I thought you guys might like to know that I’ve been working on rolling out a brand new blog for entrepreneurs. PeiProfit is a project I took on several months ago, looking to add a little spark to the immense BS rolled out in the make money online niche.

I think that message has become a little scrambled, and so I’ve decided to create a new blog that deals with the issues and troubles mattering most to online entrepreneurs.

You can check out this blog over at FinchBlogs.com

I will get round to publishing fresh content for PeiProfit eventually. But until then, if you want to learn about real-life genuine moneymaking on the Internet, Finch Blogs is the place to check. See you there!

Then you have a select group of marketers who swear by the idea that forums are nothing more than a mechanism of shooting yourself in the ass. Time that could have been spent more wisely on actual work that delivers results.

I think the reality lies somewhere inbetween.

There are some incredibly crappy Internet Marketing forums out there. But you will also find small communities where successful entrepreneurs share their knowledge for free. So just how do the big guns stack up?

Here are my thoughts on some of the more popular IM forums, as well as an introduction to a couple you probably haven’t heard about…

The Warrior Forum

Hugely popular with fledgling Internet Marketers, The Warrior Forum is a haven of friendly advice for those who are a long way from reaching the starry heights of what this industry has to offer. Warrior Forum is, in my opinion, very primitive. The marketing tactics discussed here are generally a few years behind more sophisticated boards. But you won’t find a more cheerful and friendly group of marketers to learn from if you’re just getting started.

If you’re the kind of marketer who likes to feel part of a movement, or likes to be surrounded by other marketers with big dreams but little experience, Warrior Forum is a good destination.

Digital Point Forums

Honestly, a hell hole. A terrible depiction of what Internet Marketing can become without common sense and a basic grasp of business. The only good quality Digital Point has to offer is the occasional talented (and cheap) designer for hire in the trading sub-forum. Avoid this place like Swine Flu.

Affiliates4U Forum

Affiliates4U is quite a corporatey affiliate forum compared to the choices above. You will find a lot of affiliate managers and product owners looking for the best way to promote their products. Whether you’re an affiliate or even further invested in the Internet Marketing biz, there are some great relationships to be struck up here with people in influential positions.

Much of my business today revolves around work with companies that I was first introduced to on the Affiliates4U forum. It’s not the greatest hot spot for trading tips and tricks of the industry, but a fantastic place for keeping up to date with wider industry news. Networking is such an important factor to success. Don’t overlook it.

WickedFire

Let me get this out of the way. If you’re not completely confident in your Internet Marketing pedigree, stay the hell away from WickedFire. This is a very intelligent bunch of individuals that won’t hold back from mocking, embarrassing and belittling those that it deems to be inferior.

WickedFire is a good place to lurk and spy on relevant industry happenings. You will find occasional gems of information, but a lot of red herrings. The majority of members make a LOT of money, but they quite rightfully aren’t the most welcoming bunch when it comes to sharing it.

PPV Playbook

I’ve saved the best until last. PPV Playbook is unquestionably the best Internet Marketing forum in the world today, and let me tell you why. It’s a paid subscription forum (which will alienate some people immediately), so if that is a turn-off, that’s just too bad. PPV Playbook has some of the smartest and most knowledgeable marketing brains you’re ever likely to find on an “open discussion” board. I know many of these guys personally, and they’re not short of money due to their success in the industry. Think guys who have generated millions of dollars of revenue in the CPA industry.

But most importantly, they are REAL marketers. Not just shills attempting to make a quick dime from the “make money online” niche that every Average Joe seems to piggyback. And they’re willing to reveal exact case studies of what makes them successful.

If you’re looking to move in to affiliate marketing, there really is no better place to learn than on a forum that serves up dozens of useful case studies explaining the rights and wrongs of real-life affiliate marketing campaigns. These guys are for real and if you’re under any shadow of a doubt, just check the famous blogger personalities who are registered there. PPV Playbook is frequented by the guys who are making it rain dollar bills. If you want to become part of that crowd, I sincerely suggest you check out what this place has to offer. You won’t regret it.

Feel free to share some of your favourite Internet Marketing forums below!

Building a mailing list is one of the best ways to position yourself to make money today, but more importantly to guarantee money tomorrow. Moving in to email marketing is all about preparing for the long term.

In the first part of this series, I’m going to explain how to get opt-ins for your mailing list. An opt-in is simply a user declaring “Yes, send me your email! Here’s my address…”. You’re probably also familiar with the term double opt-in. This is where you get a user to verify that they definitely, unquestionably, undoubtedly want to receive your email. They do this by clicking a link in a confirmation email.

