Archive for June, 2013

The Worst Kept Secret of Internet Marketing: Email Every Day, Sell Every Day, Make Money Every Day

June 28, 2013117 Comments

If you're struggling to make money right now, or you feel your business has plateaued and you're trying to get it back to where it once was... OR you're doing great and you want to do better...

"What's the most effective thing
you can do right now
to EXPLODE your business?"

Let me tell you three things that WON'T help... or at least, these aren't the answers I'm looking for...

It's not "expanding your social media presence" -- look, I created a LinkedIn group with the rest of them that's now just under 1,000 members. We've got a few Facebook fan pages for our business (plus some other niches) and a FB group where people login and post every day. Google+ Communities are too new for me. A Twitter account I never really use, 7k followers...

Writing a book? You should have one but there are more urgent matters you need to attend to...

Information product? The "perfect" home study course or membership site that took you 2 years of content creation to finish? Or a "steady stream" of 7 dollar products that make you 500 bucks each? Not so much...

The secret to consistent income is sending consistent emails consistently.

MEANING: Email Every Day!

I'm looking at 2,706 broadcast emails I've sent in the past 5 years alone and here's what I can tell you...

  • People are going to drop off your list no matter what you do (1% list decay every single day)
  • You can email for the same offer 45 days in a row and people will buy every single day (Newbie Crusher, Paper Template, Backup Creator)
  • You can expect a 2% clickthrough rate from your entire list every time you mail -- but you can mail 5-10 days in a row to get 10%-20% of your subscribers to click
  • Your subscribers are the hottest within the first 7 days -- so email every day when someone joins your list

I don't know how your business is doing personally (but I do care)... but if you plan on going to an offline event anytime soon, as this question to an internet marketer: "Where is your optin page and where can I join your list?" You probably won't get a URL as an answer.

Thinking back to some random conversation years ago. Someone asks me why webinar attendance was down industry-wide. He mailed to a webinar and only had 100 people register, only 33 showed up, he didn't make too many sales...

After some questioning, I realized he'd only mailed once. With a very uninteresting webinar title. At the last minute. He fooled me at first when he said his list was 50,000. I had to find out the hard way that "fifty thousand" included his Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube subscribers... not the same thing.

Is Facebook eating all our lunch? Yes! Are email opens down, email clicks down, blog comments down once people get to the page? You better believe it!

1like

Of course people would rather click the "like" button, share a 1-sentence post with friends, post a cute picture of a puppy, or get distracted by 1,000 other things on the page.

Here's another scary thought... I took an a forced optin page that converts at 42.9% to cold traffic, promoted it on Facebook... only a 1.29% optin rate! (direct linking on the news feed, running ads, placing inside a fan page iframe didn't make any difference... they ALL remained around a 1% optin rate)

It's like Facebook has turned our brains into BROWN SLUDGE!!!

So internet marketing as we know it is DEAD?!?

What's the solution? Is it to pack up your blog, pack up your website, shut down that sales letter, stop emailing, and move it all to Facebook?

No. Look, you might love Facebook a bunch, but it's "just another traffic source" just like EzineArticles is just another traffic source and AdRoll is just another traffic source and podcasting is just another traffic source!

  1. Keep the email list, free gift, optin page, sales letter, keep sending broadcast emails and save your best emails into your followup sequence
  2. Keep running ads and tracking your links so you know what converts and what doesn't
  3. Keep engaging your list by asking them questions and doing crazy things (mail your physical book to the first 20 responders, pay people $1 to attend a webinar or comment on a blog post, limit your blog to 10 comments or your sales letter to 1000 sales) -- BE INTERESTING (UNLIKE MOST PEOPLE!!!)
  4. Keep getting your subscribers to take action (consume your freebie, login to the membership, comment on your blog post, read your sales letter)
  5. Keep building your list any possible way that you can
  6. Keep networking with other marketers, use TimeTrade to schedule interviews and setup an affiliate program using Clickbank and Rapid Action Profits

The other day I literally killed a few dozen of my old websites... most of PHP and JavaScript training courses I'd pumped out over the years. Why? Because I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I only have about 20 products that have REALLY made sales in the last year.

And out of those... 4 of them are "home run hits" that make sales every single day, so I've built my funnels around them!

If your list has gone cold, tell them why you've been missing and what they can expect from you in the next 30 days.

If you've stopped building your list, figure out where you can get 200 clicks back to your sales letter -- that's 100 opt-ins (just not from Facebook!)

Speaking of Facebook, start posting your links -- and sometimes your entire emails -- as status updates for extra traffic. Post them on the groups you own, your own timeline, fan pages you run and boost those posts for 7 dollars.

