And what in the world does that have to do with marketers? Well… I found a connection and Danny Frank put the idea into this short video. Check it out. Danny has a way with video that really makes my articles come to life!
And if you’re interested in learning more about joint venturing or any Internet marketing topic, check out what our new levels of the ListBuilding Club have to offer: http://easyseotricks.com/lbc2
Wow… If you’ve never been involved in a mega-Internet marketing launch, let me tell you, it’s exhausting! All of us at Overcome Everything have been putting in 150% for weeks, trying to make sure that everything is done on time when the big doors open.
And let me tell you, this is going to be incredible! Nobody will believe what Shawn & Tellman are about to give away. I don’t believe it myself, but the orders have already started coming in with only one one-hour teleseminar. People are amazed! And like 50% of them on that call signed up for the offer without thinking. Smart people.
I just finished preparing the contents of the offer. Getting it all created properly, setting up physical fulfillment, making sure that folks get this incredible product. Plus, we just set up a brand new ListBuilding Club. It’s much better organized. There’s a lot more opportunity for members to interact with us and each other, and it just rocks out loud! So, I’ve been busy getting all of the old stuff in there and making sure that everything works.
And to boot, we just got off a two-day 9-hour call, where we helped hundreds of people get their squeeze pages up and running. Go over to http://ListBuidling.com/news and check it out! There are hundreds of awesome comments and people just loved it. I was honored to have been part of that whole thing. Helping folks is really what we’re all about and I can’t tell you how rewarding that is.
But that was only me!
Our marketing and affiliate manager, Kyle Battis, has been gathering the affiliates and making sure that all the stuff that needs to be out there is done the right way.
Our copywriters, Josh Burns and Jodi Meehan, have been working ’round the clock to come up with some really rockin’ words to make it all sell.
And our tech team—Mike Purvis, Jim Morrison, and Victor Grosser–have been in there making sure that everything hooks up the right way and that no links to the myriad sales pages are broken.
The client support staff of Donna Farrar and Yolanda Martinez are ready to help anyone who needs it. And Lindsey Meehan is amazing at keeping all the money coming and going in the right directions.
And there’s Sarah Knudson. She’s our human resources specialist now, but well… Sarah just jumps in and helps wherever she’s needed. Danny Frank should get an award for being so cool in the face of Tellman. He just does whatever he needs to do, never complains and keeps Tellman’s day running smoothly. It just confounds me.
Lest I forget, there’s Jim Giller, our COO. He’s been buttoning stuff down and keeping us all on track, and Tellman? He’s been running. And running. And running. And our meetings are all conducted while we hear the slap, slap of the marathoner’s feet. He’s just a-frickin’ amazing. And Shawn Casey, too. He’s been organizing the whens and wherefores and we’re just all cranking like a well-oiled machine. Granted, a very tired well-oiled machine, but it’s really exciting!
So, you see… When a big launch like this begins, there are scads of folks involved, making it all work. It’s not a one-person or even a two-person show. It’s a team effort. I love being part of this team, and you will love being part of Overcome Everything. Come and join us at the ListBuilding Club. You’re totally going to love having us in your corner.
I’m constantly answering newbie questions at the ListBuilding Club, which is great fun. Helping people to learn how to create an online business is probably the most fun part of being in online business, for me. And as the Project Manager for the LBC, I do lots of training for our members. I can tell you… there are questions that come up over and over and over again.
The biggest one is, “Why do I need a blog, and why can’t I just use a free one?”
I get that. People don’t have a lot of money to spend, especially in this economy. And they want to go the “Free” route every time. Can’t say I blame them. When you’re making no money yet, online expenses can mount. Yet, the old saw “You have to spend money to make money,” applies online just as it does off. You cannot possibly have a successful online business without breaking a few dollars. You just can’t!
Host Your Own
One expense that is really important is that of self-hosting your blog. I know there are lots of free blog sites like WordPress.com, Blogger, ClearBlogs.com, and Tumblr to name only a few, but guess what? You can’t be commercial at any of those places. Blogger allows you to use AdSense, but that’s about it. The other sites will just shut you down without warning for marketing on your blog–even just posting an affiliate link, and you’ll lose every bit of work you put into it. No recourse, and no, they won’t give it back.
The cheapest and fastest way to have a powerful website is by setting up a WordPress blog. This comes from WordPress.ORG, and it’s open source (=free), search engine friendly software that is also so user friendly, it’s amazing. I’ve used WordPress blogs for years and I haven’t found an equal to them. Oh sure, people swear by Drupal, TypePad, and other platforms, but they’re just not as customizable and marketer friendly, at least in my experience.
So, you have a free WordPress blog. The next step is buying a great domain for it. At GoDaddy, the cost of a domain is currently under $10 a year. That’s like 3 cents per day for your own domain, 21 cents a week, or 90 cents a month. Cheap! So, decide what your blog will be about and get a domain that includes a keyword for that topic in it. Keep it short, make it a .com, and stay away from dashes or anything hard for people to type into the address bar or remember. If you want to get maximum SEO benefit, register the name for 2 years. This way, Google will look at you as a more serious blogger, and it will be easier for you to rank.
OK… we’re up to 90 cents a month… cool.
Now, you need a place to host the domain and your blog.
The best hosting company I have found online (and I’ve been doing this for almost 6 years, remember) is HostGator. Don’t get the minimum account because you’ll outgrow that much too fast. Cough up the dough for the “Baby” Gator account, which is only $7.95 a month if you pay for the entire year up front. That would be $95.40. Sweet! But if you can’t afford that, you can go the monthly route, and pay $9.95 a month for your account.
