Early feedback from The KickStart Course is pretty good. Actually it’s better than pretty good – subscriber Vanessa Deux said ‘This is what I’ve been looking for since I started trying to make an online business work!’

Alex Jeffreys wrote us a rare testimonial too after we met up in London and I gave him early bird access to the lessons.

More than half of the 500 available places have already been snapped up – and that’s from just launching to subscribers! Tomorrow The KickStart Course will go ‘live’ on the internet in general, and we fully expect it to sell out in a few days -perhaps even hours as our last subscription site did.

If you’re struggling with success online you need guidance – you need information that leaves nothing out – even if you think you already know what you’re doing, you still might be missing those tiny details that mean the difference between success and constant money worries.

For example – we thought we knew how autoresponder systems worked until someone pointed out that we were leaving thousands of dollars on the table by not knowing this one, TINY piece of info.

We put it right very quickly I can tell you – and it goes to show that you never stop learning.

If you want to know how to set up a six-figure online business from a course that explains the most basic of steps right up to the most advanced marketing tricks, subscribe to The KickStart Course before it goes live tomorrow.

Be quick!

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We’ve just let loose www.kickstartcourse.com to a limited number of people, so it’s going to move pretty fast

If you’ve always felt you’ve been held back by not having an online direction, lack of knowledge or worse, fear of getting started (this is more common than you think), please give yourself a break and check out the site above.

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I’m writing this blog post from my hotel room at the UK Focus Marketing seminar in London. Heathrow actually.

I set off from home on a cold dark Yorkshire morning at about 6am and by 9.30am I was sitting in the hotel reading the Financial Times, four hours too early to check in.

Luckily I spotted one of my IM buddies staggering across the hotel suffering from a hangover from the night before so we went to have breakfast and he gave me the low down on what had happened since the seminar started on Friday.

After that we went into the seminar room itself – filled with about 100 people (I’m guessing) to watch the speakers.

Now I’m going to give you more info next week about the speakers – I’m not making any judgements because I’m going for for a Chinese meal tonight with some friends from the biz, and I’ll get to know more about what’s going on then.

I will tell you though, that I’ve seen mentoring products on offer ranging from $4,000 right up to $30,000 today, although the latter was discounted down to $4k for seminar attendees.

The best deals though, are the ones that are struck through an informal chat over a coffee or lunch – and in the bar tonight I think there’ll be some major JV’s arranged. The question is will anyone remember the details in the morning 🙂 ?

More soon

Tony

PS Don’t forget about the new launch we have for you – Monday 20th October  – 5pm UK time, 12noon EST.

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I’m going to The UK Focus Internet Business Building Seminar in London on 17th-19th October.

Here’s a link http://www.focusmarketingseminars.com/ukevent/

I’ll be honest and say I’m going for two reasons – firstly it’ll be extremely good for networking and meeting new contacts and potential JV partners.

But secondly and most importantly, I’m meeting up with a couple of IM mates for a few beers in the bar.

I’m flying down from Yorkshire on Saturday morning and returning Sunday afternoon so it’s quite a way to go for one night but it’ll be worth it.

After driving up to the Scottish highlands the other week, which cost me around £140 (almost $300) in petrol I decided flying would be considerably cheaper and I got a flight for £150. Not quite cheaper but easier than a 4 hour drive.

If you’re going to be at the seminar feel free to tap me on the shoulder and say hello – It’s always nice to meet other marketers, and especially subscribers or readers.

Should be fun. And if any ‘top marketers’ get a bit worse for wear and end up running round the hotel bar in their boxer shorts with an ice cooler on their heads I’l llet you know. Even if it’s me.

Likewise If the whole thing is just a pitch-fest or is about getting people excited then spending £3,000 on their credit cards I’ll let you know about that too.

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Before I went online I was (surprisingly) offline.

I was in direct mail. In fact there are a few people who kindly read my blog and can remember the early days when I used to write for business opportunity publications.

I had some stunning successes and even more glaring failures and I’d like to share one of the successes with you because it applies just as much to internet marketing as it does to offline marketing. I know because I use this technique in some of my niche sites.

It’s possible that some of you might question the ethics of this method. I’ll leave that up to you. I have no problem with it at all.

Back in the nineties, at least in the UK, people with less than great credit records could have difficulty in obtaining loans and mortgages, (Interestingly it seems as though things are going down the same road at the moment).

I’d noticed that there were one or two publications on sale that offered to show people where they could go to get credit even if they had poor credit records. Once I’d noticed the publications I spotted more and more ads for the same kind of thing. It seemed that there was a market for them.

