Lie #10 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #10 : "Build a superior product, offer a superior service, and provide elegant solution to difficult problems, and you will be successful."

NOT true.

There are all kinds of highly educated, talented people who are selling custom doors at Home Depot. It's not what they want to do, it's not what they should be doing - so why are so many talented people having such a hard time?

Here's why:

What you can do and how good you are does not matter. What matters is how well you COMMUNICATE what you do and how good you are. That is the difference.

Every year, tens of thousands of people invent, innovate and create brilliant products, terrific solutions to truly perplexing problems - only to find out that it's darn hard to raise money for their new ventures, and even harder to get customers to listen. Most of the time those new products and services die on the slag heap of great ideas that never saw the light of day.

You don't want that to happen to your great idea. So here's how to make sure it doesn't:

Make sure that marketing, sales, advertising and PR is the foremost priority in your new venture. Even if you don't like Microsoft , you MUST learn this lesson from them: They don't have the best software by any stretch of the imagination, but they do have the best sales strategy. And in business, it's the sales strategy that wins, not the superior technology.

So if you're waking up every morning thinking about the minute details of your cool product or service, please stop and re-calibrate.

Understand this:

1) Having a superior product is not necessarily an advantage, and can even be a DISadvantage - because it can distract you from the real objective, which is to GET and KEEP customers.

2) The product you develop is rarely the product your customers want to buy. That's OK as long as you're listening and flexible. But if you've already spent all your money perfecting the product, then you won't have any left to respond to customer feedback.

3) The product or service itself is, at most, maybe 25% of the equation. Advertising, PR strategies, and real-world market testing (as opposed to "market research", which is usually just "opinion research") --- all of these things are MORE important than the product.

4) Innovate, Don't Invent -- It's much easier to go into an existing market and solve an existing problem with a slightly improved, more interesting product (innovation) than to create a product from scratch that solves a problem people don't realize they have. That's goes along with my principle of "enter the conversation inside the customer's head."

Back to selling custom doors at Home Depot -- nobody needs to suffer this fate. But don't underestimate the challenge: If you have superior talent, then the best investment you can make is in communicating that talent to the world -- clearly, effectively, and without fail.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #9 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #9: 'All customers are to be treated as demi-gods'

Some of us kill ourselves trying to do this AFTER the sale, which is fine. Except... some customers simply *are not worth the effort.*

What are the 'bottom 10%' of your customers like?

--They beat you up on prices
--They pay late
--They expect special treatment
--They're rude
--They don't respect your boundaries.

Well today I'm giving you permission to FIRE them. Get them off your back, once and for all.

Most customers will be shocked when you fire them. But you'll be amazed at the liberating feeling and the renewed self-respect you have when you establish rules and stick to them. And when your other customers find out that you have enough self respect to give problem customers the boot, they'll respect you more, too.

Consider this:

Former CEO of GE Jack Welch had a policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% of employees every year. Controversial? Absolutely. Did some really good employees fall victim to 'corporate politics'? No doubt that happened, too.

But was it effective? Yes, it was.

It sounds harsh, and certainly it's an unpleasant policy for everyone involved, at least at the moment. But think about it -- don't you figure the poorest performing 10% of people in a company probably belong somewhere else anyway?

And... don't you figure your competitors need your worst customers more than you do? That IS an excellent strategy, by the way. Distract your competitors from good customers by sending 'em bad ones.

So go ahead -- Make my day. Get rid of the bottom 5-10% of your customers every year.

Make a list of people who drain your resources and damage your morale, and get rid of them.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

A Google AdWords Lesson from the Wall Street Journal

What does the Wall Street Journal have to do with Google AdWords?

Plenty.

The Wall Street Journal advertises for new subscriptions with Google AdWords.

But that's not what I'm going to talk about today.

No, what I'm going to talk about is the WSJ's famous direct mail letter, the one that's been selling millions of subscriptions. They mail 30 million copies of that letter per year.

This two page letter says:

Dear Reader,

On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college.

They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable, and - as young college graduates are - both were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.

Recently, these men returned to their college for their twenty-fifth reunion...

Of course it goes on to explain that one was super-successful because he read the Wall Street Journal.

That letter has been selling WSJ subscriptions for 29 years - unchanged. That's right, they have not changed that letter in 29 years!

Not that people haven't tried. Top writers have been trying to beat it ever since it was first written.

And nobody's succeeded - until just recently.

That's right, a copywriter named Mal Decker just beat it, apparently increasing the response by Twenty Percent!.

Mr. Decker should be mighty proud of himself.

The reason this is so significant is that because of the improved performance of this letter, the WSJ now gets 20% more sales without spending a penny more on postage or printing. I can only guess, but when you subtract out expenses, this might actually double the profit they make selling their paper.

The lesson is clear: In advertising, copy - your choice of words - is king.

So what does this have to do with Google AdWords?

Plenty. AdWords is set up to work the same way as direct mail. If you can beat your existing ad, the same way Mal Decker beat the WSJ letter, the exact same thing happens. You pay the same amount of money but you simply get more visitors.

The same thing, in turn, happens once visitors get to your website: The better your copy on the website, and the more traffic it converts to dollars, the more money you get, and you don't have to spend a penny more on traffic!

You can change the CTR of your ads by 50% just by changing ONE WORD. And this is NOT unusual, not a fluke. It's actually QUITE NORMAL. That's right - ONE word can make that much difference. My AdWords Toolkit even shows you an example of how simply reversing the order of two lines increased the response by 2000%!

