Letter from Phil...

We wake in the dead of night. Something cold has entered the room and invaded our dreams. Like a scene from a haunted house movie, a light ethereal mist slowly swirls at the foot of the bed.

Then we realize it's a cloud drifting in through the large open windows of our mountain top house. Suddenly we're laughing with delight and jumping outside to enjoy the delicious coldness.

Three hours later...it's just before 5am. Woken by birds singing - or more likely gossiping - I'm watching the giant red ball of the sun rise over the Great Barrier Reef islands. I pull out my digital camera and start shooting landscapes from the deck.

This isn't the start of one of those long, rambling stories about how to get rich on the Internet, but it is about how the net can give you the freedom to make choices about where you live and work. And these days the choice of where to live is very important.

Yesterday, Tony Blake, one of the world's most successful marketers and copywriters, said to me " I don't know if it's because of frustration or desperation... but since 9-11 and the downturn in the US economy I've seen a marked shift in how people treat each other on the net."

I found myself agreeing...and thinking about how things have changed both on and offline. And that's sparked this weeks issue which is about how the net can give you freedom to make your own choices in life.

If you're a new reader you might not know that I choose to live in Australia, on the top of an isolated mountain overlooking the islands of The Great Barrier Reef.

I'm not a survivalist redneck cutting himself off from the dangers of the world, I'm living here because it's a beautiful, peaceful place. But it does have the benefit of being a long way from most perceived terrorist actions.

You might not want to live in Australia, but the fact is, when you become "successful" with your small home business on the Internet you can choose to live and work anywhere you want. You might like living in a big, busy city, or in the vast tracts of suburbia, but I know many people hate it and are looking for a way out - particularly now, when we never quite know where danger lies.

Growing an income on the net gives you that kind of freedom. And in fact, by living away from one of the big cities, you'll be much better off financially with the lower cost of real estate being just one benefit.

It's a great feeling to know that you can make a living on the net from wherever you choose to live. Allan Gardyne splits his time between Australian beach front and New Zealand; Neil Shearing ( Internet Success Blueprint )works from a tiny village in the wild moorlands of south-west England; Jeff Belton from a tropical island.

If you only work in the Internet marketing field you might not have heard of Jeff, because he's slightly outside this field...but he's one of the world's super super affiliates with a reputed affiliate income of $23,000+ a month mainly from promoting the Match.com and One and Only Internet dating services. You can sign up for Match.com's affiliate program here - they've taken over One and Only which will soon be doing a disappearing act

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning Jeff Belton is that he's a big advocate of building mini theme sites, using them to promote the affiliate programs most of his profits come from.

In a recently published interview he told Declan Dunn ( author of Winning the Affiliate Game ) that he creates mini theme sites for each specific product he promotes, then attracts visitors through the search engines.

Come up with themed sites," he said. "If your program involves romance or dating, integrate dating into your theme site. If you're about travel, discuss romantic travel. Create minisites for each theme or specific product.

Jeff might not need to read Mini Site Profits but you do.

You can read more about Jeff, and his tactics for affiliate success in Declan's book Net Profits - how to win the affiliate game.

And talking of winning the affiliate game...yesterday afternoon I drove into town and collected my mail - a swag of affiliate checks and a late Christmas present of a big Amazon Gift Certificate from Marlon Sanders for making so many sales of his Gimme book.

Marlon's Gimme My Money Now is my personal "bible" of web business building.
And other people's too. I think that in the last year I've sold more of this book than anything else. And I've learnt more from it too. It's on the expensive side at $97, but it's value to my business can't be overstated. I re-read it frequently.

7am...After breakfast, which we struggled to cook on the giant gas/electric stove(we dined out a lot before moving here) I decide to get my home office in some sort of order.

We only moved in last week and the house is in chaos. I've chosen the one room with no views and only a small window (no it's not the bathroom which has great views) and I've just unpacked the computer, a big Dell 8100 Pentium 4 with 640megs of high speed Rambus Memory. Still no phone line, which should have been installed 10 days ago, but I don't have a an Internet dial-up account anyway. Losing my 512k download ADSL line was the hardest part of the move - ADSL won't work this far from a telephone exchange, and I need to find an ISP with good service and speed which is never easy.

Do more business by making it easy for people

Try phoning several big Australian ISP's but after pressing lots of buttons I never get to talk to a live person and sick of waiting I dig out an AOL disc and I'm online and getting my email in 3 or 4 minutes with a 2 month unlimited time / download free trial. Just goes to show that if you make things easy for people to do business with you... you'll do more business.

Listen...if you've emailed my in the past 10 days I'm sorry I haven't replied. I'm pouring through around 1500 emails, junking the spam my filters didn't catch, then highlighting the emails I need to answer and then working my way though the list.

I've just realized something.

