September 30, 2007 by David.

The Simple Dollar has a review on the book Why Smaret People Make Big Money Mistakes.  I haven’t bought the book yet, but it looks quite interesting, covering investing from the more behavioral and emotional angle than the nuts and bolts - that part of being human that overrides all the knowlege and logic that one so carefully amasses.

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September 25, 2007 by David.

I’ve only been to Street Vibrations once before, nearly a decade ago. I had ridden my springer down to an annual meeting outside of Sacramento and after the meeting I met up with my buddy Gary and we rode over the hill to Reno. We checked out vendors that evening and the next morning I headed back home. Before leaving, however, we had one of those free motel breakfasts - and that’s where the fun began. Gary and I were dressed in full leathers and everyone else in the dining room were, well, definately not bikers. Mostly older folks there for the gambling. First off, I dropped one of those stainless lids over the scambled eggs and it fell with a rambunctious, echoing clatter to the floor behind the serving table. That aparently was just to warm me up for the next event. I picked up the ketchup bottle and, as is my practice, I shook it before opening to get the goods broken loose to come out. Well, upon opening the ketchup bottle I learned an important lesson: Never shake - or better yet, never open - a multi-colored ketchup bottle. The bottle was mostly red with a little yellow at the top. Yes, the ketchup had gone bad. Very bad. And the shaking primed the contents to spray all over everything in a ten foot diameter. My leathers were covered in yellow and red stinking rotton ketchup. Let’s just say the blue hairs downing their eggs didn’t seem very impressed with my antics.

Fortunately on this trip there were no exploding ketchup bottles. Weather was unseasonably cold and rainy, but we had a good time. I rode to Gary’s Thursday night and Friday morning a dozen bikes headed out, riding back roads beside Hwy 50. We came home Sunday. For some pics, go to HawgRides.com.

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September 1, 2007 by David.

With not much surfing to find internet marketing education, one will come across Internet Marketing Center (IMC) and their “Insider’s Secrets” course by Corey Rudl. They have a large following and are a primary push behind those “long” web pages you see selling one item, complete with testimonials and screen after screen rolling down through all the reasons you will live an unfulfilled life if you don’t immediately pay up.

Well, that isn’t all bad. It has been proven to work and to work quite well. When we wanted to start selling on the Internet we took the advice of a friend who had gone through IMC’s mentoring program and signed up. Frankly, I wish we’d done more of our own research.

Don’t get me wrong. We have learned a lot. However, for us the costs outweighed the benefits. Along the way we’ve also gained a perspective that few seem willing to share about IMC and their Insider’s Secrets course.

First and foremost, IMC’s mentoring program is designed with one way of doing things and if your business model doesn’t fit that, you will find it difficult to get your money’s worth. You can’t buy the manual separately. It is part of a mentoring program.  You buy eight one hour phone calls which will be every two weeks (you can buy more, but don’t - add later if you find you need it). It is also best suited for a person who knows very little about computers and the Internet. In fact, they actively discourage what an average webmaster will want to do with a website. 

The business model they teach works like this:

1. First find what interests you, hobbies etc.
2. Take that theme, say golf or dogs, and do WordTracker searches until you find search strings that a lot of people are searching for but finding few sites.
3. Build a one page site that sells the heck out of that one item (with a liberal use of superlatives).

Step 1 doesn’t take a lot of time, but a lot of effort is poured into the second step. IMC does a good job of teaching you how to ferret out search strings. In addition, a lot of effort is put into the  sales copy on the third step. If what works for your business model is selling the heck out of one item, they will do a great job walking you through the process.

However, if you have already chosen a product, or several related products, and want to sell it on the Internet, you will find IMC difficult to get a full value from. This is the position we found ourselves in. Before signing up, we explained how we had a particular set of products we wanted to sell but they did not tell us that didn’t fit their mold. We have gone through two mentors with them and both are at a bit of a loss to help us and keep trying to steer us away from what we are selling to find a new, single product to sell.

They cover some SEO (search engine optimization) but make much more of an emphasis on pay-per-click than “organic” SEO. There will also be some coverage of a shopping cart and merchant account, but not much as when you sell one item on one page you don’t need a very sophisticated system.

Now, I understand that if I want to sell six watches that there is plenty of proof that if I make a single page for each, I will sell more than a page with all six, but that isn’t our issue. We want to use the Internet as one of many marketing strategies, not the main, and certainly not limit ourselves to Internet as a singular strategy.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out Wordtracker, you owe it to yourself if you have any kind of website and care about figuring out what search terms are most likely to attract visitors. Its information is very valuable, but don’t depend on it 100%. When I compare search string results in Wordtracker to search strings I use to see how my own sites fare, Wordtracker doesn’t always correlate.

When you sign up for IMC mentoring, you will receive two sizable binders. The information in those binders is excellent and if one were able to separately purchase those binders, I would recommend them quite highly. They give a lot of sources to get your job done, although there is a significant amount of pushing their own related products (particularly Mailloop - click here for my Mailloop review) or feeding you through links that will give them a commission. Ok, that is how one makes bucks on the Internet so I can’t bitch about that too loudly, I’m just one of those guys that prefers an honest evaluation of a product instead of one biased so the author gets a cut of the action.

IMC sees eMail lists as a primary means of attracting traffic and spends a substantial amount of time on how to attract customers to a site (through key words, etc) where you can offer them something to get them to sign up for your newsletter or such, from which you can then leverage selling.

In fact, signing up for IMC’s newsletter isn’t a bad idea.  If you get their newsletter, along with a few others such as Early to Rise, and Michael Masterson, you will soon have a pretty good picture of what IMC teaches in their mentoring course (like, for free, man).

Incidentally, Michael Masterson sells an excellent copywriting course that we found well worth every cent. It is called “Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting” (and, yes, this link is yet another example of long copy on the web). Although it is angled more toward hardcopy, its principles still apply well to the web. I recommend it if you want to learn the skills of copywriting and I consider it substantially superior to the section on copywriting within the IMC course.  It is also almost 1/20th the price of the IMC course and, while it doesn’t include mentoring, it does include sending in assignments and getting real feedback.

Here is an example site of how IMC will teach you to write. Take a good look at it. It may work well for your purposes. It may not. What it does do is sell products well, whether a person “likes” it or not. The question is whether what you have to sell can be put into that kind of a format.

I most certainly would not tell someone to never sign up with IMC. I hope, however, I have given enough of a picture of what they offer to enable you to make a good evaluation whether this is an approach that fits well within your business model or if you are better off pursuing an alternative.

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