There is an old piece of advice that says you should always, ALWAYS pay yourself first. Take 10% off the top of everything you earn and save it, invest it and most of all, keep it for yourself.
You save this 10% off the top before you pay any bills, before you pay taxes, before you buy food or pay the mortgage.
And over time, that 10% will add up to significant money and even financial freedom.
But there’s another 10% I want to talk about, and it’s time.
If you’re spending the best 10 hours of your day working for someone else, or even staying home with the kids during this unusual time in history, I’d like to suggest the following:
Spend the first hour of every day working towards your big goal. If your big goal is your own business, then spend that hour making progress on your business.
Nothing gets in the way of this hour because this hour belongs to YOU – not to the kids, your spouse, the boss or to your emails.
You are paying yourself first with this hour. I’ve seen people build entire businesses and quit their jobs by being iron-clad adamant that this hour – every single day – is used for nothing but growing their business.
Maybe your goal is fitness oriented. Use the hour to work out. Or maybe your goal is learning a language or new skill. Whatever the goal, commit the first hour of the day – when you are freshest and the ideas and solutions come quickly – to work towards your goal.
And six months from now you’ll probably need a new goal because you will have (finally!) achieved your current goal.
Save $100 Dollars a Month – By Using This Simple Free System
If you use shopping cart or affiliate software for your business, you’ll want to pay close attention to this article. It can save you hundreds of dollars in overhead expenses for your business.
Especially if you’re using software or services just a ThriveCart, SamCart, PayKickStart, Clickbank or JV Zoo. You’ll want to pay attention…because what I’m sharing with you today is making marketing history.
GrooveDigital software development company, owned by marketing legend Mike Filsaime, is focused on creating the most powerful, affordable and simple to use all-in-one software service that you can use to build, grow and manage an online business.
Well, they just seriously disrupted the business software market by carving off a major portion of their flagship product, GrooveFunnels, and making it completely free (at least for now).
Introducing GrooveSell.. a powerful sales and affiliate platform for digital marketers and infopreneurs to sell their products. The software at it’s core helps you take payments and manage customers for physical products, digital product and services. It comes with a full-featured affiliate system too (GrooveAffiliate) which lets you amass an army of commission-only salespeople to help you promote and get paid for your products!
This easy-to-use software creates checkout pages that are designed to convert more visitors into buyers, more clicks into sales, and manage the process from beginning to end.
This is no “basic” software version either. It allows you to do some pretty ninja tactics to increase your dollar per sale. Not only can you do the usual up-sells and down-sells in your product funnel, but the software adds order bumps before purchase, and true 1-click up-sells (with and without confirmation) to your funnels. This allows you to make point of purchase impulse sales of related items, increasing your dollar per transaction of just pure profit.
GrooveSell also features a powerful set of tools that lets you set flexible pricing structures that are unheard of on other platforms. Need a free trial product? No problem! You can set any trial length or price you’d like. If you have an one time onboarding charge followed by a monthly maintenance fee.. GrooveSell can do that too. Want to offer two annual payments that recur every year at the same time? It can do that too.
You even have eight different options for recurring billing. The system will automatically charge your customers at their regular billing interval (weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly, every two months, quarterly, bi-annually, annually and every two years).
It integrates with all of the major payment processors, like Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net and if you don’t have a merchant account, they are releasing GroovePayments very shortly, where they will process payments for you for a very competitive percentage.
Plus, it grows with you. For bigger businesses doing high volume there’s merchant account warming and load balancing built into the system, so you can avoid getting your credit card or PayPal account shut down during major promotions.
And all of this is free. That’s right, free for life.
-no credit card required- ever
-no monthly fees
-no surprise bills
-full feature set
-every upgrade they ever do
Plus, there’s an incredible bonus of GroovePages Basic, which lets you build pages for up to three product funnels. So you can create a sales page, checkout page, and thank you page to deliver your product to your buyer.
The bottom line is: You can do anything with GrooveSell that you can do with any digital marketing shopping cart out there.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
How much does grabbing your free GrooveSell account save you?
Well let’s compare GrooveSell to the other major players in this space
ThriveCart (one time $495.00 payment)
SamCart ($49.00 per/month)
PayKickStart ($99.00 per/month)
JV Zoo (5% commission on all sales, +2.5% additional for some sales)
Clickbank ($49.95 activation fee, $1+7.5% transaction fee for each sale, and a whopping $2.50 fee each time you want to withdraw your money!)
Which brings us to these questions… What’s the catch? Why is it free?
There’s zero catch. In fact, when you get your free account, you won’t even get an immediate promotion to try and upsell you.
