I was once interviewed my someone (a serious marketer) who before he started the recording asked if it was OK if he mentioned John Caples.

“Of course!” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

His answer was one of those things that initially shocked but did not surprise me…”Because half of the Internet marketing ‘experts’ I interview these days won’t let me mention anything that they can’t earn a commission from.”

That, sadly, sums up the state-of-affairs in much of what is called Internet marketing “education” today.

It’s a jungle out there. Choose your advisors wisely. Some have a vested interest in you not knowing what’s going on.

Be all you can be. Read.

Whether you’re the rawest new beginner or a seasoned pro with years under your belt, there are two things you need to know about Internet marketing:

1. Internet marketing is direct marketing
2. There is a gold mine of information on the subject contained in the many excellent books real marketing experts have written over the years

I know of no better way to accelerate your progress while at the same time improving your BS detector than to read – and continuously read – the books I call the Classics.

The secret, “they” hope you never find out

I try to spend at least 15 to 20 minutes every day going over one or more of these books.

It may not seem like much time, but it adds up.

Just 20 minutes a day is over two hours a week which is over 100 hours a year. That’s a brain changing (and life changing) chunk of time. I’ve been doing it for over twenty years myself.

As I’ve told all my students since Day One and repeat at every System Seminar: “Soak your brains in these books.They will change your life.”

You can do this – and why you should

This list could be much longer, but ten is plenty. In fact, any one of these books has the power to be life changing for you.

No matter what your budget of time and/or money, you can afford this “program.” In fact, I’d say nobody, no matter how much they already know, can afford not to do it.

The most successful marketers I know are invariably the most serious readers – and the very best ones never stop.

My Top Ten Reading List

1. My Life in Advertising – Claude Hopkins
2. Tested Advertising Methods – John Caples (Fourth edition or earlier)
3. How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling – Frank Bettger
4. Scientific Advertising – Claude Hopkins
5. How to Write a Good Advertisement – Victor Schwab
6. My First Sixty Years in Advertising – Maxwell Sackheim
7. Secrets of Successful Direct Mail – Richard Benson
8. Breakthrough Advertising – Eugene Schwartz
9. The Robert Collier Letter Book – Robert Collier
10. Common Sense Direct and Digital Marketing – Drayton Bird

While some of these books are hard to find, many are readily available in low cost editions.

Reading just one will make your year. Making them a part of your day will change your life.

The real secret of marketing success

Successful marketing comes from developing a way of thinking.

It’s not a the result of a bag of tricks and it’s certainly won’t come from a “coaching” program sold out of high pressure telephone boiler room.

Success is largely a do-it-yourself process.

It helps a lot if you have someone close to you who can show you the ropes. I didn’t. So I read.

By reading, I gradually found the real experts who knew what they were talking about.

I’m not saying I never went down a wrong path or was never fooled by a personable con artist. I have been. Plenty of times. But because of these books, even in the worst of times, I’ve always had a reliable rudder which has kept me on course.

Be all you can be. Read.

Best,

Ken

P.S. Our annual System Seminar is rooted in the direct marketing classics.

This year, we’ll be meeting April 9 through 11 and as has been true for the last five years our meeting will be in Chicago.

I picked Chicago as our annual “headquarters” because the Chicago area has the biggest concentration of direct marketers in the world. More even than New York.

It’s the place Claude Hopkins and Maxwell Sackheim, the guys who practically invented direct marketing, cut their teeth.

You can read all about this year’s faculty and the subjects we’ll be covering here: Click here for more information

You probably think of him as the Google AdWords guy.

Actually, he’s a lot more than that, but it’s as good a handle as any.

After all, what single factor has had the biggest impact on Internet marketing over the last four years?

I think you’d have to say AdWords: it’s traffic you can get NOW…testing you can do NOW…research you can do NOW.

It didn’t used to be this way.

In the bad old pre-AdWords days, it could take months to test an Internet business idea. Then Google came along and made it possible to turn targeted traffic on and off like water. Pretty neat.

Perry did the Internet marketing world a huge service by being the first to sort it all out for us.

In fact, he gave the very first serious talk on Google AdWords ever at a System Seminar way back in 2003.

Just think of all the people who’ve sold systems based on AdWords since then. It adds up to a small army.

