The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Selling something is the only way to make moolah in the marketing game. Duh, right?

I’d like to take a couple minutes (well, maybe 3) of your time to give you a few tips – stuff that took me years to figure out, distilled to a drinkable, yet buzz-inducing brew.

Here’s how you can:

Also:

Sound good?

Let’s start then.

Writing Is The Core Skill

Marketing is a writer’s game. Even if you market by cold-calling, you still work from a script. All writing is just expression of clear thinking, ]]> The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Selling something is the only way to make moolah in the marketing game. Duh, right?

I’d like to take a couple minutes (well, maybe 3) of your time to give you a few tips – stuff that took me years to figure out, distilled to a drinkable, yet buzz-inducing brew.

Here’s how you can:

1. Adapt the mindset of the best salespeople to your own personal quirks and interests.

1. Discover how to stop wasting energy marketing what you want to sell and start selling what people want to buy. There’s a subtle, but meaningful difference.
2. Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills

Also:

1. The simple daily way I grow my writing skills, market my services, and blunder into good ideas – all simultaneously – and easily expand them into articles and sellable information products.

Sound good?

Let’s start then.

Writing Is The Core Skill

Marketing is a writer’s game. Even if you market by cold-calling, you still work from a script. All writing is just expression of clear thinking, and effective writing wins the dollars in marketing.

Mindset

I prefer to write mostly about the nuts-and-bolts marketing stuff I know best, but I do believe your beliefs and mindset have a lot to do with the results you get in business.

Nowhere is the quality of your mindset more apparent then when you try to sell something, like your services, in person or on the phone. If your price is cheap enough you can shuffle your feet, look at the ground and do the “awww shucks” routine” and you’ll still make sales because you’re giving away your product.

However – When you want to command market-parity prices or prices higher than the competition, salesmanship matters.

Salesmanship skill is complex. There is no simple secret to winning at sales. But be diligent about refining your game, and persistent about working the market and you’ll always win.

The correct mindset is “never quit”.

Some people think that “never quit” means you should be stubborn and always follow your own internal counsel, as if success in business is a matter of a mentoring dialog between you and yourself.

I don’t agree with this at all. Often to succeed at selling you’ll need to get real about the marketplace. That means selling what people want to buy. Finding out what people want to buy can be a trial and error process that costs you a lot of time and money, or it can be a methodical, research-oriented process.

Both methods have merit. With trial and error you may blunder into ideal opportunities where your interests and skills intersect with market demands. You can find some real sweet spots this way so always be on the lookout for good ideas.

I get a lot of ideas for good stuff to sell by browsing and commenting in online forums. The WarriorForum is my favorite for marketing info. If somebody likes something I wrote and thanks me for it I often copy and paste my own forum comment and expand it into an article or blog post. String a few articles together and you’ve got the beginning of an ebook product you can sell – and this sort of thing evolves in a gradual and fun way.

The thing about the serendipity approach I enjoy most is the thinking and writing happens naturally (it’s unforced) and often my own ideas are nicely expressed. Clear writing beats rambling volume in today’s marketplace, so when my own rambling habits go well, I hold onto those ideas and try to expand on them.

The other approach to finding profitable niches and ideas for your own products is niche research. I have to confess I don’t like the keyword research part of internet marketing at all. I find it tedious, finicky, boring – a necessary evil.

If you’re at all like I am, you’ll want a system to make the time you invest in market research as effective as possible.

That’s why I’ve put together a comprehensive course on niche market research.

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For the next 24 hours only you can get the entire 129 page course at a steep discount off the already very reasonable launch price. With this 25% discount the “Niche Sleuth” method is just $27.75. No bonuses – just the book, but it’s a dandy method you’ll use again and again to save time and find profitable niches for yourself.

–> To get the discount:

1. Just go to http://zerodollarmarketer.com/nichesleuth

2. Read the letter to make sure it’s the right product for your needs, then click on the order button.

3. Enter your email on the order page, click through and enter this coupon code on the next page: NICHE

4. Click on the “Update form” button and the price will go down from $37 to $27.75.

That’s it! You’ll get instant download of the whole 116 page course. It’s breezy reading, yet rich in detail so you’ll find it very useful. If you don’t, there’s a 60 day money-back guarantee so you’ve got nothing to lose.

