It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed a product in the Internet Marketing space .. and honestly I wasn’t planning this review either. Believe it or not I actually paid for this product this morning. It wasn’t a free copy, or review copy, it was a complete purchase – with the Silver Bullet guys as my affiliate referral. So yeah this is an honest look at it.
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I happened across something yesterday that was so brilliant because of it’s simplicity, I felt the need to share it.

While watching Andy Jenkins’ BOSS webcast for a couple mins, he had Frank Kern and Trey Smith on. I’m sure most of you know them, if not you may be in the wrong business.

Some attendee asked Frank, how do you make money online?

Now mind you Kerns made millions online, but here was his answer:

“create an offer, send paid traffic to it”
“tweak it”
“send more paid traffic”
“if you make more in sales then you spend in traffic, you win”

Folks it doesn’t come more straight forward than that.

Remember those sentences when you are trying to sell *anything* online.

Then once you have a winner verified by paid traffic – Google, Facebook,etc – expand into free traffic with SEO and explore potential joint ventures.

SEO can be a long process, so make sure you have a winner FIRST, most people – myself included at times, work in reverse.

SEO may be cheaper initially in $$, but it’s very costly in terms of wasted time if you are wrong.

It’s indeed been a rather long time since I’ve posted here or mailed my list. I’m sure some of you are wondering where the heck I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Just as I’m sure some of you – don’t care either way …

I’ve spent the last while concentrating on my e-commerce businesses and making sure they are up to snuff and actively being promoted by my staff of outsourcers. This hasn’t really been a smooth process, with some more hits and misses with oDesk. Not that it’s oDesk’s fault, but rather sometimes it’s just hard to find good people to do simple tasks.

Once that was tied up, I decided to make a strategic change in my business and now I’m going to concentrate on providing solutions to Internet Marketers (read: those of you reading this) in the form of software solutions. Giving my active background in Internet Marketing, I’ve come to realize that there are very few good  software solutions – think the best spinner -  and more stuff sold by “gurus” that have never coded a day in their life. Or gurus that outsource everything, including the research, because they don’t live and die with this stuff “in reality”.

That’s right folks, most of the stuff you buy is made by people that don’t actually live and breathe this stuff everyday. People selling SEO products, don’t do SEO .. they make their money by doing joint ventures. Same with PPC, Facebook, etc .. the list is long. I won’t get off on that rant again, because I’ve shouted about it many times on my blog.

So what makes my stuff “solutions” and not “products”? Pretty simple I believe. I actually use my tools on a daily basis and I use them effectively. I believe in creating tools that not only serve a purpose (to help you make money), but also leave you no doubt about what direction to take next.

I’ve always admired a guy like Jonathan Leger for a couple of reasons. One – his products work, two – his products are simple and three – they provide solutions that you can act on.

A good example I can give, that goes the other way, is with another popular item in the IM world – Market Samurai. While MS is a good piece of software, I use it rarely .. the main reason is, while it does provide some nice information, it often leaves me with a “well now what do I do?” feeling. Research products are nice and all – but without an obvious next step they are pretty much useless.

My new company, Attack Suite, aims to make things different. In the next day or so I’ll break down our first product release, the Page Juice Calculator – which aims to replace Google PageRank as a real world page strength comparison tool.

If any of you follow Chris Rempel, and are a member of Actually Rank, you are already reaping the rewards of my PJC software.

If you don’t – hold tight, tomorrow the doors will be open exclusive to my subscribers for a beta run at my new solution! [or you can cheat and simply navigate to the AS link above ]

I’ll admit it .. I never think I know enough either. Every week there is a new (and sometimes more than 1) item that arrives on the Internet Marketing scene that aims to solve all your money problems for the rest of your life.

These guys are great at 4 things .. 1 is making money for themselves and 2 is writing good sales-letters and 3 is copying other’s stuff and 4 is TAKING action.

So before you think you need to buy something else to make your business better – STOP. Look in the mirror and say “Is this really going to help MY BUSINESS — or am I buying this because it’s going to HELP ME”

Yes it will help you .. emotionally, but not financially. Buying the next biggest “thing” or “hope” will get you through the day happy. The problem is tomorrow will be a bad day.

Tomorrow comes the regret of the purchase, and then your realization that you have not advanced your business at all. My friend it’s time to get off the hamster wheel, and decide whether you want to be IN the marketing funnel, or HAVE the marketing funnel.

“I hope this program works, because all I know is that I’ve spent 25K on Internet Marketing programs and I’ve yet to break the $100 a month barrier”

I saw this quote as a Facebook comment on yet another Internet Marketing program a few weeks back and it really shook me up. It shook me up, because this guy is a sucker. He’s not an entrepreneur — he’s a consumer, and until he realizes that he’ll never make more than $100 .. and frankly I’m surprised he made that much.

