I don’t make it to many internet marketing “events”, but this weekend I had the chance to help out Tim Brocklehurst with one of his TheFreedomClass workshops.

The workshops are designed to get people totally up and running with their own MyViralSpiral3.com site, including a blog, their own info product and affiliate program and show them how to start getting traffic in to build their list virally.

So by the end of the weekend they’ve got everything in place to start building a REAL online business that will last.

I’ve had MVS3 for a while now as I recognised how powerful it is when I saw Tim present it at Robert Puddy’s BritPack seminar last year, but hadn’t had time to get to grips with it properly, so the weekend was also the ideal opportunity for me to do the same as the students, get it all up and running and building me a list virally.

I found it so easy to set up and use it was no problem for me to do mine and have time to help the students.

Tim was smart enough to realise that having a couple of other internet marketing tech heads along to help everyone keep up to speed and it seemed to work very well, although Rob O’Callaghan and I did a lot of running around, everyone did end up with a fully set up and running MVS list building business.

Tim also had some great guest speakers lined up: -

First up was Ange Wayne who was so energized and passionate in her presentation it was contagious and she had the whole class, including us “experts”, swept up with her, which is pretty impressive for us “reserved” Brits.

If you ever get the chance to see her speak I highly advise you make it happen, she will open your eyes to your true “greatness”. I know that sounds a little “corney”, but if you do see her speak, you will understand totally.

Then we had Martin Avis, who I’ve know for a few years now and whilst he’s a fairly quiet, un-assuming guy, he really does know his stuff and makes it easy for people to understand how to do stuff like writing articles and building a relationship with you subscribers the RIGHT way.

On the second day we had Alan Forest Smith, a top copywriter who I’d never met or seen before. There were some students at the class that had seen him before and they were impressed that he wasn’t just giving the same presentation that they had seen before, it was all new stuff and real cutting edge copywriting stuff, but he also put it across so well that it was easy for even a “newbie” to understand and get the most important foundation for writing truly effective copy.

I’m not exactly a newbie at copywriting, although I tend to get experts (thanks Randy) to do most of my stuff for me, but Alan taught me quite a few VERY useful things and when I get the chance to see him speak again, I’ll jump at the opportunity.

Last up was Diane Corriette who covered podcasting and managed to keep something that could have been scary for “newbies” simple enough to be understandable and useful to everyone there.

Unfortauntly Rob didn’t get the chance to do a presentation, which is a shame as he’s got such a depth of knowledge on the latest web 2 and social site stuff.

The most important question is how did the workshop go for the students, but I guess that’s something that only they can answer, so I’m going to invite as many as I can to post comments to this post and see what they have to say…

For me the weekend was great on a lot of different levels: -

Getting my own MVS3 site up and running was probably the least important part of the weekend for me, although I know it’s going to add to my online profits this year.

Catching up with Tim, Martin and Rob is always fun, but also meeting Diane again, as well as Ange and Alan for the first time was very cool.

Having the opportunity to help Tim’s students to get to grips with everthing and make the most of the weekend and their new online list building business was also great feeling. It’s cool to have the opportunity to share my knowledge with people who are going to use it to make money online.

but the best part of the weekend was simply meeting some cool new friends who had such a positive outlook on life and were keen to get their internet businesses off to a good start!

so as well as thanking Tim, I need to thank Nicola, Suzanne, Lorna, Alison, Sue, Trisha, Lucy, Chris and everyone else who made me feel so welcome.

thanks!

Internet Marketing Blog

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1. The simplest way to start a “relationship” with a potential JV partner is to get on their newsletter, read it for a while, and when something comes up that you don’t understand or that you could help them with (i.e. have a genuine reason, don’t just make one up), get in touch.

note: being on a marketers newsletter for a while will also give you an idea of the sort of things that they promote to their subscribers. Don’t waste your time (or theirs) getting in touch with someone who only promotes a particular type of product or service if your offer is totally unrelated to it, focus on those who are likely to be intrested in what you have.

2. Always try and offer the potential JV partner that you’re approaching more than you will be getting in return, for instance rather than just sending out a promo email for them, you could also add a blog post that gives them a permanent promo for their product/offer, as well as a link back to their site

3. Sending something via old fashioned “snail mail” can be a great way of getting a potential JV partners attention, I’ve received not only postcard invites for JV offers, but even a mini remote control helicopter, although it turned out that was actually intended for another well known marketer.

