Michael Wilding

Tag: internet marketing

  • Fiverr – Are There Any Worthwhile Gigs?

    Fiverr – Are There Any Worthwhile Gigs?

    Recently I’ve seen a lot of questions from internet marketers about whether there are any good gigs on Fiverr. If you’re unfamiliar with Fiver, it’s a website where you can buy “Gigs”. A Gig is in effect a job that someone is prepared to do for you. For example internet marketing gigs may include…

    • I will post your video to Facebook
    • I will shoot a 20 second video on a greenscreen for your website
    • I will do keyword research

    But you can also get graphics, videos, writing, translation, advertising and just the pure strange such as…

    • I will make a short video of myself dancing in spandex holding your words on a banner
    • I will record you a voice message as Sean Connery

    You get the idea! But the big sales angle of Fiverr is… everything only costs $5.

    If you haven’t checked it out then you should take a look here.

    There’s no doubt that internet marketing is a very time consuming job and outsourcing can make a big difference to your business. When outsourcing there are two main reasons for doing this. They are:

    1. Time
    2. Skill

    The first is the most common  amongst more experienced internet marketers or those looking to start their online business whilst still working full time and having family commitments. There is simply no longer the time to do everything and you need other people in order to keep your business growing.

    The second is found amongst both new and experienced internet marketers. Some times you just don’t have the skill to do something and you’ll both get a better finished product and have it done faster by getting someone with more skills than you to do it.

    That’s fine, nobody can be the best at everything. But I do firmly believe that you should have some solid knowledge of what needs to be done and how it should be done. Otherwise how do you know if you’re getting a good final product?

    Let’s take programming as an example. You can get something programmed, but how do you know if it’s done well to the proper and correct specifications if you don’t know what you’re looking for?

    You don’t!

    I’m not saying that you need to go and learn how to do everything for yourself before hiring outsources. What I’m saying is that you should spend the time learning the basic knowledge so that you understand what you’re looking at when you get it delivered.

    When it comes to Fiverr and the question… “Are there any worthwile gigs on Fiverr?”

    The answer is of course yes.

    But… we must be realistic with our expectations and the sort of jobs we are looking to be done. After all, they’re only charging $5 and out of that comes Fiverr’s commission as well. Fiverr actually takes 20% which means that the providers are only getting $4.

    When you’re ordering a gig you must remember that the person is only being paid $4 for the gig. Ask yourself how much time you’d be prepared to spend on something if you were only being paid $4.

    I wouldn’t expect anybody in a Western country to be spending more than 15 minutes on the job at the most. In other countries they may be spending as much as thirty minutes on the job, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the job being done better.

    With that in mind you should only get certain jobs done on Fiverr.

    There is actually an Online Marketing category and if we look at this category we can see that it is broken down into:

    Fiverr 1

    Looking at these categories we can assume the following:

    Web Analytics: Most likely won’t take very long, could be worth using Fiverr.

    Fan Pages: Anything to do with social media takes a surprising amount of time, unless you need something very simple done you are unlikely to find much of high quality here.

    Social Marketing: As Fan Pages, most of this is likely to be of minimal value or low quality.

    Article & PR Submission: This can be done quite quickly if you’re used to it, even without using software. Most will probably be automated or semi-automated but you will be able to find some decent gigs here.

    Keywords Research: Can be done fast when you know what you’re doing and have the right tools. You will find some good gigs.

    Get Traffic: You want serious traffic? Don’t bother. There is no way you can get anything worthwhile for $5. If you do then hire the person for a year!

    Blog Mentions: Well it only takes a moment for someone to write a mention on their blog. The question is… “Is it worth it?” You’d need to do your research.

    SEO: This will mainly be SEO advice and most of it will be from people who know basic SEO. You will be able to find out how to do it free online and in the process learn some useful knowledge. This is unlikely to be worth it.

    Video Marketing: This usually comes in the form of submitting videos, becoming a subscriber or sending a certain amount of views to your video. Getting views from what is going to be automated is virtually pointless. Submitting a video may be worthwhile however if you are short of time but it only takes a moment to do and can be done while you are doing other things.

    Domain Research: Definitely potential here to get some good value.

    Bookmarking and Links: You will find some good gigs in here well priced.