Here is what an entrepreneur would do with 25K …
Option 1) Buy 1 operating mega site with 25k that’s making $3-5k a month profit ALREADY.
Option 2) Buy 5 operating semi-large sites (5k each) that are making $1k a month in profits ALREADY.
Option 3) Buy 10 operating niche sites (1k each) that are making $500 a month in profits ALREADY.
or
Option 4) Buy every Internet Marketing course for 3 months to learn how to make money online and then do everything myself from scratch for what I’ve learned.

Do you see the difference? One builds your business .. the other just builds frustration and debt.

So let’s try and keep this short as I’ve covered this immensely before. You won’t get rich buying Daniel Tans SEO Business in a Box, or Trey Smith’s Software System or whatever shit Ryan Deiss is peddling this month…

Instead you will build a business by doing something that actually helps your business.

Today has not been a great day so far .. but I wanted to pass along a word of caution along with a must see video if you are in the Internet Marketing niche.

First off is a word of warning… if you are thinking about using cloudflare.com cloud based load balancing system.

First the good: The service is free, and rather easy to setup. It’s well worth a look at if you get a lot of traffic and especially if you are hosted on a shared platform. They will offload and protect your site from “bad” traffic. For me this was important, as I get a lot of “bad” traffic (like forum spam, bad bots, etc) to a couple of my niche sites that were driving up my server costs.

Now the warning: They DON’T support SSL. So if you have an ecommerce site that needs SSL to, I dunno process orders?, then make sure you have your ssl setup already on a sub-domain. (aka ssl.mydomain.com). If it’s setup on the main: mydomain.com you WILL run into major issues.

Now as you may have guessed, I’ve ran smack dab into this issue.  I didn’t read the fine print (I mean who does?) and enabled one of my e-commerce sites over to Cloudflare’s DNS. Today I didn’t see any order action, so I checked on the checkout page .. and uh oh.  “The Request Cannot Be Completed” ..  Yeah that’s not a way to wakup in the morning.

And yes folks this gets worse ….

So after seeing that I couldn’t use Cloudflare for SSL access, I decided that I would just add a new subdomain (ssl.) and use my certificate on there. Of course that doesn’t work as the SSL cert is only tied to the “exact” domain. So ok, no problem since that wasn’t working anyway, I’ll just re-voke the SSL cert from GoDaddy (who I have the cert from), and re-install it on the new ssl.mydomain.com.

Well if anyone of you reading this have done this before, you’ll understand what a mistake this was. Once you revoke a SSL cert you cannot get it back. Thankfully GoDaddy did refund me the 2 years remaining that I had on the cert, but now I’m sitting with no SSL, no SSL cert and a wasted day (and not to mention lost revenue) ..

So what are the takeaways: Pay attention to small print — especially on live projects. IT/Tech stuff sucks .. And let it be known that I’m a tech guy. I maintain my own server and I write my own software, I can’t imagine if you don’t have at least some what of a tech background, what you would do.

The irony is, yesterday I watched my friend Andy Jenkins promo video of Kajabi. Which I recommend that you watch. If you are in the “launch” business or want to produce a membership site of some importance, then this is aimed directly at you. That’s not an affiliate link .. it’s just something that I think may be of interest to my readers. And heck after my day today, it’s of interest to me too.

Kajabi is a great new platform that takes care of the IT stuff so you don’t have to .. and it’s much more. Andy does a great job of covering it in his video, so I won’t attempt to one up him here.. just give it a look and as usually with AJ’s video’s it’s entertaining.

So my last post was a little on the anger side .. so I’ll try and be a little more level headed in this one

Local Marketing is something that has been hot in the Internet Marketing world for the last 5 months or so, with the hyper launch from Mike Koenigs just finishing up not that long ago.

What a lot of people don’t know, is that one of the people I do trust and pay attention to, Howie Schwartz has been talking about “offline” marketing for a long time before these guys.

I respect very few “Gurus” as I’ve said, but I respect Howie because he walks the walk.. now all is not rosy with his launches,
as often his products are a little overpriced for what you get.. but the good news is this this local marketing webinar will give you a ton of knowledge and content for nothing.

Here’s the webinar info:

Topic: Profiting TODAY From Local Search

http://www.shaunguido.com/go/howielocal

This content packed presentation will reveal:

* The secrets to ranking on TOP of Google local & maps right away

* How to identify and target clients to generate easy RECURRING
income

* Why everything you think you know about local search is probably
wrong

And Howie has a special surprise planned for the webinar too
(HINT: Free Stuff!)

http://www.shaunguido.com/go/howielocal

If you have the time I hope you’ll attend. Like I said Howie knows
his stuff.

In my Internet Marketing Empire review I’ll let you know what to expect inside the member’s area of Chris Freville’s latest product. Will it be for you to consider, or should you ignore? Let’s find out …

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