Product Creation

601: Mini-Offers, Market Research, Quitting Your Job, and Building Your Funnel with Michelle Evans

October 3, 2018

Michelle L. Evans walked away from her global marketing strategy role at Microsoft in 2012 after a successful 16-year corporate career spanning many industries and now works with a fantastic community of business owners - coaches, consultants, experts, speakers, authors and solopreneurs - helping them go from simply surviving to predictably SOLD OUT. Using her 20+ years of successful marketing experience she helps her clients create income-producing, client-generating, stress-reducing marketing funnels. Michelle has been featured in Mirasee, Huffington Post, Online Marketing Made Easy and 30+ other places over the internet and worked with household names like Microsoft, LinkedIn and others as a well-paid employee and consultant.

Michelle talks to us about her strategy of creating mini-offers to find hot selling product ideas, training your list, creating upsells and funnels, and how to emotionally connect with prospects.

Take This Short Quiz to Claim Your Michelle's Free Funnel Template

598: Create a Better Product, Narrow Down Your Audience, Find the Ideal Price Point and Grow with Crossword and Word Search Hobbyist Jonah Phillips

September 25, 2018

Jonah Phillips is the founder and CEO of Crossword Hobbyist and My Word Search. He’s here to talk about starting your own business, and explain why you should ignore most business advice you get. He also explains how he was able to grow the audience for his crossword and wordsearch tools, as well as the audiences he's broken into in order to expand his user base.

593: Rockstar Marketing: Make More Money, Think Outside the Box, Get Noticed and Succeed with Keynote Speaker Craig Duswalt

September 5, 2018

Craig Duswalt is a Keynote Speaker, Author, Podcaster, and the creator of RockStar Marketing.

His background includes touring with Guns N' Roses, as Axl Rose's personal assistant, and Air Supply, as the band's personal assistant.

After touring, Craig opened his marketing firm, Green Room Design and Advertising, which was named the 2002 SCV Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year.

Craig then combined his backgrounds in both music and marketing, and is now a professional speaker, author and podcaster, promoting his RockStar Marketing Program all over the world. He is known in the industry for putting on high energy, 3-Day RockStar Marketing BootCamps every Spring and Fall in Los Angeles.

Craig is here today to share with us how to use outside the box marketing techniques to generate leads, attract clients and how to stand out from the competition — Like a RockStar.

Resources

436: Speaker Fulfillment Services: Avoid the Usual Mistakes Authors Make and Discover the ABCs of Selling Physical Products at Live Events with Bret Ridgway

November 7, 2017

Bret Ridgway is co-founder of Speaker Fulfillment Services, a company that works for speakers, authors and information marketers. His unique, behind-the-scenes perspective allows him to see what is working and not working in the industry. He is the author of 5 books in the niche, including the Amazon bestseller "Mistakes Authors Make" and most recently "The ABCs of Speaking." He stops by to tell us what we need to know about selling products from stage at events, what's working now, and what physical products we should be creating and selling in our businesses.

Resources

176: Leverage Skills to Run Virtual Summits, Create Products, and Cause Massive Transformation with Entrepreneurial Business Coach Bailey Richert

November 8, 2016

bailey-richert

Bailey Richert from Virtual Summit School has made a living by creating online training courses based on website creation and product creation skills. She shares not only how she comes up with product ideas, but how she develops sales letters by re-using the "language" prospects give her. She also explains her 90-day process for running a virtual summit, including:

  • Month 1: planning, speakers, branding
  • Month 2: creating and recording interviews
  • Month 3: launching, speaker followup, execution

102: Generate Prolific Passive Income on uDemy with Alex Genadinik

July 27, 2016

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Alex Genadinik, whose Android app is ranked #1 in the Google Play store for the term "business" has 87 courses on uDemy and has sold to over 66,000 students. He's going to tell us how he sells on a high traffic platform called uDemy (which is as "hot" as the iTunes app store was years ago), how he comes up with ideas and gets traffic to his video courses.

Resources

074: The Penny Test, The Login Test, and the Opt-In Test (Does Your Internet Business Get a Passing Score?)

February 5, 2016

Can a single penny really make or break your entire online business? Listen on to find out...

Marketer of the week: Teresa King. She Taught me how to keep it simple. One of the first people I knew with a membership site (1999) -- BoxedScripts with me. Redirect Pro.

Feature Presentation: The Penny Test

Does your business pass these three tests?

  1. Penny Test (what happens if you set your product's price to 0.01, actually purchase for real, then change the price back to normal later? Can you completely pay, check out, and create an account in your system? What about logging back in?)
  2. Login Test (upsell, test user, MG user masquerading, dashboard page, login-logout)
  3. Opt-in Test (single-double-triple optin, re-optin with existing address) fill in contact form)

Ten Bonus Tests

1. Is your mailing address on your website?
2. What about a contact form?
3. What do I see when I google your name?
4. Search your name on Amazon?
5. Search on YouTube?
6. Search on iTunes?
7. Do you own the .com?
8. Where can I optin on your site?
9. What can I buy?
10. If I only buy one thing from you, what should I buy?

