I have uncovered a technique for getting ranked #1 on YouTube within 17 minutes for my chosen keyword. This was just a test to see if it works.
My video may have ranked even quicker than 17 minutes because it took me 17 minutes to check the ranking after posting the video!
This did not involve any back-linking or paying for views or paying for traffic – it was just pure on-page SEO and video marketing.
Furthermore, I used Google Hangouts on Air to make the video so it literally took less than 10 minutes from end to end because I did not script it and just opened up Hangouts and just started talking.
I do, of course, need to test my technique from end to end but the initial results are encouraging.
It will be interesting to how long the video can maintain its ranking without backlinks and then, if I throw some backlinks at it, how long it will take to recover its ranking.
Now I am going to work on scripting and systemising my promotional videos to ensure that they are of high quality and have a clear call to action. I’m also going to test this with animated videos.
I’ll keep you updated about what else I can get ranked #1 on YouTube and just how quickly it happens as I will be rolling out a lot more promotional videos in the near future.
Here are the results of another test (- sorry about the poor audio quality!):
Do you know what to do when you have products to sell?
The answer is not ‘create another product’! (which is what I have tended to do over the last few years.)
Here is what Dennis Becker said in a recent thread on Facebook:
Eric Louviere recommends spending 90% of your time on sales, which means promotion, until you’ve reached the income level you’re seeking (I think he was talking about a 6-figure annual income). Of course you can’t sell what you don’t have, so that implies that you have product(s) to sell. I agree with Eric.
This is a very important point that resonated with me because I spend far too much of my time on product creation and not enough time on promotion.
The reason for that is that I love the creative process – see my last blog post where a test revealed this fact to me
However, there is no reason why you cannot get creative in promoting your products too by creating videos, graphics, emails, blog posts, audio podcasts that promote your products and content.
I already have a great range of products with more in the pipeline so I definitely need to spend more time promoting them.
The figure of 90% seems a bit surprising but when I really think about it, that seems about right to me.
However, I would add one very important piece of advice to this…
It is extremely important to monitor and measure the results of your promotional activity in order to find out what works so you can invest more in that activity. This involves link tracking and conversion tracking to optimise your results in order to focus your energies in the right place.
It also goes without saying that you also need to deliver more value than you are charging for if your ultimate goal is to create a loyal customer base so if your product needs improvement then do that before you start promoting.
It is also important to remember that the internet is vast – you cannot exhaust the potential pool of ready buyers for your product – it is simply your job to make them aware about the benefits of your product and how it can improve their life. So having an abundant mindset is key.
In the past I have advocated spending 2 hours on product creation, 2 hours on email marketing and 2 hours on promotional activities. Clearly that ratio is not correct although email marketing is a promotional activity.
Far better to have one high quality product and promote that until the cows come home.
This advice is golden – don’t ignore it.
If you are having trouble focusing on what you should be doing i.e. promoting your products, then these tips may help:
Manage Your Mood
Don’t Check Email in The Morning
Before You Try To Do It Faster, Ask Whether It Should Be Done At All
Focus Is Nothing More Than Eliminating Distractions
I took this test and this is what my results were:
Your calling is:
Creative Master
You’ve got creative juice flowing all over your body. Everything is a canvas to you. You effortlessly make things exactly as you see them in your head, and you easily out-innovate everyone else around you. You live to create and you create to live. Simply, the universe is your playground, and you’re totally rocking it!
Not bad for an ex-banker and business consultant. This explains why I love creating products and websites.
If you are failing to make sales online, have you considered whether or not poor copywriting is killing your conversions? It doesn’t matter how good your product is – if you cannot get it into the hands of customers then it will not have the opportunity to be a success.
The definition of copywriting in Wikipedia is this:
“Copywriting is writing copy for the purpose of advertising or marketing. The copy is meant to persuade someone to buy a product, or influence their beliefs.”
This definition implies that writing with the purpose of selling something is a different kind of writing. Copywriting is therefore a skill that has to be acquired because it is different to the normal way that you write.
Top copywriters can command large fees because creating copy that converts well is a highly-regarded skill which will make or break the sales of your products and services.
Perhaps the biggest mistake made by online entrepreneurs is the failure to create copy that converts well.
If you fail in this area, your sales will be sub-optimal, your traffic will be expensive because you have to drive more of it to reach your sales goals and you will find it difficult to attract affiliates.
A LOT of your success or otherwise will be dependant on your copy.
I was therefore interested to find a product called Advantage Bot (- a horrible name! -) which can predict whether or not your copy will convert well with an 85% success rate.
AdvantageBot contains a built-in database of over two hundred and seventy thousand profitable and unprofitable ads. It allows you to score your own text against this database for profitability.
You can use this tool for:
Sales pages – to craft killer headlines, body copy, stronger bullet points, powerful calls to action and more
Email marketing – to create subject lines to boost your open rates and powerful calls to action to increase the click through rate
Ad campaigns – to boost the click through rate and to reduce your testing costs
Scripts – use the tool to create your video scripts to increase conversions
I own Advantage Bot and you will find that it throws up some interesting results. For example, if you are looking for the wording for a call to action button, you can put variations into Advantage Bot to determine which has been scientifically proven to convert better – is it ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’?
If you chose the latter option then you would be right! But you wouldn’t know it without testing – this tool removes the need for testing. Here is an outline of the scoring system:
However, you may still want to test whether it works for you and whether you can improve your results. So Advantage Bot also comes with a little tool called A/B Optmizer which allows you to split-test any of your copy just to check that Advantage Bot was correct – Advantage Bot is statistically right only 85% of the time so it is not fool-proof! This is how the AB Optimizer interface looks – really clean and simple:
Here are some useful copywriting tips that came with Advantage Bot:
I recently held a Hangout with Carl Picot who has released a product called Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind. If you listen in to this interview Carl you will hear that we both agree that copywriting is possibly THE most important skill for an internet marketer.
Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind is a collection of interviews with some of the top copywriters around today who reveal some of the methods that make them some of the most in-demand copywriters. Whilst Advantage Bot will enable you to carry out tests without spending money, Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind will help you to come up with the copy to test so both products complement each other.
If you purchase either Advantage Bot or Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind through my links then I would be happy to give you a copy of my report entitled ‘The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File’ which is a report that I prepared based on a thread in the Warrior Forum where the Warriors revealed their favourite copywriting swipes. I compiled this information into a handy little report with links to the resources.
If poor copywriting is killing your conversions then these two products – Advantage Bot (which comes with A/B Optimizer) and Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind – will undoubtedly help you.
Push button, Google friendly, silo structured websites – sounds like a load of marketing hype doesn’t it?
I would certainly think so if someone else had written that!
In fact, I have studiously avoided all products that have claimed to be ‘push-button’ and automated simply because they serve up low-quality generic content.
I’ve also given up on SEO as a primary source of traffic – it just takes up too much time and, with the frequent changes in Google’s algorithm, it is almost impossible to establish a reliable source of traffic with SEO.
I’ve therefore stopped trying to outwit Google and have concentrated on creating high-quality content that is not really keyword orientated but more content orientated and authentically records what I am doing in my business – just like the content in this post!
For traffic, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it is better to buy traffic but only on the proviso that you can measure your ROI and split-test for improvements.
Paid traffic can easily rack up big losses if you do not keep on top of the numbers. But if you get it right, it is easy to scale up quickly.
However, after seeing a demonstration of a product called P1 Traffic Machine by Peter Garety, I have for the first time glimpsed another possible way to leverage SEO to make money.
Peter and his partner, Andrew Fletcher, have created a piece of software where you can pick your top-level keyword, enter it into the software and it will automatically create a silo structured website and automatically fill it with relevant content from a wide variety of sources.
