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

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 68 my biggest failures and biggest successes in internet marketing. Welcome back to the Robert Plank show, the internet marketing radio show where we talk about making money. Let's talk today about a big mix of cool stuff. We're talking about membership sites, webinars, copywriting, list building and more. And maybe you're an expert in one or some or all those categories, or they're brand new to you. But we're gonna talk about a couple of different things, mostly 14 key principles. You know, it sounds like a lot, but we'll breeze right through them, 14 key principles in all the things that I've done right and wrong in my internet marketing career, hindsight is 2020 and if I have the choice between patting myself on the back and being super proud of everything that I've created or being super down on myself, man, I'd rather lean a little towards the more critical areas, just because it's so easy to get comfortable and rest on your laurels and all that stuff and just be proud of you getting to 10 grand a month or getting 20 grand a month and not being hungry for more. So that's kind of the the balance I'm looking to achieve today is to be a little more on the critical side, but also look at what worked and what I didn't, so that we don't aren't just constantly being super down and bad on ourselves. 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 to end up where you're heading. And finally, Albert Einstein says, try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value. And can we put in one more? I guess so Napoleon Hill said in his book, Think and Grow Rich. 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. Let's just put that in your head and move on. The marketer of the week is Stu McLaren from stu.me the former co creator. I guess if you co created, you're always the Creator, even if you left the company. But he co created WishList Member, which I think is one of the best WordPress membership plugins out there. And let me tell you what I'm taking away from Mr. Stu this week is to speak deliberately. You might notice that when I speak in webinars and podcasts and things, and you should do this too, I make sure to talk about 20% if not 50% slower than my brain naturally wants to go. I naturally want to slur my words. Talk real fast, and that's a real problem, especially for me. I'm just being open about my limitations. My natural tendency is to speak super duper fast, and then, well, what happens? You end up slurring your words and stuttering, stammering, repeating. It sounds okay in your head, but then when you go back and listen to the recording, then it just sounds like a mess. You sound like a blabbering idiot, like you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off. So the solution of that is to make a conscious just efforts to do better. And you know, in your own speaking kind of issues, maybe you say the word um, too much, or like too much or repeat things, but if you think about it, it's better to speak too slow than to speak too quickly. So this guy, Stu McLaren, I mean, he's a really good speaker, and he has all kinds of good ideas, but I often channel this guy, Stu, to slow down my speaking. Enunciate speak more clearly. Keep good focus and stay calm, because it's not just on or off, and it's not like you only have one emotion that you could crank up all the way or down. It's not like you're turning a volume control, right? You have all these emotions you could have when you're speaking, especially on something like a podcast or on stage or a webinar or product whatever. It's not like you can just be a full blast or super dialed down. You have all this mix of emotions, and you can still be intense, but also speak slowly and be calm. You can still be real and all that stuff. But being excited doesn't always mean speaking quickly, and it's it's better to speak slowly, to collect your thoughts. And early on, I think that I let my nervousness and things like that dictate how quickly I spoke, and I was worried that if I speak too slowly, I'll come off like an idiot, or I'll lose people's attention. And in fact, I believe now that the opposite is true. You. If you speak slowly, you just appear, in general, to be a smarter person, and most people aren't hanging on to your every word. So it is better to speak slowly, I think, and more deliberately. And there are videos out there about how they've actually analyzed the best YouTube performers, the top YouTube earners, and people who talk in talk shows, and they notice certain things, like how they emphasize vowels and words, or they even will add in vowels to bridge out words and put extra emphasis and stretch out the way they speak a word. And it's all this weird, crazy stuff, and it's not like you have to memorize all these rules, but I channel people like Stu McLaren, Ray Edwards, Armin Morin, all these guys who speak slowly and deliberately. I think that's the key word here, is speak deliberately so that you don't come off sounding like an idiot, even though your brain might be going a mile a minute, it might be all excited. I think that it's better in the long run, to dial it back and to speak at a slow tempo and not monotone, not like Ben Stein, the clear eyes guy, but speak slowly so that you're confident, so that it just comes off like you're not just a blabbering idiot. And today we're going to talk about my biggest failures and basic biggest successes in internet marketing. And notice how it's okay to stumble over your words sometimes and say, um, and all that, as long as the information you have out there is good stuff. And we're going to talk about my three biggest failures, which I believe to be click sensor, WP letter and action pop up. Now maybe you own some of those, and it's not like they're 100% failures, like totally bad projects, but there are definitely things where Hindsight is 2020 and in many cases, they are projects where I did okay, but if I had just done a couple things differently, I could have made a lot more money from those projects. And thankfully, I have, in fact, learned from my mistakes, and in more recent projects picked up the slack and looked back at ways I messed up. And then in newer projects actually implemented those different things. And I'm going to be talking about my biggest successes, including content creation with daily seminar and webinar Crusher, backup creator, and membership key, when there are specific things about those projects. And maybe you're listening to me for the first time, or maybe you own some things like backup creator, but we're going to be talking about basically 10 years ago, Robert Plank, and present day Robert Plank, and that is the best lens that I like to look through things to realize what I have improved upon. Because many times also, I mean, like I said, I don't want to look back and reflect too much on the past, but many, many, many times I'll either realize a sharp, stark contrast between then and now, or I might even pick up one or two things that I forgot about that I can just plug back into my business in the present day. Let's unpack the 14 key principles from what I'm about to share with you about my failures and successes. Don't worry that it's 14. Will breeze right through them. First of all, four daily tasks. I said it before, and I'll say it again, a lot of these time management systems that are out there are just a nightmare. You have to deal with grids and quadrants and columns, and it ends up being more trouble than it's worth a you don't stick to it. The best thing I've ever done is four daily tasks. Just complete four things per day. And by thing I mean like a 40 minute or so task, you sit down, you knock out an email, or you knock out a book chapter, you knock out a podcast or a video, and we're talking about four money making business related,

