Michael Wilding

Tag: internet marketing

Automatic Income
If you’re looking for an article that’s going to show you how to make money on auto-pilot without you having to put in any work, then I’m sorry to say that this isn’t the one you are looking for.

There are plenty of sites telling you how to do that and…

Every single one will charge you or send you somewhere else. Why?

Because it’s not possible to make money on auto-pilot without putting some work in.

But… if you’re prepared to put in some time and effort to grow your business then you’ve come to the right place! Make sure you join my mailing list on the right to stay up to date with the latest posts.

Okay, so back to the big question…

How do you make money on auto-pilot?

We could talk about how you need to build a website, write content, get optin forms ready, setup an auto-responder, write emails, use social media and more. But that makes it sound very complicated, and it doesn’t have to be, and you probably already know all about writing good content, having an auto-responder etc…

If not then browse around this blog and you’ll find a bunch of articles about all of those things

Today though I want to show you the one thing that you need to do before you start. And that is to… plan what happens when someone joins your mailing list!

It’s easy, can be done in less than a day and…

Nobody does it when they start.

Which means it takes them at least twice as long to make a good profit and then longer still to automate that process.

Look at everything from your prospects point of view. Imagine yourself going through it and ask yourself what you would think of it. Be honest with yourself, if you’re pushing bad products or generally selling to aggressively would you get annoyed if someone was doing it to you and not giving you any content?

If the answer is yes then why are you thinking about doing that to your prospects. Don’t.

When someone joins your mailing list you have persuaded them, usually with the help of a freebie, to trust you enough to give you their email details. You have just broken down the first barrier. But don’t think they’re going to part with money just because they’ve given you an email address.

Yes, of course a certain percentage will which is why you see so many IM’ers sending you straight to a thank you page with a product to buy on it. But, I think that a slightly different approach is better.

At the moment you’ve sent your lead a freebie and outside of that offered them no content, nothing that’s really going to help them AND will allow you to contact them in an ongoing fashion.

So… give them something that does exactly that. Maybe membership to a paid ezine, a weekly private podcast or video training session etc…

But… give them their first month free. You see the next barrier to entry is that they haven’t given you their payment details. So ask for them but with the condition that you won’t take any money for a month and they can cancel at any time.

If they don’t take you up on that then send them into an email sequence which explains why they should trust you and do this. And here’s the key, this product has to be super high-quality.

It doesn’t matter if you only break-even on it. The purpose is to build your reputation in the eyes of your leads. And if you’re providing them awesome content at a low price point then that will do it for you.

The ultimate level of trust in the IM market is to help someone make a profit. Once you’ve done that then they’re going to trust that you will do it again and again and again.

Next time you come to sell a product they’re already going to want to buy it because the last time they did that you made them way more than their investment.

So far we have broken down two barriers of entry:
1. Giving you an email address
2. Entering payment details
The next one that needs to be broken down is giving you a payment upfront. And that’s what comes next. A low priced, just a couple of dollars or pounds, product.

It’s a psychological barrier that needs to be broken down that paying you for your help upfront will help your prospects to make more money in the long-term.

Obviously all of your products or services should be very high quality and so once someone joins they’re going to not only provide you testimonials, but they’ll recommend your product to other people as well and spread the word of how much you’ve helped them.

In these two products you’ve broken down the barrier to entry of giving you an email address, of entering their payment details and of paying your upfront.

The three primary steps in converting a lead to a raving fan. Every time they trusted you a bit more you didn’t just produce what they expected, you went above and beyond and gave them so much value that they now relate paying you to being successful.

And the great thing about this is that… it can all run automatically through your auto-responder!
April 14, 2014
Focus On User Experience
It’s not often that I purchase internet marketing products anymore. The reason isn’t that they don’t have good content, but rather that I never seem to have the time to use them. I’m going through one high-end course from a big internet marketer at the moment, and then I have four other courses waiting for me to go through.

Admittedly I’m not the exact target customer that most of these products are designed for. As a general rule I find that I’m going through them to learn one or two nuggets that I know are exactly what I need to propel my business further. That makes videos a very tough type of training for me to use. Being a fast reader I can go through written content very quickly and find what I want, whereas with videos I have to sit and watch hours of information without having any idea of when what I’m looking for is going to crop up.

With the vast variety of products, services, memberships, websites and software available in the IM market it’s surprising that 99.99% of them have the same thing missing. This is…

…any kind of focus on user experience!

Although some of them look nice and shiny, the majority of them look like designs that’ve walked out of a 90’s feature film.

Okay that bugs me, but it’s not what I mean by user experience.

A user experience can be applied to both software, websites and members areas. In fact, it can be applied to absolutely anything that you’re going to have customers using.

With the rise of mobile devices and apps, users are becoming less and less patient in trying to figure out how to use something. It’s now almost expected that they’ll be able to figure out how to use your product within a few minutes without any kind of manual.

Yet the majority of products released into the IM market make it frustratingly difficult to navigate. And if this is what you’re making people do, then… they’ll cancel their membership or ask for a refund on their software.

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, I want you to ask some questions about your service, whether it’s a website, members area or software:
- What is the most important thing for a user to do?
- Why are users using this service? What are they looking for?
- How many clicks does it take a user to get to different areas of your site or product?
The first thing that you need to do is determine what’s the most important aspect of your site or software for your user. This should be displayed instantly when they first access your service. Don’t make them jump through hoops to get to this crucial element.

Next, you need to be honest with yourself about what your users want from your service and what they’re looking for. If you’re not sure then put together a survey asking them.

Without this knowledge it’s impossible to make sure that you’re delivering what your customers want in the most efficient manner possible.

Your next focus is how many clicks it takes for your user to get to any element on your website or in your software. Ideally it should take no more than three clicks to achieve everything that needs to be achieved. Of course, in some instances this is impossible, but only in very few!

If there are places that take more than three clicks to get to, look to see if you can re-arrange your layout to enable it to be possible in three or less.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your website designer will be a good user experience (UX) designer. Although you would think that UX design is critical to website design, the majority of web designers have no idea how to design based on user experience rather than look. I would always recommend sourcing a good UX designer first and then once you have the structure getting them to design the website or taking the structure to another website designer to design the final look.

Make it easier for your customers to achieve what they want and they’ll turn into raving fans!
April 7, 2014
Don’t Be Scared!
This is an email that comes from my own personal experiences that I see repeated in new marketers every day of every week. It’s something that I definitely had when I first started out in the online world of marketing. In fact, it’s probably one of the most common fears from newbies to internet marketing.

And that is…

…the fear of losing subscribers.

I got started online by mistake. I released a course with a partner and after finishing the course a lot of the people who took it wanted to carry on learning and get more advanced methods and techniques.

Well, I was more than happy to do that and so I built my first website, the Race Advisor.

At the time I had no idea how to build a website, and I had no knowledge of internet marketing. It was purely a blog to be able to help those who had joined my course continue to develop their skills further.

But then it grew!

At first I was very excited, but then I found myself with a dilemma.

You see the site had grown so much that it was starting to get expensive to run both in time and costs. I had two choices:
1. Shut the blog down
2. Find a way to make it pay
I decided to go for option 2, and I’m very pleased I did. But, that meant I was faced with another difficulty. I had never sold anything to my mailing list and now I had to.

What happened if they all left?

I didn’t want to sell too much but I had to sell something to cover my costs.

And the main reason for my concern in this was due to information provided on internet marketing blogs and forums. Almost all of them tell you to send high quality content to your mailing list, and not to market t0 them too much as they will get pissed off and unsubscribe.

The fear of the unsubscribe when you only have a small mailing list is huge. If you only have 1000 people on your mailing list and ten unsubscribe, you’ve lost 1% of your mailing list from a single email!

It’s over six years since that time and I’m now a firm believer that you can hit your mailing list with nothing but sales email after sales email and have a very strong business. After all, if you’re not selling anything then you’re not running a business.

In fact, it’s not only a belief. You will find a number of the biggest marketers do exactly that. Yes, of course, a lot of people unsubscribe. But these are people who aren’t going to buy and so the big marketers don’t want them on their mailing list.

I’ll admit that it’s not my style to send purely sales emails, I like to provide a lot of good content as well and…

…this is the killer combination.

If you provide very high quality content two or three times a week, then you can also send three to five sales emails each week and get a very high response from them.

Why?

Because you’re establishing yourself as someone who knows what they’re talking about and can be trusted because your content is better than anything else out there and… you only send your readers to high quality products!

What you need to remember is that there will always be people who unsubscribe from your mailing list. That’s part and parcel of running an internet marketing business. There is nothing to be scared about this happening.

Never forget that you’re running a business. If someone unsubscribes because you’ve sent a promotion for a service you believe in, then they would never have been a customer. And if you’re going to be able to grow and provide more top-quality content for your loyal readers, then you MUST sell services so that you business can survive.
March 24, 2014
Cracking The Myth Of Over-Emailing
Without any doubt the biggest part of internet marketing is building a mailing list. It’s incredibly powerful and the quickest way for you to generate a revenue.

Once you have your mailing list there is the on-going question of how often you should email them.

In almost every forum and blog about internet marketing you will find an article or post that tells you to:
1. Create an optin page
2. Write an auto-responder (usually 5-8 emails)
3. The first week is the most important
4. Then reduce emails to just once or maybe twice a week
As a general guide that’s pretty good. You do want an optin page and you do, most of the time, want an auto-responder for the optin page.

There is one scenario where you don’t actually want to have an auto-responder and I’ll write about that later.

But… reducing your emails to just once a week I don’t agree with.

That’s exactly what I did when I first got started, and don’t get me wrong it worked fine.

Since then I’ve tested and trialled various different time frames and I’ve found that…

…the more you email the more responsive your mailing list is!

That does come with some conditions. Don’t mail them multiple times a day every single day, although I know some people who this also works very well for because the people on the list expect and want that.

Personally, emailing multiple times every day isn’t for me. But emailing every day, or almost every day definitely is.

This goes against the conventional wisdom that’s written about by most people, but having tested this over more than 2.5 million emails the result goes against this strongly.

If we go back to look at where this original understanding comes from then we can see why emailing more often is more effective than just emailing once a week.

From what I understand the original concept of mailing every week comes from the standpoint of not wanting to annoy people on your mailing list.

The rough thought process is…
1. Email them the information that they opted in for
2. Spend the first week building your brand and trust
3. Reduce the amount of time your emailing them to just a few times a week now the trust is built
4. Reduce to just once a week so you don’t annoy your readers but they still expect your emails
If you look at it quickly then that all seems to make sense.

But let’s look at it in a bit more detail and ask ourselves some questions with the knowledge that emailing more often produces more loyal readers and more interaction.

2. Spend the first week building your brand and trust

Why are we only spending the first week building trust?

You can’t built full trust that quickly. Do you totally trust somebody whose newsletter you joined in the last seven days?

I certainly don’t. In fact I have to read a lot of useful information before I begin to trust their opinions.

And surely trust building should be unending?

Just because we have someones trust doesn’t mean we want to stop emailing them great content and just start selling to them. We want to continue emailing them great content. In fact we want to do that even more than the people who’ve just joined our newsletter because we don’t want to lose their trust!

So the concept of only focusing one weeks worth on content on this is ridiculous. We need to be doing this ongoing.

3. Reduce the amount of time your emailing them to just a few times a week now the trust is built

Based on what we’ve now looked at above this no longer makes any sense. Quite simply the trust isn’t built in the first week. You’ve begun building it but it’s far from complete and will probably take a couple of months before you have a readers complete trust so that they’ll be interested in purchasing something because you recommended it.

The last thing we want to do is start to reduce our emails at this time. We’ve started to build the trust with our reader and if we stop emailing them frequently we’re going to lose it faster than you can imagine.

We’ve also started to setup the emailing pattern we’re going to be using. If you change this drastically just a week in it will feel uncomfortable for your readers. If you change your emailing pattern you want to introduce this slowly by maybe reducing by just one or two days a week to begin with and letting them know that you’re going to do that.

4. Reduce to just once a week so you don’t annoy your readers but they still expect your emails

I can conclusively say that you shouldn’t do this. Emailing every day produces a much higher open and click through rate than just once a week. And the reason is because if you’re emailing every day and somebody doesn’t unsubscribe then… they obviously like what you’re writing!

They want to read your emails.

If they don’t like what you’re reading then yes, they’ll unsubscribe. This isn’t something you should be afraid of, readers do unsubscribe. If they’re not interested in what you’re writing about then you can be 100% certain they won’t be interested in what you’re selling either. There’s no point in wanting to keep them on your mailing list just so it looks larger.

In our testing we also found an even bigger benefit of emailing every day. Because you only have the people who want to read what you’re writing each day you need much smaller mailing lists to get the same quantity of clicks that people with much larger lists achieve.

Take a look at these two examples:

Most people wouldn’t consider a list of 1704 or 3539 a big list, and it’s not. But the list size isn’t important.

What’s important is the amount of clicks that your emails generate.

The smaller of our lists generated 514 clicks and the bigger list generated 883 clicks. A lot of people with list sizes of 15,000 will only achieve around 500 clicks.

