Author Archive | Richard

Your prospect opens your email… Reads the first few sentences… And then DELETES your email IN FRUSTRATION.

Why?

Because your first few sentences didn’t match the subject line and it confused and frustrated them.

The email felt like a waste of time…

Like maybe the subject line was clickbait.

It’s like opening the door to a chocolate shop and finding lawn mowers.

YOU WERE PROMISED CHOCOLATE!

“Where’s the chocolate??!”

“This can’t be the right place… let’s get out of here!”

I just opened an email that promised… “How to get budget approval for copywriting school.” Yes, this was written not just by a copywriter, but by someone who TEACHES COPYWRITING.

And yet the first 33 lines of that email don’t say a word about getting budget approval for copywriting school (I kid you not!)

Halfway through the email the writer finally (FINALLY!) states:

So what’s getting in the way of you joining 9 gazillion (my number) copywriters and marketers in my fantastic copywriting school?

Most likely:

Budget approval.

Chop off the entire first half of the email, start with these three lines and then go from there, and it could be an effective email.

But what did I do when I first received this email? After reading several lines that appeared unrelated to the subject line, I closed it.

Then I reopened it and scrolled down because I was thinking this could make a good lesson for all of us. As I was scrolling I found a totally unrelated large gif of a woman closing her eyes and shaking her head. Guess what? That only confused me more.

We shouldn’t have to rewrite emails written by someone who teaches copy. And yet, here we are.

Received within the same hour from an online marketer I KNOW is pulling down a minimum of 7 figures was this subject line and first two lines of this email:

Subject Line: System to add 30K to 100K per month

First line of email: Want to work together to add [30K to 100K+] per month to your monthly bottom line?

Second line: My system produces this type of revenue for winners who add in “big-fee” or “high-priced” programs to what they do… or to those who need a more compelling and irresistible offer.

Notice the first line expands on the subject line. No confusion here, and we get more clarification, too. The second line explains how this is possible, building credibility that he knows what he’s talking about.

I’m two lines into this email and instead of confusion I have a VERY good idea of what’s going on, how it works and why I would benefit by reading the rest of the email.

Notice it’s not even written all that well. Adding 30K per month to your monthly bottom line? No English teacher would let that go, and yet the reader knows exactly what he’s saying.

I’d lose the “for winners” and instead say something like, “for smart marketers”. But that’s just me nit-picking.

The fact is, you’ve only got seconds to make your subscriber GLAD she opened the email. Don’t confuse her. Don’t make her slog through 30 lines to get to the point. Respect her time and get to the heart of the matter FAST.

This doesn’t mean you can’t tell stories, either. After that second line above, you might launch into a story of how you helped poor miserable Marketing Mavis do this exact thing. The point is, your reader now knows what the devil you’re talking about and she’s now willing to go along on the journey with you because you TOLD HER exactly what this email is all about.

Whew.

Sorry, I know sometimes I go off on a rant when I see shoddy marketing like this, but I just get so frustrated at how people get in their own way.

Keep it simple. Make your first line expand on your subject line. Lay out the foundation immediately so that readers know they are in the RIGHT PLACE. Then and only then should you launch into your fancy stuff, stories, details and so forth.

Try it and see if your click-through rate doesn’t improve dramatically.

But is an interesting word, it’s defined as a reason someone gives for not doing or agreeing with something. It is probably the most overused word in the English language and also the one word that causes the most problems with regards to procrastination.

From “Oh, I was going to do it but…” to “But it…” stems all our excuses for indecision or inactivity.

What do we fear so much that we have to presuppose a failure and wrap that possibility up with a “but”? And here is the more interesting question… Are we committing to that failure by raising that as a possibility?

What if we never actually said the ‘but’? What if we didn’t allow into our consciousness the possibility of failures, could that prevent them from occurring?

