In 2013 this is going to be my motto. 

Over the last month a combination of being ill, and then just spending hours learning stuff based on a random purchase I’ve done almost nothing that will have a positive impact on my business.

I bought Evil Facebook Magician: List Building Unleashed which was a great product, but for me personally I’m not going to take any real action with it. I’ve always wanted to utilise facebook more, but when I don’t have a personal account and all the “niche research” I do comes back negative it’s hard to get excited about taking action.

I spend many hours devouring up the content, only to realise I’d been spinning my wheels, and actually gone backwards with my own listbuilding. If I’d spend the same amount of time doing my safelist mailings, adding a “+1″ into my downline at ClickTrackProfit, writing a blog post, or blog / warrior forum commenting I would have generated some long term traffic and found visitors who are interested in what I have to say and will buy the things I recommend.

A dull unsexy message and one I struggle to adhere to, but it guess what, in the words of Jon Olson  it is doing these repetitive tasks that turn a hobby into a real business.

Now I can’t go back in time, but next time I’m reading a salespage I will try to stop myself from being the impulsive nodding dog who buys into the concept and finds out after several hours that actually it’s a simple phillips head screwdriver I needed and I’ve bought an expensive pozidrive 500W electric combi drill.

Sometimes the best course of action is to just walk out of the shop / close the browser (ignoring the pop-up discounts) and look at what you need to keep on doing rather than buying bigger and better tools to do something that actually doesn’t need to be done. I tend to be impulsive and buy the shiny new tool, a lot of things I buy end up on ebay being sold at a loss as I just want rid – sadly I don’t think a market exists for digital products with one careless owner who let them gather cyber dust.

When you have identified your biggest weakness it becomes easier to overcome it.

My focus needs to be on driving traffic to my websites and fiverr gigs. I want people to buy products / services from me and build my brand as being an expert who’s willing and able to help newbies get started without going through the spinning wheel phase my impulse buying leaves me in.

Lastly I plan on being off the computer during the holidays, but I do have an awesome guest post lined up for January to help you focus the mind on what you want to achieve in 2013.

Enjoy Christmas, hope that Santa is good to all of you.

Andrew Stark

On Sunday I went to give blood, and whilst sat on the bed waiting for my valuable donation to pump out of my body I spotted the logo on the left, and it made me think about how I would spread the word about this excellent service. You see the NHS have invested heavily in viral marketing, they want you to go out and tell the world that you’ve just done an amazing thing.

It’s highly likely that in today’s connected world that doing something like giving blood is something that you will share on twitter or facebook. This kind of word of mouth recommendation and social proof is what reminds other people to register for donations, and it also has a positive impact for the poster – after all when you give blood the chances are that you will have saved someone’s life!

So How Can My Marketing Become Amazing?

The driver for people sharing the fact they gave blood is to improve their self esteem, and say look at me I’ve done a good thing. So if you were able to provide content that changes the way people think, and give them a little golden nugget that will make them a better person / improve the profits in their business that’s something they will be proud to share – and that sort of amazing content is the basis for all good viral marketing campaign.

You want to become a Maven for your niche, where you’re the person who people look to for how to apply new ideas to the marketplace. You don’t need to be the person coming up with the ground breaking ideas, in fact you normally make more money by telling other people how to apply the idea than coming up with it yourself.

Just to prove how powerful this concept is, here’s a list of people going back several years that have been responsible for helping me achieve success. Some of the list have moved into different areas over the years, but I will always have respect for these people thanks to that “golden nugget” spark they gave my marketing career.

Ewen Chia – Putting banner adverts on your download page for related products. This simple idea has made me thousands of dollars in sales, and I know for sure that he was just applying the direct marketing technique of cross selling.

Mike Filsaime – The butterfly marketing concept.

He’s the reason why almost every marketer will try to sell you a “One Time Offer” when you join a list – note many of the people doing this now still have no idea how to do it correctly. 

He’s also the guy who taught me all about ftp, html, and installing membership scripts / aweber forms via his camtasia screen recordings. 

Gary Ambrose – Quality List Theory.

Have you noticed where the idea to call my site “Build A Quality List” came from? The idea that selling low priced information products and creating a relationship is so obvious now, but it was Gary who introduced the concept to me. 

In fact, you don’t even need to be the product creator to get in on this act. You can use Resale Rights to become the expert, just like the Maven example above. Connecting people with proven ideas in an appropriate and actionable fashion is one of the most fundamental principals of any business.

Jon Olson – Personal Responsability / The art of owning a business.

When I first started out I was really bad for posting affiliate links all over the internet, and was sure that I would get rich by building downlines and being a part of many dubious “network marketing” sites where there was little or no product behind the matrix. 