The number of comments on this blog post proves it... the "traffic" hasn't gone anywhere. We just have to be more interesting in order to get more engagement than the clicking of a "like" button.

Question: What are can you do this week to rise to overcome the FACEBOOK SLUDGE that seems to be stealing our traffic and taking everyone's attention away?

Magic Offers: How to Run Strategic Product Launches and Increase Sales (Using This Method That’s Better than Copywriting)

June 21, 201343 Comments

Product launches have been on my mind the last couple of weeks, not just because Lance and I run a 1-hour webinar launch just about every week, but we have recently come off of a "tear" of lots of NEW product launches (as opposed to us running webinars to promote existing ones)...

  • Our Product University live event
  • Updating our Webinar Crusher course to version 5
  • Updating Setup a Fan Page to version 2
  • Updating Newbie Crusher to Income Machine

Plus of course re-launching those old classes that we created initially as live webinar courses, then repackaged into home study courses – including a member's dashboard, transcripts, affiliate program, evergreen webinar replay, post-sale autoresponder sequence, all the usual "product" stuff.

And when I see other internet marketers try to do the same for their business, they fail to think and act in strategic terms. They incorrectly focus on the MECHANICS they think they need, like creating a blog post with 2000 Facebook comments. Making 4 pre-launch videos. Creating a report (or whitepaper) about the product they're about to create.

These are things that DON'T make the difference
between a successful and unsuccessful product launch!

Things No One Cares About

  1. How much time you spent creating your product
  2. How many pages, megabytes, or minutes of video you have
  3. A too-big 3 to 5 hour webinar
  4. A too-long launch sequence of videos that takes 4 weeks
  5. How great, smart, or rich you are
  6. Wordplay, hypnotic language, the confusion close

"Tricks" That Get People to Buy (Sometimes)

  1. Time running out
  2. Offer closing
  3. Price increasing
  4. Limited seats
  5. Disappearing bonus
  6. Price (high or low)

What Actually Works

  1. What they'll know
  2. What they'll GET and HAVE
  3. Cost of NOT doing it
  4. Repeat success or exponential success
  5. Speed
  6. Ease of use
  7. Power and effectiveness
  8. Hungry crowd
  9. Compelling magic super-offer that combines logic (and proof) plus emotion

The Answer You've Needed All Along

Here's how to think "strategically" about your product sales and launches.

I keep scouring books, courses, and the internet for something better than WWHW, Eugene Schwartz, and Robert Cialdini but I haven't found it yet.

Basic sales copy tells us to structure a sales argument in this way:

  • Attention (promise)
  • Interest (problem)
  • Desire (solution)
  • Action (buy it now)

High school English class told us to structure our writing like this:

  • Why (why is this important)
  • What (what am I going to discover)
  • How-To (how do I do this thing)
  • What-If (what are the possibilities once I take this action).

Eugene Schwartz tells us there are five levels of marketplace sophistication: novelty, enlargement, uniqueness, sophistication, and abandonment. But if you think about it, you can combine #3 and #4 so it's just...

  • Novelty (something is new to the marketplace)
  • Enlargement (bigger claims)
  • Sophistication (faster and better)
  • Abandonment (too complex and back to the original)

Robert Cialdini tells us there are six social weapons of influence to get what we want. Let's organize this as well...

  • You use Authority (why people should listen to you) in the Attention phase of sales copy
  • Liking (why you are similar) and Reciprocity (I'll give you something, like free information, now you owe me in return) introducing a Problem
  • Desire, which is where we explain our solution, uses Consistency (get people to agree with you every step of the way), and Social Proof (how have others used it)
  • In the final phase, Action, where we want people to buy, we use Scarcity the most (buy this now or else something bad will happen).

AIDA, WWHW, Eugene Schwartz, Robert Cialdini,
all just different ways of saying the same thing.

What's a "Strategic" Product Launch?

It's where your email sequence, videos, sales letter, pitch webinar, everything all matches up to a consistent message and MOST people think they have to flood the marketplace with information, list 53 different components potential buyers need to have. Nope, you just need to walk them through the FOUR STEPS.

The only way I've found to do it, that works every time, is to list out the ALTERNATIVES people might take (but you make fun of them) so that the only logical and emotional course of action is to buy from you.

Let's take our Webinar Crusher product for example...

Alternative #1: Don't run webinars. Alternative #2: Run webinars from free services. Alternative #3: Run evergreen webinars.

Alternative #4: Run webinars using our Webinar Crusher system.

