No Nonsense Marketing From Doug Prentice

Possibly like me, you received an email this week alerting you to John Thornhill’s Crazy eBay Auction. This is where  John was selling 8 of his products plus online training and a monthly mentorship scheme access plus bonus products (including resale rights)  for $97.  Now if you appreciate the quality of John’s products you’ll probably think that’s quite a bargain and well worth the $97 – which John obviously believed as he only put 50 of these packages up for sale.

What I have not mentioned so far is that there were 3 additional bonuses:

1) A direct phone line to John’s desk for 8 weeks from the date of purchase

2) A complete review of your business model by John

3) A one on one audio consultation with John

Now I don’t know about you but these 3 bonuses make the cost of $97 pale into insignificance for what you get in return. This set me off in a couple of directions.

My first thought was that I should carefully read through the offers that bang into my mailbox every day in case I miss some jewels like that. However I must temper this with the realisation that the value of any bonus is only as good as the reputation of the seller.

I guess we’re all in a similar boat in as much as we all receive lots of offers – you could spend all day doing nothing else but opening emails promoting this week’s hot products. As any of my regular readers will know I firmly believe that you find your mentor (or two) and stick with them. This way it will lessen the time I spend reviewing offers but hopefully will give me time to thoroughly inspect the offers that do come from my mentors.

The second thought that occurred to me was what can we offer as wow! bonuses when we’re still relatively new and as yet without reputations. Well, I guess we all have something that will be of value to our potential customers.

Say for instance your niche is organic food and this is an area where you have some expertise. You may want to offer a one an one consultation on how to source the best value organic foods, which stores you prefer, good local producers and so on.  The idea is to add original personalised bonuses that will really appeal to your customers as adding some unique value and separating you from the crowd.

If you make the bonuses good enough the actual product almost becomes irrelevant as people will buy for the bonus. I would bet that John had people making multiple purchases purely for the “extra” bonuses.

Next time I’m putting together a product offering it’s certainly one of the options that I’ll be considering.

Until next time……

Is it just me or is everyone else’s inbox full of promos lately? I must confess that I am subscribed to quite a few lists but it seems that when I open up every morning there is another host of items that promise to change my life forever. Not only that but on occasion day after day from the same list owner.

Most of these “opportunities” are usually somebody else’s product as part of a JV (joint venture) promotion. Now I’ve no problem with JVs – in many cases it’s the only way to get a new product out to the market in a fairly short period. However I do begin to wonder about the quality of some of the products being promoted. Are there really that many life changing products out there?

The mass marketing of so many products really make me stop and raises a couple of problems for me and probably many like me:

1) Does this list owner really care about me and my success or am I just another number in his machine? When you join many of the mailing lists you’ll be assured by the list owner that all that he/she is really interested in is your success ans welfare. To be fair I know of a few examples where this is the case. These marketers tend to give you much more for free than you end up buying from them – see Lee McIntyre or John Thornhill both of whom have given for free at least 10x any purchases I’ve made.

2) How much time do I have every day to read these emails and watch the “dreaded” video. Why do I say “dreaded” video? Well, once upon a time (yes, I do admit to remembering ticker tape) what you got was a quick email followed by a link that took you to a sales page. Once at the sales page you could quickly scan and see if the product was of interest. Now we get the explanatory email plus a link that almost inevitably takes you to a video. These videos can last anything up to 20 -30 minutes to get to the point. Some you can zoom forward but with others you have to sit through the full presentation to get to the meat of the offer. Personally I just don’t have the time to review up to 10 of these per day.

So, what’s the net result of this? Frequently in my case I just delete the lot and read none! Am I missing out? Probably, but I also have a life to lead and work to do.

And as a side issue why does the product always have to been created by “my good friend …….”. How many good friends do some of these people have? Why not just tell us that you don’t really know this guy but he has good reputation and delivers good product. My supermarket doesn’t try to con into believing that they got these beans for me from their good friend Mr Heinz! No – it’s good reputation and good product.

You may be asking why I just don’t unsubscribe from some lists. Because I’m a keen student of internet marketing I do like to see the different approaches used by different marketers.

However in the final analysis I end up opening the mails from the marketers who have gained my trust and respect and just give a cursory glance to the others. The quickest route for a marketer to lose my allegiance is to bombard me with product offers day after day. Sure, send me stuff if it’s interesting and informative with the occasional sales pitch but please remember that time (my/yours) is valuable. Please don’t squander it!

“The money is in the list!” How many times have you heard that? Almost every guru or Internet Marketing training course that I’ve come across always utters these words somewhere in the package.

Is it true? Yes and n0. Without a list it’s very difficult to get your ideas or your products in front of a large market. However if you have a list of 50,000 desert dwellers ans you’re trying to sell sand, you may end up with a very limited take up.

So it’s not entirely about the list. The money is in the relationship you have with your subscribers. So you could say that it’s not the size of the lsit, it’s much more to do with the responsiveness of the list. To have a responsive list you have to have subscribers who have confidence in you.

If the purpose of your blog is to attract responsive subscribers then you have to build a relationship with them. You want them to come to trust your judgement and opinions on anything from the latest changes in your chosen marketplace to products that you recommend.

What better way to achieve this than via your blog? This is a wonderful platform where you can let your subscribers into your life and show them just the type of person you are.

There are three main categories through which you can build trust and respect with your list:

1) Tell them about yourself. Consider current events in your marketplace or niche and give your honest opinions on them. Always be honest. That way you’ll never trip yourself up with something you forgot that you said in a previous post. People will generally respect you for your honesty and the more your personality comes through in your postings the more your subscribers will warm to you.

2) Supply your subscribers with good content. Explain tips and handy hints that you have discovered. If you find a new free tool that helps with keywords tell them about it. Tell people how you’ve achieved your successes and also tell them about the mistakes you’ve made so that they can avoid the same pitfalls. Give away as much free information as you can. The more you give away the more you will get back in the long run.

3) Review and recommend products to your list. This is where your honesty is of paramount importance. Review any product thoroughly and test drive it yourself. If after that you’re happy that it will be of benefit to your subscribers tell them about it. Tell them the good points and the bad points.  Be honest about your affiliate links and let your subscribers know that you will be making a commission on every sale. If you’ve done enough of points 1 and 2 above your list will not resent you making a commission on a useful product.

Whatever you do don’t flood you list with blogs of type 3 above. Remember that you have to fill the well of goodwill to able to drink from it. Fill it with good content and insightful information and then occasionally when you have a product that you believe is of top quality and suitable to your niche, promote it to your list.

When you mail out to your list your first and most important objective is to get your subscribers to open your email. Promote too much and your emails will go straight in the deleted file without even being read.

Use your blog wisely and it will bring you great benefits and a very responsive subscriber list.

Successful article marketing demands keyword rich articles. While your article must be stimulating, informative and provide a solution to a problem it should always be keyword dense if one of your aims is to get free web traffic.

So how do you go about this? The first thing I do is try and get inside the mind of someone using the internet to find information. How do people interact with the internet. In most cases they just type in the words that relate to what they’re looking for such as “get free web traffic”. So when you’re thinking of keywords try to imagine what you’d use if you were searching.
What you want to try and achieve is to get your article listed on either page 1 or 2 of Google. Now that’s easily said and a bit more difficult to do. This is where you need to think smart and find key words that have high search demand but low competition.

One method of doing this is using seobook.com. It’s free to use and provides you with a powerful keyword tool that you can use in your campaign to get free web traffic.

1) Register on seobook.com, then click on the keyword tool.
2) Enter your chosen keyword(s) into the box and submit. You’ll be then presented with a list of variations of your keywords with piles of other information. The stuff you want to look for is the number of times that the words or phrases are searched for on a daily basis on Yahoo, MSN and most importantly Google.
3) Choosing the phrases with the highest search (demand) will result, in almost every case, in having high competition. As what we’re looking for is high demand and low competition, choose keywords with a monthly Google demand of about 100 or slightly higher.
4) Make a note of the keywords that fall into this category.
5) Repeat this exercise for a variety of keyword phrases.
6) Now go to Google and submit each phrase with quotation marks at the beginning and end. Google will show you how many results there are. Ideally you’d want 20,000 or less results for your chosen keywords. Once you’ve completed this exercise for the list you created you should have a list of keywords around which you can write articles.

The above should result in a Google page one or two listing on the basis of one article submitted to, say, Ezine.com. and should help you get free web traffic to your site.
The parameters will vary depending on how many articles you plan to write. If you plan to write say 20 – 30 articles on the same keywords you can go for bigger demand / competition numbers.

When writing you article be sure to include the keywords in your title and at least three to four times throughout the article, bolding where appropriate.

So it’s up to you now. This stuff really works!

Yes, let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start. So sang Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music and she was so right.

In the beginning I was looking for ways to make money on the internet. Like the rest of us I was searching around, registering for this and that as long as it was free. A totally indiscriminate scattergun appoach. As a result of this I started to receive all these free ebooks, some of which were hundreds of pages long. So I started printing these off and soon was the proud possessor of a bulging bookshelf of internet knowledge.

Wow! I thought I must really be on my way now that I have all this knowledge. Did I read these books? Well maybe a little bit. Did I take action? The only real action was happening on my printer as I printed out another 100 page epic on how to be an internet millionaire.

About this time I started to receive regular emails from a “guru” whose $200 plan would give me entry to his lifestyle of easy money and fast cars. So I sent off my $200 and sure enough received an impressive five inch thick manual, some audio tapes and some video tapes (yes it was that long ago). Now in no way am I denigrating the guru involved as I’m sure the content, if followed through, would have led me somewhere but, boy, how daunting and complicated did it all look. too daunting for me.

So, once again I took no real action. Does any of this ring bells with anyone?

Next I came across eBay. Simple concept, easy to follow steps straightforward to execute (again yes, it was some time ago). No prizes for guessing what  . I started selling some of my old stuff. Next I started buying stuff and selling it on and making a reasonable amount of money.

Don’t get me wrong, selling on eBay while relatively straightforward still requires a lot of work. So I figured out eventually that it wasn’t the hard work part that deterred me from internet marketing but the complete lack of  direction and being able to see the endpoint.

After a few years my growing disenchantment eBay lead me off to other channels of money making but still left me feeling that I’d missed a trick somewhere and rekindled my interest in researching internet marketing. And oh how it had changed. Every day i started receiving emails telling me that for anywhere between $19 and $4999 there was a plan that would have me earning mega bucks within a few weeks.

Despite my previous experiences I did fall for this at least a couple of times. But then reality kicked in and I started sorting out the wheat from the chaff and read the emails a bit more closely. I found out that there was breed of successful internet marketers out there who wanted to help others succeed – sometimes without even asking for anything in return. This was my eureka moment – find a mentor you feel you can trust! Especially before you buy anything from them.  Anyone will be your buddy once they have your cash.

I’d give this advice to anyone starting out on the road to Internet Marketing. Subscribe to a host of internet marketers and find 2 or 3 that you feel comfortable with and who seem to have genuine interest in their subscribers. Be wary of the guys/girls who only email you to make a pitch. Yes, everyone will make a pitch at times but that should be secondary to what is in the best interest of the subscribers. Go to the Warrior Forum and have look at the list of successful markerters. Sign up to a few and they will in turn lead you to other people.

However, it all still seemed complicated without any clear road to a destination compared with the simplicity of eBay. I knew then that what I needed was a clear step by step visualisation of internet marketing.

In my next posting I’ll reveal where this lead me.

Listening to Chris Rea recently I thought that about sums it up – I’ve come so far but I’ve still got a long way to go.

The last few months have crystallised quite a lot of my thoughts about how to progress with Internet Marketing. As I’m sure you probably believed at the outset, all we had to do was buy one of the “bright shiny things” that for a consideration of $49, $97, $199  would take us by the hand and lead us to the promised land of untold wealth and luxury.

Yes, I did and spent a bit of money along the way. And what have I learned? Well, I’ve learned that there are a lot of people out here who want my money more that my success. I’ve also discovered that there are some really good people out there who want to help me to help myself to succeed. There is a cost attached but there’s also a lot of good free stuff as well.

So from today this blog will be dedicated to revealing what I’ve learned so far and what I learn as I go along.  One of the major problems I encounter is that of assumed information, i.e. that the writer assumes that you know what something is – whether it’s how to find and buy a domain name or how to use a particular piece of software. On a regular or more likely irregular basis I’ll try and give you as much free info as I can muster starting from the very basics onward. As I get better and quicker at doing things hopefully my blogs will become more useful.

The very first lesson is that THERE IS NO EASY BUTTON. If anyone asks you for $199 and all you have to do is push the button and watch the money roll in, don’t believe them. Internet Marketing is like any other business (yes I said business). It’s not a toy or a hobby – it’s a business. What many people won’t tell you is that to really succeed in business you need two things – a tremendous amount of hard work and a bit of luck.  But often by doing the hard work you make your own luck. Gary Player, the renowned golfer, was often quoted as saying “the more I practice, the luckier I get”.

Your internet business must be run and planned like any other business. Calculate how much you can afford to invest in your business for the first 6 months and then set that in concrete. There will be many people whispering in you ear along the way, tempting you with there “bright shiny things”.

What I plan to show over the coming weeks is to show you where I went wrong and where I still go wrong as I surely will along the way. Hopefully you can learn from what I’ve learned and the mistakes I’ve made.

Well, so long for now. In my next blog I’ll start from the beginning and where I now believe I should have begun.

Doug