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444 Members, Open Call-in Sessions, Earners Club, and Thursday’s Webinar

Hey everyone -

A little over two weeks ago we launched The Keyword Crash Course membership community, and the response has been fantastic. As of this writing we have 444 people enrolled in the community, 1,318 posts in 310 different threads in the forums, and concrete plans for two solid new content webinars.

I just wanted to put up a post with a few program updates and some detail about this Thursday’s webinar on outsourcing.

First I want to mention how impressed we are with the caliber of people who have signed up for the program. Before we launched one of the things we debated most was whether to include a forum in the program, and it was a point of big debate for us. Why? Two main reasons:

  1. Forums can be the biggest time waste in the world. We’re dead set on seeing our members get results, and we’ve always been hesitant to create a potentially huge distraction that significantly delays the accomplishment of the individual members’ goals.
  2. The quality of answers given in open internet marketing forums is usually….well…suspect. You usually see a lot of blind leading the blind, pointless debate among theorists, etc.

We were leaning heavily away from having a forum, that is until our buddy Jesse of YouNeedaBudget.com (where he provides personal budgeting software) got in on the conversation. I told him Court and I probably weren’t going to offer a forum, and Jesse said “Listen, I’ve been running my business now for over four years, and I can point to a couple of major events that took it to a completely different level. One of those events was the launch of the YNAB forums [an active community of his users]. If you guys don’t give your members a forum, two things are going to happen. One, your members won’t do nearly as well working on their own than if they have a community to lean on. In fact, most of them will fail without some kind of support structure. Which leads to the second point – if your members fail your site will fail.”

With that advice ringing in my ears I went to Court and said “We have to give them a forum. The benefits to the members outweigh the risks, and we’re just going to have to carefully manage the forum culture so people have a great experience in there.” Court agreed, and we nervously told our developer to integrate a forum into the membership area.

I tell that story because I want you to realize how hesitant we were, and how our fears evaporated within a few hours of launching the site. The morning after launch, Court caught me on instant messenger and started rattling off names of members…”Hey do you know Dave O? Do you know Arno? Have you seen how much Lissie has been posting in the forums? Man…we have some really smart people in those forums. This thing is going to be awesome.”

So consider this a public thank you to all of you who have joined the program, and especially to those who have taken the time to share their knowledge and experience in the forums. It’s quickly becoming an amazing resource. We’re working every day to on ways to make the members’ area more useful.

Speaking of making the program more useful…here are a few things we have coming up:

Thursday, April 23 at 6:00pm MDT we’re hosting our next webinar. When I announced the session a couple of weeks ago I said it was going to be on the subject of outsourcing, and that’s still mostly true. However I’ve been thinking about how to give people maximum benefit in the session and I’ve decided we need to go a little deeper than outsourcing. Here’s what I mean…

Success with your niche sites (and any business) is mostly about the intelligent allocation of your scarce resources – time and money. So, yes, we need to talk about how to wisely leverage money to save time through outsourcing. But that’s not the whole story. We also need to talk about how to plan a site start to finish – including how much time and money that site is going to cost before it’s ready to earn. Every step in the process involves a decision about whether to spend time or money, and you need to have a guiding set of principles to help you make those decisions consistently and intelligently.

We have two sections planned for Thursday night:

  1. We’ll be talking about the nuts and bolts of planning an entire niche site from a business planning perspective, breaking down the cost (time and/or money) start to finish. We’ll also be providing you with a planning and task management tool.
  2. We’ll be doing a full case study where we talk about what outsourcing decisions we’d make given different dollar budgets and time budgets to complete a site. This is where we’ll get into how to spend your outsourcing dollars wisely at each stage of site development, how to intelligently reinvest your profits, and how to approach your business when you really can’t spare a single dollar to get help from outsourcers.

Members, watch the members’ area and your inboxes for webinar registration information.

