Shorties – But Goodies
When Your Competitors Don’t Play Fair
Rule #1 of online marketing… there aren’t nearly as many rules as you might think.
Rule #2 of online marketing… some people will do things that really should be against the rules. And sometimes these things will really make you mad.
Rule #3 of online marketing… you can’t change what they do and getting mad won’t help. But what you can do is sleep well at night.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
Within the ‘make money online’ niche, as well as most likely every other niche, there are people who don’t play fair.
I’ll give you a few examples:
- They sell live coaching for big fees, boasting about how customers will have direct access to them. Then they outsource those calls to staff or virtual assistants.
- They offer upsells at one price, then offer the same upsells at lower prices when people don’t buy. Those who bought the first time paid more for the exact same product other customers paid less for.
- They offer products that aren’t created yet. Then say they have ‘technical difficulties’ as they rush to outsource the creation of the product.
- They sell software that does not work.
You get the idea.
I’ve bent the rules myself, but in ways that never disrespected my customers. My own rule is that customers come first and it lets me sleep well at night.
The other day I was promoting an affiliate product when one of my customers sent me an email. He was livid. Seems he bought the product at one price, and then later discovered that had he left the page and waited for a follow- up email from the seller, he could have saved $100.
Whoops.
This is a good customer of mine. He’s been with me for years. I apologized for his experience and sent him the $100.
What I didn’t do was complain to the product seller. I let it go. While I play fair, I realize I can’t always expect everyone else to do the same. This seller has quality products I totally believe in, and I’ll probably continue to promote them.
But in the future, I will look at the funnels I promote more carefully. And if there is a way to get a better deal, I’ll let my readers know about it.
Case Study: Increasing Opt-ins by 50%
Matt offers a physical copy of his book for free, if the new customer pays for shipping and subscribes to a $1 trial of a $47 monthly continuity program.
When Matt set up his squeeze page he was in a hurry. He recorded a short video of himself talking about the book offer but he omitted using an ecover. Conversion was at 26% and it wasn’t paying for itself. In fact, for each new subscriber, he was paying about $2.00 out of his own pocket.
The continuity program is a good one and he was making a profit overall, but he really wanted to get the initial offer to pay for itself so that he could ramp up his advertising.
He tried a few things which increased conversion a percentage point or two. But then he finally added an ecover right above the opt-in form.
Conversions increased.
Then he went a step further, recorded a new video in which he holds a copy of his book and replaced the old video.
Conversions have now increased by 50%.
Never underestimate the importance of pictures in general and ecovers in particular. Whatever it is that you’re offering; a book, a report, software, etc., display a picture of it for prospects to salivate over. Or better yet, hold it in your hand to make it even more real and more desirable for the prospect.
Weird Website Trick Increases Conversions in Any Market
You’re going to think this is too simple to work.
Big mistake.
Certain website designs attract certain target markets. The design that attracts gardeners, for example, is going to be different from the design that attracts electrical engineers.
Knowing this, the question becomes, “How do you design a website that you KNOW will attract your target market like no other?”
And how do you do this without a lot of market research, testing, trial and error and so forth?
It’s so simple, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you.
Look at the successful websites in your market.
And then do what they do.
See? I told you this was simple.
There is zero need to waste your time or money conceptualizing what your site could look like. You don’t need to make a dozen mockups and drive traffic to see which site people stay on. You don’t need to hire fancy web designers to create an artsy site.
See what’s working, learn all you can and then create your own familiar design without copying.
If you use any site design other from the type favorited by your target market, you’re going to lose traffic. And conversions.
People trust a good-looking site that feels somewhat familiar. Using a professional, familiar design boosts trust, reputation and authority. The visitor won’t realize why they trust your site, only that they do.
And that’s all that counts.
Why Internet Marketing was made for Introverts
20 years ago if you wanted to get rich and successful, it helped tremendously if you were an extrovert.
Why?
Because of networking. You had to convince people to finance you, to work for you, to work with you and to buy from you. Handshakes and small talk and saying all the right things and making the right impression and… whew. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
That’s because I’m an introvert. Yes, I can do all of those things in person, and I can do them well. But to recharge I need plenty of time alone. What I can’t do is that sort of thing 8-12 hours a day. It’s just not going to happen.
Enter the internet. All networking can be done online. All selling can be done online. EVERYTHING can be done online! It’s an introvert’s dream come true.
Online marketing is your shot at the life of your dreams.
And if you’re an introvert, you have an edge over extroverts. Especially in the time of coronavirus.
So get busy and make your dreams come true.
Do You Hate Paying for Advertising?
It’s great when we can use free advertising to make sales, right?
Like when affiliates send you traffic.
Oh wait… you have to PAY those affiliates.
Okay, but when you do guest posting, and appear on podcasts, and haunt forums and do all those other things that are free…
Except all of that takes TIME. And it may – or may not – send you the traffic you seek.
Hmmm….
