Exposing the seedy underbelly of the internet marketing world + Studying hard, and taking notes so you don’t have to.

Welcome Pardner!….now how did you get this number?

This is the internet marketing and info product development facet of serial entrepreneur Troy Gardner, occasionally his minions (back to the dungeon I say!), and the other cool kids guest speaking.   Done in an irreverant yet no B.S. reporter style, it covers my journey from “The world most technically advanced marketing newbie” to the point of making the first million (and maybe more past that) purely by infoproducts, affiliate marketing and a few tools in a year.

What you get..

My goals for you are to get

• Just the facts Ma’am – like Cliff’s Notes(tm), just the essential details in a minimum of space
• hard core strategies -you can use immediately to make mo’ money, better products.
• Immediately Actionable Information with no hype. (supply your own shock and awe if needed)
• No BullSh*t Reviews of the tools and services out there…let’s face there are lots of crap products out there, but you still need the information.
• fun content and occasional geekery.
• lots of ellipsis………..really….I just love hitting the period like Track and Field hurdling….
• many mispellings and incomplete…. Between typing fast and speedreading I don’t always catch mistakes. Sorry.
• The information in a playful way because Play is the natural learning state.

These are written from the perspective of a reasonably demanding tech entreprenuer who speaks “net” fluently (hey I’m part vulcan) but is a newbie marketer.  In addition due to my diverse background..artist, performing musician, inventor, engineer, interface designer.  I believe I have a unique perspective to offer… To go where no IM marketer has gone before.

Learn from the Smartest Slacker Kid in class…

Remember that smart kid in high school in class who was always scribbling in a pad, taking notes and drawing cartoons… instead of fully paying attention to the teacher yammering on?   The generally nice one who usually had most of the answers if asked,  aced the tests,  usually while doing as little homework as possible.  Ever wish you could get them to do your homework for you?    I was that kid.

Copy my Notes please!

I am constantly taking notes as it’s the only way I can really keep engaged.  Notes also allow mindmaps, which I really love, they help make deep connections clear.   It never really occurred to me this wasn’t normal, but it alllowed me to ace most my subjects with a minimal amount of work.

Part of  why I got so good at it was was band practice’s fault.    As a kid I had to bicycle to school both ways, in the snow, uphills both directions.  No seriously, band practice was early in the morning before the bussses and I didn’t get a car until after high school.  That was simply the only way to play music ..which I loved.   Almost everyday of the week I had to carry my trombone….on the bicycle, which with traffic whizzing by is quite the juggling act.   Anyway despite taking all advanced courses, I found good note books MUCH easier to carry than big bags of books.

Ever since high school people have come to me for advice on class subjects, and frequently asked me to copy my notes,  normally I refused…until I started tutoring, using my notes for the outline.  Then I had a surprise,  knowing I had to teach it I took better notes,  I learned the material more.     Then seeing the lightbulbs pop on when my students “got it”, and watching the reactions in themselves and the parents as they went from struggling to mastering.   Their identities changed, they became different people.   I began to see how good education can create better lives.    It wasn’t that the kids I helped weren’t smart, couldn’t be interested,  They had that potential all the time!   Just nobody had spent the time to present the information in a way they could understand.

Later in life I grew this uncanny ability to X-ray things and extract the most essential critical data  in a minimum of space, into strategic competitive analysis, evaluating technology and sizing competitors for startups, executive reports and the like for a price of hundreds of dollars an hour.

Now I’m applying the same X-Ray techniques on the marketing products, curious to see if they had value in the marketing world, I’ve shared my notes with others on the forums, and other people have found them so useful I’m going to be sharing them here, away from the private forum you can’t see in…thus the name “TroyNotes”.

The Straight Shit …with a bit of fun.

When I’m not goofing off or geeking out.  I’m going to venture into No BullSh*t Reviews, because  I’m very disappointed by aspects of  the products I’ve bought… ever noticed how many products are

1. wrapped in hype, to outright lies
2. outdated inaccurate to just never right in the first place
3. padded with PLR junk, and overloaded in information you don’t need
4. missing critical information
5. Big Boxes of Stuff, which are impossible to do anything practical with?

