Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 279 | May 24th 2003

Letter from Phil

got to tell you that this has been written in a rush. I'm about to leave for 8 nights in a remote cottage on the Yorkshire Moors.

Remember the opening scenes of the movie An American Werewolf in London where the two Americans on a backpacking trip through the wild countryside of North England reach a small village near the onset of nightfall, and stop in at the local pub, a place with the odd and ominous name of "The Slaughtered Lamb"? When they quickly leave they're warned to stick to the road and not wander onto the moors...but they do.

Well that's the kind of place I'm heading for.

There's no telephone, so I won't be logging on for 8 days.

8 days with no Internet connection....that's scarier than any werewolf to me.

1. Awesome mini site success...

On Wednesday a family man in his early 30's emailed me to ask if we could meet up while I was in England.

At this stage I can't tell you his name, so we'll call him Nigel.

Now Nigel's story was so remarkable that I hopped onto a train the very next day and raced down to London for a chat.

Nigel turned full-time Internet marketer just three weeks ago, and was feeling a bit nervous about it. So he needed someone to talk it over with.

Now there's nothing too remarkable about turning full time net marketer, people do well at this all the time and quit their jobs.

But the amazing thing is that Nigel only became interested in Internet marketing earlier this year.

He's only read 3 books on the subject. My Mini Site Profits book, Ken Evoy's Affiliate Master's book, and one other I've forgotten the name of.

He's not been to any seminars, he's not met an Internet marketer until he met me.

He's not a writer or a web designer.

And now we get to the really interesting part.

Nigel has only built ever built one site. It's a 2 page mini site built around a template from his web host.

It's not ranked in Google or any other search engine because it's only a couple of months old.

He's not got his own product, he's linking to affiliate programs he found in the Clickbank marketplace.

But get this ----- he's already making 2000 pounds a week ( over US$3000 ) from this one site by promoting it purely in Google Adwords and on Overture.

Sounds like he's making those figures up to impress doesn't it.

But he's shown me the figures, including screen shots of his Clickbank earnings, and I believe him.

His earnings went from something like 300 the first week, to 700, to 2000. We're talking English pounds here.

What held him back at first was he'd limited the amount he spent each day on Google until he'd worked out all the figures.

Otherwise he could well have been making 2000 from the very first week.

Anyway, I can't write any more about it this week but I just thought you'd want to hear the story.

Great news to see someone doing so fantastically well.

Now Nigel is going to write up a report about how he's done so well. I'll let you know all about it soon.

2. Is content dead...?

In Starbucks, in Borders on Charing Cross Road, I read an interesting piece in a business magazine proclaiming that that day of the online content site is dead.

While that's not necessarily true in the Internet Marketing world - think Terry Dean's Netbreakthroughs website and Cory Rudl's Secrets To Their Success website which are both hugely successful content (text) based sites, it is increasingly hard to find successful content sites in the broader marketplace.

The magazine cited the case of restaurant.com, which started as a sort of online magazine full of restaurant reviews, ads, menu's, and recipes, but the revenue model based on selling banner ads and pages to individual restaurants failed.

Now restaurant.com is a coupon site, selling vouchers for discounted meals... and it's doing very well, making the kind of money we'd all like to have.

It got me thinking about many of the recent success stories in this marketing niche and how many of the big successes are sites providing tools to help make online life easier for we marketing "entrepreneurs."

Take Armand Morin, for example, who has made a fortune in the past year with a string of well marketed tools like his Sales Letter Generator. He now seems to come out with a new product every month and he's doing VERY well.

Ken Evoy though is perhaps the classic example. Starting with a series of books he turned to software with the excellent Site Build It! web development tool which is now the shining star of his stable

As my friend Bill Burdin once said to me "who got rich in the gold rush days? The prospector or the man selling them the shovels?"

In other words, if you can come up with a "shovel" that will make the lives of Internet marketers easier you're likely to do a lot better than if you're selling an ebook or publishing an information site.

ok, got to go and meet the werewolves.