Archive for August, 2015
053: Journaling & Documenting: The Amazing (And Almost Too Simple) Shortcut to Killer Productivity, Multiplied Results and Increased Sales
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:10 — 45.9MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
Most problems in Robert's business are not fixed by a crazy solution or a fancy piece of software. It's so easy to think that the reasons that you're not doing well or that you're not happy with your business is because you don't have one-click upsell, or because your website is not mobile-responsive, or your prices don't end in some magic number.
It's tempting to think that everything that has been ailing us and our business can be fixed with a magic wand. But, usually it's something really simple. Usually when you get tripped up or stalled/delayed, etc., it's typically because of these reasons:
- Scope creep: you plan on something simple and the more you think about it, the bigger and more exciting it gets and before you know it, it's a huge beast of an undertaking and way more than what you intended. All of a sudden, you've gone from something that would take you one week to implement to an entire year.
- Procrastination: there are a small number of activities that WILL make us money and an unlimited amount of activities that will not make us money and it's a lot more fun to sit around and think about all the non-money making ideas instead of just starting work on an actual money-making idea.
- Distraction: letting yourself focus on a variety of things that keep you from our goal. For example, you might sit down in the morning to work on your e-book, but then you get an email about a product you must buy and next thing, you're reading about that product, buying that product, and hours have gone by.
How do you actually stick to completing everything that you've started? Today, we're going to talk about a real system to get you through the things that trip you up.
Journaling and Documenting
Have a Checklist. If you don't have a checklist, you're going to miss important steps.
For example, while recording and publishing this podcast, there are some steps that Robert has to go through each time.
It may seem silly to have a checklist for something that seems easy or that you do "all the time", but it's easy to miss a step which could affect your outcome. Sometimes, when you do something over and over and achieve mastery on it, you will blow through it faster and faster and take it for granted which can result in being sloppy. Adhering to a checklist will keep that from happening.
Most, if not all, of Robert and Lance's courses contain checklists. If you joined his podcast course, Podcast Crusher, there's a checklist for everything along the way, from setting up your first podcast to marketing your podcast and everything in between.
They also do this with Webinar Crusher. There's sections on how to create our PowerPoint presentation, how to find attendees, running and recording the webinar, and post-broadcasting/remarketing. They have a checklist for each part.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is great because if you have that master calendar you can easily see things, delete them, move them around, etc. You can have multiple calendars (such as a family calendar, a business calendar, etc.) and you can share these different calendars with different people, but the screen YOU are looking at has all the different calendars in one place, in different color codes.
You can synchronize the calendar to your smartphones, tablets, etc. You can set it up to give you alerts/pop-ups.
But, there are a few caveats about using calendars to be aware of:
- Appointments on the calendar are good until you start loading up to the point that when you look at today's agenda, there are 20 different things on it, which is entirely too overwhelming.
- This is also what happens with the "To-do list." It also sounds good in principle but the same thing happens with the overwhelming amount of tasks. It grows faster than you are able to complete anything!
- Some people swear by tools like Evernote, Dropbox, Gmail, etc. and if that works for you, great, but just in Robert's personal experience of meeting people who use these tools, they work for maybe a month or two before the system overtakes them. Too much time is spent managing that system as opposed to getting real things done.
Get a Help Desk
This is a real shortcut to efficiency and outsourcing effectively.
Step 1: If you're answering customer support queries over email, don't do that. Use a Help Desk instead. Emailing regarding customer issues is not efficient or effective.
From a customer point of view, if someone has a problem with one of your products, and they receive a response, they can always have it to refer to. They're not sending emails to an individual person where there is the back and forth of "I sent it", "It got lost", etc. Instead, they are posting the query/problem on a central help desk system.
Most help desk systems (Robert and Lance use ZenDesk), issue "tickets" whenever a customer initiates contact.
From the business point of view, you CAN have only yourself responding to tickets at first if you are a very small "outfit." But, if that becomes too much work later on because your business has grown, and you need to hire an extra person, you really don't have to do too much. You just have to create an account for them in the Help Desk system so they can access tickets.
If ZenDesk is currently out of your price range, there is a free option if you have a webhost that utilizes CPanel. There should be a QuickInstall button, you can install a free help desk solution called OS Ticket.
If you don't have CPanel, you can go to DoubleAgentHosting to get hosting that has the CPanel and OS Ticket capability.
Install the Help Desk solution in the "support" folder (aka page) of your website. If your website was www.backupcreator.com, then the Help Desk solution would be at www.backupcreator.com/support.
For whatever external freelancers or employees you might add to your Help Desk, you'd want to have a process in place for answering tickets.
For example, the customer wants a refund. There is a "script" that you'd want your Help Desk person to go through before a refund was issued:
Every Help Desk program allows you to have "canned responses." These are just responses that are pre-written and can be chosen from an automated system based on what sort of customer query comes in.
Step 2: Don't just start creating "canned responses" right off. You and/or your business partner will want to answer tickets yourself for a little while to see what the most common questions are coming in.
Step 3: After a few weeks, take some time to sit down and group your messages.
- Step 3A: Responses. Figure out 2-3 responses to your most common messages.
- Step 3B: Assignments. This is where you hire your freelancer or employee. Some queries/problems they are just not going to probably have the answer to. This is where they can assign the complicated queries back to the correct parties (in Robert's case, he is the programmer for their plugin's, etc.)
- Step 3C: Procedures. The follow-through on the request, such as a refund.
This is where a Checklist or a Procedure Document would come in. For example, you'd have a Document/Checklist that would say, "If Customer wants this-send this email. If customer wants that-assign back to Programmer, and so forth.
About 80% of the queries/issues that come in will and can be handled by your Help Desk personnel. The other 20% will have to probably be assigned to one of the business seniors/owners but this process cuts way, way down on the time that ownership has to spend working on routine tasks.