Cheers,

_Loren Woirhaye

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Steve Jobs No-Pressure Selling Secret – Revealed! is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

(part 4 of 5)

If you’re looking for a way to make a lot of money without the pressure of making sales calls, direct response marketing is the most low-pressure form of selling there is.   No sale will actually happen without pressure.  Direct response is so  low-pressure in fact, you have to elicit the sales pressure within your prospect, which is the selling skill that  trumps all others and all master marketers have it.

Apple computer actually uses direct response marketing methods like perceived scarcity and elitism, which is an emotional hot-button in some people.  Apple claims they cannot meet demand for their latest products, Ipads or whatever, which causes people to be desperate to be the first person they know to get one.  It’s a bit of reverse psychology really and also very well integrated with the intentional elitism embedded in all of Apple’s branding and advertising.

When you buy the pressure you feel is your own desire to get an advantage for yourself or meet some basic need.  Without pressure coming from either outside of you (your spouse pressuring you, for ]]> Steve Jobs No-Pressure Selling Secret – Revealed! is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

(part 4 of 5)

If you’re looking for a way to make a lot of money without the pressure of making sales calls, direct response marketing is the most low-pressure form of selling there is.   No sale will actually happen without pressure.  Direct response is so  low-pressure in fact, you have to elicit the sales pressure within your prospect, which is the selling skill that  trumps all others and all master marketers have it.

Apple computer actually uses direct response marketing methods like perceived scarcity and elitism, which is an emotional hot-button in some people.  Apple claims they cannot meet demand for their latest products, Ipads or whatever, which causes people to be desperate to be the first person they know to get one.  It’s a bit of reverse psychology really and also very well integrated with the intentional elitism embedded in all of Apple’s branding and advertising.

When you buy the pressure you feel is your own desire to get an advantage for yourself or meet some basic need.  Without pressure coming from either outside of you (your spouse pressuring you, for example), or inside of you (need to keep up with the Joneses, perhaps), you aren’t going to buy anything.  People who don’t feel pressure in some way aren’t inclined to take any action at all.

The brilliance of what Jobs and Apple did is create a rich psychological template customers could be part of.  Apple customers tend to identify with the brand – they may even think themselves superior to PC users because they chose Mac.  I’m saying Mac isn’t a good product, just that the marketing is brilliant because the company put an actual identity into the product that buyers could slip into like a pair of jeans.  They turned a functional tool (which is all a PC is) into a “gotta have it” fashion accessory for a large number of people.  These people willingly pay much more than they need to for the computing power they get in order to participate in the shared reality of Apple’s brand.

It’s all a bit surreal, don’t you think?

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

How To Stop Selling, Yet Make More Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

(part 5 of 5)

Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling.  The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to  automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort.   The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks.  The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.

The problem is the internet has matured a  bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days  (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.

Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition.  With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.

Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship.  We read widely because you really ]]> How To Stop Selling, Yet Make More Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

(part 5 of 5)

Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling.  The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to  automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort.   The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks.  The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.

The problem is the internet has matured a  bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days  (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.

Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition.  With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.

Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship.  We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself.

If you bumble into internet marketing like I did, made some money and thought “Wow!”, good for you.  What usually happens though is most people who do that have a tough time re-creating their early good fortune.  The market will go shift on you and then the money you were making isn’t there anymore.

To be a steadily successful marketer you have to get it together on a bunch of different levels.  It’s not all easy and you cannot learn it all fast.  But if you keep up with your learning, you’ll gradually come to a better understanding of what’s going on with the marketplace and how to exploit opportunities that come along.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

JMUMM7FSB8X5

Sooner or later, you may come to the conclusion that I am not a safe-n-sane online marketing-expert dude, but really some sort of crazy freak.  That’s ok – because from my point of view non-freaky people are a bit dull.  If you were to become a client or friend of mine you’d find out sooner or later, so I might as well admit it.

While not in the class of freaky, the truth is I prefer playing guitar and reading fiction to the fussy business of how you make money with all this crazy website stuff, but we all have to make a living, don’t we?

