When I lost my virginity – my promo virginity I should say…

It was one wet and rainy Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

We had just launched our first totally online ebook and to be honest with you I can’t even remember what it was called.

It was the first EVER promo we sent and we sent it via an AOL personal account. Didn’t even know what an autoresponder service was at that time. We had simply been adding email addresses to the AOL account. There were no permissions asked, no unsubscribe links. It was all very amateur and dodgy.

We had 4,000 people on the list. Or crammed into the address book of the AOL account is probably a better description.

We sent out details of the new ebook, giving the URL to the salespage.

After 500 had gone out AOL limited the account because they thought we were sending spam.

We got round this by sending 100 emails at a time. It took quite a while.

Once the last batch was sent we went back into the inbox to look for Paypal notifications to see if anyone had bought the ebook.

It was priced at $27.

I’l never forget the feeling as I saw ‘Notification of Payment’ emails FILLING UP the entire screen of my inbox. The inbox screen displayed just 20 emails at a time but it still impressed me.

As I refreshed the screen I could see NEW SALES dropping in every few minutes.

I couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotions I was feeling.

Obviously ‘Bloody Hell!’ and ‘Oh My God’ came into it…

But mainly I knew I had opened a door I could never, ever close.

I knew there was no going back to any other way of making a living. I forgot the work I’d put into writing the book, creating the salespage, making a (seriously crap) website to show it all off…

…and just concentrated on the warm fuzzy feeling of watching money drop into my Paypal account from nowhere.

In 24 hours we’d made a little over $4,000

That’s around $1 per person on the list.

Fast forward to this week.

I saw a product I really liked and was pretty sure it would help my subscribers. I signed up as an affiliate, wrote a brief email designed to grab interest and get the reader to the salepage for more details.

It took me 10 minutes.

I pressed send and 24 hours later I had around $600 in my account.

Now do the sums for that.

If a marketer getting an average result like that sends two promos a week (that’s 8 a month) for a whole year he’ll make $57,600 a year JUST from sending promo emails to a list.

Over the years I’ve built lists of over a million people. Now hang on that’s nowhere NEAR my list size now because most unsubscribe after a certain time. That’s the nature of IM

My list is less than 40,000 people now because I regularly ‘prune’ the dead wood from it (people who haven’t bought for a certain amount of time etc)

How I do things isn’t to everyone’s taste either. I’m not a ‘vanilla’ marketer that everyone thinks is ‘OK’

Rather I’m a liquorice and blackberry flavour that you either love or hate.

But you can see that my list isn’t huge. It’s responsive but not huge. Most of my IM mates have lists WAYYYY bigger than this. Maybe not as responsive tho.

Speaking from experience, if you build a list of 10,000 people – which if you work at it can take just a couple of months, you can generate an income of $40,000 a year if you’re willing to mail three times a week. That’s from just blasting the buggers with promos.

We have a list (different business) where all we do is mail a list of about 5,000 people three times a week with related promos. That’s it. That brought in just under $20,000 last year. The work took about an hour a day, for just three days a week. Finding related promos, writing an email and sending it.

More if you’re willing to do blog posts and build a relationship with them.

I enjoy having a relationship with my list. This is why there’s great interaction on my blog posts and my ticket desk.

Some marketers think building a relationship is like trying to befriend your lobster just before you have him for supper.

It’s like a circumscised man. Pointless.

And to be honest it’s EASIER not to build a relationship.

A mate of mine – an American marketer – is a GENIUS at this. I won’t name names but you’d know him. He constantly list builds and constantly mails it. That’s his business.

He loves it. I don’t know for sure what he earns but high six, low seven figures a year sounds right.

You getting this?

What I’m saying is that YOU CAN CUT OUT ALL THE OTHER CRAP THAT YOU HATE IN INTERNET MARKETING…

IF you build a list.

It’s GENUINE money on tap.

It WILL change your life.

Come a little closer to the screen and listen up:

“What the f*ck are you doing messing about with article marketing, or fannying about building a tropical fish Adsense site?”

