Schools out, the sun is shining and hundreds of sailing boats arrived yesterday to enjoy the south coast.
So I ventured out of my front garden onto the beach to take quite a few pictures.
Those with lots of sailing boats look like dots – so I’ve chosen a picture with only a few boats to show you.

Hayling Island sailing

It was a good excuse for me to chill out with my telephone line and internet out of action – waiting for the BT engineer to arrive.
5 days after the fault developed, I’ve now got it fixed and can get back online.

Meanwhile I’ve been busy with not one, two or three – but 10 great new software products for internet marketers.
Why 10 products?
Well playing with my video camera, I discovered a recording from over a year ago featuring the good and the great Chris Farrell – not only a successful internet marketer now able to afford to live in Hollywood – but also a great guy willing to help others learn from his success.

I have a 25 minute video from Chris’s talk which I found very useful.
If enough people are interested, I could upload this to youtube?
Please just leave a comment.

I was lucky enough to meet Chris during an Open Wednesday session. A session that attracted almost 50 people – about 5 times more than normal.
Two of the characteristics Chris attributed to his success are his tenacity and understanding that ‘all skills are learnable’.
Chris went on to explain not only the importance of listbuilding but the need to prepare a plan for about 10 follow up messages to keep a list interested and involved.
Hence my latest plan to increase the number of software products I have prepared to around 10 – to give me a head start and a few months breathing space to add new products to my pipe-line.

Sorry to any readers waiting for my Header Magic, Clik-n-Snap, Transparency Magic, Hop Protector, Productivity Monitor and updated Ad-Blender software to arrive.
I use most of these every day and find them invaluable and want to make them available to lots of other people as soon as possible – but really need to do this in a controlled way fitting in with a proper business plan.

My plan is still to follow John Thornhills guidance and initially release them as Warrior Special Offers through JVZoo
But I also want to reach a critical mass of users so that I can benefit longer term from inbuilt advertising.

Apart from enjoying the sun and trying to keep fit with my daily swim in the sea, I’m still reading Mark Anastsi’s Laptop Millionaire  book – using a shotgun approach and picking out bits that appeal the most.
Today I read about Media Buying and guru’s such as Scott Rewick – able to make $100k a DAY, but using lots of capital to achieve this.
Mark explains how one student started spending $100 a pop buying media advertising initial getting no return but within a couple of weeks tweaking things to start making $60 profit from each $100 spent.

One day I still hope to learn how to turn $1 into $2 reliably enough to scale it up to these sorts of levels.
Meanwhile, back on earth, Mark did suggest using Media Buying to send traffic to my own website.
What a great idea – and how this fits in with my plan to have 10 great products I own for visitors to buy!

So that’s my latest cunning plan.
Line up 10 of my own relatively low cost products.
Launch them on warrior.
Then start paying to drive traffic to my website and offers.

So many people dream of making a living online that they are prepared to spend lots of $ learning what to do.
It is so easy to find blueprints and ‘proven’ plans and strategies that it’s difficult to know which one to pick – and whether to pay $27, $97, $997, $1997 – or even more for any training.

Anybody wanting to replace an income probably has monthly bills of $2000 or more – so even a high ticket value training course would pay for inteslf by bringing you income a month or two early.

But do any blueprints actually work?
The answer appears to be both yes and no.

Disclaimers are always justified by the explanation that it is impossible to know if any student will bother to take action.
Quite separately, statistics are published suggesting 99% of people trying to make a living online fail to do so.
I’m not sure if that means most people don’t bother to buy training – or the training doesn’t really work?

Do most people have so much money they can waste it on courses and not bother to try to follow them?
Or is it just too hard to do what courses teach?
Or has something changed in the marketplace between blueprint creation and you trying to make it work?
Or don’t the blueprints work very well, if at all.

I’m still slowly reading Mark Anastasi’s Laptop Millionaire book – where he describes how to make money online in lots of different ways.
And he provides examples of real people who have made lots of money using each individual methods.
What quickly becomes apparent is that the examples of people actually making good money have all, without exception, taken a basic blueprint method and added some special ingredient of their own to make it unique and successful.

