it’s really a fantastic read. Great job.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

Mark Mason: Okay, sir, thank you very much. I wish you all the best and I will be in touch.

Pat Flynn: All right. Let’s do this again soon.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Bye.

That wraps it up for this episode 11 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode where we have another interview with a guy that’s killing it online without selling stuff that teaches people how to make money online. Until then, we’ll see you soon. Thanks.

My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.
If you really liked this podcast there’s two great things you need to do. Thing number one, go on over to MasonWorld.com and sign up for the Mason World Internet Marketing Newsletter. I send out all kinds of information to that newsletter that goes along really great with the podcast and you’ll learn about new podcast episodes there.

The second thing you need to do is go to iTunes and Apple.com/itunes and find the Mason World Internet Marketing Podcast and leave us a positive review. We love that and it helps us tremendously rank in the iTunes media library. So, go on over to iTunes and give us a great review and two thumbs up. Thanks!

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW011 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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If you follow me on Twitter you’re probably aware that I am participating alongside Pat and Tyrone in the Niche Duel that’s being documented over at the Smart Passive Income Blog.

Now, my participation in this contest is a little bit different than Pat and Tyrone. Pat always does an amazing job of documenting everything that he does and goes into an enormous amount of detail. This niche duel is no different for Pat, he’s already done an excellent job of documenting his keyword research and progress that he’s made on his site.

In my case, I’m not able to dedicate that much time to this project, but I do think it’s incredibly valuable. So, I’ve decided to dictate some notes about my progress and have them transcribed by my awesome transcriptionist, that way you can get some information about how I’m approaching the niche site duel, but I won’t have to spend a ton of time documenting it on my blog.

My Approach to the Niche Site Duel

So, because of the fact that I’m trying to minimize the amount of time that I’m spending on the Niche Site Duel, I’ve decided to take the approach of outsourcing every possible element of the competition. And I’ve decided that the best way to document a lot of my progress is by microblogging the event over on my Facebook Fan Page. So, be sure and check the Facebook Fan Page for day to day updates, and I’ll try to post my progress on the blog every week or two so you can get a sense of how things are going in the big picture.

My first job was niche selection. When I select a niche I try to do three things. Number one, I try to find a niche that I actually think will generate some revenue and be profitable. In this case I chose the very popular guitar niche, specifically the learn to play guitar niche. I’ve noticed for some time that there are several successful products in the marketplace, both on Clickbank and elsewhere, regarding learning to play guitar, so I knew this would be an opportunity for me to play around in that niche.

Number Two, I try to pick something that I’m actually interested in. As a busy internet marketer I know that I have a higher probability of actually accomplishing tasks related to the creation of the niche site if I care about the contents. This is not a requirement in general for niche marketers, but for me personally I’ve found that I have a lot higher success rate if I pick things that I’m actually interested in.

Number three, for this particular project I wanted to make sure I chose a niche where there was a wide availability of materials for me to work with, this includes affiliate offers, blog themes, private label right materials, and other things that I would need for a completely outsourced project.

So, for my limited time commitment to this project I’ve decided to select something was easily outsourced, had a wide variety of materials available, looked like it could be profitable, and interested me enough that I could guarantee that I would participate in the project.

Keyword Research for Learn Guitar

Once I had looked around a little bit in the guitar niche and found out that there was a ton of material out there available for affiliate marketers I popped open my favorite fast keyword research tool, Micro Niche Finder. Notice that I’m making the distinction between fast keyword research and deep keyword research.
For deep keyword research once I’ve found a target keyword I prefer Market Samurai, but for fast keyword research where I’m searching across hundreds of keywords looking for a particular keyword to target I strongly prefer Micro Niche Finder. I think the user interface is a lot better for wide area searches.

So, when I put learn guitar into Micro Niche Finder the very first thing I did was ask Micro Niche Finder to find me all of the keywords that had an available dot net,, dot org, or dot com exact match domain. Now, the learn guitar niche is very crowded, so the number of domains available that exactly matched keywords returned by Micro Niche Finder was a relatively small number.

Once I had gotten a list of exact match domains I simply ordered them in decreasing order of search volume. I’m looking for a keyword that I think learn guitar prospects would be using that has a high search volume and low competition. So, starting with the keywords with highest search volume I started analyzing the competition. To make a long story short, Micro Niche Finder suggested to me that learn guitar basics was a decent keyword and it showed me that learn guitar basics dot net was available.

So, I immediately grabbed learn guitar basics dot net and continued my keyword research. In continuing the keyword research I wanted to find some additional keywords that I could target on the website that were also related to learning the guitar. I won’t go into detail about that here, except to say that for these keywords exact matches to domains are not a requirement.

So, I simply went back to Micro Niche Finder, removed the requirement for domains being available and started looking for high volume keywords with low competition. Again, the niche is very crowded, so the number of these keywords is not large. In fact, this looks like this is going to be a very challenging project from a keyword standpoint, but that’s okay, I’m up for the challenge.

Niche Site Traffic Strategy

Now I know that I’m going to be building a blog about learn guitar, and specifically the blog is going to be called Learn Guitar Basics dot net, and I know that my goal is to match offers with buyers. In fact, that’s always the goal of affiliate marketing to find some buyers and match them up to offers on the internet.

In this case I’ve found my buyers. They’re people that are typing in the phrase learn guitar basics. These are new people, maybe they just got a guitar, maybe they’re about to buy a guitar, who are wanting to learn how to play. So, the offer that I want to match them with, obviously, is an offer for online guitar lessons.
I looked around the internet and I found an outstanding affiliate program from a place called Guitar Tricks. Looking at the Guitar Tricks website made me want to sign up for their product, it really looks fantastic. As a guitar player myself I knew immediately that this affiliate offer was a good one because I found myself wanting to take out my own credit card and sign up for the affiliate offer.

As a matter of fact, one really good approach for promoting this offer would be for me to do exactly that and to blog about it. The problem is that approach is not really compatible with the amount of time that I have to spend on this project, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. In any case, I’ve saved that as a note for myself in case I decide to really spend some real effort on this site.

Identifying the affiliate offer at GuitarTricks.com means that I need to consider a couple of additional keywords to target on the website. People who are considering signing up for a membership at GuitarTricks.com might type in at least two guitar tricks related keywords, and those are obviously guitar tricks review and maybe guitar tricks coupon. Additional ones that are sometimes present in the internet marketing niche are guitar tricks bonus and other kinds of things like that, but for normal people who are buying things online review and coupon are the two most sought after keywords.

Now, here’s an important lesson for you. Those keywords do not appear in the Google Adwords Tool. Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai do not recognize guitar tricks review and guitar tricks coupon as keywords that people are searching. Why is that? The reason is that those tools are based on the Adwords database and it simply means that no one is bidding on those keywords.

However, if you go to Google and type the word guitar tricks into the search box and then hit the space bar several suggestions will pop down. Those suggestions are based on the actual search data that Google is collecting. They’re not based on the Adwords data, they’re based on the search data, and if you look at that list is presented to you when you out in the words guitar tricks, you’ll find guitar tricks coupon and guitar tricks review. That tells me that I need to target those keywords on my site.

Additionally, if you look at that list you’ll find that there are quite a few people that are trying to steal the Guitar Tricks system, because you see things like guitar tricks torrent. That makes me a little sad and reminds that whenever you have electronic products in the marketplace you need to protect the download.

Creating the Niche Website

Again, my goal in this website is to outsource everything that I possibly can. I’ve done my own keyword research, but it’s been a quick and dirty effort using Micro Niche Finder for less than an hour. If you want a really good tutorial about how the keyword research should be done, you should hop on over to Pat’s blog and look at his video about how he used Market Samurai to do keyword research for his Security Guard website. In my case however, I’ve picked quick and dirty keywords and now I need a quick and dirty website.

So, my next task was to put the search term guitar plr into Google. This returned for me a list of PLR products that are available in the guitar space. I knew I wanted three things. One, I’m looking for PLR that I can use for an autoresponder on the website. It will be very important to collect leads on this website and follow up with those leads and try to drive them to the affiliate offer. Number two, I’m looking for a blog theme and sometimes blog themes are available as PLR. Number three, I’m looking for content for the website. Again, this is an outsource project, I’m going to have some original material written, but really I want to consider PLR as the source for blog site content.

A note about PLR. I think PLR is absolutely excellent for autoresponders because there’s no search engine implications to using PLR. As long as the PLR is high quality and is in your voice and is valuable to your readers, I don’t see any problem in using it in an autoresponder. I don’t normally recommend the use of PLR for website content unless it’s completely rewritten. I’m not a big believer in the duplicate content penalty that’s often talked about by Google, but I do think you owe it to your readers to generate decent content on your own. If you do use PLR on your website, make sure it’s excellent quality and that the PLR you use is rewritten to avoid any issues with similar content outranking you for your search terms.

Having said all that, in this case I’m in a huge hurry, so I need to use PLR because I’ve committed to outsourcing as much of this as possible and moving as quickly as possible. So, lucky for me I found a complete and totally awesome guitar website theme complete with PLR content that I could buy with one click of the mouse. It cost 27 dollars and I bought it, it’s up and running at Learn Guitar Basics dot net.