Here is a diagram of a silo structured website in case you are wondering:
The speed of deployment and implementation is astounding, giving anyone the opportunity of quickly creating niche related sites filled with relevant keyword-orientated content that can be customised. It is not 100% hands-off as some editing is required, but nevertheless will remove 85% of the time and effort of entering a niche.
Most importantly, the site is properly structured with the correct redirect links in place for maximum SEO leverage.
Furthermore, it is easy to monetise the site with affiliate links and affiliate related content in a variety of variations and formats.
Because of the TIME involved in researching and creating niche sites, I have never created a website outside the internet marketing and make money online niche. Now, for the first time, I can see how I can quickly create a variety of niche sites that are silo-structured for each keyword and that will make total sense to Google because the content is all relevant.
These can be deployed on domains that you already own and have not yet been developed, or in offline niches or simply in any niche where you think there is an opportunity to rank well in the search engines.
Peter even has a tool which you can purchase in the P1 Traffic Machine sales funnel where you can quickly check how easy it will be to rank for a keyword thereby enabling you to focus on building out the content for that keyword.
My thoughts are that I will test this software in a variety of fairly focused niches that interest me – for example, lawn-care is a niche that interests me and I have some expertise in. I would love to create a niche site for this and cross-sell all the products related to lawn-care.
Also, growing vegetables is another niche that I would like to enter. Or how about trying to rank for some of my favourite pieces of software or themes?
At present there are 3 packages – I have invested in the top-level package which is the ‘Enterprise’ package because the price is currently at a large discount and it will give an opportunity to create up to 100 niche sites – with developers rights – so I can sell this as a service too!
The software is a plugin so it can be used with any WordPress theme – so site design is also flexible. I have developers rights on a number of themes so I can easily create some nice looking niche sites.
So in essence P1 Traffic Machine created push-button, Google friendly, silo structured websites really fast enabling you to quickly rank sites in almost any niche – a handy tool to have in your locker.
This week I have helped Chris Ferrante by setting up the membership site for Niche Cash Machine Blueprint.
Chris is a fellow coaching student of Marc Milburn and he created the content for this product last year. I reviewed the content then and thought that it was good material and it has taken a long time for Chris to package the product.
Chris is based in New York and that is what I love about my job – being able to do business with people from all parts of the globe. I currently have a client in Thailand, one in the Caribbean as well as in the UK. Iam also creating a product with Chris Cole based in Northern Ireland. It doesn’t really matter as long as they speak English and we can agree a mutually convenient time to liaise online.
From my conversations with Chris Ferrante, it is clear that his technical skills are somewhat limited but even so he has managed to ‘hack’ his way to creating his product by outsourcing the pieces that he can’t do. I think this is a smart way to start because acquiring the skills can be a long process – it has taken me over 5 years to get to this point.
I’ve also added in some useful plugins to his site to make it function nicely – you only know which ones to add from experience. (Just as I had to add the ‘Advanced Image Styles’ plugin to this site today in order to put a border around the image below – a function that was removed from the visual editor with WordPress version 3.9!)
Here is a sneak peak of the members area for this product:
In addition to creating the members area, I added all the content into the site – the content is served off Amazon S3 for blazing fast delivery. There are 6 video modules in each of the core training and advanced training and 4 or 5 bonuses. In addition, there are 3 membership levels in the funnel.
[boxibt style=”success”]”If they want to pick your brain, ask them to pick a time and a method of payment!”[/boxibt]
I’m not sure I could do this quite so frankly but the principle is right – when you are selling your time as a service, it is important to place a value on it. If you don’t place a value on it, then it is certain that no one else will!
You could start by saying, my clients pay me £250 (or £500 or, like Jay Abraham, $5,000) an hour for advice and I have a packed work schedule… (which is true because, if you aren’t working with paying clients, you are working to find paying clients!)
You’ve immediately notified them that your time has a value, whatever you decide to agree to thereafter.
(You’ve also just positioned yourself as an expert whose time is extremely valuable.)
Marie has also worked out some scripts for different situations:
[boxibt style=”warning”]Script 1. The Spice Girls Script AKA. Tell Me What Want What You Really Really Want. Instead of coming right out and saying no, try this script to get right to the point of what they want: “My work schedule is full so ____ (insert: breakfast/lunch/coffee) is not doable these days. Are you interested in becoming a client/customer or do you just have a quick question?”[/boxibt]
[boxibt style=”danger”]Script 2. Pay Me MuthaHumper. When saying no, you sometimes also want to avoid being “salesy” and directing people to your products or services. But sometimes, when you’re saying no, you have to do it. Try this script: “I’m not available for lunch, but you should really consider getting my X (product, training, program) — it’s all of my best thinking in one place and I created to help people in your exact situation.”[/boxibt]
[boxibt style=”info”]Script 3. Blame It On Mama. How do you go about saying no when the invite is semi-social and the other person claims they want to network? If you think they’re going to pick your brain and you want to say no nicely, try this script: “I have a rule, if I don’t have time to see my mother, I don’t have time to meet new people for coffee. And right now, I owe my mama a visit. But seriously, I’m sure we’d have a blast and I hope you’re not insulted, but my work schedule is packed and I’ve gotta pass.”[/boxibt]
‘At the end of the day, if you want people to value your time, you need to put a value on it.’
This is not unlike the advice I received when I started out in consulting – ‘ People will not value that which they get for free.’
I found this to be true in consulting – clients will not take action unless they’ve paid for the advice – when they pay, they have to take action in order to get a return on their investment.
If they don’t pay, then they’ve lost nothing by wasting your time. By not taking action, they don’t get results and they won’t value your advice or what you could potentially do for them.
Payment is simply an exchange of value and your value cannot be realised unless they take action and they are more likely to take action and get value when they pay you, so everyone wins!
The flip side to this is that I have received many unexpected and lucrative jobs by doing a freebie for someone. The work appears from unexpected sources when you demonstrate your skills, sometimes many years afterwards.
You have activated the very human emotion of RECIPROCITY and that is a very powerful motivator. When someone gives me something, I always try to return the favour in spades – it’s just how I roll. It’s human nature for most of us to feel this.
But whether you insist on payment, or you decide to give some of your time for free, you need to START by placing a value on your time.
So if you give the freebie – say two hours of your time – the recipient knows that you effectively gave them at least £500 of value and that may then activate the law of reciprocity. It cannot be activated if the recipient does not value your time.
At the very least you will want a testimonial in order to help you to find paying work.
But let me ask you, why spend time with freebie-seekers, when someone, somewhere would gladly pay for your time and expertise? You have a responsibility to both yourself and your family to spend your time wisely and find those paying customers who value your time.
And time is short.
So when a ‘friend’ or acquaintance approaches you because they just want to pick your brain, first place a value on it and then I leave the rest to your discretion – your time is valuable because it is the only thing you cannot make more of so don’t squander it – treat it as your most precious resource, because it really is!
Here’s a video I made to underline the point:
Going back in my records to when I was business consulting, I found this good advice written by…. ME!:
When we are searching for work as consultants it is very easy to under price our services.
I am even willing to bet that most of the offline consultants on the Warrior Forum have fallen into this trap.
How do I know this? I have been consulting for 10 years and I’ve learnt from my own experience.
The purpose of this article is to provide pricing guidance for offline consultants. It’s a wake-up call to re-consider your pricing policy in the light of what I will reveal.
Make no mistake, under-pricing or discounting your services will hurt your consulting business in a number of ways:
In order to meet your financial goals you will have to work harder and longer in order to make up the shortfall.
You will have less time and money to carry out the research and training necessary to maintain and enhance your consulting skills and competitive edge.
You will have less time to market and manage your consulting business which potentially means that you will miss out on more lucrative opportunities i.e. you should realise that there is also an opportunity cost to charging too little.
If you charge too little, you will sub-consciously resent your customer and have a poor attitude to getting new customers simply because you are not charging what you are truly worth.
You may also be failing your customers, who will not get the full value you are capable of delivering due to lack of time and resources. Also, if you are tired and burnt out you cannot deliver your best work.
