Fast Web Formula Internet Business Training with James Schramko
Internet Training
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Get Higher Value ForYour Products By Choosing The Right Market
Tips from this video:
James Schramko here.
Now I want to talk about what marketplaces you can sell to.
There are a few marketplaces. If you’re in the Internet marketing space, you may be familiar with the Warrior Forum. The Warrior forum is quite a populated community of mainly new people coming in to this Internet Marketing space with very high hopes and aspirations, usually false ideas about how easy it is to make money online and there’s a willing market of people ready to sell them things. There’s a good reason why companies like PayPal are reputed to be putting a focus on that type of marketplace because it really is the shifting sands of the gullible, the ill-informed, in some cases.
Now what I suggest is that you look at other marketplaces to sell your things where you’ll get a higher value for what you sell.
Because if you look at the strain that it puts on your system to bring in these new people who really require an enormous amount of support, who have in most cases false expectations, you’re asking for trouble. You’re going to have refund problems, you’re going to have an enormous amount of support required to serve these people. Whereas if you look upstream a little bit and you go for more a mature market, perhaps the paid forums markets, and of which there’s many, there’s many paid forums, you’re going to find people who are already in the system. And certainly they’re not going to hand over money for false hope products, but there’s certainly going to be less wear and tear, they’ll value what you do more, they have more context, and they’re also capable of buying the next level of price bracket up because they have already made some money or seen some success with the early stages, and they know that there’s more beyond that, and if you can be that person to come and help them with the next price level up, you’ll find that ten five-hundred dollar customers is a lot easier to manage than a hundred five dollar customers. And again, stop the obsession about getting a volume of people, because if they’re the wrong people, it’s no good.
Less customers paying more is easier to manage and more profitable
In my business I have a lot less people on my list, and I have a lot less customers than some of the big guys. But because my average price is close to a thousand dollars, my average value per customer, then I am actually enjoying it a lot more. I deal with the same people over and over again, but I enjoy working with them, I enjoy solving their problems, and what I’m finding is that I can have a very profitable business by targeting the market that a lot of people are not targeting. People are either targeting the little cheap, high-turnover newbie market, and then people are targeting that very high-priced newbie market, and I’m going for that middle section, the intermediate to advanced of people who are not wanting to spend two thousand and get ripped off, and they’re not wanting to spend seven dollars and waste their time. They’re happy in that thirty-seven, ninety-seven, four ninety-seven, nine ninety-seven product range, and that’s a sweet spot.
That’s why I think the WSOs are small game.
Even the best WSO guys only pull two hundred thousand dollars from WSO, and that’s after they put a lot of effort and JVs and webinars and back ends and all the rest of it. Seriously, you can make a couple of hundred thousand dollars from just having two or three really good offline customers with your online marketing expertise. You can make two hundred thousand dollars a year from having a mastermind with five or six people, on a weekly call. You can make two hundred thousand dollars from having a good quality information product that you market once, and have at a reasonable price point.
There are bigger, better paying markets out there
So in summary, the Warrior Forum might be good to cut your teeth and learn some skills, but I really think you should get out of that rut, or the loop, and just grow up and get out into the real market. You go and have a look at some of the bigger marketers. They’re in a huge wide open market, places where they’ve never heard of the Warrior Forum and they’re selling five hundred thousand dollar products all day, every day and absolutely cleaning up, so stick a zero on it, move to a different target market, and see what happens.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this module.
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Finding Good Affiliates for Your Products or Services
Useful topics discussed:
James Schramko here, and this Internet Marketing tip is about getting good affiliates to promote your stuff.
How do you do it? The first thing is, make sure that you have good stuff.
It goes without saying, hopefully, that your product should be really good at solving somebody’s problem.
Where do you find affiliates in the first place?
Well if you know your market and you’re doing keyword research, then you probably have a sense for who your competitors are, and you might actually come across some people with review blogs or podcasts where they’re selling your competitor’s product. Those people you should check on their social media icons and start to befriend them on Facebook. But please don’t send them a message the second that you join them, if they accept your friend request. Start interacting with them. Comment on their blogs, comment on their social media. Get in front of them more than a few times, say six or seven times, before you ask. And just discuss things in a way that they relate to. Once they get to know you, you’ve got a better chance of being able to get your product to them for review purposes.
That’s one way, and I think you’ll find the higher relationship level building will actually get you a better quality affiliate. Sometimes people contact me via my support desk, and what we will always do is firstly make sure that it’s a good fit for our audience. If it has nothing to do with our audience then they’ve wasted their time. Make sure that when you’re offering things to people that it’s relevant to them. The other thing we’ll do is we’ll review the product. And it has to be good.
What sort of things am I looking for as a list owner?