Photo by Lululemon Athletica

Before 4 or 5 years years ago making a lot of money was not high on my priority list at all.  Even though I’d been selling on Ebay since 1999, I treated it mostly as a hobby, not a career.   It wasn’t that I saw making money as being un-spiritual or bad – I was just involved in stuff where money wasn’t the big ]]> Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

JMUMM7FSB8X5

Sooner or later, you may come to the conclusion that I am not a safe-n-sane online marketing-expert dude, but really some sort of crazy freak.  That’s ok – because from my point of view non-freaky people are a bit dull.  If you were to become a client or friend of mine you’d find out sooner or later, so I might as well admit it.

While not in the class of freaky, the truth is I prefer playing guitar and reading fiction to the fussy business of how you make money with all this crazy website stuff, but we all have to make a living, don’t we?

Photo by Lululemon Athletica

Before 4 or 5 years years ago making a lot of money was not high on my priority list at all.  Even though I’d been selling on Ebay since 1999, I treated it mostly as a hobby, not a career.   It wasn’t that I saw making money as being un-spiritual or bad – I was just involved in stuff where money wasn’t the big criteria.

I was  involved in yoga, music, shamanistic “healing work” between the ages of 23 and 35.  In fact, I lived in Malibu, California for several years (hence the blog name), which is a veritable hotbed of freaky people activity compared to which my own freak-ness is quite tame.  I could tell you some stories… but we’ll save that for another day.

Incidentally, Malibu is as much a state of mind as a place and furthermore, there are two Malibus:  “the movie star” sandy beach Malibu where Ozzy Ozborne and Britney Spears have homes,  and the “coyote ate the cat” Malibu which is more of a mountainous coastal desert region.  I lived in the mountains.

“The trip I get hung-up about is that if I get into the spiritual field of looking at things, I think I’m not being pragmatic or practical.  Thus I have this ongoing push-pull with my freaky self and my pragmatic, results-oriented self.”

On closer examination and growing a bit more sure of myself however, I’m now ready to declare my beliefs to you:  You can be spiritual and metaphysical and also very much in the mix and making money.   The two do indeed mix well, but you’ll have to do some experimenting to find the formula that works best for you. Your spiritual side doesn’t have to hide when your money-making hat is on and vice versa – both sides can co-exist and help each other to grow.

My transition to a hard-nosed “results oriented” direct marketing type did not come suddenly, but eventually I did make a change – curtailing my  Bohemian behavior to focus on developing my skills as an online marketer.  For me the shift involved a jettisoning of habits I’d had for several years and a new seriousness of focus on the nitty-gritty of my new chosen career (I made my living as a carpenter before).

All this shifting has been part of my life’s journey and a largely positive thing, though not un-painful in some ways.  Recently I’ve reconsidered some of my old notions,  but in a new context coming from my experiences as a marketer and freelance copywriter/consultant.

New Age Nuttiness…

Even though I’ve been around the new age scene and had some extraordinary experiences, I don’t buy into all the wild ideas that “new thought” or “metaphysical” type people sometimes talk about.  In particular,  pertaining to making money  I’ve been critical of a lot of the “laws of abundance” and “law of attraction” stuff going around, but I also try to keep an open mind.

For example: in no way will I tell you that if you sit in your bedroom and wish for somebody to give you a million dollars will you get it.  I will tell you instead that it’s a very good and useful exercise to get a specific idea in your head about what you want to achieve.  Then you have to take action in the marketplace of life to create the reality where somebody would write you a million dollar check, provided you had an idea worth that amount of money and the skill to sell it.

There’s a thing I learned in studying NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) that goes by different names but I prefer “evidence procedure“, which means the set of feelings and visualizations  you can project into the future to show your mind what the outcome of your goal is going to be like.  Rather than focusing on the goal, you tell your mind to fetch the specific outcome and the subsconcious mind takes care of lots of nitty-gritty details in between.  You direct your mind to fetch the outcome, like a dog fetching a thrown stick, and your marvelous subsconscious brain works out many of the details of getting the outcome for you.  It’s quite elegant and useful and worth learning about.

Napoleon Hill, if you’re familiar with his writing, was very specific in his book “Think and Grow Rich” that you can establish whatever intent you want in terms of the money you want, but in return you must also have a plan to deliver value to the marketplace.  Furthermore, Hill repeatedly admonishes that in all probability many of your plans will fail to bear much fruit but that if you want to acquire monetary wealth you must persevere with great intensity.