In addition to providing you with guidance on calculating a realistic breakeven price per billable hour, this article also seeks to set-out some strategies for charging premium prices for your consulting services and the psychological power of doing so.
Pricing Truths and Myths
Truth:
It’s important to realise from the outset, your clients really don’t know what your consulting fees should be. READ THAT AGAIN before you move on because it is critically important. It’s important because they will value your service according to the price that YOU place on it.
The fact is that ‘neither do you know what the fee should be’ until you can establish the potential value or benefits that your services will deliver to your customer. If you cannot establish the value then any price you quote is effectively a gamble for both you and your customer. And you stand to lose your reputation and the customer’s money if you proceed.
It is critical therefore that you do not reveal your price until you have first established and communicated the value or benefits that you can potentially offer to their business.
Myth:
The mistaken belief that lower prices = more sales.
The problem with this strategy is that by clogging up your time with low value work it means that you may not have time for higher value work if it comes along. It also means that you have less time and money to market to find the premium jobs and may therefore lose market share. Also, your low price undermines your credibility as an expert and this may actually result in reducing your sales.
Truth:
Leading on from the myth above, realise that many people will make assumptions about your competence as an internet marketing consultant based on the level of fees you charge i.e. low fees = low value, high fees = high value.
Where do you want to position yourself in the marketplace?
Myth:
Price is the most important factor in the client’s buying decision.
You know from your own personal experience that this simply isn’t true – we are often persuaded to spend more for higher quality or our perception of it. We don’t all drive the cheapest most fuel efficient car or wear the cheapest clothes.
Our job as marketers is to help our clients to grow their business. Your fees are therefore an investment in their business and your ability to sell will therefore largely depend on your ability to convince your prospective client that you can deliver the results you promise and you are the best one to do so.
This can be achieved by:
Showing or telling them about the results you achieved for other clients
Offering a free or low-cost demonstration of your skills
Testimonials or referrals from other satisfied clients
Outlining your detailed plan for delivering results
Reducing the risk to your client if the expected results don’t materialise – this can best be done by breaking a large project down into smaller chunks and getting paid for delivering each small chunk (just like paying a building contractor to build your house.)
Providing a result upfront, on spec, and selling the finished article e.g. a lead generating website (or the leads there from).
Providing more total value than your competitors.
Truth:
You first have to convince YOURSELF that your fee is fair before you try to convince your client.
This is critically important. If you do not believe yourself in the value you are offering, you will never convince your client. This is one of the principal reasons you will be under pricing your work – you haven’t convinced yourself yet that you are worthy of a higher fee.
Let’s examine this in more detail:
You need to calculate the true cost of providing your service – a formula for this is provided later in this report.
You need to realise the uniqueness of what you are offering. We are all of us unique with different heuristics ( i.e. experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery.) Even though we may be replicating skills we have learnt elsewhere, none of us will deliver the same service in quite the same way because of our differing life experience, training, skills and personality.
We are valuable to our clients just by listening to their problems and being present with them – you don’t have to provide all the answers, just facilitate the process whereby the client arrives at their own solution by asking insightful questions.
Most of us have a lot of expert knowledge about internet marketing that will short-cut our client’s progress to online success. (Even if we have failed most of the time, we can ensure our clients don’t make the same mistakes.)
Assuming we are honest and trustworthy, by working with us we ensure that our clients do not fall into the clutches of less trustworthy service providers.
We have unique and different viewpoints to offer – often we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are – and this is valuable in itself.
The ability to market a business online is becoming an increasingly important skill as traditional bricks and mortar businesses struggle to compete. Every business must now learn to compete online if they do not wish to trade at a disadvantage to their competitors.
Some businesses do not yet recognise this reality but more and more are beginning to awaken to this reality as they realise that the traditional forms of marketing are yielding less and less by way of results. (As the saying goes – in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.)
You will get referral-based businesses saying that they do not need to market online but the truth is that their potential clients will probably first research their business online before making contact.
Also, one has to question just how many lucrative clients they are losing if they cannot be found by a new customer at the very point in time when their product or service is needed? It always pays to have several ‘marketing pillars’ on which to support your business because you never know when you traditional source of business will dry up.
Finally, there are not many competent offline consultants available – there are plenty of other internet marketing models for an internet marketer to follow in order to make money online that are potentially easier than dealing directly with clients.
I hope I have convinced you that your marketing skills are potentially some of the most valuable that a business owner can access – remember, without more customers and sales, everyone else in the business is redundant.
Myth:
You must keep your prices low until you are established.
There are several problems with this strategy. You will fill your business with under-priced work often from price-shoppers who will show no loyalty when you try to increase your fees.
You will find heavy resistance to fee increases or face difficult questions about why you are charging more than you did before.
You are creating a cut-price brand and image for yourself that will be difficult to reverse later i.e. low price = low value.
This is the lazy way to market your business. Better to position yourself at the outset as the expert you are and charge a proper fee.
Truth:
Clients will not value that which they get for free.
Getting results in marketing depends largely on implementation not theory. It is much more likely that a client will implement your advice if they have paid a fair fee for it.
A substantial fee will commit your client to taking action to get a return on their investment. If you truly believe that you can generate a good return on their investment then a fair fee is doing your client a service by compelling them to take action. (It could also put them off buying but only if you haven’t communicated your value proposition properly in the first place and reduced their risk of taking action to an acceptable level.)
[boxibt style=”info”]There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey. John Ruskin, (attributed) English critic, essayist, & reformer (1819 – 1900) [/boxibt]
How to Price Consulting Services
Newbie consultants often under-price themselves and go out of business.
They divide their annual salary by 2080, the number of work hours in a year. For example, $100,000 divided by 2080 equals $48.00 per hour.
The problem is, new consultants only bill half their time, say 20 hours per week. (You need the rest of the time in order to train to increase your expertise, carry out research, market your business and carry out your administrative duties.
In addition, this formula neglects the cost of benefits, usually 35-40% of annual salary. If your corporate salary was £100,000, your total compensation is roughly £140,000 (base salary + 40%).
Therefore, when figuring out your consulting rate, you should always include the cost of benefits, like this: £140,000 divided by 2080 equals £67.00 per hour.
Then you double this number to compensate for unpaid time doing such things as administration, customer service, entertaining clients, sales and marketing, and proposal writing. Now your hourly rate is £135.00 per hour—something sustainable you can live on.
You may be saying to yourself “that’s awfully hard to ask for.”
When I launched my consulting practice in 2001, I charged £30.00 per hour with the guarantee that if you didn’t like the meeting, you wouldn’t have to pay. I’ve gradually raised rates to £200 per hour today or a daily rate of £1,600 — with the same guarantee.
How do you ask for a lot of money?
As you know, everyone likes to feel they’re being treated fairly. Everyone loves a deal.
I’ve often positioned my rates like this:
“My normal rate is £200.00 per hour, but because you’re a friend of a friend (or it’s the holidays, or you’re on a tight budget, etc.) I’ll do it for you for £150.00.”
Without exception, people appreciate this gesture of savings and don’t dispute my fees. The same principle applies to large projects. Just structure your pricing accordingly.
It’s important to benchmark your rates against the market. Obviously, you can’t charge £200.00 per hour if the going rate is £50.00.
Package or project prices are generally better than hourly time and materials charges. Why? Because if you complete a £5,000 project in 10 hours, you’ve earned £500 per hour, not £200.00 per hour—your usual rate.
Over the years, I’ve completed several £10,000-£20,000 projects in just a few hours. You’ll need those big hits occasionally to stay in business.
Consulting often involves getting a client, delivering service, then finding another client. That sequential model of client after client creates the feast or famine income that consulting is famous for. It’s a catch-22: while you’ve consulting you can’t be selling, and while you’re selling you aren’t generating cash. How do you reduce the up-and-down cycles and even out your income?
One way is to establish “anchor clients.” You’re familiar with the idea of anchor stores in a shopping centre—big companies like Marks & Spencer or John Lewis who “anchor” the centre and make it profitable. Smaller stores contribute revenues but are less essential to the project’s financial success.
In a similar way, consultants can secure “anchor clients,” large ongoing projects that deliver revenue month after month. One or two significant anchor clients can keep you in business and even out your cash flow. It’s almost like having a job while still being independent. If you work ten hours per week for one organization, and five hours per week for a second company, you’ll have time left over for smaller, one-time assignments.
You’ll control both your time and your own destiny.
So when they just want to pick your brain, what are you going to say now?
Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog or list if you want more articles like this.
I’ve just purchased a course called Webinar Alchemy by Glen Kirkham. It is a high-ticket course but the webinar was presented so well that I wanted to learn how to do it myself.
As you will know from previous posts, I am sniffing around Google Hangouts. In fact, I am creating a product called ‘Hangout Cash Code’ with Chris Cole:
As at the time of writing, the membership site is ready to receive content and we have the content all set-out on a mind map. The product will be completed by the end of May with a view to launching the product in June.
So I purchased access to Webinar Alchemy to learn how to structure webinar presentations properly. I also have Jason Fladlian’s product – Webinar Legend. So there is nothing to stop me implementing Webinars – I have the technology and the strategy. I just need to take action.
The technology I intend to use is:
Google Hangouts on air
Webinar Ignition facilitating the registration process and live streaming from my website
I also have Evergreen Business Systems to convert my webinars to automated evergreen webinars (although I believe that you can do this with Webinar Ingnition too.)
So why do I badly want to crush it with webinars – well apart from Live speaking events, they are the highest-converting method for promoting my products and services. I want to become a ninja presenter so I can help more people to grow an online business.
On the front end of my funnel, I have 4 free reports:
(Referring to Whiteboard Presentations, I bought VideoMakerFX this week that enables me to create awesome whiteboard presentations plus a wide variety of awesome video formats.)
As you can see this ‘Webinar Alchemy’ of products and training is developing into a perfect storm – look out for my webinars coming shortly!
I was already able to create videos in a variety of formats including screen-share, green-screen, webcam videos, Hangout videos etc but this puts the icing on the cake because access to programmes that can make videos like this normally cost a hefty recurring fee. I have bought the software and templates for a one-time fee subject to annual maintenance charges.
Making videos using VideoMakerFX can be sold as a service to other businesses or I can simply create videos to promote my own, or other peoples, products and services for profit.
I am in the process of developing a new product called Hangout Cash Code with my friend Chris Cole, so video is the hot-topic of the month.
Membersonic Theme 2.0 is launching today – 7th May 2014 at 11 a.m. EST or 4 p.m. GMT. It is on a dimesale for an unbelievably low price.
I paid more for version 1.0 of the Membersonic Theme than the opening price for version 2.0 and version 2.0 has been rebuilt from the ground up based on customer feedback – including mine! Go figure.
Andrew Hunter of Plugin Results, who owns the theme, holds a monthly Q & A webinar and I attend this regularly. We give him feedback on his products and he diligently works to make the improvements with Alex, his software engineer.
These are some of the key features of the theme:
– Fully mobile responsive
– Built on the StudioPress Genesis Framework (included in members area)
– Fully customizable header/menus/sidebars
– Built in optin form (works with almost any autoresponder)
– Customized navigation bars for logged in vs. visitors
– Customized sidebar menus to control who sees what
– Built in graphics (add at the click of a button)
– Developers license included
I really like this theme because of its relative simplicity and flexibility – I can deploy it in minutes and it is great for membership sites.
Here are some of my websites and those of others that I have helped that are built on the Membersonic theme:
Hopefully these sites display the flexibility of the Theme.
However, the new theme also has some additional design capability that means that you can make it look like Optimise press 2.0 – as you can see from this demo page:
You can also create a menu above the header, within the header and in the sidebar of the theme. This is massive flexibility. There are 5 or 6 menu options in total which is very useful for membership sites.
My Bonus: If you buy through my link and subsequently need help to configure the theme, you can contact me – there are good tutorials that come with the theme but sometimes you can hit an unexpected barrier – I can help you. I know the theme inside out and love creating products with it.
You can purchase Membersonic Theme 2.0 here – I recommend it because I use it and in fact I have given a testimonial for it!
In this audio I discuss the topic ‘How to Focus On What You Want & Get It’.
Achieving focus and avoiding the many distractions online, are a very important ingredient for online success. There are plenty of people who have been online for literally years but have very little to show for it other than a substantial reduction in their savings.
This can be caused by confusion about exactly what you need to be doing on a daily basis. In this audio I discuss these problems and some strategies for improving focus:
(Click the image to play the audio)
Run-time: 22mins 39secs
This is a summary of what I discuss in the audio:
Here is a demonstration of Action Enforcer, which I mention in the audio – you can find out more about this product from this link or the link below the video:
I want to find out more about Action Enforcer (- This Will Skyrocket The Amount Of Things You Get Done On A Daily Basis.) When I use Action Enforcer, I always achieve more in my day than when I don’t use it.
I have an ebook entitled ‘Focus – How to Focus On What You Want & Get It’ (- this is quite separate and covers different material to the audio-) simply click the image below to read it!
Knowing how to focus on what you want (and get it) is an important aspect of success and please comment below if you can think of something else that either stops you from focussing or helps you to focus on the task in hand.
Google Hangouts have given marketers a low-cost entry into creating webinars – it’s a technology that I intend to master for my own business.
Webinars have great conversion rates and coupled with Google Hangouts, that rank well for keywords on Google, represent a great way to create content and to market your business.
Here are a few ways that we can use Hangouts in our businesses:
we can create lessons, either free or unpaid, that help our customers and demonstrate our expertise. Google have taken this to the next level to create Google Helpouts.
we can create workshops and training for a Group of students. I think this is the way forward for education – by providing recordings, students can learn at their own pace.
Hangouts are a great way of creating demonstrations of products – demos are a great use of the technology
what about creating marketing presentations with Google Hangouts? You can cover the full benefits of the product and also handle questions and objections from the viewers.
one of my colleagues has just created an interview product that launched with 560 front-end sales – interviews are a great way of using Hangouts. You can even have more than one expert in the Hangout – infact up to 10 people including yourself!
I haven’t yet mentioned webinars. Prior to Google Hangouts, webinar technology was relatively expensive, with leading providers demanding hefty monthly fees. Google Hangouts have made the technology available to everyone.
communicating with partners and staff is now made much easier with Google Hangouts. This is a great way of holding an online meeting or colaberation.
what about providing customer support through Google Hangouts? I’ve not seen it done yet but it is perfectly feasible. I have seen it used for a monthly Q & A session with customers to demonstrate product features and to get feedback.
you can also use Hangouts for announcements and news items.
In my mind, Google Hangouts is just a question of being prepared to master the technology – the more that you do, the better you will get.
You just need to be a little mindful of copyright – make sure that you do not infringe copyright with any of the material, images, music, background items in your videos. It would be very easy to inadvertently infringe copyright if you do not remain vigilant.
With these thoughts in mind, I have added a report entitled ‘Bad @$$ Hangouts’ to my site – you can get it for free here.
As a bonus to a video product I have just bought was a package of nice free background images with a reseller license.
These images were part of a previous paid product by Todd Gross and he has now bundled them as a bonus with a new product.
I therefore though that I would offer these to my subscribers. The only drawback is that the images are all from the US. In due course, I may add to the package by steadily taking some pictures in the UK.
There is an optional upsell to purchase a collection of video backgrounds that are perfect for optin pages and green screen video purposes.
The free images can be downloaded here in return for an optin.
