It’s where most newbies START promoting products. And you know what? It actually works!

The method is simple. You pick a handful of online forums and participate in them. Most
forums allow you to have a signature line or sig line where you list a URL and a subject line.

In the sign line, you send people to your blog or offer a free download, free PDF or free REPORT
on a problem-solving topic.

That means you’ll need to learn HOW to write and create a PDF or problem-solving report. This is why I say that you learn a lot of basic, necessary skills by promoting affiliate products. Later,
when you have your OWN product or service, you’ll be able to promote it the very same way.

Plus, you practice your WRITING and typing skills by creating free reports, writing promotional articles and so forth. I’ve found a lot of people can’t type worth anything. In this business, you need to be able to type. So I recommend you buy a little software program that helps you learn to type faster.

Anyway, the BIG LESSON to learn about promoting in forums is do NOT under any circumstance go into a forum and post a blatant commercial pitch. You’ll get FRIED immediately for doing so. What you do is you offer helpful, useful information to others. And you promote using your sig line.

It’s that simple.

In “Amazing Formula” I talk about how you create “bait” that gets other people to bite. That is what your free PDF reports are. They are “bait” that gets others to bite.

The other thing to know about forums is they sometimes attract cynical, skeptical people with the worst attitudes in the world who are convinced everyone else is trying to scam them.

You’ll also find the resident frequent forum poster with no track record who acts like the expert from above. It’s not a bad idea to BECOME that person. But don’t take advice from them!

People in forums are often like the blind leading the blind. Nothing wrong with that. Just don’t
get sidetracked by the forum participants who are dogmatic and have their own agenda to
push, programs they want YOU to buy and so forth.

Remember, you are there to HELP and to PIMP! By “pimp” I mean, to push YOUR programs,
not get sucked into the promotions of other people who, quite frankly, may not have a clue
what they’re talking about.

Marlon Sanders

1. Promote affiliate products

2. Google adsense

3. Sell a service

4. Sell advertising

5. Sell physical products (think ebay)

6. Sell information

You’ll notice that the last 4 all involve selling something. That’s the approach I wanna talk to you about today.

I did a survey with my Milcers and Alist members. I found out that most of them are still stuck to a degree in getting things going.

I want to give you an abbreviated action plan that I spend 100 pages elaborating on in “Gimme My Money Now” and that the icons walk you through in “The Marketing Dashboard”.

There are MANY Formulas out there. Here’s the Marlon Sanders Formula in a nutshell. So many of you have written and said, “I need a Formula. I need step-by-step.” This is the big picture:

1. Find demand

2. Write sales letter

3. Create info product to meet demand

4. Roll out with affiliate program

That whole formula is elaborated on in much greater depth in both Amazing Formula and Gimme My Money Now.

Here’s what I found out from my survey. Most of you guys and gals have jobs that you want to escape from. You have bills and debts to pay.

And most of you are coming into this without a lot of prior knowledge of marketing and some of you have limited computer skills.

Based on that, do you think it’s safe for me to say it’s unrealistic to think you’re going to quickly and easily become a zillionaire? Well, it’s true. If you have no background in sales and marketing, and you don’t have very good computer skills, you have a learning curve ahead of you and that takes time.

HERE’S HOW I PERSONALLY DID IT

I remember when I was broke and bought deodorant with all pennies. But what I did was kept learning and didn’t expect easy nor overnight results.

I kept buying books when I could afford them. There were no cheap and easy ebooks back then. I could have done it
10 times faster if I had access to all the information available today.

Anyway, my way out was self education. And action. I kept doing little projects to put what I learned into ACTION.

I ran this one little business where you sold booklets using answering machines. You didn’t have voice mail then. So I had 3 answering machines hooked up in my home (my friends hated it).

I ran these little ads in what we call in the U.S. “penny shoppers.” These are little papers given away for free that are all classified ads.

I ended up running ads in 72 cities! And people would leave their name and address on the answering machines. I shipped the books C.O.D. Half the books came back. It was sorta like paying out 50% affiliate commissions.

