Businesses can share, connect, and interact with customers through Facebook Pages and  Facebook Ads, and we recently introduced Facebook Places to provide a presence for a business’s physical store location and encourage people to “check in” when they arrive.

Now, we are now excited to offer Deals! Deals gives businesses the opportunity to reward customers when they check in on Facebook, and this helps generate awareness, encourage in-store traffic and build customer loyalty. In addition, if someone checks in to a business that is offering a deal, their friends have the opportunity to hear about it through word of mouth marketing that is generated naturally on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18846

For example, last month I built my first list using fb and I added around 1000 people for less than $100. Not bad. 

Next I setup a new list in a different niche and grew it to around 3500 within 2 weeks. The new list I started building this month using the ‘purpose method’ instead of the usual niche + keyword approach has attraced 10,119 members already for a total cost of just over $500. Which mean I’m getting clicks for under 3c and list opt-ins for 5c each.

FIVE CENTS PER OPT-IN! Yeah baby!

There is also a return on that investment, as the direct traffic received was 17,967 uniques which then went on to sign up for various CPA offers I’ve been testing on this demographic. The weekly impressions are off the chart! I tend to post an update every one or two days, just saying hi or asking a simple question and the responses are huge. I’ve seen the list take action on a broadcast offer within seconds.

This campaign only took about 40 minutes to setup originally. If you worked in demon mode you could setup 10 of these per day I reckon, but you’d be pretty tired in the end. Using my new ‘facebook hot ads’ method I’ve been averaging 15 new campaigns per day, and I’m only spending half the time! I’ll share more about facebook hot ads later, for now I just wanted to mention the stats on list building.

For example. I read recently that the default daily spend limit of $50 would increase automatically if I hit the max consectutively and paid instantly. Well I did that for a month straight and I’ve still got the $50 daily limit.

So I contacted facebook ad support last night and asked if they can increase my limit please.

BAM when I wake up this morning I’ve already been approved to the next level of $1000/day and they also emailed to let me know. If that was google, I’d be waiting next month and still not have a response.

facebook ads rock!

Sounds good huh? That’s a massive improvement on what I’m getting on AdWords, but what’s most rewarding for me is that I’ve figured out how to make facebook advertising work! When I started out advertising on FB last month, I thought it would be enough to simply migrate my AdWords campaigns and Google way of thinking across. Oh how wrong I was! The Google PPC methods do not work on FB, so I had to relearn everything from scratch before doing LARGE amounts of experimenting with different campaigns, niches and landing pages.

Finally, I’ve got a system that is profiting extremely well on autopilot and the money is truly passive! Mmmmm, the best type of income

There is so much I want to share and I’m seriously SUPER EXCITED about the potential of facebook advertising….

I can see this being my obsession for the next 6 months as I continue researching and experimenting, so watch this space as I promise to post as many tips and tutorials as I can. Given that I don’t offer much AdWords coaching anymore, I think I’ll put together a solid training course on facebook advertising along with a coaching program. Send me a note if you’re interested in learning how you can use the power of social media to gain more customers or increase your turnover. 

Here’s just a few juicy facts on Facebook for you to consider….

1. Facebook USA now gets more daily traffic than Google
2. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world (population 300M+)
3. On average, facebook users spend 4 hrs per day on the site (Google gets a few seconds of time)
4. Facebook advertising is not crowded or competitive (unlike Google AdWords)
5. Facebooks’ ad manager is simple to use when setting up campaigns (unlike Google AdWords)
6. Facebook will actually tell you what’s wrong with your ad if it’s rejected (unlike Google AdWords)
7. Facebook allows you to target people based upon their demographics (unlike Google AdWords)

Seriously, I could just go on and on about the benefits of Facebook advertising all day. But it’s Monday morning right now and I’m about to setup some new campaigns so off I must go… PLEASE KEEP WATCHING FOR UPDATES ON FACEBOOK ADVERTISING :)

My browser homepage is set to the Vertical Measures Blog, because in my opinion there is no better portal to what’s happening in the SEO world, and about a month ago they did a feature interview on the team at ontolo. What stuck out in my head about the interview was the amount of link building content covered… things that I’d never even heard of before! Considering I’ve been doing professional level SEO work since 2002, I like to think that I know a thing or two about search engine optimising… but after reading that Ontolo interview I felt really humbled and it inspired me to step up my game and learn more about link building.

So then I went off and visited the Ontolo.com website….

OMG, are you serious?!!

These guys are using SEO tools and systems that I would never have dreamed of in a million years. At this point I feel like a tiny, little acorn sitting in front of a 100ft oak tree.

So I read and read as much of their content as my brain can handle, but eventually I reach information overload and walk away to take action and practise the tips I’ve just learned from ontolo. I now understand how much more I need to learn and absorb…

I really love those moments in life though! When you think you’ve got things under control and then BAM you realise that people out there know tonnes more…. it’s an opportunity to grow and learn more, which I think is the main point in life.

So with that said, we arrive at the point where I find the Ontolo link building book! In the words of Garrett and Ben, this is what the Ontolo link building book will teach:

After reading benefits like those it was a simple (and quick) decision on ordering a copy.

Now I have my hands on it and over the next 5 days I’m going to review each section as I read them…

If you can’t wait to hear my feedback, perhaps you should go grab a copy of your own right now: Ontolo link building book

easy video player

Just a quick post before I go to bed, it’s after midnight already so I wont go into too much detail…

Today was a great day for me in terms of video marketing, as I finally finished my first sales video. This project has been literally months in the making so it’s such a good feeling to get it completed and see the results online.

It started back in January when I began researching the correct structure and sequencing required for a sales video (aka: a multimedia version of a sales page)….

It took quite a while, but once I had that down pat it became an 11 page document that listed step by step what I had to say and show the viewer in order to compell them to buy.

Then I began writing the script for my sales video… to highlight the various benefits, to outline my experience, to overcome their objections and also clever use of embedded commands. This wasn’t as easy as I originally thought it would be, but in time I fleshed out the script to a point where I was happy.

After that, I invested in a green screen studio for my house so that I could record HD quality footage. The lighting was WAYYYY trickier than with standard photography, so I spent more on the studio lights and rigging than the HD camera cost. But as I came to learn, good green screen footage is all about lighting. Once the studio was setup and I had fine tuned the configuration of the lights I was ready to begin capturing footage.

I thought it would be easy to just speak into the camera, which it kinda was but it took A LOT of takes to get it right. I had to record over an hour of footage just to capture all of my sales script… next, it was off to the editing room (yes, my house is more like a production studio than a home). I managed to edit 75 minutes of footage down to about 20 minutes, but that was too long so I cut it down to 15 minutes. It was at this point that I realised I wasn’t happy with the lighting, so back I went to the recording studio to capture everything again from scratch with a slightly different configuration of the lights.

Again, it took over an hour to capture the 11 page script. Once that was done, I went back to the editing room and chopped the footage back down to 12 minutes this time.

Once the video sequence was completed, I had to insert titles, animations, cut aways and a backing track. This was the fun part and I really enjoyed overlaying videos and animations on top of the narration.

At last! A finished product I was happy with, so I rendered the video to AVI format and went to watch TV while the workstation chugged away.

Ummm, final project ended up at over 10GB. That’s not cool!

Okay render video again, this time as WMV. Sweet, now it’s down to around 100mb… much more acceptable.

Then I did a conversion from WMV to MP4 format and uploaded it to my Easy Video Player. After embedding the correct code onto the website, the video wouldn’t actually play and all you could see was black… but the audio worked. Hmmm, bummer…. okay time to email Josh Bartlett (the genius who produced the Easy Video Player). By this point it was about 10pm on a Friday night. I figured I would just send the support request then have an early night, as surely it would take at least a day or two for a response.

Fiddled with facebook for a while chatting to friends… then about 15 minutes later I get a reply from Josh’s support team. He’d sent my message onto Chris, who contacted me directly with his feedback on the issue and a solution. It was actually quite easy, as the MP4 codecs could muck with the flash player so all I had to do was convert the original WMV file into FLV then upload to Easy Video Player.

Embed the code again. Upload new sales page and test…

WOOOOOT! It works, PERFECTLY.

So I love my new sales video… I love easy video player…. I wont say I love Josh Bartlett, but that guy rocks so I gotta send a shout out to him, chris and the whole EVP team. Thanks boys!

I’ll post more info another time about the reasons why I use Easy Video Player… if yr curious to know more, go have a look for yourself because this is probably the one video marketing tool that you can not do without! It doesn’t just help your videos, it actually makes you more money: http://www.enicholas.com/easy-video-player

Josh Bartlett is spending more time blogging and helping out his customers with IM coaching these days, so I recommend you drop by his site to see what he has to say and dont forget to sign up for email updates: http://joshbartlettblog.com/

Okay time for bed, I’m crashing out. Can’t wait to check my stats in the morning, this new sales video is going to CRUSH IT!!!!

Who wouldn’t be? While everyone is struggling to start their week and complaining about how much they hate Mondays, I’m laying in bed wondering if I should get up or go back to sleep.

A text message on my iphone at this point answered that question for me (you gotta love how the universe times things perfectly)…. it’s a client that wants to catch up for lunch. She runs a day spa here in Brisbane, we have a contra deal so that I give them marketing advice in exchange for treatments. I could do with a full body swedish massage today actually!

Yep, that’s another reason why I love this lifestyle!

Sometime this afternoon when I get home I’ll spend an hour editing a new online video I’m working on, after I upload that it should double or triple the sales conversions for one of my websites. Cha ching, more easy money in the bank from that passive revenue stream.

Then I’m going to fiddle around with AdWords for an hour or so, to publish a handful of new ads that are promoting my latest information product. Once they’re up and running, I’m hoping the campaign will add another 4 figures to my weekly turnover. Cha ching, more passive income.

At 5pm it will be time to head off to iLab as tonite I have my workshop where I’m teaching a group of people how to make money online. I really do enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others, so this will be the most rewarding thing that happens to me today. Yes, even more enjoyable than sleeping in or making money on autopilot.

I really do love this lifestyle

From there I sat back and just kept an eye on the stats, as the OTO had a specific tracking code at the checkout process which allowed me to view how many sales it was producing.

Before I share the results, I need to explain a few things.

Firstly, the OTO made absolutely no sales in the first week. But rather than dump it, I thought I’d do a review of the offer itself and realised that my copy was way too long and graphic intensive… so I took out the flashing icons and shortened the copy. For the next week, it made a few sales but something still didn’t seem perfect. Off I went to research exactly what the formula was for OTO’s and found out that I was doing everything wrong. DOH!

