Terrible Quality Content

It’s awfully tempting to want to start making money online, and one of the best ways to do this, is to start teaching others how to make money online. This sort of thing occurs across most niches, where people want to start making money, through teaching their own tutorials on the internet. I do the same with my photography website. I spend hours every week coming up with fresh and interesting content that will interest my readers, while I try to fit in working around other websites at the same time. With blogging being so easy these days, everyone wants to do it, but not everyone wants to put in the time and effort it takes. I brainstorm, and take notes throughout the day about topic ideas, and posts that I could research, so that I know that the content that I write will always be better than my competitors. I do this for a few reasons. Firstly, if something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing right. Secondly, the more you write, the more likely you are to be found by others. Finally, and most importantly, if you’re writing the best content on the internet, then pretty soon your competitors are no longer your competitors.

Fresh ideas, along with good quality, and well punctuated writing, is the key to creating quality content. If you’re just taking ideas from other people in your niche, then it’s fairly likely that the more established, better quality content, is going to be ranked higher in Google. Another problem that Income Diary has is people blatantly ripping off our content, sometimes simply copying and pasting, and other times using our articles as a direct blueprint for their own content. Imitators will never have the same results as someone who goes out of their way to create original content, so if you don’t think you have what it takes to create original content, then you might as well give up.

Infrequent Content

You can write the best content in the world, but if you only ever post it once a month on your blog, your website will struggle to do well. If you want your website to grow, you need to rely on a consistant following, that will feed your website with pageviews, and to do that, you need to post content multiple times in a week. I will update my website a minimum of 3 times a week, and for Income Diary, it’s more like 5 times a week, with subscribers receiving the information very frequently. Followers of our websites are constantly reminded of our presence, and so are sites like Google. The more content we post, the more likely we are to appear in Google, which will lead to even more traffic. The thing about writing content is that you never know which content is going to be the most popular, so if you just keep posting content, then it should eventually be picked up by someone of interest, who will share it with many more people. I have written over 110 posts on my own website and around 40 on here, and that’s all in the past 8 months. Commitment like this is what separates you from the competition.

Poor Social Following

I’m surprised at how common of a mistake this is, but I guess it’s because I started my website in the apex of social media. People who don’t understand social media, are missing out on a huge potential following, which will help to keep their website alive. It’s not enough to simply open a Facebook and Twitter account, you actually have to put in some hard work make people want to follow them. This is where we lose most people, it’s at the idea of hard work, because when there’s hard work to be done, there’s always something better to do. As I browsed through the websites submitted to us last week, I noticed that a lot of the poorer websites had very small followings, which likely consisted of friends and family.

Roughly 3% of my Facebook following is from friends of mine, and I would be surprised if I even knew 0.5% of my Twitter following, and that’s because I use my social media properly to grow my following. This includes inviting my readers to like my page, and using my Twitter account to find people in my niche, where I post content from my website, which ultimately leads them to my fan page. Up until just recently, my aim when finding new followers was to send people to my fan page, and not my website, because if I could get someone to like my fan page, then I knew that I could get them to come to my website on multiple occasions in the future. When you start to embrace the power that social media can provide for you, then you’ll start to see some serious results. Turn one visit, into many.

*Note: I only stopped sending people to my fan page through a Twitter DM, because I’m trying to promote content that I want to go viral.

Minimal Interaction

It would be a shame to miss this simple, but vital step out of your website’s promotion, because it can make a real difference. If you have a fan page, but don’t really use it much, then Facebook starts to recognise this and acts accordingly. What this means is that they will see that people have stopped interacting with you, and stop sharing your content with parts of your following, even if they do like you. Think about it, how many pages do you like on Facebook, but how many do you actually hear from? It’s a two way street, if the reader isn’t clicking on your content, replying to comments and polls, then Facebook will stop showing that reader your content. Daily updates, or at least five updates a week are essential on Facebook, and they’re easy to do because you can ask questions and polls, and post photos, in between articles.

When you’re on your own website, then it’s important to reply to peoples questions when they ask you, because not only will they consider you to be more of an authority, but they’ll be more likely to come back. This is all public too so other people are going to see it, and respect you and your website more. The same goes for Twitter, I keep TweetDeck open at all times, and whenever I get a Tweet, I stop what I’m doing and answer it straight away. This does not go unnoticed.

Human interaction turns your website into a persona, and the steps to getting there are remarkably simple. People don’t want to talk to a website, or a program, they want to talk to a person. If you’ve ever updated your Facebook through a program like HootSuite, then you’ll know that it doesn’t provide you with very good results, because it leaves a tag, sharing where it came from, and people immediately know that it’s not a person behind the update, it’s a computer. This is a good indication that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to interact with your readers.

Design Sucks

First impressions are everything, and because everyone judges you by your appearance, you need to make sure that you’re looking sharp. When I went through some of the sites that were submitted to be critiqued, I was horrified by some of them, because it seemed as if some of them hadn’t even bothered thinking about their design. Something that always bugged me was the fact that we didn’t have a logo up on ExpertPhotography, it was just some writing, in a horrible font, and bad colours. Recently, we’ve had a logo designed and put into the header, which you can see below, and it’s actually changed the way I feel about the website. It makes the website look much more sleek and welcoming to any new visitors. Even the popup that I use from PopUp Domination is in keeping with my logo and website design.

One common factor with people who had attempted to try and design their website, but failed, was the fact that they were trying to do too much at once. When it comes to website design, I personally believe that less is more, and I’ll tell you why… I come from a background of photography, and one of the most important lessons to learn when taking a photo, is that whatever isn’t adding to a photo, is taking away from it. In terms of web design, this means that if you start installing distracting elements, then you’re just taking your readers attention away from something more important. The homepage is a sacred place, keep it that way.

Adverts

This is a schoolboy error that I see all too often. People think that installing ads is going to be a really easy way of earning an extra income for themselves, and while that is often true, it’s not always the case. You see, if you sell cameras, or you’re a plumber looking for work, and you install ads, then it’s very likely that you’re going to be advertising a competitor in the market. You might earn 50¢ from someone clicking on the ad, but you’re very likely going to lose a sale at the same time. This is a big no no.

On the other end of the scale to advertising competitors, you have sites who are looking to earn money mostly through adverts, and to do so, they install lots of them. There’s a couple reasons why this never works. Firstly, and most obviously, they’re distracting and annoying, and are actually convincing people to install adblock. Keep the ads to just a few, and put them in the right place, and this is a lot less likely to happen. Secondly, by including lots of ads on your webpage, you’re actually reducing their worth. It’s simple supply and demand. If you have three banners next to each other, the bid for those ads is going to be a lot less, because who wants to have an ad which is sandwiched between two competitors? It takes a few weeks, but you should be able to find a compromise that works well for you and your adverts.

Not using WordPress

I don’t want to be bias here, but I can honestly say that I wouldn’t use any other website system. It’s easy to install, customise, and market, and has provided me with exactly the results that I’ve been looking for. The way that you can install free plugins, that do exactly what you want without having to pay for a developer, is a really great feature. What’s more is that I recommend a lot of different plugins to readers, and if you’re not using WP, then these are going to be lost on you. There’s plenty here that you can’t do with Blogspot, or Heaven forbid… Tumblr. To say that the reach of WordPress is substantial would be an understatement, as it’s used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. If you’re not using it, then I suggest that you start.

Searching – Larry Page & Sergey Brin – Google

I couldn’t even count the amount of times I use Google in a day, it’s become so accurate and intuitive that it’s the only search engine that I need, but of course that’s not all it does. It makes me money with AdSense, helps people to find my website, search for my own images on the internet, powers people’s phones, hosts a social network, and so much more. Google keeps growing and buying other companies to add to their portfolio and improve their service; on the internet, Google is king.

By the looks of things, these two are the richest, and most successful internet entrepreneurs in history, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to be changing anytime soon. They were introduced by their professor at Stanford and started working on Google, went live in 1997 as part of Standford University’s website at google.stanford.edu and the rest, as they say, is history.

Social Networking – Tom Anderson – Myspace

I can see the comments coming already ‘what about Facebook?’, ‘what about Friendster’, but Tom is on the list because he made social networking what it it today – he brought it to the masses. It may not be the best social networking platform on the internet, but there was a time when we were all using it, because everyone else was using it as well. You could add bands as friends, and browse through music, way before Facebook allowed you to listen on their site, but best of all, it laid out the blueprint of how we network with friends on the internet.

Myspace isn’t really what it used to be, with a large number of users having switched to Facebook for good, many of whom (myself included), have closed their accounts. It was at one time the largest social network on the planet though, and for that Tom deserves a mention. Tom sold Myspace in early 2008 and left in 2009, not liking the direction the website had taken, he’s even got a Facebook page now.

“People seem very confused why I’m on Facebook. I’ve had a profile since 2005 and a “fan page” since 2009…Why am I not on MySpace? Because, I left the company in early 2009, and like most of you, I don’t like using it anymore.. not a fan of what the new folks have done with MySpace.”

Music Sharing – Shawn Fanning – Napster

Before Kazza and Limewire, there was the original, and largely illegal peer to peer network – Napster. Napster set the president for online music downloading, as well as a lot of the legal troubles back in the day before there were so many competitors. For the first time on the internet, it was possible for the masses to be able to share their music with each other and download music and videos for free.

As many of you probably know, Napster learnt their lesson the hard way and got slammed with masses of legal problems, and eventually had to be shut down. Nevertheless, it lead the way for similar services, and gave us all a taste of what it’s like to download music for free. It now runs a service similar to Spotify in that you pay a subscription and you can stream music from a library online. What’s interesting about this is that Sean Parker, who was one of the co founders, now owns a stake in Spotify, which is Napster’s biggest rival (now owned by Best Buy).

Learning – Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia

Many people have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia, because of it’s ability to provide you with excellent and well referenced information, as well some complete nonsense. Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, which is a user generated internet encyclopedia, back in 2001. It currently indexes over 20 million articles and has helped hundreds of thousands of students world wide find ‘inspiration’ for essays and reports. If I’m looking for something on Wikipedia, I more often not just Google it, because the wiki I’m looking for is usually in the top 3 results.

Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 90,000 regularly active contributors. Wikipedia can be seen in 282 languages and is currently the largest encyclopedia on the internet… no surprises there. It’s currently ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone. Just to keep in the spirit of things, this whole paragraph was made up from information on Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales really had changed the way in which we learn on the internet, because even though there’s some bad information on there, a lot of it is well referenced and full of the facts we’re looking for.

Shopping – Jeff Bezos – Amazon

Amazon.com is the internet’s most popular and trusted online retailer, and has completely changed the way we shop. The death of the high street is all down to online shopping and there’s no better retailer than Amazon for finding the best deals with service you can trust. The website was one of the first of it’s kind and went live way back in 1995, when most of us were still trying to get to grips with a keyboard. It started as a bookstore to rival chains such as Barnes & Noble, but it soon diversified and spread to many more countries around the world in an effort to turn a profit. It survived the burst of the dot.com bubble and finally made a profit in 2001 on the sale of over 1 billion dollars worth of goods.

The growth was initially quite slow, and it took me a while to get into it too, but with free shipping, a huge selection of products and some of the best prices on the internet, it’s hard not to love them. Now as the world’s largest online retailers and Jeff Bezos being worth more than $19Billion, Amazon.com has made a permanent mark on how we use the internet.

Watching – Chad Hurley & Steve Chen – YouTube

The world of online video watching took a lot longer to get off the ground, due to internet speeds and hosting fees, but it’s well and truly here to stay now, with no website more popular than YouTube. Started by two former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube was launched in 2005, and was sold less than 2 years later in November 2006 to Google for $1.65 billion – not bad for a couple years work. YouTube offer the ability to upload an unlimited amount of videos for people over the 18, so long as it didn’t include adult content.

The site made huge changes to viral media, with fun and short videos becoming much more easily accessible with YouTube’s fast loading time and unintrusive website. It also created the ‘YouTube Star’ where people could make their own regular videos and earn money through Google AdSense, which has provided full time careers to some users. YouTube seems to have gone downhill a bit recently, with their annoying adverts, but they’re still the market leader and name we think of when we think about online videos.

Blogging – Matt Mullenweg – WordPress

Again, I’m hearing cries of ‘what about David Bohnett, the creator of GeoCities’ and ‘what about blogger.com or Tumblr’, and the answer is simple, Matt Mullenweg did it right. GeoCities was a massively popular site back in the day, but the customizations made it look childish and usage went so far down that they’ve closed it all together. WordPress on the other hand is the most popular blogging platform on the internet because of its usability and easy to install plugins that can make every site look unique. No doubt that the majority of people reading this are using WordPress for their own site, and we recommend it as we use it for IncomeDiary and ExpertPhotography.

It’s not just changed the way we blog, because the capabilities of WordPress go far beyond that now, and they’re so easy to use, that just about anyone can do it. To say that the reach of WordPress is substantial would be an understatement, as it’s used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. Matt has made a big change to the way we use the internet, because we’re not just spectators anymore, we’re now a part of it.

Gaming – Mike Morhaime – Blizzard

Mike is currently worth nearly $2billion because of the way that he managed to revolutionize the way that online gaming is done, with one of the most popular games of all time – World of Warcraft. WoW alone has over 10 million online gamers, all of which have to pay a monthly subscription to play. I’m not trying to say that he changed the internet because he managed to make so much money out of it, I’m saying that he’s created a game so popular, that 10 million people happily pay for it and spend their time on the internet, using it. There are of course other games on the internet, such as Runescape, or simple games you may find on sites such as Miniclip, but no game seems to rank higher with gamers than WoW.

Matt has helped online gamers realize that there are some things that are just worth paying for, and that’s set a president for other online gaming sites too. His community is vast and virtual world, huge.

Communicating – Niklas Zennström & Janus Friis – Skype

Niklas and Janus have had a pretty interesting career so far, with their part in the online music peer to peer network Kazaa (which was the most downloaded program in 2003), and more famously, Skype, an online telephone based on the same principals. Within just five years of it’s launch, it already had over 300 million users, proving itself to have a place in business and pleasure. I personally use it to talk to friends who live abroad, as well as Skyping in when I work from home.

Zennström and Friis have had a bit of an on again, off again relationship with Skype, selling it to eBay for €2.1 billion in 2005, as well as being a part of the investment team that bought it back in 2009, where they re-joined the Skype board, before selling it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, in May of 2011, netting them approximately $1 billion. International calling is almost a thing of the past these days, and even if you did want to make a phone call, it’s cheaper to use Skype credit. With mobile phone apps, you can now take it with you anywhere, it’s truly become a part of the way we use the internet, and it seems to be here to stay.

File Sharing – Bram Cohen – BitTorrent

Yes, there are of course plenty of legal uses for torrenting, but that’s not typically what we think of when we hear the name BitTorrent. The BitTorrent network revolutionized the peer to peer network by breaking up much bigger files into parts and sharing them with multiple users to download from, which was a distinct advantage over the traditional p2p network. The BitTorrent network has many illegal implications, where you can download and share files such as music, movies, software and TV shows in just a couple hours, although Cohen himself claims to have never violated copyright law.

The program launched in the 2004, and now there’s thousands of websites and programs dedicated to the sharing of files, for whatever the use may be. Whether you’re using it for legal or illegal purposes, you can’t deny the fact that torrenting has changed the way we share large files on the internet and Bram Cohen has been a huge part of that.

Educating yourself and those who work for you is important. We all know the better our website is, the higher our earnings will be. I have listed 10 websites that I read and get inspiration from to make my blogs better. Let us know in the comments what blogs you read about WordPress and why.

Top 10 WordPress Blog

Yoast

One of my personal favorites, Yoast offers a wide range of advice about WordPress and SEO. If you want advise above what everyone else offers then check out this website. My favourite posts include:

• Yoasts WordPress SEO Guide
• Content SEO Made Easy
• Link Building 101

Net Tuts

Part of the Envato network, this website talks about everything code related. They have great detailed posts and tutorials about WordPress and how to use it better. My favorite posts include:

• How To Split Test in WordPress
• How To Create WordPress Shortcodes
• How To Setup a WordPress Testing Environment

Pro Blog Design

A lot of WordPress users forget the importance of design and user experience, this is why I enjoy reading Pro Blog Design.  They offer a wide range of content ranging from design, coding, usability, blog posts and the list goes on. My favorite posts include:

• 30 Ways To Increase Readability
• 7 Elements To Make Your Blog Look Great
• Great Way To Backup Your Blog

Six Revisions

A long time favorite for me. Sixrevisions lays a lot of their content out in lists which I’m a big fan of as it’s easy to skim and find parts that will actually interest you. Another great part about this site is the majority of content is done by guest writers so you get a wide range of subjects covered and different points of view. My favorite posts include:

• 10 Techniques for Customizing the WordPress Admin Panel
• 12 WordPress Security Tips
• 10 WordPress Plugins That Will Save You Time

Web Designer Wall

Another long time favorite of mine. I have seen this blog go through a few redesigns and have always been a fan of what he produces. A great thing about the owner (Nick), he has a lot of websites and really does know what he’s talking about, not simply talking about a subject because he thinks money is in it. Back in 2009 we interview Nick La about how he created his blog, check it out. My favorite posts include:

• 20+ WordPress Codes
• Unique Blog Posts and WordPress Tips
• Building Custom WordPress Themes

The WordPress Podcast

Another website by the owner of Yoast. This websites content is provided in a different format, audio, or podcasts if you will. We all like learning in different ways and I love listening so that works well for me. They are not the only ones teaching, they also invite WordPress experts to come and talk about what they are doing and what you can learn from it. My favorite posts include:

• How To Monetize Your Blog
• Interview With Brian Clark (founder of Copyblogger)
• How Collis from Envato Built His Empire!

Wp Recipes

Sometimes your looking for the answer to a WordPress question. This website most likely has that answer. Every post is another great tip or trick to do something WordPress related. My favorite posts include:

• How To Redirect Your Homepage To Your Most Recent Post
• How To Hide Your Sidebar On Your Homepage
• Removing Auto Links in Comments

Wp Beginner

Wpbeginner is a large blog teaching WordPress users how to do more with it. The owner who is a personal friend of mine has some great tutorials ranging from code to SEO. Ever if you think your amazing with WordPress, there is still stuff to be learned on this website. My favorite posts include:

• Display Popular Posts By Day, Week, Month, Year
• How To Setup W3 Super Cache
• How WordPress Plugins Affect Your Website Load Time

WPCandy

Jam packed with WordPress news, updates and tutorials. This is a must read for any programmer, developer and WordPress Fan. A great combination of learning, inspiration and awareness for WordPress users. My favorite posts include:

• A Simple WordPress SEO Strategy
• A Hypercritical Analysis of $35 WordPress Themes
• How To Create a Functional WordPress Plugin

WPMU

A unique website about WordPress plugins, themes, how to guides, help and much, much more! This website is great for those more like us, who care not just about creating blogs but running them. My favorite posts includes:

• Using Piwik To Track Traffic
• How To Setup Your Own Online WordPress Theme Shop
• Facebook Optimization Guide For WordPress

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What’s Your Favorite WordPress Related Website To Learn From?

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the Techie Title of today’s post – hardly sounds exciting – but I promise to make it more interesting and FUN than it sounds.

I have two exciting announcements:

1) The Launch of Blog Essentials – a series of Posts on how to be a Better Blogger that will appear over the next few months.

and

2) Details of a new eBook and inspiring gift from Yanik Silver called “Creating Your Ultimate BIG Life List“. (More on Yanik’s gift at the end of this email)

I will say up front that much of what I will publish in the BLOG ESSENTIALS has already been covered in my eCourse but I know from all the questions I get that a lot of people could do with further clarification. So I will also be elaborating on much of what is included in the eCourse when appropriate.

From the questions I get that I know that a lot of people find using cPanel Hosting to set up their blogs along with email etc very confusing. And it doesn’t help when you are told it is ‘easy’ and you really don’t need to be a ‘techie’ to order to operate in cPanel.

But before I go on with this guide proper I would also just like to give My TOP TIP for anyone having a challenge with CPANEL, especially if you are afraid you will mess something up. Here it is:

Set up some “Dummy” hosting

What I mean by “Dummy” Hosting is that you configure some hosting for a domain that you don’t plan to launch in the near future and quite literally ‘play around’ with cPanel, following the guide below and also guides at some of the resources I am including at the end of this email. The worst thing that can happened is that you mess up – but if it is not a real LIVE domain that doesn’t matter and you can just delete the hosting and start again. (And really you are very unlikely to mess up) The Hostgator Baby Plan and Business Plans allow you unlimited domains – so just go ahead and set up some ‘dummy hosting’ that you can play around with.

Hostgator.com even offer a cPanel Demo – so that is another alternative to try out.

Simple Steps To Set Up Your Blog and Email Accounts

Hosting – Where To Get It

1. If you don’t have a host yet and are not sure who to choose, go to Hostgator.com HostGator is one of the world’s top 10 largest web hosting companies with more than 2,500,000 hosted domains. They also have over 300 employees to provide you superior around the clock support.

But most importantly – whoever you host with, only use a hosting company that offers CPanel hosting (easiest control panel) and the following is based on that.

2. Once you get the hosting details by email, go to your domain name registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, TVCNet or whoever you bought the domain through) and change the nameservers to whatever it says in the email. After a while, you should be able to then access www.your-domain-name.com/cpanel and log-in with the user-name and password in your hosting email. (Most hosts will also give you an IP address which you can use to login while you wait for the Nameservers to update)

I am not going to cover changing Nameservers here – but there are plenty of videos and guides around explaining how – such as Godaddy’s own guide at: Setting Nameservers for Your Domain Names

There is also a pretty useful video at: Metacafe.com

Setting Up Email in cPanel

When you login to cPanel you will find that you have two main alternatives for handling email.

a) Set up an email address that allows you to send and receive via your own domain {Called POP3 email} or b) Set up a forwarding email address that FORWARDS any email received at the email address you set up to an existing email address, such as your ISP email address.

On most of my blogs I just use Forwarders that forward to one main email address but if you are an Offline Business with sales and support staff etc you may want to set up as per Item 3 below.

3. To set up an email address that allows you to send and receive via your own domain find and click the ‘create email’ icon. Create an email account such as ‘info’ @domain-name.com and the password as whatever you think best. I would make the password something difficult to guess – e.g: change the vowels to numbers, use one capital and an exclamation at the start. Also, use Roboform or LastPass for passwords.

Using CPanel To Set Up Your Email Account

Setting Up Email Forwarders

4. To set up Forwarders in email click on the ‘forwarders’ icon in the Mail section on cPanel. Click the ‘Add Forwarder’ button and proceed to set up any email addresses you require. (Forwarding to an existing email address)

Setting Up Email Forwarders In CPanel

Install WordPress blog

Using Fantastico To Install WordPress

5. Find the ‘Fantastico’ smiley face icon near the bottom of the cPanel home page to set up a WP blog. When you enter the Fantastico section of CPanel it is then just as simple as clicking ‘WordPress’ and ‘new installation’. (See screen-shots below)

Install in directory = leave blank to install at the domain name level (instead of adding /blog to have it as www.your-domain-name.com/blog)

Fantastico Installation Of WordPress Blog

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From Fantastico - Select WordPress New Installation

Installing WordPress – Settings

Items 6 – 10 Refer to Image below:

6. Admin access data – Administrator-username = ‘admin’ or whatever you want

7. Password = Again make it unique and difficult to guess by anyone but you.

8. Admin nickname = your name or whatever you’d like to be used as the name on your own blog posts. You can change it or add others later

9. Admin e-mail = By default it sets up an email address that is username@your-domain.com but I always change it to one of my main email addresses – as after you have more than a few blogs it becomes quite an issue having so many different email addresses to check on.

10. Sitename = something like ‘Your Domain Name’ and the description would be a few short words as ‘How to make a Gazillion Bucks in 78 seconds – in your PJ’s‘ or similar (depending on your subject of course). Again, can be changed later so is not life-or-death.

Setting Up Username and Password in a WordPress New Install

WordPress blog set up

10. Test that you can log in to WP admin by visiting www.your-domain-name.com/wp-login.php and enter the user name admin and your password as created in #s 6 and 7 above. Update to current version of WordPress (should work with same user and password as you used for cPanel access)

Test Your WordPress Blog Logins

11. In left menu, find ‘pugins’. By default some plugins will already be uploaded – I suggest you activate Akismet (Quite easy to do – just follow the instructions) You should also add a Feedburner Plugin.

Find New WordPress Plugins To Install

You can then Upload and activate any plugins you require by clicking the ‘Add New’ button and one at a time finding and installing the plugins you require – you probably need the same user and password as you used for cPanel access.

Upload New Plugin In WordPress

I personally don’t use more than a handful of plugins so I do worry when I see people creating posts called “30 WordPress Plugins every bloggers need” – I’m proof you don’t need them. So often I get asked, “Michael, what WordPress main plugins do you use”? Here they are:

• Podcasting Plugin which allows me to add a player to blog posts so people can play our audio interviews.
• WP-ContactForm which is basically a contact form, really simply plugin that works perfectly. For anyone who has tried to create a contact form on a normal website, you will realize just how hard it can be.
• Comment Notifier which is basically an RSS feed for comments, alerting people who subscribe when there are new comments.
• All in One SEO Pack which basically makes optimizing your blog for search engines really easy.

OK, there will be some other Plugins – such as re-Tweet post, Email A Friend etc but to make it less complicated here I am just focusing on the main, essential PLUGINS

12. Also in ‘Settings’ find ‘Permalinks’ and add /%postname%/ into the custom field and update (with slashes and % symbols). Depending on how your hosting is set up you may need to Change File Permissions when you make this setting change. This is not as complicated as it sounds – but for the sake of brevity I am not going to cover it here. For now find out more HERE

However if there are enough requests, I will cover this in a future post.

Permalink Settings For A WordPress Blog

13. Create account at Feedburner and activate RSS feed through plugin – if not already done as per 11 above.

14. Got to WordPress.com and sign in or create an account for free. Then you will be given an ‘API’ in your user settings. This API number is to be posted in to the ‘plugins’ > ‘Askimet configuration’ (left menu) and saved. You should have activated ASKIMET earlier, but it will not work until you add your WordPress.com API key. Fortunately you can use same API key on all your blogs.

Add a Theme

16. If you are adding a custom theme, go to Woothemes.com and get one. They have free ones and lots of others such as Fresh News or Busy Bee (as used in Income Diary). If you do get one and are not sure how to ftp it, download ‘Filezilla’ (google it) for free. Open it and enter ‘ftp.your-domain-name.com’ and the username and password in your hosting email.

Once logged in, in the right side, click ‘public_html’ then ‘wp-content’ and you will see a folder called ‘themes’. In the left side window, find the place you downloaded and upzipped the theme to. Double click it until you get down to the folder called ‘Busy-bee’ ot whatever you bought. Drag the folder across to the ‘themes’ folder on the right side and let it do it’s uploading. When it is all done and finished, click the little red ‘x’ symbol on the top toolbar to disconnect (next time you can connect with one click from the drop-down under ‘quick connect’)

Congratulations because you are now a webmaster and a professional web site creator

Note: If it all went wrong, through cPanel > fantastico, you can go and delete WordPress and re-install.

More cPanel and Fantastico Resources

a) This documentation describes the features of the cPanel interface for cPanel 11.25: cPanel User Guide

b) WordPress.org guide to Installing WordPress Using Fantastico

c) Fantastico De Luxe is the leading autoinstaller for cPanel servers. With more than 10.000 installations, it provides more than one million end users the ability to quickly install dozens of the leading open source content management systems into their web space.

Free Gift From Yanik Silver

Anyone who has been following me for any time knows what a huge fan I am of LISTS. Well my good friend Yanik Silver has just put together an eBook on building the Ultimate Life List (Which frankly is the most important list of all). Yanik’s Creating Your Ultimate BIG Life List eBook is the perfect tool with which to create your own list for your most memorable and exciting life ever.

Download Yanik Silver's Creating Your Ultimate Big Life List eBook

Creating Your Ultimate BIG Life List is available as a free download HERE (there’s not even an opt-in required)

I am a Big Fan of Yanik’s Maverick Rules – in particular Rule 33

Maverick Rule #33: Get A Life!

Business and making money are important but your life is the sum total of your experiences. Go out and create experiences & adventures so you can come back renewed and inspired for your next big thing.

Check out Yanik’s Blog at InternetLifestyle.com/blog Enjoy Yanik’s gift

Thank You To A Reader

I think most of you know I am not a huge fan of having Guest Posts on my own blogs, especially IncomeDiary.com – but I think it is important to give credit here because this first edition of Blog Essentials was inspired by a document sent in by one of my readers – Jon Butt. I got to hang out a little with Jon at Yanik Silvers Underground Online Seminar last month and he also just happens to be a member of Yanik’s Maverick Business Adventures. Thank you Jon.

Finally a great quote about blogging from Brian Clark over at copyblogger.com

Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers

That is my GOAL – I hope it shows.

I would love to hear about your experiences with cPanel and of course details of Your Big Life List. Please let me have your comments, suggestions and general feedback below.

To Our Blogging Success.

Michael

PS: What – No PS?

I first met Yanik in 2006 when I attended his Underground Online Seminar 2 in Washington DC. I had never before been to such a FUN, business event and I was literally blown away with the amount of information Yanik and the speakers provided. (This was also the event were I first met Ryan Lee) Even cooler for me, Yanik awarded prizes to members of the audience – such as in my case winning a prize for being the youngest attendee. When Yanik presented me with his Internet Copywriting workshop course (value something like $1497) I really did not know just what a remarkable influence on my life Yanik was about to become. Even though I was just a 17yr old “kid entrepreneur” Yanik went out of his way to inspire me and encourage me as he still does today. Thank you Yanik.

Just a few of the things revealed in this interview are Yanik’s philosophy on business, his passion for helping young entrepreneurs, plus some insights he got from hanging out with Sir Richard Branson in Necker Island and running his newest Business Maverick Business Adventures.

Yanik also introduces us to the principle of creating “Fish” or “Done For You” products – something I am starting to apply myself these days.

Enjoy the interview – I look forward to your comments

Very Best Wishes

Michael

PS: My Takeaway from this interview? Well as always with Yanik there are tons of Takeaways — but one that for me stands out a mile and which is also somewhat obvious is: Your questions dictate your Answers

So often in life and in business we ask ourselves the wrong questions – so next time you are looking for an answer – think “Am I asking the right question?”

Yanik Silver Interview

++ Yanik Silver and Michael Dunlop Enjoying The Casino Evening At Underground Seminar 5 ++

Interview Transcript

Michael Dunlop: Hello everyone, this is Michael Dunlop from Income Diary and today I’m with Yanik Silver, who has being mentioned in dozens of our interviews and top lists and posts throughout the last seven months we’ve had the site up so it’s great to have him here today in person. Welcome Yanik.

Yanik Silver: Thanks Michael, yeah I’m excited to be here.

Michael: Okay Yanik’s being mentioned for a good reason and today we’ll get to share some great advice from him. So I’ll jump straight in with my first question which is – a lot of my readers are starting off with their online business, or blog, or website and so many of them are trying to put together their big idea – so what advice would you give them to bring it together?

Yanik: Well there’s, two parts to it. One is, I really think that, your questions dictate your answers, When I first got started online, I literally was kinda scoping out the scene and this was back in ’99 and I didn’t even have an email address back then and looking at some people that were selling information online and digitally delivering it that I’m like thought that’s an interesting thing. I could probably do that and I’d literally like ask myself the question you know, how can I create a fully automatic website that makes me money while I sleep, is an incredible value for people, and, and is not just an e-book and I’ll explain why, why that was important in a moment, and so literally at 3 o’clock in the morning one night I woke up and tapped my wife on the shoulder- I’m like “Missy, Missy, wake up, wake up, I got this great idea” and she’s like “Oh, please go back to bed” and I’m like “No, no, this is gonna be, this is gonna be really good” and I jumped out of bed and, and took action and so that was one of the key points was, was jumping out of bed and, and taking action, and that’s you know, one of the things that, that I see so many people falling down on – as I think everyone has at least one million dollar idea in, in their head and they don’t, they don’t take that, that positive action to, to get it going. That first idea was a little site called ‘Instant Sales Letters’ and that has gone on now to be my first, that was my very first million dollar product at forty bucks a clip so we sold a bunch of those.

Michael: Yeah, that’s, that’s incredible.

Yanik: Yeah, and, and actually kinda relates to, you know, what, what you mentioned before, Michael, was, you know, how, that the idea stage in, for young entrepreneurs and for those getting started, um, I’m a, I’m a big believer in having that big idea or having a, a big hook which is a unique angle, so like remember in my questions I said it can’t be an e-book, I wanted to differentiate what I was doing from other things out there in the market place at that point, so ‘Instant Sales Letters’ was a series of, of download-able templates that people could use and, you know, the technology behind this is pretty damn crude right now and I probably should update it but I haven’t, I haven’t touched it in probably five or six years, but the, the big idea of that was something that I call it a “fish product” and everyone has heard this saying – “you hand a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach a man to fish you feed him for life, well that’s kinda bullshit.

People want the fish handed to them you know, and you walk into a restaurant, you don’t want to go out back and go fishing for your dinner in most cases. You want it prepared really nicely by the chef and so that was what ‘Instant Sales Letters’ did and my wife even had a little bit of success kinda knocking me off with instant thank you letters, but you know, anytime you can give people a fish product I always think about okay, what, what can you do to make it push buttons simple for people – how do you give them something on a silver platter. Look at even like Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for example. I mean that, that really took off. I had the good fortune of meeting Matt Mullenweg, down in the British Virgin Islands actually along with your dad, and you know WordPress, I think what makes it so great, I mean there’s a lot of things, but part of it is that it’s so damn simple and it’s like, it’s like the fish product. It’s, it’s handing it to them on a platter for, for concept management, so there’s a lot of those out there and I’ve had good success with that and then the other really big point of the, the big idea is I always think about how can I go the opposite direction? I look at things like my underground online seminar which is a good example of that which stemmed out of me thinking about what’s in the market place right now? and this was five years ago and I’m like okay there’s a lot of internet seminars and there’s a lot of people doing it the exact same way, with pretty much the same speakers, so I thought, okay to really differentiate let’s go with really unknown speakers who are making a whole lot of money online, making millions of dollars but are doing it very quietly and most people never heard of and that was how the underground seminar was born so those are just two ways of coming up with a big idea.

Michael: That’s great advice, Yanik. I’m sure everyone could take something away from that, even myself, at the last MasterMind you had, my dad brought me along and I took away the idea of “done for you” which is sort of the same sort of principles, like, you know, give it to them done instead of teaching them how to do it.

Yanik: Yeah, some people are, are do it yourselfers and then a, a lot of us are, are kinda lazy and, and that’s not lazy in a bad way, but we’re all so busy. However if you present its as “done for you” and the give it to them on a silver platter it works much better. This stems through kinda everything that I try and do, everything from when we get our affiliates to help promote our products, for example you wanna provide your clients with all the tools that they need to do it, all the pre-done emails if possible, and banners, and so forth so they don’t have to think about it too much.

Michael: Yep, exactly and that’s probably touching on my next question- you, you mentioned that, uh, you were selling ‘Instant Sales Letters’ for just forty dollars, but like loads of my readers, um, you know, sending from twenty to a hundred dollars to sell over a million dollars worth you must of, uh, sold a lot, say what sort of, of tools or resources, or what was the idea that you used to sell so much?

Yanik: The biggest thing is partially what we covered is it had a good hook to it and so it got people excited, they could, as soon as they got the site or even heard the URL they, they kinda got what, what it was and that get the ball rolling. I really based a lot of my business on affiliate marketing, where we get other people to promote our products, drive traffic to our site, and right now we have about some forty some thousand affiliates which sounds impressing but the reality of affiliate marketing is that a tiny percentage actually produce business. It is not even like the 80/20 rule, the Pareto Principle, it’s more like a 97/3 rule or a 98/2 rule, so about two percent are, are driving ninety eight percent of your sales and traffic and, I mean, this is a total aside but I ran an affiliate program for, for one of my friends at one point and we had a hundred fifty affiliates only, and we generated about four million dollars in sales from, from those affiliates in one year, so you don’t need a ton of affiliates to do this right but, but affiliate marketing has always been one of my kinda arsenal weapons of choice because of the low risk involved, because of the fact that I only have to pay my employees once somebody that they referred has made a sale and so the very first thing that I did and it’s so simple and you can still today is, I started thinking about okay, well, where are my existing costumers already and at that point I went to AltaVista search engine which, I don’t even know if it’s still around? Obviously you would go to Google today and maybe a couple of other search engines, but just type in a couple of your keyword phrases and see who else is coming up on top, so who’s in the top ten, so I typed in ‘sales letters’ and I would see, okay, you know, one of the top ones was like a university, they’re not going to promote for me, obviously, or it would be pretty hard to get them to promote for me and then, you know, so I went through the list of top ten, top twenty sites and obviously those top ten, top twenty, had the traffic that I was looking for and so I just contacted them in a very personal way, not in a spam me sort of way, and, and just said ‘hey, you know, I created this site called Instant Sales Letters I think, the visitors coming to your site might be interested in this if you wanna come, go check it out here’s a password for it” and you know, I think I got like one or two of those people to, to respond and say “yeah, okay” and then they promoted it and then what I did was kinda of like a, a Chinese water torture where just, we just kept, uh, following up on the rest of those, those hot prospects with, with the results from, from the guys who promoted it so, I just kept them posted: “hey, you know, so and so just promoted this and they made this” and I think I got about thirty, nah, probably like forty percent of my top twenty people to sign up as affiliates pretty quickly and from there it just kinda, kinda grew where we’d advertised it a little bit, we still do some paperclip advertising, but, uh, to tell you the truth the affiliate program the affiliate network is probably the biggest thing that ever really runs it. Articles that I’ve done have helped, but the affiliate program, that is the big one.

Michael: Alright, great, great advice, Yanik. You have got more than just one product here, you got dozen of products and services and events now and you got hundreds of thousands of people following what you’re doing and contacting you, how do you sort of keep up with all of this and what advise would you give to other entrepreneurs with a lot on their plates right now?

Yanik: Ha, I don’t know, you got to figure out where your breaking point sort of is.  I mean I love having multiple things on the go and for some people they like having only one thing on the go. Instant Sales Letters was my very first thing and the funny thing is, uh, that’s probably the most entrenched thing I did because I focused solely on that and built that up and had a good foundation around it and then the other things kinda came as a, as a creative byproduct of, of ‘Instant Sales Letters’ I mean, within four months I was on track to do six figures a year and that’s when people started asking me “hey how did you do this and can you teach me how to do the same thing and that’s how I started creating internet marketing related products based on what I’ve done and so that was all just this weird, you know, side by-product that, well my original goal was to sell ‘Instant Sales Letter’ for half a million dollars to like stamps.com or something like that but, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that today for, just because it’s a great engine that drives a lot of the other things that we’re doing. I try and focus in on what I’m really good at and I’ve taken a lot of different self assessment tests throughout the years and I think any kind of time that you spend leaning about yourself, learning about your strengths, learning about where you fall down, what you suck at, is all, is all really good time that’s proactive. I mean I’ve literally done everything from like a two day test at the Johnson O’Connor Human Engineering Institute, which is, I think they have locations all around the US, I don’t, they probably have some internationally too, to things like now the Discover Your Strengths, Kolbe Profiling, which is a really good test which is online which is ‘Kolbe.com’ um, created by a woman named Kathy Kolbe which is your connotative ability which is like your natural inclination of how you work and I found that, that really fascinating and, you know, for me, my number which won’t mean anything to you right now, but it’s a 24 or 10-2 but the ten is the area called quick start, which mean how quickly do I initiate a project without knowing what the hell I’m doing and, so a lot of entrepreneurs are behind that quick start and just knowing, you know, knowing a lot of these things about yourself helps you to realize what, what you’re really good at, what, what gives you passion, and for me it’s, it’s definitely the ideas, it’s the start up phase, it’s the, um, it’s coming up with the, the big hook, the big ideas, and a lot of entrepreneurs are like that and, and you gotta, you gotta sometimes partner up with someone who’s, who’s the opposite. I mean, I just hired, a VP of operations – so now I’m in charge of figuring out where we’re going and the vision and the big ideas and then he’s in charge of how are we gonna get there and I’ve found that throughout the years that I’ve done this it’s been really helpful of me bringing my strengths to the table and then having a partner in a lot of cases who has different strengths. A lot of people bring a partner in for the wrong reasons, they bring him in for comradery, or just having somebody to commiserate with. I think it’s a good time to bring people in if they compliment your strengths, so they’re, you know, whatever you’re weak at is where they’re strengths are, hopefully.

Michael: No, that’s a, spot on, I’ve recently got somebody working with myself and I did it for exactly those reasons and it’s helped my business so much it’s, it’s great. Uh, okay, okay so, um, as you mentioned you’ve got so many different things going on like, uh, you have your physical book, e-books, you run seminars, you got your physical newsletter, MasterMind trips, and so on and what is your favorite business model and why?

Yanik: You said favorite business model or business?

Michael: Ah, business model, sorry. Which one of them would you…

Yanik: You know it’s kinda weird, and I would’ve answered this probably differently two years ago and I still love this business model because I think it’s probably one of the best for people that want to break into doing something on their own and, and want to create a nice lifestyle business and that is Information Marketing. I’m such a big believer in having these high margins, low cost produced products, whether it is an e-book, or a membership site, or, or a home-study course, or even a series of seminars or events. I think creating info-products and you can do really well with them and, and its also one of the easiest most lucrative, most fulfilling business models that you can come up with because you get to impact other people. I’ve worked with students from, you know, one guy, one of my favorites is this college kid that came to me and, and he knew how to take engines out of a Honda Accord and put it into a Honda Civic because uh, because they share the same engine or something like that and he, he put it out on a CD-rom and after I worked with him for a little bit he did a hundred thousand dollars a year selling that information to other, other you know mostly kids that wanted to mod their Hondas and, uh, his mom accused him of selling drugs out of his dorm room, he had that much money, yeah so, I, I got a good laugh out of that and I enjoyed that so, you know that’s just one example of selling information and I, I think, you know, we have students who’ve done everything from potty training, to guitar lessons, to financial related things, and I, so I love that model and even if you don’t think you’re an expert at something, I’ve taught repeatedly about taking public domain information and so information that has fallen out of copyright, for whatever reason, and, and just using that. We have, we have stuff that we created, about houseplants that, that sell and about for artists how to, uh, how to draw people better so we’ve done little, little projects like that just to show people how, how easy it is. Um, or I mean, you become almost like a publisher and like what you and I are doing right now, Michael, you’re interviewing me and there’s no reason that, that if you picked out a marketplace, like let’s say I don’t know training parrots how to do tricks, or something like that, you talk to a vet, you talk to, I don’t know, an animal trainer, and you just have a couple interviews and you package them up into a little course that teaches, uh, people how to, how to train their parrots, or whatever marketplace you decide. So I love, I love information and I think, you, um, there’s so many multiple ways they could deliver it now that gets really exciting, whether it’s via.. all the way up to iPhone, to the most simplistic, which is a regular book, which so many people are familiar with and delivering via kindle, delivering via online membership site, there’s just a ton of ways of doing that. Now, so like I said that would have been my answer two years ago, and I still love that, that business model. Um, today, I, you know, I’m evolved as an entrepreneur and part of what I really, what I really lean and get attracted to is passionate, passionate projects so, not only should there be a good solid business model or margin to it, but I, I think it should be something that hopefully gets you excited, that you can have fun with, and, and that yeah, just really revs you up.

