Not long ago I was asked to participate in a training session for the vice presidents of a national non-profit group. They had hired a very experienced (and expensive) media consultant to come and groom these executives to be effective media spokespeople. My job, beyond sitting in and soaking up all of the things being taught, was to videotape the executives in simulated interview scenarios so they could watch themselves and become aware of their on-camera behavior.

A few of the things taught that day are relevant to anyone who wants to look good on camera and use the medium of web video to build trust with their audience. In this post I’m going to share a few tips I learned during that high-level training session that you can put to work right now.

Be Yourself

The most important thing I can share with you is the need to ‘be yourself’ on camera. It is tempting to try and create a character for yourself when you are on camera, but you need to resist the temptation. Few people are good enough actors to be convincing, so the result is that you end up looking like you are hiding something - your ‘real self.’

Being yourself doesn’t mean you don’t try to look and sound your best, it just means that a laid back person shouldn’t pretend to be a type-a executive or a PhD Psychologist shouldn’t try to act like a blue-collar worker.

In today’s Internet, authenticity rules. So, relax and let the real you come through.

Manage Your Adrenaline

The next tip has to do with managing your ‘nerves.’ Most people get at least a little nervous before going on-camera. It is very natural to have a little stage-fright, and the result is that your body will produce adrenaline. The only way to get adrenaline out of your body is through movement - you literally burn it off. If you try to force yourself to sit still, the adrenaline will still work its way out through weird facial tics and eye blinks.

The most natural way to deal with excess adrenaline is to ‘talk with your hands.’ Relax and allow yourself to make gestures while you talk. It looks natural to your viewers and gives a natural outlet for any adrenaline in your body.

Know Your Material

Rambling on and on, drifting off topic, stumbling and stammering are all symptoms of someone who does not have a clear understanding of what they are trying to say. And, that does not instill confidence in your viewers. They want to listen to someone who appears to ‘know their stuff.’

The best method to avoid rambling is to create a clear outline of what you plan to say before you go near the camera. This can become a very detailed script, or just a simple outline of the main talking points. Whichever path you choose, take the time to clarify your message and then rehearse what you want to say.

Sit Forward In Your Chair

Viewers read a lot into your body posture. The camera likes people who take charge. The strongest and most energized position you can assume is sitting on the front edge of your chair, weight balanced on the balls of your feet, with a slight forward lean.

Leaning back in your chair causes your body to slouch and makes you look distant and indifferent - not how you want your viewers to perceive you.

Ditch The Tinted Glasses

If you wear glasses at all, consider taking them off while you are on camera to avoid reflections in the lenses. And, if you wear glasses with tinted lenses, never wear them on camera.

Tinted lenses make it hard to see your eyes, which gives you a sinister look. If people can’t see your eyes, they will have trouble trusting you, because the people who usually hide their eyes don’t have your best interests in mind.

This is another reason to make sure you have good lighting when you record video. The simple lighting system I teach in Cheap and Easy Video Lighting is designed to ensure that your eyes are always well lit so that viewers can ‘read’ your face.

Most people who use the available light in a room when making videos end up with heavy shadows in their eye sockets. The reason is that most of the time, the dominant light is coming from overhead.

Conclusion

These tips should help you present yourself better on camera which will, in turn, make you stand out from the crowd. Most people (even professional marketers) just don’t go the few extra steps required to transform their videos from awful to awesome.

Are you having trouble creating the kinds of videos you want to make for your web video marketing? Leave a comment below and describe your problem. We’ll help you come up with a solution that works.

…if only you send some money and learn some new ‘secret magical Internet trick‘!!!

It hasn’t worked like that for me and I’ll bet that hasn’t happened to you either. In fact, it has been just the opposite experience for me.

I’ve spent years learning how to build a business online. My first website went live in January 2005. But, instead of big overnight floods of cash, my income has grown steadily over time - mostly from small sources.

Starting from scratch with no existing business or experience online, there is very little chance that you will experience one of those huge paydays that get talked about all the time. You will have to learn a few things first - sorry to have to break the bad news.

Some people certainly experience those big pay days, but they are the exception and not the rule (and most had some insider help they don’t talk about.)

My first year marketing online generated less than $30 in revenue and cost far more than that in expenses. I learned some very valuable lessons, but there were no instant Adsense fortunes or affiliate marketing riches…

…but some of the projects I started back then have grown to generate steady profits.

One website that I created that first year has grown to the point where it generates a steady annual income. Last year it earned $315.34 in advertising revenue with no new content or marketing - just a few tweaks to the look of the site to keep it fresh.

Another site, that grew out of a blog post I made that first year, earned $1,752.65 from advertising revenue and the promotion of one affiliate product. It generated other income as well that is a little harder to track, so I can’t give detailed figures - but it is at least another $50-$100.

Those are not stellar numbers. Nobody is going to pay me $2000 to learn the secrets to my success ( here is the short version: research a niche, build a website, add advertising and affiliate promotions, generate traffic with article marketing and other conventional sources.) But, just imagine what would happen…

…if you built up 50-100 websites that generated that kind of income (or spent time nurturing a few winners to maximum profits.) You could build a respectable business and maybe even quit your day job.

This is what happens for a significant number of the people who start taking action and building an online business. They work in their spare time learning how to create a small auto-pilot profit. Then, they grow that portion of the business or create another profit stream to add to the first until it all grows large enough to replace their regular income.

I have just created a new potential revenue stream that builds on a niche website I created a couple years ago (www.e-bookmarketingsecrets.com if you want to see what I’m talking about.) The site itself was created with content that I had purchased the rights to, some videos found on YouTube, and a few articles I wrote myself.

The website has been published for a while and has developed a small, but consistent, level of traffic. I’ve made some income from advertising and an occasional affiliate product sale, but I have completely revamped the strategy for the site.

The site is now focused on driving visitors to watch a short video meant to entice them to sign-up to an email mailing list in order to view the full video. The header of the site pitches the video and sign-up forms are being added in other places as well.

I’ve removed the Adsense advertising and most of the other promotions that had previously been on the site in order to focus attention on the free video.

Once a visitor signs up to watch the free video, they receive an automated sequence of emails with tips on the main topic and a subtle pitch for an affiliate product.

After the initial sequence of daily tips, the subscriber will get a periodic mix of tips and promotions of related products (some are products I created and others are products I am an affiliate for.)

If the site shows good results, I will develop some new products to take the place of the affiliate products, do some testing to determine conversion rates and lifetime visitor value from the site, and recruit affiliates of my own to promote the site and boost traffic to my offers.

The whole thing functions as a market test as well as an income stream. I can even conduct surveys with my subscribers if things work out well.

I think this combination of video content and email sequences will be effective and plan to try it on some of my non-marketing/business niche sites as well (I’ve got something very specific in mind for one of my most profitable niches. I just need to find time to create the content and put everything in place.)

Give the www.e-bookmarketingsecrets.com site a look and let me know what you think. If you have tested similar promotional strategies, I’d like to know what kind of results you got and if you have suggestions for improving the marketing sequence I have created.

If you have any questions about what I did, leave a comment and I’ll answer as best I can.

This approach is great for the guru’s affiliates because they don’t have to spend a lot of time ‘warming-up’ their audiences before sending them to the guru’s website. They just have to point to the awesome new freebie that the guru has released and let the guru do the selling.

