Today I’m excited to announce a new 4-Week Web Class that I will be teaching…

It’s called “Money Mindset.”

I believe the right mindset about how/why/when/where to make money is absolutely key to someone’s financial success.

Many know by now that I’m a HUGE believer in having the right mindset when it comes to starting or growing a business.  And now for the first time ever I’m going to teach a complete systematic approach to figuring out what you want in your life and then how to strategically plan and take action in order to get it.

Check out the video where I make the controversial statement…

Is ‘The Secret’ A Bunch Of B.S.?

Click here to watch the video and learn more about my new Money Mindset 4-Week Web Class.

Today is the 5-year Anniversary of the “Million Dollar Day.”

On August 17th, 2004, I released the original version of my Traffic Secrets course and pulled in over $1,000,000 in sales in less than 24 hours.  And without spending any money on traditional advertising.

Up until that day, doing a million dollars in sales in a single day (for an individual) was unheard of.  Many thought that $100,000-$150,000 in a single day (which was still extremely successful) was about the ‘ceiling’ for what could be done.

But just like Roger Bannister breaking the 4-Minute Mile (which many thought would never be done) many others started to do it as well.  Today there are many high school athletes that can break a 4-minute mile.

And today in 2009, since that big day in 2004, many other Internet marketers have also had million dollar days and even multi-million dollar days.  I, myself, have done it again as well.

While certainly much of what contributed to these big days was ‘technique’ (which I’ll get to in a moment) a lot of it is simply MINDSET.

That barrier, just like running a 4-minute mile, was a MENTAL barrier as well as a physical one.  Often times before anyone accomplishes something for the first time it seems like it’s not possible.  Yet once something is accomplished, even if it’s extremely difficult, others seem to follow with similar success.

This is the same reason why if you take most self-made millionaires and take away everything they have that they’ll find themselves back on top in less than a year.  Yet so many other entrepreneurs that have never made a lot of money flounder around for many, many years before breaking through - and some never break-through.

If you want to make a lot of money in your life (even in a short amount of time) you need to get your MINDSET together.  And, no, I’m not talking about The Secret and the law of attraction.

It’s not enough to WANT a better life.  It’s not enough to be AMBITIOUS.  And it’s not enough to just work hard.

You have to have a conversation inside your own head about what’s really possible and what are you really capable of.  Only when you truly believe this capability (no matter what it is) are you on your way to achieving it.

So What Are You Truly Capable Of?

That’s the question you need to answer within yourself.

It’s also interesting to look back on that “Million Dollar Day” and observe HOW it happened from a technique and strategy standpoint…

For years many marketers repeated the mantra, “The money is in the list, the list, the list.”

I shocked a large crowd of marketers when I was on a conference panel in 2002 and I said, “Let me tell you the real secret…  the money is NOT in the list.  The money is in OTHER PEOPLE’S LISTS.”

One of the most powerful things about Internet Marketing is the ability to LEVERAGE the marketing assets of others - their customer and prospect lists, their traffic, their content, their relationships, their expertise.

I leveraged Affiliate Marketing and got a lot of partners to help promote my product and that was a big key to why it was able to break-through that $1,000,000 in a day barrier.

And while, yes, I had to pay my affiliate partners about 50% of any sales they referred, most don’t realize that my net profits were still very high.  Some like to think that the launch ended up only netting me about $300,000 or so after all commissions and other costs were paid.

That launch, in just the first few days, ended up NETTING me $1,000,000 in PROFIT.  Not sales.  And it continued to bring in cash flow for many months after the initial launch.

The total ‘end result’ from the launch itself will probably end up being worth $20MM or more.  That’s the power of LEVERAGE.

From a technique standpoint I came up with several tactics for that launch that are now being used today.  I was one of the first marketers to ever leverage a blog for SOCIAL PROOF.  During that original Traffic Secrets launch I was driving prospects to blog posts and their comments about “can’t wait to buy this!” were encouraging others to do the same.  I strategically leveraged those comments to create more FRENZY and get more people interested in buying the product - long before it was even released or people even knew an exact date it would be released.  A lot of marketers use this technique today.  And it still works great.