You didn’t have Paypal or easy merchant accounts in those days. So you had to do C.O.D. I sold $12,000 of books via “mail order.” And I was exhilerated to do so. I think at the end of the day I probably LOST money.

But I sure learned a lot.

Then AOL and CompuServe came along and I started writing sales letters and running ads on there. You’d run a little classified ad (they were free on AOL). People would email you.

Since autoresponders didn’t exist, you’d personally email them back your “free report.” Since there weren’t any PDF’s then (at least, that I knew of), the free report was a long email.

The “big trick” my friend Jonathan Mizel taught back then was to put their name in the return email! That was a big secret back then.

Mizel, me, others all learned copywriting from Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. That was like one of 4 or 5 books on copywriting. But you know what? We wrote some pretty good sales letters back then. I first met Jonathan Mizel ’cause he sent me one of his sales letters, and I thought it was good. So I wrote and asked him where he learned to write copy.

Of course, he said “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples. So we were immediate friends.

AOL was great. You could test out your little ads, emails and sales letters. I don’t even think in those days we sent out follow up emails.

As far as I know, my friend the late Corey Rudl created the demand for autoresponders when he wrote about how he brought in all this money by automatically emailing buyers 4 days later.

It was only after that someone was smart enough to create an autoresponder. Corey’s stuff was hand coded. Gosh, I miss Corey. And I reckon you’ve been in this business a long time when you see your friends move on to the next great adventure.

Somewhere in this timeline (it all escapes me), I had a little retail store selling self help books and tapes. The first thing newbies think to sell online is either diet stuff or self help.

Man, self help is a tough sell. Both Dan Kennedy and I had self development stores. And we both lost bux on ‘em. But I did have the chance to write and send out a few sales letters. And since I often didn’t have the money to print and mail letters, I’d call ‘em on the phone.

I found out that just by calling people, I could say ANYTHING and I’d STILL get a lot of people coming in for the next 3 weeks.

That’s the power of staying in contact with your customers.

Anyway, I could go on with this story. I’ve told the rest of it in bits and pieces in different places.

What are you supposed to get out of this?

Dan Kennedy I think had a path kinda like mine. And what he said once is profound. He said, “I became an overnight
success after 20 years of effort.”

Now, I’m NOT saying you need 20 years of effort. You don’t. But neither is 20 minutes a week gonna do much for ya.

Most of the people I’ve seen make it in this business do so after trying things that didn’t work. And they kept on trying. And sooner or later, somethin’ clicked.

I think I shoulda called this article, “Sooner or Later, Something Clicked.”

So you got a job that sucks. You got bills that are stacked up. Hopefully you can buy deodorant with something other than pennies like me in the old days.

So what do YOU do?

My friend, I’d personally tell ya to do what I did. Fall in love with the process more than the immediate fixation of “I gotta make this work now or the whole thing is a scam.”

What you’re learning is marketing.

And that’ll benefit you your whole life. It can help you get your son or daughter or friend a job. It can help you raise money for your Church or charity. It can help you promote an idea whose time has come.

See, a LOT of people say, “I feel like I’ve just wasted my #*$&* money on stuff.”

I my response is, “Then you don’t understand what you’re learning. No wonder things haven’t clicked for you yet.”

See, this isn’t about gimmicks. It isn’t about you figuring out how to trick people into buying with magic words. It isn’t about fooling the search engines into stickin’ your stuff at the top. If you do this business the way I teach it, it’s about learning marketing. And yeah, I said the dirty 5-letter word — LEARN. You can paint it up. You can put perfume on it. You can sell the sizzle not the steak.

But my friend, what you’re doin’ is learning. And like my friend Jim Edwards says, “That isn’t something you microwave.”

“So Marlon, tell me how long this is gonna take and how much I’m gonna make when I’m done?”

Rule 1: People learn at different rates, so no one knows.

Rule 2: You’ll never be done.

