This is a special interview I did with Peter, the creator of a product to be released tomorrow.

What Peter is teaching is EXACTLY what I do on my websites in terms of the layout and design. It’s exactly what I have my GUYS do for me to make me money each month.

Where it’s different is in his promotion strategy, which is BETTER than what I’ve been doing.

Just listen to this:

Download the mp3
My post about making sales

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In a nutshell, David asks “how many sites do your GUYS maintain, and how much are the sties making in order for them to pay for themselves?”

I thought the question and answer were informative enough to make a post out of it.
Here’s my response:

@David – this is a great observation.

I’ll tell you a little about my business so you can understand a bit about how I work.

I don’t know how many sites I currently have…maybe 50, maybe 100?
How many have I built over the past years? …hundreds maybe?

Here’s a quick breakdown of sites my team has 100% built for me:

• I have a site that makes me over $15,000/month that my team built.
• I have some sites that make between $1000-$5000/month that my team built.
• I have lots of sites that make between $100-$1000/month that my team built.
• I have even more sites that make me between $1-$100/month that my team built.
• Most of my sites that my team built don’t make me anything! $0.

Some of those $0 sites are new…at some point they’ll make me money.
Lots of them I’ve given up on because the model/market/niche/site failed. I lost money on those.

For me, I just know that the more sites I build, the better chance I have of finding winners.
I also know that some of them that I build are going to do really well. Every once in a while I’ll get an awesome one.

My team (of 3-5…depending on how you look at it) builds and maintains all these sites.
Once a site is built and established, it requires less and less maintenance.

The thing about all this is that I DIDN’T DO THE WORK!
If it were up to me to do the work, none of these sites would have been built or marketed.
Because other people are doing it, it got done, and I make money because of it.

To me, that’s the key to all this. For years I tried to do all the work myself. With that I think I had built 10 sites in a few years and only 1 of them was really successful.
With other people doing the work I’ve built hundreds of sites and lots of them are successful.

Frankly, I’m capable of doing better work than my GUYS do.
However, I DON’T DO THE WORK even though I’m capable. I don’t know…it’s just some problem I have. If it’s up to me to do the work, it’s just not going to get done.

For this reason I created my outsourcing system. So others can benefit from what I’ve done.

John

• “What kind of person do I hire first?”
• “How long does it take them to get up to speed?”
• “What do I have them do for me?”

The other day I got an email from Lisa Schwartz that hinted towards her having a great experience that answers these questions.

I got on skype with her and recorded the call.

Download The MP3

Here are the answers to the questions above:

• “How long does it take someone to get up to speed?”
  • She has been at this for 6 weeks and has had 6 sites built in that time. She expects to be building 2-3 sites per day within the next few weeks
• “What kind of person do I hire first?”
  • She hired a “blog builder.” Someone to get everything up and running.
  • Then she hired an “SEO” person. Someone to promote the blogs (your blog builder could do this themselves)
  • Then she got a “VA.” Someone to do everything else that’s required.
• “What do I have them do for me?”
  • Build Blogs
  • Research
  • SEO
  • Video marketing
  • Article marketing
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Social Networking
  • Phone calls
  • Reporting/Tracking
  • …

Then, notice some other general business items she talks about:

• She understands her business model very well. Please think about this for yourself. If you don’t understand your business model VERY well, go back and learn more before continuing.
• She is working on just one thing. She’s doing it very well. She’s not chasing bright shiny objects (the latest and greatest launch)
• She synthesized all the info from all the things she’s learned and is using it all in this business. Remember, you’re running a BUSINESS here. There will be set-backs. Work through them!

She’s using Joel Petersons Mini Site Formula which I reviewed here.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as simple as this.

Inside ReplaceMyself.com I give people a “Business-in-a-box” that lets the guy they hire get started doing simple affiliate marketing without any intervention on the customer’s part.

All you have to do is say “Go do this” (like Dion did) and it gets done. Simple.

A friend of mine has made it even easier.

See, my business-in-a-box is based around the game of numbers. If you put up enough campaigns, you’re GOING to find some that are profitable. If you’re not the one putting up the campaigns, it actually gets done, and you make money.

What Letian is doing is he took the numbers out of the process. I interviewed him about it. Listen to this:

After Letian agreed to do this interview with me, I got him to give some of what he’s doing away for free.

Click here to get Letians free profitable campaigns
(I think he has only given this away to his personal list before)

With that he’s also giving away access to Top Secret Automatic Money program, plus video editing training (here’s how I did it, I wish I had his training).

This is one of the easiest things I’ve ever seen for giving something to your Filippino to have him make you money with very (VERY) little effort on your part.

I think it’s the best model, that fits well with outsourcing, is hard to fail at, is scalable, easy to understand, exceptionally well explained, and answers people’s questions better than anything I’ve ever seen online! (whew…yes, that was a long, run-on sentence).

In watching some of their material in their membership site (using myspeed to watch the videos at 3x), one video in particular really stood out to me. It was like:
“Hey, this is it! This is the formula. This is what works! and it’s explained SOOOO well.”

