The Silent Internet Marketer...

Business is war?

2011-11-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

The more successful you are in your business, the more you may get nervous when up and coming businesses come into your focus. This sometimes can you make you feel the stress of "what if they take my customers? What if they take my marketshare?"

The hard truth is that the free market isn't fair. It's a war zone. It's very competitive, and it literally is war, albeit without weapons. The weapon is your wits, and your business savvy (including marketing savvy). Those who can face adversity, revise their strategy, and move forward will ALWAYS prevail over time. Simply innovate, move forward, and serve your customers the best you can.

The key to success: Get off your 'but'

2010-11-15T11:47:00.000-08:00

One of my first "motivational" books that I ever read and actually ABSORBED was a book called "Do it- lets get off our buts".

Basically in a nutshell it's this: don't make excuses. Face your fears. Just shut up and get the damn job done.
But, saying it is one thing. Doing it requires a person to stop complaining and BRING it.

Here is a pdf I found of the book, enjoy:
http://www.petermcwilliams.org/books/McWilliams,%20Peter%20-%20Do%20It%20-%20Lets%20Get%20Off%20Our%20Buts.pdf

Paradigm shifter... in action

2010-10-23T11:48:00.000-07:00

When talking about how my business works I'm often talking about a shift in paradigm - that is a shift in a viewpoint. My business would never have thrived and been successful had I listened to all the naysayers who talked about how it wasn't a conventional business structure, and would never succeed. No matter how I explained that the internet would change the face of business as we know it (keep in mind - this was 2001 or so), they pretty much told me it would never work.

I proved them wrong.

My wife taught me this action today... while on vacation all we had to connect to the internet was a wired modem and a short 6" cable. I told her "honey - you have to sit here in this chair because the cable won't reach".

After getting out of the shower she proved me wrong... she found out the cable going TO the modem was much longer. She draped it across the floor and took a seat on the comfy couch and surfed away...

AH! A paradigm shift in action!

So how about you? Is your business stuck in a rut? Sales slumped a bit? Blaming it on the economy? Maybe... just MAYBE... you need to move your "modem" to a different place...

Apple BLOWS it again...

2010-06-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

Recently Apple released the new iphone. Demand FAR exceeded their supply and resources.
(See http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-06-16-iphone16_ST_N.htm )

Imagine what could have happened if all those unsuccessful customers were directed to a newsletter signup page that allowed Apple to email all those customers when supply was available again? That could have had a huge list of people chomping at the bit to buy anything Iphone related... all at their fingertips.

10 Steps to having a successful internet and ebay business

2009-12-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you're trying to solve. Google's first and primary job was very simple: Help people find stuff. They didn't start layering on everything else until much later. Its the easiest, simplest version of what you're trying to do... the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew--small enough to get hooked on very easily.

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas. They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don't like stuff. You couldn't have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don't rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he's not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

3. Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day.   Don't wait until its perfect to put it out in the open. Put whatever you can out there and get people using it as soon as possible. Feed them daily with new features to keep them interested and coming back. No one likes waiting six years for new releases.

4. Distribute. Distribute. Distribute.    Don't force your users to play on your site in a walled garden. Let them take the service and use it wherever they want. (See Flickr badges, Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, Indeed jobrolls, del.icio.us linkrolls, moblogging, RSS, e-mail alerts, etc., etc....) Instead of building it so they will come, go out and get them by placing little bits of your service everywhere on the web. Be where they are.

5. Don't hold users against their will. If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave... for free. Charging $0.29 to get back each of the hi res photos you uploaded to the site is thievery. You have to let the barn door open and focus on keeping your customers fed, so they want to come back, instead of coming back because they're stuck.

6. Be mind-numbingly simple. Extra clicks are deadly. People just won't do it. Indeed: One search, all jobs. Two boxes: What job and where. You can't get any easier than that and all it takes is for someone to put one search in for people to go, "Wait...what's this... links to Monster AND Careerbuilder??"

7. Get people hooked on free. Craigslist wouldn't have become Craigslist if it wasn't free for so much for so long. Even now, they're very profitable and they're only charging for just a few small pieces of their service in just a handful of their 120 markets. The world is changing. Service is cheaper to provide now than ever and users are expecting to get more for free than ever before. Its hard for a lot of big companies to accept that. I just had lunch recently with a couple of friends from a music publisher. They were signing some bands to "incubator" deals for just a couple of songs to test the market with them. I said, "And you're giving those songs away for free, right?" They nearly choked on their food. :)    Well, why the heck wouldn't they? Give a few songs away for free, generate buzz, get lots more people to buy future albums. Seth Godin did that with his books, releasing e-books that generated buzz around hardcover sales. Free sells. Do you think the Facebook would be the Facebook if you had to pay for your smooches like you do on Match?

8. Don't waste any money on marketing.   Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication. Things go viral in a hurry... when they're good. Ever see a Skype superbowl commercial? No, but they've had 146 million people download it. If you don't have the service and the quality to back it up, no amount of fancy marketing is going to help... and people are so quick to share cool stuff, because they want to be the person "in the know". When they're satisfied, they'll blog about it and e-mail everyone they know. And they'll tag it furiously on del.icio.us, too.

9. Don't overfund. Do you know how many times a day I see companies get funded on Private Equity Week and I'm like, "What the heck are they going to do with all that money??" Underfunding a company can be a problem, too, but thinking that more money makes you better is a fallacy. It probably makes you a bit sloppy and fuzzies your focus. When you raise $2 million, you're much more likely to have a clear sense of exactly where that money is going to go than if you raised $20 million.

10. No one sucks. I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks. Now, I say it myself, I'll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up. Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it. Why? There's got to be something there. AOL sucks... or does it? They still have 20 million users, so it can't entirely suck. You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that's only one thing and the rest of their service sucks.

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Is Internet Marketing just a scam run by LIARS and CHEATS?

2009-12-23T18:48:00.001-08:00

Sound familiar?

How many internet marketing ebooks have you bought? How many of them told you something new? How many gave you the pieces of the puzzle you were missing?

Unfortunately, most of the ebooks available today are written by someone who is just copying the same techniques and rewording them. Don't get me wrong - there ARE definately methods that do work and work well, but there are also methods that are outdated and don't work as well anymore.

The same is true for those selling on ebay. Most sellers are now using pictures on their auctions (if you are new to ebay, there actually WAS a time when a seller would put up an auction with little description and no pictures!),

I should know...I used to be one.

I think I've tried just about every method available concerning ebay marketing. Some worked, some didn't work at all. I discovered that eBay is a bit different than traditional marketing.

But before then, I was a carpenter building houses. I made an hourly wage that got me by but I was never really happy. I always felt something else was out there that I should be doing, though I didn't know what. At that time, I barely knew anything about the internet and in fact not a whole lot of people knew the power it held.

Eventually I started trying several money making methods, one of them being a guide I wrote to teach others how to build a web design business (keep in mind, this was 1998 or so)...then I found eBay! And like everyone else, I sold a few things here and there, and never thought much about it. After a while I started realizing just how much potential eBay could have for me, and I dived in headfirst...listening to all the guru's, applying their advice, and trashing the advice that didn't achieve results. My biggest influence was and still is Jim Cockrum for silent sales machine fame...I would always bounce ideas off of him, and I KNEW that he would give me a 100% no BS answer. If you find a mentor like this, hold close to them - that is golden! My hope is that I can help you in the way that Jim and others helped me. Eventually I found my own niche and my own place in the www world in teaching others how to customize their guitar equipment. More about that in detail here: http://www.indyguitarist.com/aboutus.htm

Why I wrote the first "The Auction Secret" book

Though you may not have heard of me, I have been selling on the internet since 1998, and I have learned from many successful internet guru's and creative thinkers. I've tried every method to eBay sales I could find, created my own strategies, and have made a fantastic living off of eBay and the internet by creating and using my own unique ideas! The entire course came from my experience with my main guitar online business. I'm NOT the average internet marketer who writes book after book about the same old tired stuff with a new cover.

As they say though..."things they change", and they certainly did for me too. Since my customer base was mainly younger folks age 18 - 25 or so, technology and it's constant rapid change forced me to try many new methods, now called "web 2.0". Basically, this is a totally different paradigm of selling. Let me introduce:

The New Rules of “Web 2.0” Marketing

   1. Technology is changing the way you reach customers and the way that customers find you.
   2. Websites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, facebook, and myspace.com are preferred by the next generation (the “Igeneration”) over search engines like google and yahoo.
   3. The Igeneration is much more than irritated by an ad or a blatant sales ploy...and they see right through you if you try that. And what's worse, they rejoice in smearing your name in every blog they come in contact with.
   4. Blogs are Impacting Everything. Their “opinions” are often held as fact and held in higher regard than traditional news media.
   5. To be taken seriously, you must publish content that is relevant and that is valuable to the consumer.
   6. Static Web Sites and Stale Content are effectively DEAD (and ignored)
   7. People won't do business with you unless You Are a Trusted Advisor
   8. Consumers of Products and Services Trust People, Not Websites or Faceless Corporations. “Indie” (as in independent) is the new trusted company. Big companies and organized businesses or “evil”.
   9. Your Content is discovered in many other ways not heard of in 2005 or even 2006. Social Bookmarking. Digg. Delicious. Youtube. Facebook. Myspace. Flickr. Know these.
10. The Long Tail contains high value, especially those who service long tail oriented companies.
11. eMail is on it's last leg and dying as an effective marketing and communication tool. Most consumers in the Igeneration rarely log in to check email. Instead, they rely on text messaging, myspace, and facebook.

Currently, I market with a variety of methods...podcasting has been a wonderful marketing method for my niche so far... maybe it can help you too!

If you want to learn all about the newest, latest, greatest sales methods utilizing the newest technologies, subscribe to my podcast (audio and video downloads) and my newsletter for free.

Subscribe to the podcast for free, here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theauctionsecret

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