Did you enjoy the Olympics? Every four years we get to see the best of the best and their gold medals, but sometimes the best inspiration comes from those who don’t win – or even someone who came in dead last.
In 1988, Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards became the first competitor since 1928 to represent Great Britain in Olympic ski jumping.
How did Eddie do? He came in #58 out of 58.
But it didn’t matter. His fans loved him for other reasons. He had no trainer, no money, no practice facilities – and some called him the great British loser.
He had a cheerful air of bumbling incompetence, epitomized by the big pink goggles he wore.
Says Eddie, “I got my letter saying, ‘Congratulations, you can represent Great Britain in the Olympic games’ when I was in a mental hospital in Finland. I wasn’t a patient. I was there because it was the cheapest place for me to stay.”
On getting ready to do his jump, Eddie says, “There were about 85 or 90 thousand people in the ski jump area, and I thought this is going to be really good, I’m really going to go for this. The Germans and the Swiss and the Italians were going down jumping, but the crowd were ignoring them and chanting, ‘Eddie! Eddie!’”
“And I got out and sat on the bar and they started cheering and cheering and it was great!”
“When you sit at the top of the ski jump, you look down, and you’re probably about 500 or 600 feet up from where you’re actually going to finish. You can see a million and one different reasons why you shouldn’t really go down. So you do have to be not a little crazy, but probably a lot.”
“You’re traveling at 65 or 75 miles per hour. Within about a second you’ll be 250 feet up from where you’re going to be landing. And you just try to relax and let your skis carry you to the bottom of the hill.”
“It’s the most exciting, exhilarating feeling in the world.”
Eddie’s British record jump of 71 meters landed him in 58th place – out of 58 competitors, 19 meters behind the jumper who placed 57th.
And if you ask anyone in Great Britain, “Who won the Olympic ski jump in 1988?” Almost no one could tell you.
But if you ask, “Who is Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards?” They’ll tell you all about the crazy ski jump guy who they still remember and love to this day.
Eddie stood on the top of the precipice and said, “Geronimo!”
The British people were so proud of him for just trying, that winning didn’t matter a bit.
He dared to go where most of us won’t. Yes, he came in dead last, but he will be forever and fondly remembered by his country for doing what no one else had done in 60 years.
So what daring thing are you afraid to do? Whether it’s something online or in real life, take Eddie’s example and just go for it.
You’re just starting out and your list only has 500 or 1,000 people.
While it’s true you would gladly trade your small list for one that’s 100 times bigger, it’s also true that if you treat your little list right, you can still make really good money.
How does that work?
By getting personal.
First, answer emails that you get from your list. When someone reads your latest email and takes the time to write to you – answer them. You’ve only got 1,000 people on your list, so odds are only 5 to 10 will ever write to you at a time. Yes, you can do this. Keep it personal.
Second, let your list members know that they are part of a very small, intimate, private community by telling them. Otherwise they’ll assume you’ve got a gazillion people on your list and don’t give a flying flip about any of them.
Third, email them daily. Yes, DAILY. Keep in constant contact with them. Update them on the latest news and give a tidbit here and there about yourself.
Fourth, care about their success. If you really, truly care, then it will show in your emails to them. Communicate how important they are and that you want to help them succeed in a big way.
Fifth, hold open Q and A sessions over webinars, Skype or your favorite platform. Don’t charge anything, and let your subscribers know it is only for your list. You’re creating the feeling that they belong to a small, exclusive, private group.
Sixth, send out emails that start with something personal, such as, “Hi (name) – I wanted to contact you personally because I think you might be a good fit for my coaching program.”
Seventh, ask for their help or opinion on something and then answer every response.
Doing these little things will keep your list engaged and interacting with you.
And when you send out an offer for just 10 people to get personalized coaching at $500 a month, what do you think will happen?
Odds are you’ll fill those slots in less than a day with no additional effort at all. You might even have a waiting list of people who didn’t make the first ten slots.