Outsourcing Tasks for the Duel

Once I bought the PLR mentioned above I was able to outsource a series of tasks. The first task I outsourced was taking some of the PLR that I purchased and breaking it up into content for an autoresponder that was appropriate for beginning guitarists. The virtual assistant was able to split up the content, edit it, place a call to action to the affiliate offer at the bottom of every email, and load that content into an autoresponder over at Aweber.

Task two, I asked another one of my virtual assistants to take the PLR website and get it up and running on the domain that I had purchased. I also asked the VA to modify the site header so that it matched the domain name, to edit the footer, to take out references to the PLR and so forth and make the site somewhat visually unique.

Task three, affiliate offers. I asked the VA that works on my websites to integrate creatives from the Guitar Tricks affiliate site into the website. This meant that the virtual assistant needed to change the banner in the header, as well as place a video creative in the sidebar of the website.

Task four, I also asked the virtual assistant to integrate the autoresponder into the website so there would be a signup form in the sidebar. The sidebar will say something like, “For free beginning guitar lessons delivered straight to your inbox leave us your email and we’ll rush you your first lesson,” or something like that.

Task five, I asked my writer to go into the website and edit every PLR article on the site to change the title, very important for changing PLR, the permalink, also very important for PLR, and the text, less important but still important for using PLR on your website. This will help guarantee that my content is more unique, which can help in my search engine rankings.

To be honest with you, I’m not very worried about the impact of PLR on the search engine because I’m not trying to rank the PLR pages. I’ll be trying to rank the home page and some other pages targeted at guitar tricks related keywords, that content will be completely original and unique and will be easier to rank than the PLR content.

Task six, I asked my writer to write 10 articles around keywords that I had found in Micro Niche Finder. Among these included content for the home page around the keyword learn guitar basics and content for the affiliate offer landing pages for guitar tricks review and guitar tricks coupon.

Current Status and Next Steps

Right now I’m waiting for all those outsourced tasks to be completed. Once those tasks are completed I’ll move to some additional site set up tasks that need to be addressed. I’ll need a Twitter ID for this project, I’ll need email addresses and other set up items, I want to add an eBay and Amazon store into this blog, and so forth. We’ll talk about all of these tasks and more in a future blog post.

Once the site has been set up to my satisfaction (in about a week) I’ll need to start promoting it. For promotion I intend to use article marketing and other backlink building techniques that we’ll talk about in subsequent posts.

That’s it for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this update, sorry it’s a little bit long winded but that’s one of the downsides to dictating posts rather than editing them. Please let me know if you have any comments, I’d be happy to answer them below. Have a great day!

Best Regards,
Mark Mason

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Niche Duel Update #1

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I hear this all the time when people are talking about old-school static HTML sites versus newer WordPress sites.  They say it loud and proud as if it were a law of nature like gravity or something.

Google Loves WordPress!

The truth is (as far as I know) that there is no real data that says Google prefers static WordPress versus HTML (or vice-versa). There is no reason that they should care -- and I don't think that they do.

People say "Google loves WordPress" because they see WordPress because they see WordPress sites doing well in Google. The question is this: is this correlation, or causation? In other words, are these sites doing well because of WordPress, or for some other reason.

If two sites were COMPLETELY identical, Goggle would not care if a site was WordPress or Static HTML. In fact, if they were truly completely identical, Google could not tell easily which was which.

I don't think Google loves WordPress.

Why WordPress Sites Perform Well

Rather, I think Google loves what most WordPress installations do automatically (and most static HTML sites do NOT do at all).

If you install WordPress with a decent theme and use a few popular plugins, you get some killer stuff that is not present on many plain-jane HTML sites:

• Ping-O-Matic to announce new content
• Blog pinging to encourage back-linking
• User-generated content (comments)
• An RSS feed (promotes traffic)
• Auto SEO optimized titles and URLs (in most cases)
• Good automatic intra-site linking (in most cases)
• et cetera

This is why "Google loves WordPress". It is not because there is some unfair bias in Google or some magic in WordPress itself. All of the above things are possible with an HTML site, but people usually do not do them.

So, while it looks like Google loves WordPress, what they really love are well constructed sites. Constructing site well is something that WordPress does automatically.

Build good site, follow the webmaster guidelines, and you too will live a long healthy and happy web life.

photo credit: AlbertaAndMe

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Does Google Love WordPress?

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Boy, that is a mouth full.

As an affiliate marketer, one of the things that you need to be able to do is write good pre-sales copy with great SEO properties.  This is hard to do sometimes, but it can make or break your affiliate campaigns when you are counting on search engine traffic.  It's so important (and so misunderstood -- especially by beginners), I felt like we should talk about it here.

I was discussing this with my friend Karon Thackston, and she could not agree more.  Now make no mistake, Karon is a famous SEO copywriter.    If you know anything about Karon, you understand that she's been writing high-ranking and converting copy for clients including Gorton's Seafood and the American Boating Association for over 25 years.    I talked Karon into offering a free hour-long teleclass on SEO copywriting exclusively for you (people on my list).

Free SEO Copywriting Teleseminar

Teleclass: The Simple SEO Copywriting Framework
Signup Link: Just click here! Format:  Audio (via teleconference bridge)
Date:   August 26, 2010
Time: 2:00pm Eastern Time   Length:  Approx. 1 hour

What you'll learn:  In this one-hour teleclass, Karon Thackston presents a simple framework for writing SEO copy including:

• Which keyphrases to use
• How to use them without ruining the flow of your copy
• Precisely where to place keyphrases for maximum impact with Google and other engines
• Which popular advice is a useless, outdated myth you should avoid
• How to organize/outline each page for SEO copy so you don't miss a thing
• And more!

In the mean time, I wanted to share with you the following tips from Karon.  You'll get a lot more stuff like this on the call.

Thanks,
Mark

7 Don'ts for SEO Copywriting

By Karon Thackston © 2010, All Rights Reserved

There is no shortage of don'ts when it comes to SEO copywriting.  It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade.  Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don't shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible.  It's not about the sheer volume of search terms you include.  Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about.  Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher's query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio.  When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2.  Don't lose site of balance.  If SEO copywriting isn't about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about?  Balance.  You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors.  But surprisingly, the balance doesn't come with serving both masters well.  The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines.  You see, your site visitors always come first.  However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won't see good rankings.  If you put too much focus on the engines, you'll start to lose your target audience.  Balance… always balance.

3.  Don't let someone else choose the keywords.  If keyword research isn't a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research.  Don't just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way.  Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically.  Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4.  Don't sacrifice flow for numbers.  This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting.  SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don't work in a normal sentence. An example?  "Candies samples free."  Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers.  The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, "If you're looking for candies samples free, you've come to the right place!"  Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5.  Don't use keyphrases that don't apply to the page.  If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don't try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic.  (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won't be applicable.  (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It's a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6.  Don't use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page.  I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms.  However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you've got a bunch of typos in the content. It's just not professional.  Some writers will go for the old, "We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town."  I don't care for that approach. It's just not natural.  Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way?  I think not.

7.  Don't use keyphrases the exact same way every time.  This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it.  (See #4.)  There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one.  In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use.  One way is to break up phrases using punctuation.  Since search engines don't pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: "Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate.  Hawaii listings can be…"  See?  "Real estate" is at the end of the first sentence and "Hawaii" is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there's no problem.

And Here Are Three More Bonus Mistakes To Avoid

8. Don't use all types of search phrases for every situation.  There are many ways in which this "don't" applies.  One quick example is that of an ecommerce site.  It wouldn't be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site.  They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages.  Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page.  If you don't understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you're likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don't neglect ALT tags/image attributes.  These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link.  The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link.  Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don't forget the chain of protocol.  There's a method to the SEO copywriting madness.  The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page.  The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes.  Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn't likely to do a lot of good.  Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you'll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Did you get a lot out of this article? Then you'll want to join Karon as my guest during a FREE SEO copywriting teleclass August 26, 2010 at 2:00pm Eastern time. This call - exclusively for MasonWorld readers - will give you a simple framework for writing great SEO copy.  Register today at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/mason-registration.html.

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7 Serious Salescopy SEO Slip-Ups

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In this episode of the MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we talk about "our new Internet Marketing Motivator segment" and about making money online without selling make money online stuff. We also interview Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com

I've known Pat since just after he left his day job and started trying to make a living on line.  His story will amaze and inspire you.

As an added treat, we have a special mystery guest doing the podcast intro this week.

We need reviews on iTunes!

If you like the podcast and are willing to take a second to leave us a favorable review in iTunes, that would be fantastic. You should be able to do that using this link. You will need to do this from inside of the iTunes application (which is free).

This week we give a shout out to Josh Spaulding who gave us a nice review over at iTunes.  Josh says:

In the episode, I introduce a new segment I am calling "Internet Marketing Motivator".  Each week, we will cover a topic that will help you stay motivated in your internet business.

Also this week, we tackle that difficult topic -- can you really make money online without teaching people how to make money online.

Most importantly, I continue with the interviews I promised last week.

Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income Blog is in the HOUSE!

Pat talks about how he got started (an amazing story) and reveals the three most important things new marketers should know.