A lot of this issue sounds self congratulatory Like I''m boasting about my new place and the web success I'm enjoying. I don't want it to come across that way but I think you might see it that way. What I'm trying to get across to you - in my clumsy way - is that working the web can bring you exactly the lifestyle you want. You really can live anywhere and earn an income online.

What you can't do though is achieve instant web success. It's a myth. You've really got to stop listening to all that crap you get in emails, things like "Invest $25 and make $5000 a month" "You will EARN BIG $ as you learn" It's just not true. You've got to learn the skills before you'll make the money.

And you need to work at this as you would any other business. The more effort you put into it, the more skills you develop, the more enthusiastic and dedicated you are, the better your long term results will be.

Ok, I'm back online with AOL but only getting 26.6k which is not great. The telecom company says the lines are poor around here. Looks like I'll have to invest in satellite. Two way satellite will be arriving here soon. I'll wait for that. But right now there's a terrific electrical storm going on, so I'm unplugging my modem anyway.

The lightning is amazing. Decide to grab a beer and go on to the deck to photograph it with my Canon Digital SLR and a 20mm lens. 6 second time exposure. Canon D30 Digital, 20mm 2.8

"No BS Examples of Real People Making Real Money
And The Exact Step-by-step Details Of How They're
Doing It!" - Cory Rudl

Bet you got tons of emails yesterday promoting Cory Rudls new product. No matter how good the product is (and Corey's new member only site is very good) I hate it when that happens - when everyone with an ezine shoots out a similar email all hoping that they're the first to get the message out to you.

As far as I can see this same message problem is only going to get worse. If you subscribe to 100 marketing ezines half of them are probably going to mail you the same day with a sales spiel for the new release.

If I'd been online yesterday (I've only just had my phone connected after nearly 2 weeks without one) I'd have been half tempted to do it myself because it's a strategy that works...though I'd have tried to come up
with a different letter/angle.

The vast bulk of affiliate sales come in the first few weeks of a new products release, and the people who benefit most are the fastest movers at getting the message out - providing they have a responsive list of course.

If you don't have a big responsive email list, the way to go is build a mini site around the new release to grab the long term sales. Each time a worthy new product appears put up a small site on the theme of that product and use your mini site to presell it, and drive people already in a buying mood to the new products sales letter. You can learn how in my book Mini Site Profits

Taking Corey's new product as an example you could quickly put together a small site about Internet success stories, or the theme of this ezine, which is live anywhere, work the web. Pepper it with small teasers for Corey's web site, promote it via search engines, pay-per-clicks, and advertising, and if you presell effectively you've got almost guaranteed sales.

In case you haven't read all the email "sales" letters you got, Corey's new product is a monthly newsletter on a member only site featuring real life detailed, in-depth, interviews with work-from-home Internet success stories. Interviews which detail exactly how people are making their money and how you can use the same techniques to generate a substantial online income of your own.

The people featured seem be to ordinary hard working people, like you and me, but they're making big online incomes in excess of $100,000 to $600,000 online every year. Like I said most of them do it working from
home. On Corey's site they discuss just what you can do to copy their success. You get the exact strategies they have used to generate incomes, and you'll find your head spinning with income generating ideas

Already featured is Anthony who is making over $250,000 a year selling only one product. Ellen, a work-at-home mom who generates a great income by simply selling her homemade soaps from her web site. Ken,
who in his second year of business made $300,000 from his beachfront condo in Hawaii. And best of all Andy who makes $600,000 a year with a simple site that plays on people's fear of hair loss, and how to reverse your own hair loss. (I'm kind of tempted to buy from Andy's site myself. He does a good sales job, and I sure need it).

As Corey says, these are real web sites built by real people making real profits online. I'm sure you'll love this site. The professional, very in-depth interviews are fascinating, and you'll pick up heaps of tips to help you
boost your sales. You can read more about it here.

I've joined myself because I think it's incredibly important to learn from people who are actually making big money. I want that kind of money. Don't you?

Overture listing rules change again...

Ah, the ever changing world of search engines and directories. Yahoo has changed it's only recently introduced $299 fee to an annual one, which now means you'll have to pay each year to keep your site listed.

And Overture has tightened it's relevancy rules / listing guidelines yet again. Here's what they've just announced.

"Beginning on January 21, 2002, all new search listings for the U.S. Marketplace must meet the following guidelines:

Direct Path:
The URL listed in the search result must take the user directly to the specific content page that qualifies the site for the search term. Sites may no longer direct users to their home page, or require users to
search for content by having to click deeper within the site.

Description Quality:
Titles and descriptions must be well-written, objective, clear, and concise. Using superlative words, such as "best," "biggest," or "lowest" are no longer acceptable.

Location-Specific:
Location-specific sites may bid only on location-specific terms.Therefore, advertisers whose services can only be rendered or delivered within a certain region will have to specify that region in their terms, titles, and descriptions.

We will begin reviewing existing listings on February 1, 2002 to ensure compliance with these guidelines. "

click here for issue 202