"The Raw, Uncensored Truth About Internet Business"

My Biggest Tip For Closing Consulting Deals (It’s So Easy…)

October 3, 2011 By

90% of clients are an absolute pain in the you know what.

Let’s be honest, most consultants suck at consulting and most clients suck at being clients.

It’s not like you can read a book on how to be a better client and make people who work for/with you love you. [Continue reading]

Filed Under: Blogroll

Internet Marketing Print Newsletter Review: Ben Settle, Doberman Dan, Russell Brunson, Perry Marshall, Dan Kennedy, Craig Garber.

September 20, 2011 By

I'm a marketing nerd, there's no doubt. But when it comes to Internet Marketing things can get tricky because you're dealing with so much rehashed crap it's pretty tough to break through and find the good stuff. Well, for the last year I've tested … [Continue reading]

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The Ugly Side of Online Lead Generation

August 10, 2010 By
Want to see the inside of actual lead generation campaigns, using real money, with a nice pretty little picture also? I know this will be really weird considering that people never use real numbers and only talk about fictitious “businesses” they run and how successful they are. But let me go ahead and show you what REALLY goes on behind the scenes of a real business trying to make real money. Okay, then – let’s roll! There are 4 basic parts to successful lead generation. 1. Landing page with good call to action 2. Qualified traffic 3. Good follow-up 4. Simple A/B split testing Don’t overcomplicate this. The easy part is driving traffic, because you can buy it. Usually, if you’re doing lead generation with follow-up, the hardest part is figuring out if the campaign you’re running is working. If you’re straight up asking for the sale, it’s simple. Here’s why I’ve found this to be true… Let’s make this easy. If I buy 100 clicks for $1.00 each, I just spent $100. If I’m selling a product for $50 and have a 3% conversion rate, then I just made 3 sales, which means I made $150. If this is the case right out the gate, then I’m going to try to scale this bad boy as hard as possible and really push it. This is all easily done with Google Adwords. But what if you’re driving traffic to squeeze pages and only asking for an e-mail address? How do you know it’s paying off for you? Sure, you can forward the visitor straight to an offer after you get the visitor’s e-mail address, but what if you’re losing money, even though you’re getting a 30% opt-in rate and a ton of e-mail addresses? THAT is what I want to explain to you today. I want to let you in on how to do and track lead generation if you’re just asking for an e-mail address (which can kind of suck). To do this I use 1ShoppingCart, Aweber, and AdTrackz. You can use any tools you like, but these are what I use and they work great. Here’s what to do… When I create my campaigns I’m cool with breaking even every time. If I make a profit it’s great, but I’m cool with breaking even. So, let’s start with the keyword “how to golf.” I would take that keyword and create a campaign in Google Adwords for it. And let’s say that I pay .50 per click for that keyword and I drive each click to a well SEO’d page that Google likes. It’s got all the fixin’s: great design, big call to action button, great copywriting, high quality images, good video, etc. Now, let’s say I spend $500, which buys me 1,000 clicks. Out of those 1,000 clicks I have a 30% opt-in rate, which gives me 300 leads. Now, I’m using double opt-in, so in reality, only 80% of the people will double opt in and go to the free video or whatever you’re giving away. So I REALLY got 240 straight-up leads – so basically I paid $2.08 for a real e-mail address from a real human being. Except that you also have the people who unsubscribe right after they get your free stuff because they couldn’t care about you, your life, your products, or your business. I’ve found that about 5% of all leads do this. So that leaves us with 228 real, breathing human beings on our e-mail list, at a cost of $2.19 per e-mail address at the end of the day. Can you see why people go broke online and give up? They aren’t going this far, they usually give up after this step because they think they lost. But not us, we keep rolling. Now, I’ll usually follow up with 5 e-mails, for which I use Aweber. And THIS IS THE KEY right here: in each e-mail you need to tell great stories and always do a soft pitch at the end of the story, offering your product as the solution to problem that you’ve described. Don’t