The manifesto is very close to completion and is a bootstrapper’s formidable guide to online marketing and earning a living online.

I have set myself a target for Wednesday 27th May for the release of my eBook. Guess how much I’m selling it for? $297? $197? $97? 47?! $7! How about nothing. $0. I’m not charging a cent for this book at all. I believe the basic principles outlined in this book should be given away so that everyone can learn them and remove any excuse not to try.

I get extremely frustrated when great online markets with valuable information decide to run a course but then charge $497 or $297 a month. This immediately eliminates those who genuinely want to try but can’t because they simply don’t have the money to invest. It doesn’t make sense really does it? You provide a beginners course but then charge corporate rates. By no means am I knocking their product as I think many of these courses are worth many times more than what they actually charge. However it simply does not give everyone a chance to learn not only the basic principles but great marketing techniques as well.

A few things the eBook will contain:

• How to determine what product to sell
• Using your blog to full advantage
• 1 single step to increase affiliates conversions by over 200%
• Drop shipping guide
• The mega profitable eBay loophole that 99% of sellers don’t know
• Loads more.

Once again, all you need to do to get your hands on a copy when it comes out is to sign up to my mailing list. You can do this on the right hand column of this blog (and get your Free copy of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich) or using the form below. Hope your excited like I am!

Every online marketer knows that building a list is the one of the most effective ways to build a potentially profitable following. The same marketer also knows that those who have already bought from them are most likely to buy from them again. We see this all the time so would you like fries with that?

So how do you combine these two well known theories and turn them into one powerful marketing and sales technique? One and a half words – eBay.

There is a strange divide between people who swear by the monster marketplace and others who shun it like an Italian motorcar. I’m a bit of both, I love Ferrari’s but I drive an Alfa. What I’m trying to get at is that you may not be experiencing the full potential of the available resource but that doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

When I first started selling on eBay I did the normal thing. I sold something, sent out a great product, got good feedback and then moved on to the next customer. I would comfortably say that the majority of the sellers do this because that’s the way you do things right? Not quite.

Lets dissect things a little more. eBay is a massive marketplace full of millions of buyers ready and willing to buy stuff. Ready and willing to buy stuff. Those are some really powerful words right there. If you put a product up for sale on eBay you are exposing it to a market that is there not just surfing for fun, but are genuine buyers. That’s the first thing to take note of but it’s nothing that we don’t know already and many hundreds of ambitious entrepreneurs have used this fact to make thousands and thousands of sales.

Secondly when people buy a product from you on eBay you are required to communicate via email to finalize the sale. Now I’m guessing that little light bulb is flashing inside your head thinking you know where I’m heading with this. Your also thinking how could you possibly have not thought of this? Well looking at eBay’s terms and conditions there is good reason why you haven’t already thought of it or dismissed it entirely:

• Using member contact information obtained from eBay or using any eBay system to offer to sell any listed item outside of eBay
• Canceling a listing to sell to a buyer who became aware of the item through eBay.
• Ending a listing early to sell the item at a higher price to the winning bidder
• Offering to sell an item to a bidder in a Reserve Not Met listing without going through Second Chance Offer
• Offering to sell duplicate or additional merchandise to under-bidders without going through Second Chance Offer
• Sending unsolicited (without prior permission) commercial email offers to bidders for the same or similar products that they have bid on in the past

We need to read between the lines here a bit. If you run through the text in more detail you will notice that eBay makes a specific point of mentioning that sellers are not to use details obtained within eBay to sell any listed items outside of eBay.

So you can’t go and use the details you gather from eBay to sell the listed product outside of eBay but this is also the loophole: it doesnt actually say you can’t use this information to sell non-listed or alternative products outside of eBay.

As an eBay seller, once an item is sold, what you now have are the details of people who have already bought from you in a buyers environment. That’s the marketers dream right there and the potential is enormous.

Some brief action points to consider after a sale:

1. Send your buyers a digital thank you note (as well as a physical one when you send out your product)
2. Offer them a great bonus gift if they sign-up to your mailing list for great offers.
3. Once they sign up send through the bonus
4. Over the next 7 or so days build a healthy relationship giving away excellent products and information.
5. Sell to them again.
6. Then again.

Go the normal way and you’ll come out ok. Think outside the square and do that little extra and you’ll get your Ferrari.

I am in the process of writing my first ebook. The ebook came out of my frustration with the whole Need Money To Make Money thing. It is yet to have a name so lets call it.. Book 1. How original.

As some of you may know, in one of my earlier business ventures I spent over 50k developing a product which never took off. 2 years of hard work and frustration led to nothing and I was left demoralised. However a little later I spent $45 and $70 respectively on 2 other projects which have since proved extremely profitable. So why was this?

