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By Matt, on November 29th, 2011% Top Tip Number 8 for Beginners to Online Business:
Formulate a Plan – And Stick To It
After your self-enforced learning period, decide exactly what you will be doing in your online business. Niche marketing? Reselling? Affiliate Marketing? Creating your own Product? Do not get yourself totally confused and overwhelmed by falling for a variety of sells that might take you down every one of those paths, and more.
Once your decision is made – select your target market. Note we use market in the singular? The only way to really get traction is to have a pure, driven focus on your selected market (you can start hitting multiple markets with different income components once you’ve become familiar, comfortable and successful with the online business process). Then the plan becomes:
Your Online Business Success Plan
- Do Something – launch your carefully considered and planned online business.
- See Something (as in a result, be it success or the failure that teaches you where you went wrong and how to get it right second time around). Understand that small successes at first can be the building blocks for large successes later.
- Be persistent. Push that market and watch it grow. It doesn’t have to turn over $10,000 in the first month (that only happens in sales pages!), even $100 will do – as long as your persistence grows that income on a month-to-month basis until you consider the initial project a successful starting point.
- Do it again. Once you have figured out how to make this work, feel free to pick another market, even another style, and launch a second project.
- As I said a second ago, be persistent! Go back to Step 1 and start the process over and over again as your first project(s) provide the financing for growth. They can pay for Google Adwords campaigns. They can pay for outsourcing. They can feed your momentum until you really are earning the “kiss the job goodbye” money you wanted.
Beware The Traps!
Speaking of Adwords campaigns – don’t try to buy all your traffic, you’ll end up paying Google more than you earn, especially in competitive (high cost-per-click) niches. Adwords should be considered a supplemental traffic tool, bringing people to a proven seller – and therefore paying its own way. Monitor the cost effectiveness of any advertising and only stick with it if it is making you a profit (many people get caught up in the thrill of making their first few sales and let their ad accounts run wild in the background).
Okay, let’s go back to point 1, “Do Something”. Remember, it is based on your well-researched decision during the period that you didn’t buy into get-rich-quick schemes or fall for “anyone can make a fortune” sales letters.
Once you’ve made the decision, it might be time to buy things, but there’s a distinctive set of rules here too.
Rules For Spending Money
- Only download/join/buy 1) content that fits with your market choice decision or 2) tools, techniques or training dedicated to improving your site content or traffic. If the latter, do your research and be very selective – this is one area where the hype is through the roof!
- Don’t be in too much of a hurry to slap what you consider to be money-earning items all over your site. You need traffic before you can have sales.
- Start your site with content. Build a reasonable selection of meaningful content before you do anything else. The more meaningful and useful you make your content, the more valuable you make your “brand”. Throwing half-baked PLR and other third-party information at a site (without some real, meaningful and preferably unique and original content) might get you visits from search engines but typically won’t get you repeat traffic – the people that trust you and buy from you.
- Once you have the content, chase the traffic. (Yes, more on that, as with everything else we’ve summarised so far, later).
Have some worthwhile giveaways (and add/change on a regular basis) so people come to value your site as a resource, not just see it as a money-grabber. If you give them something good, they are a lot more likely to also buy, or return (and maybe buy next time). And the freebie is a great way to build a list.
- When you have decent content and traffic, introduce the money-earning components (maybe that’s sales, maybe it’s advertising, maybe it’s both of those and a number of other related income-producing streams).
- Work hard to build a responsive email list – and don’t bombard your list with endless money-grabbing emails. If that’s all you do, unsubscribes will come thick and fast. Provide some useful information, links to free downloads, and scatter sales emails (that sell useful things – the “anything for money” approach will kill your brand!) in regular but not-too-frequent broadcasts.
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By Matt, on April 28th, 2011% The Wizard of Oz is at it Again
My old friend (and a truly honest, value-for-money marketer) Oz, at Addictive text, has a competition running where you can win one of six iPads just by joining his research competition – and reading his posts on how “You Can Create A Six-Figure Asset… Starting Today”
You just sign up for the contest as you work your way through his fascinating material – his gain being to get you to participate in a short and simple research project (two questions!).
You can earn contest points by referring others, and you can win an iPad in a random draw – too easy, especially as it’s worth any marketer’s time to read Oz’s postings.
