Happy New Year and I hope you all have the success you are striving for!

Over the holiday period I appear to have partially erased my memory. This morning I tried to login to a site but couldn’t remember the password.

Checking my login folder proved fruitless as I hadn’t saved it either. A small inconvenience but still 10 minutes wasted time.

A quick look back.

2011 was an interesting year in my online endeavours. I joined John Thornhill’s One On One Coaching program, and whilst it is his most expensive course there are many benefits if you are prepared to use them.

You have access to all John’s products and some others he has procured from his Internet Marketing friends.

Basically, you have access to every type of course and money-making idea you would ever need. You just need to find the time to use them.

John preaches that to be a success online you must get into product creation. He has a number of coaching programs and some of the content is used in more than one of his courses as it is relevant to them all.

Producing your own product can seem like a daunting task and unless you are prepared to work you will not get anywhere. He doesn’t offer a total done for you service but he is always around to help.
Lets face it, if you are trying to make a living online you have to be prepared to work hard at it. Forget all those systems that promise you can retire within a week. They don’t work and the people behind them are making a fortune based on the fact that we are prepared to try it out ‘just incase it does works’.

OK, back to product creation, procrastination, fear and failure.

One of the courses that John runs is his Marketing Masterclass and it is a slightly cut down version of his Partnership To Success course that I am on but it is still a very good course if you are prepared to put in the work.

Unfortunately, not everyone is, and there are some members who just give up and some times they will be well into the course and ‘something will come up’ which stops them in their tracks. No doubt some have genuine problems but in my opinion some give up before they really try.

Mindset is a well versed subject which is very relevant if you want to succeed.

You simply have to bite the bullet. Procrastination and fear of failure are only a frame of mind and taking the first steps is often the hardest thing to do.

Creating your own product doesn’t have to be as difficult as you convince yourself it is. You don’t need to create something that nobody has done before and it doesn’t matter how many similar products are out there. Just getting your first product finished is the start of things to come.

You will undoubtably go through the full range of emotions and self-doubt will be your close companion for a lot of your journey. Even when you have created your first product you will wonder if it will sell at all, but you must carry on, put all your fears behind you and look to the future and not the past.

So, what does 2012 have in store for me?

Well, I finished my first product, http://www.30daytrafficflow.com which basically does what it says in its name. It is a system to help people get a flow of targeted traffic to their sites in 30 Days or less.

I spent hours putting the content together and at no stage in the proceedings was I happy that it would ever be finished. Indeed it probably won’t be as I intend to add to it whenever I think I can improve it.

It has been available on Clickbank since just before Christmas but we don’t intend to launch until mid January. It would be nice to get a few sales under its belt though as it would be good to keep the thoughts of self-doubt at bay.

I am in the process of creating my second product which is more of a membership site for traffic generation. It is fully functional at the moment but I need to work more on the sales page and the content. It is called Traffics Cool and I have done a simple page with a few affiliate links at http://www.traffics-cool.com, a free offer to join my membership at http://www.traffics-cool.com/free/ and a blog at http://www.traffics-cool.com/blog/.

I am trying to build a list and hopefully my two products will go a long way to doing that.

So, onwards and upwards and quitting is not an option.

What will 2012 bring for you? A full range of emotions, your own product, a few sales or many sales? If you do nothing, nothing will happen. Don’t sit around waiting for your lottery ticket to come up or the new fangled product that really works bringing you a fortune overnight.

Grasp the nettle and enjoy the journey. Make this year your year!

To Your Success

Dave Whitworth

GoAnimate.com: Merry Christmas To All by davetw

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

I thought I was focused on everything I needed to do to create my Traffic Generation product but I think I must have been dreaming.

I have managed to sidetrack myself. I have allowed myself to be sidetracked by others and I have become sidetracked even more when I started to do the things I was sidetracked with in the first place.

I thought I was doing really well and virtually finished my product so it wouldn’t do any harm to start on my next venture. Unfortunately things are never as easy as they seem and my little bit of side tracking became more than that and I went on a journey from A to Z but not in alphabetical order.

I could be doing a little research, but before I know it I am downloading some graphics software that promises to make my banner making life easier.

Graphics and me, or me and graphics, graphics and I? Well, whichever it is, we don’t go together very well and when it took me 4 hours to create a really crap eBook cover I decided not to bother again.

Just to prove what a perpetual wanderer I am, I just found another website that promised me I would be able to produce professional standard graphics for my sites only to find If I was that way inclined I wouldn’t need the site in the first place and I could have done them with Gimp.

So, no more getting sidetracked. I am going to concentrate on my two products with an open mind for my third…. See what I mean, I just can’t help myself.

I think what the real problem is, I have gone as far as I can with 30 Day Traffic Flow and need help to get it to the finished product. It has been a great journey, but not one I could have done on my own.