Robert Plank 8:54 tangible tasks that you can actually finish that day instead of just chipping away at some Big, huge problems. So the top of the list is for daily tasks, and that relates to number two is finishing everything that I start and less ideas, less notebook doodling, less planning things out on paper, estimating future profits, stuff like that. Because doodling is a cool idea. Doodling is great for creativity and to solve problems, but we don't want to use the wrong tool for the wrong job. We don't want to use doodling to get ourselves off on another tangent and getting 10 or 20 ideas floating around in our head. We have to have absolute focus. And so doodling is great to solve the problem you're in or to map out in interface, or to figure out the upsells we're going to put out this week. But it's really tempting to get off on a creativity kick and just keep on starting things and not finishing anything. You have to finish everything that you start number three, charging both high ticket and low ticket. You. So what's helped here is experimenting with offers, experimenting with price points. So I I've experimented with charging $997 for a an online class when I used to go only as high as $400 or only as high as $100 playing around with payment plans, which means that if someone buys, for example, our membership cube course, they can pay the whole 997 or they can pay $47 every two weeks. And so we've experimented with things like a five payment option has worked very well for us as well. For example, you sell a course at $100 and give people a choice between paying the full $100 up front, or getting on a payment plan of five payments of $19.95 who you've played around and taken it to the extreme. And for example, just in my experience, taking, say, $100 course and splitting it into two payments is a terrible idea. And I only know this because I've tried it, and it converts terribly. And we're talking about where you can say, well, you can either pay us $97 or pay us $49.95 today, and then $49.95 in 30 days didn't work hardly at all. And we've also tried things like saying, Well, we have $197 course. So roughly $200 and then we say, well, you can pay us either the full 200 or $17 once a month for 12 months now, that petered off pretty quick, because after three or four months, the payments stopped coming in, but playing around with a $200 offer and then offering a payment plan of $39.95 every 21 days actually got most people to complete it. And there's just that, that sweet spot in there where you can have an offer, and if you're selling a piece of software or a theme or a course or things like that, there is something to giving people the choice between paying full price and putting it on a payment plan that's right there in the sweet spot. And I'm not saying a payment plan where there's hardly a discount, like a two payment or three payment, but a five payment kind of option works pretty well, or where they have three or four months or so to pay it off. But then there's also where you get outside the sweet spot zone, where if you give someone a year or two to pay something off, then then either the sales just stop coming in, or the sales come in and the the payments stop as well. So there's something to be said about charging both high and low ticket to figure out what the marketplace wants and what the marketplace will actually buy. Let them vote with their wallets, and don't just depend on what they tell you, because they don't even know. But you put out these different price points and you see what makes you sales. Key principle number four, investing in myself. I don't want to get into financial advice, but have you ever thought that maybe you'd jump in, do this internet thing, build up 10 or 20 grand, and then use that nest egg to play around with stock trading. Well, I used to do that back in the day. I built $17,000 up to 30,000 but then kind of lost it all. And the big reason for that is because stock trading is not only a distraction, because you have to check it every day make sure your money's not evaporating. But also it's gambling. I don't care how many ways you have a sure thing in the market, there's so much going on, so many factors and manipulation that stock trading and playing around with your money is gambling and a distraction I used to listen to like the Jim Cramer kind of advice, the Mad Money guy. And his advice, more or less, was, well, if you're young, play around with your money and basically gamble it, because you have time to build it back up. And then if you're older, put it in safe stuff where you can pay dividends. But then in more recent years, the Dave Ramsey kind of advice made a lot more sense, and Dave Ramsey just says to well, to be more careful with your money. And Dave Ramsey's little plan is to look at your debt and pay off the smallest amount of debt first, and then take all the money you had paid into your smallest credit card and put it into the bigger credit card. And it's called the snowball method, so that you end up paying more and more and more to pay off debt till it's wiped out, and then don't get back into debt and then build up an emergency fund and then pay off your house. That way, you don't have to pay this monthly fee and then start putting it into retirement. But he has these steps where it's it's really geared towards, like, the psychological aspect of getting things knocked out and simplified and out of the way. So I don't want to get off on a tangent, but it makes a lot more sense if you want to grow 10,000 into 100,000 to put it into your own business, or to wipe out your debt, instead of having a juggle paying off this interest on your debt, but also having other money, growing your stock market, and then the long run, you lose money. So it makes a lot more sense to and. Invest in yourself and your own business and your own online business, especially than to play around with stock trading stuff. Number five, I don't trust myself to complete things. I like to get to the to have almost like the worst case scenario thinking, and get to the minimum viable product, because I know that after three days, my excitement will have decreased slightly, and that might be enough to get distracted by something else. So there's a three day window to get that minimum viable product out there, whatever it is, if it's software, you're gonna have to put out a really basic plug in, but have something that's finished up and sellable that way. If you want to go back and improve your product or piece of software you can and you will be more motivated to do it if it's already making you money. Key principle number six is related, and it's the saying that I'm not smart. I'm not saying I'm stupid, but I'm saying that I personally don't know, and you don't either what's going to sell without experimenting, and I'm always open to new ideas

