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

Jeff Walker has offered his Product Launch Formula 2.0 course two times now. He opens it up for a week, takes on a bunch of students, closes the doors and the course begins.

He’s about to open the doors again for the 2009 intake, and you really don’t want to miss out if you’ve never done this course before.

The program opens again on Wednesday 15th of April, and you can join from that date onwards here (it usually stays open for about a week) -

http://www.productlaunchformula.com

I’ll have some bonuses for people who order through my link too, so stay tuned for that.

If you are planning to release a product online sometime in the next 12 months and have you haven’t studied the Product Launch Formula, then you’re making a mistake. I’ve used the formula now five times and every time it’s blown me away in terms of how many people have purchased my offer. It just works and you need to get this foundation training under your belt if you really want to make big bucks online.

I honestly recommend this as the number one course to do in Internet marketing that you pay money for. There just aren’t any other guys out there with Jeff’s experience and since he teaches the program personally, it’s a great opportunity to learn from him directly.

One Of The Best Case Study Videos Ever

I published a link to this video when Jeff first released it and it became one of the most popular posts on this blog ever.

The video presents one of the better teaching case studies out there in a niche that isn’t Internet marketing or make money online. It’s about a guy who makes money selling a board game about HERBS. Not an exciting topic to me, but it becomes exciting when you hear him break down how he does automated product launches and makes $9,000 a month selling a board game online.

Jeff explains how his student, the herb expert, pulled off this amazing feat and breaks down the exact process he went through to launch his board game in the free video you can watch here -

Food stamps to six figures video

What Is Product Launch Formula?

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I ran two affiliate promotions recently for very similar products at very similar pricing points. The promotion techniques were also very similar, and although there are many variables involved, there’s a powerful conclusion you can make as a result of this test.

One promotion, as I type this, is nearing $5,000 in commissions.

The other is nearing $500.

So what gives? Why did one do ten times better than the other?

The answer is TIMING.

One product was brand new to the market and I was one of the very first people to promote it.

The other I was very late to the show and as a result most people who were likely to purchase already had.

This is a lesson that always holds true, and there are some powerful reasons why.

Why You Need To Act Fast As An Affiliate

If you ever want to make good money as an affiliate, here’s some very sound advice about why you need to promote early and promote often when a product is first released -

1. When a product is new, it’s NEW. New sells a lot more than old because people are interested in new things.
2. When a product is new, no one has bought it yet. The entire market is still up for grabs. Those who act quickly stand to gain the most.
3. New products are often launched with a lot of buzz. You can ride along with that buzz and benefit from the excitement. That’s why the launch formula works, and it can help affiliates too, as long as you have the right timing.

I Have Something New - Now Is Your Chance To Have Good Timing

I’ve just finished switching over my affiliate program to Clickbank. All my current affiliates have to set up new accounts with the system and replace their old affiliate links with the new ones. All existing affiliates should have received an email about this already.

Blog Mastermind is now available to promote under the new system. As a result of this change, I am once again able to offer the $97/month option for those who can’t afford the $497 upfront payment (this is also an opportunity for smart affiliates - I’ll email details about this shortly).

However, and this is really exciting, I have something new that is about to launch, which many of you know is coming already.

I’m finally going to do an official public opening of my Membership Site Mastermind training program and the launch is just about ready to start rolling.

If you want to get in on the ground floor as an affiliate, now is the time to join. Here’s the link -

The Yaro Starak Affiliate Program

Once you sign up you will be on my affiliate email newsletter. I only send details about opportunities with my affiliate program to that newsletter, so as to not clutter this blog with too much promotional content, so if you want in, go register now.

Once you register you will have your personal affiliate links to promote Blog Mastermind immediately, and then Membership Site Mastermind once it is ready to roll. New and existing affiliates should go straight to this address now and sign-up -

www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/affiliates/

I look forward to working with you.

Yaro Starak
Making New Things

I’ve read a lot of articles about membership sites at other blogs and websites. Many people who write in the online marketing space jump on the bandwagon and talk about the benefits of owning some kind of subscription based income stream. They point out the obvious, such as recursive income, the stability and significant money that can be made with only a few members.

