<b>Your Time Has Value....or "The Smartest Thing I Ever Did" </b> A few years ago I was starting to suffer from a very bad case of burnout. I should tell you that burnout is hard to recover from and should be avoided at all costs! I was making good money, about a quarter million $$ per year, but I was working nearly 100 hours a week to do it. I had no life, I was bitchy and I was starting to hate my work. It was not good. You can probably go look at the quality of the work I did around the time I was partnered up with Themarketvushow and see the major decline in the quality of my providings. Anyway, I finally did recover from that and it was because of a very powerful realization, simply that my time had an actual value to it. I sat down one weekend and I broke all of my business down into two groups of two catagories. Stuff that makes me money and "busy work" and stuff I liked and stuff I hated. I realized that my "productive time"..ie posting to my blogs, on message boards, product creation and development etc resulted in income of about $800 to $1000 per hour that I was focused on them. Then I looked at the busy work, like creating earnings calenders..You know company XYZ reports on monday etc, the Fed Report is on Tuesday etc, articles submission, link creation, customer service (which I really hate) and coding shit (which I hate more then anything and suck at too boot). So..I had a great solution to my problem. I promised myself that any activity that made me lesst then $200 per hour, I just wasnt gonna do it..period. I can hire someone in the Philippines for $3.50 an hour (and they live like a king on that) to figure out when earnings come out for this company and that and put it in a report. What the hell am I doing screwing around with a $3.50 an hour job? I can hire someone who doesnt even speak English in Cambodia for $1.25 an hour to build backlinks for me and submit articles to ezines. I can hire someone to write 500 to 800 word ezine articles for me at $5 to $10 each. I can hire someone in the United States, a good someone, for $25 an hour to do customer service. I can hire a programmer overseas for under $10 an hour, and one in the states for $30 to $50. You get the idea. This was hard to do. I was Mr Everything, and even though I was getting burned out and hating my life I also had this "I'm a hard worker..and I want everything done right!" complex going on..which I think most entreprenuers have....and I was afraid the people I hired would suck (a few of them did, you just fire them). The end result of this was spectacular. My non-trading workweek (I mean the time that I wasnt focused on my trading and money managment business) went down to about 15-20 hours per week and I actually started to make more money then I'd ever made in my life for awhile right up until the point that I got divorced and then got sick..those two threw me for a loop..but I think you get the point. This is something that is VERY important to think about as you move forward as an Digital Info Empire Builder (I love coming up with cheese ball names for shit, I can't help myself!) because your time is very valuable and you want to protect both your time and your sanity! Brandon PS. YEEEEEEEEEHAAAWWWWWW GATORS!!!!
I don't like adwords much (for reasons I'll cover) but here is a link for $250 in free adwords ads. Nothing beats free. http://www.google.com/ads/250/v.html
I was looking closer at domainspriced right and it looks like it is a division of godaddy. I'd stay away from godaddy as they have all kinds of rules that are not really rules, they just threaten to turn off your website unless you upgrade.
My last point on this, at least for now and I hope forever. Every single person following this is going to be signing up for clickbank and selling products. If I was trying to make a profit when I sent people to clickbank I simply would have cloaked my affiliate but basically sent them here http://AFFILIATE.reseller.hop.clickbank.net , but where it says AFFILIATE it would have my affiliate ID in it, instead of sending them straight to www.clickbank.com. Clickbank pays referall's very well, about 5% of all sales from the affiliate you refer, plus when it comes time for them to create their own product's I'd make an addition $15 each time they did that. I'm some marketer huh?
I have a specific question I have asked clickbank and am waiting for a reply. Once I have it I will make the second video.
I'm still getting excellent feedback, please keep it coming. Asking on the board is the most helpful for everyone, but PM's are fine too. The next video will be released this weekend.
A friend of mine from HS and my sister have both stumbled upon a good niche (each has a diffrent one) in CB and so now both of them are at the point that the next step is to create their own product...which really means a business. Let me tell you, for the first three years I was "in business"I did not have a business...I sold a product and because my product was a lot better then most and a rising tide lifts all boats I was given a break, and the opportunity to fix my mistakes and move on. Running your business is very much like trading (Imagine that since those who treat trading as a business by and large are the successful ones!). For me the diary approach I used to improve my trading worked even better with my business. I always start out with a mind-mapping process. I don't know how in the hell I ever lived without them. There are a lot of premuim mindmapping software applications that cost anywhere from say $25 up to $750 or so. I just use www.bubbl.us because its 100% free and it does the job. You can also save your maps and share them with friends. I'm in a mastermind group with other online business orders and so it's nice for us all just to be able to look at each others maps when a gliche comes up. It saves you from having to send a ton of stuff to a ton of people. Most important though, at least for me...is that mindmapping takes advantage of the way your brain actually works. It's a wonderful creative process and very effective. The first mindmap I have up is of a quick outline for a business. Note that this is just the skeleton, and each item in the mindmap also has its own mindmap, some very extensive. The next one I will share will be of the traffic funnel. I'm going to just use a hypothetical trading site because that will be a business each of you can understand since I'd dare say 90% of you have experience buying some trading related stuff @ least once. I'm going to share two maps with you guys today, and put the videos up to explain each of them later tonite or tomorrow. Brandon PS....Note to traderzones....if I was just trying to "harvest emails on the cheap" from ET I'd make people go to an autoresponder in order to do it...or at the very least force you to sign up for bubbl and friend me. Alas...I'm terrible at my salesman ship and so I'm just putting the image up here.
