“Ain’t gonna be no rematch!”
Me, after struggling across the finish line of my 3rd Indy Mini Marathon

The worst physical pain I ever suffered was when Scott Clayton delivered a picture-perfect blindside block to my left leg while it supported all of my 175 pounds plus another 15 or 20 of football equipment. Next was when I was flung  into a fence by a quarter horse who, just before I thought he was going to jump it, took a hard 90 degree right turn. My body, however, continued on its rather rapid southerly course and was stopped abruptly as I crashed left-side-first into the wooden barrier. that little drunk driving escapade cost me a broken Rolex GMT Master and four cracked ribs. Number 3 on my list was the last 3 miles of the Mini.

The Indianapolis 500 Festival Mini Marathon is the largest half marathon in the country and the third largest in the world. It attracts 35,000 participants, from the world’s elite long distance runners to geriatric hopefuls that really have no business trying to complete a 13.1 mile course that will require them to place one foot in front of the other over 25,000 times. The starting gun fires at 7:33 in the morning; the race winner will cross the finish line approximately 63 minutes later, about the same time those at the back of the pack will cross the starting line. They must finish 240 minutes later; those who cannot keep the requisite 18 minute per mile pace will have to board the “bus of shame” with a DNF behind their name.

In 1979 the Mini became an official 500 festival event and attracted 2,600 racers. I don’t recall when I first became aware of the Mini but I do know that I spent a whole lot of first-Saturdays-in-May ruing the fact that I had to work. And even if I could take the day off my job left precioous little time to acclimate my body to the rigors I would experience running a half marathon. Then, in February of 2009 I lost my job, laced up my sneakers and hit the pavement.

I “ran” my first Mini (okay, I walked a lot) with my brother Kerry and finished in an un-incredible 3:15. But the time was a small part of the attraction. For 13.1 miles I was treated like a rock star by enthusiastic bystanders and volunteers who fed me water and Gatorade while cheering me on: “Come on, you can do it! Only XX miles left, you’re almost done!”  I don’t think I’d even finished the banana they handed me at the finish line before Kerry and I agreed to sign up for next year’s race.

My unemployment ended in March of 2010, only eight weeks before the Mini. I was in good shape and only had to run/walk a couple of times a week to maintain my race conditioning. Two friends joined Kerry and I and I finished in 2:59; still unincredible but a few seconds under the 3:00 goal I’d set.

Kerry passed on the 2011 Mini but my friend John and his brother (the two that joined us in 2010) signed up for the 2011 race. Not wanting to miss the fun, I decided to join them.

Begin by building credibility for your site. One of the best ways to do that is to have other sites link to yours. For instance, here are a few sites that I own:

Repair Your Relationship
Electric Guitar Lessons
House Training A Dog
Stop Smoking Easily

And here is a link to a site I do some SEO work for:

Zionsville Dentist Suzanne Germain

What’s happening here is that this site is recommending those sites to its readers. There are other things that come into play here, specifically the credibility of the site doing the recommending. For instance, this site has a bit of Google page rank; that’s Google’s view of the importance of this page. It’s a scale fro 0-10 and this site is a “0″, which is decidedly better than the millions and millions of sites that have no page rank at all.

As to how you can build links to your sites, that’s a topic that deserves considerably more discussion than I’m able to allot time for right now. But here’s a hint–blog posts.

Before I continue with our discussion on niche selection I’d like to give my readers (MADs) a look at what an affiliate marketing site might look like. Obviously, the appearance of your storefront is limited only by your imagination but the template that I use is simple, to the point and very functional.

Check it out here: Electric Guitar Lessons

There is a lot going on here and in the coming weeks we’ll use this site as an example of what you can do to make money while hanging out in your pajamas. (And please remember that it is copyrighted; if you steal any of my stuff I’ll find out and you’ll hear from my lawyer.) For now I want you to notice two things.

First is the product and next is the store from which I sell said product. See all those articles and product reviews? Those items are what I use to attract people to my store.  Titles like “How to Read Guitar Tabs” and “2 Basic Bass Guitar Scales” aren’t just descriptive. They contain words or phrases that I’ve researched to find that they are reasonably well searched and relatively low in competition. For example, if you search Google for “basic bass guitar scales” you’ll find one of Google’s page 1 results is a link to my article on the topic.