Rule 3: It depends on what you sell, who you sell to, how much you charge, what your margin is and how often they buy.

Some people like Russ Brunson get in this business, do it part time between classes in college and go great guns with it. Russ was one of my top affiliates. But he figured out this business so quickly, before I knew it he had his own line of highly successful products. More power to him!

Others are like me and take like 10 or 20 years to learn it. What’s average? Average is not doing anything, therefore not learning anything, therefore the bills pile higher and the job gets tougher.

“Well, if you can’t tell me how much I’m gonna make, how long it’s gonna take and how much it’s gonna cost me, then I think this whole thing is a scam.”

To say that is to say you believe marketing is a scam. Because at least the way I teach it, that’s what you’re learning.

What’s my advice?

Think of the best info product idea you know how to come up with. Interview some experts and record it. Or have a friend interview you. Do a little 3-hour product, write a sales letter for it. And see if anyone buys.

If they don’t buy, guess what? You asked the market a question and the market answered.

You asked the market, “Do you want to buy this?” And the market responded, “No, not in the way you’re presenting it to me.”

Your choice is to present it differently or do another product. Along the way hopefully you learn some things about how to find out what people want, how to get ‘em to buy, how to fulfill products, write letters, create sales pages and so forth.

Honestly, in the DOING, you’ll learn a lot more than you’ll ever learn in the reading. You ask. The market answers. You learn along the way.

But if you’re a spectator and you never get in the game, I can guarantee you one rock solid thing: You’ll never win the game if you aren’t in it.

This is a great business. It isn’t for everyone. It sure isn’t a way to become a zillionaire overnight. Maybe after 5, 10 or 20 years you hit that zillion and you’re the next John Reese or Jeff Walker.

I don’t think everyone should be in this business. If you don’t wanna figure anything out yourself, if you don’t wanna learn how to solve problems, if you don’t wanna learn more things about html and the computer than you really wanna know, if you can’t tolerate risk, if you need your first attempt to be a success, or even your first 3 or 4, then I don’t know, if you can’t afford to spend money on learning and education, if you can’t afford to try things that don’t work, if you think it should all be simple and easy, I don’t know if this industry is for you.

A lot of people get seduced by the lure of ez dough. The promises of zillions without learning. Just connect the dots and you too can be John Reese, Marlon Sanders or whoever you wanna choose.

Here’s the deal: People WILL sell you a turnkey system to escape your job, make zillions or whatever. They’ll give you the fish. I want to teach you TO FISH.

I have a strong belief that unless you buy a franchise, in most cases your going to better off learning marketing than “buying a fish.” There are exceptions. But more often than not, buying a fish doesn’t serve you well.

Some of my friends would disagree with that premise. I happen to have a strong conviction that you are better off learning marketing. My friends are RIGHT in that people DO want to buy the fish versus learn how to catch it. So oftentimes, you’re best off selling a “fish” product.

But everybody has their perspectives. And for me, my criteria for buying a product: If whatever “IT” is doesn’t “pan out” for you, are you STILL better off from having spent money on it? Will it continue to benefit you, your family or your friends in the future?

If the answer is NO, then think twice before spending your money.

You have a job you wanna escape, bills to pay off, retirement to prepare for. Or special needs like a sick loved one. Or a sickness yourself.

I can’t promise you ez zillions. There’s no integrity in that.

I can’t promise you 6 figures a year ez as pie.

What I CAN promise you is that selling products works. It’s no scam. People been doin’ it for thousands of years.

I can promise you that marketing works. Always has. Always will.

I can promise you that money and time spent learning marketing can pay off in many ways.

I can promise you that if you find demand, meet it with products and well-executed promotions, and you do that over time, those bills will likely fade away.

I can promise you that everybody on the Net selling you this or that “dough making system” ALL have 1 thing in common — THEY are selling you a product, service or seminar.

They have a target market.

They have an intro offer.

They have a back end.

I believe in paying more attention to what people DO than what they SAY.

People get all confused what to DO. And there’s a new system invented every day that’s the next big thing. Thank God. I love commerce.

