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.

(Please note: I do promote 1ShoppingCart & Aweber in the post because I actually use them and believe in them. If you click the links I would earn a small commission. If you’re not cool with that, just go directly to their website and order and you’ll get the same results)

Alright, now 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.

At the end of the day just remember that this game is never pretty, in fact it’s usually an ugly mess until you get all this stuff figured out. But once you do, everything is a lot more fun.

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 problem…

First of all, you’re not me, and I’m not you. You’re not the Read the rest of this entry »

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 a place called MILSTAR (Military Satellite And Tactical Relay). It sounds complicated, and the job itself could be, but thank God all we did was play PlayStation on the 3 p.m. – 11 p.m. shift.

Because of the cake hours, that job became the birth of my online career. I had no clue what I was doing; I just knew that the Internet was the future, and I hated being in the Air Force.

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After working with so many people in different industries, and monitoring human behavior of those whose goal was “Internet success,” I came up with the 80/10/8/2 People Principle.

If you pulled 100 people out of a crowd and monitored their lives for 30 days, here’s what you would discover…

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I hit an affiliate website last night and decided to make a little recording on my interesting findings! Press play on the video below and prepare to be a bit surprised. I dive into some of the tactics these affiliate players are using.

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A lot of people get stuck on what type of internet business to run. Most people start out with Affiliate Marketing because it’s cheap and easy. I don’t oppose affiliate marketing, but I don’t think it’s the best internet business model. The fact is, there’s a ton of different ways to make money online. But I want to share what I think is the BEST internet business model.

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Trying to remember statistics, facts, and the whole body of content is not only difficult, but at the end of the day, remembering those things won’t open big doors for your business.

Remembering all those factoids will only make you feel better because you learned something new and can sound smart when you talk to others. Unfortunately, feeling better and acting smart won’t make money for you. That’s why I recommend you avoid this strategy.

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If you’re not offering alternative payment plans, you’re probably leaving a ton of money on the table. Since we began offering payment plans in our businesses, we’ve seen the amount of our average order almost double, along with a significant increase in total sales.

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I pay close attention to user behavior on our websites. Mainly because opinion is just opinion as far as conversion, funnels, so called “best practices”, etc. Most people have an immature view on what’s really happening with their website analytics. Most website owners know what their conversion rate is, how many unique visitors they have, etc.

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I hope 1ShoppingCart pays attention to this blog post because this fix is so easy to make.  I’ve already called them about this problem and there’s still no fix. Why? I have no idea.

Here’s the deal… When people use the E-Check function in 1SC there needs to be a simple text change.

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