In brief: If you cannot market and sell your ideas to your employers and colleagues, you’ll be exploited and under-paid.

Fifty years ago, giant corporations offered a lifetime of job security and upward mobility. Today you’ll have to be more flexible in your working skills because chances are the jobs you are doing today will not be the ones you are doing in 5 or ten years.

In our current 2010 economic meltdown in the United States, we have a chorus of workers demanding the government create jobs. I’m not too astute about politics or economics, but it seems to me that the workers should be busting their buns to get new skills with more value in the new economy instead grousing about the loss of the obsolete jobs they lost.

In the news, a factory worker who for 25 years has put in his hours and spent his off-time watching television rather than bettering himself cries angrily at the government to replace his lost job. I ask this: how many books has he read in the last year about improving his earning capacity by learning new skills?

I am not being political here.  As I see it, this  is a very practical matter. If your skills are no longer valued where you are, you have two basic options to improve your standard of living:

• 1. Go to where your skills are valued. The move may be geographical but if you are a knowledge worker and not a physical worker, you may be able to work remotely.
• 2. Learn new skills that are valued or will be valued where you are.

During the industrial revolution workers moved from farms to cities in order to do better financially. It did not always work out for workers, but consider that 19th century farming was pretty unscientific and unpredictable, the idea of stable, long-term industrial employment was attractive to poor rural folk.

In today’s shifting new economy the likelihood of you becoming very prosperous doing any form of work other than knowledge work is remote. Knowledge work can be creative work and it can involve physical activity, but the driving force behind the value a knowledge worker provided is not in his or her muscles, but between his or her ears.

Get Over Yourself

In my work as a marketing consultant I have had clients who boasted to me of their sales prowess – ie. “I can sell anything to anybody”

When I hear that I think 1. “you have a big ego” and 2. “if you are so skilled, why do you need my help?”

From personal experience hiring and managing salespeople I know they can be quite un-humble in assessing their own skills yet when it came time for them to dial for dollars (I ran a phone sales operation), very few would actually get positive results.

The closer you get to real mastery of a skill, the more you realize how hard it really is. By way of example: I thought I was a much more skilled guitar player 5 years ago than I think am today, even though today I am much more skilled in reality. The difference is now I am humble about it because I realize how much I have yet to learn to truly master the instrument.

The less you know about a topic the more likely you are to have a sophomoric (“wise fool”) view of its challenges. It is common for people to overvalue their own prowess. While I’m much too polite to tell anybody to their face they are over-valuing their own skills you would do well yourself to assess your own present skills a bit critically.

Skills in sales and marketing are the same way – when you learn a little bit about it you’ll start to think you are pretty hot stuff, when you really don’t have the goods yet. This is all part of the learning process, so observe it without judgement in yourself. Even if you must brag to compete in the marketplace, try to be humble inside yourself because humility keeps you in the learning process. If you think you know everything you stop learing and get arrogance.

Preparation Matters – So Be Prepared

The Boy Scouts of America slogan “Be Prepared” is a bit of wisdom. I was never a boy scout and I’ve learned to be prepared through numerous instances of failure to be prepared, with disastrous consequences. Skilled salesmanship is all about being prepared, and in today’s competitive marketplace it stands to reason that the people with the sharpest skills are going to be the winners.

Today’s marketplace is a very sensitive environment because consumers have virtually endless choices of who they do business with. You’ll want to pay attention to subtle details and part of preparation to market yourself or your product is learnng what to look for. It’s honing your instincts, if you want to think of it that way.

In order to market your products or self competitively you’ll need to have a plan to communicate to the marketplace. Without one you’ll be just like all the other poor sops without a clue who are forced to take what they can get, which usually isn’t much.

Writing is communication and any planned communication involves writing. All effective salesmanship and marketing must be planned to succeed and sell the product. That’s because our brains work in a somewhat mysterious but fairly predictable way. The old sales gurus figured out a lot of stuff intuitively by observing people. Now we have mounting research into consumer behavior.

What is indisputable is that some people seem to have a “knack” for selling. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. Selling does not come naturally or easily to me. Everything I’ve learned about how to sell has come from hard work and diligent study and I suggest to you that selling and marketing are very learnable skills.

If you’re selling face to face or on the phone, you may not really be a marketer. A salesman relies a great deal on his ears for listening and his voice for talking. A marketer uses a pen instead of the voice. This allows the marketer to have leverage, but it also means if you want to be a really skilled and successful marketer, you need to hone your writing skills.

Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it.  It is a watershed work.