Now I know that seems naïve, but when we were children, we didn’t see failures as something bad, it was simply just a lesson to learn along the way. We learned to walk by taking a few steps then falling, then we just picked ourselves up and tried again, and again, until after those few false starts and those initial faltering steps we were indeed able to walk, and then run.

As children, it never occurred to us to even think in terms of “I’m going to walk, but maybe I won’t.” We just kept on trying and trying until we succeeded, and that is the difference between the entrepreneurs and everyone else.

Where everyone else acknowledges the “but”, we don’t breathe as much life into that uncertainty. We don’t have time for buts… We are far too busy getting the job done to worry about whether our independent vision might not work.

A funny phrase I heard once: “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” It’s a great throwaway statement that shows how often we use those two particular words.

Banish them from your life and your outlook. You have businesses to build and successes to achieve and there is no time for a ‘but’ in your exciting journey ahead!

First let me say that $3,000 is an ultra-conservative guess. I suspect this guy (we’ll call him Mike) is earning 3 to 5 times that much, but let’s be conservative and call it $3,000…

Mike has found a way to earn residual income that is right underneath all of our noses. In fact, it’s a method that’s been taught for a couple of decades or more, and yet very few marketers do this.

I’m almost positive you already know of this technique. But I’m also pretty confident that you are not USING this technique, at least not to the extent Mike is using it.

On the technical side, all you need to make this work is a squeeze page and an autoresponder.

Remember, residual income is what you earn for work you do ONCE and get paid for over and over again. If you write a hit song, you get royalties every time that song is played. If you sell software as a service or a membership site, you get paid every month until that person unsubscribes.

And if you’re Mike, you do what might be the simplest thing of all: You create specially made autoresponder sequences that last for YEARS, keep subscribers interested and continuously sell, sell and sell some more.

Mike’s ENTIRE business model is built around autoresponders. It’s not just a sideline for him, it’s what pays his bills, bought him a second home and put his kids through college.

Here’s what Mike does:

He chooses a niche. His favorites are weight loss/health, along with making money online. But he works in a couple of others as well.

He writes a follow up sequence that goes on for years. YEARS. Naturally he doesn’t do this all at once. Once he targets a niche, he writes follow up emails for the first couple of weeks prior to going active. Then he adds to the sequence on a regular basis until it’s about 3-5 years long (I’m not kidding!) He sends out about 1 email per day on average, although sometimes he sends out 2 emails if he’s promoting something hard.

If you’re freaking out about writing all these emails, remember two things: You just have to write enough emails to stay ahead of your earliest subscribers. And you can always outsource the work.

Mike’s emails are a mixture of information, content, observations, humor, jokes, quotes… pretty much whatever he feels like writing that he knows will interest his niche not just today but also in years to come. And every single email does something else, too. It sells.

Sometimes the entire email is selling. Other times the selling part comes in about halfway through the email. Once in a while he doesn’t sell until the P.S. But the point is this: He delivers content his readers WANT and he never stops selling, either.

He chooses evergreen products that are likely to still be available well into the future. ClickBank is his #1 source for these.

He sells one product per week. That is, he spends 7 days talking about just one product, what it can do for the reader, anecdotal stories of what it’s done for others, common questions answered and so forth.

And here’s a little trick he uses: Because each week focuses on just one product, he makes it look like a new product launch. Mind you, he never SAYS it’s a new product. Nor does he say that the product will no longer be available after the week is over. But he does give that impression in order to give the reader a sense of urgency.

To create even more urgency, he also offers a bonus that is good for that week only. His bonuses are usually built on PLR that he’s repurposed just for this.

And here’s where it gets even MORE interesting: 5-6 times a year he promotes a PACKAGE of products that are all his. These are the same products he’s been giving out as bonuses, all with big price tags attached so they look high value. He bundles about seven of these together and offers them for one ‘low’ price. And of course he gets to keep all the profits when he does this.

Offering these PLR products as bonuses and then packaging them together to sell is optional to the system, but it does bring in more sales and revenue and it doesn’t take all that much time to source good PLR products and rename them.

