James J Jones.com

Note:  this is a reprint of a newsletter issue I wrote a few years ago.  I thought I would share it with you here.  The info is just as timely today — maybe more so… I received an email from one of my subscribers that I wanted to share with you. It exposes a myth about info publishing that leads a lot of potential info publishers astray.

Today I want to tell you a personal story about a huge mistake I made because I was trying to create the “perfect” product.

The year was 1992.  Before the internet.  Before email marketing.  Heck, before most people even had a computer.  I was playing around with the online services:  AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy.  I had accounts on all three.  Back then you could share text files with other users (there was no PDF, no HTML).  And in the text files you could promote stuff but you had to take payments by mail because there was no Paypal.  No ClickBank.

(That just reminded me:  I have a 13 year old nephew and he has never known a world without eBay.  Weird!)

Anyway, it was basically the Dark Ages of Online Marketing.  But people were selling stuff.  And people were buying (I know because I was one of the people buying)  So, I came up with the idea for a product.  It was based on a product I had bought through the mail and it was called something like 999 unusual ways to make money.  I ordered the book and it was crap.

But, it planted the seed of an idea in my head.  I thought the concept was great.  It was just the end product that was bad.  So, I decided to improve it. 

The biggest problem I had with the book was it only had a paragraph or two about each idea.  So, I decided to expand on the ideas and create a massive body of work that would be like an encyclopedia of unusual business ideas. 

Over the months I worked on it sporatically.  I would go on binges where I would put in 60 hours of work and then I wouldn’t touch it again for months.    The months turned into years and before I realized it 10 years had got behind me. 

And I still wasn’t finished. 

I did at one point have enough sense to create a free ebook out of some of the ideas and I started giving away this ebook in return for an email address and permission to send more emails.    

I think I started collecting email addresses in 1999.   It wasn’t until 2002 that I finally decided that I would never get the stupid thing finished and it was good enough as it was.

So, I finally emailed this list I’d been sitting on (I hadn’t sent a single email to it before — some of the addresses where 3 years old)  and offered a product called Secret Underground Business Ideas for $14.99.   And then I went to the park because I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around waiting and hoping for an order to come in. 

When I got back from the park a couple of hours later I was shocked to find orders in my inbox.  Not just one or two but dozens.  After the first day I had sold over 100 copies of that ebook.  

The day was Jan 13, 2002.  The day I knew I would never have to work for anyone else ever again.  (and I quit my job on Oct 25th, 2002 but that’s a post for another time)

But, you know what?  As happy as I was I also realized what a fool I had been.   That was 10 years of profit I should have made from that product.  10 years of experience I should have gained from marketing.  That product has gone on to sell thousands of copies plus has had 10 or 12 more spin off products that have sold in the thousands. 

You’ve heard the saying, “Good is the enemy of Great”?  

Look, that’s true to some extent but only after you’ve had some success.   When you’re first starting out and you’re struggling to make your mark in this world good is good enough! 

I’ve got another saying that I live by:  “Perfection is the enemy of success.”

Terry Gibbs and I have been talking about what it takes to be successful — specifically what it takes to be successful marketing on the internet.   We realized that we started having successes when when stopped trying to be perfect and started doing only the things that have to be done.   

Basically, we figured out how to succeed by being Slackers. 

Do you want to be a Slacker too?

Terry and I are going to do two teleconferences explaining how you can finally start making money on the internet by using our Slacker Methods.

The price to attend both sessions is $47, BUT you won’t be charged until after the first session. In fact, we won’t even ask you for any payment information until AFTER the first session.

Only 200 people can attend the sessions, and we will not be offering transcripts or recordings of these two sessions. We also will not be selling anything during these calls — pure content. 

If you’re interested go here and sign up:

http://www.slackerprofits.com/

Remember, there’s no fee until after the first session so if you don’t find it helpful it costs you nothing.   

James

I received an email from a customer the other day.  He was having problems downloading a product.  So, I sent him the generic “here’s the link, please try again, the server may have been down when you tried to download, etc.”  He emailed that it still didn’t work. 

I tried it again and everything was fine on my end (and no one else was having a problem) so I decided that instead of going back in forth for two days I’d just mail him a CD.  So, I sent an email that said…

“Please email me your address and I’ll mail you the product on CD.”