But keyword research is a topic that deserves a post or 12 all to itself. For now, check out the site, read some articles, watch the video and if you’re moved to do so–buy Jamorama from me!

In my last installment I told you how to find products to promote in your affiliate marketing business. Now it’s time to investigate the next step, finding someone to sell products to (Oops! I did it again!). And keep in mind that these two steps do not necessarily need to take place in this order; finding your audience or “niche” can be your first step if you prefer.

In Internet affiliate marketing the term “niche” (pronounced “neesh” outside of the US) refers to a targeted group of potential customers, typically a subset of a larger and less well defined group. For example, people searching for “jazz guitar lessons” would be a tighter niche than people searching for “guitar lessons”. And capturing those searchers is what this Internet affiliate marketing is all about; to wit…

A Google search for “guitar lessons” (using the quotes to closely define the search) turns up 2,460,000 competing pages. Your efforts as an Internet affiliate marketer will focus on rising to the top of Google’s search results (getting on page 1) and the fewer competitors the easier it will be to do that. Winning a top spot for “guitar lessons” is highly unlikely.

A search for “jazz guitar lessons” produces only 31,900 competing pages; there’s a Google rankings battle you have a chance to compete in! Let’s look at a few other potential related niches and their search results:

• Online guitar lessons: 259,000 (3,000)
• Online jazz guitar lessons: 133,000 (35)
• Free online jazz guitar lessons: 63,400 (<10)
• Free online jazz guitar lessons for beginners: 0 (0)

Based on the information I’ve given you thus far it would appear that winning a Google top ranking for “free online jazz guitar lessons for beginners” would be a cakewalk—and in fact it would. However, the numbers in parentheses shed another important light on the niche selection process; they are the number of inquiries for that search term each day. And as you can see, no one searches for that term so getting Google’s #1 ranking would be meaningless to your bank account (though admittedly a boost for your ego). You can find numbers of searches as well as competition data and a host of other valuable information by visiting Google’s Free Keyword Tool here: Google Keyword Tool.

Now I have to go sell some cars or cut the grass or something, so I’m going to cut this post short. But there’s plenty more to learn regarding niche selection, so stay tuned for part two.

Having read the first two parts in this series on Internet marketing you are likely woozy with anticipation of the riches soon to befall you as a successful affiliate marketer (I’ll explain that term in a minute). And you are likely also in the dark as to where to start.

The first question most aspiring marketers ask is, “What am I gonna sell?” Good news—there are more products for you to choose from than there are in a Wal-Mart regional warehouse. And there are scores of sites on the ‘Net that represent producers of products (i.e., Neverblue Ads, Azoogle Ads, Commission Junction)that span the gamut of human consumables. And those producers are eager to find savvy “affiliates” (one who affiliates himself with the producer’s product and attempts to sell it to the final consumer) to market their wares and often pay commissions in excess of 60% of the sell price. Let’s take a look at the King Kong of affiliate networks, Clickbank.

Go to the top of the Clickbank homepage and click on the “Marketplace” link. Now look under the “Categories” heading and click on “Health and Fitness”. then be sure to sort by “Popularity”. The first product will be a popular and profitable one.

Under “Stats” you’ll find some interesting things about the product. $/sale tells you how much you’ll make every time you sell the product. %/sale is the percentage of the sale price you’ll receive. Now look at “Grav:” (gravity). The gravity of a product is a representation (Clickbank does not reveal their formula for calculating gravity) of how many affiliates have sold the product and how recently those sales have taken place. Most consider a gravity between 75-100 to be ideal; enough sales to warrant an effort to promote the product without too much competition.

