In this article I want to discuss the importance of celebrating success, however small that success may be.
My son, James, just telephoned me – he was happy, I could hear it in his voice.
He’s recently started playing cricket again with a small village cricket team in Thurgaton in Nottinghamshire. It really is ‘village green’ stuff but they do play in a league.
Most of his old cricket kit did not fit him so he’s had to invest in new pads and bat, so he really hasn’t played for a long time.
Coupled with that, when he played in the past he never bowled – he was always a batsman – this is important in understanding what comes next.
I think the village team is well supplied with batsmen but they must lack for bowlers because they asked James to bowl for them! This is someone who has never bowled for a team in the past! He was desperate to contribute to the team and so he took the ball.
In the last two matches (- this is the beginning of the season -) he has bowled a total of 12 overs only. His bowling average is 0.8 runs per over and he has taken 4 wickets. These numbers have put him top of the league in the bowling stats apparently.
In the last match, he opened the bowling and bowled out the teams best batsman second ball – someone who scored over 100 runs last year when they played his team.
I asked James what he was bowling – it turns out he’s bowling slowly but accurately.
What’s happening is the batsmen, who are eager to get runs on the board, are trying to hit him for six, missing the ball and getting themselves bowled out. (If the ball is not coming down the wicket at speed, then the batsman has to generate all the power themselves when hitting the ball which is breaking their normal pattern of scoring off a quick opening bowler!)
Of course, it’s unlikely that James’ stats will last and it could just be beginners luck. Also, James will probably try to defend his stats by trying harder which may mean that his bowling averages deteriorate.
That’s why it is so important to celebrate little successes as and when you encounter them.
Today he is up but tomorrow he may be down. Life is like that.
Everything is temporary – today you may be poor, and tomorrow rich. Today healthy, tomorrow at deaths door. None of us know what life has in store.
The only time that we can really live is in the present moment – the past has gone, nothing we can do about it. The future may partially be determined by what we do in the present moment but there are no guarantees about that.
So it’s important to celebrate our successes today – their memories will keep us moving forward and motivated in tougher times.
Psychology and mindset play an incredibly important part in success – one millionaire I met, who had bought his business for £1 and sold it for £49m, told me that 85% of success was due to having the correct mindset.
Which is why, my product, The Sky Inside, is an important one – because it addresses the issue of the role mindset plays in success. There are a huge number of mindset resources in The Sky Inside and you can get free registration on this page as my gift to you.
There is so much wisdom and help in this product that I really should be charging at least £2,000 for it! I genuinely think that it is the best gift that I could offer to any aspiring entrepreneur.
So I’ve given you a reason for celebrating success – I’ve just given you FREE access to what I consider to be my most valuable product 🙂
Have you ever considered list building with Kindle? I’ve just read about this strategy and it sounds very interesting to me because the KDP Select program gives you the ability to enroll your books in a Free Book Promotion i.e. Amazon will get the traffic for you.
If you include links to your squeeze page inside your ebook then you will be able to build a list of people interested in the topic in your book. For example, you could offer a bonus tip or a video tutorial in the book for people who sign up to your list.
As your ebook can be only 2,500 words long, it would be relatively easy to build up a library of books on Kindle.
If you also made all your books in a related niche, you could also cross-sell your other books to existing customers.
Once you have enough books on Kindle, you could be earning a very nice passive income from Kindle.
You may even pre-launch your book in a Forum like the Warrior Special Offers Forum before transferring the book to Kindle so you get access to two market places. (To enable you to charge a little more on the Warrior Forum, you could include the additional bonus content mentioned above because the reader is already on your list, thereby making your book more complete and valuable.)
All the tools for creating and launching this strategy are essentially free if you use a text editor like Google Docs or Open Office. Kindle includes a cover creator so you are golden from start to finish!
I am definitely going to try this strategy as I have a lot of ebooks that I have written on my hard disc.
You may be thinking that you couldn’t possibly write a book. If this is you, then why not head over to a PLR site, buy a PLR book and then totally rewrite the content to make it your own.
Alternatively, buy several books on the topic and mash up the content, or indeed head over to Ezine Articles and research your content there.
Or how about taking some of your blog posts and mashing up a book from content that you have already written – a little bit of editing and you could quickly create something very valuable for others to consume – particularly if you plan your blog content in advance so that a series of blog posts creates a coherent whole.
Using a mind-map to map out the structure of your content is a quick way to sort out your chapter headings and the points to be covered in each chapter.
(WARNING: Do not be tempted to use PLR content, or plagiarize other peoples content, which has not been radically altered, on Kindle! You must make your book unique and original!)
If you could pump out one book a day, then you would quickly build traffic to your squeeze page whilst at the same time earning cash from your book sales.
Once you have built up a whole series of books, you would then be able to create one large book – a compendium of your micro-ebooks – and sell that on Amazon.
List building with Kindle is a great strategy for aspiring internet marketers.
I have created some demo sites for my website design business. You can take a peek by clicking the image below. This will take you to a page where there are links to each site – there are 5 or 6 sites in total.
I’ve been studying about how to do story telling with email marketing – specifically reading Auto Responder Madness by Andre Chaperon.
At well over 300 pages, it is an ebook that I have had on my computer for quite a while and failed to read properly because of its length – indeed, I refer to it in one of my previous blog posts.
However, it is well worth taking the time and effort of ploughing through it because it gave me clarity about how to upgrade my email marketing efforts.
Your list building efforts will have a pitiful return on investment unless you get your email marketing right – my biggest failure to date is ‘list attrition’ i.e. not knowing how to properly develop a long-term relationship with my prospects and clients even though that was always my intention. ‘Intention’ is not enough unless you deploy a few writing strategies
My email marketing has been relatively poor in the past – lacking proper structure, strategy and, yes, based on what I read in Autoresponder Madness, the content of my emails can be greatly improved.
There are 3 core tactics that are employed within Autoresponder Madness:
List Segmentation – i.e. to ensure that you send relevant messages to your list it is critical that you understand who is on your list and what they want. List segmentation is critical to this. Andre outlines a number of strategies and tools for achieving this. It is not easy to do but it is very effective!
Story-telling – he delivers his content by way of stories in automated sequences – he calls them Soap Opera Sequences – to engage the reader and uses open loops and cliffhanger content to draw his reader through his emails. These stories are in a strategic order to deliver an overall solution to the client but the client can be diverted onto sub-lists with new Soap Opera Sequences depending on which topics they show interest in. Product Launches are delivered sparingly via broadcasts, perhaps once a month. Each email has a ‘hook’ and ends in a cliffhanger.
He uses Jay Abraham’s Strategy of Preeminence in creating a strong relationship with his readers i.e. he works hard to become their trusted long-term advisor, which results in incredible conversion rates from small lists.
A surprising bonus at the end of the book was that he outlined the structure of his working day. His work schedule is two 90 minute sessions in the morning with a 30 minute rest in between and then in the afternoon he works in Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes each to reflect his shorter attention span in the afternoon. As he lives in Spain, he takes ‘siesta’ time midday.
Within Autoresponder Madness, he refers to a product called Nano Lists which is not officially for sale. I managed to get hold of a copy of this too. This was also an eye-opener as to how well you can do with skilful list-building and email marketing i.e. adopting a smart strategy is crucial for success.
Together, both these products have made me realise that my email marketing needs to be upgraded in both strategic intent and content. I have received a glimpse of how it can be done so much better and I now just need to take action on what I have learnt.
I wish I had read Autoresponder Madness a long time ago – possibly I wouldn’t have realised just how good the content is had I not first ‘failed’ with my email marketing!
This book and ‘Email Slick’ by Lee Murray should be required reading for any internet marketer who wants to get to grips with their email marketing.
If I can just implement the strategy of story telling with email marketing, it would be a massive improvement!
This article is about fixing website issues using Google Webmaster Tools.
All websites that you want to be indexed in Google need to be set up on Google Webmaster Tools. You will need to verify that you own the site by going through their site verification process and it is also a good idea to submit an XML sitemap.
In the past I have used Google Webmaster Tools to primarily check my search traffic keywords, links to my site and that the pages were being indexed by Google.
I have not systemised these checks and it is certainly a good idea to make sure you check your site with Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis and here is the reason why.
From time to time you will get messages from Google flagging up errors on your website which you need to fix. I have just discovered 2 huge general errors and, because I was not checking Google Webmaster Tools regularly, was not aware of this until today.
Much of the content on my pages was blocked to Google because of a faulty robots.txt file which I needed to correct and re-upload via FTP. I discovered this using the ‘Crawl’ menu within Google Webmaster Tools which firstly flagged up the crawl errors. I was then able to see how Google was viewing the page using the ‘Fetch As Google’ function in the ‘Crawl’ menu. It is easy to use and very illuminating!
