| Issue for June 17, 2009 | Online Marketing Newsletter |
| In This Issue...
"He's Baaaaack...": What a long, strange month it's been. [Read] "Let's Make a Deal": The most profitable skill you can master is the art of making the deal. Learn it here. [Read] "Good or Bad Example?": In this one, we take a lemon of a JV offer and show you how to turn it into lemonade. Don't miss this article. [Read] Not already getting the newsletter? Sign up here. Tweet it!: The URL to pass along is http://talkbiz.com/needtoknow/617 Hi, folks... Yes, I'm still alive. It's been a month since the last full issue was sent out, and I've started getting the "Are you okay?" emails. Just busy. I did write one issue since the last went out. Wrote it three times, in fact. Still too long, and too specialized to send to the whole group. Like I said when you signed up, I'm not going to send you stuff that wastes your time, just to keep to a schedule. I may break that one up and post it to the blog later. It's fun, but it won't make you any money. Today's issue definitely focuses on something that can make you money. Potentially, lots of it. It starts with a real life example of how NOT to approach someone with a deal, and then one way to do it right. The explanation is specific to the approach this guy used, but the ideas can be applied to any offer you make, to prospective partners or to potential customers. Tell your friends, or Tweet it. Send them to http://talkbiz.com/needtoknow/617
Paul
Return to the table of contents The Most Profitable Skill There are a number of skills that are critical to making a business work. If you're in a business that's based around working with people directly, deal-making is at or near the top. If you want to get other people to do pretty much anything to help you get ahead, you need to get good at this. I know people who make incredible incomes doing nothing but spotting the deals that are all around us and bringing them to the right people. That's a whole other level, but it's fun if you like the challenge. You probably want to focus on the specific deals that relate to your business. You can focus on refining your offer until it works on a regular basis, and then scale it up. That's where the real growth happens for most businesses. And it's easy to do, if you take the time to look at your prospect and your offer the right way. Those deals can be anything that moves you forward. Selling more of your product, getting others to sell for you, developing new products or content, any kind of negotiation, hiring new employees, getting a book published... Anything. If you want to get some quick and solid training in this area, grab a copy of "The DealMaker," my manual on the art and science of making a deal happen. Get that here. That's a "no lose" proposition, by the way. If you don't feel it's worth at least 100 times the entry fee in new profits, it costs you nothing. Check it out. You'll enjoy this one.
Return to the table of contents Making JV Lemonade Let's look at a real-life example of a "JV" proposal I got from someone recently. He seemed to think he was making me a good offer. The only changes I've made were to remove the identifying links and the gentleman's name. As you read it, see if you can spot what's right and what's wrong with it: So, what was your impression as you read that? .... Let's start with what was right about it. The most important thing is that he sent it. He took action, which puts him ahead of most people who try to start a business online. He also:
In addition, he had a very professional site designed for the sign-up page, and he wrote actual copy for it. In order to show you that, I'd be telling you who the guy is, and that's not fair if you're going to critique him publicly without his having asked for it. The goal is the lesson, not embarassing someone who's out there making an honest effort and being civil in the process. .... So, what's wrong with it? Other than a sales page that makes ridiculous promises, the guy brings nothing to the table. He adds no value to the offer, and he's stacked the value that he receives pretty heavily. He gets visitors to sign up before they even know if there's anything worthwhile behind the curtain. He's basically asking for the recipient's best subscribers to be handed over without anything in return. Given his approach and inexperience, there's little reason to believe that he'll be able to provide any useful content in the future to benefit the folks who do sign up. He wants affiliate commissions from publishers for sending their own subscribers to the links. Why could they not just promote their products themselves, and keep the whole sale price? Or, if they wanted to do a cross-promotion, why wouldn't they just arrange it themselves, since they have something of value to offer in exchange? Very bad: He promised something he can't be sure he'll deliver. Specifically, the traffic from all those other publishers he hopes will participate. The "product" is undefined, and seems to be based on the same 10 questions for each respondent. Most people with experience will run from that kind of "deal." He hasn't given me any reason to believe there's anything of value in it for you. If it's not going to benefit you, why would I want to recommend his site? He appears not to understand that I'm not his actual prospect. I'm just the gatekeeper between you and him. YOU are his real prospect. He's expecting other people, who are already established, to send him content and traffic. He offers nothing in return but a system by which he can siphon off their most active subscribers and half of their revenues. Yeah. Sure. Count me in. I'll do that right after I mow your lawn. .... To sew it all together, he finishes with, "Please just be sure to include real substance as I aim to provide valuable content to my list." Umm... The rest of that email just seemed like a lot of others I've gotten from inexperienced folks who think they've invented a clever new idea. That sentence, though, floored me. It pretty much translates as: "Do all the work for me - and make sure you do it right!" My initial thought, after voicing a couple of choice words, was to send the guy a witty and scathing response. Something that would set his shorts on fire, and make everyone else who read it laugh for days. Instead, I decided to use his email to help other people avoid alienating potential partners. Seems more useful, if not quite as satisfying. .... The question is, given that this guy has no