Ubot studio is a great way to set up your own little automated empire.  Want to log in and delete all your mail – can do it.  Want to log in and post to twitter? Can do it.  Want to post to all your bookmark places? Can do it.  Get the picture?

• Guru’s will suddenly start sending out mails to help pay the tax bills… nothing they tout will be good for those that buy it.
• Someone will be selling tax guides.
• Someone will try and avoid taxes through some stupid on-line scam.
• and someone will start threads in forums like “I’ve got 10k what do I spend it on?”

For those of you who run your own business, get an accountant.  Even if you are smart enough to file your own taxes, a good planning session on how to structure things next (this) year can be very beneficial.  Our income fluctuates and the credit card expenses that come with PPC means that it’s more than smart to plan things out.

There – that takes care of ignoring all the tax guides coming your way.

For those of you looking for advice on what to do with 10k with your tax money, I don’t know what to tell you.  But that money comes from one of two things.  1.) You overpaid all year long.  Obviously it’s your money that you earned.  It’s not a gift of the Government or some windfall like winning the lottery.  2.) Your broke, and it’s EIC money or because you paid into the system but didn’t earn enough to be taxed.  In that case save the damn money because you are going to be in trouble at some point in the year.

Anyone else that wants an excuse to spend xyz – feel free to run your ideas through me.  I’d love to do a section on the blog where “anonymous”  wants to spend xyz and this is what I think they should do – and then allow others to comment to expand on it.  Make sure you give some idea of what your interests and skill sets are.

Just leave a comment here – and we can go from there.  I won’t share ‘who’ you are with anyone.

You see almost every product launch in the internet marketing world has some of the same things in common….. if you are being sold by ‘those’ people.

Here is how it happens – and of course your complete guide to doing it yourself!

General rule:

Once you have as much of your customers money as you can get through a single sales funnel it’s very important to structure things to get your customer the hell off your product and onto someone else’s.  The refund goes to the last person holding the potato and you don’t want it to be you!  The fact that you can earn commissions for doing this makes it so much better than sex!  Don’t feel guilty about selling crap.  Most people won’t even read your report, watch your videos, or do something foolish like actually trying your method if you do your execution and layout correctly.

The Set Up

1st. You’ve got to have minions to sell your crappy e-course/guide/book/pdf/etc…  You’ll charge a lot more than anyone could really justify for the product, but so your minions can make money as well you will give them 50 percent, 60 percent, even 100 percent commissions.  If you are just starting out you will probably want to partner with someone who has already attained GURU status and then you will probably lose money, but you will build your own list of people and can be a GURU yourself.

It’s awesome.

2nd. You’ve got to come up with something unique, ground breaking, earth shattering.  Something like an auto blogging tool.  If you can’t even come up with that just copy someone elses product, post, etc…  Personally I feel that there are a lot of high quality products being pitched at Digital Point. Any of those $5 dollar reports qualify as the base for your $997 product.  We cover why it doesn’t matter what’s in your product later.

3rd. Don’t tell anyone in the sales page what it is.  Lord knows they wouldn’t buy an auto blogging tool.  Especially one that just scrapes rss with things like Righthaven out there.  Hopefully it doesn’t do that.  There are smarter ways to auto blog and I know I’ve talked about them here.

4th. This is the most important part.  You need screenshots of yourself making stupid amounts of money in a short period of time.  Preferablywhile you were homeless, with your legs stuck beneath a log, and while wild sparrows attacked you.  If you need help with those screenshots please see here:  Screen Shot Faking.  Really want to be slick about it?  Change things up using that massively secret technique then make a video of it – of course a video is real right?

O.K. so first off you know how to set things up properly now for your first product launch.  That’s just the set up.

Now for the execution.

1.) You open your doors at a certain time.  Have all your minions start talking about your great product that only they have seen so far DAYS or even weeks in advance.  If you are really smart you’ll have people start opting in so you can blast them every few hours about how hard it is to keep the digital doors locked while you wait for that secret time.

2.) Make sure it’s a limited amount.  I mean this secret that saved you from the sparrows can’t be shared with everyone – just a few thousand – so it doesn’t get diluted.