Now then, this all sounds great but you’re probably wondering how he gets people to join his lists so he can send them all these emails on autopilot. And the answer is awesome lead magnets.

In fact, this is where he spends his real time and energy, because the better the lead magnet is, the easier it is to get subscribers. Often, he’ll buy the rights to a product that’s sold well and offer that as his giveaway for joining his list. When you can say that a product sold 3,000 copies at $297 but the visitor can get it for free just for subscribing, your conversion rates can get pretty high. For his non-IM niches his conversion rate is over 70%, and for his online marketing niche it’s about 50%, which is still excellent.

By taking the time and expense to get the lead magnet right, he doesn’t just increase the conversion rates on his squeeze pages. He also builds a lot of goodwill and credibility with his new subscribers, which makes it easier to get his emails read and his links clicked.

This all sounds great, right? But what about traffic?

Good question. Mike pays for all of his traffic because he likes being able to turn on the traffic switch whenever he wants for as long as he wants. He already knows what each subscriber on each list is worth for the first six months they’re on the list. Any sales that come in after six months are just gravy.

His method is to spend as much as 50% of what he will earn in the first six months on advertising. So for example if the average subscriber earns him $3.00 in six months, he’ll spend as much as $1.50 to get that subscriber. But most of his subscribers stay with him for years, so in the end he actually earns a good deal more than just $3.00 apiece.

He buys his traffic from solo ads, Facebook ads and Google ads. He also uses several less well-known methods, two of which I was able to pry out of him. One of these is paying Facebook Group leaders to promote his free offer to their members. And another method he uses is to pay product sellers to offer his free product on their download page. Since everyone who hits the download page is a buyer, these tend to be especially good leads.

Naturally Mike uses a tracking service to find out where his squeeze page traffic is coming from so he knows what’s working.

Once a new subscriber joins one of his lists, that subscriber automatically receives emails for a long time from Mike. But the emails never look dated because they’re written in a style that makes it look current. Mike does have to check and make sure the products promoted in his sequences are still active. If one of them is no longer available, he simply finds a similar product and substitutes out the URLs and the product name.

And Mike does a lot of cross promoting, too. For example, if he has a list of people who use social media for online marketing, he’ll promote his free video marketing lead magnet to that list to see if he can get them on a second and even third list. Yes, this can mean a subscriber is in maybe three different autoresponder sequences simultaneously, but the profits far, far outweigh any unsubscribes.

As you can see the hard work in this business model is getting things set up. But once you do, it takes very little work to keep things running smoothly. And if you decide to take a month off, it shouldn’t affect your income, either.

Here’s maybe the most interesting thing about this entire case study: Mike had no previous marketing or writing experience prior to setting up his first squeeze page – autoresponder funnel. He was good at technical stuff but never did any kind of sales or marketing before.

And I wonder if this didn’t help him to succeed, because his writing is very basic and sounds like it comes from that slightly weird ‘guy next door’. He just writes about what interests him in each niche, because he figures that same stuff will interest his readers. His grammar isn’t great but he tells new subscribers up front that he’s no English professor; he’s just a guy like them who enjoys doing XYZ just like they do.

It works for him. And if you choose an evergreen niche that interests you, then I think you could easily build a hands-free funnel like Mike’s and start earning some of that residual income on autopilot. You set it up, send a continuous stream of new subscribers and get sales. It’s so simple, most people overlook this – but it works.

You’ve got a forum or a Facebook Group or some sort of social media platform that is keeping you super busy. So what do you do? You ask a couple of your most loyal members or followers to act as moderators for you.

Or maybe one of them even volunteers. “Hey there, I’m on this forum all the time and I know you’re busy… how about I act as a moderator to help you out?”

Wow, that’s awesome, right?

You get free help from one of your biggest fans – someone who knows your stuff and wants to help you tell the world about you and your products.

