Posted by (14) Comment
Anyone who knows anything about me knows how much I nag people about the importance of leverage, about sticking with something long enough for it to reap rewards, about how powerful and valuable multi-level programs are.
It’s just a few days away from my 5 year anniversary with EasyHits4U, a program that exemplifies all the above points of importance, so I thought I’d put pen to paper, figuratively speaking, and share some of my ‘vital statistics’.
My first referral was gained on the 17th March 2007 (that’s the only reason I know my join date must have been round about the next day or so because my first referral was a long term friend and would have joined right after me).
I’d already created VitalViralPro a few months before so naturally EasyHits4U went into the Downline Builder.
I never ever promoted EasyHits4U directly, everything was done through VitalViralPro – as I promoted VitalViralPro, so some of those incoming referrals would join one or more traffic exchanges below me and then in time, others would join below those referrals.
Also, it’s easy to think that I had an advantage because I owned VitalViralPro; not so! I promoted VitalViralPro like all the other members. I had no more advantage than you have when you’re the sponsor and your referral is…well, your referral.
So my EasyHits4U downline grew. It’s interesting that even now, after 5 years, I only have just under 400 direct referrals. That’s less than 7 referrals per month. But here’s where the magic happens…
Those 397 direct referrals have referred 1356 people; they in turn have referred 2087 people!
Those 2087 people have referred 4016, who’ve referred 6531 who’ve referred 6714.
That makes a staggering 21101 people in my downline!
That’s all well and good but what’s in it for me?
Well EasyHits4U is a 6-level program (if you’re upgraded, and I of course would be mad not to be!). I earn credits from my referrals (15%-10%-5%-3%-2%-1%) – so if a first level referral surfs and earns 1000 credits, I get a bonus of 150 credits. If a level 6 referral did that I’d get 10 credits.
I always explain this the same way to people that have yet to grasp the importance of getting referrals in traffic exchanges; most traffic exchanges pay 10% from direct referrals so having 10 referrals that surf the same as you is like having another you working for you for free.
So with my downline, 400 (approx) at 15% is like having 60 free surfers. On level 2, 1350 (approx) at 10% is like another 135.
Without showing all the math, it turns out my downline is like having an army of 617 surfers!!
If that isn’t leverage, I don’t know what is!!
Of course we all know that many, many of the downline will be inactive or surf very little. Even so, it’s enough to bring me in 22k credits a month for free. At EasyHits4U prices ($5.95/1000) , that’s $130 of credits I’m getting every month without needing to lift a finger. I can’t remember what I pay per month for membership but it sure isn’t $130.
My downline grew by 21 members in the last 24 hours too – so the whole this is really starting to compound now.
It’s grown by 18% in the last 9 months and it should keep growing at that kind of rate. And remember, I have promoted this program quite passively. If it was my main business and that was multilevel, I’d be promoting a lot more actively.
And that’s one of the key learning points with anything multilevel. All of the benefit comes later – often quite a lot later. And for a lot of people, that’s unpalatable – they want results now!
Well I didn’t sit on my backside doing nothing while I waited for my EasyHits4U downline to grow – I did lots of things that had a more immediate effect. But I have always planted seeds in multilevel programs where I see them because they’re your passport to an easier life!
I hope this post inspires you to plant your own seeds now – the sooner you do it, the sooner you reap the rewards.
Posted by (2) Comment
Whatever your marketing funnel, you don’t want it to have leaks. If you pour a litre of oil into a funnel while topping up your engine, you want to know that a litre of oil makes it into the engine, not half a litre.
Judging by many funnels I see, people are content to get just 1 drop in the engine from a litre bottle!!
In this post I’m going to show you a couple of free or low cost tools that you can use to plug leaks in a couple of typical scenarios.
Every time you do something that directs a visitor to a page, you need to be thinking about leaks. If I send traffic to an affiliate page, most of that traffic will leak. In fact if I send 1000 visitors and 10 buy from the page, that’s pretty good – isn’t it? Well it’s not bad, but what about the 990 that leaked never to be seen again?
The only surefire way to have zero leaks is to only promote affiliate products from your list. That way if they go take a look, they may not buy but they’re still on your list so you can try something else in the future.
However, you’re going to be doing lots of other activities than just promoting products to your list – this is where you want to plug as many leaks as you can.
So how can you do that?
