FREE SPREADSHEET: Profit from Your Own Bad Advertising

Posted on 27. Apr, 2012 by in Blog, conversion, Decision Making, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is my second post in a series on “How to Profit from Your Own Bad Advertising”…

And today I’ve got a short (18 minute) mp3 interview with none other than THE Ryan Levesque illustrating several very specific examples…

Along with a free spreadsheet to help you implement this in your own market! (IMPORTANT: Listen to the interview first or the  spreadsheet won’t make any sense)

Last thing…

You might have noticed the new club where you can interact with me LIVE 2x/mo.  (There are also video recordings of course)

It’s selling quickly, and I’m going to raise the price next week, so you definitely should lock in your rate now (it’s only $5 for the first month!)

Honestly, this is the best deal you’re EVER going to get from me…

I’m doing it so I can bond more with my audience in a group environment without costing you a fortune.  (People keep asking for a forum, but honestly I hate those… people get so yucky-ass-stupid on them, and there’s just SO much nonsense to deal with!)

Anyway, if you’ve been around GlennWorld for a while, you know that I introduce my products and services at a low price in order to prove the concept, gather market intelligence about the buyers quickly, and then I steadily raise the price.  (You might wanna copy this philosophy by the way… because it frickin works)

You also get two crushing bonuses immediately when you join (1) Maximum Sales Bumps in Minimum Time – a collection of the BEST sales bumping techniques which I’ve identified as working across markets and (2) Building Your Persuasion Architecture(tm) – How to Focus on a Two Minute Verbal Sales Pitch Before You Publish a Single Page.

Anyway, why anyone would read this deep into a blog post of mine without spending $5 for live interaction AND those two bonuses is beyond me :-)  But hey, you know, with the recession and all, you could almost buy a whole gallon of gas for that money!  (Not in Europe of course)

But seriously, if this isn’t worth $5, I don’t know what is.

All my best,

Glenn :-)

Glenn Livingston, Ph.D.



When is Crappy Advertising Actually MORE Profitable?

Posted on 21. Apr, 2012 by in AdWords Cost, Blog, conversion, Copywriting, Decision Making, Information Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Q: When is crappy advertising the MOST profitable route you can take?


A: When it’s working–AND–you have bigger fish to fry!

Today’s insight is for the more sophisticated marketer…

(At least I like to think it is because I didn’t realize this until I had already burned through a LOT of cash, and the alternative is that I’m just an idiot!)

You see, when I first started building my own advertising systems, I really thought it was possible to have a perfectly optimized system.

I figured I knew how to split test, and I understood what consumers responded to in advertising…

So all I needed to do was aggressively split test every last part of my system until it was a perfectly tuned machine, making more money than anyone else’s machine on the market, and thereby becoming an unlimited traffic magnet. (Because due to the “Unlimited Traffic Theorem”,  if I’m making $3 per visitor and you’re only making $1 per visitor, I can pay you $1.50 per visitor and eliminate your reason for competing… you should just start sending all your traffic to me!)

Here’s what I didn’t take into account…

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE REAL WORLD OF BUSINESS!

I really started understanding this when I started Rocket Clicks with Jeff Hughes about 4 years ago. (As a side note, time goes SO fast and I’m SO fricking old!  I wish I could remember which comedian said this first but when I look at my receding hairline I think “that’s not a forehead, that’s a fivehead!)…

Anyway, way back in 2008 I was talking to all these entrepreneurs, constantly astounded at how much money they were making with relatively crappy advertising, seriously under-optimized AdWords accounts, and landing pages which had conversion leaks in them the size of Kentucky!

When I interviewed these people about their business, I was kind of shocked to find out that it wasn’t that they didn’t KNOW there was a problem…

They all kind of “hung their heads in shame” (metaphorically over our GoToMeeting conferences), dropped their voices and said “I know, I feel so guilty but I’ve been so busy with other things I just can’t get to it!”

But the more people I interviewed, the more I started to realize these people weren’t stupid by a long shot…

In fact, they were making BETTER prioritization decisions in their business than I was.  Because the kinds of things they were attending to were making them a whole lot more money than doubling their conversion on the front end would… at least at the moment.

