I am frequently asked by beginners, “What should I do in internet marketing?”
In this 7-minute interview with Ryan Lee, I talk about the first things a beginner should think about.
Note: The first thing is NOT to run out and buy the next shiny new product out there. Think first.
One of the most important parts of creating a
strong offer is risk reduction. And the higher
the price, the stronger the risk reduction
component must be.
You’ll find a good example of that here:
http://CBmall.com/detail/lower-risk
A strong risk reduction may include:
* Money Back Guarantee
A 30, 45, 60 or 90 day guarantee is pretty
ho-hum these days for many products. But still
important.
* Results Guarantee
When accompanied by a money back guarantee,
this becomes much more powerful. For example:
“Here’s my vow to you: You must agree that
product XXXX has put at least FIFTY TIMES your
first payment to your bottom line, or send it
back for a 100% Unconditional Refund.”
Now doesn’t that seem much more powerful?
Obviously, this person believes in their
product enough to take all the risk.
* Proof of Performance
Positive proof of performance is another risk
reduction method. If you can state clear
performance benefits and prove them with credible
testimonials, prospects have another strong
data point for their decision-making process.
It’s also more powerful to have a range of
different types of results. If you were
selling a golf product, you might have a
testimonial from a young guy who now hits 350
yard drives. Great. But also include one from a
small woman who went from 150 yards to 180
yards. That’s just as important for her.
Or if you are selling a marketing product,
having testimonials from established businesses
is great, but also share results from beginners
to demonstrate that your product helps all
types of businesses.
* Creative Restatement
Saying, “Money back guarantee” is fine. And
important. But consider stating your guarantee
in more creative ways.
Example: “Use it to make all the money you want
between now and March 15, 2009. Then you decide
…”
This reinforces the fact that the buyer can’t
possibly lose, because if they don’t profit
from the investment, they can decide to return
the product. And they’ve got plenty of time to
try it and see results.
* Payment Reduction
Accepting payments over time is another great
risk reduction strategy, especially in
difficult economic times like we are in now.
Many people who can’t come up with a big
upfront payment may be able to invest a couple
of hundred dollars a month if the rest of your
risk reduction is powerful.
If they believe your powerful guarantee, and
you compound that power with a creative
restatement and then finally make the initial
investment a fraction of the total through
payments, you’ve made it a much easier “buy”
decision.
Here’s a beautiful example of risk reduction:
http://CBmall.com/detail/lower-risk
You won’t find a much better sales letter, and
you can tell they have spent a lot of time on
risk reduction.
You might want to file away this email for the
next time you are working on a sales letter.
These risk reduction techniques have a huge
impact on the effectiveness of any offer.
Techsmith, the guys who develop Camtasia, have a great free service called JingProject. It lets you do quick screen captures, both still and video, and it hosts them for free.
This makes it very easy to do a quick video and easily share it. The free account gives you 2 gig of storage and bandwidth, enough for a lot of videos and views.
The downside is you can’t edit. But it’s a great way to quickly demonstrate something. I don’t use JingProject for marketing purposes because I have Camtasia and my own hosting, but I use it to explain things to my support people, partners and developers. For anyone just starting out, it’s an excellent service.
I'm eager to hear your comments...
Goodbye PC Magazine.
Yesterday I received the last print edition of PC Magazine, which I had I started reading shortly after it was first published in 1982.
PC Magazine was one of the best places to learn about PCs, software and accessories. They have great articles on technology, user tips, software reviews, etc.
At one point the magazine had over 600 pages. This last issue in my hands has 98.
PC Magazine will still publish in an online version, but I’ll miss the print edition. I feel like I grew up with it.
I wonder if PC Magazine was a victim of its own trend toward covering the general industry, with more articles on cell phones, gadgets, MP3 players and the like along with a trend to commoditization of PC equipment.
I find it interesting that a huge publishing company like Ziff Davis is closing a venerable print edition like PC Mag when individuals like Yanik Silver, Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins & Brad Fallon have all successfully introduced print editions of newsletters targeting the online marketing world.
Seems there’s a lot to be said for a tightly focused niche.
Hopefully these tips have been helpful. What do you think?Just read an interesting report on the capture of Saddam Hussein. It was 5 years ago when Saddam was pulled out of a spider hole. You might remember that the US military had come out with a deck of cards ranking the 52 most wanted Iraqi terrorists – with Saddam being the Ace of Spades.
Turns out that while everybody else was looking for all these “cards” they were hoping would lead to Saddam, Staff Sgt Eric Maddox went “long tail”.
He decided to look for and question the body guards and drivers for Saddam and his top aides. To make a long story short (and you can read the long story here) his interrogation of these low level personnel lead him to the farm house where Saddam was hiding.
By thinking slightly out of the box and analyzing the long tail, Maddox reached his goal where hundreds of others had not.
Now think of this in terms of your business. It’s not just about long tail keywords, for which it is extremely relevant, but about many aspects of your business.
Example: What joint venture partners make sense for your business? Let’s say you sell training on how to play a guitar. Sure – you do PPC. And you have lots of competition there. But a more long tail strategy might be to contact music stores and recruit them to be your affiliates. You could even work with their headquarters who may be willing to send an email to everyone who buys a guitar from them. Now that would be an “Ace of Spades” score for your business.
Long tail creative thinking worked for Maddox in finding the #1 fugitive in the world. It can work for your business, too.
Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.
I downloaded Jeff Johnson’s Free SEO blog software and followed his instructions.
In less than 10 days I had the number 3 spot in Google for my keyword phrase as you will see in this video.
If you are at all interested in getting free SEO traffic from blogs, you should really get this free software and just follow the step-by-step instructions.
Download free SEO blog software.
Edit 12/6: Free software not currently available, but the pro version is now for sale.
What about you? What do you think?
I received an email from Google telling me I had a Google Alert and needed to lot into my account to read it. But as you see in this video, it was not really Google. These criminals were trying to get me to supply them with my login and password so they could take over my Google AdWords or AdSense account. From there, they can change payment information, run ads on my budget supporting their products, etc. Beware – and always look for the real URL. In any email like this, if they tell you to log into your account, go directly to your browser and enter the URL of the account. Don’t click on the email unless you are 100% sure.
Please let me know what you thought of this post... I'm dying to find out...
Download free WordPress SEO Blog software here.
Wondering what one of these blogs looks like? Here’s a model rocket books blog I just made with this free software.
Amazon has released a public beta of a new service called CloudFront. It works with their Amazon S3 service to distribute web content geographically so that your files are closer to your visitors.
I think this may be the solution to the server meltdowns we have seen or experienced first-hand during big product launches. I know several big-name marketers who have had server issues recently. These aren’t rookies. They’ve bought multiple servers to handle the anticipated load, but had big problems anyway. It’s a tough challenge.
With CloudFront, your files are hosted on the massive Amazon network. In the US alone there are eight geographically disbursed “edge” locations. If your web page starts getting lots of requests, as it will during a big launch, CloudFront takes your files from the S3 server and pushes them out to its edge servers in these eight locations. This means there is less “travel time” for the files to get to the visitor, and that the demand is shared among those server locations.
Result? Your sales page stays up and orders keep coming in.
What kind of capacity can it handle?
From the web site: “By default, your distributions support peak data transfer speeds of 1,000 megabits per second and peak request rates of 1,000 requests per second. If you expect more than this amount of traffic, please request a higher limit here. ”
Pricing is based on what you use – not upfront fees or monthly charges.
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.Got this idea from Mike Filsaime. Simple but effective. If you want to build a following on Twitter, register a domain name for it. Example: I registered http://TwitterMulligan.com
In your host control panel, simply forward this domain to your own twitter link. This works especially well if you were unable to get your desired name when you registered at Twitter.
You can put this in your email footers, email confirm pages, blog pages, etc.
Please comment below and let me know... I would really appreciate it.