Internet Marketing Tell All

That one thing is probably follow-up.

Picture this.

You have a sales letter that converts at 3%, and your profit is $75 per sale. 1000 people see it. You make 30 sales. $2250. Congrats. You da man.

What if you had a follow-up series that also converted at only 3%. But the sign-up rate to the series was 50%. You have the original 30 sales.

Watch this. Sign up to the follow-up is 500 people. 3% of them convert at $75. That’s another 15 sales. Another $1275.

An hour extra work giving away a couple of excerpts or articles that you’ve already written or setting up the autoresponder series. 50% increase in sales.

I would call my initial lack of follow-up my single biggest marketing mistake ever. Follow up is not just for signing up the people that didn’t buy on impulse the first time they came to your site, it’s for selling upsells to people who are already sold.

Once I started marketing to customers I already had, I kicked myself every day for about a year.  I don’t even mean newsletters. I mean listening to your clients really well. When they send you testimonials, really study what they’re saying that they liked. Be anal, keep a database of comments and who said what.

I started to keep the people who had bought from me separate from those who didn’t. With their permission, I offered them upsells about four times a year. Once I had a 100% conversion rate.  I had sold 100 people an ebook and listened to their suggestions. All 100 of them bought the multimedia version. $9700 for a day’s work.

How much are you leaving on the table?

Don’t have a list of people to market to? What if you can’t go back and write individual emails asking your customers to sign up to your special offers list (Bait works. Offer them 10% off if they buy during the first week a new product is out.)?

Ask a fellow marketer. You probably have a friend who was a one-hit wonder in internet marketing and can’t figure out what to do next. Pitch them the idea and sell to their customer list in exchange for a cut in the profits.

I only worked seriously about three months of the year. Another quarter I did enough work to sustain me. For about two quarters a year, I rested and did my physical therapy.

When I didn’t want to work, or couldn’t, ezine advertising not only paid my bills, it kept me comfy. A lot of people will tell you to rely on AdWords. There’s nothing wrong with any type of search engine marketing if you know enough about it to maintain a decent conversion rate, and have enough money to keep your sales steady.

My preference was for testing with small ezine ads, and then, when they test well, solo ads. Six months out of the year, I would hire someone to look at my product and write me two ads, an ezine ad and a solo ad. All told, a really good copywriter that specializes in advertising would cost me $300 or less.  I can write a decent ad pulling about 15% for visits, and then 3% of those for sales, but do the math: if a specialist can get me 25% for visits, even if the sales conversion rate remains steady, I’ve made a lot more money. So investing $100 for a solo ad in a high quality publication of about 10, 000 visitors would bring me 1500 visitors, and then about 45 sales.
Still, I wouldn’t suggest ezine advertising for everyone.

Pros? Instead of keyword research, you just do publication research. Is the publication targeted? Did the smaller ad yield good results? Then it’s on. If not, you’ve wasted maybe $10. So add to that cost effective. I’d spend around $100 - $250 just to Test pay per click results. A sampling of less than 100 visitors isn’t really worth the effort. The return is bettery when you hit paydirt on the right publication.

There are more pros, but you get the idea, more money, less effort, more cost effective.

Cons? It’s not as predictable as pay per click and returns aren’t as immediate. You don’t always know when your ad is going to run. Even if you get a special where the ad goes out within three days, you don’t know when the prospect is going to read the ezine or if it will make it through their filters (which I believe accounts for most of the return rate.) Pay per click has it beat there.

You also have to be careful of saturation. In a publication of 10,000, with a visit rate of 15%, I would only run the same ad for the same product ten times, and that’s over the course of several months. I’d also say that this is more of a method for a career affiliate or career infoproduct entrepreneur. Almost anyone else is better off with AdWords, or a combination of other online marketing methods. But here’s a clue - use this method to earn the initial effort for an AdWords campaign.

Of course, no smart marketer uses only one technique. I use AdWords when I want an immediate, controlled response, and have the attention span to test and track the results, and have the time to do the research. Even in the beginning, I always had the money to invest - but I’ve found that I get a better return from a combination of several methods that includes ezine advertising on my own products.

That’s what I used to say to my rich friends when I was broke. I’d like to invite you to say the same thing to me.

I am a workaholic. I can’t Not work. I work when I’m sick. And with the vacuum in my life from the sale of my company, I had to find a few other things to do. This blog is (note: not was) one of them. But things unexpectedly went SO well that I had more work to do, suddenly, and felt obligated to celebrate.

I will be back from my work hard/play even harder silence - thank you to the 200 people a day who take time from their schedules to see what I’m up to. I promise you continued chatter from the globe-like area where I keep my brain over the next week.

And the contest is still on.