The software is in beta at the time of this writing, so there are some features (like support for worldwide currency) that is not yet available. The company has assured me that all features will be ready by their launch in July 2020. Until then, the platform is still fully functional and usable.
GrooveDigital stated that the company wanted to give back to the community, and provide real value to people… not just a flimsy ebook or lame set of templates to entice you to join their list… but REAL value in the form of a usable product that never requires a purchase.
And they’ve done just that. You could build a pretty decent business using nothing but the free product you get with GrooveSell, plus your social media pages.
And while the folks at GrooveDigital hope that one day you’ll decide to upgrade to the full suite of tools that comes with GrooveFunnels (which includes an email service, membership sites, video marketing, a helpdesk, calendar, and all the tools you need to manage and grow a robust business), GrooveSell and GrooveAffiliate are yours to keep for free, forever.
All you need is your name and best email address.
Oh, there’s also an active Facebook group. The company keeps out the spam and off topic posts, and instead ensures a community of users that share ideas and information. We are all learning and growing there together.
Whether you already have a shopping cart service and looking to reduce your monthly bills, or your just getting started with your online business and your budget it tight… you’ll want to check out GrooveSell. Do it today while it’s still free.
I received an email from someone promoting a plugin that helps a website become compliant with the American Disabilities Act (ADA). It looks really easy to use, and if it conforms to the ADA law, then I’m sure it would have been a good deal.
But here’s where it all went wrong for me. After watching a short video on how the plugin works and what it looks like when it’s installed on a website, I searched high and low on the sales site for the symbol that says the plugin is there.
And it wasn’t there.
If this person is telling me how fantastic his plugin works and how foolish I would be to not have it on my own site… then WHY is it not on his site?
Obviously, I didn’t buy it, because if he doesn’t believe in it enough to put it on his own site, why would I want it on mine?
It’s bad enough when affiliates don’t use the products they recommend. But when product creators aren’t using their own products then maybe it’s time they promote something they do believe in.
Okay, to be fair your paid members aren’t truly ‘stealing’, even though it might feel that way to you.
I recently joined a paid monthly membership that consists of hundreds of videos. As I was browsing the site, a pop-up box with a one-minute video appeared, showing me how to share videos with my friends.
I paid to be a member. My friends are NOT paid members. And yet I can send them a link to any video I choose with the full blessing of the membership site company.
Now why would they let me do that?
One reason – it’s the best possible advertising they could have, and it costs them NOTHING.
Do you have a paid membership? Can you let your members share a video or module or lesson of their choosing with a friend?
You might need to get a special script to make this happen, but if you’ve got great content, it could be well worth the one-time price.
In the midst of all the dire news, perhaps it’s time for a positive reality check:
Most people still have jobs and an income. Even during the great depression, the vast majority of people were employed.
An economic crash doesn’t destroy wealth, it merely transfers it. The money is still there, although you might need a new method to get it.
People are still spending money and always will.
Regardless of what happens – good or bad – some industries will prosper and some won’t. This has always been true and always will be true.
Economic downturns are almost always shorter than periods of growth. What you do now sets you up for the next growth period.
Some of the most brilliant minds around the world are united in working tirelessly on treatments and vaccines for the virus.
Whatever it takes, we will get through this. Humans have been through tens and likely hundreds of pandemics before, and never before did we have the resources we have now.
Being curled into a ball of fear won’t improve the pandemic. Neither will choosing to be positive and working on your business. But the second option will improve your income.
Here’s how a simple change to your opt-in page can give you a 200% increase in your conversions.
Or rather…
The BIG mistake you’re making right now that’s costing you a TON of opt-ins every single day.
This won’t apply in all situations but when it does, it’s amazing what a difference this can make.
Let’s say your affiliate is sending out your promotion to their list.
Your email, which you’ve written for your affiliate, gives all the reasons why they should opt into your list to get the special offer – or whatever it is that you want the reader to do.
You craft a brilliant email that gets them excited and ready to hand you their email address. They click the link, and what do they find?
A great big headline with a bunch of bullet points and copy, telling them why they need to hand over their email address.
Think about this…
In the first step, you SOLD them on joining your list.
They. Are. Ready. To. Join. Now.
Then they click the link and they are confronted with another sales pitch on why they should join your list.
You already sold them once. They were ready to join. But now instead of letting them join, you are trying to sell them a second time.
All it takes is ONE objection to this new sales copy and you’ve lost them.
In sales, they call this overselling. Once the customer gives you a buying signal, you STOP SELLING and you let them BUY.
