Here are my best thoughts on what’s happening with video right now…today…and how you can use it in your business to turn more surfers into buyers, increase your customer value and boost the money you stick in your hip pocket national bank — even if you aren’t photogenic, don’t look like an actor or actress and aren’t all that crazy about doing video. By Marlon Sanders

Joe Crump is a customer from way back in the day. He bought Amazing Formula back in 1998 or something like that and says it’s still one of the best things he’s read on writing copy, even though that isn’t the focus of it.Joe has an amazing business where he sells to a very crowded market of “how to invest in real estate.” What I love about Joe is he just does his thing and doesn’t feel the need to jump on the speaking circuit and whore out his list to jv offers he doesn’t believe in.

Here’s an example of how he uses video: http://joecrump.com/trenches/video1.html

Way back in VblogSecrets.com we showed how to create videos like these. In fact, Joe’s videos are what inspired me to create Vblog Secrets. And everything in there we taught still applies. Joes uses audio, video, reports. He does everything from home and no employees other than family. Anyway, Joe and I started talking about OTHER ways to use videos.

I pointed out what I call “The Frank Kern model” where Frank does slice of life videos where he gets in his car and goes to a location to shoot a video. Now, actually, I was the first to use the technique in this market in the Red Factor videos, if you recall. But Frank has done a great job of almost branding the idea. In one slick video, he drives in an old beat up beach van BUT shows his super fancy car in the background. So without SAYING “Hey, I got a hot car,” he SHOWS it.

So I suggested that Joe try the same thing. Where he reads an email from a customer who is skeptical. Then hops in the car and sets out to prove the skeptic wrong by driving to an investment property or to interview a student.

My friend Daegan Smith at recruitylikecrazy.com does a video where he drives to the bank and makes a bank deposit. My friend Jason Fladlien recently did a video along the same lines for his up and coming seminar in Austin. And just last week, Keith Wellman did a cool video he put up on Ustream where he got some guys in a room in comfy chairs and discussed Internet marketing. I thought it looked great.

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A message of encouragement if you feel uncertain, doubt if  what you’re doing will be successful or sometimes feel like you’re on the wrong track. By Marlon Sanders

Hello, Marlon Sanders here.

If you’re tired of having smoke blown at, through, under and up every part of your clothing and anatomy, then maybe this article will be refreshing to you. I’d like to talk to you about what I call…”The Night Of Uncertainty”When you go to learn Internet marketing, you experience a variety of times and days.

What I mean is, you have those moments where the sun is shining. Everything looks like it’s working.  Everything is all hunky dory, as we’d say in the state of Oklahama where I’m from.You wake up.The light seems brigher. There’s a bounce in your step.  It’s all good.

But life has its ups and downs and so does marketing.

There’s also this period you go through at times where what you thought was working isn’t.  Where you’re going through a learning curve.  You put in time and effort and do NOT get the payoff.Most people quit at that point. It’s the “night time” of marketing.  And night precedes day.

Before things work, they don’t work.

It’s all part of the learning curve.  And the hardest thing about it is during the night, you doubt yourself and what you’re doing. You doubt if it’ll ever work.  You doubt if your time, money and
effort are well invested or not.

It’s one of the reasons I teach and preach to spend a big chunk of your time, money and energy learning marketing methods that will benefit you in ALL of life, and not just in an Internet
business.

It’s hard to make it through the nights of business.  Everything seems black.  What you thought was working isn’t.  You’ve expended all this effort and the payoff didn’t come. The doubt. The indecision.  The hurt.  The pain.

The only thing you have to go on is your hope and your belief. Sure, there are the successes of others. But there’s always a reason those don’t apply to you.

So in the nights of business, you’re often there alone.

Anthony Robbins said with great eloquence that life is an interaction between pain and pleasure.  People will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.

So the trick is to make it through the nights of business, so your days can out number your nights.

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How I Started My Business At Home From Scratch Out of A 600 Square Foot Apartment With a 386 computer and a dot matrix printer… then grew it into a 6 figure auto-piloted income, discovered the Internet lifestyle is true — and traveled the world.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably not a customer of mine yet.

My customers who have bought in the past 6 months and are.

So you wanna start from scratch and stick some dough in your bank account.

Hey, I don’t blame ya. You got bills to pay, a retirement to worry about. A mortgage payment. A car payment.