Big Problem for E-Junkie Users

It would be great to let your affiliates refer their audience to free videos, special reports, webinars, etc.when they promote your product rather than sending them straight to a sales pitch. But, there is a big problem for E-Junkie users…

…E-Junkie only allows you to designate 1 landing page per product in their affiliate tools.

You either send your hoplink to your product sales page or some other page – but that is it. No chance to let your affiliates choose the best way to promote to their audience. No way to create customized landing pages for special JV promotions or let affiliates promote a post on your blog and still set their affiliate cookie.

Fortunately, there is a workaround that is easy to setup.

Adding Alternate Landing Pages for E-Junkie Affiliates

E-Junkie is a very flexible shopping cart solution, but they don’t make it easy for the average person to customize their account. If you aren’t comfortable tweaking website code, it can be tough to take advantage of this flexibility…

…but I’m about to show you everything you need to know!

The workaround is this: add a unique identifier to the end of your promotional URL’s for each freebie your affiliates can promote. Whenever E-Junkie comes across an extra code in an affiliate link that it does not recognize, it just passes it along by adding it to the end of your landing page URL.

To take advantage of this and create alternate landing pages, we will setup a simple php script as the default landing page which will re-direct traffic based on custom landing page identification code that we will create.

When an affiliate link comes into e-Junkie, they pass along any code that isn’t e-Junkie specific by appending it to the end of the landing page URL you set for the product.

The Step-By-Step Breakdown

To show you how this all works, I will demonstrate how to create an alternate landing page for my copywriting course that leads to a free report.

It all works like this:

This is the standard code provided through the e-Junkie affiliate tools for an affiliate link to the Meatball Copywriting course…

Code:
https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=283940&c=ib&aff=7144

To use this technique, I would first create a short PHP script that will look for a unique code added to the URL for the landing page. Then, when it finds the code, it will forward the visitor to an alternate landing page. If the code isn’t found, it sends the visitor to the default landing page for the product. This is the basic code for this script…

Code:
<?php
if ($alp=="uniquepagecode")
$redirect="http://www.urlforalternatepage.com";
/*
To add additional alternate landing pages to the script, copy the code
below, update the Unique Page Code and the URL for the Alternate
Landing Page, and then paste it just before the final 'else' code.

elseif ($alp=="uniquepagecode")
$redirect="http://www.urlforalternatepage.com";
*/
else
$redirect="http://www.defaultlandingpage.com";
header( 'Location: '.$redirect ) ;
?>

The portions of the text in red need to be modified to include your unique page codes and the specific URLs to your alternate landing pages.

At the bottom of this article is a link to a script generator program I created to simplify the process of creating this script (and helping avoid problems due to typing errors.)

Just follow the prompts in the software, copy the results to a text document, and save the file with a ‘.php’ file extension.

For this example, I’ve named my file ‘redirectscript.php’ and uploaded it to the main directory for the Meatball Copywriting website. This is the direct link to the script…

Code:
http://www.MeatballCopywriting.com/redirectscript.php

Inside the e-Junkie Shopping cart, I will set this page to be the affiliate hoplink landing page for the product.

Next, I made a special free copywriting report for my affiliates to promote to their lists. To give them the ability to direct their visitors to the report opt-in page, I setup a unique code for them to add to the hoplink that will tell the redirect script where to send the visitors.

The code is ‘report01′ and the variable name I use is ‘alp’ (for Alternate Landing Page – clever, hey?) The resulting bit of code that my affiliates will add to the hoplink is this…

Code:
&alp=report01

When that code is added to the original affiliate hoplink, you get this…

Code:
https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=283940&c=ib&aff=7144&alp=report01

When an affiliate uses that hoplink to direct people to my product, e-Junkie sets the tracking cookie, identifies the non e-Junkie code (’&alp=report01′), and appends it to the product’s designated landing page URL.

In the case of this example, the visitor would be sent to this URL by e-Junkie…

Code:
http://www.MeatballCopywriting.com/redirectscript.php?alp=report01

From there, the PHP script checks for the alternate page code and forward the visitor to the appropriate page on the Meatball Copywriting site.

The whole thing is active on my server, so you can copy and past the page links and see the process in action. (If you want to actually promote Meatball Copywriting – a guy can dream, can’t he – just replace the affiliate id with your own e-Junkie affiliate id where the link says ‘&aff=7144′. Click here join Go-To Guy! Enterprises’s affiliate program).

An Imperfect Solution That Works

This is not the most user friendly way too manage multiple landing pages for a product, but it’s not horribly complicated to implement and gives you a lot of flexibility when giving tools to your affiliates to promote your products.

You can add as many alternate pages as you want by just copying the ‘elseif’ line of code and adding a new code and landing page URL.

Click here to join Go-To Guy! Enterprises’s affiliate program
Click to download the E-Junkie Alternate Landing Page Script Generator.
Click to Download PDF version of Sell Like a Guru with E-Junkie

Click the link below to check out Russell’s affiliate program website first hand with the milestone markers in action.

Russell Brunson’s Second Tier Affiliate Program
Micro-Continuity System

Marketer Perry Belcher has put together a little video that shows the order button that he has developed for use on his sites. He also explains every component in detail along with why it works and his testing results.

Watch The Video:

You’ve probably seen the ‘Belcher Button’ used on a number of high profile marketer’s websites. They don’t often use something like that unless their testing proves it works.

Create one of these order buttons for your site and test it against your current solution.

…YOU ARE PROBABLY SMARTER THAN 99% OF BUSINESS OWNERS.

I’ll bet you take your knowledge for granted (it happens to me all the time), but most people running small and medium sized businesses (and even some major companies) know nothing about selling online. As a result, they are missing out on a huge revenue source for their business…

…THERE IS A HUGE OPPORTUNITY HERE FOR YOU.

Partnering with offline businesses and helping them develop online marketing systems for their business is a huge opportunity. They supply the products, all of the order processing and fulfillment, and the customer service. You come in and show them how to leverage the Internet to boost income (and take a cut of the sales.)

I’ve found a whole bunch of pre-packaged “offline business systems” on the market that provide websites and a basic business service package you can offer to offline businesses. I recently installed one of these on my own site and am in the process of customizing it for my business.

You can check out the basic website template I bought here:

www.GoToGuyMarketing.com

That stuff is pretty cool, but I just came across a really amazing new product from “Product Launch Formula” creator Jeff Walker. He’s put together a training program that teaches marketers his extremely successful “Product Launch Formula” system and then shows how you can turn around and hire yourself out running launch campaigns for others - and collect a percentage of the sales as your commission! (Jeff does this very thing himself, which is why you don’t see him running around developing new ‘must-have’ marketing products. He sticks with what works.)

I’m not doing Jeff’s system justice. He has just released a series of videos that lays out what his consulting system is all about, along with some case studies from students. Go check out what he’s doing:

Watch Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Marketing Video**

Everything you have learned about marketing online is like magic to people who have never done it before. Your knowledge is extremely valuable to business owners who are not leveraging the Internet in their businesses. So, put your knowledge to work helping them!

**I am an affiliate for Jeff Walker. So, if you click this link and buy something, I’ll get a commission (and will likely blow it all on party dresses and hats for my little girls.) I’ve studied the Product Launch Formula myself and it is some of the best marketing information I have ever seen - so, I’m very confident recommending Jeff Walker as a teacher.

