list building

Dec

2011

Personal One On One Coaching Part 2

I had lots of replies and kind words to my last blog post about my depression a few years ago.

In that post I said I’d tell you why I made it. It’s important.

With me, it was my trial through depression and the recovery time that followed that bought me to the place where I realised it was time to strike out on my own. In my case I thankfully had no choice in having to do my own thing as following my depression I effectively became unemployable.

I can take advice, and I can learn stuff just like I’ve always done, and even ask for help. But what I can’t do is have anyone tell me what to do. I can’t help that side of it any more, the barriers just go straight up and whoever’s doing the telling is wasting their breath. It’s quite different if I want the advice or knowledge.

When I finally moved into the digital products market place (in my case software) I believed for a short while all the nonsense I was told about how easy it was running an online business and how you didn’t have to do any work, ha-ha. I say “nonsense” because it really is.

Running your own business takes work and determination no matter what the business type.

There is no “short cut”, no “magic bullet”, no “loophole”, no “weird solution” or “ancient remedy” that many of the methods sellers would have you believe. You just need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it until you get better at doing whatever you do.

Obvious really isn’t it?

If you’ve been going through this yourself, or trying to get started at it, then you’ll have found that to begin with many of your days bring new problems to go with the pile of existing ones and the need to discover ways of solving them. And you find yourself “working” long, unproductive, pointless days when what you really need to be doing is focussing on the money that will drive your business forward.

More than 60% of people give up at some time in the first 6 months for whatever reason, and I suspect the biggest reasons to be a lack of focus and just plain not knowing what to do. This results in trying out lots of different things – “thrashing about” – until finally throwing the towel in.

I’ll repeat it again in case you weren’t paying attention further up the page, you need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it. 🙄

Usually and in my experience, whatever that something is, then you’ll find there’s always going to be a core set of requirements.

From my own perspective, I chose to sell software. Some days I wish I’d just gone into ebooks as I’d have total control of my own product creation process, but I don’t see that as being as much fun as working in software. I’ve always liked computers, but that’s just me. Something else might light you up in your case, or you may be similar to me.

Whatever it is, you need to do something you enjoy, or at the very least feel confident and determined about.

And I can help if you let me.

In a few days time I’ll be opening what might be my last ever personal coaching programme which will run through January and February 2012.

I say might be last ever because I have a project starting in March that will consume a chunk of my time and may eventually take me in a different direction (still with software). We’ll see, it’s very early days yet.

The last coaching I did was four years ago so you can see it’s not the kind of thing I do on a regular basis and that’s why I think it’s a bit special.

I won’t be pushing you through a one-size-fits-all sausage machine. I know that more than a few of the coaching programmes I’ve seen tend to operate on a “come one, come all” basis, but that’s not how I do it.

This will be personal coaching, tailored for you. The way I think coaching should be done.

There are some provisos that come with it though, and these are only there to make sure you’re not signing up for something that isn’t appropriate for you.

#1 – The coaching will be in the IM (Internet Marketing) niche.

#2 – The coaching won’t attempt to cover things I don’t do myself such as CPA and PPC, or network marketing. I have very little knowledge of those and I’m not really inclined to find out, it’s just not my bag.

#3 – The coaching will cover things like product creation, traffic, list building and automation by outsourcing. The stuff I personally see as vitally impotant to most online businesses. I’ll give you more information on what I will cover with this personal coaching in my next post.

#4 – You’re prepared to work hard at it and work under your own initiative with my guidance. Yes as your coach I’ll do some hand holding and pointing you in the right direction, but the sooner you take responsibility for your performance the better. I can help you achieve that very useful attribute.

#5 – You commit to the ethic of product creation. To be in the “game”, you need your own products to either give away (to list build) or preferably sell, and I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to create or have one created for you after 30 days or less. Once you know what you’re doing and you’re really cooking with some useful outsourcers, a week or less for product creation is completely do-able.

On that last one, having your own product(s) is vitally important as from that point on you can start list building. The size of your list bears a direct correlation to the size of your business. Simple isn’t it?