How could that possibly be?  Let me give you a few examples:

Consider someone selling a supplement for prostate health with a just barely profitable front end.  Maybe they’re spending $2 per click and making back $2.10, all things considered.  Now, suppose they’re a one man shop, and so far they’re able to sell 10,000 customers per month.  Might sound like a lot, but because of the margins it’s just $1000 profit.  Certainly not enough to hire a PPC agency or conversion expert.  And worse yet, he’s at the mercy of ONE supplier with limited capacity.  So even if he COULD ramp up his sales, the supplier can’t keep up!    And he’s got customer service problems (e.g. he can’t afford to hire a team but he can’t afford not to!) so refunds are climbing.  What do to?

With seriously limited time and resources, this person’s got several options for where to put his time and resources.  He could:

  • Work on striking deals with other supplement companies to eliminate the vulnerability in the business…
  • He could work on back end products to sell to his buyers to seriously increase his margins…
  • He could build a stick sequence via direct mail to get existing customers on the continuity to stay longer…
  • He could spend a month building a better customer service system…
  • Or he could dig into AdWords, learn optimization techniques, test and optimize his landing page, in hopes of making an extra 20% to 30% on the front end.

Now, it’s not that there’s no money in the optimization…

And it should be done EVENTUALLY…

But the hard reality is that the other problems really take precedence given his capital resources and available time.    Because what good will the extra 20% to 30% be if his supplier drops out of the game, can’t keep up with capacity, or if he loses his merchant account due to too many chargebacks (from lousy customer service?)

This is why all businesses develop a long list of “guilty projects” which they KNOW would make them more money if they could only find the time and resources to do it.

And sure, you can make joint venture arrangements to solve a lot of these problems, but you can’t choose these partners randomly… finding JVs itself takes time and effort. (You’ve also gotta vet the prospective partners or you could be making more trouble than it’s worth… trust me, I learned the hard way!)

JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN FIX SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD.

The reality of business is that it’s a constant game of priorities.

“What is the highest and best use of your time and resources this week?”

As much as I hate to say it, sometimes optimizing this or that part of your advertising system just isn’t the answer.

And even when it is, it’s rare that you have the time and resources to optimize the WHOLE THING.  Rather, you usually need to pick the point of greatest leverage where you’ve got the greatest potential for increasing your profit volume…

Like your highest end product…

Or often it IS the front end, because that increases the value of the whole system.  (Hint: most people totally ignore their email follow up system when it comes to optimization… but you can often quadruple your site traffic with a well optimized long follow up system without spending another penny on traffic!)

But there’s a bright side…

Because when you KNOW and UNDERSTAND this essential business reality…

You also know that everyone else is going through it too…

And that the best we can ever do is  (as Stephen Covey taught me) is to “organize and execute around priorities”

So throw away the “guilt” from that “guilty project list” you’ve got building in Outlook…

And just put your head down and ask yourself “What’s Next?”

Dr. G :-)

PS – we’ve got some new options and services I’d like you to check out:





WARNING: Analysis Paralysis Man – Watch Out!

Posted on 17. Apr, 2012 by in Blog, consulting, conversion, Decision Making, Information Marketing, Inspiration, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Yesterday we started talking about the kinds of  ”traffic demons” people become vulnerable when they don’t understand the essence of converting visitors into customers.   Because when you just don’t know what makes a site sell, you’re extremely susceptible to thinking all you need is  more traffic (or cheaper traffic).  And this is how evil creatures like seo scorpions, ppc piranhas, and social media snakes are able to make a good living.

Unfortunately there are many more internet demons you’ll face if you don’t know the 5 simple underlying principles of conversion.  So today, let’s face off against…

Villian: Analysis Paralysis Man

Evil Motto: “I’ve never met a problem more data couldn’t solve.  (Give me some money and I’ll be happy to waste weeks generating countless charts, graphs, and tables which will lead to an ever expanding list of questions, which of course will require more data to solve, etc.)”

Solution: Listen, I (Glenn) love data more than the next guy.  In fact, I spent a semester supervising graduate students at Yeshiva University on the  ”multivariate analysis of human behavior” via computer models.  But when it comes to internet sales you’ve REALLY got to be careful.  Because the ability to scientifically measure internet activity can create a dangerous vortex which sucks you into a paralyzing maze of meaningless numbers.