Go check out the videos and let me know what you think:

Watch Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Marketing Video**

If you plan to get your own MP3 Player from Russell, do me a favor and click on this link:

www.GTGGO.com/micro-c

…I’ll get a few bucks commission from the referral (my girls are going to need braces one day!!!)

Thanks!

P.S. Please, no comments on how bad I look in the video. I’ve got a toddler and a teething 10 month old - I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in nearly 3 years. It’s astonishing that I can even speak coherently.

I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but they are lying (or at least misleading you.) An autopilot business doesn’t run by itself.

The Reality of an Autopilot Business

Autopilot systems were invented back in 1912 to help airplane pilots relieve some of the constant effort and attention required to keep an airplane flying on course. As sophisticated as these systems have become, every airplane still requires a pilot - he or she just doesn’t have to spend every second of every flight with hands on the controls. The flight runs a little smoother (most of the time) and the pilot can focus on other important business with less fatigue.

Your business goals should be the same. It takes real work to create an autopilot business. But, with the correct systems in place, you don’t have to keep your hands on the controls all the time.

You can:

• Setup automated order processing and product delivery systems that handle your sales
• Outsource tasks like website design, copywriting, and customer support
• Hire a general manager who completely operates the business for you on a day-to-day basis and frees your time for other things.

But, like an airplane autopilot system, you will still need to be in charge to make sure everything is working smoothly and that the business is headed in the right direction. You still need to be the pilot.

That might not be the most seductive description of an autopilot business you’ve ever heard. But, it is probably the most honest and realistic. My Internet based business is highly automated, but I still need to work on it actively to keep things going and growing.

Building Your Own Autopilot Business

Information publishing and Internet marketing are business models that allow you to create highly automated systems. Those systems can lead to a very profitable business that requires little time and attention to maintain. You can profit many times from the products you create and the marketing sequences you develop to promote and sell. But you are going to have to do some work, and you’ll have to stay in command all the time - even if you your hands aren’t constantly on the controls.

Don’t fall for the ’success without effort’ sales pitches you see floating around. If they are not willing to tell you about the work involved to build your business, there are probably a few other details being left out as well. Any honest teacher will tell you that there is work involved - and then show you how to get your hands off the controls as much as possible.

Imagine you have a product that sells for $17. You also have a premium version of the same product that sells for $47. You get the occasional sale for the premium version, but most people opt for the low cost version. How can you get more people to trade up?

With decoy pricing, you introduce a third version that is slightly better than the premium version in content, but radically more expensive in price - say $97 (or even more.)

You aren’t offering a good, better, best choice. You are offering a good, better, holy crap choice. The average prospect will look at your high-end offer and say that it isn’t worth the outrageous price. But the magical thing that happens is that significantly more people will then settle for the $47 product as the best value and purchase that. The decoy option draws more people to the $47 product which was your primary target in the first place.

It’s a bit of perceptual contrast. By introducing the outrageously priced option, you make the middle option seem like the best deal by comparison.

This strategy is easy to implement. Just make three separate offers in your sales copy and link to three separate versions of the product with different prices set.

If you’ve experimented with decoy pricing in your business, please leave a comment below and let us know what happened.

When I first started selling products online, most of my selling efforts were devoted to writing sales copy to persuade people to click the order button. I was only making one offer on the sales page and visitors either took it or left without making a purchase. I had a one-step sales process. Then I read an e-book called…

The Butterfly Marketing Manuscript, by Mike Filsaime

Butterfly Marketing transformed the the way I thought about selling products online. My sales process became more sophisticated and my offers were no longer take-it or leave-it!

NOTE: As part of a promotional campaign for his Butterfly Marketing 2.0 product, Mike Filsaime is giving away the original Butterfly Marketing Manuscript as a bribe to sign-up for his mailing list. I paid $97 for this amazing e-book - I highly recommend you take him up on the free download.

Upsells, Downsells, and The Power of a Multi-Step Offer

A critical change in my thinking about selling came when I learned about upsells and downsells. An upsell is a second offer for a premium version of the product that is made right after the customer accepts the initial offer. A downsell is a lower cost offer made after a prospect refuses another offer and should involve removing something from the offer so your customer does not get the impression you were simply trying to overcharge them with the initial offer.

To use the multi-part offer sequence I have created, I need to have 4 separate product offers. They are:

Bronze - The entry level product with no bonuses
Silver - The entry level product with a highly relevant bonus
Gold - The premium version of the product with no bonuses
Platinum - The premium version of the product with a highly relevant bonus

It’s important that the bonus offered is complimentary to the main product but not essential. If the customer chooses not to get the bonus, they should still get the full value from the main product. For information products, a common bonus is an audio version of an e-book or a free coaching session. Both can add value, but the information in the main product is still complete without them.

My Sales Process Step-By-Step

The specific sales sequence I use is not some magic formula - there are others out there that may work just as well or better. But, I want to walk you through what I do and why to show the logic behind it and you can adapt it to your business.

Silver: The Sales Page Offer

When a customer comes to the sales page for my product, the offer at the bottom is for the Silver product. It’s a good value at a good price. If the prospect accepts the Silver offer, they jump ahead to the Platinum offer upsell page. If they try to leave the salespage without clicking the order button, an exit pop-up appears with a downsell to the Bronze offer.

Bronze: The Sales Page Downsell

If the prospect tries to leave the sales page without ordering, I make an additional attempt make a sale be offering a lower cost alternative - the ‘no-frills’ version. For cost conscious people, this might be enough of an incentive to motivate them to order and will convert some of these exiting visitors to customers.

Platinum: The Upsell

When a customer accepts the main offer, I direct them to another page that shows them how they can get an enhanced premium version of the product for only a few dollars more than what they had already decided to spend. I may even add an additional bonus as well that relates to the enhanced features of the premium product.

If the customer refuses the upsell offer, I send them to a third offer which is a ‘downsell for the upsell.’

Gold: The Downsell for the Upsell

If the customer turns down the upsell offer I give them a second chance to get the added features of the premium product for less money (which is still more than the Silver offer.) To justify the cost reduction, I take away the bonuses from the offer.

If the customer refuses the Gold offer, I take them directly to the shopping cart to complete the order for the Silver offer they originally chose to buy.

This whole process is directly inspired by what I read in the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript. At $97 I recommended this e-book for any Internet marketer. Now that Mike Filsaime is giving it away, I think it’s a no brainer to get a free copy. Once you have yours, print it out so you can make notes (trust me, you will make lots of notes as you read.)

Notes on the Process

This process is very effective for getting customers to add a little more to their order on a consistent basis. If you have an affiliate program, this increase in the average sale will be a big incentive when you recruit affiliates and JV partners to promote your products. Plus, you’ll make more money.

Mike Filsaime’s ordering system is setup to capture and process the initial sale before the upsell process begins. This helps to minimize sales lost by people who don’t like being upsold. My shopping cart setup doesn’t allow me to add onto the first sale like that, so I don’t send a prospect to the shopping cart until they’ve reached the end of the process and settled on the most a product package to order.

I run the risk of losing some sales this way. But, my feeling is that you won’t lose many if your upsell messages aren’t filled with hyped-up language and fake scarcity tactics. Nobody walks out of a movie theater and demands a refund when the guy at the concession stand asks if you want the large soda for a quarter more.