What happens when someone emails their list of 100,000 with the exact same offer? Surprisingly, there’s a good chance they’ll have trouble selling those ten slots, even though their list is 100 times bigger.
You can make great money with a small list when you take the time to get personal with your subscribers.
How can you create a product in less than a week that has a high perceived value and is almost guaranteed to bring its own traffic and sales? One word: Interviews.
Here’s how to do it…
First, choose a niche if you don’t already have one. Preferably you want to find a niche with experts who have their own email lists.
Second, choose a hook. If your niche is vegetable gardening, your hook might be, “How to grow an entire year’s worth of veggies for less than $50.” If your niche is classic cars, your hook might be, “How to buy classic cars for half their real value.” If your niche is Internet Marketing, your hook might be, “How to drive tons of traffic to your website without spending a dime.”
Third, once you have your hook you’ll want to find your experts. Book authors are great for this, as are bloggers and any fairly well-known experts in your niche. Don’t be afraid to approach well known people because you’re going to offer them something they want – exposure. Everyone has something they want to plug, whether it’s their latest book, their website, their new product or whatever – and you’re going to use this to your advantage.
Fourth, contact your experts. You can do this through phone or email, whichever you’re more comfortable with. Ask them if you can interview them, and be sure to mention that you want to plug their latest product or book for several minutes at the end of the interview. Everyone loves a chance to not only expand their audience, but to also make some sales of their latest product.
Fifth, if their product has an affiliate program you’ll want to sign up as an affiliate, do a redirect and give that link at the end of the interview to promote the product. This way both you and your interview subject will make money.
Sixth, conduct the interview. Sign up for a trial at Instant Teleseminar. You’ll get your own conference number and access code. Set the interview up to be recorded, and once the interview is over you can download the mp3 recording. Simple!
Keep the interview fun and relaxed, and ask questions along the lines of your hook. You might want to let your interview subject know ahead of time what you will be asking so they can be properly prepared. They might also have suggestions for you on what they would like you to ask them.
Seventh, ask your interview subjects to promote your new interview product for you. Because they are one of the featured speakers they will likely not only promote it, but promote it heavily. In addition to sales for you and commissions for them; it also means subscriber sign ups for you and back end sales as well (remember, you’re promoting a product at the end of each interview and receiving affiliate commissions on those as well.)
And there you have it – an easy, fast way to create your own product with a high perceived value. If you do a dozen or so interviews, you can easily charge $47 to $97 for the package. And since you’ve chosen experts who have their own mailing lists, you’ll also have a way to promote your product for immediate sales while simultaneously growing your list!
Okay, your competition has been around longer than you.
They know more than you about your customers, your products, your marketing…
…let’s face it – they’re racehorses, and you’re a mule.
But what does that mean?
New marketers feel like they are coming into a race when it’s three-quarters over.
Seasoned marketers know more, have more tools, more contacts, more customers, bigger lists, more outsourcers and so forth.
How is a mule to compete against a tried and true racehorse?
One step at a time, that’s how.
In 1976, the Great American Horse Race – 3,500 miles long through 13 American states – had 90 teams of purebred racehorses competing…
And 1 team of mules.
That’s right, mules – competing with thoroughbreds from across the world in the perhaps the longest, greatest horse race ever.
Entered in the race were Viking horses from Iceland; Arabian stallions, favored to win by almost everyone; tall Irish thoroughbreds; striking Appaloosas; and horses from France, Australia, Denmark and Japan.
And then there was Lord Fauntleroy, the mule. “Leroy,” for short, was the choice steed of Virl Norton, a steeplejack from San Jose, California. Lady Eloise was the backup mule. And no one – no one – took them seriously.
3,500 miles later, you already know who won: The most unlikely victor in any horse race, ever. As Leroy crossed the finish line into the stadium, he flopped his ears and gave a victorious “hee-haw.”
The mule had won with 315.47 total hours. Second place went to an Arabian, clocking 324.6 hours. That’s right – it wasn’t even close.
