The Internet Marketing Fastlane

[Blackman]

Just finished reading MJ DeMarco's book and to be honest, no big surprises there. Although, well-written, easy to read and straight to the point. Great book, without a doubt.

However, now I'm kind of stuck thinking about how to "provide real value", solve problems, identify "needs", etc...

The only way I can figure out how to do it, is through the "classic" way of publishing content on a blog, but then MJ argues that "content systems" have low entry barriers and there's less leverage, because you rely on ad networks and affiliate programs for your income...

It is true, every John and Barry got a blog, but surely if yours has 300+ articles, neatly organized theme and a strong structured layout, then you are no longer part of the crowd, but more like in the 1-2% of bloggers?

On the other hand, the alternatives of creating a social network, brokerage firm or an advertising company, seem like very distant ideas and you'd be competing with very big boys out there.

A subscription service, software - no idea where to start...

It's a completely different mentality from, slap a website, build some backlinks, get ranked, make sales and wait for Google to ban you. I tried to get away from that by creating my own digital product on CB a few times, but now I'm getting a feeling that it's too dependant on affiliates and I can't scale it to the level I want it to be myself.

Then I start thinking about CCarter's "Big Brands" and that's the only thing that is well described on this forum, which you can follow and implement...

Apart from that, if you were to start something from scratch, what would you do?

 

[CCarter]

I tried to get away from that by creating my own digital product on CB a few times, but now I'm getting a feeling that it's too dependant on affiliates and I can't scale it to the level I want it to be myself.

To be honest, the last product you had which you sold was a solid product, but you were relying heavily on affiliates. You have to be your biggest affiliate, meaning you'll have to market your product and account for 80% of your sales in the beginning, if not forever. I think where people fail with this is they heard "Just create the product and the affiliates will do the work for you!" - WRONG.

You have to push the product, split test your landing pages and showcase to potential affiliates you are doing all you can on your side to maximize conversions, but even then YOU have to market your product like any other company on the planet. Yes, if you are good enough and have a great funnel people will be falling over each other to sell your product, but just like in life, you can't rely on others to make you money. YOU have to be the biggest pusher, and that's where I feel like most people drop the ball.​

 

[mont7071]

subscription services always sound great in theory, long-term value of your list, not at the mercy of google or Facebook, biggest fans do your marketing for you, etc. Unfortunately, its very hard to build up enough forward momentum (read: content) to get subscribers to sign up in droves in the first place, and once they do, then you are forced to continue generating more and more content/value to keep them around, often at a cost that is higher than what it costs in the early stages.

If you can find ways to do both, monetize while you are slowly building up the content so you can afford to invest in growing it, then you have a better chance of succeeding vs a "build it and they will come" approach, then you are ahead of most that start giant projects, only to stop too early because they get discouraged or run out of money before they build up any momentum.

 

[ncmedia]

You have to be your biggest affiliate, meaning you'll have to market your product and account for 80% of your sales in the beginning, if not forever. I think where people fail with this is they heard "Just create the product and the affiliates will do the work for you!" - WRONG​

This many times over.

Starting from scratch today - only seems difficult because we know how good/easy we (could have or did) had it.

I'd still go after solving problems and needs/desire solutions, probably with software, (harder to clone if successful) - and probably trying to fill in small gaps until one showed promise. Walk away from losers fast, speed to market, test, and grow or NEXT as fast and many times as you can handle within reason not making the product or idea suffer. Affiliates can be awesome but imagine you didn't have any, is your idea/product still going to fly on its own? It should be able to - good organic problem solvers tend to not be able to hide for too long. I wouldn't let affiliates touch it until it's booming on its own (and by then you may not want them especially if the brand gets big, then they can become a liability quick).

 

[JoseArmando]

The way I found that works best is to realize just how valuable the affiliate system is. Think about it, being an affiliate for someone else allows you to build your own advertising funnel and to worry only about landers, ads and ad platforms.