What you want are BIG SIMPLE TESTS with PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS. Tests that focus on the fundamental elements of conversion.   What are they?  (1) The way you describe the problem you solve; (2) the unique selling proposition you make; (3) the amount of proof you provide (and the way you present it); (4)  the specific offer you make, and; (5) the type of scarcity or reason to act now you’re using.

Screw the fancy analytics, heat maps, live-chats, uber-complex multivariate analyses, etc. UNLESS they’re designed to support a big simple test with a very clear and meaningful hypothesis.  At least until until you’ve exhausted conversion bumps from testing the fundamental elements.

Read that again (I just saved you a good year of wasted time and/or money to pay for data gathering and analysis experts!)

Listen, you can clear away SO much confusion–and easily defeat a myriad of evil internet villains–if you just master a few simple principles. And now you can watch me do it LIVE on site after site.  (Get started as of the time of this post for less than $5)

Onwards and Upwards My Fine Marketing Friends!

NEW: Live Conversion Webinars 2x/mo with Glenn.
Watch me fix conversion holes in site after site.
Get started as of the time of this post for only $5

PPC Piranha(tm), SEO Scorpion(tm), Social Media Snake(tm)
and Analysis Paralysis Man(tm) are trademarks of Psy Tech Inc.

PPS –  New “Done For You” Marketing Opportunities from Glenn…
(1) Let Us Get You More Compelling Proof
(2) The Weirdest Opportunity in the World (listen to the audio)



Make More Money By Turning OFF Your Advertising

Posted on 10. Apr, 2012 by in AdWords, AdWords Cost, Blog, Campaigns, Content Network, conversion, Copywriting, Decision Making, Hyper Responsive Marketing, Information Marketing, Inspiration, MSN, Overture (yahoo search marketing), Pay Per Click, Quality Score, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Traffic

If the escalating expense, difficulty, and time to generate a high volume of profitable internet sales is crippling your growth–or crushing  your morale–I’ve got a very important audio for you to hear today…

Because it’s entirely possible that…

“You Can Make More Money by Turning Off Your Time Killing, Morale Crushing, Migraine Inducing, Pain-in-the-Ass Advertising System!”

Listen to this interview with Ryan Levesque, my partner in an extremely weird new marketing experiment which just might be your saving grace :-)



Make More Money By Turning OFF Your Advertising

Posted on 10. Apr, 2012 by in AdWords, AdWords Cost, Blog, Campaigns, Content Network, conversion, Copywriting, Decision Making, Hyper Responsive Marketing, Information Marketing, Inspiration, MSN, Overture (yahoo search marketing), Pay Per Click, Quality Score, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Traffic

If the escalating expense, difficulty, and time to generate a high volume of profitable internet sales is crippling your growth–or crushing  your morale–I’ve got a very important audio for you to hear today…

Because it’s entirely possible that…

“You Can Make More Money by Turning Off Your Time Killing, Morale Crushing, Migraine Inducing, Pain-in-the-Ass Advertising System!”

Listen to this interview with Ryan Levesque, my partner in an extremely weird new marketing experiment which just might be your saving grace :-)



My $500,000 One Click Mistake

Posted on 17. Mar, 2012 by in Blog, conversion, Decision Making, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

So, here’s something which makes me want to smack myself
repeatedly in the head with a spatula…

A $500,000 mistake I could have fixed with ONE click!

That’s right… I literally left a half million dollars on
the table by failing to lift my lazy-ass finger up and
down just one time on the mouse.

About 7 years ago I set up a joint venture with a major player
in the field. I built literally dozens of promotions, audios,
videos, and emails for him to send to his list, program into
his autoresponder system, and basically put on autopilot.

They all pointed to an opt in form in aweber.

And guess friggin what?

I forgot to turn off the double opt in setting. ONE click
on the big-old “OFF” button.

This left the default double-opt-in confirmation message
going out of course, which has ZERO benefits and really
ZERO reason for people to confirm. (I’ve had great success
lately in other systems using double opt in with carefully
crafted confirmation copy AND a stronger ethical bribe)

Just happened to be breezing through aweber settings on all
my list segments (I’ve got about 50 of them in this market)
and saw the problem.