We’re excited to announce The Keyword Crash Course Earners Club. Two of the central elements of all goal achievement are motivation and accountability. We want to provide you with both. Starting early next week (barring any programming delays), Premium members of the Crash Course will be able to go into their forum profile and place yourselves in different earnings clubs. These are the clubs we have planned at the moment:

  • N club (for new online marketers)
  • $100 Club
  • $200 Club
  • $300 Club
  • $400 Club
  • $500 Club
  • $1,000 Club
  • $2,500 Club
  • $5,000 Club

Each level carries an associated badge, and your badge will be displayed in two places: on your forum profile page and next to your name in your forum posts. We’ll also provide you with some code so you can display your Earners Club badge on your blog or website if that’s something you’d like to do.

Every time you see your badge (whether you’re in the N club or the $2,500 club), we hope you’ll feel a spark of motivation to knock off that next level.  We want you to be accountable to the entire community (because we all tend to perform better when we’re accountable to other people instead of ourselves) to achieve your goals, increase your income, and earn those badges. And yes, of course we all know it’s not about the dumb little badge – it’s about the accomplishment the badge represents. We’re excited to have the chance to publicly congratulate you every time you achieve a new club level.

One more thing about the Earners Club – we’re committed to the integrity of the system, so you’re going to have to prove you’ve earned each level before it will be displayed to the community. We’ve programmed our system to let you choose any level you want, but your club level status will show as “pending” until you submit some proof of earnings. We want everyone who sees your badge to know you earned it, and we verified it. We’ve programmed in a handy little upload feature on the forum profile pages where you can send us screenshots of your Adsense, affiliate, or product sales information so we can certify that your earnings are the real deal. Of course all proof will be completely confidential and never publicized in any way (beyond the badges).

We’re ALSO excited to announce weekly Open Call-in Sessions for Premium members. I’m loving the fact that we now have over 400 people in the community, but I’m worried that as the community grows Court and I will become disconnected. To try to stay in touch with your questions, needs, and feedback I’ve decided to open up the phone lines for a few hours each week and give Premium members the opportunity to call in. I’ll provide a phone number and Skype contact information in the members’ area. The Open Call-in schedule (for the time being) will be Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:30am to 12 noon, Mountain Time. That’s 12:30pm to 2pm Eastern Time, and 5:30pm to 7pm for many of the folks in Europe.

These calls will involve some real “quid pro quo”….I”ll answer any question you have about your sites and in return I’ll be taking the opportunity to ask you a few questions about what you’re liking, hating, and missing in the program. I’ll try to make sure calls last less than 10 to 15 minutes so I can maximize the number of people I talk to each week.

And that’s about it for now. We’re working every day to make this site a premium internet marketing resource; thank you for helping us get there!

- Mark

The Keyword Academy Pro…where you’ll finally get the method, the support, and the tools you need to build a sustainable low-maintenance income online.

It’s time to free yourself from the fog created by free information overload. When you join The Keyword Academy Pro you’ll see (probably for the very first time) a clear path to the stable, low maintenance internet income you’ve wanted. A full 30 day trial of the program is completely free…and if we can make a good impression during the month you have to get to know us, continuing your membership costs just $33 per month.

There are three big reasons you should become one of over 1,400 active subscribers to TKA Pro:

1. The Method

After you register we’ll start you off with our Core Videos – nearly six hours of “over the shoulder” instruction where we explain our entire income generating method as you watch us walk through the process on your screen. What is that process?

If you feel like you already know everything you see there, think again. Take Keyword Selection for example – do you have a tried and tested method for comparing the profit potential and competitiveness of one keyword to another? What about comparing an entire family of keywords to another completely different set? We do – it’s called The Formula, and our students rave about it. Don Lawson – a full-time internet marketer who joined TKA Pro back in February – had this to say about The Formula:

All I have to say is OMG! This is exactly what I was looking for when I bought the course. I got my money’s worth the fist half of the 1st video! The formula for evaluating keywords is the missing link that I’ve needed for years. This explains why some of my sites make money while others don’t even though I get the traffic. I’ve often felt like my Keyword research was one of my weak areas even though I’ve tried most everyone’s method of finding keywords. This formula proved to me that I was leaving money on the table. – Don Lawson, AffliateWatcher.com

2. The Community and Support

After five years of teaching people to make money online, we know the biggest reason people fail (other than a lack of a proven method to follow) is a lack of support and encouragement from knowledgeable, experienced people who can get them through the rough initial learning curve.