Check this out: For around $11 a month, you now have your own domain, a powerful hosting account, and with Fantastico (which is available at HostGator), you can install a WordPress blog with the push of a button. It will take you all of about 5 minutes to do it.
Your in business, baby!
Where else can you spend $10.85 a month and have a business? Only online!
Other concerns
There are other considerations, like you have to change your nameservers and such, but there is a solution to that, if none of this is making sense. The ListBuilding Club will take you by the hand and walk you through all of this in easy-to-understand videos. Brian Edomondson, my good friend and Chief Video Instructor, is a natural teacher, and he makes it all very easy for you.
Right now, there’s a trial membership going, so jump on over and sign up! I only wish that I had had the option of joining the LBC when I was starting out. It would have cut my learning curve by more than half.
Anyway, blogging is a great way to start out! AND, when the blog is on your hosting account, you can do anything with it you like. Nobody can tell you what content you can have or that you aren’t allowed to advertise. Plus, nobody can shut you down for that. Blogging is really a great way to begin, so don’t wait… get your blogging engines started!
Tellman & Shawn won a Ferrari from Eben Pagan’s Altitude JV Contest. But it lives with Shawn in Atlanta, and they’ve decided to give it away! I asked Tellman why, and he said, “Think about it, Pat. I live in Vermont!” Well, yeah. I guess there aren’t too many Ferrari’s in rural Vermont.
And Shawn, well… he’d rather get you excited about making it big online.
True.
Get into the contest and you can not just win a Ferrari, but you can be Overcome Everything’s spokesperson! How powerful is that?
And in the bargain, all you have to do is be the best at following the step-by-step instructions inside The ListBuilding Club.
Wow.
Anyone can win this, and you can get in for just $1. Yep. One, slim dollar.
Check it out. Get excited! This is going to be enormous! We’ve been working really hard to make this the coolest contest on the Web. I mean, come on. Russell gave away a Corvette. That was cool. But THIS is a Ferrari.
Even if you just sell it, you’re a huge winner.
At least check it out. Everyone will come away a winner in this one.
Yes, I’ve written a few press releases in my day. I’ve published a few, too, back in my editor days, but I love what they can do for your business in terms of getting traffic. If you haven’t written one, they aren’t terribly difficult, either.
First and foremost, you need a good hook.
That’s exactly like a headline. So, if you’re good at writing headlines, you have half the battle nailed.
I like to tie my headlines in to something that people might currently be searching for. So, I cruise the headlines in the news. Of course, you have to tie your headline to the body of the press release or it won’t work.
I go to places like Google News and Excite or Yahoo to find the choice headlines, and the trick is to find something people are searching for. Right now, it could be Obama, Batman, or there’s always the fuel crisis.
Just be very careful how you do it or the release won’t be approved. If you can work a legitimate tie-in, though, you’ll be cool. Like, if you’re talking about Batman, you’d better have a gothic product or something superhero-like. I think that would be kind of hard.
Last year, when we were launching The ListBuilding Club, I did one for Tellman that said he was opening the club with more tricks than Harry Potter, which was out at the time, and then went on to say that Tellman’s not a magician, but he has more marketing tricks than a tutor at Hogwart’s. All worked out, you see?
Anyway, that’s my tip for the day. Have fun coming up with cool ways to get people interested. They may not even know that they want to know about your cool news, but well… when they get there, they just might be highly interested, eh? Get as many people reading your releases as you can.
I just read a very cool post over at Jack Humphrey’s blog, The Friday Traffic Report. He’s on kind of a rant about all the Internet marketing gurus charging an arm and a leg for products that they know 90% of the people who buy them will never use.
Yeah. He’s right. But…
It’s not the gurus’ fault that people are too lazy to take action. It’s just the way of human nature.
But that’s not the part that interested me. He said that he gives 110% to the people he mentors. He wrote:
“I guess what I am getting at is that I know me. And people who have paid big money for my services know from that experience that I give everything I’ve got. They can tell there’s a country boy deep down inside me that blushes when he gets paid so much just to tell folks what he knows about marketing. And they ALL walk away appreciative and very much fulfilled from the experience. I make doubly sure of that. (Almost to THEIR embarrassment at times.)”
I’ve learned that from Tellman. The List Building Club is all about giving people value. We give them content that rocks. We give them the ability to ask questions and have them answered twice a month on calls. We offer tons of quality stuff.
But it’s only $29.99 a month. I’d say that’s what Jack’s getting at. It’s not about greed. It’s about giving value. I believe in that, too.
And so, it’s how I’ve modeled my site Blogging4BoomersinBusiness.com . I have clients that email me reguarly and I mail back to them the minute I can and answer their questions. If it’s too involved, they can find me on the phone every Monday night. I want to be there for them, you know? I have one member who told me today…
“WOW! Pat. You’re not only my favorite blog and SEO mentor, but you’ve taught me so much about interrelationship marketing. If everyone were like you, they’d have customers for life.”
Well sure, it’s flattering, but what makes me feel really good is knowing that I helped someone move forward. I remember stumbling around feeling stupid 4+ years ago when I got into Internet marketing. And I don’t want people to do that.
I really want to help them, and I love doing it.
But I can see where someday, I may not have the time to do as much as I’m doing today. And then what? Will I be one of those $2,000 product gurus who never gets near their customers?
I don’t think I will.
Part of the fun of being smart at Internet marketing and having information to share is sharing it. If I can’t do that, I don’t think it will be fun anymore.
Money’s nice to have, but it doesn’t pay the soul.
