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People often ask me for advice on ‘how to succeed’…

I was asked just a little while ago and I don’t have stock answers generally but this time I started thinking about how you could boil success down into a paragraph or two. I know plenty of people do this online, I must have seen zillions myself over the years. So I thought I’d do mine without ‘cheating’ and using any search engines or other peoples’ words generally.

And so, as with many other things you find online, there is no claimed originality or unique insight. Just that sometimes one can hear something from a particular person, said in a particular way and it just clicks where hearing (or reading) it countless times from others, it didn’t. Maybe we just weren’t ready to hear it before.

So here goes. Let’s hope my particular way of saying the same as many others will have said before me, will somehow help you!!

Take action early. Don’t worry about understanding everything before you start. Provided you use common sense, you’re unlikely to do much harm. But action is the best teacher, and learning by watching is second best. Reading or hearing about something is not generally a great way to learn unless you follow what you’re reading and do it alongside.

‘Master’ one skill at a time. I don’t mean don’t move on until you’re perfect. But if you’re learning about submitting articles, practice until you know all the steps and could write and submit an article any time you needed to. If you don’t do that and you go off learning something else, there’s a high chance you’ll have to start right at the beginning again when you come to submit your next article.

Aim to fail as quickly as possible. We learn from mistakes very well. I’m not saying make them deliberately but the point once again is rather than worry about getting 100% prepared before you start (and then find something still goes wrong!), do something as soon as you think you’re close. Chances are that doing it will reveal bigger ‘holes’ than the ones you were fretting over before you did it so you can now sort those out.

If something works and it’s a useful skill, make sure you do it regularly enough that you don’t need to start over if you need to do it again. And if something didn’t work as well as you hoped, don’t give up right away but don’t blindly do it again. At the very least review what happened and if you think it was just unlucky, by all means try again. But don’t do something over and over that doesn’t work over and over!

Make notes and think about what other people you come across are doing. Try to understand their ‘business model’. If you sign up for something for example, make a note of all the steps you go through. If you’ve got reason to believe they’re successful then…

copy copy copy copy copy

Copy what successful people are doing. Learn from successful people.

I don’t mind being asked how to be successful, even though it’s a bit vague. But don’t expect to be handed the answer – there isn’t one.

Soak up information but don’t overdo it. Get a feeling for what you want to do, the skills you’ll need and focus on those and try not to get distracted into learning things that won’t help you right now. But devote 10% of your time perhaps to ‘keeping an eye on’ what’s going on in the world.

Making money online is easy. Anyone can do it. Making money consistently and in sufficient quantity to be worthwhile is much harder and don’t believe a single website that says it will be quick or it won’t need effort on your part.

Build a list. This is the most ignored piece of advice online and must have cost hundreds of thousands of wannabe marketers, millions of dollars.

The only other ways to build a consistent income without a list are to run a membership site and get subscription type incomes or to find a good program with a worthwhile product and a good multi-level pay plan and promote it almost to the exclusion of everything else until you’re making the money you want.

Now why are those last couple of items as close to a guarantee of success as you’ll get?

Because they’re all incremental.

If you have a list, all your effort will grow your list, you don’t start each day with an empty list, you start from where you got to the previous day

If you have a membership site, all your effort will get you more members (generally) and that means more paying members and more income.

If you have a good multilevel business with a product people need and want, each time you refer a new member to your team, you’re growing.

Do you see the pattern and the similarity there? Compare that with trying to make affiliate sales without having a list. Or promoting on traffic exchanges without building a list. Or selling things on ebay. Or..Or..Or..

So that’s my advice for what it’s worth. Take action, ‘master’ core skills and do things that are incremental and learn what residual income is all about.

The marketing machine is in full swing right now for PPC Bully – any why not, I’m sure it’s a great product. I got my copy so I’ll be reporting on my results in the near future.

But I’ve been using some of the forefathers of PPC Bully to practice ‘don’t pay per click‘ – DPPC.

I figure that it’s getting to the point where it’s harder and harder to make PPC profitable unless you’re very good or you have some of these PPC spy tools in your arsenal.

But what if you grab the tool and then use it in a very different way? Instead of using it to compete like crazy in the Adwords space, why not try something a bit more subtle, a lot less expensive and perhaps a lot longer lasting?

Nearly everyone that managed to grab a copy of PPC Bully is going to be using it to create adwords campaigns but I’m going to be pursuing a different tack, something I’ve been quietly doing over the last 6 months. You’ll see some evidence of it on this blog.

You see, these tools (and I’m going to come on to a much cheaper one than PPC Bully soon) allow you to spy on the competition, giving you a real advantage. And while it’s not totally childs play, you should be able to get a profitable campaign going in far less time and with far less risk.

But another approach is to use the extra information to position organic search results on the same page as the PPC ads!

You see, for a long time I was doing keyword research to know what to fill my articles, blog posts etc with and I suspect if I were spending more time on it, I would do ok. Certainly many of the posts on this blog rate reasonably well for the amount of effort expended.

But what we can do with these spy tools is really find out what’s making people money, what adverts are working – then let them play on the right hand side and we’ll play on the left.