Now you might be asking why am I telling you about affiliate programs if you don't want to be an affiliate but want to build your own product. The reason is that by creating a product, unless it's one of a kind meaning there's nothing like it in the whole world, you're basically going at it from the wrong direction.

If you try to tackle it like you described it, then of course you'll have problems coming up with a model and furthermore, even if you do come up with one that makes sense you won't be able to figure out easily if the issue is in your business model or in the way you market it. So it's almost impossible to figure that out since it's a sort of catch 22. To figure out if the problem is in your marketing you'd need a solid business model to base your stats off (which you don't have), and to figure out if you have a solid business model you need a proven to convert marketing funnel (which you can't build without a converting offer).

The way to get out of this dilemma, as someone that doesn't have either, is to promote affiliate offers and build a strong, heavily optimized marketing funnel you know converts and you know exactly how well it converts for what kind of offers.

The optimal way to building your own offer therefore is to paradoxically not know what kind of offer you want to build and to test dozens of different offers and find one that works well for you. Then once you have optimized your funnel and are getting cheap traffic you reverse engineer why they're profitable and do a test by switching their offer with your own site.

Now what you've done here is, you've put the issue of finding if it's the offer or the traffic out of the equation and the only thing you had to figure was finding the traffic. It's not that traffic is more important than the offer or the other way around, it's just that for someone who is just starting out what I described is IMO the optimal path to eventual profitability.

And the beauty of this process? You now have probably pretty optimal percentages of conversions for your funnel. This is what you have to strive for once you plug in your own product/service. The rest is basically just figuring out a way to put all the pieces in place and which really shows if you're a good businessman or not. Because here you have a funnel that you know is profitable and works - and if you can't build your own product to maybe match the performance of the affiliate offer you ran or at least be somewhat profitable.. well maybe you aren't cut out for it.

But yeah... this is the way I'd do it were I to start from scratch. From everything I learned so far I believe this is the optimal way to use the affiliate system to eventually build up your own multi mil business.

 

[Blackman]

To be honest, the last product you had which you sold was a solid product, but you were relying heavily on affiliates. You have to be your biggest affiliate, meaning you'll have to market your product and account for 80% of your sales in the beginning, if not forever. I think where people fail with this is they heard "Just create the product and the affiliates will do the work for you!" - WRONG.

You have to push the product, split test your landing pages and showcase to potential affiliates you are doing all you can on your side to maximize conversions, but even then YOU have to market your product like any other company on the planet. Yes, if you are good enough and have a great funnel people will be falling over each other to sell your product, but just like in life, you can't rely on others to make you money. YOU have to be the biggest pusher, and that's where I feel like most people drop the ball.​

Agreed, the one I sold wasn't tested properly before I launched it, and I was sort of doing both at the same time - optimizing the offer, while trying to recruit affiliates, which is obviously the wrong way to do it...

I definitely know what you mean re being your own biggest affiliate, but you can only take your product so far yourself. I can start a Bing campaign today for my current product and I'll be making multiple sales per day, converting no worse/even better than my competitors, but there's no way it will be profitable due to the current CPC for pretty much any keywords out there. And again, scaling on my own would be very limited.

Trying to utilize the "free methods", inevitably brings me back to content, which is a very long shot, while I can sell NOW and I KNOW it converts well due to my previous 6 months of heavy testing (while incurring substantial losses), yet no way to make it profitable on PPC nowadays.

subscription services always sound great in theory, long-term value of your list, not at the mercy of google or Facebook, biggest fans do your marketing for you, etc. Unfortunately, its very hard to build up enough forward momentum (read: content) to get subscribers to sign up in droves in the first place, and once they do, then you are forced to continue generating more and more content/value to keep them around, often at a cost that is higher than what it costs in the early stages.

If you can find ways to do both, monetize while you are slowly building up the content so you can afford to invest in growing it, then you have a better chance of succeeding vs a "build it and they will come" approach, then you are ahead of most that start giant projects, only to stop too early because they get discouraged or run out of money before they build up any momentum.