Sales from that partner proceeded to jump by about 80%.

When I did the math on the improvement, it comes to
over $500,000 left on the table because of that one friggin
button!

Can you say “OUCH!!??”

Anyway, here’s the thing.

This is definitely not the first incredibly expensive, stupid,
easy to fix mistake I’ve ever made… it’s kind of part of the
game when you’re moving at the speed of business and constantly
taking massive action.

BUT…

It got me VERY interested in looking for OTHER simple things
I might have ignored in my business.

Like, for example, not sending DIRECT MAIL to my customers.

Direct mail might be difficult to make work with cold prospects,
but once you know someone’s a happy buyer (and you know the
kinds of things they buy), well, the math is decidedly in
your favor.

So in the next few weeks I’m going to do a webinar with
someone who knows quite a bit about the mechanics of direct
mail, especially with customer lists. (He lived with Gary
Halbert for several months)

In fact, what I’ve been learning this year from him actually
has me REPEATEDLY smacking myself in the head with a spatula!

“If only I knew then what I know now…”

Please click here now on my sneaky affiliate link to see what
he’s got to offer…

WARNING: you might want to put on a helmet before you click!

http://www.KillerNewsletter.com

Onwards and Upwards,

Dr. Glenn :-)



I Am Human Bug Meat

Posted on 10. Jun, 2011 by in Blog, Decision Making, Hyper Responsive Marketing, Inspiration, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

My 5 Most Important Warnings for Internet Marketers:

I got ALL these bites in LITERALLY under six minutes
(That’s gotta be a new world’s record… someone call Guinness!)

OK, so Wednesday morning I woke up with nice, clean arms.

True, I was whiter than the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man combined, but I didn’t have even a single bite.

Then Sharon called to say she had to work late, and so I got it into my head to hike the Caps Ridge Trail up Mt. Jefferson… a stunning 5,000 footer in the White Mountains.  (It stays light until 9 pm now up here… it’s like getting two days in one!)

I also thought “it’s so hot out, even though I never hike in short sleeves, today’s the day”  (In the 90s this week… a rarity for New Hampshire, where our state motto is “Live, Freeze, and Die”)

So off I went… two hours in the car, 4 litres of Fiji Water in my back pack (always gotta be Fiji!), my boots, poles, short sleeves, and big bottle of  sun block to keep me nice and white. (Because I don’t tan, I burn)

When I got there, Jefferson Notch Road was CLOSED. (The 7 mile dirt road which leads to the trail)

But there’s just something about the 4,000 footers in the Whites that calls to me…

So I decided to tackle Mt. Hale instead, because the trailhead is only 15 minutes away, and it’s another mountain I’d been wanting to knock off my list.

What I FORGOT was you absolutely do NOT want to hike near a shallow stream or still water in June unless you enjoy feeding the gnats and mosquitoes…

The trail head was more buggy than usual, but I blew it off thinking that I wouldn’t notice it once I got moving.

About half way up the trail I ran into a guy who said “it’s unbelievably buggy on top, not sure I’d continue if I were you”.

But I dismissed this warning too, thinking “he’s just an inexperienced hiker… kind of a wuss”.  (Yeah… like real men are supposed to wear bee hives as lampshades at parties, right?)

So I continued on up to the top.

At the summit I thought “this isn’t so bad”, so I took off my pack, took out my sardines and rice (a guy’s gotta eat), and prepared to enjoy a meal.

Well…

You know how people tend to say “there were a thousand bugs after me”… and you take it figuratively, meaning “there were a LOT of bugs”

I’m NOT talking figuratively.

I’m being LITERAL.

At least 1,000 bugs came swarming.

I’ve never seen anything like it…

It was like being in a horror movie (remember the scene in “Wilbur” with the rats?)

I couldn’t get my pack on quick enough…

And run for my life.

I’ll never forget it.

Well…

The bugs did NOT follow me off the summit.  I really don’t know why… maybe there was some electromagnetic force which kept them up there, maybe they were “defending their turf” and were just happy when I left, but for whatever reason I was free of them within 50 yards.