I want to make sure that the product that I’m being proposed to promote is good for my customer, is not going to send them through up-sell hell or send them to a control-less video player. I don’t want them to be fully name squeezed without any value given so I prefer to send them where there’s a reverse squeeze page or good valuable content. In fact if the content that I’m sending my customer to is almost as good as a paid product or as good as a paid product, then that’s great because as a list owner I’m sending my customer to something valuable, and there’s a payoff.
Do an interview with the person
The other thing that will really increase sales is when you do an interview with the person that you’d like to have promote your product, and then they simply put their affiliate link with the interview. Again, podcasts are great for this, so scour the iTunes. Have a look at people who are active on YouTube channels for your key phrases. Quite often you can get an interview, and they’ll put you in front of their audience.
Another great way to find people is at events face to face.
Go to a face to face event, mingle with the crowd, have a coffee, hook up with someone at lunch, go with six people you’ve never met before. I’ve done that at many an event. And just have a conversation, but it’s not all about you, it’s all about them. I mean, read that book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and you’ll understand it’s about the other person, they really don’t care about you. But if you can help them solve problems for their audience and they get paid for it then that’s interesting.
The other way that you might do it is get in and start promoting other people’s products.
And you should be blending other people’s affiliate promotions with your own product and hopefully you have built up a list or an audience for your product and you’re not approaching people to promote your products directly without any proven test data, because if you are, you’re asking an affiliate to take all the risk, when you haven’t actually established that your product even sells. So get your product out there, promote it yourself with your own traffic and get the statistics such as the earnings per click, the conversion rates, have your sequential follow up in place, and then, when you’ve got that data, then you can have a useful conversation with someone else about promoting your product. If someone sends me to a JV offer and they’re saying “Well, it’s a new product and we haven’t tested it but we’ll try a few things on launch day”, that’s a red flag, I’m afraid.
Make a video
Now my final tip for getting people to promote your product is make them a video, just like this, and make it personally to them. So say, “Hi, Fred”, and then send it to their email address, if they have a reply to their broadcast, if they have a helpdesk, or if they have a YouTube channel, or if they’re on Facebook, send them a personal video with a email with their name in it and link it to a page or a private YouTube video with their name in it. I do get those from time to time, and generally I will watch them because they’ve gone to some effort. Even if I can’t promote or even if it’s not what I’m interested in, usually I’ll have a quick look and then say “Hey, great, thank you. It’s not exactly my market but I really appreciate the effort you went to.
A bonus tip
My bonus tip on top of this is if you happen to load your video up to Wistia – and you can use Wistia for free these days – you’ll be able to see if they watched it and if they shared it and which parts of your pitch they were the most interested in so you can learn from that and refine it as you send more. And also, make sure above all that whatever you do that works, do more of it. I know that that sounds simple, but if you’ve had people promote your products before, go back and remember why did they promote it and do more of that.
Just in final closing: make sure your product’s great, make sure you’ve got your own data that you can show someone if they’re interested, be relevant, be all about the other person and how you can solve their problems, not about you, and approach people through the channels that are easiest for you to get to them, especially face to face, especially through social media, and you should find that people will promote your products.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this training.
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Creating a lifetime value customer list.
Important things in the video:
James Schramko here with a training on developing your list and building your lifetime value of your lists.
Taking care of your list
When I say list, I’m talking about your database and in particular your email database. One way to approach this is to think about the lifetime customer and stop doing tactics that are one time wonders.
If you are continually sending promotions to your list or if the promotions are not relevant you’re probably getting list fatigue or high unsubscribe rate and you not actually going to have that customer in a few years. Now here’s a statistic you may be interested in. My current average customer is worth nearly $1,000. That is nearly $1,000 per customer who buys things from me. That means I need to take a gentle approach to the way that I’m communicating with them.
One of the best ways is to put a lot of news and quality information to your customers rather than just continual promotions. It does seem obvious but not everyone does this.
Maintain a good relationship with your customers
It’s a little bit like a game of snooker or pool you think about the next shot that you’re going to take. First thing is make sure that every time you sell something that you capture your customer’s details. I really hope you’re doing that.
Probably the best way to do that is to promise and offer updates to the product or service that you sold. Also complement it with some training or additional benefits that might help them with the product they bought from you or the service they bought from you that really make them appreciate it and it trains your customer to expect good things from your emails. Look after your email database like its gold bullion. Really look after it.
Question everything
The next thing is to survey your customers. You need to know why did they buy. It’s probably one of the most important survey questions you can ask because it tells you what they’re resonating with and then you can repeat that. Whatever they resonated with, you can add more of that to your marketing process.
The other thing is when someone leaves your recurring product or service; you need to find out why did you leave. That way if you can ask for feedback, you can do this with sequential follow up or with automated triggers. You can again protect your customers from leaving the ones that you’ve already got.