When you're writing those little ads, little hinges swing big doors!

Lie #8 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #8: 'You can't charge premium prices for a commodity product.'

If you're fooled into thinking this is true, you'll live by cheapest price and die by cheapest price all day long. People who believe this have thin profit margins and low morale. But they don't have to.

Case in point: Starbucks, AOL, and Microsoft are ALL in commodity markets but have managed to re-define the rules such that they are relatively immune from price competition. And I can assure you that there are THOUSANDS of small businesses as well, who use the same shrewd tactics to sidestep the whole issue of 'commoditization.'

Being a 'commodity' is the pits. The worst situation you can be in is to sell something that's readily available from dozens of other people. But you can change that. I have a very specific terminology and strategy for re-inventing your
business and making it clearly stand out from your rivals, even if you ARE in a commodity market.

It's the same thinking process that AOL, Microsoft, McDonalds and Starbucks all use - seemingly invincible companies that dominate fiercely competitive commodity markets.

Let's take AOL as a brief example. You can become an Internet Service Provider with a few thousand dollars of cash and some phone lines. Some ISP's have even given away their services for free. But AOL maintains a fat-margin price of $23/month.

How can they do it? Because AOL is fundamentally different than all other ISP's. They have FORCED themselves to come up with unique ways of making themselves non-interchangeable with others. They have AOL instant messenger, all kinds of online communities, and proprietary software. And once you're on AOL, it's hard to get off.

You can lift ideas right out of AOL and Microsoft and cleverly apply them to your business, so that apples-to-apples comparisons to your competitors are difficult or impossible. If you are in a commodity business - then you MUST do this. *It's not an option.* When you do, it makes everything you do vastly easier and more effective.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #7 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #7: 'If you want to educate customers about new ideas, you have to buy 'em all doughnuts, lunch or dinner, and do a big dog & pony show.'


Is your product or service something that's really cool, really useful, and really helpful to people -- but the problem is, nobody realizes how much they need it?

There was a new technology that I sold at two different jobs. Basically it was another one of those 'great ideas' that could solve lots of problems for people, but nobody knew they needed it.
So it was very hard to sell!

I would go into companies, buy lunch for all their people, and give enthusiastic, informative presentations about this really cool new technology that could make their lives infinitely easier.

Ever done that before?

They'd file in, consume my pizza, listen apathetically to the presentation, and file out. They'd go back to their cubicles, I'd go back to my office, and they wouldn't spend a single dime on anything. The whole situation really sucked.

Then I heard about a guy named Jeff Paul in the financial planning field who'd figured out how to solve the entire problem by charging people for seminars.

Here's what Jeff did: He used low cost advertising and direct mail to get people to fork over real money to come to his tax seminar. Then he charged them another fee if they wanted to meet with him for a private 'consultation.' On top of that, he got paid the usual commissions on the financial products they bought. Not only did he make money every step of the way, he
closed twice as many sales as he did before, and his customers followed his financial plans more carefully. He built an enormously successful practice, because he was positioned from square one as the expert that he truly was, instead of a peddler.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? 'What if that could work for me???'

So... I put together a 3-day, $1500 training course for this technology. I wrote a 4 page sales letter that 'sold the sizzle' and *really* explained why it was worth the time and money to show up and really, really learn this stuff.

Two months later, Fortune 500 companies were sending their employees to this class, learning how to use our equipment, and paying for information that I formerly couldn't give away with free pizza. A major trade organization even licensed our new
course and started selling it to their entire membership. We were getting paid to teach prospective customers how to use our products! Our competitors were HACKED OFF. You can probably do something similar in your business. It's a lot easier than you might think. And your competitors will be really mad at you, too.

Since the Internet can deliver information to people for very low cost, and sometimes for almost nothing, it can be the key to doing "missionary work" for cutting edge products very inexpensively.

My favorite tool for doing this is a White Paper. A White Paper is your statement about how a problem should be solved. A well-written, well-promoted white paper is worth its weight in gold, because it educates customers about your way of doing things cheaply, and it's a terrific tool for generating sales leads.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #6 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #6: 'People need to see your advertisement 6-12 times before they'll remember it.'

If your ad does not work one time, it ain't going to work twelve times. This lie is used to sell all sorts of advertising space and campaigns that are a waste of money. And because the people who tell you this ALSO tell you you can't measure advertising, you have no way of knowing whether they're right or wrong.

You pull the big black checkbook out of your desk, spend a bunch of money, and you have no idea what you got back. What
a horrible feeling that is!
First, figure out how much response you need to make it pay off. Play with the elements of your ad, running it in an inexpensive place, until it gets the response you need - THEN run it six to twelve times. When you measure the effectiveness of advertising - and systematically improve it - you'll discover that some ads produce 20 times as much results as others. When you discover formulas that truly work, you won't just run them 12 times - you might run them for years. And you'll make profits all along the way.

And when you actually test marketing messages for performance and experiment with them, you'll find that tiny changes in wording have ENORMOUS effects on response.

It's absolutely SCARY to think about what can happen if you're not testing things. And it's absolutely incredible what happens when you are.


The good news is, 95% of companies don't test their advertising. Your competitors almost certainly don't. If you do, you have a clear advantage over them.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #5 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #5: 'You have to pay your dues now, but in only 2-3 years you'll have enough customers and referrals that you won't have to cold prospect hardly at all.'

