Uncategorized

the vast majority of people who get started in Internet marketing look at seo (search engine optimization) as THE way to get traffic to their offers.

Whilst it’s of course great to get free traffic, most  people get the whole “SEO game” backwards and never reap the real benefits of search engine traffic.

In this webinar we explore how to do it right.

(lol, just noticed which image Youtube uses as the preview image, just to clarify, there’s NOTHING for sale here, the image you see is part of a case-study I’m showing you in the webinar)

httpvh://youtu.be/i4JVZ0JmN-4

Note: in the webinar I mention a follow-up presentation, and I wasn’t quite sure where to post it. Ignore what I’m saying in the webinar, I’ll post it here in the next few days.

Alrighty,

one of the big issues many new marketers are struggling with is the so-called “squeeze-page”.

The idea is that you’re offering something of value in exchange for an email address.

Unfortunately, as soon as you ‘step out’ of the Internet Marketing niche, many of the ‘tried and tested’ squeeze-pages don’t really work – meaning low (really low) signup rates, and hence of course low (really low) conversion rates to whatever you have to offer.

Here’s the problem:

Take a look at the example on the top right. It’s a squeeze-page for Jeff Johnson’s TubeTrafficSecrets launch, and it uses what everybody tells you is the latest and greatest in squish-technology:

A simple header, a strong headline and a signup box. And of course the ‘motivational’ image suggesting freedom, happiness and never ending streams of cash in the background.

This squeeze page works extremely well, for one simple reason:

the VAST majority of people who come to this page are already presold by the affiliates who sent them there.

In other words:

most of the heavy lifting (persuading or convincing someone to sign up) has already happened in the email that was sent by the affiliates to their list.

I’m willing to bet that if you did some eye-tracking studies of this particular landing page, the vast majority of people don’t even read the headline or the fine-print, but instead jump straight to the bottom, enter their email and hit the happy “send me the cheat sheets” button.

I’m also willing to bet that if you sent cold traffic (PPC and similar) to this squeeze page, you’d get far less than the reported 50.1% signup rate.

(and this is not meant to be a criticism of this particular signup page, it does exactly what it is supposed to do: collect emails from pre-qualified leads)

The reason why it wouldn’t work so well with cold traffic is simple:

in your PPC, or banner, or whatever ad, you will have had much less time and space to prequalify the prospect, and hence they are less likely to raise their hand and say “yes, that’s me, gimme, gimme, gimme”.

So, take-away:

the landing page you’re using has to take into account to what extent a prospect has been pre-qualified.

And the ‘colder’ the traffic, the more ‘warming up’ you’ll have to do before asking them for their email.

Back to the beginning:

the real reason why so many people are struggling with their squeeze pages is because they are modeling what they are seeing in their email-inboxes every day.

And those are typically examples of squeeze pages that assume that you’re already prequalified.

So, modeling is a GREAT approach, just use with caution and always be aware of how ‘warm’ the traffic is that hits your squeeze-page.

Enjoy

Veit

PS: I guess a question that might/should come up is: how to warm up a cold lead? It’s a topic for another post, but a good starting point for testing would be a multi-page signup-sequence – think of it as a mini-sales-letter that sells them on the idea of signing up. Remember to include your cliff-hanger at the end of each page, so your prospects keep reading.

PPS: just found out that if you click ‘back’ or exit Jeff’s page, a more detailed signup page pops up! Just click on the image above, it’ll take you to the page, then navigate away from the page, you’ll see what happens.

 

So, a couple of days ago Steve and I get talking, and he tells me he’s got 3500 domains, all waiting to be turned into gold … ideally in a (semi-)automated fashion.

Here’s my response to Steve:

3500 sites, lol, and I thought I had too many with 300.

Now, my master plan had been to rank & sell the
vast majority of those 300 – and in the end I kinda
gave up on them – they’re slowly expiring now, simply
because Google caught up too quickly (many of them
are EMDs) – and I couldn’t figure out a good way of
getting them ranked in a way that doesn’t piss off
Google too much.

Yes, I had a few of them rank on pg 1 of Google just
with content (5 pieces of content), and I very quickly
got notices from Google telling me that I’m violating
their Adsense rules, would I please take down Adsense
from those sites.

and, obviously, they’re not ranking on page 1 anymore.

so, as semi-automated doesn’t really work that well
anymore (especially at the scale you’re talking about),
I’d work on the highest value ones of your portfolio
for maximum profit, and find one of those “I’ll build your
site and get it ranked” guys on the WF and do a profit
split with them: you give them the domain, they build
it out, you split the profits (probably not 50-50 as they’re
doing the bulk of the work – but enough to make you
a small profit).

anyway, that’s what I would do

Cheers

 

Now, there is a “higher purpose” behind this:

a lot of people are married to their past results.

