This analyst is loud and brash, but hang on. He’s got the goods on these crooks and all the evidence needed to stop them in their tracks. Watch and share. (Audio volume alert.)

Fast forward to the present: AdWords has revolutionized Internet marketing, formed the basis of thousands of successful businesses, and turned a small, profitless business (Google) into one of the biggest corporations on earth.

When the first comprehensive history of Internet marketing is written, Perry Marshall will be credited as the first person to put a flag in the ground and declare that not only was Google AdWords important, it was far more important than the then current state-of-the-art which at the time was Overture, formerly GoTo.com.

That was quite an huge mental leap back then and it took some deep thinking and courage of conviction to take that stand.

With an accomplishment like that…

What do you do for an encore?

Well, Perry has done plenty. Since first appearing on the scene, he’s continuously pushed the envelope on Internet marketing techniques, identified new trends and uncovered authentic Internet marketing talent.

Now Perry and Thomas Maloche have come out with the definitive book on Facebook advertising: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising

I have to confess to being a Facebook skeptic. The things I’ve heard about Facebook as an advertising and marketing medium have just not been all that compelling. But as usual, Perry has dug deep – just the way he did with AdWords all those years ago – and come up with a treasure trove of actionable insights.

In my case, thanks to this new book, I realized that Facebook would be a fantastic lead generator for some businesses I own that are normally very difficult to buy leads for economically.

Key takeaway: Facebook is not for everyone. For some some businesses it can’t do much to help at all. But for others it can help mightily.

How can you tell if Facebook advertising is right for your business?

Perry’s created a simple quiz that will help you quickly assess if learning more about Facebook, and the intricasies of how to use it the right way, is worth your effort.

Click here for the quiz: http://isfbforme.com/

- Ken McCarthy

P.S. We did an in depth interview with Perry and Tom for this month’s System Club.

P.P.S. I’ll be on the road a few day so it may take a while for me to approve comments to this post. If you post something legitimate and it doesn’t appear, that’s why. Patience.

There’s a massive shortage of people who understand pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, tracking and testing, conversion and just plain crunching the numbers.

You can’t say I haven’t done my part.

What have we been doing since 1994?

We’ve brought people the best of the best in the hard disciplines of Internet marketing, the skills I’ve referred to for at least 12 years as “the plumbing.”

It’s not glamorous stuff, but folks who make the effort and take the time to learn these things can literally write their own ticket.

So what do people do instead?

They chase the guru, fad and/or whiz bang marketing trick of the month.

As usual, the New York Times is a little slow to pick up on reality, but they’ve finally joined the party:

Advertising companies fret over a digital talent gap

- Ken McCarthy

As amazing as the iPod is and as incredibly useful as the iPad is, I think his earlier products had a more massive impact on society than even his later ones.

For example, when I lived in New York City in 1984 I had a little business teaching speed reading to college students and professional people. I was in my 20s and I don’t mind admitting I was stretched pretty thin.

My main –  make that my sole –  means of effective advertising was posting flyers up and down both sides of Broadway. The response rate on those flyers literally determined whether I ate and was able to pay my rent on time or not, therefore I did a lot of testing.

Guess what it cost to typeset a single one-sided 8 1/2 x 11 flyer in those days?

$100 –  which in 1984 was a lot of money.

The first Macintosh, the 128K, changed that overnight. You could actually lay out flyers in different types and with different typefaces by yourself and then, if you had a laser printer, you could print them out too.

This was life-changing for me.

I didn’t have anywhere near enough money to afford to buy either a Macintosh or a laser printer, but in those looser, friendlier times, I could take the subway up to Columbia University and pretend to be an undergrad, get in the “computer lab”, and knock my flyers out before anyone was the wiser.

In time, I was actually able to buy my own Mac – amazing –  though I still had to make the trip to Columbia to print stuff out. (Thank you Columbia University.)

I did have enough money to buy an ImageWriter (I think that’s what it was called) which was a very mechanical sounding dot matrix printer, though it ran like a racehorse.

I don’t think I ever wore it out. I did outgrow it though and eventually was finally able to buy a laser printer, which happened many years later. I think I paid $2000 for it.

My business then was simple. I’d lay out flyers on my Mac, get the master printed up at Columbia, and then get it printed by the thousands. I’d post the posters myself and then wait for the phone to ring.  (Pre-Internet days folks.) Thankfully it always did ring and I was always able to fill my classes.

The Mac help me again. After somebody called and I described the course to them, I take their name and mailing address and send them a brochure which was actually a sales letter.  I’d print out the sales letter right on the spot on my ImageWriter.

Understand that previous to this the only other way to accomplish this was to type the letter by hand or send a xerox copy. With my own printer, I was able to personalize the letter so it looked  like I sat down and actually wrote it to them. Amazing.

The Mac help me in yet another way. I forget the name of the program but there was a program at the time that let you easily enter names and mailing addresses into a database and then print them out on labels. Another miracle.

Every month when I had a new class, I simply printed out the labels of anyone who ever inquired, put in the letter for the new class in envelopes and mailed it.

With this simple system I was able to buy my freedom from the 9 to 5 workaday world.

How can you put a price on something like that? Steve Jobs and Apple made it possible.

But that’s not all…

A few years later,  I upgraded the 128K to a 512K and that machine became the foundation of one of the first digital audio for film studios in New York City. Don’t ask me how he did it, but my brilliant friend Bill Markle somehow rigged together a mixing board, an Otari tape recorder, a Sony U-Matic 3/4″ video deck, and the Mac and use that to create the soundtracks for countless small productions.

