Business Development Advice

It looks like tough times are ahead but if you want to recession proof your business Guerrilla Marketing can bring you two solutions:

Guerrilla Marketing Main Event

This is an intensive eight week program with Jay Conrad Levinson, Mitch Meyerson and six Guerrilla Marketing Coaches.

I worked with Mitch Meyerson on the Guerrilla Marketing Coaching program and it was a great experience so I am sure that this program will be a great benefit to anyone wanting to prepare their business in case of recession.

Guerrilla Marketing Main Event

Guerrilla Marketing During Tough Times

Some years ago Jay Conrad Levinson wrote the book “Guerrilla Marketing During Tough Times” which is available as an E-Book.

Guerrilla Marketing During Tough Times

Remember the old saying “proper preparation prevents particularly poor performance.”

Hopefully it won’t be needed but I am not optimistic about the economies in the UK, USA and Europe.

I also highly recommend the Guerrilla Marketing Association which has an amazing amount of free resources and a 30 day free trial to encourage you to give it a try.

I am fascinated by the art of great copy and the way it unconsciously persuades a prospect to buy.

Possibly the best copywriter in the world is John Carlton and I was introduced to his thoughts through Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System coaching program where John is extensively featured in the marketing module.

He very rarely holds events to teach people how to write copy but he is about to release his Copywriting Sweatshop 2 DVD set on March 21, 2008.

As part of the launch you can get some free tips from a master copywriting by:

1. Watching the videos and then sign up to receive news of more freebies.
    
2. Signing up to his 7 day email course

I’ve done both.

Great copywriting is often the difference between OK performance and good performance. Or to put it personally, the difference between driving around in a four year old car or a brand spanking new car which is the envy of your neighbours.

Just think about it.

If you market by email or direct mail, it is the copywriting which may move your response rates from 0.5% to 2%. That’s a four times increase in your sales.

If you market on the Internet, it is the copywriting which determines whether the reader bounces on your page and bounces straight off or stays around and reads what you have to say. But then the visitor doesn’t just read, they click through to your order page.

Isn’t it about time that you knew more about copywriting?

“But what if I end up buying the program?”

Great, can you think of any better proof that John’s ideas work?

Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 2.0 pre-launch rolls on with another 75 minutes of video.

This time we have three Internet marketing legends talking together:

1. Jeff Walker
    
2. Frank Kern
    
3. Eben Pagan - Get Altitude

How to get people to read your copy is just one of the topics these three discuss along with how to work with joint venture partners and create an instant.

Sounds fascinating doesn’t it so click over to the latest Product Launch Formula video and surrender your email address to get the full seventy plus minutes.

You know you want to, so just click over to the video.

It is very informal and unless you like the look of Frank Kern’s legs, I would download it as an mp3 and listen to it rather than sit glued to your computer screen.

I have now completed my first exposure to the CDs and DVDs of the Main Event conference from July 2007 included as a major element of Rich Schefren & Strategic Profits Business Acceleration Program.

Included In This Review

The final four sessions of the conference from:

1. Jeff Walker of Product Launch Formula fame
    
2. MaryEllen Tribby of Early To Rise (Agora) 
    
3. Mike Filsaime - Butterfly Marketing and the Seven Figure Code
    
4. Rich Schefren wrap up session with final closing remarks by Tom McCarthy

I have made the point before that this was a “no pitch” event but it is inevitable that in a 60 to 90 minute presentation, your appetite is whetted to learn more.

Jeff Walker & the Product Launch Formula

Jeff seems like a really nice chap and he was introduced as being responsible for possibly the most important marketing concept.

The Product Launch Formula has been a major success, both behind the million dollar Internet marketing launches and many much smaller launches of real world products.

As it happens Jeff Walker is currently launching the Product Launch Formula 2.0, the new improved version updated for the lessons learnt from the last two and a half years. Take a look at the first video. I recommend that you sign up as it certainly makes it easier to watch the second video.

Jeff’s presentation at the conference was quite low key. He told a few stories about some of the launches he has been involved in (including that Mike Filsaime went live with his launch with a sales letter that said “insert bullets here” because the server was so busy, he couldn’t FTP the full sales letter) and explain the thinking behind the Product Launch Formula.