I told you about Oz in this item: Addictive Text – Oz is a Magician. back in October, and since then he has continued to release superb products (yes, I buy them, keep them, use them!  )
“Freemium Content” Auto-Blogging
For those interested in auto-blogging without suffering duplicate-content penalties and without any black-hat tricks (the core of so many products), Oz has put a lot of further development into his earlier product, and renamed it to WP Easy Content (WPEC as we all know it). This is a fantastically powerful tool at a reasonable price, with none of the negatives of the typical competing product.
WPEC is well worth checking out – and, as I told you last time, so are all his products, including the powerful free reports such as SEOn Trial and the Q Experience.
My Number One Marketer
Oz is so generous with his free reports and blog content, and his paid products are so good and so fairly priced, that he is one of my three preferred marketers of the hundreds I hear from regularly or occasionally. You really do owe it to yourself to get onto his list for great value information (without cheesy cons and without email bombardment).
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By Matt, on April 22nd, 2011% Top Tip Number 7 for Beginners to Online Business:
Free Stuff Now! Forced Continuity
One of the big things these days is internet marketing membership sites, where they get to charge you every month. Many are expensive, useless toys, although some provide exceptional value in constantly sourcing new products for you to sell or learn from (these sites are often easily picked from the crowd because they have a free membership option – you don’t get access to all the best goodies, but you do get to look around to see if it’s worth spending the upgrade cost).
In the same category is “member products” – sites where you must do your work and possibly your hosting through the seller’s online site. Access to the product you thought you had paid for is conditional on you remaining a member – with a horrible tendency to charge you $97, $127, $197 or even more for each month.
Now I can’t write off every site that uses this approach – every now and then one of them is actually worth the money – but the majority prey on beginners who blame their lack of progress on themselves rather than the deficient product they are paying for. It takes months (and lots of dollars) before they realise whose fault it really is.
Your Unwinnable War
Many of them (and many for-sale-once, done-for-you products) create an unwinnable war for you – giving you what appears to be great content or complete web sites (or affiliate campaigns) that they are also selling to 200, 500, 1000, or 10,000 other people at the same time. How can you stand out among such a crowd of absolute duplicates? How can you get traffic (the lifeblood of any site)? How can you get anywhere in the search engines, who recognise duplicate sites/content and discount them in the rankings?
Sure, if you’re a marketing/traffic/SEO guru you can win the war – but you’re being sold this as the beginner’s answer to overnight riches, and you have no chance of competing until you learn a whole lot more, by which time the product/site/service is stale. In reality, the winner of the war is the person who sold you the product in the first place – because he/she not only got your money, but also got the material to the top of the search engines before you even purchased.
“I Own You, Sucker”
And remember, “free hosting, no technical knowledge required” really means “I own you, you’re stuck with your monthly membership payments until the day you wake up to the fact this isn’t going to work for you”.
Forced Continuity
There are two very common ways of sucking you in to forced continuity these days:
- One is the never-ending string of “Get this wonderful (physical) product Free!” (their cost is covered by the shipping they charge anyway). Your free product includes a bonus membership or monthly newsletter, and there’s a huge reliance on inertia – that you’ll just let the monthly charge keep coming off your credit card without really noticing. Quite often you’ll be so buried in information overload that even when the newsletter does arrive you’ll put it on the shelf “for later”.
- The other is the “get all this for just one measly dollar!”, getting you to sign up for the 5-day, 7-day, or even a generous one-month trial before your monthly fee is automatically deducted from your credit card or PayPal account.
Too Tempting to Resist?
It’s extremely tempting, especially based on the hype-filled (and information-poor) sales letter. It is so easy to spend that dollar, or sign up for your free CD or iPod-clone to be shipped to your door, that I can hardly blame anyone for doing it.
However, there is one important thing you must do immediately after you sign up (or before, to be safe if you’re the forgetful type) – and that is to make a plan for cancelling unless you discover the product is one of the rare gems that pops up occasionally.
Set the Alarm Bells
When we sign up for one of these schemes, we put an alarm in our diary for before the end of the initial trial (or immediately after, if we really want to see the “bonus”, so we only need to pay one membership payment) – it says “Cancel XYZ product today, before they charge me the membership fee”.
We don’t actually insist on cancellation – the diary entry (usually in a smartphone with calendar alarms) is to remind us to make the decision on whether this is really a worthwhile product before any more money is taken from our accounts. We don’t want to be the sucker they rely on for continuing income – the one who forgets until it’s noticed on a credit card bill six months later . . .