Even if you think that what I’ve just described makes perfect sense and you are completely sold on the idea, test. Every product and market is different and yours may not respond to this specific approach. The only way you can ever know whether an idea makes sense for you is to test it and compare your results to another offer or sales sequence.

Get a Free Copy of Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Manuscript right now (a $97 Value.)

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights!

I am a member of Dennis Becker’s Earn1KaDay marketing forum and was recently asked by one of the other members about my opinion of the course. I think the response I gave would be helpful for anyone who is on the fence trying to decide whether to buy this product.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t get paid one thin dime if you order Mass Control. I’m not one of Frank Kern’s affiliates (but Frank, if you’re reading this post, I’d love to get into the program!) I do sell an audio interview with Frank in the IM Products section of this site, and (if you read my ‘4 Day Cash Machine’ case study posts and sign-up to get the email sequence from my promotion) you will also see that I’ve written a report called ‘4 Day Cash Machine EXPOSED!’ But, that is the full extent of profit I stand to make from the info I’m about to share.

Here is the response I gave over at the Earn1KaDay forum to the question - is Mass Control worth the money:

I got in during the first Mass Control launch last year and have not regretted the decision for a second - I’ve learned a lot from Frank Kern.

Now, Frank definitely rubs some folks the wrong way, but he has a lot of insight into copywriting and the psychology of selling. His whole ‘California Surfer Dude’ persona (while an extension of his personality) is also a very carefully crafted public image that is central to his sales message.

I can also report that Frank delivers far more value than he advertises.

Inside the Mass Control course itself was the full video content from his Under Achiever Method course, plus a number of other seminar presentations and interviews. These were not empty pitch-fest bonuses. They included his original Mass Control presentation at one of Jeff Walker’s seminars and his Core Influence presentation (which really helps you understand his marketing persona).

Frank also conducted a free seminar for his Mass Control students - for everyone who couldn’t attend, the full sessions were made available as free video downloads. Some of the videos in this current promotion are from that seminar - so you can see the quality of the content for yourself.

Finally (and this surprised me), Frank sent me an email saying that he is giving a free copy of the new version of Mass Control 2.0 to all of us earlier customers. He never promised physical products or free upgrades to any of us - but he’s giving them just the same.

I grab a copy of nearly everything Frank Kern creates just to study what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. His products have been of consistently high quality and they always contain some valuable insight.

While I know a few very successful and respected Internet marketers who absolutely cannot stand Frank Kern, I have been very happy with the investment I made in Mass Control and would happily do it again.

My hope is that the free customer seminar he is planning this year extends to those of us who are getting Mass Control 2.0 because of our purchase of the 1.0 version. I missed the last live event and will not be letting that happen again.

So, if you think Mass Control 2.0 is the right product for you but are just nervous about spending $2k during a bad economic downturn - just know it’s worth every penny and then some.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this post, visit us online at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights.

As my business has grown, I’ve looked for every opportunity to conserve effort and improve my overall results. By creating templates that can be used over and over again, I can quickly create new documents and web pages that have a consistent style and quality without having to hire a designer and coder every time or slave for hours building something from scratch.

The basic sales letter is an essential document for online business. Having a good clean template to work from lets you focus on the most important elements - the sales copy, the images, and the ORDER BUTTON.

I’ve decided to share my SALES LETTER TEMPLATE with other marketers who are just getting started. It will help you quickly create the web pages you need to sell your products and give you professional looking results. It includes all the graphics, style sheets, and code.

Free Sales Page Template <-- Click To Download

Using WordPress? Get WP-SalesPage and build and manage your sales page from inside Wordpress. ==>Click Here to See WP-SalesPage In Action<==

I have created templates for ebooks and the legaleze that appears on my websites. I even developed a process for making a template out of an entire website so that I can quickly build new niche websites that share similar structures. It’s a great way to free up your time to focus on things that will make you money instead.

Enjoy!

The answer to my question is: Little Luxuries!

My wife calls it “Lipstick and Lacy Underwear Time.” When women who normally buy Coach handbags and Prada shoes fall on hard times, they console themselves with ‘affordable luxuries’ like expensive lipstick and lingerie. They are able to buy something expensive for its product category, but the category itself is far cheaper than what they have been buying - so they can still lead that life of mini-extravagance without going bankrupt.

There are hundreds and thousands of these ‘affordable luxuries’ that people will turn to during the hard times. Gourmet coffee and candy treats tend to do well. Magazines about expensive lifestyles also sell. Memberships in places like CostCo will be on the rise as people look to get a little more for a little less. Trader Joe’s affordable gourmet foods will satisfy the urge for many. And other low-cost luxuries like sunglasses, watches, and (of course) lipstick and lingerie will become the focal point for people looking to ‘treat themselves’ to a little something special.

How To Capitalize On The ‘Little Luxury’ Mindset

The best way to capitalize on this mindset of ‘little luxuries’ is to simply rewrite the marketing copy for the things you are selling right now. Position your existing products and services as ‘affordable luxuries’. Encourage people to ‘treat themselves’ to your products because they are far more valuable that what is being charged.

Simply re-framing the perception of your product can shift the mental gears of your customers and give them permission to spend a little money with you.

Of course, you can also create products that are designed to supply many of the feelings of luxury at reduced costs. Or, you could simply reduce the costs of buying your products.

Another tactic that may work instead of lowering prices is to allow payments to be made in installments so that the initial cost of purchase is much lower.

I am responding to the recession with a special low-priced offer of some of my best selling products designed to help people create and grow their own information publishing business.

Instead of waiting until ‘things get better’, I want to help people develop the skills to ‘make things better‘ by starting a new business. Information publishing is a very inexpensive business to start and the profit potential is significant. I make money from it every day - so I know what I’m talking about.

The ‘Recession Buster’ Package is On The Way

I’m working on a special “Recession Buster” package that is going to put together an amazing collection of products for walking anyone through the process of starting up their own information publishing business. It will be available to subscribers of the IM Insights newsletter in a few days. (Only newsletter subscribers will receive this offer, so subscribe to the free course using the form on the right side of this web page to get the sale announcement. You’ll get an awesome e-course too!)

Keep watching your emails, the ‘Recession Buster’ package will only be available for 4 days. So, you’ll need to move fast to take advantage of this amazing deal (over 75% off of my normal sales prices.)

Real value is created in our economy when people like you and me create new and valuable products and sell them to others who need them. As our businesses grow, we pay for things like payment processing, web hosting, and software. We also hire bookkeepers and other folks to manage our business. We purchase computers, video cameras, audio recorders, and more to create new products to sell. And, the list goes on.

In short, it’s people like you and me getting to work that will ultimately start rebuilding this shattered economy. I hope, through the “Recession Buster” package, to help you get a jump start on doing your part without breaking the piggy bank in the process.

Don’t let a recession get you down. Let it inspire you to create instead.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com to sign-up for the newsletter and receive our powerful e-course titled “The Six Secret Weapons of Power Persuasion.”

An interesting thing happened on ‘Black Monday.’ As the bottom fell out of the stock market and trillions of dollars in investor wealth vanished into thin air, I actually had a pretty good day in my information publishing business. I made sales as an affiliate, I sold some products from my own product line, and I earned income from ads on my various blogs and websites. (Of course, I lost plenty of money on my investment portfolio!)

