I think it was GB Shaw who said ‘Youth is wasted upon the young’

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but here’s a Tony Shepherd quote that I’m pretty sure is true:

‘It takes a long time to learn to break the rules, but it’s the best lesson you’ll ever take’

When you’re a child you learn pretty fast that the best way to survive – in life – in school – is to blend in. So you colour inside the lines, don’t ask too many questions in class and make sure your homework is in on time.

As you get older (about 40 I reckon – ahem!) you start to seriously enjoy breaking the rules. Getting your nipples pierced, not washing your car ever, and wearing top hats.

When my wife was teaching she brought home a ‘stranger danger’ book that she’d been showing to her class, warning them not to trust people – especially men  – they didn’t know.

Through hysterical giggles she opened the book to show me the ‘stranger danger’ man who had unkempt hair, a beard and torn jeans. He looked exactly like me.

Most perverts I’ve seen on TV look like lawyers (maybe they are) but we musn’t break the rules by telling kids this.

Actually the media goes on all the time about how dangerous terrorists are, and muggers and identity theives and the like but I thought about this. Who has relieved me of most of my money in my adult life?

It wasn’t some bloke in a hooded top with a knife requesting my wallet or someone who pretended to be me and bought a porsche on Ebay – No – it was some bloke in a suit called ‘the tax man’ or in a bank or a lawyers office! Yet we’re taught to be wary of people in scruffy shoes.

Armani suits and silk ties more like.

 I digress…..

Yet again we can relate this to internet marketing. Most successful internet marketers didn’t become that way until they learned to break the rules. We’re told to submit articles, construct sales pages in a certain way, bang away at your list with an autoresponder and never, ever offer too many freebies to your list or that’s all they’ll want.

Why the hell do top marketers tell people this WHEN THEY DON’T DO IT THEMSELVES?

Look Mr Guru – if you explain the truth to me slowly with pictures and pretty diagrams I’ll understand it.

I might not be a neuro surgeon but I can tie my own shoes. Don’t insult my intelligence by telling me to follow the rules when you know damn well that the fastest way to get rich in IM is to break them!

 So I broke the rules and now earn 6 figures. That’s it.

Here’s the plug. I wrote down one of the methods I used to do it. The experts tell you not to do it this way but they’re wrong. It worked. I tried giving stuff away and earned eight thousand dollars in a number of weeks. That was just ‘trying it’. Now I’m serious about it and guess what? The money is increasing.

I don’t put my picture in it though – I don’t want to scare you!

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I’ve been called an expert on Viral Marketing.

The reason for this is that I don’t like emailing people asking for JV’s or checking out products that other people ask me to push to my list for them. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve regularly undertake JV’s and they always – always – bring in a big cash boost, so I’m not complaining (much).

 What I’m saying is that I want my business to be completely self-sufficient so that I never need to do another JV as long as I live if I don’t want to and still remain extremely comfortable as a full-time marketer.

Impossible?

Not with viral marketing. It’s the best kept secret in Internet Marketing – because when you think of viral marketing you think of submitting articles, rebranding e-reports and the like. Some of viral marketing IS about that but not the way WE do it.

If you could throw together in a couple of days a viral product that would then roam the internet for as long as you wish throwing money back into your bank account as it went, wouldn’t you have a go?

Don’t take my word for it – Google ‘viral sneakiness’ and read the reviews from the people who use the system themselves.

www.viralsneakiness.com

 

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I have a really badly knackered knee.

I sometimes tell people that it got injured as a I rescued a little old lady from muggers. Other times I’ll say it was a motorbike accident sustained as I crashed on a Greek island (that actually happened but I was completely uninjured because luckily (for me) I came off my bike, flew 12 feet through the air and landed on someone.

In reality I injured my knee (quite seriously actually) watching Yoga on TV. Not doing Yoga you understand – just watching it.

I’d had a few beers and was relaxing after a long dinner and great conversation with my wife. She wandered into the kitchen to refill her wine and I flicked the TV on. I still don’t know what the TV was showing but they were featuring a 98 year old woman in a leotard who was a Yoga master. She was chatting away while sitting in the lotus position (for those who don’t know it’s a sort of cross-legged position but with your fee on TOP of the opposite leg)

Well machismo kicked in and I said to myself – ‘If she can do it at that age, then I can’

But I couldn’t. I used to be quite supple but not any more.

After 5 minutes of sweating and cursing I got hold of my left leg with both hands and pulled it onto my left knee. For half a second I actually acheived the Lotus position.

Then my knee emitted a noise like someone grinding a walnut between two bricks and a wave of pain hit me like a Tsunami.

As my wife (who’d heard me scream) pulled my legs back into their usual position while yelling at me for being a ‘silly bugger’ I vowed that I’d never again worry about what other people could do that I coudn’t.

Which is why I’m very happy with my Internet business. It’s doing pretty well both with Sara and with my own ventures.

 So when the latest marketing guru tells me what I should be doing, I squeeze me knee until it hurts, re-learn the ‘Yoga Injury’ lesson and go do my own thing.

Hurts less.

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One of the things that is written on the whiteboard in my office, and that is uppermost in my mind pretty much every day of my working life is this:

‘CREATE ANOTHER STREAM’

It’s possibly the main reason that I’m a full-time marketer when so many other people aren’t.

It’s no secret or anything – it’s just that my income comes from more than one source.

I’ve actually never sat down and counted how many income streams I have. The trackers and testers among you will be freaking out now I guess but my answer is ‘why do I need to know exactly how many streams I have?’

I know what they are and I pretty much know when any of them increases, decreases or stops generating profits. That’s because, like most successful online marketers, I have a feel for my business that goes beyond tracking and testing, which I actively dislike.

It’s no exaggeration that I can look at my Paypal and Clickbank accounts and almost read it in the way that geeky bloke in ‘The Matrix’ reckoned he could see an attractive blonde women in those green squiggles on the PC screen.

I can tell when it’s a slow week or that one website isn’t performing well or is having tech problems, just as I can tell when I get a surge of unexpected traffic and sales increase.

I’d guess that I have somewhere between 50 and 100 seperate income streams, including (and mostly being) ebooks sold from stand alone or mini sites, but including affiliate sales, adwords, offline book sales, niche markets etc (JV’s don’t count because they’re bonus income surges and I don’t like to reply on them as day to day income. This also means that if my business is successful without JV’s I don’t have to ass kiss as so many people do, afraid they’ll get kicked out of the JV circle).

I also have a number of hosting providers. I’ve considered time and time again moving everything to one huge server but it’s a question of risk – if I did and my server blew up I would lose my entire income overnight. as things are, being hosted on numerous different sites means that if one of them has serious downtime I still have the others to provide me with a living.

It’s a personal choice of course, but that’s what being in business is about – making your own decisions and not letting other people do it for you.

The more income streams you can generate the safer you are. People often ask how much I was earning before I knew it was safe to go full-time. Actually it wasn’t quite like that – it was more a case of how many income streams I had ( I had a few from online marketing and a few from offline).

Once you’ve set up an income stream in place (by which I mean it’s bringing money in, not just a pretty website) then build another one. Rinse and repeat.

You’re actually reading one of my fastest growing income streams – it’s this blog. People are becoming much more used to buying from blog than they were even last year. I also find it immensley enjoyable to write. A great combination for an income stream.

If you want to find out how I maked money from writing down my feeble personal thoughts have a look at www.blogyourwage.com

It’s free.

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About 3pm yesterday afternoon, which in Yorkshire at this time of year is when it starts to go dark, there was a knock at the door.

I was working in my office and the kids were sitting in front of a warm TV so my wife answered the door.

I heard some mumbling then she called me to the open door. As I passed her she turned to me and raised her eyebrows a little making sure the person standing in the doorway couldn’t see her.

The sky was turning dark so I flicked on the outside light and watched the poor bloke’s pupils shrink to the size of decimal points as the light hit him full in the face.

He nodded and said ‘Sorry to bother you sir (HOW old am I?) but we’re in the area clearing roof guttering and we wondered if you’d like your guttering clearing out and sealing. We can do the work right now’.

Before he’d finished speaking I interrupted with ‘How much?’

‘A tenner’ he said in what I now recognised was a broad Irish accent. I told him I thought that was a fine price and he should start immediately.

Now there are, in my part of the world, unscrupulous individuals who offer to replace tiles, clear gutters and the like, then go up on your roof, break as many tiles as they can without being noticed, tell you your roof is knackered and will rain in at the first sign of a dark cloud then charge you £400 to fix it.

Which is why whenever anybody offers to do work on my house like this, I pour a small glass of scotch and go outside talking to them while they work.

Which is what I did.

Now my home is the larger part of an old property that has been split into two. The gutter runs along the front and rear roof of the house, which is quite long. Not too bad for the workers,  but it also runs along two extensions and a garage that have been added on over the years.

It’s also over 200 years old and the gutters are wide and deep – perfect in fact for all manner of sludgy, crappy, smelly wet goo to gather there.

Which is why I don’t do the job myself.

The poor blokes were at it for nearly an hour. They thought it should be a 5 minute job, but instead it turned into 60 finger numbing, cold, wet minutes for ten pounds. There were two of them so that was a fiver each. Not good pay by any standards.

But (here comes the marketing bit) they weren’t doing it for the money – they were doing it as a loss leader – to get a foot in the door if they will. Just like offering a freebie from your website to get prospects to know and trust you. Once they’ve downloaded the freebie you can start to sell to them.

Which is what they did next.

‘Your roof’s in really good condition, sir’ they said.

‘But your ridge tiles…..’ Here he made the sound that only builders and car mechanics can make by sucking in a long breath of air over clenched teeth. The one that tells you it’s going to cost a lot of money to fix.

It seems my ridge tiles were ‘shagged’ and at the first sign of rain would leak like a minor government official.

Good news though – they could fix the problem for just £280 – about $560.

I knew for a fact that my ridge tiles were not shagged or anything else because a builder friend who did a bit of work for me in the summer told me they were in very good condition.

I said I didn’t want any more work doing, thanks. That got rid of their ‘upsell’ but quick….what’s this?

Now they showed me their TIME LIMITED OFFER

He said ‘I know money can be tight after Christmas sir, but since we’ve no work on until next week we’ll do it for you for just £250, but we’ll have to start this week.

 When I said no they said I offered a hard bargain and introdued their ‘ONE TIME OFFER’ – never to be seen again, of just £200 – ‘and I’m cutting me own throat at that price’.

Well I turned them down again and by now the sky was very dark and my scotch had gone. So had my interest in the encounter, but it made Me think about my own business – and to those of us who think that time limited offers, one time offers and sales generating freebies are a cutting edge internet concept, think again eh?

PS It won’t be funny if it DOES rain in next time the storm clouds gather.

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Happy New Year, and if you celebrate it, I hope you had a great Christmas too.

We’re in the process of building a site where subscribers can distribute their free products. It’s free for subscribers to my own and Sara Brown’s newsletters and although I don’t have to explain the potential of this, subscribers should watch their inboxes for our newsletters, for more details.

I love Christmas and the holiday season brought family get togethers, great meetings with friends we don’t see often enough and a father in law who drunk most of my 10 year old Irish whiskey.

Luckily I hid the Scotch.

And as the New Year came and went I realised how a persons work can affect their whole outlook on life.

As usual, despite having a hangover I was very excited to wake on the first day of a new year and spend half an hour lying in bed while the house was quiet thinking about plans and possibilities for the coming year.

As everyone else awoke (we had a house full over the hols) i realised that those people who were heading back to work the next day were already planning their next holiday – one friend in particular said she couldn’t wait for summer because she had a big holiday planned.

I absolutely agree – but what about the time in between when you can make a start on shaping how you want your life to develop over the next 12 months?

In contrast, a couple of friends who run their own successful business were looking forward to next week when a new ad campaign goes live and they expect a rush of sales – they’re excited about the planning and tracking of the whole thing to see if it works as well as they hope.

Spot the difference?

And this is why you absolutely need to work for yourself.

Because people who run their own businesses don’t throw away big chunks of their lives waiting for the small gaps in their 9-5 job when they can ‘be themselves’.

People who work for themselves know that their businesses are part of their lives – a vibrant, important, vital part of their existance and while they might look forward to a holiday in the sun, they would be horrified to think that the bits in between that are part of their extrememly limited time on earth, shouldn’t be just as important and exciting.
It’s all part of being alive.

Unless you’re very lucky, if you have a 9-5 job then chances are you’re wishing a big part of your life away by ‘passing the time’ until the next week off comes around.
This is why I started to work for myself and why I can never work for anyone else again.

Not because I’m any more intelligent, talented or entrepreneurial than you are, but because I’ve woken up, smelt the coffee and fully realise that it would be like agreeing to throw away a big part of my life, and I enjoy it too much to do that.

Shake off your doubts, fears and anxiety and start work on your business. Make 2008 the year that you take charge of your life.

It’ll take work, effort and it won’t be a walk in the park but it’s still easier than working a 9-5 for the next 20 years.

I’d raise a glass to toast ‘new beginnings’ but a house guest who shall remain nameless would probably grab it from my grasp and down it in one!

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