If you listen, you will certainly see that Jeff Walker is strongly influenced by Robert Cialdini’s work on influence and persuasion but the Product Launch Formula is much more than that.

A launch is an event with the build up, the launch and then the post launch activities to continue generating revenue.

This is the session I have listened to most frequently so far, partly because it is interesting (and having seen several major Internet marketing launches recently, you suddenly understand why they did what they did) and partly because I have wanted to become more familiar with the Product Launch Formula as I help to promote version 2.0.

MaryEllen Tribby - Early To Rise

MaryEllen Tribby gave a talk on direct marketing as the CEO and publisher of the Early To Rise newsletter.

In the 15 months she has been there she has seen it grow from $5m to $20m a year so she clearly knows what she is doing.

In some ways you could say that this was standard material as she contrasted direct marketing to brand marketing and then went through the important direct marketing terms and concepts.

However this is an area where I believe that you can always get better and it pays to listen to people who are successful.

What blew me away was that there was a long question and answer session between MaryEllen and the audience and I couldn’t believe how open she was prepared to be.

It was fascinating to learn how a big Internet marketing company works even though the Early To Rise newsletter makes little impact to me. It certainly connects with a large number of people so I must make time to study the techniques.

Mike Filsaime - Butterfly Marketing and the 7 Figure Code

Before I watched the video I had always viewed Mike Filsaime with a certain level of scepticism.

Not because I have anything against him but I think he was the first high profile Internet marketer I was exposed to.

I now know how intensively some of them can market but when I was young, innocent and naive, email after email offering me one revolutionary product after another made me resist his messages.

For some reason I didn’t unsubscribe (perhaps thinking that when I had the time to go through all the emails there could be some nuggets) so I just routed the emails to a separate folder.

So I came into this presentation wary of what I was about to hear.

Mike Filsaime split his presentation into two:

1. Viral marketing
    
2. A walk through of his 7 Figure Code launch

This is high intensity content as he explained the issues involved with creating a marketing virus and in particular twelve factors required to create buzz - the desire for other people to want to get involved and pass on your message.

Mike Filsaime then went on to explain how you put together your viral campaign by using ideas like the tell a friend script and incentivising a person to want to pass on your message.

I am certainly attracted to the idea of viral campaigns. It is much better for a friend to say to you “have a look at this, it is great” than a marketer sending message after message out waving the red flag trying to attract your attention.

In the second part of the presentation he focused on the 7 Figure Code launch which followed Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula.

I have no idea whether he was paid by Jeff but if he wasn’t he should have been because it was fascinating to see the inside story of a big Internet launch and has made me keener to know more about the Product Launch Formula.

I have also revised my opinion of Mike Filsaime since he made a good impression on me and I have bought the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript but not yet read/reviewed it.

 
  Save
  Your Online Business

I know it’s cheesy but I couldn’t resist.Rich Schefren & the Attention Age DoctrineIn the wrap up session Rich Schefren returned to the issues of the Attention Age where the problems were covered in his first Attention Age Doctrine which was later updated to include some of the solutions.

You can get a free copy of the Attention Age Doctrine.

There is some unnecessary hype in there but I do recommend that you read it. 

The report made me think about the problems of marketing in a world overwhelmed with interruption marketing messages and customers learning to tune out everything they don’t want to know about. 

This is an important issue and is one of the driving forces for my customer focused entrepreneur initiative.

Attention is in short supply and people will only give attention to people who treat it carefully. In some ways this harks back to my early experience of Mike Filsaime when I felt overwhelmed with messages that hadn’t made a connection.

Summary

I still have a long way to go in my review of the entire Business Acceleration Program but I can say that the July 2007 Rich Schefren conference was excellent.

In February 2008, the New Beginnings conference was held and I am looking forward to receiving my DVDs of the presentations. You may be interested in taking a look at the Dream Team Home Study Program.

The price will increase, so if you are tempted, you may want to grab your copy now.

As for whether I will recommend people buy the Business Acceleration Program, I haven’t reached a conclusion.

I have the personal productivity training to go through yet which is supposed to make a big difference to my ability to process and retain information so I am looking forward to that.