So I bought a couple. I remember the cheapest was £9 (about $20) and it was 10 roughly photocopied sheets of A4 folded and printed into a small booklet.

All it contained were adverts for small loan companies, offshore banks and details of larger banks who would look at mortgage applications for people who had previously been blacklisted. I phoned a few of these ads and sure enough it seemed as though they did in fact offer sub-prime lending.

After chatting to a few of these people (some of whom were not nice and I got the impression they would ‘send the boys round’ if you missed a payment) I decided to do some of my own research.

Taking the publications I’d bought as a starting point I spent about a week (and over £100) phoning round various organistaions and asking about their policies on sub-prime lending. I went through the Yellow pages and when I’d finished I had enough contact information to publish a decent sized booklet. What’s more the information was up to date.

In essence I’d back engineered an idea after reading through a few publications (which I’d bought legitimately) and improved on their work. Nothing was plagiarised or in any way stolen or misappropriated from the original except the idea, which can’t be copyrighted or ‘claimed’ by an individual.

So I’d seen a good idea and pinched it OR I’d spotted a niche with a few sellers in there already and entered the market alongside them. You decide.

If you’re in Internet Marketing you can’t cry or sulk when this happens to you, because happen it WILL at some point. I had a very nice little income stream coming from an ebook I’d produced about setting up a profitable hobby newsletter from home for a couple of years.

Then suddenly someone came along, bought my book, rewrote it and published the information for free on his website. What hit my business hardest was that he got a higher place in the search engines so my sales dried up. He monetised the site with Google ads and offering a printing service for people who wanted to publish their own newsletters. I was impressed. Very clever – even though it had buggered up my income stream.

I could have tried to do the same – publish the info for free, monetize the site and try to SEO my own site higher in the rankings but it wasnt worth it. I seem to remember banking around $600 a month from the book, but had other streams and genuinely valued the lesson.

So what am I saying about Internet Marketing?

Well I don’t believe the old saying that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’, but I don believe that finding it can be damn hard work.

So I suppose what I am saying is don’t try to be too different. We publish ebooks about how we make money – we give examples, proof of income – the lot. That’s something that’s hard to do unless you’ve made money from IM or unless you’re lying to your readers. There are ways into IM without making a penny as Sara wrote about in a free report some time ago, but if you’re looking for a way in to niche marketing then take a long hard look at what other people are doing.

I’m not saying buy their books and copy them. I AM saying that ebooks are a legitimate source of information if you’re looking to compete in a niche.

Some people have a strange view – that buying a book from a bookshop for research purposes is fine, but buying an ebook with the purposes of entering the same niche isn’t. I think that’s plain wrong.

If you’re looking to get into the viral marketing niche then buy Viral Sneakiness and use the information in it with my blessing. Plagiarise it and I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks but use the information to create your own product and that’s cool. See the difference.

So if you’re interested in tropical fish, buy some books, some ebooks, read some sites and talk to some people. If there are people in that niche already then COMPETE. Make your product better – make it eaier to read or better value. But don’t be put off by people who think they OWN a particular niche because they don’t.

A mate of mine in IM – a talented and clever marketer – told me about how he went into a niche and dominated it completely. In the process he basically wiped out the business of the person who was previosly top dog. Now he didn’t do this on purpose, it was a by-product of him being better at it and offering better products. But his competitor went crazy. Got very angry and pulled a few underhand stunts.

If you trample on someones income stream it’s unfortunate. I don’t think many people would want to do that on purpose. But we are in the business of making money and a sale going to you can mean a sale taken away from someone else.

But with niche marketing your competitiors are providing you with all the information you need to successfully enter that niche, whether they’re aware of it or not. Look at their ads, buy their products, look at what they offer, their upsells – the whole thing.

Your competitors are almost as important as your customers.

Now you might think that’s all well and good but what if you’re the person who’s book is being used as research. Why spend the time and effort it takes to research and write an ebook just for some lazy marketer to come along and pinch your idea?

Well for a start it WILL happen in you’re involved in IM for any length of time. But it doesn’t mean it will affect your business, Many people enter niches and find they either don’t enjoy them or can’t make a profit out of them and leave. Others will enter but won’t be as successful as you. And many more – in fact most people – will never enter any niche because they won’t take action.

But for me the main answer to the ‘why bother’ question is that whether someone pinches my idea or I end up making $10,000 a month from it is that we – you and I – are Internet Marketers. We’re trying to improve our situation – both financially and from a lifestyle point of view and it simple doesn’t matter what other people do. We’re doing this for ourselves and our families, and not for anyone else.