Well with the proven formula in my hand I went back to my website to redesign and rewrite my OTO…. Houston, we have ignition!!!

THE RESULT: That thing took off like a rocket and for the past 5 months it has pretty much doubled my sales. Yes some of those sales are at half price, but the overall conversions and turnover are way up compared with the previous period.

So then 2 weeks ago I thought I’d do the final test, turn off the OTO and see how that affected sales. Oh man, I wish I hadn’t done that as I’ve lost thousands in sales ever since disabling the offer… but it was a valuable lesson. Sales funnels work. Upsells work. Special offers work. Giving your audience a discount when they are about to leave WORKS.

So now I’m going to enable the offer again and never turn it off. It’s probably a good time to add some code to the script to make it cookie based, and actually show only once. Right now it shows everytime, so really it’s more like a special exit offer than a one time.

Are you thinking of doing a one-time-offer on your website? DO IT! DOOOOOOO IT!!!

Never considered adding a one-time-offer to your website? Dude, I suggest you get up to speed as you’re leaving money on the table and missing a bunch of sales (expect an increase anywhere from 25% – 100%)

I’ve said this before, but it amazes me when I meet people at seminars and conferences who happily tell me that they’ve been into IM for 3-5 years, they’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on various programs… but they’ve not made a cent yet.

YET?!?!

I would argue that if you can’t make money from IM after 3 years, then it doesn’t matter what you learn and it’s safe to say you’re not going to make it in this game. That may not sound like the most positive attitude to have, but the reality is that education only goes so far and in the end it comes down to the individual and their ability to do what they’ve learned.

I’m talking about ACTION people. You know, that little process of getting of your bum and doing the things that must be done to achieve your goals

With my current workshop I did some covert screening and profiling before accepting people into the group… basically, I wanted to identify the people who are committed to taking action from the rest of the crowd who simply get excited about internet marketing but never actually do anything. Out of over 60 applicants, I chose 12 of the most promising and dedicated people that fit the criteria and appeared to have the correct attitude for success. There are 2 reasons for me being so stringent in my selection process:

1. I don’t want to waste my time and knowledge on people that are there just for interest and entertainment who wont take action
2. I want to have a high success rate in the end of the workshop (I planned to have over 70% of delegates earning money straight away)

I’ve heard many of the big guys mention amongst themselves that 90% of the people that buy their Internet Marketing courses don’t actually do anything with it. I thought that was just a bad attitude on their part and perhaps the 10% strike rate had more to do with the teacher than the students. So off I went, all idealistic and positive, on a mission to prove them all wrong by having all of my workshop delegates do the SIMPLE tasks required to make money online.

Well folks, after 3 months of teaching my class as we approach the final workshop, the results are now in…

Out of the original 12 delegates, there are only 4 people left!

Some dropped out for reasons unknown, some found it too hard and reverted to excuses instead of action, a couple of them are genuinely too busy right now and plan to return in the near future. Of the 4 that remain, I knew that 2 of them would always make it to the end but the other 2 I thought would struggle and possibly drop out… I gotta say that I’m really proud of the 2 strugglers, as they’ve had to try the hardest to understand the fundamentals and take action. They’ve constantly hit walls and steep learning curves, only to pull through like absolute champions. I admire people like that, because I know that technology can be a scary beast for some people and when they push through obstacles it shows how much character and tenacity they really have!

So I guess that means I have a 33% success rate for my workshop. That figure isn’t what I was hoping for but the entire experience has been a sobering realisation that no matter how much I try, I can’t get people to help themselves. Like the cliche goes “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”.

I was talking to my buddy about this late the other night and we tried to analyse why there was such a low follow through rate from delegates. Initially, I simplified everything down to being a case of people just wont take action no matter how easy you make it for them. But after 2 hours of midnight deliberation, it finally dawned on me when I compared the workshop results to his own (lack of) action and procrastination with IM…. it was risk, specifically the fear of it.

*BING* we have an aha moment!

Now it made sense. It didn’t matter that I had explained the minute details of the process and given them a step by step guide to taking action, as the problem wasn’t with the content. It didn’t matter that I’d given them 3 weeks for each module to do tasks that would only take 1 week or less, the problem wasn’t time. It didn’t matter that I demonstrated ways of developing an information product for around $100, the problem wasn’t money. The problem was that they perceived the end result as a risk… deep down they either feared creating something tangible that could fail in the real world, or they feared success itself.

It sounds crazy I know, but humans are literally afraid of their own success and most of them sub-conciously sabotage any efforts that could possibly lead to success. There are thousands of studies done on the subject so have a look around if you don’t believe me… but I know emphatically, absolutely 100% that this is why people are breezing in and out of the IM community.

They come in thinking that Internet Marketing is so exciting and easy, they run around on the forums being inquisitive leaving magnanimous comments, they download as much course work as they can get their hands on, then they find a plan that feels comfortable and begin executing it… only to stall somewhere around the half way mark. Did things become too difficult? Hell no, this isn’t difficult work (especially when you have a road map and formula). What happens is that after they take action, the mind becomes cognizant that a process has begun and soon there will be a final result which attracts a judgement or score…. so then the dummy brain kicks and says things like “what if it doesn’t work, what if I muck up this simple process and look like a failure?”.

Next comes the ubiquitous excuse that something unforseen has come up and they are too busy, but they’re sure they’ll come back to this soon. This allows the person to avoid any risk of failure, as the process is never completed and in their defense they can always justify it with the excuse of “oh I was too busy, but I haven’t given up as I’m going to come back to this next year”. But deep down on a sub conscious level, they actually chose the distraction and kept themselves busy with other stuff. Procastination is a funny little thing, as it gives you instant gratification. When faced with the task of doing real work and possibly failing in the end, you literally get a good feeling straight away by giving up. If you are known for procrastination, think about that for a second… would you rather feel good for a few minutes by giving up, or would you rather endure a few weeks of uncertainty to be rewarded with something that will make you feel good for years and decades?

So I think I’ll end it on that note and challenge you, the reader, to think about Internet Marketing in these terms:

would you rather feel good for a few minutes by giving up on something worth while that is proven to work, or would you rather endure a few weeks of uncertainty to be rewarded with something that will make you feel good for years and decades to come while paying you passive money that gives you financial freedom and the options to have everything you want in this lifetime?

You see I thought my first book would do very little, but that’s a consistent earner every week. The subsequent books I produced after that were expected to go gang busters and earn me a motza, the reality is that at most I sell one of those per week. But as with everything in life, you gotta look for the lesson in it all so you can move forward.

For me, the biggest (and hardest and most expensive) lesson from the past 12 months was the learning curve of picking the right niche. I’ve always been good at finding and picking niches, based upon traffic. But after having so many ebooks (great ones at that) fail I had to evaluate everything again and find a formula that works. I’m happy to say that I’ve figured that out now so much is riding on the results of the latest niche I’m about to launch in. FINGERS CROSSED!

So what advice would I give someone based upon the past 12 months? Well quite simply, if you’re not solving real problems then you’re not going to make much money with information products. Dont get me wrong, servicing fanatics with hobbies can work in your favour but if you miss that market then you’re probably going to do very little in terms of sales. If you can provide a solution to an urgent problem, then you don’t need to sell anything as they are already looking for answers and are willing to spend.

On that note, if you want to check out Eben Pagans latest course he’s releasing the guru blueprint this week. Out of all the top guys in IM, Eben is the only one who’s teaching the real tricks of picking the RIGHT niches. Everyone else just teaches marketing, but that doesnt count for much if you’re in the wrong niche (which I think 80% of people out there are doing).

How to grow apples = poor niche
How to make a piniata = poor niche
How to treat acne = great niche
How to fix your credit = great niche

Have a think about that and try to integrate it into your own business processes. Even if you’re half way through a new niche, if it’s not revolving around a serious problem then I urge you to rethink your strategy before spending any more time and money.

automated sales formula

I’ve had over 600 people visit in the past few days looking for information about Keith Wellmans Automated Sales Formula program and quite a few have contacted me to enquire about the bonus coaching I offered last time that ASF was launched.

Although I’m not actively promoting the Automated Sales Formula, I do believe in the value of the content and can personally vouch for the quality of the training.

A common complaint that went around last time the program was opened, was that customers who signed up with Keith didn’t quite understand how to get up and running. Keith kindly offered everyone an automated service where his technical people could do all the hard work with setup and hosting, so you dont need to worry if you aren’t very geeky when it comes to IT issues.

Of those that chose to set things up on their own, without the help of technical staff, some came to me stating that the templates and pages included in the Automated Sales Formula members area did not work. Yet when I investigated things further, I found that they hadn’t done the required configuration which is clearly stated in Keiths instructions for getting started. This to me shows that they didn’t even bother to read the training material or follow clear guidelines.

Some people even went so far as to say that Keith didn’t provide training or guidelines, but I’ve personally read every page of the members area and training manuals so I know for a fact that everything you need to get started (even with no prior experience) is provided.

But I understand that some people are impatient and just want to get a few campaigns up and running before doing the necessary learning part, so if you are one of them I recommend you buy using my link so that you can receive instant guidance and help on any part of the Automated Sales Formula program from someone that knows and uses it.

I did also get a question from someone asking about the traffic software… as they wanted to know if it works. Again, I’ve personally sat down to use the software at the first chance I got and was receiving hundreds of visitors within the first day so I know that it produces traffic. You do however, have to take the time to setup campaigns and follow the easy steps to capture traffic from twitter.

Nothing is truly automated, please get this firmly ingrained in your head. You need to set things up initially, and from there the process of creating traffic and generating sales is automated but you still need to do some work up front. This goes with anything in life, there is no magic button that you can simply press to make things happen.

So just to recap… I’m still offering 8 weeks coaching and support as a special bonus when you sign up for the Automated Sales Formula using my link below. Included in that is unlimited help with the program to ensure there are no gaps in your understanding and someone will be there to help you get started creating traffic and sales by using the templates and videos that Keith provides to all members

PURCHASE AUTOMATED SALES FORMULA VERSION 2.0 WITH BONUS COACHING & SUPPORT

automated sales formula bonus coaching

So it looks like Keith Wellman and his team have launched Automated Sales Formula version 2.0 to the public after around 3 months of improvements since the first version was released in January. What exactly has been improved in the Automated Sales Formula program though?

I received a few emails from his JV manager Rachel Karl this week to give me an update on the refinements, so I thought I would share those with everyone that is considering purchasing the latest version.

Before I do though, I feel it necessary to explain a few of the common problems with the previous version of Automated Sales Formula so that you understand why the latest improvements were required.