The advantage of seeing success through a somewhat “spiritual” lens is that it can help you keep balance while you’re working hard to create prosperity for yourself.  Your spirituality, if you call it that, can help you be both energized and relaxed about the whole process of making things happen for yourself, which can be a lot of work.  Work without meaning becomes tedious and a chore.  The thing about being an entrepreneur however is you have to maintain enthusiasm and creative flexibility and energy over  a long period of time.  A spiritual or philosophically grounded way of seeing success as a journey and a process can help you stick to your vision, stay empowered, and persevere for as long as it takes you to succeed.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Google Whackness: How The New Instant Auto-complete Suggestion Feature Warps Search Trends is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Good old Google has unleashed some new whackness into our lives with it’s new “instant auto-complete” feature. I’m not sure what it’s really  called, but whatever it is, if it sticks around the roll of search marketing optimization as a traffic source will be changed.

In brief, the auto-complete suggests key-phrases based on what you type in for your first word.  Google has had something like this before but it was vulnerable to manipulation. Phrases like “why won’t my parakeet eat my diarrhea” would pop up in Google’s older auto-complete feature—which may just be a slower version of Google’s new suggestion tool.

Aside from the parakeet thing being gross, it’s hard to believe that more than one person ever typed in that search phrase sincerely looking for an answer to such a question.   Two theories about why the phrase showed up in Google’s trends are that either somebody at Google put it there as a joke, or a bunch of people got together and conspired to search Google with that phrase or create content and links ]]> Google Whackness: How The New Instant Auto-complete Suggestion Feature Warps Search Trends is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Good old Google has unleashed some new whackness into our lives with it’s new “instant auto-complete” feature. I’m not sure what it’s really  called, but whatever it is, if it sticks around the roll of search marketing optimization as a traffic source will be changed.

In brief, the auto-complete suggests key-phrases based on what you type in for your first word.  Google has had something like this before but it was vulnerable to manipulation. Phrases like “why won’t my parakeet eat my diarrhea” would pop up in Google’s older auto-complete feature—which may just be a slower version of Google’s new suggestion tool.

Aside from the parakeet thing being gross, it’s hard to believe that more than one person ever typed in that search phrase sincerely looking for an answer to such a question.   Two theories about why the phrase showed up in Google’s trends are that either somebody at Google put it there as a joke, or a bunch of people got together and conspired to search Google with that phrase or create content and links containing it.  Either way, it’s not really the kind of content Google wants to be serving up in general.

Now you can check out Google’s new version of auto-complete for yourself.  I think the main difference is that it’s faster, as in almost instant. If you go to Google.com and type “why” into the search engine, you’ll get something that looks like this:

why search

Some of those results are pretty odd.  The raven one from the Mad Hatter in “The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland” by lewis Carroll.  Of course it seems like nonsense popping up in your Google search, but it is a rather famous riddle.   Furthermore, not making sense was the author’s point.

The thing about poop might seem odd, but I can imagine quite a few people wonder about why their excrement comes in funny colors sometimes.  I’m sure the answer to this question has assuaged concern in more than one child so I figure some good is being done with Google’s calling it up as a search phrase.

How This Affects Online Marketers Like You and Me

By redesigning the auto-complete feature to be instant (or at least much faster) Google is in effect steering millions of people towards the most common searches.  This in turn will make those search phrases more popular.

The concern among marketers, both SEO people and Pay-per-click people, is that this move by Google will steer much of the so-called “long tail” traffic towards the more popular terms.

This means Google is making up our minds for us.  Google is choosing what we want to search for.  Maybe this isn’t all bad because it does make some types of general searching easier for the average Google user.  For Google, the effect will be to consolidate more traffic towards a tigher grouping of key-phrases which will—when those key-phrases are monetizable with advertising—cut the long-tail Pay-per-click marketers out of the zone where profits are made and create Pay-per-click  bidding wars for the keyphrases being pushed by Google.

It’s very clever really, if Google’s motive is to increase and consolidate Pay-per-click revenue.