Links Mentioned in the podcast:

• Smart Passive Income Blog
• Internet Business Mastery Academy
• Nicole Dean

When the transcript is available, it will be here.

If you are lovin' the podcast, please be sure to leave us some feedback and subscribe in iTunes!

Podcast Alley is another option:
My Podcast Alley feed!

Here is the Raw RSS Feed.

I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Drop me a line here on the blog on on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Ask a question or leave a comment and we may use it on the show.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

MW011 | Interview With Pat Flynn

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I am planning to do a case study on JV Giveaways and report the results here.   You can help my by following along with the study and (more importantly) signing up for to be a JV partner.  This will give me the points I need to participate.  This will also give you an opportunity to participate in the giveaway and build your  list.  If you have never done a JV list-building event before, now is the time (because we can do it together).

This JV Giveaway Is Different

I've got to tell you the truth.   In the past, I have not been a big fan of JV giveaways.  They have the reputation of generating tons of un-targeted, unresponsive leads.   They also put you in a position of having to "give away" some of your list to participate.  But recently, I learned about a JV giveaway that sounded like it might be different -- it is being run by someone that I trust, has several big name A-list marketers on board, has the potential to save kids lives.

To give you an idea, here is a promotional graphic from the event:

Let me back up a second.

In a JV giveaway, internet marketers recruit other internet marketers to participate in a giant giveaway.  All of the participants do three things:  they recruit other marketers to participate (that is what I am doing now, by the way), they contribute items to the giveaway (more on this later), and they send traffic to the giveaway.

The JV Giveaway Promise

The idea is that many marketers send tons of traffic to the giveaway, and some of those prospects will see the free gift (or gifts) that you donated and decide to download it (or them).   To access the download, the prospect will need to opt-in to your list.  So, by participating, you hope to build you list.  (Note:  There are some cases where you might want to give something away without opt-in, but we will talk about that later.)

To get this to work, you need some heavy hitters in the mix.  So far, the giveway has over 100 participants planning to send traffic, including some big names you might recognize (Willie Crawford, Kevin Riley, Kathleen Gage, Jeff Herring, Lynn Terry, Bob "The Teacher" Jenkins, Maritza Parra, Nicole Dean, Sid Hale, Denise Wakeman, Dan R Morris, Roger Carr, Cindi Dawson, Joe Marsh, Karon Thackston, Paul Evans, Doug Hudiburg, Traci Knoppe, Doug Champigny, Mark Hendricks and David Perdew)

For this JV event, the goal is 1000 contributors and 100,000 "members" during the week that the event is live (next week - Aug. 20 to Aug. 27, 2010).  Amazing.  Hope his servers are up to the task.

And of course, if you are participating in this as a JV partner and you have One-Time-Offers (OTOs) or affiliate links associated with your opt-in, you can profit directly from the event.

The organizer usually benefits in a couple of ways.  First, the organizer can (and usually does) require and opt-in to get to the give-away in the first place.    Secondly, the organizer can place offers inside the software that runs the giveaway (these days, giveaways are completely automated).  This particular giveaway has a lot of those (see the postscript at the end of this post).

Saving Kids Lives

In this giveaway, the organizers intend to collect donations for Dr. Mani.  In fact, the literature indicates that all the proceeds from the front end of this effort go to Dr. Mani's CHD Foundation.

That is one of the things that made this interesting for me.  I have donated money to Dr. Mani before.  He is quite an amazing guy.

If you don't know about Dr. Mani, this guy basically uses internet marketing as a way to fund open heart surgery for kids that can't afford it.

Here's a one paragraph comment from Mark Joyner in the forward to one of Dr. Mani's books:

"To hold this (book) up as the measure of the man is a great disservice to one of the greatest men now walking the earth...What makes Dr. Mani great is the way he has leveraged his info- preneurship...  He doesn't make a big fuss about it, but he uses the funds he raises with his entrepreneurial endeavors to save the lives of children who really need it. He is a heart surgeon who has dedicated his life to providing heart surgery to children who cannot afford the costs."

Join As A JV

So, here is what I would like you to do. 

Thing one: Stay tuned and follow along.  I plan to see if this "really works" to drive traffic to my list.  I also plan to report all of the details to you.

Thing two: participate.  If you sign up as a JV partner, you can easily add a giveaway and participate.

Your participation under my signup link will give me "points."  These points give me a higher priority in the giveaway, and make it more likely that this will be a decent case study.  So, even if you are not sure that you want to participate, signing up would help (it's free).

Oh -- and don't forget that you can help save kids lives by participating.  This fact is part of the reason that I decided to do the case study.  So, if you are on the fence, you can use that as your excuse.

Thanks -- look for my next post about setting up my giveaway items tomorrow.

PS -- If you do sign up, you'll immediately see a couple of OTO asking you to upgrade your JV account.  I did upgrade my account ($17), but there is no reason for you to do that unless you want to contribute multiple gifts.

Also, you will see some OTO's in the back end software.  Again, just ignore those (but pay attention to the marketing).  I'll be talking about that part of the JV Giveaway magic in a future post.

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JV Giveaway Case Study

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Throughout our lives, we repeatedly hear that hard work is the key to success. But sometimes it isn’t. In some cases, working harder and longer hours won’t bring you closer to your goal; it will only move you further away from having perspective—and it will only sap your energy further.

So make sure you take breaks. Take some time to step away from your goal, re-think it, and decide whether it is truly something you want to accomplish. And, better yet, take some time to thing of other things, too. If you let your goal completely dominated all aspects of your life, you may find yourself drained and unable to continue.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #21 – Give Yourself a Break

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Now, one of things that I do and one of the things that I think it is absolutely critical for part time internet marketers is that you need to work on your business every day. Habits that you form as a part time internet marketer are the most important tools that you’ll have in your business.

The first habit that you develop should be that you work on your business every day. Not a day goes by literally that you don’t do something on your business. Now, maybe you make an exception for Sunday, because of your religious preferences, but what I mean is there’s not a day that goes by where you go, “I just don’t feel like working on this today. I’m going to just watch Grey’s Anatomy instead.” You have to avoid that.

You need to make consistent progress and stay motivated. One day will turn into two days, and before you know it a week and a month will have gone by and your dream will be sitting on the couch with you watching the latest episode of Private Practice.

The other reason, and this sounds very much like a Tony Robbins thing, but I absolutely promise you this is true, if you keep the project that you’re working in front of you in your conscious mind you’re subconscious mind will offer you up solutions. This is where these ideas come from that people have in the shower and while they’re brushing their teeth.

You put these ideas in front of your conscious mind all the time, whatever problem it is you’re working on in your business, whatever course it is you’re trying to develop or information product or website and you run into problems that you’re conscious mind can’t solve, your subconscious mind will continue to work on those even when you’re not aware of it and it will present solutions for you.

If it’s out of sight it will be out of mind and you won’t get that benefit of having that subconscious mind working for you. A lot of research on that, don’t take my word for it, go check it out. That’s a really powerful way to get work done.

Another thing that I tell people that’s really important is internet marketing is a marathon, it is not a sprint. You need a strong steady consistent pace for a long distance in order to win in internet marketing. It’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint.

If you adopt this very important habit of working on your business every day without fail, one thing is that you’ll accidentally accomplish more than you think. There will be a couple of days in there where you’ll intend to work a little bit and you’ll work a lot, or you’ll get lucky and be online at the right time to get something accomplished. Whatever it is, I don’t know what it’s going to be. Things will land, as we say in Texas, jelly side up. It will be good for you to work on this every day.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Work on Your Part Time Internet Business Every Day

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Another thing you need is you need routines. I live in Allen, Texas, there’s a famous Olympic gold medal gymnast that lives here and she grew up in a gym down the street from me and I know these gymnasts they have these crazy routines and they show up at the gym every day.

You need to have similar routines. At the same time every day if you can you need to be working on your business. For me, that’s every night. That’s why my branding is around this idea of late night internet marketing. I’m recording this at 1:46 AM and I got started around 10:00. I got a head of steam, so here I am still going at almost 2:00 in the morning.

I also like to catch a little work on my internet business while I’m getting the kids ready for school between 6:00 and 6:30. That’s an excellent time for me to answer email over breakfast and do a little social media promotion.

The other thing I’ll say to you in terms of routines is you need to establish the routine of balancing your business activities. This is another thing that Jimmy D. Brown taught me. You need to make sure that you’re not only working on the easy things or the thing that you like.

Maybe you really like creating content, but you hate promoting. Maybe you really like social media, but you hate article marketing. Maybe you really like this and you hate that. The thing about internet business is that you need to have a balanced approach.

The thing about part time internet marketers is it’s really easy to fall in this trap of, “I’ve only got an hour, so I’m going to pick the thing that I want to do, not necessarily the thing that I need to do.” So, it’s very important that you have this balanced approach. The example I have here is that you don’t need to just create content or products, but you also need to drive traffic, so that’s kind of an idea of having a balanced approach.

You have to do it even if you don’t want to. One strategy for that is do the thing you don’t want to do first, so you get that out of the way. Then when you’re running out of steam you can turn your attention to the thing you really wanted to do anyway and a lot of times that will have the effect of helping you work a little bit longer.