Robert Plank 16:07 so many times, especially when it comes to paid traffic and cold traffic, and the the biz op crowd, and making your marketing appeal to the lowest common denominator, for lack of a better term, I don't know what's going to sell. And many times I think that, oh, common sense tells me that increasing the price of my product, for example, will decrease sales. Not always true. Many times, increasing the price, to a certain extent, increases sales. Or we think that having a discount or lowering the price or having a trial offer will boost sales. And that's just not always the case. The only way to know is to try different things and experiment. Key principle number seven, weekly focused email for the same offer to your list all week, and stick to your guns. Don't psych yourself out or let your customers bully you into giving away all your best stuff for free. I mean, if you know me, I give away a heck of a lot of my stuff for free, and I don't think that you owe me by listening to my free stuff or anything, but you can't let one or two bully customers tell you what to do. You have to take a risk and do things because you can or because you want to, and the consequences then are increased or decreased money for you, but you have to basically grow a pair and try different things and some I mean, you're gonna make mistakes, and that's fine. You use the mistakes to get past the bad stuff and the good stuff and the the result of either doing something great or doing something badly will translate to less money or more money. And in my experience, if you do something incorrectly, then you might not make money for a couple days. But if you do something correctly, then you might multiply your income by five or 10 times or more. And then, doesn't that seem like the the risks out or the rewards outweigh the risks? Well, I think so. So if that made sense to you, you have to try different things and experiment and stick to your guns, as opposed to just letting the fear and the bullying and the way it's always been done dictate your actions. Key principle number eight, membership sites. We said before, to have both high and low ticket offers, and a membership site is the the answer to managing those high and low ticket offers. Think about it, if you sell something for $7 to make that worthwhile for you, don't you think you're gonna have to sell at least 10,000 copies of that $7 offer in the next year or two. How are you going to manage all that, if 1% of those people need their download link, or if 10% of those people need an updated version of your plugin, that's going to be a customer service nightmare, free. So having a membership site is the answer, because they can always come back to the user account they created and come, you know, log in again, and they can't pass it around and share it. And if you sell a high ticket offer, I'm talking about $1,000 or more. Doesn't it make sense that you're gonna have to pile in a lot of different things, a lot of different bonuses, Videos, downloads, links, resources. So a membership site is the way to build all that in there, and you can group multiple offers together where it makes sense. For example, we have a membership site you can join at income machine.com and we use that for the whole income machine, course, which gets your whole online business set up in three days. But we also use that same membership area to sell our paper template plug in, because that plug in is part of the whole course. We also use that same members area to sell our member genius plug in, because people can buy just member genius or the whole entire course. And even in our membership cube site, we sell membership cube as the whole thing. We also sell WP drip individually, WP import separately, WP notepad and all these other plugins you might know about or not, where people can buy just the one little plug in, the one little solution, or the whole entire package, or even buy just the plug in and then upgrade to the whole entire package, it's important to note that you don't want to have. You don't want to give somebody the ability to piece together your different offers. Like, for example, I would never have a sales letter for someone to buy just Module Two of income machine or just module six of income machine. But we have a few of the hot items where they can buy just a plug in or so and then upgrade to the whole course, if that makes sense, we also don't want to have an all in one membership site, because that becomes too much of a hassle in a perfect world, then I would have Robert plank.com be the home for all the products I sell in a perfect world, Double Agent marketing.com, would be the one membership site will resell 100 different products, but it just doesn't work that way. But there is a happy medium where we group multiple offers together once again, if that makes sense, key principle number nine, pitch webinars. You've probably been on a webinar before where someone says, sign up for this training that's going to be at this upcoming date and time. You show up at that date and time, and you made a little bit of a micro commitment, because you you agreed to show up at this specific appointment. And then they have a few things to teach or show or demonstrate to you how you can improve your business or improve some part of your life. And then at the end, they have an offer to buy, and there's a good chance that you'll buy because you made all these commitments, just show you. Register for the webinar. You showed up to the webinar. You paid attention for most of the webinar. You got a couple things out of it. Now it's time to take it to the next level. And what's great for you as someone who can run pitch webinars is that you can get the excitement back in your business, get the uncertainty, the chaos, do things unexpectedly, teach a lot and then earn the right to sell hard at the end and give them a wow moment, and not necessarily an aha moment, show them things that amaze them and change the way of thinking, but still leave them thirsty or hungry If you want to call up that to buy more things from you, key principle number 10, remarketing. And I'm not just talking about dropping a pixel on your sales letter, if you know what that is, but I'm saying that you create different products. You try out different offers. I sell plugins