Bonus test: where's the one place that I can find your "best stuff"? (best of page on your blog, blog post listing all your products, etc.)

Wise Words: John C. Maxwell's 7 Steps to Success

John C. Maxwell, author of 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, says you need to take these seven actions:

  1. Make a commitment to grow daily
  2. Value the process more than events
  3. Don't wait for inspiration
  4. Be willing to sacrifice please for opportunity
  5. Dream big
  6. Plan your priorities
  7. Give up to go up

068: My Biggest Failures (and Biggest Successes) in Internet Marketing

December 18, 2015

I'm going to get really personal today and talk about times I've screwed up...

Marketer of the week: Stu McLaren from stu.me and Wishlist Member. Rather than share a "breakthrough" I picked up from Stu, I want to tell you that when I present (a webinar or podcast), I imitate his speaking style.

When you speak, speak deliberately! Especially if you're an American and your natural tendency is to slur your words like I do.

Is there anyone in your life who speaks slowly and carefully, without becoming monotone? Then I would suggest you imitate that person's speaking style when you present.

stu

(That's us a few years ago at Inc. Magazine headquarters at
7 World Trade Center in New York City.)

I often "channel" Stu to slow down my speaking, enunciate, and speak more clearly, focus, calm. You can be intense but still make sense. See also: Ray Edwards, Armand Morin.

Fourteen Key Principles: The Common Thread That Runs Through These Successes & Failures

  1. Four Daily Tasks: I said it before and I'll say it again...
  2. Finishing everything that I start, less notebook doodling
  3. $997, $47 every 2 weeks, 5 payment option, experimenting! Charging high ticket AND low ticket.
  4. Investing in myself: attend conferences instead of stock trading which is gambling and a distraction. Dave Ramsey instead of Jim Cramer.
  5. I don't trust myself: get to the Minimum Viable Product because of the 3 day window.
  6. I'm not smart: I don't know what's going to sell without experimenting and I'm open to new ideas.
  7. Weekly focus: email for the same thing all week. Stick to your guns, don't psych yourself out or let customers bully you
  8. Membership sites: organize both high and low ticket, group multiple sites (but no all-in-one site)
  9. Pitch webinars: do something unexpected, teach a lot and sell hard. Give them a wow moment and not necessarily an aha moment.
  10. Re-marketing: phase out what's not selling and go back in future weeks to promote what's selling (Backup Creator)
  11. Don't delete old sites or content
  12. Your most popular content, marketing and products are the "beginner" stuff
  13. It's ok to repeat your most "powerful" ideas and phrases. How many times have I mentioned Income Machine in podcasts and blog posts? A lot!
  14. Don't be a timid marketer. Welcome pitch emails, upsells, ads. Don't have a buyers only email list or a monthly digest email list. Be on the lookout for what you can absorb/apply, for example, an affiliate bonus package.

Three Biggest Failures

  1. ClickSensor: should have made it an online service
  2. WPLetter (now Paper Template): should have built it out more and controlled the market faster (16k overnight from a 12 minute video)
  3. Action PopUp: should have got the entire marketplace using it, added tons of templates
  4. Bonus: all the PHP products, which made money, but not enough. Lesson: keep publishing things to get to "the good stuff."

Three Biggest Successes

  1. Bulk content creation: books, Daily Seminar, Webinar Crusher monthly, blog, podcast. Just make 12 pieces of content to last you an entire year.
  2. Must-have tool for everyone's business such as Backup Creator: pitch is all about what you can do with it, 100k sites, tie in with our other stuff (Membership Cube) -- yearly renewals, developer license
  3. Pain of disconnect in Membership Cube: selling high ticket, playing with the payment plans, pitching on webinars! (35k in a couple hours)
  4. Bonus: platinum coaching program. Lesson: the first step is getting the button online!

Wise Words to Live By

When you can't change the direction of the wind, adjust your sails.

If you don't change the direction you're going, then you're likely end up where you're heading.

Albert Einstein: "Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value."

Napoleon Hill: "Keep your eyes and ears wide open--and your mouth CLOSED, if you wish to acquire the habit of prompt DECISION. Those who talk too much do little else. If you talk more than you listen, you not only deprive yourself of many opportunities to accumulate useful knowledge, but you also disclose your PLANS and PURPOSES to people who will take great delight in defeating you, because they envy you."

067: Proof of Concept: Use the Minimum Viable Product, Prototyping and Version 1.0 to Leapfrog Your Competitors and Get Everything Done

December 11, 2015

The only way you're going to make any kind of consistent progress is to break it up into milestones.

