And a lot of ranting. Because once I’m officially and finally retired, I’m really going to say any and everything I’ve always wanted to say. Bridges will be burned. Feelings hurt. Lessons learned. Hilarity ensuing.

Stay tuned.

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The biggest lesson I learned in internet marketing was that it doesn’t always have to be the invention of something new and ground-breaking - if you wait for the most divine intervention, you’ll never make any money. In the meantime, it might help to think of it this way: you have knowledge your clients want, and you’re doing them a disservice by not giving them the chance to snatch it up.

This is true whether you create your own products, resell other people’s products, are an affiliate marketer, or sell advertising on your site.

To apply this concept to marketing, remember that there is a point of merging between your style of attracting a potential customer and making a sale, a point at which you take your own style and join it with what you’ve learned from other people.

If you want to be a lady’s man, do you study someone who never gets a date? That would be dumb. If you want a relationship, do you ask other bachelors for advice with your girl? Equally stupid.

Decide what your identity is, and think about what works on you. Learn about it. Take all those elements and then add you. The same way Andy in 40 Year Old Virgin took the best elements of all the advice from his friends and through trial and error, found what worked for him.

==> Sidebar<== Love that movie, the extended DVD version. “Okay, let’s start over. Hi, Are You Fucking Retarded?” haaaaaaaa.

You see a beautiful woman in a grocery store. She smiles at you suggestively. So you move in closer to flirt with her.

You stand next to her in front of the ice cream cooler and make eye contact. She smiles, looks away, your eyes meet again in the reflection from the glass. She turns and says, “Hi, I’m Candy.”

You yell “MY NAME IS ANDY. MY PENIS IS HUGE. WILL YOU MARRY ME? I’M ONLY GOING TO BE STANDING HERE FOR A LIMITED TIME, SO YOU MUST ACT QUICKLY. LOOK, ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE DATING ME, AND SOME PEOPLE YOU REALLY RESPECT, HERE ARE THEIR NAMES AND COMMENTS. ”

She rubs her ears and says, “Uh, hi.” And starts to back away.

Stalker that you are, you follow her and continue your pitch.

“IF YOU’RE NOT READY FOR MARRIAGE, LET’S TRY A TEST MARRIAGE DURING A TRIAL PERIOD CALLED A DATE! IF YOU GIVE ME YOUR PHONE NUMBER, I WON’T SELL IT TO MY FRIENDS, HONEST. ACT NOW AND I’LL TAKE YOU TO FRIDAYS.”

“Maybe we should start ov-” She’s willing to give you another chance but you just can’t shut up.

“OH YOU WAITED TOO LONG, NOW IT’S SUBWAY. TOO LATE MCDONALDS. BEFORE YOU GO, CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME WHY YOU’RE NOT MARRYING ME RIGHT NOW? WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN MARRYING ME LATER? OKAY, WELL WHAT IF WE JUST HAD SOME SEX, WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN THAT?”

If you’re pissing yourself laughing, and getting flashbacks to 40 Year Old Virgin, you might not be for long. How many of us either market that way, or have bought something from someone who markets that way?

Think about how often you use some similiar marketing tactics in your sales copy, on your site, or in your blog. Think maybe if you flirted a little with your audience and readers first, did something nice for them, paid attention to their needs, you’d be more popular?

I tried both ways. Turns out you need only a dash of flash in your sales letter if you take your desired customer for a steak dinner prior to bumping uglies the first time. And just like in dating, if you maintain a good benefits balance in your relationship, they’ll be back.

Of course, if you think it’s smart to have a series of one night stands, more power to you. Me, I’d rather be up front and serially polygamous with my customers than fake monogamy just to get them into bed the one time. Don’t know about you but I’m building a business not a brothel.

As my mood/health/family stalkers allow, we’re going to talk about coy marketing, and the intersection of romancing your prospect into a sale by addressing their needs, instead of batting them over the head with a caveman’s bat and facing dire consequences later.

