This has been a week where I’ve learned so much and as a result I will be making a number of changes to my business.

I’ve been working every evening to promote Matt Wolfe’s new product Autopilot Cash Formula

Matt is a colleague from Alex Jeffrey’s coaching course last year and I’ve seen him go from
losing his job to sales of $10,000+ per month which is incredible.

Some of you may also remember my Blog Post about getting indexed fast on Google.
It was Matt who suggested someone should create a backlinks app in a forum thread which become the Free Backlinks Generator – my most successful product so far. It’s been installed by many people on their sites including well known marketers like Matt Garratt and Randy Smith. I now have over 7,000 members in the site and it gets 800+ visitors each day and is in the top 50,000 on Alexa.

Well I seem to have caught rambling from Randy, so back to Matt’s launch…

I got started a little slow on this one – just putting links into my email signature to see what happened.
But from Sunday onwards I decided to crank it up and through everything behind the launch.

I’ve spent every evening working on emails to send out the next day and trying different
methods to drive more traffic – forum posts, twitter etc.

I realise I’ve been sending a lot of emails to my list and have taken a big risk doing this.
I’ve sent 6 emails about ACF in 5 days, so I have to apologise to anyone who got too many from me.

As for the actual product, well I bought it myself and you get and eBook full of great tips and also video tutorials for key points.

I have been following the same general blueprint that Matt outlines in the eBook and I can confirm that it works. I’ve spotted several thnigs I can now do to improve my business.
Matt makes everything as simple as possible and highlights the important points.

That’s all for now as I have changes to make….

Autopilot Cash Formula

It can be very hard to succeed alone. You can try to find out everything for yourself but it will take a great deal of time. There are many people out there claiming to show you the way to succeed, but if you’ve tried any you will know that most do not show you the complete picture or make it seem much easier than it really is.

Personally I think the best way to be successful is with the help of people who are already doing what you want to do.
At the begining of this year I chose to not buy anything at all except for advertising and training. This includes upgrades in Giveaways, coaching courses, and going to workshops. This has helped be move forward and focus on a clear path.

If you want to do the same there are three ways I recommend getting help all of which I have first hand knowledge of:

1) Forums

This is how I started as mentioned in my previous posts.
There are various options some are paid and some are free.

For just $1 you can have a trial of MoreMonthly which will
give you help in the forum and a large amount of PLR which
you can use to create products (or you can sell it).
You really can’t go wrong for $1..
MoreMonthly

I’ve made a video about the site here..

2) eBooks and Courses

You have to be very careful here as most eBooks and courses will not give you everything you need. You will still be left with pieces of the puzzle to fill in.

I’ve selected one which I think will benefit the majority of people. It’s from of my Colleagues from Alex Jeffreys coaching course last year, Matt Wolfe, who has gone from nothing to a substantial business in only 6 months. He kept a journal of everything he did and turned it into a complete product on how you can create a business just like his.

This one isn’t launched until 15th April but you can get some free tasters and get on the early bird list..

Autopilot Cash Formula

3) Mentoring/Coaching

This would be the first choice if you can afford it. You have to think of this as an investment. As I’ve already mentioned I was part of Alex Jeffrey’s coaching last year, and it was a turning point for me. I got my investments back in a couple of months and am moving forward fast now.
Alex has just re-opened his coaching with an even better one and I wish this had been available last year…
You can check out his video here to see what’s included:

Alex Jeffreys Coaching

Bonus
My Bonus for any one of these products if you buy via my link and forward me the receipt to keith.purkiss (at) gmail.com
This is limited to only 50 people and I will remove this paragraph as soon as they are gone.

1) I’m offering you 100% recurring commission from my new membership site that launches later this year and at $27 per month this can really add up fast for you. (Standard affiliates get 50%)

2) I will promote your product to my list as long as it fits the IM niche and is good quality.

3) I will speak to you on Skype for one hour – you can record this and use it as a product.

I’ve just checked my stats for my Free Backlinks Generator site and found I’d had

20181 visitors since July last year:

and 5446 in the last 2 weeks!

(click on images to enlarge)

However I’ve only had 5256 total optins or 26%.

I was on a coaching call with Jip Uppal and Adam Spiel last Wednesday and Jit said our optin rate should be 50% or more.
That implies with the same traffic I can now get an extra 5000+ Subscribers

I’m using the butterfly script because it has powerfull features including easy upsells/downsells membership area and built in affliate program that all members automatically belong to.
I have also added my own plug-in feature to drip feed monthly membership content.

My old signup page has a link that goes to a sign up page which asks for first name, email address, and also they have to tick a box to agree to terms and conditions.
This is too complicated. The simpler the better to get the maximum number of signups.

I got rid of the link and placed the optin on the squeeze page.
I tried to change it to only ask for email, but the script gave an error and the submit button didnt work.

I ended up using view souce, and created a new html page, bypassing the butterfly script homepage.
I edited out the check box and the first name form and simplified the pafge down to just a few sentences.

This won’t work well for Google traffic (which has been 1,800 visitors) but I will change so I have one on the root domain for search engines and a different ones for squeeze pages for adswaps and giveaways.
I will be split testing these and continually improving them.

If I can double my optin rate I will also double my sales, and with a bigger list can adswap with larger lists and grow even faster.
I’m recording all my stats – visitors, optins etc and will report back in a month or so.

If you are starting out get your sites setup fast – it’s better to have something working than to spend ages trying to make something perfect that never will be.

