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 Table of Contents

Welcome to the Silent Sales Machine 10.0 ....................................... 7

Acknowledgments .......................................................................... 11

Dedication ...................................................................................... 13

Section One: Silent Sales Machine Basics (An Overview of

Our Successful Models, Principles, and Attitudes) ....................... 15
Section Introduction ...................................................................................... 17
Chapter 1: Living the Multiple Income Stream Dream
Since 2002: Jim’s Story ............................................................................... 19
Chapter 2: CES: The Best 3 Models of Online Success and
the 5 Principles Behind Them ...................................................................... 25
Chapter 3: Focus on Serving and Creating Value, Not on Fear and Excuses ... 29
Section One Wrap-Up: Tips and Additional Resources.................................... 35
Section One Action Steps ............................................................................... 37

Section Two: The “S” of the CES Models: Sell (Selling

Physical Goods Online) ................................................................ 39
Section Introduction ...................................................................................... 41
Chapter 4: Discover Your Niche Market and What Customers Want but
Can’t Get Online—Yet .................................................................................. 43
Chapter 5: Making Good Inventory-Purchasing Decisions .............................. 47
Chapter 6: Signing Up to Sell and Choosing Your Marketplace ....................... 51
Chapter 7: Becoming an Amazon Expert: FBA and
ProvenAmazonCourse.com ......................................................................... 55
Chapter 8: Moving Beyond Newbie: Advanced Ways to Find Inventory .......... 59
Section Two Wrap-Up: Tips and Additional Resources ................................... 61
Section Two Action Steps............................................................................... 63

3
Section Three: The “E” of the CES Models: Expand (Creating
Content and Partnerships that Attract, Grow, and Serve
an Audience Well) ........................................................................ 67
Section Introduction ...................................................................................... 69
Chapter 9: Expanding with Your First Website and a Multi-Channel Selling
Strategy ...................................................................................................... 73
Chapter 10: Email Marketing–The Case for It and How to Grow Your
List .............................................................................................................. 81
Chapter 11: Expand Your Reach with Smart Simple Video ............................. 85
Chapter 12: Become an eBook Author (It’s Easy!) and Write
Valuable Content ......................................................................................... 89
Chapter 13: Partner with Complementary Specialists to
Grow Your Prospect List Fast ...................................................................... 93
Chapter 14: Create Three-Way Wins .............................................................. 97
Chapter 15: As You Grow, Protect Your Reputation with High Standards .... 101
Section Three Wrap-Up: Tips and Additional Resources ............................... 103
Section Three Action Steps .......................................................................... 105

Section Four: The “C” of the CES Models: Consult (Get

Paid to Partner with Business Owners and Help Them
Succeed with Internet Marketing) ............................................. 109
Section Introduction .................................................................................... 111
Chapter 16: Free Yourself Up by Training Close Partners to
Lead with You ........................................................................................... 113
Chapter 17: Free Yourself Up Through Delegation ....................................... 115
Chapter 18: Help Others as an Online-Expert Consultant ............................. 117
Section Four Wrap-Up: Tips and Additional Resources ................................. 119
Section Four Action Steps ............................................................................ 121

Section Five: What Not to Do (Lessons on Avoiding Shiny

Distractions—and What to Do Instead) ...................................... 123
Section Introduction .................................................................................... 125
Chapter 19: Beginners Beware: Pay-Per-Click, Affiliate Marketing,
and Push-Button Simple ........................................................................... 127
Chapter 20: Gurus and Big Launch Hype Are to Be Watched,
Not Followed.............................................................................................. 131
Chapter 21: Don’t Invest in SEO Tricks; Get Google Love in Legit Ways....... 135
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 Chapter 22: Don’t “Drive Traffic”–Instead, Attract Eager Fans by Getting
Great Content Out There Free ................................................................... 139
Section Five Wrap-Up: Tips and Additional Resources ................................. 143
Section Five Action Steps ............................................................................. 147

Wrapping Up the Silent Sales Machine 10.0 .................................. 151

5
6
 Welcome to the
Silent Sales Machine 10.0
You and I were clearly born at the best time in human history to be entrepreneurs. In the
coming decades, the move from traditional commerce to online commerce will create more
opportunities than any other economic shift in world history. This single trend will easily
create tens of thousands of millionaires in the next 20 years, and many more will find
financial stability for the first time.

This book could be your gateway to that kind of success.

Not, mind you, because Silent Sales Machine 10.0 is a great book (although of course I
hope you like it), but because of how massive and wide-open the opportunities are for
those who follow its time-tested advice. Like nearly all the successful Internet
entrepreneurs I know, my team and I are simply using inexpensive tools and strategies to
frequently test out new ideas related to proven concepts. We couldn’t wait to stuff all our
best ideas into this updated volume for you!

So, welcome to Silent Sales Machine version 10.0.

The goal we have for you as you read this book is quite simple: that you learn and put into
practice ideas to increase your income and help you launch a profitable business, or grow
your existing business to exciting new levels. This book is not about any magical formulas
or short-term opportunistic tactics. What you’ll find instead is advice based on firsthand
experiences lived out or witnessed by my team as we’ve grown our own online businesses
steadily since 1999, while also sharing what we know with thousands of others who have
then gone on to succeed as well. We are learning more all the time about what really works
when it comes to building an online business and multiple income streams. So, Silent Sales
Machine 10.0 is all about increasing your income with the latest proven strategies while
encouraging you with a few of the most compelling stories from one of the largest
communities of successful online entrepreneurs in the world.

For example, you’ll read more later in this book about:

• a man who, with the help of an earlier edition of this book, turned $400 into an eight-
figure, Internet-based business in a couple of short years;

• a married couple who, with the help of these ideas, turned a $1,000-a-month side
business into a seven-figure business that allowed both spouses to focus on it as
their sole support;

• a young man who used our ideas to move from a fun, family project to wild success
that has included making a custom car for the famous comedian Jerry Seinfeld;

7
 • a woman who got coaching from our team and went on to develop her own loyal
following of people who both devour the content she produces and pay her for
coaching;

• a buddy of mine who used our principles to turn tinkering with a hobby into a full-
blown business, garnering celebrity status in the music industry along the way;

• and the most popular coffee brand on social media that went from near bankruptcy
to seeing a Super Bowl commercial made for it using the ideas in this book.

Now, a handful of testimonials from readers is typical. We, however, go well beyond that
surface fanfare. At this point, we have thousands of testimonials and success stories
directly attributable to the principles you’ll read in Silent Sales Machine 10.0. We are proud
to serve successful students and readers from around the world who credit our ideas for
their success online and hang out in our private, free online community on Facebook at
MySilentTeam Group. As tens of thousands of people interact globally around the clock in
this group, we learn from and encourage each other in the group, as well as at live events a
few times a year. (Check out photos from past events at Jim Cockrum Events Photos.)
This is why you don’t need to take my word that these ideas work. Join our Facebook group
to evaluate my credibility. Then, if you like what you see, you can stay on to benefit from a
community that, for many of us, has become like family.

Something else that is beautiful about the success stories we are seeing is that collectively,
they are proof positive that your ability to succeed online isn’t dependent on where you live,
how much money you have to start with, what your level of education happens to be, what
color your skin happens to be, your gender, or your previous business success (or lack
thereof).

A big goal I have for Silent Sales Machine 10.0 is to destroy

all your excuses while fully equipping you to succeed.

Don’t worry if you are new to the idea of having a legitimate and successful online business.
I’m going to show you where to start and where not to start right in this book. We’ll break
the process down into manageable pieces:

• Section One–Silent Sales Machine Basics lays the foundation. We'll go over
topics such as the steady transition from traditional retail to online shopping, my
story as an example of the multiple-income-stream way of doing business, an
introduction to the three basic models of online success with the five principles that
support them, and the core attitudes of multiple income stream success: working
excuse free, and focusing on creating value and serving.

• Section Two–Sell dives into the ins and outs of where online entrepreneurs usually
start—selling physical goods online—from essentials such as finding a customer base
and products to sell, to more advanced ideas like exploring trade shows and
launching your own private label products without taking big risks or making big
investments.

8
 • Section Three–Expand focuses on expanding your online business and influence.
You’ll see how to transition from serving one-time customers to developing ongoing
relationships with an audience of eager fans who want what you have to offer and
who respect what you have to say. (Don’t miss the advice on creating three-way
wins!)

• Section Four–Consult focuses on getting paid to use your growing online business
skills and experience to help others follow their paths into the bright world of Internet
success.

• Section Five–What Not to Do offers important lessons on how to avoid shiny

distractions when pursuing Internet-based enterprises. We will take a closer look at
some of the bad ideas that may have been pushed at you as you’ve searched for
business ideas online. Plus, we will offer wisdom and advice that redirects you toward
the path of tried-and-true success.

Each section opens with an overview of the chapters within, and—to help you revisit the
material easily and go beyond the book where helpful—each section will end with a wrap-up
that includes tips, additional free resources, and opportunities for further training. In other
words, not only does this book give you concrete info, but it also shows you where to get
even more help.

Ultimately, our goal is to help you. Creating value and serving others is probably my top
advice to you (you’ll see this advice often throughout the book), and it’s certainly my
standard for myself with Silent Sales Machine 10.0. The standard holds for the rest of my
work, too. Fifteen years of success and a 10th edition of the book later, I’m thrilled to report
the bottom line is this: our ideas work for anyone who is ready to do the work.

We’ve now reached a decision point, coming down to two questions for you:

1. Are you ready to do some work?

2. Are you ready to follow our proven advice and instruction?

If so, we have some great ideas for you that are already working for thousands of other
readers of previous editions of this book. You won't be implementing all the ideas from this
book, but you'll undoubtedly find a few that you can act on starting immediately – and
you'll get results!

Read on for more than a decade of experience-based, success-honed wisdom. We hope

you’ll join the thousands who’ve been helped by it, and we look forward to hearing about
your own success very soon!

9
10
 Acknowledgments
I want to offer special thanks to all who helped edit and proof Silent Sales Machine Version
10.0 to catch as many of my typos as possible. My gratitude goes to each of the following
(listed here in no particular order):

• Tracy Hensley Bumpus

• Jeremy James
• Andrea Rezabek
• Dave Pugsley
• Gaye Lisby
• Rebecca L. Lloyd
• Bob Metcalfe
• Patricia Smith
• Melissa Trammell
• Steven Fry
• Lisa Thornton
• Robert West
• Maria O’Brien
• Ashley Kurit
• Brooke Ballenger

This book simply would not have happened without the support of my incredible team.
Thank you to Steven Deaton, George & Holly Thompson, Mary Case, my partners Brett
Bartlett & Nathan Bailey, my Mom Judy Cockrum who runs my online selling business, as
well as our event coordinator Rhea Perry. Special thanks as well to this book’s project
manager, Greg Perry, from our own ServusPublishing.com who worked as hard on this
book as anyone else – myself included.

11
12
 Dedication
Dedicated to my best friend, wife and top advisor the beautiful Andrea Cockrum – the best
gift God ever gave me.

13
14
 SECTION ONE

Silent Sales Machine

Basics

An Overview of Our Successful Models,

Principles, and Attitudes

15
16
 Introduction to
Silent Sales Machine Basics
When my online business-building career began to take off, I quickly realized that virtually
everything I’d ever learned about the traditional challenges and struggles of launching and
growing a business was wrong.

Online business success was coming far easier than my college business professors
indicated it would!

For one thing, it was evident that anyone could grow a healthy business without a huge
financial risk. Up until about 1995, starting a business almost always required a large risk of
both time and money. It required extraordinary dedication and patience and even then, the
professors and “experts” all said that most of us would fail.

But by the early 2000s, the Internet—the ultimate “multiple-income-stream” or “Silent

Sales Machine” tool—had changed the way we do business. It became clear that it was time
for us to adjust our thinking about what it meant to “invest” in launching a business.

The Internet brought with it the biggest paradigm shift in the history of commerce–the
steady transition from traditional retail to online shopping. Yes, the trend has been building
for a while now, but as I write this update only around 6 to 7 percent of all retail shopping
in the U.S. occurs online; the rest of the world is even further behind. As hundreds of
millions of retail shoppers worldwide move ever increasingly from “offline” traditional retail
markets to the online world of ecommerce, the opportunities available to any and all of us
who pay attention are incredible.

In other words, the time to get into making money online is now, while more than 90
percent of retail spending is still happening off the Internet in traditional markets, while
more and more people are searching the web first for their goods. The risks are low—you
don’t need a lot of investment capital or new skills—the opportunity is massive, and the
trend of online shopping is just getting started. Believe me, I know! I’ve been doing this
since 2002, and even with that many years of business experience, I’m still excited for the
millionaires who are yet to find their niche in this world of explosive growth.

See, there’s nothing complicated about succeeding in business online. Even online, where
new tools and trends are constantly presenting themselves, the rules of success never
change. The tools of success, however, are always changing, which is why you’re looking at
the 10th edition of a popular book. The first version of the book came about because people
started asking a lot of questions about what I was up to because I had begun to experience
some truly staggering, humbling success after leaving the corporate world behind to pursue
Internet business.

As I documented my strategies and lessons in ongoing updates of the book, word began to
spread, and I had people all over the world—friends and strangers alike—asking me how I

17
was able to build streams of income online. So, this book was born as an alternative to
answering all those questions one email at a time.

Let’s answer the biggest question you might have.

What is a “Silent Sales Machine”?

A “Silent Sales Machine” is a stream of Internet-based income. My partners and I have
several of them (hence the term “multiple income streams”). “Silent” refers to the fact that
each stream of income, such as selling a particular item on a website, is typically a
relatively quiet, smooth-running, independent system that churns out sales and profits day
after day, week after week, and month after month in a nearly hands-free fashion. Once
you get it established, it operates mostly, or even entirely, on autopilot.

As you build new, smooth-flowing streams, these “Silent Sales Machines” accumulate
around you and flow into one, big, unstoppable river of income. While all streams
complement each other, there is little, if any reliance between one stream to another. In
other words, if one stream dries up a bit, the other streams are affected very little, if at all.
In the end, you’re serving an ever-growing list of delighted customers in ways that bring
you income with relatively little ongoing effort while enjoying the freedom to use your time
and energy elsewhere. When done correctly, your income supports your lifestyle instead of
your lifestyle being ruled by the pursuit of income.

All this can seem intimidating at first. After talking with thousands of online business
building dreamers, I can tell you that so many of us have been overwhelmed at some point
when trying to decide what direction to go with the multitude of online business ideas. Still,
we’ve seen students overcome all manner of challenges and go on to succeed with our
ideas.

While we’ll expand on the most current proven strategies for increased income throughout
the book, this first section offers an overview of them, starting by showing them in practice
through my own story.

For me, it all started on eBay.

Then it really got going when I was fired.

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 Chapter 1

Living the Multiple Income

Stream Dream Since 2002:
Jim’s Story
The job I was fired from—the last “real” job I had—was what most would have called
“safe.”

I’d been selling Microsoft software and other goods as a reseller during the prime of
Microsoft’s dominance in the software arena. As a sales rep, I’d been a top performer for
several years in my industry. While I was doing quite well by any standard, there was a
problem.

I was bored.

See, despite the safe career path I’d chosen, I had a rebel entrepreneur inside of me raging
to get out. Working for someone else wasn’t the dream I had for myself—I knew I was
meant for more—and the disconnect clearly showed in my attitude toward my career.

In my boredom, I started playing around online with eBay in 1999, as well as with simple
websites of my own, in my spare time. I found this interesting and motivating. I felt
creative and inspired when I was working online. Very quickly, I discovered that a few
hours of spare time spent working on my online side business started earning me a very
nice income. As my online business gained momentum, I realized I was accomplishing more
meaningful work in my spare time and on weekends than I was in my “real” job.

Then, just a couple of years into playing with online enterprise on the side, I was fired.

In retrospect, that November 2002 day was the best in my entire employment history
because it forced me to do what I’d always dreamed I was capable of: to run my own online
business and do it well.

Of course, it took me a while to get past the initial shock of getting fired from a stable,
corporate career as a positive development. No one wants to get fired, but there are days
when that kind of news hits particularly hard—and the day of my firing was one of those.
My wife Andrea was eight months pregnant; if there’s one time in life when having health
insurance is a good thing, it’s then!

Still, in the hours and days after being fired, I became very determined to walk away from
the corporate, business-as-usual world. I didn’t send out resumes. I didn’t start calling my
“connections.”

19
I was done.

No looking back.

I decided, way back then in 2002, that I was going to become one of the greatest success
stories of online marketing that the world had ever seen. My wife and I were both a wreck
for a few days, but she believed in me and encouraged me further proving that I had
married an amazing girl! We had a few months of savings built up, but in retrospect, it still
was a huge leap of faith.

Luckily, I had some ideas that were starting to pay off.

How I Started Selling Goods Online

During my beginning with eBay, I sold a handful of items at a time and making a decent
side income doing it, as were tens of thousands of other eBay sellers around the world. This
was not a “silent” or “autopilot” income by any means though; eBay was (and still is, in
most cases) a lot of hard work.

Then suddenly one day, a simple observation changed everything for me.

On that day, I took a hard look at the visitor counter for my eBay listings and realized I had
hundreds and even thousands of people in some cases looking at each of my eBay items for
sale. Very few of those shoppers were sending me any money though, since there could be
only one winner/buyer per auction or listing on eBay.

Then it struck me: while I was on eBay selling a handful of items and thinking how much
fun I was having, I was missing a golden opportunity right under my nose. See, I knew that
all the leading business strategists on the Internet were constantly talking about trying to
get “targeted traffic” to their websites (traffic, of course being the same as visitors). We all
know that a beautiful website is useless without targeted traffic, right? Well, when I looked
at that visitor counter on my eBay auctions, I realized I was staring down on targeted
traffic—only virtually every visitor except the winning bidder was being sent away empty-
handed.

It upset me just to think about all those people who came and went ignored and unserved!

With the wide-open world of the Internet, I knew I could sell other related items and grow a
loyal audience—stored in an email list, a fan base, or dedicated, lifetime buyers—for
virtually any niche. So, I began to figure out ways to tap into the huge volume of traffic on
eBay and attract some of those visitors over to other web offers related to the eBay listing
they were interested in. (I did this without violating eBay policy of course; it’s important not
to bite the hand that feeds you!)

Once I figured that out, my business took off fast. My team and I have since used this same
strategy on numerous other platforms for our own businesses and for clients.

20
That was my first “Silent Sales Machine.” It happened because I understood that the long-
term attention and trust of a prospect is worth far more than the short-term transaction he
or she represents to most online entrepreneurs. I now see every online encounter as the
first big step toward a lifelong, mutually beneficial relationship with a prospect, customer,
or possibly even a future partner!

Selling items is one of the three basic models for online success. It’s where most beginners
start, and for most, it provides plenty of income and satisfaction.

For me, however, it wasn’t where I wanted to stop.

How I Expanded: Growing from Gathering Customers to Building

an Audience
From that first eBay lesson, I determined that I was going to stop doing exactly what nearly
everyone else was already doing. I wasn’t going to try to “drive traffic,” feverishly search
for new customers, or goof around with the latest trendy Internet business tricks and
gimmicks. I chose instead to focus on finding creative ways to engage with customers right
where they were already gathered online. Every income stream I’ve launched online since
2002 has involved going to where the customers are already gathered, finding ways to
initiate a relationship (usually by asking great questions), and beginning by serving them
well right there.

After that first “Silent Sales Machine,” my business exploded into multiple streams. For
example, I began creating content to help others do the same things I was doing. I wrote
my first 20-page eBook over a decade ago and, within just a few weeks, my life began to
change forever. Since 2002, I’ve had the privilege of waking up each day, logging on to my
computer, and checking the statistics of how many books and courses I sold while I was
sleeping. It’s a feeling that never gets old, and this is a perfect example of how an income
stream can become virtually hands-free.

These books are delivered electronically as downloadable files to customers who purchase
them from my various websites, and I’m not the only one promoting my income streams.
The foundation of much of my early success online came as the result of joint ventures with
other marketers and websites servicing my same customer demographic. These partners
agreed to promote my products, articles, and services to their customer base if I would pay
them a share of each sale. This became the basis for what I call a win-win-win scenario; I
win, the partner wins, and—because we don’t do this indiscriminately, but with a mind to
only providing and promoting legitimate and valuable information—the customer wins.

Having eBooks floating around the Internet has made me a lot of money, and better yet,
it’s grown a large audience for my team and me to serve. My “team” is now well over 100
people as I update this book, and it's growing! I only have a few “employees,” but people
all over the world are in partnerships with my core team and me working on exciting
projects around the clock! Now THAT is a silent sales machine!

21
How I Became a Consultant: Getting Paid to Use My Online
Business Skills and Experience to Help Others
Yes, what started out as a one-man show couldn’t stay that way for me to truly expand. In
time, my story has become my team’s story. My partner Brett Bartlett, for example, started
out as a reader of an earlier version of this book with only $400 to invest in his online
business only a few short years ago. He went on to purchase my Proven Amazon Course at
ProvenAmazonCourse.com and then became one of our all-time most successful
students, moving from zero income streams and knowing nothing about online selling to
working nine income streams very quickly (9 Quick Income Streams). Brett was so
successful and driven that it was a natural fit for our two teams to work together closely;
today, we manage a healthy eight-figure business. And that was only the beginning. When
you add up our projects and partnerships, we are generating about 35 independent yet
complementary streams of income with a growing, healthy team of people all over the
world–and it's not chaos. We'll explain more about these points later in the book.

Expanding my business and growing my team made room for me to become an expert
consultant—the third model for success that we'll explain in this book. This is where the
dream I had back when I was bored working for others really came to life, and it had a lot
to do with our mindset. See, a service mindset has always been a major key to our
success—mine and my team’s. One example is the way we handle our technical support
and the community engagement for readers of this book. We transitioned from hosting our
own support forums on our own website to a Facebook-based support group a few years
ago. Doing this made it possible for our students to gather easily without logging into a
separate site. This small and seemingly insignificant shift in the way we engage our
community caused our level of interaction and loyalty to skyrocket, and our rapid pace of
growth is undeniable!

And that was only the beginning of the places being service-minded has taken us. Because
my team and I openly share what we learn with others, new doors constantly open for us.
In the explosive-growth of Internet-based entrepreneurship, people need help—and if you
have enough valuable help to offer, this can become yet another income stream. I’ve had
clients happily pay me $1,000 per hour or more merely for advice. We also have dozens of
coaches on our team who are available at a very competitive rate for any business or
individual who wants more information on the concepts in this book.

Being service-minded has served me better than anything else. Between you and me, I’m
not highly qualified to be a raging online business success, much less an expert or an
author: I earned Bs and Cs in high school and college, and both hated and got bad grades
in marketing classes in high school and college. Ironically, our podcast is a top
biz/marketing show on iTunes! (You can find our podcast here: SilentJim.com/podcast.)
I’m not a good writer (thank you, editors). These are the parameters I work within, and yet
I succeed with multiple income streams online.

For illustration purposes, here’s a list of our major online income streams: We are selling
physical products on Amazon, eBay, and several other sites. We are also selling digital
products. A digital product, also known as content, could be an audio, video, or text file (in
other words, a product that provides information). We run membership sites, I have
22
authored books (both printed versions and eBooks), and my team runs discussion forums,
both free and paid. We manage large Facebook groups and have large email lists full of
readers who are eager to hear from us on various topics. In addition to handling the clients
who pay me very well to advise and assist them with their Internet endeavors, I’ve also
recently moved into assisting self-published authors and doing live conferences. Finally, my
team and I offer coaching and consulting for individuals and businesses alike. There are
more streams, but you get the idea.

Having more than two dozen streams of income may sound like chaos to manage, but it’s
actually quite orderly. For me, this arrangement has developed one small, simple step at a
time with virtually no significant risks or large investments necessary over the years of my
journey. It’s been this way since 2002, and I continue to add new streams. Some streams
require a bit of daily attention—someone to post a new product for sale on Amazon, for
example—and other streams require a bit of work every few days by either someone on my
team or me to keep them flowing. Ultimately, I’m not reliant upon any one stream of
income. These streams typically run like my eBook sales: mostly predictably and on their
own, while producing delighted customers and profits that flow nicely into my bank
accounts. Individually, the streams aren’t always that large; some of them are as small as
$100 to $200 per month. But add them all up, and I would have to work 70- to 80-hour
weeks as the CEO of a major corporation to get the same income results.

Plus, I couldn’t be home with my family during the day, or enjoy the flexible lifestyle we’ve
become so accustomed to since 2002. Since my firing in 2002, I’ve been the sole income
earner in our household, using only the ideas you’ll read in this book. I’ve been able to
work from home with my wife and five kids nearby. We travel for weeks at a time, we’ve
adopted three times internationally (twice since being fired), we support the causes we
believe in, we volunteer, and my kids have the best tutors they could ever have schooling
them in our own home: their mom and me.

There is no traditional job that could possibly lure me out of this lifestyle.

I truly hope my story has stirred something powerful in you about what is possible. If you
share a similar goal to quit your job and live the Internet-business lifestyle, then my goal is
that this book will be the first step in getting you there. But first, let me point out there’s no
way to rush the process of establishing multiple income streams. This Silent Sales Machine
10.0 way of doing business is not a get-rich-quick scheme. The reason I’ve given you a
peek into my reality is to give you a big view of what could be for you in time, by way of
what is for me and so many others today.

23
24
 Chapter 2

CES: The Best 3 Models of

Online Success and the
5 Principles Behind Them
Since I first began working to build and establish successful online businesses in 1999, I’ve
been observing others, learning lessons, and filtering out the junk in the arena of online
business opportunities. Through that experience, I’ve become convinced that all successful
online business opportunities come down to three complementary and universally powerful
strategies. We call them the “C,” the “E,” and the “S” models: Consult, Expand, and Sell.
We’ll discuss each model, or path to success, in much greater detail later in the book, but
here’s the short definition of each:

C = Consult. Get paid to partner with business owners and help them apply
foundational concepts of Internet marketing to their business.

