Category: Blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could completely, totally automate customer service? This way every time a customer had a question, it would be handled automatically without you or a virtual assistant having to do a thing.

Well, maybe not.

What many marketers don’t realize is that a customer service request is the PERFECT time to sell an additional product.
When you answer a customer’s question, it’s usually going to be about a product they purchased. Maybe they’re having trouble opening it, or need a new download link, or they’re having trouble with Step # 4 of your course.
Now imagine if, when you write back, you not only answer their question but also point out a helpful product that will aid them in reaching their goal.
Yes, this takes time. But these customer service replies often convert like gangbusters because you’re making the customer an offer when they are actively engaged in your product or website.

Think of it as making the perfect offer to the perfect person at the perfect time. They see that you are a real person who replies to their questions. They see you want to help them achieve their goals. And they’ve already proven they’re ready to spend money to get the solutions they seek.

And don’t be shy about offering high priced products or services, either.

They’re having trouble getting traffic? “This ABC Traffic Course is the absolute best resource I’ve seen for getting traffic.” Are they having trouble getting started, or are they stuck halfway through the course they already purchased? Maybe it’s time to offer them some personal one on one coaching. At the very, VERY least, be sure to place an offer at the bottom of every customer service reply email you send out.

Read our full May Newsletter here

When new marketers are wondering why they’re having trouble selling their offers, it’s usually because of one or both of these mistakes.

Conversely, highly paid online marketers never make these mistakes, which is why they are so successful.

Mistake #1:

Focusing on selling the product. You might think this one sounds pretty stupid. Why wouldn’t you focus on selling products? How are you going to make any money if you don’t sell products? Guys, let me ask you this: When you want to build a long-term relationship with a lady, what’s the first thing you do?
It’s not asking her to sleep with you or proposing you move in together. Rather, the first step is to ask her out on a date. If that first date goes well, you try for a second date and so forth.

Marketing is like that. Sure, you can try to sell your product cold. “Psst, hey buddy, wanna buy my product?” You’ll even occasionally get a yes to that question, but it won’t be enough yes’s to build a business.
Even if you can offer the most wonderful products in the world, you’ve got to first build a relationship with your prospects before you can expect most of them to become customers.

That is why you want to place your energy and focus on selling your visitors to join you email list rather than purchasing the product.
Concentrate on increasing the conversion rate of your opt-in pages. Split test the headlines, the free offers, the calls to action and so forth. Once they join your list, you can work on selling them on not just one product, but many
different products over time.

Now here’s the second place where new marketers slip up:

Mistake #2: Not continually following up from day 1.

Here’s what happens to the average new list builder: They start building their list (yah!) but there’s only a few subscribers right now so they wait to follow up.

Weeks go by and the marketer finally has a hundred or a thousand subscribers and now they decide the time is right to start creating and sending emails.

But here’s the problem with that: Most everyone on their list already forgot who they are. No relationship is built. No products are sold. Is it any wonder the new marketer gives up and goes back to his 9 to 5 job?

Here’s what you’ve got to do instead, no matter how silly this might seem: Start following
up with your first subscriber from Day 1.
Create a series of pre-written emails that go out automatically to your list and create these emails before you even get the first subscriber.

This gives you the freedom to focus on list building without having to worry about creating those automated emails because it’s already done. Everybody gets an email the day they sign up and every day after that like clockwork. They quickly become accustomed to hearing from you and in fact expect to hear from you. And when you send an email to the entire list with your latest offer, they remember you and they’re more receptive to what you have to say.

Recap:
1: Focus on getting the sign up.
2: Start following up with the very first subscriber the day they join.
This is what every successful marketer does to build a real business. If it sounds too simple, all I can suggest is that you give it a whirl and see for yourself that it flat out works.

Read our full May Newsletter here

VIEW DIRECTLY OR DOWNLOAD A PDF OF THIS NEWSLETTER HERE

May Internet Business School Newsletter

You already know how important images are for your marketing efforts. 

People pay attention to images, read image captions and are more likely to read your content if it contains compelling pictures. Images make your content look more professional and help to improve your communication with your audience.

While there are numerous free stock photography sites you can use, here are a few reasons to consider paying a small fee to license the images you want:

Your rights on free images are sometimes confusing and sketchy. Can you use it on for profit material? Do you need to credit the site or photographer? Have the rights changed since you downloaded it?

Paid photo websites give you clear terms of use on copyright laws, restrictions, and licenses

Free images are overused and make your site look like everyone else’s. Cheesy, overused and poorly shot images are NOT helping your brand.

With paid photos, you can get professional and sometimes even unique photos. You can get them in bulk, if you so choose, and there are new photos uploaded all the time to choose from.

Paid images are high-quality and not blurry when enlarged or cropped. They help you to build a polished, cohesive online presence.

Paid image subscription sites often offer vector art, illustrations and graphics.

Free image sites are a time-suck. You can search endlessly for that one decent image.

