Winter Begins

Monday has been a weird day in Summit County, Colorado...

I have been trying to work all day, but continuously find myself staring out the window, watching winter roll in.

The locals here always say that right as you see the Aspen trees start to glow yellow, you know that winter is a few short weeks away. I heard this statement again, this past Friday, and on Saturday night we had our first snow. Below are some pictures of the event from Saturday afternoon, and then the results on Sunday morning :)

This is around 5:00 on Friday the 11th. It was raining in town, but not on the mountains...



...The Next Morning:

What was Conceived

You might be wondering what we've created with all of this information and if so, please read on about the first project that went BIG:

With increasing popularity towards Social Networking sites, founders Marc Horne and Hollis Carter, under the name of HC Consulting Group, took the social media industry to the next level.

The idea was to create a social network template that anyone would be able to own and operate, and this software package would be of great value in many ways: The name is Social Network Empire, and here are some of the perks:

Inspired by Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, Social Network Empire (SNE) was created for anyone looking to own their own online community. This package includes all of the following default options and all you will need is your own domain name from godaddy.com.

A.) Social Network Template, full of customizable options.

B.) Training Videos and Blueprints that explain all set up and follow through techniques.
www.snempire.com/webinars.html

C.) 7 day Tech and Customer Support, found at support@snempire.com

D.) Interactive Dashboard, Calendar, and User profiles.

E.) Internal Messaging

F.) Interactive Discussion Forum with Subjects, Topics, and Posting abilities.

G.) User friendly Advertising Capabilities

H.) Opt-In Form/Lead Generator

SNE also has a few additional options that we charge extra for:

A.) Graphics Package

B.) ANY technical upgrade that you can think of, we will quote and provide programmers to work for your site.

C.) Logo Design

D.) Website Consulting & Marketing Consultations

This package was first Launched on November 10th, 2008 and has been a huge success for the HC Consulting Group. Since then, SNE has been updated multiple times and now has upwards of 500 Joint Venture Partners and Affiliates.

We are currently working with over 1,000 active SNE site owners, and their success stories have increased the rewards of this job tenfold. Some of the niches that our clients operate in include, but are not limited to:

Home Owner Associations
School Class Rooms
Tennis Clubs
Neighborhoods
Golf
Marketing
Niche Industries
Health Products
Horse Breeding
Public Discussion Clubs
Pets
Relationships
Dating
Counseling
Support Grouops
...and many more.

If you are interested in purchasing an online community of your choice, please see our order form below. There are no risks included when clicking this link, and your order will only be processed if you click the buy button and fill out your information.

http://snempire.com/go.php?4_A876629_19

Enjoy! And please feel free to contact me for demos of our sites.

Get Married to Your Mission

My last post was a mouthful and I wanted to follow up with some tools that will help you accomplish the tasks that we talked about yesterday.

As mentioned before, it is important to commit and marry this project without any doubt of failure. Keeping yourself positive with a healthy mind is of utmost importance, and I wanted to compose a list of items that I believe will help you an your business:

Payment processors: We currently created, use, and recommend http://securepaypro.com which offers an all inclusive shopping cart, auto responder, customer management system, 1 click upsells and much more.

Merchant account: Merchant account providers extend credit, so that you may take credit card payments directly. We have had good experience with the following company: myinstantaccount.directtrack.com/. This merchant account company will approve almost anyone, anytime without paying hundreds of dollars.

Website building software: http://zEZweb.com (invite code: vip)

Free FTP Software - FTP software allows you to efficiently upload and download large files. http://FileZilla.com is a free file transfer protocol software.

Place to host your website: http://hostgator.com

Purchase a Domain name: GoDaddy.com

Our personal list of additional resources:

Technical help:

zEZweb - http://www.zezweb.com/ (use invite code: vip)
Free & easy to use website builder that requires no technical knowledge. Allows you to build squeeze pages, sales pages, up-sell pages, & download pages.