But to remove the confusion, understand this:

They all may disagree on HOW you make money. But one thing is certain: They’re making bux selling a product to a target market — YOU!

Go and do thou likewise.

I remember back then. When I bought deodorant with all pennies.

I remember the date I had with a model in a car that smoked like a bomb.

And to me, there’s no confusion. It’s all crystal. It’s all simple. Take away the smoke. Take away the mirrors.

You need a product. You need people who want it with the money to buy it. You need some great promo out there.

There’s only ONE method people having using to pay their bills and quit their jobs for the past 1,000 years –

Selling products and services to a target market with a great sales pitch that presents benefits and solves problems.

I know you want more details on how. How do you find target markets? How do you identify demand? How, how, how.

I have provided a lot of those answers in the Milcer’s newsletters, Amazing Formula, Gimme My Money, Action Grid.

You wanna quit that job? You wanna liquidate that debt? I don’t have an ez zillion for you. But I do have a crystal clear answer.

Find a group of people. Find out what they need and want. Meet those wants with a product. Provide great service.

And who knows. Maybe. Someday. If the stars shine down on you, you’ll hit that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

———————————————————–
Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy.” If you’d like to get on his mailing list and receive tips, articles and information about online marketing, visit: http://www.marlonsblog.com

You get a list of 25,000 people and send an email that averages $1.00 per subscriber. 25,000 x 1% buy rate is 250 orders. 250 x 100 = $#25,000.

If you wanna make a million in 24 hours, you calculate a buy rate of 1%, and figure out the rest. One million divided by $1,000 = 1,000 orders. So you need 1,000 people to buy. At a 1% buy rate, that means you need 100,000 visitors. Figure you can average 1500 visitors per joint venture partner and you need 67 joint venture partners to email their list.

Now, the above is ALL true.

However, the REASON I’m pointing it all out is to get the stars out of your eyes! People hear about someone making $25,000, $50,000 or more in a day, week or month and they go all starry eyed over it.

Fact is, the way all the “big name gurus” make the dollars in their sales letters is by emailing their list or getting friends to email their lists all at the same time. THAT is the product launch formula simplified.

The point of all this is to NOT let your eyes glaze over and get sucked into every online pitch that throws out BIG numbers.

The biggest set of numbers in a sales letter do NOT win!

What you need to do is start acquiring skills. The basics of writing articles and reports. Making Camtasia videos. Getting your hosting in place. Learning to ftp. Discovering how to get people to agree to be interviewed and how to record the interview, turn it into flash audio and post it on your web site. How to do surveys to find out what people want to buy.

Now relax, you don’t have to learn all those things at once, although a bunch of them are in Design Dashboard (although not nearly all of them.). My point is that instead of buying every highly hyped program that comes down the pike, pick and choose.

Get the programs (if you have the money) that teach you EVERGREEN skills. Things like the above.

You stack and layer skills one by one. Oh yes, I know full well the next guru in line will come along and tell you to outsource all of it, they don’t know how to do any of it, you have to build and manage a business, blah, blah, blah.

Listen, I do ALL of that and have been doing it for 7+ years before a lot of the current “gurus” even knew jack about online marketing. I’m all for outsourcing. But unless you have the money for it, I recommend you invest some time and trouble into learning to do the basics YOURSELF to begin with.

You’re a LOT better off forking over the money to buy a good PDF creator or Camtasia or ebook compiler than you are hopping on the next get-rich-easy pitch that really isn’t going to teach you EVERGREEN skills that last.

So get those stars out of your eyes and get busy learning the stuff that is NOT sexy but is REALLY important. Like maybe figuring out how to use an html editor. Like buying Dreamweaver or Web Expression. Or buying and following Design Dashboard. Or learning how to use an autoresponder or set up automateyourwebsite.com.

NONE of those activities are particularly fun. But they ARE the skeleton on which you build a successful online marketing business.

