Recent Updates
What Membership Software Do You Use?
Do you run a membership site?
What software, plugins, and payment processors do you use for it?
I just setup a real recurring membership site. No more of this password protected blog stuff. I used aMember and WordPress, with Clickbank as the payment processor.
I was really surprised how many plugins are available for this stuff now. Even a year or two ago, you had to modify code and do custom scripting... "duct taping" the scripts together. Now you just install some plugins.
Pretty freaking cool!
I used a blog because I wanted to stockpile a bunch of content up. aMember has the most support (I'm a member of Membership Academy so that helps.)
And Clickbank? If you read my Membership Sites on Crack report, you'd know why I chose Clickbank. Affiliates (60% commission on a recurring product) plus the escape plan. If I can get enough content piled into that membership site so that I have a year's worth of content in advance, you better believe I'm selling it off.
Do you run a membership site? What software do you use to run it? Membergate, aMember, Visiongate? What processor... PayPal, Authorize.net, Clickbank, PayDotCom, 1ShoppingCart? How do you like it?
Please, show off the sales letter to your membership site as well since those can be tricky...
Recession?
What are you working on this week? I'm cranking out a bunch of content for a new membership site...
Lots of marketers the past couple of months are using the economic recession as a hook to sell their stuff. "This system will help you profit in a recession..." I'm sure you're tired of it. You can't have a Unique Selling Proposition if it's not unique!
It's not just the internet marketing niche either. I got this e-mail from Experts Exchange (a programming forum) a few weeks ago:
"If you had invested in the S&P 500 just before Thanksgiving 2007, and cashed out just before Thanksgiving 2008, you would have lost 41% of your money."
Boo-frickin-hoo. I lost $30k in cash to the stock market the first month of this year. The value of my home has dropped $137,000 in the past 5 months on a city block where at least 30% of the homes were in foreclosure when I moved in.
One of my relatives was laid off this month, and you know what he immediately did? He didn't feel sorry for himself -- he started looking for another job. He has a savings account that will last him a little while and doesn't have a ton of debt that will eat him alive.
Another friend of mine just bought a brand new car and a house for his wife and kid, neither of them are college educated, they work "average" jobs and they can actually afford the payments.
For my business partner and I, 2008 was our most profitable year ever. I just made close to $5000 selling a 7-pack of PHP scripts, and another $4000 before that selling a 23-page PDF report, using minimal outside advertising. It was almost 100% in-house e-mail marketing. He is close to $100k in income for the year.
We both bought homes this year, and we're both taking our girlfriends to Hawaii for New Years at the end of December.
I don't have to tell you about how there are more cars on the road, more people in lines at stores and in the movies now than ever...
The whole point of a "recession" is to weed out the weak businesses. You can either watch the news way too often, believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and let it depress and demotivate you. OR you can realize that there are people out there giving up (just because they hear bad news) and you can get ahead of them.
You might have already read the story below. It's "The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs!"
There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.
He was hard of hearing so he had no radio. He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers. But he sold good hot dogs.
He put up signs on the highway, stood on the side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog, mister?" People bought. He increased his meat and bun orders. He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.
He finally got his son home from college to help him out. But then something happened. His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio? Reading the newspapers?
"There's a big depression. The European situation is terrible. The domestic situation is worse."
The father thought, "My son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know." He cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.
His hot dog sales fell almost overnight. "You're right, son..." The father said to the boy. "We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."
D'oh!!
Do you belong to any clubs or memberships to network and get more ideas, do you know what you want in 2009 and do you know what you have to do to get it? Heck, what can you do differently in the next three weeks that hasn't worked for you this year?
Please comment below, and let me know what you are working on for the remainder of this year. And guys, PLEASE don't turn this into a political or economic discussion. The whole point is that politics and economics won't affect your business unless you let it. Your bad attitude will KILL YOU if you let it.
Hypnotic PHP
I just launched Hypnotic PHP on Thursday, so how did it do? $3,308 in 24 hours... and $4,574 in 48 hours, that's how it did!
Out of the 962 people who actually clicked through my e-mail, 211 bought. That's a 21.9% conversion rate on my untested, half assed full of typos sales letter that I wrote in a few hours.
