Welcome Everybody – this is Mark Valentine, aka Jazzkat, the Multimedia Professor.

I know it has been a while since I have updated my blog but since we last talked, I packed up everything I own and moved it across town. I also underwent a procedure involving a camera that explored the far reaches of my digestive tract, but that is entirely more information than you wanted to know. But, just so you know, everything is fine.

So now I want to move ahead with more discussion about my passion, which happens to be internet marketing using permission based email. This is an area well worth studying in some detail. The reason being, that it approaches and tries to address a problem which most everybody is familiar. Namely, Spam.

If you are receiving unwanted, unsolicited email, you know what I mean when I say there ought to be a law. Well, in fact there is a law known as the Can Spam act. This little piece of legislation was an attempt to shut down those wily spammers making it a crime to send out bulk mail that the recipients didn’t ask for. So how do you send bulk email and not be lumped in with the spammers.

Well, we are now in a new age of communication. There are digital solutions to most of the problems you face when you are trying to promote your message. But, in this brave new world we are facing a new problem, the problem of clutter.

More and more, it seems that everybody is trying to get our attention through the email inbox. We all feel inundated with email on a daily basis. That is why it takes some real explaining when I tell a client that their best marketing solution is to send email campaigns to their list using an auto responder.

The big hurdle here is to overcome the common misconception. One that most people see the sending of bulk mail to their list, as being the same thing as what the spammers do. Therefore, most don’t want any part of it.

So, how do we differentiate ourselves from the lowlife spammer? How can we send email to a large list and make it so that it is not only welcomed, but actually anticipated by the prospective client? Well, the answer lies in the packaging of your message to where it requires a subscription.

I know you have seen the opt-in box on many websites and that is the key ingredient for us permission based email marketers. By placing a form on a web page, blog or email, the prospective client is invited to join the club or mailing list by leaving their email address.

When you do this you are asking for a great deal of trust and most people are reluctant to just hand it over. Therefore, it always helps to offer an incentive for their attention. A popular gift might be a white paper or e-book which must be relevant.

To be relevant it must cover the topic which the prospect initially typed into google and then it led them to land on your page. That’s what a landing page is. Essentially, there is a specific niche or area of expertise, which is discussed in great detail on a one page sales letter.

The landing page offers a solution to a single problem. One that can be discussed in some detail within the ad copy. The supporting ad copy which is quite often accompanied by a video, will be the first place where you will be gaining his trust or build a sense of rapport with the customer.

This is key because people are likely to buy from people they know, like, and trust.
At this point, if you are effective at painting yourself as an authority, you can easily point them to a form where they will subscribe to your marketing.

Tomorrow we will talk more about what happens after they sign up for your newsletter. So until then.

Today I would like to give you a quick hint on how to blackout a portion of a paragraph.  In this case it is a sentence that runs over two lines.  I use a $40 program to do most of my photo editing.  It’s called Snagit and it is a program that I can’t live without.

What I like best about this as apposed to photoshop elements is how quick it loads.  Face it, photoshop elements is one bulky program.  So check out Snagit and it is available through TechSmith, makers of Camtasia.

What Snagit does best is grab a portion of text, in this case, it is a PDF file.  A student was asking me how to black out a sentence that spans more than one line.  To best illustrate, check out this video.

Here is a quick video showing part one of a three part podcast which will give you a look at an amazing product…

Well, maybe not quite yet.  We haven’t quite got to the point of an I-phone app but we are close enough to show you some exciting new twists on some old ideas. Take email Auto-Responders.  What are they?

Well you know how when you sign up for a promotion like a newsletter or the calendar for your favorite bar band?  What usually happens is you leave your name and email address and click submit.

Then you receive notification that in order to confirm your subscription, you must visit your email account and click on the confirm link.  What you have done is called a double opt-in.

The first “opt-in” occurred when you clicked the check box and left your name and email.  The second “opt-in” happens when you click a link in the email to confirm your subscription.

This has become so commonplace that when I tell people about permission based email campaigns, they say, “what’s that”?  But when I give them the above example, they recognize it immediately.

What has happened is that the world of e-marketing is so full of spammers that there must be a way of controlling it.  That is why permission based email campaigns are so valuable.  They arrive at your inbox only when you ask for them and there is always a link to unsubscribe if you change your mind.  This is really the only way to do businesss through email. I believe that this will become the ONLY way to do business on the web.

