Can’t Find A Good Niche?
Don’t tell me you can’t food a good niche.
You must see this to believe it: Fish Pedicures
The Secret Of The One Thing
Sometimes success comes with complex, life-changing ideas. But usually the more simple you make a system, an idea, a sales process, the more effective it will be.
As simple as the concept is in this video, it is employed by almost every direct marketing business I know with a high degree of success.
Most people hold the belief “I have many products to offer and I might lose a customer if they don’t know about all of this great stuff I have to offer.” Little do they realize how many customers they’re losing with that approach. So here’s the video . . .
Are You Slave Or Master?
I watched the Fight Club again last night for at least the 20th time - but the first time in at least a year. If you haven’t seen it, you have to. Great movie.
I have these flash cards and each morning I go through and pick out one that has a theme to it I want to focus on for the day - today, “Are you a slave or MASTER”?
It doesn’t matter what you know about anything if you don’t take action consistently IN THE DIRECTION OF YOUR CHOOSING. If you take action from reaction - ie end up wasting an afternoon on the forums, as I do on occasion, then you’ve made yourself a slave. This is why I keep a hammer on my desk too. :-) Really.
Write that question on a sticky note and put it on your monitor for a day or two - see if you don’t produce a little more of what you want as a result.
X
Adwords Income
Check out this video clip on Adwords Income
Great domain name. Wonder who owns it.
Squeeze Page Advice: Low Optin Rates
I offer up the best material when people write to let me know the issues and struggles they’re having.
This is a great example. This guy is getting a 3-5% optin rate on his squeeze page using PPC traffic. Is it just bad traffic he asks?
I think that even BAD traffic should produce better results than that and looking at his squeeze page it’s easy to see what’s going on.
I’m not going to give up who he is or his site - or even his niche. Let’s just say it’s a very basic looking squeeze page that I’ve seen a hundred times - a bordered table with a headline, five bullet points and an optin form. That’s fine and some people make that work very well. A little more design effort - putting your headline in an image with an attention attracting picture above my optin form on the right side of the page is my personal preference through a lot of testing.
Design is an issue, but it’s the offer and how the offer is presented that REALLY matters.
So I gave him some copy modification suggestions - here are a few: ...
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Review Crusher
Part way through the tediously long 52-minute video about this new product from Mike Filsaime - that included about 5 solid minutes of bragging about the various stars of reality TV shows he’s hung out with - I saw some potential for the concept. (Remind me to share and gloat about my pictures with the past Presidents I worked for during my world travels for the National Security Council. I know you’ll be VERY impressed.)
Basically, Mike discovered all of the people running “Mike Filsaime is a Scam” ads. Then he discovered these ads were being run widespread and on the names of all the other saintly Gods of IM.
After he learned his good buddy Russell Brunson was running ads just like these when people did a search for Mike, he decided “game over”.
I have vowed to be more positive and less obnoxious - personally confrontational, if you will. But there seems to be this new level of Ego with “the Mike” that I’ve never seen in Internet marketing. “Guru” is truly going to his head - is that how God would have you to be Mike?
Game over? Does Mike REALLY think he has THAT much power over the rebel underground.
Folks - this is the Fight Club. We make the food you eat. Do not fuck with us.
Game over?
The solution Mike’s come up with is to create some software that allows you to create your own review site. Except, you don’t have to do any of the work - you can buy product reviews he writes, which most definitely are going to promote his products or you can have the mass hoard with nothing better to do write those reviews for you (how realistic is that REALLY - what I’ve found is that there are only 2 types of people primarily motivated to write a review online - those who are pissed about their experience and those who have something to gain monetarily. So . . . how much is your pissed off review going to help me sell this product? And if you’re not plastering my site with your affiliate links, then what’s to be gained? Exactly.)
In short, when I realized what he was selling - how much he was asking for it - and the thinly disguised motives for offering it were revealed, frankly I was pissed that I’d wasted an hour of my time watching it.
Am I being malicious here? Man, I hope not. It’s more like Dwight Howard swatting away a shot by a Russkie who’d have the gall to attempt to score - we ain’t having that around here.
Yeah.
Game over.
I’ll tell you exactly who can stop X.
X
2-days, $200 = Extra $2500 Per Month
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Landing Pages
Forget for a minute things like click through rates, ad placement and keyword phrases.
Those things are important for one reason and one reason only: to get people from point A (Google) to point B (your sales process).
SIDE NOTE: It really helps to get questions from you, because I just do what I do and sometimes I’m too focused on the “wow” material to recognize some readers need things I “just do”.
OK, so we’re talking about what REALLY matters to a marketer and that is conversion. If you don’t convert, you make no money.
There’s buyer traffic, shopper traffic and info seeker traffic when it comes to people doing Google searches. And I’ve added a fourth type of traffic to this list, but it doesn’t apply to Google so I’ll leave that to another post. This is the type of “BIG” traffic you hear people talking about, but making it work isn’t as easy as some would have you believe.
...
Now, I STRONGLY believe that you should ALWAYS be focused on building lists. And, you can go about list building with all of the above. At the least, with a list, you should be able to double your conversion rates with a decent follow-up effort. Plus, if they don’t go for this offer then there other plenty of other offers to be made – or you can leverage those lists for joint ventures, etc.
