Archive for April, 2009

Banned From YouTube

April 27, 2009101 Comments

As some of you noticed, I was banned from YouTube. No reason given!

That account had 160 videos, 50 subscribers, has been around for 2 years and responsible for a couple of extra accidental sales per week.  Some of the videos on that account had over 2,000 views.

Long story short: the Thursday morning of April 23, 2009 I drove from Turlock, south down Highway 99 and then Interstate 5 through Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles then finally San Diego to meet a few people who were in town for Mass Control 2.0.... Jason Fladlien, Lance Tamashiro, Dale Maxwell, David Risley, and Bryan Blyss (Faceman).

Tragedy Strikes!

We check into Jason's room at the Hard Rock Hotel, break out the laptop like usual internet marketing nerds and check out our Video Sales Tactics blog.  Try to play the latest YouTube video I have posted there... and it's been "removed for terms of use violation."

That's weird, I say... and try to play another YouTube, same message.  I load my YouTube profile... it says, "This account is suspended."  Try to login to that account, same deal.

YouTube never sent me any e-mail about any videos being a problem or about the account being taken down.  YouTube has no phone number of e-mail address, but after filling out a 10-part form I was able to get this canned response:

Hi robertplank,

Thanks for your email. Your "robertplank" account has been found to have violated our Community Guidelines. Your account has now been terminated. Please be aware that you are prohibited from accessing, possessing or creating any other YouTube accounts.

YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week to determine whether they violate our Community Guidelines. When a video or account is brought to our attention we investigate and take action if necessary.

We are unable to provide specific detail regarding your account suspension or your video's removal. For more information on our what we consider inappropriate content or conduct while using YouTube, please visit our
Community Guidelines and Tips at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines and our Help Center article http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=92486.

Regards,

Roberto
The YouTube Team

So YouTube tells me my account violates their community guidelines, but won't tell me which ones, and it's obviously none because their community guidelines refer to copyright infringement, anything illegal, hate speech, etc. of which my account had none.  It was ALL talking head and PowerPoint how-to videos.

The icing on the cake is that being "suspended" from YouTube not only means your account is gone, but you aren't allowed to create any new accounts.  (The guys from Traffic Geyser told me to create a new account at a friend's house, but there's no way I'm doing that.)

That Sucks!

The lesson to all this is: post videos in Camtasia format on your blog so you aren't stuck with a bunch of "this video has been removed" links all over your blog.  I have the originals of all those videos and YouTube only accounted for 5% of my traffic, but it still sucks.

Build your own site, not someone else's. You shoud be posting your YouTube videos on your OWN blog, including hosting the video itself.  It's just like how you should be posting your own articles to your blogs, and not just EzineArticles.

Matt Levenhagen responded to my tweet on Facebook and mentioned sxephil (Philip DeFranco) who is one of my favorite YouTubers, who does this too.  Use your videos to get people offsite and on your list so you can continue posting videos on your blog.

As far as why I was banned? The only thing that makes sense is Traffic Geyser. It looks like I was wrong, other internet marketers not using Traffic Geyser have been banned for the same reason...

What Does All This Mean?

The moral of the story is YouTube throws great parties, but is not trustworthy enough to watch your kids.  Use YouTube as a traffic source, not a place to store all your content.

That's the true story of the last YouTube ever posted by Robert Plank... what are your thoughts on this?  Make sure to comment below!

Write Sales Copy Without a Teacher

April 20, 200917 Comments

Copywriting is one of the best-paying writing skills you could possibly have. When you know how to write good ads (instead of just good content), you can hit peoples' persuasion triggers and get them to buy or get them to take any sort of action (like putting your info to use or opting into your e-mail list). That's a skill worth $500 per page instead of $5 per page.

You don't even need to know how to write copy from scratch, you can just make a few tweaks to bad copy to make it into good copy. Think about it. What if you found a great product with an affiliate program that had a crappy sales page? You could rewrite that copy to gut out the unimportant parts, add a few of your own points and shape the offer in such a way that gets people to buy.

What shape is that? AIDA... Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Get their attention with a headline, capture interest with a problem and a solution, build desire with benefits and testimonials... then tell them to take action. Click an order button, subscribe to a newsletter, whatever. Today you need to find AIDA in every day ads.

Look at 4 pieces of junk mail on your mail table or look at direct mail ads online at a site called "Hard To Find Ads" ... you can find it in Google. For each of those 4 ads, write down what the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action for each one is.

(Come on, hurry up and do it, it will only take you a couple of minutes. Make a commitment to yourself.)

You have only done four today, but I want you to keep AIDA in mind every time you read a web site, watch a TV commercial, see a poster at the mall... ALL successful ads use it. We have all seen commercials that are clever or funny... but you have no idea what they are selling.

Obviously attention and action are the most obvious parts of AIDA, but attention is only the beginning... and without desire, you don't want the product and you won't order. Keep in mind that the elements of AIDA go in order and keep building... building... and building pressure until your prospect is ready to explode, and have nowhere to go BUT to buy.

What's your best QUICK tip to write sales copy on your own, if you have no one to help teach you?

Are You Doing Something Every Day?

April 14, 20098 Comments

It can be tough to stay motivated and on-task day in and day out, especially if you're self employed. In addition to that, if you're self employed and you work from home, you have to battle the urge to stay away from the TV, play with the kids, and so on. Luckily, there is hope. There are three tactics I use every day to stay motivated, even though I work a day job and have very little free time.

