I'm going in for surgery on the ankle today (Friday) and it has me thinking a lot about being negative (or rather, avoiding or "fixing" that negativity that creeps up), being honest and owning up to things like procrastinating without labeling and feeling sorry for yourself, so you can actually make progress on yourself -- because no one else will do it for you.
As internet marketers, we need to motivate ourselves. Let's be real... sometimes stuff just happens.
You have to find the good in situations, get some perspective, and be honest without feeling sorry for yourself and labeling your situations or the emotions. Then, you are better able to look at things in a positive light.
Be Honest With Yourself
This is probably the most important thing we're going to talk about today. Just think about how you would answer these questions and we're going to talk about some solutions afterwards.
Do you find yourself filtering out the positive things that happen to you? Or, do you minimize all the good things while only focusing on one negative circumstance?
Do you blame yourself for everything that happens, even if it is out of your control?
Do you always expect the worst in any situation?Do you only see things in terms of black and white?
If any of these 4 things apply to you, then you might have some negativity problems. Let's talk about some ways to combat those.
Approaches, Strategies and Solutions
Do you have a support system that gets you out of that "rut" you sometimes fall into? It's tough to go it alone. Just explaining the problem or the frustration itself can help you get past it.
Are you preventing the problem before it even happens? "Play out" the scenarios of what could happen. A good strategy here is to make a list of the "enemies" you're fighting against and categorize the fears. Out of those, what's the simplest one to take care of?
Let's say your situation is that you're going to be broke and your fears about it are losing your car, your marriage breaking up, and becoming homeless. Which one of these can you work on first and easiest?
A lot of the issues that led you to a problem are by you not getting out of your comfort zone or not having real goals to drive you.
Let's use the money example again. You are basing all of your income hopes on this one product launch and it doesn't go well and you're afraid you're going to lose it all.
Then, it would be time to get out of your comfort zone and do things you might not want to do so you don't lose your shirt. Things like joining Fiverr, freelancing, getting a part-time job, etc. "Always do what you're afraid to do."
Are you aware of simple mindset tools? It's simple. There are simple mindset tools and strategies all over the place-you can just search the internet for "self-help mindset." For Robert, there's no one solution. There's probably 5 or 6 at any given time. it's a matter of identifying which one works for the situation.
A mindset is also called "a state", which is a collection of emotions that can get you thinking and acting in a certain way. Sometimes you just need to "change your state." Maybe you've been in front of the computer for too long working on a problem. Go for a drive. Go to a movie.
It might also mean removing the triggers that put you in that state. If you get in a ‘bad mood' from something that you can remove, then do so.
Think about the words you're using. We tend to describe "positive" feelings in one syllable words, like "good" while we use big words for negative feelings. Start replacing the ‘positive' feelings with big words, like ‘fantastic', ‘fabulous', etc. They're less automatic, meaning we have to think about them more. The more you think about something…you guessed it-the more it becomes your ‘state'.
Think about the words that you're using to describe situations. Turn "negative words" into "challenge" words. Instead of something being a "disaster", call it an "adventure."
7 Quick Exercises To Turn Negativity on its Head
1. What's good about the situation? What could be good about it? Take the negative and make it a positive. If you're a procrastinator, and you're close to a deadline, now you're not a slacker; you are motivated to get the project done.
2. What are 3 things you're grateful for today? The sky is the limit!
3. What small step could you take today to fix your situation? Are you thinking about going back to school? Print out the college brochure. Do you need or want to replace your old car? Get a catalog for the new one you like.
4. Are you predictable? What usually sets you off? And, what can you do to avoid it? Expecting a bad result "off the bat" is a typical coping mechanism for a lot of people. But, negativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy so just don't do it this time. Just tell yourself you're going to expect the best this time. Break that pattern.
5. Do you journal and meditate? Both of these turn your thoughts into words so you can make sense of them and seek out a solution. The plus to journaling is it can help you to identify those triggers that set you off.
6. If you have a negative person in your life, how do you deal with them? It sounds simple, but tell them the thing that's bothering you. If they can't change it, you have to. Call them less. Don't go ‘hang out' with them unless it's necessary to see them for family events, etc.
Remember: Negativity is contagious. The more you're around it, the more it infects you.
7. Can you identify your own negative thought patterns? Do you find yourself the "victim" in most situations? In life, you can be the hero, the villain, or the victim. It's easiest to see yourself as the victim and hardest to see yourself as the villain. Why? Because if you're the villain, then you might be the problem and you might have to change.
In many situations, it's helpful to take a step back and say "The thing I'm doing right now-maybe it's not working", "Am I really doing the right thing?", "Maybe I need to change".
There 7 "Flavors" of the Negative Mindset
The Echo Chamber: "If you think you can or you can't, you're right."
Negativity leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up attracting more negativity and then you surround yourself with other miserable people because misery loves company. Pretty soon it's a merry-go-round of negativity.
Your Solution: Anticipate the best. Stay away from other negative people.
The "I Told You So" Syndrome: Many people will root for someone else to fail so that they can be right.
It's easy for someone else to make fun of you and look for you to fail because they hate themselves, they want to be you, or they're threatened by you. It's easier for them, instead of being as good as you, to tear you down and root for you to fail because when you do, they were right all along.
Your solution: Success is the best revenge.
The "Realistic" Fallacy: This sounds like, "I'm not being negative, I'm just being realistic." The problem with being "realistic" is that it causes you to give up too soon.
The other side of the coin, being "unrealistic" is another form of self-sabotage. Sometimes people set huge, huge unattainable goals.
Your Solution: Just look at the situation for what it is. Don't make it huge and don't belittle it. Give it all you've got but don't make it so unattainable that you'll never achieve it.
Social Policing: Setting absolute rules for society. Why don't they play by your rules?
"I never lie, so neither should anyone else, ever.", "It's so unfair that they get away with that and I don't.". This is playing the victim again.
Your Solution: Don't try to apply so many rules to everything and pick your battles.
Mind Reader Pitfall: Many negative people somehow think that they have been granted the ability to read minds. They just know what someone else is thinking and can anticipate everything that person is going to say and do, generally for the worst.
Your Solution: Give people the benefit of the doubt. You don't know what else they're going through.
Overgeneralizing: Be careful about thinking that things "always" seem to happen to you. Most of the things that happen to you are random and happenstance. Fate is not conspiring to give you a bad day. This is victim mode again.
Your Solution: The only time you should even let this enter your mind is if you're going to use it as motivation for you to discover better things.
Playing the Tape: You think about what others might say and their reactions to everything you're doing.
It's a bad place to be when you're letting someone else live in your head rent-free. You're letting them control you.
Your Solution: find a better, more positive, person to ‘talk' in your head, someone who supports you.
Seven Helpful Thoughts
"I'm not smart." We all think we have more common sense than we have. If we think we've seen it all, there's no point to keep driving. You need to be a little bit naïve. It keeps you learning.
Negative people are negative about everyone and everything. Don't take it personally.
It is what it is. Sometimes stuff just happens. Stop worrying because you're bigger than your problems and you can choose to ignore those bad incoming thoughts.
Control what you can control. You don't have to take responsibility of everything good and bad that happens. If you are little more optimistic and happier to do things for your business you'll probably make more money which will lead into a feedback loop.
Imagination can work for or against you. Turn the things that you don't want to focus on into tiny, silly little hallucinations and transform the good things into big powerful things.
Replace what you delete in life. If you decide today to stop talking to everyone negative, you might find yourself with no one to talk to. Instead, replace talking to the bad people with new people. Join a new group or club. Join a different mastermind. Devote the time you used to spend on bad habits to doing something positive.
You can't compare your inside to someone else's outsides. Robert calls this "The Facebook Projection." Many people put on a "face" of living in paradise, although they have the same ups and downs as you or they might even be a total fake. Don't worry more about someone else than you do about yourself.
Closing Thoughts
When you're faced with feeling negative, narrow it down to one of the "mindsets." Then, you can approach it with a solution.
Understand that for so many people, the worry, stress, and fear of the upcoming situation is almost worse than the event itself. Redirect that negative energy.
If you see someone doing better than you, you don't need to take that personally. There's no point in comparing yourself to others. It's a losing game. Realize that you are on a different path than that person.
I broke my ankle in two places this past Saturday evening. I was dancing at a wedding and walked over a wet spot on an already shiny, slippery, coated cement floor. There was water (or maybe wine) spilled in a little spot that I didn't see, and I slipped and landed on it with all my weight.
The technical term is a "fibular and medial malleolar fracture" and they had to reset (or I guess "reconfigure") the bones (very painful) and I'll be hopping around on crutches for a few weeks and keeping it elevated in bed.
What I found interesting is that the orthopedist, emergency room doctor, nurse, etc. kept asking me... what do you do for a living? Is this going to affect your work? Luckily I've "worked" from home for 6 1/2 years and I'm glad I don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
In fact, the last couple of days have been hugely productive in my business. I've been making leaps and bounds in productivity, getting my upcoming "Website Remote" wordpress tool ready for our November 11 launch date, even from bed (currently "My Little Pony" sheets):
I'll give you ten quick reasons why you can run a business, even if you're bedridden and only have a few hours per day:
Lesson 1: The Best Productivity Tool at Home: Camtasia + GoToWebinar + Google Calendar
Many internet marketers consider themselves in "learning mode" which really means they're spending all their time studying (and doing a good job of it) but not implementing, but if they are implementing, they're just dabbling, taking action on the fun or small stuff, and not what's going to make them money. Or they can self-label as a "procrastinator" which is just a fancy way of feeling sorry for yourself.
The best thing I did in my online business (which I delayed for years) was recording video for products instead of writing them. You can whip up an easy $47 or $97 product in 1 to 3 hours -- do it all in one take and don't worry about the "umm's."
Don't nickel and dime yourself looking for "free" or "cheaper" alternatives. You'll end up piecing together lots of things that don't do what you want and wasting money and time on the wrong tools.
Use Camtasia (free trial) and a $30 Logitech ClearChat USB headset. Show whatever you need to show on your screen (PowerPoint, web browser, or software) to teach someone how to do something (edit video, trade in the stock market, soup up your race car).
Then, use GoToWebinar to meet and record each "module" of your course if you want to do it live (using Camtasia to save the video for sale later). Use GoToWebinar for a bonus Q&A session and even to pitch the course later. We give you a free GoToWebinar at WebinarCrusher.com and even if you were a cheapskate, you could knock all this out within 30 days and only have to make one payment.
Also use Google Calendar to show up on whatever webinar Q&A, product creation, pitch sessions, or even meetings. Use them to meet your deadlines, i.e. even just to create one 1-hour module each day for 4 days, whip up a 1-hour sales letter on the 5th day, and so on.
Lesson 2: The Best Productivity Tool Away from Home: iPad + LogMeIn + Evernote
What do you do if you're not at home? What have I been doing while laying in bed and still building my business?
It's simple. You don't need to drag the computer to bed or find a crappy iPad version for the apps you want to use for coding, word processing, and web page editing. Heck, you can get most things accomplished using a web browser...
But for many desktop tasks such as coding and web page editing, I prefer to use LogMeIn, which is a remote desktop program. Install the LogMeIn "control panel" on your desktop, and then you can remotely control it from your iPad. See your screen, click, drag, and type.
I use an iPad Air. You want to get the cellular version so you can connect even if you're not on Wifi (AT&T only costs me $29.99/month for this). A 64GB iPad Air 2 costs $729 and a 32GB iPad AIr 1 costs $579. Either price is more than worth it for the ability to use the internet anywhere without a bulky laptop or a tiny phone.
An important accessory is the Logitech Ultrathin iPad keyboard which is much better than Apple's iPad keyboard, although I don't use it as often as you think. I use it for typing blog posts and reports, but not for coding. The only trick to getting the keyboard is that you have to be very careful to get the right one for your iPad (iPad Pro, iPad Air, etc.) because all iPads are different sizes now.
I prefer remote desktop when I'm using the iPad because I can set something in motion (like processing a video), and then come back to it later. I can start typing a document, or edit a web page, and close the connection, then come back later and all my old windows are still open.
If I don't have the time or the connection to hop onto a remote desktop just to write a quick note, Evernote is good for jotting down "scraps."
Lesson 3: Your Goal is the Minimum Viable Product or "Version 1.0"
There's no point in having the fanciest tools (like iPads) or the best productivity strategies (like Four Daily Tasks, staying off Facebook and email) if it's not actually leading somewhere.
You should actually be excited about your business instead of just "going through the motions." (Imagine that.)
Can you make money from a course where the sales letter has typos and the paid product is 2 hours of video? Will fixing those typos or upping it to 3 hours double or triple your income? Probably not.
What will make you money is sending traffic to that COMPLETE system. Contact joint venture partners, buy some banner ads, mail youir list. You can't make one sale with something that's incomplete. You need a sales letter, download area, and payment button, even if it's "just good enough" to get you by for now.
Lesson 4: Have At Least 20 Buy Buttons or "Things" For Sale
I'm not saying you need to go crazy, but if you don't have 20 "things" you can buy, then you need to setup those 20 things over the next 12 months. I'm not saying you need 20 $997 courses.
But what if you bought from resale rights and setup a $27 package this coming Friday, including the download page, sales letter, and payment button? What if you setup an upsell for someone to buy coaching from you?
What if you whipped up your own $97 video series next week? Created a sales letter with your affiliate link, listing the exclusive bonuses you'll provide if someone buys through that link.
And once you find your "big hit" -- repeat the process and setup more membership sites, build the list bigger.
That way you can focus on helping your buyers and not just the freebie "tire kickers" who never buy and just complain.
We're just talking about setting up something that is complete. That could just be that you buy one, or a few private label rights products, and fiddle around until you're selling a pretty cool "package" that you can call your own.
Lesson 5: Make Consistent Progress Every Day
Have you noticed that I keep listing the same things, those things that actually make money, as opposed to bright shiny objects? List building, product creation, traffic, conversion tweaking, upsell funnels.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel from scratch or think of a new technique every time you want to make money. You also shouldn't be desperate for money at any point.
