No Opt-ins!

As of March 15th, 2009 we have made the decision that we will NEVER ask you for your name and email address!

We know that everyone in marketing says that you can increase your earnings by an average of 40% by using opt-in forms to gather names and email addresses so you can send out emails with other back end offers. 

Well, we refuse to follow that philosophy!

Here's 10 good reasons why!

1. We don't like getting a bunch of useless emails ourselves, and so we refuse to put other people through all that!
   

2. Most of the people who do this have been brain-washed into the idea by all the marketing hype going on in the internet marketing circles!
   

3. Most of the people who do this, and do it well, are the ones who are already making plenty of money and don't NEED to do it! 
   

4. We believe that if you have a quality product of your own to begin with, or ones that you have checked out and can recommend to people, and show the customer a better way to keep in contact with you, that the customer will come back on their own to get more!
   

5. There are many other ways of getting traffic and sales without having to constantly pester people with sales offers! Those tactics may work for some people, we just think there is another way!
   

6. We have read too many complaints recently about how some "so-called professional" marketers have been selling their email lists to third party mailers just to increase their profits, and we don't want to be accused or even suspected of that in any way shape or form! We don't share information with anyone to begin with, nor do we ever want to be accused of it!
   

7. That same "professional" marketer, who has been flitting around like a "butterfly", trying to make every last dime from everywhere he can at the expense of his customers (including selling their email addresses to other people), has now lost a good portion of his subscribers due to the bad publicity spread in the forums, so what he could have gained, he has now lost.
   

8. Opt-in lists create more work for the list manager and marketer, so most of the 40% increase in profits is spent in time and money to continually generate more newsletters, more offers, more programs to sell people just to keep them from dropping off those lists!
   

9. They say that once you know how, managing all that and creating new content is easy. It may be for some, but others struggle with it! All of that extra work takes time and money!
   

10. We know that there are other people and other marketers who believe in the same things that we do, many marketers who are running successful businesses that truly run on "autopilot", without all those lists, and that there are other people who would like to do the same!

That is what our business is all about, and therefore we don't ask you to "opt in". As an alternative, if you would like to hear more, and keep up with our information and progress on a regular basis.....

 Here's what you can do:

1. Bookmark our site, or add it to your favorites (depending on what browser you are using. The only problem with that, is that bookmarks usually get buried among all the other bookmarks you have saved and soon gets lost in the mess.
   

2. (The better way): (On Internet Explorer) Once you are on our site, go the file menu of your browser (in the upper left corner), click on it, and then find the "send" menu item. Hover your mouse over it, and it will open up a second menu list where you will find "Shortcut on Desktop". Click on it. That's all there is to it! Now you will find our site on an icon right on your desktop, where you won't forget it, and with one (double) click it will take you right to our site. If you have a particular page on any site that you are interested in, this is how you create a direct link to that page any time you want to.

If you learned something from this last little trick, then hold on, because these are the kinds of "how to" items that we will be bringing you on a regular basis as part of the way WE teach marketing!

Don't get us wrong, we know that for some, list building can help get a business going when other methods have failed. You have to ask yourself the question "WHY did they fail?"

I can almost guarantee that a lot of the reason had to do with time spent in the wrong places. Part of what has led up to that is all the research that needs to be done to try to figure out what to do to make a project work, and from my own personal experience, I have to lay the blame on the way marketing is done.....not sales.....but marketing!

The "what to" instead of "how to" game...

Too many so-called "gurus" want to tell you only enough to peak your interest! They will thrill you with all their so-called "know-how" to get you to buy products from them, and you won't realize until after you've spent your money that they always leave out some critical information that you need to know to move ahead. Why? 

Well, because that information is continued in the next item that they have to sell you! That's how they keep you coming back to buy more products! This is what perpetuates the whole list-building theory, and it's why it exists!

They want to tell "what" you should do but don't tell you "how" to do it! That's how they can keep you coming back to sell you the next higher priced product, until they finally have you locked into some very expensive coaching program where you can actually "talk" to someone to get straight answers on a particular topic. 

By then, they have you working on your own opt-in list, because they know that once you become successful, they have acquired another marketer "buddy" that they can do a joint venture with, who will then promote their product to yet another list, to help THEM make even more money! 

It all boils down to sales volume, but there are no principals involved! It becomes like selling your soul for the sake of that extra name that you can market to, whether that name is interested in the product or not! It comes down to greed, and the chase for the almighty dollar!

I guess I can understand the "game" they play. Some enjoy being in business, and just have to keep making it to that next level of play. So what if they are already making a million dollars a year? One of their golf buddies makes more, so they have to "prove" that they can do even better, so their next goal is 1.2 million.