1. First, and most importantly, amuse myself while I hopefully recovered from an illness I’ve been dealing with for 14 years. I did amuse myself, but my recovery has Not gone as well as I hoped. I’m considering it a pass.
2. Show people who I have trained to blog that you don’t need a name behind you, or some huge marketing campaign to start a large enough following to make money from blogging. Instead of trying to create one super blog and become an A-list blogger, my advice is often to start several smaller blogs that are on a topic you care about.I hit all my numbers, and spent less than $1000 on the whole thing if you count the prize money I’ll be giving out. If this blog was consistent with other small, niche-within-niche blogs that I’ve created, I would have made around $600 a month with this blog, even though circumstances caused me to have to stop blogging halfway through the project.
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   Too bad you have to put up ads in order to have income. SO, I actually have to start this project all over again on another topic. Dang. Maybe I can use this one as a traffic example. I am quite screwed there. Guess we can call that one a fail on the experiement side, but a pass on the fun and traffic side.

3. Share some of the lessons I’ve learned about the industry my health is forcing me to leave. Yes, all that stuff about selling my company for a deal that could make me a millionaire over the next year is true.And yes, I’m leaving marketing as of today.I’ve never done a pure marketing product before, so I’ve decided to never do one, and just give away advice, tips, tools etc, here for free whenever the mood strikes me.I’m going to stick around to help the people who will inherit my company in about a year with the traffic and website promotion company I sold them, but purely as a consultant and writer. My internat marketing days, which never really started, are over.From today on, I’m an author, and I plan to make a living from selling books and blogging. At the moment, I’m kind of screwed in that capacity, because I haven’t been able to keep up the writing side of it.

My name is Tinu Abayomi-Paul. As I’ve said, I’m not terribly famous (at least I hope not), just well-known in certain circles. I used to run Free Traffic Tips, Leveraged Promotion and a few dozen other smaller spin-off sites.

In late January, I took some time off to have what I thought would be a quick outpatient procedure having to do with a degenerative disc disorder I’ve been dealing with for 14 years, which has only been truly bad the last 5 years. Long story short, I have to quit my business to save myself. It’s not just my body that’s been suffering, it’s my soul. But I’ll go into that another day because this is getting really long.

For those of you who thought I was a dude, my bad. I’m really sorry about that. I picked the name Tatum as an alias because I thought it could be a man or a woman’s name. Wrong. I usually do better research, but life has taken me to some weird places these past few months.

Everything else I’ve said in this blog is true, though some names and genders have been changed to keep people guessing or avoid the anger of friends, or to avoid witch hunts, etc, you get the idea.

So, that’s it. I’ll be back with more soon. Over the next week I’ll change up all the bios and such.

Picture this.

You have a sales letter that converts at 3%, and your profit is $75 per sale. 1000 people see it. You make 30 sales. $2250. Congrats. You da man.

What if you had a follow-up series that also converted at only 3%. But the sign-up rate to the series was 50%. You have the original 30 sales.

Watch this. Sign up to the follow-up is 500 people. 3% of them convert at $75. That’s another 15 sales. Another $1275.

An hour extra work giving away a couple of excerpts or articles that you’ve already written or setting up the autoresponder series. 50% increase in sales.

I would call my initial lack of follow-up my single biggest marketing mistake ever. Follow up is not just for signing up the people that didn’t buy on impulse the first time they came to your site, it’s for selling upsells to people who are already sold.

Once I started marketing to customers I already had, I kicked myself every day for about a year.  I don’t even mean newsletters. I mean listening to your clients really well. When they send you testimonials, really study what they’re saying that they liked. Be anal, keep a database of comments and who said what.

I started to keep the people who had bought from me separate from those who didn’t. With their permission, I offered them upsells about four times a year. Once I had a 100% conversion rate.  I had sold 100 people an ebook and listened to their suggestions. All 100 of them bought the multimedia version. $9700 for a day’s work.

How much are you leaving on the table?

Don’t have a list of people to market to? What if you can’t go back and write individual emails asking your customers to sign up to your special offers list (Bait works. Offer them 10% off if they buy during the first week a new product is out.)?

Ask a fellow marketer. You probably have a friend who was a one-hit wonder in internet marketing and can’t figure out what to do next. Pitch them the idea and sell to their customer list in exchange for a cut in the profits.

When I didn’t want to work, or couldn’t, ezine advertising not only paid my bills, it kept me comfy. A lot of people will tell you to rely on AdWords. There’s nothing wrong with any type of search engine marketing if you know enough about it to maintain a decent conversion rate, and have enough money to keep your sales steady.