3.) Make sure you have lot’s and lot’s of upsells, downsells, secret pricing, and other things that engineer trust and make you look really legit.  Personally I think if you can start off at $997 for your product and then everytime they try to leave the page you take the price down 97 bucks until they are at 97 bucks it’s a winner.

Now for the product layout.

This is the MOST important part.  You see people are lazy and the majority aren’t REALLY going to read all 999999 pages of fluff.  They will get distracted by Youtube so it’s very important you follow this page layout structure for your report.  Lot’s of LOOOOOONG videos with each only containing a little bit of the method is a sure winner.

For the purposes of this guide I’m going to just make sure that you understand the format for PDF’s.

General PDF Overview

Length, length, length.  This is the goal.  People are lazy and if they don’t read the whole thing they won’t ask for a refund.  You know if they read your tripe they are heading over to Clickbank to demand a refund, damages, and to see if anyone is selling how to’s on home lobotomies.  It’s important that have a footer and header for every page of the PDF (to take up space), and don’t worry it’s just fine to dedicate an entire page to one sentence.  People appreciate brevity in your words and REALLY they want to keep scrolling to find something in your guide worth reading.

DO NOT – I REPEAT DO NOT SKIP ANY SECTION OF THIS GUIDE.

Section 1:

This is the disclaimer section.  You need lawyer speak, and plain speak.  If you are smart you will also include some anecdotes about this anaconda you saw in mexico that ate a lawyer.  The point is to make this REALLY LONG!

Section 2:

This is where you talk about when you were homeless, had your legs stuck under a rock, the sparrows were attacking you, and you used your telepathy to have the local librarian help you make a fortune online.  This has to be long – hell describe the sparrow poop if you have to.  LENGTH LENGTH LENGTH creates value — NOT CONTENT!

Section 3:

This is where you talk about some other mailing list they should join.  Give them instructions, get them off this report.  DISTRACT THEM.  As fast as you can with as much urgency as you can get them off this page.  If you are really really smart you will find a way to get them to install something that will require them to restart their computer.  There is a 90 percent chance they won’t be back and if they do come back the sympathy you’ve created by talking about the sparrow trauma will help you avoid that refund!

Section 4:

O.K. you know you’ve gone on long enough – but let’s give the reader one more chance to get off this page.  Tell them about your good friend “JOHN’S” amazing report that will help them with your guide.  One more chance to get them off the page and get them into someone elses sales funnel so they stop thinking about getting a refund on your report – let John deal with this loon who actually expects something.

Section 5:

This is the meat where you actually have to teach them some outdated method you probably got from a forum post or someplace where bloggers still post. Make sure you put a twist on it – if you can get some script coded in Arastastanziba for $45 dollars it’s not a bad idea either.  It doesn’t have to be bug free – just has to load, they probably won’t use it anyway.  If people complain you can use your profits from the launch to get it recoded.

Section 6:

This is the important section – the most important section of all. Right now they are sort of like this:

(*yes that’s a ape that put on lip stick and then didn’t get taken to the prom. Sorry couldn’t find a picture of a monkey – deal with it)

This is your last chance to distract them and get them into someone else’s sales funnel.  It’s like a game – the last thing they buy is the only thing they will think about.  If you can get them to take their disappointment with your sparrow shit product and project hope again to something else they will be TWICE as disappointed with the next product.

Remember though – if you can stuff your sparrow crap report into a bunch of videos and just put your pre-sales to other peoples stuff in the PDF’s you will win 90 percent of the time.  The good news is the lazy bastards buying your guide WILL open the pdf’s and get shoved into someone else’s sales funnel – and never realize you gave them a great deal on a pile of sparrow shit!

How can you help others?

Spread the love for this guide.  The more people that know the secrets to making their own digital guru guides the more people there are to pass the potato to!  Post to twitter, facebook, or from your blog.

Updates  (I could have done an upsell on you here – but damn I’m nice):

I forgot to mention how to pre-sell your digital product and get more affiliates!

Just making your product, sales page, and lining yourself up with a GURU isn’t enough.  It’s also important to go to popular internet marketing forums and ask for affiliates.  Make sure to promise things that you have no intention of doing!  This is an awesome way to build trust, establish your brand out the door, and make sure you ONLY have greedy affiliates that will push whatever crap you push out.  No sense messing with the ones that care about their lists and relationships.

Make sure you are on a very cheap shared host!

