Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Like most people, some mornings I wake up and feel less than enthusiastic about working. Sometimes, this feeling doesn’t stem from laziness or apathy, it’s a stronger power, a sense of futility and helplessness.

I know a lot of people look to my story of success as a source of inspiration and that is one of the greatest benefits I enjoy as a blogger, but - and I’m not afraid to admit it - I don’t always feel energized to pursue business and sometimes in my darkest moments, I even consider throwing in the towel.

This feeling is not so common for me now as I have lifestyle flexibility, a more stable income and a better mindset about work, but earlier on, it definitely was a problem. I want to explain how I overcome these moments (and still do the same thing now on occasion) to stay on track and how you can even have a productive day when you are not really feeling the mojo on the inside.

I expect you have felt similar feelings of despair or a lack of motivation at different stages of your business development, especially if you are yet to establish an income stream online that is sufficient for you to live off, or if you are right at the beginning and you have not seen one cent of return for the work you have put in.

Inspired or Dejected

Depending on your world view and personality style, when you hear of the success of others you may either feel inspired or dejected, and while it’s obviously more fruitful to look at other people achieving what you desire as motivation, as a fallible human, jealousy, depression and anger may be your initial responses.

Your mind is your greatest asset for success in business, but it can be just as strong a force of hindrance, sabotaging your efforts, destroying your work ethic and leaving you with no option but to return to the soul destroying job you promised yourself that you would never go back to.

How To Work When You Don’t Feel Like It

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The release of Product Launch Formula 2.0 has been building for a few weeks, with a ton of great videos coming from Jeff.

Today (Thursday 27th of March), the program goes live at 2 PM EST (USA time) and according to Jeff he expects to sell out in about 8 hours, but states he is leaving the doors open for 24 hours.

If you are reading this post after the 2 PM launch time, then you can go grab your copy from here -

Product Launch Formula Order Page

I focused on the theme of product launch here at my blog in the last few weeks, covering how John the food stamps guy made $9000 A Month From A Board Game using PLF tactics, How To Motivate Affiliates To Promote For You and a podcast were I talked about How To Launch A Product Using Your Blog.

A Special Bonus If You Buy Through My Link

In that podcast I revealed the bonus I’m offering if you decide to purchase Product Launch Formula via my link. Here’s what you get -

Blog Mastermind is my training program for people who want to build a successful blog that generates a full time income, which you only have to work two hours per day to maintain.

Over 500 people have participated in the program and I’ve got hundreds of testimonials and great feedback. I honestly consider it my best work regarding how to blog effectively.

As I write this, you cannot get into Blog Mastermind.

I will give every person who buys Product Launch Formula through my link a copy of all 27 Blog Mastermind lessons. The lessons are the meat of the program, with one lesson delivered via text and audio once per week for six months, if you were to take the training.

For this bonus I’m offering the audio version of every lesson, which is me (my voice) talking out the lesson to you - over 10 hours of the best content I have on professional blogging, including how to -

• Write content that pulls readers like a magnet
• Build traffic using high impact techniques
• Make money with your blog using direct and indirect methods
• Buy and sell blogs for profit or empire building
• Build a responsive email list with your blog
• and loads more!

I hate it when people label the “value” of something with an arbitrary number, but in this case, given the lessons are the main part of my training program and it’s going to be priced at $97 a month when it opens again later this year, I feel honest in saying the value of the lessons is at least $500.

When you follow my advice and just one or two tips help you make a few hundred or even thousands of dollars a month extra from your blog, then the value to you is significantly more.

I’ll Give You My MP3 Player To Listen To The Lessons

Now since I’m giving you the audio version of the lessons, I thought I’d provide something cool to listen to them with.

You might remember back in January I published - Podcast In The Park With Yaro - where I recorded the podcast in the botanical gardens here in my hometown of Brisbane.

I recorded that podcast using my iRiver S10 portable MP3 player, which in my opinion is superior to the iPod. I’ve always preferred iRiver because the technology is great in terms of features and you don’t need to use any proprietary software or file format to use it. Just stick it in to your computer, it functions like a USB stick, transfer the MP3s directly using drag and drop and it works.

Every person who purchases Product Launch Formula via my link will receive a brand new iRiver S10 with all 27 Blog Mastermind audio lessons stored on it ready to listen to, delivered to your door. You can sling the iRiver around your neck and listen to my dulcet tones talking everything you need to know about blogging as you head to work or school.

If you are not familiar with the iRiver S10, here’s a very comprehensive review with a ton of pictures and video of the MP3 player (it’s a tiny little thing!).

How To Claim Your Bonus

To claim your bonus, there are two steps -

STEP 1. Purchase Product Launch Formula via my link.

First clear your browser cookies to make sure you don’t have another affiliate’s cookie, then click this link and order -

Order Product Launch Formula through this link

STEP 2. Email supportATblogmastermind.com

Send an email to my support address with your name and email (the name and email you bought PLF with) and your mailing address to send the iRiver to.

Once I confirm your purchase the iRiver with all the lessons will be shipped to your door.

Your Product Launch

I hope with all the great training available from courses like PLF from Jeff and the experience we are all enjoying watching these product launches, many of you take the plunge and release a product in your market this year.

You don’t have to make thousands of dollars with your first launch, just going through the process teaches you so much and lays the foundation for building a large email list and a thriving Internet business.

It all starts with action and conducting a product launch online is definitely one of the best forms of action you can take today to accelerate your progress towards full time income from the world wide web.

