Rock Stars at Frank Kern's Mass Control

Hey! Just got back from a San Diego weekend.

Surf Dude and big time Internet Marketing Rock Star, Frank Kern, taught, entertained and delivered as he played host to a crowd of 500. We rocked, we rolled, we had fun, but most importantly we learned.



Frank Kern and me.

The happening was appropriately held at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego. The stars at this venue did not come playing their guitars or drumming on their skins; instead they played on their strings of knowledge, experience and success. Headed by Frank himself the retinue included names like Filsaime, Deiss, Carlton, Moffat, Dale, Serling, Walker, Mulligan, Koenigs, Belcher, Reese, Lemberg, Jenkins, Johnson, Rozmanith - and those were just the speakers! Now that’s what I call an Internet Marketing Rock Star lineup! And then there was a passel more of them in the audience. So …. Does that make us their “groupies?”

Two pads of notes … too much to cover here, but over the next few months tips will be dropped into the appropriate postings so that you can apply them to your own blogging.

Some observations:

1. The thing that impressed me most was not the content, although undeniably that was awesome. No, what impressed me most was the graciousness and ease of accessibility of these extraordinarily successful men. Is it just me or is it a universal truth that the more successful a person is, the more generous and giving?

2. Twitter and all that Web 2.0 stuff. I have mentioned it here before that I haven’t quite got the hang of why social media is so important to internet marketing. Ed Dale, who runs the annual 30 Day Challenge gave a most compelling talk on this subject. In his view, the holy trinity in social marketing are Google, Twitter and You Tube. There was much more meat on Ed’s talk and for that he got a standing ovation. There will be more posts on this subject in the future.

3. Jason Moffat talked of the 7 Characteristics of Highly Successful Marketers. They were all good but the ones that caught my ear were nos. 6 and 7: Connections and Cause. Connections is not just who you know, but who they know. Cause is do you really know why you are doing this? It really is more than just the money. Another one I liked was courage, that speaks for itself.

4. Jeff Johnson talked on becoming a super affiliate. I thought that was an appropriate subject for this blog and will write a whole post on it, but the gem that I picked up was to make sure that you choose the right product/offer to promote. It’s your time, your list, your reputation. By becoming an affiliate of someone’s program, you are in effect endorsing it.

5. Your ideal client. Who is your ideal client? In other words who are you marketing to. If you could advertise for your client, what would your ad look like?

6. Determine what you want to be known for. Do you want to be the brand or do you want your business to be the brand? Both have their pros and cons.

7. Time Management: Are you doing your highest valued activity? Too often we get bogged down doing the small stuff, the admin: things that don’t really advance our business. Concentrate on those activities that make a difference to your results. The other stuff can wait.

8. Back to Twitter. Be selective as to whom you invite and equally selective as to whose invitations you accept. Follow the right people and the right people will follow you.

People often wonder what is so great about attending these weekend seminars. Aren’t they just pitch fests? Are they not self serving? What do you get out of it?

I am not fond of the term “pitch fest” because that implies that all you hear are pitches to buy, buy and buy. Let me tell you, when you attend a seminar weekend like Mass Control, the host has taken a lot of time and trouble to line up quality speakers who have valuable information to give to the attendees. Moreover, the host will also spend a good deal of time on stage, giving more good free advice and tips on how to ramp up your online success.

Speakers typically are on stage anywhere from one hour to as many as three. During that time they give you information on some of their most successful campaigns, what they did that was different, how they pulled the whole thing together. Granted, there is a lot that is not fleshed out, but hey! give me (and them) a break! You can’t do that in the short period of time that they are on stage. Yes, of course, they invite you to purchase their course – what? What’s wrong with that? I think it is a wonderful opportunity for attendees to purchase valuable courses at “a seminar price” which is often significantly less than the cost of that course on their sites. So you get:

- valuable free information, and
- big time cost savings if you want to purchase the speaker’s course.

Attendees are typically at different stages of their online careers – there are some that are just starting out and others that are well along to big pay checks. There is something for everyone. A seminar is a good place to make connections and form alliances. I for example, have several dog sites and was able to make connections with other internet marketers who also have dog sites. The importance of that is that you can support each other’s endeavors resulting in increased traffic and sales.

