There Is A Sucker Born Every Minute
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You have to love the Internet marketing world. There’s a certain amount of jaded bitterness that surfaces when you sell something that presents a make money online opportunity. Every time I promote a product related to marketing or online income generation, there are those people out there who have adopted the belief that all marketers are liars and their products are more sales than substance.
Some might argue that it’s the hype – the language used to sell Internet marketing, in particular the long sales page format, that elicits the snarky comments or the sighs of “not again” from a handful of viewers. The disdain is palpable from some people and as much as I understand where they are coming from, it would be nice to only deal with satisfied customers.
You can’t please all of the people all of the time and everyone has a different experience and mindset, which isn’t always positive. No matter what you sell, there are people who will take issue with what you do and how you do it to the point where they feel the need to publicly state their disapproval.
I’m a bit tired of negativity, so today I’m going to relay to you three “golden nuggets” from three products I purchased from Internet marketers who sell Internet marketing products – the prime targets of the naysayers.
I spent at least $1,000 on each of these information products and they have all had a positive impact on my business and returned more than their cost in increased income and resource savings. Note these ideas – the nuggets – are just a sample of what I learned from the products and as anyone successful knows, it’s the two or three really powerful ideas that make a big difference.
Here are three examples -
Butterfly Marketing by Mike Filsaime
I purchased Mike’s product a long time ago originally thinking that it was the software script I wanted. It turned out that the script didn’t cut it for what I needed, but the information – the butterfly marketing manuscript that Mike himself wrote about his techniques – that really had an impact on what I did in 2007.
The release of Blog Mastermind (which incidentally has now generated over $100,000) was heavily influenced by Mike’s techniques. There’s many ideas I could draw on for this article, but I’m going to focus on one concept I think is really valuable and I’ve never seen it presented in any other product besides Butterfly Marketing.
Keep It Simple – Offer Steps
Mike’s entire premise is about encouraging viral events so your users carry the message forward. One of the key understandings behind this is simplicity and guidance – make things ridiculously easy and put big fat sign-posts that tell people what to do.
I took this principle and flat out copied Mike’s methods as it applies to the affiliate area of your website. The idea is that you offer your affiliates all the promotional tools on one single page and present them as steps to take. For example…
Step 1: Copy this email and send it to your list
Step 2: Put these banners on your website
Step 3: Fill out this tell a friend form
…and so on.
I’ve been a member of many affiliate programs and nearly every one makes it very hard to navigate and find the tools you want and they don’t tell you what to do with them. Unfortunately the problem usually rests with the affiliate script itself, having been designed by developers and not marketers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a single page that guides the affiliate through the promotional resources available.
If you offer an affiliate program, keep it really simple, offer one page with all the promo tools as copy-and-paste options and presented as steps. The only other page you need is a statistics page to show referrals, leads and conversion. That’s it! – Affiliates don’t need anything more and you shouldn’t complicate things or hide resources behind tiny hyperlinks or old-fashioned navigation structures.
Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System
Rich’s coaching program is massive and terribly comprehensive. The end goal of the course is the creation of a business that functions autonomously and frees the entrepreneur to enjoy whatever lifestyle they choose. This is not something that is easy and there’s a lot of ingrained habits you need to change and new awareness you need to create in order to truly adopt the system Rich teaches.
I learned a mountain of ideas from Rich but there was one key concept that I really took to heart and implemented throughout the time I was studying his course in 2006 and 2007. I began to outsource and change my business to a model that is sustainable and based on my strengths.
Before Rich’s training I was excited about money making ideas and things I could do in my business to generate more cash. Unfortunately most of the ideas where either not sustainable, depended on me entirely too much or were divergent from my core strengths.
Rich helped to cement my future and as a result in 2007 I sold a business that was profitable and easy to maintain, but not heading in a direction I wanted to go, and then started a new business. I began to rely on other people a lot more and opted to focus on only a very few projects tightly in tune with my core positioning.
In a nutshell, Rich provided clarity and presented practical steps to take to get there. Some of this is mindset, so it’s difficult to grasp the benefits if you don’t live them and on the surface it might look like all I did was hire some good tech people and release an information product, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
A Practical Tip
If you are the kind of person who likes raw techniques, here’s just one very simple one from Rich’s training that I used -
When you are looking to hire people, use your existing communication channels. In my case I used my blog, my email list and my friend network to attract every person I currently work with. I never used any traditional method like a jobs board or recruitment service.
Remember, your marketing channels can be used for more than just selling, you can also use it for recruitment and chances are the people you bring on board from your current readers/prospects, will make better staff because of their established engagement and familiarity with you and what you do.
Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker
There’s so much to say about the Product Launch Formula methodology from Jeff I don’t know where to begin.
