In my last article I talked about the only three ways to increase your business. If you remember they were:
I am actually now sitting in a plane flying home from my Glazier Kennedy Inner Circle (GKIC) mastermind group. I pay $15,000 a year to be part of this and we meet three times a year with 19 other business owners.
We get to discuss our businesses, what’s working and not working and then get suggestions from the rest of the group. When I showed them our business model, the one thing from the list I mentioned above that my company had no problem with was getting more customers.
I showed them how we have built a subscriber list of about 200,000 people, and buyer lists of 40,000. The biggest focus in our business now is steps two and three. But what was amazing was that in all of the other 19 businesses I saw, they were all struggling with number one.
I had a lot of conversations with them after our meetings and they all wanted to know how I was able to get so many customers, and what they could do to replicate these results. I want to share with you some of the same strategies that I told them.
Step 1: Understanding Herd Mentality
The first key that is vital to attracting large amounts of new customers is understanding herd or community mentality. That is, people will group together based on similar beliefs, likes and dislikes.
I’m sure you remember this concept well from your days in high school. Think of how people grouped together. All of the band people hung out together, all of the wrestlers were together, all the skaters grouped together and so on.
What’s interesting about the internet is the fact that this same grouping happens, but it’s on a much larger scale. People all group together based on similar things that they like. For example, if you go to www.TheMat.com, you will see a wrestling forum with tens of thousands of active wrestlers talking about wrestling. If you go to www.SpudTech.com you will see thousands of people talking about potato guns.
People are congregating together in herds based on what they are passionate about. This is powerful because as a marketer, we are looking for targeted groups of people to put our advertising messages in front of all the time.
So the first question you need to ask yourself is this: “What is my ideal customer interested in?”
Now it’s going to be easy to pick the first few, but I want you to dig deep and think outside of the first idea that comes to you. For example, if you are selling a real estate product, obviously your ideal customer is interested in real estate, investing, money and business, but they may also be interested in politics (are they republican or democrat?), traveling the world or watching sports.
This is important, because it will be easy to target their main interests immediately (like real estate or investing) but because these are so obvious, they are the same things that your competition is already targeting.
I have friends in fitness and forex that pull thousands of customers from strong republican sites every month because they have recognized that their target customers are also republican.
Again, the key with this first step is to figure out who your target market is, then to find out where they are congregating.
Step 2: Become A Parasite
After you know who your target market is, and where they congregate your next step is to become a parasite. What I mean by a parasite is that those sites are already getting a lot of traffic from the exact same type of person who should be your customer. So you need to figure out ways to siphon off the traffic that is going to their site, and direct it to your site.
So how do you do that? You are only limited by how creative you are. Let me show you a few ideas that work well.
Find a website that has already attracted the type of customer you are looking for. The first (and best) thing I would start looking for is if that site is gathering their customers’ names and email addresses. They may do this through a pop-up, a squeeze page, a registration page or about a half dozen other ways.
If they do, the first thing you want to do is see if they would be willing to do a joint venture with you and email one of your offers to their subscribers. If they say no, then the second thing you can do is to see if you can buy a “solo email” to their list.
If they say no to that, then your third option is to see if you can buy advertising in their email list. Try to get them in this order too, because the best option is always an endorsed mailing from the owner of the list, then next best is the solo ad, and the last is the classified ad.
Be sure to set up a tracking link and ask the newsletter owner for stats on how many people the email was sent to, how many people opened the email, and how many people clicked on your ad.
Online Advertising Space:
This is probably my second favorite method of getting new customers. With this you will want to see if you can put banners, articles or anything else onto their website. The best spots are always above the fold (meaning everything you see when you first open a webpage without scrolling down).
Just like email advertising, if you can get them to become your affiliate, then it won’t cost you anything to put the ads or articles on their website. If not, you can also try to purchase advertising from them.
When purchasing banner ads, it usually works on a CPM basis meaning you pay a certain dollar amount per thousand impressions of the banner. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that your ad is in a spot that will be seen. If it’s at the bottom of the page, you’re going to be getting charged for it even if no one ever sees it. An average price to pay for banners is about $2 per 1,000 impressions.
Google Site Targeting:
Another great program that currently works on a CPM model is Google’s site targeting program. When you visit a competitor’s or another website that you have been looking to advertise on, if you see that they have Google adsense on their site, then you are in luck!
You can use Google’s site targeting program to put your ad on those sites directly without contacting the website owner. Just open your Google adwords account, and look for the site targeting section. You just tell it which pages and on what sites you want your ad to be shown on, and almost instantly your ad will start showing up in place of the google adsense ads!
Again, these also work on a CPM, so make sure the ads are above the fold so you can get maximum clickthrough rates.
Community Marketing:
Forums, community, groups and social networks are all great ways to get in front of a large group of your target audience. Most of these groups have some rules and are very strong anti-spammers, so be sure to read their rules before you play around or you will get a lot of angry people trying to shut down your website.
Now with that said, this is one of the best places to first, find quality people in your industry (usually list owners) to network with. Be very active in the communities in your target market.
Second, build your creditability in that industry and use your signature files (the 2 to 3 lines under your signature) to drive people back to your site. And third, is an awesome place to get banner ads!
You can find forums by searching for “your niche forums,” or “your niche message boards” (replace your niche with your keywords). You can also go to Google, Yahoo and AOL to find “groups” which are email list communities you can join.
Leverage Major Search Engines:
The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) are obviously the largest and easiest sites that you can use to leverage traffic. There are three main ways that we get traffic from the search engines.
Free search, paid search and also using some web 2.0 techniques to get listed high in the search engines for our top keywords. We can’t go into a lot of detail about how these work in this article, but I will cover these in greater detail in other articles and on our website.
Mass Shotgun Submission:
Many of the methods that I described above to get traffic are targeted like a sniper rifle. The next two ways are much more like a shot gun.
They aren’t highly targeted, but because you are shooting out huge masses of campaigns in several directions you will pick up traffic from them just through the shear volume of people who are seeing your message.
The first and probably most well know is article submission. We use the software found at www.PostYourArticle.com to mass submit our articles to hundreds of article databases. We also try to get our articles placed on other related websites.
The second type of mass shotgun submission is press releases. While we do get some free PR from this technique, we also get thousands of back links and pages out there gathering customers and pushing them back to our websites! This is a simple way to get big results.
Offline Lead Generation:
The last way we generate leads that I wanted to talk about in this article is offline lead generation. We are starting to move to a lot of offline media to bring in customers. A few that we are testing now are infomercials, buyer lists and magazines.
We are filming our first infomercial in January of this year. We are now working with a list broker to rent buyer lists that we can send direct mail to, and we’re also going to be placing some space ads in some of the business opportunity magazines. All of these methods bring in diversified buyers into your funnel.
During my GKIC meeting, I had one guy who told me that he knew all of the methods I had mentioned above, but for some reason he still wasn’t able to build a list. So I asked him if he was actually doing any of the methods above.
He said that he hadn’t yet because he wasn’t sure what way worked the best. I was very blunt and told him, “You need to throw some stuff up against the wall, and see what sticks!”
He was so worried about finding the best thing, that he didn’t do anything. Don’t let this be you. The key to success with this business is to take action. Start moving forward quickly and you will be successful!
- Get more customers
- Get your customers to spend more
- Get your customers to buy more often
I am actually now sitting in a plane flying home from my Glazier Kennedy Inner Circle (GKIC) mastermind group. I pay $15,000 a year to be part of this and we meet three times a year with 19 other business owners.
We get to discuss our businesses, what’s working and not working and then get suggestions from the rest of the group. When I showed them our business model, the one thing from the list I mentioned above that my company had no problem with was getting more customers.
I showed them how we have built a subscriber list of about 200,000 people, and buyer lists of 40,000. The biggest focus in our business now is steps two and three. But what was amazing was that in all of the other 19 businesses I saw, they were all struggling with number one.
I had a lot of conversations with them after our meetings and they all wanted to know how I was able to get so many customers, and what they could do to replicate these results. I want to share with you some of the same strategies that I told them.
Step 1: Understanding Herd Mentality
The first key that is vital to attracting large amounts of new customers is understanding herd or community mentality. That is, people will group together based on similar beliefs, likes and dislikes.
I’m sure you remember this concept well from your days in high school. Think of how people grouped together. All of the band people hung out together, all of the wrestlers were together, all the skaters grouped together and so on.
What’s interesting about the internet is the fact that this same grouping happens, but it’s on a much larger scale. People all group together based on similar things that they like. For example, if you go to www.TheMat.com, you will see a wrestling forum with tens of thousands of active wrestlers talking about wrestling. If you go to www.SpudTech.com you will see thousands of people talking about potato guns.
People are congregating together in herds based on what they are passionate about. This is powerful because as a marketer, we are looking for targeted groups of people to put our advertising messages in front of all the time.
So the first question you need to ask yourself is this: “What is my ideal customer interested in?”
Now it’s going to be easy to pick the first few, but I want you to dig deep and think outside of the first idea that comes to you. For example, if you are selling a real estate product, obviously your ideal customer is interested in real estate, investing, money and business, but they may also be interested in politics (are they republican or democrat?), traveling the world or watching sports.
This is important, because it will be easy to target their main interests immediately (like real estate or investing) but because these are so obvious, they are the same things that your competition is already targeting.
I have friends in fitness and forex that pull thousands of customers from strong republican sites every month because they have recognized that their target customers are also republican.
Again, the key with this first step is to figure out who your target market is, then to find out where they are congregating.
Step 2: Become A Parasite
After you know who your target market is, and where they congregate your next step is to become a parasite. What I mean by a parasite is that those sites are already getting a lot of traffic from the exact same type of person who should be your customer. So you need to figure out ways to siphon off the traffic that is going to their site, and direct it to your site.
So how do you do that? You are only limited by how creative you are. Let me show you a few ideas that work well.
Find a website that has already attracted the type of customer you are looking for. The first (and best) thing I would start looking for is if that site is gathering their customers’ names and email addresses. They may do this through a pop-up, a squeeze page, a registration page or about a half dozen other ways.
If they do, the first thing you want to do is see if they would be willing to do a joint venture with you and email one of your offers to their subscribers. If they say no, then the second thing you can do is to see if you can buy a “solo email” to their list.
If they say no to that, then your third option is to see if you can buy advertising in their email list. Try to get them in this order too, because the best option is always an endorsed mailing from the owner of the list, then next best is the solo ad, and the last is the classified ad.
Be sure to set up a tracking link and ask the newsletter owner for stats on how many people the email was sent to, how many people opened the email, and how many people clicked on your ad.
Online Advertising Space:
This is probably my second favorite method of getting new customers. With this you will want to see if you can put banners, articles or anything else onto their website. The best spots are always above the fold (meaning everything you see when you first open a webpage without scrolling down).
Just like email advertising, if you can get them to become your affiliate, then it won’t cost you anything to put the ads or articles on their website. If not, you can also try to purchase advertising from them.
When purchasing banner ads, it usually works on a CPM basis meaning you pay a certain dollar amount per thousand impressions of the banner. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that your ad is in a spot that will be seen. If it’s at the bottom of the page, you’re going to be getting charged for it even if no one ever sees it. An average price to pay for banners is about $2 per 1,000 impressions.
Google Site Targeting:
Another great program that currently works on a CPM model is Google’s site targeting program. When you visit a competitor’s or another website that you have been looking to advertise on, if you see that they have Google adsense on their site, then you are in luck!
You can use Google’s site targeting program to put your ad on those sites directly without contacting the website owner. Just open your Google adwords account, and look for the site targeting section. You just tell it which pages and on what sites you want your ad to be shown on, and almost instantly your ad will start showing up in place of the google adsense ads!
Again, these also work on a CPM, so make sure the ads are above the fold so you can get maximum clickthrough rates.
Community Marketing:
Forums, community, groups and social networks are all great ways to get in front of a large group of your target audience. Most of these groups have some rules and are very strong anti-spammers, so be sure to read their rules before you play around or you will get a lot of angry people trying to shut down your website.
Now with that said, this is one of the best places to first, find quality people in your industry (usually list owners) to network with. Be very active in the communities in your target market.
Second, build your creditability in that industry and use your signature files (the 2 to 3 lines under your signature) to drive people back to your site. And third, is an awesome place to get banner ads!
You can find forums by searching for “your niche forums,” or “your niche message boards” (replace your niche with your keywords). You can also go to Google, Yahoo and AOL to find “groups” which are email list communities you can join.
Leverage Major Search Engines:
The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) are obviously the largest and easiest sites that you can use to leverage traffic. There are three main ways that we get traffic from the search engines.
Free search, paid search and also using some web 2.0 techniques to get listed high in the search engines for our top keywords. We can’t go into a lot of detail about how these work in this article, but I will cover these in greater detail in other articles and on our website.
Mass Shotgun Submission:
Many of the methods that I described above to get traffic are targeted like a sniper rifle. The next two ways are much more like a shot gun.
They aren’t highly targeted, but because you are shooting out huge masses of campaigns in several directions you will pick up traffic from them just through the shear volume of people who are seeing your message.
The first and probably most well know is article submission. We use the software found at www.PostYourArticle.com to mass submit our articles to hundreds of article databases. We also try to get our articles placed on other related websites.
The second type of mass shotgun submission is press releases. While we do get some free PR from this technique, we also get thousands of back links and pages out there gathering customers and pushing them back to our websites! This is a simple way to get big results.
Offline Lead Generation:
The last way we generate leads that I wanted to talk about in this article is offline lead generation. We are starting to move to a lot of offline media to bring in customers. A few that we are testing now are infomercials, buyer lists and magazines.
We are filming our first infomercial in January of this year. We are now working with a list broker to rent buyer lists that we can send direct mail to, and we’re also going to be placing some space ads in some of the business opportunity magazines. All of these methods bring in diversified buyers into your funnel.
During my GKIC meeting, I had one guy who told me that he knew all of the methods I had mentioned above, but for some reason he still wasn’t able to build a list. So I asked him if he was actually doing any of the methods above.
He said that he hadn’t yet because he wasn’t sure what way worked the best. I was very blunt and told him, “You need to throw some stuff up against the wall, and see what sticks!”
He was so worried about finding the best thing, that he didn’t do anything. Don’t let this be you. The key to success with this business is to take action. Start moving forward quickly and you will be successful!