I’ve long been an advocate of  Martins Avis’ Kickstart newsletter. Now Martin has started to offer a brilliant series of PLR products. PLR – Private Label Rights is a way of buying pre-written copy and making it your own. Basically you are buying the rights to use the copy. It’s a technique used by a lot of Internet Marketers to create both site content and saleable products quickly and easily.

The downside of many PLR products is that they can be extremely badly written.  People often outsource the writing of these products to non-native English speakers without testing whether they are capable of stringing two sentences of intelligent English together. Martin – an excellent writer himself, works with his wife, Delia, who is a former English teacher, and also has a way with words.

Even when they do outsource, it will be to someone who is an expert is the topic. The results still get passed to Delia for editing.

Martin also provides software tools to help you ‘spin’ the articles and do keyword research. And there are other resources on the site to help you make money online using PLR.

Current, recent topics Martin and Delia are offering include: camping, Halloween, dating, weight loss and stop-smoking. He is also offering a hypnosis MP3 download you can offer alongside advice on stopping smoking.

To learn more, take a look at Martin’s PLR Membership Site. This link will also tell you how you can buy individual products if you don’t want the full membership service.

I’ve always been fascinated by business, and I’ve been advising business owners for most of my working life, so I enjoy TV reality shows with a business slant, like ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Restaurant Inspector’ (where an expert restauranteur turns round failing restaurants). But it was a recent episode of ‘The Hotel Insepector’ that really got me thinking.

On this show, the Hotel Inspector was helping a hotel owner who saw his hotel as being upmarket with a ’boutique flavour’. One of the questions Alex, the ‘inspector’, asked him was what his costs were. He had no idea, and could soon be seen phoning a supplier to find out the cost of bacon, saying ‘there’s a resident tyrant who says I should know what everything costs’. His approach to pricing was to decide what he thought the market would bear, and charge accordingly. Grumbling bitterly he made a half hearted attempt to gather the information needed, but soon got bored.

After giving him various tasks, the hotel inspector left him to it for a while. It quickly became obvious that the most important thing she had asked him to do – get his head round his accounts – was the last thing he had in mind.  He could be seen on his hands and knees polishing the floors, servicing the rooms, hoovering, doing the garden.  Anything except go near the accounts. ‘I don’t have time for that – I’m too busy, I do everything myself, and there are more important, urgent things to get on with.’

The sad thing is, his attitude is typical of many entrepreneurs and business owners. Back when I used to advise garages and gas station owners, I found that several of my customers simply stuck all their paperwork in a large box, unfiled, unsorted and unread, and handed the box to the accountants at the end of the year.

These tended to be the customers whose businesses lurched from crisis to crisis, and had to pay cash in advance for their tanker deliveries because the oil company couldn’t trust them.  The people who couldn’t understand that if you want to run a business, you need to understand basic business management principles, as boring as that may seem.  Either that or hire in someone who does have this knowledge.

And it’s just as important for business success in an online business as an offline, bricks and mortar enterprise.

Do you know what you should be measuring in your business? What do you measure? And how often? Do you know if you are making a profit or a loss, and by how much? How well do you understand concepts like working capital, cash flow, assets, liabilities and debtors? Do you know what a balance sheet is and why it is important?

If this all sounds likes gobbledygook to you, then do yourself a favour and get some basic training or coaching around business finance.  There’s plenty of good information to be found just by googling ‘free business finance information’. According to an article in USA Today, around 85% of businesses fail within the first year of existence. Some statistics suggest that it’s nearer to 60%, but even so, that is an awful lot of failure, and pain. So what’s the main reason small businesses fail? Because their owners don’t spend enough time understanding what they need to do to manage the businesses.

I’ve been a fan and follower of Frank Kern for some years now. The Man talks a lot of sense about internet marketing, and business in general. He’s made a fortune out of the internet, and even survived the dreaded Google Slap.  So when he has something to say it’s worth listening.

His latest State Of The Internet Address is 30 minutes of straight talking. His theme is optimism in business, via the value of offline marketing, the importance of levels of service and faster answers, and the three principles of building a business.  Attract quality leads, turn those leads into happy customers, and turn the happy cusotmers into repeat business.  He doesn’t tell you how, but he will tickel your brain cells.

Recommended New Year viewing!

The best kind of traffic is free traffic, I think we can all agree on that.

There’s just this one little problem: Free traffic isn’t free.

At least, in most cases it isn’t.

If you’ve ever tried to rank for anything but the crummiest of low-traffic keywords in Google, you might have had a frustrating experience. Just optimizing your website certainly won’t get you there (and unless you’re in the top spots, you won’t see hardly any traffic).

