Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

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Perry Marshall is the first true Internet marketing expert I ever came across. I can’t remember how I found Perry, but he was one of the very early influences on my work online, in particular his email newsletter style.

In this interview you will hear Perry explain how he became an Internet marketing expert, his thoughts on affiliate marketing, why content is so important to success online, why Perry says no to most joint venture requests and lots more wisdom about direct marketing online.

Perry Was The First Marketer I Gave My Money To

Perry’s Renaissance Club membership was the first internet marketing information product I ever purchased. Many of the lessons I learned from that package stimulated some of the very early and most successful pillar articles I have ever written, including my two part series on search engine optimization, which was partially inspired by lessons learned from Brad Fallon on the CDs I got from Perry.

I then went on and promoted Perry’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords as the very first affiliate product I marketed on this blog, way back in 2005.

Although that first affiliate promotion didn’t do so well, a few months later I promoted an event Perry was running which was offering a 50% commission on a $1500 sale, and I managed to make two sales netting my first ever four figure affiliate income payday. That was a momentous achievement for me and enough encouragement to continue down the affiliate marketing path, leading to where I am today.

What I like about Perry is that he rarely does any affiliate promotions and most of his emails are 99% content with a link to one of his products, if any promotion at all. This style of very soft selling, content-driven email marketing was a heavy influence on my own style of email marketing and I recommend you join Perry’s email course just to see how he promotes his products and delivers value through email.

Show Notes

• Perry explains how he entered the Internet marketing industry
• How Perry landed his first speaking gig at an Internet marketing seminar
• Why Perry was able to convince so many affiliates to promote his products
• Perry’s two key elements of an effective online sales process
• Why Perry doesn’t participate in big product launches
• What Perry considers the two most important variables to track in your online business
• Why email list segmentation is so important to maintain list integrity
• How learning in slow chunks is the key to success
• Why content is critical if you want to become an online expert

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 57 Minutes - 26 MB]

Update Oct 14: The PPC Classroom people are in the process of launching their coaching program so the links for the free report have changed and now instead go to the sales page. I’ll chase them up about finding alternative access to the report – but it may be gone. Apologies if you missed out!

Go straight to the free report and videos that explain the details here -

• Free Report and Videos

Here’s the background story…

I remember this feeling quite clearly. It was about 3 years ago. I was living in a share house in Brisbane and my Internet business ventures were doing okay, but far from brilliant.

My proofreading business was paying the bills and ensured I didn’t need a job. My blog was growing and starting to make some money, but let’s say I felt far from comfortable with my financial circumstances. I’m sure many of you can concur with those feelings right now.

As a result of my situation I was easily swayed by different methods to make money online, but there was one thing in particular that I was really interested in because it seemed like a very FAST method to generate a return and potentially earn big dollars online in a period of months.

The method I’m talking about is using Pay Per Click advertising, like Google AdWords, and selling affiliate programs.

You buy traffic, send it to affiliate offers and tweak your campaigns to the point where you make more money in affiliate commissions than you spend on the per click traffic.

Once you get the numbers right you can really open the traffic floodgates and spend thousands a day on PPC traffic, knowing for each $1 spent you will make more than a $1 back. At least, that’s the theory and how the professionals do it.

There’s literally thousands of people who still use this technique to make anything from a few hundred dollars a month to a few million. In fact I know a friend in Sydney who last time I spoke to him, was spending about $5000 a day on AdWords, to make $8000 a day in commissions for a total profit of $3000 A DAY – amazing stuff!

I Got Distracted

Read the rest of this entry >>

I’ll just slip this in before I head off and work on my launch video since EVERYONE is going nuts on Twitter about it (Ed Dale is of course the craziest).

Google’s keyword tool just become a goldmine for accurate keyword data. Go have a play with it now and you will see what I mean -

You can use this tool to look up keywords related to your blog or the product you are promoting and find the EXACT number of people conducting searches for each keyword phrase. You can also stick in a website URL and Google will give you suggested keywords based on search volume.

You can use this data to decide what headings to use in your blog tiles, how to conduct SEO on your sites and to generate keyword lists for your advertising campaigns.

This is of course not a new thing – keyword services have existed for a long time, but this is the first time Google has made such finite data available to us at no cost.

As Ed so calmly noted – the Internet marketing game has just changed…again.

I have a couple of quick updates for you today as I have to run away from the house with the cleaning lady here.

Help! My Business Sucks!

Andrew Lock who I refer to as the eBay expert with the cool British accent, has recently started producing a web based television show called Help! My Business Sucks!.