Your Memberships
Found a good membership? Been sucked into a useless one? Leave a comment so others can have the benefit of your experience.
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By Matt, on November 2nd, 2010% Vote With Your Feet!
I mentioned it in Tip 6: Understand The (Evil) Tricks of the Trade, but if you haven’t done it you must go and watch the fantastic video demonstration called “IM Victim Services: Beware Of Scandal” (better referred to as “outing the unethical scam marketers) on Mark Dulisse’s Blog – watch the video, read the comments, and absorb it all.
Remember the line “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!“? Well, that’s how I feel after seeing the scum selling scrap with their stock-format sales pages so many times in recent months. This has been happening for years, but it’s becoming an epidemic as these people steal money from (mostly) newcomers to the online business world. And, as Mark highlights, there seems to be a clique of UK-based marketers locking in on this formula.
I see part of my job as buying some of these products, just so I can be able to advise my friends and readers who ask whether they’re worthwhile. I’m getting to the point where just the sound of one of those polished Brit accents makes me either want to close the page or be sick on the keyboard. Every nation has its scammers, and the UK has some great people (like Alex Jeffreys and Lee McIntyre), but it just seems there’s a Mayfair Mafia in action at the moment, all supporting each other and all copying each other’s evil lies and sales tricks.
And Vote with The Refund Button!
We must protest! A lot of newcomers don’t realise how painless it is to get a refund from places like ClickBank, or feel embarrassed to do so. Don’t feel embarrassed, you’ve been lied to and cheated – just do it! I don’t just refund these products, I give both ClickBank and the vendor an earfull about the deceptive tactics (when I am going to buy anything, I always save copies of the sales pages, videos and everything else through the process so I can go back and compare what I received to what I was promised.
Don’t just refund, tell them why – and tell them you believe in ethics in marketing and will never deal with them until they show they’ve changed.
Next, give every affiliate promoting this rubbish a quiet word as well – pointing out that even though they might not realise it, they are promoting junk and earning themselves a bad name. Tell them you’re not interested in hearing from them again unless they, too, start believing in ethics in marketing.
And Vote with the Unsubscribe Link!
After you’ve sent the marketer an email telling them what you think of their tactics, point out you will be unsubscribing and do so immediately. Tell anyone who’ll listen to do the same.
Then do exactly the same with the affiliates. Both are people you don’t really want to hear from again because you can’t trust them!
If enough of us refund, unsubscribe, and tell these people exactly why we are doing it, perhaps they’ll re-think their tactics and some sanity will return to the Internet Marketing World.
Naming Names
The big problem with publishing the names of these people, or the products that identify them, in the same breath as calling them liars, scammers and scum is the possibility of law suits. I’d love to list a bunch of names here (and there are several mentioned on Mark’s Blog), but I’m wary.
However, I think I’m going to start an entirely different thread soon, listing what I buy and making comments on the products. For some products the only comment will be “Refunded”.
Let’s beat some sense into them!
What do you think? Are you refunding things, or have you bit your lip and stuffed the rubbish in the digital bottom drawer?
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By Matt, on October 24th, 2010% Top Tip Number 6 for Beginners to Online Business:
I’ve mentioned it before, I’ve referred to it in some tips, and I want to point you to a fantastic video demonstration called “IM Victim Services: Beware Of Scandal” (better referred to as “outing the unethical scam marketers) on Mark Dulisse’s Blog – watch the video, read the comments, and absorb it all.
Treat every sales page and claim with contempt, then examine it closely and see if it deserves to move up a notch to “vaguely, possibly believable”. If it gets that far, and fits your plan, read it again from start to finish and see if it really tells you what you’re buying.
If you get that far and still believe, check that it is refundable. Only if it satisfies all those conditions, consider buying it.
Sucking You Dry?
If the often endless streams of OTOs (One-Time Offers) that follows your initial purchase are mandatory to achieve the claims of the original sales page (as opposed to supplementing them and significantly improving your chances of success), that’s another indication of sleazy tactics.
If you get to the “Add to Cart” stage and push the button, download and test it quickly to ensure it isn’t another re-hashed, half-baked mind-number, and if it doesn’t pass that test don’t even think about waiting more than a couple of days before demanding your refund!
Tricks of the Trade?
Yes, the tricks they are playing on you! Violent attacks on your emotions, probably when you are at your most vulnerable, to make you believe there is an Internet Marketing Millionaire’s Heaven and you are about to claim your cubicle in it for just a few dollars.