Except…

Except sometimes these helpful moderators are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, ready to take you down, get you banned and even put you into legal trouble.

Yes, I know I sound like a crazy, paranoid doomsayer, but this really happens. In fact, it costs companies millions or possibly even billions of dollars a year in lost revenue.

Take the case of Bob’s* Facebook Group account. Bob runs his own online marketing business, teaching people how to use social media to get new customers.

Bob is a social media marketing expert, and the last person you think would lose his business because of a social media marketing mistake. But that’s essentially what happened.

Bob sold his highly acclaimed $1,997 social media marketing course to someone we’ll can Suzie. Suzie turned out to be something of a pain, pestering Bob several times a day with questions and demanding far more attention than any of his other 300 students combined.

Rather than watch the course and implement what Bob taught, Suzie seemed to think she was entitled to one-on-one teaching 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Essentially, there was no pleasing her. Exasperated, Bob refunded her money and politely told her that the course was not for her.

Suzie was furious. She sent out numerous messages on social media telling anyone who would listen that Bob was a fraud, his course was a waste of money and so forth. But apparently this wasn’t enough for her.

Unbeknownst to Bob, she joined his Facebook Group with an entirely different identity than her own. Keep in mind that his Facebook Group was how Bob communicated with everyone who purchased the $1,997 course.

This identity seemed very friendly and helpful towards Bob and everyone else in the group, so much so that Bob eventually made this other identity a Group moderator. And once she had moderator status, she immediately began subtly undermining Bob and his social media course. She managed to personally contact everyone in the group and lure many of them to her own Group while gaining their confidence.

Long story short, she used her authority as Bob’s moderator as well as her authority within her own Facebook Group to cast doubt on Bob and his course. Refunds began skyrocketing and new sales plummeted. Her final act was to make several posts that were completely against Facebook’s terms of service, thereby getting Bob’s Facebook Group and Bob himself banned from Facebook.

Bob has asked Facebook to investigate and hopes to restore his ability to be on Facebook but restoring his good name and reputation will take a great deal more than that. By becoming one of his Facebook Group moderators, this woman managed to virtually destroy Bob’s business.

And this is not an isolated instance, either. I’ve heard horror tales of social media moderators doing things that created lawsuits, lost sales and put businesses in trouble with government agencies.

If and when you allow anyone else to have moderator control on any of your social media type accounts, you need to KNOW who they are and that you can trust them, because it only takes one moderator from hell to potentially ruin everything you’ve built.

*I changed Bob’s name because the poor guy’s been through enough already.

I’m surfing the internet in an early morning pre-coffee daze when I see an ad for an odd-looking watch that says, “Handmade in Switzerland: 24 hours and only 1 hand…” And I’m thinking, “Ohhhh-kaayyyyy… what fresh overpriced gimmick is this?”

And I click on the ad because, well, why not?

Now I’m on a website called slow-watches.com and it’s asking me,

“Are you ready to be slow?”

Wtf?

I need my coffee for this.

“We created a watch that allows you to experience time in an entirely new way.”
“The slow watch reminds you to stop chasing the minutes and live for the moments.”
“The unique 24 hour one-hand concept fundamentally changed our way to perceive time – yours too?”

Ha! I love how they don’t claim this watch will change your life or how you perceive time, but instead they pose those claims as questions.

•   Will this product earn you a million dollars?
•   Will this diet make you 10 years younger?
•   Will the secrets revealed in these videos make you irresistible to beautiful women?

Maybe not, but these questions fly underneath your skeptic’s radar and get you thinking, don’t they?

“Sit back, relax and watch the video. We would like to tell you about our slow story.”

And I’ll be darned if I didn’t watch their video – twice.

www.youtube.com/embed/3SP_s_UUVfM

A few things to notice:

The first half of the video shows you just how miserable your life is without this watch, while the second half of the video shows how wonderful your life will be with the watch.