    So there are some worthwhile things that you can get done on Fiverr. But by only looking at the Online Marketing category we have missed the almost sole purpose I would recommend marketers use Fiverr for. And that is…

    Graphics

    Hands down I have had better graphics experience on Fiverr than anything else. And having been a designer I have a high expectation of what I want from my graphics.

    Now, having said that. I wouldn’t go and get my main business branded using a Fiverr designer. That’s not because they’re no good, but because there’s no way they’re going to have enough time to put the thought required into something so important.

    But if you’re looking for banner ads, adjustments to designs or any smaller job. Then I would recommend that you take a look at some of the providers on Fiverr. They can be superb.

    I have two providers that I use almost exclusively for my graphics design, and I have never been disappointed. If you’d like to find out who my two favourite graphic designers on Fiverr are then please hit the like button below.

    [like-gate]

    http://fiverr.com/pandulare

    http://fiverr.com/jimmygibbs

    [/like-gate]

    So, in summary, there are some things that are worthwhile getting done on Fiverr. But the best work, done to the highest quality that I have found is, without a doubt, in graphics. Check out the two guys I recommend above, I get nothing for recommending them but I hope they get some extra work.

  • Speed Is The Key

    Speed Is The Key

    From what I’ve seen one of the biggest problems for those new to the world of internet marketing is a lack of speed. Having a lack of speed is going to prevent your business from progressing as fast as you want it to.

    There are hundreds of articles about taking action, and of course if you don’t take any action then nothing will ever get done. But assuming you are taking action then I would say that the next hurdle to overcome is trying to make things perfect.

    Perfection will kill your business.

    Now let me be clear. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t make a product the best you can, you absolutely should. But you shouldn’t be waiting for it to be perfect before releasing it because… if you do that you’ll never release it.

    Do you remember software when it was released twenty or thirty years ago?

    Operating systems worked when you first installed them. Why?

    Because they’d been tested so much that it was only under very specific situations when things didn’t work properly.

    But the world has changed.

    There’s so much technology that it is now virtually impossible to test for all situations and major companies, think Apple and Microsoft, no longer do the same kind of product testing they used to.

    Because it’s not worth it!

    It takes far longer, and costs a lot more, to do that than to simply release a relatively well tested product and let their users test it.

    When a new product is released by Apple you’ll see a large number of updates taking place very quickly as they use their customers to test their product.

    And we need to take a leaf from their books. We want to make products that we’ve tested for all normal scenarios, and then you release it. Your users are going to tell you very quickly what’s not working.

    The key is to be able to respond quickly, and I mean very quickly.

    Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of brand loyalty that these major companies have. Which means that the response needs to be even faster.

    If you want to make your business grow then your workflow should be dynamic and have the ability to release updates, new products and services with the maximum speed possible. As well as responding to your customers feedback with the same speed.

  • Upselling Properly

    Upselling Properly

    The upsell is something that every marketer knows about. It’s where you offer something extra that increases the cost of your product. This most commonly takes place after you have purchased the initial product. The general flow looks like this:

    1. You purchase the product
    2. You are sent to a page to purchase something else (often recurring) that adds extra benefit to the product

    That’s what it looks like in its very simplest form. But it can get far more complicated and you can get more than one upsell being offered. In fact some IM products have a huge number of upsell options.

    I have no problem with this if the services being sold meet two criteria:

    • The initial purchase allows you to do everything that was claimed on the sales page

    When you purchase a product based on what it can do on the sales page, only to find that to actually use it properly you need to buy one, two, three or sometimes more upsells. Then I find this goes against what I believe you should be doing as a marketer. You are no longer offering value, you are forcing your customer to pay more than they expected to use the initial product you sold them.

    A real-world example of this which I find especially annoying is Ryan Air. If you purchase a Ryan Air ticket then if you want to check-in at the airport desk (as opposed to online) then you have to pay a not insignificant fee to do that.

    Now I know that most people have internet these days, but some don’t and some people just aren’t comfortable with it. That means that if you want to check-in at the airport, which is in fact the place where you would expect to check-in (the online check-in is actually the convenience for those who use it) then you are having to pay extra just to use what you’ve already purchased.

    For that reason I will never fly Ryan Air.

    My second rule for upsells is:

    • It is a valid addition to your main product and provides significant value

    If you’re selling an upsell then it provides value to your customer and adds to the functionality, ease of use (or whatever it might be) of your initial product.

    The most common of all upsells is features based. This is where you see a list of features and the cheaper version gives you only some and the more expensive version gives you access to more. But even some very successful businesses get this wrong.

    Let’s take a look at a company that’s growing very fast in IM at the moment, LeadPages. Now I use LeadPages and I think they provide an excellent service. But…

    …I think that they could significantly increase their revenue by properly upselling their two memberships. Here’s a screenshot from their current payment page.

    LeadPages

     

    There are two options, $37 per month and a $67 per month. But let’s look at the options you don’t get in the $37 per month variation. These are:

    • A landing page course
    • Access to the affiliate program
    • Faster support
    • Custom landing page templates
    • Split testing

    Now I can’t talk about whether the landing page course is any good or not, I haven’t gone through it (in fact I don’t even know where it is) but you get this once and you go through it (remember we are paying a monthly fee).

    Access to the affiliate program is great if you have a list of people who are going to be interested in using this product and you can sell a good quantity. But… if you can sell a good quantity and don’t want to upgrade then the chances are LeadPages will let you promote anyway. I haven’t actually tested this and they may be very stringent but most companies aren’t if you approach them and say I can sell a few hundred licenses.

    Faster support, okay this is a benefit. But if you read my article about support here, then my question would be… “Why do I need to pay more to get a quick support response, should I not get that anyway in my monthly fee?”

    The custom landing page templates is going to have limited appeal because to create them within the LeadPages template structure you need to be a pretty accomplished coder. This isn’t beginning programming and… aren’t most of their customers joining because they don’t want to create their own templates!

    Split testing, now this does have benefits and I like it, but it is still quite new and in beta testing.

    I would suggest that there is actually comparatively little value for their average customer in the missing features. But when you then consider the price is an extra $30 per month! Well thats another $400 per year. I don’t see why most people would upgrade.

    The majority are probably interested in the split testing and faster support, but is this really worth an extra $400 per year when you could use other services for the split testing. The landing page course may be nice to have but I can get one for a one-off fee rather than paying every month for it even when I haven’t read it for years.

    Now I’ll probably be told that this works extremely well for them, and if it does then great. But to me this is a poorly structured upsell.

    That doesn’t mean I don’t think the service is worth $67 per month. In fact I do. But I don’t think the additional features on the $67 per month package are worth anything like an extra $30 per month for most people.

    But if we changed this around and priced the cheaper version at $54 per month, now the situation changes.

    I’m now thinking, I want this product because it’s going to save me a lot of time. In fact most people who’ll pay $37 per month will also pay $54 per month for a service like this. It saves huge amounts of time every month.

    But then I see for just another $12 per month, which is very little, I can get fast support and access split testing. That’s not much more for the benefit of being able to split test inside the same software as my landing pages without having to bother with another piece of software. The fast support would be great to have, although I’m still not sure why I get slow support on the cheaper package, and my mindset towards the landing page course, affiliate program and custom templates changes.

    Instead of thinking… is this really worth $30 a month to me.

    Because the split testing and fast support is definitely worth the extra $12 per month, I’m now thinking… a great bonus to get a landing page course, access to the affiliate program and if I want to, I can make my own templates.

    What goes through your potential customers mind has changed and the extra features are now becoming good bonuses to have rather than expensive extras I may not use.

    So when you’re structuring your upsells, think about them carefully from the perspective of you potential customer and what they want and how it will benefit them. This will increase your conversions and see you generating more revenue from the same traffic.

  • InfusionSoft – Do You Want It?

    InfusionSoft – Do You Want It?

    I’ve been a user of InfusionSoft for a number of years. In fact I would find it very hard to move away from it now because we have software products tied into the CRM using it’s API. This means that leaving would be a task of gargantuan proportions.

    Over the years I’ve recommended the InfusionSoft to a variety of people, and most have ended up joining it and loving it.

    The bottom line is… it’s a great business tool. One of the best out there.

    But…

    Having recently spent another hour on their support chat, and becoming increasingly frustrated I thought I had to write this article.

    A number of years ago the support was great and then there was an influx of new support staff that came in and… the quality plummeted.

    But this isn’t because the support staff aren’t polite, it’s because they haven’t been trained in basic marketing principles which quite often means that they simply don’t understand what you’re asking them.

    On one or two occasions I’ve even found they don’t know how to use the software as well as me.

    Now I’m a great self-learner. In fact that’s how I learn best. So you’d think I could head over to the support documentation. But again this is confusing and lacking in everything outside of the basics.

    So I’m on this support chat and I wanted to find out about tracking. The reason being was that I wanted to decide whether it was worth getting iTracker360 to track my lead sources as it plugs directly into InfusionSoft.

    Having seen someone else’s iTracker account I thought that there must be a way to do this inside InfusionSoft without external use. So I went about to try and find it.

    InfusionSoft has got LeadSource tracking built into it… or so they say. Setting up a new leadsource is no problem. Adding the tracking code to your website is no problem, they even provide a WordPress plugin to make it even easier.

    The problem comes when you try to set up a tracking link… you can’t!

    If we’re tracking paid advertising to an offer we may have ten traffic sources we want to test for our offer. Each of these gets a tracking link which redirects to our offer page and then we tally the conversion rate for each source to determine which are most profitable for us to use before scaling up.

    Comparatively simple.

    Except it took me nearly an hour to explain to an InfusionSoft support team member what I wanted to do. They then proceeded to tell me that my traffic sources weren’t lead sources!

    Quite what they think a leadsource is I have no idea but using the InfusionSoft interface leadsource tracking you can only track a single leadsource to your site without creating multiple optin forms to tag your leads first.

    But what if I don’t want to have optin forms? What if I’m sending direct to my sales page?

    Well there is an answer… you have to use third-party software.

    If the support staff had been trained sufficiently in digital marketing then it would have taken just a few minutes for them to tell me that I couldn’t do paid advertising tracking within InfusionSoft.

    No problem. Thanks. Can you let me know when I can.

    But for the support staff to not understand how paid tracking works on a very expensive marketing tool for advanced marketing is poor.

    What makes it even worse is that all the tracking functionality is there. Just not the ability to assign a unique tracking link to a leadsource, even though I can do it for referral partners!

    So would I recommend InfusionSoft?

    Yes I would. But you’ve got to be prepared to get stuck in and learn how to use it yourself if you want to really maximise what you can do with it as neither the support documentation or staff are fully equipped to help.

    When there’s more hours in the day I will look into starting an InfusionSoft training site. But until then if you’ve got any questions leave a comment here or shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to help.

  • MMO Market May Not Be The Best To Place To Start!

    When the majority of people first get involved in internet marketing, they look at starting in the MMO (Make Money Online) niche. This makes sense because this is what most of the products that are available are teaching. However, this is not necessarily the best place to begin. You are likely to find it easier if you start in a different niche.

    If you purchase an internet marketing info product then it is most likely to show you how to promote other internet marketing products to generate affiliate commission. It may use free traffic or paid traffic and it may show you how to create your own products or not. But, the general concept is to teach other people how to become successful in internet marketing. The problem with this is…

    …you haven’t yet learned how to become a successful internet marketer yourself!

    If  you haven’t learnt this skill yet yourself then how are you going to be able to teach other people how to do it.

    What you’re actually doing is repeating what someone has told you works, even though you haven’t got it to work for yourself. But, until you do get it to work for yourself you have no guarantee that what your repeating is worthwhile information.

    How do you solve this problem?

    You start in a niche that you are already experienced in and have extensive knowledge of. It doesn’t matter what your expertise is, you will almost certainly be able to find a problem that needs a solution.

    If you can find a problem that needs a solution, and the solution is something the market will pay for, then you can make money in the niche.

    I first got started in the sports betting niche, specifically horse racing, completely by accident. This is something I have a lot of knowledge in and I was sharing it, when I chose to focus online and learn how to market to that niche, my business was turning over 200k within two years.

    However I am sure that I would never have achieved this had I tried starting in the MMO niche. It is only after nearly six years online that I have decided to start a blog and share my knowledge of what works for us and what doesn’t.

    So, todays advice is…

    1. Write down your areas of expertise
    2. Determine what problems people have in these areas that need solving
    3. Investigate whether this is something they will pay for
    4. Start building your business in this niche!