- sub-title ‘The tools that automate your Internet income’

Still on day two, Rick Raddatz is one of the speakers I was looking forward to seeing.  I assumed we’d hear about Marketing Makeover Generator, Instant Video Generator and Rick’s other products… but no.

Interestingly, and to the confusion of some in the audience, Rick didn’t really talk much about ‘the tools that automate your internet income.’

What what did he talk about?  Two opening statements about business that Rick made, should give you the angle:

• The value is in the strategy, not the tactics
• The value is in the model, not the marketing

With the supporting statement that he know’s that his core strength is in creating businesses - businesses that can start small and grow and business that can exist without the owner having to be there.

This idea of creating a business that is independent of its owner certainly isn’t a new one (have you listened to Michael Gerbers The E-Myth Seminar, or heard Rich Schefren?) - don’t ‘be’ the business, ‘create’ a business that gives you freedom and that you can choose to sell or pass on to your children.

There were lots of pieces of Rick’s session that I enjoyed and here’s two gems:

In hiring

• Hire visionaries as consultants
• Hire implementers as employees

Business requires vision to give it direction and longevity and often the business founder is the main visionary.  But you should be aware of the kind of people you’re hiring.

It’s tempting to employ people who have great vision, but unless you can provide them a role that really needs a visionary (like, your role) it probably won’t work out in the long run - they will just get bored!

If you need a visionary, hire them as a consultant and hire implementers as employees.

Some common strategic errors

I think they stand-alone as thought provoking statements:

1. Not respecting the truth
2. Not respecting focus
3. Not respecting small steps
4. Not respecting self
5. Not respecting strategy

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

Adam Ginsberg put on quite a show in his eBay session.  For those who’ve not seen Adam speak… it’s an experience.  All of the speakers showed confidence, but Adam just oozes it.

Adam’s session started with Mark Anthony Bates introducing him.  Now, Mark Anthony describes himself as ‘the coaches coach’ and what he seems to do it coach speakers on how to sell effectively from the platform (i.e. exactly what Adam was about to do)… and he certainly did a great job of lending credibility to Adam.

Adam’s job was to sell his training/coaching program on ‘being wildly successful on eBay’… and before he was half way through his pitch there were people signing up (without even hearing how much he was going to charge) - he was good.

So, what did we learn from the session?  Well, of course the best stuff is kept for the course, but a few anecdotes about mistakes people make on eBay:

Terrible pictures

A picture says a lot and a small or unflattering picture isn’t going to help your position.  The picture of a shiny kettle which reflected the naked man taking the photo, probably isn’t the best way to start a bidding frenzy - and yes, this was real.

Bad descriptions

When you create an auction you include a title - that title contains keywords that are used as a part of the search… so, its kind of important to at the least say what your product is.  Adam showed some examples of property on eBayRealestate.com where advertisers had missed out key worlds like ‘house’, one example read something like ‘family of four’ (presumably meaning ‘a house suitable for a family of four’) - ooops.

This kind of description means that far fewer people find the listing… and so are ideal for bargain hunter in the know.

Incorrect spelling

Again, the title is key.  Misspelling your keywords is both good and bad.

Firstly, someone may misspell the keyword when running a search.  So including common miss-spellings is smart.  But, leaving out the correct spelling isn’t.

Adam cited a new computer described as a ‘Laptoob’ instead of a ‘laptop’ - that one was a bargain!

Bad layout

Adam showed before and after examples of layout.  Where a property with an uncompelling layout was bought cheap and then re-listed using the same pictures and content, but a professional layout, re-sold for a health profit.

In absolute summary, because eBay is so huge ($21,000m in sales, 247+ million registered members, 1,371m listings in 37 countries) there is huge scope for buying cheap from badly listed products and reselling for a profit.

The crux of Adam’s promise for this event, seemed to be:

1. I can teach you how to build your your list through eBay - and so build your Internet business
2. You can make a good income part-time

Though I’d have to say that the overall effect of this session was probably too much for me.  There were a few common sales techniques employed that were surprisingly crude (like increasing the number of spaces available from 27 to 37 as they were about sell out, because of ‘pressure from the organisers’, hmmm), that spoilt the rapport for me… but my impression is still that Adam certainly knows eBay!

