Part of my traffic strategy is video marketing so I have recently been thinking about my branding with video intros.
It is very easy to get a sophisticated video intro from either Fiverr.com or VideoHive.com but in the end I decided to create a simple video intro of my own.
Personally I don’t like long video intros, as I always want to ‘get to the meat’ as quickly as possible and a video intro often stands in the way of that. Seeing the intro the first time is cool but it gets progressively less cool if you watch the same intro time after time!
I therefore decided on another route – buy a nice piece of music and make my own intros.
Here is an example of 10 second, 30 second and 43 second intros from the same piece of music with different backgrounds – all are ‘home-made’ by me.
These were simple to make and I think they are a little more sophisticated than a ‘whiz bang’ animated intro… but that’s just my personal taste. What do you think?
CLICK THE IMAGES TO PLAY THE VIDEOS
43 seconds in blue
30 seconds in green
10 seconds in orange
I would be interested in your comments and feedback on the topic of branding with video intros – do you like this style or do you think that something a little more whizzy is required?
I somehow doubt it but that’s what I have been thinking about during the last week – branding (my days as a lover have long since finished!)
I have produced the following graphics on Photoshop to help brand my business – it only took a couple of hours:
The one I particularly like is the green can – it is slightly different and therefore calls attention.
The Solo Ads Assassin Membership Site
I am also helping Daniel Madeira with his Solo Ads Assassin Membership Site.
He has produced a very nice eBook about his solo ads business and I helped to proof-read the book. I also created the following eCover:
And this is the first draft of the header image for the site:
As a ‘quid pro quo’ for my work, Daniel is planning to promote my own products on the back-end of his funnel as a logical follow on i.e. I have a list, what do I do now? The answer is to build a sales funnel of relevant products to drive traffic to.
So some of my products like ‘Product Creation Renegade’ and ‘Membership Millionaires Bootcamp’ may be ideal follow-on products – Daniel will link to them with an affiliate link so we share the income.
Free License File Creator
Through my membership of Earn1KADay, I acquired the Master Resale Rights to a piece of software called License File Creator. It helps creators of digital products, like me, to create a PDF license file to package with product in seconds.
I have decided to add this software to my site as a free gift for opting in to my list – you can see the link in my sidebar. (As you can see, I have also branded the image on the box to my business!)
WP Affiliate Builder Launch
WP Affiliate Builder was launched this week by Omar Martin & Dave Nicholson – this includes a plugin to help create the affiliate page for digital products.
I did not need this software (as I own WP Affiliate Surge) but I bought WP affiliate Builder twice just to get the bonuses on offer from John Thornhill and Marc Milburn – they have both made some crazy promises and I fully intend to take advantage of their offers to mail their lists and introduce me to their list of affiliates. The way I looked at it was where else could I spend $47 and get exposure to large amounts of potential traffic?
WP Website Wizard Update
WP Website Wizard is my comprehensive training on WordPress – it currently has over 110 videos on various aspects of WordPress. This week I added a further 11 videos about how to speed up page loading times in WordPress. This means that I am offering over 120 short videos for just $47, including a library of graphics and various other bonuses.
I think I will have to revisit my pricing because I am just giving away my knowledge at a crazy low price at the moment and the hosting costs for this product must be relatively high.
My Son Returns To University For His Final Year
I picked my son and his girlfriend up from Heathrow Airport at 7.30 a.m. recently and he returned to Nottingham Trent University on Sunday – so we have also been busy helping him to settle in for his final year.
James & Mercedes have just returned from a month long visit to the USA where they travelled all over the country – California, Napa Valley, Bishop, Death Valley, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Florida before taking a weeks cruise around the Caribbean. I don’t know how they do it on a students income?
I’m attending Webcamp Tomorrow
I’m attending Webcamp, which is over 3 days, starting tomorrow. It is 3 days of training on How to Create Lifetime Monthly Residual Income.
It is streamed live over the 3 days and there is access to the recordings after the event. Cost is $27 which is a crazy low price.
This is the affiliate link of Andrew Hunter who brought this to my attention http://pluginresults.com/likes/webcamp. The course is run by Armand Morin who has generated over $80m online, so he ought to know what he is talking about!
The End of Another Busy Week
Whilst I may not have answered the question ‘Does Branding Make You A Better Lover?‘, I would love your feedback about the branding images that I created or indeed anything else that takes your fancy!
Hope you have a great day and thanks for dropping by.
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.
Recently I have been focusing on how to recruit affiliates as my primary source of traffic.
Whilst I have been taught the theory by my coach, Marc Milburn, I have been strangely reluctant to follow his advice. This puzzled me and I therefore requested his help to discover the reason why.
All internet marketers face a problem initially – they have few online friends, few good contacts, no proven track record, and little or no authority. This presents a major hurdle because affiliates will usually prefer to mail for people that they know, like and trust.
Put Yourself in The Shoes Of The Affiliate
Affiliates are only human after all:
they only want to send good quality offers to their list (- as their list is their most important asset.)
they don’t have a great deal of time to check out new products from new marketers
they already have a lot of product offers that they could send to their list – many of them with a proven track record
they want your proposal to be ‘presented on a plate’ – i.e. they want all the relevant information in an easily digestible format so they can make a decision – this is why your JV page or blog is so important. It helps if you have some metrics on how your offer is likely to convert and the Earnings Per Click.
they want to be incentivised with prizes and competitions i.e. top performing affiliates get rewarded for taking action.
However, something that Marc said really resonated with me – he said that he would mail for a friend ahead of any other consideration, such as a great offer or product.