There are two things wrong with this statement: The first part, and the second part. First let's talk about 'paying your dues.'

There's a traditional salesperson's version of this -- and then there's the guerrilla marketer's version. The marketer's version of 'paying your dues' is vastly more productive, as I shall explain.

The sales version of paying your dues is 1-3 years of brutal grunt work, until your client base is big enough to let up on the cold calls. Good marketing can eliminate the years of cold calls in the first place. But here's how the marketer's version works:

You polish and refine your sales message, on paper, or the web, or in some kind of media, until it's razor sharp - and then you test it inexpensively until it's effective and profitable. (Web traffic is often the fastest place to perfect this, by the way.) THEN you roll it out to the big world and put big money in - and big money comes out immediately.

It's a HUGE leap frog effect, and you don't think of it as 'paying your dues' --- you think of it as TESTING. 'Testing' is WAY better than 'Rejection.' It's a fascinating learning process instead of a gauntlet. It's also a way of growing a company fast without a ton of investment capital.

Once you've tested a marketing campaign to the point where sales or sales leads come in at an attractive Return On Investment, THEN you can invest heavily and watch the profits come rolling in.

OK, now for the other part of the lie - the part about not having to prospect any more. You ALWAYS have to prospect, IF you do not have a marketing system in place. Always. No matter how long you've been around.

Note: If you provide such an outstanding service and customers are so delighted that they eagerly refer others to you, then you won't have to prospect anymore. But referrals themselves are still a marketing system! And there are many things
you can do to stimulate still more referrals.

In any case, if you you switch from brute force prospecting to shrewd Guerrilla Marketing, you'll never again be a victim of Lie #5.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #4 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #4: 'Prove to your customer that you're willing to work harder, drive more miles, and bend over further than everyone else to earn his business.'

This one's pretty subtle. At first glance it seems like foolishness to say that anything less than fantastic customer service is going to cut it in today's marketplace. But here's the thing: Most sales people try to communicate this way too soon, in the process of being way too eager to win the customer's business.

So what happens is, you're chasing the guy, saying 'Call me any time, day or night, page me, here's my home phone number. Heck, I'll even jump out of bed and come and see you if I'm right in the middle of making love to my wife, because man, lemme tell ya, I'm eager to win your business!!'

Of course customers know that after the salesman has made every conceivable promise to win
their business, they still end up dealing with a bunch of apathetic yo-yos in customer service or
tech support, and the project will STILL probably be late anyway - regardless of how eager the
sales person is. That's why your enthusiasm doesn't help you.

Here's a great way to fix the problem:

1) Don't act so darn hungry to get the guy's business. Your customer service and tech support people ARE busy, and they don't have time to hold the hands of problem customers. Don't be afraid to tell your prospects that they have to *qualify* to do business with you. It's counter intuitive, but when the customer finds out that you're not drooling all over yourself to get his purchase order, he's going to respect you more.

2) *Guarantee* results to the customer - with teeth. Guarantee on-time delivery, specific levels of performance, with negative consequences for YOUR company if it doesn't deliver the
goods. You do not have to promise people the moon! You just have to keep the promises you DO make.

Now this requires support from the president of the company on down. And most companies
don't like to guarantee anything. (When push comes to shove, you still have to deliver results anyway, right? Giving a guarantee often just means clearly stating what's already true.)

And if you aren't willing to guarantee anything, why the heck not? Why should your customers take all the risk after they've heard a bunch of empty promises?

Even a modest guarantee can enormously empower your sales message. Define what you can and can't deliver, go to the mat to keep your promises, and draw the line right there. Customers will be far more responsive and you won't appear desperate.

People are cynical, and they'll only believe what you can prove. Here's an article on how to erase that cynicism and earn more trust than your competitors:

When you seamlessly integrate bold sales messages and meaningful guarantees with the other ingredients of my system, the results are exciting.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #3 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #3: 'You've just got to run some ads and get your name out there.'

This one costs companies BILLIONS of dollars.

It was also one of the key causes of the DOT COM disaster that tanked the stock market in 2000. Advertising is a crucial ingredient, yet it actually works against many companies. But when it works in your favor, amazing things can happen.

All advertising MUST do one of two things:

1) Generate Sales or 2) Generate Sales Leads.

And do so in a measurable, quantifiable way.

If you do either of those things, you'll have no problem 'getting your name out there' and you'll also make money in the process. But if you simply attempt to get your name out there, it's very likely that you won't generate sales OR sales leads.

Worse yet, if you hire an ad agency, your ads will usually be written by some English major who's never had a sales job in his life (a colossal mistake, since advertising and selling two sides of the same coin) and the agency account rep will try to win you over with a song and dance about winning awards.

Here's an ugly truth: Ads that win awards rarely generate sales. And ads that sell rarely win awards.
Remember the Talking Sock in the PETS.COM superbowl commercial? It was cute and memorable, but it didn't save those guys from the Dot Com Boneyard. Dead Dot Coms Don't Lie.

People don't expect nearly enough from their advertising, and they don't hold it accountable for results. So they waste millions of dollars... then they start pounding their sales people for orders on the 26th of every month. Most companies also try to make their advertising do too much. Let me explain.

When you're generating sales leads, you must remember that all you're really trying to do is get people to raise their hands and identify themselves as someone who has a problem - and tell you who they are. Anything beyond that dilutes the effectiveness of your ad. So don't make the mistake of telling them too much. The purpose of pure lead generation advertising is NOT for you to tell them all about yourself - not in the first step anyway.