E = Expand. Create content that attracts and grows an audience and then serve that
audience well.

S = Sell Stuff. Sell profitable physical goods using Amazon, eBay, or any number of
other profitable platforms.

All the numerous success stories in our community come from one or more of these three
models. While you certainly don’t have to do all three (we have thousands of students doing
only the “S” model), we’ve found that the “C,” “E,” and “S” models complement each other
quite nicely and produce incredible income stability.

Just as I did, the majority of our successful students start out with the “S” model (selling
physical products), and then in many cases, they grow from there into one or both of the
other two models. The most common example goes like this:

1. You start out selling a product or products on a website such as Amazon or eBay
(“S”— Sell Stuff).

2. You then specialize and expand to other platforms. You begin to collect email
addresses from customers or grow a following on Facebook and grow a large, loyal
audience for other products and services (“E”—Expand).

3. Then you can optionally get paid to offer guidance to those who want to follow in
your footsteps (“C”—Consult).

25
But while most people start with “S,” each model complements the other two, and success
with any of the three opens online doors to the other two. So, even for those who move
through to the “C” model—consulting—the CES dance still works.

You saw this in my story. Having established myself as an expert with a large and growing
audience, I’m constantly approached by businesses and others seeking my expertise. As I
help them out and share the great success stories publicly, my audience grows. This is how
my “C” business feeds my “E” strategy. Then, as I grow my audience or list of customers, I
can easily alert them to any new products I’m selling. For example, the book you are
reading now will have a great sales day when I alert my audience that it’s been posted on
Amazon Kindle—resulting in some solid “S” sales. This is how my “E” strategy feeds my “S”
business.

Dozens of other related streams of income can flow from strategies working in harmony.
For example:

• Most businesses are intimidated by the thought of selling their goods via Amazon and
eBay, but they also are quickly learning that they need to be on those platforms. This
is a golden opportunity and another nice combination of the “S” and the “C” models:
instead of having just one Amazon account to garner sales (which is all you are
allowed to have according to Amazon’s rules), you can get paid a piece of sales by
multiple Amazon accounts owned by other businesses.

• I have a client whose product isn’t selling as well as it should be. I’m helping him
expand his audience by creating content and launching it as a book online. This will
help sales as more people look to him as an authority in his niche. Our agreement is
that I get paid a percentage of each new sale that results from this arrangement.
This is my “C” (Consult) model helping a business owner use the “E” (Expand) model
to grow his “S” (Sell) business—which also results in three new income streams for
me.

• The credibility of so many “S” and “C” success stories in our community has opened
doors for a successful podcast we call “Silent Sales Machine Radio.” You’ll find links to
many of these podcasts in the additional free resources at the end of each section of
this book. That’s me in the role of “E,” or expanding our audience. As I help others
succeed and get the things they want, more people want to know how I do it—and
they become part of my audience, as well as potential consumers for my products,
information, or advice. It’s a self-propelling upward cycle!

Using one or more of our three powerful paths to online success, we’ve recently seen clients
achieve million-dollar sales weeks, and we’ve even seen a client go from nearly broke to
watching his company’s Super Bowl ad run in 2016. Now that was fun to watch happen!

The CES models don’t stand on their own, though. Each is supported by what we call the
foundational principles behind the CES paths to success. We focus on, and teach others to
use, five such principles that have helped me and thousands of others in our community
establish solid income streams.

26
To follow the “Silent Sales Machine” multiple-income streams
paths to Internet business success, you’ll need to employ:
• “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 1: Serve and Create Value. Predictable
success in business almost never starts out with you doing what you love because
you feel like you deserve it. Doesn’t that sound selfish? There’s a reason for that:
because it is! The alternative is what we do and what we recommend: putting the
needs of your customers and prospects ahead of your own desires, and working to fill
gaps in the marketplace.

• “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 2: Grow an Audience. The most valuable
asset you’ll ever have in the online business world is a list of people who can’t wait to
hear from you. There are three ways to grow such a list of loyal customers and fans:
sell great products, offer great content (videos and written content are absolutely
vital), and build great partnerships. This book discusses all three approaches.

• “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 3: Guard Your Reputation. A strong online
reputation makes it possible to create an audience, grow and serve an audience,
build partnerships, become a consultant—all of it. The key here is to be intentional
and hold high standards, and throughout the book we’ll discuss specific ways you
protect your reputation on that basis.

• “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 4: Only Do What Only You Can Do. As the
owner of an online business, what work should you actually be doing? Well, early on
you do everything that needs to be done to establish multiple streams of income. As
you grow, though, your first hire should probably come far sooner than your instincts
will suggest. Being freed up to do the things that only you can do is necessary for
expanding your business to new levels.

• “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 5: Avoid Online Entrepreneur Pitfalls.

The online world is full of paths that go nowhere fast, from following hype about the
latest shiny object—in other words, the get-rich-quick online schemes—to starting
out with higher-risk techniques that skip past the Internet’s low-hanging fruit that’s
best for beginners. You’ll find cautions about that throughout this book, with a special
focus in Section Five.

Understanding and employing these foundational concepts will equip you for virtually
unlimited opportunities online. My goal, however, isn’t to start you off with multiple income
streams. Instead, I encourage you to add one at a time.

Add One Stream at a Time; Then, Work Your Way to Multiple

Streams
Especially as you get started, each smooth-flowing income stream will require a period of
focused effort and attention. Don't go in multiple directions at the same time! On our team,
we call this “bolting” instead of “bouncing”—a lesson pounded into us by my partner Brett's
successful father-in-law Scott Miller. Each Internet business income source will need to be
27
added one at a time, slowly and methodically, and be systemized. I’m a big fan of Biblical
wisdom here:

“Wealth from get-rich-quick schemes quickly disappears; wealth from hard work
grows over time.” (Proverbs 13:11, NLT)

Once established, each income stream can be automated/made silent (in other words,
hands free—to whatever degree possible.) That will free up your time for more streams.

Even if you’re content with one stream, I recommend not settling there. While some people
find security in a single paycheck, I’m a huge proponent of choosing a more diversified
approach to earning income. That way, if anything should happen to one of the streams,
you still have plenty of others going. This is especially important when a stream is reliant
on a single platform that you don’t control. For example, right now thousands of our
students are succeeding wildly by selling goods on Amazon. However, they don’t like it
when I challenge them with this question:

“What would happen if Amazon shut you down tomorrow?”

I’m often told I’m being dramatic when I ask such questions but, as recently as a few years
ago, I was asking eBay selling professionals the same question. They laughed at me then,
but now 80 percent of them have been forced to move at least some of their time and
attention onto different platforms because eBay just isn’t the same as it used to be.

The fact is that eBay, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, and any other
“big boy” sites of online business could easily change direction, lose their base of loyal
users, or shut you down tomorrow for a random reason out of your control.

Are you thinking this could never happen to you? Don't operate from a place of wishful
thinking.

In fact, my large, popular, YouTube channel just vanished one day (See my Open Letter
to YouTube here), seemingly inexplicably. All I got from YouTube was a note that simply
said, “You’ve been banned, don’t ever open another YouTube account.” I was getting a
dozen or more new subscribers per day and numerous new customers and leads from my
YouTube account when this happened to me.

Fortunately, I was able to get my account back, thanks to an overwhelming response from
my community. But many good people lose their accounts or get inexplicably shut down all
the time by the major sites. It’s this sort of uncertainty that makes me such a big fan of
establishing multiple streams of income. With this approach, there are always multiple
creative solutions to move forward.

If you’re like most of our students, you’re probably pretty excited about getting started,
and you want more specifics regarding building your online empire. We’re almost there, I
promise. There is, however, one more element to building the foundation of your online
success that we need to discuss first: attitude.

28
 Chapter 3

Focus on Serving and Creating Value,

Not on Fear and Excuses
I told you in Chapter 1 that I could find excuses in my grades, my inexperience with
marketing, and my lack of writing skills. These and other traits would be great excuses if I
needed them to be, but my excuse potential doesn’t stop there. Consider this:

• I have no idea how to build a website.

• I use virtually none of what I learned in college in my business today.

• My parents are both alcoholics (clean and sober since I was 10, but it was a rough
start).

• I have five kids to feed and my wife earns virtually no income.

• I’m not well connected in my local community.

• I hate getting up early.

• I don’t like to learn new skills (nothing technical, please!).

• I really don’t like to work at night or early in the morning.

• I’m quickly bored by anything routine.

• I’m an introvert.

• I don’t like being on camera.

• I’m easily distracted and quickly move on to new projects.

Are you getting bored with my excuses yet? I could go on if you want me to! Those are all
100 percent true, but they aren’t complaints. They’re just reasons that make it appear I
shouldn’t be an online entrepreneur. In spite of it all, I’m grateful to be so successful
because I now can encourage you and others.

You may also have a laundry list of excuses. But I doubt you’re going to come up with one I
haven’t seen destroyed by those in our community. Because we’ve been doing this since
2002, my team and I have coached literally thousands of people through our coaching
program and spoken to tens of thousands of others who were considering launching an
online business—we’ve literally never seen an excuse that makes someone a bad candidate
to try our techniques.
29
Here’s why:

• You can succeed regardless of your location. Living inside the U.S. gives you
some advantages perhaps, but living outside the U.S. and finding creative local
goods to send into the U.S. is just as big of an advantage! We have students in our
community who live on small islands in the middle of nowhere running successful,
online, physical product businesses. They never see or touch their inventory; they
use a “prep partner” to help them manage their inventory in the U.S.

• You can succeed regardless of your budget for starting capital. Remember my
partner, eight-figure-income Brett, who started with just $400? We’ve seen many
other people start with less— just enough to acquire something to start selling. One
of our leaders even started out homeless!

• You can succeed regardless of your circumstances. We are seeing everything

from formerly homeless single moms now buying their first home to dads who are
excitedly leaving behind corporate careers because their online businesses are
soaring. Worried about limited space for inventory? Don’t be. Again, there are
workarounds, such as using Amazon warehouses to store inventory for you.

• You can succeed regardless of your age. The three models and five principles we
teach here are the same ones that my 17-year-old son currently uses with his own
online businesses that run entirely independent of mine. We even have 10-year-olds
in our community using some of these models!

• You can succeed regardless of what challenges you face in time or health
restrictions. This business is incredibly flexible! Some of our top students are
severely restricted from traveling from home or face other physical challenges that
prevent them from pursuing most traditional careers.

• You can succeed regardless of your education, race, gender, or previous

experiences. You just have to not be afraid of any of the barriers of the past in the
Internet business world. Your reputation and your business practices, both of which
we’ll teach you how to handle, are what online customers tend to use to decide if
they want to engage with you (and often, the online connection is all they see of
you). It truly is a new era.

• Finally, you can succeed even if you are afraid. For example, Cinnamon and
Jason Miles, started out with a simple eBay business model in 2008, but then used
our techniques to turn their small side income into a seven-figure multiple income
stream success—after overcoming a fear that they’d create an army of competitors.

The Miles story is a “Silent Sales Machine” classic, showing how students of our models and
principles can take one low-risk, high-reward step at a time into a new adventure. For
version 10 of this book, I requested an update to the Miles’ story which has appeared in
previous versions of this book; below is what Jason shared.

We started Liberty Jane clothing in February of 2008 by selling on eBay. My wife

Cinnamon was truly great at making 18-inch doll clothes, so, we quickly found a
30
following. I helped her with the marketing, and our revenue goal was $1,000 a
month.

We ran our business that way for two years and made $12,000 each year. Although
the extra money was nice, we had reached the limit of our business model and by
the summer of 2009, Cinnamon frequently was staying up until midnight sewing and
getting stressed out and burned out. Our operation just wasn’t sustainable or
scalable. We felt stuck and she was ready to walk away from the whole thing. We
wanted an online business so bad, but we didn’t know how to make it happen. We
needed to figure out how to leverage Cinnamon’s unique skill while freeing up her
time.

That summer, as I searched for new ideas, I found “The Silent Sales Machine” eBook.
The message was clear: build an email list, and offer digital products to your existing
customers.

It sounded good, but at the time we had no digital products and our eBay newsletter
list only had 125 people signed up. We debated publishing Cinnamon’s doll clothes
designs as PDF patterns, but we wondered: was Jim right? Or would we be creating
an army of competitors using her patterns to undermine her auction prices?

Would other people take her work and go further with it than we’d been able to?

Finally, that fall we decided to trust Jim’s advice and go digital. In September 2009,
we published our first four patterns. We sold 11 and gave away several hundred
more as our “ethical bribe” to begin building our newsletter list. Within six months,
our patterns were making as much as our eBay auctions ever had, and the decision
to offer digital products had proven to be a no-brainer. None of our fears
materialized. Then, we discovered more benefits than we could have imagined. Other
indie doll clothes designers started asking us if we would publish their patterns too. A
marketplace was born—and you can see it at pixiefaire.com.

But the benefits of Jim’s advice didn’t stop there.

Seamstresses started asking if they could use the patterns as the basis of their sew-
from-home work, and if we would help them understand how to successfully sell doll
clothes via auctions and other marketing strategies. As we expanded and began
offering consultations, our sales tripled to $36,000 in 2010. In 2011, they tripled
again to just over $100,000. We’ve gone on to sell millions online in our small corner
of the Internet.

I was able to leave my 9-to-5 career and join the company full time on January 1,
2014. It took six years, but it was worth the wait. Our brand leads our category, and
it’s surrounded by our marketplace that turns our competitors into collaborators and
ensures our long-term market leadership into the future. We also are passionate
about integrating generosity into all we do both personally and professionally. We
combat extreme poverty through a sewing program in Lusaka, Zambia.

31
 All of this stems from the summer of 2009 when we hit the wall, and then we got the
“Silent Sales Machine.” Jim, thanks for publishing it and for being our friend, mentor,
and coach.

Do you see how Jason and Cinnamon focused on creating value and serving rather than
fear and excuses? In doing this, they chased our principles to absolute-runaway, multiple-
income-stream Internet business success.

One caution, though: because of their example, you might be tempted to think that I only
teach students how to turn hobbies into businesses. That is not the case! The opportunities
we teach people to reach for are far more universally accessible than that.

In fact, the Miles’ story is the perfect example to show how Silent Sales Machine Principle
No. 1, “Serve and Create Value,” is the attitude that fuels online business success.

Serving over Selfishness

From an early age, many of us are taught the very dangerous (and selfish) mantra of
“pursue your dreams and only do what you love to do because you can do anything.” The
logic goes like this: Person X did it, so I can too!

It’s the same tainted logic that convinces young performers to strap a guitar to their backs
and move to Nashville rather than testing their marketability at a local venue, or to take a
few photos and move to Hollywood rather than seeing if the local theater is interested in
casting them in a play. More drastically, the same dangerous message convinces 5’ 8” high
school basketball players that their only life choice is the NBA, putting them “all-in” on that
goal with no room for failure.

The good news? Turning your hobby into a business does work—sometimes. You’ll even
read several compelling stories of people who did that in this very book.

The bad news? For nearly all of us, the odds of us getting to do “only the stuff I love to do”
are abysmal. I’m talking one-in-millions abysmal—sort of like the lottery (which I call a tax
on people who are really bad at math). Yet, each time we see a success story of a winner
who did beat the odds, we are somehow tempted to ignore the obviously overwhelming
odds against us.

But just like those who spend dollar after dollar on the lottery, people who strictly chase
their hobbies hoping for the same kind of success we see with our principles need a heavy
dose of reality. If that’s you, please hang with me here; I have good news. The voice of
reason is not as bad as you might be thinking. I’m all for turning a hobby into a business,
and I’m all for pursuing hobbies and dreams with passion. However, if you’re reading this
book because you want to pursue online business success, let me challenge you with this
question:

Why not go after the low-hanging fruit—looking for what people need and fulfilling that
need—first?

32
Predictable “low-hanging-fruit” success is all about what famed salesman, author, and
motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said: “You will get all you want in life, if you help
enough other people get what they want.” See, I’m a firm believer that the rules of
business success are timeless because human nature is timeless, and success in business
always involves serving and creating value for your clients. The fact is, doing this while
earning a much-deserved profit is always a virtuous and rewarding activity. Personally, I
love work because I love serving others! I look forward to work every day no matter where
that work takes me—and I’m not alone. I’ve met hundreds of fulfilled, excited
entrepreneurs who are amazed by the profits and liberty they have achieved as a result of
having their own income streams, even when the income is not associated with their
supposed “dream hobby.”

So, don’t make the mistake of determining that you’ll only be happy if you get to spend
your days pursuing your hobby while expecting the world to “pay you to play.” Building a
business is work, and you can learn to love many aspects of successfully running your own
businesses, even if you don’t love the work at first. That said, I think it’s a blast earning a
profit while working in my own business—and you can enjoy the same experience if you
approach online success from the same principles and attitudes.

Moreover, if you ignore the “Serve and Create Value” principle, it will be at your own peril!
I’ve yet to encounter a single failure story online where the idea of finding your audience
and serving them where they are—whether you are trying to sell a product, build your
audience, or act as a consultant—wasn’t the exact advice that would have saved the
concept from failure.

If, however, you embrace this “Serve and Create Value” principle, and the rest of the
concepts introduced here in Section One as you make choices about how to build your
Internet-based business, you’ll be prepared for any legitimate opportunity that you
encounter online. And once you are earning a great living from the low-risk, low-hanging
fruit that is everywhere in the Internet business world today, you’ll have plenty of time to
tinker with your hobby and try to turn it into another income stream later.

33
34
 Section One Wrap-Up:
Tips and Additional Resources
Believe me, there is more than enough Internet business to go around. Not only have my
two closest partners and I had several times where we’ve each used these ideas to put six
figures or more in the bank in a single day, we’ve now taught numerous others to succeed
at these levels with the concepts we just introduced to you.

There is not one “magical single path” I can show you that will take you to success online.
Your gifts, skills, attention span, personality, drive, experiences, location, connections,
interests, availability, creativity, and having a bit of cash to invest are all factors that may
influence which opportunities are available to you. But the bottom line of the essential
paths and principles you’ve been introduced to here in Section One will greatly benefit you
no matter which direction you go online. Let me share with you the two big promises I
make to my readers about the “Silent Sales Machine” way to Internet success any time I
share a business idea with them:

• “Silent Sales Machine” Promise No. 1: No Big Investments are Needed

The first promise is that you won’t be risking a large sum of money. I’m proud of the
fact that none of the models we teach require a large (or, in some cases, any)
upfront investment. Having a little cash on hand can help speed things up in some
cases, but big investments are never required for success online, and you can
actually damage your odds of success if you think your cash can save you from bad
decisions. The most compelling success stories in our readership/student base come
from those who started with virtually nothing. The era of needing a pile of cash or
taking out massive loans in order to start a business is over for those of us paying
attention.

• “Silent Sales Machine” Promise No. 2: No New Techie Skills are Required
The next promise is that being a tech-loving nerd isn’t necessary for online
entrepreneurship. Until 1995 or so, we were all taught that “your skills will take you
places”—so, of course for an online business, that sounds like you need to know how
to build a website or learn other technical skills. I reject that notion. I say
relationships, creativity, and just knowing how the online world works make you far
more valuable and likely to succeed than you’ll ever be if all you have is skills.

Most of my closest partners and the most successful leaders in our community are
technically challenged, yet we run very creative, highly automated and, extremely healthy
online businesses. So, none of the models we use or teach require you to perfect a new set
of difficult technical skills.

Section Two begin addressing the CES paths to success in more detail. But before we
continue: be warned! Reading the rest of Silent Sales Machine 10.0 could render you so
eager and excited about all the opportunities, that you could find it hard to be satisfied with
any “real job” ever again. In our community, we refer to this as being “certifiably
unemployable.”
35
36
 Section One Action Steps

Remember These Tips…

• All successful online business opportunities come down to three complementary and
universally powerful models: selling, expanding, and consulting.

• To succeed online, you’ll need to employ as many of our five principles as possible:
“Serve and Create Value,” “Grow an Audience,” “Guard Your Reputation,” “Only Do
What You Can Do,” and “Avoid Online Entrepreneur Pitfalls.”

• Even though this is a book about multiple income streams, please don’t make the
mistake of thinking that you can launch multiple successful businesses all at once. If
you try to build multiple income streams from day one, you’ll bounce around getting
very little accomplished! Remember the children’s story about the racing tortoise and
hare? The lesson—slow and steady wins the race—holds true online as well.

• Please don’t ever fall into the trap that says, “I’ll only love my work if I can turn my
favorite hobby into my business.” This is a common misconception and a dangerous
trap that could prevent you from succeeding! Start by focusing on the profits and
liberty that result from going after the low-hanging fruit: looking for what people
need and fulfilling that need.

• Learn to serve and create value, and you’ll see opportunity all around you.

• Don’t get caught up in excuses. There is absolutely no reason you can’t succeed with
the Silent Sales Machine 10.0 paths and principles, if you’re willing to follow proven
advice.

Check Out These Free Resources…

I’m proud of each profitable business I have and I freely share the details with anyone who
is willing to listen. We communicate about it with our growing audience in part through a
free podcast show called “Silent Sales Machine Radio” found at SilentJim.com/podcast.
To hear more in-depth discussions about multiple income streams and how to be
methodical in your approach online, visit SilentJim.com/podcast and listen to the first
ten episodes or so—and read on for specific information available in podcasts and other free
resources.

• You’ll read lots here and throughout the book about my blog. Be sure to check out
the reader comments, which often include fantastic tips and priceless “ah-ha!”
moments. You’ll find my blog at jimcockrum.com.

• Worried you’re too late to get in the online entrepreneurship game? Don’t be. To get
the proper perspective on the unprecedented and massive scope of the opportunity,

37
 check out my discussion on the subject in SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No.
12.

• Learn about the concept of becoming a specialist as you add new streams, focusing
on managing fewer and fewer tasks while the new streams accumulate around you
and flow into one big unstoppable river of income, in SilentJim.com/podcast
Episode No. 4.

• Learn more about how Brett Bartlett went from zero income streams and knowing
nothing about selling online to having nine income streams very quickly by checking
out this video: 9 Quick Income Streams. For more updates on where Brett’s
business is now, check out SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 2. (Look for Brett
in other episodes too. Number 16 is a fan favorite!)

• Check out the insane story of a client going from nearly broke to watching his
company’s 2016 Super Bowl ad in SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 9.

• Get the full story on how my large, popular, YouTube channel simply vanished one
day and then the readers of this book helped saved it here.

• Listen to a live testimonial from Barrington, a student in our community who lives in
Jamaica and runs a successful online physical product business. He never sees or
touches most of his inventory, yet he sells products globally–all from the small island
of Jamaica. You can hear our interview towards the top of the website
ProvenAmazonCourse.com.

• If you’d like to better get to know Cinnamon and Jason Miles, the wonderful couple
who turned a $1,000-a-month doll clothing business into a runaway million-dollar,
multiple-income-stream success, check out my interview with Jason on
SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 8.

• I talk about focusing on serving and creating value rather than only on tinkering with
your hobby in SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 6. Scroll to the 27-minute
mark to hear me discuss why I really don’t like the phrase, “Do what you love and
you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Train Further…
Our Facebook community, is free to join. This is where we hang out with successful
students and readers from around the world who have made great things happen online
and credit our ideas for much of their success. You’ll find us learning from and encouraging
each other at MySilentTeam Facebook Group.

I mentioned my partner Brett’s path to success included not only this book but also
investing in my Proven Amazon Course. You’ll find references to this deeper training
throughout Silent Sales Machine 10.0. For those who want to dive deep quickly and have
additional resources to put toward getting started, it’s a worthwhile investment. Learn more
at ProvenAmazonCourse.com.
38
 SECTION TWO

The “S” of the CES Models:

Sell

Selling Physical Goods Online

39
40
 Introduction to
Selling Physical Goods Online
Now that you’ve had a chance to see an overview of the Silent Sales Machine way of doing
Internet business, we’re ready to break it down piece by piece. Again, although we’ve
fondly nicknamed our three business models CES, I’m reversing the order as we dive into
them because the “S” model is where most of our students begin–and a great many
readers of this book are thrilled to stay with only the “S” model.

As I mentioned previously, currently less than 10 percent of all retail spending is done
online. By the year 2020, that number will be as high as 25 percent, based on current
projections. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars in more spending with plenty of growth
coming at us fast! As consumers are moving online by the millions and making more and
more of their purchases from online channels, those virtual store shelves need to be
stocked and ready for the wave of new spending that is coming in the next two decades.

At the most foundational level, becoming a seller who stocks those virtual shelves can
simply entail buying on-sale and discounted items and reselling them online for a profit.
This process is known as “arbitrage.” As we’ve coached thousands of students through
launching online businesses with an arbitrage model, we’ve observed what we call the
typical life cycle of a successful online seller. The path often looks like this:

1. You start with an inch-deep mile-wide strategy where you are buying just a few of
many types of products from stores, websites or even garage sales or other local
sources, then you resell them online for a profit.

2. In that process, you find your niche and begin to do a bit of “specializing” and
producing even greater profits with streamlined systems.

3. Once you’re firmly established, you’ll start developing new income streams.

Some are quite content to remain in the “inch deep and a mile wide” strategy long term—
buying lots of types of products in small quantities—but we'll encourage you to journey
towards specialization for the most stable models long term. This is the only way you'll be
able to grow into multiple income streams.

Here in Section Two, you’ll see all five of the “Silent Sales Machine” principles in play—
starting with “Serve and Create Value.” Remember, when it comes to the “S” (selling)
model, the challenge isn’t trying to figure out how to sell the stuff you want to sell. That’s
the way business was done before the Internet came along.

The more profitable, lower-risk challenge is this: set out to find audiences who are already
gathered and then find out what they want but don’t yet have. That way, you can know
whether something is marketable before you spend a dime accumulating merchandise.

