You can skip this post if you want – it might bore the pants off you.

It’s 8.37am on a cold Yorkshire morning and I’m going to tell you about ‘a day in the life of an Internet Marketer’ – the glamour, the sex, the parties….

Actually there’s none of that but there ARE bird nuts and filling the dishwasher. This is a potted history because I’ve only been up an hour or so.

7am ish. Wake up to realise my son (9 months old) has slept through the night – a rare happening – rare enough for my wife to listen to the baby monitor and shhhhhh! me every time I breathe in. Rushes to his room to find him beaming happily at her. He just fancied a full night’s kip.

Daughter wakes next and we go downstairs for breakfast, passing my office where I longingly look at my laptops and PC’s brightly lit and buzzing and want to rush in and check the mornings email. Family must come first depsite the fact that THEY won’t have brought in a single sale as they sleep unlike faithful PC’s.

Coffee, waffles and toast later my daughter finds some peanuts we’ve bought for the birds to eat over winter. Depsite being half dressed and it being bloody cold in the garden we go out and put the bird buts on the table. They wait for us to get back inside and swoop.

As brekky continues I escape to my office and start my morning ritual. Plonking my coffe on the desk in a position that could wipe out all three computers with one spill I go to my email page.

I always make sales. Every day without doubt. This is the result of constantly putting up new websites, blogs and recently, lenses. Internet Marketing is all about numbers. The more sites you have out there selling things, the more money you’ll make. So my income comes from my niche websites, my IM-type websites, affiliate sales, royalties and books under license.

I have a target – an amount of money that I like to make in a day – it’s an off the top of my head target but I don’t really relax (if I’m being totally honest) until I’ve pulled that in. This morning I have – most mornings I do.

The ClickBank cheques arrived a few days ago so it’s nice to see the CB receipts starting to come in for the next cheques in 2 weeks time. I get CB cheques every 2 weeks.

In my inbox is a proposal for an ebook partnership. Some are great, some aren’t but this is an ebook I would buy myself. I’ve swapped emails with the author and now he’s sent me the actual book to read. A quick glance and it looks well written. This is a non-IM type book so will be marketed via a blog that I’ll put up today to get indexed ASAP and then it can be changed accordingly when the books ready for market.

A couple of emails from some IM mates – a bit of gossip (didn’t know HE was in trouble!) and some from the mailing lists I’m on providing great content, and some ‘buy me buy me buy me’ ones.

An email from my business partner telling me that a site I promised I’d finish for the end of the week isn’t finished, and another saying I’d had a product accepted for a big ‘giveaway’ type launch done by a well know IM’er. That should bring in a few subscribers to my newsletter.

My wife then walks in and instructs me to ‘shred something’ because she needs some packing for a parcel she’s sending out. She’s also planned a trip for us to buy an antique kitchen rack thing and a new desk for her workroom this afternoon.

Two emails I’m waiting for about meetings next week for new projects I’m involved with don’t arrive. I’ll wait until tomorrow. I write my ‘turd do’ list (dunno why I call it that) and think about a coffee refill. It’s 9am now and I’m wondering whether to actually post this on my blog or does it seem a bit anal?

I’m going to post it because it proves a point – and this is it. I’m 40 years old and I made more money this morning than some people do in a week. Just by waking up and checking my email. Obviously that’s not true – I had to set up an awful lot of websites and do a lot of work to get to this point, but Internet Marketing is LIKE THAT.

Prepare for capital letters – THE MORE WORK YOU DO, THE EASIER IT GETS. Because every new websites piles on top of the last one, and they all keep trickling money into your bank account. And you get to a ‘criticial mass’ stage where you don’t need to do much except take on the role of a gardener and tend to your money plants every once in a while to make sure they don’t die.

I’m not a guru – I dunno how you got to my blog but I bet a fair old percentage of you don’t have a bloody clue who I am. And that is COOL – I like it that way. Gurus work hard to preserve an image and maintain quality. I can sit down and watch the rugby instead.

Non-gurus is where it’s going guys. Quiet, background marketers like me, working in IM and niche marketing and earning a nice amount of money without being an IM rock star. My lifestyle is wonderful. I’ve now done my work for a while. I’m going to go back into the family room now and spend a bit of time with them.

