Setting up sales funnels appears difficult if you are just starting out in internet marketing. Let me show you how to make this easy on yourself.
Whilst I have created some funnels myself, I’ve not always been thrilled by the aesthetic result. I was therefore interested that someone on the Warrior Forum was offering their proven sales funnel for sale offering a collection of affiliate plugins on the back-end on the funnel to monetise the traffic immediately.
A great way to build a profitable list.
I decided to buy the funnel for 4 reasons:
To install the funnel on my site – it is said to convert well
I wanted to reverse-engineer the funnel to understand how it has been constructed
I want to build my own funnels by replacing the products in this funnel (- both my own products and relevant affiliate offers)
With regards to point 3, I am delighted to report that I can see how to alter all aspects of the funnel to create my own new funnels. This is good news because I love the simple design.
Here are the respective pages of the funnel I purchased:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Here are some things that I have learnt as a result of reverse-engineering the funnel:
the theme is called Simon Framework – a free theme that has been modified
the background colours are easily changed in the WordPress Editor, as is the header with the ‘WARNING’
all plugin offers are affiliate products on Clickbank – it is very easy to simply replace your Clickbank ID in the code and swap out the products on each page
the whole funnel is well systemised and easy to replicate and set-up – I set this whole funnel up in less than 1 hour on a new WordPress installation.
Page 2 redirects after 5 seconds using code called Meta Refresh – something I hadn’t come across before. (The revolving button on this page is a simple gif that can be found free via a Google search)
the funnel comes with a 14 day auto-responder email series packed with more great offers
you also get a well-written swipe email to use for solo ad traffic generation.
The vendors of this funnel say that they have grossed over $24,000 from this funnel but they do not reveal how much they paid for the traffic that they drove to the squeeze page.
Let’s assume that it only broke even, which I doubt, then the addition of multiple hundreds of people to your list is worth a lot of money in its own right – this funnel alone has the potential to give me a very good income if worked correctly and the back-end profits are included.
But that’s not all – with the PLR Rights, I have the opportunity of also selling the funnel to other people to make money and to build new funnels with the same system.
The PLR funnel includes a front end offer which should be sold for $27 – $47 and then a back-end offer of $47.
As I said earlier in this article, buying a funnel as a product from an expert is a smart move in my opinion if you forensically examine the funnel to see how it has been constructed and then use it as a framework for constructing your own funnels.
It then becomes important to add some additional vital ingredients into the mix – namely, a process to measure and monitor your conversion rates and EPC from the funnel.
I will be testing this funnel and will report back in another post on how I set up the monitoring system and what the results have been from driving traffic to this funnel.
This funnel has already been extensively tested but, in circumstances where you are creating your own sales funnel, you will also need to split-test your pages in order to maximise conversions.
This is not just a theoretical exercise – you can visit the actual sales funnel that I have set up here: http://mark-salmon.com/plugins/
Learning about setting up sales funnels for your business is much easier if you take this approach i.e. learn from an expert before you try to build your first sales funnel.
Later
I’ve sent around 70 clicks to this squeeze page from surplus traffic generated by a friends link rotator and it is converting at around 30% i.e. 21 optins – with higher quality traffic, my friend reckons that it should convert at around 40% or more. I will send more traffic to this page a test it further!
Every entrepreneur has to ask the question ‘What Am I Selling?‘
This is not a superficial question because it is critical to the way in which I market my business.
Charles Revlon said that whilst they manufactured cosmetics, they were really in the business of selling ‘Hope’ – selling ‘hope’ to women who wanted to look more beautiful.
We see this everywhere in brand selling – for example, the current Marks & Spencer Christmas advert weaves a magical illusion of Christmas and only at the end do you realise what is being sold when they post their name – a ‘magical’ Christmas courtesy of their products. (They conveniently ignore the horrendous shopping experience and queues at the tills!)
The same goes with the sale of top-brand cars – they are selling a luxury lifestyle – beautiful women, sharp clothes, perpetual youth and intoxicating sophistication. The car is almost an after-thought and cannot possibly live up to our expectations.
So this got me to thinking about ‘what am I selling?’ Yes, what am I really selling?
It’s certainly not information products about how to create an online business – it’s really much more than that. Yes, it’s a lot more than that!
My business is about offering freedom and independence to those currently working in a job that doesn’t fulfil them.
I did that for 25 years.
Yes, I made a good living but my spirit was strangled and suppressed by the burden of rules and obligation that are a necessary part of the corporate culture.
I wore a suit and tie for 25 years – I haven’t worn one since 2001 (other than for funerals and weddings to comply with social dress-code convention). These are symbols of enslavement to me.
A tie is like a leash around my neck – just squeezing hard enough to remind me gently and persistently that I am in bondage to the organisation.
The rules within a corporate culture can be extremely onerous – you have to comply, whether you agree with them or not if you want to remain a part of the company.
Someone worked out in my last job that every week there were 9 hours of required reading to stay abreast of local and head office bulletins where the rules were continually changed and upgraded.
It became almost a full-time job to keep abreast of the rules!
That’s oppression almost as bad as that in North Korea – it is almost like being watched and examined by the ‘thought-police’.
I did a consulting job for a large non-profit organisation about 9 years ago – it was no better there. This time it was political correctness that ruled the culture due to an over-bearing operations director.
The organisation was looking after people with learning difficulties and you had to very careful with your terminology so as not offend anyone. I hate political correctness and was glad when my assignment ended. It’s just another way of suppressing your thoughts and behaviour.
In every job you get customers you would rather not deal with but have to for one reason or another. In banking it was sometimes because their financial position was very good (or bad).
If a customer was in a bad financial position and you didn’t like them this was the worst position of all because no-one else wanted them and you were stuck with each other in trying to resolve a difficult situation. There’s really no joy in business when you are forced to deal with each other from a position of mutual dislike!
When you are in a job you can often think that the business strategy is crap but you have to comply (or at least be seen to comply).
I well remember a diktat from Head Office in the recession of the early 1990’s requiring us to put up the interest margins for all customers. Ironically, the bank liked to think that we were ‘relationship’ managers i.e. that we nurtured a long-term, supportive relationship with our customers.
I’m not sure how they squared that thought with kicking our customers in the goolies when they were already down and fighting for survival. That sort of treatment is never forgotten and, quite rightly, a relationship of mutual trust is lost forever.
The other problem is that ‘creatives’ are not welcome in an organisation that works by a set of rules – they don’t want you to change things or create anything. In fact you are a dangerous individual if you start to buck the system.
The other factor is the daily commute. My daughter and son-in-law currently have a 3 hour, uncomfortable daily commute into London each day – that’s a massive portion of their life wasted travelling on unreliable public transport!
And it costs them a small fortune in train fares to participate in this madness!
In my bank, the organisation was so vast that they had an internal directory that was a couple of inches thick. The fact is that I couldn’t track down the person responsible if even I had wanted to suggest any changes. The job roles of those responsible for particular services bore no relationship to the actual services themselves!
Of course, starting your own business does not shield you from the absurdities of business. The only reassurance I can offer you in that regard is that at least the absurdities are usually of your own making. You can choose to change them yourself because you alone are responsible for everything that happens, good or bad, in your business.
This is what ‘freedom‘ means. It brings new responsibilities and you have to set your own standards and rules for doing business.
Personally, I would now rather live in a cardboard box than comply with someone else’s rules (- this is why I hate all politicians and particularly those in the EU who are unelected).
Starting your own business allows you to create something that works in a way that fits in with your values and the way you would like to earn a living i.e. doing something that really interests you, in a way that you feel comfortable with.
In many ways the stresses and responsibilities of running your own small business are even greater than being one of the sheeple i.e. a compliant employee creating someone else’s vision of what their business should be. If you fail, then you may have to return to employment to earn a living having had an intoxicating taste of freedom.
That thought alone will drive me to success in my business!
The other big benefit of knowing what you are selling is that you can start to define your target market i.e. who might be interested in what you have to offer. In my case it will be people either looking for a viable exit from their job or who have left a job and want to stay out of a job (like me!)
But first I needed to ask the question ‘What Am I Selling?’ because it is vital that I understand what I am really selling and I think I have the answer. I am selling FREEDOM.
I’ve decided that my next product should be Email-ATM – it’s a product that’s all about email marketing.
In the past, this has not been an great area of strength (or interest) for me:
I’ve lacked a proper strategy
I’ve lacked consistency
I’ve really failed to focus on this area of my business
This is massively stupid because this is a key area for any online business – creating a list and communicating with that list. It’s not as if I don’t know what I should be doing! In the past, I’ve bought a number of products on email marketing and it’s now a question of putting it all into practice.
These are some of the things that I am planning to put into place as I create Email-ATM as a product:
7 day-follow-up series for each list
after 7 days, my lists will receive daily broadcast emails with a mixture of value and promotional information
I will be formatting and structuring my emails better
emails will be created within a relevant framework that makes sense to my customers
emails will be planned for at least 90 days and eventually longer
I will be monitoring open and click through rates with a view to improving my performance
I will be cleaning up my lists on a regular basis
I will create an avatar of my ideal customer
promotions will be carefully selected to be relevant to the storyline of my emails which will follow my consulting framework (see Businessstoryboards)
I’ve already created a number of high value bonuses, (some from PLR material) that I hold:
The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File – this is a collectionof links to free copywriting resources recommended by Warriors on the Warrior Forum
Surefire Solo Ads – this is all about building a list and making money with solo ads
Emails in the Cloud – as you list gets bigger, the costing of sending emails rises. You can mitigate by using ‘the cloud’ to send emails – this training shows you how to use Mail Jet.
Get Response Training – I generally use Aweber as my auto-responder supplier, but it is useful to know about other solutions like Get Response. This training shows you how to maximise your use of Get Response.
Alongside the development of Email-ATM, I am going to put more effort into growing my list as follows:
driving more traffic to
more squeeze pages and funnels (one coach I know has 50!)
better monitoring & testing of my stats and use of split-testing.
increasing my speed of implementation
I have just purchased a ready-made, high-converting affiliate funnel for the first time – I’m going to test this and, if it works, consider purchasing more. At the very least, I intend to reverse-engineer this funnel to see how it was created.
Traffic sources will be:
Facebook Ads
Solo Ads
Promoted YouTube videos
Google Hangouts – I am planning a series of short video workshops that will be keyword optimised.
If you would like access to any of the above bonuses to Email-ATM that are all related to email marketing, then please feel free to make me an offer I can’t refuse! Alternatively, you will have to wait for the launch of this product.
Chris Payne introduced the DEPOT Method at the KISS 2 Event held at Gatwick recently and I subsequently had a consultation with Chris which proved very enlightening.
Firstly let me tell you what the DEPOT Method is. It relates directly to product creation.
When you are planning the creation of a product you must ensure that it meets these criteria:
Desperate Problem – your product needs to solve a desperate problem – a problem that needs solving urgently. To do that, you need to understand what pain people in your niche are suffering.
Exactly – your product needs to be exactly what they are looking for. As soon as they see it, they say ‘that’s exactly what I want’.
Proof galore – show that people similar to your prospect are getting amazing results with your product
Offer is irresistible – when they see your offer, they will think ‘I thought it would cost more than that.’ Show them how they can get the solution within minutes and remove the risk of buying by offering a guarantee
Time is short – introduce urgency into their decision through scarcity e.g. the price is going up tomorrow/there are only 3 left in stock/ if you buy today you will get an extra bonus.
Chris Payne reviewed my product portfolio and said to me ‘your products are what your customers need but they are not what they want!‘
He said, ‘They won’t sell well because they do not address a desperate problem.’
Initially this came as an enormous shock to me. I have invested a lot of time and effort into creating my products because I believe that they are what everyone needs to create and grow an online business.
Upon considered reflection, I actually agree with him that they are not what people really WANT! Most people want the ‘easy button’ – a fast and easy way to make money online. That’s what most marketers are marketing but when you have purchased as many products as I have (see last post) then you realise that this is a big lie. There is no ‘easy’ way to build a business – it takes work and building your business around a proven model.
We actually need to build a list, create valuable products for your list, build a sales funnel with higher value products and then generate traffic (preferably by recruiting affiliates) – this is a solid way to build a sustainable online business.
So my strategy now is to build smaller front-end products that conform exactly to the DEPOT Method i.e. sell them what they WANT (on the basis of one problem/one solution) and then educate my customers into investing in my other products or coaching to build the kind of business they really NEED – one that is built on solid principles and foundations.
This week I filled out a questionnaire about my business – one of the questions was something like ‘what internet marketing products have you bought?’
My first reaction was that there are so many, where to I start with a question like that? Here’s a quick peak at my hard disc:
As you can see, I have either purchased or acquired a huge number of internet marketing products over a period of just under 5 years. Have a pretty good understanding of all aspects of the internet marketing niche.
The problem is that when I view the full extent of these purchases I realise that I am an addict for information about online business and internet marketing and there are plenty of other people who have similar stories to tell. This is what makes it a great niche to be in if you are an information marketer – buyers do not just buy one product, but multiple products, such is the breadth and extent of the skills and topics you need to master.
If I was starting out again, I would recommend that a beginner finds a good mentor. Selection of a mentor should be carried out very carefully because I have also made one or two bad choices in that regard too!
Expensive as a coach or mentor may seem, it will not be as expensive in terms of abortive products or wasted time as trying to go it alone, I can assure you of that having made this mistake myself.
Whilst internet marketing can seem very complicated, at the heart of the internet marketing model it is very simple.
You need to be able to drive targeted to an offer. Now I started out trying to master SEO and had some success with my blog at http;//businessrenegade.co.uk by getting it into the top 1% of websites in the world for traffic according to Alexa.com. But I was not really converting that traffic to sales.
So you also need to master the art of converting traffic to sales through list building and copy-writing and making offers that are irresistible. You also need to master the art of email marketing because following up with the people on your list is a vital part of creating a relationship of trust with your prospects and customers.
As part of this process, you also need to start making your own products so that you have something to offer or create a service based on any skills that you have. This is not difficult to do when you understand a simple process for doing so – I set all this out in my products such as Product Creation Renegade and Membership Millionaires Bootcamp.
Here is an image of some of my products or forthcoming products:
This Sunday I am having a consultation with Chris Payne, who is a highly successful product creator and consultant. He sold $3m dollars of one of his products and at one stage was sending out over 1m direct mail letters a year for his various products in the personal development niche.
Chris calculated that he has spent over $320,000 on his own education, so perhaps he’s an even bigger information junkie than I am!
Chris has a number of interesting ideas on product creation and after this Sunday, I will know more.
For example, he creates his products based on the DEPOT framework:
find a Desperate problem
give them Exactly what they are looking for
provide Proof galore
make an Offer that is irresistible
Time is short i.e. introduce some scarcity into the offer
I also like his ideas about generating products quickly – he produces a minimum viable product and then only if that is successful in the marketplace does he build out the product idea.
