Archive | March, 2021

Thanks to Covid-19, businesses have been pushed from the offline to the online world at record speed, making digital marketing more competitive than ever. How can you compete in 2021?

1: If you haven’t already, it’s time to get serious about putting out plenty of great content. Whether it’s one sentence on social media or an entire white paper, you need lots of content continually flooding the internet on a daily basis.

2: Change the size of your content. Instead of making super long authority-type posts of maybe 3,000 words that comprehensively cover a topic, consider going smaller. Short articles that cover just one thing well are ranking high these days, perhaps because of people’s shorter attention spans and less time to read a long article.

Consider breaking up an authority post into small ones, each with a title matching what people are searching for. For example, instead of an article that outlines in detail all the steps to take when starting an online business, break it up into a series of short articles, one on each aspect of the topic (niche selection, branding, game plan, website creation, etc.)

3: While your written content should probably be shorter, your video and audio content needs to be longer. 10-minute videos are performing better than 2, 3 or 5 minute videos in the search results.

If you think about it, it makes sense that if someone is searching for answers, they’re more likely to click on the 10-minute video than the 2-minute video. But expanding your video or audio lengths only work to a point. Videos of 20 and 30 minutes are not doing as well as the 10-minute versions. People want the whole story but they want it quickly.

4: Speed up your pages. It’s more important than ever to have pages that load quickly. When you improve your page speed you’ll also increase your rankings and traffic. There are multiple methods and tricks to decreasing page loading times. Research what’s right for your site or hire someone to do it for you.

5: It’s more important than ever to rank high on page one. Google is going to be looking for additional ways to increase their income, which will likely mean increased paid ads, changes to algorithms and who knows what else. If you rely on free traffic from Google then don’t get lazy or you’ll lose it.

6: Repurpose your content. Turn that article into a video and a podcast. Take several small articles and make them into one big one and take a big one and turn it into several small ones. Remove the best bits and use it on social media, and then package it all up for a whopping comprehensive lead magnet.

7: Update your content. Take that blog post from 6 months ago or even 6 years ago, make it fresh and republish it.

8: Do some podcasting. If the time is right, start your own. If not, be a guest on other people’s podcasts. Compared to blogging, podcasting is still wide open and far less competitive. Plus, you can convey things like emotion and passion via voice that sometimes get lost with writing.

9: Backlinks probably aren’t going to matter as much. Focus on great content built on what people are searching for. Relevancy is king.

10: You better be branding. Brands are already dominating the internet because people know them and TRUST them. It’s easier to get followers, to reach people and get sales when you have an established brand.

Conversely, people out to make a quick buck and run don’t have a brand – they’re just somebody making promises into the void.

10.5: And this is a big one: Forget the, “HELLO – BUY – GOODBYE” of yesterday where you tried to sell someone the first time they saw your offer, and if they didn’t buy, you gave up.

Instead, find ways to interact with people at least 7 times. It might be through email, push notifications, messenger bots, social media, etc. I once knew a guy who was launching a brand new business. He guest posted on a hundred blogs and appeared on 30 podcasts all in the space of 6 weeks. While no one had heard of him in the beginning, by the sixth week everyone in the niche felt like they’d known him for years. His list exploded, he got JV offers daily, bloggers and podcasters asked him back repeatedly and promoted him for free… in the online world, that’s about as close as you’ll get to overnight success.

It may sound like a lot of work, but it can really pay off big if you apply yourself. Aren’t you and your business worth it?

You already know that the better your funnel converts, the more money you can make. You can spend more on advertising or pay more in affiliate commissions and still make tons of money. The trick, of course, is getting your sales funnel to convert well. And to do that, you need to test… well… everything.

You need to test the sales copy that brings someone to your squeeze page, the copy on the page, the look of the page, the title of the freebie you’re giving away, the cover of that freebie, the offer they see when they subscribe, the upsell offer after that (if there is one) and so forth.

You. Must. Test. Everything.

Which is time consuming and costly. Because it could be days or weeks before you even manage to break even, much less start earning a profit – if you ever do at all.

But there is a massive shortcut that some people are taking, and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least tell you about it.

We could debate the ethics on this but we won’t. I leave that up to you. The fact is, people do this sort of thing in every single industry all the time, so it is nothing new. What is new is that the average Joe or Jane marketer doesn’t think to do this.

And if you haven’t guessed yet, I’m talking about modeling another marketer’s business. That is, replicating someone else’s sales techniques and processes. You’d be surprised how many people already do this in one form or another.

I’ve even seen marketers take pride when their own funnels have been modeled. And no, it’s not copying. At least, not if it’s done correctly.

The idea isn’t to copy the text or even use the same products. Rather, it’s to model in terms of design, options presented, layout, pricing, number of upsells and downsells and so forth.

Your headlines might be the same color, size and font. But it’s YOUR headline. Your video might be in the same location on the page, but it’s YOUR video. You’re selling your own products, not theirs.

Your sales copy will be different. Your bullet points will be different. Your key benefits and so forth will be different. But things like the layout of sales pages, colors, fonts, and so forth aren’t copyrighted.

Does a green ‘buy now’ button work better than a red one?

Does a centered black headline in Verdana that asks a provocative question do better than a red headline on the right in Tacoma that makes a bold statement?

Does having the opt in box above the fold convert better than having a long list of bullets and the opt in box beneath the fold?

There are 1,001 decisions to be made when creating a new sales funnel. But emulating a funnel that is already proven to work can make the process a whole lot easier. And faster, too.

Big time marketers can literally spend tens of thousands of dollars on traffic to test what converts best. But by emulating their funnels (not copying) you can get a leg up on what’s working.

How do you know which funnels are working the best in your niche? If you’re in the IM field, you can check their stats in JVZoo, Warrior Plus and ClickBank. In other niches, ClickBank can be a reliable indicator, as well as paying attention to which products you see promoted via paid ads time and time again. If they weren’t making sales, they wouldn’t be paying to promote these products.

One last thing… this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still test. Since this is your own funnel with your own copy and your own products, testing will give you a ton of info on how to raise your conversions as much as possible. But by emulating a proven funnel as the foundation to your system, you get to take a massive shortcut that will have you in profit that much faster.

While this isn’t something I’ve tried, I’ve seen others doing it for years so it must be working like gangbusters. You’re likely already aware of the concept of building a full website with sales funnel, sending traffic to it, making sales to show it works and then selling the website as a proven money maker, right? This is something simpler than that.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised this works so well. But I’ve been watching people do this over and over again, so I know it’s working.

They’re building one page websites (one page!!) and selling them at auction for $100 to $300 or more. Sometimes they’re building several of these in a week or even in a day.

Here’s how it works, or at least how I think it works. Mind you, I’ve never done this myself, but you don’t have to be a detective to figure this one out:

First you find a paid service geared towards online marketers. It could be a website offering to write packages of articles, do SEO, build websites or whatever. Ideally you want a service that is extremely reasonable in price, and frankly these aren’t hard to find.

It can be any service that is bought and paid for online, using basic info and contact details. For example, if the service writes packages of 50 articles, the details collected would be the niche for the articles and where to send them when they’re finished.

Let’s say the article writing service offers 3 packages: $35 for 10 articles, $70 for 25 articles and $120 for 50 articles. You would then create your own one page website which might even look quite similar to the original page. Insert three buttons for the three options, but increase the prices to perhaps $55, $100 and $175. The buttons don’t actually link to anything at this point.

Buy a domain name, make the site look professional with a nice layout and good headline and bullet points, and then put it up for sale on Flippa or some place similar. Remember there is no need to show stats, sales, traffic hits, SEO and so forth with these because none of that applies.

Instead, you talk about – and this is the important bit – the potential of the website to make sales. Explain that all the buyer needs to do is make the buttons active to pay into their account, take the payments and customer details, and pass the information on to the real service for fulfillment. They get to keep the difference in price.

The buyers are likely newbies looking for a way to get started online. And the sites most definitely do have the potential to make money if the buyers send the right traffic to them. You don’t reveal the real service until they’ve purchased the site. The site buyer then acts like a middleman, much like Amazon or Walmart on a much smaller scale and earns money from every sale.

You can make multiples of these sites, using basically the same website template and the same copy to sell the site. Choose a different URL each time and sell the sites one at a time on each of the website flipping sites. Do this with one vendor or several, build one website a day or 5 a day or whatever.

This can be a great part time income for not much work, and it can act as a stepping-stone to building complete, proven sales sites that fetch four and five figures, too. Or just stick with these small sites if you’re more comfortable – either way, it’s a nifty idea that can bring in reliable income when you apply it.