I recommend starting with the easy stuff.  Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.

THE CORE TRIO

The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.

1.  “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times.  It’s short but very potent.  Everybody who writes advertising should internalize Claude Hopkins’s stuff.

2. “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab.  Subtitled “A Short Course in Copywriting” it is just that.  It walks you through Schwab’s 5-step sequence of what every ad needs to accomplish in the first half, and in the second half are observations about direct mail, ad layout and so forth.  If you advertise online only you’ll find the first half valuable, since the second half of the book pertains largely to the problems of print advertising.

3. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John C. Caples.   I have the fifth edition, but some folks say the 4th is superior.  All I can say is the book is packed with good information and insight, but I find reading it front to back a little dry.  The book has examples from catalogs and brands we are familiar with today.  Allegedly the 4th and earlier editions are more fun to read, but  less contemporary.

Do get these books as soon as possible, and read them.  If you just read internet ebooks you are missing-out on the proven fundamentals of advertising.  Between the 3 of them, the authors of the above books had over 120 years experience when they wrote their books.  That’s a lot of wisdom.

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

I’m personally ambivalent about Twitter as a push-marketing channel, which is how most internet marketers try to use it.  I do use it here and there but I haven’t really pursued building a large base of followers or tweeting regularly to them.

“Everybody Talking, Nobody Listening”

If you get enough followers on Twitter you can definitely drive traffic at will. One problem is, for most of us, is that in order to get a lot of followers, we have to follow a lot of other people who only follow us because they want us to follow them.  What happens, mostly, is a phenomenon where everybody is talking but almost nobody is listening.

I am not saying you should not play the Twitter game.  I’m just saying the situation with marketers using Twitter to get web traffic is a little silly due to the self-serving nature of marketers.

Is Twitter Worth The Time Investment It Demands?

Well, that’s up to you.  You can certainly automate some of the process of following other marketers and thus getting them to follow you.  There are dozens of software programs that automate some aspect of Twitter.

How Non-marketers Use Twitter

I actually interview random people I meet what they think about Twitter and Facebook and how they use them.  What I’ve found is that almost nobody is interested in using these sites to find stuff to buy from marketers.

I think Twitter and Facebook can be very useful for keeping in touch with your group of real friends.  That’s mostly what I use Facebook for, personally.   One young woman told me she and her friends use Twitter to keep in touch on the fly – and they use their cell phones to send and receive tweets.

Rather than texting each one of a group of, say, 20 friends in the local area, this woman might agree with another friend that they would go dancing that evening at a local club.  Then she wouldl tweet about that to her list of friends and some of them would show up at the club.  This is a fine and appropriate use of Twitter.  It saves time and gets the message out clearly to a specific group of people.

If one individual in this circle of friends joined an MLM and started tweeting to his friends about it, they would probably get annoyed and stop following him.  But among marketers there is on Twitter a massive “you follow me, I follow you” party going on.  The truth is you can sell stuff to other marketers pretty easily – which makes Twitter appropriate for marketing to marketers in many way.

Twitter Lightening Rod

Another interesting use of Twitter I found is local groups of people using it to congregate and communicate about issues they share and interest in.  I’ve identified activist groups doing this and, in my area, a group of people who share and interest in organic food and farming who use Twitter to notify each other about farmer’s markets and other events.  The usage is pretty low key, but it makes a point to me:  it might be a good idea to have different Twitter accounts for different interests of yours.

Even if there is not much potential to make money directly from a Twitter group you become part of, if you are selective about who you follow and why you can have these feeds of information that tell you what is going on.  Twitter thus becomes an invaluable research tool that tells you what people in the group find important.  This information can inform your marketing efforts in mind-boggling ways – in the past gathering such information would take countless horus of surveying people on the phone or in person.  Today, it’s fed to you in 140-character info-bites.

“Great Salespeople Listen More Than They Speak”

With Twitter most of the marketers are talking, but few are listening.  When you listen to and grasp the way people want to receive information and what they want to know about, you become empowered to give it to them.  Then you can wrap your advertising messages in contextually appropriate packaging for your market.
Today’s marketplace can feel like a sand dune shifting under your feet.  Knowing where to put your energy and use your time optimally can be a real challenge.   Just charging ahead and following marketing fads like Twitter may or may not work for you, but if you study human nature and learn to give people what they really want, then you’re onto something.

It shouldn’t surprise you that resistance and apathy towards advertising is at an all-time peak.  The major reason is because most advertising is harshly interruptive and people resent advertisers impinging on their time. They can switch the channel or go to another web-site or video so very quickly with the internet.  For this reason you should not expect to win at marketing by hitting people over the head telling them what you want to sell.