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

The first ‘content’ session on day two of World Internet Summit was a relative Internet marketing newcomer - Tracy Repchuk.

Certainly Tracy isn’t new to business or marketing - in fact she has always been ’self employed’ and seems to have made a name as a direct response copywriter.

Tracy has also written a couple of books, one of which is 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles.  So, an interesting background, what did she have to say - what are the seven critical building blocks?

1. Find your niche

As well as the usual - use keywords tools, search etc (see previous post), Tracy briefly mentioned ‘Survey Monkey‘ which has a ‘free’ to get going option for building online surveys.  If you can ask your target audience questions like ‘what are your 3 burning questions about <the niche>’ and other such intelligence gathering questions, you’ll have a much better chance of creating a new product that people will actually want..

2. Deadly website combo

A website on its own, is often not enough you want to use as many channel to reach your audience as possible (and leverage the cross links between them for SEO).

So a sensible combo would be:

1. a regular website (for branding), plus…
2. a landing page for capturing interested parties email addresses (yes, a squeeze page), plus…
3. a sales page (the one that comes after the opt-in at the landing page) , plus…
4. a blog

3. List building and autoresponder

There’s an ‘old’ adage the money is in the list, and Tracy agrees. Use a great sequential autoresponder service to store leads, build relationships and make more sales.

4. Rapid product creation

A few sensible ideas: Interview experts and sell the recordings (see previous post), find interesting content to package at gutenberg.org, record and sell a tele-seminar, blog and include affiliate links, buy master resale rights to existing good products…

Essentially, you don’t have to slave for years to build a product.  Find out what people want and be creative in finding a way to provide it.

5. Affiliate programs

If you have a product, increase your marketing/sales force by offering an affiliate program (get a free report from here about running your own affiliate program)!

Or use affiliate programs instead creating your own product… take a look at what’s available at ClickBank.com to fit your niche!

6. Creating a traffic hurricane

Essentially the same as point 5 in this post.

7. Maximise your marketing funnel

Map a route that matches the growing confidence in you - ie start with a free or very low cost product and work up to your most expensive (take a look at video 2 in our demonstration list, after two minutes I talk about the sales funnel for a ‘raw food’ business).

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

This is how the day two agenda looked:

• 08.30-09.30 Parade of speakers - this is where most (some like Armand Morin were yet to arrive) of the speakers get 5 minutes or so to introduce themselves.  And of course take the opportunity sell their session.  This is a bit like the ’subject’ of an email, its only purpose is to get you to open the email - or in this case, to be at that speakers session!
• 0930-11.00 Tracy Repchuk - 7 critical building blocks to your internet marketing empire.  Tracy describes herself as the ‘Marketing Makeover Maestro’ and in this session she’s offers to be your coach. (see separate post)
• 11.30-13.00 Adam Ginsberg - How to succeed wildly on eBay.  Gosh, Adam really is a force to be reckoned and he pulled out all the stops in this one. (see separate post)
• 14.00-15.30 Rick Raddatz - Success on Autopilot: The tools that automate your internet income.  Actually, Rick didn’t talk very much about ‘tools’ as you might think of them (and especially if you know Rick provides online marketing tools).  (see separate post)
• 16.00-17.30 Sean Roach - Google Information & Web 3.0 … where is it all going? How YOU can make money from it, with absolutely no experience whatsoever.  Now, that’s a title for you.  But did Sean’s session deliver on the promise?  (see separate post)
• 18.00-18.45 Internet networking

We’ll follow up with posts about each of the sessions…

Enjoy…
Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

The final session of day one of World Internet Summit was delivered by Tim Brocklehurst, which was a combination of the importance of building your list (the old ‘the money is in the list’ adage) and doing it using Viral Marketing (in fact, more specifically, doing it using Tim’s “My Viral Spiral” product).