products, no connections and nothing to offer other than his willingness to take action, what should he do? He has lots of options. They all boil down to finding or creating some value to add to the mix. Here's one possible way to approach that. The description is specific to the example, but the idea can be used in a lot of ways. To begin, we'll look at the idea: Start a newsletter review site. Why that choice? It matches his market. It has the potential to become a serious resource for his prospects and deliver real benefit. And it can significantly improve his position when approaching people in the future. .... The steps are easy. The first is to do a few hours of research and find out which newsletters and blogs people seem to like in your market. Don't make it a narrow search. For example, if your niche is Internet marketing, don't just review newsletters that talk about affiliate selling. Look at all the newsletters and blogs/RSS feeds that cover anything on the overall topic, and sign up for every one that looks like it might be worthwhile. I recommend creating a new email address for this, as it's likely to get flooded with content. Don't worry. You're not going to get overwhelmed if you follow these instructions. Find an available domain that covers the field, get hosting, and install a blog. To start with, use a simple theme. One that seems solid and not flashy. Set it up to be search engine friendly, which you can find instructions for with just a bit of digging. Note: I'm not going to get into the technical end of things in this article. It would hit 25 pages, fast, and many of you already know how to do this stuff. You will want to install a few non-SEO related plug-ins. These are:
You will also want the standard RSS button near the top, and a sign-up form for an email list somewhere in the sidebar. For your list and autoresponder hosting, I recommend Aweber They're who I use for everything but my oldest subscribers, who were with me before confirmed opt-in was as important as it is now. Aweber is extremely reliable, and provides very good customer support. Install the plug-ins, put the subscription form in your sidebar, and you're just about ready to go. For those who don't know how to do this stuff, fear not. It's much easier than it sounds. If you just don't want to be bothered, you can get someone with minimal tech experience to do it for a few bucks. Or a pizza. .... In the writing section of your blog's admin panel, find the Update Services field and paste in this list of places to ping when you add a new post:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ Click "Save Changes." "Pinging" is the process of letting various services know that you've posted something new, which they then tell their members or subscribers about, automatically. This helps to generate traffic to your blog. That's a Good Thing. .... If you have even a little technical skill, the longest part of this process is picking out a theme, which is the look and feel of your blog. You can find over 800 free themes at the Wordpress site. Do a search in your favorite search engine for "Wordpress themes," and you'll find a ton more. The process I just described shouldn't take an entire evening. Go help your rent-a-geek finish that pizza. .... If you're doing this full-time, you can go to the next step, after wiping the pizza sauce off your face. If not, do this step the next evening. First, go to Facebook, and create a profile. Make sure it's clear that the profile is for your review activities. Include the link to your blog, and start a group (see their instructions for that) for review announcements. Copy the URL for your Facebook profile into a text document on your computer. Next, go to Twitter and create an account. Make sure you use the link to your review blog, and mention that you do reviews on whatever your topic is. Now, use the Find People function at the top to look for the publishers of the blogs and newsletters you signed up for. Follow any of them that you find. You can also scroll to the bottom of the page and use the Search link found there, which gives you different options. When the page comes up, click on "Advanced Search," and enter some keywords that relate to your topic and see who comes up. If their profile indicates an interest in the topic, follow them. You want to follow maybe 50 people your first time through. By the way, for those who don't know how Twitter works, the whole "follow them" thing probably sounds kind of stalkerish. It just means you're subscribing to their public Tweets (mini-posts) which appear on your Twitter home page as they're made. Nothing weird or creepy in it. That's not to say that some of the Tweets aren't a little... odd. .... Also, search for sites in your industry, or services with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, that report on news of the niche. An example in the Internet marketing field would be imnewswatch.com If they're on Twitter, follow them. At Facebook, send them a Friend invitation. This is the most basic of promotional plans, but it will work for starters. Going into all of the possible ways to publicize a site like this would take more pages than I want to put into a book, much less a newsletter issue. You will want to do further research into the various promotional methods that fit your project. For starters, though, do the important thing: Start. There's no reason not to do something like this quickly. It's only a two or three evening job. Or one day, if you do it all in a stretch. Much less, if you pay someone to do it for you. Just give them these instructions and a check. .... Now you get down to work. As you let a few issues of the email newsletters build up, you want to go to the blogs you found earlier (or start finding now) and review them. Do them one at a time, and do them in some depth. Read a bunch of posts, and note the good and bad points of the content and overall style as you do. The key thing to keep in mind while doing your reviews, after noting the specific range of topics the publication covers, is to be honest about what's good and what could be improved. Tell both sides, along with your opinion of who should read the publication and who doesn't need it or won't benefit from it. Write up your reviews in a text editor - not a word processor. Use something that has a spell-check function, no matter how good you think your spelling is. And, very important: Make sure you include a live link to the site being reviewed. I recommend