And a lot of ranting. Because once I’m officially and finally retired, I’m really going to say any and everything I’ve always wanted to say. Bridges will be burned. Feelings hurt. Lessons learned. Hilarity ensuing.

Stay tuned.

If you could have a power lunch with anyone in business you wanted, who would you put on the guest list?

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• An “Ultimate Connection” power lunch in New York City with the up-and-coming entrepreneur winners and top-ranking marketing stars
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• Mentoring from a legendary marketing expert throughout the year
• Access to a Yahoo! Search Marketing expert throughout the year
• A website makeover, courtesy of Yahoo! Small Business and Web site development firm FastPivot.

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The biggest lesson I learned in internet marketing was that it doesn’t always have to be the invention of something new and ground-breaking - if you wait for the most divine intervention, you’ll never make any money. In the meantime, it might help to think of it this way: you have knowledge your clients want, and you’re doing them a disservice by not giving them the chance to snatch it up.

This is true whether you create your own products, resell other people’s products, are an affiliate marketer, or sell advertising on your site.

To apply this concept to marketing, remember that there is a point of merging between your style of attracting a potential customer and making a sale, a point at which you take your own style and join it with what you’ve learned from other people.

If you want to be a lady’s man, do you study someone who never gets a date? That would be dumb. If you want a relationship, do you ask other bachelors for advice with your girl? Equally stupid.

Decide what your identity is, and think about what works on you. Learn about it. Take all those elements and then add you. The same way Andy in 40 Year Old Virgin took the best elements of all the advice from his friends and through trial and error, found what worked for him.

==> Sidebar<== Love that movie, the extended DVD version. “Okay, let’s start over. Hi, Are You Fucking Retarded?” haaaaaaaa.

You see a beautiful woman in a grocery store. She smiles at you suggestively. So you move in closer to flirt with her.

You stand next to her in front of the ice cream cooler and make eye contact. She smiles, looks away, your eyes meet again in the reflection from the glass. She turns and says, “Hi, I’m Candy.”

You yell “MY NAME IS ANDY. MY PENIS IS HUGE. WILL YOU MARRY ME? I’M ONLY GOING TO BE STANDING HERE FOR A LIMITED TIME, SO YOU MUST ACT QUICKLY. LOOK, ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE DATING ME, AND SOME PEOPLE YOU REALLY RESPECT, HERE ARE THEIR NAMES AND COMMENTS. ”

She rubs her ears and says, “Uh, hi.” And starts to back away.

Stalker that you are, you follow her and continue your pitch.

“IF YOU’RE NOT READY FOR MARRIAGE, LET’S TRY A TEST MARRIAGE DURING A TRIAL PERIOD CALLED A DATE! IF YOU GIVE ME YOUR PHONE NUMBER, I WON’T SELL IT TO MY FRIENDS, HONEST. ACT NOW AND I’LL TAKE YOU TO FRIDAYS.”

“Maybe we should start ov-” She’s willing to give you another chance but you just can’t shut up.

“OH YOU WAITED TOO LONG, NOW IT’S SUBWAY. TOO LATE MCDONALDS. BEFORE YOU GO, CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME WHY YOU’RE NOT MARRYING ME RIGHT NOW? WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN MARRYING ME LATER? OKAY, WELL WHAT IF WE JUST HAD SOME SEX, WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN THAT?”

If you’re pissing yourself laughing, and getting flashbacks to 40 Year Old Virgin, you might not be for long. How many of us either market that way, or have bought something from someone who markets that way?

Think about how often you use some similiar marketing tactics in your sales copy, on your site, or in your blog. Think maybe if you flirted a little with your audience and readers first, did something nice for them, paid attention to their needs, you’d be more popular?

I tried both ways. Turns out you need only a dash of flash in your sales letter if you take your desired customer for a steak dinner prior to bumping uglies the first time. And just like in dating, if you maintain a good benefits balance in your relationship, they’ll be back.

Of course, if you think it’s smart to have a series of one night stands, more power to you. Me, I’d rather be up front and serially polygamous with my customers than fake monogamy just to get them into bed the one time. Don’t know about you but I’m building a business not a brothel.

As my mood/health/family stalkers allow, we’re going to talk about coy marketing, and the intersection of romancing your prospect into a sale by addressing their needs, instead of batting them over the head with a caveman’s bat and facing dire consequences later.

1. First, and most importantly, amuse myself while I hopefully recovered from an illness I’ve been dealing with for 14 years. I did amuse myself, but my recovery has Not gone as well as I hoped. I’m considering it a pass.
2. Show people who I have trained to blog that you don’t need a name behind you, or some huge marketing campaign to start a large enough following to make money from blogging. Instead of trying to create one super blog and become an A-list blogger, my advice is often to start several smaller blogs that are on a topic you care about.I hit all my numbers, and spent less than $1000 on the whole thing if you count the prize money I’ll be giving out. If this blog was consistent with other small, niche-within-niche blogs that I’ve created, I would have made around $600 a month with this blog, even though circumstances caused me to have to stop blogging halfway through the project.
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   Too bad you have to put up ads in order to have income. SO, I actually have to start this project all over again on another topic. Dang. Maybe I can use this one as a traffic example. I am quite screwed there. Guess we can call that one a fail on the experiement side, but a pass on the fun and traffic side.