Firstly, when ASF was launched back in January it was promoted by Mike Filsaime (among others) and that put a large amount of buzz out there about Keith’s Video Skinning techniques. Many people, myself included, were unaware of Keith Wellman before then but after watching his sales video I was immediately motivated to seriously consider purchasing the program.

I did a bit of research on Keith and then turned to my fellow warriors for fadvice on his previous history and results. Pretty much everything I read on the warrior forum wasn’t very encouraging or polite… and that would usually be enough to scare most potential customers away, but as much as I love the warriors they can be a tough and fickle bunch at times! I decided to look past Keith’s previous mistakes, as most of them sounded like they related to issues pertaining to him growing the business too fast and not being able to keep up with customer support. That’s hardly a punishable offence, and can happen to the best of us. The first version of Automated Sales Formula was only $470 so I decided to sign up on the launch day before the offer expired.

After I purchased, I was hoping to get straight into the material but did not receive any welcome email or login details. Similar stories were being posted on the warrior forum so I left a comment (in a polite, matter of fact style) to advise that I wasn’t able to get into the website within the first 24 hours. When I checked back the next day, Keith had left a message with his personal email address stating that he would personally look into things and help get me up and running. From that point, it was all smooth sailing for me due to the fact that I had one on one contact with Keith. Other customers however, weren’t quite so lucky and were becoming frustrated with the 2-3 day turnaround it would take to receive a response from the support team at justaskkeith.com

This was in essence the largest and most common problem with Automated Sales Formula Version 1…. long delays with obtaining support and guidance.

Version 2.0 of the Automated Sales Formula program has been released with a support team that is double the size and phone support also. That alone should put many minds at ease, as it would indicate that the response times will be cut in half compared to last time. I personally think that Keith will have less customers for this version, so that will be even less support tickets which should (in theory) mean that reponse times are even faster.

I’ve been advised, but haven’t personally witnessed, that the new version of ASF is a more stable product than the last. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m guessing it points to improvements with the website, the registration and login process, and perhaps additions to the content. Which brings me to my main point… the content included in Keith Wellman’s Automated Sales Formula.

For under $500 I don’t know of ANY other video marketing course that even comes close to the quality of the content Keith has provided to his customers. The website has absolute masses of educational documents, procedures and techniques for gaining traffic and improving sales conversions using his video skinning method of marketing. I love that he breaks down his method into a step by step roadmap that anyone else can follow when planning and producing internet video marketing campaigns. I think that this part of the program is worth at least 5 times the price he’s asking. You can take that opinion all the way to the bank too!

The reason why most people have chosen to purchase the ASF program though is for the automated campaigns and marketing videos that Keith provides to his customers. I’m not into affiliate marketing, so that side of the program doesn’t interest me in the slightest… but if you’re short of ideas, knowledge and action I can see why it would be enticing to have everything provided on a platter so that all you do is plugin your affiliate code and aweber ID’s.

I wish I could give you a definitive answer on if the support issues have been fixed, but I can’t due to the fact that I haven’t needed support from them in months. For newbies though, this would be the deciding factor so if you’re finding the response times good or bad please leave a comment below and share your feedback with everyone.

One option though if you are worried about support, is to purchase the Automated Sales Formula program using my link below and I will personally give you 8 weeks of coaching and support to help you through understanding the content and getting everything setup. That should be peace of mind coming from someone that has purchased and used Automated Sales Formula for almost 5 months now…

PURCHASE AUTOMATED SALES FORMULA VERSION 2.0 WITH BONUS COACHING & SUPPORT

Well it’s been about 8 months in the making and I’m really happy to report that this week I kicked off my first workshop in April! There are 12 delegates attending, I had twice as many register but I kept the numbers low so that I could focus on each person and not spread myself thin. Another reason for keeping the numbers low, is because I want to achieve a high success rate with this group… specifically, my goal is to make sure that every single delegate creates their own information product and creates profit within 3 months.

There are a total of 6 classes in the workshop, each going for around 3 hours. I’ve spread the classes out to be 3 weeks apart, so that everyone has time to do their research and homework after learning a different step in the development cycle of creating an info product.

The first workshop was completed on Wednesday night, everyone arrived on time and the feedback was very positive. This class was focused purely on the subject of ‘how to find a niche’ because everyone I’ve ever spoken to in the IM community says they have major troubles with picking a niche. I’ve personally never had this problem, because of my early days in traffic & SEO when we learnt the art of category and keyword research… and that prior knowledge is something of value that I can teach to others now in 2010.

As soon as we had the projector sorted and the wifi configured for the laptops, I delved straight into my own personal history of dealing with info products and how I’ve both succeeded and failed when it comes to the process of how to find a niche. Still to this day I thank my blessings that my first info product was a success, because if I had only experienced the failed info products I created after that first one I could have easily walked away from info marketing with the belief that it doesn’t work or I can’t make any money from it…But as I mentioned to my students, the failed ebooks I created aren’t really failures… they are valuable lessons on what not to do in future. At this point I asked a few people in the class if they were scared of having their first ebook bomb miserably, a few hands went up, but after discussing it as a group they came to realise that the process of creating an ebook would be a success unto itself and the passive income would simply be icing on the cake.

The biggest and most important point when you want to find a niche, is the underlying motivation for people in that niche. Specifically, why are customers looking for a product. One example that you will find online, is the train of thought that you should pick a niche you are passionate about. The gurus will often teach that you should pick a niche that people are fanatical about, like golf. I agree with both of those, but for me the most valuable lesson I can share is that you should ALWAYS pick a niche that is derived from a problem. If someone has a problem, and that problem is urgent or critical enough then they will go out of their way to find the solution and buy the best thing to solve their problem. Put simply, if you pick anything other than a problem niche then you will always have to sell the benefits to the audience. But if it’s a problem and you have the solution, there is no selling to do! You offer it and they take it, a much easier way of making sales!

So after a few questions and answers, I explained then demonstrated a variety of methods on how to find a niche for information products….

• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH EZINEARTICLES.COM
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH GOOGLE TRENDS
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH EBAY PULSE
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH ASK IQ
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH AMAZON SALES STATS
  
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH CLICKBANK MARKETPLACE
• HOW TO FIND A NICHE WITH THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

So for the next workshop, I’m going to teach the class how they can evaluate their niche ideas to decide if it’s worth getting into. I have a niche scoring formula that evaluates niche ideas to give a success/failure indicator along with a score to show how likely it is to make money. I’ve also developed this myself and I only share it with people in the workshop, you won’t actually find it anywhere else or anyone that is even evaluating their niche ideas with such a scientific approach.

Stay tuned for workshop #2 on how to evaulate a niche….

How to find a niche

You’ve gotta love Google Trends! This website is basically a snapshot of the hot categories and search terms on Google today.

This particular method of how to find a niche is pretty much the best way I know of to find hot current niches that are experiencing a large spike in interest. If you want instant traffic, then targetting hot Google Trends is the place to find your niche.

When visiting the Google Trends website, you’ll see 3 main options:

1. a search box to query the trends database
2. a column of hot trends
3. a column of hot searches

If like many people you don’t have any ideas for niches, then jump on the site and you’ll instantly see 10 hot topics and up to 30 hot searches. The search box is great for when you already have a niche and want to investigate things further… simply enter your niche keyword and you’ll see all sorts of stats from the periods of interest to the most searched based upon country. You can also enter a website address and Google Trends will show you the websites and keywords that their visitors also look for… that there is very cool if you’re trying to compete with an existing website in your niche!

The hot searches on Google Trends are often focused on disposable traffic, the type that doesn’t last very long. Chasing what is hot right now doesn’t fit with my hedgehog concept so I don’t persue it personally. What that means, is that in order to target and convert traffic using the hot niches on Google Trends, you generally have to be doing it constantly over and over. There is a lot of continuous effort in chasing hot trends, and once those trends aren’t hot then the traffic usually drops off the radar.

I prefer the type of niches that are steady or evergreen, so it doesn’t matter what’s happening in the news as they will always be in demand. In terms of logistics, this means I can set something up once and it will attract traffic and generate sales month after month, year after year.

http://www.google.com/trends

How to find a niche

Using eBay Pulse to find a niche has very specific benefits as it’s aligned closely with consumable products. This can greatly help you with choosing a niche for an information product, with just a little bit of lateral thinking you can take an item that is in demand and think of ideas on which to create information products on.

To give you an example, today on eBay Pulse the best selling item is the iPod Touch… now you’re not exactly going to make an eBook on the features of an iPod touch as they are so many websites and youtube videos that already do that. But with just a little bit of thought, it’s not hard to come up with ideas like: a guide on using your ipod touch, how to make money from creating ipod touch apps, or an ebook on how to make money selling iPod touches on eBay.

When visiting this website, you’ll see a list of popular searches, a list of stores with the most listings and then a list down the page which shows the most watched items. This page only shows a snapshot of generic items, so if you want to see what is selling in a particular niche then just follow the link down the bottom that says ’see more eBay Pulse categories’ and click your way to the correct section. This will then display popular selling items in a particular category, allowing you to identify niches to target

http://pulse.ebay.com/

How to find a niche

Using ASK IQ as a method of how to find a niche has both pros and cons, as it’s a lagging indicator that is about 2 months behind the current date. The best way I can see of making these stats work for you is when you use them in conjuction with Google Trends to compare current niches with niches from 2 months ago. If something shows up on ASK IQ as a hot niche and it is still present in the hot Google Trends, then there is a good chance that it will continue being popular for another 2 months.

The one good thing about using this method, is that it gives you a much different view of popular trends. Ask traffic is different from Google traffic which is different from Yahoo traffic, so this will give you ideas out of the usual realm we encounter in Google Land.

When you are on a mission to find a new niche on the ASK IQ site you will see different options to the previous websites I’ve covered. On ASK IQ, you’ll see top searches along with top advancing searches…. the latter are searches which are rising in popularity quickly (gaining momentum).

You’ll also see top news searches, which is very similar to the popular news search feature listed on Google Trends. They also have top movies on ASK IQ, which would be handy if you are chasing entertainment traffic by creating movie reviews. This method is actually under rated, as there are HUGE amounts of traffic going to the latest movies and it’s not that hard to rank in the search engines… the traffic itself is quite easy to convert also as I have a friend that makes money using only this niche.

http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

How to find a niche

Using sales and search statistics from Amazon is basically a fool-proof and guaranteed method for finding a niche that is popular and selling well! Let’s think about that for a minute…

Amazon is the largest book store in the world, so they have a large marketplace with large numbers of users. Those users leave traces of their consumer patterns by doing searches, by creating wish lists, leaving book reviews and also when buying books.