So I asked them to let me use the video and publish it outside their site.
The demonstration Adam gives on the whiteboard is really good, yet sooooo many people miss it.

For your enjoyment:

If you follow this formula, it’s really hard to not succeed at making money online.

Here’s the interview I did with Adam about his business

For more info, watch their 5-part mini course.

People show me their products all the time.

Cool…ok…”it doesn’t solve my customers problems.” (that’s my thought most of the time).

Adam’s is totally different. It solves people’s problem of “what actually works online, and how do I do it correctly.”

It answers people’s question (that I get asked almost every day):
What works online to make money, and what niche should I do it in?

In this video Adam shares his entire business model of how he writes, publishes, and sells ebooks to niche markets.

THIS is what works!

In it he reveals some things I’ve never heard people teach so well in my life:

1. How to pick a niche (this is going to blow you away)
2. How to get a 100 page ebook written for $100 (better quality book than he had been paying $1500 for)
3. How to spend 30 minutes to have a sales page that converts
4. How to get tons of free traffic
5. How he outsources 98% of this

It’s a half hour video interview that you won’t regret watching!

JonasBlog.com/NPC

Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!

Tell me how you’re implementing this, or how to improve on it, or how it helped you in the comments!

Download just the audio

Having trouble viewing the video?

Download video part 1
Download video part 2
Download video part 3

But, it’s something people miss over and over again.

The first place you should look for traffic to your website is Google Adwords.

Use adwords because:

1. you get immediate traffic
2. you get immediate feedback
3. you can track what is working and what isn’t
4. you figure out which keywords convert and which ones don’t
5. It’s the furthest thing from shooting in the dark as you can get online

Steps In This Series:

1. Make Sales
2. Use Adwords
3. Article Marketing and JV’s
4. Implement Everything!

Please comment and Digg if if you like it ==>

This is only for people trying to run an online business
If you’re not running an online business, you can skip my next 4 posts.

As far as I’m concerned, there are only 4 steps for making an online business succeed. And, in reality, you can succeed with just steps 1 and 2.
The problem is, most people skip 1 and 2 and only do 3 and 4.

(Yes, I did just call out Henry and Dustin.)

After I made this video, I realized that a lot of people out there are trying to make money as an affiliate.

So, here’s a video for you:

Yes, I just made fun of a whole bunch of you.
Yes, I just trashed on every “pre-made, template, 99% of the work is done for you” website ever created.
Why?
They don’t work!

This is step 1. If you skip it, you can’t succeed.
You HAVE to understand why you’re selling, what you’re selling, to whom you’re selling, and why they’re buying it, or you can’t make money online.
This is the only part of this that can’t be outsourced!

Steps in this series

1. Make Sales
2. Use Adwords
3. Article Marketing and JV’s
4. Implement Everything!

Please comment.
Digg it if you like it ==>

“You have to have a list”
“You have to do SEO”
“You have to do Adwords like this!”
“You have to be a great copywriter”
“You have to have an info product and give it away and then sell something else and create a newsletter to create continuity and have an audio and ship them a cd and then offer them a big box package with the goal of offering them a seminar so that they can then buy personal coaching…”

The number of things you can (and should) do goes on forever. Just not right now.

Recently I’ve seen that one of the reasons people fail is because they’re trying to do all of these things, and they’re trying to do them all their selves, and they’re doing a very poor job at every single one of them.

I had someone ask me recently, “how do I build a list as an affiliate?”

When I looked at what he was doing, he was running dozens of different affiliate campaigns that were making him money. Because he had heard “You have to have a list”, “You have to build a list”, “The money’s in the list”, he thought “I must need to build a list.” The reality is, even if he had a list what was he going to do with it? There’s no way he could service 10 lists right now. Having those 10 or 20 lists wasn’t going to make him any more money than what he was currently doing. In fact, he would probably lose money on gathering those people’s email addresses.

You don’t have to build a list.
You don’t have to have a squeeze page.
You don’t have to have an upsell.
You don’t have to do everything you hear of.

There’s so much info out there and it’s always presented as “You have to do this or else you’re doomed to failure.”

You’re really not.

Yes, I think you should have a list.
Yes, I think you should do SEO.
Yes, I think you should do lots with Adwords.
Yes, yes, yes.

But, not all at the same time.

Everything has it’s place and time.

Lots of stuff should be given to other people to do for you (like blogging, myspace, twitter, articles, seo, adwords, finding affiliate programs, social networking, social bookmarking, …, …).

Other than that, concentrate on your main business right now. Make it more profitable. Implement one thing you know of. Or, better yet, go back and do a great job of implementing the last thing you did a half-ass job of implementing.
Get deeper into that niche that is making you a little money, instead of heading off into another niche where the grass looks greener. It’s not.

Just because you hear some “guru” say that you have to do something, doesn’t mean he’s right. It doesn’t mean it applies to every single business out there. It doesn’t mean you should jump and do it right now.

Keep it simple. You don’t need to do everything online. You just need to do one thing very well (gee…you’ve heard that before haven’t you?). When you get great at that one thing, move on to the next thing.

