Tag: stu mclaren

Seven Things #3: Second Chance Offers

December 17, 2008 • 15 Comments

Stu McLaren (The Nicest Guy on the Internet) interviewed me live last night in between Jim Edwards and Joel Comm.  When he asked me what's the most signifcant change I made in 2008, the very first thing that came to mind, and therefore the thing I blurted out, was "automation."

If you can write a quick e-mail, or article, or blog post, chances are you can write 2 more really quick posts, even if they say nothing but, "Remember a few weeks ago when I said this?"   Then lead into the exact same call to action...

Answering Stu's question reminded me of when I was at the Warrior Event in Austin earlier this year, when I picked up a really great tip from Ron Capps -- the NicheProf!

We were talking about sending offers to your list and how we both sometimes send new offers to our list for old products.

Ron will send a mailing out to his list promoting a product,
then send the same offer out again in 90 days!

On average, he promotes the exact same offer 5 or 6 times (one time every ninety days) before it completely runs out of gas.

That is a freaking cool way of looking at mining gold from your list.

That's what our plan is with the Daily Seminar membership site... simply because of attrition.  I launched my first recurring membership site almost three years ago and it began with a big splash, but we didn't market it after that, and the membership slowly died off.

But you can do that with your one time products as well!

Two Products a Week?!

At one point many people on forums thought I was a machine -- that I pump out two products a week consistently. Not true. I just have so many products I created in the past year or so that it seems that way.

People forget. People don't read every single e-mail. People will look at your offer and save it for "later" ... which ends up being never.

In fact I promoted a product from 2001 (Software Secrets Exposed) ... all I did was I took an old product, slapped a dimesale onto it and told my list. $1200 in a day -- on a SUNDAY -- probably about an hour's worth of work total.

Nevermind the costs I put in, I'd already broke even on the resale rights from an earlier promo I did for that product.

The best thing was... because I had it on a timer... I didn't even do any work that day.

Your Mission (Should You Choose to Accept It)

Here's what I want you to do: The next time you send a mailing out to your list, write the mailing a second time and save it as a timed mailing to get sent out 90 days from now.

If you do that now, then just before Valentine's Day 2009, you'll get a nice little surprise bump in income!

It doesn't have to stop there. You know that 2001 product? Someone bought it and saw the 2001 copyright and asked how could the info still be relevant.

I responded with an e-mail explaining how 100% of the stuff in the book still applies today and how all the predictions Ben Prater made in 2001 are now true today.

After responding to that message, I worded it into a quick follow-up and added it to my autoresponder to go out SIX months later. Hit on an extra benefit in the follow-up that people missed or forgot about!

p.s. How's this for automation?  I wrote this blog post on April 24, 2008, when I was in a blog writing frenzy, and scheduled it for December 2008... so I wouldn't overload my readers.  It's only now being published 5 months later.  Just before it went live, I took about 60 seconds to make it current.  Best of both worlds.

Here's what we learned today:

  1. Send the same offer to your list every 90 days.
  2. You can promote the offer 5 to 6 times. (Over the course of 18 months.)
  3. Have it on a timer so you don't have to worry about it.
  4. If you can take the answer to a common fear and turn it into a sales message, do it!

Have you resurrected any dead offers successfully?  What about when you failed, how was that different?  Please leave a quick comment below.

Always Write a Report About What You Learned

September 30, 2008 • 30 Comments

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 1

September 21, 2008 • 14 Comments

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.

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