Another tactic I came up with was using great free content to ‘warm up’ my partners lists.  After all, most of those people didn’t have a relationship with me, or even know who I was, so it was very important that before a product of mine was put in front of them that they had a reason to be interested in what I had to teach.

I produced a special PDF report that my affiliates were able to hardcode and giveaway to their lists.  This played a MAJOR part of why the overall launch was so successful.  It greatly increased the conversion rate of people buying on launch day long before they ever saw a sales letter for the product or even know what all was in the course or how much it was.

Today practically every launch you have been exposed to gives away great content upfront before the product itself is promoted.  And today that PDF (which will still work) has evolved into VIDEO.  Reports and special hand-outs can still work well, though.

Throughout all of those techniques the power of ANTICIPATION is what helps build the buzz and demand.  Apple is a master of doing this with their product releases.  So anytime you can give your customers something to LOOK FORWARD TO it will increase the rate at which they buy.  The movie industry does this with movie trailers and release dates, and so does the music industry, car industry, and so many others.

If you aren’t using anticipation in your marketing you’re losing a lot of money.  So start thinking of different ways you can incorporate it.

Last but not least I just want to drive home the point that my historical Million Dollar Day accomplishment would not have happened without the involvement of my affiliate partners.  Relationships online are incredibly important.  If you want to leverage other people’s marketing assets like I mentioned, then you need to ‘play well with others’ in your market.  Sell other people’s stuff first, then try and build a relationship to get them to reciprocate to promote your products.

The most successful marketers online are working with others - across any industry you can think of.  The ones that end up making only a tiny percentage of what they could have are the ones that burn bridges with people (i.e. ruin relationships), get into fights with other people, and typically have a negative attitude.  It truly does come down to the difference in having an ABUNDANT mindset and a SCARCITY one as mentioned in the amazing book, Think And Grow Rich.

I hope this post has inspired you in some way to go out and create your own new record day of accomplishment.  Always remember, no matter what you currently think you’re capable of is not even close to what you truly can create.

Let me start by saying this post isn’t going to be very popular with some people.  In fact, it’s probably going to ruffle a few feathers.  But that’s okay.

I’m here to help people make more money with their marketing, and sometimes the truth hurts.

There are certainly exceptions to everything, and some marketers may find a way to make auto-follow effective, but I’ve personally seen the light and believe it’s a doomed technique for long-term success with Twitter.

A couple of days ago, I unfollowed over 30,000 people on Twitter.  Many people are wondering WHY.  And this blog post explains why I am no long auto-following people on Twitter (i.e. auto-following anyone that starts following me.)

After using Twitter for the past several months, and running several marketing tests with it, I’ve learned many things about it.  I think Twitter has great long-term marketing potential, but there are definitely some powerful do’s and don’ts to making it work for your business.

Here Are Five Reasons Not To Auto-Follow People On Twitter

1.  Twitter Auto-Follow Is The New Email ‘Safe List’

Do you remember email opt-in safe lists?

Someone came up with an idea to help other marketers get more opt-in email subscribers.  So they created a system where anyone who joined would get the ‘right’ to be able to send emails to all the other members.

Thousands upon thousands of marketers joined these ’safe lists’ so they could instantly have access to a large opt-in email list to send their marketing to.  Sounds great, right?

There was only one small problem… barely anyone would actually read the emails that the system sent out.  In fact, it became a known technique to join a safe list and use a throw-away email address that you never used.

This made safe lists worthless for marketing.

Twitter auto-follow is producing similar results.  Think about it…

No one can possibly follow the tweets from thousands of people.  NO ONE. Trust me, I know.  

I was following so many people that I barely saw tweets from anyone.  Heck, I’d ‘refresh’ my timeline and instantly see an entirely new page of tweets.  It was just too overwhelming for me to pay attention to.

If Twitter is to be used as a RESPONSIVE marketing tool for your business then you’re going to need people to read your tweets and to take action when you want them to take action - such as to read blog posts links that you post, visit links to special offers for your business, etc.

AUTO-FOLLOW ATTRACTS OTHERS THAT AUTO-FOLLOW.

It’s an incestuous cycle.  If you auto-follow others you’re going to be attracting Twitter users that also auto-follow others.  Let’s face it, most are using auto-follow to get more Twitter followers.  But getting more Twitter followers this way comes at a price — you attract others that WILL RARELY (IF EVER) READ YOUR TWEETS.  It’s just like the safe list model.

Good marketing is all about RESPONSE.  It’s definitely a QUALITY not QUANTITY scenario.  There’s a reason that an opt-in email list of 5,000 highly targeted and responsive people can make 100 TIMES MORE than a lower quality opt-in list of 500,000.

2.  ”It’s Not Show-Friends It’s Show-Business”

That’s a great quote from the movie Jerry Maquire and it really applies to using Twitter for your business.

Something you need to quickly realize is that ego doesn’t pay the bills.  Most people want high follower counts for ego purposes.  Heck, I do and I’m willing to admit it.

Twitter is fun and your follower count is like the scoreboard of a video game.  Who wouldn’t want a gazillion followers just for bragging rights?

But at the same time, it really has to come down to MAKING MONEY.  Do you want a big ego or do you want to make maximum money from your marketing efforts?

If you want to make more money, then don’t auto-follow.  The followers you do attract will be people that only want to read what you have to say and actively follow what your up to.  Wow, what an amazing concept.  (It’s actually why Twitter was created in the first place.)

Your “@” replies and conversations will be much more valuable to your business and will yield much higher returns - because you’ll be eliminating a lot of other auto-follow marketers that will be wasting your time trying to get exposure for their own accounts by starting pseudo-conversations with you.

Keep in mind that many conversations on Twitter don’t happen from just follower-to-follower connections.

“But Is Not Following Someone Back Rude?”

Not at all.  Again, that’s not what Twitter was created for.  If you want reciprocal communication then use an Instant Messenger service.  Would you add all of your Twitter followers to your IM list?  Of course not.

People should follow you on Twitter because they want to read what you have to say.  Period.  If you want to make money from Twitter then you need to be saying and attracting YOUR TARGET MARKET.  You need to be giving enough value to your ideal prospect that they’ll WANT to follow you.  If you don’t, you’re not going to make much money from Twitter; regardless of what tricks and techniques you try and use.

3.  You’ll Get Bombarded With Direct Messages That Aren’t Worth Your Time

When you follow someone you give them the right to send you a direct message.  Rest assured, you’ll start to get all sorts of spam and worthless DMs.  I know, I was up to over 6,000 DMs before I nuked my account.

You also run the risk of hurting your reputation with certain prospects and customers if you aren’t extremely attentive to their DMs.  You’ll quickly discover it’s very hard (nearly impossible) to reply to all the DMs you’ll receive, and as a result you’re going to upset some folks that contacted you.  This can hurt your business and lose you a lot of money.

There are different methods to keep people from sending you Direct Messages on Twitter, but most are unaware of them and it can still create a problem for most marketers.

4.  Auto-Follow Destroys The Twitter Experience

As I’ve already mentioned, when you follow too many people it becomes impossible to keep up with all the tweets.  You’ll end up discovering, like I did, that it takes the fun out of Twitter.  Twitter ends up becoming just a bunch of NOISE.

And, sure, there are more and more tools being created where you can ’sub-list’ your followers so you can keep up with just a select group of Twitter users, but to me that’s really DISINGENUOUS.  When you follow someone on Twitter (automated or not) you’re basically saying, “I’m going to read what you have to say.”

So if you auto-follow too many people that really does become just a big LIE.  Because, again, it’s nearly impossible to follow so many tweets.

5. Twitter Users That Auto-Follow Will Lose Credibility

If you’ve paid attention to everything I’ve stated so far then you’ll understand why most people on Twitter will eventually realize the same things.