The other thing I’ve got to tell you, social marketing is a business killer if you don’t manage it correctly. So, limit your social marketing to specific time windows. Do not spend your entire day on forums, reading blogs, and tweeting about what you had for breakfast. Don’t do that. Have a plan for those things, spend a finite amount of time, get it done and get out.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Get Into a Regular Routine in Your Part Time Internet Business

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When it comes to accomplishing your goals and staying motivated, it is important to employ “commitment devices.” A commit device is any strategy that will give strong incentives to adhere to your commitment, even when there is no third party enforcing that commitment.

One good commitment device you can employ is to get others involved in your goals. Tell them about your goals; and tell them what you’re going to accomplish and when you’re going to do it.

Now, when you’re attempting to accomplish your goals, you’ll have a built-in mechanism reinforcing your efforts: shame. If you fail to accomplish what you set out to do, you’ll have to report this to others; and look stupid as a result.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #20 – Tell Others About Your Goals

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The other thing I think you need to do is you need to get as much software as you can to automate tasks. Now, I’ve got some recommendations here and these are products that I actually use.

• If you’re going to submit your websites to directories I recommend Deep Linker Pro from Josh Spaulding. It automatically submits websites to directories.
• If you’re going to submit articles to article directories I recommend Automatic Article Submitter from Millan, who lives in eastern Eupore and I’m not going to say his last name, but it begins with K.
• There’s a really good social bookmarking application out there called Bookmarking Demon.
• If you want to automate the setup of blogs, if you have a business model where you need to run many blogs, I recommend Firepow from Andrew Hanson.
• If you are going to try and get some automated backlinking going one of the products I recommend is One-Way-Links from Jon Leger.

There are many other products that compete in these spaces and a lot of them are really good. These are just the ones that I use. The point is I definitely recommend that you go out and you invest in software.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the highest leverage investments that you can make is software to automate your business. It’s right up there with outsourcing and just the most critical business knowledge, learning, course work that you can get. So, definitely look into software to automate your business.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Automate Repetitive Tasks in Your Part Time Internet Business

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I had the funniest phone conversation with Nicole Dean yesterday.   Nicole is the "mostly sane marketer" -- at least that is her claim.  I'm seriously not sure about the "mostly sane" part.  On days like yesterday, she calls that whole sane thing into question.

You see, our conversation was about owl vomit.  Well, not owl vomit, exactly.  We were talking about owl pellets.

Nicole does a series on her blog called " Weird Niche Wednesday" -- and today her weird niche is owl pellets.  In case you don't know, owl pellets are little balls of bones and feathers that owls cannot digest after eating their prey.

I've had two fourth graders, so I knew that kids all over America dissect these little gems each and every year.  What I did not know was that there is a niche market for these pellets on the internet.

Don't believe me?   Check this out....

People Are Looking For Owl Pellets On The Internet

So, I'm sitting on the phone with Nicole laughing about owl vomit (trying to decide just how sane she really is) and I decided to take a look at the market for "owl pellets".

I was surprised when I typed "owl pellets" into Google (without the quotes), I saw 11 paid AdWords ads (these are the "sponsored links" on the top and right side of the Google search results.) Whenever I see that many ads and searches, I know that chances are people are making money in this niche.

I also saw that there were shopping listings in the Google search result-- a clue that there may be affiliate marketing opportunities in this space.

I know personally how quickly AdWords can suck money out of your bank account, so when there are ads running (particularly if they are running for a long time), it means that people are making a profit.

One measure of the competition is the price of those AdWords ads.  If the ads are cheap, it usually means no one is bidding on the phrase.  Sometimes that can mean that there is not much money to be made, so people cannot afford to bid much.  We already know there are 11 ads - but what are people paying for them.

A quick trip over to SpyFu.com show me a nice little surprise.  It turns out that people are paying as much as a couple of dollars per click for ads.  So, there 11 ads on Google and some of them are costing $2 per click.

Hmmm.   I smell money.

As you know, internet marketing is about matching offers with buyers.  To be successful, you need buyers.  Lots of them.

So, I decided to look at the search volume.  According to the Google Adwords Keyword tool, there are 9900 exact match searches per month for "owl pellets".  On top of that, some keywords are showing a cost per click of over $5.

That got my attention.

Next Stop Micro Niche Finder

At this point I had seen enough to make me want to fire up a keyword tool.  I have several tools in my toolbox, but for quick stuff I love to use Micro Niche Finder.  I find it easy to use.

I put owl pellets in Micro Niche Finder, and it told me some interesting things.   Since it get's data from the AdWords keyword tool also (most tools do), it confirmed my finding of 9900 exact match results for Owl Pellets.  It also showed me results for about 100 other owl-pellet-related keywords.

Of the keywords that it found, 28 of them contained the word pellet (or pellets).

I asked Micro Niche Finder to show me all the domain names (.com, .org and .net) that were exact matches for keywords.  It turns out that owlpellets.com (and .org and .net) were already taken.  However, the second most popular keyword, owl pellet dissection, was available.

Micro Niche Finder also told me that the competition was pretty weak.  In fact, there are 1000 searches per month for "owl pellet dissection" and there is only one strong site competing for the term.

So, on a whim, I registered OwlPelletDissection.com (that is why it is shown as unavailable above) and I am in the process of throwing up an owl pellet site at OwlPelletDissection.com for experimental purposes.

Get it?  Throwing up an owl pellet site? I crack myself up.

Sorry.   I put up the site last night.  So, it is a work in progress (kind of like my jokes).

An Interesting Case Study

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if I can rank for "owl pellet dissection" and or "owl pellets" over the next few months.  I don't plan to work too hard at it (which makes it even more interesting), since I have lots of other things going on.  But I will work at it some.

I'll keep you posted.  Maybe this would make a nice case study for us to discuss on the blog.  We can talk about the how and why of this project.

I'd love to hear what you think about this -- or answer any questions that you might have.  Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Owl Pellets – A Weird Niche Response To Nicole Dean

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Often, when we think about goals, we either think “either I will accomplish this goal in one week or I will never accomplish it at all.” Unfortunately, things don’t always work out this way. More often then not, we’ll run into a snag when we attempt to accomplish goals; and we’ll need to reformulate our plans accordingly.

And this is precisely why it is important to think in terms of shades of gray, rather than black or white (success or failure). If things don’t work out this week, it’s okay. Take stock of your progress; and then figure out how you can do things differently over the course of, say, the next week to ensure that you don’t miss that goal again.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #19 – Think in Shades of Gray

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I know.  You are sick to death of people telling you that you need to outsource.  Just hang with me for a second here.  I know you hear this all the time, but that is only because it it true.

As a part time internet entrepreneur you need to outsource in your business as much as you possibly can. It’s important and you need to figure out how to get it done.

Instead of just preaching outsourcing:  let me give you a simple way to think it.   Consider it a model for success as a part time internet business person.   Ready?

If you spend 15 minutes every night making a list of things that could be done at that moment by somebody else.

Simple, right?

Take for example transcribing a video. When I get done with a video I’ll typically ship it off to a fantastic transcriptionist, she will transcribe it for me and make a PDF, and I won’t touch it.

Sending articles to directories is another really good example.   Other examples include pulling traffic reports from your sites, tweaking and maintaining sites, updating autoresponders, etc.

Make that list of things that you don't want to do anyway and have them done while you sleep.  I can’t explain it to you any other way.  The most effective use of your sleep time is to have some worker in the Philippines doing your work for you while you sleep.  That person is thrilled to have the work, and you will be thrilled to have the work complete.

It's Win-Win.

I know what you’re going to tell me. “Mark, I’m just getting started. I can’t afford to outsource.” Let me tell you, Your time is worth more than you think. You cannot afford NOT to outsource.  But, if you really don’t believe that, just start small.

Think of a small thing and go to Scriptlance.com, or someplace like that and outsource it.   Just one thing.

Even better yet there’s a new site called Fiverr.com where you can get stuff done for five dollars. Look at the internet marketing section (Social Marketing), and you will see that people will do various social bookmarking tasks and other things for you that you should not be spending your time on for five dollars.

I know you’ve got five dollars, give it a try and see what you think.

You need to learn how to outsource if you’re going to be a successful part time internet marketer, take my word for it.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Outsource Tasks in Your Part Time Internet Business and Work In Your Sleep

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In this episode of the MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we talk about "the mouse in my pocket" and about having the right mindset for your internet business. We also interview Jeremy "Sterling" Frandsen from Internet Business Mastery.

In the podcast, we're still rocking out the new MasonWorld Late-Night Internet Marketing Podcast Theme Song that I introduced last week.  I really hope you like it

If you like the podcast and are willing to take a second to leave us a favorable review in iTunes, that would be fantastic. You should be able to do that using this link.  You will need to do this from inside of the iTunes application (which is free).

In the episode, I talk about the power of teams, the value of "we", and the critical mindset that you must have if you want to be successful in business (and in life).

Also, I continue with the  interviews I promised last week.

Jeremy "Sterling" Frandsen from Internet Business Mastery is on the show this week talking about lifestyle design and definite major purpose.

All that I want to do for you that have to do with how to think about internet business. Then, I will be turning my attention to affiliate marketing techniques.

Basically, I plan to touch on the kind of things that I will be teaching over at NicheProfitUniversity.com (starting in about 4 weeks).

