Mark Joyner has has been releasing products thick and fast for the past few months.  As part of this series of launches Mark has also been giving away lots of great information at no cost whatsoever.   As from today you can download a copy of his best selling book The Irresistible Offer.  Just go to Mark's simpleology web site and sign up. No money down. No charge at all! 

Apparently Mark has persuaded his publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to conduct a marketing experiment.  Mark's theory is that giving away the ebook will actually boost sales of the print version of the book.  Is he right?  I guess only time will tell, but we'll conduct a little experiment of our own to try and test out this idea.  Today The Irresistible Offer is at number 4099 in the Amazon.com list of best selling books.  We'll keep track of the book's position in the Amazon charts and let you know how it fares over the next few weeks.

You may be asking yourself whether it's worth your time downloading and then reading a 200 page book.  I suggest you just do it, but if you need a bit more information here is a quote from the dust jacket to give you a flavour of what the book is all about:

For too long selling has been about manipulating a message and manipulating a consumer.  The Irresistible Offer presents a new, effective, and ethical way to sell based on what you're selling, not how you're selling it.

If that has whetted your appetite here's some praise for the book from Joe Vitale, star of "The Secret" and the author of quite a few marketing books himself:

I've read every book on marketing printed in the last 150 years. This is the first breakthrough in over fifty years. A truly brilliant, practical, and inspiring book.  Destined to be a classic and a collectible.  It's a masterpiece.

Like I said, if you're at all interested in marketing in general, or internet marketing in particular, get your copy of The Irresistible Offer now.  Just do it.

I'm just catching up with my emails after a couple of days travelling.  In my inbox is a message from Mark Joyner about a new simpleology course about blogging.  Our regular readers will know we are big fans of  previous simpleology courses, and we are also in the business of teaching people how to start to generate an income from blogging without having to spend any money first, not even one dollar!

The new simpleology blogging course fits that bill, since it is currently available free of charge to anyone who blogs about it, so here I am blogging about it using the particular form of words that Mark requested. 

P.S.  It is less than an hour since I first posted this article.  We are already at number 16 (out of 14,200) in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase simpleology blogging, despite a certain amount of duplicate content!

I was up early this morning. The smoke alarm kept beeping to tell me the battery is going flat. It still beeped even when I took the battery out! I pressed the test button and eventually it stopped A little while later the downstairs alarm did exactly the same thing

Still without my first coffee of the day I fired up my laptop and did another search on Google for wwwgurus. We're still at number 6, but at number 9 was our entry on Technorati. Google's cached page shows that when Google crawled Technorati on 6 Aug 2007 at 10:05:09 GMT we were top of their list of new posts about internet marketing! I clicked the link and then Technorati invited me to sign up and claim my blog, which I duly did. To prove I own the blog I had to make a new post on the blog, including a special link to my shiny new Technorati Profile. Here it is!

Technorati also asked me if I'd like to add a button to my blog that people could click on to show their approval. I went into the blogger dashboard and added an HTML/Javascript page element, then copied and pasted the HTML code Technorati supplied into it. You can now see the nice green button over on the top right, just above the AdSense block.

Around 4 hours after submitting the sitemap Google webmaster tools said that it had successfully accessed both the sitemap and robots.txt, but still maintained we were not yet indexed. I've just checked again and we are now indexed! Google insists that it last crawled the blog on August 5th, and the cached version is marked as having been retrieved on 5 Aug 2007 at 10:53:48 GMT.

We currently stand at position 6 on Google.com for the keyword "wwwgurus", but appear to be nowhere in the top 1000 for any other relevant keyphrase. Interestingly the same search reveals that the domain wwwgurus.com was deactivated 0n December 29th 2006 and expired on March 23rd 2007.

The first step on the long road to becoming an internet guru is to start a blog.  If you have access to some sort of internet connection then those nice guys at Google will let you have an email address at zero cost.  They'll even sweeten the deal with a website at zero cost too.  That seems like a pretty good place to start so lets head on over to Blogger and begin. (By the way, Blogger is certainly a good place to start, but not necessarily to continue - More on this topic later)

The first thing you'll need is a Google account.  If you haven't got one yet you can sign up here as long as you already have an email address.  If you haven't even got an email address yet you can get both at the same time by signing up here instead. If you're setting this up on a public computer, in an internet cafe or library for example, remember to uncheck the "Remember me on this computer" box.

Having done that go back to Blogger and type in the email address and password that Google now knows about and click the "Sign In" button.   You'll be shown the Blogger sign up page.  Type in the name you wish to appear on all of your blog posts.  It could be your real name, a nickname or a nom de plume.  Check the box to say you've read the terms and conditions and then click the "Continue" button.  (If you're of a nervous disposition, or even merely curious, you may wish to read the Google terms and conditions carefully before doing this)

You'll now find yourself in your shiny new Blogger dashboard.  It will tell you "You are not a member of any blogs", as though you didn't know that already!  Click the big "CREATE YOUR BLOG NOW" button.  Type in your blog title (I chose "World Wide Web Gurus") and your blog address (I chose "wwwgurus").  If you have read anything about search engine optimization you may wish to work your core keywords into the blog URL and title at this point.  However, as you will see, we don't intend staying on Blogger forever, so there's really no need to worry about all that just yet.  Simply click the "Continue" button.  If Blogger complains that "Sorry, this blog address is not available" keep trying other addresses until it lets you continue.  Like I said, don't be too concerned if you can't get just the one you want.

Now choose a template you like the look of.  The default Minima is nice and clean and as good a place as any to start.  Click "Continue" for the last time.  Blogger will inform you that "Your blog has been created!"  Joyfully click the "Start Posting" button.

Type in your very first message to the world, not forgetting the title, and click the "Publish Post" button. (I typed in something remarkably similar to the first post on this blog.  Well, actually it was identical.  Cut and paste is an essential skill to learn if you want to be an internet marketer!)  Blogger will report that "Your blog post published successfully!"  Click the big "View Blog" link and you can at long last admire the fruits of your labour.

Congratulate yourself and go and put your feet up. Make yourself a nice hot cup of tea, or something stronger if you prefer.  I had a large glass of the best Somerset cider.

You're probably wondering how we justify the somewhat pretentious title, so I'll try to explain. I first started selling stuff online before the World Wide Web existed. When everyone started getting very excited during the dot com boom of the late nineties I built a one page website and vowed not to waste any more time on the new media until I got my first genuine lead from that site.

The site was listed in a few directories. We got lots of emails from people trying to sell us stuff, but none from anyone considering buying. Then in 2003 the first real lead arrived in my inbox. It wasn't from a potential user, but from an intermediary scouring the web for what their customer was interested in (customised software for routing fleets of trucks). Not ideal by any means, but it did at least count as a real lead so I started taking a interest in internet marketing.

Up to now I've only used pay per click, but a series of events which will be related in future posts have led to this current experiment with natural search. Is it possible in this day and age to produce a decent income from internet marketing without spending half your revenue on acquiring clicks, not to mention a large (albeit virtual) pile of ebooks?