Exclusive Interview With Neil Shearing
Of ScamFreeZone.com

Part 1 of 5

Louis Allport - Hi, I'm Louis Allport, and today I'm speaking with Neil Shearing of ScamFreeZone.com. Hi Neil, and thank you very much for being on the call today.

Neil Shearing - Hi Louis, thanks for having me.

LA - That's okay. I know you've been marketing online for a very long time - I think it may even be more than 10 years. What we're going to focus on in this interview in particular is autopilot income. We will look at how to create sites that generate income both quickly or over a longer period of time. But most importantly, these are sites that require very little work and very little upkeep.

So, okay first of all, if we can just briefly talk about your background and particularly your Internet business history?

NS - Okay, I first found out about the Internet in... it was about 1996 I think, so we're going back an awful lot of years. And it was in a lab, a science lab in Chicago - because I was basically a scientist up until that point.

I remember someone saying, "Oh yeah you need to get online, you need to do this stuff." And I was, "What's this Internet thing about?" So they pulled me over to the computer and they said, "Yeah it's great you can find anything. Type in your home town." So I did, I typed in the name of my home town and it came up with zero results, and this was probably Infoseek or Alta Vista because I don't think Google was around back then.

And I've just repeated the same search online now just to put it in context and it came back with like 603,000 results for my hometown. But when I first discovered the Internet there was zero, which shows the growth of the Internet.

I remember deconstructing the GeoCities.com homepage to try and work out how their tables all fit together to make their page - I was teaching myself HTML. So I was playing around with some free GeoCities.com pages, and then GeoCities was subsequently bought out by Yahoo in 1999.

And after putting up a few personal pages I thought I could start maybe writing a report and try to sell it online.

So I wrote a report and because I was a poor student at the time I didn't have any money to invest in the business. I basically figured it had to pay for itself, there had to be a way to do it. So I used a third party processor. A third party processor is a company that will process credit card orders for you and take a percentage of each sale. So if you don't sell anything in a month you don't owe them fees, that way you only pay a percentage of your costs.

So I used some free web space from my Internet service provider, the only thing I was paying for was the Internet service. And I put up a page on the free web space and I started selling this report through the third party processor and there was no instant delivery or anything. The report was basically just a Word document. There were no fancy eBooks and I don't think anyone had invented the term 'eBook' or the term 'Internet marketing'. It all predates that. And I started selling these reports from my free web space.

And then I thought, right, there must be other people who want to know how to do this now that I've put all the pieces of the puzzle together. So I started selling a report called "How To Make Money on the Internet" - which was incredibly naive back then, but like I say, it was before Internet marketing.

And I started selling this report and I was contacted by the Australian Government, some kind of anti fraud department they had, and they said, "What we think you're selling looks like a scam and we've made a note of your website." And I thought well that's nice of them. This is a perfectly legitimate report that shows you how to start creating your own eBooks - even though we didn't call them that at the time - and selling them online. So it wasn't a scam.

So that prompted me to start ScamFreeZone.com which I did in 1997 and that grew quite rapidly and I've held that website ever since, so that's 12 years of having that domain. And I've gone on to release more of my own eBooks and custom-built software. I have built (email) lists that I can use to contact people with and I have built private member sites and basically anything that's digital, I've created and sold. So that's a potted history of the past 12 years of my Internet marketing experience.

LA - Thanks for that. Okay, so if we focus on something I understand you know a lot about and you have had a lot of experience in, which is creating income from sites - as I mentioned - that are easy to put together and literally run on autopilot. Some of the examples you talk through I think will demonstrate that this is actually possible.

If I can first of all ask, from your direct experience, is such a thing possible?

NS - Yes it's definitely possible. I've created lots of different systems that are geared to creating autopilot income.

I think one of the biggest things you can do is create your own product and then have an affiliate program. Because once you have an affiliate program and you offer affiliates incentives to promote your product, such as commission or other ways of incentivizing them, then affiliates link to your site and they send traffic through and they make sales. You pay them the commission and that's pretty much autopilot income.

Okay, you have to do the delivery for the customer, deliver the product, but if it's digital then you can have that automated. So all you have then is the overheads of the technical support and customer support, for example if they say, "Oh I lost my password to the eBook" or whatever.

But if you have a good support system - I use the Kayako eSupport - it can allow you to have a knowledge based area and a frequently asked questions area. With digital products you can get the support function way down to virtually zero, so that's the way I consider most of my products to be autopilot income.

But there are ways to do it if you don't want to have a full-blown product and a full- blown affiliate program. If you just want to start off with a basic affiliate system, where you're the affiliate driving the traffic, then you can actually go to something like ClickBank and search their marketplace for products that have recurring billing.

