Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my online business and the strategies that I’ve employed to get to where I am. Josh Bartlett and I have sat around for hours discussing the ways that most people get started in online business. We’ve come to the conclusion that almost everyone out there is doing it all wrong.

It seems to us that most people have this strategy that consists of basically building a list as large as possible. Their number one focus in life is to build it bigger and bigger. While having a huge list is definitely not a bad thing, most people are putting their focus on the wrong thing. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that “the money is in the list”. You’ve probably also heard the counter-response that “the money is not in the list… it’s in the relationship that you have with the list”. Obviously, the second one is probably closer to the truth. Today I’m going to put a new spin on the idea…

Focus on Building Fans Instead of Gaining Subscribers.

When I talk about a fan, I’m referring to the people that purchase every product that you create just because you made it. These people have so much faith in you that they are willing to blindly purchase what you are selling simply because you made it and they trust that what you made will live up to the quality that they’ve come to expect from you. These fans will purchase products through your affiliate links because they trust you and that you would only recommend the best for them. One fan is worth infinitely more to you that even 100 subscribers on your list.

Think of Apple Computers… They have thousands (if not millions) of fans. There are people out there that will purchase every single product that Apple puts out just because it’s Apple and they’ve come to expect a certain level of quality and usability from them. We call these people Apple Fanboys / Fangirls (and day by day I’m becoming one too). When they put out an iPhone 4, hundreds of thousands of people who already have perfectly fine, working, iPhone 3s drop their old phone to go grab Apple’s latest new toy. It happens with each new product they put out… They have fans.

Another example would be the gaming company, Blizzard. They do games like WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. I’m a fan of their company. In my opinion, they’ve never released a bad game. As a result, I own every game they’ve ever released. I buy the games before even reading reviews because I’ve come to expect a certain level from them and they seem to never disappoint. I am a fan…

Let’s put some math behind the idea… Written on the white board on the wall in my office I have “1,000 FANS” written in huge writing. That goal has been on board for months and months now. It is my opinion that if I can build my business to the point where I have 1,000 fans, I will be set…

One fan can be worth any amount to you. I would say at the very minimum, 1 fan is worth $100 per year. Remember, a fan buys everything you release and also purchases most of what you recommend. You only need to sell 2 products in a year, valued at $50 each for one fan to be worth $100 per year. However, at this rate, 1,000 fans is equal to $100,000 per year to your business.

Realistically, though, one fan is probably worth more like $324 per year (or about $27 per month) to your business. So at 1,000 fans, you are probably closer to a business worth around $324,000 per year. At this rate, you only need about 309 true fans to have a $100,000 per year business….

It’s fun to play with these numbers. Obviously, people who only sell and promote really high-ticket items will have a higher value per fan. However, in the high-ticket market, one fan is probably a little harder to come by.

Are you starting to see how simple the concept of building a huge income becomes when your focus becomes building fans as opposed to building a list of subscribers?

How to create fans

There are a few simple rules that myself and Josh tend to follow. Do these things and you will be on your way to building a list of adoring fans.

1. Give tons and tons of high value content for free. Use your blog, create eBooks, make video tutorials, and record interviews. Then just give them away for free. People love to get for free what most other people probably charge to give. As long as the content is quality, people will stick around to see what you’re going to say or offer next. I do my best to share everything I know and learn and I usually give it away for free. The funny thing is, that has never hurt the sales of the products I sell. So don’t be afraid to share what you know for free. People will still pay to get even more details or to dig down a little deeper in to the concepts.

2. “Learn to love getting the short end of the stick” This is one of my favorite quotes and it comes from, fellow internet marketer, Eben Pagan. It basically means that when you do sell products, sell them for a lot less than you think they are worth. Have a philosophy of always over-delivering and make sure that when people purchase a product from you, they are always getting much more than they paid for.

3. Be customer service oriented. I still personally respond to most of my e-mails myself. I do my best to answer questions about my products or my ideas to the people who take the time to e-mail me and ask them. I’m not always the fastest at responding (I get a lot of e-mails) but I pretty much always get back to people. I hired people to manage my support desk as well. I want to make sure that even if I can’t respond quickly, you will get a quick response. No question goes unanswered and theres usually someone to answer quickly no matter what time you send it. These little details really solidify the confidence that people have in you and your business.

4. Never promote anything that you don’t know much about. Don’t jump on launches just because everyone else is promoting them and don’t agree to adswaps without knowing the product of the person you’re swapping with. Make sure that you do what you can to protect the list that you do have. Don’t violate the trust that you are working hard to build by sending crap that you don’t know much about. I’m not against promoting products, promoting launches or even doing adswaps. I just think that you should never mail anything to your list unless you are confident that it will benefit them. Don’t put your credibility with your list on the line by blindly mailing them everything that pops up to promote.

