No, it’s not a pseudo-apocalyptic rant about the world coming to an end in 2011 – although we may all revisit that comment when the FTC have finished with all their little plans for us this year.

It’s more about a line in the Bible that talks about us “doing what we know we should not do, and not doing those things that we know we should”. Of course, in the original sense it all boils down more to the spirit being willing, but the flesh being weak….an excuse trotted out for almost any kind of slightly naughty thing we think we can get away with these days. Cream buns, anyone?

On a more secular and personal level, it hits home at this time of year as we all make and break those incredible New Year resolutions. Who’s stopped going to the gym already?

Where it really gets serious, though, is in our Intenet Marketing endeavours. Here’s a list of some of the stuff I have looked at in 2010:

• SEO
• PPC
• Facebook Ads
• Outsourcing
• Local Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Amazon affiliate program
• Adsense

Now, that’s not a comprehensive list and it certainly doesn’t do justice to all the books, courses and WSO’s that I have bought in the same period. So, how many of these things made me money? How many of them should I look at in the light of the quote at the start of the post?

So, what are the things that have been “the things you should not have done” – how have they stopped you getting on with all the things you should have concentrated on and how much money has been diverted away from you as a result.

My promise to myself this year is to get down to turning all this incredible knowledge and “stuff” from 2010 into cash and to do it one step at a time. Yes, the Facebook page will get some attention, but it won’t be my first port of call. This blog and its readers and subscribers deserve first call on my time. So I’m committed to getting back to the near-daily updates on my progress, with reports of what I have learned along the way.

Secondly, my existing Amazon sites are going to get some work and traffic sent their way. They deserve it, the poor wee  orphans!!

Thirdly, my listbuilding will definitely see a new lease of life in 2011. This is one area that I have been woefully poor at and this needs to change for the New Year.

Then finally (for now) I will definitely be putting more work into reviewing the stuff that I have bought, so that others get a chance to see exactly what’s in some of these packages that are sold “sight unseen”. I’m only going to recommend and promote the ones that I have used and like. Others may get a passing reference and maybe sometimes a sneer too, we’ll see.

This is actually one of the things that worked quite well for me towards the end of 2010. I spent some time reviewing and promoting Dan Brock’s Amazon program (Deadbeat Super Affiliate) and I am still seeing sporadic affiliate sales coming from that even now.

For those that tracked my earnings progress through the Summer, I’m pleased to be able to say that the Christmas period brought in a combined total of around $300 for the month of December. Next year I will starting the site creation waaaay earlier!

This number brings my total for the year to an almost perfect $1000 and that’s only starting the counting when I did, later in the Summer. So, not perfect, but certainly encouraging as a start. My next target is to get that earning period down to one month i.e. one month, $1000 and of course to start ramping it up from there.

So, where is your New Year starting? Does any of this strike any chords?

I had a few questions about the details of this course, so I’ve made a quick video of the whole thing to try to clear them up. Sorry for the squashedness of it all….video is still eluding me, despite all the expensive tools!

One thing I forgot to say in my last post (Elite Niche Research Review) was that the course is going to be held at it’s current price for a while, but will be going up in price fairly soon so if you want to check it out, head over here fairly soon.

STOP PRESS – Elite Niche Research price increase.

I got one thing wrong in the video, but it’s pretty important. If you want to get ENR at the lower price, you don’t have until the end of the year as I said in the video. It’s going up in price on the 21st of December, so there’s even more need to get it sorted now.

I wanted to bring you all a quick review of Andrew Hansen and Josh Stanton’s Elite Niche Research before going back to some other updates on what I’ve been up to.

The observant (and not so observant) among you will have seen all the changes that Google has been putting their keyword tool through and have probably seen how that has affected all the niche keyword tools out there. One of those was generating me a bunch of great niche keywords and now it doesn’t work at all.

So, as a result, I’ve been working on newer ways to find niches and affiliate offers. I’ll bring you an update on some new tools in another post, but I wanted to fill you in on Elite Niche Research which has just been released. Andrew Hanson is a genuine super-affiliate and I grabbed a copy of Elite Niche Research to see what his spin on finding niches is all about.

