QUESTION ONE: Is this just for designing web sites? Or can
it help me (or my assistant) do graphics for blogs,
landing pages, affiliate pre-sell pages, ebook covers and
Power Point presentations?

ANSWER: It’ll help you with anything you need to do
graphics for. Even if you outsource, it’s GREAT to be able
to whip something out in a hurry when you don’t have time
to wait.

QUESTION TWO: Is this something I can REALLY do without
sweating bullets and going through the learning curve from
down below?

ANSWER: ONLY if you have “The Design Dashboard.” If you
don’t, yeah, it’s gonna be a real pain. But with the
Design Dashboard, you have step-by-step screen caps that
make doing things a breeze. Plus, video where needed.

QUESTION THREE: Why would I need this if I use templates?

ANSWER: 1. A blog header with graphics looks better than a
plain one. You have the chance to do a little branding.

2. Templates for Power Point are just backgrounds. What
about graphics that illustrate your point?

3. If you buy the SAME templates from the same places
everyone else does, will YOU break through the noise?

4. With just a little skill and the right software, you
can create some GREAT graphics for affiliate pre-sell
pages.

5. There ARE programs that create ebook covers but they
don’t do the GRAPHICS FOR the covers in most cases. The
Design Dashboard serves many purposes.

QUESTION FOUR: How much is the software gonna ding me for?

ANSWER: $100 or less for the graphics software. If you
want to add flash audio buttons to your site, you can
spend $27 to $100 for that software, but SAVE $20 a month
vs. what most people do.

In other words, if you do just ONE graphic header in 2007
yourself instead of outsourcing it, you paid for it.

QUESTION FIVE: Why learn to do design when I can outsource
it?

ANSWER: 1. You may not get the special treatment and same
quality that “gurus” receive.

2. Talented designers sometimes get booked up for weeks.
What if you need it sooner rather than later?

3. Once you see how easy it is to do graphics, you’ll
probably find yourself doing at least SOME stuff yourself
when you’re in a hurry.

4. Outsourcing is great. But you may want to only
outsource when you need that special touch and do
bread-and-butter stuff yourself.

5. You can have your ASSISTANT use the Design Dashboard
and do stuff for you. It can be your training tool for
THEM.

QUESTION SIX: What will the Design Dashboard do for me?

ANSWER: 1. You can design GRAPHICS for blogs, landing
pages, affiliate pre-sell pages, ebook covers, power
points.

2. Above and beyond that, there are step-by-step
instructions for your sales letter (if you need one), ftp,
shopping cart and other stuff. This is ONLY for the people
who need it. You can use all the design part even if you
don’t need THOSE things. But it’s nice to know they’re
there if you need them.

3. You will save money.

Other programs use software that isn’t mainstream and may
not keep up with the times. Plus, you can’t buy any books
on it at the bookstore. Or they use Photoshop CS which is
$650 or $750 USD. Then, for html, they use Dreamweaver,
which sets you back more. I could go on and on. I’ve
stripped out every possible cost.

4. You will save time

I know you have 1,000 things to do. Even watching videos
takes TIME. That’s why I’ve used as many screen caps as I
can. Learning from them is faster than video. But I’ve
used video where it made learning faster.

5. You will avoid a painful, full-blown learning curve

The worse thing about software is the learning curve. I’ve
taken out the learning curve and JUST given you the steps
you need to know.

QUESTION SEVEN:
What is the difference between the Design Dashboard and the
Marketing Dashboard?

ANSWER: One is for design. The other is for marketing.

The URL is:
http://www.designdashboard.com

Best wishes,

Dealing With Machines Instead Of Humans
Another common mistake by Internet marketing newbies – is that they do not spot the hottest trends.
You see, some people are sadly mistaken because they assume that Internet marketing is all about dealing with ‘machines’.
At the core of it, the very people who are going to be your customers (or the people who are going to click on your advertisements) are HUMAN BEINGS. We have to apply the proper psychology when we are dealing with them.
Dealing with humans require the human touch. Are you just writing articles for PEOPLE to read or are you just writing articles to please the search engines?

Not Being Focused
There are Internet marketers out there who try every traffic generation method in the book but they are not focusing on one.
They try driving in traffic from blogs, search engines, AdWords, viral marketing and everything under the sun, but they are not focused.
It is better to have ONE traffic generation method driving LOTS of traffic compared to 10 traffic generation methods that produce less than one focused method because dabbling with many methods often do not produce concentrated results.

The easiest way to make money online is to ‘sell’ a skill. This skill could be any form of service that you can provide to help other marketers save time, save money and save effort.
Here are a few examples:

• Writing – you can become a ghostwriter, copywriter or blogger and sell your skills to other marketers

• Graphics Design – you can create powerful E-covers for E-books or graphic banners for mini-sites

• Technical – you can help people if you are good with programming (e.g. script installation, testing and website setup)

• Networking – help other people to recruit affiliates for their product launches

If you want to develop the winning mindset, make sure you work hard by serving others first even if the pay is low or you are required to sacrifice time (and sometimes, money) in order to develop your skill and build your clientele.

Create Your Own Product
After you develop enough expertise with your skills, you can turn your skills into a product.
The most important thing to remember is that your skill must be something that brings value to others. If you can bring value to others and monetize it, others will most probably want to learn from you as well.
Once you teach others how to monetize their skill, you will have a product that will impart your expertise to others. For example: a product that teaches people “how to make money with copywriting”

Create A Business
Once you are able to combine all your products together and develop your very own system, you have a business running already.
The important thing to remember about a business is that you must have a holistic approach when it comes to business building.
Don’t just focus on your primary skill alone. Try and outsource other tasks to other people. For example, if your strength is in writing, your business must not only include writing but many other aspects such as graphics, tutorials and even a helpdesk to help you answer questions.
At the end of the day, you need a complete system to market your business.

