One of the things we hear all the time is that we need to ‘avoid shiny object syndrome’ and focus on what we’re doing. And they’re absolutely right. Nothing beats focus and work for getting something done. That said, I’m going to make a case for the fad bandwagon – but not the case you might expect.
First, what do I mean by a fad or trend?
Simple – every time a new social media platform becomes popular, or a new marketing technique is the latest rage, it becomes a marketing fad. Everybody is talking about it. Some people are doing it. And a few people are profiting from it like crazy. These are the marketers who are creating and selling the products to feed the ‘fad frenzy.’ And they are making a killing.
The fact is, you can do the same if you choose to, without sacrificing your focus on your main objectives. Here’s how:
Keep an eye out for the next up and coming trend. When you see it, decide if you want to try it. Not in a super-serious, set-everything-else-aside way, but simply as something you do for fun to see if it works. If it interests you, then play around with it. See if you can make it work, and if so, how well.
Frankly just about every one of the latest greatest marketing techniques does indeed work. It’s just a question of do they offer a high enough return for the time and effort involved. If you’re short on time, outsource the experiment and have someone do it for you. Keep close tabs on the steps involved and the results achieved.
If you have success, record it on video or write it up in a pdf with screenshots. And sell it as a product.
That’s right – I’m going to tell you what a lot of big marketers already know but frankly don’t talk about – give the people what they want.
These products on the latest greatest marketing techniques sell like hotcakes. For example, a while ago there was hardly a TikTok marketing course to be seen. Now they’re everywhere. And the people who produced these courses are making bank.
Now to be clear: Do not offer something that you haven’t proven works. This is not a method to scam people – this is a method to give them what they want. If the technique doesn’t do what it says it will do, don’t make the product. Be 100% honest. And have fun.
Experimenting with new marketing techniques can be a blast. And now and then you’ll run across a new system or technique that you want to add to your own marketing arsenal on a permanent basis. Think of this testing of marketing techniques as a hobby that can pay off handsomely.
It’s a win-win-win because:
– You make a new product with proven results that sells like hotcakes.
– Customers get to buy exactly what they want, and you can feel good about selling it to them because you KNOW for a fact it works (you tried it!).
– And sometimes you learn a very valuable new skill for your own business.
So yes, if you’re interested and if it won’t interfere with your main business, by all means jump on the next new shiny object and see where it takes you!
I can’t stress the importance of what I’m about to tell you enough. If you look at entrepreneurs who have made fortunes – I mean SERIOUS wealth – in almost every case the money came not from inside the business, but from SELLING the business.
You’ve heard numerous news stories of internet companies selling just 1-3 years after their initial start-up. And the businesses you hear about sell for 7, 8 and even 9 figures.
If this sounds out of reach right now, picture this scenario: You start a business today, and in 6 months to 2 years you sell it for 6 figures. Would that make a great payday for you?
Now you might be thinking that selling your business is something you don’t need to worry about until long after you start it. Not so.
If you are starting a business right now, you should also be considering your exit strategy. After all, you could get bored with what you’re doing and want out. Or maybe you need quick cash. Or you decide to go in an entirely different direction. So you decide to sell your business.
If you’ve laid the groundwork, you should be able to sell quite quickly and for a very good price.
Here’s what you need to know:
– Don’t think of it as flipping a website. Think of it as selling a BUSINESS. That’s because buyers don’t want a website. They can build their own website cheap enough.
What they do want is a ready to go, money-generating cash-cow business, so make your plans accordingly.
– Make your business transferable from Day 1. Every product should be its own entity – after all, a single product can actually be an entire business.
Give it a website of its own, its own list, its own customer base, its own affiliate program and affiliate list, etc.
– Don’t brand it exclusively with your name. It’s fine to attach your name to your XYZ product, but don’t call it “yournameproduct.”
In other words, “Bob Smith’s Traffic Gorilla Mania Course” is fine. “Bob Smith’s traffic course” is not. In the first case, the product is Traffic Gorilla Mania, a name that anyone can sell. In the second case, the product is Bob Smith’s Traffic, a product forever branded as belonging to Bob Smith.
