A slightly different post from me today, after seeing the below video.

Click play and watch to the end, then check out the text below:

www.GoldforLife.com

Naturally, (as you’ll know if you’ve spent more than a couple of minutes reading this blog) my main method for creating wealth in my own life is to use the internet to help people get what they want.

Now, as many of you will be all too aware, the U.S. government has just managed to save itself from a serious problem with its debt ceiling. Basically, as I understand it, the U.S.A. appears to be heading towards defaulting on its debt, which would have caused huge problems for anyone who uses the U.S. dollar… which is pretty much the entire planet in one way or another.

Most of the internet trades in dollars, and the dollar is fundamentally flawed as a currency, as you’ll see if you watch the above video.

So, making money online (or indeed via any other method) begs an interesting question in the current economic climate:

How do you secure your wealth once you’ve started to accumulate it? What’s the best way to invest money? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been wanting to write a post like this for a little while as I think it’s useful to you if I share some income figures with you.

In fact, by the end of the year I’m planning to be doing a monthly income report here on the blog so you can see what I’m making and how. That way you can see how you can do the same. Where I can, I’ll help you to do that.

My aim is also provide some inspiration to those of you who read my blog and may be on the same journey.

So, with that said…

Last month, I added an extra $3,295.28 to my monthly income over the course of July 2011 (£2027.40 converted according to exchange rates on 3rd August 2011). I’ll explain how in a moment.

Just before I do, I know that’s quite a claim, so I wanted to back it up immediately with proof. If you can’t see the image below clearly, simply click it to blow it up:

Ignoring the smaller amounts – which are from a $1 Warrior Special Offer I launched last year and $77 which is from a PLR offer I have on the back end of one of my squeeze pages – all the amounts you see are from the same method. In fact, I actually made more than stated in the title, but I’ve allowed for Paypal fees so you get the figure I actually took home.

In fact, if you’ve been reading my blog in the last month, then you may have seen my post on How to Make Money Online Fast, which will give you a little clue as to how I made this money. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel like I’ve mostly been writing ‘how to’ style articles recently, which while they’re great for SEO traffic and good as ‘pillar content’, they can be kind of dry.

I’ve also realised that I need to put more personality into my marketing online, as I do have a personality, and several people quite like it. Consequently, I’m going to start doing more video posts, or at least, integrate video tutorials and ideas into my blogging.

(Note to self: Get a decent lapel microphone for my camera)

I’ve been asked about my move from TotalBusinessCart to GetResponse by a few of my subscribers, so I wanted to answer it here for all to read.

Basically, the majority of the ‘problem’ is me and the fact that I like things to be very simple and clear. I felt like TotalBusinessCart (TBC) wasn’t.

The reason I signed up with TBC (which is a UK clone of 1ShoppingCart) was because a mentor of mine, Neil Asher, recommended it to me as his ‘go to’ solution for autoresponders and for use as a shopping cart. Neil has since bought TBC and is now the proud owner of it. Incidentally, the fact I’ve moved to another provider has nothing to do with Neil, who’s always given great advice and guidance and who remains a friend and mentor in the internet marketing world.

TBC is actually very good as a shopping cart and I have used it as such to good effect. However, I quickly realised that I didn’t really need the shopping cart function for what I was planning to do (affiliate marketing and listbuilding).

What I did need was an autoresponder that had the following attributes: Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been a while since my last blog post, mostly due to a few significant advances in my business which I’ll be charting in a blog post at the start of next week. With more things happening to make me money via the internet, I’ve realised that I’m at a crossroads in my online business…

Either I can work hard, taking on more and more things to do, thus sacrificing my personal life, or I can work smart and be more productive.

Obviously, that’s not really a choice, as it’s blindingly clear which way I need and want to go. However, in order to work smarter, I need to know how to be more productive with the time and work I have.

So, I went to do some reading and picked up my rather tattered copy of The One Minute Millionaire. I was looking for some gems of wisdom that would help me to see how I could make better (more productive) use of my time and resources.

What I found was a couple of pages packed with some excellent tools and thoughts on how to be more productive. I’ve set them out below. I hope you find them as useful as I do and that you use them on a daily basis to enhance your business and life. Where appropriate, I’ll put my own thoughts in within square brackets.

1. Focus on the Critical Few – Eighty-five percent of the things you do account for only 15% of your results. And vice versa. Therefore, only work on the critical things and you’ll get there faster and with less effort.
2. Throw Away Your To Do List – Create instead an 85/15 list. Write the top priority items at the top in the 15% box. Write the lower priority items at the bottom. Only work on the top of your list. [I've just started doing this and it's amazing how it unclutters your 'to do' list and gives you the focus to concentrate on the critical few]
3. Do Your FTF: Feared Things First – Which activity on your list do you fear the most? That’s your FTF. When you start your day, ask yourself, ‘What’s my FTF today?’ Start your day with that activity. By training yourself to do your FTF, you unconsciously urge yourself to tackle tougher tasks. [I love the psychology of this one. For a brilliant example of why you should Just Do It, you might want to read my friend Steve's bungee jump story]

Read the rest of this entry »

In a way, this post actually leads on from my post on How To Get Traffic To Your Blog, in which I showed 5 ways to promote a blog or blog post. Naturally you can use some of those methods to promote a website or offer, just as easily as you can to promote a blog.

However, this post is about a few more methods you can use to promote offers and make money from your site, whether they’re affiliate offers or your own product or service.

It also stems from a lesson I truly learned this past week. I say ‘truly’ because I think that unless you can and actually do apply what you’ve learned, then you’ve only half learned it.

I want to just cover this briefly before we get to the actual methods of how to promote a website.

The lesson seems simple enough: Go where the traffic is.

But most people with sites or blogs aren’t doing it and yet they’re still hoping to get loads of visitors, subscribers and sales.

You see, last week, I got to see behind the scenes of a large internet marketing outfit. I say large, it actually only consists of three guys, but they’re making hundred of thousands of dollars per month with what they do. This got me thinking…

If you think about it, there are certain hubs online where there’s already traffic in abundance. These include places like:

• Google
• YouTube (the second largest search engine in the world)
• Facebook
• Established mailing lists

What you need to do is to get in the way of that traffic to present your site and/or offer or service.

Now I know what you’re thinking…

‘Yes Matt, this is obvious. To get traffic you need to go where the traffic is.’

So why are most people (possibly you included) building sites and expecting the traffic to come to them?

Many people, when they start a site, fill it with great content, make it look great and then promote it via small streams of traffic that will never lead to bigger flows of visitors. Some of it comes down to a lack of willingness to spend some money, of which more later. And sure, it’s fine to promote your site to your friends and family, or to post updates on Twitter, but if you don’t already have a decent-sized following (of several thousand) on Twitter, the chances are that you won’t see lots of traffic.

This site gets around 2500 unique visitors per month at the moment and growing. Now that’s not massive, but it does lead to me building a subscriber list that grows daily and allows me to promote useful products to my readers.

I want you to bear in mind that to really get thousands of visitors, you need to Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently been working on a new service for my search engine and social media marketing business. The idea is to list local businesses in over 120 local business sites for a small cost in order to get them massive exposure. You can click the following link to see the Business Listing Service.

Anyway, it got me thinking about you lovely readers of mine, here on the Adventures blog. That service of mine is targeted at UK business owners, but it got me thinking…

What are the best universal ways to get more customers, regardless of your country?

Well, with my thinking cap firmly in place to keep my shiny head warm, I came up with the following 4 simple methods. Use them wisely, young Jedi…Oh, and as with all the strategies I share with you, make sure you focus on one and master it before you start another. Be a master, not a jack of all trades.

Presenting, How To Get More Customers, the Matt Duggan way!

Build Your List of Prospects and Customers

You will have heard this time and again in you’ve been in online marketing for longer than about 5 minutes, but there’s a reason for that: It works.

Those people that are making good money in their businesses have a way of getting in touch with their existing clients in order to promote new offers to them.

Think about this for a moment…

Imagine you have a new service or product you want to sell. Naturally you want to sell as many as possible because you know that your offering is going to help people.

Who will be easier to sell it to?

• People who’ve never heard of you before and with whom you have no rapport.
• People with whom you have a relationship with and who may even have bought from you before.

In case you weren’t sure, I’ve given you a clue!

With that in mind, you need to be building a list and dividing it between prospects and customers. If you’re not sure, it’s easy. Customers have bought something and deserve special attention. Prospects haven’t. They may or may not buy something in the future, but until they put their hands in theit pockets, they’re prospects.

How to Do It:

Simple. Give something away for free.

It can be a report or whitepaper (these tend to be more popular than the word ‘ebook’) on something in your industry that people want to know about. For example, this article, if expanded with more illustrations and step-by-step elements, could easily be a white paper. In fact, I’ll be using parts of it as part of the giveaway on the site with the business listing service.

If you’re feeling more ambitious, Read the rest of this entry »