Author: Tom Woods

I graduated first in my class at North Andover High School in 1990. So I had to give a speech.

Point in my favor: I refused to give one of those “follow your dreams” and “you’re special” speeches.

Point against: I instead gave a speech urging people to pay higher taxes for schools.

Ugh.

(See, I tell you folks things I would never admit to on my libertarian email list.)

Sometimes it pays to listen to those boilerplate speeches and be original.

In other cases you’re just wasting your time and energy.

This is one of the latter.

Virtually everyone I know who’s successful online follows this strategy:

(1) Send people to an opt-in page for a free gift (an eBook, video series, whatever), or for an inexpensive product (a $7 eBook, for example).

(2) Follow up via email with relevant offers for that audience. Earn commissions on sales.

(3) Repeat.

Some people I know have a few other strategies they employ alongside this, but pretty much everyone does at least this.

That’s because it works. Man, does it work.

The trouble is, (1) is easier said than done. How do you get people to your page in the first place, and how do you make sure they’re the kind of people who’d be interested in what you have waiting for them there?

(Of course, if you’re a true newbie you probably have no idea how to create one of those pages in the first place, but I promise it’s easy.)

The search engines aren’t much help; your opt-in site is too “thin” for Google to rank.

Facebook ads are great, but can be tricky for a newbie.

Hint: what about those people with huge YouTube and Facebook followings in your niche? Might you be able to give them an incentive to send you some traffic?

Oh, and how can you be sure you’re choosing a niche with plenty of products that carry decent commissions?

All this stuff is covered in a webinar we recorded a couple of days ago. Check it out right away, because she’s being taken down super soon:

https://www.happyearner.com/lingreplay

Suppose someone said:

“I can speak 15 languages. I’m fluent!”

But the person never spoke those languages in front of you, and refused whenever you asked.

You might start to wonder.

I’m the same way: when I see people say, “I earn $X!” I want proof.

Yesterday I gave you my favorite example of proof.

I was in a sales contest, which had three prizes: $20,000 for the person who brought in the most leads, $50,000 for the person who made the most sales, and $50,000 for the person who made the most sales in the last 36 hours.

Mark Ling beat everyone, and won all three contests. That’s $120K in prizes in two weeks — and that’s not to mention the commissions he earned, which must have been at least $400K more.

So yeah, Mark earns a lot, and he really does know how to do this stuff.

He spent some time with us a couple of days ago, discussing the main models people use to earn a living, or a side income, online. He covered things like this:

(1) Niches. What are some of the best online niches, with plenty of products to promote that pay good commissions?

(2) Traffic. How do you get eyeballs on what you have to offer? This is the single biggest hurdle people face. Mark gives away a bunch of ideas, but idea #1 is the best — and the one almost no beginner ever thinks of.

(3) His email strategy. Totally different from mine, so it may be worth seeing a different perspective. He used his style to beat the daylights out of me in that contest I mentioned, so there’s that….

(4) The quickest products to create. You think you can’t create a product to sell online? Not only can you, but Mark tells you the exact kind to produce — quick, costlessly reproducible, and idiot-proof. You can make this product in one day. No joke.

Warning: he makes you an offer at the end (oooh!). Whether you take Mark’s offer or not, his presentation gives you an excellent overview of what a master of online business does, and it should get you thinking in productive and creative ways.

He’s taking it down pretty darn soon, though:

https://www.happyearner.com/lingreplay

I was an unusual kid. (We know, Woods, we know.)

I was a Beatles fan in the 1980s. I knew no other Beatles fans my age.

I went to a Beatles convention when I was about 10, and I met Pete Best, the drummer who was eventually replaced by Ringo Starr, just as the band was about to achieve massive success.

“You must have wanted to kill yourself,” I once heard a radio host say to him.

Earlier this week I saw a Beatles tribute band called Liverpool Legends. They were excellent. They had the music down, yes, but also the singing voices, the speaking voices, the mannerisms, the sense of humor, the stage presence, everything.

I found out a little about them, and it turns out they’ve played to audiences of as many as 100,000.

Then tonight I ran into them in a bar. (I’m on a cruise ship at the moment.) I bought them all a drink, and wound up striking up a conversation with Marty Scott, the guy who plays George Harrison.

It turns out he’s a former bond trader [!] who decided the stress was going to kill him, so as a lifelong musician he jumped at the chance to become a Beatle, so to speak. He asked for a copy of Meltdown, my book on the financial crisis. My kind of Beatle.

Naturally I started thinking about the business angle. These guys have found themselves a niche, all right: Beatles fans.

And it’s a niche not just anyone can enter. You need all the qualities I mentioned at the beginning.

So that’s great for them: less competition.

Not good for you: you want niches you can enter without needing unusual talents.

If you want to earn dough online, you need a niche. A good one.

Identifying good niches, then dominating them, is what Mark Ling has specialized in for 18 years.

He’s going to give you 20 niche ideas, plus a way to identify hundreds more, in a live session I’ve arranged for you.

If you’ve been reading these and figuring you won’t go, please reconsider. Literally nothing is more important to your success than niche selection.

And we’re donating $5 to Antiwar.com for every live attendee, so I hope to see you there:

https://www.happyearner.com/lingwebinar

I got my Ph.D. at Columbia University. I thought it was a lunatic asylum then.

Over the weekend I received this. It’s intended as a fundraising letter, if you can believe it.

Headline: You make innovative research possible, Dr. Woods!

Here’s the “innovative research”:

“My upbringing in Long Island, in a mostly white community, created a sheltered vision of what hip-hop culture is. As I entered college, I was suddenly confronted with my own identity, driving me to learn more about issues of race, class, and gender within the culture that has taught me so much.

“At the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, my research could transcend traditional academic boundaries. My master’s was in American Studies, and my coursework spanned many departments as I examined the hip-hop cipher, or freestyle rap circle, as a means to communicate the values of the hip-hop community: education, politics, social norms, and ambitions.”

That was Ediz Ozelkan, Class of 2017 convocation speaker.

So you left graduate school an expert on “hip-hop culture”?

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

And of course, if you’re looking to support yourself in reasonable comfort, I wouldn’t recommend that.

Meanwhile, tons of people with no college degree at all, much less a doctorate, have figured out: if I pick a good niche and really learn my audience, I can absolutely clean up online.

Mark Ling, a successful online businessman for 18 years, knows how to do this. I’ve been learning from him myself for nearly two years.

He’s doing a free, private demonstration for my readers. And for every person who attends, $5 will be donated to Antiwar.com.

So grab your seat:

https://www.happyearner.com/lingwebinar

A guy in the telecom industry recently grew tired not just of telemarketers in general but of scammers in particular — people who try get sensitive financial information, or even your money, from you.

So he created a series of bots, each with its own personality, who can trick these people into thinking they’re speaking to real human beings, and thereby tie them up for extended periods of time.

I interviewed him for The Tom Woods Show; the episode will air next week.

A brilliant idea, going after people nobody likes. I doubt even telemarketers themselves enjoy doing what they do.

Thankfully, there’s no need to do cold-call telemarketing anymore. Once you’ve identified a niche you’d like to enter, there are plenty of ways online to track down eager buyers without ever having to pick up the phone. (What is this, after all, 1977?) It’s not rocket science, and it’s not the hideous misery of cold calling.

Mark Ling has prospered online in niches like music education, health, the Paleo diet, personal development, and more. And he hasn’t had to pick up the phone once.

He spends 80% of his time doing what he teaches, and 20% of his time teaching what he does. (Oh, and he’s a gazillionaire.)

By all accounts, he’s one of the good guys. He’s the Robert Higgs of Internet marketing, for my libertarian readers — someone who’s somehow liked by everyone and all factions.

He’s recorded a nice video overview of what he does — which is, in essence, what all successful online folks do. Mark just happens to be a monster at it:

https://www.happyearner.com/nichesvideo

Imagine this:

About six months ago my mentor Ben Settle, an expert on email marketing, asked people in his private Facebook group: out of curiosity, how many of you can legitimately say that your workday is finished once you’ve sent out one email?

He’s not saying you wouldn’t want to work on other projects, or whatever, after sending that email. But strictly speaking, can what you do online survive and flourish even if all you do every day is send out one email to your email list?

I don’t remember exactly how many people answered yes. But whatever the precise number was, it would shock you.

I know people whose email lists are so responsive that all they have to do is click SEND and serious dough starts showing up in their PayPal accounts.

“The money is in the list,” the saying goes.

That means your greatest asset as an online earner is going to be a list of email addresses from people who have voluntarily opted in to receive regular correspondence from you.

So how do you get a list?

Just asking for an email address without giving something away in return rarely works. The usual way is to create some product you can give away for free in exchange for the person’s email address.

But writing an eBook or coming up with some other kind of giveaway to build an email list sounds like a lot of work. So it sits on your to-do list, and never gets crossed off.

That doesn’t make you a bad person.

It does mean your progress is going to be slow.

So you’re going to thank me for telling you about the neat method I’ve been using to build my email list at my Happy Earner site.

It truly is the lazy man’s approach:

https://www.happyearner.com/lazymethod

I told you I’m on vacation in Massachusetts. Well….

We spent six solid hours yesterday at one of my favorite places in the world: Boda Borg, in Malden, Massachusetts.

There you’ll find sixteen or so quests, each with two to four rooms. You walk in without knowing what the heck you’re supposed to do. If you solve the task of the first room of your quest you advance to the next room(s), until that quest is complete.

In one quest you and your partners are rats, and need to think like rats to succeed. In another, you’re in a haunted house and have to pacify a creepy baby. In another, you’re in a war zone and must pass through without getting killed.

Incredible.

Our favorite: Alcatraz.

You’re in a jail cell. How to get out? The answer involves crawling, climbing, teamwork, and above all, avoiding detection.

Seriously, though, half the fun is having no idea what’s expected of you when you begin each quest.

That’s not so true when you’re trying to make a living, or at least build up another income stream. Having no clue what to do is pretty crummy, and not fun in the slightest.

Hence the beauty of YourProfitStore, a newbie-friendly piece of software that creates your very own online store in literally 60 seconds, and even gives you a running start by populating that store with four software programs you’re given the rights to sell and keep all the revenue from.

As an optional upsell, you get more software to add to your store every month.

And because this is 2017, the price of this idiot-proof software is less than what you’d pay for a steak dinner.

But the price leaps up at midnight, so climb and crawl your way over to the link:
https://www.happyearner.com/yourveryownstore

Katie runs a site and community called Wellness Mama. She has monetized it like crazy.

She has a podcast, she earns advertising revenue, she does affiliate marketing, she has a membership site, and she sends out an email newsletter.

(She’s a Tom Woods fan, too, it turns out.)

Oh, and she has six kids under 10.

“Woods, I just can’t find the time to build an online income stream.”

Did I mention Katie has six kids under age 10? She even has me beat!

She created her entire empire from scratch.

(Expect an interview with her sometime this summer, by the way. When she interviewed me not long ago, I thought: I’d love to turn the tables and get her story. That’s coming.)

Building an online empire isn’t easy, I admit.

What if I just handed you your own online store, which you could have up and running five minutes from now, plus resale rights to four software programs you can sell and keep all the money from?

And what if you had the option to get resell rights to more software every single month, to add to your store?

Katie built an empire from nothing.

Here, on the other hand, is a fully functional, ready-to-go store, with products and everything, for less than the price of a steak dinner.

Yes, this is what the technology of 2017 makes possible.

Worth a shot?

Price goes up at midnight Saturday (June 10), so have macaroni and cheese instead of a steak dinner tonight:

https://www.happyearner.com/yourveryownstore

Last week Radio Shack — remember them? — closed 1000 stores. It’s all over.

Their business model had been unenviable ever since their line of computers was outcompeted decades ago. They sold five-dollar parts for various electronic products. They have not survived Amazon.

But it isn’t just Amazon that took them down. It’s the fact that they amassed a huge database of customer information and had no idea how to use it.

One observer put it this way:

“When I went into the store, whenever I bought something, I had to supply all of my personal data. I had to give my telephone number. I had to give my address. It was ridiculous.

“Not once did I ever receive a mailing from Radio Shack, yet they forced me to provide all this information in order to buy a five-dollar item. They had no clue as to how to use this immense database that they were assembling. I knew from that point on that the company would not survive.

“To fail to understand the most important single asset the company has is a mark of imbecilic management.”

If you don’t want to share Radio Shack’s fate, get this stuff right the first time.

Two good ways to do so:

(1) Use my 20% off coupon — 20VIP — to join Kevin Fahey’s IM VIP Training program. The guy is honest, thorough, and very generous with his time. That coupon is about to expire, as you’ll see when you click.

If you can look at this page and not salivate, my work here has been in vain:

https://www.happyearner.com/viptraining

(2) Study my video series on conversion — that is, how to get customers to do what you want (buy, join an email list, whatever).

​​​​​​​It’s a free bonus when you join Kevin’s program. Just forward me your receipt.

Now:

You want to prosper online.

You just saw a chain go down because it had no idea what it was doing.

But you will.

If Kevin’s resources and help don’t get you up and running online, then I’m stumped.

Coupon — 20VIP — expires tomorrow:

https://www.happyearner.com/viptraining