It was a while ago now that I got my business to the point where I could work just a few hours a day and make over $10,000 a month easily. I knew I had to do it before my children were born because I wouldn’t want to work as much once they were here.

I started online with a single website – actually that’s a stupid thing to say because we all start with one – but you see what I mean. Build a website – promote it. Build another. Now build a blog. It’s not hard but it takes consistency. You have to do a bit on a regular basis.

Just got an email from my sis – she’s very successful in medecine. Earns well, lives well. And she drives 100 miles a day round trip and is at her desk from 6.30am until 6.30pm. Imagine what SHE could do in IM with that sort of commitment?

IM is easier than having a full time job…once you get to critical mass that is. 

Easy for me to say now.

But it wasn’t always….

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It’s easy to imagine when you’re reading through forum posts, and contributing to them yourself that you’re in a community that has rules and regulations, and that certain ‘authority figures’ might frown on you if you do something they don’t like. If you’re a newbie you might even have a sense that you could get ‘banned’ from Internet Marketing for not following the somewhat unwritten rules and codes that seem to float about in our business.

Yeah well you couldn’t be any more wrong if you had a degree in wrongness from the University of Southern Wrongville.

There are no rules except one…don’t talk about fight club…..whoops sorry wrong neuron – the ONLY rule you need to follow is to do things your own way and don’t get sucked into what you’re ‘supposed’ to do.

In Internet Marketing the most successful people are rule breakers. the most successful people rub others up the wrong way and basically make a bloody nuisance of themselves. That’s exactly why they’re successful.

If I want to paint my ass green and red and make a Camtasia video of it cashing a Clickbank cheque as proof of my earnings then I’ll do it, regardless of what anyone else in IM thinks or says. Probably won’t make much money mind but it WILL  probably get quite a bit of YouTube airplay. Not that my mother would like though.

And that’s the point. The Internet, depsite many attempts to govern, regulate and even censor content is still the final frontier in terms of freedom today. If you want to try something new in your business chances are you’ll be told it either won’t work or will p*ss people off.

So what?

It costs very little to fail on the net, but the rewards for success are huge. Go try stuff – silly stuff – try making money in the wildest most preposterous ways imaginable.

And when some self appointed referee quietly PM’s you and tells you that you’re going about things in the wrong way and you won’t make much in terms of friends or money, think deeply about his advice, search your soul for the answer…..

Then tell him to bugger off and go try it your way 🙂 

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So it took a little longer to get indexed than I expected – four days actually, but now I’m well and truly indexed.

If you want to find out how I did it, pick up this free publication http://www.anthony-shepherd.com/wpg  – the methods are all in there, and they’re quick and simple to use.

 Kids…..

My children run in and out of my office during the day when I’m working, which is cool – I love having them around and they get to see that Dad actually DOES some work, because the whole concept of work is a bit tricky for them. They can’t quite understand why their friend’s parents have to leave the house to work, and can’t just wander downstairs for a game, a snack or (as recently) to abandon work completely to go and build a squirrel table in the garden so we can watch the little blighters eat peanuts for an hour or so.

I worried about this for a while, thinking they weren’t getting a ‘real’ picture of what work was actually like – my job as a work from home full time Internet Marketer being a little out of the ordinary.

Then I realised that them having a distorted picture of work is a good thing – if they don’t know about having to commute, having a 9-5, working weekends and overtime and basically being out of the house a lot, then great! Let them follow my path (if they want of course) and be the exception to the rule.

Kids often turn out different to their parents expectations though – but as long as they’re happy, who am I to judge if they want to get on the corporate treadmill and work a ‘real’ job for a living?

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Well it’s been 48 hours and my blog still isn’t indexed by Google. I’m not sure why but it’s an interesting experiment.

 I’ll check every day and see how long it takes. This is the only blog I haven’t had indexed within a day or two at least, so it’s typical that this is the one I use as a live experiment of how good my blogging techniques are!

I think it’s gremlins because I said I don’t believe SEO is worth the effort and targeted traffic is much more effective. So with that in mind I’ll start publicising my blog in other ways to get some traffic here.

Other news….

I have 5 hosting providers, with my IM and niche sites spread across them in no particular order. Yesterday one of my hosting providers had a major wobble and it’s possible some of my sites went down for pretty much the whole day (although I was out and can’t be sure – sales were fine so maybe not).

