If you know me personally, you know that I am a sucker for the next BBD (bigger better deal) and over the past year I have awakened to my “lemming” ways.   Like so many, I would get into a nice program and be fairly interested in the program and just put out one page and let it set.  Guess what, it collected dust.  I have been taking marketing classes for about a year from the Dream Team and they do have some good material, they subscribe to the old way.  Basically, throw money at it and it will grow.  Now being of the class of normal, aka not rich, I never really had money to throw at it.  The money for the classes set me back a bit but I knew I wanted to get into online marketing.  Over the past few months, the more I looked around, the more I started to realize that these marketers are full of crap.  Most blowing hot air trying to get your money by selling more hot air.  I became disenchanted with the business model.  The whole model just was not sitting right on my stomach.  January was probably the best wake up month for me.  I started reading more and more from non-mainstream marketing people that made more sense and actually felt a whole lot better on my stomach.

One example is Danny Arrington.  I did not join his list until a few days ago, but the information he is giving out for FREE is amazing.  Most marketers feed you a nice meal but you can only eat the peas without paying.  Danny is holding back a few peas and giving you the meat.  This makes me trust him and I am more likely to buy from him than some mumbo jumbo old schooler full of hot air.  Actually if you want to join his list, which is free and he does not spam his subscribers, click here.  He is just now putting together his Bootcamp series and just finished Day 2.  It just makes sense and he is honestly open with you before you even open your wallet.  Actually I am not sure what he is selling but if he has his hand in it, it will get serious consideration from me.

Another example is blogging.  Yes I blog here, often with very pointed posts, but I have been wanting to run a real blog for a while.  I never really found my passion.  Well I had, I just did not realize it till this weekend.  I started a blog on health.  How to Invest in YOURself.  Now this is not some crappy get rich quick program.  I am actually writing real posts about the research I have been doing over the years trying to get my mind and body to a state of harmony.  If you are interested in Meditation, New Age stuff, or just curious I suggest you take a ponder at it.  Its there for free.  Yeah I know, bad for the wallet but good for my soul.  I have ALWAYS wanted to help people and this is the perfect outlet.

Not sure what the new blog has in common with marketing but perhaps it helps demonstrate a shift of mentality.  I am now focusing on the “product” more so than my “cut”.  I have been blinded by money so long and I will post more on that in my health investment site.

- SJ

Technorati Tags: BBD, Danny Arrington, health blog, marketing, MLM, Money

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On October 2, 2004, I headed into the Emergency room in Frederick Maryland because I was having “chest pains”. I did not think these pains were heart attack related as i”ve been having them for quite some time and just figured they were stomach related. However, my pulse was a bit on the “weird” side so my father and I decided it best to go “just in case”….’, ‘We get to the hospital at about 11pm on a friday night and I head to the triage to check in and tell them why I am here. Not taking chances, I immediately said “I think I might be having a heart attack” and her response was “I hope not”. Well duh, I hope not also. LOL. Turns out that they had run out of “Cardiac Beds” which means if I was having a heart attack I was shit out of luck unless I coded right there on the floor and they took me into a trauma room. 15 minutes pass by answering what seemed like 1000 questions she put me on a gurny in the triage room and hooked me up to the EKG machine. It was “normal” so they thru me in a hallway until they had a cardiac bed for me. Over an hour has passed since I walk into this hospital complaining of chest pains before they even get me into a room where a doctor can see me. He checks my pulse, uses his stethoscope and pretty much confirms what I thought was wrong. My stomach was contracting because I had produced “too much acid”. Of course, he wanted to be sure just like me, so he took my blood and had my chest x-rayed to see if my heart was swollen. When they took my blood, they attached what I call an “IV Hookup” which would allow them to put whatever they wanted directly into my blood (which I was not too fond of and it was extremely uncomfortable). 2 hours pass by (Now remember I have only seen this doctor for a total of 5 minutes so far) and he comes back in to tell me my bloodwork is fine and so are the x-rays and that he is going to give me a prescription for Nexium. I”m thinking “oh joy” medicine. For the record, I hate taking any kind of medicine. He tells me a nurse will be in shortly to remove the “IV Hookup” and get me checked out. About 45 minutes later, a nurse shows up, hands me this weird green “GI *censored*tail” and said it would help with my stomach contractions. She removes the “IV Hookup” and sends me on my way. Now on to the ass-raping part.. Less than a week later I received my first bill for the visit. Not so bad, only $35 for the xrays. 4 more days later, I get the actual bill from the Hospital, $550! Yep, thats $550 to sit in a bed for 3.5 hours, use of an x-ray machine and “equipment used”. I”m thinking “holy crap this is rediculous.” I lay it aside in my ever increasing “have to pay” bill pile right on top of the x-ray tech bill. Then 2 more days later, I get another bill from the doctor himself for $250!! yep. He thought it prudent to charge me $250 to see me for less than 15 minutes. So that 3.5 hour trip to the hospital cost me $800. Not to mention the Nexium cost me $5 PER PILL. So $100 for a grand total of $900. Albeit, the Nexium was the best thing since sliced bread. It worked great and I wish i could continue to afford to buy it as it provided relief on my stomach pains i’ve been having for years. If you have acid problems with your stomach go check out www.purplepill.com and read up on Nexium. I recommend it to anyone. Though it hasn”t helped the “chest pains.” I can tell you this for a fact, I”m never going to the hospital again unless I am unconcious and unable to protest. Its going to take me a year to pay this trip off.