The purpose is for them to tell you who they are.

When you do this correctly, it's simple, elegant, and outrageously effective. And most importantly, nobody feels like you're chasing them. Oh, and one more thing: Everything you say in advertising must be very, very specific, including what you do and who you do it for.

If you're busy being all things to all people--if you've got a huge list of things that you can do,
you're probably not going to sell anything to anybody. You must define a niche for yourself that's reasonably unique. In fact even if you don't have a niche, you need to invent one where it did not exist before.

Here's an article about what's so desperately wrong with most business-to-business advertising, and what to do about it:
http://perrymarshall.com/marketing/b2b_marketing.pdf
Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #2 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #2: 'You've just got to get in front of more people.'

Lie number two used to be the first thing I'd say to myself when I woke up each morning. Waking up every morning with a lie circulating in your brain is a very, very bad thing. This one gave me ulcers. It caused me to spend untold thousands of hours in my car, driving to see anyone who would allow me to walk through their door. It caused me to spend untold thousands of hours on the phone, trying to set up appointments. It also caused me to owe staggering amounts of money to Aunt Visa and Uncle Master Card.

Here's the truth: If you are nothing more than a 'salesman,' then nobody wants to see you. Ever. Because nobody is ever jazzed about having an adversarial discussion with you about whether they're going to buy something or not. 100 years ago, face-to-face selling was often the only way to find out about a new product or service. Not now. We've got a PC right in our dining room and a DSL line - and ANY TIME my wife or I want to know about something, we jump right on the Internet and go find out. Just yesterday Laura and I were discussing housing prices and five minutes later we were surfing a real estate site and learning everything we wanted to know. Isn't that a lot easier and safer than inviting a real estate agent over for tea & crumpets? You bet. But please understand, the issue is NOT that real estate agents are obsolete.

The issue is:
1) Is the Internet working FOR the agent, or AGAINST her?
2) Does she add legitimate value to what the customer can already get from the Internet?
Is she positioning herself such that customers who are ready to do something see her as a valuable resource and call her when it's time to act?
Or is she just a friendly face who really just wants their listing?
She must clearly position herself as someone who drastically speeds the buying or selling process and makes it MUCH EASIER for the buyer / seller to get what they want.

OK... So how do you DEMONSTRATE that you, as a sales person, make your customers' life easier - that time spent with you is time well spent?
Here's how: In your marketing, you focus on their problems, not your solution. You focus on the itch, not the scratch. This might sound simplistic, but even so, hardly anybody really does this. If you doubt me, just pick up ANY magazine and flip through it. Ask yourself this question as you look at every ad: 'Is this ad about my problem, or is it about somebody's product?' 90% of the time it's about their 'cool' product. And nobody really cares.

The only thing people care about is their problem. So here's a major shift: Instead of being a sales person who's trying to get in front of people, become a problem solving Information Source. (Usually it's *written* information first, not a phone call.) You'll get five times as many sales leads that way. No joke.

After you've provided information that helps them solve their problem, the next logical step is for them to meet with you. They call you first - you don't call them. And you walk through their door as a problem solver, not a peddler. I call this 'Information Marketing.' It's THE fundamental concept in my marketing system. People aren't interested in your solution. They're interested in their problem.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Coming Soon.. Yahoo! Publisher Network

Yahoo! would soon launch its own Adsense program to counter Google's dominance in this part of the net. The paid-search advertising market is worth billions and is expected to be worth tens of billions in a few years time. Yahoo! is betting that market will support a growing network of small to medium sized online publishers who will in turn bring more revenues to Yahoo!.
Google, which generates over 90% of its enormous revenues from the AdWords program, might face serious competition from Yahoo!, which currently receives about 60% of revenues from paid-advertising.

Click here to read more about Yahoo! Publisher Network

Lie #1 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #1: 'Make more phone calls today than you did yesterday.'

If making phone calls really, actually works for you, then I suppose you should make more of them.
But most of the time, as I explain in 'Guerilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People,' the phone calls aren't really working that well in the first place. And doing more of what already isn't working is just dumb. Plus, unsolicited phone calls just annoy people.
Today when you hear a motivational speaker getting sales people all revved up to go make phone calls and endure rejection, picture this in your mind: 1000 soldiers with sticks and rocks in hand charge valiantly onto a battlefield, where they are cut down with machine guns, tanks and artillery fire - dying in droves.
Actually a tiny handful of extraordinary, talented warriors will survive by strength, testosterone and wit. But the odds are heavily tilted against them. Only the very, very best even survive, much less prosper.
If your only weapon in sales is your telephone and your ability to withstand rejection, you're fighting tanks with sticks. And as the 21st century unfolds, the problem's going to get worse, not better.
Think about this: about 30 years ago, factory workers began to be displaced by machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $12 per hour but the robot only cost $2.50 per hour. Anyone willing to work for $2.50 per hour? Lots of sales people are doing just that.
Today, sales people are being displaced by websites and media. Imagine for a moment that you were a door to door book salesman today (they were quite common 100 years ago) -- how would you ever compete with Amazon, or a bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble? Impossible. You'd starve to death. And you couldn't possibly provide your customers a similar level of service or selection.
A person selling books door to door is only slightly different from somebody who sells insurance or telecommunications or any number of other products and services today.
But here's the TRUTH: IF you carve out a niche for yourself and IF you use automated tools like your website and direct mail, you CAN increase the efficiency of your business and you CAN compete. And you won't antagonize your customers in the process and you won't need those big doses of motivation.
Listen up: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use your communication tools shrewdly.
Most companies don't. Most websites are designed with no particular purpose in mind. Most companies don't have any idea how to create a direct mail piece that makes the phone ring. (That's why they think direct mail doesn't work.)