He then said that recruiting affiliates was really about ‘making friends’ with people who have lists in your niche.
So how do you make friends with people who have lists in your niche?
Here are just a few of the ideas I have come up with:
interact with them on Facebook and show that you have some value to offer – good advice, an opinion, a tip, a free product or download for their Group or customers(no subscription necessary)
buy their product and interact with them and their customers within their membership site or product Facebook Group
offer to help them in some way – a testimonial, a service that you can provide, by resolving a problem they may have or you identify
going to live events and meeting them in person
interviewing them and promoting their product at the end of the interview (- give them a copy and a transcription)
supporting their launch and making sales for them as an affiliate
These are just a few suggestions – you can probably think of more.
Act With Purpose
In order to be effective, I think that you must act with purpose i.e. identify who you want as a partner and then deliberately take action to get yourself known to them in a good and ethical way.
Building relationships takes time but think of it as building an asset – it’s not an asset that you can touch, see or even value accurately but nevertheless it is a major asset because a friend will help and support you ahead of any stranger.
In order to act deliberately, set time aside to identify your preferred partners and then record their contact details, website etc on a spreadsheet and then take action to contact them in some way. Record your contact with each of them on your spreadsheet and take deliberate action to start and maintain a relationship with them. If you have access to CRM software like Sage ACT, this is ideal but an Excel spreadsheet will do.
Personally, I like the idea of interviewing potential affiliates because:
you can make a much deeper level of connection and relationship
you can make content or a product out of the interview for the benefit of both parties
both parties can quickly decide if you think the relationship is worth developing
you are not trying to ‘sell’ anything other than a conversation
My Mindset Block
And that brings me back to the mindset block I was having about contacting affiliates – the knowledge that I was trying to ‘SELL’ them on promoting my product.
That word ‘sell’ was the block in my mind. However, at the end of an interview it will be very easy to transition into asking them about what products they have available to promote, and visa versa, don’t you think?
Also, make a friend of them on Facebook and just keep them informed of what you are doing and your blog posts – I think a more natural relationship will develop as a result.
Where To Find Potential Affiliates
You may be wondering where you can find potential affiliates. Here are some good suggestions:
marketers connected to you on Facebook
marketers whose products you have bought
JV’s in JV Facebook Groups – I am a member of at least a dozen such groups
coaching students and colleagues who are taking action to build a list
Google your products keywords and the owners of the websites on the top few pages will no doubt have lists of people that are interested in your product.
vendors of similar products on affiliate platforms like JVZoo, Warrior Plus, Clickbank etc
Finding affiliates is not the main problem – building a solid relationship is much more difficult and time-consuming.
I will be using Skype (and Pamela) and/or Google Hangouts to carry out my interviews – I recently wrote a short eBook about how to use Google Hangouts to make online connections because I think that it is a great way for newbies to get started online – you can simply register here to download a copy of my eBook entitled ‘Quite Possibly THE Best Internet Marketing Business Model for Newbies’ :
Hopefully, this article about how to recruit affiliates will give you some good ideas. Oh, and look out for my interviews with some cool marketers shortly!
After a weeks ‘holiday’ looking after my grandchildren, I am finally moving forward with my sales funnel. After 3 weeks of frustration, Bryan Zimmerman (joint owner of JVZoo) finally replied personally to my support query! I had to change a number of things in my funnel when I understood how it all works.
I decided to make a video about how I set my sales funnel up on JVZoo and the problems I encountered:
I have also improved my affiliate page and you can view it here http://wayofthewarriors.com/affiliates/ – Manie Amari’s feedback was very helpful in adding the finishing touches – a fresh pair of eyes is always helpful.
Now I have to move onto recruiting affiliates as I have already released this on JVZoo. If you would like to promote it, simply follow the steps on my Affiliate page and let’s make some money together.
In the meantime, I am going to throw some traffic at the page in order to get some conversion stats which will help when I approach affiliates. I got 5 sales from the initial mailing I made to my list before the funnel was fully set up.
I may also try a limited time launch on the Warrior Forum just to get some traffic and sales moving. My front-end product, entitled The Way of the Warriors, is perfectly positioned for enticing the Warriors on the Forum.
Membership Millionaires Bootcamp
This is the product I started (whilst I was waiting for JVZoo to reply to my support queries) on how I make membership sites quickly using Membersonic and a number of other useful plugins. This is coming along nicely and I am just working on the sales letter at the moment. This is how it currently looks – do you like the ‘Ferrari’ red colour?
I have realised that I can make a nice little funnel by packaging this product with Product Creation Renegade – I just need to decide on my front-end (FE) product so the progression will go:
$7 FE to
$27 for Product Creation Renegade and then
$97 for Membership Millionaires Bootcamp which includes $233 of software at retail prices and my training.
The logo ‘All For one And One For All’ is taken from ‘The Three Muskateers’ but it does encapsulate what membership sites are all about.
Business Storyboards
One of the products that I have had in the planning stages for sometime is Business Storyboards – I want to graphically represent some of the business strategies I have learnt over the last 4 years and indeed from my consulting days.
My ideas for this product have gelled over the last few days, and I think this will be my next product. We will see.
One of my problems is that I need to ‘pull the trigger’ by marketing my existing products rather than producing yet more products. But it is fair to say that I just love the product creation process. I would love to get into designing software soon i.e. WordPress plugins or themes.
Optimize Press 2.0 Launched this week
Optimize press 2.0 launched this week but the price is higher than I had hoped for – even with my discount as an existing user of Optimize Press 1.0, the price is double what I paid for the original version.