I Am Not Knocking Twitter, But… is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

(this post was updated July 25, 2010)

If you haven’t started your internet business yet, you may be too late… if you’re an average person.

Average people would like to be rich and successful – but they won’t take the kind of rigorous action getting what they want requires. 95% of people are pretty average in terms of how ambitious they are, which means they don’t have the fire in the belly entrepreneurial success requires. Most of the people you know are average in this way – and thus are poor role models for the budding entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs and business owners pay themselves, on average, about 500% what they would make with their same skills as employees. Thus a $100,000 a year skill becomes a $500,000 a year skill. Most people surveyed would like to own their own businesses, yet most lack the aggressiveness to do so and remain employees for life.

Factoid
The word “employee” incidentally, has the same Scottish root as the words “ploy” and “exploit”. That should tell you something.

But If YOU Are Tired Of Working For Average Rewards And Want To Boost Your Income By 500% Here’s Some Advice To Help You Get There…

you cannot do it thinking like an employee. You have to shift your mindset to become an instigator. An instigator is one who sets events in motion. Creating that motion is what being and entrepreneur/marketer. No entrepreneur is not a marketer because entrepreneurs must always sell their ideas to the marketplace and sometimes to investors.

How To Get Money In The New Economy

The internet start-up marketplace is very, very crowded. It is like a gold rush. Only the most aggressive and fast-moving will get the big rewards. For feeble competitors there will be scant rewards. Tons of people have blogs and sites that could make them full-time incomes… yet only a tiny, tiny portion of those people make more than a few bucks a month. These folks, whatever their virtues, are feeble competitors in the new economy.

Even if you have already “started” your internet business, have you really got started ?

There’s a huge difference between putting up a blog or website and creating a business. The first thing is easy. I set up sites in under an hour. Setting up a real business is a different matter.

There is good news however. Innovation is not needed of you. Successful marketing is not a matter of innovation alone, as Emerson thought when he penned this fallacy:

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Emerson may have been a fine writer, but he was a dope about marketing. He seems to have believed that innovation or quality alone would insure success.

In Emerson’s time it was not true, and it is not true today.

Innovation can be a powerful advantage, but if you are bootstrapping your own business, trying to innovate is likely tilting at windmills. Inventing something new and unproven can be slow, costly and draining. All too often the inventor emerges with little clue how to market the innovation.

The good news here is that imitating what is working for other businesses, and improving it where you can, is the surest route to profitability and, if you make appropriate choices, wealth.

Producing a quality product or service alone will not bring you money. Money from your internet, or any other kind of business, will only come as a result of salesmanship. There is an unprecedented quantity of quality information about how to start and market a business today. The internet puts so much useful information at your fingertips ignorance can be no excuse.

Therein lies the problem. The problem you may be having is not in knowing what to do, but it how to do it.

It is likely nobody ever taught you the job of marketing your business, especially online with all the tricks and twists and technology that comes into play. Sure, you can read up on how to “do SEO” or “article marketing” or “build a list” but unless you’re actually getting your hands dirty you aren’t learning how to do the job of marketing.

Of course, we marketing bloggers do our best to try to explain how to promote, but without action – and smart action too – you won’t get far trying to make money online. Internet marketing is a craft and it is intricate. If nobody has told you this before I tell you now.

Because marketing is intricate it is hard and it requires perseverance to succeed. As you persevere you learn and grow from experience and, gradually, you can become a skilled practitioner. Mentoring or coaching can speed the process in many cases. This is because chief among the decisions you must make is to decide what extraordinary value you will bring, yourself, to the marketplace in exchange for the money you desire.

This level of focus does not come easily to most people. Even many in the elite 5% have to work hard and struggle with their own doubts and self-limiting behavior for many years before they achieve that crystalline focus. Again, many books talk about how to do it – Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” is good to read, or read again if you have read it before. There is no substitute for single-minded determination in the getting of money, especially if you want to get a lot of it. And without focus that determination cannot take shape.

How To Quintuple Your Income (Not Easy, But Tested and Proven To Work) is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

• 3 easy ways to start attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog
• How to start growing your email list immediately
• The secret ingredient (that skyrockets sales) you must deliver in all your content

First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all.  In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.

The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity.  When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.

Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free.  Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who want information and come searching for it.  I call this traffic friendly because they are asking questions and want solutions to their problems.  They aren’t really expecting to be sold anything, so their guard tends to be down.  The “friendly factor” is part of what makes blog traffic so high quality.