Be rich for the price of a night out! Invest the value of a couple of Big Macs and get ready to order your Ferrari! So easy anyone can do it. Just 7 clicks and go on holidays while the money rolls in! Oh, and now we have your money for that, buy this super-deluxe platinum version and get really, really rich really, really fast. It’s a no-brainer! AutoPilot! All your dreams will come true before breakfast!
There is no magic bullet. Anyone selling you something decent will make it clear that some work is required if you want to succeed. Secret discoveries, “glitches”, magic software developed at super-expensive prices but sold to you for $37? Dream on!
Market without Marketing . . .
The “you don’t need a web site, PPC, ads, article marketing, or any of the things the Gurus will tell you to do” claims are usually just BS, if you’ll excuse the expression. As soon as you pay and get in there you find the bulk of your time is spent downloading someone else’s rehashed PLR videos telling you how to work your backside off getting traffic, registering domains, buying hosting, learning FTP, and all the rest of the things you didn’t need.
How do they sucker you?
- Extraordinary (often extremely expensive) copywriting
- Appealing to your emotions, not your business sense
- Sometimes, with pure lies.
- Urgency, countdowns, “Offer ends soon”, “Price rises dramatically soon”
- Free web sites for the non-technical, as if a thousand near-identical traffic-free sites will make anyone but the seller any money. (Not to mention the hefty referral fee they usually get from the web host you have to sign up with).
- For every good product or system, there are a thousand Internet get-rich-newbie-bunnies trying to make their “system” sound better. You need to see a huge selection of these offers before you’ve learned enough to separate the good from the bad.
One of the first signs to trigger your super-skeptic mode is the sales page that starts with monstrous earnings claims (and yes, all that proof is easy to fake or else it comes from an entirely different product/launch cycle).
If it then goes on to show you the million-dollar house you should start noticing the wafting smell of rats in the room. The rats become dead and smellier when you get to see pictures of not just one, but two or more extremely expensive and desirable cars.
Anf then the pictures of exotic holidays in faraway places (what the hell does his holiday have to do with internet marketing?) complete the picture of an outright and violent assault on your emotions – all this could be yours, for $37 and 7 clicks! How could anyone walk away from such a dream of a life?
Don’t Walk Away – Run!
Get a real recommendation from someone you trust (don’t just Google it and get the raving reviews from affiliates who haven’t even seen the product), research the seller, test the claims, and be ready to believe it is a complete con. If you have a feeling it might work, and know if fits your plan, then make sure it is refundable.
Refunding on good products is not nice, and a lot of good marketers (“a lot” is a relative term) get hurt by “serial refunders”, but I could make a case that places like ClickBank shouldn’t even touch some of these extremely dubious products. They solve that issue by insisting every product has a 60-day refund period, and you get no arguments when you ask for your refund. Make sure you’re in those sort of safe hands unless you know and trust the marketer (and if you do, (s)he won’t be guilty of most of the sins expressed above anyway).
Don’t ever feel embarrassed, and don’t let laziness come between you and your refund – it’s time we all took a stand against these scammers. Vote with your feet and your dollars (and unsubscribe from their lists, and those of anyone promoting them) – if they see their ill-gotten gains falling away, they might just have to re-think things and start acting ethically.
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By Matt, on October 9th, 2010% Top Tip 5.5: Tactical Guide To Giveaways
As I said in this item – The Last of the Giveaways – I’ve spent some time telling you about giveaway events, both here and by email – but I may stop . . .
Why? Because events like this are designed specifically for list-building – that is, to get you on as many of their lists as possible. While I’ve given you techniques for how to avoid this aspect of information overload in this tip, I’m afraid I’m becoming as guilty as anyone else of foisting this evil on you.
As I said there, I feel the need to develop a “Tactical Guide to Giveaways” as part of my Tips series – so here it is, and that’s why it’s numbered 5.5, as it wasn’t part of the original series of 10.
Remember, I said you have to promise to read this before joining any Giveaways I might tell you about!
Free Download? Oh, Quick, Get It!
The problem is that for many people, the urge to download “free stuff” is too hard to resist – whether you need it or not. So you end up with more and more megabytes of unused (and often unread) junk filling up your hard disk.
There is great value in some giveaways, and some gifts, as long as you have the right approach. Don’t grab something because it’s free, only grab it because it can become a useful component in your own marketing plan, or your own learning process.