What if we thought of advertising as an investment?
Let’s say you invest in real estate: You might make 5% to 20% yearly returns on your capital, right? Of course there are things like property taxes and maintenance that eat into that.
Or you could lend money to others and charge 10-20% interest. But what are you going to do if people don’t pay you back; break their legs?
Okay, you could buy a business. You’ll need a big (BIG!) down payment and either a paid manager or 40-60 hours per week of your own time to run the place.
Then there’s the stock market. Win some, lose some… better buy the blue-chip stocks to be safe. That’s about 6% per year. I hope you’re either very young and willing to wait a long time to see your money grow, or you have a lot of money to invest right now.
Then there’s ads. Little bitty ads on Facebook, YouTube, Adwords, etc.
You place an ad – depending on what you’re selling, you might spend $50 a day. But you have a system in place, and that $50 yields $50 in immediate return and another $100 over the course of the next couple of weeks or months.
In other words, you invest $50, you get back your $50 and you make another $100 within 2 months. Like clockwork.
What are you selling?
Courses, info products, services… whatever it is you want to sell. Maybe you already have a brick and mortar business and you’re getting new customers this way.
What other investment will give you a return like this? Because if you know of one, I sure want to hear about it.
“But I don’t know what to sell or how to sell it.”
Fair enough. Pick something. Choose a niche where there is a lot of money to be made that you find at least somewhat interesting.
Got it?
Now go on a quest. Find out what other people are selling in this niche and how they’re selling it. Take an entire week to do this. Make lots of notes.
At the end of that week you should have a long list of affiliate products you can promote as well as ideas for your own products and services.
Pick one and get started.
My point here isn’t to give you a primer on how to sell products or build sales funnels or even do advertising. It’s to show you that one of the very best investments you can make is in buying silly little ads.
Because once you have a winner, you can continue to invest in that ad over and over again for remarkably large and fast returns.
Want to retire in 5 years?
This is how you do it.
5 Reasons You NEED a Blog
Blogs are so 2005, right? You’ve got to keep writing all the time and finding things to say and communicating and who needs that?
Okay, maybe you do.
If you have a website, you need a blog.
If you market online, you need a blog.
If you want to have an audience for whatever it is that you do, then you need a blog.
Here’s why:
1: More Connections.
Blog marketing boosts your connections with potential customers. They can get to know you through your posts, understand why you are the expert, find out how you’re different from all the rest and leave comments for you to respond to.
2: Improved SEO.
If you want to rank for certain keywords, frequently updating your content and using keywords in your posts is a great way to do it.
3: Freshness.
A website without a blog is static. It’s stale. It’s not growing, moving, inspiring, adjusting to new developments, improving with the times or helping people when they need it most.
4: Testing New Ideas.
You’ve posted 30 new blog posts in the past couple of months. Of those, 25 received a moderate number hits, 4 received a lot of hits and 1 went viral. Which post topic is telling you to expand upon it, create a product around it, write a book about it and teach a course about it? Gee, I wonder…
5: Practice.
Do you want to get better at content creation? Having a blog is an excellent tool for that because you’ve got to continually update it. And you get immediate feedback, too.
When Typos Cost You Money
I just received an email from a well-known online marketer. The guy has been in the business at least 20 years and makes significant bank – or at least I assume he does – who knows.
Look, I get it that proofreading is boring. It sucks. Who wants to take the time, right? I’ve probably published more mistakes than anyone.
But… some mistakes can be far more costly than others.
I clicked over from the email to his sales letter which was interesting for more than just the typos (of which there were many.)
His sub headline wasn’t even about the product, it was about one of the bonuses – a stack of old books written on a related topic. I’m going to tuck that little bonus-in-the-sub headline technique away for possible future use.
Scrolling down, there were the typical typos such as, “ahve” for have. “Befroom” and “beddroom” for bedroom. “Podcsat” for podcast. “Soemthing” for something. These are things that are super easy to catch if you pay attention to your spellcheck. And yet, there they were.
Then I got to the one that cost him sales. I’m going to paraphrase the paragraph headline and what he wrote, but you’ll get the idea:
3,000 members on recurring billing at $47 a month. This guy I knew was famous for raising money for bigwigs and doing this and that, but he also ran an online business where he got 3,000 people paying him $38 a month. I’ll show you the exact method he used.
Ouch.
Did you catch that?
My theory is he first wrote $38 a month, but later decided it would look better at $47. He changed the headline but forgot to change the paragraph that came after it.
Which had me wondering… is he making ALL of this up?
Just as bad, there was a ‘testimonial’ from “John Doe,” the name Americans use as a placeholder for a real name. Obviously, this was supposed to be flushed out with a real sounding name and a much better testimonial from the placeholder of, “I’ve taken a few of his programs over the years and have learned a bunch.”
Wow that’s embarrassing. Ironically, I have no doubt this marketer has enough real testimonials to fill a book.