Well the first thing is that it very much depends on context so the pointers I give here should be taken away and adapted to your own funnels or pipelines.Much of this isn’t rocket science and much of what I’ll be saying is just pointing out something that may not be obvious to you right now (because you just haven’t though about it). But once it’s pointed out, you’ll slap your forehead, say doh! and never make the same mistake again.
Just think of the number of different strategies for sending someone to a sales page to try to make a commission:
And many more possibilities.
If you’re sending visitors that are not on your list then there’s the potential, no the certainty, that you’re going to lose most of those visitors. So let’s look first at two attempts to plug some leaks – the forced opt-in.
Of course there’s no such thing – you don’t have a gun to their head. But a forced opt-in means the vistor either signs up to your list (and then gets to see the intended page) or they don’t see the intended page at all.
At one time, this was all the rage. But you’ll find now that it’s becoming increasingly unpopular with visitors. Visitors are on enough lists, they don’t want to opt-in or have to register just to see a sales page. After all, from their perspective if they don’t buy, they’ve just added themselves to another list for nothing.
However, done right it still works and can be done without annoying your visitors. For example, in the link or advert they click, explain why they should opt-in. A good example would be an advert that says ‘join my newsletter for a $20 discount on the RRP”. Now the visitor won’t get so annoyed.
It’s also reasonable and expected that someone should exchange their name and email in return for a free report. So forced opt-in has it’s place, just don’t use it unless you’re offering something in return. Don’t use it just to restrict access to the sales page.
This is more visitor-friendly. Just ask them if they wouldn’t mind opting on to your list. Of course, the more you offer in return, the more likely they are to comply.
Optional opt-ins could be a gateway page (a page you send them to before the main sales page) that has an opt-in form and a ‘no thanks, take me to the sales page’ link.
It can also be an opt-in form on the sales page itself. This is a passive opt-in. They are totally at liberty to opt-in or not. To get good opt-in rates depends on having an opt-in form that catches their attention and a compelling reason to do something that is optional. Free gifts are the norm, be it newsletters, reports, ebooks, discounts etc.
The point is that you want to capture people that don’t buy before they’re gone forever.
Another popular optional opt-in method is to have an exit pop-up. This is a special form that appears if they attempt to leave the sales page. Sometimes these pop ups require a mouse click to dismiss them, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a fake live agent that might offer a discount. These work on newbies but not on anyone that’s been online two days or more.
Done the wrong way, these are becoming quite unpopular with visitors. If they click away from the page, they don’t always want to see another offer and it can simply antagonise them. However, if the offer is genuine and worthwhile and, most importantly, closely related to the original advert (or link and description) that got them to the sales page in the first place, this works moderately well; “ok, you don’t want to buy this gizmo, how about you grab my free ebook on how to care for your gizmo – just give me your details and I’ll send it to you.”
Another way to capture more of your visitors is to have a related offer on the page. This can be done in a wide variety of ways. The idea is that if one product doesn’t appeal, the other might.
However, this can be counter-productive; it really depends on a lot of factors.
Peel away ads are a very good example of this. They are so eye-catching that they can get a good response rate. The theory is that if someone is interested in the sales page, they’ll ignore the peel away ad. But if they aren’t interested, they might just peek at the peel away ad before they leave for ever. And the peel away adcould be an opt-in or lead to an opt-in.
There isn’t really one right way, though a few ways would certainly be considered definitely wrong. As mentioned, don’t force them to opt-in to see a sales page without giving something in return – you opt-ins will be negligible and so will your sales.
Done right then hypothetically your sales page should do no worse than it would have done originally but of the 990 visitors that previously would have just disappeared into the ether, you’ll get another 20 opt-ins to your list.
Firstly, you do need an autoresponder to plug leaks. I recommend Aweber or TrafficWave.
Secondly you need to implement your chosen method of leak-plugging, i.e. opt-in strategy.
If you own the sales page then you could consider designing an opt-in form into the page. Just grab the form code from your autoresponder and design it in.
However, there are a couple of specific scenarios I’d like to show you because they’re very powerful…
Do a search for “wordpress optin plugin” or “wordpress autoresponder plugin” and you’ll find many possibilities, many of them free. I haven’t reviewed extensively because I already have two that I found that work well for me. Neither are free but considering the potential value of plugging your leaks, they’re very worthwhile. However, once you grasp the principle then you may be able to find free alternatives.
The first one is Digi List Builder. I really like this and it’s really easy to add to any WordPress blog.
You can actually see this in action on this blog – the opt-in form at the bottom is one aspect but there’s more. You may also have by now seen a timed pop-up. This is part of the same plugin.