called backup, creator, paper, template, things like that. And I like to phase out what's not selling and then go back in the few in future weeks and things like that, and re promote what's a hot seller, for example. Backup creator, key principle number 11, don't delete old sites or content, especially if they're making you money. I don't care if you cringe at looking at your blog posts from five years ago. You get to the point where, when you first started out, the things that you thought were advanced are now beginner stuff to you now, but the problem with deleting that old beginner stuff is it might be what appeals to your cold traffic people who are hearing about you for the first time. And I mean, many people, many people are stuck in beginner land, and what they're looking for is not to have a huge, big breakthrough or have a bunch of advanced stuff, but just get a handle on that beginner stuff and even reinforce the beginner stuff that they know about so they know they're moving in the right direction, so that they eventually become ready for your advanced stuff. For example, you might create training on how to choose a niche, how to install WordPress, how to visualize a customer avatar, which might seem super five year old stuff to you like stuff that a kindergartner or a preschooler would only need to know, but think about how things were in the beginning, and that was advanced to you, but beginner to you now. And by leaving that, that beginner stuff out there in the wild for people to discover, even though you might cringe at it, that's going to be the stuff that gets you will turned on the most pre key principle number 12 is that is still related, is that your most popular content marketing and products are really the beginner topics. What I've liked that I enjoy doing is I put out lots of content. I put out blog content, podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, and

Robert Plank 24:41 then I go back and I can sort in basically all of these systems. I can sort by what gets the most clicks. I can go to YouTube and see what are my most viewed videos. I host my podcast and an online service called Libsyn, and I can actually sort by the most. Popular podcasts, and I can go back to my old easing articles account and sort by the most popular articles. I can look at my blog because I have statistics programs on there, and sort by the blog posts that get the highest view counts. I can look at what phrases people type in search engines that lead people to my sites, and almost every time, it's the most basic stuff, my most popular articles out there were about how to create headlines, or about the A, I D, A, attention, interest, desire, action formula in copywriting. All this the real basic day one, how to choose a niche kind of topics. And I didn't know that for years, until I put stuff out there and then sorted by the most popular stuff first, which relates us to key principle number 13, it's okay to repeat your most powerful ideas and phrases. For example, if you've listened to past episodes of the Robert Plank show. I mentioned our income machine products so many dang times. Now if you don't know, here we go again, repeating it. Income machine is our idea that every successful internet business needs to have eight components to keep it going on as close to automatic pilot as possible. You need to have a niche, a website, an opt in page, an autoresponder sequence, a product for sale, a membership sites traffic, a blog, and I think that's everything niche. Web host, opt in page, autoresponder, blog, sales, letter, membership, site and traffic, those eight things. And if you're missing one of those, well then great. You should join income machine and get those gaps filled. And if you already have things like an opt in page or an autoresponder sequence, let's get it souped up and performing at 100% that's income machine.com. I want you to be aware of the ratio you have of learning to doing to teaching, and I don't know what the exact perfect ratio is, but when we talked about Napoleon Hill earlier, we don't want to be talking more than we're learning, and we don't want to be learning more than we're doing. We actually want to do the most, and then learning kind of comes secondary, and then teaching what we've learned and done kind of becomes a third type of thing. So if you're consistently putting out a lot of blog posts and content and podcasts and things you don't want the well to run dry. I know that's a real fear of my own is to to teach so much stuff that I run out of material, but I keep generating more material because I'm doing a lot more and that I can just talk about, especially in this episode, the things that I've done so that there's always a fresh supply of content, because I'm always doing things in the background. And finally, key principle number 14, don't be a timid marketer if you're someone who's an internet marketer. And the thing too also is that being an internet marketer doesn't just mean that you sell how to make money online. You can be in the weight loss niche and you market on the internet. So you're an internet marketer. You can be a surgeon who's trying to get your practice noticed on the internet. And guess what? You market on the internet. So you're still an internet marketer. It really baffles me when internet marketers ask about or talk about installing ad blockers on their browsers. So if they browse the New York Times or browse a forum, it doesn't show any banner ads. Why you're a marketer? You want to be inspired by however many ads they say, if it's 400 or 4000 different advertising messages you get hit with every single day, you want to absorb that. That way you're never out of ideas for your next product. Headline, email, subject line, you want to welcome those pitch emails and upsells and ads, and when you're selling, you don't want to have this thing called the buyers only email list. Have you heard of this where people say, Well, you should have a free a list for free people and a list of people who've paid you and only email to the people who never bought anything from you. And if someone's bought something from you, never email them again. Well, that's terrible advice. If someone has bought something from you, that's those are your highest leads right there. And you shouldn't have just one thing for sale. If you only have one product out there, that's okay, but at least, at the very least, register as an affiliate for some other offer or buy resell rights. That way you have some kind of upsell that you can use as an experiment. But it really baffles me when and this happens every now and then, and I know I'm gonna sound like a jerk for saying it, but every now and then. I'll get an angry email from someone saying, why bought something from you? Stop emailing me. Well, you know what, if you bought something from me, that's a good sign that you'll benefit from something else I have for sale. So you can't think that way. You can't think in terms of, well, I'm gonna have all these free people. I'm gonna convert them, and I'll never email them again, because that'll so called bombard them. You should have a sub list for every product you have for sale. And what that ends up doing is, for example, I have, I have a list of people who just joined from my blog. You can join from the sidebar on my blog at Robert plank.com and that is a list for people to get to know me. And that's where I mentioned income machine for several weeks, in fact, and that's where I mentioned the product I have for sale and past blog posts. But after someone buys, for example, backup creator, now they are on the backup creator list. And if I happen to mail for backup creator, specifically, they're excluded. But if I mail for a paper template, then someone who buys backup creator and uses WordPress sites to backup and clone their Wordpress blogs,