Imagine you’re Bob Smith, and you sell your traffic course business to someone else. That person then sells the course. Who do people ask for help? You. After all, your name is on the course.
Then let’s say the buyer alters the course and now it stinks. Who will people blame? You. Now you see why your name needs to be completely separate from the product name.
Yes, it’s a bit strange to think about your exit strategy when you’re just starting a business. But when it comes time to sell, you’ll be glad you did.
One more thing – what if you have a partner?
Write into your agreement what will happen if you sell. Just look at the possibilities and agree on how it will play out if one of you wants to sell to the other, or if you both want to sell to a third party.
You can make a good amount of money by making each of your businesses as stand-alone as possible, and then selling them when the time is right. In fact, selling your business can potentially earn you more than you made running the business.
So plan ahead, and make sure you are building your business-selling exit strategy directly into your business itself!
When I got started in online marketing, I was lucky. Someone told me exactly what to do, and I didn’t know any better than to follow his instructions to the letter. I looked at it this way – the guy was a self-made millionaire. I was broke. So what was I going to do – take what he told me and ‘fix’ it?
Somehow make it better? Improve upon it? There’s an old expression: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. I took his instructions as gospel and did what he said. Soon I was making so much money, I was frankly astounded.
The biggest mistake I see new marketers making is they try to innovate. They have a better idea. A better system. A better method. And they almost always fail.
Look, there is a place for innovation once you know what you’re doing…
… But not when you’re first getting started.
Imagine you’re teaching someone to drive, and they get a great idea: ‘Why not just beep the horn when they’re about to hit someone? This way that person can get out of the way, and they never need to step on the brakes.’
See how crazy that is?
But it’s exactly how new marketers tend to think: “Forget the old ways, I’ve thought of a better way no one has ever thought of before.”
Uh-huh.
Instead, if you want to meet success quickly in this business, take a system that is already working and copy it.
Yes, that’s right – I’m advocating that you flat out copy what’s already working.
Are you in the diet niche? Then do this: Purchase the top 5 or 10 diet information products. Pay close attention to every step of the funnel. Take screenshots and notes. Pour through the products and see what’s good about them and what’s missing.
Then create your own product based on what you’ve learned, and set up a sales funnel based on the funnels you went through. Do this and I almost guarantee you’ll have a good selling product.
Online marketing isn’t hard if you’ll simply do what’s already working. But being human, we tend to think we can do better. Or we think we should do better and that it’s not right to copy systems that others are using.
But all industries are built upon the knowledge of those who went before – even those that innovate like crazy.
I’ll give you an example: It’s July 2003 and you’ve just co-founded Tesla Motors with the intention of building cars.
Are you going to start from scratch, with zero knowledge of cars and engines and how they run?…
… or are you going to take all of the knowledge accumulated over the last century and a half of car making, and then BUILD UPON this knowledge to create your own cars?
See?
Even companies like Tesla don’t reinvent the wheel – they make it better AFTER they’ve learned everything they can about what’s working now.
When you’re just starting out, find a system you like that you know is working, and then copy it. Once you’ve got it working, then and only then do you start innovating.
There are lots of great ideas here so please pay close attention… Let’s say you write an email to promote a product. Your email is basically a review of the product, and with it you make lots of sales. Now you’re done, right? Not even close.
Take that very same email and repurpose it into a review. Post the review on your blog under “reviews” and optimize it for SEO. Don’t panic – you’re basically optimizing for just a couple of key phrases like “XYZ Product Review.” Done right, you’ll get steady free traffic to your reviews, and sales, too.
Capture the email addresses of these additional visitors when possible and of course capture your buyer’s emails addresses so you can sell them more stuff.
Now think about what you just did – you wrote one email, made some sales, put the email on your site, made more sales and got more people on your list. Not bad.
But we’re just getting started.
Let’s say you write a 35 page report on traffic strategies. You sell the report for $10, and you make lots of sales. It’s a good start. But you are leaving SO MUCH money on the table.