My preference was for testing with small ezine ads, and then, when they test well, solo ads. Six months out of the year, I would hire someone to look at my product and write me two ads, an ezine ad and a solo ad. All told, a really good copywriter that specializes in advertising would cost me $300 or less.  I can write a decent ad pulling about 15% for visits, and then 3% of those for sales, but do the math: if a specialist can get me 25% for visits, even if the sales conversion rate remains steady, I’ve made a lot more money. So investing $100 for a solo ad in a high quality publication of about 10, 000 visitors would bring me 1500 visitors, and then about 45 sales.
Still, I wouldn’t suggest ezine advertising for everyone.

Pros? Instead of keyword research, you just do publication research. Is the publication targeted? Did the smaller ad yield good results? Then it’s on. If not, you’ve wasted maybe $10. So add to that cost effective. I’d spend around $100 - $250 just to Test pay per click results. A sampling of less than 100 visitors isn’t really worth the effort. The return is bettery when you hit paydirt on the right publication.

There are more pros, but you get the idea, more money, less effort, more cost effective.

Cons? It’s not as predictable as pay per click and returns aren’t as immediate. You don’t always know when your ad is going to run. Even if you get a special where the ad goes out within three days, you don’t know when the prospect is going to read the ezine or if it will make it through their filters (which I believe accounts for most of the return rate.) Pay per click has it beat there.

You also have to be careful of saturation. In a publication of 10,000, with a visit rate of 15%, I would only run the same ad for the same product ten times, and that’s over the course of several months. I’d also say that this is more of a method for a career affiliate or career infoproduct entrepreneur. Almost anyone else is better off with AdWords, or a combination of other online marketing methods. But here’s a clue - use this method to earn the initial effort for an AdWords campaign.

Of course, no smart marketer uses only one technique. I use AdWords when I want an immediate, controlled response, and have the attention span to test and track the results, and have the time to do the research. Even in the beginning, I always had the money to invest - but I’ve found that I get a better return from a combination of several methods that includes ezine advertising on my own products.

I am a workaholic. I can’t Not work. I work when I’m sick. And with the vacuum in my life from the sale of my company, I had to find a few other things to do. This blog is (note: not was) one of them. But things unexpectedly went SO well that I had more work to do, suddenly, and felt obligated to celebrate.

I will be back from my work hard/play even harder silence - thank you to the 200 people a day who take time from their schedules to see what I’m up to. I promise you continued chatter from the globe-like area where I keep my brain over the next week.

And the contest is still on.

There was this guy, we’ll call him Scammer Rick. Scammer Rick convinced a (still) trusted friend of mine to join an organization whose sole aim was to help certain types of corporations with a very specific kind of online marketing that involved what I still think is one of the best products I have ever seen or used.

The friend wanted me aboard. Because of how great the product was and how much I trust my friend, of course, I said yes. I still don’t regret that decision because I met some great people.

Scammer Rick was the pitcher, and my friend, myself, and a few other people were the catchers. When we got the clients he signed, we actually got them set up and did the actual legwork.

After about a week working with Rick, I realized that my clients were being sold something completely different than what they were actually buying. I found this out when a new customer called me up asking what exactly he had bought.

I said “What do you mean, exactly?”

He said, “Well, Rick said that we were buying the most powerful marketing system online but he didn’t tell us what it actually was or what it does.”

I hated Rick desperately for a couple of years after this was over, not just for the mess I had to clean up, not just because he never paid me most of the money I made on any of the jobs I did, but because of the innocents harmed in the making of his scam.

However, I always will have a reluctant respect him for his sales ability, though not how he used it. To date, I still haven’t quite figured out how he got people to fork over what eventually amounted to thousands of dollars for something several of them claimed not to be able to identify.

If only he had used his power for good.

Getting back to the story, this kind of thing became a pattern. One of my biggest regrets in the time I spent with his organization was that sometimes I have too much faith in people, and that just because the product they are reselling is mind-blowing, doesn’t mean they are themselves good people.

It seems like a silly assumption now, and I’m alarmed that I was so naive then as it wasn’t that long ago. Since then, I’ve learned that if something doesn’t feel right, no matter how rational things seem on the surface, I have to trust my instincts and walk away.

If I can just get one person to realize that same truth, well, that’s really not enough people, man, LOL.