A product launch is an interesting beast. On the surface it seems relatively simple. String together some emails, release some resources, build some buzz, slap on some scarcity and social proof, and sell copious amounts of your product.
When you break it down you realize there is a lot to it and WOW – there’s a huge amount of work to do.
Jeff taught me a lot and in the spirit of keeping things practical, here’s a technique I simply would not have known or benefited from if I did not purchase Product Launch Formula…
How Much Should You Charge For Your Product?
One of the hardest questions to answer whenever releasing a product is how much should you charge? The answer itself is simple – whatever results in the most profit (in most cases). Finding out the specific number that results in the greatest profit is the tricky part.
Jeff presents a very simple method for determining price – ask your audience how much they would pay.
Yeah, genius isn’t it.
This method is based on you having access to an audience, in other words you need a responsive list first, but once that is in place, here are the five questions Jeff suggests you ask in a survey -
Jeff then takes the responses, plots a graph and comes up with a price range ready to test. From there it’s simply a matter of testing volume and pricing points to find the maximum.
The pricing survey step slots into the product launch process during the prelaunch and takes a lot of the guesswork out of pricing. When I surveyed my list prior to releasing Blog Mastermind I received some very interesting responses to my question about pricing and if it wasn’t for Product Launch Formula, I would not have known to ask the question.
Buying Products Actually Makes You Money
I’m not going to dive into a diatribe on how every information product can make you money if you take action. We all know that action is the key and if you are in the right circumstances where you can leverage what you learn, most information products represent very good value for money. At least certainly every product I have purchased and talked about on this blog.
It should come as no surprise that those who are truly successful in this world are the people who take action. One of those actions is buying products, studying them and then implementing the techniques.
No one knows everything and that’s why you must learn from other people’s experience and knowledge. The Internet marketing world is fantastic because of how much great information flows in the community and if you just take the opportunity to implement what you learn, the rewards are amazing.
No one successful wastes time by using their energy and time resources to bitch and moan about the legitimacy of a product, they are too busy working to actually make money using the techniques they learn.
Two of the biggest lessons you can learn are to respect education and admire hard work. Take that to heart and you are well on your way to awakening to your true potential.
Yaro Starak
Awakening
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Two thoughts immediately come to mind from this post. Firstly, from Mike’s Butterly Marketing – the idea of using very clear steps to show people exactly what to do doesn’t just apply for your affiliates but for your products too, assuming that you are teaching something, which most people are. When you make it really easy for someone to follow the steps that you lay out for them, they are far more likely to succeed at whatever you are teaching them to do which raises the perceived value of the product in their mind.
The second point was on the PLF – that graph you mention – does Jeff have some kind of automated script that produces it for him from his results or does he do it manually? If not, I bet that would be a great software product
My developer head is turning cogs now…
I’m still very new at marketing on the internet for my business. Like you, I have spent a lot of money furthering my knowledge and business skills by buying information products from gurus I admire and trust.
I provide powerful and information packed products and workshops for business owners and find that so many of them want everything for little or no cost. Perhaps that’s what the less scrupulous internet marketers are playing on? The old saying ‘you get what you pay for’ comes to mind…
Outsourcing is a great idea and certainly allows one to better direct one’s time and energy (i.e., not only will it free up your spare time, but it also frees up your business time, thus allowing you to better run your company).
And for those people who do not yet have a response list or blog to help them find quality people to outsource to, use the old-fashion, non-technical method of asking your friends and colleagues. That’s how I found my first programmer and designer.
In terms of buying informational products – I remember when my brother recommended to me a few years back that I purchase a subscription to Search Engine News. The sales page put me off and I didn’t do it for a long time. But he kept insisting that it was worth it and eventually I bit the bullet and bought a subscription.
That was the best purchase I’ve ever made online – and not just because it’s a top quality product, but because it helped me realize that behind many of these hype-filled sales pages are valuable products, programs and services that can actually help me and my business grow online.
All marketers aren’t liars, but it’s true that money often change people behavior.
As for me, my business really started to change after Eben Pagan’s get altitude.
I stick with Eben now. I know that Rich’s material rocks (I still need to take the time to read his “maven” ebook).
It is encouraging to hear that some of these products are actually worth it. It seems that there must be a better way of presenting these products. Yes, the long sales letter has proven itself, but at what cost. If a long sales letter has a 10% conversion rate, what about the other 90%? If you receive a 10% on a test in school, that is considered a miserable failure! In this case, you’ve not only failed to convert 90%, but you’ve also made them much less likely to convert to ANY offer from you. Any thoughts on that?