However, I am mighty tempted to buy OP2 because, if I was starting in internet marketing again, these are the 3 themes I would look at:
Low Price – the Membersonic Theme – this theme is a steal at $20 because it is highly flexible, is responsive, has 4 navigation menus (which makes it great for membership sites) and you get developers rights. I also love the look of this theme – not unlike Optimize Press (- I have used the Membersonic Theme on both The Way of the Warriors and Membership Millionaires Bootcamp.)
Medium Price – Instabuilder – for $77 this plugin is packed with features. Whilst the training videos suck a bit, this is a great mid-priced option for unlimited personal use.
Premium Price – Optimize Press 2.0 – at $297 this theme/plugin is the ‘Rolls Royce’ of themes in my opinion. Whilst, I don’t yet own this theme, from the promotional videos and my knowledge of OP1, this looks to be an incredibly good theme with a membership script built in to the package, a button creator, responsive and cutting edge design and a host of other great features.
Email Sequences
I am also setting my mind to creating a new sequence of follow up emails that I can plugin to all my lists.
I think I will devote the first few emails to be product specific but I will then create additional email sequences that can be plugged in to every list i.e. the automated cash machine that everyone talks about. I have a small, rather neglected list of subscribers which is growing inexorably. I really need to start treating them as I would wish to be treated myself.
Having started consuming Marc Milburn’s Email Cash Siphon product, I really have no excuses for not upping my email marketing game.
Personal Problems
As you know from my last post, last week I took a weeks holiday to look after my grandchildren to help my daughter who was starting a new job in London. We live about 85 miles from her. She has arranged for a nanny for her children for 2 days a week and my wife is travelling to their house to look after the children for 3 days a week. This is a huge commitment on my wife’s part and it now turns out that as the new nanny has pre-booked a weeks holiday later this month, my daughter needs help for another week.
This is simply too much for my wife to cope with on her own. Obviously, as I work at home, there is a perception that I am always available to help out. It is impossible to work with 2 young children under the age of 5 in the house and I cannot really afford to take yet another week off! Difficult conversation with my daughter coming up this weekend!
My primary concern is that I don’t want my grandchildren palmed off on strangers or my wife to be over-whelmed with the responsibility but at the same time I need to work on my business. Also, we want to support our much-loved daughter as much as we can. Sometimes life just gets in the way.
Here is my one year-old grandson, Daniel, enjoying my wife’s chicken curry – this picture alone was worth the week I spent with them and reminds me of when my son used to lick the plate clean!
My Plan is Coming Together
Thanks to my coach, my business plan is inexorably coming together and I feel confident that ultimate success is close now. It is great to have the support and assistance of my fellow coaching students, who all seem incredibly talented in one way or another. I am hoping that we will all start to see some incredible results shortly.
I am locked within sales funnel frustration having not yet found anyone who can explain how to test a JVZoo funnel. I’ve therefore sent a stiff support ticket to JVZoo telling them that their training is not good and asking for help. If I cannot resolve this soon, then I will set my sales funnel up elsewhere.
I have had a consultation with Marc Milburn and this has helped me to resolve a few issues in my mind. With regards to driving some traffic to my sales funnel (once testing is complete), then I am going to buy some solo ads and I have a couple of good sources for this.
List Building with List Liberation
With regards to list building I am going to test the system that Chris Ramsey has created called List Liberation. This involves building a fan page following using Facebook Ads and then running surveys with the offer of a free gift at the end as a reward for completing the survey – of course, the respondent needs to provide their email address in order to get the free gift. The free gift will be one of the free gifts I created for my funnel.
Chris Ramsey is a very clever marketer – I came across him first when I was doing offline marketing and he was really crushing it. In fact he has recently moved to a small Caribbean island to live the internet lifestyle there. Just shows what can be achieved when you get it right.
Excuses, Excuses
Progress has been exceeding slow since my last blog post for a couple of reasons:
I am gridlocked by not knowing how to test my funnel in JVZoo
I had to take a couple of days out to help my daughter
I attended the first day of the Ashes at Trent Bridge in Nottingham (cricket – England v Australia) last Wednesday – a great day out with my son James.
I cannot catch up this weekend because the whole family are descending on us for the weekend to celebrate my grandsons first birthday
Daniel, my grandson
My Son, James
Incidentally, we have set up James’ first blog at http://james-salmon.com – we literally set this up in 10 minutes so it requires a bit more work but I am pleased that James is interested in creating his own website. He is going to help me to recruit affiliates during the couple of weeks he has off after leaving IBM (his work experience job) and before he goes back to Nottingham Trent University. One of James’ strengths is that he is a people person i.e. most people like him and he will be ideal in a sales role.
My son & his girlfriend
James is living the millionaire lifestyle having just returned from 4 days in Nice with his girlfriend and shortly about to spend 4 weeks in the US travelling from California to Las Vegas by car and then a weeks Caribbean cruise with his girlfriend and her parents – I don’t know how he does it but I hope that he enjoys himself before he gets into his final year at university.
Tweaking The Funnel
Three other issues that arose from my consultation with Marc were:
to change the headline on my squeeze page
to amend the sales letters on my upsells within my sales funnels to position the offer in relation to the front-end products in the funnel
setting up a split test for my squeeze page
I am almost there with my sales funnel and once I am confident about what I am doing then I am going to create a video of how I set the funnel up.
I’ve also been consulting with Manie Amari on his FB CashFuse product and this is almost good to go – I have learnt a lot from Manie about monetising a membership site – his site is full of potential income-earning opportunities.