Now Mark’s book offers training and doesn’t claim to provide a blueprint to success.
I wonder if that’s because real successful working blueprints don’t actually exist?
My personal view is that if one does exist it should be possible for at least 50% of purchasers to be able to follow it and successfully achieve the promised outcome – something I have yet to find.

Instead what seems to happen is that ‘star’ users adapt strategies for themselves and find extraordinary success.
And these stars are promoted impying if you follow the strategy, you can acieive the same results.
For example, at one of Marks’ seminars with around 400 attendees, the message went out that ‘somebody had made $200 overnight’. Great – but 0.25% really isn’t statistically relevant.
To me, far more impressive would have been if 40 people (10%) had made $10, or better still 160 people (40%) had made $2.50!

One problem with making money online is the almost infinite number of possibilities leading to information overload, a lack of focus and attraction to shiny new offers to learn something you don’t know that seems to be yet another essential ingredient for success.

That’s why finding an honest mentor is so important. – to keep youself on track and avoid distractions.
If only that were easy, we would all be internet millionaires by now!

UPDATE I listened in to John Thornhill’s IM Advantage webinar last night.
John offers mentoring to a limited number of people committed to succeeding online – and he mentioned that his success rate is … 100%!

Mark Anastasi has just published a book called ‘The Laptop Millionaire‘
This includes Mark’s story of moving from poverty to financial independance with the guidance of a mentor he calls his Laptop Millionaire

One interesting target needed to replace a typical income is to get 400 clicks a day – to bring in $100 a day.
At first I thought no problem – until I started thinking a bit more about it.
400 clicks would typically cost $400 using Google adwords or $120 buying solo ads (that typically insist on free offers)

Also 400 visitors with 2% clicking on Adsense might typically bring in $4 – so you really need a product of value to sell instead.
Then 8 buyers would bring in about $120 for a $17 digital product (after fees) that you owned or $60 as an affiliate.
Still not a viable business – spending more than you earn.

Long term ‘free’ organic traffic is great – but no way to plan a start-up business at the mercy of Google.

Alternatively, if you have your own list to mail, say twice a week, with a 20% open rate and 5% of those bought making 1% of list members buying you would need a list of 2500 to produce 200 sales a month – or $3000 income from your own $17 product.

Buying clicks from solo ads to create a list typically costs $1 per lead.
So a list of 2500 would cost $2500 and bring in $3000 if you have your own products to sell.
But that’s where things start to get tricky, because you really need 8 new products a month to keep your list interested.

Jason Fladlein suggests creating 1 product, to solve 1 problem in 1 two hour sitting.
Sounds easy – but I have yet to get anywhere close to that goal.
I’m just not happy unless I spend much more time to improve products to meet my own standards.
Nevertheless a ‘job’ creating 8 new products a month to market to your list is quite realistic.

Alternatively, creating one product a week worth $17 suggests a list size of 5,000 is needed for $3000 a month income.
This pushes the time to recover a $5000 investment in list creation out to a couple of months.
Or a list of 20,000 if you are able to create  only one new product a month.
Pushing the time to recover a $20,000 investment in list creation out to over 6 months.

These are still reasonable business plans – and a few years ago they would work with an extremely high degree of confidence.
But nowadays products of extraordinary value sell for a little as $5 – making life a lot tougher – even more so when companies, such as as clickbank charge a fixed $1 fee as well as a % for every sale.
This makes it much tougher to get started and much longer to recover any initial investments.

Experts, like John Thornhill, confirm that most of your online income is likely to come from ‘back-end offers’.
That’s where I still get stuck.
Affiliate back end offers ore OK for your own traffic but don’t help if you want other affiliates to promote your offers.

The time and effort I spend creating new products or the value I think they are worth means very little.
All that really matters is the value customers put on my products.
That’s why I am planning to create shareware versions of my software so people can try before they buy.
This means I’ll need to wait much longer before any income arrives but hopefully the unit price will be higher when users understand the real value of each product.