When you think you can’t compete – when you’re sure you don’t know enough, have enough experience, don’t have the contacts or whatever thought is going through your head, just think of Leroy.
No one expected him to win except his owner and rider, Norton.
Maybe no one expects you to win, either, except maybe your spouse or loved-one.
That’s okay, because if you simply stay in the race and be consistent, you can outshine them all… Or at least cross the finish line with a lovely payday for yourself.
So you’ve set up your blog and you’ve got several posts – and no readers. Now what? Here are 7 proven methods to drive traffic to your blog in no time…
Facebook Fan Pages. You can set up a Fan Page for your blog in about a minute – ten minutes if you’re hunting for a photo and just the right thing to say. It’s simple, easy and free, and here’s my favorite part: Once people become fans of your blog they’ll be able to see your blog updates when they’re on Facebook. Plus, when they like your blog, their friends see that and check out your blog, too. Some of them ‘like’ it, and their friends check out your blog, and so forth.
Twitter. Yes, just about everyone seems to be either on Twitter or joining, so go ahead and set up a Twitter account just for your blog. Again, it’ll take you a whopping 2 to 3 minutes. Make a few interesting Tweets, and then begin adding followers. Use one of the many Twitter add-ons to schedule your tweets to run around the clock, mixing them up and always making them interesting. Tweet each time you make a new blog post, and be sure to use your blog’s URL in your profile. Ask others to retweet you, continue to build your followers, and you’ll be driving traffic to your blog in no time.
Forum signatures. We’re going to assume you’re blogging about a topic you thoroughly enjoy, and thus you belong to at least one forum that focuses on that topic. Be sure to place your blog information in your signature line, using something catchy that teases them into checking out your blog.
Social Networking, RSS Feeds and Blog Directories. How are people bookmarking and /or finding blogs these days? Through blog directories, RRS feeds and social networking. That’s why you want your blog to have all those social networking buttons – they’re not just for decoration. And get your blog listed in all of the big blog directories as well. Here’s a list to start you out…
Blog Commenting. Find the most widely read blogs in your niche and comment on their posts. Here’s how: Create an Icon that absolutely catches the eye. If you’re not sure what it should look like, spend some time looking at other Icons/Gravatars and see which ones positively pop out at you. Next, leave helpful, interesting comments on the blogs, always with your blog’s URL in the website field. Last, watch to see which of these blogs sends you the most traffic, and focus your commenting on those blogs. Better yet, hire someone to post the comments for you.
Guest Posting. Now that you’ve been leaving great comments on these blogs, let’s take it a step further. Contact the blog owners and ask if you can write a guest post for them. Since they’ve been (hopefully) seeing and reading your comments, there’s a good chance they will be open to letting you do the heavy lifting of writing a blog post for them. To increase the chance they’ll say yes, actually attach the blog post to your email. If they turn you down, it could be because they didn’t like your topic, so ask if there is something else they would prefer. Then resubmit your original blog post to another blog.
Ezine Articles Dot Com. Yes, this is still a good way to drive free traffic, for a couple of reasons. First, people searching for information on Google often land on a particular article at this website – so why shouldn’t it be your article? With your blog in the resource box, this can result in free traffic. And occasionally your article will end up on someone else’s website – again, a good source of free traffic, not to mention another backlink.
I feel almost silly writing an article on this topic, because I can sum it up in one sentence:
Write about your own personal experiences in story form.
That’s it! People love stories – especially true ones – that show you overcame an obstacle, solved a problem, created something positive and so forth.
So if you’re writing a blog post about how to increase traffic, use your own examples of what you did, how you did it, and the results. If you can flavor it with storytelling skills that keep your reader riveted, so much the better.
And who better to show you how to tell a story than professional stand up comics? These guys and gals live and die by the story – they either get it right or they’re booed off the stage, and being booed is not funny or fun.
The steps to great storytelling according to comedians?