I thought I knew plenty about most of the stuff required to make a website and a sales page and a squeeze page and so on. But in reality, if I hadn’t joined John’s coaching I would probably just be still trying to find out how to do it all and probably never actually doing it.

It is great having someone to lead the way but I wish I had recorded everything that happened so I could use it to remind me when I make the same mistakes again.

Ok, we all know it is far from easy peasy, but lots of people do it so why not us?

Did you know that there are over 100,000 domains registered each day and around 133 million registered in total?

That is a heck of a lot of domains but not all of them will become websites. Still, it is still a lot of competition but if we do our research we can become part of the money-making fraternity.

Lets try to go briefly into the whole process of how to make money online:

• We have done keyword research and found that people are looking to buy product X.
• We build a site or a blog and create content around the keywords people are searching with.
• We have a product or we are affiliates for a product that we know people want.
• We know that the search engines are only interested in giving their customers the best content and whilst we can fool the search engines some of the time we certainly cannot fool them all of the time.
• A light bulb comes on as we think about what the search engines want.
• We will give the search engines what they want, they will give their customers what they want and their customers will give us what we want!
• Easy Peasy!

So there we have the simple process of making money online.

Now, there are many eBooks and courses which you can waste your money on trying to learn exactly how to do this process. There are also countless thousands of free eBooks that you can download which will show you most of the methods required.

I will save you a fortune if you take this next piece of advice. Don’t waste your money on all the new push button products that promise the earth but really should be buried in it.

Find yourself a mentor, someone who has done it all before, someone who is successful. Copy what they do and you will not only save money you will start to make money also.

My mentor is John Thornhill and he has a number of coaching programs to suit all pockets.

Just look around this site and you will find links to some of John’s stuff. Check it out, you have nothing to lose!

Regards
Dave

I don’t mean stretching the truth. I mean stretching my site to its limits.

I should have tried to adjust it but didn’t think it would be easy so I didn’t bother.

And that brings me nicely into my next post, well that would be this post.

I didn’t think it would be easy so I didn’t bother seems to sum me up in many ways. I suppose others also.

Take trying to generate free traffic to our sites. We know that we need traffic. We know we don’t want to empty our bank account in the process, but we also know that to get free targeted traffic it will take some work.

Work is a four letter word that we try to ignore but unfortunately sometimes we have to bite the bullet and do some.

Getting free targeted traffic takes some work and it also takes some planning and some target setting.

If you are still looking for that push button piece of kit which will bring the whole world and his dog to your site, you won’t find it here and I doubt you will find it anywhere anytime!

What you will find here is help to find that free targeted traffic you need for your site.

One great way to get visitors to your site is by commenting on other people’s blogs. Go ahead try it.

Even if it is only me who checks your site out it is one more visitor than you had before you left a comment.

As this is a relatively new site it is doubtful you will get thousands of visitors to your site but the principals are the same.

If you are going to start a campaign of blog posting you first need to find blogs that relate to yours. Try to find popular blogs with high page rank.

Post good relevant comments and they will be accepted by the blog owner. If you just say things like ‘good post’ or ‘it is just what I have been looking for’ it will just get deleted, so try to give something and in return you will get something back.

Regards

Dave

Aweber are in my opinion the forerunners of email services.

With more and more youngsters communicating by Social Media and messaging services, they quite rightly wondered what would become of email in future generations.

Would email be used to communicate or would it fade slowly away.

Here is the results of a recent survey…..

Data and infographic by AWeber Email Marketing

Personally, I think that until big online companies stop asking for your email address, the email will be with us for a long time.

Regards

Dave

Clickbank Start To Get Tough!

And not before time in my humble opinion.

If you have purchased anything from the Clickbank Marketplace recently, you may well be happy with your purchase. On the other hand you might be reaching for the refund button 15 minutes after you realized what you actually got.

Why they spend fortunes on producing great sales pages only to sell you a sub-standard product is beyond me.

It has been noted that some products have had 80% refund rates. Obviously Clickbank would not be happy with this for a number of reasons and hopefully the main reason they have done something about it is because it is harmful to their reputation as the number one site for digital products.

They are clamping down on all those fake testimonials you see on the sales pages and any sales pages or videos which give false claims of earnings.

Saying there are only 300 copies when they will sell as many as they can is also banned. False scarcity was something that you saw a lot of, hopefully not anymore.

Saying that something once sold for xx price when in reality it never did is a no no.

Upsells and downsells are now restricted to 3 and 2 respectively and they must be enhancements of the original product and not required to make them work.

I recently bought something which had 8 upsells and when I got to the product it was not possible to use part of it without further purchase. Suffice to say that was the quickest refund in my history.

To read more about the guidelines go to clickbank here….

In some circles the word ‘spam’ is attributed to the sketch by Monty Python. If you are not familiar with that particular sketch you can see it here……….

