Right, I’ll be honest here. If it hadn’t been for the half-dozen kind comments I received on my last post I would have deleted it, since it played havoc with my AdSense content! Okay maybe not, since I hadn’t posted anything in a month and even this post is being written two weeks on. So my one post a week target needs a bit of fixing and this is my latest offering, on topic this time.

So, I’ve lost a bit of business building momentum over the last month or so, most particularly on my product creation as part of the Masterclass program. If you lose momentum it’s a well known fact that it is difficult to regain it, however I watched one video and read one blog post today that have given me the jump start I needed.

The video was by Lee McIntyre (I subscribe to his newsletter) and the subject was basically…if you don’t believe you can succeed online then you won’t. Now this was a 25 minute video, which is fairly lengthy to get such a simple message across. Sure, Lee recounted some of the self-doubts that he experienced in the past but he kept banging on about this self-belief message. It took me the full 25 minutes to really get the message though; it’s not simply having the belief that you can succeed online – that’s easy, and I do believe that I can. It’s having the self-belief to get your products out into the market, about casting away the self-doubts about whether those products will succeed or fail, and so on.

The blog post was John Thornhill’s latest offering which can be viewed here. John’s message about basic online success is frighteningly simple – create your product, drive traffic to the sales page and then repeat the process. After reading this post, I felt as though it had been directed at me personally. Sure, I had had a medical issue and lost momentum on my product creation effort, but then I go and write a blog post about it and I also started a similarly themed thread on the Masterclass forum! Enough already! Real action was required, not some kind of self-pity.

So, thanks Lee and thanks John. Your reminders that self belief and effort are required to succeed couldn’t have come at a better time for me. Even writing this post has got me back into the swing of, well, writing – and product creation will resume tomorrow morning sharp!

Some time in early December last year I was taking a shower and noticed that I had two pimples on my legs, one on each calf. No problem I thought, insect bites, and blew them away with my shower mitt. On Monday 13 April, 16 days ago, I woke up in Room 405 in Welcare Hospital, Dubai having just had surgery on both calves to remove cancerous lesions that those two pimples had mutated into. The intervening four months aren’t really important – obviously the pimples got worst, biopsies confirmed the condition and I went under the knife.

For the first six days after surgery my legs were locked with splints to protect the skin grafts. I was pretty comfortable though – no real pain, a private hospital room with a flat screen TV, and plenty of decent nursing care. I watched more movies during that period that I probably have in my whole life! When the splints were removed I attempted to walk and found I couldn’t – both calf muscles had gone into deep spasm, probably from a mixture of surgery trauma and not being able to move while my legs were in splints. To cut a long story short I was discharged last Friday. By this stage I could get about, but only by using a walking frame. My wife collected me and we went home, 10 days after I was admitted.

Our bedroom is upstairs and while I can just about get up and down those stairs I decided to set up camp on the sofa in our living room. This is primarily because my normal sleep pattern is shot (I’m writing this at 5.30 am) and it would unfair on Lana if I was sharing the bed and being awake most of the night. Another reason I’m camped out here is I have 24/7 access to my laptop. The hospital did not have any internet facilities so I have lost 2-3 weeks on the Masterclass course. I contacted Dan at the support desk and he replied “no problem – work hard and you will catch up”. Great reply – I felt good.

It’s about time I came to the point of posting all this. Well, for starters I am not soliciting sympathy of any sort. You see, I had plenty of time to think while in hospital and also now, while recovering at home. I have found so many reasons to be grateful; to my company for understanding the situation and supporting me, to my wife for helping me and doing things only she can do, and just generally for being alive and discarding all the negative thoughts I had harboured not so long ago. I’m sitting here typing, in some discomfort, but hey, I actually feel great, I feel positive about the future. My goal is to be a full time internet marketer by the end of 2010 and my recent experience has simply reinforced the desire to achieve that goal in a way that is difficult to describe. I can come with catch phrases – ‘no pain, no gain’ for getting my legs back in shape, ‘focus and courage’ for getting a difficult work task done. There are plenty of other such phrases as well.

I think I found some kind of inner strength whilst in hospital, a strength that perhaps came from the realisation that time stops for nobody, that what must be done must be done now and done well. No procrastination, no wavering, no negative thoughts or influences. I have an eBook to put together and I am behind schedule, but no matter – I will complete it no matter what it takes. I will achieve my goal.

So, really, I just hope this tale can provide some kind of inspiration to anybody who needs it. Before I finish, one more thing. The cancerous lesions that were removed from my legs were sent for post-op pathological examination. The result – pseudocancer, not actually cancer at all. The lesions just presented themselves that way.

Life is good.

The use of traditional forms of advertising and product marketing platforms, such as newspapers, magazines and television, is slowly on the decline. It is evident that an increasing number of businesses are turning to the internet for promotional needs, for the simple reason of cost effectiveness gained from the enormous reach of web based advertising coupled with reasonably priced advertising solutions.