These errors were also affecting the mobile-friendliness of my web pages – 22% of my pages were flagging mobile errors including the fact that some of the mobile ‘touch’ elements on my pages are too close together. I may need to change my WordPress theme to correct these as Google has announced that it is de-indexing pages that are not mobile friendly as from 21st April 2015! As mobile related traffic accounts for roughly 50% of all traffic, sites that are not mobile-friendly will be at a serious traffic disadvantage.
This demonstrates why it is important to invest in a good professional theme which is tried and tested by a lot of users i.e. to make sure that all the wrinkles are ironed out. Errors like these will severely affect the amount of search engine traffic you and I will attract to our websites and therefore should not be ignored.
So I recommend that you check out your websites using Google Webmaster Tools and set about fixing website issues that this site flags up for you.
Here are some easy ways to create valuable content.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ideas – for example, you can take content already on your hard disk and just remodel it. However, I have copied this infographic from Copy Blogger as a useful reminder to me that there are many easy ways for creating valuable content or for coming up with content ideas for my readers.
If you do any sort of podcasting for example, you could easily use this infographic as the basis of a very informative podcast.
One of the biggest mistakes I have made with my business is my failure to operate in a focused profitable niche and adopt the ‘inch-wide, mile-deep’ niche strategy.
I’m supposed to be operating in the make money online niche which has a number of sub-niches but I’ve signally failed to restrict my activities to a sub-niche or even the make money online niche.
It seems to me that most operators in the make money online niche, if they are making any money at all, are making money by selling courses on how to make money online i.e. their revenue comes from selling tutorials or ‘selling the shovels’ to the ‘miners’ rather than ‘mining’ themselves.
There are somewhat shady practices – many testimonials are created by ‘friends’ rather than actual users of the product and there are affiliate rings operating i.e. I’ll promote your product if you’ll promote mine. Such recommendations are driven by self-interest rather than the quality of the product.
I often listen to my iPod when taking our dog for a walk and Jay Abraham’s tutorials are mixed in with the music files. Whilst he is not really an internet marketer, he is a great marketer and he believes that the best and highest use of internet marketing skills is to support real businesses with real products and services rather selling digital products of dubious quality.
Having had some experience of the info-marketing niche, I am inclined to agree with him. I would say that 95% of the products in the info marketing niche are poor quality and rehashed rubbish and you and I can waste a small fortune buying them before we discover the error of our ways. (Oh dear, that’s bitter personal experience speaking!)
I am therefore tending to move away from info marketing – if I continue to create info products, I am determined that they will be:
in a narrow niche,
well-researched and high quality i.e. deep rather than wide
consumable in an hour or less
systemised for easy action taking
Rather, for the time-being, I would like to work in partnership with a small handful of high quality offline businesses as their internet marketing strategist and mentor i.e. to return to my consulting.
I feel that there is more integrity in helping such businesses who are often scammed by website designers who, whilst they can make websites, have little or no clue about making money online. Things like traffic generation, sales funnels, list building and email marketing do not even make it onto their agenda with their client!
See, once again I am expanding the remit from website design into a lot of other areas. It is so easy to slip into!
Ideally I should be concentrating on one small aspect of internet marketing, say sales funnels, email marketing or list building, and then outsourcing the rest. This would enable me to go deep into the topic and become the ‘go to’ expert for that particular topic.
That is much more attractive then trying to be all things to all people and master of none.
Also, why not segment the market?
In other words build sales funnels for, say, dentists. If I went to a dentist and said that ‘I specialise in building sales funnel processes just for dentists in order to grow their practice geometrically (rather than linearly)’ that would be much more attractive to a dentist than just saying I specialise in building sales funnels for small businesses.
By segmenting in this way, it would enable me to focus on testing sales funnel processes that convert well for dentists.
Once such as process had been developed, if you then went to other dentists and said that ‘I have developed a high-converting sales funnel process specifically for dentists. Here is a testimonial from XYZ dentist where I increased his revenues by a factor of 3 times.’ That is so much more powerful than if my testimonial and case study was from an unrelated industry.
Last night I was watching a programme about Harley Street. Huge sums of money are made by medical specialists – for example, one surgeon just specialised in treating prostate cancer. That’s it! Nothing else.
One of the featured patients had travelled all the way from Norway for treatment and was happy to pay his extortionate fee.
I’ve no doubt that that surgeon could have chosen to operate on numerous parts of the body but he chose to treat ‘men with prostate cancer’ and become a leading expert in that alone. This meant that he had performed thousands of prostate operations in the course of his career giving him genuine experience and expertise. In a life and death situation of prostate cancer treatment, he will always be able to charge more than a general surgeon.
The funny thing about this strategy is that you make it so much more easy on yourself. No need to try to be an expert on multiple topics – your specialism is narrow and you can also narrow your learning and research which is cheaper and easier to do.
Also by narrowing your target market in this way, your marketing becomes easier because you can target it more effectively and you will see higher conversions for less spend.
Before you make the final decision on your inche wide, mile deep niche strategy, just make sure that your chosen niche is big enough and hungry enough for the product or service you want to provide.
So let’s briefly recap the reasons for choosing an inch wide, mile deep niche strategy:
you get really very, very good at serving the needs of your customers in your niche by specialising
you have a deeper understanding of your target market and their needs which will help you greatly with your marketing and copywriting
you can increase the range and depth of the specialist knowledge, products and services you provide in your niche
you can become an expert and thought leader in that niche which will again add power to your marketing
This is what is meant by a profitable niche – the inch wide, mile deep niche strategy – have you chosen yours? For that matter, what is mine? I’ll let you know when I decide – it’s not an easy decision for me to make.
In this article I want to discuss the critical importance of systems in business because everything we do in our business needs to be systemised for several very good reasons:
we need to provide a consistent customer service experience – without systems their experience and contact with our business would be chaotic and unreliable.
we need to free ourselves from working ‘in’ the business. Delegating work to others would be impossible without creating systems and processes for staff members to follow.
it is difficult and risky to scale a business without systems for the same reason above.
if the business relies too heavily on the input of the owner, it is unsaleable as an asset – in reality the business’s value largely resides in its systems
systems bring stability and control to the business which enables us to test and make improvements based on previous experiences in operating the system.
Everything we do in internet marketing is a system. From writing a blog post, to creating a product, to email marketing, to setting up a website, to driving traffic and so on – all are systems.
Software programmes are semi-automated systems – products like WordPress themes and plugins are ALL systems and processes.
The mix of systems and processes within our business, and the way we implement them, is what differentiates our brand, products and services.
Every system or process has a series of inputs and outputs. We put in time or money at the front end in setting up and operating the system and get a result of one sort or another at the back end.
Ideally all these inputs and outputs need measuring and improving.
In reality 20% of our systems and processes produce 80% of the results. If you can identify the these critical success factors then you can prioritise these systems as key performance indicators and prioritise their measurement and improvement.
This means that having a good management information system is critical to the success of all businesses because it enables management to make better, more informed business decisions.
The question I want to ask you, dear reader, is how systemised is your business?
Are you measuring your most important systems and using that information to improve our business?
If not, this is something that you really need to stop and consider NOW! Why, because you will likely not last in business very long if you continue to operate your business by the ‘seat of your pants’.
From my previous career in banking, I can categorically report that those businesses that performed best all had good management information systems, almost without exception. I dealt with medium sized and larger family businesses and to get through the initial start-up phase (and particularly when you want to access other peoples capital) management information was always critical.
To be successful in info marketing online you will require these systems:
traffic systems
blogging systems
email marketing system
list building systems
sales funnel systems
product and content creation systems
affiliate marketing systems
management information systems
productivity systems
planning systems
Each of these systems requires multiple sub-systems and processes. For example, your blogging system will or may require a theme, plugins, linking to Google and Bing webmaster tools, Google Analytics, linking to your social media accounts, ecommerce, secure members area etc and so on.
I am going to be releasing a series of products about these systems & process with check-lists and step-by-step processes to help my fellow entrepreneurs doing business online.
Sign up to my list by subscribing to one of my freebies in my sidebar if you are interested in systemising your online business and realise the critical importance of systems in business. I will advise you as and when I release further content and products on systemisation.
In the meantime, I can recommend 3 great books to read, particularly if you need further convincing of the importance of systems:
I watched the Baroness Martha Lane Fox Richard Dimbleby Lecture last night and was struck by the coolness and cleverness of Martha Lane Fox of LastMinute.com fame.
I can’t help thinking that in the musty, fuddy-duddy atmosphere of the House of Lords she must shine as a beacon of energy and light in an otherwise moribund and bellicose culture.
Her first main point in the lecture is that we need a national institution to coordinate Britain’s development of the opportunities available from more creative use of the internet.
Creating an institution to develop the internet seems like an oxymoron to me. ‘Institution’ and ‘internet’ seem totally incompatible.