And if you go about setting up a website on a sub-niche - say the product's about weight loss - the first thing you do is go to Google's Keyword Tool and do a bit of digging which will give you some ideas for a sub-niche. So say the sub-niche is weight loss eBooks, you build a little blog around that, capture the traffic for that sub-niche, funnel it through your ClickBank affiliate link to a product that has recurring billing. Then that will build up an autopilot income stream for you.

LA - I think that's a great high-level overview. Now let's start diving into details, and with this interview particularly I'd like to focus on 3 goals if possible:

• Showing listeners how to make income using autopilot sites within 90 days.
  
  
• How they could potentially make a fantastic long-term supplemental income using autopilot sites
  
  
• And even - if you feel the potential exists - to get to 6 or 7 figures a year with such sites.

So first of all, if we can focus on the first goal, for someone starting from absolute scratch how would you suggest they get started creating income with autopilot sites within the next 90 days?

NS - Right, well I wouldn't go with the 'being a merchant' method. I wouldn't go with creating your own product and setting up an affiliate program and all that initially. What I would do is go after the affiliate method.

So, like I said, if you go to ClickBank Marketplace at ClickBank.com and search the marketplace for products that have recurring billing, then you'll get a list of merchants that are offering their products such that they bill the customer every month. And if you refer your traffic through an affiliate link to their product and the traffic that you refer purchases the product, you will get credit every month, each time that customer is re-billed. So, that's one of the best ways to start generating autopilot income - look for products offering recurring billing.

If you like the look of any of the merchants' products that are selling on ClickBank, go to Google's Keyword Tool, and, and say my initial idea was just weight loss, if you type the word or the phrase 'weight loss' into this Google Keyword Tool, then it will show you sub niches - so basically keywords you could consider when targeting a sub niche and it will show you the monthly search results.

Now right at the beginning it will show you obviously weight loss, and I'm looking at it live here as I speak to you, and you don't want to go after the actual keyword phrase 'weight loss' because there will be so many people trying to get to the top of the search engines for that phrase that you won't be able to compete, it will be phenomenally complicated.

So all you need to do is drill down. I've typed in 'weight loss' - Google shows me there are 800 different phrases that include the words 'weight loss'. By the time you get down to about 60 to 80, the phrases number 60 to 80, you'll see the monthly searches drop down to about 600 to 800 searches per month.

That would be a brilliant niche, a brilliant sub-niche to build a little blog around, because then you'll be able to capture the traffic for that sub-niche whereas others won't be optimizing for it, others will be optimizing for different niches, for different terms, different phrases, and you'll have much less competition.

So I can see a phrase here. It says 'weight loss ideas' which gets 660 searches per month and a suggested bid for the pay per click search at Google of $2.62, this means that the actual phrase is worth quite a bit of money per click. So if you target that sub niche you should be able to capture traffic for that and then pass it through with a recommendation and a review of the product that is being sold at ClickBank on recurring billing.

So if you took the domain name WeightLossIdeas.com, or WeightLossIdeasAndTips.com, and then started a blog... I don't know if you think people will be familiar with how to start a blog, Louis, or whether we should go into that in detail?

LA - That's actually a question I wrote down, I was going to ask you for your suggestions for that, and particularly why you recommend blogs over a standard website?

NS - Well, basically there are just inbuilt search engine optimization advantages to blogs such that they come default with RSS feeds; you can plug in your RSS feed into RSS directories and submit your site to them, you can submit your blog to blog directories, which you can't do with just a regular plain website. Usually the actual structure of the URLs and the navigation of blogs are basically better for search engine optimization.

I find it a lot easier to publish a new page as a blog post rather than having to create it offline and upload it to your website and then create the links to that new web page and so on. It's a lot easier from a user's point of view to manage a blog - especially as WordPress is getting simpler and simpler. And they look really nice - you can change the themes just with a couple of clicks here and there to actually change the theme so your blog looks completely different and very professional. So it's just a lot easier all round to use a blog than to actually go about creating a standard static website.

You can download WordPress from www.WordPress.org, or if you go with some hosting company such as HostGate.com, which I recommend as it's a nice cheap and cheerful but pretty professional service, they have something installed called Fantastico, and with just a couple of clicks you can install a blog at your website. So, it's getting easier and easier to get a blog online.

If you just want to get your feet wet and you know nothing at all about blogging you could go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog and they'll host it for you as opposed to WordPress.org which is where you download the package for free that let's you install a blog at your own web space.

Or you can go to Blogger.com - they'd also give you a blog for free. But I generally recommend taking the extra time to learn how to install a blog - either using Fantastico with a couple of clicks through your web host's control panel, usually somewhere in the management admin area, or through downloading the actual WordPress package, uploading it to your website and installing it there.

It's not too difficult, it seems difficult at first but once you've done it a couple of times it's very easy to actually get a blog up and running online.

So once you get your blog online - as I was saying - I would go with a phrase such as 'weight loss ideas'. If you go to Google's Keyword Tool you can drill down further and find even easier phrases to optimize and to get traffic for, but obviously the further you drill down the less monthly searches there are, so it becomes then a relative thing.

Questions you need to ask yourself... Do you want to put your effort into building a blog which will be easy to rank at the top of the search engines but only get a couple of clicks a month, or do you want to go after a higher competition phrase to try and attract more monthly searches and more traffic?

It says here, look I've just drilled down a bit further, 'coconut oil weight loss.' What the dickens is that about?! That must be a very easy phrase to optimize around. There's only 230,000 pages online that contain the words 'coconut oil weight loss' so that can't be difficult to optimize around if you took the domain name CoconutOilWeightLoss.com and then did a bit of research, wrote some really good articles, then that will get indexed relatively rapidly.

Which is another advantage of blogs they come with a ping system which lets the search engine know every time you've created a new post. This ping system basically calls the search engine indexing spiders to come through and grab the new content which is something static websites don't come with - so that's another advantage of blogs.

So yeah, I would create some unique content. It has to be unique because if you just take someone else's content and put it on your site then it's likely that their site will rank above you in the search engines and you may have multiple other competing sites containing the same content, so you may just end up in Google's supplementary results and get no traffic at all.

So I recommend reading a bit around the actual phrase that you're going to optimize for and then writing some good quality articles, putting them on the blog as blog posts and then that will create the content for your site.

At the bottom of each article you will need to actually have a review, a partial small review and recommendation of the product that you're selling as an affiliate at ClickBank. So the weight loss product with recurring billing or whatever niche it is, whatever product it is, and say at the bottom of each blog post, "we highly recommend this product at ClickBank.com".

I don't recommend that you actually say you've tried it, tested it or anything like that, unless that is the case. You can't act like you're giving a testimonial for a product if you haven't actually tried it and tested it. It' s just a whole minefield to stay away from. Also the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is now cracking down on unethical affiliate marketing. But, you can say the product looks good and the guy, whoever it is, selling the products claims these results and you can say this is where you get it, and give the people the affiliate link.

So then people will go through to ClickBank. You can check in your ClickBank account the stats; how many people are going through, how many sales you have made, and with a little bit of promotion, which we get into in a few minutes, that should get the blog up and running as basically a miniature auto-income system for you.

LA - You mentioned ClickBank a few times, would you also recommend adding AdSense to a site for increasing income or would you lean more towards having more focused sites pushing the visitor towards clicking through the ClickBank link.

NS - Well, it depends what you mean by autopilot income streams. Because if you have someone who signs up for recurring billing then that person has made a commitment, they know they're going to be billed every month, and then as an affiliate you know you're going to take a percentage of that every month. You can be sure that you're going to be earning income a few months into the future.

Whereas with AdSense it's income on a day-to-day-to-day basis and if your traffic drops down your clicks will drop down and you won't be earning the money. With brand new sites it is quite difficult to get authority links into them. You can't really get to the top of the search engines very rapidly because Google does not trust your site. So you don't particularly want to sign up with a service that sends you a thousand links to try and get you to the top of the search engines quickly - Google will just slap you with a penalty.

So you need to grow your links slowly over time; you need to build the authority of your domain and of your blog over time.

So I wouldn't think you would have enough traffic initially to make autopilot income from AdSense that you could be sure you would be getting month after month after month. New sites in the Google index bounce around a lot, they might go in at a decent position then they might drop down, they might go in low and over time come up higher so, I wouldn't think if you wanted to make money within 90 days, I wouldn't really suggest AdSense would be viable as a way of actually getting autopilot income over time.

But, having said that, if you use the ClickBank system, and if you have an on- topic blog sending traffic through an on-topic link to an on-topic product, you should have a fairly high conversion ratio, then the merchant will actually make sales and pay you affiliate commission on an ongoing basis which is one of the best ways you can set up autopilot income streams.

Before the call started Louis I just showed you one of my sites where I've been making money and receiving checks for almost 9 years from one service that I recommended that was in the financial services industry.

And they've sent me checks - started off at two checks per month, went down to one check per month and has stayed like that ever since. They've been sending me those checks for almost 9 years for a total of thirty-two thousand eight hundred and something dollars. So that is money that I know will pretty much be coming in month in, month out, because it's done that for almost 9 years.

Whereas I have, I think I have some AdSense on that site and it's kind of dribs and drabs, sometimes you make some clicks, sometimes you won't, it's not really the same as getting yourself in the middle of someone's recurring billing, that you know is going to be more likely to provide you with a residual income stream. So AdSense is good, but I wouldn't say it is the best idea if you want to build long-term autopilot income streams.

Neil Shearing Interview: Transcript Part 1

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Neil Shearing Interview: Transcript Part 4

Neil Shearing Interview: Transcript Part 5

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