Spam as we know it in internet terms is about the unsolicited emails and blog comments we receive.

I have lost count of the amount of lottery winnings I could collect (who needs money?) or recently I have had a problem with my US taxes and some parcels from UPS have had some problems. Oh, and there are the many emails I get offering to enlarge specific parts of my anatomy.

These are just a nuisance and get deleted straight away. Some others you might get look as though they come from a legit source offering you the chance to purchase something. Did I subscribe to that? It could be from something I signed up for years ago offering to build a list for me or another one that I opted into to receive double opted in email addresses.

I meant to unsubscribe to those years ago and now is a good time to do it as I clear the way for total concentration for my job in hand.

Was you aware that if you click on the unsubscribe link in some of the spam emails you may well get unsubscribed from that list but you have just confirmed your email address is a live one and you will soon feel the wrath of other spammers as you have just been added to a premium cd which will be sold on to other spammers.

On to comment spamming and if you have a blog you will know what I mean.

The Akismet plugin does a great job of whittling out spam but I still find myself going through them just incase a legit comment sneaked through.

I have just installed SI CAPTCHA to this blog so any automated comments will not even get to my Akismet Plugin.

You don’t mind people getting a link to their site if they post relevant comments but things like ‘nice post’ or ‘I agree’ will not get you anywhere.

The same principle applies if you are using forums to get yourself a little traffic. If you just keep throwing in one liners and not giving anything to the community you will get banned.

The moral of this story is to do everything online and offline in an honest ethical manner and if you try to trick people you will get found out in the long run.

Regards Dave

Just got back from a family holiday on the Norfolk Broads, here is a picture of our home for the duration.

Alpha Vulcan

We had some great weather, with only one day of rain and a few cloudy days but also plenty of sunshine.

As is usual with my previous visits, something always happens which stays with you for the rest of your life.

Unlike holidays abroad which tend to be sun, sea and sangria, the Norfolk Broads have always given me lasting memories.

On this occasion, the one that I will be reminded of forever was on our first mornings journey.

It was our intention to go from the Southern Broads to the Northern Broads as soon as possible.

I had arranged to reserve a mooring at a pub called Berney Arms. This remote pub is on the edge of Breydon Water and is only accessible by river rail or by foot.

Breydon Water is a large expanse of water but has only a narrow channel which is regularly dredged to stop it from silting up.

Passing through it is fairly straight forward if you follow some guidelines. Passage times are dependant on draft of boat, tides and weather.

There are coloured posts to stay between and so you would think it would be easy.

Our passage time for this particular morning was 5.30am and after sampling one or two of the pubs real ales it was a bit of a struggle getting up. I heard a couple of passing boats which prompted me to get up and to my amazement the rest of the crew were awake.

I turned on the power and got the deck hands ready to cast off.

Looking out of the boat I noticed a very heavy mist was just starting to lift off the water and could only see about 300 yards ahead.

This is when my first mistake happened. Knowing all too well that it was hazardous to cross in limited visibility, I figured that others had just set off, so it should be ok.

We set off and I was steering with my daughter Lucy sat with me. The mother in law was making a drink and my wife and my mother chatting.

The first 500 yards were easy and I thought everything was going ok. Without warning I somehow lost sight of the marker posts to my left but thought it was because the mist had got thicker.

Thankfully, Lucy spotted that the posts we were looking for were over to our right past the posts which should have been on our left.

We had gone outside the designated channel and the boat suddenly slowed. I quickly put it in reverse going back the way we came. You could see the bottom of the river all churning up at the side of the boat.

If I had tried to turn or carried on forward we would have run aground.

Now, this is not a life threatening situation, but it would have been very embarrassing having to wait hours for high tide or for the tug boat to drag her off.

Anyway, that was our near miss and the rest of the holiday whilst being very memorable was relatively trouble-free.

Are you just starting out on an incredible journey trying to make money online.
Or have you already started your journey but are not sure which direction to take?

This post could save you thousands of dollars and hours and hours of your time.

Have you heard the old adage ‘do as I say and not as I do’?
Well, in this case it is ‘do as I say and not what I have done’.

Let me try to explain, first of all, the meaning behind this post’s title.
How To Make Money Online – It’s Not What You Know – It’s Who You Know!

I have downloaded thousands of free ebooks about how to make money online. I have read some of them but the rest remain on my hard drive which is about to be transferred to that place close to the sky – The Attic –

Do yourself a favour and don’t download anything you don’t intend to use. If you must download it and haven’t used it within a week, don’t hoard it, delete it.
I know it is not easy to do but this is how I can save you thousands of hours of wasted time.

Are you a sucker for the latest must have software or e-book?