I wonder whether a small core leading group leading a community of digital leaders throughout the country would not be a better model – similar to the way that WordPress has developed. There is a core team of developers who are assisted by a community from around the world.
I could see that a small core team could lead and guide the agenda for the community and would be much more agile than an ‘institution’ that conjures up a vision of institutionalised, time-serving civil servants who simply wouldn’t have the creativity and vision to develop the countries response to the myriad of opportunities and threats that have opened up as a result of the internet.
I do, however, agree that leadership is required to guide the national agenda and that this agenda could then be studied and developed by sub-groups of the internet community. Someone who has an overall grasp of the internet and the energy to lead multiple projects in sub-groups is required to electrify the debate in this country.
Where the ‘institution’ idea might contribute would be from a compliance perspective particularly when setting the moral and ethical code for our online activities. I just don’t think an institution is the right model for exploiting commercial opportunities.
I personally believe that we have an incredible opportunity to radically improve the education system simply by delivering online tutorials. Digital technology gives us the opportunity to get THE very best leaders and educators in every subject and field to create tutorials that our children and adults can all access on our desk-top.
This would mean that EVERY child (or adult) no matter what their background could learn from the very best in their field and at their own pace i.e. they can slow-down and re-watch tutorials until they understand what is being taught.
Such a change in education would radically reduce the costs involved in education, improve standards massively and transform our education system to make it the very best in the world and at the same time produce an educational platform that could be sold throughout the developed world.
In reality online tutorials can be delivered anywhere, at any time – no need for a classroom, why not a park bench? With the congested traffic on our roads we are getting to a point where driving our children into a school location with limited classroom sizes and restricted premises sizes, is getting increasingly problematical and costly. Online tutorials could be accessed at any time 24/7 so why restrict school hours or attendance times?
A more creative way of teaching our children is needed. However, the vested interests of our educational establishment will no doubt block the way to progress!
As Martha Lane Fox pointed out, I am sure that every other public service would benefit from a much more creative and connected use of internet technology. The technology could be developed by getting the customer involved in giving feedback and suggestions on their user experience.
Martha went on to discuss the lack of women in digital jobs. I find this difficult to comprehend because this is surely an area were there is no bar to women getting involved if they wish to. There are no physical or mental barriers other than prejudice. I think that the more diverse and the more people that contribute to developing our internet technology the better.
I wonder whether men’s love of gadgets and technology is part of the reason why women do not get involved. I can only speak from experience with my wife, sister and daughter. All are to some degree technophobic and impatient with technology. They do not seem to have the same problem-solving mentality that I do.
That sounds sexist but we have to acknowledge that we are all different. I have no interest in clothes but my wife does. Our differences are what makes the world go round and we should all play to our strengths. I think that more women should get involved in technology but only if they are passionate and interested in it because without that it is a hopeless ambition.
I also agree that we should debate the moral and ethical issues involved. The internet is like the wild frontier at the moment – it is being used for good and evil purposes and we need to set the agenda for the moral code online. Whilst I would hate to see the internet controlled by any government, it does need regulating with a clear set of rules for engaging with people online.
Personally, I think that there are many media activities that require investigation. For example, is it right that the ‘loan-shark’ companies who charge 1,000’s% are able to advertise on television? Personally, I don’t think so.
I also feel that the alcohol and tobacco industry need to bear the full weight of the health problems that they cause and their right to advertise severely restricted.
We need to take a common-sense approach to the internet – what sort of society do we want to develop as a result of the opportunities that have arisen with the internet?
One thing I am certain of is that the establishment and old government institutions ALL need reforming and the costs of the public sector dramatically reducing in favour of a more dynamic, entrepreneurial culture driven by the internet.
There are a lot of ‘sharks’ in technology who are willing to exploit the ignorance of others by over-charging for their products and services. These providers also need to be exposed and prosecuted for their mendacity. The best way to deal with them is to but up government projects for tender to drive down costs.
These projects should be carefully planned and payments only released subject to achievement of milestones in the project to avoid the crazy situation where huge sums of money are paid out for technology that is not fit for purpose. Government mismanagement of technology projects is a major reason for our lack of progress with important national technology projects like the computerisation of the NHS.
I whole-heartedly agree with Martha that the opportunities afforded by the internet are huge. We need a visionary leader (like Steve Jobs) who can guide our nation to exploit those opportunities
The Martha Lane Fox Richard Dimbleby Lecture has at least opened up the debate and now needs a strong push from our online community to get behind this initiative – I for one would like to get involved because I have positioned myself at the forefront of technology and the internet.
It’s important to have a system or routine when building your list.
That’s why I’m sharing mine – it may just help you.
Step #1 –
I start my day by checking my stats for the previous day. I can get immediate feedback on number of clicks, optins and sales through my link tracker.
This is important because it MOTIVATES me to take further action, and that action is influenced by what is working best for me already. (Try to avoid taking any action that you can’t measure – measuring the results of your actions is critically important to your success – you must, must, must find a way to do it!)
Step #2 –
I open up my auto-responder and create my daily follow-up and broadcast emails. Sending value and promoting products is how my business makes money so I need to do this and get good at it. (I track all the links I put in my emails so I can see what is working – see Step #1 above.)
One of the most helpful products on email marketing is Lee Murray’s Email Slick – it pays to invest time in getting good at email marketing.
Step #3 –
I make sure that I implement AT LEAST one traffic strategy each day.
In truth this is where you need to spend 80 to 90% of your time if you want to build your list quickly.
Again track all your links to see which traffic sources work best.
Step #4 –
Research affiliate offers and apply for affiliate links. (If you are are PRO member of List Spark (see below), the research part has been carried out for you.)
You need to do this in advance to ensure that you have offers to put into your daily emails to your list (- it may take time to get approved as an affiliate for some products so you need to plan out your promotions schedule in advance.)
Step #5 –
Ideally you should be creating your own products/content to offer to your list – these can be free or paid offers or a combo of the two.
Preferably your products need to be part of an extended sales funnel but it quite OK to build your sales funnel over time i.e. get your squeeze page converting and then add an upsell and a downsell and then later add another offer on if those are converting.
One of my biggest mistakes in the past was trying to create products that were too big, and therefore difficult, to make and consume. I advise creating products that can be consumed in one hour or less i.e. concentrate on quality rather than quantity.
Step #6 –
If you rinse and repeat this 6-step process daily, I don’t think that you will go too far wrong 🙂
This daily list building routine may seem too simple to you but I promise that if you can execute this simple SYSTEM with focus, you will be doing a lot better than 95% of the IMers out there!
If you need help implementing this, then my top suggestion is to join the FREE viral list building system called List Spark. Most of the work involved in setting up squeeze pages, sales funnels, researching offers and link tracking is done for you and you get video training on how to drive traffic too.
I will also support you with my follow-up email sequence where I reveal some more traffic tactics.
List Spark is where you can put the above daily list building routine to great use and I recommend it highly because it is working like gang-busters for me.
In this post I am going to cover what I see as the bare essentials required for internet marketing success.
The problem with internet marketing is the number of distractions that wil blow you off course. Once you get onto a few marketers lists you will often find that you are smothered in a blizzard of offers. Without experience, it is difficult to find a path through the maze of advice and information.
That’s why I was motivated to create the video below. It’s a getting back to basics kind of tutorial and all the tools are free or at least very low cost. There is literally no barrier to entry other than lack of focus and not knowing the basic system.
The truth is you are probably fully aware of the system that you need to follow but you have simply failed to implement and simply moved on to the next shiny object because it seemed too difficult to implement a part of the system or you lacked a tool that you thought that you needed like a link tracker or a method for split-testing your pages.
You see I understand your problem and the reason why you have so far failed to much, if any, money online. I understand because I have stood in your shoes.
What if I could show you a system that gave you all the tools for free. Your only task is to send traffic to the squeeze page and watch the results.
What’s that you say? You don’t know how to drive traffic? Well there is free training on how to do that too as part of the system! So you really have no excuses now.
Watch this video and I will reveal the bare essentials of internet marketing and where you can find this free system I am referring to:
If you can’t be bothered to watch this video then click this link to get the system and training that literally gives you the bare essentials of internet marketing – everything you need in order to succeed for free:
In this article I want to cover why you MUST have analytics data for everything you do in your business.
You may already be aware of this at some level but it may seem too time-consuming or complicated to set up. I want to address both these issues in this article because this mindset has certainly dogged me in the past.
I’ve even set up Google Analytics on most of my websites but simply failed to login to Google Analytics to look at the stats because the layout of Google Analytics is a bit confusing and the wealth of information provided is overwhelming.
If you set up your products on an affiliate platform like JVZoo or Warrior Plus, then you will automatically get your sales stats and sales funnel conversions but what if you want to setup your sales funnel outside one of these platforms or indeed you want to get conversion stats on a squeeze page on your blog?