People may change their focus and priorities during a recession, but they don’t stop buying things.

When people are feeling ‘rich’ and there is plenty of cash and credit floating around, you don’t have to try hard to sell products. Even lazy marketers can make a few bucks riding trends and copying other people’s marketing methods.

But, when fear grips the markets (and people’s wallets) you have to have spend a little more time and energy to find or create the products that will sell.

What Will People Buy Right Now?

Think for a minute about what your friends and family are discussing right now when it comes to the economy and their jobs. Many are probably trimming back spending on ‘luxury’ items. Others are trying to stretch the useful life of products they have been just throwing out and replacing in the past.

Instead of a new car, it’s new brakes on the old car. Maybe you know someone who is learning to cook and bake from scratch to avoid the cost of expensive pre-packaged foods in order to stretch the grocery money a little further each week. You may even know people who are scrambling to trim their lifestyle and sell off non-essential items in their homes to keep up the payments on a house after their spouse lost a job.

In every one of these cases and more there are opportunities for smart marketers. Information about car repair, selling on eBay, and meal planning are easy sells in a difficult economic climate. You can also teach people how to make things for themselves to save money (think knitting, sewing, crochet, woodworking, etc.)

There is also a huge market for ‘frugal living’ resources. These folks may not like to spend money on store-bought cleaning products, clothes, and packaged foods, but they will buy inexpensive info products that teach them how to make their own versions of popular products for pennies.

Plenty of people are in desperate need of credit and budget counseling too. It is amazing how few people actually know how to create a household budget and use it. I don’t know many. You can get away without this kind of knowledge when times are good, but when the money pool dries up, these are the skills that keep you from going bankrupt. If you know anything on the subject, now is the time to get that information into a product.

The ‘Recession Buster’ Package is On The Way

I’m working on a special “Recession Buster” package that is going to put together an amazing collection of products for walking anyone through the process of starting up their own information publishing business. It will be available to subscribers of the IM Insights newsletter in a few days. (Only newsletter subscribers will receive this offer, so subscribe to the free course using the form on the right side of this web page to get the sale announcement. You’ll get an awesome e-course too!)

Keep watching your emails, the ‘Recession Buster’ package will only be available for 4 days. So, you’ll need to move fast to take advantage of this amazing deal (over 75% off of my normal sales prices.)

Real value is created in our economy when people like you and me create new and valuable products and sell them to others who need them. As our businesses grow, we pay for things like payment processing, web hosting, and software. We also hire bookkeepers and other folks to manage our business. We purchase computers, video cameras, audio recorders, and more to create new products to sell. And, the list goes on.

In short, it’s people like you and me getting to work that will ultimately start rebuilding this shattered economy. I hope, through the “Recession Buster” package, to help you get a jump start on doing your part without breaking the piggy bank in the process.

Don’t let a recession get you down. Let it inspire you to create instead.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com to sign-up for the newsletter and receive our powerful e-course titled “The Six Secret Weapons of Power Persuasion.”

So, What Is Integration Marketing?

Like many things that Mark Joyner has written about in the past, Integration Marketing is a concept that seems very simplistic on the surface, but has profound impact when used properly.

Integration Marketing involves the integration of one marketing process into another. This can be as simple as placing a promotion for a related product on the download or thank-you page of a product you just sold. You can also place your offer into the download pages of another company’s product.

In the Internet marketing world, there are many examples of this. During the recent launch of Traffic Secrets 2.0, Frank Kern gave a free DVD to every customer who purchased the course. This DVD was included (integrated) directly into the course package and introduced Frank Kern and his marketing approach to every customer of that course.

Mike Filsaime did the same thing during the recent ‘giveaway launch’ of his ‘7 Figure Secrets’, but cross-promoted other products of his own. The resulting promotion made him a small fortune. His Traffic Fusion course includes a product called HyperJava that is a tool which is 100% focused on giving its users the ability to quickly and easily integrate their marketing into the marketing efforts of other people.

When you anylize Mike Filsaime’s business, you quickly realize that many of the tools and products he has created are designed to get his marketing integrated into other people’s promotions. There is a very good reason why his business generates 7 figure sales every year.

But, Integration Marketing is not limited to Internet marketing businesses. One extreme example that Mark Joyner gives of a successful integration is Microsoft. The pivotal deal that launched Microsoft into the massive company that it is today was the agreement they made with IBM to supply the operating system to the first personal computers.

Every new computer came with the software installed. IBM spent millions of dollars making and marketing personal computers, but when you turned one on, the Microsoft logo was what you saw on the screen. However, the real genius of the deal was that Microsoft retained the rights to sell upgrades directly to the users (who were now on their customer lists at IBM’s expense) and the right to sell the operating system to other manufacturers.

Microsoft integrated themselves directly into the marketing systems of all the major personal computer manufacturers and profited massively.

How Can You Profit From Integration Marketing Today?

The 2 easiest ways to profit from Integration Marketing are to make sure you have promotions for other products integrated into the thank-you and download pages for your existing products. Then, look for people selling compatible products and approach them with offers to promote your products on their sites.

If you register for a free account at IntegrationMarketing.com, you will get access to a ‘Deal Board’ where people can advertise opportunities for integration or products to integrate. Mark Joyner seems to be working hard to bring the power of integration to the masses.

Keep Your Eyes Open For Integration

One of the best ways to develop creative integration strategies in your business is to watch what others are doing. Whenever you sign-up for something or make a purchase online, watch out for integrated promotions. When you see a clever tactic, make a note for future reference. Look deeper than download and thank-you pages too. Pay attention to ‘guest speakers’ at conferences and bonus chapters in books.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us online at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights. Don’t forget to sign up for our free e-course, “The Six Secret Weapons of Persuasion.”

I’ve signed up, downloaded the book, and checked everything out for you, and in a moment I will tell you what I discovered. But first, I want to make sure you know who Mark Joyner is.

Mark Joyner started marketing in the Internet way back in the 1990’s. He’s been in it from the beginning and has written a number of popular books including “Mind Control Marketing” (one of my favorites) and “The Irresistible Offer”. A quick search on the name Mark Joyner at Amazon will pull up a number of books he’s written or in which he’s been written about.

In the past few years Mark has been working on his Simplology membership website as a platform for helping people become more effective in their businesses and their lives.

Integration Marketing - The Next Big Idea

IntegrationMarketing.com places Mark Joyner squarely back in the world of Internet marketing once again.

So, after checking everything out, here is what I thought if it all:

Integration Marketing is a brilliant concept. When you sign-up at the website, you are taken through a step-by-step internal integration marketing process and Mark Joyner explains what is happening every step of the away - like one of those masked magicians who reveals the secrets behind his tricks. It’s the best way to understand the concept (and Mark also pitches a product as well.) I recommend signing up just to see the whole process in action.

The “Integration Marketing” book is also excellent. Mark admits up front that he did not invent Integration Marketing, but rather observed it in action and realized that there had not been anyone yet who had written a clear study of the subject.

In my experience, Mike Filsaime’s “Butterfly Marketing Manuscript” is the closest thing to a book on the subject of Integration Marketing (and Mike is a big fan and friend of Mark Joyner - so no surprises there.) His latest product is completely focused on providing integration tools to his customers to boost their traffic and sales and it has long been a staple in his marketing process. There might be other books on the subject , but I haven’t come across them so far.