You don’t need to create products, ‘establish a brand’ or anything like that. You may want to do that later with money in your pocket.

Many prospects actively DISLIKE it when you try to make friends with them. They simply want recommendations that they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

You want to make money in Internet Marketing?

HERE’S what you need to do to make money.

1. Build a list as big and as fast as you can in the IM niche. This will help with the ‘how’

2. Find products to recommend to it

3. Press ‘send’

Once you’re earning $4,000 a month from doing this, THEN you can start a blog about ‘Flower Pressing For Conspiracy Theorists’

Yesterday I recommended an easy to follow, very effective course that will show you how to build a list and become an email marketer.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS

Honestly guys, there IS a magic button out there where you just press a button and it pushes money into your account. It’s called email marketing.

It’ll involve some work but it’s worth it more than ANYTHING I’ve ever come across in IM

Comments most DEFINITELY welcome.

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This post might upset a few people.

It’s the online equivalent of being told you’ve got bad breath or your partner is cheating on you.

It’s bad news I’m afraid.

At first glance anyway.

Once it sinks in and you’ve looked past the despair you initially feel then maybe, like me, you’ll see it as a blessing and start changing some aspects of your business for the better.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of this please remember this is JUST MY OPINION.

(I’m bloody right though!)

FREE TRAFFIC DOESN’T WORK IN THE LONG TERM

If you base your business on free traffic you’ll die of old age before you see the results you want, or at least your business will.

I’m talking about traffic from making forum posts, SEO (unless you’re an expert), Facebook, giving away free viral reports, article marketing, Squidoo, Craiglist and most other things you can think of.

On the WHOLE it just doesn’t work for most marketers. Me included.

Now let me qualify that.

It doesn’t work as much as you need it to.

You WILL get SOME success from free traffic sources, but speaking as someone who’s tried ALL of the above for YEARS, let me tell you it’s BLOODY HARD WORK.

Too much for me anyway.

It’s an uphill struggle every day, and basing your business on free traffic like this is the quickest way to get grey hair and an empty bank balance.

Now I know I’ve recommended most of the methods above in the past but I have two points to make about that:

1. Show me someone who doesn’t change their opinions as they get older and more experienced and I’ll show you a complete tit

2. I’ve tried them (and the alternative which I’m about to mention) and they simply don’t allow your business to grow fast enough or to the levels of success you need.

Free traffic isn’t consistent enough.

It’s not reliable, controllable or targeted enough for what most marketers REALLY need.

So what’s the answer?

Well many of you already know the answer to this, and many more will groan inwardly at the next line:

Paid Traffic.

Buy it.

The weird thing is that paid traffic can actually be FREE if you track your conversions, set up an effective sales funnel and then mail out to your new list a couple of times a week.

I’ve tried both and buying traffic – in the form of banner advertising, paid solo mailings, paid ads on other people’s sites and various CPA and PPC campaigns – and it’s SO much easier and much more profitable.

I KNOW a lot of you just don’t want to hear this.

You’ve no real budget, you don’t know how to go about buying traffic and even if you did, you’re sure you’d just ‘blow’ the money.

And I won’t lie to you, getting your head round making paid traffic work for your particluar business takes work.

But to be honest it’s probably the ONLY real solution if you’re serious about your business rather than just playing pretty at the computer every day.

The ideal solution is to make your sales funnel pay for the traffic at the point of entry (when they come into your funnel) but sometimes that’s not possible.

I’m quite happy paying $1.10 per subscriber at the moment. So for example to get 500 new subscribers costs me $550

Because I know what the average subscriber is worth to me and I know I’ll make the money back and more over their ‘lifetime’ as one of my subscribers.

The art to paid traffic is to get the most targeted possible for the lowest price possible.

And the whole point is to build a list that you can send promos to and make money.

You’d be amazed how many people spend a fortune on paid traffic to build a list then just don’t mail to them.

It’s like paying for a new car then not driving it.