So if you navigate to the family section of Amazon Books then filter by best selling, you’ll be looking at titles which receive the most amount of sales. If the top selling book for that niche is pregnancy, then you are able to target that niche when creating your own info product. There is much more to drilling down into that niche and finding out what the audience wants of course, but at least now you have a solid niche idea that took just a few minutes to find.

Also, if you filter results based upon most reviews, this can illustrate niches that are popular because the customers aren’t simply buying the title they’re also reading it and discussing the contents with others. If you then look into the book reviews, you will see them peppered with negative comments and questions… THAT STUFF IS GOLD. Because if a book is popular, and people are saying that they enjoyed A,B & C but they are annoyed they can’t find D, E & F you know exactly what to create your info product on.

I could go on for hours about using Amazon stats to find a niche, but I’ll save that for my workshops. For now though, if you want to know how to find a niche then you can’t go wrong with the data provided for free on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com

How to find a niche

When you want to know how to find a niche that is in demand and selling, the sales stats in Clickbank are just as valuable as Amazon. CB stats are probably one of the best places to find a niche when you’re researching ideas for an ebook, as they are focused just on information products and digital downloads. The CB marketplace straight up tells you what is popular, what is selling, and also what is not.

In just a few minutes you can search or browse your way through the categories and find a niche that is selling well. From that, you can simply research the top products to find what they’re missing out on and create an info product that has those sections plus more. In essence, Clickbank allows you to gather market research data at someone else’s expense. If that isn’t leverage, I don’t know what is!

The clickbank marketplace has had a slight face lift recently so to find a niche you must first select a category from the list on the left of the page. From there, you will be presented with an ordered listed that are sorted by default as popularity. I like to hit the drop down on the top of that list and sort results by gravity, then I can see what is the best selling info product for that particular niche. If the top product has a decent gravity score then you can look into the search stats (using any type of keyword tool you want) in order to judge how much traffic the niche receives.

If you don’t want to use the category method of finding popular products/niches on clickbank then just use the search box on the marketplace page to look for the exact niche you are investigating.

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

How to find a niche

This method is BY FAR the easiest way, the most productive way, and the most valuable way possible if you want to learn how to find a niche. Combined with my strategy for targetting problems, in just a few seconds I am able to use special wildcard searches to instantly identify HOT niches that people are willing to spend money on. When you compare a few of the top results here with Clickbank popular products it’s easy to find good commercial niches that are selling like hot cakes. Mmmmmm, hot cakes!

I had to  invent this wildcard method of finding niches on my own over the past 5 years. It’s definitely not something you would think of when starting out, but once it’s explained to you the lightbulb goes off in your head and it all makes perfect sense. After a little bit of playing around, everyone in my niche workshop was finding their own niche ideas after 2 minutes and you could see the dollar signs in their eyes.

I’m not going to share my wildcard method of how to find a niche using the Google Keyword Tool out in public sorry, if you want to learn it you’ll have to join one of my workshops or register for coaching with me. The commercial value of this niche finding method is HUGE, so it’s something I will protect as best I can.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

How to find a niche

The first method of how to find a niche that I teach in my workshop is focused on the EzineArticles.com ‘most viewed’ section. This handy page will show the topics and niches that are in demand right now based upon EZA page impressions.

EzineArticles displays the 30 most viewed articles, I don’t know the exact time period this is for but the results are fairly recent. The relevance of this list is that EZA has a huge amount of content and visitors, and with so many people visiting the site you get a good feel for what the general public is looking for. If you know that a large amounts of people are looking for a particular subject, then you have a niche to investigate!

I also compare the most viewed articles on EZA with the clickbank marketplace to see if there are information products that are in that niche. If I can find related ebooks, then I can test market those as an affiliate before creating my own product. If there aren’t any products on CB that match a hot topic on EZA, then you’ve got yourself an untapped niche (but usually not for long so get in there quick!).

http://ezinearticles.com/?type=mv

Nobody enjoys listening to someone rabbit on while jumping from one topic to another. If you can begin your video with a problem the user can relate to then lead them through the process of solving it, the only thing left is to provide them a link to purchase…

TIP #2 : Keep it short (2-4 minutes max)

Don’t try to make a 30 second commercial, people will instinctively think they’re watching a TV ad. Instead, make your video about a personal experience or professional opinion that draws their attention in. Saying you enjoyed a product is better than selling it!

TIP #3 : Keep it moving as often as you can

Even if you choose to make your videos using PowerPoint, be sure to animate the page elements and transition between slides so that the attention span is constantly being reset. This way the viewer is less likely to click back or to another website!

TIP #4 : Copy the infomercial recipe

The infomercial industry is big business and they have spent large amounts of time and money refining the process to get results. You can replicate that process for your own product by using the AIDA formula or the problem-agitate-solution method.

TIP #5 : Optimise your video pages

Make sure that your main keywords are listed in the text content beside your video listing and link to it from other video pages. Be sure to have a link to your sales page or website if using video hosting sites like YouTube.

TIP #6 : Leverage your time with tools

Don’t just upload one video to YouTube, sign up for a free Tube Mogul account and have your video automatically distributed to dozens of websites at once. Then cut a different version of your video that is shorter and then upload that… repeat each week or month!

Brisbane Internet Business Meetup

I’m speaking tonight at a local networking group that I belong to, which is basically a meetup.com club for people in Brisbane that are interested in online business.

My presentation is on ‘Effective Google Advertising’ and I will be giving the audience a general introduction to AdWords before moving onto some inside techniques of succeeding with Google Adwords (pay per click) advertising. I’ve published the PowerPoint here for everyone to download after the night and refer to….

Click here to download powerpoint presentation on ‘Effective Google Advertising’.
Click here to download PDF version of the presentation

traffic bug

I signed up for Mike Roberts’ software (traffic bug) about a month ago and have been testing the trial account since. Gotta say, I’m pretty impressed with the results I’ve obtained from just a few hours using traffic bug.

I simply input a URL and some descriptive text for 7 websites I had just built, then walk away to let the bug do it’s thing. After checking my stats today, I see that traffic bug has obtained a combined total of 1,753 new backlinks, bookmarks and submissions for those 7 websites.

I had my eye on traffic bug for over 6 months but finally went ahead and tried it out around the time I was doing a lot of RSS submissions. Both are very handy to my business because they allow me to spend a small amount of time setting up a new campaign that will then go out obtain a massive amount of inbound links. This is a great way to leverage your productivity, but it also cuts out the boring tasks involved with getting links and bookmarks to your sites.

Well I got an email today reminding me that my free trial to traffic bug is about to expire in a few days. In the message was an offer to sign up for $19/month with protection from future price increases while still receiving updates to the software. For me, this is money well spent considering how much time it saves me and what I get in return.

If you’re thinking of trying out traffic bug then I recommend doing so, you can get an extended trial period when registering through the thirty day challenge too. I think then you get 40 days instead of the standard 30 day trial for traffic bug.

Leave me a comment below if you’ve used traffic bug or similar types of software, it would be good to hear other opinions out there

list building

Okay lets take stock of where things are at so far after my previous posts on list building (part 1 & part 2):

1. Setup an account with a list management / email marketing provider

2. Create a list and signup box

3. Insert your signup box on your website

4. Have a juicy headline and something valuable as a giveaway

So get those parts done and you’ve got a good foundation setup to begin list building. Now lets talk about the next part of the process: LIST MANAGEMENT/RELATIONSHIP MARKETING.

List management in my opinion is really the art of relationship management, or as Seth Godin and Jeff Bezos puts it ‘relationship marketing. One of the most important things… actually make that THE MOST IMPORTANT THING about list management is that you DO NOT view your list as a bunch of sales prospects that you can simply bark at everytime you want to.

Shift your way of thinking and view them as good friends (in that you shouldnt send hype and spam to your friends) and also see them as a list of paying clients that (so you provide clear and valuable advice all the time).

So with that in mind, you want to provide regular content to your list and expect nothing in return. So rather than send out hype and crap everyday saying ‘you really cant do without this widget/product’ or ‘5 tips to make you an instant millionaire’ think about actual usable information that will benefit your readers. Some people like to broadcast to their list twice a week, others like to do it once a week. Different frequencies work better in certain situations, so I encourage you to research this area and choose what suits your audience best.

You can either create a bunch of content and setup autoresponder emails that will send out automatically when you specify, or you can setup a schedule so that each Tuesday you write an email to your list, or you can simply send out things when you think of something useful. I like to do a combination of all these methods so that list members get autoresponders that are targetted to the niche, they get little snippets when I think of them and a regular monthly newsletter that has the latest info from that subject area.

Oh and I have a ratio that is 5:1 which means that for every 5 pieces of free content/advise I giveaway I like to give 1 sales offer. That’s a really nice balance which will get a healthy return and sales conversion rate from your readers

Dont hype things up, keep the tone friendly and personal. I have a gmail account setup that is used to subscribe to many types of newsletters so that I can keep an eye on how others are communicating with their lists. More often than not, I see broadcast emails from marketers that are just embarassing. They get all excited and turn into salesmen with ADD, touting their service or product with superlatives and animated copy. Quite simply, these marketers believe their own BS and think that their readers will lap up any rott that they email out.

Generally speaking, people aren’t stupid and they know instinctively when someone is trying to sell to them. Dont try to over sell, do the opposite and undersell! Make recommendations, with reasons you can backup, then encourage your readers to consider the purchase for their own motives.

You can be critical, but dont go off on a negative rant! What this means is that humans are suspicious of anyone that is ALWAYS positive, because people aren’t that way 100% of the time. If you can review a product and include some constructive criticism with your list of benefits, your audience will see that you are genuine with your advice. This goes a long way towards building trust and the relationship which is so important to making money from a list.

In summary, the 2nd half of list management is about building trust and a relationship with your readers. Because once you have their trust, they will be far more receptive to your offerings!

From there, I encourage you to interact with your list. Actively survey them on what they want, things you can do better and perhaps suggestions they have for content. Your driving force should be about pleasing your list, finding out what they need most and then giving them exactly that.

If you do all of these steps, then I ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE that you will be making good amounts of sales and online income. It’s a much more productive method for making money than simply selling a product with a sales page.

list building

So now for some fundamentals to help you with list building…

List building isnt just the process of putting a signup box on your website and collecting email addresses. If you previously viewed things that way, then I can understand why you wouldnt focus on LB but there are a few more tricks to the process. To be fair, the entire process should be called list management as building is only the first part. Managing the list of subscribers is where the real magic happens.

Now if you’ve never built a list before, then the first thing you need is a place to store your subscriber database. Here are a few of the more popular platforms:

• aweber
• icontact
• constant contact
• mailout.com

When I first started out, I actually used the list management software that came pre-installed on my web server. I recommend that you dont go that route to avoid potential pitfalls down the track like blacklisting and consumer complaints. Going with an online provider gives you double opt-in protection along with load balancing and spam prevention. I use aweber these days after reviewing many of the others and I simply love it.

For about $50 each quarter it really is great value for money. But no matter which one you choose, just find something that suits your needs and budget. Once that is setup, you will have the ability to create a signup form to put on your website or blog.

In terms of web design and layout, you want to give your signup box (also called an opt-in box) prominence on the page. It should be above the fold, either in the center or right hand side, with highly visible colours that stand out from the rest of your page. So if your colour palette is mostly cool earthy tones, make your signup box with a thick dashed red border and orange background with a nice big submit button.

Now that you have the signup box embedded into your site and styled it to stand out to your readers, you want to give them a compelling reason to actually join your list. Think outside the square here, dont just put a boring headline that says “JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER” because that isnt enticing and it’s actually quite vague because what on earth does a newsletter do for the reader?? So word the headline to be something specific and juicy, if your niche is investment have a headline that says “GET THE LATEST STOCK TIPS FREE” or “HEAR ABOUT MARKET MOVERS BEFORE THEY TAKE OFF WITH OUR EMAIL UPDATES”.

The headline or a newsletter isnt simply enough to build a list, the best way is by giving people something valuable up front then ongoing content on a regular basis. So anything from an ebook or report, to a review or some consultation, to the chance of winning a new bike/tv/etc. Make it relevant to your niche of course, there’s no point in offering a bonsai tree guide to your audience of motorbike enthusiasts. If your blog is about plasma TV’s then put up a promotion that gives people the chance to win the latest multi control remote in exchange for their name and email address.

So is everyone following so far? If you’ve already encountered some terms that escape you then post a question below and dont be shy okay! Oh this might be a good time to repeat our mantra…

“I WILL FOCUS ON LIST BUILDING AS THE MAIN AREA OF MY ONLINE BUSINESS TO GENERATE LEADS, THEN THE SALES WILL FOLLOW!”

For the next part of this series, I’ll give a bunch of tips and guidance specifically on relationship building. This is probably the most important thing to learn once you start building your list. You will be surprised how different the methods that work are to what you think will work…

» Click here to read part 3 of this series on list building

video marketing results

I haven’t had a huge amount of time over the past week to devote to video marketing, client projects are starting to ramp up again for the new year so time is precious right now.

I do want to report the latest results from my video marketing test campaign from a few weeks back though…

So for the 2 word term I was targetting, my video no longer ranks in the top 10 in either youtbue or google video. I think this has to do with the amount of page views, or lack of, so I’m going to replicate the campaign with the same optimising with one difference… this time I’m going to pump a bunch of traffic into it and see if the view count affects how it sits in the results.

The 3 word term I was targetting is still holding in the top 5, but I’ve slipped from the #1 spot recently. I think this is for the same reasons as above.

So what is the lesson from this? Well I think there are a few key factors, I’m not certain yet but the next round of testing should prove or disprove that:

• interlinking videos should help page rank
• increasing page impressions of the video should help retain search position
• having a video longer than 2 minutes should help retain search position

I’ll distribute another round of test videos tonite then keep an eye on the results over the next week then report back as things happen.

On a personal note, I’m a little sad that I didn’t retain the top positions for these videos! But with a little more effort and smarts I feel that obtaining and keeping top position for any mid – long tail keyword using video marketing is something that anyone can do so long as you follow a formula.

list building

Firstly, I’m no expert on list building. I’ve researched how a lot of the successful guys approach the subject and integrated their best methods with my own knowledge of the web demographic.

So before we get into any tips and techniques, I’d like to impress something upon you to switch the way you think… repeat this as your mantra from now on!

“I WILL FOCUS ON LIST BUILDING AS THE MAIN AREA OF MY ONLINE BUSINESS TO GENERATE LEADS, THEN THE SALES WILL FOLLOW!”

So to put that into context…

If you currently spend your time chasing page impressions and monetising your traffic, you should focus on converting that traffic to opt-in subscribers.

If you currently spend money on buying PPC traffic from adwords trying to convert it into sales, you should focus on enticing them to join your list.

If you have a blog that gives away your opinions and knowledge for anyone to read, you should focus on encouraging visitors to join your list.

If you do affiliate marketing and make sales by pumping traffic to a sales page, you should modify your funnel to have leads go to your list rather than straight to the publisher signup page.

So lets repeat that mantra again…

“I WILL FOCUS ON LIST BUILDING AS THE MAIN AREA OF MY ONLINE BUSINESS TO GENERATE LEADS, THEN THE SALES WILL FOLLOW!”

What I’m trying to impress upon you, is that EVERYTHING you do should be about list building rather than doing it as a compliment to your online efforts or something you do occasionally.

I’ll blog about the fundamentals of list building and relationship marketing in part 2 of this post, keep yr eye out!

» Click here to read part 2 of list building

google video search

The video I distributed a few days ago has made it to the #1 and #2 spot in the google video search results and youtube. It started at #9 within the first day, then dropped down a page or two, then made it back up to the top 2 spots. I achieved 2 spots because I recut the main video into a slightly different sequence then distributed with similar keywords.

Next I’m going to interlink each video to point to each other and spread some link juice around.

I uploaded some new videos tonight, for the same niche but this time targetting a 3 term keyword. I will let you know when that makes it into the video search results and the position it achieves, I’m hoping for another #1 as this is 3 words now and is getting close to being long tail video marketing.

underground 6 seminar

It’s time to grab tickets to the Underground 6 Seminar, organised and presented by Yanik Silver. I just read an email from Yanik and he’s announced that there are only a few days until registrations close for early bird tickets. If you missed out on these, you wouldn’t be at the special VIP dinner with everyone along with the secret bonus day that others can’t even look into.

I’ve already got my ticket and cannot wait until this event in March. I’m looking forward to joining the extra days and events that early bird tickets receive at the Underground 6 Seminar. The hotel precinct that is housing UG6 and it’s special agents is absolutely amazing, we have nothing like this type of building here in Australia.

For anyone that is interested in learning more about Internet Marketing should definitely be at Underground 6, you’ll get to meet Yanik Silver in person as he works the crowd during the day and at bar afterwards.

Oh and did I mention, if you sign up for your ticket within 48 hours you’ll receive my special bonus package that helps you get setup with making automated profits from the Internet straight away no matter which guru internet marketer you’re following.

Click here to grab the last tickets for earlybird entry to Underground 6 Seminar with Yanik Silver 

google video search

The results are already in after distributing 2 videos yesterday.

The first video has already made it to #1 position for google video and youtube for the 3 term search phrase I was targetting, all within 24 hours. 

The second video made it to #9 position (still on the front page, just) for a 2 term keyword that is HUGELY competitive. We’re talking about the dating niche, so ranking first page for a 2 term phrase is very encouraging. Next I’m going to target a set of long tail keywords (3 term & 4 term) to see if I can make #1 for the subniches…

singles-dating.org

Okay so it’s pretty much 10 hours since I started my chunking schedule for today, the results are good… very good.

All in all, I’m quite proud of the video I produced today in terms of content and quality. The chunking has helped in every aspect of my day so it looks like this will be my new good habit to adopt in 2010.

TIME SAVING: Firstly, I allocated 6 chunks of 90 minutes for each different task required. Yesterday these 6 chunks took me over 12 hours, so by being more efficient I reduced my man hours today by 90mins.

PRODUCITIVITY: I felt much more focussed today, I wasn’t constantly trying to figure out the context every 10 minutes. Some tasks that I usually dred doing so I drag them out over a full day, but by doing them in one chunk I produce almost twice as many as when multitasking.

QUALITY OF WORK: There is no comparison to the video I created yesterday (in terms of music score, editing, video graphics, transitions and visual story) and the video I created today. By doing focussed chunks of research for media, instead of on the fly while doing video editing, meant that I had more time to browse the available footage and images. Not only was I able to compile 3 times as much media when compared with yesterday, the final video was just over 90% longer in play time.  My next target from here is to double the length time and produce a marketing video that is 4 minutes in length.

VIDEO COMPRESSION: Found a huge time/cost saving trick today, instead of uploading massive avi video files I did the conversion locally to .flv and shrunk the original version of 2 gigbytes down to a flash movie that is 8.4 megabytes. That not only saves my bandwidth, but also the amount of time it takes me to upload the video and then also for mogul & geiser to distribute.

DISTRIBUTION: Although I didn’t meet my target for today, I only fell short by just one site. Using geiser and mogul, I had my video sent out to 9 video websites with a few clicks of the mouse. That will get easier from here as I now have accounts saved into the software.

Traffic from the video and profiles are directed to a niche website I created in about 2 hours using PLR content and WP. CPA deals are then inserted into the site templates to convert traffic: www.singles-dating.org was the best domain I could find yesterday.

Comment on my video below, it’s really a proof of concept on using stock photography and footage with no voice over. I spent roughly $40 on media to produce the 2 minute video, much quicker and cheaper than outsourcing for a person to do narration. I will start creating videos with voice overs next week then test against the written message version.

It’s the weekend in a few hours, so I think I’ll power off and get some rest.

… or maybe jump back into the editing studio to recut todays video into 2 x 1 minute videos. Then I can quickly upload those thru geiser and mogul to increase todays output to 3 final cut videos.

Okay, so maybe I wont get that last chunk of time free now

“sidenote: youtube captures 43rd second of video for the still thumbnail. Optimise keyword/headline on that frame to improve click through’s”

“update: video made #9 in google video search results and also youtube, all within 24 hours”

“update: video made it to #1 and #2 spot, now with side by side listing at the top of front page in google video & youtube, all within 4 days”

I found that multitasking while scripting /editing /producing is not condusive to productivity. When my brain had to deal with so many different subjects, it couldn’t think ahead for all parts and only the current part. This resulted in only 2 test videos being cut and one real video being broadcast at the end of the day.

I made it to tube mogul and traffic geiser at around 11pm (which was earlier than my estimated time of 3am the next morning). The video ended up being broadcast manually through a YouTube account. Received traffic within hours and the video is #1 for it’s keyword and long tail phrase in YouTube results. side note: need to figure out how to also attract comments to help the SEO…

To improve productivity, I’m going to only do chunking tasks today (instead of multitasking) and I will see how much output I have tonight. I just put each chunk into my Google Calendar, which syncs with my iPhone, which then gives me little reminders at each interval so I stick to the schedule and chunking is efficient.

