Here's a quick and easy way to find out what questions people are asking about a particular topic/niche.
It's a custom Twitter search. Enter the following into the Twitter SEARCH BOX, not your update box.
keywords ? filter:-links
What this will do is search Twitter for tweets that contain your
keywords and a question mark (?), but don't contain any links. If the
tweet has a link, there's a good chance it's promotional in nature.
Although the Twitter search isn't perfect and will return a link or two,
it's a great way to really get the "meat".
Note the minus sign before filter: -filter:links.
You can try using your keywords with and without quotes to get specific or general results:
dog training ? -filter:links <= Tweet contains both words in tweet, but not necessarily together.
"dog training" ? -filter:links < Tweet contains the exact phrase
Go to Twitter and give it a try and see what you come up with...
Tuesday, 12 April 2016
Monday, 11 April 2016
Simple Tips How to Make Your List Building More Profitable
Simple Tips How to Make Your List Building More Profitable
Here is a list of 7 tips which will help you instantly when it comes to building your lists.
These tactics and tips work in ANY NICHE so don’t think it’s just the Internet Marketing niche because it isn’t.
After surveying some segments of my list these 7 things which I’m going to go through here seem to be some common problems that people face when it comes to building a list.
So lets get stuck right in to the Meat and Potatoes of the content :-)
1. Use a professional looking template. I use optimize press and I have been for over 2 years and it’s all I use these days to create all of my squeeze pages. Using a professional looking squeeze page will not guarantee you good results on it’s own but it certainly plays a big part of the overall success of how well your squeeze page converts.
2. Be specific on what you are giving away. I wouldn't recommend using broad based squeeze pages saying things like “enter your email below to see how to make to make $974.38 dollars a day without even getting out of bed”
You only want to build a list of highly targeted prospects and this will make it much easier too when it comes to selling them your paid product because you know exactly what they are interested in.
3. Include curiosity filled bullet points. Creating good bullet points takes practice and is a fine art but once you master them they can make a massive difference in your conversions, both on squeeze pages and on sales pages.
An example of a good bullet point is : “1 weird Free traffic method I use to add 30 – 50 subscribers to my list every day”
(You can look at other peoples squeeze pages to get more ideas and tips)
Bullet points should only really create lots of curiosity and desire and this makes people take action which is obviously what we are after. You should never reveal everything within the bullet point, just a taste of what they get leaving them wanting to find out more.
4. Include your opt in form above the fold. This also helps too if you have a longish squeeze page. I usually have videos on my squeeze pages so by having the opt in form above the fold it will be in plain view while they are watching my video which then increases the chance of them opting in.
5. Use a good headline with lots of power words which induce action. Here is a list of some power words that you can use on your squeeze pages to create more attention. There are lots more but these a good start.
Power, Fast, Whopping, Ultimate, Blasting, Crazy, Burning, Overdrive, Warp Speed, Profits, Secrets, Closely Guarded, Proven, Free, Discover, Blueprint, Insane, Explosive, Exploit, De-Bunked, Forced, Sky Rocket, Extreme, Jaw Dropping, Mouth Watering, Weird, Boosts, Super, Extra, Jumpstart, Killer, Surprising, Little known, Melting, Blazing, Unleash, Avalanche, Tsunami, Hot, Power packed, Spark, Mind blowing, Mesmerising, Incredible, High powered, Electrifying, Awesome, Blockbuster, Rocket-Launch, Turbo boost, Explode, Ignite
Your OTO</acronym> stands for one time offer and usually it’s not actually only shown one time. I personally like to use the term “low ticket product”
Knowing what type of OTO</acronym> will convert well into sales for you is very simple.
Basically the closer related the paid product is to your free produt/gift which you give away on your squeeze page the higher your conversions will be for your paid offer.
It’s all about flow. Remember that because if you are having problems with conversions on your OTO</acronym> most of the time it will be because of the flow. If you were to give away a Free ebook on how to make money on youtube and then sell a product for your OTO</acronym> for say $10 on how to make money with adsense, your conversions will be absolutely dreadful 99% of the time. You will of course get the odd sale but generally your campaign will be a disaster.
Let me give you 3 of my Killer tips when it comes to making more OTO</acronym> sales and increasing your conversions. These alone will probably save you hundreds of hours of testing
1. Firstly if you are giving an Ebook away as your free gift to people that join your list then make sure your product is an Ebook format of some description.
2. If you’re giving away any videos as your free gift then make sure that your paid product is a video course too.
3 - And thirdly (this works awesome and it’s exactly what I do) What you need to do is create your complete product in what ever niche you are in. If you make it video (which I highly recommend) say if you have 12 step by step videos as your paid product, give 3 – 5 of them away as your free gift. This is an absolute killer technique to get much higher conversions on your paid product within your email follow up campaign.
Remember what I said? You need to keep everything flowing and highly related and you can’t get anymore related than it being part of the same course.
If you do this you can market your paid product as simply “an Upgrade” and it’s far easier to make a sale. This is exactly how I started building my list when I used to do adsense. I gave away some free adsense videos and then the rest were an upgrade and that is exactly what I still do.
After someone has opted into your squeeze page you then of course need to give them their free gift/course or ebook.
The best way to do this which I have found is to create and set up a download page where you have their free gifts and then include this page in your auto-responder which gets sent out as soon as someone joins your list.
On your download page you give them their free gifts as well as an option to upgrade to the full/paid product. This page is also an opportunity where you can include links to other products that you may have which would benefit them.
This is by far the most effective way to deliver your free information because straight after the opt in you can send them to your OTO</acronym>/low ticket product.
Even if in some areas of your marketing you don’t include a OTO</acronym>/low ticket product after their opt in it’s still important to deliver their free information in the first follow up because this conditions them to open your emails.
This is actually easier than you think. It comes down to 3 things. They have to like you, know you and trust you.
Sure, you will get the odd impulse buyer which spends money with you but generally people are loyal and will not part with their hard earned money unless they feel like they know someone well enough, trust someone enough and they like them.
This is where your email marketing comes into play.
Your email marketing is your chance to build all 3 of those elements. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen if you do things correctly. This is why it’s such a waste of time, effort and money if you just send all your traffic direct to a sales page because most of the time those 3 elements will not be present.
If you set up your email campaigns effectively with the correct balance you will start to see that some people purchase the very next day after liking your free gift which you gave them. Others may take an extra day, another person may take a few more days while for some people it may take weeks and even months before they are ready to purchase from you.
The more expensive the product the more of these 3 elements have to be in place.
For a $10 product it will be fairly easy but if you sell a $97 right off the bat then you will generally be in for a rough ride.
This is why a customer is much more likely to purchase from you again because they have already shown their trust in you once and if you put the right offer in front of them at the right time they may purchase again even if the price is much higher and you have a solution to their problem.
You need to be different and stand out. If you just use the same old boring subject lines that people expect then you’re going to find it very difficult to get many of your subscribers to open your emails. The best way that I have found is to use subject lines that spike curiosity. Your task at this point is ONLY to get someone to open your email. You should be creating blind email subject lines so that people cannot find out what exactly you are talking about so they need to open your email to find out the full story.
That being said you still need to use your subject lines wisely and still deliver on what you either promised in the subject line or continue your email around the topic of your subject line. If you just use random subject lines like “I’m giving up Internet Marketing” but then you go straight into something completely un related then expect to lose a lot of trust and credibility because this is exactly what will happen if you just use subject lines like that to just get people to open your emails.
The subject lines that have worked well for me are ones that create some interest, curiosity, controversy and/or entertainment of some kind.
Believe it or not, my best subject lines that I have used actually have nothing or very little to do with Internet Marketing or business of any kind. Below are some of my recent subject lines that I have used which have worked well.
1 StarBucks Coffee = Big Traffic and FAST
Start the Year with a BANG
This is a Knockout Punch
Crazy Fish Guy’s $120+ per day Method
So as you can see, these are pretty different to your average Internet Marketing subject lines. Even with the last example, I use an entertaining description of “crazy fish guy”
What ever you do try to put your own spin on things you will see that people react better to day to day personal things than they do to the normal garbage of “hey this makes you $12,764.73 each day check it out”
To make this easier to understand I will only focus on your prospects list because setting up follow up campaigns to your buyers lists works slightly different.
The first thing I will say is don’t think that you need lots of follow up messages in place before you start building a list. As you’re building your list you can go in everyday or every other day and add more follow up emails to your campaign. You only need say 3 email follow ups in place and then you can progress from there.
With regards to how long your entire sequence be, that is entirely up to you. There is no right or wrong way but I would make it at least 7 – 14 days as a bare minimum.
One thing which you have to remember when building a list is some people will purchase your product straight away while others may take 6 months before buying from you, this is just the way it works so it makes sense for you to have a lot of follow ups in place going out over many weeks and even months.
