I am still slightly tainted with the social cultural cringe that is prevalent in my social circle when it comes to selling on line – but only on the odd occasion. Owning one’s own store or educational institution doesn’t have the same cringe factor when it comes to making a profit. But selling online is seen by some in my social circle to be just one stage up on multi-level marketing, as though the profit motive is sufficient to make one drop all of one’s personal values as soon as money comes into view. This cringe factor is irrational, but awareness of its impact is the first step to letting it go.

It is interesting that most of those negative about online marketing that I come across are paid by the education industry. They have no hesitation in working for money, perhaps not seeing that they are trading their time resource for money. Most of the institutions they work for are in the business of making money from students to pay for their salaries, but perhaps they believe that is OK as long as the making money bit is at arms length. I could go on and on about how they are happy to buy their food, their TV and their internet and phone services… but I think my readers get the point about the irrationality about it all.

Basically, any business has to make a profit and even the not-for-profit sector must avoid spending more than they get in. Profit is necessary to pay the bills. Without it our society cannot exist.

I listened to an interview between Jonathan Gunson of Traffic Cafe dot com and Frank Garon that I found very helpful. Towards the end Garon suggested we needed to know what we were about, what we wanted from our business. He acknowledged that of course we wanted to make money, but beyond that how did the internet business need to serve us? His thought was that we needed to design our business around our personality and our brand.

This set off all sorts of questions. Did I want my business to be automated or hands on – or how automated and in which areas? I know some people who use their online business to go alongside their public speaking and networking and others who are definitely quiet behind the scenes people. Which mix of these did I like? What end point did I want – short term and longer term? And how does all of this fit my personality?

The answers to all of these questions will make a difference to the type of business I build. I definitely need to outsource any real techie stuff and my husband does the semi-techie stuff, but I am happy to write regularly and to speak publically if that is needed. Basically my end point is to have almost all of the work outsourced with me to manage it. I hadn’t really understood that till now.

How about for my readers? What type of business do you need to suit your personality?

I was reflecting on successful affiliate marketer Lynn Terry and how she brands herself as a single mother. I had to smile when I realised that she was as technically savvy as the guys on stage at Ed Dale’s Coming Home 2 seminar in Melbourne last weekend. But I recognised that much of her drive came from being able to provide for herself and her child.

Much of my drive comes from wanting to provide for myself in the last half of my adult life and to be a good role model for my grandchildren. I want them to know how to market online and the best way is to model it for them. I want the family to have financial freedom and the ability to work from anywhere in the world. My daughter was saying how she would like to move to Albany (a beautiful city in the south of Western Australia) but there weren’t many jobs there. Being an internet marketer would make such a move possible. [Please note that I'm not going to drive this down my daughter's and grandchildren's throats - just to be a role model of what is possible.]

Being a grandmother is part of my branding, I think. Grandmothers can be the repository of wisdom and knowledge that is useful. Grandmothers are not perfect and can be a bit scruffy or stuffy and challenging as well as loving, committed to family members and the bearer of the family’s stories. None of that will make much difference in the work I actually have to do to be successful, but it is a large part of who I am.

If a single mother like Lynn can be a marketer so can other single mothers. If a factory worker like John Thornhill can do it so can other manual workers. If a scruff like Ed Dale can do it you don’t have to have a great up to date wardrobe to be a marketer. So a grandmother can also be an internet marketer. The logic doesn’t quite follow, I know – but the emotion tells me it’s true!

I am still recovering from mental overload as a result of attending Ed Dale’s (of 30 Day Challenge fame) coming home seminar. I went to meet up with other marketers in the hope and expectation of making contact with others in the field that I might be able to JV with. Ed has moved back to Australia and he brought with him – for the seminar – a very highly powered group of internet marketers, most of whom I had never heard of. I hasten to say this was due to my ignorance, not as a put down about them.

I have attended internet seminars before but in those cases most of the people standing up on stage were making their money, not from marketing on the internet, but from selling how to make money on the internet courses. A great many of these were high power sellers, very convincing and a great many people went home with lighter wallets.

This seminar was totally different. It was very business focussed with no hype. Much to my astonishment there wasn’t even a registration desk. This was all information based with no attempt to sell us stuff – from time to time something was mentioned for sale, or contact details were shared but there was no hype at all. These marketers didn’t need us to pay them for courses as they had enough private clients as it was and they made their money through doing what they were teaching.

This was reality – and the reality was that internet marketing was a business and certain attitudes, knowledge, actions and tools lead to better results. And these incredible 8 marketers were sharing what they found worked. Thank you Ed.