Journaling/Journal Entries
This doesn't need to be paragraphs long. It is just 3 quick sentences about something you did TODAY. What is the purpose of this?
You're doing it with the consideration that at any one moment, an emergency could happen and one of the business owners/partners could become unavailable due to illness or injury.
You need to have procedures and checklists in place that would be easily replicated by another so that the business keeps functioning.
You can use any word processing software but Google Docs is a good option because it's basically a Word document that you can share just like a Google Calendar.
Then, you go to your Google Doc and post 3 quick sentences about what you did today that you'll need to know about later.
Some examples are:
- What steps would I need to take to record and publish a podcast?
- Quick directions on how to get your text messages to display on your iPad.
- Directions on how to get your Google calendar to display on your iPad.
- If you're the programmer, it could be how you fixed something on your WordPress blog (like the "white screen of death").
If you're the accountant, it might be who you gave refunds to that day or whose accounts you fixed.
If you're in charge of marketing, it could be how many affiliates you contacted that day.
Remember, these are just a few bullet points about little quirks that you may forget several months down the road and will need again but more importantly, they are a documenting of what you've worked on or "secrets" that you know so that if something were to happen to you, the business could keep working because your partners can pick up right where you left off instead of guessing where you've left things.
Just a warning: Do not use this for passwords. For that, use a password manager such as LastPass.
Hiring Freelance Employees Efficiently
Many people want the ego trip of hiring a team and looking at themselves as just the delegators while everyone else does the actual work.
The problem with being just the delegator is that no one else is going to do the job as good as you.
You need specific procedures/checklists in place, so while you do get to the point where you cannot do everything yourself, you DO need to do at least some things yourself at first so that when you make the directions and procedures for it, they are complete and can easily be followed without you having to micromanage tasks.
A good place to hire freelance employees from is Upwork. Upwork freelancers install a program on their computer that will show what their screen looks like while they are billing you for time.
A mistake people make when hiring employees is in not requiring them to create "X" per day. For example, if you're going to hire someone to be your Facebook ad manager, hire them on the basis of them creating 3 new ads per day. That way, they're not just dilly-dallying for a month and then at the end, rush to make a bunch of stuff.
If you take Robert and Lance's Income Machine course, and discover how to make a Thank You Page, Opt-In Page, etc., what if you hired someone to once a day look at your site and create new ideas for free gifts/free reports, and created a new Landing Page and Opt-In Page.
Even if you only hired them for a month, at the end of the month they will have created 30 new reports and 30 new Landing Pages and Opt-In Pages. If you hire someone on a 30-day basis to create 30 items at X per day, then, you know after the first few days if they are going to work for you, and if not, you can move on to the next freelance employee. That's better than waiting for a month and they don't deliver at all.
Closing Thoughts
Robert uses a system called 4 Daily Tasks. What you did for your 4 Daily Tasks are definitely something that you could include in your journal entries to document your goals and productivity.
Checklists are a powerful tool for productivity and efficiency. Document all of your processes from your podcasting to your Help Desk procedures. Checklists ensure that no steps are missed.
Everyone thinks they can hire an exact clone of themselves and they're going to do exactly what you would do in the exact same way. It never works that way.
This is why having procedures in place that are the same across the board will be far more efficient for your business.
Join Time Management on Crack to Claim Your
Productivity and Mindset Training Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:10 — 45.9MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
052: Three Activities That Don’t Make Money vs. Three Activities That Make Money
At one of the earliest internet marketing events Robert ever attended, he went to one of the Q&A panels. Usually, in these panels, people will have these really vague, generalized questions and in turn the speakers will have really "big", generalized responses, answers that don't really give any specific, overly helpful answers. During one of these, an attendee asked "Where can I get graphics made?"
Join Graphic Dashboard to Claim Your
Training, Templates, Affiliate Banner Ads & More
Most speakers will answer with something like, "You can go to any one of these 10 sites", which isn't very helpful.
At this particular one, a speaker, Ross Goldberg said: "You need to get graphics made. Is anyone in the audience a freelance graphics designer? Okay, during the break, go talk to each other. "
Sometimes it really can be that easy.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:30 — 37.1MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
Ever since that moment, every time Robert listens to a podcast or reads a blog post, he looks for that one solution, pursues it and gleans from it what he needs instead of going down the learning "rabbit hole."
He's heard a lot of struggling marketers talk about how much they've spent on "X" amount of courses over the last X amount of years. He thinks to himself, out of the 30 or 40 courses you bought, what was the best one? What did it teach you exactly that you implemented?
Often, Robert talks about "The 4 Daily Tasks", the principle of taking 4 tasks a day at 3 tasks for 45 minutes each and 1 "gimme" task at 15 minutes.
Why The Time Limits?
Because no one actually puts in a 40-hr week. Even if you are paid on that basis, you still do things like: take long lunches, wait for the coffee to start, wait for the computer to boot up, talk to your coworker, etc. There's no point in committing to 8 hour days.
What works better are focused spurts of productivity, actually putting something in place, actually implementing something that can bring you money.
Checking your email, retweeting, Facebook posting, etc. should not count as one of your tasks.
Sometimes, exceptions can be made if those activities can be proven to bring you traffic. So, what about grouping off of these activities together that are distractions and have it be the 15 minute task? It's all about the activities that you do.
Since we're talking about activities that do or don't result in bringing you money, we're going to look at some of these today.
A "7-Ways" Type of Book vs. A "7-Steps" Type of Book
Unconscious incompetence: you don't know what you don't know. For example, you know what a sales letter is but you don't know any of the elements of one, such as how to add graphics, do code, build a webpage, write good copy with compelling bullet points, etc.
Conscious incompetence: you realize that there are holes in your knowledge. You know what a sales letter is and you know all the elements to make a good one but you don't really know how to develop or implement them successfully.