And that’s stopping them from moving forward.

Here’s the thing:

what you have done or achieved in the past, has very little influence on what you are doing now and can achieve now …

… unless of course you let your mind tell you that “just because you couldn’t make it work in the past, you can’t make it work now”.

Similarly, a lot of people are married to their past ‘investments’:

the feel they ‘should’ at least get some value out of all the ‘stuff’ they’ve bought in the past, and now it’s sitting there creating this fog of guilt in the minds. Others keep collecting the ‘stuff’ and tell themselves that it’ll all be part of the new project they are “just about” to start … it’ll be the ultimate “curation” project.

And of course, that then redirects their thinking AND ACTING towards collecting more stuff, instead of taking what they’ve got and making it work as it is.

Either way, yes, letting go of 3500 sites (which at $6.95 a pop on average, unless they’re all .info domains) is a decent lump of money is a tough call … but may be just the ticket to get you focused on the ONE project that’s moving your to the place where you need to be.

Godaddy are going to hate me for this….

Veit

So, as Alex pointed out rightly on my full time income from a single blog post, none other than Dan Kennedy warns of the dangers of basing any business on ONE.

ONE single customer.

Or ONE single method of getting customers.

If you have just ONE, then there is a real danger of that ONE going away, and with it your business.

However, Dan also says that you have to absolutely MASTER that one single method, before jumping to the next.

Which is precisely, WHY so many people fail in business:

they ‘try’ one method, it doesn’t work, and they assume that this is a method that doesn’t work for them.

The reason for this is quite simple. As Rusty points out in the interview on the full-time income post: the success curve (and with it the ‘energy expenditure curve’) is not linear, but exponential:

Getting the first 10 visitors/leads/customers is just as hard as getting the next 100, which is just as hard as getting the next 1000. Totally counter-intuitive, but hey, what in business is ever intuitive?

And move to the next method. Only to repeat the process of not following through with that method.

End-result: jump, jump, jump and not ONE, but ZERO results.

So, unless you have an existing business (in other words: when you are starting out): the real danger of ONE is not that it’ll go away, but that it will inevitably lead to ZERO (unless you are hell-bent on following through and making it work).

So, there’s a bit of a self-serving purpose to this blog-post:

I’d like to test my assumption that most people who are in Internet marketing have yet to make that first $, to get their first client, to get their first signup.

(I’m being a really ‘bad’ marketer here, because all results will be visible to everyone, so my ‘evil’ competitors can spy on these results and create products to fit these needs, scandalous behaviour…;-)

What would you say if I had an offer that’s something a little bit like this one here:

 

yes, I can crank up the hype or down a little, but you get the idea:

would you be interested in a training that pretty much eliminates the whole freakin’ “empire” approach: setting up tons of affiliate sites, tons of autoblogs, feeder sites, tons of this, tons of that.

I know, in German we have this wonderful saying “Kleinvieh macht auch Mist” (which apparently translates to “many a mickle makes a muckle”), so yes, spreading your risk is all very well, but it fails on so many fronts FOR SOMEONE GETTING STARTED OUT!

There’s overwhelm, there’s not learning the skills that really matter (marketing & business building), there’s … ah well.

Let me know what you think!

ZEROS and ONES, ZEROS and ONES, …

Veit “01100011011011110110110101110000011101010111010001100101011100100010000001100111

PS: the one thing I won’t promise is an income replacing Internet Marketing business in ONE month. If you listen to Rusty’s story, ONE year is very well doable … and I reckon there are a few (non-hypey, fully ethical and completely white-hat) shortcuts that should make his lower estimate (need to listen to the interview;-) very realistic. ONE commitment from you will be required though: go easy on the shiny, magic stuff … but I have a plan for that too – so you don’t have to commit to buying ZERO shiny objects;-)

 

In this interview with $20.000.000 Marketing Legend Dr Glenn Livingston, you’ll discover

How To Dominate Your Niche From The Safety Of The Mole-Hill

The idea is simple: figure out the one mole-hill in the competitive landscape YOU can totally dominate, so you turn your mole-hill into a major centre of gravity which you then grow out until you reach total market domination.

And you do this by attracting the right prospects and rejecting all the wrong ones.

Sounds easy in theory, but how do you do it in practice?

Find out in this interview!

[audio:http://onlinerule.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/glennLivingston.mp3]

Resource mentioned on the call: if you want to find out more about Glenn, go to his site
http://www.endlesstrafficmachine.com/ where you can get tons of great free content – beginning with the secret on how to get endless streams of traffic … pretty much for free (without having to rely on Google, Social Media, Pinterest or any other of the ‘in’ traffic sources)