From this humble beginning, Bill went on to create the soundtracks for some pretty famous movies including “Like Water for Chocolate” and the Academy award-winning documentary “When We were Kings”, the film about the life of the boxer Mohammed Ali.

I’m sure there are thousands of stories like this, maybe even millions.

The whole concept of “desktop publishing” was enabled by Apple and the vision of Steve Jobs. Suddenly, businesses of all kinds could produce their own marketing materials and anyone who had the will could become a publisher. This was literally as important a breakthrough as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

But that’s not all…

Amazingly, and not many people realize this, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the original code for the World Wide Web on a NEXT machine and, of course, Steve Jobs was behind that machine as well. Therefore, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Jobs was present at the two great revolutions of self-publishing, first on paper and ink and second on the Internet. The iPod and the iTunes Store put the icing on an already substantial cake.

Note that Steve Jobs received no government subsidies, wasn’t anybody’s friend in Washington, and didn’t need bailouts to do any of these things. Yet it’s very possible he created more jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities than anyone in the last 30 years.

Here’s a video of the talk Steve Jobs gave at a college graduation in 2005.

I guarantee the 15 minutes. it will take to watch it will be worth your time.

Video: http://www.realecontv.com/page/5225.html

- Ken

There is a lot to learn from watching this short video.

First, there’s the all-important lesson that everybody who “gets there” gets there the same way: by putting on their pants, or in this case gym shorts, one leg at a time.

Obviously, the scale and scope of Facebook has changed dramatically since the time of this interview.

New money, new expertise, and new ambition has poured in.

But look at where Mark Zuckerberg started.

He didn’t start out with the ambition to make billions of dollars. He also was not thinking about creating a service that would be so huge it would challenge even Google in traffic.

The answer is very simple and it’s the answer to everything: he focused on getting what was in front of his face at the moment right.

I detect no wild ambition, no intoxication with the fantasy of limitless riches, no rush to bring something to market ready or not.

Instead, I see a guy who just picked up his tools everyday, worked on his blueprint, and took pains to get it right.

I know this flies in the face of typical “get rich quick” seminar bullshit, especially the famous “shoot, ready, aim” method that students of a certain type of “guru” are encouraged to follow.

The truth is that nothing goes right the first time, but the idea that you can build a lasting success with a “sell first and get the quality right later” approach is a great way to fail.

That being said, it certainly is possible to package and sell things, even at high prices, that are not ready for market. You can even make money launching products, selling a lot of them, and then abandoning support for the product, which is another way of saying screwing your customers.

Yes you can do it, but it’s…

Unfortunately, this approach has become the new normal in the Internet marketing education world, so much so that I find that some among the new generation of would-be educators don’t even realize there’s another way to do things.

This is bad for the marketplace, it’s very bad for people who are trying to learn Internet marketing, and it’s a stupid and shortsighted way of doing things.

Big spikes of income from episodic hyped up promotions of products that have no basis in reality does not make a business.

Businesses are built on selling products and services. Products and services that do what they say they are going to do and are supported and improved when they don’t.

“We wanted to make sure it was going to work before going any further with it.” – Mark Zuckerberg.

After getting a good results from a test at one school, he didn’t roll it out to the world. He tested it at just three schools.

After those three schools continued to prove the concept, then he rolled it out to 29 schools.

Then, he geared up to launch the service to schools around the world. Not the world. Just the world’s schools.

All day this Monday and Tuesday, we’ll be rolling back tuition for System 2010 to 2009 levels to celebrate the Saints making it to the Super Bowl.

Four and a half years after the federal levee failures – forty-three years after the start of the franchise – and New Orleans is headed to the Super Bowl.

Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints!

The two-day sale is on now: click here

If you’re wondering what the next decade is going to bring for Internet marketing, consider this:

At the end of the last decade…

* Dotcom stocks were heading straight up in one of the biggest orgies of manic stock buying the world has ever seen

* Banner ads were selling at massive (and irrational) premiums

* Pay-per-click advertising (then offered by just one company, GoTo.com) was considered an oddity

* Yahoo was the 800 pound gorilla in Internet media

What a difference ten years can make

Today:

* The NASDAQ still hasn’t come even close to recovering its Year 2000 heights

* Banner ads are sanely priced

* Yahoo appears totally hopeless

* Pay-per-click advertising (mainly in the form of Google AdWords) has taken over the world

Crazy times

I was there ten years ago.

Actually, I was there seventeen years ago (1993) when I started making my first tentative experiments online. I had the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of witnessing and participating in the birth of a new medium.

But all was not sunny in Internet Land.

By 1998, I reached a point of total bafflement at what was going on in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the Internet industry I helped pioneer.

People I knew to be hopeless idiots and in some cases outright scammers were being helped by New York investment banks like Goldman Sachs to loot billions of dollars from the stock market by selling shares in companies so loony that they defied belief.

That year, the fall of 1998, I voted with my feet, said “bye” to the Bay Area digerati crowd (who thought I was nuts) and moved back east to the sleepy, beautiful and then low-priced Hudson Valley to wait for the inevitable.

A year and a few months later, New Year’s Eve 1999, I watched in amazement as Internet shares that were already insanely priced went straight up.

Then it all fell apart

By the end of 2000, Internet companies were vanishing in droves.

Companies valued at hundreds of dollars per share were selling for pennies…if they were still in business at all. And as the months progressed, the implosion became more and more severe.