Keep thinking about building a list via a squeeze page in a weight loss niche, offering a report and then promote various products after a few warm-up emails, but traffic is always an issue - do it the paid way, then I struggle to see how even long-term revenue would cover current advertising expenses. And the free way, you'll have to build up some mega content site, before you can start generating any decent amount of leads.

This many times over.

Starting from scratch today - only seems difficult because we know how good/easy we (could have or did) had it.

I'd still go after solving problems and needs/desire solutions, probably with software, (harder to clone if successful) - and probably trying to fill in small gaps until one showed promise. Walk away from losers fast, speed to market, test, and grow or NEXT as fast and many times as you can handle within reason not making the product or idea suffer. Affiliates can be awesome but imagine you didn't have any, is your idea/product still going to fly on its own? It should be able to - good organic problem solvers tend to not be able to hide for too long. I wouldn't let affiliates touch it until it's booming on its own (and by then you may not want them especially if the brand gets big, then they can become a liability quick).

Hey Norb, good to see you're still around. Yeah, it seems like we had it very easy before all the Google's Pandas and Penguins kicked it. It used to be, build a nice website with a relevant domain and "white-hat" anchor-text backlinks, and it would be making you money for years to come...Had that mentality myself for a good while = waste of time.

A software is a solid idea, except since I'm not too clued up in this area, it seems to me that it's all been done before and even if I was to do it, I would have to outsource heavily.

My current product does get quite a few direct sales, randomly coming from all corners of the world, and with affiliates, it's definitely hit and miss. The 80/20 rule totally applies in this case, meaning 20% of my affiliates are generating 80% of the sales.

I see guys sending thousands of hops every day and nothing happens - no order form impressions, no sales, nothing. And yet, you get someone who knows what he's doing and he generates 20 sales within a week with a conversion rate that matches your own results....


Jose, yes, you're right - promoting established, proven offers is a lot easier, than trying to come up with your own product, since you have to test a lot, pay all the development costs, etc.

The only issue then becomes just getting the traffic. And when it comes to traffic, like CCarter, I don't want to rely on a 3rd party source for it - I want to be THE SOURCE myself, and the only way I see of doing that, is by having a Big Brand website, which then you can monetize however you like, because traffic is there, NOT because you've optimized your keywords or thousands of backlinks, but because you are providing genuine value with your content and people keep coming back to you for more.

Except, whatever topic you decide to go for, to quote MJ DeMarco, it will be a "me too business", because you'll be doing what other 1000 blogs are doing, just in your own words...

 

[Ronnie55]

Good thread/topic. I just finished MJ's book too. I'm forcing myself to stay away from content sites for a while.

Pretty much every newbie that wants to be location-independent is doing content sites right now. That's a lot of noise to break through even if you're better than all of them.

Join a FB or LinkedIn group on any business or money related topic and you'll see hundreds of newbies spamming their own links. 100% to content sites.

So for that reason alone, that's not a game I want to be in.

Things I'd rather do instead:

Create a physical product. it's a digital world but often the simplest, offline tools and products can be really well-received from what I've seen. Would market it online though, ecommerce, affiliates, etc.

Start a newsletter or a mastermind group. Monetize with membership/subscription fee.

Create a course on a topic that I can become an expert in, or that I have exerience in. Decent amount of competition here but if you find a niche and out-market the generalists, or the few competitors in that specific niche, you should make some sales and be able to grow your brand (your name basically = your brand on this one)

 

[BigWill]

Maybe start a glory hole?

 

[Blackman]

Good thread/topic. I just finished MJ's book too. I'm forcing myself to stay away from content sites for a while.

Pretty much every newbie that wants to be location-independent is doing content sites right now. That's a lot of noise to break through even if you're better than all of them.

Join a FB or LinkedIn group on any business or money related topic and you'll see hundreds of newbies spamming their own links. 100% to content sites.

So for that reason alone, that's not a game I want to be in.

Things I'd rather do instead:

Create a physical product. it's a digital world but often the simplest, offline tools and products can be really well-received from what I've seen. Would market it online though, ecommerce, affiliates, etc.