5. Always live up to the standards that you’ve created. If you are going to follow in these footsteps and build a business around creating fans and trust, make sure that any products that you put out continue to be high quality. Don’t let your true fans down. It may take only one misguided slip up to ruin that relationship. Don’t blow it.

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to creating a huge list of fans. I know people with lists of 60,000 to 100,000 subscribers that get a worse response out of their lists than people with lists of a few hundred true fans. True, sustainable wealth comes from buildings fans and creating trust, not from making a list…

If you enjoyed this post, can you do me two huge favors? Click the “Like” button to let me know that you enjoyed it and leave a comment so we can further discuss it. What are you a fan of? Do you agree / disagree with this philosophy? Get your input heard.

As many of you may already know, I work very closely with a good friend of mine named Josh Bartlett. Josh and I probably have about three to four brainstorming / mastermind type calls each week. A few days ago we were talking and it hit us, “why don’t we start recording some of these calls and share them with others?” Well that’s exactly what we’ve decided to start doing.

Yesterday, Josh and I had a pretty in depth discussion about something that everyone needs to implement in their business. You may not need this immediately… But at some point, you will find that you can no longer grow unless you follow the advice in this call.

Anyway, I’ve posted the call below. There’s nothing for sale, I’m not looking for opt-ins and you can feel free to download it and share it with whoever you want. It’s just pure content and nothing more. The call lasts a little less than 40 minutes and we drop some really good tips at the end. By good tips, I mean NOBODY else is doing this yet.

So check out the call and please leave your comments. Your feedback has been amazing and I love to hear what you think about this stuff.

After leaving a comment, head on over to Josh Bartlett’s blog at JoshBartlettBlog.com. Josh is one of the good guys. The topics discussed in my last post where the result of a previous call with Josh. We’ve definitely got similar philosophies about how to treat people and how to ethically market to people.

So here’s a cool technique that I discovered not too long ago about how to use G-Mail as an autoresponder. If you get a lot of e-mails, you can use G-Mail to automatically send a response based on the subject of the e-mail. It’s a really cool trick!

Watch The Video

Do you have any cool tricks with G-Mail? I love G-Mail and I want to start posting random posts about how to get the most out of it. What are your tips?

So I woke up this morning and jumped over to my blog. I noticed that my theme was still installed and that I could still log in to my dashboard but that there were no posts on my front page. All I saw was a “Page Not Found” error. I logged in to my dashboard and saw that every single post and page that I have ever created had been deleted. I have no idea how this happened but everything was gone. The database that held all of the information on my blog had apparently crashed. I freaked out a little bit and then remembered that I had taken some actions to safeguard against situations like this. I spent about 5 minutes reloading my last backup and everything was back to normal again. I may have lost one or two comments that may have come in over night but, for the most part, it’s like it had never happened.

It is scary because if I hadn’t have taken a few certain actions a few weeks ago, I would have been unable to recover my blog. I figured that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there that may not know how to backup their blog or how to recover their blog from a backup. It is really scary because your blog CAN go down at any time for no apparent reason whatsoever! Read this post and maybe you can put yourself in a situation where a database crash is nothing more than a 5 minute fix.

The very first thing that you should do is download and install the WP-DB-Backup plugin for wordpress. It’s a free plugin and can usually be searched for and installed from directly inside your WordPress Dashboard. Get that installed today. Once it’s installed set it up to backup daily and send you an e-mail with the backup. By doing this, you can jump back to any point in time and recover all the information that crashed. If you don’t update very frequently, you can also opt to backup weekly. I prefer daily because I know I can restore comments from the previous day as well.

Now… If your blog ever goes down and you have been doing a good job of backing it up, here is how you restore your blog.

1. Login in to your CPanel account and scroll down until you find phpMyAdmin

2. Find the database that your blog is installed on. The backup files that are sent to you from WP-DB-Backup will share the same name as the database you need to recover. So if you are unsure of which database to open, refer to the filename of your backup file.

3. Click on the tab that says import at the top of the new screen that just opened.

4. Click on “choose file” and find the backup file that you are going to use to restore your blog.

That should do it. Your blog should be back in all of its glory. Having a database failure can be extremely scary! Fortunately, if you take the right precautions from the beginning, it can be a very quick and painless fix. If you only have one plugin installed for your blog, make sure that it is a backup plugin. It will save you someday!

