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The True Guru Marketing Strategy

I don’t consider myself to be as naive as most in the internet marketing crowd appear to be these days, though I’ve been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. After all, back in the day, Google Cash is the make money ebook that got my ball rolling to start with.

That said, until quite recently I had at least a semblance (and in some cases, a bit more than that) of respect for the likes of StomperNet, Kern & Co and some of the other big names in our industry.

That was until I was introduced to the Salty Droid. Yes, it is indeed quite salty, but at the same time, a bit of an eye opener. Regardless of what you may think of the Droid himself, his writing style, or his caustic method of name-calling, you can’t really argue too much with the PDFs he’s posted of actual legal documents that reveal some of the goings-on behind the scenes at StomperNet. Feel free to read for yourself, if you’re bored or interested. It’s not really the thrust of this post.

All that got me to thinking though. These gooroos, when was the last time you saw them running a PPC campaign? How about out-seoing each other for top spot in one of the launches? Nope, the only action you see from them is via their list.

These guys have built up massive lists, mostly back in the heyday, and now their prime contribution to the internet marketing niche is their ability to drive traffic via their list to whatever offer they choose.

Which got me to thinking… what’s the real winning strategy in internet marketing?

Well, you might say it is SEO, or PPC, or PPV, CPV, or some other acronym with a couple hundred dollar price tag, but in reality the winning strategy is having a list, and knowing what to do with it. Add to that having your own product.

The best education you can get from these gooroos is to watch them rather than transact with them.

At the end of the day, your long term security comes from having a list. Google can slap you silly, but they can’t take your list. Perhaps an affiliate manager dumps you – still they can’t take your list. It doesn’t really matter what kind of nasties come your way, if you can hang onto your list, and maintain a trustworthy connection with them, then you will be ok, long term.

Sure, there are many different means of listbuilding. I’ve chosen PPC primarily for my own, because it is *fairly* dependable. Ideal? No, free would be nice. But SEO is a wizardry that I’ve yet to master, and in the meantime, I’ve got PPC. Perhaps you choose JV traffic, or something else. But build yourself a list.

Next up, have a product. Having your own list puts cards in your hand. Having your own product(s) gives you jokers. Or aces. Or whatever is good in your game of choice.

If you look closely, this is the true strategy that the gooroos are using. They’ve got products, and they’ve got lists. Between those two things, their methods vary slightly, but that is the basic idea. You can bet your bottom dollar they didn’t get rich by gaming the system with some new-fangled software that now rules the interwebz. Afterall – how often have you even seen them using these tactics they flaunt so frequently?

Ok, time for review:

Build a list, get a product. Order is not important.

Screw Google: Facebook Now Rules… Whaaat?

With the simple qualification of you being in marketing and having a functioning email address, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve recently been digitally assaulted with one of the latest renditions from the “Screw Google” crowd.

Specifically, I’m sure you’ve now been educated to the fact that Facebook gets 39+ BILLION page loads per month, 5x more than Google. And that for this very reason, Google is now trembling in their gold-lined, diamond encrusted bunker, aware that their demise must be imminent at the hand of this fearsome foe. Further, savvy marketers should get on the band wagon ASAP, and ditch Google in the hope of greener pastures on the other side of the fence. Why stick it out on the Titanic?

Facebook, so it would seem, is the new Adwords (circa 2004) – king of cheap, targeted traffic.

Proponents say there’s more traffic, you can target by demographics, and that click prices are cheaper.

I’ve been seeing the emails increasing all week long, to the point where I’m getting a little cheesed at this latest ‘slap-Google-back’ stunt. Finally, I just read a good post over at the Affiliate Black Book blog that talked about the issue (yes, that’s where I scraped that fan picture from… thanks X!) and seeing as I was just sitting around here on a Friday evening waiting to go out, I thought why not write my own?

So let’s consider the issues.

Is Facebook a Threat to Big G?

