200-Proof Marketing

As you know, I recently re-built this entire website. The new version not only looks better, but it’s also more functional and expandable.

The cool thing is that as I’m learning more about customizing this new setup, I’m having some great ideas for making it a better website.

As you can see the first of those ideas is my new “Ask Chad” page. Which will be “members only” soon (more on that later).

That’s something other marketers would charge $100-$500 a month for. But in the spirit of this site I made it free.

When I was getting started… (more…)

Want some free marketing advice? Ask me anything you want to know by going to the new “Ask Chad” page.

Just click the”Ask Chad” link at the top right of this webpage to find out more…

If you look in the Money and Employment section of Clickbank, it’s dominated by “Get Rich Quick” type products that promise big money for little or no work.

I bet very few of their customers ever make a dime from their programs yet those same customers will most likely keep buying Get Rich Quick products.

They dream of being rich and living the good life, yet they either can’t figure out how or their too lazy to actually work for it. The ‘how’ is easy. It’s on this website for free to anyone willing to read it.

Here’s something I want you to try for educational purposes…

First, create a little Home-Biz Opt-in webpage on a domain of your choice. Make the domain name something small and easy to remember if possible. The purpose of this webpage is only to gather names and email addresses.

Now call up your local newspaper and place a little classified ad in the Employment section (it’s really cheap). Make that ad read something like this:

Earn up to $10,000/Month
All from the Comfort of Home
(Your website here)

Now sit back and watch what happens. I bet you’ll be surprised.

What do you do with your new subscribers?

Just setup an Auto-Responder Sequence and promote affiliate products in the Business Opportunity area.

Easy Money…

Keep running the ad and work on improving your opt-in rate as well as the conversion rate from your mailings. From there (if it’s profitable), start spreading to more and more newspapers.

I haven’t done this (I’m trying to focus on product creation right now), but I know someone who is making Millions doing something similar (on a larger scale).

This is one of the biggest traps in the Internet Marketing community. Everyone says to create products about your hobbies or things you enjoy with no thought of their profitability.

In a perfect world we would all have hobbies that were also great markets to sell to, but it’s not a perfect world.

When I was younger me and some friends invented a sport we called “Extreme Repelling” where we would find tall cliffs, antennas, buildings, and so on to repel from.

Repelling is where you use a rope and a harness to descend down the side of a cliff or other tall structure.

We would repel upside down, backwards, forwards, do spins, time each other to see who could get down fastest, etc. I know it was a little stupid but it was a lot of fun.

Do you think I could create an ebook about how to do crazy repelling tricks or anything similar that would sell at all? I doubt it, maybe some crazy rock climbers would buy it but it certainly wouldn’t be worth my time.

What if you’re hobby is knife making? There is a hardcore group of knife makers out there but it’s a pretty small group and although I’m sure you could make a profitable beginners product for this niche, it would bring in less than $100 a week, if that.

I do believe you should love what you do, but your job isn’t to be a knife maker or a extreme repeller, your job is to be a Marketer and Businessman.

Love what you DO, not what you SELL.

I love Marketing, Advertising, and Business in general. It’s one of my passions that I’m a little obsessed with. I enjoy selling products and making money as you should.

If you just want to make an extra buck by cashing in on your hobby, you’re welcome to try but I doubt you will ever be successful unless you’re also passionate about Marketing.

If someone told me when I was a kid that I would grow up to be a Marketer, I would have laughed at them. I thought I was going to be a Pilot or Police Officer, not a boring business man.

Oddly enough I stumbled across Marketing(fate?) and instantly became obsessed with it. We’re talking 16+ hours a day reading about Marketing for several months or more.

Here’s what I mean by saying don’t love your products…

Obviously you should strive to make quality products that help your customers. Because If you don’t, you will severely damage your products long term profitability.

When you create a product, you can’t afford to get attached to it. Products can and will fail sometimes and if they’re going to fail, you want them to fail as soon as possible so you can move on to the next product which could be successful.