Seriously, here’s the reason it’s so crucial to know this.

See, my reputation Almost got attached to his reputation. And that would have ruined me. Failing is never easy to deal with, but it’s unbearable when it isn’t through your own actions.

I will seriously regret telling this story….

If you are sitting on a few thousand dollars, and thinking about how to make money in internet marketing, here’s one of the things I did to start money working for me.

Go to a place where you can find products affiliates can make money from - I like reading up at the Associate Programs site, or going to Clickbank (esp the login page) and finding items that state their conversion rates, or ones I hear tell of from top affiliates. My personal comfort zone is with ones that say they convert at 8%, which I find normally means 5%.

Don’t put all your money in the pot yet, though.

Get a professional copywriter to make some ad copy for you, and do a test run in some of the cheaper publications or in lower bids on pay per click, and evaluate if you’re getting a decent return.

For example, if a product converts at 5%, and you’re testing that theory with $200, if the product costs $50, you would need to sell 4 units just to break even. How that money is spent to get to 4 units will vary, but when you find one that lets you end up in profit, that’s the one you lean on.

That isn’t exactly common knowledge, but it’s not rocket science either. Most people don’t go wrong there. So why isn’t everyone rich?

They spend their profits instead of reinvesting them.

The amount of money I lost before I figured this out still makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Put every last thin dime of what you make on that product back into advertising it once you find a way that works in a market that works. After a few rounds, take out only half, let the rest keep rolling back on itself until sales start slipping or trends shift.

Now I’m not a master affiliate, and I much prefer doing this with my own products, since I then have total control and know what the conversion rates are first hand. But during the part of the year that I don’t work, that system has worked for me year in and year out.

A mentor soon half-scoffed that I wasn’t owed anything, by anyone.

At first it was offensive that he thought that about me. Then when soul-searching revealed that it was true, that I felt I deserved or was owed some kind of a break because of the hard times I had in my life, it made me take a look at myself. That’s when I thought about working for it harder than I ever had before.

It’s painful to admit, but I was in a situation where I lawfully could have gone on public assistance or social security. This was post-entitlement me though, and I couldn’t bring myself to take a hand-out.

My money issues went so much deeper than that, though.

When I finally worked my way to what I started to believe was this great income, I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I thought it was too easy. All this time, money was coming to me at an inverse proportion to how hard I had to physically work. The less laborious it was, the easier and more rapidly money came to me.

I just couldn’t handle it.

Of course, I started to sabotage myself. I overspent in a period that should have put me on the road to wealth. I rested on my laurels when I should have kept working. It eventually stopped coming in more and more slowly and I was thrown into a panic.

The truth of the matter is that money has a certain type of energy. I promise I’m not going to get too touchy-feely on you. Here’s something to think about along those lines instead.

Broke people congregate together. Rich people try to hang out with people richer and smarter than them so they can learn.

Broke people hoard knowledge. The rich pass knowledge down.

Broke people complain about how much money they don’t have. Rich people talk about what they’re going to do with money they haven’t even made yet, then they go get it.

Broke people hoard pennies rather than saving intelligently. While a rich person isn’t a frivolous spender, they don’t jump over dollars to pick up dimes.

Broke people hate people who are rich and think that they owe them something. And yet it’s the rich people who were always the most willing to help me out when I was broke.

Yet, when a broke person pulls away from the pack and begins to think differently, and re-evaluate how to earn, and gets out of their own way, money seems to rain out of the sky for them, even more than for those sgment of rich people who are born rich and take it for granted.

If you want to be rich - or better yet wealthy - really think about how you feel about money. What did you learn from your parents? Are you tight-fisted or addicted to spending? Why?

Resolve your money issues now while you don’t have much, and when you get money, you’ll keep it.

The alternative is Not fun.

Real marketing isn’t lying, and if you think it is, you’re probably broke right now. The two truths are related.

Marketing is, however, telling the truth is a creative way.

The first time someone said that to me, he was talking about cheating on his wife. It’s funny how some of us are hardwired to interpret creative truth-telling as lying.

In fairy tale marketing, we attempt to hypnotize our victim sucker potential client into believing that whatever we are selling is a cure-all, a magic elixir, and that after they give us just $1997 in three easy payments, they will experience a happily ever after.