Some people even have en entire years worth of follow ups going out after someone opts in.
One thing I will say is make sure you take into consideration the niche that you are in and the content which you set up in your follow emails because the information that you share today needs to still be effective and current in 12 months time. If you’re only using a fairly short follow up sequence say over a couple of weeks then you can go in and edit them as and when is required but even if you have a shorter sequence you should really still be making sure that the content you provide now is still current and effective in 12 months time. This will save you so much time and will be much easier to run and grow your business.
So I guess you’re wondering how I structure my sequence?
Ok I will tell you
(this is just for my prospect sequence remember)
It goes something like this 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3
They are the days apart which my messages get sent out.
The first 7 days that someone enters your list is the most crucial because this is when they are most interested so this is why I follow up every day. Then after 7 days I drop to every 2 days and then after a another week I drop it to every 3 days and that is where I keep things. Every 3 days is plenty good enough.
I currently have around 30 days of follow ups but I add more all the time so at some point I will have 6+ months worth of email follow up messages set up
I hope that gives you a better understanding on what you need to be doing when it comes to how long your follow up sequence should be and how you structure it.
I saved this one till last because it’s one of the biggest problems people face.
Before I tell you what you should be doing for traffic you need to do something else first. This is something that most people NEVER tell you, instead they just keep filling your head with traffic method after traffic method.
This is serious so listen up!
You NEED to have your system set up BEFORE you start driving traffic!
It’s no good you going out there and trying to send traffic if you have no system in place to take care of that traffic.
What I mean is you need to have the basic foundation laid out.
You need your:
Squeeze page which converts at at least 30%
Free gift set up and your download page set up and monetized .
Your low ticket/OTO</acronym> offer set up. (optional but very effective)
Follow up emails in place (at least 3)
These are the basic things which you need set up but you can add things and expand your sales funnel as you go.
Once you have these items in place you can then go out there and start driving traffic to your squeeze page.
You are now building an asset (your email list) and every bit of effort you put into driving traffic will be worth it because you are building your email list rather than just sending traffic direct to an affiliate offer or sales page.
Now…this brings us onto TRAFFIC and how to get lots of it to your squeeze page
Firstly I am NOT going to give you x50 different traffic methods for you to use to start building your list because to be honest I know you will just get information overload and not end up doing anything. Not only that but these few traffic methods that I share below are more than enough for you to start sending a Tsunami of traffic back to your squeeze page each and every day.
1. Forums – Yes you may already know about this one but believe me when I say you can drive massive traffic back to your website from forums. The traffic is lazer targeted and one of the best types of traffic you can generate online. Simply leave 5 – 10 good helpful comments per day making sure you have a link to your squeeze page in your signature. I also have a link to this blog too which helps to increase my traffic. Once you gain a bit of momentum and get quite a few comments out there and you post consistently you can easily build 10 – 20 subscribers a day just from a forum
2. Youtube – There is an absolute boat load of traffic to be had from youtube. If you don’t have videos on youtube then you are losing out on a lot of free traffic. All you need to do is create 2 – 3 videos a week and upload them to your youtube account. Make sure you have a link to either your squeeze page under the video or leading back to your blog. You don’t need to do any more than creating 2 – 3 videos per week for youtube in order to see a nice steady amount of traffic back to your site/squeeze page.
4. Google alerts – This is one of my secret weapons on how to get more targeted traffic back to your website. It’s one of the most underused traffic methods out there (probably because no one knows about it) It’s really simple to set up and using this traffic method you get the most lazer targeted traffic possible for your niche.
You simply enter your keywords and choose "discussions" and set to get emailed instantly as soon as a new blog post, forum thread etc is started using any of the keywords you set. You can then leave comments on platforms which is lazer targeted to the type of traffic that you are trying to generate into your business.
A quick tip is to use keywords "like this" because you then only get notified of things that have only those keywords and in that particular order otherwise you will be getting lots of variations which creates all kinds of problems.
So if you wanted to choose the keyword how to lose weight fast you would put it in google alerts as "how to lose weight fast"
5. Solo Ads – This is in my opinion one of the best ways to generate fast targeted traffic to build your list. They are a great traffic source to use in combination with free traffic method to give your list a nice boost of subscribers every now and again. Solo Ads can also be very profitable as long as you have a half decent sales funnel set up and a half decent front end offer and also if you only use proven and tested solo ads not the garbage that gets passed around to every man and his dog.
6. Your Blog – I will put this as plain as I can. If you’re not building a blog within your niche you are making things much harder for yourself. Now… before you start thinking “but I can’t blog” or “there’s no way I can blog 3 times a week I simply don’t have time”
I never ever blog 3 – 4 times per week?
I only create new blog posts when I have something very important or very interesting and helpful to say. So I could create 2 posts 1 week and then not create another post for another 3 weeks.
I have NEVER classed myself as an actual “blogger”
In fact, I throw every blogging rule out of the window when I blog.
By having a blog you make it 10 times easier for yourself to provide value to your subscribers rather than just sending them a long drawn out email all the time because on your blog they can interact with you and leave comments.
I simply use a blog for creating good content for my subscribers. By using your blog as the content platform you do get many other benefits as well such as.
1. Building more traffic to build your list.
2. Branding yourself as an authority in your industry.
3. Building a better relationship with your subscribers.
4. The ability to have your blog content shared across the web (link bait) which sends you even more traffic.
Well there you have it, those are 5 bullet proof traffic methods that you SHOULD be making the most of. By ONLY using those 5 traffic methods you will be able to generate more traffic than you could ever possibly need if you use them effectively.
Forget about using 30 different traffic sources because you will just get information overload and not actually do anything.
I hope you can take somethings away from this post which will help you when it comes to growing your lists or business in general :-)
These tactics and tips work in ANY NICHE so don’t think it’s just the Internet Marketing niche because it isn’t.
After surveying some segments of my list these 7 things which I’m going to go through here seem to be some common problems that people face when it comes to building a list.
So lets get stuck right in to the Meat and Potatoes of the content :-)
How To Create a Good Squeeze Page?
1. Use a professional looking template. I use optimize press and I have been for over 2 years and it’s all I use these days to create all of my squeeze pages. Using a professional looking squeeze page will not guarantee you good results on it’s own but it certainly plays a big part of the overall success of how well your squeeze page converts.
2. Be specific on what you are giving away. I wouldn't recommend using broad based squeeze pages saying things like “enter your email below to see how to make to make $974.38 dollars a day without even getting out of bed”
You only want to build a list of highly targeted prospects and this will make it much easier too when it comes to selling them your paid product because you know exactly what they are interested in.
3. Include curiosity filled bullet points. Creating good bullet points takes practice and is a fine art but once you master them they can make a massive difference in your conversions, both on squeeze pages and on sales pages.
An example of a good bullet point is : “1 weird Free traffic method I use to add 30 – 50 subscribers to my list every day”
(You can look at other peoples squeeze pages to get more ideas and tips)
Bullet points should only really create lots of curiosity and desire and this makes people take action which is obviously what we are after. You should never reveal everything within the bullet point, just a taste of what they get leaving them wanting to find out more.
4. Include your opt in form above the fold. This also helps too if you have a longish squeeze page. I usually have videos on my squeeze pages so by having the opt in form above the fold it will be in plain view while they are watching my video which then increases the chance of them opting in.
5. Use a good headline with lots of power words which induce action. Here is a list of some power words that you can use on your squeeze pages to create more attention. There are lots more but these a good start.
Power, Fast, Whopping, Ultimate, Blasting, Crazy, Burning, Overdrive, Warp Speed, Profits, Secrets, Closely Guarded, Proven, Free, Discover, Blueprint, Insane, Explosive, Exploit, De-Bunked, Forced, Sky Rocket, Extreme, Jaw Dropping, Mouth Watering, Weird, Boosts, Super, Extra, Jumpstart, Killer, Surprising, Little known, Melting, Blazing, Unleash, Avalanche, Tsunami, Hot, Power packed, Spark, Mind blowing, Mesmerising, Incredible, High powered, Electrifying, Awesome, Blockbuster, Rocket-Launch, Turbo boost, Explode, Ignite
How to Know What OTO</acronym> Will Convert to Sales?
Your OTO</acronym> stands for one time offer and usually it’s not actually only shown one time. I personally like to use the term “low ticket product”
Knowing what type of OTO</acronym> will convert well into sales for you is very simple.
Basically the closer related the paid product is to your free produt/gift which you give away on your squeeze page the higher your conversions will be for your paid offer.
It’s all about flow. Remember that because if you are having problems with conversions on your OTO</acronym> most of the time it will be because of the flow. If you were to give away a Free ebook on how to make money on youtube and then sell a product for your OTO</acronym> for say $10 on how to make money with adsense, your conversions will be absolutely dreadful 99% of the time. You will of course get the odd sale but generally your campaign will be a disaster.