Unfortunately, nearly every person I’ve seen write about running membership sites has never actually owned a profitable one. Despite how good the model is, most people never get off their butts and actually launch a membership site, or if they do, their site fails because there’s a fatal flaw in their execution or strategy. I find it hypocritical that people can “teach” how to make money with a membership site never having actually done so themselves.

I agree with what people say about membership sites, even if they make statements without having the experience of running one. They are not necessarily wrong, they are just repeating what others have said, so it’s hard to have faith in them as experts. Without proof, how can you really know about something?

I say the same things about membership sites that other people do; they are the best online business model I know of. The difference of course, is that I own two membership sites and have conducted many different types of membership site launches. There’s no greater insight gained about how to do something than actually doing it, so I’m in a position to pass on some real “insider” information about this subject.

Today I want to clarify something that has bothered me about other people’s commentary about the membership site model, especially from people who have never actually run such a site.

The Reality About Membership Sites

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A couple of weeks ago I introduced and reviewed the Affiliate Theme, which I called the perfect WordPress blog theme for marketing.

In the comments to that review, some people mentioned they were using the Thesis Theme, which is also a very powerful theme for WordPress created by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark, two very respected bloggers.

Custom themes for WordPress like Thesis and Affiliate Theme make it MUCH easier to maintain a professional blog, especially if you don’t know how to manipulate code like HTML and CSS. You can use these themes to easily change the design and look of your blog, they are very well optimized for search engines and give you a lot more power of your blog than the default WordPress set-up.

Which Theme is Better? Thesis or Affiliate Theme?

In response to feedback on my Affiliate Theme review, it was clear people wanted to compare it to the Thesis theme.

Joel Williams (BlogTechGuy.com), who is the technology mentor in my private forum for paying students, is a regular user of Thesis, so I invited him to write a review of it and then do a cross comparison between Thesis and Affiliate Theme.

If you’re looking for a robust and powerful theme for your WordPress blog, have a read of what Joel has to say below, read my review of the Affiliate Theme and then decide which one to go with.

Thesis Blog Theme Review

A lot of blog owners are looking for a middle ground between a free, but generic blog theme and a unique, but expensive custom theme. This gap has been filled with the “premium” theme, a paid for theme that is not unique, but comes with admin options and customer support. There are a wide variety of premium themes out there, but Thesis is perhaps one of the most well-known and used.

What is Thesis?

Simply, it’s a Wordpress theme, but it is much more than that. It is often described as a “theme framework” due to the fact that many different styles and types of theme can be created from Thesis.

Created by Chris Pearson, and expertly supported by Rick Beckman, the theme has been through a major series of regular updates, continually adding new and user requested features from the 3,000+ users.

It allows the user a huge amount of control through two control panel menus. One is based on configuration options that I won’t go into detail but include options such as what pages to include in navigation, what information you want to show about each post, some display options, Feedburner feed URL and any header or footer scripts that you wish to include.

The other menu, Thesis Design Options (pictured) really give the theme massive flexibility. In the current version (1.5) some of the options include:

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After I finished writing my previous article that featured a very basic diagram of the three steps you go through to create an online conversion process (the Squeeze Page, Email Follow-up and the Sales Page), I was struggling with what to title the article. In the end I went with the decidedly simple, “How To Make Money Online“, and please read that article first if you have not already before finishing this article, otherwise this article won’t make sense to you.

If you’ve done keyword research in the Internet marketing niche then you will know that one of the most heavily searched for terms is “how to make money online”. That is the reason why so many bloggers use that phrase in their blog articles and blog title, if their topic is something to do with online business. The hope is to rank well for that term and get some search engine traffic as a result.

Personally I’ve never believed in going for the very top, most competitive terms. I consider blogs much better for a Long Tail search engine strategy, targeting secondary keyword phrases with each article and thus ranking well for lots of different terms. A blog can attract plenty of traffic from Google without ever ranking well for a very popular phrase, simply because it ranks well for hundreds of not quite as popular phrases. The traffic is much more targeted because of this, since secondary phrases are more specific in nature.

If you’re confused by this and have never heard of the Long Tail, please read my primer article here -

What Is The Long Tail?

My choice to use the “How to make money online” title on the previous article (and this article too now) was made because I couldn’t think of anything else more applicable. Since that article covered the “macro” viewpoint of how to make money online, I felt it was the best title.

I stated in the previous article that my diagram was missing two key ingredients -

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