Robert Plank 31:05 that person could probably stand the benefit from creating landing pages, such as those with paper template, and if they don't like that, they can always unsubscribe. No big deal. But you don't want to put an extra work to decrease your income. Having a buyer's only list that you never market to decreases your income by a huge amount, having a monthly digest list where you say, Well, I'm going to email you every week, but if you don't want to get that many emails, click this and unsubscribe and resubscribe so that you only get one email per month. You don't want to do that. That's not worth your effort. You want to be on the lookout for what you can absorb and apply, for example, a current trend at the time that actually it's not even a trend. This is something that's always, always a marketing technique is to have a bonus package. If you promote something as an affiliate, the best thing you could do is say, well, here's this really popular product launch going on this week. I want you to buy it through my link. And the reason you'll buy through my link is because you'll get all these extra bonuses, just as my thank you for giving me that commission. And I've seen this done a lot with with like, the product of the day, product of the week, low ticket offers. But there are many marketers that I admire quite a bit who I've then seen create their own bonus package to promote a $2,000 or higher offer. And it's ironic because the bonus package game started with the high ticket stuff, but then the lower ticket guys owned it and took it over the high ticket guys forgot about it, and then the high ticket guys see what the load ticket guys are doing, and reabsorb it. If that makes sense. They did something that worked really great. Forgot about it. Someone else picked it up, and now you just own it back again. Alright, so 14 key principles in my failures and successes, four daily tasks, finishing what I start. Experiment with price points. Invest in myself. I don't trust myself. I'm not as smart as I think I am. Weekly focused membership sites, pitch webinars, remarketing. Don't delete old sites or content. Your most popular content is the beginner category. It's okay to repeat your most powerful ideas and phrases, and don't be a timid marketer in the last home stretch of this episode, let's talk about my three biggest failures. Number one click sensor was a script, PHP script, plug in software, whatever you want to call it, web based software, where you could put Google ad, type of ads on your site. This was when ads and sites were huge, and instead of only getting a one cent or a five cent click on a Google ad, this would put Clickbank advertisements on your site, and that's great, because that means you get higher commissions, recurring commissions, and it would act just like AdSense, which means that if you put A Google ad, AdSense block on your site, on your content blog, you don't have to, you don't have to think about you put it on there, and then Google will spire your web page and then give you an appropriate matching ad for that. And so I put this out there, and within a couple of weeks, there were about 10 different competitors from other internet marketers and they were all inferior, but having the superior product doesn't guarantee you'll make the most money. So basically, to make a long story long, these other competing Google Ad knockoff products would require people to specify keywords in every single ad on their web page. What that means is, if you ran a forum or an article site with 10,000 articles, you would have to specify keywords for every single page where you put this ad that would link to Clickbank products, whereas my product would spider the site just like Google. So if you had 10,000 different subjects in your article directory, it would automatically match, and it would become smarter because it would, it would give more of a weight to ads that people clicked on the most and that paid a higher commission. And my mistake with this, and the reason why you probably haven't heard of it. Why it didn't catch on, why I eventually sold it for just $5,000 after making a bunch of money from it myself, was because I should have made it an online service. And I I had the mistake of, I had the mindset of telling myself, well, I'm gonna sell this as a one off payment, a standalone product where people can can buy this and install on their own sites. And I was missing a huge chunk of the market, of people who just wanted to use it, like Google AdSense, where I hosted it as a software as a service type of deal and and there, I mean, there are a lot of ways I could have made money from it, and the biggest one is that not to get too much off on attention again, but this plug in basically turned a one tier Click Bank affiliate program into two tiers. By that, I mean that you could put an ad on your site people click on it, so like you have an article about child birthing, and then that little ad block in between, your site would say, buy this $30 eBook about childbirth, someone would click and then pay you get, like, you know, 50% commission. And what I could I added into click sensor was that some of the time, it would display an ad from one person's affiliate accounts, and then maybe a third of the time, or half the time, it would show the ad and give another affiliate credit. So kind of a cool idea here, right? If you wanted to split money from different people, you could say, well, some of the affiliate sales go to this guy, some of the affiliate sales go to that guy. And what I should have, would have, could have done with this hosted click sensor service is made it where someone could put Google ads or not Google ads, but click center type of ads on their site for free, and then it would credit my Affiliate Account half the time. And if they wanted to, if they wanted to, you know, go to the full on service, they could pay something like 510, 20 bucks a month, kind of like if you ever use the like the Hulu service to watch TV and movies. At the moment we're recording this, it's about $7 a month, and they still show you some commercials, and it's working out very well for them. And if you want to upgrade to no