I had a client express his frustration, and lack of results. Here is what I shared with him:
I’ve been at this for 6 years, and only recently have I seen any real income, and what I have earned goes right back into the business. I can tell you what I do, but I’ve been building a base for a long time. Much of this is covered in my book, A Traffic Strategy
Measure. You should be using an ad tracker to understand the results of WHAT you are promoting and WHERE you are getting results, and more importantly, what is NOT working, and what advertising resources are not performing. If it is not being measured, it cannot be improved. It’s a process
Leads. When you first start out, you should be trying to get LEADS to build your list. People rarely make a buying decision on first exposure. It takes 7-11 exposures, even for someone with a propensity to buy to be moved from
LEAD (curious) to PROSPECT (interest) to CUSTOMER (buyer)
Contrary to popular belief, the money is NOT in the LIST but rather the MONEY IS IN THE FOLLOWUP TO THAT LIST. That is why it is so important to promote only LEAD CAPTURE PAGES that feed an AUTORESPONDER. The autoresponder gives you the opportunity to do that followup automatically through followup sequences, and also gives the ability to BROADCAST to that list.
TELL don’t SELL. Your autoresponder should tell people about features and benefits of the product or service, reviews, comparisons, how YOU use it (I use what I sell), and answer the question from your prospect’s perspective: WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Your AR messages and broadcasts should reflect INFORMATION 4-5 times to each PROMOTIONAL email you send.
Give them something of value. I give away more free stuff than I sell. eBooks, eCourses, videos, traffic. Incentives for them to keep viewing my emails, to look at my business opportunities, join. These things also continue to get my leads on MULTIPLE LISTS seeing more offers, reinforcing my BRAND, establishing myself as the "expert", building trust. After the signature line of autoresponder messages I have rotator links to ebooks, ecourses, Clickbank products, other business opportunities (some paid but mostly free)
What to promote. A some point, you need to sort out what opportunities are not only generating LEADS but generating revenue. I have several multi-stream income programs but the two most effective are TeamEliteHomeBusinesses with the "Quickstart" and WorldProfit. Joe’s 12+ part series (in TEHB News) lays it all out. You should be promoting your own sites every day AND I recommend at least 1-2 programs in rotation within Quickstart, especially those that are traffic sources. TheDownliner is a given. CashStreamMaximizer, Pangea, SuperListExplode, TrafficAdBar.
Where to promote. Everywhere: safelists, solo ads, traffic exchanges, social media, SuperSolos, broadcasts to my lists. See my book.
How I built my traffic resource base. For quite awhile, I was joining 1-2 new safelists every day. Upgrading when it made sense. I purchased OTO’s, got upgrades on dime-sales, made bulk purchases of traffic. More OUTFLOW of cash than revenue but… now I have a base of resources where I get monthly (some daily) points and ads that I use to promote. I’ve built a stable of 28 Founder/Co-Admin memberships that not only give me promotion resources, but earn dribbles of income (100% commissions) by cross-promotion and pass-ups, plus over 100 top-level (SJV) memberships.
How often and how much to promote. The short answer: as much as you can possibly promote EVERY DAY. I send between 250,000 and 500,000 emails EVERY DAY. I have gotten it so that I spend 1-3 hours daily doing NOTHING but promoting. I promote 1-4 programs per day and I rotate those programs: 2-3 days then leave fallow for several days. I promote my safelist plus 1-3 commission-rich safelists. Mix it up. Special events (like the LURN conference), training sessions ( Gorilla Marketing Pro Saturday training invitation). Launches. JVzoo events.
Combination offers. Examples:
- A WorldProfit Silver membership could generate $40 per month so I give away a top-level membership at WebcastSource worth $29.95. They get a great advertising resource, monthly traffic, and see MY promotions.
- I do the same with paid memberships to Matthew Graves sites: Your Viral List, etc. These generate $10 each quarterly
"Consultative selling". I’ve owned my consulting firm for over 20 years plus I was a professional consultant in the corporate world for 25 years. I am officially retired but still give free consulting. (I actually never charged for consulting in my own company: I made my money from hardware/software margins and service contracts). I was taught to build "customers for life", build relationships. I’m not interested in this week’s sale, but the sales I might get with that relationship over the next couple years. I still have clients from 10-12 years ago call me for advice.
I teach, coach, produce tutorials and videos, ebooks, training. I share virtually EVERYTHING. I don’t SELL, but I advise, and many times, that advice leads my clients to things that generate revenue. I lead by example, and tell people what I have done, how I have built my business, I share what has worked, what has not worked. If they follow, the revenue comes, or not. The core group of people that "get it" are the ones who generate consistent revenue for me. Then there are the ones who blew me off, and came back.
I’m here to help. I have done for many: value added development, fixes. I "rescue" hacker-ravaged sites, mothballed sites, non-performing sites. On many of these sites I have had a vested interest because I have already paid for upgraded memberships that will produce NO ROI if these sites have failed. I don’t charge, but I also don’t turn down free traffic, memberships, upgrades, solos or Supers.
Also, I help, but it does absolutely no good to do it for people. I learned the value of "the struggle", guiding but letting people actually figure it out for themselves (teach them to fish). I was a teacher (corporate executives and middle management) – like teaching kindergartners with egos and attitudes. But they still needed to be taught the fundamentals, and how to play nice. They remembered my name afterwards and I built some valuable business relationships as I moved up the ladder.
So, you see that what I have built and there is no magic button. And it didn’t happen overnight.