Firstly, Tim is Brit and has an absolutely super English accent - which sounded quite unusual in the setting we were in.  (I know, we were in London, and I’m a Brit too, but until this point we’d heard from Brett McFall an Aussie, Tom Hua from China and Shaune Clarke from Canada).

Tim’s goal was to show how you could build a list of 5000 people - a size that can help you earn a considerable income (if you look after and value your subscribers of course).

Tim shared his simple rule of thumb that you should be able to earn $1 per month in affiliate commission per list subscriber.  With a list size of 5000 that’s $5000 *(£2500) per month, based on

• Email open rate 20% (that’s 1000 people)
• Click on affiliate link in email rate: 25% (250 people)
• Buy rate (sale conversation): 5% (13 people)
• Earnings 13 x an average $50 commission/sale = $650 (£325) per offer, then you need 7+ offers per month

Now, its quite possible that my notes aren’t quite right, because 7 sounds like a lot now I come to write it out.  But that number assume a $50 commission.

BUT… you have to have the list before you can create the relationship with the people on your list, before you can make offers to them… so, Tim’s point… how do you build the list?  Viral marketing.

“If you’re online and you’re not doing viral marketing, you may as well be offline” was Tim’s favourite quote.  He did have some interesting information, but not a great deal on how to do viral marketing.. and I guess that’s because Tim has a product, My Viral Spiral, which automates the whole thing for you!

From what we saw it looked pretty well thought out and set-up to completely automate the viral process, making things as easy as possible.

It is based on a piece of software that you can choose to install yourself on your own web server, or they will host it for you.

The product does look interesting, but we don’t have current plans to use it - so I can’t tell you if it really is a good as Tim say’s it is.  You can of course read more about it on Tim’s My Viral Spiral site!

One final thing I thought was interesting was that at a previous World Internet Summit, Tim met a small number of people that setup their own Mastermind group (al la Napoleon Hill)… something I’d had on my list for a couple of years.  And yes, I did make this suggestion to a small number of people I met at the event and am in the process of setting that up right now.

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

How easy is it to create an income from a website?  Can you really create a sensible income?  These are two of the questions the World Internet Challenge is aiming to answer.

Essentially, the challenge is “Can we create a new website that generates income before the end of the four day conference”.

The man faced with that challenge was Shaune Clarke.  Here’s an outline of what he did…

Shaune’s partner Terri Dumont wanted to create a wine oriented website.  And prior to the event Shaune and Terri did three things:

• Research areas of wine to find a niche with lots of traffic and not so much competition (just like Brett talked about in the 7 Steps to success)
• Found a small number of wine experts who were happy to be interviewed - and recorded an interviews with them
• Bought the domain GrapeVineGuru.com and created a blog based website

So, strictly speaking Shaune didn’t create all this at the event - but he did explain what he had done and why (and promised later that he would tell us how he & Terri secured the interviews; Shaune positioned himself as ‘the interview guy’ more about that in a later post)!

The business model of the website was perhaps the most interesting, simple and hopefully effective (yes, take note of this bit!)

The backend product that is being sold is a monthly subscription for wine enthusiasts, to receive regular expert interviews.  The route to that subscription is:

1. Offer 2 free audio interviews in exchange for name and email (the opt-in or squeeze page)
2. At the ‘thank you page’ offer 4 more for a small amount of money say $47-$97 (this is the sales letter page)
3. As a part of the 4 interviews, offer a ‘free period’ to the subscription service

Pretty simple, and a tested model where the upgrade from a free opt-in to the low priced product has in the past proved to be high (over 20%)

Why is the site based on a blog?  Two reasons, firstly it’s quick to update and assuming that it is being updated regularly, search engines like to keep them indexed and generally consider them good information sources.  That’s key for medium to long term traffic generation.