Let me give you 3 of my Killer tips when it comes to making more OTO</acronym> sales and increasing your conversions. These alone will probably save you hundreds of hours of testing
1. Firstly if you are giving an Ebook away as your free gift to people that join your list then make sure your product is an Ebook format of some description.
2. If you’re giving away any videos as your free gift then make sure that your paid product is a video course too.
3 - And thirdly (this works awesome and it’s exactly what I do) What you need to do is create your complete product in what ever niche you are in. If you make it video (which I highly recommend) say if you have 12 step by step videos as your paid product, give 3 – 5 of them away as your free gift. This is an absolute killer technique to get much higher conversions on your paid product within your email follow up campaign.
Remember what I said? You need to keep everything flowing and highly related and you can’t get anymore related than it being part of the same course.
If you do this you can market your paid product as simply “an Upgrade” and it’s far easier to make a sale. This is exactly how I started building my list when I used to do adsense. I gave away some free adsense videos and then the rest were an upgrade and that is exactly what I still do.
How to deliver Your Free Gift/Ebook/Videos/Course to your Subscriber?
After someone has opted into your squeeze page you then of course need to give them their free gift/course or ebook.
The best way to do this which I have found is to create and set up a download page where you have their free gifts and then include this page in your auto-responder which gets sent out as soon as someone joins your list.
On your download page you give them their free gifts as well as an option to upgrade to the full/paid product. This page is also an opportunity where you can include links to other products that you may have which would benefit them.
This is by far the most effective way to deliver your free information because straight after the opt in you can send them to your OTO</acronym>/low ticket product.
Even if in some areas of your marketing you don’t include a OTO</acronym>/low ticket product after their opt in it’s still important to deliver their free information in the first follow up because this conditions them to open your emails.
How to Get People to Buy From You?
This is actually easier than you think. It comes down to 3 things. They have to like you, know you and trust you.
Sure, you will get the odd impulse buyer which spends money with you but generally people are loyal and will not part with their hard earned money unless they feel like they know someone well enough, trust someone enough and they like them.
This is where your email marketing comes into play.
Your email marketing is your chance to build all 3 of those elements. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen if you do things correctly. This is why it’s such a waste of time, effort and money if you just send all your traffic direct to a sales page because most of the time those 3 elements will not be present.
If you set up your email campaigns effectively with the correct balance you will start to see that some people purchase the very next day after liking your free gift which you gave them. Others may take an extra day, another person may take a few more days while for some people it may take weeks and even months before they are ready to purchase from you.
The more expensive the product the more of these 3 elements have to be in place.
For a $10 product it will be fairly easy but if you sell a $97 right off the bat then you will generally be in for a rough ride.
This is why a customer is much more likely to purchase from you again because they have already shown their trust in you once and if you put the right offer in front of them at the right time they may purchase again even if the price is much higher and you have a solution to their problem.
What Email Subject Lines Work Well to Get People to Open Your Emails?
You need to be different and stand out. If you just use the same old boring subject lines that people expect then you’re going to find it very difficult to get many of your subscribers to open your emails. The best way that I have found is to use subject lines that spike curiosity. Your task at this point is ONLY to get someone to open your email. You should be creating blind email subject lines so that people cannot find out what exactly you are talking about so they need to open your email to find out the full story.
That being said you still need to use your subject lines wisely and still deliver on what you either promised in the subject line or continue your email around the topic of your subject line. If you just use random subject lines like “I’m giving up Internet Marketing” but then you go straight into something completely un related then expect to lose a lot of trust and credibility because this is exactly what will happen if you just use subject lines like that to just get people to open your emails.
The subject lines that have worked well for me are ones that create some interest, curiosity, controversy and/or entertainment of some kind.
Believe it or not, my best subject lines that I have used actually have nothing or very little to do with Internet Marketing or business of any kind. Below are some of my recent subject lines that I have used which have worked well.
1 StarBucks Coffee = Big Traffic and FAST
Start the Year with a BANG
This is a Knockout Punch
Crazy Fish Guy’s $120+ per day Method
So as you can see, these are pretty different to your average Internet Marketing subject lines. Even with the last example, I use an entertaining description of “crazy fish guy”
What ever you do try to put your own spin on things you will see that people react better to day to day personal things than they do to the normal garbage of “hey this makes you $12,764.73 each day check it out”
How Long Should an Auto-Responder / Follow up Sequence Be?
To make this easier to understand I will only focus on your prospects list because setting up follow up campaigns to your buyers lists works slightly different.
The first thing I will say is don’t think that you need lots of follow up messages in place before you start building a list. As you’re building your list you can go in everyday or every other day and add more follow up emails to your campaign. You only need say 3 email follow ups in place and then you can progress from there.
With regards to how long your entire sequence be, that is entirely up to you. There is no right or wrong way but I would make it at least 7 – 14 days as a bare minimum.
One thing which you have to remember when building a list is some people will purchase your product straight away while others may take 6 months before buying from you, this is just the way it works so it makes sense for you to have a lot of follow ups in place going out over many weeks and even months.
Some people even have en entire years worth of follow ups going out after someone opts in.
One thing I will say is make sure you take into consideration the niche that you are in and the content which you set up in your follow emails because the information that you share today needs to still be effective and current in 12 months time. If you’re only using a fairly short follow up sequence say over a couple of weeks then you can go in and edit them as and when is required but even if you have a shorter sequence you should really still be making sure that the content you provide now is still current and effective in 12 months time. This will save you so much time and will be much easier to run and grow your business.
So I guess you’re wondering how I structure my sequence?
Ok I will tell you
(this is just for my prospect sequence remember)
It goes something like this 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3
They are the days apart which my messages get sent out.
The first 7 days that someone enters your list is the most crucial because this is when they are most interested so this is why I follow up every day. Then after 7 days I drop to every 2 days and then after a another week I drop it to every 3 days and that is where I keep things. Every 3 days is plenty good enough.
I currently have around 30 days of follow ups but I add more all the time so at some point I will have 6+ months worth of email follow up messages set up
I hope that gives you a better understanding on what you need to be doing when it comes to how long your follow up sequence should be and how you structure it.
How to Build Traffic to Your Squeeze Page?
I saved this one till last because it’s one of the biggest problems people face.
Before I tell you what you should be doing for traffic you need to do something else first. This is something that most people NEVER tell you, instead they just keep filling your head with traffic method after traffic method.
This is serious so listen up!
You NEED to have your system set up BEFORE you start driving traffic!
It’s no good you going out there and trying to send traffic if you have no system in place to take care of that traffic.
What I mean is you need to have the basic foundation laid out.
You need your:
Squeeze page which converts at at least 30%
Free gift set up and your download page set up and monetized .
Your low ticket/OTO</acronym> offer set up. (optional but very effective)
Follow up emails in place (at least 3)
These are the basic things which you need set up but you can add things and expand your sales funnel as you go.
Once you have these items in place you can then go out there and start driving traffic to your squeeze page.
You are now building an asset (your email list) and every bit of effort you put into driving traffic will be worth it because you are building your email list rather than just sending traffic direct to an affiliate offer or sales page.
Now…this brings us onto TRAFFIC and how to get lots of it to your squeeze page
Firstly I am NOT going to give you x50 different traffic methods for you to use to start building your list because to be honest I know you will just get information overload and not end up doing anything. Not only that but these few traffic methods that I share below are more than enough for you to start sending a Tsunami of traffic back to your squeeze page each and every day.
1. Forums – Yes you may already know about this one but believe me when I say you can drive massive traffic back to your website from forums. The traffic is lazer targeted and one of the best types of traffic you can generate online. Simply leave 5 – 10 good helpful comments per day making sure you have a link to your squeeze page in your signature. I also have a link to this blog too which helps to increase my traffic. Once you gain a bit of momentum and get quite a few comments out there and you post consistently you can easily build 10 – 20 subscribers a day just from a forum
2. Youtube – There is an absolute boat load of traffic to be had from youtube. If you don’t have videos on youtube then you are losing out on a lot of free traffic. All you need to do is create 2 – 3 videos a week and upload them to your youtube account. Make sure you have a link to either your squeeze page under the video or leading back to your blog. You don’t need to do any more than creating 2 – 3 videos per week for youtube in order to see a nice steady amount of traffic back to your site/squeeze page.
4. Google alerts – This is one of my secret weapons on how to get more targeted traffic back to your website. It’s one of the most underused traffic methods out there (probably because no one knows about it) It’s really simple to set up and using this traffic method you get the most lazer targeted traffic possible for your niche.
You simply enter your keywords and choose "discussions" and set to get emailed instantly as soon as a new blog post, forum thread etc is started using any of the keywords you set. You can then leave comments on platforms which is lazer targeted to the type of traffic that you are trying to generate into your business.
