You are trying to persuade someone to do something. He is resistant. You suspect it is because he has misgivings he prefers not to talk about. You don’t want to upset or offend him, but you do want to get his okay. What do you do? (more…)
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You are trying to persuade someone to do something. He is resistant. You suspect it is because he has misgivings he prefers not to talk about. You don’t want to upset or offend him, but you do want to get his okay. What do you do? (more…)
Clayton Makepeace has a strategy that his largest client has used to bring in $2.5 million in sales in 24 hours. And it generated $16 million in sales in a single month.
Though it’s not a traditional sales process or marketing campaign, direct-response marketing is at its heart. And it leverages the best parts of the Web — what Clayton calls the Internet’s “5 Golden Advantages”:
So you’re starting your Internet business. The first step is to make your website shiny and pretty (by spending a lot of time and/or money on it). And then build product pages and a shopping cart. And then drive visitors to your site with search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads. And then sit back and watch the orders roll in.
Right?
What do you really need to start building a life-changing amount of wealth?
Your 401(k) ain’t gonna do it. Neither is your day job.
The 200 aspiring Internet entrepreneurs at Bootcamp know. It was the subject of Michael Masterson’s keynote speech: The Special Theory of Automatic Wealth.
ETR’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp started last night. And for those of you who couldn’t make it, we’ll be publishing breaking news throughout this week from the conference.
Writing those Bootcamp dispatches will be Jason Holland, ETR’s Managing Editor. He’ll be playing the part of roving reporter. (His first dispatch is below.)
Today, I tell you why, when it comes to luxury items, price doesn’t mean quality to buyers. It means something more intangible. And I show you how to apply that secret to your marketing.
I also discuss what you should and shouldn’t be buying “on credit,” the rise of organic junk food, and a marketing trap that is all too easy to fall into.
Here’s what’s on tap for the rest of the week…
Rich Schefren, who is appearing at ETR’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp, lays down the four stages of learning. Before truly mastering any skill, you must go through these steps.
AWAI’s John Wood shows you how to meet powerful people in your industry. A simple “Hi, how are you?” could change your career and life.
Comedian, copywriter, and professional speaker Peter Fogel explains why self-confidence is not necessary to be a great public speaker. You just have to pretend you have it.
And finally, success mentor Brian Tracy explains the Law of Indirect Efforts. The quickest way to raise your self-esteem, says Brian, is to focus on making others feel good about themselves first.
(more…)
In most businesses, the 80/20 rule applies to just about everything — including the question “Which customers contribute most to our bottom line?”
There is a good chance that about 20 percent of your customers are responsible for more than 80 percent of your profits. (more…)
Our sales were hurting. Every one of our distributors was selling three to five times more of our competitor’s cheaper, inferior air ionizers than ours.
It seemed that consumers decided at the shelf that all ionizers are pretty much the same. So why should they spend 67 percent more on ours? (more…)
When writing or reviewing long marketing copy, you’ve got to get to the point where you find yourself thinking, “Yes! This is good! This is really, really good!”
I call it the Eureka Moment. (more…)
Products — the most successful products — meet urgent needs and solve important problems.
But what solves today’s problem won’t necessarily solve tomorrow’s. We must constantly refine and reinvent to make our products “new.” (more…)
MaryEllen and I were sitting in my office the other day, discussing our upcoming joint speech at ETR’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp.
We talked about how smart it is for a business to host conferences. As we say in our book Changing the Channel, it can teach you a great deal about your customers that you can’t get from surveys or marketing statistics. It is a must, in fact, for any business that “wants to know its customers on a face-to-face basis.” (more…)
In marketing copy, “need to know” info is the facts your prospect has to hear to help him make the decision to buy your product.
But it’s often the “want to know” info that has more pulling power. By that I’m talking about things your prospect has an emotional interest in. (more…)
I’m so old, I’ll betcha my tie has gone in and out of style at least five times.
Not that I pay much attention to such things, mind you.
My professional life revolves around marketing trends. And there again, my advanced age means I’ve seen many promotional styles over the years. (more…)
Only the faint tick of the grandfather clock broke the silence as I waited for him to acknowledge my presence. He’d summoned me to his office to discuss the great idea I’d outlined in a memo only last week. So new in the company, yet already meeting with the Managing Director! (more…)
Before you optimize your website or buy pay-per-click (PPC) traffic, you should perform “keyword due diligence.”
That means you must check to see that Internet users are actually searching for information on your product by using the same keywords you assumed they would use.