So, you need to build backlinks, right? That’s what gets sites ranked in the big G. But if you go and submit a few articles, maybe do some social bookmarking and put your signature in a forum or two, that still doesn’t get your site anywhere near the top…

If you want to get sites ranked in the top spots in Google, you need some automation tools. It’s just a fact. You can’t build thousands of backlinks manually and unless you build thousands of backlinks, you won’t get good rankings.

And that’s why free traffic isn’t free.

Good link-building automation tools cost a fortune, often in the form of monthly subscription fees.

And so, to get a good amount of “free” traffic, you need to invest quite a lot of money.

But that’s about to change…

Backlink Battleplan is a system that teaches you how to build backlinks and it’s all about getting tons of top-quality backlinks, getting them automatically and getting them for free!

Click this link to check out the amazing offer and learn how to build backlinks.

I have been collaborating with 30 other top coaches, entrepreneurs and other successful individuals on a new book – Ultimate Life Lessons.

Launched yesterday, it’s been shooting up in the Amazon ratings to reach 24,546 on Amazon.com within only hours of being launched.

Apart from the fact that I am extremely proud to have been involved in this enterprise, it shows me just how powerful the internet is – particularly when you combine with hsome hot-hitting internet marketers like Tracy Repchuk. We’re all over Facebook, and Twitter, Youtube, and – of course – our own blogs and other peoples’ blogs about our blogs, and people’s comments about the book itself. It’ a great example of just how to make money online.

We’re also offering some fantastic bonuses, worth thousands, although I can’t promise how long they will be available. Here is the link to buy the book and get these fabulous offers.

Any one who offers sensible advice about Internet Marketing will stress the importance of finding your niche. The tighter the niche, the easier it is to dominate, to have your voice heard.

Eben Pagan (well worth following on blog and/or Twitter) talks about 3 mega niches – health, relationships and money – for making money online. In some ways Personal Development cuts across all three. In itself, Personal Development is a huge niche, and if you are going after it, it’s a good idea to narrow things down considerably (what aspect of Personal Development, and who are you aiming at in terms of things like gender, age, interests, problems/issues?)

My good friend Martin Avis, publisher of the excellent, zero cost e-newsletter, Kickstart, had this to say about Personal Development in the latest issue of Kickstart.

Personal development training is a huge industry that has its roots in thousands of years old religious writing. Ever since humans came together in societies, there has been a yearning among many to improve our lot in life, to achieve bigger success and to live as better, more organized, more efficient people.

It was only really at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries that the whole self-improvement movement really started to take off.

Early pioneers of what we have now come to know as best-selling life coach courses, such as Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie paved the way for a massive explosion of personal growth experts and motivational speakers to emerge – and greatly change the way that 21st century thinking has developed.

It is no longer thought of as strange or maverick to want to improve your life. Tony Robbins told us how to unlock the giant within us all. All we have to do is follow the instructions.

An entire new language of personal development training emerged -Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP for short) has merged the sometimes woolly self help advice that early writers published with hard-hitting, proven psychological principles. It is no longer enough to simply repeat affirmations to bring about change in your life – NLP gives you powerful tools to reprogram your mind away from the things that are holding you back and into patterns that will almost force you to succeed.

Personal development training, as we now know it, really got started with the publication of a book called ‘As a Man Thinketh’ in 1902, by an English writer called James Allen. He told his readers that you don’t necessarily get what you want in life, but you do tend to get the things that you most consistently think about.

At the time, that was a revolutionary idea: that we are in control of our own destiny and that our way of thinking can change our way of being. It became a bestseller and still gets much critical acclaim more than 100 years later.

The people who most took the message, that success comes from thinking successful thoughts, to heart were publishers. They saw the future and the future was personal development training!

Nobody knows how many self-help books have been published in the 110 years since, but the best seller lists always have several high in the charts.

It is estimated that over half a billion copies of self improvement books have been sold, and the real total may be even higher.  Type ‘self help books’ into Amazon and they’ll present you with almost 105,000 to choose from. And with the current ebook explosion in full force, the personal development industry is growing even faster than ever before.

Does the vast array of books, courses, CDs, tapes and DVDs that characterize the personal growth market suggest that it is all hot air: castles of hope built on shifting sands?

I don’t think so. It seems to me that the hope that we can change our lot in life, the promise that a few simple actions will turn our circumstances around and the idea that we only have to follow the advice of a few charismatic trainers who have discovered the secret is what personal development training is all about. Yes,  it is selling dreams, but dreams can come true.

And it is so much better to live with dreams that can come true than to merely exist without them.

Eben Pagan has just posted his third Gurublueprint video – all about how to make money online cheaply and easily.

Actually it’s not just cheap – it’s about as near to free as you can get.