Now click on the product’s title (it’s printed in red at the top of the ad). This will take you to the product’s sales page and you should spend some time investigating it. Your job as an affiliate is to drive traffic to that page—and then your job is done. It is up to the product manufacturer to create an effective sales page that converts interested “lookers” into buyers. And when he does, you get paid a commission; 24hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year…

In the first part of “An Internet Marketing Primer” we looked at the one of the traditional ways of putting products into the hands of hungry consumers; the retail store. The cost of doing business is high—rent, utilities, insurance, advertising and help add up to a big fat “nut” that needs to be cracked each month before Mr. Entrepreneur can begin paying his own rent, utilities, insurance, etc.

The personal cost is high, too. The retail store will be open 60+ hours per week and the owner will likely be there the vast majority of time the store is open. And when he’s physically free, his mind will remain incarcerated as he worries about his store. Now, let’s look at how I make money on the Internet selling a similar product.

Here’s my storefront, and in it you will find the guitar instruction books that I sell: http://electric-guitarlessons.com.

“Rent” for my store currently runs about $28/month. That’s its share of what I pay for hosting the site and my Internet access fee; that cost will drop as those two fixed expenses are spread over more sites as I build them.

I wrote all the articles and reviews on the site, and it took me about 20 hours to do that. While I acknowledge that my time is valuable, I spent $0 cash constructing my storefront.

I market my site using my knowledge of the best free Internet marketing techniques; keyword research, search engine optimization, link building, article marketing, directory listing, etc. Notice I said “free”; my monthly marketing expense runs $0. (Yes, you can spend money, and lots of it, marketing your site and one day I will explore that option. But for now I use the best free Internet marketing techniques.)

My hours are what I want them to be. I can build a site, choose a niche to market to and appropriate products, write product reviews/reports and articles (content) whenever and wherever I feel like doing it. My goal is to launch (build and market) one site per week; I’ve never actually counted hours because I love what I do and who punches an “I’m having fun playing golf with my buddies” time clock?

Once my storefront is running efficiently I can pretty much leave it alone and it will continue to earn money for me for months, or even years, to come. If I want to spend two weeks, or two months, in Aruba the groundwork I laid will continue to draw a hungry customer with credit card in hand to my site. If I am sitting on the beach or lying asleep in my bed and an aspiring guitar god in Istanbul decides to purchase “Jamorama”** from my site, I get paid.

So how much is one of these sites worth? Of course that’s impossible to say; build 10 sites and eight of them may be duds. But let’s use Jamorama for an example. The course costs $49.95 and pays a 75% commission; that’s about $37 to me. Let’s say that I sell a product 4 times a week; over a 30-day month that averages out to about $20 per day. I’m now making $600/month, or $7200/year; hardly a living but remember, I have 10 sites! So if I average $20/day on 10 sites I’m now making $72,000/year.

Remember, it takes me a week to build and market a site. So that means that every site I build earns me a $7200/ year raise. If I build one site a month for the next 12 months I will have given myself an $86,000 raise which when added to the $72,000 I’m currently earning from my sites will give me a total income of nearly $160,000—now we’re getting somewhere!

No, I am not doing this kind of business—yet. But now that I know how to do it I assure you I will. It has been a long and arduous task coming up with the tools, techniques and business model that has put me in a position to begin living the lifestyle of an Internet entrepreneur. The path to enlightenment is fraught with wrong turns, dead ends and charlatans. In coming articles I hope to share with you what I’ve learned in hopes of providing you with the freedom and independence that we all so desire in our lives—stay tuned, or better yet, subscribe.

**The link to that site contains a code that tells my affiliate that it was me who sent you to his site. That way, if you buy his product he knows to pay me. Go ahead, click on it; I don’t mind!

“So Old Dog, what are you doing these days?”

“Since I lost my job I’ve been learning the intricacies of Internet marketing.”

“Oh yeah; I have a friend who does that.”

I believe people when then tell me that; but I do not believe that they have any idea of what I do.

Selling books and guitars and baby clothes and advice as to how to get your ex back over the Internet is a slight shift on a paradigm that’s existed since Eve sold Adam on the apple idea. But there’s a whole new world of Internet marketing out there, and if you’re interested in improving your lot in life I encourage you to read on.

Let’s start with a quiz; how many of these terms can you define?