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42
 Chapter 4

Discover Your Niche Market and

What Customers Want but
Can’t Get Online—Yet
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could tell you specifically what exact product you should begin with?
I wish I could! The game is always changing when it comes to finding profitable products to
sell. That’s the bad news, and it’s the good news at the same time. This means there will
always be new opportunities to find profitable inventory all around you. (It also means, of
course, that you’ll always have competitors. That’s the nature of business!)

That said, you do want to be strategic in making inventory-buying decisions. We have a

saying that we use all the time with new students: “You make your money when you buy
your inventory, not when you sell it.” This means you should do your hard work and
research before you buy inventory. Once you invest in your inventory, it’s really hard to
push it if the market doesn’t want it.

So, while we can’t tell you exactly what to invest in (and p.s.—neither can anyone else),
what we can talk about is how to investigate niche markets, find your customer base, and
discover what it is they are looking for online but have not yet found.

Niche markets such as “how to make money,” “relationships,” “kids,” “pets,” and
“beauty/fitness” are everywhere for a reason: these are some of the most emotionally
charged, polarizing, and passionate markets out there. But they aren’t the only ones; there
are thousands of other niche markets to get into. I’ve coached successful businesses in
niche markets including real estate, paint-ball accessories, guitar pedals, hand-made
wreaths, alternate running shoes, gaming and various pet niche markets, just to name a
few.

In all cases, online selling success starts out with choosing a niche with plenty of qualified
prospects already eager for more. In other words, you want to look for what we call
“passionate prospects.” Passionate prospects are people so excited about a product they
can’t sleep nights—or at least wake up every day thinking about and wanting to spend
money on that product.

Becoming the seller who provides what passionate prospects want. That is how you ride the
“Serve and Create Value” Principle—which in this context, we often call our “Find Your
Audience” concept—all the way to the bank.

It’s not crazy to have a dream or create a product. But it is unnecessarily risky to start
there. Your audience is already gathered somewhere. It's not necessary to invest in your

43
product before you find your audience. Work out a plan to find your audience and connect
with them before you go into invention, investment, or production mode!

Depending on what you’re researching, your ideal customers might be single moms with
older kids, or married couples with dual careers—but your target demographic is not the
answer I’m looking for when I ask about your audience. Finding your audience is not about
finding out who your audience is; it’s about finding out exactly where online your audience
is residing. I want to know what websites, blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, and
YouTube channels they are gathered around. I want to see you come up with a list of the
names and websites of leaders in your niche—specifically, those who have large followings
on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. (I call these people “gatekeepers”). I want to see that
you know who owns an email list full of eager, engaged fans who might want what you
have to offer. And I want you to find out, by asking great questions, what these people
want that they don’t yet have.

Another way to find out what people want but don’t yet have is testing concepts on
Facebook through video for a few dollars. In essence, you can shoot a cheap video that
features your product and see, by the response, whether you should invest more in the
product. It’s so cheap that my team and I use this way of investigating audience interest all
the time—and it has paid off to the tune of millions. We recently posted some very simple
videos on Facebook that were recorded with a handheld smartphone and they went viral.
We knew by the response that we should invest in the product used in the video and we
did—and sold millions of dollars’ worth of it very rapidly. It was insane—and we had no idea
that we’d need thousands of units until the passionate prospective buyers told us how
interested they were.

Again, the lesson is that we don’t invest in product first and then eagerly try to market out
of our investment. We instead find—or even create—demand first, and only then do we
invest in product in a significant way.

Finding your audience and investigating what they want is how to have a virtually foolproof
certainty of success before spending a dime. You’ll find it’s quite rare to see experts
teaching this obvious lesson. That’s probably because it’s not an easy sell. What seems so
strange about this selling model is that deciding which product to sell isn’t first (or even
second) on your to-do list. You aren’t investing big time or money in building websites,
writing books, creating products, or looking for sources for products until you find yourself
in front of an audience that is begging for these things. You may start out with one idea,
find out that’s it’s not a hot-ticket item, discover something else that is, and never actually
create your own products—you might just sell other people’s products!

I’d estimate that 95 percent of all online entrepreneurs I meet or deal with are shocked and
confused when they first hear the “Find Your Audience” concept, but after they consider the
idea briefly, it makes total sense to nearly every one of them. If you fail once, twice, or
more at trying to build a business online, come back to this chapter, and you’ll see
immediately where you went wrong. It will make far more sense if you've been through a
few failed product concepts.

44
Once the ideas I’ve shared in this chapter make sense to you, you’ll see the world of online
business differently. When you’ve found your potential customers and ideally discovered
what they’re eager to buy and unable to find, you can begin to accumulate inventory.

See how easy this is? You’ll have an audience begging for what you’re going to sell before
you ever invest a dime!

Your next step is becoming very intentional about making good inventory purchasing
decisions.

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46
 Chapter 5

Making Good
Inventory-Purchasing Decisions
Even after you’ve discovered a niche market—and the types of products its customers are
eager to buy, but can’t yet get online—you don’t want to go all-in on one product.

As we’ve taught thousands of people to make that first sale on their way to building an
incredible business, we’ve recognized there are some go-to ways to get off to a great start.
Remember I mentioned that the typical life cycle of a successful online seller involves
starting by buying many types of items? That’s normally our first big piece of advice to
nearly all new sellers who want to make money as quickly and reliable as possible.

This “inch deep, mile wide” approach, as we call it, means you look for any types of
products that you can flip for a profit—even if you can only find a few of each different
item. In fact, that’s what we recommend. Diversifying, rather than going after one product,
allows you to test the waters for a product you can latch on to. At first, you are not looking
for long-term, sustainably profitable products. We want to see you get confident making a
few sales first, and we don’t care what product you sell to realize those first few profitable
sales.

That said, going an inch deep and a mile wide is really about verifying the level of demand
in a niche before you go deep into it. Testing small quantities of several items is a great
way to research and discover new opportunities. This is the strategy we’ve used to uncover
numerous opportunities in our own business without ever having to guess what the market
wants.

So, let’s talk about some tips and tools to take into consideration when making good
inventory-buying decisions.

• Seasonally Hot Items that You Purchase Off-Season are Always a Great Bet!
You can buy seasonal-specific items right when they go on sale after a major holiday
and sell them for big profits on Amazon or other online selling channels 10 months
later. This is true for any major shopping holiday. One seller in our community
bought a few thousand dollars of Valentine’s Day items including chocolates, stored
them for a year (while minding expiration dates, of course) and sold $10,000 profit
worth of them the next year on Amazon. It’s not complicated.

• Selling Books is Also Usually a Big Winner. Another simple model that is fairly
newbie-friendly is to focus on selling used books. There are some long-term storage
fee considerations with this model, but getting started and seeing profits is fairly
straightforward, and the potential inventory is all around you.

47
 • Use Amazon’s Seller App. The Amazon Seller App serves one basic purpose:
assisting sellers in finding out what inventory they are eligible to sell. Available to
registered sellers on Amazon in the U.S. and most (but not all) other countries, it
allows you to scan items by barcode and check the price they’re selling for, the
quantity, if any, that others currently sell, and other valuable data to help you rapidly
make a “purchase” or “pass” decision on potential merchandise. The Amazon Seller
App is a great tool.

• Recent eBay Results Can Indicate Popularity in Multiple Markets. Amazon

does not share information about what is and isn’t selling well on their site recently,
but eBay is very willing to share it. Use this fact to your advantage across platforms!
If a product is selling well on eBay, it’s quite likely to sell well on Amazon too. Use
the recent pricing and sales results data on eBay to get an idea of what the online
value of an item is currently. To search recent sales on eBay, search for any item
using the “advanced” search feature on eBay and then choose the “completed
listings” option.

• Amazon Sales Rank Offers Clues (Though Imperfect as an Indicator). On

Amazon, the product sales rank is easily accessed by looking up any product. This
info is useful, although you want to keep in mind that sales rank is subject to major
fluctuation from day to day (especially for many lower-ranked products). In other
words, one day’s “high” sales rank is not a guarantee of sales results, nor is a “low”
sales rank an indication that you shouldn’t pursue a particular item. On
MySilentTeam.com, we keep charts like our Amazon Categories Decision Helper
and Hottest Categories on eBay), updated regularly, to help sellers gauge what
the sales rank might mean for any given product, and we have videos to help you
interpret results.

• Look for the Gaps. The fact that sales ranks aren’t fail-proof actually disguises a
piece of good news: there are millions of gaps yet to be filled online and on Amazon.
Remember, you’re looking for what people want but can’t yet get, or products with
higher demand than supply so that you can discover and verify an ideal niche for
yourself.

As you can see, there are a variety of opportunities for low-hanging fruit when it comes to
products to test online.

Where you find products may vary, too.

Where to Find Profitable Inventory to Resell Online

Beginners usually find early success with three solid methods for “sourcing” products—in
other words, for finding sources for inventory.

• Stores (Retail Arbitrage, or RA): Virtually every time I visit a retail store, I come
across winning items to add to my online selling inventory. The closeout aisle of any
major chain or overstock discount store will frequently have great finds for you as
well. We have hundreds of students in our community who make a full-time living
48
 using only this strategy earning tens of thousands or more monthly on sites like
Amazon, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace.

That’s what we call “retail arbitrage.” Remember “arbitrage” is simply the name for
buying on-sale and discounted items at retail stores and flipping them for a profit.

• Websites (Online Arbitrage, or OA): You can find incredible inventory that can be
flipped onto Amazon or other for nice profits simply by shopping on lesser known
websites online looking for deals and sales. We call this this “online arbitrage.” With
very little training, this strategy alone can uncover huge opportunities.

• Yard Sales and Estate Sales: You will never find higher margins anywhere in your
online selling business than you’ll find sitting in neighborhood driveways. With the
most basic of tools and virtually no training required besides what you’ve read in this
book, you could be a potential yard-sale selling hawk!

One word of advice: even these simple sources for finding products to resell can be a bit of
an adventure with the ever-shifting rules on some brands.

Using Caution When Choosing Big Brand Products

There’s an ongoing struggle between big selling sites like eBay and Amazon and the power
players of some major brands who don’t like “regular people” buying and reselling the
products they’ve created and want to control. For example, the NFL (National Football
League) is notorious for threatening those who sell officially licensed goods on Amazon or
eBay without purchasing it through a licensed manufacturer. (Obviously, they work extra
hard to stop any non-licensed goods from being sold.) As a result, we avoid most of the
biggest and most recognized brands when selling on Amazon.

Fortunately, there is a law called the “first sale doctrine” in the U.S. that essentially states
that once you buy something, you own it and you can sell it to whoever you’d like for
whatever price you’d like. Additionally, eBay and Amazon are on our side. This doesn’t
mean that you won’t find sellers of some brands getting shut down from time to time,
though. You may also be accused of intellectual property violation or counterfeit by the big
brand owners; these tactics are ever present. The vast majority of these issues are
resolved without incident of course, but the more you expose yourself to brands and
licensed products owned by others when doing arbitrage, the more your odds of exposure
to these challenges rises.

Although you’re wise to be aware of potential challenges (and what path doesn’t have
them?), there’s no reason you should shy away from the simple, legal arbitrage models.
They are not only encouraged by Amazon, the biggest of the big online marketplaces, but
they’re also highly profitable! There are many ways to “flip” profitable arbitrage finds.
Amazon is only one of many great options. Even the free option of Facebook Marketplace
can be used to sell just about anything!

Now, it’s time to make that first sale—which, of course, means it’s time to officially become
a seller.
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50
 Chapter 6

Signing Up to Sell and Choosing

Your Marketplace
There’s no big mystery to becoming a seller on Amazon, eBay or other sites. If you simply
visit eBay.com or Amazon.com, you can quickly go through the process of signing up to
be a seller. This is true for any online selling platform, which include options you might not
think of, like Walmart.com. (The possibilities really are endless.) After you open an
account, each site then takes you through the basics of becoming a seller on their site.

So, let’s talk about which site to start with. For most of us, that’s a no brainer.

As I update this book, the largest platform with the brightest future for online sellers like
you and me is Amazon.com—by far. Spend some time browsing Amazon. You’ll discover
millions of products are being sold there, including everything from diapers to pool tables.
Amazon relies on third-party sellers like us to stock its warehouses and website with these
products, which is why the marketplace encourages the very practices you’re learning in
this section. Selling physical goods on Amazon is a hard business opportunity to ignore.

Some advantages of selling on Amazon include:

• Amazon is the most shopped and trusted online marketplace.

• It’s easy to get your account set up in the U.S. as well as in most other countries.

• They have incredible free tools like the Amazon Seller App.

• Virtually any barcoded item that isn’t restricted can be easily sold on Amazon, even if
you put your own barcode on your own products.

• Amazon is growing like crazy right now and set for a decade or more of sustained
growth.

If you don’t want to box and ship every item yourself, you can send your entire inventory to
Amazon using their Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) program.

There’s a huge success rate for sellers on Amazon with virtually zero risks if you go about it
with the caution that my team and I advise.

Other sites exist where you might consider starting, like eBay, but those other sites take a
distant second place to Amazon. There are disadvantages to eBay as opposed to Amazon.
For example, eBay has a fraction of the shopping traffic, and you are responsible to ship

51
every item yourself and therefore typically can’t take a vacation without shutting down your
business or having someone in charge of fulfillment. In other words, it’s hard to automate
(make hands-free).

Still, you want to use eBay instead of Amazon when you’re selling any unique, old,
collectible, or other unusual item when you are unsure of the value. One eBay advantage to
keep in mind is that they allow you to capture buyer emails when done correctly, while
Amazon is quite strict on this and does not ever allow it.

Whether you choose Amazon, eBay, both, or even more platforms, the best marketplaces
where you can sell your goods online already exist. In other words, even though there are
tons of businesses pushing you to create your own website, let me save you a huge
headache.

Rarely does any business or individual with a product to sell have a good reason to start
with their own website.

Where Not to Start: By Building a New Website

Building any kind of website as your starting point in online business is almost always a
huge mistake. Millions of customers are already on Amazon and eBay—and if you can’t get
their attention there, you’ll have an exponentially harder time selling products from your
own website.

I’m going against the grain of what you’ll hear from many other “experts,” but, then again,
I’ve been at this longer than most of the other leaders in this game. As I’ve seen experts
and students alike succeed and fail, I’ve observed this fact: building a website is probably
step 4 or 5 (at the earliest) if you are going to succeed online. Again, the first step is
always finding where a target audience is already hanging out online, and then you
strategically approach the process of getting your products and ideas in front of that
gathered audience.

I love helping beginners start out with low-hanging-fruit opportunities like selling on
Amazon or eBay, because I know I can get you going in a successful direction on those
platforms. A little training and a bit of creativity and you’ve got a successful business with
momentum! After that, you are possibly ready to expand into a website that makes money
starting on Day 1.

Even Amazon—the Best of the Best—Has Disadvantages

If you intend to start out simply by selling physical products, building a mailing list may not
be high on your to-do list at first. However, as you start to settle into a niche, you’ll find
email marketing and growing an audience of prospects to be the most powerful asset you
can pursue. Having the contact information of your customers is a powerful advantage and
provides long-term stability. From this perspective, Amazon gives us, as sellers, less of an
advantage when compared to eBay. On Amazon, it’s virtually impossible to capture
customer email addresses; Amazon is very protective of this. They consider your buyer to
52
be their customers, not yours. On eBay however, you can employ some creative “list
growth” strategies and be well within policy.

Another common Amazon negative that gets far more attention than it deserves is the
suspension or “seller account loss” issue. Fears of account suspension used to cause some
sellers to worry about losing their account, but insurance is now available, and industry
averages tell us that if for some reason you are suspended, you will typically be reinstated
95 percent of the time. As long as you pay attention to what Amazon is asking of you, you’ll
be fine.

While it’s helpful to know about the advantages and disadvantages of Amazon and eBay,
any seller aiming for success should probably be on both selling platforms—especially the
juggernaut that is Amazon, which has more shoppers by far than any other online platform.
During the most recent Christmas shopping season, Amazon’s online sales were a whopping
30 percent, of all online sales in the U.S., while thousands of other sites battled it out for
the remaining 70 percent.

Clearly Amazon is not to be ignored, and it's a great starting point for any online business
building effort.

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54
 Chapter 7

Becoming an Amazon Expert:

FBA and ProvenAmazonCourse.com
Amazon’s FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) is the revolutionary concept that propelled the
company past every competitor it had. FBA is the shipping and order fulfillment side of
Amazon. As a seller, you can send just about any inventory you’d like to Amazon and
Amazon will store and ship the items to your customers when these items sell. Since it
means you can sell just about anything on Amazon to any country where they have
warehouses, this is an awesome feature not just for those who want to make their
businesses as “silent” as possible, but also for those who don’t have room for inventory, or
easy access to the best deals in person.

Even if you don't live in a country where there is an Amazon warehouse, you can easily
have a partner do all the inventory preparation for you and send it in to Amazon. For
example, let’s say you live outside the U.S. in a small apartment where managing your own
inventory is impossible. Here’s the process that takes you from your computer to a check in
your hand without ever seeing or touching inventory:

1. Shop online on any U.S.-based website.

2. Buy products that are selling for less online than they sell for on Amazon.com.

3. Have the seller ship the products that you buy to a U.S.-based prep/ship partner
(several are in the downloadable document here). We have students with
manufacturers that ship product directly to Amazon for them as well.

4. The partner prepares your shipment for Amazon, puts your labels on the boxes, and
then sends the products in to Amazon for storage until your items sell.

5. Amazon does the fulfillment and manages all aspects of customer interaction.

6. When products sell, you get a check from Amazon minus the fees that Amazon
charges to process and store your inventory.

Of course, you can do the shipping and labor yourself when you start out and save yourself
some fees, but don’t let a lack of space or a remote living location discourage you;
hundreds of others in challenging circumstances are thriving on Amazon due to FBA.

55
Advantages of Adding Amazon FBA Service to Your Business
When you use FBA, your products are listed for sale on Amazon as “Fulfilled by Amazon”
which gives you a huge advantage over any other items which are listed as “merchant
fulfilled” (the designation for shipping goods yourself). Here’s why: tens of millions of
shoppers have a paid “Amazon Prime” membership that gets them free shipping on all FBA
items. Many Prime shoppers on Amazon only shop for FBA items—and Amazon Prime
shoppers aren’t nearly as price sensitive as others, focusing instead on fast shipping, which
Amazon provides. This means you could have a competitor with a far lower price who is
using “merchant fulfilled” to ship his own orders on Amazon, while you take the lazy route
and sell via FBA at a higher price—yet sell more at the higher price because customers
prefer FBA.

Also, your listings are more likely to appear at the top of the Amazon search results if you
use FBA.

This is because Amazon would rather ship from their own warehouse and ensure their own
shipping time frame than rely on shippers who are sending their goods from home or
various businesses.

Other benefits of FBA include:

• Amazon provides fast, reliable, and very cheap shipping for your customers.

• Amazon handles all return issues for you. That means no customer hassles. No
emails at 2 a.m. about measurements. No “best offers” to review. No waiting for late
payments. Did I mention no customer hassles?

• It makes it easy to go an inch deep and a mile wide. Who cares whether you
have a variety of shapes and sizes if it’s not hanging around in your house? With
FBA, you can be as diverse as you’d like in your inventory selections without
worrying about all the headaches that can go with being diversified.

• You can take a vacation anytime you’d like and your business continues to
function. We have several Amazon selling students who travel full-time while
growing their businesses. They source products from wherever they are in the world
and send their finds to Amazon!

• You can purge old inventory with the click of a button. Amazon will destroy,
donate, or ship it back to you, and you are even offered a free inventory report to
show you what products they suggest you purge to avoid higher fees.

• Amazon offers relatively cheap storage. Overall, the fees are very cheap. That
said, it’s something to keep an eye on as your business grows. Storage fees can
sneak up on you if you don’t purge your inventory.

• It lets you simplify your business model. Especially if you have a prep partner,
FBA paves the way for employing “Silent Sales Machine” Principle No. 4: “Only Do
What Only You Can Do.” In other words, it allows you to be in the business of doing
56
 one thing—finding profitable inventory. You don’t have to interact with customers at
all if you don’t want to.

• FBA isn’t limited to selling on Amazon. If you choose to sell items using eBay,
your own website, or any other method, Amazon FBA can still be your fulfillment
agent. (But list your items on Amazon.com, too, to see what happens. You’d be
crazy not to.)

Keeping these benefits in mind, you also need to keep an eye on a few issues with Amazon
FBA. For example, losing physical control of your inventory can be a little nerve-wracking
for some. Also, it can be tricky keeping track of the different fees. Finally, there’s a delay
element with FBA. If you want to put an item you have in hand up for sale on Amazon by
managing the fulfillment yourself, your product can be live on Amazon a few moments from
now with customers buying a few minutes later. However, if you sell via FBA, you’ll have to
wait until your products are received and checked in by Amazon at an FBA warehouse
before customers can see your inventory up for sale. It takes a bit of time for Amazon to
process your inventory into their system, and the delay is especially noticeable in December
each year when this process can take a few weeks.

Obviously, we’re big fans of FBA. Taking advantage of Amazon FBA is not the only way to
become an Amazon expert, though. That concept could easily be a book all by itself—which
is why we created the most comprehensive, up-to-date course in the world on the topic of
selling physical products on Amazon.

Are You Ready to Jump into Amazon? Consider the

ProvenAmazonCourse.com Course
Because Amazon represents the hottest marketplace in the hottest legitimate online
opportunity arena, and because of the tremendous success of so many in our community
on that platform, we decided to create a comprehensive course on the topic of selling
successfully on Amazon starting from scratch. In 2008, we proudly launched our flagship
Proven Amazon Course, and we’ve been updating it and improving it constantly ever since.
Found only at ProvenAmazonCourse.com, it has a large support staff, stacks and stacks
of great success stories, and a huge online global community discussing aspects of the
course all day every day in our Facebook group.

As I pointed out when I first mentioned the PAC in Section One, you’re going to find
references to this course throughout the book. We’ve even broken out some parts of it to
provide for free, such as the Proven Amazon Course Endorsed Tools, Apps, & Services list
you can download here.

That list gives you information about tools that automate your selling process. You’ll get a
great list of prep/ship fulfillment companies among other resources. The PAC is filled with
incredible resources, and we keep the price ridiculously low compared to the value.

Perhaps the best part is that if you buy PAC, you never have to spend any more money on
your online sales education because we have more than 30 people helping update,
57
moderate, and expand the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course constantly at no charge to
past students.

Once you grasp the basics of selling on Amazon, the next question you'll have is “What
should I sell?” The PAC answers that common question with training modules with dozens
of great options!

58
 Chapter 8

Moving Beyond Newbie:

Advanced Ways to Find Inventory
Remember my partner Brett, who started out with an earlier version of this book and only
$400 to invest? He purchased the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course and then went on to
be one of our all-time most successful students.

As Brett began to succeed with the PAC course, he took a very cautious, yet predictably
profitable approach to sourcing and selling inventory. Rather than risking large amounts of
capital on inventory he was unsure about, he instead started experimenting with using
Amazon paid ads to find what we now call the “golden gaps” on Amazon. Brett used this
strategy—which we came to call our $10,000,000 Proven Performance Inventory strategy—
to build an eight-figure business on Amazon with a team of more than 100 people helping
him manage it all!

Granted, Brett’s path is exceptionally successful. That said, it’s just one demonstration of
the third phase of the typical seller life cycle—learning and developing more advanced
strategic approaches to finding inventory to sell—we’ve seen play out in varying degrees in
thousands of our students.

Trade Show Sourcing (And You May Not Even Have to Leave
Home)
Large trade shows are where dozens to hundreds or more manufacturers or wholesalers set
up booths and sell bulk inventory to businesses. Traditionally, retail outlets were the
primary buyers at these shows, but with increasing frequency it’s the online sellers like us
who show up as well. These environments can be a great way to find solid inventory at
great prices!

For now, here’s a huge secret to trade-show sourcing: you don’t have to actually attend the
shows to get a lot of the benefits! You can register for the show, contact the vendors listed
in the materials, and ask for the show discounts even if you don’t attend! We had one
student, Jim Peterson, do this with huge success. He even wrote a book for our community.
The book title is Trade Show No Show, available at TradeShowNoShow.com (which is
absolutely free if you own the PAC course).

Bulk Wholesale Sourcing

Finding profitable sources of wholesale products to resell online for nice profits is not a
complex process—and I don’t mean just seeing what items at Sam’s, Costco, or BJ’s are
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allowed to be sold individually. Simply by searching Google for the name of your hometown
and then the word “wholesale,” you could uncover gold mines of product and partnership
opportunities near you. And honestly, there’s no reason to work only with those sources
near you; you can use these strategies to work with any business.

When doing wholesale, it’s very easy to establish your own brand and protect yourself from
competitors. We call that strategy getting your own “private label.”

Private Label Products

Basically, using a private label is a strategy that designates a product manufactured or
packaged for sale under the name of the retailer (that’s you) rather than that of the
manufacturer. In other words, it simply means working with a product as your own branded
item.

The benefits of doing private label are obvious. If you are the only seller, you set the price.
You have a product that is far less likely to get into a price war with other sellers. It also
simplifies your focus. Where retail or online arbitrage requires you to keep moving
constantly to seek new, profitable products, a successful private label strategy means
keeping enough stock on hand to meet demand once you are rolling.

This is why we spend a lot of time in our Proven Amazon Course talking about creating your
own private label products or establishing exclusive relationships with manufacturers or
wholesalers. We know if you have a successful and thriving online selling business, private
label is worth doing in a simple manner. But don’t start out going all in with your own
product line on Amazon. Get your experience slowly in a low-risk fashion by circling back to
going an inch deep and a mile wide. You can be safe and smart and still wind up with a
great private label success story once you have a feel for the business.