Start a newsletter or a mastermind group. Monetize with membership/subscription fee.

Create a course on a topic that I can become an expert in, or that I have exerience in. Decent amount of competition here but if you find a niche and out-market the generalists, or the few competitors in that specific niche, you should make some sales and be able to grow your brand (your name basically = your brand on this one)

I'm trying to convince myself that content systems are not as easy, as MJ describes in the book.

Yes, any idiot can buy a domain and put Wordpress on it, but from there on, it's quite a lot of work and a lot of barriers to keep wanna be's out...

Even if you manage to put 20-30 articles on the blog (which is what often most people do), that won't get you far, because you have to present them in a nice theme (ideally custom), organize it all properly, possibly with loads of pictures, maybe videos? Obviously, the content has to be interesting, relevant, engaging, etc.

Unless you are a good writer or outsourcing for $10-15 per article, then that alone can slow down a lot of people.

And besides, it takes a lot of patience and persistence to keep writing despite no income. People want fast results, they want them NOW, so usually they get involved with SEO, get burned/slapped and move to something else...different niche, easier keywords, etc, etc.

Sounds like a common blogger's journey to me. You rarely see anyone building a massive content site with 200-300 solid articles, all well-written and neatly organized in a balanced theme.

 

[Vadym]

If you don't market - you can't come up with services to sell marketers.

I have dozens of private coded tools I've used for years and 3-5 that a private few others get use for paying me monies for it - so I can focus on non-marketing money attempts. If you can make something good enough to use yourself - it can be a great private 100-person SaaS or whatever there's room for without ruining it. If you don't do lots of marketings yourself - you won't know anything about an SaaS to market to peers because you can't know or relate to the problems.

So like - do more marketing and less making of sites and Clinkbank products and wasting time on prettifying things due to fear of having to finally market it sometime - and you'll find problems you can turn into SaaS solutions to other regular marketers in a month.

 

[bluechinagroup]

I definitely know what you mean re being your own biggest affiliate, but you can only take your product so far yourself. I can start a Bing campaign today for my current product and I'll be making multiple sales per day, converting no worse/even better than my competitors, but there's no way it will be profitable due to the current CPC for pretty much any keywords out there. And again, scaling on my own would be very limited.

I don't understand. If you own the offer, how would you not be profitable due to the current CPC?

I own my own rebill offer and run my own Adwords + Bing traffic into fine and it's very profitable especially because there's no affiliate middleman. I am my biggest affiliate, I also have 3rd party affiliates, but I'm never dependent on them. CCarter is 100% right on the money.

The thing about Adwords and Bing is I'm always optimizing it. You can't just sit around and let it run on auto pilot.

 

[Blackman]

I don't understand. If you own the offer, how would you not be profitable due to the current CPC?

I own my own rebill offer and run my own Adwords + Bing traffic into fine and it's very profitable especially because there's no affiliate middleman. I am my biggest affiliate, I also have 3rd party affiliates, but I'm never dependent on them. CCarter is 100% right on the money.

The thing about Adwords and Bing is I'm always optimizing it. You can't just sit around and let it run on auto pilot.

Unless I'm totally ignorant and missing something major, there are no profitable keywords in my niche for less than $1.00/click. Plus you also have to consider the fact that I need to use a pre-sell landing page, before sending the traffic to the main page, because otherwise cold traffic doesn't really convert well, unless 1:100 is considering "well".

It's the same story with pretty much any CB product out there, unless we're talking about some MMO stuff or weight loss offers with outrageous claims, which may convert well initially, but then you get flooded with refunds.

Anyway, even if I was to "direct-link" (sending the traffic straight to the sales page), then 100 clicks = $100. I convert 1:40-50 with cold traffic using a pre-sell, so direct, it would probably be something like 1:100.

My full vendor cut is approximately $30 per sale, after Clickbank takes their commission. You can already see that numbers don't make sense.