In addition, Google has recently gone on a rampage of banning direct response marketers from it’s Adwords Pay-per-click program.   In effect Google keeps putting up new roadblocks to  making direct sales from web-pages advertised with Adwords.  My theory is that Google wants Adwords to be more of a corporate advertising engine and get rid of us direct response marketers, as we’re viewed as troublemakers.

What do you think?

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting” In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing.  I  blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process.  Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering.   For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career.  Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace.  ]]> The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting”

In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

• how to choose a sensible web-hosting plan and what to avoid
• how to host multiple sites on one account
• how to know the right time to upgrade to so-called reseller hosting
• the best hosting control panel for internet marketers (in my opinion)
• why a blogging platform may be your best way to get started and which platform to use

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing.  I  blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process.  Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering.   For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career.  Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace.  I also save lots of  money because I don’t have to pay someone to work on any of my sites.  I am the one in control, and so will you when you  manage your own websites.

These days it’s a lot easier to be your own “webmaster” than it was only a few years ago.  The whole process of setting up and managing websites is much more user friendly today.  With a little patience you can learn to put up eye-popping websites in record time.   You’ll have the ability to get an idea for a new site and have it up and getting traffic within one hour.  No kidding.

Control Panels Matter (especially if you’re a beginner)

One of the things that baffled me most of all was web-hosting.  I was on a Plesk host when I first started. To this day I want nothing to do with Plesk. I found it dreadfully confusing.

When I discovered C-Panel hosting things got a LOT easier.  C-panel has improved since I started using it too.  Now it has tutorials embedded inside it that help you as you go along.  I’ll recommend a reliable C-Panel host (the one I rely on) at the end of this lesson.  You can save a few bucks by using non-c-panel hosts, but I don’t recommend cutting corners.  When you choose a C-panel host you’re choosing a standard that has earned a preferred position of preeminence among internet marketers.

Basic Hosting

“Starting a Website” means different things to different people.  If you work for a billion dollar company, your budget may be in the millions and there will be a small army of developers, writers, strategists and coders involved in the project (plus some management types there to take credit/shift blame and basically pee on the projcet to mark  their territory).

But if you’re like “Joe Average who wants to make some money on the internet”,  you can launch a website for less that the price of a night out -  $20 or so.

To start your internet empire with just one website or blog (which is fine) you don’t need to invest much in hosting. Less than $10 per month gets a nice plan for one website.

Dedicated Hosting is probably more than you need.  If you’re starting a site with heavy bandwidth requirements, dedicated hosting may be necessary, but often shared hosting, which is very cheap, is adequate and works fine.   As your needs grow you might go from basic hosting to reseller hosting to dedicated hosting.  If you think you need dedicated hosting or a private server for your websites,  you’ll want to get some specific education that goes way beyond the scope of this article

Multi-Site Hosting

You can usually run more than one site on any hosting plan, but there’s an awkwardness to running more than one site on a basic hosting account.  Basically, you would have to set up each site as a sub-domain.  Thus you would have http://site1.yourdomain.com and “site2″  and so forth.  You can also do it like this:  http://yourdomain.com/site1, which is making your site a subfolder of your top-level domain.

I use domain sub-folders all the time, creating a sub-folder for each product I sell on a site, for example.  It’s not a bad practice at all but things can get out confusing to manage once you have more than a few sites running as sub-domains or sub–folders.

As your  empire-building progresses you’ll acquire numerous URLs, which are registered domain names you own.  They generally cost about $10 a year so you can afford to have a few and owning more than one has  advantages I’ll explain later.

When To Choose Reseller Hosting

The next step above basic hosting is to get a so-called “reseller” account.  It’s called that because you can resell hosting space to anybody you like and set them up with their own control panel.  Doing this is a cool way to make some money or cover your hosting costs, but unless you really want to get into the webmaster and support business (which isn’t a bad thing but could suck your energy away from a business you’d prefer) be selective about who you sell hosting space to.

If you do sell hosting space on a small-time basis you’ll want clients with minimal support needs who just need a site that’s reliable – this way you get paid every month and don’t have to do much to earn it.  You could also sell the hosting/support plan for top dollar with the value to the customer being in the support.

