Robert Plank

For 2008 I told myself I was going to treat my internet business more like a business. As in, put work into it every single day (even if it was just a little bit) instead of putting a ton of work into it every now and then (which is a hobby).

It wasn't a "New Year's Resolution." Those never work. I just kept telling myself every day that I was going to have a business instead of a hobby, and after several weeks, it finally stuck.

Building A Business Requires Personal Coaching.

My friend Steven Schwartzman (I've mentioned him before) is my consultant. I have joint ventured with him on projects for the past five years and flew to New York last summer to meet him and attend a Warrior luncheon.

I make more money than him but that's only because I put out more products. As far as internet marketing experience goes, he and I are equals.

Earlier this year he got back into internet marketing after a break for several months -- he was studying for the LSATs to get into law school. I've made it a point to call him every weekday to ask him what he accomplished that day, then tell him what I accomplished that day.

I've noticed a gigantic boost in productivity by doing this. If I have nothing to report I feel like I'm letting him down, and I think it has the same effect on him. We motivate each other pretty darn well this way.

So far in 2008, I've earned $30,247.38 just from PayPal sales alone. That's not counting my day job, that's not counting my Clickbank income, that's not counting my stock trading income (usually that last one loses me money... I hardly do that nowadays anyway).

That's 1,762 sales in the past 100 days. That's right, doing some simple math in your head will tell you: 17 sales and $302.47 per day.

I've launched 24 products since New Year's.

I'm telling you, you need someone like this. I'm not talking about instant messaging, that is a huge time waster. You need someone to actually call on the phone (not Skype, you should be away from the computer) at the end of the day and talk for 5-10 minutes maximum about what you both accomplished.

It needs to be someone far away, it needs to be someone who does the same things you do (marketing on the internet). It can't be someone you know, it can't be a real friend or a family member.

At one point Steven was very sick, on the couch, watching Jeopardy, but we randomly got the idea to get him to watch some internet marketing videos so at least he can accomplish something until he gets better. In the meantime he assured me he was less than a day away from finishing his special report.

As soon as he was all-better, I'm bugged him on the phone every day until it was finished.

I have been feeling a little bit down from these product re-launches, because I put a lot of work into videos for existing products, but each launch only gets me a few hundred dollars because most of my list already owns these products and I deliver free upgrades. (For brand new products, I am used to bringing in a couple thousand dollars in the first few days.)

However, Steven assured me that, in his words, "A few hundred dollars a day is nothing to shake a stick at." It's consistent income and though I have seen several $100-$150 days lately.

My combined income, taking into account PayPal fees, Clickbank, and day job income, equals $34,000 year to date or $136,000 per year. Profit from the past 12 days equals $275 per day on average... or $100,000 annualized.

I must be doing something right. Considering I made $90,000-ish last year INCLUDING day job income, I could be in for quite a boost if I keep doing what I'm doing all year round.

Sometimes it only takes a simple comment like "it's nothing to shake a stick at" to put everything in perspective.

You don't need to spend $2,000 a month on professional personal coaching unless you are making so much money that you need to get rid of that $2,000 for a nice tax write-off... yeah, I wish I'd thought of that before getting my bigass five-figure tax bill this month.

(For the rest of 2008 I have to pay more money per QUARTER in taxes than I made in INCOME for an entire year just a few years ago!)

You just need someone to talk to on the phone. Someone who won't steal your ideas and won't lead you on the wrong path. They can be your equal, it doesn't matter... you just need someone to TALK to.

Could you comment below and tell me if you have a business mentor? Are they paid or free? How often do you communicate? Has it helped you?

Eugene Humbert, cool guy that he is, sent me an e-mail the other day letting me know that my Camtasia videos were producing weird "chipmunk" sounds.

This only happens with recent (version 9) versions of the Adobe Flash player. There's an easy solution:

Download the Camtasia Audio Bug Fix.

(The zip file is located at the bottom of that page.)

TechSmith solved this in Camtasia 5.02.... but I still use Camtasia 4 because I want my videos to look the same. By the way, this is ADOBE's fault and not Camtasia's.

The cool thing about this tool is, you can drag a whole FOLDER containing your SWF files, and the tool will find the SWF files even if they are buried deep inside other folders.

Last night, I de-chipmunked 14 video products. It didn't take that long at all because I used the above method.If you want the technical explanation of why this had to be done, Flash 9 can't properly play MP3 in SWF files that is encoded at a non-standard bitrate (it only understands bitrates that are a multiple of 11.025 Hz). The audio fixer quickly re-encodes the MP3 audio stream in your Flash file.

Why was all this extra work for me a good thing? It enabled me to finish adding affiliate programs to ALL my infoproducts.

All my products now have the affiliate subdomain trick built-in, as well as solo ads, an affiliate page for quick copy and pasting, and a call-to-action in the final chapter explaining to readers how to join the affiliate program for the product.