When the transcript is available, it will be here.

If you are lovin' the podcast, please be sure to leave us some feedback and subscribe in iTunes!

Podcast Alley is another option:
My Podcast Alley feed!

Here is the Raw RSS Feed.

I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Drop me a line here on the blog on on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Ask a question or leave a comment and we may use it on the show.

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MW010 | Is There A Mouse In My Pocket?

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One of the best ways to motivate yourself to achieve goals is to provide yourself with tangible incentives for doing so. For instance, if you work at a sales-based commission job and you want to push yourself to sell more, then you may want to commit yourself in the following way:

If you make over a certain amount in commissions for the week, you will spend 25% of everything you make over that amount on something for yourself; or on a nice evening with your significant other.

You might immediately think: “that’s a lot to spend on a weekly basis.” But the point is this: if you can encourage yourself with good incentives to not only make as much as you would normally make, but more, then giving yourself that incentive not only makes you richer, but it also finances nice evenings with a special person in your life.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #18 – Reward Yourself

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My very personal favorite and my nemesis is that you’ve got to avoid bright and shiny objects as a part time internet entrepreneur.

Marketers are really good at marketing, there’s a newsflash for you. These people, some of them are amazing. They can sell ice to Eskimo’s. You need to recognize that.

You don’t need to run away from it, you don’t need to be upset with them about it, but just understand that they’re professional sales people and marketers out there and they’re going to try and sell you stuff. Your best defense is only to buy stuff that you need.

I’ll tell you the big way you can evaluate this is to ask yourself whether or not this particular purchase, the purchase that you would be considering that might be a bright and shiny object that’s going to detract you from your part time business, does it take you closer to your goal or further away? If it takes you further away don’t buy the product.

By the way, Jimmy Brown, a very famous marketer, taught me something that I’ll never forget. Jimmy said,....

“If you weren’t looking to buy something , if they found you, odds are you don’t really need it.”

Buy the stuff when you need it, when you’re looking for it. If they came to you, chances are you probably don’t need it.

When possible wait before you buy. There are very few circumstances where you really need to act now, so stew on it for awhile. The worst thing that can happen is that thing that’s going to change the internet forever will sell out. Let me tell you, very few things change the internet forever. There are a few gems out there, but when possible you need to wait before you buy these things.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Avoid the Bright Shiny Objects in Your Part Time Internet Business

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Today I have asked affiliate marketer Jason Acidre, a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, to come and talk about how to promote ClickBank products.  In his post,   Jason describes three ways to go about promoting products successfully.

Remember, when using these promotion techniques, you should keep new FTC rules about disclosure and testimonials in mind.  Promote products that you really believe will help people.  Be honest in your promotions and act with integrity - you will love the results in the long run.

Here is the post from Jason....

Effective Ways to Promote ClickBank Products

Ready to learn the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products? It’s much easier than you think and anyone can get started earning in virtually no time. There’s no better way to earn online than getting started with a good affiliate network like ClickBank so read on to learn more.

When it comes to earning income as an affiliate, using a popular affiliate network like ClickBank is the best way to gain access to top selling products and services. ClickBank has become the gold standard of affiliate networks and is often the first thing newbies to affiliate marketing learn about. There are many sites similar to this network but very few are as reputable or have as many affiliates promoting the available products. That being said, what are the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products for the best results? Read on to find out.

Method #1 – Blog with a pen name and “alter ego.”

In recent years this has become even more popular. While some people argue the ethics behind it the plain and simple fact is that it works. Many people set up free blogs at sites like Blogger or WordPress and blog from the point of view of someone else about how useful a ClickBank product is for solving problem X –whatever that may be. This is quite popular amongst people promoting weight loss related products and male enhancement products. Since the visitors read the blog and assume it’s a real evaluation of the product by someone who’s similar to them and their situation they go through with the purchase through your affiliate link.

Method #2 – Make YouTube videos

Make YouTube videos and make passive commissions.  Depending on how saturated a niche is or how many people are currently doing this with the product you’re trying to promote you can have varying results. The way it works is simple. Make a video (either of yourself on camera or a slide show in Power Point) and talk about the product you’re promoting and why it’s great, how it helped you or could help the viewer and then tell them where to get it. The best way to do this is to purchase a domain name and redirect it to your affiliate link. Throughout the video recommend visitors go there to learn more and purchase the product.

Method #3 – Go Offline.

One of the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products is to go offline altogether. While this requires significantly more work and can be harder to monitor results it can work very well in certain areas. For example if you pick a weight loss product you want to promote you can purchase a domain like “KarensWeightLoss.com” and then print that on flyers along with a short message about how well it worked for you or what the benefits are. Then simply post the flyers in different areas around town like gyms, grocery stores or health food stores.

Depending on which methods you choose try to stick with it until you see results. Don’t immediately skip from one to the other if it doesn’t immediately work. Check to see what you could change and improve next time and try it again. Do this repeatedly until you get something that starts to make sales for you. Once you’ve identified what works simple scale it up and begin outsourcing the majority of work to others.

This guest post was written by Jason Acidre, a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates. 

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Effective Ways to Promote ClickBank Products

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One good way to encourage yourself to accomplish your goals is to write them down on paper. Until you do this, you will never convince yourself that your goals are concrete, inflexible, and something worth accomplishing.

However, once you write them down, you have no way to escape. You can simply look at a document on your computer or on the piece of paper you wrote them on; and you can see exactly what your goals were. If you aren’t accomplishing them, you can hold yourself accountable.

So start writing your goals down. As soon as you have them on paper, you also have a way to hold yourself accountable—to make sure that you are living up to your own standards.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #17 – Write Your Goal Down

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Stick-to-it-iveness, as we say here in Texas, has a lot to do with part time internet business, and I’m going to argue you need to really stick with what you’re doing. Again, I say there are 10 to 100 ways to make money online. I told you before you need to pick one. Now, I’m telling you in addition to that you really need to stick with one.

Let me warn you. As a part time internet entrepreneur this is true, but it’s also true for the full time people out there. Most legitimate business opportunities on the internet that I’m aware of, and gosh I might even say all legitimate business opportunities on the internet take time to develop.

All of those overnight successes that you hear about, they’re usually working for years before they become an overnight success. There’s really no such thing as easy money. You cannot get something for nothing. Just forget it.

As a part time internet entrepreneur you need to recognize and acknowledge that this is going to take you some time, it’s going to take you longer than the full time guy. You need to accept that and embrace it.

Fail as fast as you can. You’ve got to fail as quickly as possible. You miss every shot that you don’t take. There’s no way for you to be successful if you don’t try. So, you want to try and fail as you possibly can, fix that problem and move on to the next problem. That’s the recipe for success and you’ve got to have stick-to-it-iveness to do that.

I submit to you that internet business is like eating an elephant and everybody knows the way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. You’ve got to stick with what you’re doing in order to get that done.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Get Some Stick-to-it-iveness and Fail Fast in Your Part Time Internet Business

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When it comes to getting motivated and achieving your goals, few things are as important as truly understanding who you are, what you want, and how you respond to various situations that life presents you with.

So, get to know yourself better. Next time you make a plan for the day, think about whether you have carried out similar plans in the past; and, if not, why you weren’t able to do so. This will help you to gain a better feel for how you are likely to respond to this plan if it is implemented.

Over time, if you make a conscious effort to do this, you will begin to understand yourself better. You will not only know what makes you fail, but how to overcome it. And you will not only know what makes you succeed, but how to ensure that it is always present.

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Motivational Tip #16 – Get to Know Yourself Better

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I just spent the last few hours playing around with an advanced copy of Instant Article Factory (IAF) from Jonathan Leger.  Bottom Line:  I was so impressed with the software that I talked to Jon and scored 3 free lifetime copies for my readers.

To enter to win a free copy, all you need to do is look at the video here ( Instant Article Factory Sales Page) and tell me what you think about the software, how you would use it, etc in a comment on this post.

Jon is offering special pricing until Friday (deep discount of 40%), so my contest has to end Friday as well.

This software is really neat, and the video speaks for itself.  In fact, the video is so complete, here is my review:  The software works exactly as advertised.

The video is so cool, I don't think you'll have any trouble coming up with comments about what you see.  I am interested in any sort of feedback on the software, including questions.

Update:  Instant Article Factory Bonus

If you decide that Instant Article Factory is right for you, and you purchase through my link, I will send you the following really cool bonus that will help you with your business (note, you may want to clear your browser cookies before purchasing through my link):

	36 of the hottest techniques and websites to have ideas coming out of your ears! - CRUCIAL!
	A simple plugin that can cut hours off your research with just a few clicks!
	How to quickly and easily find out if people are opening their wallets in your niche - then exactly how to find out the magic formula to get them to do it for you!
	The 6 ways to find out how to reach your market which after you do this, will give you a treasure map to follow anytime you drive traffic!
	How to find out the best time to launch your campaign, and the times that will absolutely make it bust.
	How to use one insanely popular website to spit out ideas like a spammer sending out emails, and actually make it gives you LISTS of niches to choose from - no more hunting through sites!
	The truth about the absolute best types of niches, and ones you can profit from them like no other...
	A list of 'gateway' keywords you can exploit to get Google to give you more niches than you can use in your lifetime...