Video  is better than badly written ebooks, but with the increasing shift to video, it means you end up with week long cooking shows when you only want the recipe and ingredient list.   If you’re like me you’ rather be living life      Worse  in the end, after all the hours it’s easy to still feel hungry or overloaded stuffed with fluff and confused where to start.    That crap ends here.

Since as an engineer (on video games) I am used to working with detailed specs, giving them to others, and as an educator used to teaching it, that’s what you’ll get here.    Also since I am already successful,  my opinions can’t be bought and I think this industry needs more transparency and accountability to be the best it can be.

This is important to me, we live in a unique time where the direct marketers can have a voice as loud as major corporations, and many have important things to say. In my travels meeting countless people with passions and great ideas work boring unfulfilled jobs with asshole bosses and crappy commutes.  and let their dreams decay..till the day they are past doing it.   I feel this is one of the worst tragedies, and it happens every day.

Plus I do this for fun…because work should be fun.

My Story:  Recovering Lego addict.

Oddly enough I’m not really in it for the money.

The problem really started with Legos bricks.   As a kid I’d spend entire weekends building spaceships, buildings, even transformers. ..often due to structural inadequacies in Lego bricks sticking together, they’d rarely make it to the living room in one piece so I could showcase it to my parents, but they were always pretty cool.  I did it and continue to do things like it for free.

Over the last 10 years this passion for building stuff grew into a career building all sorts of things..for other people.  I’ve built million dollar applications, that brought in 10’s of millions for Fortune 500 companies, but at the end of the day I only took home what I got paid.   Being so in love with creating it only recently occurred to me to work on my own products and sell them, and that by doing so I could do more of my own products and bigger ones.

Creating products as you will see is easy, I’ll teach you.  But getting them out to where people can see them, requires something ‘evuhl’… marketing…and that I’m still learning, but hey .. I passed calculus and drama 

Some people are afraid of clowns, and honestly most marketing people scare or bug me.  I much prefer legos, they make intrinsic sense and have more substance. That said in my recent gigs have met some that have totally reshaped my understanding of what marketing can be and how amazing good…and FUN!… goodmarketers are.

Bottom line: what good is a great product if it sits in a box with nobody looking at it?

My Plan: 1 Million in 1 Year… from below zero.

Because you have to have inspiring goals.

I know many product launches do more than this, and many info businesses do this in volume easily a year.  Clickbank alone frequently has $1 Million in sales a day, and that’s mostly ebooks!.  Contrast this with any other J.O.B. (aka Just Others Bitch) you can think of.

A hidden fact behind many of these so called guru marketers, are the launches are actually the crown jewels built off of years of spiraling  up social proof, and continual refinement.  Take John Reese in his infamous Million Dollar day, by his own addmission it took 3 years of setup before that day was possible.  I started out at below ground zero in this field. No list, no product, no clue. which I bet many reading this blog are too.  So hopefully the info in this will be less pie-in-the-sky, wide eyed dreaming, or glossing over all the previous investments.  Like I said I don’t need th money.

Like many starting out, I have a day job continuing to do what I normally do (in web-development, specifically flash), until my efforts at boot strapping allow me to step out on my own.  So IM is a part time gig (evenings and weekends only), using the knowledge gleaned by learning from those who have collectively sold $100+MILLION DOLLARS *hold’s pinky to lip*.   Such characters like

• Frank Kern (Mass Control 2.0),
• Perry Belcher (King of Social Media..now retired from IM)
• Ryan Deiss (Get Money From Google),
• Jeff Walker of (Product Launch Formula 2.2).
• Chris Carpenter (googlecash, googlecashdetective)
• Ed Dale (3o day challenge)
• Steve of Underground Affiliates and Commision Blueprint

I’ve been told by people who have waited years to get some of these peoples stuff, I have been very fortunate to hit so many launching so close after each other… so I am grateful for the knowledge these people have shared and continue to provide while frequently overcharging for the info.

I highly encourage you to opt-in on the right to keep up to date with all the cool tools being built, the No Bullsh!t reviews and other good stuff.

Welcome Aboard!

Troy

P.S.  If you’re interested in following me along in real time check out http://twitter.com/troynotes

P.P.S.  If you want to shout out, some subject you want me to summarize, give me a ping troy at troynotes dot com

P.P.S.  We love Cliffs Notes but they are in no way affiliated or endorsing us.