Here’s what you can do…
At the end of your report (which is a really great report, btw) offer the reader personal one-on-one coaching tailored to them, based on the report, and charge a whole lot more than $10. A LOT more.
And don’t panic. You already have the information you need – it’s in the report you wrote. All you’ll be doing is working with this client on-on-one to tailor a solution for their business. “Let’s do A, then B, then C.” You’re simply acting as a coach or consultant. They’re getting the result they want and you’re getting a nice 3 or 4 figure fee.
But we’re not done yet.
Take the content from your report and make a video course. Put the course on ClickBank and pull in more sales. Setup an affiliate program while you’re at it (super easy to do with ClickBank), and the sales will continue to flow without any additional effort on your part.
Now take the content from your report and create a webinar with it. At the end, offer your personal coaching service. Or an upsell. Or whatever you want that fits.
Are you getting the point?
These are just a few examples of how you can repurpose your best content to earn yourself 10 times more money. You don’t necessarily need more content. You just need to use the content you do create wisely, and repurpose whenever possible to reach more people and create more customers for your business.
If you’re not doing it, you’ve certainly heard of it – segmenting your email list is based on things like when and where readers subscribed, products they’ve bought, geographical location and so forth. Should you be doing it? Absolutely! Segmenting your list is a great way to increase response rates and grow your profits.
It’s not just the segmenting you’ve got to think about, but also moving people from one list to another.
Example: Jane subscribes to get your free traffic report. A month later she buys your traffic product. But the week after that she also buys your video creation product, and the week after that she buys an affiliate product you recommended on product creation.
So what do you do – move her to a new list every time she buys? Keep her on more than one list? Get frustrated and decided to keep everyone on the same list?
List segmentation might seem complicated and messy, so let’s talk about why you would even bother with it in the first place. Then we’ll cover how to go about it, what you need to think about, and ways to make it pay off handsomely for you.
Why Segment Your List?
According to DMA, 77% of email marketing return on investment came from targeted, segmented campaigns. Segmented email campaigns produce, on average, 30% more opens and 50% more click-thru’s compared to untargeted email campaigns. That alone might convince you to start segmenting your lists.
Let’s say you have 1000 people on your list. 300 of those people purchased an exercise guide on using stretch bands. The other 700 didn’t buy the guide.
If you send an email to the 300 offering them a discount on the exercise stretch bands to go with the book they purchased, you’ll likely get a good response. And if you send an email to the 700 offering a discount on a package deal of the book and the bands, you’ll likely get a good response.
But if you sent an email to both lists with a more generic offer, your response rate would go down. You can see how segmenting your list can work to your advantage.
Here’s how you might think of list segmentation: Pulling out portions of your list who are the most likely to respond to certain offers, and then giving them those offers. For example, you might have a list of 10,000 people who are interested in online marketing. But certain people on that list are especially interested in video marketing, while others aren’t. Some are interested in email marketing, while others aren’t. And some are interested in affiliate marketing, while others aren’t.
If you can segment your list to send the right offers to the right people, your response will go through the roof.
“But can’t I just send all the offers to all my subscribers?”
You can, but it’s counter-productive for several reasons:
First, readers are less likely to open any of your emails if they aren’t tailored to their interests. If you’re sending every offer under the sun, they’re going to realize that most of your emails don’t contain anything relevant to them. They won’t open all of your emails just to find the few that do pertain to them.
Second, the math is terrible if you send everyone the same offer. Imagine you have subscribers with 5 different interests. You could send out 5 different emails on the same day, each tailored to their specific interest, and get sales on 5 different products. But if you sent out the same email to all of them, then 4 out of 5 will have no interest and won’t buy anything.
Third, if you don’t segment then you’ll inevitably send out offers to people who already purchased that product. And that’s bad.
Imagine you’re the list subscriber. You buy product X, and a few days later you get an email suggesting you go buy the product you just bought. Now you’re thinking this marketer is an idiot.
Or maybe after you buy the product, the price goes down. Now you’re steamed. You paid $99 last week, and now you get an email saying the product is on special for $79. Grrrrr.