It's the constant competition that drives them, and they enjoy it immensely! That's OK....for them. But what does it take to get to that next level? It takes time and commitment to what you are doing, to continually build your business.

Most people don't have the focus, the determination, the ambition, or any of the other attributes to be that successful, which is why (if you look at the statistics) over 80% of the people trying to market on the internet aren't even meeting their normal household budget yet!

They waste too much time getting overwhelmed with emails, marketing offers, and the information overload that is typical of internet work. Before they can get one marketing campaign off the ground, they see some other method that "might" work better, and so off they go again on another project, leaving the first one unfinished. If you don't break that cycle at some point, this is all that will ever get done, and EVERY campaign will fail. This will lead you to assume that internet marketing doesn't work, and then you will give up on it!

If you do get something going, and it involves lists, I can guarantee you that most people will end up doing all the work it takes to keep up with the maintenance (and sales programs to those lists) that you will end up working fulltime in another J-O-B. If you are working "in" your business, instead of "on" your business, then it is no better then working for someone else! 

Even if you have other people running the daily grind for you, you still have to take part in it to make sure it stays with what you intend for your business to be. These self-employed people can tell you they don't have a job....that they work "for themselves"....but the truth is, that most of them have an office, with employees, with commitments to other people, and responsibilities besides knowing when the next tee-off time is, or when the next high surf is coming in! Basically IT IS a J-O-B, only now they have customers and employees to commit to, instead of someone else!  I don't see any difference!

They all tell you that if you want to be successful, that you HAVE to build a list of people to sell to! 

Baloney!

There are thousands of marketers who have figured out ways to make a comfortable income without all that maintenance work, and that is the philosophy that we agree with, follow, and teach here. In fact, here are the rules we have created for ourselves that  we base our business philosophy on:

• We will no longer become a warehouse for buying bulk quantities of products. It limits our freedom, and is WAY more work than it's worth!
  

• We will no longer waste time with cheap  "one-shot" products that take more time to write sales copy for, and take pictures of, than the commissions are worth! (Sound familiar, auction people?) It's not that we're against auctions, but there IS a way of doing it right, and profitable!
  

• We will find alternative ways of getting traffic (Hurray!) other than building lists! (Yuck!)
  

• We will find EVERY way of operating an internet business from nothing more than our computers! That way, we can run our businesses from anywhere we want to!
  

• We will run our businesses without employees, and if we have to deal with outsourcing, it will be kept to a bare minimum, and not on a regular basis!
  

•  We will make AT LEAST 75% of our business run on total autopilot, so that once a particular product system is set up, it will take no more than one hour per month to maintain it. That will make time for moving on to the next product system, and the next, and the next, until our income is where we want it!
  

• We will keep the list of these rules in constant growth, so that we can continually focus on exactly what avenue makes us the most money in the shortest amount of time....WITHOUT A LIST!
  

If you believe in the same philosophy that we have laid out above, then follow along at your own pace. You know where to find us, and now we have shown you how to make it easy to get back here! Just put that little icon on your desk top, and with one double-click you can get back here anytime you want!

However, if you still believe in list building, it's OK. We may not agree with everything you say, but if it works for you, please do what makes you happy! It just isn't "our" preferred way of marketing.

Oh sure....list building makes additional money from future sales, and I have no argument that a satisfied customer is more likely to buy a second time, and that the advertising costs to generate sales from that existing customer is WAY less than from acquiring new customers. All of that is true. 

Sometimes contacting those customers can take very little time and generate huge profits. No argument there.

 But what these gurus don't tell you is that in between all that is a constant barrage of newsletters, follow up emails, customer service issues (most of them just answering questions), developing of new products to continually sell, the cost of the autoresponder service, and the time it takes to maintain all of this. That's not a business....it's a J-O-B!

They want to make it sound easy, because the more people they can "make successful" the more people that they can add to their lists and sell future products to, and that they can partner with later to sell products to more people than just those on their own lists! It's all one big, vicious, time-consuming cycle....but where does it end?

There are many other ways of getting traffic without going to all that trouble, and if you deliver quality products, and do it the right way, and train people how to find you again, those people WILL find you! There is no need to pester them nearly every day with stuff that they are only going to buy a small portion of the time!

The fallacy in lists...

Lists are great if you are continually keeping in contact with people about the kind of product they are interested in. But marketers automatically assume that if it has "anything" to do with marketing, they are going to present it to you, whether you have any interest in it or not! 

This is where the newbies get lost in the flood of emails! Instead of getting information ONLY about the particular method of marketing they are interested in, they get all kinds of offers about everything imaginable!