And it turns a product fault into a positive. “Yes, our watch doesn’t tell you exactly what time it is, but who cares about exact time anyway? We don’t care about seconds or minutes because those are for losers.” (I’m totally paraphrasing here – watch the video.)

Put on this watch and for the first time in your life you will see, “How time naturally flows.”

“Remember, don’t count every second – make every second count.”

Cliches, anyone?

I thought it hilarious that while the silky-smooth talking announcer is telling you to make every second count while admitting their watch can’t count seconds, they’re showing you two good looking guys staring at an hourglass…

I mean just staring at…

And staring at it some more…

Like they are so bored they’re wishing their miserable lives would just end right then and there.

But wait a minute… (pun intended?)

…why are we talking about this crazy watch and how they’re marketing it?

Because there are some great lessons here.

First, making a 24 hour watch is such a simple idea, I’ve got to wonder why we haven’t seen these before. Or have we seen them but they didn’t catch on? The point is this: Simple ideas like this are everywhere if you are paying attention.

Personally, I would love to have a watch that reminds me every hour to get up from my chair and MOVE. I’d also like the watch the act as a Pomodoro timer throughout the day, with 25 minutes of work and a 10 minute break, or something like that.

Yes, I know my phone can do those things for me, but I leave my phone in other rooms and I’d prefer to have those features on my wrist. Is that a good product idea? I don’t know, but if you decide to create a watch like that, let me know and I’ll likely buy the first one.

Second, the watches cost $300. That’s why they tell you over and over they’re made in Switzerland, because we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that great watches can only be made in Switzerland, so it helps tremendously with price justification.

Third, the watches cost $300 which means it’s going to be all about the marketing and positioning. Most people are never going to impulse purchase a weird-looking unknown-brand watch for 300 bucks. Heck, most people have stopped buying watches altogether because they own smartphones. To sell a watch without a well-known brand for $300, you’re going to have to get slick with your marketing.

Fourth, that is exactly what they’ve done here. When I looked at their website and watched the video the first time, I confess that I WANTED ONE OF THESE WATCHES! Yes, I really did.

Watching the video the second time with my marketing cap on made me totally rethink that impulse. Because hey, I don’t really believe that buying the watch will cause me to move from the city to the country and have absolutely nothing to do but play frisbee and watch an hourglass, two things I don’t want to do anyway. (Watch the video to see what I mean.)

To answer their question: “Can a Watch Change Your Life?”

Potentially.

Regardless, if you can take a simple product like an odd looking watch and use your marketing to make people feel better about themselves, then maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

If you sell a product that teaches people how to make money, for example, then you can certainly paint a picture of their life before and after getting your product. And in fact, you can use this watch video as a template of what that might look like.

A mediocre product with great marketing can sell like gangbusters. That’s what I think they have here. If they get a few celebrities to wear their watches, it could become a viral sensation and they’ll make millions.

Then again, there have been plenty of products that were supposed to be “the next big thing” but failed terribly.

https://digg.com/2021/next-big-thing-fails

Back to you and your business… Take a look at your products and ask yourself, what simple change can you make to totally stand out from the crowd? In other words, what’s your version of going from 12 hours to 24 hours?

Next, look at your marketing like you’re seeing it for the first time. Does it sweep you up in the moment and make you think, “Wow! I want this!” If not, you might want to rethink how you’re presenting your product to the world.

Here’s a neat little trick you can try: Every time you see an ad or commercial, imagine it’s for your product. Look for the elements you can borrow to use in your own marketing campaigns to make them fresh and grab the viewers’ attention.

Can your product change people’s lives (unlike this watch)?

Then just imagine what you might achieve with a fresh marketing campaign that lets people feel what that change will be like when they have your product.

Can you devise a fresh marketing campaign that sells a million copies of your product? I think you can…

Facebook “jail” is when users are blocked or banned by Facebook from posting on the site or accessing their account. This is supposed to happen because of violations or spammy behavior, and it can lead to a Facebook account being deleted permanently.

