Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love

Chapter 5. Easy to Be Hard

How to Learn Internet Marketing by (Over)Producing Records

Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.

—Fran Leibowitz

It's important to be real. If you have a firm grasp on who you are—as a marketer, copywriter, author, or musician—you can speak with your authentic voice.

That's the important thing.

It doesn't matter what niche you pick, there will be other people writing about and marketing in that niche.

Cool. Those people are your future joint-venture partners. In the meantime, the thing to remember is no matter how many people are telling the story, if you're telling your story in your voice, it's going to ring true and people are going to want to hear it.

If you're telling somebody else's story, and trying to sound like somebody else—well, bluntly, why bother? Who wants an imitation?

That's the trick. From deciding what niche you want to work in, to writing your sales copy, to writing your e-mail marketing material—the hardest thing to do is keep it simple. Just tell your story like you would tell a friend.

After the interview, we hung out on the manicured lawn of his very nice house talking about the time we wasted before we "got it."

Craig has only been working in Internet marketing since 2003. To go from "unknown" to "speaking at Big Seminar 7" that fast is just amazing.

I learned a lot doing the interview.

One of the things we talked about was how hard it is for beginning marketers to get started. It's hard to believe how easy it is to crank ...