There’s something I see online in Internet marketing forums all the time, which bugs me to the extreme…
Avoiding the keyboard warriors that do battle in Internet marketing forums
A good friend of mine recently contacted me and asked me for some help in getting him started earning some money online. I spent three hours with him laying out exactly what he needed to do, how he should do it, and proved to him the kind of income he could bring in from it. I left his flat safe in the knowledge that I’d get some kind of positive karmic payback for this good deed.
I’d told him to contact me with any problems he had and I’d help him out. Last week I realised I hadn’t heard from him for a month so rang him up and asked him how he was getting on.
“It’s rubbish Jon. I haven’t made anything at all”
“Ok what have you actually done?”
Silence.
It turns out Gary hadn’t actually done anything at all. And I mean nothing. If he wasn’t a six foot four rugger bugger I would have gone round and beaten some sense into him. Here he was saying things didn’t work when he hadn’t even taken a step forward.
The sad thing is I wasn’t annoyed at him. On the contrary I knew exactly where he was coming from. This has happened to me with my friends in the past who say they want to earn online. Also I see the same thing whenever I visit online marketing forums. I rarely do this because for all the time I spend at the forums I’m not doing anything to actively make any cash. Also it’s because they are packed full of people who are not doing anything to actively make any cash, yet moaning to everyone about how everyone’s out to scam them. Without fail I always leave them feeling depressed for those who are constantly posting in them. I always see the same thing:
“So and so’s product is rubbish. Their company has had loads of my money and I still haven’t made a dime. Steer well clear”.
Out of intrigue I made a post in the forum asking the person what action they had taken. They were moaning about Mike Filsaime’s Seven Figure Code course, which I have reviewed favourably here in the past. I knew exactly the kind of response I was going to get. The person posted back a link to their web site. I checked it out and it was truly shocking. It was clear they had put no effort into this and were just venting their anger at their own procrastination on Mike. Their product was useless and their sales letter was non-existent.
I see these “keyboard warriors” every single week. They’ll go into a forum and slate someone, when really they are just annoyed at themselves for not taking any action or moving forward. I’ve had first hand experience with people like this myself and it’s always obvious as to what the issue is. Some people say “depression is anger turned inwards”, I think the same can be said for all these who moan at why they’re not getting anywhere, when really they’re not doing anything to get anywhere. I suppose you could say: “failure is procrastination turned inwards”. You could say that, but it’d make absolutely no sense.
Listen to me. If you don’t take action, if you don’t move forward, if you don’t actively do something what can you expect to change? There’s a great saying that says: “madness is doing the same thing every day and expecting different results”. I couldn’t agree more. There’s also a great saying that goes: “in life, like a midget at a urinal, you have to stay on your toes”. Again this is a wise thought.
When you visit these forums you can find yourself getting caught up with these keyboard warriors. Trust me on this one forums breed negativity. Every successful person knows surrounding yourself with people of the same driven mindset is a key to being successful. If you visit these forums not only are you wasting time were you could be doing something that’ll bring in some moola but you’ll also find yourself a keyboard warrior, moaning at others when you should take a look at yourself and what you are doing to change things.
Don’t get me wrong there are those who genuinely have made an effort and are still not getting any real returns. Here’s a few ways to solve that problem.
Develop a great product a market wants
The first thing you need to do is develop a great product a market wants. If you’re on the take and selling rubbish it won’t take long for you to get rumbled. You’ll never get repeat business, heck you may not even get initial business, and it’s the easiest way to fail fast.
The first thing to do here is ask your market exactly what they want. Go to www.groups.google.com and sign up to relevant forums. Make a post asking them what their biggest problem is they want solved. I assure you you’ll be surprised at how many answers you’ll get. All you need to do is create a product that solved that problem.
The great news is you don’t have to create any products yourself. Hire experts at guru.com or elance.com and make sure they create a cracker.
Create a web site that sells your product
I see this time and time again. People moan about their products not selling and then I visit their web site and see that their sales letter is appalling. If you have a poor sales letter you will never make any money.
Hire a decent copywriter, sign up and get a copywriting course and teach yourself or get software that can create a reasonable sales letter for you (I recommend www.pushbuttonsalesletters.com). This is the most crucial part of the whole process of marketing. You can become a millionaire selling junk providing the sales process is good enough! When you combine a great product with great sales copy you are onto a winner.
Don’t just put up a sales letter and expect it to make you money. It’s not that easy. It’ll take time and tweaking, but once you get it right you’re set.
Attract targeted customers
There are tons of companies out there that offer things like one hundred thousand visitors to your web site for two hundred quid. On the face of it, it sounds great. Three years ago I was hit with this same scam and fell for it hook, line and sinker. They send you either visitors who have no interest in your product, or just use software to make it look like you’re getting visitors. The result is zero sales. You live and learn.
Here’s the thing. I would rather have one thousand visitors to my web site who had an interest in what I was offering, than have one million people visit the site who were not interested in my product.
There are tons of ways to get targeted visitors. You just need to make sure you advertise or set up partnerships in the right place. If you’re selling a dog training product don’t start trying to set up joint ventures with owners of weight loss web sites for example. Find and advertise in places where people interested in dogs will see your marketing.
Increase the number of visitors to buyers
Let’s say you were making a couple of hundred quid a week from your web site. This could be through ad sense, promoting affiliate products, selling your own products…whatever. You could create another site and increase your income that way, or you could increase the effectiveness of your web site. This is sometimes called conversion.
In other words let’s say you knew that for every one thousand people who visit your web site fifteen buy. Why not test changing the headline and see if that makes twenty or more buy. In other words test to see if you can increase conversion and the effectiveness of your web site. Simple little changes can make huge differences to your income over time.
Increase the amount you sell to each customer
There are a lot of different ways to do this, but basically it breaks down to a few simple strategies. Offer an up-sell of a product and create more on the initial sale. For example sell an ebook, and then when they go to sign up offer a “deluxe” version which gives them the audio version for a tenner more or so.
Other ways are to sell more similar products to your customers, often called the back end, or sell more expensive products to your customers.
If you focus on these core principles you’ll see a difference in revenue I can pretty much guarantee it.