I will stick with the butterfly script because I know how to set it up, but if you are new just use something simple. Don’t spend time looking at ten different scripts with various different features just use straight html pages.

Keep improving and testing to make the most out of what you have.

I’ll be posting again soon with my improved results

“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her…” – David Brinkley

When you try to create your online business you will be bombarded with emails offering you ‘Bricks’ that may or may not help to build your system. Some will be free and some paid for.

For the plan I’m using you will need is a domain, webhosting and an autoresponder and these will all cost. There are ways to raise this money first (hire yourself out eg if you are good at graphics, or installing scripts) but you need need some finance to build a business.
I believe you also need coaching, mentoring or to at least be a member of some useful forums as I mentioned in my last post.
You will also to need your own product and some good contacts. You can use other peoples products initially but it won’t work as well or as fast.

The hardest part is to only collect the parts that your really need and throw away the rest.

You must have a solid plan just like when you are building a house, so that you know exactly what you need and what to do. Otherwise you will end up with the leaning tower of pisa with crumbling foundations.

You must focus on this plan and not start building other sites before you have one working.

It takes time – Rome wasn’t build in a day, but if you keep pushing away at one plan you will get there.
But be prepared – it may well take a couple of years. Most people aren’t going to tell you that but realistically it does take time to gather the knowledge you need and to train yourself to put it to good use.

If you are just starting out this probably isnt what you want to hear, but everyone finds this out in the end anyway so you are better off knowing now.

Focus – don’t keep checking your email, autoresponder, or paypal accounts.
I’ve been doing that today it just shows that finding out what to do is much easier than actually doing it. It’s just that I keep getting ‘Congratulations , You Just made a sale’ emails and until this week this didn’t happen.

You have to ignore all the latest products on how to make $1000 per day without doing any work and stick to one thing. If you don’t you will never even make $1 per day.

Following a big boost in my IM business early this week I spent Thursday working on my IM business and left the staff to run our Printing & Stationery and Mail Order businesses. It was sunny so I had a break in the garden. It’s not quite warm enough in our summerhouse, but later in the year I may sit in there with my laptop and work, or maybe even go away somewhere for a week in the summer.
Can you imagine what it would be like to get this kind of freedom?

That’s the target I’m working towards, but for now it focus, focus, focus…

When I was struggling to create my first proper digital product (I’d done a few odds and ends before but nothing I felt I could release – does that sound familiar?) I had a lot of problems:

My Problems

1) Should I do my own graphics or outsource? If I outsourced where should I go. I’d seen some horror stories about using sites like eLance.

2) Who should I go to for advise on the content of my eBook? Was it good enough.
At the time I think it was about 7 pages and I was findind it hard to make longer.
I didnt want to pad it out with fluff like you see in so many eBooks.

3) How do I write the sales page and emails

4) How do I get testimonials?

5) How do I sell it. Do I use Paypal?

6) How do I setup a mini site?
I had many websites already since 1999, one had 1000s of pages, but a site selling and ebook is different and you need to get it right.

7)How do I get affiliates or JV partners to sell it?
With no traffic how could I get any sales at all.

This was in August 2007. I’d been selling physical products online since 1999, but couldn’t break into the information business.

The answer turned out to be simple. I joined two forums – John Thornhill’s Planet Forum and Lee McIntyres Standing Start Profits. Inside I was able to get answers and advice.

Here’s the answers to the above problems:

My Solutions

1) The graphics I outsourced on eLance but scrapped in a few days after everyone hated them and I went with someone from a forum who was recommended by other members.

2) This one was easy, I just sent the eBook to some forum members and they suggested adding step by step instructions with screen shots. In a couple of weeks it to well over 20 pages, and the final version was 44 pages.

3) The sales page was really the hardest part but again loads of help was available, and I hired copywriting expert Randy Smith to write the emails. I figured his copy would sell so many more copies that it would easily pay his fee (and he became my first affiliate too which was a bonus).

4) Testimonials weren’t hard either – the people I’d sent the eBook to wrote them for me.

5) I was lucky to get the advice of John Thornhill on how to sell it and went with Clickbank. He became the biggest affiliated selling many hundreds of copies (he still gets sales today nearly 2 and a half years after it was released)

6) Setting up the mini site was again done with advice of colleagues. It takes time to get it right. Make sure have a good affiliate page with banners and emails or you won’t get top quality affiliates to promote it.

7) Some affiliates appeared almost by themselves, although I did have to do some emailing and PMing to get the bigger ones.
Don’t be intimidated by the thought of approaching a big name. If you have a good product and give them a good commission some should agree.

I’m putting no links in this post because I want it to be information only with nothing to lead people away half way through – if you want to know more about which forums I’m in or have any other questions or tips please comment below.

Disclaimer

This disclaimer is the bit people usually do not tell you so that their headlines look better!

1) Not all the $3149.71 was from sales of my eBook, I had commissions on a few eBooks sold to people on the list I built, they are however directly connected.
[This is only my commission so the actual sales would be over $6000 since I gave 50% commission and clickbank take fees as well. Please note most people would quote the total sales so it looks better.]

2) The 1143 subscribers included my affiliate list of 79, and a total of 294 have since unsubscribed.

3) The 3 months is the time it took me to setup everything and get the first sales. Some of the sales and subscribers came later, but it was all on auto-pilot and I did very little more work on the product, so the results came from those 3 months.