3. Share some of the lessons I’ve learned about the industry my health is forcing me to leave. Yes, all that stuff about selling my company for a deal that could make me a millionaire over the next year is true.And yes, I’m leaving marketing as of today.I’ve never done a pure marketing product before, so I’ve decided to never do one, and just give away advice, tips, tools etc, here for free whenever the mood strikes me.I’m going to stick around to help the people who will inherit my company in about a year with the traffic and website promotion company I sold them, but purely as a consultant and writer. My internat marketing days, which never really started, are over.From today on, I’m an author, and I plan to make a living from selling books and blogging. At the moment, I’m kind of screwed in that capacity, because I haven’t been able to keep up the writing side of it.

My name is Tinu Abayomi-Paul. As I’ve said, I’m not terribly famous (at least I hope not), just well-known in certain circles. I used to run Free Traffic Tips, Leveraged Promotion and a few dozen other smaller spin-off sites.

In late January, I took some time off to have what I thought would be a quick outpatient procedure having to do with a degenerative disc disorder I’ve been dealing with for 14 years, which has only been truly bad the last 5 years. Long story short, I have to quit my business to save myself. It’s not just my body that’s been suffering, it’s my soul. But I’ll go into that another day because this is getting really long.

For those of you who thought I was a dude, my bad. I’m really sorry about that. I picked the name Tatum as an alias because I thought it could be a man or a woman’s name. Wrong. I usually do better research, but life has taken me to some weird places these past few months.

Everything else I’ve said in this blog is true, though some names and genders have been changed to keep people guessing or avoid the anger of friends, or to avoid witch hunts, etc, you get the idea.

So, that’s it. I’ll be back with more soon. Over the next week I’ll change up all the bios and such.

Picture this.

You have a sales letter that converts at 3%, and your profit is $75 per sale. 1000 people see it. You make 30 sales. $2250. Congrats. You da man.

What if you had a follow-up series that also converted at only 3%. But the sign-up rate to the series was 50%. You have the original 30 sales.

Watch this. Sign up to the follow-up is 500 people. 3% of them convert at $75. That’s another 15 sales. Another $1275.

An hour extra work giving away a couple of excerpts or articles that you’ve already written or setting up the autoresponder series. 50% increase in sales.

I would call my initial lack of follow-up my single biggest marketing mistake ever. Follow up is not just for signing up the people that didn’t buy on impulse the first time they came to your site, it’s for selling upsells to people who are already sold.

Once I started marketing to customers I already had, I kicked myself every day for about a year.  I don’t even mean newsletters. I mean listening to your clients really well. When they send you testimonials, really study what they’re saying that they liked. Be anal, keep a database of comments and who said what.

I started to keep the people who had bought from me separate from those who didn’t. With their permission, I offered them upsells about four times a year. Once I had a 100% conversion rate.  I had sold 100 people an ebook and listened to their suggestions. All 100 of them bought the multimedia version. $9700 for a day’s work.

How much are you leaving on the table?

Don’t have a list of people to market to? What if you can’t go back and write individual emails asking your customers to sign up to your special offers list (Bait works. Offer them 10% off if they buy during the first week a new product is out.)?

Ask a fellow marketer. You probably have a friend who was a one-hit wonder in internet marketing and can’t figure out what to do next. Pitch them the idea and sell to their customer list in exchange for a cut in the profits.

When I didn’t want to work, or couldn’t, ezine advertising not only paid my bills, it kept me comfy. A lot of people will tell you to rely on AdWords. There’s nothing wrong with any type of search engine marketing if you know enough about it to maintain a decent conversion rate, and have enough money to keep your sales steady.

My preference was for testing with small ezine ads, and then, when they test well, solo ads. Six months out of the year, I would hire someone to look at my product and write me two ads, an ezine ad and a solo ad. All told, a really good copywriter that specializes in advertising would cost me $300 or less.  I can write a decent ad pulling about 15% for visits, and then 3% of those for sales, but do the math: if a specialist can get me 25% for visits, even if the sales conversion rate remains steady, I’ve made a lot more money. So investing $100 for a solo ad in a high quality publication of about 10, 000 visitors would bring me 1500 visitors, and then about 45 sales.
Still, I wouldn’t suggest ezine advertising for everyone.

Pros? Instead of keyword research, you just do publication research. Is the publication targeted? Did the smaller ad yield good results? Then it’s on. If not, you’ve wasted maybe $10. So add to that cost effective. I’d spend around $100 - $250 just to Test pay per click results. A sampling of less than 100 visitors isn’t really worth the effort. The return is bettery when you hit paydirt on the right publication.

There are more pros, but you get the idea, more money, less effort, more cost effective.

Cons? It’s not as predictable as pay per click and returns aren’t as immediate. You don’t always know when your ad is going to run. Even if you get a special where the ad goes out within three days, you don’t know when the prospect is going to read the ezine or if it will make it through their filters (which I believe accounts for most of the return rate.) Pay per click has it beat there.

You also have to be careful of saturation. In a publication of 10,000, with a visit rate of 15%, I would only run the same ad for the same product ten times, and that’s over the course of several months. I’d also say that this is more of a method for a career affiliate or career infoproduct entrepreneur. Almost anyone else is better off with AdWords, or a combination of other online marketing methods. But here’s a clue - use this method to earn the initial effort for an AdWords campaign.

Of course, no smart marketer uses only one technique. I use AdWords when I want an immediate, controlled response, and have the attention span to test and track the results, and have the time to do the research. Even in the beginning, I always had the money to invest - but I’ve found that I get a better return from a combination of several methods that includes ezine advertising on my own products.

I am a workaholic. I can’t Not work. I work when I’m sick. And with the vacuum in my life from the sale of my company, I had to find a few other things to do. This blog is (note: not was) one of them. But things unexpectedly went SO well that I had more work to do, suddenly, and felt obligated to celebrate.

I will be back from my work hard/play even harder silence - thank you to the 200 people a day who take time from their schedules to see what I’m up to. I promise you continued chatter from the globe-like area where I keep my brain over the next week.

And the contest is still on.

There was this guy, we’ll call him Scammer Rick. Scammer Rick convinced a (still) trusted friend of mine to join an organization whose sole aim was to help certain types of corporations with a very specific kind of online marketing that involved what I still think is one of the best products I have ever seen or used.

The friend wanted me aboard. Because of how great the product was and how much I trust my friend, of course, I said yes. I still don’t regret that decision because I met some great people.

Scammer Rick was the pitcher, and my friend, myself, and a few other people were the catchers. When we got the clients he signed, we actually got them set up and did the actual legwork.

After about a week working with Rick, I realized that my clients were being sold something completely different than what they were actually buying. I found this out when a new customer called me up asking what exactly he had bought.

I said “What do you mean, exactly?”

He said, “Well, Rick said that we were buying the most powerful marketing system online but he didn’t tell us what it actually was or what it does.”

I hated Rick desperately for a couple of years after this was over, not just for the mess I had to clean up, not just because he never paid me most of the money I made on any of the jobs I did, but because of the innocents harmed in the making of his scam.

However, I always will have a reluctant respect him for his sales ability, though not how he used it. To date, I still haven’t quite figured out how he got people to fork over what eventually amounted to thousands of dollars for something several of them claimed not to be able to identify.

If only he had used his power for good.

Getting back to the story, this kind of thing became a pattern. One of my biggest regrets in the time I spent with his organization was that sometimes I have too much faith in people, and that just because the product they are reselling is mind-blowing, doesn’t mean they are themselves good people.

It seems like a silly assumption now, and I’m alarmed that I was so naive then as it wasn’t that long ago. Since then, I’ve learned that if something doesn’t feel right, no matter how rational things seem on the surface, I have to trust my instincts and walk away.

If I can just get one person to realize that same truth, well, that’s really not enough people, man, LOL.

Seriously, here’s the reason it’s so crucial to know this.

See, my reputation Almost got attached to his reputation. And that would have ruined me. Failing is never easy to deal with, but it’s unbearable when it isn’t through your own actions.

I will seriously regret telling this story….

If you are sitting on a few thousand dollars, and thinking about how to make money in internet marketing, here’s one of the things I did to start money working for me.

Go to a place where you can find products affiliates can make money from - I like reading up at the Associate Programs site, or going to Clickbank (esp the login page) and finding items that state their conversion rates, or ones I hear tell of from top affiliates. My personal comfort zone is with ones that say they convert at 8%, which I find normally means 5%.

Don’t put all your money in the pot yet, though.

Get a professional copywriter to make some ad copy for you, and do a test run in some of the cheaper publications or in lower bids on pay per click, and evaluate if you’re getting a decent return.

For example, if a product converts at 5%, and you’re testing that theory with $200, if the product costs $50, you would need to sell 4 units just to break even. How that money is spent to get to 4 units will vary, but when you find one that lets you end up in profit, that’s the one you lean on.

That isn’t exactly common knowledge, but it’s not rocket science either. Most people don’t go wrong there. So why isn’t everyone rich?

They spend their profits instead of reinvesting them.

The amount of money I lost before I figured this out still makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Put every last thin dime of what you make on that product back into advertising it once you find a way that works in a market that works. After a few rounds, take out only half, let the rest keep rolling back on itself until sales start slipping or trends shift.

Now I’m not a master affiliate, and I much prefer doing this with my own products, since I then have total control and know what the conversion rates are first hand. But during the part of the year that I don’t work, that system has worked for me year in and year out.