I believe Twitter users will begin to look at others that auto-follow (which is obvious when the ‘following’ and ‘followers’ numbers are very close to each other) as POOR QUALITY USERS.  Auto-follow users will be looked at like safe list marketers.  People will look at them (whether it’s true or not) as someone that’s just trying to get as many followers at all costs, and not really caring about what those people tweet about.

Think about it… what’s more impressive… someone with 10,000 followers that follows only a few people, or someone with 10,000 followers that also follows 10,000 people?  Twitter users know that the first person in this example must really be someone worth listening to because all those people that follow them stand to gain nothing in return.  (Except for the great value of their tweets.)

There’s a reason 99% of the most influential Twitter users in the world don’t auto-follow thousands of people.

This is exactly what will lead to HIGHER RESPONSE for your Twitter marketing.  Higher response will make you more money.  This is a PROVEN FACT in marketing.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johnreese.  I won’t promise that I’ll follow you back, but I’ll do my best to deliver great value in my tweets.

PLEASE RETWEET THIS BLOG POST.  SO MANY PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW THE TRUTH.

Just copy & paste below the line and tweet it.  (Thank you.)

—–

PLEASE RT: @johnreese 5 Reasons Why Twitter Auto-Follow Is Bad Marketing -> http://tinyurl.com/l2jmzf

Opportunity.com will open at 3:00PM EST today.

For now you can watch a Sneak Preview video of what’s on the inside…

http://www.income.com/images/OPP/opptysneak.html

For everyone asking, Opportunity.com opens next Thursday, May 7th.

I’ll be posting a new Special Report very soon about Affiliate Marketing.

Stay tuned.

Just released a video to kickoff the launch promotion for Opportunity.com.

This video will show you how to create an “Affiliate Commission Engine” that can generate affiliate marketing income on auto-pilot.

To watch the video and bypass the opt-in form click here to go directly to the video.

I’m very happy to officially announce (finally) that we are rolling out a new site this month…

Opportunity.com

Opportunity.com is a very powerful membership site that will help you make money with Affiliate Marketing.

The site will have a full-time research team that will constantly scour the Internet to report back to you with the latest trends, market research, keyword activity, what the ‘hot’ affiliate opportunities are at any given time, and much much more.

Opportunity.com will contain tons of step-by-step tutorials that will teach anyone how to start, grow, and explode Affiliate Marketing income.

EVERY BUSINESS should be generating some of its revenue from Affiliate Marketing.  So if you have an existing business, Opportunity.com will make it easy to tap into your market for additional income.  (And show you how to scale that income each month.)

If you don’t yet have your own fun-to-run income-producing online business, Opportunity.com will show you how to start making money right away from scratch.

Opportunity.com will be the ultimate resource for finding new affiliate programs and CPA offers.  It will help you discover lucrative new opportunities before ‘the masses’ do so you can make easy ‘first mover’ income; as many popular offers get saturated once too many people are promoting them.

Opportunity.com will teach you the flexibility of being able to ‘mine’ different opportunities in different markets at the same time.  The sky really is the limit for the potential of the estimated $7 Billion a year Affiliate Marketing industry.

Stay tuned for more info!

Income.com Update: We’ll be rolling out the main Income.com Media & Community site as soon as we finish the development.  It’s been a long time in the works but we hit a few programming snags along the way.  We’re now in the late stages of development and getting closer to completion.

It’s funny how so many people missed the “April Fool’s Day” joke of the previous post.  We had a few emails from people that thought it was serious.  (I think they didn’t read all the way to the end about “Spamway” as that should have given it away.)

Until next April 1st…

After a lot of careful consideration, even before Income.com gets fully launched, we’ve decided to change the company name.

This is for many reasons.

1.  ”Income.com” no longer fits the business model we’ve involved into. (I’ll explain the business model in a moment.)

2.  Domain names are becoming irrelevant.  It’s only a matter of time before all URLs are truncated into some sort of short redirect.  (As is happening on Twitter with tinyurl.com.)

Our plans for Income.com were originally to build a massive media company that would be part education portal for starting & growing an online business, and part social community to connect entrepreneurs and marketers.

But those plans have changed…

After analyzing a lot of data during the past few months I’ve come to the conclusion that all the real money is in Pass-Along Marketing via email.

Every get ‘pass along’ emails from friends and family?  You know the ones, where they forward you (and tons of other people) jokes, news stories, videos, etc.?

Or the crazy viral effect that happens on Facebook when all of your friends send you new app requests or other pass-along things that show up in your newsfeed?

This is essentially Pass-Along Marketing and it’s only to get BIGGER.

Because of this, I have decided to evolve the direction of the company to take full advantage of it.

We have invented some amazing technology that will allow anyone to create an account that connects them with tons of affiliate program offers that they will earn money from.  Then the system ties these offers into carefully ‘disguised’ pass-along emails that they can send to friends & family.

These emails also contain powerful tracking URLs so the ‘pass-along’ path can be fully tracked; even through multiple generations of one person passing it to another.

Members in our new system will be able to earn override commissions on a multi-tier person-to-person ‘triangle’ shaped structure.  It’s VERY powerful.

So if you pass something along to your parents, for example, and they then end up passing it along to others, the affiliate commissions compound.

AND… 

It gets even better.

If someone you pass something along to ends up joining the program as a member themselves, you’ll earn a percentage of all of their pass along activity.  So your income will only explode through the pass-along effect.

We’ll Be Starting Pre-Launch Very Soon - Don’t Wait To Sign-Up!

I expect this opportunity to take the Internet by storm.  Because now people can make money from annoying others with pass-along emails and Facebook requests.  This is a MAJOR breakthrough.

So Income.com Is Changing Its Name…

The new company name is Spamway.

Get in before its too late.

Validation.  AKA Hey, this works!

It’s a process that every entrepreneur and online marketer really needs to know and know well.

Before you start a new web site or online venture you need to VALIDATE it first.  In other words, you need to be able to make sure it has promise and/or it’s going to work.

There are TWO important validation steps that you should do at the beginning of any new online business or project…

1.  Test Market Related Affiliate Offers

Every online business needs to generate some of its revenue from Affiliate Marketing.  It’s a great way to monetize lead generation and can be a great profit center.  Sometimes it can be the entire business.

So when thinking about a market to go into, or a product to make for a market, the first thing you want to do is to run some tests and try to earn some affiliate commissions by promoting competing or related products in that market.

If you can’t find any affiliate offers that will sell in that market, or you can’t get any to sell (doesn’t have to necessarily turn a profit) then that’s a major danger sign.

2.  Drive Traffic With The Most Targeted Keywords Possible

Buy some Google AdWords traffic before anything else.  Run ads using the absolute most targeted keyword related to what it is that you want to sell.

If you can’t produce conversions from this highly targeted traffic it’s a major danger sign.

Think about it… if you’re trying to sell an infoproduct or merchandise related to growing tomatoes and you buy some clicks on Google from people searching for “grow tomatoes” and you CAN’T get it to convert then you’re in deep trouble.  Either your landing page is horrible and needs major work, OR…

Your offer for that market is a bad one.  That market might not buy that information, for example.  Or maybe it’s a mostly do-it-yourself market and they rarely buy kits like the one you’re trying to sell.

Whatever the case, trying to VALIDATE the market will usually tell the situation.

IF you are able to generate some affiliate income by promoting products in your market, it’s a great sign.  If you’re also able to generate sales of your own product or something you’re thinking about selling with the highest targeted keywords then you’re well on your way.

But if you can’t generate some affiliate commissions or can’t generate direct sales using the most targeted keywords possible, then you are unable to validate that market/offer as a potential winner.

That means it’s time to move on to something else.

The rate at which you can quickly test and move on to something else will often have a lot to do with how much money you make.  Because generating money online is all about TESTING.  So get used to doing it.