I didn’t know what to title this post so I just came up with ‘A week in my life as an internet marketer’ because it covers a lot of different aspects of my activities.
Before I get into the meat of the article, I just want to mention that I have rewritten my ‘About’ page after watching a video that said that readers are interested in your back story and how you came to be involved in internet marketing.
I think my rewrite is a lot better than the original page, so hopefully you will find it interesting – Here’s my new ‘About’ page http://mark-salmon.com/about/
My Favourite Internet Marketing Tool
My favourite internet marketing tool (apart from WordPress) is Easy Video Suite. It is very simple to use and extremely powerful – Josh Bartlett, the creator of Easy Video Suite, created this video on how the desktop app works – I think you will find that it is incredible. If you want more details on Easy Video Suite click here.
Business Creation Mastery
Business Creation Mastery is a coaching programme that I am planning based on my consulting and internet marketing experience about creating an online business. It’s a kind of mini-mba for people who want to start an online business or who have started and are wondering which pieces of the pieces of the puzzle they are missing.
Most of the products and training online do not cover all the necessary bases – this one will. It will be supported by every other product that I have created so far – they are all part of my masterplan!
I have started creating the coaching site using Instatheme and Instamember – I picked the developers version of these plugins up at a bargain price – they have just relaunched Instamember and I think that it is a very worthwhile investment. It is not as easy as Membersonic to setup but it does have some extra features that Membersonic does not like:
- a developers license
- revolving affiliate payment buttons i.e. you only need one sales letter
- an inbuilt help desk
- your own affiliate programme. if you want to set it up
- the ability to integrate Instamember with a wide variety of affiliate platforms including Deal Guardian
- you can create discounts and coupons
- a system for creating licenses if you are selling software within your membership site
However, extra features mean more complexity and more things that can potentially go wrong, which is why I like Membersonic so much. Even so, I am going to give Instamember a trial on my coaching site because some of the extra features will be useful.
Here is the Dashboard for this new site:
Justin Glover’s 11-Step Process
I invested $19 in a product by Justin Glover which was a video presentation for his coaching programme – a video of about 2 hours.
This is a really high quality product that makes it perfectly clear exactly what is involved in building a high converting sales funnel. You really need to get the product to see all the details – for the money it is an absolute steal – but the order in which he approaches this is really quite instructive:
The 11 Step Process:
- First he plans out his product and sales funnel
- Then he creates his email follow-up and sales letter/video – this was new to me – creating the sales materials before you create the product.
- Then he creates the content/products i.e. products for each part of the funnel
- Then he creates the funnel
- Then he creates a plan for generating traffic in phase 1 using one paid method and one free method
- He then executes on that plan – very focused for 21 days on just getting traffic
- He then analyses the conversions and identifies possible improvements
- He then makes those improvements to the sales funnel
- He then creates an updated traffic plan in phase 2, this time involving affiliates (because he now has some conversion stats)
- He then executes on his affiliate recruitment traffic plan for 21 days – again, he totally focuses on this phase.
- He then rinse and repeats through steps 7 to 11
I love this because he puts a time frame on each part of the process which covers 17 weeks in total. There are some real nuggets of wisdom that he drops along the way. However, for most people, it would be too much to execute on, which is where his back-end offer comes in.
Fortunately, due to my training with Marc Milburn I feel confident that I have the ability to set up such a funnel having already set up sales funnels already – you can pick up my free eBook on sales funnels here!
It’s just that Justin has laid out his exact process and that is incredible value for $19 in my opinion.
He was quoted ‘HOW MUCH’ for a website?
One of my offline friends was quoted £10,000 for a website on a .co.uk domain. I told him he would be crazy to even consider such a proposition.
I was helping him to resolve an issue with his domain registrar and I noticed that he had the unused .com of the same domain. So without telling him, I redirected the nameservers for the .com to my own server and created the website in WordPress and 3 hours later sent him the link to the new website.
He was blown away by what I produced for him and immediately contacted his existing webmaster (on whom he had waited for weeks to get some simple images added to the site) and removed all his business from them in my favour.