Up until the fake testimonial and the price discrepancy, I’ll bet a lot of people really wanted to buy the product he was selling, too. I know I did. But after those confidence shaking mistakes, why would your average customer believe anything on the page?
Credibility and sales were lost.
You might want to proofread your sales letters like your sales depend on it. Because they do.
How to Sell Products at a Ridiculous Markup
I’d love to call this a case study but I don’t have enough info to do that. What I can say is that this must be making money or they wouldn’t keep doing it.
Lately my Adblocker isn’t always working properly on YouTube, which is why I’m suddenly seeing ads appear before my videos, and it’s been a real learning experience for me. If you have an adblocker, you might disable it for a few days just to see what you’ve been missing.
Recently I watched a YouTube video while doing research on Tinnitus, which is likely why I was shown an ad for a simple product – an ear cleaning device – with an equally simple ad. It was a bunch of short video clips (mostly stock footage) assembled with background music and words on the screen – no audible narration of any kind.
They were selling this “revolutionary doctor-invented, doctor-endorsed” soft little plastic corkscrew device with a handle. Imagine a disposable toothbrush – only for your ears – and you get the idea. And you could buy one for $44, or 2 for $69, or 3 for $93 or something like that. The prices were HIGH. And of course, they only had 7 available for my area and these prices were 50% off but only available for the next 7 minutes (yeah, right.)
Following a hunch, I went to Amazon and looked for the same device and found it for about ten bucks. Taking a wild guess, wholesale it’s probably about $2-$4 in quantity.
Here’s my point: If someone has an urgent problem and you have the solution, you can pretty much charge as much as you can get away with. If your advertising is done right and creates urgency and makes the product seem exclusive, then it’s a fair guess that most people aren’t going to go to Amazon to see if they can get it cheaper like I did.
If you can find a product that:
- Is low cost to you
- Can be made to appear to be worth much more than it costs
- Solves an immediate and urgent problem
- Can be targeted to the right audience on YouTube
Then you can make a simple video ad for YouTube and test it out. This might take a few tries to get right, but if you hit upon a winner, you can make some SERIOUS money doing this. I’ve seen the exact same system used by the same company for a portable air conditioner and a vacuum cleaner attachment, and I’m sure they’re doing this with many other products as well.
The beauty of placing your ad on YouTube is people are on there looking for SOLUTIONS, and you do not have the competition of hundreds of other sellers like you do on Amazon.
The video ad itself was simple enough that almost anyone could create it. This leads to a sales page, which leads to an order page. And while I can’t show you the videos, here are the sales pages for…
The ear cleaner: https://qtwists.com/
The portable air conditioner: https://getpolaire.com/
The vacuum cleaner attachment: https://myvacuumax.com/
Spend some time on YouTube without your adblocker and you’ll eventually run into this type of video ad. This is an easy system that can be duplicated multiple times for multiple products. In fact, it’s not hard to image that these guys are pulling in 6 or 7 figures doing this.
3 Tips for Selling More T-shirts
T-shirts can be a great way to make extra money. Find a quote people love, design a super simple shirt with that quote, get it on Teespring and run a Facebook ad campaign. Yes, it’s just about that easy.
The key of course is to find the quote that people are willing to pay for. To do this, first pick a niche so that you know exactly who you are targeting. For example, I saw someone on FB targeting female military veterans.
Once you’ve got your niche, set up a Facebook fan page for that niche and find a quote that is getting a lot of shares and positive feedback on Pinterest or Facebook.
The t-shirt I saw for female veterans said simply: “Yes I am a Veteran. No I am not a guy.”
Nice.
Tip #1: Don’t know what to put on a shirt? No problem, just ask. Let’s say you go to Pinterest and you search for quotes. Choose what you think are the most promising quotes and put them on shirts in Teespring.
Post images of the shirts on your Facebook fan page without the links and simply ask if people would wear them. If you don’t have fans yet, run Page Post Engagement (PPE) ads to reach your target audience. $5 might be all you need to drive enough engagement to any one shirt picture.
Once you’ve chosen a winner, then you make a new Facebook post with your Teespring link. Drive traffic with Facebook ads.
Tip #2: Whenever you post a new shirt on Facebook, make this your first line of text: “Tag your friends who also love it.” Follow this with your Teespring link and your sales copy and shirt picture.
Asking people to tag their friends will get you more views and more sales.
In the above example, who knows female veterans? Other female veterans, that’s who. It will only take you a second to do this and it can result in a lot more sales.
Tip #3: Continue to make shirts for your chosen target market rather than hopping from niche to niche.
Then every time you run a new campaign, go to the admin area of Teespring and send a message to everyone who has purchased from you in the past. Let them know about your latest shirt that will be only be available for a couple of days.
Send the message 3 days prior to ending the campaign to give them just enough time to see the email and order. This is a short message of about 2 or 3 lines of text, nothing fancy. You will get more orders doing this one simple thing each time you have a new campaign that is ending soon.
Irving
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