You do not have to do anything more than sit through the IntegrationMarketing.com sign-up marketing sequence to get a free digital copy of the book. According to the site, the book will be published in a few months through traditional book outlets, but the electronic version is available now.

The Integration Marketing book is 49 pages long and is broken into 3 parts: The core idea, strategic implementation, and advanced techniques and examples for using Integration Marketing. It’s not fluff or relentless sales pitches. This book is pure content that you can put to work without buying anything else. Chapter 8 even leads you through a process that Mark has developed to evaluate Integration Marketing deals to minimize the guesswork involved in the process and increasing your probability of success.

Getting the book is a ‘no-brainer decision.’ Just click the link below and sign up at the website.

Claim Your Copy of “Integration Marketing”, by Mark Joyner.

Once inside the website, the book can be found by clicking the ‘Products’ link on the upper right corner of the page. But, the real genius behind what Mark has done is the website itself. It is a hub for marketers to share opportunities for Integration Marketing. The ‘Deal Board’ lets you post an opportunity to the community or find one offered by someone else to integrate in your own business.

This is the most brilliant part of the whole promotion. Mark Joyner is creating a whole community around the concept. If it takes off, I’m sure it will be a major resource in the marketing community.

There are about 11,000 people signed up as I write this article and there are only 30 posts on the boards for integration opportunities, but I’m sure that will improve as the whole promotion gains traction. Mark seems to be avoiding the massive “event launch” process being used by many in the Internet marketing community.

Claim Your Copy of “Integration Marketing“, by Mark Joyner and carefully study his marketing process during the sign-up sequence. This is a man who has made millions online and his methods are worth studying.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us online at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more great marketing resources. Make sure to sign up for our free e-course, “The Six Secret Weapons of Persuasion.”

The latest version of the iPhone was plagued by severe problems that would cause customers of other products to abandon ship and look to another company with a better product. But, even the most dissatisfied customers are keeping their phones because they are the ‘best designed’ phones available and ‘Apple makes the best products.’

They forgive a massively defective product because they love the company and they love being part of the hip and cool crowd that pays a premium to own the ‘best designed’ products on the market.

That is a marketing cult operating in high gear.

What Is a Marketing Cult?

Cult style marketing is about selling the experience of owning the the products and the aura of being a member of a ’select group’ once you own them. It’s not about price, or features, or value - it’s about belonging.

Now, I don’t use the word cult to imply that these marketers are evil or don’t deliver valuable products, but rather to demonstrate the intense passion the customers have about being a customer in the first place. (And, of course I’m using a ‘loaded’ word to sound controversial and pique curiosity to get people to read this article.) In the case of and honest to goodness cult, you’d be asked to sell all your worldly possessions, leave your family, move to some compound in the middle of nowhere and chant songs about the benevolent leader all day

Cult style marketing is effective because it uses some of the underlying psychology that gets manipulated by the people who start cults. This style of marketing focuses on the leader of the group, the lifestyle of those on the inside, and an attitude that people on the outside ‘just don’t get it!’ They have their own language that is only understood by those on the ‘inside.’ When you market to a cult you don’t sell a product, you sell a ‘lifestyle choice.’

I Am a Cult Member

Turns out that I’m a member of 2 ‘marketing cults’ - who knew?

Fortunately, I have been paying attention to how this happened and studying the tactics and techniques that lead me to join in the first place.

I didn’t set out to become an expert in cult style marketing, I just wanted to learn how to build an online business and I started seeking out people who were succeeding and then studying what they did.

Recently I joined Frank Kern’s Mass Control program to learn how this ‘evil’ marketing genius can get people to fall all over themselves trying to give him money. Guess what, Frank knows the psychology behind building a cult and uses it to build a devoted group of people who want to buy things from him (like me - happy member of the club.)

The cool thing is that you don’t have to be a marketing genius like Steve Jobs or Frank Kern to build a profitable group of passionate followers. The first marketing cult I joined is run by a very nice guy from New Jersey and grew very organically from an ebook he wrote called “5 Bucks a Day.”

How A Nice Guy From New Jersey Built A Passionate Group Of Followers

Dennis Becker is an incredibly nice and generous guy. He wrote “5 Bucks a Day” to help other marketers develop a more focused approach to applying all the knowledge they were aquiring about Internet marketing. The book helped many people just like me start to break down their big dreams into small goals that would add up to a real business over time. Dennis shared his personal story and some ‘common wisdom’ that we just don’t think about enough.

Now, Frank Kern says that one of the first things you should do to build a ‘cult’ of your own is to tell them something they already know, but present it as though it is a gospel revelation.

“5 Bucks a Day” taught people to stop hopping from one trend to another and focus on one small project that could make you $5 per day until it was up and running. So the revelation was, “you are not succeeding because you don’t focus on one thing long enough to make any progress.”

Dennis shared his story because this shift in thinking really did change his business and make it much more profitable. But, it also had all of us who read it nodding our heads in agreement. We knew this, he validated what we knew deep down, and he showed us that this was a path to real success.

The seeds were planted.

Bonding The Group And Inventing A Language

Dennis was a bit surprised at how well the “5 Bucks a Day” ebook was received. He had a nice list of email addresses from customers and one day he announced that he was starting a free membership forum for owners of the ebook. Now the group had a place to hang out and we could talk to Dennis on a regular basis.

Very quickly we started to develop a list of special abbreviations like 5BAD as we spent hours discussing how we were applying our newfound focus on our Internet marketing efforts. We were creating our own language.

Dennis participated every day in the discussions and gave us tons of free resources to help us improve our success. He encouraged members to ‘get out there’ and start doing things instead of just talking about them. He personally welcomed every new member and celebrated every success on the forum. He also pulled up short whenever someone asked him for details about exactly how he was making his major income - and we asked!

Secret Knowledge Is Revealed To The Elite Members

Then, one day, things got even more exclusive. Dennis started a new paid monthly membership forum called “Earn $1k a Day” where he ’spilled his guts’ and gave us a step-by-step blueprint for making money using his (until now) secret process. He invited a small group of his most active members to join first and lay the groundwork for the rest who would follow.

Now, all us freshly minted E1KAD members began to follow our leader and the community grew. Dennis had built himself a passionate community of people who looked to him for inspiration and who now paid him a monthly fee to be part of the group.

The “Earn $1k a Day” membership site is a great place and I’ve learned - and earned a good bit of money - since I joined up. The other members have supported my projects and I’ve benefited from the reports and software that are regularly posted for the members.

Dennis Becker ended up creating his own private ‘cult’ around the notion of focusing small for big results and by nurturing a community of others who see the world in a similar way. And now, it’s turned into a valuable business for him and spawned the successful careers of several other marketers.

It is safe to say that Dennis Becker did not set out to create his own E1KAD and 5BAD ‘cults’. They grew organically from his success publishing the ebook and from the community he nurtured around that core idea. He gave a lot of time, energy, and content to his members and it grew into something pretty amazing.

The Greatest Cult-Building Evil Genius In Internet Marketing

Frank Kern sets out on his cult building efforts very intentionally.

The psychology behind the process is the same for both of these marketers, but Frank uses a much more focussed and accelerated plan to get a cult going overnight and to fire up his followers and get them to fight for a chance to throw large sums of money at him.