This is probably the best way to increase your profits.  First make SURE your server goes down during the ‘launch’.  Redirect to a mailing list or something and make sure you don’t give your affiliates credit for any sales that come in that way.  You save $$ and of course everyone knows how awesome your product is if the server goes down.

Common Mistakes:

One of the most common mistakes is having a forum.  This gives people another page of yours to bookmark, and of course keep your product in their mind.  It also gives them a place to think of things like class action suits, and mass refunds because you know your product sucks.  Don’t make it.

Offering a service:  Services are hard work.  Don’t do it – plus then when you deliver the service every month/week/day/year/decade it reminds them of their subscription giving them a reason to cancel.

E-mailing and mentioning your service ever again.  There is a reason launches only happen for a few days and you never hear of the product again.  Keep it on the down low – and just get your next product ready!

“I built this site – but I’m not making any money.  It’s about internet marketing!  What’s wrong?”

“How about these keywords:  ”make money online”"?

“I have a review site with all these products (all e-books) can I make money?”
Sadly I can’t really help these people because they obviously have never read anything I write – or haven’t realized my “niche” revolves around programming tools for webmaster to use.  I’m certainly not in the “make money at home” niche at all.  In fact if you are trying to promote in that niche I’ve got 5 words for you:  FAIL:  YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG…. no wait, that’s 6 words.

Information is power – selling it is hard! (or get the hell out of the information bartering game)

Let’s go take a walk over at the warrior forum and see how many people are trying to sell “make money” things to the same group of people.  Sure the group changes as people leave the niche, enter the niche, etc..  But there is a whole mess of noise, bad advice, and 100000′s of people trying to ‘fake it till they make it’.

The return on time and money invested for a new marketer just plain sucks.

Let’s take my assistant Aaron as an example.  (sorry Aaron)

Aaron was a warrior forum junkie peddling e-books, reports, and guides on how to make money on-line.  Aaron wasn’t making anything except for what ever he could eek out of a 7 dollar report on building back links.  Nothing he was selling was mind breaking, shattering, or to be honest even good.

In his defense it wasn’t his fault.  He’d bought reports that pretty much told him to do this…. from the same place he was selling them.

Aaron’s skill set:  None really except the ability to use open office, generate a pdf, and put it up on e-junkie.  Then he would write up a “WSO” over at the warrior forum.

Aaron’s problem:  He was totally broke and about to lose his house.

Aaron’s solution:  He lives 2 blocks from me and a bit of fate.

I hired Aaron to basically build links, web 2.0 properties, etc…  He’d work when he needed money, and through the process he would learn how to actually make some money on-line on his own, with out selling crap fake reports when he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

Then I got sick, and someone had to step up to the plate.  The man did it.  He’s learning html, a bit of php, and more importantly the bigger picture.

Sadly, he’s making enough now that for me to keep his assistance we are partnering up on a lot of things.  Why?  He’s making money now and isn’t a spaz trying to get rich quick on a 7 dollar report and panicking when he only makes a few bucks.

In retrospect, what I’ve REALLY taught Aaron isn’t how to build a website, or do keyword research, or build links, or do anything “technical” isn’t that mind blowing.  What’s really changed was his mind set.

This was Aaron a few months ago:

I need money right now.  Hmm I bought this dumb report on how to get links from a forum or I read this blog post at blackhatdigest….. Let me spend the next 8 hours typing in open office and put enough of a spin on it to call it my own idea, and sell the report.  I’ll make maybe 100 bucks for the day since the report really is crap.

This is Aaron now:

What can I do that will make me money all  year long?  While I think, maybe I’ll get a glass of coke.  Damn I wonder if they sell Coca-Cola glasses on-line.  Yes they do.  Hmmm sounds like people are interested in old coke bottles too.  Hey look – they sell them on e-bay.  Look there are some search results – people are looking into this.  Look this domain is available.  Let’s get it, scrape ebay and rss feeds to populate the site… great.  Let’s put up 10 articles about coke glasses with all that information I just learned.  Hey look – Coke glasses are on Amazon too.  Let’s put up a few more posts about coke glasses and I’ll link off to these amazon deals.

Hey look there are forums and other blogs about antiques where I can link back to my site…. great.   Let’s do that.  Let’s use the rss feed from this site to promote the site, hey rss rebound is free – I’ll use that.  Look at this post about how to really promote with rss feeds when you are pulling content from ebay.   He’s also using some of our other tools like magic rss linker, magic keyword plugin, but there is no reason you can’t do the same things free with just a little more time.

Cool, I’ve made a bit of money on this coke glasses site.  Let me go buy some content and links so I can spend some time on my next site.  Someone else can increase this sites value 5 fold while I work on other long term income projects.

This is Aaron Sometimes still:

Damn it.  I really want to buy “something” to speed things up.  Hmm, I’ve got a few sites making me a little bit of money.  I need some “right now” money though.  Off to flippa I go.  I bet I can sell this Coke Glasses site for at least 500 bucks.

Where are you?

Chances are you might not even be to the selling crap to people trying to sell crap stage.  Let’s take a look at what Aaron is really doing now.  He’s using his life experiences to figure out what people are looking at, buying, and researching on-line.

He’s making sure there is enough traffic and the competition is possible to outrank (when he’s even worried about that – sometimes just traffic from your incoming links is enough).

He’s building the site fast and loose and using as much content as he can from affiliate services such as e-bay or amazon.  He’s automating his promotion to start with, doing a little manual work as well, then hiring someone else to work for a few bucks an hour (or less) to do what he can’t do as cheaply.

His pay off is long term income, and right now income if he needs it.

Do you think you can install a wordpress blog, take a few hours writing content for it and pulling in data from affiliate programs?  Then spend a few more building links.  Do you think that maybe the 8 hours and 10 bucks (domain name) that you spend on something like this will turn into enough to pay for your time over the next year?  The answer is almost always yes – and when it’s ‘no’ the good thing is that someone else will buy the damn dud site, and you’ll have others that blow your projections out of the water.

Quality writers wanted.  Join us.

It’s themed locally btw – so it does limit some of your content choices but it’s worth checking out.

A couple we’ve sold off as soon as we built them for over $200 dollars.

We’ve worked pretty hard to streamline this system and we are ready to bring in our first members.  I’m going to be letting you guys join at a HUGE discount per site — but there is a catch. Actually 2 of them.

Catch Number 1:  I’m not giving you “real” access to the members area yet.  I want to see what kind of information we get from our first members so we can make the members area friendlier.

Catch Number 2:  I’m giving you a HUGE discount.  I expect you to tell me what you think of the members area when it’s done, and to provide a testimonial of your experience with your first site(s).

I know – pretty hard stuff for you to deal with.

Webmaster Training Wheels

Can you use google?  Ezine Articles search engine?  Youtubes search engine?  Surf the web?

Can you copy and paste?

Can you rewrite a few sentences in english?

If you aren’t fluent enough in English this won’t work for you – or me.

I’ll be honest – it’s pretty boring stuff.  But you can burn through an entire project in a matter of an hour or two based on what my guys are already doing.

If you are interested send me an e-mail at admin (at) stmadeveloper.com with “I need the job” in the subject line.  I’ll send you the details.

You see – if you had already followed some of the instructions inside the 30 day guide that means you’ve signed up for Other98percent.com as a free member.  Guess what?

I teach CSS and the basics of PHP in there already It’s free – PAY ATTENTION!

What I was hoping for was for someone to say hey – Teach me cpanel.  Teach me to set up my VPS.  Teach me how to scrape some articles.  Teach me something beyond the basics….

I’d LOVE to do it.  I will do it…. IF…..

10 comments literally asking to learn something.  If 10 of you can’t say “I WANT TO LEARN XYZ….” well I won’t be bothered to teach it.

Sound fair?

1.) Register domain. Install WordPress.

2.) Put up 20 articles (outsource if you don’t write them).

3.) Sell on sitepoint for $200.

Assuming you outsource the articles for 5 bucks a piece, your “costs” are going to be about 130 dollars with a 70 dollar profit.

Your time (I’m estimating 2  hours to register, set up, and put in those articles) has got to be worth something so I think THIS method actually ends up in a wash… if you sell the blog.  Not that many stupid people out there.

Here is a different concept for you – that will take you longer, but won’t actually suck up your money or actually cause you more time.

If you are in wordpressmonthly just use it…. and let the blog sit for a few weeks while wordpressmonthly does it’s posting.