Remember my favourite quote from Alex Jeffreys – “stop being a prospect and start being a marketer!”
The tragic thing about grabbing too many free things is they distract you from your plan. The clutter of useless stuff on your hard disk hides the really useful gems you should be putting to use. Don’t let giveaways contribute to the information overload that prevents you from being successful online!
The Tactical Guide
Here’s my main points of the “Tactical Guide”
- These comments apply as much to the OTOs (one-time-offers) you get when logging in as to the list of freebies you scroll through to decide on downloads. The OTOs are often extremely attractive – a lot of components at a low price – but if there is nowhere in your marketing plan for the offer, don’t buy it regardless of how attractive it may seem!
- The same goes for the freebies. The only difference is they are extremely cheap (i.e., $0.00) – but if they don’t have a place in your marketing plan, or fill a very important gap in your own learning, they are worth less than what you’re (not) paying for them!
- Anything you do sign up for should use that “throwaway” email address we outline in “Avoiding Information Overload” – after you have your gift, unsubscribe immediately.
What Should You Download?
- Only things that you need to study to learn a part of the business, and only if it is clearly a good product for that purpose.
- Only things that fit your marketing plan.
- Only things that have some form of rights attached – giveaway, resell, master resell, or PLR – so you can actually use them in your marketing. I always scan the giveaway lists quickly and tend to totally ignore anything that isn’t offering rights. (Similarly, I try to make sure every gift I enter into giveaways has some form of rights, and I’m successful at least 90% of the time.
- You want useful products, products that fit your marketing plan, and you want them with rights so you can sell them or give them away to help build your own list. The only “non-rights” products to download are useful learning items, and potentially “personal use only” tools like software and blog plugins that you can use to increase the effectiveness of your web presence.
If it doesn’t fit these categories, you’re wasting time and distracting yourself from your success plan – better to give away Giveaways than approach them without these strategies.
Remember, if and when I tell you about a giveaway you’re not allowed to join it if you haven’t read this and promised hand-on-heart to follow the rules!
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By Matt, on October 1st, 2010% Top Tip Number 5 for Beginners to Online Business:
Another set to print out and stick on the wall:
• It won’t go away at midnight, or when that (usually) fake clock finishes its countdown . . .
You can see examples of countdowns that never end (or re-start when you refresh or re-visit the page) elsewhere on the blog (for example, “The Evil of Internet Marketing Sales Pages”). There, we showed a countdown timer which started at 3:00 minutes, and when it got to zero you got a “Time is Up” message. Of course, if you simply refreshed the page, the timer started again! And if you came back 12 minutes later (as we did), or the next day, or probably next year . . . that timer is going to start at 3 minutes again, and again, and again.
We’ve seen this so many times it makes us sick. Have you ever seen a retail store say “you have 3 minutes to buy, or we won’t let you have it”? Can you think of any reason why someone in the business of selling you things would decide not to sell you something because you weren’t quick enough?
“Go away, I don’t want your money any more, you took too long to decide!” I’d like to read the marketing book that teaches this philosophy . . .
• If it sounds too good to be true . . . it usually is
It costs you almost nothing, but will turn you into a millionaire overnight. You can expect your first income within 48 hours, and your four-, five- and six-figure months will follow almost instantly. Yeah, right!
It’s all true – as long as you know how to spot and correct the failings in the product, have an army of employees to set things up and generate the traffic, and have no scruples about conning people out of their money.
Oh, yes, you might also need to have a spare $5000 a month for Adwords to get the prospects to your page (and if you use half the Adwords techniques these people promote, you’re likely to get banned from Google anyway).
That very old saying – If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – should be burned into your brain. People put more money, time and effort into the sales pages that extract your cash than into the product they’re selling you. And all too often you’ll make a purchase only to be hit by multiple One-Time Offers (OTOs) and upsells that you really have to purchase to ever get the capabilities the original sales page highlighted.
• If you believe there’s only 100 83 47 25 12 3 copies left, you’re probably wrong!
We’ve seen this one so many times it makes us sick too. The most recent classic was the Cambridge Business Academy’s “Secret penny-per-click Google Adwords” product, where the video we watched a month ago went to great lengths to convince us only 100 copies would be sold. The same video, with the same promises, appeared on their blog this week. Either they are very poor at selling, or the 100-copy limit is a bit of a stretch.