Looking for the golden gaps, using trade shows or wholesale to find products in unique
ways, and experimenting with private label products after you’re on very firm ground are
just a few of the exciting opportunities in the “S” (selling) model of online success. Really,
the opportunities are endless.

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 Section Two Wrap-Up:
Tips and Additional Resources
If Section Two is the only section of this book that you read—and if you take action based
on what you’ve just read—you’ll be in great shape to launch your first successful income
stream online.

Based on what we’ve seen among readers using earlier editions of this book, starting simple
and getting some momentum is the best way to build successful online businesses. A few
early victories such as making your first sale on eBay or Amazon can ignite an unstoppable
desire to continue and grow in your niche. Then, you have valuable information, insight,
and experience that can benefit others, which indicates potential for more income streams.
We’ve seen it happen time and time again!

Now, you might think that to have multiple income streams, you’ll need a whole set of new
skills with each new stream. Not true. See, the second phase in the life cycle of a seller—
becoming more of a specialist as you add new streams—means capitalizing on what you’ve
learned as you discover your niche. For example, if you try selling one toy and find you
have a hit on your hands, you may try another—and before long, not only are you selling
toys on multiple platforms, but also, you’re the person who knows the ins and outs of the
appetite for toys in the online community. From what customers are looking for that’s not
yet available to other sellers, to knowing the best seasons to sell certain toys.

Some sellers, however, get distracted from Silent Sales Machine Principle No. 1 (“Serve and
Create Value”). Entrepreneurial instincts tend to balk at this, and it can be hard to focus on
finding your audience before getting completely caught up in what you want to sell.
Hopefully, though, finding your audience first is something that you will come around to
quickly because embracing this lesson early on will save you so much time, heartache, and
money. Then, what starts out as a skill becomes an instinct for most people who stick with
it—and once the “Find Your Audience” concept becomes instinctual, you’ll find yourself
saying no to a lot of marginally good ideas while you actively pursue far more exciting and
predictably profitable right ideas!

The “S” model could easily be the heart of your business efforts for an indefinite amount of
time. Hundreds of students can be found in our community who have built seven figure
businesses using only this model.

However, if you want to progress to expanding your online business and influence, you’ll
need to transition from serving one-time customers to developing ongoing relationships
with an audience of fans who are eager for what you have to offer and respect what you
have to say. Section Three (“Expand”) focuses on growing just such an audience and
serving them well.

First, though, we have Action Steps for you to take with you as you depart Section Two.

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62
 Section Two Action Steps

Remember These Tips…

• There’s no need to be intimidated about selling physical goods online. The risks are
virtually non-existent if you research your potential audience and inventory before
investing.

• In that vein, never spend a pile of cash on inventory until you are positive it’s a good
investment based on proof that customers are waiting and wanting to order.

• You don’t need to find a single hot product in order to succeed at online selling (a
frequent concern for beginners); instead, explore retail, online, or yard/estate sales
products with an “inch deep mile wide” approach when you first begin.

• The hard work and research you do before you buy inventory includes checking out
how it’s doing on Amazon and eBay, verifying you’re approved to sell that item, and
keeping in mind the risks of some brand-name products.

• Don’t start out by building a website to sell your product! The best marketplaces on
which you can sell your goods online already exist (Amazon, eBay, retail sites that
allow outside sellers, etc.). Building a website is probably step 4 or 5 (at the earliest)
if you are going to succeed online.

• As of this writing, Amazon represents the best opportunity for the majority of this
book’s readers who have yet to earn a profit online.

• Email marketing and growing a list of prospects may not be high on your to-do list at
first, but as you start to settle into a niche, you’ll find it vital if you want to grow a
sustainable and smooth-running business. At least make a mental note to come back
to it (and don’t ignore eBay’s advantages in this department).

• Although you’re wise to be aware of the potential challenges (and what path doesn’t
have them?), there’s no reason you should shy away from the simple, legal online
and retail arbitrage models. They are not only encouraged by Amazon, the biggest of
the big online marketplaces, but they’re also highly profitable! Don't stay there as
your only strategy, but it's a good starting point for most people.

• Remember, even if somehow your Amazon seller account is suspended, 95 percent of

the time you can get reinstated if you pursue reversal of your situation properly. The
majority of the time, Amazon only suspends permanently those they consider to be
“bad actors.” Accidental policy violations rarely are enough to get your account
permanently suspended.

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 • Fulfillment by Amazon, FBA, is an awesome feature for people who don’t have room
for inventory, those who want to make their businesses as hands-free as possible, or
those who don’t have easy access to the best deals in person.

• The Proven Amazon Course, PAC, at ProvenAmazonCourse.com is a powerful

investment for those interested in launching or growing an Amazon-based business.
Our team updates PAC frequently, PAC expands with new modules and training
courses and books, and is a one-time investment–for life.

• Once you’re an established seller, start looking for Amazon’s “golden gaps” where
heavy demand resides among buyers, but that few good options are available for
sale. You'll need to learn a bit about Amazon’s paid ads to do this, but we can help
with that! Check out our Proven Performance Inventory training below in the “Train
Further” section.

Check Out These Free Resources…

• For a detailed discussion of the typical life cycle of an Amazon seller, go to
SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 41.

• For details on our slow and steady approach to building a profitable business selling
physical goods, go to SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 10.

• Check out this short video that shows you how to use simple strategies to find
great inventory to sell.

• For some examples of how to use the free Amazon Seller App to scan any barcode
and discover information that allows you to make rapid decisions about what
inventory to purchase for resale, see this video.

• Access the most recent version of our inventory purchase decision charts to help you
gauge what the sales rank might mean for any given product here and here.

• Selling only books on Amazon is a hit for several people in our community. For a
“Silent Sales Machine Radio” show dedicated to this topic, please see
SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 5.

• Although big name brands aren’t fans of retail and online arbitrage, Amazon
encourages us as sellers to do it. I believe retail arbitrage and online arbitrage
strategies will continue to be a viable business model for decades on Amazon and
other online selling sites. Read about my take on the future of arbitrage in this
article (which I’ll update as things change).

• Amazon seller account suspension is the topic of a great discussion in

SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 38.

• New to the idea of selling using Fulfillment by Amazon? Here’s a short “Making Good
Inventory-Buying Decisions” video especially useful to beginners here.

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 • Watch the video “Learn FBA in 8 minutes” here.

• Want to know more about going hands-free (“silent”) with your selling business?
Check out SilentJim.com/podcast Episodes No. 5 and 28.

• The Proven Amazon Course Endorsed Tools, Apps & Services, a list of our favorite
tools and services for online sellers and those actively seeking to grow their online
business, features a great list of prep/ship fulfillment companies. My team and I
maintain this resource for our coaching students and those who purchase our Proven
Amazon Course, and it’s my pleasure to give you free access as my way of saying
thank you for buying this book! Find and download it here.

• Interested in knowing more about how my partner Brett used the $10,000,000
Proven Performance Inventory (PPI) strategy—the one where he uses Amazon paid
ads to find the golden gaps on Amazon—for free? Go to SilentJim.com/podcast
Episodes No. 2, 16, 31, and 32.

• Searching Amazon to uncover incredible wholesale sourcing opportunities is featured

in an interview with one of our great Jim Cockrum Coaching’s coaches, Teresa
Rose, in SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 39.

• For details on how easily our Proven Performance Inventory strategy can be used to
find private label gold mines, go to SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 40.

• For information across multiple topics—including specialization leading to multiple

income streams, some facts that every Amazon and eBay seller needs to know about
selling on Walmart and private label strategies—go to SilentJim.com/podcast
Episode No. 16.

Train Further…
As you’ve probably noticed, we use the term “Proven” a lot. There’s a reason for that. We
aren’t interested in floating theories; we don’t need to be. Fifteen years of success—and a
desire to protect our audience from the latest, shiniest but untested ideas—means we have
rock-solid experience to share.

Here are just a few of the “Proven” courses that might be helpful based on what we've
covered so far. Keep in mind, the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course contains all these,
and we continually improve and expand that single collection of courses, while charging our
students no new fees for the updates!

• Go to ProvenOnlineSourcingStrategies.com for strategies for finding profitable

inventory online simply by using an Internet connection.

• What items can you find locally and sell for big profits online? We show you in this
comprehensive course! Check out: Buylocalselltotheworld.com.

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 • Go to ProvenPrivateLabel.com for our super-simple approach to easing your way
toward big success by using the private label model. This model enables you to test
ideas slowly and build a stable business using proven, simple, low-risk steps all the
way to the top. We've sold tens of millions of private label products on Amazon with
these strategies.

• Go to ProvenPerformanceInventory.com to see some of Brett’s results with our

$10,000,000 Proven Performance Inventory (PPI) strategy—the one where he uses
Amazon paid ads to find the golden gaps on Amazon.

• A book entitled Suspension Prevention will lead you through all the steps to ensure
your Amazon account does not get suspended for minor policy violations like
arbitrage missteps and other commonly punished behaviors. (The same book is also
sold on Amazon as of this writing.)

• Jim Peterson’s simple book that teaches you all you need to know about tapping into
his fantastic trade show inventory strategy. (Learn more here.)

• Advanced video training about how to use Amazon search to uncover wholesale
sourcing opportunities.

• A Proven Book Sourcing Course that offers tips and strategies about bookselling.

• A Proven Bundling Course that shows you how to eliminate your Amazon
competition by creating unique, hard-to-replicate bundles.

• Our Coffee Master Class, which shows you how to build your own coffee brand on
Amazon as a way of demonstrating principles that can apply to other products.

And that’s just the beginning. The Proven Amazon Course includes a list of wholesale
sources from one of our top students, videos from our previous annual conferences in which
we share top strategies, and more. That’s why the PAC is so wildly popular. Check out
ProvenAmazonCourse.com for yourself for a full list of training options, all included for
one price. (We don’t nickel and dime our students). The video stories of students who
started with zero knowledge and went on to build awesome businesses will inspire you!

Remember, our large, active Facebook community is free! There you'll find encouragement,
help, and many unique and creative strategies and insights for your business building
efforts. Even if you don’t want to invest in the PAC, the Facebook group is an incredible
opportunity for anyone ready to do the work to become an online selling success. Come
hang out with thousands of successful, positive and helpful online entrepreneurs who also
have read this book. We are always discussing the latest developments in the arena of
online selling—and, as I said, it’s 100 percent free for you to join here.

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 SECTION THREE

The “E” of the

CES Models: Expand

Creating Content and Partnerships that

Attract, Grow, and Serve an Audience Well

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68
 Introduction to Turning Prospects into
Lifelong Loyal Advocates and Fans
The best way to position yourself for success in the online business world, regardless of
what business you launch, is to have a large loyal audience that can’t wait to hear from
you—and the key to that is typically gathering a list of email addresses. A common phrase
in Internet marketing circles is, “He who has the list, wins.”

I'd love to see you with a large Instagram following, a large Facebook group, and thriving
YouTube channel, or an active blog, but, you need to also have a “list” of prospects that can
be backed up if something goes wrong.

As we begin our transition from the “S” model of Internet success to the “E” model—
expanding or growing an audience, it's important that I point out a common misconception.
There are rumors going around that say email marketing is dead.

Don’t buy into it.

Those same rumors have been going around for over a decade, and I can prove them all
wrong. Email is alive and well and it is the foundational bedrock of “growing a list” of
prospects.

Why is email so important?

While there are many great ways to expand an audience online, be wary of any strategy
that leaves the list of customers/prospects in the hands of a large impersonal entity such as
Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram. While these are all great platforms for growing
an audience, any one of these services could feasibly shut you down intentionally or
accidentally and your entire list could vanish in an instant. You might recall from Section
One about how my YouTube account was shut down. Thankfully, YouTube reinstated my
account due to an outcry from my fan base, whom I informed of the situation...by email!

In this section, we'll discuss several ways of attracting a list of loyal customers. Great
products, great content, and great partnerships are the three primary strategies. Any one
of these three will get you there. Using all three together will get you there even faster. The
key is to focus on developing ongoing relationships with an audience of fans who respect
what you have to say and who are eager for what you have to offer before you push
products.

Some surprising advantages exist to having a loyal audience of online followers. They can
help you make critical business decisions so that you no longer have to guess! For example,
I get emails all the time from excited newsletter readers or fans of my content that start
out something like this:

“JIM! JIM! I’ve got a great idea and I’m wondering if you think it will work. I want to
build a website [or write a book, create a course, invent a product] that does

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 [fill in the blank]. Jim, I’m wondering if you think it’s a good idea or not? Can you
help me market this? What advice can you give me?”

I usually don’t focus on whether I think it’s a good idea. Instead, I have certain questions I
always fire back at eager online dreamers.

“The real questions you should be asking,” I’ll write back, “are these:

• “Where are the eager prospects hanging out right now and who are begging for this
concept? Have you surveyed them to gauge interest?

• “What easily tested content distribution concepts could be used to attract the proper
prospects and partners? What’s your plan to win over these initial ‘fans’ and partners
who will help you shape this project and grow it?

• “Who are the other established, online thought leaders in this niche who will possibly
agree to partner with you to expose your idea/product to their audience? Get a list of
names. How will you intentionally pursue a genuine relationship with these people?

• “What win/win strategy can you use to gain the favor and attention of an established
expert who already has the attention of your ideal target audience?”

What good is a fantastic idea if you don’t have anyone to present it to? Additionally, if you
want to increase your odds of success 1,000 times over, you need to stop looking at such
people as customers and start looking at them as a long-term loyal audience. Seek their
advice through surveys and interaction before you make most of the major directional
decisions in your business. In other words, when you move into the “E,” or expand, model
of success, it starts to become less about products and more about relationships with
people you’re in contact with online. They can tell you what they want next if you'll just ask
them!

Attracting loyal followers and prospects online starts with creating good “virtual content”—
that might mean video, Facebook posts or groups, Instagram posts, blog articles, eBooks,
audio, Kindle books, etc.—for them to consume. But keep in mind that great content is not
a slick online brochure or fancy video touting all of the features of your latest and greatest
products. Instead, great content is often simply defined by your prospects as “exactly the
right information I want or need at exactly the right time I need or want it.” It is online
material or experiences so good that your prospects would gladly pay you for them—and
are left wanting more!

Sometimes it can be as simple as giving the like-minded people in your community a place
to gather for free such as an exclusive Facebook group. There is some serious energy and
support happening 24 hours a day in our group and it's not because our leaders are
interacting with the audience! The great members of our community do the vast majority of
the heavy lifting in making our group incredible! From time to time when we alert our
members that they should join our email mailing list, they respond in mass numbers
because they don't want to miss a thing we are doing!

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Growing a following is exciting and we are always experimenting around here. Right now,
we are seeing incredible results with Facebook messenger for example. While the platforms
and tools change over time, the timeless rules of “winning hearts and minds” apply
regardless of the popular trends and tools available to you.

The following section is full of ideas in that vein, and my goal is that it will inspire you to
expand by becoming a content creator, specialist, and partner, no matter what niche you
focus on and regardless of the platform you use to build upon as you grow a following and
“expand” your audience.

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72
 Chapter 9

Expanding with Your First Website and A

Multi-Channel Selling Strategy
Sometimes teachable moments aren’t scripted. That was certainly the case at 2015’s CES
III in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the speakers asked everyone to stand up if they were
selling over $5,000 a month online. Of the hundreds in attendance, a large percentage of
the room stood up.

• Then she asked people to remain standing if they sold over $10,000 per month. A
reasonably large group remained standing.

• She raised it to over $20,000. Fewer remained standing.

• Then over $30,000 and still fewer remained standing.

• Then over $40,000 and only a handful remained standing.

• Then over $50,000 and two remained standing.

The two people who remained standing at the end of that exercise received a hearty round
of applause and sat down. I’m grateful to have worked closely with each of them and I’m
very familiar with their businesses. They have several things in common. As we move into
the “Expand” section of this book I want to elaborate on these concepts.

Here are just a few of the common traits:

1. They each operate in a specific niche.

2. They have their own brands they’ve developed over time.

3. They sell on multiple marketplaces.

4. They’ve gathered a strong following of loyal fans and customers.

5. They depend heavily on email marketing.

6. They collect and wisely use customer reviews and testimonials.

7. They use Shopify to run their website.

Although we didn’t do a formal survey during that impromptu exercise, I know many of the
people that were standing toward the end and they share common traits as well. In this

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chapter, I’ll explain how these advanced students have gone from newbie sellers to running
large successful online businesses.

Not Familiar with Shopify Yet?

If you’re not familiar with Shopify, it is an e-commerce platform made by entrepreneurs for
entrepreneurs. It enables you to quickly set up and run your own e-commerce business and
do so affordably whether you sell in the “real-world,” or online through your own website.
Shopify supports your unique brand and even works with you as you sell through social
media channels. You don’t need to know a programming language and the training and
support are fantastic.

Many celebrity entrepreneurs such as Damon John from Shark Tank, Tim Ferriss, Tony
Robbins, and Sir Richard Branson have all positively discussed Shopify in recent years. Yes,
Shopify is that good. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the top sellers in our community are
using it.

A Warning Not to Build a Website Too Early

As I’ve mentioned in prior chapters, it is a mistake for new online sellers to focus on trying
to build a website too early in their journey. So, while I do recommend Shopify as part of
your “Expand” process, I still have cautions. Why?

When you are just starting out as an online seller, you don’t have a proven product yet. Nor
do you have a proven audience. You are just learning about your niche and what your
customers may want from you.

Additionally, you are testing price points. You are learning what quantity and packaging
works best. You are learning about returns, refunds, and exchanges and how those impact
your profits. These are all critical lessons. You can most easily learn them on the large
marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay without ever creating your own website.

In fact, if you try to learn these lessons on your own website, you’ll be slowed down
dramatically because the sales volume simply won’t be there to support rapid learning.
That’s why the sequence of your work is important.

After you learn these important lessons, and once you are confident enough to scale your
buying audience for support of a specific product, then it’s time to consider building a
website. I’d love to see you learn the basics first on an established marketplace. Use their
customer base and take baby steps first and then take those lessons and expand to our
current favorite platform for “expansion”–Shopify.

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Things Not to Do When Building a Website:
Building a website can quickly become a huge distraction. I constantly see a set of common
mistakes in this aspect of online selling, so let me share some of the most common. Do
your best to avoid these.

• Don’t Pay Large Fees: Don’t pay someone a large fee to build your first website.
There is no need for it if you follow the advice in this chapter. You’ll want to develop
a minimum level of competency with your website knowledge so that you can
manage it properly. Part of that learning curve is working through the setup process.

• Don’t Use Expensive Systems: Some e-commerce platforms can cost you
thousands of dollars a month to use and some even cost six figures to set up. That is
a huge mistake.

• Don’t Spend All Your Time Learning the Technology: Don’t waste a huge
amount of time trying to do it all yourself. You want to become a manager of your
website, not a full-time technician. Just as a mistake you might make in the “Sell”
stage of our model is to do all the boxing and taping yourself as you grow, in the
“Expand” stage it’s equally a mistake to do all the technical work yourself. While you
may start there, you’ll want to grow to the pace where you have help that handles
website details.

• Don’t Use the Cheapest Possible Options: As you’re about to see, we recommend
Shopify for e-commerce sellers over WordPress and other similar e-commerce
options. This remains true even though, at first glance, WordPress is often cheaper.
We’ve heard from student after student that Shopify is the best actual value for the
benefits you receive.

• Don’t Use Poor Quality Photos & Graphics: Part of the discipline of creating an
effective website is getting professional photography done in support of your work.
As with the other parts of your business, you can do this at first, if you have the
technical competency, but you’ll want to get to the place where other people do this
work for you.

• Don’t Forget to Focus on Email Address Collection: The highest and best use of
your website is to collect email addresses and then encourage those new subscribers
to return to your site regularly. In fact, I’ve written the next chapter on this topic, to
make sure you have everything you need to turn this into a primary aspect of your
business.

• Don’t Try to Compete with Amazon: A key lesson my top students have learned,
and that all successful online entrepreneurs learn, is that you must select your niche
carefully, serve it vibrantly, and position yourself as the leader in that small segment
of the market. Dominate a very small niche instead of trying to compete broadly. If
you try to offer random products, work in multiple categories, and speak to lots of
different types of people, it will not work. I call that strategy trying to compete with
Amazon and it is a serious mistake. Your site must have a smart niche focus to
expand wisely.
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 • Don’t Try to Launch Two Business at Once: An important transition to make is to
go deep with one product (or groups of complementary products) to support one
niche community.

10 Reasons We Recommend Shopify

There are lots of great reasons Shopify is the best solution for e-commerce sellers. Let me
share ten of them with you briefly. I offer these because so many options exist and it’s easy
to become confused. You’ll be pulled in dozens of directions as you begin to consider
various website options. But I want to make this simple, clear, and concise for you.

1. Shopify is Super Affordable: You can start for just a few dollars a month and build
a fully-functional e-commerce website. Plans increase as your sophistication and
functionality needs grow, but starting with Shopify is affordable. Other options may
be cheaper, but when you compare features, Shopify offers tremendous value.

2. Beautiful Themes: Shopify offers beautifully-designed themes for every type of

niche, product, and business. You can use these pre-built themes to get up and
running quickly. You use their pre-built theme as the starting point to set up your
website and customize it with your own photos and graphics.

3. Payment Frequency: One of the cashflow benefits of using Shopify is that you get
paid instantly when customers use Paypal. You get paid daily from the Shopify
Merchant Services transactions that occur on your site. You can also enable Apple
Pay and Amazon Pay as additional customer payment options.

4. Hosted by Shopify: Shopify handles the hosting for you. Why is this important? As
your site traffic grows, Shopify ensures that you get the server resources you need
without needing to worry. This simplifies your efforts by removing the need to work
with a separate, dedicated web-hosting company.

5. Scalable: One of the most important aspects of website design is planning for large-
scale success. Shopify is prepared for massive traffic spikes so you don’t have to
worry about your site breaking at the exact wrong time–when lots of people are
trying to visit it. Our community was shocked during our live “CES IV” event when
my client Mike Brown of Death Wish Coffee shared about the ultimate challenge to
his Shopify website–when his Super Bowl Commercial aired during the big game and
his site traffic went from a few hundred visitors daily to over 100,000 visitors in an
instant. His site did not crash! Shopify held up just fine. This is also why many of the
Shark Tank television show entrepreneurs use Shopify.

6. Content Marketing Integration: Shopify enables blog and page features that allow
you to have an in-depth content marketing strategy in support of your niche right on
your e-commerce site. This enables you to add valuable information along with your
physical products. This information helps you generate organic search engine results.
It also allows you to bond with your customers by sharing your story and knowledge.

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 7. Amazon FBA: You can use Shopify as your inventory tracking system and online
selling hub, then integrate your site with Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and other sales
channels.

8. Social Media Integration: Shopify integrates your social media marketing efforts
seamlessly. You can encourage fans and follows to visit your social accounts, and
even integrate content such as Instagram images and Facebook comments.

9. Email List Growth: Shopify enables you to turn your e-commerce site into an email
address collection machine. It integrates most easily with Mailchimp, but supports
other third-party email list-management services also.

10.Detailed Sales Reports: Shopify provides a fantastic set of sales- and traffic-
related reports. This information is incredibly valuable as you begin to learn to
identify the sources of profitable Internet traffic.

If You’re Ready to Expand with Shopify

In Chapter three I mentioned Jason and Cinnamon Miles, creators of Pixie Faire, a Shopify-
enabled marketplace. They average over 50,000 transactions a month and out of 368,000
Shopify websites, their site ranks in the top 1% based on worldwide site traffic. Because
they’ve sold millions of dollars of product using Shopify, I encouraged Jason to create a
comprehensive course that delivers all the training you need to launch and grow a Shopify
site.

That course is available to our community at: provenshopifycourse.com.

Through that course, Jason has already helped over 5,300 entrepreneurs get up and
running on Shopify. I know he can help you too.

Creating Your Multi-Channel Sales Strategy

Let me explain the latest shift that has begun to happen in the e-commerce industry and
how it impacts each of us. In the early years of e-commerce, selling on eBay was the best
option for entrepreneurs. Then the momentum shifted to Amazon, as it became the
dominant online retailer. Amazon’s massive audience made it the best choice for most
entrepreneurs. The primary exception was craft-related products, which tended to work
best on Etsy.

But we are entering an age where more options are quickly emerging. eBay still has a
powerful audience and can work well for entrepreneurs. Alibaba, the largest Chinese e-
commerce site that’s bigger than Amazon and eBay combined, is an option. Wal-Mart
recently bought Jet.com and is aggressively adding third-party sellers to the platform to
compete against Amazon. And the list goes on.

What is the wisest path for the online seller who wants to expand? It’s become more and
more clear. After you have a primary sales channel well established, which is likely Amazon,
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and a “home-base” selling channel well established through Shopify, you’ll want to explore
selling on more marketplaces. These become your additional sales channels.

This approach has begun to be called an “Multi-Channel Sales Strategy” and it has a lot of
advantages. Rather than choosing one e-commerce marketplace, you begin to test them all
and scale up on each one if the early results are positive.

Instead of saying, “I sell on Amazon,” you begin to say, “I sell online in lots of
marketplaces.” Your center of gravity shifts. Rather than working for any one marketplace–
you begin to realize you are making them work for you. And as you grow, you set up these
sales channels to ensure that your business thrives.

One of the reasons I’m so excited about this opportunity is that is lowers the risk for us
sellers. If you only sell in one marketplace and they suspend your account, you have a
serious problem. But if you sell on five marketplaces, and receive income from each of
them, then having a problem on any one of them will not devastate your business.

Lessons from MyAudioPet.com

In the SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 51, I interviewed my client K.J. Robinson,
and asked him about his wildly-successful, seven-figure, private label product. His story of
the “Expand” strategy is incredible. His site, myaudiopet.com, demonstrates another good
example of a Shopify site that serves as a home-base for his product, while other sales
channels send massive traffic his way and help him sell thousands of units.