BlinkWeb - http://www.blinkweb.com
This easy to use website builder that requires no technical knowledge allows you to create a multitude of different websites.

SiteBuildIt - http://sitebuildit.com
This is a very easy to use website builder that requires little or no technical knowledge at all. SiteBuildIt is one of the most popular website builders around.

DreamWeaver - http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
Design, develop, and maintain standards-based websites and applications.

Build-website - http://build-website.com
This website explains web page design, development, and promotion. A free web development toolbox is provided.

Rent-A-Coder - http://www.rentacoder.com/
Rentacoder is the world's #1 software outsourcing website. Find professional programmers to create your software for cheap.

Money making tools:

Social Network Empire (SNE) - http://snempire.com/
Easily create social networking websites and make money while building your subscriber list.

Butterfly Marketing Script - http://www.thebutterflymarketingmanuscript.com/
This is an extremely powerful membership site software script. This allows you to put in place up sells, down sells, paid memberships, free memberships, and so much more. This will help your website become viral as well.

aMember - http://www.amember.com/
aMember is a flexible membership and subscription management PHP script. It has support for PayPal, BeanStream, 2Checkout, NoChex, VeriSign PayFlow, Authorize.Net, PaySystems, Probilling, Multicards, E-Gold and Clickbank payment systems (see list of integrated payment systems) and allows you to setup paid-membership areas on your site. It can also be used without any payment system - you can manage users manually.

Goldbar - http://goldbar.net
An all in one solution that offers; Shopping Cart Software, Internet Marketing Tools, Merchant Accounts, Auto responders and more.

Powerpay - http://www.powerpay.biz/
Powerpay is a Merchant account. This is where you can get set up to do internet-based Credit Card processing.

PayPal - https://www.paypal.com/us/mrb/pal=3FK7HNWE6NUBW
PayPal allows you to pay online, or sell online in a secure environment. If you haven't already signed up for a PayPal account, do so now.

PLR Video Junction: http://www.plrvideojunction.com/special/holliscarter.php
Create multiple streams of income by using this professional-private label video library.

Clickbank - http://clickbank.com
Online retail outlet for over 10,000 digital product vendors and 10,000 active affiliates.

Business software:

Camtasia -http://www.techsmith.com/
Incredibly powerful screen recorder able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

CamStudio - (Free Version) - http://www.camstudio.org/
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files. Using its built-in SWF, CamStudio can turn those AVIs into bandwidth-friendly streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

ScreenFlow - http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/
ScreenFlow has the best screen capture available on the market. Easily create powerful, professional presentations with this software. (Only for Mac)

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It's easy to use and understand, and a great way to create recordings to put into information products.

Windows Movie Maker - http://microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
With Movie Maker 2.1, you can create, edit, and share your home movies right on your computer. Build your movie with a few simple drag-and-drops. Delete bad shots and include only the best scenes. Then share your movie via the Web, e-mail, or CD.

Email Aces - http://www.emailaces.com/
Auto responder service that you can use to generate web subscribe forms. These forms will enable you to build a list and follow up with your prospects.

Aweber - http://www.aweber.com/?317441
This is one of the auto responder services that we use. Try it free for 30 days. I enjoy Aweber's ability to send to multiple lists at one time, with the click of a button.

High Speed Conferencing - http://www.highspeedconferencing.com/
Hold and record telephone conversations. A great place to go to if you would like to hold teleseminars and have groups of up to 500 people on the line. You can moderate the conversations, and have the ability to mute participants on the phone with you.

Voice Shot - http://www.voiceshot.com/
Voice shot lets you send mass telephone messages to clients, partners, or customers. This is a great way to give JV partners updates on your upcoming launches.

Powerlink Generator - http://www.powerlinkgenerator.com/
This enables you to cloak any link that you would like. Typically, you will get better click through rates if you have cloaked affiliate links rather than the regular ones. Whenever you see links from that start like this, http://www.marchorne.com/recommends/..., I have used the Powerlink generator.

Smart Draw- http://www.smartdraw.com/
This is a great resource to visually map projects out. This is what I do in advance before I create software. It also has tons of really cool features that you can actually use in your products.

Adobe Photoshop - http://www.adobe.com/
Photoshop is the # 1 tool used by graphic artist and web designers.

Efficiency tools:

Dedicated Worker - http://www.dedicatedworker.com/
Dedicated Worker is a great place to find an affordable virtual assistant and customer representative.

Send Out Cards - http://www.sendoutcards.com/
Send Out Cards is a great resource to use to send physical postcards to partners, clients, or customers. Sending snail mail is much more powerful and effective than just sending e-mail.

Copywriting Forum - http://www.copywritersboard.com/
This is a great resource to either find copywriters or have your sales page reviewed by professional copywriters.

vFinance - http://www.vfinance.com/
This is a great resource to find venture capitol investors for your project.

Monster.com- http://www.monster.com/
Monster.com is where I find qualified employees. Using Monster is cheap and easy to post an add and then set up interviews with qualified candidates.

Web-Appointments - http://www.web-appointments.com/
This is an amazing resource to let you have your own schedule and let others sign up for a time slot. It is the resource that I have my profit creation consultants' use.

Robo Form - http://www.roboform.com/
Automatically lets you fill any form that you come across. This resource saves me hours every week.

Instant-Scheduling - https://instant-scheduling.com/?page=enroll&pc=S-N-E&co=y&type=professional
Instant-Scheduling.com is about scheduling appointments online with hosted software.

Google - Create a free Gmail account and use shared calendars, documents, and excel files. http://gmail.com

If you have any questions about these links, please let me know. We can provide custom programs for your business, as well as graphic design to spark it up a notch.

Please enjoy this list and use it wisely.

Suiting Up

When we first arrived in Breckenridge, it was a little tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The plan was to outsource a software product, using a third party from India, and then market this product through affiliates and joint venture partners.

The more I learned, the more I saw that this model is the perfect way to make money, and then have it set on autopilot. The way it works looks like this:

1.) Make a company using employeeinfo.info. I recommend using an LLC.

2.) Commit to this business by investing in something such as a domain name, along with investing your time to a to-do list. This to-do list (preferably on a white board) is going to be your only boss.

3.) Find a problem. You can sell anything online, but using the software sales example, I recommend going to rentacoder.com and seeing what is needed and what is getting the highest bids. This is a really cool way to create a high ticket item that you can sell over and over again.

4.) Figure out your target market and niche. Then, DO AS MUCH RESEARCH AS POSSIBLE!

5.) Invest and create the software using your team of programmers.

6.) In the meantime, begin looking for joint venture partners that have lists of leads. Let's use Real Estate software for an example: Say you have invested in a software that helps real estate agents gather leads... The perfect joint venture partner(s) is going to be someone that has a list of real estate agents. Call up a few of these people and make friends. ...then make an offer. You can say something like, for every software unit that you can refer, I will give you a 40% commission on your sale. Keep in mind that after your software is made, there are no more over head costs... and you can sell clones of the same templates. Your client may need to purchase a domain name and have some modifications done to meet their exact needs, but they can still get a screaming deal, because the site was hopefully paid off after your first few sales.

7.) Get a Hook! The whole purpose of obtaining joint venture (JV) partners is for the sole purpose of gathering affiliates. Affiliate marketing has been around for years, and now with the help of the internet, anyone can mass communicate sales offers to targeted people who are potentially looking for what you have to offer. Affiliate marketing is basically just word of mouth advertising, using direct referrals. It will be hard for your market to turn down offers that are coming directly from someone that they know and hopefully trust; and having a solid product will make your software spread rather quickly.

Essentially, your joint venture partner (the real estate broker) is going to need some sort of sales pitch to offer his clients and affiliates. His offer for his affiliates will be a referral based commission, and his clients will be sold in a traditional sales fashion.

Your hook in this real estate example might be something like, "gather 100 leads per day, using our optimal market retrieval."

The broker can now make his own sales pitch, and he is aware of the essential purpose of what he is trying to sell. He pitches this to the real estate agents, who are the affiliates and who are also capable of selling your software for a commission. He will tell the affiliates that they too can sell this product. The affiliate might get 10%, as opposed to the joint venture partner, who is making 40%, but they are still making money regardless.

Now that you have a product, an offer, a hook, and a small army of people in your niche that are going to refer your product, your business will grow. You will also grow with your niche, because you will be getting feedback from your customers that will shape your software to fit all of their needs.

8.) Promote and launch your product.
My apologies for ranting about JV partners and affiliates, but this technique is going to be the bread winning element of your business. We recommend getting around 30 joint venture partners (at the very least) and setting a day when they will all promote to their list of targeted suspects. Your offer needs to have some urgency and this will push your customers to buy in mass, at one time.

Make a solid offer that is limited, make a day to launch, and get it done!

***Give yourself maybe 2 months from the time of software completion, in order to find ~30 JV partners that are going to promote your product.

Shoot for the Moon

Well...the above image is just a goal, but I suppose that this lifestyle is what I am looking for, and what made me commit to moving from Atlanta for a greater good and quality of life

I had finished my degree in Advertising at the University of Georgia, and was looking for an idealistic, job in the South East. A big part of me wanted to move to the Virgin Islands; and this was my backup plan if a solid corporate job was not found.

I had just been certified in scuba diving, and the more I looked for that "perfect job" the more discouraged I found myself with the options that were available. Along with the current status of the economy and my desire to have an adventure, the more driven I became to leave Atlanta.

Just when I had it all figured out and was making plans to live in the islands, I was talking with two of my good friends from high school and they somehow changed my mind.

Hollis Carter and Marc Horne had been working on some affiliate marketing work, building joint ventures and promoting products, and were starting a business. Hollis was set on moving to a ski town and both of these guys were set on making a ton of money online, while staying in contact across the country.

The plan sounded a little far fetched, but the idea of having a roommate that I already knew, and being able to ski all the time, slowly began to change my direction. The kicker was that we would all be working together, making products, and providing consulting for people looking to start an online business.

Maybe it was my interest in advertising, or simply being intrigued by a new way to make an income, but both of these guys knew what they were talking about and had been doing very well with their new practice.

I was sold on the plan, and have never regretted my decision.

Now it's been a year...

It has been a full year since I moved to Breckenridge and to recap, I have a lot to share. This place has been awesome, and we are excited to begin, as we call it, our sophomore year :)

It is now Labor Day weekend, and looking back on our first year here, I have tried to do it all. Everything from working for Vail Resorts, at a hotel here in town, to being a website consultant has been such a learning experience, and I have found myself striving for much more than skiing and playing outside.

This blog is of course going to mention the Champagne Powder of Colorado, but more importantly, I want to talk about some cutting edge, online marketing practices that have kept me a float and made life here possible.

Waiting for the Storm

Before I go into details about making life happen out here, I wanted to first talk about life itself. Breckenridge, Colorado has been good to us, and as we wait for the snow to fall, it's sort of like sitting on the North Shore, waiting for the winter swells.

Life here is a little different from Atlanta, where I am from, and it has been difficult to look back. I love the small town community and find Breck surprising similar to Athens, GA...minus the mountains of course.

The eclectic mix of people here are from all over the country, if not the world, and everyone we meet is so full of life. We all seem to share one thing in common, and that is a love for the environment, and a passion for outdoor activities. Seeing this part of the country during the summer, is such a gift, and I recommend spending some time here when there is not snow everywhere. Everything from kayaking, fly fishing, rock climbing, camping, and mountain biking has kept me busy, and I find myself as stress free as ever.