making that link open in a new window. Make sure the title is clear on what the review is about, and use words that relate to the main subject, so that people who see it will immediately know if it's something they want to read. Possibly something like: Review of "Associate Program News" (Affiliate marketing) Highly recommended. or... Review of "Fred's Autoresponder Weekly" (Email marketing) New marketers only. or... Review of "Joe's Killer Tipsheet" (Nothing but ads) Skip this one. Once you've finished the first one, you're ready to post it to your blog. Go to the admin section and create two categories: "Blogs" and "Newsletters." Post your review, and mark it for the appropriate category. As soon as you hit "Publish," the blog should ping the announcement services, and you're on your way. Now, go to Twitter and log in. Post the title of the review, along with the URL, in the text box at the top. Then click the "Update" button. If the URL is long, use TinyURL.com to create a shorter one. While you're doing this, you may find that a few people have followed you already. This is not unusual. Some folks will "follow back," which means that they saw that you had followed them and decided to return the favor. That was the purpose of following that initial group - to get you to see how that part works. Others may have found you based on a search of the relevant words in your profile. You're going to repeat this process at least 10 times in the first two weeks, concentrating on blogs to start with. After that, you'll begin to get to the point where you've gotten enough of some of the email newsletters to start reviewing those. Once you get to 10 reviews, send a courtesy note to each site that's been reviewed, including the URL and the title of the review. Send these to an email address or through a contact form. Do NOT post them in response to a blog post, for example. You are not making any offers at this point. Just letting people know about your review of their site. .... I recommend not bothering to say anything about any publication that's really bad. If you must, I'd have a separate list, called something like, "I didn't find these useful enough to personally recommend." Then just include the name of the publication and the URL. Do not make the URL a live link. .... After you've done this long enough to have 30 or so reviews, contact the people you gave decent reviews to. If they email newsletters, ask for permission to post one of them as a sample for your visitors. Put those in a separate category, called "Sample Issues." You do not want to change anything in it. Specifically, you don't want to switch product links to affiliate links. Remember, you want to be as objective as possible in your reviews. Look for the good points, yes, but don't manufacture them, and don't gloss over important negatives. You also want to avoid extreme words, whether positive or negative. Stick to the facts, as you see them. Inject your personality through your writing style, and perhaps an occasional editorial post. You will want to add "pages," a special type of entry in a blog, that tell your criteria for reviews, your personal outlook, and a "Who am I?" page. You'll also want a page that tells people how to submit resources and products for review. Make sure that's up before you start emailing people to let them know you've reviewed their publication(s). That last one is important. .... Okay. We've gone through the "what to do" and the "how to do it." The real lesson here is in the "Why should I bother?" The perennial question: "What's in it for me?" Let's go back to the example email. The gentleman who sent that is hoping to get people to help him kickstart his online business. He's asking complete strangers to carry him from Zero to Hero, with no value offered in exchange. That's not going to work very often, as you can imagine. So, how many of the shortcomings of his approach are fixed using this model? The first is that, to the extent that he promotes effectively, he's developing an audience of his own. He will build up a list of subscribers, regular visitors and Twitter followers as he adds and announces content. If he keeps things objective, he's developing credibility with that audience. There are so few people that will point out both the good and bad sides of a given product or publication that people notice it immediately. Everyone knows that nothing is perfect, and they're more likely to believe a review that recognizes that without making benefits or shortcomings into a bigger deal than they are. As his credibility develops, he's going to start to build a brand for himself. A reputation that is directly related to his breadth of knowledge. He will become an authority. He's also developing several skills. As he reads various styles with a critical eye, his writing will improve. He will also get better at spotting things in the writing and the ideas that other people might not notice. The quality and usefulness of his reviews should improve quickly. By exposing himself to a broad range of ideas within his topic, he'll build his understanding of the niche, and the problems of people within it, more quickly than if he focused on just one part of the subject. That will help him to figure out the best ways to grow his own business, along with ways to add value for his prospective partners. His first contact with various people in the business will be giving them something, with nothing asked in return. That first email will give them the review itself, and the link to their site, which can help with search engine rankings and bring them more visitors and subscribers. Throughout the process, he's developing a network that will help him in the future. The subscribers and social networking contacts can become more than an audience, if he interacts with them. And some of the people whose information he reviews will reply, starting the process of building other relationships. Through the page offering information on submitting publications and products, he's likely to get requests for review of paid products. That's where the real test starts. He may be tempted to look more at the positives of those products, since he's going to be linking to them with affiliate links. If he can avoid that, and maintain the same level of objectivity he applied to his early reviews, he'll really cement his reputation. If not, he's going to tank everything he's built up so far. Consistency is key to making an approach like this work. .... Notice that this