In this video, I show you an Aweber List Maintainance tip to keep the amount that you pay for your Aweber subscription to a minimum.
I show you how to delete ‘Unsubscribes’ and ‘Undeliverable’ email addresses from your lists so that you do not pay more than you need to for your autoresponder subscription. This is particularly appropriate if you are approaching the pricing break-points of 500 subscribers, 2,500 subscribers and so on.
The graphic below shows you Aweber pricing which they do their best to hide (- the pricing matrix is difficult to interpret in my opinion and they hide their tariffs beneath a drop-down tab)!!
As you can see, if your subscribers go over 500 then the price rises from $19 per month to $29 per month, and it rises again to $49 per month once you have over 2,500 subscribers and so on:
Aweber list maintenance should be scheduled for every month or quarter to ensure that you keep a tidy and up-to-date list of your prospects and buyers.
In my last blog post, I mentioned that I was creating a WordPress Marketing System for my sister who is a health consultant called Wake Up To Health.
This overview video sets gives you an idea of what I have created for her. I have created additional videos showing her how to get started with each part of the system.
It is my intention to sell this system to other coaches and consultants for a set-up fee and modest monthly payments.
It has taken me almost 5 years to arrive at the combination of theme and plugins that make this system a marketing powerhouse. That represents a massive shortcut and saving in time and money for anyone who purchases my system!
I’ve set up some free coaching emails on the subject of list building.
List building is one of THE most important goals of any online business.
The plain fact is that only a very small percentage of visitors to your web pages will make a purchase. Why? Because you have no relationship with them so they do not know, like and trust them.
The process of list building is simple:
First offer your visitor something that is attractive for free or at a cost that is far below its perceived value.
Ideally this needs to be presented on a squeeze page with no other distractions to capture their email contact details on your auto-responder account.
Have a follow-up email sequence in place to educate your visitor as to why they should listen to you and click your money-making links.
The emphasis on this process is to create a relationship with your potential customer.
This means that communications should ideally be a mixture of value and promotion – after all, you are in business and if you don’t promote it will be difficult to sustain your business. By offering free stuff all the time, you are educating your prospects to expect to get everything for free. So some promotional activity is important if you wish to remain in business.
If they unsubscribe from your list, so be it, they are not a good fit for your business.
Here is proof that my list building is working – I came in third on the leaderboard of the recent promotion of Digital Millionaires Bootcamp after the initial launch:
Here is my final position on the leaderboard after the offer closed out:
To help my visitors to set up a list building process, I’ve put together a free coaching course on list building that is delivered in a follow-up series of emails – you can sign up for free here – or you can invest in my comprehensive course on list building called List Building Renegade.
You are probably already aware that emails in the cloud are a great way of reducing the long-term cost of your email marketing.
The popular email auto-responders like Aweber and Get Response have conditioned us into believing that we need to pay more the bigger our list gets and the more emails that we send out.
Amazon AWS offers emails in the cloud but as far as I can see you need to be a technical wiz to get this up and running.
I was therefore interested to find comprehensive video training on a cloud service called MailJet . The creator of the training has looked at the alternatives available in the marketplace and settled on this service as being a great option.
If you are wondering how much you can save versus your existing email provider then this pricing page will give you a good reason for buying access to this training.
I have placed the training on the new membership site that I am building called Email-ATM.com as a bonus but for the time being you can purchase separate access to this bonus just for reading this article!
I will still use Aweber for the time being in addition to setting up emails in the cloud until I have tested this service more extensively.
Training can prevent us from taking action. This is one of my weaknesses – I love learning new things!
But it’s all completely useless unless you take action and pass on the value to others. Money does not flow until you do that.
It’s great to feed your intellect and be comfortable in the fact that you have skills but the real learning comes when you take action. You then find out how the theory translates into reality and you start improving your performance based on actual results.
Over the past week, I have indulged in too much training which prevented me from taking ACTION!
Webcamp with Armand Morin
I spent 2 days last weekend listening to Armand Morin at his Webcamp in Las Vegas – the topic was ‘residual income’.