4. Never ever send a broadcast email to several people, even if you use “BCC”. If you’re trying to build a relationship with someone, which is what a JV partnership is, it has to be based on trust and respect. Even the slightest hint that you’ve sent a “broadcast” email is going to get you off on totally the wrong foot.

5. Never be afraid to ask, if you don’t ask you can’t get a “yes”, but ALWAYS be polite and respectful.

That’s just a few extra tips that popped in to my mind while writing yesterdays post on building JV partnerships, so here’s your chance to win $100 cash (paid via PayPal)…

Post your best tips in the comments and I’ll pick my favorite from all the comments as the winner and send the poster $100, can’t say fairer than that can I…

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If you’re just beginning and don’t have a list or product then that’s really where you need to start.

JV’s are usually based on a relationship that you’ve built up with the prospective JV partner, but you still need to be able to offer something of value, good JV partnerships are never “one sided”, and you want to make them as good an offer for your new partner as possible, as it should be seen as the start of a long term relationship/friendship, not just a “one off” thing…

Just writing an email saying “promote my product and you’ll make a bunch of money” is simply not going to work, unless you have something new and exceptional, which is rare, and it’s more likely to stop that potential JV partner from ever wanting to work with you.

So Step 1 of your plan should be to start building a subscriber list/newsletter.

the simplest way to do so is to grab a PLR product, re-brand it, and preferably add some extra value to it with your own perspective and ideas on the topic it covers.

then you can start using it as a free offer on a “Squeeze page” to get people to sign up to your newsletter.

I recommend using AWeber for managing your list, you can get a free trial here

There’s also some free videos on using AWeber and ading optins forms to your blogs here:

Free Internet Marketing Tutorial Videos

but how do you get traffic to that offer page to start building your list?

Well, the quickest way is to use PPC (Pay Per Click), but that can be expensive depending on your market.

I recommend trying out some less well known PPC sites (e.g. 7search) if you’re on a smaller budget.

The cheaper, but slower, way is to use good old fashioned article marketing, just don’t forget to do some keyword reseach to make sure you’re targetting terms that will get you some traffic and are targetted enough for it to convert in to optins.

The advantage with article marketing is that you do the work once and the traffic will keep on coming for months and years to come, so all you need to do is keep writing and submitting more articles to increase the number of optins you’re getting each day.

Step 2 - AdSwaps

Once you have have 250+ subscribers on your list you can use a free forum like Internet Marketing Ad Swaps to start doing AdSwaps with other list owners, which can easily double the number of optins you get each month.

Step 3 - Giveaways

Giveaway events are a great way to get even more optins for your list, but most will only allow you to join as a “contributor” once you have a list of a certain size.

Alex Perez-Prat runs a very useful group on FaceBook where you can find out about upcoming giveaway events: -
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6405644093

You can get more suggestions on how to get your own products for giveaway events here:

List Building With Giveaways and AdSwaps

In the month of May this year I added over 1,500 new subscribers to just one of my lists from just doing Giveaways and AdSwaps, so I know this works…

All this extra list building and taking part in giveaways will also raise your profile with other marketers, so you should start to find it easier to build those all important relationships for future joint ventures, especially as your new list will allow you to promote other peoples products and become a JV partner for them.

It’s a lot easier to approach someone to become your JV partner if you’ve already promoted their product!!

Step 4 - Permanant JV agreements

Your long term aim should be to set up permanent JV agrements with other succesful marketers.

This could be as simple as trading spots in your autoresponder follow up sequence with another marketer, or it could be something a little more sophisticated, like setting up a “partnership” site with some fellow marketers that you get on with and compliment your own areas of expertise, so that as a group you can offer even more to potential subscribers and customers…

To see an eample of this in action take a look at the newly launched AskTheIMExperts.com

This is a great example of four succesful internet marketers with diffeent areas of expertise working together on an ongoing basis, to the benefit of all four, Kevin Riley, Daniel McGonagle, Fabian Tan, and some guy with a silly goatee…

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I posted something a while back about “getting” twitter, and I have to say that whilst I am finding it worthwhile for myself, I can still understand why some people think it’s just another time sucking social black hole.

I now spend more time than I would prefer each day keeping an eye on my twitter feed, I use Twhirl.org, so it “beeps” me when there is something new, which does help.

Neil Shearing posted an “anti twitter” post recdently on his blog: -
http://www.neilshearing.com/2008/05/02/is-twitter-just-bird-chat-for-people-with-add/

and the ironic thing is that most of the replies he got to the post came from someone posting the link to his post on twitter…

Now Neil does fire of some fairly strong points about why and how twitter can be a waste of time, but if you read his post, and the replies you’ll notice that he actually mentions one of the reasons I enjoy twitter: -

“or a group of work colleagues twittering socially”…

If you only follow people you are interested in, then this is the situation you can get from twitter, and trust me, this makes it a powerful tool.