Search engine optimization, both on-page and off-page. Google AdWords. Google AdSense. Pay-per-click. Pay-per-view. Pay-per-action. Affiliate marketing. Affiliate network. Clickbank. FTP. Domain name. Website (I thought I’d throw you a bone!). Have you heard of ‘GoDaddy’? Do you have any idea what the do?

As you can see there is a whole new lingo that represents a whole new way of doing business.

And while I’m somewhat familiar with most variations on Internet marketing I’m going to focus on the one with which I’m most familiar, “affiliate marketing”. Let’s look first at the old way of marketing and then we’ll have a look at the way I do business on the Internet.

I’m a guitar player and I’ve built a website (http://electric-guitarlessons.com) to sell guitar instruction courses under this new paradigm we’re discussing. Here’s how to do the same thing the “old way”.

First you need to find a product or two; shouldn’t be tough, there are plenty of publishers and book wholesalers to help you find a few good-selling titles. Now you need a place where customers can come and buy your books. So you rent a storefront for, let’s just say, $1000/month.

You’ll be open from 9-6 Monday through Saturday and 12-5 on Sunday, but you can’t be there every minute of every day so you’ll need to hire some help. Let’s bring in a part-timer, say 20 hours/week @ $10/hour. That’s $800/month, and don’t forget that you’ll need to contribute 7.5%, or $60 of your money to her Social Security .

Then there’s the light bill, heat and AC, and don’t forget insurance; I’ll be conservative and estimate $500/month. You’ll need to bring customers through the door (that’s called ‘marketing’!); again, I’ll estimate advertising and marketing expenses conservatively at $500/month. So it looks like you’ll need $2410 just to open the door. With a typical wholesale>retail markup of 40% you’ll have to sell about $6000 worth of $20 mguitar instruction books to break even; at $20/book that’s 300 books, or 12 each day.

You will need some start-up cash, of course. There’s inventory to purchase, fixtures to buy and everyone who provides service to you is going to want a deposit in the unlikely event your business doesn’t fly. I don’t think $7500 is far-fetched at all.

All this expense is worth it to you, of course, because you know you’ll be one of the fortunate “two-thirds of new employer establishments [that] survive two years, and 44 percent [that] survive four years” (from the US SBA).

And no more punching the clock; no more answering to “the man”; no more “yes boss”, “no boss”.

Also no more time to play guitar or golf, no time for vacations, no time to play with the kids…you have abusiness to run, after all! I’ve worn the shoes of “business owner” and trust me; even in the best of times its like wearing a very large stone around your neck.

In Part II of “An Internet Marketing Primer” I’ll show you how I sell guitar instruction courses. I guarantee that you will be awakened to a whole new way of thinking about and doing business. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to click on that orange “Subscribe” button on the upper right of this page.

During the November prior to my emancipation I’d begun building a website based on a book I’d written called “Conversations with Katherine.” It is the story of …

“…a middle-aged man’s struggle to overcome the debilitating lack of self esteem bequeathed him by an abusive step-mother. It is a vicarious account of the author’s own journey back to sanity and the lessons he learned along the way.”

More than any other thing in my life I felt compelled to build this site; indeed I’d been enlisted by a Higher Power to share my experiences in order to bring comfort, hope and reconstructive methodologies to others whose lives had been derailed be child abuse. During the writing of the second half of the book I’d learned an important lesson; I didn’t need to know how anything was going to turn out. I only needed to take the next step (which was always apparent) and have faith that I’d ultimately be led to a destination that was right for me.

This is a truth that I carry with me everywhere, and anytime I get agitated or worried about how a seeming challenge will be resolved I remember to simply take the next step with faith that by doing so the next one will be revealed and in due time, the successful resolution to the problem will come about. Then one day during an infrequent Internet surfing session (LMAO!) I stumbled into the world of Internet marketing. (Come on! I don’t care how good you are at putting one foot in front of the other; eventually you’re going to stumble!)

If I had to write a small classified ad for a class to teach Internet marketing it would read something like this:

“Work from home. Earn Ferrari money in 10 hours a week. For more info call toll free, 1 800-BULLSHIT.”