Ideally you also need to be split-testing your squeeze pages ans sales pages for maximum conversions. Again you can use Google Experiments or Goals inside Google Analytics but again you are faced with grappling with the interface of Google Analytics.
For this reason, I recently invested in a product called Funnel Trax. But more about that shortly.
First, I want to discuss why you really must have analytics data so you are at least motivated to take this stuff seriously.
Taking action at all is difficult but finding the motivation to take action is even more difficult if you do not get immediate results feedback.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s say that I create a squeeze page and buy a solo ad to send some clicks to the page. Without results feedback, it would be difficult to motivate myself to send more traffic if I didn’t know the results.
If it cost me $35 to buy this traffic and I received no sales from the transaction then my loss is $35 – without further information I might decide to cut my losses.
But if I also knew that, of those 10 subscribers, on average 5 would go on to buy a $47 product as a result of my email marketing follow-up campaign then that would motivate me to buy more traffic and also see if I could increase my squeeze page conversion rate.
See what I mean? Without the right information it is impossible to make sensible and profitable decisions about your business. It is also difficult to find the motivation to take the action you need to take unless you get immediate results feedback – that action might be to cut a loss-making marketing campaign and move your resources into something else that will yield a better result.
You probably know all this at some level already but are you monitoring your stats daily? Probably not.
Do you think this could be the key to making headway in your business?
I think for many entrepreneurs this is the key PROVIDED it is easy to set up the monitoring system and the information it spits out is easy to understand and assimilate.
This what I like about Funnel Trax. It’s bloody simple to set up and use and it enables you monitor all your analytics data in one place.
The key point that you should take from this article is that if you’re not using data to drive your decisions, and paid traffic to help grow your business – you’re in trouble. The writing is on the wall and the people who fail to adapt will only struggle before perishing.
(P.S. With the rise of remarketing/retargeting, one of the key stats is how many pixelled leads you can gather and Cost Per Pixel)
List Spark is an all-in-one viral email list building system. It combines absolutely everything you need in order to start making money online. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never made a dime online, you don’t have any money to invest, you have no previous experience in the field and that you have no clue how to run an online business.
List Spark contains everything you need to start your home-based business.
The best part is – you can get started without spending a single cent.
That’s right!
You can choose between two membership levels:
List Spark Standard (100% free, and always will be)
List Spark PRO ($19.95 / month)
In order to get started with List Spark you will need an email autoresponder. Currently List Spark supports AWeber and GetResponse. I recommend using AWeber (you can sign up for their 30 day trial for only $1), or if you want to go for 100% free approach you can register with Get Response and get their 30 day trial (no payment or credit card required).
Inside List Spark you will find everything:
Squeeze pages ready to be used (to build your email subscriber list)
Training how to drive traffic (both paid and free traffic)
Software that will allow you to get access to hundreds of thousands of high quality clicks
Support that will give you a hand if something is not clear
Cloud hosting – for ultra fast and reliable pages
Link tracking software to monitor your marketing campaigns
I joined List Spark today – this is a 100% free viral list building system with an optional PRO membership on the back-end. This is my initial List Spark review.
I was introduced to List Spark by Ed Newman, one of my online colleagues, who I know is very good at list building. He tells me that List Spark is working well for him right now.
When you join List Spark for free, before you can start building a list for yourself you have to bring 5 subscribers to the person who brought you in to List Spark. After you have brought in 5 subscribers, you have bought your way into the free system (see what you get below) and all other subscribers are yours and they too will build your list exponentially.
After you bring in 5 subscribers – you are going to start getting viral traffic as well! Every subscriber you bring after that will need to bring you 5 subscribers before they can start using the system.
If you are a List Spark PRO member you can get commissions as well! If you are a free member – if someone decides to upgrade their account to PRO, you will NOT receive commissions (they will be passed through to the person above you which is a major reason why you should get a PRO membership).
With List Spark PRO you will be able to make money WHILE you build your list. Not only that, they will teach you how you can be using multiple streams of income (affiliate marketing, selling solo ads, ad swaps etc) to make money with your email subscriber list.
List Spark Standard Membership (Free in return for 5 subscribers)
Proven to convert squeeze pages – tested with conversion stats shown. They include optional exit pop-ups as well!
New squeeze pages are provided monthly.
Conversion numbers are shown in real time
Training on list building topics – especially how to drive free and paid traffic
Link Tracker to track how well your traffic is converting
Support
Viral leads
List Spark Pro Membership ($19.95 p.m.)
Pro training (advanced strategies – affiliate marketing, selling solo ads etc)
Power emails daily – new high-converting products to promote with unique email swipes are provided daily.
Unlock the List Spark Sales Funnel (i.e. you get 90% of $19.95 p.m.) – with List Spark Standard/Free you can only collect subscribers, but with List Spark PRO you can make money while you are building a subscriber list. Every time your subscriber decides to upgrade to PRO you will get 90% of $19.95 monthly charge. If your free subscribers are making sales – those sales are getting passed to you! So you will be making sales even when you will not be driving any traffic at all!
Unlock system – don’t have to send the first 5 subscribers to the person that introduced you. Every subscriber (and buyer) will be yours to keep!
I have purchased PRO membership because I think this is a great system for getting paid to build your list.
Once you are set-up on List Spark you need to generate traffic to the squeeze pages that they provide.
You can either use free traffic sources or paid ones – but which methods to use?
Here are the pros and cons of each general method but in reality you will probably have both types of traffic generation running and track the effectiveness of each campaign using the excellent List Spark link tracker that is provided for free.
you can get started with your list building completely free of charge
you get free high-converting squeeze pages that are updated regularly (and the sales funnel if you get Pro membership)
you can easily monitor your numbers using their free link tracking tool
it builds your list virally – it’s a very leveraged way of building a list.
one of the problems with email marketing is finding and researching good products to promote and then writing the email campaigns – this is all done for you if you get PRO membership. This is a true copy-paste money making solution.
if you want to generate traffic to your squeeze page by buying solo ads (traffic is the ‘spark’ needed to get the viral system working), there is a very useful solo ad vendor rolodex included in the PRO membership which normally costs $47
The List Spark system reminds me of the MLM business model i.e. it gets other people to help you to build your business using the viral list building system. At the moment the system is built for the ‘make money online’ niche but it could be adapted for other niches if you ignore the power emails provide in the PRO system and simply plug in your own email campaigns.
If you join List Spark through my link, I will share my list building strategies and results with you – in particular which traffic sources I am using.
Every online business needs to build a list and the 100% free viral list building system that is List Spark is a very clever way to leverage your list building efforts.
This article covers the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel. This is a brief summary of a webinar that I listened to following the purchase of Funnel Trax which is an app for recording and tracking your sales funnel stats that has just been launched by Mark Thompson.
I thought long and hard about buying Funnel Trax because in circumstances where your funnel is set up on JVZoo, or one of the other affiliate platforms, your stats are already recorded by the affiliate platform. But I thought that in circumstances where your funnel pages lie outside such a platform this app could prove useful. It also enables me to run A/B split-testing using this same app (quicker than Google Analytics) and also to carry out link tracking for marketing campaigns.
Funnel Trax looks to be very simple to set-up and use. Within the Funnel Trax training there was also a very useful video showing how to plan out a sales funnel using a mind map.
The webinar about the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel was presented by a sales funnel specialist and was a lengthy presentation. I jotted down some notes below and hopefully you can get the jist of what was discussed.
The off-putting thing is that there was a whole list of other things at the end of the webinar (- see under ‘Additional Elements’ below -) that he didn’t discuss because the presentation segued into a pitch for more training which I declined. Hopefully, from the headings below you can get an idea of what was likely to be covered.
Apart from Point 6 below, I pretty much agree with the main points listed below being the critical factors for sales funnel success. Instead of Point 6, I would have included monitoring and tracking as being crucial to sales funnel success – hence my purchase of Funnel Trax!
1. Big Idea/Differentiated Hook
Goal is to prevent prospect mental opt-out
Idea behind marketing is new, interesting, compelling, and different.
Enter into the conversation already in your prospects head.
You must know your markets sophistication level – when market is sophisticated introduce a unique mechanism or process that produces the result
What are the dominant appeals, claims and benefits being presented in the market right now?
You need to differentiate yourself from the market
What is the most surprising thing about your content
Understand the deeper benefits behind obvious benefits
Show, don’t tell
Turn the promise into a picture
Picture touches as many of the 5 senses as possible
Appeal to mind, heart and wallet
It must appeal to feelings, beliefs and desires
Power verbs not hypey-adjectives
Recommended Book: The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale
3. Education-Based Pre-Selling Content
Everything you say in the funnel should ‘further the sale’ (strategic)
Create rapport and trusted authority based relationship whilst leading them to buy, rather than trying to sell… all giving them a sense of freedom of choice/decision.
What do prospects need to believe to buy? – about themselves, you, your product
Linear progression of claims and benefit statements to establish those beliefs
Turn a want into a need
Don’t over teach – educate in a way to create more desire and demand
Hit emotional benefits
Contrast – emotional benefits of what you are offering
Demonstrate results, role performance, relief, relaxation, recognition, remuneration
Goal is to make selling superfluous
4. Unquestionable Proof
Every single claim and/or benefit statement must be backed with at least one proof point
Always be specific
Strong reasons ‘why’
Vivid compelling pictures
Strategically placed customer testimonials/case studies – outcome-based – proactively generate the right type of testimonial. Survey that elicits testimonials.
Dimensionalise facts and figures
5. Unique Delivery System
The unique method system or process behind your product/service that brings the outcome they desire
Truly unique versus ‘not being talked about’
Explain the unique mechanism for getting them results
Present the mechanism as the catalyst of results (pluralise the verb – strip body fat v strips body fat / put music in your life v puts music in your life)
Explain why the unique mechanism works (remember proof)
Establish the value of the unique mechanism
6. Multiple Engagement Paths/Sequences
Never arbitrarily move your prospects through the funnel
Conditional content
Behavourial triggering
7. Irresistible Superior Offer
List, offer, copy – order of importance
Hard offer v soft offer
Proof of value
Damaging admission
Objection resolution
Scarcity – time-based and quantity-based. Give a reason why.
Risk reversal – creative guarantee
Why now?
Repeat, reinforce and summarise the main benefits
Outcome scarcity/urgency v offer scarcity
Additional elements
Lead magnetic creation – strategically created to pre-sell
Opt-in page creation
Conversion optimization
Funnel content
Funnel flow and retention
Multi-media follow-up
List segmentation
Data collection
List management
Segway into offer
Offer structuring
Overcoming objections
Split-testing
Metrics and tracking
Stick strategies post-sale
Testimonial acquisition
Refund reduction
That concludes my notes on webinar about the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel… I hope this was useful, if only because I gave you a link to the new product called Funnel Trax!
Today I’ve created some Powerpoint to Video promotions for my web design site at Salmon Web Design.
Whilst you can view them on that site, I thought that I would also add them to this site as it represents yet another method of creating animated style videos for video marketing purposes.
Here are a few of the other methods with which I create videos for my web properties:
web cam videos
screencast videos
Google Hangouts
green-screen videos i.e. replace the background
animated videos
sketch-style videos
Powerpoint videos
freestyle videos with my camera
Adobe After Effects logo stings
The 3 Powerpoint to video examples above were created from the content already on my computer just to test the format. I hope you enjoyed watching them. If so, head over to Salmon Web Design and take a look at some of the great content I have on that site to wow prospective customers.
In this article I will discuss how to build your list of subscribers quickly and why this must be your absolute #1 priority as a business.
The business of internet marketing is about putting people onto lists, sending them emails and them clicking on the links in our emails, purchasing products and services that we recommend, in return for which we receive money/commissions.
The important thing is to focus on list building as your goal – the size and quality of your list is key to the size of your income and success.
Building a list is simply a question of maths.
It requires traffic/visitors to a your website or landing page to click on an offer (free or paid) to join your list and for you to then follow-up with them to develop a relationship and make offers.
The number and quality of subscribers you get onto your list depends upon a number of variables:
the volume and QUALITY of traffic i.e. how targeted it is for your offer
the conversion % of your landing page(s) (which can be increased by testing variables)
the quality of relationship that you develop in the follow-up process.
These are the key metrics that Ryan Deiss works on:
$1 per subscriber per month i.e. 1,000 subscribers = $1,000 per month
20% email open rate = 200 opens 30% Click Through Rate from his emails = 60 clicks
@$1EPC = $60 x 4 emails per week = $240 per week
There are 4 weeks in a month = $960 per month from a list of 1,000 subscribers
These metrics give you a guideline to work to. In practice, the numbers will vary from niche to niche and marketer to marketer so they are merely a useful ‘rule of thumb’
So how do we get, say, 1,000 subscribers?
We first need to offer ‘something’ to a subscriber in return for their email address – either free or paid. The offer needs to be relevant to the reason they visited your web page.
(Having a free offer is not an essential pre-requisite for list building – you might simply have a squeeze page with a headline that piques the visitors curiosity and then redirects them straight to the sales page of an affiliate offer e.g. ‘This guy generated 1,000 subscribers in 2 hours at zero cost – register to find out how’ – as soon as the visitor opts in they are redirected to a sales page with that headline to their main offer.)
If we make a good squeeze page, we could convert perhaps 30%/40%/50% or more of our targeted traffic to subscribers (compared to perhaps only 5-10% if the offer is a good paid one to warm targeted traffic.)
Most marketers choose to make a free offer and then immediately follow this up with one or more paid offers in a sales funnel, supported by a follow-up email marketing campaign to maximise conversions.
Another popular tactic in the internet marketing niche is to make free and paid offers via the Warrior Special Offers Forum, which naturally has a lot of people looking for information in that niche. This can be supported by affiliate traffic i.e. affiliates drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission.
If you are driving traffic to your blog, the number of subscribers may depend upon:
the quality of your content
whether you are asking for their email address frequently throughout your blog – sidebar, in page, footer, header, in content links, exit etc
what you are offering in return for their email address
the quality of the traffic to your website i.e. how targeted it is
Conversion %
Conversion percentages are driven by a number of factors:
how targeted your traffic is
the relationship and emotions, you can create with that traffic
the quality of the offer
how much information you ask for at optin – you will get better conversions asking just for an email address than asking for more complete details like name, address and telephone number (although leads that do give this information may be more qualified and therefore more likely to convert to a sale.)
the clarity of your offer i.e. no confusion.
the quality of your copywriting – why it’s important (the hook), what it does for them (benefits), how they can do it and where they can get it NOW!
the optin mechanics and how frequently you ask for the optin – pop-overs, two-step optins, exit popups, page load speed etc
the size and quality of your sales funnel – you can increase conversions by making a variety of different offers in your sales funnel. (I include your follow-up email marketing as being a part of your sales funnel strategy.)
testing and tweaking your offer pages with A/B or multivariate testing.
Defining Your Target
Throughout this post I mention the need for ‘targeted’ traffic. This means that you must have some understanding of:
who you are targeting – demographics, newbies/intermediate advanced etc
where you can get these people from e.g. Facebook advertising, solo ads, Warrior Forum, etc If you cannot identify where to get targeted traffic from then you have a problem and may need to reassess your entire list building strategy.
why your offer is attractive to them – does it entertain, educate or solve a problem for them?
The more focused and defined your market is, and the more you understand it, the more likely it is that you can make an offer to appeal to that particular market. It is difficult to get good conversions by trying to appeal to everyone.
Earnings Per Click
This is an important metric for all internet marketers. Affiliates may not mail your offer to their lists if they cannot earn $1 or $1.50 per click minimum on average from your offer.
If you are offering only 50% commission, the affiliate only gets $0.50 per click which may not be sufficient for them to mail their list. You can rectify that by offering 100% commission on the basis that you may be able to earn commissions either from the offers made in the immediate sales funnel or from email marketing.
Earnings per click = sales revenue, divided by the number clicks or unique visitors to the sales page i.e. if sales revenue is $2,000 from 2,000 unique visitors that is $1 per click.
If you want to make a profit, the cost per click (CPC) needs to be lower than the earnings per click (EPC).
When you know your EPC, you also know how much you can afford to pay for traffic. Traffic does not become a problem when you can achieve higher EPC’s than your competitors because it means you can afford to pay more for your traffic.
If you are offering your products through a sales platform like JVZoo or Warrior Plus then your metrics (other than CPC) are calculated for you and it is easy to monitor your conversions and EPC. Alternatively you can use Google Analytics or paid services like MyClickBoss, Hypertracker, Adtrackz Gold, Quality Click Control etc.
The Purpose of Creating Your Own Products
When you create your own products, as opposed to just being an affiliate marketer, it puts you in the position of:
earning 100% from sales that you generate from your own traffic sources as well as building your list
you have potential for affiliate marketers to drive traffic to your product offer to generate profits and build your list
you control the terms of the offer – price, period of the offer, quantity offered etc
you have an asset you can leverage to grow your business further e.g. offer your product as an affiliate bonus to get more people on your list
If you do not have a product, then you need to master traffic generation so that you can earn a commission from other peoples products.
Ultimately, the best traffic strategy is to build your own list and then send them emails that direct them to whatever offer you wish. With your own list you have an asset that you can readily turn into cash.
Sources of Traffic
There are many sources of potential traffic but here are some of the most popular:
affiliate traffic i.e. other marketers drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission
forum traffic e.g. WSO or signature link in forum comments
list traffic – if you have an existing list you can email them to send them to your new offer
solo ads – drive solo ad traffic to a free offer then offer your paid product as an upsell
Facebook Ads – highly targeted – or other PPC traffic
banner advertising on niche websites
media buys – you can buy traffic from many media sites
ad swaps – I’ll mail for your offer if you mail for mine
adding your product as a bonus to another marketers download page or membership area – the buyer has to opt in to your list to get the bonus
video marketing – a lot of marketers do ‘launch jacking’ by ranking their videos for new product launches.
blog traffic
social media traffic
and so on…
If your product has a good EPC, you will find that traffic is relatively easy to attract or acquire.
You are Running A Business
In internet marketing it is easy to forget that you are running a business and that your ability to generate sales and profit is what will ultimately keep you in business.
This being the case, you need to run your business as a business i.e. monitor, tweak, tune and know your numbers – traffic volume by source, CPC, conversion %’s, EPC’s, # on your list, email open rates and click through rates, sales revenue, costs and profit.
Once you know your numbers, then you need to work on strategies for improving your numbers. If you can master the mindset of running your business by the numbers, then you will be well positioned to build your list of subscribers fast.
I’ve just completed a classified ads website for a client.
The site is called Homestay Pals and is specifically to enable anyone with a spare room in their house to advertise for paying guests – a small home business opportunity which is quite common around the world.
The difficulty in creating this site was creating a secure registration process that enables both Homestay Hosts and Homestay Guests to upload their own information and contact each other through the website.
Rather than hire a coder, I’ve used an off-the-shelf solution called Classipress Theme. This has a lot of settings and functionality which makes it quite difficult to configure but it is far easier than starting from a blank piece of paper and coding the site from scratch.
My main concern, which has been voiced to the customer, is how he intends to get traffic to the site and how does he get the site up and running with a critical mass of ads that will drive and engage visitors.
Also, there are clearly security issues in inviting strangers into your home as a Homestay guest but Homestays are quite a common business model around the world.
Despite these reservations, my client wanted to proceed as he intends to put his own house on the site and invite friends and family to join him.
He is a Christian and believes that prayer and goodwill will assist him in his endeavour to help other people to earn an income from the spare rooms they have in their homes. It also provides the guests with cheap and affordable accommodation so that everyone is a winner.
If you would like to see this classified ads website that has recently been completed, then click this link or you can view some of my other website projects at Salmon Web Design.
Here is a link to the article, which also reveals that he sold 2 further photographs to the same collector for $1.1m and the other for $2.4m. That’s $10m in total!
Having looked at Peter Lik’s work on his website, I can’t say that I am terribly impressed by his portfolio.
It seems to me that he over-saturates his photos with colour i.e. that he is using a photo-editing programme like Photoshop to do so. In doing so, he loses the natural tonal quality and the colours become somewhat harsh and even garish.
Of course, art is very subjective but, personally, I cannot see anything very special in his work and he reminds me of artists like Damian Hirst.
So why would someone pay so much money for a photograph? And why has he sold upwards of $500m of his work?
I think perhaps Peter Lik is a better marketer than he is a photographer (although I have to say that his website is less than impressive – my images site is better in my opinion).
Firstly, he has clearly been in the industry for quite a few years and has won a number of awards so he has become something of an authority in his niche. The more that he has social recognition, and particularly from the experts in the niche, the more people are likely to pay for his work irrespective of how good the image is. This is called ‘social proof’ (- something that Van Gogh failed to acquire in his lifetime.)
It has Lik’s name on it, he has been recognised by the ‘establishment in the photo art world, and therefore he commands a premium.
He has also appeared on television and carried out a number of photographic stunts that have attracted publicity so that he has become a household name in the US.
Next, he limits the number of prints that he creates from any particular photo to less than 1,000 to create artificial scarcity. In practice, there is nothing to stop him from creating unlimited copies of his images. I imagine he agressively defends the copyright to his images to maintain that scarcity.
He prices his work starting at $4,000 and increases the prices as the prints sell so that buyers end up paying a huge premium for the last few prints. The high prices means that there is a perception of higher value, which together with his social proof of being a photography expert, gives instant cache to his work and commands the attention of buyers.
Here’s how one article describes his pricing strategy:
Most photographs are offered in very limited editions. A large format print is often limited to ten or less. And they all sell for the same amount. This is the typical business model for galleries. Lik’s approach is very different. His editions are in lots of 995—950 limited editions and 45 artist’s proofs. Each print is identical but the proofs have a bit more prestige to them so they start at $10,000. His business model is that as a print is selling, the price will increase. Once he has sold 10 percent of a limited edition, the price increases. So, an image that would cost $4000 if you bought the first one, could reach as high as $200,000 when it’s down to the last few. All being said, each photo can gross more than $7 million.
The price alone gives instant exclusivity to his work.
He has also reinvested his profits in creating galleries around the world to showcase his work. This also provides instant cache for his work as no doubt these galleries are located in places where there is a wealthy client-base living locally. I imagine that he holds events at his galleries where only the wealthy are invited to exclusive shows of his work.
However, the fact that he has sold the 4 most expensive photographs, more than almost anything else, means that the rest of his work automatically acquires a higher perceived value even though there are probably many better photos available. This is an example of how value is completely subjective in the art world (and in many other spheres).
You can imagine the conversation with a buyer…
‘I am offering this print for ONLY $200,000 which is a massive discount on the $6.5m that I sold one of my pictures for – get it now before the price rises or I completely sell out!’
There are lessons to be learnt here for any business – perhaps having the highest prices in your niche mark you out as the ‘go-to’ expert in your industry and the lowest prices mark you out as a relative loser even though you offer a good service.
Isn’t perception a wonderful thing?
People will value you and your work according to the value you place on yourself and your work – remember that when you are marketing your business and you will make more money and be able to command higher prices. This will in turn enable you to invest in the kind of marketing that maintains the perception of higher value – things like presentation, packaging and marketing events.
$6.5m for a photograph – he’s having a laugh all the way to the bank but I also applaud him for being a master marketer!
There is a compelling case for retargeting ads and this article will explain exactly why every business with a website needs to implement retargeting in my opinion.
When I started out as a business consultant, I learned that there were just 4 ways to grow a business:
increase the number of customers of the type you want to have
increase the number of times that customers come back
increase the average value of each sale
increase the effectiveness of each process in the business
Retargeting has the potential to impinge on all 4 ways to grow a business but, more specifically, it brings customers and prospects back into the business.
But let’s look a little closer at the true benefits of retargeting…
The Benefits of Retargeting
In overall terms, retargeting reduces the RISK of doing business online. Let me explain why I say this.
Getting traffic to your site costs money:
either you have to create content (and get it ranked in the search engines) to drive organic or (as it is sometimes referred to as) ‘free’ traffic (- it is not free because someone had to spend valuable time creating the content and time is money!)
you paid for the click
or someone referred the visitor to your site and you may have to pay for that referral to incentivise further referrals.
The sad fact is that most of that traffic will visit your website and leave it and never return – some say that this figure is 98% on average – but it all depends on the source and quality of the traffic and the ability of the page you send them to convert the traffic e.g. if your traffic is going to a squeeze page with a compelling free offer you may convert 50% of the traffic or more if your traffic is targeted.
Nevertheless, for most websites let’s assume that 98% of visitors that visit the average website leave without taking action and never return. That’s a massive waste of traffic.
This is why top marketers try to persuade their website visitors to optin to their list by making a compelling free offer – once on their list it enables them to send emails and bring them back to whatever web page they wish.
Even this strategy is far from efficient as much depends on your email reaching your recipients inbox, then them opening it and then clicking on your link. With the amount of emails flying around the internet, email clicks are expensive assets to accumulate and require a degree of marketing and copywriting skill to capitalise upon.
Retargeting enables the website owner to ‘capture’ 100% of unique visitors to their website and gives us the ability to follow up with those visitors via paid retargeting ads.
This is truly beneficial as these website visitors are HIGHLY targeted – they have already shown an interest in your website and what you have to offer.
It’s a well known fact that most potential buyers will not buy on their first visit but require 4-8 ‘touches’ or contacts before they know, like and trust you enough to buy.
Retargeting ads enable you to follow-up efficiently with these potential buyers and convert them into buyers and sales revenue (which is the whole point of the exercise).
The important point to realise is that you can easily monitor the cost of your advertising versus the sales return from that spend and also tune your advertising to improve your return so you can be sure that you are getting a good return on your investment.
Perfect Audience (a well-known retargeting company) reckon that they create $10 of sales revenue for every $1 spent on retargeting ads – that’s a 1000% return.
If that is true, can your business (or mine for that matter) really afford NOT to do retargeting?
I think that that claim is at least worth investigating, don’t you?
How Retargeting Ads Work
This simple diagram explains simply how retargeting works. You prospects visit your website, a cookie is added to their browser automatically, they leave your website without taking action, they then see your adverts wherever they go on the internet. When they click on your retargeting advert they are sent back to whatever web page you wish.
You can also segment your retargeting lists. For example, if they visited your website, opted in but did not buy your paid offer, you would not want to send them back to your optin page again. Your ad would need to take them back to your paid offer – you can segment your retargeting lists and set up your campaign so that only visitors who did not optin are sent back to your optin page and those that did optin are set to your paid offer.
This can get quite sophisticated if you have a long sales funnel!
How To Implement Retargeting
You can implement retargeting for your business in a number of ways:
sign up with Facebook, Adroll or Perfect Audience and follow their online training
buy a third-party training programme – this what I did
hire someone else to implement this for you if you have no inclination to get technical.
It is my intention to provide a retargeting ads service to any business that wants to set this up – please contact me if you would like a free intial consultation and quotation.
I have just created a promo sketch video for Astles of Nottingham.
I decided to create this video as an added-extra just to keep my hand in with creating these types of videos. Like anything else. you get better with practice!
In internet marketing you often find yourself thinking about the next thing to do.
This is a transcript of an email that I received from one of the most productive internet marketers I know – Sean Mize.
This is how it starts…
I’m gonna share a concept I use in my business to get me more results, and I’ve used iterations of it for years, and it’s one of the key things to which I can attribute my aggressive production (whether it was 25,000 articles on ezine articles, testing ~ $30,000 of solo ads, or running well over 100 wsos) and I use it today to increase my productivity.
And that’s the “what’s the next thing I need to do?” principle.
It works like this:
I know what my yearly goal is, and I know what my next big goal is (they are sometimes the same, sometimes not)
So since I know my goal, and I know the current state of my business, I also know there are a number of things that need to be done to achieve that goal.
But that’s where I think most folks get derailed (is that where you get derailed)? So much to do, so you do . . . nothing on the path to getting where you want to go? I digress 🙂
But instead I ask the question, what is the NEXT thing I need to do to achieve my goal?
For example, if my goal is 100 subs a day, and I’m at 10, what is the NEXT thing I need to do? Is it create another traffic instance? Is it add a new squeeze page version into my testing rotation? Is it to write another article? Record another video? What is my NEXT thing that I need to do?
Here’s another example: if I am creating a 10 hour training program, and I need:
an outline
record for 10 hours
write a sales letter
write 5 sales emails
create a download page
put the routing into infusionsoft
That can be overwhelming and if I just put it on my “to do” list with everything else, everything else gets done, but nothing on this.
But what if I wake up everyday and just ask, what is the NEXT thing to do?
Day 1 I write the outline
Day 2 I record one of 10 hours
Day 3 I record one of 10 hours
…and so on.
In a finite period of time my task is done.
The problem is, when you look at it this way, you might think, but this will take so LONG.
Maybe 30 days.
But in reality, trying to do it all at once isn’t working for you, is it?
I doubt it (you do too, think back on the last month, did you accomplish what you set out to do?)
So . . . what is the NEXT thing you need to do to get to your goal?
This article about the law of averages was inspired by a recording by Jim Rohn that randomly cropped up this morning when I was listening to my ipod whilst walking the dog.
If you do something often enough a ratio will appear.
It’s amazing.
Once a ratio starts, it tends to continue.
This information is hugely important to business success.
In baseball or cricket its called a ‘batting average’.
Talk to 10 people and you get one.
Talk to 10 more and get another one and so on.
If you get 9 out of 10 and I get 1 out 10, I can still compete with you.
How can that be?
If you talk to 10 people and get 9, I’ll talk to 100 people and get 10. I beat you.
You will learn more from losing than you do by winning.
I make up in numbers, I lack in skill.
Anybody can do this.
The law of averages can be increased.
The fourth time you talk to someone you get 2.
Why?
You’re getting better.
In baseball if you only hit 3 out of 10 balls you make $4m per year. That means that you can win big by missing 7 times out of 10!
It’s the same in internet marketing. I’ve found that from affiliate traffic, on average I can get a 10% conversion rate when I sell a digital product.
That means that 9 out of 10 visitors don’t buy!
Once you know these numbers you can work on strategies for increasing your conversion rate through strategies like split-testing, improving your sales funnel, using exit pop-ups etc.
The point is that you don’t have to ‘bat a thousand’ to make big money.
When recruiting people to his network marketing business, Jim Rohn knew he could recruit 3 out of 10 people.
His invitation to listen to his network marketing presentation went something like this:
‘I normally recruit 3 out of 10 people. I don’t mind if you come to my meeting as one of the 7 that don’t join. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you just listen. As one of my friends, I don’t want you saying in a years time, when you see my success, why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me and tell me about this opportunity. At least if you listen now I can say I gave you the opportunity.‘
The story of the sower from the bible & how it relates to the law of averages.
The sower was ambitious. He had excellent seed (opportunity).
The sower goes out to sow the seed, some fell by the wayside and the birds got some of the seed. (Some people will not make it to your meeting – the birds will get some.)
You have two options:
chase birds – if you do this, you will leave the field i.e. distract you from your main purpose.
or just say ‘Isn’t that interesting’ which is the preferred option.
The sower kept on sowing.
There are only 9 or 10 miserable people in the world – they move around a lot. When you bump into one, remind yourself that there only 9 more like you in the whole world (i.e. you need to be persistent in the face of adversity.)
Now the seed falls on rocky ground where the soil is shallow but it is not of your making.
The seed begins to grow but, with the first hot day, the seedling whithers.
(These are people that don’t show up to the second meeting.) The hot weather will get some – not an easy thing to watch.
Just say, ‘isn’t that interesting’ and don’t bother asking why.
Some just don’t stay or get put off by the first obstacle. You can’t change that – just take it as it comes.
If someone says ‘why does the sun come up in the east?‘ – don’t sign up for the ‘why is this’ class – it’s the law of averages!
He kept on sowing – he had to discipline his disappointment.
Some are not going to stay but in the normal course of things this is the way things are.
Some of the seed falls on thorny ground.
As the seed begins to grow, the thorns strangle the seedling. These are the little things that get in the way of making progress. Little things cheat people out of big opportunities. It’s just the way it is – like winter following fall.
The sower keeps sowing the seed.
Finally the seed falls on good ground
If you keep sowing ‘it always will’. Some of your ‘seed’ will fall on good people – it’s the law of averages working again!
Some of the good ground did 30%, some did 60% and some did 100%.
Why? Don’t sign up for that class – it just the way it is!
If you try to get the 30% to do 60%, you’ll just hit your head against a brick wall. Just let the 30% do 30% and 60% do 60%.
Learn the law of sowing and reaping because it directly relates to the law of averages and your success in life and internet marketing.
The problem with trying to make a living online is that it can become all about making money rather than genuinely changing lives. After all, we all have bills to pay and there is a pressure to make money!
So how can we change lives without losing our integrity through the imperative to make money?
If we’re selling training that we want other folks to consume, it needs to fit in with our persona, our character and our life. This is being authentic and genuine to who we are. We don’t need to pretend to be someone else because who we are will resonate with other like-minded people and we can be consistent with who we are i.e. our business needs to be an extension of ourselves.
So we need to know who we are…
If you believe in a God, then you may believe that he/she has a plan for you and your God will direct your path so you may feel you can submit your purpose to him/her.
I’m not a religious person but I do believe that destiny and intuition can direct our path. Being true to our ‘gut-feeling’ and what we feel deep down inside is what is truly important (- you could say that God put those feelings within us.) For example, deep down inside I believe that I was meant to be an artist and writer.
In this I am similar to my grandfather who was in banking but his hobbies always reflected the fact that deep down inside he was an artist – painting, photography, calligraphy were what he truly enjoyed. The sad thing was that the imperative to make money meant that half his life was wasted in banking because he had bills to pay.
I find myself drawn to internet marketing because it is a visual medium that involves, writing, graphics, video, audio and making digital products. It is important to me that these are presented and packaged well and so I love creating graphics and visually appealing work.
So our business needs to be a reflection of who we are and it may be that our failure to date reflects the fact that we have not yet found our unique purpose and who we are meant to be.
So what if you don’t know who you are and what your purpose is? How do you uncover this?
There is a generic purpose – a call on your life that we all share.
We are all given an ability (or at least an ability to get the ability) that we need to fulfil our purpose. This may mean that we need to get some additional training in order to fulfil our purpose. For some of us we have the ability to do something great but we haven’t yet been trained so it is just ‘babbling rather than talking’ at this stage.
We each have a gift – in my case English was always very easy for me at school. English Language and English Literature were always a breeze to me and, when I chose to exercise my creativity at school, I excelled.
I subsequently buried my creativity because of the need to conform to the banking system that did not encourage or reward creativity because it only wanted you to conform to a rigorous set of rules and regulations. 9 hours of reading per week was necessary just to remain up-to-date with all the rules and regulations!
This is what running our own business is about – the freedom to exercise our creativity and give expression to our gift and your purpose – who we were really meant to be.
