Monthly Archives: October 2012

How to Get Top Ranking as an Amazon Reviewer

So my original purpose in interviewing John Chancellor was just to share the thinking of an extremely introspective, dedicated, passionate blogger who’s caught my attention outside of the internet marketing space as of late…

I wanted to bring you the perspective and wisdom of someone who seems to have a solid grip on life, business, and philosophy in ways far and above the average person I run into online these days…

But in the course of doing so, I discovered something about this intriguing man I couldn’t help but share with you…

He’s worked his way up to the top 300 Amazon.com reviewers and is now regularly courted by journalists, publicists, prestigious trade periodicals (like the Harvard Business Review)…

And he didn’t even do it on purpose!

I really do hope you’ll listen to this one, even though I was a veiner-shnitzel towards the end and couldn’t help but drop the “f-bomb” (Sorry!  But consider this fair warning to keep your kids out of earshot ok?)

All my best,

Dr. G 🙂

PS – John’s going to let me publish his book on my blog for anyone to download.  I’ll push that out next week!  Also, I know John will appreciate comments on this audio below after you’ve listened… so if you’re remotely inclined, please do share 🙂

PPS – Hey, if you’re struggling to get that critical “leg up” which comes only from understanding the conversation in your customer’s head better than all your competitors then you’ll absolutely want to grab one of the ten spots we’re opening this week for the BULLS EYE MARKETING SERVICE.   (Bulls Eye Research + Competitive Analysis).    We’re still taking case studies at a substantially lower rate than the final service will cost… so if you’re at all interested, now is the time!

Marketing Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about how EVERY marketer is  living between a rock and a hard place these days…


YOU ARE BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE BECAUSE:
“What’s easy to sell is hard to deliver, but what’s hard to sell is easy to deliver!”

For example, most every CONSUMER  is sick to death of dealing with computerized goods and services. They’re overwhelmed and frustrated by the inability to find a real human being to answer their questions, solve their problems, and generally make them feel like they’re part of a society run by people, not machines.  (This all started 25 years ago with the advent of computerized voice mail “Press 1 for…”, etc., and the frustration has been accelerating ever since)

On the other hand, most every MARKETER is sick to death of dealing with consumers. They don’t want to “trade hours for dollars” anymore, to manage large teams of human capital, or to develop the systems necessary to field complaints and attend to quality assurance at this level.

MARKETERS WANT TO SELL INFORMATION WHILE CONSUMERS WANT TO BUY SERVICE.   Anybody see a problem here?

It’s pretty EASY TO  SELL DONE FOR YOU SERVICES, but it’s getting DAMN HARD TO SELL INFORMATION PRODUCTS. (You really DO have to have a truly unique position in the market, overwhelming proof that you can deliver, and good copywriting skills… and most marketers dramatically under-estimate what I mean by the three words “unique”, “overwhelming”, and “good” in the preceding statement!)

On the other hand, it’s EASY TO DELIVER INFORMATION PRODUCTS. When compared to done-for-you services, they produce ridiculously fewer numbers of complaints, require MUCH less management skill, have a much shorter training and ramp up time for your team to deliver, and they scale quickly once you get your marketing systems in place and optimized.

But it’s DAMN HARD TO DELIVER SERVICES.  Services require people, and people require ongoing management, training, and motivation.   For many small businesses, that’s just too time and capital intensive.

So where is our salvation?

How can we possibly market our way out from between this “rock and a hard place?”

For many businesses, the solution is to add  coaching to the mix.

Coaching is often be the perfect solution because:

  • The consumer gets human service, but the marketer doesn’t have to do any of the actual work required to achieve the results…
  • You can charge more for it because of the human element, yet in many cases you’re not really adding much additional costs to your internal infrastructure…
  • When the coaching is delivered in a group format you can record it,  instantly creating information products without additional planning and development costs…
  • People who consume coaching are more likely to purchase your information products because they come to know, like, and trust you on a much more intimate level…
  • And for this same reason, coaching clients are MUCH more likely to refer others!…
  • Plus, it creates an ongoing feedback loop for your existing products and services (people pay YOU to give you valuable marketing research data!)…

