I’m sitting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport waiting for a flight.

(Big cheers to this airport for providing free wireless access in all the terminals! I hate it when they stick it to you for $8.95 to get online for ten minutes before your flight.)

Anyway, I was speaking at Agora’s International Living conference. If you’re not on their list, you may want to join. They have writers in all these foreign countries that tell you about living and investing in inexpensive, coastal, often tropical places.

Anyway, my topic was on import/export. Specifically, “Import/Export Opportunities in the Internet Age.” It goes along with the big Trip to China we’re doing in April. www.chinaimportseminar.com

But the interesting thing was that I was the only one talking about online business. Everyone else was talking about foreign cost of living, real estate markets, etc.

The concept of “internet marketing” ws completely foreign to most of the audience. But it seemed to strike a chord — my off-conference-topic breakout session was one of the best attended. And when everyone came up to me after I spoke you could see the lights going on in their eyes.

So the question is:

If someone doesn’t know anything about internet marketing, and they are interested . . . where do you tell them to start??

It’s been awhile since I went through that phase where you buy every ebook and get that overwhelmed feeling when you have so much rattling around your brain that you just don’t know where to start.

(Now, I have that overwhelmed feeling because there’s way to much to DO, but that’s a different story.)

So, if someone you know said, “I don’t know anything about internet marketing — where’s the best place to start,” what would you tell them?

Andy Jenkin’s Yahoo Store Profits?

Yanik Silver’s 33 Days to Internet Profits?

Corey Rudl’s course?

Your thoughts?

The Stomper Extreme Videos (the last search engine course you’ll ever need) are finally finished being edited — and they were worth the wait! Look for an announcement soon.

Here’s a REALLY good example of how real business blogging works.

Read the example below, and if you want to learn more ideas like this from Dave Taylor, sign up for our business blogging 8-part telecourse and me. It starts next Tuesday, December 6th and there are only a couple seats left. Details here: www.businessviablog.com.

This is the email that we are sending to the group that has already signed up. It’s from Dave . . . .

Business Bloggers,

While we’re waiting to get started, I wanted to share a recent experience I had that I think you’ll find interesting. It’s all tied to Content Generation Strategies, one of the greatest challenges most people face when they begin working on their business blogs.

I’m a member of a lot of different mailing lists, some of which are busy with useless chatter and others that are slow but full of really smart folk.

On one of those lists, we started talking about a shared web bookmark service with the weird name of del.icio.us, and I realized that the discussion really lent itself to a weblog article. Even better, the site in question is one that many people in my market space don’t really understand, so the opportunity for gaining lots of traffic and visibility was definitely there too.

The problem was, I didn’t really understand what was so compelling about Delicious either. But clearly other people on the mailing list did, as they were very briefly explaining why they used the service.

So here’s what I did…

I picked the highest profile person out of the group, Jeremy Zawodny, a well-known blogger who works at Yahoo!, and asked if he’d be willing to share his perspective on Delicious. He assented, so I spent about five minutes writing up a half-dozen questions and mailed them to him along with an introductory note:

“Great. So if you’re amenable, here’s my first batch of questions. Feel absolutely free to change them, reword them, tweak them, or even skip ‘em if they’re stupid or uninteresting, and do add more questions if you think the conversation should go in a specific
direction to be maximally useful and interesting, Jeremy…”

He responded with some great information, and then I asked two more people if they’d share their views too, Jeff Barr, who works at Amazon, and Stuart Maxwell. They agreed too, and within 24 hours I had about 40 paragraphs of interesting and insightful commentary from these three industry experts.

At that point my article was 95% written. I copied and pasted each of my original questions, then each person’s answer, prefaced it with a rudimentary introduction with links to each person’s weblog or website, posted it to my Intuitive Life weblog, and voila! One of the best and most definitive pages on the entire Web about the Delicious service, hosted on my weblog, and without me having to do much more than about 15 minutes work total.

See for yourself:

Interview with Experts: What’s so cool about del.icio.us?

This is but one of the many techniques Brad and I will be exploring in our teleseminar, so get ready to learn all our insider secrets and find out how to not just get into the blogging world, but become a true luminary, an expert who everyone turns to for expert advice and products!

It’s not too late to sign up here.

Today I was trying to explain to someone the time value of money as it relates to spamming the search engines.