Direct linking:

100 clicks = 100$
1 sale = $30 (1:100 conversion rate)
Loss = $70

Pre-sell:

100 clicks = $100
Clicks to the sales page = 50 (that's 50% landing page CTR, which is being very optimistic)
1 sale = $30 (1:50 conversion rate)
Loss: $70


Essentially, it's the same outcome with either method. The campaign is well-optimized, filtering all the irrelevant crap keywords with broad match modified, some negative keywords, targeting US/CA, Bing/Yahoo search engines only, etc, etc.

You could say that my product's sales page is crap, but there's no way you could optimize it to the extent that you will be profitable paying $1/click. Clearly, the problem is CPC, rather than the product. I've tested similar products in my niche and they convert the same or even worse.

That's my personal experience with Bing and I've been doing PPC on/off since 2007. The clicks have definitely got more expensive over the years and if I try to bid something like $0.40 or $0.50 for my keywords, then I get no impressions/clicks, nothing. The campaign is dead - raise the bids back $1+ and the traffic explodes.

I've stayed away from Adwords for a long time, as I heard too many horror stories about them banning genuine advertisers...

 

[cardine]

You could say that my product's sales page is crap, but there's no way you could optimize it to the extent that you will be profitable paying $1/click. Clearly, the problem is CPC, rather than the product. I've tested similar products in my niche and they convert the same or even worse.

Clearly someone is optimizing their offer and sales page so that it is profitable at $1/click, otherwise the bidding wouldn't be at $1/click.

 

[Blackman]

Clearly someone is optimizing their offer and sales page so that it is profitable at $1/click, otherwise the bidding wouldn't be at $1/click.

Brick and mortar businesses (clinics in my case) and pharmaceutical companies - yes. Digital products are non-existent in that space.

 

[cardine]

Brick and mortar businesses (clinics in my case) and pharmaceutical companies - yes. Digital products are non-existent in that space.

It sounds like Bing is not a good fit based on your products limitations.

But it also sounds like you are getting a little off topic. I agree with everyone else here that you should be your own biggest affiliate, and Bing being a bad place to promote your product doesn't negate that. Clearly you think someone out there has the potential to profitably promote your product, so why can't that person also be you?

 

[Blackman]

It sounds like Bing is not a good fit based on your products limitations.

But it also sounds like you are getting a little off topic. I agree with everyone else here that you should be your own biggest affiliate, and Bing being a bad place to promote your product doesn't negate that. Clearly you think someone out there has the potential to profitably promote your product, so why can't that person also be you?

That's a very good question - you got me by the balls.

I used Bing Ads initially to get maximum targeted traffic, so I could test the conversion rates, knowing the quality of traffic wouldn't be an issue....and then I sort of stuck with it, because I couldn't think of any other efficient way to get fast relevant traffic.

With PPC, it's so easy - choose keywords, write ads, choose countries, click here, click there and a few hours later you're getting traffic. If I was to do the same thing "organically" or any other way, I wouldn't know where to start and it would probably take months to get the same amount of traffic.

I guess my excuse would be that I was trying to build a solid product in the first place and then leave the traffic generation for affiliates, while my focus would be optimizing the offer, despite my "temporary" losses.

 

[JoseArmando]

Unless I'm totally ignorant and missing something major, there are no profitable keywords in my niche for less than $1.00/click. Plus you also have to consider the fact that I need to use a pre-sell landing page, before sending the traffic to the main page, because otherwise cold traffic doesn't really convert well, unless 1:100 is considering "well".

It's the same story with pretty much any CB product out there, unless we're talking about some MMO stuff or weight loss offers with outrageous claims, which may convert well initially, but then you get flooded with refunds.

Anyway, even if I was to "direct-link" (sending the traffic straight to the sales page), then 100 clicks = $100. I convert 1:40-50 with cold traffic using a pre-sell, so direct, it would probably be something like 1:100.

My full vendor cut is approximately $30 per sale, after Clickbank takes their commission. You can already see that numbers don't make sense.