When I went back to San Francisco in 2003 after having been away for nearly five years, it was like a neutron bomb had hit the place. The buildings were still standing, but the people – and the companies – were gone.

In the middle of the wreckage, I did something that a lot of people thought was crazy. In 2001, I started working on a new Internet marketing training. In 2002, I launched it.

It was called the System Seminar.

The turn around

I created the System Seminar with a simple premise…

In spite of the crash of bogus Internet companies, the Internet itself was as solid as a rock – and it was going to grow, this time for real.

How could I be so sure?

For the same reason, I was willing to risk substantial time, money, energy and my reputation for sanity by putting on the first web marketing conference ever (November 1994, San Francisco.)

This time around though, things were going to be different.

The big change

The big change – and we built it right into the very first System Seminar – was that Internet advertising was going to be based on careful calculations of ROI (return on investment.)

In a way, this was nothing new. Old school direct marketers have been tracking the profitability of their ad buys for decades.

But this was a brand new concept to many on the Internet.

It’s hard to believe now, ten years after the fact, but it’s true. Before the System Seminar, only a handful of scrappy Internet entrepreneurs were tracking anything besides “hits” and the cost of banner ads.

I’m not going to take credit for the massive sea change that’s taken place in the last ten years

But I will take credit for being the first to put it on the line to teach this approach as the only one that makes sense for Internet marketers when nearly everyone else was still talking about “branding” and “mindshare.”

The big change – Part Two

In 2002 (2001 actually if you count our early beta trainings), the System Seminar was the only place on earth where you could learn an integrated approach to Internet marketing…

…One that combined smart online media buying and careful results tracking with “old school” smarts like direct response copywriting and list management.

From the very beginning, our focus was on pay-per-click. We even mentioned Google AdWords at our first seminar, even though it had only just launched and no one really understood how it worked yet.

Fast forward a few years and two of the attendees at that first System seminar (both then total PPC “newbies”) wrote what have become the two definitive books on the subject (See Perry Marshall’s “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords” and Howie Jacobson’s “Google AdWords for Dummies.”)

Thanks to its PPC revenues, some say that Google is poised to take over the earth.

Not so fast Google

Here’s what absolutely won’t change in the coming decade:

* The Internet will continue to be a central part of hundreds of millions of people’s lives. If anything, it will become even more central as the Internet solidifies its position as the “central switching station” for all media: text, audio, video, buying, selling, communicating, chatting, gossiping etc.)

* Consumers will continue to seek VALUE in their purchases and if my crystal ball is working, they will be even more militant about getting value for their money in the years to come.

* Advertisers – the ones who are going to survive that is – are going to become even more sophisticated about tracking their results and making sure they get the best possible value for their money.

What this is going to look like is smart Internet marketers diversifying away from Google AdWords.

AdWords will continue to be an important part of the mix, but anyone who is not taking energetic, aggressive steps to free themselves from dependence on Google for their traffic is going to have cause for regret.

Strategy for System 2010

I’ve been writing ad copy since I was in high school and started paying the rent with my efforts back in the mid 1980s.

I am a serious student of the game.

Copywriting is the switch that turns raw traffic into money.

I don’t know how to state it forcefully enough but here goes: Traffic is worthless without masterful conversion and conversion is just a fancy word for ad copy, so in a very real way the whole game of Internet marketing boils down to copywriting.

In all the noise about Twitter, Facebook and other “mindshare building tools” a lot of internet marketers have lost sight of what matters in Internet marketing.

To bring us all back to reality in 2010, I’m bringing in two Big Guns of the copywriting world to System 2010 – both multi-decade veterans who write real ad copy for real companies selling real products to real people. Both master teachers…

But don’t take my word for it. They’re both published authors with their books continuously in print: Bob Bly from the US and Drayton Bird from the UK. Google them.

The other piece of the puzzle: traffic

Great copywriting, as important as it is, is not enough.

You need the second part of the equation: traffic.

I’m a big fan of SEO, article marketing, JVs, viral marketing and all the other “free” ways you can drive traffic on the Internet. Over the years, we’ve offered scores of trainings and master classes on these subjects.

But none of these methods can hold a candle to the simple, reliable method of simply buying the traffic you need.

If you want to maximize your potential on the Internet, buying traffic is where it’s at.

Here’s why:

Buying traffic lets you turn on the traffic you need right now, not weeks and month from now.

If you’re already a traffic buyer you already know that Internet traffic is the Eighth Wonder of the world.

You can buy a little, test it, amplify what works and turn off what doesn’t.

It takes skill, know-how and paying attention, but knowing how to buy Internet traffic comes as close to money-on-demand as anything on earth.

Why it’s so hard to get good information about traffic buying

Two facts:

1. There are no “old” traffic buyers. Not yet, anyway.

Most of the traffic sources that matter today (like pay-per-click) weren’t even around ten years ago.

2. People who are good at traffic buying generally don’t teach.

Traffic buying is a demanding and lucrative specialty. Taking time away from the main event to teach it to others is not something most traffic buyers ever think of doing, let alone are willing to make the serious effort to do.

That’s where the System Seminar has a major leg up over every other Internet marketing training.

Just as people like Perry Marshall and Howie Jacobson were motivated by their experience as System Seminar students to document and share what they learned about AdWords, the new generation of System-inspired Internet marketers is ready and willing to do the same with what they’ve learned about the nut and bolts of buying traffic today…in 2009, soon to be 2010.