On a whole, paid images just look better than free, and you’ve got so many more to choose from, too.

Are you just starting out and on a strict budget? Then maybe free images are for you. But do consider upgrading to paid images just as soon as you can for that polished, professional look people trust. Here are my favourite paid stock photo websites:

1.Creative Market

Creative Market is an online marketplace offering photos, graphics, templates, themes, fonts, and more.

All stock photos are created by independent photographers and cover just about anything and everything you can imagine, including animals, architecture, beauty & fashion, business, health, food & drink, nature, sports, etc.

Prices start at $5. https://creativemarket.com/

2. Deposit Photos

This stock photography website offers high-quality photos, graphics, vectors, music & SFX, and video.

There over 229 million royalty-free assets with thousands added weekly by photographers and musicians. And their stock videos are all HD including 4K videos.

Price: $9.99/month. https://depositphotos.com/

3: Envato Elements

This is an unlimited creative subscription service best for students, agencies, marketers, etc., boasting unlimited downloads of 57+ million creative assets with lifetime commercial licenses.

Their monthly subscription includes stock photos, themes, plugins, videos, music, graphics, fonts along with 1,200+ courses and tutorials.

Price: $16.50 per month paid yearly or $33 for a single month on the monthly
plan, and a discount for students. https://elements.envato.com/

4: Ivory Mix

Ivory Mix stock images cater to every brand with their myriad of categories including business, parenting, and wellness, to name a few.

Best for entrepreneurs or content creators who constantly need fresh content.

What’s included: over 5,000 stock images with 100+ new photos being added each month, monthly Canva templates, Caption templates, workshops & training, and more.

Price: $67 paid quarterly or $167 paid yearly. Be sure to get their freebie package just for joining their list. https://ivorymix.com/

 

5: Pixi stock

This stock photo subscription site is geared for women, offering beautiful feminine stock photos, social media graphics, templates and content planners.

Pixi stock membership gives you access to Over 7,000+ stock photos, customizable Canva graphics, 365-day Social Media Content Planner, DFY hashtag strategy, research in over 30 niches, and more.

Price: Monthly plan $47 with a $375 Annual plan. https://pixistock.com/

 

6: Social Squares

Beautiful images combined with monthly expert marketing education and high-engagement new content delivered monthly.

Over 6,000 lifestyle, mockup and flat lay images, 30 monthly customizable caption templates, custom curation of images in your brand color palette, keywords, digital marketing courses, mastermind calls with guest experts, monthly social holiday posting ideas and more.

$39 a month, $109 paid quarterly, $420 paid annually. https://www.socialsquares.com/

7. Stock Unlimited

Stock unlimited membership offers over 1 million downloads of high-quality photos, vectors, clipart, and more.

You can find any photo based on your niche as they offer over 25 categories with thousands of extra images added to their portfolio every week.

Price: $19 monthly subscription, $79 annual subscription or $169 for 3 years. https://www.stockunlimited.com/

Read our full April Newsletter here

Not all upsells are automated. Some of them are born out of a genuine desire to help your customers.

Let’s say you notice that Judy purchased your program on how to write sales letters that convert, along with your program on sending high converting traffic to an offer.

But Judy hasn’t purchased your program on creating info products that sell like gangbusters. So, you drop Judy a personal note and mention how most of your customers who buy those first two programs also buy the third one, too.

You can let her know that while all three programs work well on their own, your customers have found that combining the three provides the greatest success.

Then you give her a link to the sales page and let her know that the product is still currently available.

You close by saying something like, “Judy, please let me know if I can be of further help to you.” And that’s all there is to it.

 

The conversion rate on this is higher than almost anything I’ve experienced before. And you’re not even selling. Instead, you’re simply being helpful and making sure your loyal customers have everything they need to succeed.

If you can automate this, then that’s great. But if not, it’s still worth it to do it by hand.
There is something about the personal touch that works wonders, too, because the next time you
send out an offer to the entire list, you’ll find the ones you contacted personally are more likely to
open your emails and respond to your offers.

And once your customers are used to getting personal emails from you, your future recommendations will carry more weight, too.

In this automated world of ours, customers place a high value on your personal contact and help.

Read our full April Newsletter here

DEEP WORK: RULES FOR FOCUSED SUCCESS IN A DISTRACTED WORLD

Deep work’ is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Coined by author and professor Cal Newport on his popular blog Study Hacks, deep work will make you better at what you do, let you achieve more in less time and provide the sense of true fulfilment that comes from the mastery of a skill.

In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive economy.

 

And yet most people, whether knowledge workers in noisy open-plan offices or creatives struggling to sharpen their vision, have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realising there’s a better way.

Put simply: developing and cultivating a deep work practice is one of the best decisions you can make in an increasingly distracted world and this book will point the way.

Read our full April Newsletter here

VIEW DIRECTLY OR DOWNLOAD A PDF OF THIS NEWSLETTER HERE

April Internet Business School Newsletter

Every time you repeat a habit, whether it’s a good habit or a bad one, it strengthens the neural trench network.

Imagine a pristine field of knee-high grass. If you walk across that field just once, it barely shows. Take the same route several times and there is now a path. Walk that path hundreds of times and you have a trail. Walk the trail thousands of times and you have a dirt road.

The more times you repeat an action, the faster your brain will guide you back to taking that
same action and the easier it is for you to take it.

But if you stop walking that path, the field will eventually heal itself. And if you stop doing bad habits, you will reprogram your brain to stop guiding you towards those bad habits.

How do you reprogram your brain?

 

1. Discipline 

Studies show you have far more discipline in the morning than at any other time of day. That’s why, if at all possible, you should start a new habit first thing when you wake up, when discipline is the highest. For example, if you’re creating a course, work on it each morning for 30 minutes before you do anything else. 

2. Focus

Instead of attacking your work haphazardly, focus on just one thing at a time.
For example, one video in your course, one chapter in your book, one page of your website and so forth. Don’t try to break every bad habit at once, or create every new, good habit at the same time. Focus your efforts and build on that.

3. Be Bold

Don’t strive for a little goal when a big one will make you more passionate. Do what they say cannot be done. What goal will get you out of bed at 6am with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning?

4. Manipulate Your Environment

Clutter is not conducive to getting work done, nor are distractions. Create a space that is used only for your work. 

5. Take Consistent, Daily Action.

Without exception, take action every single day for the next 6 weeks. Better still, take daily action for the next 52 weeks until the habits of starting, completing and shipping are so ingrained, it’s nearly impossible for you NOT to do these things.

6. Habit Stack

When the brain learns a new song, it will not simply link together the notes already in your memory. Instead, it will develop a region that encodes the entire song. In the same way, you can stack one new good habit on top of an existing good habit to develop an entirely new brain region dedicated to this habit stack.

For example, if you already get up early in the morning, stack a new habit on top of this such as writing for 30 minutes as soon as you wake up. 3 weeks later, stack the habit of taking a 5 minute break and then writing for another 30 minutes. Or add the habit of going for a run.

Each time you add a new habit to the stack, the entire stack is rewritten in your brain, making the entire stack of habits automatic and requiring virtually no discipline to accomplish each day.

 

Read our full March Newsletter here

TRACTION: HOW ANY STARTUP CAN ACHIEVE EXPLOSIVE CUSTOMER GROWTH

In Traction, serial entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares give startups the tools for generating explosive customer growth.

‘Anyone trying to break through to new customers can use this smart, ambitious book’ Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.

Building a successful company is hard. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers.

 

Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and offers a three-step framework to figure out which ones will work best for your business.

No matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

Read our full March Newsletter here

 

You got fired by your dumb-bag boss. You got flamed by a social media troll. You got a lousy review from some know-it-all pretender who couldn’t find her own butt with her hands, much less do what you do.

Good.

Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can either curl up in a ball in your closet and never come out……or you can use your anger to propel yourself to new heights of success.

In 1983 a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band right after they signed their first record deal. They were about to record their first album in New York when they woke up their guitarist and handed him a bus ticket back to L.A. with no explanation.

What the heck??!

It’s a long bus ride across the U.S., and by the time his bus hit L.A., he’d gotten over his self-pity and vowed to start a new band. He decided that this new band would be so successful, his old band members would be green with envy. They’d be flipping burgers and playing lousy gigs in clubs while he was onstage in front of thousands.

 

This guitar player practiced like a man possessed. He searched high and low for the very best musicians for his band – all better musicians than those guys in his previous band.

 

His anger fuelled his ambition and revenge became his muse.

 

He wrote dozens of songs, made numerous musical connections and within a couple of years his band signed a record deal of their own. A year after that, their first record went gold.

The guitarist’s name was Dave Mustaine, now considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in the history of heavy metal music. His band is Megadeath, and they have toured the world many times over and sold over 25 million albums.

 

Great story, right? That is exactly how you can use your critics to fuel your own success.

 

There’s one more thing you should know about this story:

The band that was stupid enough to kick Dave Mustaine out was known as Metallica, and they sold 180
million albums. Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest tock bands of all time.

And because of this and despite all of his massive success, Dave Mustaine still considers himself a failure because he was the one who got kicked out of Metallica. Which I guess just goes to show that success and motivation are all about the thoughts you choose.

Dave could have chosen to give up music, but instead he used his anger to motivate himself to became a legend.

Dave has millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of adoring fans and a career doing what he loves. And yet, Dave still thinks he’s a failure because his metric of measuring success is to compare his band
with Metallica.

Dave values ‘beating’ Metallica more than doing what he loves, more than making millions and more than having his own band and millions of fans.

What do you value? And how will you know when you’re a success?

Read our full March Newsletter here