Anyway, I am hoping that we can produce a new product in collaboration together – hopefully, I will know more about this after Sunday. The meeting of two information addicts should be an interesting experience.
You are probably already aware that emails in the cloud are a great way of reducing the long-term cost of your email marketing.
The popular email auto-responders like Aweber and Get Response have conditioned us into believing that we need to pay more the bigger our list gets and the more emails that we send out.
Amazon AWS offers emails in the cloud but as far as I can see you need to be a technical wiz to get this up and running.
I was therefore interested to find comprehensive video training on a cloud service called MailJet . The creator of the training has looked at the alternatives available in the marketplace and settled on this service as being a great option.
If you are wondering how much you can save versus your existing email provider then this pricing page will give you a good reason for buying access to this training.
I have placed the training on the new membership site that I am building called Email-ATM.com as a bonus but for the time being you can purchase separate access to this bonus just for reading this article!
I will still use Aweber for the time being in addition to setting up emails in the cloud until I have tested this service more extensively.
This week I have been reviewing the thorny question – where to get traffic from?
This is one of the most pressing questions that I have at the present moment.
I have plenty of products and I now need to start promoting what I have created. A number of my sales letters require a bit of improvement but I am guessing about this until I start sending traffic to them and monitoring the conversions.
With my first blog at http://businessrenegade.co.uk, I had quite a bit of success in attracting SEO traffic simply due to the quantity of posts on that blog. However, conversion of this traffic to actual money was disappointing.
Why was that?
I think that without making a personal connection with the reader, whilst the information on that blog is valuable, the information in and of itself is pretty dry.
I therefore need to concentrate on a number of factors to make my content more attractive:
try to make my content entertaining as well as informative
introduce more of myself – probably in the form of audio and video
keep the quality of information extremely high
to differentiate the presentation of the information – perhaps through higher quality copy, images and outstanding presentation
I also need to state the intent of my business with greater clarity and passion so that subscribers to my blog and content know exactly what they are subscribing to i.e. how to start and grow an online business that generates an income of at least $100,000 p.a..
I also need to target a segment of the market and speak directly to an ‘avatar’ in order to make a connection. In my mind, it only makes sense to target people exactly like myself who have left a job in order to find freedom and independence through starting their own online business.
I understand these people’s feelings, and the problems they are facing, with intimacy and can empathise with their journey.
Having first sorted out exactly what I stand for, and will be delivering in the way of content and products, and exactly who I want to help, I can turn my attention to methods for driving traffic.
I have in mind 3 or 4 alternatives:
#1 Facebook Ads
Advertising on Facebook makes perfect sense to me:
it is where my target market is on a daily basis
I can target my market very, very precisely with my advertising
I can build an audience and add them to my list over time using strategies such as surveys ( a strategy set out in List Liberation)
done properly, you can scientifically measure return on investment
With this in mind, I have spent 1 day this week going through some excellent Facebook Advertising Tutorials on Learn to Blog (formerly WP Classroom)
#2 Webinars
Webinars have the highest potential of converting attendees to buyers (apart from perhaps Live Events). With the advent of Google Hangouts on Air, the technology is no longer a barrier and it will enable me to make an instant personal connection to my audience.
Google Hangouts also rank very well in Google if I optimise the title of the webinar with keywords.
I invested in Webinar Alchemy by Stephen Renton this week – done properly, webinars have enormous potential. (This was another day of training.)
Again it is important to monitor traffic, registrations, attendance and sales conversions to understand my ROI.
As I also own a copy of Evergreen Business Systems, which enables me to automate webinars, I have all the tools necessary for this strategy.
It will also be possible to get webinar registrations, by leveraging Facebook Ads.
#3 YouTube Marketing
I also think there is enormous potential for creating short videos and placing them on both Facebook and YouTube. Then using both Facebook Advertising and YouTube PPC to promote them to drive traffic to a landing page. The PPC stats will enable me to measure advertising ROI precisely.
(I am moving away from SEO as a means of driving traffic (although I will still do some optimisation for keywords from force of habit) because ROI is not as easy to measure – it requires that you convert your time to a cost. I suspect that if everyone did this, they would abandon SEO. Also, the changes in Google algorythm pretty much place your business and traffic at the mercy of Google. For this reason, I now regard SEO traffic as a bonus rather than my main source of traffic.)
Creating short videos is easy with tools like Camtasia 8 and Easy Video Suite – both of which I own. I have also updated this week to Microsoft 2013 – this gives me the potential for creating Powerpoint animations.
#4 Recruit Affiliates
Marc Milburn, my coach is a great advocate of recruiting affiliates to drive traffic. I agree but initially it is difficult to get them to promote for you if:
I am relatively unknown
I have no previous track record online
I cannot show that I have a sales funnel that converts
This is why it is important to get some initial traffic using the other means available so I can approach affiliates with a professional and well thought-out proposition.
However, none of the above should deter me from connecting with potential affiliates and persevering. For this purpose, approaching them for an interview and getting to know them, and how I can connect with them, is a smart strategy
Conclusion
In answering the question – where to get traffic from – I’m going to start with Facebook Advertising and mix in the other strategies if I have time. It is important for me not lose focus by attempting too many strategies at once.
‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ is a book written by Joseph Campbell.
The first time that I heard about this book was from Chris Payne at the KISS 2 seminar last weekend 19th/20th October 2013.
Apparently, both the storyline of Star Wars and also The Lion King are built around the framework that was outlined in ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’.
Chris Payne told us that this was an excellent story framework to use when selling yourself as a coach or consultant (or indeed in any setting) as our life stories almost always follow the pattern set out in the book.
The basic framework is as follows (taken from the notes of his talk):
The hero is stuck in a wasteland
He/she receives a call to adventure
Initially he/she refuses the call
Then accepts the call
Meets a mentor
Crosses the threshold into a whole new world
Encounters adventures
Things get worse
The hero then triumphs and transforms
The hero returns home and shares what she/he has learned i.e. brings back the elixir
This story framework does indeed mirror my own experience with internet marketing.
I wanted to get online as a business consultant but didn’t have the necessary computer skills. I was in the wasteland!
I initially started with internet marketing by going to a local college to learn how to create a website with Dreamweaver. All the students were at different levels of skills and the whole experience was a nightmare. But I had received the ‘call to adventure’ – I was desperate to express myself online.
However, the experience at the local college put me off – I was no longer confident that I could do it. I ‘refused the call’
To promote my business consultancy, I was part of a local BNI Group to network with local businesses. One of these businesses was a network marketer called Avril who signed me up to the Telecoms Plus network marketing opportunity.
It only took a short while trying to generate leads offline before I realised that I needed to generate leads online or risk losing all of my friends and family.
In 2009, my sister then introduced me to Ann Sieg and her partner, Mike Klingler, who were teaching internet marketing skills online to network marketers.
It was in this comprehensive training, for which I was paying $33 per month, that I was introduced to WordPress. My love of internet marketing took off from that point – I accept the call as a result of meeting my first mentor.
Of course, the subsequent 3/4 years have been a real adventure, because I quickly transitioned from wanting to generate leads for my network marketing opportunity to providing internet marketing services to offline businesses.
This part of my journey is documented on http://businessrenegade.co.uk (- incidentally, at one time Alexa listed this site as being in the top 1% in the world as far as traffic is concerned which proves that I also know a little bit about SEO.)
Rather than focusing on one business niche and one service, of course, I made the mistake of trying to be all things to all men and learn a lot of different skills. This led me into thinking that I don’t want to mess around with local businesses.
I discovered that most local businesses have been badly treated by so called web design experts who have charged them a lot of money and given them a website that doesn’t perform. As a result they are rightly suspicious of anyone offering internet services – the motto is ‘one bitten, twice shy’.
I am constantly shocked how web designers and SEO companies are ripping off small businesses and leveraging the business owners ignorance of the internet. (99% of business websites receive hardly any traffic and are therefore almost totally ineffective in my opinion.)
Converting offline businesses to customers ethically requires that you have the patience to educate them about what it really takes to succeed online or alternatively take their money and give them something that you know won’t work (which is what most people do!)
I therefore decided that I would prefer to create information products that teach what I have learnt about internet marketing in an ethical way.
So as you can see, for a while things got worse as I explored many blind avenues and I have been through many adventures and created many websites in the process of getting to where I am today.
In May this year, I hooked up with Marc Milburn as my coach and started implementing the strategy he outlined. In a very real sense this was the point at which your ‘hero with a thousand faces’ – me 🙂 – triumphs and transforms. Since that time I have been highly productive by creating this new blog and numerous products that I can now promote.
I now have a solid business plan and strategy that I know will work and I am loving doing what I do.
[features_box_grey width=”75%” + border=”2px”]My products have been created to share what I have learned on my journey so far. For example:
The Sky Inside sets out the mindset required to succeed in any business, including internet marketing, and the time management strategies that I use to be as productive as possible as a self-employed entrepreneur
Easy Web Page Graphics that covers how to create stunning images and graphics because websites are a very visual medium and graphics are very important
Outsourcing Renegade that will cover the opportunities for outsourcing to scale your business
Business Creation Mastery which will be my high-end coaching programme bringing everything together
In addition to these products, I want to cover various traffic strategies. For example, I am helping a friend of mine to put together a traffic product about solo ads called Solo Ads Assassin. As a quid pro quo, he is selling my products on the back-end of his funnel.
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If you are not convinced about the value of telling stories in your business, then read this article to see evidence of how stories can add huge value to any brand, product or service – in one experiment, stories added 2,706% to the value of the products concerned! In the circumstances where YOU are the brand (as in the case of people like consultants and coaches), then it is critically important that you tell your own story.
As you can see from my own story, in a very real sense I am bringing back the elixir for others to partake of and my story definitely follows the framework set out in ‘the hero with a thousand faces’.
If you have a similar story, I would love to hear it – alternatively, you may still be ‘in the wasteland’. Let me know below where you think you are on your business or life journey!
I was alerted to the profit potential of self-publishing books when I met Christine Clayfield at the KISS 2 seminar on 19th October 2013.
I already knew about Christine – I had bought her eBook ‘From Newbie to Millionaire’ off the Warrior Forum some time ago. This book is around 500 pages and is all about internet marketing. For several years it has ranked in the top 3 for the keyword ‘Make Money Online’ on Amazon – and that’s a very, very competitive keyword!!
However, Christine has been concentrating on self-publishing books over the last 3 or 4 years and is now making 7 figures.
I had no idea that there was so much money to be made from self-publishing books. She now has around 70 books published with many more in the pipeline.
Each book averages around £2,261.50 per month or £27,138 per annum, some less, some more.
With just 10 books, you can make £271, 380 per year and with 20 books £542,760 per year with Christines system. Her self-publishing system is different in that she creates multiple formats and publishes worldwide.
Christine outsources the writing of each of her books for around $500 and pays up to $500 for the sales letter. Apart from this, the costs of distribution are around $54 including purchase of the ISBN number and uploading the book and cover.
The skill is in coming up with an idea and doing the keyword research to ensure that there is demand and that you can compete for top spots in Amazon and elsewhere.
The big difference between her course and the other book publishing courses you can buy, is that she literally gets worldwide distribution in most major outlets where you can buy books both online and offline!
Christine has created a comprehensive video course (over 23 hours of content) showing her exact step-by-step system. Once completed, she does nothing more and the income from her books just come rolling in.
In fact so successful has she been, she is now translating her books into many languages for even more income potential.
A Great Passive Income Opportunity
I have to tell you that before I met Christine, I had no intention whatsoever of going into self-publishing because I didn’t think there was enough money in it compared to my information marketing model.
She has convinced me otherwise and the fact that it is a real passive-income opportunity makes it very appealing i.e. you do the work once and continue to get income rolling in for years to come without lifting another finger.
Whilst I cannot get moving on self-publishing my own books in the short-term, because of other work commitments, I nevertheless bought her course (along with many of the other attendees on the KISS 2 seminar) so that I can dig into this opportunity when I have more time.
If you would like more information about this, then here’s the link to her sales page:
P.S. On a personal note, I really liked Christine – I had the opportunity to speak to her personally at length in the bar.
She had a very difficult life up until around the age of 30 (when her first husband beat her into a coma.) This difficult start to the first half of her life has made her a person who is very driven to succeed. This is why her course is so comprehensive – she wants to give us the best product and service she is able to to valid her own success and self-worth. It is rare for someone to show you their complete system on how to make money online from self-publishing books, so I highly recommend that you tuck this one away!
Do you remember Dire Straits and their song ‘Money For Nothing ‘ – this sums up information marketing because all the information that people are looking for is out there on the internet for free.
So why do people buy info-products if they can get the information for free?
It mainly has to do with convenience and speed – if we can aggregate, sort and organise information for other people, who have busy lives, and provide a short-cut to the information they are seeking, this is valuable and well-worth paying for.
However, a lot of the work that we do online is essentially free in order to position ourselves as someone who our readers can ‘know, like and trust’ BEFORE they invest in a paid product.
However, the importance of charging for information cannot be under-estimated and I have therefore copied an extract from a very good article by Michael Hyatt that explains why it is important to charge for our products and services:
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This forced me to get very clear about why charging for my work is not only acceptable but essential. Rather than feel guilty, I’m convinced it’s important for at least three reasons.
Because of how it changes your mindset When you start charging for your services, you go from being an amateur to being a pro. You are suddenly more accountable.
It matters if you show up. You don’t get paid if you don’t.
It matters if you do quality work. People won’t buy if you don’t.
It matters if you are consistent. You won’t get repeat customers or grow your business if you don’t.
In short, when you charge, you respect yourself and your own work more. It creates value in your own mind.
Because of how it improves your customers’ experience. People don’t respect what they get for free. There are exceptions, I’m sure, but not many. I have seen this time and time again.For example, I occasionally give away free tickets to one of my conferences. Often, the people who get them don’t come to half the sessions—or don’t pay attention when they do. Worse, they sometimes cancel at the last minute, not realizing I still incur costs.The truth is that until people make an investment, they are not invested in the outcome. This is why I now always make sure they pay something and have “skin in the game.”But charging also improves the user-experience. Recently, I bought a very high-end marketing course. It cost me almost $2,000.You can bet I just didn’t stick it on the shelf and forget about it. Instead, I rearranged my entire schedule, so I could get up an hour earlier and work through the material.Because I paid so much, I was more focused, more committed to working through every exercise, and more determined to apply the principles to my business.The author of the course promised that it would be life-changing. But it’s only true if the students follow-through on his teaching. The fact that he charged so much for the course improved the chances of that happening.
Because of how it impacts the world. This is the most compelling reason of all to me. Charging for your services is a necessity if you are going to support your family. If you don’t charge, you won’t be doing what you do for long.But even more importantly, making money provides you with the opportunity to share with those in need. The more you make, the bigger impact you can have.In fact, within the bounds of my calling and ethical practice, I believe I have the moral obligation to make as much money as I can. Why? Because there are people in need, and I have the opportunity to help them.