It’s like never seeing a fish and then getting thrown into a school of herring; fish are suddenly everywhere. Google “Internet marketing” or “work at home” and you’ll find tens of thousands of pages promising you to show you the way to make your fortune while working in your pajamas. There are blogs and forums to help you, courses for sale and experts to teach you, guide you and take your money every step of the way as you get ever closer to living the life of a rock star. The problem becomes this: among all these thousands of herring which are worthy of packing in cream sauce?

Amidst all the ballyhoo one thing became apparent; Internet marketing was viable and do-able. I knew that if I could learn what to do and how to it I would never again have to answer to a superior, I could repair the financial damage that years of frustrated and misguided career efforts had caused and I could win the one prize I coveted most—freedom. So I set about learning the intricacies of Internet marketing.

In the posts that follow I’ll try and help my readers find the pony that lies amidst the pile of manure* that comprises the bulk of Internet marketing information. It’s a jungle of misinformation and outright chicanery out there; add to that the fact that the mechanics of getting a site up are like reading Arabic to most old guys like me. But stick with me and soon you’ll be confounding your friends with tech-speak terms like “search engine optimization”, “keyword research” and “HTML tags”. And if you hang around long enough you may even learn how to make some money while sitting at the kitchen table.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked.

“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

“Old Dog to the business office, please. Old Dog, please come to the business office.”

It was my sales manager, and I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. He’d warned me a few months earlier that my weekly draw was outpacing my commissions and that if I didn’t begin to lessen the gap quickly I was likely to become the first man in history to lose his job as a car salesman for something less egregious than aggravated assault on the owner.

I wasn’t sure why I’d been paged to an office other than his but I suspected that he didn’t have the guts to fire me all by himself. Dean was reputed to have a rather impressive male appendage but I’d come to observe during his tenure as sales manager that his balls were the size of bee pollen.

He just couldn’t handle conflict. During one dramatic episode I watched a terribly distraught general manager make a cathartic apology to the sales force he’d been abusing for the past 20 years. The GM and Dean were good friends; in fact, he’d given Dean his position of sales manager. Watching his friend’s anguish was more than Dean could bear; he walked to and stood facing the door while hanging his head and staring at the floor. He looked like a little boy being made to stay in a room while his father beat his mom; I thought he’d pee his pants before it was over.

So there I was; 58 years old and unemployed and in a sense, relieved. I had, after decades of trying to make a living as a car salesman, finally failed in my attempt to do so. I had proven to myself and the entire world that I was not very good at something I really disliked doing.

For that reason, as well as the fact that the auto industry (and the entire US, for that matter) was in the throes of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, finding gainful employment as a seller of automobiles was out of the question. But the rent still needed to be paid so if I was going to continue living with a roof over my head I was going to need to learn a new way of making a living—some new tricks.

For the last 11 months I’ve been living on borrowed money while searching for a way to pay the bills.

I think I’ve found it but I’m now living on borrowed time, too. I need to start earning money and I need to do it fast. So I’ve decided to combine my quest for personal freedom and financial security with attempting to find an answer to a question that I’ve pondered for years: “Can people change?”

Of course people can change, they do it all the time. Drunks become sober, addicts get clean, men become women and street people go from homeless in the street to a penthouse office on Wall Street. But that kind of change doesn’t happen often. And it doesn’t happen without seismic shifts in the way people see and think about themselves. Fundamental change is hard but it can happen; and it must happen to me—fast.

I have 30 days to turn my midlife crisis into an extreme makeover.

In that period of time I must become a successful Internet Marketer. In 30 days I must be able to look at my wife and tell her “Yes, this thing I’ve been working on will work! We are not going to lose the house; we are not going to have to file for bankruptcy; we will retire with comfort, ease and lots of money. Find something else to worry about, if you must. Money is no longer, and never again will be, a problem.” And I might just drop 10 pounds to boot!

• If you want to learn how to make real, lasting change in your life, subscribe to this blog*.
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**Update 4/27/2010: I’ve returned to my old career and joined the sales staff at Terry Lee Honda in Avon, IN.