I do believe it’s possible to do this full time. I’ve had consistent results and glimpses of mega success since I started this venture. There were weeks over the past year where I made way more than my regular salary and I know that can be a regular occurrence with some effort. No doubt about it - this stuff works.

The first thing on my plate is to redo a couple of Ebay niche sites. I had 29 of them set up using a rapid landing page generator and my custom research tool. About 5 of those were profitable but most of the profits were getting eaten up by PPC costs. Recently my main site got “Google slapped” and all the minimum bids went up to $10. Not a big surprise. I was expecting it to happen eventually as the sites were pretty thin. I need more content to keep the big G happy. A friend of mine is doing the same thing but using BANS (Build a Niche Site) software and going the natural search method. He’s making about the same as I was but it’s all profit since he doesn’t have the ad costs. I’m going to try that with a couple of the niches I know are profitable.

Watch this space .. I’ll be updating it a lot more frequently.

mike
:8^)

Composter Blog: We started a blog about using our electric composter a few months back mainly as an experiment in natural search and blogging.  I initially spent a lot of time promoting and bookmarking it which seemed to work until it mysteriously vanished from the Google index. I checked back last week and it was on page one. Go figure! When I last looked it was at number 3 for “kitchen composter”. We haven’t done anything about monitizing it yet.

Pay-Per-View traffic: I bought Gauher Chaudry’s latest course. Very promising but I haven’t put in the legwork yet. I believe he’s releasing a few more copies this week. The companion software product is killer.

Product Development: As part of my Ebay site development I commissioned a great little software tool that I have been tweaking to be extremely useful. I’m working towards releasing this as a product but I want to fine tune the system that goes with it first. You feed high search keyword phrases into the tool (validated demand) and the tool checks these against what is actually selling and in demand on Ebay. This gives you an instant list of potentially profitable keywords. It also does a competitive analysis of PPC advertising.

Other Fronts: Probably the reason I’ve been slacking lately is that I still have 3 campaigns regularly bringing in profits. It’s nothing to retire on but it does keep me in ebooks and expenses. My J.O.B. has been getting pretty interesting of late as well. Plus it’s summer …

Talk soon,

 Mike

Most recently, I’ve been refining a process to build ebay niche sites. I’m building extensions on a system that allows rapid site creation. Then I buy traffic from Google and link up buyers with a niche site tailored to what they are looking for.

I’ve managed to launch about 12 of these sites so far. I’m not quite profitable yet but I do have a reasonable cash flow and I am refining the process daily. I’m confident that within a month or two this will be a new mainstay of my internet business.

Next I’ll tell you how I got started with this project and about a very special place where ideas flow like water.

cheers,

mike
:8^)

Step one: Cancel your cable TV

You heard me right. Cancel it. Cold turkey. Cut the umbilical cord and free yourself from your self imposed shackles.

I can hear you now. Grumbling about missing your favorite shows. How will you keep up with current events? Guess what. You won’t miss it a bit. It’s hard to believe but 100% true. One of the best things we’ve done as a family is to cancel the cable. Sure, we still watch movies and we get a couple of channels but we rarely watch at all. What do we do instead? Spend a hell of a lot of time on the internet. Read. Knit. Go for bike rides. Do stuff. If you have kids you won’t believe the positive change this will have on their lives.

Just humor me for a moment. Think for just a minute about how much of your life you spend watching television.

According to a quick internet search,  Americans watch an average of almost 4 hours of TV a day! That’s 28 hours a week, 120 hours a month. 7.5 full 16 hour days a month. A quarter of your life. Holy crap - it’s even worse than I thought!

Where do you fit into this average? If you only watch 2 hrs of TV a day it’s still 60 hours a month. Think about how much you could accomplish in 60 hours a month.

What would you be giving up?

Missing out on the latest hot series. Getting spoon fed your news with a generous helping of advertising. Some great shows on public access networks. You won’t be able to keep up with the latest “what happened on 24 last night” water cooler gossip.

What do you have to gain?

60 hours a month to break out of your holding pattern. In just one month you could be building websites, soaking up useful information, creating ebook products, researching niches, running cheap and effective ad campaigns. In a year or less you could be kissing your J.O.B. goodbye and living anywhere you please. Then you can turn the cable on again (if you still want to).