When I was in consulting, I was told that people will not value that which they get for free.
It is totally true.
If you’ve ever paid for information then you will know that you are much more motivated to take action on it and get a return on your investment.
I also think that many of us under-estimate just how much value we each have to offer – we are all unique with enormous potential for creativity. It’s just a question of honouring that potential by taking some action.
Whilst your first product might be slightly horrible, if you keep working on the skill of product creation you will quickly improve.
If you haven’t yet got a product or service that you can offer then you might like to take a quick peak at this video of Marlon Sanders about the need to complete your product – if you’ve got a lot of half-finished projects sitting on your hard-disc, then this could be the kick up the backside that you need:
If you can complete you half-done projects then perhaps you too can start earning money for nothing from the ‘digital dust’ on your computer! On the other hand, you might like to invest in my product – Product Creation Renegade – if you don’t yet know where to start with this ‘Money For Nothing’ info-marketing model!
The Way of the Warriors is coming 15th January 2014
I have finally moved The Way of the Warriors (- this is my membership site that has a high-value eBook on a proven internet marketing strategy-) onto the launch pad – it is scheduled for launch on 15th January 2014.
Why so long you may ask? There are a number of reasons:
I need to sort out the sales funnel – in particular I need to change the current sales funnel and I want to upgrade the sales letters in parts of the funnel – particularly the one for Product Creation Renegade.
it is important to get the Christmas season out of the way
most importantly, I need time to recruit affiliates… and lots of them. In fact, for 2 months prior to the launch, this will be my main task.
With regards to the revised sales letter, I want to try some high-quality Photoshop sales letter designs that I have acquired. These have high visual appeal. It will be interesting to compare them with the ‘down-and-dirty’ style of the Paper Template plugin that I normally use for sales letters.
Armand Morin’s Lead Generation Strategy
This week I have been thinking about how to increase the number of people joining my list. With this view in mind, I started to create some free eBooks to give away.
Then last night I was catching up on the recordings of Armand Morin’s Webcamp and was gob-smacked to discover that he is ‘too lazy’ to create give-aways. He then explained that by giving away some free-stuff in return for the optin you are doing two things:
letting the prospect off the hook psychologically – they’ve given you the optin in return for your free gift – so they are less likely to buy the subsequent offer in the funnel. He then explained that when he started out as a hoover salesman he would never accept a drink or anything from his prospective customer until he had closed the sale i.e. the customer lessened the obligation created by giving them his time through giving him a drink of water.
second, the prospect will have an excuse to delay a decision to buy i.e. ‘I’ll read the free gift before I decide whether to buy’.
He therefore creates an optin page that just piques their curiosity e.g. ‘To find out how to lose 12 pounds within 24 hours – just click here’ – after opting in the prospect is taken straight to the weight-loss sales letter.
This enables him to create multiple optin pages for the same sales letter – he likes to create 30 optin pages for the same sales letter, each addressing a different reason why a person should lose weight e.g.
lose weight after child-birth
lose weight for your wedding
lose weight for your holiday
lose weight to due to diabetes
lose weight to look better
lose weight to run faster
and so on
Each optin page will then have 5 or 6 adverts – each advert is matched to the optin page – same issue, same image so that you directly address the issue that caused the person to click on the ad – this obviously leads to higher conversions. The issue is dealt with as a bullet point in the generic lose-weight sales letter and the person naturally assumes that the letter is speaking to them.
Here are some of the rules that he adopts with this strategy:
he can create multiple optin pages fast using a free plugin called Post Duplicator that simply creates a duplicate of the optin page and you only then need to make a couple of changes to create an entirely new optin page
create one optin page at a time and get it converting at 20% or more
the sales page must convert at 3% or more
if both these conversion rates are in place, he calculates that he can make any advertising pay
he tracks conversions using Link Trackr (- this has a monthly recurring cost and I therefore think that a tool like Quality Click Control is ultimately cheaper to use)
you can increase sales page conversions by having a $1 trial (- this needs to be tested to see whether your ultimate sales take is better as your refund rate might be higher too!)
If you create 30 optin pages that convert at the required level, as Armand advocates, then you get potentially massive leverage and results.
Let me know in the comments section below what you think of this strategy.
The KISS 2 Event at Gatwick 19th/20th October 2013
I am attending this event tomorrow – getting up at 5.30 a.m. to drive down to this event. Here is the agenda:
Saturday 19th October
8.15 – 9.00 Registration and coffee
9.00 – 10-30 Martin Avis
11.00 – 12.30 Christine Clayfield on Self Publishing
12.30 – 1.45 Lunch and networking
1.45 – 3.15 Cassie Hicks Kerr on Product Creation
4.00 – 5.30 Rob Cornish “Step-By-Step: How To Make Thousands Online By Harnessing The Power Of Software”
5.30 Martin Avis with a surprise guest!
Sunday 20th October
8.30 – 9.00 Coffee
9.00 – 9.15 Martin Avis
9.15 – 10.45 Christopher Payne on Product Creation
11.15 – 12.45 Neil Stafford “Public Domain For Fun and Profit”
12.45 – 2.00 Lunch and networking
2.00 – 3.30 Sarah Staar “Now Sell It!”
4.15 – 5.45 Martin Avis – “The Profit-Pulling Power of PLR”
I met Rob Cornish at Alex Jeffries event earlier this year. Rob is one of the marketers whose emails do get through to my inbox. In fact, it was one of his posts that stopped me from buying Optimize Press 2 – he is definitely one of the good guys in my opinion.
I also bought Christine Clayfield’s epic eBook entitled ‘From Newbie to Millionaire’ – she is definitely an over-achiever so I am looking forward to meeting her. I know less about the other speakers but suffice it to say, I am going to the event with my networking hat on!
Hopefully I can start recruiting some potential affiliates for The Way of the Warriors launch on 15th January 2014 – we shall see!
Training can prevent us from taking action. This is one of my weaknesses – I love learning new things!
But it’s all completely useless unless you take action and pass on the value to others. Money does not flow until you do that.
It’s great to feed your intellect and be comfortable in the fact that you have skills but the real learning comes when you take action. You then find out how the theory translates into reality and you start improving your performance based on actual results.
Over the past week, I have indulged in too much training which prevented me from taking ACTION!
Webcamp with Armand Morin
I spent 2 days last weekend listening to Armand Morin at his Webcamp in Las Vegas – the topic was ‘residual income’.
I was completely gobsmacked when he revealed that, as an affiliate of Powerpay, he is receiving between $40,000 and $80,000 every month in affiliate commission for doing NOTHING. He has plans to boost that to $200,000 per month. He actually opened up his affiliate account and he has been receiving huge sums of money each and every month for many years.
That’s where I want to be!
He revealed a number of cool ways for making residual income, including newsletters, Facebook Groups, Google Plus Groups, Membership sites and recurring income affiliate programmes. I am eagerly awaiting the recordings of the event to to recap some of the material.
I paid $27 to attend the live broadcast and, whilst he pitched a lot of his products, there was incredible value given from time-to-time throughout the weekend. I admired the way that he actually demonstrated what he was teaching via a laptop on the stage – very authentic.
He is holding monthly or bi-monthly Webcamps and I will certainly be attending more.
KISS Event at Gatwick Airport on Product Creation
Next weekend I am going to the KISS Event at Gatwick Airport near London on 19th/20th October 2013. The theme is about product creation – I don’t feel that I need a lot more tuition in this area but I think the networking opportunity will be valuable. There are 6 speakers and I know 3 of them. I want to get myself known in the right circles for affiliate recruitment purposes!
The cost of this event is £127 (about $200) plus accommodation – I felt rather better about this when my sister sent me an email from Malaysia (stopping off on the way back from a speaking event in the US) saying she needed to raise £15,000 to get more training on how to improve her already good speaking skills. Apparently she was chosen to progress by the event organiser – lucky her!!!
The ‘Solo Ads Assassin’ Project Progresses
I have been helping Daniel Madeira to set up his membership site throughout the week – he is starting to create the content and we have sorted out the graphics , so that project is progressing nicely.
Coincidentally I bought my first WSO for a while called ‘31,525 in 59 days’ – this is about how a warrior built a list of 31,525 in 59 days – on the sales page he recorded it as it was happening on a video. I had to find out how he was doing it – it turns out that he was throwing solo ad traffic at the squeeze page! Matt Bacek was behind the product and he revealed that in his business (which was not the business in which this list was built) he spends $250,000 per month on solo ads!
Business Storyboards Progresses
I have also created more content for my strategy membership site called ‘Business Storyboards’ – I created 10 or 11 videos in a spurt of creativity last Monday morning and then ran out of energy! I have also managed to reorganise my thinking about this product on a mind map and I am reorganising the membership site as a result.
Photoshop Actions
I also discovered an incredible free resource of Photoshop Actions for marketers – I am now able to create all sorts of highly professional marketing graphics as a result.
Today I re-wrote a PLR eBook on Focus as a front-end free product leading into The Sky Inside membership product. The book is actually fairly high quality for a PLR product and I have formatted it nicely so it is now a very valuable product indeed. I am in the process of building a squeeze page here – http://mark-salmon.com/focus-offer/ .
Tony Robbins said this about ‘Focus’:
Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.
Here is the eBook cover I created with Photoshop Actions:
As you can see, I am now very conscious of my branding and all my eCovers will reflect my brand from now on. I will be producing more front-end offers in order to start building my list faster and in order to create sales funnels into my paid products.
I also badly need to start promoting myself on weekly or even daily webinars. I see people with less talent making more money than me and I am getting annoyed with myself so I have to keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and not a sprint – I am building for the long-term, rather than the short-term, according to a strategic plan!!
YouTube Marketing
Finally, I bought a small product on YouTube marketing by a guy called Nick Breen – this too is an incredible traffic method. He shows you how to create short videos and get them ranked quickly using PPC to give the videos an initial push. Definitely a good traffic system.
So much to do and so little time to do it in! I just need to make sure that all this training does not prevent me from taking action i.e. to implement what I am learning. Ironic that my eBook above is about ‘focus’ – this is exactly what I need to do!
Part of my traffic strategy is video marketing so I have recently been thinking about my branding with video intros.
It is very easy to get a sophisticated video intro from either Fiverr.com or VideoHive.com but in the end I decided to create a simple video intro of my own.
Personally I don’t like long video intros, as I always want to ‘get to the meat’ as quickly as possible and a video intro often stands in the way of that. Seeing the intro the first time is cool but it gets progressively less cool if you watch the same intro time after time!
I therefore decided on another route – buy a nice piece of music and make my own intros.
Here is an example of 10 second, 30 second and 43 second intros from the same piece of music with different backgrounds – all are ‘home-made’ by me.
These were simple to make and I think they are a little more sophisticated than a ‘whiz bang’ animated intro… but that’s just my personal taste. What do you think?
CLICK THE IMAGES TO PLAY THE VIDEOS
43 seconds in blue
30 seconds in green
10 seconds in orange
I would be interested in your comments and feedback on the topic of branding with video intros – do you like this style or do you think that something a little more whizzy is required?
I somehow doubt it but that’s what I have been thinking about during the last week – branding (my days as a lover have long since finished!)
I have produced the following graphics on Photoshop to help brand my business – it only took a couple of hours:
The one I particularly like is the green can – it is slightly different and therefore calls attention.
The Solo Ads Assassin Membership Site
I am also helping Daniel Madeira with his Solo Ads Assassin Membership Site.
He has produced a very nice eBook about his solo ads business and I helped to proof-read the book. I also created the following eCover:
And this is the first draft of the header image for the site:
As a ‘quid pro quo’ for my work, Daniel is planning to promote my own products on the back-end of his funnel as a logical follow on i.e. I have a list, what do I do now? The answer is to build a sales funnel of relevant products to drive traffic to.
So some of my products like ‘Product Creation Renegade’ and ‘Membership Millionaires Bootcamp’ may be ideal follow-on products – Daniel will link to them with an affiliate link so we share the income.
Free License File Creator
Through my membership of Earn1KADay, I acquired the Master Resale Rights to a piece of software called License File Creator. It helps creators of digital products, like me, to create a PDF license file to package with product in seconds.
I have decided to add this software to my site as a free gift for opting in to my list – you can see the link in my sidebar. (As you can see, I have also branded the image on the box to my business!)
WP Affiliate Builder Launch
WP Affiliate Builder was launched this week by Omar Martin & Dave Nicholson – this includes a plugin to help create the affiliate page for digital products.
I did not need this software (as I own WP Affiliate Surge) but I bought WP affiliate Builder twice just to get the bonuses on offer from John Thornhill and Marc Milburn – they have both made some crazy promises and I fully intend to take advantage of their offers to mail their lists and introduce me to their list of affiliates. The way I looked at it was where else could I spend $47 and get exposure to large amounts of potential traffic?
WP Website Wizard Update
WP Website Wizard is my comprehensive training on WordPress – it currently has over 110 videos on various aspects of WordPress. This week I added a further 11 videos about how to speed up page loading times in WordPress. This means that I am offering over 120 short videos for just $47, including a library of graphics and various other bonuses.
I think I will have to revisit my pricing because I am just giving away my knowledge at a crazy low price at the moment and the hosting costs for this product must be relatively high.
My Son Returns To University For His Final Year
I picked my son and his girlfriend up from Heathrow Airport at 7.30 a.m. recently and he returned to Nottingham Trent University on Sunday – so we have also been busy helping him to settle in for his final year.
James & Mercedes have just returned from a month long visit to the USA where they travelled all over the country – California, Napa Valley, Bishop, Death Valley, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Florida before taking a weeks cruise around the Caribbean. I don’t know how they do it on a students income?
I’m attending Webcamp Tomorrow
I’m attending Webcamp, which is over 3 days, starting tomorrow. It is 3 days of training on How to Create Lifetime Monthly Residual Income.
It is streamed live over the 3 days and there is access to the recordings after the event. Cost is $27 which is a crazy low price.
This is the affiliate link of Andrew Hunter who brought this to my attention http://pluginresults.com/likes/webcamp. The course is run by Armand Morin who has generated over $80m online, so he ought to know what he is talking about!
The End of Another Busy Week
Whilst I may not have answered the question ‘Does Branding Make You A Better Lover?‘, I would love your feedback about the branding images that I created or indeed anything else that takes your fancy!
Hope you have a great day and thanks for dropping by.
I didn’t know what to title this post so I just came up with ‘A week in my life as an internet marketer’ because it covers a lot of different aspects of my activities.
Before I get into the meat of the article, I just want to mention that I have rewritten my ‘About’ page after watching a video that said that readers are interested in your back story and how you came to be involved in internet marketing.