36 of the hottest techniques and websites to have ideas coming out of your ears! - CRUCIAL!
	A simple plugin that can cut hours off your research with just a few clicks!
	How to quickly and easily find out if people are opening their wallets in your niche - then exactly how to find out the magic formula to get them to do it for you!
	The 6 ways to find out how to reach your market which after you do this, will give you a treasure map to follow anytime you drive traffic!
	How to find out the best time to launch your campaign, and the times that will absolutely make it bust.
	How to use one insanely popular website to spit out ideas like a spammer sending out emails, and actually make it gives you LISTS of niches to choose from - no more hunting through sites!
	The truth about the absolute best types of niches, and ones you can profit from them like no other...
	A list of 'gateway' keywords you can exploit to get Google to give you more niches than you can use in your lifetime...

To claim your bonus, simply purchase through my link
and submit your receipt to my help desk.

Here is how to Win A Free Copy  (CONTEST NOW CLOSED)

The contest is now closed.

Thanks for all the entries.  To select select the winner, I simply picked the comments that I liked (completely at my discretion) and gave some consideration to backlinks (as described in the rules).  Selection was very subjective.  Thanks for participating.

Here are the winners:

• Mark Sierra
• Kent F
• Lori B. Walker

Please contact me through my support desk to claim your free copy of IAF.

• Enter your comment about IAF before the end of the day, Thursday July 16th
• Good, thoughtful comments get the most consideration
• People who link to the post (or tweet about it) will be smiled upon
• Early entries get special consideration
• On Friday, July 17th at noon (not Saturday) I will pick 3 winners and contact them.
• Three winners will get free lifetime copies.

Note:  If you have already purchased a copy, don't worry.  I will make sure you get your money back if you are one of the three winners.

It's that simple.  The winners will be totally at my discretion.  My decision is final.  3 people get lifetime accounts.

Check out the video and let the contest begin.

Winners will be announced at NOON on Friday July 17th by email and on the blog.

Thanks,
Mark

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Instant Article Factory Review (Free Copies)

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Today on the podcast we talk about the fact that there’s still six months left to do all those crazy things you said you were going to do at the beginning of the year. We also talk about all the crazy things we need to do on the Internet Marketing Podcast for the rest of the year.

Finally, last, but certainly not least, we have a fantastic interview for you today. We caught with Geoff Smith, music legend, author of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast jingle, and accomplished entrepreneur, and asked him to tell us all about his tips for successful client relationships when you’re outsourcing creative content.

All this and more today on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

It’s really great to be back on the mic. Hello, it’s Mark Mason and I’m really excited to be here to talk to you about internet marketing and all the stuff that’s been going on at MasonWorld.com.

I hope you’re digging that new jingle. I’ve got a great interview for you later in the episode with Geoff Smith, he’s the incredibly talented musician, really famous in podcast circles, that put that jingle together for me. Shout out to Geoff, it’s just really awesome. You guys are going to enjoy hearing from him later in the show.
Before we get to that I wanted to cover a couple of things. The first thing is this is episode nine of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. In the first eight episodes we spent a lot of time talking about all of the different business models that we decided to cover.

There are an infinite number of business models on the internet, but we decided to cover several of the fundamental business models to kind of help people get an idea of how you might make money online.

I got a couple of interesting pieces of feedback regarding that. One of the overwhelming feedbacks that I kept getting was, “Hey, Mark, keep going, we really like that.” That’s why I’m back here with episode nine.

We’re going to really kind of push this forward and talk about some of the business aspects that are fundamental that cut across all of the business models that we talked about by focusing down on affiliate marketing in the next several episodes.

Now, the reason we want to focus down on affiliate marketing is because the things you need to do as an affiliate marketer, build websites, drive traffic, identify products, convert traffic, test, land and convert, measure sales, all of these kind of things retain visitors, email marketing, all of these things that apply to affiliate marketing apply across all internet marketing.

So, if you can learn to be an affiliate marketer my claim is that you know enough about internet marketing to do a lot of different kinds of business models on the internet, so it’s a great place to start. In the next many episodes we’re going to be talking about the different fundamentals of affiliate marketing and really kind of teaching affiliate marketing right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Of course, this kind of content goes hand in hand with my work over at Niche Profit University, which is one of my other main activities right now. So, if you’re interested in really starting to get an in depth knowledge about affiliate marketing Niche Profit University is where you want to go.

Now, before we get into some of the details of affiliate marketing in the future episodes I’ve got three really special things planned for you. The first thing I’ve got for you is an interview with Geoff Smith. Now, I’m putting Geoff Smith in this episode because I’m rolling out the new jingle, you just heard it at the beginning of the podcast, and Geoff has some interesting things to say about internet marketing and about how to deal with clients and creative media relationships on the internet when you’re outsourcing your creative media. I wanted to get this to you, because it’s fresh and to celebrate the roll out of the new jingle.

In the next episode we’re going to answer one of the other feedbacks that I’ve gotten, or questions that I get all the time and that’s the following. “Hey, Mark. I see that people are making money on the internet teaching people how to make money on the internet. But, can you really make money on the internet helping people do something?”

So, to answer that question I’ve got an outstanding interview for you from Scott Tousignant, the guy over at FatLossQuickie.com who is going to tell you all about how he is successfully making money on the internet helping people change their lives, literally helping people change their lives.

Then the week after that I’ve got a really special interview for you that I’ve had in the can for a long time and that’s an interview with Sterling from InternetBusinessMastery.com. Sterling is going to talk to us a little bit about how to get our mind right with having a purpose for our internet business.

I think if you can really have a purpose for your internet business and you can really have an internet business that’s trying to help people you’ve really got the key elements of a successful internet business almost no matter what internet business model you decide to go after.

So, that’s the plan for this episode and the next two episodes. After that we’ll start getting into some of the fundamentals of affiliate marketing and we’ll carry that on for a long time. As I’ve described in some of the videos that you can find over at Niche Profit University, there are five basic pillars of affiliate marketing that we’re going to be covering on the podcast over the next coming months.

Those include identifying niches, creating a web presence, driving traffic, identifying products and converting sales, and retaining visitors. Those five main pillars of affiliate marketing are the kinds of things that we’re going to be talking about in the coming months on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

As I mentioned before, I got a lot of feedback from listeners over the last few months after thousands and thousands of downloads of previous episodes of the podcast asking me when the next episode was coming out. It really told me people were resonating with the kind of content that I was generating here on the podcast.

The other thing that really motivated me to get going again on the podcast is that I’ve been spending some time with Jason VanOrden, also from InternetBusinessMastery.com. As many of you know Jay just released a new course called Traffic Attraction Formula and I’ve been going through that course.
That’s a course all about the creating of magnetic media. That really got me fired up to bring back the podcast in its full glory. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing, that’s the reason for the new jingle, we’re just getting everything ship-shape over here so we can push through the end of the year.

That reminds me that the other point I wanted to mention to you today is a very important one. You may not feel great about everything that you’ve been able to accomplish so far this year. I hope you’ve had a fantastic year, but I’ve talked to several internet marketers, some of whom I really respect, who have told me they just felt like they haven’t gotten everything they wanted to get done accomplished yet this year.

They really feel like they’re off to a little bit of a slow start. To that I say, “That’s great.” Water under the bridge, it’s an opportunity to excel in the back half of the year. So, I really want to challenge you to think about that.

At the beginning of the year, or maybe even as recently as last month, you may have had some goals. You may be behind on those. It’s no problem. Tomorrow is another day. The best thing you can do for your business is to buckle down and get after it tomorrow. It’s a fresh day and whatever you can accomplish tomorrow will be moving you closer towards your goals at the end of the year.

I really want to challenge you to think through that and identify some goals for the end of the year, even if you have to tweak your original goals from earlier and push through to the end of the year really strong into Christmas.

Look, there’s one thing I know for sure about internet marketing. Most people that fail in internet marketing fail because they give up too soon. So, don’t be one of those people. Push through strong to the end of the year, work hard, and you’ll like the results.

That leads us to what is my favorite part of any podcast and that’s the interview. I’ve got a doozy for you today. You see, when I decided that I was going to revamp the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, one of the things I knew I wanted to do was get a really polished and professional front end for the podcast, the new jingle. I hope you love it, I absolutely love it, I’m thrilled with it. In order to do that I decided to go get the best in the industry for this sort of thing and without question that is Geoff Smith over at TheGeoffSmith.com.

Geoff is awesome. When I worked with him there were two things that I noticed right away that I knew would make a fantastic interview for you here on the podcast. Thing number one is Geoff has taken his passion, which is music, and turned it into this fantastic internet online and offline business opportunity that is just amazing.
It really just goes to show you that if you can combine passion with internet business you can really kill it. Geoff is providing podcast jingles for people, including very famous people, he runs in very famous circles in internet marketing, he’s got a ringtone business, which is a pure play internet business based on his passion in music, and he’s able to establish a fantastic web presence.

The media and stuff that he has on his website is truly shocking to drive his offline music business. It’s really a nice little trifecta there of internet business melded with passion that really comes through in the interview. That’s thing one.

Thing two in the interview is when I interacted with Geoff as a professional his ability to understand client requirements in an outsourcing situation was truly impressive. So, at the end of the interview I pin Geoff down and ask him, “Hey, what makes a good client? What can my listeners do to be better outsourcing clients so they can get more for their money and get better results when they outsource?”

Those two things make this a fantastic interview. I hope you enjoy it. Geoff is an awesome guy and I encourage you to check him out at TheGeoffSmith.com. Here’s Geoff.

Mark Mason: I am very excited to be on the line with actually The Geoff Smith. Now, Geoff is this multitalented amazing guy that I’ve recently come in contact with.
All of you today heard the fantastic new introduction to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, that’s all thanks to Geoff and his amazing talents. But, I’ve been blown away not just at Geoff’s musical talents, but his talents as an internet marketer and his talents as an entrepreneur.

So, I wanted to get Geoff on the phone and talk about some things that I thought would be relevant to internet marketing and the kind of things that we talk about here on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Geoff, how are you?

Geoff Smith: I’m great, Mark. It is late at night, it’s awesome. This is my time of night.

Mark Mason: I knew that about you from our previous interactions, which is something that I want to talk to the audience about here in a little bit, because I thought it was such a successful example of content outsourcing.

I just thought you run such an excellent business and I wanted to get some tips from you for the audience on that. But, before we get to that, I’ve been going through your video resumes and all of the stuff that you’ve done and I’m just shocked.

How in the world did you get started with all of this music business? It’s just amazing all the things you’ve been able to do.

Geoff Smith: Thanks. Where do I start? Well, my dad is a musician, so right off the bat I’ve got that going for me where music and being a musician is not frowned upon, but encouraged. So, we had a lot of cool records playing around the house. My dad used to play with The Temptations and Marvin Gaye, and he backed up a lot of bands.

So, he’s a huge influence in my life and basically I got into music because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and that’s all I really want to do. I act and I write and I do a bunch of stuff, but it’s all kind of based around music.

All the different gigs I’ve had up until now have been quite numerous. I started out doing theme parks. I grew up here in Nashville, so Opryland was one of my first jobs. That got me to Texas, which got me into playing in bands, which got me into piano bars, which got me into a steady gig where I could actually make music and afford rent, then pick up some gear and start dabbling in studio production.

Then through the course of just time, I guess, podcasting came around and I of course jumped on listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, because I knew who he was and also I just thought, “This is one thing I should kind of connect with.”

Immediately I was listening to him “outsource” content, which he’s got listeners who would be providing feedback. Whether it be emails or voice recordings and in my case I decided that my type of feedback should be a little jingle for a segment that he always talked about, which at the time happened to be a biodiesel car.

So, I wrote a little song and then he loved it, which blew me away because then I had the thumbs up from a guy who had a huge audience. Then I proceeded to whenever I had free time write more little segment pieces for that particular show. Pretty soon some of his listeners would say, “Could you get me in touch with that guy to do a segment piece for my show?”

I started doing them just for, “Give me an iTunes card,” or whatever. Then I realized, “Hey, this could be like a gig that I could tweak and make money at. Cool!” And at the same time become better in the studio.

So, a long story even longer, I kept that contact list going. I was fortunate enough to run into many other great internet names like Leo Lapport, who got me to do some music, and Kelly Lewis, and our great friend Paul Colligan, who is also just an visionary in internet marketing.

It really encouraged me and opened up the door to not only be a part of entertainment media content, but there’s a lot of marketing people and people who aren’t doing shows about entertainment, but also doing shows about marketing. This is kind of what you and I have found. You’ve got an amazing thing to tell and to teach people and the variety of content that you can have and the variety of media to do so, to catch people’s attention is highly important.

But, most people, from what I’ve seen, in this kind of podcast world they’re really good at talking and really good at maybe even marketing, but creative musical content I was fortunate enough to be kind of remembered. I found that volume, the more I kept doing more and more and people just kept saying my name, it seemed to be kind of a windfall.

I still have to work at. I’m rambling, I hope that’s okay.

Mark Mason: That’s okay.

Geoff Smith: So, I get up to this point where now I’m hashing how I want to do this type of thing, because through the many years that I’ve been doing this I’ve learned how to interact with clients. I would 99.999 percent has always been real easy, because I like to communicate.

One thing that you and I did that I do with all my clients now is really get as much information and as much personal interaction before I get started, so not only do I know what direction I need to be going in, but kind of the vibe of the person.

Our phone conversation probably directed more than the email questionnaire that I sent you just because we figured out each other’s kind of vibe. You could sort of feel how I am and I liked that, because I think one problem with the internet is that we’re hidden behind these little ones and zeros and little words and I like to hear the person’s voice.

Mark Mason: Yes. That’s kind of the magic of podcasting is that you get to break down some of those barriers. I guess in your business the client interaction and the jingles themselves, they really go a long way to tearing some of those barriers down. I really like that about it.

Geoff Smith: Well, I think I’ve been fortunate enough to make stuff that most people like, at least for this genre of jingles. I do have an original sort of career as well.

Mark Mason: You sing Motown too, right? Aren’t you doing a Motown gig right now?

Geoff Smith: I co-produced and engineered and wrote the title track to The Impressions Christmas Album that was released last year.

Mark Mason: That is so cool.

Geoff Smith: These are the guys from People Get Ready and Curtis Mayfield and those kind of things. I used to work at a studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is the studio out there where James Brown and Johnny Cash, a lot of people did definitive records out there, so it’s got a lot of history.

A lot of those old guys still go out to that studio to cut records and I happened to be an intern, actually not an intern, but an assistant engineer at the time and they said, “Hey ,Geoff. We’re going to do The Impressions record this week.”

Mark Mason: Wow.

Geoff Smith: It was all covers, it was them doing their really cool renditions of great Christmas songs, but there was nothing original. So, I wrote a song and they liked it and cut it, which is cool.

Mark Mason: Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty cool, dude.

Geoff Smith: I was talking to my great friend Neil Campbell and I said, “I’m just making jingles.” And he said, “You’re writing art no matter what it is.” So, I look at the creative process of writing a jingle versus writing a pop song for pop radio or a piece of background music as all the same thing.

The great thing about a jingle is that it gets to the point really quick. I think that’s a good thing about pop music, and I kind of like pop music. When I say pop music I mean anything from the Beatles to the Beastie Boys really. Stuff that just gets going and you’ve got to get to the hook really fast.

But, the interaction part I’ve learned a lot through the years and I think I’m hitting a little point where I really like where it’s at and I like the trickledown effect. I just did one literally a week before that you heard a rough mix of and immediately were like, “I’ve got to get in touch with this guy.”

Mark Mason: That’s right.

Geoff Smith: This sort of viral thing still keeps going.

Mark Mason: We’re going to try and keep that going here now. So, I want to encourage people to actually check out your website, because particularly your video resume on the biography page of your website is just shocking.

You’re not just running a music business, you’ve got some internet marketing stuff, you’ve got this ringtone business, you’re into a lot of stuff. That’s TheGeoffSmith.com.

Geoff Smith: Right. It’s TheGeoffSmith.com. I also registed the one with the J just in case people spell it wrong.

You mentioned the Ringtone Feeder business. That has been quite an amazing ride and still is. It’s become one of my major kind of outlets as well.

I have a really good, he’s my business partner now, but a guy who had heard my jingles on This Week in Tech or Geek Brief or Daily Source Code and said, “Hey, you could make ringtones. Why don’t we work together and I could help you with backend things?”

So, what we came up with was a unique way to do ringtones. There’s a million ringtones. A) the unique thing, part of it is the delivery, because you sign up to get ringtones every week and it’s 1.98 a month.

Mark Mason: And they’re delivered directly to your iTunes via RSS, right? Then they just show up on my phone.

Geoff Smith: Right. Yes, they will. We’ve definitely been focusing on the iPhone at the moment. We have partnered now with Verizon now for some other things, but the iPhone market was really what inspired me, because the amazing backend of how iTunes and RSS all this stuff works.

It’s basically a premium podcast in a way. You sign up and stuff downloads right to iTunes, and because it comes already completely created in the ringtone format it immediately syncs to your ringtone folder. You just plug in your iPhone and you’ve got ringtones.

It’s neat, it’s simple, and people like it. I have no idea what people like half the time. Sometimes I have no idea if people are going to like stuff. So, it’s my kind of take on a ringtone. It’s not like chopped up pieces of pop songs or dirty sound effects.

What you get each week once you sign up you get a dozen or so that are the most recent and then you start getting new ones every week. One of them is like a rock song, or whatever genre I do that week, and the other one is more of a traditional instrumental ringtone for people who might be embarrassed to hear a loud rapper saying, “Pick up your phone,” or me doing a Beatles type of thing.

Then the other one is something a little bit more traditional, very Apple-y. I tried to kind of make creative hip kind of sounds. I think I’ve got a really neat catalog. I think it’s the best deal to get it from subscribing to our feed. You can also buy one ringtone off of iTunes.

Mark Mason: I noticed you had a 25 pack now. I looked at a bunch of those ringtones, I thought they were really cool. I thought it was very interesting the way you’ve also got a video component and you’ve actually added a bunch of production value into the videos.