From the minute you join TKA Pro you’ll get answers to any question you have – quickly – inside our members only forums.

Isn’t it nice to know you won’t have to fumble around in the dark anymore when you have questions about building your online income?

But our support structure doesn’t end with the forums. Every Thursday we hold a live webinar for our members (one of which is scheduled to accommodate our European and other international students). That’s four webinars per month. Three of them are open Q&A sessions where we show up and our members are able to ask us anything they want about how to make their sites more successful. These Q&A webinars last about an hour; we’re able to answer a lot of questions in sixty minutes. The fourth webinar each month is a New Content Webinar, and during these sessions we lay out new angles on our method, as well as teaching principles from the core videos more in depth.

Here’s a quick list of our last six New Content Webinars:

“August ‘09 Webinar: The Anatomy of a $5000 Per Month Super Site”

“July ‘09 Webinar: Winning the Mental Game and Creating Momentum”

“June ‘09 Webinar: Hubpages – Who knew this would be such a solid money maker?”

“May ‘09 Webinar: Google Changes, the Trend Toward Quality, and Protecting Yourself from Adsense-related Penalties

“Running Your Business Like a Business…April ‘09 Outsourcing Webinar

“March Webinar: Multiply Your Income by Targeting Multiple Keywords on Your Posts and Sites

(By the way, during your 30 day trial to TKA Pro you’ll be able to download all six of these sessions in both windows movie format and mp3 audio format. Same goes for the most recent Q&A sessions. Call it a thank you for giving our program a shot.)

3. The Tools

The most difficult and time consuming part of getting the search engines to trust your website and send you traffic is getting quality links to your site. When you join TKA Pro you’ll get immediate access to two powerful link building tools. That’s all we’re going to say about that, but trust us that these tools are worth a look.

This isn’t your typical sales page.

Rather than bombard you with all caps red font, double exclamation points, and artificial “expiring offers,” we’ll let the program speak for itself, because the truth is it’s awesome. Here’s what some of our 1,000+ members have to say about it:

(These quotes are taken from a thread we started in the forum, asking students to tell us why they joined and why they stayed after their trial membership expired. We’re grateful to these students for sharing their thoughts and letting us publish them.)

Hi Mark – I’m only about a month into this membership…I don’t even think my first payment has been processed….but it should be soon. I’m happily going to pay it and just so you know, I’ll be staying. I’ve learned more here than dozens of other courses. (And dozens is not an exaggeration.)

As to why I joined:

1) I’ve seen this “low initial price” offer before – it’s quite a popular tactic these days. I look at these offers with a skeptical eye. I’ve been scammed before, but I thought I’ll take this offer for the 30 days and cancel if I’m not happy. If I don’t like it, I’m not out a thing.

2) I didn’t know you guys from any other “guru” membership site, so I was going to let your product be the determining factor in whether I stayed subscribed. I liked the fact that you didn’t use any screenshots of earnings, big claims of making money online, or anything like that. If I felt you had something different to offer, I’d keep going. If not, I’d leave.

What I think now that I’ve been subscribed a while:

1) This is a great site full of high quality information. Those intro videos finally made Adsense and other Internet marketing make sense for me. That’s after I’ve spent thousands of dollars on other courses and software.

2) The forum seems to be a genuine place that good people hang out. I haven’t participated much yet because I’m still working through my keyword research. (I’m slow I know.) But there seems a genuine willingness to help others and some of the students here are quite successful AND still help the newbies. This is VERY different from most other sites.

3) You and Court seem to care and take an active role on the forums proving that you have a vested interest in your students success vs. having a vested interest in only selling more memberships. I’ve seen responses from the TKA folks quite a bit in the forum postings and that is encouraging. Many other membership site gurus sell the customer on joining and then disappear never to be heard from again.
That’s my thoughts. Thanks for offering a great service.

- John H, Illinois, USA

Mark,
I actually looked at joining you guys last winter but I wasn’t willing to spend the one time fee [when we had a program that cost around $600]. You even offered to talk to me but I didn’t want some high pressure sales pitch. Now that I’ve seen your integrity I know that wouldn’t have been the case but back then I figured it was just another internet marketing gimmick to get my money.