I was completely gobsmacked when he revealed that, as an affiliate of Powerpay, he is receiving between $40,000 and $80,000 every month in affiliate commission for doing NOTHING. He has plans to boost that to $200,000 per month. He actually opened up his affiliate account and he has been receiving huge sums of money each and every month for many years.
That’s where I want to be!
He revealed a number of cool ways for making residual income, including newsletters, Facebook Groups, Google Plus Groups, Membership sites and recurring income affiliate programmes. I am eagerly awaiting the recordings of the event to to recap some of the material.
I paid $27 to attend the live broadcast and, whilst he pitched a lot of his products, there was incredible value given from time-to-time throughout the weekend. I admired the way that he actually demonstrated what he was teaching via a laptop on the stage – very authentic.
He is holding monthly or bi-monthly Webcamps and I will certainly be attending more.
KISS Event at Gatwick Airport on Product Creation
Next weekend I am going to the KISS Event at Gatwick Airport near London on 19th/20th October 2013. The theme is about product creation – I don’t feel that I need a lot more tuition in this area but I think the networking opportunity will be valuable. There are 6 speakers and I know 3 of them. I want to get myself known in the right circles for affiliate recruitment purposes!
The cost of this event is £127 (about $200) plus accommodation – I felt rather better about this when my sister sent me an email from Malaysia (stopping off on the way back from a speaking event in the US) saying she needed to raise £15,000 to get more training on how to improve her already good speaking skills. Apparently she was chosen to progress by the event organiser – lucky her!!!
The ‘Solo Ads Assassin’ Project Progresses
I have been helping Daniel Madeira to set up his membership site throughout the week – he is starting to create the content and we have sorted out the graphics , so that project is progressing nicely.
Coincidentally I bought my first WSO for a while called ‘31,525 in 59 days’ – this is about how a warrior built a list of 31,525 in 59 days – on the sales page he recorded it as it was happening on a video. I had to find out how he was doing it – it turns out that he was throwing solo ad traffic at the squeeze page! Matt Bacek was behind the product and he revealed that in his business (which was not the business in which this list was built) he spends $250,000 per month on solo ads!
Business Storyboards Progresses
I have also created more content for my strategy membership site called ‘Business Storyboards’ – I created 10 or 11 videos in a spurt of creativity last Monday morning and then ran out of energy! I have also managed to reorganise my thinking about this product on a mind map and I am reorganising the membership site as a result.
Photoshop Actions
I also discovered an incredible free resource of Photoshop Actions for marketers – I am now able to create all sorts of highly professional marketing graphics as a result.
Today I re-wrote a PLR eBook on Focus as a front-end free product leading into The Sky Inside membership product. The book is actually fairly high quality for a PLR product and I have formatted it nicely so it is now a very valuable product indeed. I am in the process of building a squeeze page here – http://mark-salmon.com/focus-offer/ .
Tony Robbins said this about ‘Focus’:
Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.
Here is the eBook cover I created with Photoshop Actions:
As you can see, I am now very conscious of my branding and all my eCovers will reflect my brand from now on. I will be producing more front-end offers in order to start building my list faster and in order to create sales funnels into my paid products.
I also badly need to start promoting myself on weekly or even daily webinars. I see people with less talent making more money than me and I am getting annoyed with myself so I have to keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and not a sprint – I am building for the long-term, rather than the short-term, according to a strategic plan!!
YouTube Marketing
Finally, I bought a small product on YouTube marketing by a guy called Nick Breen – this too is an incredible traffic method. He shows you how to create short videos and get them ranked quickly using PPC to give the videos an initial push. Definitely a good traffic system.
So much to do and so little time to do it in! I just need to make sure that all this training does not prevent me from taking action i.e. to implement what I am learning. Ironic that my eBook above is about ‘focus’ – this is exactly what I need to do!
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 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.
As you will be aware from my last two blog posts, I am waiting on JVZoo to reply to a support ticket – in my frustration, I decided to press on to create a new product called Membership Millionaires Bootcamp because I cannot afford to sit around waiting for their reply – now 10 days old!
