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I promised you some snapshots of the Dot Com Secrets print magazine as soon as my copy arrived from the USA. The March edition arrived in the mail last week and I’ve grabbed the trusty digital camera to show you what the magazine looks like.

If you remember I ordered the free (you pay $7.95 for shipping) Dot Com Secrets DVD from Russell Brunson, which includes a one month trial of the magazine, The DotComSecrets ‘Insider’ Journal.

There are not many full gloss magazines talking about Internet marketing and a guy with Russell’s experience and staff working with him, has the resources to put something quite polished together. It’s a great little magazine, the only problem to keep your subscription going you need to invest online info product fees ($39.95 a month) rather than offline magazine rates.

If Russell’s magazine was published offline and distributed via traditional means like newsagents you would pay maybe $10-$15 a copy at most. Offline magazines are supported by advertising and the Dot Com Secrets magazine at the moment is nearly 100% content, so there’s that trade off, but the main price driver is the model used for pricing online information.

Real world books cost $15-$40, online they tend to average anywhere from $37-$97. Online information is generally much more focused and to-the-point than offline books and serve a different market segment, yet it’s still an interesting observation of perceived value and pricing models. For whatever reason, people are prepared to pay more for online information products and expect to pay a lower price for a book in the real world even if the cost of distribution and manufacturing for an offline book is significantly more than a digital download. It’s amazing what we come to perceive as acceptable when it comes to pricing, but as Internet marketers seeking profits from online products we shouldn’t have any complaints!

What Is In The Magazine?

Russell has each of his staff produce an article for the magazine covering their unique expertise and job function within Russell’s business.

Topics include:

• Copywriting
• Press releases (the March edition features a nice template you can follow for constructing a press release)
• Web and graphic design
• Search engine optimization
• Traffic generation
• Outsourcing
• Taking payments online
• List building
• And pretty much the whole gamut of Internet marketing

The level of information is quite high and if you are new to Internet marketing the magazine will certainly teach you a lot each issue. Personally I found most of the content relevant, if not mind-blowing, but for example I was not interested in reading the section on graphic design because it’s not an area I want to become an expert in. I outsource this aspect of my business and in fact should avoid building too much knowledge or I’ll end up doing it all myself!

The one big nugget of value I took away was in an article Russell wrote himself mentioning some options for outsourcing. He discussed a technique he uses to raise his natural search engine rankings with the aid of forums to build backlinks (if you don’t know why backlinks are important, read this article on backlinks). I don’t know what exactly the technique is, but I suspect it’s something along the lines of maintaining an active profile in certain forums, contributing articles that include links back to your site with the appropriate anchor text. If you do this from high authority forums you can significantly improve your organic search results.

What I found interesting was not the forum technique itself, but how Russell uses outsourcing to get it done. He created some videos to train people how to implement his forum SEO technique and then hired a full time staff member to just implement the technique every day. His goal is to raise his position in the search engines for the very popular phrase “Internet Marketing” to the top of the Google results, and so far he’s doing well - about position four on the first page. He hires this full time person for around $500 a month via a service called Agents of Value, which I did not know about until I read the magazine, and looks like an awesome service I will quite possibly make use of myself in the near future.

It’s nuggets of knowledge and learning about resources like Agents of Value that have convinced me to remain subscribed to Russell’s magazine. If I can discover just one great strategy like the above example per issue then I will very easily recoup my investment money by improving my online business. You also get an entertaining read and material for blog posts (remember my post about ongoing education to build your preeminence? - Subscribing to Dot Com Secrets is one of the ways I can maintain my level of knowledge and with help from my blog, position myself as an expert in the marketplace).

If Internet marketing is your game and you would like to get yourself a copy of the magazine, you can get a free one month trial by ordering the Dot Com Secrets DVD from here -

http://www.dotcomsecrets.com/freedvd.html

Yaro Starak
Reading magazines since age 4