I didn’t know anything about Frank Kern 12 months ago and ended up giving him 10 times more money in one day than I have given to Dennis over nearly 2 years (and Dennis has actually spent a lot of personal time and energy helping me build my business.)

Fortunately, I have yet to give one dime to Steve Jobs. I listen to my Sansa Fuze MP3 player and talk on my Nokia phone while typing on my Windows computer! Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got to start running before the Apple fanatics start flaming me.

Who Is Following You?

If you want real success for your Internet marketing business, you need to start thinking about building your own cult. You don’t have to swing for the fences to have real success that will fatten up your bank account. A few hundred devoted followers will go a long way.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, please visit us at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights and to sign up for our free e-course, “The Secret Weapons of Persuasion.”

The process for establishing the value of your product is not very complicated. It relies on something psychologists call ‘perceptual contrast’. That’s a great big fancy label, but it basically means that if I show you something expensive first, and then show you a lower priced item second, the second item will seem like a bargain. As long as both items are similar, your mind will compare them when deciding the value of the second item. Your mind uses the first thing it sees as the benchmark for evaluating what comes after it. (There is a really cool experiment you can run on your friends that demonstrates how perceptual contrast works - check the bottom of this article for more details.)

To put this into practice during a launch, you start by establishing a very high value for the ‘benefits’ of the product you are selling. If a customer saved $10,000 dollars using your training, you can establish that the ‘real’ value of the training is $10,000 (at least for that customer.) If there are other people teaching something similar at a higher price, talk about how much they charge, and explain that this person’s customers are getting a good deal because the training is worth much more. This has the double benefit of showing that you are a nice likable person because you said generous things about a competitor.

Any time you have a chance to use a third party voice to state a value for the type of product your are selling, work it into the sales copy - you want to continually re-enforce the value of the product. When you solicit testimonials, always ask for details and numbers.

A common tactic is to wait until after you’ve hooked your prospective customers into wanting your product and then, as your launch date approaches, you can reveal that the product is ‘only’ going to cost $97 while still delivering the same quality as the far more expensive options. Your $97 price tag will seem like the most amazing bargain in the marketplace. A secondary benefit is that keeping people guessing about the price will encourage them to do just that. They will visit forums and blogs and speculate about how much you will actually charge - this provides more buzz in the marketplace and helps 3rd party voices re-enforce the value of your product.

That’s the process. Demonstrate the value of the results. Discuss the value and price of similar products in the marketplace, and then mention your price and compare it to reinforce the value.

Now, here is the cool experiment you can run on your friends. Fill three buckets with water. The water in the middle bucket should be room temperature. Fill the second bucket with very cold water and the third with very warm water. Have your friends place one hand in the cold bucket and the other in the warm bucket and leave them there for a few seconds to get acclimated. Then, have your friend place both hands in the middle bucket and describe the temperature of the water.

Your friend’s mind will interpret the information from each hand relative to the temperature of the bucket it was in before. The signal from the hand from the cold bucket says the water is warmer than room temperature and the other side says it’s colder - but your friend also ‘knows’ that both hands are feeling the same temperature water.

Catch their reaction on tape. It should be good for a few laughs (specially if your friend has had a few beers!) If you get it on tape, put it on YouTube and post a link in the comments here!

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us online at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more internet marketing insights.

A little background info first. I was one of the folks who waited by my computer with credit card in hand and rushed to send Frank Kern $2k when the Mass Control training course was offered in early 2008. Once inside the course I discovered a lot of very cool bonuses including the complete video training from the Underachiever Method seminar that Frank Kern and Ed Dale held in Australia. Frank used the promotion for that course as one of his case studies in the Mass Control course, and threw in the full content for fun!!!

In addition to plowing through the Mass Control content, I made some time to watch the Underachiever Method training as well.

Fast forward to today! I’ve been following along with Ed Dale’s free 30 Day Challenge course and I discovered something pretty cool…

Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge is essentially the same process he and Frank Kern used to taught in their Underachiever Method course - with updates, of course!

The basic Underachiever Method process is this:

• Find niche market to test
• Test the marketplace
• Create product or choose a primary affiliate product
• Sell your product with a sales page

Ed tweaks some of the basic steps and also integrates the huge number of networking and syndication tools now available on the web, but the core process is identical.

The lessons on finding a niche market are basically the same. The videos in the 30 Day Challenge are very detailed and there is no ‘missing information’ that you have to buy in order to make the process work.

The original Underachiever method recommended putting up an “ask campaign”. You bought traffic and sent it to a website with a short survey on it. If there was enough traffic and interest to validate the market, you went and made a product. The current refinement of the process involves quickly building a blog and promoting an existing affiliate product on it. Then, you use social bookmarking and other web 2.0 tactics to direct traffic to this site rather than pay-per-click ads.

Like the original training, if the test performs well, you then build a product of your own for the niche and start selling it.

In addition to this core strategy, Ed also provides an amazing series of lessons on the subject of social marketing. He demonstrates, in detail, how to use tools like Friend Feed, Facebook, and Twitter to develop a huge network of connecting points where your audience can connect with your messages. He shows you how to use each social networking tool for the task it is best at performing. This content is worth check out on its own.

You are probably wondering (like I did) why in the world Ed Dale would give away all of this training for free. Well, get a few days into the training and you start to see him promoting different tools and services - all of which he’ll get a commission from, I’m sure. But, he always shows you how to get the job done with free tools, so you are never stuck if you choose not to buy something. Plus they also provide several free trials for critical tools so you can use them during the challenge and then later pay for them after you achieve your initial success. I downloaded the trial version of Marketing Samurai and wasn’t required to give away anything more than me name and email address.

Another bonus for Ed is that everyone he teaches is connecting to his network of RSS feeds and email lists. So, that valuable collection of Internet marketing newbies will surely be worth many dollars in the future - particularly when they credit Ed Dale with their first real business success online.

So, if you’ve missed out on all the big product launches this year because you didn’t have the thousands of dollars required to get onboard, jump on the 30 Day Challenge training. There is great content here for the intermediate marketer and it is absolute gold for the novice.

I still recommend it for the advanced marketer as well, but more for the purpose of watching how Ed Dale uses the YouTube video platform to pull in new participants, how he organizes a highly polished presentation of the content on his website, how he builds a subscriber base by teaching people how to use the tools, and how he uses Twitter and his blog to keep the story going during the 30 days. It’s a well designed and operated program.

The 30 days is already underway, but you can go back through the previous content and get caught-up pretty quickly. Your effort will be rewarded.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this review, visit us online at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com.

One of the first big decisions that any new Internet business faces is figuring out how to sell and deliver products. Simple solutions like PayPal’s ‘Buy Now’ button and shopping cart tools are attractive because they are free to setup and easy to use. But, they come with some very severe limitations. They don’t have secure digital product delivery options (you have to set that up separately with 3rd party software on your own server), there are no tools for processing sales/VAT taxes or shipping charges, and there are no tools for running an affiliate program.

When you’re business grows, you will have to drop the simple solution and completely rebuild the infrastructure of your business to use a new e-commerce solution.

The other extreme is to run your own shopping cart software from your own server and use companies like PayPal and Google Checkout to process your payments. This provides the most flexibility for running your business, but requires a significant upfront investment of time and money to get started and ongoing security and maintenance work.

