Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

Most recently attributed to Lewis Carrol (Through the Looking Glass), the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme actually contains several important insights of value to marketers.

First and foremost, Humpty Dumpty’s position high up on the wall might be interpreted as the distance so many of us try to keep from our markets.  I see this again and again in the students who become obsessed with my “abstraction tools and methods” (quantifying things in spreadsheets, building statistical models, and predicting consumer behavior… much of which is covered in Glenn Club)

Abstraction is a vital tool for marketers… and the absolute best marketers I know are all fans of spreadsheets and segmented response rates.

True enough.

But it’s all too easy to fall in love with abstraction, and in doing so, to lose touch with the market.

Of course, the lesson Humpty Dumpty taught us was that to do so is to set oneself up for a BIG fall… to suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by competitors, or with customers leaving you in droves when the market takes a dramatic shift without your awareness.

More importantly though,”all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”…

There are some falls from which you can’t recover, no matter how smart you are, no matter who you surround yourself with, and no matter how many resources are at your disposal.

I learned that lesson personally from a treasured mentor when I was a very young psychologist (thankfully before I started working with suicidal people!)

One of my first patients was a young, inner city woman with who came to the clinic where I was an intern in order to get help in leaving a life of prostitution.  She was depressed and anxious, but genuinely interested in making a change… against the interest of several people in her circles (I leave that part to your imagination).

So here’s what happened.  (Changing several details to protect her identity, but not the essence of the story)

I made a genuine connection with her in the first few sessions.   I helped her talk about her plans, got her connected with a social worker, helped her get involved with the relevant community resources, and finally to begin opening up to me about how she got into the life in the first place.

And then I broke the egg.

It was a simple, uncaring moment…

I had to excuse myself to use the lavoratory…

And before I went, I reached into my suit jacket (hanging on the chair), and grabbed my wallet to take with me.

She blurted out “I ain’t no thief!” (she was right), and wasn’t there when I returned.

When I went to talk to my supervisor about the incident, I was SURE he would tell me what to say, and how/when to say it to get her back.  I imagined he was experienced enough to know how to solve any situations.

But he simply told me “Glenn, you can’t unbreak an egg”

Ouch!

A painfull lesson which stayed with me always.

I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and we were playing at the big boy’s table.  People’s lives were on the line.

Now, the same thing happens to most marketers at some point in their career.

For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken with people who have a VERY successful product they’ve been selling almost entirely by Joint Venture, and they’re SURE they’ll be able to sell it to a cold audience via PPC.   Many have developed years worth of support materials, follow ups, etc., and are sure these will be of great help in porting the success to the paid traffic arena.

To no avail though… because that egg’s REALLY hard to unbreak.

One of the quintessential marketing lessons in the last decade (especially as the internet evolves and people expect increasingly more specialization) is “You can market to the audience you’ve researched and built your foundation on… period”

Or maybe you chose a price point much too high for your market out of the gate, but you sold a few hundred units anyway.  Sorry… almost impossible to go backwards once you do that.  (You can always go up, it’s very hard to go down without really pissing off your customers)

Or maybe you spent a year building a product in the absence of research and a specific audience to sell it to, and now you’re knocking your head against the wall trying to make progress.

I rarely see those projects work.

There ARE indeed some eggs which all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put back together again!

As a thought experiment, perhaps you can look back on your own marketing projects (or heaven forbid, one you’re working on right now), and ask yourself if you’re trying to unbreak an egg?  Much better to know sooner than later.

Food for thought,

Dr. G

PS – Although the painful lesson never left me, I actually DID unbreak the egg with that patient.   She eventually came in for another session, at which point I immediately handed her my wallet and asked her to hold it while I went to the bathroom.  She smiled knowingly, sat down, and handed it back to me with every dollar intact.  Pivotal moment for her (and myself)

An evil child says:

• “Gimme”
• “Mine, mine, mine!”
• “Gotta have it, gonna take it, get out of my way!”

When do your customers think like that?

For starters, when you present a UNIQUE SOLUTION to a DESPERATE PROBLEM, with OVERWHELMING PROOF you’re for real.

Go write that now on the mirror in the bathroom so you’ll have something useful to memorize the next time  you’re doing unspeakable things.