(The audio is different than what I wrote below)

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’ve probably already seen or heard about the change that’s coming on April 1, 2008:

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.

I’ve had a few people ask me about how to deal with this so here are a few thoughts:

1. For People Doing Direct Linking
I have 3 solutions for how to deal with this for people who are direct linking to affiliate programs.
First, get better at adwords than your competitors and out rank them. By out rank them, I mean write a better ad that gets a better CTR and hence a higher ranking ad in google’s results. If you do this, you can use the merchants display url with your affiliate link and your ad will be shown above all other affiliates.

If the merchant is advertising for themselves on your keyword…I don’t really have a solution for you. Very often if you outrank the merchant they’ll get really mad at you for being better than they are at selling their product and they’ll kick you out of their affiliate program.

However, if you’re just competing with other affiliates, writing a better ad will usually do the trick to get your ad shown.

One thing you need to realize in this is that while google doesn’t dislike affiliate marketing, it doesn’t help their core business. Affiliates usually fill an inefficiency in a marketplace. Google doesn’t like inefficiencies and if they can take care of them without having an affiliate in the mix, they’ll be more than happy to do so.

As a direct linking affiliate, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not that it can’t be fought, but over the years google has shown a consistent pattern of making it more and more difficult to do direct linking as an affiliate.

Knowing this, you can either make the choice to continue doing it, fighting the uphill battle, or you can chose to evolve and do something that google isn’t fighting against.

At this point, it’s like the days when adsense died. Google had made it clear that they didn’t like sites that were made for adsense (MFA sites). At one point they made a change where it became very difficult to continue with the page generator/adsense business model. Smart people changed their model. Others continued doing it because it was the easiest path, and today they’re really struggling (at least…I don’t know anyone who is still succeeding with that model. If you do, I want to know them).

Second, set up your own domain. You have a few options in doing this. You can set up a simple iframe landing page where your domain just has a page with an iframe on it. The src= part of the iframe is your affiliate link. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know how google is going to deal with it with their new rules. But, doing this, you can have your display URL be the same as the actual page where the person ends up (because they’re on your website).

Another option for your own landing page is to try and add value to the transaction you’re trying to create. As an affiliate, you’re trying to get person A (buyer) to buy product B. If all you’re doing is providing a link to product B, you’re not adding very much value to that transaction.

However, if you can give person A a reason to buy product B (You give this reason on your website), now you’re adding value to the transaction and now you’re starting to build a business for yourself.

In doing this, you leave the realm of people google is fighting against and join the side of people google likes…information providers.

Google knows that the first reason someone goes online is to find information. It’s always super simple to find someone who will sell you something, google knows that. They also know that it’s much more difficult to find someone who will give you good information without selling you something (or even someone who will give you good information before selling you something).

They also know that the first 2 steps in the buying process (browers and then shoppers) are looking for information. If you can be a voice that someone trusts in those first 2 steps, they’re very likely to trust you when they’re ready to whip out their credit card.

So how do you give a person a reason to buy?
Here are a few ideas:

• Write reviews that tell the person which product is the best
• Solve a problem the person has and give them the solution if they buy through your affiliate link
• Give them a free something (report, mp3, video…) that partly solves their problem, and then tell them to buy product B to completely solve their problem
• Write about your personal experience with product B and how it solved your problem and how it will solve their problem too

There are a ton of ways to add value to the transaction. I think most affiliates who are doing direct linking would be surprised to see their conversion rates go up after creating a good landing page.

Third, try cloaking.
You can set up a landing page that just has content on it that’s related to your keywords so that google will give you a high quality score, and then cloak that page (either by a redirect or a straight cloak…there’s software that will do this for you) to go to your affiliate link. This will allow you to pass that visitor on to the final landing page (not your own url) but will have google think that the person actually is landing on your url (so your destination URL is your domain, and google thinks the person is going to end up on your domain (so they’re ok with it for their new rules), but the person actually ends up on the final landing page through your affiliate url).

Just be warned. This can be tricky, it is considered black hat, Google doesn’t like it, and it can get you in trouble.

Lots of people do it.

That’s all I’m going to say about it.

2. For people using adwords for testing
Brian Todd wrote a good piece on how to split test url’s using Adwords even with google’s new rules.

Read it.

3. Go use Yahoo/MSN
Obviously this isn’t a way to deal with Google’s new rules, but I think that most affiliate just blatantly ignore Yahoo/MSN ppc.

Mistake.

While there isn’t as much traffic from either of those as there is from google, and both of their systems are more difficult to use, I consistently find that the traffic I get converts better. Less money spent + more conversions = higher ROI (Yes, I understand that it doesn’t always mean higher profits).

Conclusion
As far as I can tell, what they’ve said is that this will effect “NEW” ads that are created after April 1. It shouldn’t (not yet) affect things you’ve done in the past. But, if google is moving this direction, you better believe that at some point they’ll make this rule retroactive.

This is a good point for affiliate marketers using adwords to make a decision about what they’re going to do in the future with their businesses. As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s time to evolve.

Let me know your thoughts.