Probably the best way to figure out what people want when they’re on the internet is to do market research on what people are searching for. If they’re searching for it, they are looking for it. If they’re looking for it, they may be willing to pay to find it.

Using Wordtracker is still a great way to find out what people are searching for online. You can use their free keyword research tool to find out exactly what people are searching for and it will automatically list related searches, in order of popularity from most popular to least.

For instance, if you type in “dogs”, it’ll return what people type in related to dogs, in the order of most popular. You’ll get dog, dogs, snoop dog, dog breeds, dog pile, etc.

Now, Wordtracker has a feature in which you can eliminate all of the offensive words. If you turn this off, you will see the what people search for… uncensored. That’s when you get some scary stuff. More on that in a second.

If you think you’re the average web surfer, think again. I guarantee you don’t look for 99.99% of the things that people are most looking for. Here’s a perfect example. I’ll warn you, it’s not pretty.

So if you have absolutely no idea what market you want to get into, type in a generic phrase like “find”. You’ll get results like find people, find a classmate, find cheap gas, etc. Each one of these searches represent a different market.

Let’s just say that I’m shocked every single time I look for a market or research one I’m in (to expand). Almost every search I have ever done turns up something dirty in the top ten. And I mean d..i..r..t..y. I was in the Navy. I’ve seen it all… this stuff is bad.

DISCLAIMER: ADULT SEARCHES INCLUDED!! Perfect example: Do a search for “How To”. I expected “how to tie a tie” or “how to play guitar” or things to that effect. Check out those results.

Astonishing, isn’t it? The number on the left is an approximation of how many searches are done on that term, per day, across all the search engines. Wow. You mean 1000 people a day search for “how to kill a fetus at home”? Sick.

It’s sad, isn’t it? Still think you know what the average web surfer is looking for? I learned that a long time ago. Hopefully you learned that today. Don’t enter a market solely because you like it. Don’t create a product you think you’ll like. You’re not the average web surfer, and you don’t know what is in their mind.

The best you can do is to check out what they’re searching for, and give it to them; paid or free.

Overture, when their keyword tool worked and showed number just like Google does now, inflated their numbers. Why? Well, why not? When you have a new advertiser come in, it is nice to be able to point them to the numbers and say “you see, you can have all this traffic. All you have to do is sign up with us”.

Now Google is doing the same thing. How do I know? I’m an Adwords advertiser and have been for awhile, so it’s not hard to figure out.

Let’s say I was at an average position of 2.3 for the keyword [keyword] (original – I know). Let’s say I was not budget, geographically, or schedule limited, which I was not. Let’s say that I had 1 keyword, [keyword], in 1 adgroup. Let’s say that in my Adwords account, they stated that I was getting 21,748 impressions every month. Let’s say that the Google keyword tool was showing that there are about 37,000 searches for [keyword] every month.

Wait… huh?

Am I saying that my statistics for my Adwords account was showing for every single search for [keyword]? I don’t know – I thought it was.

Am I instead saying that Google’s numbers are inflated? I don’t know – Overture’s was.

So somewhere something fishy is going on in the land of Mountainview. Why aren’t I showing up for almost half of the searches? I have no idea. Unfortunately I’ll probably never know. That’s the way Google works. Just be mindful of their numbers. They may not be the truth.

Here’s a very quick tip on how to write headlines that magnetically draw attention toward your sales letter/blog post. These headlines are 100% proven to drive people to click on your ad or read your sales copy. It’s sort of like the ultimate swipe file.

1. Go to EzineArticles.com and go to the home page. Click on the category that your niche is under. If your niche doesn’t have a category, I’m sorry, but this will not work.
2. Click on the first article in the category.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom. Look under the articles titled "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the…"
4. Take any one of those article titles. They are, by far, the most viewed articles in that niche. That means that someone has seen the article headline and clicked on it. It has drawn their attention and curiosity enough that they wanted to read that article.
5. If you’re curious, you can even click on the article, scroll down to the bottom and see how many times the article has been viewed. You’ll be very surprised as to how some articles draw a lot better than others do.
6. Change it very slightly, or even use it "as is". Your headline will now magnetically attract readers, no matter what the niche.

What you have there is pure gold. You can use those headlines to study which words work and which do not in your niche. You can use it to come up with product ideas, blog post ideas, article titles, and a few more things less obvious (use your imagination)

OR, try this… before you write your next sales copy or ad, write 3-5 very similar articles and use different headlines in each one. Submit them all to ezinearticles.com. See which one outperforms the other. This is a free way to test your headlines before you lose money due to non-performing sales copy.

I hope this tip helps you out a little bit. Any questions?

Ohh and happy 4th of July Americans.

For those who don’t know, network marketing is the business model in which independent representatives (sometimes called distributors) are the primary method for a company to market products. Think of Pampered Chef, Amway, Avon, Discovery Toys, etc. How did you hear about those products? Probably not from a Super Bowl commercial, but instead from a friend or family who is trying to sell them.

The Business Model

The business model runs off the extremely successful theory that the best type of marketing is word of mouth, or endorsement marketing. It has been around for decades and will be around for a long time to come. The commission structure is different for every company, but usually it is a multi-tiered commission structure.

For example, if I sign up under my sponsor, Person A, for every sale I make, not only do I get paid, but my sponsor (Person A) gets paid a small portion as well. If I sign up you, my reader (Person B), every sale you make will pay me a commission, and for some companies will also pay my sponsor, Person A, a commission as well. Terms such as upline, downline, "team", roll-up, one-up, two-up, residuals, and many more are used to describe the payment structure.

Network Marketing vs. MLM

Multi-level Marketing, or MLM, is a type of company that has multiple levels of commissions. Like the example above, if you, Person B, makes a sale, I get a commission, my sponsor (Person A) gets a commission, his sponsor gets a commission, and so on. For your first sale, everyone gets a commission except, well, you, the person who made a sale. Some companies (called 2-ups) even have the policy that you won’t get paid until after your first TWO sales.

MLM has had a very checkered past and does not enjoy the best of reputations. They have been hit pretty hard by the FTC and rightfully so. It is illegal (in the US) to require someone to join a program in order to sell it. For instance, it is illegal for the a company like the Global Resorts Network (GRN) to make you buy one of their vacation packages before you can sell it. This law came about when people were joining Amway, buying thousands of dollars of stuff in order to be able to sell it, and would go bankrupt because they couldn’t sell it.

The way current MLM companies get away with this type of practice is requiring what they call "qualifying sales". If you do not buy the product or service, the MLM company segregates you from the rest of the distributors who did, and requires you to make even more sales before you start receiving your commissions. It is not uncommon to have to make 5, 6, or even 10 sales before you get paid for your first sale. Even worse, all the people who sign up as distributors will be signed up under your sponsor instead of you, potentially costing you thousands of dollars.

As you can see, this is shady at best. Because of these practices, the MLM industry has gotten a bad name. It is so bad, in fact, that my best advertising ads included the phrase "NOT MLM!"

So the term "Network marketing" was born. Sometimes it is synonomous with MLM, sometimes it means something completely different, but the concept is the same. The MLM business model is slowly dying away but is being replaced with the direct sales model, in which you get paid, from day 1, for every sale you make. In addition, your sponsor will get paid, and that’s it.

The Stigma and How They Get You to Join

Quickly (maybe it’s obvious), I found out that the best people to join your "team" are those who want to start a business and market the product themselves, not someone who wants to buy the product just for the product. This way, you can take advantage of the residual income they make for you by selling the product (no advertising cost for me). I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch: what if, you were to get 5 people to join, and they got 5 people, and they got 5 people. It’d be easy to make millions! (in truth, you may get 5 people to join, but any one of those 5 people may get a total of 3 people, only 1 of which will actually make commissions for you, and it goes on from there)

So for you relatively advanced marketers, it should be obvious that the ideal persona for these companies is a business opportunity seeker with enough cash to spend a significant amount of money on advertising. In fact, the best chance to get someone in your downline is by recruiting them from another company. MLM is extremely incestuous, with the top earners usually coming off a bad experience with another company.

Herein lies the first fundamental problem of running a network marketing/MLM business online. I’ll discuss that in a second, but first I want to get into the basics of who profits from MLM companies.

Who Profits, and How Many Fail?

It should be obvious that the people who profit the most in an MLM company are those who are at the top. Who is higher than the original founders of the company? There are a few sporadic cases of extreme success sprinkled throughout the organization, but by and far the most successful people are the ones who "got in at the ground floor".

The reason behind this is one that not many people see right-off-the-bat. I’ll put it in another light.

What if I, right here and now, revealed that I was making about $100,000 a month in the croquet niche? Then I went on to say that the way I made this money was by selling croquet balls, and I told you who my manufacturer was, what my keywords were in Adwords that I was advertising on, where I placed my banner ads, etc. all for the low price of $39.99. Then I went on to say that you, too can get into the croquet niche, sell the same balls, and make the same amount of money? What would you do? Would you go out and start your own croquet site using all my information? Maybe some of you wouldn’t, but most of you would.

What just happened? I became rich selling croquet balls. Then, I got rich again, selling information on how to sell croquet balls. What else did I just do? I made it a million times harder to sell those croquet balls because my competition just went from 0 or very low to extremely high. The same thing happens over the lifetime of a MLM or network marketing company. As the number of distributors increase, so does competition.

Besides, what USP are they going to have? They haven’t been successful yet, so they can’t talk about that. If you couple this with the fact that most people who start a network marketing business do not have much experience in marketing and have very little time and money to devote to success, you get a failure rate of 98%.

Seriously, a failure rate of 98%

What I personally started to see is that as soon as the company started getting very popular, the top distributors in the company started accepting the fact that they would break even, or even lose money their first sale.

In my company, this was a $2,000 product that we were breaking even on!!

How can you possibly expect a new distributor to get started if they 1) have to pay for a $2,000 product, 2) don’t make money on any of their follow-on sales and instead make money from their residual check.

If you’re a numbers person, here are the graphs from the Direct Sales Association, the guys who want to legalize pyramid schemes:

Keep in mind, these are THEIR number, and they are estimates. (they’re still not good)…

US Sales (Worldwide is worse):

US Sales FORCE…

 From this data, this is what I have determined. Amount of sales, per person, per year (in dollars):

Now here’s the sick part. Amount of yearly sales, per person, after adjusted for inflation:

WOW! Not a very good trend, huh? Would you invest in a company with trends like this? Not only that, but the average person only sells about $2117 a year in the US and $1866 a year worldwide! That’s about $176 a month. And here’s the kicker: commission is usually around 10-20%, so that’s what, $17 a month? What kind of business is that? Do you think that offsets the fact that they had to buy hundreds of dollars of equipment to get started? Absolutely not. The numbers do not lie, folks.

They’re all Liars

So what drives so many people to network marketing? The money. There seriously is a lot of money to be made if you are successful, and the people who make the millions shine very brightly and attract a lot of distributors.

How do the new distributors attract other distributors when they don’t have a great success story? When a prospect calls and says "how much money have you made so far", how do they say, "Well, actually, I haven’t made any money, but I’m sure I will soon."

It’s simple… they lie.

I did it. Everyone under me did it. Everyone above me did it. I didn’t tell them over the phone that I was successful, but I did on my landing page. I joined a marketing company called Carbon Copy Pro. The landing page says "A Realistic $250k First Year Income". It tells the story of Jay Kubassek and how successful he was with this exact same marketing system.

I bet 80-90% of the people who opted into my system thought I was Jay Kubassek. They had no idea who I was until they bought from Jay me.

The Present and Future State of Network Marketing, Particularly Online

Network Marketing and MLM are here to stay. If you don’t think so, just google the term "business opportunity" and see what ads pop up. Advertising, however, is to the point where it is too expensive to compete unless you can make a significant amount of money on each sale. The companies where you make $5 or $12 a sale will not be able to advertise on any sort of bid-based medium (which most ad platforms are now)

The success rate will stay the same – around 2% – because most who join do not have the deep pockets or heavy time commitment required to participate in Web 2.0, pay-per-click, or banner advertising. That’s the statistics I saw in my business and that’s what I believe it will be.

Even though there are successes in this industry, I DO NOT recommend getting started in it. If its purely for the money, there are plenty of other ways to make just as much money online with a much higher success rate and in a much more honorable way.

I personally am quitting the company I’m in because I cannot market something that claims to be able to transform anyone into millionaires overnight and doesn’t deliver. After 9 months, I felt sleezier than ever before when I started to find out that the honeymoon may be over for my company. I would much rather focus on my guilt-free businesses.

My father is a relatively successful entrepreneur and my mother is a piano teacher. Even though they accomplished a lot,  unfortunately, they’re not very good at saving money. After 40 years of working, they have about $10k saved to their name, and a retirement plan (not including social security) that will pay them out about $700 a month after they retire in 3 years. Not if I have anything to do about it.

The truth is, I’ll end up paying for their retirement. I don’t mind. They took care of me for 18 years, so now it’s my turn. I have enough money set aside that they can live off the interest for the rest of their lives.

That’s not enough, though. I want to give them a huge "happy retirement" present. What better present than to buy them a waterfront house on an Adirondack Lake? Unfortunately, I don’t have the $550k to buy the property and the $300k to buy the house. Yet. However, they’re retiring in 3 years. Here’s how I’ll make $850k in 3 years and how you can, too.

First off, you need to set a goal. Obviously mine is set; $850k in 3 years. Now we need to break it down into smaller goals.

Well, an online business usually sells for 12-14 months net profit and if it has potential all the way up to 24 months. This means that with 3 years, I would have to make ($850k/4=) $215k a year in online profits. ($215k x 3 years + 1 more year for selling the business). Can I make $215k a year online? Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

Take that $215k a year and divide it into months. $18k a month, roughly. Do you think you can make $18k a month? That also seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

How much is one visitor worth in your business? $1? $2? $0.10? Let’s say one visitor to your site is worth about $0.50, a conservative estimate. That means in order to make $850k in 3 years, I’ll need to get 36,000 visitors a month to my site. Does this sound more achievable? It still sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

How about if I started about 7 websites and marketed every single one of them the correct way? 36,000/7 = 5,200 visitors month. Hmmm… doesn’t seem so bad now. What if I started 10 websites? Do you think you can start 10 websites in 3 years and market them to the point where they get 3,600 visitors a month?

That’s only 120 visitors a day!  Between all of the traffic methods you know already, do you think you can get 120 visitors a day?

This blog already gets twice that amount and it’s only 4 months old! Do you think you can create a blog like this 10 times in the next 3 years (every 3 months)? Doesn’t seem so hard now, doesn’t it?

So what did we just do? We just found out a way to pay for an $850,000 waterfront lakehouse with cash just by being successful entrepreneurs. We broke down our goals into smaller pieces that actually became achievable.

The next step, of course, is to take the next step and put this plan into action. One….step… at… a… time…

I know some of you may have objections and think this is not achievable. What are they?

Here’s a list of 5 sources of traffic that deliver extremely targeted, extremely low cost visitors to your site. I use them as lead generation/list building sources, and right now they’re very untapped. As I’ve hinted at before, I’m trying to find the time to put together a traffic-getting manual, but that’s looming in the near future. Here’s your good stuff now. I’ve actually seen someone try to sell these 5 secrets for $147, so consider yourself lucky.

1) eBay. That’s right, the 18th most trafficked site on the internet. Why is eBay #1? Because every single person that goes to eBay is looking to buy something. There is no more targeted buyer. From my experience, people are looking to buy stuff at garage sale prices, so when they see a $6 million ebook (or however much you charge for it), they won’t buy. They will, however, buy a stupid $3 report ***UPDATE: EBAY NO LONGER ALLOWS YOU TO SELL DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT. FIND A CHEAP PHYSICAL PRODUCT***. They probably won’t buy a $500 fishing rod (well, they will, but not necessarily all that much), but they will buy $1 lures in BULK.

To take advantage of this traffic, find a very cheap dropshipped item or fix up a PLR article and call it a special report and place an ad for it on eBay. Include your website. Start out small (like everything else), and optimize your ad so people click through just as much as they buy. Your goal is to break even with this. Let your mind wander with this: if you are selling a fishing eBook, sell fishing lures at-cost. Then upsell them once you have their email address.

You’ll be amazed at how targeted your traffic is, and it’s an extremely effective way to build a list. Just send them to a squeeze page, or place a popover on your home page. Do not underestimate the power of this one traffic source.

2) Amazon. See #1. The only reason why eBay is higher than Amazon is because it is much easier to sell junk on eBay, otherwise Amazon would be higher because the traffic is actually of better quality. I’m not an advocate of selling junk, but it’s a good way to generate leads Just think of all the stupid refrigerator magnets you have of different realtors (or am I the only one). It’s the same idea, except people will pay you for it.

3) Craigslist. I know, it’s getting very hard to sell on Craigslist these days, with phone verified accounts and all. Suck it up. There are ways around it. Sell the same stuff as in #1 and #2, AND even sell your main products. The traffic from CL is OK. It’s not great, but the key is in your posting city and category. Books have been written about it, and I really don’t want to spend much time on it. I honestly think the traffic isn’t worth the hassle for some markets, but others it’s a gold mine.

4) Affiliate Networks. What? But I thought these were secrets, you say? This one actually takes a little thought, so hear me out. The secret is not in the source, it’s how you use it. Let’s say, you’re in a crazy competitive market like, ohh, let’s say… ringtones. Who is the primary market for ringtones? (I haven’t done any market research on this, so don’t shoot me for generalizations) 14 year old teenage girls, right?

While there is no way you’re going to compete with marketers who are firmly entrenched in the ringtone market, you will be able to break into a market like the "how to get a boy to like me" market. Create a cheap (they are 14 after all) product like this and list it on the affiliate networks. The standard rules apply: maximize the affiliate’s cut, ensure you have a well converting page, etc. Then, after you’ve gotten them to give up their email from affiliates driving traffic to your site, send them the ringtone offers.

See, you need to know your market. I quickly found that one of the markets I was in didn’t make much money in the mainstream electronics I was selling. I actually was breaking even. I made my money on the accessories and other products down the line (upsells and cross-sells) in similar, but different markets. i.e. selling Star Wars stuff to people who buy Macs (or vice versa). Is that such a far stretch? Get affiliates to promote you in a not-saturated market and bring them into the saturated (but lucrative) markets you want to.

Did I explain that well enough? If not, let me know. I’m not the best of writers.

5) Offline Advertising. Am I crazy? Is there really a world offline? Yes, there are! And the best traffic you’ll ever get is the one who takes the time to write down your website, come online, and interact with you. No kidding. Postcard campaigns, direct mail, billboard, radio, and to some extent TV (although I would stay away from TV for now. I’m just not sure how effective it is with DVR) create the best leads you’ll ever get. Like always, you have to test and track, but do not overlook the power of offline advertising. At the very least it should be a part of your backend.

So there you have it. Leverage 3 of the top 20 most trafficked sites on the internet and you’ll be doing pretty well for yourself. Any questions?

BTW, even though this will get you some decent traffic pretty quickly, I haven’t told you the absolute best traffic secret I have. And it doesn’t have anything to do with search engines or social media. This secret is responsible for some pretty awesome traffic if you have a well monetized site. By awesome I mean a minimum 1 million visitors a month. Sorry guys, it will remain my secret for now

Stephan Miller just wrote a great post about keeping track of your ideas and making them real. He uses a Moleskine and used to use a notebook. It’s funny how great minds think alike because I use a voice recorder that is built into my mobile phone/PDA and used to use a sticky pad I carried around in my pocket (yes, a sticky pad – stop laughing). I used to take the sticky pad that I wrote the idea on and stick it on my desk where I couldn’t work until I paid attention to it. Now, I have a voice recorder that I sit down and listen to every Friday afternoon when I plan out my next week.

I never, ever, get my best ideas sitting in front of the computer. Like Stephan, when I come across boring times (aka nuclear power school or the 25 years of formal schooling I’ve gone through), my mind wanders. That is when genius strikes, and I am prepared to remember it! I attribute this one habit as one of the ones that has lead me to great success online.

It doesn’t stop there, though. I then go to bubbl.us and brainstorm. I set aside a half hour or so and come up with different types of products, promotions, giveaways, potential partners, related industries, etc… all the things necessary for beginning a successful internet business.

Stephan says this habit was responsible for his first $1,000 month. It is responsible for my first $1, $1,000, and $10,000 month, because once you find something that works, you grow it BIG! (then I sell it)

Do you have any habits that foster this encourage mental greatness? Or do you come up with great ideas then let someone else figure them out?

I’m subscribed to my competitor’s email lists, as you should be too. You will gain great insight into a niche, get great free content, and even better, know exactly who to contact when it comes time to JV with them when you launch a new product.

So out comes this message from my #1 competitor stating he has something big coming up. Then he goes on to explain what the new product will entail and to watch out for it on Tuesday. Wouldn’t you know, the description matched my product concept, almost word-for-word.

What was going to be a decent, $20-30k a month product that was rediculously easy to create and market because there is no direct competition will now require me to find a better USP, charge less, have a few less JV partners (because he has already partnered with a few others), etc.

The worst part? In my short list of maybe 15 different JV partner possibilities, I’m absolutely positive that at least 7-10 of them were going to accept a JV with me because my product was different enough from theirs that I could easily convince them to help me launch this product. Now I’m probably down to 3-4 at most.

Instead of being able to say, "it’s the only one of its kind online", my USP now has to be something like "it’s the least expensive of its kind, or best of its kind or has the most features" or something along those lines.

That is how business goes. I could just as easily switch directions and scrap this product. Instead, I am just going to make it much better and be able to market it better.

That, IMHO, is the difference between the super successful and the semi-successful. Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome.

What do you think?

The San Francisco was travelling through the Western Pacific in order to transit from one point to another, sort of like you would travel an interstate to get from one city to another. They were travelling at extremely fast speeds. The area they were travelling through was very mountainous, as is most of the Pacific Ocean, but they were never operating outside of the operating capabilities of the submarine. So how could the have avoided a mountain that is literally invisible?

They certainly weren’t the first submarine to go through the area, and they definitely will not be the last. Why didn’t the other submarines hit the invisible mountain? Because the other submarines followed a path that had already proven safe by submarines before it.

You see, the San Francisco had chosen to cut a corner when travelling. They were a little bit behind schedule, and they decided to deviate from the proven path that previous submarines had followed when transiting through the area. The area was perfectly safe, and all submarines are allowed to create their own path if they would like to, provided it is safe. If the San Francisco had used the same path that was tried and proven, they would never have run into that mountain, and that crew would be perfectly fine.

How could you use this in your business? Simple: use paths that are tried and proven. Get started in niches that you know for sure are profitable because people are already making money in them. Don’t try some kind of crazy traffic "secrets" that you think may work. Use the same tried and true methods that everyone else uses.

Don’t stray far from the path. You’ll eventually hit that underwater mountain.

I will make the disclaimer that the two products I link to, Terry Dean’s List Building product and Brian and Tony Clark’s Teaching Sells, have both made me lots of money and they are two of the best products I can recommend.

I am working on something to give to you for free, though. Something that I get a lot of questions about:

Traffic.

John Reese is going to re-release his Traffic Secrets course. Let me ask you this: what do you think is his "secret"? There is no secret. It’s pretty simple, and the ways to generate traffic, I guarantee you already know about. I’m going to write them down and explain in general terms how each one works, and then in the blog I’ll expand. If you think it’s incredibly hard to get over a million visitors a month, after you read this book I’m going to write, you’ll ask yourself, "that’s it?"

I would like you to realize what John Reese is doing: it’s taught in Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, and they even talk about this specific tactic: he just released a "spy" photo of his product, Traffic Secrets 2.0. Even though it’s months away from being released, he’s starting to generate buzz.

Then he goes on and talks about the box, how pretty it is and it was specifically designed to help you return it if you need to. What does that sound like? A USP (Unique Selling Proposition), maybe? It’s also a reason to release the photo to generate buzz. He can’t just say "I released this picture of the box because I want to generate buzz so more people will buy this overpriced product", can he? Nope, instead he has a reason for the photo.

What other reasons does he have to come up with?

• The reason for scarcity when it comes time to launch the product, like he’s only going to sell 1,000 products, or at midnight he’ll shut the doors forever and you’ll never get a chance to buy the product again, or perhaps he’ll have some dumb bonus that will only be included for the first 50 purchases.
• The reason for relaunching the product. Can anyone say "my server crashed?"
• The difference between Traffic Secrets 1.0 and 2.0 and why those who bought 1.0 need 2.0

You see, launching a product is really standard. Once you do it yourself, you can spot the tactics a mile away, and they’re the same story over and over. That’s because it works, and works extremely well. You should think about incorporating this into everything you sell.

Ohh, and I just bought a new house My wife and I are very happy.