A good marketer knows how to make the actual expected outcome just as desireable. And there is the difference. The best example of how this works in real life is the movies.

Ironically, the only way we’ll accept fiction is if it is true to life. We go to the movies to observe stories we know not to be true, by going through a process called “suspension of disbelief”. We go into sort of a trance, and feel as if the story is happening to us.

Bad movies have one thing in common - at some point, they trigger our bullshit meter. The same thing is true of bad marketing.

Did you know that the guys who made The 40 Year Old Virgin didn’t expect it to be a hit? The most common reason that people saw the picture, then saw it again, then bought the DVD, was because it was so true to life. Even that story one of the characters told at the card table about making love to a woman, and that her cat got involved rang true.

Not because it sounded like it actually happened - because it sounded like BS that someone would come up with on the spot.

(See what I mean? I worked in the beastiality, but it wasn’t enough for the original title to warrant it.)

You want marketing to make you rich? You want to sell products with low return rates? Mix in a healthy dose of reality. About the product, about you, another customer’s experience, it doesn’t matter.

If you can make it ring true, you can make it feel real. If it feels real, it is real. When it is real, it’s not a hard sell. When it’s not a hard sell, you make more of them.

Special thanks and shout outs to everyone who stopped by on my day of inner reflection (read: Hijacked Laptop). I answered all your comments and you’re welcome by anytime. This afternoon and tomorrow are my prime comment times, so expect me by your blogs for extensive contact.

Off we go then.

What I came up with is to publish the checklist to the plan I use to launch a new infoproduct, from research to launch.

I may come back and edit. Feel free to chime in if it looks like I skipped something. (I used a version of this when selling affiliate products, but there are some steps you’d have to drop or change. I’ll discuss that when I examine each point in detail within upcoming posts.)

1. Research the market
2. Narrow to several products and test market response
3. Pick an entry product and an upsell product
4. Create a content site for list building, marketing and/or networking
5. Market the site and gather more research from the signed up audience
6. Write a sales letter for your private use describing the ideal product
7. Write PPC/solo ads/ezine ads, etc
8. Create the enticement for the squeeze page/mini-site
9. Create the squeeze page for your private use (optional - combine with sales letter to make a mini-site)
10. Create the product (and upsell if applicable)
11. Test the product with past clients or admired mentors
12. Improve the product with their suggestions
13. Solicit multi-media testimonials (pictures, audio)
14. Test/polish the sales letter
15. Test/polish promotional materials and/or ads
16. Create any additional buzz
17. Choose a date for product launch
18. Set up sales and product delivery
19. Make a promotional plan for the product
20. Make an advertising plan for the product
21. Do any pre-execution for advertising/marketing
22. Test sales process (and product delivery if electronic) and follow-up
23. Automate the entire marketing and sales system as much as possible
24. Test sales/delivery process again post-automation
25. Create follow-up schedule for clients (in addition to autoresponder)
26. Have a dress rehearsal
27. Execute

Right before I took a break from my real life, I did.

One of my potential customers, who happened to be already be an associate of mine, said that they didn’t really believe that if I took my own advice, and I was “some nobody like me”,  as they put it, that I’d be successful at marketing myself.

I took that comment seriously. The techniques I was going to teach this associate were going to help put him into business for himself, if I was right. If I was wrong, he would have wasted their time and money.

Yes, I had regular clients for them to talk to and testimonials and all that. They ended up hearing all the success stories and deciding to go for it. That’s not the point.

The point is this, if I wasn’t well known, and I didn’t already have a bit of a reputation, would people still trust my methods — even if I gave some of them away for free? I have the advantage that people can research me before they try my product by typing my name into any search engine and seeing what other people say.

What if you don’t have that, as a newbie, what then?

When I was a newbie, I started out as an affiliate marketer, built a list, and gave away freebies and information. But that was four years ago. Is it still a viable method today?

If I was just some unknown person with good ideas, would the testing of those ideas be enough to prove their worth? What does it matter who I am if an approach I tell you to use works?

How much do we rely on social proof, vs hype or someone’s name? Is the plain old truth the best marketing there is? If so, why do people use hype in sales letters?

–>Sidebar<– yeah, I know people are going to say “I don’t buy products from people because of who they are.” That’s total bullshit.