Conscious competence: you understand all the aspects and how to fix them. At this stage you might even understand some advanced aspects.
Unconscious competence: now you're just the maestro. You just "know" how to do something without really thinking about it. You couldn't really tell someone how to do it because it's so easy for you and it's a smooth process. You don't even think about the steps anymore.
In any situation, we want to get someone from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence. But it's very easy for us to overlook the newbie point of view especially if we're now masters at it.
When you're making anything on any topic, and you're an expert at it, it's easy to show off your knowledge even though it may not be helpful and in some cases harmful.
If you're teaching "7 Ways To Do...", you're giving people multiple "OR's" which can be really confusing for a beginner.
You only want to do this as a way to "introduce" yourself to your audience. It should be something that is either free (like an opt-in "gift") or very low-ticket because it's not terribly useful for your audience.
Instead, you want to do something high-ticket if you want to make a great income, and you want to make it a "7 Steps To..." product.
An easy way to decide what steps to include is to have your end goal figured out and backtrack from there all the steps necessary to achieve that end goal.
Having an end goal, a quantifiable result in sight is exciting to your customer.
Private Label Rights Articles vs. Resale Rights
"Private Label Rights" are where you can buy or sell groups/packages of articles, and make limitless changes to them, including claiming ownership of the articles. One of the most common purposes of buying articles like this is to supply your own website.
For example, you have a product on how to plan a wedding and you have a free blog but you don't want to spend all day writing articles. An option would be for you to go to one of these PLR sites (like master-resale-rights.com), and now you have 10 blog post articles that you can tailor to make it look like you wrote them. You'd use the articles to market your product.
Another option is, what if, for $5 you can get an article written on any topic that you want.
You could allocate $50 and hire 10 different article writers, and have 10 articles in a few days that you could do whatever you wanted to with. Then, you'd have this 10 article pack for $10 each so if you made 6 sales, you'd have a $10 profit on each pack of 10.
The theory behind this was that Robert could keep picking random niches, and just keep generating different packs of articles and before he knew it, he'd be multiplying his money every step of the way.
Sometimes this worked but it was very hit or miss on the niches.
Resale Rights is where you sell the rights to the product but with no changes allowed. Resale rights work better. They're more substantial and far more high-ticket.
For resale rights, you want to create an entire product, something high value, where you include videos, plugin's, checklists, etc.
The strategy is to make a very good course that sells successfully and after a couple of weeks, start selling re-sale rights to it after you can demonstrate how successful your sales were, your "proven track record."
When you sell the resale rights to your product, you are selling it "as is", meaning the buyer can't change it.
You can sell it for a much higher price because once the person buys the resale rights, they will get 100% of the sales income. It is literally a "business in a box."
There's a big difference between selling a $10 package of articles and selling a $300 product with resale rights, that has a built-in sales letter, maybe some email examples, videos, etc.
You could also cap the number of resale rights so that you don't have to compete with all of the copies out on the market. There's something to be said for raising the price based on exclusivity and ease of income-generation for the resale-rights purchaser.
You should sell at least one thing that is high-ticket ($500 to $1000+) because all you need to do to get that to happen is to change a number on a sales letter (i.e. change a $50 product to a $500 product).
You may have to put an extra day of thinking into your offer, you may have to add an extra tool or something like a one-on-one coaching session, a resale-rights option, or you may just have to market it better.
Although you will make less high-ticket sales as compared to low-ticket sales, the amount of $$ will more than make up for that.
Your only purpose for having low-ticket items is to have people get on your list and to get people used to buying from you.
To get that $100-$1000 sale (average $500), what could you sell?
High Ticket Product Bundles vs. High Ticket Webinar Class
Initially, Robert looked at all the "small", lower-ticket items he was selling (i.e. a pop-up plugin for $20, a guide to making sales letters for $10, etc.) and combined them to create one giant, behemoth product package.
It worked so-so. What happened was that:
- Potential customers saw ALL of these things and thought "I'm only going to use 10% of it. Let me go find that one thing and buy it separately."
- Because there were so many lower-ticket items that made it up, Robert had to include the sales letters/sales copy for ALL of them. It was about 102-page sales letter!
- It was kind of a huge mess and people reading it probably gave up.
Interestingly, this actually goes full-circle because if you sell a high-ticket product bundle, full of smaller, random pieces, that is very similar to selling the "7 Ways to...." product/book, etc.
What works better is a high-ticket webinar class. This is now similar to the "7 Steps to...." product where you tell your customers what the end goal/result is going to be at the end of the webinar.
For example, the end goal is that you will have your WordPress site set up, your blog portion is bringing you traffic, your sales letter portion is bringing you money every day, your membership site portion is delivering products and offering upsells, etc.
You could backtrack from your end goal to compress it into 4 Modules and 3 Bonuses. Each module should be about 30-60 minutes so, ideally, you could then divide it up so that it closely matches your 4 Daily Tasks. That means that one of your daily tasks would be to create your 1st module, your 2nd, etc.
Don't overload it with 20, 30, or some other crazy amount of modules. That is overwhelming and it looks like you are just throwing stuff in there, which is no different than the product bundle we just talked about.
When you present it as 4 Modules, each module being about an hour, and each module has an end accomplishment, that is so much easier for your customer to "swallow."
Maybe it seems scary to offer a webinar for a high price of $500. How do you justify that?
You need to offer them something in the webinar package that's worth a couple of thousand dollars so that the $500 price is a real steal.
Ask them how many times have they tried to set up a WordPress blog and failed?
Include 5 different WordPress themes that sell separately for $100 each. Include some WordPress plugin's that they will also set-up as part of the course to complete their site. For instance, you could include an SEO plugin.
You could install a plugin like WP Notepad that they can fill out and submit to your help desk to get their first articles written by a writer you hire for them.
Visit MembershipCube.com for everything you need (including all of the software) to have your own income-generating membership site!
Join Membership Cube 3.0 to Claim Your
Membership Site Training, Plugins & Clones Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:30 — 37.1MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
051: Rise Above Being a Geek: Use This One Little Trick to Shortcut Years of Trial and Error in Your Internet Marketing Business
Whatever project you have going on, what would it take for you to complete, round out or get to the next milestone of that project today?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:54 — 34.7MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
Turn that project into a product. A project is something that you're just always tinkering away at, an ongoing venture that is never going to be completed. You need to complete it.
Robert comes across so many people who have websites that aren't done and the reason why is usually pretty silly...
"I need to have one-click upsell in place", or "I need to have this special thing in my member's area."
Ask yourself: Is that really going to make a difference? Is the missing element really going to double your income? Is it worth delaying your income for X number of weeks? Or worse, is it ruining the potential to make income on that product at all?
You can round-out what you have in the next 24 hours.
What if you have an e-book that you planned to be 100 pages but you only had 10 pages completed? What if you just put that out there at this moment? Just about anything you put online, is re-doable. You can edit your sales letter later if you do an expanded version of the book.
Psychologically, it's really important to have something out there right now for sale.
Let's say you have a website with an information product about selling on eBay. You wanted to have a huge 12-part course but right now, you only had time to make 3 parts. Maybe then you edit your sales letter to remove the parts promising Parts 4-12. So, now, just for the time being, it is a ‘beginner' eBay course. Maybe your original intent was to make it $97 but now that it's a fractional part of the entire series that you can market as a Beginner course, you price it at $17.
There is something very psychologically important about having at least something completed. Now, you just have to go back and complete the rest and edit your sales letter, if you feel like it.
That's the entire basis of thinking behind Robert and Lance's program called Income Machine.
"If You Give A Mouse A Cookie"
The plot of this children's book is that if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk. If he drinks the glass of milk, he's going to want a napkin to wipe off his milk mustache. Then, he's going to need a mirror to make sure he's wiped it completely off. After looking in the mirror, he realizes he needs a haircut, so then he needs scissors.
It's about how one silly thing can take you down a very long path where nothing is ever complete.
The Promise
A promise means that you live up to what you told your customer the product is about.
Don't tell your audience that you're going to show them how to create a 5-Minute Video Sales Letter but then spend 90 minutes explaining it. You are going to confuse and frustrate them and lose their attention.
Put yourself in the attendee's shoes. If you "promise" to show them a video sales letter, they want to know what that is. They don't need to know every technical detail.
How To Rise Above Being A Geek
Being a geek is not just about being a techie who knows A-Z about computers. Instead, it's about being so detailed and over-inclusive of every tiny factor that you exhaust your audience.
How do you avoid doing this?
#1: Avoid the "OR" as much as possible.
Don't give your audience an endless list of choices.
If you're teaching a class on podcasting, don't give them a list of 5 microphones they can use. Tell them the one that you personally use.
If you do that for every single step of your presentation/course, your customer is going to be more confused than when they started.
That's why in their Podcast Crusher course, and their Make A Product course, Robert and Lance say, "Use this one piece of software and you can get fancy later if you want." They're only going to give you one solution for each step.
#2: Tell Your Customer What They Can Do With the Finished Course/Product
Going back to the video sales letter, show the customer how it is used successfully.
Give a before and after on a site that didn't have a good rate of conversion and after the video sales letter was done, it drastically improved.
This means that your know what your end game is and what the result will be. In other words, you are ‘promising' the customer what result they are going to have when they are finished with your course. If you know what your end result is, you will know when you get there.
#3: Have a Superhuman Demonstration
This means that you take something that normally takes "forever" to figure out and compress it into 5 or 10 minutes. That's huge!
Why only 5 or 10 minutes? Because of people's short attention spans.
Going back to the video sales letter example, that would take the average beginner days to figure out, learning it on their own, etc. If you say "I'm going to do this really fast. I'm going to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on this and record it in 5-10 minutes from start to finish", that's not something most people can do.
For one, it will really impress your customers. Secondly, it will give them everything they need to know without confusing and tiring them out. If you tire people out, they miss half of what you're telling them anyway.
#4: The Easy Button
To rise above being a geek, what can you lay out for someone that is just a no-brainer, no work easy button?
If you're selling your course on video sales letters, what if you said "I will record your first 5 minute video sales letter for you." Or, that you'll critique it for them. Or, if they create it, you will record a split test. Or, you'll review it and record your version of it to show them possible improvements.
That might help out some people with their fears and frustrations.
Sadly, if Robert asks most people, "What if you sold a $97 course on how to record a video sales letter for your online business, and for that $97, you will also record a 5-minute video sales letter for them?" The average person says, "Forget it. Because if I get 20 sales then I'm going to have to do 20 x 5 minutes of work ." There are a couple answers to this:
- If you make 20 sales at $100 you made $2000. Not too shabby!
- And, a fair estimate is that only 10% of your customers are going to take you up on your offer.
- You can also add in a couple of hoops to jump through. For example, "If I am going to record your video sales letter, I am going to need these 10 things from you. (a headline of this, a screenshot of that).
- A very small percentage of people are actually ever going to take you up on this.
So, if you sell 20 and only 10% take you up on it, that's TWO people. Now you've done 10 minutes of work for $2000.
When you do these above-and-beyond things, this is a chance to get a customer for life. If you end up being flooded with so many sales of your course and you are swamped with all of these video sales letters that you have to create, then it's a good problem to have and it's time to outsource it.
You could increase your price now to $120 and take that extra $20 from each one and hire a freelancer to create the video sales letter based on the 10 things the customer provided in that checklist.
Checklist Marketing
This is a way of marketing that shows a path for getting someone to the end point with the use of templates and checklists, something you can create very easily and sell pretty inexpensively.
To use the example for the course on video sales letters, you present it as "What you want at the end of this course is to have this and this done. When you have these in place, your video sales letter is ready to go!"
Put together a series of steps that someone is going to take from having nothing to being at the end point of that video sales letter.
Make a series of questions that are formatted as "Did you….?" The first 10 questions might be equipment based. Then you have another group based on setup/preparation, etc. etc. You want to do about 30-40 questions in groups of 10.
To make this process very easy, Robert has a WordPress plugin called WP Notepad that will enable you to set up this checklist/questionnaire and put it on your membership site. The cool thing about this plug-in is that you can "spy on" your members. Don't worry, this isn't nefarious spying! You can pull up an entire screen and see what checkboxes people have clicked on, what parts they filled out, how far along they are, etc.
This is powerful because you can see where people are getting stuck in your course and you can focus on where you can help people complete it instead of getting focused on geeky little details that people don't care about and that will only discourage and frustrate them.
The Other Side of the Coin
While you need to avoid being too geeky and advanced, you also need to avoid being too "basic" about a subject.
No one wants a course about "Internet Marketing Basics." The Basics sounds like you're only going to give theory but not any kind of result.
Make it exciting and focus more on the results. People don't want to know all the chemicals and processes that go into building an atom bomb. Instead, they want to know what they can DO with an atom bomb.
Robert's course Income Machine is "secretly" about the "basics" of setting up a list, creating content, starting a blog, running a membership site, etc. but the end goal is that you have all these pieces in place. Yes, it's about learning the terminology but it's also about having everything in place with the end result being a membership site where users can start making money.
You wouldn't call it "Membership Site Basics." Whew, that's boring. No, you want to focus on the result, which is "Get Your Membership Site Up and Running and Making Money in Three Days!"
Have a Case Study
If you have a course about creating podcasts, like Robert's Podcast Crusher, you want to actually create a real podcast during that course.
In other words, don't just give your customers "words." Give them a real-life demo. There's something really helpful in telling people exactly what you're going to do and then doing an actual real version of it, and not a test.
Then, you can go back to the checklist showing them everything you did together. Now, your customer knows they can apply it themselves. When you show people something "for real" it makes a lot more sense than just written text or speaking.
Closing Thoughts
- Rise above being a geek.
- Avoid the "OR" because that just confuses people.
- Have an end goal so you know when it's been achieved and it shows your customers the results that they can have.
- Show something simply and "super-humanly" that most people can't do.
- Use the easy button.
- Have a case Study both in the pitch and in the actual product. It's huge if you can have a "Before and After."
Join Income Machine 2.0 to Claim Your
All-in-One Money Making System Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:54 — 34.7MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
050: Fifty Game-Changing Internet Marketing & Online Business Breakthroughs from 37 Mentors Including Mike Filsaime, Armand Morin, Jim Edwards, Stu McLaren & Others
An action-packed 50th Episode Anniversary Special with 50 Game Changing Internet Marketing and Online Business Breakthroughs from 37 Mentors...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:25 — 61.7MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
Four Daily Tasks
You need to be completing 4 Daily Tasks. Before he realized this, Robert would have days where he'd knock out 20 or 30 tasks and then weeks would go by where he was burnt out and couldn't get the motivation to get anything done.
As soon as he realized the 4 Daily Tasks Principle, things really changed for him.
Today, of all the things you need to do, think about the 4 most important:
- Send out emails
- Run pitch webinars
- Set up sales letters
- Set up "buy buttons"
- Contact affiliates to promote our products
- Of all of those things, what is going to move you along the path of making money TODAY? That's where you should be concentrating.
On a weekday, you want to do (3) 45-minute tasks and (1) 15-minute task. On a weekend, do (4) 5-minute tasks. For more info, check out Robert's book called Four Daily Tasks.
List, Traffic and Offers
Everything you do in your online business goes to one of these 3 categories: list, traffic, or offers. If it's not, it's probably not making you any money which means it's not essential.
- List: building your list or sending emails to your list
- Traffic: doing ads, blog articles for SEO, podcasts for SEO, working with your affiliates to drive more traffic to your site (p.s. all of this is also building your list).
- Offers: information products, iPhone apps, coaching programs, affiliate links that you promote.
Of all the things you could do today, you want to do something that meets at least one of these aspects as part of your 4 daily tasks. It's easy to get caught up in what you should do first, the "chicken or the egg" syndrome.
Robert's program, Income Machine can help with this. It shows you how to fill up the list, traffic and offers by still only completing 4 daily tasks. It shows you the 8 things to set up to satisfy having a good list, having decent traffic and having at least 1 or 2 offers for someone to buy. What you'll discover:
- How to choose a niche
- How to set up a website
- How to set up an Opt-In page
- How to set up an email follow-up sequence
- How to set up a blog,
- How to write a sales letter
- How to start a membership site
- How to drive traffic to your sites
Check out Robert's book called List, Traffic, and Offers. And, now for 50 Great Business Lessons from Robert's Mentors...
Mechanics, Marketing, Business, Branding and Strategy
- Allen Says: If you just have a sales letter, a payment button, a download page and a short report solving a problem, that's all you need to get started. Robert has started a lot of auto-pilot business just from having these 4 simple components.
- Gary Ambrose: One person CAN do everything. Gary is one of the first people Robert ever joint ventured with.
- Lance Tamashiro: A big result can be too scary for potential buyers. Go for a small achievable results in a short amount of time. Lance is Robert's business partner.
- Gary Ambrose: It's all about the Joint Venture. It's better to have an okay product with a lot of great affiliates and traffic rather than a spectacular product with no affiliates. This does not mean to put out bad products, but there is a point where it's good enough and it's more important to have good marketing than a perfect product and average marketing.
