Chris Todd
Chris Todd
Optimize Ad Spend with this Simple Tracking Tactic
Do you advertise? Are you sending visitors to your home page? To find out how this could be loosing you money, checkout this quick video:
Start Your Online Business the Right Way!
What does car washing have to do with and Internet Marketing Business? Well, it is easy to see the errors of your ways once you are past the event and wise to them! For me I realized what one of my biggest mistakes was as I drove past a local car wash. This mistake is probably the one that had held me back the longest…and so I felt I would share this with you.
As I drove past the car wash, for some reason, I had a flashback to when I first saw the premises. At that time it was a closed down petrol garage… a bit run down and derelict. I am sure this will be a familiar story to you if you live in the UK. Some bright business mind took ownership and started a car washing business.
This business started on a shoe string. Every day one or two people would be there to wash cars. Needless to say that this must have been a success, as the business grew from strength to strength. The car washing team grew – now about ten strong. The advertising improved with professional branding and advertising signs spring up around the town. The place was improved with first temporary gazebos, which gave way to permanent awning.
Then came the diversification. First car washing, then changing tires, followed by car services and MOTs (assessments for road-worthiness). Now the place is a fully fledged garage. There is a fully kitted out service center with two four-poster hydraulic car ramps. Every possible service is now offered – even an air conditioning re-charge!
So, how does this relate to me and my mistake? Well this business started small and grew. The most important thing is to start. My mistake was taking on too much information from all the guru’s… you must do this, you must do that. Well actually, when I tried to do all of these things… which all take time, I spent so long trying to set up my business “the right way”…. literally months and months (about 5 if you must know) that I didn’t actually ever start!
What I should have done, is start. Get a small, simple model of a business and start. I was so worried that a “simple” model wouldn’t work and would not be optimized and would not make me any money, that I over complicated everything trying to get it “perfect” before I started. So, with hind sight… don’t do this. The most important thing is to just start. And then build up from there…just like the car wash company. Start with something small that works – then improve upon it!
I heard a great phrase to capture this exact learning point on the “Internet Business Mastery” podcast….they said “PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION“… and I think that is spot on… having found out for myself the hard way!
There are many other things we can learn from my simple example of the car wash company, but that will have to wait for another day. So I hope that you have found this article thought provoking… I know it won’t apply to everybody –as we are all different – but if you have recognized any of these thoughts, or these situations, then please give serious consideration to whether you are making the same mistake that I made?
Are you costing yourself undue time and money by trying to start with a completely kitted out garage, when a bucket, a bar of soap and a cloth would do? The most important thing is to start building your list and to send out emails to your subscribers.
What I eventually realized… is that every day that goes by before you “start”….every day whilst you try to set up your perfect “garage” is a day that you are not building your list of subscribers and that you are not sending emails and making money by helping connect your subscribers to great products. The most important thing is to build your list and send emails.
Please let me know your thoughts, I would love to know if this sounds familiar to anybody else…and I hope that if you have been over completing things, that this has helped. Now it is time for me to take my car to the car wash!
If you liked this info, and you think it is time for you to start your own online business… you might like to check out the IMC Quickstart Video Guide Series… where the challenge is to get your online business tool up and running in less than two days!
Cheers for now
Chris.
Rob Cornish Interview – Online Business
- Online business basics
- List building basics
- Outsourcing for product creation
- Traffic generation methods (free and paid)
- All links mentioned are included below… scroll down
How to get going with your online business: Rob is a very successful full time Internet Marketer and is well known in IM Circles, often speaking at events in the UK. He specializes in product creation and list building…and does it very successfully.
I have many of Rob’s products so I was fascinated to know more about the “behind the scenes” efforts within his business. Rob offers some really great tips about what is working now and this interview could be titled “the fundamentals of getting started the right way” – so well worth your time… all the links mentioned by Rob during the interview are provided below.
For more information I would highly recommend that you check out more of Rob’s story in his product Newbie to $350K. I would also recommend two of Rob’s other products – Spybar and ViralPayments (closed at current – but if it re-opens grab it, quickly!). They are both really great and I use them both every day… they save time and make money – so I recommend that you at least take a look.
I hope you find this interview helpful… cheers for now!
Links mentioned in Rob’s interview | outsourcing sites:
Links to London Lunch: Internet Marketing Networking Meeting:-
How to Increase sales 50% using small tweaks [video]
In this post I show you how to get a 50% increase in sales by making 1% improvements to your sales funnels… sound impossible? It is just simple mathematics…check out the two minute video at the bottom of the page to see how this works… but before you do, check out the few paragraphs below which attempt to explain “why” you need to care about this….if you want to optimize your income.
