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How To Make a Fantastic Income
With Information Publishing

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Louis Allport: For example if you go to Google and search for "pay per click management", there are loads of companies that do this. If you don't want to get involved with the nitty-gritty of handling all your AdWords campaigns you can actually pay companies to do it. I think a lot of companies charge you however much they spend on advertising for you, plus 10% management fee, something like that.

So you may wish to look into this and I am going to look into this at some point because I would prefer not to spend my days managing the intricacies of AdWords campaigns and if I am building up my customer base, if I am making profits on the front end, I am happy for someone else to do that [PPC management] for me, so I can have more time to myself, but at the same time still grow the business, grow my email lists, then I can make sales on the back-end.

Because obviously once you have made a customer, they are a captive customer, then cost per sale is a lot lower because you don't need to keep advertising. You can just send them an email, which is free effectively, if they are on your customer list, or else send them a letter maybe, which costs like a dollar or something - it depends how you wish to do it.

Articles, Jeremy touched upon. You can create an article, or go to eLance.com, or Guru.com, and have someone write an article for you. You can distribute articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, just submit manually. Or you can go to sites like iSnare.com, and they submit to article directories for you - they distribute your article for just 2 dollars.

What you will find is that they will send your article to a lot of article directories but you won't get a lot of traffic from those article directories I've found. Even with one article, distributed using a service like this, to hundreds of directories, you may just get five to ten visitors a day. I have found that more articles doesn't necessarily mean more traffic. Let's say ten visitors a day that is 300 a month. It's good because you are getting links to your site, which is good from a search engine point of view, because Google likes sites with links to them, but I wouldn't spend too much energy on this.

However, there are other distribution services like SubmitYourarticle.com, I think it is $37 a month or something, so you may want to look into this. There is also ThePhantomWriters.com they also distribute articles. I can't personally differentiate between these services, you may want to try them out and see whether one is more effective than the others. Their prices do vary quite a lot.

I have done some article marketing but not a massive amount; I have focused on other things. Jeremy has outsourced his article writing and marketing, so that is all done for him. But I think, and Jeremy has mentioned this, and other people have mentioned this too, and common sense would dictate - that one of the best ways is to create very good content, very good, exclusive content, and again you can have it written for you if you are happy to spend the money.

For example, let's say you wanted to get visitors to your site that were searching the web for "Forex Trading". What you can do is kind of 'piggyback' on other people's sites, you search for terms like this, and you find content sites which appear quite high for that term, and then you contact those sites personally and say, "Look - here is an exclusive article, the little bio, the little two or three line bio at the bottom links to my site but I am giving this to you, no other site has this article. Do you want to host it?"

Basically, manually contacting different sites, you'll find one site that wants to host it and that could give you quite a bit more traffic, because these sites are obviously quite high profile. And if you do that with the same site with more and more articles, or different sites with more and more articles, that could work well, so that is something else to try as well.

Okay what's next? SEO. I don't want to get too bogged down in this, this will be covered in more detail in videos included on CDs to come, so do pay attention to those videos.

(This last paragraph is not accurate as it relates to a product we didn't publish, instead putting some of the product content here for free. My extensive video library content is instead being made available to Exponential Returns and Inner Circle customers.)

So you could write articles, you could write blogs, you could have blog articles written for you, if you just search the Internet for "article writing", "article blog writing"...etc. the writing might not be fantastic but I guess it is one way to go, you may want to try that out.

So that I don't cost these people money let me go directly to their site rather than click through on the AdWords ad. SEOArticleWritingPros.com - $10 an article I think. Let's have a quick look...

Anyway, I know that if you search for "article writing" or "blog writing" or something like that you will find services, so that may be one way to go.

How to manage your site - I can't get into that here, that is really something quite technical but on the videos, on the CDs to come you will get a lot more coaching on that.

(This last paragraph is not accurate as it relates to a product we didn't publish, instead putting some of the product content here for free. My extensive video library content is instead being made available to Exponential Returns and Inner Circle customers.)

How to grow your business - well, at the simplest level: more products, more revenue per customer, more offers, larger lists... this all means more revenue. So keep growing your list, keep growing your customer base, keep growing your product line, move into different markets if you want to, but test carefully at each step, don't just dive in. If you are not really familiar with the market become familiar with it slowly, better to be cautious than dive into a market you are not sure about.

One reason Jeremy has a good income from this is that he has a lot of sites, he gets a lot of visitors, he has a large email list because he has a lot of visitors, he has good partnerships with people sending him traffic. And so on. You have got to grow your network of sites, your product catalogue... and so on.

How to automate your business with systems? Okay, you will get a video on this as well, but just in a nutshell now... Well you can automate a lot online with tools like autoresponders for example. Aweber.com, or there are many other ones.

(This last paragraph is not accurate as it relates to a product we didn't publish, instead putting some of the product content here for free. My extensive video library content is instead being made available to Exponential Returns and Inner Circle customers.)

For example, when someone signs up at your site you can have them sent a new article or a new promotion automatically after a week, after two weeks and then after three weeks. You can set up ahead of time your entire promotional campaign for a year and then it goes out automatically to your list, for example.

What Jeremy does to outsource a lot, to automate a lot... the technical work is done by the team he has hired pretty much full-time in India. You may choose to do that or hire one person to help you, either locally or through eLance or Guru.com. And also Jeremy has one or two staff members that help him with a lot of the day-to-day tasks, for example customer support, which frees him to focus more on marketing and strategy and so on.

And also what he does, he does a lot of partnerships, so then that way the partners take some of the strain of the day-to-day running. Like, for example, the InstantVideoEmpire.com offer, the 83 disc offer delivered over 12 months, that is a partnership I'm in with Jeremy. Jeremy is focusing a lot on the marketing there whereas I'm focusing a lot on the product creation, so we are sharing the labor which is another way of starting to help automate things.

"How much money is required to start and build such a business?" I wrote in the overview - "When doing everything yourself, when outsourcing or when doing a combination of both?"

Okay, personally I started full-time about six years ago with 600 pounds in the UK, which at the time was about $800. And I didn't really spend anything more. I managed to turn that into a full-time income in three months with just a bit of hard work, and then money made was re-invested to grow the business. All the money in the business from that point on until now has been re-investment from that initial $800 investment. So that is quite a good return on investment.

However, of course, it hasn't been passive, it's been a lot of work. So I have put the work in and I have got a good return there. Maybe I had a slight advantage of coming from a technical background, so I could do a lot of the technical stuff myself. But I didn't come from a marketing background, so understanding the sales and marketing mindset took a little while.

So depending on what sort of background you come from it can take you a little while to get to grips with all of it, because running your own business you do have to understand everything. You don't have to be an expert at everything but you do need to understand every facet of the business.

For example, you don't have to be an AdWords expert, you can outsource that if you wish, but you need to understand how it all fits together otherwise if you don't keep a close eye on numbers and don't understand whether an AdWords campaign is working or not working, and how to judge that, then you could potentially lose a lot of money. So you have to understand the fundamentals even if you are not an expert at everything. You really do need to be a 'Jack of all trades'; you do need to understand everything.

I'm not an accountant, I have an accountant to do my accounts, but I understand enough to be able to talk to them and ask the right questions and know what to do. So basically you need to learn enough of all the parts that make up a business.

So doing everything yourself. You don't need much money if you are doing everything yourself. The bonus CD, and bonus CDs to come, should help you with the technical aspects and the marketing aspects but also you can outsource the technical aspects inexpensively again through sites like ScriptLance.com or Guru.com.

(This last paragraph is not accurate as it relates to a product we didn't publish, instead putting some of the product content here for free. My extensive video library content is instead being made available to Exponential Returns and Inner Circle customers.)

I will just give you one more example - in the past when I have sent out CDs and DVDs to customers I did everything inexpensively. This was a while back, several years ago. I duplicated the discs on my computer, I printed the CD labels on my computer, I stuck them manually onto the disc, I posted the packages myself - everything was done manually. I didn't really enjoy the work because I find that I am very slow at doing manual labor for some reason. So something that could have taken someone a day or two took me a week.

So it wasn't the best use of my time. But it's good to do it, it's good to help understand every aspect of the business but also I was cost-conscious then. But, at a certain point, to grow the business you need to start letting go of every aspect of the business. So what I did with InstantVideoEmpire.com, the project with Jeremy - the 83 disc offer - a CD/DVD duplication and package fulfillment company local to me, 10 miles down the road from me, do everything. I create the master discs and then they create the actual multi-colored discs. Let me go back there quickly...

This is not the sort of thing I can create at home. It really needs a professional company to create these CDs and the booklet has been professionally done. So there was quite a bit of an investment there, to set it all up and so on, so that required a lot of investment. But we wanted to make that investment with the project because we were looking to grow it quickly, and considerably, for the long-term, so it felt like a safe investment.

I would say as a side note, if you are happy and confident with your business, one of the best places you could put your money, or some of your money, is in your own business. If you spend the time to understand the fundamentals and get the fundamentals of your business working I don't think you will get a better return on investment than putting it in your own business.

But that's my opinion, obviously do tread carefully when you are investing money, when you are investing money in yourself that is a good thing, and I only invested $800 dollars when I started out, but I reinvested a lot more to get the Instant Video Empire project going.

So we had thousands of discs made up in one go, which cost a lot of money but that project is going well, quite a few months later now.

So that is one case where obviously I couldn't do everything myself in that project.

However I don't want to get too bogged down in side issues but I keep getting sidetracked, not sure when exactly this is going to happen, but we are looking to basically now bring fulfillment in-house.

Rather than pay a company to send out packages we are looking to actually bring that in-house, to manage that ourselves, to send out packages ourselves. But, again as mentioned, I'm not really the man for the job because basically I am a complete slowcoach when it comes to me doing that.

We are in the process of setting that up. We are looking to bring the fulfillment in-house, it gives us more control, and may actually be more inexpensive for a staff member, for example, to send out packages rather than continuing to pay this company.

This is something we are looking into, but basically we still need duplication companies to create the discs and the covers and the booklets and everything for us because that is not something that we can do ourselves.

The basic point I am getting at is, I know it seems somewhat counter-intuitive, because if you want to automate it is obviously good to outsource, but then as a compromise, to maybe cut costs, or really it might make more sense for your business if you want to maybe recruit someone and maybe manage an employee/employees, you can maybe bring a lot of that in-house, and you will actually find it is a saving and will give you more control. And we are in the process of looking at that for those reasons specifically.

But obviously, we are doing quite high quantities with Instant Video Empire; this isn't something that can be run from home. We have to start looking at maybe renting an office and then recruit someone to send out the packages. So there is quite a bit of management that starts coming into play, so you might have to decide at that point in your business whether you want to start managing people, or not. Obviously there is no management needed if it is outsourced entirely to a fulfillment company really.

A bit of a sidetrack, but basically we kind of felt it made sense to bring that in-house and it's not really going to be a huge hardship, we can set it up in quite a good way and it is going to be a saving. It is just going to make more sense for us, because it gives us more control. Just something to think about; that is something we are looking into right now.

Okay, so what's left in the list? I'll just answer these three points quickly and then we will do a quick Q & A if there is time.

Okay - how quick and easy is it really? Well, I would say some of it depends on your background.

The expression often goes "They have taken six years or ten years to become an overnight success" and you only become aware of them when a site, a marketer or publisher suddenly explodes onto the scene, but you are not aware of their background, maybe in marketing, or running their business and making only $20,000 dollars a year for years. So, it does depend on your background, it does depend how quickly you can learn the skills and become familiar with it all, and understanding how a business works and what is important to pay attention to, and so on and so forth.

So, it's really an impossible question to answer. But as I have mentioned before and I will probably mention it again and again because I think it is a useful case study, since I left a job and from leaving a job and making a full-time income that was three months.

It was good because leaving the job really focused me and you prioritize a lot better than if you are just fiddling around with a business part-time. When you are doing it as a hobby it doesn't have to work, necessarily. So, that focus and that level of motivation are important. However, I didn't make much income at all the first year or two - it was a full-time income but it really wasn't very much. But then I grew the business and reinvested the profits and so on. But I was part-time before that for a while, learning the ropes and just becoming familiar with it. It does require commitment, focus and persistence, and motivation is very important.

It is important to stick to one thing and just do it. For example, I've stuck with information publishing and that's all I've done and that's all I'm choosing to do, for the next few years at least. If you do one thing and then another thing and then another thing, then you don't really get anywhere because nothing really gets going since it can take a lot of motivation and an awful lot of pushing for a project to gain enough momentum to really take off.

 

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