The issue I’m talking about here is the failure of the mainstream publishing industry to embrace the Internet and the Information Age.

I’ve been agonizing over what to do with my next book concept. It’s a killer concept, totally groundbreaking, and is sure to sell a ton, probably even more than my best-seller Never Cold Call Again has. My choices are to go with a traditional book, through a traditional publisher, or to release it myself, perhaps as an information product or an online course.

I’ve made the decision to skip the publisher and do it myself.

Why?

Because the Internet has made publishers obsolete and increasingly irrelevant now that we’re fully in the Information Age.

My logic is very simple: Years ago, if you got a book deal, your publisher would promote your book. After all, that’s what a publisher is for. They’d do promotions, set up media tours, and get the word out about your book.

Today, with the exception of celebrity authors, publishers don’t do that anymore. They way they operate now is to seek out potential authors who have a large Internet platform, presence, and mailing list, entice them with a book deal, and then rely entirely on the author to promote the book. (That sounds frighteningly similar to companies who order their sales reps to cold call in order to avoid marketing expenses, doesn’t it?)

Now, this obviously makes sense for the publisher – it allows them to all but eliminate their marketing budget – but it’s a foolish choice for anyone who has a large Internet presence, as I do.

The problem comes down to the very fundamentals of what publishing entails: Giving up the lion’s share of profits from your book in return for a small royalty percentage. In consideration for keeping the bulk of the profits, the publisher is supposed to spend their money to promote your book. That’s the very basis of the legal doctrine of “consideration” – if you give something up, you must get something of equal value in return, or a court can declare the entire contract void.

Sadly, publishers just don’t get it. They’ve been in business for so long that they can’t understand just how much the Internet empowers those of us who know how to use it to publish and sell our own material and keep 100% of the profits. I had a chat with a literary agent the other day who told me the industry is getting downright dismal and editors are more grumpy and unhappy than ever. Yet, it’s their own fault for ignoring the threat of the Internet and believing that they can continue their antiquated business model in the Information Age.

To make matters worse, the amount of quality information that goes into a book with a cover price of, say, $19.95, that ultimately sells on Amazon for around $11.00 and pays the author a dollar or two per copy, could be translated into an information product that would easily sell for $97, $197, even $497 by someone with the Internet presence to do so. (To be totally honest, my published books took more time and work to create than my high-dollar info products, largely due to the publishing industry bureaucracy.)

Looking around at Internet marketers who I know, a shocking truth becomes clear: Some of those marketers who have made the most money have exactly zero published books out there. They know they’re better off selling their knowledge directly, in the form of information products, seminars, and coaching programs. That’s where the real money is. I even heard an Internet marketer, who has made well over twenty million dollars online, openly mocking published authors for their foolishness!

So, for those of you who always ask me how to get a book published, my advice is this: The Internet is making publishers irrelevant. Skip the publisher and learn Internet marketing, because that’s where the real money is!

In a previous post about what I’ve “resolved” to do different this year (I put that word in quotes because I’ve publicly mocked New Years’ Resolutions), I mentioned that the more I email my subscriber list, the more people buy, and, surprisingly, almost no one unsubscribes.

Since I’m a numbers guy and won’t make any business decision without first seeing the hard bottom-line numbers, I of course went about my decision to increase email frequency scientifically, and set up an A/B split-run test to determine what works best. (If you’re new to internet marketing, an A/B split-run test is where two different versions of a web page are served to visitors in equal amounts, and the results are tracked and recorded.)

For the seven years that NeverColdCall.com has been in business, my email autoresponder series has gone out weekly. Week 1 is a Q&A, week 2 is a newsletter, and on and on, alternating between those two formats weekly. It’s worked well for me, but I wanted to try increasing frequency and track sales results.

In this test, version A of my home page subscribed visitors to an autoresponder series that sends emails twice per week instead of once. Version B went to the default weekly autoresponder. (By the way, I managed to confuse the hell out of myself because I typically use ‘A’ as my default.)

After running this test for a full month – which is necessary in this type of test, where the impact of mailing frequency must be measured over an extended period of time – mailing twice per week edged out the weekly newsletter. Not by much, mind you, but every increase in sales counts. I’ve done very few things in my years of internet marketing that really blew my sales numbers wide open in one shot. Rather, it’s been years worth of split testing and finding little things that increase sales by one tenth of one percent. Dozens upon dozens of those tests has resulted in several percentage points increase in sales conversion, which to me equates to several hundred thousand dollars per year in increased revenue!

So, if you’re of the opinion that emailing too often will turn people off, think again. Or, for that matter, subscribe to a few top internet marketers’ lists – many mail daily! Increasing your email frequency will increase your sales without driving unsubscribes, and I have the test results to prove it.

I think the same thing every time someone calls hiring a maid or some other domestic help as “frivolous.” Sure, I could do the work myself, but why would I waste my time when it’s so well-spent elsewhere? Is it really a good use of my time to mop the floors or mow the lawn? The only domestic work I still do myself is detailing my car, and it’s because I really truly cannot find anyone who can do it better or with as much attention to detail as myself.

As true as this issue is with domestic work, it’s even more so in business and particularly internet marketing.

Nowhere else but in internet marketing do I see more people wasting so much time on menial tasks. I’m guilty of this myself – every day I wind up doing something that someone else should be doing, and I’m always making mental notes to outsource that kind of work.

The answer is outsourcing. Outsourcing is a hot topic both in the marketing world and out. Successful entrepreneurs and internet marketers understand the value of time, and not wasting that time on non-productive tasks, whether that means mowing the lawn or building a web page.

Starting out, most new marketers don’t have any choice but to handle their own tasks. From responding to emails to handling support tickets to processing unsubscribe requests – not to mention fulfilling orders – there’s a lot to be done in any new online business, and without solid profits or a budget to work with, the new marketer generally has to do everything.

However, tasks should be outsourced as quickly as possible. When I started out, I had a fulfillment house producing and shipping my products within a few months of making my first sale. I contracted with a call center to handle the phones and support requests, and even hired an outside firm to run my PPC campaigns so I wouldn’t have to. I wanted my time to be free to create new products and work directly on marketing, and nothing else.

Take a look at your days and how you’re spending your time. Time is the only asset that cannot be replaced, and therefore it is the most valuable. Think about whether you’re using your time effectively, or wasting it. If you’re wasting it – and we all do to some extent – correct the situation by outsourcing as much as possible, both at home and at the office!

Most of these plans come from trial and error experience in prior years, as do most of the decisions I make and new directions I try. Here’s the short list:

1. More JV and Affiliate Promotions. There’s a common myth in the internet marketing world that mailing affiliate promotions to your list will encourage unsubscribes, but I have not found that to be the case. If you maintain a good relationship with your list, they’ll pay attention to you and they won’t unsubscribe. Combine that with the fact that open rates are never as high as we all want, and you can see why multiple promos per month won’t hurt.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m going to spam my list with endless affiliate offers. Quite the contrary. When I say “increase,” I’m referring to the fact that I normally send no more than one per month. I’ll increase that to two, possibly three in the event of really good offers that would benefit my subscribers. (NOTE: This is not a request for more JV invites! I already have a closed list of marketers for whom I promote and am not seeking more.)

2. More E-Mail Frequency. Last month I moved to a very high-end email server solution, and in the process of tweaking the configuration, my server admin had me sending numerous email broadcasts out over and over to monitor performance. I was convinced I’d piss off my lists, but to the contrary, sales volume was explosive for those couple of days.

From that experience I learned not only will my interested subscribers not unsubscribe, as I pointed out in #1, but they want to hear from me more often and more frequent mailings will encourage them to buy sooner.

3. More Diversified Traffic Sources. When I was “Google Slapped” last month, there wasn’t a disastrous drop in sales and opt-in volume for the period of time that my AdWords account was off. It made me realize that my primary focus on Google AdWords was distracting me from many other quality traffic sources. Therefore I’ll focus much of my energy in 2010 on diversified traffic sources, particularly free ones.

Keep in mind that I’m in the anti-SEO camp due to the fact that I optimize my sites for conversion only and refuse to screw that up by altering my copy to please search engines. However, there are many ways to exploit SEO using other sites that drive traffic to your main site (this blog being just one example).

4. Less Work, More Fun. Having spent all of last week on Mike Filsaime’s Marketers’ Cruise and then spending the first 3 days of this week at home getting over being sick, I hated coming to the office today and would have much rather stayed at home or done something fun with my bride. As much as I love my “work” – if you can really call it that – hobbies and recreational activities are still more preferable. So, as much as I openly criticize most interpretations of “time management,” I’ll have a clear and concise list of things to do each and every day, and will not come to the office unless I have a full days’ worth of activities on my schedule. No more coming here just for the sake of coming.

For the first full year after I became a successful internet marketer and quit my last job ever, I didn’t work at all; contrast that with my time living in California, where I was in the office constantly looking for new ways to make money in order to justify CA’s outrageous cost of living. Neither were healthy; balance is.

This underlines the importance of balance and why it’s so necessary to have a true balance in life if you expect to succeed in business.

5. More Focus On Opt-Ins. I’ve always tracked PPC and other traffic sources for sales conversion, but have recently put a stronger focus on opt-in conversion. Why? Well, first of all, no one is going to buy if they don’t first opt-in. That’s a no-brainer. Second, there is a greater value to opt-ins than in just selling my own product. Like those affiliate promotions that frequently put five figures into my pocket with the sending of an email or two. Just because a subscriber isn’t going to buy one of my products doesn’t mean they won’t buy someone else’s product that I earn commission on.

There you have it … my main new focuses and shifts in direction for 2010. I’ll keep you posted on the results!

Fast-forward to today. The place was PACKED. And we all know why.

It’s the New Year’s Resolutions crowd.

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing inherently wrong with New Year’s Resolutions. Resolutions are just another form of goal setting, and setting goals is a good thing. After all, you can’t get something unless and until you define what it is that you want in the first place.

The problem with the New Year’s Resolutions crowd, however, is that few of them, if any, will follow through with their resolutions. This will be obvious in the gym two or three weeks from now, when they’ll have all but disappeared.

Most people I know who come up with New Year’s Resolutions are the type of people who don’t follow through with things. They’re not consistent, and if there’s anything I’ve learned on my own journey to success, it’s that consistency is everything.

Whether you want business and financial success, or you want to get in shape, or you want to improve your relationships with others, the key is to work on these things consistently.

I’ve explained in the past that top sales professionals don’t care what day of the month it is. They don’t change their activities if it’s the first day of the month, or the last. They consistently do the same things each and every day, and that’s why they’re on top.

And that’s what the New Year’s Resolutions crowd needs to understand. Consistency = success. Lack of consistency = failure.

People who are in great shape know that you don’t do a diet or exercise program for a few months and then go back to your old ways. It’s a permanent lifestyle change.

People who are successful in business know that you don’t work hard for a few months or a few years and then reap the benefits. You make permanent changes instead.

People who are in wonderful relationships (as I am) know that you don’t woo someone for a few months and then get lazy and indifferent, as all too many couples do. Those who are in happy relationships know that you love someone with all your heart forever, not just at the beginning.

Remember, consistency is everything. Without consistency, you have nothing. So forget about those silly New Year’s Resolutions, and instead resolve to make permanent changes in your life to improve!

The answer is simple: There is always room for improvement. Unless you have 100% opt-in, 100% conversion, and 100% upsell rates, you can improve your marketing. The easiest way to do this is via a/b split-testing. An even faster way is multivariate (MVT) testing, or variations on a/b such as a/b/c (split-3) or a/b/c/d (split-4). Multivariate testing is sometimes known as “Taguchi testing,” named after the mathematician who invented the various MVT formulas.

In the nearly seven years that I’ve been marketing online, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped testing. There is always at least one active split- or multivariate-test active on my sites, particularly NeverColdCall.com, my #1 income producer and also the “test lab” where I try out all of my new ideas that I can then apply to all of my other sites – and future sites as well.

The benefits of this are many:

1. Your conversion rate continually improves. I’m running near 9.2% conversion on NeverColdCall.com. This is for a variety of reasons – finding and exploiting high-quality traffic sources, continually educating myself with internet marketing info products, master-minding with other internet marketers, and more. However, the biggest reason for this is the fact that I am constantly testing new ideas.

2. You can apply your results anywhere. Each time you conclude a test and declare a winner, you now have a new marketing technique, or piece of copy, or whatever, that you can apply to any and all sites. As a result of my years of testing, I have a cookie-cutter marketing system that I can apply anywhere. For example, if you compare two of my sites – NeverColdCall.com and AdwordsInsideSecrets.com – you’ll see that they’re nearly identical. This is very simply because I’ve taken my system, site structure, basic copy template., etc., from NeverColdCall.com and applied it all to AdWordsInsideSecrets.com. I know that it works VERY effectively, so why use anything different?

With this approach you can increase your income exponentially by simply plugging different products into your master marketing template, as I have. I realized how wealthy one can become in internet marketing when I discarded the mindset of trying to squeeze a few extra sales from one site, to realizing that I can plug any product into my system and make money. That way, instead of trying to take a site that makes $20,000/month and improve it to $30,000/month, for example, I can just create ten sites using that same system that generates $20,000/month.

(Having said that, I’m always testing. The reason I run nearly all of my tests on NeverColdCall.com is because it gets more traffic than any of my other sites, so I get the fastest results there. Then I apply the winning formula to all of my sites.)

It’s a known fact that people who stop learning and stop educating themselves stop growing. A similar maxim can be applied to internet marketing: Any business that stops testing stops growing, and will never realize its full potential.

With that in mind, stop whatever you’re doing, go to your site, and start looking for new and creative ideas you can try out – and test them!

Yes, I can confirm that the rumors are true. Mike is leaving the info product business, and going forward, Mike Filsaime, Inc. will strictly be a software and services company.

So…

…what does that mean to YOU and why should YOU care?

Because today at 2PM Eastern, you can get his $1297.00 Home Study Course, “The 7 Figure Code,” for Free if you act fast!

Mike he has decided to give ONLY Lucky 10,000 people the course for FREE (Instant Access) as well as send you some free bonuses just for the s&h. Here’s the link:

7FigureSecrets.com

I’d recommend going to the site NOW, signing up for the advance VIP list, that way you will get the first shot at one of the 10,000 copies when the site goes live at 2PM.

Enjoy!

A good, well thought-out internet marketing approach it the best way to promote your business. Do not think for one second that you will gain customers by using spam. Sending out bulk emails taken from a spam list and then trying to forge where the email is sent from is tacky and deceitful. There are many severe laws against spamming and people can take it very seriously. They take it so seriously, in fact, that some advertisers went to court and the courts forced the spammers to pay hefty fines. Shutting down someone’s email is not the way to gain business. Talk does fly at Internet speed, and your reputation will go down the tubes as word spreads about your annoying spamming.

The use of spamming software is very advanced. If you want to take a chance with it, it would not be a very good idea though. The likelihood that you will even get a few good customers out of it is almost nonexistent. People enjoy your asking them to join your network or buy your product in a legitimate way. Financially opening up to involving a third party is certainly asking for trouble. By using some else’s email and causing a lot of heartache for them will open complex issues for you.

The next form of advertising that will turn off a customer in a heartbeat is pop-ups. Today, there is not only the traditional pop-up but pop-under too. A barrage of pop-ups or quick pop-ups from under the screen will leave your customer insulted and angry. It does not matter how good your product is – do not do it. In addition, a new marketing software technique slides pop-ups across the customer’s screen. This might sound non-intrusive, but think about this: What if they are in the middle of reading some information about your site? That is not helpful to your cause. It can be especially bad if they were about to click on the order button. Lost profits are never good for your wallet. If you are going to use pop-ups – and I hope you don’t – learn the software, and more importantly learn a bit about the human psychology of advertising. Look around for information on how and why people buy on the Internet, and apply that to your advertising and marketing campaign use.

Not only are spam emails, pop-ups and pop-under ads bad marketing techniques to use, but the tactic of high speed spawning is hideous and more than irritating to your potential customer. If you have ever thought about using it on a customer and have experienced it yourself, then go back and experience it again. You may have forgotten what it was like, although that is hard to see how you could forget it. A vicious attack on your customer’s browser button will not let the customer leave your site. Worse yet, they are forced to do an emergency shut down of their computer. Let us hope they have saved all information they were working on because ad after ad will over take their screen. Please do not use this garbage to try to increase your profits.

I hope that you will avoid using any of these three tactics in your advertising campaign. Using them will not bring the money in at a faster rate; in fact, just the opposite may occur. Take the time to use good marketing strategies. Learn what people appreciate in the way of business practices. Also, use manners and courtesy along with a little shrewdness in your marketing strategy. There are many ways to do it. By exercising patience and learning your way around the Internet, you can bring in many very happy customers and a lot of money for you.

The first Google search result I clicked on wanted me to register just to do a search. Unbelievable! I quickly clicked my “back” button, and moved on to search result #2.

This one allowed me to do a search, review the results, and click on the “more details” link. I did, and guess what? I hit a page telling me I had to register before I could view details on that particular home.

No thanks. Time to move on to the third result.

And so I did. This one let me search without registering, but I couldn’t view the search results until I did.

What the hell is the matter with these people? Especially at a time when the real estate market is dead, you’d think real estate brokers would have enough sense to use their brains when putting these sites together!

Unfortunately, common sense is uncommon. They fail to realize this one basic truth of marketing:

Anything that isn’t helping people to buy is preventing them from buying.

Think about that for a minute. Anything that isn’t helping your sale is hurting it. That means unnecessary pages, unnecessary registrations, unnecessary product details or brochures, unnecessary company information, and on and on.

You may have heard the concept of “filters and amplifiers” in marketing. Simply put, anything that doesn’t amplify the power of your marketing is acting as a filter between you and your prospect. These stupid, idiotic, moronic pages that demand I register my personal information before I can view a simple real estate agent listing (or even search in the first place) are a prime example of a filter. A big-time filter, at that… not only will I not be buying from agents who pull this nonsense, I left their sites completely and won’t be doing business with them at all.

Do this right now: Review your entire marketing system, from traffic generation, to your opt-in pages, all the way through to your thank-you pages. Identify any and all filters and either remove them, or convert them into amplifiers. Your marketing success depends on it. Remember, anything that isn’t helping people to buy is preventing them from buying.

(In case you’re wondering, I’m such an anti-SEO person for the simple fact that you must optimize your sites for conversions, not SEO. I use external sites to drive traffic to my high-converting marketing site. I don’t mess with my site’s copy, content, and structure to make Google happy. No way. Not ever.)

Having said all that, I still spend a large amount of money on Google AdWords every month. Except for the past few days, that is, while my account was temporarily “Google Slapped” due to landing page issues that have since been corrected.

Here’s the funny thing: My opt-ins and sales didn’t suffer terribly while I was without AdWords. This was not what I expected at all.

You see, when you’re paying for traffic, you tend to focus on optimizing that source of traffic above all others. It only makes sense, since your dollars are at stake. The result is that you tend to forget that traffic is even coming in from other sources.

The bottom-line is this: You must exploit all available sources of traffic. In doing so, you diversify your traffic sources, thereby hedging against unforeseen events (like my Google Slap), while simultaneously enjoying the high ROI of pay-per-click advertising. This is what I do, and it’s the reason why losing AdWords for a few days only resulted in a drop in traffic of only about one-third, rather than a complete shutdown of my business – something those who market solely on AdWords run a constant risk of, especially now that Google has gone ban-happy.

Here’s a brief list of traffic-generation methods that will keep visitors coming to your site, with our without PPC:

Article Marketing. Article marketing is one of the most underrated methods of traffic generation. Simply write a content- and keyword-rich article about once a month (more if you’re new to marketing online), and upload it to EzineArticles.com. Include a link to your site in the resource box along with some incentive for people to click on it, like a free report or free e-course.

Blogging. Set up a Wordpress blog with my recommended list of plugins and you’ll have a traffic-generation machine on autopilot. Be sure to post at least two or three times a week to keep the search engines happy, and include a link and incentive to get people to click through to your marketing site, like the ad for my AdWords site you see below this post.

YouTube. YouTube is becoming one of my top sources of high-converting traffic. It has very high prominence in search engines, and videos give you the capability to both massively give yourself credibility, as well as to provide valuable content that will keep viewers coming back for more. Best of all, with video technology advancing as quickly as it has, you can produce high-quality video with an inexpensive camera like a Flip HD and upload it in minutes.

Podcasting & Vodcasting. After YouTube, my iTunes video podcasts are my next largest source of high-converting traffic. All you need to do is set up a blog to host the video content (you can use your existing Wordpress blog), set up a free account on FeedBurner with iTunes podcasting enabled, and complete the “Add A Podcast” form in the iTunes music store. You’ll be up and running in just a few days. Best of all, each time you create a new video for YouTube, simultaneously post it on your blog, which will automatically feed to iTunes via FeedBurner. That way you’re showing your videos on both YouTube and iTunes, with zero additional work on your part!

Twitter. First things first: I’m not a huge fan of Twitter for business. I think most people who tell you that you can explode your sales with Twitter just want to sell you their latest Twitter information product. Where I do like Twitter, however, is integrated with your blog. I use a free Wordpress plugin called Tweet This, that automatically tweets the title and link to every new blog post the instant I click the “Publish” button. Combine this with a large list of Twitter followers (follow people with tons of followers and turn on auto-follow), and you’ll drive a nice amount of traffic to your blog. This gets comments active, pushing you up in search engine rankings, which in turn get you more traffic and more clickthroughs to your marketing site.

That’s the basic list. Do those things diligently and you won’t have to worry much if and when your AdWords account gets slapped!