When you buy Pepsi, and decide you like Pepsi, you’ll keep buying Pepsi, even if it’s more expensive, until you have a reason to stop. It doesn’t matter if it’s car stereos, televisions, laptops, ebooks or blow jobs, if a person has a preference, they’ll stick with that preference until they have reason to change, sometimes even if they have to go out of their way to get it.

Sometimes the preference is whatever’s cheapest. That’s still a preference, it’s still a type of brand loyalty.

Answering all these questions is part of what made me start this blog, and that’s part of the theory I’m testing out.

Why am I doing it myself and not just looking over some newbie’s shoulder?

Because I want to know what it’s like again to be new, or as close as I can get.

Because I’m on kind of a forced vacation due to my recently failing health, and doing this as a “hobby” is the only way I can keep my family from hiding my laptop.

I’m being anonymous because I refuse to just outright lie and pretend I’m an average Joe. The only other truthful option is anonymity.

There’s no mystery. There’s no site launch. I’m not starting a new company. I’m not selling anything. I can’t find out what I want to know first hand any other way.

Not to mention how much fun this is…

My linkback/postback policy is now in full effect. I’ve already talked about how I reciprocate linking and writing blog posts about your favorite posts here on your site/blog, in which I mentioned a commenting contest.

Let me clarify, then, what I consider a comment, before we get into cash/merchandise prizes. Pay attention because this one important point could help you win.

Rules

Writing about me on your blog with trackback, I consider both a link and a comment. It only counts once.

Linking to me from both a blogroll and a post I’ll count as another comment, because I believe the sites you link to from blogrolls that are on every page of your site are a transfer of trust. You’re saying to your readers, “you’ll benefit from going to this site”. This also only counts once.

Real Comments on this site count as many times as you make them. I consider a real comment to be a relevant contribution to the conversation at hand. If I smell bullshit/spam I won’t count it. I reserve the right to decide, but I’m not a tyrant. You’ll probably be cool if you say something more than “great post” or “hey, visit my site” and things of this sort.

So those are the contest rules. In case of a tie-breaker we go to sudden death.

I’ve always wanted to say that. The Sudden death rules will be determined by me at some later date if it comes to that, or looks like it will be close.

Reciprocation

Commenting on a site is much harder to reciprocate. If you comment on me and I see it, I’ll do my best to comment on something on your site within a week. I have a lot of time on my hands as I do my withdrawal from Internet Marketing, but as the popularity of this site continues to grow, that could get out of hand fast.

That’s why I’m having a contest instead.

Prizes

Top commenter will get $100 USD in cash.

The person whose comment is exactly in the middle of all the comments after today will get a $100 Amazon gift certificate. The comment I consider to be the most helpful will get $250 in cash.

Some other person I pick at random will get $50 in cash.

The contest is from now until midnight on my reveal day, April 14, 2007. Comments will be added up and tallied and spot checked by some other impartial party and annouced a week from that day. (Also making it easy for me to deliver the prizes because I’ll no longer be anonymous.)

Note: The first 8 people who commented on this site who left their real information will get an Amazon gift certificate for $25. I think that’s only fair because the contest started after they got here. They were all instrumental in sparking interest in my site, so that’s my thank you to them.

If I can mail them and still be anonymous, I’ll send them next week. Otherwise, on April 14, 2007, my reveal day. So, Dane, Mark of 45n5, Scott , Josh, Ibnu, Faith, Matt, and Mark of bloglyne, please contact me at im@imtellall.com so I know where to send your certificate.

Why Money?

1. You will be more likely to take my commitment to you seriously if I back it up with cash. I think.

   At least, you’ll pay more attention to the site.

2. I wanted to be different.

   In other blogs I’ve done, I’ve reciprocated for people linking to me or talking about me with return links, etc. That’s not bad and I’ll still do that, but with a new blog, it seems like you as the commenter wouldn’t get much more back than a free link to your site, and my appreciation extends farther than that.

   One could argue all the intrinsic social benefits, but since this contest is an experiment about that, the point is moot.

3. I wanted to have a good reason to do a press release on Tuesday that people will really pay attention to, not one of those “Hey, Gots Me A New Blog” announcements.

   I’m thinking of the title “Crazy New Blogger Gives $500 in Cash and Prizes For a Common Blog Practice.” Maybe Crazy Anonymous Blogger. Which is more sexy?

