An Open Letter To My Subscribers, Affiliates, Partners, Friends and Customers. Let me say one thing up front: I’m not quitting as an internet marketer.

Let’s get that settled from the beginning. This is NOT another one of those “I’m retiring from internet marketing” deals. I’ve put in almost ten years as a full-time internet marketer and I hope to have many more decades of it in the future.

H – o – w – e – v – e – r … I AM “retiring” ALL of my current products, membership sites, coaching programs, ebooks, software programs, small reports, etc.

What do I mean by “retiring”?

I mean I am systematically going to begin removing ALL of my current offers from the internet and discontinuing the sale of them. Once they are removed, they will no longer be available for purchase.

The offers will be removed, one at a time, at a rate of about every 7-10 days. Everyone on my list will be given advance notice of what product is being removed with the date of removal. This will give everyone ample time to purchase anything they are interested in before it is gone.

August of this year will mark my 10 year anniversary since going full-time. I launched ProfitsVault.com in August 2000. (As a side note, I’ll be totally revamping that site and relaunching it in August of this year to celebrate!)

I’m not “quitting” internet marketing, but I’m going to scale back tremendously.

In a matter of weeks, every single current offer (ebook, membership site, etc.) will have been removed from the Internet and no longer available for purchase.

The big question is — WHY?

There are three quick reasons that I want to share…

1. To free up time for personal interests.

I’ve got a book that’s being released in March called “Lessons That Leave A Mark” for Sunday School teachers and another one that will be done for release in July or August. I’m going back to Poland this summer as the mission trip team leader. I’ve been speaking at some churches and have a Christian based membership site that should launch sometime first quarter 2010. I just feel like my life needs to head in more of a ministry direction. Plus there are a lot of other personal things that I want to give more of my time to such as family trips (we’re gone somewhere almost every month … and loving it!) and running, tennis, backpacking. Life is too short to work all the time and we’ve been blessed enough over the past ten years that we can spend the next ten doing what we enjoy and feel called to do. (NOTE: You can keep up with my ministry stuff at my “other” blog … http://www.LifeTurns.com)

2. To streamline my business.

Despite the fact that I outsource most of my customer support these days, there are still a lot of day to day operations stuff that I’m involved in that demand my time. When you oversee more than 100 different offers, it can be time draining trying to train team members to handle new FTC rules, update sites, use new technologies, troubleshoot errors, not offend 20,000 customers who all feel like “personal friends” which require a personal response, etc. By having only 1-2 offers out there to maintain as opposed to 100+, I’ll be able to be more personal with my customers and eliminate a lot of time drain.

Read the rest of this entry

Let’s start out by talking about developing your own info products. Honestly, I believe that this is the route that you should take to ensure that you create the greatest income online (with the exception of combining methods). Even if you have to pay someone to develop your products for you, in the long run, your profit potential is greater.

You see, with this option, you are able to develop your own force of affiliates to sell your product for you. You also control whether you are selling the product only or selling some form of resale rights to the product as well. In fact, you can even charge a separate price for the product and the resale rights, providing you with multiple income streams from a single product.

The one downside to creating your own products (or having them created for you), is that it takes some time to do it properly. And, if you are paying someone else to develop the product, your costs can be quite high. However, if you have sufficient time and a desire to save a ton of money, the work is not difficult. In the long run, though, I am sure that you will find that the costs are minimal compared to the income you can derive.

One further benefit of creating your own product is the name recognition that you will certainly attain if you have a hit product on your hands. Once you produce your own product, you can instantly become an expert in your field. Who knows?

If your product is a big enough success, you may even attain that coveted “guru status” overnight!

Think about what this can mean to your income online? People always look to the experts to provide them with information. One good info product can open the door for an entire line of info products, all created by you!

The first step that you will take in creating your own product is to find your market. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of finding a market first, and then creating your product for that market. Once you have your topic selected, only then can you move on to the next step … deciding what type of product to create.

Information marketing is by far one the of the most lucrative forms of doing business online. Gone are the days of everyone expecting information for nothing. It is about solving specific problems and providing answers to issues.

If writing a full fledged ebook scares you and or makes you a bit nervous, then my suggestion is trying Jimmy D Browns Short Reports Fortunes. It shows you step by step how to create meaty products and if done the right way you can create a couple chapters at a time and before you knowit,  you actually will have a full fledged ebook in your hands. All of it filled with all the meat that your customers will be searching for and giving you the opportunity to over deliver.

Internet marketers often complain about “slow sales” during the holidays. With many people concentrating most of their spending on Christmas gifts and travel, selling digital goods generally takes a backseat.

I haven’t seen a single “top ten gifts for Christmas” list that included a “how to make money as an affiliate” infoproduct. After all, it’s hard to gift wrap an ebook and put it under the tree.

Many internet marketers simply take the month of December off and enjoy the profit they’ve made throughout the year. That’s good news for you and I.

It leaves a lot of extra money for IMers who want to implement some age-old Christmas retail practices. If you want to get some extra sales before Christmas, here are three ways to do it…

1. Offer a discount coupon.

CASE STUDY: My wife received a coupon a few days ago from one of her favorite stores, a hobby shop. She loves this hobby shop, but it’s not usually a place that she shops at Christmas. But this coupon offered 40% off any one item. Coupled with sales and clearance discounts, that could mean a great bargain. Effective use of a coupon. It brings in people who might normally shop during this time of year.

How many retailers have you seen offering coupons? Many, many, many. Why? Because they work! Pure and simple. They work.

Three principles that will really drive up the usage of coupons to increase sales…

Principle #1: The deeper the discount, the greater the interest.

Ten percent (10%) discount is better than none, to be sure. But if you want to really get people to take notice, bump it up to 50% or more.

Principle #2: The broader the discount, the greater the interest.

Offering a deep discount on “select items” is good. But, the best usage of coupons is to make it a “blanket” coupon. In other words, customers can use it on ANYTHING you offer.

Principle #3: The timelier the discount, the greater the interest.

When you couple a great discount coupon with a TIME DEADLINE, you’ve got a winner. “This coupon only good from 5AM-11AM on December 12th”. Guaranteed boost in sales that morning.

*** The Digital Version ***

With so many shopping carts offering the ability to use coupon codes, with the ability to let people send you Paypal payments and with the ease in which you can temporarily lower prices in Clickbank and other order processors, it’s extremely easy to put this into practice if you’re selling digital goods.

(NOTE: If you’re an affiliate marketer, talk with the owner of the products and services that you are promoting and arrange for a discount for your own contacts.)

Read the rest of this entry

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.

Read the rest of this entry

The key to creating information products that sell even in overcrowded, highly-competitive markets! Jimmy is a task master at pumping out short reports loaded with enough meat in the content to please any customer. Jimmy is also the author of many ebooks related to generating traffic and teaches you also how to cultivate the list of subscribers once you have them.

I want you to add a new word to your business vocabulary -

The word is “specialization”.

A new age has dawned in information marketing. And it’s the age of “specialization”.

Before I explain how this will help you create information products that sell like crazy, let me give you a very brief history lesson.

(I promise, this won’t hurt a bit.

Information products online have evolved since I logged onto the Internet back in 1999…

1) THE SIMPLE AGE.

Times were simple back when I first came online. And so were the information products. Way back when, information products weren’t readily available online like they are today. If you could find ANY information on the topic you were interested in, you grabbed it.

2) THE SYSTEMATIC AGE.

As more and more people learned how to create and market information products online, a new era emerged: the “systematic” era. This was a time when huge information products were created with hundreds of pages. The idea was to create comprehensive courses on a particular topic.

Read the rest of this entry