The very best customer is the one that you’ve already got. So go back and focus on your current existing customer base, why did they buy from you? And the ones who have left, why did they leave you? And the ones who never bought if you can possibly ask them on exit, why they didn’t buy at all? If you perhaps have a newsletter or a free list and then you try to convert them to pay but they don’t, just ask them, say hey listen I’ve sent you a few times an offer to purchase, but you haven’t purchased, you mind just letting me know why? If you can find this out, this is gold and it helps you continue that lifetime value.
Care for your customers
Be prepared to invest in your customer for the long haul and you’ll have a great asset. Every time they open an email from you, it should be full of value, it should be something useful. You can still blend in offers but give them some information that helps them solve a problem or increases the value that you bring to the table and they will still open your emails and they’ll unsubscribe and leave everyone else’s.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed this building your list and increasing a lifetime value training module.
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Find the right customer, get targeted traffic.
Things to know:
James Schramko here and this module is about Targeted Traffic.
Look, give away advanced and low value freebie things, classifieds, email drops, a lot of this is just a waste of effort. You don’t need a lot of traffic if you have the right customer. You need to target people who have a relationship with the kind of customer that you want. That means participating in high value forums, making comments on people’s blogs who are in your industry and getting known in your own right, putting out premium contents in podcasts, in videos and on your blogs with pictures and audio.
Really step up the on-page content
Get to know people in your market especially using Facebook and you’ll start to find a more relevant targeted source of traffic. That’s my first step, make sure that you’re only focusing on things that get you the right person. You can have a lot of traffic but if they’re not the right people it just going to chew up resource. It’ll take up your time and energy and increase your support.
The other thing is to be conscious of who’s already buying your stuff.
Where did they come from? Who’s your best customer? Go back through your customer profile and work out what it is that you did to get those people and do more of that. Probably one of the best traffic sources possible is email. Once you build your own house list, you can direct your customers around between product and product. But you don’t have to do it directly; you can do it indirectly via a news blog which is something I focus heavily on.
I put out weekly news videos and from those videos I’m able to direct customers into other parts of the business but only because it solves the problem for them. So as you grow your portfolio, focus on building authority in your market. Know who all the players are, hang out in the places that they hang out and contribute the better quality content in your market place and you’ll start to attract customers. Do your forensic on who has already bought from you, why did they buy, where did they come from and scale that up.
Sourcing traffic
My favourite traffic sources at the moment are Facebook, press releases, forums, email lists and through my own products where I’m getting opt-in pages in some cases to give away some free training and those people can turn into customers. Maybe not right now, but at some point in the future with the correct sequential follow up and nurturing of the relationship. But by far and away, having a central blog with good quality content is a good starting point for most people. Especially until you become known in your market place because if you keep putting good regular content out there, you will eventually get known.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this module.
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Increase Productivity, Manage Your Time Better By Managing Your Energy…
Summary of this module:
James Schramko here.
Now how do you know what to focus on?
You might be familiar with the Pareto principle the 80/20 rule. Well you can take that to an even more extreme if you want and just focus on the top 10% of things and you’re going to get most of the stuff that’s going to make a difference. I think probably a lot of people are just hiding behind doing the work; you do have to roll up the sleeves and get stuck into it sometimes. And it’s so much easier just to watch a YouTube video or listen to music or be distracted.
Determination and the discipline.
Get serious about why you’re doing this and be determined to focus your efforts with more discipline. The average population are just lazy, overweight and unhappy people so you have to make a difference. You have to decide why you’re going to be disciplined; you’re going to get the result.
Categorize your tasks
Make a big audit of everything you’re doing right now. I suggest you just write everything down on a huge whiteboard or a massive piece of paper. Just everything in your mind and just dump it. And then what I do is I pull out a fresh piece of paper or a new white board and I start transferring across the things that are important or urgent or both. If something’s urgent or important, you really have to do it. It could be like your tax return, it could be renew your driver’s license, I mean that is deadline critical, urgent. If something’s not that important like a low level activity like watching a YouTube video of cats falling over themselves then it really shouldn’t be transferred across into your current workflow.
Be mindful of your goals.
In order to really get the best result you need to know what your goals are. You see there are things we can focus on today that get us a short term result but then we need to do it again tomorrow and the next day. That’s like the cash flow element. If you’re building up assets as part of your overall goals and you can learn a lot more about this from my product called Wealthification then you need to be doing things that have a longer term approach. You might be needing to do things in steps.
Identify your goals; be very clear on the outcome you want and then score everything that’s left on that whiteboard on your new white board according to what’s going to get you the result in the shortest possible pass. It’s not the one that’s going to get you the result with the least effort. You will need effort regardless but you want to put your effort onto the right things. As Peter Drucker would say, “it’s about doing the right things.” Identify your goals, identify everything on your plate now eliminate everything that you possibly can, just leave the minimum and between the minimum, work out what’s urgent and important and going to get you close to the goals and set yourself an action list. The action list really should be no more than 6 items. Ideally it will be 3. Put it up somewhere where you can see it and then do it.
It really is that simple.