I’d encourage you to listen to that podcast. In addition to selling on Amazon, he has also
added some amazing additional sales channels, including;

• Oprah’s Favorite Things: During the 2016 Christmas season, My Audio Pets was
featured as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things. Making this list is an incredible honor and
guarantees a massive sales spike.

• Rachel Ray Show: During the holiday season of 2016, Gayle King, editor-at-large of
the “O” magazine, discussed My Audio Pets on the Rachel Ray Show as well as online
at rachelrayshow.com.

• GMA Deals & Steals: My Audio Pets were featured on Good Morning America in
their Deals & Steals segment. This presented an amazing sales opportunity and a
powerful viewing audience that became exposed to the product.

• The View On ABC: The ABC morning show, The View, featured My Audio Pets during
the fourth quarter of 2016. They featured these products on their online selling
channel viewyourdeal.com.

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Conclusion:
When you’re ready to expand your e-commerce empire, we are here to help. Take the next
steps with our course provenshopify.com and be sure to listen to my interviews with:

• Mike Brown of Death Wish Coffee, at pickmikebrown.com.

• Jason Miles of Pixie Faire, on SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 8.

• K. J. Robinson of My Audio Pet, on SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 51.

In the next chapter, I’ll explain how to expand using the single-best online marketing tool
available today–email marketing. When you add email to your proven product strategy and
proven audience strategy and proven Shopify strategy–you’ll have an incredible set of
winning tools.

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80
 Chapter 10

Email Marketing–The Case for It

and How to Grow Your List
When done correctly, the return on investment on email marketing is 50 to 1–or more.
Most months, my own personal email-based ROI is far higher than that.

Remember how I started out on eBay? As I grew more advanced with my strategies, I
started treating eBay as a lead source instead of merely a place where I could sell items
one at a time to one stranger at a time. For example, quite often the reason I would put an
item up for sale on eBay was not to merely sell that single item. Instead, putting popular
items up for sale on eBay was done strategically in order to gather emails and grow my
audience by 10, 20, or even 100 or more new prospects whom I could serve indefinitely.
This helped ensure years of future sales.

I was happy to sell eBay items at a loss because I knew my list of

prospects was expanding rapidly with every product I sold on eBay!

This could work similarly for you; you can invite your eBay buyers to become subscribers
while staying within eBay policy. (Be sure to visit their latest rules.) So, growing an email
list there is possible, although tricky because of rules that are in place that discourage it.
But, when you follow the rules, you can pull it off with virtually no risk.

Amazon is a different story because of the strictly-enforced regulations in place for all who
sell on their platform. It’s a bad idea to toy with these strategies. Remember, Amazon
considers your buyers to be their customers; the people running this huge marketplace can
and will shut you down quickly if they suspect you are trying to “game the system” by
turning the customers they send you into leads for your own purposes. It’s not worth the
risk of upsetting Amazon, in my opinion—and you should ignore anyone or anything that
says differently.

The good news is that getting email leads from selling great products is just the beginning
of growing a list of the email addresses of loyal customers and fans. Before we dive into
other methods, though, let’s look a little more closely at the reasons why having a list of
email addresses for those who want to hear from you is widely considered the most
powerful form of marketing in use today.

• Having a list of email addresses allows you to build genuine relationships

through mass communication. A large and growing email list is ideal because of
how powerful and automated it can be.

• You can build such relationships without the risks associated with social
media. It’s clearly better to have a large email list than it is to have a large
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 Facebook group, a large Twitter following, or a popular YouTube channel. Why is this
so? Because you can lose an account on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter easily, and
your reputation and audience simply vanish with it! (Remember how my YouTube
channel up and disappeared? I was lucky enough to get my channel back, but even
more fortunately, I was growing a list and was not entirely dependent on others’
systems.)

• The rules of success with this incredible communication tool–email–haven’t

changed much since the late 90s. For example, your list puts you in a position for
your best customers to become your best salespeople as they spread the word about
how great you are. Our team does very little, if any, paid marketing. We strategically
serve our core audience so well that they do the marketing for us!

In my own online businesses, I focus heavily and strategically on constantly growing my

email lists with a steady stream of new prospects. Every day I add a minimum of 100 to
200 new prospects into my various email “lead funnels.” This level of continuous growth
does not happen by accident. I’ve set up several systems that drive this type of traffic to
my email opt-in pages.

While every organization and niche market will be a little different, several effective
strategies exist that you can use to grow an email list.

I’m actually going to give you my entire best-selling

course on email marketing before we’re done!

First, for the purposes of establishing a foundation, let’s look at a brief excerpt, modified for
our purposes here.

Good Ways to Grow Your Email List

Below are several strategies I personally use to grow my email list, along with a brief
description of each. I've kept this section of the book short, however, because I'm giving
you my full course later in this section.

• Invite every buying customer to join your list. Perhaps the best time to invite
someone to join your mailing list is at the point of purchase, right as they’re buying
something from you.

• Design a “squeeze page”—in other words, a website landing page where a

person who wants more access or information provides his or her email. Also
known as an “opt-in page,” a squeeze page should be designed to gather the email
addresses of prospects in exchange for additional information on the topic you were
covering. In my own business, the website SilentJim.com typically serves this
purpose. Keep in mind that people are becoming more protective of their
contact information, so you may want to give away a high-quality
information product before you even ask for an email address.

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 • Make your squeeze page part of your online signature. I feel strongly that the
best “signature line” that any email or other online communication can have is a link
to a squeeze page so people can instantly join your email list if they are interested in
what they’ve just read.

• Get active on online forums. My advice for participating is the same for all high-
traffic sites: be authentic, be creative, and generate leads into your sales funnel by
providing valuable content and advice. Prospects will seek you out and you can direct
them to your list.

• Add a call to action to an active blog. If a blog has a significant number of

readers, yet there is no email capture activity occurring, the blog owner is throwing
away literally thousands or possibly even millions of dollars of potential business or
publicity. The best call to action for any blog is to encourage blog readers to join the
email mailing list.

• Swap blog articles with those who have popular blogs. It’s quite common for
bloggers to request a blog article swap with other bloggers in the same niche area of
interest. You should pursue this type of blog swap activity, but with a twist.
Whenever you provide an article to another blogger, be sure to include an invitation
to join your email newsletter list as part of the article.

• Be prepared to mention a simple squeeze page in any press coverage. If you

or your business are featured in some type of online interview, print article, or
television appearance and allowed to mention a reference to one of your websites or
services, this is the best use of free press.

All these are great techniques. Many more exist that I'll be sharing in the free course I want
to give to you.

First, before we go further, let me stress that the format of your content (audio, video,
eBook, Kindle, blog article, etc.) is not nearly as important as the quality of your ideas. If
you are engaging, helpful, and “shareable” (meaning people want to spread the word once
they hear or see your content), then you are all set, and the media format becomes
irrelevant; all forms of content delivery are open to those that have a message that is
desirable.

That said, if I had to pick only one strategy to use to attract quality prospects as I expand
my audience, that one strategy would be simple video.

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 Chapter 11

Expand Your Reach with

Smart, Simple Video
My middle son started posting simple videos on YouTube when he was 10. Within a short
time, he gathered hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of followers on his
YouTube account without any help from me. He didn’t set out to accomplish these things;
he just turned on a video camera and recorded himself doing things like tinkering on his
guitar, playing video games, or riding his skateboard. His spelling was atrocious, he didn’t
try to use the right keywords to get hits, and he has no idea why all of it got so big so fast.

If a 10-year-old with a borrowed $100 video camera can create a virtual empire online, why
can’t you?

YouTube isn’t alone either; Facebook has really made a strong move in the video space and
is an even easier platform on which to attract viewers of your content than YouTube. Many
times, I’ve recorded simple video on Facebook and had thousands of views within a couple
days.

We launched an entire toy line on Amazon based on a simple viral video we posted on
Facebook. By simple, I mean we shot the video with a cell phone and the audio and video
were terrible quality, but the message resonated and has now been seen by millions. Our
toy has sold multiple millions of dollars. It all started with a simple video and the
engagement of a Facebook audience. Mind you, it wasn’t the readers of this book or our
entrepreneur audience who saw this video. It was an audience we built from scratch. I'll
give you more details on this in the resources list at the end of this section.

Clearly, video-based content and interaction is the future of online engagement.

People are consuming more and more online video content. If you aren’t getting your
message out on Facebook or YouTube, then you aren’t in the game as much as you should
be at this point and you are only falling further behind. No matter what business you are in,
if you need more customers than you have now, video is a good place to start making your
presence known.

Chris Vallone knows. He is one of the many readers of an earlier version of Silent Sales
Machine who uses the techniques you’re learning about now to grow his business. Chris
credits expanding his reach through video in taking him from working a fun family project
to enjoying wild success that’s included making a custom VW Bug for the famous comedian
Jerry Seinfeld:

All through my college years, I had a classic VW (I am an artist, so ya gotta have a

Bug). I grabbed a trashed 1968 Beetle for $350 and I wanted to restore it. My father
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 thought I was crazy—I knew nothing about restoring cars. My dad had some
mechanical skills when he was young working in a Brooklyn garage, but neither of us
had ever worked on a VW.

Still, we did it together. Thanks to the Internet, there are many resources to learn
any craft you want. If you have the drive and a desire to do something great and be
independent, there’s never been a better time to be alive than now!

I sold that Bug on eBay Motors! We made food money on it! My father and I looked
at each other and said, “We gotta get into this!” So, from a one-car garage to now a
2000 square foot facility, we are kicking butt! We developed a nice track record on
eBay, and we are now taking orders for my “Build-a-BuG” program. We are running
our business with a year-and-a-half wait time. People want us to build a Bug just for
them!

I learned these skills from you, Mr. Cockrum. What made me stand out from the
crowd is that I filmed my Bugs. No one is doing what I am doing when it comes to
selling on eBay Motors. All bidders are exposed to over 50 pics of my cars and full HD
video.

I also do “how to” tips on Beetle restoration and throw them up on YouTube.

Every resource is available out there. I am always learning and staying up-to-date
with the trends. This will give you the edge and make you stand out from your
competition.

Chris Vallone, classicvwbugs.com

Notice how Chris is building and leading his own community? Do you see how he’s growing
an audience of like-minded people and then giving them what they want? Can’t you imagine
about 10 new income streams after just reading his story? And it all started with simple,
smart videos.

There’s no doubt about it, video is a powerful way to expand your reach and build that all-
important prospect list. Remember the story about the simple videos recorded by a
handheld smartphone that went viral, clueing us in to the fact a product of ours featured in
it would sell well to those viewers? Well, as the videos went on to be viewed millions of
times, an email list of tens of thousands sprung from it very quickly. (The videos included a
simple “call to action”—in other words, an opportunity for viewers to share their email
addresses.) We went on to sell more than 18,000 units of this $150 private label item—yes,
that’s more than $2 million worth of product—in one quarter as a direct result of emailing
that very list of prospects.

That one of several huge success story is a classic example of video being key to our “E”—
expanding your business—model of Internet success. See, we’d sold some of the product
before, but it had previously only been an average performer for us. Smart, simple video
allowed us to grow our audience and expand that performance exponentially.

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Many books and courses have been dedicated to creating video online as a business
strategy, and there are many ways you can use video to enhance your online business
building efforts. For now, though, let’s keep it simple. The greatest disservice I could do at
this point is leave you with the impression that marketing with video is complex. It’s just
not. You don’t have to spend very much time on YouTube or Facebook to discover that it’s
not just the “pretty and articulate people with nice editing skills” who are making effective
videos. No one cares about perfect lighting or special effects either. Content and message
are what’s important.

To create smart video:

• Keep it authentic. From a marketing perspective, I find that the most powerful
videos are the ones that let you into the “real world” of the person making the video.
I’m talking about being authentic. When in doubt, tell a story that your viewer will be
able to relate to, or feel a part of; it’s hard to go wrong when you’re looking to help
people like that.

• Keep it simple. Some of the most popular content on Facebook and YouTube is the
simple stuff. These are the videos that make it easy for the viewer to connect and
relate with the maker of the video. Using too many slick graphics, intros, or great
backgrounds can work against you. This should be encouraging to those who are
nervous about creating video content. Spend some time on YouTube checking out
popular videos on topics related to your niche interest. You’ll quickly see what I mean
about the “authentic videos” rising to the top.

• Always have a call to action in your video that gives your viewers a chance
to get more. For example, you could ask for your prospects’ email address in
exchange for more information on the topic covered in the video, or you could invite
your prospect to join your Facebook group. A call to action is how you convert
viewers into prospects. In most of the videos that I put on Facebook or YouTube, I
will have a very gentle call to action. This call to action typically invites the viewer to
join my email mailing list. When I see a viral video that everyone loves but there’s no
“call to action” where the viewer can easily get more information, I think to myself,
“What a waste of that valuable attention and potential to serve prospects!”

• If you aren’t an expert, interview one. One great way to meet influencers and
create great content is to interview those who are already making great things
happen in your area of interest. Many of the top podcasts, blogs, and YouTube
channels rely on this strategy for a steady stream of new quality content.

• Don’t be afraid to have fun with no obvious business agenda. Sometimes I

give away free downloadable information products as part of the video presentation.
I don’t always have a business purpose in mind when putting videos out, though.
One of my most watched YouTube videos is one that shows how to get a high score
on a fun online paper airplane game. But I’m sure some of the tens of thousands of
viewers who enjoyed my paper airplane video have noticed my other videos as well.

• Go to YouTube for more tips. There is so much good, free content online regarding
making videos to get your message out. One of the best places to pick up the skills
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 you need is by watching “how-to-do-video” videos right on YouTube. We’ve learned
so many skills quickly by seeking out true professionals on the YouTube platform.

Keep in mind that even if only a handful of people ever see your video in the first year,
there could easily come a time in the future where the subject matter of your video
becomes fodder for a larger conversation and, at that point, it could get passed around
virally. As long as the content of the video you create has some useful value, or is
entertaining, then it is worth having been made—and posted.

Where to Post Videos

Obviously, YouTube has firmly established itself as being far more than just an entertaining
video-hosting site. It is now a viable search engine for an unimaginable amount of topical,
video-based content, and it’s one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. The best
part of all is that it’s 100 percent free to use and anyone can upload content. In fact, many
savvy online marketing businesses now use the site to host educational content that
attracts their ideal clients. So, get yourself established on YouTube now if you are looking
to inform prospects about a topic.

But Facebook isn’t to be ignored either. A huge battle will be waged for the next several
years as YouTube and Facebook both try to attract and retain the attention of online video
viewers. Either way things go, we win as content creators who know how to take full
advantage of video strategy. Facebook has the advantage of being the platform where
billions of people already connect to each other. A video posted on Facebook (especially a
“live” video) has a great chance of showing up right in the face of your followers. We are
very excited about Facebook as a video-hosting platform right now in our business.

Let me give you a big tip to use as you begin posting video content on both Facebook and
YouTube. Keep in mind that these two sites are currently in a major battle for the attention
of viewers. This means you will get very few views by posting a direct link to a YouTube
video in a Facebook post. Always upload a copy of your video to both places if you have
content that you wish to place on both platforms. Facebook tends to bury YouTube videos
that users post on their site.

The bottom line is that you should be making video even if you have a face for radio (and
remember, you can always get someone else to do it if you really don’t want to be
pictured.) It really is my favorite way to attract prospects. Do whatever it takes to get a
video posted on Facebook and YouTube. No excuses, no delays. This chapter has given you
all the confidence, tools, and advice you need. Go make it happen now if you’ve never done
it before.

After video, my next favorite form of content is written content. Whether it be an article, a
blog post, or my personal favorite, an eBook, written content is a close second-place
contender to video for expanding your Internet business success. We offer lots of tools,
tips, and advice to help anyone make the leap into becoming an author quickly and
effectively.

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 Chapter 12

Become an eBook Author (It’s Easy!)

and Write Valuable Content
I believe everyone has a good book, or two, or 50 in them. Very few people ever get them
written and finished, though. That’s probably part of the reason why the title “author” is
held in such high esteem.

It’s not hard to become an author of valuable content, though. Look at me—I told you that
writing doesn’t come easily or naturally to me. Still, I’ve sold or given away more than
1,000,000 eBooks just sharing what I know. By an eBook, I mean any type of electronic or
digitally delivered book, such as a Kindle book or a simple PDF file.

If the idea of writing a “real book” is a bit intimidating, or if you don’t feel quite ready for it,
an eBook is probably the option for you. Writing your first eBook could be as simple as
creating a 20-page document and then saving it as a PDF file. (That’s where this book
started back in version 1.0.)

I’ve been in the self-publishing arena for years now with several failures and successes to
show for it, so I’ve learned a few things. Read on for some foundational lessons that should
help you as you begin creating your own works.

Very Often, an eBook is Better than a “Real Book”

Some are surprised to hear that I’d rather sell an inexpensive eBook than an expensive
“real book” in nearly every case. Several reasons exist for this, not the least of which is the
amount of money that I earn in the long run! With a print book, there are a lot of people
touching it before it finally gets to the reader. Everyone gets their piece of the pie including
the paper company, the ink company, the glue in the binding company, the printing press
business, the marketers, the publishers, the guy who sweeps the publisher’s floor at two in
the morning, and so on. What does that leave me, the book’s actual creator, in the end?
Not much.

With an eBook, however, the delivery is instantaneous and free, and my profit margins are
huge in comparison.

That’s not the best part of the story, though. The best part is when someone buys an eBook
directly from me, I get their email address. I can begin to build a lifelong relationship with
that customer instantly. I can follow-up with current updates, other products and services
of interest, and include clickable links inside the book that take the readers to related blog
posts, articles, or other supporting content online. I can even sell something from inside the

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book, and a click or two later, the customer has the product ordered and I have been paid.
Plus, eBook readers are already online and can easily jump into my online community.

Additionally, eBooks are easily updated, and it’s easy to reward past readers with a brand-
new copy for free. When is the last time that happened to you as a reader? I’ve done it
numerous times with my eBooks. I collect the email addresses of my readers when they
buy, and then send them free updates for life. There are readers of this very book who
have devoured all previous versions of it, but they paid only once. While it’s true I’m not
getting paid for the latest editions, these readers often make up our most loyal community
members who eagerly devour our other higher-priced content and events.

You can see why I’m such a huge fan of eBooks, which I wrote for a decade before I ever
had a “real book” published.

An eBook Should Be a Lead-Generating Tool That Gives Away

Great Content, While Establishing Your Expertise
Don’t make it a big sales pitch, and don’t fill it with “fluff” content. Customers who buy a
product, or even download something for free, are expecting a great first impression, so put
great information inside. When I sell information, it’s the starting line for what will hopefully
be a lifelong relationship with a new customer, or audience member. It’s not the finish line
where I finally made some money. The customer needs to feel like they got 10 times the
value from the purchase or I’ve failed them.

Take as an example the best-selling course on email marketing I told you I’d be giving you
free at the end of this section. Rather than take up numerous pages in this book including
all I know on this topic, I decided to give you the $97 training as a thank you for reading
this book. So, it’s free—you can even share the link with someone who could benefit from
training on the way my team and I do email marketing—but it certainly isn’t a “throw away”
training. This course is widely considered to be the authoritative course on the topic. Clients
have paid me thousands to help them implement the same email marketing strategies, as
my somewhat controversial and unusual approaches to growing an audience and gaining
their loyalty have been tested time and time again and proven to work—and this all-time
bestselling course is all yours without any opt-in or upsell. And obviously, as you’ve seen
from the resource-packed conclusions to each section in this book, that’s only one of the
above-and-beyond extras I wanted to make sure to get into your hands just for investing in
this one book.

Making your content a big sales pitch or filling it with “fluff” content is how the other guys
do it. When I tell you to serve and create value, I mean what I say—and I do it myself, too.

Choosing a Good Title for Your Content (“Information Products”)

Is Important
Most professional copywriters will tell you that they spend as much if not more time on the
title or header of a sales letter than they do on the rest of the document. You can assign a

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lot of value to your content and information if you use powerful words to title and describe
it. Great titles give the content a feel of exclusivity and simplicity at the same time. Top 10
lists or step-by-step lists make for great content titles, such as:

• Seven things every puppy owner must know about housebreaking;

• Five back pain secrets your doctor won’t tell you;

• Special report: Getting out of debt step-by-step;

• Eight steps to landing your dream job fast.

This is one of the great lessons that I learned a little late in my business career. I wrote the
first edition of this book extremely early in my online career and the book took off in spite
of my poor choice of title. Now that the term “Silent Sales Machine” has been branded and
associated with being a top-selling book, I’d be crazy to abandon the title. If I had it to do
all over again, however, I probably would have chosen a much more descriptive title such
as, “The three online strategies that have earned me millions online.”

Today, I’m much more careful in choosing titles for my content, written and otherwise.

• You don’t want to have a “protect my ideas” mindset with eBooks; it will
work against you. This is one of the most common concerns that I hear when
working with new eBook authors. The reality is if your product is any good, it will be
passed around to people who haven’t paid for it. But, once you have the correct
mindset, you’ll quickly realize that your material being distributed free isn’t
necessarily a bad thing. Instead of fighting it, plan on it happening and use it to your
advantage. Whenever I create content that I know will be going into an eBook (or
anywhere online for that matter), I intentionally include multiple links, references,
and stories that all lead the reader back to my websites, blog, mailing lists, etc. By
doing this, I’m actually ensuring that even the most blatant of copyright violations
against my material will actually be a huge marketing boost for my overall business.
With the right mindset, it can be fun to use free Google Alerts to track where your
content might show up illegally online as you laugh all the way to the bank!

• Formatting your eBook or other content as a PDF is best. The eBooks that I’ve
written are simple PDF files that can be sent as an email attachment or downloaded
and easily, instantly distributed anywhere in the world where there is an Internet
connection. PDFs can be opened by anyone on any computer (Mac or PC). If you are
looking to keep things simple with your first eBook, start with a PDF.

• There are many ways to distribute your work; use them all! More than a
decade ago, I set up a simple website to sell the earlier versions of the book you are
now reading. The book has been updated nine times now, but the simple website
where it all started is still the primary place where my book sells every day. You’ll
find my books as well on Amazon in various formats, including in audio format on
Amazon’s Audible.com. The format and location doesn’t matter really—why not use
all available options when it is so easy to do? (If you have to pick just one place to
start though, start with Amazon—of course.)
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This chapter doesn’t include a comprehensive list of lessons on self-publishing by any
means (we do have a course for that in the resources area of this section), but if you start
here, you’ll be in a good position to grow your audience with truly valuable written content.

Whether you’re focusing on video, books, or the myriad of other informational products you
can put out there, having content available to share puts you in a position to tap into
another great way to expand through growing your prospect and email lists: partnering
with complementary specialists and creating three-way wins.

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 Chapter 13

Partner with Complementary Specialists

to Grow Your Prospect List Fast
Who was it who said, “Man is not meant to be alone”?

Oh, yeah.

God said that.

Business success relies on great partnerships. That’s true even on the Internet. One of the
most powerful strategies for quickly growing your own email list is to find creative ways to
partner with those who already have a large email list that contains good potential
prospects for your business, and form a partnership with them. These types of cooperative
partnerships are often called joint ventures (JVs)—although I sometimes hesitate to use
that term because many JVs merely abuse large email lists. We’re aiming for something
very different here: serving delighted customers in partnership with others where everyone
is better off in the end.

In the 1990s and earlier, entering into a business partnership implied a much stronger and
legally binding arrangement that was full of risks and involved a great deal more planning,
lawyers, paperwork, financial considerations, etc., than is necessary today. When I talk
about partnerships here, I’m referring to a far less risky and far more easily formed
arrangement. Nothing is signed, reputations are the handshake, and business moves
forward rapidly. I’ve had partners with whom I’ve shared hundreds of thousands of dollars
of profits on projects, and we’ve never spoken by phone or Skype—only by email!

Some of these partnerships are entered into with only a few minutes of research and
negotiation involved, and the partnership activity lasts only a few days. In other cases,
longer-term partnerships are formed. But in nearly all cases, there is a casual and speedy
process of compatibility evaluation and agreement on the terms.

Of course, you don’t want to partner with just anyone, no matter how badly you want to
expand your online business. There’s an art to picking great partners.

High-Risk Versus Successful Partnerships

Your best partnerships will not be with the type of people you most likely think of as “good
partner material” instinctively, unless you’ve heard a certain timeless lesson before.
Essentially, it’s a lot more important that you partner with people who specialize in areas
where you are less competent than it is to choose those with whom you'd like to become
friends.
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Focusing too much on partnering with someone you “like and trust,” while expecting he or
she will share your entire business with you indefinitely while making all decisions together
and sharing the responsibilities and rewards with you 50/50 style is an approach that is
almost certainly destined to fail.

You can ask any experienced business professional, and they’ll tell you that it’s rarely a risk
that’s even worth taking. Ask any accountant who has been in business more than 15
years, and they’ll tell you the same story. Failure is the norm in these “let’s share
everything with someone we like” business partnerships.

The high-risk partnership model that almost always fails eventually looks like this:

1. You have a business idea.

2. You approach a trusted friend or family member and ask them to partner with you to
build out the idea.

3. You struggle through the process together learning a bunch of new skills as you go.
This part is fun!

4. Far more often than not, the project fails and worse yet, you strain or lose your
friendship. Even if you succeed, disputes over direction and work duties arise and
strain the partnership.

Clearly, it’s a mistake to seek out partners only based on your circle of people you “like,
trust, and know well.” I think that’s what financial guru Dave Ramsey—the most popular
financial advisor radio host in the U.S.—meant when he said, “The one kind of ship that
won’t sail is a partnership.”

However, there is a different kind of partnership that will sail just fine.