Lets look at this Front End Offer (FEO) quickly because it's very important. The first thing to note is that your not creating a FEO to make a profit. In fact it's probably a loss leader who's only purpose in the world is that you can build up an email list of what we call "Hot Buyers", that is simply people who are willing to pull out their credit card and buy a product from your world famous website www.buymyshit.com. Now, let's just pretend you have decided to launch a trading site. Honestly your not really in it for the profit, pissing off Trader Zone's is plenty reward, but you certainly wont turn one down either. Now the key is having multiple SMALL FEO's. Little 40 to 90 page e-books (that if they where "Real books" would probably be 15 to 20 pages long in reality). Each small product should have it's own unique sales page (for example: www.prettypleasebuyshit.com) and another, seperate squeeze page (for example:www.gimmieyourdamnemail.com). The point of a squeeze page is to make a small offer, maybe a 3 to 5 page sample of your 80 page e-book, that will, along with the compelling sales copy on your sales page, help you sell a lot of BIG products from your backend site www.buymyshit.com. (someone actually owns that...the jerk..I'd love to have it..and I'd actually use it and not be a dillhole and just park it on godaddy for the last 3 1/2 damn years....anyway I moved slightly off topic..but I'm pretty sure I have ADD..so your just gonna have to work with me...you get what ya pay for they say ) Anyway like I said you want to create several small prodcuts that you can sell for $7 to $49. You just want to get them in your system, that's it. The backend will take care of itself later. In your hypothetical online trading education bizniz (dedicated to TraderZones) you might have let's say 3 small products you sell via CB and also your own PPC efforts. You pay out a nice 75% commission so that affiliates wont feel like they are being scammed by working their asses off to do your job for you. (Btw, if your paying out 75%ish on say a $47 product and then also paying out say 25% of your continuity income (but none of the BMFO (aka the Big Mothher Fu<b>N</b>king Offer) ) you will have some of the most successful sales people in the world working for you. I know of a forex product that sold over 7000 FEO's in just 4 days on clickbank. The owner did not generate a single sale of his own...it was all affiliates (btw, attracting top affiliates is a seperate business in and of itself...and it's big business). The FEO was a $79 video course that was also transcribed into text, and a newsletter that was $49 per month. They kept over 80% of the newsletter buyers for an average of 4 1/2 months. He paid out $60 for each course sold, and $25 per month for each newsletter subscriber. So, the CB affiliate was getting $59 straight out of the gate, plus an average of $45 over a few months for the Newsletter. Think the guy had a hard time attracted the sharpest affiliates on CB.....HELL NO. His backend included $49 webinars, $250 webinars, $349 courses, $2000 live seminars and $10,000 coaching. He also had a relationship with a forex broker where he was paid (I think) $60 for each person who opened an account under his offer, as well as getting paid betwen 50 cents and $3.25 for every single trade they ever made with his partner brokers. Not only that, but once they stopped buying stuff from him he starting to promote other people's products to them as an affiliate. You think he had a hard time with money? Again I was not "on the inside" of this offer, but I heard he made over $7million with it. Please not that is VERY untypical, but it shows what can be done. Let's say you have, as I said, three little e-books. A few pages long - each also comes with a few bonus offers...maybe an audio or a video. You create your little books, here are your offerings at the intro level. Fibonochi Cluster Funk. Point the Finger Trading The Top Secret Eyes Only Classified Chopstick Trading Method. Etc Etc Etc You get the idea. (Please note it's totally ok to come up with totally off the wall names like this too.) People buy from people they like, let your personality shine through in everything you do and fuck the ones who don't like you, they ain't buyers anyway. Also, let's say your doing a trading biz. Don't fall into the stupid ass trap of doing, saying and acting like everyone else. PEOPLE BUY FROM PEOPLE THEY LIKE and they buy from PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKE ME. If you want the suit and tie crowd, then dress up in a fancy suit and go head to head with Pristine, Tradingmarkets etc etc etc. Personally I have found that just being yourself works miricles. Any of you who have been to the expo's know that I don't put a clown suit on (I'm 32 years and still don't know how to do a necktie). There is nothing wrong with the suit and tie if that is who you really are, but being fake stands out and people can pick up on it very quickly. Any of you who have seen me wondering around the expo's know that I don't dress up. Hell I've spent have the day down there before wondering around in sweatpants a ratty old T-shit and a $25 pair of flip flops I probably got from Target. Toni had been hearing terrible tales of my dubachary all morning but we kept not seeing each otehr (and when I did see her down an isle I was gonna go down I hooked it and booked it...coz I didnt want to put real damn close on..and I knew she'd make me do it. She finally happened across me and threatened to cut my nuts off if I didnt at least go get some jeans on...but the point is it's just who I am, and I always got good sales out of the expo.
Don't get me wrong this sounds like good information to have, but I'm curious if there is going to be any more "how to" in this vid. For example in the last one, we were supposed to get a clickbank account and study the website. Ive done that and I'm interested in what to do next i.e. domains, website building software, hosting, advertising, what to put in the website ect. I may be off base and that stuff may be coming, just curious because it looks like mind mapping would come after you knew how to use all the stuff you would be mapping. (fyi this is all self serving because I have a domain, CB product I like, and hosting but I'm not sure what to do with it all or what to do next )