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On the weekend I attended a workshop by Australian copywriting expert Pete Godfrey.

The room was full of a variety of people and I was pleased to hear that it wasn’t all about Internet marketing. There was a lot of advice handed out for small business owners in any market and plenty of people in the room were from traditional companies who do normal things like sell widget type stuff - you know, physical goods offline. People like mechanics and printers were in attendance, and also a few people looking to become better sales writers like journalists and budding freelance copywriters.

Today I want to pass on some of the biggest lessons from the workshop that every small business owner needs to think about.

The Money Is In The Relationship

Pete was quick to point out that the money is not in the list but in the relationship you have with your members. He teaches that you need to foster a “tribe”, a group of core customers who buy from you not just because of your good service, but because they have a real vested interest in you and what you do.

To facilitate relationship building Pete recommended the use of a newsletter, but in this case not your typical online email newsletter (though Pete certainly agreed you want one of them too!), but a print newsletter you send to people via oldschool snail mail.

The Print Newsletter

Pete showed a copy of his print newsletter that he charges $49 a month to subscribe to and also a copy of a free print newsletter one of his clients use (a car parts wholesaler).

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I’ve had a few queries asking what is going on with my RSS feedcount. As I type this article, my feedcount according to the Feedburner chicklet looks like this -

Yeah, 34,015 readers, not bad considering I was around 6,000 a few days ago, then I jumped to around 17,000 and now it’s doubled that number.

So what’s going on?

As reported in this article where I asked - Will Feedburner Feed Counts Include AWeber Email Subscribers? - the answer is yes, they do.

I had set up my blog blaster (RSS-to-email service) in AWeber a LONG time ago, in fact, before I even used Feedburner and I realized I had my old standard WordPress RSS feed plugged into AWeber, so it wasn’t reporting to Feedburner.

I went into AWeber, switched over to my Feedburner “burned” feed and now my AWeber email subscribers are also included in the feedcount. Here’s how the feedcount breaks down now -

However, something is not quite right with these numbers because I do not have 27,000 AWeber subscribers - not yet anyway. I suspect AWeber and Feedburner haven’t quite got the communication right and no doubt tomorrow or the next day the numbers will settle to a true reflection of reality. I suspect it will fall to around the 22,000 mark, still a nice improvement.

Gobala stated - Aweber/Feedburner Integration is Good News For Marketers - and I have to agree. What will be interesting to see is if some of the Internet marketers out there with email list sizes in the hundreds of thousands begin using Feedburner chicklets on their blogs, thus catapulting them into the top of blog rankings even if the blog itself doesn’t get that much traffic.

Does this mean the Feedcount chicklet will lose its position as the standard measure of blog status, just like PageRank has? I doubt it, people still look to PageRank as a measure of a site’s worth and I suspect Feedburner chicklets will continue to be the social proof tool of choice for blogs, regardless of how accurate a measure it is. Once a standard is adopted, it’s hard to change it.

In the meantime I’m going to go and enjoy the one moment in history where I can pretend I was almost as popular as Darren. Even when the numbers are broken I can’t beat him! (…it’s not a competition Yaro ).

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Andy Beard reported on his blog that AWeber will begin to report email subscriber numbers to Feedburner.

This triggered a line of thought in me that I hadn’t considered before. Let me tell you why…

I’ve been an AWeber user for ages now and it’s been my RSS-to-email service of choice for forever too. I never used any other RSS-to-email service and it’s been clear to me for a long time that a real email list service is the way to handle anything that has to do with email marketing - it’s a “well duh” situation in my mind.

Why people would use a service that doesn’t focus on deliverability to deliver their RSS-to-email function is beyond me, so yes, I recommend AWeber to you too. You can read my full AWeber review for more about why it is a must-have tool.

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I want to show you something. It’s a check (or cheque if you come from where I live). It’s by no means the largest check in the world, but so far for me, it’s the largest one time affiliate commission check I’ve made.

Here it is:

This check is for $4,314.34 USD. I made this money by writing one blog post and one email. That’s it.

In fact, this check is only part of the money because some of the income was paid in split payments, so I still have more to come. In total, that one blog post and email generated over $6,000 in commissions.

I’s not a six figure check or even a five figure check, but remember this is from just one blog post and one email. It’s not my entire blog income for the month, nor is it money from Pay Per Click advertising selling CPA promotions or money made from membership sites or anything else.

Just one blog post and one email. Imagine if every blog post and email you wrote was worth that much!

Best of all, this money came from selling an affiliate product so I didn’t have to deliver anything after making the sales, just deposit the money and done.

How Can You Generate Checks Like This?

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This is the third and final installment of my year 2007 round-up report. You should read part one and two first, before reading this. Here are links to the previous articles -

• How I Made Six Figures In One Day - 2007 Year In Review Part 1
• What Do You Do When Everything Happens At Once? - 2007 Year In Review Part 2

Forming A Routine

I moved from my dad’s place into my own place in July and in August I began settling in, slowly buying furniture and household items. It’s amazing how many things you have to do when you first move into an empty house. Ikea certainly benefited from my money during this time as I stocked up on stuff.

My working life became quite routine and although initially I had trouble keeping up with all the new tasks, I eventually found a balance.

This is what I do most days when working at home

Each week I had to produce one lesson for the students and I would usually create one additional piece of multi-media, like a video case study, or an audio interview. In between this, I would man the helpdesk, write blog articles and prepare little mini-promotions, one of which I did with Darren Rowse of Problogger and another with Anita Campbell of SmallBizTrends and one with Jason Katzenback of Portalfeeder.

Rob Kingston took over the helpdesk and Fran Kerr started assisting with other Blog Mastermind tasks, like adding materials to the members area. This freed up some time and meant I could focus my energy on producing the best content for my blog and Blog Mastermind. It felt good to practice what I preach about working less by outsourcing, focusing your energies on your core skills and of course, increasing your income at the same time.

Breaking $10,000/month in Blog Income

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