When partnerships are based on joining two or more ethical, driven parties who each have
a strong established specialty with clearly defined roles, the odds of success climb
dramatically and the risks of disaster become virtually non-existent! I have dozens of such
partnerships running smoothly at any given time, producing income for both my partner
and me as we serve our common customers together.

Once you embrace this truth, the only logical path forward is partnerships with specialists.
In contrast to the model above, here’s the partnership model I use with predictable
success:

1. You develop a specialty and get very good at a useful service or skill that is in high
demand. (Thanks to Internet-based opportunities, this has never been easier!)

2. You partner with other ethical, established specialists who have the skills that you
lack or the skills that complement yours. They do what they do best as do you.
Together, you serve an ever-growing customer base.

3. You automate and outsource wherever possible and repeat.

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Sweet success is the norm in this scenario. I’ve followed the successful model literally
dozens of times to launch projects, websites, events, books, consulting gigs, etc. In many
cases, the project partner was someone I knew only by reputation and we used only email
to correspond!

Consider my partner Andrew Cavanagh, with whom I share a 50/50 payout arrangement on
a 12,000 member-strong membership site, OfflineBiz.com. For the first eight years we
ran the site together, we never met or even spoke on Skype. We live on opposite sides of
the planet, so we used email exclusively.

We managed hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership fees and other income

annually from our partnership efforts, yet the entire arrangement for our partnership
happened in a series of short emails exchanged over the course of a couple days a few
years ago.

How is such an arrangement possible?

When I approached Andrew initially, he and I both quickly researched each other’s online
reputation and accomplishments. It became quickly obvious that the combined skill sets
and assets that we brought to the table would produce a great deal of synergy and success.
In other words, we knew we’d be successful before we even started. It was just a matter of
putting the pieces into place.

If you too seek out specialists who are doing great things and getting results, you’ll have no
problem coming to like them and respecting them. Those of us who focus our efforts on
high levels of achievement get along quite easily with others who take life, business, and
achievement as seriously as we do.

So, instead of seeking a way to build a business with someone who is already your friend, I
strongly suggest you flip the script. Try instead to create a successful project with someone
who is a specialist in an area where you are weak. Do this and you’ll find yourself
establishing many great long-term relationships with achievers! If things go well on lower-
risk projects, the doors will open for more success over time, and your friendship will
inevitably grow as you grow together and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.

Another benefit of seeking specialists rather than buddies for partners is a specialist will
always need partners because while they are very good at the one thing they do best, they
lack top level skills in almost every other important area. In other words, you NEED each
other which is better than just LIKING each other.

How to Seek Out Achievers and Begin to Build a Relationship

with Them
Most high achievers aren’t hard to find thanks to the Internet. They are the ones who have
people listening to them when they talk. They have customers buying from them when they
sell. Their name comes up a lot when you research a topic. These are high-achieving
specialists, and once you know their reputation is solid (which is also very easy to
research), you have a potentially great partner to approach.
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You’ll need a win/win proposal. Achievers are in constant “opportunity seeking” mode,
which means you need to have something to offer them. If you are starting out without any
email list of your own, you will have to be creative in how you approach potential partners
who have a good list you want to key into. You will have to find a way to make the list
owner (a.k.a., the “gatekeeper”) look good or earn a nice income from your brief
partnership in order for them to be interested in allowing you access to their list.

I mentioned that content is a great option for having something to offer a partner, and this
combines easily with making him or her look good. For example, you might create a high-
quality special report and allow the list owner to put their name on the cover as your co-
author. Interviewing them and requesting that they share it with their own list is also a
great idea. Next, the list owner passes the report or interview out to their entire email list.
This makes them look good, and you will grow your email list because of the call to action
that is found inside of the special report. (Remember, the best call to action is something
like an offer for more content, or free updates of the special report.)

Achievers are inherently busy, and you’ll need to be intentional about getting their
attention. Only approach them if you have a win/win proposition. Then, there are lots of
ways you can approach potential partners, including:

• Making useful comments on blog posts or articles on their site or where you find
things written about their site elsewhere online.

• Sending them links to useful content that may be of interest to them (Google Alerts
are great for tracking this).

• Following them on social media and making supportive and relevant comments on
the content they post when you find it.

• Getting a physical mailing address and sending a creative card or gift expressing
your appreciation and admiration for what they’ve done. You shouldn’t approach this
phase with an agenda when you reach out—just begin the process of showing them
that you are a fan of the way they do things, and doors will open.

Once you are good at finding specialists and approaching them, you’ll be ready to create
win-win-win scenarios. You read that right; we’re talking about three-way wins, where you
win, your partner wins, and your audience wins.

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 Chapter 14

Create Three-Way Wins

If I had to identify the one concept that has played the greatest role in my success online, it
would be the idea of a “three-way win.”

The first simple eBook I wrote earned me $600 and about 150 subscribers to my email list
the first day I launched it. This was well before I had any audience of my own. I simply
found an email list owner who had an audience made up of people who I thought might be
interested in my simple 20-page book. I offered a 50 percent cut (an “affiliate commission”)
on all sales made, and asked the list owner to send an informational promotion of my book
to her email list.

This resulted in several sales and also helped launch my online eBook career. Remember,
the simple book was just a PDF file—nothing fancy. We emailed it to buying customers
manually back then. I repeated this multiple times with other influential leaders in my niche
until I had a well-established following of my own.

That’s how I started out with a win-win-win concept in the early 2000s. By following this
model, I’ve built a virtual online empire. I discovered there is a practically infinite number
of new communities and influential leaders who are already established online and that by
partnering with these online leaders, you can do big things fast.

This practice is so huge many businesses are even starting to hire “affiliate managers” just
to manage their relationships with powerful online influencers. They recognize that these
influential leaders hold the keys to rapid exposure online.

You can do the same with a win-win-win strategy and mindset.

What is Win-Win-Win?
You’ve heard of “win-win” arrangements before, but I add in a third “winner” to my
strategy because it’s not just about me or my partner. Truly serving and adding value
includes my customer base or audience.

So, the three parties who all must win are:

A. The community (otherwise known as the readers, the subscribers, the social media
follower, the customer base, etc.).

B. The community leader (the gatekeeper). For this example, let’s assume it’s a guy
with a, large targeted email list or a load of YouTube followers.

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 C. You (the content contributor). A content contributor is a person with great
information to share who wants more visitors, traffic, and eyeballs on his or her stuff,
but may not have any of that quite yet.

Here’s how the win-win-win game works:

As long as the community is getting timely, relevant information from their trusted leader,
they will remain loyal to that source and they will tell others about it in a viral fashion.
Fortunately, few gatekeepers are so convinced of their own importance as to think that only
their ideas are good enough to share with their community. In fact, most forward-looking
community leaders actively seek out top-notch contributors to help keep their community
happy and their own reputation intact.

This opens the door for other “experts” or content/information contributors like you and I to
get in front of the community with the blessing of the leader.

Now here’s where the third win comes in—the content provided truly has to benefit the
community. A good community leader always acts as a filter to keep bad content out. This
is the invisible part of the job—it’s a lot of work and no one knows it is happening. The
community leader only allows the best content in so that the experience of their loyal
community members is protected and strengthened. I’ve heard this role described as being
a “curator of content.”

A good win-win-win makes the community leader look great and helps him grow his
audience. It also makes the community very happy and gives them something they want.
And, it gets you the exposure you are seeking. If you can accomplish this sequence
successfully, even a handful of times, you’ll have tremendous success online. You’ll quickly
move from a contributor to a trusted and respected leader. Once you are an influential
leader to some degree on your own, you will then find it easier to initiate win-win-win
arrangements.

By the way, the better the community leader is at managing his community, and the larger
the community is, the harder it is for you to get your foot in as a contributor. But it’s
always worth it in the end.

You can see the win-win-win strategy played out just by following my free newsletter or
blog. While I do write most of the content, I will occasionally offer up content from guest
writers who have contacted me, or those with a fantastic, relevant product to offer. The
guest writers or product owners get exposure and sales. I get commissions and kudos from
readers and the readers get the content they want. As long as I make sure that I filter the
content diligently, the win-win-win continues.

Many of the courses we’ve rolled out to our community are examples of the win-win-win
strategy in motion. One example is the website ProvenSelfPublishing.com. My partner
on that project was Jason Miles. He made nearly all the content, while I added about 15
percent of it. We share in the sales proceeds that are made, and he gets the additional
benefit of exposure to my audience. As he promotes the site to his ever-growing audience,
I get additional exposure to new readers as well.

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You too can begin to take full advantage of the same partnership strategy I described
above. The key, though, is reputation. Protecting that is vital. Even these “simple”
partnerships can lead to trouble if your name becomes tied to someone who doesn’t put
their character and customers first consistently.

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 Chapter 15

As You Grow, Protect Your Reputation

with High Standards
Confession time...

I’m in the business of teaching people how to make money online.

(GASP!)

That puts me in the company of some pretty slick scam artists and I’m well aware of that
fact. I’ve managed to keep my integrity and not “sell out,” though.

What do I mean by sell out? In this business, you “sell out” when you start promoting
products (your own, or those from someone else) that bring you a nice profit without any
regard to the actual usefulness of the product or success rate that your audience can
expect. You jump from “hot concept” to “hot concept.” You begin selling things you don’t
really believe in, lowering your own self-worth. That’s selling out. And I see it way too often
in the online business world.

The good news is those of us who recognize the power of a strong online reputation and
specialization have an advantage over everyone else. A bad reputation stands out online
easily; having no reputation stands out almost as glaringly. Having a great reputation,
however, is impossible to fake.

The key to carefully guarding your reputation is being careful, intentional, and picky in what
you do, how you do it, and whom you partner with along the way. Some of the best advice
that I received early on in my business career was to be very careful about who I
associated myself with. While the Internet makes these new kinds of fast growth
partnerships possible, they also come with risk if you turn off your character radar.

I told you the foundation of much of my early success online came as a result of doing joint
ventures with other marketers and websites that were servicing my same customer
demographic. These partners agreed to promote my products, articles, and services to their
customer base if I would do the same thing for them in return. I don't play that game. Just
because someone is willing to promote my product does not mean I’ll be willing to promote
theirs. This is because I’ve learned to protect my audience from any products or
information that doesn’t resonate with my core principles and message. I don’t give blanket
endorsements to anyone; instead my team and I make methodical decisions on a project-
by-project basis. I’m perfectly willing to hurt anyone’s feelings if I have to in order to
protect my audience and my integrity.

That’s how I maintain my reputation—and you should be just as protective of your own.

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How to Guard Your Reputation while You Expand—and Beyond
• As a content contributor, only work with trusted community managers or
gatekeepers who have a reputation for having the best interest of their
community in mind. Don’t engage in a partnership with anyone who treats their
community abusively. Your reputation will be tarnished as they eventually go down in
flames for abusing their influential position. I’ve seen it happen many times.

• Likewise, as your own list begins to form, protect it like crazy. I’ve seen many
owners of large email lists totally burn out their reputation by promoting junk. Don’t
do that; treat your list like it’s a list of your most respected future partners, because
that’s exactly what it is—no matter how large it gets.

• Seek partners who have a great reputation or a proven track record already.
Today, without exception, all my business partnerships are with those who performed
well before I partnered up with them. In other words, I wasn’t trying to get them to
learn how to have something to offer; they were fully capable well before we formed
a mutually beneficial arrangement.

• Be extremely picky, and take your time. I’ve had potential partners pursue me
for months attempting to get some exposure to my 100,000-plus email followers.
Most of the time, I turn these people away.

While I preach caution here and elsewhere, don’t get me wrong—I believe strongly in the
right kind of partnership, based on people who have like-minded principles in addition to
good reputations and high-quality products.

I credit a handful of mentors for my business success, and one who has arguably shaped
my business philosophy more than any other mentor is my favorite living author, Rabbi
Daniel Lapin. A timeless lesson I learned from him went along these lines:

“Tell me how many people would answer your phone call at 3 a.m.
and gladly assist you if the need ever arose. The bigger your list
of names, the greater your potential for business success.”

In other words, it’s about shared values—someone else who has the serve-and-create-value
mindset. When I find other experts who meet my high standards and also have
complementary strengths, I’m extremely willing to enter into a creative partnership with
them.

Partnerships exponentially fuel the “E” model of my C.E.S business building efforts.

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 Section Three Wrap-Up:
Tips and Additional Resources
Have you by chance heard the erroneous hype that email marketing is dead? Take a look at
just a few more examples of how it’s working exceptionally well for my clients, partners,
and in my own business:

• When I launched my first “real book” into bookstores around the world, it shot to the
No. 1 position on Amazon in the “Marketing” and “Internet Marketing” categories
using only email marketing. I didn’t spend a dime on any other marketing efforts.

• Since 2013 we’ve hosted several live events and sold out all of them in about a day
or less simply by sending an email to our mailing list.

• My closest partners and I have each experienced numerous six-figure sales days
thanks to email marketing.

• Finally, remember the client of mine who won a contest that awarded him exposure
during the 2016 Super Bowl? Well, that ad—in front of 115 million television
viewers—was not as powerful as email marketing. Yes, the Super Bowl gave him
some incredible sales numbers on his website in the days following the one-time ad,
but his top sales day came a few months after his Super Bowl exposure when he sent
a simple email offer to his customer list.

We can’t emphasize it too much: regardless of what business(es) you launch online, there’s
simply no stronger position to be in than having a list of the email addresses of followers
who are eager to hear from, and work with you. But email is not the only option, either. We
are excited about using SMS messaging as well right now because sending a text is one of
the highest “open rate” forms of communication in our culture. We are even more excited
about growing lists of followers using Facebook Messenger. As I write this chapter we are
working on a course that explains our strategies for attracting Facebook prospects called
ProvenAudienceFormula.com. We'll tell you more about that course at the end of this
section as well.

Whatever road you pursue, keep in mind the best content contributors come from a place
of experience, success, motivation, originality, and credibility. A lack of any of those
characteristics will make it harder for you to succeed. If you have all or even some of those
character qualities, you’ll quickly move from being a contributor to a trusted and respected
leader. Once you are an influential leader to some degree on your own, you will then find it
easier to initiate win/win/win arrangements with partners and their communities to widen
your reach and explore new income streams.

Successful partnerships with others are so much more about being a match of
complementary specialists than being buddies, especially at first. Again, I point to Jason
Miles: Because we partnered together on ProvenSelfPublishing.com, we’ve grown closer
and have gone on to work on other projects as well. I didn’t seek Jason out because he was
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a great guy (although that’s more than true!). It was about agreeing that a three-way win
opportunity was right under our noses based on our mutual success with self-publishing. I
had the audience, he had the content, and the opportunity was obvious from there.

The Internet gave us all the opportunity to thrive in numerous arenas that were never
before available. Our “Silent Sales Machine” community is full of people who thrive with
online business models and they constantly amaze me. As you work toward your specialty
and get results, you’ll establish a reputation as someone who makes things happen and
you’ll become a great and potential partner for other achievers. Then, by seeking out
simple, complementary partnerships with others that also built up a positive online
presences and reputations, you can find amazing partners quickly. Starting your search can
be as simple as spending a few minutes searching online using your industry keywords and
Google.

Expanding your business is not where the “Silent Sales Machine” journey has to end, either.
Really, by building an email list or online following, becoming a valuable content creator
and contributor, partnering with complementary specialists, and creating three-way wins
that benefit you, your partners, and a growing audience—then holding to high standards in
fiercely protecting the reputation you’ve built in the process—you’re ripe for the most
lucrative of the CES models: consulting. So, Section Four will be all about positioning
yourself to get paid to use your growing online business skills and experience to help others
follow their own paths into the bright world of Internet success.

First, of course, you’ll want to investigate our takeaway tips, free resources, and further
training and opportunities for connection related to Section Three’s “E” (Expand) model.

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 Section Three Action Steps

Remember These Tips…

• Congratulations for making it through 2/3rds of the book! I have a gift for you. You
may go to the following link and get this book, Silent Sales Machine 10.0, in audio.
That’s right, I’ll read the book to you! (Note: The audio book won’t be finished at the
same time the printed and eBook versions are. So, if the following link doesn’t yet
have the SSM 10.0 audiobook, it will soon so keep checking.)

silentsalesmachine.com/ssmxaudio/

• Growing an email list from eBay is tricky but when done correctly (and within eBay
policy), you can pull it off with virtually no risk.

• Never violate eBay or Amazon policy in trying to gather email addresses—or in any
way. Don’t let my advice, or the advice of any other expert or guru, replace reading
the current rules of interacting with your buyers and visitors on each site and
proceeding with caution. Especially with Amazon, all it takes is one customer
complaint about “spam” and your account is at risk!

• Most people don’t care about (or even understand) email marketing and how
powerful it is. Don’t make that mistake! There is no stronger position to be in than
having a list of customers who love you and are excited to hear from you over and
over again.

• Don’t forget to use your squeeze page—the simple page that allows potential
followers to provide their email—as a signature everywhere. One new email
subscriber, as a result of someone reading an article, trumps 100 random website
visitors who only stop by a site once and are then gone forever.

• Great content marketing is giving your audience for free what they’d gladly pay for.
It should leave your customers with two reactions: First, they would gladly pay you
for it and next, it leaves them wanting more and willing to subscribe by email (or any
other opt-in option) get it!

• You should be making video a regular part of your marketing efforts. There is no
downside to embracing simple video now because the cost of “failure” (little
response) is so low, and the upside potential is huge. The best video hosting
platforms for business are clearly Facebook and YouTube.

• Rather than have your videos viewed once and then lose the prospect/viewer forever,
include an invitation to join your email list as a strategic part of every video you
produce. This is your “call to action.”

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• One of the best ways to establish yourself as a credible “thought leader” in any niche
market is to create an eBook product. Even if you simply record an interview with
other experts in the niche, you will still be perceived as an expert for having
completed a book project, and the marketing potential is limitless.

• An eBook is not the finish line where you finally make some money. The customer
needs to feel like they got 10 times the value from the purchase.

• As you begin creating a steady flow of content, keep in mind that the titles you
choose are a significant factor in how much impact your efforts will have. The name
or title of your content is the first impression, and you can gain or lose many readers
or viewers based upon what you decide to call it.

• Enjoy seeing eBook products being “secretly” distributed on piracy download

websites. Just pack them with references back to your squeeze page and material,
and consider the “pirates” your unpaid marketing staff!

• If you want to try to track where your content might be showing up online, use free
Google Alerts (alerts.google.com) with key phrases from your work.

• The greatest asset any business or leader can have is a large list of followers or
customers who can’t wait to hear from them, and finding creative ways to partner
with leaders who already have an email list is a fantastic way to expand your own
list.

• “I’d like to hang out with that guy” is not a significantly important factor in finding a
great partner for a project. Instead, partner with ethical people who are strong where
you’re weak and watch yourself come to respect them and grow closer to them.

• In business, it’s best to partner with specialists; those who go deep into one area of
expertise come out ahead time and time again. A good reputation and a specialty will
take you to great places!

• If you bring a potential partner an opportunity to provide value to their customers

while making you both win in the process, there’s a good chance they’ll listen—but
you’ll need to have a track record proving you know your stuff to get the attention of
the highest achievers.

• Actively seek out win-win-win opportunities. It shouldn’t be exclusively about you, or

a partner, or your readers. Everyone should take home a WIN.

• Only choose partners with integrity; those who abuse the simple “unwritten rules” of
the system go down in flames quickly. You can destroy your reputation in minutes in
the online world.

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Check Out These Free Resources…
• My all-time bestselling course (purchased by thousands) on email marketing, which
has been called superior to courses costing thousands on the same topic, is yours
absolutely free as “thank you” for being a reader of “Silent Sales Machine 10.0.” Find
it here.

• This free video shows you one way to grow an email list of your eBay buyers using
a service called Zapier.

• For more on passing out quality free information, keep an eye on my blog.

• Hear the discussion and a coaching call I had with Chris Vallone about the
strategies—including video—he and his dad are using to expand their VW “Build-a-
BuG” online business (it includes my giving them several new income ideas for their
business) in SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 3.

• Listen to more specifics about the story where we sold more than 18,000 units of
what became a hot private label item as a direct result of using video to prompt an
email list and using that list to market the product in SilentJim.com/podcast
Episode No. 16.

• Strategically using a “call to action” in videos to encourage viewers to share email

addresses is detailed in SilentJim.com/podcast Episodes No. 49 and 60.

• Check out this blog post about connecting with “big hitters” with big email lists.

• I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and mentor Daniel Lapin, author of
Business Secrets from the Bible, in one of my all-time favorite podcasts. Broken into
two parts, the interview is packed full of timeless wisdom on specialization and
proven business strategy. Check out SilentJim.com/podcast Episodes No. 23
and 24.

• This short video offers detailed proof of the success of my first “real book” launch
into bookstores using only email marketing.

Train Further…
As I’m writing this book we are building a course about the video strategies we use on
Facebook to grow massive mailing lists and text opt-in lists, such as including a “call to
action.” We’ve had several exciting success stories so far for ourselves and our clients! You
can get an update on that course here.

Our insanely, underpriced “do it yourself” self-publishing course—my project with Jason
Miles— is a fantastic course for anyone interested in writing and publishing their own book
and other information products. Find it here.

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Jason and I are so excited about the self-publishing possibilities that we launched our own
self-publishing service. If you want to work with our team to get your book published the
right way as a self-published author, check out ServusPublishing.com. We'll do the parts
you can't do or don't want to do as you work towards launching a book!

Our previously mentioned Proven Amazon Course is not just for those who want to sell
on Amazon. We really do pride ourselves on having the most comprehensive course on the
topic, so not only will it help you get set up the right way, learn the best practices for
success and show you some of the many great places where you can search for profitable
inventory, it also teaches you to grow your business—in other words, to practice Section
Three’s “E” expand model— strategically, while helping you solve any issues you encounter.
You’ll find it here.

Finally, thousands of members of our online community gather all day every day in our
massive free Facebook community. Check us out for free here.

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 SECTION FOUR

The “C” of the CES Models:

Consult

Get Paid to Partner with Business Owners and

Help Them Succeed with Internet Marketing

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 Introduction to Getting Paid to Use
Your Online Business Skills and
Experience to Help Others
Traditional advertising methods (TV, radio, newspaper, direct mail, billboards, Yellow Pages,
etc.) are failing to get the results they once did for traditional businesses. More and more
offline businesses such as restaurants, lawyers, tattoo artists, pet groomers, and more are
waking up to the realization that marketing is no longer a matter of applying these fading
traditional strategies. They know they need to go online if they want to survive and grow.
But in most cases, websites built to help these businesses aren’t generating any new
business. So, traditional businesses feel stuck, overwhelmed, and a bit confused by it all.
They need help.

Enter the offline marketer—that’s you, operating as a consultant in the “C” of the CES
models. You are the one who gets the phone ringing again.

You are the one who gets the leads coming in again for pennies instead of dollars per
prospect.

You are the one who makes marketing work again using small, inexpensive strategies that
are easily tested, offer virtually zero risk and have potentially huge rewards for your clients.
You take the risk out of the game!

If you are new to making money online, you won’t be starting out as a consultant
obviously. But it’s still very good for you to realize from the very start just how valuable
even the most basic of online business skills are to business owners all around you. Even
the smallest success online will qualify you to begin helping others, and you can get paid
well to do so! (Better yet, you can refer clients to others and get paid a referral fee.)

Last, but not least, we’re circling back to the C in CES— becoming a “C” consultant who
gets paid very well to assist others. In fact, this third model can be the ultimate income
stream, often allowing those who get there to serve the most people in the least amount of
time, as their services go out in waves from those they serve directly to those their clients
serve as well. If you are willing to share the strategies that are working for you, it will open
doors of opportunity for you to become an authority who leads others to success in your
area of expertise. To do so, though, you’ll need help running the rest of your business(es).

In my own business, I am constantly evaluating the way I spend my time, and I’m
consistently growing my team and passing off to others all the tasks that can so easily
clutter my day. My team consists of partners all over the world who are working part-time
in most cases to support the various online business ventures my team and I operate.
Keeping my time freed up to do the things that ONLY I can do is vital.

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 Chapter 16

Free Yourself Up by Training Close

Partners to Lead with You
I see so many business owners become bogged down in doing the day-to-day tasks that
could and should be passed off to someone else’s capable hands.

It is 100 percent true that no one can complete a task exactly the way you would. It is also
true that struggling to maintain control of every aspect of your business will keep your
business small and vulnerable. Eventually you must begin bringing in other people to
stabilize your business. If you are unable to remove yourself from the equation of the day-
to-day responsibilities of your business, you will never be able to take a break without
losing income. When you are gone, the business dies. You'll also have a cap on your
growth.

So, even if you love the work you are doing, you should dedicate significant time to
replacing yourself. Trusting others to take over any repetitive tasks that are involved in
your business model is an uncomfortable but vital step for all of us as we grow. See,
virtually every aspect of running an online selling business is something you could train a
good partner to do with and for you. You also want to make your business transportable so
that a new owner could buy and take over the business if it ever became necessary or
desirable. This is called having an exit strategy.

Your first hire should probably come far sooner than your instincts will suggest—really, as
soon as your profits allow you to comfortably take that step. Rarely though is it a good idea
to hire your first worker merely to do some of the tasks that you think are mundane.
Adding people to your team just so you can work fewer hours is a good way to go broke.
On the other hand, hiring partners who are ready to help you grow your business is a good
way to grow! Your first hire should be someone who puts money in the bank with you.
Teach them to bring home the profits just like you do. That's your best first hire!

For me, one such hire is my mom. She is tasked with finding profitable inventory for my
Amazon and eBay business. I give her training and resources, and it’s her responsibility to
earn more for the business than she is paid.

That’s a standard I’d suggest you hold for your early hires. Almost always, the correct first
hire will be someone who is tasked solely with making you a profit as fast as possible. This
first worker is someone who will be doing all the same things you do to generate income.
(If you aren’t generating income, then you aren’t ready to hire!) Then, once your first hire
is bringing in more than he or she is costing you, it’s time to grow and hire more people.