If you're pressed for time, then even putting in five focused minutes of setting up a web page and writing sales copy is more than most people (who aren't trying).
Lesson 6: Sell Both High and Low Ticket
I'm also tired of hearing of people thinking they need to pigeon-hole themselves into being "just" an affiliate marketer, just a product launcher, just a $7 buyer, just a $997 buyer. What a bunch of crap...
The only way to really know what's going to make you money is to put out (and update, and market) your products. See what sells the best, and repeat that. Usually, those things that you "think" will sell, will be your flops, and you'll be shocked at the products that take off.
For example, our Backup Creator plugin is protecting nearly 100,000 WordPress sites now, and I still don't know why it's such a popular product with us, but I don't need to know why, only that it IS popular, so I'll put more time and energy into it.
Lesson 7: Email Every Day
This is the worst kept secret in internet marketing, it's the technique I use when I want to increase my income, and it's something "timid" marketers are afraid to do.
There's nothing wrong with contacting your subscribers every day or several times per week. You don't need to "bombard" them with a new offer every day. It's actually better to continue a campaign (giving different reasons to click over and check out the same offer throughout the week).
Your subscribers are listening to other marketers, and they're playing on Facebook every day. So what's the difference if you dispense some free advice, send them to blog posts and podcasts, or short videos, and there happens to be a button to click or a link to buy at the bottom of the page?
Keep that list alive. If you don't email that list often enough, it will whittle down to nothing. Either schedule your upcoming email autoresponder messages 5 days at a time or spend 5 minutes every morning knocking it out.
Lesson 8: Have a Content Piggy Bank
Search engines like Google (plus social media neworks too, I guess) reward you for giving away lots and lots of free content. But they're going to punish you if you flood a bunch of stuff quickly and then neglect your blog for months or years.
Most marketers bite off more than they can chew when it comes to blogging. This means they blog daily for 30 days. Then there's nothing for a month. Then one post. Then nothing for two months. Then a single post. Then nothing for 6 months. Not good.
This is exactly why, for years, I only blogged (or podcasted) once per month, because I knew that was within my means. I had a pool of reserve content (some people call it a content piggy bank), that way I could schedule it all out, rearrange it later, and have posts and podcasts coming out even if I didn't know what to talk about that week or I "wasn't in the mood."
Have at least two podcast episodes or blog posts in-the-can. You don't want to be living paycheck-to-paycheck with your content.
Lesson 9: Focus On What Makes Money Sooner, Not Just What's Fastest, Easiest, or the Most "Fun"
It's fun to start and end projects. The first problem with that is that no project of ours is ever really "finished." So all you're left with is coming up with new ideas, registering new domain names, creating new graphics, writing "chapter 1" or making "video 1" of your new course.
You need absolute focus. You know what's the most fun? Making money. You don't need an office or business cards. You don't need to agonize over the perfect logo or color scheme for that next app of yours. Especially if thinking too much will delay you making money even for a few days.
You need better marketing which usually means better strategy, more traffic, making a better use out of your list, talking about the things your subscribers worry about (NOTE: worry about and not necessarily think about).
There's no reason for lazy marketing. Discounts are a "drug" that you'll hit for a big boost of income, but do it too much and you'll notice that without that discount, your sales will drop because you've now trained your customer to wait for the discount and punished them for paying full price. The solution: only use price discounts (even early bird pricing is a price discount) sparingly and use decent marketing (like mailing more often) instead.
Scarcity is a lesser "drug" that hurts your business just the same if you use it too much. You know what I'm talking about. Only 100 copies will be sold. This offer closes this coming Friday for two months. It's okay to use as one of the tricks to pull out of your marketing hat but it shouldn't be your entire business model.
Lesson 10: Beware of the $10,000 Per Month Comfort Zone
You need to treat your business like a real business. That means havng real deadlines. Would you be fired if you couldn't bring the good stuff in your business? Think about it.
Let's say you were hired as an internet company's copywriter. If your copy didn't bring in sales, maybe you'd split test, tweak the copy, or poll your list to figure out what to improve. If you were hired as a company's email marketer, and you went 2-3 weeks without sending a simple email to that list, wouldn't you be fired?
Years ago, I was told to write down my goals and I wrote down that I want a specific house (got it a year later), a specific car (bought it in cash a year later), and that I also wanted a $10,000 per month income, thinking that was all I ever needed.
There are a couple of problems with that. I'm not even going to get into how your expenses match your income unless you have a budget, you get slammed with taxes (even if you structure everything the way you should, you can only minimize them, not avoid them). =
The real problem with ramping your business up to $10k per month (which is really just 3 sales at $97 per day, or 2 coaching clients and 2 sales at $97 per day, or 1 coaching client plus one $97 per day plus your spouse's income, etc) and then stopping, is that you'll get comfortable.
Imagine if you stopped attending events, stopped with the joint ventures, shut off your traffic, didn't create any new products, stopped running webinars, didn't take any new risks...
You might be comfortable for 6, 12, maybe even 18 months. Your income might even "maintain" even if you didn't do anything new or build your list. The problem is when it starts to shrink. It might shrink slowly, you might play mindgames with yourself and try to say this is just a "phase" in your business, or that you're just having a couple of bad months...
But if your income is flat, you should be just as frightened as if it's taking a dip.
It's a slippery slope for your income to dip, then you lose interest in your business, then your income dips more, and you lose more interest... and the next thing you know, you're not interested in re-treading that old trail you went through a decade ago to get "back up to" $10,000 per month or higher.
Instead of going through all that, I would rather do the small things NOW to avoid a huge headache in the future, and that should be too. Like I said, that doesn't mean throwing out your websites for new ones, or becoming a workaholic, or anything like that. It means your #1 goal in your business is to make money, and then you can get excited about making more money, which in turn makes you even more money, so money becomes the "drug" or "high" that continues to move your online business forward.
Don't get comfortable with your income level, even if it's at some level about $10,000 a month. You should always want more, and you can get more just by doing something as simple as staying focused and making daily progress, even if it's just 5 minutes a day.
I'm still having lots of fun with my online business, even with a broken ankle, because it's still making me lots of money every day, and I hope yours does too. I also hope that our "Website Remote" plugin on November 11th (remote WordPress management tool) helps you make a lot of money, which equals lots of fun, which equals even more money in your online business.
Find a new product idea, build a course and implement a repeatable system for a constant revenue stream.When you're creating a product, you need to have WWHW in place.
WWHW is your "system." You need to have a system in place so you stay on point, lay out each point you promised in your sales letter, and know when you've gotten to the finish line.
What-these are the steps you're going to take. For example, you're going to show how to log in to a site, you're going to show how to install a plug-in.
Why-this is why the customer wants to use it. For example, to make money.
How To-this is your media component. For example, a video on how to use WordPress. You will be showing your customers from beginning to end what the process looks like.
What If-this is the challenger at the end.
When you're making your membership site, you want to lay it out in modules.
Four modules are ideal, at about an hour each. Each module is a milestone in the process.
You want to be 100% clear what the end goal is going to be in each module.
Now, let's put these into practice by doing a case study of Robert's Graphic Dashboard (www.graphicdashboard.com)
Graphic Dashboard Case Study
Graphic Dashboard is a course on how to use Pixlr, which is a free software program for graphics creation (www.pixlr.com).
For reference, we are going to point out that some time ago, Robert bought a course on how to create graphics in PhotoShop. It was full of useless and/or very advanced topics such as how to rearrange toolbars and a long explanation on how to do 3D graphics. This product was meant for people who didn't even know how to do 2D yet!
You don't want to do what "PhotoShop Guy" did so that's why Robert and Lance didn't spend oodles of time on how to make 1000 different shapes.
Instead, you want to show your customers something they can actually use today.
Think of it like this: You want to teach them the equivalent of making $1 million in 5 minutes. Okay, that sounds a little far-fetched but the point is, your goal is to tell your customers how they can use your product right now to make money.
That means not playing around (like "Photoshop Guy" and the toolbars), but doing something practical and useful like making a logo or a banner.
If you teach someone how to create a banner, you've given them the heads-up on creating affiliate banners. They can start getting affiliates to make money!
Creating Your Modules
Next, you take that goal (i.e. teaching them something practical that earns money) and use that to create your modules.
Each module is going to have the WWHW elements and each will have a measurable milestone the customer will reach by the end of the module. For Graphic Dashboard, the modules are:
Module 1 is how to create affiliate banners.
Module 2 is how to list your graphics-making services on Fiverr to make some money
Module 3 is how to make digital 3D product covers
Module 4 is how to make book covers and DVD graphics
The 4 Stages of Figuring out Your "Hook" for your modules are:
The Hobby Mindset
This is playing around and researching to see what will sell.
"Crack the code" to start making money from it
Once you've figured out what will sell, this is how it can be applied to start making money with it.
Systematize It
"Template-ize" your service and your delivery system.
Trim the fat the fat to make it fast, fun and profitable.
Get it down to a 1-2-3 system that can be duplicated time and again for quick, achievable results.
The Sales Letter
Now, you put together your sales letter outlining your 4 modules and how customers can quickly benefit from each thing you're teaching.
Important Point: Why is Robert not using PhotoShop instead of Pixlr?
PhotoShop is a paid product belonging to someone else. The customer would already have to have PhotoShop.
He doesn't want to have to convince someone to use PhotoShop in his sales letter because then they would have to leave his site to go buy it. It gives them time to hesitate.
Tip: If you don't have an alternative, like Pixlr in this case, your best bet would be to bundle that product into your course (and then price accordingly).
What just happened? We went from a boring PhotoShop course with a lot of blathering on about nothing useful to how to use Pixlr to make money with short, to-the-point, easy to follow steps!!
With this repeatable system, you could teach all kinds of stuff, everything from how to become an Uber driver to how to rent your home using AirBNB.
The "Now What" and Going "Evergreen"
"Evergreen" means that your product can be sold perpetually.
Now, with the Internet and how quickly software and sites change, this can be a little tricky.
But, that's okay! It just means you might have to go in now and then to update some of your slides or update some of your features to reflect changes and make new iterations (i.e. version 2.0)
Every time you make a new iteration, you also update your sales letter and pitch and this product can be sold again and again to your list.
When you have a system, like the WWHW, that you apply to producing your courses, it is an easy matter just to make some updates because your approach is reproducible each and every time.
Today's Takeaways and Tips
Have a system. Don't ramble. Don't go off-course. Make something that can be reproduced over and over.
Have a defined Point A and Point B. ‘Show' AND ‘tell your customers how you're going to get them there.
Do video-not just audio, especially if your course involves how to do anything online. Imagine if you were trying to learn MS Excel from a CD!! Your customer won't be able to use it effectively.
Additional Links
Master Resale Rights: www.master-resalerights.com
This is a great resource to pick up additional courses that you can include on your own membership site.
If you love this show, please go give us a review on iTunes at www.robertplankshow.com/itunes
If you have any questions or comments OR you would like to be interviewed on this show, please contact Robert via his email Robert@robertplank.com.
There are many ways to get traffic. Some of the older ones include fads such as:
Joint Venture Giveaways: someone would sign up and have access to multiple giveaways that they could then send to their list. Everyone in the network would be cross-mailing their own lists, offering these giveaways, to attract traffic to their site.
Viral Reports: you have a special report (i.e. how to set up a basic WordPress site) and mail it to your list and the link back to your site is included in the report. For each of your subscribers that passes it on and gets a new subscriber to sign up, you could pay them a $1 per new subscriber.
Traffic Exchanges: this operates similarly to the JVG above where there's multiple people in the network. You would join it and then everyone is rotating through viewing multiple sites and each one you view gets you a credit. With these credits, you could then buy banner ads, etc. to drive people back to your site where they would hopefully buy your product.
Co-Registration: you would sign up with several other marketers and basically cross-promote. As subscribers signed up for your list, they were signing up for other lists in the same group as well.
Safe Lists: join an email-based community with several other marketers. It's really just marketers mailing other marketers each day.
Renting/Buying a List: you can choose parameters and order a list from a site like InfoUSA, to market to and pad your own list. Even if they don't opt-in, you can create retargeting ads that follow them around the internet.
All of the above have either gone "out of style" because they didn't work forever, or because they became illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act. Now, the major forms of driving new traffic are Solo Ads or Affiliate Networking.
Solo Ads
Solo ads are when you pay someone else to mail out your offers to their list. You are paying someone else, who already has an established list, for email leads. It sounds good in theory. What are the pitfalls?
It's a great way for the solo ad seller to make money, not necessarily you and probably not you. They don't have to expend any effort-they are not marketing their own product and they are not having to take the time to research affiliate programs.
Not everyone's lists are created equal. You don't really know where they got the names on their list from. Some are built from questionable traffic sources.
Example: AdFly. The traffic you get from using Ad.Fly is mostly from interstitial ads, the ads that are placed before you can see articles and videos, etc. It's very untargeted traffic because you can't enter keywords. There is nothing that you have that everyone wants to buy. So, in this case you'd be paying someone to send ads to a list where subscribers aren't even interested in your niche.
You could be paying $1 per click if your squeeze page is on target and converts at 50%, which is a good conversion rate. Tip: for a good squeeze page, see our Backup Creator squeeze page.
You Win Some, You Lose Some
Over a 1-year period, Robert purchased $1912 in solo ads. For that $1912, he got 3209 clicks, which resulted in 1059 email opt-ins and $502 in sales. This appears to be a $1500 loss but you can keep marketing to them (until and if they opt-out) and generate additional sales later.
The good news is that 3209 new subscribers quickly builds your list-if you have a big list, you'll be excited to send out those emails for potential sales, which is the name of the game in internet marketing. Sales!
Caveats & Advice
The best solo ad sellers that will bring you success are likely those that don't do it as their only income. They may just be doing it for a time while they are on vacation, have family matters to attend to, or are between projects. Robert's experience with solo ad ‘only'
You need to put back about 20% of your business income into ad spending so solo ads aren't the worst thing and you SHOULD experiment with new types of traffic. It's not going to be the huge payday you're hoping for but you can build a list that will earn you income over time.
Make sure you have a link tracker like AdTrackz where you can create subcampaigns for each solo ad. That way, you can determine exactly how much traffic you actually generated from each solo ad campaign. Ideally, you can and should also create a spreadsheet that keeps track of all of your solo ad spend, your clicks from the sellers, the opt-in rate for each subcampaign, and any sales.
Affiliate Networks
The best way to get loads more traffic is to create a paid product and put it a on paid affiliate site, such as ClickBank or JVZoo. Our Member Genius plugin supports both these platforms.
When you put that product up on one of those sites, anyone can sign up to be one of your affiliates. You can also immediately offer the affiliate program option to all of your buyers after they purchase your product by giving them the link to register.
You position it as, "Thanks for buying my product! Did you know you could have this for free if you become an affiliate and sell it just 1 time?!" When someone signs up to be one of your affiliates, you give them a special link. When one of their friends or subscribers wants to buy the product, it sends the traffic back to your site and your affiliate gets a commission.
You want to make it easy and profitable for your affiliates-give them a reason to market YOU above others. Have your email(s) ready for them, your banner ads, etc., so that they don't have to do any work for you. Give them a really good commission-50% and 100% are good.
You need to build a list somehow. Solo ads and affiliate marketing can be part of your strategy in addition to: having a blog to take advantage of SEO, having a podcast, running Facebook ads, running Bing ads.
Affiliate marketing can also be a great option for you to bring in income if you don't have a product ready, if you're between projects or you need to be away from your business for a period of time.
Don't be afraid of Affiliate Marketing-it's not evil and you won't burn out your list if you deliver some really cool value along with the product that you're selling.
One Last Word of Wisdom
Don't be negative. Just don't. Negativity leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias (choosing only to hang on to things that reinforce our beliefs). If you're upset and frustrated, turn that into fuel.
Ask yourself, "What's good about this?" even if it means you just learned 10 ways not to do something. Have an "abundance mindset." Know that you'll succeed.
It's very easy when you first start your internet business, working from home, to fall back into those habits that you have from working for an employer, where you have to fill up 8 hour days one after the other and no "project" really ever has to be done for you to make income.
Or, some of those very things that led you to develop an internet-based business, such as wanting to dream ‘big', form your own partnerships, etc., but all of those ideas will not make any money if you do not implement them.
It's easy to get pulled into "Scope Creep", where you continue to add more and more features or additional webpages, upsells and bonuses, etc., instead of just focusing on ONE thing and pushing it out there.
These are all productivity killers. Instead, you want to think in "Three Day Window" terms.
Principles of the Three-Day Window
What is it? The 3 day window is the time period from "idea" to "implementation." You have 3 days to get it to a stopping point that if you had to sell it right then you could.
It's okay if it's not perfect. You NEED to make some websites that you will look back on later and be embarrassed by. What IS important is getting in the habit of getting your ideas implemented and out there.
What if it's lacking some features? You still put it up for sale in its "basic version" at a discounted rate. Instead of your end goal of $97, you sell the basic at $7.
Don't sell your first version with multiple features. You can't be sure that your customers want all these "bells and whistles." What's exciting to you is quite probably not exciting to them.
It's better to put the product out there and get feedback of the most wanted features and use that to develop your "deluxe" version. As you continue to refine it, you can roll out "iterations" later and charge the higher price(s).
Iterations: these are releases each time the product is enhanced/improved, i.e. Version 1.0, 2.0., etc. When Robert created Backup Creator, it only took him 3 days from start to finish to get his first version out. In that first 3 day version, it did do the basic backups. Then, in future iterations, they added additional backup capabilities (i.e. to Amazon S3), cloning abilities, and other features.
Why Just 3 Days?
If you don't set yourself an "end" date, you will run into issues such as:
You spend too much time working on it and get burnt out or bored. Or, you end up doing a lot of things that are not productive or they're fun but they don't really increase your sales, such as spending 2 hours to make a 2-minute sales video.
You could have spent that same 2 hours doing at least 2 of your 4 Daily Tasks:
A better choice than a video would be to build a bigger list. Examples: contacting affiliates, running ads for traffic to your site, knocking out a great sales letter
You need to think in "milestones" and take a scientific approach. The scientific approach will help you create a framework or "Spec" for your project. Within that framework, you can then be creative.
For example, if you make a video: You need to set up how many segments it's going to be and the length of time for each. Then, within those measured segments, you can be creative about what you're going to feature.
Today's Take-Away's
Don't be the guy (or gal) that has a bunch of stuff on their hard drive without taking any action to put it out there. Use the "4 Daily Tasks" Method to be productive. Do something every day that will result in sales.
There's no point in pulling "all-nighters." You're fooling yourself with a lot of empty time. It's more important to have something imperfect that is functioning and earning you money because a lot of work with no income results in boredom and burn out.
One of the best ways to make money online is to create content that solves problems but a lot of us struggle with writer's block. The answer to that "blank page" is to have a system.
Don't be afraid that using a system or a template will result in something that is bland and not unique. It's quite the opposite. The best thing about using a system is that you get the thing DONE.
Three Elements of A System
The system component-you can think of it as your approach, the actual "1-2-3" of getting words on paper. For example, if you're creating a 400-word article, don't say 400! That sounds huge.
Instead, break it down into: Title, Intro, 3 points, Summary, and a Call to Action. Now, what if each of these sections was 50 words? Sounds a lot better, right? You can make things even easier by turning everything into a question.
This is a really easy way to do it. Act like you're having a conversation with someone about your subject and think what they would ask about your subject. The answers become your text.
Example: What are the 3 things I need to have when playing the guitar? Instead of your title being "Guitar Basics", it becomes, "How Do I Play the Guitar Quickly?"
Another Approach is "So What?"
This is really helpful in a sales letter. If you notice you have a weak headline and bullet points, pretend someone is saying to you "So what?"
You are forced to answer back with something compelling and exciting and emotional. Now, you have script that will hold your buyer's attention!
Keep in mind that with sales letters (and with books), you are going to lose someone every 10 minutes. So, for every 10 minutes of reading, you need to have something really exciting and compelling to keep them engaged.
Make your buyer say "I don't know", with your email headlines.
This is the most effective approach for email marketing.
We want to present a question that arouses curiosity.
Ex: Don't do a headline like "Simple Guitar Playing."
Instead, your headline should be "Are you missing out on these 3 simple guitar tricks?"
Then, your buyer is saying, "I don't know. Am I? Let me click over to this link and see".
Type out sentences that are only 7 words in length. It sounds silly, but it forces you to keep your language simple. Outside of academia, you don't want to use complicated language and long sentences. It turns internet readers off.
Think of keywords if you're really stuck. If you are still really stuck, think in terms of keywords. Have one keyword for each of your 3 bullet points.
For example, if you're writing about webinars, your keywords are: "title, date, and time."
Then, your first bullet point is on "I create a compelling title for my webinar", the 2nd bullet point is, "The date is more important than you might think because of your demographic" and the 3rd point would be, "Consider your customers' time zones carefully when you're scheduling."
Time Management: Give Yourself a Time Frame
You really need to do this. If you give yourself unlimited time, the odds are you will sit in front of that blank page for 5 hours with no results.
At one point, Robert spoke out 100 articles in one day. How?!!?
If you try to think of 100 subjects that your business covers, you're probably going to get overwhelmed and walk away. Instead, think of just TEN subjects and then break those down into 10 prompts (or questions) for those categories.
For example, if your business is guitar instruction, your categories might be: equipment, beginner, advanced, starting a band, album recording, etc. Then, for equipment, you'd have "acoustic vs. electric" as a prompt. For starting a band, a prompt would be "how to book shows."
With this approach, Robert just started answering and recording the questions/prompts, one after the other and each one took about 3-4 minutes.
For this, he used his Logitech Headset and Camtasia for recording. He gave himself 1-hour blocks for each category. If each prompt = 4 minutes, you can do 40 articles and have about a 20 minute break.
That timeframe sounds really tight but if you force yourself to cram a lot into a little space of time, you end up with something better than if you had all the time in the world to blather on.
The Motivation: this one is simple. For most people, that's the money. You need to put content out there if you're going to sell anything.
The "10-7-4" Mind Hack
It's easiest to think of 10 things that people need and want to know about anything. This mind hack gets you trained to brainstorm quickly and then easily find the best to offer your customers.
It's super easy. Think of 10 questions. Write them all down. Cross out the weakest 3. Now you have 7 points left. Here's how you use them! For an e-book: You now have 7 chapters. Pick the best 4, which are going to be aimed at your beginners and basic knowledge. Put those in the front. Leave the rest for the remaining 3 chapters.
For more info on how to jet-fuel your e-book writing and publishing, go to Robert's course at Make a Product.
For a Sales Letter: you have 7 modules now that you can offer in your product you're selling. Your best 4 are going to be what your program actually is and the remaining 3 modules can be your bonuses.
For more info on how to write a great sales letter FAST, check out Robert's course called Speed Copy.
For a Webinar: compress your 7 down to 4. Most webinars should only contain about 4 in an hour's time. Then, those 4 can actually mirror the 4 modules of your product. You can use the additional 3 points to interweave throughout your presentation but you're focusing on your best 4.
For a great course on how to start and run your own webinars in no time flat, check out Webinar Crusher.
Today's Take-Aways and Some Extra Advice
You need to be excited about the content that you're creating so that you will finish it.
Don't use $10 words. Write the way you actually talk. If you write an "English paper", you'll lose customers.
If you can dictate your articles, etc., that's even better. Usually, the way you FIRST said something is just about right.
It's more important to have it all down and edit later than have nothing. If you keep trying to edit while you're writing, you will never get anything done. It's important to create and put out a lot of stuff because you don't know which is going to pan out.
You want to get to the point where you are churning out content in one-take and you have a pool of content. You need to have a system, time management and motivation working together.
HostGator: This is for web hosting. After you buy your domain name, your site has to "live" somewhere. This is web hosting and fou can get this at DoubleAgentHosting.com.
AWeber: This is an autoresponder, your essential tool for building a list and keeping in contact with your customers. Get this at DoubleAgentAutoresponder.com.
WordPress: This is a free tool that you "place" at the front door of your site. It lets you edit your site and pages without having to know how to write or edit HTML code. You can just click around and create any extra webpages that you like using plugin's and tools that WordPress uses.
Once you get webhosting via DoubleAgentHosting.com, there's a special button where you can install WordPress on the front door of your site. Its' going to make creating all the pages we talk about today super simple.
Robert has a WordPress plugin called Paper Template that makes everything look like a plain piece of paper that you can customize. You can also buy Robert's course, Income Machine (www.incomemachine.com), which includes Paper Template as well as Member Genius, which is a plugin that allows you to take payments on your site and is integrated with PayPal.
Must-Have Web Pages
"Front Door" of your site (www.example.com): This is where your sales letter lives. You want to have a place for someone to buy something from you. This page, the sales letter, also has your buy button. Additional tip: when purchasing a domain, also buy a .com, not a .org or a .net.
Membership area of your site (www.example.com/members): When people have purchased your product, they go to a page where they create an account and then get access to the members' area.
This is a protected area where they can download the product and intake any additional content that goes with the product, such as videos, etc. Also, if they ask for a refund or stop paying installments, their access to this section can be shut off.
Training Page (www.example.com/training): This is where you put your 1-hour pitch webinar replay for your product/service. It makes everything simple and easy because you can use your webinar training as anything thing later on (i.e. a 'bonus') and just call it 'live training'.
Record your webinar using Camtasia, put it on YouTube, place that video code on this demo page, and then below that have a link that takes them back to your sales letter page/front page.
Demo Page of your site (www.example.com/demo): Here is where you can put a 5-minute demo of something you have in your product/course. This is where you'd put something exciting, such as 'before and after' pictures, evidence of your 3x income generation after flipping a house, or a trick that your software can do.
Just like for the training page above, record your demo using Camtasia, put it on YouTube, place that video code on this demo page, and then below that have a link that takes them back to your sales letter page/front page.
Nice-To-Have's
Opt-In Page (www.example.com/free): This is where you have just some simple free gift so that people will opt-in to get it, thereby joining your list.
Download Page (www.example.com/gift-download): This is where they're redirected to download the free gift. You have a link below that download for them to hop back to your sales letter.
Contact Page (www.example.com/contact): An easy form for people to fill out to contact you so that you don't have to share your email address. This is where they can ask questions, ask for interviews, etc. They could send tech problems here but it's better if you have a Help Desk page, which we'll mention in just a few minutes.
7 Extra Pages For No Extra Charge!
Blog Page (www.example.com/blog): This is where you put any articles and/or videos you find interesting to your niche. There are places on this page for them to go to your Opt-in page (and get on your list) or go directly to your 'front door'/sales letter site and buy your product.
Affiliate Center (www.example.com/affiliates): A page that tells others how they can recommend your course and make a profit from selling it themselves. This is also where you'd have banner ads and swipe copy for your affiliates to use so that they can more easily promote you.
To see an example of how this looks, go to the Action PopUp affiliate page. The easiest way to have an affiliate program when you start out is through ClickBank.
Robert's Member Genius plugin functions with ClickBank. You can get Member Genius by itself or by joining Income Machine to get the complete system including the sales letter plugin, blog, autoresponder, and traffic training, and more.
Support Page (www.example.com/support): This is your Help Desk page. We use ZenDesk for this.
Secret Door area (www.example.com/secretdoor): When Robert and Lance do a launch the best way to fire people up is to announce that they will be closing the offer soon. But sometimes you want to experiment with cold traffic like FB ads, etc.
That means, you take your sales letter and use a WP plugin called Post Duplicator to make an exact copy of the sales letter where you've now opened the button back up to buy but you don't advertise that it's open to your list.
Essentially, you're trying to see if your ads work and the only way to tell that is if you have the sales closed to the public and so any sales you get that are from this Secret Door page you know are from ad driven traffic.
Welcome Page (www.example.com/welcome): This is your upsell page. If someone buys Paper Template, they would be redirected to this page that says something along the lines of "Welcome to Paper Template, but do you want to buy Income Machine too?"
The cost would be the price difference between your large package (the upsell) and the product they just purchased.
Coaching Page (www.example.com/coaching): Offer coaching that is specific to the product that you are selling. For example, if you were selling a course on playing guitar, here is where you would offer say, 4 one-on-one sessions for customers that are still having problems or want to advance even more in guitar playing.
Your copy would say something similar to "Are you stuck? You came to the right place! In just 4 sessions with me, we'll get your roadblocks taken care of."
Your coaching should have a large dollar amount attached to it. Even if you have no clients or just a few taking part, it's fine. It is just an opportunity. Provide a link for them to go straight back to your .com front door site if they don't' want coaching.
Application Page (www.example.com/application): This is where a customer submits an app for your coaching program. You ask them specifics such as:
"What is the URL where you need help?"
"What is your monthly budget?"
"What are you looking to get out of the coaching? Is there anything else you need? "
You can use Google Forms to set this up. Once they hit submit, it notifies you. It will pile in the responses into a google spreadsheet.
Use a scheduler called TimeTrade to schedule a Skype call with them to discuss this further. The ones that you want to talk to, you then send them to your coaching page to join up.
Just like anything in life, it's a good idea to know WHY you're doing something, as opposed to only "going through the motions"…
And if you're only dabbling, if this "internet marketing" thing is only a hobby to you, then it's likely you haven't found very much success because you rarely finish the things you start. If you actually want to make money, it's time to stop dabbling and actually create something. Don't "start" to create something. Actually make that single membership site, add that affiliate program to it, and get some traffic…
You need to go all-in. The first problem I see with people going all-in is that they keep changing what they're going "all-in" for, which really isn't going "all-in." You probably know what I'm talking about. Changing to a new niche every month. Only focusing on Pinterest marketing one month because "everyone's" talking about it. Only focusing on Kindle comic books the next month because "everyone's" talking about it…
Let's separate the forest from the trees: the only things you need to focus on in your business are your list (so setup an opt-in page and follow-up sequence), traffic (setup a retargeting pixel, run Facebook ads and have an affiliate program) and offers (promote affiliate products and sell your own products).
When it comes to list, traffic and offers, there's the MUST-HAVE's (sales letter, email autoresponder) and the NICE TO HAVE'S (blog, podcast, Facebook fan page, etc.)
You "could" run your business without a blog (the website you see here) and you could run your business without a podcast (an internet radio show where you post audio episodes on your blog and they also appear in places like the Apple iTunes store).
BUT, if you already have SOME kind of sales letter and opt-in page in place, your blog is the TRAFFIC method to get more clicks onto your webpages and a PODCAST is a really easy way to consistently update that blog even if you have just a few minutes every week…
I highly recommend our Podcast Crusher course to get your podcast setup. You use your existing blog (or setup a new one) and use a special plugin called PowerPress and a file hosting service called LibSyn. You don't want to host your podcast audio files on Amazon S3 or on your own web host for a number of reasons. The biggest one is that it's easier to look at your stats. You can tell which episodes get the most play and that tells you what kinds of podcast episodes to create in the future.
The Robert Plank Show premiered on September 13, 2012.
I'm not a super prolific podcaster but I've published 56 episodes with exactly 41 hours of audio content in those three years.
I want to get you into podcasting (or BACK into podcasting if you've neglected it) because the traffic is steady consistent, as long as you publish consistently which is probably the #1 most important thing when it comes to podcasting…
Podcasting is just audio blogging that happens to get listed on Apple iTunes. Let's just call it what it is. In the past, when I had something to say, I'd spend a couple hours typing out some big long post (kind of like I'm doing to you now). When I want to put out a new podcast:
I spend about 10 minutes figuring out some bullet points (if that), and I hit record
I speak out my podcast "episode" in one single take, about 30-40 minutes. The "ideal" podcast length is 20 minutes, but that's a little short to cover the things I want to cover, although I don't want to go over 60 minutes
After recording the audio, I spend about 1 minute adding intro and outro music. Important: I don't edit out any "um's" or "ah's" or anything like that
It takes another 1 minute or so to properly "tag" the file for podcast players and add things like my cover graphic into the file
About 1 more minute to upload the audio file to the special hosting service (just wait for a simple file to upload)
Finally, I go to my WordPress blog at RobertPlank.com, click Add New Post, paste in the podcast title and "show notes" – basically, the bullet points I created to structure the show. This is a 30-second process. More recently, I've hired a person to listen to the podcast and type more detailed notes that I'll paste in later…
It's a 6-step process that takes 33-and-a-half minutes. Most people don't have a podcast even though it's easier to create than a blog post. Just speak your thoughts and then go through the checklist to publish it.
What I Didn't Do Correctly In My Podcast
Getting "some kind" of podcast online, even with just one quick 5-minute episode with zero music (that's how we have you create your first podcast episode inside Podcast Crusher) is more than most of your competitors will do.
BUT! Since launching the podcast, I've noticed many other internet marketers start podcasts, and they've done what I can only call a "podcast launch." I'm not sure if someone's teaching it in a course, but here's what I'm seeing new podcasters do:
Launch about three 5-10 minute podcast episodes the first day, and then another quick 10 minute episode after two days, then another 10 minute podcast another two days later
Get about 200 reviews to their iTunes podcast that very first day. It's very important that all 200 reviews roll in within those first 24 hours
With any luck, this will get you in the New & Noteworthy section of iTunes and possibly in the top 20 of your podcast's category (internet marketers use the "Management & Marketing" Business subcategory)
Wait a second... how do you get 200 podcast reviews within a 24 hour period? The internet marketers I've seen have been paying for them on Fiverr which I consider a blackhat technique. I'd be worried about getting banned from iTunes, and it will set you back a couple thousand bucks to hire all those reviews, but that's how many marketers are doing it. 200 reviews in 24 hours.
The next thing I didn't realize until recently was that you should be checking your rankings in iTunes. Open up the Podcast app on an iPhone or iPad and click on the "Top Charts" button, then browse to your category.
It's huge if you get into this "top 300" in a category even if you're near the bottom. My podcast has steadily climbed the rankings, then fell back down, and I've seen others rise fall in the rankings as well.
At the very least, when you check out this list you'll know what a successful podcast looks like.
Mistake number three: I wasn't consistent at first with my podcasting. Here's my podcast posting frequency:
11 new episodes in 2012
17 episodes in 2013
15 episodes published in 2014
16 episodes published in 2015 (so far)
There were no new episodes between November 2014 and March 2015, but other than that, I've posted "just under" one new episode per month. In 2015, I've been posting weekly from July and now well into September.
What I Did Right With My Podcast
There are a lot of things I did correctly with my podcast that you can learn from. First of all, I didn't start posting podcast episodes every day and then burn out after a month like many bloggers. I recorded a handful (five episodes) and only published a few.
There's something encouraging about being a couple of weeks ahead on your podcast. I'm not saying you have to plan and film an entire year's worth of podcasts or anything like that. Actually, if you did that, you'd probably record a lot of bad episodes. But I want you to record podcast episodes close to TWICE as quickly as you publish them.
That means if you're planning on publishing a new podcast episode every week, record a quick one on Monday and another quick one on Friday BUT only publish one of those two. That way you can keep building up a "pool of content" and you have one in your back pocket if you don't feel like recording that week.
Next, hire someone to listen to your podcast and type up some shownotes. The "show notes" are the text that appears on your blog for that podcast episode. It's also viewable in most podcasting apps when someone listens to your show.
Posting "just" the podcast audio player alienates the readers on your list, but when I pay to get it transcribed, I end up with a transcript that sometimes 5,000-plus words… too long to put into a blog post. I put it all into a PDF document but that's still a lot for someone to read.
The answer: pay someone on Fiverr.com (the cost is $15 to $30) to listen to your podcast, and not type up a transcript, but take "notes" so you can post your summarized content as your show notes.
Another thing I did right: recording one-take content. Just imagine if you left edit-points throughout a 20 minute podcast, or you spent 3 hours removing the "umm's." Treat it like a radio show. You're allowed to stop for a second and say "umm" if you want. It's your show. Record all your podcast episodes in one-take. It's great practice for future products and webinars.
I'm also glad I created a Facebook fan page for The Robert Plank Show which has now grown into nearly 15,000 fans. You should have a fan page for your podcast as well.
Something most people miss out on is SEO with their podcast episode titles. If you publish a podcast and your blog post title says something like, "How to Record a Video" … that's one thing.
But what if you titled that podcast episode, "How to Record Screen Capture Videos with Camtasia and Upload Them to YouTube?" Now when someone searches iTunes for the terms "screen capture" or "Camtasia" or "YouTube", you'll show up in those search results.
As far as I can tell, iTunes only counts your blog post titles in these results and not the contents of your show-notes. But it amazes me when people put out podcast episodes that are only one or two words long, when they could be showing up in more places.
I'm not the kind of person who wants to run an "interview show" where I have a new guest on my podcast every week, but this is why interview shows (besides being easy to create) are an easy podcast traffic source. If you interview a Michael Gerber type of celebrity, then that podcast episode where you interviewed him shows up when someone searches for his name.
Heck, even if you're too chicken to have guests on your show, review their products and books. You can create an episode talking about Seth Godin's latest book and show up in podcast searches, for example.
Podcast Format & Formula
Our Podcast Crusher course shows you all the fancy details, like how to record and properly tag your podcast episodes, where to host them, what settings on your WordPress podcasting plugin to customize, how to promote that podcast, and more.
When I first created my blog, I noticed a handful of people always reading the blog at any given time. With the rise of attention-stealing sites like Facebook and a few Google slaps, I noticed the traffic drying up. Good news: now that I've been podcasting consistently, I always see a handful of people browsing the site. The traffic came back!
Numerous studies show that 20 minutes is the ideal length for a podcast. I've listened to podcasts on a 5-minute format, and that's not enough time to make more than one or two points. 10-minute podcasts are a little better, but as a listener, I find myself waiting for 2 or 3 to pile up, and then I listen to all those in a row.
On the other hand, when someone pumps out 60, 90, 120 minute podcasts… it takes me at least 4 separate sessions to get through them all, and the number one reason I unsubscribe from a podcast is because too many unplayed episodes pile up.
20 minutes is the ideal length if you can manage it. Most of my episodes unintentionally last about 40 minutes, but I do my best to keep them from getting any longer.
My personal formula for the best podcast episode possible:
Three sets of three bullet points each.
Just like with any content you create, you should be solving a problem which means either answering a common question or explaining an obstacle you overcame. If you can channel the frustration of others doing the wrong thing in your industry, even better. It will be impossible to shut you up in that case.
What do I put into those three sets of bullet points? We have three bullet points about the problem we're setting up and the alternatives or solutions that didn't solve that problem. Then, three more bullet points detailing the steps you'd take to solve that problem. And then, three additional bullet points on the actual case study of yours that used those steps to solve the problem.
Here's how I mapped out my 51st episode of the podcast, "Rise Above Being a Geek"…
What Problem Are We Setting Up?
How to complete projects instead of "chipping away" at them and get "something" for sale?
How to avoid being an "upsell hell" marketer who sells at $17, $27, $37?
If you give a mouse a cookie problem, going down a long path where nothing is complete
What Steps Can We Take to Solve That Problem and Rise Above Being a Geek?
Avoid OR
Tell and show what they'll do once they take your training
Superhuman demonstration w/ easy button
What Does This Look Like in the Real World?
Checklist Marketing: WP Notepad
Internet Marketing Basics sounds boring: Income Machine is a better system
Real life demo: Podcast Crusher
(There are other types of podcasts such as 10-part and 14-part list posts, but those are simpler... just go through the list.)
When I actually talk during the podcast, the length of each section gets pretty uneven, which is okay, because I can spend more time on the interesting stuff.
Ideas for Podcasting Content
If you've setup your iTunes podcast using our Podcast Crusher training, and you're still stuck, here are some starters for your at least your next six episodes:
Interview show: have a real conversation about something you genuinely want to know about, ask them questions they don't normally hear
How did you get started online?
What tools do you use in your online business?
Compare two schools of thought (i.e. Dave Ramsey vs. Robert Kioysaki) -- which is the best?
What's a common "saying" you can use to make a point? (i.e. The Mom Test, Self-Recharging Bank Account, Copycat Marketing)
What have you been up to in the past 30 days of your business? (live case study) -- i.e. backing up your website and what tool you used (not a list of possible tools)
The bad news about all this is, the information I've just shared with you is useless unless you setup your own iTunes podcast using Podcast Crusher. The good news is that once you have a guide, it's easy to setup your podcast and you could be listed on iTunes by this afternoon.
If you want to win at the content marketing game, have something setup, keep it online and update it as often as you can, once a week if possible. What's also great about building your own website and creating your content is that you can do it on YOUR terms. If I decide I want to decode a 5-minute, or 40-minute podcast, I can.
If I type out a 200-word or 2500-word blog post (like this one) I can do that and no one can tell me otherwise. However, I'll use the TEMPLATE or the GUIDE for a successful podcast to ensure I knock that "nice-to-have" task out within one sitting, and get back to the "must-haves" that bring me all my online income.
When we run our own businesses and don't have a "boss" to answer to, it can be easy to fall back into old habits of goofing off. It's easy to fall back into the habit of filling up time because when you worked at your "day job", the objective was to fill up 8 hours a day.
Today, we're going to talk about getting all that clutter that we're used to from a day job out of the way.
Quick Computer Programs Everyone Can Use to Improve Their Productivity
Online Stopwatch: Use this to time yourself doing a task so that you truly commit to getting it done in a certain amount of time, i.e. knock out a blog post in 10 minutes instead of thinking about it for an hour.
Camtasia: This software can record everything you're doing online. This is excellent software for recording tutorials, software walk-through demo's, etc. You can simultaneously record your processes as well as your spoken audio. We'll talk more in depth regarding Camtasia a little later in the episode.
Google Calendar: This is free and you already have it if you have a Gmail account. If you don't, you can just go to www.google.com/calendar to get it. It's great because you can synchronize it to your iPhone and iPad as well as share it with other users, such as spouses and business partners. It will send you popups/emails for upcoming appointments. Don't schedule EVERYTHING you do on your calendar-you'll just end up creating a glorified to-do list. Use it for essential appointments, such as meetings and webinars, etc.