commercials, something like $14 a month. But there's something to the online service, and it's free or super low ticket, but then it gives me some of these recurring commissions, and people can pay extra to take me out of the equation. So click sensor sold Okay, especially since I was just 20 years old at the time. But I should have, would have, could have made it an online service, speaking of being ahead of my time, WP letter was the second ever WordPress plugin to create sales letter style landing pages on your websites. And the modern version of this, the version that I've built for you know, for 10 years, at least into what's the current iteration of it today, is called paper template, which you can grab at paper template.com so the story behind this was basically that we created a class about WordPress. And, I mean, at this point, this was six, seven years before I'm recording this, so this was ancient history. Put out a class on WordPress and, and, you know, it was $400 and we promised, I think, about like, 20 or so different plugins, and I fulfilled them all. But I mean plugins for things like put a pop up on your site, put a quiz on your site, make it where, when someone fills in a something in the comments of your site, it puts them on a list. Make it easy to to put a opt in a box on your sidebar, things like that, and it sold okay, but it not really well. And then what I did was I looked and someone had just come out with a WordPress plugin that turned WordPress into a sales letter. And I thought, Well, what a great idea. And so I didn't. So, being the programmer that I am, I said, Well, I got this idea and I put it into practice, and I made the very basic version 1.0 of what is now paper template, what back then, was called WP letter.com

Robert Plank 39:28 so this class that was $400 wasn't selling. Super great. But then I recorded a quick 12 minute video showing the behind the scenes, and I made it this thing called a leaked video, where I pretended this was a video sent to my business partner, and someone would watch this, and then it was kind of like a fun thing, because, I mean, the video was watermark, and obviously, looking at this, it would just, it was a sales video, but it was something different and funny. I was like, okay, don't share this with anyone. This is just to this specific person, and people would watch it. Like out of almost a morbid curiosity, and they would show how you can turn WordPress into a sales letter without editing code, without uploading and even had, and it still does, have many built in headlines, so you don't even have to write the sales letter itself. And just this 12 minute video brought us in $16,000 overnight, which might be not, might not be a lot of money for you, but it was a lot of money for me back then. And either way, that's a lot of money to make overnight. And the reason for that was because, out of all the things we loaded up into that, course, it wasn't just about the amount of stuff, but about the hot button. And I made a video demonstrating WP letter. Now my mistake there was that that should have become my priority. I should have seen that 12 or that $16,000 overnight from a 12 minute video. I should have seen that as a sign. And I should have cut out every other distraction that I had. I should have built it out more, and I should have controlled the market faster, meaning that I should have attended every possible internet marketing given out there. And I should have given away free copies to everyone out there. I should have found influencers, big names, and got them to all use it, because they would have. And nowadays, I've got to compete with all kinds of other alternatives, even though I was the second one to market. And, I mean, let's face it, the first guy to market was, was terrible. I mean, he only sold a handful of copies, and I kind of had the germ or the kernel of this idea before, but just seeing it in action got me to make a jump on it, to make my version. And then now there's hundreds of other alternatives. And that just goes to show you that ideas aren't unique, and you have to get your idea out there quickly, because other people will, so called copy you. Even though your idea is never 100% original, it's always built on the guy before you, and then when they copy you, you have to go and copy them right back on or not. So I should have built it out more and control the market, which leads us to failure number three action pop up for a couple years. This was the thing I was known for, like, my biggest thing, and that's kind of like what backup creator is. In the modern day, if someone says, What do you do? I could list a bunch of things, but I tell them, backup creator back then, I could list a bunch of things, but I tell them, action pop up. I sold 1000s and 1000s of this action pop up, plug in which you might even use today still, or might see it used today. And I mean, this is so widely used at one time, I was on the website for Tony Robbins calm, a pop appeared, and I looked at in the source code, what powered it. It was action pop up. So even Mr. Anthony Robbins used, or at least at one time. I haven't looked recently, but I've seen action pop up in use on Tony Robbins website. And what I should have done is I should have, once again, got the entire marketplace using it. I should have had more of a startup mentality. What I mean by that is the stereotypical, especially if we look back at like the.com bubble, the stereotypical startup kind of company are the ones that aren't geared towards making money for at least five or 10 years. They're geared towards building the list and getting everyone using their product, their offer. I should have, just like the VP letter, I should have shut everything else down and dedicated 100% of my life and my time into action pop up instead of making, I mean, I mean, like video courses, ebooks, but it should have been all about action pop up. And it should have been about getting everyone to use it, and not necessarily about getting everyone getting money out of it early on, out of the gate, I should have made it more point and click and added tons of templates, and you can still buy action pop up today, and there are lots of things I still want to add to it, but that's once again, now it's kind of lost in the sea of all the other pop up plug ins. And should it would have, could have, I should have had more reach for I should have joint venture network more and given up a lot of early profits in order to dominate later. And finally, as far as the bonuses, the not the bonus, but the bonus. Failure. I want to share with you are all the how to code PHP products I have, and I believe, well, hopefully, when you're listening, these are still online. One of my very first websites was simplephp.com I don't think I'll ever be able to bring myself to take it down, but I sell products called simple PHP websites on crack, simple JavaScript impact PHP, five minute PHP, lots of stuff, and those still sell every now and then. But the name in the get well, the