Whew! That doesn’t even include kids, gas and clothes. No wonder you wanna bring in some dough part time and possibly even full time on the Net.

I started in this business way way way back on AOL and Compuserve. I’d run a little freebie classified ad offering a report.

People would email me and I’d hand email them back. things weren’t very automated back then and they’ve thankfully come a very long ways.

But get this: I use the SAME formula today as I did back then and you can too.

I started out of a tiny 600 square foot apartment, where I barely had any room for books or courses. I had a little white wooden press board desk my friend Kelli gave me.

I had a 386 computer I bought from the Dax mail order catalog not to mention the dotmatrix computer. I must say I’m VERY happy to have a faster computer today.

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This strategy is one we use in our “5-Day eBusiness Success Clinics” as we teach people how to build a fully functioning online business from scratch in five days or less.

Our students come into our clinics without even a product idea — and they leave five days later with a website that’s getting great traffic and already making sales in many cases.

And a key strategy that allows our students to set up their businesses so quickly is using Google AdWords to build a huge list of potential customers before the product is created.

Not only that… it’s a great way to confirm the success of your business idea before your website is even ready!

Here’s how you can implement this effective strategy yourself…

1. Create a keyword-targeted landing page

You’ve done your keyword research — using a great tool like Keyword Discovery or BeBiz of course — and you know people are searching for information related to your product idea.

… Now it’s time to put those keywords to the test!

How do you do this? You create a simple web page that addresses the need people are demonstrating when they perform searches on your top keywords — and promise them a solution to that need.

For example, let’s say one of your top keyword phrases is, “how to teach child to play guitar.”

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The easy days of AdWords are over. But you would not guess that from reading most of the launches, sales letters and make-money-online pitches on the Internet.

Yes, there are lots of people volunteering to teach you AdWords but most of them are still pretending it’s 2006. If you do what they teach:

-You’ll promote some affiliate program that they are somehow tied into, which means they’ll always make at least some pocket change even if you lose thousands of dollars

-You’ll do things that p*** off Google and might even get you banned

-You throw good money after bad in a frenzy of constant changes and attempted fixes, ultimately throwing up your hands in total exasperation

-They teach you a whole set of bad habits that’s sort of like Internet Bulimia. A vicious, addictive cycle that some never escape from

AdWords started in 2002 and back then, nobody understood it. The way you succeeded back then was, you threw a whole bunch of mud against the wall, AND you split-tested a whole bunch of things (it’s not like it was a total crap shoot, even then!) and some of it stuck.

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It’s all under your control. If you sell information products and want to make more money with them, there’s good news. It’s all under your control. That’s right, you can make more money with your information products simply by doing something that you have the power to do.

It’s not dependent upon anyone else. It’s up to you.

Let me explain …While there are a lot of different aspects of selling information products, there are really only two ways to make more money with them …

Sell More
Refund Less

Really, it’s pretty much that simple.

In order to make more money with information products you need to either SELL MORE or REFUND LESS.

Or, better still, do BOTH. Now, in the many years I’ve been selling information products, I’ve found there are three powerful tools that will help you do just that.

You can use these three tools to SELL MORE by using them on your classified ads, solo mailings, sales letters, autoresponder messages and virtually any sales tool.

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Hello, Marlon here. I’ve been in this business of marketing online since before the world wide web existed. How? Because I was marketing on AOL and Compuserve. I’ve been full-time so many years I don’t remember NOT doing this for a living. So you might say I know a few things about how to build a business that will be here tomorrow and next month and next year and five years from now.

Let’s talk about how you can build one step at a time from  scratch.

1. Learn to acquire new customers

This is the heart and soul of your business. It’s your engine. If you learn to do this, you have a business that runs. If you don’t, you fail. Getting new customers requires several things:

a. Figuring how WHERE to find ‘em. If you can’t target them, you can’t get ‘em on your list.

b. Figuring out WHAT they’ll respond to If you’ve “tried” squeeze pages but they didn’t work for you, it’s because you never figured out what they’ll respond to.

c. Making irresistible offers. This involves figuring out their hot buttons and pushing them hard!

So the other day I visited the blog of a customer just out of curiosity. This person is still in the process of “getting it.” She’s getting closer but isn’t there yet. I looked at her blog and honest-to-goodness, I had NO IDEA of who she was targeting with her blog. You don’t write a blog or any communication just to blab. You target.

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