What is Membership Millionaires Bootcamp?
I have a number of membership products up and running at the present time and I am now pretty handy at creating membership sites fast. In fact, I have developed a system for creating these sites cheaply and fast.
I use a membership software called Membersonic which is now retailing for $167. To enable me to package this software with my course, I have negotiated a special rate of just $27 (no affiliate commission) to bundle this software with my course. I also use a WordPress theme that looks similar to Optimize Press but which costs just $20 (- I have negotiated a 100% affiliate commission on this).
My Membership Millionaires Bootcamp course will cost $97 including these two pieces of software which can be used to develop unlimited sites as long as the domains are owned by the user i.e. no developers rights.
[features_box_light_blue width=”75%” + border=”1px”]In this product I will show how I:
install WordPress manually to create a secure database
which specific plugins and software I use
how to protect your content with Membersonic within 5 minutes flat (- massive productivity saver versus other membership plugins!)
how to create the favicon, header and any other graghics required
how to clone and backup your membership site ( for insurance purposes and fast deployment of new sites)
how to deliver content from Amazon S3 and the cloud
how easy it is to integrate with both your auto-responder and affiliate programmes (such as JVZoo!)
how to create the sales letter
how to drip content if you want to
how to install a Help Desk
To reward action takers, anyone who completes a membership site using Membersonic purchased through me will get one installation of WPCourseware (value $47) [/features_box_light_blue]
This means that purchasers of my training are getting software with a retail value of $233 at just $47 (plus my training) and the membership software and theme can be used to create unlimited personal sites to bring the per site cost down with every site they build. Another way of looking at it is that buyers get the software for just $97 v $233 and my training for free.
I purchased the developers rights to WP Courseware
I own the developers rights to WPCourseware – this is a plugin that allows you to create courses within your membership site. The benefit of this is:
you can make sure that at the end of a lesson or module that your students have grasped the key points required to be successful by making them complete some questions before moving on and
it also gives you a measure of how many people are actually fully or partially consuming your content and who they are.
it will also differentiate my membership site from almost every other one out there as I will be able to engage more easily with my members by encouraging them to complete the course and, if they are having problems, to help them in the knowledge that I will know how much of my content they have consumed – effectively I am their accountability partner.
Only by consuming and understanding and taking action on my content will they get value from my product and I think this tool will help me to deliver enhanced value in this regard.
(There is huge offline potential in WPCourseware to create training programmes like induction and health and safety courses where you want the person taking the course to complete some questions to ensure that they understand the information in each lesson or module and to certify that they have completed the required pass rate at the end of the course. The offline market is not currently my target market but, if I ever get stuck for income, I think there is a huge market for this if you can do it cost-effectively – which I now can!)
Also, when someone has completed your course, you can point them to the next logical step. The key word is ‘engagement’!!!
The Google Hangouts on Air Business Model
I have been watching my mate, Manie Amari, crushing it with Google Hangouts on Air – he is interviewing some of the movers and shakers in internet marketing and it struck me what a great business model this is – particularly for newbies to internet marketing who have little experience, connections or their own products.
In fact, it inspired me to write a short 20 page eBook outlining how awesome this business model is and why everyone should consider adding this to their business whether they are new to IM or not – the book is entitled ‘Quite Possibly the Best Internet Marketing Business Model for Newbies’. Within the eBook I also point users to a page on my blog to learn how to use Google Hangouts on Air for free.
If you would like a copy of this eBook, then just subscribe to get your free copy – the information in the book is simple, awesome and transformational:
Engage Rocket is Launched
Engage Rocket was launched this week – this is the first plugin to use Facebook Open Graph to share on Facebook when someone on your blog:
joins a Product Launch
claims a Giveaway
claims a Free Gift
attends a Webinar
attends a Hangout
This product basically creates a viral Popover on any page on your website! (At the moment I am having some technical problems with it as I think it is conflicting with my theme!)
Ongoing Training
I am still working steadily through a free course on Photoshop at Udemy.com – I want to increase my skills to ninja level .
