Michael Wilding

Tag: internet marketing

  • Managing Your Product Launch Finances

    Managing Your Product Launch Finances

    I’m writing this post because over the years I’ve never seen a internet marketing blog talk about managing your finances.

    Sure, they talk about how much you can make. They sell shiny new products.

    But…

    …nobody seems to ever talk about managing your finances.

    And if you don’t do that correctly you can still go bust even if you are generating a lot of revenue.

    Before I carry on, it’s important to say that I’m not an accountant and any advice written below is my own personal experience and you should check with your accountant before following it.

    With the disclaimers out of the way, let’s move onto the main topic of this post.

    Breaking down the costs of a business into their most simplistic elements means that you will have:

    • Staff costs (including yourself)
    • Running costs (website hosting, auto-responders, traffic, payment processors etc…)
    • Development costs (creating new products, updating old ones)
    • Marketing costs (sales copy, sales videos, affiliate payments etc…)

    The number one mistake is to forget about yourself in your staff costs. If you decide not to take a salary initially then this needs to be a fully framed decision incorporated into your overall business strategy.

    If it isn’t, then you’ll quickly find that you’re turning over a decent amount but spending more than your business can afford if you’re going to take anything out.

    And… if you don’t take anything out you’ll feel like you’re spending a lot of time working and not getting anywhere.

    It’s a very psychologically important to take some profits out of your business for yourself.

    Whether you’re starting your business alongside another job or focusing on it full time, you need to determine how much you want to take out now and how much you want to be taking out in twelve months time.

    Now that you know that make estimates of your other costs, and don’t forget that your time costs.

    When starting I would give rough figures to certain jobs assuming someone other than yourself was doing it.

    Running Costs are the easiest to determine as other companies set them. You will know how much your hosting, auto-responder and similar services are going to cost.

    But be careful not to buy into services that you don’t use. It’s very easy.

    Every couple of months go through your monthly payments and get rid of any services you’re paying for and not using or isn’t worth the cost. This will help to keep your monthly running costs as low as possible.

    Next come marketing costs. It may be that you’re going to do all of this yourself, but if someone else was to do it you may have:

    • $3000 for a sales letter
    • $1000 for follow-up-email sequence
    • $300 to setup the website and sales funnel

    You get the idea 🙂

    Affiliate payments will most often be a percentage of sales.

    Finally development costs. How much is it going to cost you to make your product?

    If you’re going to do it yourself then work out how many hours you think it will take and what you would charge as a minimum hourly rate to someone else.

    Now you can work out how much it’s going to cost to set up a launch for your product and you can determine how many sales you need to cover your costs and make the profit you want from it.

    Is it going to be possible to make this many sales based on your current business?

    Reduce your costs.

    This is where you can either eliminate elements that aren’t necessary at this stage of your business, or you can do the work yourself on the understanding that you will only be able to charge out your own time at a percentage of what you would have to pay others to do the work.

    It’s great, you’ve got the finances sorted for your product launch, and the money is rolling in.

    Now it’s time to consider the other costs. All this money doesn’t belong to you!

    First of all a percentage of it is going to be your affiliates.

    Next a percentage of it is going to go to the tax man. There are two types of tax, there will be the sales tax you’ve charged your customers and the tax on your profits.

    You want to make sure you can afford it when the bill comes in!

    The way to do this is to separate out this money into another account. Never touch this account except to pay the tax man from.

    Doing this prevents you from ever being in the position where you have used your tax money to grow your business

    This is the second most common reason most small businesses fail.

    After you’ve removed the tax money and paid affiliates, next you need to pay out for the services used (including your own time).

    What is left is profit… congratulations.

    You can choose to spend this how you like. Personally I always put a percentage into future developments, leave some for cash flow in the account and take some for myself of course.

    In summary you should be looking to make sure that you have a full understanding of how your accounts are working before you start any product launch

    Doing this will ensure that you are never in a position where you can’t afford something or you have an unexpected cost. Plan your product launches carefully not just from a marketing perspective but also from a financial perspective.

  • How To Take £5 and Turn It Into £500

    How To Take £5 and Turn It Into £500

    I know the title of this post use the pound sign. That’s because I’m British and so I work in pounds however what I’m about to share with you will work the same if you’re selling products in dollars, euros, yen or any other currency.

    You’re also going to be surprised by the length of this post.

    Why?

    Because it doesn’t take very long to explain how to do this.

    The principle works. Full stop.

    But…

    …it’s never going to work if you don’t take action and put it into practice.

    So take what you’re about to read and put it into practice in your business and you’re going to find your world has just changed!

    I’m sure that you’ve read time and again that the money is in the list.

    Well it is.

    But how much is very dependent on your mailing list.

    Years ago I decided to dabble in the IM niche. I didn’t really take it seriously at the time, I just wanted to take a look.

    I bought a few solos and got a ton of optins.

    But after the first email they’d received with their free product, 90% of them never opened another email.

    Why?

    Because they weren’t interested in what I had to say, they were interested in the optin only.

    The majority probably used email burners which they only checked to get their downloads after opting in and never looked at again.

    Of course, that’s not to say that all solo ads will produce these results but in the IM space you will find a lot do.

    So the question is…

    Do you really want people on your mailing list that aren’t going to buy anything?

    Admittedly it’s quite cool to be able to say you have a mailing list of 100k names. There’s a sort of kudos attached to that.

    But who gives a &*$@ about kudos!

    We care about business and if 100k names produces you £100 of sales, then it’s going to cost you more to host them and send them emails then they’re making you.

    So there’s no point.

    What you want is a mailing list of buyers. A mailing list of people who love your content and want to take action so will buy your products or those you recommend.

    And the best way of building a mailing list of buyers is to…

    Force people to buy something to join!

    Always start cheap, just a few pounds. If it’s recurring you can even give them their first month free as long as they submit their payment details for the following months.

    Let’s say you have a product that you’re charging £5 for. Everyone coming on to that mailing list has proven that they’re prepared to get their card out and pay for high quality information.

    Great news for you because not only are you building a mailing list of buyers, but if you’re spending money on traffic you’re already recouping some of the cost!

    What happens once they join your mailing list?

    Well you give them their product of course, and then you give them a bunch of extra bonus really useful cool information.

    Why?

    Because you’re a nice a guy, and if you make your subscribers successful. They’ll make you successful.

    And then two weeks later you off them a product for £15 that directly compliments the one that they bought a couple of weeks ago.

    They’ve had enough time to put the first product into practice and are doing well with it and now you’ve offered them a way to improve that rapidly.

    Why wouldn’t they buy it?

    They’re already doing well with what they bought from you the first time and now you’re offering to show them how to do even better.

    So your £5 buyer has now become a £20 buyer.

    A couple of weeks later you offer them an opportunity to join your community, it’s where you help people personally in your forum and get them to where they want to be.

    They can get your personal help for just £27 per month.

    I’m sure you can see what’s happening here.

    You’re starting off by building a buyers list using a low-end product, and then you’re offering them more complimentary products with higher price points as they progress through and become more experienced.

    The more successful you make them with their products, then the more successful they will make you.

    If you provide a good service, it’s not difficult to turn a £5 buyer into a £500 buyer within six months.

    But to do this you need to plan. Grab a piece of paper and put down the low-end price point products. Determine what they’ll be and where they’ll lead people to.

    Discover what information is missing in their training and develop a product to fit it, each time providing more value as each service increases in cost.

    By the end what you’ll have is a killer sales funnel that not only builds you a list of buyers, but generates you raving fans as you drive them to success!

  • Finding Your Perfect Customer

    Finding Your Perfect Customer

    I want to share something today that I learned from Andre Chaperon. He’s one of the few people who’s content I always read and follow and strongly recommend that you do to.

    He’s an email marketing master, so pay particular attention to the copy in his emails!

    What we want to do is determine your perfect customer.

    Why?

    Because once you know who your perfect customer is, it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to find the best ways to pull them into your sales funnel!

    What you want to do is determine who this person is, what their pain is and what the deepest and most emotional reason is for doing something.

    To find the deepest and most emotional reason for doing something you have to ask the question “Why?”.

    For example, in the IM niche you would ask “Why do people who buy these products want to learn how to make money online?”

    The answer that you need to find to this question is the emotional response. It’s not just because they want to make more money. You want to discover what the emotional attachment is to wanting to make more money.

    Perhaps they’re fed up with the 9-5 and want to be their own boss. Maybe it’s because they want to travel and need to be able to earn a living on the road or they could be a housewife whose children are now at school and she wants something she can do from home part-time during the day.

    There are lots of answers to this question and even with the simple three answers above we’ve already dug deeper into the type of customer you may have and their emotional reason for wanting to buy what you’re selling.

    If you’ve gone through any copywriting courses then you will be familiar with the phrase “pain points”.

    Copywriting requires you to touch on a customers pain points so that you can offer a solution to them. You can offer them something that’s going to remove whatever pain they’re experiencing by not buying your products.

    And we need to find out what these pain points are if we’re going to determine your perfect customer.

    Let’s stick with the IM market for the purposes of this article.

    The first thing you need to do is find out where people who are interested in your market talk. To do that go into Google and do some quick searches.

    You don’t want to make your search too broad. After all you are unlikely to be selling a product that teaches IM. It’s more likely to teach a sub-category within the niche.

    For example, it may be copywriting, email marketing, social media marketing, lead generation etc…

    So a search you may choose to do is:

    “Copywriting techniques for digital products”

    or

    “How to write sales letters”

    This will bring up a load of results and you want to make a note of any that have a lot of comments and any that are forums. Active forums are a superb source of information, to find them you can simply add the word “forum” to the end of your searches.

    A good example in the IM market is the Warrior Forum which is one of the largest out there and contains sections for elements of internet marketing.

    Next you want to determine the demographics of the audience. To do this you can use a site like Quantcast.

    Make notes of everything you discover. You want to make notes of problems that are repeated time and again by different people. Discussions that are taking place time and again and the reasons people say they need something to help them time and again.

    Put this together with your demographic data and you will end up with between two and five ‘types’ of people that make up your perfect customer. You know everything about them which means you can now determine the product that they’re going to need most to solve their pain and how to market to them.

    You should use this approach before you even think of what your product is going to be.

    There is no point in making a product that you think your customers are going to want. Find out who your perfect customer is and then discover what they already want.

    When you know that you can make a ‘fake’ product and test it for a few hundred dollars to see if it’s something that’s going to be profitable for you to make and sell.

    And I’ll show you how to discover whether you have a profitable product before you’ve even made it in another article!

  • How To Run An Online Business Without Any Stress

    How To Run An Online Business Without Any Stress

    It’s very common to hear stories of internet entrepreneurs who at some point in their career suffer a break-down due to high levels of stress.

    Most people take this as part of the struggle they went through to get to where they are today.

    But doesn’t that seem strange since most IM based products are sold on the dream of living a completely relaxed lifestyle and making money on autopilot?

    The reason most people get started making money online is to run a business from anywhere in the world on their own timescale.

    This is very pertinent to me at the moment as I was heading towards a break-down. Admittedly it wasn’t likely to be this year, and possibly not the next. But it was guaranteed to happen at some point.

    Let me give you a bit of history.

    I got involved online by mistake, it wasn’t a conscious choice to start an internet marketing business. I started a blog that got popular. So popular that the costs of running it kept spiralling. Combined with this I wanted to provide my readers with more content and better service. Which meant one thing…

    The website had to start generating revenue in order to cover it’s costs.

    There were only two options:

    1. Make the website generate revenue
    2. Close the website down

    Aside from the running costs, I was spending more and more time on it. There’s only so much time you can spend without being paid. And so.. I chose option 1. Make the website generate revenue.

    From there I self-taught myself everything and am still learning today. In fact, in this business I don’t think that you ever stop learning.

    But that’s not the point of this article.

    As the business grew so did the number of jobs that needed to be completed. I was aware from the beginning that I wouldn’t be able to do everything myself.

    In fact, although I always believed in doing something a few times to truly understand how it’s done, I was very conscious about employing other people to do jobs if they weren’t my speciality.

    The problem was… I didn’t create a business structure for the day-to-day running of the company and the jobs that could be completed by others.

    Big Mistake!

    Fast forward to 2014 and I’m spending an average of twelve hours a day, seven days a week, running my business. There’s no rest time, never a moment to just relax and no time to spend with my family.

    I could feel the stress building every single week because I knew I couldn’t cope with the amount of work that was coming in. Even worse, if I wanted to continue to grow the business then this workload would also grow.

    Then two things happened.

    The first is I read Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week. An incredible book and one I strongly recommend you read.

    The second is I sat down with my mum, the person I use to bounce ideas off outside of the company, to see where I was going wrong.

    Admittedly this is an area my mum is quite experienced in.

    We worked out that on average there 56 jobs every single day that needed to be done by me!

    If each job only took 10 minutes (I wish), then that would be just over nine hours a day.

    That kind of workload is simply not sustainable by anybody.

    To make it even worse, 90% of these jobs didn’t actually need to be done by me. Someone else could do them, I just had to let them.

    I’ve spent my life working towards being able to generate a good income whilst having the freedom to travel the world and live my life on my own schedule.

    Somehow I’d lost it all.

    Because for the first time ever I’d got caught in the trap that most people get caught in.

    Thinking that if you’re successful then you have to be super-busy.

    And that’s simply not true. The truly successful are people who make a lot of money and have a structure in place so that they need to provide very little input to make it.

    That’s what real success is.

    I’ve now defined a company structure and am in the process of implementing a number of big strategic changes that are already showing not only to have reduced my time required by over 75%, but are also increasing our revenue substantially.

    But today I want to share the two things that made the biggest difference to me.

    I would strongly suggest that you implement these now, whether or not you feel like everything is getting on top of you. They’re going to make a huge difference to your life.

    The first I have to thank Tim Ferriss for, and that is…

    Check your email a maximum of twice a day

    Turn off all the instant notifications and only check your email twice a day. The truth is that there is no situation or person that needs to be responded to immediately. On the rare, like once a year rare, occasion when something does need an immediate response. Then guess what?

    They’ll call you!

    Not only do you benefit from not worrying about what’s in your inbox, or using your email as a means to stop yourself doing the work that’s actually required. You also stop getting interrupted in the work you are doing by alerts popping up.

    This one trick has saved me more than four hours a week in lost time. Just implementing this immediately made me feel more relaxed and more in control.

    And you don’t have to stop with emails. I now log into Skype periodically throughout the day rather than leaving it on all the time.

    The result = I no longer see messages coming in that both disturb what I’m doing and make me want to check them.

    Don’t just hide yourself from other contacts, actually log out so nothing comes through. If your Skype is anything like mine then you’re getting an almost constant stream of messages. You need to step away from them.

    Check them periodically and reply to those necessary and it will take no more than 10 minutes a day.

    The second thing I implemented was…

    Give the people who work with me more responsibility

    I truly have a great team of people who work with me, they do an incredible job and are great to work with. I never consciously didn’t give them responsibility, but I realised that was what had happened.

    So… I changed.

    The bottom line is I trust them. If I didn’t then they wouldn’t be working with me. So why was I being hesitant in allowing them to do more?

    Because we all get worked up about what happens if something goes wrong. Will we lose one or twenty paying subscribers. Will we get a lot of unsubscribes on our mailing list.

    The truth…

    If you lose ten subscribers so what?

    Are they worth $100, $500, $1000?

    Bottom line is, it’s not the end of the world.

    A bit irritating, sure. But much better to be working with someone who makes the mistake once, recognises it and doesn’t do it again than forcing yourself to do more jobs because you’re not allowing them to do their job easily.

    More responsibility means jobs get done quicker by your staff because they know they don’t have to ask you every time they want to make a decision and… you save hours of time because you’re not involved anymore.

    If you’re employing someone to do a job then it’s simple… let them do the job. If you don’t trust them to do it then don’t employ them!

    Those two changes made the biggest impact to me, and my business, in the shortest period of time. In fact, it made a difference almost instantly.

    You don’t need to be feeling stressed to implement them. Put them into practice now and you can avoid ever getting to the point of overload, and avoidance is by far the best option!

  • You MUST Have An AutoResponder

    You MUST Have An AutoResponder

    I was recently consulting with someone who runs a very successful offline business. They do have a web presence and it gets a very large amount of traffic but they don’t make any money from it.

    Which is why I was brought in.

    As soon as I stepped through the door I knew what the main problem was in their digital marketing strategy. They didn’t have an auto-responder.

    Yes, they were capturing the leads that visited the site but then they…

    …did nothing with them!

    Okay first things first, I needed a drink.

    Only coffee… it was about 9am in the morning after all!

    With my coffee, and a couple of biscuits, in hand I sat down in the office I’d been given while I was there and logged into their emailing system.

    I couldn’t believe my eyes.

    In fact I logged in and out a few times just to make sure that everything was as it was supposed to be.

    They had 100,000 leads in their system and the last email they sent them was three months ago!

    I took a swig of my coffee and strolled into the directors office. Sitting down I said…

    Do you know you’ve been losing $100,000 every single month?

    He looked at me like I was insane. After all, I was telling him that he’d been missing out on an additional $1,200,000 every single year in revenue.

    That’s when I explained to him that every single email lead is worth, on average across all markets, $1 per month. So if he’d just sent a few emails out then he’d be more than a million dollars better off.

    When I told him that he could have done it on complete auto-pilot I thought he was about to hit me.

    The way he could have done this is using an auto-responder.

    An auto-responder is an emailing system that sends emails to your leads at set time intervals over a period of a few weeks or months.

    There are three ways to use them. These are:

    1. Use them to deliver all your content and sales promotion
    2. Use them just for content delivery
    3. Use them just for sales promotions

    Either of these will work well in the right scenario. Most people will tell you that you should be using number 1 from the list above. This means that you don’t have to ever worry about writing any content or sales promotions, as soon as someone joins your mailing list they start getting content and promotions.

    But, personally, I think that’s dependent on both your market and the type of business that you want to run.

    This won’t work for all markets because the content in some markets is not evergreen. By this I mean that it’s constantly changing and if you’ve written an auto-responder that always uses the same email then the content is going to be outdated by the time people read it.

    Of course, if you’re looking at a market such as dog training then it’s not going to change very often and this won’t really be an issue.

    My biggest issue with using this method is that at some point subscribers will come to the end of the pre-written content and then they’re going to receive nothing. That’s fine if you’re business is simply about getting people into a sales funnel and converting as many of them as possible.

    If you’re doing that then it’s purely numbers.

    But…

    I don’t like running a business that way. I want to keep helping people achieve their goals and provide them with the support I would like to get if I had trusted someone with my email address.

    And that means that you need to keep emailing them even after they’ve finished your auto-responder sequence.

    Which is why my preference is for option three.

    I don’t want to be continually writing sales emails but if I want to keep my business going then we need to sell our products. However I do like to stay in touch with my subscribers and mail them between three and five times every week.

    It’s the content emails that I write each week because I want to make them personal to what is happening to me at the time of writing. How I’m feeling, what I’ve experienced recently, the results of new tests etc…

    And I’m a firm believer that writing like this not only creates more fans, but it also helps your readers to learn faster.

    Yes, it takes more work. But, as an internet marketer, without your subscribers you don’t have a business at all!

    If you don’t already have an auto-responder series then you should get one right now, in fact you should have got it yesterday. If you already have one then it’s time to start determining if you’re using it best. Which means determining if your readers are getting the maximum value from your emails.