Save your money unless you have had it recommended by a reputable source and it is something you need and will use.
Following this principle will save you thousands of dollars over the years and I know this is true because I used to be the perpetual journeyman, moving from one product to the next to the next and so it went.

If you don’t take my advice now, years will go by and all you will have to show for it is some fragmented knowledge about how to make money online, a hard drive full of stuff you will never use, the odd affiliate sale, and a bank balance which could have been a lot healthier.

Believe me when I tell you that when you get to this stage after many years, it is hard to defragment your life.

So, you have learnt quite a lot over the years, but if you analysis it, you probably learned hundreds of ways of doing the same thing.

This is where the ‘It’s Who You Know’ comes into play and let me tell you about an experience that set me back years.

I had been trying to make some money online and soon realised that with everything there was to learn and all the places I could get it from, sometimes at a price. I would need guiding through the minefield of Internet Marketing.

I got myself a mentor.

I feel as if I am on a psychiatrist’s couch here, because this is the first time I have ever told this story to anyone, not even my family.
I was paying around $47 a month to learn everything I needed to succeed online. I received weekly lessons on how to set up a web site and how to monetize it and so on.
The kind of stuff you can find anywhere for nothing nowadays.

I had a weekly Skype call with my mentor, but this turned out to be a proofreading session where I would go through next weeks content for him and correct any spelling mistakes and grammar.
He also admitted to not being very good with html and I seemed to be answering more of his questions than he was of mine.

After six months I was no further on than when I started and I felt conned and disillusioned with the whole Internet Marketing scene.

It was about the same time that I had been trying out a betting system for soccer matches.
Betfair was getting big with the concept of the gambler now being able to be the bookie.
I totally ignored the Internet Marketing scene and concentrated on sports betting.

I had some success, but it was a little hairy as you stood to lose a lot to gain a little on each bet.
I got wiped out on one tennis match betting ‘in play’ and decided there must be a better way to make some money online.
That was around 4 years ago and I decided to go back to Internet Marketing. I was convinced that there is a way to succeed but it is not easy on your own.

However, my experience with my previous mentor put me off paying for someone to show me what to do. I would plod on and work it out for myself.

I have had some success over the years that followed but not enough to retire yet.

I recently decided that if I carried on the way I was that in another 10 years I would probably be not much further on, so I would find a mentor.
Well, my mentor found me!

When I changed from a desktop PC to my Laptop I set up my email accounts using Webmail. I left behind around 100,000 unopened emails, some just in my inbox and others filtered out into their own folders because they were ‘important’.

Anyway, that is history. When I started to get my emails to my laptop I decided I would check them out as they arrived and unsubscribe to any I didn’t want.

I spent the next few weeks checking out my email as it arrived and one of them was from John Thornhill. I subscribed to John’s Newsletter many years earlier but he was one of many that got lost in my system.

I liked the way John didn’t try to ram stuff down your neck and checked out a couple more emails over the next few weeks.
I then received one about an old coaching program that John had previously sold for $497. He was now selling it for $19.99.
I decided to check it out and was surprised at how much you got for such a cheap price.

I was that impressed I decided it was time for a one on one mentor and that is where I am at today.

Rubbing shoulders with some of the most successful Internet Marketers in the business and learning the right way to go about things.
It is not an overnight thing, you have to be prepared to work and the program is for 12 months and it is a ‘high ticket’ product, but If you don’t spend thousands of dollars chasing your tail you could afford this easily.

I apologise for the length of this post and congratulate you if you are still here reading this. If you are, I would suggest you have what it takes to succeed and maybe just need a little guidance.

There is nothing wrong with asking for help and there are plenty reasons why you should.

One last little story, and I don’t believe in coincidences but, when I was looking for a mentor I came across a sales page for one of Omar Martin’s products ‘Higher Level Strategies Personal Mentorship’.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I received John’s email and John is based in the UK and Omar in the US, I may very well have gone with Omar’s coaching.

Now to stretch the realms of coincidences (if you believe in them) a little further, it turns out that Omar was one of John’s first students when he started his Masterclass Coaching Program. This is not the $19.99 one but is the next level of coaching.

And, to even top all of the above as part of my one on one coaching we have a weekly live webinar with John and guess who was also on this weeks? Yep, Omar.

We get to find out where they are up to, what they are currently working on and exclusive behind the scenes insights to how their businesses work. Awesome!

Check out John’s $19.99 Coaching Program here….
Check out John’s Masterclass Coaching Program here…..
Omar’s coaching program that I was checking out is ‘Higher Level Strategies Personal Mentorship’ but during the webinar he told us about his ‘Unfair Advantage ‘Live’ Weekly Coaching’ I have checked this out and it is also awesome with everything you need under one roof.

Regards Dave

P.S. Remember that when the student is ready, the master he shall appear.

All I ask from you when you are successful, is to come back here and tell us about your journey.