The idea is to Fail Fast. You learn from mistakes and get better each time you try. The faster you fail, the faster you will succeed. Failure isn’t the end, it’s just part of the process. It’s a result that allows you to learn.

Like I’ve said before, there’s no need to be original when looking for a product to sell. Just start looking around at what’s selling well right now.

Find a product that’s already doing well, then create a competing product and do your best to beat your competitors.

Sell what’s already selling, not what you think will sell. Learn that and you will be far ahead of most people.

It’s really not too difficult to find winners when other people have found them for you.

I’ve given away more valuable information on this website than most guru’s would be willing to sell you, and this is one of the most important lessons I can teach. I wasn’t successful until I learned this lesson.

Sell what people want to buy, don’t look for people to buy what you want to sell.

Take a look at this quote:

“Those who have much, enjoy little. Those who have little, enjoy much.”

What does that mean you ask? Think about it, the more you want or need something the more satisfying it is.

When I was just starting high school I went to football tryouts. The tryouts were tough and the coaches kept us going non-stop for about two hours.

For some cruel reason they refused to give us any water except for a small, almost pathetic sip half way through.

When it was over, I was worn out and dehydrated. Yet, after cleaning up and changing I remember having one of the most satisfying experiences I can remember.

I went to the water fountain just outside the locker room and probably spent 5 minutes sucking up every bit of water I could get.

That was without a doubt the best tasting and most enjoyable water I’ve ever had. If water was that good all the time no one would drink anything else.

What made the water so fantastic? I was very dehydrated after over 2 hours of heavy physical exertion in the hot Florida sun.

The lack of or extreme need for water is what made it so good.

That’s why those who have little enjoy what they get so much more than those who have “much.”

I saw a show on the Discovery Channel a few weeks ago about two guys who were stranded on a desert island for 4 days with no water. When they were rescued it showed them gulping down water and I found my self envying how much they must have enjoyed that water.

Now you’re probably wondering what that has to do with Marketing…

While it is somewhat relevant to Marketing it’s also an important life lesson(and something for me to write about since I can’t think of anything else right now).

When you’re picking a product to sell the first thing you should look for is a Starving Market. A group of people that desperately want something.

You don’t want to sell A/C units in Antarctica, sell heaters instead.

Once you have a starving market, all you have to do is let the market know you have what they’re starving for. From there on it’s easy money.

I’ll use almost anything to get a competitive edge, and although I won’t tell you all of my tricks, I figured I’ld give you a few.

If you do your Niche Marketing like I do, you sell your products primarily with PPC(pay-per-click) in the beginning. SEO comes later, if at all.

When you release a new product on Clickbank, it goes to the bottom of the list in the Marketplace, where it is usually overlooked by affiliates.

To get affiliates you have to either wait until a good affiliate finds your product and promotes it(which could take months), or use a dirty trick to send it climbing up the list.

How do you raise your product rank in the Marketplace?

Easy… If you’re like me you have a lot of accounts with Clickbank. All you need to do is use another one of your accounts as an affiliate in your PPC ads.

Say your product is on an account called “product” and you have another account called “something.”

Just make an affiliate link like this one: something.product.hop.clickbank.net

Then make that your Destination link in your PPC Campaign.

Now every sale you get on your own will count as an affiliate sale, which will boost your ranking in the Marketplace.

I suggest you only use this until you have a few affiliates. There’s no real benefit to over exploiting it because once a few affiliates find it they will raise the rank on their own.

Some of you may think I’m crazy, but I actually enjoy infomercials. They can be entertaining and educational for a Marketer.

The humor is probably lost on non-marketers, but if you understand what they’re doing (or trying to do) it can be funnier than the latest blockbuster comedy.

Just the names of some of them are hilarious…

Take Yoga Booty Ballet for example. That’s a pretty funny name and product, but from the looks of it, it’s selling like crazy.