Marlon

But then they find themselves skipping showers, piling papers on their dining room tables and feeling isolated. They miss the office — and the copiers and water coolers and secretaries that come standard.

Entrepreneur Josh Bereano, 38, said he rolls out of bed each morning in his Hawthorne Hills neighborhood to check his e-mail. He feels cut off from the work force sometimes.

“People don’t look down at home offices anymore, it’s natural,” said Bereano, who owns the video Internet marketing company Direct Marketing Inc. But still, it’s good to “just get out of the house and spice up the workday.”

My Day Office, a new Belltown business, hopes to cater to folks like Bereano — mobile workers who don’t need, or can’t yet afford, a long office lease. It will offer a la carte office space and services.

Full Article

CNN: What were the circumstances that led you to work from home?

Blasingame: I’ve been home-based a couple of times, but I’m not now. The main reason people work from home is it allows them to start a business without having to pay the expenses of an office somewhere else. A lot of people start a home-based business part time. They do their job, they come home and they set up a little shop in the den or the attic or the basement … and it allows them to literally grow a business one teeny tiny step at a time without making a huge infrastructure decision. The last time I was home-based was in ‘89, and I started a consulting company.

CNN: What are the qualities of a successful home-based business?

Blasingame: Discipline. First is discipline. You’ve got to be able to separate your work from your personal life. You’ve got to be able to set working hours so that when you work, you work, and when you’re not working you have quality personal time. You’ve got to make the decision to turn the computer off and not take e-mail. You’ve got to be able to say, “This is a job, it’s just a coincidence that it’s in my home, and so I’m going to work 8 to 5.”

But also you can time shift. You can say, “I’m an early morning person who has to pick my kids up at 3 o’clock from school.” So you can work 5 till 7, get up and take the kids to school, come back and work till 3 and go get your kids and come back. You don’t have to work a full shift like a regular 8 to 5 kind of thing.

But whatever you’re doing, you have to have regular hours, and you have to have the discipline to stick to those hours, otherwise you wind up not really getting a lot accomplished.

CNN: How does telecommuting fit in with being home-based?

Read More…

Rising gas prices have topped the $4 per gallon mark in some U.S. cities.

Thorner is requiring all staff at the National Recreation and Park Association to avoid commuting at least one day a week — either by working four long days and taking the fifth one off, or by working from home on the fifth day.

“The 70 people in our office drive an average of 30 miles a day. We did the math and figured that by having the employees not commute one day a week, we would be saving 100 gallons a week,” says Thorner, executive director of the nonprofit, which is based in the suburbs of Washington.

“This is not a huge amount of gasoline, but it could serve as a model for other operations.”

When the average price of gasoline in the United States hit $3.18 in May, it was the highest price ever recorded, even when adjusted for inflation, according to the Lundberg Survey of thousands of service stations across the nation…..Full Article

Many new moms, work at home moms (WAHM) and dads explore starting their own mlm home business or online business opportunity after having children so they can spend more time with their kids. Finding the right work at home idea so you can become work at home and stay at home parents also makes sense from a business standpoint.

Many stay at home moms or a work at home moms get frustrated by the fact that they aren’t bringing money into their home as they stay home to raise their children. This is very understandable. After all, it can even get boring to do nothing more than clean and cook all day long with no money as an incentive.

Full Article

Are you confident in your ability to earn an income?
Some ‘experts’ recommend that you stick with your home business for at least a year before you consider quitting your job. This will give you the opportunity to ‘feel out’ any possible trends that may occur during the year. For example, you may find that sales are slow during the summer, and that your strongest months are from January to April.

If your business has been profitable for at least a year, you’ll probably feel reasonably secure that you can continue to turn a profit even after you leave your job.
Full Article

New Problems for Job Seekers
Finding a job isn’t as difficult as it used to be especially if you have Internet access. The problem job seekers have today is a problem of abundance–an abundance of online job listings. There are literally hundreds of career sites on the Internet that list open jobs all over the country and in many cases all over the world. Employers pay a fee to these online job listing sites so they can post open jobs.

