Welcome back!

I’ve been working online for a while now, off and on, since 2000 when I taught myself html from a book and started a website creation business. I did dabble with posting video on my website way back in about 2003 using my simple little webcam but as I’m so self critical, and of course didn’t realise how ahead of my time I was, I didn’t do more of it.

Well of course, nowadays every internet marketing bod on the planet is waxing lyrical about using video as a more dynamic method of capturing your visitor’s eye, imagination and if you’re offering something half decent, their cash too.

And of course, as someone who gets suckered into reading a whole load of fantastic – and errrm not so great – sales letters/pages I have to agree with it. It’s like the Big Brother thing – people love having a sneak peak at the person behind the screen and it DOESN’T MATTER if they are sitting there being critical of your big nose or tragic hairstyle that day, they are still sitting there engaging with you.

So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered a great webcam and a digital camera – my friend Flugel will fall off his chair at hearing that as I’ve been procrastinating about it for ummm a year or more. My sister Nicola is constantly frustrated at me for taking NO action as I start researching things and either take forever or give up as there’s just too much choice.

So how did I overcome my complete overwhelm at looking for ‘the right one’ for the job?

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Probably like you, I get snowed under with email and this week I am slowly going through unsubscribing myself from all the ‘really useful’ stuff I have coming in but NEVER EVER get round to reading!

I’m being ruthless and to be honest, it’s not been THAT hard to do.  One of the few people I’ve decided to continue to follow is Yaro Starak, an awesome blogger who resides in Australia when he is not travelling around the world doing whatever he fancies.

Why Yaro?  Well he is doing what I want to do – living his dream lifestyle and profitably and it hasn’t taken him an eternity to get there which gives me hope that if I could just stay focussed and stop procrastinating I too can get there.

The other biggy of course, is that he DELIVERS VALUE.  He shares what he learns, his viewpoints and has made himself an expert in his chosen field.  He is INTERESTING to read, talks in simple, plain English and is not feeling so scarce that he can’t divulge his opinions, tools and ’secrets’.

Looking through his site, this paragraph from the following article he wrote, really struck home to me:

“Bear in mind I’m saying this from the mindset of running a business of a certain size and living a certain kind of lifestyle. I’m not looking to take on full time employees, get an office and grow to the point where I’m committed to certain things simply because the size of the machine has become more than I can handle.”

And that’s the thing – I just have to get clear on what my ideal lifestyle IS, what it looks like, how my days will be structured and what kind of income it will take to cover that without working my guts out .. ie. become financially free.. and then some.

There are of course a mass of other little gems packed in it too and I hope something kicks you up the bum too x

How To Work Less and Earn More By Leveraging The Synergy Between People And Technology by Yaro Starak

Several years ago when I was…

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Well then you have gotta read this brilliant post on MarketersBoard.com giving useful resources and insights into getting hold of great copy or inspiration for your own sales letter, blog, website etc.  Better than stabbing yourself in the eye rather than writing something from scratch yourself *lol*

Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You?  by Robert Plank

When you sell anything on the internet… whether you do it using e-mail marketing, forum marketing, blog posting… if you sell e-books, physical products, e-classes, even a newsletter… the best way to sell anything is using direct response sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-class copywriters like Michel Fortin. I consider myself a pretty sloppy copywriter, and althought I can whip up a headline, quick story, bullet point list of benefits, testmonials, feature list, guarantee and a call-to-action… I will never be a great copywriter.  Gary Halbert can’t hold my attention for longer than a few minutes, I’ve never read Scientific Advertising, so how do I scrape by writing average sales copy?

The answer is: practice and resources. I’ve written enough sales letters that I know what my audience wants and how I can present it to them to maximize sales.  I rarely spend more than a couple of hours writing even 5 or 10 page sales letters, and some have converted as high as 19 percent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the practice, you can still hit the following sites to produce an average sales letter, enough for a copywriter to rewrite it or critique it.

Site #1: Digg.com
As far as I’m concerned, Digg is THE best place to find…

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