There are also a series of follow up coaching calls but Rich Schefren and his friends have fallen behind schedule on that and there are various payment in full bonuses which have not yet materialised.

I am a believer and a fan of Rich Schefren and seem to be buying everything he issues but at the moment I am concerned about the price hike on the Business Acceleration Program but you can read the sales letter here.

Perhaps this is mid-course blues but after overloading us with time consuming activities in the early weeks, democratically agreeing to have a one week break (I voted for two weeks), I am not getting all the benefits I had hoped.

The week on video largely passed me buy although I can certainly understand why Traffic Geyser is highly recommended.

I like the idea of video and StomperNet used it to great effect with the SMARTS launch and the Go Natural 2.0 series of videos which should be starting again soon, but I don’t really see it succeeding that well in the business advice market.

Rich Schefren did some pretty neat feeds from the New Beginnings conference which he put on his blog.

Jeff Walker seems to be doing better with the first video for his Product Launch Formula 2.0 but there seems little about business videos which are viral. I guess that they are just not entertaining or original enough.

John Cleese did a great series of training videos with Video Arts which used humour to show management fallibilities in the seventies and eighties. These were excellent although very expensive but we do need to find a way to make these business videos entertaining at a number of different levels.

One problem with the SMARTs course is the old chestnut of having to catering for people at different levels of knowledge so some training has been slow, even for someone as inexperienced in the social media as me. I do accept though that much of the social media success is built on layers so if the foundations are weak, everything you build on top will be weaker than it should be.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some very good sections in the SMARTS course and some of the content of week six had me leaping into action.

I like the way StomperNet seek customer opinion and the program is changing but my feelings are that this is too intensive for the short duration of the course.

At the moment, the benefits are mixed.

Traffic on my main Business Coaching blog has been down in February where I had hoped it would increase. This is partly caused by the time allocation issue as my time has been spent watching the videos and building my Squidoo lens rather than delivering extra content on the blog.

Several of the Squidoo pages are very successful, consistently getting 5 to 15 hits per day and on the Product Launch Formula, my page achieved over 50 hits one day when it was number 1 in Google.

Hopefully my interest in producing videos will increase when I have finished Andy Jenkins (co-founder of StomperNet) bonus guide to producing videos. He has many years of experience in producing videos and the Going Natural 2.0 videos were superb.

You can see for yourself here.

Going Natural 2.0 - Video # 1 - Double Traffic

Week 7 is about blogging so that should be interesting.

After a longer delay than I was expecting, Jeff Walker has released his next video for the launch of Product Launch Formula 2.

In this video he tells the story of how the horizontal helix (it’s like climbing a series of revenue steps which get higher and higher) turned a herb educational game into a $100k a year product.

Jeff has been sneaky, half the video is available for free (no sign up - just press play) which tells the story of the launch up to about $3k per month but for the remaining 23 to 24 minutes you have to trade your email address.

Personally I don’t regard this as a problem because you can always opt out of the emails later.

I recommend that you don’t bother with the first video because its contents is repeated in the second, so don’t make it difficult for yourself. Just give up your email address and watch the fascinating video. 

Where is it? Nearly forgot. This is the video for the horizontal helix launch

 Creating Your Front End Product

This is step 3 in the Nitro Blueprint System for creating an online business with the focus on creating your front end product.

While this is primarily aimed at people wanting to develop Information product businesses online, it is also worth remembering that information products can also be a great way to develop the relationship with a customer for real world, physical products.

For example my parents have just had a new kitchen and it has all gone very smoothly but it did bring back memories of how overwhelmed I felt when we were looking to choose a new kitchen. There were so many different styles, units, handles, work surfaces, accessories. This list seemed endless and we did need to be gently led through the process and that could have been done by an information product like “How To Choose The Kitchen Of Your Dreams.”

Anyway back to Step 3 of the Nitro course and the importance of having the right front end product.

While you should make most of your money of back end products with happy customers, if you fail to tempt enough people into beginning the relationship with you, then your business is destined to struggle.

It is just like this blog. I want people to maintain the relationship by subscribing to the RSS feed but I know that you won’t have any temptation to do that if I fail to deliver pertinent comments, assessments and advice.