This is the reply I recieved (sic):

Allright James I’ll bite. How is the hell can I receive an email from you with a request from you for me to send my email address to you.  Am I in the twilight zone.  From my vantage point it looks like you have my email address. Anyway enough of that.   removedtoprotectprivacy@comcast.net.   Hows that?

It was a Monday morning, I hadn’t had my coffee yet and I just didn’t feel like dealing with a smartass over a $40.00 product. 

So, I refunded his money and sent him an email letting him know. 

This is the email I received in return (edited slightly to remove words even I won’t use in public)

Look, I did not ask for nor want a refund. There was obviously a problem with the download of the MP3 file. If I right clicked of left clicked it didn’t make any difference all I could get was 30 seconds. I tried 4 different times. And I can’t follow directions. There were no directions. There was something wrong with the
link or your server or who knows. I did not purchase your product for myself but rather for my neighbor’s son. And then you get pissey like some little bitchey **** (rhymes with runt). I wish you were close to Sacramento,Calif.  I think you are very badly lacking a needed life lesson. Once again here is my email address removedtoprotectprivacy@comcast.net and if you are ever near Sacraamento please email me so we can meet so I can give you that much needed life lesson. OK ?? Hope to SEE Ya sometime  George

Once an exchange like this starts it’s very tempting to fire back an obscenity filled or insulting email. 

Don’t do it.  

Read and Heed this warning:  People like “George” are either stupid or crazy and you don’t want to stick around and find out which it is.  

99% of the people I deal with (I personally answer 100s of emails from customers every week) are honest, respectful, and patient.  Sure, I get my share of, “i paid and didn’t receive my product, I’m going to report you to the BBB” emails but basically people are easy to get along with.  They just don’t want to get ripped off. 

But about 1% want to name call or curse or challenge me to a duel (like George).  People like this are usually passive aggressive and wouldn’t hurt a flea in person.  But the anonymity provided by the internet gives them “digital courage.” 

But, every once in a while you’ll run into someone who is just plain nuts.  And dangerous.  As in, might look you up and pay a visit to your home, dangerous!

One Internet Marketer told me about a subscriber who showed up at her front door one day while she was having dinner with her kids.   He just wanted to meet her.  He looked her up through her website whois and since he lived in the same city thought he would just drop by. 

The marketer seriously considered moving because of this incident.  Even though this man was harmless what about the next one?  

You need to avoid the possiblity of this happening to you.  Here are some tips to protect your privacy:

1. If you have a website don’t use your home address in the whois record.  You can rent a post office box or Mail Box Etc (now UPS store) mail box for about $15.00 a month. 
2. Make sure your phone number is unlisted.  And make sure unlisted means it’s also not provided to third parties who may list it. 
3. Run a search in Google using your Name and City and see if your address shows up.  If it does contact the websites it’s on and demand they remove this info.  Keep after them.  Send them certified letter.  If need be threaten to sue them.  It really is that important. 
4. Run the same search using your telephone numbers.  If it returns your address have your phone number changed.  And make sure the new number isn’t listed.
5. Use a local voice mail number on your website and in your domain whois record.  This shouldn’t cost more then $10.00 a month. 
6. If you have an aweber account check the Global Fields (under the List Settings tab) and make sure it doesn’t have your home address listed.  This is one thing I absolutely hate about Aweber.  They automatically insert your credit card billing address in this field and this address is displayed in every message you send.  If your credit card billing address is your home address every subscriber will see it.   Change this to your PO Box or UPS store address.
7. Check any other services you use that displays your address and change it to display your PO Box or UPS store address instead. 
8. Make use of multiple email accounts to keep your business and personal life seperate.   Google will now allow you to open an unlimited number of gmail accounts.  I use different gmail addresses for different products and even have multiple gmail addresses for programming, support, updates, etc for the same product.  This allows me to delegate the emails appropreately.  You can also use this capability to keep people from tracking you down using your email address.   If you post in online forums using your personal email address it is a simple matter for someone to run a Google search on that email address and find everything you have posted.  You may not want the people in your Animal Lovers forum to know that you’re also a member of the Deer Hunters forum.   Use different email addresses and you won’t have posts from both forums appear when someone tries to track you down.
9. When joining a forum look to see if you can make your email address private.  Sometimes this is not the default selection.   If possible you want other members  to contact you through the boards private message system then have the message system email the message to you.
10. Be aware that just about everything you do online may be archived by www.archive.org  and searchable from their database even if you delete it from the source.  This includes forum posts, personal websites, community sites, ect.   For websites you own if you don’t want archive.org to add a particular website to their index simply create a text file named robot.txt and add the following to the file:

        User-agent: ia_archiver
        Disallow: /

Upload this file to the top level of your site (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) then submit your site to: http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site

James

P.S.  I just read an interesting statistic about email lists:   If you have an email list of 100,000 you probably have at least one murderer on your list.   A list of 10,000 and there’s probably at least one pedifile.    A list of 1,000 has at least one person with severe  mental problems.  

What the heck – since the inaugural post to my brand new blog just happens to coincide with the start of the new year  why not?  So, without further  ado…

My Internet Marketing Predictions for 2008

1. Google will roll out Pay Per Action Ads.  Currently Pay Per Action is in beta and by invitation only but I think before the end of 2008 we’ll see Pay Per Action come out of beta.  More info about Google Pay Per Action Ads can be found here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11635
2. Yahoo Publisher Network will briefly come out of beta, see it’s shadow, go back into beta and slowly chock to dead on it’s own indecisiveness.
3. Google will do evil.
4. eBay will drop their listing fee in favor of a higher final value fee.  (ok, that’s not so much a prediction as a forgone conclusion but as I write this it hasn’t been announced yet so if it happens I get to take credit for the correct prediction.)
5. eBay sellers will find something to bitch and moan about wheither Prediction #4 happens or not.
6. The Kindle will be the hottest consumer electronic product of 2008.  What does this have to do with internet marketing? If you publish PDF content you should also publish it in Kindle format and take advantage of this emerging new distribution channel for digital products.   (stay tuned to this blog for more about Kindle and Kindle Content)
7. Aweber will be acquired by (Google?).  Tom Zulzer and his team have done a great job of building Aweber into the premier Auto Responder service on the internet.  You can barely utter the phrase “email marketing” without mentioning Aweber in the same breath.  I think Tom’s positioning Aweber for a buyout.  And with Google’s new Pay Per Action Ads coming on line this year — well, sounds like a no-brainer for the good folks over at do-no-evil headquarters. 
8. Microsoft will acquire Facebook.   Acquisition rumors have been flying for a couple of years now with various players including Yahoo, Google, and AOL.   I think the most likely and best fit would be Microsoft.  In 2008 Facebook will be a force to be reckoned with in the Pay Per Click industry and I think Microsoft will see this as a way to gain much needed Pay Per Click Impressions without competing with “Live Search” (the MSN search engine).
9. The return of Wayne Yeager to Internet Marketing.  If you don’t recognize the name then you need to turn in your internet marketer membership card and badge.   Wayne was one of the first Internet Marketing gurus — although I doubt he ever considered himself such.  He started the Trafficology newsletter.  He was ClickBank’s first customer with a product called Unclaimed Domains.  (ClickBank actually used his account as a live demo on how to use ClickBank — probably still viewable on archive.org).  He was the first internet marketer to talk about the weath of information available in the public domain.  He developed a traffic generation technique called Sidetracking.  A few years ago he sold everything and got out of Internet Marketing to devote all his time to his eBay Auction tracking service, Viewtracker (www.sellathon.com).   Last January Wayne sold Viewtracker to Auctiva.  I figure Wayne’s had about a year now to rest up.  And with his sharp marketing mind I doubt he can stay out of the game for long.  Come on back Wayne.  We miss ya! 
10. Pay Per Play ads will die a fast death.   If you haven’t seen this yet it’s basically an online media channel that plays 5 second audio advertisements on websites.   The website owner gets paid a commission for every play.  Sounds like a great concept but I really doubt it will fly.   Fraudulent impressions (ie: bot generated hits to a website instead real visitors) plus the lack of participation of quality websites will cause advertisers to pull out in droves.  Pay Per Play will be dead before the end of the year. You can find out more about Pay Per Play here at http://www.sellingppp.com/

It’ll be fun to see which (if any) of these predictions come true. 

Your comment are welcome.

James