Internet Marketing Tell All

You think I came up with this stuff? People have been trying to tell you this for years. They just lack the finesse of someone as conceited and charming as I.

The biggest lesson I learned in internet marketing was that it doesn’t always have to be the invention of something new and ground-breaking - if you wait for the most divine intervention, you’ll never make any money. In the meantime, it might help to think of it this way: you have knowledge your clients want, and you’re doing them a disservice by not giving them the chance to snatch it up.

This is true whether you create your own products, resell other people’s products, are an affiliate marketer, or sell advertising on your site.

To apply this concept to marketing, remember that there is a point of merging between your style of attracting a potential customer and making a sale, a point at which you take your own style and join it with what you’ve learned from other people.

If you want to be a lady’s man, do you study someone who never gets a date? That would be dumb. If you want a relationship, do you ask other bachelors for advice with your girl? Equally stupid.

Decide what your identity is, and think about what works on you. Learn about it. Take all those elements and then add you. The same way Andy in 40 Year Old Virgin took the best elements of all the advice from his friends and through trial and error, found what worked for him.

==> Sidebar<== Love that movie, the extended DVD version. “Okay, let’s start over. Hi, Are You Fucking Retarded?” haaaaaaaa.

Imagine this.

You see a beautiful woman in a grocery store. She smiles at you suggestively. So you move in closer to flirt with her.

You stand next to her in front of the ice cream cooler and make eye contact. She smiles, looks away, your eyes meet again in the reflection from the glass. She turns and says, “Hi, I’m Candy.”

You yell “MY NAME IS ANDY. MY PENIS IS HUGE. WILL YOU MARRY ME? I’M ONLY GOING TO BE STANDING HERE FOR A LIMITED TIME, SO YOU MUST ACT QUICKLY. LOOK, ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE DATING ME, AND SOME PEOPLE YOU REALLY RESPECT, HERE ARE THEIR NAMES AND COMMENTS. ”

She rubs her ears and says, “Uh, hi.” And starts to back away.

Stalker that you are, you follow her and continue your pitch.

“IF YOU’RE NOT READY FOR MARRIAGE, LET’S TRY A TEST MARRIAGE DURING A TRIAL PERIOD CALLED A DATE! IF YOU GIVE ME YOUR PHONE NUMBER, I WON’T SELL IT TO MY FRIENDS, HONEST. ACT NOW AND I’LL TAKE YOU TO FRIDAYS.”

“Maybe we should start ov-” She’s willing to give you another chance but you just can’t shut up.

“OH YOU WAITED TOO LONG, NOW IT’S SUBWAY. TOO LATE MCDONALDS. BEFORE YOU GO, CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME WHY YOU’RE NOT MARRYING ME RIGHT NOW? WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN MARRYING ME LATER? OKAY, WELL WHAT IF WE JUST HAD SOME SEX, WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN THAT?”

If you’re pissing yourself laughing, and getting flashbacks to 40 Year Old Virgin, you might not be for long. How many of us either market that way, or have bought something from someone who markets that way?

Think about how often you use some similiar marketing tactics in your sales copy, on your site, or in your blog. Think maybe if you flirted a little with your audience and readers first, did something nice for them, paid attention to their needs, you’d be more popular?

I tried both ways. Turns out you need only a dash of flash in your sales letter if you take your desired customer for a steak dinner prior to bumping uglies the first time. And just like in dating, if you maintain a good benefits balance in your relationship, they’ll be back.

Of course, if you think it’s smart to have a series of one night stands, more power to you. Me, I’d rather be up front and serially polygamous with my customers than fake monogamy just to get them into bed the one time. Don’t know about you but I’m building a business not a brothel.

As my mood/health/family stalkers allow, we’re going to talk about coy marketing, and the intersection of romancing your prospect into a sale by addressing their needs, instead of batting them over the head with a caveman’s bat and facing dire consequences later.

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.