Chris, 10% conversion rate is very good. Even 1% is not bad in many cases. To say that a website should be able to convert 90%, well anyone that has ever sold anything online knows that’s just unrealistic. Perhaps if you are a car mechanic that talks to every prospect in person, and charges well below other mechanics, plus all the prospects know you to have a great reputation, then maybe 90% conversion(probably not even then). But selling something from a website when you can’t be there to actually talk to the person – that’s a different story. Lastly to compare web site conversion ratios to taking a school test is not comparing apples to apples. To compare the two, you would have to compare to a 5th grader of average intelligence taking a molecular biology test designed for Ph D’s. Selling from a web site is quite a bit more difficult than your average school test.
Joe,
I know that even 1% conversion is considered acceptable. It’s the idea of settling for 1% that rankles me. Just because those percentages are accepted as the best that you can do, does not mean that they really ARE the best that you can do. I think our whole mindset and approach has to change. All we have done is made incremental changes in our approach and applied offline marketing methods to our online presentation. There is a lot of talk about the new Web 2.0, but I never see it used to maximum effectiveness. And what about what comes next?
I know, I know, if I’m so smart, where is my great program for accomplishing this. I’m working on it. I will say this, part of the answer lies in who we address. If I was that car mechanic, I would talk directly to those people that needed my services the most. I would not talk to car owners in general, I would find a way to talk to that person whose car is broken down on the side of the road and needs me NOW. Think of what my conversion rate would be with THAT audience!
Hi Chris.
Video is the answer I reckon.
I stil use long sales letters and it stll packs a great big punch…BUT it’s a one two knock out combination when accompanied by a series of videos giving great value via an autoresponder series before sending people to the long sales page.
(PLF – or Mass Control Style – two awesome courses)
And it’s proven now that you can have a shorter sales letter if you have people in a buying frenzy from a launch formula full of videos etc before hand.
I think people are crazy to be cynical of the sort of marketing courses that Yaro mentioned. There is *usually* great value in them. I used a PLF/Mass Control style lauch to make a 100 K revenue for a client on a list of just 3500 people in just over a week.
Results are truth!
John
Yaro I read your blog everyday because its full of useful business information, which comes from your experience. There is so many “get rich quick” bs out there that it is the last thing anybody wants to read about. Sorry about the Sucker thing, I will be more positive from now on, and I will buy one of those product you recommended.
Hi from one of those negative people. I hate long sales letters. I don’t read them and any site with pop-up ads I leave immediately.
If people don’t like negative comments about long sales letters, the answer is pretty simple I think.
If all programs presented the kind of value you got from these programs Yaro I don’t think internet marketing would be regarded as negatively as it currently is. People feel negative about being ripped off. I think this is a good thing. Don’t you? Blaming the customer isn’t terribly useful.
I really like the comment by Joe: at what cost. I think this repays much thought. I’m just beginning to think about it and would very much like to hear what others think.
I just thought that I would follow up on your comments.
I’ve not had much success with Mike Filsaime’s products or ideas but he certainly implements them very effectively as I get attracted into trying all kinds of things.
Rich Schefren’s business growth system is excellent if you are looking for a strategic business training program for Internet businesses but don’t buy it if you want to operate at the tactical level of how to gain traffic.
Jeff Walker is the master of the product launch and everything I see from Jeff just makes me think that he is a really nice chap who is committed to meeting promises and then over-delivering on them.
I can’t emphasise Yaro’s comments about action is the key enough. If you just use these types of resources as intellectual entertainment then don’t be surprised when nothing happens. It all has to be turned into purposeful action designed to deliver the end result you want.
The long-copy-versus-short-copy thing apparently gets beat to death every 10 years or so, whence the same results are produced: Good long copy sells like crazy… but it takes a really, really good copywriter to write long copy. A bad copywriter should probably stick to short copy. That whole thing where: “If he would just shut up, I would have gone home with him.” And, etc.
What I learned from the relationship industry: just about every “pickup guru”’s method works just fine… if you work it. Most men won’t work it. The difference I saw was mostly in the type of women that were attracted. Again, most men won’t work it.
My take on all this internet marketing stuff is pretty much the same, and it explains why it all either works (you work it), or sucks (you don’t work it). That is, even some random “foobar ultra ninja marketing system” will probably sell pretty good, given that the person implementing the system implements it with intelligence and dedication. Lots of dedication.
FWIW, Frank Kern saved me a lot of money explaining that a lot people buy stuff because they get bored. Guilty! Implementing all this stuff is hard work… now that I recognize when I’m simply bored, I go other stuff instead of buying the Next Big Thing. Thanks Frank! MCP looks pretty cool, when I get the time (maybe late 2009), I’ll consider picking up a copy if her ever opens it back up. (Which he will, because he’s addicted this stuff just like the rest of us.)
About the gadflies and harsher critics: they aren’t your customers. This “internet” isn’t the only possible internet, and they’re free to point at a different set of name servers and leave all this commercial “claptrap” behind.