• A DESPERATE PROBLEM:  means something they’ve gotta solve now unless they’re willing to live with worsening pain and consequence.   (Website sales are deteriorating,  poisonous Radon gas is threatening to kill their home sale, biological clock close to running out and no mate in site,  diabetes imminently threatening your vision, etc)
• A UNIQUE SOLUTION: means something they haven’t heard before, and can’t get from anyone else but you (The hyper-responsive marketing method, a “Men Who Want to Get Married and Have Lots of Babies Now” matchmaking service,  a one-of-a-kind patented radon gas mitigation tube, a “Reverse Your Diabetes Naturally in 30 Days or Less” DVD)
• OVERWHELMING PROOF: means you don’t make ANY claims you can’t back up 3 times over.  (17 profitable niche markets + $14M in consulting services sold; 42 new baby pictures from last month alone, a dozen before and after radon test sheets with sworn affidavits and state-certified results; Harvard conducted scientific studies proving 82% of diabetes patients were able to cease all medication without complication, etc)

A desperate problem, a unique solution, and overwhelming proof.

There ARE 12 other reasons your site might not be selling as well as it should be, but if you get the above 3 right, you’re at least half way home.

AND…

If you’re REALLY struggling, I’ll bet my pancreas you’re missing at least one of the magic 3.

Answer these questions honestly, right now:

• What, specifically, is the desperate problem you’re addressing on your site? And HOW desperate are your prospects, really?  (Can you help them feel more desperate by repositioning yourself?)
• WHY is your solution unique? Fill in the blank in detail “Only my product or service can solve their desperate problem because only my product or service has or does _______________”
• Why the hell should they believe you? Where’s your PROOF?  Have you overwhelmed them with it?

Seriously…

If there’s ONE thing I learned in 2010, it’s this… don’t go into a business where you can’t answer address the above three questions passionately.

The reason this makes me want to repeatedly slap myself in the head with a spatula, by the way, is that I suddenly realized  even though I’ve launched many profitable businesses, most of them were the WRONG ones…

Terry Dean finally convinced me that I have  fought my way to profitability by the strength of my research DESPITE missing at least one of the above in most of my endeavors .   If I’d only known the above first, I’d be a lot wealthier than I am now!

Which leads me to my final point.

“Glenn’s Research Abilities + Terry Dean’s 14 Years of Internet Conversion Experience = Ability to Do Some Real Damage!”

Well, Terry and I have been spending Sundays together all fall recording videos, totally debriefing each other  on our respective systems, figuring out how it all fits together, step by step…

So we can teach YOU how to really do some damage online.

We’re still about 6 to 8 weeks away from launching the product, coaching systems, events, etc.

But if you want to be among the first to know when it’s ready (and be sure to get the introductory pricing, free pre-event webinars, etc), head on over to TotalConversionCode.com and leave us your email.

You’ll be glad you did.

Oh….

And we’d LOVE for you to leave your answers to the exercise above in the comments section if you don’t mind.

What’s the desperate problem you’re addressing in your market?

What’s your unique solution?

Can you prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt?  Overwhelm us!

To your success!,

Dr. G

Total Conversion Code | Hyper Responsive Marketing

PS – I’ve totally updated the “How to Choose Your Market” product with Terry’s help for 2011 too. It’s available right now for FREE in the Hyper Responsive Marketing club,… but not for long.  Right after Perry promotes the club one last time this year I’m going to pull it out as it’s own product, so if you’re interested, get into the club now. (If you’re already a member, just visit the bonus section and download or view)

Which is a big fancy word I learned in my corporate consulting days for “separate your market into reasonably large groups of reasonably unique desire and serve them separately.”

Most internet marketers don’t bother with segmentation at all.  They think their market is comprised of a bunch of white ping pong balls zipping past them, and so they gear all their marketing communications to white ping pong balls.

Which is FINE  IF 80% of your market really IS white ping pong balls… having essentially the same needs, wants, language, emotions, and concerns…

It’s ALSO FINE  if your market is so small that the financial boost you’d see from segmenting it is outweighed by the time and resources needed to manage a separate and distinct sales process…

But if you’ve got more than one color of ping pong ball in your market ( most markets do) AND it’s large enough that boosting the response of the new  segments financially outweighs the resources required to do it… then you’re leaving  money on the table.

