It’s very easy when you start out in Internet Marketing to think that this is a career that won’t require you to interact – with your customers, with your competitors and with other marketers. Everything is so neatly handled by being online.

Well, in practice, that’s probably the most damaging idea you could have. Removing personal interaction from your business (no matter how shy you are) can only end up hurting your prospects, no matter what personal comfort you gain from it.

I try to make a habit of going to at least 3 or 4 big events every year and if I get the chance, I’ll also attend a lot of smaller get togethers. Both have their place in my business.

The big events often turn into pitch-fests, where every hour you get a new call to action along with a price tag to make your wallet bleed. If you can find ones where this is not the case, then the opportunity to meet a lot of new people in one place is a huge benefit. Take lots of business cards and a notebook for names and numbers where others have no card of their own.

As an example of the latter, I just spent a weekend at Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom bash in London this weekend. Mark has arranged many conferences over the last few years (often multi-speaker wallet-bleeders!) but has moved more recently to running the show himself. The new format gets a huge thumbs-up from me, I always liked Mark’s speaking style and getting more of that and less of some other unpredictable speaker is a real plus. If he runs more shows like this, I’d recommend you check them out.

The smaller events work on a different level for me. It’s much easier to grab more time with one or maybe two people and really get to know them…this is where the real joint ventures are made. You’ll often hear more about what is really working (along with some smal but tasty tips) at this kind of meeting and you will also get a chance to be an answer to someone else’s questions. Don;t underestimate what you’ve already picked up…everyone starts somewhere.

One of the things that makes it harder to do this regularly is actually finding out what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere that regularly announces events, so watch out for an announcements about a new site that I’m going to set up just for this purpose.

So what did I learn over the weekend? Well, apart from being hammered by the “build a product” message, the big wake-up call for me was to build my list properly. If you’ve just started reading this blog, you’ll have seen my pop-up by now – did you grab it?   It was there because I think I’ve always known that a list of folk I can help is actually the same as a list of people who can help me, but when it comes down to it, I’ve never pushed that side of my business.

So, my commitment for the next 30 days (let’s see, that takes me up to something like the 11th of November) is that I will post my list-building efforts and results on here daily for all to read. As is always the case, I will probably end up doing too many other things as well, but that is the target.

In that capacity, I am going to set aside 2 sums of cash; the first will be just $100 to see what is possible with a small investment. The second will be more, I haven’t decided how much more yet, definitely less than $1000 but maybe not much less. This will be the real all out effort to build a substantial seed list.

As you can guess, I intend to buy traffic, but I’m also hoping to use other techniques like giveaways to boost my efforts. I will be tracking how successful everything is. Not only that, but I will probably also be following along with Valerie Duvall’s List Ignition WSO which you can guess is also about list-building!

Consider this Day Zero, I’ll update later in the day about the progress so far but just so we are all on the same wavelength, here is my rather small list on Aweber for reference:

Another quick video review for you of a program that I like a lot. This is a full Lump Sump Profits review, looking inside at all the stuff you get after signing up, with a peek at some of the other etycoon extras.

I’ve been absent too long and it feels like the blog needs a bit of revitalization….just as I’m coming up to two weeks in Spain with pretty much zero chance of internet connectivity!

So in the interests of starting the ball rolling, I’ve recorded a short Unstoppable Affiliate review. This is Andrew Hansen’s latest release and builds on some of the work he put into Elite Niche Research and takes it up to the site building level.

I’m going to say right now, that I like Andrew’s stuff a lot. He spends a lot of time looking for affiliate programs that are off the beaten track and so are likely to be less competitive and maybe pay better too.

When it comes down to it, however, this is very much a beginners’ course. If you’ve never seen anything on niche selection and affiliate marketing before, then you could much worse than to pick up this course. If, on the other hand, you have a ton of stuff on all these subjects – READ THEM! I had a revealing chat with one of the guys on my list the other night. We decided this was exactly the route he needed, not to spend any more, but to just get down to reading and implementing what he already had…..and it was plenty.

If that’s tempted you to actually check out Andrew’s sales page, you can get to it here.

The lesson I’ve learned – and it’s one that I should have really thought about before, is that using YouTube to post these videos is a double-edged sword.

The video above is just a bit too anonymous, it’s too easily used on other sites (and of course YT encourages that behaviour). So, what do I find, some guy with my review on his site (ranking high for the search term), with no attribution and probably doing very nicely off my work, thankyou very much!

Here’s a big video hint…..put an unalterable link on the screen throughout the video. Camtasia, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere will all do this for you quite happily and I just plain forgot! So, that’s today’s big take-away.

Day 2 of Adeel’s Internet Millionaire Academy followed on pretty well from the Friday session and since I can’t get to day 3 on Sunday, I’d encourage you to head down there if you have time.

We started the day a little more promptly, which I think was as much due to the presenting team knowing how to get there as the attendees. More thoughts on that at the end, but suffice it to say that the attendance hasn’t been stellar up to now.

First up on the stage was Larry Loik. Larry has obviously had a lot of success in loads of different ventures over the last few years and has branched into IM more recently. His presentation reflected that – slick, full of NLP techniques and a monster offer at the end that just kept piling on bonus course after course to feed the buying frenzy. I have to say, despite all that, that it didn’t make my blood race! There was a brief flicker when he promised a crack at being one of the presenters at an event they will be running this year. My intention is to get back onto stage again at some point soon, so that sounded good, but the rest of it just looked a bit too much like filler.