The second works differently in that if someone moves their mouse out of the area of the page (like to hit back or click on a toolbar bookmark), a visitor friendly opt-in appears. I say visitor friendly because they’re not forced to click anything to carry on. You may also see this one in action if you try to move away from the page.
It’s called wpLapDance but please don’t be put off or offended by the name – it is a seriously good product. At the moment I run both because they plug leaks in complementary ways and if I had to recommend just one or the other I’d find it a tough call right now.
This is something that gets me really excited because it is so easy to implement.
Suppose you really want to tweet an affiliate link. You do know you shouldn’t do that, right? It’s rarely very effective. Well the following technique can be used to plug a leak on an affiliate sales page but works best if you create your own gateway page, like a review page.
The two tools I recommend can both do what’s needed (and a whole lot more besides).
Take a look at this link to an article I wrote on the IMfaceplate site. Now ordinarily I would send a visitor to the article with an IM Faceplate URL – in fact it’s this link here. But what would they do if they like my article? If I’m lucky they’ll browse around IMFP and maybe join under me or find my twitter follow link.
But by using the first link where I use my BZ9 tools to create the opt-in bar at the bottom I’ve given the visitor an easy and clear way to sign up to my list if they like the article.
Another similar set of tools I highly recommend is Widget Quik
Both of these tools can do so much more than just this. My preferred tool right now is BZ9, particularly for the opt-in form at the bottom of a page. But you can use either of these tools to create exit pages that can capture the visitors details and a host of other things. I’ll be creating an article in the future on each of these tools. Both tools have great demo pages so you can see what they’re capable of.
Most people have a leak the size of a dinner plate in their marketing funnels. Use the tools on this page to significantly plug those leaks and stop throwing so much traffic down the drain.
Posted by (0) Comment
The marketing machine is in full swing right now for PPC Bully – any why not, I’m sure it’s a great product. I got my copy so I’ll be reporting on my results in the near future.
But I’ve been using some of the forefathers of PPC Bully to practice ‘don’t pay per click‘ – DPPC.
I figure that it’s getting to the point where it’s harder and harder to make PPC profitable unless you’re very good or you have some of these PPC spy tools in your arsenal.
But what if you grab the tool and then use it in a very different way? Instead of using it to compete like crazy in the Adwords space, why not try something a bit more subtle, a lot less expensive and perhaps a lot longer lasting?
Nearly everyone that managed to grab a copy of PPC Bully is going to be using it to create adwords campaigns but I’m going to be pursuing a different tack, something I’ve been quietly doing over the last 6 months. You’ll see some evidence of it on this blog.
You see, these tools (and I’m going to come on to a much cheaper one than PPC Bully soon) allow you to spy on the competition, giving you a real advantage. And while it’s not totally childs play, you should be able to get a profitable campaign going in far less time and with far less risk.
But another approach is to use the extra information to position organic search results on the same page as the PPC ads!
You see, for a long time I was doing keyword research to know what to fill my articles, blog posts etc with and I suspect if I were spending more time on it, I would do ok. Certainly many of the posts on this blog rate reasonably well for the amount of effort expended.
But what we can do with these spy tools is really find out what’s making people money, what adverts are working – then let them play on the right hand side and we’ll play on the left.
These tools give another perspective on our keywords. A more financially biased view. It’s probably true that if people are in buying mode they tend to use the PPC ads and if they’re in research mode, they’ll often use the organic results. But whereas the PPC ads people tend to need deep pockets to get started (the tools help with this of course), the organic people only need effort and patience – and a bit of assistance from tools like PPC Bully.
If you’re competing in the organic listings then you don’t need to pay the $1500 price tag of PPC Bully either. A tool that will do admirably is Brad Callen’s PPC Web Spy. A really powerful tool at an incredibly low price (check out the web page for the latest price).
If you’re not a firefox fan then you’re going to have to lump it I’m afraid because this is a firefox add-in but boy, is it good.
Imagine doing your regular Google search and having a button below each PPC ad showing you their campaign. Ok, that would be good. But this tool gives you a lot of information about their keywords and their spend, the clicks per day and so on – powerful stuff indeed.
By all means use it to compete in the PPC arena. Or, consider using it as another tool in helping your written content get free traffic.
Be patient, track and bask in the knowledge that you don’t need to worry if your campaign is making a loss – it can’t. It may not be the aggressive approach but it lets anyone compete with the guys with the expensive tools.