But it made me think about getting everything together on one host – a dedicated server – to minimise problems. Then it hit me that this would be a silly thing to do. If one of my hosting providers bites the dust for a while, at least I have 4/5 of my sites providing an income for me.

And whereas it might go down much less often, if a server with all my sites did go offline for a day, it would completely halt my income until it was back online.

So I think I’ll continue to split the risk among several servers for now and judge the situation as I go. I’ve never had a site go down for more than 24 hours (touch wood!).

Anyway, despite what the press and insurance companies wouldhave us believe, there is an element of risk in life that nobody can be blamed for – call it fate, bad luck or whatever, and I think that’s what makes life exciting!

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That’s a tall order right?

I agree, but I think it’s do-able. I know it’s do-able within 24 hours because my business partner, Sara Brown got her blog indexed within that time http://www.tarrang.com/sarabrown

 It’s all to do with altering the settings of your blog, but if I can do it, in under 10 minutes, I’m pretty sure most of you lot can too. Full instructions are available from this free tutorial http://www.anthony-shepherd.com/wpg

You’ll have to give me your name and email address to get it, but it’s worth it and you just might enjoy my newsletters too.

I’ve just changed the settings on this blog and UK time it’s 10.36am on Friday 2nd November.

Let’s see how long it takes for my blog to get Google-grabbed.

Spend weeks on complicated, expensive and boring SEO?

Don’t think so.

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How long have you been riding then?

Months?

Years?

There are two ways I think you can hop off the IM roundabout. One is to make money. The other is to get extremely bitter and disillusioned, put the whole thing down as a scam and go do something else with your time.

I’m in the first category. With just a laptop and a few ideas I make a nice amount of money each year – certainly enough that I’ll never work for anyone else as long as I live. Some of it comes from selling ebooks in niche markets – sport, health, finance etc and some of it comes from showing other people who want to learn how to do the same, well….how to do it.

I’m a half decent writer, a slightly better copywriter but best of all I have some terrific marketing ideas. Put this lot together and it’s not too difficult to make money online. I’ve made tens of thousand of dollars from a $3 ebook that came with resell rights (Resell rights are nowhere near dead as you’ll find out if you keep reading this blog), and quite a bit selling a smallish ebook that told people about some free software and how to use it.

Someone said most people stop thinking for themselves the moment they’re born. I think the same is true of people the moment they enter Internet Marketing. You could argue that the tried and tested methods that everyone kneels to worship in IM are there because they’ve stood the test of time.

Well so have sexually transmitted diseases but all they’re good for is making your private parts swell up, scab over or drop off.

 SEO – Search engine optimisation is an example of a ‘tried and tested’ method that is next to useless. The effort needed to get SEO to work takes up wayyyy more of your resources than it’ll ever bring in.

I’ll just pause while the sheep baa a little….

I’ll prove this to you in this blog.

Viral marketing on the other hand, is the most effective method of getting the word around about a new product that you’ll ever come across. Get it right and you’ll be banking the cheques for the rest of you life.

This is something else I’ll prove to you.

 There’s more – a lot more, but if I write it all down now there’ll be a three month gap to my next post.

I’ll leave you with this. Some of you who’ve read this will already be getting a bit ‘miffed’ about my SEO comment, because it’s gently rocking the foundations of what you’ve been told (or sold) by experienced marketers. All I ask is this – this blog is free (same goes for my newsletter – sign up on the right) so what have you got to lose?

Treat yourself to a little pure thought. Ask yourself what YOU think for a change. Forget the forums, the arguments and the experts and think about listening to me, just for a while – some English guy you’ve never heard of but whose smallish list constantly outsells almost every marketer he’s ever JV’d with.

Oh yes – and I’ll prove that too.

I thought about being a little less abrasive in my writing because it could come across as a ‘selling technique’.

 It isn’t – it’s just that I’m very passionate about Internet Marketing

Hope you’ll stick with me

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This is my first post on my new shiny blog. I’m a bit unhappy because as soon as I got it up and working the bloody thing told me my version of WordPress was out of date and to install a new one. Maybe later.

It’s traditonal to say ‘welcome to my new blog’ but I think it’s a wee bit corny to say the least and let’s be frank – unless I’ve anything interesting to say in the next few lines you’ll be off never to return…….which is why you should read the next post carefully…especially if you’ve never made a penny online.

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