KitwanaAkil.com

By Jimmy D. Brown

My wife laughs every time she sees me doing it.

At least once or twice every week, I’ll be at my desk (or at the dining room table) with my Franklin Covey planner open and a stack of laminated checklists in hand.

“What are you doing, honey?” she calls, already knowing the answer.

“I’m planning”, I reply with a smile.

She laughs and I get back to work.

She laughs because she swears I spend half of my time “planning”. But, if you ask me how I’m able to get as much work done as I do in only 3 hours a day, I’ll point to a black Franklin Covey planner with about a dozen laminated checklists inside.

Building an Internet business is easy. Seriously. I’m not saying that it’s not complicated, because it is. I’m just saying that it’s easy to accomplish if you just have a system in place.

There’s very little in this world that can’t be accomplished with the right set of action steps in front of you.

Today, I’m going to give you such a system for building your Internet business. There are only 4 steps…

1. Decide What You Want To Do. Do you want to run an eBay(R) business? Be an affiliate marketer? Buy and sell reprint rights? Get involved in niche marketing? While all of those things will likely find their way into your plan in time, you gotta begin with one thing at a time.

My recommendation: Choose a “broad” topic you are interested in and begin building a list of folks interested in that topic.

2. Determine A Weekly Action Plan. After you decide what you want to do, it’s time to determine how to get it done. What I do is this: I create a weekly set of action steps. That is, I have a set of things I do on Monday, on Tuesday, and so forth. Decide how many hours (as little as ONE) you want to work each day and schedule yourself a reasonable amount of things to get done in that time frame. Repeat this process week after week.

My recommendation: Begin writing ezine articles to promote your list … and affiliate programs. It’s the easiest way to get free traffic and build your list at the same time.

3. Devote Yourself To Staying On Schedule. The important thing here is to stick to it. The easiest way that I know of to make certain you develop discipline in your schedule is to NOT set unrealistic expectations. Give yourself ample time to do each day’s action step - don’t overschedule. Look for progress along the way to celebrate. Reward yourself when you’ve reached a milestone. And, remember, you’re GROWING a business. Just like physical growth, it takes time … it WILL happen if you remain committed.

My recommendation: Weave in simple activities related to the following categories - List building (ezine articles), product creation(conduct interviews or hire ghostwriters), site development (making your site convert more visitors into buyers),and education (continuing to learn new ways to grow your business).

And for more ideas on how to work more effectively and deliver your planned projects, read through the resources mentioned at http://www.topreports.com/effectiveness/

4. Develop Additional Shortcuts. As you get better and better at working with your lists, creating products and tweaking your site, you’ll want to continue to improve your business with new ideas, strategies, tools, and resources. The key is simple: never stop learning!

My recommendation: Visit forums. Read articles. Download reports. Identify sites and resources that CONTRIBUTE to your success in educating you. You want faster results, bigger increases, automated processes, and other ways to get more accomplished and more profit, with less work involved.

Everything depends on your developing a plan and sticking to it.

And that is the REAL secret to building a high-profit Internet business!

Believe it or not, there is a tremendous “operations manual” that you can download right here at SR Zone to help you create a plan that works for YOU. Check out “Homepreneur Habits: How To Run A Successful Home Business “ by clicking here . You’ll learn all the tools you need, how to setup your work space and how to create a day-by-day schedule of recommended activities to start and grow your business.

By Jimmy D. Brown

photo credit: ?

Are you a “traffic juggler”?

That is, do you attempt to get traffic to your site by doing all kinds of activities ranging from SEO to PPC listings to buying solo mailings?

In other words, do you “juggle” your traffic generation activities like multi-colored balls – never holding on to one for very long and always moving on to the next one?

As a recovering “traffic juggler” myself, I can tell you this with great certainty … you and I aren’t alone.

Sadly, most internet marketers wear the same hat. They complicate things by trying every new traffic strategy, buying ever new traffic tool and joining every new traffic program.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

In fact, what I want to suggest to you in this article will make your life a whole lot easier, and, as a direct result, will actually get more traffic to your site than ever before.

Brace yourself for a life-changing statement –

** If you have your own product to sell online,
you only need to focus on ONE traffic strategy! **

Yep, you read that correctly.

Instead of trying to do a gazillion things, there is a very simple, very effective approach: focus on the ONE thing that really matters, the ONE thing that produces the greatest results, the ONE thing that will get you all the traffic you’ll ever need.

And that ONE thing is to…

** Start, Strengthen and Spread Your Own Affiliate Program*

Let’s look at that statement in 3 steps for simplicity purposes…

Step 1: *START* Your Affiliate Program.

There is one major reason why you need to start your own affiliate program that stands head and shoulders above the rest: every traffic generation concept (past, present and future) can be done FOR YOU, BY OTHERS if you have your own affiliate program in place.

