The Pre-requisite for Internet Marketing Online Success

This is going to be very interesting to you because what most people think are good investments, I think are usually bad investments; and what most people overlook as good investments, I think are some of the best investments, and surprisingly those are the best investments of all. And I’ll pre-qualify each of these because some of these work in different contexts in different circumstances.

So with that said, let’s get right to it. The best investments in internet marketing — the basics. There’s certain things that everybody, I think, needs. So when we talk about simple stuff to running your business online, AWeber — GetResponse is okay, too. Now I’ve personally never used it, but I know a lot of good marketers who do and swear by it. I honestly — I’m old school. AWeber’s good to me. They’re up almost all the time. I get great deliverability rates. They’re reasonable. I don’t have to pay a whole lot, and whenever I have a question I can simply just call them on the phone, and I usually get a live representative to me right away. I’ve had to do that in the past, and they’ve worked stuff out for me. AWeber’s really easy to use.

If you’re in this business, the best way to make money is to build a list. There’s no doubt about that. So if you’re not building a list because you don’t have AWeber, then you need to get AWeber. Basically, it tells me — when I talk to coaching clients who don’t have AWeber or some sort of list-building device — says they are not serious about their business.

The second best investment I made was Camtasia — totally, totally paid off. I’m shooting this in Camtasia right now. I made all my big money, my big leaps in internet marketing when I started shooting video. Now, if you can’t afford Camtasia because it’s kind of expensive, Jing is a great, cheap alternative. It’s free for 5-minute videos, but I think for something like 13 or 20 or 30 bucks or whatever, then you can shoot whatever you want. And it’s pretty hands-off. It doesn’t have all the functionalities of Camtasia, but it’s good for people who are not tech.

Hosting — you’ve got to have hosting. Screw free hosting. Again, that tells me you’re not taking this serious. You want to get hosting that you can upload stuff to. You don’t need a dedicated server. I still don’t have a dedicated server, and I got tons of web sites. I sell stuff that’s 600, 700, 800 — almost a gig even in memory. I use Amazon in that case, but it’s all hosting. So you need something to host your own files on instead of some free hosting and all that crap.

The other thing is a flip camera. I think everybody should get a flip camera because you can just shoot videos of yourself. If nothing else, shoot a video of yourself and put it on your sales page. Shoot a video of yourself talking about your guarantee. I do that all the time. Just a simple “Hey, this is Joe here. Thanks for purchasing.” You put that on the download page. Flip cameras cost 125 bucks, and you can use them for all sorts of things. They’re great at seminars. You pop them out and say, “Hey, can you give me a testimonial?” And boom — you’re done.

After that, let’s talk about what everybody thinks is the best investment — information products.

Now look at my list. It’s a little bit different than what you’re probably going to expect. The only real internet product on here is Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. And nothing against Jeff — it’s a great program. I think the power of it is it hit me at the right time. It was the right thing I needed at the right time, and that’s very important. Not only is it information that’s valuable to you, it’s got to be at the right time that it’s given to you. I can’t show you advanced stuff if you’re a beginner, and it’s not smart for me to show you beginner stuff if you’re advanced even if they’re both very good information.

So Jeff Walker really showed me the power of video for products. He just shot — and I looked at it. This is a 2000 course, and this is all he did. There is not much difference between the courses I could make with video and that quality and what Jeff made. The only difference is proof. I don’t have all the millions of case studies that he does. That opened my mind. He showed me mind maps — which you’re seeing now. I saw that in the product.

So what I got out of Jeff more than anything was the process of how he sold it, what it was when I got it, and how it was delivered more than anything, although I did learn some very, very good stuff about getting people excited that your products are going to come. So that was cool.

The Gary Halbert newsletter is at the GaryHalbertNewsletter.com. It’s free, and I’ve probably learned more from this regarding internet marketing than anything else in the world. As far as copywriting goes, I learned so much from this newsletter. Now I don’t approach the newsletter the same as other people approach it. Other people study it, and they take his advice. I study it and steal his techniques. I don’t steal them, but I study them and say, “Okay, this is how he opens every paragraph. This is how he builds a story.” So I dissect his methods that he personally uses more so than the instructions that he gives because a lot of the instructions on that page are dated. But Gary Halbert, in my opinion, is the most persuasive in print salesman ever to exist. So I study how he writes, and then I try to write with the same techniques as he does, the same styles as he does, the same transitions, and all that cool stuff. It’s free.