BOTTOM LINE:
1) You MUST have marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.
2) You must tweak those tools until they're effective.
Often you'll try something and it doesn't work the first time.
But... the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.
That's why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make - IF you're educated about what really works and what doesn't.
Here's a link to an article about selling new technology to hard-to-reach customers

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Why the Most Important Success Ingredient Has Nothing to Do With Google!

100 years ago, in 1903, the Wright Brothers achieved their monumental goal of flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Most people don't know that there were quite a few other people trying to build an airplane at the same time. One was Alexander Graham Bell; another was the President of the Smithsonian Institution.

All of these guys were much better funded than a pair of bicycle shop mechanics from Ohio with a wind tunnel in their garage.

But there's a key difference that led to the Wright Brothers' success.

The other guys focused on making a more powerful engine.

Orville and Wilbur Wright focused on the plane.

Specifically, the Wright Brothers built their airplane as a glider without an engine - then mounted the engine later, almost as an afterthought.

They flew it in the breeze first, then added power later. That was the key to their success. They discovered that when you're building an airplane, the wings are more important than the engine.

What does this have to do with Internet Marketing?

The point is that all of this is not really about Google AdWords, or any particular way to get traffic. What matters more than all of that is the ability of your website to get people to take action - to opt in, to buy, or whatever you want them to do.

Google AdWords just happens to be the fastest, easiest, and sometimes the least expensive way to get the traffic there. But once again, it's not about Google - it's about your website.

What Google will help you do, more effectively than anything else, is send highly targeted, predictable traffic to your website, day in and day out, so you can experiment, test, and perfect your sales process.

Perry Marshall's "Expanding Universe Theory" for Doing a Marketing Rollout

Now listen up, because what I'm about to explain is profoundly important. It seems simple, but it's revolutionary. Please pay attention here.

For most businesses, the FIRST thing you should do is properly set up a Google AdWords campaign and play with your website until the traffic converts to sales profitably.

Frankly it doesn't matter how long it takes to make that work. Every step of the process teaches you very important things, even if it's through trial and error.

Why use Google for that? Here's why: It's just about the only way to get a steady, predictable stream of traffic day in and day out. Most other sources of traffic, like free search engine listings and PR, are things you have no real control of.

THEN... once it's working on AdWords, you take the same messages and sales process and roll out your product in this order:

1. Google AdWords
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Other PPC's like Overture and Findwhat etc etc.
4. Email promotions
5. Affiliates
6. Press Releases
7. Direct Mail
8. Print Advertising

You see, items #2 through 8 are more expensive and/or less controllable than Google. Get it right with Google first, where you have total control THEN do email. THEN get help from affiliates. Don't let any of these other things or people be your guinea pig - if it works on Google AdWords first, then you can invest in these other things and be fairly certain it will work.

I can't overemphasize how powerful this is. Usually search engine traffic represents only a tiny percentage of the people who are potential customers for you. When you roll out to items 2 through 8, you can often make five to fifty times as much money as you were making with AdWords. And no longer is it necessary to risk more than a few hundred dollars on a marketing campaign!!!

A little traffic. A lot of traffic. Turn it on or turn it off at will.

You can use it the same way the Wright Brothers used the wind tunnel in their bicycle shop - to perfect the airplane before going out to "the big time."

Original Source: Perry Marshall

The Fastest, Easiest Way to Test New Ideas

I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of money developing products and ideas that nobody wanted to buy.

What a horrendous waste - especially considering how many other ideas there are that people will spend money on!

If you understand how to use Google AdWords, you'll never need to invest more than a few hundred dollars - or in the worst case a few thousand dollars - chasing a product idea that has no chance of working.

Let's say you've got a product idea. The product itself costs $50,000 to develop, and you're sure it's a good idea because it solves a really thorny problem.

So here's what you do: You write a report, e-book or white paper about how to solve that problem. You create an opt-in page where people can get your report in exchange for giving you their contact information.

Then you buy keywords, send people to that page and see how many people you can get to opt in.

That alone will tell you something!

And if you can't get anybody to opt-in to your report - or if you can't find keywords that people are searching for - then that's a good sign you should abandon the project before you throw any more money at it.

When people opt in, send them an email (or maybe even call them on the phone) and ask them what they're looking for. If your report is any good, they'll be happy to talk to you, and you'll get LOTS of input about the kinds of problems they're trying to solve.

It's impossible to do this and not learn some major things that you did not know or anticipate.

Not only will this process validate that you're solving a worthwhile problem, it will also fine tune your efforts so you're dealing with the real problems that real people have!

It's worth repeating: after testing your concept on Google AdWords, you'll never throw good money at a lousy product idea. And when you need assistance or investment money, you'll have proof that people are looking for what you have to sell.

The GoogleCash Method: The Safest Way to Enter a Market

A couple of years ago, an astute young man by the name of Chris Carpenter came up with an ingenius traffic-brokering strategy called "GoogleCash." Here's how this works: You join an affiliate program, in which a website pays you for sending them traffic whenever one of those visitors buys something. Then you buy clicks on Google AdWords and send people through your affiliate link. You get commission on the sales, and your profit is the difference between the cost of the traffic and your commission.

