Author: Tom Woods

I’ll bet a lot of less wealthy people think: man, that guy works for a Fortune 500 company. He’s living the dream!

Well, not always.

“I was so, so miserable,” Steve Clayton recalls. “After five years of being vice president of a Fortune 500 company, I just said, ‘I need to be happy. It’s not enough just to make money. I’ve got to find a way to have some happiness and some freedom, and to be able to travel, and all that good stuff.'”

Leaving the security of that job was scary, he said. “I was supporting two kids, and my wife hadn’t worked since the kids arrived.”

But his father asked him: is that security real? Which is really more risky? Working for a faceless corporation, where your fate is decided in some boardroom somewhere, or working for yourself?

So Steve made the decision to go out on his own.

He says, “I didn’t realize how incredibly miserable I was until I quit, and didn’t have to do it anymore.”

He went on to be even more successful in eCommerce, to the point that he’s now laid out arguably the most newbie-friendly online business model out there.

Steve has an excellent reputation as an eCommerce specialist and a teacher.

If you’re looking to make a change, or at least build in some insurance against the unforeseen, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you sign up for Wednesday’s presentation. Steve and his business partner will run you through how people are running their own stores from their laptops, with great success.

Sure beats digging ditches.

I’ll be there, too, because if you decide to do this, I’m going to do it along with you.

Plus, for every person who shows up live, I’m donating $5 to Antiwar.com. Let’s raise thousands of dollars for them.

Reserve your seat:

https://www.happyearner.com/factory

Politically, Mark Zuckerberg is a train wreck.

But he’s built something you’d be out of your mind not to use.

His advertising platform allows you to target your posts to, say, single women, age 35-55, who live in Florida, earn between $75,000 and $150,000, and enjoy gardening.

That particular combination may not be so helpful, but imagine the possibilities.

If you already know who’s likely to want your stuff, you can pitch it to them immediately.

If you’re not yet sure, you can run little tests to all different groups and compare the results.

Compare this to a car company advertising on CBS. Almost no one watching will be in the market for a car at any one time. So the ad is wasted on them (although, to be sure, they may remember it when they do go looking for a car someday).

Your ads aren’t wasted. Instead of targeting 1,000,000 people almost at random, you can find 1,000,000 who fit the exact requirements, in terms of demographics and personal interests, that make them most likely to want what you’re selling.

So whether or not you decide to join me in opening an online store, learning this stuff is going to be very, very valuable somewhere down the road no matter what you end up doing online. So it’s a good idea to learn it now, while you can.

And if you’re pumped to open an online store, as I am, then you’re definitely going to want to know it.

Steve Clayton, the eCommerce master, is teaching the basics in the special presentation he’s giving to my readers and listeners. I would not miss this if I were you.

And no, you don’t have to invent anything, create your own products, or hold inventory. This isn’t 1957.

Plus, I’m donating $5 to Antiwar.com for every person who attends the event live.

Reserve your spot, because they will fill up:

https://www.happyearner.com/factory

Plenty of libertarians get this wrong.

They think it’s “censorship” when, for example, a website owner deletes someone’s comments.

Of course it isn’t. You don’t have “freedom of speech” on someone else’s property. Unless you think I have the right to harangue you as you eat dinner in your own home.

Whoever owns the property sets the rules.

That’s why the old chestnut about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is so ridiculous. “See,” the know-it-all says, “everyone has to admit that for public safety there are cases where we have to restrict free speech!”

Wrong!

It’s again a question of property rights. Whose theater is it? No theater owner is going to want people crushed in a mad rush to the exits. So the property owner will set rules pertaining to disruptions of his productions, and that will include prohibitions on shouting “fire.”

So again, it’s property that resolves these questions.

Why do I bring this up?

Suppose you boost one of your posts on Facebook, and you’re hoping to sell some product. Suppose further that someone in the comment section makes fun of your product, or calls the offer a scam, or whatever.

You should instantly delete those comments and ban the person writing them. No question about it. It’s your page, and you set the rules. Idiotic and hostile comments will harm your sales.

I see this all the time, though: horrible comments on sponsored posts, and the post creator doesn’t bother to keep an eye on them. You should.

For that matter, you should respond to all comments. The more activity there is in the comments section, the more organic views your content will get.