In my own business, which obviously includes all three CES models, I have three primary
leaders in addition to myself. My “S” (sell) team is led by my mom, Judy Cockrum, and
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Brett Bartlett (the guy who started with $400 and turned it into eight figures). I have
another partner, Nathan Bailey, who leads my “C” (consult) team.

Working with these three allows me to be the “E” (expand) guy, putting most of my effort
and energy into expanding my business into more and more income streams and making
them “silent” by outsourcing everything possible. I call myself the “Chief Momentum
Officer”. That's the role I have as the “E” guy.

Note there is a distinction between these closest partners and the many people I work with
overall. I have many single-project partners like Jason Miles (my ProvenSelfPublishing
.com partner), but I don’t necessarily consider them to be on my team. They have many of
their own projects as well, where the bulk of work done by Brett and Nathan, in particular,
is in coordinated efforts toward building our joint overall business.

Part of the allure of this new model is that the traditional “org chart” does not apply. We go
by the philosophy “If you want to get paid, get results.” It’s all results-related—and we
share those results, too. I share profits with my team as incentive to help grow my
business.

The bottom line is if you have to handle everything yourself to the point where it’s holding
your business back, then something is out of order. Outsource the tasks that could and
should be getting done by someone else as soon as your profits let you. Otherwise, you
won’t grow as quickly or become as successful as you would otherwise.

While early hires are all about increasing your profits, over time you’ll want to pass off all
possible tasks to others with the goal that you do only those things that only you can do.
That's how you build a sustainable business that can accommodate time spent doing high
income coaching and consulting without losing the income streams that helped you gain the
credibility and experience you needed to get to that point.

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 Chapter 17

Free Yourself Up Through Delegation

Think through the tasks that you perform yourself on a day-to-day basis. Are any of those
tasks ones that could be passed to someone else willing to work remotely for a few dollars
per hour, freeing you up to think, create, plan, and do the stuff that only you can do? If so,
you should plan to eventually transition those responsibilities to someone else.

For example, one of my rules I teach eBay sellers is “Never Touch Box Tape.” What does
this mean? It means that you can pay a neighborhood kid a few dollars per hour and free
up a bunch of your time by letting them pack and ship your boxes. And remember how I
mentioned sourcing products at yard sales and estate sales? Even if you hate the thought of
going to such sales yourself, you can outsource that part and still turn a profit. It’s the
same with online arbitrage; you can train workers to scour the Internet to find big profit
items to flip on Amazon or eBay for a percentage of the profits.

When I suggest this, often some of our students wonder what prevents these “workers”
from learning from you and then quitting just to do the same work on their own? We have a
simple and effective solution to this challenge. When we hire anyone to work on our team,
we ask them to sign a non-compete agreement. This means they are barred from selling on
eBay or Amazon themselves so that I can freely share tips and ideas with them without risk
of creating well-armed local competitors. It's rare that this would happen, and I'm not
afraid of the competition, but we like to put barriers in place that help remove the
temptation.

And that’s just the beginning of how many tasks you can outsource. Again, the “Silent Sales
Machine” leadership includes just a handful of people; when I refer to my “team” it includes
more than 100 people who work in partnership with us part-time. This is how I sidestep
something I learned early: that you can easily get sucked into a skill cycle on the Internet
and never escape.

Take a look at some of the skills that are a vital part of my various businesses: learning
how to create Amazon and eBay listings, finding profitable products to sell, doing social
media marketing, shipping product, returning customer support emails, building websites,
using WordPress, building a blog, building membership websites, updating old content,
keyword research, editing, writing, and repurposing content, posting content to various
sites, editing and designing video/audio/pictures, transcribing video/audio, and more.

I could spend time for years learning and perfecting all those skills and many others I didn't
even mention – all in the name of helping my business flourish. But all of them are time
wasters for me, in my opinion. I don’t do any of these activities myself. I let those we hire
do what they are best at doing. They handle the skilled work and we share in the benefits
together as our company grows.

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I don’t pay a lot of money to have these things done. There are many skilled programmers,
writers, web designers, and hosts of other talented people all over the planet. These
workers are ready to do excellent work for a great pay rate. When I have a task to
complete for my business, I don’t limit my talent pool to only those who live inside of my
own country. I like to open the job up to all eligible candidates and offer the partnership to
someone who can best meets my needs.

Many business owners have yet to realize it, but you can hire amazingly hard-working,
talented, honest, reliable, very educated help for a few dollars per hour from the
Philippines. Filipinos love the U.S. dollar (and the Euro) because the currency goes so far in
their country at this time. It’s not hard to find incredibly-talented people who are eager to
help you grow your online business.

The Filipino culture is characterized by being hard-working and honest. In my experience,

they don’t resent foreign employers, as some people might suspect they would; in fact,
those I’ve worked with are typically extremely grateful for the work. In general, my Filipino
team members love the chance to do meaningful work. I find that they thank me frequently
for the chance to prove they are worthy of our trust.

Honing a long list of new tech skills is not where you should spend your time and effort to
succeed as an Internet business entrepreneur. I’m convinced I could spend forever learning
any skill, yet in about 10 minutes I can find someone online who is faster, cheaper, better,
more experienced (better looking and more fun to work with too). So, keep in mind that
while your pursuit of technical skills might make you a great employee, it will not make you
a great business builder!

The bottom line is if you try to be the one who does all the “techie” and repetitive work in
your business, you will never grow a viable business. But if you know how to partner with
capable skilled workers to complete such tasks, then you can provide a valuable service
while keeping your time freed up to do those things that only you can do.

Then, you’re in a great position to step away from the day-to-day tasks and tackle exciting
opportunities such as consulting.

Right now, as you are reading this chapter, there is a rapidly-increasing demand for people
like you and me who understand even the most basic Internet marketing tools and
strategies and can apply them to real-world situations and businesses. Having the small
amount of required confidence is often the only barrier that stands between you having a
stable monthly income from grateful clients.

Of course, this assumes you have some basic knowledge, but your success with the “C” or
consulting/coaching business model does not rely on your technical, graphical, sales, or
marketing skills. Instead, success is quite often simply a matter of connecting clients with
some of the most basic services and tools that you know could revolutionize their business.

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 Chapter 18

Help Others as an
Online-Expert Consultant
When I first met Nancy, she was selling her handmade wreaths one at a time on eBay for a
decent price. But, after some coaching from me and my team, she grew her business to
include creating informational materials—content—teaching others how to build wreaths in
the same way she did. She sold those informational materials on eBay successfully as well.
In the process, she collected the email addresses of her prospects and buying customers on
eBay and started to grow her mailing list. Once her loyal list was big enough, she launched
a website (ladybugwreaths.com) where her fan base could go to get more of what Nancy
had to offer.

Her loyal following of “crafty” women rely on her for the latest decorating and craft-making
tips and strategies. She has the email addresses of thousands of buying customers, many
times more fans, and a very nice income as a result of her ongoing efforts.

It doesn’t stop there though. Today, Nancy’s customers (audience) not only devour the
content she produces about decorating and craft-making, they even pay her for coaching.
In other words, Nancy started with the “S” model, moved into the “E” model, and ended up
in the “C” model as well with an absolutely thriving Internet business featuring multiple
income streams.

You too may be able to utilize your own specialty in the “C” model, using what you’ve
learned to help others as a coach or consultant in ways highly specific to your own
business.

Here’s another simple example of the “C” model in action. I have a partner who has helped
dozens of businesses begin selling their inventory on Amazon. When he started approaching
traditional businesses with the offer to help them get set up on Amazon, he wasn’t even an
Amazon selling expert himself yet.

He didn’t have to be.

He did know a few basics about online business, and he knew some fellow Amazon selling
experts who were available as a resource if he needed them. He knew as well that Amazon
represented a huge marketplace of online buyers. His simple proposal based on those
factors made sense quickly to many clients. Once he had a client, it was easy to find any
help he needed to get things set things up the right way.

He now has dozens of clients, and he uses that momentum to find even more clients easily.
He sets up Amazon selling accounts for his clients, helps them get their inventory onto
Amazon starting with the highest potential items first, and then he gets paid a percentage
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of the resulting sales. He’s a highly paid “commission-only” sales rep for the businesses
who hire him and the best part is, he has other people earning the money for him.
Considering that Amazon is the most-shopped website online, my partner is doing very well
without ever having to track down inventory of his own. His only task is managing the
inventory levels for his clients.

Another beautiful part of this “Proven Product Partnering” model, as we call it, is that it
creates true multiple-income streams with minimal risk of ever losing your business due to
an account shutdown or accidental policy violation with Amazon. This is true because each
client has his or her own independent Amazon account.

In general, the “OfflineBiz opportunity” (our nickname for the “C” model) is huge. I see it
every day in my own work. I’ve spent half a day with businesses that pay me very well, buy
me lunch, and surround me with VIPs to help them make the most basic of Internet
marketing decisions. At this point, I have more people who want my advice one-on-one
than I can serve and still prioritize my family, which is why I am able to charge what I do.
Believe me, if you are willing to take less than the $1500 per hour that I charge clients,
then you can find plenty of opportunities to help small businesses succeed online and they’ll
gladly pay you for it!

Here’s another huge tip about consulting: your best ideas might be a combination of others’
ideas. For example, a true online pro might take a course from Expert A, then read a book
by Expert B, and then combine ideas from both experts into a brand-new idea to pursue
with another online creative project partner—and, in the end, it’s unlike anything anyone
else is doing. Then, after such entrepreneurs succeed themselves, they teach this new
strategy to others.

The “C” model for Internet success is one we’ve seen delight plenty of “Silent Sales
Machine” fans—and I see so much potential for others to join our ranks. Remember Chris,
who started out with the “S” model (selling the VW bugs he restored with his dad on eBay)
and shifted into the “E” model by growing a large loyal audience for his other products and
services? I’d love to see him get paid to consult with those who want to follow in his
footsteps from similar niche markets.

Whether you coach others in your specialty, help traditional offline businesses, or combine
others’ specialties to come up with your own unique income stream you can then guide
others in, trust me—there’s plenty of untapped potential out there to help others as an
online-expert consultant, and plenty of business owners right in your own community who
would love to see the right person show up to help them make the transition to Internet
marketing.

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 Section Four Wrap-Up:
Tips and Additional Resources
Remember how we reversed the “Silent Sales Machine” CES models for the purposes of this
book to focus first on selling, because most beginners start there? So, why do we still call it
“CES,” other than long-standing habit?

Well, those who go as far as consulting often find that becoming their first priority.

In other words, though you may start out “S” then “E” then “C,” if you stretch into all three
“Silent Sales Machine” models, you may spend most of your effort (and find most of your
profits) in the consulting/coaching arena. This is where you truly build solid one-on-one
relationships. Business is all about relationships, so I love encouraging successful online
entrepreneurs to take that final step into teaching what they know and growing real
relationships as they do it.

If you are going to live out the “Silent Sales Machine” lifestyle, you’ll need to free yourself
up by outsourcing, or delegating. If you are trapped in the mentality of thinking that you
are the best person to tackle every aspect of your business, your business will own you if it
ever does grow, because it will be entirely dependent upon you. If instead you focus on
selecting some close partners to help you lead what could quickly become a team of
workers who contribute to your success, you’ll be freed up to focus on working on your
business instead of always being stuck in your business.

Remember, your time is a premium asset that you should be protecting when it comes to
making business decisions. The more time you can free up, and the less money you can
spend freeing it up, the more stable and sustainable your business will become.

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 Section Four Action Steps

Remember These Tips…

• Do not allow your business to own you; instead, hire help as quickly as your profits
let you. Outsourcing and delegation are becoming vital components of nearly all
successful businesses on and offline.

• Your first hire should be someone who puts money in your pocket – not someone
who does the work you don't like doing.

• Once your business is ramped up and ready to pursue income options beyond selling
products and growing an audience, hiring help is a great way to automate your
business so you can set about creating multiple income streams.

• Consider paying local partners to run your entire eBay and Amazon business—I do,
and so do many others in our “Silent Sales Machine” community.

• Any repetitive, mundane, or technically challenging projects that you find yourself
trying to tackle on your own should be delegated as you grow. The goal is to find
someone else who can do the job more easily, faster, and (in most cases) better than
you could ever do it yourself.

• Skilled labor can be outsourced too. You don’t need to be able to build websites, add
content to existing websites, program, create graphics, edit your writing (grammar,
etc.), video, or audio, answer customer support email or phone calls, take great
product pictures, edit or create graphics, or even put products up for sale on eBay or
Amazon, etc. All of these tasks and many more can be handled for a few dollars per
hour by someone else once you know how to find good help.

• People with skills work for people with great ideas. If you want to be a highly
successful online business entrepreneur, be an idea person!

• Businesses around the world (online and offline) need help getting their products
online. Becoming a consultant for them is a fantastic model for Internet business
success.

• Remember, you don’t have to be the one doing the work in the “C” model! This entire
model could be a simple matter of referring clients to others to do the work while you
collect a finder’s fee.

Check Out These Free Resources…

• Interested in building a team on a budget? To learn how my partner Brett and I built
our sourcing teams, go to SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 29.

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 • For details on how to automate (outsource) shopping yard sales to flip goods for
profits on eBay or Amazon, go to SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 28.

• Learn more about helping businesses around the world with their Internet marketing
and social media efforts checking out the free report at OfflineBiz.com.

• Join our OfflineBiz.com Facebook group for free here.

Train Further…
We created a comprehensive course to teach all we know about building a team to source
profitable products for and with you and help you automate your business and free up your
time.

Learn more at ProvenTeamBuilding.com.

For the entire strategy related to setting up Amazon accounts for clients for a percentage of
resulting sales, you can invest in our detailed course at ProvenProductPartnering.com.

Please note that both courses listed above are included in the Proven Amazon Course as
well. You’ll find this comprehensive course at ProvenAmazonCourse.com.

We’ve told you plenty about our huge Facebook community. Well, it’s not our only one.
In our OfflineBiz.com Facebook community (also free), you can easily find partners to do
just about any work you need for a client including website builds, email marketing
management, eBay, and Amazon set up for a client or any number of other online business
strategies that you don’t quite feel up to yourself. Join our free OfflineBiz Facebook
group for those interested in the Offline Biz niche.

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 SECTION FIVE

What Not to Do

Lessons on Avoiding Shiny Distractions

—
and What to Do Instead

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 Introduction to What the Most
Successful Online Entrepreneurs Avoid
So far in this book, I’ve given you ideas about legitimate options that are proven to lead to
Internet business success. I’ve also pointed out several pitfalls to avoid.

In Section Five, I’ll be helping you to recognize and discard even more of the attractive but
dangerous strategies from the principles we’ve established throughout Silent Sales Machine
10.0.

Why is this important? Well, many would-be online entrepreneurs buy system after system
in search of the one idea that will work. I call this “shiny-object syndrome,” as many of
these distractions look great on paper—even though they are actually dead-ends for nearly
all victims who pursue them.

Based on what I’ve seen since 2002 in online entrepreneurship, here is what I predict will
happen to you (or may already have happened to you) repeatedly if you lack a principled
mindset and instead fall prey to shiny-object syndrome:

• You’ll operate under the false assumption that building a better website, creating a
good product, pursuing your passion online, or writing an elaborate book is the first
step to success online. These are all dangerous places to start.

• Next, you might fall for every guru launch and “step-by-step” system that promises
to teach you to make money online, believing the misguided if well-intentioned
“experts” and teachers who are trying to sell you system after system, claiming they
finally have the easy way to riches.

• As frustration and desperation set in, you’ll jump from idea to idea without success
all the while blaming yourself for failing. You might even wind up hating the Internet
and abandoning the greatest business tool ever invented by mankind!

Does any of that sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’re not alone if you’ve been there; in my
office, we talk to people nearly every day who have been down one of the roads that don’t
work. That’s why, in Section Five, we’ll take a closer look at ideas that don’t work, in
addition to redirecting you toward the ones that do to help you succeed while reducing your
frustration. We’ll also reveal the characteristics and abilities that the truly successful people
who are making decent money at online enterprise tend to have in common.

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 Chapter 19

Beginners Beware:
Pay-Per-Click, Affiliate Marketing,
and Push-Button Simple
Have you noticed that nearly all the experts who are selling “how to make money online”
courses seem to like flashing big checks and big results in an effort to impress you? Do you
ever feel like you are only getting part of the story? Do you keep seeing the same people
endorsing each other’s stuff over and over again? Do you ever ask yourself questions like
“If Guru X has tens of thousands of followers, and hundreds or thousands of them are
taking his courses, then where are the piles of success stories?”

The truth is, you are only getting part of the story and you should be asking questions like
that! Beginners (or “newbies,” as we affectionately call them in our community) should
sidestep many very popular business models in favor of more tried-and-true practices—
including:

• Pay-per-click advertising (Google AdWords, Facebook ads, etc.).

• Affiliate marketing (selling other people’s stuff for a commission)

• Virtually everything and anything “step-by-step” or “push-button simple”

• Eagerly and thoughtlessly following a celebrity “guru” into action. (Watching them is
okay!)

• Big launches (heavy on the hype, small percentage of success stories) Let’s take a
closer look at the first three.

Newbies Beware: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

You’ll notice when using the Google search engine that they always list the paid results or
“pay per click” ads down the right-hand side of the screen, as well as a handful of them at
the top of the screen. All of these ads appear as a result of someone paying (in some cases,
paying a lot) to appear in those positions.

Pay Per Click—where a company that has placed an ad on a website pays a sum of money
to the host website when a user clicks on it (Facebook ads, Google AdWords, etc.) - is
cutthroat for all popular niche markets. There are entire books written about the expensive
prospect of effectively using these ads. While we do like to slowly test for opportunities
using paid ads, we don’t rely on “pay per click” ads to generate our prospects; the learning

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curve is typically expensive when using them, and it’s getting more and more difficult all
the time to have success with them. There

are also millions of “stupid dollars” being thrown in the mix constantly by newbies, throwing
off the numbers. This only drives up prices, making it more difficult for anyone who isn’t
super serious about studying the process deeply.

Until and unless you are good at growing an audience, serving that audience, and creating
compelling content, you should avoid any and all Pay-Per-Click and paid ads activities. It’s a
game being won by mathematics, big budgets, and those who are experienced and
committed to testing—and it's all one big rabbit hole of insanity for newbies!

Another Newbie No-No: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of finding a product you like, promoting it to others, and
earning a piece of the profit for each sale that you make—and it’s not a viable business
model for newbies.

There—I said it.

This is possibly my most controversial stance I take in this book. The “experts” love to
teach affiliate marketing strategies because it’s really not all that hard to get people excited
about it.

Flash some big checks, get some tiny results for a few people, and then supply a steady
stream of tips to keep the crowd listening.

I’ve attended conferences specifically aimed at affiliate marketers, and they are depressing
to me. These events are aimed at allowing the “best-of-the-best” affiliate marketers to get
together to share ideas, etc. Inevitably, these conferences actually are mostly full of people
who have been trying for years to get that supposedly low-hanging fruit that is affiliate
marketing income. It lures so many in—but few see significant results. The vast majority
(I’m talking 95 percent or so) of the people at these events are either selling something or
trying to make affiliate income and struggling to make more than a few bucks per week,
even after months or years of trying.

The dirty little secret is that by the time people become that vested in the game, they tend
to feel good about the “skills” that they’ve picked up along the way, and fail to see that
they are on a path to nowhere.

The bottom line on affiliate marketing is it is a nice gravy-on–top income model, but it is
not a steady income business model for anyone except the most advanced experts. Even
with over a decade of experience using some affiliate techniques myself, I’m still not one of
them!

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Pass on Virtually Everything Step-by-Step or Push-Button Simple
Millions of very smart and well-intentioned people have spent (wasted) billions of dollars on
online business schemes because they were fooled into thinking that it was all far easier
than it really is. Typically, they read a few success stories (or even several success stories)
and think to themselves, “that sounds easy enough,” so they jumped in.

Online business is business, and business is never “easy.” It can be fun, rewarding,
challenging, entertaining, energizing, and fulfilling—but never “easy.”

Perhaps I'm the only business coach you’ll ever hear this from, but the fact is if you follow
the herd, you’ll get slaughtered. What I mean is if you buy into any popular “step-by-step”
or “big launch” course of any kind, you’ll wind up completing a bunch of steps that make
you feel good (and yes, you might pick up some new useless skills or even have a shiny
new website to show for it), but unless you are in the lucky 2 percent, you won’t make any
money, or you’ll have very short-lived success at best. It’s a sad truth I’ve seen played out
time and time again.

Anyone endorsing a “step-by-step” system or anything “push-button simple” deserves your

highest level of scrutiny. Hold them to these standards: Demand to see that there are
numerous success stories. Demand to see that their customers all get to hang out together
and discuss the ideas in depth. Demand to be allowed to wait a few weeks to get in on the
“super deal.” If the information is so incredible, it will still be incredible (and available) a
couple months after “launch” even though the guru claims it will be gone forever. And keep
in mind the most offensive and hardest to detect scams are those that make people feel
good.

That brings us to eagerly and thoughtlessly following a celebrity “guru” into action through
big launches that are heavy on the hype but in the end, offer a tiny percentage of success
stories.

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 Chapter 20

Gurus and Big Launch Hype

Are to Be Watched, Not Followed
In the game of Internet business, big egos come with the territory.

Although I’ve met several very genuine and helpful people at the top of my industry, I can
confidently report that they are all human. Like all of us, they are all susceptible to classic
human flaws; no one is creative, innovative, and helpful 100 percent of time.

When it comes to teaching “how-to-make-money” strategies, you’ll run into even more
flaws among the leaders. I think this is because it takes a special kind of humility to remain
genuine and focused on serving others once you are in the spotlight. We've all seen many
fast rising “experts” fail miserably at this challenge.

There are some very popular personalities online with very large followings, but there’s a
quick way to know who is worth following and who isn’t. This glaringly obvious flaw in the
vast majority of online “business leaders” is, of course, a significant percentage of true
success stories among their followers—even if they have an impressive list of fans and
followers on social media. See, a raving “fan” is not the same thing as a success story.
Anyone can spend $20 on fiverr.com and get a few thousand “like” clicks, podcast
downloads, or comments on any post or website (scammers love this game!) Such “social
proof” is borderline meaningless. The fact is, the vast majority of Internet business strategy
teachers only have a handful of truly compelling success stories to share from their massive
audience of followers.

How do they get so popular then? These often entertaining, energetic (and perhaps even
well-intentioned) experts are simply good at making people feel good, for the most part.
Often, it’s all masked in building your confidence that you are “doing something.” They are
masters of getting you to “invest in yourself” (a.k.a. giving them a lot of money).

What’s true in business is true in online business as well. Business success belongs to the
creative mavericks willing to do just a few things better and differently from the crowd.
Only the creative mavericks survive in the end.

I’m proud that we’ve managed to build a huge community of creative mavericks—and I
know this is true because we have stacks and stacks of success stories easily seen in our
interactive Facebook group. The fruit of the work my team and I have done is clearly
evident as measured by the changed lives of those who hang out in our community. That's
our standard of success.

You'll need to learn to look past engaging and entertaining gurus with just enough success
stories to lure you in by appealing to your emotions and focus instead on doing your
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research before you buy into anything tied to becoming an Internet business success,
whether it be a course, coaching, conference, or a paid membership site.

“Scam” approaches have been done a thousand times—and, surprisingly, nearly every time
a new “guru” comes onto the scene with one, they get rich while actually helping very few
people. Why does it work? Because buyers will most likely blame themselves for failure (“it
all seemed so simple in the sales pitch”). What the scammers know is this: as long as
enough time passes between the “purchase point” and the inevitable “frustration point” so
that you don’t ask for a refund, the “expert” who sold you the course wins and you’ll wind
up thinking that you are at fault. Again, we talk to way too many people who have been
down one of the roads I’m describing here—in some cases, multiple times.

The bottom line is that you should never become so enamored by a “big dog” that you
check your brains at the door. This advice fully applies to me just as much as it does
anyone else, both in deciding whether to become part of my community, and in deciding
whether to follow only me. I get emails occasionally from subscribers to my newsletter
letting me know that they’ve dropped all other email subscriptions and will only be reading
my Internet marketing email from now on. That’s just silly! There is no one guru or expert
worthy of that sort of loyalty, I don’t care who they are. Creativity demands that you be
exposed to all sorts of ideas so that you can improve your filter and come up with great
ideas of your own. So, I rarely unsubscribe from anyone’s email list. I read several every
day and often, I learn something even from the bloodsuckers in my industry. Still:

I’ll never blindly follow anyone—and neither should you.

The same goes for big launches that are heavy on the hype and have a small percentage of
success stories.

Say “No Thanks” to All Big Launch Hype

If you don’t know what a big launch is, I’ll sum it up for you. Typically, it's the same 15 to
20 “Internet business gurus” cooperating with each other to launch high-price-tag product
after product to hopeful online entrepreneurs. The “gurus” take turns propping up each
other’s big launches while giving away massive prizes to each other for the most affiliate
sales. Endorsements flow like water from one “guru” to the next for each big launch without
any of them even pausing to read a summary of what the product contains.

Your inbox will fill up with offers from numerous “experts” who all support the same big
launch—and the email sales copy is often simply “copy and pasted.” There’s even a specific
formula that’s typically they use: They’ll show you a handful of free videos with convincing
content, and then they’ll drop the price tag on you with a deadline. (Look for manipulated
“social proof” and herds of people joining in the fun, too.) The slick packages include a lot
of “bonuses.” Finally, watch for wording such as, “Buy now before it’s all over” thrown into
the marketing mix.

I’ve seen firsthand how rare it is for the support system behind such launches to live more
than a few weeks. The initial wave of new clients typically kills the support system. Refund

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rates are very high, but still, millions are made by the happy gurus, who quickly move on to
planning their next strike.

