Regularly, I review my subscriptions to various tools and platforms.
Those subscriptions, even the small ones, need to be providing value to me, or they are too expensive.
A $5 per month subscription doesn’t seem like it should be a big issue, but if I’m not using it or it’s not providing any value, I should cancel it to subscribe to something that provides value.
The one I cancelled today wasn’t a $5 subscription.
It was an $815 per year subscription for a tool I don’t use much.
I think I can live without it as my requirements have changed.
The problem with this tool is that the company has been gradually moving functions out of the main program and charging extra to get them back.
I think this is dirty pool, and I refuse to support them further.
Pushing your prices up doesn’t improve your cash flow unless your product is unique and has no competitors.
Even the smarter politicians know that increasing taxes reduces their income.
The stupid ones keep pushing up taxes and adding new ones.
The really smart ones reduce the tax burden and their economies boom.
Like to share some thoughts on that?
Reply to this email and let me know.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. You have been looking at the Short Video production tool and wondering if it was worth the tiny investment.
Today, I’m giving you a look at a way of doing the same thing, not on the same scale, but creating and using Short Videos for traffic.
This way, you can get a feel for the methods and discover if you can generate some traffic.
Although relevant and valid, I’m not talking about the learning from failure process.
No, I’m referring to the simple fact that you only have to succeed 51% of the time to be considered successful.
Only you know about the other 49%, so they don’t count.
There is a slight caveat in this, though.
Doing something ten times does not mean you’ll succeed five times.
You do need to attempt whatever it is at least 100 times for the percentages to work for you.
For example, if you want to have a successful blog, you’ll need to write 100 posts before assessing how it’s going.
You’ll also need to promote those posts where your target market hangs out so they can find them.
Same if you want to do video marketing.
Make and post 100 videos.
Writing books for Kindle, write 100 books.
More often than not, when you commit to this type of activity, you’ll notice the results much sooner than your 100th whatever.
But when you commit to doing something 100 times and put in the persistence and consistency, it’ll get easier, and the results will come faster.
The rock facing the ocean doesn’t wear down because water is harder than rock.
It wears down because the waves are consistent.
Success always goes to the most persistent.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. There is nothing wrong with using tools to help automate the process of content production.
You still have to use the tools consistently to benefit from their help.
Leveraging the big platforms’ competitiveness can be a big boon to you as they’ll help push you along.
eBay is attempting to pinch a big slice of Amazon, so they help their listers with promotional traffic.
YouTube is attempting to take a big slice of TikToks business by pushing video shorts and promoting them for the creators.
Amazon is attempting to grab a bigger slice of the book market by pushing its Vella platform, which is not available outside the USA at the moment.
Facebook is pushing into the video market by promoting any video content posted.
The best one to get into is the battle between YouTube and TikTok by creating a short video for YouTube and posting them on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
Create once, post four times.
Do you think you could make a buck from traffic from four high-traffic sites?
Discover how easy it is to create these short videos.
You’ll see older children breaking out on their own.
You’ll see older people being cared for by their children.
Each stage is a change in role.
From parents caring for you, caring for yourself, caring for your parents.
Today I visited my 93-year-old mother in the memory unit of the nursing home.
That’s always tough because she is beginning to lose the memory of her children.
She no longer remembers her grandchildren.
She struggles to remember her husband, who passed away 12 years ago.
Her world is shrinking to what happened 1 minute ago with little else other than confusion.
I visit twice a week, and it gets harder and harder each time.
Tonight our youngest daughter helped me with a Javascript problem that I’ve been wrestling with for days.
When she was going through University, I would often help her with her coding issues.
Now the role has reversed.
I don’t have a problem with that, as she codes every day, and I don’t.
She still comes to me for advice and to talk through issues which is great, but at some point, she’ll come to talk through issues with me that are my issues, not hers.
This is the natural course of the evolving lives we lead.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Yes, you are right.
I did send out yesterday’s email late.
All my fault.
I had it written except for the P.S. when I got called away and didn’t get back to it until morning.
Because of that, there was a significant drop off of opens which means that many of you lovely people didn’t get to see the excellent offer.
You’re getting some excellent training on how to leverage Google’s ravenous hunger for short videos.
Google wants to dominate TikTok, and they see that short videos are the way to go.
This tool and training allow you to create short videos at scale, which Google will promote on your behalf.
I know that intellectually we all understand that everybody is different, but do we know that internally?
I’m not convinced that we do.