Sure, you write and ask for a $20 refund and you probably get it. But what happens from here on out? You don’t buy anything because you figure a better offer will be coming next week.
One more scenario – you buy a product and forget about it. Then later you get an offer for that product, buy it and… Oops! You realize you’ve just been snookered into buying the same product twice. Sure, you get a refund on the second one, but how do you feel about the seller? Not too great.
The list of reasons to segment go on, but let’s talk about…
How to segment your lists
In a word – autoresponders. Your list management service (autoresponder) holds the keys to segmenting. You can create tags, so that when a subscriber takes a particular action, they get tagged. For example, when they buy product X, they are tagged so they no longer receive emails promoting product X.
You can create automations, so when someone buys product X, they get moved into the buyer’s sequence. This is yet another reason to list segment – you can send a series of emails to product buyers that makes sure they get the most out of that product, thereby reducing refunds.
You can create separate sequences for each product you promote, moving your readers from one sequence to the next based upon their actions and preferences. Plus you can create separate sequences based on preferences, what lead magnet they signed up to receive and so forth. With the technology available in services such as Aweber and Ontraport, you’re only limited by your imagination and the desires of your readers.
Get creative in segmenting
Sometimes you’ll need to get creative, such as offering a bonus package that they need to enter their email address to receive. This will give you a list of buyers to a particular affiliate product you’ve promoted.
Use opt-in forms that offer bonuses, freebies, guarantees, support and anything else you can think of to get readers and product buyers to subscribe to segmented lists.
Always be thinking – how can I segment my list so I get them the information and offers they want to receive?
What can you segment?
This is where it gets fun, challenging and even exciting.
There are so many ways to segment your lists, and there are no hard and fast rules on this. Really you need to decide what is best for you, your list and your niche.
Here’s some ways to segment your lists…
Purchaser or non-purchaser – have they made a purchase? How long ago? If it’s been a long time, you’ll want to give them a great offer to get them buying from you again. If they purchased recently, you might want to reward them somehow to keep them active.
How active – have they clicked a link in your emails in the past month? Generally you want to make more generous offers to the least active subscribers, to get them interacting and purchasing again.
Customer value – did they purchase a $10 product? $100 product? How much they’ve spent with you can determine what offers you send them. Be sure to speak to your best customers in a way that shows how important they are to you.
Geographical location – depending on your niche, this can be a terrific way to speak to people using their local lingo, customs and so forth to better relate to them and push more emotional buttons.
A good example would be sending out special emails to the U.S. for things like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, or Boxing Day in the U.K or Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand.
Area of interest – even if you build your list with a somewhat generic lead magnet, you can still segment your list based on interests. You can do this by making an offer – free or paid – and then segmenting those who click the link.
For example, your lead magnet is online marketing (very generic) and then you make offers to your main list for a free video on traffic generation, a report on making money with blogging, and a paid offer for a product creation course. Now you’ve got 3 separate list segments that are niched down.
Content format – some prefer written content such as blog posts and pdf’s. Others prefer podcasts, or video, or webinars. If you know how certain segments of your list prefer to consume their content, you can tailor future offerings accordingly.
Stages in the Sales Cycle – giving new subscribers an introductory email series is a great idea. This introduces them to you and your business and gets them excited for more. Then you might even give them a choice of what they would like to receive next.
This barely scratches the surface of different ways to segment your lists, but you get the idea.
Segmenting tips, ideas and monetization…
Making the same offer to your entire list? Segment anyway. Let’s say you’re promoting a course on traffic generation strategies to your entire online marketing list, which is segmented into 3 parts as follows:
– People interested in video marketing – People interested in blogging – People interested in Amazon affiliate sites
Of course you could send out the same email to everyone, but why would you?
Instead, talk about using videos to generate traffic to your video list. For your blogging list, talk about driving more traffic to blogs. And for your Amazon affiliate list, talk about driving traffic to Amazon affiliate sites.
Remember to tailor the subject lines to each segmented niche as well. You might be shocked at the improvement in your open rates, clicks and sales.