Here a few examples of images in the free package:
I recorded a short video showing how I create a video playlist in Easy Video Suite.
If you know how to do it, it is easy but if you have never done it before it can seem daunting. Hopefully this video will remove the mystique from this process.
Yesterday I purchased a reseller package of 89 videos called The No Cost Income Stream. These tutorials basically outline 5 models for making money online without investing money.
They came supplied with a professionally written sales page and download page. It appealed to me because it is what most people are looking for in the ‘make money online’ niche.
However, a download page for videos really sucks – particularly when there are 89 of them! So I have decided to create a video playlist for each model and put these onto a membership site to improve the presentation of the material.
I have a membership site clone set-up for fast deployment of membership sites – it is almost easier to than setting up a download page and certainly enables you to cross-promote your other products and services better.
The 5 No Cost Income Stream models are:
Product Launch
Freelancing
Video Marketing
List Building
Affiliate Marketing
In addition there are video tutorials covering 16 free traffic methods.
Here is a snapshot of the front of the membership site:
These are high quality videos made by a partnership of 3 x 7-figure marketers. I paid $37 for the package of videos and I’m selling access to the tutorials for $37 – so just one sale will recoup my out-of-pocket investment.
I’ve converted the sales letter onto a WordPress page with an exit pop-up that offers access to each model for $9.95 in order to maximise sales. Seperating the models like this gives me a number of options for marketing each of the models as a separate product.
I’ve also created the website header, video splash image and variors images for marketing the product.
The first module of 30 videos is in place and the rest are being uploaded to Amazon S3 today – 89 videos represent a lot of work, particularly as I had to download each one off the download page. The videos were uploaded to Amazon S3 via Easy Video Suite.
Here are a few more details:
1) What is the course all about?
Eric, Paul, and Jeff aka the Real Guys wanted to give the very best answer that they possibly could on how to make money online without spending money, so they created a comprehensive step-by-step video course showing how to actually build an online business using 100% free tools.
2) This is 2.0 of the product – what’s the difference between the first NCIS course and NCIS 2.0?
They created NCIS 1.0 about two years ago. It basically covered one business model, which was affiliate marketing. NCIS 2.0 actually covers 5 business models: No Cost Product Launches, No Cost Freelancing, No Cost Video Marketing, No Cost List Building, and No Cost Affiliate Marketing.
It goes into a lot more options, more depth with 89 videos, and it is 100% up to date at this time, having been created in the past month.
3) Are there any bonuses included?
There are several valuable bonuses: I’m including some additional courses:
Videos about the various free Video Screencasting Tools available
Video tutorials about how to use free graphics editors
I’m also adding PDF’s of the Powerpoint presentations to each ‘No Cost Income Stream’ model. I may also create a video sales letter and split-test this against the written version.
Of course with 89 videos to watch there is a cost – your time – and time is money! But if you are ‘time rich’ and cash poor’ this is an excellent option.
If you are cash rich then I would also recommend that you sign up for coaching – if that interests you feel free to contact me through my Contact page. Whilst you may baulk at investing in coaching, ultimately, in my experience, it will save you both time and money.
Hopefully, selling these tutorials will add another income stream to my business as I build it into a ‘multiple streams of income’ model. I probably need to create a low-cost or free squeeze page in front of this product and put this product on the back-end.
It’s not a ‘No Cost Income Stream’ but it is a low-cost income stream!
This post is about why I re-designed this website.
This is how my website looked before the changes – pretty radical, huh! –
I was running my site on the Optimise Presss 1.0 theme but this theme is not responsive.
Whilst it has many good features, website design has moved on and I guess that is why Optimise Press 2.0 was created. I almost bought OP 2.0 but backed off after Rob Cornish did an article saying that the page editor was slow and clunky.
I certainly like the look of some the OP 2.0 sites that I have seen but speed of implementation is also important. The price at $197/$297 was also an issue.
Optimise Press 1.0 was good for squeeze pages, sales pages and membership sites. However, I use plugins like Paper Template and Instabuilder now to create squeeze pages and sales pages and I build membership sites on either the Membersonic Theme or the Instatheme.
I then looked carefully at the Thrive Themes produced by Shane Melaugh but I felt that these were relatively expensive compared to other options on the market. I own Shane’s plugin called the Thrive Page editor which gives plenty of page building flexibility anyway on any theme on which I choose to install it.
I was therefore pleased to snap up the developers rights for the Elegant Biz theme by Tantan Hilyatana for just $47. It seemed a bargain given that it has all these features:
Fully Responsive + Has Custom Mobile Design
Elegant and Beautiful Design – Designed for easy user interface, elegant and beautiful design as well as professional and modern.
Can be Used for Any Type of Website
Rating System: on post and comments plus rating block as well as top rated items list.
SEO Optimized: all content have been structured for SEO, we use semantical HTML & CSS code which allows search engines to easily index the content.
Unlimited Color Options
Beautiful Gallery with lightbox popup feature
Custom Gallery which allows you to add images from external URL
Content Lightbox Popup – You can add text, image or video on the lightbox popup
Custom Post Types
Custom Page Types
Advanced Typography options: font size, font color, font family.
Un-Moved Background Image for The Boxed Layout – You can use both pattern background or cover background image.
Color Insights – You’ll find color insights inside theme setting. No more confused choosing the best color for your site.
Header Image & Background Color Option
Build-in Contact Form
Stunning Pricing Table – Unlimited color options, built with CSS3 and HTML5.
3 Awesome Homepage Sliders – Big image slider with several of transition variations, sequence slider and featured posts slider.
Testimonial Slider
Automatic Update – You’ll see an update notification on WP admin dashboard when we release new version, simply just 1-click to update without losing all saved settings.
Star Rating Google Rich Snippet
Unlimited-Level Dropdown Menus
Sleek Admin Panel
Auto Generated Thumbnails
Automatic Pagination
Social Sharing Ready – Position is adjustable (floating left, right, top, bottom).
Social Profile Icons
Support All Major Modern Browsers
XML Demo Content & Dummy Theme Settings for blazing fast setup
Boxed and Wide Layout variations
Facebook Comments
Custom Message on Each Post – You can display specific message on each post, on top or bottom of the post.
Threaded Comments
Works with 3rd Party Slider plugin – On the demo we are using Revolution Slider. Please note, this theme does not include Revolution slider, it can be purchased separately on the vendor sales page on CodeCanyon. [Update May 31, 2013 at 01.48 PM EST] We’re going to integrate Revolustion Slider, so you don’t need to buy it.
Built with HTML5 and CSS3
Custom CSS Option – Need more customizations? You can easily add custom CSS directly from admin panel without editing core theme files. Those styles will overwrite the theme styles.
Footer Bar Layout Option
Sidebar Position Option – You can choose left or right sidebar position.
Stripe Bar or float bar on top: Very useful to point out an important information.
Supports Multi-Site – You can install this theme on a multi-site environment.
Custom Login Screen
600+ Icons – A lot of icons included. Use them and create awesome pages.
Support with Latest WordPress – version 3.5.1, also has been tested with WordPress 3.2.+.
Complete set of instructional training videos and text.
Get all future updates with added features FREE for lifetime.
Dedicated support team – We provide you private support and community forum. We care about your site as much as you and will help in anyway possible.
I particularly needed to make my site mobile-friendly and, as this theme is responsive, it fitted the bill nicely.
This design can also incorporate the Revolution Slider, which I have just configured for my sisters website. It took me about a day and half to master the complexity involved with setting up this slider so I am glad that this time was not wasted!
Also, the Revolution Slider was incorporated within my purchase of Elegant Biz theme – if purchased separately off Code Canyon I notice that it costs $19 so my net outlay was just $28 for the developers rights to Elegant Biz – it just gets better and better.
I have no doubt that there will be some page problems involved in swapping over to this new theme and some coding problems but ultimately the additional features should make the change worthwhile.