GoogleCash can be made to sound easier than it actually is. However, when you identify a good niche, a good site and some keywords, this most definitely can be made to work. It's literally the world's fastest business opportunity - you can jump into a new market in as little as 15 minutes. No inventory, no email lists - you don't even need a website.

Now here's the thing: GoogleCash is really a game of doing quick research and cutting your losses. You set up ten different campaigns in ten different markets and you get out of the ones that don't pay as soon as you've got some results under your belt.

Well this also ties back into the first part of this article, the part about testing new ideas. Before you enter a new market with your own product, why not test the market with the GoogleCash method? GoogleCash has some disadvantages (for example if you don't own the website, you can't change anything) but the advantage is you're not married to a product. You can abandon something that doesn't work and try something else.

This is a lot better than guessing! Test the water first with GoogleCash, then develop your product. The flipside of that is that once you have a GoogleCash campaign that's working, you can build your own products into it and keep even more money in your pocket.

One 'Trivial' Change Can Cut Your Bid Prices by 95 %!

Why the Bid Price is NOT the Price You Pay & the Huge Difference that Makes for You
What to do when your Keywords Get Disabled

Today I'm going to talk about the thing that many newcomers find most confusing about Google - and I'm going to explain why it's a really ingenious twist that will actually help you.
The price you bid is almost never the price you actually pay. You almost always pay less.
First, it's a little bit like Ebay: You pay 1 cent above the position below you, not the maximum that you bid.
But there's an even more important secret that is the key to getting lower and lower prices, even while other bidders are jumping into the game:
Your Click Thru Rate (CTR) is MORE important than how much you bid.
The Click Thru Rate is the percentage of people searching who click. If 100 people search, your ad shows up 100 times, and one person clicks through, that's a 1% click thru rate.
So let's say I've got a 1% CTR and I'm paying $1.00 for position #2.
Let's say you've got a 2% CTR --- you only have to pay 51 cents to get position #2 and knock me down to position #3.
That means if you're 2 times as relevant, you pay 1/2 as much!
The rules are simple, but the implications are huge.
When you achieve high click-thru rates, your bid prices go down, down, down and your traffic goes up.
The difference can be quite amazing. Here's an example of two ads - they are ALMOST IDENTICAL but one got nearly TWENTY TIMES the CTR as the other:

Popular Ethernet Terms
3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download
Complex Words - Simple Definitions
www.bb-elec.com
2 Clicks - CTR 0.1%

Popular Ethernet Terms
Complex Words - Simple Definitions
3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download
www.bb-elec.com
39 Clicks - CTR 3.6%

Notice what happened: All I did was reverse two lines - and the Click Thru Rate jumped from 0.1% to 3.6%!!!
That means that the ad on the right gets more than TWENTY TIMES as much traffic for the same amount of money. Just think how much money we'd be leaving on the table if we didn't discover this???
This is just one of dozens of tricks I've found that push your bid prices down, down, down while your traffic goes up. (Of course you get all the secrets in my toolkit.)
Beat your best and you'll get more and more traffic for less.
I just explained how Google ranks your ad higher as your CTR goes up. Overture does not do this. In Overture, the highest bidder always wins.
That rewards people who have more money than brains.
Which means that for the smart marketer, Google is vastly superior!
Before I go, there's one other thing I need to tell you: This is precisely the thing that gets people all tangled up over disabled keywords.
Keywords get disabled for one and only one reason: The message in the ad doesn't match what the person wanted when they typed in the keyword!
How do you fix this problem? By organizing your keywords into narrow themes and by testing different ads, like I described above, until peoples' clicks vote on the words that actually sell! This is an absolutely foolproof method, and my Definitive Guide shows you dozens of variations on this method that you can use right away.

Read the original article here.

How to Build a Sales Pipeline

By Philippe Lavie, President, KeyRoad Enterprises

How do you get prospects who are not looking for the “things” you are offering to start to look?

Many of my clients have asked me what their sales people can do to increase their pipeline with qualified leads. The simple answer is to spend more time on effective business development activities. Such activities necessitate at least 20% of a sales reps time and include, but are not limited to:

Networking with existing friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Attending industry/trade meetings and walking the floor

Securing speaking engagements at local and regional associations or interest groups

Hosting breakfast meetings for like titles

Cold and warm telephone prospecting

Direct mail/e-mail/fax prospecting followed up with direct telephone calls

The most effective way to build one’s pipeline is to engage in a five to seven touch-point campaign combining direct mail introduction, followed by phone calls, in a very specific sequence. The thing I don’t understand is that most sales reps know that sequence, but most sales reps will also stop doing it if they can find any excuse to use their time somewhere else.

So Where Do We Start?
Warren Culpepper, author of the Culpepper Report, writes that there is a 5-year cycle in IT purchasing. Therefore 20% of your total potential universe is actively looking for a way to improve its operation through the use of your technology at any given time. By the way, your competition knows that too. It also means that 80% is not actively looking at any given time. Not looking means that they do not perceive, at this specific moment, that they have a need to satisfy, a goal to achieve, or a challenge to address. So my question is: Do you want to spend your time calling on the same universe that the rest of your competition is also calling on, or do you want to spend your resources and energies calling on the 80% that are not actively looking today, and bring to the forefront of their priority the understanding that their operation does need your offering to help them achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need? Imagine two companies, one that is looking and one that is not. Both have similar profiles, work in the same industry, and have a similar history. Do you think that their C level executives share similar goals? If no one has contacted them because they are not looking at that present moment, do you think you could leapfrog your competition if you were to call on them first, and get them to discover that they need your offering?