The problem was I was basing my work on theories developed by people who wanted you to spend a whole heap of money. The theory was that you needed money to create a product in order to make you money. Society makes you believe that this is true and this is the way you have to do things.

Worst of all, individuals now use this as an excuse not to try and get out and do something on their own. Eventually it became the excuse for everyone any anyone who wasn’t where they wanted to be financially. Now this theory has become a viral institution and infected the minds of millions world wide.

Well my aim is to get the message out there and prove that this is not true. Financial freedom does not require you to invest thousands and thousands of dollars before you get going. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to work 18 hour days for the next 20 yrs. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to do anything unethical and I’ll prove it to you.

So this is my little super soft pre-launch. The book isn’t released but if you want to get a FREE copy of my new ebook when it is released then please put your details below and I’ll keep you updated and make sure you know about it first.

Oh an I’ll also throw in a little present when you sign-up . To find out what it is fill the form and check your email!!

The beauty of doing your own thing ay? At the moment I’m away on holidays in Northern NSW in a place called Byron Bay. I’ve just come back from a jog on the beach and am sitting at the hotel balcony with my laptop checking a few things and updating my blog.

In business there are ups and downs and you should not feel that things might not go the way you planned. The truth is they never do. You WILL hit rock bottom at some poit, both financially and worst of all mentally.

On the flip side the perks are quite remarkable. I’m not really talking about financial perks right now (although these are great) but the perks of freedom. Freedom to get up and go and do whatever you want, whenever you want without requesting permission or feeling guilty about it. If you don’t want to get into business for the money, then the reward of freedom alone, should be enough to convince you to take that step.

After all, when your on your death bed the last thing you will be thinking is, “I wish I worked more”.

Have a great weekend!

Its quite a broad area but one way you can make money without money online is through selling products online, more specifically in this case, through drop shipping.

I have written a previous post about the pros and cons of drop shipping but in this post I will talk more on how to get started.

A drop shipping business is basically where you sell a product, either online or offline, and after the sale is made you order with the manufacturer (or drop-shipper) and they ship the item directly to your customer. This could be your own private label product or a manufacturers however the principle is the same. You don’t see the product and you don’t hold inventory, all you do is make the sale, process the payment and then place the order with the manufacturer or drop shipper. That’s it. When done correctly its a fantastic way to make money and doesn’t involve a lot of the nuances existent in a ‘normal’ business.

One of the key features of drop shipping is that you need next to nothing to start out, especially in today’s online environment. Sites like eBay and other online marketplaces allow you to sell to thousands on potential buyers and the cost to set up is $0. Here is an example of how to do it using eBay as an example:

1. Sign up with Ebay – FREE
2. Get a Paypal account if you havn’t already got one for processing payments – (also FREE)
3. Check out eBay pulse – this will tell you what the current top searches on eBay are. This information will help you understand what is in high demand on eBay.
4. Once you are aware of what is selling, write a list down of these items and find out what people are willing to pay for them. A good way to do this is to check out other sellers in the category selling similar products and have a look at their feedback. Most of the time you can see what they sold previously and how much the item sold for. Use these sales as a guide to what the items will sell for. Write down a rough price range for each item to refer to in the next step.
5. For each item find the appropriate manufacturers and possible drop shipping companies where you can purchase the product and have it drop shipped. You can find manufacturers and drop shippers at the following places: Alibaba, Craigslist and DHgate.
6. Determine those products that you can make a profit from based on the amount they usually sell for (see step 4).
7. For the profitable products, put an advertisement up on eBay setting the minimum bid at what you need to break even or make a small profit.
8. Sell your products, take the money and then organise the shipment of the item
9. eBay will invoice you once a month (around mid-month) and will include submission fees (fee for placing an auction) and also their commission on the sales you make. Ensure you factor in these fees into your bidding reserve as they will eat into your revenue.

If you take the approach above you actually will never need to spend a cent of your money before you make money. Signing up to eBay is completely free and you will only pay the fees in bulk which most of the time is after you have sold your products so you have the money already. Once you have found the right product it is super easy to develop and automated sales process that can immediately send orders to your drop shipper as soon as your Paypal account has been credited.

You can also set up an online store selling drop shipped items. There are both positives and negatives in starting your own online store. The positives are mainly the fact you don’t need to pay insertion fees to a company like eBay and the commission fees are much much lower. Added to this with less competition (compared to eBay) you can charge a premium for your products. However the other side to this is that you need to find a way to drive traffic to your online store and your main options are paid advertising. These can be offline and online. You can use offline methods like print, flyers etc to drive traffic to your online store and also online traffic methods such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, banners ads or similar. Most of these cost money but probably not enough to turn you away from this path.