I think my rewrite is a lot better than the original page, so hopefully you will find it interesting – Here’s my new ‘About’ page http://mark-salmon.com/about/
My Favourite Internet Marketing Tool
My favourite internet marketing tool (apart from WordPress) is Easy Video Suite. It is very simple to use and extremely powerful – Josh Bartlett, the creator of Easy Video Suite, created this video on how the desktop app works – I think you will find that it is incredible. If you want more details on Easy Video Suite click here.
Business Creation Mastery
Business Creation Mastery is a coaching programme that I am planning based on my consulting and internet marketing experience about creating an online business. It’s a kind of mini-mba for people who want to start an online business or who have started and are wondering which pieces of the pieces of the puzzle they are missing.
Most of the products and training online do not cover all the necessary bases – this one will. It will be supported by every other product that I have created so far – they are all part of my masterplan!
I have started creating the coaching site using Instatheme and Instamember – I picked the developers version of these plugins up at a bargain price – they have just relaunched Instamember and I think that it is a very worthwhile investment. It is not as easy as Membersonic to setup but it does have some extra features that Membersonic does not like:
a developers license
revolving affiliate payment buttons i.e. you only need one sales letter
an inbuilt help desk
your own affiliate programme. if you want to set it up
the ability to integrate Instamember with a wide variety of affiliate platforms including Deal Guardian
you can create discounts and coupons
a system for creating licenses if you are selling software within your membership site
However, extra features mean more complexity and more things that can potentially go wrong, which is why I like Membersonic so much. Even so, I am going to give Instamember a trial on my coaching site because some of the extra features will be useful.
Here is the Dashboard for this new site:
Justin Glover’s 11-Step Process
I invested $19 in a product by Justin Glover which was a video presentation for his coaching programme – a video of about 2 hours.
This is a really high quality product that makes it perfectly clear exactly what is involved in building a high converting sales funnel. You really need to get the product to see all the details – for the money it is an absolute steal – but the order in which he approaches this is really quite instructive:
The 11 Step Process:
First he plans out his product and sales funnel
Then he creates his email follow-up and sales letter/video – this was new to me – creating the sales materials before you create the product.
Then he creates the content/products i.e. products for each part of the funnel
Then he creates the funnel
Then he creates a plan for generating traffic in phase 1 using one paid method and one free method
He then executes on that plan – very focused for 21 days on just getting traffic
He then analyses the conversions and identifies possible improvements
He then makes those improvements to the sales funnel
He then creates an updated traffic plan in phase 2, this time involving affiliates (because he now has some conversion stats)
He then executes on his affiliate recruitment traffic plan for 21 days – again, he totally focuses on this phase.
He then rinse and repeats through steps 7 to 11
I love this because he puts a time frame on each part of the process which covers 17 weeks in total. There are some real nuggets of wisdom that he drops along the way. However, for most people, it would be too much to execute on, which is where his back-end offer comes in.
Fortunately, due to my training with Marc Milburn I feel confident that I have the ability to set up such a funnel having already set up sales funnels already – you can pick up my free eBook on sales funnels here!
It’s just that Justin has laid out his exact process and that is incredible value for $19 in my opinion.
He was quoted ‘HOW MUCH’ for a website?
One of my offline friends was quoted £10,000 for a website on a .co.uk domain. I told him he would be crazy to even consider such a proposition.
I was helping him to resolve an issue with his domain registrar and I noticed that he had the unused .com of the same domain. So without telling him, I redirected the nameservers for the .com to my own server and created the website in WordPress and 3 hours later sent him the link to the new website.
He was blown away by what I produced for him and immediately contacted his existing webmaster (on whom he had waited for weeks to get some simple images added to the site) and removed all his business from them in my favour.
I wasn’t really after his business – just wanted to prove that he was being ripped off. Anyway here’s the site I created http://businessgardens.com (mobile responsive) and this was the site it replaced http://businessgardens.co.uk (not mobile ready). I could have produced something a lot better with a budget and more time but I was just making a point that some web designers are taking advantage of their customers lack of knowledge.
Live Networking Event & 6 in 6 Coaching
A couple of years ago I invested in Jason Fladlien & Wil Mattos’s 6-in6 Coaching Programme. I think I initially invested $97 for 12 coaching sessions and I have been fortunate in that the coaching has continued with new coaching sessions every 2 weeks and we are now up to well over 50 coaching sessions with no sign of it ending.
Needless to say, I think it costs a lot more than $97 to join now and you need to get on a waiting list to join (positioning), to reflect all the coaching material now on the site.
A few weeks a ago they had a session on offline networking, so I decided to attend my first local offline networking meeting in 4 years last night. This was an incredible experience for me – as I was talking to the small businesses, I realised, for perhaps the first time, just how far ahead I had moved in my knowledge of internet marketing.
The speaker (in his 60’s and a highly repected member of the business community) was talking about how we must dress to impress for our meetings – I was thinking that offline meetings are somewhat passe given current online technology which now means that you do not have to move from behind your desk to hold a meeting. It really doesn’t matter what I wear when I am marketing online.
I realise, of course, that nothing beats a face-to-face meeting to build the ‘know, like and trust’ factor but absolutely nothing was said about online meetings in the presentation and technologies such as Google Hangouts and Skype. The speaker really had very little of value to offer the audience because what held good a few years ago, has moved on.
Ironically, the meeting organiser was dresses in scruffy cargo shorts and T-shirt, whilst the speaker was in pinstripe suit and tie!
(I chortled out-load when he asked us to name 3 types of banker!)
Offline Business Case Study 1
I met an Armenian architect that had built his own site – this has to be one of the worst sites I have ever seen but he seemed pleased with it! However, he admitted that he had never received any business from it.
I then asked him, apart from offline marketing, how did he market for new business. He said that it was all ‘word of mouth’ but he did do some magazine advertising. I pointed out that the problem with that was that they would look at his website first.
Anyway, I got the impression that he is scratching around for business at a time when he should be rushed off his feet with the current high demand for new housing space in the UK.
I am debating whether to do another freebie to help him – but he did seem to be emotionally attached to his current site and he did make the comment that he was ‘pretty good at marketing’ and his site was ‘ranking well in Google’ (i.e. telling me I couldn’t help him)!
It might be worth creating a generic architect site and telling him that if he doesn’t like it, I will just pass it onto to another architect. (Hmmm perhaps not!)
What do you think?
Offline Business Case Study 2
I got talking to a manufacturer of allergy remedies – he had around 20 products. He has just commissioned an eCommerce site for £3,000 – I’m thinking it would be two days, maximum 5 days, work if they have the product images and virtually zero cost for the software (perhaps $50 for a nice design). He’s already ordered the site so I didn’t make him feel bad about this decision.
Offline Business Case Study 3
Just as I was leaving I was introduced to Shireen – we exchanged business cards. I asked her what she did and how she marketed her business. She is a graphic designer.
At that stage I hadn’t seen her work – when I got home I checked out her site – from the examples of her work, she clearly has a lot of design talent.
Before I left her, I asked her how she was marketing her business. She told me that she loves Twitter – I asked her if she had landed any business from Twitter and what the return on investment was for her expenditure of time on Twitter.
As expected, I didn’t get a good answer, other than she might have a good lead to someone. The problem with social media marketing is that it is promoted as being a ‘free’ marketing method. However, without a good strategy and a way of measuring the return on your investment, I would suspect that most small businesses are simply wasting their time (and time is money).
Also, she really needs to track her links to see how responsive the links in her Tweets are – does anybody click on them? I suspect she doesn’t know because no-one has shown her how to do it.
(To be fair I am being a little hypocritical here because I waste time on Facebook without measuring the ROI but I wanted to make a point about how social media can be a total time-waster.)
Also, the SEO on her nice-looking website (which gets hardly any visitors) sucks but that’s a whole different topic!
The opportunities to help offline businesses are almost a bottomless pit.
Some Favourite Copywriting Swipes
I was reading this old swipe by Gary Halbert this week – it is his personal advert for a new woman! It’s a quite brilliant piece of copy. I don’t need one but, if I ever did, I would model this!
I also swiped this from the Social Triggers blog because it is speaking directly to me – I produce a lot of content but don’t promote it enough. Actually Marc and Manie (in our coaching group) also told me that I needed to do this (- I particularly like the analogy of yelling into a closet!):
After reading this, I’ve GOT to say something…
On Twitter, Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups, said something, and I believe he’s wrong. DEAD wrong.
He said, “If you’re spending more energy promoting and pushing your content than producing it, something is wrong.”
Sigh.
The BIG PROBLEM with what he said is this:
If you currently have NO readership, and you spend all your time creating wonderful content, it’s like you’re yelling into a closet…
…Because where do you expect the readers to come from?
Are they going to fall out of thin air?
Are you going to wait around for the search engines to notice you… and MAYBE send you some readers?
I sure hope not. That sounds like you’re waiting for a handout, to me.
Now In his case, I can see why he thinks creation is the answer.
When you have 100,000 subscribers, or followers, or readers, you don’t need to do the promotion work. Your readers do the work for you.
When you already have domain authority, the more content you add to your site, the more things you can rank for in search engines, thus generating more unique visitors.
But most people are not in that position.
Most people barely crack 10 visitors a day.
And they can add as many articles to their website as they like, and NOTHING will change that…
…unless they spend time promoting their content.
And that’s why I always tell people:
“In the beginning, you should spend 20% of your time creating amazing content, and 80% of your time promoting that content”
To elaborate:
It’s a simple numbers game…
If you write an article, and that article is great, but it only received 1,000 visitors. Chances are there are another million people in the world can benefit from what you just created.
So why would you spend more time creating more content, when you can focus on getting in touch with the people who can benefit from what you already have?
It’s not like companies release new products every single day as a way to reach new customers.
They perfect ONE product, and focus on getting more customers to buy the SAME product.
I treat content the same way.
And so should you.
Come up with ONE amazing piece of content that changes the game. Something like 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelly.
And focus on getting that message heard by EVERYONE who needs to hear it.
Now it may not be possible for you to create a piece of content that changes the world. That type of content is TOUGH.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a piece of content that benefits a specific group of people…
…and then focus on getting in touch with that group of people.
Treat your content as a product. Think about what segments of a market can benefit from what you wrote, and focus on getting those people… segment by segment. Just as if you were marketing a product.
And that’s how you’ll get exponential growth in readership FAST.
How do I know this?
I’ve done it. Multiple times.
My most famous example is Social Triggers.
I launched Social Triggers in March 2011. There were probably ten thousand other marketing blogs (many of which updated daily or several times each day).
Writing great content, and “hoping” to rank in search engines was impossible. There were other blogs spamming the web with content that was ranking, and I had no chance to outrank them.
So, what did I do?
I spent 80% of my time promoting content. And 20% of my time creating content.
And what happened?
In the first 13 months, I went from 0 subscribers to almost 27,000 subscribers.
Here’s the kicker: I averaged 2.53 blog posts each month.
This strategy works so well because in the beginning, when you’re trying to build your readership (or customer base), it’s not about how great your content is.
It’s about how well you get your content into the hands of the right people.
Then, eventually, as you build up your base readership, you can slow down on promotion because your readers will do the work for you.
But you need that base readership.
And the only way to get it is by promoting… not creating.
As a person who loves creating, this is good advice that I have ignored for far too long!
I know that this post is a little random but it does reflect some of the activities that I got up to this week!
Did anything in this post strike a chord with you? If so, please leave a comment as I start yet another week in my life as an internet marketer.
Recently I have been focusing on how to recruit affiliates as my primary source of traffic.
Whilst I have been taught the theory by my coach, Marc Milburn, I have been strangely reluctant to follow his advice. This puzzled me and I therefore requested his help to discover the reason why.
All internet marketers face a problem initially – they have few online friends, few good contacts, no proven track record, and little or no authority. This presents a major hurdle because affiliates will usually prefer to mail for people that they know, like and trust.
Put Yourself in The Shoes Of The Affiliate
Affiliates are only human after all:
they only want to send good quality offers to their list (- as their list is their most important asset.)
they don’t have a great deal of time to check out new products from new marketers
they already have a lot of product offers that they could send to their list – many of them with a proven track record
they want your proposal to be ‘presented on a plate’ – i.e. they want all the relevant information in an easily digestible format so they can make a decision – this is why your JV page or blog is so important. It helps if you have some metrics on how your offer is likely to convert and the Earnings Per Click.
they want to be incentivised with prizes and competitions i.e. top performing affiliates get rewarded for taking action.
However, something that Marc said really resonated with me – he said that he would mail for a friend ahead of any other consideration, such as a great offer or product.
He then said that recruiting affiliates was really about ‘making friends’ with people who have lists in your niche.
So how do you make friends with people who have lists in your niche?
Here are just a few of the ideas I have come up with:
interact with them on Facebook and show that you have some value to offer – good advice, an opinion, a tip, a free product or download for their Group or customers(no subscription necessary)
buy their product and interact with them and their customers within their membership site or product Facebook Group
offer to help them in some way – a testimonial, a service that you can provide, by resolving a problem they may have or you identify
going to live events and meeting them in person
interviewing them and promoting their product at the end of the interview (- give them a copy and a transcription)
supporting their launch and making sales for them as an affiliate
These are just a few suggestions – you can probably think of more.
Act With Purpose
In order to be effective, I think that you must act with purpose i.e. identify who you want as a partner and then deliberately take action to get yourself known to them in a good and ethical way.
Building relationships takes time but think of it as building an asset – it’s not an asset that you can touch, see or even value accurately but nevertheless it is a major asset because a friend will help and support you ahead of any stranger.
In order to act deliberately, set time aside to identify your preferred partners and then record their contact details, website etc on a spreadsheet and then take action to contact them in some way. Record your contact with each of them on your spreadsheet and take deliberate action to start and maintain a relationship with them. If you have access to CRM software like Sage ACT, this is ideal but an Excel spreadsheet will do.
Personally, I like the idea of interviewing potential affiliates because:
you can make a much deeper level of connection and relationship
you can make content or a product out of the interview for the benefit of both parties
both parties can quickly decide if you think the relationship is worth developing
you are not trying to ‘sell’ anything other than a conversation
My Mindset Block
And that brings me back to the mindset block I was having about contacting affiliates – the knowledge that I was trying to ‘SELL’ them on promoting my product.
That word ‘sell’ was the block in my mind. However, at the end of an interview it will be very easy to transition into asking them about what products they have available to promote, and visa versa, don’t you think?
Also, make a friend of them on Facebook and just keep them informed of what you are doing and your blog posts – I think a more natural relationship will develop as a result.
Where To Find Potential Affiliates
You may be wondering where you can find potential affiliates. Here are some good suggestions:
marketers connected to you on Facebook
marketers whose products you have bought
JV’s in JV Facebook Groups – I am a member of at least a dozen such groups
coaching students and colleagues who are taking action to build a list
Google your products keywords and the owners of the websites on the top few pages will no doubt have lists of people that are interested in your product.
vendors of similar products on affiliate platforms like JVZoo, Warrior Plus, Clickbank etc
Finding affiliates is not the main problem – building a solid relationship is much more difficult and time-consuming.