Here’s the change you should make:
In every case where you are selling them on taking the action BEFORE they get to your opt-in page, change the opt-in page to a very simple black and white form. At the top of the form is what they are signing up for, such as a workshop, webinar, etc.
For example, it might say, “Traffic Multiplier Workshop.” In this case, you would give the time and date: Tuesday, May 12th, 6pm EST. Then there’s a field for their name, a field for their email address, and a button that says, “Register for the event.”
It’s that simple.
This works especially well if you’re using solo ads and you’re paying by the click. Send them a long email that does an excellent job of pre-qualifying them, and then send them to a super simple sign up page. Your solo ad click conversions can go from 20% to 50% or 60% with this one change.
Just give them all the info they need within the solo ad itself, and then send them to as plain and boring of a page as possible, so they have nothing stopping them from doing what they intended to do – sign up.
Amazon Slashes Commission Rates for Program That Gives Publishers a Cut of Sales
Commissions have dropped as of April 21, 2020,
Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products, Pantry from 8% to 3.00%
Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial Supplies from 6% to 3.00%
Outdoors, Tools from 5.5% to 3.00%
Grocery from 5% to 1.00%
Sports from 4.5% to 3.00%
Baby Products from 4.5 to 3.00%
Health & Personal Care from 4.5 to 1.00%
Amazon Fresh from 3.0 to 1.00%
In addition, Amazon is taking third party affiliate networks out of the loop and has hit pause on direct affiliate programs with publishers such as BuzzFeed and Vox.
In positive news, affiliate campaigns for casual clothing such as t-shirts and yoga pants are outperforming other categories because people are staying home right now.
If you’re a self-publishing author, or you simply want illustrations for your website or PDF, check out this site.
Any illustrations you commission come with full rights, meaning they cannot be reused by the artists and you do not have to ask permission to reuse them yourself.
This means your illustrations can pull double duty, not only making your book more valuable but also appearing on other merchandise you sell.
Illustrations are just $45 each with $0 royalties and no hidden costs. And the examples are gorgeous.
How to Add Original Artistic Images to Your Site for Free
Use the Google Arts and Culture app to turn your photos into works of art. A new feature called, “Art Transfer” that lets you apply various art styles to your own photos has been added to the app.
To use the Art Transfer feature:
Open the Google Arts and Culture app
Tap the Camera icon in the bottom-center
Click Art Transfer.
Either take a new photo or choose one from your current photos
Choose an art style to apply to your photo.
For example, that landscape photo you took could become a bold, swirling Vincent van Gogh-like painting.
Do you need some fast placeholder copy for a new site you’re building?
Or would you like to win a bet on how fast you can type?
Here’s the trick:
Open Microsoft Word and type the following: =rand(3,10)
Hit enter, and in this case you should see 3 paragraphs of 10 lines each. Change the numbers to anything you like, depending on how much copy you want.
If you’d rather have Latin than English, type: =lorem(X) You’ll get “X” paragraphs of this filler text.
Note: The Replace Text as You Type feature (File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options > AutoCorrect tab) must be turned on for this feature to work.
$1 Million Every Second
I just read that the Federal Reserve is printing $1 million every second.
Now if I could just have 5 seconds of their time…
My 4 Favorite Reverse Image Search Apps
Have you ever needed to identify a picture or an item? These apps let you upload an image to search instead of entering text.
CamFind – take a picture, upload the image and CamFind identifies the object.
Google Lens – Google’s visual search engine analyzes the image and gives you a link to the Google image search page in the results.
Photo Sherlock – upload the image, optionally crop the image to focus on the main element, then let the app fetch your results.
TinEye – this is an online tool, so you’ll need to download a dedicated app. Search an image by URL or by sharing a file. You can sort the results by best match, most changed, the biggest image, newest or oldest.
WhatsApp is Limiting Forwarding
To fight misinformation on the corona virus outbreak, WhatsApp has introduced new limits on message forwarding. This means you can now only forward a message you’ve received onto one chat at a time.
Calm – This is a great meditation app for beginners. Choose a meditation length of 3 minutes to 25 minutes. Then choose a topic such as managing stress, gratitude, forgiveness, happiness or many others.
Dark Noise – Ambient noise can help you focus on your work or even get to sleep at night. Choose from 30 possibilities, including a cat purring, rain, brown noise or a spaceship engine.
Day One – Research shows there are many benefits to daily journalism, including releasing negative thoughts and memories, gaining key insights and feeling happier. Day one is a daily journal that makes it easy to organize your thoughts and clear your mind.