Be Brief (don’t ramble – get to the point)
Give Details (the useful ones – don’t bog the story down with useless stuff)
Use Story Twists (surprise is a wonderful thing)
Work the Crowd (or in this case, your readers)
Act Out The Characters (difficult to do in a blog, but I’ve always thought lending your own personality or character to your writing is extremely important)
Practice (write often – the more you write, the better you’ll get)
End on the Biggest Laugh (or point if you’re a blogger)
Get the details on how comedians tell great stories here:
Half of Facebook’s more than 2.2 BILLION active users are on Facebook in any 24 hour period. In addition, the average U.S. Facebook user spends nearly 6 hours a month browsing this social network.
In other words, if your business isn’t on Facebook yet, maybe it should be. And one of the first questions I invariably receive from newcomers concerning Facebook is, “What should I post to get people interested in my business?” Here are some ideas:
Showcase your customers. If you’ve got photos, videos or emails from happy customers using your products, go ahead and show them. Just remember, you’re not bragging about your product, you’re showing what your customers are doing with your product. Keep the difference in mind when choosing and framing content and you can’t go wrong.
Instead of showing a testimonial from Jimmy telling how great your product is, show Jimmy using or enjoying your product, or show the direct results Jimmy achieved with your product. For example, if you teach your customers how to restore classic cars, show Jimmy with before and after shots of his car.
Use humor. Don’t make yourself or your business overly serious on Facebook. Instead, use light-hearted humor whenever possible. This isn’t necessarily telling jokes – most times it’s simply taking a poke at yourself or your day, showing something in a humorous light, being witty or simply sharing that silly thing that happened to you a few minutes ago.
Post funny videos, especially if they’re relevant to your business. And don’t just grab videos from YouTube – make your own quick videos when you feel inspired.
Give them content. Facebook isn’t necessarily the place to offer long winded diatribes about anything. But it is a great place to share cool content – especially the “How-to” variety and the entertainment variety. And it doesn’t all need to originate with you – use curated content to round out your own and keep people engaged.
Let them inside. That is, show off your staff (if you have one) or your family or the inner workings of your business. Engage them by pulling back the curtain and showing what they normally wouldn’t get to see. For example, if you’re a one person business working out of your home, show them your office, your view, and your little dog that keeps you company. If your business has oodles of employees, post pictures of your in-office celebrations such as birthdays, as well as the antics that go on and so forth. By giving them a peak behind the curtain, your friends and fans feel very much included and part of the group. You’re no longer just a business, you’re part of their circle.
Ask questions. Nothing engages other people like asking them their opinion on something, even if it’s as silly as, “What’s better: Baseball or Football, and why?” Posts with questions get the conversation rolling, especially when it’s an easy question to answer. And be sure to respond to the answers you receive.
Use these Facebook “attention getters” to quickly begin bringing more people your way.
Here’s a ridiculously easy business you can run from Facebook using Facebook groups. It won’t take you much time, and it can net you a tidy little profit each month.
Better still, you can create as many of these as you like. Grow them big enough, and you might make far more than $1,000 a month, too.
Plus, you can either do it yourself, or outsource the work – it’s up to you.
Here’s how it works:
First, create a private Facebook group. This is going to be a free group, and you can do it for any niche where money is spent.
For example, if you’re in the IM niche, you might title your group something like:
Shortcut copywriting techniques for non-copywriters
Easy and fast SEO for non-SEO people
Latest and hottest ways to get tons of traffic to your offer
Techniques for doubling and tripling your conversions
Simple methods for building massive emails lists fast
Etc.
You can populate your groups with free WSO’s, from Facebook itself, as bonuses to other people’s products and so forth. You’re offering a tremendous benefit for free, so it’s not going to be difficult to get members to your groups.
You might even limit the number of members you take, since that will make it seem much more exclusive and valuable.
For content you’re going to do one or more of the following:
Write your own content
Hire outsourcers to write the content for you
Get guests to write your content for free
Use high quality PLR. Not junk, just the good stuff
Whatever content you use, be sure to break it down into brief daily posts.
All you need is short snippets of content, because the members will do the rest of the work for you. They’ll ask questions, respond to questions, give opinions and so forth.