I also took the opportunity of freshening up my logo into something a little more snappy. There are also 600 icons included within the theme which will make for nice page designs.
So the three main reasons why I redesigned my website were – responsive theme, re-branding and additional features and flexibility offered by the new theme. I hope that you like the new look and functionality.
I took time out – a whole morning to be precise – to proof read William Golding’s first product – Catch Your Cheating Wife.
I was a little bit worried that my wife would see me reading it and wonder why I was doing so! I’ve never, ever doubted my wife and after nearly 32 years of marriage, I am not about to start.
William’s book was a real eye-opener. He is a police detective by training and some of the technology that he mentions in the book, I never knew existed.
One of the simplest strategies is to leave your mobile phone in your wife’s car with voice activation recording on! You can also locate her car using the GPS locator in the phone. There really was some sneaky stuff revealed in the book.
I received the following testimonial from William for my work:
[boxibt style=”success” bgcolor=”#A4B9CF”]”Thank you Mark Salmon for taking the time out to proof read my guide. Mark is a true warrior!”[/boxibt]
I also made William think about his eCover design by sending him the following:
If you really want to Catch Your Cheating Wife, then William Golding’s ebook is a great place to start – it’s based on his real life experience as a police detective.
This post is about Carl Picot and Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind, which is the product that he launched recently. The reason I am covering this is that I helped Carl to set up his product.
Carl approached me to set up his membership site – both the theme and the the membership software were causing him problems so I worked with him to set up his product, ready for launch.
Prior to launching the product, he attended a marketing workshop in Manchester and said that ideally he wanted to distribute some leaflets advertising his launch at the event but he couldn’t do this because his printer had broken down. This was a week before the event took place!
I therefore advised him to outsource the job and gave him a link. He received his leaflets just before setting off for the event and distributed them at the event.
As it turned out, his product launch was a huge success with well over 600 front-end sales driven mainly by affiliates jumping on board.
Three factors are interesting about this:
Carl is very dis-organised and it is a miracle that he launched at all. He was still changing the sales letter at the point of launch and his computer filing system is non-existent. This was only his second launch.
He leveraged the skills of others by interviewing them – this method of product creation is somewhat old-hat but Carl proved that it can still work spectacularly well.
Carl has been to the point of bankruptcy in the recent past but kept moving forward to his goal despite all his difficulties and leveraged his online relationships to achieve eventual success.
Here is a snapshot of his site:
[boxibt style=”gray”]
Here is an unsolicited testimonial from Carl:
[/boxibt]
I find Carl Picot’s story and his success with Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind very inspiring and I am proud of the fact that I was able to help him before he achieved his success.
You may be interested in viewing this interview with Carl in which we discuss his journey to creating the Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind product – I think you will find it very interesting and inspiring with some great learning points:
For more information about Millionaire Copywriting Mastermind – Click Here
This week I have been planning my WSO Schedule for the next 14 weeks. As you will know from my last post I have been challenged to create one WSO per week.
Initially, I felt pretty stressed by this target but this feeling of pressure has lifted by planning out my schedules below.
The fact is, that when I started taking an inventory of all the products that I have already set up and ready to rock and roll, I realised that I only have to create 6 new products and reorganise and repackage my existing products to have a good selection of up-front offers and upsells.
So the task boils down to:
creating 6 new products, membership sites and sales letters
creating 14 sales funnels
creating 14 JV pages
placing 14 products and sales funnels on Warrior Plus
testing and checking that everything works and is integrated
Initially, I will be slow at some tasks, like setting up JV pages and putting products on Warrior Plus but as I develop familiarity and systems, this should become easier and easier.
My partners, Daniel Madeira and Scrembo, are handling traffic, affiliates and email follow up. I will handle any support issues.
So here are my schedules for the next 14 weeks:
In the week beginning 14th April, my granddaughter is coming to say – so getting WSO #2 out that week will be a challenge – I really have to get WSO’s #2 and #3 ready for launch next week so I can meet my deadlines. Also, once they are ready for launch, it would be helpful to make a start on my first new product, Honey Trap Funnels.
Honey Trap Funnels is all planned out, the membership site has been created – I just need to create the sales letter and content.
On top of all this, I have a number of clients to service and I am going through The IM System by Kenster – this is an excellent product that I recently invested in in partnership with my sister. I also have a number of PLR and resell rights products to set up.
The first product – Product Creation Renegade – is all ready for launch next Wednesday at 6 p.m. EST which is 11 p.m. GMT. The basic strategy behind our pricing and launch is being coordinated by Scrembo who has some experience at launching multiple WSO’s.
Product Creation Renegade is being sold at a large discount to its normal pricing – as you would expect with with a WSO. It will be well worth the small amount of money I am asking. If you want to promote this product, our affiliate page is here.
I have plans to launch Product Creation Renegade versions 2.0 and 3.0 because I have several more complementary product creation products that I can add into the funnel. However, I may end up creating a new front-end product for either or both launches.
I hope you found my WSO Schedule for the next 14 weeks – if you take nothing else away, you should be mapping out your plans for the next few months too and setting yourself challenging deadlines for achieving your goals.
I’m preparing for my latest challenge – at least one WSO a week.
That’s quite a challenge for me since I have not launched many WSO’s. (Also, I am babysitting my grandchildren for part of the time in April during the Easter break.)
I first came across the idea of launching multiple WSO’s from Sean Mize when I bought his WSO entitled ‘How you can make a full-time income selling WSO’s in 2014’.
Sean set himself a target of doing 150 WSO’s in 2013 but came up short on his target – he ONLY did 80! However, that was enough to generate $65k in sales.
Was it a coincidence then when two of my online colleagues, who know about my product creation skills, approached me to partner on creating a business where we launch one WSO a week?
I will focus on product creation whilst they focus on traffic and email marketing. We would share the list of buyers.
My first thoughts were that I could be working flat out 100% of the time whilst my partners had the easy end of the stick and would also have time to run their solo ads and coaching business. They do, however, have a large list from their solo ads business!
On reflection, I think that this partnership would be little different to a normal affiliate relationship and I have decided that it would be worth trying for a month or two and then review progress at the end of April or end of May.
The products would of course be ‘one problem, one solution’ type products that can be consumed within one hour and will sell at $5 to $7 on the front end and up to $17 on the back-end. The back-end will be built from existing products and former WSO’s most of which will be taken down after 7 days or the price increased.
Each product will be on a membership site to cross-sell other products and services. I will create a membership site clone for fast deployment and easy branding.
Products will be sold through Warrior Plus where I will also be doing product research. Existing buyers might also tell me what they would like to learn to generate more ideas, if I take the trouble to ask them.
The key to monetisation is the email marketing on the back-end to cross-sell more products. I would like to get up to 2 or 3 WSO’s a week when I have refined the system but it is important not to run before I can walk!
Initially I am thinking in terms of planning my time like this:
– research – 1 day
– product planning & sales letter – 1 day
– product creation & membership site – 2 days
– WSO set-up & funnel testing etc – 1 day
– weekend as a buffer and to enable me to do other things and you to do product quality control.
Compared to what Sean Mize advocates, I am planning to take far too long on each part but initially I want to start off ‘slow’ and then if I can get it up to 2 or 3 a week, try for that rather than saying I can do it off the bat.
I think the important thing is to work out a system i.e.
carry out research for several products at the same time and / or utilise my existing products better by repackaging them
get the planning done in an hour
sales letter written in an hour
product created in 1 to 3 hours
clone a membership site for fast deployment
get familiar with Warrior Plus and membership site and auto-responder integration
This will require extreme focus in order to consistently churn out high-quality low-priced products week-after-week. (Here is a product idea already – showing other people how I am doing it.)
So there it is – my latest challenge is at least one WSO a week.
The new Tiger Feet website launch is today, less than one week after I accepted the brief from my customer.