There are a number of email auto-responders out there, some you might recognize with names like “Aweber” and “Constant Contact”.  But the one I recommend and use every day is called “Marketing F5″ by Attain Response.

This is an incredible tool that is so new, most of you haven’t heard of it yet.  I want to give you an overview so you can see why I think this product is poised to take the internet marketing industry by storm.

The entire product by Attain Response is actually a suite of products that encompass several parts of the campaign tool.  These include a robust email program, a media vault, a template manager, and finally the marketing F5 auto-responder.

The thing I like best about it is that you can do everything from one site.  The old way of doing things required that you use several applications including FTP upload software like Filezilla.

I won’t go into detail here but suffice it to say, if you wanted to put media onto a page of html, it required that you host your videos or photos at the server.  This meant you had to have a domain name, host, and usually a web programmer to put it all together for you.

Well, you are going to be so pleased when I show you how the F5 suite of products eliminates all of the middle men.  You will be able to upload video, photos, and even live broadcast to our server.

You then can easily pop them into a landing page, email template or blog.
In the next segment we’ll start with the mail product.  Mail F5 is a great web-based email platform that just might have you ditching your Lotus Notes or Outlook.  Stay tuned…

I have been a student and junior consultant in the field of Internet Marketing for several years now.  For a long time ( all the way back to 1999 ) I saw the internet as the place where I knew I wanted to be in business.

I wanted to start something but didn’t know what.  I tested the waters on Ebay while having a web page built.  Both endeavors cost a bunch of money but I did learn a little about e-commerce and I came to realize a very nice tax break.

Now that I understand the tax savings end of it, I don’t know why everybody doesn’t have a home business.

Well, actually I do know why.  It usually comes with the problem of having a passion for something while having no idea of how to market it.  Or, like with my case, having a passion to start something on the Internet but just not knowing what.

I was fortunate not to have lost my shirt while I experimented with reselling DVD burners, Mp3 players, and assorted gadgets.  What I learned was, nothing falls faster than the prices of electronics, especially while they are sweeping across the internet.  The other thing I learned was to not try and sell something that is readily available down at Target.

So, what do you sell.  I came to the conclusion from running auctions on Ebay, that this becomes a lot of work and it is very risky. And when I hit my peak, I was only netting an extra $100 per week.

While I enjoyed the extra money, it did little more than keep me in lattes.  In my defense, I do have a pretty expensive espresso habit.

From what I could gather, the ones that are making big money on Ebay are collectors that know the true value of their collectibles.  Guys that don’t mind getting up with the sun to hit the yard sale way before anybody else.  While I can appreciate these go-getters, that just wasn’t me.

Reselling at auction can also be a bit like gambling because there is always the chance that you have overpriced the product and you end up re-listing it.  Worse yet, it might not sell the second or third time.

My last foray into this market saw me stuck with a closet full of Seikos and having to dump them below cost to keep from eating them.

So, what did I learn.  I learned that if you are going to sell consumables, you don’t want to be responsible for a garage full of inventory.  That is where the beginners in Amway get beat.

Amway is the grandaddy of home based businesses and I think the main reason that most Amway businesses fail is that they require that you stock a volume of product in order to maintain an active account.  The stuff piles up and pretty soon your friends and family aren’t returning your calls.  Sound familiar?

I do believe in their home business model though.  Where I would do it differently is in a couple of ways.  One, Instead of product, I would sell memberships to a buyer’s club or service like Melaleuca.

They only  require that you purchase 35 points of products each month which you consume yourself. (you don’t resell product)  It might sound like a chore or burden, but I do love the products and can honestly recommend them.

This business comes with a very low entry cost and very low risk since the products you buy through the club are as good or better than the ones in the store and fact is, you have to buy these consumables anyway.

They include things like dish soap, laundry soap, and vitamins.  There are well over 400 items and I will eventually show you how you can earn a stream of residual income by just changing stores.

That brings me to the other change in the way I would recommend to do a home business.  Most home based businesses, from Mary Kay, to Herbal Life, to Pampered Chef have you inviting people to a home meeting.

Nothing against those of you who like hosting these events.  I just find it a bit pedestrian to throw Tupperware parties for only a handful of guests.

Folks, we are in the information age and that is what I want to deal in and that is what I want to help you deal in.  If I am selling a product, ordered, processed, and delivered over the internet, why would I want to only limit myself to selling locally.