4. I achieved the traffic goal of this site in TEN DAYS without leveraging on my name or spending a thin dime.

   I figured this will give me extra motivation. After all, I have to keep writing or you’ll have nothing to comment on.

5. I want to know what the reaction of the Blogosphere is going to be, if, that is, they pay attention to this experiment.

   Will people think it’s unethical to give away money for commenting? It’s not like pay per post, it’s a contest. But is there a difference in people’s minds? If so, what’s SO bad about pay per post? *pulls tongue out of cheek*

6. I’m curious to see who wins.

   Will it be someone with four comments, because everyone thinks I’m bullshitting and won’t enter?

   Or will it be a person who is smart enough to leverage the attention I’m paying for in a smart and ethical way, making 100 comments, a blog post about me, and a link back from their blogroll, all of them useful - even funny and entertaining?

   Will the money make the quality of the comments better? Or will it skew them in the opposite direction? Will people forget about the contest as they begin to enjoy participation in a community and visiting each other’s sites?

7. It’s all part of my overall marketing research.

   And my plan to take over the world, Pinky.

For instance, if you are the only vendor offering a certain type of product, all you do is find the people in need in the market place and pose your solution. In that case, it’s a volume numbers game - get as many of those people as you can to your product.

This can even work if you’re an affiliate - if you’re the only one offering a special kind of bonus to people who buy through you, or you find a special way to market it that other affiliates ignore, it’s still all about the numbers.

You’ve also got the situation that is more common, and that’s when there is competition. In this case, you can’t just rely on being in the way of your client, hanging out where they are, and helping them buy.

The sales page will need to be a little more convincing. The price might have to be more competitive. You may need social proof, in the form of a good reputation, testimonials, or through building trust with your prospects in their natural online habitat.

You’ll have to target your prospect more carefully so you won’t be wasting money on the wrong kind of advertising. Testing and tracking will become your mantra.

If I ever had to make a blind choice, I’d err on the side of exacting quality in my numbers game, rather than quantity, but that’s with my current expertise. If I was a novice, or could not afford to hire a copywriter, etc, I’d do the best I could on my own, and then do a quantity push.

Choose your numbers game carefully the next time you market.

You’re going to want to focus on learning about laser-targeted traffic, getting the most focused population to the product you want to sell. This is particularly useful if you’re an affiliate marketer.

I haven’t been an affiliate marketer in a long time. For a few years now, I’ve been one of those people that someone approaches to be a joint venture partner, someone who has affiliates rather than is one.  I’ve since decided that I would probably make a lot more money as an affiliate marketer, with a lot less stress, for the remainder of my online career.

That’s taking me back to my original days as an affiliate. And back then, there wasn’t much I could do about how good the sales page was, or whether the system I was sending people to really had good follow-up, and if so, if I’d still credited for the sale.

Eventually I learned how to pre-sell the prospect, and make friends first, so they’d want me to get credited for the sale.

However, my first sales, the ones that made me realize that I could change careers, came from knowing I was able to work intensively for a short period time on a burst of traffic. It  might be a better method if you’re new.

Be sure and remember, though, targeted traffic is where it’s at, from real bodies. Don’t be fooled by the imposters or you’ll end up broke and bitter.

With even a $10 product, 300 people A Month can have you quitting your day job. And if you’re really smart and can come up with a good membership site and the right price point, you’ll only have to sell to them once.

Do you think, over the course of a month, you can get 600 people, just 600, to a website? What if your conversion rate was 50% among targeted visitors? There’s your 300 right there.

Of course, that’s not typical. At first, you should be thinking of getting your conversion rate to 10%. To do that you need to make sure, as much as you can, that every single person who made it to that page has a problem that your product can solve, that they understand that your product will solve it, and that you can follow up with them until you do.

You’ll have to deal with boring issues like better sales copy, or hire someone to do it for you. Your ads will need to be better. You’ll have to come up with a system that has the highest possible probability that they’ll subscribe to your follow-up and eventually buy.

Everything you do from meeting people online in forums and on blogs, all the way down to  the delivery and after-product upsell will have to be examined and perfected, then the entire process needs to be automated.

But if you can do that, if you can take the time to learn, or the money to pay an expert, with even a decent product, you can become a full-time infopreneur.