Robert Plank

What are you working on this week?  I'm cranking out a bunch of content for a new membership site...

Lots of marketers the past couple of months are using the economic recession as a hook to sell their stuff.  "This system will help you profit in a recession..."  I'm sure you're tired of it.  You can't have a Unique Selling Proposition if it's not unique!

It's not just the internet marketing niche either.  I got this e-mail from Experts Exchange (a programming forum) a few weeks ago:

"If you had invested in the S&P 500 just before Thanksgiving 2007, and cashed out just before Thanksgiving 2008, you would have lost 41% of your money."

Boo-frickin-hoo. I lost $30k in cash to the stock market the first month of this year.  The value of my home has dropped $137,000 in the past 5 months on a city block where at least 30% of the homes were in foreclosure when I moved in.

One of my relatives was laid off this month, and you know what he immediately did?  He didn't feel sorry for himself -- he started looking for another job.  He has a savings account that will last him a little while and doesn't have a ton of debt that will eat him alive.

Another friend of mine just bought a brand new car and a house for his wife and kid, neither of them are college educated, they work "average" jobs and they can actually afford the payments.

For my business partner and I, 2008 was our most profitable year ever.  I just made close to $5000 selling a 7-pack of PHP scripts, and another $4000 before that selling a 23-page PDF report, using minimal outside advertising.  It was almost 100% in-house e-mail marketing.  He is close to $100k in income for the year.

We both bought homes this year, and we're both taking our girlfriends to Hawaii for New Years at the end of December.

I don't have to tell you about how there are more cars on the road, more people in lines at stores and in the movies now than ever...

The whole point of a "recession" is to weed out the weak businesses. You can either watch the news way too often, believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and let it depress and demotivate you.  OR you can realize that there are people out there giving up (just because they hear bad news) and you can get ahead of them.

You might have already read the story below.  It's "The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs!"

There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.

He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.  He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers.  But he sold good hot dogs.

He put up signs on the highway, stood on the side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog, mister?"  People bought.  He increased his meat and bun orders.  He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.

He finally got his son home from college to help him out.  But then something happened.  His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio?  Reading the newspapers?  "There's a big depression.  The European situation is terrible.  The domestic situation is worse."

The father thought, "My son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know."  He cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.

His hot dog sales fell almost overnight.  "You're right, son" the father said to the boy.  "We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."

D'oh!!

Do you belong to any clubs or memberships to network and get more ideas, do you know what you want in 2009 and do you know what you have to do to get it?  Heck, what can you do differently in the next three weeks that hasn't worked for you this year?

Please comment below, and let me know what you are working on for the remainder of this year.  And guys, PLEASE don't turn this into a political or economic discussion.  The whole point is that politics and economics won't affect your business unless you let it. Your bad attitude will KILL YOU if you let it.

So, what is your thought on this? Let me know!

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Imagine for a second that you have a full-time employee working on your business. (Maybe you already have one.) I don't mean a pay-per-job kind of employee, I mean a salaried employee you pay every single month.

• You pay for this person's health insurance.
• You pay for sick and vacation days.
• You pay into their retirement account.

Their job is to build you a web presence and create new products and sites, write sales copy, buy advertising, and so on.

Despite all this, your employee frequently visits forums, checks e-mail, chats in instant messengers, and generally puts out products at a snail's pace... let's say 1 or 2 products per year when he could be producing one per month, easily.

Now that you've got that pictured in your head, tell me... are you that employee?

Do You Deserve To Be Fired From Your
Self-Employed Internet Marketing Job?

I am still following the daily video challenge and I hope you are too.

I recorded five videos instead of just one on Monday, to make up for my trip away from home at Disneyland... that was some nice downtime and recharged my batteries, by the way.