So What Works, and What Does Not Work?
The Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina interviewed senior business executives to understand the circumstances under which they would accept a telephone call from a salesperson. The findings were as follows:

	Always	Usually	Occasionally	Never
A recommendation from someone inside the Company	16%	68%	16%	0%
A referral from outside the Company	8%	36%	44%	12%
A letter(s) from a salesperson followed by a direct call	4%	25%	40%	31%
A contact at an off-site meeting	3%	16%	28%	53%
A direct telephone call from a salesperson	0%	8%	19%	73%

This research clearly shows that cold calling does not work very well. Although important to do, (as one the business development activities), a sales rep could quadruple her chances to reach the desired executive if the call was preceded by one or two introductory emails. Such emails or snail mails would sensitize the executives to challenges, pains, or goals (s)he could relate to. We suggest a five to seven touch-point campaign using email, snail mail, and phone calls for the highest return.

Whom Should I Call On?
Now, before you even think of sending an email or making a call, it would be important to identify whom to call. While for some sales reps it appears obvious, I would recommend that for each potentially important account, a targeted conversational list be developed. The two main reasons are that “You can’t sell to someone who can’t buy” and “Buying is always a committee decision”. Another thing that amazes me is the length of time and number of resources sales reps and companies spend talking to people that have no buying power or no idea or understanding of the prospect’s critical business issues that would justify them buying from you. Often we talk about “the power line”, this imaginary dividing line that exists between executives that have a budget to manage, and those that can create/define/allocate a budget. When your sales people call on a company to create a vision of what the prospect could do with your offering, are they better of calling above or below the line? Would her opportunity be better qualified if she was able to talk with the “above the line” decision maker who has the authority to secure unbudgeted funds? Would her opportunity be better qualified if she could get the prospect to realize that the way they do business is costing them ten times more than the benefits they could generate by implementing your offering? Would her opportunity be better qualified if her sales cycle was aligned with her prospect’s buying process? Remember, “People buy from people who empower them to achieve their goals”.

What Conversation to Have With a Specific Title?
How many times have you been delegated down to the project manager when you started to have a product feature function monologue with a C level executive? Aside from being upset, did you understand why? People get delegated to people they talk and act like. Should you prepare yourself to talk at the level of the title you want to reach? Of course you do. But many sales executives do not know how to get ready for such calls, nor are they interested in taking the time or applying the discipline necessary to prepare. Our suggestion is that Marketing is, or should be, responsible for preparing the necessary conversational tools and prompters for sales people to have intelligent conversations around critical business issues with their prospects’ C level executives. We recommend you check into the process called Sales Ready Messaging to create these conversational prompters, scripts, tools, and aids. You will empower your sales people with the information and the discipline to have these intelligent conversations and marketing will once again become relevant to the sales organization. We call this “ loading the lips” of the sales people with business issues and information relevant to a conversation with a C level executive, while staying far away from product demo or technical presentation.

Your Next Steps
After having identified the universe for your offering (territory plan), having decided whom you should be calling on (targeted conversational list), and after having created the tools and prompters for your sales people to engage in prospecting and selling your offering (sales ready messages), it is also important to remember to:

Write your prospecting letters

Pick up the telephone and call

Manage the rejection that comes with selling

Set aside “sacred time” on your calendar dedicated to prospecting (at least 20% of your time)

Track your response rate and successes

Change your message if it does not work

Be prepared to have that conversation if the prospect says: “Tell me more, I am interested”


Spending an equal amount of time or more prospecting with people that are not yet looking, will generate better qualified, less competitive, and an easier selling cycle than focusing on those prospects that are already looking. That said, if you get a call from someone who really wants to buy from you, please take the order.

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Philippe Lavie is president of KeyRoad Enterprises, an affiliate of CustomerCentric Systems. KRE helps companies implement customized sales processes designed to drive increase revenue and greater accuracy in their pipeline management. Based in San Francisco, California, Philippe can be reached at: plavie@keyroad.com.

Read the original article here..

The ONE Thing That Separates the Men from the Boys in the Google AdWords Game

There is ONE central idea, one key concept that Google wants you to understand. If you have this right, Google will literally reward you by giving you lower prices on clicks, and your customers will reward you by buying what you have to sell. If you DON'T have this right, you'll pay way too much for clicks, your campaigns will get disabled, and your whole Google experience will be unpleasant. The one thing that matters on Google is relevance. You might think of this as "message to market match."

This will make complete sense once you understand a bit of Google's history. Google started in 1998, after the "big boys" in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were well-established. At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all - but in five years they have done exactly that. What's even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door.

So what happened?

Google's mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for "California butterflies" they wanted to give you the very best and most popular California butterfly websites on the very first page of results. They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine.

So.... when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers also put out messages that were highly relevant. Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it's relevant. If it doesn't, it's not. It's that simple.

If you can't get 5 out of 1000 people (0.5%) to click on your ad, Google disables your ad. The higher your click thru rate, though, the less you have to pay for the position you want.

So this creates a "Darwinian" effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What's good for Google's customers is good for Google and good for you. When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you're bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking.

So... what were they really thinking when they typed in "California butterflies?" That is the question. Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you'll win on Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they're searching for and you'll beat your competitors by a country mile.

A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You:

Here's a little mental trick to help you write Google ads.

Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer.