Posted by (0) Comment
PyraBang can be a great way to get traffic to a blog and done correctly can get many comments added to a chosen post.
PyraBang is great fun too. The concept will remind you of Digg and similar tools – you can use it to advertise directly (which costs credits – known as ‘bangs’) or you can write something informational only with a view to earning bangs.
We all know that Google loves a good blog. A blog, grown organically will become a Google magnet. And that’s even if you just write naturally about subjects. If you think ahead and plan some keywords into the post then you can really get ranked well for some great terms.
So where does PyraBang come into this?
Well as I said, you can place adverts on PyraBang. But to attract comments on a blog, you first need to create a new post on your blog. Write about something topical, humerous, interesting, factual - anything that lots of people might want to read.
And then, much as you might Twitter, post to PyraBang. A ‘post’ in Pyrabang is almost exactly like a Google sponsored Ad. You have a limited length headline and a limited length description and it has to capture attention. The great thing about PyraBang compared to Digg is that you can determine how long the story stays around for by how many bangs you ‘invest’ in it.
You will certainly see traffic to your blog. And some of those people are likely to comment. Particularly if you write in such a way as to invite comments. E.g. ask a question, be controversial, do a poll.
If you’re even luckier, you might get others investing in your post too.
There are other benefits to the internet marketer too. PyraBang gives you stats. So you can practice writing headlines and descriptions – these are very much like sponsored Google Ads but much cheaper to experiment with.
You can also see what other people post and try to work out why some posts get more views and earn more bangs. This is going to be a great tool for those who work out how to use it to their advantage.
Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.
Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.
They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.
It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.
Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!
Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.
While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.
So go forth and nab your knols.
You can find the service at http://knol.google.com
Posted by (0) Comment
I just received an email from Jonathan Leger and as I’m in content mode at the moment, I went straight and watched the video.
Boy, am I glad I did. This software sets the bar very high indeed. At least based on the video preview – I would love to be reviewing this product for real right now but I guess I’ll have to wait.
There’s a link to the video at the end of this review.
I have never used Instant Article Wizard 1.0 so I don’t know how that performed but it gleaned its content from free articles. Version 2.0 uses the web at large! And the preview shows how to use it to generate really readable articles that look like they were written by one person.
I would like to make a suggestion both to anyone intending to use it and maybe to the great Jon himself: modify every sentence slightly rather than using it verbatim. Maybe the software should only let you retrieve the content after it’s been modified a small amount. Nothing too onerous but change a few nouns, insert superlatives, do something to each sentence.
Why?
Because good as this is, Google could easily detect these articles. Not saying it would now. But if Google didn’t like this concept, it could detect them. I may be wrong but if I’m right, you read it here first.
What are the odds of two people writing the exact same 10 word sentence? OK, if it’s on a specific topic it’s of course feasible. What if 3 or 4 or 5 people have that exact same sentence? Now while the article may well look extremely unique taken as a whole, if (and it is a very presumptive if) Google finds the exact same sentence used in multiple sites, Google can now simply look for that sentence and any site with the exact same sentence will be penalised because it’s a near certainty it was scraped.
Will Google care? Maybe not. There is some value in an article that ‘summarises’ lots of other articles. But if the big G does care, I’m guessing it could switch on detection in a heartbeat.
Change a couple of words in each sentence and it would dramatically reduce the chance of big G spotting it.
This is not to knock the product, far from it. It’s great and I would recommend it. But if it’s overused and if people are too lazy, it may lead to lots of sites getting slapped.
So be smart. Like any tool, use it wisely, not lazily – you might thank me one day. Then again, I could be talking rubbish.
What do you think?
Maybe you already knew that a good way to increase your web presence is by posting comments on blogs. Many an ebook about free traffic preaches this technique and any worth their salt will tell you that for best results, you need to find blogs with a high page rank and that doesn’t use ‘nofollow’ in their blog comment links.
To understand why you need to realise that the benefit from posting to blogs comes in two forms:
The 2nd of these benefits only applies if the blog doesn’t use the ‘nofollow’ tag because that tag means ‘don’t follow this link’ - a directive to the search engines to not consider the link a link to your site.
Many sites add the nofollow tag to make it less attractive to comment spammers but there are still many sites that don’t have it. These are obviously the best sites to find for commenting on.
Comment Kahuna is a free piece of software that helps you find such blogs. Rather than me explain it, go watch the video and see it in action.
And come back and let me know what you think.
Troy