From those $17 purchasers: 141 of them accepted my $7 upsell containing 7 more videos and scripts (Urgency Tactics) ... 66% conversion rate there.
So the grand total was 352 sales for a total of $4,574... $4,320.56 after fees, but the number of sidetracked sales of other products, made up for those PayPal fees.
So why the heck didn't I do a dimesale or anything like that for this launch?
You don't ALWAYS need to repeat the same freaking exact process when you launch a product!
I used to have people complain about my dimesales (because they couldn't get in at a low price fast enough), this time I had people complain about the LACK of a dimesale (because he's used to getting in at a low price).
I haven't given up dimesales, but the effort that goes into pre-selling my list a few days ahead of time is a lot more valuable than doing all the steps to make sure my dimesale works correctly.
You don't ALWAYS need a dimesale offer, just some kind of scarcity. Mine was really low-key... you get in now for $17, but after 48 hours it's $27. No countdown timer, no ticker counting the number of sales... just a simple offer.
If you were on my list you got the Email Marketing on Crack videos that explained it...
- Day 1: Tell your list something's going on sale at such and such date and time.
- Day 2: Explain the biggest benefit. (48 hour notice)
- Day 3: List out the rest of the benefits. (24 hour notice)
- Day 4: Tell them you launched it. (3 minute notice)
- Day 5: Tell them it's the last chance to get in before you close the doors or raise the price
That's it! It's not rocket science. I only started applying this after people told me the dimesales didn't give them time to read the sales letter.
But when I replaced the dimesale with standard scarcity, I still made the same amount of money with less customers -- which means less support.
I know some of you guys might cry and say, "Yeah right, you couldn't have done that without your big mailing list..." How do you think I built that mailing list up in the first place? Product launches on forums to build my list.
One final tip about pre-selling your list: Have the product ready to go before you start pre-selling it. I see lots of guys promote first and then end up having to push the launch date back.
But me, I used those few extra days to whip up an irresistible upsell offer (the extra $7 videos and scripts). 90 minutes of work netted me an extra $707 on that promo. 🙂
Am I Evil For Working At a Day Job?
My question to you today is: does working at a day job make me evil?
I have been balancing the day job and internet marketing thing for years. It's not that bad. I'm getting my first 3-5 year computer programming job on my resume, lots of free training that would otherwise cost $5000, really good health insurance, and a reason to get up in the morning.
I don't always work 9-to-5 hours. Some days I work 6AM to 2:30PM, or 10AM to 6:30PM. It's also not the most challenging job. I don't have to work overtime, I'm not on-call, I don't take my work home. So I'm free to do internet marketing stuff after work, during lunch, and on weekends.
Quick Story:
Sometimes I forget to pick up my paycheck at my day job. Last month when I went to the receptionist to pick it up, one of my co-workers, a really cool woman in her 40's, noticed I'd taken a while to pick up my check.
She commented, "Someone else must be making those Mustang car payments..."
I told her nope, I pay for my car, but I wasn't making payments on the car... I bought it for $20,000 in cash last year.
She was surprised. I shrugged and said I'd saved up some money. I forgot to add that I own a home at age 24, or that I pay double into my principal every month.
I also kept quiet the fact that I'd launched a product the night before, and made more in 90 minutes than she made in 30 days.
How about the fact that I dropped two months worth of pay at that job for a one week vacation in Hawaii during the winter break?
No one at work knows my secret, that I make more than my boss, his boss, and his boss. Out of 800+ employees at my place of work, the only people who take home more money than me are the president and his 10 vice presidents.
When do you think I should quit?
When I have a year's worth of income in savings? Don't give me that, "Quit when your internet job has replaced your day job" line. I did that years ago.
I'm not going to be one of those guys who quits without health insurance. When did you quit and do you have health insurance? Who is your provider?
Once you lost that "time crunch" to get back to your day job, did it kill your productivity?
I am completely lost here... I had planned on being self employed right out of college but this REALLY nice and easy day job fell into my lap. Some days it keeps my busy, some days I get bored and wish I could take a road trip or something.
Stay or quit? Please tell me in the comment box below. If I don't get ten replies maybe I'll just quit regardless.
Always Write a Report About What You Learned
I'm back from my trip from Affiliate Incubator 2008 Dallas.
I learned a lot, and here's my tip for attending seminars: Take whatever notes you write down and turn it into a PDF report, that you NEVER show anyone else.
Not only does it train you to keep pumping out 5 to 10 page reports, the information becomes a part of you because you retyped it and revised it.
If I had a clone who wasn't able to attend the seminar, I could just hand this document over to him and he would have all the info without having to attend.
I'm a pretty rare note-taker. If you're a smart enough businessperson you know that 99% of what's being said doesn't apply to your business, but I still wrote about 10 pages of notes.
I took the best of Perry Belcher's AdWords tips, Ryan Deiss' continuity management, Mr. X's time management secrets, Frank Sousa's traffic tips, Russell Brunson's "moving the free line" and article marketing stuff, and Anik Singal's affiliate marketing techniques... plus some stuff I learned from chatting at meals and made it into an 8 page report.
To be honest, I walked out of all the other presentations to avoid information overload. There's only so much information you can absorb over a weekend, and with seminars I always avoid the newbie oriented stuff.
Now I've torn most of the pages out of my physical notebook and I have stuff to do for the next 30 days to keep me busy.
To be honest, looking back over my report, I'm going to ignore about half of the tips on there because I know I just won' t have time for them.
Knowing what NOT to change on is even more important than knowing what to change in your business.
Anyway, my friend Jason Fladlien wrote up a quick report of his own about the 8 mistakes he saw being made at these seminars.
Some of these are truly classic, like the SEO guy and the "60 Second Rule." If you can't make a decision about something, give yourself exactly 60 seconds to decide.... even if it's the wrong choice.
P.S. No, I didn't get to meet Russell, but I did meet Stu McLaren, Joel Christopher, Big Jason Henderson, Blake Milton, Bobby Walker, and more. It was great to see Eric Louviere again, and Marc Harty talking about mini-days.
P.P.S. I'm also on an article writing frenzy, setting aside one hour per day to write 7 articles... before I come off this seminar high.
Today's Question: What's your best post-seminar productivity tip? How do you get back on track, and maintain that seminar high?
I need my ten comments... if I don't get them, I'm never attending another seminar ever again.
Affiliate Incubator Part 2
The other day we went over some stuff you can do to promote products as an affiliate, but what can you do to get others to promote YOUR affiliate products?
As of this writing, I sell 48 different products from one Clickbank account. Affiliates only account for about $1,000 per month of my income, but hey that's a free $12,000 per year on top of everything else so it's definitely worthwhile.
I'm sure the seminar will have some kind of non-disclosure agreement, so I don't want anyone to think I'm passing on something from the seminar... which I haven't attended yet. Let's get my affiliate MANAGING tips out in the open right now.
Affiliate Management Tactic #1: Offer High Commission or Recurring Commission
I joined Amazon.com's affiliate program, the first BIG affiliate program on the net, in 2000. They offered 15% commission on DIRECT sales (if you linked right to that product) or 5% on SIDETRACKED sales (you link to that product and the person buys something else on Amazon.com).
Screw that. If you are running a pay per click ad campaign, the sales letter you're promoting converts at 1%, the product costs $30, and you get 50% commission, your maximum bid would have to be 15 cents just to break even. 10 cents per click if you even want 50% profit.
Likewise, if that same vendor offered 75% commission, you could bid up to 22 cents per click. If they offered a $297 upsell, and 10% of buyers took the upsell, that brings the "average" product price up to $56.70 and means you can bid up to 42 cents per click.
Introduce backends: upsells or one-time-offers, thank you page offers, recurring commissions, anything to give your affiliates more money... and they'll be able to afford sending the serious pay-per-click and targeted traffic your way, instead of the usual "setup a blog and post to forum" half-assed effort.
Give free access to the product after a certain number of sales. Incentives for the top affiliates... plasma TVs and MacBook Airs... but only if it's a big launch. Russell Brunson gave an H3 Hummer to his top affiliate once! Show affiliate leaderboards to get people clawing for the top spot.
Affiliate Management Tactic #2: Provide Banners and Solo Ads for Affiliates
When I give affiliates something to promote, I create a page for them where they can fill in their ID and it shows them their affiliate link and a solo ad branded with their ID. I do this using JV Plus.
A solo ad is simply a quick e-mail your affiliate can cut and paste to send to his list. It doesn't have to be long, just 250 words. Find the best bullet points or the biggest benefit/takeaway and write a SHORT article about it. Tell affiliates they can post it on their blog, submit it as an article, send it as an e-mail, do whatever they want with it.
468x60 sized banner ads are also popular but for me (not being a graphics-oriented guy), the solo ad is most important.
Affiliate Management Tactic #3: Remove Distracting Links
Remove opt-in forms, squeeze pages, offsite links from pages affiliates will send traffic to. I just had this argument with Ben Prater about an opt-in form he had on a sales letter I was promoting as an affiliate.
If I'm sending affiliate traffic to someone else's site... it's not leading to a sale... and it's building someone else's list without giving me credit, I'm GIVING away subscribers. Your list is your baby... your affiliates value their own lists as well.
What's your TOP TIP for getting affiliates to promote your products? Give me ten comments, below and I'll increase the affiliate payout on ALL my products across the board from 50 percent to 60 percent.
Affiliate Incubator Part 1
I'm attending the Affiliate Incubator seminar next week (Sept. 25th - 27th 2008) in Dallas, Texas. I'll probably learn lots of things about promoting stuff as an affiliate.
Affiliate marketing is pretty cool, you don't need to worry about product creation or customer support, you just send traffic to the vendor's page and then get your commission.
My own products sell the best to my list ($2000 to $4000 launches all the time) but I have been known to send $500 e-mails on a regular basis. Recently, I promoted the legendary Ben Prater's "iPhone Secrets Exposed" package.
That landed me 8 sales on a $397 product with 50% commission. You do the math... that's 1500 bucks from a couple of e-mails, probably 20 minutes of work writing the follow-ups. Those e-mails were so good that Ben incorporated them into his sales letter.
Let me empty out my brain with what I know about affiliate marketing already...
Affiliate Tactic #1: Have a List Already
It's simple, you can't expect any big profits unless you have a list of leads you've built yourself and more importantly, qualified buyers. Write up a quick 10 to 20 page report, record at least 20 minutes of videos and price it at $7 to get lots of buyers. Make sure to capture an e-mail address after the sale.
If you can get just 100 people to buy that $7 report, you can safely assume you'll score one affiliate sale... if you promote a complementary product to that list.
Affiliate Tactic #2: Think of Something They Didn't Think Of
I learned this one watching Todd Gross promote affiliate products. He promoted a product called "Floating Action Button" ... it's just what it sounds like, shows a hovering box that moves as you scroll. My Action PopUp script does the same thing.
Instead of giving people the usual sales pitch about popups, he showed how cool it was to place a YouTube video on the floating button, giving your sales pitch in the corner WHILE they read your sales page, and you urging them to click the order button.
All I see Big Jason Henderson do when he promotes affiliate products... records a video of himself (either screen capture or talking head) going over the benefits, then he watermarks his affiliate link to the bottom of the video and blasts that video out to YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, all the video sites.
When I promoted "iPhone Secrets Exposed" I just thought of what Ben left out of his sales letter...
E-Mail #1: You should be in a SPECIFIC profression... i.e. iPhone programmer instead of a regular programmer. No URL yet, just warming them up.
E-Mail #2: Code iPhone apps to get a recurring income on subscription fees... I just looked at Ben's bullet points and asked myself, "WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME when I create an iPhone application?"
E-Mail #3: Are iPhones an untapped resource? What would you do if you invented YouTube, MySpace, before anyone else. If you don't code an iPhone app is it like letting the next Facebook pass you by.
E-Mail #4: Statistics to blow them away. There are this many iPhone users, this much profit from the AppStore, this many applications (low competition).
That's it. I could have fired that off as one e-mail but I spaced it out into several.
This tip goes without saying: Don't promote the same launches as everyone else and don't use the samea cut-n-paste affiliate messages as everyone else.