Future Plans
One of my former offline customers has referred me to a charity who need their website refreshing – I have quoted £500 to £1500 depending on what they want done. I am hoping they will go for the latter figure which will enable me to spend some time on building them a great site using a premium theme. I already have some great marketing messages worked out. Their existing website is horrible to behold so I am confident that I can make them very happy if they trust in me.
I have also negotiated a special deal with Andrew Hunter of Membersonic for both his membership plugin and his theme. It is my intention to use this deal to set up a free webinar to demo the Membersonic plugin with an offer to help the attendees to build their own membership site in a 4 to 6 week workshop programme to include the discounted purchase of these tools. This business model was outlined by Marc in module 6 of Email Cash Siphon and I really like it. I bought Russ Rufinos ‘Knockout Profit System’ some time ago which outlined the same business model but at the time the webinar technology was very expensive. Google Hangouts on Air have changed all that for ever and I now think I will pursue this business model.
Google Hangouts & Other Products
Manie and myself I are using Google Hangouts to carry out our meetings so that we get more used to using the technology. In our last session we used a free tool called Hangout Magix to create customised overlays for the Hangout. 10 days ago we demonstrated Google Hangouts on Air to our coaching group and had some fun doing so.
The only other progress I can report is that I am receiving monthly affiliate commission cheques from affiliate marketing activities and I have imposed a rule that I will not spend more than I earn on new internet marketing products. Buying products is a bit of a sickness as far as I am concerned. I am planning to buy Optimize Press 2.0 when it launches at the end of the month. They have just demonstrated a built in button creator which you can see on their blog. This plugin is going to be awesome!
I am also benefiting from the fact that I get all Marc Milburn’s products – he is currently rolling out several products including Online Wealth Blueprint, Profit Flare and the remaining bonus modules of Digital Millionaires Bootcamp. In addition, I am studying his Email Cash Siphon training about email marketing. So much to do and so little time to do it! It is great having access to all of Marc’s products as I am constantly learning how to do internet marketing the right way.
Concluding Remarks
Whilst progress is slow, on reflection, I am still moving forward inexorably towards my goals – next week will hopefully be a cracker jack week when I can clear up some of the outstanding issues with my sales funnel frustration and I can finish my affiliate page and start driving traffic.
I’ve been having some sales funnel ‘fun’ this week – I speak sarcastically of course!
I needed a free give-away on the front-end of my funnel so I created a 30 page eBook about sales funnels at the start of this week. This is now on a squeeze page at http://mark-salmon.com/free.
I went through a number of names for this eBook including Slippery Sales Funnels, Sticky Sales Funnels, Sales Funnels on Steroids, Sales Funnel Domination but, when I saw Sterling Sherrells Book title called List Building Supremacy, I knew that ‘Sales Funnel Supremacy’ had to be it. Sorry for ‘stealing’ your idea Sherrell, hope you will forgive me!
On the same squeeze page, I have created an exit-redirect offering another free eBook called ‘Website Traffic Tornado’ which also has an exit pop-over with another free offer for ’10 Free ways to Generate Massive free traffic from Facebook. These exit pops are designed to give me the maximum opportunity to add visitors to my list.
I have therefore written or created 3 free give-aways and I also designed and created the ecovers below using Photoshop:
I also added a $1 downsell to The Way of the Warriors by recycling an eBook that I had written a little while ago so my funnel now looks a little different to the one I planned a week ago (click on it below to read it):
I had hoped to have the funnel up and working by the end of today but I have been frustrated by problems in setting up the $1 trial for both the Product Creation Renegade and WP Website Wizard downsells in the funnel on JVZoo. For some reason the system is not giving me the correct payment buttons so I have had to submit a ticket for help to JVZoo.
Once I have the whole funnel set up on JVZoo, I am going to create a video about how I did it so that it might help some of the students in the coaching group who have yet to set up a sales funnel.
Once I have set-up the sales funnel, I am going to ensure that Google Analytics is fully installed on the front of the funnel to monitor incoming traffic and then set-up a spreadsheet to monitor sales and conversions. I will also set up a couple of split-tests using Google Experiments.
Getting stuck into Google Hangouts on Air
I had a very useful Google Hangout with Manie Amari last Tuesday evening – we are both intent on cracking the use of Google Hangouts on Air for webinars. Manie is using the Google Hangout plugin for webinar set-up and I am using the Webinar Express plugin. It is my turn to test out Webinar Express on the next call this Tuesday.
The trial of Google Hangouts was useful to Manie who was operating on an Apple computer – he discovered that he needed an app to increase the light-levels on his web-cam. The other useful thing to come out of the meeting was that we have both discovered an automated way to calculate EPC and we are just trying to get to grips with the system before we discuss with our fellow coaching students.
Manie also revealed his new product about Facebook and I suggested that he get the help of our student Facebook Group to launch the product – I note that Manie did this the following day and the reaction to his product, FB Cash Fuse, is encouraging. Sweet graphics Manie!
Reverse-Engineering My Income
Following last weeks session with Marc Milburn, I also reverse-engineered how I was going to generate an income of $100,000 this year. When I extrapolated my EPC it came out at just $0.32 for me and the same for affiliates which clearly illustrated the need for some higher-priced products in my funnel. However, Marc advised me to set up my funnel as planned on the basis that I can change it later. As he said ‘it is not set in stone’ and I say that ‘every journey starts with the first step’. Just getting a funnel online will be a major breakthrough for me.
Improving My Graphic Design Skills
I have found a free course on Udemy.com to enable me to increase my skill level on Photoshop. At the moment my tool of choice for graphics is Macromedia Fireworks but Photoshop is more advanced and I really want to up my skill levels to the point where I can produce my own amazing graphics.