The fact is there’s no such thing as a mass-market business opportunity that will lead to
your long-term success. Sure, you’ll hear some success stories come out of these launches,
because when 10,000 people try an idea, it’s bound to work out for a few of them. But keep
in mind that every time, there are thousands regretting the decision just a few weeks later.

We hear from such disillusioned “big launch” students all the time. They tell us unfortunate
stories of how they fell for the great videos and celebrity-endorsed courses that taught
them the overly complex path into private label success, for example. Only later did they
learn that they were following the herd—and they got slaughtered. In many cases, these
great people now have a garage full of a single product they just can’t sell, or they’ve sent
in hundreds of “widgets” to Amazon and their inventory isn’t moving the way they’d hoped.

Nearly all big launches are for chumps, so when one comes along, proceed with caution.
Keep in mind that 50 percent or more of the money you pay to become part of it is going to
the sales contest behind the product, and the so-called “endorsements” are typically bought
and paid for.

Don’t fall for the scarcity tactics (i.e. “only a few remain at this price,” etc.). Get the whole
story and wait out the big launch. If the program is good, it will almost always be back
again soon at a lower price anyway, or someone else will teach the same thing for a lower
price.

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 Chapter 21

Don’t Invest in SEO Tricks;

Get Google Love in Legit Ways
I have several websites that rank very well on Google for top keywords, but I’ve never (not
even for 10 minutes) focused on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies that try to
outsmart Google.

That’s right, I’ve never hired an SEO firm, and I don’t read “driving traffic” books and tips.
All I do is create great content that others want to get.

SEO is an entire industry set up to provide services to help businesses and websites get
highly ranked—in other words, to show up higher—on online search engines like Google.
So, many people have become mesmerized by this wild goose chase and it nearly always
ends badly because there are a precious few honest experts who will tell you that there is
absolutely no way you can ever be assured of a good ranking online. I’ve encountered
countless website owners who could have sworn they had cracked the Google code but,
inevitably, they’ve all realized a harsh reality (or soon likely will):

Google is too smart to be fooled long term.

Before I dive further into getting a good ranking on Google, let me establish two things:

1. While there are several search engines that arguably could be included in this
discussion, I’ll only be referring to Google because all other search engines wish they
were Google and are doing their best to emulate this leader of the pack. But if
anyone ever does surpass Google, these same ideas will apply to them as well, I
assure you.

2. When I’m talking about getting a good Google ranking, I’m referring to Google’s
“organic search results.” These are the websites that Google likes and rewards with a
good search engine rank at no expense whatsoever to the site owner.

To truly understand what you are up against when trying to win the affections of Google,
you’ll need to start to grasp how seriously they take the business of deciding which sites
will rank high on which pages of organic search results. One of their core missions is to
automate, as much as possible, the process of providing easy access to the best content on
the Internet for all users of Google.com. With that core service as their goal, they’ve spent
countless hours and millions of dollars hiring the most brilliant statisticians,
mathematicians, genius-level data analysts, etc. All were given the mission of creating a
top-secret algorithm that automatically tracks and assigns page rank scores to every
website online.

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One of the best ways I ever heard Google’s process described is that it’s like a large wall
covered with rows and rows of hundreds of light switches manipulated by top-secret,
genius-level engineers tasked with continually adjusting those light switches in an ongoing
process that never stabilizes because Google does not want anyone to know the exact
nature of their algorithm and be able to manipulate their “machine.” I even have a theory
(and I’ve met many other industry experts that wholeheartedly agree) that they put several
random elements in this process that make it impossible to fully map it out by anyone
ever—even their own engineers.

Yes—it’s that complicated.

I’ve long predicted the demise of the concept of SEO as the best way to get noticed online.
So, I’ve chosen not to rely heavily on my Google rankings. Neither should you in my
opinion. That said, you should still do your best to generate the greatest amount of free
traffic from Google that you possibly can.

How to Get a Better Website Ranking in Legitimate Ways

There are only two proven ways to get more Google love:

• Have a great site with current, user-friendly, keyword-relevant information

• More important, increase the number of quality pages that link to you by creating
such great content that they have no choice but to rank you high.

In Google’s own words:

“Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher rank and are more likely
to appear at the top of the search results. Webmasters can improve the rank of their
sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Any “shortcut,” trick, strategy etc. other than playing by the rules—getting multiple other
quality websites to willingly and voluntarily link to yours (that’s the process called creating
back links)—is doomed. If, for example, anyone tells you that they can automate the
process of creating great back links, you should know that they are participating in a
process that Google is actively spending millions of dollars and many genius-level man
hours trying to punish and eliminate. Google will not only find the best websites and reward
them; they will also find the sites that have automated the manipulation of their system
and punish them. Google’s own success hinges on their ability to do this task better than
anyone else in the world, and they have the resources to do so!

The next time someone tells you that they can guarantee you results on Google, imagine
that person matching wits with Google’s multimillion–dollar, genius-level process described
above. And if anyone promises results, you should run away. Even if you are fortunate
enough to get ranked well on Google in the short term with SEO “tricks,” the odds of your
site being there long term are against you.

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Only quality sites that meet the Google standards will be rewarded, and anyone who tries
to game the system can go from page 1 on Google to page 431 overnight. Pretending that
this could never happen to you is simply inviting disaster.

So, what should you focus on to be rewarded by Google with a high ranking? Posting the
best unique, quality content that other respected experts in the same niche willingly link to
from their highly regarded sites—emphasis on the quality. Creating content that you could
ultimately care less about is a waste of your time. Build something real instead.

Ultimately, though, unless you are both fortunate and focused in your efforts to maintain
your rank using legitimate strategies such as creating great content that others link to, you
shouldn’t focus much on rankings. Again, I don’t spend a dime or any time focusing on SEO
strategies. The most work I do is finding potential partners who already have an audience
that might want what I have to offer. This is the winning strategy that can’t be stopped by
Google, or anyone else for that matter. Otherwise, I let quality content bring attention to
my work.

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 Chapter 22

Don’t “Drive Traffic”–Instead,

Attract Eager Fans by Getting
Great Content Out There Free
It’s getting harder and harder to get your message to busy people who are already focused
on other things. No one has time for your desperate sales pitch. It has become increasingly
simple for all of us to surround ourselves with only the content and messages that we wish
to receive. We are all annoyed by anything that forces its way into our attention without an
invitation.

But, the more free-quality content you can distribute on the Internet—such as videos,
eBooks, and more—the more likely you are to attract the quality prospects that your
business needs. In fact, if you can find a way to position yourself as an expert who
frequently delivers great free content, you won’t be able to contain the number of leads and
prospects who will beat a path to your door.

You can give away, sell, or post on membership sites for paying customers only, great
informational products such as smart videos, simple eBooks, and more. So yes, content you
create can be a stream of income in an obvious way. In the past 15 years, I’ve easily sold
$10 million worth of information products, often in affiliate arrangements where partners
have shared in the profits. I’ve sold my own information as well as information put together
by others, in which case it’s usually my turn to get an affiliate commission.

My team and I give away countless free tips, articles, videos, courses, etc. As a result,
we've watched our audience expand by hundreds daily for years. In fact, I’d say your best
way to go, especially when you’re focused on building your prospect list online, is to give
information away while asking nothing in return. For example, as people become more
protective of their contact information, giving away a high-quality information product
before you even ask for an email address is a smart strategy.

Here's a great example. It's the story of my guitar-playing buddy Brian Wampler, who went
from tinkering with an idea in his garage to celebrity status in the music industry.

For several years, Brian and I worked together fixing up junk houses—using loans
and investment money from our parents. He had serious construction skills. I mainly
did “grunt” work. Neither of us enjoyed this type of work, but we were trying to
supplement our income so that we could each work on our true passions online. Plus
working together on houses gave us time to talk, and those talks helped each of us
establish what can now easily be considered “online empires.”

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 See, the theme in many of our talks was the power of the word “free”—and it wound
up working out great for both of us!

Brian’s true passion was guitars and more specifically, the tiny niche market of “guitar
pedal mods”—in other words, modifying a guitar pedal so it would produce sounds way
cooler than they were supposed to produce. For years, bands in the Indianapolis, Indiana
area all knew that there was a guy locally who was “the man” when it came to making
guitar pedal mods.

Brian was that man. He would tirelessly work weekends and evenings on one guitar pedal
at a time for band buddies and local musician friends. He made a decent side income
charging for his services, but he was trading a few dollars for a few hours—and neither of
us would ever settle for that.

As my Internet career began to take off slightly ahead of his, Brian and I had several
conversations about how he could use his unique skill to grow a real business around his
passion driven niche. I was sold on the free content concept as his best approach and
shared that with him.

He decided to run with it.

In Brian’s case, the free content concept meant taking digital pictures and documenting the
process he used to modify various guitar pedals and turn them into the valuable mods that
his local fans were enjoying. He turned these digital courses into PDF files that could be
easily downloaded or printed and mailed to his increasingly eager fan base.

Inevitably, each course that he produced and distributed would lead to more questions,
more followers, and more fans of what he was trying to do. So, the more he distributed this
free and inexpensive content online, the more his fan base grew. The demand for his guitar
pedal mods and manuals and other related instructional material began to steadily increase
to the point where he had to hire help to meet demand.

Although I’m sure Brian isn’t the only guy in the world that can crack open a guitar pedal
and modify it with a soldering iron, I am sure he’s the only one who took the time to
document the process and then give the information away in order to grow a raving fan
base of people who get it.

His reward?

Dozens of the top musicians in the world now use and rave about “Wampler Pedals.” He has
his own brand on store shelves around the world, and has worked with some of the most
talented musicians on the planet who rave about his custom equipment. The last time I
checked, Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Brent Mason, John Fogerty, and bands like Skillet and
dozens of other world-recognized artists were using Brian’s stuff. In fact, at music
equipment conventions, Brian spends the entire weekend signing autographs for eager
fans.

Needless to say, both Brian and I stopped buying houses and started focusing online long
ago!
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To see where free content has taken Brian now is pretty incredible. So, I’d encourage you
to begin not only creating simple yet valuable video, audio, or written material, but getting
it out there free. Until you’ve proven the value of your content and your prospects are
begging for more and willing to pay a fair price to get it, you should not be in sales mode.
Focus on the fact that passing out quality free information helps you convince your
prospects to give you an email address. From there it’s just a matter of time before you win
them over and convince them that you are the “go to” expert on your niche topic of
interest. Great things will happen when you take this step.

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 Section Five Wrap-Up:
Tips and Additional Resources
Warren Buffett, one of the most successful businessmen of all time, once said, “The
difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful
people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

I have to agree.

I hope this section was a bit of a reality check for you—a slap in the face of some of your
misconceptions about some of the not-so-obvious dead ends. Of course, there are countless
other potential scams that can be entirely avoided by doing some simple Google research
before spending any of your hard-earned money on any slick products.

Here’s a tip: If the sales letter includes a yacht and pricey cars in the presentation, if it
guarantees results, or features someone trying to look or be “cool” as part of the sales
pitch, then odds are it’s going to have a 2 percent success rate or worse for the victims who
buy in. The good news is once you are able to recognize lame duck business ideas, you’ll
see them coming well before you fall for them. So, perhaps the biggest lesson to keep you
moving forward is to be sure to use common sense rather than getting distracted and
falling prey to shiny-object syndrome.

Now, am I saying there are no systems to learn and apply or that you shouldn’t invest in
courses and training? Of course, not—I sell a lot of simple strategies that are the foundation
of all we do at great prices without doing any hyped-up launches, and I know of many other
great leaders who do as well. But, all of these legitimate systems require you to work and
center on the customer needs you'll discover in your own niche—not on some gimmick. In
the past 15 years, I’ve seen that those who think there’s a “one size fits all” business model
out there somewhere are sadly mistaken.

Instead, the truly successful people I’m working with—in fact, all those I’ve observed who
are making decent money at online enterprise—tend to possess some or all these
characteristics and abilities:

• They watch what leaders do instead of just following leaders blindly.

• They don’t randomly buy course after course, but they purposefully invest in their
own self-education.

• They watch how those who are successful sell online. They learn to sell and lead and
take calculated risks.

• They don’t follow the crowd; they find ways to build a crowd.

• They apply successful concepts from two seemingly unrelated fields and combine
them creatively.

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 • They are sought out for their knowledge and they form creative partnerships.

• They know how to leverage and build real relationships online with other influential
people.

• They contribute to powerful online communities and build real relationships in those
communities. They give more than they take.

• They know that success takes time; it never comes overnight because of a course
you bought yesterday.

• They say no to “good ideas” and only pursue those rare gems called “right ideas.”

It’s my belief that to succeed at any level in business requires a degree of

motivation and effort. It also requires integrity, passion, and ambition.

That’s the sort of mindset typical for the people we freely welcome into our community
every day. Don’t be lured in by courses or teachers who tickle your ears with sweet-
sounding lies. Success will find you if you get good at just two things: serving and creating
value.

So, I challenge you to establish and maintain a four-point standard for yourself to improve
your ability to discern garbage from legitimate reputable instruction.

The Four-Point Standard for Investigating Internet Business

Strategies
1. Before I invest time or money with any course, expert or training involving online
business strategy, I resolve to first do some simple, common-sense research.

2. From now on I will only pay attention to those “experts” who have proven their
ability to deliver content and training that produce predictably consistent results for
their students and clients.

3. Because I’m fully aware that false evidence is so easy to produce online, the only
reasonable proof I will ever again accept will be in the form of a large community of
highly successful followers who credit the “expert” and his/her team in part or fully
for their success. If the “expert” lacks such a thriving, active, successful community
that I can join at no cost prior to investing, I will move on.

4. Once I am granted free access to this thriving community, I will begin my careful
evaluation of the “expert’s” credibility by observing the members of this free and
open community. I will carefully assess if the community is merely full of “fans” or if
on the other hand, the community is characterized by success stories based on the
strategies being taught.

To save yourself a lot of heartache, money, time, and pain, I recommend you read and
reread the standard above repeatedly until it sinks in.
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As we draw to a close here in Silent Sales Machine 10.0, it might do some good to point out
that this very book has been a demonstration of the Silent Sales Machine CES models and
principles blurring together.

I'll explain.

Writing this book, which, obviously, I Sell, is working to create great content, which is how
I Expand (including you in my audience), and a way of being a Consultant (using what I’ve
learned to help others). It’s just one stream of income to add to my team’s big list of them,
yet I’ve worked to practice all five principles here:

1. Serving you and adding value with tons of extras

2. Encouraging you to embrace powerful marketing strategies, while frankly hoping that
you’ll join my own list for ongoing relationship (if you haven’t already)

3. Carefully guarding my reputation by sticking to what I specialize in, and how I can
best serve you

4. Letting other people handle other elements of my businesses so I was free to do

what only I can do (revise this book for its latest edition), and

5. Taking good care to make sure I wasn’t being the guy I’m telling you to avoid by
being willing to tell you the hard truths instead of suggesting some softer, easier way
to success.

You can do the same with your own efforts. See, where you really shift into becoming a pro
is where you start to understand and apply these models and principles from concept to
concept as you explore your own business(es) online, adding one stream at a time, and
going further than the average Internet-based businessperson in trying to serve your
customers/audience.

My goal in Section Five and, in fact, throughout Silent Sales Machine 10.0, has been to do
my best to share my years of experience with you.

It’s now up to you to take action.

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 Section Five Action Steps

Remember These Tips…

• Shiny object syndrome—where you jump from attractive-sounding system to
attractive-sounding system—is a condition that will destroy you before you even
begin. Very popular business models can be places you should not start no matter
how big and flashy the pitch that tries to convince you otherwise.

• Beginners, beware—until you are making money or growing a following online and
feeling very grounded, confident, and creative, you should stay away from the
following activities: pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, affiliate
marketing, building any kind of website, driving-traffic gimmicks, virtually everything
and anything “step-by-step” or “push-button simple,” eagerly and thoughtlessly
following a celebrity guru into action, big launches that are heavy on the hype and
light on success stories, going all in on a single product line and then marketing your
way out of the hole you dug, and thinking absolutely anyone can turn their hobby
into income.

• Remember, the most offensive and hardest to detect scams are those that make
people feel good.

• Watch out for guru charisma; telling great stories does not make them a great leader
or teacher of business truths, nor is being “cool” or “helpful” or “kind” enough if a
person’s job is to teach how Internet business really works. I’ve never trusted
anyone who uses such tactics and you’d be wise to ignore them as well. Wealth
hastily gained always vanishes just as rapidly.

• Don’t be enamored by the results the experts and their handful of top students are
getting—dig deep to get the full story of how they got there to begin with and know
your odds of success before jumping in!

• Remember, “fans,” “followers,” “likes,” and so on can all be purchased on social

media; you want to be able to check out a vibrant, interactive community instead of
an impressive list of so-called fans to investigate any expert.

• While you shouldn’t thoughtlessly follow any “expert,” especially one who touts a list
of vague, non-specific testimonials, you do want to keep an eye on multiple people
so you can be exposed to all sorts of ideas to both improve your filter and come up
with great ideas of your own.

• The next time you see a slick launch or big pitch for a training course or product that
includes impressive statistics and “user results,” be very critical, patient, and
determined in researching the offer.

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 • Ignore SEO “tricks.” While there is a chance that they might be able to accomplish
some results, some of the time in the short term, Google cannot be fooled long term.
Trying to automate the process of creating back links—or paying someone else to do
so—will ultimately fail you and possibly get your site punished in the rankings or
banned.

• Many opportunistic tactics or tricks will be entirely irrelevant within a few days,
weeks or, at best, months after the “herd” starts using the same ideas. It’s why I feel
confident to use the term “proven” in so many of our products (such as the
ProvenAudienceFormula.com, and so many others)—there’s a big different between
a track record and the latest shiny distraction.

• The most effective strategy for attracting eager fans to your work is getting quality
content out there for free.

• Don’t be a sheep, wanting to sit back, watch the latest guru, pay for their material
and wait for the money to walk in through the door. Remember true success takes
work—always.

Check Out These Free Resources…

• Here are some articles that go into why a newbie should never get into affiliate
marketing, and some good conversation from my readers about other options (I’d
love to have you join the conversation on any of these topics; remember, when you
go to add a comment, the site will show you how to join so you can see others’ as
well):

jimc.biz/jimonaffiliatemarketing

jimc.biz/betterthancash

jimc.biz/affiliateorsellyourownproducts

• In this popular blog post, on the topic of “mega-launches” and Internet business
products, I set the bar high for the experts who claim to be able to teach you
something about making money online.

• On the other end of the spectrum, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on how to be

a rich Internet Marketing Guru in four simple steps.

• It’s too common to follow bad advice and wind up with piles of inventory that you
can’t sell. Therefore, I recorded a couple of podcast episodes that go into depth
about this costly problem and explain how to avoid it. Check out here:
SilentJim.com/podcast Episodes No. 17 and 20.

• For more on the need for higher standards in Internet business growth marketing,
complete with suggestions, check out this blog post.

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 • I’ve long predicted the demise of the concept of Search Engine Optimization (working
to get a higher placement in a Google search) as it gives way to the incoming trend
of quality content as the preferred way to rank well and get noticed online. To stay
up to date on my thoughts regarding SEO, visit the SEO category on my blog.

• For the full story on where my friend Brian’s guitar-pedal mods passion—and the
word “free”—have taken him lately, go to wamplerpedals.com/.

• For help affirming the standard you should maintain for yourself in exploring gurus
and experts, check out SilentJim.com/podcast Episode No. 18.

Train Further…
Most people have time or money. If you have both, you have many options. If you have
just time, I’m sure Section Two of this book about starting to sell products Amazon and
eBay are the best bet for you as a starting point. If you have a little money to invest in
your business, I suggest you consider the Proven Amazon Course’s large support team,
long track record, fantastic reputation, comprehensive list of modules, and numerous
success stories. Don’t take my word for it, look around at competitor’s courses. You’ll
quickly find the PAC is priced ridiculously low considering the value it provides you. Go here
now to learn about it: ProvenAmazonCourse.com.

If you are a bit more serious of a student who is ready for coaching and you’re ready to
invest in a coaching team that follows the principles you’ve learned here in Silent Sales
Machine 10.0, give us a call. All our coaches started out just like you right now—they read a
version of the Silent Sales Machine book. Then, they tried one of the business models I
teach. When they succeeded, they sent us a testimonial. We approach the best of the best
students to ask if they’d like to become a coach with us. That’s the sort of people you’ll be
working with if you want to be coached by my team, and unlike the here-today-gone-
tomorrow “experts,” our success rate is off the charts—in part because we’ll work with you
until you succeed. We’re so proud to be able to say that despite having coached thousands
of people since 2003, we have a zero-complaint record so far—and we plan on keeping it
that way. Learn more at JimCockrumCoaching.com or call 1 (800) 994-1792.

I mentioned that you should hold any Internet business guru to standards such as having
numerous success stories, a place where their customers get to hang out together and
discuss the ideas in depth, and more. I wouldn’t expect you to hold me to any lower
standard, so I want to extend one final invitation to any readers who haven’t yet checked
out our long-established, large, globally diverse, fast-growing, and well-supported Facebook
community. If you do, you can investigate my team (and whether we have what you’re
looking for) through actual people who have had experience with us—and not just a handful
of them, either.

Our community of nearly 40,000 independent members is full of success stories based on
the strategies being taught here and in our other materials. You’ll quickly find that not only
are we welcoming, we are a community of doers, not viewers. In other words, we aren’t
looking for fans or followers. We want serious entrepreneurial thinkers in our community,
and that simply can’t be faked—which is why our Facebook community is something I’ve
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mentioned at the end of every section. I’m proud to say this community speaks not so
much to my success, but to the success of my team’s techniques—and I can assure you
that you will benefit greatly from this community should you choose to be a part of it!
Again, you’ll find us here.

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 Wrapping Up
Silent Sales Machine 10.0
“This looks like a good spot to take a picture,” my wife Andrea said. She was right, of
course.

We were in Guatemala to finalize the adoption of our new daughter, and it seemed to me
that everything involving our schedule and expenses had gone wrong. While it was a
beautiful family trip, I very clearly recall the stress of several minor twists and mishaps
causing our trip to go well over budget.

But this was a memorable. We were touring a gorgeous coffee farm in the beautiful yet
desperately poor city of Antigua, Guatemala with our five young kids. The sights, smells,
and sounds were simply incredible. It’s always beautiful in this city that blossoms all year
long with colorful plants, old Spanish architecture, and breathtaking views of lush hillsides
and lively landscapes around seemingly every corner. The year-round spring-like weather is
the final touch in this Central American paradise. The day of our tour was no exception and
we were enthralled with the scenery.

As a family, we take a lot of pictures, so we all know the routine when it’s time to pose. We
placed our bags on the ground, handed our camera to a friendly local who had offered to
assist, and we quickly began to pose with our four young boys and our newly adopted
Guatemalan infant daughter who was finally ours. We got our boys settled into position and
the kind stranger took a couple of nice photos and returned our camera. We thanked him
and began to move on, enjoying our tour.

Oh no! Did you catch that? We forgot something!

We hadn’t taken more than a few steps before I realized that our bags weren’t with us.

Quickly turning to retrieve the bags, my heart sank when it became clear to me that in just
a few seconds, all the bags we’d been carrying had vanished. The souvenirs were easily
replaceable, but our passports were in the goofy-looking belt pouch I’d been wearing all
day—until I’d taken it off and dropped it in a bag for a quick photo-op! I hurried the few
steps back down the dirt path we’d been on. I didn’t see anyone. Even the kind stranger
who had taken our family photo seemed to have vanished quickly.

Everything was gone.

As our family has grown I could tell you a hundred such “oh no—this is going to be
expensive” stories, as I’m sure you could as well about your family’s adventures. I could tell
you about how I was the victim of a professional pickpocket just a few days after losing our
passports, or how one of our kids needs ongoing very expensive medical procedures, or
how the auto accident that has affected my wife Andrea deeply for years has created
challenges in our family routine and medical expenses—and more. The point is, life happens
and when it does, it’s often expensive.

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We all face crazy challenges. We either thrive or we sink a little in such moments. Part of
the beauty of having a comfortable income, though, is that many of life’s stresses and
obstacles like these can be reduced to mere expenses. Because of our flexible multiple-
income-stream lifestyle, we’ve not only been able to withstand incredible challenges as a
family, but we’ve thrived in the midst of intense challenges since 2002.

And to think it might never have happened had I not been fired.

To be sure, I was quite nervous early on as life began handing us a series of difficult and
expensive adventures. Ultimately, though, my wife and I became grateful in spite of all the
challenges and have remained confident since. Even with a young family, the expense of
international adoptions, and all the surprises we were facing, we were enjoying a very
flexible lifestyle and we were in a strong and stable financial position.

Thank you for taking the time to read my book. I hope I haven’t come across as too brash
when I talked about the ability of my team and me to teach successful online business
strategies to just about anyone. To be blunt, with several thousand entrepreneurs around
the world who openly credit our team in part or entirely for their success, I think we’ve
earned this level of confidence. We’re so proud that readers of earlier versions of this book
have gone on to launch some of the most exciting businesses and creative income streams
in the world with an amazing rate of success. As this book’s community of readers
continues to grow, sometimes I can hardly believe that the message spread so far and
helped so many.

Now, I hope the lessons I’ve shared in Silent Sales Machine 10.0 help you take action and
become your own definition of success. Your unique skills, talents, location, connections,
experiences, and motivations give you an advantage that none of the rest of us have. Find
a way to serve others well, and you’ll soon find out that you love the work you are doing.

As we’ve watched stories pour in from around the world, we can’t help but notice the
Internet makes so much possible that we never even dreamed of just a few short years ago
– and we are just getting started!

God bless you. You’re a business-building warrior! I'm in your corner!

Jim Cockrum - SilentJim.com

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