You know every now and again somebody will say something that will really make you think? Well on this subject, it was my wife… this is what she said to me… “you know, I think I prefer my e-reader to a book”….”why is that?”….”because I don’t have to turn the pages”.
What? How much trouble is it to move your hand from one side of a book to the other to turn the page? Not much, right? But how much effort is it to turn the page on an e-reader? You only need to tap at the bottom of the page, right side to advance, left side to go back a page. So not much difference, you might think.
But this is the kind of thinking that can make the difference in Internet marketing. In today’s instant gratification lifestyles… making the visitor click one more button, or visit one more page than is strictly necessary is enough to put people off and lose you a sale.
So for example if you have just obtained a subscriber via an opt-in form and then you offer them a product, but in order to register them for the product you require them to sign-up again… you will definitely lose a proportion of customers that think “oh – I have just signed up…I can’t be bothered to do it again”.
That is not because they think that your product is not good enough… it’s is because we live in a “convenience driven world”… a world where people make buying decisions based on convenience more and more…I even heard a friend say that he buys the most expensive milk cartons in the store because they are the easiest to open.
So, if you would like to increase your conversions…you want more people to take action…think about the user experience and use systems to automate as much as you can for the visitor – so in my earlier case you can use PayPal integration with your email service so that when someone buys a product they are automatically added to a “buyers list” without having to sign-up again.
This is just the tiniest glimpse of the world of “conversion” optimization…and I will be posting more later… along with some of my split testing results, but for now just be aware of the massive potential available for optimizing conversions…just think about the smallest of differences, poor effort into your systems to make them easier for your users…and you will reap the rewards.
Here is the video…How to get a 50% increase in sales (i.e. profit). with just a few 1% improvements in your sales funnel….
Have Fun, Get Stuck In and Take Massive Action!
P.S. If you need to contact me for any reason you can get in touch through the contact page.
Paul Fallon Interview – Affiliate Arbitrage
- PPV (pay per view) advertising
- CPA (cost per action) offers
- Outsourcing
- All links mentioned are included below… scroll down
How to Make Money Online Without a “List”: Paul is a successful full time Internet Marketer (well – two days after we recorded this, he jetted of for a 5 week long summer holiday in Hollywood with his family). He specializes in what I would call direct marketing … he connects prospects with offers…and does it very successfully. Paul has developed this approach because in his own words “he likes to keep things simple”…no complicated websites and “no list”. I would say it is a great interview for someone just starting out – as it contains some “home truths” as Paul “tells it like it is” and this interview could be titled “the truth about internet marketing”, so well worth your time as Paul reveals some great info…. all the links below are mentioned by Paul during the interview… cheers for now!
Links for Cost Per Action (CPA) Offers: –
Links for Tracking: –
Links for Paid Traffic (PPV): –
Links for Paid Forums:-
Links to Free Forums:-
Warrior Forum | Wicked Fire | AffBuzz
Links to Accounting Software:-
Outsources:-
How to Sell Without Selling
how to sell without selling
If there is one thing I hated, and still hate doing – in fact can’t do… it’s the hard sell. In fact my first email campaign went a full 21 days without mentioning the “S” word. Well I have discovered that it doesn’t have to be like this at all…. and where did I learn this? When camping in a field with no internet access!
But before I spill the beans, just think about both the best and worst buying experiences that you have ever had…
For my wife and I, our worst experience was when we literally had to evict a double glazing salesman on Christmas Eve – after no less than four hours of hard sell. Nightmare…and no sale!
Enter – “the complete opposite”. Imagine, if you will, a camping experience where everything has been laid out before you to perfectly “match” your need and to enhance your experience. When we arrived at the campsite to check in, we were helped by some lovely staff, who showed us around and pointed out all the facilities. We then selected our preferred pitch (we found just the right one… to get both the sea view and the evening sun – perfect) and returned to the check in desk to notify the campsite of our selection and to pay.
Both my wife and I were surprised by what we heard next? “would you like a croissant or a pain-au-chocolate, or a French loaf for tomorrow morning?”….. errr, “that sounds nice, yes please”.
Without even a… “how much will that be”. And so it went on. Everything had been thought out to offer you what you would need next. Newspaper if you wanted it. Ice blocks for the cooler box… and yup we got through plenty of these. Or even a fridge if you wanted to hire one by the day! Chips on the lounge decking if you wanted them, or perhaps a cappuccino? Any food? Home grown veggies? Even home grown sausages! It was amazing…
So, I took away some major lessons from this amazing camping trip…
When is selling not selling? When you are offering something to help somebody at just the right time that they need it or they would like it. By solving problems for people – they will readily and happily part with their pennies. All of these things I am talking about at the campsite were very reasonably priced and were over and above what we had ever been offered at other campsites we had stayed at.