Yet over all these years and all these folks when you think of AdWords – one of the mission critical tools in our biz – it’s
Perry’s name that comes up when you think QUALITY.

Bottom line: When the pros need to sharpen their game, they call Perry.

If you know anything about Internet marketing, you know that it never stands still. And Perry hasn’t been standing still
either.

In 2006, he used the insights he’s gained working with some of the world’s top Internet marketers to put together a
radically new approach to Internet business building.

They say there’s noting new under the sun, but when you find out what he’s been up to, you may change your tune on that.

I believe when what Perry’s accomplished gets out, it’s going to have an even bigger impact than Google AdWords did for the lucky few who “get” it.

If you’d like to be one of the first to see what serious, high probability Internet marketing looks like, I’ve arranged to spend
an hour with Perry this Friday on the phone.

If you want to listen in, you’re welcome.

Details: http://ken.adwordstactics.com

Ken

Sell nothing, talk to nobody, provide no customer service…

In short: do nothing…and watch the big bucks roll in.

This fantasy – pushed aggressively by an ever-growning army of Internet pitchmen – has probably caused would-be Internet marketers to lose more money (not to mention time and sleep) than the national debt.

Let’s make 2007 the year we all get over it.
Yes, you can make some money collecting traffic and passing it on to others (AdSense, affiliate programs, whatever) to “close” it for you.

It’s a legitimate way to generate revenue, but here’s the key: it’s not a business!

I tried to explain this to folks way back in 1994.

(Maybe you’ve seen the video where I first talked about this.

If not, just go to Google Video and enter the keyword “marketing.” It usually comes us as #2. It’s called the First Internet Marketing Conference.)

Bottom line: In my book, it ain’t a business unless you own the most valuable asset there is on earth: a big list of customers with money in their pockets who are happy to spend it with you.

Any activity that does not result in generating a customer list and a positive relationship with the people on it just doesn’t cut it – for me at least.

Customers are the source…they’re the gold…they’re what makes the world go ’round and if you want to…last as a
business…and maximize your lifetime income…the key is to get as close to your customers as you possibly can.

Maybe someday this idea will become common in Internet marketing circles.

And maybe someday pigs will fly, but for those who “get” what I’m saying, consider this…

On the average, for every 100 people who come to your site, 98 leave without doing anything.

They don’t buy, they don’t opt-in, they don’t download anything.

They’re gone – and you don’t know who they are, why they came to you in the first place and why they turned away from your offer – even your snazzy, free, no obligation one.

Think of all the effort and expense it takes to get someone to your site…

Are you really happy knowing that the overwhelming majority of visitors leave your site without taking even the first step toward becoming a customer?

If you’re sane, you shouldn’t be.

If we ran real stores with monthly rent and utility bills and staff and inventories, we’d care a lot more about this.

But because it’s the Internet and everything is free (what a joke that is), we don’t care as much.

Big mistake.

Big expensive mistake.

Big expensive mistake that keeps us running ’round and ’round on the hamster wheel expending lots of energy, but
gathering little green.

So what’s the answer?

This year I came across a guy who has one of the most intriguing solutions to this problem I’ve ever seen.

Once you get over the shock of how much sense it makes and “why didn’t anyone think of this before” I think you’re going to find what he’s doing very exciting.

As in a tenfold increase in revenue…from the same amount of visitors. Those are his results and lots of the people he’s taught his method to are enjoying similar gains.

Check it out:

http://www.unlockyourbiz.com

Enjoy!

Ken

P.S. It’s a new year. Anything’s possible.

One thing I do at the end of each year is get rid of as much old stuff – books, clothes, outmoded ideas – as I can so I make room for new stuff to come in.

Try it. It’s simple, but it works.

This year throw out the outdated way you look at your customers…and this is one of the best places I know to start:

http://www.unlockyourbiz.com

“You should spend more time on how to sell physical products online. It’s a great opportunity for people.”

Mike knew what he was talking about.

He took his family’s business forms business from $700 a month to over $1 million a year in online sales in less than 18 months.

And he did it with just his basic System Seminar training and no special help from us.

He was right, of course.

Many System grads chose to apply what they learned at the System not to selling information, but to selling hard goods.

And lots of them did very, very well.

When something happens naturally, it’s always a good idea to pay attention – and pay attention I did.

Here’s what I learned…

I went on an intensive search to find folks who were:

a) successful at selling physical products online and

b) willing and able to talk about it.

Surprisingly, this was not an easy thing to do.

Most people who are good at selling physical products online don’t see any reason to slow down long enough to teach what they know to others. Also, many of them go into selling *physical* products specifically because they’re NOT speakers, or writers or teachers.

They’re just guys who sell stuff and make money. Simple.

A big breakthrough came for me when I met Andy Jenkins. Andy not only ran several successful online stores, he captured everything he learned about the process in a book.

“Andy, you realize there’s $10,000 worth of information in that book, don’t you?” (I think at the time he was selling it for $49.)

It was a super book and the reason I know is that is that it helped launch so many online physical products success stories.

One day Andy suggested I meet his friend Robin Cowie. Robin is an expert on one of the most important aspects of selling physical products online: product sourcing.

Unlike info marketing, where most entrepreneurs create their own material or license it from colleagues, folks who sell physical products live or die on the quality of their product sourcing.

If you’re good at sourcing, it means you can find high quality, high demand goods from reliable vendors at excellent prices.

This is one skill physical products marketers must have. All the traffic and fancy marketing in the world won’t help you one bit if you can’t find a steady supply of product. But sourcing product ain’t easy.

First of all it’s very labor intensive… Long hours searching directories, contacting suppliers, deciphering terms, and then testing.

And I don’t mean testing ads. I mean testing whether your supplier is reliable!

This is a huge challenge in the physical products business. Probably less than 1 out of 10 suppliers is worth doing business with.

A few years back, one of Robin’s colleagues had a brainstorm…why not find and catalog all the reliable, net entrepreneur-friendly product suppliers there are in each product category and make all the information available in a single guide.

It was a simple idea, but very powerful.

In a short time, thousands of online merchants were using the resource and even eBay was looking to Robin’s company for advice and training for its own merchants. Fast foward to the present…

No matter what you’re selling, whether it’s information, advice, services or physical products, it pays to think about selling physical products. Let me give you one example of why:

An attendee at last year’s System Seminar, a veteran online marketer who provides Internet services to dentists, stood up at the end of the conference and said: “Robin Cowie just added a million dollars in annual sales to my company – minimum.

We have a relationship with thousands of dentists and it never occured to me howit easy it could be to source physical products to sell them. I didn’t know that there are company’s that make selling physical products as easy as selling eBooks. We can just send them payment and they handle all the warehousing and shipping for us. Virtual and hands-off.

This is going to be a gold mine for us.”

No matter what you sell, there may be a line of physical products you can add to your business to increase your overall sales. If you’re already in the business of selling physical products, Robin’s sourcing resources are invaluable.

But as good as Robin’s service has been, it just got ridiculously better. He’s just come out with a service called One Source that when I saw it literally made the hair stand up on the back of my head!

It’s an insanely advanced product research service at an insanely low price.

Frankly, I don’t get it.

But I know that Robin knows what he’s doing.

Maybe he’s decided he doesn’t need to make all the money in the world.

Mayeb he’s decided to become a humanitarian.

I don’t know, but if you’re in Internet marketing, you really should check this out without delay before he wises up and jacks up the price substantially.

Click here for Robin’s video about One Source

Enjoy!

Ken

* time-proven
* works like crazy in the right markets
* for all practical purposes – a secret
to Internet marketers who are not part
of the insiders group…

It’s called Pay-Per-Lead marketing.

http://www.ppladsystem.com/

If you’ve been around the Internet world for any length of time, you may also know it as CPA or cost-per-action. It’s the same thing. Just a different name.

How big is the potential here?

I had one colleague in the 1990s who made so much from these kinds of deals that he was able to retire in 2000 before he hit the age of 35.

Done. Finished. Living off interest and doing what he loved.

Yes, there’s that much money in this particular pie.

But before I get into the specifics of how these deals work, I want to tell you a little about the trailblazer who is bringing this little known, but highly lucrative area of Internet marketing to light.

Meet Mike Mograbi

This year I had the pleasure of getting to know Mike Mograbi.

While his name may not ring a bell for some, everyone knows the publication he launched in 2006:

Internet Marketing News Watch (IMNW)

What a great service IMNW is for people trying to keep up with the ever-changing world of Internet marketing.