And the trip down was relatively uneventful, except for a nice 70 year old man who turned out to be a psychotherapist, horribly lost in the woods.  (I took him back down with me and gave him a ride to HIS trailhead… we head-shrinkers have got to stick together!)

So why did I tell you this story?

Because when you want something bad enough–a business goal for instance–sometimes you’ll ignore repeated, obvious, strong warnings in pursuit of it.

Granted, persistence is a necessary character trait for entrepreneurial success, and if it weren’t for hard-headed, stubborn business people innovation would never occur.

But on the other hand, there ARE paths that don’t need to be retread, problems that don’t need to be repeated.

Here are a five I’ve seen literally hundreds of times in the course of dealing with coaching students, customers, and peers:

  1. GET THE MATH RIGHT!:  If there’s one mistake which kills marketing projects way over and above all others it’s this one.   In fact, I’m going to coin a new quote right here and now “the stronger the dream, the weaker your math ability”. I’ve seen hundreds of coaching students, Glenn Club members, clients, friends, and peers plunge straight on to their “deaths” all the while completely convinced their dream MUST catch on.  Really… ask yourself how much (specifically) you’re planning to make when the business model is mature, estimate your cost per visitor, cost per lead, cost per sale, refund rate, customer service costs, chargebacks, lifetime customer value, available traffic, etc. and put it all in a big spreadsheet.  Do it NOW while you’re thinking about it, before your dreaming brain takes over and tells you “I think it’s gonna be OK because you’re such a great marketer”, or because the product idea is so cool, or because nobody else is doing it.  If you don’t have math on your side, you don’t have ANYTHING.
  2. DON’T ASSUME YOU CAN TRANSFER A JOINT VENTURE MARKETING SUCCESS INTO PAID ADVERTISING CHANNELS:   Joint Ventures carry two very, very powerful advantages which disappear when you move to paid traffic (1) the endorsement of someone with a relationship with their list and (2) the relative absence of competition at the moment of contact (in contrast to PPC, for example, when there are 20 other vendors on the page competing for your prospect’s attention).   Most successful JV projects I’ve seen were limited to JV traffic (and possibly SEO).   On the other hand, you CAN and usually should pursue joint ventures in the opposite direction… if something is profitable in paid media, there’s probably a lot of money on the table to be picked up by working with your competitors.
  3. DO RESOURCE PLANNING BEFORE YOU LAUNCH:   You’ve probably heard me say this before… In internet marketing, “the name of the game is staying in the game until you win the game”.  Most people crap out of the game not so much because they can’t manage Google, or don’t know how to advertise, or have a bad product, or aren’t making any sales… most people crap out of the game too soon because they run out of resources.  What resources?  (a) Money; (b) Time; (c) Passion for the Project; (d) Moral Support.   (In the How To Choose Profitable Markets system Terry and I spent quite some time making the point that your very market choice should be determined by your resources, and provide a spreadsheet/blueprint to help)
  4. DO YOUR FRICKING RESEARCH:  Most of you know I used to get paid between $100,000 and $500,000 to do marketing research for large companies.  What you don’t know is that the way the internet has evolved, there are now literally dozens of ways to get the same information for free.   Someone could make a business out of just compiling consumer language from the buyer reviews on Amazon.com alone… it’s absolutely amazing!  There’s absolutely no reason to play blind archery anymore.
  5. SELL RESULTS, NOT PROCEDURES:   (Thanks to Perry Marshall for this one).  For example, my wife’s been developing a web-video infomercial service for entrepreneurs.  She really is among the best in the world at her craft… but the problem is, people don’t want infomercials, they want CUSTOMERS.   So I’m helping her develop a model where the client simply covers her costs of production (usually just a few thousand dollars), and then they pay for phone calls and sales instead.

Now, no one’s invulnerable to the allure of the mountain top.

We all trudge ahead on our journeys despite the warnings and clear signs on the road.

Dreams are the stuff of life.. they make us human…

And nobody’s more prone to them than I, as evidenced by my lovely bug-meat story.

But above are the 5 most important warnings I want engraved on my tombstone for all the entrepreneurs that ever come visit me OK?

Onwards and Upwards,

Dr. Bugmeat :-)

Coaching |  Do it Yourself | Choosing Profitable Markets |  Audio-Video Infomercials |  Total Conversion Code