Your group will take on a life of its own, which is terrific. You want to encourage as much interaction as possible to keep people coming back time and time again.
So now the big question is… How do you monetize this?
There are three ways:
First, promote your own products. You’ve got to do this in a very soft, non-pushy way. Done right, you’ll make plenty of sales without turning anyone off.
For example, you might answer someone’s question, then refer them to your product for even more info.
Second, promote other people’s products (affiliate products) using the same method.
Third, if you don’t want to sell products or you want to make even more money, you can sell advertising on the timeline.
If you think about it, you’ve got a highly targeted group of people who are super focused on this one area of interest.
Basically, you have a terrific prospect list of active, interested people.
Whether you are selling your own products, affiliate products or advertising, you’re going to make money.
Let’s talk more about getting advertisers. These advertisers would LOVE to convert your members to their deal.
Limit your ads to just one per day, and call them the “Sponsor of the Day.”
Of course, advertisers can book as many days as they like.
Post the ad in the morning and keep it as the pinned post for the rest of the day.
Charge maybe $50 to display the ad for a day, which compares favorably to solo ads.
If you sell all 30 days of the month, you’ve made $1,500.
Only allow that one ad per day, and don’t let your members post affiliate links.
How do you find advertisers? Many times your best source will be from within the group itself. You can also let your email list know about the opportunity, and you can offer your ad slots to anyone who is in your niche and has a product to sell.
I recommend starting one group and learning the in’s and out’s of running this type of business. You’ll need to invest perhaps 15 minutes each morning for adding content and answering questions, and then check back 3 or 4 times during the day.
Once you get a good feel for what you’re doing, expand to related niches and even branch out to completely unrelated niches, too.
And of course you can outsource the entire process.
While you’re not going to make a fortune from just one group, several groups can yield you a full-time income.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make good money online is by doing webinars.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell: You choose a date and topic for your webinar, promote it, give great information on the webinar and then promote a product at the end. It’s like one big informational sales letter, in that you begin by giving away a great deal of awesome info, and you close by offering them even more information or a service or membership they can use to implement what they’ve just learned.
If you either have a skill that others want to learn, or you can interview an expert who has the skill (or information) people want to learn, then you can do a webinar.
Here are the steps to ensure your webinars generate income…
1. Make the webinar an experience. There is so much I can say about this, but it might all boil down to the following: Do NOT be boring. As you put your webinar together, think about your customers and what they want to learn and experience. Make it interesting, exciting and fun. Plan to show major enthusiasm for your topic, and to answer questions. Remember, they can leave the webinar any time they like, so make sure it’s worth staying for.
2. Provide great tools. If you’re partnering or using affiliates, provide great blog posts and emails so they can drive as much traffic as possible to your opt-in page. And provide a good variety – you don’t want every affiliate sending out the same email, since they begin to look like spam. Instead, consider helping each affiliate to write a unique email tailored exclusively for their list.
3. Spend time on your registration page. This is the page you and your partners or affiliates will be sending traffic to, and it’s do or die. Prospects decide whether or not to sign up for your webinar based upon what’s on the page, so spend a little time fine tuning it to produce the most sign-ups possible.
4. In creating the slides for your webinar, try to have a new slide every minute or two with one or more important points on it. This keeps the webinar moving and interesting.
5. You can do the webinar by yourself or with a partner. The nice thing about having a partner is you can have a give and take of information, adding in bits that the other might overlook. Of course whoever the expert is will do most of the talking, but the second person can ask questions and add a different dynamic to the call.
6. Promote the webinar. Begin promoting no more than a week in advance because frankly, people have short memories. And as the webinar gets closer, promote it more often with increased urgency.
7. Send reminders. The day before the webinar is the time to send the first reminder, preferably in the early evening. Send the second on the morning of the webinar, and the third reminder 30 minutes before it begins. “Did you forget?” Is a great subject line for the last minute email you send out. Also remind them that there are far more people signed up than there are open webinar slots (assuming this is true, which it usually is.) Suggest they get on the webinar early to ensure they get a “seat.”