In the middle of these two extremes are hosted shopping cart solutions like E-Junkie that provide many of the features of the high-end solutions, but with the low cost and ease of use provided by the simpler options.

E-Junkie E-Commerce Shopping Cart

The E-Junkie e-commerce shopping cart system offers an extensive range of tools for selling digital downloads of MP3 music, podcasts, PDF e-books, software, videos, and just about any other downloadable product you can imagine. It also includes a full set of tools for selling physical products as well. So, you don’t have to find a new solution if your business expands to include both digital and physical products.

Key features of the E-Junkie Shopping Cart:

• Easy to use, centrally managed service
• Secure storage & delivery for digital files & codes
• Multiple payment processor support
• Copy-paste Buy Now and Shopping Cart buttons
• Support for variants and physical products
• Shipping and packaging calculator
• Sales tax and VAT calculator
• Product bundling (Great for selling groups of MP3 files as an ‘Album’ or creating bundled discount offers)
• Inventory control
• Product promotion
• Discount codes
• Affiliate management
• Autoresponder, updates & newsletters
• Sales tracking with built in support for Google Analytics
• Customization for branding
• Download link renewals
• Easy integration with 3rd party and custom services
• Logs & e-mail notifications
• Works with multiple currencies
• GeoTrust secured service
• PayPal and Google Checkout certified
• Integration with SwiftCD
• Integration with Aweber

Using the E-Junkie Shopping Cart

Setting up and selling digital products using the E-Junkie shopping cart can be done in minutes. You simply select the ‘Add New Product’ option from the administration menu on their site and fill in the details of your product as prompted. When you have filled everything out, you will be prompted to upload your digital file.

If you need detailed help with the setup process, there is a very good e-book available called “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie” that walks you through the process step-by-step with screen shots of every important setting.

When you have created your new product in your E-Junkie account, you provided with the code for a ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Shopping Cart’ button. You simply copy the code and paste it into your web page and your product is ready to promote.

That’s all there is to selling your digital downloads!

E-Junkie offers many more options than this to customize your sales process, but none are required to get started earning money.

Payment Processing Options

E-junkie Shopping Cart buttons give you the option to let your buyer pay via PayPal Standard/PayPal Pro, Google Checkout, or Authorize.Net

E-junkie Buy Now buttons give you the option to let your buyer pay via PayPal Standard, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut, or ClickBank.

Secure Digital Downloads

When you let E-Junkie deliver your digital downloads for you, they host the files securely on their servers and manage the entire delivery process to protect your files from theft. You can set the number of downloads allowed and/or set an expiration date for each customer’s download link. None of the links point directly to the files themselves, so your content is safe from digital thieves.

But, for users who want to deliver files from their own servers or integrate with more complex product delivery systems, E-Junkie will allow you to completely customize your product delivery. So, you are not locked into a one-size-fits-all solution.

E-Junkie - What Is Missing

The E-Junkie shopping cart is an amazing product at an equally amazing price, but it is not perfect. Before you get too dependent on it, you have to decide if these limitations are deal-breakers for your business.

Here is what is missing:

• Recurring Payment Support
• Multi-Payment Support
• Free Trail Period Options
• Refund Processing for Affiliate Sales

If your business involves subscriptions or memberships, E-Junkie will not work for you at all. You will either need a separate solution for for these aspects of your business or you will need to find an entirely different option for your whole business. I contacted the company to ask if they were planning to add recurring payment support and was told that, due to technical issues, they had no plans to include recurring payments to the shopping cart service. PayPal has a very easy to use recurring billing option, but you don’t have the option of an integrated affiliate program.

If you sell big ticket items, one popular marketing strategy is to allow customers to pay in installments or sample the material during a free trial period before purchasing. E-Junkie does not allow for these selling options either. PayPal does allow for trial periods and you can set a multi-part payment using the recurring billing feature. But, again, you lose the powerful feature of a built in affiliate program.

E-Junkie does have a robust set of affiliate tools built into the shopping cart. You can track sales by affiliate. You can set special commission rates for your top performers or joint venture (JV) partners, and they generate a PayPal ‘Mass Pay’ file every month so that you can quickly send out commissions to your affiliates. One big flaw is that there is no way to track refunds back to the referring affiliate and deduct them from their next commission payment.

Any business will get a certain number of refund requests no matter how great their products. Without a tracking system for refunds, the seller ends up paying the commission portion of each refund out of their own pocket. As your business grows, this could become a major problem - particularly if you rely on affiliates for the majority of your sales.

These limitations are significant, but E-Junkie may still be the best solution for your business.

E-Junkie’s Competitors

E-Junkie has several competing services. Payloadz, PayDotCom, 1 Shopping Cart, offer similar solutions, but none matches the performance, price and flexibility offered by the E-Junkie shopping cart.

Payloadz allows you to sell digital downloads and also on-demand CDs (E-Junkie has an integrated solution for this in partnership with CD Now). They even offer a free service (limited to $100 in sales per month.) All of their price packages include limits to your monthly sales and the cheapest is $15 per month (with a sales limit of $250.) The other option is to pay them a whopping 15% of every sale. In both cases you are limited to 10GB of total storage space for your products. By contrast, E-Junkie’s service starts at $5 per month, charges no transaction fees, no setup fees, has no limits on bandwidth for delivering files or the number of transactions allowed, but gives you a smaller 50MB of storage space for your digital files. The most expensive E-Junkie package ($125 per month) comes with 999 MB of storage and each additional 1GB costs $20 per month. The primary choice between these services is storage caps versus sales caps. With E-Junkie, you can choose to deliver the files from your own server and bypass the cap - with some additional setup, software (and possibly bandwidth charges) required. The Payloadz sales caps are severe (for the $135 per month fee you can only process $2500 in sales), and there is no way around them. But their online storage limits are very generous.

PayDotCom has no monthly fee, but charges a fee per transaction as well as a $29 activation fee. Their transaction fees are lower than others but, if you sell 5 items a month or more, you will exceed the base fees charged by E-Junkie. PayDotCom does have one significant advantage in that you can sell products with recurring fees.

1 Shopping Cart charges a minimum monthly fee of $34 for a shopping cart. They allow for many more payment gateway options, but don’t provide secure digital downloads for your products unless you upgrade to their ‘Professional Package’ at the cost of $99 per month. The high end service price does include a robust autoresponder service and other marketing tools built in, but may not provide enough value to justify the huge fees.

Choosing E-Junkie

The E-Junkie shopping cart solution is a very robust option for selling and delivering products on the Internet. They have no setup or transaction fees, there are no limits on transactions, no bandwidth charges for product delivery, and monthly fees start at only $5. It is an extremely flexible service and can easily be customized and integrated into your website(s). With the few exceptions noted earlier, it offers everything needed to run almost any small to mid-sized online e-commerce site.

You may still have reservations about using E-Junkie. For that, they offer a free 1 week trial. Visit the E-Junkie website, open a trial account, and setup a few products. Test the system out and see if it works for you.

If you need a little extra help setting up and selling your products, the “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie” e-book will lead you through the process, step-by-step, with illustrations for every critical setting you need to make. This inexpensive guide is sold using the E-Junkie service, so you can see the tools in action when you purchase your copy.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us online at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights.