Robert Plank

Traffic Bad Boys is a site Jason Fladlien and I launched during the first week of our PLR Copywriting class -- DURING the end of the first class.  It was pretty crazy, we showed our students how fast and easy it is to build a site consisting of private label rights material.

I don't usually read what other people say about me.  But I just read a bad review about Traffic Bad Boys, actually a bunch of bad reviews written by just one guy.  And I'm smiling and laughing about it.  You know why?  Because the only bad things he had to say about it were:

1. I was banned from YouTube, so I "must" be bad.  (Not a good assumption.)

2. Someone blogged about me a couple years ago calling me the next Mike Filsaime in a good way, that reviewer found it and tried to spin that as a bad thing.

3. The Traffic Bad Boys site contains master resale rights material, so it must be bad. (False... in the AM2.0 Platinum Google group full of $100K+ earners we recommend master resale rights products all the time.)

For that class, we took 7 products we had rights to, cut them up into pieces and dripped them out onto a membership site for 7 dollars a month.

The reviewer joined for one day, couldn't wait for the rest of the month or even the rest of the week, cancelled immediately and wrote a bad review about us... even though all he had to base it on was the first 20 pages of the material.

So What Does This All REALLY Mean?

It means you need a $7 product for two reasons: to get people on your list, and to get people OFF your list.

You can't always land a $97 or $497 or $997 sale immediately, you have to build trust.  Get them to say yes to something small and then build them up with upsells.

But when you price so low you're also attracting bad buyers... it's a fact of life.  When those people cancel, you can't take it personally, it's just part of the weeding out process.

You need to weed out those people complaining about having to pay an entire dollar for each product, complaining about having to wait for the rest of the material when they haven't even read what they already have.

(It would be stupid to put your best stuff into your free products and $7 products... save that for your high-end stuff.)

You can't pack the member's area with more stuff because then people will join and complain about being overwhelmed... been there, bought the t-shirt with the Daily Seminar membership.

The Solution!

If you're offering a $7 per month membership site, put $7 of content into it every month... no more, no less.  (That's exactly what we did.)  That sounds like common sense, but far too many people take bad customers personally and overcompensate.

If you were selling everything in that first month for a one time $7 payment, you would value-stack so that the information was already worth at least $50 or $100.  There's no need to further bloat that up to $200 or $300 of value every month just because it's recurring.

Your information and your advice needs to be expensive so people will take it seriously.  That's the real lesson you should take away from what happened with Traffic Bad Boys.

Do you find when you price higher you deal with better customers, yes or yes?  Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.

$30K month is going very well, last night's launch of Time Management on Crack put me over the $26,000 mark. I've got two offers lined up for this week but I might only need one to push me over my goal.

This is what I've been doing the past week.  Product launch was just about automated, so I went on the "lecture circuit" to land a couple of joint ventures, have fun and add value.

Last night, Jeanette Cates interviewed me about time management... which was the perfect time to launch the time management report.  We shared a ton of tips with her subscribers and had fun.

You know what, a short time ago my sister sent me a job posting for a teaching position up in the mountains at a community college close to Yosemite National Park.  More money than I make at my current day job and less hours.  No master's degree or teaching credential required, just a bachelor's degree which I have.

Here's what I would have done if I was laid off from my current job and really needed that job: I'd implement stuff from Time Management on Crack!   It's not what you think: let me explain...

I would look at the exact job description and do a search for resumes plus some of those descriptions to see how people were customizing their resumes to fit that kind of job... measuring marketplace demand!

I'd use my copywriting skills, especially the A.N.S.W.E.R. formula explained in the time management report to draft one heck of a benefit-oriented cover letter that showed my personality, presented an irresistible offer and gave a clear call-to-action (call me up and tell me I'm hired).

Finally, and I wouldn't spend longer than an afternoon on this, I would take 30 minutes to find a handful of pain points based on the subject they wanted me to teach (I think it was PHP programming).  I'd find the things community college students have the toughest time learning about PHP.

Then I'd use my 5x10 video creation formula to solve those problems and make a DVD demonstrating PROOF that I know what I'm talking about, with the URL embedded in the three ways I explain to have a call-to-action in video.

I know a lot of places only accept online resumes these days, so I might have to settle for making it web video and adding the URL in the cover letter and resume.

I'd send that out, and if I ever felt like I had nothing to do while "waiting" for a response, I would put those videos on a blog at the same URL I provided in the resume, stick the videos on there, and use the R.A.T.G.U.M. blogging formula to whip out a bunch of blog posts in an hour... even more proof.

Worst case scenario, not hired.  Then I have to be willing to relocate a little bit.  I'd go to job sites like Monster.com and apply for similar positions and have a kickass web site to show that will stand out better than 95% of the other applicants.

Regardless if I was hired or not, how hard would it be to turn that proof into a product?  Surely I must have come across a few gotchas, do's and don'ts... I could turn my job posting process into a system, turn the cover letter and videos into templates and give a step-by-step of what I did EXACTLY.

How hard would it be to create a product like that, if you already DID anything in it? It would be tough to keep it under 20 pages... real tough.

Anyway, copywriter Karl Barndt is interviewing me tonight about e-mail marketing for his blog, that'll be a lot of fun.  In the meantime check out Time Management on Crack if you haven't already.

For you commenters, the question of the day is: if it was an emergency and you absolutely HAD to get a day job... what internet marketing skill would you use to make yourself irreplacable?  I need 10 comments to keep this party going... thanks.

My question to you today is: What's your goal for next month, as in how much money do you plan on making?

Is it consistent with your previous months?

In 2008 I logged several $10,000 months and several $15,000 months. But I've only broken above the $20K per month glass ceiling once or twice... so when we were in Hawaii, I said to Jason, "Let's make sure that in February 2009, we both make at least $30,000 profit that month."

Do you think I'll fail or do you think I'll succeed?

I don't want to reveal too much, but here's what my personal plan is:

• Co-host two e-classes, one at the beginning and one at the end of that month.
• Launch one new product per week.
• Launch one new resale rights offer per week.
• Re-launch one existing product per week.

I've never been that great at pay-per-click, joint ventures, recruiting affiliates or any of that good stuff, so the above plan will have to do.

I already have product #1 for the month finished, now I'm busting my butt to get a bunch of trivial stuff out of the way, so it dosen't take up my time during the $30K Month.  Here's what I have to get out of the way in the next 48 hours:

• Record the rest of my weekly Daily Seminar videos... through the end of December 2009.  (I only have content scheduled up to September 2009).
• Solve all the issues people are having with Action PopUp conflicting with other plugins. (Don't want to be overwhelmed with customer support next month.)
• Get Daily Seminar listed for sale on SitePoint. (I don't want to have to wait until March to put it up for sale.)

So, will I meet my goal?  $30k per month is just $1071 per day.  What is your goal for next month?  Comment below and please be honest.  No one will make fun of you if it's only $3k or $1k or $300...

Do you run a membership site?

What software, plugins, and payment processors do you use for it?

I just setup a real recurring membership site. No more of this password protected blog stuff.  I used aMember and WordPress, with Clickbank as the payment processor.

I was really surprised how many plugins are available for this stuff now.  Even a year or two ago, you had to modify code and do custom scripting... "duct taping" the scripts together.  Now you just install some plugins.

Pretty freaking cool!

I used a blog because I wanted to stockpile a bunch of content up.  aMember has the most support (I'm a member of Membership Academy so that helps.)

And Clickbank?  If you read my Membership Sites on Crack report, you'd know why I chose Clickbank.  Affiliates (60% commission on a recurring product) plus the escape plan.  If I can get enough content piled into that membership site so that I have a year's worth of content in advance, you better believe I'm selling it off.

Do you run a membership site?  What software do you use to run it?  Membergate, aMember, Visiongate?  What processor... PayPal, Authorize.net, Clickbank, PayDotCom, 1ShoppingCart?  How do you like it?

Please, show off the sales letter to your membership site as well since those can be tricky...

I just launched Hypnotic PHP on Thursday, so how did it do?  $3,308 in 24 hours... and $4,574 in 48 hours, that's how it did!

Out of the 962 people who actually clicked through my e-mail, 211 bought.  That's a 21.9% conversion rate on my untested, half assed full of typos sales letter that I wrote in a few hours.

From those $17 purchasers: 141 of them accepted my $7 upsell containing 7 more videos and scripts (Urgency Tactics) ... 66% conversion rate there.

So the grand total was 352 sales for a total of $4,574... $4,320.56 after fees, but the number of sidetracked sales of other products, made up for those PayPal fees.

So why the heck didn't I do a dimesale or anything like that for this launch?

You don't ALWAYS need to repeat the same freaking exact process when you launch a product!

I used to have people complain about my dimesales (because they couldn't get in at a low price fast enough), this time I had people complain about the LACK of a dimesale (because he's used to getting in at a low price).

I haven't given up dimesales, but the effort that goes into pre-selling my list a few days ahead of time is a lot more valuable than doing all the steps to make sure my dimesale works correctly.

You don't ALWAYS need a dimesale offer, just some kind of scarcity.  Mine was really low-key... you get in now for $17, but after 48 hours it's $27.  No countdown timer, no ticker counting the number of sales... just a simple offer.

If you were on my list you got the Email Marketing on Crack videos that explained it...

• Day 1: Tell your list something's going on sale at such and such date and time.
• Day 2: Explain the biggest benefit.  (48 hour notice)
• Day 3: List out the rest of the benefits.  (24 hour notice)
• Day 4: Tell them you launched it.  (3 minute notice)
• Day 5: Tell them it's the last chance to get in before you close the doors or raise the price

That's it!  It's not rocket science. I only started applying this after people told me the dimesales didn't give them time to read the sales letter.

But when I replaced the dimesale with standard scarcity, I still made the same amount of money with less customers -- which means less support.

I know some of you guys might cry and say, "Yeah right, you couldn't have done that without your big mailing list..."  How do you think I built that mailing list up in the first place?  Product launches on forums to build my list.

One final tip about pre-selling your list: Have the product ready to go before you start pre-selling it.  I see lots of guys promote first and then end up having to push the launch date back.

But me, I used those few extra days to whip up an irresistible upsell offer (the extra $7 videos and scripts).  90 minutes of work netted me an extra $707 on that promo.