Dan Kennedy’s Wealth Attraction book. It’s like 10 bucks at Barnes and Noble. This will get your mind state in the right situation to start making money because a lot of people self-sabotage so they don’t attract wealth to them. Once you have that mindset to attract wealth, then all the information you’re going to give with specific techniques is going to become so much more valuable.

Winning Through Intimidation. It’s by Robert Ringer. I got this because Dan Kennedy recommended it. Again, it’s like 10, 12, maybe 15 bucks on Amazon. And basically Robert Ringer talks about how you can’t get intimidated by other people because a lot of people will intimidate you to the point where you do stuff that’s not in your best interest but in everybody else’s best interest, and you end up getting the short end of the stick.

So he talks about — in real estate he’s like “There’s three people that you basically deal with. There’s one guy — when the chips are on the table, he wants all the chips — your chips. He will skin you alive to get them. That’s one kind of person you’re going to deal with. Another person says they’re in it and they’re going to play fair, but then when it comes down to it, they’re going to try to steal your chips as well. And then the third people — they’re duplicitous. They act like they’re going to play fair, but they’re really in it to steal your chips. They’re two-faced. The last people have good intentions, but they’re probably going to steal your chips, too.”

I liked it because it had accurate thinking. He shows you what it’s like in the real world, not some fuddy-duddy self-help book. This really is good stuff so that other people don’t intimidate you and don’t influence you to do things you don’t want to do. And when you have that strong self-confidence, then you can do a lot of stuff in internet marketing. So this is a great book.

Tony Robbins’s Personal Power II — the tape program or CD program now. That was what really got me for mindset stuff. It’s just fabulous, intelligent stuff. Tony Robbins was breaking down and giving NLP and distilling it in a way that the common person could get it. I watched what he did, and I studied him from two angles. First I took his information and actually used it. Second of all, I was watching, again, how he created products, how he delivered products, how he marketed, and what made him successful. Then I modeled his approach — a lot of it.

As far as influence goes in my persuasion, Cialdini’s influence book, the Psychology of Persuasion — this is a classic. It’s good, especially in congruence with Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. He basically systemized Cialdini. And when you put those two together and you see it from both angles, it becomes very powerful.

Finally, Zig Ziglar’s Secrets for Closing the Sale — I learned a lot of my copywriting from this book. It’s not a book that a lot of copywriters reference, but Zig showed you how to sell stuff, gave you closes, gave you the mindset. He gave you everything. This book is so good. Again, it’s 10 bucks. So if you look at all these things, this is free; this is 10 bucks; this is like 40 bucks, I think, used or whatever; this is ten bucks; and this is ten bucks. This is where I got most of my education from — a majority of it. 60 percent of my education probably came from these products alone. The other 40 percent came from spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and picking up one thing here, one thing there, one thing there.

But interestingly enough, like I said, this is the only one strictly dedicated to internet marketing. This one has some internet marketing. This is mindset; this is mindset; this is mindset; this is just overall influence stuff; this is salesmanship.

Okay, now let’s move on to some other really good investments in internet marketing.

What you’re seeing right now, this mind map software? FreeMind mind maps. It is free, completely free. Pay nothing for it. It’s transformed my business. I create webinars with this; I create these seminars with this. I do this when I do audio programs. I do this when other people are interviewing me sometimes. I help my clients do this. I’ve taught students how to use this, and they’ve went off and made a ton of money. This is awesome stuff, and it’s free. Just look up FreeMind mind mapping software on the internet, and you’ll be able to download it.

GoToWebinar. The thing is, I don’t really like GoToWebinar. I don’t think they’re that great of a program to be honest with you, but this is what happened. I bought GoToWebinar, and it’s $97 a month. And I’m like, “Oh man. I got to justify having this,” because I only bought it to use the webinar once, the first time I got into webinars. “I got to justify this cost.”

So then I said, “Let me try selling a class as a webinar,” and I did, and it sold like crazy. I was like, “Oh my God.” I just made $7,400 in one day selling this thing. I’m going to use this more often. Then I started doing all kinds of webinars and e-classes, and GoToWebinar’s made me tens of thousands of dollars all because it was $97. But more importantly, it made me use this software. I said, “I’m going to get this. I’m going to use it.” And that was a big breakthrough in my business.

Adobe Photoshop — I don’t recommend everybody use this. If you absolutely have no graphical skill in the first place and you’re not a very technical person, hire somebody else to do your Photoshop for you or your graphics in general. But if you’re good at this, this is an excellent tool. I create very quickly all kind of graphics and all kinds of stuff, lay stuff out and format my sales pages with it, and just do these little extra things I think that help sales.

Dual-monitor setup. This one is major. You have two monitors here. In fact, I have a laptop — this old clunky laptop — and I have this big old monitor to the left of me. You can set them up in Windows. That way you can drag your mouse, and it’ll go from one screen to the next and back. If I’m using GoToWebinar, I’ll put all the webinar stuff over here as far as the software goes, and I’ll put just the screen that I want the people to see over on the left-hand side. With Photoshop it’s the same thing. I’m looking at my sales page, but I’m tweaking the stuff over here. Then I’m sticking it over there, back and forth.

E-mail’s the same thing. I have reference stuff over here, pages to grab; and I have just their e-mails over there in the left-hand side — really cool stuff. Even with FreeMind mind mapping software, sometimes when you’re showing a class live or doing something live, you can look over at the right-hand side to get your notes. And then you can look over at the left-hand side with your mind map stuff. Just all kinds of uses with two screens. I put the toolbar right in the middle of the two screens here on the left screen going vertically instead of horizontally, and it’s just a good — flip back and forth. It’s increased my productivity a ton. More importantly, though, it’s reduced my stress. Now I’m not having to do all this flipping back and forth as much when I can just look left and right. It’s good for copywriting, too. It really is because I can look at my copy and just a notepad on one screen, and I can see it outlined on the other screen on a web. So I can get both — just the copy, and I can see the overall design.

Ads

Well, I have four new leads to market to in the future, especially if I put them on a list once they buy. That’s a great tool. If you can put it out there for free, give away something for free and pay $20 to give it away for free and you get 20, 30, 50, 70 leads, that is a damn good deal because those are instant. And then you can immediately upsell them once they sign up for your list and recoup your 20 bucks that way. But you have leads more importantly. I built a whole business just on Warrior Forum Special Offers alone.

Some solo Ezine ads, and I qualify that — some. Do your due diligence here. Some people, when they tell you they have a list of 40,000 or whatever, what they mean is they have 40,000 total on all of their lists, but some people are on more than one list. So there’s a difference between total subscribers and unique subscribers; so make sure you get the hard data if you’re going to do the solo Ezine ads so you know the difference between unique subscribers and overall subscribers because that can make a huge difference.

The other thing is you’re going to want to get on people’s list before you even approach them for a solo Ezine ad just so you can see how they market to that list. But I’ve had some solo Ezine ads. I ran one in James Jackson’s publication that made me about a hundred bucks. I think it cost me — I don’t remember how much it cost me. It cost me like 500 bucks or 750 bucks to buy the Ezine ad, and I ended up selling $900 worth of product. I made 150 bucks, which in itself is pretty freaking good since it only took me — I don’t know — 30 minutes to set up the whole deal. 30 minutes, 100 bucks — good deal.

But more importantly, since I sold about $900 in product on a $37 product, that just produced me 24 new customers on my list that I can market to. And I know that the average person buys more than one product from me. So it ended up making me a lot more money down the road.

Forum banners in some cases can be extremely lucrative for advertising. I’ve worked with a client on this, and we got a banner for 10 bucks a month. It made us 400 or 500 bucks each month. That’s another thing to look into. A lot of people overlook forum banners. I’m here to tell you they are live; they are underutilized; and they are a steal for the amount of money they can make you compared to what you have to invest.

. The basics, what I think everybody needs. A look at what I got out of info products might help you reevaluate your purchases with information products. Some software and hardware to consider. It’s also good for you to think of your own. Just a couple things I have. These are all a couple things. Not a lot here, but it’s what you do with them that’s important.