Heck, I've even JV Plus enabled all those products on this blog.

Before I encountered this chipmunk emergency, I was lazily working away, putting up maybe 3 or 4 affiliate pages per day. That was a task that I told myself I'd finish FIRST before anything else. So, I had to hurry up and finish all the solo ads before I could begin de-chipmunking.

I whipped out Microsoft Excel, copy and pasted all the product links on this blog's sidebar, then made a column for each thing I had to do for the site (write the solo ad, link to the affiliate page, setup an upsell, write the call-to-action, update the PDF file, de-chipmunk) and I just plowed through it. Because I had to.

So, don't forget to de-chipmunk your Camtasia videos if you haven't already.

Ben Prater is a guy I have never exchanged words with, unfortunately. He is an expert Internet marketer and has a way of reducing refunds that is pretty damn effective.

He is similar to me because he sells infoproducts in the "make your own software" niche, but he focuses more on the managerial, engineering part of that niche than I do. I am a do-it-yourselfer, he is an idea guy.

I'll never forget his best product… called,
"Software Secrets Exposed."

His sales letter sells you the story of what you can do with his book – his friend at Microsoft who worked in a high tech office and went to the Ferrari factory himself to make sure they painted his six-figure car the exact shade of purple he wanted.

I bought his book in 2003, before a lot of people had thought to direct sales into autoresponders or even save those leads at all. But Ben had thought of that.

You buy from him and you are automatically added to a follow-up series that sends you an automated, personalized message every few days.

When you first purchased, you got the book. After 7 days he sent a 30-page bonus report with a sample blueprint (just like the ones he talks about how to make in his original book).

He sent out more bonus reports after 14, 30, 45, and 60 day periods. They were either bonus chapters that wouldn't have fit anywhere in the book, or interviews with others – which are even easier to make than reports!

He didn't always simply give away the bonus materials… sometimes he asked for something in return.

For example, in one follow-up he offered a report on a related subject – but to get the report, you needed to provide a testimonial for his original "Software Secrets Exposed" e-book. Look at that sales page, it overflows with glowing testimonials!

If you can spread out the bonus items like he does, you will cut down on refunds because those people who refund immediately won't get the bonus items. If you can string them along for long enough, they might pass up the refund period!

When information is cut up into pieces it has a greater "thud" factor. Five twenty page reports all with their own sales letters have a higher value than a big 100 page book, even if contains the exact same information.

Spreading that information out over time gives it even MORE value, because your customer is more likely to read the information given to them in pieces than trying to sift through a huge pile of stuff the day they purchase.

I'll admit, I don't have a follow-up series for every product -- that would take time away from creating new products -- but every now and then I choose one product randomly and spend a minute or two writing a follow-up for it.

It doesn't have to be anything super valuable. You could:

• Remind them to download the product. (7-day followup)
• Ask what they thought of the product... which you can then use as a testimonial. (14-day followup)
• Offer an affiliate link and a solo ad they can copy and paste and send to their list. (30-day followup)
• Send a special discount link to another one of your related products. (45-day followup)
• Give them a surprise bonus report. (60-day followup)

That's how you reduce refunds. Advertise these items in the sales letter as a 7-day bonus, 14-day bonus, and so on.

On a forum I called this strategy:
"Turning a one-time product into a short-term membership site."

If you give a refund, immediately zap them from the update list and block their IP address from your site.

Recently, I paid through the nose for the rights to Software Secrets Exposed, setup a web site and an affiliate program, and added the bonus reports as autoresponder follow-ups just like Ben did.

Do you have any advice on how to reduce refunds? I don't mean legal issues like disputing transactions with PayPal, but ways to turn refunds into a good thing. (In this case adding more long-term value to a product.)

Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes. When you break into any niche you have to deal with a learning curve and the only way to learn the most important things in life is to make mistakes doing them.

A "professional newbie" is someone who never wises up, never figures out what they are good at, and doesn't belong in the niche they are in.

Are You a Professional Newbie?

There are people in the internet marketing niche, in the stock trading niche, and in the programming niche who lurk on message boards who have no idea what they are talking about, who post on blogs and have no idea what they are talking about.

In internet marketing, a professional newbie is someone who gets hyped up about AdSense, makes some sites for a few weeks and then gets bored. He gets hyped up by another guru about article marketing, writes some articles, but that doesn't make him any money so he moves onto the next thing.

The professional newbie tries Squidoo, blogging, Craigslist, eBay, Forex, AdWords, Clickbank, PLR, ELance, all only for a few months all with no results.

Oh look... a rock over there... oh wait... another rock over there.

Idiot professional newbies spend all their time "thrashing" from idea to idea without any focus. They don't accomplish anything besides losing money.

