The Dirtiest 4-Letter Words in Internet Marketing?
1) WORK 2) WHEN 3) RISK 4) TIME
Listen, this is NOT the first loaf of bread I’ve baked! I’ve been around the internet marketing game almost as long as anyone else. I’ve seen more pitches and appeals than you could possibly imagine. And given I’ve chosen to teach marketing, I’ve also spent many long, hard nights laying awake thinking about why so few people genuinely succeed.
It pains me, it really does. But most people in this game are so terrified of the truth, they stop reading when anyone starts to disclose it. You’ve got to be a little bit of a masochist to step out and say what I’m about to say if you still expect to be able to sell your materials.
On the other hand, anything of significant I’ve ever accomplished in my life came from facing reality square in the face, and then driving forward with intellect and fortitude until it yielded. Everything. So before we get to WHY “work, when, risk, and hire” are the four dirtiest four-letter words in internet marketing, let’s start with a challenge question…
I CHALLENGE YOU TO ANSWER THIS: Is there ANYTHING of significance in your own life which came to you without hard work, risk, deadline-focused commitment, and persistence over time? Anything?
When I ask people this question, perhaps 5% quote some lucky break. But upon further reflection and prompting they inevitably conclude “luck favors the prepared.” People who seem lucky from afar have usually worked VERY hard to put themselves in a position to take full advantage of the situation which seemed to “fall in their lap.”
Success requires we deal with four letter words! It takes the ability to put in the work, the willingness to commit to deadlines (“when”) , the cajones to take risk, and the ability to play the long game (“time.”)
Perhaps the toughest part is this: As an entrepreneur you don’t get the kind of linear, step by step feedback we were all trained to love in school. You don’t really know if you’ve “passed the first grade” or not because money doesn’t come out the end of the pipeline if there’s even one leak along the way…
So we all suffer with constantly agonizing decisions on how to balance these four letter monsters. Being an entrepreneur inevitably means having way more projects and opportunities than you can possibly handle, and having to take more risks with your resources than any of us ever really grow comfortable with… no matter how big we get.
The good news is, there are tools and systems for making these decisions much easier.
One of my favorites is a simple little spreadsheet technique for calculating weighted averages. I just list out my projects or choices one per row, and evaluate them against all the factors which I consider important to the decision in the columns. Finally, I assign a relative importance level to each of the factors, and the simple spreadsheet calculates a “batting average” (overall score) for each project.
Have a look at the video to see what I mean, and feel free to download this example here
NOTE: be sure to download the spreadsheet here to follow along. (My apologies for the visual quality of this particular video… please don’t
tell my Mom, OK?)
The one quote I review each and every day is Jim Rohn’s
“A Life of Discipline is Better Than a Life of Regret”
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve grown older (besides the ginormous bald spot on my head and the need to pee every 43 seconds or so) is that my greatest accomplishments weren’t things which
“jumped” into existence do to an amazing sudden insight…
No, my biggest accomplishments AND the things I appreciate
most in my life were the result of long term, daily disciplines.
– My most important relationship (Sharon, who also happens to be my wife) developed over the course of a seven year, regular
friendship where we progressively deepened our trust and
worked on our communication
– My greatest friendships emerged from regular meetings
and shared events
– Every business I’ve ever successfully developed came from
a long term plan at which I incrementally chipped away day
by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year
– Every health goal I’ve ever achieved came about in the
same way.
And all of these accomplishments required maintenance too!
It’s not like you can just forget about everything else, floss your
teeth for 24 hours straight, and then not have to worry about it
the rest of your life. (Although if there’s some dentist out there working on a way to do this, please come see me because I want to give you a big hug)
Anything worthwhile requires discipline…it’s just a fact of life.
Without discipline, the center does not hold.
Without discipline you don’t have accomplishments, you have regrets.
So every day I get up and I thank Jim Rohn for that quote…
And remind myself I must be willing to pay the price.
Because as the years go by, the years go by! We will all definitely
be one day older tomorrow… the question is, will we one step closer or one step farther away from our goals?
And the great thing is, it’s entirely within our power to decide!
Onwards and Upwards,
The Very Good Dr. Glenn 🙂
PS – One of the most important disciplines I practice each day
is reviewing a website from the “Golden Glove(tm)” perspective.
The Golden Glove is a set of five power principles operating
any time money changes hand anywhere in the world. It’s easy
to learn those principles… but translating theory into practice
is another thing entirely. Analyzing what’s working in a given
market, rank ordering the top vendors from best to worst
according to their successful ad-spend, and then comparing
and contrasting these on the Golden Glove is perhaps the
MOST powerful thing I’ve discovered in the marketing world. And now you can watch me to it live each month for just $9.95/mo. You can even get me to do it in YOUR market.
