Archive | January, 2019

… And see what your best competitors are doing, too. When you look at a marketing campaign from the outside in, you miss a lot. But when you join competitor’s lists and let them sell to you, you’ll get to dig beneath the surface and see what’s REALLY happening.

Read their emails, subscribe to their membership sites and buy their products. Take note of their entire selling process from start to finish. You might do screen capture for upsells, download pages and so forth.

I am NOT advocating that you copy what they’re doing – at least not blatantly. But if you notice a step they take that seems to be working, you might add that step to your own funnel as well.

For example, I bought a product the other week that had sales offers on the download page. There is nothing new about additional sales offers in general, except these offers were increasing in price by a penny every 7 seconds, right on the download page. It was instantly clear these products were being sold, and the price was going up.

I forgot about downloading my product and instead went immediately to the sales page of one of the products, where I found the same thing – the price was increasing by a penny every 7 seconds.

The counter wasn’t obnoxious, but it was in plain view in the upper right-hand corner the entire time as I scrolled through the sales letter. And I never would have seen this if I hadn’t purchased the product.

So if you want to increase your own sales and profits online, find the top selling products in your niche, enter their sales funnel, buy the product and learn everything you can along the way that you can apply to your own business.

Do this, and instead of re-inventing the wheel, you’ll leverage the experience of other successful campaigns and businesses for your own benefit so you can grow your business faster, and help more people by ensuring your products and services are sold to the most buyers who will benefit from them as possible.

You know what a lead magnet is – something given away for free in exchange for an email address. You join their list, you get their free report / video / book / software etc.

I recently ran across a lead magnet that blew my mind. And I didn’t even realize I was being set up to join a list – or that it WAS a lead magnet – until I was hooked like a prize fish at the end of this master marketer’s line.

Here’s what happened:

I was on this marketer’s site when a headline caught my eye. This was a headline you might find on a book or a paid product – in fact, if it had been a book, I probably would have bought it on the spot. It promised a big benefit and had a curiosity element to it that immediately got my interest.

The headline was on an article and I started reading it. It was giving me methods to accomplish a certain task, but it was doing it in story form. I didn’t even realize until later that it was telling me what to do, but not how to do it. And the story was captivating, as good as any fiction you might read.

I was fully engrossed in the story when it was about to come to a climax and it suddenly – stopped.

It just stopped. There was no more to read. I was left hanging. But of course, there was a subscription form, and a note that said only subscribers of this website would be given the secret information contained at the end of the story.

Yes, I filled out the form. By that point, I would have paid money to get the rest of the story.

I’ve purposely kept this vague because it’s probably not a good idea to copy this marketer’s story. What he wrote works for him and his site. What will work for you and your site is likely to be far different.

But what I can tell you is that no matter who your audience is, they love stories.

And if you can weave the information they want inside of that story and insert a cliffhanger point that compels them to join your list, then I suspect a very high percentage of people who read the beginning of your story will subscribe to your newsletter.

Be sure to have a title so good, people would pay for a book with that title, even if you didn’t give them a book description.

Keep the story intriguing and entertaining, while giving the lessons promised.

And in the portion they read prior to subscribing, only give them the secrets of what to do, not how to do it.

For that, along with the story ending, they’ll need to join your list. 😉

For those of you who remember or have heard of Earl Nightingale, you may recall his recording about “Greener Pastures.” He made the point that every patch of grass, or pasture, looks greener from a distance.

When you’re standing on your own lawn, you see every weed and brown spot. But when you look across to your neighbor’s lawn, it looks lush and green like a golf course.

But the fact is, grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence – it’s an illusion. Just as it’s an illusion that the next customers you get will be the best customers who spend the most money and so forth.

This might be one of the greatest secrets of making money via marketing of all time.

Nearly every business owner fails to fully mine the gold in his own customer list. They’re running around trying to get NEW customers, instead of focusing on their current customers.

Jay Abraham made a fortune simply by going to existing businesses and showing them how to fully utilize their most under-valued and neglected asset – their own customers.

Here are some ideas for extracting maximum value from your own customers.

• Offer more products and services.
• Make offers to your list more often.
• Communicate consistently.
• Create VIP groups and memberships with special privileges.
• Let your list know you reward frequent purchasers as well as high volume purchases (if applicable).
• Identify and focus on the hyper responsive customers and give them more opportunities to spend money with you.
• Create and sell continuity programs, or sell affiliate continuity programs.
• Sell renewable products or services.
• Learn about your customers and tailor offers to match their needs and wants.
• Communicate frequently with information, education, and even fun stuff.
• Incentivize greater usage.
• Analyze your customers and separate them into A-B-C groups based on their responsiveness. Then develop strategies to upgrade the C’s to B’s and the B’s to A’s.
• Become the resource in your niche for your customers, offering discounts on other people’s products through joint ventures.
• Ask your customers what they want and what you can do for them as well as what they want to buy right now.

You could even take this one business idea – extracting maximum value from a customer list – and help local businesses to increase their own incomes while paying you a nice percentage of the additional profits.