That okay for starters?

More information on personal coaching in my next post.

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2011

2012 Personal Coaching Programme

After many requests for help I’ve received from people this year about how to set up their sites, how to create a product, how to outsource it, how to build a mailing list etc, I’m finally able to offer a coaching programme.

Unlike some marketers who only make their money by coaching others, I’m the real deal. I’m like you.

On Wednesday 7th December I’ll make an announcement as to how you can sign up for coaching with me.

This will be a little different to the usual “run-of-the-mill” progammes as you’ll be getting direct access to me via Skype or phone. And I’ll also expect you to be open to doing other projects with me under my guidance, as a joint venture partner.

It will be an ongoing 12 month programme, although you will have at least one product and web site at the end of the first 60 days coaching. Depending on how fast you can work, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have at least two products and web sites (it’s up to you), and you’ll soon learn how you can create one per week with a bit of effort.

One per week?

Well, long time readers of this blog will know that’s almost exactly what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. And I also know there are people reading this that have bought pretty much everything I’ve ever released.

You’ll learn how you can move fast and achieve the same kind of results as I do. There have been many times where I’ve had the idea on Monday and delivered the product on Friday.

The focus will be in the IM niche and will be on product creation, traffic, list building, outsourcing and earning lots of money.

Due to the very personal nature of the coaching, you will be one of only 10 people that I’ll be working with. I don’t believe I can offer you the kind of attention you need to succeed with any more than that.

I know that some people will want to know how much the personal coaching will cost, and my first (and experienced) response to that is if you’re serious about succeeding online it shouldn’t matter. You’re simply coming at it from the wrong point of view.

This is NOT an expense, it’s an INVESTMENT. In you.

There’s never been anything more true than “you have to give to get”, so just put it on your credit card and pay it back out of the profits.

Let me put this into perspective. A few years ago I paid something like ~~$10,000~~ for coaching, and although I didn’t get everything that was advertised (shrugs) and a lot of it was unnecessary (shrugs again) I still consider that the BEST investment I ever made.

I paid for it on my credit card and maxed it out. The credit card company being the evil swines they are then upped my limit, but that’s another story.

All I want to say here is, I’m NOT going to be asking you for anything like the ~~$10,000~~ I paid.

This is SERIOUSLY affordable if you’re SERIOUS about making a go of it online. I don’t know, maybe you’ve had a bit of a skirmish already with creating a product, but it didn’t go anywhere?

We can fix that.

On Saturday I’ll tell you something very personal about me that I’ve shared with maybe two or three people over the last few years.

I’ll publicly explain how and WHY I got into marketing, and what drove me to do what I now do, and why my options became limited and why I HAD to do what I do.

Who knows? You may have a similar story.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2011

Five Minute Reviews – New WSO

Some time on Monday 14th, I’ll be releasing a new WSO and it’s the first of a couple of projects I’ve been working on with Martin Salter.

If you’ve been reading my recent emails then you’ll have already heard me mention Martin a few times.

He is AMAZING.

While people have often told me they’re impressed with the amount of products I put out (yeah I know I don’t always get it right), my output is piffling compared to what Martin can do. He can put together an entire product including videos, ebooks, sales page design and sales copy in 20 working hours (at a push).

I’m 99% certain that there are people reading this who have had Martin create a white label product for them. And I’m 100% certain that there are people reading this that have bought one of Martin’s products and not realised it was Martin who created it.

😉

So you know that when he gets stuck into a longer term project then it’s going to turn out something special.

This is the first of them that we’ve collaborated on and we think it’s pretty damn cool. We’ve both said that if we saw this when we were both starting out a few years ago we’d have snapped it up. But the nice thing is it’s not just for newbies either. Even though we’re the ones creating this, we’ll be using it on our own sites too.

It’s something we’ve both been doing for a few years now in an on-off fashion when it takes our fancy, so it’s nothing new in that respect. But it’s very new when it comes to how it affects you.

We’ve created an easy (for you) way of adding product reviews to your blogs in under 5 minutes per review.

The way it works is we create the reviews at an average 2-3 per month – very probably more than that – and you do a quick copy and paste of a shortcode with your affiliate links embedded inside and create a new WordPress post. This then creates a short pre-sell review on your web site which points to a fuller pre-sell on a completely unbranded white label site.

Pre-sells are a great way of introducing a potential buyer to a product.

All the white label site reviews appear with your name on them and your affiliate links – the method we’ve put in place effectively rebrands the site to appear as if it’s all yours. When a visitor clicks the link on ANY of the reviews on the rebranded site, you earn the commission.

What that means is that even if people don’t buy the product in the review they originally came to read and instead buy something else, you STILL earn the commission on that other product. (Martin and I don’t take any of the commissions – they’re all yours – we earn our money from membership subs.)

Now we know that there are some membership review sites out there already, and that they’re asking for $27+ / month – eventually we’ll be there too when we hit our targets.

But on the 14th we’re releasing a WSO for $7 membership which is a $5 discount on the official launch price. This is a monthly recurring subscription, and we think it’s so low and so easy to increase your income that it’s the proverbial no-brainer.

When you’ve registered and added your affiliate IDs, then it will take you about 5 minutes to add each new review to your blog. Mix that in with some regular blog content of your own and you’ll begin to build and fatten your personal cash cow.

Even if you consider yourself a complete newbie, then you can do this.

And once you have your reviews in place, then all you need to do is make forum and blog comments in order to see traffic clicking through to your blog. Where you could then also make them an offer to join your mailing list.

So not only do you easily build a pre-sell review blog, you also get to build a mailing list. 🙂

I hope you can see the potential in this simple to do method.

I’ll drop you a line on Monday the 14th when the WSO opens.

-Frank

Aug

2011

Building A List Of Buyers

Where could you possibly get new buyers in the Internet Marketing niche on your mailing list and only pay 50 cents or less per lead?

Or in my case, pay nothing at all. In fact I made a few hundred dollars on the front, much to my surprise.

Think about this for a moment now… If you could pay 50 cents for a new buyer on your mailing list, and then sell them something for a dollar, you’re ahead of the game.

Let’s put it another way.

If you could stand on a busy street corner handing out 50 cents to everyone you meet and have them give you a dollar in return a couple of days later, how many people would you give the 50 cents to? ;-)[br][br]

And how about if they gave you another dollar a couple of weeks later? And then again another couple of weeks after that.

That’s what I’m talking about.

I have to clarify here though. It’s not the same person giving you a dollar and then another and another, but when you do the maths that’s what it works out as.

Put another way, you pay 50 cents per buyer on your list, and you get 10 of them. A few days later one of them gives you $10. A couple of weeks after that, a different one gives you $10. And so on.

The effect is, it’s like all of them giving you a dollar every so often. You with me?

That then drives the simple doubling of your 50 cents to another level, because you aren’t just doubling it, you’re trebling or quadrupling it, or even more. So if you see you’re making $2 per lead over a month or so, you know that you can now afford to spend $1.50 to get that lead and you’re still making 50 cents on the deal.

That’s how you should look at your online business.

You need buyers, and you need to know the numbers and do your sums to work out how much it costs you to get a new lead. It can be fiddly to do so and consume a lot of time until you get it all worked out so that your numbers update themselves. It can be a difficulty and I don’t know of any easy way of doing it, especially if there are new buyers coming in, and old buyers leaving. It makes it hard to see which lists are performing and what the real figures are for the new buyers unless you take the time out to segment and test each new group that joins.[br][br]

That’s a bit of a royal pain, but I can see that with MASSIVE numbers of buyers coming on board and where the money numbers are high, how important it is to do this.

Let’s get back down to earth.

From my perspective, I like to keep things as simple as I possibly can and I often don’t have the patience to put checks in place and work it all out to the nth degree. As long as I can see the exercise has paid for itself a few days later, then I’m a happy bunny. Because buyers often hang around for quite a while, sometimes years.

That 50 cents cost up front could have a massive return on an individual basis. I know that many people reading this right now have been on my list for years and have bought everything I’ve released in that time (thank you!) and will still be around (I hope) for years to come.

Where then, do we get the new buyers for 50 cents or less per lead?

From the Warrior Forum.

It’s like a busy street corner that’s populated with a special kind of person that’s in the Internet Marketing niche – it’s not the only one, but it’s the busiest. If you go looking, you’ll find busy forums out there for many niches where you can do the same or a similar thing.

From my perspective and probably yours if you’re a marketer, the Warrior Forum is THE place to find new buyers. They even have a special place on that forum where you can bang your drum called the Warrior Special Offers forum.

You can go there with a product you’ve created, put up a sales page in the form of a new thread and watch the buyers join your lists.

It costs $40 to run a WSO (there are other criteria too), and another $19 to use the Warrior Plus system – which is absolutely crucial to your list building efforts.

Up front you have a $59 outlay, and as long as you can bring in at least that much in sales, you’ve broken even. It hasn’t cost you a penny to run and you’ve picked up at least a few new buyers on your mailing list

In practice, as long as you run your WSO with 100% commissions and it’s a GOOD product or a GOOD deal, you’ll get LOTS of affiliates promoting for you that you’ve never heard of before. All thanks to the Warrior Plus (WSO+) system.[br][br]

The WSO+ attracts affiliates like this.

The seasoned affiliate may check out your WSO as a likely candidate, and as soon as they see the WSO+ button on it, they go to the affiliate page to check out the offer. If your product is part of a rising price sale and pays 100% instant commissions, then it’s a very attractive proposition to them.

What the affiliate will then do is place a request with you that will allow them to be your affiliate for this sale. If you wish you can then auto-approve them for all future sales if you know who they are or they perform particularly well.

They will then send you traffic to your WSO using their affiliate link, and some of that traffic will buy. The affiliate will get paid immediately into their PayPal account, the buyer gets their product, and if you’ve created your new list using Aweber or ImnicaMail, then WSO+ will auto-add them to your list. (They still have to confirm by clicking a link, but most do.)

That’s a win-win-win. Perfect!

If you’re lucky, enough casual traffic will find your WSO attractive enough to buy and you’ll make enough money to cover your WSO. In that case, the new buyers on your list haven’t cost you a penny. You shouldn’t bank on it though.

You should be very happy to break even, and ecstatic to make money on the deal. Remember that making your money on the front isn’t what this is all about. You can make your pot of gold after the event by either selling your new buyers one or more of your other products, or by being an affiliate for other vendors or both.[br][br]

Here’s the proviso to make this work.

You need your own products that you created yourself or had created just for you.

I said this a few years ago, and it was important enough for me to stick it to the top of my blog.

Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business.

And then again a variant on that on another site I’ll be opening shortly:-

Product Creation >> Traffic >> List Building >> Business Building

It might sound obvious, or difficult, or crazy, or easy, or not for you, or whatever, but it works.

If you choose a style or niche (e.g. mine’s web apps, WordPress plugins and scripts) then go and find out what people in your niche want… they will buy. And if they like what you did, they will buy other things from you too as long as you address what they want.

You need the power of affiliates to really make it all work, and you turn them onto promoting for you by paying them 100%.

Okay?

Let’s just quickly run through it again.

Create a product.
Put up a WSO for it.
Use the WSO+ system to pay 100% commissions to your affiliates.
Gather your new buyers onto a new mailing list.
Repeat.

You then make your money by selling other products or memberships to your new buyers afterwards.

After you’ve gone through this cycle a few times and created a few products, then it gets easier as you can sell your original products directly to your new buyers as those products will be new to them.

That doesn’t sound too hard does it? It’s also fun and you learn lots of new stuff along the way.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. What have I missed out? Do you need some more detail? And so on.

Fire away.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2010

How To Create List Builders

Probably the best thing you can do for your online business is to build a mailing list.

It’s always an eye opener for people when I say that the size of your business is a direct reflection of the size of your mailing list. Okay that’s not 100% true as there are other variables which I’ll talk about shortly, but it is a good indicator.

There are many ways to list build, and a favourite of many people is to offer a freebie in return for a name and email address.

The problem with only using this method is you get what are called “tyre kickers” on your lists. Now that’s not a bad thing as over time you can educate your tyre kickers into becoming buyers, but generally speaking if you’re building a list, you want to build a list of buyers rather than tyre kickers.

I’ve found that if you have say 10,000 people on your mailing list that there’s a small core of a few hundred people who tend to take notice of what you say.

(If you’re reading this then you’re probably one of those people, and to you I say Thank You!)

If you think about it, this is one of the variables I mentioned above. It’s entirely possible to run a successful business online with just those few hundred people. It’s not always size that counts! It’s the responsiveness of the people on your mailing list that really makes the difference, and that’s obvious when you stop to think about it.

So ideally you want to build lists of a mix of freebie seekers that you can educate over the long term, and more importantly buyers.

I’ve already mentioned the most common way of building a freebie seekers list – you just give stuff away in return for a name and email address. You might now be thinking to yourself, “Okay so I have to sell stuff in order to build a list of buyers, and that’s harder than it sounds.”

True.

And one of the reasons it’s so hard to build a buyers list is you don’t get enough proven buyers visiting the site where you’re selling your products. Just increasing your search engine traffic isn’t enough, as you could just end up with a pile of freebie seekers at your site who have no intention of buying anything.

So how do you increase the number of proven buyers to your site?

Here it comes. The answer is in four parts.

#1 – You create a low cost product, usually under $17, under $12 is better, and $7 is the magic number.

#2 – You run an affiliate scheme, and let affiliates and joint venture partners send you traffic that consists of people who listen to them. These people are already warm and there’s a better than average chance they’ll buy.

#3 – You pay 100% commission directly to the affiliate and straight into their PayPal account. Affiliates love this and are always eager to promote.

#4 – On your download page you get them to join your mailing list. There’s a simple technique you can use that will turn almost 95% of buyers into subscribers. I’ll tell you about that next time.

What happens is as you pick up buyers they immediately turn into affiliates who are all willing to promote your product. Think – they were impressed enough to buy it and so why wouldn’t they be impressed enough to also promote it and make back the money they spent buying it?

So you end up with a constant stream of buyers and affiliates, all busy buying and then promoting your product, and ultimately building you a list of buyers which is exactly what you want.

You don’t make any money from this product, but you can later sell something else to your list of buyers, or even promote someone elses product, maybe another 100% commission item.

There’s also another option where you even upsell directly during the sales process, and take a cut of that sale rather than the front end one.

There are even more variants on this entire process.

You could put a squeeze page on the front of your site, and get a name and email address in return for a freebie, and then offer the full price item as an upsell, and maybe even do another upsell to something else. The full price item could be 100% commission and the second upsell 50%.

Or you could use a DHTML popover on your regular sales page to capture the name and email address instead.

Using either of those you build a list of freebie seekers and a list of buyers at the same time.

It’s up to you really how you do it, but I’m sure you can see the benefit? Doesn’t all this make perfect sense?

The question you might have now is how you can do it. You need a script that will handle the sales process.

Well first up, both the free and paid for versions of SmartDD will allow you to run a 100% affiliate scheme and also run one time offers at a different percentage commission. Or the Nickel Script will also allow you to run fixed price sales at 100% commission too, but no upsells.

However, probably the simplest method is to use a script that’s specially designed to handle the exact scenarios I’ve mentioned above.

Now the thing is, I thought everyone knew about this script, but I just shouldn’t take things like that for granted as I’ve had several people tell me recently that they’d never heard of it.

What you actually buy is an ebook that describes in detail the advantages of using the above method and exactly how to do it. And what comes with it is the script that will allow you to use this method and pay your affiliates instantly and automatically directly into their PayPal account.

Better still is that there are no databases to set up – the whole thing runs off flat text files just like the Nickel Script does.

But the icing on the cake is the price.

Just $7.

You can get it from here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/7ds/

-Frank Haywood