When I record a daily video:

1. I make sure Camtasia is running, and that I have my headset on so I can talk about what I'm doing.
2. I open up Notepad and write "Appointment with myself: Finish chapter 5 by 6:30 PM" (I set that to whatever the time is half an hour from now and whatever chapter I'm working on.)
3. I set my alarm clock for 10 minutes -- use a kitchen timer or Cool Timer.
4. I haul ass for ten minutes and stop immediately when it runs out, then explain what I'll be doing for the next ten minutes.

The above formula works wonders to keep me motivated.

Sometimes I'll start out and not feel like working, but within a couple of minutes I'll be in the exact mood I need to be in.

I recently discovered another hidden bonus about recording yourself at work: You have indisputable proof that you are working!

If you are one of those people trying to convince a spouse or family member that you are doing more than just clicking around on the Internet all day, give them access to the daily videos you are recording.

(Show them how to fast-forward to skip the boring parts.)

You can respond by saying, "Look, today I wrote 50 pages."
Or, "Today I wrote four sales letters."

If you didn't meet your goals, you can explain in the video, exactly why you didn't write that many pages or why you didn't make as much money as you wanted to that week.

Heck, it could also remind you what you were working on yesterday.

• Are you using a similar formula?
• Are you using video to document your work?
• Do you have some OTHER tip to keep yourself motivated so that you don't disappoint the people in your life?
• Should you really be fired from your self-employed job (or at least put on probation) and what will you do to make up for it?

Please comment below and let me know... I would really appreciate it.

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Ben Prater is a guy I have never exchanged words with, unfortunately. He is an expert Internet marketer and has a way of reducing refunds that is pretty damn effective.

He is similar to me because he sells infoproducts in the "make your own software" niche, but he focuses more on the managerial, engineering part of that niche than I do. I am a do-it-yourselfer, he is an idea guy.

I'll never forget his best product… called,
"Software Secrets Exposed."

His sales letter sells you the story of what you can do with his book – his friend at Microsoft who worked in a high tech office and went to the Ferrari factory himself to make sure they painted his six-figure car the exact shade of purple he wanted.

I bought his book in 2003, before a lot of people had thought to direct sales into autoresponders or even save those leads at all. But Ben had thought of that.

You buy from him and you are automatically added to a follow-up series that sends you an automated, personalized message every few days.

When you first purchased, you got the book. After 7 days he sent a 30-page bonus report with a sample blueprint (just like the ones he talks about how to make in his original book).

He sent out more bonus reports after 14, 30, 45, and 60 day periods. They were either bonus chapters that wouldn't have fit anywhere in the book, or interviews with others – which are even easier to make than reports!

He didn't always simply give away the bonus materials… sometimes he asked for something in return.

For example, in one follow-up he offered a report on a related subject – but to get the report, you needed to provide a testimonial for his original "Software Secrets Exposed" e-book. Look at that sales page, it overflows with glowing testimonials!

If you can spread out the bonus items like he does, you will cut down on refunds because those people who refund immediately won't get the bonus items. If you can string them along for long enough, they might pass up the refund period!

When information is cut up into pieces it has a greater "thud" factor. Five twenty page reports all with their own sales letters have a higher value than a big 100 page book, even if contains the exact same information.

Spreading that information out over time gives it even MORE value, because your customer is more likely to read the information given to them in pieces than trying to sift through a huge pile of stuff the day they purchase.

I'll admit, I don't have a follow-up series for every product -- that would take time away from creating new products -- but every now and then I choose one product randomly and spend a minute or two writing a follow-up for it.

It doesn't have to be anything super valuable. You could:

• Remind them to download the product. (7-day followup)
• Ask what they thought of the product... which you can then use as a testimonial. (14-day followup)
• Offer an affiliate link and a solo ad they can copy and paste and send to their list. (30-day followup)
• Send a special discount link to another one of your related products. (45-day followup)
• Give them a surprise bonus report. (60-day followup)

That's how you reduce refunds. Advertise these items in the sales letter as a 7-day bonus, 14-day bonus, and so on.

On a forum I called this strategy:
"Turning a one-time product into a short-term membership site."