Granted "some" things, like graphics programs are necessary to ANY method of marketing, but if you aren't into building lists, then you don't need to be hit with every new offer on that topic! If you aren't doing PPC, then why listen to every new offer about it!

If marketers would only ask you, in a short questionnaire, what topics you would like to receive information about, they could focus their lists to only those buyers and save everyone a lot of time, but very few of them do. It's much easier to it "everyone" with an offer than to miss out on a few sales!

I hate unwanted emails....

....even if they are from a marketer that I follow, and even if they have a good product to let me know about! Do you know why?

The #1 biggest problem with new marketers getting started in business (and I'm talking ANY business, not just the internet marketing products circle) is TIME. 

Many people are trying to do this while maintaining a full time job elsewhere. Even the ones who are getting into it full time can tell you that the amount of time they spend learning this business can be overwhelming! A good part of that time is spent going through emails from all kinds of places, trying to keep up with what's going on in the marketplace!

I know, because at one time, I was getting email newsletters from nearly a hundred different marketers! I have to admit that not all of that time was wasted, because I DID gain a lot of valuable information from it, but it was at the cost of NOT making the money I wanted to be making! You can't be focusing on making money when you have your head in emails for most of the day!

So how do you get out of that rut?

As we progress to build this site, we will be showing you how...because we have done it ourselves, and having been through it, we can save you countless hours of time by first guiding you to the TYPE of marketing that suits you best. Once you know that, you can eliminate most of the emails you will receive from marketers who don't specialize in that type of marketing! 

Q:  How do we know our methods work?

We started off with a product that isn't even on anyone's radar, as far as the number of people looking for it on the web.  It was not an ideal product, the site isn't the best looking, there has NEVER been an opt-in box (until recently, when we discovered that it wasn't worth the effort and took it off again), there is no other monetization on the site (yet)....in fact we didn't even do our research on the product! It was just something that we happened to find available, so we used it. The only thing we have done is to run the pages through a free analyzing tool and tried to get the generic SEO as good as we could, and yet the site continually makes a profit, each and every month, and the sales are growing!

Now if that can be done with a product and a site like that, then why can't a business be built around twenty such sites? Only this time, let's do our niche research, build a simple but good looking site for the product, monetize the site with other products, and then optimize the site for the search engines! Do you think it might do twice as good.....maybe three times....maybe ten times better than the first one? Of course it will!

This is how web businesses are built....without all the hype of getting into marketing "marketing products" to other marketers! If you have a product (or maybe more than one) that doesn't fall into the "internet marketing" niche, then why listen to all the hype from people who are only trying to help you get into "their" marketing niche in order to perpetuate their own plan!

The internet marketing niche is such an over-saturated niche to begin with, that getting a number #1 position (or even a first page position) on the search engines is going to be next to impossible! That's why the marketers working in that niche think they have to build lists to begin with. They think that if they didn't, people wouldn't find them! 

Do we even need some of their information?

As much as I hate to admit it, yes, we do. Many of their marketing plans and ideas are based on sound business principles which will work for any product in any market. The problem is that there is an awful lot of re-hashed junk out there. In fact some of them will tell you to take someone else's product, rewrite it in your own words and then turn around and sell it as your own, just to create a product to make more money with!

Oh come on, people....!

How many times do you have to read the same business plan over and over again? And many of the marketers haven't even used the plan themselves....they're only promoting some other marketers product to make sales from it! They don't even know if it works!

The thing you have to be careful of here is the trap of internet marketing! Here's how it works:

• You find a product that can help you in your non-IM business, such as graphics for your golf shoe web site.
  .

• It offers you a link to become an affiliate so you can make sales from selling it to someone else.
  

• So you end up promoting that product to other people.
  

• Where do you find most of them? In the internet marketing circles, because that's who would use that product! Even the keywords that you have to use to promote the product are geared toward that niche!
  

• So now, suddenly, you ARE one of those marketers that you didn't want to become!

Q:  Yeah, but is that all bad, and aren't YOU in this business, too?

No, it's actually not bad at all. After all, isn't that what this site is geared to, even though we have many other sites and products that don't fall into this niche? Here's why:

• We had to learn from "somewhere" how to market those other products, didn't we?
  

• In the process, we were led into training on creating web sites, reading html, writing good USP's, writing sales copy, adding payment processors, getting traffic, AdWords, Adsense, PPC, CPA, SEO, Blogs, monetization, auctions, comparison shopping engines, and on and on and on.....which are ALL tools that are used in marketing ANY product!
  

• Since all of these things are such hot topics to literally EVERYONE with a web site (that's billions of us), it only makes sense that there are a lot of people looking for this information....right?
  