There’s lots more great advice where this came from inside Steve Clayton’s PDF summary of all the best practices and recommendations of his top eCommerce students – people whose online stores bring in at least $30K in monthly revenue.

Gee, think that’s the kind of thing it would be useful to read?

And Steve’s giving away $5000 to a lucky downloader of this PDF.

Here’s your easiest decision of the day:

https://www.happyearner.com/transcript

I am going to commit an atrocity the next time I hear a leftist or a nostalgic conservative tell me how much better the economy was in the 1950s.

Think about the guy running the corner store.

He’s cheery and everyone loves him.

But chances are, he used to be, or often still is, a nervous wreck.

With a brick-and-mortar store, as soon as you open the clock is ticking. You’d better get profitable fast, or you’re going to be overwhelmed by rent, utilities, wages, and the long list of other expenses a store owner faces.

With an online store those expenses are a tiny fraction of what the poor brick-and-mortar fellow has to deal with. You have all the time in the world to get profitable. You can experiment, learn the ropes, try different products, try different audiences, until it begins to click. No ulcers from worrying that if you’re not profitable by the Xth week, you’re finished.

Another thing: if life should happen — if you should need to take a few months off to attend to an emergency, let’s say — your online store will still be waiting for you when you get back.

The advantages are overwhelming.

Now: what products you choose, where you get the products from, how they get shipped to the consumer (you don’t have to touch them), how to pick winners, how to identify the right demographic — this is all stuff Steve Clayton can teach you, since he’s the expert.

He’s going to give you a good overview at a special presentation he’s agreed to do for my folks next week. I guarantee you’ll find his presentation absorbing and valuable. In fact, I’m donating $5 to Antiwar.com for every person who shows up live.

You keep telling yourself: one of these days I’m going to look into this Internet thing.

Today’s the day. Reserve your spot:

https://www.happyearner.com/factory

One of my favorite movies of all time is Young Frankenstein, starring the late Gene Wilder. There are so many funny parts, you can just act the thing out all day.

Wilder plays Friedrich Frankenstein, the grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein. As a respectable scientist, he is embarrassed by his grandfather’s work.

But while spending some time at his grandfather’s castle he comes upon the man’s notes — in the form of a book ludicrously titled How I Did It.

He starts flipping through, and before he knows it, he’s mesmerized. He slowly looks up from the book, and in his usual over-the-top style declares, “IT…COULD…WORK!!”

Now Steve Clayton hasn’t brought anyone back from the dead, it’s true, but he’s done everything short of that, and you’re going to feel like Friedrich Frankenstein when you read his overview of how he and his students build online stores.

IT…COULD…WORK.

And it has, for Steve and for a boatload of other people.

It’s just: offer stuff for sale, see what sells, see who’s buying, sell more of that to those people. Not brain surgery.

Steve explains every single step.

And as he puts it: sure beats digging ditches for a living.

If it looks like hype, it isn’t. It’s not hype when Steve actually gets these results, and everyone in the industry knows he does.

Remember, too, that tomorrow they’re giving $5000 to a lucky person who has downloaded their PDF by then.

I want someone who follows this site to win. And since nobody hates $5000, get clicking:

https://www.happyearner.com/casestudy

Quit pining for 1957 like it was some golden age, and be thrilled you live in 2017.

Let me put it even more simply. There’s easy, and there’s hard.

Let’s start with hard.

(1) You open a store.

(2) You borrow $1 million to build.

(3) You stock your shelves with things you hope people will buy, but you have to cross your fingers.

(4) You hope people who will like your merchandise will visit. But again, fingers crossed.

Now let’s try easy.

(1) You open an _online_ store.

(2) You borrow $0 to build, because there’s nothing to build.

(3) You stock your shelves with nothing, because you have no shelves.

Instead, you experiment with products you think will sell. When you find ones that get a good response, you find similar or complementary products to round out your store.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to send back any physical inventory that doesn’t sell, because you never have any physical inventory. Everything you sell is shipped directly to the consumer, and you don’t have to touch anything.

(4) You don’t have to hope people who like your merchandise will happen to visit. You experiment pitching particular products to particular demographics. When you find a group that really responds to a product, you pour major resources into pitching to that group. Facebook ads, which you can learn in an afternoon, are all you need.