Working in the polling station was an eye-opener.
Several people looked, on the surface, to fit in the general classification of normal.
But, when it came to writing some numbers in boxes on a piece of paper, they came into their own.
Some of them only showed up after voting had closed and we were sorting the votes.
What they wrote or didn’t write on those pieces of paper picked them out as different.
For others, it was apparent while they were there that they were different.
One person didn’t understand that they only had to write up to 12 numbers in any order on their voting slips.
Another, brought in by their spouse, was so clearly suffering from advanced dementia that they shouldn’t have been voting at all.
And they didn’t.
Their spouse got to vote twice.
In this polling station, we had just over 1,000 people attend.
There were only 121 informal votes meaning that around 90% of the attendees apparently did make an effort to understand what they were voting for, but I’m not convinced that was the case.
Overall, it was an orderly and calm display of democracy in action with no attempt by anyone to disrupt the process.
Of course, it’s not a true democracy because we, the voters, don’t get to choose the candidates.
We only get to choose between the candidates on offer.
That’s no different to any other democracy and is the best we can hope for in any country.
Australia doesn’t use machines to accept or tally the votes, that is all done by the voter writing on a piece of paper and the polling station staff manually sorting and counting them at the end of the day.
Party scrutineers monitor and witness the ballot boxes being sealed before voting starts, and the boxes are unsealed in the presence of the scrutineers at the end of the day.
There is complete confidence that there has been no tampering with the votes.
So that’s how we vote in Australia.
This time we got a change of Government which will be interesting to see how that pans out over the next three years.
I’m still building my online business because I don’t have any confidence that our economy, like the global economy, will have a nice easy time.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. With every election, the candidates and their parties spend massive sums across multiple platforms to get the result they want, to be elected.
Only one will get that result, and it doesn’t always go to those who spend the most.
It does, however, often go to those who get the most eyeballs on their promotions.
Marketers know that, on average, it takes at least seven views of your offer before a sale or conversion happens.
That’s why so many launch offers try to have a no-brainer, super value deal for those who take action immediately.
They are leveraging the FOMO principle.
This offer isn’t on launch.
It’s still a no-brainer product that does what it says on the tin.
If you want to get Google to help you get people on your offers, then this is one way to do it quickly.
It pretty much doesn’t matter what you read or watch concerning goal-setting and goal-reaching, it all seems to suggest that all you do is set the goal, take the steps and boom, there you are.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly why so many people give up on their goals and dreams for a better life.
Reaching your goals is not a linear process.
There will be obstacles along the way that may mean you need to make changes to what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.
Some of those obstacles can appear to be insurmountable.
They’re not, but they can seem that way.
Sometimes you need to reach out for help or guidance.
Sometimes you need to grow as a person or learn new skills.
Sometimes, what holds you back is the force that helps you grow stronger.
As you move forward and your goals get closer, sometimes you decide that you don’t want that one after all and change your focus.
None of these things are wrong.
None of them should prevent you living the life you choose.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. The free traffic tool I mentioned in the last email is selling fast on Warrior Plus.
That means the developers are likely to switch to a subscription model sooner than expected.
I don’t have insider information on this, but it would make sense to take advantage of the buzz and the affiliates promoting it to shore up their revenue model.
It’s still on launch pricing at the moment, as far as I can tell.
The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing – Free traffic.
Now I can’t vouch for this as working as I only bought it today and haven’t completed setting up the first page yet.
Not only that, but the creators say it takes 72 hours before the first visitors arrive as a trickle, but the volume gradually increases.
That means that I cannot say if the promise is true or whether the visitors convert to customers or not, but I trust the two people who created this product, and I know they have been testing it for a few months before releasing it.
The reports I have seen are positive, so I didn’t hesitate to grab it.
It’s on launch pricing.
One upsell could be used with the product but isn’t required.
A third upsell gives access to the creators but is also not required to make good use of the free traffic app.
This is not targeted traffic to the first page they land on, but you place your ads on that page and direct them to where you want.
I’ve managed to get one day’s work in a voting centre for Saturday.
TBH I didn’t care if I got it or not, but it pays pretty well.
Why would I bother?
My wife wanted to apply because it pays $500 for the day.
If we both ‘work’ the day, that’s $1,000 for a day’s light work.
We have a trip booked, and this will fully pay for the trip.
As I said, I didn’t care if we got the gig or not, as the money itself isn’t the issue.
The experience may well be something we would like to repeat or not.