Our System 2010 traffic faculty

For the first time ever, we’ll have traffic buyers on this year’s System faculty who have spent (and continue to spend) and track millions of dollars of their own money on Internet ad buys: Greg Davis, who specializes in high volume mass appeal consumer offers and Ben Moskel who specializes in a highly competitive niche where traffic costs are at a premium.

Both are real-world experts in uncovering new traffic sources, testing them, and figuring out how to make them pay. Their knowledge is not theoretical – and you won’t find it in any book or course. It’s based on the market as it is right now.

To round out our faculty, Google-certified Timothy Seward of ROI Revolution who guides the purchase of tens of millions of dollars a year in traffic for over seventy companies, will share his perspective on what’s working today, where things are headed, and what it takes to maximize the profits of an Internet business.

Steal this seminar

If you’re reading this before January 1, 2010, you have the chance to get all this cutting-edge knowledge at a bargain basement price.

Every year, we make the System Seminar available to people who can make an early decision to get a bargain price.

If you’re an Internet marketer and you’re already buying traffic for your business, System 2010 will be some of the best time and money you’ve ever spent.

If you’re looking to make the leap into Internet traffic buying, System 2010 will:

a) show you what’s really involved (no sugar coating),
b) cut months if not years off your learning curve, and
c) help you get where you want to go faster without making expensive mistakes.

The fact is one wrong move in traffic buying can easily cost you several multiples of the price of System Seminar 2010. (You may even be making an expensive traffic buying mistake right now and not even realize it.)

Our traffic buying faculty has already made most of the big, dumb, expensive mistakes so you don’t have to.

Even more important, they’ve dug up traffic sources and refined tracking methods that are practically guaranteed to improve your bottom line.

Early Bird Registration Deadline: December 31, 2009

How much for this hard won, can’t-be-found-anywhere-else knowledge?

For the multi-decade experience of two master direct response copywriters with hundreds of campaigns each under their belts…

For the rough and tumble know-how of two master multi-million dollar traffic buyers…

For the insights of one of the sharpest Internet campaign advisors in the business, certified by Google…

And for the insight of yours truly, the guy who’s been at this now for seventeen years, consistently finding you the right people at the right time for your next right move?

Check it out.

You may be pleasantly surprised at how affordable all this is when you’re an early bird.

But do it by midnight December 31, 2009.

Details:

http://www.TheSystemSeminar.com

Ken

P.S. Happy New Year!

It doesn't really look like this...it's 1,000 times better

There’s always one day that stands out from all the rest. I think this Sunday was the day.

If you wonder why I live in Tivoli, NY in the summer and fall, this picture is my answer.

How did you spend your summer vacation?

What I thought was going to be “kick back and relax” summer turned into a travel and study marathon:

Vancouver, New York City, Maryland, London, Manchester…over 10,000 miles traveled and at long last…home.

Who benefits?

You do.

Here’s some freebies to get your fall season off to a strong start:

1. Free Google AdWords course

Three-time System faculty member Timoth Seward is giving away a complete basic training in Google AdWords.

http://www.smartbeginners.com/adwords/

2. Remembering Ken Giddens

Ken Giddens passed away four years ago this month and he is still sorely missed.

He was one of the bona fide pioneers of our industry and an inspired and generous teacher. For those who knew him, and those who didn’t…

Lessons and recollections from his friends and colleagues: http://thesystemseminar.com/kengiddens/audio.html

This was Ken’s first seminar talk. It was at the System Seminar in 2004.

Videos from System Seminar TV.com

Ken McCarthy, Greg Davis and Lloyd Irvin at Lloyd’s private gym

If you stick with anything long enough, life takes all kinds of fascinating twists and turns.

I was planning on a “kick back”, hang loose summer, but when you’re in the Internet marketing world you have to be prepared for pleasant surprises.

A couple of months ago Lloyd Irvin sent me a long text.

Lloyd is twice world champion in Brazilian Jujitsu and twice US champion in Judo and Russian Sambo. He’s also a heck of an entrepreneur and has interests in a number of areas including publishing, Internet marketing, and real estate. With a small, highly effective team he’s built a very successful business.

I’m proud to say that the System helped get Lloyd off on the right foot on the Internet, a fact he graciously shares with everyone who asks. In turn, he’s been an inspiration to me – and when Lloyd talks, I listen.

So when Lloyd sent me a long text raving about the breakthrough work of his colleague Greg Davis, I decided to waste no time, get on a plane and get myself to Maryland to see first hand what had gotten him so excited.

Long story, short version

Greg’s one of those guys who’s been working diligently for years on cracking the Internet marketing code. You know the routine…endless experiments. Some of them bomb. Some work, but not well enough to get excited about. Two steps forward and sometimes three steps back.

But he stuck with it and along the way he accumulated experience and KNOWLEDGE.

Greg was one of the early pioneers who bought clicks from GoTo when you could get keywords for a penny because no one else was smart enough to recognize their value.

Bit by bit, things started to click for him (pardon the double pun) and he watched his income grow until he got to the point that keeping his 9 to 5 job was not only no longer necessary, it was absurd.

Then through a combination of his own deep study and a few critical insights from Perry Marshall, Glenn Livingston, and Gauher Chaudhry plus mentoring from Lloyd (not-so-coincidentally all these guys have been System faculty members), Greg made a truly big breakthrough.

How big?

Wealth beyond your wildest dreams

Greg’s numbers are so big that I hesitate to say because a lot of people are going to have trouble wrapping their minds around them.