You see many people are pumping out spam web sites using automated techniques, fake content, pre-set RSS feeds, and other tactics that work for awhile — until Google kills the site and it goes away.

Yes, you can make money for awhile if you crank out enough web sites (one of my friends does one every single day), but even the advocates of this strategy admit that all of the sites eventually get killed.

When they get killed, no problem, say the advocates of this strategy — there are plenty more where they came from.

The question is, is it “better” to do real content or fake content?

To analogize, the question is, would you rather rent your house or own your house?

When you rent, you spend your time making money to build someone else’s equity (the landlord’s). When you own, you build your own equity over time.

I think the options for building real vs. fake content are similar:

Over time, fake site jump up faster, peak out, then die to almost zero.

Conversely, real sites start a little slower, then build faster and faster until they are far much better than the fake sites ever were.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to create excellent content that the search engines love, not fake content that they’re getting better at killing faster.

The example above from Dave Taylor is a perfect example.

If you’re interested in learning more about dramatically improving your bottom line through the power of real blogging, there are still a couple seats available for our 8-week telecourse. Details here.

Hey Stompers,

Long time no talk. There’s so much cool stuff happening on the internet these days that I can barely read my own email, let alone all the RSS feeds I try to keep up with.

Are you using del.icio.us yet? Very cool — see below. (Warning: Stay away from the ‘popular’ section or you might not get anything else done for two days.)

Today I was trying to explain to someone the time value of money as it relates to spamming the search engines. For those of us interested in traffic, this is worth thinking about.

(Story continued online, here… If you want to read a great short story about how easy it is to get sustainable traffic, click here to continue:

Until next time,

Keep on Stomping!

Brad Fallon
Chief Stomper

Now there’s a blog.

At Joel Christopher’s Marketing Cruise last week I got to meet and hang out with Mr. Fire, AKA Dr. Joe Vitale. Very cool.

Dr. Joe is one of the most prolific authors and hands-down best copywriters around. His course, Outrageous Marketing from Nightingale-Conant is a must-have, and if you’re not on his email list, you’re missing out on some of the best examples of email marketing around.

Anyway, I’ve been a fan of his for years. In fact, his advice on how to write a book in six days was an inspiration to me to finally finish my first book.

So it was great to discover that Joe is a very cool guy. We had a great time talking about marketing, copywriting, hypnosis and life.

In my presentation during the Seminar at Sea, I mentioned blogging as a great tool for business. Joe was unconvinced, but has decided to give it a whirl.

He just started three days ago and he’s already averaging almost two posts per day. Pretty interesting stuff, too.

Check out the post about The Secret. There’s a link to a very compelling trailer for a new movie coming out in February. Joe thinks it will change the world. If you haven’t seen the trailer, you should check it out.

And no, even after we plied him with free drinks, he wouldn’t tell us what the secret was. We’ll have to wait until February 15th like everyone else.

And if YOU want to learn all you can (fast) to build your business with the power of blogging, there’s still time to sign up for the Blogging for Business eight week telecourse that Dave Taylor and I will be teaching starting November 30th. Learn more at www.businessviablog.com

Here is a link to an interesting interview with Bill Gates. The Microsoft Chairman, and world’s richest person, has an interesting take on the challenge from Google.

According to Bill, the demise of Microsoft has been foretold many times. What do you think about their challenge from Google?

As a tribute to Ken Giddens, Ken McCarthy has put up a web site with some of the recordings of Ken teaching and history of Ken’s contributions to the industry of internet marketing from the very beginning. It also includes a link to remarks about Ken and what a great guy he was from the owner of the original WorldofWatches.com. (One of Ken’s claims to fame was being responsible for this web site selling over $500,000 of watches in just one day.)

I still can’t believe he won’t be teaching anymore…

One of the Stomper Apprentices is a finalist in the $1 million Body for Life competition. Very cool!

Nicole and Brock went with us on our last trip to China. They are an awesome couple and we had a great time. Their business, Simply Poker Chips, sells poker chips and poker supplies online.

Now, Nicole is a finalist and is in the running for the one million dollar grand prize in the Body for Life competition. Check it out here and Vote for Nicole!

Just when you were getting started blogging — here’s a great t-shirt for 2005.

Hat tip: Anne Holland