It was early 2006. I had been blogging for over a year and felt I had achieved something.

My blog had recently surpassed 1,000 RSS subscribers (what is RSS), making it at the time the most popular website I had ever built. The income was solid – up to $2,000 a month at best – and it was growing. I loved what I was doing.

My plan, based on all the Internet marketing advice I studied from the experts to “create a product”, was to start by releasing an ebook to test the waters as my first product. I had already begun to grow my email list, focusing on the idea of teaching other bloggers how to build traffic, since I felt that was something I was becoming good at.

One of the keys to my success with traffic was how well I was doing in organic search results. I was literally famous in the Internet marketing space because all the top Internet marketers would find my blog when searching for their name or their products or terms related to our industry.

This is incredibly powerful leverage, if you want to meet important people in your industry, or as an affiliate marketing technique, because you can just write about something often enough if you want a top ranking for a certain term or name.

My blog’s solid search engine performance has continued as a trend today, with about half the traffic I attract to this blog still coming from Google search queries. Considering how much more competitive the environment is now, with so many blogs on the same topic as this one, I consider my consistency an achievement.

I don’t really talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) much on this blog anymore, mainly because I don’t believe much has really changed over the past few years. The fundamentals are still the fundamentals. You will find plenty of articles on SEO in my archives under the SEO category if you’re keen for study materials.

However, SEO was a huge part of my early studies of Internet marketing, primarily focused on attracting more traffic to the business I used to own, BetterEdit.com, a proofreading service. When I was running that business, 50% of new client acquisition came from Google search, which was important – it made the business much more hands off for me to run when you have a steady stream of customers coming in without advertising expense.

As a result of the focus I had back then and the results with my blog, I considered myself half-decent at SEO. By no means was I an expert, and I certainly didn’t pretend to be one, but I felt I knew enough that I had something to share.

As a result of this, my intended first product, was to be an ebook called “The Definitive Guide To SEO For Bloggers“, which as you can guess, was designed as a guide to help bloggers improve their search engine rankings and attract traffic from Google and the other search engines. The ebook was almost complete and I even went so far as to have a cover created for it, which you can see inset (including the big haired, old suit photo version of me).

The book was never sold publicly because I decided to release a course on traffic. I can’t really remember why I decided to switch gears so late in the development of this product. It could have been because I thought selling a course at a higher price would make more money, but it was more likely due to some kind of fear based decision making or distractions. I just didn’t have the follow-through at the time to do a launch.

I registered the domain name BlogTrafficSchool.com, which I still own, and focused on releasing that program instead.

Of course if you know my story, the product never saw the light of day either, so I ended up having a 75% complete course on Blog Traffic, and a near complete ebook on SEO for blogs. Thankfully the third time I finally got something out the door, and released Blog Mastermind as my first product. The rest is history.

Definitive Guide To SEO For Bloggers – Revamped And Ready For Release

I recently began reviewing my ebook on SEO for blogs and was quite impressed to see that it’s still full of fantastic advice. It only requires about 10% revision work and I believe it could become one of the most helpful, and true to my style – simple guides – to follow on how to get more traffic from Google to your blog.

The book is over 100 pages and includes insights into how search engines work, how to optimize the internal structure of your blog, some very solid advice on linking strategies – including 75 link building techniques, with some case studies of my own experience using them – a quick launch checklist, and more.

It’s all content of course, direct from my experience and research, into your hands.

So do you want a copy?

I will release the book for sale later in the year, however I have some good news for you if you want a copy now.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Rather than throw you head first into my very long sales page for the opening of Membership Site Mastermind, I’m going to show you just the video here on my blog, to help keep you on focus .

This video was taken directly from my sales page, however it’s full of great content – not just a pitch – including my story about why I decided to launch a membership site after spending the previous year writing an ebook (which I still haven’t released!), how I launched my membership site and why I think it’s so important you sell your own product online if you want to make serious money.

Here’s the video, just press play to begin:

I encourage you to watch this from start to finish whether you want to join my membership site training program or not and even if you have seen it before.

After watching this video if you’re keen to join the program, you can sign up here -

Join Membership Site Mastermind Here

Or if you want to read all the details about the program, you can view the full sales page right here –

Membershipsitemastermind.com/signup/

If you have any questions, please leave a comment to this blog post and I will reply as quickly as I can.

Yaro

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.