You're not the dude with the cool solution. You're the guy or gal with some stupid problem. You've got an itch and you want to scratch it. And you're not in front of your computer. You're sitting in front of their computer. What do you type into the search bar on Google? And what do you hope will come up? Answer that question and you'll be successful marketing online.

Click here to read from the original article link

The 10 Big Lies of Work at Home Opportunists

By Michael Hetzer
The Artful Affiliate
http://www.michaelhetzer.com

1) Earn $300/hr filling out surveys! I mean, get serious. If you could really earn $150/hr. as a paid survey-taker, would anyone bother to go to college? We'd all just sit at home in our pajamas and "fill out short surveys" and wait for the checks to pour in.

2) Earn $300/hr as a paid shopper! One fabulously famous woman in New York City earned $7,000 in a month as a paid shopper and was featured in The Wall Street Journal. No one, not even her, has been able to repeat the feat. Frankly, I doubt the veracity article (It was the online edition). Do the math. Nothing adds up. Even if the article is true, at $7,000/mo she didn't earn $300/hr, and that would be before expenses. Finally, am I being a stickler by pointing out that mystery shopping is not really a work-at-home job?

3) Get a free car! In the scheme of work-at-home schemes, this one is actually true. True, that is, if you're willing to drive a car so covered with ads it looks like it belongs in NASCAR. I mean, what will the neighbors think? Waiting lists go on for months and it is not available in all cities - a fact you only find out AFTER you subscribe to the service.

4) Earn $100/hr. stuffing envelopes! The keyword term "stuffing envelopes" gets hundreds of thousands of hits in a typical month, which just goes to show you how far this notion has seeped into the national psyche. It's nonsense. Most bulk mail is processed by bulk mailing houses that use equipment, or employ low-paid, immigrant labor at their facility. Think about it, how would you get the envelopes to stuff? They'd have to mail them to you! In reality, this is a thinly-disguised pyramid scheme, or multi-level marketing (MLM). You pay a sum, then recruit your friends and family to pay a sum under you. No envelopes are getting stuffed, but money is changing hands. It's a great idea, if you don't mind ripping off your friends and family.

5) Earn $1000/day as an eBay drop ship seller! Drop shipping is when you sell other people's products without even having them in your possession. You run the listing on eBay and when it sells, you send the order to the drop shipper. Trouble is, eBay is clogged with these products. You can easily spend hundreds of dollars per month on listings that look, well, remarkably like the listings of other people just like you, who are, just like you, trying to sell the very same drop-shop products on the very same margins. Look at it from the manufacturer's point of view. What a diabolically great way to dump a lot of junk without any marketing expenses. Seriously, if it was so easy to move this junk on eBay, why aren't they selling it there themselves?

6) Start earning $1000/day as an affiliate marketer! Affiliate marketing is when you work as an online manufacturer's rep for the products of many different companies. This is not a scam, but nor is it quite as easy as it was in 2002, when this home-based work exploded. The lure of fast money drew in tens of thousands of people, mostly dabblers, who bid up advertising costs, wrote bad ads with no websites and little or no understanding of what they were doing or even the product they were selling. Google has adapted to try to push them out, though the high cost of keywords has done more to that end than anything. You can still make $1000/day, but you'll have to know a lot more than you did in 2002. Good. I run my own a course in how to get started in affiliate marketing the right way. Learn more by going to: http://my1stgoogle.michaelhetzer.com

7) Earn money while you sleep with our automatic money machine. Sell XYZ product and build your own income empire. Pay attention to the word, "build." This is code-speak for MLM. As soon as they ask you to make a list of 25 of your friends and relatives, run screaming for the BACK button. It's MLM, and the world is still waiting for the first MLM business that actually makes money for all but .05% of the people who join (or should I say, got scammed).

8) Make money part-time assembling crafts and jewelry! If only this were real. It's isn't. You don't actually assemble anything, unless, that is, you feel like it doing it for fun. Sure they send you all the parts and instructions and help you sell your "product." But your real product is the craft and jewelry assembly business. Yep, it's another MLM. You earn money is recruiting others into the scheme, usually friends and family.

9) Earn money while you sleep! I love this one. Especially since it means nothing. I can teach anyone in 10 minutes how to earn money while they sleep. These claims are usually related to pre-packaged, online stores. For example, for a fee, you get a website "stocked" with pharmaceutical products. You get paid 50% commission on everything someone buys off the site. Basically, it's a pre-packaged affiliate marketing plan. Now, ask yourself, how many spam emails do you get a week for pharmaceutical stores? Behind every email is a poor soul trying desperately to recover his/her investment. To help them out of their pickle, the packager sells them bulk email lists, pop-unders and all the things that seasoned affiliate marketers know are money- losing propositions. These poor souls, who wanted merely to earn some easy money at home, are sinking in quicksand, the harder they work to get out, the deeper they sink. Shameful.

10) Earn $100/hour with your own candle business! When's the last time you bought a candle from anything but a store, or perhaps an in-home party? Uh, never. That's right. So what's going on? If you've read everything up to here, then you already know what this is. That's right. Sign up your friends and family to start their own candle business. What a world! Just think, if these people had their way, we'd all be making and selling candles to each other.

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Michael Hetzer is the founder of My 1st Google, an online training course that teaches affiliate marketing. He is an author, consultant, and sought-after speaker on the subject of affiliate marketing under the heading, "The Artful Affiliate." You can contact him at: Michael@michaelhetzer.com