Don't forget to check out Robert's Book, 100 Time Savers for more useful advice.
Essential Software/Programs for Internet Marketers
Camtasia Studio (again): You can record a full video and save that but also have the option of saving just the audio portion. You could use the audio for doing something like a podcast.
You can even record tutorial videos or "helper videos" just for yourself. If Robert has a particular process he has to go through, that he doesn't want to forget, he can record the entire process and then post that video to YouTube.
Some examples would be how to convert a .wav audio file to an MP3 file:
... Or how to convert any graphics file into a JPEG thumbnail:
... Or how to upload a book to CreateSpace:
Now that you have this process, you don't have to write it down on a piece of paper or make extensive notes. Your entire tutorial is accessible anywhere you can access internet to get to YouTube.
Access Robert's video tutorials at his YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe too.
GoToWebinar: Use this software for setting up all of your webinars.
WordPress
Most all other things that Robert needs to accomplish in his business can be taken care of through WordPress and various WordPress plugins.
He uses a plugin called Paper Template to create landing pages, opt-in pages, download pages, thank you pages, etc.
He uses a WordPress plugin called Member Genius to take payments in combination with PayPal.
Then, he uses a plugin called Backup Creator to back up his WordPress sites and if you back it up to another place (i.e. your hard drive, etc.), you've now cloned that site and you can use it over and over (with editing) to produce multiple sites.
These are all plugin's that Robert has created and you can get all of them in one package by joining Income Machine today.
Additional Software/Programs You'll Find Useful
GoodSync: Developed by the same creators of RoboForm, it allows you to synchronize your folders with FTP websites, Dropbox or Amazon S3 buckets.
Let's look at this scenario: When you record a video that you want to put online (like your membership site), first you have to record it, then you have to edit it, then you need to produce it and save it to a folder on your computer, then you would have to open up an FTP program (like FileZilla), then you have to drag the file over and wait for it to upload to your website, at which point you probably go create or edit a webpage and finally your video is there. It's A LOT of steps.
GoodSync automatically uploads certain files to your website. You specify which folders it syncs when a new file is added to that folder. So, essentially, as soon as you would produce and save the edited file from above, GoodSync would automatically recognize it as new and sync it over to your website.
It's skipping an entire step of you having to open the FTP website and wait for your videos to upload.
As part of Robert's sites, Webinar Crusher and Double Agent Marketing, he and his business partner Lance run monthly Q&A video calls. They record them using Camtasia, perhaps do a little editing and then save them. As soon as that step is done, GoodSync recognizes there's new files added to those folders on his computer and it uploads them to the websites so that the replay is always available.
RoboForm and LastPass. If you don't have Roboform, get it. You want to use the "Roboform Everywhere" option.
Roboform remembers all of your passwords and stores them, encrypted, in the cloud. If you ever have to reinstall your computer or certain programs, you can retrieve those passwords from Roboform. You don't have to remember your own passwords for multiple sites and you don't have to have them written down ANYWHERE.
There is also a RoboForm app for smartphones, tablets, etc. There is also a master password to RoboForm so no one can just get on your computer and have access to everything.
LastPass is great for for shared sites.
Jing is useful for capturing screen shots that you can then send as a file. That way, you don't have to send them an entire tutorial or video, etc., just the one piece that you're discussing.
You can then save that screen shot as a file to the public folder in Dropbox.
Dropbox iss similar to GoodSync in that you have folders that syncs up to the cloud.
It's good for sharing files with others but you can also use it between your own computers. For instance, you could edit a file on your laptop, save it to the Dropbox folder, and then it's the exact same version on your computer when you get home from a business meeting.
Dropbox has a public folder that you can save videos and documents to. No one else has access to it until you provide them with a link from that public folder and now you can share those certain files with them. It's also free (up to a point).
Google Sheets: The free Google equivalent of MS Excel. Just like with Google Calendar, you can share your "sheets" with or without editing privileges. It's handy for having documents that you share with your business partners, employees, and outsourcers/freelancers.
This is part of Google's "Google Drive" products which are free software programs almost identical to Microsoft Office products that are browser-based (instead of computer-based).
Google Chrome Bookmarks Bar: This is obvious but most people don't think to use it. Most of us are familiar with bookmarks but we have 100's of them in different folders that we never even use.
Instead, use the Bookmarks Bar for your most common sites that you go to EVERY DAY. You can also use it to bookmark certain docs that you're constantly using (like a Google Sheet) and editing and when you are done with that doc, you can just delete it off your bookmarks bar. The doc still exists but it's no longer a bookmark.
Additional Sites/Timesavers
Fiverr: A website for getting quick outsourcing work done at a fairly inexpensive rate, such as graphics, transcriptions, video editing, etc.
Backup! Backup your desktop, your files, etc. The time IS going to come when a computer crashes, you lose files, etc. Spending time on recovering files or creating new ones is a productivity killer! Here are some options:
Backup Creator: automatically backs up your WordPress sites. If you have a cPanel and/or dedicated server, use their backup options.
CloudBerry Backup: backup your desktop/any files you specify to an Amazon S3 bucket.
G-Safe: An external hard drive with 2 internal hard drives.
Amazon AWS Import/Export: You can mail an external hard drive to Amazon with specifications as to which S3 Bucket you want it saved to, they will do the upload for you, and mail you back your hard drive. It costs about $120 but it's worth it if you have a slow internet connection to get that "first" offsite backup in place.
Don't forget to relax! Give your brain a little bit of a rest and enjoy some podcasts (free at iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcatchers) or listen to an audiobook via Audible. Robert recommends you take in some fiction and turn off "marketing mode" for just a little bit!
When people talk about their favorite WordPress plugins, you usually hear things about SEO plugins, security plugins, or backup plugins. By the way, the best backup plugin for WordPress is Backup Creator and the plugin you should use to manage, bulk load, and mass update your WP plugins is Plugin Dashboard...
But anyway, imagine having "chunks" of text for your WordPress site that you could re-use where-ever you want. You use shortcodes for this. For example, I have a podcasting plugin on my blog that I use to post audio episodes of my iTunes radio show. (Podcast Crusher shows you how to use the PowerPress plugin in WordPress to create an unlimited number of podcasts)...
If I ever want to display the current podcast episode more than once in a post, for example, one player at the top in addition to the one at the bottom, I just have to add this code to my post:
[ podcast ] (Without the spaces around those hard brackets.)
That's a WordPress shortcode. You post the "code" anywhere in your posts and pages and when it's "rendered" for public viewing, people see the podcast audio player as opposed to that "short" code.
WordPress Post Snippets allow you to do this: create any number of shortcodes such as: [ webinarcrusher ]. I can set that snippet to display a huge headline advertising my Webinar Crusher product, a link to it, maybe open that link in a new window, even toss in some bullet points and a banner.
Now anytime I want to link to Webinar Crusher, I just add the [ webinarcrusher ] shortcode (the video below shows how it's point and click simple) into my posts anywhere I want to mention it:
I used to use the WP Post Signature plugin (also free) to display the same link and ads under EVERY blog post, but I now prefer using WordPress Post Snippets because I have more control over what posts link to what offers.
The first 9 minutes of that video show how I use it on my blogs and sales letters. But after the 9 minute mark, it gets REALLY crazy... because you can pass VARIABLES into Post Snippets!
What does that mean? Well, you can create a post snippet called "offsite" that takes in variables called "url" and "title"...
Then set your "offsite" post snippet to this in your Post Snippet settings:
<a target="_blank" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to leave this site?');" href="{url}">{title}</a>
This looks a bit geeky, but it's some HTML code that displays a link on a web page, and when someone clicks that link, a pop-up appears asking people if they REALLY want to leave the site.
Whenever you want to link offsite but you want to display that warning that they might not want to leave, just add this "snippet" or shortcode into your posts:
[ offsite url="http://www.incomemachine.com" title="Income Machine" ] (again, without the spaces)
Adding this shortcode will "plug-in" the "url" we passed (which is "http://www.incomemachine.com") and the "title" (which is "Income Machine") right into that code I showed you a minute ago, into the {url} and {title} sections of that code.
As I said, this might be a "little" advanced for you personally, but I've found it very helpful for re-using that "repeat" code in my membership sites if I have to display a lot of graphics, video and audio players, and download links.
Enjoy using WordPress Post Snippets in your WordPress sales letters, blogs, and membership sites!
Webinars are the best use of your time and the best way to make money. You've probably wondered out of all the things that you do, can you outsource some of that? Can you just be the creative person and do the few things that make the most amount of money?
When we're talking about webinars, we're not talking about a Google HangOut or a YouTube video or a Periscope broadcast or anything "fancy."
We're just talking about showing what's on your screen and saying what you're going to say in just 1 hour. It's that simple!
What if you could turn whatever you're selling into a mini-launch event for a week?
You could say, "On this Wednesday I am going to open the doors to my new course." Or, it could be your service, such as a package for consulting services on how to run your own business (i.e. set up sales funnels, etc.).
You can put the description of your product/service that you're selling on your sales page.
That's great if people read the entire thing but many of them won't and for some people, it can just be sort of dry and boring and they won't read it or at the least finish it.
What can you do to compress all the different things about your product (or service) that you want to get across to people?
You could make a video which makes it a little more entertaining to your audience.
But, what if instead you take the points you were going to make in your sales letter and your video and make it into a one-hour live show, at a specific time and date.
There's no showing of your face involved.
Instead, you are showing the screen. It could be a web browser, a piece of software or a PowerPoint presentation.
If you have a one hour webinar it takes you exactly one hour to create that and you make sales through that webinar.
If you were going to make a 1-hr video that wasn't live, how many days would that actually take you? You'd probably be tempted to start adding a bunch of 'fancy' elements like graphics and music. There'd end up probably being too much scope creep in that and you would drive yourself crazy. Just get it on the calendar, show up and get it done and knock it out.
Pitch Webinars
You want to run a webinar when you have something for sale. That's the most important part. We don't want to run a webinar "just because."
"Just because" includes teaching a big concept. For example, if you teach a one hour course on InfusionSoft and give them all these business ideas, you've created 2 situations:
Either they're going to be confused about what to do with all the information with no way to apply it and/or they're going to go to your competitor to actually buy it because YOU didn't give them the option to buy right now.
If someone wants to buy something, you want to give them the chance right then and there.
What if you've got the idea but have not actually created the course yet?
Then, in the sales letter you want to list all the things you're GOING to have and just put a future date of availability on it.
That allows you to still sell it and then deliver it at a later date. To see what a sales letter looks like, go to WebinarCrusher.com.
This is a way to also present to your webinar attendees that since everyone is starting it together at a set date, that you're "all in it together" and everyone's participation will shape the way that the course is created.
Or, if you don't have a product created yet, you can go to www.clickbank.com (which is a huge site of affiliate listings) and see all of the products in your niche that you can promote as an affiliate.
Then what you would do is have your website, set up the webinar in GoToWebinar (included with Webinar Crusher), and send out emails/invites to your list about your webinar.
If you already have the product, you can look at the things that the sales letter talks about and think what sort of aspects you can make exciting for the attendees. What sort of cool demos can you do?
Don't be afraid of webinars! People who show up for your presentation have already make somewhat of a micro-commitment by setting aside time to watch your event.
You may have doubts about whether people will show up and stay for your 1 hr. presentation.
A lot of people WILL if you're at least somewhat interesting, if you can solve their problem, and if it relates to something they actually want.
Those that are the most desperate and need your solution right now will watch and listen to your webinar.
Running a webinar is a great little credential tool. You can take this presentation, record it and have it transcribed. Then, you can put it into a Kindle book, a Create Space book, etc. Now, you look even more professional.
Put the webinar replay on its own page. Why? Because there are some people who don't want to sit through an hour long video, they might only watch 10 minutes and decide then that they want what you're selling.
Install a button that allows them to go right to the sales letter/buy button.
During your live presentation you also want to mention the URL for the sales letter/buy button a few times through the webinar.
Don't Believe the Voodoo. Many people think that there's some sort of magic formula to doing a webinar "just right."
Some people watch these great stage speakers and write down everything that they say including the 'oohs and ahhs' and they completely overanalyze everything.
Stop looking at it like it's 100 steps or that you need to talk a certain way.
WWHW: Why, What, How-To, What-If
Instead, a good webinar can be summed up in 4 phases. This is the WWHW.
Look at your presentation and how you can break it up into these phases:
Your "why" is about 5 minutes. Why are you here? Why listen to me? You're setting up the frustrations of what led them to you.
Your "What" is about 15 minutes. This is where you explain your solution, how you're going to solve their problem. "Here's a couple of steps", "Here's what I want to show you", "Here's a 4 part process that I use to show you how to improve your sales funnel."
Your "How To" is about 20 minutes. This is your demo. If you can show software, that's great. If you can't, show your checklist(s), your system or some kind of before and after.
You're going to be moving slowly so you can show everyone exactly what to do. Even though a process might only take you a few minutes, you are going to dial it back to show them every single step slowly.
The more basic you are the wider appeal your webinar will have. We all want to believe that if we focus on the stuff that's fun for us, the more advanced stuff, that that your crowd will really love it.
Realistically though, in any kind of list you have, most of your crowd are going to be newbies or need to go back to the newbie area to improve what's not working for them or else they wouldn't need a 'solution.
Your "What If" is going to be about 10 minutes. Your "What If" is your offer and your closing.
"What if I could do this for you? Here's the package I'm offering that can improve your conversion rate by 70 percent!"
You want to be proud about the thing that you're offering and "introduce" it and remember to name the package that you're selling. You make it absolutely clear as to what you're selling.
You are telling what's in your product/package and how it will work for them. Essentially you are telling them what is included like you bulleted out in your sales letter.
If you do this webinar thing right, the whole 1 hour is set around demonstrating something.
Leave your hand OFF the mouse except as absolutely needed! If your hand is shaking because you're nervous or you're unconsciously playing with the mouse, your attendees are going to get distracted and annoyed and not pay attention to what you're saying.
"Avoid the Gap" between your "how to"/demo and the closing. Your demo wants to close with a solution so you avoid that awkward pause between your content and your pitching
Avoid "teaching" a concept. Instead, talk about YOUR product and how it solves their problem. If you're just "teaching" a concept instead of demo'ing your product, you end up having this really awkward transition from being a teacher to being a salesperson when you try and get people to buy at the end.
There are 4 pieces on how to effectively start, run and finish an effective webinar.
The Platform
Use GoToWebinar. Join Webinar Crusher today because includes a GTW account. GoToWebinar runs in its own separate software (and not a browser) so it's harder for attendees to accidentally click away and cancel by mistake.
Use a $30 Logitech headset from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-ClearChat-Comfort-Headset-Black/dp/B000UXZQ42)
The Mechanics
The "WWHW" we discussed above:
5 minute Why: pattern interrupt & hook
15 minute What: 100,000 foot view
20 minute How: magic trick or "wow"
10 minute What-If: pitch, irresistible offer
Your Closing
When you are doing your closing, you want to list out your package/product elements in the same order as your why's (i.e. problems being solved) and the same order that you showed them in the demo.
You want them to line up. In other words, if you are going to solve 4 problems than you want 4 modules in that same order.
The Stack/One Sheet
This is literally one page/slide where you reiterate everything that is in your package, your bonuses and all.
You want to keep reintroducing the One Sheet between every 3 or 4 module slides.
Bullet Drip
Have you ever looked at a PowerPoint slide where someone has listed 5 bullet points and you have to read through all of them? And they do more than one of these in a row?
What Robert and Lance do in their webinars is drip out the bullet points. This is where you talk about and release one bullet at a time. Now, your attendees can't read ahead and lose valuable information you're talking about because they're busy reading.
The Price Drop
When you come to the part where you ask for the money, that makes a lot of people uncomfortable but you have to make it fun.
If you added a dollar amount for each element through your presentation and came up with this pretty large amount (let's say $8K) here's where you say:
"The Good News is it's NOT $8000….it's not $1000, it's not $800…", etc.
You keep telling them what they're not going to pay until you get to your dollar amount and then direct them to your URL.
You can also have some more slides telling them reasons to go buy, such as a 30 day money back guarantee, other customer testimonials, etc.
And, since you are going to have your screen displayed to your audience, go ahead and go to the URL yourself too.
Avoid Q&A sessions. If your attendees have that many questions, it's probably something you should have included in your presentation.
Plus, there's always 1 or 2 people who ask really "out in left field" questions that you're better off answering privately.
Q&A's make your webinar end up in a whimper and not a bang.
The Cool Factor
You want to have an awesome title with a promise and solutions. Think of 3 really awesome things you can promise them.
In other words, you don't want to have a webinar called "membership sites."
Think more along the lines of "Have your membership site online today" or "Start making sales by this weekend" or "Drive thousands of people to your site in the next 3 days."
Don't use the word "learn", use the words "discover", "uncover", "breakthrough", etc.
Take a minute to think about: "what would I pile in on this if I had a magic wand?" Look at what you came up with and figure out your hook.
Is it exciting to just show people checklists? No. But, it would be exciting if you offered to record their first webinar FOR them. That's something really "cool" that no one else is probably offering.
The Push Button Software
If you don't have software, because you're in a niche where it may not apply, find a way to make it apply.
It makes your selling a lot easier.
Giving people guides and lessons is great but people like things that are interactive.
That way people don't necessarily have to 'learn' stuff and apply it they can just use software to get to the point where they want to be.
Webinar No-No's
You don't need a slick, word for word polished script.
It's better if you're "human" and come across as real.
Don't worry about how many or how few attendees show up. Just promote it all week. If a lot of people show up great, if not, you'll get them on the replay.
Don't mention the time and date on the presentation. Keep it evergreen. This way you can use it in future contacts with your list, put it on a membership site, etc. Don't go on for too long and don't run them on the half or quarter hours. People will get bored and drop off and people drop off at the top of the hour so they will miss part of your presentation.
You don't need to get too fancy. Just have one presenter. You don't need a team of people.
Don't go too long between webinars. Your webinar "muscles" will weaken. Run one a month and aim for 10% increase each time.
Closing Thoughts
Are your competitors running webinars?
If so, attend them. Check out which "do's and don'ts" from today that you now notice.
Check out Robert's course at Webinar Crusher to get all of this info and lots more useful how-to's on how to run your own successful webinars!
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.
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.
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?"
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. "
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!
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."
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.
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.
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.
Think about that for a second. You can post all day but who has the biggest list in the world? Facebook. When you're on Facebook, don't you receive emails from them AT LEAST weekly?
Even if a customer opens your website or followers check out your Facebook page, all of the most popular sites (Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) use email lists too.
"It worked so well, I stopped doing it." In other words, don't neglect your list.
When we first start out doing something, sometimes it goes so well that we get lazy and we backslide. Then, we start losing income and we have to work twice as hard to get to where we were.
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers
A lot of people are shooting for the wrong kind of numbers...
It's not a big achievement to say you have a 0% refund rate if your website says absolutely no refunds and you spend your time ineffectively arguing with customers over $5 and $10 transactions.
Don't waste your time moving people from one list to another to achieve a "false" click-thru rate:
Say you have a list of 10k subscribers. Many people send out an email saying something like, "I have a new course coming up soon and I don't want you to get bombarded" so "instead, I want you to go join this other list to be on the exclusive XYZ launch list." They'll send their subscribers to that new list to sign up for the launch.
Let's say out of your 10k subscribers only 100 sign up on the new list. That's a really small amount...
When they announce the launch, 80 of those 100 click on it and they have an 80% click thru rate. In reality, your total interested subscribers are really only less than 1%. It's a lot of unnecessary steps.
A better use of your marketing is to get 100 new subscribers per day to your EXISTING list.
How? Add some exciting content to your blog, like videos.
Then, on the sidebar, you say something like "if you want to get exclusive articles, sign up here" and then you create the opt-in page where you offer a free report of your best few pieces of content. Now, you have additional potential customers on your list.
The service you use for this is called AWeber. AWeber is a permission-based (i.e. your customers "opted in") email marketing system...
$1 Dollar Visitor Value
This means that when you average everything out, when someone lands on your webpage, you want that visit to be worth $1.
If you're selling something for $100 you want that to convert at 1% to equal $1. If 100 people go to your webpage and you have a $100 product you want at least 1 buyer for that $100 product.
That's why you want 10k subscribers, at a minimum, so if you have a $1 per visitor value you still make that $10k per month.
Daily 1% List Decay
Your email list is going to decay every day by 1%. If you have a list of 10k people, you can expect to lose 100 people per day.
At first, that goal of adding 100 people a day we talked about earlier sounds like a lot, but at some point it will level off in that if you're losing 100 people per day but you're gaining people at 100 per day you are still at a net list of 10k.
Expect a 2% click thru rate list-wide.
That means if you have 10,000 subscribers, expect 200 people to click thru when you send an email. If you have a $100 product for sale that is moving, then you can expect at least $200 a day in sales just from 2 people at a product that's $100 each purchase.
Then, if you email your list about the same product for the next 5-7 days in a row, the rate of clicks remain about the same. At a 2% click through rate, if you sent out 10 emails on that same product, you could expect to get 20% of that list to buy.
That would be 200 net people for sales of $2000. This can really add up.
You want to have a 6% refund rate when it comes to your products. If it's lower than that, you are not marketing aggressively enough and you're not selling enough. Any higher and there may be something wrong with your product. To learn this whole system and get vital information on how to successfully build and utilize your list, check out IncomeMachine.com.
Things You Need to Do to Successfully Utilize Your List
Have a way for people to sign up and become email subscribers.
Give them a way to "opt-out." Every now and then you'll see opt-out's. If every now and then 1% or so opts-out of your list, you're doing your job right. Besides, you don't want to waste your time marketing to people who will never be interested.
Market to your list. Don't forget about it and don't be afraid of it.
If you do at least once a week, that's great. Robert does once a day. Have something interesting to say every day:
Did you check out the thing I have for sale? Here's the coolest thing about it.
Describe different feature(s) of your product every day.
Give them a couple of good reasons to click on a link, to go to one of your podcasts or blog articles for example.
What to Avoid in Your Email Marketing (Important!)
Some people will tell you to write stories in your emails, that it will keep people coming back for more. No, no one reads all their emails and they usually don't read them in order. Customers will get tired of doing this.
Some people advise you to come up with about 20 tips about some such subject and send your list one tip every day. This is just a great way for your customers to save your emails in a "saved email folder" and never get around to reading them.
What's worse, another tip is to interview 10 experts, and include 1 interview each day. Your subscribers get tired of that because if they miss a day or two that's a few hours to catch up on and they'll give up.
Pay attention to the emails that get the most click-thru rates
Pay attention to the email others send that get YOU PERSONALLY to click through
Pay attention to what headings seem to work, or are "weird" (in a good way, because they get noticed)
The best subject lines that work are ones like: "hey", "frustrated", and other one-line "teasers."
An email subject line that just says "frustrated" works well because it makes people question what's frustrating.
When they open the email, you can then talk about what's frustrating in business. For example, how to write an e-book, how to publish it, etc. and then tell them the "simple solution" which is your product.
The first 7 days are most important. Even if you don't want to email people every day, when they first become subscribers, email them once for 7 days in a row.
That's when they're hungry and looking for an answer to their problem and might be ready to buy something to solve it. In the first few days, you want to email them the link to get their free content, and then email them about your product.
After that first 7 days, you want to get them to take any kind of action. Opening an email and clicking a link is an action.
Even if they're not ready to buy just yet, they may still be thinking about it, so you want to throw out some questions in those emails to get them to think about how buying your product is going to solve their problem. That's where the "why didn't you buy?" email comes in.
Use The "Why didn't you buy?" Email
This is super-important and is the best email to send. "Why didn't you buy?" IS the subject line.
In the body you say something like, "I noticed you haven't yet claimed your membership to our Make a Product book creation course. Did you know that we can show you how to: (insert what your product claims to do). Click on the reply button and tell us why you didn't buy."
This does a few different things: If they already bought from you but get this email, you can reply: "Great. What did you think of the course? What motivated you? Where's your book?" so now you can piece together a testimonial to use from this person to use on the sales letter.
If someone is an "on the fence" buyer and writes back saying, "I didn't buy because of X reason", maybe they say the price is too high... now you can tell them there's a payment plan
If they say they can't be sure the system works, you can tell them there's a money back guarantee
If they say something specifically related to the product, you can tell them the solution or maybe you need to add something in the sales letter
Even if they never plan to buy, you still stand out because a lot of people never even bother to ask
This email gets the most responses out of everything that Robert sends. They came to YOU looking for a solution.
Find out why they haven't bought the solution yet. Don't forget that you can find out more about this entire program of list-building and successfully utilizing your list by going to IncomeMachine.com. It shows you how to:
Don't be another statistic! Run your online business model, product, and sales letter through "The Mom Test" to discover how to sell faster and easier without resorting to painful "copywriting" or piling a lot of extra money into your business. It'll simplify your internet marketing...
Bad situation: A lot of internet marketers too caught up in ‘jargon’ and reinventing terms for concepts that already existed + a lot of people not wanting to look stupid and admit that they don’t know what something is = missed sales .
Too many marketers get too involved in making simple concepts difficult OR they are so vague and oversimplified that they sound ‘sketchy’.
Your marketing should ideally be able to pass "The Mom Test"...
Piece #1: Can You Explain What It Is That You’re Doing Online In A Way That Your Mom Could Understand It?
In other words, can you explain it to someone who isn’t "stupid" but is not necessarily internet-savvy and has zero interest in "internet tech stuff."
Piece #2: Are You Solving A Real Problem?
Figure out what people want to know and where they are personally stuck and how you can help them.
Example: Your niche is the stock market. Most people just want to know how to get started, how to trade some simple stocks. They want to learn how to buy a stock, read the stock quotes and make some return on their investment. They don't need to know the inner workings of Wall Street. THAT is not a real problem you are solving.
Piece #3: Can You Explain It In Less Than One Minute Or In One Sentence?
Just "state the facts."
Uber is a good example. Instead of saying, "I am a freelancer for a website that facilities transportation and is in direct competition with more traditional ways of hiring drivers for important events", etc., you would say, "Uber is a Peer to peer taxi service that costs less than traditional taxi service."
Piece #4: Do You Have A Physical Item?
Tangible items tend to lend credibility, especially to people who are unfamiliar with internet technology and feel that they need to see and touch something for it to be legitimate.
Let’s say that everything you have for sale is 100% online and is in the form of digital downloads.
You can put this internet-based digital information (ex: a 4-module course) on a physical product like a DVD and puts it with a service called Kunaki.
Robert uses Sony DVD Architect to create the DVD and Kunaki is company that specializes in DVD replication, packaging and distribution.
Another option: take several of your blog posts, cut and paste them into Word and then turn those into an e-book.
Go to Amazon KDP to create a Kindle format version of your book, and CreateSpace to create physical/printed copies of your book.
Robert's course, Make a Product, has a lot more information for you on how to publish your own e-book in less than 24 hours. Go check it out!
Piece #5: Is This Something That Can Change A Life Within 1 To 30 Days?
If it takes longer than 30 days it’s not exciting and you’re probably not doing a very good job marketing.
You need to have a set goal in mind of what your customer is going to achieve or will have been able to produce, as a result of their learning from you, WITHIN 30 days. Will they be able to play guitar? Will they have their own membership site up and running?
Closing Thoughts
The average person, whether they’re a mom or not, does not understand a lot of the "technical stuff" and think that everyone on the internet is a "crazy new start-up."
This is not about having an elevator pitch or a customer avatar.
This is about explaining things in real, simple language and understanding that just because something might be exciting to you or seem simple to you, it might be going over your customers’ heads. Play it safe and dumb it down.
Ask your list and get feedback. Probably 80% of your list thinks that you’re too advanced.