If you have the money and more importantly, the impetus to follow through with action, Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula course is a great place to start and with my bonus of the Blog Mastermind lessons you can create what I believe is one of the best email list building tools available today - a blog - to use as the springboard for your first launch.

For one last time, here is the link to grab your copy -

Click here to order Product Launch Formula

Good luck - and a big thanks to everyone who buys through my link today, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yaro Starak
Launching Products

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Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.

Download the MP3 [ 42 Minutes - 10 MB]

With all the talk of doing a product launch online thanks to Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 2.0 release, I thought I should talk a little bit about how blogging can be used to launch a product based on my experiences.

My list was built off the back of this blog and I have conducted a product launch process a couple of times. In this audio I go through some of the techniques, the mistakes and the successes I have experienced over my three years as a blogger, which led to the eventual successful launch of an information product, which I made over $150,000 from.

If you are thinking of doing a product launch online, or a relaunch or closing down sale or any kind of online promotion, and if you want to know my opinion of Product Launch Formula (and let me be frank - I did NOT plan on buying the product at first because I didn’t think I needed it), then this is a podcast you have to listen to.

There’s lots of good content in this audio and some behinds the scenes stuff too, plus at the end I’m offering a special bonus. You will just have to listen to the audio to find out what it is (okay, here’s a clue - the bonus includes a free one of these, the same MP3 player I use - the iRiver S10).

Note: To get the bonus you have to take action on Thursday 27th of March 2008 at 2PM EST (USA time) when Product Launch Formula 2.0 is released for 24 hours only, so listen to this audio before that date or you miss out!

Show Notes

1. How to build email lists
2. How I created my first list of 3,000 subscribers using blogging
3. Some key lessons from Jeff Walker about using surveys before releasing a product
4. The first million dollar launch day
5. The real reason I bought Product Launch Formula (nothing to do with the content itself)
6. Jeff teaches me the importance of list segmentation
7. What I did in the lead-up to my own launch
8. How I attracted top affiliates to my launch
9. The real reason you do a launch - to build a list (so you CAN start with no list and still succeed)
10. Who should and should not invest in products like product launch formula
11. A special bonus from me if you decide to join PLF 2.0

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 42 Minutes - 10 MB]

******

Success with No List and No Affiliates?

If you are still worried about conducting a launch without an email list, watch the latest free video from Jeff about the guy who started with no list, no web site and no joint venture partners and did over $7,000 in sales - impressive stuff!

Here’s the video - No List, No Web Site, No JV Partners

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There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers - you guys and girls are not great at marketing.

Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.

Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.

Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you - if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.

…or will they?

The Long Road To Blog Traffic

You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.

This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.

Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche - effectively millions of articles.

Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months - and it really kicks in after about six to eight months - knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.

Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed - it’s just a bit slower this way.

One Visitor At A Time

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I just finished watching (actually listening to the MP3 version) of the video conversation between Jeff Walker, Eben Pagan and Frank Kern. The video is one of the resources Jeff released free from his “road trip” around the USA interviewing marketers who have done big online launches.

If you haven’t seen any of the videos, head to the product launch formula website and enter your name and email to gain access to the video and MP3 interview with Jeff, Eben and Frank. It’s free and Jeff’s stays on topic when he sends mail, so you won’t get hit with pitch after pitch once you are on his list.

Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and Eben Pagan talk product launch

If you haven’t watched the first video from Jeff where he interviews John who makes $9,000 a month from a business selling a board game about medicinal herbs (!) - you can find that video and the full story in my previous post here -

$9,000 a month from a board game

I won’t recount the entire video with Jeff, Frank and Eben but there was one point they brought up I wanted to discuss further because it’s something that is often overlooked by people doing a launch. These techniques are part of what Jeff claims are new to the 2.0 version of the Product Launch Formula and it’s safe to say no one else is looking at this to the depth Jeff is.

What are we talking about? Your affiliates - in particular, how to motivate them to promote your product.

The Greatest Source of Traffic Is…

Most of us poor bloggers have a mentality akin to the working class when it comes to building traffic. We toil day-in and day-out, pumping out content, building little channels of traffic and slowly creating an asset. We hope to retire one day leveraging our years of previous effort and follow the slow-and-steady path to success.

That’s a fine way to go about building an Internet business - that’s exactly how I did it and in time, it can be very rewarding - BUT, there are others who don’t have the patience to go through the slow process of content production and marketing, and instead look for quicker ways to reach an audience.

Marketers who have released products online understand that their affiliates, in most cases, drive traffic and sales. Affiliates are definitely an integral part of a launch process because they help bring in traffic, usually much more traffic and better quality traffic than any other source available online today.

As an avid student of how to build traffic online and also a teacher attempting to offer my students the quickest methods to deliver traffic results (since you are all so impatient!), I’ve studied information products about traffic generation and watched with interest how people market things on the world wide web.

Whenever I purchase an Information product related to making money online, the first page I turn to is the one about how the person built an audience. I have to know how exactly they attracted the traffic necessary to generate sales. In most cases, this is where the real nuggets of value come from and where the real gains can be made if you apply the advice to your business.

After years of research, study and practice, it’s pretty clear that almost every marketing expert agrees that your affiliates are the greatest source of traffic you have. You can look deeper into this and qualify the difference between joint ventures, host beneficiaries and plain old affiliate traffic (each source of traffic is of different quality), but that’s not something we will look at in this article. What’s important is if you want to succeed online today, you need to understand how to leverage affiliates.

It’s Not As Easy As You Think

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