But here’s the thing…

Facebook can’t accurately police content, which is why Facebook makes 300,000 content moderation mistakes…

… every single DAY.

Here’s what happens:

Facebook content moderators review posts, pictures and videos that have been flagged by users or artificial intelligence about 3 million times per day. To do this, Facebook employs about 15,000 content moderators.

With 3 million posts to moderate each day, each moderator looks at 200 posts per day. That’s 25 posts per hour if they work 8 hours, which works out to 150 seconds per post to decide if it meets or violates community standards.

It gets worse…

Imagine if even a handful of those 200 posts are 10-minute videos. Now the moderator will only have seconds for some of the other posts. That’s mere seconds to make a determination that can affect your account, your business and your bottom line.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that moderators “make the wrong call in more than one out of every 10 cases.” That means 300,000 times a day, a mistake is made. This means that no matter how careful you are, you can still lose your Facebook Page or Group and it won’t even be your fault.

For example, Sherry Loucks runs a Facebook page on breastfeeding. She shares only credible content from fact-based sources, yet Facebook blocks every page she runs and routinely blocks her Page for ‘spam’.

Rectifying an unfair ban from Facebook can be nearly impossible. Remember, Facebook users are not considered Facebook customers. If you contact Facebook, you likely won’t receive an answer. If you do receive an answer, it will likely be, “We are looking into this and will get back to you,” which they never will.

Facebook is providing their online community free of charge to users, which means users are not paying customers and cannot expect customer service from them. When you sign up with Facebook, you agree with their terms and conditions which essentially say (I’m paraphrasing here) that Facebook is God and you are not.

And since there are no laws which require Facebook to allow you to participate… Getting yourself out of Facebook jail can be next to impossible.

How can you reduce your chances of being banned on Facebook?

1: Show nothing that can be considered adult nudity and sexual activity. Yes, this includes anything to do with just about anything related to the human body, including breastfeeding. Just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean an underpaid and overworked moderator won’t ban you for something that is perfectly moral in any circle except a religious order from the dark ages.

2: Display nothing that could under any circumstances be considered violent or graphic content.

3: Do not refer to dangerous organizations, terrorism or organized hate, even if you are 100% against it. People have been banned for simply using the names of hate groups.

4: Don’t use hate speech. Like everything else, this is open to interpretation. If you’re not sure if it’s hate speech, it probably is to someone so don’t use it.

5: Don’t post about ‘drugs’ and ‘firearms’. To be safe, assume there are no exceptions to these two terms.

6: Don’t post child nudity or any kind or sexual exploitation of children.

7: Don’t post anything that can be interpreted as bullying and harassment. Someone posted something terrible and you want to fight back? Don’t engage – just report them and leave it alone.

8: Don’t talk about suicide and self-injury. This one makes me angry, but you need to be aware that even saying something along the lines of, “If you are feeling suicidal, call this number for help,” can potentially get you banned if the wrong moderator gets a hold of it. Yes, I know that’s bull@#$%, but sadly it’s true.

After everything I’ve said here, you might think I hate Facebook. I don’t.

As an online marketer, I realize that Facebook is just one marketing tool of many that we can choose to ignore or use. If we choose to use it, we need to realize the limitations and risks involved.

Above all else, it’s imperative that when using Facebook for marketing, you move your prospects off of Facebook and onto your own website and email list as quickly as possible. Because sooner or later, the day may come when you get that dreaded notice from Facebook letting you know that as far as they are concerned, you are no longer welcome on their site. It’s good to be ready, just in case.

CTA stands for Call to Action. When you’re talking about an email you’re sending to your list, the call to action is when you say, “Hey Reader, click this link to get a once in a lifetime deal” or some such.

The more you can get your readers to click the links you put in your emails, the more traffic you send to your offers. The more traffic you send to your offers, the more sales you can make. Usually.

Okay, there is an exception to this rule, and it’s if you don’t set up your email and your offer to be congruent. Like if you say in your email, “Click here to discover the best fertilizer for roses” and then you send them to a page that is advertising a cleaning solution for rubber duckies… you’re not going to make sales.

But let’s assume that your email sets up your reader to know exactly what to expect when they click the link. The more people who click the link, the more people you have who can potentially purchase the product and the more money you can make.

Thus the question becomes, how do you get more of your email subscribers to click the links without holding a gun to their head?

By using the CBS method:

•   Command
•   Bolden
•   Soften

First, you’re going to COMMAND them on what to do. Don’t be subtle here. Don’t slip your link in there and assume they will click it just because it’s there – they won’t.

You’ve got to TELL them to click it.

•   “CLICK HERE NOW”
•   “Go HERE now for full details”
•   “This is the link to click NOW”

Next, you’re going to BOLD keywords. People tend to scan emails just like they scan sales letters. By bolding the keywords, you can stop a scanner in their tracks and get them to do your bidding.

“The price will double at midnight so to get the discount go here now and check this out before it’s too late”

Read just the bold words above and you’ll realize it’s everything the subscriber needs to know they should click the link NOW.

Finally, you might want to sometimes SOFTEN the language you use.

If you only say, “CLICK HERE NOW” it seems kind of pushy or bossy.

But if you say, “CLICK HERE NOW and see if this is for you” then you’ve softened the language and made it more friendly.

“Click HERE now and see if this can double your income”

“Click THIS LINK now and find out why 2,926 reviewers give it 4.8 stars”

“Go HERE NOW and discover for yourself why grown men blush when they see this”.

Remember CBS to increase your email calls to action: Command, Bold and Soften.

I received an email the other day promoting contests, telling me how I can become a big winner if I know contesting secrets and so forth. Which is true, there really are methods to winning a lot of stuff through contests.

But here’s the weird part… the email was written by a guy in his early to mid-20’s and judging by the language he used, it was also targeted to that same demographic – 20 something males.

What guy in his 20’s is interested in spending hours a day entering contests to win appliances and gift certificates and what not?

I suspect the target audience for something like this is people over 40, most likely female, who have some time on their hands. You could write about how they can enter these contests while they’re standing in line, while on their commute (assuming they’re not driving) while they’re watching television and so forth. And I’d talk about the vacations they can win, the cash prizes, and yes, the gift certificates and appliances, too.

This 20 something marketer will start making more sales when he starts choosing products to promote that appeal to the type of audience he is attracting to his mailing list – 20 something males.

A marketer has to know his or her audience and know what they want, what fits into their lifestyle, and what will bring them the benefits they seek. Keep this top of mind when you are choosing products to promote, and how to promote them.

I’ll bet there is something that is holding you back from greatness in your online business… And if you eliminated this one thing, you’d get more accomplished in a week than you’re currently getting done in a month. And not only would you get more done, but you’d make more money, too. Maybe exponentially more…

I know, because I’ve experienced this myself. There was something holding me back, and at first I didn’t even realize what it was or why it was stopping me from earning as much as I wanted to make.

This thing is in your business, and while almost every online marketer has this same problem, the issue itself differs from one market to another. Goodness, that’s about as clear as mud, isn’t it?

Let me try to illustrate…

Imagine you have a giant hourglass filled with gold nuggets. Any nugget that falls to the bottom of the hourglass is yours to keep, and there is an unlimited supply of gold nuggets at the top.

But here’s the problem: Because an hourglass is skinny in the middle, the nuggets have a hard time falling to the bottom. In fact, those nuggets are continuously getting jammed in the middle, and when that happens, you’re not getting any gold nuggets at all.

The solution is obvious – eliminate the area that is slowing down the flow of gold nuggets. In the case of your business, identify and eliminate the bottleneck.

Let’s say you’re a whiz at creating content, making products and doing social media. But building landing pages, sales pages, websites and all of that is hard work for you. It can take you days or weeks to build a funnel.

There’s your bottleneck! Get a program such as Leadpages or ClickFunnels to allow you to quickly and easily build those pages and you’ve just eliminated your bottleneck.

Or maybe you’re an expert at building pages but you’re terrible at writing content. Hire someone to write content for you or find another way to get content such as curation or maybe recording your own videos.

Perhaps the only thing you do well is social media. Then the answer might be to do social media for other marketers, teaming up with them and even taking a percentage of profits.

The idea here is to determine what you’re good at, what you’re NOT good at, and then find a way to eliminate, outsource or expedite the thing(s) you’re not good at – your bottleneck.

In my case, I was great at creating content, getting product ideas, setting up JV’s and a host of other things, but I didn’t like the technical aspect of building websites, pages and so forth. When I found a way to make it easy for myself, I freed up an amazing amount of time and energy which I then used to focus on my strengths. And when I did that, I literally tripled my income, had more fun in my business and for the first time found the entire experience to be thoroughly enjoyable.

I’d removed the bottleneck, removed a lot of stress and frustration, and replaced it with many more opportunities to build my list, gain new JV partners and make more money.

Find your bottleneck and eliminate it so that you can concentrate on your strengths, and that hourglass of gold nuggets will be replaced by a firehose of income.

I want to clear something up right now. Too many aspiring online marketers have bought into this fairy tale that says all you need is ONE BIG hit and you’ll magically go from broke to six-figures. 95% of the time it just doesn’t work like that. Nor is your online income going to magically grow like “clockwork” on “auto-pilot” with “zero effort” or investments.

Have you heard the expression, “Two steps forward, one step back?” That’s how almost every business grows, including any and all forms of online marketing.

Building an online business isn’t like winning the lottery, nor is it a movie. You don’t get struck by lightning and fall into a pot of gold. Instead, you do an affiliate promotion that costs you $500 in advertising and makes you $400 in commissions.

This is where most people quit. “SEE?! ONLINE MARKETING DOESN’T WORK!”

Baloney.

You earned $400 in commission AND you learned something, too.

You use that new knowledge on your next promotion where you spend $500 again, but now you make $900. You repeat that for awhile and you’re making pretty good money, all because you didn’t quit when you lost that initial $100.

Then you’re feeling pretty confident so you decide to expand your list with a solo ad that costs you $300, but you only earn $50.

Nuts!

But now you’ve got a bigger list, and you nurture that list and eventually over the course of weeks or months you earn an additional $2,000 from it.

Yeah!

Then you hire someone to create a product for you, and it’s a terrific product but no one wants it, and you lose $700.

Darn!

But you still have the product, so you break it up into pieces and use those as posts and free reports and combining that with social media you further build your list while promoting a related affiliate product and now you’re earning a cool $300 a week just from that while also watching your list grow.

Wow!

But you need to invest in a better website or software or whatever and there are expenses and so you’ve got to pay those and…

Do you see how this works?

Two steps forward and one step back.

The trick, therefore, is to simply keep moving forward no matter how many steps you take backwards.

If you graph out the growth of online businesses, you’ll find that 95% of the time the line goes up, dips down, goes up, dips down and so forth. But the downward dips don’t mean a thing as long as the overall trend is up.

And if you’re prepared for this and expecting that it won’t be all smooth sailing and that you will have setbacks small and large, then you’ll know enough to weather those setbacks and keep plugging away.

You’ll be far less afraid, too, knowing that it’s normal to have these setbacks. And in my experience, it’s much easier to work when you’re not terrified that your income will suddenly dry up if you make one wrong move.

The vast majority of online marketers experience a series of small successes and small failures, too. They go hand in hand, and that’s okay. Just make sure you either have more successes than failures, or that your successes are bigger than your failures and you keep moving forward.

Really, that’s the only ‘trick’ to online marketing.