Newbies are going to outnumber experts. The things that are going to keep bringing in leads are your simple things, the ones that are the "first step."
Yes, you want to have high-ticket items that are more advanced but don’t forget about your lead generation, introductory products. People want to know the basics.
No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you're still way ahead of anyone who isn't trying.
Very few marketers even make the effort of doing Thank You cards. Should this be part of your everyday routine? Are there tasks that are a "better" use of your time?
Maybe. But, what if, no matter what niche you're in, you just singled out 4 random customers today and just jotted down 4 quick Thank You's? It would take just a few minutes out of your day but put you way ahead of the curve.
You just want to thank your customers for buying from you. There's no "sell", no discount and no hustle. You are just thanking them for their business. They are part of your success. Here are your tools for "Thank You" productivity...
Thank-You Tool #1: WPKunaki
On Robert and Lance's website, MembershipCube.com, as well as their other membership sites, they use a plug-in called WPKunaki, which is an address collector.
When someone joins their membership site, the plug-in pops up and asks for their mailing address and runs it through the address validator. Lance would be really crazy not to be collecting addresses.
It's nice to have it on hand. He can use it for Thank You cards, he can use it to send them webinar or DVD copies as just a quick bonus. He can also use it for geographics to target customers later for Facebook ads.
Thank-You Tool #2: Phone Calls
Sometimes Lance will even call them on the phone.
If someone just bought a $7 e-book from you, they're not expecting anything at all, not even an auto-responder-generated email. So, if you make that call, you're way ahead of anyone else.
If someone bought from you and you contact them the same day, they are going to just be happy and not have any complaints.
Thank-You Tool #3: Send Out Cards
This is a service that will allow you to send traditional cards to your customers. These are NOT electronic cards. They are "paper" cards like you would get at the store so they are very personal, not "mass e-mailed" and they won't go to your customer's spam folder or look like another sales push.
There are also gift options within the Send Out Cards system that you can send to your customer as well.
To learn more about how Send Out Cards can help you personalize your relationships with your customers, go to DoubleAgentCards.com.
Thank-You Tool #4: Google Drive
If you have a Gmail account, you also have a drive account. If you don't already have one, go get one. It's free.
You can create any doc and have it be in your Google Drive, where you can now access it from anywhere.
A good idea here is to keep a journal of different contacts/activities that have with your customers. Here is where you can keep a journal of the Thank You cards that you send out.
"Cheesy" Marketing
You want to stay away from cheesy marketing. Many marketers tell you to look up today's holiday and give your customers a "special discount" for that day (example: a "Boxing Day" discount) or to look up your customers' birthdays market to them on their birthdays.
It sounds like a good idea but all these marketers who teach this have never personally marketed to me on in this way. They've really just posted an occasional sale here and there when they're probably running low in their bank account.
It makes more sense to just sell what you sell and be consistent. You don't have to have sales all the time if you're thanking your customers for being there.
15% won't always buy high-ticket items but they will probably buy things where they can do a payment plan.
Then, your last 80% will probably not buy anything products/services over $20.
If that disappoints you, you can build a bigger list OR you can take better care of your list.
Even if your list is not that big you can still make sales. If you wanted to make $50K/month, would you rather have 100 subscribers and 50 sales of $100 each, regardless of the type of products? Or would you rather have 10,000 subscribers that only purchased $5 items. Robert has asked this of several of his customers and overwhelmingly people would rather work with the first option.
It's not necessarily about getting floods of people but about building a decent size list and really adding value in cultivating relationships with those who want to buy the higher-level products. It doesn't take much to:
Send them Thank You cards (Vistaprint.com for address labels and postcards)
Give them a phone call
Avoid the 3-inch DVD Syndrome
There are small writeable CD's. When Robert was first starting out, he saw these and thought, "Hey, cool I can fit this mini CD into a normal sized envelope. I can record something and send it out and I am going to make so much money."
If no one cares or no one plays it and it doesn't lead to anything it's not going to get you anywhere. In other words, something has to bring the customer back. It has to be intensely valuable and/or make the customer feel very valued.
Some Fun and Creative Marketing Ideas from Robert
One time for an event he took out Facebook ads that were so narrowed and targeted that the ad was basically just showing down to the 1 person he had picked out in Facebook.
For the one person he wanted to see it, he would put their name in the ad and their picture. He did successfully sell seats to seminars just based off this ad.
Another time, he went to Amazon and bought a huge box of microwave popcorn. He left the individual packages all sealed up in plastic and sent 100 of them out with copies of a quick letter. The letter basically said, "Here's some popcorn to watch this movie" and the URL in the letter went to an online "movie" that was pitching a live event. He spent $200 or $300 altogether on this marketing and sold seats to his event this way. It was a good return on investment.
An idea he's pursuing now is to send out copies of his Double Agent Marketing book to his customers along with a highlighter and a letter that says something along the lines of "this book has so much valuable information you'll need an extra highlighter."
Closing Thoughts
Don't do this to prospects or to people you plan to joint venture or network with. Do it low tech. once you start getting fancy it really kind of backfires.
These "Thank You" and marketing ideas are for your current customers, your best buyers and those you want to come back. Do it "low tech." Once you start trying to get "fancy", it really looks cheesy and can backfire. You just want to say Thank You and do something fun for them.
You can always reach Robert at his email via robert@robertplank.com. He would love to hear from you about your business and what marketing you're doing that is working successfully, and is happy to hear your questions. He may even feature your question on the show!
There's a problem with people wanting to take shortcuts to get to that $10K per month level.
We want to get you out of that way of thinking. You have to do 3rd grade before you go to college. If you jump right in without the warm-up, you stand the chance of the whole venture falling in on itself.
You want to do this the RIGHT way.
A lot of people in internet marketing get to that number but without sufficient preparation, they fall into the trap of having to put a lot of money back into the business or maybe have to hire a lot of employees, so when it comes down to it, they're actually "netting" quite a bit less than the $10K per month.
Four Daily Tasks
We've covered the Four Daily Tasks principle before. To recap, it means to take 4 tasks EVERY DAY that you can complete. 3 of them are your longer tasks, your half hour to 40 minute tasks. Then, you complete a "gimme" task that take just a few minutes.
Being able to finish FOUR THINGS EVERY DAY is very purposeful and motivating.
Why "tasks" and NOT "time"? It's not a matter of how many hours you put in per week. That's an employee way of thinking, i.e. "If I make $10 an hour and I put in 40 hrs. this week, I've made $400."
You're not an employee. You're a one man show, a business owner. For you to be successful, it's about hitting milestones.
Your four tasks need to be things that are actually able to be completed that will put you in the position of making money.
Changing your Twitter background doesn't do that. If you're making a membership site, and you've only made 10% of it, that's not complete. If you register a domain name for your site that is a complete task and puts you on the path. If you have set up your membership site that someone can see is complete with a PayPal button, THAT is a complete step.
Attitude Adjustments
When it comes to mindset, one of the most powerful things Robert ever learned was it's either inside of you or outside of you.
If something is not working for you, only one of two things needs to happen: you either change the way you think about it or you change what you're doing.
80% of your problems are in the way you think about them. If your business is not succeeding and you're walking around complaining that "life isn't fair", it's time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something different. If you're buying thousands of dollars of products but you're business still isn't up and running or successful, these 2 things need to happen:
Finish one of the courses that you keep buying. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start implementing something.
The problem with your beliefs is that your beliefs are set in stone first. Then, you filter the information and facts that you find through that belief system in a way that lets you reinforce those beliefs. A lot of this is subconscious.
If your personal belief is that making money online doesn't work then everything you read or take in that says the opposite, you will ignore it or think it's fake.
What's really scary about this is it turns into an echo chamber. You're going to believe that people who think and talk like you are smarter than everyone else, because you can relate to them better. The problem is that if you're grumpy and you make friends with 5 other grumpies, you reinforce each other's beliefs and drag each other down.
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -- Henry Ford
We need to model. We need to look at what it is that we want. We need to find who has it. Then, we need to emulate what they are doing to get there.
Steps On The Path To $10K Per Month
Phase 1: Freelancing. This is your quick way to get from $1k to $2k per month.
Fiverr (Fiverr.com)- a website where you can sell any service that you are skilled at. It doesn't have to be an advanced skill. It can be anything from transcription to voiceovers to converting documents to testing iOS apps. It sounds like you'd have to make a crazy amount of sales at $5 each to get anywhere, but the secret is in the up-sells. Additionally, although it doesn't sound like much, it may work out to be $7 or $8 per hour of work in income, you've now saved the time from having to spend countless hours looking for a job, you can work from home avoiding gas and parking costs, etc.
Uber (Uber.com) – this is like being a private taxi service. This works particularly well if you're in a larger-scale city and can work peak times, like weekends and nights. It is possible to make $1000 or more per week doing this if you can meet those 2 aspects.
Airbnb (AirBNB.com) – a property rental service. You can rent out a shared room, a private room or an entire home. Like Fiverr, there is a public profile rating system so you can see other reviews and know who is trustworthy and who is not.
Ebay and Craigslist (Ebay.com and Craigslist.net) If you're using it and have no plans of using it in the future, sell it!
FBA-Fulfillment by Amazon. This is where you find items that are low-priced and ship them into Amazon and make a profit on the difference between what it's sold for and what you purchased it for.
There's a little more advanced information to this and you can find out all the different ways to use and profit from FBA at Robert's program, www.dropshipceo.com.
Phase 2: Information Products. This is where you can make about $2K to $5K per month.
At some point, you're going to cap out on freelancing opportunities and just not be able to get over that $1K-$2K mark due to time constraints, etc. This is your next step.
First, you want to find a niche. Go to Clickbank.com and check out their "Marketplace." These are all the subjects and topics that people are looking for answers to. These are their "pain points"-the issues that they have where they are willing to pay for products that can help solve them.
Then, you can go to Robert's site, IncomeMachine.com, where you can find out how to take advantage of that niche, how to build a product with video and/or e-books, how to optimize putting together a program for people to purchase.
Once you get on the way with selling your product, you are building a "list", i.e. people who are purchasing your product that you can market to in the future.
As you build up that list, you can then joint venture with other peers in your niche (or a very similar niche) to piggyback on each other in an affiliate-type structure, where each of you benefits from the sale of either one of your products and you're both building lists.
You can also set up podcasts or webinars at this point, where you interview each other, guest blog, etc. This grows and grows.
When you're putting together information products for sale, it's best to go from "idea to implementation" within 3 to 7 days.
Some of what you turn out will be great and some of it may turn out to be duds.
It makes no sense to spend a year or two trying to get it perfect. Just get it out there and your customers' responses will tell you what you're doing right and wrong.
The ones that turn out successful, you can then spend more time revising and improving those or capitalizing on them. Let the duds go. They were just experiments.
As your information product business grows, you can let go of the more time-consuming and less-paying things you were doing to get by, you can step renting your room, etc.
Phase 3: Passive Income. This is where you're getting to that magical $10K per month.
This is the dream that you want to achieve. You need to build a membership site where people are paying to keep engaged with your program in one fashion or another.
Robert's MembershipCube.com will walk you through all the steps to set up a successful membership site.
For example, one of Robert's clients/students, Dr. Charles runs a directory. There's a certain procedure he teaches other doctors. When the doctors buy and complete his training, they get added to the nationwide directory so local people interested in that service can find them. These doctors are paying Dr. Charles monthly to stay in that directory. If they stop paying, they are deleted.
Ask yourself, what sort of service related to your niche would people be willing to pay for month after month? Do you have something where you could also provide a directory that people can pay to join?
Robert also has membership sites that people pay to have access to, such as www.podcastcrusher.com and www.makeaproduct.com. People want to learn how to do podcasting and create e-books because these are items that you can sell that will generate leads. What skill do you have that you can teach people that will provide them with real value?
Coaching
Once you've developed your information product in Phase 2 and a membership site in Phase 3, your next step to that $10K per month passive income can be coaching.
You've developed your DVD on guitar playing in easy steps in Phase 2, then you created a membership site in Phase 3, where you show monthly how to learn in just 1 day all the popular radio hits and started a directory for local guitar teachers.
The next step would be coaching. For a certain $ amount per hour (say $200 per hour), you will get on Skype with your client and walk them through any difficulties they are having or help them with starting their own local guitar teaching business.
Now, you've gotten to a level where you wake up in the morning and have an entire leads list that you can email with future products and services. You're pretty advanced at this point and getting ABOVE that $10K is going to seem a lot easier than it was GETTING to it.
P.S. 5 hours per week to $10K....where'd that come from? Your 5 hours per week is your 4 daily tasks. Spend an hour or less every day on the path to making money. It's fun, things move a lot of faster, and it keeps you motivated!
The Product: This is a solution to a problem. Also called an "information product" The Offer: Is the whole package grouped/stacked in a way that's really "sexy"
Let's Break Down Information Products
Here's a little exercise for you:
Go to ClickBank.com. At the top there is a tab that says "Marketplace." Click on the magnifying glass. It shows top offers on this site. These are real things that people are looking for-i.e., infertility cures, how to play piano, etc. Since people are looking for them, you know now that these are subjects that people are willing to pay for if you provide an "information product" that will help them fix it.
An Information Product can be an E-book, a video, or a PDF file. It just needs to be digital.
An Information Product is a step-by-step repeatable solution to a problem many people have.
Let's Break Down Offers
An offer is how you "package" the Information Product.
Most solutions involve combining 2-3 things, if not more, so those become your "offers."
This is the "extra stuff" that people will find exciting and desirable.
For example, if your Information Product is an E-Book on "How to Play Piano", your "extras" could be that you're going to teach them how to read sheet music or you're going to teach them how to play the most popular 5-10 songs right off the bat. You could include a monthly video meetup (via Skype or Google Hangout) to talk about what they're learning.
Now, they're not getting "just a book." Anyone can go buy a book and they probably already have and didn't find the answers they were seeking. You are here to take it to the next level and give to them what other's didn't.
What Do You Need To Sell Effective Offers? Good Copy!
Here are Robert's "Geeky Copywriting Terms"...
Product-see above.
Features-what it is. In this example, it is an "extra" on how to read sheet music.
