Tinu-Abayomi-Paul: I suppose my "how" is like anyone else's. I needed extra money and I wanted to dream of bigger things than my world then had a capacity for.

When the internet wasn't even the world wide web yet, I had this boyfriend in college at UMBC who was constantly trying to get me to try something called email, and something else called gopher. To date myself, this was around 1992 or thereabouts. It was almost five years before I made my first website, but when I did, I saw the potential, I just didn't know how to use it.

I was in my second real job out of college, and was still performing at poetry readings, so I wanted to improve my computer skills so I could puff up my resume, and I thought I could sell my chapbooks online, maybe in electronic form.

I bought Cory Rudl's book, got it shipped to my house, studied it. At first, my only goal was to make a site for poetry where I would grow my own fan base and then sell to them. I once had the third most popular poetry site in the world. For a while I was making a few hundred bucks a month from advertising. I was thrilled. Those were the days when $400 - $600 extra dollars a month was like having an extra paycheck. I couldn't have been more happy.

Until I started to think that if my site was marketed better, I could be number one and get even more out of the equation. I got Ken Evoy's Make Your Site Sell, and read how I could better serve my population. I knew that was part of it, I knew that I just needed to get more in touch with what people wanted, and that if I could, I'd make a fortune. I ended up dropping the poetry search engine for the community part of the site.

That poetry site was part of this experiment of network sites that
About.com was doing for a while, and that helped us get a lot more traffic, exposure and recognition. I was grateful for that, but I wanted even more.

By this time, some people I knew online who had non-commercial or non-profit sites wanted me to show them how to get more traffic. I helped them, then I started thinking, everyone wants traffic to their site, no one understands how to get it. I came up with a few theories and tested them out on affiliate products that were associated with the Warrior Forum.

This was when I realized that until I could get better pay per click rates, rather than relying on what were then declining CPM rates, I needed to have a product, one I controlled. Then came the first site about traffic, then came a book, then a few books, then a new site, and here I am.

Dale King: Some Internet marketing experts advise newbies to steer clear of certain areas of Internet marketing, like selling e-books on how to make money, advertising services, SEO services, copywriting, etc., because they're too competitive. Do you agree with that assessment?

Tinu-Abayomi-Paul: Let me talk about both sides of the logic first. The first thing that I thought when I heard that advice was "yeah right, you just want to keep all the money for yourselves."  I just didn't know any better. Then I tried, and failed, to be in cut and dried internet marketing. I changed my strategy, made a few affiliate sales, and thought about it for about a month.

And I realized that the reason people say that is because in general, those markets are too competitive. But far down in a segmented region to a particular market, you have much less competition.

Then about half way through my career, I started back down the road I was originally on, and geared a site towards more things that have absolutely nothing to do with those particular areas of Internet Marketing, though they could certainly be marketed TO Internet Marketers. Big difference. You can topic matter that is compatible with some of the biggest online spenders, but you have virtually no competition. How much more money do you think I make there?

MOST of my income now comes from those areas. I make ten times as much as I did then, I can pick and choose which consulting projects to take on, and I work a lot less.

So the other side of the logic is from the people we call "Gurus," they honestly want us to prosper, so they tell us what they wish they'd known then.

The crazy thing is, each level you go up to, when you start to make money, you find out how money works, and how abundance works. You find out that you have a lot more control than you thought over how to create the opportunity to have a better income.

Then competition goes right out the window. At that
level where you're respected as an industry expert, everyone wants to either copy you (if they're dim), emulate you (if they're a bit smarter), or partner with you (if they are truly genius about approaching you the right way at the right time, whether as an affiliate or a JV partner).

Now if you know all of that, or can at least understand it, you'll realize that if a Guru wants to keep getting great results and great advice, they'll give great results and great advice. And where am I going with this? One of those great pieces of advice is to market to where the competition is the least. You don't need to be afraid of competing, but it's better to own the farm than to be just another cow, isn't it?

You compete in ultra-competitive segments of Internet Marketing, and you have 1000, maybe even 10,000 merchants competing for a few million dedicated ears. It's harder to rank for related keywords. It's harder to get them to come to a teleseminar that's basically a remix of the ten others on the same subject, going on now.

But change your market to .... Las Vegas Bacherlorette Parties - this is real, I saw a few stories on this in the news over the past week - and you have a market no one has captured properly, that has a demand no one is filling.

You don't even have to be the person who plans the parties. You could write about where they can be held in Las Vegas and make money off Google AdWords related to Vegas. (I have a client who I trained to do something similiar making $30 a day with his blog. What if he had five blogs like that? Good bye day job, hello one day work week. With no customers and no overheard.)

You could write an ebook about the venues. You could sell the ebook and automate the business to the point where you'd just collect the money. You could have a backend that ties into a site that books the travel arrangements. You could do consulting as a backend to plan the perfect party for $1000 plus arrangements.

Who is doing this online? Look up "bachelorette las vegas" and you'll find only four of the paid listings that are any good out of the twenty paid and free listings on the page. Almost no competition, but there's at least 5000 people a month looking for information about that or something similar. If you really sucked at marketing, you could still  get 1% of those people as clients, 50 clients a month. Twenty dollar guide and it's $1000 a month JUST off the search engine traffic. It's an easy term to rank for if you know how to turn your blog into a proper search engine magnet.

Now, why would I give away a free idea like that if it's any good? I believe in abundance. I have twenty ideas a day for sites, particularly AdSense sites, but I'm not a machine, am I? I can't do them all. Yeah, I give the best ones to my clients. And yes, I'm hoping that people will come to me to learn how to optimize their blog in a way that will bring them clients, and learn a bunch of other traffic methods. So yeah, part of my motivation is totally about self-promotion.

But it's mostly about wanting other people to prosper, and to align myself with prosperity mentally. I personally think it would be a much more fun world if I had more friends who could go to the movies with me on Friday morning to see "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Superman Returns."

Dale King: Tinu, if you could give my readers one piece of advice, what would it be?

Tinu Abayomi-Paul: Search engine traffic is fantastic when you can get it. But don't rely on search engines alone for traffic to your site. If you added just one more traffic tactic that gets you as much traffic as you get from search engines, you've doubled your traffic. And if sales go up at the same rate, you've doubled your money too.

Dale King: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Tinu.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul: You're welcome.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul can be reached at:

Tinu's Blog: http://freetraffictip.com

Warning: This interview is the exclusive property of Tinu Abayomi-Paul. It may not be reprinted in any format...period!