We’re winding down for Christmas and the New Year and a lot of you will be too I expect.

You’ve probably had a hundred ‘Happy Christmas’ messages from the various marketers’ lists you’re on so I’ll keep this post short and sweet.

Thank You - A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you for being customers, subscribers, friends, telling us about typos on sites and in books, yelling at us if something doesn’t arrive on time, offering superb and deeply appreciated feedback and views on our products, sites and way of doing things, for feeling that you can drop us an email at any time about anything please don’t lose that feeling just because we’ve gone over to a support desk system, emailing us when you’re so excited at making your first sale that you can hardly type straight, for letting us know that you’ve gone full time or cracked your first $10,000 month, to tell us about new sites that might be of interest to us, to say that Tony should have a shave or that the Laycock blog alignment still isn’t right (working on it), to ask who our graphics bod is, to tell us that the kickstart Course has changed how you view internet marketing or that we should start a hosting service, to ask why we’ve started using Open Office rather than word or why Aweber isn’t working on a particular day.

In short- just stay in touch- it’s what makes it all worthwhile.

We’ve some very exciting things coming up next year….and we’d like you to get involved, boost your business and know your opinions.

Very best wishes…..Merry Christmas and a very prosperous and happy New Year.

Sara & Tony

No catches - just high quality free information from Matt Garrett.

Just Click on the image below to grab it.

It’s got to the point that we need to streamline things a little so we’ve set up a new ticket based helpdesk.

This doesn’t mean we’re going to be impossible to contact or we’re outsourcing our support emails to some call centre in another country, although that may happen one day.

At present we’re still answering all support tickets personally but the support ticket format means we’ll be able to answer absolutely everyone who needs us, and will still be accessible to all of you.

You can check out the support desk by clicking on the support link on this blog.

Check us out. Hundreds of subscribers can’t be wrong!

We read two year’s worth of your emails so we’d know exactly what you wanted to get you up and earning in a matter of weeks.

Click on the image to visit the site.

Some of you will be looking at your Paypal account in absolute amazement because you’ve finally realised that internet marketing can change your life, and others who are just setting out on the journey to product an online income might feel excited, scared, out of their depth yet like they’ve been shown a glimpse of a new universe.

Well to all the above - welcome to LIFE

You have decided to walk out of your comfort zone and ‘have a go’ at life. You have decided to allow yourself to become scared, excited, worried, bedazzled and euphoric about simply living.

If nothing else that puts you in the top 5% of the population of the western world. I say western world because most people on our planet are too busy trying to survive rather than worrying about their blog or whether their car is newer or older than their neighbour’s.

But that’s no need to feel guilt. If you’re worried about paying your mortgage as parts of the world have no water, that’s fine because that’s the hand you were dealt. We were lucky enough to be born into a society where we have the luxury - the absolute heavenly luxury - of being able to improve our lot with an online business without worrying about the secret police bundling you off in the middle of the night.

BUT - and it’s a BIG but.

While you can’t help where and to whom you were born - you have no control over the hand you were dealt - you DO have 100% responsibility of how you play it. You must take responsibility for your life, your decisions, your failures and your successes.

Which is why I thought I’d share with you the secret of success

It’s simple really - give people value - provide a product that adds quality and value to other people’s lives and you’ll recieve success in return. You’ll also sleep like a baby with a clear conscience and a light heart.

Look at what you want - what do YOU want right now?

A tutorial about how to build a blog?

So do other people so find a way to provide that info.

A way to build a website for free?

So do other people so find a way to provide that info.

We started out offering the information that WE had needed just months before. We researched, experimented, tried, failed, then finally succeeded in all the things we needed to know -  then we packaged the info up for other people like us.

Why would we offer you information that we wouldn’t need?

We wouldn’t offer information to you if it wasn’t something that at some point wasn’t key to our business.

We have something on the way that we 100% know will benefit your business perhaps more than anything else you’ve come across ever.

Watch your inbox over the next week.

See if it strikes a chord with you if you’re not making much money with your IM business.

I don’t know the marketer personally, but Tony Shepherd has swapped a few emails with him and says he’s a talented, honest and thoroughly likeable man, as well as being dedicated to his internet marketing business.

I’m not naming names but it seems that this blokes relationship has hit hard times because of the hours he spends working on his IM business.

It’s VERY easy to do. It’s VERY easy to get sucked into sitting in front of your PC for 10 hours a day and forgetting the reasons why you started doing it in the first place.

And the reasons most of us get into it is to have more TIME with people you love. What good is a million dollars in the bank if you have to pay people to spend time with you?

Even from the start we realised that although IM is fun, extremely profitable and highly addictive once you see those little ‘notification of payment’ emails arrive in your inbox, it’s vitally important to spend time doing other stuff - the REALLY impoerant stuff.

As if to prove a point, my esteemed business partner Tony is somewhere on a boat right now and I plan to crack open a nice bottle of red and watch some TV the second I finish typing this blog post.

Even when you’re working your backside off getting a new IM business off the ground, remember that there’s a balance to be struck. On your death bed you may well be thinking about that day you wandered through the countryside, kicking the golden autumn leaves with your lover/children/friends and watching the sky go slowly red….. but you probably WON’T be thinking about your sales funnel or the conversion rate of your upsell.

Obviously you’ll need to invest some time building your business. But give yourself breaks. It helped us to set an income point - maybe $500 a month, and a limit of 8 hours a week to acheive this amount. It’s not as hard as it sounds.

After that it gets easier  - honestly - and you’ll find that you can hone your techniques and suddenly your 8 hour a week work limit brings you $1200 instead of $500. We’ll be bringing you more info on this soon.

But put a limit on the amount of IM work you do. Look after the other important things in your life.

To cut the story short- we have an upsell page. It’s a One Time Offer that subscribers are sent to after they opt in from a certain page. They get offered one of our products at a 60% discount. It’s a niche site and always converted pretty well.

5% of every subscriber taken to the offer would buy. Not bad.

The offer says something like ‘This is your only chance to get this great ebook at a whopping 60% discount’

We changed a TINY part of the above text and replaced the % sign with the actual word ‘percentage’.

The conversion rate went up to over 8% (or should I say ‘8 percent’?)

I don’t have the faintest idea why. I’m glad of course but I don’t think I’ve slept since wondering about WHY the increase

Talk about dragging up the past.

Find out about our first successes and failures at

http://www.jobhaters.com/earlyyears

It’s a freebie.