Ok – is Facebook really a threat to Google? Well, depending on your source, Facebook’s projected revenue for 2009 was somewhere between $500 and $550 million. Google’s 2009 reported gross income was $23.65 Billion according to this source. Oh yeah, and they reported net income of $6.52 Billion.

In case you didn’t catch that, there was a B on Google’s statement, and just a little m on Facebooks’.

In case you didn’t catch that, Facebook’s entire 2009 revenue was about 8.4% of Google’s profit.

I highly doubt Google is shaking in their boots about on this one.

Is Facebook Targeted?

Ok, so let’s look at the claims. Facebook is incredibly targeted – you can choose your customers (that’s the claim). Ok, but what are they doing on Facebook? Most people are jumping on Facebook to tell their friends that they just got their hair done, the latest game sucked, or their boss is a jerk. (Careful with that – boss’s are on FB too!). Does that sound like a warmed up prospect? Not to me.

Ok, let’s look at Adwords again. Hmm… prospect types in “XYZ review” sees your ad, and clicks because its relevant. You’ve got a shot at making that sale. He was looking for you. On Facebook, they’re not looking for anything. It’s interruption advertising, same as anything else. Content network, CPV, etc etc. Except search. Oh – and the fact that content network is contextual.

Yes, you can choose your demographics on Facebook, but you can do the same on Google’s content network. And the content network is far larger.

Compared to Google, Facebook’s advertising platform looks like something a 2 year old could rustle up in a sandbox. And need I say that you have FAR MORE OPTIONS on Google’s highly advanced Adwords platform? Anybody who is familiar with the content network on Google knows that Facebook doesn’t offer even 1/10th of the refinement and control that Google does.

Google offers targeted advertising. The best we currently have anyways. Facebook offers you an educated shot in the dark.

Is Facebook Cheaper?

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

I found a blog post where one fine fellow got quite excited about Facebook’s potential. He says he spent about $500 in a couple of weeks and was able to add about 1000 fans to his new fan page (less 50 of his friends that joined as well… so 950 for $500).

How does that work out? That’s about 53 cents per conversion. To get a fan.

I’m trying desperately to remember how that quote goes about not being able to buy love.

Ok, so 53 cents for a conversion isn’t bad. But how does it compare to the content network, or search network? I’m currently getting conversions for around 83 cents a piece (its still dropping) – but these conversions aren’t joining my fan page. They’re opting in to a sales funnel. Many of them are buying my products. The revenue from my sales overshadows the cost of PPC, thus making list building (and there’s a BIG difference between list building and fan base building) essentially a negative cost. Yes, because of the sales, it costs me less than nothing to build my list.

So yes, you maybe be paying 25-50 cents per click on Facebook, but I can tell you I’m currently getting hundreds of clicks per day at an average of 11 cents each off the content network. Oh, and a quite bunch at 4 cents each off one particularly massive site which I won’t name, just to keep you guessing.

So you can talk about prices, and you can talk about conversions. But even then, most people aren’t talking about the same thing. A conversion can be becoming a fan, opting in to a list, or becoming a paid customer.

Should We Really Ditch Google?

If you had an income stream producing consistent revenue, would you throw it away in favor of something else? No, any rational, sane person would simply test the new source, and if it worked out, add it to the mix. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

I’ll say that again. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

So, that gets me to the main tick in my craw. The fact that every marketer, as well as some of their dogs, have been promoting the NewTrafficHoneyHole product from Ryan Deiss.

The same guy who just promoted his product that taught people how to use Google’s content network to target Gmail is now telling people Google sucks.

You can’t have it both ways!

That’s the thing that really gets me about the internet marketing crowd. Gurus are no exception. Somebody comes out with a hot product, and every starts flogging it, because there are a few bucks to be made. Fact is, I and others I know have tested the Gmail tactic and never been wildly successful at it. And I’ve seen Deiss’ course – nothing we weren’t trying in there.

I’m not sure it ever worked that well, and that makes this latest Facebook thing suspect.