Food for thought.

mike
:8^)

Why should you care? Camtasia is the industry standard software for recording screen demos. It allows you to create demonstrations of everything from setting up an Adwords account to formatting a Word document. This is an essential tool for internet marketing.

Quick Example 1:

• You come up with a special way to find hot products.
• You record a video demo of your research method.
• You make a few of these into a product
• You sell this product through Clickbank for $27

Quick Example 2:

• You are a wizard with MS Word
• You record a few techniques about setting up cool features
• You make a product out of this and sell it.

It doesn’t matter that this information is available for free on the internet. If you can package something up into an easily digestible form you can sell it. Even something as simple as setting up a Flickr account can be daunting for someone not so computer savvy.

The other great thing about Camtasia is that it creates a complete package of files that you can simply upload to your website to instantly have streaming video. That means when you create your product you have an easy way for people to  view it. I could go on and on.

Even if you don’t see a use for this software right now GO AND DOWNLOAD IT ANYWAY! You can keep it around and use it later. This will save you $299 dollars which is the regular price.

Techsmith is running this promotion for a limited time to promote the new version of the software (Camtasia 5). They do allow you to upgrade from this version to the latest one for a reasonable price. However you will find that version 3 is very full featured and probably all that you will need.

Click this link to download the software. Save the file to your hard drive.
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

Then click this link to register the software.
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp

They will then send you an activation code for the software. Do this part right away before they wise up and finish this free offer.

cheers,

mike

:8^)

There is so much hype around internet marketing that it’s perfectly natural to have doubts about it. The old adage “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is” still applies, but so does “there’s gold in them thar hills”.

This is a real business and it makes real money. It doesn’t mean you will be rich and famous in two weeks but when you do hit the right button the cash will start pouring in regularly.  The opportunities for income are abundant and lucrative.

When someone asks me how to get started I usually point them to the resources on my Profitmuse page (ebooks, links, lessons) or give them a list of ebooks and tell them what order to read them in.

I’m realizing more and more that many people find this amount of information overwhelming. There is so much to learn. They feel they have to read everything and don’t know where to start taking action.

For this reason I’m leaning towards a new strategy of small digestible chunks. My objective is to help YOU get your show on the road. We’ll start with short achievable goals and before you know it you will be rolling forward on your own momentum.

I’m going to give you an easy assignment which is to read one 32 page book.

The book is called “Everyone is an expert” by Seth Godin. It won’t cost you a penny.

You can get it here: http://profitmuse.com/members/ebooks/EveryoneIsAnExpert.pdf

When you are finished, write down five things that you know a lot about. It doesn’t matter if you think they are “common knowledge” or unimportant. Just write them down. This could be anything from carrot cake recipes to trout fishing. The more specific the better.

To summarize your assignment:
  1) Read the book 
  2) Write down 5 things you know a lot about
  3) Send me an email to let me know you finished the assignment. When you do I’ll send you the next lesson.

You can email me at mike[at]profitmuse.com. (replace the [at] with an @)

cheers,
mike

:8^)

There has been so much happening in the last month. My head is swimming with ideas and projects. I bought the DealDotCom product today which was actually something I was looking at a couple of weeks ago. It’s a one time membership fee to a site that helps you find hot products. I followed up on one of the leads and it was good enough that I have a new Adwords campaign running for it.

In the next few months I’m planning to add a membership area to the Profitmuse site. I want to create a place where information is available in small digestible packages. I’ve been talking with a lot of people who are interested in internet marketing, but find it overwhelming.

A great instructor named Dennis Vance once told me a story that hits home in this regard.

He was living in the country and had a problem with deer getting into his garden so he built a fence. Unfortunately the fence he built was too low and the deer could jump over it. So he built one a bit higher. The deer learned to jump over that as well so he built a higher one again. This repeated until he realized that he had trained the deer to be high jumpers! If he had started with the highest fence the deer would never have learned to jump over it.

This idea is a perfect analogy to learning and making progress in your internet marketing career. Small achievable goals are essential to building up the confidence to keep going. If someone is presented with a really high fence they won’t feel that they can climb it. It is also important that each goal results in something concrete and rewarding.

The other guiding principle for teaching is:

“education is not about filling a cup, it’s about lighting a fire”.

My job is not to stuff a lot of information down your throat. My job to open that door just wide enough that you can see the other side and get there yourself.

Hang on. It’s going to be a great ride.

mike
:8^)