Direct linking:

100 clicks = 100$
1 sale = $30 (1:100 conversion rate)
Loss = $70

Pre-sell:

100 clicks = $100
Clicks to the sales page = 50 (that's 50% landing page CTR, which is being very optimistic)
1 sale = $30 (1:50 conversion rate)
Loss: $70


Essentially, it's the same outcome with either method. The campaign is well-optimized, filtering all the irrelevant crap keywords with broad match modified, some negative keywords, targeting US/CA, Bing/Yahoo search engines only, etc, etc.

You could say that my product's sales page is crap, but there's no way you could optimize it to the extent that you will be profitable paying $1/click. Clearly, the problem is CPC, rather than the product. I've tested similar products in my niche and they convert the same or even worse.

That's my personal experience with Bing and I've been doing PPC on/off since 2007. The clicks have definitely got more expensive over the years and if I try to bid something like $0.40 or $0.50 for my keywords, then I get no impressions/clicks, nothing. The campaign is dead - raise the bids back $1+ and the traffic explodes.

I've stayed away from Adwords for a long time, as I heard too many horror stories about them banning genuine advertisers...

This just shows you aren't properly monetizing your back end. We are losing money on front end usually, it's no big deal.

Imagine this set of monetizations additional to your current model:
- partial email auto responder
- exisiting sales upsells through auto responder
- one time offer after the initial sale
- additional high ticket upsell after the one time offer
- partial monetization through callcenter
- existing customer monetization through callcenter

These are just some of the ways you can pull additional $$ through your back end. You gotta start thinking more creatively, but yeah sometimes your business just sucks which is no big deal either... just move on and use whatever you learned and build a better product

 

[ToddW]

Blackman, here's a couple tips.

- You don't have to be a good writer (grammar, spelling) to profit from your content. You do have to provide value to your readers. That's it, simple.

I'm a terrible writer in my opinion but some of my most profitable sites in the past years were sites I contributed to myself, and did so regularly. Content is still super easy to make money with. The problem is everyone wants to pay for shit content and parrot what everyone else has already written offering no value/new value.


- Your PPC to offer value is a flawed way of thinking. You're failing to take into account the LTV of the customer. How do you think web hosting companies pay out such high amounts to affiliates for customers only paying $5/month. It sounds to me like you've never actually completed competitors registrations, and learned about how they profit on their path or backend. I thought by now this was common knowledge, basic stuff, no?

EDIT: Jose was faster to reply, and gave you some hand holding...

 

[rusvik]

Clearly someone is optimizing their offer and sales page so that it is profitable at $1/click, otherwise the bidding wouldn't be at $1/click.

Except that a lot of big companies run negative just to keep others out and the clueless media people - of which there for sure are fewer now - also factor in things like 'exposure' and 'eyeballs'. For big companies, they could very well be considering the branding effect of Google Adwords. Besides, even if someone is able to make a small profit, this could be due to economics of scale. A small profit which only makes sense if you have huge volume.

I am not saying this is the case and I don't really do ppc, but it seems to me like Adwords is tough for the small advertiser.

 

[bluechinagroup]

I've stayed away from Adwords for a long time, as I heard too many horror stories about them banning genuine advertisers...

Adwords did ban us back in October 2013, but we appealed it and it's been smooth sailing since.

Also our Adwords campaigns are slightly more profitable per customer than Bing.

What other people are saying about the LTV of the customer are on the money. I have an entire upsell chain I setup, an auto responder, a call center, etc to squeeze every dollar I can from my customer.

Or you can just listen Rusvik's conspiracy theory to make yourself feel better. By his own admission Rusvik doesn't do PPC, and thus doesn't know his head from his ass. When someone says "I don't really do PPC" it makes they tried it and failed. They're not people who you should take advice from.

Even if the top bid placement are taken up by unprofitable campaigns, you don't need to make top bids to earn a ton converting clicks. None of my CPC bids are top bids, and I am getting a ton of traffic. Plus I've been crushing it with display as well.