But not only are we achieving the same amount of traffic with list sizes 90% smaller. Our readers are expecting the daily email so we’re achieving those clicks ever day without any concern that we’re going to annoy them.

That means a list owner mailing once or twice a week may get between 1000 and 1700 clicks. With our smaller list of just 1704 people we are getting 3598… double the amount of the bigger list owners!

Of course, the downside is that you need to write a lot more content. But that’s a small price to pay for an increase in reader loyalty.
February 10, 2014
The Danger Of Overloading Your Readers
Almost any internet marketing blog that you go to will tell you to create some kind of freebie which you offer as an optin bribe to build your mailing list.

That’s great. But you create one and then after a while you build a product and that has an optin as well. You may then use an optin form on a blog post to get people to optin before being able to read the rest of your content and before you know it you have five, six, seven or even more possible ways of opting into your mailing list.

Nothing wrong with that at initial glance. After all, you want as many avenues for people to join your mailing list as possible.

But… there is one problem. And it’s a big one.

Every time somebody joins your mailing list they get the auto-responder sequence for that particular offer. That maybe just one or two days of emails or it could be many weeks.

The people who read your blog regularly are going to be the people who want to get all your free stuff. After all they like what you do.

This means that your best prospects, the ones reading your content and engaging to get more, are now on multiple mailing lists.

For example let’s say they’re now on three mailing lists. This means that they’re now getting as many as three emails in a single day from you through different auto-responders.

Then you add in your emails sent outside of the autoresponder sequence and they could be getting as many as four emails in a single day.

And we’ve only got three possible methods of joining your mailing list!

If those auto-responders each go on to sell something then you could be trying to sell the same person three products at the same time.

That’s only going to do one thing to your conversion rate…

Kill it!

If you’re doing this then you’re probably overloading your best prospects with too much information.

We need to be careful when we look at building our auto-responders to make sure that when someone joins our mailing list they’re only getting one email from that particular website at a time, possibly two if they’re at different times of the day but unless we’ve specifically told them we’re going to send more then you don’t want to do more than two a day.

There are two types of auto-responders. They are:
1. Contact Based
2. List Based
Aweber or GetResponse is an example of a list based auto-responder. This means that you create a list and the email addresses are assigned to that list. You may have a list for two optins and the same email address may be on both lists.

InfusionSoft and Premium Web Cart are examples of contact based auto-responders. These are where a contact is only added once and instead of having lists you have tags. These tags tell you what information the contact wants to receive. For example Contact A has tags of optin1 and optin2 so they would go both emails from auto-responders one and two. Whereas Contact B only has a tag of optin1 so only receives the emails from the optin 1 auto-responder.

My personal preference is for contact based mailing and I personally use InfusionSoft. The reason I prefer this is because it’s easier to keep control over the content that your sending out to your subscribers.

With these types of auto-responders you can make sure that they only receive a promotion sequence once by using tags to mark when they’ve had a particular mailing sequence. If they rejoin your mailing list through one of your other free offers you can check to see if they already received a sequence before sending it to them again. You can also make sure that they are only ever in one sequence at a time.

In the above screenshot you can see a segment of one of my blog campaigns. As you can see there are three entry points. You can join the mailing list through one or all of them. However in each of the three follow-up sequences there is only one single email telling them how to get what they opted in for.

Then the magic happens. Notice there is a three day delay, this is to make sure that we’re not emailing too often. Some people will get a newsletter email during this time depending on when they joined up. And then we get the…

Decision Node.

Before I explain how that works, notice how there are three possible options coming out of the decision node. This us one sales promo, one freebie offer and the other is blank time delay sequence.

We don’t want to send people both the sales and freebie promotion at the same time. So we check their tags! If they’ve:
- Not been through the sales promo already then we send them the promo
- If they’ve been through the sales promo but not the freebie then we send them the freebie
- If they’ve been through both we send them to the blank time delay
When they’ve finished the sales promo (whether a purchase is made or not) you can then see we put another time delay in place and then use another decision node to see if they’ve had the freebie or not. If they haven’t we send it to them and if they have we send them to the blank email sequence.

By doing this we are making sure that we are providing a high level of quality content and aren’t overloading our readers with multiple emails each day.

Overloading your readers will increase your unsubscribe rate and decrease your conversion, keep a close eye on your mailings to make sure that you aren’t in danger of doing this.
January 27, 2014