Most email marketing service providers will require that you enforce double opt-ins. It helps to reduce spam and raises the quality of the list, which believe me, is to your advantage in the long term.

As I’ve said many times over, AWeber is my mailing service of choice. I’ve swooned over the reasons why I prefer them in the past, but feel free to do your own research if you’d like to compare and seek out some alternatives. Regardless, AWeber is an excellent service which is used by many other affiliates, not just myself.

So…how do you get opt-ins for your mailing list? And more importantly, how do you do it cost efficiently?

The golden rule for collecting emails – unless you’re an international brand attracting interest through name recognition alone – is to give something away for free. It doesn’t matter what you use as a freebie, the results are often the same. Everybody loves a free giveaway, and most people are happy to hand out their email address if it gives them access to the bait.

What you use as freebie bait will depend entirely on your niche.

If you’re running low in inspiration, here are a few ideas.

Promoting a dating offer? – Give away a report featuring 7 “scientifically proven” methods of attracting girls on dating websites…

Promoting a weight loss offer? – Give away a report showing 5 lifestyle changes you can make NOW that guarantee weight loss tomorrow…

Promoting games offers? – Tell your users to submit their email address to receive first-dibs on upcoming beta testing opportunities for new online games.

This method alone has helped me to build mailing lists with thousands of opt-ins that produce conversions time and time again. I just need to find suitable offers for my list and balance the referral whoring act with content that actually has value. We’ll cover that in the next part of the series.

But you’re probably wondering, as you should be, how and where do I get these opt-ins at an affordable price? The value of an opt-in fluctuates crazily on a lot of different factors.

- What country is the opt-in based in?
- Why did the user originally opt-in?
- What niche are you working in?

I am generally very happy if I can score opt-ins for around $0.50 per user.

In my opinion, the best sources of driving traffic to your mailing list are social advertising platforms – like Facebook, Plentyoffish etc – and also contextual advertising networks. If you’ve never used a contextual (Pay Per View) network, let this be the shove to go and find out what the fuss is all about.

PPV involves springing pop-ups and pop-unders which are targeted based on the URL that the user happens to be clicking through to at the time. It sounds dirty and scammy, right? It’s actually all performed with the consent of the end user, and it can be very effective. It’s also one of the cheapest and most untapped sources to buy advertising. Particularly for your mailing lists!

I would recommend giving Media Traffic a peek if you’ve never worked with a PPV network before.

If you’re not looking to spend money collecting opt-ins, I’m going to drop you one huge pointer for where you can get a lot of them for free:

Classified sites.

I’ll let you work out the rest.

One of the great advantages of using AWeber for your email marketing campaigns is the sheer ease of use with the system. Before I moved in to email marketing, I was wondering how I was supposed to go about collecting emails. Did I need to write my own script? How did I store the data? How could I customize the data I was capturing?

AWeber allows you to literally plug in your requirements (maybe you want to collect gender, date of birth, whatever…), generate a block of code, and copy and paste opt-in forms on to your website. There are a bunch of different templates and it really is the sort of thing you can have up and running within the hour.

The process of getting opt-ins is relatively easy and the main challenge comes in the shape of getting them at the cheapest price. Next up, we’ll take a look at what you can actually do with your data to make money from it. And I’ll also show an easy way of making money from your list on Day One.

Recommended This Week:

• If you’re not signed up with AWeber, now is a great time to get yourself an account. You won’t regret it when your new shiny mailing list is still rolling in the dollar bills many years from now.

This is a saying that has been relevant in marketing circles for years now, and for online marketers, it really shouldn’t be ignored any longer. Many entrepreneurs are shy when it comes to engaging in email marketing, probably because they assume – often falsely – that it will affect the ROI of an advertising campaign.

PPC marketers like to bid on keyword phrases and then funnel users through to a sales page. If you’re an affiliate, it’s likely that most of your advertising budget is spent praying those clicks will somehow turn in to sales. And if they don’t? Well you’ve wasted your money because the potential customer is lost forever. By capturing emails, you can eliminate a lot of the risk attached to paid advertising.

It’s smart marketing. All affiliates should be looking to develop long term assets. An email list is one of the best long term assets for three reasons:

1. It gives you unlimited opportunities to sell an unlimited number of products.

Okay, so let’s say you’ve been capturing hundreds of email addresses after users have expressed an interest in losing weight. Instead of having just one opportunity to sell that weight loss product, by opting the user in to an email list, you get many more bites at the cherry.

