Internet Marketing & Home Business Articles and Reviews

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“Perfect For Beginners”

“All Internet Marketing Newbies Should Start Here”

“Step-By-Step Training from A to Z”

Compare the number of times you’ve hear expressions similiar to the above, with the number of times the product or service managed to ACTUALLY deliver something that a fledgling internet entrepreneur could use to start their online business from scratch.

You’ll most likely have a high number, followed by zero (or something close).

But this isn’t a rant about poor quality IM training products - this is about the very real difficulty that an experienced IMer has in relating to the complete beginner.  It’s hard to remember exactly what you did and didn’t know when you started out, and easy to forget that the knowledge or experience that you gained in just the first few weeks are still a complete mystery to the novice starting from day one.

The consequence is that many so-called “beginner”, “newbie” and “step-by-step” guides, omit crucial information that seems obvious and straight-forward to the teacher, but represent a frustrating and unscaleable wall to the student.

With that in mind, I downloaded Tim Whiston’s (the guy on the top-right) “48 Hour Profit Plan” course with a mixture of hope and skepticism.

Claiming the ability to take a beginner from nothing, to a functional online business in 48 hours is an audacious claim, and yet it manages (just about) to stand up to scrutiny.

And more importantly, the course is presented in - what appears to be - a true step-by-step method.

I say “appears to be” because I’m no less affected by an inability to remember what a newbie does and doesn’t know, than anyone else.  The 48 Hour Profit Plan appears to cover ALL the bases, but it’s something that only a complete beginner can judge.

Let’s take a look at the contents of the course and you can form your own opinion.

After downloading the course and unzipping it to my hard drive, I’m left with two folders “Action-Plan” and “Modules“, and three PDFS entitled “ReadThisFirst“, “Instructions” and “Resources“.

So far, so good - no prizes for guessing that the first step is to read the first of the three PDFS.  This sets out a strong recommendation for how to approach the course and what to do next… which is to read the other two PDFs.

The “Instructions” PDF breaks the course down, describing the contents of each folder, and also outlines the suggested schedule for following the step-by-step instructions.

The “Resources” PDF is a comprehensive list of every tool (software or service) that you need to complete the course.  All the recommended tools are either free, or inexpensive - and there’s a good chance that you’ll already have some of these (or something similar).

Once you’ve completed the overview, it’s time to plan out your next two days.

Day One:

• Finding & researching a niche.
• Creating your first product.
• Setting up your sales website.
• Constructing your front-end and back-end sales process.

Day Two:

• Launching your new website.
• Short-term promotion and traffic generation.

And Beyond…

• Once your new online business is born, planning for long-term promotion and traffic generation are discussed.

The above may sound like an awful lot to cover in 48 hours, and the course material readily admits that this goal is achievable, but is most likely to be accomplished if you take a day or two to read through the material first, and THEN start the clock on your 48 hour project.

Of course, you can take more time if you need, but clearing a couple of days and then setting yourself a strict deadline is a great way of ensuring that the necessary tasks get done.

The concept of step-by-step instruction is clear to see, with the plan being broken up into 10 PDFs, helpfully labelled “Step1“, “Step2“, and so on.  The contents strike a nice balance of depth and brevity; never skimming over important or technical jobs, but not getting hung up on minutaie.

The basic approach of each PDF is to describe the current step in words, and then show you screen-shots to help you visualise it.  The more technical jobs (editing your website, setting up your hosting, setting up an autoresponder, etc) are presented through in-depth videos through which you can watch Tim methodically demonstrating each process and explaining everything, each step of the way.

As if text, pictures and video weren’t enough to help you along, additional items are also provided, including:

• Idea and Theme swipe files
• Website template (sales page, thank you pages, etc)
• Email templates
• Info-product outlines
• Press Release outlines

I’m not going to try and presume that it will be impossible for a beginner to get stuck, but there is more than enough here to help you over the vast majority of hurdles.  Especially if the technical details of hosting, FTP, autoresponders, HTML, and the like are of concern to you, the videos are really going to smooth your way forward.

By the end of 48 hours, you won’t be an expert with nothing left to discover - but you will know enough to create an info-product, and design a system for promoting and selling that product.  Anything else you study after this course (copywriting, SEO, PPC, split-testing, etc) will no longer have to remain theory because you will actually have a business on which you can apply these things.

In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, I’m seriously impressed with the contents and presentation of the 48 Hour Profit Plan.  Tim also deserves credit for creating an IM course that demonstrates how to get started online in ANY niche.

If you want to ply your trade in the IM niche, then the contents of this course are perfectly applicable.  But this is equally true of any niche in which you have an interest or some expertise.

The only real criticism I can make (and this is going to sound like silly), but the price of this course is much, much too low.  Even if you read this review after the current sale price has expired, the regular price is NOT a true reflection of the quantity and quality.

Let me put it this way…

If you invest in the 48 Hour Profit Plan and use your new skills to create an info-product that is anywhere near this level of quality, please, please, please, select a price point that is LEAST 4x higher.

This is - finally - a course that is TRULY suitable for a complete, online business, beginner.

And if you already have some experience, but haven’t yet managed to get your first product and website up and running, then apply yourself to the 48 Hour Profit Plan, and in just a couple of days, you’ll have accomplished your goal.

No more excuses

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Home Business, Reviews, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.