A quick tip is to use keywords "like this" because you then only get notified of things that have only those keywords and in that particular order otherwise you will be getting lots of variations which creates all kinds of problems.
So if you wanted to choose the keyword how to lose weight fast you would put it in google alerts as "how to lose weight fast"
5. Solo Ads – This is in my opinion one of the best ways to generate fast targeted traffic to build your list. They are a great traffic source to use in combination with free traffic method to give your list a nice boost of subscribers every now and again. Solo Ads can also be very profitable as long as you have a half decent sales funnel set up and a half decent front end offer and also if you only use proven and tested solo ads not the garbage that gets passed around to every man and his dog.
6. Your Blog – I will put this as plain as I can. If you’re not building a blog within your niche you are making things much harder for yourself. Now… before you start thinking “but I can’t blog” or “there’s no way I can blog 3 times a week I simply don’t have time”
I never ever blog 3 – 4 times per week?
I only create new blog posts when I have something very important or very interesting and helpful to say. So I could create 2 posts 1 week and then not create another post for another 3 weeks.
I have NEVER classed myself as an actual “blogger”
In fact, I throw every blogging rule out of the window when I blog.
By having a blog you make it 10 times easier for yourself to provide value to your subscribers rather than just sending them a long drawn out email all the time because on your blog they can interact with you and leave comments.
I simply use a blog for creating good content for my subscribers. By using your blog as the content platform you do get many other benefits as well such as.
1. Building more traffic to build your list.
2. Branding yourself as an authority in your industry.
3. Building a better relationship with your subscribers.
4. The ability to have your blog content shared across the web (link bait) which sends you even more traffic.
Well there you have it, those are 5 bullet proof traffic methods that you SHOULD be making the most of. By ONLY using those 5 traffic methods you will be able to generate more traffic than you could ever possibly need if you use them effectively.
Forget about using 30 different traffic sources because you will just get information overload and not actually do anything.
I hope you can take somethings away from this post which will help you when it comes to growing your lists or business in general :-)
segmenting email list
Please note that all the comments I give work with any simple regular autoresponder.
The best advice is to segment your list. I have over 200 segmented lists. Some of the ways you can segment your lists are...
1.PROSPECT list per category. Some categories for IM may be...Article Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, List Building, Joint Ventures, Software, Copy Writing, and many more. These are the people who are entering your sales funnel,which tries to convert prospect into customers or buyers.
2. BUYER list per category. This allows me to promote similar products to this list based on category.
3. BUYER list per product. (Note, I did create my own software that allows me to add a new subscriber to multiple lists. So I can put a subscriber into a buyer list per category and per product.) Some autoresponders will allow you to do this with setting withing the autoresponder.
4. JV PARTNER list. This can be one of your more valuable lists. When ever I have a new product to launch, these are the first group of people I tell about the new product. These are all people that I have done some kind of joint venture with before. I believe my current JV Partner list has well over 800 people on this list.
5. AFFILIATE list. This is very similar to the JV Partner list but I don't know these people very well. But they have signed up to promote my products. This is a list I'm working on very hard and hope to add another 20,000 affiliates to this list next month.
Provide high quality information. Tell stories with some stories being personal. Supply good resources. Be approachable. Tell your subscribers how to get a hold of you when they have questions. A support desk works great for this. Keep your emails personal as if you are just talking to the person who is reading the email message.
I write all my emails for a specific purpose in mind. It is always to promote a specific product or service.
At the end of an email sequence I add an email or two that give something away. Naturally the link goes to another squeeze page to get them on a new list and an new email sequence. The squeeze page is a good tool to move people from list to list and promotion to promotion.
I move the subscriber to a different list and follow up sequence using a squeeze page.
This is one big problem that no one can completely solve. There is no way to tell who is just a freebie seeker or a buyer. You should handle every prospect the same and let your sales funnel do its job. Try to stick to this equation... subscriber = future buyer
...Don't try to do any predetermination because they will become a buyer when they make a purchase. You can promote specials with very low prices like a dollar or two to get people who never buy to become a buyer. Sometimes once they make their first purchase, even with a very low price, they will now make more purchases.
A good email is very similar to a very small sales letter. The goal is to presell the subscriber before they click on the sales letter link.
1. You want to present the problem.
2. Make them feel the pain the problem causes.
3. Offer a solution to the problem.
4. Give a call to action to click on the link in the email message.
You can present these four elements and a number of different ways. Plus the call to action does not have to be to a paid product. It can be to a free product that is on a squeeze page.
You start promoting your products in the very first email message. The main reason for building a list is to make sales. The promotions don't have to be direct. They could be a sponsor ad or a P.S. at the end of the email message.
I always promote before the subscriber receives their first email message. When a subscriber opts into my list vis a squeeze page, upon clicking the subscribe button they are redirected to the sales letter of the product I'm trying to promote.
They either become buyers right away or they check their email for my free report and in the free report I promote the same product. Plus the follow up sequence always has at least one link to the same product. The purpose of email marketing is to MARKET in your emails.
If you send out emails with no call to action of some kind whether free or paid is a wasted email and you are just catering to the freebie seekers. Always write your email messages with a purpose in mind.
I hope this has been helpful,
Steve Yakim
The best advice is to segment your list. I have over 200 segmented lists. Some of the ways you can segment your lists are...
1.PROSPECT list per category. Some categories for IM may be...Article Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, List Building, Joint Ventures, Software, Copy Writing, and many more. These are the people who are entering your sales funnel,which tries to convert prospect into customers or buyers.
2. BUYER list per category. This allows me to promote similar products to this list based on category.
3. BUYER list per product. (Note, I did create my own software that allows me to add a new subscriber to multiple lists. So I can put a subscriber into a buyer list per category and per product.) Some autoresponders will allow you to do this with setting withing the autoresponder.
4. JV PARTNER list. This can be one of your more valuable lists. When ever I have a new product to launch, these are the first group of people I tell about the new product. These are all people that I have done some kind of joint venture with before. I believe my current JV Partner list has well over 800 people on this list.
5. AFFILIATE list. This is very similar to the JV Partner list but I don't know these people very well. But they have signed up to promote my products. This is a list I'm working on very hard and hope to add another 20,000 affiliates to this list next month.
Provide high quality information. Tell stories with some stories being personal. Supply good resources. Be approachable. Tell your subscribers how to get a hold of you when they have questions. A support desk works great for this. Keep your emails personal as if you are just talking to the person who is reading the email message.
I write all my emails for a specific purpose in mind. It is always to promote a specific product or service.
At the end of an email sequence I add an email or two that give something away. Naturally the link goes to another squeeze page to get them on a new list and an new email sequence. The squeeze page is a good tool to move people from list to list and promotion to promotion.
I move the subscriber to a different list and follow up sequence using a squeeze page.
This is one big problem that no one can completely solve. There is no way to tell who is just a freebie seeker or a buyer. You should handle every prospect the same and let your sales funnel do its job. Try to stick to this equation... subscriber = future buyer
...Don't try to do any predetermination because they will become a buyer when they make a purchase. You can promote specials with very low prices like a dollar or two to get people who never buy to become a buyer. Sometimes once they make their first purchase, even with a very low price, they will now make more purchases.
A good email is very similar to a very small sales letter. The goal is to presell the subscriber before they click on the sales letter link.
1. You want to present the problem.
2. Make them feel the pain the problem causes.
3. Offer a solution to the problem.
4. Give a call to action to click on the link in the email message.
You can present these four elements and a number of different ways. Plus the call to action does not have to be to a paid product. It can be to a free product that is on a squeeze page.
You start promoting your products in the very first email message. The main reason for building a list is to make sales. The promotions don't have to be direct. They could be a sponsor ad or a P.S. at the end of the email message.
I always promote before the subscriber receives their first email message. When a subscriber opts into my list vis a squeeze page, upon clicking the subscribe button they are redirected to the sales letter of the product I'm trying to promote.
They either become buyers right away or they check their email for my free report and in the free report I promote the same product. Plus the follow up sequence always has at least one link to the same product. The purpose of email marketing is to MARKET in your emails.
If you send out emails with no call to action of some kind whether free or paid is a wasted email and you are just catering to the freebie seekers. Always write your email messages with a purpose in mind.
I hope this has been helpful,
Steve Yakim
Friday, 8 April 2016
adsense story 1
Early Beginnings
Let's rewind a bit...
I had only just turned 19. It was in my first year of college and things were heading nowhere FAST. There was no chance in hell I'd be staying here long. My GPA was unspeakably low, and I still had not chosen a field to study. At this point, I knew I needed to stop taking out loans for school, and start making some money online.