 It takes me a month to sell 100 copies! I have watched plenty of those “3 copies left” sales pages, re-visited them, left them on my screen, and a week later clicked the order button to see if I would be rejected. I’m sure you can guess what happened.
Again, we have to ask ourselves – why on earth (with the few types of exceptions we have mentioned already) would someone stop selling something that was bringing them money? Why sell 100 copies when the income doesn’t even cover the claimed cost of development of the product?
It’s yet another of those emotional marketing techniques to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.
• Never buy without exiting the sales page first – they’ll almost always make you a better offer.
Please, never get a dose of “oooh, I have to have this” and click the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. Copy the URL, then try to close the sales page – at least 50 percent of the time you’ll get the “wait, click cancel to see the next page” dialog.
And on the next page there will be a significant discount, a cheaper offer with some of the useless extras left out, or some other form of “we still want your money, even if it’s half as much”.
If the page actually closes without the fake human discussion or other form of discount offer, just paste the URL back into your browser and go back to the original sales page.
And another useful point is to always save the sales page to disk before proceeding with your purchase – gives you concrete evidence when you ask for a refund because the product description was misleading or incomplete.
• “You’ll never see this page again” is rarely true, and easily beaten.
Yes, it’s yet another of those emotional marketing techniques to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.
In very rare (about 1 percent) cases, you’ll have trouble getting back to that page – the rest of the time it’s just another scare tactic to get you to buy now.
Mostly they’ll just put a cookie on your machine to say you’ve been there (if they even bother to try to stop you getting back to the page). So tell your browser to clear its cache, and head on back!
In those 1 percent cases where they want you to believe they’re serious about OTOs, they might record your IP address. Might. It’s a lot of programming and a lot more hard work than a cookie, so it hardly ever happens (even when the page claims that’s what they are doing),
If they really are doing it, just borrow someone else’s machine, head down to the local free wi-fi hotspot, or use a proxy service (plenty of free ones, just type “free proxy” into a search engine).
• Ask yourself “Why does this person want to make me a millionaire?”
The question that always occupies my mind. If you believe the sales pages, there’s so much noble intention on the internet that we should have world peace by now!
“I want to give back to the community!”
“I used to struggle like you, but now I’m a millionaire and I’m happy to spend all my time helping you get there too.”
Oh, yeah, right! And while you’re doing me this incredible service, all you want is a tiny $97 for your $5438.26 worth of product/information/bonus. You’re so generous!
Please, while you’re at it, show me your million-dollar house and at least two fancy cars so I know how rich I can become thanks to your generosity . . .
Seriously, ask yourself the question – do you believe the “generous, noble, giving” lines squashed between the pictures of hugely profitable ClickBank accounts and the million-dollar house? Is there any more than about 0.25 percent of the population who would put all that effort into online generosity rather than just giving to charity?
Why the hell does this person want to make me a millionaire? Or is he making himself a millionaire by fooling me into believing I can get there too?
Update: Take a look at this entry on Mark Dulisse’s blog where he discusses scamming and poses the “Internet Marketing Victim Services”. It’s just the asort of thing I would love to have published . . .
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By Matt, on September 23rd, 2010% I’ve spent some time recently telling you about giveaway events, both here and by email.
I may stop . . .
Why? Because events like this are designed specifically for list-building – that is, to get you on as many of their lists as possible. While I’ve given you techniques for how to avoid this aspect of information overload in this tip, I’m afraid I’m becoming as guilty as anyone else of foisting this evil on you.
And for many people, the urge to download “free stuff” is too hard to resist – whether you need it or not. So you end up with more and more megabytes of unused (and often unread) junk filling up your hard disk.
I have to admit there is great value in some giveaways, and some gifts, but I feel the need to develop a “Tactical Guide to Giveaways” as part of my Tips series – so that will go towards the top of my to-do list, and until I’ve published it I’ll stay quiet on the Giveaway front. And you’ll have to promise to read it before joining any Giveaways I might tell you about!
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By Matt, on July 28th, 2010% Guest Post: Classic email I just received from the esteemed Dr Glenn Livingston, PhD.:
“There’s something driving me nucking futz today, and I hope you’ll excuse my ranting to my list because my wife is tired of hearing about it, and my dogs just look at me like I’m an idiot.
(If you think this is inappropriate, go ahead and use that magic link at the bottom please)
What’s irritating me is something called “Techniqueosis”, which is the technical term we psychologists use for a psychotic obsession with new marketing techniques.