X
Have a question you want an answer to? Leave a comment. If you don’t want your comment made public, that’s cool - I’ll answer it without posting your details.
Sales Are Easy, Profiting Is Hard?
I’m doing some market research at the Warrior Forum -
I put up the question, “What do you love about Adwords, and what do you hate?”
The first response fits here perfectly:
“Making sales with Adwords is easy - profiting is hard.”
There are some things .X. is friggin’ lousy at - for one, I’m a disorganized mess.
What I’m good at, though, is looking at a situation and seeing solutions. I used to have to work at that - now it’s natural.
And to do it requires getting out of the box and recognizing what the existing paradigm is.
Internet marketing is changing so fast that you can’t hold on to old paradigms - it’s no different than holding onto a concrete block in a swimming pool.
The old Adwords paradigm is the Google Cash paradigm; spend one dollar on ads and work at making 2 dollars or more in return.
It’s not legendary fable that there was a time when it was easy to make six to eight dollars for every dollar spent - now, I regularly make 2 or 3 dollars on those campaigns - but you better expect the trend is going down on the profit margins.
Because of this old paradigm, most Adwords marketers (at least the affiliates) are finding it harder and harder to make money. Then you have tools like Undercover Profits coming out which basically exposes those . . . and you get the picture.
People are dying here.
So here’s the shift you need to make now - ...
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How Much Selling Have You Done Today?
FREE to EVERYONE
I’ve been doing a ton of reading lately and one of the books I’ve gotten a lot from is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson of Agora Publishing fame.
Masterson breaks the book into four parts and each of those parts essentially talks about what your focus should be at various levels of income from your business.
Level one is generating income up to $1 Million per year, which probably covers where most readers of this blog are (although I know I have a few readers doing over $1 million per month).
Before I reveal WHAT you should be doing, let me stress now that if you’re an affiliate marketer running a solo operation then this is a message for you.
Or, if you have your own product but you’re struggling to reach that critical mass of customers then this message is also for you.
And, if you consider yourself a relative newbie who’s still working your butt off (or thinking tirelessly about how to make money online) then this message is REALLY for you.
So here it is - this is what you should be spending 80% of your time on as the leader of your business until you’ve reached $1 million per year in revenue.
It’s not customer support.
It’s not product creation.
It’s not picking out furniture.
It’s not setting up the best legal entity for your business.
It’s not creating pretty website designs.
It’s simply this . . . you should be spending 80% of your time marketing and selling.
Now, I think a LOT of people are grossly - GROSSLY - mislead and misunderstanding what marketing and selling IS.
Here is a simple fact of business - if you are not selling anything, then you are not going to make money and you are not going to stay in business.
And yet that’s the last thing MOST people want to do. We hate the idea of selling and being sold.
So we engage in passive activities that come close to accomplishing our goal . . . but not really. We’re sort of selling, but not really.
So, we write articles . . .
We hope someone is kind enough to pick our article up and post it on their site or in a newsletter (something I NEVER hear anyone talk about anymore and that works better than “bum marketing”, I guarantee you). We hope that someone then is able to find our article through a search engine, that they’ll read the article and click on a link and end up where we want them to end up so we can FINALLY make them an offer.
So, we hang out on forums with a link in our signature . . .
And we jump into the latest gossip and we hope that someone clicks on our link and goes somewhere and buys something.
So, we post some stuff on our blog and hope that somehow someone ends up there and buys something.
And on and on.
Now, sales do occur with these methods and a lot of the other passive forms of “selling” going on out there. And that’s the BAD news. Because these people think they’ve experienced some success without realizing how BADLY they’ve failed when compared with what they’re potential is if they were doing what they SHOULD BE DOING.
This is all a lot like having a crush on a cute girl in the 10th grade. We devise all of these passive ways of letting that girl know we like her. And not surprisingly, looking back, she’s not impressed - and then we wonder why she’s going to the prom with the schmuck she’s going with. It’s not necessarily because that’s who she’d have preferred - it’s because he actually took the chance and did the hard work of SELLING THE IDEA.
What does all of this have to do with affiliate marketing?
I’ll tell you.
You’re one and only focus needs to be on mastering selling, then mastering marketing. It doesn’t matter if you can identify a hungry crowd if you can’t sell to them. And that’s why I say selling first.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable. If you have any conscience, it may never be totally comfortable - unless you only sell products you REALLY believe in.
The reason that affiliate marketing is so important is you don’t have to focus on doing all of the things that you SHOULD NOT BE DOING ANYWAY.
Your focus should be almost exclusively on selling - and on finding more people to sell to. And then on finding more things to sell to those people. It should not be on creating products, supporting customers, creating pretty website graphics, etc.
Listen to me because I’m speaking to you from my own experiences and Masterson just put it into words I completely identified with: until the day came that I STOPPED attempting to be the guru - ie, creating everything from scratch - the product, the sales copy, the site, etc - when I stopped trying to do all of that and I started promoting the stuff created by real-live recognized gurus - that’s when I started making money.
Until you have mastered selling to people, all that other stuff is a waste of your time and resources.
Hey - you don’t have to agree with me on this but I’m telling you the truth here. Over the next week, see if you’re spending 80% of your time on marketing and selling. And if the answer is “no”, then tell me you made as much money as you could have made.
All the best to you - X