I will be using Skype (and Pamela) and/or Google Hangouts to carry out my interviews – I recently wrote a short eBook about how to use Google Hangouts to make online connections because I think that it is a great way for newbies to get started online – you can simply register here to download a copy of my eBook entitled ‘Quite Possibly THE Best Internet Marketing Business Model for Newbies’ :
Hopefully, this article about how to recruit affiliates will give you some good ideas. Oh, and look out for my interviews with some cool marketers shortly!
In the process of creating a viable management information system for my own online business, I have been thinking about the very essence of making money online.
What are the critical success factors and how can I measure my progress towards achieving them? These are critically important questions because they will determine our daily activities and the actual work we do online.
Here are my current thoughts…
#1 Build Lists
Why you need to do this:
so you can communicate value and offers to people who have an interest in your niche
so you can contact them many times (as most people will not buy until they know, like and trust you.)
you will have the ability to direct traffic on demand and to earn money through doing so
What is a list?
a database of people willing to accept communications from you
the definition of a list can be extended to:
email lists (aweber, get response, icontact, mailchimp, infusionsoft)
social sites
Facebook friends, fans and groups
Twitter followers
YouTube subscribers
LinkedIn colleagues
Google Plus followers
other lists:
Skype contacts & groups
How to get people to join your lists
offer something valuable in exchange
free gifts
products
information or tools that will improve their life
give them multiple, high quality opportunities to join your lists with a call to action i.e. create multiple and deep sales funnels (- see my free eBook entitled ‘Sales Funnel Supremacy‘)
drive TRAFFIC to those opportunities (i.e. optin boxes, squeeze pages, sales pages, invitations to join your social network)
What you need to measure in your list building activities
number of people on your lists
their responsiveness to your communications (i.e. the quality of your relationship with them)
email opens
clicks on links
likes, comments, shares
the amount of unique visitors to your landing pages
sales/optin conversions
Return on Investment (ROI), Earnings Per Click (EPC), Cost per Click (CPC), Cost Per action (CPA)
Advertising spend & effectiveness
buyers convert better than prospects – also measure #of buyers and # of prospects
The size of your lists, and the quality of relationship with them, will be a major determining factor in your ability to make money online. I created List Building Renegade to give more information about List Building
#2 High quality communication with your lists
Why you need to do this?
to differentiate yourself from your competition
to build a relationship – the know, like and trust factor
this shows that you are an authority and someone worth listening to
this is what will generate a substantial portion of your online income if you do it well
What is ‘high quality’ communication?
regular and consistent communications i.e. this shows that you care and that you actually want a relationship
your content is:
entertaining (- stories, real, well-scripted, well-presented, easy to consume)
valuable (- useful and relevant or Better, Cheaper, Quicker and/or Nicer than your competitors.)
disruptive (- that you have your own opinion or viewpoint that is worth listening to)
answers the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question going on in the recipients mind
has calls to action (and all the other elements of copywriting)
What you should measure
See list building measures above plus
Amount of communications:
no of posts
no of emails/promotions
no of Facebook posts
no of tweets on Twitter
The quality of your communications will determine the strength of your relationship, your customer retention rate, the lifetime value of your customer i.e. your ability to get them to buy from you again and again. Look out for Email-ATM which I will create shortly covering email marketing!
#3 High quality content/product creation
Why you need to do this
to persuade people to join your list
to build your relationship with your list
to get people to give you money either for your own product (or through following your recommendations for other people’s products)
How to deliver high quality content / products
keep informed
be on the lists of the best marketers in your niche
Google Alerts
use content creation techniques to find current and relevant information
Google search
Facebook shares
improve on, add to and share the best stuff (e.g. re-purpose, re-format, re-organise etc)
focus or go deeper on one aspect of your niche (become the expert) – preferably in an area where a lot of other people are having problems.
share what you are actually doing (and your results, good or otherwise) – authenticity is critically important.
outsource content creation e.g. a plugin coder or content creator
What you should measure
no and range of your own products (- just one product may be enough if it is a market leader but a spread will reduce your risks)
traffic
no of leads and buyers
no of affiliates
refunds
multiple purchases
email open rates and click throughs
number and amount of sales
outsourcing – project management measures – delivered on time and to cost at an acceptable quality?
The quality of your content and your products will influence the volume of sales, prices of your products, the average value of each sale and your reputation in the marketplace. This is why I created Product Creation Renegade and Membership Millionaires Bootcamp i.e. my strategies for creating high quality content and products.
#4 Traffic Generation (- start by focusing and mastering one method)
Why you need to do this
to build your list of prospects and buyers
to find the people who want what you can provide
to grow your business
How to generate traffic – examples
through affiliates
through paid advertising – examples
PPC
Banner ads
Solo Ads
search engine optimisation (SEO) – examples
blog posts
articles
podcasts
videos
viral content – examples
posting on other peoples blogs
facebook posts
forum posts
YouTube views
your list
What you should measure
Decide the critical success factor for each traffic method and then decide what to measure – examples:
Affiliates
time spent networking
no of affiliates on your list
no of approaches to affiliates and responsiveness (opens, replies)
average number of communications with affiliates
EPC’s
Amount and number of prizes
Paid Ads:
Ad Impressions #
CTR (click thru rate) % Ad to Landing Page
Clicks to Offer
CTR % to Offer
Unique Visitors
# Sales
Conversion Rate %
# Refunds
Revenue
Costs
Profit
Return On Investment %
Earnings Per Cclick
Cost Per Click
Cost Per Action
SEO
Alexa ranking
No of relevant ranking keywords
On page factors (- score)
No of backlinks & quality
No of unique visitors
WSO’s – there is a huge amount of traffic on the Warrior Forum for IM related products!
The amount and quality of traffic that you can drive to your offers will determine your ability to scale your business. This is also a function of the size and quality of your list.
A Viable Strategy & Proven Business Model
The business activities above need to take place within a viable strategy and a proven business model ( such a strategy and business model is fully set out in ‘The Way of the Warriors‘.) For example, selection of your niche and target market are critical. You also need to be able to build the systems and processes that will deliver on your strategy. In fact you need to be able to deliver in each of the following areas in your business:
However, measuring your progress towards delivering on the critical successes factors is absolutely vital in my opinion. If you take action without putting in place the systems to measure the outcome you will not know what is working and what isn’t. I am afraid that many, many businesses make this mistake.
It is absolutely critical that you should implement systems to measure your activities. It’s boring and tedious but it is nevertheless essential which is why I created Measure N Manage.
Whilst it is desirable to measure everything, in practical terms there is a cost to doing so. Initially, it is therefore important to get started by selecting just a select a handful of measures that are the most critical and apply those, building more sophistication into your management information system as your business grows.
I believe that some of the key performance indicators outlined above will be appropriate for most online businesses but each business has to design its own management information system according to its own aspirations and goals and depending on the stage of its development, ability and the tools available for doing so.
Measurement will focus your activities around what is getting results and the results will drive your actions. This is the very essence of making money online.
I’ve been indulging in a bit of Shakespearean Copywriting this week. I completed my eBook entitled ‘What You Can Measure You Can Manage’ and this in now on my site http://measurenmanage.com.
I will be completing this product with an Excel spreadsheet as I develop my own management information system. There is already a nice bonus on the site – 5 videos about mastering Google Analytics. This bonus is relevant because MeasureNManage is all about running your business by the critically important numbers.
I have written the sales page for this site but I now need to create the JV page, list the product on JVZoo and integrate JVZoo with my membership script.
The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File
I have also created an eBook today on copywriting called The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File – this is a combination of some PLR material I had about copywriting and a list of copywriting swipes that I obtained from The Warrior Forum. This book will be used for 3 purposes:
as a bonus on a fellow coaching colleague’s (Matthew Houghton) solo ad product
as a bonus on my next product which is called Email-ATM
as a free giveaway on a squeeze page to build my list.
Here is the eCover I designed:
I went with the Shakespearean Theme because of the fact that I live in the town where he was born and died – Stratford-upon-Avon!!
When writing my own sales letters, I mainly use the Paper Template plugin by Robert Plank. It does what it says on the tin – you follow a template for creating your sales letter.
This is a note that Omar wrote in one of the Facebook Groups I am a member of. I thought I would share it here as it looks like a good system. (I use Camtasia (or Easy Video Suite) and Powerpoint rather than Screenflow and Keynote to make my videos because I use a PC rather than a Mac.)
“I tend to use audacity quite a bit for narration but other than my brain, the most influential tools I use to create content are decisively Screenflow and Keynote.
I use the 5-5-5 method for drafting a quick outline on a particular topic. This means I create 5 subheadings and put them on Keynote slides then I add 5 bullets to each slide. I hit record on Screenflow and press play on Keynote then I talk for at least 5 minutes on each slide.
I try to create 3 or 4 of these videos on the same general topic and then hand them over to a transcriptionist or ghost writer that converts the content into a 100+ page book.
Content creation is only as complicated as we chose to make it.”
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Creating my Own WordPress Plugins
Creating my own WordPress plugins has long been a goal of mine but I have been reluctant to get involved in an area that I have little or no expertise in. I bought into Peter Garety’s Software Mechanics course about a year ago but Peter seems to have lost interest in this programme which was a bonus to another product.
However, on the recommendation of Andrew Hunter (who is himself a plugin creation expert), I bought Plugin Creation Blueprint for $37 when it was launched on 2nd September. This is an incredible product for the money and made by a coding expert called David Vandenburg. It has been made with meticulous care and the membership site is incredibly good too. This guy calls himself the CodeKing and I can see why.
If you have aspirations to get into the business of creating plugins then Plugin Creation Blueprint is definitely worth investing in.
G-Font Plugin
I also bought the developers license for the G-Font plugin – this plugin enables you to use around 600 Google Fonts on your WordPress sites – it works with most themes. As you can see from this page, I have played around with some of the Menu fonts.
I felt that this was a good investment as it means I can customise the fonts on any theme and make it my own!! I also love fonts – they just make your text so much more interesting to look at! I hope you agree!!!!
Thank You Tsahai
One of my colleagues, Tsahai de Silva, sent me a message this week – this is part of what she said – it means a lot to me:
[features_box_red width=”75%” + border=”2px”]You are quality and you deserve to be successful. Don’t give up I believe in you Mark. You can do it! What are you doing to get sales? Please let me know if I can help.[/features_box_red]
I have some superb friends online – this is vitally important to me as internet marketing can be lonely at times. With friends like this I am rich indeed!
‘Strong reasons make strong actions’ – this is a quotation from Shakespeare who died just under 400 years ago and lived not half a mile from where I am writing this post.
I think this is certainly one of the key attributes of self-made entrepreneurs – they had strong reasons for taking action and becoming successful.
In Shakespeare’s case, I think he may have got Anne Hathaway with child and had to go to London to make his living as a playwright.
My son-in-laws job recently came under threat – as a result of this he got a better paid job (+25%) and my daughter did the same (+50%). They have recently bought a new house with a massive mortgage and were staring down the barrel of potential bankruptcy had my son-in-law been made unemployed for any lengthy period of time. Strong reasons = strong actions.
This has a been a large part of my trouble in starting an online business. I have funded myself from my investments and savings for several years without making much money – because I had money, I didn’t need it badly enough i.e. weak reasons = weak actions.
I have created a number of products but, because I have not yet run out of money, I have not really marketed those products.
Sergio Felix, my coaching colleague, has told me that I must change my mindset. He is absolutely right – in my case it is definitely a mindset issue. I already know enough to succeed, I simply need to reach out and grasp it.
Ironically he is the same. He has been working on perfecting one WordPress product for well over 12 months – with his wedding due to take place in 2 months time he needs to make some money and lots of it!
Both Sergio and I are both fast approaching this crisis point – the point where we simply HAVE to make the next step.
In my business career I have seen this phenomenon many times before – I saw it time and again when the financial crisis hit in the early nineties as my business customers faced the real possibility of going bust as interest rates soared to 17% or more and asset prices plummeted.
It was amazing to me how creative people can be in a crisis – one builder customer created 3 houses out of his own home and sold them to make enough money to survive.
The truth is that we are all much more resourceful than we think we are – when the chips are really down, the strong get going.
Have you considered that if you are not yet finding success, perhaps you don’t yet have a strong enough reason for taking strong action?
I expect you already know of many examples of wealthy people who came from a background of relative poverty. That poverty and hardship is a large part of what drives them throughout life – the remembrance of their early years when where the next mouthful of food was coming from was a genuine worry.
I’ve been fortunate to never face that kind of hardship and it’s easy for me to be complacent about money. As I have got older I’ve realised that as long as I have enough money to enjoy life, I really don’t desire money for it’s own sake. In other words I am not willing to do things I hate doing just for money… unless I have a strong reason enough for doing so!
I’m fast approaching that point with my business – where I need to go out and promote myself and my products. It really does not appeal to me at all – I would much rather be helping other people ‘under the radar’ than marketing myself as some kind of guru. I want the satisfaction of genuinely helping other people without make bull-shit claims about myself and what I can do.
But my mindset and attitude have to change if I want to stay in the internet marketing game – the key word there is ‘marketing’. As Sergio says, I must find my own audience and reach out to them. He has to do the same – we all do!
As a small step on that road I have installed the Page Peal Pro plugin (aka One Ring Plugin) – this is on the top right of my web pages – if you like it you can get a copy of this plugin here. It’s not a ‘strong’ action but it is a step in the right direction.
Your task and mine is to find a strong reason for taking strong action – whatever it is, whether it’s your family, your health, your self-respect, your wedding etc – find it because I believe that it’s part of the formula for success.
One of the important business principles that I have learnt and re-learnt over my business career is that ‘Measurement Drives Action’. Let me explain…
As a corporate bank manager one of my tasks was to enforce the receipt of management information from customers on a monthly basis. This ensured the following:
that the customer was monitoring their financial performance for themselves
that the bank could monitor the business performance and ‘step in’ if the business was deviating substantially from the plan that gave rise to the lending in the first place
that better decisions could be made by both the customer and the bank in relation to the business and its performance.
When I left banking in 2001, I established my business consultancy on the basis that one of the services I could offer was to create and establish management information systems for business to improve their business performance. One successful project that I undertook was to create a management information system for a £6 million turnover business that had 40 different profit/loss centres!
My system enabled the operations manager to see quickly which of the centres were profitable and which were not. Within mere days of producing the information for the first time, the operations manager was planning the closure or amalgamation of loss-making activities.
Within the space of just weeks, the business had turned around from losses into substantial profits – it literally added several hundred thousand pounds to their bottom line almost overnight. This was a perfect illustration of how ‘measurement drives action’.
As a result of this success I was subsequently offered the job as interim chief-executive of that business. Hopefully, that illustrates just how powerful management information can be.
