Have you subscribed to my RSS feed yet?. Thanks for visiting!

When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to do and ended up in electrical retail, selling just about everything from irons and kettles to washing machines, fridges, TV’s and cellphones.

I worked in a number of stores for 3 different retailers, over about a 6 year period. I eventually left because I got fed up with having to force those overpriced extended guarantees on people, but that’s another story.

I was one of those rare breeds of salesman who actually went out of my way to learn about the products I was selling, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and be able to help my customers choose the best product for them.

Whenever it was quiet and I had the place looking great, I used get out the instruction manuals and learn all about the new products that had come in. If you’ve ever asked for assistance in an electrical retail store, I’m sure you already know that most salesman don’t have a clue what they are talking about.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was the ‘go to guy’ whenever the other salesman had dug themselves into a hole and needed help. If a customer was on the phone or in the store, and didn’t know how to work something, I was there. If a customer was shouting and ranting and about to bite the managers head off, he’d pass them over to me and I’d have them sorted out in no time.

"I Knew The Service Would Be Very Popular,
But I Didn’t Know How To Make Money From It"

I knew from my own experience that people just weren’t getting the level of service they wanted from the electrical retail stores. I had this vision of me running my own business providing a much needed service, where people would ring me up and I’d talk them through stuff, and help them understand their new gadget.

The trouble was I kept looking at it from the wrong angle, and could only see obstacles with my idea. I spoke to about a dozen friends, and they all said they would use a service like I was proposing, but they would expect it to be provided for free by the retailer.

In the end I gave up on the idea, because I just didn’t know how to make it work.

Fast Forward About 10 Years And
Crispin Thomas Figured Out A Way

Unlike me Crispin wasn’t very good with technology, and soon realized how many other people suffered the same burden and needed help. Crispin’s idea was essentially the same as mine, but the big difference was, he looked at how he was going to profit from a another angle and on a much bigger scale.

He set up his company ‘Talk Me Through It‘ four years ago. Instead of asking the customers to pay, Crispin set up lucrative deals with cellphone manufacturers and retailers. Free vouchers are included with cellphones, allowing the customer to call the ‘Talk Me Through It’ call centre and get help from Crispin’s team of advisers.

This created a win win situation. The customers were able to get free expert advice from people who actually knew what they were talking about. In turn, this cut back on all the returned phones and customer service issues in the stores.

Crispin’s ‘Talk Me Through It’ service continues to grow and he’s expected to make £13 million, when he floats the company on the stock market next year.

If You Have A Great Idea But Can’t See
Where The Profit Will Come From…

I wanted to share this story with you, because it’s a great example of two people with the same idea, but with two very different outcomes.

It illustrates what can be achieved if you look at an opportunity from different angles.

• If you have a great idea, don’t give up on it without exploring a number of different options.
• Look at what’s being done in other markets to get ideas.
• Spend time brainstorming to identify companies that might benefit from your service or product, and consider creative ways of joint venturing them.

Where I went wrong is that I only considered the benefits to the customer buying the product, and overlooked how this type of service would also benefit the retailers and manufacturers.

For your reference you can find the ‘Talk Me Through It’ website here: http://www.tmti.net

Jason lewis

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the big craze on creating pages with 500 keyword links, also known as ‘word cloud’ sites. With all the hype that’s going round I’ve been asked by a number of people what I think of them, so I’d thought I’d share my view here…and I’ve got to say it’s not good!

From looking at all the word cloud sites I’ve seen so far…they seem like a total waste of time and money for the advertiser and the end user.

With a base cost of between $50-$100 for a keyword ad, plus up to $29 extra if you want your ad in a bigger font, bold, color etc., it seems obvious to me that the only people to benefit from this craze, are the people who sell the ads or the software to create the word cloud sites.

The big alleged incentive is that you can place your ad on a high traffic web page. But where is all the traffic going to come from? Most of these sites are brand new, and the only traffic they are getting is from marketers emailing their lists, trying to get people to buy ads. Where is all the genuine traffic going to come from? You know…those Internet users who might actually want to click on an ad and buy something.

Once all the ad places have been filled, I honestly can’t see the site owners doing much if anything at all to promote them and get traffic, can you?

Some of these sites say things like: ‘This site is guaranteed to stay online for at least two years.’ BIG DEAL! How does that help you if the site doesn’t get any traffic after the first few weeks of promotion?

• With 500 outward links on a single page, these sites are not going to help boost your search engine rankings. With so many links, any chance of gaining any link popularity value will be virtually non-existent.
• Most of these sites are about as general as you can get, with 500 keywords on every conceivable subject. Honestly…who in their right mind is going to trawl through 500 random words to find the keyword/topic that they are interested in?
• The only traffic I can see these sites getting is from potential advertisers, after the site owner has just emailed their list of Internet marketers. After that, don’t hold your breath! If advertisers get any traffic from these sites, I can see the vast majority being clicks from other advertisers, who are just seeing what other people are advertising before they place their ads.

Now, I have seen a few people try to apply a little common sense, by adopting a theme and targeting a specific niche with their cloud sites. But I’m afraid I don’t see that doing enough to make these sites useful to the end user.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I would never bookmark one of these sites thinking it was a useful resource. I’d be more likely to click my back button, before all those glaring colors give me a headache!

My advice - Don’t waste your money, steer clear!

Jason Lewis

All it takes is one ’spark of brilliance’.

Take a simple website idea, give it a controversial or unique twist, then light the touch paper…

Discover how revolutionary, offensive and entertaining websites get traffic and make money:

http://www.businessbrainwaves.com/Spark_Of_Brilliance.htm

Wishing you success,

Jason Lewis

I was researching a particular topic when I saw an ad for an ebook which looked interesting. Unfortunately when I got to the site, the author had a big notice up saying that the ebook version of the product is no longer for sale, and you couldn’t buy anything else on the page.

So my first thoughts were…‘if the ebook is not for sale anymore, why was someone spending money to promote it?’

I hit my back button, and it was then I realized that 8 out of the 10 pay-per-click ads were all promoting the same product. 3 of the ads were sending traffic direct to the site using different display url’s. The others were sending the traffic to a landing page on their site, where they had written a review.

‘In every case’ they were spending and wasting money, promoting an affiliate program they couldn’t make any money from!

The author’s statement was dated 24 June, so all the affiliates have been wasting money on pay-per-click ads for over 2 weeks already.

The product is being sold via ClickBank which is one reason why this is happening. Unfortunately, ClickBank doesn’t give the seller the option of emailing their affiliates, unless you have used a third party affiliate script like: ‘EasyClickMate’.

If they had this option, the seller could of sent out a note to all affiliates informing them that the ebook is no longer for sale. The way it is, the affiliates won’t know about it unless they visit the affiliate site again, or if they happen to notice that their ad is no longer making any sales.

Here Are My Tips:

1. If you are spending money on advertising you should keep an eye on your sales conversion rates, and if you notice a dip you should try and find out why. It should go without saying that if the product is no longer available…stop your ads!
   If for some reason you have to keep the ad running if it’s a pre-paid advertising deal or something, try and redirect the traffic a different product.
2. If you are selling a product with your own affiliate program, and then make a big change like pulling the product, ALWAYS e-mail your affiliates to tell them.
3. If you have no way of contacting your affiliates (if you happen to be using Clickbank for example), try and contact the affiliates that you can see are still spending money on advertising.

With tip 3 I’m not saying you should spend time scouring the web looking for affiliates advertising, but it doesn’t take long to quickly check Google with your main keyword.

If your affiliates are advertising on Google, they are going to be pretty peeved when they find out they’ve been wasting money promoting your product. Chances are; they probably won’t consider promoting any of your other products again when they find out.

…Now you’ve just lost yourself a load of good affiliates, who are willing to spend money on advertising!

If it was me, I would spend a few minutes to track down a contact address for the affiliates advertising, and shoot them a quick courtesy email to inform them.

Instead of losing good affiliates you tried hard to get, you’ll earn their respect and they’ll be much more likely to promote your products in the future.

Jason Lewis

‘Multiple Streams Of Income’ is a phrase that is thrown around a lot in Internet marketing circles, and a strategy that many gurus suggest you adopt. The problem is; you could be going about this in completely the wrong way. Instead of helping you; your pursuit of this goal is what’s holding you back and leading you to failure.

The idea behind ‘multiple streams of income’ is that you don’t rely on one source to make you money. Effectively spreading the risk, in the event that your sole source of income should dry up or fluctuate downwards.

The other advantage is that you can increase your profit potential, by taking advantage of other opportunities in different markets.

However, if you get it wrong you can end up with: ‘multiple streams of next to nothing‘.

The big temptation is to move onto creating the next stream of income, before you’ve done everything you can to maximize and ‘protect’ the profit of the first one.

With the huge growth in PLR articles/ebooks and content site building software, I know lots of people are involved in many different niche markets (including myself). On the surface this is not a bad strategy, because it does provide you with multiple streams of income.

Unfortunately, the average profit per site is not always that great, so the strategy most people employ is to just keep throwing up more sites, in even more niches.

I know this is a way to make more money because I’ve done it myself, but it’s not necessarily a very good long term business strategy to have. What you are doing is creating a lot of weak money makers, that can potentially turn to dust overnight. Either from a small change in the search engine algorithms, or after being flattened by stronger and more savvy competition.

Here’s What You Should Do…

Spreading yourself very thinly across a lot of niches does have its advantages, because it can provide you with some first hand research data into how profitable certain niches might be.

If you’re building lots of content sites for AdSense, you probably notice that some sites make you a lot more money than others. The temptation is to keep building more sites for different niches, in the hope that you find more winners.

Instead of doing that, what you should be doing is taking a closer look at your more successful content sites, and see how you can make them even more profitable. You’ve practically got a big red flag telling you that you’ve found a profitable niche, so instead of trying to find another one, first do everything you can to make more money within the niche you have already found!

If one of your content sites is showing more promise than the others:

• Go out and get more articles ghostwritten for that site.
• Start adding more and more unique, original and useful content.
• Start capturing email addresses and work on building a strong relationship with your client base.
• Add a blog.
• Add a forum.
• Start creating your own products for that market.
• Step up your marketing for the site and stop relying on search engine traffic alone.

The same applies to any ebook mini sites you have out there. If one or two ebooks seem to be selling well, look at creating better and more expensive products to sell on the back end. Maybe set up some separate content sites for the same niche, to help drive traffic to your main money site.

In other words; if you happen to find a gold coin in a well, your first instinct shouldn’t be to go and try to find another well, but to see if that well has lots of other gold coins sitting at the bottom of it.

When you develop and build on your successful sources of income and traffic within a niche, you are also creating a wall of resistence that will frighten off and protect you from lesser competition, who aren’t propared to put in the work you have.

If you go about things the right way, you’ll end up with multiple streams of strong and sustainable income, and a ‘business’ that will serve you in the long term.

Jason Lewis

P.S. Back in 2004 I wrote about a guy who has created multiple streams of income for his business, and he’s a great example of how to do this effectively. You can read that article again here:

http://www.businessbrainwaves.com/archive_section/29.10.2004.htm