Sometimes a LOT of money.

Because you can’t underestimate the value of showing people that what you’ve got is EXACTLY for them.  Not 65% for them… EXACTLY for them.

How do you decide?

The key is in guesstimating, in dollars and sense, what improvement you might expect to see, and what it might cost you to execute the segmentation.

Let’s look at how you might do this.

Generally, I assume that segmentation should boost response by 25% to 50% for minority segments broken out of the main marketing stream. (You can see this effect in Adwords itself when you “peel and stick” keywords into their own group and write ads specifically for those groups… in fact, the impact is often MUCH greater)

I’ve definitely been VERY  wrong about this (in both directions), but as a rough guideline it’s a pretty good one.

Add to the equation the fact you can usually charge MORE for a segmented solution than you can for something perceived to be for the market as a whole. (That’s why we pay more for medical specialists than our general practitioners)

Then do the math, look at the estimated financial bump, compare that to the resources required to make it happen and decide.

A fictitious example will illustrate the point.

Let’s use a new “Mega-Wonderful-Diet-Solution”, and assume we’re attracting 100,000 visitors a month to our site for simplicity, selling a product for $100, and converting 1% of the visitors.

Also for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume we’re selling an e-book with 100% profit margin (we must have a really beneficent payment processor who’s granted us zero fee processing and no customer service costs too).

In this ridiculously oversimplified example, we’d have a visitor value of $1 ($100 x 1%), and a profit of $100,000 each month.

Now, what would happen if we did a little research and segmented our sales process into “The  Low Carb Mega Wonderful Diet Solution” and “The Low Fat Mega Wonderful Diet Solution”

To estimate that, we’d have to know something about what percentage of the market were attracted to Low Carb vs. Low Fat vs. Other Types of Diets.

Let’s assume it’s 40% Low Carb, 25% Low Fat, and 35% Other Types of Diets.

And let’s further assume we’re gonna get just a 40% bump in overall dollar value for each visitor in the new segments.

So now, the Low Carb people (40% of the market)  become worth $1.25 per visitor, the Low Fat people (25% of the market) become worth $1.25 per visitor, and the rest of the market stays at $1 per visitor.

40% x $1.40
25% x $1.40
35% x $1

———-

= 100% x $1.26 (when you do the math above)

So we’d be looking at an overall bump in visitor value of about 26%

Now, at 100,000 visitors per month, we’d be estimating $26,000 per month additional gross, or $312,000 per year.

Is it worth it?

You’d have to ask what resources would have to be put into achieving this segmentation, and compare that to the business owners other opportunities, priorities, and overall goals.

If all that were required were maintaining two separate advertising systems, the answer would very likely be yes.   But if it required developing a whole new product line, the owner would have some harder thinking to do.

But that decision would be a LOT easier with these estimates than in a vacuum (which is how most people make their segmentation decisions… and probably why most marketers never do)

The point here isn’t to give you a hard and fast rule to decide how and when to segment.  It’s to teach you to “think on paper” about it in a more methodical way.

On a practical basis, I’ve found segmenting a market enormously helpful.   I used to run my body language market segmented into 8 groups.  It was the difference between $500/mo profit and $3500/mo profit.

The cost?  Running 8 adgroups instead of 1, keeping people in 8 separate lists in aweber, and 8 separate salesletters.  (I hired a writer to seriously alter one letter 8 times based upon my understanding of each segment)

It was a great marketing experiment,  but maintaining 8 separate salesletters and email follow up lists was a real pain.  So I condensed it into the biggest 3.   And after I got slapped, I just let it run with ONE segment, because at this point I live in a world with more zeroes… my resources are better spent elsewhere.   Though as I’ve built up my outsourcing team and systems, segmenting smaller markets is looking  more attractive, and I’ll once again attend to it.

Do you see how estimating the impact of segmentation helps?   And how the DECISION to segment changes depending upon where you are in your company and the resources involved in execution?

In sum,  unless you serve an exceptionally small market with a very, very narrow positioning, there are almost always unique segments in your market, and money on the table to be picked up by addressing them.   But you’ve gotta weigh the predicted value of segmentation against the resources necessary to execute it.