When you came out with the free trial offer I joined – I figured it didn’t cost anything, so why not see what the program was about.

Once I saw a few videos I liked what I saw and I starting putting the steps into action. I had a few sites from last winter but had never made any money and I knew I had to try something new. I liked the step by step method as it really helped me to get focused.

The forums have really added a lot to my understanding and they’ve allowed me to feel like part of a community of like minded people. It is hard to find anyone who is not online to discuss this with because they don’t understand what we are doing.

For me it was really important to not risk a lot of money to see if you guys had a clue – which you do.

Here’s a timeline that shows my income:

Aug 08 -Dec 08 $0

Jan 09 – mar 09 $44 total for 3 months

(Realized I had a lot more questions and joined TKA Pro)

Apr 09 $50
(Wife said it was a scam.)

May 09 $126
(Wife gave a little smile at check.)

June 09 $155
(Wife nodded at check.)

July $439
(Wife said, “we’ll see.”)

Aug 09 $634
(Wife strangely silent.)

All I did was take the basics and then get focused by Court and Mark. This system makes money if you actually apply it.

- Andy B, USA

I joined on the recommendation of someone I trust, and with a free trial I didn’t see anything to lose. I was looking for a program like this – one with good support, where questions would be answered, and where there was a fairly detailed program to follow to get started.

My hesitation was that this would be one of those programs, like I found [program name removed] to be, where there were too many people giving conflicting advice, too much information and a lot of people into methods that didn’t interest me at all. I was also concerned that it would be too ‘big’ and impersonal to the point that a total newbie like me got lost in it all. Thankfully it was nothing like that.

Since participating in this, I feel the strengths are the good support, the on-topic forum where help is freely given, your active participation in the forums, continued progress and advancement, new tools to use being developed, and the opportunities for networking with others via contact on the forum. A big plus for me when initially joining was that all the training and information was available right from the start, unlike [program name removed] where they give you one dose a week, and it’s an 8 week course so if you want to learn ‘all they have’ you have to stay on 2 months (and the last week’s stuff isn’t worth it anyway).

What’s keeping me here is the forum and the link building tools, and the feeling of being in touch with what’s happening in the internet marketing world a bit as in new challenges you undertake, and being privy to your ‘experiments’ etc. All a fantastic learning experience.

- Robyn W, an American living in Taiwan

I almost got sucked into an internet marketing scam just before starting this course. The pricing structure was similar, but they required the first payment in full, and didn’t really give you any idea of what you were getting until you paid. I got all fired up, because I’ve wanted to make money online for years. I really needed a specific set of instructions to follow (that’s just the way I am).

The group I signed up for (who will remain anonymous, mainly to save my own embarrassment for falling for them in the first place) had absolutely no idea, and were just trying to make money online themselves. Lucky for me, I had done some reading over the years of some really trustworthy bloggers, and knew to a certain extent what was right and what was wrong.

In my frustration over being scammed, I started looking at the your site as well as some others I trusted, and was elated to find TKA Pro. I had no hesitation in signing up for a trial. I’m still not sure whether I’ve been lucky or not, but I’ve covered my costs as I’ve gone. I’ve just paid for my 3rd month and have earned over $100, doing nothing but following the steps.

I can’t imagine leaving any time soon. This business is so damn fluid, that you need to constantly stay on your toes, and this is the best place to do that. With the monthly webinars and the knowledge in the forums, I see it as being a necessary expense in order for me to succeed at this business…

Some people need to be pushed, motivated and assured that they are doing it right. I am one of those people. Every time there is an announcement of a new Earners’ Club** badge in the forums, every time someone starts a thread saying that they don’t know if they are doing things right, the support from the regulars in here is overwhelming. Some people may not need this type of support, but for me, it’s what keeps me buzzing.

- Josh B, Australia

**The Earners’ Club is a progress tracking system we’ve set up for our members. When members reach certain income levels, they privately submit proof of earnings to us and we award them the corresponding earnings badge. The badge displays alongside their name when they post in the forum. Not all members choose to participate in the Earners’ Club, but we’ve found it really helps people stay excited about working toward their goals, and it’s fun for us to be able to publicly congratulate our members as they progress. A side benefit of the Earners’ Club is that it makes it very easy to identify exactly who knows what they’re talking about when they answer questions in the forum.

Speaking of the Earners’ Club, these comments are from a student who’s earning over $3,000 per month after working with us for a little over a year:

For me, the strongest part of your program is that it gave me a plan to follow – everything laid out for me in a step by step fashion. Of course in the beginning I thought you were holding things back, but I was lucky in that I realized early on that you were giving us the whole picture. I knew if I followed this plan (and didn’t allow myself to get distracted), I could be successful at this.

I just checked my traffic stats and my top five sites have received just under 2,500 visitors since yesterday, which is pretty typical for me at the moment. I’ve promoted all five of these sites using the principles you teach. One of those sites I’d started in another program (where they really had no clue about how to get traffic to a website), and it’s now earning over $900 per month thanks to what I learned from you guys.

I know I have said this before Mark, but I think what you and Court are doing is truly life-changing for some people. The income I make from this now would be enough for many people to quit working the 9 – 5. Unfortunately I’m still caught up in it until the end of the year, but only because I have a wife with expensive tastes (you can print that, she will never read this)!

- Ray B, United Kingdom

Here are some answers to commonly asked questions about TKA Pro:

1. How many hours per week do I need to invest to see results?

We’ve been teaching people to make money online for a long time, and we always tell new students the same thing:

If you want to create progress and momentum you need to be able to dedicate 10 to 15 hours per week. It doesn’t matter if it’s ten hours in one day or about an hour and a half each day. You just have to put the time in.

We’re all busy. We often get emails from students who are canceling their membership because “I just don’t have time to fully dedicate myself to this right now. I love your material; I’ll be back in a few months!”

Let’s be real. They’ll never be back. Life happens and you’ll always be busy. The problem is the weeks, months, and years fly by and you’re still not making any money online. It’s tragic.

Besides, we’re not trying to give you a full-time job. If all you can put in is 15 or 20 minutes per day, you will still make some progress. The students who are sporadic in their effort and generally flaky….STILL do better then the students who say “I don’t have time but I’ll get back to this in a few months.” Trust us, we’re saying this after five years of coaching people. You can not afford to keep putting off your goals while you wait for the stars to align and timing to be “perfect.” That’s a fantasy. Start today, do the best you can, and look to all the other busy people in our community for support and motivation. Taking action always pays off.

2. What’s the deal with this ‘free for 30 days and then $33 per month’? I don’t want to be locked into some lame subscription I can’t control.

Yeah, we know this whole teaser price deal is one of the most abused tactics in the internet marketing world. But here’s why we do it:

  • There’s no way for you to see the full value of our program until you get inside and tinker with it. We’re not going to ask you to pay full price to take a test drive.
  • Our content and community are awesome. If you’ll just get in there and give it a serious look you will be pleasantly surprised. We give 30 days of access for free because we know plenty of people will be so impressed that they’ll keep their membership active for a long time to come.
  • YOU control the subscription. We run everything through Paypal, which means you can log into your Paypal account and cancel anytime you want. And if you don’t know how to do that you can just contact Paypal and tell them to cancel this subscription. Not that you’ll need to – we have a wonderful support gal named Lisa who will take care of canceling your subscription the very first time you email her about it.

The point is we have no interest in trying to keep you subscribed to a program you aren’t excited about. If we can’t impress you enough during your free trial membership, you’re always free to leave and there will be no hard feelings.

4. How much money will I have to spend (outside the membership fee) to make this work? What hidden costs are you not telling me about?

Running an internet business is cheap, but it isn’t necessarily free. If you’re going to make this work you should be prepared to invest around $10 per month in a web hosting account and $10 on a domain name for your website. If you have no idea what web hosting and domain names are, don’t worry – we’ll teach you what they are and show you how to use them.

Down the road you should be prepared to reinvest some of your profits back into the business so it can grow more quickly. There are tools we’ll recommend once you get going, but initially all you’re going to need are the web hosting account and the domain name.

5. How long will it take me to start making money with your program?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Every student is different – some have more experience than others, some have more time than others, some have more motivation than others. We have seen students create a nice income within a few months of joining our program. Unfortunately, we’ve also had students let months pass without applying what they learn, so their income takes much longer to develop.