The expert in anything was once a beginner.

Wise Words...

  • The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. -- Winston Churchill
  • When people say mean things about you, it's a reflection on themselves.
  • You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. -- John C. Maxwell

INTERNET MARKETER OF THE WEEK: Marlon Sanders

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He's from TheTrafficDashboard.com and the best piece of "strategic" advice I ever heard from him is to: Absorb the changes. This means, if you put out a great product, service, app, etc. and someone copies you, adding a few features, then copy them right back and make it even better. Use their copying of your idea to make your idea one step ahead of theirs.

marlon2

People give "cliched" advice like: just serve one person, imagine a customer avatar, success leaves clues. Model successful people.
What do you do when you're burnt out? Someone "steals" your idea? (No, they copied. Stealing suggests you don't have it anymore.) The best ideas are combinations of 2-3 things. iPhone, Facebook.

Most people have too many ideas, too scatterbrained, pulled in different directions. Most people can't tell the forest from the trees.

Successful FUNDAMENTALS to Model from Other Marketers

  1. High ticket course (profit margin)
  2. Low ticket solution or software (list)
  3. Warm up: free blog posts, YouTube videos, autoresponder sequence with a blend of pitch and content. A short book couldn't hurt.
  4. Platinum coaching program: easy money
  5. Be a thought leader, speaker, innovator, teacher, even if it doesn't come "naturally"

Knock these out one at a time (series) and not all at once (parallel)

Things Angering Me This Week

  1. No real mailing address on your websites? What are you afraid of?
  2. Linking directly to an order form from an email? At least show the "contract" of what I'm getting.
  3. Trying to piece together a solution (i.e. podcasting) when you should have just bought a damn course (Podcast Crusher, uDemy)

Get it working now and connect the pieces later, so you can whip up the interface when you're in that frame of mind. You don't want to over-engineer software OR your business.

8-Step Software Iteration Process (That Also Works for Non-Software Membership Sites)

  1. psuedocode / "ugly" basic interface (text and buttons)
  2. proof of concept
  3. mock-up interface
  4. test cases
  5. working interface
  6. connect it all together
  7. debugging
  8. interface again based on use-cases (iterate)

You might have to do 10-20% more "work" in the long run, but you'll have a more stable product, make the money faster. You sometimes have to "see" a design or interface in action.

Non-software example: first get the results. Show how you can get consistent AdWords traffic. Keep a swipe file. Develop a checklist. Make it easily do-able and easily relatable.

Resources

065: Get Your Business Noticed on the Internet: Course, Blog, Podcast, Book, DVD

November 27, 2015

Are you annoyed that an Internet marketer is marketing to you? Instead of looking at other marketers as people who are "serving" you as a consumer, why don't you look at what successful things they repeatedly do, like consistent products, blogging, and webinars? And model what they do!

Marketer of the Week: Dennis Becker

Dennis wrote the book from 5BucksADay and has the membership site Earn1kaday.
Like me, actually leaves his money-making websites online. What a concept.

dennis-becker

 

If a site makes me money, I'll keep maintaining and promoting it. He has lots of irons in the fire such as a new product and new Kindle book every month.

Complaints of the Week

  1. I'm at your sales letter. Where do I go to login to your membership site?
  2. I bought the "lite" version and I login. Where can I go to upgrade? Marketers delight, 5 site license to unlimited license.
  3. What about an in-your-face upsell or interstitial ad? I want something else you're selling.
  4. You're supposed to "sell the click" in emails but what the heck am I clicking on? You're only telling me about the Pro and Basic packages, launch deadlines, but what it is, in one sentence?

Feature Presentation: Course, Blog, Podcast, Book, DVD

I once found an internet marketer "coach's" page but I couldn't find 1 product, 1 video, 1 book by him or even his last name.

What do people find when they search for you? What about on YouTube? Amazon? You should always be URL dropping or off-handedly mentioning the things you sell on your blog and podcast. Who needs testimonials? Use yourself as you own examples, testimonials, and case studies.

  • Course: Four milestones for $997 to get in the "high ticket" mindset, then drop that price SLIGHTLY (MembershipCube.com)
  • Blog: content marketing, cannibalize your Facebook re shares, 5 minute YouTube content: what pisses you off (your opinion) or something helpful (video to create a PayPal mass pay file, or resize an image without Photoshop) (IncomeMachine.com)
  • Podcast: 5 minute audio, no music (PodcastCrusher.com)
  • Book: 10-7-4, WWHW, 56 minutes, Fiverr for transcripts (MakeAProduct.com)
  • DVD: iPhone, Camtasia, DVD Architect, Kunaki (also MakeAProduct.com)

Today's quote: "The difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

 

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