Internet Marketing Tell All

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.

I’m trying to think of things I haven’t talked about, and also go through certain things in a more organized fashion - where do I start and what can I say that would be useful to a new person, or a checkpoint to someone with an intermediate marketing backround?

What I came up with is to publish the checklist to the plan I use to launch a new infoproduct, from research to launch.

I may come back and edit. Feel free to chime in if it looks like I skipped something. (I used a version of this when selling affiliate products, but there are some steps you’d have to drop or change. I’ll discuss that when I examine each point in detail within upcoming posts.)

1. Research the market
2. Narrow to several products and test market response
3. Pick an entry product and an upsell product
4. Create a content site for list building, marketing and/or networking
5. Market the site and gather more research from the signed up audience
6. Write a sales letter for your private use describing the ideal product
7. Write PPC/solo ads/ezine ads, etc
8. Create the enticement for the squeeze page/mini-site
9. Create the squeeze page for your private use (optional - combine with sales letter to make a mini-site)
10. Create the product (and upsell if applicable)
11. Test the product with past clients or admired mentors
12. Improve the product with their suggestions
13. Solicit multi-media testimonials (pictures, audio)
14. Test/polish the sales letter
15. Test/polish promotional materials and/or ads
16. Create any additional buzz
17. Choose a date for product launch
18. Set up sales and product delivery
19. Make a promotional plan for the product
20. Make an advertising plan for the product
21. Do any pre-execution for advertising/marketing
22. Test sales process (and product delivery if electronic) and follow-up
23. Automate the entire marketing and sales system as much as possible
24. Test sales/delivery process again post-automation
25. Create follow-up schedule for clients (in addition to autoresponder)
26. Have a dress rehearsal
27. Execute

The minute you get the formula out of your head that yields only 1 - 1.5% of some mass number of people converting the better. Before you even try to get more visitors, think about getting the best visitors. Get the ideal person to come to your site in search of answers they are willing to pay for. That’s it.

With even a $10 product, 300 people A Month can have you quitting your day job. And if you’re really smart and can come up with a good membership site and the right price point, you’ll only have to sell to them once.

Do you think, over the course of a month, you can get 600 people, just 600, to a website? What if your conversion rate was 50% among targeted visitors? There’s your 300 right there.

Of course, that’s not typical. At first, you should be thinking of getting your conversion rate to 10%. To do that you need to make sure, as much as you can, that every single person who made it to that page has a problem that your product can solve, that they understand that your product will solve it, and that you can follow up with them until you do.

You’ll have to deal with boring issues like better sales copy, or hire someone to do it for you. Your ads will need to be better. You’ll have to come up with a system that has the highest possible probability that they’ll subscribe to your follow-up and eventually buy.

Everything you do from meeting people online in forums and on blogs, all the way down to  the delivery and after-product upsell will have to be examined and perfected, then the entire process needs to be automated.

But if you can do that, if you can take the time to learn, or the money to pay an expert, with even a decent product, you can become a full-time infopreneur.