Let’s just say Greg nets in a week what a lot of people would be very happy to make in a good year – and he does it with bare bones overhead. And most importantly, it’s based on a formula that works over and over again. As long as there’s an Internet and people are spending money on it, this system will work.

Though you may be aware of some of the elements (PPC, CPA, affiliate marketing, tracking and testing conversion), I guarantee you’ve never seen this system before.

To help me keep up with all the info that Greg was willing to share with me, I brought System grad Ben Moskel who does over $1,000,000 a year in affiliate sales generated by pay-per-click.  The whole weekend we visited with Greg and Lloyd, Ben never put his pen down.  I swear at times I thought it was going to start smoking he was writing so long and hard.

The Internet marketing brain trust: Where killer Internet marketing ideas are born. If past is prologue, months, even years from now, the hot air “gurus” will be trying to peddle the leftover scraps from this weekend for thousands of dollars a pop.  If you were part of the System, you’d be getting it whole while it’s still fresh.  Left to right: Lloyd Irvin, Ken McCarthy, Greg Davis, Chris Chico, Ben Moskel

Chris Chico, another very savvy Internet marketer, was also invited to sit on in this very private two day session. Here’s a picture of the five of us together at the end of the weekend. We were visiting Lloyd’s training facility in Camp Springs, Maryland  just around the corner from Andrews Air Force base, right outside of Washington DC.

When he’s not running his chain of martial arts schools, publishing, training entrepreneurs, dealing in real estate, starting and growing Internet businesses, Lloyd trains UFC fighters.  It’s been a mystery to me how this one guy gets so much done. Then I met his team.  Sharp, smart and tight. If Lloyd ever gives a seminar on how to build and manage a world class team, all I can say is “Go!” I’ll be sitting in the front row.

OK, how does Greg make all this money?

I know what you’re thinking…”Glad you had a great time in Maryland Ken, but get to the money. The money.”

There are three levels to what Greg does:

Level One: Good, solid, old school affiliate marketing, the kind that can get anyone who applies themselves to the $500 to $5,000 a month level.

Level Two: Greg is a master of the tools, strategies, tricks and techniques of affiliate marketing.  No one knows everything – and Greg was wide open to learn from everyone at our private meeting – but when it comes to high level, deep KNOWLEDGE of how to shake the affiliate money tree, he’s got it – and that’s what got him to $500 to $5,000 a day.

Level Three: This is where Greg is at now. Again, for the reason I gave earlier, I’m not going to even talk about his current numbers, other than to say they make Level Two look sad and forlorn.

His years of effort, study and testing paid off and gave Greg a profound insight that “flipped” regular affiliate marketing upside down and turned it on its head.

Bottom line: A whole lot of what you’ve heard about the “right” way to do affiliate marketing is backwards. Yeah, it will work and it will make pretty good money, but if you want rock star money, crazy money that makes even Internet gurus gasp, you’ve got to enter into what I can only call Planet Greg, an alternate – and very profitable – universe.

And I’ll tell you straight up, most people are not ready for it.

They don’t have the necessary foundation of experience and knowledge to be able to execute what Greg is doing, let alone understand it.

Besides that, after looking at Greg’s system for two solid days, my advice to him was to put a padlock on it. No amount of money he could ever make teaching would ever compensate him for letting the cat out of the bag.

He asked me for my honest advice and that’s what I told him.

But the door is not closed…

Greg can definitely help you if you’re at the beginning of your affiliate marketing path (seeking to make $500 to $5,000 a month) or if you’re a pro who wants to leverage your current know-how into a lot more revenue ($500 to $5,000 a day.)

I can tell you from working with him for two days, he’s a masterful and generous teacher. It would be great to have someone like him inside the System circle teaching.

So, I took a shot and asked him if he’d like to come to London and present at our upcoming UK Intensive.

Think about how significant this is. I created the UK Intensive specifically to highlight UK Internet marketing wizards, but Greg is so extraordinary I decided to throw out my playbook out and ask him, a Yank, to teach.

After thinking about it a bit, he said “sure” so I’m happy to report that the first live public training given by Greg Davis in advanced affiliate marketing (traffic + conversion) will in London this September at the System UK Intensive. Will there be another? Who knows? I know the fact that this event is in London was a big hook for Greg and his wife.

The last I checked registrations are already a hair over 2/3 sold out and as you know, I’ve barely even advertised the thing. As the date gets closer and I get on the job, we’re be closing the doors on this one pretty quick.

I don’t care where you live. If you’re in Internet marketing and you’ve got a chance to spend some time with this guy: take it.

This development has been so sudden, we haven’t had time to include Greg in the description of the course, but here’s how to get all the info about the rest of the program.

http://www.systemintensive.com/uk

Best,

Ken

Ken McCarthy and Lloyd Irvin

P.S. The thing I’ve always admired about martial arts (real martial arts) is that it’s the ultimate No BS discipline. You can’t fake your way into it. You can’t rip off someone else’s work and present it as your own. You’ve got to personally stand and deliver and you can’t coast on last year’s or even last week’s accomplishments.

Lloyd just turned 40 this year. I’m going to be 50 in September, but I can still take him (in my dreams!) LOL

But seriously, the greatest satisfaction from teaching Internet marketing (real teaching, not “guru” prancing and posturing) is all the System grads who go out and do amazing stuff with what they learn and the many like Lloyd, who are gracious enough to turn around and give back.

That’s why there’s 1001 “dog and pony” Internet seminars and a million and one “flash in the pan” gurus, but only one System Seminar.

You see, we actually TRAIN our students to accomplish great things and many do and with this formula our circle and knowledge base just gets bigger and bigger, year after year.

You know the difference

If you’ve been to a System Seminar, you know what I mean. If you haven’t been and you’re in Internet marketing for real, you’ve really been depriving yourself.

The UK Intensive in London, England this September 26 & 27th is a great opportunity for you to get involved with real world,  high level Internet marketing, the kind that;s only dreamed about by most Internet marketers.  We’re limiting the group to just 79 attendees to keep it manageable and well more the half of the seats have already been claimed.

Participants at the UK Intensive will not only get the live training, they’ll also get the complete recordings of last year’s UK Intensive featuring direct marketing legend Drayton Bird (we’re still working to digest all the wisdom he shared with us last year) Plus they’ll also get the complete DVDs of System 2009 in Chicago (which alone sell for over $1,495.00 US.)

I want smart people at this event. If you’re smart, join us. We’d love to have you add to the power of our Master Mind.

Details:

http://www.systemintensive.com/uk

Transcript of a talk given by Ken McCarthy, November 5, 1994 in San Francisco to an audience of advertisers, publishers, and multimedia producers at Pacific Bell’s Yerba Buena Media Center

“This was a great talk for 1994, and it would still be a good talk today. Most people still don’t get the points you made…” – April 27, 2000

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.
User Advocate and Principal, Nielsen Norman Group

In the spring of 1994, the Internet Gazette’s founding publisher Ken McCarthy made an amazing discovery. Here in the Bay Area, the undisputed capital of digital media, there was virtually no conversation between the multimedia industry and the world’s largest collection of Internet gurus.

To remedy this strange state of affairs and open a dialogue (which is now in full throttle), Ken enlisted the aid of Marc Andreessen and Mark Graham to introduce the multimedia world to the wonders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. This meeting – the first major conference ever devoted exclusively to the subject of commercial opportunities in web publishing – was made possible by the enthusiastic support of Maurice Welsh, Pacific Bell’s Director of New Media Development and Jeannine Parker, International President of the 3,500 member International Interactive Communications Society.

What follows are excerpts of Ken’s remarks from this now historic meeting held November 5, 1994 in San Francisco, at Pacific Bell’s Yerba Buena Media Center.

We’re here today because this year the Internet has really changed. It’s become a true medium that attracts people from all walks of life. How did that happen? Well, Mosaic is the reason it happened and the Internet now takes its place with television, radio, publishing, and CD-ROMs as a medium, not just as a place for computer people to hang out.

Of course, the number of people on the Internet now is very small relative to the other mediums I mentioned, but that’s not the point. That’s not what defines a medium. It’s not just numbers. It’s who shows up to play. And what the future holds.

How did this particular meeting come to be? I was amazed to discover when I did some inquiries last spring that very few multimedia producers were even on the Internet, let alone Internet savvy. It’s a growing number, but then it was less than 20%. I thought, that’s very odd. Here we are in San Francisco, the world center for multimedia development. The Internet, by definition, is distributed all over the world, but a lot of the great Internet talent is right here in the Bay area. Yet there was no dialog. Kind of strange. It’s particularly strange because the Internet really needs multimedia developers, and vice versa.

What’s going to determine whether the Internet succeeds or not are not technical issues, it’s going to be content issues. Is the programming that’s going to be on the Internet interesting enough, motivating enough, enlightening enough that people are going to want to tune in and use it? That’s purely a content issue. Nobody goes to the movies to watch the technology of the movies. They go to the movies for the story and the action. When we think about movies we think about the Academy Awards. Hundreds of millions of people watch the Academy Awards on TV every year. How many people know or think about the annual SMPTE Convention? A very, very small number. And that’s what’s going to happen in the Internet too.

The Internet needs compelling content. And who better to produce digital interactive content than multimedia title producers? They’re the only people on the planet who have experience doing it, who even think about it.

But there is another reason why multimedia people should get hip to the Internet very fast and that’s because the CD-ROM business, in my opinion as a person in the publishing business, is a lousy business to be in. It’s terrible. Why? Well, let’s say you spend two hundred thousand dollars to produce a decent title. Now you’ve got to press it. You’ve got to package it, and the packaging often costs a lot more than the pressing. You’ve got to inventory it, which is like taking a big pile of money and putting it in a closet. Not much fun. You’ve got to find a distributor. You’ve got to beg a distributor to take your material. It’s true, isn’t it? I see people nodding their heads. Then you’ve got to give them a big piece of the sales price. Then your distributor has to persuade a retail store to take the disk. And to be truly effective your persuasion somehow has to reach a $6 an hour clerk to take those titles out of the backroom and make sure they’re well stocked on the shelf, and that one link in the chain can undo millions of dollars of promotion.

But as bad as all this is, there is even a more important reason why CD-ROMs are not a great deal for publishers. You have no contact with your customer. You have no relationship. Their relationship is with the store or the catalog they’re buying from. So you’ve gone through all this effort to produce a title, to excite somebody enough to buy it, but at the crucial moment when money changes hands, you’re not there, and most importantly, you are not positioned to sell them your next creation. You have to go right through the old channels of distributors and stores all over again.

Now the thing that excites me about the Internet is that it allows you direct contact with your customers. No middlemen. You produce it, you distribute it. And you can build up a following and profit from that following. One of the tragedies of the way our media system is set up now is that we all have to go through film studios or recording companies or publishers to get our work out. And these companies don’t necessarily make their decisions based on quality. They just don’t. Their decisions are made with a lifeboat mentality. They have limited resources and ferocious overhead, like distribution and inventory, which eats up enormous amounts of capital.

So what gets produced these days is not necessarily the best, the best for society, or even what people are really interested in, but the lowest common denominator that fits within certain financial parameters. What fits in the lifeboat. The Internet can do a lot to change this and we’ve seen some success stories already.

What I’d like to use as a point of departure for my remarks today are the Internet stories that the media has missed this year. The media has done a great job of hyping the Internet and getting a lot of people interested in and excited about it, but they’ve gotten a few stories wrong, presented others in a confusing manner, and have left certain key points out of others. So, since I’ve got a podium, I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do, correct the newspaper.

First misconception: A lot of people are talking about “Cyberspace”, and the “Information Superhighway” with the idea that we’re trying to create an alternate environment and the measure of our success will be that everything is done there. And that we should be gearing all our attention to creating this place that is completely independent of the rest of the world.

That’s crazy. Would you start a business that only did business on the telephone? In other words, you wouldn’t have a store, you wouldn’t talk to anybody in person, you wouldn’t send mail or receive mail, you would only deal on the telephone. Would you have a business that only had a store but didn’t use the telephone and didn’t use the mail system? Of course not.

The picture of every mature business is that they use every conceivable channel available. They use the mail intelligently, they use the phone system intelligently, they use video intelligently, and they use the Internet intelligently. So let’s get rid of this idea that we’re trying to create some alternate world that’s going to be completely independent of all the other medias that exist. What we’re really doing right now is learning how the Internet fits in amongst all these existing medias. To integrate the different medias so that they support and coordinate with each other.

Second crazy thing that I hear going around alot is “How are people going to find out about what’s on the Internet? How many places can we post on the Internet to tell people what we’re doing?” Well, how do people find out about your telephone number? And how do people find out the location of your store? You advertise. And you use every available means. You use television commercials, or radio commercials, or direct mail campaigns, or space ads in magazines, or you put on conferences, or all the other things that you do to get people to dial your phone number – these are some of the things you need to do to get people to dial up your web site. So don’t worry that there may not be enough advertising opportunities on the Internet itself to get people to come to your site, though even this is changing rapidly, just look out to all the other medias that are available and use those to drive people to your site.

What other stories has the press gotten wrong? Demographics. Who is on the Internet and who is not on the Internet. In the Wall St. Journal or Times recently there was this story, “The people on the Internet have more time than money.” Hey, surprise, that defines 95% of the world, including me some of the time. I know that big companies, like Dow Jones take comfort in demographic studies. But they make little sense in a new exploding medium. What sense would it have made to do a demographic study of television owners in 1949? There were 8,000 of them. Let’s say you’d done a brilliant study, and you’d wrung every ounce of data out of it, what would it have proved? Nothing. What if you’d studied PC owners in 1978. That would’ve told you a lot. Not.

Yes, when an industry is mature. . . if you’re trying to figure out if you should buy an ad in Steel Making Today, then demographics are important. But with a medium that’s growing 20% a month or more, it’s off the point. “Is this is a real medium? Is this something that’s going to last? Is it really going to grow?” And my answer to that is another question: “Does it fill a need?” And the answer to that question is – yes. And that is why the Internet is growing so fast and will continue to grow. So disregard all demographic studies regarding the Internet. I don’t see what the point there is in them at this stage if you’re making the decision of whether or not to learn how to produce content for the Web.

There was another article in another major publication which said something to the effect that “people are setting up Internet catalogs, but nobody’s buying anything.” Did anyone see that story? Well, I’m well versed in the realities of the direct marketing industry which includes direct mail and catalogs, and producing infomercials and direct response television commercials, and I’ll tell you right now, at least nineteen out of twenty direct marketing ventures in the old fashioned mediums of television and print don’t work either. It’s quite hard to create a direct marketing business that works.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the early pioneers of Internet cataloging might not be getting the sales they hoped for initially. Number one, the market is a little thin. While there are millions and millions of people with some kind of Internet access, not all of them know how to find catalogs. And number two, a lot of the people running online catalogs are not marketers, and take this on faith, one of the hardest businesses, from a marketing point of view to run is a catalog business. It’s a brutal business. Every time the postage rate goes up a penny, catalog companies fail by the hundreds. The margins are razor thin. It’s tough to sell things at a distance, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the initial attempts at selling via the Internet are running into certain difficulties. So I wouldn’t take that story seriously either.

Bandwidth limitations. I always hear about bandwidth limitations. Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say it’s 1880. And we’re down at the telegraph station and the train is pulling in and you point to that train and you tell me: “Someday we’re going to take that train and shrink it down. We’re going to put rubber wheels on it and create a road system so you can take that train anywhere you want to go. And it’s going to be so cheap that everyone’s going to have their own. Anyone who wants to can have their own train, drive it anywhere they want.” What do you think the reaction would have been? “You’re nuts! You’ve been taking too many of those opium-laced patent medicines they advertise in the back of them fancy pulp magazines.”

Now walk into the telegraph office. What was a telegraph office? It was a line of people waiting patiently to hand their message to a technologist who, using binary code, would send the message to another technologist who would translate it for the receiver. Let’s say you went to one of those people waiting on line and said “Someday you’re going to have your own telegraph office. It’s going to be in your house. And you’re not going to need anybody to operate it for you because you’re just going to be able to speak over the line and you’re going to be able to talk to anyone you want to talk to whose got a line.” Again, the reaction’s going to be the same.

The human race, and I think Americans in particular, if I can be a little prejudiced, is capable of creating all sorts of amazing leaps of technology and we’re really just talking about adding a little bit more bandwidth. We’re not talking about inventing something new, or laying the first transatlantic cable, which was quite a difficult physical feat. We’re talking about taking technology that we already have, figuring out how to pay for it, and installing it. So the bandwidth problems. . . when they’ll be solved, I don’t know, but the solutions are inevitable.

Speaking of bandwidth, more than one multimedia publisher has said to me: “I can’t distribute my CD-ROM on the Internet. What good is it?” Well, why not create a product that works on the network as it is? The people that produced the game Doom seem to be doing alright with this strategy. I read this week they have 500,000 store orders sitting on their desk for their first-ever retail release. They got their start distributing online.

There is a principal in direct marketing that if you can’t get your product distributed in stores, run your own mail order ads, run your own infomercials, run your own direct response tv commercials, and, if you succeed, you can force the big retail distribution networks to take you seriously and adopt your product. The Internet is another viable way to force distribution. I would look at it that way, if I were you.

For a little perspective on where we are right now, let’s take a look at this picture. It’s from the cover of a magazine that was published in 1925 called Radio Broadcast. It’s a very interesting thing to study. First, the topics being discussed, “A Good Four Tube Receiver.” How many people listening to the radio today have any knowledge or interest at all in what is going on inside it? They don’t care. And that’s how the Internet should be and will be.

Next topic – “Choosing a B-Battery Eliminator.” Somehow this was important to people messing around with radio seventy years ago. And then finally, the million dollar question: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” Sound familiar? Well, we worked it out somehow and we’ll work it out somehow with the Internet.

Some funny things about this picture. This could be a PC guy, right? No problem. He’s got his manual open on the floor, actually there’s a pile of them, and he needs every one. Batteries sitting behind his chair, a tangle of wires and headphones that no longer work, but might work again some day. He’s smoking a pipe, and I’ll leave what might be in it up to your imagination. And – can you see the expression on his face? – he’s extremely excited. You might even say he’s wired! That was seventy years ago, and guys like him created broadcasting, then a big question mark, now a multi multi-billion dollar business.

A lot of people say the Internet is having an impact similar to the first printing press. I don’t think that’s an accurate analogy. Gutenberg’s Bible was more like the first original mainframe computer. There weren’t many of them and they were expensive. Books were still the property of popes and cardinals, kings and princes. The vast majority of people couldn’t read.

The more accurate analogy to what we’re living through now is the late 19th century. What happened in the late 19th century? Because of the coming together of a lot of different forces, print suddenly became very cheap.

We see print everywhere now, and we assume that it’s always been ubiquitous. We assume that newspapers and magazines have always been around. The fact is – that’s not true. We did not have an explosion of print as a mass medium until after the Civil War. For example, in 1850 there were 254 newspapers in the US total. Fifty years later there were 2600 daily newspapers, 520 Sunday newspapers, and 15,500 weekly newspapers. Before the Civil War, most families were lucky to have a single Bible, and it was a family Bible, passed down from generation to generation.

After the Civil War, there was a remarkable phenomenon called the Sears Catalog. Richard Sears very intelligently realized: “We’ve got cheap printing. We’ve got a postal service that goes everywhere. We’ve got a national railroad system to ship goods anywhere. Why not make a beautiful book, put all the stuff we have to sell in it and give it away so that it ends up in everyone’s home.” Think about the intelligence of giving away a marvelous book, a luxury item, so intrinsically interesting that people loved to page through it – and in the process bought billions of dollars of goods in the process.

Just as low cost printing made newspapers and magazines and the Sears Catalog possible, low cost computer networking is creating an explosion of opportunities that would have been impossible to imagine even three years ago. And remember, as the Doom guys and Mosaic showed, the Internet makes the distribution of free digital goodies extremely easy.

There was one more big story that everybody missed this year. There was an invention 150 years ago that made high speed travel possible. It made mass production possible. It was the precursor of the telephone, of recorded music, of broadcasting. One invention. All those innovations flowed directly out of this one invention. Does anyone know what it was? It’s celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. It’s the telegraph, the first telecom device.

So many amazing things came from the telegraph culture. A lot of people don’t know that when Edison invented the phonograph he was not trying to record music. He was trying to make a way to automatically relay telegraph messages. The wax cylinders he used were meant to record dot and dashes. The telephone was originally an attempt to send multiple telegraph messages on a single line. Bell discovered, “Wow, we can put a voice through this too. Cool!” You couldn’t have high speed train travel until you had the telegraph because you couldn’t very well send a train barreling down the track at 60 miles an hour unless you knew with some degree of certainty what was going on a half hour or so away.

So the telegraph is the ancestor of just about everything modern we know today, and this year it’s 150 years old. I think it’s fitting that this is also the first year that the Internet fully sheds its experimental status and takes its place as a fledgling medium along with print and TV. Like the telegraph, the Internet will surely spawn all kinds of inventions and new ways of doing things, things we can’t imagine today. And someday, strangely enough, our descendants will look back at 1994, the year of the birth of the Internet-as-medium, as the old days and wonder how in the world we ever got by with such primitive technology!