I wasn’t really after his business – just wanted to prove that he was being ripped off. Anyway here’s the site I created http://businessgardens.com (mobile responsive) and this was the site it replaced http://businessgardens.co.uk (not mobile ready). I could have produced something a lot better with a budget and more time but I was just making a point that some web designers are taking advantage of their customers lack of knowledge.
Live Networking Event & 6 in 6 Coaching
A couple of years ago I invested in Jason Fladlien & Wil Mattos’s 6-in6 Coaching Programme. I think I initially invested $97 for 12 coaching sessions and I have been fortunate in that the coaching has continued with new coaching sessions every 2 weeks and we are now up to well over 50 coaching sessions with no sign of it ending.
Needless to say, I think it costs a lot more than $97 to join now and you need to get on a waiting list to join (positioning), to reflect all the coaching material now on the site.
A few weeks a ago they had a session on offline networking, so I decided to attend my first local offline networking meeting in 4 years last night. This was an incredible experience for me – as I was talking to the small businesses, I realised, for perhaps the first time, just how far ahead I had moved in my knowledge of internet marketing.
The speaker (in his 60’s and a highly repected member of the business community) was talking about how we must dress to impress for our meetings – I was thinking that offline meetings are somewhat passe given current online technology which now means that you do not have to move from behind your desk to hold a meeting. It really doesn’t matter what I wear when I am marketing online.
I realise, of course, that nothing beats a face-to-face meeting to build the ‘know, like and trust’ factor but absolutely nothing was said about online meetings in the presentation and technologies such as Google Hangouts and Skype. The speaker really had very little of value to offer the audience because what held good a few years ago, has moved on.
Ironically, the meeting organiser was dresses in scruffy cargo shorts and T-shirt, whilst the speaker was in pinstripe suit and tie!
(I chortled out-load when he asked us to name 3 types of banker!)
Offline Business Case Study 1
I met an Armenian architect that had built his own site – this has to be one of the worst sites I have ever seen but he seemed pleased with it! However, he admitted that he had never received any business from it.
I then asked him, apart from offline marketing, how did he market for new business. He said that it was all ‘word of mouth’ but he did do some magazine advertising. I pointed out that the problem with that was that they would look at his website first.
Anyway, I got the impression that he is scratching around for business at a time when he should be rushed off his feet with the current high demand for new housing space in the UK.
I am debating whether to do another freebie to help him – but he did seem to be emotionally attached to his current site and he did make the comment that he was ‘pretty good at marketing’ and his site was ‘ranking well in Google’ (i.e. telling me I couldn’t help him)!
It might be worth creating a generic architect site and telling him that if he doesn’t like it, I will just pass it onto to another architect. (Hmmm perhaps not!)
What do you think?
Offline Business Case Study 2
I got talking to a manufacturer of allergy remedies – he had around 20 products. He has just commissioned an eCommerce site for £3,000 – I’m thinking it would be two days, maximum 5 days, work if they have the product images and virtually zero cost for the software (perhaps $50 for a nice design). He’s already ordered the site so I didn’t make him feel bad about this decision.
Offline Business Case Study 3
Just as I was leaving I was introduced to Shireen – we exchanged business cards. I asked her what she did and how she marketed her business. She is a graphic designer.
At that stage I hadn’t seen her work – when I got home I checked out her site – from the examples of her work, she clearly has a lot of design talent.
Before I left her, I asked her how she was marketing her business. She told me that she loves Twitter – I asked her if she had landed any business from Twitter and what the return on investment was for her expenditure of time on Twitter.
As expected, I didn’t get a good answer, other than she might have a good lead to someone. The problem with social media marketing is that it is promoted as being a ‘free’ marketing method. However, without a good strategy and a way of measuring the return on your investment, I would suspect that most small businesses are simply wasting their time (and time is money).
Also, she really needs to track her links to see how responsive the links in her Tweets are – does anybody click on them? I suspect she doesn’t know because no-one has shown her how to do it.
(To be fair I am being a little hypocritical here because I waste time on Facebook without measuring the ROI but I wanted to make a point about how social media can be a total time-waster.)
Also, the SEO on her nice-looking website (which gets hardly any visitors) sucks but that’s a whole different topic!
The opportunities to help offline businesses are almost a bottomless pit.
Some Favourite Copywriting Swipes
I was reading this old swipe by Gary Halbert this week – it is his personal advert for a new woman! It’s a quite brilliant piece of copy. I don’t need one but, if I ever did, I would model this!
I also swiped this from the Social Triggers blog because it is speaking directly to me – I produce a lot of content but don’t promote it enough. Actually Marc and Manie (in our coaching group) also told me that I needed to do this (- I particularly like the analogy of yelling into a closet!):
After reading this, I’ve GOT to say something…
On Twitter, Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups, said something, and I believe he’s wrong. DEAD wrong.
He said, “If you’re spending more energy promoting and pushing your content than producing it, something is wrong.”
Sigh.
The BIG PROBLEM with what he said is this:
If you currently have NO readership, and you spend all your time creating wonderful content, it’s like you’re yelling into a closet…
…Because where do you expect the readers to come from?
Are they going to fall out of thin air?
Are you going to wait around for the search engines to notice you… and MAYBE send you some readers?
I sure hope not. That sounds like you’re waiting for a handout, to me.
Now In his case, I can see why he thinks creation is the answer.
When you have 100,000 subscribers, or followers, or readers, you don’t need to do the promotion work. Your readers do the work for you.
When you already have domain authority, the more content you add to your site, the more things you can rank for in search engines, thus generating more unique visitors.
But most people are not in that position.
Most people barely crack 10 visitors a day.
And they can add as many articles to their website as they like, and NOTHING will change that…
…unless they spend time promoting their content.
And that’s why I always tell people:
“In the beginning, you should spend 20% of your time creating amazing content, and 80% of your time promoting that content”
To elaborate:
It’s a simple numbers game…
If you write an article, and that article is great, but it only received 1,000 visitors. Chances are there are another million people in the world can benefit from what you just created.
So why would you spend more time creating more content, when you can focus on getting in touch with the people who can benefit from what you already have?
It’s not like companies release new products every single day as a way to reach new customers.
They perfect ONE product, and focus on getting more customers to buy the SAME product.
I treat content the same way.
And so should you.
Come up with ONE amazing piece of content that changes the game. Something like 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelly.
And focus on getting that message heard by EVERYONE who needs to hear it.
Now it may not be possible for you to create a piece of content that changes the world. That type of content is TOUGH.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a piece of content that benefits a specific group of people…
…and then focus on getting in touch with that group of people.
Treat your content as a product. Think about what segments of a market can benefit from what you wrote, and focus on getting those people… segment by segment. Just as if you were marketing a product.
And that’s how you’ll get exponential growth in readership FAST.
How do I know this?
I’ve done it. Multiple times.
My most famous example is Social Triggers.
I launched Social Triggers in March 2011. There were probably ten thousand other marketing blogs (many of which updated daily or several times each day).
Writing great content, and “hoping” to rank in search engines was impossible. There were other blogs spamming the web with content that was ranking, and I had no chance to outrank them.
So, what did I do?
I spent 80% of my time promoting content. And 20% of my time creating content.
And what happened?
In the first 13 months, I went from 0 subscribers to almost 27,000 subscribers.
Here’s the kicker: I averaged 2.53 blog posts each month.
This strategy works so well because in the beginning, when you’re trying to build your readership (or customer base), it’s not about how great your content is.
It’s about how well you get your content into the hands of the right people.
Then, eventually, as you build up your base readership, you can slow down on promotion because your readers will do the work for you.
But you need that base readership.
And the only way to get it is by promoting… not creating.
As a person who loves creating, this is good advice that I have ignored for far too long!
I know that this post is a little random but it does reflect some of the activities that I got up to this week!
Did anything in this post strike a chord with you? If so, please leave a comment as I start yet another week in my life as an internet marketer.