The first iteration of the website went by the board within 24 hours! After a discussion with my customer, I realised that she wanted some enhancements to the design that the previous theme I was using couldn’t really handle. So I simply changed the theme.
However, the new theme was quite time-consuming and complicated to configure and I spent a long time on Photoshop to make my client’s images really ‘pop’ by removing the backgrounds to bring the main images into stark relief.
You will also see that I am using a very nice slider and a nice portfolio widget to present her images.
I also guided my client on the type of content I would like to see on her pages and she was very responsive in providing it to me. I then formatted it to present it nicely and with some extra marketing impact.
I think this is one of my best website builds yet – a client who knew what she wanted and helped me to respond quickly to her requests.
These are some of the comments I have had from my client by email:
[boxibt style=”success” bordercolor=”black” bgcolor=”yellow” fontcolor=”red”] “I am really loving the new website!”
“It’s fantastic! I love it! “[/boxibt]
Click on the image below to see the new website:
Earlier this year, I created a website for my sister and she said that she would add the content. Guess what? She approached me yesterday and asked me to add the content which she has created! So that is my next job.
I’ve also been approached today by two of my online colleages:
one wants to discuss partnering with me – since he is a master of solo ad traffic, this is interesting to me
the other wants me to check over his membership site and sales funnel prior to launch in 2 days time
I’m also wanting to create my next product ‘Honey-Trap funnels and I also have 3 squeeze page products I want to get online, including the email follow-up sequences. On top of that, I yesterday invested in Kensters ‘The IM System’ so I have that to go through as well.
To bring me back to earth, I lost my car key and front-door key whilst walking the dog today – I think my head is somewhere else at present but I’m really loving the fact that I have plenty to do. (I had to get my wife out of the bath to let me back into my house – anyone passing would have seen a naked lady wrapped in a towel letting me into the house and would be wondering what was happening!)
Hope you have time to head over to view the Tiger Feet website launch and please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the website.
My current consulting assignments are moving ahead quite well now.
I have been working with Tsahai de Silva to help her to get her new product ‘Affiliate Income Boost’ ready for launch.
In yesterdays’s consultation on Skype we:
added a watermark into all of her videos
we created two new eCovers to replace the ones that she had received from Fiverr.com, which were unbranded and uninteresting
we added two of my products into the ‘Resources’ section of the site
we set the product up on JVZoo
we configured Membersonic, her membership plugin, and integrated it with JVZoo
After our consultation, Tsahai was kind enough to say this:
[boxibt style=”success” bordercolor=”red”] “I have admired Mark’s work for sometime and I recently got the opportunity to work with him in a professional capacity. Mark’s knowledge and professionalism is exactly what you need in a consultant. He is patient and has a eye for detail that makes such a difference in the end product. His easy going style immediately puts you at ease and it was such a pleasure to work with him. My product rocks now thanks to Mark and I am eternally grateful. Cheers Mark!”[/boxibt]
Thank you Tsahai.
I also admire Tsahai because she is working on her internet marketing business part-time whilst looking after her young son and holding down a full-time job. This is not easy to do but she is making good progress now and she is close to launching her first product so look out for ‘Affiliate Income Boost’.
[hr2]
My other client is Emma Breeze, who I featured in an earlier post.
In that post I revealed the first draft of her new website but neither of us was entirely happy with the results of my efforts but, in doing the first draft, she gave more some important clues as to what she wanted. (If you read between the lines on that post you will see that I was feeling frustrated!)
Then Emma dropped something into the conversation about her father’s website, that I had built a couple of years ago, which made me realise exactly what she was looking for.
Subsequent to this conversation, I was sitting in my chair at 9 p.m. watching TV when I had another inspirational moment that told me exactly what I needed to do to please her. I immediately went to my computer and, by 1.30 a.m. in the morning, I had replaced the WordPress Theme and set up a new design.
I spent the rest of the following day on Photoshop working with the photographs of her clients and resubmitted my design to her. This is what she said in the email reply:
[boxibt style=”success” bordercolor=”red”] Its fantastic! I love it! Great slider and feedback page! Thank you for your time and patience! Emma[/boxibt]
This is exactly the encouragement I hoped and expected to receive.
Her site is still under construction and I will reveal it shortly because I think it might end up as being my best work yet as far as website design is concerned.
(By the way, I received the assignment on Wednesday, stared work at 4 p.m. and by close of business Friday had created two versions of the website prior to the comment above.)
I am hoping that this project will lead to other projects like it because I have enjoyed creating the images on this site which exactly illustrate what Emma’s business is all about. They do say that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ and in this case it is true.
It got me to thinking about how impersonal most websites are. The true nature of the people and their business are hidden behind a façade that is impossible to penetrate. This is why images and video have such a vital role to play in online marketing.
Of course, you need some courage to put yourself ‘out there’ but, if you do, I feel that you can differentiate your business and immediately begin to build a relationship with prospects and customers.
It is important to tear down the curtain and give direct access to the people involved in the business. It is then much easier for the website visitor to decide whether or not to transact business.
So my current consulting assignment are moving ahead well and I’ll reveal the final results shortly!
My latest client website, Tiger Feet, was a super-quick WordPress website build.
My client rang me at lunch time, I started work on it at around 4 p.m. and later that evening I sent the first draft of the site to my client.
This client is a young lady named Emma Breeze. About 4 years ago she came to our Rotary Club to tell us about the dance business she was setting up. To help her, I volunteered to build her first website at http://embodydance.co.uk.
I showed her how to operate the site and from then on, apart from the occasional intervention by me, she has basically developed her website as her business grew.
Her personality and energy are such that she now has a team of 5 staff and has found a sub-niche in ‘dance for people with disabilities’. She has therefore decided to split out this part of her business as a separate brand called ‘Tiger Feet’.
This is is the initial draft of the front page of the website. I have no doubt that this will be tweaked and improved over time:
I don’t build that many websites for clients because I prefer to build them for myself. It is much easier because beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.
I have found from experience that, when someone else is doing the work, everyone likes to become a web designer by suggesting enumerable changes without realising what the changes really entail in time and skill. And it is difficult to get them to pay for the additional time involved – in other words, they are happy to suggest a thousand changes as long as it is all on your time!
In the case of this website, I did a lot of work on Photoshop to resize the images, lighten them up, optimize them etc
Of course, I want my customer to be happy but it does make me reluctant to create websites for other people unless there is a reasonable margin in the job to cover revisions. In this case there simply wasn’t, as I offered a super-keen price.
One of the business improvements I have suggested is to create a membership area which could serve the following purposes:
to create a dance tuition product
to create a product showing others how to establish a dance school
to use as a staff training area
to create individualised training programmes and schedules for dance students
With this in mind as a future enhancement to her business, I used a theme with a lot of navigation flexibility (the Membersonic Theme) so the membership area can be built on the back of this new site without the need for another website installation.
There are also a number of premium plugins installed on this site including an auto-backup plugin, a security plugin, and a visual editor.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking at this super-quick WordPress build.
My latest product ‘Honey-Trap Funnels’ is coming soon.
Sales funnels are a vital part of an internet marketing business but when you are starting out it can be difficult to work out the technicalities of building a sales funnel.
My new product will address this problem by providing flexible sales funnel templates that can simply be uploaded into WordPress and the sales funnel products can simply be plugged into the pages.
However, prior to constructing a funnel, there is an important planning stage. What products to include in the funnel and in what sequence?
Also, how do you use the psychology of selling to get visitors to engage with your sales funnel rather than click away?
The most important part of the funnel is the front-end – if you fail to capture the contact details of your visitor, the rest of the funnel will not be seen and you may lose the opportunity of helping your visitor forever. I will therefore be going into this part of the funnel in a lot of detail.
Then, in order to optimise your funnel, you really need to test and monitor variations of your funnel pages to optimise sales conversions. How do you do this exactly? These are questions that I will address in this new product.
