My Notes From The Ed Dale Internet Marketing Seminar
Over the weekend I attended Ed Dale’s 30DC Coming Home three day event in Melbourne.
Ed Dale, if you don’t know him, is one of Australia’s most well known and likable Internet marketers, who adds a uniquely Australian flavour to the industry. Currently he is most well known as one of the founders of the 30 Day Challenge, an introductory program that aims to take any person from absolute beginner to making their first few dollars online, and beyond, within 30 days.
Ed also has a rep for website flipping, having earlier in his career sold his website portfolio for $5 million dollars. He then moved on to teach how to build niche sites with Frank Kern using the “Underachiever Method”, which focused on creating small sites that each earned a few hundred dollars a month, and then pumping out as many of them as you could.
Ed is one of those types of people who likes to keep up to date with everything and anything going on online, with the eyes of a marketer and a geek. He’s constantly talking about the future before it gets here, and it’s clear this is a passion of his more so than a business interest – he just likes to geek out on technology, marketing, social media and the web, but always refers back to how it could be used to make money.
The seminar on the weekend was by far the most relaxed event I’ve been too, led by the TubbyNerd himself (Ed) wearing his sandals, shorts and geeked out shirts. This wasn’t a formal seminar with suits, or people attempting to keep up professional appearance or sell you anything. It was a bunch of experienced guys and girls coming together to teach a bunch of up and comers how to make money online, in the format of a casual conversation. Just how I like it 
What Are We Talking About
Video Interview With Fran Kerr: 3 Tips For Driving Traffic To Your Blog With YouTube Videos
I had breakfast last weekend with my good friend, Fran Kerr who blogs at HighOnHealth.org. Fran has enjoyed some pretty amazing results, growing her audience to over 6000 daily subscribers, and much of that growth has come thanks to YouTube video marketing.
In this video Fran offers three quick tips for improving your results marketing with YouTube. Keep an eye on the background in this video and you will see all kinds of things going on (see if you can spot the ibis!).
Dominate Your Market: How Self Contained Communities Create Permanent Barriers To Entry
Some of my early readers may recall that I was a Magic: The Gathering card player as a teenager. No, that’s not dungeons and dragons or role playing or anything like that. It’s closer to poker combined with chess with a little bit of lord of the rings story telling thrown in. It’s a “mind sport” as far as the PR people at Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces the game, are concerned, although I’m not sure that’s the most accurate label.
Whatever the case, “Magic” as we call it, is a serious game for some people, and besides the first two or so years where I played for fun, most of the latter years in my career as a card gamer, were about trying to win tournaments.
Tournament Magic is big, with millions of dollars given away in a pro tour that travels around the world. Some guys even play the game professionally as their full time job. I never won big money as a gamer (my highlight was representation on the 98 Australian national team at the World Championships), but I did get to visit Japan, Singapore and the USA thanks to gaming. I look back on those years as a lot of fun.
Magic Cards Are Money
Magic cards, like baseball cards, are collectible. Each card has a value, and for a long time I made my lunch money by trading and selling the cards I won at tournaments. As a typical entrepreneur, I often enjoyed the business of running a little card shop as a teenager more so than playing the game itself (unless I was winning a tournament of course!).
Wizards of the Coast (let’s just call them “Wizards”) made some very smart moves with Magic. It became a serious cash cow for them.
In case you are wondering how they keep the cash coming in, each year Wizards produces new cards so the pool of cards people play with at tournaments is constantly cycling over. This makes the playing field very dynamic, but it was also a brilliant business decision as they keep making new cards that players need to purchase in order to stay up to date.
It’s fair to say that effectively, Wizards produced a new form of currency, at least within the realm of their customer’s universe. As long as the cards have value to players of the game, they can print money simply by printing new sets of cards.
Wizards Goes One Better
I thought that Wizards had a good thing going already, but when the Internet came along, the did something really clever – they ported Magic over to the virtual world.
Online Magic is pretty much the same as offline, or real world Magic. You challenge people from all over the world to a game, you can play in tournaments to win more cards and cash and you can buy and trade cards virtually with other people.