Who in their right mind thought of such a thing?

Entertainment aside, the main reason I watch infomercials is to see what’s selling and how they’re selling it.

It’s the same as reading all the ads in a magazine month after month.

The ad’s in the magazine or the infomercials that keep repeating are the ones that are profitable.

This is an excellent way to find new products that are already selling and to learn what sales techniques are working in that market.

If you want a wildly profitable product just look at some infomercials…

Some long time winners are Real Estate Investing (no money down and tax sales), EBay get rich quick deals, Exercise machines, Exercise videos, Diet pills, Cooking gadgets, and many others I can’t think of.

If you want to improve your marketing, one of the easiest ways is to study what’s working for other people. That means watching infomercials, buying magazines for the ad’s, and whatever else you need to do for the particular media.

Right now I’m watching a show I like called “Deal or No Deal.” It’s usually an enjoyable game show but tonight it’s a 2 hour commercial.

I’m “roughly” timing it and there’s 5 to 6 minutes of the show followed by 3 to 5 minutes of commercials.

It’s incredibly annoying…

Typically there are about 15-20 minutes of commercials for every one hour of TV, and somehow people have learned to live with that. But a commercial every 5 minutes?!?!

I know that’s a little off topic but it leads me to what I really wanted to talk about…

Image Marketing aka “Marketing Made by Idiots”

Direct Marketer’s generally dislike Image or Brand Marketing because it isn’t sales driven.

The goal of Image Marketing is to make a company or product look good and to get customers to remember it.

The goal of Direct Marketing is to SELL! Screw everything else, just sell the damn product.

Obviously any successful business needs to provide a quality product and build repeat business, but you can’t have repeat business if no one ever buys your product.

Company’s like Pepsi or Reebok, can benefit from Image Marketing because their customers are often faced with two very similar products and rely on “Brand Loyalty” to make the decision.

But Entrepreneurs who start a Small Business get little benefit from Image Marketing.

They usually go to an Ad Agency that makes all kinds of promises, charges a ton of money, and delivers very little.

This leads to the failure of countless small businesses every year.

Sure everyone in town may know your business’s name but if you don’t give people a reason to come to your store and buy something, they won’t.

If you’re going to start a business, take the time to learn about Marketing first, and don’t rely on an Ad Agency to take care of the most important part of your business.

In Direct Marketing your Ad’s should always give you a measurable increase in sales. Exploit the Ad’s that sell and throw out the ones that don’t.

Well… It’s not quite free, but from the customer’s perspective it is.

The idea is to offer a product that’s very cheap to create and ship, for Free plus Shipping & Handling.

The catch is that you hide the cost and a small profit in the S&H.

That’s perfectly legal and it’s done all the time. In fact many marketers cover their entire fulfillment cost with their S&H, leaving the full price as pure Contribution To Overhead.

With just a little bit a of thought, I was able to think of quite a few products and markets this could be done with.

The idea has been around for a long time and a lot of marketers use it, but I had never seriously considered it until recently.

To make it worth the effort, you have to move a lot of product and the best way to do that is to target a large, “hungry” market.

Here’s a quick(well it was supposed to be) example…

A well known large market is the diet market.

Creating and popularizing a new diet takes to long so we don’t want to mess with that. Instead we can take advantage of whatever the most popular diet at the time is.

I’m guessing the low carb, high protein diet is still the popular fad diet right now, so let’s think of a product that would help people on that diet.

How about a small book called “10 low carb foods that will curb your carb cravings.”

Craving Carbs is a common complaint for people on that diet so it should appeal to much of our target market.

Next, find a fulfillment company that will print and ship the book for you, so all you have to do is send them the names and addresses of your customers.

You should be able fulfill orders for under $5.00 dollars each.

If you charge 7.95 S&H, that leaves you with $2.95 per order CTO or Contribution to Overhead.