There are much fancier sets of statistics and procedures for making these calculations, but I hope I’ve gotten you started thinking the right way about these decisions with some simple math.

All my best practices are STILL in the hyper-responsive club.  (Note: that’s the reason I haven’t done anything “shiny and new” for some time… I’ve just been pouring my best thinking into the club, rewarding my most loyal customers.  BUT, I’ll shortly be revealing a Video Marketing service, a Conversion product, and a thoroughly updated Choose Your Market product.  Join the club for best pricing and earlier notice when most of these are launched)

All my best,

Dr. G

“Outsourcing Disasters and Duplicating Failure”

The desire to duplicate oneself and offload work is only human nature. In fact, it’s one of the strongest elements I’ve observed in the entrepreneurial mindset.

So it’s only natural that people want to COPY other sales systems, and OUTSOURCE all the work involved in building their own.

The problem comes when people don’t take the time to ensure they’re copying SUCCESS, and when they try to OUTSOURCE something they don’t really fully understand or know how to supervise.

Because here’s the secret…

The success of a sales system doesn’t lie entirely in the words on the sales page, or even necessarily in the system as a whole.    It relies much more on the understanding the writer has of the market. And since copycats can’t legally plagiarize the whole system, absent this understanding, they wind up copying an empty shell.

Moreover, it’s rare that a WHOLE system is successful. Lacking an exhaustive understanding of the market in which the system operates, people are prone to copy the failing elements just as easily as the successful ones.

In other words, many competitors are succeeding in spite of bad marketing, because just a few elements are right on target.  Without thorough research and market intelligence, how do you know you’re not duplicating their failure?

There’s also a lot of talk these days of just outsourcing your marketing, or your market research, Glenn-Style.

Now, I’m totally in favor of getting help to scale up your operations. In fact, I’ve been working through John Jonas’ materials, and they’ve helped me to hire no less than 8 people in the Phillipines now.    (You can watch the Outsourcing Webinar Replay through my affiliate link here.  John has a lot of very useful advice for hiring full timers at $300/mo, and provides some training to get them started.  I have a LOT of good experience with his hiring advice and resources, but can’t really say one way or the other about the training he provides for the outsourcers — I’d prefer you used them to do things you already do very well and just want to offload from your plate)

There’s a LOT you CAN outsource. You CAN outsource all the grunt work of setting up your automatic intelligence machine, doing some of the initial scanning of social media conversations, installing and managing your websites, installing wordpress blogs and plug ins, doing routine backups, setting up your surveys, programming scripts and databases, running through the first set of codes for your survey analysis, transcription, audio editing, video editing, article distribution, social bookmarking, data entry, a very, very rough first draft of your copywriting, and so on)

But in my opinion, you can’t outsource the STRATEGIC THINKING AND MARKET IMMERSION necessary to succeed in a project, especially in today’s competitive adwords auctions.

Somewhere along the way, if you want to build a REAL business, you’re going to have to spend a few hundred hours immersed in the market yourself.

Because no one’s really going to care about it like you do.

And because without doing this, you’re NOT going to pick up the subtleties which allow you to connect with the market above and beyond  your competitors.

You simply won’t know what your customers “smell like”, and they’ll sense your templated, outsourced approach.

Because prospects in any market can “smell” honesty, integrity, and passion when it’s poured into a project.

In my experience, the people who try to outsource strategic thinking and market immersion wind up with MORE work, not less, in the long run, because their systems simply don’t perform.   (You CAN partner with someone to champion a market for you, but only if they’re tested and proven in their entrepreneurial and strategic thinking abilities… and if they’ve got enough upside potential and skin in the game to make it worth their while)

A long time ago, I heard Brian Tracy say “if you want to make a mark in your market, make 100 phone calls to prospects and I promise you you’ll never look back”

At the time, I was starting a psychology practice in the midst of the collapse of  indemnity insurance (doctors could no longer get so easily reimbursed for their high session fees as the big companies cut off the gravy train).   My colleagues were all terrified, complaining, and going broke.

What did I do?

I made a few hundred phone calls to every psychologist, psychiatrist, counseling center, etc. I could find on Long Island.  I asked them if they had any patients they were having trouble working with.  I asked how I could help them.  I asked if I could volunteer to see clients for free at their clinic for a day.   I asked if I could work for them in any capacity whatsoever.