It’s like a science.

The old-fashioned way, on the other hand, is more like roulette, and with big chunks of dough on the table.

That’s why lots of people have turned to eCommerce as their way of earning an online income. It’s more straightforward and easy to understand than any other model: you have a store, and you sell things!

Who’s the master? Steve Clayton, the guy I interviewed over the weekend. He left a top corporate job at Labcorp so he could have more flexibility and freedom.

And man, did he ever find it. His eCommerce stores are wildly successful, and now he teaches other people how to open their own. And even his teaching is wildly successful.

I’ll be hosting Steve for a live presentation for my readers on March 1, where he’ll lay out what running an online store looks like, and how you can do it.

If you’re not spellbound, I owe you a Coke.

Plus, I’m donating $5 to Antiwar.com for every live attendee at this event.

Reserve your spot this second:

https://www.happyearner.com/factory

We have a friend who reads my emails regularly. She came over for a visit not long ago and asked me flat out, “Can you explain what the heck affiliate marketing is?”

(It’s earning a commission by selling other people’s products.)

So despite all my emails, she hadn’t quite gotten it.

Thus I introduce to you the simplest possible approach to creating that extra income stream online: opening a store and selling stuff.

Now that’s straightforward!

Remember Steve Clayton, whose interview I hope you listened to when I blogged about it the other day? He and his business partner Aidan Booth are the undisputed masters of what’s called eCommerce.

That means they’ve made a fortune with online stores.

They’ve just released an epic PDF that walks you through every single step of how they do it, so you can see what you think.

There’s plenty of actionable advice in it, too.

Let’s just be blunt: the information in it has changed people’s lives. They changed Steve’s: he left a corporate job he hated, and now spends his time traveling — since he doesn’t have to be in any one spot.

If it looks hypey, I assure you it isn’t. Steve and Aidan are famous for their eCommerce success, and they really have trained a ton of people to do what they do. They know more about this stuff than anyone I’ve ever come across, by a country mile.

And by the way, this Friday they’re giving away a $5000 cash prize to a lucky person who has downloaded the case study by then. I VERY MUCH want the winner to be one of my people.

When you consider how few people download business-related PDFs, your chances of winning ain’t bad.

So grab that epic PDF right now, before you forget:

https://www.happyearner.com/casestudy

Steven Clayton earned a fortune at Labcorp, where hundreds and hundreds of people answered to him.

But he hated it, and had no desire to do it a moment longer.

So to everyone’s astonishment, he quit.

He went on to become one of the giants of eCommerce (selling products via online stores). He now has what he wants: financial and geographical independence. He can work from anywhere in the world.

When he and his business partner started teaching people how to open an online store (with no physical inventory) as an additional income stream or as a whole business, their training broke all sales records on JVZoo, the major website for Internet marketing products.

A fascinating guy, in other words, from whom you can learn a lot:

Bad Luck Ichabod had a beautiful website he thought the world would love.

Poor Bad Luck Ichabod didn’t know basic SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”).

His content kept getting buried on page 18 of a Google search. So nobody found out about his lovely site.

Bad Luck Ichabod was sad.

Bad Luck Ichabod had to resort to paying for visitors to his website — which can get costly very quickly, and doesn’t always end well.

The best kind of website traffic is free. And a lot of it can and should come from the search engines, particularly Google.

Our new eBook and video series, SEO Mastery, shows you what to do — and what to avoid — if you’d rather not have your content wind up languishing with Bad Luck Ichabod’s, on page 57 of a Google search.

I’ll be selling it later this year for $37. I’m giving it away for free when you pick up Review Wizard (which costs considerably less than $37). Just forward me your receipt.

Review Wizard is the (1) software and (2) video training from Brett Rutecky and Mike Thomas that shows you how to create a profitable review website.

Brett and Mike each run a product review website that earns each of them $30,000 per month on average.

They review a product, interview the creator, and earn commissions on sales.

As you can see, although there’s plenty of work involved, brain surgery it ain’t.

But get grabbing: the price of Review Wizard jumps after 11:59pm EST, and my bonus is going away, too:

https://www.happyearner.com/mikefrommaine