I saw countless examples of the beneficial impact of management information systems in my banking and business consultancy career – often the best businesses were those that had the best management information systems.
Why then have I signally failed to create a meaningful management information system for myself and my business?
For the last 4 years in internet marketing, I have been totally absorbed in learning the skills of internet marketing and ignoring this basic business principle of measurement (or as some say ‘know your numbers’. ) I think I put my knowledge of numbers to one side to learn a totally new skill, ‘forgetting’ the critical importance of numbers to any business.
‘Flying by the seat of my pants’ has to stop right NOW!!
I’m now determined on putting this right and as I do so I am going to create a very, very important product called ‘Measure ‘n’ Manage‘ based on the principle that ‘what you can measure, you can manage‘.
I’m hoping to bring increased insight and clarity to this important topic because I am perhaps uniquely qualified to write on this subject from my previous 35 year experience in the business consultancy field and my knowledge of internet marketing.
My purpose will be to create a simple management system for my own business and to help others to do the same for their own internet marketing business. In doing so, I will clearly identify the key performance indicators and how to measure and monitor them.
One of the problems with internet marketing is that a number of the tools, like Google Analytics, spew out tons of potentially useful information but I find that it is bewildering in the complexity and amount of information that they produce. If I am bewildered, and I like numbers, then goodness knows what others think!
I also think that this will be key to me taking action on my own marketing activities because ‘action without measurement is always sub-optimal’ i.e. if you don’t measure the results of your actions, then how do you know what the best action is to take in future?
Surprisingly, very few internet marketers have produced any training on this important topic – probably because they think that it won’t sell – but in my opinion, without a good management information system you are unlikely to succeed in business.
Also, I don’t think you can delegate this task without at least understanding the information and numbers for your own business and how they are calculated. I have seen that happen and it never works. (I turned one business down for a loan flat within 5 minutes because the business plan they produced was two inches thick with computer print-outs (- needless to say, they were enraged!) I knew there was no way they could properly understand the information they had produced and neither could I – they were trying to blind me with science and chose the wrong person to try it on with. They went to another bank, got the loan and went bust within 6 months!)
If you want to run a business, then you need to know the numbers whether numbers are your thing or not. It is compulsory in my opinion.
Changing the Topic
One of my areas of weakness is email marketing but I have recently completed Marc Milburns’s Email Cash Siphon product. To re-enforce my learning on this topic, I am also planning a product called ‘Email ATM’ – here is the outline of the product:
This product will be produced after ‘Measure ‘n’ Manage’ but before ‘Business Storyboards’, which is my product on online business strategy.
Plugin News
I implemented the ‘Attention Grabber’ plugin on this site this week. It’s a plugin I acquired a long time ago but never took action on. You will see it in the corner of my web pages advertising my latest product – hopefully it is ‘grabbing your attention’ haha!
This brings me on to a brand new plugin that one of my coaching colleagues, Aaron Webster, has just launched which is a page-peal plugin for adverts called One Ring Plugin – it looks extremely powerful and I hope to give it a trial over the next week or so – here is a link to this new product if you want to check it out.
I also lashed out $6 on a new plugin launched this week called G-Font plugin that enables me to enhance the fonts on my websites (I can now choose from 600 fonts!) – pure indulgence but hopefully it will improve the presentation of my products. I am in the information marketing niche after all!
That’s all for this week, but in the meantime please remember ‘MEASUREMENT DRIVES ACTION’!
When I left banking in 2001, I was reminded about the importance of relationships.
I was surprised and touched by the number of customers who asked me not to leave banking and who told me how much they valued their relationship with me. (It was only a pity that they had not told me earlier before I had made the decision to leave!)
Looking back, I can now identify the reason that I had to leave banking. The bank was asking me to do things that meant that I could not properly honour the relationship that I had built up with my customers.
How could I sell them products and services that I would never buy myself? I simply couldn’t do it and live with myself. (But it seems plenty did and hence all the mis-selling scandals we have seen in the UK.)
I started a business consultancy immediately after leaving the Bank and for the next 5 or 6 years attracted new business to my consultancy principally from those former banking customers.
Today, I’m trying to drum into my daughter and son-in-law, who are both working long hours in the city of London, the risks they are taking by leaving their two young children in the hands of nannies. They are seriously under-estimating the importance of their relationship with their children and the impact it will have on all their lives.
The older I get, the more and more importance I attach to relationships. Whilst we may be poor in money terms, if we are rich in relationships then we are rich indeed. (I admire the Asian community for the way in which family, friends and community support each other, particularly in business – it is one of their great strengths in my opinion.)
Surveys have shown that many poor people in the under-developed countries are actually happier than more wealthy people because of their relationships within their community, family and friends.
Having too many possessions can actually be a huge burden because they need maintaining, securing, storing, insuring etc Do people like you because of who you are or what you own?
On the other hand, you can never have too many genuine relationships.
I have been considering the role that relationships play in internet marketing. It seems to me that most relationships are pretty superficial:
take ‘friends’ on Facebook for example – are they really friends or just people you want to exploit or who want to exploit you in some way?
how about subscribers to your list – do you genuinely care for them and their success or are they just a source of cash?
how about our relationship as internet marketers with local businesses – are we simply preying on their ignorance rather than offering genuine value to those business owners? I have seen plenty of so-called web designers that have produced websites that will never earn a return on their customers investment.
In business, the strength of your relationships will generally be based on your ability to improve the life of your customer (and very occasionally will develop into something stronger and more personal.) It seems to me that you cannot go too far wrong if you concentrate and focus on helping to improve the lives of other people.
In order to do that you need to know who they are, what they are interested in and what they might want and need. Without that you are shooting in the breeze (which is what most internet marketers do which is why they end up in my spam folder).
You can mitigate that a bit by segmenting your lists but it takes a lot of work to communicate ‘personally’ with each list. One strategy is to automate your follow-up sequence for each list so that those emails address the immediate reason the joined that particular list. So your first 7 days emails are directly relevant to what they opted into. After 7 days you might then address other problems that are commonly encountered in their niche.
You also need to acquire the skills to be able to improve another persons life.
Simply calling yourself a ‘coach’ without having any coaching skills is asking for trouble because your customers will eventually discover the truth of what you can deliver and potentially your reputation in the marketplace will never recover. As the banks will discover, once lost, reputation and trust takes an awfully long time to recover.
But how do you stand out from the crowd of marketers that are filling your prospect/customers email inbox with their communications?
Here are a few things that you might consider:
make your communications fun and entertaining – become an expert at telling stories
be authentic, genuine and open – tell them the good, the bad and the ugly i.e. about your failures as well as your successes, the pros and the cons, your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Only promote from a position of personal knowledge of a product or service (rather than obligation or being motivated by money) i.e. be worthy of trust
have a personal opinion – even if it risks alienating some people with contrary beliefs i.e. stand up for what you believe in
ask for your customers feedback and respond to it e.g. surveys
offer free value or bonuses together with your promotions – this is called an ethical bribe.
be approachable – give them your direct contact details
communicate in face-to-face videos – let them see who you really are and show them that you have an attractive personality.
show them your depth rather than your surface – most of us only reveal ‘the tip of a very large iceberg’. How can we expect people to know, like and trust us if we only reveal a carefully doctored image of ourselves?
respond promptly to requests for help and assistance.
treat them as you would wish to be treated by others – no tricks, lies or deceit. (Turn away customers that you cannot help, or refer them elsewhere, rather than trying to deliver the undeliverable.)
Please let me know in the comments below how you develop relationships with your prospects and customers?
Do you agree with my comments about the importance of relationships or do you prefer the strategy of burning your list by hitting them with offers right from the outset?
When I was a child, I used to read stories of events in history. One of the ones that gripped my imagination (and still does today!) is the story of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. This was the decisive battle between William’s invading Norman army and Harold the English King.
William became ‘The Conqueror’ but it was what he did BEFORE the battle that laid the foundation for his success.
It is said that his invading army came across from France in around 600 ships on 28th September 1066 and landed at Pevensey. After he had disembarked all his troops and equipment, his army watched in horror as William ordered that the ships were burnt on the beach.
Can you imagine what his troops were feeling? Their only line of retreat was destroyed even as they watched.
Do you think that in the heat of the battle of Hastings on 14th October 1066, that when things got difficult and bloody, that the knowledge and mindset that they either won or died on that day, didn’t affect the outcome of the battle?
I’m pretty certain that it stiffened the resolve of Williams army wonderfully.
The reason that I mention this episode in history is because I think it has a bearing on our business success or failure (and also our personal success).
Inevitably in business there will be tasks that you don’t enjoy, that make you uncomfortable or even downright scared. Tasks like speaking in public, pitching your product, creating relationships with people of influence, technical challenges, understanding the numbers – all these things and more are a part of building a successful business.
The problem with being in business for yourself is that WE get to decide what we do on a daily basis. There is no-one standing over us saying that you have to do this or that. This presents a challenge to most people and a large part of why many people fail in business – they simply don’t have the discipline to do what is uncomfortable or difficult.
We sometimes fail to realise that there are certain tasks that are unavoidable if we want business success. Even if we realise it, because we have the power of choice, we choose to avoid ‘the challenge’ in the hope that somehow success will arrive anyway.
Someone once said something like ‘it is in our moments of greatest discomfort and difficulty that we have our greatest learning’. I think that this is true.
When I was in banking, I never really ‘knew’ my customer until they faced a moment of crisis or a moment of great difficulty in their business. Some would lie and cheat. Others would run away from their obligation.
However, others would turn and face almost insurmountable odds in the face of professional advice to give up and declare bankruptcy.
And often I could not pre-judge how my customer would react until the crisis happened.
So what does this mean for you and me in our struggles to create a business?
I think that firstly it is important to recognise that EVERYONE in business faces these types of difficulties at one time or another. If you are facing a moment of crisis in your business, you can be sure that many others have faced the same or a similar difficulty before you.
These are often the moments that will define your success or failure. You intuitively know WHAT you HAVE to do but you always have a choice of whether to do it or not.
Will you take action or side-step the challenge to complete a more comfortable task?
The problem with this is that the same challenge or difficulty will often not go away- it usually presents itself again and again and again. You cannot move forward to be as successful as you might be, until you face that challenge or quit to get a job where someone else is willing to do that which you have been avoiding – often these are well-paid jobs simply because these people are doing what others will not.
Of course, you could outsource the challenge, but then your business is totally reliant on someone else. If this task is central to the success of your business, this represents an area of potential vulnerability in your business. For example, if that person realises their importance to the business, you either have to pay them accordingly or face the possibility that they will look for another opportunity to be paid what they are worth.
This is why people talk about the importance of getting out of your comfort zone – it is only in these moments that we grow as individuals and we allow our business to grow with us. If you avoid these challenges, often they don’t disappear but they keep coming back in one guise or another.
Sometimes we wait until our back is literally against the wall (or the boats have been burned on the beach), before we are literally forced do what we know we have to do. That’s pretty drastic but if that’s what you have to do to move forward, you can easily engineer that situation for yourself.
However, why wait for this moment of ultimate crisis?
If you are feeling uncomfortable about doing something in business, take a moment to to realise that this may be something that you MUST do in order to be successful.
Think through the consequences of not doing it.
If you decide it is something that cannot be avoided if your business is to be successful, then this is THE priority task for you and your business. Everything else is secondary and YOU must find a way – YOU alone are responsible as the business owner.
This is THE moment when you and your business will grow because, by conquering that crisis, you know in that moment that you have the discipline to do whatever it takes in the face of extreme personal discomfort, pain or fear.
If you avoid it, you may be selling yourself short in not only this area but in many other areas of your life. You see, it’s all about self-respect and self-confidence.
When you know that you are willing to do whatever it takes, then your success is inevitable and you become an unstoppable force.
And success is often on the other side of failure.
So what difficult areas of your life or business have you been avoiding?
Often these challenges and failures are disguised as your greatest opportunity for growth. Embrace that fact, ‘burn the boats’ of potential retreat in your mind and move forward with iron purpose and resolve.
Realise that you will not potentially die (like William’s army) if you fail. This is simply one of the challenges that life is presenting to you in order to find out whether you REALLY, REALLY want success.
And these questions will keep on coming (and you will have to find answers) until your success becomes unstoppable and inevitable .
Rejoice therefore in the challenges that you face and ‘plunge into battle’ with your sword arm swinging freely!
If you you want success badly enough, you cannot retreat because you have first metaphorically ‘burned your boats (the line of retreat) on the beaches of your mind’.
You can find more on the importance mindset for business and personal success at ‘The Sky Inside‘
My new product ‘Membership Millionaires Bootcamp‘ is shaping up well. It is almost finished bar some tidying up of the navigation.
Here is the video on the sales page that sets out the offer:
Additionally, I need to sort out the following:
sales funnel construction – I still need a nice $7 front-end product but I have something in mind
I need to get some testimonials – hopefully my fellow students in my coaching group can help out with this if I give them a review copy
I need to consider making a coaching offer on the back-end to help students with any membership site or product creation issues.
I am also considering deploying WPCourseware on this product to test out this plugin and create additional value for the students.
I’m really happy with the overall offer although, if an affiliate sells the product, I only get $20 from the $97 sale price plus any back-end sales that I can make. In due course, I may increase the price-point if the product is well-received in the marketplace.
I’m going to send a review copy to the maker of the membership plugin after I have tidied up the above matters, on the basis that he might promote or endorse it as well.
Marketing Is The Big Elephant In The Room
I have now created a nice suite of products and I definitely need to concentrate on the marketing aspect i.e. driving traffic to my sales pages, primarily through affiliates.
The other aspect is building a list and getting my email marketing sorted out – there is no consistency or strategy in my approach to this. I think I know what I need to do, but I just need to execute.
I think I need to allocate time each day or at least each week to each of these aspects. So far, too much time has been allocated to product creation and not enough to marketing and selling.
Marc Milburn is creating a product called Profit Flare on the premise that you are saying to yourself ‘I’ve got a product, now what?’ That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I know what I need to do but I would like to follow along with Marc’s product if he get’s around to completing it!
I also need to set up a decent management information system for my business to track the key numbers in my business (and this will be documented in my Measure ‘n’ Manage’ product that I have planned for the future. The domain is set up and ready to go.)
Resisting Purchases
I’m really proud of the fact that the amount of product purchases I have made over the last few months have dried up to a mere trickle. I’ve realised at long last that salvation does NOT lie in buying more training but in taking action on the information already in my possession. The credit card bill is definitely lower than before – I hope I’m not angering the credit card gods by saying this!
I think I now have most of the tools I need (apart from a good click tracker.) I have a little plugin called Link Tracker that will have to do for the time being.
My To-Do List
I have tried a number of ways of organising my to do list in the past:
using a piece of paper but this often gets buried on my desk
using an online to-do list but I forget to login
I’m currently using a small bound notebook (about A5 size) and I am finding that this works better for me as it doesn’t get lost on my desk and it is easier to move unfinished items forward. This is a small but important improvement in my business where so much depends on focus and productivity.
