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.

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.

This is going to burn a huge bridge for me, maybe several. I am thinly disguising the name of the individual this story is about to keep from shaming the guilty, because he got what he deserved in the end. Maybe too much of it.

There was this guy, we’ll call him Scammer Rick. Scammer Rick convinced a (still) trusted friend of mine to join an organization whose sole aim was to help certain types of corporations with a very specific kind of online marketing that involved what I still think is one of the best products I have ever seen or used.

The friend wanted me aboard. Because of how great the product was and how much I trust my friend, of course, I said yes. I still don’t regret that decision because I met some great people.

Scammer Rick was the pitcher, and my friend, myself, and a few other people were the catchers. When we got the clients he signed, we actually got them set up and did the actual legwork.

After about a week working with Rick, I realized that my clients were being sold something completely different than what they were actually buying. I found this out when a new customer called me up asking what exactly he had bought.

I said “What do you mean, exactly?”

He said, “Well, Rick said that we were buying the most powerful marketing system online but he didn’t tell us what it actually was or what it does.”

I hated Rick desperately for a couple of years after this was over, not just for the mess I had to clean up, not just because he never paid me most of the money I made on any of the jobs I did, but because of the innocents harmed in the making of his scam.

However, I always will have a reluctant respect him for his sales ability, though not how he used it. To date, I still haven’t quite figured out how he got people to fork over what eventually amounted to thousands of dollars for something several of them claimed not to be able to identify.

If only he had used his power for good.

Getting back to the story, this kind of thing became a pattern. One of my biggest regrets in the time I spent with his organization was that sometimes I have too much faith in people, and that just because the product they are reselling is mind-blowing, doesn’t mean they are themselves good people.

It seems like a silly assumption now, and I’m alarmed that I was so naive then as it wasn’t that long ago. Since then, I’ve learned that if something doesn’t feel right, no matter how rational things seem on the surface, I have to trust my instincts and walk away.

If I can just get one person to realize that same truth, well, that’s really not enough people, man, LOL.

Seriously, here’s the reason it’s so crucial to know this.

See, my reputation Almost got attached to his reputation. And that would have ruined me. Failing is never easy to deal with, but it’s unbearable when it isn’t through your own actions.

I will seriously regret telling this story….