If you don’t know Internet Marketing News Watch, google it and take a look.

It’s a news site that’s updated constantly (as in hourly) with news from the Internet marketing and high tech industries. There’s nothing like it in the world and visiting IMNW has become a daily ritual for thousands of marketers including me.

What some people may not know about Mike is that he’s based overseas – in Beruit, Lebanon.

If you followed the international news this year, you know what that means.

If not, here’s a conversation you could have had with him in July…

========================================

You: Hey Mike. How’s business?

Mike: Great! The site keeps growing by leaps and bounds and people really seem to like it.

You: How’s the family?

Mike: Well, at the moment my country is caught in the crossfire of a shoot out between Israel and Hezzbollah.

I drove my family across to Jordan to keep them from getting killed. We considered ourselves very lucky to have arrived in one piece. There are folks who weren’t as lucky.

Otherwise, we’re all fine. How about with you?

========================================

While we were all grilling hamburgers in the backyard this summer, this was, in fact, how Mike spent his summer
vacation.

And here’s the amazing part…

Through all of this, Mike’s business didn’t skip a beat.

And unless you knew Mike personally, you’d never know any of this was going on in his life.

Talk about grace under pressure!

As we go through 2007 and beyond, we might all remember Mike’s summer vacation next time we think we’re facing “adversity.”

If bombs aren’t falling on your city, things are probably not as bad as you think they are

And if you’re Mike-like, you could find a way to deal with it if they were.

Anyway, if all Mike did was start Internet Marketing News Watch and keep it running during a shooting war that would be a huge contribution to our industry.

But he’s done a lot more – and that’s what this letter is about…

This savvy, gutsy businessman – he has an MBA from the American University in Beruit – has cracked the code on the Pay-Per-Lead business and made it comprehensible – and easy – for the rest of us to join the party.

OK. What the heck is Pay-Per-Lead?

First, Pay-Per-Lead what’s known as a monetization method.

Most of us have pretty straightforward businesses.
We get traffic (paid and free), we convert visitors to prospects and then we convert prospects to buyers.

That’s one form of monetization.

People who sell banner ads, monetize their traffic by selling impressions and that’s called Cost-Per-Impression or CPI.

People who are playing the AdSense game are in the Cost-Per-Click business, or CPC.

Affiliate marketers monetize their traffic by sending visitors to merchant sites and they get paid when their leads turn into sales. Cost-Per-Sale. CPS.

Pay-Per-Lead occupies the sweet spot between affiliate marketing and AdSense.

You get paid – and paid shocking well – not for sales, but simply to get someone to fill out a form!

How big can these check be?

How does $8.00 *per lead* sound?

How does $18.75 – per lead – grab you?

Would you say “no” to $60 per lead?

These are actual industry examples of deals that are currently available right now.

It doesn’t matter whether your visitors buy anything or not. If they fill out a form, you get paid. Period.

You might be wondering how on earth can this be?

How can an advertiser afford to pay commissions when there there is no sale?

It’s simple.

The advertisers has done his math.

He knows to the penny what a completed form – a lead – is worth to him and not only is he glad to pay up, he’s anxious to find you and get you generating leads for him because the more qualified leads he gets, the more money he knows
he’ll make.

If have traffic, you might be sitting – right now – on the equivalent of a gold mine.

It’s not uncommon for marketers who “get” Pay-Per-Lead to quickly ad 50%, 100% or even more to their incomes – without adding a single new traffic source.

How many Pay-Per-Lead programs are there?

Hundreds – and they’re in practically every niche you can imagine.

If this is so great, you might be asking, what’s the catch and why haven’t you heard about this before?

Well, Pay-Per-Lead deals have been around practically since the beginning of Internet marketing. There’s no mystery there.

But to actually play this game used to require a ton of research and personal contacts.

There was no guide book.

Pay-Per-Lead really was – and still is – largely an insiders game.

But like I said at the beginning of all this, Mike’s applied that razor sharp, grace-under-pressure
mind of his to open this new world up to you.

How’s that for a new year’s present?

Check it out.

By the way, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you see how affordable he’s made it.

Two big thumbs way up on this one:

http://www.ppladsystem.com

Ken

P.S. 2007 can be your best year ever. Why not?

Best wishes for health, happiness and success for you and all your loved ones in 2007 and beyond.