Internet marketer of the week: Big Jason Henderson from BetterPostureGuaranteed.comBigMarketingOnline.com.
My big breakthrough from him: a membership site doesn't have to be a recurring forever monthly payment. You can create a single payment, or even better, a fixed term site, instead of that old and tired download page, using Member Genius.
Black Friday deals, discounts. It's a drug for your business. Get that quick "hit" that you pay for later.
What you're trying to obtain from the discount is to get non-buyers to buy something low ticket. Get the juices flowing.
I buy from you and you say, check your email for the download link. What? Send me to a membership signup so I get an email and have a lost password link for later. Member Genius takes care of all that.
No support link from your sales letter or your membership site? Time to change that.
Five Things to Identify So You Can Get the Magic Feeling Back
Signal #1: Fear-driven thoughts. Have you been told to "manage your expectations?" Then you're always expecting to be let down. That's not a solution. That's settling!
Serve the needs of those who deserve it (customers), and cut out those dragging you down. Avoid lists of your failures, enemies. What's the point? We become what we focus on AND we become what we repeatedly do. There will be up's and down's in your business.
Signal #2: What's the pattern? Buy that course, find one thing you don't like with it? Refund or just don't implement? Off to more of the same stuff?
What if you implemented exactly as they showed you? Don't be smarter than the person. Who cares if you don't "like" the person. The real test: does it do what you said it would?
Signal #3: Can I just get one thing out of it? Go through it all. Do it all. Russians who copied WW2 planes. They left the dents in.
Signal #4: What can and can't you control? Don't depend on anything external for happiness. Only you can be happy, satisfied, and fulfilled.
Are you setting yourself up for disappointment, because you know you can't control it? My old reliable thought is: "what's good about this, or what could be good about this?"
Signal #5: Have a good support system. As in, a helpful mastermind, mentor, and role model. Kick out those toxic people and instead, get some positive perspective.
What's your goal, anyway? To pick up one extra thing? To master Facebook ads? To figure out how this person got 800 webinar attendees?
"You cannot change others but you can change yourself"
"The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about." -- Wayne Dyer
If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed. -- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
It helps to know what goal you're after, and then you can monitor those who have what you want.
Are you annoyed that an Internet marketer is marketing to you? Instead of looking at other marketers as people who are "serving" you as a consumer, why don't you look at what successful things they repeatedly do, like consistent products, blogging, and webinars? And model what they do!
Dennis wrote the book from 5BucksADay and has the membership site Earn1kaday. Like me, actually leaves his money-making websites online. What a concept.
If a site makes me money, I'll keep maintaining and promoting it. He has lots of irons in the fire such as a new product and new Kindle book every month.
Complaints of the Week
I'm at your sales letter. Where do I go to login to your membership site?
I bought the "lite" version and I login. Where can I go to upgrade? Marketers delight, 5 site license to unlimited license.
What about an in-your-face upsell or interstitial ad? I want something else you're selling.
You're supposed to "sell the click" in emails but what the heck am I clicking on? You're only telling me about the Pro and Basic packages, launch deadlines, but what it is, in one sentence?
Feature Presentation: Course, Blog, Podcast, Book, DVD
I once found an internet marketer "coach's" page but I couldn't find 1 product, 1 video, 1 book by him or even his last name.
What do people find when they search for you? What about on YouTube? Amazon? You should always be URL dropping or off-handedly mentioning the things you sell on your blog and podcast. Who needs testimonials? Use yourself as you own examples, testimonials, and case studies.
Course: Four milestones for $997 to get in the "high ticket" mindset, then drop that price SLIGHTLY (MembershipCube.com)
Blog: content marketing, cannibalize your Facebook re shares, 5 minute YouTube content: what pisses you off (your opinion) or something helpful (video to create a PayPal mass pay file, or resize an image without Photoshop) (IncomeMachine.com)
Internet marketer of the week: Ray Edwards. Creator of the Rapid Writing Method. He absorbs what Brendon Burchard, Michael Hyatt, Dave Ramsey all do very well -- branding and unification.
A huge breakthrough I got out of his "Writing Riches" book was that just taught straightforward copywriting. Not a lot of silly stories or parables mixed in like others teach you "should" have in a book. What a concept!
Common Cop Outs (That We Just Solved in Today's Show)
My niche is people with money! Who wouldn't want it?
My niche is young people because they're smart, or old people because they have all the money
Split test it!
I'm going to provide value and give everything away for free
I'm still learning
I have an idea but it's already been done before
I have an idea but I'm waiting on someone else to do the work
I'm "waiting" for the right time
A Confused Mind Never Buys!
Delayed buy button and I can't buy, or I can't buy on an iPad
I optin and I can't buy right away, I have to wait for your sequence
I have to buy 3 upsells just to get the thing I actually wanted (Lance says: sell what you sell)
Blogging or posting without purpose (Add Signature plugin and URL dropping)
Too many choices: 2 or 3 at the most. More choices = "experimental" pages (yearly and trial)
Optin page: headline, 3 bullet points, call to action, optin form (no video, no testimonials)
Sales letter: have you noticed they're way shorter? very few words, even. Software is all about the screenshots and features.