It may not sound sexy, but we tell everyone who makes an investment in our program that your second year in internet marketing will be a lot more exciting than your first year. You can get some results in the first few months, but if you don’t have a long term perspective – if you aren’t committed to sticking with your goals for over a year – don’t join this program. Get rich quick scams are called get rich scams for a reason. Success comes to those who will persist longer than all the people who lose interest when they don’t make money within three days of starting a project.

6. How much can I really earn with your method?

We can’t make any claims or specific promises about how much money you will earn in the program.

What we can say is when we started the program we asked ourselves “How can we show people a way to create an extra $1,000 per month online without having to live in front of their computers?” The method you’ll learn inside is the answer to that question.

We’ve been happy to watch as many of our students have taken our “$1,000 per month” method and used it to earn quite a bit more. We have students earning $1,500 to $2,500 per month, and we’ve even had one student get let us know he’s earning in the neighborhood of $9,000 per month using the techniques we taught him.

We’ll sum it up like this: If you take a trial membership of our program, we’ll show you the steps these successful students used to create their income. After you’ve seen the method and experienced the support we provide, we’re pretty sure you’ll want to hang around after your trial is over.

7. How will I get help with my problems and answers to my questions?

A few ways different ways:

  • When you join as a Premium Member (free for your 30 day trial, and then $33 per month), you’ll have access to The Keyword Academy Forums, where you can get fast answers to any question you have about any part of our method. We participate actively in the forums, and so do many of our more experienced members. You never have to worry about getting stuck when the community is right there to get you back on track.
  • Each month we hold multiple live Q&A webinars where we don’t bring any prepared material; it’s just an open forum for the students to ask any question they want. We hold two Q&A sessions in the evening, and one in the early afternoon. With this schedule we’re able to get accommodate most of the time zones around the world. For students not able to attend the live Q&A we make the most recent three sessions available as downloadable recordings in two formats – windows movie files and mp3 audio files.

The bottom line is you’ll have the support you need. There’s no “read a book and struggle through it” in this program.

8. I don’t have a website, and I’m clueless about web design and programming. Are you sure I can make this work?

Yes. Our students use free software to build their websites, and we provide some extra instructional videos that walk you through the site setup process. It will take you about 20 minutes to have your first website online.The reality is you’re going to be a lot better off as an internet marketer if you have some basic web publishing skills (being able to set up a simple website and publish content on it), but we’ll show you how.

9. Is this program for beginner, intermediate, or advanced internet marketers?

All three groups will benefit from TKA Pro. Beginners and intermediate students will get the most from the program because they’re most likely missing a specific method to help them build momentum and actually create some cash flow. Advanced internet marketers (those already making a good income online) will find that they know a lot of what we teach, but they’ll still get new insights from the forums and Webinars. Not to mention the link building tools, which will benefit anyone no matter how much they’re already earning.

If you’re making less than $1,000 per month online you are crazy not to take a trial membership of The Keyword Academy Pro.

We hope to get to know you better on the inside!

Mark Butler and Courtney Tuttle

Compare Memberships

Basic Premium
The Keyword Academy Pro Core Videos included included
Monthly Live New Content Webinar included included
Weekly Live Q&A Webinars included included
Linkbuilding Tools included included
BONUSES
Webinar Recording Downloads (both movie and audio format) included
Access to the TKA Pro Forums included
Basic Membership (free for 30 days, then $29/mo) Premium Membership (free for 30 days, then $33/mo)


Thanks for the Help With the Survey

Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey – all 101 of you. It turns out the free survey program I used cuts you off at 100 (not sure how we snuck number 101 in) unless you upgrade. 100 responses was more than I expected to get, so we really appreciate it.

I also want to say thanks to the majority of you who were so thorough and insightful in your answers. I was really surprised at the number of people who said “Yes, I’d be happy to talk with you – here’s my phone number.” Very kind of you to be willing to do that.

I’m trying as we speak to send personal thank you notes to everyone who gave me an email address, but I’ll be traveling all weekend and may not get around to those emails and phone calls (to those who left numbers) until next week. Consider this an early and less personal thank you.

Have a great weekend.

Mark