If you give a refund, immediately zap them from the update list and block their IP address from your site.

Recently, I paid through the nose for the rights to Software Secrets Exposed, setup a web site and an affiliate program, and added the bonus reports as autoresponder follow-ups just like Ben did.

Do you have any advice on how to reduce refunds? I don't mean legal issues like disputing transactions with PayPal, but ways to turn refunds into a good thing. (In this case adding more long-term value to a product.)

Participate in the conversation by leaving your comment below.

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If you have big huge grandiose plans for your product launch, it's never going to get launched.

Here is what I would do instead...

Write a simple report. It doesn't have to be big, just 10 to 20 pages. Write a quick one-page sales letter for it because... it's only a report, right? Then launch it, price it at $7 or $10.

Limit the special offer to just 10 buyers. After 10 sales, snap it shut and close the offer. Now you have $100 in your pocket for writing this report... great, right? But it's not the big huge product launch you hoped for.

That same afternoon, write the next chapter in the e-book. E-mail it out to all your buyers for free (if you were really evil you could charge $1 for the upgrade... but I'd rather not have to try and juggle multiple versions of the same book). Then post another special offer with the upgrade book for $11... again, limiting it to 10 buyers.

These will be 10 new buyers you can add to your list. (Make sure you are funneling all these sales into a product update list... otherwise this strategy is totally useless.) Repeat the process. That afternoon, write another chapter, add a couple bullet points to the sales letter, mail out the free upgrade and then post the offer for $12.

If you do this until you have a 50-page report (let's say 10 chapters in addition to the original report)... that's:

$100 + $110 + $120 + $130 + $140 + $150 + $160 + $170 + $180 + $190 + $200...

Which equals: $1,650. But more importantly, it equals 110 proven buyers, and you can expect a good number of those to buy from you again if you come out with similar reports for that same niche in the future.

If you could write just one "article" (I like to call my chapters "articles" ... it makes them easier to write) per day for a month, that means you launched three reports and accumulated 330 buyers (some duplicates... let's say 200) for a profit of $5000.

You don't even have to write every single day. If you were ambitious and could pump out 5 articles in one day, you could take the rest of the week off... aside from 10 minutes a day posting the special offer and dealing with customer support.

Continue this for six months, and you don't have to do these incremental launches anymore... your list will be big enough that you can write a report, launch it, send an e-mail, and take orders.

June 2007 was my best month and I didn't do any sort of AdWords, joint ventures, article marketing, social networking, nothing. I made a product, posted on a forum, then e-mailed my list of 8000 people (mostly previous buyers... because they are the most responsive!)

If you are the kind of person interested in totals, I only launched 3 e-books that month... 7 chapters, each chapter had a video, they were about 50 page reports with 60-90 minutes of video. The book part took a week of writing one article-chapter per day and a grand total of two hours making the videos.

On June 19th, 2007, I made 362 sales totalling $3,058.72 ($2,850.02 after fees). The total PayPal sales for that whole month and the three products I launched was 978 sales totalling $11,420.30... $10,541.05 after fees and a couple refunds. That plus my Clickbank accounts and day job income totalled right about $15,000 income for one month... not bad for a 22 year old! (I was 22 in June... now I am 23.)

I just came back from the 2nd Warrior Event in Raleigh, North Carolina where I was a speaker.

Speaking of webinars and seminars, remember the "Which Test Won" game we played on the webinar a few days ago?  I showed you how:

• What converts BETTER than a squeeze page giving a free gift?  One of my $7 reports selling almost the exact same thing!
• Removing three words from a headline TRIPLED conversion rates -- an EXTRA $625 from every 500-something clicks
• Adding a small logo to another sales letter boosted conversions from 1.99% to 3.57% -- an EXTRA $846 from every 1000 clicks

When you split test you make those small tweaks.  But if you don't even have a product of your own, or a sales letter, then it's impossible to split test those pay raises!

Here's Something Crazy...

When I was on stage at the warrior event, I asked this question...

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