2006 was an interesting year for me as I moved from academic and business conferences into the often more questionable world of Internet Marketing. There are lots of sharp people who are helping others learn how to use legit tools to earn a credible living, but there are also plenty of shysters, people who doubtless sold used cars before they got into the Internet and will be filming infomercials from rented boats with rented bikini-clad babes after their particular Internet hype fails to materialize.
Nonetheless, it’s been instrumental in my evolution from thinking about my online efforts as a “cost center” into a “profit center”, so even if I’ve met some dubious folk, I am quite thankful to have also met a lot of really great people.
If you’ve been paying attention to my speaking gigs, I spoke at five Internet Marketing events in 2006, from the World Internet Summit in Las Vegas to the Focus 4 the Future event in Dallas. The best event? The System in Chicago, the only event where I’m planning on speaking again in 2007.
But it’s not because I’m bailing on Internet Marketing. Quite the opposite: through the efforts of my good friends and colleagues Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon, I’m now a faculty member of their extraordinary StomperNet. And that’s what I want to highlight, because the StomperNet program has been closed to new people for months and will remain a closed group, except for today, 4 January 2007.
Let me tell you who is involved, what we’re doing, and why StomperNet is unquestionably the best long-term Internet Marketing investment you can make to fulfill your resolution of ‘make more money, become your own boss, wrest control of your destiny’!
Before I do that, go right now and get more info on StomperNet!
Now, let me explain what we’re doing with StomperNet, so you don’t think I’ve just fallen off my rocker…

If you have ever attended an Internet Marketing event, you know that all too many are predicated on ‘pitching from the podium”. in fact, it’s epidemic, and some of the events I’ve attended had me cringing in the back as other speakers gave 10 minutes of content and 50 minutes of sales pitch. Ugh.
To combat this, you can create small events, like Aaron, Jeremy, Lee and I did with our successful Elite Retreat, but even with two days of intense one-on-one interaction with a small group, we can only offer so much of our expertise. Attendees were delighted, but we were offering a bootstrap, a brainstorming intensive that ultimately couldn’t include long-term coaching.
But what if you want to engage with a dozen of the very best people in the Internet Marketing world (and dozens of guest gurus who pop in from time to time) in a cooperative community of hundreds of like-minded entrepreneurs, a community that includes an incredibly active discussion forum, hundreds of hours of expert training videos, podcasts, and four conferences in 2007?
That’s the beauty of Stompernet. I dunno if I’m supposed to do this, but here’s a tiny snapshot of some of the actively managed forums we have, forums that all have their own experts, people like Frank Kerns, Dan Thies, Leslie Rohde and Sherman Hu:

• Finding Your Niche
• Keyword Research
• Yahoo Stores
• Catalog Managers and Shopping Carts
• SEO Strategies
• Social Bookmarking
• Viral Marketing
• Monetizing Strategies
• Email Marketing
• Physical Products
• Merchant Services
• Blogging Strategies

That’s just a subset, and if I added up all the discussion threads in those forums alone it’d be well in the hundreds. Hundreds of discussions that are from entrepreneurs just like you, except for one difference: they have full access to a faculty of extraordinarily smart experts that are helping them become more successful every single day.
I realize that you might not be familiar with all of the experts in our group, so let me mention a few of them and what they do: Dan Thies runs SEO Research Labs and has years of experience with keyword research and search engines, Leslie Rohde also has lots of years with SEO, much of it quite pragmatic and experimental in nature, Brad Fallon runs a site I’ve written about many times — including in my Google book — called My Wedding Favors.com which last year grossed $12 million in purely online sales, Mike Long is an expert on how to leverage eBay for marketing and sales, and Sherman Hu, fellow blogging expert is my mirror: his expertise is focused on WordPress, while mine is MovableType.
I was in Atlanta a few weeks ago for the first StomperNet Live event and it was pretty darn cool. Over 500 people and two days of solid information with almost zero sales pitch. The cocktail party was splendid and I know that I learned a ton listening to everyone else, including the attendees themselves.
The next StomperNet Live is next month in Orlando and it’ll again be a great event with excellent speakers and a room full of entrepreneurs who are doing something to realize their online dreams by participating in the event and StomperNet itself.
Shouldn’t you jump too, while you have the chance?
I kid you not. The only day you can sign up and join us in StomperNet is today, the 4th of January. Tomorrow the door will have closed again and you’ll just be on the outside, listening to incessant pitches and wondering why other people are enjoying such success.
So, a call to action: don’t just sit there reading!