Of course some of your traffic will usually come from phrases people type into search engines.  You’ll get this sort of traffic naturally over time,  but getting lots of it is a technical process I won’t try to teach in a short article.

The cornerstone of the best free traffic is human engagement. That means giving information as from one person to another.  Imagine a person asked you a question and you knew the answer.  You would probably share the answer, right?

Sharing answers to questions is the easy way to get free traffic.  Of course sharing answers means putting words together.  There are many opportunities online to share answers to questions, but the easiest to learn to use are:

• forums
• article sites
• press releases

Online forums are easy to figure out.  You’ll want to explore whether the forum allows you to put a signature link at the bottom of your posts.  If it doesn’t allow links, it’s probably not a good forum for getting traffic.  There are hundreds of great forums where people ask questions.  One easy way to find forums is using Google Alerts, which is a service that emails you whenever somebody uses keywords, anywhere on the internet.  For example, if you had a blog about alternative energy, you could have Google Alerts email you whenever new content turned up with phases like “home solar power” turned up.

It can take awhile to build up forum traffic, because with most forums the more you post, the more people on the forum will trust you because they can see your “post count”.  People naturally assume the more you’ve posted, the better your advice.  Thus, a good strategy is to stake out a half-dozen or so forums and promote your expertise on them consistently.  This strategy takes awhile to generate a lot of traffic, but in time the traffic can get to be quite substantial.

Article sites  are another good way to get traffic. The most important thing is to learn how to title your articles so people will be curious to read them.  Arguably your title is more important than the content of the article in getting people to read the article.  Article marketing can be frustrating if you aren’t writing about subjects lots of people are desperate to learn more about.  A smart approach is to test different approaches until you figure out what kind of article topics and titles get you the most traffic, then write more of that type of article.

Press releases are like articles but you can get away with a lot of self-promotion in them.  Articles tend to do well when they are informative on their own.  Try to make your releases more newsy and tease the reader to go to your site to get the really hot information.  Not many marketers use press releases effectively, but the traffic is often substantial.

How to start growing your email list immediately (plus a secret)

All anybody online searching for information thinks about is “what’s in it for me?  What do I get and how do I get it?”. Web searchers are about as self-centered as 2-year olds.  The best way to build your email list is offer instant gratification in terms of bait.  Free reports or training videos are common subscriber baits because they work.  The secret missing ingredient you must offer in the bait, if you want a lot if subscribers, is the implication that if the person gets your free goodie, all their problems will go away effortlessly.  I cannot emphasize this enough – you have to write to the “Chimpanzee brain”, the 2-year old who wants only easy, instant gratification.  A nice box shot or graphical presentation of the free prize your subscriber will get can skyrocket your email list to.  That’s because people want what’s new.  Make your free prize “goodie” appear as new and exciting and effortless as possible and you’ll get much better results in building your list.

3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

Experienced folks may find this information basic, but it’s a fun read because…

In the next two minutes you will discover:

• What kind of traffic is best for making money
• How to get the best kind of traffic for free
• A little-known secret proven to increase your income from free traffic

Not all traffic is equal. Some traffic is high quality and you can make money with it. Some traffic is poor quality.

The only kind of traffic that’s any good to most marketers is targeted traffic. When traffic is perfectly targeted making money is easy. All you have to do is send the people to a webpage that offers exactly what they want. This is targeting. If you have traffic looking for barbeques and you send them to a site about baking cakes, the traffic is unlikely to be well targeted to sell the cake stuff. Send traffic looking for barbeques to a page selling barbeque recipes or barbeque sauce and your chances of selling something are way higher.

The internet is an amazing thing for targeted traffic. The easiest way to do it is to pay for clicks, which can get expensive but can be very accurate in targeting people who are ready to spend money.

Since I know you want a free method, I’ll tell you the three easiest free methods. The bad news is they all involve you working to get the traffic. No martinis on the beach for you yet!

Article traffic is the best-known free traffic strategy. You’ll improve with practice, but the secret revealed at the end of this article will instantly improve your results when you use it.

Free press releases are less used than articles. Overlooking press releases is not very smart because they are excellent ways to get traffic and often out-perform articles.

Forums and message-boards are also excellent ways to get free traffic. Don’t let yourself get glued to any one forum though, and make sure you are writing plenty of press releases and articles to balance your forum activity. Forums can seduce you, because they are often social and fun. Use forums but don’t over-use them. The easiest way to learn how to get forum traffic is emulate what the other people on the forum are doing to get traffic from their forum activity.