Automating Your Business
If your business is taking up too much of your time, the best thing you can do is to try and automate your business by letting others run it for you.
Basically you still maintain ownership of your business (and revenue, of course). But what you must do is to train up people who are capable of running the business for you. By the time your business is successful enough to be automated, you can hire people who are smarter than you to run it for you.
The trade off is that you have to pay them a lot of money, but the best thing you have is more free time. When you buy people’s time with your money, you effectively remove the shackles that your business has on your time and you can use that time to invest into another business.

Remember the golden rule: Think BIG and think long term.

It is unfortunate that the majority of people attempting an online business are not making money. Most may only be recovering a fraction of their investment!

I don’t think it’s fair to say the majority of them fail because they do NOT desire success badly enough! Most of them that DO succeed is because when they want something badly enough, they will find the means to obtain success no matter what!

In this article series, we will talk about some essential factors that will give anyone (even total newbies on the Internet) important principles to take you from a small time site owner into a massive Internet marketing machine!

We will talk about:

• The importance of having the right mindset as well as choosing the right vehicle

• What the success blueprint is all about by choosing the right business models that work

• The roadmap that you or anyone can use to achieve Internet marketing riches by applying this 4-step system

• The many pitfalls that people do all the time

So without further ado, let’s get started and learn all about the winning mindset immediately!

Every major plan or big business has a birth place – that place is from the mind (the source where every action flows from).

Before you jump into the Internet marketing scene, one of the first things that you must fine-tune is your mindset.

But what does it mean to develop the right mindset? Here are a few suggestions:

• Making money online is NOT a get rich quick scheme. You don’t just ‘dump money’ into some marketing scheme hoping to get money in return.

• You must invest time into your education. Depending on your aptitude, you don’t just read an E-book or two and expect to become an Internet marketing expert. After all, how long did it take you to get your university degree?

• You must invest time for trial and error. No one gets it ‘right’ on the first try. You must be prepared for failures and mistakes. Learn from them and make sure you get up and fight again!

• You must be prepared to put up with negative people. There are many in the world out there who do not believe that it is possible to make money online. When you put your plans into action, you will face resistance from your beer-drinking buddies, your family members or even your BOSS! If you don’t have the endurance, you will succumb to the pressure.

• You must be prepared to go all the way. An Internet marketing business is just like any other business in the ‘offline’ world. If you are not prepared to go all the way, you will give up halfway because you have put in a half-hearted attitude into your business. Remember the golden rule: how badly do you want success?

Choosing The Right Vehicle

Another thing that you must remember is that it is not enough to have the winning mindset alone. You must have the right vehicle to take you there.

For example: if you wanted to get from one state in the U.S. to another, you will need to have the right vehicle to take you there. You can choose to ride a plane, drive a car or walk.

Of course it would be absurd to walk. But that is what people do in their Internet marketing business. They do not choose the best (or cost effective) vehicle to get them there.

They have the right mindset alright. And they are probably so fired up and positive that they don’t care how long it takes them to arrive at their destination.

It is also no different from natives who are all riled up about defending their homeland against invaders, but if they don’t have guns, their axes, spears and shields are not going to save them no matter how valiantly they fight (against the enemy’s gunpowder)!

Make no mistake about this. Taking too long to reach the destination is no different from failing. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that it takes time to build a business when we should be making money after a couple of months.

Some people spent years reading ‘make money online’ E-books without making a single cent from the Internet. They convince themselves that they are still in the learning and education phase but they don’t take action!

Sure it takes time to build a solid business, but any money that you are not making means you’ve ‘lost’ money because that is the money that you SHOULD be earning instead of wasting your time with things that don’t work.

In the next article, we will talk about choosing a proven business model. But for now, suffice for us to know that we must have:

• The success mentality and the right vehicle to bring us to success!

The Niche Marketing Series

As we went over in the last article the term ‘niche marketing’
means selling a specific product to a specific type of buyer.
In this article I’ll compare niche marketing to its far more
competitive cousin: marketing in an internet marketing niche.
Niche marketing is a much easier way to start a home based
internet marketing business.

Much as you consider apples and oranges as fruit; you can compare
niche marketing and marketing in an internet marketing niche.
They may both be fruits, so to speak, but not from the same tree.

Here’s an example just to be sure you understand the difference.
With a niche market you may have a website, a newsletter and be
selling an ebook on beekeeping. Your customers would be beekeepers
and they have no interest in SEO tweaks to the site or the
conversion rate of the salespage. If internet marketing is the
niche you are working, then you could sell an ebook on how to make
money on the internet.

A mistake that many beginning home based internet marketing
businesses make is in using internet marketing as their niche.
How do you teach people to be sucessful on the internet, if you
are not sucessful yet yourself.

Most niche markets are more open to the latest marketing
strategies, as well. Small niche markets are not over stocked
with gurus and wise men and are much easier for the beginning
marketer to break into. A niche market allows you to promote
your own niche product or that of a niche affiliate product.

There is a niche market for anything and everything you can
imagine. All it takes to break into a niche market is a good
idea, a good product created by you or someone else that will
appeal to certain people, some advertising and the desire to
succeed.

The Internet marketing niche, on the other hand, means that you
will be promoting your own Internet marketing product. This is a
very crowded field of endeavor and really difficult to break into.

It’s a world filled with gurus and wise men who have been playing
and winning the game for a long time. This doesn’t mean that it
is impossible to cash in on the Internet marketing niche because,
of course, you can. It is a world still built on demand and that
means that if you have a product that can compete and if you
have the willingness to play hard ball with the big boys then you
can succeed at the Internet marketing niche game. Just be
aware that there are easier niche market nuts to crack.