The kicker is that the online digital cards have roughly the same value as the physical cards. You can buy packs of cards for the same price, but instead of receiving little pieces of cardboard with pictures on them, you receive digital cards with pictures on them that are stored on computers.
In other words, Wizards can now print money online, with the cost of production and distribution drastically reduced. All I can say is that is one heck of a good business model.
The Power Of A Self Contained Community
How Not To Approach A Potential Joint Venture Partner
Let me state an obvious fact about Internet marketing:
Joint ventures (JVs) are the quickest and most effective way to make a lot of sales and/or bring in a ton of targeted leads.
The reason this is the case is fairly obvious. You get someone who already has access to and a relationship with a large audience, who then recommend your product. The combination of distribution and trust, two of the most critical factors for online success, makes this marketing method hard to beat.
The only thing that beats a good JV is an internal promotion where you personally have distribution and trust, in which case the connection between you and the product itself is seamless – because it’s your product you are recommending – there is no disconnect in the mind of the audience, like there is with a JV or affiliate promotion.
Unfortunately building your own audience and establishing trust with them takes time, so if you are in a hurry, going the JV route is the best option. It’s also the quickest method to expand reach, so this is a technique you simply have to get on top of if you want to really explode your business online.
How Not To Approach People
I’m approached every week by people looking for me to promote their products. I’ve also been rejected more often than I’ve had success with my own JV approaches, so I know what works and what doesn’t from both sides of the relationship.
I often receive template emails suggesting I promote a product, which I delete before reading beyond the first paragraph. Other approaches come from genuine people, who appear on the surface to have a great product and are sincere in their intentions, yet unfortunately this approach usually fails too.
So what exactly does it take to convince someone to promote for you? Let’s take a look at the dos and don’ts of seeking joint ventures.
Are You Demonstrating Enough Proof?
If you’ve been reading my blog over the last few months you’ve seen me publish quite a few successful case study podcasts with my coaching students. Stories like Alborz Fallah the million dollar blogger, Leigh Peele making $4,500 a month in the fat loss niche (and recently another $11K in a relaunch), Miami Mitch attracting thousands of readers to his college football blog and Leslie the freebie guy who made $31K last year in the freebies market while still working a full time job as a teacher.
I love case studies as learning tools, and podcast interviews make great blog content, so I’d publish these regardless of whether the people involved are students of mine or not (most of my podcast archives are full of successful people who are not my students), however it makes smart business sense for me to showcase my best members because they offer the most powerful demonstration of proof I can present.
Proof, in my opinion, is the single most persuasive element of any marketing campaign, especially if you are an information publisher. I think it’s safe to say that most top Internet marketers agree with me simply by how they market their own products. There hasn’t been a single sales page or launch process that doesn’t involve people talking about how successful they became after studying the information the product offers.
Proof is so prevalent as a marketing hook today, that many successful launches are hinged on the back of just one success story. The power of the story – and the proof demonstrated within – is enough to convince hundreds and even thousands of people to purchase the product. If you don’t understand this and use proof to your advantage with your own marketing campaigns, you’re making a huge mistake.
Why Proof Works
There’s a very clear reason why proof is a powerful marketing tool. When making a purchasing decision, some of the big concerns a customer has is whether what is on offer is a scam, or won’t work for someone like them, or is more hype than substance. Regardless of the objection, proof is the best psychology we have to destroy it when it comes to purchasing decisions.
I don’t really need to explain this to you, you already understand and experience proof. Most of the new product buying decisions you make today, especially online, occur usually because you have some kind of proof that it’s a good product. The proof may simply be a friend or trusted expert recommendation, like for example me talking about how amazing AWeber has been for my business and showing how I use it to build profitable email lists.
What Kind Of Proof Do You Need?
Proof comes in many shapes and forms. It can be something simple, like a text testimonial from a previous customer, or even just a comment left to a blog post. You can take it further by recording a video interview, or doing full blown case study podcasts as I do.
In general there are two kinds of proof that are prevalent in most information product marketing campaigns, they are –