When I first started my internet training with John Thornhill I already had a product almost ready to go to market. It is important that this information get out into the general population but from a marketing perspective I did this the wrong way round. It is better to find a market where people want to spend money rather than try to take a product to market.

The issue is to find a niche where people spend money that you are prepared to spend time doing what needs to be done.

And this is a learning process. I was talking to a friend about my online explorations. She asked me how long I had been doing it. I responded a couple of years, but only one year moderately seriously. She replied that it was time I gave up on it as I had given it a good go and it was time to move on.  My thoughts were that I had now learned enough to have an idea of what I was doing right and what I hadn’t yet got my head around.

I thought of my research question of how people could recover from serious illness and how I had that idea back in 1983. It took me until 1996 to get my research accepted and 2008 to get it published in an international journal. If I had given up after a year or two I would have missed out doing some original research that does contribute to human knowledge. The easy reading version is at www.beatthemedicalodds.com.

Getting a handle on internet marketing is a bit like recovering from serious illness. There are a lot of things you have to get right together. It isn’t tried this, didn’t work. Tried that, didn’t work. Blah….

I am happy to admit that my website doesn’t convert as I would like and I need to learn to write better copy. That is one of my tasks for this year. But I also need to learn more about how to do internet marketing – to fill in the gaps and do what makes a difference to getting results.

I have spent a lot of time exploring search engine optimisation and list building and other internet marketing stuff and it is starting to drive me in a different direction. I initially fell in love with the idea of being able to get high on the Google listing and driving traffic that way. But it isn’t easy and despite getting in the top 3 rankings for Bing and Yahoo over the last few months Google has eluded me, with my best ranking being 230 – until that is, I commented on the science blog and they took such offence at it that they drove so much traffic to it that I jumped to number 10.

The more I did the more I realised that it was all in the list, a good list of people who would buy something from you sometime down the track. Building lists, particularly good (paying lists) depends on either spending a lot of time, or paying through PPC. What bugged me though, was that the internet “gurus” had to use an internet marketing product of $1000 to show that the return would be adequate. Where does that lead me to when my product is under $30? They were assuming you would bombard your list on a weekly (or sometimes a daily basis) until they bought one of your products or unsubscribed from them. I don’t have a business model which supports this. And I have my doubts that it supports my niche.

There was also a bigger question - did I want to build a list of people who were focussed on facing death, either their own or someone elses? What was I to do? Send a marketing piece on dealing with loneliness in a few months? While I have written that book, the whole thought of working that way is not right!

They say that any publicity is good publicity. I found this was as far as google is concerned. I made the mistake of commenting on a so-called science blog and got a flogging in response. But really, what happened was that I challenged the new religion of Medicine – a capital letter because it is SOOOO IMPORTANT and thou shalt not challenge their new GOD. What was interesting is that there are so many people who have the time to try to take down people who disagree with them.

The writer castigated me for using epidemiological studies (amongst other things) for supporting food in the diet (onions in particular) but then wanted to use similarly designed studies for the use of surgery in cancer.  But the good side of it all is that his ranting and his readers ranting doubled the sales of my book Beat the Medical Odds and brought me up in the Google rankings from 230 to 10-12 or so. I really had to laugh at it.

I have mixed feelings about it all as I used to believe that medicine worked till I had the time and expertise to read the research itself and found that much of it just didn’t stack up. A great proportion of the medical journal articles (and probably science) can  be criticised for some aspect of their assumptions, method and conclusions drawn from the data. What happens is then that the person looking at the paper lets through those papers they agree with and castigates those they don’t agree with. It is possible for two people to both read a paper and both have their preconceptions confirmed and go away knowing they are right, even though they take diametrically opposed views.

One of my issues is that I really believed that medicine and pharmaceutical interventions worked until I had my head down in the medical literature. Then the dissonance between the claims and the data became too strong – it just wasn’t there.

As I searched I came across a different model – one based on a better set of assumptions than was used in most of medicine. This was a model which said that the body was always attempting to stay in good health and that if one provided the essential support (diet, and the whole bio-spycho-social-spiritual stuff) then the body had the physiological capacity to heal. The other component is that any absorption of something that was not a food or bioidentical to the body then that something would be treated as a toxin and lead to the body’s attempt to expel it. This includes all drugs. This was to me a commonsense model – and very far reaching because it precludes the use of most drugs. This is not to say that I would never take drugs, just that I would be very selective.

There is a strong move within the medical communities and government bodies such as the US FDA to make sure that people who are ill are not subject to scam claims about alternative cancer remedies and natural cancer treatments.

This would be fair enough if the medical community was actually offering treatments that worked. Unfortunately some of them have been shown to be medically ineffective. An important medical paper in 2004 showed that chemotherapy only increased the average 5 year cancer survival rates by just over 2% (reference below).

Chemotherapy for breast cancer, for example, has an average increased 5-year survival rate of only 1.5%. A number of cancers (soft tissue sarcoma, melanoma of skin, uterus, prostate, bladder, kidney and multiple myeloma) were shown to have no increase in survival due to chemotherapy at all.

Doctors often talk about patients having unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of drugs, but to my way of thinking they only have themselves to blame. None of the doctors I work closely with in our medical school had ever spoken to patients about the low effectiveness of chemotherapy. In fact only one of them knew exactly how ineffective the drugs actually were.

If we take the breast cancer example again – women with breast cancer have a 78-85% 5-year survival rate in Australia, of which only 1.5% was due to chemotherapy. None of my friends who have had breast cancer were told that the average length of survival for breast cancer is 20 years nor about the high survival rate, nor about the low impact of chemotherapy. All believed that they needed chemotherapy to have any hope of survival.

The flip side of this terrible situation is that if only 1.5% of survivors are due to chemotherapy, then 76.5-83.5% is due to other things. Surgery and radiotherapy may play some part. [Actually it seems there is no evidence that either contribute to survival - it just isn't there in the literature.] But so too, does the body’s natural ability to heal. If you really want to keep on living it makes sense to spend a little time exploring those aspects of healing, known to science and to our cultural traditions which will improve our quality of life, and hopefully, our longevity.

There is much known to science but a lot of this is tucked away in health psychology text books and journals. Some of this is known through pop psychology but may not be accurate. For example, it is often believed that to survive you have to be positive all the time. My own research has shown that this is not the case, however being positive most of the time is one of the characteristics of survivors.

Governmental bodies and anti-scam scientists are particularly hard on those who promote supplements suggesting that all people are after is making money out of the sick. No doubt this is sometimes the case. But what excuse is there for promoting chemotherapy as THE answer to cancer when it only increases survival by an average of just over 2% and in some cases, is not of benefit at all. Who benefits from this? Who is paid the big money?

As a researcher I have to say that it is highly unlikely that just one supplement, herb, fancy berry from the highlands of somewhere will be sufficient to make the difference of life or death. However there are some good scientific pointers to suggest that avoiding sugar and flour which feed cancers, adding anti cancer foods of brightly colored vegetables and fruit, adding some supplements proven to be advantageous, taking regular exercise, and undertaking certain self care activities would definitely be positive to health. And many regions around the world have their traditional cancer remedies, their natural cancer treatments which might be good to add to your overall regimen. Check out all of your options and don’t let yourself be bullied by anyone.

Reference: Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clinical Oncology 2004;16:549-560. This is reasonably readable and anyone with cancer should get a copy (try your university medical library – they can download it for you). It isn’t very chatty, mostly just how they came to the figures for each of the main cancers.

The online site I set up as a result of doing the 30 day challenge has been taking my time. I have been annoyed that no matter how many links I got it wasn’t making any difference to my google rankings.  I was stuck between 235 and 260 and not moving from that general ranking no matter the pages and links. I narrowed the problem down to not taking enough notice of the SEO training and getting my keywords right. So I have spent lots of time looking at what I needed to do. Unfortunately my husband thought that some of the changes I made were mistakes so changed a whole lot of them back again! So we will see what google has to say to what I have done, and then go and make some of the new changes again and see if that improves it further. My online site is www.cancerremedies.org.

I have also been writing 7-8 articles each month and submitting them to ezine articles and I thought it was silly. I should post them here as well, so will do that on a regular basis.

I have been very remiss at writing here on my blog. That’s because all of my “out of work” time has been focussed on doing the 30 day challenge and implementing the learning alongside what I’ve learned in John Thornhill’s training on internet marketing.

The market samurai program they use gave me so many useful insights that I had to get to work and make big changes. On doing a lot of keyword searching I discovered some phrases I could use that had sufficient daily searches and less than 30,000 sites as competition and with little SE optimisation.

As a result we are setting up a site called www.cancerremedies.org to send people to my www.beatthemedicalodds.com site. Noone searches for beat the medical odds but enough search for cancer remedies to make it a useful exercise. In just setting up the first attempt, with what we’ve learned from John and 30DC we managed to get ranked as 255 on google first run through out of some 14 million sites. We expect to improve on that in the coming weeks. We have been working on getting back links in but now need to work on the site itself to make it worth visiting! So back to it now.