1st 90 min: register for 10 video hosting accounts from different providers. customise profiles with bio info, photos and weblinks
15 min break: get up, stretch, drink water & eat vegies/fruit

2nd 90 min: collate footage/pics/audio into folders in preparation for editing mode
15 min break: get up, stretch, drink water & eat vegies/fruit

3rd 90 min: Write short sequence script for visual story telling and sales messages

1 hour break: have some lunch, play with the dogs, read a few pages from a current book

1st 90 min: compose & edit media files into video then mix the background music and voice over
15 min break: get up, stretch, drink water & eat vegies/fruit

2nd 90 min: compose & edit media files into video then mix the background music and voice over
15 min break: get up, stretch, drink water & eat vegies/fruit

3rd 90 min: use tobul mogul and traffic geiser to distribute final cut videos to 30 sites around the web

END OF DAY UPDATE: see the very cool results I produced today on my latest post

Today I’m putting together a 4 minute sales video for one of my information products, I’ll be using everything I learned on ASF to create the reel.

I predict that the scripting will take up to an hour, as I already have sales pages and marketing articles for this project. Very excited that I’m at this part of the program, video is the coolest medium to work on (especially when you can code actions into the flv to increase CTR and opt-ins)

It sounds like everyone that signed up for my coaching club on the Automates Sales Formula bought the program for the same reason : to have automated websites that are premade and simple to install. Welcome to everyone in the club

automated sales formula bonus coaching

I’ve had a steady stream of people asking me for help and coaching with Keith Wellman’s latest program over the past week so in response to that demand I’ve put together an Automated Sales Formula bonus for anyone that wants to signup through my link before the offer closes on Wednesday night.

That’s not me ending the offer by the way, Keith won’t be taking any new registrations after that point so he can focus on the people that have currently joined.

Here is what you get with the Automated Sales Formula:

• 15 premade video skinning websites, with squeeze page and sales video included
• Twitter software and tutorials on how to generate quick, free traffic to any website you want
• Easy Sales Formula training videos
• Seminar videos of Keith Wellman presenting his tips and systems at live events
• Workshop video of how to make your first $1000
• Workshop videos of breakthrough profit creation 

Here is what you get with my Automated Sales Formula Bonus:

• 8 week coaching program to help you get started for the first time with Internet Marketing (designed just for newbies)
• Step by step coaching on how to learn then use the Automated Sales Formula (customised to a niche that suits you)
• Email support Monday – Friday and often on the weekend too for urgent matters (I am online 16 hours per day)
• Tutorials to follow on exactly how I use the Automated Sales Formula to generate quick traffic (you can follow these and replicate)
• Methods for converting traffic from just visitors into paying customers of affiliate products, CPA deals, or your own products/services

I’ve been helping people for over ten years succeed on the Internet, from first timers to corporations and government agencies. The compliment that I get most often is my ability to take something technical and explain it without big words in easy to understand steps. Yes I have a great deal of experience, but my whole aim with this particular coaching course is to help the new guys get started and off the ground while using the Automated Sales Formula and a few bonus items where I show you how I am using the formula for my own business.

Here is what you will be able to do during and after the Automated Sales Formula Bonus Coaching:

1. Understand the broad fundamental aspects that make up Internet marketing
2. Research and identify niches to promote for yourself
3. Create niche websites that attract and convert traffic into customers
4. How to create your own information products to sell on clickbank / paydotcom
5. How to use marketing videos to generate traffic and gain first page rankings in google
6. How to use Keith Wellmans Twitter software to setup campaigns that generate free, instant traffic
7. How to generate passive income using at least 3 different methods 
8. You will have a video skinning website setup within the first week
9. You will have twitter traffic generated within the first week

Okay, here is what you need to do RIGHT NOW.

1. Act fast! This coaching clinic and Keith’s Automated Sales Formula are closing registrations on Wednesday night, so you need to click here to signup right now
2. Do not delay! I will only accept 7 people into the coaching clinic, so that I can focus on everyone that has joined and give the attention they need
3. Once you have clicked on my special link to Keith’s Automated Sales Formula then watched the video, you will follow his instructions at the end of the video
4. Next you will register your details and credit card using a secure page
5. Once you have purchased, you will receive your login details and receipt via email from Keith Wellman. Please contact me to advise you have joined with the receipt number
6. We will begin coaching as soon as you signup, so there is no delay or waiting around to get started.

If you wish to take a slower pace than the rest of the coaching group, that is fine as I understand everyone doesn’t have the same amount of available time.

Nothing left to do now except sign up! If you’ve been thinking about getting started with Internet marketing or you’re interested in Keith Wellman’s Automated Sales Formula, you wouldn’t want to miss out on having coaching included for no cost would you? I’m always happy to help people that wanto get up and running with Internet marketing, so I’d love to have you in this special group.

So either you can sit on this and think about it, or act now and change your life forever. The choice is yours

Click here to signup now to receive the Automated Sales Formula and Bonus Coaching

clickbank

Woooot. Today was a great day, I finally made it to triple digit sales for one of my ebooks on clickbank!

It seems like so long ago now that I got into information products, but it was only 9 months almost to the day. I’ve read so many books and completed so many training courses since March 2009, that it feels like I absorbed more in that time than my entire high school life.

I probably did actually, as high school was mostly about chasing girls and partying every chance we could get.

Long story short, I was watching a Yanik Silver seminar… it was probably the info players workshop where it’s just him in a small room with a bunch of people. He made everything sound so straight forward and achievable for anyone. I don’t know exactly what it was that attracted me, because I’m a designer by trade and don’t actually enjoy writing content. But when I heard that you can just create an eBook on any subject that is of interest to me, I thought it would be a great way of having something tangible to show at the end of a research process.

I’m always going through research processes, but usually I just walk away with the knowledge and a bunch of new skills. This way, I could compile all of my findings into a coherent publication that was simply exported into PDF format to sell as a digital product.

So with that, I embarked on a mission to learn everything I could about a particular type of fishing that I really enjoy and began a strict routine of writing useful, easy to read articles every night and early morning. About 3 weeks later, absolutely brimming with pride and a bunch of new information that was previously unknown to me, I completed my project with a beautiful cover design and a well planned website to market the book.

I never actually sat down and wondered how many would sell or how much money I would make, all I wanted to prove was that I could actually sell a copy to someone out there on the Internet and they would find the content useful.

It was a Sunday night that I launched the book, I setup an AdWords campaign targetting all the relevant keywords and then had my ads running within minutes. Much to my surprise, I sold my first copy within 5 minutes. When I saw that email notification come through from clickbank I was grinning like an idiot and kept repeating something like ‘it works, if friggin works!’.

These days I upsell my eBook customers into purchasing the soft cover printed version to increase revenue, so the overall sales figures are higher than 100 copies but I’ve officially sold my 100th digital version as of this morning. At $75 per copy, that is a nice little earner for my very first ebook in it’s first 8 months. It won’t buy me a new boat, but it pays for a few sport fishing charters around the world each year  and I get to write off the cost on tax because the trips are classed as research.

Man, I love the Internet!

automated sales formula

Day 4 completed of the Automated Sales Formula, I had a few break throughs today that proved to me that the twitter software works really well. It’s one thing to have a process explained to you and described as working, but it gives you so much confidence when you can make it work for yourself.

I had a play with it over the weekend and setup a new campaign for a very popular twitter trend then sat back expecting to see thousands of unique visitors. I logged in the next day to only find less than 10 impressions. The day after I found that the twitter account I setup for the campaign had been suspended. This is one of those times where you either implode and give up, or you recognise that something wasn’t done correctly and you need to go back through the steps. Of course, I chose the 2nd option and sent Keith a bunch of questions asking for guidance. Even on a Sunday, he got back to me within minutes and helped me through everything I was doing wrong.

So then I went back to the software and created a new campaign for the same niche… BINGO, we have a winner! This time, by making just one small adjustment I got the settings correct and it ran off to find me 100 uniques. It’s doing that daily now for the keyword I selected so all that was left to do was configure more keywords and more campaigns. It took me something like an hour to create another 4 campaigns that had really well written tweets with a good mix of advertising and useful comments.

Another thing I learned today, which makes perfect sense when you think about it, is that you need to make a healthy ratio of advertising to observations. The people following these new twitter accounts are effectively a list, so you dont want to just smash them non stop with advertising. We all know that the hard sell and constant marketing to your list just burns subscribers, so with Keiths assistance I’ve modified my campaigns to have a 1 in 3 ratio of commercial links. I don’t know if it was Jimmy D Brown or Yanik Silver, but someone once said that it’s good to keep things short and sweet with your messages and generally give your audience 4 bits of useful information and then one product recommendation. I will of course test the advertising blend to see what works best for growing and nurturing a list of followers.

So now that I’ve completed the proof of concept for this part of the Automated Sales Formula I’m going to start a schedule of creating 15 campaigns per day for the next month. Going on my current settings, at the end of 30 days the software will be generating 45,000 tweets per day. At a conservative conversion ratio of just 0.5% that should produce about 225 signups per day. How much I make in revenue will depend on what types of products are being promoted. Simple Amazon Associate products might only make $1 each. Basic clickbank products would make about $10 per sale. I’m reluctant to start plucking figures out of the air and do ‘what if’ calculations so I’ll report back with impressions, conversions and turnover after 30 days. One great thing, is that it’s all targetted traffic and it’s free. Sure I spent a few hours each day of my time setting up the campaigns, but then it’s all cream so I can now understand how Keith does the millions per year in revenue he’s known for.

Conclusion as of day 4: still loving the ASF product, very excited about the prospects and potential… extremely happy with Keiths assistance and willingness to help everyone that joined the program. I’m kicking off a bonus coaching program to help anyone that wants to sign up for the Automated Sales Formula so get in touch with me if you’re interested or simply purchase through my link while you still can: www.enicholas.com/automatedsalesformula

the magic bullet system

As I write this post, there is about17 hours until Amish Shah launches his highly anticipated ‘Magic Bullet System’. This thing is creating a crazy amount of buzz online, I heard there are over 90,000 people on the pre-purchase list… now considering that there are only 500 copies of the magic bullet system being offered, I’d estimate that it will take somewhere between 3 to 30 minutes to sell out. That will give Amish the fastest $1.5m he’s ever made! That’s only 1/3 of his turnover for last year, but it’s still not bad for a half an hour!