Send new subscribers your old offers.
Let’s say you launched a new product 60 days ago. Everyone on your list at that time received several emails about the product. But now you have new subscribers on your list – what to do? Send an email (or 2) just to them, telling them about the product. The point is to tell new subscribers about offers, products and opportunities they haven’t seen yet.
Segment product buyers who didn’t purchase the upsell.
Make them another offer to buy the upsell they missed – perhaps with an additional discount or an added bonus.
Segment affiliate product buyers based on product creator.
If you sold a hundred copies of Joe Smith’s course to your list, those buyers might want to know about everything else Joe Smith puts out. And right there in the email, you can remind them that they bought Joe Smith’s course back in June.
You can also segment based on interest – that is, people who clicked the link in the email to check out Joe Smith’s course, but didn’t necessarily buy. Remind them of their interest in Joe’s products.
Segment based on clicks.
Readers click a link to check out a product – send them a follow up email reminding them of their interest and that the sale is ending.
Last of all, get creative.
What can you offer certain segments of your list that will have them shouting ‘YES!’ The more segmented you make your lists, the more specific and creative you can get with your offers.
If you were a college student who never stopped attending school full time… how much would you earn. Likely nothing. You’re too busy learning to earn.
When does a college student start making money? When they leave school (graduating or not, doesn’t matter) and start working.
So why do we think our online marketing businesses are any different?
When you put education in front of ‘doing,’ you’re a perpetual wannabe marketer.
But when you put the doing first, you’re building a business.
It’s a simple mind-shift that can take you from broke to six figures.
I’m not saying you should stop learning – not at all…
What I am saying is you should devote your best hours to working on your business. And devote your ‘spare time’ to learning.
Of course, sometimes you’ll need a crash course in something. Like when you try to build your first squeeze page. This is when you go to Google or YouTube, find a video that walks you through what you need to know, and do it as you follow along with the video. Yes, you’re learning. But you’re doing it in context with working on your business.
Bottom Line: There is a point when you have to put all the courses and programs aside and get busy doing something. And while you’re actively engaged in that, don’t learn anything unless it directly relates to what you’re doing.
Think of doing as your full time activity, and learning as something you do during off hours. You’ll make a lot more money that way.
There are a lot of things in life and in your business that you can’t control.
You can’t control what other people do.
Or what they don’t do.
You can’t control what regulations come down the pike.
Or what happens to the economy.
Or who or what wins elections. (Brexit, the US presidential election, etc.)
So what can you do?
Focus on those things that you can control.
Fix the problems that you can fix.
And for everything else, stand back and be an observer.
As best you can, remove your emotional stake in those things you cannot control.
If you are able to take this liberating attitude, you’ll notice your anxiety reduces ten-fold.
You’ll be calmer, you’ll think more clearly and you’ll get more done.
And you’ll be happier.
One more thing – when you’re calmer, clear-headed and feeling positive, you’ll begin to see solutions to problems that previously seemed insurmountable.
And you’ll discover you can control more things in life than you thought you could.
Only then can you begin to truly make a difference in the world.
Your readers probably enjoy hearing about your latest exploits and victories. They like to hear how you made $10K in a day, especially if you give them all the details so they can try and duplicate your success.
But do you know what they love hearing even more?
Your failures.
Your muck-ups…
The time you fell down the stairs stone cold sober while holding your best friend’s wedding cake.
The time you thought you were so smart, you had found a brand new way to sell widgets, and lost $1,200 in the process while gaining a closet full of maxi-widgets 2.0.
And the time you got conned, too, also makes for a great story.
So why do people love to hear about your failures?
Because they can relate. Because it shows you’re human. Because it’s just plain fun to know they’re not the only ones who sometimes screw things up.
We all know the guy who brags non-stop about how everything he touches turns to gold. In fact there’s a word for him – BORING.
Then there’s the bloke next store who has some success, but enjoys a few failures, too. Now THAT’S the guy we want to hang out with.
That’s the guy we can relate to.
And guess what? That’s also the guy we’ll listen to and buy products from…
So go ahead and regale your readers with tales of your failures. They’ll love you for it, and in the end, so will your bottom line.