- Armand Morin: Double your prices. It sounds scary but all you need to do is edit a number on a website. If you want to make 10x your income, are you going to build up your list by that much or are you going to charge more?
- Josh Anderson: If you're making a newbie product, the budget for that is $100. That's a price point that doesn't hurt much for anyone that's new to a niche.Once you've done that, you can think about what else you could include in that $100 product and that is your upsell.
- Eric Louviere: Create a technology or a term that's more than a thing that already exists. If you tell someone that you have a copywriting course, that's okay, but if you call it the ‘copywriting and persuasion course' or the ‘hypnotic persuasion course', you're making it more than something else.This is the same principle Robert used when naming Income Machine. No one else has a term like that. And, there's really not a term for all those things bundled together.
- Michael Gerber (from the E-Myth): Checklist your online business processes so that they are repeatable. Robert has never met Michael personally but The E-Myth is one of the best business books he's ever read.
- Big Jason Henderson: Deliver downloads in a membership site even if it's a single-payment low-ticket item. If you're making all of these sales on your information product, why not put the product into a membership site so that you can show them upsells, etc.?
- John Calder: Get out more. There are places that you hang out, like FB groups, forums, etc. and if you're not careful, it becomes an echo chamber. You get locked into a certain way of thinking.
- Allen Says: No one wants to hear you saying "we here at Beltman industries..." What they want to hear about is you as an individual and real person. It's tempting for people to go all over Facebook and pretend to be Trump International and to seem really big, but it's better to be just an individual person.
E-mail Marketing
- Eric Louviere: Go on a site called EzineArticles.com, search your niche, pick out 3 articles. They will allow you to take up to 25 articles from any niche. Their condition is that you copy the entire article with everything intact including their byline. You can paste all 3 of these articles into a word document.Then sandwich your own gigantic links in the text between their own links in the bio boxes. Even if you're brand new in a niche and don't have time to write original articles, get 3 of these together in a logical sequence and then sandwich your links in between them so you're still abiding by the terms but you're also making something that leads back to your sites.
- Ryan Deiss: You don't want to have an opt-in bribe promising 7 Ways to do xyz, 7 tips for xyz Why? Because customers don't want to wait around for all 7 things.
- Mike Filsaime: Email every day. It's okay to email old offers. When someone joins your list, the first 7 days especially, they're the most active they are ever going to be.
- Robert Puddy: The best day to send an email broadcast was yesterday. The 2nd best day is today. This is a huge newbie problem. It doesn't really matter as long as you send something. Don't be superstitious. You're missing out on opportunities.
- Jim Edwards: Blend content and pitch in your email. When we build this list of subscribers, it's really tempting to give them lots of advice and helpful tips and freebies and goodies. You intend to warm them up and then hit them with your paid product in 2 or 3 months. You've overwhelmed them and you've gotten stuck in the Friend Zone.Because you've given them all this stuff for free, when it's time to sell, they've either cooled off or figured they have everything they need for free. It's too much of a shock for them to switch gears into paying you.
- Brian Garvin: Send new subscribers daily pitch emails, especially the first 7 days. If someone opts in on a Monday-are you really going to wait?
- Jason Parker: Commit to emailing for the same offer all week long What Robert learned from him unintentionally was that if you have something for sale, you need to dedicate a week to doing that. If someone is mailing for the same offer all week that tells you it's selling. If they're changing it every day. that tells you it's not selling.
- Marlon Sanders: Your list gets trained. If you send your list free stuff every day for 6 months and then you ask them to buy something, they're not going to buy. But, if you send offers to them every now and then, they're used to you being the person who has things for sale. They also get trained for high-ticket and low-ticket. Mix it up. There's a real danger in offering them low ticket for too long. And, they're not trained at all if you don't email them regularly.
- Michael Fortin: Every post on your blog is another possible email in your follow up sequence.
- Armand Morin: The "Why didn't you buy?" email. See Robert's episode #48 for a full explanation on this concept.At the end of 7-10 days you have a lot of people warmed up but are on the fence. Out of all the possible things you could do or say in an email this gets the most responses.
- Gary Ambrose: Combine 3 things that don't belong together to create kooky and creative emails. The emails that are going to get you the most opens and clicks are the "weird" ones because they stand out.
- Steve Schneiderman: Unintentionally, he taught Robert to mix up email subject lines. What irritated him about being this guy's subscriber was that literally every week or two he would send out an email titled "An Update From Steve Schneiderman" instead of having interesting subject lines. Robert never opened these "update" emails.
- David Cavanagh: Sometimes you just need to sell something quick for $10 to wake your buyers up, to get the juices flowing again.
Product and Content Creation
- Jason Parker: Taught Robert that you don't delete your websites, your blog posts, etc. If you have a .com website out there, even if it only made 1 sale a year, that would double the money you're paying to keep that domain going. What can it hurt? Robert has a lot of old products out there. They still work they are still functional and still make occasional sales. Why cancel out all the effort you originally put in?
- Paul Myers: Sell the notes based on actions you're actually taking. Let's say you learn something, like WordPress blogging. You can buy some courses on WordPress and go in and play with it. You yourself might figure out a better way to do it, especially if you're applying it to your specific niche (i.e. WordPress for carpet cleaners). Now, you have a personal checklist, notes, etc. Make a case study of yourself and sell those.
- Mike Filsaime: Solve a problem, and then sell a product about how to solve it, and then sell a product about you made money selling THAT product.
- Jim Edwards: Taught Robert about how to do video and not to overthink it. Jim used to do a lot of video blogs using Camtasia.
- Wes Blaylock: You don't need to reinvent the wheel.
- Ben Prater: Simplification. Create "simple ware" type of software that only does one quick thing. You don't need to create the next Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. A lot of people try to compete on features but what if you made a piece of software that was just a one-click?