Affiliate Tactic #3: Proper Redirects
Don't promote your naked affiliate link. Get a simple script to send traffic from a link like http://www.robertplank.com/recommends/some-affiliate-program so it's not totally obvious you're using an affiliate link.
Actually what I really prefer is, I register a .com domain and use that as a redirect. It's only 8 bucks, and I've got some really good ones. For example, Jason Fladlien's 7 Minute Article product is on a domain name called "InstantContentCreation.com" ... but I grabbed up 7MinuteArticles.com and redirected it to my affiliate URL.
I'm sure Affiliate Incubator will have a lot of newbie-oriented info like, promote recurring products... how to calculate the Clickbank refund rate or statistically decide if a product is worth promoting... how to make a squeeze page and a viral report. How to add your own crazy bonuses "Gary Ambrose" style.
But if I can find out just one thing I don't know, the trip will be worthwhile (just like everything).
What's your FAVORITE affiliate marketing tactic? I mean marketing AS an affiliate, not MANAGING affiliates... we'll get to that later.
I need ten comments on this post... add yours below... or I might stop creating products for good, and only promote affiliate offers.
Barack Obama Follows Robert Plank on Twitter!
You know you're popular when one of two Presidential candidates personally goes out of his way to add you as a friend on Twitter...
Okay, just kidding. Senator Obama is following 70,000 people on Twitter including me... his account automatically subscribes to YOUR updates when you subscribe to his.
Twitter is a social networking site where you can provide brief, up-to-the-minute updates about yourself -- you are limited to 140 characters so that people who subscribe to you can receive updates via text message.
It sounds like a big waste of time if you use it incorrectly (just like anything else)... and lots of people leave updates like:
(8:35 am) Went to the bathroom.
(9:36 am) Waiting in line at McDonald's...
(10:59 am) Leaving to do errands...
No one cares about that but people do care if you have a relevant discussion going, if you're launching a new product they would like, you have a new blog post, you're going to a seminar, or have a quick question... Twitter is a nice and easy way to build a (non-email) list.
Just about every day his Twitter update says: "In Albuquerque, New Mexico. Discussing the need for equal pay. Watch this discussion live at (url to watch the streaming video)" ... The city, state, and topic change.
That's perfect. You know what he's doing every day but there aren't a ton of annoying promotional messages, and there aren't any useless messages either.
My question to you:
Do you use Twitter?
Is it a waste of time?
Will spammers ruin Twitter?
What's your BEST Twitter marketing tip?
Please! Take 27 seconds to leave your comment below so I can get the ten comments I need to keep updating this blog...
Google Alerts
Do you happen to use Google Alerts to track what people are saying about you and your products?
I have been using it for several months. I wish I'd used it sooner. In the past I have used a combination of Awstats (to see what other sites link to me, including search engines) and WordPress Psychic Search to see what search phrases bring people to my sites -- and what they search for when they get there.
(I once joined a $60/month membership site just because their private message board was sending traffic to one of my products and I wanted to see what people were saying.)
It's saved me a ton of time. I don't need to hop on Google to check and see if any new affiliates have popped up or if anyone has reviewed my products, I just get an "as-it-happens" e-mail... usually within the first few hours.
Just today I got an e-mail alert when someone mentioned my new Action Optin script, and I was the first person to leave a comment on his blog post.
Now that the Warrior Forum is search engine friendly I know right away if someone mentions me.
(This is BIG as it keeps me out of forums... which are huge timewasters for me.)
What's even more powerful: entering the names of all your products as Google Alerts... and your competitors' products... and the names of your competitors!
I have also found discussions about my products and new affiliate sites when my name was not even mentioned.
I got that idea when some people were badmouthing an internet marketer on a message board, and they were very careful about misspelling his name and product names on purpose... just in case he had a Google alert set.
As luck would have it, one of the forum commenters spelled his product name correctly just ONCE, and the product creator found his way onto that board.
Google Alerts have been around for 4 years, but almost no one uses them... do you? Do you use it to spy on your competitors, track your products, stop plagiarism, jump on blog conversations, or something I haven't thought of?