If they don’t buy from the first sales pitch, maybe you’ll lure them in to a sale with the second. Some users may be receiving, reading and ignoring your emails for many months before they finally convert in to a paying customer. The point is that if you don’t retain the user, you’ll forever be bidding another $0.35 on Adwords to regain their attention.

2. Companies love to work with mailing affiliates.

If you have a targeted mailing list, you can be 100% sure that many companies out there would love to work with you. If you’re boasting 20,000 emails of Canadian users who are interested in getting a new credit card, that data list is DYNAMITE for the right credit company. They will pay you mega bucks for a partnership.

3. It’s not expensive to build a mailing list.

Contrary to what a lot of marketers think, it’s actually very cheap to start building a mailing list. The software required can be snapped up for as little as a few dollars per month. I will be posting about the best mailing services shortly.

It’s also very cheap to add subscribers to your mailing list. I’ve been able to gain new subscribers for as little as $0.02 per user. I’m going to be revealing how this is possible in future posts. But for now, just know that email marketing can be cheap AND very effective.

I’ve been using email marketing for several years now and I’ve tried a wide selection of software packages catering to my changing needs. All things considered, I would recommend AWeber as my first choice mailer. But there are a lot of worthy alternatives on the market and I know several affiliates are big fans of MailChimp instead.

AWeber offers a useful $1 trial to sample their services. If you’ve ever been shy about getting started in email marketing, now is the time to make the jump. I’ll show you how to get profitable in the next couple of posts.

I also have to say sorry for the sluggish posting lately. I’ve just invested some of my hard earned Internet money in to a move across the globe to Thailand. The weather is pushing past 33°C here in Bangkok, so it’s a challenge to stay out of the pool!

For many affiliates, slapping a site together and reviewing a few products was how we made our first dollar on the Internet. I think for people new to the industry, it’s the most obvious starting point. But is the review site still going to be successful in 2011? Some would argue that it’s effectiveness is already on the decline.

Ever since Google rolled out a bunch of guidelines relating directly to affiliate marketers and their “bridge pages”, the review site has been under attack. If you create a simple portal reviewing several products in a niche, you can enjoy a great deal of success by generating organic traffic from the search engines. But this is 2010, going on 2011, and with a huge influx of affiliate marketers ALL having the same idea, there’s only going to be so many riches to be passed around.

The business of ranking a review site high enough in Google to get a good volume of traffic isn’t exactly turning easier as the years go by. But even more worrying is the crackdown in paid traffic methods. Whereas in 2008, I could get away with promoting just about anything on Adwords and driving traffic to my review sites, that’s not the case anymore.

Google doesn’t like bridge pages, or anything that it deems to be an unnecessary step between the user and the product. Many review sites are so wafer thin that it’s easy to see where Google is coming from. Affiliates rarely have the desire to cast a thorough eye over the products they’re reviewing and I’ve yet to find a 1 star rating for any product that offers a commission.

So the pressure is on affiliates to develop something more than just a review site. If Google is no longer willing to let us access large crowds of users searching for Product X, we need to start offering a little more to our projects so that we can be considered more than just a bridge page in the grand scheme of things.

In my opinion, it’s never been more important to develop brands. The classic affiliate review site isn’t dead, but it’s dying. And if it isn’t dying, it’s been tapered off and marked for demolition. Google is working to weed out the wafer thin affiliate content. I don’t think there can be any argument that we don’t deserve it.

The FTC is also cracking down on any site that it deems to be operating without full disclosure on the nature of it’s affiliate relationships. If you’re reviewing a product and receiving commission for it, you need to be stating so. There are ways to get around this but the direction we’re heading in is unavoidable. Affiliates are being backed in to a corner and told in no uncertain terms that it’s time to stop selling false hope and start adding real value to the sites that we build.

Establishing your own brand, as an affiliate, is absolutely crucial. If you can gain your own crowd of trusted readers, you have an asset that makes you desirable to other companies. I’ll tip my hat to any marketer who manages to build a brand with the outdated review site of yesteryear. It’s just not up to the current workings of the web.

Dare I say it, we need to stop thinking about ranking for search terms in Google. It’s time to start focusing efforts on how we can produce outstanding content that lights a social fire, spreads virally and draws traffic through it’s relevance and authenticity alone. That’s a tough challenge for any affiliate marketer. But it’s a challenge you’re going to have to embrace if you want to survive.