The little-known traffic secret took me a long time to figure out. People surfing the web are like little cookie monsters. They want a cookie. You have to point them to where the cookie is and tell them how easy it is to get it. To get them to go from where they are to where the cookie is you need to tell them how delicious the cookie will be. Then you tell them what to do to get it.

You may find this makes a funny picture in your head. Enjoy it, but take it seriously. The cookie I offer you here is how to get the best traffic for free. Then I offer you an even bigger cookie in my link below, a free system for getting free traffic.

Cookie Monster List Building System – 3 Easy Free Ways to Get Top Quality Traffic is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

Get Your Free Trial of This Breakthrough Money-Making Tool

I had to wheedle my way into the Market Samurai affiliate program, but on Monday it’s opening up to everybody who owns the software.

When a program like this opens up, there will be a big opportunity to make affiliate commissions at the beginning. A lot of new affiliates will be jumping on the bandwagon… and if you want to make some easy affiliate money, you should be one of them.  While it is not always the best thing to follow the crowd, often with affiliate marketing it is.

If you work at it and make some videos and blogs and stuff you’ll probably find recouping your investment in Market Samurai fairly easy.  I’ll be making some videos myself because Market Samurai has recently added some really cool features I’ve been exploring that make it much more versatile.

Market Samurai is a phenomenal research tool, but it’s also an implementation tool.  It even has an automated ad copywriting module that practically writes ads and blog posts for your niche WordPress blogs… and it uploads your posts to your blogs too!

All you have to do is have 1 or more niche WordPress blogs hosted on a hosting account (Hostgator is awesome).  Blogs take about 2 minutes to set up.  You can change the appearance of the blog with free “themes” and many of them are quite attractive. So making a good-looking website is not a big deal anymore.   It’s literally something you can learn how to do, with WordPress, in less than an hour.  Once you know how to set-up a blog and you have your theme chosen, creating a new WordPress blog is an incredibly fast process.

Market Samurai’s Monetization module helps you choose affiliate products to promote, and it basically writes your ads and blog posts for you by pulling images and words right out of the sales letter for the affiliate product.  It’s all drag’n'drop easy too, which makes it kind of fun to play with.

I recommend you at least grab the free trial of Market Samurai.  If you like it, buy it and jump on this opportunity opening up Monday to earn some easy affiliate commissions promoting it.  Of course I cannot guarantee your results, but I can say that I’ve sold a bunch of Market Samurai licenses with very casual promotion of it and I intend to scale that up because such a great product doesn’t come along very often, and the quality of the product is the root of the astonishing ease of promoting it as an affiliate.

How To Earn Extremely Easy Affiliate Commissions With Market Samurai is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

Today’s consumers are over-communicated to, pressed  for time, and perhaps a little lazy. They want to  know what it’s about fast and they don’t want to  read your languid prose.

It’s  frustrating, but we have to accept that the longer and more detailed our writing gets, the less likely we are to seduce readers into accepting our ideas.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat?

At worst, readers  take one look at your long salesletter, bloated video run-times, sprawling blog posts and articles… roll their eyes (or yawn) and move on (I’ll tell you why in a bit).

At best your readers are fans who have decided they like your  writing. Don’t count on getting too many of these rare birds on your lists though.

Writing To The Common Denominator

People want clarity and brevity. They aren’t stupid -  they just prefer easy.

It’s not just about selling products, it’s about  selling people the idea they should be paying attention to what you want to tell them.

At regular intervals in your written communication -  perhaps once or twice every page - you should be placing markers of some sort that help your readers to scan and interpret the shape and meaning of what you’re trying to get across.

Making Better Markup

These markers can be bolded text emphasizing some relevant concept, cross-headings and section headings, bullet lists, Johnson boxes, callouts, sidebars, colored or italicized text, different type faces and font sizes…

Of course if you throw all those together in one  web-page it starts to look like it came from  HTML Hell.

We’re in an era of Visual Communication

… and the young people now are accustomed to, and expect, a style of communication that is frankly  “dumbed down”. Print-era writers are probably  more skilled readers than many many of today’s smart young folks – and it will probably hurt our ability to reach them if we don’t bring our writing to  the level they prefer.

In short – just because today’s buyers prefer short, dumbed-down, visual communication doesn’t make them stupid – but it is foolish for us professional  communicators not to adapt to their preferences.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat? How To Reach Today’s Overstimulated Consumers is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

“I do hope you get satisfaction on this issue, and persevere in building your list and pursuing an income as an information marketer. If you do, you’ll find it fun and rewarding.

The whole “make money online” thing is something of a circus. I admit that. I used to be involved with “make money at home” programs I would probably not promote now… but I worked hard at it and I made money so I have no reason to be bitter or cast stones at the industry. That said, most of my customers never did anything with any of the ebooks, or software or courses I sold them. They did not build lists and they did not work hard to learn the skills of marketing… yet they had big dreams of internet millions and an easy life.

Most people who try internet marketing, perhaps 90% or more, grow discouraged and give up. This is totally in line with what is taught in books like Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich“ – that most people give up before they even get close… and some give up when great success is almost within their grasp.

The Internet Marketing Opportunity Sham

I have had people tell me “internet marketing is a sham” when really what they are saying is that they thought making money online would be easier and were disappointed when making money wasn’t easy for them. The information and knowledge of the basics of how to build an online income are widely available – there are no secrets but there are skills to be practiced and worked on. The rewards of mastering certain skills, such as list-building, are great – but the commitment to learn them is great too.

My position is that there are parts of doing this that get easier with practice, but considering the competitive online business environment, only serious students do well and prosper.

Why Even Ethical Marketing Benefits From  Hyperbole

The unfortunate situation with marketing anything under the sun is that nobody wants to buy from a marketer who says “this is hard, but it is worth it” – they only want to listen to the guy who says “this is easy, and you will get results quickly”. If you are going to succeed as a marketer, you must come to terms with this quirk of human motivation. This is why the online marketing game, “make money” products and courses, are a circus. This is what the market demands.”

Sometimes – as a point of hyperbole, I might say such-and-such is a secret or something “new”,  but understand these words and concepts have a purpose – 1) to sell stuff and 2) to provide hope and encouragement to people who are reading.

No New Methods…

“New” methods are an illusion.  Making money online, consistently, is most a matter of applying proven business fundamentals and working really hard to master diverse skills.   It is a challenging career choice – much more so that the gurus who make it look like effortless surf-bummery would have  us believe.

I think the most important thing is to select a business model that fits what kind of responsibility and lifestyle you’d like to have in 2-5 years and then work really, really hard to move towards your goal.   I have got lucky a few times in this business, but it was always because I was in the right place at the right time and had worked very hard to get in that place.

Some of the time I have felt like a soldier throwing myself at a castle wall – but with consistent effort I found chinks in the wall.  I am far from being the smartest, most clever, or resourceful marketing guy around. But I am consistent and work on it almost every day.   In this way I have worked myself into “The Jombo” , which is my self-invented (actually dreamed) word for “in the zone”.  I find much of what “Lay of Attraction” people preach to be silly and unrealistic, but the Jombo is, I suppose, my own version.  I may tell the world about it sometime, but for now I’m just telling you.

This is a tough industry in today’s marketplace.  Just like most other industries.  But, with perseverance, you can lay the foundations for a long-term success in it.  It is like making a structure, brick by brick.

Only a small minority of those who call themselves “internet marketers” are really busting their butts to build their own empires.   To some success comes early, but to most it’s a process, and hard work, but it does come to those who stick it out and develop discernment to know what they want and what they do not want.

The Real, Honest To Gawd Truth About The Great Internet Marketing Opportunity Sham is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog

I have now removed it.

The reason was because I was having very slow load times, on this blog and some others.  All had the OnlyWire button.

When the button was removed the load-time problems diaappeared.  I’m not talking milliseconds either.  The OnlyWire button was, in my opinion adding 5 or more seconds to page load time.

That kind of slow loading will kill your traffic.  People won’t wait.

So Adios OnlyWire.

I have other gripes about OnlyWire that had let me to stop using it for bookmarking a while back.

The company has introduced lots of hoops for users to jump through.  I guess they don’t want people using it.   Aside from the load-time issue they just made it hard to use by trying to bully users into using the OnlyWire Firefox plugin (which means you have to use Firefox).   They did a couple other lame things too.  Phmeh!

Instead I’ve put “Sociable” buttons on this blog.  We’ll see how that goes.

As far as bookmarking, I prefer the results I get running a desktop software.  The problem with services like OnlyWire is you have to login and confirm a bunch of bookmarks all the time.  With the desktop software confirmation and posting are handled at the same time.  The one I use and recommend is SocialBot

OnlyWire Sucks. Here’s Why is a post from: Loren Woirhaye's Entrepreneur Blog