In the next few segments, I am going to introduce to you a product that is revolutionizing the field of Internet Marketing, specifically something called Permission Based Video E-Mail Campaigns.  This might sound foreign to you but stick around and prepare to be blown away.

Until next time…

A Day In the Life…

Hi folks, this is Jazzkat, the multimediaprofessor, and I am about to give you a glimpse into my perfect day. It involves some media that shows you my three favorite hobbies.

Skiing deep powder, playing saxophone and golfing. I have actual clips of me doing 2 of the three and by the end of the winter I will have clips of the skiing part as well. But thanks to YouTube, I can show you what my perfect day of skiing looks like too.

Anybody who is familiar with these forms of fun knows well enough that outside of maybe yachting, I probably couldn’t have chosen any more expensive hobbies.

A day at the premier ski resorts for a lift ticket alone is around $75. By the time you take a family of 4 and rent them some good gear and buy them lunch, a day on the slopes will run you an easy $500.

As for performing music. A recent trip through the Guitar Center to shop for a starter PA. Gave me a little sticker shock. To get me and my bass player some amplification, which means 2 mics, and 2 speaker cabinets and a mixer.

All costs right around $1500. That will get me bare basic amplification to a room of around 50 people. The price goes up to fill a bigger room with sound. I’m not complaining because this is something I really love to do.

Lastly, I recently played 4 rounds of golf over a long weekend in Las Vegas and Mesquite, Nevada and St. George, Utah. There are many great golf courses in those areas and it was the high season. We played in late October and the weather could not have been more perfect.

I highly recommend this time of year in the desert to any avid golfer. But be prepared, you can expect to pay around $150 per round so bring your Visa.

So the point of this discussion is not to brag. It is to take you away from the doom and gloom of CNN and Fox News just for a moment and point our focus on what is really important.

Face it, life’s short and when you are lying on your deathbed and you look back on your life, you aren’t likely to say that you wish you had worked a little more overtime down at the factory.

What we are more likely to wish is that we had spent more time with the ones we love. Or maybe that we had taken that epic ski vacation before our legs gave out.

Or that we had layed down the tracks of music that we love to play so they can be immortalized. What about playing the old course at St. Andrews while we can still hit the ball 200 yards.

Let’s set some goals…a bucket list, so to speak. To accomplish these you have got to have a plan. Because it isn’t getting any easier to make ends meet.

The key to making ends meet and still having money left to blow in Tahoe, is to have multiple streams of income and to especially have streams of passive income.

You might have heard me talk about this in an earlier incarnation of this site ( www.multimediaprofessor.com ) and I will be talking about it again quite often in the future.

What passive income means is that the income flows whether you are working or not. Examples of this are like royalties from a hit record or book. Or it could be positive cash flow from investments like rental properties or stock dividends.

Since most of us don’t really have a hit record or book in us and investing in real estate and the stock market takes deep pockets and a lot of nerve these days. The place I recommend you to get involved in order to create a nice passive income stream, is Network Marketing.

I know what you are thinking. This is just another pitch for Amway of some other pyramid scheme. I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I was too at first.

I have been involved in quite a few before I landed on the perfect fit. There are many good reasons to choose this as a means of devoting your spare time. I will be getting into those in the next series of posts.

For now, lets sit back and enjoy the perfect day.

Today, I think we should set a starting point so we can track our progress.  That means we will be taking stock of where we are and compare it to where we want to be.  If you stay with me to the end there will be a short list of questions that will help you to evaluate what I am saying.

I got to thinking the other day about what would compel someone to leave a steady job and to attempt a career in the uncharted waters of a home based business.

Zig Ziglar once said that to change your circumstance you must change the picture.  So for me, for starters, I picture a work day where I am not chained to a time clock.  In my picture, I have time freedom.  I am in charge so I can choose to work when I want, where I want, and with whomever I want.

Next, the limit to how much I can make is a direct correlation to what I put in.  It is only a function of how hard I want to work.  If I work a little, I make a little money.  If I work a lot, I make a lot of money.

And finally, in my new career there is nothing more important to me than to be happy.  My happiness comes from job satisfaction and there have been many times when I have known the feeling of happiness from a job well done.

Now, how does this apply to the real world:

When we are working a job, happiness comes when the people we are working for show us honest appreciation for what we do.  It also helps if they give you incentives like raises, bonuses and promotions to sweeten the pot.

From where I stand, in this economy, I don’t see much of that going around.  I feel a lot of fear and uncertainty.  There have been lay-offs and people are wondering when,not if the other shoe is going to drop.