If you’re doing web-design or some sort of web-consulting work you might want to include hosting in the packages you offer to clients.  Doing so may help clients put-off discontinuing your services because if they do they’ll have to cope with moving their hosting, which is no big deal but your clients won’t know that.  Little “hooks” like this is good business strategy because they help you keep your customers in a buying cycle with you.

The Best Reason To Choose Reseller Hosting

Many website owners use reseller hosting for their own websites but don’t resell space at all.

When you choose reseller hosting you benefit because it simplifies the running of more than a couple of websites enormously.   Because with reseller hosting you can create a new control panel for as many hosting accounts as you want, you’ll be able to put every domain you own on a separate account.

The first benefit is this makes site-management a cleaner process with fewer files on each hosting account, which saves time.

You’ve probably already know your time is your most precious resource in building an internet business.  There are time-thieves everywhere trying to suck it away from you.  Even if you are disciplined about not doing obvious time-wasters like watching a lot of YouTube videos of stupid pet tricks, your own working methods can be time-inefficient and when they are your progress will be slower.

The main reason I recommend using reseller hosting for a serious internet business is the separation of sites into invidual control panels… mostly because it saves lots of time.

If you’ve ever spent an hour combing your hard drive looking for a misplaced file, you know how frustrating it can be.  Just as being organized with the files on your hard drive saves you time, using separate control panels for each domain you own does as well.

Other benefits become more obvious as you learn a little more about webmastering.  Some php “scripts”, which are programs that run on a hosting account, can conflict with each other if they are on the same account but if put on separate control panels they don’t.

A Blog May Be Your Best Choice For Website #1  (and why it’s also the easiest)

When I got started I didn’t even know what a blog was.  My first websites were very ugly things coded in plain HTML.  Real ugly — and labor-intensive as well.

These days WordPress is perhaps the best platform to start most websites with for the serious beginner.  In relation to it’s power and flexibility, WordPress is easy to learn.

With most C-panel hosting you get a feature called Fantastico which can be used to create a WordPress site in about two minutes.   Fantastico won’t install the very latest version of WordPress, but since WordPress has an auto-upgrade feature you can install it from your C-panel using Fantastico and then login to your WordPress site as an administrator and just click the upgrade link to upgrade to the latest version. As of today the latest version of WordPress is 3.0.1  – version 3.0 was a watershed upgrade to WordPress that marked it’s real maturity and that’s part of why I’ve gone from being  skeptical of WordPress to recommending it wholeheartedly.

WordPress is robust, flexible, and easy-to-learn.   It isn’t the right system for every website,  but it’s a powerful, widely used,  amply supported tool that can grow with you.

Enhancing Your Site’s Core Functions

The WordPress core script is a blogging program.  By adding other features, called “plugins”, you can modify it to do a huge variety of tricks.  I am currently running about 20 plugins on the WordPress site I experiment with the most, and I’ve tried probably 40 or 60 and researched dozens more.   In subsequent articles I’ll tell you about every single plugin I recommend and why, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to get  started with WordPress, you’ll need to get a hosting account and a domain name.  Domains registrars are all pretty similar (I use Godaddy mostly), but the hosting service I recommend you use is Hostgator.  I’ve used them for years and the features are excellent,  support is stellar and the value you get is superb.

SAVE on HOSTING: If you want to save some money on hosting you can use this coupon code to get a discount: JUSTINTIME

(of course I’ll be compensated if you sign up today through the link above)

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Marketing In the Moment: Are You Prepared To Adapt To Web 3.0? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I’m reading a book called “Marketing In the Moment: The Practical Guide To Using Web 3.0 Marketing To Reach Your Customers First”.  I’m not going to review it here, but it has got me thinking.

You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but if you want  to make it as a marketer, you have to be able to learn new skills and adapt to new technology.

When the web was new as a marketing medium (up to about 5 years ago it was new) people weren’t looking to replace day-to-day activities by going “virtual”.  Now they are.  In droves apparently.  At 38 I may be a little too old to “get it”, but many people under 25 practically seen to have their smart phones permanently attached to their bodies.

Recently I was visiting Boston and riding the subway.  Ever the observer, I was looking around at what people were doing.  Almost everybody under a certain age was spending a majority of their subway time engaged in some way with ]]> Marketing In the Moment: Are You Prepared To Adapt To Web 3.0? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I’m reading a book called “Marketing In the Moment: The Practical Guide To Using Web 3.0 Marketing To Reach Your Customers First”.  I’m not going to review it here, but it has got me thinking.