Benefits-what you can do with it once you learn it. Once you learn how to read sheet music, you can literally read limitless songs. The benefit is WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH IT. What people are REALLY looking for is what THEY can get out of your training.
The Hook-what the offer hinges on. This is where you boil down your offer to the coolest thing you have included and inform about it in a short, concise sentence. This is what most of your marketing and your follow up emails and your sales copy is going to hinge on. Most people are going to be sold on the one thing because it's the coolest thing you have going on.
Let's put ourselves in the mind of your prospect . Someone just wants to play the piano. They want the shortcut. Your "Hook" would be: PLAY GUITAR TODAY.
That's an easy way to find a hook-take something that people expect to take months or years to learn and show them how to do it in a REALLY short time.
On his IncomeMachine.com, he teaches the 8 things you need in under 3 days. Shows people how to stop spinning your wheels and get something completed.
The formula is: How to get something big in value for little in money in a short amount of time without a lot of unnecessary stuff and fluff.
The Magic Wand-what would you add into this package if you could wave a magic wand, if anything was possible? It doesn't have to be practical. Think big and open up that creativity.
A Short Little Break for Some Quick Thoughts from Robert
Dunning-Kruger Effect: intelligent people tend to underestimate themselves while idiots tend to be overly confident and very often loud. That's okay. Just rest in the knowledge that if you're quiet but very capable that's okay too.
Facebook: Everybody's Facebook persona is better than real-life. When you see someone on there who's bragging every day, just know that they're more than likely overcompensating.
Thank You: Just say "Thank You" when you receive a compliment. It's that simple.
And, now…back to the show!
Let's Talk About Consistent Passive Income
This is your goal in Online Marketing. You want to get to a point where people are continuing to buy from you but you are not working harder than ever to keep up. The goal is to work less and continue having income and grow and excel.
People make a lot of mistakes in this area. Here's where they fall down:
People think that you can just create a membership site at $5 or $10 a month. They believe they will get 50k customers at a tiny monthly cost who will never remember to cancel it. That's not a way to make money. The way to find real money is to find solutions for people, price it reasonably, have happy buyers on your buyers list and continue to sell to them.
People just load up their site with interviews, articles and tidbits, etc. That's a lot more work for you and it has no substance and more fluff for them. Again, the way to find real money is to find solutions for people, price it reasonably, have happy buyers on your buyers list and continue to sell to them.
People want to give a "bulk discount" or a short "free trial" with a payment later on. That's just gimmick-y. You only want to price low (and it needs to be a high value product) if you're trying to build a list to sell higher-priced products later.
People use "geeky" research tools. Doing all this research on your competitor's blog posts and ads and pricing is not productive. You don't want to look to your competitors just for their pricing. To make this productive, you need to be concerned with what their hook is and come up with something better. The core of your marketing should be fixing a problem your customer has in a unique and fresh way.
People load up their site up with 20 bonuses, 1000 hours of video, etc. No one cares how many hours or years you worked at something. What they care about is "is this solution going to fix my problem?"
People get too close to their offers and too in love with their own stuff. They are so worried about having stuff and more stuff, that they end up just churning out crap. Again, think of a problem you're solving, create a product to solve that problem, throw in some offers that mean something and that you can keep active on a consistent basis for people to continue to buy packaged just as it is.
Okay, I've had enough problems! Let's Talk SOLUTIONS!!
What Makes Good Offers... What You Need to Know:
Not all websites can be recurring membership sites. For ex: "Dollar Shave Club." You're not a startup. You're here to start making money, not invest millions.
You need to solve a real problem 1-30 days. This is why Robert likes FIXED TERM membership sites. It's easier to make the course and sell it over and over again. The average attrition rate for membership sites is 3 months. If you charge someone $10/month and they only stay for 3 months then you've only made $90 and you constantly have to come up with new content to hopefully even keep them on your site. INSTEAD, solve their problem in a shorter amount of time, package it that way, that's what's on your sales and membership page(s) and you can keep selling that same product over and over again for $150. It's easier to sell once than to keep people engaged indefinitely.
Sell what you sell. Sell what you sell at the price you always sell it at and make it really easy for the customer to buy it. No one wants to wait 2 hours on a video for a "buy button" at the end and no one wants to pay $100 today and see it discounted to $50 the next day. Both of these tactics will just annoy potential customers.
Stomach buying from your competitors. That's right, buy your competitor's product. See what they're leaving out and how you can maybe do something better than them. If they're champions, then figure out how you can emulate them.
Eat your own dog food. Use the products you sell. Make it clear on your site to your potential customers that you use them.
The Magic Wand (yeah, it's that important we said it twice!) Do something fantastic. If you're Information Product is teaching them how to have their own membership site, do the initial set-up for them and your information product is how they can "run it."
How Do You Present an Offer?
First is The Core Offer. Tell them how many modules they're getting (the ideal number is 4). Every 60 to 90 minutes they get to the next milestone.
Tell them about the bonuses (which are also digital, like PDF checklists). Then, here is the physical bonuses (it could be anything from a DVD to a handheld video recorder, depending on the product you're starting with and the cost).
The FOUR Questions that will determine what you include in your total offer package:
What do people need to fill in the gaps? Could you send an iPod or camera to record video? Can you hook them up with an adwords coupon to help get them started?
What new problems do they have now that they solved the first problem? For example, they set up the membership site, now they need content. So, now you have a training on how to record and publish PowerPoint content using a video player.
Is there anything that can be a shortcut for them? An external service, a "Done-for-You" or even a simple calculator For example, in DropshipCEO.com, Robert offers a built in software tool that generates an email to all the customers requesting them to leave an Amazon review.
Is there something huge and cool that you could put in the offer that makes them say "Gotta Have It." For example, In Robert's SpeedCopy.com, he includes his huge swipe file.
The "Ultimate Offer Master List"
You need to go "Deeper Focus." Really hone into those things your customer desires.
Template or Checklist or a Swipe File: For example, a Checklist with How to Play Guitar would ask, "what kind of guitar do you have/plan to buy? Do you plan to play acoustic or electric? Did you buy extra strings?, etc. etc. You want to group these in 10-question sections by break-down of the subject. One guy who does real estate includes a swipe file of all of his successful real estate ads
Software (can be Web-Based or External): For example, WPNotepad.com lets customers track their own progress through their program on your membership site.
Or, you could offer a coupon for an external service, like a coupon for Camtasia Studio software.
Or, it could be a bundled service. Customers who purchase the program at WebinarCrusher.com, get automatic account with "GoToWebinar."
"Done- for- You": Just like it sounds... do something for them. If you're teaching them the Amazon FBA program (Dropshipceo.com), offer to make their first call to a supplier WITH THEM.
Go for the Low-Hanging Fruit (stuff that's pretty easy to do)
Mixed modalities: Make audio and/or video for things that are also written. Or, if your Info Product is already in video, provide them with an accompanying manual (use Lulu.com for this)
Resale Rights: This is a right to resell this and that part of your course. Don't sell the entire course. But, you can give sell them re-sale rights on maybe 3 of the videos in the program.
Personal coaching: Statistically, only about 5 -15 % of your customers will actually talk to you. Use TimeTrade.com to put up a special link in your site where they can schedule a time to talk to you. Or, give them access to text you with questions (use a Google Voice number for this). Extra content: interviews with experts. Extra resale rights you bought and re-packaged from a site like Master-Resale-Rights.com. (just don't tell them you did that)
"Go Large" with Enlargement
Extra Live Webinars: like a monthly recurring webinar where your customers can have a Q & A session.
Physical items like DVD's: (use Kunaki.com) or cameras, etc as discussed above
Offer them "community": Facebook Groups or Forums (the tricky part about forums is either a ghost town or a mess that you have to moderate).
Certification Directory: Dr. Charles runs membership sites for different surgery procedures. As part of other doctors paying him monthly for access to the instructional videos, they're part of a directory. Then, when Dr. Charles advertises, and someone seeks him out, they will find a physician near them trained in his methods.
Live event: "I'm going to teach you how to do this at this time and this place" on't offer this without an actual date or hotel booked. Or, you can rent out a smaller space, like a loft (check out AirBNB.com).
"Bundle It": Buy a program from this site and get access to an additional site.
10 Built-In Benefits that Should Come with Every Offer
Proof and results
Customer support
Uniqueness
Up to date
Price
Guarantee refund
24-7 access
Lifetime upgrades
Access to course forever
Community (means what you want it to mean as much or as little as you want)
Robert's Closing Thought: When someone google searches your name what comes up? Make sure it's what you want them to see!
Use WordPress to setup and manage all your sites: blogs, sales letters, membership sites...
Use our Plugin Dashboard plugin to click around and setup all the anti-spam, navigation, SEO, security, management plugins and more (plus get your themes and settings the way you want them in just a few seconds)...
And finally, use Backup Creator to create a copy of your site for safekeeping and to clone the next time you create new sites. Backup Creator now protects over 91,000 and will automatically backup your site to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, plus the 1 GB of free storage we give you as our personal "thank you" for using our plugin.
An online web-based digital membership site... you have a web page (a sales letter) where you offer to solve a simple problem: play guitar, reduce man-boobs, get your ex back. People click a button to buy the solution (a set of videos that play directly in their web browser) and they're taken to a member's area where they watch videos solving their problem.
A membership site: you need it to handle downloads whether you're running a single payment site ($10 one time, and yes, membership sites DON'T have to be recurring)...
Fixed term site (X number of payments) or forever-continuity (i.e. $37/month)...
And I don't want to tell you about how tough membership sites were during the "dark ages": your choices were either a $4000 piece of crap software that was old (even then) and didn't work right, or $400 per site and it literally took at least a week to connect the membership piece to WordPress, PayPal, and your email autoresponder...
Guess what?
You need to have a membership site
It needs to run in WordPress (so you can use your favorite themes and plugins with it, and it's setup in just a few minutes)
You need to host it yourself (hosted services that "do it for you" always end up lacking in what you want and a huge chunk of our coaching clients deal with people who want to migrate OFF those hosted membership platforms)
You need to get that membership site setup as FAST as possible and get your FIRST paying member as FAST as possible (even if it's just $10 one time)
The things that have always made money like having a sales letter and building a list STILL make money!
Can I tell you what made a huge difference when it came to setting up membership sites?
It's This: Your Membership Site Is Made Up Of "Levels"
Let me explain... NOT the way "they" explain it... they tell you to "setup levels for Silver, Gold, and Platinum." Or, "setup a level for your beginner golfing course with 24 lessons and then another level for your advanced golfing course"... that doesn't help anybody!
This makes more sense to me: sell access to your $100 (one-time) course on How to Buy and Flip a House. Create a single "page" in WordPress (it's ok if you don't know what that means yet) and pile your videos in there (I recommend four modules of 60-90 minutes each to get people to each milestone when it comes to buying and flipping a house.
Create the content (videos) for that site, put it in a membership site, create a 1-page "sales letter" listing a simple headline and 10 reasons people would want to grab your house compared to the alternatives. Add a PayPal button (a way to take payments online).
You're done at that point...
You can always add or change things later, like increasing the price from $100 to $497 to $1997 or add a second button next to it to give people the option for a payment plan.
THEN the next "course" or "page" or "level" (if you create one) would be called How to Buy and Rent a House. Not Advanced House Flipping, or House Flipping Volume 2. You find another NEED or PROBLEM people have and you solve that.
No one cares about your 400 hours of video...
No one cares about tips, tricks, interviews, tidbits -- get me from Point A to Point D and that's all you have to do.
Just take PayPal payments for now, don't worry about fancy stuff like an affiliate program (Clickbank) or taking credit card payments over the phone (Stripe)... the grass is always greener on the other side and what's more important is that you have SOMETHING rocking and rolling... just get to that one sale...
Don't worry about drip content (as the membership site owner, you're the only one that really cares about that) -- although we include our WP Drip plugin (we've been using it for over 6 years now) inside our Membership Cube course which also includes Wishlist Member.
Don't worry about organizing your content into a fancy "dashboard" just yet -- it's actually much easier to create the content (videos) first, pile them all on a WordPress "page" and then organize them... as opposed to trying to fill in a bunch of empty cubby-holes...
Membership Levels Explained: Don't Make This More Complicated Than It Has to Be
You make this real estate membership site and you have your "House Flipping" level and "House Renting" levels. It's much easier to use Wishlist Member. Most membership plugins that aren't Wishlist, even the WordPress ones, don't use "levels." When you use levels you can set one single page for that level, mutiple pages (and sub-pages) for that level... you could have a "Bonus" page that both levels share. It makes things a lot easier.
Now for one of my biggest breakthroughs with membership sites... levels are "on or off."
Someone buys the House Renting course from you, they pay, they create their membership account with you, now they're on the House Renting level.
Maybe they refund or they join using your payment plan and they eventually "cancel" or stop paying for that payment plan. PayPal sends a signal over to your membership site and "cancels" them from that level.
So you can see that they "used to" be on that House Renting level, but they're now disabled from it, so they can't access the pages or pages (or posts) you've assigned to that level.
On or off. Your membership site doesn't care or notice what price they're paying, or if they're paying every 30 days or 60 days or on a trial payment or whatever. They join, they create their account. If they cancel or refund, PayPal sends that signal over to cancel them from that level.
You can host multiple products (levels) within the same membership site. You can change the price of your button later (just edit the page on PayPal's screen, takes 30 seconds). You can add a fixed-term (payment plan) button to give people the choice between paying the whole $997 or in installments. You can walk the price up as you pile in more members until you encounter price resistance.
Heck, I've even started sites as forever-continuity (people pay $37/month) and then when I become tired of updating it, I just switched the button to a single payment and it was now a "package" of videos and content...
Get all the latest insights with membership sites, passive income, mindset, and more.
About Robert & The Podcast
The Marketer of the Day Podcast interviews entrepreneurs who have been through “the struggle.”
They’ve experienced the headaches of repeat failure, trial-and-error, scaling, delegating, course-correcting, and getting their online businesses to succeed beyond their wildest dreams… and want to help you get to where you need to go.