I read someone's blog in the stock trading niche who is a professional newbie and probably always will be. He follows the advice of random strangers who post comments on his blog and invests tens of thousands of dollars into some stock he has hardly even heard of, but was given "a tip" that it will make him a bunch of money.

Usually it blows up in his face.

Do you make this same mistake in your niche?

(That newbie whose blog I follow was ahead $200,000 at one point and is now almost $500,000 in debt.)

I see the same mistake in the software niche...

• Professional newbies switch from project to project.
• Professional newbies begin learning how to program, but they get bored and switch around to some other languages.
• Professional newbies want to make their products so perfect that they never get launched.
• Professional newbies want to make the most unique product there is... the only problem is... it's a stupid hair-brained idea and no one wants it.

I could go on forever. In every niche there you are going to deal with a LOT of noise. Moreso if the niche is in any way profitable, because that means others can prey on you -- they profit from your inexperience.

Don't be a professional newbie. Stick to one single project for a month, get off your butt and do some work.

If you have a niche you've always wanted to break into, spend 1-2 days writing a short report and create a sloppy sales page. Send some traffic to it and see if that path is worth pursuing.

Find out what niche you are good at and like.

The only way you are going to get anywhere is by working hard and working smart. You need both. If you work smart but not hard, you're a philosopher. If you work hard but not smart, you're a McDonald's employee.

DO SOMETHING! Stay focused. Don't even think about what your next product will be until the one you're working on now is launched and is selling.

One last thing. You need to know where you want to end up. Do you want to host seminars on your topic, do you want to produce an autoshipped monthly CD series? Do you want to do freelancing and then move up to high-end paid consulting? Or do you just want to sell off the rights to your products and bail out at some point?

It's like a map, you need to know your start point and your end point, and always be on a road that is getting you one step closer to that end point. Just one little step in the right direction.

You can't possibly be thinking about every single road you're going to take to that destination... but on the other hand you can't turn at every single street hoping it will lead you somewhere.

My friend Steven Schwartzman has this problem of taking action... so recently when he had a great idea for a niche to break into, I told him to make the small report, get it out there as sloppily and as quickly as possible, and see if it takes off.

I have been building my business just a little bit every day. I don't think I'm ever going to go full time in internet marketing but I want to build a bigass product funnel, get into physical products then maybe hit some seminars. I don't want to host seminars or speak at any.

The way for me to get there is with more video products, which is why I have been upgrading my e-books to video packages. So far this month I have released Simple JavaScript, Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 and Sales Page Tactics Volume 2 as video products.

I'm not going to try to break into any other niches at this time or pursue any weird projects right now like a membership site. I'm not going to go back to freelancing or put effort into any big joint ventures because that's not the direction I want to be headed towards... but that's just me personally.

What you want with your sites, your products and your niche is going to be way different than what I want.

Previously when I was talking about product creation I said the three ways to get infoproducts produced quickly are: don't make it look good, get excited about the topic, and practice.

This last Sunday (January 13th, 2008) I took my girlfriend to the Arco Arena stadium in Sacramento and attended an open-to-the-public Sacramento Kings basketball practice session.

(Don't I look oh-so-entertained?)

Everyone benefits from practice -- not just professional sports players. You benefit from practice every day of your life, from driving a car to brushing your teeth, to writing that e-book and recording video.

Practice means you get used to a routine and can focus your creativity on things that really matter.

You automate the hard part -- getting the ideas down on a page -- and can think about cool homework assignments to add to your books, better headlines, or fun ways to market the product to your list.

My older sister graduated from college a few years ago with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a minor in Journalism. She had to write a lot of papers. When she still lived with our parents, I would visit sometimes and see her working on a paper at the computer.

I noticed a few things about her at the computer:

1. Sometimes she would "warm up" for a paper by quickwriting. She would open up a blank Word document and start typing anything that came to mind just to get her into the rhythm for a few minutes, then start on the actual paper.
2. She kept a blog for fun. This was a private blog and obviously I never read it, but she would write pages and pages on that thing. Keeping a blog gets you used to writing.
3. She would wait until the last minute to write the paper. Usually the night before. She was a great student but was unable to work on a paper ahead of time... her brain wasn't trained for it. Her brain was trained to write under pressure with a time constraint. If you ask me that's the best way to write because it means you get the most work done in the least amount of time.

The books I write -- you can check any of them out on the sidebar of this blog -- are filled with dumb little jokes and puns. Most of the time I don't realize I've written them until they're already typed out. Because I'm not really thinking about what I'm typing, the final result is funnier, more story-like, and more interesting.

Even ignoring all the creative benefits of practice, when you make a routine, the process is easier and repeatable. This doesn't just apply to the creation of your product -- it applies to the promotion of it too.

Once my product is finished, I'm so used to writing the sales letter, writing the ad, posting the WSO, sending an e-mail out to my list... that I get a weird unsettling feeling if I don't do all that stuff right away.