I estimate that 80% (at least) of new marketers NEVER pay for traffic. No wonder so many people don’t suceed!

It’s impossible to see how well your products convert when you’re working with trickles of untargeted free traffic from Facebook and article marketing. And that’s without mentioning the crazy amount of time most people spend generating free traffic.

I’m not blaming anyone though.

I used free traffic sources for a LONG time and pretty successfully too. I’m pretty good at viral marketing and a lot of money came in, but it never really felt …..dunno, suppose ‘secure’ is the right word. The traffic always felt as though it would vanish overnight.

Paid traffic doesn’t do that.

It’s there WHENEVER you need it. Constantly.

But I understand fully why many marketers concentrate solely on free traffic. It’s because as marketers we’re brought up on a diet of ‘quick fix’ solutions and products. Pie in the sky.

The thing is, building your business on free traffic is JUST as pie in the sky as the latest Clickbank scammy software.

Listen – there IS obviously a place in your business for free traffic sources. I use them. The thing is they MUST be cost effective and must must MUST be time-effective. If you’re spending three hours every day on Facebook to drive traffic you don’t have a business. Or if you outsource it and it doesn’t cover the costs of paying the outsourcers then you’re getting it WRONG.

Likewise with paid traffic – if you can’t work out how to spend $1.00 to make $1.75 you probably shouldn’t be in this business.

If your budget won’t stretch to buying a few $100 solo mailings to test your conversion rates then you DEFINITELY shouldn’t.

Sorry if this stings a little. If it’s any consolation it stung me too when I realised the same thing.

Obviously there are exceptions to the free traffic rule, so if anyone’s making $10k a month solely from ree traffic sources please comment below and prove me wrong.

And the rest of you guys – I’d LOVE to hear what you think about this. Please leave your comments below. I expect a lot of differing opinions on this – let’s see if I’m right 🙂

 

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Hi Guys,

Well choosing the first site to put under the ‘Hot Seat’ spotlights was SERIOUSLY hard work.

I ended up with a shortlist of 7 then eventually chose the site.

It’s Joanna Paez’s site http://inspiredworkingmoms.com/

It was launched in january and now she says she’s ‘totally stuck’

So let’s see if we can offer a little help and maybe learn something too.

Here’s what we’re going to do chaps.

I’ll start the ball rolling with the first comment below, by posting some comments, ideas and suggestions

Joanna – just go through the comments and answer the Q’s – and we’ll probably need you to answer some questions too.

And everyone is free to make their own comments of course.

In short guys – we’re making up this ‘hot seat’ event as we go along, so let’s see what happens eh 🙂

My first comment is below.

Please get involved and give your opinions of Joanna’s site. (Constructive please)

So leave your comments about Joanna’s site below!

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If you’ve ever been to some of the bigger internet marketing seminars you might have heard about something called ‘The Hot Seat’

Basically, it’s where you show the rest of the group your website. Maybe one you’re struggling with or that isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped, in order for the attending experts AND fellow marketers to give you some input and advice as to what you might do to improve your results.

It’s not harsh or brutal – it’s incredibly useful and the advice and input you get from both your peers and from more established marketers is invaluable.

So how do you fancy getting one going on my blog?

After the massive success of the Seven Day Accountability challenge a few weeks ago, we know know that we have a thriving and motivated Hippy Marketing Community so what do you think guys?

Shall we have a ‘Hot Seat’ feature some time next week?

If you fancy getting involved, or having your website placed under the microscope in the hot seat then post your details below, including your website URL and I’ll choose one.

You’ll get more traffic from it (because it’ll be mentioned on my blog) and trust me, the advice and feedback you get will give your business a MASSIVE boost. I’ve seen how well these things work.

Anyone can take part and submit their websites below. Don’t be embarassed – this is a community that HELPS each other.

It won’t get nasty because I will ban anyone who get vicious.

If you don’t have a website then please get involved giving your opinion and advice.