Insight Timer – Features 30,000 meditations and music tracks you can access for free, many of which deal with anxiety and stress.
MindMeister
– This is a mind mapping tool available on mobile devices as well as online interfaces. Do you have a million thoughts swirling around, distracting you and making you anxious? Use this app to organize and prioritize your thoughts so that you can stop being distracted by them.
Simple Habit – Tackle stress and manage depression through 5 minute meditations based on what’s happening in your life now.
Sleep Cycle AlarmClock – Helps you feel more refreshed in the morning by tracking your sleep to wake you up in a light sleep phase, as well as vibrating when you snore to encourage you to shift position.
Email Marketing: Doing THIS Reduces Reply Rates by 40%
According to SalesLoft, explicitly referencing Coronavirus or COVID-19 in the subject line of an email creates a 40% reduction in reply rates. Their suggestion: Be human, don’t lead with Coronavirus, acknowledge the situation and then get to the point.
Secondly, things are changing fast. What worked last month might not work this month, so continually be testing and adapt your approach as necessary.
“Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable.” – Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad.
This isn’t black hat. Maybe gray hat. And the things I’m about to share with you are not illegal.
They are aggressive and controversial. They might upset some people. And I don’t necessarily recommend using them.
But I do think they serve an important purpose, in that they can make you think not just outside of the box, but outside the realm of everything you know of as online marketing.
You might view these as a springboard from which you can get your own creative ideas for promoting your business – not at a snail’s pace – but at light speed.
Just one idea like the one’s I’m about to show you can metamorphosize the right business literally overnight.
Before we dive in, I’m going to assume you have identified your target audience and the channels to reach them.
And you also have a value proposition (the benefit of using your product/problem you’re solving) and clear differentiation from competitors.
Those are the basics.
See How Easy it Is To build Your Website
And here are three examples of dark side internet marketing:
1. The Poo Stirrer
Let’s say you’ve got a controversial topic that is being heavily debated by your target audience. For example, the presidential Coronavirus response in the U.S., or Brexit in the U.K. There are strong feelings on both sides. And it just so happens that your target group is within one of the groups in one of these debates.
This is your opportunity.
Go on all those discussion forums, Facebook Groups, Twitter hashtags and blog articles and start posting comments that are contrary to the popular opinion.
Key point here: For this to work, your “opinions” need to be just controversial enough to spark interest and discussion, but not so controversial that people will dismiss you as a troll and ignore you, or worse yet not click your link.
Be polite, not rude and aggressive. But be controversial.
Have a blog post set up with an article providing support and credibility to your argument, that is also…
… and pay attention here…
… packed with ads for your company’s product.
Obviously, this article is not going to be on your domain, or even under your own name.
You might even buy a domain for this purpose, such as “UKShouldHaveQuitEUYearsAgo dot whatever” or something along those lines.
Create your post and generate 20-30 comments or discussions to make it appear active and give people the sense they need to join in on the argument.
Every time you engage in a debate on a third party site (or your VA engages in a debate) forward people to the relevant blog where they can see your “evidence”.
Remember to place your ads on the blog. It should look like the ads just happened to be served by an ad network.
The stronger people feel about the topic, the better.
Make Money Online Now.
Depending on your product, you might even be able to make the post recommend the product, but again it’s got to look like a third party is doing this.
Create a few more pages on this website to make it all look legit. Place your ads on those pages as well because… why not, right?
See what I mean by dark side marketing?
It’s legal, but is it legit? You decide.
The point isn’t to teach you this trick as much as it is to get your brain cells working. Because when you see something that’s entirely different from what you’re being taught – something that works really well, by the way – it should fire you up to find your own unique ways of doing what you might call ‘guerrilla’ promotions.
2. Create the Story
We’re always told in marketing to have a good story.
And this is excellent, primo, top-of-the-line advice, too.
But what if you’re making the whole thing up?
In 2010, TheChive was fighting for viewers just like every other struggling website. They could have tried traditional marketing or even PR. But what reporter is going to write an article about a site for guy humor stuff?
They wanted eyeballs on their site, and this is how they did it:
In October 2010, Leo and John Resig, the brilliant guys at theChive, posted a story that had all the characteristics of an internet sensation.
Supposedly, some unnamed person sent them pictures of a gal named “Jenny” who was fed up with her boss’s harassment. She decided to quit her job in a unique and entertaining way, and the headline read, “Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office” (33 Photos).
The story went viral, most likely because…
1. Jenny has a vulnerable girl next door look and she was victimized by a jerk male. This was a winning story for men who want to be a savior to women, as well as women who hate womanizing men.
2. Jenny quit her job in a grand way, as many people wish they could. She’s now a hero in the readers’ eyes, and people are sharing this story when the boss isn’t looking.
3. They started a side discussion by misspelling a term, causing a debate. Yeah, I know that sounds silly, but it can be highly effective. HOPA? HPOA? Which is it? What does it mean? Better jump into the debate and argue with others online about it.
4. One of the dry erase boards referenced TechCrunch, saying the boss spent 5.3 hours a week on the site. Naturally, TechCrunch took notice and immediately did their own story, referencing the original TheChive story, causing even more buzz and traffic. Smart.
And of course, the entire story was created (fabricated) by TheChive.
Mainstream media soon took up the story, linking back to original TheChive article.
Reports say TheChive saw traffic jump dramatically as a result of the story, from 15,000 uniques an hour to 440,000 the next hour. It struck a personal chord, garnering 238K Facebook shares and 31K tweets.
Overall, its estimated that millions of unique visitors were exposed to TheChive as a result of the story.
And TheChive has since grown to be one of the biggest blogs in the space, if not the biggest.
Notice that TheChive was never the story, at least not during the actual hoax. It was simply the platform on which the story took place.
However, once the hoax was revealed, the creation of the hoax became the story and TheChive got plenty of additional press and credibility, twice.
The first time was of course the initial hoax, and the second time was the story of how it happened.
Do you want to fake stories? Maybe not. But can you pull pranks or hoaxes? Of course. Yes, maybe it is semantics, but it does work.
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3. Be the Underdog
Let’s say you’re a small political party or maybe an underdog candidate trying to make it big. You need publicity and attention, but the media is focused on the big boys. What can you do?
I can tell you what others have already done around the world – create yourself an enemy.
For example, post information that your website has been attacked. Plant hostile files on the site to complete the picture.
Say that your database has been hacked into. File public complaints. Make it look like there is vibrant activity going on. People are plotting against you and so forth.
Sure, it sounds a bit silly and provocative but it’s important to understand that every spin of this type increases traffic by hundreds of percentages.
That’s hundreds of percentages at zero cost and almost no logistical effort. These are the rules of the game, whether we like them or not.
How does this translate to your business? If you pitch a reporter a story about your new product, they’re going to yawn in your face. But tell them you’re the victim of some big unknown evil, or even better, a David fighting a Goliath, and the media will love your story.
What happens anytime some organization boycotts a movie? Ticket sales go up. The harder they boycott, the more tickets are sold because of all the free publicity. Plus, people want to SEE the forbidden movie that everyone is now talking about.
Every time the group called “One Million Moms” protests a movie such as Toy Story 4 because two women in the background are dropping off a child at school (I am not making this up) publicity runs swift and ticket sales soar.
In fact, I’ve sometimes wondered if “One Million Moms,” which has approximately 89,775 members (math is not their strong point) isn’t really a ploy to increase sales of certain products.
If you should happen to make a lousy movie, put a scene in it that some group will hate enough to publicly boycott, and I can almost guarantee you’ll make money.
It gets even better if most people don’t like the group doing the boycott. Not only do you get tons of free publicity, but people who normally would never see your movie or buy your product will do so now just to spite that group. I know, I’ve done it myself.
One more quick story…
In a classic David vs. Goliath tale, two young hippies named Ben and Jerry started an ice-cream shop in 1978.
By 1984, they had grown the business to $4 million in sales.
Independent ice cream distributors started selling Ben & Jerry’s in big grocery stores in Boston.
And that’s when the fight started.
Haagen-Dazs, owned at the time by $4 billion corporation Pillsbury, didn’t like the competition.
But rather than compete in an open market, their game plan was to pressure distributors into refusing to carry Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Distributors were told that if they did not obey, there would be serious consequences – sort of reminds you of the mob, doesn’t it?
Ben & Jerry’s was a young company with limited resources. And they were innovative, finding the one thing that would give them a shot: They became the David to Pillsbury’s Goliath.
They launched a grassroots campaign printed on the pints of their ice cream called, “What’s the Doughboy Afraid of?”
If a customer sent in $10 they could get a bumper sticker and a t-shirt with the rallying cry: “What’s the Doughboy Afraid of?” on the front and “Ben & Jerry’s Legal Defense Fund: Major Contributor” on the back.
The customer-centered approach worked, the lawsuit was settled out of court and the rest is history.
None of these examples is meant to tell you what to do with your products or your company. But hopefully they’ve opened your eyes to a new world of possibilities if you will simply start thinking unconventionally.