name of the game a couple years ago was WordPress, and the name of the game now is software as a service, where someone can just click and buy an offer from you, where you host it, and so PHP, how to products are I've kind of gone to the wayside. They made me money, but not enough. And what I realized was that I was selling to two crowns of people. And I mean, I had to put these products out. To make this realization. The realization was that I was selling to two crowds of people, and one crowd were the programmers who either wanted to learn programming or had been hired to program something and were buying my products to just put some pieces together for their existing projects, which is fine. The other crowd of people were internet marketers and copywriters who wanted to add these conversion boosting items to their sales letters. And what that led me to were these products, such as fast food copywriting, five minute copywriting, sales page tactics which were less geared towards programming and more towards the marketing conversion boosting. So this isn't, this wasn't 100% failure, because I had to put out all those products. And, I mean, it's always good to make some money, right? Just to pay the bills. Get some of the edge off things like that. Get better at, you know, marketing copywriting. But I feel like I had to publish out all those PHP products and courses to get to the good stuff, to get to the sweet spot, to realize that, well, I shouldn't just sell PHP stuff, but I should sell conversion boosting products and courses. So three biggest failures, click sensor, WP letter, action, pop up. Let's get to the fun stuff. Let's get to the three biggest successes, which are bulk content creation, having a must have tool for everyone's business and the pain of disconnect. Let's unpack these real quick. In the final minutes of today's episode, bulk content creation, we put out a membership site called Daily seminar. And the premise of this was that every day of the week, so five days a week, you get a quick 20 minute video or product boosting your internet marketing business, that way, you could just log in every day and get something out of it. Now, the best thing we did about this was create a lot of the content in advance. Number one reason for this is because you don't know if you're going to be in the mood to turn out content later on. And many times when I put out my podcast or record podcast episodes, I'm recording it the same week, but in this case, I'm recording it just a couple days ahead of time. And many cases, I will record a month's worth of podcast episode, so that way I don't have to think about it for a month, and I'm always at my peak state, my best self, and you only need 12 pieces of content to fill up a monthly blog post for the whole year. By the way, we sold daily seminar for $32,000 after a couple months. So that was worth the about 10 hours or so, I believe, is 55 videos divided by in 20 minutes each. So it was worth the 10 or 20 hours to make a 32 grant. And so I record many blog posts or podcast episodes or things in advance, because it's easier to chunk it up, batch it up, and record three quick things, then you psych yourself up three different times. So one of the best things I've done, and still do, and you should do, is that bulk content creation number two is to create a must have tool for everyone's business, and that's what action pop up and WP letter kind of were, and that paper template kind of still is. But backup creator, I would say, is, is the best thing I've ever done. It's a WordPress plugin to backup, restore and clone your site. And it's not the only backup plugin out there. It wasn't the first backup plug in out there, but it's a must have tool at the time we're recording this podcast, it's in use by just under 100,000 websites. Let me look this up like I always do to get the exact count. The exact count is 95,716

Robert Plank 48:38 websites protected with the backup creator plugin. And the thing about this plugin is that everyone who has a WordPress site needs to back it up. And a huge chunk of the people who have WordPress sites have them configured just so and need to make an exact copy. And I think I came to this realization when we were putting on our $2,500 per person live event in Las Vegas years ago, and I was explaining all the things I put on a new WordPress I said, install this plug in, this plug in, this plug in, go into the sidebar and add this box, this box, six box. And everyone in the audience was loving it, but they were feverishly writing down every little thing. And they said, wait, go back to Plugins. What was that? And I realized that it would help so much just give someone a pre made site with it loaded up with all the plugins and settings and content that you'd need in a content blog or a sales letter or a membership site. And we have those clones when you join income machine.com, the other cool thing, the other big breakthrough when it comes to backup Creator and having a must have tool for everyone's business, that is the last thing we'll stop paying for, is that the pitch, the selling of it, isn't about the features necessarily, even though they might be looking for a specific feature. So put that on the sales letter, but it's about what you can do with it, and that means, like I said, we show with backup creator how you can use it to clone your blog, or how to grab our template for a membership site. Or we use different scenarios where you can charge local business, set up a site, and then to automatically back it up every single month, we showed how you can create a template to make a restaurant site. So you make a website for your local towns Italian restaurant, but then you back it up and clone it, and that way you can go to the other Italian restaurant across town and then get paid again to host their website, but you just restored the template you had used. We also tie in backup creator with our other stuff. So not only do you get clones and income machine, but when you join membership queue, we use backup creator that's built in too to put a single payment membership site together, or a coaching membership site together. And other things we did great with backup creator were having yearly renewals. So someone paid $47 to get the plugin and to get updates and support for one year. Now, if they waited a year plus six months, their plugin would still work. It would still do all the things they paid for. But if they had any kind of issues, like, I mean, 1% of our customers have some small issues or things like that, or if they wanted the latest and greatest features that we would add to it, then they would have to renew for another year. So they wouldn't have to renew the plugin would continue to work. But if they wanted newer stuff, then they would have to pay for another year. Now it sounds almost like a bait and switch with that is a bad idea, but this is how all of the software marketplaces work, and just by adding this, I thought it would, it wouldn't catch on at all. But this is where most of our income from backup creator comes in. Is from people renewing their support for one more year. Another huge profit center for backup creator is selling a thing called a developer license. Now, the way I used to sell plugins that I would say, you get this unlimited lifetime. Use it on your own sites. Use it on client sites. But now we say, well, you buy this and you get support for one year, and you can use it on as many sites as you personally own. Now what does that mean? It means that if you're hired by someone like a local business or someone else to back up or clone their sites, you need to buy a separate license for that person, or just buy the one time developer license, which allows you to now use the plugin on other sites. The weirdest thing about this thing called the developer license is people buy it, and nothing really changes. No other features are unlocked, no extra bonuses. But now in our membership site, now they're on a level called the developer, and then if they ask for help with a client site, now we'll be able to help them, because they paid the one time lifetime fee to the $100 to upgrade to the developer license. So it's just, I mean, a lot of little things out there. But the biggest takeaway from that part of it is have a must have tool for everyone's business. So, I mean, if you think about it, the very last thing to go, Okay, the first thing to go, if someone is trying to cut costs, are is information. Are, you know, membership sites where they learn new things. But then the last things to go Are the services, the software that runs things like their web hosting bill, there maybe their their autoresponder bill, their webinar bill. So how can you get in on that and get them, depending on your superior must have tool to run their business, and now biggest success number three is the pain of disconnect. We have a course a membership site called membership queue. I mean, it better be in a membership site, because we teach membership sites in that course now that, like we said at the beginning of this call, is at a 990 $7 price point, because it includes all this stuff that's worth 1000s of 1000s of dollars, and people can join it at 997 or at $47 every two weeks for, I believe, 21 or 22 payments, which sounds ridiculous, because it takes, I think, a year or so to pay it off. And normally I would be against any kind of offer that takes a year to pay off, but people pay it because if they cancel, they lose all the plugins that we offer, and they lose especially the membership plug in that we offer now, if they finish paying it off, it's theirs for life, and they can just pay the 997 but selling something high ticket, playing around with the payment plans, and especially well pitching on webinars, but also making it where they lose something if they cancel. It's one thing to pile on more and more things longer they're in, but it's a lot simpler to explain and to keep them in, that they lose a thing if they cancel. Now membership cube, that was an offer where we made $35,000 in a couple of hours. We put out the very first version of that, which is now. So six years ago, I believe, and that once again, 35 grand might not be a lot of money to you, but in a couple hours, that is huge, and that is awesome. So pain of disconnect, what goes away if they cancel your site. And finally, the bonus, biggest success, I would say, is a platinum coaching program, a program where you can make a button for, you know, 1000 or 2000 bucks a month or so, where someone pays that and that automatically bills them every month. And in exchange, they get access to all your products. And there is a recurring webinar appointment where you will meet with them for one hour and fix some aspect of their business that they decide. The first step to a program like that is just get a Payment button of any kind, online and in membershipcube.com we have a module on how you can have a monthly site like a platinum coaching program. But the first step is you just have the button. Not only does it improve your perception like you look more like someone who charges high ticket, but even if you just get one or two or three of those kinds of clients that right there can be a huge income booster for you, even for just one hour per week. And one of the best things about the marketer of the week, Mr. Stu McLaren, that we talked about earlier, is that he posted something a few weeks ago about how he's booked up for months and months ahead of time. And that's not to say that he's now become an employee or built himself a new job. He has tons of vacation time built in there, but there's something up to that, but something to charging high enough price where you're not just like a taco bell employee type of wage and you're getting paid for what you want, but you also don't have to go out and market yourself for months ahead of time you're booked up and and you're doing what you love, and I mean doing coaching, especially for these high ticket guys, is the most fun you're ever gonna have, because they're only looking for one or two quick things, and they don't know about things that are simple to you. So things about what WordPress plugin to use for a survey, or how to write a quick email or even to have an autoresponder list, simple things that, if they plug in, can easily make them an extra 20 grand a month extra, but to you, it's child's play. So there's something to that. That platinum coaching program, we have platinum students, and the best way that we found to get new Platinum students is to host a live event, get our best people there, including the ones already in the platinum program. And they almost kind of sell the program for us. They go on stage and say how we've changed our lives. So then other people want to be like them and get past our hurdles with that high ticket, personal coaching, my biggest failures and successes in internet marketing. The three biggest failures were not making something an online service, not controlling the market faster and not devoting all my time and adding tons of templates to my earlier products. Biggest successes were bulk content creation, making a must have tool for people's businesses, and adding in that pain of disconnect that was Robert Plank Show episode 68 my biggest failures and biggest successes in internet marketing. Make sure to write in and tell me what your biggest successes and or failures were in internet marketing. I'm curious. I won't put it on the show, but I'm curious to hear from you. My email address is Robert at Robert plank.com the blog is Robert plank.com the place to rate us and give us a five star review on iTunes is Robert Plank show.com/itunes

Robert Plank 58:36 and the place to get your entire online business set up, including a membership site, sales letter, autoresponder sequence, blog, traffic and more, is at income machine.com that's i n, C O, M, E, M, A, C, H, I n, e.com, income machine.com I'm Robert Plank. Get yourself out there and market yourself online. Have a great day. And thank you.