The economy is an angry economy. There is rampant distrust of the government and big business.  I happen to work for one of the biggest of big businesses, a casino.  Here, the clientele suddenly feels they have turned the tables.

What that means is that they can easily pick and choose where they spend their money.   They are getting huge discounts on rooms and shows.  And they are getting a rush out of sticking it to the man, so to speak.  In the past it has always been the other way around.

What does that mean to a tip earning casino dealer?  Well, maybe you can guess. Since the house has now resorted to begging the customer to come, now it seems the players just want to kick them while they are down.  In their eyes, the dealers represent the house, so we are taking a hit as well.

I call my tips “retro” because they are numbers I was seeing when I broke in back in ’85.

So, what is the solution?  It is time to activate plan “B”.  It is time to step into your power and put your creative resources to work.  There are fortunes to be made in a down economy.

If you have a passion it is just a matter of finding others that share that passion.

So, when I was presented with this little survey on how to qualify your leads, I could see how it really applies to me and just about everyone who has been taking inventory of their current lot in life.

Please take a few minutes and see how these 10 questions make you feel:

1.Do you love your job?  (yes or no )

2.In your job, do you have the potential to make unlimited income? (yes or no)

3.Do you have a plan “B”?  (yes or no )

4.What are 3 things that you would love to do if you had the money?

(A)   ____________ (cost )

(B)  _____________ (cost )

(C)  _____________ (cost )

5. Where are the top three places you would love to travel to?

(1)  ______________ ( cost )

(2)  ______________ (cost )

(3)  ______________ (cost )

6. If you had extra money, is there anyone you would like to help?

7. If it made sense, are you in a position to start a business of your own?

8. Do you have 12  or so, hours a week to build your own business?

9. Can you think of any reason you should not take charge of your future?

10. Which starter package can I put you down for?

Now, I know that there will be some of you that are happy with your job, and are making all of the money that you want to make.  Some might not feel a need to help a loved one or family member.

But I think for most of us this survey makes us take a close look at our current circumstance and also gets us to dream a little bigger than we normally would.

For me it did a nice job of reaffirming all of the reasons I started down this path and I hope it will help you consider following me into a field that is literally wide open with possibilities.  That is the field of internet marketing using permission based video email campaigns.

If you want to learn more….stay tuned.

The core Beliefs Holding us Back:

There is a metaphor in the book by Bob Proctor called  “It’s Not About the Money” and he describes the fear and insecurity of rowing a dingy off of an island in a direction that you know might be your true calling.

He says that people will call you crazy and that you shouldn’t leave the security of what their world calls safe for the risk involved in being your own boss.

What most of us have are a set of beliefs that has been handed down over the years.  It starts with some well meaning people telling you that the best way to go is to study hard in school so you can get good grades, and be accepted by a good college, then be hired by a good company.

If you follow this recipe, you can have the security of working for the company, climb the corporate ladder, get the corner office, be well taken care of until you decide to retire on your terms, to play out your years on the golf course.

Anybody else but me see this as fairy tale?  Something has happened to this rosy picture of how things ought to be.  Like it or not, we have been catapulted into the information age and if you think that you can still get away with marking time down at the factory without trying to grab some specialized training along the way, you are mistaken.

Those in pursuit of the American Dream said that if you work hard and save you will eventually have enough to retire on.  Then along came the economic meltdown that has left everybody wondering where their bail out is coming from.  There is a foreclosure every 7 ½ seconds in this great country of ours.

So, where do you turn.  I say you turn to the social media for a glimpse into where this is all going.  Wayne Gretsky was once asked what made him such a great hockey player.  He said it was simple; he just skated to where the puck was going to be.  Think about that as you look over a few of the fun facts from a YouTube video that asks

“Is Social Media the biggest shift since the industrial revolution or is it a fad?

This clip does a marvelous job of painting a picture of where the puck is going.  It starts off by saying that:

• Facebook added 100 million subscribers in under 9 months.  Ipod  sold a billion apps from their new app store in the same amount of time.

• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more followers on Twitter than the population of all of Norway, Ireland and Panama combined.

• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with 100 million videos.

• There are over 200 million blogs on the web and 54% of bloggers post or tweet daily.  34% of bloggers post opinions about products or brands.

About traditional advertising:

• Only 18% of traditional tv ads work. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations but only 14% trust ads.

• 90 % of people who can zap the ads with their TiVo, do so.