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For several years now I have been making money on the “net” and several people have asked me “how”.  When I get my checks, my family is amazed that I can even make cash from the internet.  I’m the kind of person who will not buy anything unless I can buy it thru an affiliate link.  I believe in the affiliate system and try my hardest to make it work.
People have said its impossible to make a living off of the internet and others are more than willing to sell you a $200 e-book on how to do it.  What they dont tell you is, thats how THEY are making there money.  They come up with some watered down version of how they do it and write a small book and then sell it.  Others have joined affiliate programs and place banners or products on there personal pages to create hype around a product so that someone signs up for it or buys that product.

The key to affiliate marketing is being found and having an outlet for your promotions.  If you dont have a web presence already or are ready to build one, making money on the net is quite difficult.  Plenty of people out there advertise that you can even make money without a computer.  We all know this is bull puckey and its playing on the minds of those who really do not have the cash to begin with.  I call that bottom feeding.

The absolute BEST way to sell any product on the web is to create a product page.  One where people can go to and read about this product.  You need to write a PERSONAL review of this product as you make this page to give it your own seal of recommendation.  Without your own recommendation, most people will not buy.  Especially if the people visiting your site value your recommendations.  A good example is Amazon Web services.  While this is a great feature of the Amazon system, quite honestly, I never made a DIME from Amazon until I implemented a CGI program to pull there entire site into my own.  I would hand pick products that I thought would suit my visitors and NOBODY was buying.  With AWS (Amazon Web Services), I am making a decent income.

I found this little perl script called Amazon Products Feed (http://www.mrrat.com/scripts) which basically creates an online store of ALL of Amazons products for you.  Being the little hacker I am, I hacked his script up and added  a mod_rewrite ability to it.  Now I will admit, I’m not the first or only person to see the value in mod_rewrite.  In fact, I got the idea from this script.  Today, that little APF script earns me enough money to run my own servers.

Now you are sitting there thinking, big deal, how do I make money using APF.  The first step is to get a copy of Jessie’s mod_rewrite (http://www.codeshq.com/webmasters/mod_rewrite.shtml) and upload it to a new domain name.  If you need webhosting or a domain name, visit my companies site (http://www.emagin.us) and get yourself a fresh domain with webhosting.  Heck, before you buy, SIGN UP WITH THERE AFFILIATE SYSTEM!  That way you can get paid a commission on your own sales.    After you get the code uploaded and running, you need to, and this is the MOST IMPORTANT STEP, modify the default templates to be ORIGINAL!  So many APF sites are being closed out of search engines because they just upload, configure and forget hoping there little wallets get fatter.  Well guess what.  Your wallet will stay LITTLE if you do nothing to the default layout.  And finally, the 3rd step, GET TRAFFIC.  You need to get traffic to your site.  Create a blog like I have here or a movie review site.  Something that search engines like.  Once you start getting traffic and people start linking to your pages, you will get higher on search rankings and crawled more by spiders.

If you follow these steps, you can and will make money using Amazon.

-SJ

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