I wanted to pitch in with my own perspective of the system, and at least one thing that isn’t being mentioned in his videos that will catch people by surprise.

First, let’s cover the features and benefits…

So the fact that you have one control panel to research, setup, test and track your campaigns is very sweet. It will save some time and increase productivity by having that integrated into the one cloud.

The ‘covert recon’ section of the magic bullet software is a big time saver for me personally, because it will do the competition research automatically then present the opportunities. One thing I love about the covert recon section is that it displays demographic information for the niche! I don’t know how they find this or where the data feeds from, but this is gold because not only do you know if the target audience is able/willing to spend money but you’re also provided with a snapshot of your customer profile. I repeat, this is gold!

So many people don’t know who their customer is or what the characteristics of their online behaviour is, so the covert recon feature is going to provide data that either takes AGES to find or you can’t actually find it until you have a history selling to and surveying customers.

There are way too many features to mention here so if you haven’t seen the complete offering for the magic bullet system I suggest you head over to the site and spend 16 minutes watching the sales video. It explains what you get for $2997 and all the conditions.

www.themagicbulletsystem.com/g3/

next up… I want to explain something that everyone needs to know about the Magic Bullet System from Amish Shah.

the magic bullet system

One thing I need to mention, which EVERYONE needs to know about the magic bullet system, is that everything revolves around paid traffic of some type.

Yes it has the ability to create search engine optimised pages, but the power in this software is the ability to rapidly deploy PPC and CPA campaigns with a few clicks within minutes. But you can’t just go out and buy traffic in hundreds of niches without money.

There is a large investment of marketing dollars required if you want to go big, or if you wish to start small with one campaign using the magic bullet system then you can look at spending just a few hundred dollars on traffic. Be aware though, this software isn’t a magic bullet to get you quick, free traffic. It’s a magic bullet to get your niches identified and campaigns setup VERY quickly.

Amish and Jay Styles made $5,000,000 last year but they potentially spent up to $2,000,000 on paid traffic to obtain that revenue.

In short, this magic bullet software is most suited to people that already run CPA campaigns or those that want to get into it and have a marketing budget set aside. This is a time saving tool, so if you’re not spending large amounts of time on niche research and setting up campaigns, then don’t spend your money on it!

You’re much better off using that $2997 to manually setup your CPA campaigns and make a return on that investment before looking at stream lining.

I’m going to think long and hard about whether I sign up in the morning. I already have a great method for identifying and analysing niches, I’m super fast at setting up optimised blogs and campaigns, plus I’m focussing on video marketing this year and the magic bullet has nothing to do with that nor will it help me with that.

I’d love to signup and be part of this program, but I just know there are things I need to focus on for my headgehog concept…. I’ll let you know if I do buy it though!

If you have questions or thoughts on this, pitch in with your comments below

matt granfield

A quick post before I rush out the door to meet a new client… I’m getting a little portfolio of video marketing clients together and one of them is a local corporate apartment building, so in the next 16 minutes I need to write a quick blog, have a shower and get changed, grab the laptop and HD camera then drive about 10 minutes to Spring Hill.

Doh, make that 15 minutes now.

So if you’re into Seth Godin and Dan Kennedy/Bill Glazer I think you should check out my mate Matt Granfield. I used to work for Matt years ago as an external contractor to his eCBD business (one of the finest digital agencies on the Gold Coast) and these days he’s moved onto more 2.0 stuff but his talents lie in being able to see the bigger picture of any situation and write engaging content. He can hold his own on the bass guitar and chess board too.

Basically, it’s a no bullshit account of the web and Internet marketing with random whiffs of poetry and philosophy too… if yr locked into information overload then visit his blog and take a break from it all!

www.mattgranfield.com

Okay, 11 minutes to go so I better run….

easy video player

Just read details about Easy Video Player, wow!

This will only be a short post about the EasyVideoPlayer as I don’t have a huge amount of information to share just yet, but I wanted to send bit of a shout out to Josh Bartlett for his new video marketing product that is being released in a few days.

From what I can tell so far, the service allows users to upload marketing & sales videos and then configure the controls (scrubber) and the action taken directly after the video ends. Controlling the video isn’t anything that new, there are already heaps of video players and you can of course configure some of the code variables with YouTube videos so that it does just want you want.

But what is really sexy about the Easy Video Player is the ability to do a redirect when the video ends or show HTML…

Why is that sexy? Well that means you can show a sales link, buy button or opt-in form to the user at the very instant that the marketing video ends.. typically at this point, we would prompt the viewer to visit a URL manually or perhaps click a link nearby or fill in a form on the page. But now, with EasyVideoPlayer you can show the call to action in the exact place where the viewer is focussing. This will eliminate any confusion and also save on page space (perhaps your marketing video will show somewhere other than your sales page, where you have no control over the links and buttons).

Guaranteed, this new player is going to increase list opt-ins and sales conversions without a doubt. So spending the money required to use it is no brainer. How much it will improve conversions is still unknown, as I don’t have access to it yet but I’ve contacted the owners and will do a review as soon as I can. If I don’t hear back from them until the launch date then I’ll buy a copy and give you the features, benefits, some how-to tutorials plus real world instructions of how you can use it for your own business & marketing campaigns.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Internet video marketing? This really is an exciting time to be working on the web

» Check out Easy Video Player in more detail here…

bit.ly url shortening

I never really saw the point in shortening URL’s before I got onto twitter.

I can see the appeal maybe for cloaking links, but I was never that type of guy. The only reason I started shortening my weblinks was out of necessity… twitter only gives us 140 character so typing a long ass domain name would have wasted most if not all of the space for a tweet.

So for months there I was just following the crowd by using tinyurl.com and that seemed to do the job well enough. Then recently I got onto this bit.ly thing and now I’m loving it because it tracks a bunch of stats on the clicks. As an Internet Marketer, you want to know the stats! As an obsessive, compulsive traffic hound… you want to know the stats!

If you’re not yet using bit.ly then I highly recommend you open a free account with them. Then you can track all your URL’s from the one interface, allowing you to take a visual glance at which are getting the most clicks and where you traffic is coming from.

Sorry I can’t tell you anymore, it’s really late and I should be in bed not blogging at 3am.
Night

automated sales formula

Day 3 completed of Keiths Automated Sales formula… it’s now 2:30am and I’m hella tired but still really amped after a long day of learning and finally taking some action with the new product. We had a webinar just before lunchtime so Keith and his buddies could show us the ropes on how to use the members area and tools.

The twitter syphon got me all excited so once the webinar was finished I got straight into setting up my first campaign.

I haven’t actually done the video skinning part yet, I wanted to get the twitter traffic all sorted first so I could track the stats and conversions for a CPA campaign I launched. I got traffic within a few minutes, which is very sweet, but I’ll let that run for 12 hours then report back with the results.

All in all, that’s another exciting and educational day with the Automated Sales Formula. I am lovin it

I’m kicking off a bonus coaching program to help anyone that wants to sign up for the Automated Sales Formula so get in touch with me if you’re interested or simply purchase through my link while you still can: www.enicholas.com/automatedsalesformula

cheap video screen capture software

When it comes to cheap video screen recording software, you wouldn’t mention Adobe Captivate or Camtasia Studio! I personally use both of those, but not everyone has the budget to fork out for high end software… especially if you are just starting off with Internet Marketing and Video Marketing.

I think everyone is different with their spending thresh holds when it comes to hardware and software… I like to have fast toys and the latest applications, but it wouldn’t be fair of me to just recommend the newest, most expensive gadgets so I thought this would be of interest to anyone and everyone that enjoys video marketing.

Today, I happened to stumble upon a site today that features a pretty decent software package that will allow you to capture a video of what is on your computer screen. It produces files that are nice and small for the web, you can capture full screen or a fixed region (just like captivate and camtasia) plus it will allow you to dump a voice over back onto the AVI video file.

Sure it won’t have all the features that the other software packages include, but if you want to get straight into recording videos of your computer screen (for everything from software tutorials, website demonstrations, slideshow presentations, etc) then this will allow you to get up and running for under fifty bucks.

It’s actually only $39.95 and you can try it out with a free trial version too.

So if you’re on a budget and want to get started making your own cheap videos then give this a look: EZ Screen Recorder

Buy The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost Your Sales (Paperback)

automated sales formula

Okay after a little bit of confusion on my part, I’ve managed to get access to Keith Wellman’s Automated Sales Formula and have officially started the program. I feel the need to clear up the confusion, because a bunch of people on the warrior forum have been giving this program a good bashing without much evidence (in my opinion).

Firstly, I signed up for the Automated Sales Formula within about 30 minutes of getting an email from Mike Filsaime. I watched Keith’s pitch video and was really impressed with the offering. Okay yes it has one of those ‘let me add up the value’ pitches, which most of us don’t like, but that doesn’t make them untrue. I’ve come to learn that having that sequence in the video is part of the formula, so I’m cool with sitting through a few minutes of that in the video.

So then it has one of those count down offers, where it triggers the part of me that doesn’t want to miss out on a good deal. I wasn’t tricked by it, but it did make me want to take action sooner than later. I’m on a quest right now to learn and master video marketing, so this particular product fits in with my hedgehog concept. I went ahead and entered my details then submitted my order. Next screen: your card was declined. Hmm that’s weird, there is nothing wrong with my card. So I went back, checked the details, hit submit again. This time I got a message saying duplicate order.

Okay so I interpreted that to mean the first order had gone through and I didn’t need to follow up with anything. Then I sat back and waited for my login details, which didn’t come immediately. While waiting, I did some searching for Keith Wellman and Automated Sales Formula on google and the top result was a post on the warrior forum. I had a read of the thread, saw some mad scurrilous banter from a few warriors about Keith’s past, then became a little worried. I still had faith though, because I’m wise enough to know that you can’t judge a man by his past. We all make mistakes, and it’s ridiculous to think that I (or anyone else) should be tarnished for life due to errors made in the past.

So shortly after, I found a message from Keith saying that he wants to help me clear up the issue and we went back and forth thru gmail. Within minutes, he cleared things up and I simply went back to the site to order the product again using another card. This time it worked, I received my login details within about 2 minutes and now I’m up and rocking.

It took me all of about 15 minutes to setup the first campaign, of which there are 15 made available inside the members area. That’s easy enough, I just edited some code to reflect my paydotcom ID and some aweber variables.

Next I am prompted to watch a bunch of training videos, which I think are about scripting and producing the videos used for marketing the campaigns. There are 15 in total, which is pretty shimmy coz I like lots of content which is broken down in easy-to-understand chunks.

Watching the videos is probably going to take an hour or so, not sure yet, but I’m keen to get started so it’s time to put the blog down for a while and get learning.

So for anyone considering the Automated Sales Formula that isn’t sure about the program or Keith, I’m happy to vouch for him. This is great value for the small price of $495! I don’t doubt that it will take a short amount of time to recoup that cost, but the lessons and formula for making automated sales are the real gems for me.

I’ll keep you posted on results with  the automated sales formula as I try my best to knock out 2 campaigns per day for the next week.

I’m kicking off a bonus coaching program to help anyone that wants to sign up for the Automated Sales Formula so get in touch with me if you’re interested or simply purchase through my link while you still can: www.enicholas.com/automatedsalesformula

tube mogul vs traffic geiser

I should be asleep right now, I actually went to bed an hour ago but had one of those moments where you think of something to do and jump up then run to the computer. Ah well, past midnight is the best time to work on the PC if you ask me

So today I finally opened my traffic geiser account. I’ve been wanting to for 6 months now, but I used restraint this time and waited until I actually had some marketing videos to upload. I love the that Micheal Koenigs has put this together out of necessity, that usually makes for the most useful applications and tools. I watched a video from Super Bad Kern a little while ago where he and Mike did a demo on the Geiser system, then showed the SERP results a day later… that got me pretty excited, because if there is one thing that I love more than seeing my bank balance rise it’s the feeling of getting into the top5 results on google.

It had never occured to me to go out looking for comparitive services to traffic geiser, as I saw the inherent value in paying the $97 per month for it. But that little ajax suggestion thing that happens when you search in the google toolbar came up with a search phrase that said “traffic geiser vs tube mogul”.

I couldn’t resist, I clicked it and went looking at the top result.

It was a blog post from a about a year ago, and the blogger was pretty brutal about his comparison of the two services. Especially hinged on the fact that geiser is a premium paid service and tube mogul is free. He did point out that there is a big difference in the quality and quantity of video sites that each service distributes to. Now I love that these things save me time and gain traffic, but the whole point is distribution and if one beats the other then it’s a no brainer for me.

But the review is a year old, and you should always take what you read on the net with a grain of salt! So I signed up for both and will begin using them first thing in the morning. I’ll do a running commentary of the two services and will post back before my free trial ends with traffic geiser to report which was better (based upon ease of use, amount of distribution, quality of rankings and quantity of traffic generated).

ps. Have I mentioned lately how much I love video marketing on the Internet?

pps. On a random note, what are they thinking over at traffic geiser? I signed up for the trial, entered all my CC details, then after checking out they land me on a receipt page. Okay that’s cool, but then there is a continue button… which I clicked, and it dumped me back on the sales page for the free trial (which I just signed up for). Surely it would be smarter to forward people onto the login page at least, or better still a nice page of tutorials and video lessons maybe? Mike, if you’re reading this, do something with your ‘continue’ button after people signup.

customer service

Good customer service is a touchy subject for me. I give it in every situation I encounter, and if I experience bad customer service then something inside me just wants to teach that person a lesson.

Before I starting working on the web back in ‘97, I worked in the hospitality industry for many years. I mention that because if you work in a restaurant then not only do you have to learn people skills, but you gotta be able to handle complaints and negative feedback. Basically, no matter what is being shouted you must remain professional and do your best to empathise with the customer.

Now when it comes to the Internet, I encounter a fair bit of either bad customer service or just plain silence. It amazes me that website owners and online businesses can treat their customers this way, I wont even try to explain or rationalise their reasons, but it’s pretty obvious that more often than not the person on the other end of the email only wants to communicate if you have something nice to say or money to hand over. Often, they don’t even want to hear from you to take an order. Some people are just bad at interaction I guess.

So the ability to work through an issue or fix a problem is pretty rare if you ask me. I see it with small websites, I see it with big websites. People from all levels and countries display this behaviour, some worse than others but I wont name names.

I thought that this would be a good topic to write about today, because I am currently experiencing an issue with a website that I’ve paid money to. Now I can’t really say that it’s bad customer service, because I haven’t actually had a response to my 1 email and 2 support tickets yet. Let’s just say that this issue revolves around a lack of customer service. Now that might not be as awful as bad service, but it’s kinda in the same ballpark. I’m sure in time, this will be resolved and put down to a break in communication, but not everyone is as patient and forgiving as I am. I’ve already witnessed a barrage of negative comments on a certain forum, all stemming from the same issue of either getting no response from this organisation or having huge troubles in getting a response.

They say that the most valuable customer is the one you already have. Which to me, means that you should put twice as much effort into keeping a customer than finding a new one. So if somebody has already gone through the decision process and decided to buy your product or services, it doesn’t make sense to ignore their questions or take days to respond.

I can feel a rant coming on, so I think I will just conclude this post with a little bit of wisdom I learned once that changed my view (for the better). I don’t remember the guys name, but he was basically telling me that he LOVES to get customer complaints.

I thought he was crazy, and replied that I hate getting complaints from customers and would sometimes (at that point in my early adult life) argue or insult anyone that dare complain about my website or service levels.

He then said that the reason why he loves getting complaints, is because  they are worth ten times more than a compliment. When someone complains, they are giving you direct honest feedback which can then be used to improve your business. If someone writes to say thanks, they’re not going to tell you how to improve. When someone makes a complaint, they are clearly communicationg what is wrong with your service (which should then be taken as an opportunity to improve).

Once I reframed my way of thinking to be in line with that, my life changed and my business changed. Not only do I avoid all confrontation these days, but I seek out complaints so that I can improve my business and myself.

So if you’re reading this and you don’t look at customer service and complaints like I do, perhaps you could think about it for a minute and consider changing your perceptions. At the very least, if you’re offering products and services online then give people clear options to contact you and make sure to reply promptly. Even if you can’t give a full response, let them know you received the message and will get back to them shortly.

automated sales formula

Today I signed up for Keith Wellman’s ‘Automated Sales Formula‘ program. I’m not familiar with him in the IM world, but I love the idea of using video marketing on the Internet! Plus it was Mike Filsamie that recommended the Automated Sales Formula to me so you gotta listen to a referral like that. 

For starters, I’ve always been fascinated by video production and editing, it is a natural extension of my trade working with pixels. There were three pivotal points in my early childhood, the day I first used DTP software on a computer, one afternoon when my sister taught me how to use an SLR camera, and the time I used a video camera that belonged to a friend of the family.

So fast forward about 25 years and I’ve mastered the art of graphic design and layout.

I never went ahead with professional photography, but that didn’t stop me from spending $15,000 on hardware and 7 years studying the form.

But the one dormant passion that still hasn’t been tapped yet is my love of video and motion graphics. I already own 2 video cameras, one for underwater footage and also a HD camera, mostly I use them to chase my Malamutes around and on days that I actually catch fish when out in the boat. But I haven’t even scratched the surface yet with the medium of video, deep down I think I’ve always been waiting for the right moment to evolve from still images to motion pictures.

So what does this have to do with the Automated Sales Formula from Keith Wellman?

Well I watched his latest video after getting an email from Mike tonite and decided to sign up for this new service. Sure, the lure of having automated cash generators is appealing but I’m more interested in Keith’s methods for scripting and producing marketing videos. I’m actually in the process of creating my own system for producing marketing videos, kind of like a road map and recipe of ingredients for making high impact videos that compell the watcher to take action. My research is pretty thorough when it comes to things like this, but I hope to release it mid 2010. I definitely want to have it perfected for my own use by then!

Anyways, Keith has a solid reputation when it comes to video marketing and what appears to be good results, so it was a no brainer for me to shell out the $495 for his offer. The fact that he’s taking a philanthropical approach to 2010 says to me that he’s credible. If he hadn’t already made his pile of IM loot, then there would be no reason for him to discount such a valuable product. He openly admits that his goal for this year is to make 1000 people into millionaires, so I think that is the main motivation for him to put such a great package together at such a low price.

If you haven’t yet seen his site for Automated Sales Formula, then get yr butt over there now because this is a limited offer and won’t last long!

I’ll continue posting about the results as they happen. (You can keep up to date on my progress and results with the automated sales formula)

increased productivity

I like to think that I’m pretty good with time & productivity. I’ve read a bunch of books on time management, I make daily lists of tasks and set goals, most days I work around 14 hours… but at the end of the month, although I produce more results than the average bear, it still doesn’t quite add up to the sum of my efforts.

When the reality doesn’t match the perception, something needs to be checked! It’s human nature to fool ourselves and make excuses, so I like to use these kinds of cues to evaluate how I can improve my action (or at least the way I view things).

For this particular situation, I figured that I needed to improve my methods in order to be even more productive. It would have been easy for me to continue comparing myself to others and resting on my laurels, but comfort zones are the devil! Repeat, COMFORT ZONES ARE THE DEVIL!!

So shortly after I had this realisation last month, I noticed something from James Schramko that spoke about some guys that had setup the SEO BrainTrust. I’m always keen to listen to what others are doing in the SEO world so I couldn’t resist opting-in to their site and watching the promo videos. Long story short, after listening to Dan Thies for a while he started talking about maximising results by “chunking” your day. This got my attention because I’d recently started to comparmentalise my work day into focussed chunks instead of my usual style of manic multitasking.

Then Eben Pagan sent me an email this week for his wake up productive blog and in one of his videos he started to talk about chunking also.

Hmmm, I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

Eban also spoke about the pillars (which I’m learning about in his guru course) and how I should be spending 40% of my time on customer generation, 20% on conversion tactics and then 10% on content. Damn, this is where I’ve been going wrong as traditionally I will spend around 80% of my work week or more on content. Being a web designer, it’s second nature for me to sit down and smash a heap of websites to pass the time. I’ve incorporated SEO tactics into my development cycle, so that was my contribution to traffic generation. But now I see how I had everything ass backwards! This is why I’m able to punch out a bunch of websites and info products each month, but the financial returns don’t match my efforts. This is why I’ve been making small incremental improvements to my turnover but no leaps and bounds.

Houston, we have an ‘ah ha’ moment!

So today was officially the first day of my new routine. I spent the first 4 hours on traffic generation, then 2 hours on coversion tactics, now I’m going to work on content. I’ll post the results at the end of the month and report how the stats and revenues have improved.

CONCLUSION: Do one type of task at a time and prioritise the allocation of time to each task.

ps. turn off your email client and just check it first thing in the morning and then once more towards the end of the day. This eliminates the largest contributor of distractions and allows you to work without interuptions. Trust me, the world wont end if you’re not checking your inbox every 20 minutes!