Can I ask you a question? How many people do you know … and I mean REAL people, not someone on stage at an internet seminar, who’ve built sustainable businesses based on the latest shiny object bouncing across the IM product launch world?
Do you even know ONE?
Now, let me ask you another question … how many broken hearted people do you know who spent money they couldn’t afford on an ill-fated dream they thought this technique or that would finally put together for them?
(I bet that’s a much bigger number)
Here’s what I keep coming back to, and it’s actually something Perry Marshall taught me …
You need ONE way of generating traffic, and ONE way of converting those people into buyers.
When you get good at that, you can let everyone else worry about all the other methods and just pay a really, really good affiliate commission. You can even do this for the other parts of business you’re not good at.
For example, I’m so good at PPC for traffic, and Market Research for conversion, that I not only let affiliates handle all my web 2.0 stuff and SEO, I was also able to attract a partner to run a whole company for me (Rocket Clicks).
I’m really not saying this to brag. (Except sometimes I AM an idiot and I do brag … but que sera’ sera’)
I’m saying it to FOCUS you on the real question at hand which is …
Do YOU know what your MAGIC TWO are?
More importantly, what’s it going to take to cure your Techniqueosis and get you to focus on THOSE?
Damn … I’d probably better stop getting so much gratification from writing these letters and get back to selling stuff by presenting benefit after benefit, etc.
But it’s really cool to have 25,000+ people who really pay attention to what you’ve got to say … I guess sometimes I abuse that priveledge. (Please don’t complain to me … you can just write my wife supportive letters)
And honestly, this IS an important message given where we all are in the world now, don’t you think? Who among us can afford to be chasing shiny bouncing balls TODAY?
Hope I made you think.”
Yes, Glenn, you made me think, and reminded me in a very succinct manner of the mistakes I make despite my dedication to bringing exactly those concepts to online business beginners. Thanks for the heads-up, and thanks for letting me run your email as a guest post. – Matt
As I’ve said elsewhere on these pages, you owe it to yourself to get onto Glenn’s mailing list, he gives away better information than the wannabe’s try to sell you every day. And he has some great products too – I’ve been subscribed to his Hyper-Responsive Marketing Club for nearly a year, and it’s packed with information, real value, and shows you the right way to build a business.
I suggest you start off by grabbing Glenn’s Free AdWords Cheat Sheets & Videos.
And what about you? Can you name your MAGIC TWO? Feel free to share – or even to argue with Glenn’s ideas – by posting a comment.
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By Matt, on July 8th, 2010% Top Tip Number 4 for Beginners to Online Business:
This will be short and sweet – because, as we told you in Tip 1, it had a combination of the information required for Tips 1 and 4.
As we said, if you – like most beginners – have a single email account you are in deep trouble. Once you start signing up for information, freebies, downloads and the like you will collapse under the storm of emails you start receiving daily.
In the combined opening Tip we outlined our special technique for handling that email bombshell so you can get what you want, get rid of the rest, avoid having to be terrified of opening your email client each day, and sill collect the goodies you want and the information you really need.
Yes, You NEED Web Hosting
As we said in Tip 1, now is the time to get cheap web hosting to make the multiple-email-address technique simple and powerful. Sure, you could grab yourself five free email accounts at Google, Yahoo or Hotmail – but having your own web space will give you the chance to learn many of the things you will need in the future.
You can play around with installing and using blogs, see how you go at creating your own web pages, and generally test things rather than just reading about how you might do them one day.
Don’t believe the get-rich-quick sales pages that say you don’t need a web site. You will need a site for your first project and, depending on the style of business you decide on, you may need many, many more.
Hosting Resources
Even the cheap hosting plans at places like HostGator will allow you to establish multiple web sites. However, those sites will all be on the same IP address – not a problem if they are independent sites and topics, but not so good for Search Engine Optimization if you plan to build a “cloud” of sites linking back to your main sales site.
If the “promote yourself and give yourself backlinks” technique is part of your plan, it may be better to sign up for a more expensive, but invaluable, reseller account with Host Nine because that account lets you host sites in vastly different geographic locations such as the US, the UK, and Singapore,
The geographic (and IP-address) distinction of these accounts is invaluable for SEO, back-linking, “blog farms”, and a host of other techniques that will give you Search Engine love juice.
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 7.0/10 (1 vote cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
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