The landing page, including the opt-in to get the free interviews is a separate page on the site (not part of the blog).  Using this approach means that you can have a well ranked site by the search engines (to generate organic search traffic) AND have an opt-in and sales letter.  An opt-in and sales letter alone aren’t very interesting to search engines so this approach gives you:

• A simple sales funnel from ‘free’ to ‘regular subscription’ (see our short video on the sales funnel - it’s the second one in the list of our demonstration videos and I talk about the sales funnel after 2 minutes)
• A flow that can convert prospects from a free opt-in to a subscription
• The chance to follow-up using email autoresponders for those that don’t buy our product
• And finally, a site that has a chance of appearing in the search engines

Overall, this was a great session and there’s such a lot’s more we could discuss about this approach.

For now, I’ll sign-off.

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

The first session on day one of World Internet Summit, Brett McFall covered what he described as the 7 Steps of Success during his “Internet ABC’s” session.  There was nothing startling there, but it was good basic advice for getting started (or indeed for any new project)

1. Find a hot niche market FIRST

   The point here is simple, many, many people have an idea for a product or service and they invest in that idea and take their chances in the marketplace.  Whereas this can of course work, isn’t more sensible to find a hot market where there is demand for information or products… and then provide them?  Well, that’s the difference between someone creating a business based on their passion verses someone who is passionate about being in business.  You must choose which will work for you of course.

   The example that Brett gave for himself was related to Scrapbooking - in 2005 he heard someone one the radio say ‘this is going to be big’ or something similar.  He did a little research and decided this was a hot market.

   The simplest research is to check the number of people that search for phrases specific to the niche you’re researching, using a tool like WordTracker.  When you find a popular niche you can use your favourite search engine to see how many great products and websites already exist.  Clearly a high number of searches and a low number of quality sites and products is a good start.

2. Create a product which gives your market what they want

   OK, we know this makes perfect sense and on the internet ‘information products’ like e-books and audio programs are good product categories to start with.  So, in the scrapbooking market Brett created ScrapbookingProfits.com.

   Additional advice was over deliver and surprise your customer and make it unique.

3. Create a powerful, compelling sales message

   Simply, why is the product you’ve created interesting to your target market.

4. Design a simple website that converts prospects in to buyers

   Typically, this is a ‘one page’ website containing a sales letter OR (the preferred suggestion) a squeeze page to collect your interested visitors name and email address and then your sales letter.  If you have their email address, you can of course follow-up using an autoresponder or newsletter email.

5. Bring traffic to your site

   Consider these as getting traffic to your site in short, medium and the long term:

   Short term: pay-per-click advertising - using PPC you can have people visiting your site within hours
   Medium term: E.g. publish articles that include the link to your landing page or issue online press releases at places like PRWeb.com
   Long term: this is essentially search engine optimisation than typically takes weeks (or months) to kick-in (and of course, articles and press releases all help with this)

6. Use email to turn even more people into customers

   If you captured the names and emails of your prospects, then you can follow up.  An interesting statistic Brett used was 82% of online buyers have bought from an email!

   So, you would use an autoresponder, permission email marketing service to do this.

7. Finally, have people sell your product for you

   This is essentially about having an affiliate program for your product, whether your create an manage this yourself though a service like the one included in our ValuedClientSystem.com professional package or use a service like ClickBank.com.

All good basic stuff to get going!

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

For each day of the event I’ll list the agenda and then where I think its interesting I’ll post a separate item on the actual session… so what happened on day one?

Day one is described as Newbie’s Day, it looked like this:

• 10.00-10.30 Opening - the usual welcome and how to get the best of type material
• 10.30-11.30 Brett McFall - Internet ABC’s - Brett covered the ‘7 Steps of Success’ (see separate post)
• 12.00-13.00 Shaune Clarke - How to guarantee you’ll succeed online - this session had nothing to do with the web, but was a session about getting your psychology right and writing your goals for 30-90 days and most interestingly your two year vision, written as a movie.  In fact, this was a really good session (though I am interested in success psychology) delivered with real passion by Shaune.
• 14.00-16.00 Shaune Clarke & Brett McFall - “World Internet Challenge” - creating an online business, while we watch (see separate post)
• 17.00-18.30 Tim Brocklehurst - How to build a huge list of customers (see separate post)

(If the ’separate posts’ aren’t URL’s yet, then we’ve not written the post yet, so its coming really soon.)

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box