8. Start the webinar on time. Don’t wait for stragglers, you’ll just irritate those who bothered to show up on time.
9. Give some of your best stuff. Seriously, you want to majorly over deliver, because the more you give, the more your listeners will want to know. If you hold everything back then not only do you run out of things to talk about – your listeners also wonder if you know anything at all.
10. Be a tease. Seriously, while you’re delivering great content you will also be inserting teasers here and there for the pitch that comes at the end. For example, you’re telling them how to do “a, b and c,” and of course they’ll need “d, e and f” which you don’t have time to cover here but you’ll give them a chance to learn all about it at the end of the presentation. For example: Your webinar is on traffic, so you teach several basic methods on the call and allude to the many advanced techniques they can also use – when they know how.
11. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. If your webinar system allows questions to be typed in (such as GoToWebinar) then the person who isn’t doing the talking can keep track of the questions and make sure they get answered. Great trick: Imagine you are a new listener hearing you for the first time. What do you want to know? What isn’t clear? What questions might you have? Always keep your listeners in mind, and even periodically check in with them to see if they’re following what you’re teaching.
12. Make your offer deliciously irresistible. The entire webinar should flow nicely into the offer you’re making, and the offer itself should be as irresistible as possible. Pile on the benefits, make it clear what this will allow them to accomplish, and back it with a super strong guarantee. Place the URL of the order page on the screen and tell them exactly what will happen when they order.
13. Give a bonus to the first “x” number who grab your offer. This is a great way to get them off the fence and moving fast. Depending on the price point and the number of listeners, limit your special bonus to the first 10 to 50 people who sign up.
14. Stay on to answer questions and give order updates. If one person has a question there’s a good chance others have the same question. Plus you can be there in case they have a problem ordering. And as the orders come in, update the listeners on how many of the bonuses are already gone. This provides proof that others are buying and they should as well. You might even close out the webinar by letting them know you’re confident the bonuses will sell out this evening.
15. Follow-up. Send an email thanking them for attending and reminding them of the URL to order if they haven’t already.
16. Post the replay online for a few days and inform all those who did not attend to listen to it before you take it down.
It’s fairly common to make several thousand dollars from one webinar, depending of course on your offer and your listeners.
What if you don’t have a product to promote? Then you’ve got a couple of options:
1. Choose an affiliate product and ask the product owner to do the webinar with you, splitting the profit between the two of you.
2. Make your product a series of teaching webinars. These are additional webinars that they pay to attend to learn the rest of what it is you’re teaching. Record them and get transcriptions, and now you’ve got a product you can sell on future webinars.
So, are webinars for you?… If so, these tips will help you get started on the right track!
I see new marketers all the time who have a goal of $100,000 per year or even a million dollars per year. And how are they getting their traffic? They’re happily submitting articles, writing blog posts and commenting in forums and blogs.
Now, if your goal is to earn an extra $1,000-$2,000 per month, then these methods are great. But if you want to earn far more, you’ll want to change the way you get traffic.
No one that I know of is making large sums of money using only these methods. Instead, they are doing either SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, or creating their own products and affiliate programs.
Or they have a HUGE list. But how do you get a huge, responsive list? Generally by using SEO, PPC or some kind of advertising.
So the real questions to think about when it comes to not only traffic but also any issue regarding your business is:
A) What is your goal?
B) Is what you’re doing going to get you to that goal this year?
And if it’s not – look for another method.
I will say there are of course always exceptions to the rule. If you’re really good at a particular marketing strategy like blogging, or direct sales using Facebook chats and other social networking engagements AND you sell products that can pay you high commissions, it IS possible to build a 6 or 7 figure income with free marketing.
But for the average person, paid advertising can be a faster path to the higher income tiers. Either way, choose a strategy that works within your current budget and commit to learning how to execute that strategy at the highest level possible if you are in the online marketing game to make a serious and life-changing income.