Instamember Is On Fire
I also bought and promoted Instamember this week – a new membership plugin that was launched last Monday and they sold over 3,000 copies in the first 3 days which shows that a good product will always find a ready market. I bought it for the developers license so that I can now produce membership sites for anyone. I will continue using Membersonic for my sites because of its simplicity but Instamember has some features that Membersonic does not so they could become useful in certain circumstances.
I also spent an hour with Ian Horner this week showing him how to set up Membersonic on his site. It was good to connect personally with Ian, who is one of Marc Milburn’s students. (I also made initial contact with Sterling Sherrell in our student group and we have a new member in Doc TheCoach, who has recently sold his hedge fund!)
James Dyson announced the launch of Optimize Press 2.0 in mid-July – I have to say that it looks very attractive. It will be fully responsive with a drag and drop interface. The page designs are off-the-hook, so it looks like I will be investing in this in July.
Looking Forward To Next Week
So all in all it has been a busy week but I am disappointed that I did not quite meet my goal of getting my whole funnel set-up by the end of play today. Hopefully, another hour or so’s work and I will be there and I can start driving some traffic to the front of the funnel to test it. I will start with some solo ads and hopefully I can get Daniel Madeira to guide me on this after he has inspected my funnel set-up.
One of the ideas I have running around in my mind is to start creating ‘vBooks’ i.e. these are eBooks with links to illustrative videos to explain something in more detail that I am discussing in the book.
So it looks like my sales funnel fun will continue into the start of next week and I also plan to finish off my affiliate page and start recruiting affiliates or at least networking with affiliates on in the Facebook JV groups.
The Way of the Warriors eBook that I started last week is almost finished – I have basically written 1 chapter a day to get this book written. We are up to 63 pages now and almost 16,000 words. I hope to complete the final chapter of the book today. This will be a front end product and I will then try to upsell my other products from this eBook.
I basically chunked the book down into chapters to get it done because I found that I was getting fatigued if I tried to keep writing beyond one chapter per day. I didn’t want to find that I couldn’t finish the book because I got fed-up with it. To motivate me to write the chapter each day I added a more pleasurable task into my timetable to do when I had finished the chapter – it was something to work towards.
I am using Google Calendar and a piece of software called Action Enforcer to time-box my work in to 60 minute chunks to increase productivity.
I have taken the same approach to recruiting affiliates. I have joined a load of JV Facebook groups this week – this is where my potential JV partners will be lurking. Thank you to Manie Amari, a fellow Marc Milburn student, for this list:
*Make Money Online – JV – WSO – Solo – Adswaps – Giveaways – IM – Warriors
*Warrior JV WSO Group (VERY ACTIVE HERE)
*JV Launch Calendar
*WSO Launch & JV Network
*JV ELITE LAUNCH GROUP
*Forum Offers
*Official JVZoo.com Facebook Group
*JV Zoo Product Launch
* Launch Superstars
*Affiliate Products PROVEN To Sell
*Daniel Lews Kickass JV Group
*WSO Elite Inner Circle
*Elite JV Group
*IM Secret Elite JV Launch
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I have been steadily adding affiliates to my affiliate spreadsheet but found I was getting distracted when I looked up some personal information on them. I therefore decided that I would set a goal of adding 5 affiliates a day to my spreadsheet before moving on to another task.
There was an incredibly good thread in the WSO JV Central Facebook Group – it was started by Kenster which then sparked a reaction from Andrew Fletcher of DigiResults and I am copying these comments below because they are highly instructive about how to recruit affiliates to sell your products. They also re-enforce Marc Milburn’s teaching:
Don’t you HATE when somebody messages you for the first time asking you to promote something. Don’t you hate when somebody you never know just pushes their offers on you…like they just want to use you. Don’t these people know how to market? Don’t they understand that they are being rude? Shouldn’t they respect you and your time!
Well…
I’ve griped about these people before and I’m sure you’ve seen my comments in this group at one point or another.
But to be honest, perhaps I’m getting soft at my old age of 28, but I’ve learned to give these new marketers a break. Let’s be honest, I think most of us successful marketers have done something along the those lines when we first started out…right? I know I certainly did.
I didn’t intend to be rude or approach the affiliate-getting process wrong – I was just doing what I thought was supposed to be done. People said, “create a product and get affiliates”. I created a product and now I was emailing random people to “get affiliates”. Was is a bad way to approach affiliates…absolutely. But I was a new little IM sprout with no experience or knowledge…I was just trying to hustle.
So I’ve learned to respect these marketers that approach me to promote their stuff and ask for advice. They are trying to hustle and over time, they’ll learn the right way to approach affiliates and the right way to build relationships. I think we should give these newbie marketers a bit more slack!
Now the experienced marketers who know how this industry works and know how they should be approaching affiliates and networking partners and who still bombard me asking for advice, referrals, traffic, promos, etc…no slack given to you 😉
Remember struggling when you first started? I do and I have a new-found respect for hustler newbie marketers…even if they are doing stupid and annoying stuff!!! [/features_box_light_blue]
Andrew Fletcher then posted 3 times:
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Andrew Fletcher – 1st Post
Kenster just made an awesome post all about his approach to handling newbie’s sucky cold approaches.
I replied how one of my top JV recruitment strategies has been helping new starters out. The best example being one guy who went from not knowing what an upsell was to topping my leader board less than a year later!
Needless to say I immediately got a deluge of friend adds and messages looking to take me up on that … predictable if nothing else!