Let that sink in. Chew on that for a while. It’s such a paradigm shift that most people don’t even realize the tidal-wave-like power behind the concept.

Instead of you working with PPC ads and you working on the SEO stuff and you buying the solo mailings, you can get others to do this FOR YOU as a member of your affiliate program.

So, to begin with, you need to start your own affiliate program. A great place to do this is Clickbank.com.

Step 2: *STRENGTHEN* Your Affiliate Program.

After establishing your affiliate program, it’s important to “strengthen” it. That is, you will need to train your affiliates to do all of the marketing for you. You’ll also need to provide them with marketing materials such as brandable PDF reports, articles, advertisements, banners, etc.

But, let’s take this another step.

Instead of loading some marketing and training materials to your affiliate center and leaving it up to your affiliates to figure out how to use them, why not point out how to use them?

Example: List 10 great newsletters where they can purchase solo mailings to promote your offer. Put something in there for every budget. (What a nice treat it will be when one of your aggressive affiliates purchases a $500 solo mailing to promote your offer!)

You’ll be SHOCKED to see what this one additional step can mean to your bottom line.

But, you could take it even another step further.

How about offering to personally train 10 affiliates in how best to promote your offer? You could teach one how to use ezine advertising; another how to buy PPC ads in numerous engines; still another how to distribute ezine articles.

(Here’s an idea: how about you purchase a copy of the latest traffic tool or manual for one of your affiliates and get them involved in using it to promote you?!)

Can you imagine the impact?

Step 3: *SPREAD* Your Affiliate Program.

Finally, you want to continue growing your program by recruiting more and more affiliates. As your numbers grow, so will your results.

The bottom line is simple: instead of “juggling” a bunch of different traffic ideas, a much more effective use of your time is to focus on ONE source of traffic: your own affiliate program.

Juggling is great for clowns, but lousy for internet marketers.

Don’t be a clown when it comes to your business.

Wouldn’t it be nice to attract some Super Affiliates? You know — the type that can make hundreds or thousands of sales by sending just one mailing to their lists. Jimmy D. Brown has authored a report that you won’t want to miss. Check out “8 Irresistible Ways to Get Super Affiliates To Enlist In Your Sales Army” by clicking here .

By Jimmy D. Brown

If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes. But I did.

For such a small word, “if” sure does cause a lot of problems, doesn’t it?

“If I had not turned off the alarm clock, I wouldn’t have overslept.”

“If I had paid attention to what my wife said, I would have not shrunk my 100% cotton shirt three sizes too small.”

“If I would have taken the time to fuel up, my car wouldn’t have run out of gas out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“If I had charged up the battery on my mobile phone, then I would be able to call AAA to bring me some gas out here in the middle of nowhere!”

See what I mean?

“If” is such a tiny word.

But it’s like dynamite. It packs a lot of punch.

For me, as I teach (and learn myself!) about viral eBooks, the phrase is this:

“If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes.”

You see, I made MANY costly mistakes in my early viral eBooks. Mistakes that are *literally* costing me thousands of dollars in profits right now.

And there is nothing I can do to change them.

Once you set a viral eBook into motion, it’s impossible to get it back and make corrections to things ya screwed up on.

Man, if I could go back into time and change some things.

I have learned the hard way some things you DON’T want to do with viral ebooks.

That’s what we’re going to take a look at here.

I’ve made ‘em all.

You don’t have to.

Don’t do this…

1. Never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

I learned the hard way that you should always use redirect links from your own domain when putting any kind of link inside your ebook.

For example: most people insert their affiliate link for an affiliate offer inside the ebook that they have put together. The one that was given to them by the affiliate program owner.

Instead, you want to link to a page at your site that refreshes and redirects the visitor to your assigned affiliate link. Something like this… http://www.yourdomain.com/brainstorm.html
This is important so you can CHANGE the link anytime you want to in the future.

For example: If I decided to no longer use ClickBank to handle my affiliate program and went with a different affiliate tracking link, what happens to the thousands of copies of your viral eBook that are in place with that old affiliate link in there?

They become obsolete, unusable and unprofitable.

Or, suppose you are linking to a dating service that goes out of business? What now?
Your links are toast. They are worthless to you.

With a redirect link you can easily adjust the target page and send the traffic to a different dating service, or to a page at your site. With a redirect link the changes are made at YOUR SITE, which you remain in control of regardless of what happens with the products and services that you linked to.

Even if you change hosts or servers, you still remain in control.

You don’t have to make changes to all of those eBooks — which would be impossible to do — you simply make a 2 minute change at your site.

I can’t tell you how many dead links are in some of my earlier ebooks that continue to give me headaches as people email me saying, “Jimmy, you’ve got a dead link here … can you give the correct link?”