I also, own a product called Action Enforcer – I don’t use this as much as I should do. It basically forces you to parcel up your work into time slots and then work to deadlines. It also helps you to take time-outs on a regular basis which is important in a sedentary job like internet marketing. It also helps you to work according to the Pomodoro Principle i.e. work according to your bodies natural rhythms.
A Productivity Tip
Here’s a good productivity tip. If you are promoting products via your email marketing, turn the emails into a product review on your blog i.e. recycle the content – it’s possible that you will also earn a commission from traffic coming to your blog. I will probably create my product reviews as posts, so I have created a new category called ‘Product Reviews’ to cover these types of posts.
The other tip I have is ‘don’t have a family’! My daughter started a new job earlier this month without having the necessary care sorted out for our grandchildren. The burden has fallen squarely on my wife during August with no likelihood of relief until September, when my granddaughter starts school for 5 mornings a week. Then in February, the nanny moves from 2 days a week to 3 days a week, meaning my wife can reduce her support to just 2 days a week.
This week my wife has been away for the whole week because the new nanny had booked a weeks holiday. When she is away, I realise just how much my wife supports and cares for me and life is not as sweet when she is away. I hope that she feels the same way!
In the meantime, I will take my consolation from finishing Membership Millionaires Bootcamp and improving my marketing activities.
Another week has gone by in internet marketing paradise as I crawl inexorably closer to my goal of earning a $120,000 per annum income online.
John Thornhill posed the awkward question on Facebook ‘How many buy buttons do you have?’ (because this will correlate with your ability to earn an income online.) I am pleased to say that I now have a number of products up on JVZoo, all with buy buttons and this week I added one more – List Building Renegade. Here is my updated list of products. I just need to get my backside in gear and market these.
I launched List Building Renegade as a WSO in November 2012 – whilst I only made around 26 sales, the experience of launching a WSO was invaluable. On reflection, it has taken far too long for me to launch my next WSO, so next week I am going to start the process of launching The Way of the Warriors as a WSO to get some traffic into my funnel and see how it converts. I will aim to do this by no later than the end of this month.
I did a mailing to my list about The Way of the Warriors about a month ago and had a 24% conversion rate and a $1.65 EPC – I hadn’t calculated these stats until Marc, my coach, asked me the $64million question about how my email had converted this week. It made me realise that until you test your product in the marketplace, you really have no clue about how it will sell and it is just important to get it out there and then monitor the stats closely.
My First Solo Ad
I ordered a 100 click solo ad from Daniel Madeira, my fellow coaching friend and colleague. I haven’t really ventured into paid traffic before but Daniel is someone I could trust to give me a fair shot.
As of last night I had 115 visits and 41 optins, which is a creditable performance on my first attempt – 36% conversion.
I split the traffic between 3 variations of my squeeze page and monitored results via Google Experiments (within Google Analytics – very easy to set up). I was surprised to see that my third variation was converting at a much higher rate than the other two – it was the version I spent the least amount of time on preparing. Again, it just goes to show how you can’t prejudge what the market will like.
Daniel is also offering a competitive rate for solo ads to his fellow coaching students and it is well worth a try if you want to get some solo ad experience in a safe environment. Daniel was helpful to me initially in sharpening up my squeeze pages.
Niche Cash Machine Blueprint
I also reviewed Niche Cash Machine Blueprint that has been created by Chris Ferrante, a fellow coaching student. Chris has already created a successful online business in the pigeon racing niche and Niche Cash Machine Blueprint sets out exactly how he created that business.
Altogether, I thought it was a great product based on his actual experience, so I will definitely promote it when he launches it in due course.
FB Cash Fuse
Fellow coaching student Manie Amarie launched his epic product, FB Cash Fuse, this week. This product is all about how businesses can leverage Facebook fan pages for profit. The product is also a business-in-a-box, because you could also provide a Facebook fan page service to other businesses.
Manie has been meticulous and focused in his approach to launching this product which should do well. It has been very useful for me working with Manie on this project – just seeing how professional he is in his approach was an education to me.
FB Cash Fuse is a highly polished jewel, whereas my products are perhaps rough diamonds in comparison!
Manie has paid to get his sales letter created and his graphics have also been purchased from a full-time graphics designer – nothing has been left to chance and he deserves to succeed.
I on the other hand have created everything myself which is not what my coach advocates and shows my reluctance to outsource any aspect! My strategy is to try to create multiple products as quickly as possible to see what works in the marketplace and then expand on that.
The Optimize Press 2.0 Launch
Optimize Press 2.0 launched last week. Frankly, I was disappointed by the price point and it gave me pause for thought.
I like and respect Rob – I met him at Alex Jeffreys Live Event earlier this year. He is definitely one of the good guys who offers his honest opinion and his content is always top notch.
I am amazed that I made this decision because I have been looking forward to OP2.0 for a long time. However, I feel James Dyson is being a little greedy with his price point.
I have been using the Membersonic Theme to create my latest membership sites – it is responsive, has 4 navigation features, and I have the developers license. (Plus I can plugin in 44 child themes to the Genesis Framework on which it is built!) All this for $20 compared to $297 plus VAT for OP 2.0 – I don’t think so!
I think this decision also reflects the fact that my mindset has moved from being a ‘buyer’ to a being a ‘seller’ of products.
I also love Tony Shepherd’s direct and earthy style – he is based in Burnley and I can almost hear his Northern accent in his writing. I am going to study his style and technique as it is something I would like to model myself (- although I also need to be true myself!)
Interestingly, most of his products have a price-point of only $9.95 and he appears to be doing very well with his business. (It also looks to be a lot of fun for him!!)
All Is NOT Well in Internet Marketing Paradise!
I took my wife to a doctors appointment as she is having blood pressure problems. Before her appointment, I quickly had a blood pressure check myself.
I was shocked to get a reading of 200 over 110!!
Oh SH1T!
My wife was pulling my leg about it but after her appointment she was not laughing because she had exactly the same reading as me!
Looks like a change of lifestyle is needed by us both because these are critical readings – the doctor told my wife that she should be signed off work with a reading like that.
Just shows that you must not neglect your health in favour of your business. I don’t want a golden coffin!
Membership Millionaires Bootcamp
This product is proceeding nicely – I hope to complete it next week. I am basically recording how I create this membership site so someone else can replicate my system for creating membership products.
This is how the site looks at present:
Packaged with the training will be the key pieces of software – the membership plugin and theme – that I use to create the site. As this software can be used to create unlimited personal products, I feel confident that it will be an attractive proposition – you can see my draft sales letter here.
So with that, I end another enjoyable week in internet marketing paradise. (Let’s hope I live long enough to see another one!)
After a weeks ‘holiday’ looking after my grandchildren, I am finally moving forward with my sales funnel. After 3 weeks of frustration, Bryan Zimmerman (joint owner of JVZoo) finally replied personally to my support query! I had to change a number of things in my funnel when I understood how it all works.
I decided to make a video about how I set my sales funnel up on JVZoo and the problems I encountered:
I have also improved my affiliate page and you can view it here http://wayofthewarriors.com/affiliates/ – Manie Amari’s feedback was very helpful in adding the finishing touches – a fresh pair of eyes is always helpful.
Now I have to move onto recruiting affiliates as I have already released this on JVZoo. If you would like to promote it, simply follow the steps on my Affiliate page and let’s make some money together.
In the meantime, I am going to throw some traffic at the page in order to get some conversion stats which will help when I approach affiliates. I got 5 sales from the initial mailing I made to my list before the funnel was fully set up.
I may also try a limited time launch on the Warrior Forum just to get some traffic and sales moving. My front-end product, entitled The Way of the Warriors, is perfectly positioned for enticing the Warriors on the Forum.
Membership Millionaires Bootcamp
This is the product I started (whilst I was waiting for JVZoo to reply to my support queries) on how I make membership sites quickly using Membersonic and a number of other useful plugins. This is coming along nicely and I am just working on the sales letter at the moment. This is how it currently looks – do you like the ‘Ferrari’ red colour?
I have realised that I can make a nice little funnel by packaging this product with Product Creation Renegade – I just need to decide on my front-end (FE) product so the progression will go:
$7 FE to
$27 for Product Creation Renegade and then
$97 for Membership Millionaires Bootcamp which includes $233 of software at retail prices and my training.
The logo ‘All For one And One For All’ is taken from ‘The Three Muskateers’ but it does encapsulate what membership sites are all about.
Business Storyboards
One of the products that I have had in the planning stages for sometime is Business Storyboards – I want to graphically represent some of the business strategies I have learnt over the last 4 years and indeed from my consulting days.
My ideas for this product have gelled over the last few days, and I think this will be my next product. We will see.
One of my problems is that I need to ‘pull the trigger’ by marketing my existing products rather than producing yet more products. But it is fair to say that I just love the product creation process. I would love to get into designing software soon i.e. WordPress plugins or themes.
Optimize Press 2.0 Launched this week
Optimize press 2.0 launched this week but the price is higher than I had hoped for – even with my discount as an existing user of Optimize Press 1.0, the price is double what I paid for the original version.
However, I am mighty tempted to buy OP2 because, if I was starting in internet marketing again, these are the 3 themes I would look at:
Low Price – the Membersonic Theme – this theme is a steal at $20 because it is highly flexible, is responsive, has 4 navigation menus (which makes it great for membership sites) and you get developers rights. I also love the look of this theme – not unlike Optimize Press (- I have used the Membersonic Theme on both The Way of the Warriors and Membership Millionaires Bootcamp.)
Medium Price – Instabuilder – for $77 this plugin is packed with features. Whilst the training videos suck a bit, this is a great mid-priced option for unlimited personal use.
Premium Price – Optimize Press 2.0 – at $297 this theme/plugin is the ‘Rolls Royce’ of themes in my opinion. Whilst, I don’t yet own this theme, from the promotional videos and my knowledge of OP1, this looks to be an incredibly good theme with a membership script built in to the package, a button creator, responsive and cutting edge design and a host of other great features.
Email Sequences
I am also setting my mind to creating a new sequence of follow up emails that I can plugin to all my lists.
I think I will devote the first few emails to be product specific but I will then create additional email sequences that can be plugged in to every list i.e. the automated cash machine that everyone talks about. I have a small, rather neglected list of subscribers which is growing inexorably. I really need to start treating them as I would wish to be treated myself.
Having started consuming Marc Milburn’s Email Cash Siphon product, I really have no excuses for not upping my email marketing game.
Personal Problems
As you know from my last post, last week I took a weeks holiday to look after my grandchildren to help my daughter who was starting a new job in London. We live about 85 miles from her. She has arranged for a nanny for her children for 2 days a week and my wife is travelling to their house to look after the children for 3 days a week. This is a huge commitment on my wife’s part and it now turns out that as the new nanny has pre-booked a weeks holiday later this month, my daughter needs help for another week.
This is simply too much for my wife to cope with on her own. Obviously, as I work at home, there is a perception that I am always available to help out. It is impossible to work with 2 young children under the age of 5 in the house and I cannot really afford to take yet another week off! Difficult conversation with my daughter coming up this weekend!
My primary concern is that I don’t want my grandchildren palmed off on strangers or my wife to be over-whelmed with the responsibility but at the same time I need to work on my business. Also, we want to support our much-loved daughter as much as we can. Sometimes life just gets in the way.
Here is my one year-old grandson, Daniel, enjoying my wife’s chicken curry – this picture alone was worth the week I spent with them and reminds me of when my son used to lick the plate clean!
My Plan is Coming Together
Thanks to my coach, my business plan is inexorably coming together and I feel confident that ultimate success is close now. It is great to have the support and assistance of my fellow coaching students, who all seem incredibly talented in one way or another. I am hoping that we will all start to see some incredible results shortly.
As you will be aware from my last two blog posts, I am waiting on JVZoo to reply to a support ticket – in my frustration, I decided to press on to create a new product called Membership Millionaires Bootcamp because I cannot afford to sit around waiting for their reply – now 10 days old!
What is Membership Millionaires Bootcamp?
I have a number of membership products up and running at the present time and I am now pretty handy at creating membership sites fast. In fact, I have developed a system for creating these sites cheaply and fast.
I use a membership software called Membersonic which is now retailing for $167. To enable me to package this software with my course, I have negotiated a special rate of just $27 (no affiliate commission) to bundle this software with my course. I also use a WordPress theme that looks similar to Optimize Press but which costs just $20 (- I have negotiated a 100% affiliate commission on this).
My Membership Millionaires Bootcamp course will cost $97 including these two pieces of software which can be used to develop unlimited sites as long as the domains are owned by the user i.e. no developers rights.
[features_box_light_blue width=”75%” + border=”1px”]In this product I will show how I:
install WordPress manually to create a secure database
which specific plugins and software I use
how to protect your content with Membersonic within 5 minutes flat (- massive productivity saver versus other membership plugins!)
how to create the favicon, header and any other graghics required
how to clone and backup your membership site ( for insurance purposes and fast deployment of new sites)
how to deliver content from Amazon S3 and the cloud
how easy it is to integrate with both your auto-responder and affiliate programmes (such as JVZoo!)
how to create the sales letter
how to drip content if you want to
how to install a Help Desk
To reward action takers, anyone who completes a membership site using Membersonic purchased through me will get one installation of WPCourseware (value $47) [/features_box_light_blue]
This means that purchasers of my training are getting software with a retail value of $233 at just $47 (plus my training) and the membership software and theme can be used to create unlimited personal sites to bring the per site cost down with every site they build. Another way of looking at it is that buyers get the software for just $97 v $233 and my training for free.
I purchased the developers rights to WP Courseware
I own the developers rights to WPCourseware – this is a plugin that allows you to create courses within your membership site. The benefit of this is:
you can make sure that at the end of a lesson or module that your students have grasped the key points required to be successful by making them complete some questions before moving on and
it also gives you a measure of how many people are actually fully or partially consuming your content and who they are.
it will also differentiate my membership site from almost every other one out there as I will be able to engage more easily with my members by encouraging them to complete the course and, if they are having problems, to help them in the knowledge that I will know how much of my content they have consumed – effectively I am their accountability partner.
Only by consuming and understanding and taking action on my content will they get value from my product and I think this tool will help me to deliver enhanced value in this regard.
(There is huge offline potential in WPCourseware to create training programmes like induction and health and safety courses where you want the person taking the course to complete some questions to ensure that they understand the information in each lesson or module and to certify that they have completed the required pass rate at the end of the course. The offline market is not currently my target market but, if I ever get stuck for income, I think there is a huge market for this if you can do it cost-effectively – which I now can!)
Also, when someone has completed your course, you can point them to the next logical step. The key word is ‘engagement’!!!