Short & To the Point Landing Pages: Keep it Shippable
Make the buy button first, before anything else
Then headline and subheadline
Then the offer stack (what's in it)
Then flesh out the bullet points (dream product), story and transitions
Then create the product after all that!
(PLR placeholder is optional)
Quick Questions Answered in Today's Program
To replay or not to replay?
Non fast forward video?
Squeeze page? What's the exact structure?
What niche? Healthy, wealthy, or wise
What product? Solve an actual problem that's easy for you, tough for others, that people are willing to pay money for, that's repeatable in checklist form, but there's still enough wiggle room for people to be creative. It gets them there and delivers a FAST result
Testimonials? Don't let that hold you back from launching. No review copies, but have an email sequence asking how they like it. When people use it and respond, piece together a testi from their response.
Upsell? This is another "goodie" you don't need right away. It shouldn't "just" be something "bigger" or something lazy like resale rights. It should be "the bigger picture."
Five Dimensions of Knowledge from Jonathan Wells of AdvancedLifeSkills.com
What we actually know
What we think we know
What we would like to know
What we don't need to know
What we used to know
Let's add two more (the hardest ones to sell to you have to "sneak them" inside other ones: what we don't know we don't know, and what we need to know
Internet Marketing
World's largest taxi service owns no taxis (Uber)
Largest accommodation provider owns no real estate (Airbnb)
Largest retailer has no inventory (Alibaba)
Most popular media company creates no content (Facebook)
Largest movie house owns no theaters (Netflix)
Largest software vendors don't write the apps (Apple & Google)
Today's Quotes from Henry Ford
You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.
Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
Attributes That Should Be Running in Your Head all the Time, Consistently
New Things Coming Down The Pipeline: There is no such thing as luck. (Scientific studies have disproved luck.) You just have to keep putting offers out there and promoting them.
Follow-Through: Finish what you start (focus, minimum viable product, iteration, debugging, refactoring)
Self-Actualization: Know the difference between a lost cause, an offer that's "close" but needs tweaking, and a "home-run" that you should keep rolling.
Creativity: New ways of solving the problem bigger and faster while working under limitations (and making old tired concerts new and exciting to prospects)
Easy & Repeatable Solutions to Your Current Problems
We created it because there was no good way to manage all our WordPress sites from one location. The other solutions that "tried" to do it, sucked!
Solve a real problem. It doesn't matter if "a" solution already exists. It probably sucks. Yours will be better.
When we put Website Remote together, and had our new affiliates sell and market our existing Backup Creator plugin, I had a few realizations...
Realization #1: Get Out More
You don't have to confine yourself to little sites like the Warrior Forum. You can use other peoples' land to build a list, but don't live there.
This is true when it comes not just to pricing and positioning your products, but also what advice or training you listen to.
Your business is your business. You're free to charge whatever price you want, limit the number of sales, email as often as you want. Update your blog or submit podcasts as frequently as you feel like, because you can. You don't need any reason for why you're doing what you're doing in your online business, other than because you can.
Realization #2: Eat Your Own Dog Food
If you actually use the products you create and sell, then you can't use because it's something that helps your business regardless of how slow or quickly it sells.
The programming term "eating your own dog food" means that if you use the thing you sell every day, then you'll transform it to a piece of crap into something that's useful.
To make our tool useful, we iterated. I created a simple version of our tool, and had Lance login sight unseen and show me how he was using it, and where he got stuck, to see his thought process. This is called hallway testing.
Because of "dog-fooding", we added SSL support for our Paper Template, Member Genius, and Video Player plugins this month, and made them all compatible with WordPress caching plugins, because we needed those things in place for our launch.
This past couple of weeks, we launched our new version of Backup Creator (3.0) and had an army of affiliates make us a bunch of sales, without us using our list at all. We gave away 100% commissions, and the point wasn't to make money but to recruit some new affiliates and build a list of buyers.
Realization #3: Treat Your Business Like a Real Business
We created the minimum viable product (version 1.0) and the launch deadline pushed us into gear and got our priorities in order.
Get that first version out there, and market the hell out of it. Don't make any rash moves like offering discounts or lifetime access which shouldn't be on your radar for a long time until you can "run the numbers."
Price your offers where there's buying resistance. Don't give into the mob. You might just need better marketing.
We need to do a little better with the positioning on Website Remote to compete against free, inferior, and generally worse "similar" products (not necessarily competitors).
Realization #4: Follow the "Four Daily Tasks" in Order to Get Everything Done
Four Daily Tasks means you should complete four business-related tasks, each in one sitting (three 45 minute sessions and one 10 minute session). Every day, complete the four tasks that get you closer to making more money.
I'm at my best when I alternate days between proactive business-building tasks (traffic and product creation), and on alternate days, business-maintenance tasks like answering support desk tickets.
Automate your business as much as you can, for example, queue up autoresponder emails for the week so there are no distractions.
Simple Words of Advice
It takes the same amount of energy to feed your dreams as it does your fears. Make a list of things that make you happy. Make a list of things you do every day. Compare the lists. Adjust accordingly.
12 things successful people do differently:
They Create and Pursue FOCUSED Goals
They Take Decisive and Immediate ACTION
They Focus On Being PRODUCTIVE, Not Just "Busy"
They Make Logical and Informed Decisions
They Avoid The Trap Of Trying To Make Everything "Perfect"
They Are Willing To Work Outside Of Their Comfort Zone
They Keep Things SIMPLE
They Focus On Making Small, Continuous Improvements
They Measure and TRACK Their Results and Progress
They Maintain a Positive Attitude and LEARN From Mistakes
They Spend Time With Successful and Motivational People
They Always Maintain a Balance In Their Life
And finally, be sure to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (link below) and grab your Website Remote account to remotely manage and control your WordPress sites.
Are you scared? What if you became more aware of what made you anxious, scared, or nervous? Could you dissect those into smaller pieces? If you did, you'd be able to change and improve those small, manageable pieces...
What if I asked you to write down a page of words to describe a "bad mood" such as: flustered, dejected, beat-down? What if I asked you to then write a list of words describing a "good mood" such as: happy, energized, bubbly?
My guess is, that list of "bad mood" words would be longer than the "good mood" list. Let's change that for you.
To become more successful in both our personal lives and our businesses, we need to become more detailed about the positive things and less detailed about the negative. Whatever you apply more detail to is where your mind will focus.
What's the "trick" for overcoming that fear and thinking more positively and effectively?
Answer on a 1 to 10 Scale
When you go to the store, the clerk asks, "How are you?" Both of you are expecting your response to be a mono-syllabic "good" or maybe a "great."
Instead of doing that, ask yourself how you are on the 1-10 scale. Maybe you're having a "better than average" day, so you say 8.1.
Not only do you cause a "pattern interrupt" for the clerk, which might get you a nice laugh, but it will help you out by causing you to actually think about how you feel, instead of just replying generically with a word that has no real meaning.
Use the 1 to 10 Scale in Your Own Business
Okay, so we can see how evaluating yourself on a 1-10 scale can put you more ‘in touch' personally, but how does it help in your business? Here are a few examples:
Writing and Revising: The majority of people are not the greatest writers but if you are in internet marketing, you have to put out content. You need to be able to put out on okay first draft and for the most part a first draft is good enough. This isn't school and you're not going to triple your income by making some small edits to an email.
If you're writing a book, you might need to spend more time than on a blog post, but the principle is the same. We don't want to spend an hour writing 1 chapter of a book and then spend 5 hours doing edits.
How do you edit quickly so you don't consume all of your time? Again, the answer is scale from 1 to 10. Once the book is written (and it's been typed/spell-checked), you could just skim paragraphs and rate each one on a scale from 1 to 10 for substance.
Then, you quickly average those to get an "overall" rating. If you come up with an 8 or 9, great. But, if you come up with a 7.0 book, and you wanted an 8.0, your strategy would be to just go through and focus on fine-tuning the lower-rated paragraphs.
Overall Business Strategy: What if you're not making enough money from your online business? What if someone asked you, "How are you doing with Facebook ad campaigns?" If you answered with "good" or "okay", that's not going to help. "Good" is not measurable and it's an "automatic" response, instead of one that forces you to look for clarity.
Use that 1 to 10 scale to pinpoint issues. Rating gives you better accuracy about what/where the problem is and where you'll improve it.
Here are 10 areas that you could focus on and maximize to improve your business overall and make more money.
Time management and Mindset
Building the List
Email Follow-up and Auto-responder sequences
Membership Retention
New Customers
Joint Ventures
Free Traffic
Paid Traffic
Info Products and Recurring Income
Big-Ticket Sales and Coaching
Write a number next to each of those above items. Look at these factors individually and "score" them. This draws attention to areas where you'll capitalize to improve the overall picture.
For example, if a real problem that you have is not emailing, rate that lower. If you need more traffic, then you'd rate those lower.
Doing these one by one will help you think of solutions to improve that specific aspect of your business. Then, look at that average number. You'll see where you are and where you're headed.
Today's Winning Quotes
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, but small minds discuss people." (Eleanor Roosevelt)
"I found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, be more active and show up more often." (Brian Tracy)
"1 in 160 are Millionaires in the U.S. 1 in 1460 are millionaires in the world." -- Dan Kennedy
Check out Robert's proven method for writing a winning e-book at Make a Product, his A-Z strategy for developing your own "free traffic-generating" podcast at Podcast Crusher, or his fun and easy course on creating your own graphics at Graphic Dashboard.
You can also get more personal guidance in his monthly mastermind at Double Agent Marketing.
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.
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.
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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.
