My Expensive, But Ultimately Successful, Search For A Mentor

It takes different Internet Marketing Newbies different lengths of time before they realize that there are two “must haves”, (excluding essential pieces of software), that all profitable Internet Marketers need to have to be successful. These 2 “must haves” are, in order of importance:

• A Mentor
• A list of email addresses belonging to people who are interested in your niche and have learned to know, like, and trust you

I have just checked my hard drive, and currently, in my Internet Marketing folder, I have 116,162 files in 10,147 sub-folders which, in total consume 49.1 GIGABYTES of my hard drive. I would estimate that at least 95% of that data is junk and could be deleted without having any ill-effect on my current business. Where I got it all from, and how much it cost me, goodness only knows, but I do know that it was mostly collected before I had a mentor.

• My first mentor, as I have talked about before in previous blogs was (and still is, to a limited extent) Brett McFall from Australia, ably assisted by his senior help-desk lady, Donna-Marie Coggins, who is an entrepreneur in her own right. But with me living in Thailand, and Brett more and more restricting his business to seminars held in South East Queensland, I found it more and more difficult to get any meaningful advice from him. I also am of the view that he doesn’t keep up to date quickly enough with new advancements which are happening in the Internet Marketing world on almost a day to day basis.

• My second attempt at finding a mentor was an expensive disaster. I found an American company at www.wahuniversity.com For an outrageous amount of money, (over $5,000, as I remember) I was to be given a weekly one hour training call on Skype backed up by some free software. For some reason I signed up. The “mentor” who was assigned to me sounded as if she was a young girl in her early twenties and all she ever did was ask me what ideas I had and agree that they were good ideas. I never did get any meaningful training and never did get to know what the software I downloaded was for, or how it worked. The whole thing was a disaster and a waste of money. Wah University does not seem to exist any more, but if you try the URL above you get redirected to www.wahedu.com, which appears to offer something similar to what I was supposed to get, at a much more reasonable price. However I would still suggest that you ignore them completely.

• 

  Next in line could easily have become another costly mistake, but, as it happened, it turned out to be okay in the end. For a Thousand Dollars or so I was conned (again) into a scheme run by a scumbag called Alex Shelton. His scheme involved selling a product called “Instant Online Profits” and, in addition I was to receive 10 coaching calls on Skype from one of his team of coaches who, according to Alex, each earned at least $30,000 a month in their own right from the Internet. I got on quite well with my coach who, at the time was living in Thailand, although we never met in person, but he certainly wasn’t making $30,000 a month from the Internet. With or without Alex’s knowledge, I don’t know which, my coaching was concentrated not on “Instant Online Profits” but on building a list through the buying and selling of solo-ads. I learned everything I know about the solo-ad industry, which will be the subject of a blog by me some time in the future, from my coach. However, in the first few weeks i did manage to sell 3 copies of “Instant Online Profits” at about $100 each, but then, suddenly, without warning, the web-site closed down. I got all the money I had paid refunded, without too much difficulty from my credit card company and my coach, who had tracked down Shelton, who was also living in Thailand, got paid after surprising him in a pub, accompanied by several policemen. As he had got paid, my coach finished the 10 sessions with me, so, despite Shelton’s collapsed empire, everything worked out reasonably alright in the end. By the way, I’ve just checked and the domain www.instantonlineprofits.com is now “parked” at Godaddy.com and Shelton has another scheme up and running. So beware and don’t touch anything which has any connection with a young English guy called Alex Shelton.

