I’m excited to announce that I’m interviewing a true online marketing expert this week, Ezra Firestone, who’s created incredible wealth online and primarily through Ecommerce dropshipping.Ezra recently sold a store for $250,000 USD, not a bad effort at all!

Ezra has spoken at many big online marketing conferences in the USA and is sort after for his knowledge when it comes to marketing online.

So….with all that said, if you want to know about dropshipping through your own online store, then paste your questions below under this post as comments and during the interview I’ll flick over to this post and do my best to read them out with Ezra on the live interview we do together.

Keep your questions relatively brief and you’ll have a better chance of me reading it out for Ezra to address.

Dropshipping is an exciting business model and one that you can make great income with. You don’t have to buy in any stock or do any shipping and handling, its sort of like an affiliate ecommerce store.

Should be a lot of fun anyway, so I hope to hear from you below.

UPDATE: CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT

Drop Shipping Webinar with Ezra Firestone is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Along the way I’ve learned a great deal, from the success and also the failures. The most recent projects I’ve been focusing on and that have been taking up a considerable amount of my time, are creating my own brands.  I now have my own brand here in New Zealand that I sell locally and I’m working on a new one that I’ll be selling in the USA soon.

In this post I want to share with you some of the things I learned about doing this and provide practical tips for folks who may be interested in doing a similar thing. I also want to add that I still do affiliate marketing, lead generation websites andYouTube videos, and they make me great money, so if you’re doing these kind of sites then that’s great, I encourage you to keep doing that, YouTube is a great way to market at that moment.  However this post might also spark some ideas for future projects for you to undertake.

Developing an Idea

The first thing you need to do if you want to develop and sell your own brand of product, is come up with the idea. As I mentioned in my last post, the easiest way to establish your own brand is through private labeling, if you haven’t read that post I encourage you to do that. Private labelling is where your source a product from a manufacturer who allows you to brand the product yourself. This way you don’t have to make the product, and means you can have your own product instantly.

I am for products to be sold in the $20-70 range myself, as that’s where I feel comfortable and what most private label products will be suitable for.

I’ve done this for over a year now and it works well. You can source products from over seas via the website Alibaba. Its a little tricky to get your head around how to use this site at first, but once you have some practice you’ll soon get the hang of it. Spend some time researching potential products to sell.

You MUST think through HOW you intend to be different from the current products in the market. It might be that you can do a cheaper price, or you can do a slightly different version of a product that currently isn’t available, either way make sure you think it through.

Know Your Customers

One thing I’ve learned over the past 12 months especially is that you NEED to know what the customers in the niche market think and what they want. If you’re already a customer in the niche, then you’re in a good position, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that you want exactly what all the other customers want.

You really must research the market. For physical goods Amazon is a great place to visit, because they have their review system, where you can read good and bad reviews about a product. This information is really useful as it helps you to know what customers like and what they don’t like about a product. By doing this you’ll be able to uncover potential opportunities for what will make your product different.

For example if a particular product gets a lot of bad reviews because it doesn’t have a handle on it perhaps, then you might possibly be able to make a product that does have one!

Know Your Market

You absolutely need to know what’s happening in the market currently. One way to do this is to survey customers in the market and find out. If you create your own branded product with intention to sell wholesale, then an smart thing to do is call up current retailers of a similar product and ‘pick their brains’.

Find out what they like about the current suppliers and what they don’t like. Find out what they wish they could have but currently isn’t available. The more research you do BEFORE you start, the higher the chance of success.

YouTube, Facebook and forums and also great places to find information about what customers in a market want.

Know Your Competition

Once you know your market and your customer reasonably well, your next step is to know your competition. Analyze them and work what their strengths are and also their weaknesses. You need to know what products they sell and what price. Find out what customers say about them. Find out how they do their marketing. You’re essentially looking for ways to outsmart them and take market share away from them quickly. I would avoid entering a market if there are dozen of strong competitors already, unless there is a really clear gap in the market that you can fill.

Designing Your Brand

A huge part of your product brand is the design element. You don’t have to spend 10′s of 1000′s of dollars to get a decent brand. You can get great logos created for under $500, on sites like Design Crowd and 99 Designs. Once you have a good logo, the rest of the design comes out of that. Make sure that the packaging you choose also matches the theme of the niche, so that your products look and feel resonates with your target market.

Have a Solid Plan

Once you have an idea of a product you could private label, and you know your customers and the market, and you’ve also assessed your competition, you need to create a business plan so that you don’t forget this stuff and so you can develop your plan of attack and stick to it. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! Its very easy to get side tracked by a new idea, which may well be great, but if its not inline with your original plan it can slow your progress. I’ve experience this a few times already, and learned the hard way!

Selling Your Product

When you have your own brand there are many avenues you can take to sell it. One simple one is selling it on your own ecommerce store. Other possibilities are Ebay, Amazon, or of course approaching retailers and selling it to them wholesale. Plan out your traffic strategies well. These might includes retail stores, Google Adwords, YouTube, SEO, Ebay and Amazon etc….

My final note to leave you with is this….don’t be afraid to have a go, the fear of failure robs people of success, so don’t let it do this to you. If you want a successful business you have to take some calculated risks sometimes!

All the best.

Developing Your Own Brand is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

It’s been a very busy year for me in 2013 so far so I’ve been a little quite on the blogging front, but I thought it would be a good idea for me to update you all on what I’ve been up to and share some ideas that will hopefully help you make more money too.

As most of you will be well aware I’ve done a lot of affiliate marketing over the years, selling digital products, physical goods and also selling leads too. This has and continues to be very lucrative for me, however what I’ve been focusing on more over the past 6 months is selling physical products and in particular creating my own products. What I will share with you now is the benefits of creating your own products and the various ways you can go about doing this.

Isn’t Product Creation Really Hard Work?

Creating your own product is more work than affiliate marketing, there’s no doubt about it. You can set up an affiliate sites in a few days, however product creation does take more work, BUT the payoff is much larger so it’s worth it.

Some of the major benefits of creating your own product are:

• You can make more money
• You can get affiliates selling your product
• You don’t have to rely on SEO only
• You can build your customer base over time
• There are more marketing avenues available

How to Start

There are a few different ways you can create your product, the two that I do are:

Digital products – ebooks, video courses, software, apps
Physical products – private labeling from a supplier

Let’s look at digital products first as this is the easier way to go. You can package up knowledge and experience in a niche and create your own product out of this. This can come in the form of an ebook which you can sell on Clickbank or through Kindle.

If you’re not an expert on any particular topic you can outsource this to someone who is, or you could interview people who are experts and turn your interviews into a product, in the form of an ebook, audio or video product. I recently saw someone do this in the natural dental care industry, where they interviewed a bunch of well respected natural medicine experts on the topic of natural tooth care, and they turned this series of interviews into a product. You can have a look at this here – Tooth Summit. I’m not an affiliate for that product nor do I necessarily endorse it as I don’t know much about it so can’t say whether its good or not, but either way its a good example.

Physical Product – Private Labels

Most people think that creating your own physical product is only for giant companies with lots of money. However this is not the case, as you can buy products from suppliers who’ll allow you to put your own label on the product and call it your own, this is known as ‘private labeling’, and something I started doing about 12 months ago.

A lot of huge supplement companies in the USA do this. They buy the supplement from a wholesaler and provide them with their label artwork and the supplier attaches the label and ships them the products as their own brand.

Private labeling is BIG business, and it means that small players can get their product inexpensively and focus on the marketing. To find companies that will allow you to do this, you can Google for things like “Product Name Private Label”

Getting your own brand developed is not hard, all you really need is a logo designed which you can get done over at Elance pretty cheaply.

Once you have your own brand like this, you are free to market it anyway you want, which is great, as often when selling another companies brand you are restricted in the way you can market it. For example some companies don’t want their brand sold on Ebay or Craiglist etc… Whereas where you own the brand you call the shots!

Helpful Tools

When creating a digital product you might want to use video. Two tools that I have used for years in doing this are Camtasia Studio for screen recording and GotoWebinar for webinars.

Gotowebinar is expensive but I have heard that there are more affordable options these days for webinar software, so it pays to shop around. Webinars are great as they allow you to interview an expert, and it provides them the option to do a live presentation as well which makes the content more interesting than just plane audio.

Camtasia on the other hand allows you to record your screen, which is helpful if your product revolves around teaching people things that rely on visual aids to show people what you’re doing.

Once you have a digital product ready, the easiest way to make it available is to use Optimize Press in conjunction with Wishlist Member WordPress plugin. These two tools will allow you to set up a member’s area using WordPress, and they are not hard to use either. At the end of the day it’s not that hard to create your own quality digital product.

Why Sell Your Own Product?

There are a number of advantages of having your own product, of which I listed a few at the beginning of this post. One of the best things is that unlike a lot of affiliate marketing websites, you don’t have to rely on Google SEO to make money.

If you own your own product you can get affiliates to send traffic, you can use Adwords (as long as the site does not look like a long sales page), and if you’re doing physical goods via private labeling you can even get other retailers, such as ecommerce stores or even offline stores to stock your product and sell it for you, I do this myself and it works well.

When you’re selling your own product you can also rely on a lot less traffic, whereas affiliate sites, because they’re sending traffic away from their sites in order to make money, require a lot more traffic to make the sale.

Also when you own your own product there is much less risk involved. For example a subscriber of mine recently contacted me and explained that he had started to make $6000 a month from affiliate marketing and was very happy, and in fact left his day job. The unfortunate thing that happened to him was that the merchant he was affiliated with decided to stop their affiliate program one day, and overnight he lost all his income! This is obviously devastating and I really felt for this guy, however that is one of the risks you run when selling another companies product. Whereas if you own the product you call the shots.

The final thought I want to leave you with is this; it is more work to create your own product, but that’s a good things as the more barriers to entry the less people will do it, so you’ll have a lot less competition.

I hope this post has inspired you to consider creating your own product. It doesn’t have to be the only way you make money online, as I still do affiliate marketing, but it is a nice way to add an additional revenue stream to your business.

Creating Your Own Product is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recently recorded a webinar with a good friend of mine Andrew Hansen, who has over 7 years experience as an affiliate marketer and has coached loads of people to reach affiliate success also.

The replay for that webinar is here for you:

==>Click HERE for Webinar Replay<==

Andrew explained his entire system on the webinar and provided examples and case studies, plus told us about some of the people he has helped to build their own profitable affiliate sites.

It was a great webinar, so make sure to catch the replay now.

Webinar Replay:$100 Day Affiliate Sites is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Below is the replay for an awesome webinar on email list building that I recorded recently with Shane MeLaugh. Shane delivered some of the best content on list building I have ever heard.

Honestly, if you’re not building an email list in your niche then START NOW as you’re missing out BIG time. Shane shares some great practical tips in this webinar so takes notes and put the stuff he teaches into practice.

Don’t Miss This: List Building Webinar! is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I was just starting to enter Internet marketing, and obviously one of the first steps is to pick up a hosting package. So just like everyone else, I went to Google to search for things like “web hosting reviews” and “top hosting companies”. The results on all of the sites seemed to be consistent with the top companies. The same companies were always coming up on top, and so the choice seemed obvious.

Three months later, I was dealing with terrible servers that were almost always down, and I had borderline useless support. How could the top hosting company on these sites have so many issues? All hosting companies must be terrible, right?

I was duped. And this is so obvious to anyone with any affiliate marketing experience at all. These web hosting review sites are naming the “top hosting companies” based on who gives the highest commission. Well this makes sense, if a company is giving out a $150 commission, they must be the best company. Give me a break! These review sites don’t care about you, they’re after the money.

So I’ve decided to clean things up, and I’ve created a site, Reviewpon.com. I’ve gone around and reviewed eighteen different hosting companies so far. Obviously, as an Internet marketer, I’m looking to earn a living, but the reason behind this site was far from that reason. I have a core belief about being ethical, and I just think if you focus on doing things the right way, long term, you’ll be able to create a much more powerful brand, and you’ll feel a lot better knowing you’re doing things the right way.

Okay, great. Why are you telling us this?

Well, there are two things that I wanted to get across with this article. Firstly, evaluate how you’re doing things in your own business or site. Do you really believe in what you’re doing? Do you believe in something? Why does your business exist? If you answer with: “to make money”, you need to reevaluate your situation.

Secondly, I wanted to talk about the importance of getting the right hosting company for your sites. So let’s get to it.

You need a fast site, and this should seem obvious, but check out this staggering graph:

(credit: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

Obviously, there are certain WordPress plugins that can help your site speed, but hosting plays a huge roll in your site speed. If you’re hosting your site with a garbage shared hosting company, there’s a good chance they’re overselling their server space, causing your site to slow down. With these systems your site becomes way too reliant on other people’s sites that are on your same server. Do you really want to risk your reputation?

Because of the constant struggle to get traffic to your site, you cannot afford to have your visitors leaving because your site’s down, or just plain slow.

If you’re stuck with a host that you’re not satisfied with, that’s not an issue. Please, don’t use the excuse that it’s too much trouble to change hosting companies. Almost all of the good hosting companies are willing to transfer your sites for free, when you sign up.

If you’re trying to build a serious business online or even just some affiliate sites, don’t think you can get away with $1 a month hosting. It just doesn’t work that way, you’re going to have issues, and I’m willing to guarantee that.

I’d love to get a discussion going. Tell me what you think about web hosting in general or just some of your experiences.

The Importance Of A Good Web Host is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Conversions is a strange thing in the internet marketing world, it seems to be that most people are too busy trying to get as much traffic to their websites as they possibly can, that they neglect to pay much, if any, attention to the conversions.

I need to say that I was guilty of being like this too, until more recently that is, when I started to test a few things and realized the power of conversions. To put it simply, if you get good at converting traffic you need a heck of a lot less of it to make good money!!

Causing Confusion

Perhaps the most common thing that people make the mistake of is confusing the visitor to their site. You really don’t have long to engage the visitor to your site. If they don’t like what they see because they don’t know what to do, then you lose!! You’ve got about 2-3 seconds for a person to go through this procedure of deciding to engage or leave.

So what you need to do is ask yourself, what is it that you ideally want the visitor to do when they arrive. If its not obvious what that is, then you’re going to confuse them. Classic ways to confuse people are having double and triple column websites, where the visitor simply doesn’t know where to place their eyes! Or having more than one call to action on the page trying to get their attention.

If you want them to opt in to an email list, then make that very obvious and not hard to find. If not then leave them to engage in the content you have. Don’t have all sorts of other things trying to distract them or they will not engage at all!

Also make sure you have VERY easy to find and use website navigation. Use dynamic menus so you only show the visitor other relevant content to what they are currently viewing.

Call to action

I recently spent some time with a friend and went over her site, and one of the things I noticed straight away was the lack of a solid call to action. We soon established what the primary goal of the site was meant to be, and also realized that the way the site was at that moment was not doing a great job in achieving that.

The sites purpose was to gather a lead that would hopefully turn into a consultation for this person. The problem was that the lead capture process was weak. So we overhauled the site, and made the top center section of the home page totally dedicated to this ‘call to action’. The result was that when someone landed on the page it was very obvious what they need to do.

I made a mistake with my call to action recently on my eCommerce store, which I am in the process of fixing right now. I have a beautiful slider on the home page, it rotates 5 slides, each showing different products I sell. However I noticed that although the graphics were brilliant, I failed to place a button in the slider that the visitor could click!!! How silly, I show them the product but then leave it to them to find it on the site. Needless to say I am fixing this today….(continued on page 2, click link below).

Increasing Your Website Conversions is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Recently I did a post about becoming an Adwords consultant for businesses, you can see that post here – Adwords Consulting, and in the post I asked if people would like me to organize a professional Adwords consulting master class. Well the good news is that I did just that at your request and you can register for the training at the link below:

PPC Master Class

The Master Class is taught by a good friend of mine, Binh Nguyen, who’s an Adwords and SEO expert. Last year Binh spent almost $2 million dollars on Adwords!!! So you can rest assured that you’ll be learning from the best of the best!!

How Will This Master Class Benefit Me?

Essentially you’ll be learning the skills you need to be able to set up and manage profitable Adwords campaigns for any business. This is a valuable skill set to have and something that is very easy to make money with, as most businesses owners, large and small really have no clue how to do Adwords profitably. They either have tried it and lost money or are doing it currently with limited success.

The way you make money is charging clients 10% of their Adwords monthly spend. So for example if they spend $4000 on Adwords, which is pretty typical for a small business, then you would get $400 a month for managing their Adwords for them.

The cool thing is that once you have set up the Adwords campaigns for businesses, the on going management is ony about 15 minutes a day, and to be honest even that is  a lot, some days you wouldn’t even need to check it.

What this means is you can work from home running your own Google Adwords consulting business, which provides great flexibility to be your own boss!

I have recorded a video that explains everything about the PPC Master Class here – PPC Master Class

If you can’t make the live events all the recordings will be made available for you to watch.

Hope to see you on there!

Matt

Adwords Master Class is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

SEO expert and good friend of mine Eric Lancheres recorded an interview with me the other day for his list and provided the recording for me to share with you all. The interview was all about my new course E Wealth Blueprint and exactly what its all about and how I make great money with such little traffic with my new strategy.

I highly encourage you to watch the reply now, as I provide some juicy secrets in there.

One of the coolest things about my new strategy that I teach in the course is that these sites don’t need much traffic to make good money.

My best site now makes over $10,000 USD a month and gets only 350 visitors a day. However another site was making me $2000 and only getting 30-40 visitors day! I explain in the interview with Eric how these figures are possible.

Click PLAY below to listen to the interview

click here to download the interview

Also Eric has just agreed to provide a special bonus of his Secret Sauce SEO II course, for anyone who buys E Wealth Blueprint this week only before the launch special discount expires on 22nd Jan at midnight.

You can check out my new course here:

E Wealth Blueprint

Eric Lancheres Interviews Me! is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I’m excited to announce the launch of my brand new coaching program called E-Wealth Blueprint!

To celebrate the release of the course I’m doing a special launch week special discount price which expires at midnight Jan 22nd.
Here’s the link to check out the course, and I have also explained more below: E- Wealth Blueprint

What is E-Wealth Blueprint?

The best way for me to describe this course, is that it’s a different/new approach to making money with websites. You see I spent the past 12 months testing this new approach, as I for one got sick and tired of all the competition in traditional affiliate marketing and adsense niches, so I branched out and experimented with a different approach, and I’m glad I did as my best site is now making over $10,000 USD a month!

Why Does It Work So Well?

There is a very good reason the simple sites I create with my E-Wealth Blueprint method work so well, that is, they DO NOT require much traffic to make great money.

I know it might sound kind of crazy, but these sites don’t need much traffic to profit, which I will explain below. Everyone seems to get obsessed with getting loads of traffic to their sites, but the fact is getting traffic is hard work, let’s be honest with ourselves there’s no magic formula for this, and the less traffic we all need the better I say!

Two reasons these sites don’t need much traffic to work:

1. You Are Not Selling Anything: These sites don’t require the visitor to buy anything, all they have to do is fill in a basic form requesting a call back from a business owner. This increases conversions dramatically! The cool thing is that each person that fills in that form is money in your bank, as you are selling these leads to a business.

2. Everything Happens on Your Site: because the traffic doesn’t have to leave your site to take the action you want them to take, the conversions are higher. With affiliate marketing the traffic is required to go to another site, and every extra step involved decreases the conversions. What this means is that this style of site of mine requires much less traffic to make great money…one site of mine got only 30 visitors a day and made $2000 a month.

Off the Radar!

The other reason I think I have had great success with this method is that what I am doing is somewhat ‘off the radar’ of other internet marketers. Most people doing traditional affiliate marketing and end up competing against each other for sales. Whereas with what I’m doing I avoid all that, and market in niches that don’t even have affiliate programs, as I don’t need them!!

This means in a lot of niche doing this there is less competition, and the competition that is there are not that clued up about internet marketing.

Money Magnet Bonus

One of the most important aspects of these sites is the way they are designed. I had to test this a lot of the past year until I finally got it right.

This is another reason they can rely on so little traffic to make great money, because they convert so well.

The good news for my customers is that I cloned my successful sites and created a premium WordPress theme, which I now call the “Money Magnet” theme and I give this to my customers to use as a free bonus!

The theme cost me $600 to get made, so I can assure you it’s awesome!

Anyway, if you want to read the full details about my new course, I encourage you to do so before my launch discount special expires!

Here’s the link again – E- Wealth Blueprint

E-Wealth Blueprint is Live! is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing