Archive for November, 2015

065: Get Your Business Noticed on the Internet: Course, Blog, Podcast, Book, DVD

November 27, 2015

Are you annoyed that an Internet marketer is marketing to you? Instead of looking at other marketers as people who are "serving" you as a consumer, why don't you look at what successful things they repeatedly do, like consistent products, blogging, and webinars? And model what they do!

Marketer of the Week: Dennis Becker

Dennis wrote the book from 5BucksADay and has the membership site Earn1kaday.
Like me, actually leaves his money-making websites online. What a concept.

dennis-becker

 

If a site makes me money, I'll keep maintaining and promoting it. He has lots of irons in the fire such as a new product and new Kindle book every month.

Complaints of the Week

  1. I'm at your sales letter. Where do I go to login to your membership site?
  2. I bought the "lite" version and I login. Where can I go to upgrade? Marketers delight, 5 site license to unlimited license.
  3. What about an in-your-face upsell or interstitial ad? I want something else you're selling.
  4. You're supposed to "sell the click" in emails but what the heck am I clicking on? You're only telling me about the Pro and Basic packages, launch deadlines, but what it is, in one sentence?

Feature Presentation: Course, Blog, Podcast, Book, DVD

I once found an internet marketer "coach's" page but I couldn't find 1 product, 1 video, 1 book by him or even his last name.

What do people find when they search for you? What about on YouTube? Amazon? You should always be URL dropping or off-handedly mentioning the things you sell on your blog and podcast. Who needs testimonials? Use yourself as you own examples, testimonials, and case studies.

  • Course: Four milestones for $997 to get in the "high ticket" mindset, then drop that price SLIGHTLY (MembershipCube.com)
  • Blog: content marketing, cannibalize your Facebook re shares, 5 minute YouTube content: what pisses you off (your opinion) or something helpful (video to create a PayPal mass pay file, or resize an image without Photoshop) (IncomeMachine.com)
  • Podcast: 5 minute audio, no music (PodcastCrusher.com)
  • Book: 10-7-4, WWHW, 56 minutes, Fiverr for transcripts (MakeAProduct.com)
  • DVD: iPhone, Camtasia, DVD Architect, Kunaki (also MakeAProduct.com)

Today's quote: "The difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

 

064: Short and To the Point Landing Pages: Where’s the Dang Buy Button? A Confused Mind Never Buys, So Sell What You Sell!

November 21, 2015

Internet marketer of the week: Ray Edwards. Creator of the Rapid Writing Method. He absorbs what Brendon Burchard, Michael Hyatt, Dave Ramsey all do very well -- branding and unification.

A huge breakthrough I got out of his "Writing Riches" book was that just taught straightforward copywriting. Not a lot of silly stories or parables mixed in like others teach you "should" have in a book. What a concept!

robertandray

Common Cop Outs (That We Just Solved in Today's Show)

 

  1. My niche is people with money! Who wouldn't want it?
  2. My niche is young people because they're smart, or old people because they have all the money
  3. Split test it!
  4. I'm going to provide value and give everything away for free
  5. I'm still learning
  6. I have an idea but it's already been done before
  7. I have an idea but I'm waiting on someone else to do the work
  8. I'm "waiting" for the right time

A Confused Mind Never Buys!

image

  1. Delayed buy button and I can't buy, or I can't buy on an iPad
  2. I optin and I can't buy right away, I have to wait for your sequence
  3. I have to buy 3 upsells just to get the thing I actually wanted (Lance says: sell what you sell)
  4. Blogging or posting without purpose (Add Signature plugin and URL dropping)
  5. Too many choices: 2 or 3 at the most. More choices = "experimental" pages (yearly and trial)
  6. Optin page: headline, 3 bullet points, call to action, optin form (no video, no testimonials)
  7. Sales letter: have you noticed they're way shorter? very few words, even. Software is all about the screenshots and features.

Short & To the Point Landing Pages: Keep it Shippable

  1. Make the buy button first, before anything else
  2. Then headline and subheadline
  3. Then the offer stack (what's in it)
  4. Then flesh out the bullet points (dream product), story and transitions
  5. Then create the product after all that!
  6. (PLR placeholder is optional)

Quick Questions Answered in Today's Program

  1. To replay or not to replay?
  2. Non fast forward video?
  3. Squeeze page? What's the exact structure?
  4. What niche? Healthy, wealthy, or wise
  5. What product? Solve an actual problem that's easy for you, tough for others, that people are willing to pay money for, that's repeatable in checklist form, but there's still enough wiggle room for people to be creative. It gets them there and delivers a FAST result
  6. Testimonials? Don't let that hold you back from launching. No review copies, but have an email sequence asking how they like it. When people use it and respond, piece together a testi from their response.
  7. Upsell? This is another "goodie" you don't need right away. It shouldn't "just" be something "bigger" or something lazy like resale rights. It should be "the bigger picture."

Five Dimensions of Knowledge from Jonathan Wells of AdvancedLifeSkills.com

  • What we actually know
  • What we think we know
  • What we would like to know
  • What we don't need to know
  • What we used to know
  • Let's add two more (the hardest ones to sell to you have to "sneak them" inside other ones: what we don't know we don't know, and what we need to know

Internet Marketing

  1. World's largest taxi service owns no taxis (Uber)
  2. Largest accommodation provider owns no real estate (Airbnb)
  3. Largest retailer has no inventory (Alibaba)
  4. Most popular media company creates no content (Facebook)
  5. Largest movie house owns no theaters (Netflix)
  6. Largest software vendors don't write the apps (Apple & Google)

Today's Quotes from Henry Ford

  • You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.
  • Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
  • Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

Attributes That Should Be Running in Your Head all the Time, Consistently

  1. New Things Coming Down The Pipeline: There is no such thing as luck. (Scientific studies have disproved luck.) You just have to keep putting offers out there and promoting them.
  2. Follow-Through: Finish what you start (focus, minimum viable product, iteration, debugging, refactoring)
  3. Self-Actualization: Know the difference between a lost cause, an offer that's "close" but needs tweaking, and a "home-run" that you should keep rolling.
  4. Creativity: New ways of solving the problem bigger and faster while working under limitations (and making old tired concerts new and exciting to prospects)

Easy & Repeatable Solutions to Your Current Problems

  • Make a Product: Publish your book on Amazon
  • Webinar Crusher: Run pitch webinars to make high ticket sales
  • Backup Creator: Backup & clone your WordPress sites
  • Website Remote: Manage all your WordPress sites in one place
  • Paper Template: Create landing pages (opt-in pages & sales letters) in WordPress
  • Income Machine: Create your entire system (including membership site) using Backup Creator, Paper Template, Member Genius

Resize and Crop Images Without Photoshop Using Pixlr Editor

November 18, 2015

Join Graphic Dashboard to Claim Your
Training, Templates, Affiliate Banner Ads & More

063: Website Remote: Get Out More, Grow Your Internet Business, Make More Money, Have More Fun, and Increase Your Productivity Without Burning Out or Creating a New “Job” For Yourself

November 13, 2015

We recently launched our Website Remote service. It allows you to centrally manage and update your WordPress sites.

We created it because there was no good way to manage all our WordPress sites from one location. The other solutions that "tried" to do it, sucked!

Solve a real problem. It doesn't matter if "a" solution already exists. It probably sucks. Yours will be better.

When we put Website Remote together, and had our new affiliates sell and market our existing Backup Creator plugin, I had a few realizations...

Realization #1: Get Out More

You don't have to confine yourself to little sites like the Warrior Forum. You can use other peoples' land to build a list, but don't live there.

This is true when it comes not just to pricing and positioning your products, but also what advice or training you listen to.

Your business is your business. You're free to charge whatever price you want, limit the number of sales, email as often as you want. Update your blog or submit podcasts as frequently as you feel like, because you can. You don't need any reason for why you're doing what you're doing in your online business, other than because you can.

Realization #2: Eat Your Own Dog Food

If you actually use the products you create and sell, then you can't use because it's something that helps your business regardless of how slow or quickly it sells.

The programming term "eating your own dog food" means that if you use the thing you sell every day, then you'll transform it to a piece of crap into something that's useful.

To make our tool useful, we iterated. I created a simple version of our tool, and had Lance login sight unseen and show me how he was using it, and where he got stuck, to see his thought process. This is called hallway testing.

Because of "dog-fooding", we added SSL support for our Paper Template, Member Genius, and Video Player plugins this month, and made them all compatible with WordPress caching plugins, because we needed those things in place for our launch.

This past couple of weeks, we launched our new version of Backup Creator (3.0) and had an army of affiliates make us a bunch of sales, without us using our list at all. We gave away 100% commissions, and the point wasn't to make money but to recruit some new affiliates and build a list of buyers.

Realization #3: Treat Your Business Like a Real Business

We created the minimum viable product (version 1.0) and the launch deadline pushed us into gear and got our priorities in order.

Get that first version out there, and market the hell out of it. Don't make any rash moves like offering discounts or lifetime access which shouldn't be on your radar for a long time until you can "run the numbers."

Price your offers where there's buying resistance. Don't give into the mob. You might just need better marketing.

We need to do a little better with the positioning on Website Remote to compete against free, inferior, and generally worse "similar" products (not necessarily competitors).

Realization #4: Follow the "Four Daily Tasks" in Order to Get Everything Done

Four Daily Tasks means you should complete four business-related tasks, each in one sitting (three 45 minute sessions and one 10 minute session). Every day, complete the four tasks that get you closer to making more money.

I'm at my best when I alternate days between proactive business-building tasks (traffic and product creation), and on alternate days, business-maintenance tasks like answering support desk tickets.

Automate your business as much as you can, for example, queue up autoresponder emails for the week so there are no distractions.

Simple Words of Advice

It takes the same amount of energy to feed your dreams as it does your fears.
Make a list of things that make you happy. Make a list of things you do every day. Compare the lists. Adjust accordingly.