I am only doing this outside working hours because I realise that this is not a priority in my business because Marc Milburn advises that we should be outsourcing tasks like graphics creation. At the moment, I am reluctant to do this because I enjoy graphics creation too much! To me it is the best part of creating a product. Oops – that is not the attitude Mark!
Personal Stuff
I am taking a week off next week to help to look after my grandchildren whilst my daughter starts a new highly-paid job in London. As the temperatures are forecast to continue over 30 degrees centigrade next week in the UK (virtually unprecedented for our country), it will be an opportunity to get out and enjoy the sunshine and my grandchildren. I am really looking forward to the break – my first real break since last September. I hope to take them to see some animals and also to pick fruit and things like that, just to keep them occupied. I also have an old paddling pool that I will dig out from my garage!
I’ve always found that after a holiday I come back with new ideas and perspectives on my work so the next post should be a good one!! In the meantime, I will be working hard to complete Membership Millionaires Bootcamp and my sales funnel on JVZoo (that is, if they ever get around to replying to by request for support!!!)
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.
One of the other students in Marc Milburn’s Coaching group, Daniel Madeira, wrote a blog post about the power of online relationships because he has had some help from the students to put together his product about how he created his solo ads business. It made me realise again just how many skills there are within the group of students and that if we just helped each other to implement Marc’s teaching then collectively we can overcome each others weaknesses.
Amongst the students we have people like Andrew Brackpool who has a talent for copywriting, Sergio Felix who is technically proficient with WordPress and a lot more because he has coding skills, Daniel Madeira knows all about solo ads, Chris Ferrante has just put together an amazing squeeze page, Mani Amari blew us away with his sales funnel strategy, Robert Watkins runs an internet marketing Facebook group with 2,700 fans (bet there is some nice traffic there!) and that’s just a few of the students I know about.
Then, of course, we are under the tutelage of Marc Milburn himself who is busily churning out incredible insights into internet marketing. I have to say that I am excited by how this coaching is shaping up – we have had two full trainings so far and the main coaching called Online Wealth Blueprint only starts TODAY!!! I think that means that the best is yet to come which is slightly unbelievable to me.
Last week I launched The Way of The Warriors eBook within a membership site and I have made my first sales without really promoting the product. I am holding back from promoting it because I want to get my sales funnel in place before I do that so here it is – you’ll have to click on the image to view it properly because it is too wide for the page:
This is not quite as daunting as it looks because I already have the OTO1 and OTO2 products created so I just need to create the upfront products. I have written Website Traffic Tornado already – I think I might move that to the Exit Pop and create a product on sales funnels as the front-end product because that will lead in better to The Way of the Warriors. My goal is to put this funnel into place this week.
Interestingly, it was Mani Amari’s funnel and than Daniel Madeira’s eBook that reminded me about the possibility of using an exit-pop to maximise conversions and this functionality is inbuilt into Optimize Press. It also made me realise that the more products you create, the more options you have for including your own products into a sales funnel.
There is one addition to the funnel that I want to shape up and that is a high-end coaching programme. I want to get that planned out very soon. I am working with Mani Amari on my sales funnel and recruiting affiliates and we intend to keep each other accountable.
Last week I also spent a day just proof reading Daniel Madeira’s Solo Ad Assassin product. I think it will sell really well because it is entirely authentic and it sets out a simple plan for creating a solo ads business. I am hoping that Daniel will teach me all about solo ads because it looks like a good business model for earning some cash and, failing that, a great way to drive traffic.
I have also started watching Marc’s Email Cash Siphon and I think I will create a product on email marketing just to consolidate Marc’s teaching – I created a logo for the product (Mercury, the winged messenger) which is the featured image on this post – probably not the right way to start a product by creating the logo first, but ‘hey’, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat!
Finally, let me leave you with two quotes from Alex Jeffrey’s:
There is no ‘push button’ without a list
It’s not what they sell, it’s how they sell to you
And my own thought for today ‘Collectively we can overcome each others weaknesses’ – an empowering thought for our coaching group.