I love the French one, and the Beatles ones are awesome. I was just shocked by all this stuff that you’re doing. It’s really neat.

Geoff Smith: I know my family is just wondering how much time I can take away, but I manage to fit it all in. But, yes, those videos are so when I make a ringtone every week as part of the marketing kind of example instead of just letting people listen to it I make a music video to the ringtone.

So, when you go to the website you immediately see the latest updated video of the ringtone and sort of following in that little video is sort of how to subscribe, or how to sign up, or how to get it and any other pertinent information that we want to deliver that week.

We were holding quite a high ranking in iTunes for a long time on that thing. That actually is almost more fun than making a ringtone, because I get to put costumes on, I get to animate. Speaking of outsourcing, I don’t do all of that animating that’s in that video.

I have a partner, a guy who you’ve probably seen his work all over the place, he’s done a lot of pretty high tech podcast intros. He’s my go-to animation guy. When I’m doing a jingle for a client who also wants to have a video opener I basically work with him.

Mark Mason: That’s awesome.

Geoff Smith: I’m doing a mew thing now for a company in England and I’m the music portion and I’m going to have him do a 10 second video intro and then we kind of piece it all together, and then I finally mix it down in my little studio here. I’m doing probably too much stuff.

Mark Mason: But, that’s the greatness of genius. Let me bring you back around a little bit, because now that my listeners have a great idea of just all the stuff you’re into I was wondering if we could close out with a few tips.

You’ve got so much experience with dealing with clients on the content creation side and my listeners are often outsourcing to content creators or other artistic people, whether it’s graphics or audio. I was wondering if you had just a couple of tips you could leave people with.

What makes the best client? If I want to be really effective as one of your clients what are a couple of things that I can do to sort of get the most for my money when I’m outsourcing creative work?

Geoff Smith: I think one of the first things, and it’s probably one of the first questions that I ask people, and that’s, “How did you hear about me?”
Then sort of building off of that question is maybe I would hope that my client would have done a little homework to look at or listen to some of my other work to kind of get an idea about me, because I may not be the best Bulgarian folk singer they want.

Not that I’m stereotyped as this pop jingle guy, but that is a good chunk of what people know me for is the sort of catchy commercial kind of song thing or the kind of snappy production type of things. So, I would hope that would save a lot of time, and I do the same thing.

When someone has agreed to work with me I want to go and check out what they’re doing, because I don’t want to waste their time either. So, when you and I started talking I went and listened to the links that you gave me.

I think the more information the better. You can’t give enough information to me and I hope that I can have enough background information on my website for you to figure out what you may want from me.

So, for people to say, “Hey, just do whatever, do your magic.” That’s cool too, because then it’s a lot of freedom. Hopefully their idea of my magic is the same idea as mine.

Mark Mason: Right. It sounds like the two keys that you’re pointing out there though is if you want to be a good client you should do the due diligence to make sure you’re working with the right person. Then you should do the guy you’re hiring the courtesy of giving them enough information to get it right the first time.

Geoff Smith: Yes. That’s really it. The cool thing is that even the people who aren’t musically inclined and they have no idea what they want, I just recently in the last year and a half to two years started sort of a phone conversation with my clients, it used to just be all the web and I think most of the time that’s all I really need.

What I find with a lot of people who when I say, “What’s your favorite type of music?” They say, “Well, I’m not really into music.” Most people are, but there are a lot of people who are just like, “I have no idea.” I try to talk through them and sort of give them examples of, “Listen to this. Is that kind of where you’re going.” And then yes or no.

I think I can cover a good particular genre. For example, the one I did right before you was definitely much more of a upbeat younger more modern rock kind of sound, and you definitely liked but you said, “I would prefer more of a acoustic contemporary rock thing of sort of our age,” which is the late 30’s or whatever.

Mark Mason: It’s cool to say it, because Lynn Terry is a friend of mine and she is launching her new podcast. We’re definitely encouraging my listeners to check out Lynn Terry. I’ve had her on the show before and everybody who wants to hear another Geoff Smith intro needs to go listen to that podcast, because you’re right, that one is completely different and it kills too. It’s just fantastic as well, so kudos to you on both of those.

Geoff Smith: Well, thanks. I can’t really think of too much. I’ve been so blessed to have people that are just really cool to work with. I think a lot of it has to be with this community of new media we kind of sort of already know each other a little bit.

Mark Mason: Right.

Geoff Smith: Just you mentioning a few people’s names, Paul Colligan, Lynn Terry, all these people that I know and then some of them I’ve actually already worked with before. It’s like, “cool.” We may not take too much of a conversation to get in the right head space together, because we’re all kind of in the same kind of “new media club.”

Mark Mason: Well, Geoff, I can’t thank you enough. I can’t tell you all the great feedback and reactions that I’ve already gotten off of the jingle, even before it’s released. You are incredibly talented and I admire not just your musical talent, which is clearly God given, but your business acumen is very impressive.
I can’t wait to work with you again and I want to encourage all my listeners if they’ve got audio needs you are the guy. Thank you so much.

Geoff Smith: Thanks so much.

Mark Mason: I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the call. Remind everyone again how they can find you if they need you.

Geoff Smith: You can go to TheGeoffSmith.com, you can just click contact me and it will email me directly. You could tweet me, I’m at Twitter.com/GeoffSmith, I love tweeting. I’m on Facebook somewhere.

My website is sort of the stepping off point, so TheGeoffSmith.com, there’s an email address right on there and you can follow my tweets. I have a new album coming out that I just produced and head mastered.

I’m probably going to hit the road, I’m kind of planning a major city type of stop off, Dallas is one of them. So, as soon as I get some stuff ironed out in the fall I’ll be tweeting some actual live performance.

One other thing, I do a pretty regular Ustream show. I haven’t done it in about three months, but if you follow my tweets, if I’ve got a wild hair in my head a lot of times I just fire up Ustream.tv/GeoffSmith and I just sit in front of the camera and take requests from the crowd. It’s a fun little show.

So, follow my tweets, go to TheGeoffSmith.com and we’ll rock together.

Mark Mason: That is so awesome. Geoff Smith, thank you so much. It’s my distinct pleasure. I can’t wait to hook up with you in Dallas. I’m here and I’m looking forward to it. Thank you very much, sir. Have a great evening.

Geoff Smith: You too.

Mark Mason: Thanks. Bye.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. That about wraps it up for this episode. Remember, get back out there, reassess those goals for 2010 and recommit yourself to getting some stuff done by the end of the year.

My name is Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.

If you really liked this podcast there’s two great things you need to do. Thing number one, go on over to MasonWorld.com and sign up for the Mason World Internet Marketing Newsletter. I send out all kinds of information to that newsletter that goes along really great with the podcast and you’ll learn about new podcast episodes there.

The second thing you need to do is go to iTunes and Apple.com/itunes and find the Mason World Internet Marketing Podcast and leave us a positive review. We love that and it helps us tremendously rank in the iTunes media library. So, go on over to iTunes and give us a great review and two thumbs up. Thanks!

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MW009 – Internet Marketing Podcast Transcript

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You need to commit yourself to becoming a pro in areas that you need to, but not in areas that you don’t need to. For example, one area you need to be a pro in is traffic. You always need to be looking for those areas where you need excellence and focusing on those.

Be a lifelong learner. However, what I would offer as a part time internet entrepreneur, don’t let that learning paralyze you. You can get information overload, you can get paralyzed in indecision, you can be too busy learning and not busy enough doing. Avoid all of those things and learn for the rest of your life, but take action first.

Again, you have to find balance here. You can't always be in learning mode or you'll never be able to move forward in your business. I think the 80/20 rule applies very well in this case -- spend 80 percent of your time working your business and marketing and then spend 20 percent of your time learning the newest things in your niche, new marketing ideas, etc...

Just because you’re part time that doesn’t mean that you can afford to stop learning about internet marketing. In fact, the problem is that internet marketing is changing and that’s your business. So, don’t ever stop learning about your business. That’s a fatal mistake that will cause you to go the way of the dodo bird.

Don’t confuse learning with distraction. Just because I’m telling you that you need to learn stuff it doesn’t mean that you need to go off in the weeds and start researching stuff that you don’t know about or get distracted by the latest bright shiny object.

Just make a habit of finding and following quality sources of internet marketing information. The two I like and rely are the Internet Business Mastery podcast (excellent source of information) and/or mastermind groups that you can become involved in. Either find live ones in your local area or something like the Internet Business Mastery Academy or LearningWithLynn.com. You want to do something like that where you can interact with like-minded people. Just be careful and limit the scope of that interaction to something that fits inside your time budget.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

Never Stop Learning in Your Part Time Internet Business

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This year, the 4th of July fell on a Sunday.  Thought you might enjoy seeing what I was doing with part of my time that day.

Special thanks to all the service men and women in the Armed Forces that make such days possible.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3C3H_pVf14

Thanks for subscribing to my RSS Feed. As a thank you for subscribing, I'd like to offer you this free gift. If you like that, and you want to get all the latest information from MasonWorld.com, be sure to join my Internet Marketing Newsletter. Subscribers enjoy access to the MasonWorld Members area. Have a great day!

In my spare time I sing

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