IMPORTANT: YOUR ADVICE AND INPUT IS NEEDED AND APPRECIATED NO MATTER WHAT LEVEL OF MARKETING YOU’RE AT.

So don’t feel that you have nothing to contribute – you absolutely do. If you wouldn’t buy a particular product that’s in the hot seat then tell the owner WHY NOT. Feedback like this is worth it’s weight in gold, so you don’t have to be at ANY level to participate ok?

If we get a big enough response we’ll run the first one next week, OK?

If you’re chosen to have your site in the hot seat, you’ll be expected to answer questions and comments in the comments section as we go.

If you submit your website to the hotseat please also include any relevant stats (if you wish) such as traffic, sales, conversion rates etc

Please leave your commments and website URL’s below.

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The survey we conducted a week or so ago threw up some pretty fascinating results.

So much so that I thought I’d share them outside my own blog readers subscribers.

I was also a chance to try out something I haven’t sone before, which was to have a FREE front end product leading onto a couple of upsells.

The actual technical side of putting the free front end together with everything else was a little harder than I had hoped, but I freely admit to not being a great techy and in the end it only took me about 30 minutes once the sites were in place and including testing.

The survey results were a GREAT insight into what internet marketing techniques are actually making money for people, how much they’re earning (and how much they’re not) and what the major obstacles taht are keeping them back from success are.

If you want to grab your free copy of my survey results from my JVZoo squeeze page just click HERE.

I’ll also share with you how the experiment went and if I’ll be doing it all again!

Comments welcome below

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I’ve just launched a survey to find out what’s REALLY holding most people back from the success they want (and deserve) in their online businesses.

I’ll be sharing the results with you when they’re in.

I think it’ll be quite eye opening for people to find out:

What’s been holding other marketers back

Which areas of internet marketing people have most difficulty with

Which show most successes

The average amount of time a marketer works on his or her business BEFORE they see success.

I’d love to have you on board

To fill in the survey just click the link below

UPDATE: Survey is now closed – Thank you

I’ll be sharing them with you in a day or two.

Comments ALSO welcome below.

EDIT: With 30 surveys in already, this question: Which of the following do you think has been stopping you achieving the results you desire? is showing a CLEAR winner so far and surprisngly it’s NOT lack of time, money or motivation. It surprised me! Looking forward to sharing this with you as soon as everything’s in!

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You know that I live the internet lifestyle right?

Running my business from a deserted beach while the kids play happily?

Yeah well sometimes it works well and you feel like Richard Branson.

And sometimes it doesn’t and you feel like a PROPER tit.

Guess which one happened to me last week?

Yep – I’m a 36DD cup!

It was the Easter holidays here in the UK and the kids were off school so as usual we decided to wander.

I think I’ve mentioned before that we have a ‘grab bag’ that contains all the requirements for ‘mobile business’ such as various leads, headsets, adapters, pen drives, spare power supplies, notebooks,and other stuff that we need to run the biz.

It just gets chucked in the car whenever we wander off, along with my netbook and our iphones and suddenly everything it totally portable.

We could (and have) run things like this for weeks and even months at a time.

So this particular morning it was raining and windy so we decided to go beach walking for a challenge.

I had a last check of my emails before we left as I drank my morning green tea and all was fine. Peace and calm.

Then for some weird reason I decided to check my ‘divert’ folder.

I have ‘divert’ folders for most marketers whose lists I subscribe to. Their emails go directly into this folder and don’t hit my inbox becuase I find them distracting.

If someone is launching something on the same day as me, or a similar product, I find that if I’m aware of it, it makes me think a little too much about whether I should change the time of my launch, or put a different angle on the product so they don’t clash.

Whereas if I don’t know, I don’t give a crap. Hence my divert folder.

But this particular morning I was skimming through and I noticed John Thornhill’s folder.

I hadn’t seen what John was up to for ages, so I clicked on it.

Well by total co-incidence (and this is the absolute truth – not some cruddy IM ploy) he’d just sent out a JV invite for his latest WSO.