You never know until you have a go.
I’m a firm believer in stepping through doors that open because you don’t know what’s on the other side.
I don’t know what role we may be doing in the centre.
They range from greeting people, checking them off the list, ensuring they get the proper voting slips, putting them in the right boxes, etc.
As you can tell, there is nothing too complicated there.
It seems that it’s money for old rope or money for jam to use a couple of old expressions.
There is an ulterior motive, though.
I might get a couple of great stories for future emails.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. When you build an email list of happy subscribers and you email them regularly, you build an exciting connection with them.
You reply to the emails that trigger something in you. Thank you.
I reply to every email I get from you, so feel free to reply and let me know what’s going on with you.
The only traffic source you can rely on is the one you build yourself.
That’s your email list.
A high-traffic website can be de-indexed in minutes, and the traffic stopped cold.
Your YouTube account can be shut down.
Your Facebook account can be shut down.
Your Twitter account can be shut down.
Any of your social media accounts can be shut down.
These things have happened to people I know, and it isn’t always their fault.
Sometimes it seems that these platforms have some sort of quota that they have to fill, so they smack people down for no reason at all, but there is never any chance of reinstatement.
As long as you back up your email list to your computer, you cannot lose it.
In the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, there still stand twenty structures from Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine.
Some of these date back to the original shooting in 1976, but most were built for the 1999 film The Phantom Menace.
It’s not likely to happen now, but I would love to be able to visit the Cantina.
I can almost hear the band now.
You guessed it.
I’m a Star Wars fan.
I get Star Wars toys for Father’s Day, my birthday and Christmas.
I have little 3D-printed Storm Troopers who hold onto my USB sticks and protect them from the Rebel forces who have X-wing and Micro fighters.
I also have Star Wars themed shirts, jumpers, socks and underwear.
At least I don’t dress up as any of the characters and join the fun at Comic-Con like other family members.
I’ve got some pride, at least.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Sometimes, other people’s hobbies can be a great source of income for Internet Marketers.
People will spend significant sums supporting their hobbies.
Sports fans, golfers, model train enthusiasts, history buffs, gardeners, cyclists, skateboarders, etc.
I’m sure that you can build a list of potentially hundreds of niches and sub-niches.
Internet marketing is not only about health, wealth and relationships, although you could be excused for thinking that way because so much training concentrates on those three big markets.
While some parts of the No Cost Income Streams training use one or more of these big niches as examples, the training itself is generic and will work for any niche you wish.
The beauty of getting started at no cost is that you can explore niches to find the one that works best for you.
It is plagiarism if they present your ideas as their own. If they give you credit in some way then it isn’t plagiarism, even if it isn’t very courteous. Plagiarism is about the proper attribution of ideas. Citation is the way to avoid it. In this case, not enough is known here to make a real judgement, and, you say, they took them in a different direction.
Perhaps you have an opportunity, however, to work with them on these ideas jointly so that attribution is no longer an issue.
Note that you don’t “own” ideas. Plagiarism isn’t really about “stealing” what another “owns”. It is a concept in scholarship that creators should be recognized.Buffy
The National Science Foundation Research Misconduct regulation defines plagiarism as the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.
Plagiarism and intellectual property issues are issues of ethics.
OK, so as you can see, I have linked the item and the bits I’ve copied.
I’ve said before that an idea could not be copyrighted, so it’s perfectly ethical to read three books on a subject and then write your book from memory and notes.
If you really want to CYA (cover your …), you can cite the three books as references in yours.
It’s the same with blog posts on a niche you want to break into, but it’s better for blog posts to copy snippets, link to the original(s), and comment on the sections you’ve copied.
If you’re using PLR, you don’t have to cite or reference anything as you are the legal owner of the document, video, audio, etc.
See, creating content isn’t a difficult thing to do at all.
It’s all around you, and we’re drowning in the stuff.
Grab what you need, use it ethically, and produce reams of it.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. When you use techniques like these to produce your content, you can get it done fast.
A bit like this email.
All of the content from that article was straight copy/paste.
Grammarly wanted to change sentences, words, punctuation, etc.
I didn’t permit that as I wanted it to be a direct copy.
It’s not perfect, but it didn’t take long to produce.
I read the article, copied the bits I wanted, pasted them into the email and curated the ideas.
20 minutes from start to here.
I embraced my imperfections and slapped out an email that is probably too long.
Learn how to do that yourself with this free book.