• 24 of the biggest 25 newspapers in America have experienced record decline in circulation.

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.  Same for products and services.  They will find us through social media.

So, how does this tie in?  If you are in business on the internet and you are not tapped into the new world of social networking…well, you do the math.

To get a better feel for what I am talking about, I recommend reading these three books.

• “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”      by David Meerman Scott

• “The World Wide Rave” by the same author

• “What Would Google Do” by Jeff Jarvis

I will do my best to help steer you down the path.  Stay tuned.

The biggest objection I hear when it comes to owning your own business is; I just don’t have time to do something on the side. You might have always thought this to be true but just consider this; that there are more people working from home than ever before and I can guarantee you that they don’t have any more hours in their day than you do.

So what if you could find a good enough reason why, wouldn’t now be the best time to get a fresh start on a new career path?  Because, if you wait a year you are just going to be another year older and twice as frustrated.

Let’s consider how do we find the time, and how much time are we talking about? To branch off on a part-time basis, I think that 10 – 15 hours per week is a good target to shoot for. Most of us could find that amount of time by just turning off the TV.

I know what you are thinking…how am I going to get by without watching football or American Idol? Well, if you follow me through this next line of thinking, you will soon see why you can’t afford not to sacrifice some TV time if you want to make some real money.

So, how much money are we talking?

Let’s pick a target salary of say….200K per year. I think that this is a figure that most of us would consider a nice level of wealth. I choose the 200k amount because most would agree that 100k per year is a little tight to raise a family of 4 and save for college, a dream home, dream vacations and retirement, etc.

So, in order to reach the 200k level, let’s divide that by 365. Do you realize that you would have to make $548 per day to reach that goal and that’s provided that you never take a day off?

Realistically, let’s look at a five day work week, times 50 weeks out of the year. So there are now 250 days to work with and our new target has become $800 per day. Think of it this way, when you reach this point, your time is worth $100 per hour based on an eight hour day.

I can tell you that this is a level that is attainable and well worth shooting for because there are people I know who are doing it. But I can tell you for sure that they aren’t watching TV for three or four hours per day.

So let’s proceed under the assumption that it won’t be hard to find, and those extra 10 hours per week are available. And let’s also say that we can safely do it without risking our day job, at least for now. Would you be willing to suspend disbelief for the time being and come follow me into my world of internet marketing?

This is absolutely the best place I know for taking on a little risk to starting your own business. The reason being is that the normal barriers of entry are much lower than with traditional business.

There is little to no overhead or startup costs. The training is available online and at your own pace. There is no inventory to stock or ship. And you can carve out a lucrative niche just by training yourself in some new methods that I am about to help you with.

So, I would like to close by saying that I don’t know where you can look for a job that pays $4000 per week as an employee, but you can be sure that there are many entrepreneurs making that much and more in passive income.

So, what is passive income and how do I get some?

…Stay tuned.

We are living in amazing times.  Never before has it been so easy to reach an audience of any shape or size and deliver a message.  From what I can tell, the preferred mode of delivery is now the blog.

With literally millions of blogs coming online each month people are just now starting to see a good reason to put them to work in their business.

I think  until now, the problem with people taking blogs seriously, may have been partly the name blog. And also because of the sheer number of irrelevant ones, it is hard to take them seriously.

Sure there are many that do more than just tell you what we did on our summer vacation, and provide meatloaf recipes, etc. but  often it is hard to see the forest through the trees.

I feel that we are in transition and all of that is changing rapidly. There is becoming a blend of websites/blogs/landing pages/email templates that are beginning to blur the line to a point where they are all a part of marketing an effective brand.

Until now, you had to hire a web design guy to set up a page and this usually costs several hundred if not, several thousands of dollars.  Then if you wanted to make any changes, you had to come out of pocket some more.  All that has changed with the Php format of webpage design.

Without getting into great detail, this type of format runs the blogging software and allows you to make changes on the fly and have these changes reflect throughout the entire site.  Making changes like the post you are looking at can be done as easily as writing an email.

So, I highly recommend blogging as your the main source of distributing information.
What I use is free software from Wordpress and some other inexpensive tools to develop a vehicle to drive my message to the world.

You will want to make sure and use the blogging software that comes from www.wordpress.org and not the one from wordpress.com.  There is a big difference.  We are going to be monetizing our blog and with the second form of blog, it really isn’t as effective.

I will be discussing the strategy of blogging as well as what else you will need in upcoming posts.