These tools give another perspective on our keywords. A more financially biased view. It’s probably true that if people are in buying mode they tend to use the PPC ads and if they’re in research mode, they’ll often use the organic results. But whereas the PPC ads people tend to need deep pockets to get started (the tools help with this of course), the organic people only need effort and patience – and a bit of assistance from tools like PPC Bully.

If you’re competing in the organic listings then you don’t need to pay the $1500 price tag of PPC Bully either. A tool that will do admirably is Brad Callen’s PPC Web Spy. A really powerful tool at an incredibly low price (check out the web page for the latest price).

If you’re not a firefox fan then you’re going to have to lump it I’m afraid because this is a firefox add-in but boy, is it good.

Imagine doing your regular Google search and having a button below each PPC ad showing you their campaign. Ok, that would be good. But this tool gives you a lot of information about their keywords and their spend, the clicks per day and so on – powerful stuff indeed.

By all means use it to compete in the PPC arena. Or, consider using it as another tool in helping your written content get free traffic.

Be patient, track and bask in the knowledge that you don’t need to worry if your campaign is making a loss – it can’t. It may not be the aggressive approach but it lets anyone compete with the guys with the expensive tools.

PyraBang can be a great way to get traffic to a blog and done correctly can get many comments added to a chosen post.

PyraBang is great fun too. The concept will remind you of Digg and similar tools – you can use it to advertise directly (which costs credits – known as ‘bangs’) or you can write something informational only with a view to earning bangs.

We all know that Google loves a good blog. A blog, grown organically will become a Google magnet. And that’s even if you just write naturally about subjects. If you think ahead and plan some keywords into the post then you can really get ranked well for some great terms.

So where does PyraBang come into this?

Well as I said, you can place adverts on PyraBang. But to attract comments on a blog, you first need to create a new post on your blog. Write about something topical, humerous, interesting, factual - anything that lots of people might want to read.

And then, much as you might Twitter, post to PyraBang. A ‘post’ in Pyrabang is almost exactly like a Google sponsored Ad. You have a limited length headline and a limited length description and it has to capture attention. The great thing about PyraBang compared to Digg is that you can determine how long the story stays around for by how many bangs you ‘invest’ in it.

You will certainly see traffic to your blog. And some of those people are likely to comment. Particularly if you write in such a way as to invite comments. E.g. ask a question, be controversial, do a poll.

If you’re even luckier, you might get others investing in your post too.

There are other benefits to the internet marketer too. PyraBang gives you stats. So you can practice writing headlines and descriptions – these are very much like sponsored Google Ads but much cheaper to experiment with.

You can also see what other people post and try to work out why some posts get more views and earn more bangs. This is going to be a great tool for those who work out how to use it to their advantage.

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

Coolest plugin I’ve seen in quite a while. I post to my blog and I tweet without moving my lips (methaphorically speaking).

See that ‘My Twitter Feed’ on the right? That’s part of it.

The coolest things is when I post and my automatic tweet is generated. Twitter users following me or somehow seeing my tweet see an automatically shortened url to my blog post. When they click on the URL, they see my blog post but in a frame with a prominent ‘advert’ for TweetMyBlog at the top – which is of course my referral link for TweetMyBlog.

And if they join TweetMyBlog, I get their email address (via the TweetMyBlog back office) so I can always send them a welcome email with an invite to follow me or some other kind of link.

Sweet!

You can get it for yourself here

Comment here if you like/dislike it  

Have you ever been stuck trying to make a decision about something?

Happens to me a lot. I want what I do to be right so I stall – I stall because maybe I think of something and then I think of the downside, the negatives. And I can’t make that decision until eventually I shake myself and say “Just do it!”.

I went to an internet Marketing Mastermind Group Meeting last evening and had we some great discussions.

Internet Marketing can be a lonely occupation, sat in front of a PC all day long. But more than that, what hit home last night was how much easier it is to move an idea forward when you have a bunch of like-minded people to bounce those ideas off.

I didn’t agree with every idea, some things I already knew. But guess what – I came away knowing a whole heap of new little things, a really big concept fell into place and I got a whole load of different viewpoints to consider.

That meeting was worth hours of sat-on-my-own-ness in terms of moving some of my ideas forward.

They say two heads are better than one. And for some aspects of life it may be just 1+1 = 2. But when you’re stuck, stopped by analysis paralysis, 1 + 1 = 5 and 1 + 5 = 100.

And I guess it’s because when you self-talk about your problem, you are often stuck because you lack a few critical viewpoints.

And with the addition of those new viewpoints, that new input, many ideas can now be rejected while others can be narrowed down and tested against not only your own views but all these extra viewpoints.

Even just phoning someone for a chat about something will move you forward far faster – believe me!

Even two people with little experience will make decisions much better than someone alone.

So, get yourself involved with at least one other person and preferably, find a group or create your own mastermind group.

There’s an article by Chris Garrett about analysis-paralysis here that you might find interesting :

http://www.chrisg.com/defeating-procrastination-analysis-paralysis/

To our success
Troy