The show focuses on entrepreneurship and Internet marketing, with Andrew as the host. If you are looking for another example of a new way to use Video online to spread your message, educate and entertain, take a look at what Andrew is up to.

The show can be found at – http://helpmybusiness.com/

Perry Marshall AdWords Update

Next, some important advice from Perry Marshall – the only AdWords expert I follow. I’ve been on his newsletter for years now, it was one of the very first I subscribed to and one of the only ones I remain a subscriber.

Perry sends out actual advice to his newsletter and rarely promotes any other products than his own. I’ve never seen him participate in an Internet marketing product launch, so if you are sick of “launch emails” and you are looking for a great newsletter covering Google AdWords, general Internet business, lead generation and conversion advice, you can’t go wrong with Perry’s Newsletter.

You can join his free AdWords e-course, which is great, and that will get you on to his newsletter too.

Google AdWords New Feature: Automatic Matching

Perry recently sent through something I thought was critical for anyone currently running a Google AdWords campaign, regarding a new feature called Automatic Matching. Perry presented a warning regarding this feature, so if you have never heard of Automatic Matching, here’s some advice you need to read…

Google is phasing a MAJOR feature into the AdWords
program. If you log into your account you’ll see a notice
that says,

“New! Automatic matching has been enabled in your
account. Your ads will now show for additional relevant
search queries based on the keywords, ad text, and landing
pages in your ad groups. You can opt out by visiting a
keyword-targeted campaign, and then clicking on edit
campaign settings.”

If you edit your campaign settings, you’ll see a check box
that says:

“Automatic matching: Show ads on more search queries
without adding keywords.”

And in your ad groups at the bottom of your keyword list,
you’ll see a new column labeled “Automatic matching total.”

What this means is, if you’re bidding on a keyword like
“dog grooming”, Google may show your ad for a keyword
like “pet grooming brush” even though you’re not bidding
on it at all.

The question is, do you want this?

First of all, there’s no way to know for sure unless you’re
using conversion tracking.

In fact, you should disable this feature immediately unless
you have conversion tracking enabled and hold Google
accountable for the quality of traffic they’re sending you.

***DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE UNLESS YOU TRACK
THE CONVERSIONS FROM ‘AUTOMATIC MATCHING’
TRAFFIC.***

Automatic Matching traffic will seldom be better traffic,
except maybe for people who simply do not know what
they’re doing in AdWords.

AdWords advertisers who learn this game from me are
always control freaks. They don’t want to just take what Google
gives ‘em. (Hey, that’s how you gain an advantage that Google
doesn’t have.) The ideal way to do this would be to use
the bootstrapping technique I’ve taught for years, which is:

-Campaign 1 has bids set at, say, $1.00 with Automatic Matching OFF
-Campaign 2 has bids set at, say, $0.75, with Automatic Matching ON

This will shift all the Automatic Matching traffic into Campaign
2 and you’ll have complete control of it.

Source: Perry Marshall Newsletter

Perry went into more detail than the above excerpt, but I don’t feel right publishing his entire newsletter here (although I almost did!).

Unfortunately I’m not sure if you can get back-issues of Perry’s newsletter, but if you want more info along the lines of the above, take his free e-course and you will never miss another newsletter.

StomperNet is reopening for members at the end of this month. As they always do, they announced the news by releasing a series of free videos.

If you have never seen a StomperNet video then you are missing out. The video work from Andy Jenkins is definitely the best you will see, at least for free, about Internet marketing. However, it’s not the presentation that makes these worth watching, it’s the content.

StomperNet has so much talent working for them that they always uncover strategies that no one else talks about, at least not in free content.

You can watch the latest one here –

Going Natural 3.0 Video – Part 1

The topic this time is Pay Per Click Marketing with Dan Thies, who offers advice that isn’t your typical PPC tactics. He goes through the whole process in the video and if you do any PPC marketing you want to pay attention to this.

Keywords With Commercial Intent

The part in the video about researching the commercial intent of keywords I found really fascinating and I had no idea there were research tools available for this.

Commercial intent is what all business owners want – to find people who have the intent to buy. Obviously if you are in business you want to sell, and while there’s a ton of traffic searching for your goods and services every day, a good chunk of that traffic doesn’t buy.

Finding the phrases that people type into search engines that result in a sale is absolutely gold since you then know the keywords that lead to the buyers, not the browsers.

There’s a lot more to it of course and I recommend you go watch the StomperNet video for more on this. Here’s the link again -

Going Natural 3.0 Video – Part 1

More Videos From StomperNet

There’s a few more videos to come from the StomperNet team, so make sure you enter your name and email address if you want notification when the next videos are released. The opt-in form is on the video page.