First of all, make sure you do something every day. This sounds like a "no brainer", but it's so easy to work for 5 hours on a project one day, then forget about it for a few days. If you let something go for more than 24 hours, you will have difficulty getting that inertia built back up. Personally, I work every evening when I get home from work and I work weekends -- including Sunday -- even if it's only for 5 to 10 minutes. Chances are, if you force yourself to build your business, even for five minutes, you might have fun and end up working for 30 to 60 hours.

You also need to hate your present situation. Let me explain. You should not be miserable and hate your life, but you need to have some reason to do what you're doing. Do you want a bigger house in 5 years? Do you want to go to Spain for vacation this year instead of Disney Land?

A really good and weird tactic is to set slightly unrealistic goals. If you always make $3,000 a month, tell yourself you want to make $5,000 this month. You'll work harder and might hit $4,000 or $4,500... which you will view as a failure, so you'll try harder next month. You started working for yourself because you wanted more of something... more money, more freedom, whatever. If somebody paid all your bills and did all your work for you, what would be the point of living?

Finally, you need to keep your work shippable. This is a practice I began using with software development and carried it with me to article production and info product creation. If you create your products and write your reports with the assumption that it HAS to go out tomorrow, then you'll be able to launch it if you suddenly get bored. Instead of having your project in a million pieces, have the bare minimum ready to go NOW, and add to it as needed.

Those are my three best motivational tools: doing something every day, hating your present situation, and keeping products shippable.

Explode Your Productivity in 3 Simple Steps

April 7, 200922 Comments

It does not matter what profession you have, if you are self employed or employed by someone else, you need some way to stay motivated. On the other hand, if you really are self employed you probably have a difficult time every now and then to keep performing tasks that make you money, day in and day out.

If you want to stay productive for as long as possible, keep in mind the 24-48 Hour Rule. Also make that extra effort to improve your typing speed, and do everything you can to put yourself in the right mindset.

The 24-48 Hour Rule came about when I realized that whenever I work on an article writing campaign, create a video product, or write a report or e-book, 80% of the work is completed within a 24 to 48 hour period. If I take any longer, my productivity declines considerably. Even if it takes me 3 to 7 days to write a book, I tend to drag my feet or focus on other tasks during that time.

You need to work inside a 24 to 48 hour box where you are not distracted by anything else. Stay up all night, wake up early, decline an invitation to hang out with friends, do whatever it takes during that time to finish. I say 24 to 48 hour box because I tell myself I am going to finish in exactly 24 hours, and end up going to 48. You need to set that 24 hour goal, and end up finishing within 48 hours.

Another bottleneck you are going to run across is your typing speed. You need to learn how to touch type using programs such as "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing." You might type a little slower the first few weeks, but if you can bring your typing speed up to 50 to 120 words per minute... any programming, copywriting, e-mail marketing, forum posting, or article writing you do will take a lot less time.

Finally there is the mindset factor. You need to be in the right mindset and train your brain to hate being poor or not having products completed. You also need to reward yourself after you have finished a job, so your brain associates your success with happiness.

Those are the three easy steps to exploding your productivity and getting a lot more accomplished.

Double Your Prices!

April 1, 200913 Comments

Hey guys, I'm back from AM 2.0 in Dallas and I'm still getting caught up on customer support issues.

I talked to Ryan Deiss the first day (I saw him speak in Dallas last year but I never got a chance to say hi).  He said, "How business?"  I said great, that I just had my first $30K month in February and that I quit my day job of three years (first and only job out of college) to attend the event.

Later that night, Armand Morin was talking to a group of people so on my way out to dinner, I fist-bumped him (my standard greeting) and he said: "Robert, double your prices.  You'll double your income instantly."  Basically, if you wanted to buy all of Armand's products it would cost you $15K.  To buy all my stuff (not including webinars), probably about $1K.  He gave the same advice to the rest of the group the following morning.

You got it, Armand.  The first product I'm doing that with is Action PopUp.  The price was $27 for the last several months, it's now $37 and it will be $47 before the end of this month once I wrap-up my new popup training course that'll go along with it.

1. This weekend was one of the best events I've ever attended.  Armand mentioned Action PopUp onstage and Ray Edwards mentioned WordPress Letter to a bunch of people.  I didn't get to meet Michel Fortin... maybe next time!

2. My goal was to have 10 webinars scheduled by the end, I left with 5.  I'm still happy.

3. March 2009 was my SECOND consecutive $30K month (actually it was slightly over $32,000).  February's goal was $30K, March goal was $31K, so now my goal for April is $32K.

4. I launched Enhanced Sales Letters and WordPress Letter just before leaving.  The night I left for the airport, I cleaned out my PayPal account and came back to an $11,000 balance.  Not bad for my first week of full-time self-employment.

5. I joined AM 2.0 Gold, the $500/month program that gets you into these seminars.  My goal is to upgrade to AM 2.0 Platinum within 10 days.  All you need to do is prove you made $100K last year (done -- in fact I've made about $80K just in 2009), and complete a 100-point checklist that all "professional" web sites satisfy.  I knocked out 58 of those 100 points in about 20 minutes this morning.

6. Armand showed a super-secret AdWords technique that my business partner is already implementing.  At the bar, DJ Dave Bernstein shared six networking strategies that made the whole trip worthwhile.  The following night I used just ONE of those techniques to pay $46 for $120 of alcohol.  Good stuff.

Bottom line: Go to seminars, know what you want out of a seminar before you go, actually make mistakes and use the stuff you learn, and most importantly... hang out at the bar every night even if you don't drink.  You'll make some connections and have a heck of a lot more fun sitting at the computer in your hotel room.

What networking events are you attending this year?

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