In a further advancement of online promotion several brand name businesses have ventured into social media marketing (SMM). It is such a pioneering aspect of promotion that businesses are not entirely sure of the best way of using SMM. This was most recently demonstrated by the Mars relaunch of its candy brand Skittles.

Essentially, in its original form, the Skittles website allowed a real time uncensored feed from posts on Twitter (a post would have to include the hash tag #skittles to be fed to the site). This novel yet somewhat naive venture into social marketing had, perhaps predictably, disastrous results. Many Twitter users abused the idea by feeding obscene / derogatory posts or by submitting promotions to their own products. Mars quickly changed the format of the site and, after some morphing, it now appears to be a YouTube.com driven site. So Mars initially made a mistake, but how does all this apply to the internet marketer.

Basically, the average online marketer could take advantage of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like. These are free to join sites and are, generally speaking, very user friendly. Another tool that is becoming the norm is the use of video and audio on websites and blogs. So how does the online marketer go about generating visitors to monetized websites or blogs using social networking sites. Perhaps Jack Humphrey’s excellent article The 90-10 Rule for Successful Twitter Networking should be used as a guide. Jack basically advocates making 90% of your content value related and just 10% as promotional content (although Twitter specific, this article should be a guide for all social network marketing). This makes sense if one gives more than a passing acknowledgement to the term social networking (a self-explanatory term if one thinks about it). After all, you would not wish to be bracketed with a group comprising cold-calling telemarketers or in your face door-to-door salespeople.

So is social marketing the way to go? Well, clearly it is an area worth exploring and testing. Whilst methods of effective social networking promotion are still being developed, particularly on the limited Twitter platform, it is possible that these methods will, sooner rather than later, become extremely effective and the internet marketer would be wise exploring the possibilities now or be prepared to play catch up later.

If you sell products online, particularly on platforms such as eBay, then you are in an extremely competitive business. To consistently make a profit, it is necessary to establish a relationship with a number of reliable suppliers who are able to provide genuine wholesale products at the lowest price possible. However, a lot of time can be expended in using the search engines to find reliable wholesale suppliers and dropshippers .

To help overcome this problem, some time ago I joined SaleHoo, a global product sourcing community designed to give your business a distinct competitive advantage. The benefits of membership include:

• Over 8,000 up to date and verified product sources
• Over 50,000 registered members in forums
• Have your questions answered by expert eBay Powersellers
• Information of the latest auction trends
• Market research tools

Discover how joining the SaleHoo community can be of benefit to your business:

Now, I joined SaleHoo about 3 years ago and at that time there was a monthly membership fee; these days you can reap all the benefits of membership for a single lifetime joining fee. What’s even better is that SaleHoo offers an unconditional 56-day money-back guarantee. Click the link below for further information and read about the joining bonuses you will receive:

http://keith-blackburn.com/recommends/salehoo/

Do yourself and your business a favor and reap the benefits of the SaleHoo community now!

For me anyway, Masterclass Week 6 raised the stakes somewhat. John made the first webinar recording available which was very useful (I was ‘time zone challenged’ so could not participate in the live event). There was also the offer of free membership to Dave Nicholson’s Total Web Traffic, a great membership site designed to help drive traffic to your site(s) and is particularly aimed at newcomers to internet marketing.

However, the big deal about Week 6 was that each student was provided with links to all other student blogs. So what’s the big deal? Well I can only speak for myself, but apart from links to my blog in forum signatures, and my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I have not actively promoted my blog, and the chance of anyone coming across it and reading it are slim. Now all students are encouraged to view and comment on other blogs.

To me this essentially means that, since my postings are under some scrutiny now, I need to start thinking much more about content, providing value and, if possible, getting a ‘hook’ into my posts. I also need to be getting ‘outside’ traffic to my blog and will start using some of the ideas suggested by Dave in Total Web Traffic.

Week 7 has kicked off the product creation phase and this will no doubt be time consuming. Couple this with the launch of Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing 2.0 next Tuesday, and things are really starting to hot up now. So, there are plenty of different tasks to complete and I’m going to have to set up some kind of organizational and time management system – so that I do not miss anything nor spend too much time on any particular task.

I think I’ve just about got my head around Twitter now; I’ve made nearly 300 Tweets and have about 200 followers and am following about the same number. To make things easier I downloaded a free interface tool called TweetDeck which basically has automatic page refresh and allows you to view Tweets, @replies and Direct Messages in different columns. This is very useful when you are following a significant number of people, say more than 40 busy posters.

I generally don’t go looking for followers, but will almost always reciprocate when someone follows me. This is not some sort of high-handed attitude – I have adopted a philosophy based on this blog post which, as you can see, advocates providing value to other users and not just using search tools to  follow thousands of people or saturating Twitter with posts linking to your own product. People will find you if they want to. Obviously this is just a personal thing that I believe in and, of course, I do start following people I find particularly interesting who are internet marketing orientated.