I also set up focus groups and individual interviews with people considering seeing a psychologist or counselor.

18 months later I had a private practice with 65 patients. (By the way, for any psychologists considering advertising, one of the critical insights was that no one looked for psychologists, only for counselors, ’cause “you’ve gotta be sick in the head” to see a shrink, “but everyone needs a little counseling sometimes” )

Why?    I knew what the market wanted cold.  I had more connections than any of my peers.   I WENT THROUGH THE IMMERSION EXPERIENCE.

I’ve got several coaching students now who are really getting the value of this.

One of them spent the bulk of this year doing low-end consulting with literally hundreds of people looking for help with a particular software program.   He’s now set up a lucrative PPC lead funnel in this VERY competitive space, and I’ll be utterly shocked if he doesn’t have a million dollar business in 18 months or less.

Another one got so psyched about immersion, he decided to make 1,000 phone calls to prospects in his market.  ONE THOUSAND.   Then he developed a training system based on his experience.  (I can’t imagine anyone else’s training system in that very, very competitive market could possibly be any better.  I can’t imagine any prospect not instantly sensing this after just a little exposure to his materials)

Moreover, both of these gentlemen are NOW in the ultimate position to leverage themselves and outsource their work.   NOW they can replace themselves, and begin building multi-million dollar enterprises.

I guess what I’m saying is,  we’re all in such a hurry to get away from the market, most of us never get into it deep enough to truly succeed.

And so we look for the short cuts…

And wind up copying failure, or outsourcing things we don’t really understand.

I’m not invulnerable to this…  I’m human too, and always fighting a tendency to get lazy.  (Plus, when you get a little money and can easily afford the help, it’s easy to think “I’m above this now”)

But when I look back at my successes, the #1 thing they all had in common were a passionate immersion period in the market, right there in the trenches with the customers and competitors.

Have YOU really immersed yourself in your market?

Something to think about,

G

Get in the Club Already, Huh? |  Get Step by Step Hand Holding and Motivation to Do It |  Blueprint for Beginners

Seriously… he was my full time programmer 10 years ago, then he came to visit, then I helped him immigrate to the USA.  Now he lives a few minutes away from me.

When he and his wife (then his fiance’) first came to visit us here in New Hampshire in November, they were constantly shivering and complaining about how cold it was.   (It was about 35 degrees that week, which is relatively warm for New Hampshire in the fall)

Very surprised, I said to him “Alex, you’re from fricking Siberia, where it’s maybe minus 10 on a warm day, what gives?”

He looked at me with a funny Russian smile and said, in the thickest of Russian accents:

“Glenn, man from Siberia NOT warm man, man from Siberia man with lots of clothes!”

In other words, I had assumed the Siberian weather had toughened him up, and that he could go anywhere on the planet without batting an eye.  I had visions of him taking showers outside in the snow in his bathing trunks, like the Ant Arctic expedition workers I had read about  in the Guiness Book of World Records as a child.

I figured he lived in an igloo or something, chewed on ice all day long for water, and spat out icicles with glee.

But I was wrong.

I made assumptions about the man, when what I should have been looking at was his adaptive tools and materials (his warm clothing).

He was wrong too.  He came to New Hampshire without these tools.

It’s a funny story without too serious a consequence, but if you transfer it to the marketing arena it can be deadly.

Because here’s a story I hear all too often…

Guy does his research, goes into a competitive market, builds up a series of products and services, writes a g’zillion follow ups, and tests and tweaks his way into strong profitability.

THEN, he starts to feel like a SuperMan.   He forgets how he got where he was.

He goes into a new market without doing the research, without plans for a full product line, without the expectation of a long period of testing and tweaking his conversion, without the same zeal for writing follow ups, without the same break even cash flow planning, without the willingness to thoroughly and passionately immerse himself in the market by talking to the customers and finding out what they smell like.

He just trots off to a totally foreign country, attributing his success to his personal marketing genius, rather than all the tools, methods, resources, and techniques which put him where he was.

He forgets to bring his warm clothes.

If he’s lucky, he only shivers a little until a kind stranger or friend gives him shelter.