I use my own PHP scripts to setup these sites quickly, for example, the scripts I offer at www.SalesPageTactics.com to do things like add a contact form, make my site more interactive, or setup a countdown timer to increase urgency.

When you get used to releasing smaller imperfect products over and over, you will cut down on your launch time with each release and have time for more "fun."

You'll get more excited and as a result have a more creative finished product with lots of flow.

Most importantly, you'll actually have something out there selling and making a little bit of money so you can move on to creating the next product and setting up a new income stream.

You can write down a lot of information at a time by getting excited about your topic. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself and think back to high school when you had to write some stupid 5 page essay and it was a struggle just to finish a paragraph. It's easy to give up and say you're "not a writer."

Ask yourself:

• Have you ever stayed up all night talking with a best friend or significant other?
• Have you kept a diary?
• Have you had a phone conversation that lasted longer than an hour?
• Have you described every little detail of some amazing movie you really liked?

I bet your answer is YES to all of these questions.

Why is it hard to write a term paper but easy to write a blog or post a zillion MySpace comments? Because a term paper is "work" and blogging is "fun." If you are in a niche that also happens to be your favorite hobby, writing gets a lot easier.

When I write a book, it takes me around two hours for a 5-10 page article. If it's a book on PHP then this includes the time to write the PHP script. If the book includes video, it takes me about 15 minutes to record the demonstration video for each chapter. I almost always get the videos recorded in one take... that's just because of practice. I'm a horrible public speaker and always will be, but I show that I'm excited about the topic and know what I'm talking about.

The same thing goes with writing. Have you seen my writing? I'm sloppy, I don't use fancy language and I try to put as few sentences possible into paragraphs.

I wouldn't have it any other way. If you learn to write the same way you speak, your writing will have a strong voice and you will be able to write everything quickly.

I try to write with 5% or less passive sentences.
I try to write at a 4th or 5th grade reading level.
I feel guilty writing sentences longer than 7 words.

The downside is that everything you write kind of smells like a first draft, but then again if you go back and edit your writing, you won't find anything particularly horrible, plus your writing will be packed with more ideas than the average writer.

Getting Excited = Less Work + Stronger Voice + Higher Idea-to-Paragraph Ratio.

• Instead of writing a big long paragraph explaining a series of ideas, make a bullet-point list of 3-4 items.
• Bold the important words but don't get carried away.
• Never say more than you have to.

Every now and then I like to read a little bit about copywriting. Copywriting doesn't interest me all that much, but I want to write in a way that keeps attention to the very end, and has a clear call-to-action at the end.

Headlines, stories, mysteries, cliffhangers, lists... these are much more interesting than topic sentence... concrete detail... concluding sentence... and then onto the next boring paragraph.

You need to be passionate about your topic. If you are excited about it then it will show and get your readers / customers / prospects excited about what you have to say.

I only have three tips for fast infoproduct creation:

1. Don't make it look good.
2. Get excited about your topic.
3. Practice.

John Williams made an excellent point to last Wednesday's blog post... which was about writing a small report and adding onto it later, releasing free upgrades to existing customers while increasing the price to new buyers as the size of the infoproduct went up. John said that I left out the part about doing the actual work, writing the e-book itself.

It has never taken me longer than 7 working days to create an infoproduct. By "infoproduct" I mean a 100 to 150 page e-book. A few years ago I created a package where I sold 3 e-books in one, that was a one month project.

One week to write each of the three e-books and I spent the final week writing a bunch of articles to promote the book so I could post one article to article sites every day or so.Your product doesn't have to look super great and fancy. It doesn't even have to look okay.

I heard a story once about a guy who ordered a DVD from a web site about how to play the guitar. The DVD was homemade, burned on a store-bought DVD-R with the title of the DVD handwritten with a sharpie marker on the disc.

The buyer popped the DVD into his DVD player. There was no menu, the video just started up and was a low quality camcorder video of a guy warming up on his guitar. The camerawoman (his wife) was fiddling with the focus and zoom and asking if it was recording.

Edit: Paydex pointed out that the story was from Russell Brunson about some weightlifting DVDs he ordered - thanks - it's been bugging me for years where that story came from.

The creator of the product didn't bother to edit any of this out. Heck, maybe he didn't even know how!

It didn't matter. The buyer was more than happy with the lessons the DVD had to offer. The presentation doesn't matter as much as you think. Ken Evoy heavily tested graphics versus no graphics on his sales letters... guess what... graphics hardly made any difference.

In fact, fancy graphics and Flash can hurt your sales letter conversion rates if they are too large and distract readers from your headline and sales copy. Just present your information in a simple and readable way.

Would you rather create a product that has a nice looking box with crappy content, or a crappy box with great content?

Please, do everyone a favor and get your product out there even if it isn't 100% polished.