It creates a lot of extra work in answering emails and certainly is throwing away potential profit for the countless people who never bother to ask for an updated link.
So, never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

Always use redirect links.

2. Another thing is you want to avoid using dated information by providing too specific details.

Affiliate program A may not be offering that free 30 day trial offer very much longer.

The price for admission to that special site may not always be $29.95.

That site that was “just released last week” may have become an all-time classic by the time Bob reads your viral ebook two years after it was released.

You want to make certain that you stay away from information that is too specific that can easily become irrelevant.

Again, I get emails all the time griping about inconsistent prices because I put a price for the Profits Vault membership into one of my early viral ebooks and that price is no longer valid.

Hasn’t been for almost two years.

I’ve even gotten ugly emails accusing me of fraud and false advertising, with threats to turn me in to the attorney general and all kinds of nonsense.

So, be careful that you don’t date your viral ebook if you can avoid it.

3. Another no-no is to never put any information into your ebook that you don’t want all over the world.

These things travel folks and they can be global in a matter of days and certainly over time you can easily have a worldwide audience.

I made the mistake of putting my cell phone number in one of my earlier ebooks because everyone claimed that if I didn’t have my contact information in there, no one would buy from me… which is nonsense I might add.

Anyway, I started getting all kinds of calls at all hours of the day.

What was 3:00 in the afternoon in the Philippines was 3:00 in the morning where I live.

So, it was a nuisance.

Kind of a funny story came out of it.

I disconnected that number, of course, and got a new one. That was almost 2 years ago.

Well, about a month or so ago I had a lady email me and she was hopping mad.

Apparently, she had ordered a cellular phone and got my old number… and folks were still calling!

She told me that she was getting calls from England and all over looking for me and they were running her cellular bill up with charges.

She wanted me to do something about it and all I could do was tell her “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”

With viral marketing, it’s pretty much unstoppable, which is why it is so effective. It keeps spreading and it’s hard to stop the growth once it gets going.

So, never put anything into your ebook that you don’t want the world to know and use.

4. Another thing is this … always have your carriers do the branding.

You want to automate the process as much as possible.

Again, I learned the hard way.

Early on, before there were all of these branding tools available, I hand customized each ebook.

And as they began to spread, the customization requests grew to be way too much for me to handle. I was spending most of my day putting together these customized viral ebooks for each new person that requested a copy.

That had to change and so now I use branding tools and branding instructions. I give them to anyone who wants to customize the ebook and I let THEM do the work.

Keeps me out of the loop completely.
So, unless you have some specific reason to do it yourself, place that responsibility onto the ones who want to distribute the viral ebooks.

5. One more thing I want to share. Always launch new browser windows with your links in your ebooks.

Whenever you link to a site within your viral eBook content, always remember to code that link to launch a new browser window when the reader clicks on it. I learned this the hard way. There are many scripts involved in the order-taking process at online credit card processing sites.

And many of those have caused glitches in the eBook due to the software the eBook was created with and it crashes the eBook, making it impossible to order.

So, what happens is this.

You do your job well. The content is great. You’ve got a hungry customer waiting to buy.
They click on a recommended product link. They arrive at the site still inside your eBook window. They click on the order link and the entire thing shuts down. I mean completely shuts down the ebook and website altogether.

And, in some cases, it even crashes the computer. You just lost a customer because two sets of code didn’t like each other.

That has happened to me on MANY different occasions in some of my early ebooks.

Now, all of my links launch new browser windows OUTSIDE of the ebook if you click on a link inside the ebook. All you need to do is insert a simple line of code into your links inside the eBook. The code looks like this…

Target=”Resource Window”

Now when someone clicks on your link, a new browser window will launch outside of the eBook itself before taking them to the website. Now, you’re safe. EVERY link in your eBook should have this code. You can thank me later.

(NOTE: IF you are using a PDF maker for your ebooks, you should be fine with your links.)

Viral eBooks are tremendous tools. But, there are also some pitfalls associated with them.

I’ve just shared five of the mistakes that I have made.

There is just no way of measuring how much profit I have lost over the years due to those errors.

There wasn’t a manual available to tell me how to do it. History hadn’t really been recorded at that time to tell me what to stay away from and what to make sure I did in order to protect myself from problems.

So, you’re getting something that I didn’t have.

Aren’t ya happy?

In all seriousness, don’t make the mistakes that I made.

History doesn’t need to repeat itself on this one.

Want to learn a NEW viral ebook strategy that isn’t outdated and overused? Check out “How To Get Free Traffic With PLR Reports “ by clicking here . You’ll learn a great way to get free traffic to any site you choose with free “private label rights” reports.

photo credit: mitmall

November 2008

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