And it was due to go live that very day. I knew the product too and it was a good offer

I now had two choices:

I could spend half an hour writing a promo, grabbing an affiliate link, working out the international launch time (EST/EDT and all that) and risk getting verbally (and possibly physically) abused by my lovely wife who was herding the kids into the car…

Or I could follow the internet lifestyle and launch the whole thing from the beach…

I chose to live the IM dream and launch it from the beach using my trusty iPhone 3g.

WHAT a mistake.

That iPhone is now about to be listed on eBay and the latest model sits on my desk in it’s place as I type this.

Back to the story….

In the car I emailed John T and asked him what time GMT the launch would go live because I intended to send the details to my PA along with the promo email I was going to write and let her send the promo out via Aweber at the correct time.

John got back to me with the time and I wrote my promo on my phone while eating sushi as we stopped off for an early lunch. I also got my affiliate link sorted out.

All going well and I’m feeling like a real IM dude.

We got to the beach and the sun came out. It was gorgeous and wild and windy and my nose got sandblasted. We walked for miles.

The launch was due to go at 4pm.

Earlier that day at about 1pm I’d emailed my PA with full instructions and asked her to set up the promo and send it at four PM.

At 3.30pm I’d had no reply. This is something that NEVER happens.

I checked my iPhone to see if the message had been sent successfully and found to my horror that my phone had moved itself over to ‘nobhead mode’ and despite having an almost full battery kept restarting itself every time I tried to load a webpage or access my email.

I just couldn’t access my email or the promo I’d written earlier.

I now know that the email I sent to my PA actually WASN’T sent.

By now it was 3.45 and it looked like the promo wasn’t going to happen.

This wasn’t life and death of course but I’m stubborn and was determined to go ahead with my plan.

I left the rest of my family to wander round and sat on a rock with my wife’s iPhone (a 4S model) to see if I could make the deadline.

The first thing I needed was access to my email. I tried to add my email account to my wife’s phone but I couldn’t remember the password so that bombed.

Luckily I COULD remember the affiliate link I’d set up so I reckoned that if I could log into Aweber I could do the launch myself.

5 minutes to 4pm by this time.

If you can send out a promo on time you’ll make more sales. People are on multiple lists so they tend to check out an opportunity from the first link they see. That’s what I’ve found anyway.

So after three failed attempts I logged into Aweber (I remembered the password for that one luckily) and by expanding the screen and working on a section at a time I managed to write a (very short) promo and send it from Aweber complete with affiliate link.

I couldn’t get into my email account so had no idea if it had been sent successfully.

Here’s a picture of me pacing up and down as I’m sending out the promo. I’m extremely grumpy here and muttering words that you only usually hear from possessed people with Tourette’s syndrome.

So what did we learn from this, in terms of being able to successfully market on the move?

1. Make sure that when you get a new phone you BACK UP all the info that was on the old one, including a folder with relevant passwords.

2. If you work as part of a team, as we do make sure that all info is duped across all devices.

3. If possible set up as much as possible from your office first. If I’d uploaded the promo from home I could just have logged in on the beach and cicked one button to send it

I finally got my promo out at around 4.14pm. I didn’t know it had gone out until I got back and could plug in my iphone to charge it for long enough to check my emails.It still obviously wasn’t working properly though

It wasn’t a disaster because at the end of the day it was just a promo I was sending out, and it would probably have been better to just abandon the whole thing.

But in the past on numerous ocassions I’ve launched my own products from various locations away from home very successfully.

So this was a good lesson I think.

On the whole I’m glad i didn’t abandon this promo for two reasons. Firstly I’ve generated sales into four figures and it’s also paid for my new iPhone.

And secondly because it’s a great product that I highly recommend.

I only lost about an hour of my day at most, and because of my lifestyle I’ll definitely continue with my mobile marketing.

It might be better to put a new system into place though…

Any ideas?

Comments welcome

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I got an email the other day from a pretty furious chap who called into question one of my marketing techniques.