That brings up a valid point about all these conferences. If you go, don’t expect every presenter to be perfect for you. It won’t ever happen, and you’ll only split your focus in too many directions if you sign up for everything anyway! If you have the chance to decide what you’re most interested in before you even arrive, than all the better. At least you can save your cash till that subject comes up.

Anyway, back to the show.

Second up was Adam Ginsberg – a man whose Ebay achievements are second to none. I have to take my hat off to Adeel again at this point; it was great to get so many genuinely high-powered speakers in one place. Real people with real results.

Adam obviously pitched ebay as a way to make good money and made an offer that very nearly took my cash, but going back to my comment above I’d already committed myself to working with Lee McIntyre and I felt that this would just distract me. Adam was surprisingly candid about some of the other things he sees going on in our industry – so much so, that he got the camera switched off at one point so he could speak “off the record”. If you’re looking for one solid way to make money, I reckon it would be a lot of fun working with Adam and just to give him even more kudos, he even went to bat for the attendees and got us an hour lunch break. Adam, for that alone, you were a standout speaker

After that lunch break, we had Andrew X up on stage. The sheer volume of his Clickbank accounts is staggering…just insane amounts of cash flowing through around 200 separate accounts. Andrew’s big message was to look at low gravity items on Clickbank (rather than high) as the competition is so much lower, and some of them do turn out to be money spinners. He talked though affiliate sales, becoming a product creator and then also running a membership site as three different ways to make $1M in 6 months.

Now, at this point, I got distracted by a few folk turning up that I recognised, so I can’t claim to say that I know who the next speaker was. Sorry whoever you were (blame it on Chris Freville!). In principle I guess this slot could have been set up for Anik Singal, but a colleague of his was speaking about Lurn Inc. What was most interesting was that he immediately talked about going with high gravity Clickbank products…..it really is possible to go in both directions and you need to find what works for you.

I confess that I got “conference chair fatigue” at that point and ran away. One of my blessings is that I live near to all these London/Heathrow events, but that’s also a curse in that I never get to hang around in the hotel bar at the events as I can’t justify staying away (so close to home). I’d still say that this would have been a great addition to the day, but I just couldn’t justify it.

So, what can I conclude for the event so far (as I won’t be there on Sunday)?

I think I’d have to give Adeel a big thumbs-up for the line-up and the way in which they presented (in general). The venue was pretty good in terms of facilities – the usual Heathrow prices taken into account!

I hope it was worth it for him, the attendance was pretty poor on both days, so I imagine the speakers will have been a bit disgruntled at their sales. There just isn’t enough cash sloshing around in a group of 50 to support so many good offers. On that front, I quite liked the £997 cap on the sales – I may be wrong, but they all came out with the same price, so there weren’t any outrageous numbers being quoted.

Will I attend another event laid on by Adeel. Yes I will. That’s getting to be an increasingly rare thing for me to say, so check it out on Sunday and watch out for anything else he lays on. Adeel, well done! Oh, and get the same admin staff next time too

I spent some time last year going into details about conferences that I had attended in the hope that we can all help each other make these events more enjoyable for all concerned and I think I was a little harsh on my last victims.

It’s nice to be able to swing the pendulum the other way with this review for the first day of Adeel Chowdhry’s Internet Millionaire Academy. I’ll even go as far as saying that you should get down to the Renaissance at Heathrow for the next 2 days if you are near enough to do so – tell ‘em Martin sent you

We kicked off with Adeel setting the scene for the rest of the day with a summary of his earnings and some ideas on how to get started, but he passed the baton fairly quickly to a colleague of his called Biku (truly sorry here, I don’t think I ever heard your whole name).

Now, it may be that we had a fairly small audience as a result of it being a Friday, but Biku immediately jumped to a more workshop-style session and got the crowd intimately involved in answering his questions and working through the particular points of his presentation with a few individuals….and yes, yours truly was one of them! This was one of the most impressive, confident and useful presentations I’ve seen in all the conferences I’ve been to -  an echo of Biku’s corporate background, I suspect. This got a big thumbs up from me.

Simon Poulson followed on, with a session mainly focussed on marketing to local businesses…..just another great, solid piece of content with a real list of action items to follow to get started in this space.

After lunch Scott Rewick wowed the crowd with his life as a media buyer and builder of monster companies (in super fast times). I’ve seen Scott a couple of times now and his offer is one of the most compelling and “real” that I’ve seen. Another great speaker.

Finally (for my day anyway), Lee McIntyre took to the stage. If you trawl back almost to the start of this blog, you’ll se how impressed I was with Lee when I first saw him. He’s gone on to grow his business from 110K a month to something which is now around 220K – all in the space of just over a year. I’m still hugely impressed by his integrity as a marketer and the way he goes about selling. His main focus today was on Membership sites and a lot of folk I spoke to afterwards were inspired by the way he broke down the numbers needed to make some decent money with one of these sites.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this was still a selling opportunity for all the speakers….it’s just that they concentrated on the content first and their pitches were both relevant and concise. I can handle that so much better than some of the pitch-fests that I have visited. The usual 90 minute talks with 30 minutes taken up by the pitch are just getting old as far as I’m concerned!

All in all, the day was a big success as far as I’m concerned, kudos to Adeel and the team….including the stunning admin helpers Just one niggle….quite a late start led to lunch being only 30 minutes….the liquid lunch I had worked quite well though!