Michael: Well hit. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that as well. Um, so, that sort of leads me to my next question, actually, you’re well known for the Internet Lifestyle, and I guess that’s sort of what you were just talking about, so what’s your favorite thing about the Internet Lifestyle?

Yanik: For me the Internet Lifestyle means: fun, freedom, financial independence funded by the internet (lot of F’s in there) maybe we could call it the, the F-bomb Internet Lifestyle My favorite thing is that internet is an amazing golden opportunity right now, a golden age where literally for a couple bucks and a semi-decent idea you can get started and see what happens and the coolest part is we can just grab our laptops. You can run our business from just about anywhere via Skype, via instant message, via gmail and that to me is the coolest part. I mean there’s got to be a balance to, to your entrepreneurship and to, to your whole life, I mean, really that’s where the fun part kicks in and I’m, you know, we could definitely talk about that for a while, but on, on ‘internetlifestyle.com’, which is, which is my blog, I have a whole running list called my ultimate big life list, and some of the things that, that I want to accomplish and, and so that, that keeps me motivated beyond any sort of monetary thing and, and just, uh, the, the freedom. That I think that’s probably the biggest driver for entrepreneurs, if you’re gonna kinda get down to what is the essence of entrepreneurship in, in a lot of cases, it was the freedom that, that drives them and you, you don’t want to get in a situation where, where you lose sight of that and your business really becomes a, a job for you, you wanna, and you have to, and it’s definitely a constant process of being vigilant because, you know, for me, I can keep taking more and more new projects and I’ll never leave my office even though my office is out of my house but still, you gotta have that, that balance and create that fun and the freedom for you and then another element that I kinda just added, like I said I’ve been evolving as an entrepreneur and I have this notion of, not just making more money, not just having more fun, but now it’s about giving, giving more back, so combining all this together I think becomes an optimal business bliss.

Michael: Alright, great. And is this the reason why you launched Maverick Business Adventures or what did inspire you to create that business?

Yanik: Yeah, partially that. It was partially around this, uh, idea, I was kinda, ah, a little burnt out on just the internet marketing thing that I was doing and it wasn’t totally fulfilling to me and I, I made a list of all the things that I would love to have in an ideal business and it was things like: adventure, unique experiences, hanging out with really smart entrepreneurs, brainstorming, um, helping the next generation of young entrepreneurs, and philanthropy, and, and giving back, and having an impact and, and so that was the impetus turn for Maverick Business Adventures. I don’t know where it’s gonna lead to, but I, but I got some, some pretty big ideas for it with, uh, not just this high, high level group of, of entrepreneurs that, that are million dollar plus businesses, but, but hopefully expanding to, to a whole, whole series of groups. I mean, my ultimate goal by 2020 is to have a million, a million young entrepreneurs ages 13-23 start their own businesses and based on mentorship, blueprints, strategies and the secrets that, that a lot of Maverick members would be sharing and creating that, that platform for, for the next generation.

Michael: Which, I mean, everything there just sounded so great to me as well. I mean, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs it’s hard to, sort of, talk about business to normal people so Maverick Business Adventures sounds like a, a great opportunity for everyone to, sort of, connect on a better level.

Yanik: Yeah definitely, I mean at the highest level it’s everything from hanging out at Sir Richard Branson’s Island and doing all sort of cool activities, and plus raising a lot of money for his charity to like next year we’re going to South Africa. That will be a great trip and we’re going to the finals of the Soccer World Cup, and the semi-finals, and cage diving with sharks, and going on a safari and at the same time while we’re there we’re teaching at the Branson School of Entrepreneurship some kids that we’ve actually already been mentoring with, so it, it combines those three things, those elements that, that I’ve always loved all throughout my life and now I’m just, I just have, uh, kind of, uh, a, I don’t know, a holder for all of them in, in one place.

Michael: Great Yanik. I mentioned at the beginning of the interview you are probably, you are the most mentioned person on this site. You come up all the time. Why do you think you’ve come across so well on the Internet? Is it because you just provide the best value or what do you think is the best way to be seen as the best, I think I just answered that myself, but…

Yanik: Well, I definitely appreciate that, it’s very uplifting and it’s great, maybe it’s just because I have a unique name, I think, uh…

Michael: We know that’s not the case.

Yanik: Well I’ve attempted to be really conscientious about focusing on the things that I expect from myself and I mean, literally if I look up my planner right now on October 6th 1998, (Which was when I felt like I was first getting out of this really big upward trajectory) and one of the big things that, that I wrote there was “I’m rich by enriching others ten times to a hundred times what they pay me in return” and I think that’s, that’s a big element of what, what I really, really, really try and , and focus on, whether it’s a product for forty dollars like the ‘Instant Sales Letters’, I wanna make sure that someone gets at least four hundred to four thousand dollars, and I return to our MasterMind, which is twenty thousand dollars so I wanna make sure that people get a tremendous ROI and I’m, I’m always, uh, attempting to do that, always looking for ways that we can, we can add value, we can provide, you know, some unexpected bonuses. Just, just really having that intention out there, I think helps a lot.

I’m rich by enriching others ten times to a hundred times what they pay me in return

Michael: Well that’s really powerful stuff and I’m not surprised you do so well after hearing that. So we have a lot of, we have lot different aged people on this site, but in particular we have a lot of young entrepreneurs and I thought we’d just quickly mention, you’re doing a pre-day at your underground event in March 2010 – so what would you say to any young entrepreneur out there who is starting an online business right now?

Yanik: I would tell them A) congratulations because I think it’s one of the most exciting things that you could do and, and I’m really excited about the recent statistics that I’ve seen, that say that, that kids coming out of high school, it’s about seventy percent now wanna, wanna start their own business or do their own thing and, and it used to be only maybe about twenty years ago that the statistics were completely opposite where seventy percent wanted to get a job and, and work for, work, work for a big company and have that security and, and I don’t think that there’s any security in that. I think the security in your life comes from having the self assurance and, and the knowledge of knowing that you can literally start from nothing and create something incredibly valuable that, that, that you know, essentially, that the career cash on demand, money, value, pretty much whatever you want. I would tell you another couple other pieces of advice that, that I would, that I’d like to share on that is, you know, a lot of time the, there’s, there’s thinking around, well, you know, if I, I need a lot of money to, to start this business and that’s all bullshit. You don’t, you don’t need a lot of money. On every Maverick Adventures multiday trip that we go on we spend time with a group of, of young kids, uh, in, in every location and I remember this pretty vividly from this last one that we did in San Francisco and we had, I don’t know, maybe like forty kids there or something and I had a panel of the Maverick members up there and I love asking them how much, how much money did you start your business with because it’s, it’s always revealing and a lot of them are like, you know, Tim Huston, from Internet Lifestyle, he said five dollars and, you know, that, that was cool. Um, some of the guys are a couple hundred dollars. One guy, um, who trains fitness trainers, he has a multimillion dollar business now, but his very first business that he started, he started with something like, I think he told me either two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars and that was the one that failed. The one that succeeded was the one that started with a couple hundred dollars and having a so called lack of capital, I think, it forces you to you get creative, it forces you to just not throw your money at, at a problem and cause you’re always gonna have either an excess of time or an excess of money and it’s, it’s, it’s, that’s where the creativity comes from and, and coming up with unique ways to market, uh, what you’re doing and, you know use the natural kinda gift that you got, the, the media is definitely fascinated by young entrepreneurship, but use, use the media to your advantage, that’s all free. Um, I mean, everyone has grown, grown up with, with all sorts of connection points around Facebook and Twitter now and, and, you know, a bunch of other social media sites, use those your advantage to, to build, build your, your marketplace up. So, so start, you know, just start, that, that’s probably the biggest thing and just get into motion and start thinking about what’s the best use of my time and I would also, you know, I, I definitely would stress something that I did really early on was, was learn about direct response marketing and that’s, that’s what I think when you break it all down is, is what the Internet comes down to and, and so I would study like from a hundred years ago to like all the best mail order practitioners because, you know, what, what we’re really trying to do is, in some way shape or form, influence peoples’ actions whether it’s a click whether it’s get them to buy just through the computer screen and, and now we have a lot of different tools that are at our disposals from video to, to live messaging and, and SMS, all sorts of stuff, but back then a hundred years ago, you know, people had to walk down to their mailbox or, or their local mail post and, and place that order. Uh, and, and it would be hard to get them to do that. So if you can learn and study what, what psychology went into that, you can apply that, and not in a, not in a deceptive way, not in a, not in a way that’s used for evil, but in a way, a way that gets people to, uh, gets them to see that you’re product or service is a real benefit to them and, and you gotta have that, this element of, of persuasion there in a good way. One of my favorite books that I’ve read nine times on that is by a guy named Robert Ciladini called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Michael: Brilliant, top advice, Yanik. Actually, been looking into that myself, so, cool. Uh, if you could go back in a time machine, if it was possible, uh, what would you do differently?

Yanik: That is a good question. You know what, the funny thing is I’ve asked this question of a lot of people too when I interview them and I always cringe when I answer this, because it comes out the same way as so many other people’s answers, that I’ve asked this of and it is that I wouldn’t change too much because I really think we all develop at the right time – you know, what is that saying- “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”, or something like that?

I think you have to go through certain things to, to kinda, kinda come into your own, so I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t really change too much, I mean, you know, maybe I would’ve got started with having more continuity in my business quicker. So that means some sort of ‘Of The Month’ kind of thing, whether it’s a newsletter or membership site or, you know, something that, so we know every single month in, month out, that there’s X amount of income coming in. Um, I probably would’ve got, got smarter around testing prices sooner, all the things where, you know, you realize that you’re leaving money on the table when you’re looking back at, at, at what you’ve done. You know, selling a bunch of those ‘Instant Sales Letters’, I mean, we had an up-sell originally, very quickly, but you know we never, we never added any sort of continuity to it or anything like that. Um, I don’t know, I mean, I think, definitely everything develops in the right time, so, so I don’t think I would change too much.

Michael: Yeah, cool. I mean, about ninety percent, probably, of people I interview, they sort of look at it the same way, you know, in the, they like the way, the route they’ve taken because, uh, they’ve learned from everything they’ve done wrong and if they didn’t have the opportunity to do things wrong then they probably wouldn’t have learned the lessons.

Yanik: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael: Alright, cool. I’ve got a, a few quickfire questions for you to end the interview – The first is what do you like most about the Internet?

Yanik: I love the way that you can literally come up with an idea at, at 3o’clock in the morning and depending on how fast you are, what kinda skills you got, or what kinda skills you got on your team, that within a day or, or at most a couple weeks, you can have something out there and see what happens. I mean, you get that instant feedback, that’s what, that’s what’s so exciting, you get instant feedback around, around an email that you send or, or a twitter or, or, you know, whatever, and, and that’s exciting to me.

Michael: Wicked. And what do you like least about the Internet?

Yanik: What I like least about it is that it’s too easy to get wrapped up and sidetracked in a hundred different weird, random things that, that makes you think like you’re, you’re doing something productive but you’re really not.

Michael: Twitter.

Yanik: Well, possibly, yeah. If you’re in there for a strategic reason or, uh, you know like, like the other day I connected with the CMO of Kodak on Twitter so that was a strategic thing I wanted to do and go in there and set up this interview and that happened, but if you’re just kinda socializing, unless you got a plan for what you want to achieve it’s too easy to get sucked into your screen 24/7.

Michael: Cool. And, uh, who do you look up to? Um, who’s your role model for your business?

Yanik: As trite as it sounds, Sir Richard Branson is definitely my role model. I’ve been really fortunate and had the opportunity to hang out with him a couple times now and he’s one of the few kinda role model / inventors that I’ve met that once I’ve met them I’ve been even more inspired.

Michael: That’s always good.

Yanik: Yeah, I just love the fact that he’s not afraid to put himself out there. I mean, he runs multiple businesses, there is something like three hundred Virgin companies out there, that, that’s really inspiring to me because as, as an entrepreneur, with ADD (I haven’t been diagnosed with it, but I’m sure I got it) – you know, I love that, that aspect of it. I love the way that he’s created, he’s sort of imprinted his DNA on the companies and that cheeky sort of behavior, if I can steal a British term. He totally lives his life on his terms and that to me is the big inspiring point. You know there’s a lot of very wealthy, rich entrepreneurs that just seem pretty damn boring.

Michael: Yeah, well they say life is an adventure, so go live it.

Yanik: Yeah, make it one.

Michael: Yeah, wicked. And what is the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Yanik: You know what, it’s not something that I’ve been given directly, but there are some audio and print programs by a guy named Earl Nightingale – one is called ‘Lead the Field’ and is the most popular one but, I really like ‘The Strangest Secret’. So I study a lot of his stuff, even like really random obscure stuff and one thing that, that I really took to heart from, from him was: if you wanna become an expert in any subject you have to read or study for one hour a day on that subject material for three years, and if you wanna become a world class expert you read or study for one hour a day for, for five years. In my formative kinda entrepreneurial years where I think I was about eighteen when I first got impacted by learning about stuff like direct response marketing and also because of what I learned from Earl Nightingale I said “Well, you know, what would happen if you study for two hours a day or three hours a day”? – so you know what I just really ramped up for my my success.

Michael: Cool. Alright, so thanks very much for, um, being here today, Yanik. We’re taking some great advice away from you. Is there anything, uh, any last things you’d like to tell us, any personal business plans you have, or would you like to quickly mention the underground?

Yanik: Sure, I’ll mention the underground – after all you’re gonna be facilitating the Young Mogul day, that we’re having this year as the pre-day to Underground. It takes place March 12th-14th, 2010 in DC, with the Young Mogul day on the 11th, and that’s going to be really exciting and we’ll be releasing that soon. I’m sure that they’ll hear about it from you and, um, yeah, I don’t know, I mean I have, uh, we got, we got a lot of great big plans in place for this new vision of, uh, like I, I mentioned the, the one million young entrepreneurs getting started and it’s going to be part of an association that we’re going to be calling the, uh, the ‘Maverick One Million Association’, so that’ll be at ‘maverickonemillion.org’ so look for, look for something there pretty soon.

Michael: Alright, thanks very much, Yanik.

Yanik: Thanks, Michael. Appreciate it.

Just some of Yanik’s Websites:

Underground Online Seminar

Internet Copywriting workshop

Yanik Silver

Maverick Business Adventures

Instant Sales Letters