More often, he almost freezes to death and catches the next plane back home.

You see, we can be ruined by our own success.

We’re constantly tempted to attribute it too much to our own abilities, and our sheer marketing genius, which, naturally, means we can go into any market or take on any competitor without the exhaustive, and sometimes quite tedious research and planning required to get there.

Which is why I strive to be one dumb-ass marketer, with lots of checklists, cheat sheets, and methodical plans for everything I do.

Not that I’m always perfect… just like everyone else I’ve made my mistakes by thinking too much of myself too.

But a simple checklist goes a long way towards knocking my ego back down where it needs to be. (Read “The Checklist Manifesto” at your leisure by the way, it’s surprisingly insightful and will change the way you run your business in a weekend)

“PPC Marketer from Siberia Not AdWords Genius, Marketer from Siberia Man with Lots of Checklists!”

For what it’s worth,

Dr. G

Get in the Club Already, Huh? |  Get Step by Step Hand Holding and Motivation to Do It |  Blueprint for Beginners

I’ve got the weirdest job in the world.

It’s true!

Because, you see, I get paid gobs of money to talk to myself.   I spend a LOT of time alone in my room, staring at the computer, recording Camtasia videos, MP3s, etc.   Of course, I’ve also got REAL businesses, and of course, I’m not really talking to myself, I’m talking to thousands of people.

But still, if a Martian were to land and observe what I was doing, he’d see a great big hairy guy sitting in his room and talking to himself.

Which couldn’t be farther from what I set out to do as a psychologist… (I really thought I’d be spending my days in a room listening to other people talk to themselves)

Anyway… sometimes it makes me a little “loopy”

(The Rocket Clicks team is great, and always interested in talking to me… but they’re in Milwaukee and, truth be told, Rob Sieracki is such an amazing Chief Operating Officer and partner that Jeff and I really don’t have to do that much anymore)

So I suppose this is a part of the reason I’m pushing the coaching program more seriously now.   (Get on the priority notification list at the bottom of this page if you’re interested … a limited number of slots will open tomorrow and, from experience, will go very quickly) I find that the people who’re willing to work my systems seriously via the coaching structure I’ve set up are some of the nicest, most interesting, (and most respectful of my time and boundaries)  people I’ve met in my years as an internet marketer.

Plus,  sometimes it’s just plain nice to worry about someone else’s business instead of your own.

I dunno.

Maybe I really am nuts.

I really should be DOING more than teaching, if money was my primary goal.

But I’m gonna do this anyway, at least for a while.

Hope you’ll take me up on it before I change my mind

Ryan, one of my most successful students, is also offering to coach a limited number of people through my systems for a little more than HALF my personal rates.   (Get on the priority notification list at the bottom of this page if you’re interested … a limited number of slots will open tomorrow and, from experience, will go very quickly)

Here’s a VERY SHORT MP3 (13 minutes) where Sharon and I discuss my personal neuroses, and how they can benefit you.

Enjoy

OK, OK … so here’s 21 of my absolute best quick and dirty money making cheat sheets (right click and download the ZIP file) including:

- How to corner your market
- How to master the conversion optimizer
- 7 uncommon reasons internet businesses fail
- My 10 most important business insights of the decade
- How to Taguchi test in adwords
- How to profit from  word of mouth URLs today
- The content network curse
- Getting more content network impressions
- Working with display advertising on the content network
- Domain name testing in Adwords after 2009
-  Automatic Broad Match
- The Livingston Broad Match Magic approach to competitive market entry…
- Hyperresponsive Surveys…
- Mining for negative keywords…
- PPC XRay..
- Multivariate email testing…
- Self esteem and purchase behavior…
- Adwords mysteries…

And more!

Don’t say I never gave you anything

Like this stuff?  Then get your ass into my hyper-responsive marketing club so you can REALLY put it to use before I raise the price forever (on Friday).

G

-

I’ve tried for 4 years now to make what I do seem sexy, but it’s not.

That’s why you don’t see any beauty contests for marketing researchers.  No bikini babes lined up with surveys and statistics.  No hunky t-shirts of 45 year old men showing their market segmentation tables and graphs.   No endless, seemingly irrelevant display ads stalking you across the internet which say “click here for some hot market research action”.

And nobody really wants to talk about market research at parties.

Because market research isn’t a “bottom line function”, it’s just not that attractive.

Most marketers would rather jump into the market and try to make money right away, slogging it out on the battle field, licking their wounds as they go along.  But I’d rather sweat in training than bleed in battle.

So I’m constantly imploring people to avail themselves of the literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of FREE information available today online.  To slow down, digest and organize it all, choose their targets carefully, and plan their attack methodically.

Which somehow makes me the bad guy in their minds.  Because I’m not as sexy as the newest traffic technique, or the quickest way to make money this week.

Oh well, I guess I’m destined for an ugly life, having a (comparatively) small but rabid group of followers who make more money doing rather than teaching.

A group of Ugly Tortoises with X-Ray Vision and steadily growing businesses, not flash in the pan booms and busts.

I guess people don’t really want to see that at the beach.

But  I honestly can’t see any other way.

And you know who DOES think market research is sexy?

Fortune 100 companies who can afford it. I’m NOT talking about the DUMB brand managers who go without research and just consult their wife for an opinion on which poodle to show in the ad. I’m talking about the smart companies who research the hell out of their markets before they spend $20,000,000 on an advertising campaign.

To them, $100,000 for a research project is a drop in the bucket, they do those day in and day out. I ought to know, I’ve done plenty of them.

But what if I told you that you could get MORE information about your market for $77 than than these companies are getting for $100,000? What if I reminded you that I used to conduct those projects, and have translated these research principles into practical, easy to implement, step by step procedures and illustrated them all in over my shoulder videos and cheat sheets?

Would you still hesitate to join before my final price increase?

Because I’m going to jump the price from $77 to $97 on Friday morning. And because I NEVER increase the price on existing members, this is your last chance to LOCK IN YOUR RATE to learn this ugly, ugly form of marketing, tested and proven in over a dozen markets, and honed over a lifetime of an ugly researcher’s career.

So? How about a little kiss? Yes?




PS – My stuff USED TO be difficult. It USED TO make people’s brain’s hurt. Not any more… now it’s EASY, just not sexy. (Kind of like this lady above). But I know you’ll be happier with the results! Price jumps from $77 to $97 on Friday

LIARS.

A Darwinian economy creates ruthless temptation to lie, exaggerate,  distort, and mislead.  And the PPC auction puts that on steroids.

Every time you look at the results of a split test you’re faced with a moral dilemma.   Because the majority of the time, strengthening your claim beyond what you can actually deliver raises your click through and conversion.   And sadly, outright lying raises it stratospherically.

Of course, the smart marketer knows that lying creates only trial, not repeat. (It can also lead to being married to a big smelly guy named Bubba, and spending a lot of time lifting weights in the yard)

So what’s an ethical marketer to do?

I’ve known Chuck Batson for years, have had dinner with him, and in my judgment he’s one of the most ethical marketers around.  Chuck  operates in a market you’d think is more traditionally known for honesty and compassion… the vegetarian/vegan/raw-food world. (Which means, you know… he refuses to eat fried kittens and stuff, no matter how good they taste)

But he’s up against LIARS too.

Thankfully, he used my old How To Double Your Business course (predecessor to the hyper-responsive club) and found an honest way into the market, but he’s only making a few bucks and because he works full time as a programmer, he can’t seem to find the time to expand.

I really like Chuck, respect his values, and appreciate what a dedicated customer he’s been for almost 4 years.

Listen carefully and you’ll learn a few things about dealing with the Liars in your market too!

Dr. G

PS – Chuck asked a few very valuable questions towards the end about the difference between free and paid content.  It’s definitely worth listening to the answer if you’re following my model.

Glenn Club |   Coaching |  A to Z Product for Newbies |  Advanced Adwords Seminar

I’ve had hundreds of students come to me with some variation of the following “You’re obviously the guy to work with for building a solid foundation for a long term, profitable, growing business. But who do you recommend to make money NOW? I NEED money NOW!”

For the answer, please listen to the free mp3 below.

PPC DONE FOR YOU

EVERYTHING DONE FOR YOU

DO IT YOURSELF

PRIVATE COACHING WITH GLENN