The Google Hangouts on Air Business Model
I have been watching my mate, Manie Amari, crushing it with Google Hangouts on Air – he is interviewing some of the movers and shakers in internet marketing and it struck me what a great business model this is – particularly for newbies to internet marketing who have little experience, connections or their own products.
In fact, it inspired me to write a short 20 page eBook outlining how awesome this business model is and why everyone should consider adding this to their business whether they are new to IM or not – the book is entitled ‘Quite Possibly the Best Internet Marketing Business Model for Newbies’. Within the eBook I also point users to a page on my blog to learn how to use Google Hangouts on Air for free.
If you would like a copy of this eBook, then just subscribe to get your free copy – the information in the book is simple, awesome and transformational:
Engage Rocket is Launched
Engage Rocket was launched this week – this is the first plugin to use Facebook Open Graph to share on Facebook when someone on your blog:
joins a Product Launch
claims a Giveaway
claims a Free Gift
attends a Webinar
attends a Hangout
This product basically creates a viral Popover on any page on your website! (At the moment I am having some technical problems with it as I think it is conflicting with my theme!)
Ongoing Training
I am still working steadily through a free course on Photoshop at Udemy.com – I want to increase my skills to ninja level .
I am only doing this outside working hours because I realise that this is not a priority in my business because Marc Milburn advises that we should be outsourcing tasks like graphics creation. At the moment, I am reluctant to do this because I enjoy graphics creation too much! To me it is the best part of creating a product. Oops – that is not the attitude Mark!
Personal Stuff
I am taking a week off next week to help to look after my grandchildren whilst my daughter starts a new highly-paid job in London. As the temperatures are forecast to continue over 30 degrees centigrade next week in the UK (virtually unprecedented for our country), it will be an opportunity to get out and enjoy the sunshine and my grandchildren. I am really looking forward to the break – my first real break since last September. I hope to take them to see some animals and also to pick fruit and things like that, just to keep them occupied. I also have an old paddling pool that I will dig out from my garage!
I’ve always found that after a holiday I come back with new ideas and perspectives on my work so the next post should be a good one!! In the meantime, I will be working hard to complete Membership Millionaires Bootcamp and my sales funnel on JVZoo (that is, if they ever get around to replying to by request for support!!!)
I am locked within sales funnel frustration having not yet found anyone who can explain how to test a JVZoo funnel. I’ve therefore sent a stiff support ticket to JVZoo telling them that their training is not good and asking for help. If I cannot resolve this soon, then I will set my sales funnel up elsewhere.
I have had a consultation with Marc Milburn and this has helped me to resolve a few issues in my mind. With regards to driving some traffic to my sales funnel (once testing is complete), then I am going to buy some solo ads and I have a couple of good sources for this.
List Building with List Liberation
With regards to list building I am going to test the system that Chris Ramsey has created called List Liberation. This involves building a fan page following using Facebook Ads and then running surveys with the offer of a free gift at the end as a reward for completing the survey – of course, the respondent needs to provide their email address in order to get the free gift. The free gift will be one of the free gifts I created for my funnel.
Chris Ramsey is a very clever marketer – I came across him first when I was doing offline marketing and he was really crushing it. In fact he has recently moved to a small Caribbean island to live the internet lifestyle there. Just shows what can be achieved when you get it right.
Excuses, Excuses
Progress has been exceeding slow since my last blog post for a couple of reasons:
I am gridlocked by not knowing how to test my funnel in JVZoo
I had to take a couple of days out to help my daughter
I attended the first day of the Ashes at Trent Bridge in Nottingham (cricket – England v Australia) last Wednesday – a great day out with my son James.
I cannot catch up this weekend because the whole family are descending on us for the weekend to celebrate my grandsons first birthday
Daniel, my grandson
My Son, James
Incidentally, we have set up James’ first blog at http://james-salmon.com – we literally set this up in 10 minutes so it requires a bit more work but I am pleased that James is interested in creating his own website. He is going to help me to recruit affiliates during the couple of weeks he has off after leaving IBM (his work experience job) and before he goes back to Nottingham Trent University. One of James’ strengths is that he is a people person i.e. most people like him and he will be ideal in a sales role.
My son & his girlfriend
James is living the millionaire lifestyle having just returned from 4 days in Nice with his girlfriend and shortly about to spend 4 weeks in the US travelling from California to Las Vegas by car and then a weeks Caribbean cruise with his girlfriend and her parents – I don’t know how he does it but I hope that he enjoys himself before he gets into his final year at university.
Tweaking The Funnel
Three other issues that arose from my consultation with Marc were:
to change the headline on my squeeze page
to amend the sales letters on my upsells within my sales funnels to position the offer in relation to the front-end products in the funnel
setting up a split test for my squeeze page
I am almost there with my sales funnel and once I am confident about what I am doing then I am going to create a video of how I set the funnel up.
I’ve also been consulting with Manie Amari on his FB CashFuse product and this is almost good to go – I have learnt a lot from Manie about monetising a membership site – his site is full of potential income-earning opportunities.
Future Plans
One of my former offline customers has referred me to a charity who need their website refreshing – I have quoted £500 to £1500 depending on what they want done. I am hoping they will go for the latter figure which will enable me to spend some time on building them a great site using a premium theme. I already have some great marketing messages worked out. Their existing website is horrible to behold so I am confident that I can make them very happy if they trust in me.
I have also negotiated a special deal with Andrew Hunter of Membersonic for both his membership plugin and his theme. It is my intention to use this deal to set up a free webinar to demo the Membersonic plugin with an offer to help the attendees to build their own membership site in a 4 to 6 week workshop programme to include the discounted purchase of these tools. This business model was outlined by Marc in module 6 of Email Cash Siphon and I really like it. I bought Russ Rufinos ‘Knockout Profit System’ some time ago which outlined the same business model but at the time the webinar technology was very expensive. Google Hangouts on Air have changed all that for ever and I now think I will pursue this business model.
Google Hangouts & Other Products
Manie and myself I are using Google Hangouts to carry out our meetings so that we get more used to using the technology. In our last session we used a free tool called Hangout Magix to create customised overlays for the Hangout. 10 days ago we demonstrated Google Hangouts on Air to our coaching group and had some fun doing so.
The only other progress I can report is that I am receiving monthly affiliate commission cheques from affiliate marketing activities and I have imposed a rule that I will not spend more than I earn on new internet marketing products. Buying products is a bit of a sickness as far as I am concerned. I am planning to buy Optimize Press 2.0 when it launches at the end of the month. They have just demonstrated a built in button creator which you can see on their blog. This plugin is going to be awesome!
I am also benefiting from the fact that I get all Marc Milburn’s products – he is currently rolling out several products including Online Wealth Blueprint, Profit Flare and the remaining bonus modules of Digital Millionaires Bootcamp. In addition, I am studying his Email Cash Siphon training about email marketing. So much to do and so little time to do it! It is great having access to all of Marc’s products as I am constantly learning how to do internet marketing the right way.
Concluding Remarks
Whilst progress is slow, on reflection, I am still moving forward inexorably towards my goals – next week will hopefully be a cracker jack week when I can clear up some of the outstanding issues with my sales funnel frustration and I can finish my affiliate page and start driving traffic.
I’ve been having some sales funnel ‘fun’ this week – I speak sarcastically of course!
I needed a free give-away on the front-end of my funnel so I created a 30 page eBook about sales funnels at the start of this week. This is now on a squeeze page at http://mark-salmon.com/free.
I went through a number of names for this eBook including Slippery Sales Funnels, Sticky Sales Funnels, Sales Funnels on Steroids, Sales Funnel Domination but, when I saw Sterling Sherrells Book title called List Building Supremacy, I knew that ‘Sales Funnel Supremacy’ had to be it. Sorry for ‘stealing’ your idea Sherrell, hope you will forgive me!
On the same squeeze page, I have created an exit-redirect offering another free eBook called ‘Website Traffic Tornado’ which also has an exit pop-over with another free offer for ’10 Free ways to Generate Massive free traffic from Facebook. These exit pops are designed to give me the maximum opportunity to add visitors to my list.
I have therefore written or created 3 free give-aways and I also designed and created the ecovers below using Photoshop:
I also added a $1 downsell to The Way of the Warriors by recycling an eBook that I had written a little while ago so my funnel now looks a little different to the one I planned a week ago (click on it below to read it):
I had hoped to have the funnel up and working by the end of today but I have been frustrated by problems in setting up the $1 trial for both the Product Creation Renegade and WP Website Wizard downsells in the funnel on JVZoo. For some reason the system is not giving me the correct payment buttons so I have had to submit a ticket for help to JVZoo.
Once I have the whole funnel set up on JVZoo, I am going to create a video about how I did it so that it might help some of the students in the coaching group who have yet to set up a sales funnel.
Once I have set-up the sales funnel, I am going to ensure that Google Analytics is fully installed on the front of the funnel to monitor incoming traffic and then set-up a spreadsheet to monitor sales and conversions. I will also set up a couple of split-tests using Google Experiments.
Getting stuck into Google Hangouts on Air
I had a very useful Google Hangout with Manie Amari last Tuesday evening – we are both intent on cracking the use of Google Hangouts on Air for webinars. Manie is using the Google Hangout plugin for webinar set-up and I am using the Webinar Express plugin. It is my turn to test out Webinar Express on the next call this Tuesday.
The trial of Google Hangouts was useful to Manie who was operating on an Apple computer – he discovered that he needed an app to increase the light-levels on his web-cam. The other useful thing to come out of the meeting was that we have both discovered an automated way to calculate EPC and we are just trying to get to grips with the system before we discuss with our fellow coaching students.
Manie also revealed his new product about Facebook and I suggested that he get the help of our student Facebook Group to launch the product – I note that Manie did this the following day and the reaction to his product, FB Cash Fuse, is encouraging. Sweet graphics Manie!
Reverse-Engineering My Income
Following last weeks session with Marc Milburn, I also reverse-engineered how I was going to generate an income of $100,000 this year. When I extrapolated my EPC it came out at just $0.32 for me and the same for affiliates which clearly illustrated the need for some higher-priced products in my funnel. However, Marc advised me to set up my funnel as planned on the basis that I can change it later. As he said ‘it is not set in stone’ and I say that ‘every journey starts with the first step’. Just getting a funnel online will be a major breakthrough for me.
Improving My Graphic Design Skills
I have found a free course on Udemy.com to enable me to increase my skill level on Photoshop. At the moment my tool of choice for graphics is Macromedia Fireworks but Photoshop is more advanced and I really want to up my skill levels to the point where I can produce my own amazing graphics.
Instamember Is On Fire
I also bought and promoted Instamember this week – a new membership plugin that was launched last Monday and they sold over 3,000 copies in the first 3 days which shows that a good product will always find a ready market. I bought it for the developers license so that I can now produce membership sites for anyone. I will continue using Membersonic for my sites because of its simplicity but Instamember has some features that Membersonic does not so they could become useful in certain circumstances.
I also spent an hour with Ian Horner this week showing him how to set up Membersonic on his site. It was good to connect personally with Ian, who is one of Marc Milburn’s students. (I also made initial contact with Sterling Sherrell in our student group and we have a new member in Doc TheCoach, who has recently sold his hedge fund!)
James Dyson announced the launch of Optimize Press 2.0 in mid-July – I have to say that it looks very attractive. It will be fully responsive with a drag and drop interface. The page designs are off-the-hook, so it looks like I will be investing in this in July.
Looking Forward To Next Week
So all in all it has been a busy week but I am disappointed that I did not quite meet my goal of getting my whole funnel set-up by the end of play today. Hopefully, another hour or so’s work and I will be there and I can start driving some traffic to the front of the funnel to test it. I will start with some solo ads and hopefully I can get Daniel Madeira to guide me on this after he has inspected my funnel set-up.
One of the ideas I have running around in my mind is to start creating ‘vBooks’ i.e. these are eBooks with links to illustrative videos to explain something in more detail that I am discussing in the book.
So it looks like my sales funnel fun will continue into the start of next week and I also plan to finish off my affiliate page and start recruiting affiliates or at least networking with affiliates on in the Facebook JV groups.
One of the other students in Marc Milburn’s Coaching group, Daniel Madeira, wrote a blog post about the power of online relationships because he has had some help from the students to put together his product about how he created his solo ads business. It made me realise again just how many skills there are within the group of students and that if we just helped each other to implement Marc’s teaching then collectively we can overcome each others weaknesses.
Amongst the students we have people like Andrew Brackpool who has a talent for copywriting, Sergio Felix who is technically proficient with WordPress and a lot more because he has coding skills, Daniel Madeira knows all about solo ads, Chris Ferrante has just put together an amazing squeeze page, Mani Amari blew us away with his sales funnel strategy, Robert Watkins runs an internet marketing Facebook group with 2,700 fans (bet there is some nice traffic there!) and that’s just a few of the students I know about.
Then, of course, we are under the tutelage of Marc Milburn himself who is busily churning out incredible insights into internet marketing. I have to say that I am excited by how this coaching is shaping up – we have had two full trainings so far and the main coaching called Online Wealth Blueprint only starts TODAY!!! I think that means that the best is yet to come which is slightly unbelievable to me.
Last week I launched The Way of The Warriors eBook within a membership site and I have made my first sales without really promoting the product. I am holding back from promoting it because I want to get my sales funnel in place before I do that so here it is – you’ll have to click on the image to view it properly because it is too wide for the page:
This is not quite as daunting as it looks because I already have the OTO1 and OTO2 products created so I just need to create the upfront products. I have written Website Traffic Tornado already – I think I might move that to the Exit Pop and create a product on sales funnels as the front-end product because that will lead in better to The Way of the Warriors. My goal is to put this funnel into place this week.
Interestingly, it was Mani Amari’s funnel and than Daniel Madeira’s eBook that reminded me about the possibility of using an exit-pop to maximise conversions and this functionality is inbuilt into Optimize Press. It also made me realise that the more products you create, the more options you have for including your own products into a sales funnel.
There is one addition to the funnel that I want to shape up and that is a high-end coaching programme. I want to get that planned out very soon. I am working with Mani Amari on my sales funnel and recruiting affiliates and we intend to keep each other accountable.
Last week I also spent a day just proof reading Daniel Madeira’s Solo Ad Assassin product. I think it will sell really well because it is entirely authentic and it sets out a simple plan for creating a solo ads business. I am hoping that Daniel will teach me all about solo ads because it looks like a good business model for earning some cash and, failing that, a great way to drive traffic.
I have also started watching Marc’s Email Cash Siphon and I think I will create a product on email marketing just to consolidate Marc’s teaching – I created a logo for the product (Mercury, the winged messenger) which is the featured image on this post – probably not the right way to start a product by creating the logo first, but ‘hey’, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat!
Finally, let me leave you with two quotes from Alex Jeffrey’s:
There is no ‘push button’ without a list
It’s not what they sell, it’s how they sell to you
And my own thought for today ‘Collectively we can overcome each others weaknesses’ – an empowering thought for our coaching group.