If you want to take the online store route then there are plenty of options where you can easily develop a great looking and functional e-commerce ready store. My favorite is Shopify and there is a Free Trial so you can test it out. It’s not expensive at about $24 per month for a normal sized business selling 100 units. This can be much cheaper than eBay if you get it working well. Essentially that means you can set up a free store (using the trial) and all you need to do is drive traffic to it, no inventory, no staff and no bulk orders. It shouldn’t take longer than 30 days to start making money from it so you already have money to pay their monthly fee starting from the second month. So in this example you have again effetively started with virtually no capital.

I have tried both of these and both of them worked well. I was able to charge more with my online store with Shopify however eBay sales came easier but much less profit.

Do dropshipping right and you to will realise just how little money you need to establish a great revenue stream.

This is the most important step you can take when starting out a business. You can do everything else brilliantly, come up with a multi million dollar idea and if you fail to do this step then it will amount to nothing. Once again to read about the first 3 steps (important!) you can do so by clicking here. This will take you to the category and you can browse through the other posts.

In today’s environment taking action has never been easier. There are a multitude of plug-ins, scripts, programs and programmers that make this step super cheap and super easy to do. All you need is the idea of what you want to do (which you already know from Steps 1 and 2 ) and Google. Get in there and go onto forums asking questions about your chosen business and ways you can make it happen. Don’t be afraid to talk about what your thinking of doing but obviously don’t give away the finer details. For example in my situation, I am looking at creating a mobile video site where you can search a massive database of videos and download them directly to your mobile. So I would go to a forum and ask them if anyone knows how to download movies to their mobile. Using this information you can gather further info then ask following questions until you have a better understanding of whats involved.

Once you have a great load of information, simply post your request to a programmer on either rentacoder or elance and see what they come back with. One thing to remember is that if your not a programmer, don’t think everything is difficult because it sounds difficult to you. If in your description you make out like its a big project which requires the uber brain to code, then programmers will treat it like that and you will pay a premium. On the other hand, if you have all the information you need, know what you want and write it with clear straight forward instructions then you will notice programmers will be much more honest. They immediately can tell what you will be like to work with and will tailor their pricing considering this. These guys are professionals (most are anyway!) and what you think is a big deal could probably be bread and butter easy for them and most often is. So just stay aware of that.

Ok, so what I have done is put up a bid request to see what I could get. It goes something like this:

I am looking at having a simple WAP (mobile) site created. Its for a hub where people can download videos onto their mobile/cell phone.

The design is quite simple, see attached file – (i’ve shown this below).

The site needs to be designed for mobile phone and support .php ads from google and admob.

I would like to be able to:

1. Ad Videos
2. Update the “featured videos”
3. Amend the position of ads
4. Ad and remove categories.

A content CMS would be required for this.

Coding has to be search engine friendly and clean.

The image I attached was this:

Mobile Video Site outline

What I need to do now is wait to see what comes back and if the programmers have any questions, which they usually do. What to get out of this is that I was very succinct yet quite open in what I wrote down. I used graphical representation so that they could even better understand what I was after. I strongly recommend this and it only takes a few minutes to do. Even something hand drawn would work great.

By understanding exactly what I require, programmers immediately associate me with less effort compared to someone who doesn’t really know what they want. This leads to more accurate and usually lower priced bids. Secondly because its not overly detailed it gives the programmer a bit of flexibility and the option to discuss better ways the site can be done. This is great especially if they are aware of plug-ins or scripts that can be integrated quickly and easily. This can result in the saving of costs associated with the project as well as improving project turn around times. So keep it succinct yet make sure you give the programmer a bit of flexibility, unless your determined and sure about what you want.

I’ll let you know how this goes when some feedback comes through!

Many of you may be aware I’m quite into reading other Blogs and quite often I refer to those that I read. You may also have heard me mention Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneurs Journey.com.

Well Yaro just released his Membership Site Masterplan and I have got my hands on it. Put simply, its fantastic. Its very thorough and tells you pretty much everything you want to know about starting a membership site. He has been there and done that, which I believe is the key to being able to provide great value, so naturally this ebook is fantastic value.

What I can’t believe is that it’s a whopping 72 pages of Membership Site gold from the brain of one of the best, yet its absolutely FREE.

Here is a link to Membership Site Mastermind.com where you can get a free copy of this masterplan. I strongly recommend you do, if not for information about starting and growing a membership site, but for understanding more about online marketing and how to use the resources around you to promote your offering.