OK, so I don’t have time right now to make good on that and I feel bad. So instead I’m writing this post to show you how to make less sucky cold approaches. They are, after all, one of the hardest parts of the JV game.
First of all, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. I own DigiResults and 90%+ of the big affiliates in the space know who I am. So my cold approaches carry rather more weight than most.
So please believe me when I say, this is the stuff I used to get here from nothing and it still works really effectively now.
First up, making cold approaches not so cold.
This is where your branding and exposure come into play. It doesn’t have to be some Madison Avenue branding exercise, just a few basics that will massively improve your results –
1. Pick a brand word and stick it on your products. For 3 years I was the Digi guy. Everything I put out was Digi Something Something. Doing that makes you seem a bigger deal than you really are, which ironically starts to make it true!
2. Get yourself out there in an appropriate way. If you’re a newbie, aim to ask smart questions and seek advice. If you’re experienced aim to give smart answers and provide it. Parroting marketing theory that you have no experience of isn’t going to help. This isn’t Warrior Forum 101. The JVs you want to work with KNOW THEIR STUFF and will see through you without a second thought.
3. Pay attention to who engages with your content. If you ask a smart question and someone answers or provide a smart answer and something ‘likes’ it. That lead stopped being a cold approach. Engage!
Next up. Make an approach but do it the right way.
This post has already got quite long so I’ll cover some approach strategies next time. If you want to speed that up make sure you like this post and say nice things about me 😀
Andrew Fletcher’s 2nd Post (- read his ‘why me’ page on the link below – it’s really impressive!)
Yesterday Ken Ster inspired me to start posting about JV recruitment.
It’s several months and quite a bit of money out of date but it illustrates the point 🙂
Now, as promised yesterday, a simple approach that’s about 1000 times more likely to get someone to engage with you than a copy/pasted “Will you promote my shitty product” email.
Make your approach specific to the person you’re approaching and don’t make them feel like they’re going to be trapped in a conversation with you. (Pro tip: This applies just as well to picking someone up in a bar 😉 )
How to make it specific –
Either do a group of approaches at the same time, or find a few other people you could approach if you’re just doing a single one.
Now ask yourself, “Is my question/flattery/whatever applicable to other people in this group?” Contrary to every approach email anyone has ever sent, if the answer is “Yes” DO NOT SEND IT.
If it’s specific to them, then by definition it doesn’t apply to many other people.
You also can’t cheat.
I’m emailing you because I really liked PRODUCT_NAME and I’m on your list.
PRODUCT_NAME makes it feel specific but it’s not. It’s a mail merge in Word. It’s lazy.
So also ask yourself, “Could I substitute another name into this and have it apply?” If you could, DO NOT SEND IT.
Instead, pay attention to what they are currently talking about in their emails, on FB, on their blog, wherever and match your approach to something going on in their lives. This will massively increase your chances of engagement.
How to keep it short –
Realise they don’t care who you are to start with. If they are worth engaging with they already have a bazillion FB friends, Twitter followers and Skype contacts. Your goal is to stand out. You do so by fighting the urge to talk endlessly about yourself.
Make your own life harder by engaging about something that doesn’t imply you will follow up a million times. You’re much more likely to get a response if the person doesn’t feel that doing so will open them up to a million more questions or hearing all about you.
Some of my best approach emails have simply been flattery about a product (again, in specific terms) and a note saying “Please feel free to publicly quote me on that. If you need anything like a headshot photo or whatever to go with it, just say the word.”
You think that gets a response? Of course it does!
I started writing up some real world examples and bonus points on how to get a response but this post is long enough already.
Andrew Fletcher’s 3rd Post
Following on the topic of making your JV approaches suck less I’ve compiled a list of the most basic mistakes people making.
Just fixing these things won’t guarantee you a reply but getting them wrong will pretty much guarantee you don’t.
1 – Generic subject line: “JV”, “Hello”, “Promotion” for a marketer with 100+ emails a day, is this going to get opened?
2 – Being overly deferential and apologetic: “Sorry for the interruption, I know you are a great man and probably don’t have time but could you spend 60 seconds looking at my JV proposal, I’d really appreciate it.”
3 – Being needy: “I have a great product, I just need your sales and marketing skills, advice and access to your list to make it happen.” Big affiliates promote people who have their shit together.
4 – Not getting to the point: Copy can never be too long, only too boring but I guarantee 99% of the drivel people write by way of an introduction is TOO BORING.
5 – Guarding your idea: “I have a fantastic product and I’d love you to promote, I just need you to sign an NDA so I can give you details.” Ahahahahaha, No.
6 – Having someone run the process on your behalf: I actually did this one for ages and it can definitely work once you’re established but when you’re starting out trying to abdicate responsibility for this just plain won’t work.
7 – Being too casual: We’re IMers but that doesn’t mean you can type like,,, ths and xpct me 2 rspnd. If you message me sounding like a retard, I’ll presume your copy will sound like a retard and bin it.
8 – Being vague: I have a software, would you like to promote it? I have a trash can, would you like to be in it?
9 – Sharing nothing in the email: It’s fine to have the details on a JV page that you link off to but you’ve got to give me enough to make it worth clicking the link. This isn’t some “You have to check this out: LINK: solo ad we’re writing.
With top JVs getting 1000s of these kind of pitches the success ratio is probably about 1000 to 1. Do yourself a favour and skew the odds, stop making these mistakes.
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I wanted to record the above comments because these are the opinions of someone with experience in the field and represent a great template for recruiting affiliates.