At each point along the way we make fun of each alternative and point out its disadvantages to the extreme. There actually is a method to this madness:

  • Alternative #1: Not Doing It ("Novelty" or "Attention” or "Why Is It Important")
  • Alternative #2: The "Too-Big" Solution ("Enlargement" or "Interest" or "What Do I Do")
  • Alternative #3: The "Too-Complex" Solution ("Sophistication" or "Desire" or "How Do I Do It")
  • Alternative #4: Your Solution ("Abandonment" or "Action" or "What-If I Use Your Solution")

Just by listing these four things, we've structured most of our sales letter, the webinar pitch, the email launch sequence, everything. We didn't brain-dump a laundry list of alternatives that sent people elsewhere. We didn't jump in with our solution right off the bat. We've LOGICALLY listed out the possible avenues while EMOTIONALLY exhausting people with the pain and frustration of those other guys without specifically calling them out.

Too many times, I see people in an uninteresting niche, with a boring product and offer, or the wrong positioning, just trying to make it work. For some reason they think that more traffic, more subscribers, more affiliates will help... a slick sales pitch, fancy videos, or amazing sales letter graphics will help. They won't.

What will help? Having the right offer, in front of the right crowd, and presenting it in this (4-step) process.

Please comment below: Do you think that 4-step sequence will make it easier for you to come up with sales copy, webinar presentations, email sequences, and more?

Product University: Attend Offline Events and Quickly Grow Your Business in the Process

June 15, 201331 Comments

Let's talk about offline events. Seminars, workshops, masterminds, intensives, whatever you want to call them. Getting off your butt (off your "but" too), off the computer, onto a plane and to a hotel for 2 or 3 days where you get to interact with people just like you.

If you're "new", you need to attend these events for the training sessions – and probably to buy someone's course from the stage. If you're experienced, you need these events to network, make some joint venture connections with people just like you.

pu-small

I'm talking about attending at least 1-2 events per year. I don't want any excuses. You need to go. It's a cost of doing business and if you spend too long cooped up at home, you're going to wonder why you aren't relevant anymore, what happened to your affiliates, and therefore your traffic, list, and sales.

If you're young with no family then you need to see the world anyway. If you're old with a family then take them along, not into the conference room at the event but take them so they can do the touristy stuff on their own and hang out at the hotel.

These things called offline events are on my mind because Lance and I just wrapped up our event called "Product University." It was the first event we had run in two years, and THAT event was the first event I had hosted in two years. Our next one is in Salt Lake City October 12-13 and you should attend.

Pitch-Fest vs. Pitch-Free?

Sure, some of these events are "pitch-fests" (I still learn a lot from those though), some are "pitch-free" (a bad excuse for speakers who don't know how to close onstage), some of the people you meet are all about getting their business card in your face, others have the tired "I have an idea so you can do all the work of implementing it for 50% of the business" approach, a few will talk your ear off, plot world domination with you and want to be your best friend... but the majority of the people you meet at these events are cool people just like you, a lot of them are in your niche and just want to make a new CONNECTION that might pay off in the future.

I speak on just a FEW stages per year to stay relevant. Lance and I are reluctant to host a bunch of offline events because we could just as easily run a webinar to generate a few tens of thousands of dollars without having to promote it for several months, deal with the hassle and expense of traveling and renting the conference room, dealing with the equipment, making sure everything goes smoothly. But it is a lot of fun to host an event every now and then.

"Two-Day Intensive" Explained

The way we run these events is slightly different from what we usually see from others and here's why...

1. First of all, it's just us two speaking for the whole event – mostly because we trust very few people ALTHOUGH having one or two guest speakers in the future (who promote the event through our affiliate program) would go a long way towards getting more people to attend

2. We run the events for two days (Saturday and Sunday) instead of three days (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) because a 1-day is too short and a 3-day is too long – I have attended a few events where hardly anything happened on that last day

3. No PowerPoints, SOME very minimal software demonstrations on the laptop and projector, it's mostly teaching using markers and a flip chart

4. Eight 90-minute sessions total (morning, before lunch, after lunch, then a Q&A session to wrap up the day, for both days) – we had each session's topic planned in advance and probably 5 bullet points so we knew what areas we wanted to cover. Only one of us would be the "presenter" (i.e. Lance presenting on affiliate programs while Robert is the sidekick with the occasional comment, or Robert presents about product launches while Lance interjects)

5. We never did a hard-pitch, but we did mention several URLs and we soft-pitched our Double Agent Marketing Platinum Coaching Program at the end of the day on Saturday (just before the Q&A session)

6. We recorded the whole event (audio only, so we didn't have to deal with lighting) and posted those inside the member's area whether people attended or not. This lead to a bunch of extra overseas sales and I think is a much better alternative compared to people selling the live stream of their event for 10 or 20 dollars

7. We bundled the event (for a short time) with our Income Machine course. Income Machine is $97, the event is $197, but when we launched Income Machine (about a month before the event), we said that Income Machine is $197 and includes Product University. But Product University is $197 and comes with Income Machine for free – this is called the double close

IMPORTANT:
Know WHY You're Running an Event!

