Email Interview #17: Ron Douglas

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* Start of Interview *

1. Please introduce your name, who you are, which country are you staying in and your area of IM expertise

I’m Ron Douglas from Traffic Sage.. I’m a New York born Internet Marketer, Author, and Search Engine Marketing service provider. I’m proficient with many aspects of IM, but I’d have to say that my expertise is using leverage for website promotion and list building.

2. Share with us your first success in Internet Marketing and how did you do that

I started in IM back in 2001. I was just trying to make money promoting other people’s products. I was an affiliate. A friend of mine I went to grad school with graduated and began working for a company that marketed cell phones for AT&T. He pretty much introduced me to e-mail marketing.

We kind of partnered up early on in my career and we were trying to figure out ways to make money online. In the first two or three years, we didn’t really make much. I actually had an Internet marketing make-money product back then in 2002. I wasn’t making any money yet, so you can tell that didn’t sell too well. I decided I needed to find a different market.

I kind of stumbled across a niche, to be honest with you. One day my wife and I were interested in trying to figure out how to make Kentucky Fried Chicken at home. We began surfing the Internet looking for recipes and found out that people have a big interest in trying to figure out how to make their favorite restaurant dishes at home.

I thought to myself, “This would make a great e-book to put on ClickBank. So I began gathering and testing recipes. The first ebook I put on ClickBank had 11 recipes. It was like a cooking ebook, but it was called America’s Most Wanted Recipes. It was kind of mysterious. They weren’t regular recipes; they were secret restaurant recipes. That was kind of like my USP; my Unique Selling Position.

To my surprise, people liked it and affiliates started picking it up and promoting it. From there, I started getting a lot of traffic and I started paying a lot more attention to it. Eventually, that ebook became a real cookbook with 125 recipes. It’s been #1 on Clickbank’s Marketplace in the cooking category since 2004.

To this day, I’ve sold over 50,000 of those cookbooks. It did so well as a self-published title that I was able to get a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. They gave me a six-figure sign on bonus and plan to release the title in bookstores in July 2009.

That’s basically how I got started and how I started to build a big Email list early on. I also built a community because I saw how many people were searching for these recipes online. It was a hobby for a lot of people, especially people who work at home: stay-at-home mothers just trying to cook a meal and find new recipes of something exciting to make and something to brag about to their friends. They could say, “Look! I made Olive Garden lasagna.” It was just a hobby for them.

So I created a forum where people can come and share their test results from testing these recipes. That’s how I got a lot of the recipes for my original cookbook. Today, this forum has 75,000 members and a lot of active members that post every day. The forum began getting me traffic from the search engines because of all the user-generated content that was posted in the forum. Then I would build my list and feature things in the forum just to get the forum active. In my e-mail newsletters, I would tell people, “If you want this recipe, go to the forum.” The forum really became active. Today I get a lot of traffic from the search engines and from very little content that I posted myself.

3. Share with us one obstacle which you have overcome and you have learnt a lot from it

I’m an introvert by nature and for many years I operated my business “on an island.“ I discovered that it’s so much easier to make money when you create alliances and collaborate with others. It’s important to get away from your desk sometimes and make a point to get out and meet people. You’ll find that the best ideas come from interaction with other like minded people. Forums and mastermind groups are great for this, but attending seminars and meeting people face to face is even better.

Another point to consider is that email is the most common form of communication in IM. If you want extraordinary results that are not common, you should expand your communication efforts beyond just email.

4. Share with us one mindset tip you would like to share with others, especially those who find IM hard

IM is not hard, it’s just marketing. There is no copyright on marketing process – find out what works from successful marketers and do the same thing. The difficult part in my opinion is finding a product or service that people want to buy and that affiliates want to promote. If you can do that, the rest is easy.

Many people waste time marketing products that don’t have good potential to begin with. If you’re competing with 1,000 others in a market that has small dollar potential, you can expect to make small dollars. You want to go after the markets that have many buyers and lots of big dollar potential. That alone could be the difference between a 6-figure business plan and one that barely make ends meet.

5. Share with us about the uniqueness of one of your products.

Traffic Sage is a unique search engine marketing, Web 2.0 solution. We handle all of your content creation, content marketing, and link building for one low price. No other services provides you with teams of website promotion experts for less than $10 per hour. It allows you to have your own team of marketers without having to spend time hiring, training, or managing them.

For all those who are struggling to get traffic to their website and losing out to the competition, have a look at our service. You can even get a free 34-part personalized website evaluation and competitive analysis by visiting Traffic Sage.

6. One project you are working on right now and you would like my readers to know

Right now I’m working on a joint venture with the winner of Season 4 of NBC’s hit reality show “The Biggest Loser.” It will be a weightloss program that shares the secrets of how he lost 170 pounds in less that 8 months using the “Rapid Action Metabolism” RAM™ system. The product will be on Clickbank and offered at www.TruthAboutDiets.com.

We were fortunate enough to get one of the copywriters who wrote the copy for FatLoss4Idiots.com – which is the #1 selling product on Clickbank. He wrote the copy for our product as well. The combination of good copy, a huge mass market, and celebrity appeal will make this one of the best converting products in the history of Clickbank. Affiliates are going to make lots of money with it.

7. One last tip you want to share with my readers

There are no limits to how much you can make in Internet Marketing – but most people place limits on themselves with their mindset. For example, if you build a business in which the money you make is a function of your time, you’re limited by the amount of time you have in the day. The same thing holds true if you try to do everything yourself – there’s only 24 hours in a day.

To really reach the true potential for your IM business, you have to use leverage. Some examples from my experience are:

– Creating a system to get user generated content, instead of trying to write your way into the search engines

– Leveraging the motivated efforts of others by having an affiliate program and a product that does well for affiliates who promote it

– Leveraging the profitability of a product to have an advertising budget, get traffic, and build your list

– Leveraging your email list to survey ideas for new products and to have a platform for launching new products related to your subscriber’s interests

– Outsourcing revenue generating work such as traffic generation, content creation and marketing, link building, social media marketing etc. to services such as Traffic Sage.

Learn to work on your business instead of making yourself an employee who works in your business. It’s honorable to work hard and work lots of hours, but working smarter can produce more money with less effort.

* End of Interview *

Additional resource:
>> How Ron Douglas Sold 60,000 Books & Ebooks – Built List of 225,000 & Gets Millions Of Hits Per Month