Suddenly I’m building relationships with “peers” that I might not have been able to get in touvh with via email, and it’s all happening naturally!

now you need to understand that I’m a fairly “practical” person (virgo) and am happy to kick things out if they are wasting my time, which I thought Twitter might, but I’ve somehow managed to put together a list of people that I follow that regularly supply me with interesting/useful info that I wouldn’t otherwise get.

Some of the “tweets” I’ve received have even helped me to provide my newsletter subscribers with very valuable content, as an example, just a couple of days ago Michael S Copeland Twittered about a free audio on how to deal with self limiting beliefs, which is a very important aspect of gaining success in life.

You can see my blog post about it, along with the link to the free audio and Mike’s blog post here:

http://iamuncovered.com/free-self-limiting-beliefs-audio/

I was able to shate that free audio with my subscribers because I saw Michael’s Twitter about it…

There’s another blog post I’d recommend reading if you are interested in building your own Twitter following…

http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-get-more-twitter-followers/

DoshDosh makes some excellent points, and yes you can get more Twitter followers by following other people, his example of “Osen” is perfect, but my advice would be very strongly not to do this.

It’s down to the twitter equivalent of website keyword targettiing, follow people people you are interested in, and twitter good stuff and you will gain followers who are actually interested in what you have to say.

Osen may have ended up with over 7 thousand followers (after signing up to follow ove 41 thousand other people, but how may of them are actually interested in what he has to say.

Osen’s tactic seems effective, but I would happily put money down on him not having made much money from that “experiment”.

and of course Mr ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, also has an opinion on twitter that’s worth reading: -

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/05/08/5-tips-to-grow-your-twitter-presence/

here’s the thing to remember though, Twitter is not going away.

Twitter is becoming bigger and bigger.

If you “get” Twitter now, I believe the time you spend will be a good investment.

For me, I know that I now have the opportunity to build relationships with people that it would have been hard to do so without twitter…

nuff said.
;]

Matt Garrett

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I can’t believe I haven’t made a post to this blog since the start of the month!

It shows what can happen when we get some sunny weather here in the UK!

I know us Brits are supposed to be “obsessed” with the weather, but that’s because a lot of the time it does rain or get “cloudy”, so when we have a week or so of summer weather in May we tend to want to enjoy it, just in case it’s the only summer we get…

That may sound negative, but you have to remember that last summer I had to leave my home for several weeks because the flooding was so bad there was no power or fresh water, that was a serious exception to the norm, but we don’t have great summers here that often, so when it feels like summer, we have to rush out and enjoy it while it’s there…

And the weather isn’t the only factor in my lazy lack of posting, having also just moved to a far better part of town, in walking distance of all the best pubs, I seem to have re-discovered having a “life” outside the internet.

and I have to admit I’m not even going to make this blog post particularly intersting, let alone “groundbreaking”!

Instead I’m going to tell you a little bit about the history of this domain name, “mattgarrett.com”

Until I turned this in to one of my “main” blogs a month or so ago, this was pretty much a “dead” domain name.

Let me explain a little more..

MattGarrett.com was the first domain name I ever registered, about 9 years ago, and back then registering a domain wasn’t quite so cheap as it is now, MattGarrett.com cost me over £250 ($500+)!

In fact when I registered the domain there were far more valuable domain names available, including domains names that have sold for $millions since, so I guess it’s a sign of my own “hubris” that I registered this domain when I could have registered something with a very high “retail”/”resale” value…

or perhaps I just have a lot of belief in myself…

So why didn’t I use this domain more?

Well, back in 2000/2001 I did, but even back then when I was first learning about “SEO”, I was experimenting with the “blackhat” side of things, and for a while the site did very well, it got up to PR6 at one point and then was hit with a PR0 before (back in 2004) people were even talking about Google Penalizing sites for bad liking practices…

I did spend some time on the site correcting what I believed Google were penalizing the site for, but back then there was no “re-inclusion” proceedure, so I shot off a few emails to the big G with the typical result, no-reply, so I stopped updating the site, getting links to it, or doing any work on it for several years.

and then about 6 months ago the domain suddenly got some “google love” again, the PR was back and it was back in the index, after 3+ years of being “shunned”.

I hadn’t changed anything on the site itself, so I’ve no idea why google decided to pay attention to the site again, but once I realised they were I decided to do the natural thing (for me), set it up as a blog and start blogging…

has it worked?

check for yourself, do a search on Matt Garrett, with or without “’s and this is the site you will find at no. 1, at present anyway..

so what’s the moral of this post?

a. I’m self obsessed plonker who could have registered a valuable domain like “business.com”, but chose to register my own name instead… 

b. who knows what the frack google are going to do to your site

c. blogs are good!

d. taking time out fromn blogging to enjoy the sun when it is shining is a good thing to do.

Matt Garrett

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and when I say I “bought” them, I do mean that, there not freebie products that I got a copy of for “reviewing”, these are ones where I’ve put my hand in my pocket, and one of them I bought mostly for one of the bonuses on offer…

Dan Kennedy’s Info Riches Course went on sale on Tuesday (29th April) and for some reason the launch had gone under my “radar” until today, but I received a few emails about it today, as the price is going up at midnight, and I just had to go take a look…

It didn’t take me long to dig out my credit card and stump up the cash!

The resale right bonus to “Info Millions” 12 CD Audio Course is (imho) worth the price of this product alone, as it will add a significant amount of profit to my business, without me having to spend months and thousands of dollars preparing my own higher priced up sell for my own products!

but I’m also keen on getting the main product itself too, as I’ve always wanted to go to oneof Dan’ seminars, he’s like the Grandfather of making money from info products, but I’ve never managed to make it to one…

Now I’ve got one of his best on DVD and Audio CD’s so I can watch/listen to it at my own pace.

I have to admit though, I’m not totally sure I would have bought it without the bonus offer, simply because it can be difficult to find the time to watch such a big pile of DVD’s. I know this from experience as I’ve still got a bunch of other such DVD’s sat on my shelf unwatched, probably my own fault for watching too much sc-fi… ;]

 You can check it out for yourself here:

Dan Kennedy’s Info Riches Course

The other product that I simply couldn’t resist today is Joel Comm’s Instant Resale Templates offer, again because this fits in so well with my own business!

The resale rights, and master resale rights in the “upsell/one time offer” are another excellent front end or back end product that should be a great fit for anyone’s oneline business, although they do fit in particularly well with some of my own products and sites.

I expect to see quite a few marketers start to use both of these products as backends and upsell offers for their existing products quite soon, me included!

Take a look to see if Joel’s offer can help your online business:

Joel Comm’s Instant Resale Templates

The only downside to all this is that there is only so much I will let my self spend in a day/week/month and as I’ve already overspent my budget,I’m going to have to miss out on another product that I really wanted to get my hands on, Ryan Deiss’s new Whole Sale Traffic Course!

oh well, I guess I’ll just have to make do with the free reports Ryan gave away and wait to see if he re-releases it at somepoint in the future..

if you missed the free reports for this you can still (I think) get them here:

Free WholeSale Traffic Report

So what’s the point of this post?

Well, first it shows how important, and powerful, a good bonus offer can be, and second when you find a product or offer that can be used to directly and quickly increase the profit of your own business, it’s not a cost, it’s an investment, and in most businesses you can even write it off against profits, to save even more money, but obviously you’ll need to talk to your accountant about how that works..

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The idea is simple, we both get some new subscribers to our list and increase the size of our subscriber base.

I’d not done an adswap before so I was interested to see how effective it would be.

We both ended up getting over 200 new subscribers on our lists, so I was pretty happy with the results.

I got chatting with Sean afterwards and he let it slip that he had added over 1,800 new subscribers to his list with adswaps in the last month, a pretty impressive number of new subscribers, especially as they’re free, which got me to thinking…

I ended up setting up a new site with a forum for fellow marketers to request adswaps here: -
http://www.imadswaps.com

as well as a new facebook group dedicated to the same thing here: -
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10901414126

Now you may be wondering about the value of such “subscriber swaps” as those subscribers are now on two lists and are they really going to be “valuable” subscribers..

I think there is an important factor to doing adswaps which is what makes it work, if you get this right, and that is to make sure you’re free offer to the other marketers list is targeted to a particular niche for that subscriber list.

let me try and explain that a bit better…

I have more than one subsciber list/newsletter, as most marketers do. I have one specifically targeted to blogging, another for PLR, etc.

so when I did the swap with Sean I used a blogging related free offer to make sure I was getting people interested in blogging on to my list, whereas Sean used an article marketing related offer, so we both ended up with new sbscribers who were very targeted for our lists.