It was listening to Jon that helped me realise that I should network with like minded people and concentrate on learning marketing rather than slot machine marketing and believing every salespage and snake oil salesmen I found.

Who Do You Find Amazing?

Please use the comments to share your thoughts and give a shout out to the one person who has had the biggest impact on your marketing success so far.

Andrew

Why is that when you buy a list building product all you get (at best) is a variation of the following?

The salespage will sprinkle in claims of $1 per month per subscriber with an automatic push button solution and instantly you fall into the trap of assuming that the person you bought this course from is trustworthy and knows what they are talking about.

My biggest gripe with this sort of course is that they never explain the concept of personal branding, and automatically assume that you want to target the “Make Money Online” niche. You stand a much better chance of success if you build a list based on something you know and have a passion for, and in a lot of cases applying listbuilding to a different niche will be the most profitable for you.

The trouble is that this won’t be most profitable for the owner of the report, hence it’s barely ever mentioned.

I’ve been looking at “listbuilders” asking for reviews of their squeezepages over at the warrior forum and it saddens me that these people have taken action and have gone backwards by following the advice given above. If someone tells you that any old PLR report and optimizepress is how you create a squeezepage followed up with “Buy Solo Adverts” it’s time to put your fingers in your ears and add that person to the ignore list.

But Why Are PLR reports & Solo Adverts Bad?

To create a relationship with subscribers you need to use the one thing you have that makes you different from everyone else – your own personality. I’ve read many reports which are 25 pages of bland writing, full of filler, spelling and grammar mistakes that want you to get out the digital red pen. A bad first impression like this won’t be building the kind of relationship that leads to them buying something from you.

If you’re lucky the chapter outline in a PLR report may be good enough that you can convert it into something you would be proud to put your name against. Speaking of which you will look much more professional if you buy an ecover and get your name on the front with a great title. Here’s the link to the fiverr seller who made the cover for my Headline Report.

http://fiverr.com/qsera/design-in-less-than-24-hours-3d-ebook-covers

So with a good quality report and some personal branding in place how do we get traffic to the page?

Solo Adverts used to be the answer, but sadly this market place has gone the way of investment banking where greed and corruption have ruined it. The prices I see of a hundred plus dollars for 200 clicks makes my eyes water, and then if you join a sellers list to test out the quality you find that you get bombarded with multiple offers everyday which are totally random based upon who was daft enough to purchase that day.

One day the seller will be advertising a SEO report, the next day it’s Social Media, followed by a blind squeezepage with a rented mansion and ferarri on the drive. How can this sort of traffic ever be worth $1 a click!

If you’re targeting a specific niche where you have a passion then you will already know the forums and popular blogs in the niche, so buy advertising on the sites that you visit and get a list of people who have the same passion and views as yourself. That last sentance is your golden nugget for today, write it down on your whiteboard.

Reality Check Over

I really hope that you’ve managed to steer clear of the “churn & burn” brigade who are unwittingly trying to teach you listbuilding when all they have is the 8 points above but want to sell you a product without actually knowing enough to teach it properly.

Andrew Stark

Blatent link to my Build A Quality List Course which is currently on sale as a Warrior Special Offer

So I’ve been spending a lot of time at the warrior forum looking at the threads relating to list building and I have to say the advice that people are getting on list building is shocking, and as you can see from the video above the people who claim to be experts know nothing.

If you are going to tell people how to avoid stupid mistakes at least make sure that you’re own site is free of stupid mistakes.

#1 Have some sort of personal branding on your squeezepage. I know that other experts tell you this will hurt the opt-in rate, but I would rather know who I was giving my details over to if you want a list of proper e-mail addresses that people actually check.

#2 Create a “confirm page” where you can explain what happens next. Aweber have an excellent video, or you can record your own welcome message, and immediately build up a relationship with your new subscriber.

#3 Use a download page to deliver the freebie. A simple page with a related offer and download instructions will make you a lot more money and create value than just attaching a pdf file.

#4 Stick to a single niche, if you give away a report on listbuilding don’t send me to a survey relating to something else in the first message.

#5 Actually put some effort into the gift, and make it look valuable and full of information that people who paid money would feel like they had a good deal.

So it seems that poor Ryan has made 5 stupid mistakes in his list building process trying to tell you about 3 stupid mistakes you should avoid when building a list.

Essentially Ryan is just one example of people who bought in the dream of internet marketing and blindly doing what put in the report they bought. No thought has gone into what the customer thinks, and what the actual product will be, and this is just wrong.

So next time you buy something or go through a sign up process that sucks, please give that person some feedback.