Full Article: Online Job Listings

1. You will not get rich overnight, or even in a few months. But if you work you can make very good money that will even get better as you learn more about your business. You will only get out out what you put into your business. Don’t fall for the empty promises of instant money.
2. Consistently devote time each working day to your business. Depending on the business, it may not be necessary to work several hours a day, but it is necessary to work some every day.
3. Learn to be organized. Organization in fact is one of the most important ingrediants to success in a work at home business. If you are organized you will look and feel more better, and you will be working with a purpose and therefore you will have a much better chance for success.
4. Don’t become a hermit. When working from home is can be easy to cut ourselves off from the world. But lack of human contact is not good because soon you will become hardened and unable to interact well with those you are doing business with. It is important to have some human contact on a regular basis for our emotional health and well-being.
5. Learn as much as you can about marketing. If you are going to be successful as a work at home business entrepreneur, you will spend most of your time marketing your business. You don’t like marketing? Then don’t get involved in a work at home business because with marketing you won’t have one very long anyway.
6. Grow your mind. Read good books and listen to motivational tapes when you can. This will not only keep your mind sharp, it will also stimulate you and keep you motivated.

So when you work at home you do work. And the sooner you understand this the better you will be positioned to make the money you were looking for when you decided on a work at home business.

I was laid off from a corporate job during one of our country’s worst economic recessions. All over the world corporations were laying off millions of people, forced to cut costs to stay above water. The easiest way for a company to save money is to lay off or terminate employees. Overnight, organizations can save millions and millions of dollars by letting go of their biggest financial liability–the employees.

Full Article: Online Employment Opportunities

Multi-level marketing, on the other hand, is simply a system whereby the seller of a product receives commissoins on the basis of what he or she sells, along with what those that he or she has sponsoered sells, down to a defined level, depending on the company. The truth is that a work at home multi-level marketing business can actually be fun, and many have found it to be the easiest way to make a residual income online.

So just because a company uses mlm (multi-level marketing) as its sales approach does not mean it is bad. In fact, most true mlm companies do offer a viable product that can very legitimately be promoted. And if it is a product you particularly like or have an affinity with chances are you will be good at promoting it to others. Of course, just like any business, mlm or not, you should always check to see if it is a member of the Better Business Bureau and whether it has a solid reputation before you join.

That’s exactly what I did for three years, somehow thinking that some get-rich-quick program was out there where I could just sit back, do very little, and start collecting money. I’ve got news for you. NO SUCH PROGRAM EXISTS. Finally I decided to join a work at home business and stick with it. I am now earning significant money and it keeps growing at an ever-increasing rate every month.

What is the lesson here? The longer you stick with a work at home business the more you know about it the more confident you become when talking to others about it. It also pushes you to market your business better – coming up with better ads, targeting prospects better, and in general doing a better job of selling your product or service.

The next thing I knew he signed up. As soon as he did he called me again. Most people email me, but he’s from a different generation and I’ve learned that Herbert prefers talking. I could not believe all the contacts he said he had, and all the advertising ideas he started bouncing off of me for my opinion. Well I figured he had more time than most people, and he certainly came up with more creative advertising ideas than most people, so who was I to tell him this might not be for him.

I learned a valuable lesson from my friend Herbert (not his real name). Never prejudge anyone who wants to get involved in a work at home business. The more he’s talked to me the more I realize he’s checked out more work at business opportunities than I even knew existed. And for some reason he settled on mine. And he’s doing quite well with it. I wonder how many others he thought about joining only to be spurned when his sponsor found out his age. Go to www.simplegdi.ws/dvdmr if you want to know what work at home business Herbert joined. Oh, and there are no age restrictions except that you have to be at least 18.

The message? Patience is always rewarded in the work from home business industry. Most people jump from one work from home business to another, thinking they will eventually stumble onto some get-rich quick program. I’ve got news for you. No such program exists. So find a reputable work from home business and stick with it through thick and thin. If you do you will eventually be rewarded.