Price elasticity. This may be a bit of a stretch from this scenario, but I know it to be true from other cases I have experienced, and that is that offering somebody something at just the right time gives you some “price elasticity”, i.e. you can charge more with less resistance – and still be offering your customer a product / service that that are pleased with and that they will rave about.
Let me ask you this – if you had just crawled out of a dessert and were literally “dying” for a drink… how much would you pay for a glass of water? Having had that thirst quenching glass, but still quite parched… how much would you pay for the second glass? And now pretty full and not really needing any more… how much would you pay for the third glass? – you get the idea. Offer something at the right time and you don’t have to sell it. It sells itself and at a higher price!
The power of a captive audience. Anybody that has been to the cinema will know about this as you get charged over the odds for a drink, a bag of popcorn, well just about everything. But in this campsite is wasn’t like that – prices were very reasonable, comparable to those in the shops… so you didn’t feel “ripped – off” and you would happily come back for more!
The power of repeat sales to one customer…. In the morning, when you went to collect your croissant… guess what? “Same again for tomorrow?”…. “yes please!”. So buy giving great value – and helped by having a captive audience – plenty of repeat buyers. This has a huge effect of extending the “lifetime customer value” (the amount that each customer spends with you) which is an important factor in business.
So, I have seen a great real life, non-internet marketing, example of “selling without selling”. So I will now be trying to apply this across my internet businesses and I hope that you can see the benefits of this approach and that you will apply some of these lessons too.
Hope this helps you – let me know your experiences… how can you apply this in your online business. Please leave me a comment to let you know your experiences.
Cheers for now.
Chris.
What is an affiliate network? Why are they so profitable?
Hey there, just quick video… this is why Internet Marketing is so powerful… if you like this video and want to know more – check out my IMC Quickstart Video Guide. Hope this helps…
Cheers for now…
Are you tracking your leads properly…?
Are you running an email marketing campaign, and trying to attract new subscribers? Are you tracking your leads properly? If you are thinking yes, then you should be able to track your lead back to the original source. There is a simple way to do this, then there is a more complicated way – if you are using multi-channel marketing analysis. But wait… there’s more – much more….
IM Catalyst Motto: “Scrutinize, Analyze, Optimize [look, learn, tweak!]”
Why bother to track your leads? The obvious answer is that you need to know how they found your site so you can determine hows best to spend your time and money attracting new people to help (do business with), but that is not enough. You need to know what they do after they found you too, in fact this can be more important! It is no use having a subscriber unless you are exchanging value with them. Now, that can take many forms, even if they don’t buy from you. For example they could be your biggest and loudest fan and they might be shepparding hoards of new customers to you. But for now, let’s just look at the typical exchange of value – i.e. your subscriber becomes a customer and they buy something.
Here’s why:- what good is it if a particular advert is driving lots of traffic to your opt-in pages and is generating you boat loads of new subscribers, if they don’t buy anything? So you must monitor where the buyers are coming from – this will allow you to work out the revenue per channel (by channel I mean advertising medium, youtube, facebook, banner ads, etc). Once you have this data for all of your advertising and marketing efforts you can figure out which channel is best converting leads into customers – we could all do with more customers, right? But more than that, you can figure out which channels are weakest.
It would be a very bad idea simply to focus on the best channels at the exclusion of all else. Why? Because things change – remember pop-up adds! They once ruled – and now they are gone! So you need to focus on all your channels. I identify the weakest. What is wrong – do you have landing page disconnect, which in summary means that the advert indicated one thing and visitor feels that they were offered something else? They were lied to! This can have an effect on any part of your sales process… the opt-in form, the email follow up sequence, the free gift or in fact the products that you are offering. So it is hyper important that you are clear on what you are offering, how it can help, and make sure that it delivers. By looking at your weakest channels you might be able to detect some “disconnect” and fix it to make them stronger – it is worth spending some time on this.
To help you figure out what is going on, you need to track your sales funnel. There are many ways to do this, Google Analytics is a good way, but most good paid email providers also provide tracking codes and these can be very powerful in improving your profits.
Dot Com Secrets Review
I hope you find this quick peek at Dot Com Secrets helpful… I have learnt a lot from this program and I think this is suitable for anybody just starting online… check it out. Let me know what you think…. please leave me a comment.
Links: Dot Com Secrets – Internet Affiliate Marketing Tuition Videos
Quick tip for easy web graphics without any cost
I struggled for ages to find a way to include some of the modern trends, such as shadows on my web graphics. Here is a quick, easy and free way to fix that – hope you enjoy and use this method.
Download Jing and start using this tip to make your life easier. Have fun!