In early May, Ray and I attended Gail Bottomleys sneaky workshop in Melbourne. As I have been doing this gig for quite a while, I didn’t learn anything new on the day. However, I should point out that I spent a lot of time in my early days sitting in on Gail’s webinars and learning a lot. In any case, Gail did an awesome job teaching all the newbies in the room about how to get a website up and running. She even had some new tricks to show at her latest workship. Ray also learnt a lot about building a wordpress website since his focus has been on auto-responders and tracking in Google analytics.
In any case, what I like about Gail is that she takes everything in her stride. She is a patient and very endearing. She certainly knows and understands the Internet Marketing gig and can answer virtually any question thrown at her. This is no mean feat. She even copes with the occasional tear from some students who get a little frustrated when things don’t work out quite right. I seriously recommend Gail Bottomleys workshops if you are just starting out.
Gail Bottomley teaches a different model to Brett McFall. While Brett’s program focuses mainly on creating your own product, Gails program focuses on affiliate marketing. Personally I prefer the affiliate marketing model – well at least when you are starting out. This is because there is a lot of information to learn and absorb and I believe it is best to focus on the core skills of keyword research and how to search engine optimize your page properly before you go out and create your own product.
By way of example, we created a product early on when we first started the Warpspeed program. We even outsourced it and spent around $1200 on getting our ebook written by an elance writer. We even followed instructions on how to find products with low competition and high traffic – the problem was that the product we selected was not a viable market that was willing to spend money. This was an expensive mistake. In my mind, why go out and buy an expensive Harley Davidson if you don’t have a license to drive it.
Essentially, I went back to the basics and learnt the correct skills and used affiliate marketing as a vehicle to perfect and hone my skills. Thats why I like the way Gail teaches. She covers some pretty critical steps in her sneaky workshop and I think this is Gail’s core area of expertise.
However, since then I’ve learnt even more advanced techniques since joining James Schramko’s program. This has been a positive step as I can honestly say that I have made much more money on James program than what I had done previously.
Whats the difference:
For a start, the content James teaches is cutting edge and up to date. This has helped me progress much faster and I have pretty much unsubscribed from most other Internet Marketers email lists (although I still affectionately love to hear from Gail as well).
James is actively involved in his community. He holds weekly / fortnightly webinars. He posts and responds to questions on the forum on a daily basis. Would you believe he even flew directly to Melbourne from Sydney this week to spend a night and get to know his Superfast Results forum members? That’s commitment.
His forum has experts in virtually any field you might be interested in – from Pay per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress, Getting traffic , buying and selling domain names and even flipping websites. At US$97 a month it is the best value around. Since working with James we have broken new barriers and boundaries. Apart from making more money, we have:
- Become an expert author on Ezine articles
- Ran our first webinar
- Organised our first workshop
- Implemented powerful RSS streams of traffic
- Increased the number of visitors to our site
- Set up a paypal button that links directly to our autoresponder account
- Achieved a page 1 ranking in Google
- Got put on a private affiliate program
- Streamed video from ez3 (yes – I was nearly in tears with this one)
- And are currently putting together out first proposal to help local business with our Internet Marketing skills
How you benefit?
Our key focus is on helping other Melpies get through their stumbling blocks. We know from experience that there are many. This means you get the benefit of everything I have learnt and implemented. We have been through the blood, sweat and tears. You also get to benefit from finding out the latest, cutting edge information. For further information on what courses and workshops we are holding visit Effortless Internet Marketing.
We should also point out that while we are members of Brett’s program, we are not affiliated to Brett’s program. Whilst Brett McFall encourages local meet-ups, he does not endorse the content in them. Hence any information and advice that we provide based on our own knowledge and experience. This is not disimilar to the Warpies forum where a variety of people other than Brett McFall who offer their advice and opinions in the forum.
Filed under Affiliate Information, Keyword Research by on Jun 17th, 2010. Comment.
Keyword research is one of the most important things you can do as an Internet Marketer. Finding the “right” keywords is pretty critical as good keywords are the foundation to any website and pay per click campaign. Researching and locating the right keywords helps you identify market niches that you can dominate as well as help you get your website found by google. Unfortunately, I have seen far too many websites that choose poor keywords or keywords with high competition which they don’t have a hope of ranking for unless they are planning to spend the next few years trying to build back links to their site.