There are four main sections of the product – Foundation Theory, Keyword Research, Affiliate Research and finally Offer Finding Techniques. All in all there are a total of 33 videos, with the majority being in the final section which concentrates on working out where the best affiliate offers can be found that are untapped by the huge majority of affiliates who are out there jumping on every clickbank release.

There is only a single upsell in the sales process and it just takes the theory from the course and applies it, so that you get a bunch of pre-researched niches to get your affiliate earnings kicked off straight away. You can get to these from the course by doing your own research, but this is a kickstart.

Andrew and Josh are also offering an extra live webinar in early January where they’ll be walking students through a case study on the webinar and actually doing some niche research on the call.

All in all, I’d give this a pretty big thumbs-up compared to a lot of the “blind” clickbank sales pages I’ve seen recently and I will be using it to re-instate the keyword of the week part of the blog.

If you want to check it out, you can find it here – Elite Niche Research

I realize that I haven’t been on here with regular updates just recently and this is as good a time as any to reveal some of my activities in the last few weeks.

I had a pretty poor time with my sites in October, some slipped down in the rankings a bit, some failed to live up to their potential and so my earnings also slid slightly, I’ll dig out the numbers later. One of the reasons for that was because I chose to focus on some of the more seasonal events happening around this time of year.

I had a pretty well ranked site in the halloween outfit space but no matter how many visitors I got, I didn’t see the conversions I expected. There may be a lesson here for me in terms of learning my copywriting skills! Undeterred, I am also exploring the Christmas affiliate scene, so I hope to report more about that as the weeks go on.

In the mean time, and much more postiviely, I got involved with promoting Dan Brock’s latest launch. His Deadbeat Super Affiliate course follows on from Profitzon (that I bought last year) and so I felt I could offer some informed comment on the course.

Now, I’m not going to to claim overnight millions from this, but I set up an affiliate site, created a bonus and yesterday I had my very first $100 day. In fact it was a $130 day. So I’m pumped! I can finally see how this might work. I need to do more and work smarter, but this is mortgage money and that feels good!

I’ve decided to put online a few of my older bits and bobs that are doing nbody any good on my hard drive. Who knows, they may be useful to you. The first, Mindmap Mastery, is online now. You can find it linked at the top of the page.

I promised that I would write up some feedback on my day out in Cambridge yesterday, so here are some thoughts.

First, to set the scene, the event itself was being run by the Cambridge Business Academy (Kevin Potts’ company) and held the promise of both Russell Brunson and Chris Farrell speaking at the same event. Some of you will know that Chris is still in the US, as his wife is ill, and so this changed the format of the day slightly.

The venue was the Cambridge Corn Exchange, a building (presumably with amazing history) right in the centre of the town itself and I’m going to talk about the building here as a bit of a metaphor for the whole day. If I had to some it up, I’d say that aspects of it were superb, with a whole load of disappointments that dragged it down. Hopefully, what I learned about it all will help all of us put on better events.

First up, as a presentation venue it was excellent. High ceilings, banked seating, good-ish acoustics and a screen and stage setup that rivalled some of the best places I have ever spoken. This really was gold standard stuff. If you ever put on a show with low ceilings, small screens and even worse, long thin meeting rooms laid out lengthwise so the folk at the back can’t see, then the gods of presentation management should smite you where you stand! Higher, bigger and wider is the way to go for a comfortable audience. Even laying out your long room widthways with repeater screens is better than lengthways.

OK, so that was a plus point. Good presentation venue.

Flipside: As a conference venue it was mediocre at best…poor in places. It’s not just about the presentations folks! Your audience has to get there and stay there for a significant amount of time while you show them your awesome presentations. In this respect, the Corn Exchange is a dog.

Yes, it’s nice that it is in the heart of historic Cambridge – and maybe it is good to get away from London every now and again, but getting into town for a registration time of 9.30 is enough to try the patience of a saint…and the cost of parking is enough to make a grown man cry. Going with an out of town venue with parking onsite or nearby just makes more sense. Most big hotels can cope with conferences these days – just bite the bullet and book one. (Bearing in mind high ceilings etc etc.)

What do hotels also provide for their guests? Yes! Toilets!!

700 people packed into an auditorium for a day are going to want a comfort break at some point and it doesn’t matter what your audience breakdown (male/female) is, there just have to be enough places to pee! No excuses. In guy’s terms (as that’s what I’m qualified to comment on), 4 urinals for 500 men and a 10-15 minute break is a logistical calculation that only works somewhere like the Matrix where you can freeze time. Not only that, but when they’re done and they want to re-fill with coffee, a 2 spout coffee machine is also not up to the job.

Finally (for the venue). Try to get your audience inside the venue as fast as possible even if you have some monster logistical nightmare to handle for each person. Don’t funnel everyone through a linear bottleneck that is based on a split of surnames. This is guaranteed to be slow, as those whose name begins with W can’t see the desk for the queue and so never make their way to the sadly underutilized section with their name on it.

Scarily, this goes right back to my time in IT. We called it MSMQ…..multiple servers, multiple queues. It shortens the length of each queue but it does rely on folk finding their “server” for themselves. So, put a big letter sign up above each server (e.g. Surnames P-T), put them all round the room and just funnel folk into the room, telling them to find their surname letter for themselves.

Not only that, but let nearby queues interact. If one is empty, let the servers handle the overflow from next door – a simple duplication of namesheets lets this happen! Yes, I know it’s more work collating the sheets at the end, but as organizers you have all day while others speak. Take the burden on yourself and you won’t end up with people queuing out of the door and down the road on what was a pretty miserable, damp and cold October day in Cambridge.

And another thing! Don’t then film the queue you have generated! “Here’s a bunch of miserable people that we forced to stand in the cold at our last event” doesn’t feel like a good advertising ploy to me

Alright. Enough of the venue. What about  the day itself?

Strangely, it had the same kind of Jekyll and Hyde character. Kevin and Russell Brunson did the first two slots, delivered some good solid content and generally got the thing going very well. Some nice reminders of basics in marketing combined with a few hints and tips that had everyone writing notes. (Sidenote – damn, Russell speaks fast!!). When I look at what Russell delivered for the day, I’d say that this was the content that got me there and kept me there.

We moved on after the break to Paul Lynch. Paul’s grasp of traffic generation looks astonishing and as a lowly starter in this field I have almost no place to comment on his techniques for doing this – he’s a smart guy. What I do have the right to comment on was his delivery yesterday. I don’t know what posessed him to play videos at us for the whole of his speaking slot! Yes, they were very slick and showed a lot of relevant material but I could have sat at home and watched videos.

The pleasure (and the pain) of being on stage is that you get to be a real person. Your triumphs and disasters are both “writ large” for the world to see and I, for one, would have like Paul to actually speak to us. One of the videos was even one I’d seen in the previous week as a result of the promotion for the event. That’s 30 minutes or more of my life that I’ll never get back! Paul, man up. Do it live! I’ll train you myself if you feel you need it.

The other session of the day was given by Ian Judd(?), who works with Kevin and Paul. Along with Paul, he pitched a “done for you” business and traffic system that had some ups and downs for me. Traffic from Paul (up), membership site description (down) – and so it went. The components of the system seemed interesting, but we had another video and their passion didn’t come across for me. Not only that, but this was a seriously high ticket item. You need something a bit special going on in the presentation to sell something up in the stratosphere….no matter how much of a good deal it is.

I’d put it all down to it being the first time they’d sold from stage, if it weren’t for the religion factor. If you don’t know, Kevin came out of some kind of religious ministry when he started doing this. Ok, nice branding feature for the business, but it seems like everyone involved with CBA was  in the same boat. So I was expecting much more of an “altar call” for the selling, as they’ve all patently had practice before with speaking to congregations

So, there you have it. A mixed bag of a day, really. Learned a bit of stuff and spoke to some fellow attendees – as usual that can be the best bit of any event – and came away to face a stiff car parking price and a long drive home. Glad I went to see Russell and Kevin but I won’t be doing Cambridge again in a hurry.

Were you there? Let me know if you agree/disagree violently with any of my points.