12 things successful people do differently:

  1. They Create and Pursue FOCUSED Goals
  2. They Take Decisive and Immediate ACTION
  3. They Focus On Being PRODUCTIVE, Not Just "Busy"
  4. They Make Logical and Informed Decisions
  5. They Avoid The Trap Of Trying To Make Everything "Perfect"
  6. They Are Willing To Work Outside Of Their Comfort Zone
  7. They Keep Things SIMPLE
  8. They Focus On Making Small, Continuous Improvements
  9. They Measure and TRACK Their Results and Progress
  10. They Maintain a Positive Attitude and LEARN From Mistakes
  11. They Spend Time With Successful and Motivational People
  12. They Always Maintain a Balance In Their Life

And finally, be sure to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (link below) and grab your Website Remote account to remotely manage and control your WordPress sites.

062: How Is Your Online Business (And Your Personal Life) Doing, on a Scale From One to Ten?

November 6, 2015

Are you scared? What if you became more aware of what made you anxious, scared, or nervous? Could you dissect those into smaller pieces? If you did, you'd be able to change and improve those small, manageable pieces...

What if I asked you to write down a page of words to describe a "bad mood" such as: flustered, dejected, beat-down?
What if I asked you to then write a list of words describing a "good mood" such as: happy, energized, bubbly?

My guess is, that list of "bad mood" words would be longer than the "good mood" list. Let's change that for you.

To become more successful in both our personal lives and our businesses, we need to become more detailed about the positive things and less detailed about the negative. Whatever you apply more detail to is where your mind will focus.

What's the "trick" for overcoming that fear and thinking more positively and effectively?

Answer on a 1 to 10 Scale

When you go to the store, the clerk asks, "How are you?" Both of you are expecting your response to be a mono-syllabic "good" or maybe a "great."

Instead of doing that, ask yourself how you are on the 1-10 scale. Maybe you're having a "better than average" day, so you say 8.1.

Not only do you cause a "pattern interrupt" for the clerk, which might get you a nice laugh, but it will help you out by causing you to actually think about how you feel, instead of just replying generically with a word that has no real meaning.

Use the 1 to 10 Scale in Your Own Business

Okay, so we can see how evaluating yourself on a 1-10 scale can put you more ‘in touch' personally, but how does it help in your business? Here are a few examples:

Writing and Revising: The majority of people are not the greatest writers but if you are in internet marketing, you have to put out content. You need to be able to put out on okay first draft and for the most part a first draft is good enough. This isn't school and you're not going to triple your income by making some small edits to an email.

If you're writing a book, you might need to spend more time than on a blog post, but the principle is the same. We don't want to spend an hour writing 1 chapter of a book and then spend 5 hours doing edits.

How do you edit quickly so you don't consume all of your time? Again, the answer is scale from 1 to 10. Once the book is written (and it's been typed/spell-checked), you could just skim paragraphs and rate each one on a scale from 1 to 10 for substance.

Then, you quickly average those to get an "overall" rating. If you come up with an 8 or 9, great. But, if you come up with a 7.0 book, and you wanted an 8.0, your strategy would be to just go through and focus on fine-tuning the lower-rated paragraphs.

Overall Business Strategy: What if you're not making enough money from your online business? What if someone asked you, "How are you doing with Facebook ad campaigns?" If you answered with "good" or "okay", that's not going to help. "Good" is not measurable and it's an "automatic" response, instead of one that forces you to look for clarity.

Use that 1 to 10 scale to pinpoint issues. Rating gives you better accuracy about what/where the problem is and where you'll improve it.

Here are 10 areas that you could focus on and maximize to improve your business overall and make more money.

  • Time management and Mindset
  • Building the List
  • Email Follow-up and Auto-responder sequences
  • Membership Retention
  • New Customers
  • Joint Ventures
  • Free Traffic
  • Paid Traffic
  • Info Products and Recurring Income
  • Big-Ticket Sales and Coaching

Write a number next to each of those above items. Look at these factors individually and "score" them. This draws attention to areas where you'll capitalize to improve the overall picture.

For example, if a real problem that you have is not emailing, rate that lower. If you need more traffic, then you'd rate those lower.

Doing these one by one will help you think of solutions to improve that specific aspect of your business. Then, look at that average number. You'll see where you are and where you're headed.

Today's Winning Quotes

  • "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, but small minds discuss people." (Eleanor Roosevelt)
  • "I found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, be more active and show up more often." (Brian Tracy)
  • "1 in 160 are Millionaires in the U.S. 1 in 1460 are millionaires in the world." -- Dan Kennedy

Check out Robert's proven method for writing a winning e-book at Make a Product, his A-Z strategy for developing your own "free traffic-generating" podcast at Podcast Crusher, or his fun and easy course on creating your own graphics at Graphic Dashboard.

You can also get more personal guidance in his monthly mastermind at Double Agent Marketing.

Automatically Backup Your WordPress Sites to Google Drive Using Backup Creator

November 3, 2015

Claim and Download Your Copy of Backup Creator:
Backup & Clone Your WordPress Site to Amazon S3, Dropbox & Google Drive

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