And by doing this we find ourselves in that tiny, wonderful minority of people who are taking responsibility for their own lives (I know you’ve heard this before but it’s true) and are striving to be independent, fearless and just plain BETTER people for doing it.

Comments welcome as always.

Tony

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…and I’m editing a book.

When I was a teenager I could sleep 20 hours a day and still look forward to getting back into bed after a night partying and carousing.

I might still be that way but having small children means I don’t have the chance to find out any more. I was awoken at about 3.50am this morning by my son, who’s not the world’s greatest sleeper, although to be fair he’s still not 2 yet, so I crept out of bed, gathered him up and put him in my place next to his mum in our nice warm bed and padded down to my office to sleep in there. Our house is like musical beds sometimes and not in the way it used to be when I was a teenager!

After about 15 minutes of staring at the ceiling it became pretty clear that sleep wasn’t on the agenda so I fired up the laptops and decided to do some work.

On my desk are two laptops – one running Vista and an older one that runs XP with a slightly dodgy keyboard. I work mostly on the Vista maching but have to swap over when it comes to things like converting a Word doc (although I use Open Office more and more these days) because my version of Adobe Acrobat used for converting Word files to PDF doesn’t run for some reason in Vista.

I don’t have any fancy network between the two, I just email any files to my other laptop as an attachment, do the work I need to do then emai them back.

I use Googlemail to bring all my email addresses together and have more than one Googlemail account for various businesses so partners can log into the email accounts too.

So it’s past 5am now – heading for 6am actually on a Sunday morning and I’m editing a book for http://www.monthlyplr.com It’s not due out until the start of November but I like to be ahead in case anything unforseen crops up. The last http://www.monthlyplrniche.com package was delayed by a day because of technical problems and it bugged the arse off me – I hate not delivering when I say I will. All back to normal now though, and it’s a great package.

A quick check of my emails and I find the usual messages. Weekends are a little quieter in terms of sales but the usual Clickbank and Paypal notifications are there, including an obvious increase in sales from a new upsell I’ve been trying out.

This sells through e-junkie and their stats are a delight to use so I check my weekly income from this one product against the last few weeks and sure enough there’s been a 50% increase. This simply came from changing the look of an upsell page – an one time offer people see when they buy a certain product from me.

So for example they buy product ‘A’ then they when they land on the download page they get the chance to buy product ‘B’ – the upsell – at a reduced price. I’m still tracking the stats (don’t mind testing when it’s with real money) but it looks like around 1 in 10 are buying the upsell. 

The change that I made to this page was simply to remove all graphics from the page. Strange.

6am now. Time for coffee soon. I’ll be working today while the rest of the brood go grocery shopping. We got back from the forest last night and the cupboards are bare.

So internet marketing eh?

Up before 4am on a Sunday morning, planning to work all day sunday and no food in the cupboards. Great stuff!

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I’m writing this from a log cabin in Sherwood Forest.

I’m here with my family for a short break – lots of walking, some trekking then more walking. October is a good time to blow the cobwebs away.

I’ve just come back from sailing in Scotland (you can see the pics below this post somewhere)so found myself sitting in the woods before I’d had time to even lose my sea legs. Which is the whole point of me being an internet marketer.

My business is completely portable. The old laptop on the beach hype is actually true – I could work from anywhere in the world (and frequently do) but hadn’t thought of going into detail about it on my blog until my missus mentioned it would be a great way to show anyone who’s interested how an internet marketing lifestyle (and there are many – but this is the one for me) works.

I thought it might be of value to you if you’re thinking about going full-time as an internet marketer, even if you’re at the early stages (and we have something out soon that could help you go from early stages to ..well wherever you want to go), to see how  I do things and how it fits in with family, kids, day to day life etc.

Many marketers would have you beleve it’s a huge leap from nine to five to five figures a month but it’s not. Not a lot of good me saying that without offering proof which is where I’m trying to go with my blog.

Back to the forest..

To be honest it’s a bit of a working holiday too – my wife has her own business, and has brought some with her and I have my wireless broadband modem with me which will pick up a signal in the weirdest of places and the forest is one of those.

It’s a slow connection here – worse than dial up but for checking emails and posting to a blog it’s not too bad – especially when accompanied by a glass of the red stuff and some good grub. That said I couldn’t pick up a signal in Scotland at all.

So we arrived here on Monday evening. On Tuesday evening I checked my email and found enough Paypal receipts to pay for our holiday. Twice over. So now I’m feeling smug because I’m on holiday for free. I’m only counting Paypal receipts because they’re insant. Clickbank payments take time to arrive although since they changed their payment system I’m about to get paid weekly from Clickbank which is good. Other affiliate payments arrive as and when their owners agree to pay me – usually monthly although weekly isn’t unheard of.

So the reason I can decide to leave it all behind and go live in Robin Hood style is that my income comes from lots of different places. I’ve mentioned before that I have internet marketing income streams outside Laycock Publishing, and it’s these combined with the Laycock business that means I receive money each and every day.

Anyway the point of this series of blogs is to get ‘up close and personal’ with you lot and to try to show you how my life, business and income work. …or don’t work 🙂

The pic above by the way is just before I actually started work.

I’d not yet plugged in the laptop, and my modem was still in it’s box but I had managed to open a bottle of wine and persuade my wife to take a snap of me to use on the blog.

Marketing is all about priorities…

More soon..

 

P.S. If you fancy actually biting the bullet and setting stuck in and building your OWN online business, and earning while you do so, CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS

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Internet Marketing fits round my life. A lot of marketers seem to operate the other way around though.

I’m not saying they’re wrong – I’m the wrong person to judge anyone else about any aspect of their life. But is there a real difference between a million in the bank and ten million in terms of lifestyle?

Maybe there is – It all depends on what you want.

I think enjoying my life and my family before I’m wobbling round on a walking stick with various bags, tubes and bottles attached to my ageing body should be a priority. ‘Do it while you can’ is a bit of a motto for me!

Then again my idea of fun might not be the same as yours.

Here’s what I’ve just been doing….

Now Scotland is hardly Barbados, espcecially in late September / early October but I try to get afloat at every possible chance so I was happy as a pig in muck as my Gran used to say (although she didn’t say muck!)

The big hairy thing checking the rigging is me, and although I might look as though I’m praying in the next pic

…I’m actually trying to ignore the Germans in the next mooring who had just arrived on the biggest, loudest and ugliest motor cruiser you’ve ever seen.

 And while most marketers show you pictures of their sports cars and luxury cruisers in the Med……I’m more than happy with a simple 6.30am breakfast before casting off.

In the last few days the wind dropped

So it was time to return to Internet Marketing. I’m still pretty amazed when I come back from a holiday because I recognise that I should be feeling that horrible ‘back to the grind’ feeling that most people get on return from a break, in fact if we’re honest, most people feel the same way from Sunday lunchtime onwards knowing they’ll be back at work on Monday.

Smug me eh?

It’s NOT like that. I could work much harder than I do, but if I’d brought in 13 million already this year like one of the top US marketers, would you feel that you could even come to close to my earnings?

Exactly – but following your dream – and one of my main ones is sailing – can be far more accessible than you think once you’ve got more time. Unfortunately this is something you have to do for yourself because your boss is never ever, in a MILLION YEARS going to give you as much time for yourself as you want, need or deserve.

The other thing you need is more money than your employment will happily give you. And you need to set that figure yourself  – not your employer.

And what about other internet marketers?

Well can you replicate the earnings of some of these people when they’re working 16 hours a day on their business full-time, employ staff and spend thousands a year on Adsense or hiring copywriters?

No chance.

What you need is a lazy marketer who works three days a week tops 🙂

Seriously – you need acheivable goals. Setting out to earn a million in a year is possible, but when you’ve got a family, bills, debts and a full-time job? That’s a hell of a task.

On the other hand an achievable goal of a couple of thousand in income a monthly and quitting your job is VERY achievable – it really is – and at the end of this post I’ll be telling you how we can help.

I’ve just been cruising the lochs and islands of the Scottish Highlands. I could have been on a beach in 40 degree heat for 3 weeks if that was my thing.

Next week we’re all off to wood hut in Sherwood Forest for a few days. It’s not as basic as it sounds – there’s a hot tub included!

These types of ‘minibreaks’breaks happen very frequently because that’s the lifestyle I’ve chosen – we take a lot of time off, whether it’s in the UK or abroad because we want to.  And my lifestyle wouldn’t change much if you dumped 100 million on my desk tomorrow morning.

 My IM business is portable, as is my family so we can up and off at a moment’s notice. Again this is a choice. Your ideal lifestyle will probably be different, but that’s the beauty of freedom.

The breaks I’ve mentioned above however were well deserved because we’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to something that I think is the most important thing we’ve ever released.

I won’t be giving you any details for another week or two – sorry – because some things have yet to be decided upon.

We want this to be totally accessible to everyone who needs it….

If you’re a subscriber you’ll get an email telling you more in 7-14 days. If not you can subscribe at the top right of this page or at www.sara-brown.com

So start thinking about your ideal lifestyle..

Sailing is one of my main ‘things’ at the moment. If time and money weren’t an issue for you – what would yours be?

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