In this video, he shows you how to make an online presentation (including video) in the space of about 10 minutes.  True, he’s using Screencaster, which is a bit of $97 software.  If you’re willing to keep your information soundbites down to under 10 minutes you can do what he did totally for free by using Jing – although you’re more likely to use short soundbites for advertising, rather than sellable product.

Of course, Eben is preparing for a big launch on June 1st, which is why he is giving away so much information. But it’s really good quality information for anyone with an interest in building an online business.  He’ll probably take the videos down soon after the launch – so go take a look now.

Meantime I am about to experiment with Google Website Optimiser.  An interesting tool that allows you to test different looks and feels and content. It’s been around a while, and I had forgotten I had access to it!  We’ll see….

One of the biggest challenges for any marketer is when Ego gets in the way of understanding what your customer is really thinking.  All those pounds or dollars (or whatever) you’ve invested in your marketing are wasted because you’ve forgotten how to listen.

It’s something most of us do at some point.

Check out this excellent blog post by John Carlton.  Yes, it’s true this post is there to get people to sign up to John’s Simple Writing System (now closed – possibly for ever).  But he’s one of the best marketers in the business, the copywriter’s copywriter, mentor to starts such as Frank Kern, Rich Schefren, Perry Marshall… the list is endless.  So when he has something to say about how we sabotage our marketing efforts, it’s really worth listening to.

Many internet newbies imagine that internet marketing is all about tekkie stuff. Get some products, buy some get-rich-quick scheme form a guru (or not so guru) and bang! That’s it.

Not true. And the best gurus, people like Rich Schefren or Frank Kern, know this. (And yes, those are affiliate links – I really respect what these guys have to say.)

Before you ever get into the technical or product-selling side (whether you’re doing it as an affiliate, or using Adwords, or creating your own) you have to learn to think like a business.

Basic things like how much am I spending on all this, and how much money is coming in. If you’re spending more than you have coming in, you have a loss (or possibly a hobby). If you’re spending less than you have coming in, you have a profit. Celebrate! And then think about whether you have costed in your time.

If you want to start thinking in a business like way, but you haven’t a clue where to start, then try Nicola Cairncross’ book ‘The Money Gym’. Updated for 2010.

It isn’t just about Internet Marketing: it’s all about achieving financial freedom in a way that works for you. But first you have to start treating yourself as a business.

And think about what YOUR dreams are. As Frank would say, how do you come from your core self? Because when you come from your core self, the people have a reason to buy for you. Check out Frank’s video – it’s long ,and there’s a slow build, but the punch line is worth having.

Meantime, I’m off to Hawaii to pursue my studies of Hawaiian Huna – the ancient psychological and spiritual teachings of the Hawaiians. See you on the other side of the world!

Having just set up this WordPress blog, it’s all very fresh in my mind.  It doesn’t take that long to set one up, until you get to the plugins!

The basics are fairly straightforward, providing you are methodical about it.  You need to sort out the appearance (obviously) but it’s surprising how little you need to do in that department in order to be up and running.  Choosing a theme can take ages, or no time at all, while using the widgets to change the lay-out of the columns is fairly quick, depending how fussy you are.

It’s useful to make sure you’ve taken a look at the ‘users’ set-up, even if just to decide whether you want to be known as ‘admin’.

The settings are important too.  They affect what people see at the very top of the page.  For instance I have changed the default ’just another wordpress blog’ to Janeplewis Online.

But it’s uploading and configuring the plug-ins that take time.

It’s a while since I set up a blog from scratch, and some of the plug-ins I used originally are no more. There are also some amazing new ones, like the Viddlercomments one, which allows people to post a comment using video vai their webcam.

Currnetly I have about 12 ‘essential’ plug-ins uploaded and activated.  Akismet and One Click Installer are essential (and by the way, if you are using Akismet, it’s worth setting up an email account dedicated to this blog.  Gmail will do.)

Then there are plugins to manage your SEO, Feedburner links (that one took a bit more time than most), something to generate a sitemap and let Google know when you post (essential for rankings) and something to link your blog to Twitter.  My personal favourite is Twitter Tools.

If anyone knows a way to upload plugins in bulk, I’d love to know about it!

Because after you’ve gone through the work of uploading them, one by one, you then have to configure them.  Well, some of them at least.  So it’s back to the Settings tab, to work your way through what is sometimes real gobblydegook.

And then there’s Twittollower, to start building the traffic.  You need to be blogging and tweeting to keep your followers satisfied, though.  Martin Avis, publisher of the ezine Kickstart, reckons a minimum of 5 tweets a day.   (And if you haven’t subscribed to Kickstart yet, it’s a great read even if you have no interest at all in Internet Marketing.)

And the great things about Twitter Tools is, you automatically create a Tweet from a blog post.  And you can even create blog posts from you Tweets, if you want to.