Ely Shemer

I’ve been following Brian Barnhouse for a few years now, checking out what he is up to and how he is building his business. Who is Brian Barnhouse you may ask… And rightly so, as so few have heard of him. Brian did it his way, the hard way, but he did it. He figured it out and developed a successful online business. His story is nothing like any of those self proclaimed “gurus”. Here is what Brian have to say, on why 97% fail to make a dime of profit online:

1. Bad “EvE Ratio”
2. Not applying the 80/20 rule
3. Don’t know the THREE main items regarding successful internet marketing
4. Don’t use the Tools Of The Trade (probably don’t KNOW what they are).
5. Trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of following a recipe.

If you want No Hype, No Fluff, and NO B.S…listen to what the guy have to say: Watch this short video

*** Rant Alert ***

This post may be considered a rant (and get me kicked out of Dean Holland’s Quick Start Challenge)

*** End of Rant Alert ***

I have learned a lot from Dean Holland’s Quick Start Challenge but not from the “content” being delivered. The content of the 4 weeks course is very basic and has to do more with motivation to take action than with actual content. You see, all we actually learned was: Build a personal blog and blog about yourself (How to build the blog? Search for it… What to blog about? Why not about the Quick Start Challenge? You may win a prize if you do…) Drive traffic with blog and forum commenting (and why don’t you comment on each other’s blogs? That way you will see immediate responses… And as far as forums are concerned, the Warrior forum is recommended 😉  You want to know how to comment effectively?… Go out and find out for yourself). Bonus assignment – create a video (about… you guessed it – Dean Holland’s Quick Start Challenge…). How to do this? Go out and search for it…

Rant within a rant – those basic traffic tactics are only useful when you are starting up as they require a lot of time and effort on your part. Once you stop actively posting, traffic will die out. This is just one example of how the whole program was geared for the short term and not really showing people how to build their business for the long term.

Build a list – create a product to giveaway, setup an autoresponder and a signup form on the blog. How to do all this? … go out and search for it… (This was actually named: “Push Button Income & Automation” if you can believe it…) Really, this has been one big disappointment as far as content is considered. Only the very basic concepts were covered, none of the strategies, tactics, tips and trick you would have wanted to learn were even mentioned. So what did I learn from Dean Holland’s Quick Start Challenge? Brilliant marketing. I did not learn anything from the course itself but learned a lot from the way it was constructed. Let me lay it all out for you… Let’s say you have a high end coaching program (which sells for $5,000) that you want to promote. Of course you can do the hard work of advertising it all over the place while spending a lot of money in the process. You could recruit affiliates you may say, and you’ll be right in thinking so, however there is one little snag – why would big name affiliates want to promote your coaching program when they have their own to promote? So what do you do? Let me tell you what Dean Holland has done. The very basic approach to marketing says you build a funnel which sorts out your prospects and turn them into customers. You start out with a low end (or even free) item which in turn promotes your high end product and build your brand in the process. So where is that “brilliant marketing” you were talking about, I hear you asking… Hold on to your pants, it’s coming 🙂 You start out by advertising the entry level product as being a newbies dream of quickly starting a true Internet business. With some name dropping and the following list of topics you say it will cover:

• The Big Beginning
• The free Traffic Tap
• On demand Income and Automation
• Instant Internet Lifestyle

it’s an easy sell (you really need to see the sales letter… it’s very enticing 🙂 ). Next, you promote it on the warrior forum as a WSO (lot’s of newbies looking for their breakthrough and eager affiliates ready to promote it for you) and start a 4 week process of building the marketing monster. On week one (“The Big Beginning”), getting everyone excited on what’s to come, you tell them that building a personal blog IS the only way to properly build your brand and your online business. You motivate the participants to go out and build their blogs by offering a prize with high perceived value (which for you, is no out of pocket money). If you do a good job with motivating them, you will have a lot of people entering your “build my marketing machine” funnel. Oh, and don’t forget to suggest they blog about their experience with your coaching program… On week two (“The free Traffic Tap”), you need to keep the motivation up by providing instant tangible results so you tell them how to drive free traffic to their blogs and get some social engagement (social markers are the hot thing with SEO these days). You set it up so they will visit each other’s blog, leaving a comment and thus creating a complex net of links among the blogs. This is brilliant strategy number one – build a network of connected blogs which are all owned, operated and hosted by others. This massive Internet presence, of course, is focused on your low end product, building your brand. Drop a hint about how this will benefit them in the future 🙂 Brilliant step number two – suggest creating a youtube video (about your program, of course) asking them to name the file with the name of your product. In case you did not know, Google pays close attention to the name of the video file you upload to youtube. Week three (“On demand Income and Automation”) is all about getting them to start building a list (did you notice how this is all basic affiliate training? I’ll get to that in a moment). You teach them they need a free offer to get people to signup and setup an autoresponder sequence where they can then go and promote products to make money. They don’t have a product to give away? Point them back at your OTO for the training (we did say on demand income, right? LOL) Week four (“Instant Internet Lifestyle”) is where you tell them how building a real business is hard work but the “Internet Lifestyle” is all about not working so hard but enjoying life, while making money. This is where you revile a small part of your marketing funnel and suggest for them to be affiliates for your products, as part of their newly discovered Internet Lifestyle of working less while making money. You tell them how you are going to turn the training they just had to a product and how they are situated to benefit from all the traffic your new product is going to receive. Now the full master plan is in the open for everyone to see (Check out this post on the Warrior forum I did a few weeks back). The so called “Quick Start Challenge” is nothing but a cultivation program for affiliates while building a massive marketing funnel. And this is the brilliance behind it all. You build yourself:

• An army of highly motivated, trained affiliates which have nothing but rave reviews for your teachings.
• A monster of a marketing funnel.
• A lot of buzz around your brand and product.
• A huge amount of positive feedback and rave reviews.

all while getting paid to do so! What did you learn?