If you aren’t you are going to get down and dirty for a few days, then do some natural posting.  Like this:

Install wordpress – Set up feedwordpress.

Let run for 2 weeks.  Turn off feedwordpress.

Whether using feedwordpress or wordpressmonthly after a couple weeks turn them off.

Make 20 “REAL” posts.  They can be short paragraphs, full blown articles, or even articles from the directories. If you have a PLR membership just do some mixing and matching.  2 PLR articles on a post even is fine.

Your last 5 posts should be 100 percent unique content.  MAKE SURE YOUR PINGING.
Use the web 2.0 stuff in here at that point – promote for an hour of your time.  Let it sit.

A week later make another couple posts.

A week later make another couple posts.

You’ve had the blog for a month now, you probably have 50 or 100 posts – and because of wordpress monthly or feedwordpress you have a number of backlinks.  You’ve expanded those with your social network…. and you’ve got some traffic, and probably have made a few bucks.

Time to sell (OR KEEP).
Your sale will actually work at this point.

Here is a partial list of places where questions are asked and answered – (full list is here)

1. InfoPlease: Visitors to this site will be treated to an almanac, atlas, encyclopedia, dictionary and much more, which should be more than enough to find information on just about anything you’d need.
2. Fact Monster: Run by Infoplease, this site is geared towards the younger crowd, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find some great information here. Find answers to basic math, science, history and sports questions.
3. About.com: This site provides articles on a huge variety of subjects, many of which provide useful information or can link you to sites that have what you’re looking for.
4. Refdesk.com: Billed as a “fact check for the Internet,” this site provides a range of resources that make it easy to search the web, check an encyclopedia or dictionary, read the news and much more.
5. Reference.com: Part of the Dictionary.com site, this online resource provides access to many encyclopedia articles, as well as the accompanying dictionary and thesaurus.
6. Answers.com: Answers.com provides visitors with access to articles from sites and journals all over the Web.
7. Factbites: Called a cross between a search engine and an encyclopedia, this site is designed to make searching for information easier by filtering out information and only giving you the most relevant results.

If you can’t dig through those sites and get enough material for a few articles or pages on your site – well you must be illiterate — Or like me you just hate writing coherently.  It’s still a great place to do a little research so you can pass off the hard work to whoever is doing your writing.

Rails

But PHP is much more practical as your first language for a number of reasons. First off it’s easier to deploy, there is a lot more help out there, and I think it’s easier to learn for those two reasons. A person learning a new language shouldn’t have to figure out how to walk as well — it would be overwhelming. Learning to deploy Ruby is a freakin nightmare if you are a newbie.

Php on the other hand is probably 100 percent on your server already and if you can make your file extensions end in .php you can pretty much handle things from there. Dreamweaver is probably my preferred way to work with php (others like other IDE’s like aptana or eclipse)

When your ready to buy DW — USE MY LINK
Dreamweaver CS3 – Full

Hey – a man’s gotta eat   Couldn’t help putting that in there – I’m not suggesting that you rush out and buy DW today or anything.  But it’s an invaluable tool for building your sites.  Things like xsitepro only go far.

I’ve put a pretty basic ‘tutorial’ on php up over at other98percent.com in the free section. It’s geared for beginners and you should probably go through that before doing much more.

But let’s say you want to “LEARN” php more thoroughly? Where to go? It really depends on how you learn. I’m a big dork and can’t seem to “learn” (I mean really learn) on-line. I need a ‘book’. And 0′Rielly is probably the brand I would recommend.

If you learn better with video – check out: phpvideotutorials.com. It’s a great little site packed with stuff — not all free I’m afraid. But the free content isn’t bad.

There are also places where they have compiled tutorials and code all together – Robert Plank does this… most of his ‘stuff’ doesn’t apply to black hat sites – but I’m sure some of it could apply to your white hat or money sites.  I’ve taken a peek at some of Robert’s earlier stuff and saw some value in it.  Plus he has “Speak The Geek” over there 

My point – I suppose it’s that you need to at least know enough PHP to get going…. and I’m going to be using DW and PHP pretty heavily in the future.  The last 10 days of Black Hat Digest training are literally going to be videos of me and DW building sites  (and maybe a few other tools).