be afraid to tell your readers about your products. If your products are good, they NEED to be told as long as they work and are what you say they are. So here’s what to do next… We NEED to know if you’re follow-up is allowing you to break even. Remember, we spent $500 to generate 228 e-mail addresses. We need find out if it’s even possible to get our $500 back. Here’s how to do that… In 1ShoppingCart create an AdTracker for your follow-up for that campaign. So I would create “AR1 - How To Golf Campaign,” “AR2 - How To Golf Campaign,” etc. What’s great about 1ShoppingCart is that their AdTracker tracks EVERYTHING down to the dollar once the person clicks. It’s beautiful. But don’t be lazy and use the ugly link the AdTracker spits out. Make sure to make it a “Pretty Link” with AdTrackz. I recommend that you create a folder on your server called “link” for tracking purposes. So if you have 5 follow-up e-mails for this campaign, your links will look like this… http://www.domain.com/link/1.php (AR1 - How To Golf Campaign) http://www.domain.com/link/2.php (AR2 - How To Golf Campaign) http://www.domain.com/link/3.php (AR3 - How To Golf Campaign) http://www.domain.com/link/4.php (AR4 - How To Golf Campaign) http://www.domain.com/link/5.php (AR5 - How To Golf Campaign) Now your links are “pretty” because your 1ShoppingCart AdTracker link is wrapped in Adtrackz, and you can track all your follow up e-mails down to the dollar. I recommend that you send the e-mails 5 days in a row. So let’s say you just did all that. You’ve logged into 1ShoppingCart and found out that out of those 228 people, you made a total of $414 in sales from your soft pitches. Do you quit there? I wouldn’t, although I would consider that a success because we got pretty close to breaking even and didn’t lose much money. But the part that’s not truly quantifiable is what these e-mail addresses are worth to you 3 months, 1 year, and 3 years down the road. Here’s where it just gets funky. Sure, the math is right in front of us in black and white, but consider this… 1. Maybe your customer buys an affiliate product related to your product because they like and trust you now. 2. Maybe your customer buys another product from you that wasn’t related to the one they originally opted in for. 3. Maybe your customer clicks on an ad in your website. 4. Maybe you have a big Christmas sale and your customer buys that. 5. Maybe your customer tells 8 friends about your website. 6. Maybe your customer posts your website or one of your blogs on their Facebook or Twitter page. Why do I mention all of these possibilities? Because, at the end of the day, math only takes you so far in this game. Yes, it’s absolutely necessary to be on top of your numbers like crazy, but never forget that part of this game is an art, and that you can be as creative as you want. What I’ve just explained to you is exactly how I create and track all of my lead generation. It’s one of the best ways I know, and I hope you can take something away from this you can use. I’ve also attached a screenshot of my 1ShoppingCart account so you can actually see how they break the numbers down; it’s pretty cool. And the nice part is you start to notice cool trends and things that work and don't work with your 1ShoppingCart AdTracker data. This data allows you do more of the stuff that works for your market. Hope this helps!

Want to see the inside of actual lead generation campaigns, using real money, with a nice pretty little picture also? I know this will be really weird considering that people never use real numbers and only talk about fictitious “businesses” they … [Continue reading]

Filed Under: Blogroll, General Marketing, Life Management, Making Money

The Internet You vs. The Real You

July 29, 2010 By

I think THE biggest reason people fail at making money online is that they are simply not themselves. I’ve been in the game for a minute, and the biggest problem I see is that people in general are a bunch of copycats. Here’s the … [Continue reading]

Filed Under: Blogroll, General Marketing, Life Management, Making Money

23 Things I Learned From A $250,000 Internet Marketing Education

January 13, 2010 By

Who do you believe? Who do you trust, online and in life? I want to share a story with you, something I hope can help you as you move forward in business. When I was 22 years old, I was in the Air Force and working at Langley Air Force Base, at … [Continue reading]

Filed Under: Blogroll, General Marketing, Life Management, Making Money
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