When I tell this to people, they often pooh-pooh it. “It’s not necessary for us to do keyword research,” they tell me. “We know our industry. We know our products. And we know what words our customers would search on.” (more…)
What captures your attention?
A pretty face? A televised car chase? The smell of baking cookies wafting through the room?
It doesn’t take much.
And what holds your attention?
That’s not so easy, is it? It takes something that has a more direct impact on your life. Satellite images of a hurricane bearing down on your town, for example. Or watching your children play. (more…)
There is an important Web metric that you should be tracking in your Internet marketing business — but probably aren’t.
It is the “evaporation rate.”
The evaporation rate measures how many names you lose from your subscriber list — by the week, month, or year.
How do names evaporate from your list?
It’s simple. (more…)
David Carradine. Ed McMahon. Farrah Fawcett. Michael Jackson. Billy Mays. Karl Malden. Steve McNair. The Grim Reaper is on a roll.
What might the deaths of these high-profile people have in common with the likes of Gary Hart, Gary Condit, Jim McGreevey, Mark Sanford, and John Edwards, among others?
Or how about Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon?
Or G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Mark Fuhrman, Wayne (Dog) Chapman, and Don King?
Answer: Things change!
We do not live in a static universe. Nor do people or situations remain at a standstill on our little speck of cosmic dust. Mountains erode. Riverbeds dry up. Technology moves forward. The economy fluctuates. Even laws change.
Who could have predicted that the celebrities I listed in the first paragraph of this article would all be gone within a one-month period? (more…)
The other day I saw an ad one of my clients had posted on the Internet.
The copy was weak. It lacked an “Aha!” idea. It was balanced on two rather than four legs. Its lead was wrongheaded, it had insufficient substantiation, and no social proof.
I mentioned this to my client’s marketing exec.
“I agree. It’s not very strong,” she said. “But it has been doing very well.”
“That’s interesting,” I replied. “Can I see the test results?”
“We didn’t test it,” she said. “But the numbers are better than those we usually get for this advertising slot.” (more…)
What do you do if your prospect knows nothing about you, as is often the case? How can you sway or “nudge” their thinking about your business, products, or services?
You do it by including plenty of testimonials in your marketing materials.
Testimonials overcome a prospect’s skepticism (”Who the heck are you? And why should I listen to you anyway?”) by helping them connect emotionally to other people who’ve used and liked your products. Reading those true-life stories makes prospects more receptive to what you have to say. And sell. (more…)
If you’re an Internet marketer and you’re not taking advantage of autoresponders to accelerate your profits, listen up. (And if you are, listen up anyway. Because I have a few tricks up my sleeve for you.)
Fact is, a well-written follow-up e-mail series delivered to your prospects via autoresponder can make a huge difference …
It can bring boatloads of potential buyers back to your sales pages faster and easier than just about anything else.
I’ve seen conversion rates double … triple … even quadruple for some (more…)
“So far, my website is pretty much identical to the Early to Rise site,” PG told me.
PG is one of my coaching students. I had just asked him to tell me about the progress he was making.
He had a sign-up box on the top right-hand corner of every page of his website. It offered a free newsletter in exchange for a site visitor’s first name and e-mail address. He had a lot of quality content. And the site navigation was clean and easy to follow. He even had a search box and “refer a friend” option.
Was I upset by the striking similarity between his website and ours? Absolutely not. I was happy to see that he had copied so much. In fact, as his coach, that’s what I told him to do.
You see, it wasn’t our “intellectual property” that he was using. It was the structure of the website and the business model.
About a year and a half ago, a family friend started a business selling women’s active wear. She had no website — and no plans to create one.
She sold her goods by driving door to door, visiting every gym she could find. She was doing okay. But the time and effort — not to mention gas — she was putting into it was crazy.
Her products were great, and the people who purchased them were always happy to buy from her again. But her only follow-up with them was by phone. She worked out of her tiny two-bedroom house. And because she couldn’t afford to have someone else handle order fulfillment, there were so many boxes piled up that you could hardly walk through the house without tripping over one.
Twenty years ago, if you had told me that one day I’d be able to reach millions of prospective customers without paying a penny in printing, postage, or lettershop fees … and without paying through the nose for print space or TV and radio time … I would have smiled and backed away from you v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
I would have instantly pegged you as a lunatic. But I would have been wrong. Thanks to the Internet, we actually can do it. And that’s huge.
When I write a direct-mail package, I know my client is going to have to cough up an average of $550 to send it to every 1,000 prospects in his universe. That’s $55,000 for 100,000 potential customers. And $550,000 for 1 million.
On the Internet, you can post a website with your sales message for 500 bucks. And then blast a million e-mails to drive folks to your site for next to nothing!