Now obviously being an opinionated bugger (me not him) and also being extremely comfortable with how I conduct my business I thought I might be missing something because I couldn’t ‘get’ why he was so angry.

So if you’re at a loose end today or have an opinion on the following I’d love to have your input.

Which side of the fence do YOU sit on?

Here’s the issue this guy had with me.

He bought one of my reports. It’s a report that shares five of my proven strategies that will shortcut cash into your account in under 30 days.

It does what it says on the tin, and if you ‘just add sweat’ as one of my favourite marketers says, then it DOES work.

So make no doubt about it, he bought a report that was teaching internet marketing techniques.

No argument there.

What DID shove a pointy finger up his sense of righteousness and all things holy was that there was an UPSELL in my sales process.

He was as mad as an X Factor contestant when he came onto my support desk.

Using colourful language he pointed out that when he buys a product about internet marketing he does NOT want to be confronted with an upsell. He found it insulting and extremely inconvenient as all he wanted was the product he’d bought.

My view on this is that he needs to look at what he’s bought.

I teach internet marketing.

70% of the income of almost all my sales come from upsells.

If upsells bug him that much he’s in the WRONG business.

Or is it OK to present his customers with upsells but woe betide any marketer who actually presents HIM with one?

(Classic case of treating your customers as being less intelligent there)

Now I’m assuming that people who buy my products have a brain and can understand what they’re buying and why.

And if you want to learn internet marketing one of the most IMPORTANT things I can ever teach you is the value of upsells.

Surely you’d be annoyed if one of my techniques was teaching about upsells yet I didn’t use them in my own funnels?

Mental.

Combine this with the fact that almost EVERY company that sells online uses upsells.

Ever buy off Amazon? They’re MASTERS at it.

Trying to change your TV and Internet package?

Just look at the ‘optional extras’ they add

Almost everyone online uses upsells and one time offers.

My bloke must go trawl the internet with a permanently red face and blood pressure that could boil water.

But surely the FIRST place you’d expect an upsell is when you’re buying an internet marketing product?

If you don’t want to break eggs don’t buuy a friggin’ book on omlettes mate.

I’m 100% convinced I’m right on this.

But I’m also not stupid enough to never change my opinions.

Upsells are hugely important to anyone wanting to make a living online. You’re gonna leave a LOT of money on the table if you don’t use them.

Sure I get bugged when I have to go through 4 exit splashes to leave a page but that’s a different thing. I’m talking about related upsells.

Anyway I gave him a refund and explained how he’d be better off reading another marketer’s stuff.

ANY marketer.

I haven’t heard back so hopefully he’s gone to play with the people who post WSO’s and advertise their ‘No Upsell Promise’ as a key feature of the product they’re selling.

So here’s where I need your input guys.

I know we don’t agree on everything (thank God) but I maintain that my subscribers have a higher average intelligence than most, purely because they can understand my witterings.

So I’d appreciate your honest opinion on this one.

Where do you stand on the great upsell / OTO debate?

Comments welcome

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Well our 7 day challenge is over.

EDIT: 50 comments for the accountability challenge, only 16 (so far) for the results. C’mon guys – if you posted a goal last week please grow a hairy pair and share the results!!

I’m really excited about this.

So all you who posted your 7 day challenges please let us know how much you accomplished by leaving a comment below.

Please copy your original challenge onto the comment first so we can see what your goals were, then let us know how far you got!

I’ll start!

I originally wanted to install and learn to use some tracking software.

I DID install the software I wanted, and I DID finally get it running.

But it doesn’t do exactly what I need so I’m dumping it and installing different software.

Now that might sound like a failure BUT if you take into consideration that I’ve been thinking about doing this for MONTHS before my challenge and now, in just 7 days I’ve eliminated some software and have located some which I think will do the job…

…well it’s not all bad, so my own personal 7 day accountability challenge has pretty much worked for me.

How did YOU get on?

Remember post your original challenge in the comment box below, then let us know how far you actually got!

Other comments also welcome!

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