Recommended Reading

• If you’re already a fairly experienced affiliate, check out Finch Sells, a UK-based affiliate marketing blog offering some offbeat tips for growing your business
• Also check out Awakening The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. This is a real eye-opening read for anybody who feels they could achieve more than their current career allows them.

The book preaches that by effectively managing your own time, and outsourcing trivial tasks, you can rapidly improve your efficiency and achieve so much more with your work. I couldn’t agree more with Tim, although I somehow doubt the likelihood that vast numbers of readers will have since chopped their work down to four hours per week. It’s not an immediate tangible goal. But the logic behind it is flawless. You should value your time and work smarter, not harder.

When we talk about the “making money online” niche, we have to consider so many different methods and techniques. I could speak with a hundred online entrepreneurs and I’m willing to bet I’d hear a hundred different tales of rags to riches.

To become successful with an online business, your opportunities are endless. But to have any luck, you simply have to stay disciplined.

How many times do you find yourself brainstorming new ideas for affiliate campaigns? Or jotting down ideas for lucrative arbritage schemes? Be honest with yourself. Do you spend more time planning than you do getting work done? Are you working within the confines of the theory behind success? Or are you out there chasing after it?

Do you spend your days commenting on other people’s success on The Warrior Forum? Or are you writing your own success story in the shadows?

Many budding entrepreneurs never make it. And that’s because they spend too much time thinking and planning. Yet they never turn those plans or notepad diagrams in to completed works of art. Sometimes it’s not the greatest ideas that make you a millionaire, but the ideas that have been realized to their true potential.

Ask yourself – “How many of the tasks I’ve set myself today are going to result in me making money?”

I’m not talking about phantom website projects that might eventually spin a few dollars of profit 3 years down the road. How much of your work today can accurately be measured in money that you have made, or money that you WILL make in the very short-term future?

If the answer is a shrug of the head and a quiet “Not much”, your efforts are focused in the wrong place! Hard work will never bring you the riches you desire if that hard work isn’t channeled towards a clear vision of a business. There’s a big difference between a business and a hobbyist “niche” website.

You have to learn to evaluate the monetary potential in every single task of your working day. If you find that you’re committing too much energy in to earning too little, then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate.

PeiProfit Recommendations

• If you haven’t read it from front to back already, snap up a copy of the brilliant 4-hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. One of the best books you’ll read all year.
• Also check out Awakening The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. This is a real eye-opening read for anybody who feels they could achieve more than their current career allows them.

While I appreciate the technology behind Headway, I’ve personally found it to be a little clunky in the past.

It’s a visual editor that lets you drag and drop items until you’re happy with the design and feel of your site. For beginners, the technology is priceless. Very few products offer such a license to customize your site without worrying about knowing the HTML or CSS to make it happen.

I enjoyed using the last version of Headway. But for ease of use, the latest release just blows it away.

Many of my gripes with the old Headway Theme Manager have been addressed. There are fewer bugs – if any – and it’s much easier to place your page elements quickly, efficiently and effectively.

The brand new “Quick Start Wizard” takes the chore out of launching your blog design. The interface is much nicer to navigate, less pages hang up on the reload, and a comprehensive support system has been integrated for anybody new to the software.

I’m slowly upgrading my existing portfolio of blogs to the new Headway Theme and I’m hoping it will save me a lot of time and energy in the future. Once again, I would reiterate that this is software geared towards the beginner end of the market. And by that, I don’t mean the elss capable. But simply the users who aren’t comfortable getting hands dirty with CSS or HTML in the usual WordPress editor.

Headway is quite an extensive framework and can take some getting used to if you’ve only ever customized your blog through the confines of the WordPress Admin. That said, it’s well worth the investment and offers greater flexibility once you’ve mastered it.

I would recommend you check out Naomi’s previous video review of what Headway can do. This should give you an understanding of whether the software is right for your needs.

Naomi’s Headway Theme Review

Ahh yes… The Headway Theme Coupon Codes

We managed to work out a special offer for our readers with the last Headway package. And we’ve got one again. You should be able to use the following code to grab up to 30% off your purchase. For a limited time only. How long? We don’t know! We weren’t told. Use it while it works and grab yourself a deal. Once these codes expire, there will be no further coupons released.

The code is: 3A92E0EDD9

Alternative codes: CD40B35533, E2B8D754F8 and woot

UPDATE: I’m hearing news that the coupon codes are no longer working. I have listed all available coupon codes so if they don’t work, I apologise! The software is still worth the money, coupon code or not.

Click here to check out the brand new Headway Theme 2.0

Enjoy!

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