• I then took a break from looking for a coach for about a year, during which time I concentrated on the solo-ad industry. After my list had grown to about 750, I started selling solo-ads, but I soon realized that it was never going to grow into a full scale business that would fully support myself and family. However, I now had a list, which I continued to nurture and grow. So it was back to searching for the mentor that was right for me and this time I settled on probably the best known mentor in the UK at least, if not the world, Alex Jeffreys. Another $2,000 was spent on another Alex. Now I know that this Alex is immensely popular and has a huge following but I’m afraid that I was disappointed. To begin with, I got the impression at the initial interview that I would be getting a one-on-one question and answer session with Alex for a specified length of time. This turned out not to be true, and when I complained, I was assured that I had misunderstood the interviewer. The strange thing is that I saw my complaint repeated several times in the dedicated Facebook group. Instead I had access to a weekly seminar where all current members were invited to submit questions. But these webinars sometimes went on for three hours or more and, if you had submitted a question you had no idea when Alex was going to answer it. So I would spend hours listening to stuff which wasn’t really of interest to me, although a lot of it was, while I waited for my question to be answered. While I understood the logic that I should be interested in other people’s problems and how Alex suggested that they solved them, the fact that I didn’t know when I would get my particular problem addressed frustrated me. The fact that I live on the other side of the world, also didn’t help the situation as the webinars always started very late for me and would often go on until 2 or even 3 o’clock in the morning. On more than one occasion I fell asleep during the webinar and missed Alex’s answer to my question, which kind of defeated the whole purpose of the exercise.

  The other thing that annoyed me about Alex was the way he treated his affiliates. When I was following Alex, he was based in South Wales in the U.K. and every month or so he would launch a new digital product and proudly boast that he was offering 200%, or even 300% commissions to anyone who would like to join up as an affiliate and help sell the product. However what he didn’t shout from the rooftops was the fact that the 200% or 300% commission was only on the cheap front-end product, which would normally cost somewhere in the region of $7. 300% of $7 is still only $21, so no affiliate is going to get rich on that, especially if he is paying for traffic or advertising. The cheap front end product was, of course, the introductory offer to a long sales funnel, ending in joining Alex’s class for $2,000 like I had. But the poor old affiliate didn’t receive any commission past the cheap front-end product. Alex has now moved to the States and has stopped launching regular digital products. In fact it’s hard to understand exactly what his plans for the future are. He seems to be flitting from one idea to another without any clear sense of direction. However, as you will read in the following paragraph, I have finally found my “perfect” mentor, so although I will follow Alex Jeffreys’ future ventures with interest, my main attention will be focused elsewhere.

• 

  Dean Holland, ably assisted by his two main assistants, Louis Doughty and Glenn Shepherd, operate what I can only describe as a magnificent operation based on affiliate marketing called “Internet Profits”, which is more commonly known as “iPro”. The scheme is explained by me in great detail under the tab in the menu across the top of this page labeled “Level 1 – Earn Up To $2,500 / Day”, so there is little point in me repeating everything here.

  The first blog of the third collection of blogs, under the category “Advice On Various Topics” I will write, or have written, a blog concerning all the questions you should ask and have satisfactorily answered when you speak to a representative of the scheme you are considering spending a considerable amount of money to join. I can assure you that with iPro, if you are considering joining at the “Platinum” level, or above, that all of the “boxes” are ticked. Yes, it can be hard work, but there is no such thing on the Internet as a free lunch. But I can honestly say that in the first year of being an iPro Platinum member I have made more money than I did in the 5 years I was dabbling with Internet Marketing previously and, even more impressively I have not felt the need to spend a cent on any “shiny objects”. IPro has everything that I need and I am nnot going anywhere else.

So why don’t you bypass all my costly errors that I explained earlier in this blog, and click on the iPro logo in the yellow box near the top of the left side-bar on any page of this blog site to register for the next Monday’s webinar which will give you a mammoth amount of free training while explaining all about iPro at the same time. If you click the logo on a Tuesday or Wednesday you will immediately get a replay of the previous Monday’s webinar.

If you have any questions or comments about iPro, or any of the other organizations I described earlier in the blog please leave a comment or question below. I’m sure that this blog, in particular, would be of interest to all newbie internet Marketers and so I encourage all readers to share it, or to share the announcement in www.facebook.com/internationalinterneticons which advertises it.

Thank you

Phil Ramage

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