There is a young lady in the Internet marketing niche who has 3 separate IM type blogs. And without revealing too much (we don’t want to create direct competition for her) here are the methods she’s tried and the ones that worked in monetizing those three blogs…
To begin with, she tried AdSense. But that only made a few bucks and she quickly abandoned it. Then she tried renting out banners, but since her 3 blogs combined receive about 10,000 visitors a month, she didn’t get a lot of interest.
She does put up ClickBank ads, and those bring in about $1,000 a month from all 3 blogs combined. Not bad, but obviously not that great, either. Especially when you consider that she posts 6 days a week on each blog.
Next she decided to devote one blog post out of 6 to promoting an affiliate product. This wasn’t an easy decision for her, because she was afraid her readers would be alienated and they would stop visiting her blog.
But on the contrary, her promotional blog posts were well received and they’re making her money. In fact, it doubled her income and then some.
So now she was making over $2,000 a month on her three blogs but she felt she could do better. So what she did next was a little unorthodox.
She had a pop-up to get people to subscribe to her mailing list, which she decided to rent out. That’s right – she’s renting out her pop-up. She devoted the top right sidebar and the bottom of each page to capturing email addresses for herself.
Then she made a page showing her traffic stats, her own conversions on her own pop-ups, some demographic info and so forth. She was really selling her pop-ups on each of her three blogs.
And it worked. She rents them by the month, taking the code the customer gives her and pasting it into the pop-up. The customer has to be offering something for free, and of course it needs to fit her niche.
Believe it or not, between the three pop-ups on the 3 sites, she’s earning close to $2,000 a month just doing this.
Combining that income with the income from her ads and her promotional blog posts, and she’s earning about $4,000 a month from her blogs. Of course, this doesn’t include income from her own list which she is building.
So the question is, why was it so much easier to sell the pop-ups than it was banner ads? Maybe because it’s something different. Or perhaps because people want to build lists, and see this as the way to go.
Now you might be wondering if she isn’t shooting herself in the foot and losing out on long term income by building her own list faster using her own pop-ups.
It’s hard to say. But one thing for sure is that $2,000 a month from the pop-ups is coming in like clockwork, and all it takes is collecting the money and pasting in the code once a month. Really, you can’t beat that.
I hope this gets you thinking about new possibilities for your own website(s)!…
You drive by a restaurant and it doesn’t look like it’s been painted in a decade. The flowerbeds are full of weeds, the sign is dirty, the parking lot is full of trash… do you stop in and have lunch? Probably not, but why not?
What does outside paint, weeds and trash in the parking lot have to do with what kind of meal you’re going to be served? Frankly, none. It could be that the world’s greatest cook is inside, waiting to make you the meal of a lifetime.
But you’ll never know because you didn’t patronize the place.
What’s this got to do with your business?
Everything.
I see folks working for months to get their products just right. And then they only spend one afternoon writing the sales letter or making the sales video.
They think if they get the product perfect, it won’t matter if their sales letter looks like it was written by a third grader. But it does matter, because if no one buys, no one will ever know what a great product you have.
This might blow a few minds and cause some controversy, but… when it comes to online sales, your sales copy, graphics and sales funnel are all more important than your product.
No, I’m not saying it isn’t important to have a great product that delivers tremendous value.
But I am saying if you don’t spend just as much time on the funnel that takes people from strangers to buyers, you won’t succeed, no matter how terrific your product might be.
You get the point.
Now to suggest something even more radical – write your sales copy first.
Then create the product.
This isn’t a new idea, yet to this day it’s seldom used.
Look, it’s a lot easier to write great copy when there are no limitations to what can be in the product, and then fit the product to the sales copy.
If it turns out any of the claims in the sales letter went too far, you can always pull them out. But you will still increase your odds of creating a hot selling product when you use this method.
Remember – spend as much time building your sales funnel as you do creating your product. This will get the people in the parking lot, through the door and sitting at your table, ready to enjoy the fantastic product you’re about to serve them.