The Nitro system provides good solid advice in how to make this front end attractive which I am obviously not going to repeat. That wouldn’t be fair to Kevin Wilke and the Nitro team, especially when the Nitro Blueprint System is available at such a bargain price.

Remember your information product could be a written report or e-book (or even the option of a properly bound book like Nikki Pilkington’s 299 Steps To Website Heaven).

One of the dilemmas for new marketers is the conflicting desire - to go where all the customers are while avoiding your competitors. That is some challenge and while it would obviously be nice to find some keyword phrases with lots of requests but no matches, you are likely to have to decide between a trade-off.

Popularity v little competition.

I have recently blogged about the problems of choosing a niche and the difficulty in deciding whether to be a generalist or specialist on my Business Coaching blog.

My belief for Internet marketers is that you have to find your own special focus where you can stand out and get to the top of the search engines but then  to develop a series of products which will appeal to the same customers and which can cross-promote each other.

One tip that isn’t mentioned in the Nitro Blueprint but I have head my idol, Jay Abraham mention is the Amazon school of marketing.

Just pop along to Amazon.com or your local Amazon site and look at the top selling books in your area. Where is their focus, what type of titles do they use? Then have a look at the reviews and you should see people writing 5 stars reviews explaining what they like and people on the 1 & 2 star reviews saying what they don’t like.

Another idea I really like, and I can’t remember where I picked it up, is to get other people to effectively write your product for you.

The example I heard I think was about recipes for quiches but I had been planning to use the same principle with a prospective client I had in the Carribean food industry. I thought that I could create a blog and get people to tell me their recipes for a mention in the book along with interesting twists in recipes.

I wonder if it could work with profit tips?

I am still very impressed with the Nitro Blueprint System for developing Internet businesses and I recommend that you take a look at the sales letter and videos to learn more.

Jeff Walker, the man behind many of the biggest Internet launches in history withdrew his very successful program, Product Launch Formula in mid February for one very good reason.

The new Product Launch Formula is being released.

This is a way of building up interest in a product launch so that when the new product is released, customers are desperate to buy.

 Jeff is very keen to point out, the techniques work for real world products just as well as those released by the Internet marketing superstars.

I can’t tell you how good Product Launch Formula 2.0 is because it is not yet released and I haven’t had a chance to evaluate it but I can tell you that people rave about the original version of Product Launch Formula.

Rich Schefren, one of my personal heroes, introduced Jeff Walker at his Main Event conference in July 2007 by saying Jeff was responsible for “the most powerful marketing strategy I’ve ever come across.”

If you are thinking about launching a new product or even launching a new business (because they have  many of the same characteristics), I urge you to watch the launch the very carefully. Just click here, watch the video and sign up on the email list.

The point is not whether you buy the Product Launch Formula 2.0 but that you learn from the process.

This is your chance to watch the man recognised as the leading expert in small business/Internet product launches, launch his own new product. You should be able to learn so much from just watching how Jeff goes through the process.

I don’t think anything will beat watching Jeff Walker take you through the process one step at a time so do get involved.

Analyse the videos, look at the way the case studies are organised, watch how he builds up the momentum to his launch and perhaps you will feel your own interest and excitement growing.

This is good because you are really experiencing the launch and you will learn what emotions you need to create in your prospective buyers.

You don’t have to buy the product. You still have your own free will.

Just watch the master at work and learn by starting with the video

I bought into the StomperNet SMARTS program after Rich Schefren had really focused my find on the Web 2.0 social media phenomenon and I realised that I knew very little about how to use these new technologies for marketing purposes.

I was also very impressed with Andy Jenkins series of get natural videos, both in terms of content and delivery and if you haven’t yet watched them then I do recommend that you do because unless you are a world class website expert I believe you will learn from the experience.

We should be in Week 6 but really we are in week 5 of the SMARTS coaching course.

Boy is it tough.

Don Crowther, the SMARTS leader is an excellent teacher but there is just so much to do both in terms of watching the training videos and then putting what we have learnt into practice.

I can’t say too much about the program. Remember I have splashed out my hard earned cash for this course and so have the other 2,000 plus members of the program and you haven’t and StomperNet are very keen to keep certain things in house.

Now here is the dilemma.

As I do things and create more attention and my attention to my two blogs (the other one is my blog on business coaching ) you will see what I am up to and indeed to promote some of the things I am doing so that my regular readers get value, I have to tell you about them.

A bit of a catch 22 there then.

So here goes.

First of all Facebook.

Are you on there and if so, would you like to be my friend? You can find my profile here.

There is a lot that can be done with Facebook. The traffic it gets every day is awesome and it has much more momentum than MySpace so if you only have time for one, I recommend that you choose Facebook.

OK I am biased against MySpace. I have tried at least three times to register and failed each time because of some technical glitch. It’;s as if they have programmed into the code “Paul Simister! We don’t want him.” so I can take a hint.

The next revelation is that I have fallen in love with a website called Squidoo.

This was created by Seth Godin (famous author on marketing) and it is such an easy way to create great pages (or as they call it lenses) which promote your business while educating the readers.

What I like in particular is you can build in reader interaction through votes, comments and changing the order of lists and adding extra points.

But this is just the start because I have a host of other lens in the pre-publication stage.

I love Squidoo. Easy and fun to do, you get good search engine rankings and extra traffic.

What is there not to like?

Sadly the SMARTS program is closed and may never re-open so if you want the inside track on Squidoo, take a look at Social Networking on Squidoo. I have bought it to make sure that I don’t miss a trick because Squidoo is becoming the third major leg of my Internet presence after my two blogs and my main website.

 Planning Your Business Strategy and

Creating Your Offers

This is step 2 in the Nitro Blueprint System for developing a successful online business and I continue to be very impressed with the Nitro system.

Business Plans Don’t Have To Be Long and Boring

Read any book or guide to starting a business and you will be told that you need to write a business plan.

I completely agree but often people fail to distinguish between two totally different plans:

1. A business plan to act as a guide to the entrepreneur/business owner as the business develops and to capture the current thoughts about the business and its future.
    
2. A business plan to take to a bank or other someone else to help you to raise finance.

These are totally different purposes.

If you don’t need to raise cash then the plan is for you and has to capture the logic of:

1. What you will sell to whom
      
2. Why they should buy
    
3. How they will find out about your products or service
    
4. How you are going to supply your product
      
5. How you are going to make sure that you make a profit and a reasonable estimate of your expected results over the first 12 months.

No over-complicated numbers, no summary of the management but a simple document that records your current ideas and logic.

Just writing down the plan will force you to think and the value is in your thinking and considering different alternatives and not in a fancy 50 page plan which changes within days of being completed.

Nitro Agree

I was pleased to see that in Step 2 Planning Your Business and Creating Your Offers Nitro agree.

In fact they don’t call it a business plan but a business map which is intended to be a fun way to capture the big picture of your business idea with 5 key parts including a few key numbers.

If you are scared of numbers and accounts then don’t be.

Just get a pen and paper or create a simple spreadsheet and start “playing with numbers”. I recommend that you wear different hats to do different forecasts:

1. An optimistic one which can be used to show how much your business could make if things go well (and if this doesn’t excite you then you have probably picked the wrong niche),
    
2. A realistic one of what you think may happen based on your research and
    
3. A pessimistic version where things take longer than expected, initial take up is less than you hoped and your prices are less.

Just focus on the major drivers of your business so it may be:

1. Number of leads
2. Percentage of leads converted into orders possibly with a time lag
3. Number of orders - this is 1 x 2
4. Average profit per order
5. Your contribution or gross profit = 3 x 4
6. Your overhead costs
7. Your net profit = 5-6

That doesn’t look too scary does it?

If you have a continuity program (recurring income) you would then have a separate section between 5 & 6 to capture the profit from the ongoing income which should build up nicely.

Creating Your Offers

The Nitro Blueprint System is keen to make sure that you have set a direction and also in Step 2, you are asked to start thinking about how your are going to pitch your product to prospective customers. It is revised and polished later but in this section, you are just asked to start formulating your ideas.

Conclusion

I remain very positive about the Nitro Blueprint System but I think I have said before, it is not a quick and easy solution as it requires focus and regular investments of time.

If you are thinking of buying, you can see the sales letter or the Nitro videos or wait as I continue my slower than expected walk-through of the process and my review of the Nitro Blueprint System.