• Since all of us are business people and "entrepreneurs" we are in the business of making money regardless of what the product is, so why not get our piece of the action in this industry...... right? We'll just sell to the people that already are looking for the information!
   

• That's how you get suckered into this industry! But you don't have to make it the focal point of your business! If you have your other businesses set up and running on autopilot like they should be, then you can use the profits in these businesses, to help others to be successful. It's always a good feeling to know that you have made the world a better place by helping people out of the stress of a normal J-O-B type of life, and made their lives more comfortable. And if you can make a little money at it, so be it.

What about some guidance?

Of course, you need guidance!

You also need some fresh ideas, questions answered, and many other things, WITHOUT the constant pressure of someone trying to push some product down your throat every day! You may even need some questions answered on a one on one basis, or help from other people who have been there and can tell you how to proceed. 

We will have all of that here for you.....AS you are ready for it. First we want to help you get started in marketing your own product, and we're going to guide you step by step, with actual "HOW TO" information, not just "what to" information.

For instance, we went for years before we had a need to put a digital product on a site. When we needed that information on how to load a simple .pdf to the server so a customer could download it, we looked high and low, wasted countless hours of going through technical web sites that spoke languages we had no clue about. 

Every site we looked to for help had a different way of doing it, none of which we could understand or apply to our own needs. It took us many more weeks of confusion before we came across it by accident....when we weren't even looking for it! And once we found it, it was drop-dead simple!

The worst part was, we had been getting newsletters for years from all of these top-level marketers, who "said" we ought to to market digital products, and who sold us on collecting all this stuff (at a price) they we could re-sell with all kinds of imaginable rights involved.

But they didn't give us the "how" information to get it done! 

This is a serious problem in this industry, and one that we hope to overcome with proper and complete training and information.  

What's in it for us?

Like anyone else in business, we plan to make a profit from our efforts in helping people, but we're going to do it at YOUR pace....not ours! This isn't the only site we have going, and our profits are scattered among many sites, most operating all by themselves, without our help or interference. This one is no different. We will be here to answer questions for you, also. We won't charge you any membership fees, nor will we collect your name and address. 

That is why our contact form can be sent WITHOUT your name or email address having to be entered. If you choose to remain anonymous, we will post the answers to your questions on the page in our site relating to the question, where everyone can find the answers. There are NO sign-ups, NO opt-ins, NO memberships here AT ALL!

How will we make any money?

Our profits will come not only from our other online ventures, which continue to grow, but from the recommendations we make to the literature, programs, videos, audios, and software that we hope you will buy through our links. 

However, as you now know how we feel about a lot of the re-hashed junk on the market, you have to realize that we won't recommend things that we have not examined thoroughly ourselves, or that we haven't used in our own business. We have been involved with marketing for nine years now, and we have seen what's available, and keep up to date with the new stuff.

That doesn't mean that we are going to nickel and dime you at every turn! We have a lot of free stuff available, too, and will make that available as we can get it ready to download. We want you to learn how to market your own products the right way, and hopefully set an example that we can all be proud of.

In the process of our learning, we have determined a definite path that we want to follow, and most of what we recommend will be geared toward that path for you also. 

Occasionally, we may recommend things that are not on that path, but we will have examined them thoroughly and feel that they will benefit others. Some may want other things, other information, or may be advanced beyond our own capabilities. That's fine. We're not "gurus" nor do we want to be. We're just here to help those lost in the jungle of the internet, and if we can help you find a way out of the jungle, and onto a clear path of success, then we have done our job.

We realize that there is more than one way to find that success, and each has to find his own "specialty".  We're gearing this site more toward beginners than the pros, bit even so, maybe the pros can learn a few tips. Some of them can definitely use a few (like how to quit selling the names of their subscribers to every spammer in the business)!

Where do we go from here?

We will be working on this site on a constant basis. It may even change looks completely before it's over. It will have a blog added in the near future, possibly one that is totally off this site. 

Products will be added as we have time to evaluate them before we recommend them. Articles will be added as we have time to write them, and we hope to make these articles a complete teaching platform, so that every person who comes to this site can leave it feeling that they have learned a complete process before they move on to the next step. 

Having spent much of my life writing training and operating manuals for complex machines, in a step by step process (after all, people can get killed by machines that do the wrong thing at the wrong time!) I am very thorough in creating those same step by step instructions for everything that I do....leaving no step unmentioned!

If this is the kind of training that you need, then this is the place for you. Here are the first steps, which are more like things to think about as we progress into the rest of the program. The details will come later:

(1) Should you even be in this business?

(2) Exactly what business is this, and how do I fit in?

(3) How do I find customers?

Stick around and watch us grow!