This wasn't new to me, I had been messing with all sorts stuff from about 14 years old. It all really goes back to online games like Maplestory and World of Warcraft, that's where I spent most of my childhood days. I quickly began buying and selling items, currency, accounts - at this point everything was just money to me. 14-18 hour sitting in front of a screen were common, however, it was this rather extreme behavior that was making me an easy $2k per month.
From here it was an easy transition into CPA type stuff, promoting sign-ups for all sorts of things in whatever crazy ways I could think up (or find on sites such as this!). I spent my days reading forums, thinking of twists to take, and implementing. Video streaming sites and CPALead were my first big hustle, netting me roughly $50k in under a year.
This was great, but I knew it would be short-lived. I took a good crack at entering the SEO service niche, primarily on forums at this time. Digitalpoint and WickedFire were where it started, shortly after leading me here to BHW. The idea was to sell the same links I was using for my own sites. I knew what was working and what wasn't, and so I capitalized on that by building packages and pushing it to the people who needed it most. I made this a full-time thing for some time, always lining my pockets (and my customers
) and keeping myself fed.
The Internet - My Cash Cow
It was time to take things to the next level, I didn't want to leave school without a very comfortable savings account and a solid plan going forward. Nutrition and fitness was also becoming a big part of my life at that time. I was frequently browsing the bodybuilding.com forum. There was a thread for Internet / Affiliate marketing and I kept up with it regularly. A fellow member posted some questions regarding an iPhone 5 blog he had made (this was long before the release of the iPhone 5) and even posted some screenshots of his earnings. He was making a bit of money from the site, something around $20 per day if I remember correctly. He was however only ranking towards the bottom of the first page for "iPhone 5", and the keyword was getting well over a million searches per month at that point. The competition was laughable, and I know I could capitalize in a big way, this is when I got to work...
Wordpress was my go-to, so I through up a quick blog with a top selling theme that looked like it'd convert well (can't remember the theme name at this point). I quickly outsourced 4-5 pieces of content. These were re-writes based on the most useful articles I could find online. Rumors, concept screenshots, leaks - this was the initial angle I took. I mean, what other angle could I really take at this point? From here I started to build links myself, as well as buy services from WF and BHW. Now that doesn't mean just throwing any random services at it, I knew what was working at the time and simply couldn't handle all the manual link building that was required.
It's Not That Difficult
I'm sure you're wondering what sort of links I was using. For the most part, it was High PR blog comments, profile links, web 2.0's and a couple of High PR networks thrown in. The content being used seo was mostly spun too, it really didn't matter so much back then. It was also a free-for-all in terms of keyword density, I used "iPhone 5" and variations of the keyword for every single link. I spent around $3k-$5k on links in a months time, and had around 10 pieces of content up by now. I hit page 2 rather quickly, and I was climbing day by day at that point across a ton of keywords. I saw the pennies start to roll in, then small dollar amounts each day. This is when I knew the money was coming, I didn't know however that I was about to make a quarter of a million dollars!
It was time for a branding and design upgrade. I worked with a developer from my school to make the new website. The new site looked like this and took around 2 weeks for us to finish. This was a big upgrade from the old cookie-cutter design, and would covert much better as well. Inside the posts, I would put a square Adsense ad below the content and remove the header ad on those pages (Adsense only allows 3), this always had the highest click-through rates of any ad on my site.
I continued to build links and pay my content writer to do re-writes and I would format them and post them on the blog. My site was really starting to rank, I was on the first page for "iPhone 5" and controlled the top rankings for most of the long-tail stuff. By this point my site was bringing in about $100 per day in revenue, everything was happening very quickly. I was refreshing my earnings like a madman, I really had to stop myself from doing it too much! I threw another $2k-3k in links at the site in an attempt to power through the first page.
What Now
At that point, TechCrunch and similar sites had articles up about the iPhone 5. These were the ones ranking highest, however, they still weren't anything too difficult to pass considering I had an exact match domain and a site filled with strictly iPhone 5 content. Thankfully these authority sites didn't make full "iPhone 5" sub-sections full of content, I have to assume they just weren't up to speed yet (nowadays they all do this!).
Once I secured a #2 rank things got real quickly, I was bringing in $500 a day or more like clockwork. Again, I threw a few more thousand in links at the site. This time I went to odesk and hired a ton of workers for all sorts of links, I would typically pay them by the hour. This ate up a lot of my time, but I feel as if it's what really helped me get to #1. I kept asking them to do High PR blog comments, these were cheap for the juice they were giving back then. After about a week I popped up at #1 for just a couple of hours. My site became unresponsive rather quickly. It was already getting slow, and the surge in traffic really took it over the edge. After some rather tiring phone calls with my cheap shared hosting provider, I knew it was time to leave and get something a bit more powerful.
I got a $350 per month dedicated server, but still there were some serious load speed issues. It was affecting my visitors, my earnings, and my head. I knew I had to sort things out, so I worked with the same developer who helped me code the website to optimize everything. We read up on load speed optimization and went to work. Cache plugins were the biggest factor in the end, the thumbnails on the homepage were really causing a lot of stress. I was seeing days with 200,000 and sometimes 300,000 unique visitors to the site, things were crazy.
You can have a look at my Adsense earnings and stats here. Like I said, things got pretty crazy for a while...
I kept up with link building for a few months, but I was only spending about $1k per month at this point. I remember getting worried about having too many links, and too much spun content around my links. After I was #1 for some time and felt I had cemented myself there, I just continued to put out content and stopped building links. Google started to roll out updates not too long after, this couldn't go on forever. My site stuck around in the rankings for quite a while, I had a solid full year of nice earnings before it really started to trickle down. This was just a small side project that turned into a big thing, even though it never really took TOO much of my time, especially not for what it netted in the end.
Happily Ever After
This set me up for the rest of my life. Last year I relocated myself to NYC from Philadephia and started Gurus NYC. This is the agency I put it together with my close friend who had been designing / developing websites for a long time. It took nearly 10 years before I felt like I was in a position to take brands under my own command, and actually improve them from the bottom up. This past year has taught me some invaluable lessons. You know why? Because starting an agency forces you to get out into the real world, it forces you to talk to multi-million dollar business owners, to sell them on your services, and then you have to communicate with them regularly while you take their brand from zero to hero. Yea, it's a lot to manage, but it's what I am passionate about and where my life has taken me. I have the freedom to live anywhere I want, to work by the beach, or in the mountains. The internet has given me that freedom. I owe a lot to BHW, I took in a lot of information from day one and it continues to thrive as one of the top internet marketing forums. Bravo.
What I did with the iPhone 5 blog can be replicated, but not with such shady link building. Move with the times, and use what's working now. Google wants to see quality over quantity, and using exact match keywords is a no-no. Make it look natural, and put out quality content both on your website and around your link. Don't be afraid to reach out to blogs and news publications, they want your good content just as badly as you want that juicy backlink. Read blogs, case studies, forums - the more knowledge you're taking in on a daily basis the better. I'll end on that note, I hope you were able to take something useful or even gain some inspiration from reading this post.
Let's rewind a bit...
I had only just turned 19. It was in my first year of college and things were heading nowhere FAST. There was no chance in hell I'd be staying here long. My GPA was unspeakably low, and I still had not chosen a field to study. At this point, I knew I needed to stop taking out loans for school, and start making some money online.
This wasn't new to me, I had been messing with all sorts stuff from about 14 years old. It all really goes back to online games like Maplestory and World of Warcraft, that's where I spent most of my childhood days. I quickly began buying and selling items, currency, accounts - at this point everything was just money to me. 14-18 hour sitting in front of a screen were common, however, it was this rather extreme behavior that was making me an easy $2k per month.
From here it was an easy transition into CPA type stuff, promoting sign-ups for all sorts of things in whatever crazy ways I could think up (or find on sites such as this!). I spent my days reading forums, thinking of twists to take, and implementing. Video streaming sites and CPALead were my first big hustle, netting me roughly $50k in under a year.
This was great, but I knew it would be short-lived. I took a good crack at entering the SEO service niche, primarily on forums at this time. Digitalpoint and WickedFire were where it started, shortly after leading me here to BHW. The idea was to sell the same links I was using for my own sites. I knew what was working and what wasn't, and so I capitalized on that by building packages and pushing it to the people who needed it most. I made this a full-time thing for some time, always lining my pockets (and my customers
) and keeping myself fed.The Internet - My Cash Cow
It was time to take things to the next level, I didn't want to leave school without a very comfortable savings account and a solid plan going forward. Nutrition and fitness was also becoming a big part of my life at that time. I was frequently browsing the bodybuilding.com forum. There was a thread for Internet / Affiliate marketing and I kept up with it regularly. A fellow member posted some questions regarding an iPhone 5 blog he had made (this was long before the release of the iPhone 5) and even posted some screenshots of his earnings. He was making a bit of money from the site, something around $20 per day if I remember correctly. He was however only ranking towards the bottom of the first page for "iPhone 5", and the keyword was getting well over a million searches per month at that point. The competition was laughable, and I know I could capitalize in a big way, this is when I got to work...