Fortunately there are tools available that make the process easier. Aside from using Google Keyword Tool, I have used both Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai. Let me make this clear, both tools are pretty good. Micro Niche Finder is useful but sometimes I have trouble moving it between computers whereas I don’t have that problem with Market Samurai. Also I find that Micro Niche Finder takes me longer to do my keyword research. Data gets posted in a queue and I find that sometimes this takes time to come up.
Keyword research need not take longer than 10 minutes. Market Samurai makes the somewhat boring but essential task of keyword research quick and seamless. The software is also made by local Melbourne lads so I like being about to support the local economy. However, what I really love about Market Samurai is that not only does it help you find the right keywords, it also helps you check out your competition, analyze your page rank, find and publish content as well as find available domain names.
Whilst Micro Niche Finder does similar things I don’t find it as intuitive to use and I find it takes me longer to use the tool properly. If you don’t know what you are doing you can blow up your search results from Google so you get nonsensical data. Market Samurai has easy to use filters – you just need to tick a box. The training videos also explain everything you need to know in plain simple English. You can try it out for your yourself to see how powerful it is. It is also one of the tools that is used by Ed Dale from the 30 day challenge and used by James Schramko from Fast Web Formula.
Filed under Keyword Research, Market Research by on Jun 12th, 2010. Comment.
A few months ago I joined an Internet Marketing Coaching Forum that has taken my Internet Marketing knowledge to a new level. The forum is jam packed with live webinars, quality training videos and a vast array of web page builder tools. I have learnt a multitude of different business models outside of just creating my own product – from affiliate programs, CPA, Domaining, as well as selling your Internet Marketing knowledge to offline business. What I love about the forum is that it also weekly webinars that feature guest speakers or question and answer sessions.
The forum is very active and there are resident experts on WordPress, SEO and Consulting that will help move you to a new level. Any question you have can be covered off by one of the experts. You can have access to a serious range of affiliate products not available to the public.
The forum is a paid membership forum and is invitation only. Anyone wanting to join the forum and take their Marketing to a new level goes onto to a waiting list until an opportunity to join becomes available. It is worth getting yourself on the waiting list but in the meantime you can check out the main blog and grab some great content.
Filed under Driving Traffic, Keyword Research, Website Design by on Apr 11th, 2010. Comment.
At our last Melpies Meeting on Sunday 7th February, we covered of keyword research. Keyword research is one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle in achieving success online. In fact, research is the foundation of any marketing program. Do this wrong, and you will struggle to get the right traffic and traffic that converts.
Some tips covered at the meeting included:
- How many sponsored ads are displayed – are there buyers in the market? If so this is a good sign as it means your market is commercially viable.
- Consider the competition – if there are millions of search results it is going to take a very long time to rank very highly in google. Ideally you want less than 30,000 search results.
- Think laterally and use related keywords
- Use long-tail keywords that are 3 or more words long- these are more targeted
- Be relevant. Put yourself in the mindset of the buyer. Consider what would you type into Google if you were looking to buy something. For example, if you were looking for advice on how to save money to go on a holiday, you wouldn’t be searching for the term “cheap weekends away” – a buyer typing in this term is most likely going to be looking for locations where they can have a cheap weekend away.
- Use buying terms – words such as cure, stop, fix all suggest that the searcher is looking for a solution to a problem. You can bet if this is the case, they are more likely to be in a buying mind-state.
Keyword research is a simple process but it is amazing how many people get it wrong. We did a couple of case studies of some websites and found that many had some fundamental flaws. Some of the keywords used were too broad, the headings did not match the keywords. The PPC ad campaign for the website was also not specific to buyer needs and used different search terms to the rest of the website.
The process of finding the right keywords is relatively simple. It can be done manually by looking within various Google tools or it can be more automated by using a Micro Niche Software program. The good thing with software, is that you don’t have to go looking in various places to do your research. Your searches are automatically saved so you can refer back to them at a later time. If you would like to find out more about Finding Niche Keywords, then check out these free videos of the software in action by clicking on the above link.
Filed under Keyword Research, Market Research by on Feb 15th, 2010. 2 Comments.