My new “Million Dollar Coaching” product reveals my (and Terry Dean’s) most treasured secrets for building a financially rewarding–AND–emotionally fulfilling coaching practice. PLUS, if you purchase soon you’ll even get a license to steal the tested and proven coaching-offer salesletters from myself, Terry Dean, and Doberman Dan. (Minus our personal credentials of course).  Click here now to learn more:  ”Coaching Business Secrets: Four Million-Dollar Marketers and Coaches Reveal Their Most Treasured Secrets for Building a Lucrative–and Emotionally Fulfilling–Coaching Practice! (Regardless of whether you’re a business or personal coach, even if you’ve never done a single session, and even if you have no earthly idea how to get your first client)”

PS – The other solution to the problem is to bite the bullet and coordinate the done for you services.  There are many GREAT reasons to offer done for you services too… it all kind of depends on your personality, resources, and to a lesser extent the market you’ve chosen.  But, in my humble opinion, most of the internet marketing crowd really isn’t cut out for it.  If you’ve spent the last several years mostly chasing the digital dream, adjusting to the rigors of done-for-you is excruciatingly painful, at best.  Mr. T would “pity the fool” who didn’t at least consider solving the problem with a coaching program first.

Nuances of Conversion Rate Optimization and PPC Budgeting

Did you ever consider the relationship between your Pay Per Click budget and the time, money, and energy you spend on Conversion Rate Optimization?

Have you ever wondered what stops you from doing more testing?  (Or doing testing AT ALL?)

Listen to this intriguing interview with the author of AdWords for Dummies, Howie Jacobson, Ph.D.  (And myself of course)

Enjoy!

Dr. G 🙂

PS – Howie and I are also offering a new conversion rate optimization service.  Have a look if you haven’t already!

Social Media, Crack, and Biological Marketing Errors

Is it possible we’re biologically hard wired to make marketing errors?

Bear with me on this one please because I’ve got to start in an esoteric part of human psychology.  I promise I’ll tie it back to a money making marketing insight… perhaps THE money making insight. (Seriously)

As a psychologist–(and a guy who really loves to eat)–I’ve spent a lot of time studying ADDICTION.

And  the most fundamental conclusion I’ve reached is that, at it’s core, addiction is a biological error…

Choose your poison:  Chocolate, cigarettes, donuts, alcohol, pizza, heroine, or crack, etc.

If  you’re indulging beyond your own better judgment it’s because the artificially created concentration of pleasure has tricked your lizard brain into thinking the treasured substance is necessary for SURVIVAL.  (It’s NOT because you have a “disease” by the way, there is absolutely NO evidence for that very dangerous concept, which ruins people’s lives by giving them false reason to abdicate responsibility and control)

Over-stimulation of  pleasure centers tells the brain on the deepest level that whatever is creating the stimulation should be your utmost priority…

This is why, for example, so much violence surrounds the crack-cocaine culture.  Crack is deep pleasure inhaled through the lungs, and the body comes to associate the availability of this pleasure with survival AT THE  SAME LEVEL as oxygen.   Literally, violent acts in service of obtaining crack are driven from a biological perception very similar to suffocation.

And don’t be too quick to dismiss the the crack-cocaine culture as irrelevant to less dangerous addictions (or to internet marketing behavior, as we shall soon see)…

Because I’m only using an extreme example to illustrate the point…

Although the consequences may not be as serious, and despite the fact that it’s socially sanctioned and supported, it’s equally as true for chocolate as it is for crack!

“Just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt.” Anyone who’s experienced the pain of chocolate addiction knows there’s a fundamental truth in this cultural joke.

Even better, think of the last time you had two plates of pasta instead of one, that extra muffin or donut,  or just a little too much to drink despite that voice in your head that says “I really shouldn’t, but oh well, I guess I will”… that was your primitive brain–the lizard–overwhelming your neocortex (you!)

(By the way–because the neocortex holds dominance over virtually all primitive impulses–once you recognize what’s going on you can INSTANTLY retake full control without any fancy tricks, extensive treatment, or years-long introspective analysis.   The lizard brain can only win the game when it goes unrecognized.  For more on this, including effective, simple techniques for retaking control, please read “The Art of AVRT” by Jack Trimpey)

Now, the consequences of not recognizing (or misunderstanding) this addictive process are tragic.

Because in the extreme, the sting of addictive pleasure causes a re-organization of the personality AROUND the pleasure inducing substance…

Literally, the addict’s life becomes DEFINED by that pleasure.   Most of their waking life is spent planning for, thinking about, or savoring their precious moments with their drug of choice… to the exclusion of other fundamentally valuable activities, people,  family bonds, and moral reasoning…

What first begins as the intake of artificially concentrated pleasure becomes a biological error “run amok” with the power to ruin the life not only of the addict, but  anyone who loves him (or her) too…

The addict literally abandons reason, dignity, and most norms of human society to pursue a substance driven life.

Moreover, (s)he seeks a “counter-culture” within which to support his or her new sense of morality and what’s important in life.  Anyone who “doesn’t get it” is shunned by the new culture, thought of us “uncool”, “crazy”, or even dangerous!

OK…

Hopefully my little treatise has convinced you of the power of artificially concentrated pleasure, and it’s ability to totally overtake human psychology.

Now let’s talk about what this has to do with business.

And in order to overcome any counter-culture pressure regarding what I’m about to say, I want to remind you I’ve billed over $20,000,000 in consulting, worked for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, built and sold an internet marketing agency, entered over a dozen markets profitably myself, seen the dollars-in-to-dollars-out results of hundreds of internet businesses, and successfully marketed my own clinical and coaching practice, generating over 1,000 new client sessions in the span of approximately 6 years.

So hopefully you’ll take me seriously when I tell you this: Businesses that succeed BIG TIME online and off overwhelmingly focus on the fundamentals:

  • Generating leads with ONE advertising source they truly master through and through before moving to diversify it with another
  • Building lists of prospects
  • Converting those prospects with stellar market research, copywriting, and follow up
  • Increasing the lifetime value of every customer with back end products and services
  • Systematizing operations and customer service with quality control
  • Effectively managing cash flow and growth

Period, end of story.

Now, there’s nothing to stop social media from being included as a traffic source for some businesses following these principles…

But as a practical matter what I’ve found is…

THE MORE A BUSINESS FOCUSES ON SOCIAL MEDIA THE MORE THEY ARE NEGLECTING ONE OR MORE OF THE FUNDAMENTALS THAT DRIVE SOLID AND SECURE GROWTH

And I think I know why…

Social Media is Artificially Concentrated Pleasure

Just like chocolate, it fills a biologically hardwired need…

The need to be a member of the herd…

Which in nature protects the individual from danger, making it more likely they’ll be fed, and less likely they’ll be killed by neighboring tribes, wild animals, etc.

Social Media Feels GOOD with a Capital G!

But unless you’re using it to build lists you can track, and unless those lists are ALSO tracked back to MONEY MAKING CONVERSIONS, then you too, my friend, are under the sting of addictive pleasure, and whether you know it or not, your personality is being reorganized around it (at the expense of your bottom line)

And all you need to do is pause, RECOGNIZE when this is happening, ask yourself if your social media activity is truly trackable back to one of the fundamentals above.  If not, just change course… you don’t have a “social media disease”, you’re NOT “powerless”, and you CAN log off Facebook, as painful as it might seem at first.

Now, sometimes a particular addictive pleasure sweeps the culture like an infection gone wild…

And before you know it, what seemed like a small counter-culture BECOMES the culture.

Which is exactly, in my not-so-humble opinion, what’s happening to us right now!

It’s also exactly why very few people will care for the words on this page today…

Why I’ll be labeled a “dinosaur”, “has been”, or other derogatory outsider’s term.

But just because something is popular, doesn’t mean it’s right.

Crowd psychology is capable of witch hunting, genocide, and all sorts of other horrendous behavior in the name of what’s “now”, “hip”, or “in” at any given moment.

I don’t expect to change the world…

But if I can help just a few of you see through the madness, I’ll rest just that much easier this Sunday morning.

And while everyone else is socializing, I’ll be quietly buying media, building lists, writing my ass off, adding back end products and services, and working on my operations.

Feeling Just a Little Bit Dangerous,

Dr. G 🙂

PS – If you hadn’t heard, Terry Dean and I  just launched  “Coaching Business Secrets: Four Million-Dollar Marketers and Coaches Reveal Their Most Treasured Secrets for Building a Lucrative–and Emotionally Fulfilling–Coaching Practice! (Regardless of whether you’re a business or personal coach, even if you’ve never done a single session, and even if you have no earthly idea how to get your first client)”   Something different we’re including with this product is a license to use our sold out coaching salesletters (except for our personal credentials of course)


The Very Best Thing About Being a Coach

If you haven’t already considered adding coaching to your arsenal of products and services, it might be time to reconsider.

You see, whatever business you’re in–even if it’s NOT a “relationship” market–what you’re doing is solving problems for your customers.  And there are always customers who want you to hold their hand to create a more personally customized solution.  Always.

So there’s usually money on the table… and the nice thing about scooping it up with coaching is that you don’t have to create a product, manage inventory, or even deal with much customer service infrastructure.  Plus, there are literally over a dozen ways you can sell coaching in a LEVERAGED ENVIRONMENT, which dramatically increases the effective hourly rate while making things more affordable for your clients.

For example, I’ve found when I charge for a live webinars club–(my “Make Them Buy” club for example)–only about 10% of the people who pay a low monthly fee actually show up on the call.  And only about 10% of those will actually interact with me (no matter how much I urge them to… and I absolutely do urge them because I WANT to help them!)

That means for every 100 people who are paying $39.95/mo. (as of this writing) for the OPTION to talk to me twice a month, there’s really only ONE I wind up coaching directly.  Everybody else either lurks or listens to the recording.   That’s a leverage factor of one hundred to one!

But even that’s not the best thing about coaching for me.

Want to know what is?

Coaching makes me stronger.

I discovered this first as a psychologist, not a coach.

You see, no matter how many people you know, things change when you get to hear their most intimate thoughts, struggles, feelings, and solutions…

And it turns out that everyone solves life’s problems in distinctly different ways.

And when YOU are the confidant they turn to, over the years you get exposed to amazing solutions you’d never have considered.

If you’re a business coach, this means you get a LOT stronger in business.

If your’e a conversion coach, you get a LOT stronger at conversion.    (This, for example, is worth MUCH MUCH more to me than the approximately $100K/year I net from the conversion webinars I do)

If you’re a relationship coach, you get a LOT stronger at relationships.

If you’re a bowling coach, you become a much more masterful bowler…

You get the point.

And that, my friends, is the BEST thing about being a coach.

My new “Million Dollar Coaching” product reveals my (and Terry Dean’s) most treasured secrets for building a financially rewarding–AND–emotionally fulfilling coaching practice, regardless of whether you want to be a business or personal coach, even if you’ve never done a single session, and even if you have NO credentials, training, or any earthly idea how to get your first paying client.

Dr. G 🙂

Building Bridges, Partial Credit, and Marketing Blunders

You don’t get partial credit for building HALF  a bridge…

You could do EVERYTHING right from working with the architects, the city, acquiring the best materials, surveying the land and support structures, etc.

But in the end, if you don’t put ALL the pieces in place and complete the bridge, ain’t no cars getting across that river.

Period.  (End of story)

Either you complete it, or nobody crosses the river, period.

Same thing with marketing funnels…

You can select your bulls eye, define your keyword space, study your competitors, do extensive marketing research, identify a unique point of difference around which to construct a USP, source and/or create your product, manage your inventory, design your site to clearly call out to the right audience (with the right problem they’re desperate to have you solve) , articulate it perfectly in both text copy and video, present overwhelming proof, and even create a credible reason to act with urgency…

But if you screw up the OFFER (price point, bonuses, terms and conditions, competitive comparison, value build, etc), ain’t nobody coming through your shopping cart.  Period.

In fact, if you screw up ANY of about two dozen variables in your sales funnel, conversions go to zero mighty quickly.  It’s a sobering realization…

The fact that you do NOT get partial credit in marketing means if you’re gonna succeed, you’ve really GOT to be made of really solid stuff.

There’s simply no replacement for fortitude among bridge builders.

Which is something you should take comfort in…

Because it means that despite lack of sales in a particular project you’re working on (or your business as a whole) you very well MAY be doing 90% of it right!  In fact, this phenomenon is what makes successful marketing so hard to learn… because it can be very difficult to identify the pieces and parts you’re getting RIGHT when the sales aren’t coming through to reinforce it.  But rest assured, you’re probably getting at least some of it right. (This is why it’s critical to get ongoing feedback from other, more seasoned marketers… if a little bell went off every time something was right in your marketing funnel you wouldn’t need them, but in the absence of sales to reinforce your correct efforts, most marketers “fly blind” until they give up)

Besides, it beats shoveling up after the elephants in the circus for a lowly paycheck, hands down.

Food for thought on a crisp Sunday morning here in New Hampshire.

Dr. G 🙂

PS – Keep your eyes peeled for a special 50% discount coupon good only during my new product’s introductory week, and only for the first 200 orders.

VIDEO: Selling Coaching to Gonka-Bears

With everyone running around like a retarded goat  saying  they’re NEVER trading dollars for hours again, do you want to know what the SMART marketers are doing?  Adding COACHING to their sales funnels, that’s what!

Watch this ULTRA SHORT VIDEO to see why now:

PS – Yes, I know the video has TEN reasons while it says SEVEN. So shoot me… I thought of three more while I was recording!

The Info Marketing Apocolypse

Ahhhh… remember the good old days?   When you could set up a “business” selling ebooks, CDs, and DVDs, on Google?  Maybe make them entirely downloadable, have your customer service person handle the complaints, and you just spent a little time each day managing your PPC account?

Info Marketing, that’s the dream.

Move some electrons from here to there and money winds up in your bank account.  (While you, of course, munch on Doritos and chase cheap thrills in God-knows what way suits you!)

Enter the Kindle, the economic crash, and the general education of consumers over time and…

Oh well, you know the rest.

It’s getting harder and harder to sell information products these days.

EXCEPT….

Except if you knew what information marketing was REALLY all about in the first place…

If you understood that the dissemination of information was really just a leveraged way to communicate with your market…

To build RELATIONSHIPS with your prospects…

And that you didn’t rely on information alone as a SUBSTITUTE for that relationship.

You see, smart marketers have only incorporated information products into a more traditional product funnel all along.

Because an introductory DVD which outlines the SYSTEM you’ve got for solving XYZ problem is really best suited to position YOU as the only one in the world to SERVICE THAT PROBLEM!

The key word being service.

I’ve come to MANY high end professionals like this…

My present monthly health coach, for example, is someone I chose after (a) reading a book on her philosophy; (b) joining a paid continuity club where I relentlessly consumed her philosophy, recipes, interviews, and more.  And I actually came to both Perry Marshall and Terry Dean only after a similar course of info-consumption. (I’ve been worth tens of thousands of dollars to each of them!)

Now, most people smitten with the information marketing dream don’t want to conceptualize it like this.  They want to hide behind the information.  At least twice a week someone says to me “I’ve been working so hard at doing X for years… so everything I do going forward from here on in is going to be an effort to productize this knowledge… I’m sick of trading dollars for hours”

Well I’ve got news for you Joe…

That’s a BIG meatball you’re asking the market to swallow!

Because while every new marketer I speak with gives me some version of being sick of delivering service, every consumer I speak with tells me they’re sick of marketers trying to hide behind info products.

So you do the math!

But take heart…

Because if you KNOW the right model…

If you’ve spent years trying to master information marketing, your skills will NOT have gone to waste, and you still CAN have the dream with free time, independence, and the money you want.

But you’ve got to add something to the mix…

For most businesses, this means HUMAN CAPITAL.

One of the most natural ways to do this is just SERVE the market with a completely done-for-you solution.  But unfortunately this is often VERY expensive, time consuming, and difficult to manage.

The sweet spot is COACHING… you serve the market by CUSTOMIZING a solution for each individual, but you’re not responsible for the work itself.

And when you do it right, you can LEVERAGE everything you know about info-marketing to achieve what you’ve been looking for all along in your business…

And you can even manage other coaches to free even more of your time. (As long as you keep the bar HIGH for the people you allow to coach for you… they DO have to be able to deliver the results you promise!)

Now, I’ve sold coaching in almost every variety you can imagine.  From  some of the MOST EXPENSIVE coaching ever (when I used to do corporate team building and name development workshops, sometimes for as much as $25,000 for a two day project) to hundreds of individual pay-as-you-go sessions, to a sold out monthly coaching board (GlennCoach.com)

I’ve SUPERVISED many coaches to success to0 (both from a skills perspective, but also regarding how to market their practices).

Up until this point, I always recommended coaches work hard to sell FREE sessions using my stepladder system (bulls eye keyword –> opt in site –> dozens of content gifts –> contact for free session)

But THIS YEAR I’ve discovered a NEW model that makes the above look like a cheeseburger at La Fondue.

In fact, it’s so dramatically changed how I think about marketing a coaching practice that I’m recommending to all my coach-supervisees (with one minor exception), that they NEVER do another free session again!

On Monday (10/8/12), I’ll launch this program with Terry Dean, David Oliver, and Dan Gallapoo.

Watch your inbox for a special 50% off introductory price.

Onwards and upwards,

Dr. G 🙂