So, yeah. The Internet is huge and cheap. Just like the hypesters say it is.
And, yes, marketing on the ‘Net can make you a bundle. I know lots of Internet marketers who make tens of millions — even a hundred million or more — every year.
But there is a bit more to it than that … (more…)
When you’re building an Internet business, it’s useful to step back and evaluate your progress every now and then.
You will be at one of the following levels …
Level One: The “getting ready to start” phase.
You are spending a lot of time and money buying and studying Internet marketing courses. But you aren’t selling anything yet.
Level Two: You dip your toe in the water.
You take some actions that let you generate a few sales online. The volume of these sales is small. It puts just a few extra dollars in your pocket each week.
Level Three: You start making a modest number of sales on a regular basis. Your online revenues are about $1,000 a month.
Does the idea of selling information products on the Internet appeal to you?
It does to GL, one of my subscribers. But she is hesitating about whether to even start.
GL is worried that there are already more than enough people hawking e-books, DVDs, and courses on the Internet.
“Isn’t the Internet already overcrowded with a million info marketers selling look-alike products on everything from dating to real estate?” GL asked me the other week. “Aren’t I getting into the game too late to carve out a piece of the Internet profit pie for myself?”
Fair questions.
Yes, you are getting into the game a little later than some of your peers.
But so what?
The old saying — better late than never — is true.
And, in fact, there is still a huge opportunity to make your fortune online.
My wife strode across the yard from the chicken coop, clutching our sharpest kitchen knife. A rivulet of red ran down her forearm. Her hands were stained crimson, and a solitary feather stuck to her palm.
“Hi, Honey!” she chirped. “I was just seeing whether the new chicks liked strawberries.”
Assumptions, I am reminded, are the mother of all screw-ups. And some of the worst assumptions are made by website designers who make it hard for people to find what they are looking for.
The assumptions we make are all about our perceptions and how our brains interpret them. The human brain needs very little information in order to synthesize the bits and pieces in any scenario and immediately form a whole picture.
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell calls this ability of ours “thin slicing.” Apparently, we developed it thousands of years ago. When our distant ancestors hunted and gathered and danger approached, they needed to make the decision — in a split-second — whether to fight or flee.
At heart — more correctly, “at brain” — we are still hunters on a trail. But instead of food, we are searching for information.
It was 1898.
James Webb Young dropped out of school and started working for a book publisher. He was 12 years old.
By the time he turned 22, he was advertising manager. In 1912, he joined the prestigious advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. And he quickly became known as an “idea man.”
In 1917, Young became vice president of the agency. In 1919, he wrote one of his most famous ads. It was for the deodorant Odorono, and ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal. At the time, women found any mention of underarm odor to be in bad taste. Cleverly avoiding the word “armpit,” his headline grabbed attention with “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm.” But then readers were hit with this: “Persons troubled with perspiration odor seldom can detect it themselves.” Outraged, more than 200 women canceled their subscriptions to the magazine. Despite the controversy, sales of Odorono went up 112 percent. (more…)
In this article, I’m going to give you a definitive, to-the-penny answer to that question. Something I don’t think you’ve gotten elsewhere.
I find the rule for start-up money to be the same for an Internet business as it is for many home-based businesses. It’s a “time or money” equation. (Michael Masterson has written about it many times.)
The “time or money” rule dictates that you need either time or money to succeed.
If you have little money, you must put a lot of your time into the start-up. That’s what’s known as “sweat equity.”
If you have little time but plenty of cash, you can pay others to do a lot of the work.
Time or money. Either one will do.
It is extremely difficult to start a home business if you have no money and no spare time.
However, with an Internet business, we have a big advantage.
One of the most daunting things about starting your own Internet business is the idea of creating regular, unique content for your website. You can raise your eyebrows and sigh. It’s okay. But you are going to need this fresh content if you want to get anywhere with search engines. Plus, your site visitors will expect you to continue to provide them with relevant and useful information … if you expect them to keep coming back.
Call it writer’s block or just plain old brain freeze, but finding topics to write about isn’t always easy. There is one type of article, though, that can pull you out of this creative quagmire. It will keep your readers happy and help boost your search engine traffic at the same time.
I’m talking about the “how to” article.
“How do I figure out what to tell them how to do?” you may ask.
Your customers can be your best guide on this. They are probably already asking you questions like “How do I use this TIG welder?” “How can I bake a vegan birthday cake?” Or “How can I cook ribs on my new BBQ?”
Simply listen to their questions and address them in your “how to” articles.
Here’s what you do: