Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

Hey everyone. I just wanted to give you a little update on the series AND I wanted to talk to you about some other things I discovered this week.

The Series
We’re still developing the website. It’s going slower than I had hoped. It’s hard working online when you don’t have the time because your family, work, and other obligations that you may have. The two guys that are working on the site have decided to devote a couple of hours each night to completing the website. This of course is a little difficult because they are still learning basic HTML.

I’ve also found it difficult to teach things like good sales letters, persuasive headlines, and the basics of how a site should look.  These are things that come with time and experience.  So I set them off to look at several different website examples.  You should look at how other marketers are creating their websites.  Chances are you will begin to notice commonalities. Some things can’t be taught but are learned more by experience.  I say get out there and put your mind to work on creating your website.

The Other Things
So… while I was trying to work with these two entrepreneurs this week I got the thought of just purchasing the website.  I’m not talking a PLR website but one that has already been created and is beginning to generate an income.  These are available and they are abundant.  But you HAVE to know where to look and what to look for.

One great website to look at is Flippa.com. They are, in a sense, the ebay of websites and domains. While I was browsing Flippa I decided to take a look at their blog.  I ran across an article by my good friend… Ryan Moran.  Come to find out Ryan is an exclusive content provider for Flippa.  Which means he is basically the authority on buying and selling websites online.

Before I begin this post I want you all to know that I am now taking two individuals through this case study/series.  I will no longer be touching a thing but I will be training these two guys hands on.  I flew out to their location in order to give them a basic lesson in HTML. Believe me when I say these guys have absolutely NO experience online!

If you go to http://www.bestgolfswingsecret.com the main page you first hit will be full of links that you can use to navigate your way around the site as it’s being built.  We will be rotating between two different squeeze pages to find out which converts the best.  After they hit the squeeze they will be taken to a page with the answer (something short yet powerful) and then off to the actual sales letter.

The key to the first page is to entice an individual to sign up to your mailing list.  I’m not going to claim to you that I am some squeeze page guru…  Trust me I’m not.  I like to stick with what works and fortunately for us Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss have tested plenty of squeeze pages for us.  During this case study I will be using one of their squeeze page as my base for a split test. You can check it out by clicking here.

There are several basic elements that have been tried and tested to help boost your squeeze page conversion rates.  Here are a list that I know for a fact work… These have been proven time and time again by marketers and have proven to help your conversion rates.

Well… Affiliate Summit West 2010 is finally over and I’m ready to get back into the grind.  Before I do though I want to tell you about the event.  I’m sure you have seen everyone else posting about it, and while I’m sure they have a lot of great things to say about the conference… I unfortunately do not.

The Affiliate Summit conferences in general are very good.  I enjoy them and I will continue to attend them.  BUT… I honestly do not like going to the main event.  The summit is way too crowded.  It’s hard to walk around the meet market. I walked in… Tried to get to the back of the room… Got half way and turned around.  It wouldn’t be so bad if the tables were just a little bit farther apart.  The problem arises when you have 10 affiliates (for example) trying to stand in front of one table. You can imagine the congestion that arises. I think the problem with the meet market could have been alleviated if there were multiple entrances to the event.  I think affiliates need to also realize that the meet market is where you go to meet new contacts that you can go back to during the actual event. It’s called a MEET MARKET.  Not a STOP AND DO BUSINESS RIGHT THEN AND THERE MARKET.  Okay… So I might be blowing this out of proportion.  But seriously the meet market is way crowded and way hot on the inside.

The actual exhibit itself is awesome.  It’s not as crowded as everything is spaced apart pretty well.  The point of the actual exhibit is where you can go to meet those new advertisers or new networks that you found during the meet market.  It is a place of business where million dollar deals are being made.  Some booths do it better than others by creating an environment that affiliates want to be at.  Convert2Media has this down to the “T”.  They know what affiliates want. Other networks… Unfortunately don’t know what they are doing.

As we go through this series I want you to realize the importance of having a mailing list. There is a huge amount of money in owning your own leads so that you can email to them over and over again. Our goal is to have two lists by the end of this series. The first list is going to be for free loaders. The second list will be our buyers list. The buyers list will be our money maker. Not only will we have sold them our own product, but chances are we will be able to sell them a product that someone else owns to make an affiliate commission.

Below is an image of our overall site flow.

Here are the steps to our site.

1. Receive an opt-in for a free ebook or a free course.
2. Upsell to a paid course or package – After they optin in they will be redirected to the offer AND the free auto responder series will direct them to the offer.
3. Move them over to a buyers list.  Once the person has completed their purchase through us we can move them over to a buyers list.  This will be a more active list and will be more profitable for us.  Our end goal is to move people over to our buyers.

The free auto responder series will have several emails that cover basic advice for our niche of choice.  At the end of about 7 emails we’ll give one last hard push to buy the product and if they don’t… we’ll then chances are they aren’t going to pick anything up from us.  But they are still good to have on a mailing list so that we can try and market other products to them.

Ok before I begin I went ahead and picked a new niche. “NF” posted this in a comment on the last series post

The Dog training niche has been used extensively by all case studies i have seen and reports, ebooks, etc… It is like the only non-im niche all IM marketers are able to explain.
I think it would be more useful if you chose something else.

This is quite a good point. But let me explain why. It has everything to do with the ease of the market. The dog training niche is what we call an evergreen niche. Meaning you can make money in the niche all year long. Why? Because people don’t stop buying dogs. Golf on the other hand (My new niche choice) is down right now and about to hit an upswing as we get into spring.

That image is the basic graph of all keywords relating to golf. If you notice, at the beginning of the year is the low point. Then throughout the year there is an upswing. This will be good for this case study/series as I start off slow and build the momentum.

About halfway through the year you’ll notice from that graph that there is a sharp decline in searches. I don’t golf so I don’t know what big turn happens around July. I can only make a guess.

I’ve gone ahead and purchased a URL – bestgolfswingsecret.com

You’re more than welcome to follow along in this niche with me. However, it would be nice if you picked your own niche to jump into. I definitely understand. But please respect the fact that I am going to try and make this niche profitable. I only give you the URL so you can see what I am doing with the website as I move along.

Basically over the next few weeks I am going to show you how to build a list and how to make money from the beginning.

We’ll build out a complete site and then begin marketing to free sources. While our money is building up for the free sources we will open the doors to PPC advertising, move over to some banners/media buys, and then PPV advertising. Don’t forget the SEO that we will be receiving as well.

So I guess to start out we will need to pick a niche to jump into. I recommend that you watch the 40 minute video on niche research that I set up a few months back.

For the case of this series I am going to use dog training as the niche of choice. So before I jump into anything serious I need to so some research on the niche. What kind of products are out there and what kind of search volume is this getting?

Unfortunately for us Google has removed the sponsored links search so it might be a little more difficult to see what your competition is doing. You can always use the Google external keyword tool to gauge the competition. Make sure you do a good amount of surfing the web to see what kind of product competition there will be for your niche.

Once you have a good understanding of the competition you can begin your plan of attack. So for now I am going to surf some sites and I’ll get back to you in my next post with where I searched and what I found. Till then why don’t you watch that video on niche research and begin to pick a niche. Remember… You can make any niche profitable… It’s just a matter of how you attack it.

It’s the beginning of a new year and I wanted to start this off right for everyone.

While everyone is giving you BS posts on PPV marketing I’ll be taking you down a real road for profit! Let me explain some things first.  I’ve been making a full time income from PPV for quite a while. If you have questions on PPV feel free to post them in the members forum.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try PPV I’m just saying there are other more profitable ways to generate money.  Unfortunately not everything you do with PPV will make you rich.  Don’t buy into the hype of it all.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to cover a method for making money online that you can use for ANY niche! Best of all it is GUARANTEED to make you money. How many people can GUARANTEE you that you will make money.  I’ll tell you what… If you follow this course and can’t make money after putting in some honest effort then I will pay back any and all expenses that you incur (just make sure to document everything that you do)

This method isn’t a one hit wonder that will die out in 2 weeks so you have to pump it back up and start all over again.  I’m going to show you how to build a profitable online business.

I once paid $5,000 for what I’m about to teach you. So why am I going to give this away?  Let’s just say that I am tired of all the bullshit that goes around online.  I’m tired of people saying “HEY YOU CAN MAKE $14,597 A DAY WITH PPC”.  While it may be true… You won’t start out making that much money.  And most of the time the courses are full of holes.