Whilst this is no guarantee of the value of those new subscribers, it is likely to increase the chance of them being interested in my offers.

In a way what Sean and I did was filter our lists to make them more focused, which is always going to be a good thing.

I guess what I’m saying is if you’re interested in doing adswaps (which you should be imho), then make sure you offer a targeted offer rather than something general, as I believe it will pay dividends in the long run..

and if you’re got an existing subscriber base but want to grow it for free, go sign up for the IMAdSwaps.com forum now!

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It’s on Matthew Glanfield’s BBO Institute Blog and you can read the whole post about a very dodgy (imho) Wholesale Dropshipping Directory Site Here

What started as a free trial, turned in to a $1 trial, and ended up costing over $100!

Matt’s been kind enough to share the details with his readers so they can steer clear of a company who seem to have a somewhat unethical way of doing business…

I recommend checking the full story out..

Wholesale Dropshipping Directory Site Here

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I’ve even seen a LOT of people using the default email for this one, in fact one marketer had even left one of the “LINK HERE” place holders in the email..
lol!

here’s the bonus offers I have found, in alphabetical order: -

Guru: Rob Benwell
Bonus Offer:
1. Rob’s 12 weeks to niche annihilation coaching course
2. Rob’s new report “37,827 Backlinks In 21 Days!”
3. The Perfect Online Business Blueprint Video (value $197)
More Info Link: N/A
Purchase Link: http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/players.html
Clickbank Nickname : bttb1
To Claim Bonus: email receipt to
Bonus Offer Limit: 1st 48 hours only

~##~

Guru: Jordan Hall
Bonus Offer: copy of Jordan’s conversion software IMUrgency 2.0 ($37 Value)
More Info Link: N/A
Purchase Link: http://www.JordansTips.com/Players
Clickbank Nickname : jordanh
To Claim Bonus: email receipt to
Bonus Offer Limit: Today Only

~##~

Guru: Cody Moya
Bonus Offer: 100,000 fresh list of people interested in business opportunities.
More Info Link:
Purchase Link: http://www.ulrtrack.com/moneyplayers
Clickbank Nickname : xodoxodo
To Claim Bonus: enter receipt at www.customersupportserver.com
Bonus Offer Limit: N/A

~##~

if non of those bonuses catch your eye, then I’ve got half a dozen 4 letter.com domain names that I’m offering as a bonus if you want to pick up a copy through my link:

Players with Money

clickbank nickname : confirm

don’t forget to sign up for email notifications if you want to get the best list of bonuses I find for upcoming product launches, it’s in the sidebar at the top of the page on the right hand side..

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The system is a real nice bit of kit and in under an hour I was able to get to grips with it and pull in a LOT of targeted products from ebay, amazon and clickbank for different markets as the tutorial videos are very easy to follow, but..

Having “published” my site I discovered that the ads and pages weren’t displaying correctly at all, and whilst it’s quite probably something I’ve done wrong or not set up, I’m still waiting on their support to get in touch to help me out with it, so I guess I’m not the only one who’s had some sort of problem getting up and running.

Now there’s a couple of important points to mention here, before you get the wrong impression: -

first, it’s a heck of a bit of kit, so it’s not surprising that there will be some people with support issues, as different people will be trying to get it running on all sorts of different hosts, which is always going to throw up new problems not discovered in “beta” testing.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s causing my problems, as it does reqquire “Zend” running on the hosting you install it on and I’ve just realised I forgot to check that the two hosts I’ve tried it on have zend (note to self: check as soon as this is posted)..

second, the system has proven to be VERY popular selling almost 500 copies since it was launched on Tuesday, so they’re going to have customers with very a wide variety of “skill levels” trying to get it running, some of whom will require a lot more support time than others..

third, I’m not a paying customer!

they were kind enough to let me have a copy to test out in advance of the launch, and it’s only through my own dissorganised schedule that I left it until the day of the launch to test, rather than before when I could have received immediate support.

so they are now (quite rightly) concentrating on giving support to paying customers first.

fourth, I’ve started seeing some testimonials pop up for the system, so it is working well for at least some of their new users, I just hope I can become one of those soon…

I guess the lesson for me is remember the “7 P’s” rule:

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance…

I had the chance to test it out before the launch and didn’t take advantage of that opportnity, so if I’ve lost out on some potential commissions, it’s my own damn fault!

I’ll post again once I’ve got it up and running and know what the problem was.

You can check it out yourself here:

Website Stores

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