I know exactly what you want… more money, right?

And ideally you want more money without much effort.  You don’t want to have to go setup a new web site, or create a new blog, or produce a new product, or go write a bunch more content, or go buy advertising.

You simply just wish there was a ‘magic’ way that you could instantly make more money without much additional effort.

Well, there is a way.  And I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it.  So pay close attention.

Here’s What You Need To Do:

Do a ‘Marketing Audit’ of your entire business…

- MAP out all the web sites you have and every web page that any of your visitors has the ability to view.  And it needs to be EVERY SINGLE PAGE.

- MAP out all of the email ‘contact’ that you have with any prospect or customer; this could be emails that get sent from your autoresponder after someone subscribes to your list, or a thank you email your site sends after someone submits an order, etc.  List EVERY point of contact where an email is sent to someone.

After you take some time and map out ALL of your marketing ‘touchpoints’ (web pages and emails) it’s now time to find INCOME LEAKS.

I guarantee you that right now you are not taking advantage of everything you already have to work with.

Think about it…

On the “Thank You” page that loads, for example, after someone submits an online form to opt-in to your list, are you promoting any of your products on that page?  Are you promoting affiliate offers?  Are you running AdSense ads?

When your site sends out emails, for example, like an emailed copy of a receipt for a product someone just purchased from you, do you include a promo for another one of your products or for an affiliate offer that earns you a commission?

“Thank You” pages and other ‘Response’ confirmation pages and emails are some of the BEST places to promote other things that will generate income for you.  The reason is because you are getting something in front of someone that JUST RESPONDED to something else.  This isn’t a PASSIVE web site visitor.  It’s someone that just TOOK ACTION that you asked them to take.

So these prospects and customers are the most likely to TAKE ACTION AGAIN and click on an affiliate link, or go check out a video you created, or go buy another one of your products, or go and take any action you’d like them to take at that time.

Take some time to fully AUDIT every single web page you have on the Internet as well as every single email that’s a part of any ’system’ you use and you are sure to find INCOME LEAKS and opportunities where you could INSTANTLY be making more money if you simply used that precious real estate to get other offers in front of people.

It’s so easy for entrepreneurs (myself included) to put up another web site or project and move on to other things without MAXIMIZING every little piece of real estate that we can use to make money.

So it’s a good idea for you to do this “Leak Detection” process on a regular basis as you continue to add more sites, pages, email follow-ups, etc. to your online marketing.

AWESOME UPDATE:  Less than an hour after I posted this someone messaged me on Twitter to tell me that they applied it to a Thank You page and made a quick $145 in affiliate commissions!  (And they’ll continue to make money from that addition on a regular basis.)  Gotta love taking action!

If you’re not already, make sure to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/johnreese

Read this entire post for some information that you definitely need to know to take advantage of some opportunities that are right in front of your nose whether you realize it or not.  (More on that in a moment.)

Sorry for the lack of blog posts and communication lately.  I’ve been extremely busy working with my team on creating some really valuable stuff for you.  We’re going to finally start rolling things out very soon and throughout this entire year.  There is A LOT of amazing stuff on the way.  So buckle up!

If you’re looking to start an online business to make an additional income, or if you’re ready to explode your existing business, then make sure and be ready for some announcements that will be coming very soon.  One major announcement will be made before the end of this month (February).

The development of Income.com itself has taken a lot longer than I had originally planned.  We, as a young startup company, have been through many ups and downs.  Our primary issues have been technology related.  I won’t go into all the gory details, but let’s just say we had to abandon well over a year’s worth of programming code to start all over due to a change in our programming team.

But sometimes in life, and in business, you have to take a step back to be able to take several steps forward.

I strongly believe in our mission at Income.com and know we will be creating a legacy.  I know we will help thousands of people and their families with our new Web shows and everything else that’s in the works.  It’s going to be a lot of fun too.  So stay tuned.

Opportunity Is Knocking But Are You Answering?

Right now the global economy is going through a rough time.  And it may even get worse before it gets better.  But in any situation, even during the Great Depression, there is always a massive amount of opportunity to build wealth - you just have to be willing to seize it.

Know this… Opportunity is all around you.

I recently had a great discussion with one of the top Internet marketers in the world, and someone who is a very close friend… Frank Kern.  In this discussion I asked Frank this question…

“In your opinion, what’s the one major thing entrepreneurs should be doing right now?”

