Week 1 Day 1 of new Internet Marketing course (Twitter hash tag, #GItS1).

This course is presented by a well known and verify-ably successful Internet marketing (IM) guru. He follows the premise the most successful gurus give away their knowledge for free. The best don’t hold back what made them successful.

Why would they do this?

When you learn what made them successful you will need their help implementing what they taught you. You’ll pay for that help. If you follow through and the course is worth more than what you paid, no matter what you paid, the effort will have saved you time and money. Having researched many courses, all have potential, but few are worth what you pay in money and time. Will this one be worth it? I hope it will. I hope to keep you informed of my progress.

Another common pitch: they made their stuff available because they need your testimony that their stuff works. Maybe that satisfies your curiosity why they make it available, but I seldom bother with testimonials unless I know the individual testifying. Most of the time people who testify on behalf of the guru do it when offered a bribe, like an eBook or course, at one of the guru’s events, they offer praise of the guru though they haven’t actually implemented what was taught. In this case I was given access to the entire course with coaching calls before I am expected to testify. That’s novel, try it first before singing it’s praises. Fair enough.

In this day’s video, only 11 minutes long, I was instructed to get off all other guru mailing lists so as not to be distracted by a “shiny new” opportunity or product and lose the focus necessary to succeed in the course. Yet that same day I received an email from the guru recommending another competitive course from a different guru team. I signed up for that webinar, but in a few hours I received an email from my guru that he was ashamed of me for not signing up. This is clearly the fault of not coordinating auto-responder campaigns, i.e., a hole in the process that keeps track of the status of us who actually sign up for a course. Typical.

Why would a guru direct me to another guru competing for my limited focus?

When you or I sign up for info about any course we are now on their mailing list. Any IM knows that the money is in the list because they can market other guru products and get a hefty percentage if you buy the competing guru’s stuff. This is affiliate marketing. Hey, if you don’t buy a guru’s product you may end up buying something more to your liking and the guru still get’s paid without having to provide you anything, no time, no cost, no production, no making sure you get the product you do buy, and no support. Furthermore, the original guru can keep sending you competitive offers even if you signed up for the that guru’s course as I did in this case.

I receive about 100 IM email offers a day which I file as research for this blog. I use Gmail filters so when I am done perusing email subjects I mark all as “read.” Then they are labeled “INet Busi” and dropped from my filter results. This saves me a lot of time.

So what was included in today’s training?

1. Visualize your being successful, i.e., what your being successful looks like to you.

2. Put away other distractions. Get off other competing product mailing lists (covered above).

3. Get an egg timer to commit the time you designate to spend on the course. Do nothing else during that time. I googled “PC egg timer” and found and set up the free Easy Timer 2.1.

4. Organize your days using the free Google calendar. I have been. It comes with your free Google account.

5. Make everything you do a definable process so you can have it outsourced, i.e., someone else doing this for you in the future. Map out these processes. I use the free FreeMind mind map software.

6. Gather keyword research tools. He uses a $97 product. I’m using free tools until I need better ones.

7. Get a Hostgator web hosting account. This I have and highly recommend.

8. Get access to Google Analytics. I have a free account.

9. Install the free Filezilla FTP software to update your site. I use it.

10. Get a web page editor like the NVU free Web design software. I downloaded to try.

11. He lists two outsourcing sites, neither do I recommend. I’ll deal with this later.

The next video is on Market Research.