As a result of the ‘branding’ comments by Andy Fletcher, I added my business name (The Business Renegade) to my header on this blog to keep my business brand alive. I also added the ‘salmon’ graphic to the background of my site to spice it up a little – it looked a little dull and boring before.
As a result of Marc’s training, I also sent out a couple of promotional emails this week about Webinar Express – the new Google Hangouts plugin. I’ve got it and really like it so I felt comfortable about promoting it. Here’s a sample landing page I knocked up in a few minutes – http://mark-salmon.com/sample-webinar/. I’ll send out another email today about this post. I couldn’t reach my target of 5 emails this week – must try harder next week.
I also did a video testimonial for Marc Milburn and ‘exposed’ myself on webcam – good training for what I know must come in future. I don’t mind speaking in front of an audience but its not an activity that I rush towards doing. However, I must get out of my comfort zone a lot more in order to become a leader, so more videos and webinars are on my agenda. Here’s the testimonial vid:
I also recommended another potential student for Marc’s coaching programme.
I think I have another idea for a front end product that I can start next week when I have completed The Way of the Warriors – I would like to create a simple graphics site, mainly because I love making graphics. (That reminds me, I also completed a header image for Tsahai de Silva this week for her blog and I helped Terry Weatherill to start improving his website (but nothing has changed yet! i would like to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ makeover of Terry’s site if he will let me! ) as suggested by Marc.)
Finally, Marc Milburn recommended that we set up a help desk using a piece of free software called Hesk – this video tutorial shows me setting up the Hesk Help Desk – it is a live recording including the mistakes I made but it should give you a good idea about how to set-up a Hesk Help Desk: http://renegade.evsuite.com/hesk-setup/
If you are interested in joining Marc Milburn’s coaching and want to talk to me about his coaching programme, then feel free to contact me for the inside story.
As you can see The Way of the Warriors is not about lying on the beach with a laptop but it involves hard work and application i.e. the willingness to pay the price in advance. I am… are you?
Please post a comment below and let me know what’s on your mind.
In my last post I set out my agenda for June but I was diverted by the latest innovation in Google Hangouts on Air – namely a product called Webinar Express.
I have been very interested in starting to do my own Webinars but I have been put-off by the extortionate monthly fees of the leading webinar software which is of course GoToWebinar. For someone just starting out in Webinars, I think their fees, and the commitment to keep paying a monthly fee, have put me off taking action so far.
I have therefore been very interested in Google Hangouts on Air and I wrote a blog post on my Business Renegade blog that covered everything I had learnt about Google Hangouts on Air and even how to set it up all manually.
Recently I bought a plugin called the Hangout Plugin to automate the registration process but that back-fired when it conflicted with my blog and was totally unworkable. I was therefore delighted to see the Webinar Express launch yesterday and I bought that plugin and set it up on my blog- see this video that I have created to promote the plugin to my list – at the end it diverts to the Webinar Express offer:
I will definitely be using Google Hangouts on Air in the near future, even if I am initially talking to myself only as I want to get used to using this technology.
I also started creating another new product this week called ‘The Way of the Warriors’. This is an eBook recapping the main learning points from the Digital Millionaire Bootcamp run by Marc Milburn. I thought that by writing this eBook I would embed the main learning points in my own psyche and, at the same time, create a nice saleable product.
I was fortunate enough to pick up a review copy of the new Membersonic theme built on the Genesis framework and tested this new theme for The Way of the Warriors product so I could give Andrew Hunter a nice testimonial by way of thanking him for the review copy. I really like the theme and I will be using it for my non-core products to give a change of branding.
I also spoke to a friend about Marc’s coaching programme who enquired how I was getting on with the coaching. She is very interested in joining Marc if she can persuade her husband to make the investment. She is frustrated by her lack of progress and was bowled over when I told her what Marc was proposing to do for his coaching students over the next 12 months or indeed over our lifetime!
This week Marc Milburn gave us access to his Email Cash Siphon course so I have started to watch these videos too because I am not very good with this aspect of my business – I am too inconsistent and I don’t really like writing emails but I’ve got to discipline myself to do it daily as taught by Marc. I also need to get my traffic system going as well – I am spending too much time on product creation, simply because I enjoy the act of creation.
One of the learning points from Marc was that he initially created a list of over 10,000 people by offering free stuff and when he finally tried to promote his products to this list he found that nobody bought anything because he had conditioned them to expect free stuff. He had to write-off this list and start again and he now recommends that most emails should be promotional in nature but with a weekly email to link to the free content on your blog. (On the other hand Marc teaches not to use your blog for promotional purposes – this is completely different to how I was operating before!)
I also helped someone in the Membersonic Forum who was wrestling with their header image – it seems that graphics are a constant problem for new internet marketers and I am thinking of doing a training showing how to create simple header and logo graphics using a variety of free and paid tools. In this instance I just created the header for him.
I am also currently reading a book called ‘The Obvious Expert’, recommended by Alex Jeffreys. I have to say that much of the advice in the book is fairly obvious too – write a book, find speaking events to speak at, create your own newsletter and so forth! I have written a lot of eBooks so perhaps I ought to go the extra step and get them published on Kindle and Amazon. In fact, that might be a good step forward with ‘The Way of the Warriors’.
One of the other small things that I have set up this week is to create a separate email to sign up to marketers lists with – this diverts into a special folder that I have set up on Gmail- here’s exactly what I did and why:
Finally, I have done some modest planning for my recurring income membership site – Business Creation Mastery – which I would like to launch by the end of June if possible. Let me know what you think about what I am doing in the comments below – I would love to hear your feedback!