Who’s the Real Rival?

The funny thing is, is that in all of this, I haven’t heard a peep about the fact that Yahoo and MSN are now merging their advertising forces. Just heard it on the radio the other day. Now, that’s something to talk about. Both have highly developed advertising platforms, in many respects far closer to Google than Facebook has any hope of being within a couple of years.

They are both established players, and they’re looking to make waves. Bing is not only aiming at Google, they’re firing. With some Yahoo bullets in the chamber, they’ll get a bit further. It’s going to be very interesting to watch that particular game unfold over the next year or so.

What’s the Upshot?

Well, I’ll make no bones of the fact that Google still pisses me off. They act like they’re God, and they just honestly don’t care about me, or you. Doesn’t matter if you spend a buck a year or a million, we’re all human spawn in their eyes. Except if you’re a real big boy like Amazon or Ebay (then you get preferential treatment apparently as their ads seem to be WAY outside the normal relevancy guidelines the rest of us are subject too).

So no, I don’t like Google. Does that mean I don’t do business with them? Well no. It’s profitable for me, and an excellent source of economical, targeted traffic.

So what about Facebook? Well, I’ve just launched a campaign there this week as well, and I’m now testing out different strategies. Am I abandoning Google? Heck no. But I will be evaluating Facebook’s advertising performance against my benchmarks from Google.

So until I’m able to prove it otherwise, Facebook is not ‘da bomb’ that most people are making it out to be right now, and no, I’m not jumping ship from Google, even though I freely admit the thought of doing business with them frequently brings a sinister gleam to my eye.

Last word? Shape up guys. Use some integrity in what you promote eh?

Traffic Geyser Project Update

A couple months ago I did a project where I wanted to test out Traffic Geyser, and the whole concept of driving traffic and leads to a squeeze page purely through the use of online video.

Well, if you remember from that post, I did about a dozen videos, researched keywords and the whole bit (I explained it in much more detail in the other post which I won’t get into here). I then uploaded those all over the internet, using Traffic Geyser.

To be completely honest, my chronic entrepreneurial ADD soon manifested and just after that I got distracted on my next great project. I really have to get that in check. Anyways, I recently logged into that clickbank account and discovered my site had made some sales in my absence.

Today I remembered that I initially had pledged to keep readers here up to date on the progress of that project, so I thought I’d share a tiny bit of info for your marketing betterment. Yeah, I know, that’s probably not a word.

Okay, so let’s start with traffic, then work through to opt ins and sales.

I launched the site in early October. From October 1 to December 31 I received a total of 1567 visitors.

You can see from the graphic that there was definitely an initial spike. I did a little bit of PPC during that initial spike, for about 2 days. I then turned it off. Probably 100 visitors came from PPC, maximum.

Let me back up for a second – it just occurred to me that Traffic Geyser keeps stats of sorts on how many views your videos have got. So I did a quickie calculation and discovered that according to them, my videos have roughly 7500 views, combined. Now, I think there are actually more than that, because I don’t think their stats tracking works with all the different sites, so most of those views are off YouTube, Revver and DailyMotion. Nevertheless, that indicates something like a 20% clickthrough from video views to the site. Not bad.

Next up is opt ins. Video traffic points to the domain name, where there is a squeeze page waiting. Pretty simple stuff. I setup goal tracking a few days into this, so it won’t be totally accurate, and you’ll see how it spiked on the first day because I started mid-stream.

Total goal conversions? 678. I’m not sure how that works, because Aweber reports a Grand Total of only 572 subscriptions. So let’s run with Aweber’s data.

That’s a 36% opt in rate, which I figure is pretty decent.

So the big question – how many sales came from this? Well, it’s nothing to write home about – total of 15 sales, with a $20 commission on each. So that’s $300.

Of the subscribers, that gives me a 2.6% conversion rate. If you look at the broader picture, and compare traffic to conversions, it goes way down to 0.95%. That’s pretty weak.

Nonetheless, I must emphasize that this is 100% completely passive.

When I realized this thing was making sales behind my back, I had another look at the email sequence, and determined that nearly all the sales were coming from either the initial email or immediately after opt in (the thank you page redirects to the sales page).

So there’s lots of room for improvement, however, if this thing continues at the same rate, and judging from the pictures you can see here, I don’t see why it wouldn’t – traffic has been consistent for the last few months even with zero input on my part – therefore I don’t see much blocking this thing from making at least $1000 a year for me, completely residual income.

Not bad for an experiment. Sooner or later I’ll see if I can tweak this a bit – a simple doubling of the pathetic conversion rate would double the income. That would be cool.

Random Acts of Google

About a month ago, I started a campaign testing out a new strategy on the Adwords content network. It was an extremely small campaign, only about 5 keywords, but I setup 3 ads for it. I promptly forgot about this thing, until this morning I received one of those nice little “Your Google Adwords Approval Status” emails from big G.

Anyways, the suddenly took it upon themselves to randomly determine that my micro campaign should be suspended, because of “pop-ups” of all things.

Now, the funny part is that I’m linking directly to the merchant site here, not going through a landing page in this particular case, and the merchant is one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

Now, do you think that they are running their own PPC campaigns, linking to exactly the same page? Of course.

So my question is – why haven’t THEY been disqualified?

Oh well, it doesn’t matter to me anyways. I did a quick check and I’d only gotten three clicks on the campaign in a month, so I couldn’t care less.

But the question remains: is Google really consistent with these things, and why would they all of a sudden decide to suspend my ad NOW? I mean, don’t they check these things initially?

Oh well, there’s Google for you.

Killer Video Strategy for Affiliate Marketers

At Affiliate Incubator, one of the speakers was Mike Koenigs, of Traffic Geyser. You’ve heard me talk about Traffic Geyser before, but he really opened my eyes to a different way to use video.

This week I’ve been working on videos, pretty much straight for three days. I’m nearly done. However, my new approach, instead of spending a lot of time creating one video, is now to spend my time creating tons of videos. I’m aiming for 15, all about the product I’ve chosen. Oh, did I mention I’m doing this for an affiliate product?

So your first question is probably how in the world can I create 15 videos about someone else’s product? A very good question indeed.

What I did is I bought my target product, and read through it carefully (it is an ebook). I took notes on any questions or things I thought people might not know about it. I then did a bit more research on my niche, checking out About.com for the top five most common questions regarding it. After all was said and done I had roughly 15 frequently asked questions. I then went through and wrote a 100 to 150 word answer to each of them. It takes roughly 40-60 seconds to read that number of words.

Next I created a bunch of title slides, introducing my question, answer (ie No, but…) and my URL. Then I went to stock.xchng and downloaded pictures (for free, with free-use rights) for every part of each video. I have roughly 6-10 pictures per video. The pictures don’t have to all relate strictly to your overall topic, just to the sentence you’re saying at the time. This actually gives you a lot of leeway to use different pictures.

My next step is to get some royalty-free music to add to the videos. Because each video is no more than 60 seconds long, I think I’ll buy three different full length songs, then hack them up into sound bytes to use with each video, so each video will be slightly different. I’ve used PremiumBeat.com in the past and was happy with them.

So the plan is the finish off the videos, create a squeeze page with an opt-in form, create an autoresponder series, then submit all 15 videos twice on Traffic Geyser using their timed delivery. That should give me about 120+ videos out there; a far cry from my previous 25 or so. Plus, and this is key, for each video I will be identifying uber-popular competitors on YouTube and matching titles and tags. So each matched video theoretically will show up just after the popular one, and hopefully gain more views that way.

So there you have it. Initially I thought I would wait until I was all done and had some results to tell you about, but this way is more fun for everyone I think. Part of the purpose of this blog is to give you a window into what I’m experimenting with, and to show what works and what doesn’t. I’ve got high hopes for this, but I’ve been wrong often enough before.