whole idea is simple. There's nothing difficult in terms of technology, no special skills required, and very little expense to it. Just a domain and hosting. Everything else is a matter of a very little bit of time and energy. Look at the difference in positioning, though, when it's time to start talking deals with people. Do it right and you've got an audience, a reputation and some authority in the market, a growing network, and have already done something for the people you approach, before you ever approach them. You're an established player at that point, and can deal with the other players with some confidence. No, you're not a Big Fish (probably), but you've got something worthwhile to bring to the table, and you've got a little leverage. Very different position indeed. .... Now, for those of you who just can't wait to start promoting products, there is a simple way to include affiliate links for the people whose sites you've reviewed, before you ever see the products. It's 100% legitimate, and can actually add to your credibility. Let's say you've just done a review of Joe Schlabotnik's "eWizard Weekly" newsletter. Joe got a good grade for the quality of his information, but got dinged a little for presentation. If Joe has a product on the same subject, you might include a note after the review that said something like this: Joe is also the creator of "Magic Emailing," a collection of techniques and tools for getting better response rates from your emails. I haven't checked this one out yet but, if it's as good as the information in his newsletter, it's worth a look for folks who publish via email. You can get the details at http://example.com/?affid Notice that you're not directly recommending the product. This is completely transparent, and has some additional benefits. It will get you feedback from folks who've seen it, for one thing, which means more interaction with your visitors. And, if it's included at the time you write the review, will have a chance of prompting Joe to send you a review copy when he sees it. Either way, it adds yet another benefit you've brought to the people you contact before you ever approach them with anything: You're an active affiliate, with a growing base. Even better positioning for future offers. .... You may be wondering if people will appreciate reviews that point out flaws or disagree with some aspects of their information. I can tell you from personal experience that they do, IF, that is, you keep it objective, point out the positives and tell folks who will benefit most from the product. About 10 years ago, there was a course out that was probably the first in this market to offer an affiliate program. Everyone else was emailing a cut-and-paste note, claiming to be personal friends with the author, and talking about the results they got from his product. Weird how all those people made the same amount of money with it... I did an in-depth review of the thing, including a very strong warning to not use the information included on spamming. I gave my honest opinion on each section, with some parts getting critiqued on other points. Overall, I gave it a "Very good, but stay away from Chapter 6 at all costs" rating. When I met the publisher at a conference a while later, he lit up with a big grin and told me how much he liked that review. While he was speaking later, he told the attendees that they should all be getting this newsletter. Those are the kinds of people you want to deal with. They appreciate fairness and honesty, and they understand the value of constructive criticism. It didn't hurt that the review sold some copies, and brought him in some new affiliates. .... As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote a site like this. Article distribution, more focus on list building, short reports with a 100% affiliate commission, participating in forum discussions, developing back links, basic search engine optimization for the reviews, testing different headlines and review formats, social networking systems, and more. And there are a lot of other things you can do to develop the same, or different, advantages. As always, I chose this approach in response to the questions:
I didn't consciously ask those questions, mind you. They're assumed concepts, as a result of having looked at things that way for a long time. I recommend starting to develop that habit of mind as soon as possible. It will serve you well whenever you think about offering someone a deal. Get those basic ideas built into your thinking, and you'll always develop better offers and more focused and effective ways of approaching people. Don't get too tied up in the specifics of this example. Look at the principles behind it. Ask yourself, "What does my prospective partner really want, and how can I give it to them?" After that, it's gravy. .... Once you're in a position to make a good offer, you'll want to go slowly. Develop a process for it that you can test and improve. Watch for the potential objections, and learn to create benefits that remove them or provide enough value to make them non-issues. Most importantly, look for the things that get people to respond, and keep an eye out to make sure you're focusing on the right benefits for your market. An excellent place to learn this kind of thinking is Paul Hancox's "The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate." I would apply the techniques in that book to every step of any sales process. For this sort of project, I'd give special attention to the sections on "closing the windows." Check it out at "The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate." Amazing resource on selling online. .... If you really want to get started on the road to mastering your deal-making skills, I recommend getting a copy of my manual on the subject, called, "The DealMaker." Use what you find in that book, and you should see serious increases in the success of just about any kind of offer you make. Knowing how to build them is the key, and that book will show you more concrete ways to build a killer offer than most people have ever seen. Get that at "The DealMaker." That's killer stuff, straight from my own experience. Enjoy!
|
At some point, there will be all manner of useful goodies in this column.
For now, it's just this filler, so you know why the stuff on the left stopped early...
Like this issue? Tell a friend or 3 about it. |
651 E 24th St - Erie, PA 16503 - (814)452-2855 This issue located online at http://www.talkbiz.com/tbn061709.php |