Before I bought Marc Milburn’s coaching course, I booked to attend Marketing With Alex – Live which is being held at Heathrow, London on the 18th and 19th May 2013. Hopefully, this will be my ‘Golden Ticket’!
I am writing this blog post just before I leave for the event.
Here’s what Alex has promised to cover over the weekend:
how to double, triple or even quadruple your business.
how to launch your first information product and make between $2,000 and $55,000 in your very first week (no experience needed)
how to get an endless stream of traffic so you never stop making money on the internet
how to make $8,000 in 90 minutes on the internet, without a website or a product
how to add 1,213 people into your membership in the first few days without any of the content created
how to make $9,587 per month working just 3 hours per week
how to launch your own software product (without even knowing a line of code) and still bank $3,431 in the first 7 days
how to create simple sales funnels (and bank as much as $75,321 per month) on complete auto-pilot
how to make $67,241 in the first month you launch a back-end coaching programme. even with no experience and while just working one afternoon a week.
In addition to this seminar content, Alex has invited some of his big affiliates – I am hoping to meet as many as possible in view of the products that I want to launch shortly.
Also, Dean Holland, another of my mentors, is attending so it will be great to meet him face to face for the first time.
Even The Oompaloompas Want My Ticket
I am really looking forward to this event because it will be great to get out from behind my computer and meet some of the major players in internet marketing.
Internet marketing is all about relationships and this is a golden opportunity to network with some like-minded people and who knows what will come of it in the future. In any event, whatever happens, I’m going to enjoy the experience.
I think I have probably been over-complicating my internet marketing – this was discussed on a coaching call with Dean Holland last night.
Michael Young, another internet marketer, was mentioned. I have followed Michael for a while now – most of his products are pretty sketchy and short but he has a very engaging and likeable manner. His strategy has changed from creating and launching his own products to re-launching other peoples products at a discount to their normal price. in 90 days he has generated $340k in sales with having to work very hard.
It’s all about working smart rather than working hard and Michael seems to have cracked the formula.
However, I listened to a webinar by Peter Garety yesterday, and it is quite evident that he is running his business using some sophisticated management information. He has a product called WP Campaign Manager that allows you to track and segment your customers buying behaviour which enables him to be very targeted with his email marketing.
So there’s the dichotomy, one marketer is saying that it is easy and you can do it with other peoples products , working just a few hours a day, and another marketer is working hard to manage his business using sophisticated management information systems.
Next week I am ringing John Robbins, a fellow student of Dean Holland’s to discuss Michael Young’s strategy in more detail. It will also be a chance to get to know John who is an expert in video marketing.
I am also interested in developing a relationship with Sergio Felix, a fellow student of Marc Milburn’s. I think Sergio will go far because he is not afraid to put himself out there on video and he seems to be well connected.
I am inclined to think that working hard is the only way but it is always beguiling to dream that there is an easier way. It will be interesting to see whether my opinion changes over the course of this weekend with Alex Jeffreys.
So wish me luck with my first internet marketing seminar and I’ll report back on how I got on next week and tell you if it really was one of life’s golden tickets.
Today I was on the receiving end of some candid feedback from David Walker. He basically told me that my design work was poor! 🙁
I volunteered to do a website header for Daniel Madeira, one of Marc Milburn’s coaching students to help him out and I produced 6 versions of the header just to see what he liked.
Of course, because Daniel wasn’t paying, he was too polite to tell me what he really thought and thanked me.
In a moment of madness, I posted the 6 headers on my Facebook profile and asked my Facebook ‘friends’ to tell me what they thought. David was the first to reply and this is what he said,
‘Number 1 is the best of a very bad bunch (sorry, but you did ask…)’
Initially I was a little hurt by his comment but then I thought that by giving me his unvarnished opinion, he was actually doing me a huge favour. It got me thinking hard about what I could do to improve my designs.
I had two further replies to my thread which both agreed with David that my first, very simple design was the best one. A clear case of ‘less is more’ (just like ladies make-up!)
I decided to look at David Walker’s blog and discovered that his header was simply a simple piece of ordinary text with a transparent background. No graphics or logo. His blog was also very minimalist. I then realised that clean and simple was his clear preference, so I immediately produced a similar header (version 7) for Daniel.
Now Daniel has 7 headers he can choose from. It will be interesting to see which he chooses because often the beauty of design is in the eye of the beholder. You only have to look at modern art to realise that!
I am a complete self-taught amateur in the world of design and it made me realise that this is a very difficult field to enter because everyone has different tastes and opinions (thank god! – it would be very monochrome and boring if they didn’t.)
The problem with design is that it is easy to just mess around with ideas and to keep trying new stuff – it is also easy to pass into the realms of bad taste and poor aesthetics!
Also, I had very little guidance from Daniel on what he wanted (other than the text I put on the header). Without candid feedback from the ‘customer’ it is very difficult to design in isolation because, as I say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Daniel might like seeing his handsome mugshot on the header! I just don’t know.
Here are the headers for you to see – let me know your opinions in the comment box below and if you can link to a site whose header you really like, that would be great because I like to see what designs others like, to inform my own work.
For example, do you think it is a mistake not to have his face on the header in order to make an instant connection with the blog-owner or is that a bit cheesy?
Oh, and don’t forget to be candid with your feedback because it is the only sort worth having!
#1
#2
#3
#4 – this was just a piece of fun!
#5
#6
#7 – this has a transparent background to match the background of Daniel’s new site
Let’s really test the power of canidid feedback – please comment below with what you like dislike and prefer! (If you don’t like any of them that’s OK but it would help if you could give an example of a header you do like!)