Seminars are fertile hunting grounds for joint venture partners – again, very much like connections, but somewhat more advanced and more appropriate to advanced marketers who already enjoy a list of subscribers in your category. Joint ventures differ partner to partner, but in a nutshell say you have an awesome product that you just completed, you are new, do not have a large list to send the offering to, but you meet a few people who also play in your niche and already have a list of hungry buyers who would be good prospects for your product … how valuable do you think such a joint venture would be.

I like meeting and talking with people who are like minded, success oriented, open to new ideas and to sharing. That’s the kind of person you meet at a weekend seminar such as Mass Control. It invigorates, motivates and confirms your own beliefs as to why you are in the market you are in.

When you go home you have a few new colleagues that you can stay in touch with, and you know, just positively know with certainty, that there is a financial future in internet marketing and that you are in the right place at the right time to make a success of it.

Happy Blogging!

PS... talk about cheese! The kahunas of the big cheese were in San Diego!Quick links:

Frank Kern's Mass Control

Ed Dale Thirty Day Challenge

Jason Moffat

Jeff Johnson Super Affiliate

Pick Your Battles and Win the War

Pick your battles carefully if you want to win the war.

In the world of Internet Marketing the battles fought are over search engine rankings, traffic and lists. There are more. What we want to win is a big fat check - every month. A blog is a good starting point.

I just read Kevin Wilke's latest post on the Nitro Marketing Blog. It is so simple, yet so powerful ... and so wise. The title? The 100 Hour Rule.

What Kevin says is that to be successful in Inernet Marketing, you have to have razor sharp focus on one outcome and take action to support that outcome. He talks about the 100 hour rule: put in 100 hours of REAL focused work into your Internet Marketing and you will be rewarded for your efforts with MONEY, yessirree - isn't that what we are in this for? Depending on where you are in your Internet Marketing career, you may be looking for a different outcome. I for example am looking for my first $100 month from my Blog Along With Me project. That includes this blog and the spinoffs from it.

How does that translate when it comes to action? What action would deliver that amount month after month after month and continue to grow.

This is a young blog and my new one Money Muscle Gym is even younger. What I am looking for is more traffic, more subscribers. Nothing new there. Everyone looks for that --- even the gurus with their minions of subscribers are always looking for ways to increase traffic and increase their list. Well I think job one is to increase traffi, because sure as there are little green apples, more traffic will ultimately get more subscribers. So the outcome I am really gunning for is traffic.

There are many ways to increase traffic. Kevin's suggestion is to pick one and concentrate your efforts on that one way, until you really get good at it so that its almost on autopilot, then add another.

What am I going to do?

I am going to concentrate on my strength - writing. I may never win a Pulitzer but writing is something I enjoy, feel comfortable with. From now on you will see more posts here as well is on my Money Muscle Gym. I'll be blogging and I'll be submitting articles to Article Directories. Ahh! Stay tuned. The next posting is all about Article Marketing.

In the meantime, hop on over to Kevin Wilke's article ... it is brilliant

Happy Blogging!

PS... 100 hours to making money, 500 hours to kissing your nine to five goodbye!
Go read it!

PPS... Kissing 9 to 5 Goodbye is good ... you can buy all the cheese you want!

Quick Links:

Internet Marketing
The 100 Hour Rule
Money Muscle Gym

The Gurus Are Duking It Out in Space!

Lo! What a feast of offerings from the gurus! It's as if all the top guns in the world of internet marketing have entered the virtual boxing ring in space and are duking it out for your dollars and mine. They tempt us with offerings worth thousands of dollars for free if we but buy their newest product that will take our own internet marketing up a notch or two.

Well, I gotta tell you. There is tons of good new stuff. Of course I bought some of the offerings hence my absence from my own blog. I have been reading, implementing and installing. The last of these for once and for all confirms that I am not a techie!!!

As I go through each piece that I have bought, if I think that the information/system/revelation will be of value to you I will post it along with my comments and observations.