You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but if you want  to make it as a marketer, you have to be able to learn new skills and adapt to new technology.

When the web was new as a marketing medium (up to about 5 years ago it was new) people weren’t looking to replace day-to-day activities by going “virtual”.  Now they are.  In droves apparently.  At 38 I may be a little too old to “get it”, but many people under 25 practically seen to have their smart phones permanently attached to their bodies.

Recently I was visiting Boston and riding the subway.  Ever the observer, I was looking around at what people were doing.  Almost everybody under a certain age was spending a majority of their subway time engaged in some way with a personal electronic device.  I mean, they literally wouldn’t look at the people around them.  These young people were 100% engaged in a world of electronic communication that alleviated the tedium of real life – where you have to cool your heels riding the subway sometimes.

“If I were part of this younger generation I would probably be just as engaged as they are in the virtual world they are in:  texting, Facebook, Twitter, Iphone apps and all that, so I’m not judging this sort of activity as bad, it’s just a little perplexing.  Probably perplexing the way the appeal of the Beatles was to parents of teenagers in the early 1960s.”

So these new ways of using technology represent a generation gap of sorts.   Older people are adopting these new technologies though, and the widespread adoption of them is a groundswell that is really getting going.  I think marketers may have to adapt or die.

I’m not just pulling this stuff out of my ear - I’ve been reading books on these topics… social media and such.  Many times I’ve said the problem with social media is, well… it’s social.  It’s sort of like a party – people do it for fun.  Thus, it is sort of anti-productive to try to get work done in it.

The reality of social media marketing is that it can be effective, and the old Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule) applies.  80% or more of your social media activity will be almost a complete waste of time and energy.  Isolating the 20% that is likely to be effective is the problem.

I don’t claim to have all the  answers to the vexing questions of how to make social media and “mobile” marketing as effective as old-school direct response.  I’m investigating the subject and grappling with the implications.  My clients want social media more, and they want it because they want to make money from it – so I’m learning more about it to help them… but I still firmly believe that without a solidly grounded  direct response marketing system in place, social media is a waste of time for marketing almost any business.  I still have a lot to learn,  but I recognize the trend is not going away.

The crux of this trend is that people are busier than ever.  In part (and this is, in my opinion, a bad thing) it’s because the availability of all this electronic stimulation and new toys is eroding the attention capacity of young people.  It could be that many of our best and brightest minds are squandering their formative years developing social skills and play-games skills, but little else.   It could lead to a dumbing-down of culture, and arguably already has.

What do you think?

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

The new economy is a competitive place and you’ll have to be a marketer in order not to be marginalized by the marketplace.

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 ]]> Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

The new economy is a competitive place and you’ll have to be a marketer in order not to be marginalized by the marketplace.

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.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

The Twitter Problem is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Twitter was down when I checked it yesterday.  Twitter gets overwhelmed often enough.  It also seems to have problems delivering email to my inbox.   If you use it you’ve seen it get overwhelmed a few times already.  I don’t even login to Twitter that much and I’ve seen the “Twitter is over capacity” pages a lot. Apparently the cause is people clicking the refresh button in their browsers.

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 problemfor most of us is that in order to get a lot of followers we have to follow a lot of other people—who follow us in return (but only 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 Problem is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Twitter was down when I checked it yesterday.  Twitter gets overwhelmed often enough.  It also seems to have problems delivering email to my inbox.   If you use it you’ve seen it get overwhelmed a few times already.  I don’t even login to Twitter that much and I’ve seen the “Twitter is over capacity” pages a lot. Apparently the cause is people clicking the refresh button in their browsers.

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 problemfor most of us is that in order to get a lot of followers we have to follow a lot of other people—who follow us in return (but only 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, asking 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.

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; they use their cell phones to send and receive tweets.

Rather than texting each one of a group of,for example, 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 would 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 ways.

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

There may not be much potential to make money directly from a given Twitter group you follow.   But there is a cool side-benefit for marketers—when  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 which 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 hours 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 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 really on to 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.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.