Wordpress was my go-to, so I through up a quick blog with a top selling theme that looked like it'd convert well (can't remember the theme name at this point). I quickly outsourced 4-5 pieces of content. These were re-writes based on the most useful articles I could find online. Rumors, concept screenshots, leaks - this was the initial angle I took. I mean, what other angle could I really take at this point? From here I started to build links myself, as well as buy services from WF and BHW. Now that doesn't mean just throwing any random services at it, I knew what was working at the time and simply couldn't handle all the manual link building that was required.
It's Not That Difficult
I'm sure you're wondering what sort of links I was using. For the most part, it was High PR blog comments, profile links, web 2.0's and a couple of High PR networks thrown in. The content being used seo was mostly spun too, it really didn't matter so much back then. It was also a free-for-all in terms of keyword density, I used "iPhone 5" and variations of the keyword for every single link. I spent around $3k-$5k on links in a months time, and had around 10 pieces of content up by now. I hit page 2 rather quickly, and I was climbing day by day at that point across a ton of keywords. I saw the pennies start to roll in, then small dollar amounts each day. This is when I knew the money was coming, I didn't know however that I was about to make a quarter of a million dollars!
It was time for a branding and design upgrade. I worked with a developer from my school to make the new website. The new site looked like this and took around 2 weeks for us to finish. This was a big upgrade from the old cookie-cutter design, and would covert much better as well. Inside the posts, I would put a square Adsense ad below the content and remove the header ad on those pages (Adsense only allows 3), this always had the highest click-through rates of any ad on my site.
I continued to build links and pay my content writer to do re-writes and I would format them and post them on the blog. My site was really starting to rank, I was on the first page for "iPhone 5" and controlled the top rankings for most of the long-tail stuff. By this point my site was bringing in about $100 per day in revenue, everything was happening very quickly. I was refreshing my earnings like a madman, I really had to stop myself from doing it too much! I threw another $2k-3k in links at the site in an attempt to power through the first page.
What Now
At that point, TechCrunch and similar sites had articles up about the iPhone 5. These were the ones ranking highest, however, they still weren't anything too difficult to pass considering I had an exact match domain and a site filled with strictly iPhone 5 content. Thankfully these authority sites didn't make full "iPhone 5" sub-sections full of content, I have to assume they just weren't up to speed yet (nowadays they all do this!).
Once I secured a #2 rank things got real quickly, I was bringing in $500 a day or more like clockwork. Again, I threw a few more thousand in links at the site. This time I went to odesk and hired a ton of workers for all sorts of links, I would typically pay them by the hour. This ate up a lot of my time, but I feel as if it's what really helped me get to #1. I kept asking them to do High PR blog comments, these were cheap for the juice they were giving back then. After about a week I popped up at #1 for just a couple of hours. My site became unresponsive rather quickly. It was already getting slow, and the surge in traffic really took it over the edge. After some rather tiring phone calls with my cheap shared hosting provider, I knew it was time to leave and get something a bit more powerful.
I got a $350 per month dedicated server, but still there were some serious load speed issues. It was affecting my visitors, my earnings, and my head. I knew I had to sort things out, so I worked with the same developer who helped me code the website to optimize everything. We read up on load speed optimization and went to work. Cache plugins were the biggest factor in the end, the thumbnails on the homepage were really causing a lot of stress. I was seeing days with 200,000 and sometimes 300,000 unique visitors to the site, things were crazy.
You can have a look at my Adsense earnings and stats here. Like I said, things got pretty crazy for a while...
I kept up with link building for a few months, but I was only spending about $1k per month at this point. I remember getting worried about having too many links, and too much spun content around my links. After I was #1 for some time and felt I had cemented myself there, I just continued to put out content and stopped building links. Google started to roll out updates not too long after, this couldn't go on forever. My site stuck around in the rankings for quite a while, I had a solid full year of nice earnings before it really started to trickle down. This was just a small side project that turned into a big thing, even though it never really took TOO much of my time, especially not for what it netted in the end.
Happily Ever After
This set me up for the rest of my life. Last year I relocated myself to NYC from Philadephia and started Gurus NYC. This is the agency I put it together with my close friend who had been designing / developing websites for a long time. It took nearly 10 years before I felt like I was in a position to take brands under my own command, and actually improve them from the bottom up. This past year has taught me some invaluable lessons. You know why? Because starting an agency forces you to get out into the real world, it forces you to talk to multi-million dollar business owners, to sell them on your services, and then you have to communicate with them regularly while you take their brand from zero to hero. Yea, it's a lot to manage, but it's what I am passionate about and where my life has taken me. I have the freedom to live anywhere I want, to work by the beach, or in the mountains. The internet has given me that freedom. I owe a lot to BHW, I took in a lot of information from day one and it continues to thrive as one of the top internet marketing forums. Bravo.
What I did with the iPhone 5 blog can be replicated, but not with such shady link building. Move with the times, and use what's working now. Google wants to see quality over quantity, and using exact match keywords is a no-no. Make it look natural, and put out quality content both on your website and around your link. Don't be afraid to reach out to blogs and news publications, they want your good content just as badly as you want that juicy backlink. Read blogs, case studies, forums - the more knowledge you're taking in on a daily basis the better. I'll end on that note, I hope you were able to take something useful or even gain some inspiration from reading this post.
I'M GOING TO TELL YOU HOW INSTAGRAM MARKETERS MAKE $$1,000's OF DOLLARS
I'M GOING TO TELL YOU HOW INSTAGRAM MARKETERS
MAKE $$1,000's OF DOLLARS
WARNING:
This might piss some people off, specifically those using this method because I'm going to reveal a well kept secret in the social media promoting industry. It's so obvious that once I figured it out, I almost felt stupid for not thinking of it.
A Little Backstory on How I Discovered this Method:
I follow a lot of luxury Instagram pages, I'm sure like many others here, I enjoy looking at the exotic cars, the women, fancy clothes, & more. I'm sure many of you have seen these posts; what looks like a rich man, holding a phone in his nice ferrari, lamborghini, or whatever else with a link selling luxury phone cases. If you're like me, occasionally you might click the link of this "luxury accessory brand" (or so they say..)
When you click on these luxury brands, you'll see plenty more pictures of their product, perhaps being held next to a private jet, or more cars, or women. So what do you do? You click on their website, everyone loves luxury items, right? I won't name the specific company.... but one day I stopped to think, "How is a phone case brand selling phone cases for more than known brands; gucci, louis vuitton, etc... and I've never even heard of the brand?"
So I clicked on this specific company, their domain was registered 6 months ago. No videos, no articles, their company didn't exist. They were selling phone cases for $200+ and their brand didn't exist!!! So I digged a bit deeper...
How They Made Money:
Method:
They were selling iPhone case made of unique leather, such as python, alligator, etc. All of which can be bought on Chinese wholesale sites for a fraction of the price they are selling for. Easy enough? Now to the method. This method is going to be a spoonfed way of how they sell their products through Instagram.
First Step - The Product:
You need a product. For the sake of this, I'm going to use phone cases, which happens to be a very popular one.
So what are we going to be selling?
For this example I'm going to say we are selling red, blue, and black exotic (pick one from your imagination) leather iPhone 6 cases.
As I type this, I did a quick google search and found python cases for $2 a piece/ minimum 100 pieces. So for the sake of imagination we spent $600 for 300 cases. You can find many places with less minimums, custom branding, etc.
Now we need pictures. But wait! We don't have a Ferrari, private jet, or a Lambo!!
Second Step - Photoshop Part 1:
Instagram photos are small, you can add filters. Getting away with photoshopping is easy.
Google for stock images like "ferrari interior stock photo, private jet stock photo, expensive champagnes, etc"
Find pictures that you like, we're going to add our phone into these. Look for bright crisp images, the less shadows, the better.
Third Step - Photoshop Part 2:
You will need to take pictures of you holding your phone cases in different situations. I'm sure we all know someone with a dslr camera. Even if not, a simple iPhone 6 camera and a lot of light will do.
Don't have a green screen? Get a huge thing of construction paper for 99 cents to a few bucks. You only need small images of you holding your phone cases.
Take images in various realistic positions, include your arms, etc. Also take pictures of your phone on the green screen, you can photoshop your phone into images on tables next to champagne bottles. If you're out at the bar, have a bartender take down a bottle of johnny walker and snap a cool looking pic with your phone case on the countertop, be creative.
There are plenty of photoshopping tutorials out there, or you can get some indian to do it for a dollar, its all up to you.
Fourth Step - Using Your Photos:
This will be quick and easy.
Setup your awesome super unknown luxury phone case brand Instagram
Buy 20-50k fake followers: $20-30
Buy a like service that will give you about 500+ likes per image posted (Usually $1 per 1000, we'll assume we have 30 photos) : $15
Note: Not all pictures have to have your phone case, just post luxurious shit. Be Creative.
Fifth Step - Promoting:
Luxury Instagram:Make a Luxury Blog.
Buy 20k-100k Fake Followers: $20-50
Buy a like service: $10-20
Use an Instagram Bot: $20-30
Or do it by hand and follow people that look rich and would buy stupid shit: FREE
Shoutouts:
Buy Shoutouts: Prices Vary
Note: Many luxury blogs will promote your Instagram simply for sending them free stuff. Just send them a case for a much cheaper way.
Sixth Step - Make a Site:
Buy a Domain: $10
Buy WordPress Hosting: $5/month
Install WooCommerce: FREE
Find a luxurious looking WooCommerce theme: $0-59
(You dont need SEO, so just worry about looks and mobile optimization)
A Few Site Tips:
*Look at popular luxury brands and copy their style
*For this example, I said we bought 3 colors of phone cases. Post other phone cases, photoshop your brand on them if you want. Put them to "OUT OF STOCK" it will make your brand look more exclusive.
*Write some bullshit like "blah blah blah collection"
Conclusion:
If you use your imagination and make it look legitimate, you can earn tons of money by doing this for all kinds of luxury products.
For this example the total cost is about $800
You can make this cost much less.
This method is stupid simple and it is literally exactly what many popular Instagram pages do.
I hope you enjoy!
Want to drop out of school? READ THIS! (my personal story, MANY LETTERS)
Want to drop out of school? READ THIS! (my personal story, MANY LETTERS)
Every week someone comes to this forum and asks if he or she should drop out of school. Every now and then I hear the same question in real life from my 18-23 year old friends. The answers they get are greatly influenced by the place they present their question at. On BlackHatWorld most folks are encouraging drop-outs and telling how this decision is right and will change their lives to the better.
I know we are all here "too cool for school" and especially too cool to be employed by someone. But let me tell you something. Most people giving you advice to drop out of school and pursue IM career have never dropped out of school themselves. Most of them have never earned a dime in internet. Heck, most of them even have no clue what internet business is besides some shady YT+PPI tactics.
Who am I and why you should listen to me? I dropped out of school twice, when I was 17 and 19 years old. Later, when I was 24 years old, I dropped out from the sophomore year at college. Why I did that? Because I was thinking like most probably you are thinking right now. I was bored of school and wanted to do something serious. I thought that I am smarter and better than others. I thought that people around just "don't get me" and I couldn't understand "why no one believed in me". Now looking back, I ask myself two questions:
1. Do I regret dropping out of school and university? NO
2. If I could go back in time and change the past in a way that I would have stayed in school and university, would I use this opportunity? F#$K YES
Aren't those two answers contradictory? YES, THEY ARE. And later you will understand why but until then let me briefly describe the path I had to go through to reach the point I am currently at.
After I dropped out of school for the first time, I had no idea what I should do next. I did not want to take any money or help from parents because I already went against their will and made my mother sad. Obviously, I had zero skills required to make money doing any white-collar work, so I went to work on construction to get the ball rolling. There I quickly realized that working at construction site without an agreement you had no more rights than African slave. At best I would get 50% of the money I actually earned. So I rather quickly left those jobs, learned PHP programming language and started freelancing.
At the age of 18 I left parents' house. I had just enough money to pay for the first month to rent a room in a shared apartment. Freelancing allowed me to have some small cash but it was nowhere near enough for living. During those times I learned how to do local SEO a bit. Those were golden times, you could rank #1 for some good local keywords just by doing inner optimization. Combined knowledge of SEO and programming has helped me to get a few regular clients.
Meanwhile, my former classmates have finished school and went to colleges. One of them, who was my best friend at school, has dropped out from the freshman year to try some luck creating own business. He joined forces with his childhood friend and they got around 4500 euros bank loan to start business in outdoor advertising niche. Months went by, they had had a few customers here and there but profits were nowhere enough to cover office rent and other expenses. As negative balance started looming on horizon, my friend came to me asking how to better divide company and start all over alone. What he actually wanted to do is leave his partner with 4500 eur credit and no means of repaying it quickly.
Instead of advising him on this, I offered to overtake the control and all associated liabilities and start doing business together instead. This was one of the best and one of the worst decisions in my life ever. We dumped his partner by mutual agreement after running a few psychological tricks on him. I took their website and using my limited PHP and SEO knowledge reworked it fully. It still was very clumsy and contained many errors in texts written in local language (which was not my native language) but soon enough we started getting first orders from customers.
All you need to know about the next 3,5 years is they were a never ending battle against EVERYTHING I DID NOT KNOW. You know, there's an idiom "step on a rake". During those 3,5 years I stood on every rake I could find in a 1000 miles radius. We were pricing things incorrectly, we were focusing on wrong things, spending money on wrong advertising, not spending money on right things, taking bad orders and loosing money because of that, not signing agreements, signing bad agreements and so on. Even when we managed to accumulate some profit, we would quickly lose it due to mistakes in production or management.
This picture illustrates those times at their best:
My former schoolmates were doing their sophomore years and taking internships mostly in IT companies. They would think I was doing over 1000 euros per month while actually all I could pay myself during those 3,5 years was below average salary in my country (which was 600-700 eur per month at those times) and sometimes even less. In the first two years of doing own business I was so broke (but proud) that I would visit my parents while they were not at home and "steal" a couple of vegetable or meat cans just to not eat macaroni and fried onion for the 1000th time in a row. I think they knew about it but never said anything.
During my "running own business" times I got into the army but managed to dodge the draft shortly after. This gave me a little perspective over my life and rather quickly I realized that my business model was not working and there was no way to change it due to rigidness in my partner's thinking. So I told him I was leaving and went to work at one major advertising agency to get some experience.
How did I get hired without even a school diploma? Simply! Doing own business for 3,5 years and having no school diploma is something so outrageous and out of this world that no one even bothered to ask if I had it. I just told on interview that I was planning to enroll in university soon. And I did after finishing school the same year.
When I planned to stay employed for some time, I was secretly hoping to get a rest from 3,5 year long marathon of continuous responsibility and tiredness. Was I right? F#$K NO! Again I was working 10-12 hour shifts building my customer base. In just one year I became third sales person in a company right after agency director and sales manager, who had been working in it 12 and 3 years respectively.
I learned a lot during those times. The most important thing I learned was that pricing didn't mean as much as I thought it meant. My director would buy things for €4000 and sell for €19000. Buy for €10000 and sell for €80000. The price was irrelevant as long as relationships with clients were good. We did what no other company in this market could do and our profit margins were outrageously high. Later, when I hired salesmen and they told me that my company's prices were not competitive, I would tell them to shut up and do their work because I used to work two years in a situation where my offer was always the most expensive among all offers a client had received and I knew it was still possible to make good profit. The higher your price, the easier it is to meet sales goals.
However, being employed I felt that my potential was unfulfilled. Even though I was allowed to do lots of things besides sales in that company, they were moving slowly because I had to coordinate my decisions with higher management. I also developed a dream of being free of working in an office cubicle, moving freely around the world and having control over my time. Probably at this point the right decision would be start working on IM in evenings and on weekends and slowly switch to it over time. However, I could not do that because my new dream had dazzled me so hard that I could not do any work in advertising agency anymore. It literally was making me want to puke. I would sit day in and day out doing nothing besides writing out invoices to my repeating customers and living from it.
So I came up with the next plan. I wanted to create an agency similar to the one I worked in and lure away some of my biggest clients there. Of course, this was against the agreement I had signed with my employer but guess what? My employer taught me before that those non-compete commitments didn't mean much. In the worst-case scenario I would lose a couple thousands euros and would never be hired again by advertising agencies in this country. No big deal. However, if I started competing with them, I would still be vulnerable because I could not defend against full-fledged attack on my new business. They had more salesmen, more money for lawyers and more everything.
I realized I had to do everything smart and disguise my operation as long as possible. During the next two months I was secretly dumping all information from company's databases, all files related to my projects from designers' workstations. I dumped all dirt I could find from private servers and wrote down every password I could get my hands on. At the same time I started talking about bitcoins with colleagues and how I made good money trading them. I also made an arrangement with one of my LED modules supplier to become their distributor in my country. This was yet another backup plan and yet another vulnerability.
If clients buying LED modules from me discovered that I also compete with them in outdoor signs manufacturing niche, they would cease buying LEDs in a moment. So I had to use other people as avatars to conduct some of those businesses. This is where my former advertising manufacture business came handy. I made an arrangement with my former partner that I will be selling signs for him and he'll be manufacturing them. I hired one girl who later turned out to be very dumb but at that moment I only needed her as a proxy between me and clients.
Since the moment I told I was leaving company I used to work in, my plan worked almost flawlessly except a slight falling back on schedule. During the first half year I would implement all gathered knowledge to fuel new business. Once again I was working 10-12 hour shifts but this time building my own thing. Every weakness my former employer had in his model, I fixed and turned into a strength. I even secretly restored relationships with partners who were in conflict with my former employer. I would buy stuff from them with one company, sell it to my "avatar" company and sell further to my former employer. I guess it was their price for mistakes they did.
In the next year I developed this business from zero to 300k euros in yearly revenue. My former partner became my employee and I started hiring new employees. Information was slowly leaking out however. My former employer had noticed my style in what my "avatar" company did. They started presenting me with questions and I was slowly revealing them some information. I was giving away just enough information for them to think they figured me out while there was the whole iceberg remaining under radars. The more time passed, the more defenses I was building and the less weak spots I had had remaining. I even remember being sincerely surprised how they didn't manage to discover my undercover operation until this moment and start an attack on me because knowing them I fully expected them to do it.
I still needed to maintain a decent level of disguise however because I knew one big 100k eur project would be coming from one of my former clients that year. This project would both be the biggest in the history of my new company and impossible to hide from my former employer, thus resulting in a direct confrontation with him. Leaping ahead in this story, I can tell that I hadn't got this order. It was all due to one completely unpredictable event. This client was represented by marketing manager, who already knew about my new business and ordered some things from me. I was in very good relationships with her.
One day we had a storm and one of illuminated signs I made for her company during my days working in advertising agency was ripped away from a wall. Of course, marketing manager has called me and asked if this was a warranty case. It was not and it would cost me 500 euros to fix it if I decided to do so. So I answered it was not a warranty case as stated in the agreement. Of course, I expected her to go to my former employee (as a manufacturer of that sign) and ask the same question. I even expected him to call me and address with this question. And I was 100% sure that they knew that this client will pay for repair and still continue ordering from them.
Everything happened as I expected, she called them, they called me for consultation, I advised to reject her and repair the sign for the minimal price. What I could not expect is this particular time they went against their own logic, against everything they taught me before and even against my advise and against common fucking sense. They repaired that sign free of charge. I don't know what was the reason, perhaps it was Christmas time, everyone was in hurry, they might have forgotten to act timely and later to compensate it somehow just did this job for free. This all didn't matter to me because now marketing manager's director in client company ordered to not inquire about new 100k project from me and ask from my former employer instead.
The funniest part of this story: they could not do this project without me anyway. I was the only person in the city who knew that object well and could advise on how to do this project in the best way possible. So my former employer tried to hire me as a consultant. Instead, I sold the idea of doing the project together and sharing massive profits, which we did.
A little later the very same client had accidentally sent a part of private mail exchange between me and her to my former colleague. This was the first time they discovered I was stealing their clients and running massive disguised operation right around the corner. They were outraged! Luckily, common project and warranty liabilities had tied us up so tight that confronting me would most probably lead them to losing one of their biggest clients. Although, other guys from their higher management felt warlike towards me, the director was wise enough man to not launch an attack in which both sides would sustain casualties (but his would be 10x bigger). This was my first serious win and one of the best moments in business. Me and my former boss just became partners with equal rights while my former colleagues remained being 9-5 employees. I could now talk from the position of power while they continued seeking for approval on their thoughts and ideas.
BEGIN SPOILER >>
Nowadays me and my former boss are partners in one brick and mortar business. He manages sales, I manage marketing and business development. Although we might not love each other, we are doing good work together.
>> END SPOILER
All events described above and numerous others allowed me to accumulate enough cash start traveling the world, buying nice clothes and a car and finally switch to internet marketing, which I started learning from ground zero. I found a few high-paying customers that allowed me to hire a few employees and start working on new projects. My advertising business was slowly declining without my attention but that did not matter because I had enough time and money to get through initial barrier in the new business.
Little did I know at that moment all my first internet marketing projects will either fail or be canned due to wrongly accounted resources required to jumpstart them. However, a few projects survived and I am developing them by these days. I still have highs and lows. Only during the last year one big client went bankrupt, another lost a lot of business and owes me a big amount of money. Of course, these events influenced me a lot. However, if before such events could blow me away like dust from a table, now I got stronger and they only can influence me like wind can influence a tree. A tree might bend temporarily but will continue standing and growing.
Now you may ask what this all has to do with YOU? And I will explain you what but first let me ask you a question. Do you know who is the only person in the world I envy?
Warren Buffet? No.
Lionel Messi? No.
Vladimir Putin? No.
Ramit Sethi? No.
Tim Ferriss? No!!!
The only person in this world I envy is YOU. It's fucking YOU who I envy.
After reading my story, you may think: "what's bad in it? I would do the same and become at least moderately successful as you did!" But it's only facade, it's only one side of the coin. The other side is that during first five years or so of doing my business I could not afford to buy myself a car. I could not afford to travel somewhere. I could not afford do buy a suit. I could not afford to rest for a few weeks. On my first job interview I was dressed in an old dirty leather jacket. Heck, there were times when I would not go to hair saloon because I had no money to do a haircut. My friends were asking why I would not cut hair off and I would answer I had no time.
You may think you are different.
You may think you are smarter and better than me.
You may think the economy is better now.
You may think your parents will support you.
You may think whatever bullshit story you might want to tell yourself to rationalize dropping out of school.
And I will laugh in your face because 10 years ago I thought the exactly same things. Exactly the same. Until 2007 crisis hit me in the face with a sledge-hammer. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls such events "black swans" and be sure you will have a lot of black swans in your life. Black swan is a very improbable event, which when happened has extreme consequences.
Could I predict 2007 recession being 18 year old boy? No
Could I predict event described in the story above that led to me losing a big project? No.
Could I predict my clients going bankrupt or losing business, thus influencing my business' stability? Rather no.
I learned everything the hard way. While I was scrambling among rocks, my friends and former classmates were getting good jobs in IT industry, traveling the world, partying and doing all kind of stuff I would like to do. But I don't envy them because they are now as old as I am and although they can afford some fun, they don't have the freedom I have. I envy YOU because you are not yet stuck in some shitty job and haven't wasted time working 10-12h a day for nine fucking long years like me.
During 9 years in business I have developed a very simple and straightforward system for hiring people. During the hiring process I focus on only two questions:
a) Is this person motivated? Does he/she have a burning desire to work in this field? Does he/she have a burning desire to work with me? Will he/she continue working with me for some time? Will he/she go an extra mile wherever necessary?
b) Is this person reliable? Will he/she correct own mistakes when I indicate them? Will he/she deliver on time and take responsibility for failures?
If both questions answered "yes", it is almost irrelevant whether a person has necessary skills or not because my business does not rely on superstars (this was one of mistakes my first employer did).
My business relies on systems and I hire mostly people in their early 20s (sometimes even younger). I never hire based on resumes I receive. I even don't read resumes I receive. I teach people I hire everything I know and I envy them because they don't have to crawl through the shit I had to crawl through to reach the place I am currently at. After two years with me they know 95% of things I learned during 9 years. My ultimate goal is to teach my employees to be so good at business that I could partner up with them and run business together.
The best part: THERE ARE THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS EMPLOYERS LIKE ME. You may not believe it, especially if you tried sending resumes or were hired based on your resume. But you are seeing just the lowest level of food chain. The most successful people and companies don't hire based on resumes. Best positions are filled with people who actually bring something to the table. Show them what you can do for them and they will hire you no matter what.
Now do you remember where we started at? Two questions:
1. Do I regret dropping out of school and university? No, because this made me who I am and I don't know what road I would have went otherwise.
2. If I could go back in time and change the past in a way that I would have stayed in school and university, would I use this opportunity? Yes, yes and F#$CKING YES!!!! I would stay in school, have fun in college and at the same time find a company I would LOVE to work in and go there and WORK FOR FREE. After a while they would hire me with a 95% chance. Even if they didn't, I would find another company, just as good as the first one. Rinse, repeat. I would spend 2-3 years learning everything I could learn from them and then would create my own business alone or with them. And I would be exactly at the same place I am currently at except not losing many years of my life crawling through all kinds of shit.
DO YOU GET IT NOW?
If you don't, you are hopeless. Like me. Congratulations. Drop out of your school but at least don't take money from your parents. Have fucking pride to deal with consequences like a man.
P.S. I spent 5 hours of my time writing this for you, little boys (English is my second language, I write slowly). So if you have any questions, you better fucking ask.
Tuesday, 5 April 2016
118 Internet Marketing Forums
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