So, what is value exactly. Well, I try to link to news items of interest (not breaking news generally) offbeat or humorous articles and videos (everybody needs to smile and laugh) and any marketing articles and tips I stumble on. I also ‘retweet’ posts which I think others will find interesting. Obviously there is a lot of information to be learned from other Tweets as well.

I was quite surprised by a number of ‘follows’ I received; from WaggyWoo (a dog loving Tweeter) to Jim DeMint (the US Senator from South Carolina) to HBK (who, as far as I can gather is Shawn Michaels of WWE fame) and plenty in between. I was particularly pleased to be followed by a few high-flying marketers, such as Mike Filsaime and Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos).

You’re bragging Blackburn, I hear you say; well not really – I am certainly not fooling myself into thinking that these guys saw a post of mine and went ‘Wow’! The follows were probably generated automatically. However, Twitter does allow me to interact with these major players. This shows the power Twitter has for networking but I also firmly believe in providing plenty of value for followers to read (or listen to) if they so choose.

If you have been surfing around the net looking for internet marketing products, you may noticed sales pitches with wording such as

• Buy now – only $7
• Limited time offer – only $17
• Get your copy now – $47
• I’m giving it away – $147 $97

and so on. It should not have escaped your attention that almost all internet marketing products are priced with 7 as the last digit. Why is this? Well, it is not a coincidence. And it’s certainly not the fact that some cultures consider 7 to be a lucky number! Research has shown that this method of product pricing is the most likely to convert your website visitors into paying customers.

I can recall reading an article on this subject but unfortunately cannot locate it now. Even a Google search generally only returns results relating to…$7 products!  Essentially, if memory serves, this ideal number was arrived at by a mixture of psycho-analytics and good old fashioned testing. In searching for further background to this post I have noticed that many products are selling right at the low end, exactly $7. Whatever the psychology behind $7 being such a converter it would now seem very strange if I saw a product being offered for $5 0r $6 or $96.

So there you have it – for best results use that magical number 7 as the last digit of your prices. Tune in to the next post, coming soon.

Masterclass Week 5 material was made available last Monday o2 February, and this particular week was handled by Daniel Sumner, John Thornhill’s support manager. I had just received my blogsite graphics from Planet Divinity and Week 5 was initially about adding these graphics to the site via the WordPress admin panel. This was followed by tasks designed to generally tidy up the site and upgrade to WP Version 2.7.1. Daniel continued the style of John’s previous presentations – brief and to the point videos which break the material down into a manageable workload.

Additional, but optional, Week 5 material included removing AdSense from posts, how to add YouTube and images to posts, using widgets and adding affiliate banners to posts and the blog sidebar. All interesting technical stuff which I managed to get through by Wednesday evening. I will probably have to review some of the videos until it all becomes second nature.

John has advised that the first webinar will be held tomorrow at 3.00 pm EST. As I mentioned in Update # 1, this is midnight my time and I won’t be able to participate – I need to be up at 5.00 am Monday for work so shall be well asleep by the time the webinar starts. I would have liked to have been involved, of course, and hopefully the next webinar date / time will suit me a bit better. Sunday’s event will be recorded so I won’t actually miss out on what is discussed.

Marketing Masterclass Week 2 material included some recommended reading – basically a list of eight blogs maintained by respected online marketers highly respected by John Thornhill . The idea is to, as John put it, learn how they operate, look at how they provide value and gain respect from their subscribers by providing free content. Good idea; I opened up each of the blogs, had a quick look, and added them as links to my own blog. You can see and access these links in the sidebar under ‘Experts’. I use these links to access the sites regularly myself.

I have also added links to a couple of other blogs in addition to those recommended by John. The first was John’s own PlanetSMS Blog which is full of great content. The next blog I added was Web Guy which is by Mark Murnahan and is also packed with good content.

It has been interesting checking out these blogs. It’s an ongoing learning experience but the main thing I have noticed is that, apart from the common factor of having very decent content, each of the bloggers have developed a unique personal style and blog theme; essentially you can see that these people have ‘branded’ themselves and this is a factor that I need to, and will, develop myself over time.

Do yourself a favour and check out all the links under ‘Experts’ in the sidebar; you will discover plenty of interesting and though provoking reading.

What’s your ideal vacation? A skiing holiday, diving in an exotic location, or just soaking up the sun somewhere warm? I generally head over to the UK to catch up with family members; necessary of course, but not particularly adventurous. Personally I like sunny places and beaches – and I’m a bit of an aviation nut as well. So what if you could combine these two and indulge in an ideal break? Perhaps somewhere like this place:

This video was shot from Maho Beach which can be found on the island of St Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles. The aircraft is landing at Princess Juliana International Airport which, as you can see, is located as close as you can get to the beach. There are plenty of videos and still photographs, of aircraft carrying out this spectacular approach, available on the WWW. There have also been many claims that the images have been Photoshopped or doctored some way, but these claims are false – the images are all genuine.

I showed this video, and others, to my wife and…she approves! Maho Beach is now officially on our list of places to visit. We won’t be going this summer, a UK trip has been planned, but hopefully in the next couple of years we will get to go there. I can’t wait!