- Stu McLaren: Create a product that other businesses use daily and that their business depends on. Stu invented WishList Member. He told Robert to make a product "call home" and have other businesses depend on it. This is where the product stops working if someone discontinues their membership in your site.
- Matt Bacak: The A9 method. He taught Robert how to recycle a single article into blog posts, press releases, videos, etc.
- Brian Garvin: Give your affiliates a lot of tools to promote your product. Articles, affiliate banners, tweets to paste, Facebook posts, extra audio files they can give away, etc. Make it easy for them to ‘sell' you.
Productivity
- Tim Ferriss: The Pareto Principle or the 80-20 Rule. He didn't invent this but he made it famous. 80% of your actions only generate 20% of your income, but the other 20% generate 80% of your income.
It's a matter of optimizing, rearranging and prioritizing. - Tim Ferriss: Parkinson's Law. The time it takes to complete a task expands to fill the time that you've allowed to do it. Tim is also the author of The 4-Hour Work Week.
- Jeanette Cates: Make any decision in 6 seconds or less.
- Steve Manning: The secret to writing a book in 14 days is to write under pressure. Set a timer and write as fast as possible Write everything as if you're responding to questions. It's easier to do that then to formulate statements.
- Lance Tamashiro: You have a 3-day window on any of your projects from "idea formation" to "burn out." If you have an idea, do everything you can to get something out on it in 3 days or less.
Copywriting
- Marlon Sanders: Just list 10 reasons why someone should buy from you. That makes for a good enough sales letter.
- Ken Evoy Which sells more copies? A beautiful website with no text on it? Or, an ugly website with text on it?
- Gary Halbert: Blind, Strategic Headlines. It's like an exciting mystery. How do I make more money on my house by taking it off the market? Someone has to know the answer to that.
- Eugene Schwartz: You have 4 marketplace cycles: Novelty, enlargement, sophistication, and abandonment over and over again and it happens with everything.
- Joe Sugarman: Explain away the objections. Just bring it up immediately and explain why it doesn't matter.
- Mark Joyner: Print the price on the button.
- Ray Edwards: There won't be a replay (for webinars). It adds a sense of urgency
- Michael Fortin: Avoid Upsell Hell. Just have one upsell.
- Joel Spolsky: Split testing. You send half your visitors to webpage A and half to webpage B.They have a slight difference between them. Look at the visitor value. One site has $10 product and one has $20. On website A, 100 people purchased at $10 and on B only 70 people bought at $20. Yes, you made more sales at website A but you received more value from website B. In other words, what makes you the most money, not just the most sales.
Personal Growth
- Ray Edwards: Keep your own side of the street clean. Don't complain. What is it going to accomplish?
- Dave Ramsey: Live below your means. It makes everything you do a lot simpler.
- Gary Bencivenga: Ask your subconscious for an answer to a problem you're having. Write it down before bed and sleep on it. Your subconscious will answer you.
Bonus piece of advice from Ryan Healy:Read fiction books unrelated to internet marketing to keep your creativity and motivation going. You can't be all marketing all the time. It's overwhelming. Your brain needs a break.
Join Income Machine 2.0 to Claim Your
All-in-One Money Making System Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:25 — 61.7MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
049: Continuity Membership Sites (How to Get That $97/Month Passive Income Site Off the Ground and Making Money)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:41 — 40.0MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
Having a membership site is the best option for recurring revenue on your products. Say that you have something for sale, usually a course, and you want to know how to get the best "bang for your buck" on monetizing that product.
Join Our Webinar Crusher Program Today
You could write a report or an e-book but there's a few problems with that. A Kindle book might only get you revenues of 99 cents each copy sold. A regular book might sell for $10 but after publishing and other costs, you will only net approximately a $1 on each copy.
If you're lucky, you will make that wonderful $10K but ONLY ONCE and in the meantime, you had to wait for 2 years of making no money on it and the information could be ‘dated' by the time of release.
Besides, who wants to read a book on how to get a podcast or book published or how to get site traffic, etc.? People want answers NOW.
Wouldn't it be more helpful if you showed someone on video how to do it?
If you record a series of videos on how to solve someone's problem, it's easy to justify charging $100-$1000 for that course that will bring them from start to finish.
A Quick Intro on Membership Sites
A membership site is where someone can become a member of yours for free or for payment...
For example, Facebook, Twitter, and Ebay are all membership sites.
Why? Because you sign up once and you have access to that site forever for as often as you want/need.
Netflix is also a membership site. This is one that you pay for.
You can have this membership site that can be free, or someone pays one time for access, or they can pay multiple times.
It doesn't make sense to randomly sell your video/video series all over the internet. It's a lot easier to manage your video content when you put it on to a membership site.
Membership Sites and Payment Options
"I want to have a membership site but I just don't know what I can sell for $100 a month over and over again" is where a lot of people get stuck.
It's not necessarily about someone paying you month after month into infinity.
Let's do a quick exercise: take a piece of paper and write $997. If you sold a $997 package on real estate, what would that contain?
The # of pages and the # of hours of video is just clutter. What you're really talking about is the VALUE of what you're giving them.
What is their end result that is going to justify the $997 program price?
For example, show them how to get their realtor's license, how to flip a property, how to buy and rent a property/become a landlord, etc.
Then you put it into video format so they can go at their own pace.
You can do additional valuable things like offer them milestone assignments, provide them with your "swipe file", provide them with checklists and templates, ship them a printed manual via Lulu (www.lulu.com) and/or give them access to next 6 monthly group calls.
Then, figure out how many of these $997 packages you would have to sell per month to meet your income goals. If you wanted to make $10K per month, that would be 10 sales or 1 every 3 days.
Here's where the fun comes in. If you take that $1000 course and split it into (4) $250 payments or (8) $125 payments, that opens you up to people that have that money in installments but didn't have it one lump sum and that's a cool place because you've just opened the door to a much larger segment of the market, which in turn could result in significantly more than the $10K a month goal.
If you're ever worried about the price that you charge, look at your competitors.
- You don't want to compete on price. You don't want to the Kmart of your niche. You want to be at their price point or slightly higher.
- You want to be in a niche where there are a lot of eager, hungry, wealthy buyers.
- If you haven't done a membership site yet because it's scary, then you don't know what's important and what's not or what's going to work for your part of the market, your ‘niche'.
You don't know what's important until you start doing it.
You need to fail fast, i.e. put out these websites and do them quickly before you get bored or distracted and then you'll figure out which ones work. When you determine your best one, you can concentrate on making improvements, etc.
How to Structure Your Membership Site
You can have a membership site that has only one product/package on it that people join just to get access to that product.
Fixed-Term Sites: where a customer pays one time for the product/package either as a one-time fee or in installments, and when the installments are finished they are done but have access forever.
For a Fixed-Term Membership Site, give people a choice in the sales letter (you can see what a sales letter looks like at MembershipCube.com), which shows people what they're going to get out of your site and lists all the advantages. Then, you use "side by side" buttons for the 2 different payment options.
Make the payment plan option as close to zero % interest as possible. That way, you're taking another obstacle away from them.
These sites generally have very little additional content being generated, with the exception of some Drip Content (see definition below). Some things that you could add would be a series of monthly Q&A calls (maybe 6 month's worth) or software or templates.
If the customer pays all at once, great. If they make installment payments, they get all the drip content up front, but if they stop making payments, then they will of course lose the course as well as the additional software and files.
Continuity Site: where you charge the customer monthly and indefinitely. You can have a membership site with just the one product/package but that also has "drip content."
Drip Content is little tidbits that you post every week or so, such as a new blog post, a new video, bonus files, etc. to keep your members entertained.
Robert's plug-in for producing Drip Content is WP Drip and it also comes free with his program Membership Cube, which is everything you need to know from A to Z on how to start Membership Sites.
One of Robert's Continuity Sites is Double Agent Marketing. It was launched at $17 a month (now it is $47/month) and it includes resale rights (see below) and training materials and courses. There are backlogs of years of resources.
It comes with a starter kit, so even if someone is not ready to participate in Q&A they still get access to all the resources that are on the site. Once someone joins the site, there is a monthly "meet-up" group Q & A call.
In Membership Cube, Robert and Lance show the monthly call that they set up through GoToWebinar and set it up so it's monthly recurring. The link to join the call is in the members area of your continuity site and this is also where members can submit their question(s).
Then they use Camtasia to record the entire session. Once the recording is processed, it can be dropped into the members area of your continuity site.
Resale Rights: this is the Netflix of the internet marketing world. This is allowing someone to re-sell your product, or portions of your product, for a fee. For example, if you sell a course on how to do webinars, you could re-sell the rights to distribute that course for $20 per right and any money the buyer realizes from that is 100% theirs.
Then, if you're running a continuity site, you would want to have several of these "businesses in a box" as resources for your members. They would have paid the $20 to buy just the webinar class, but now you can charge $47 month because you can provide unlimited access to multiple programs.
Continuity Site with a Twist
This is a continuity site, along with the monthly Q&A PLUS a service that they won't want to shut off by cancelling their membership. For example, Webinar Crusher uses this concept. On this membership site, Robert has the "starter kit" which is everything you ever wanted to know about running webinars. Then they have the monthly Q&A session.
AND, it comes with a GoToWebinar account. You end up paying less than if you'd gone to go to webinar and paid them separately for you to have an account. And, for people who want to do webinars, they are NOT going to want this access shut down.
What You Want To Avoid
There are a lot of people who say, "Just make a site that's $5 a month and throw in one piece of content per week. Write an article. Record an audio. Have an interview. And because it's under a $10 payment these people just won't notice it and they'll never cancel." WRONG. There are several problems with this:
The way most payment processors work is that they will charge you a flat amount plus a percentage. For instance, PayPal may be $1 + 7.5% of your $5. If you charge $1000 for something, they might take $10 or $15 out of the fee which is not that noticeable but at $5 you've lost almost half.
Later on, when you want to have an affiliate program or a referral program for your product, who's going to promote you for a measly $1 or $2 which is all the affiliate promoter would be making.
The industry standard is 3-month retention. That's only $15 so why not just charge the $15 and get it over with.
Most credit cards have a 3-year life before expiration. That means the average person has a year and a half remaining on their card before it stops being effective. Then, if you try and make contact again to re-bill them they're likely to just not do it once they realize they've not really been getting anything useful out of your site.
1-4-15-80
- The bottom 80% of your list will buy all your low ticket offers.
- The next higher 15 % will probably buy mid-ticket up to $100 or payment plan
- 4% will buy high ticket
- 1% will probably buy everything
If you're running a $47 or other similarly priced continuity site, you're going to get about 1% of your list to join it. If your list is only 1000K subscribers that's 10 people and if you have a $47 a month site, that's $470 a month just for showing up an hour of your time each month. There aren't many jobs where you can do that.
If that dollar amount is not high enough to meet your goals, you just raise the monthly fee for your continuity site.
Closing Thoughts
Do you have a low-ticket membership site? No? Then set it up.
It's a lot easier if you have no other sites already to have a fixed-payment site.
A great start would be a $100 site. Do you have a high-ticket membership site? No? Then set it up.
Move on to the $1000 site. You can then break that one up into payment plans to appeal to a wider range of customers with different budgets.
Once you have those cranking, set up your continuity site. Create that a Q&A site with the expectation of about 1% of your list joining it. Create a service you can tie in so that your members never want to cancel.
Join Membership Cube 3.0 to Claim Your
Membership Site Training, Plugins & Clones Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:41 — 40.0MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS
