Sunday Email #43 – Following The Hot Trends of Internet Marketing
If you’re new to my subscription and wondering what is a “Sunday Email”, it’s an email full of my rants, personal tips and opinions on marketing especially in the “internet marketing” niche. Sometimes, opinions on life. Whatever it is… it’ll give you value after spending time reading it. To make sure you won’t miss any future issue, subscriber for free atwww.sundayemail.com. You can still read the archive at my old blog.
You know– sometimes my Sunday Emails can be harsh. Cuts through like a ninja’s blade. But come on, they’re my rants. If I want to keep everyone happy and write about the colorful rainbow, birds chirping, flowers blooming, etc then I should just opens up a nursery home and take care of children.
So if you can relate to what I wrote when reading it– good because I know it had just served the purpose of helping people.
Re: What Is The Trend That’s Going On?
I’m not sure whether you’ve pick it up that there’s a ‘flavor of month’ product. With a sudden, your email box is filled with promotions from many internet marketers, promoting the same stuff. Coincidence?
If you can still remember, social media was the buzz, starting with Twitter and follow up with Facebook. Or the other way round.
From nowhere, suddenly, there are so many ‘super stars’ when it comes to social media. As a matter of fact, even marketers who once preached Adwords abandoned what they taught and say Facebook was the thing. Hey, Facebook sells, Adwords don’t.
Then everybody was rushing to ‘local business’ opportunity, saying how EASY it is to make money by selling to local businesses instead.
Here’s the weird part – it’s like saying this, “Oh, it’s fine if you can’t make money online dude. Just go offline because there will be suckers who might buy your idea and pay you lots of bucks to do stuff that you can’t even do it for yourself. High five!”
Let’s say if the first statement is acceptable, but there’s a second obstacle – it is not easy to get local business. Honestly, no one’s going to pay you $2K for doing stuff that do not work. Business owners are not stupid and you know what, most of them are much more experienced than you when it comes to business building. To be frank, I doubt those who taught ‘local business’ actually do local business. If you’re wondering how I know how complex local business marketing is, it’s simply because I have another company that do this stuff where we run Adwords for clients, develop CMS websites, etc.
New “flavor”? Welcome to mobile marketing. Heck, that’s not even internet marketing. 
Yeah, I know – it’s the NEXT THING and there are huge opportunities in it. But hey, how many opportunities can you juggle? Maybe a lot, who knows. The latest one was Mobile Monopoly.
But isn’t all of these are simply ‘hot trends’?
I suggest you to read the book called, “Acres of Diamonds”, personal development stuff. You can pick that up in Amazon or just do a search on Google.com.
As part of human behavior, it is our nature to “seek” new opportunities but not so much that we need THAT opportunity but our characteristic of not being to be left out.
In a nutshell, we don’t want to miss out the next big thing (if it did become one).
Sometimes, the opportunity is just in front of your eyes but you don’t see it. Let’s take social media and mobile marketing – what do they teach in common? Another channel to build a mailing list.
I was wondering, wouldn’t it be easy to build a mailing list by using the good ol’ methods like article marketing, Google Adwords, blogging, etc if you’ve already learned that in the past and proven to work for thousands of marketers? Yeah, I know – they don’t sound ‘sexy’ but I’m more interested in knowing I have money to pay my bills than being cool.
If you want to build a mailing list, all you need is to setup a converting squeeze page with a good free offer and send targeted traffic to that page. That’s it.
People are “deceived” with simplicity. They thought it has to be more difficult than this to crack the internet wealth’s code!
The concept is easy but the tough part is knowing how to create a converting squeeze page and where you can get targeted traffic. Good news is, it won’t be tough for long if you start focusing to master these skills, rather than learning about ‘local business’. Don’t you think the marketers who sold social media, mobile marketing and all sort DID master these skills and now they are making money online?
Since we’re talking about these topics, let me share with you some tips…
How To Increase Conversion On A Squeeze Page
There are many elements that influence your conversion but if I was to choose just one, I’ll focus on the free offer. What do your website visitors are actually getting for giving their name and email address to you? An ebook? Well, that’s actually not the answer I’m looking for – the answer should be information that is valuable to them.
Where To Get Targeted Traffic
Again, so many options. The answer should the traffic source that I can get immediately and the kind of traffic that is looking for what I have to offer. This is none other than Google Adwords. Yes, it’s not free but think again… is traffic from youtube.com is free? Free if you can create the video on your own but what is the likelihood you can get traffic with your video by tomorrow?
So as you can see by now, the word ‘free’ is hard to be quantified.
Here’s the #1 rule how I use Google Adwords – I’ll always drive traffic to a squeeze page to build a list, never to a salesletter to sell.
If you’ve find value in what you read today, please leave a Comment or feedback? Needless to say, I will definitely appreciate it because I read all Comments personally and gotten the chance to know you at the same time.
Patric Chan
To Anyone: You have the rights to republish this article on your blog, newsletter and so on as long as the article is not being edited at all. You don’t even need to link back to this blog and removed any links in the article – that’s totally fine.
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True Patric,
As a newbie to Internet Marketing, I’m finding all these options
to Internet Marketing a little confusing and frankly overwhelming. I’m already deleting some Marketers from my
email that i subscribed for. Not you though, so always stay
focused and give sound advice like this, especially for newbies
that are entangled in the Marketing jungle. Thanks.
Hi Patric,
Internet marketing is a field that keeps changing every year if not month. Some things that work before may not be working now. But I think the most lasting of all is the email list building. Marketers with the most targeted quality email list never fear of what is going to happen or change, unless people don’t use email anymore.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I live in Penang too and maybe we will bump into each other someday. Have a great weekend!
Thanks for the very useful comments on latest trends.You can only do so many things at once. Work on what you know, Keep repeating and you will make money.I have watched the new trends come and go over the last five years,and find that the basics still apply, when making money on the internet.
Garry
Patric thanks for another good write up.
in your article, you said never drive traffic to a sales page. What about driving traffic to sales page that have exit pop-up squeeze page?
I am not good in writing auto responder follow up email, you have any good recommendation for improving this?
Good advice from you Patric as always. Basic building blocks for a solid foundation.
It’s very well said. Instead of jumping into new marketing methods, it is simply more of deepening sales funnel such that new competitors who come in are unable to affect the business at all. It’s about how to constantly add value to own business such that the profits would ultimately cover the costs and still profit tremendously.
George
Hello Patrick!
After reading this article I feel inclined to respond to it. First of all I would like to mention that there are no “secret codes” no “loopholes” no “hidden path”. Salesletters
always say practically the same thing over and over again, they speak of some bumn who out of nowhere discovered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and he is willing to let go of it for 37 or 47 US$ so that you too can benefit and live the life you always dreamed of.
C’mon, get real. Do you think that Coca Cola is gonna sell there recipe that made them a multinational for just 47 bucks? The trouble with Internet Marketing is that it so very difficult to find honest and proper information. If it were really so easy as so many of you guy’s say then why is there no official “learning chair” at universities for I.M.? Why is there no publisher distributing a real life “Internet Marketing Magazine”? Why are there never ads in nespapers, magazines, TV programs etc for I.M. Top marketers always say only 2% of I.M. beginners are successful. Wanna know why…? Ninety eight percent of I.M. information and programs, courses, eBooks, video’s, blueprints are complete, total CRAP! Sorry for being so bold here, there are a few I.M. teachers who are honest and good and hand out good material, to be frank, you are one of them. You’re not the best but you are pointing people in the right direction, but you know very well that I.M. is a REAL business and we should treat it as a REAL business. That requires a proper business plan, a proper product and very hard work day in day out until and after you’ve established a name for yourself.
Adwords has become a playground for the rich and big companies and for I.M. marketers that participate in “joint ventures” and have email lists running into the hundreds of thousands.
Sending people to some lame “squeezepage” isn’t cutting it anymore, your add will be disabled in a matter of hours. Even with the high standard quality score of Google nowadays you are looking at at least25 to 50 cents a click, so forget Adwords, it has become unaffordable.
Internet marketing is a jungle, full of predators, wise guy’s and crackpots looking for a fast dollar and never ever deliver what they promise.
Thank you for your article, it is nice to know that you are trying to help newbies in this field.
Respectfully,
Ton
(the Netherlands)
Hi Patric
Thanks for your Sunday email. It makes a lot of sense and provides useful information, as always. Keep up the good work and telling it as it ‘really’ is, and not how the so called gurus want us to believe! I agree with Leopoldo, above, and have starting unsubscribing from many of the guru’s lists!
Cheers
Mike
I whole heartedly agree with Ton’s comments. Well said Ton!
Best wishes
Mike
Patric,
Good post. This is just some good old “down to earth” common sense advice. I think we all get caught up in the next hottest thing when we should just keep ploding along with the things that work for us.
Jackie
I appreciate the place you occupy in the IM business. Your words are right on.
On or off the net, it it surprising how many forget the importance of list building. I find this esp. true of offline businesses. I have clients that have developed huge lists of buyers but put little or no effort into developing their business by focusing on the importance of list building. I try to explain that if 1000 people come to a client’s site and only 20 buy, that is 980 that leave and very likely never return. Sadly, too many businesses simply “do get it” when addressing this subject. Too, I find that so many businesses are still not using the power of automation to “maintain” lists of prospects, much less existing buyers.
Admittedly, I get bored over the constant introduction of the latest, greatest, best and easiest way to riches. In many ways, and I esp. feel that this is applicable in American business, that new entrants into the field of business in general expect the results of their efforts to be somewhat like a trip to McDonalds. They go to one window and order and drive around the building expect instant delivery. In many ways, our “budding entrepreneurs” expect the same from their efforts. Though there are always new ways to accomplish the same objective, getting sales, the proven foundations of successful marketing are the same. I wish more people would realize that there is no “simple”, “easy” or “instant” way to success, it takes application of proven principles and a devotion to consistent action over a period of time to build a sound foundation for success.
A good article Patric. I agree about the in trend thing. One thing I noticed about IM is how people tend to go after the quick fixes and instant solutions. IM is business, that should be the proper mindset.
Patric. I was just about to start my first adwords campaign leading to a squeeze page but going through Googles Terms — they specifically state that they will ban links that go to data collection pages (that includes building a list). Do your squeeze pages ask for an email address or do they link to another page to collect the names?
I’m a Master List builder and I have built my list to over 100,000 opt-in subscribers. Patric has hit the nail squarely on the head here. I always teach my students that no matter what system you use to make money online, email marketing is the solid foundation on which to build your business.
List building is so important that I want to give you 7 undeniable truths about list building…
Fact #1 – Without your own large opt-in email contact list you will have to pay through the nose in time or money for any sort of targeted traffic to your websites. Because I have my own large opt-in list, I can’t remember the last time I had to pay for advertising to drive traffic to any of my sites.
An example would be a marketer that relied on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). He’s getting all kinds of free traffic to his website because he has his website listed on the first page of Google.
Tell me, what would this marketer do if over night Google made a small change to their site and the marketer woke up in the morning and his website was no longer listed any more.
He would be out of business. But if he would have collected the names and email addresses of all the people going to his website when the traffic was free, he would still be able to survive selling to the list he had created. But now he has to struggle paying for traffic.
Fact #2 – Without a large opt-in email contact list you have no way of building a relationship with your leads over time. It’s a known fact that most people will not buy from you after only one exposure to your product or business…
So if you don’t have a way for them to give you their email address so you can follow-up with them you are losing out on almost 99% of your sales. That means that 99% of your efforts are a waste of your time and money.
Fact #3 – Having a large and responsive opt-in email contact list is the ultimate protection against your competition. A competitor can quickly copy your product or come out with a better one… but the one thing a competitor cannot copy is your opt-in email contact list.
Fact #4 – With a large and responsive opt-in email contact list you don’t have to worry about creating your own products (if you don’t want to). Amateurs lose sleep over the product… Products are a dime a dozen. Savvy marketers focus on becoming masters at building massive high quality opt-in email lists FAST.
Fact #5 – Having a large and responsive opt-in email list allows you to basically write your own paycheck. Need a quick influx of cash… then simply send a special offer to your list.
It is the mailing to a large and responsive opt-in list that produces the most results, by far, in the quickest amount of time. You can publish an email message to your list on Friday morning and literally be producing sales by Friday afternoon.
Fact #6 – A large and responsive opt-in email list gives you power on the Internet. The person with the list makes all the rules. You will find people asking you to do joint ventures, give you their products for review and make all kinds of offers with very high commission rates just so you will indorse their products to your list.
Fact #7 – It is not hard to build a large and responsive opt-in list. Unfortunately there is not just one list building tactic you can use to build your list. List building takes many tactics working together and is what builds your list at a rapid pace.
I hope this has been helpful,
Steve Yakim
Patric,
Thanks for the post. AQ real good point. How can I help a local business when I can help myself and this mobile crap, yep that is what it is. I don’t do the tex crap either. I am blind in one eye and the other one is old and cant see that great with it. Part of being almost 69 years old/young I guess.
I have trouble just adding names and numbers to my phone. I have been on here for two years and until I learn what and how nothing is easy.I have learned something. Just because you get 300 emails a day and they are giving you free products from their friends and all you have to do is opt-in.
Pick and choose what you opt-in to download because you will end up on another list and they do the samething. The new ones have been told build,build,build your list. Don’t worry about sending some content or sending you to a blog like this with information that is useful.
I know why they need thousands and thousands of names on their list. They are lucky if 900 of them get opened. Guess I need to shut this was supposed to be your rant. Sorry send me to the back of the class with my nose in the corner. Ton made a good point also.
Thank you Patric for trying to help newbies in this field. Until I make my first dollar I will be a newbie.
Respectfully,
James
Hi Patric,
Excellent article. By the way you mentioned squeeze page as part of your list building strategy. May I know where I get get squeeze page templates that are optimized for list building?
Thanks
Max
Hi,
Thanks for all of the comments, although I can’t reply to everyone but I READ EVERY SINGLE ONE personally.
KCLau: Sure thing, maybe we’ll bump to each other in Penang one day.
Jonathan: The purpose of running the Adwords is to generate leads, not to get sales upfront. Besides, your landing page will be disapproved if you have pop up on it.
Ton: Thanks for taking the time to elaborate your point.
John: The model is simple, extremely simple but it’s not ‘easy’ to do it – it’s through real process of building a business and many forgotten that.
Steve: Thanks for sharing!
Maxwell: For my squeeze page, normally, I’ll design my own by getting designers to help me. But if not, there are squeeze page software out there that you can buy or squeeze page templates. Search around in Google.com, you’ll probably find a few.
Thanks
Patric Chan
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Hello Patric.
Well done. Thanks for all the good points and bringing us back to an area of sanity.
And thanks to all the others who have posted here, reinforcing what Patric says.
Its much appreciated.
Regards,
Rob
Hi Ton,
A lot of people buy into the hype and great marketing.
There are so many tools and tactics being marketed online.
Sometimes it is easy to forget that these are just tools, you need to first of all have a business or at least an idea of what you want to sell.
I keep advising my friends and reminding myself (because I do get carried away) that you first need to know what busineess you want to do.
Once that is decided, then you can apply all these marketing tools and tactics.
It’s just like buying a fancyful car and then not knowing where you want to go with the car.
Business basics like having a good business plan are essential as what you have rightfully mentioned, Ton.
All the best to everyone.
Alvin
Hi patric,
Another good article. Thanks for sharing.
Warmest Regards,
Ken Ng.
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