Please feel free to make comments. Have you had your blog crash? Do you have any questions about making sure you are protected against your blog crashing?

Today I want to explain how I build my list so fast.
It’s been a while since I have posted a tutorial type post on my blog. Everything I’ve been doing lately has been about personal stuff. You’ve seen my Crib, learned 25 things about me, and met my new puppy. Today I want to talk about the one thing that will grow an internet marketing business faster than any other thing that you could possibly do. Of course I am talking about growing that mailing list. The bigger you can grow your mailing list, the more success you are going to have online. Whether you are promoting your own product or you are promoting other people’s product as an affiliate, the larger your mailing list, the larger your audience.

About eight weeks ago I had no mailing list. I had zero subscribers. I made it my 100% focus to build that mailing list as fast as possible. In a period of about seven weeks, I went from not even having an Aweber account to having a mailing list with over 1,000 subscribers. The cool thing is that I know for a fact, that I will double my list in less than one more month. My list grows at a rate of about 50 new subscribers per day. So it really should only take about 20 more days to completely double my list.

Why has building my list been my number one goal over the last several months, you might ask… You may also be wondering why I made the statement that building a list is the fastest way to grow an internet marketing business. Well, to answer both of those questions, internet marketers much wiser than myself have said over and over again that one subscriber on your list is worth one dollar per month. So if I am growing my list at a rate of 50 subscribers per day, I am growing my business by about $50 per month! If you do the math, I should have about a $3,000 per month business in no less than 40 days time at the rate that I am going.

So now that you know the importance of growing your mailing list. Let me share with you the top 3 techniques that I have used to grow my mailing list.

JV Giveaways - This was the absolute first thing that I started doing after I had a free product created. You can enter your free product in to these JV Giveaway events and every single person that has submitted a product, promotes the JV giveaway. This causes a massive flood of traffic to the JV giveaway and some of that traffic finds, and opts-in for, your product. JV Giveaways usually have an option to upgrade for a price. I tend to like to upgrade as well. Upgrading gets your product in front of a lot more people. I have done about 50% of my JV giveaways without upgrading and about 50% with upgrading. When I upgrade, I usually get about four times as many subscribers from the event than if I didn’t upgrade. JV Giveaways are the best way to start building your list before you really have many people on your list to leverage. For the sake of?convenience, I have started to compile a list of current JV giveaway events. I will make sure to keep this list updated as new ones come up and old ones shut down. You can find JV Giveaway Events Here. Bookmark that page because you are going to want to access these JV giveaways as soon as they come up.

ListJoe – ListJoe is a cool little site that I found that I don’t think is very well known yet. Basically, when you sign up for ListJoe (100% Free), you will be able to send out a mailing to 2,000 people immediately. That’s right, you will mail 2,000 people within 10 minutes of signing up. From that point on, you will begin receiving e-mails from other ListJoe members. For each e-mail you open, you will receive a certain amount of points. One point is equal to one person mailed to on your next mailing. You will receive a lot of e-mails per day but you can build up your points and send out to a list of about 3,000 per week. You might think that this doesn’t sound too effective because you are just sending to other ListJoe members. However, I have only sent 2 mailings so far and it has accounted for over 150 new subscribers. I would definitely not downplay the ability of this service. If you are interested in playing around with ListJoe check it out here.

Adswaps – Adswaps are probably the absolute fastest way to build your list up. However, adswaps are difficult unless you already have a little bit of a list built up. Basically, you are telling someone that you will promote their opt-in page to your list if they promote your opt-in page to their list. Most people will only do adswaps with people who have similar list sizes to their own. Adswaps are basically a way to leverage the list that you currently have. I have, however, asked people with lists much larger than mine to do an adswap and been surprised that they had accepted. So I would say that even though your list may be smaller than someone else’s, it never hurts to ask. You might be surprised at some people’s generosity.

Because I have made list building my complete focus over the last several weeks, I have decided to dive in deeper and explain some of the advanced techniques that I have also learned that I have used to boost my list exponentially. I want to teach people how I manage to grab about 50 new subscribers per day. To do this, I have created a two-week course that dives in to list building. The course is 100% free and each lesson is delivered to your e-mail. There is no site to log in to and you can save all of the information to your hard drive as you go. The course digs in to everything from the initial setup of a mailing list all the way in to super advanced techniques that can potentially build your list by hundreds of subscribers overnight. I also cover several resources to find things like adswaps and JV partners. You really don’t want to miss out on this free opportunity to explode your list over the next 2 weeks. To get started with the first lesson today, simply enter your e-mail address in the form below. Otherwise, please leave a comment with your list building tips or your thoughts on my list building tips.

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