This is why employing someone else to create our brand does not really work in my opinion – it does not truly reflect who we are.
This is why creating a website for someone else is so difficult – it is probably a million miles away from what the values of the business really is and the message they wish to give to their customers. So at best, their website is a compromise and does not truly reflect their core business. This means that a veil of obfuscation remains firmly in place as they withhold that information from their customers.
This means that you are not truly helping your customers with your gift or your purpose.
We all have the ability to create some generic information or training that can help our customers or prospective customers.
We probably have an obligation to help them because this is our purpose and your gift – the reason that we are doing what we are doing. We have the ability to offer something valuable to everyone who visits our site. That is quite a thought.
Some people will not take advantage of your gift or the opportunity you are giving them to learn something new – that’s OK but it doesn’t remove the obligation that we have to share our gifts.
The work we do is to change other peoples lives. We have a responsibility to share our good works and this is directly tied to the money we earn. As we help others we will be rewarded and blessed and the degree to which we can do this will determine how we are rewarded.
This means that if we write an article on our website but no one reads it then we are not really sharing our gift. So we also have an obligation to share this with as many people as possible i.e. to get traffic to that article. If we do that part i.e. generate eyeballs to our content (in other words, the marketing of our content) and share our gifts and content then by the law of averages we will be rewarded for doing so.
This is where software can help to semi-automate the process of sharing your content.
Here’s a simple business model for success:
Write a daily blog post on your website – it could just be a tip. In one year you will have 250 blog posts working Monday through Friday.
In addition write an article that you put on someone else’s site – it can be on the same topic – and link it back to your website.
Do a daily video about your blog post – this can be on your phone, or a Google Hangout or a screen-share presentation – then refer back to your website. (You could also strip the audio of that video and share it as a podcast.)
Send a daily email to your list – send them to your article or post. (Give some free training away on a squeeze page to get their contact details.)
This simple method will get you traffic and visitors to enable you to share your gifts and content – what you have that is unique to share with other people. You can then start to answer their questions and help to change their lives with the thing that you have inside yourself that you can share – your knowledge, skill, experiences or whatever it is that you can teach others to improve their lives.
How do you work out what to talk about?
Simply open up some free mind-mapping software like Freemind or Xmind, come up with 10 main topics in your niche and then 10 sub-topics under each main topic and start creating your content. This exercise should take no longer than 30 minutes and if you really know your stuff, probably a lot quicker. You will then have 100 related topics to create your content around.
So how do you make any money?
Well you might survey your readers and your list to find out what else they need help with – a handful of people will respond and tell you. You then create the training that people can buy from you. A new little plugin called Stakk can help you to do that by enabling you to put a popup survey onto your web page or you can simply link to a survey created on Google Docs – it’s free to use. You can even offer an incentive for readers to share their needs with you.
What if someone can’t afford your training?
Could they offer you a service or something in exchange for your gift? Ultimately it is all about sharing your knowledge and gifts and then charging for more detailed trainings, consultations and coaching sessions. These can all be supported by the information that you have created from your normal daily routine.
This is essentially what the info marketing model is all about. The simple process above has built into it
a traffic source,
a product source (by combining content together) and
the potential to make money, as well as
genuinely changing lives with your internet business.
I have just put the finishing touches to Mark Salmon Photo Artist. This is a website that showcases my expertise with Photoshop and my passion for creating works of art from quite ordinary photographs.
This website is fully responsive so it looks equally as good on a smart phone as it does on a desktop computer!
The interesting thing about many of my personal photographs is that they are taken on a rather ancient Casio Exilim, about the size of a credit card. I slip this into my top pocket whenever I go out and snap what I encounter. I then return to my computer and endeavour to stylise these photographs by improving them in a number of ways.
I justify the time by the fact that websites are very visual by their very nature and skilful use of graphics is a definite advantage when creating marketing media.
I am looking for other ways in which I can monetise this skill because I would be delighted to be able to make a full-time income from this passion of mine.
I have always been interested in art and the many pictures on the walls of my home testify to this fact. At one time I was even importing oil paintings from China!
If you would like to acquire Photoshop skills then you can do no better than invest in my training product Easy Web Page Graphics.
I have just created Salmon Web Design specifically to sell my web design services in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, my services are not limited by geographical area as I can design websites for any English speaking customer.
I have created a website that showcases some of my web design talent at http://marksalmon.biz.
The reality is that I can take any WordPress design template and configure it for a client. That’s not really the difficult part, although some themes can be complex and fiddly to configure like the one I am using on http://marksalmon.biz.
In my experience, it is creating the graphics and content that is the most time-consuming aspect of creating a website design.
I am able to source and edit photographs and images – whether creating 3D marketing collateral like ecovers and product images, or indeed stylising photographs. Some of my stylised images are showcased at http://mark-salmon.com/images.
One of the innovative things I have done on my web design site is to create almost 1,200 blog posts from one post using a plugin that swaps out keywords so that each article is unique in respect of those keywords. I am using this technique to target each town through out the UK with my web design service. I used this technique for another client and it worked surprisingly well in attracting search engine traffic.
Take a look at Salmon Web Design and tell me what you think. Do you think my web design is good enough to get clients in Stratford-upon-Avon?
In this article I want to discuss web designer occupational hazards. This is prompted by the fact that I have just completed a difficult project that measurably increased my blood pressure by 30 points.
Right at the planning stage of the website we established the colour scheme that we proposed to use. Having completed the website, a flyer, a business card and various other marketing collateral, I was then informed by my customer that her mother had inadvertently changed the whole colour scheme by ordering the shop signage etc in a different colour of green!
I hate having to do the same job twice, particularly when the work involved is boring and a waste of my time! Hence, the rise in my blood pressure!
I regard myself as a digital artist and I took great care in selecting the colour scheme – to have it completely overturned directly impacts on the pride and care I take in my design work. I take satisfaction in the artistry of my work and I don’t do it just for money like an ordinary labourer. I do it because I want to create something of beauty.
Anyone can throw up a website but not everyone can create something that is aesthetically pleasing. This takes skill and hard work to achieve.
Truth to tell, I don’t create many website for other people and this is why. I want to retain full control over the artistic integrity of my work.
Also, having studied this stuff for literally years, I am the expert! I don’t mind constructive feedback but the final decision as to what, and what does not, work must remain with me. Otherwise, why employ me at all?
In fact, if my client imposes restrictions upon me and my creativity, I would prefer that they find another web designer because ultimately I am responsible for the end result.
This does not mean to say that I should not keep my client fully informed and involved in the process of building their website. On the contrary, communication and asking for feedback is critical. It would be disastrous to work in a bubble without communicating with the client, only to find that the final product is not fit for purpose!
One of the problems with web design is that everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks they have some level of expertise just because it is a visual medium. It is therefore very easy to keep finding things that you would like ‘to tweak’. I don’t mind tweaking if this is on the clients own time i.e. that they are paying me for the extra work. For this reason, it is important that there is provision for only limited revisions in the initial contract to build the website. After these revisions have expired, then the client needs to pay for any additional revisions.
With regards to completion deadlines, it is always better to under promise and over-deliver. Don’t accept work where the deadline is difficult to meet. One customer showed me a quote for a 5 page website from another web designer when negotiating the initial price for the web site, little realising that by having an ecommerce store they would need many more than 5 pages – it turned out to be 17 pages!
Failure to realise exactly what you are taking on can lead to the setting of unrealistic deadlines for completion. Better to walk away from the job than find yourself having to absorb a penalty for late completion of the site!
At the outset of accepting a commission to build a website, you really need to agree the following:
a plan for the scope of the work. This includes, what the client has to do and by when as well as what you the web designer has to complete. The client to understand that failure by them to meet their deadlines may impact on the website completion date.
Within the project plan, agree interim milestones.
These milestones are ideal points for asking for and accepting feedback – agree how this feedback will be given – email phone and/or meeting.
Advise the client of your working hours and when it is best to contact you. Design work is difficult – particularly if you get interruptions – for this reason, I like to block out my peak working hours so I can work uninterrupted and my client should respect this.
Agree a budget for carrying out the work and the rules for making payment
Understand the clients expectations and deadlines – manage these appropriately. If their expectations are unrealistic, explain why and explore these until a mutually acceptable compromise can be agreed. It is better to hammer this out at the start rather than half way through the project.
Understand and agree, who owns what i.e. the license details and conditions.
Agree the scope of website revisions and communicate when these revisions are being utilised so the client understands that they will face more cost if the persist in additional revisions outside the scope of the contract.
These conditions are there to protect both you and the client, so do not be shy about discussing them and the consequences that apply if they are not observed.
These are just a few of the web designer occupational hazards – oh and high blood pressure, of course!
In this article I want to discuss the importance of celebrating success, however small that success may be.
I’ve just completed a classified ads website for a client.