Download the MP3 [ 40 Minutes - 55 MB ]

Dr Joanna Martin used to be a practicing medical doctor in Tasmania, then left that role to become an aspiring actor. Today she is a professional speaker focusing specifically on how to sell from the stage.

Joanna makes incredible money, to the tune of a seven figure business, by speaking around the world, however that’s not what this interview is about.

In late 2009 Joanna and her husband Greg were at an Internet marketing event I attended and we got talking about selling info products online. Joanna wanted to create a new income stream from the web, selling information products like continuity programs and home study courses, based on the materials they already had.

While Joanna loves what she does on stage, having a stable online income source to match her profits from speaking is an important goal, so she’s not dependent on being somewhere presenting live to make money.

I gave Joanna and Greg access to my Membership Site Masterplan report and the Membership Site Mastermind course and they went away and immediately took action.

The end result was a small trial launch of an info product to their existing list of just 1500 people, generating more than $60,000 in sales in a couple of weeks – not bad for such a tiny list and no affiliates.

In this interview I asked Joanna to break down exactly what she did to launch her product and get such a tremendous return on such a small starting point.

If you’re interested in learning more about Joanna and selling from the stage, make sure you visit
shiftspeakertraining.com/blueprint to download her free report, and also check out her personal blog, JoannaMartin.com.au

Here’s the download link again for the call –

Mp3 Download

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 40 Minutes - 55 MB ]

And here’s a reminder that Membership Site Mastermind is open too –

I’ve made some form of income from the Internet for the past ten years. That’s incredible for me to consider, as I look back over the years how for such a long time I felt very insecure about where my next paycheck was going to come from and whether there would be another one the following month.

For the first five years, roughly from 2000 to 2005, my income from the Internet varied, reflecting the choices I had made and my own variable focus. It went something like this…

• I made spare change money selling stuff from around my house on eBay
• I played a card game called Magic: The Gathering and began selling the cards I won at tournaments in online trading forums and newsgroups
• I built a website focused on the same card game, eventually earning a few hundred dollars a month from banner and newsletter sponsorship
• I started an e-commerce card shop from the website and continued to sell my winnings from tournaments, and began buying product at wholesale prices to sell online at retail (until credit card fraud forced me to shut it down)
• I started a proofreading business, which after a slow start, eventually earned enough income to pay me a full salary, equivalent to a first year university graduate

This is a list of the projects that I made money on during those five years. It doesn’t include the websites I built that shortly after I abandoned, my brief experiments at AdWords arbitrage and other various false-starts because I was so easily distracted by new methods to “make millions” online.

During this time I finished my university degree, held a couple of casual jobs and traveled too. I also watched, often resulting in plenty of self-doubt on my part, as my friends entered graduate jobs, which looked a whole lot more secure than what I was doing at the time and often paid them better as well.

Looking back over those five years the money I made proved surprisingly reliable, even though at the time my confidence in the income stream wasn’t there (good old hindsight). I had enough time to work on new projects because I focused on ideas that didn’t need too much personal time from me once set up, for example getting volunteer writers for my card site and using contract editors for the proofreading site, so I could easily manage them both at the same time.

The end result was a diversified online income stream that continued to grow as long as I did a few key activities (like put up posters to promote the proofreading business), plus I was creating assets that I would later sell.

The Era Of Rapid Income Growth

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Tyrone Shum has participated in both my Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind programs. He’s special because not only did he study the materials (which is rare enough!), he went on and has built himself a successful blog and last year launched a membership site too, so he’s a real action taker.

Part of the reason he’s one of the unusual people who actually gets stuff done is because Tyrone knows how to outsource, in fact that is his specialty. In this guest post from Tyrone he offers some advice on how to outsource your blogging effectively…

Get More Done

Recently, I saw a poll on a very popular blog asking if they outsourced any of their blogging. I thought it would be a great opportunity to share with you some tips from my experience of outsourcing blogging tasks to virtual staff in the Philippines.

Undeniably I love my work but that doesn’t mean I can manage all the things effectively from advertising to marketing, from article creation to posting, from directory submissions to email marketing, and so forth all by myself. Additionally, not all bloggers plan ahead of time, and get things completed as early as possible without missing deadlines. So we have to replicate ourselves to meet different demands. I’m not talking about cloning but it’s how we distribute tasks to virtual staff to finish more tasks at the same time.

I’ve summarized the most important points to outsource as part of your blogging below, here we go…

Tip 1: Outsource your blog design

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