Now write a small ad for your free giveaway. Something that grabs peoples attention, offers them the book for free, and contains some type of limited supply message.

For ordering it would be best to use a 800 number and a website in your ad. You might be able to get away with just the website, but who knows.

Ok… Now you’ve got your product and the ad… The next step would be to find a diet magazine to advertise it in.

Unless you already have a lot of money, you should start with one of the smaller ones that only has a circulation of a couple hundred thousand and work your way up from there.

Just find one that targets your market well and then contact them and ask for a “Rate Card” or “Media Kit.”

Because I don’t want to spend hours researching this, I’ll use “Self Magazine” as an example(I’ld start with a smaller magazine though).

They charge $14,665 for a 1/6 page B&W ad. I know that’s not cheap but they have a circulation of 1,332,782. So your Ad will be exposed to over 1.3 million people.

Because it’s “Free” and because we hopefully wrote a good Ad, we should get a pretty good response.

I don’t want to be over ambitious, so say we get a piddly 0.5% conversion rate. That’s about 6,663 orders which adds up to $19,655.85 in CTO.

We subtract the cost of the ad and we’re left with 4,990.85 in profit.

The truth is, we’ll probably be able to fulfill the product for less than I estimated and the conversion rate will probably be higher than I estimated.

I just like to underestimate things for safety.

I bet your thinking… All that for less than 5 grand a month?

Well not quite, that’s just the first step of many… We can eventually move on to other magazines thus increasing our profit many times over.

But more importantly, we can collect the names and addresses of all the people who order our free booklet.

Then we can create or find another higher priced product, with a much higher profit margin and market it to them by mail.

Let’s say we turn around and send every person that orders our free booklet a sales letter for another product that has a profit margin of $20.00.

It’s much easier to sell to people on the backend than it is on the front, so we should get a much better conversion rate for this list.

Let’s say our second product converts 5%(underestimating again) which gives us 333 orders on the back each month.

We make 20 bucks profit on those orders so that’s an additional $6,660 dollars in profit which brings us to a total profit per month of $11,650.85.

And that’s just one magazine and one cheap backend product.

Do you see the potential here? We not only profit from our first “free” product but we also use it as a Lead Generator for a more expensive backend product.

Then once you have the leads, you can easily sell them more diet related products well into the future.

I should admit that I haven’t tried this yet, but it seems like a good idea so I might give it a try in the future.

Now watch, somebodies going to see this and end up getting rich off my idea…

Oh well… I’ve got more ideas than I do time or motivation.

Alot of people obsess about their headline and one fad that thankfully seems to be ending is the use of “Who Else” in headlines.

At first it was praised as a sure-fire way to boost conversion rates by a couple guru’s.

Most people just threw it up on their sales page without even thinking twice, even if it didn’t fit their product. Almost no one tested it, and I’m sure alot of people lost sales because of it.

I’ve seen decent ones like “Who else wants to learn to drive the golf ball further and straighter in only 2 days?” and I’ve seen terrible ones(I actually found this one) like “Who Else Wants To Create Profitable Customers Quickly?”

How do you create profitable customers? Is there a special Lego set for that?

Actually what the hell is a Profitable Customer? I have profitable products but not customers. If I was a pimp and my customers were my Ho’s they could be profitable.

Funny enough when you do a Google search for “who else wants” you get 480,000 results with quite a few funny ones.

Alright back to the topic… When this all started I decided to test it, unlike everyone else. What did I find out? It converted about .6% less than my current headline.

That’s not bad considering I had tested my headline quite a bit but it demonstrates why you should test every change you make to your sales copy. What works for one product may not work for another.

Don’t ever blindly take someone else’s advice.

“Test all things and hold fast to that which is good”
1 Thessalonians 5:21

It’s in the Bible people…

Wow, I should make that my new slogan for this site. It’s crazy how that applies so well to marketing but I guess it really applies to everything in life.