Of course, once you have built your funnels, you will need to drive traffic to the front of your funnel. How do you do this? There are literally hundreds of ways to do this but you only need to master one to start with and then keep adding in new marketing channels.
I will discussing the pros and cons of the traffic channels I favour. As far as possible, I want to systemise the building of sales funnels both for my own benefit and those of my customers by going through a series of check-lists and templates.
It is important to create multiple funnels – I liken this to having multiple fishing lines out in the internet ocean baited to attract specific fish that you want to bring into your business.
(I hope you don’t mind the analogy with fishing but I think it’s a good one except for the fact that when you catch a fish, the rest of the process is quite different – I don’t want you to harm or kill your prospects and customers but instead to help them to solve a problem or in some other way that is an exchange of value!)
All my products have been built to track my own progress in my business. I already have a number of sales funnels in my business but I now want to take my skills to the next level, so this is a very important product in the evolution of my business.
Here is the framework of my membership site – it looks pretty seductive, don’t you think?
I am hoping to release Honey-Trap Funnels within one month so look out for it, it’s coming soon.
Solo Ads Assassin has been released today – one day after releasing Easy Web Page Graphics.
Two video training products in 2 days – that’s a new experience for me!
In truth, Solo Ads Assassin has been ready for release for some months and just needed finishing off but my partner in the project, Daniel Madeira, got distracted by his solo ads coaching programme that is currently yielding him big bucks and some stellar results.
He is now making a lot more than the $100 per day he was making when he started making Solo Ads Assassin!
I therefore approached Daniel and asked if I could release Solo Ads Assassin and put a link to his coaching programme in the product. He generously agreed to this given that I have put a lot of work into creating the membership site for his training.
This product is based on his actual experience of building a solo ads business. By all accounts he is taking his business to the next level – he can now get over 4,000 subscribers to sign up in 48 hours. That is truly impressive.
With results like that, his coaching programme is rising in value and price – here is one of their results posted recently:
So if you want to build a solo ads business like Daniel’s, then he would be a great person to coach you. He is completely genuine and is actually running a very profitable business.
The product funnel for Solo Ads Assassin is a $9.95 eBook (with an exit popup offering the first module for free as a taster), then a $27 video training comprising of 23 videos. Inside the membership site is a link to their coaching programme.
This makes the release of Solo Ads Assassin a very valuable product – a genuinely profitable business blueprint taught by someone who is crushing it.
I’ve released Easy Web Page Graphics today. I’ve been working on this for a while now and finally plucked up the energy to finish off the sales letter and get a payment button on the letter.
I love creating products but the act of writing the sales letter and putting it out onto the market is always difficult.
If you would like to find out how I create some of the nice branded graphics on my blog then this product could be for you.
To be honest it is not as good a product as I had hoped but, in the right hands, it could be life-changing.
Click It Please
Why do I say that?
Well, for me, the discovery of Photoshop Actions and Smart Objects has transformed my ability to create visual works of art. I love the aesthetic satisfaction of creating graphics and good-looking websites. It’s work I love to do.
The problem is that it is probably not the best way of making money online. I really need to focus more on marketing and traffic generation but my heart does not lie in that direction.
I console myself by the fact that design and packaging are important aspects of product and content creation. If I can just find a systemised way of creating traffic that only takes up a small part of the day then I could ‘eat the frog’ and then get on with what I really love to do.
Anyway, Easy Web Page Graphics fits into the framework of products that I am creating to coach anyone to success in internet marketing. I’m covering all the skills that I have had to learn along the way in order to do business online.
Now that Easy Web Page Graphics has been launched I will keep improving it over time as my own skills keep moving forward.
Solo Ads Assassin is all but finished, but my partner in this project, Daniel Madeira, has got distracted by his solo ads coaching business because he is raking in more money on this part of the business. I have therefore put a proposal to him to at least release this product and find out how it is received.
That will leave me with two outstanding projects – Email ATM and Business Creation Mastery. This latter project is under construction and will be my high-ticket coaching programme. Email-ATM will be created in conjunction with my next product.
Before I release Business Creation Mastery, I am creating a sales funnel product called Honey-Trap Funnels. This is a cloned sales funnel system teaching others on how to quickly create sales funnels.
This project was already on a mind-map when Jason Fladlien released his Reverse System which costs $500 to $700 – he sold 500 copies to gross around $250,000 recently.
I don’t have this product so I won’t be copying it but I guess my product will be a poor-man’s version. I do want to templatise my system as much as possible to make it an easy system to implement. I will be using this system myself to sell my own products as well as affiliate products I like and use.
I do think that Jason Fladlien & Wil Mattos are doing a great job of increasing prices in our niche – I won’t knock them for that. However, their products are now beyond my budget and I believe that I can produce a product that is equally easy to deploy.
Anyway, the release of Easy Web Page Graphics is another step forward on my journey – next month is my 5 year anniversary in internet marketing which I started on 9th April 2009 by joining my first training with An Sieg and Mike Klingler. A few months later I discovered WordPress and I have not looked back since.
One of the newsletters I like to invest in is Tony Shepherds – I usually buy it 6 monthly in arrears when he puts it up for sale in the Warrior Forum. In the latest batch, he posed the question – ‘What would you do if you had $2,000 to invest in your business.’
I’ve curated a clip from the Newsletter, because I think that this is particularly good advice.
It has taken me 5 years to learn the ropes and I would have made money a lot faster online if I had received this advice (and believed it) 5 years ago. You will therefore readily understand why this struck a chord with me.
So bringing it down to the bottom line if I had $2,000 to invest in my business here’s what I’d do…
I’d get an auto-responder service, I’d create my own product but hire someone to write the copy and build the funnel (squeeze page and offer), and I’d get a link-tracking service to track everything.
I’d then hire a coach for as much time as I could afford to look the whole thing over and see what he thought.
I’d make changes and buy traffic depending on his recommendation.
This next part is important.
Some new marketers spend YEARS doing the above – building sites, creating products and messing about with software.
In short, setting up the techy bare bones of your business.
Building a business is NOT about building websites and creating products. It’s what happens once you’ve DONE that, which is REAL marketing.
In my view, the setting up of sites and products should all be accomplished in no longer than one month.
Yet some people spend years doing it and never get to the actual marketing stage.
And I think that’s what a business investment should be for – to get you up and running.
I’ve been creating authority blogs in various niches this month.
Did I build all the blogs manually, install the plugins, do the SEO, created the design and optimize the whole thing myself?
Course not.
I paid someone to do all that for me.
To get me to the point where all I have to do is now add the content myself, or hire a writer.
It’s the small stuff that defeats you, the technical hurdles that grind you down.
Getting past those, that’s what your investment capital is for.
Getting you to the point where you can actually start marketing, having ideas and making money!
What I have learnt is that you can acquire skills very cheaply – much more cheaply than trying to do everything yourself. If you are scaling a business, you simply do not have time to do it yourself – you need to hire in skills to help you.
That’s what a business is all about – coordinating and leveraging the skills and knowledge of others to produce a result for your customers.
I’m still not heeding this advice – today I installed Adobe After Effects onto my computer so I could make some cool video effects but at the time I was downloading the programme I was asking myself what the hell I was doing. It would be much more efficient to outsource shit like this.
The other thing that took a long time for me to understand is what is meant by ‘marketing’ because you tend to think that everything you do is marketing, including setting up your website and creating the product. In this context, marketing’ means the actual promotion of the product i.e. driving traffic, whether paid or free, to your offer and the processes you adopt i.e. whether the traffic is cold or has been warmed up beforehand. Also the script or copy you use to persuade your customer to optin and/or buy your offer.
As Tony says, the marketing stage is the key one – almost nobody will buy unless you get this part right, however good your product.
So if you were wondering what you would do if you had $2,000 to invest in your business, you could do a lot worse than taking Tony Shepherd’s advice in my opinion.