Meanwhile, absense from this blog has indeed affected my modest statistical gains of February. While visits to this site from the search engines was almost 12% of total visits in February, that statistic has fallen prey to "no new content" which means that the robots are not taking anything back to the spiders to make it worth their while to come and crawl this site which means that Google and other search engines have siderailed their interest! More on that in some future blog - in the meantime, unless you too are up to your ears in new courses that you are trying to wade through, BLOG! Or the spiders will ignore you too!

I have also been working on a report to offer visitors that can be downloaded for free. It will be in a very simple format and is aimed for the wet behind the ears newbie. My observation is that beginners in Internet Marketing get so overwhelmed with everything out there, they simply do not know where to start. Many buy a full course (like I finally did a few years ago) only to find that once past the first three or four lessons they are in deep waters and barely tredding(like I was).

In my opinion, it is best to start with one simple program which helps you set some foundations - you know, start building your internet muscles. That report will be ready for downloading early April.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... Wonder what kind of cheese the gurus buy?

Dan "The Man" Lok, Blogging & More

In the world of Internet Marketing, Dan "The Man" Lok is a household name ... or should that be "cyberspace" name? Dan went from bagging groceries to banking big bucks for his efforts on the internet. He is now a self made multi-millionaire and I had the privilege of attending his seminar this weekend.

The seminar itself was nothing short of fabulous. It was classic Dan - two jam packed days of content, content, content, all by The Man himself. Limited to just 60 attendees the feeling of being in an inner circle was definitely clear and present. Some of what I learned will be covered later on in this series of blogging, some of it will unfold in due time.

I've known Dan for almost three years now. Met him at a friend's BBQ. We spent an hour chatting over a hot grill. I was just starting my internet marketing career, he was well into his, although at the time I had no idea just how well At the end of the conversation his sage advice to me was to blog and publish my articles.

I should have listened to Dan then. As I mentioned in my post Blogging, The First Step to Mastering the Internet, knowing what I know now, I would have started my Internet Marketing career by blogging. I think there is some inborn streak in most of us, we don't listen to our parents and we don't listen to the gurus in our own backyards!

I have also been researching five topics to launch my next blog. I have come up with a good niche market, something I know about and narrow enough that it could qualify for inch-wide, mile deep, but its not something I would want to carry on for the long term. If you are wondering about what that topic might be it is embroidery.

I know something about embroidery having learned it at school --- we started with the most basic stitchery in grade one and by the time we graduated highschool we had learned not only how to make french knots but cutouts, shadow stitchery and tedious cross stitching (the kind you counted by the squares on the fabric, not pre-printed). Amazon carries both books and a decent number of magazines. The term embroidery may be too broad as there are over 28 million results when googled, but I did note that there were sponsored links on the right hand side. Clickbank was a bit disappointing in that it did not seem to have many affiliates to offer and the pricing was low, so low profits.

I could have done more research on the subject, but decided against it for these reasons:

1. Incongruent: I have some 20 sites and blogs in total. Not all are themed, but they are grouped by topic themes. This is good for cross marketing which will be covered down the road. If this is your first blog, don't be concerned. If you already have several blogs and/or websites, a complementary topic is a good idea, an example might be if you have a site on travel, a good complementary topic would be something like canal tours, travel by cycle and so on. You could then post reviews on the various places you can take canal tours, the types of boats/barges/cruises that are available etc.

2. Little Personal Interest: Even though I have a good deal of personal knowledge and could write well on the topic, it is not one that grabs me.

3. Monetization seems to be somewhat limited. The magazines were well priced for annual subscriptions which is good and Google defintely has advertisers, but I was surprised at the somewhat limited affiliates through Clickbank. If I had my heart set on this topic however, I am sure that there are better affioliates that are available with Commission Junction.

4. Product Development : Eventually to up the ante it is a rule of thumb that one should develop a product of one's own. Now this could be something as simple as embroidery patterns that can be delivered digitally to DVDs showing how to execute certain stitches. Absolutely no personal interest.

So that is one down, four to go.

ACTION: Continue checking the viability of your niche.