TRUE OR FALSE?: This Disgusting Picture Can Help You Get an Unlimited Stream of Buying Traffic to Your Website, 100% Immune to Major Search Engine Whims and Social Media Platform Changes ? TRUE!
“I Am Human Bug Meat!” is the strangest blog post title I ever devised, but believe it or not, understanding how and why I did it can help you unlock
a flood of qualified traffic for your site! Indulge me for a few moments and you’ll see why…
A few summers ago I was aggressively working on climbing all 48 four thousand food mountains in New Hampshire. I had quite a bad experience on one trail. If you’re interested in the full story, please search the blog for the post, but for our purposes today suffice it to say I got some very bad advice from a guy I passed on the way up the trail. A guy who seemed to know what he was talking about… but led me into a situation where I got swarmed by literally thousands of tiny bugs.
It was like a scene from a horror movie. I ran for my life and managed to get away… but not before they inflicted a few hundred bites, leaving my arms looking like some weird kind of red cottage cheese.
Now, you might think the first thing I’d be thinking as I was being eaten alive and running
for my life would be “Holy crap… how am I going to get out of this!!!”… but being the sicko marketer that I am, that wasn’t it.
Instead I thought “I’m going to get a FLOOD of traffic to my site with this story!!!!
And I did.
See, I’ve trained my marketing brain to look for unusual events in my own life which
trigger intense emotion, survival instincts, or which I know can be associated with images that are impossible to ignore. I don’t worry so much about HOW I’m going to logically relate
these images to my audience’s needs at first. I just have my mind set in “capture mode”,
and because of this, I’ve always got a whole host of stories, images, and anecdotes at the
ready.
Now, that doesn’t mean I use those stories willy-nilly. But I find whenever I want to teach
some key marketing point, I can search my data-bank of these captured stories, anedotes,
and images and inevitably I find a connection.
For example today I wanted to reiterate the Unlimited Traffic Technique which Jonathan
Mizel taught me so many years ago…
Which in essence begins with your ability to capture your prospect’s attention.
Combining “human bug meat” with traffic benefits in an email subject line
creates a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean, if you hadn’t clicked on that email
when your head hit the pillow this evening you wouldn’t be able to sleep because
you’d be thinking “What the hell is human bug meat, and what does it have to do
with unlimited traffic?”
But let’s take this all the way home.
How can attention getting curiosity and benefits get you an unlimited stream
of qualified buyers to your website… totally immune to the whims of major
search engines and social media platforms?
By dramatically improving your per-visitor conversion so that you earn more per visitor
than anyone else in the market, that’s how!
The Unlimited Traffic Technique
Way back in 2003 Jonathan Mizel described something which literally blew my internet marketing mind. He called it “The Unlimited Traffic Technique” and the essence of it was this: IF you’re the guy/gal who makes more money off a web visitor than everyone else in the market, AND you offer a very generous affiliate commission, then most of the traffic in that market should tilt in your favor.
For example: I make $25 per lead, everyone else makes $10. I offer a $12.50 so the other merchants say “why the heck should I bother with customer service, cost of goods, shipping, product development, and all these other hassles when I can make $2.50/lead more with Glenn for doing NOTHING but sending him the traffic?”
See what I mean?
And that’s what Dan Kennedy means when he says you need to “engineer the economics of your business so you can PAY MORE for a lead than everyone else in the market”. (This is contrarian to say the least… while every other business is trying to pay as little as possible, obsessing about efficiencies… you figure out how to pay MORE and you can dominate the market)
IF you can reach this position, the experience is literally mind blowing. Because whereas you previously had to beg for joint ventures, eek out a profit on exhaustively optimized advertising, or expend eons of precious time on search engine optimization or social media… all of a sudden everyone needs YOU.
It’s like holding a glazed ham in a room packed with Doberman Pinchers… you’ve actually gotta take care to protect yourself, they come at you so fast.
You can also pay more than your competitors to hire the people who are most expert with Facebook, Google, Bing, Pinterest, SEO, etc. You can hire an army of bloggers and social
media marketing experts… at least more than your competitors can.
Everything tilts in your favor.
The point is, what you are currently thinking of as a traffic problem is really a conversion problem. You do NOT need to find a cheaper traffic source. You need to earn more from
each visitor so you can afford to play with the big boys.
You need a higher percentage of visitors to actually buy your products and services than
your competition. Take care of THAT problem and everything else starts to fall in place
naturally. A business grows up around you. People are suddenly available to work with
you and take the implementation nightmare that’s overwhelming you off your plate.
Here’s an old video I made to describe the Unlimited Traffic Technique… which still applies
equally as much today as it did then…and will apply just as much in ten years as it does today!
Now, please know learning the right formula for getting people’s attention (benefits + curiosity) is only ONE piece of the conversion puzzle. The rest has to do with researching your market,
making sure you’re appealing to a very specific audience with a very specific problem to solve,
making a truly unique promise to that audience, overwhelming them with proof, giving them
an irresistible offer, and a reason to act now.
It’s all much easier said than done, which is why we have the club. You can get live, practical
advice from me personally… and watch as we turn theory into action on site after site after site.
Plus, if you join this month we still have left an additional bonus in the club – our best-conversion insight summary from previous clubs. This is a 90 minute video which you can
use to help earn more from your site as soon as tomorrow.
And in case you’re wondering… yes, I do have selfish reasons for offering all this for just
$9.95/mo. I know a small percentage of you will be interested in our other programs, services,
and coaching and consulting options. But there is NO obligation and NO pressure to take us
up on this…
And of course everything is guaranteed or your money back.
So you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose by coming on in for a month.
In 1985 I was 21 years old and just about to graduate from Stony Brook University. Sharon and I were already good friends – we were both attending my father’s psychotherapy training center (CPCA – “The Center for Psychotherapy as a Creative Art”).
Sometimes the training meetings were in the official offices on 11th street in NYC (“The Village”), and other times we met in my Dad’s living room.
In any case, during one of the events at home Sharon happened to come early to find my father eating his breakfast. No sooner did she sit down at the table with him than she noticed, to her incredible dismay, that the little black dots in my Dad’s oatmeal were moving.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! MARTY!!! You’re eating bugs!!!” – she screamed.
“No I’m not!” my Dad said. Those are the raisins.
“NO! MARTY!!! THEY ARE BUGS!!!!!!! THEY ARE *$#&%*$# BUGS!!!” she retorted with disgust.
Well, my Dad put on his glasses, looked down at his oatmeal and said “Hmmmmmmmmm. I guess they are. Tasty ones too” (Dad has always had a sense of humor! Thankfully he did stop eating them though.)
So what’s the marketing lesson?
Human psychology and desire are overwhelmingly powerful. When we’re too close to a situation, we tend to see what we WANT to see, hear what we WANT to hear, taste what we WANT to taste, and smell what we WANT to smell.
My father isn’t a stupid person. Quite to the contrary, he’s not only got a Ph.D. and a very
successful practice in New York City… he’s run an entire department at the Post Graduate
Center, published several books, and supervised dozens of other successful therapists…
Yet, LIKE ALL OF US, when he really wanted to experience a certain thing he crafted his
perception to match. My Dad was working really hard that day… he had a lot of things
on his schedule. He didn’t want to throw out the oatmeal, go to the store, buy another
box, etc. That would be WAY too painful, if he could even make time to do it. No, Dad
really wanted some oatmeal with raisins, and his mind showed him what he wanted to see.
It happens to the best of us. But it’s particularly dangerous for marketers.
One of the biggest problems with developing a marketing mind is that reality is often
too painful for you to see clearly when you apply it to your own stuff. For example,
it’s not uncommon for the real solution to a marketing problem to be radically changing
the offer. This can involve creating an entirely new product. Or you may need to reduce
your margins considerably on what you THOUGHT was going to be your profit center…
but really, given the state of the market you need to use it as a loss-leader. Or perhaps
you need to change your USP and you’ve now got to go through a thousand web pages,
dozens of follow up messages, and a graphic redesign.
Ugh! That’s WAY too painful. So what do most of us do?
We decide bugs taste like raisins, that’s what we do!
We leave our campaigns the way they are, settling for MUCH lower bottom line
profit than we need to…
Or we might give up on a project entirely when in reality we were just a few
changes away from an incredibly successful business.
What’s the solution?
No matter how good a marketing eye you have yourself, you need an outside
perspective. But NOT from just anyone. Too many people accept marketing
advice from whomever vomits it up in a forum, or is willing to look at the
site.
No, you need to get advice from people who can answer ONE CRITICAL QUESTION in the affirmative “Have you personally profited more than one million dollars from direct response advertising in which you risked your own money” (Not newbies, or people who are constantly “talking theory” and THINK they know how to improve your site)
It’s 100% true…Glenn Livingston was arrested. Take a look at the mugshot here. Pretty scary what you can learn using Google Alerts!
Well, I haven’t been arrested, I’ve just been a little busy with health issues, which are all thankfully MUCH better now. But you know what? I very well could be arrested by the internet pricing police when they find out about this: I’ve decided to re-open the live web-critique and conversion club for just $9.95/mo.That’s right, you can now get live, personal help from the REAL Dr. Glenn Livingstonfor less than the cost of your grandma’s swimsuit… and as an added bonus you won’t need therapy after looking at it!
Seriously, what if all that stood between you and three times more profit from your existing traffic were just a few simple tweaks? What if you could get LIVE, individual, personalized help from ME to dramatically improve your site’s sales conversion? And what if you could also watch the best of the best recorded-live web critiques I’ve done so you could actually see how theory gets implemented on real sites with real people…
For just $10/mo?
I’m happy to announce the grand-reopening of the Make Them Buy Club now at just $9.95/mo.
This is a live, monthly web-critique club which was one of the most successful things I’d ever done about three years ago. However, I had to close it because, at the time, it was consuming too much of my personal bandwidth and I didn’t yet have enough trained conversion experts to properly assist me with the preparatory work. (Because we thoroughly research what’s working in the market before we review a site, it can take 20+ hours of a skilled marketer’s time to provide the context necessary for the review)
In any case, with the development of my other live training and certification systems, all that’s changed now! And in retrospect, I realize the live, monthly web critiques were a big part of how I helped others become successful. For these reasons (and others you can read on the site,) I’m now going to RE-OPEN the club…
And even better, because the primary purpose of the club is to give you all a chance to connect with me personally and warm up to my methods–not to generate a profit in and of itself–I’m going to offer it for a measly $9.95/mo.
Now, as you might suspect I DO have a selfish reason for doing this. I’m secretly hoping some of you will want to move on to our marketing coach certification program once you see all the value in the club. But there’s absolutely NO obligation for you do to so, and I know up front that only a very small percentage of people will want to do this… so I promise there’ll be NO pressure!
Plus, I’ve included several immediately downloadable items which will open your sales-conversion mind wider than a hippo’s mouth in just a few hours…as soon as you log in! (You don’t have to wait for the first live event):
– The BEST conversion insights of the previous club! As soon as you’re inside, head over to the recordings section and download the “Best Of” video to see a succinct, 90 minute review of the most powerful sales insights from the previous reviews we’d done and markets we researched
– Several recorded full critiques for you to get a sense of what you’ll have to look forward to in the LIVE events…
– And of course, the customary bonus audios and videos which were previously associated with the course. (Click through to the website to review them please)
Now, if the opportunity to work with both myself personally AND one of my best trained conversion coaches, as well as the above isn’t worth $9.95…I’ll shave my head and dress up like a bunny rabbit!
But I’m not too worried about having to do that…
Because trust me, you won’t want me to do this once you see what’s inside. (You wouldn’t want me to do it if you ever actually saw me dressed up like a bunny rabbit either, but that’s entirely besides the point)
Now, if the above isn’t enough to get you to join the grand-reopening of the Make Them Buy Club now for just $9.95/mo, here’s my best puppy dog face to motivate you:
The Very Good Dr. G 🙂
PS – Seriously, you don’t want to miss this opportunity. I was hounded for
almost two years to re-open the club by literally hundreds of previous clients
who thought it was the most practical and immediately useful thing I’d ever
published. I happen to have been more interested in the hyper-responsive
marketing club at the time, but admittedly it took a LOT more time, energy,
and propeller-headed dorkiness to make use of the information there than
in the Make Them Buy Club. This club is just straight forward conversion
advice.
PPS – what makes Make Them Buy different than other LIVE web-critiques you
may have participated in previously is our emphasis on context. See, we don’t
just jump in and vomit our spontaneous ideas about the sites we review.
Instead, we exhaustively research the market first, paying very careful attention
to which advertisers have been proven to sustain expensive positions in
the market first, and then rank ordering and comparing their USPs, calls
to action, brand positioning, the specific problem they appeal to, etc. Click here to learn more.
PPPS – Are you still reading? WTF!!? Listen, if you miss this opportunity the odds are very good you’re going to want to repeatedly smack yourself in the head with a spatula! And I can’t have that on my conscience. I’m happy to
announce the grand-reopening of the Make Them Buy Club now at just
$9.95/mo.