Nothing too major. I don't know if you are at the point in your business where you can or even want to host an event, but if you do, make sure you know WHY you are running this event. If you're only running an event because you've seen someone else do it, it seems cool, or your customers are bullying you into it (I have seen all three) then forget about it.

The reason we ran our event earlier this month was to add a few people into our Platinum program, which we did and is the reason why the event made money.

I have also seen several up and comers lose money running an event on purpose in order to build a list. They run an event for a few hundred people, get a few big-name speakers to promote the event (50% commission), speakers pitch products from the stage (50% commission), and the event organizer spends 30 thousand bucks on the huge conference room and the add-ons the hotel requires, only make 20 grand back after all is said and done, but now has this list of very hungry buyers, in fact some of the best people in their niche, who will buy over and over again and take action and get huge results.

Then again other marketers who should know better run events and get all the meals catered, hire musicians, magicians, and hypnotists as part of the event and lose big money, then burn themselves out and you wonder why this person hasn't run an event in the last 5 years.

What's my point? When it comes to offline events...

  • Attend them. Go to every session, hang out in the bar or the lobby instead of hiding in your room on your laptop. You'll have plenty of time for that at home. Keep attending them but be sure you know what your goal is each time (i.e., more affiliates, solve a specific problem in your business, join a mastermind, buy a product that solves a problem you've been having in your business)
  • If you want to be a speaker, attend events, make friends with the event organizers, make a speaker sheet (a list of your products, URLs, speaking topics, your bio and testimonials of you as a trainer), create a book that proves you know what you're talking about (using our Make a Product system, takes 1 hour, is 30 pages long, free to publish on CreateSpace, costs $20 to get transcribed, $20 to edit, and $5 for the book cover), and run webinars consistently (at least one per month) to stay sharp and flesh out your "message"
  • If you're running events or plan on running events, know ahead of time what your backend will be for the event (mastermind or coaching program is great) and keep it simple and low-budget, also keeping in mind that if someone attends an offline event who’s on your list, they probably own most if not all of your existing products

You can't ignore offline events but I hope to see you around, especially in Salt Lake City this coming October 12th-13th for Product University (it will be the FIFTH time we're running it!)

018: Setup Your Income Machine Including a Blog, Optin Page, Followup Sequence, Sales Letter, Membership Site, Traffic and More (That Makes Money While You Sleep)

June 7, 201314 Comments

If you've ever found yourself working too hard, spinning your wheels, and wondering if there was some "missing piece" to getting a passive automatic recurring income up and running, then this may be the most important podcast you'll ever hear. Click the "play" button right now to discover how to setup the entire income machine, including:

  • Step 1: Niche (not baby boomers, something more like "golf" or "self defense")
  • Step 2: Website (a real .com name containing your keyword)
  • Step 3: Optin Page (headline + 3 bullet points)
  • Step 4: Followup Sequence (at least 10 emails, one a day)
  • Step 5: Blog (update monthly)
  • Step 6: Sales Letter (one single call to action)
  • Step 7: Membership (doesn't mean recurring)
  • Step 8: Traffic (Facebook, AdWords, affiliates)

"Setup Your Income Machine" FREE Report

Subscribe on iTunes - RSS Podcast Feed
Like the Robert Plank Show on Facebook

Go ahead, check it out right now, and be sure to also leave your comments below.

017: Make Money Using Facebook Traffic, Ads and Fan Pages

June 1, 201320 Comments

Listen to today's exciting episode of the Robert Plank Show to discover...

  • Why your competitors are making more money than you (with less effort) and how to stop them in their tracks starting today
  • How most people market on social media the wrong way -- and how you can use it to multiply your business
  • The only three types of Facebook fan pages you'll ever create, and which one you'll use (sometimes more than one)
  • The exact steps we use to go from an idea to consistent Facebook leads and sales (easy repeatable process)
  • And more!

"Make Money Using Facebook Traffic" FREE Report

Subscribe on iTunes - RSS Podcast Feed
Like the Robert Plank Show on Facebook

Be sure to listen now and then join our Setup a Fan Page Facebook traffic training program if you haven't already.

What did you think of the podcast? Are you getting traffic from Facebook yet?

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