And his answer was simple… “Make offers.”

Frank hit it right on the head.  If you want to make money, and lots of it, you have to be making offers. That is the one action that makes more money than anything else.  Making offers.

Whether it’s creating your own new products to offer to your customers, or running a special discount offer, or even promoting someone else’s product where you get paid, making offers is what creates the cash.

Not fiddling with SEO.  Not posting on Twitter all day.  Not surfing Facebook.  Not hanging out on discussion forums.  And not spending countless hours of your time on research.

Now all of those things certainly have value, and some of them have a lot of value.  But without making offers and selling stuff you aren’t going to make much money.

There is PLENTY of money for you to make right now.  Don’t let this economic situation “fake you out” into thinking people aren’t buying stuff anymore.  It couldn’t be further from the truth.  You just need to ACTIVELY make offers if you want to make more money.

Let me tell you a quick story…

As you may or may not know from some of my previous posts and email newsletters, I’m a huge saltwater aquarium enthusiast.  As soon as I bought my house a few years ago the first thing I did was start designing my “ultimate” aquarium.

After weeks of doing research, and figuring out how much space I had to work with, I ended up designing (on paper) a 10 foot wide, 1,000 gallon aquarium.

So after 6 months of anxiously waiting, it was finally custom built for me and installed.  Here’s a photo of it with me standing in front of it to give you some perspective on how big this sucker is:

Back to the story…

I have this aquarium serviced & managed every week by an aquarium specialist.  They keep track of the chemical balances, clean the aquarium, and do a lot of other maintenance.  Having a tank of this size takes quite a bit of work — especially since the saltwater evaporates non-stop and has to be refilled.  (We use an automated system for that.)

Bill, the guy who owns the company that services my aquarium has become a good friend.  We’re both big sports fans and often watch games together and hang out.

Of course, just from hanging out with Bill we’ve had many discussions about business and marketing.  I’m constantly trying to give him advice and help him grow his company.  Well, recently he came to me and was almost in a bit of a panic…

“John, I really need to talk to you about my business.  I know when we hang out you prefer to get away from the marketing talk since that’s part of your work, but I could really use your help.”

I, of course, said I’d be glad to help and asked what his problem was.  He proceeded to tell me…

“This economy is absolutely killing my business.  I’ve never seen it this bad.  Usually I could count on a steady flow of referral business but that is way down now.  I’m really worried.”

The first thing I told him was, “Don’t panic.”  That’s the most dangerous thing anyone can do.  Every problem has a solution, you just have to analyze the situation and create a strategic plan.

I asked him several questions about how he was currently running things, what his options were, etc. and the conclusion and ’solution’ I came to was simple…

HE JUST NEEDED TO MAKE OFFERS.

Referral business in many ways IS down right now.  Some of the older more ‘passive’ ways for many entrepreneurs to generate sales in ANY business is no longer consistent.  And in many cases, like his, it has all but gone away.  (At least for now due to the current economy.)

But with so much opportunity all around us, it’s usually just about getting PROACTIVE and making offers and making things happen.

And that’s exactly what I told Bill do.

I told him he needed to be proactive and call his customers and offer specials on certain items.  Stop by some of the locations (many of them restaurants or doctors’ offices) and bring some corals and fish and tell them, “I think this would look really great in your tank, would you like to buy it?”

I also instructed him to be more active in ASKING his customers for referrals and inquiring about other aquarium needs.

Now he was already doing ’some’ of this, but just not a lot.  That wasn’t his main focus.  Like many entrepreneurs he was content with the referral business he was already getting and the revenue that was coming in from his “old ways.”

He agreed to give it a shot and less than a week later I got an excited call from him telling me that things were looking up very, very quickly.

From the very moment he ’stepped up his game’ and got more proactive about making offers and taking action to produce more ACTIVITY in his business, the money started rolling in again.  And now he’s actually in a position to really GROW things bigger than they ever were.

And it’s all because he got more active in MAKING OFFERS.

Are You Making Offers On A Regular Basis?

If you want to make more money that’s all you need to do.  Make offers.

Frank Kern made it sound and seem so simple but it really does just come down to that.

Frank’s a super successful marketer because he has the gift of cutting out all the nonsense and just getting to the stuff that brings in the cash.

Frank recently helped, of all people, Tony Robbins with this exact “offers” stuff I’ve been talking about.  Yes, Tony ‘Freakin’ Robbins.  And it’s no surprise that Frank’s simple advice and plan made Tony a bunch of money that his company wasn’t making.

It was the ultimate no-brainer.

Check Out This Amazing Video With Frank & Tony Robbins And A Soon-To-Be-Rich 13 Year Old Kid!

* I highly recommend every product, course, free report, video, or advice of any kind that Frank ever puts out.  He is truly one of the top marketers in the world and has helped so many people (including ME) make a lot of money in their business.

I’ll be in touch with more news soon.

NOW GO MAKE SOME OFFERS!

SPECIAL NOTE:  Don’t forget to make sure and ‘follow’ me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johnreese

Have you ever seen the Hugh Grant movie, About A Boy?

If you haven’t seen it you should rent it because it’s a great movie.  But if you have seen it then you’ll recognize the following quote from Grant’s character “Will”…

I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than thirty minutes. Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour. Taking a bath: one unit, watching countdown: one unit, web-based research: two units, exercising: three units, having my hair carefully disheveled: four units. It’s amazing how the day fills up, and I often wonder, to be absolutely honest, if I’d ever have time for a job; how do people cram them in?

I’ll admit the title of this post is a bit misleading.  It reads like you can get everything you want “in under 24 hours” but that’s not what I mean by it.  I used this title to not only get your attention but to demonstrate the POWER of this statement if you fully grasp it.

In order for you to accomplish anything in life you have to learn the power of INCREMENTAL SUCCESS.  Let me explain how it works…

It doesn’t matter what you want to accomplish… making a million dollars, losing 50 pounds, learning to speak French, etc.  In order for you to accomplish what it is that you want you MUST achieve your goal incrementally.  There’s no other way for it to happen - it’s IMPOSSIBLE.

No one makes a million dollars without making $1 first.  No one loses 50 pounds without losing 1 pound first.  And no one becomes fluent in French without learning how to say “bonjour” first.

So now that we’ve established that accomplishing anything you want must come through incremental progress, then you realize that success is created by a series of smaller accomplishments that add up to the final goal.

The next thing for you to understand is the process of TIME UNITS.

Just as the character in About A Boy managed his entire life, you need to understand how time is applied towards incremental progress for ANYTHING you want to accomplish.

The main unit of time in our lives is THE DAY.  That 24-hour period that repeats again and again until one day we die.  It’s what we live our lives by.  Every day is an important day and in order to accomplish everything you want in your life you must account for each and every day.

Do you know why the kiss of death in trying to accomplish anything in life is the old mantra of I’ll start on it tomorrow?

And you know exactly what I’m talking about.  You have that product you want to create.  The one that will make you more money.  Or that new blog to set up.  Or that affiliate marketing campaign to put together. Yet somehow you easily convince yourself, “I’ll start on it tomorrow.” And you lose yet another day of your life that you’ll never get back where you made ZERO INCREMENTAL PROGRESS.

When we are living any given day it’s so easy to put things off.  It’s so easy to procrastinate.  It’s so easy to convince ourselves that tomorrow we’ll start going to the gym.  Tomorrow we’ll start eating healthier. Tomorrow we’ll do some writing that we’ve been putting off.  Tomorrow we’ll start studying Japanese.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow.

Well, there’s a reason why most people don’t accomplish that much.  There’s a reason why it seems like WEEKS or even MONTHS go by and you haven’t accomplished things you know in your heart you really want yet you haven’t made any progress towards them at all.

It’s because it’s so easy to put things off until tomorrow.

So Here’s What You Need To Understand…

This is exactly what changed my life when I was struggling as an entrepreneur and really helped me break-through to finally building wealth for myself…

If you are trying to accomplish anything, in this case growing your income, you must do something every single day towards accomplishing your goal.  Let me repeat that…

YOU MUST DO SOMETHING EVERY SINGLE DAY TOWARDS ACCOMPLISHING YOUR GOAL.

It doesn’t matter how big or how small this effort has to be.  It just has to be SOMETHING.  So every day that passes in your life you will incrementally be closer to getting everything you want.  It’s a simple, yet powerful concept.

If you want to lose weight, for example, then just walk 1/2 mile each day.  Not a mile.  Not 5 miles.  1/2 mile.  If you walk 1/2 mile each day that’s like walking 3.5 miles a week.  Walking 3.5 miles seems pretty far to most people.  But 1/2 mile is nothing.  Yet you get the same net result from walking 3.5 miles whether you accomplish it in one day or one week.

Almost anything worth accomplishing in life seems BIG when we look at it from “Step 1.”  Everything requires incremental progress.  And most things require MANY steps to reach the finish line.  

When we are faced with everything we must do to accomplish any goal it often seems so overwhelming that it’s much easier to just put off starting it until another day.  And that day often becomes a week, a month, a year, or more often than not… NEVER.

If you want to grow your business you must be taking action every single day that contributes towards your goal.  This doesn’t mean checking your email more, or looking at stats more, or “doing research” (i.e. surfing sites all day) it means putting in the work towards creating that product, or doing some writing for an article or blog post, or making a video you’ve been wanting to make, or setting up a site and testing some Adwords, etc. etc.

Stop letting a single day go by when you aren’t making at least SOME incremental progress towards ALL your goals and it is IMPOSSIBLE that it won’t change your life for the better.  

Even if it’s just a small step each day. Because that’s a step you’ll never have to do again and you’ll be even closer to accomplishing your goal.

Please make sure and follow me on Twitter!

http://twitter.com/johnreese

Also please ‘retweet’ or share this blog post with others and help them start 2009 off right!

Today is a sad day for me.  I’ve made the tough decision to shutdown BlogRush.  There’s just something that stinks about seeing one of your babies (i.e. ideas) end up failing.

While the service is still going strong (serving a few million impressions a day) I just don’t see things improving for our users.  The click-rates across the network are dreadfully low (and getting worse) as so many Internet users now ‘tune out’ links and other ads on sites.

Because of this, and many other issues, I’ve made the tough decision to shutdown the service.  During the next 24 hours we’ll be shutting things down.  If you’re running the widget on your blog you’ll want to remove the widget code.

I expect that there will be many BlogRush critics that will rejoice in hearing this news and relish in saying, “I told you so” and that’s fine.  At least I had the guts to take a risk and to at least give the idea a try.  I’ve become a successful entrepreneur (online since 1990) because I am not afraid to fail.  I’ve had many ideas that didn’t work, and this one certainly won’t be the last.

I know that my overall success is a direct result from taking action and trying a lot of things. THAT is the real secret to building wealth.

In regards to BlogRush, many of my blog readers might remember when I came up with the idea at 4AM and even made a blog post about it.  You never know when a great idea might come to you.  So always be prepared to be ‘ready’ for it.

But most importantly, be ready to TAKE ACTION and at least TRY, or nothing will change in your life.

Here’s the letter that’s going out to all BlogRush users and will be posted on the site shortly:

—-

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008    

To: All BlogRush Users

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service.  If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web.  Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web.  During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected.  We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go.  All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs.  This was our primary focus.  Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else.  BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue.  We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later.

Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped.  (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them.  We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.    

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route.  While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users.  Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money.  In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice.

There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work.

Without trying there can be no success.  And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

http://twitter.com/johnreese

 

* Sorry for the ‘blog vacation.’ I was traveling throughout Europe for two months on a much needed vacation. Regular posting will resume soon.

I always laugh when I see people on business and marketing forums say this…

“There are no secrets!”

“You can learn everything for free online!”

Etc. etc.

When it comes to consulting and/or selling one’s expertise there will always be those that believe every piece of knowledge or discovery is already known by others. And these same people believe that information can easily be found on the Internet — so they believe they have no need to invest in consulting, buying a training course, etc.

There is A LOT of extremely valuable business and marketing information that is not ‘publicly’ known. New discoveries are made everyday. Anyone that ever thinks they know it all in ANY market or area of expertise is an IDIOT. We should ALL constantly strive to learn more about our respective interests and industries.

As far as “secrets” are concerned, this is a different story. The word “secrets” has, and probably always will be, one of the most powerful words in the history of copywriting. And this is the reason that this word is often used to describe valuable information and is a popular choice to use in book and course titles. i.e. my own Traffic Secrets 2.0 product.

But even if every piece of knowledge and information was being freely discussed on the Web, from articles to discussion forums to blogs, etc., the information itself is essentially WORTHLESS.

When it comes to Internet Marketing information it doesn’t matter if you know a few tricks to get top rankings in Google, or ways to pre-sell a prospect to increase the conversion of an affiliate offer, or a few words you can add to an order form to decrease shopping cart abandonment…

The only thing that matters is YOUR STRATEGY.

How you use the tactics and techniques. When? How often? What tactics can you combine? In what order do you execute them? And so on.

I’ve known many Internet marketers that actually know more information and knowledge about IM than some ‘gurus’ do. Yet these marketers FAIL. They don’t have much success building their online business. They struggle and struggle often. They end up feeling bitter and thinking that the techniques don’t actually work — or at least as well as some say they do.

The problem is simple… they know or have all the puzzle pieces, they just don’t know what to do with them.

In order to succeed and see positive progress in ANYTHING you do for your business you must use a solid strategy. A plan of action that fully defines what needs to be done and when. And then a plan for how to use the results (good or bad) to progress from that point forward.

So my advice is to pay less attention to learning so much about individual tactics and techniques and focus on a bigger picture of how to use MANY things together in a solid plan.

Even if you knew everything, or could find it somewhere, you’ll still need to know ‘what’ to do with it. Don’t ever forget that.

If you’re one of my Traffic Secrets 2.0 customers then you know exactly what I’m talking about as the TS2 course is all about carrying out a specific strategy to produce a ton of targeted traffic and not just a bunch of individual ’secret’ tricks.

Customers are receiving their courses and are excited about getting started!

If you need anything to do with your order, please don’t hesitate to submit a support ticket at http://www.trafficsecrets.com/support2.html and we’ll assist you right away. You can also call our office at (407)310-1000.

Here’s a great photo from TS2 customer Antonio Thornton…

* Matching TS2 pacifier not included.

I just got the confirmation from our fulfillment center that Traffic Secrets 2.0 is finally shipping. They received the foam inserts and reassembled the course cases and they are good to go.

Tracking numbers are being assigned and you will receive it via email as soon as your course has a tracking number. They are processing several thousand orders so your continue patience is sincerely appreciated. You should be receiving your tracking number soon and then your course shortly thereafter.

Thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding. We did not expect the unforeseen problems and this is the first product we’ve ever experienced a shipping delay with. Please know that our entire team was working very hard to remedy all the problems as fast as we could.

We’re underway with the marketing campaign for Traffic Secrets 2.0.

You can go right now and view a couple great videos:
http://www.trafficsecrets.com

UPDATE: JULY 3, 2008. The initial free videos for the marketing campaign will be released in a few more hours. We’re just making some last minute changes.

Here’s a little teaser video:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Finally.

It now looks like there’s a 90% chance that we will begin the pre-launch campaign for Traffic Secrets 2.0 starting this coming Thursday, July 3rd. We’ll be releasing several great free videos — valuable stuff even if you have no interest in the course.

If all goes according to schedule we’ll officially launch the course on Tuesday, July 15th.

Right now I say 90% because there are some last-minute minor details that need to be taken care of and I want to be very careful not to promise a date and then have to postpone it — everyone has waited long enough (over a year!) for this course to get released. So after some unexpected delays and mastering issues during the past 6 weeks, we’re so close to the finish line. More news as soon as something is 100%.

I want to thank everyone for their patience. And I promise, it will be well worth the wait.

Make sure to ‘follow’ me on Twitter for more LIVE updates: http://twitter.com/johnreese

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Special Discount For Owners Of TS1.0:
When we ran the “blow-out” sale last year to take TS1 off the market I stated that all owners of TS1 would get a huge discount on TS2. TS2 is going to have a special release price of only $397. ALL of our TS1 customers (including the blow-out sale buyers) will be able to buy TS2 at the discounted price of $297. The exception to this is for anyone that bought TS1 at full price ($997) in the beginning of 2007 (right before the final sale) — those customers will receive TS2 for FREE since they purchased the course at full price so close to the sale.

Affiliate Program:
We’re getting a lot of emails and calls asking about an affiliate program for the launch. We will be using some affiliates to get the word out for the launch but we don’t have an ‘open’ affiliate program at this time. If you feel that you would be a valuable partner for the launch please contact Andy Hussong at andy@income.com. Tell him you’re interested in being a launch partner and explain (in detail please) why you think you’re a good fit for this promotion.

Ahhhh the Internet. What a crazy 24 hours it has been.

If you followed yesterday’s saga then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Attacks. Insults. Accusations. Assumptions. Reactions. Disrespect. Punches. Kicks. Slaps. And more.

Yes, just another day on the Internets.

Well, I’m about to say something that will probably come as a huge SHOCKER to everyone, especially those that so passionately defended me; which I sincerely appreciated it…

I WAS WRONG.

Looking at the situation again after the dust has settled, I am man enough to realize that I was wrong in some of the things that I wrote yesterday and how I ‘positioned’ those that I wrote about.

I was a hypocrite in the process. As many of you know, one of the primary things I teach is not to get caught up in NEGATIVITY in your marketing. Don’t spend time bashing your competitors or others in your industry.

Because in almost every case no good will come from it.

Your sole focus should be on providing great value to your prospects and to your customers. In the great free content you giveaway, as well as anything you ever sell to someone. If you stay focused on the positive, and truly work hard to deliver great value to your market, everything else will take care of itself.

And if it doesn’t for some reason, there’s nothing you can do about it because you simply did your best.

I broke this ‘rule’ yesterday.

I read some blog posts that mentioned me by name and I became defensive because of how I felt I was being positioned. So I got all fired up and had a knee-jerk reaction and made my post yesterday. And while I truly had been wanting to express those thoughts on anti-marketing attitudes online for a long time, I realize now that the way I went about it was all wrong — even if I truly did feel I was ‘right’ in defending myself based on the situation.

Since I wrote yesterday’s post defending myself and expressing my thoughts, Duncan Riley and Mark Hopkins have both responded with new posts.

As you can see by their posts, the negative ‘cycle’ just continues to churn. As I post insults or imply things about them, they in turn find whatever ammunition they can find and return fire. It’s like a tennis match. The ball just keeps getting hit back and forth and ultimately isn’t going anywhere.

This is what happens when people’s reputations are being challenged. And it’s a completely natural reaction and one that ANYONE would have.

So now it’s my turn to defend myself against the latest remarks from them and hit the ball back over the net. But I’m not going to.

Instead, I’d rather look at this from a more constructive point of view and have the three of us go back to focusing on the more important things in our lives — because, frankly, this type of drama is a waste of time and we all know it.

Let’s start with Duncan Riley.

Duncan kind of started things off with his original post that quoted an email I had sent to my list and he referred to me as an “ebook salesman.”

I took offense to this ‘ebook’ remark because most people use that term in regards to someone selling a $19 ebook that promises to make people rich. And I get sick and tired of having the knuckleheads that DO sell that crap bringing the rest of our industry down.

So I fired back at Duncan and included him in my long rant. His name came along for the ride and I essentially painted him as anti-marketing. In hindsight, even though I was bothered by the ‘ebook’ comment, I probably should have recognized that he was subscribed to my email list for a reason.

After all, his original post was quoting an email he received from me.

Even, though, in Duncan’s latest response he ‘returns fire’ he also makes the point that he likes my copy and likes to keep up with other marketers. Hence the reason I now see that it was completely unfair of me to just lump him in with everything anti-marketing.

Which, ironically, is the very thing I was so passionate about when it came to defending myself — fighting back against the generalizations that all Internet marketers are evil and are only out to abuse the Internet and/or rip people off.

So my apologies to Duncan. In hindsight I should have contacted him personally, expressed my concern over how I thought he was ‘painting’ me out to be, and taking it from there.

As a side note, I’ve actually enjoyed reading Duncan’s writing for a very long time. Before he started his recent blog he was a long-time writer for TechCrunch where he wrote about up and coming startup companies — which is very far from anti-marketing or anti-capitalism.

Let’s move on to Mark Hopkins.

The situation with Mark is a lot different than Duncan. In fact, Mark really took the negativity to far greater lengths — even to a realm where so many things were unjustified and became personal attacks, in my opinion.

But if I truly take a step back and look at things from Mark’s perspective, I can get a different view than my own. While I certainly won’t defend some of what he said about me and how he went about it, I am reasonable enough to see what motivated him in the first place.

Mark has made it loud and clear that he despises MLM and other types of “referral marketing.” He feels that it preys on a large set of people in the process, and that any model like that is junk — and so even, though, BlogRush was free, it was based on a referral credit system and Mark just didn’t like the ’smell’ of it, so to speak.

As many of you know, I myself am not a fan of MLM and don’t suggest my students get involved with it. Because the focus of those things are more about ‘recruiting’ others than marketing an actual product of value; and that’s, ultimately, in my opinion, a doomed business model.

I think it’s better to build a business by creating ASSETS — such as your own products, your own customer list, your own content, your own marketing, etc. I believe the same money and time spent on building a business with your own assets will always yield far greater results than just ‘recruiting’ or promoting another company’s business. And, again, this is just my opinion.

As I explained to Mark in my ‘defense’ to his ‘pyramid scheme’ attacks on me, I setup BlogRush as multi-tiered referral system because I wanted to give the users the benefit of the ‘network effect’ when it grew virally. With all the other services online that have grown from viral marketing, the only core benefit is to the company that owns the service — the users get nothing out of doing the marketing for them. It was also done to help the small blogger without much traffic have a chance to leverage the network effect, otherwise a 1:1 exchange ratio doesn’t do them any good; because they don’t have much traffic to start with. But even aside from that, I see Mark’s point about the ‘overpromising’ marketing for it and have told him that we’re working to change it.

I never stated I was perfect and neither is my marketing.

And, of course, BlogRush is a free service and trying to call it a pyramid scheme is a reach — even, though, Mark makes a good point that it still takes people’s time and even uses up some space on their blogs. Fair enough. If Mark truly feels passionately about his dislike for anything related to that multi-level stuff then that’s certainly his right.

In Mark’s responses he has pointed out that I unfairly painted him as an “anti-marketing hippie” and that he has long been posting about things that are the opposite — of which I was unaware. So while I got mad at his personal remarks towards me (and how he tried to paint me as a huckster selling things to ‘my victims’) it was unfair of me to make the anti-marketing insinuations about him and do to him exactly what I was so against — the generalizations about Internet marketers.

So as tough as it may be for me… My apologies to Mark Hopkins.

Mark didn’t like the marketing of BlogRush and probably even some of my other marketing and that’s fine. It’s his right to feel the way he feels. If he wishes to continue to post negative remarks about me, my business, my products, my marketing, etc. so be it. There’s nothing I can do about it but do the best I can to deliver value to my customers — because at the end of the day, those are the only people I am accountable to.

And finally… TWITTER.

I think it goes without saying, but Duncan put a creative ‘focus’ on what wasn’t said in the email I sent out about Twitter that started this whole thing, and so I want to clarify it once and for all…

I didn’t say it word-for-word in my recent email encouraging people to use Twitter, but I’ll say it… DON’T BE A JACKASS AND SPAM OR ABUSE TWITTER.

As many of you know, I’ve already expressed how blatant promotions and pitching on social networks and other social media DOESN’T WORK. Social media is best used to give great content and great feedback in any conversation and eventually lead people to your blog or other areas where you’ve posted great supporting content. Then after someone has had a change to see what you offer in terms of free content does the process start towards being interested in doing business with you.

Perfect example: as many of you know I hit the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends in less than 5 days from the time I announced that I set-up an account to my list. For those of you that made it into that group of 5,000 you know that you’ve never seen me ‘pitch’ or heavily promote my own products, affiliate links, or anything else. I’ve only used it to interact with people and to syndicate or announce content I posted on my blog.

So don’t spam Twitter. Don’t direct message people links to your sites. Don’t overpost URLs to your stuff — otherwise people will “unfollow” you and then Twitter will serve no purpose if no one is ‘listening’ to anything you post.

If you make a new blog post, by all means share the URL with people following you. But always keep in mind… What’s In It For Them? They aren’t following you to get blasted with advertising. They’re following you because they believe what you have to share and say is interesting and has VALUE.

So the moral of the story from all this drama is this… far greater returns will happen for you and your business if you stay focused on the positive and on creating value and not getting caught up in negativity towards others — justified or not.

I am now moving on from this drama and going back to what I do best and what makes me happy. I suggest others do the same.