I’m a little sensitive about being called “lucky,” because the people calling me that usually haven’t put in the time and effort I have.

Occasionally luck intervenes, but hardly ever unless you’ve done all the work in the first place.

Cross-pollinating ideas works wonders. I think the book The Medici Effect talks to that.

A client of mine runs a machine shop. I wrote several print ads for him and wanted to split test the best performing headline and lead sentence. I asked him if he had a website and he said yes but that it wasn’t very good. I told him we don’t care about how his website looks, all we care about are the web logs. He was shocked. What do you mean, he said. I explained to him that I was going to use Google Adwords to split test the 8 different headlines and lead sentences. The one that gets the most clicks is the one that I will use in the print ad. He was blown away by the concept as he never thought of using Adwords to see which of his ads received the most clicks.

With the Internet, you can use Adwords to test which of your ads gets the most clicks. You could careless about actually making a sale. What you are doing is marketing research to find the best headline to use offline in a print publication. The beautiful thing about the Internet is that you can find out very quickly, usually in a matter of hours, which headlines will perform the best. With direct mail marketing, the same test would take many months to perform and probably tens of thousands of dollars.

The print ad ultimately worked very well for him using this strategy. Good marketing is based on human psychology and as such will work across any medium you advertise in.

Thanks Yaro another great blog.

John http://www.blacktienoni.com

Interesting idea to apply the competition tactic to non-IM niches online.

Great post. Prize competitions always work and not only online also offline. When I was working in my offline job as sales and marketing manager for a small company here in Switzerland we sold a dog and cat food brand from the U.S. We had to fight against the big guys like Nestle, Mars, Procter & Gambel, Colgate Palmolive… We had only a very small advertising budget and we invested that in prize competitions and free seminars and training for our clients (pet shops). The result: we became number 2 in the pet shop market with our dog food and now this brand belongs to Mars!!

So prize competitions work every where. And also marketing and sales training for your affiliates. This is something nearly nobody does. If these internet marketers discovered a new way to generate traffic they create a viral report or a new product and sell it. Why not give once in a while such a viral report to your affiliates? Or doing a webinar about it.

I think with a combination of prize competitions and training the affiliates would generate much more sales which would make all happy, the vendor and the affiliates.

These are just my 2 cents.

Daniel

Any tips on that one would be much appreciated.
Cheers
Rob

When you give a different niche quality information it is easy to build a relationship and make a sale

People love freebies and especially ones they can’t find at their local stores for months on end

I first did the Product Launch Formula in the scrapbook industry and I was impressed on how well it worked. The one thing that helped me is that I already had a list I’d been building for a few years so I was able to draw from that as well but of course I’ve already developed a nice rapport with my subscribers too before doing the launch.

If you are in the Internet marketing niche, just join a few affiliate programs from the top people (stompernet, strategic profits, frank kern, jeff walker, mike filsaime) and jump on board a launch and you will then find out about other launches because of the cross promotion.

If you can’t deliver results, you don’t make sales. There’s no “secret” here – these are just affiliate programs for product launches with an affiliate prize competition as an extra incentive.

There’s no luck involved with winning.

It would be nice to try a contest and winning nice prices.

Let me ask you this – if you are currently selling in a non-make money online market right now, has anyone ever done an affiliate competition to motivate launch partners when a new product is released? Even the concept of affiliate marketing is not applied to a majority or products sold online.

But, yes, I can see where knowledge of internet marketing tactics would give you a big advantage in other niches, and even with offline selling. So few businesses (even online businesses) make a newsletter a part of their selling strategy, and the ones that do usually just send you the digital equivalent of fliers stuck under windshield wipers.

I don’t know about other folks, but I unsubscribe from a newsletter that doesn’t give me anything truly valuable in a heartbeat!