The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (21 page)

business?

The next chapter is crucial to building your empire. It’s al about how to get people to

raise their hands with some level of interest in what you have to offer.

How to Get People to Raise Their Hands

Are you confused about the best way to get prospects for your product or service? It’s no

wonder. If you’ve spent any time researching on the web the topic of lead generation,

you’ve encountered the perfect storm of get-rich-quick hucksters teaming up with self-

proclaimed gurus and programmer geeks who think they’ve stumbled onto the biggest,

baddest, and best web game-changer gimmick ever.

Wel , it’s time to cut through al the nonsense and set you up with some solid reference

points, kind of like lighthouses you can use to navigate through the storm to your profit

destination.

This chapter is devoted not to getting customers, but to getting prospects or leads,

which we’l later turn into customers. It’s kind of like romance. If you ultimately want to get

married to someone, you don’t start with the topic of getting a spouse, but instead you

first might want to get a date. In our present discussion, we wil focus on leads.

Let’s start by sweeping away several common and extremely dangerous myths about

getting leads for your business.

MYTH NUMBER ONE: “IT’S ALL ABOUT TRAFFIC”

In the early days of the Web everyone talked about hits. “Hey, how many hits you got to

your site today? I got 40,000!” Marketers thought hits were a measure of how many

people came to their site but in reality it was something different. If you had three

pictures, two tables, and a form on a single web page, then that added up to six

separate items that your web browser needed to load in order for you to see that page.

So one person viewing that one page resulted in six hits.

After a while, knowledgeable people started to define hits as
How Idiots
Track

Success because it became an arbitrary measure of volume but not of success.

Pretty soon the conversation changed to traffic: “It’s al about traffic. . . . How do I get

traffic. . . . I need more traffic!” At least this was an improvement over hits, because it

measured human visitors and not items loading on a page.

Traffic is the easiest thing in the world to get. Simply go online to Google and search

its image library for bikini. Now grab one of the pictures and stick it in an ad. Within

minutes you wil begin to see thousands of clicks on that picture to your web site. Young

men al over the globe wil have their tongues hanging out wanting to see more bikini

pictures on your site.

Are you happy now that your traffic has shot through the roof? Maybe you are if you just

want to brag to your buddies at the saloon that you had 1.3 mil ion visitors to your site

yesterday. However, your bank account is no better for it and might even be emptier,

because your web host wil either charge you for the extra traffic or shut you down.

Recently, the focus has shifted from traffic to Facebook friends or Twitter fol owers.

This is just as absurd a measure as hits or traffic. A bril iant marketer by the name of

Seth Godin was asked about the value of social networking and he said:

It’s worthless to have lots of friends on Facebook because they’re not

really your friends. They’re just people who didn’t want to offend you by

pressing the Ignore button. And if you have 5,000 people following you on

Twitter because you tell a dirty joke every couple of hours that’s not useful

for your business, either.

The Internet is a giant cocktail party with all these people swarming around

and keeping score—Who likes me today? Who’s talking about me today?

What matters is where are the real relationships. Networking is always

important when it’s real, and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake.

There’s a reason why the book you’re holding is not cal ed Six-Figure Traffic and

instead is cal ed The Six-Figure Second Income. Your goal should be to get the income

and profits you’re after with the least amount of traffic you need to get there.

MYTH NUMBER TWO: “IT’S ALL ABOUT TARGETED TRAFFIC”

This is more of a half-truth than a myth, because I do agree that targeted traffic is great.

The myth part is al in how you define targeted.

Most people define it way too broadly, again because their ego is tied to size. I

suspect we males of the species have had a fixation with size for the last, oh, mil ion

years or so.

Let’s say you want to publish an info product on 37 Secrets to Outfit Your Bass Boat to

Win Competitions. You wrote your report and fol owed al my advice about setting up

your site. You see the futility of getting any old traffic to your site, but what about

fishermen? What about boat owners?

Even those terms are way too broad. If you go after fishermen in general, you’l get

people who love to go fly fishing in the mountains, plus big fans of surf-casting in the

ocean, not to mention the lobster fishermen in Maine and the king crab fishermen in

Alaska’s Bering Strait. Yes, they’re al fishermen, which makes them share more of a

common bond than they have with rol er derby queens, but that bond does not help you.

You should be after fishermen that own bass boats and want to enter competitions.

The more narrowly you focus, the fewer people you’l attract but the more strongly you’l

attract them.

“But what’s wrong with attracting al fishermen and then narrowing it down

Question:

later?”

That’s better than attracting the
free
beer crowd but is stil a waste of time

and money. In the amazingly crowded and distracting advertising world we

live in, you don’t have many shots at getting your message across to any

one person. You also have limited resources. If you were a gold miner I

Answer:

suppose you could dig up the entire state of California and eventual y find

gold. After al , you did narrow your search to California and not the other 49

states. But why wouldn’t you make your job easier by first finding a

promising vein of ore? That’s what highly targeted traffic is, and that’s what

should be your objective.

MYTH NUMBER THREE: “I’M WAITING FOR THE GAME CHANGER”

I already talked about this in an earlier chapter but it’s so prevalent that I cannot

overemphasize it.

Many marketers wil scratch and claw to stand on top of everyone else and proclaim

that they’ve found the Silver Bul et to marketing. They’ve found the game changer that

makes everything else obsolete. I suggest that you rol your eyes and find a better use of

your time.

The real game changers are not gimmicks and tricks discovered by a geek in his

basement but instead are things we’ve known about for a while. For instance, the World

Wide Web is a game changer because we can final y cut out the middlemen and appeal

directly to an audience that wil pay us directly. That’s phenomenal y big news but it’s free

for the taking—you don’t need to buy some guy’s system in order to take advantage of it.

The ability to hire specialists from the four corners of the globe to help you with

particular projects is a game changer, because no longer do you need to staff an office

building to create a thriving business.

Game changers are not things like software programs that claim to exploit some

weakness in Google such that you can shoot to the top of the rankings overnight. It may

even be true that Google temporarily is unaware of some cute trick that al ows a site to

pop up in the rankings. If that anomaly is legal then you might even consider using it

—just make sure you don’t hang your hopes on it working for very long, or you risk the

very foundation of your business.

Here’s an example of a shady game changer. I know a guy who at one point made a

fortune in the online weight-loss supplement business. An average day for him was

$10,000 to $20,000 in revenues, most of which was profit. Not bad.

What one of his pals had discovered was a very special blog technique. They posted

little images on major news sites—attractive pictures of a woman’s bare waist in skin-

tight pants, for instance. When you clicked on the image you would be taken to a blog

that was cal ed something like Kathy’s Weight-Loss Journal. It would be a pretty pink

blog with little flowers in the corner and a lively journal al about Kathy’s ongoing

chal enge with weight loss. It seems that Kathy looked far and wide and could not find

anything that worked until a friend told her about the Açai berry, grown in Brazil and

elsewhere.

Practical y overnight, Kathy became a new person! She just drank an Açaí berry

smoothie in the morning and at lunch but otherwise could eat what she wanted and not

even exercise much. The pounds just melted off. Women asked her what was the secret

and men asked her out.

Kathy’s blog also had a real y helpful section where other people could write in. Here’s

a typical series of messages:

Joan B: Kathy, is this for real? I mean I’ve tried everything just like you did

and they’re all scams!

Kathy: Joan, I know what you mean, girl, but I couldn’t believe it! I’ve even

tried other Açaí berry drinks but only this one did the trick for me.

Joan B: Kathy—You’re a lifesaver!!!!! I tried your Açaí stuff and I lost 14

pounds in just one week! Ohmygod! Now Josh and I are engaged ☺!

Kathy’s blog even has a little corner where you can order her favorite Açaí berry drink.

How helpful of her!

The whole thing was a fake. There was no Kathy and no Joan but instead some

programmer named Bruno. There was indeed an Açaí berry drink and my friend made a

bloody fortune sel ing it.

That is, until Google caught on to the existence of so many similar blogs and shut

down his advertising. He was lucky that only Google caught him because the Federal

Trade Commission would not have been as lenient with his false claims.

Other game changers may even be lawful but are just as temporary. Let’s remember

that Google uses Google too. It knows who’s skyrocketing in popularity and it knows a lot

about bil ions of web sites and the connections between them.

Google’s business model is designed around two things—profits and providing quality

search content for visitors. Anything else is a distraction that potential y harms Google’s

reputation. If you build your business on gimmicks, don’t be surprised when those

gimmicks suddenly disappear, along with much of your profits.

MYTH NUMBER FOUR: “IT’S ALL ABOUT COST PER LEAD”

This myth is alive and wel . Just the other day I saw a respected marketer trumpet the

fact that he’s found a super-secret source where his cost per lead was around one

penny.

How sil y. With our bikini method we could get our cost per lead to a fraction of a

penny. When you go to your local bank branch to make a deposit, it’s such a shame that

they don’t have a line on the deposit slip for Cost of Lead. If they did, these marketers

would be filthy rich. The last bank deposit slip I saw only had lines for Cash and for

Checks.

That leads me to the first of several crucial principles you need to tattoo onto the

inside of your eyelids.

Principle One: The True Measure of a Lead-Generation Technique Is Not
Cost

per Lead
but Instead
Return on Investment

It’s the Holy Grail of savvy marketers. If I write a check for $100 and I get a return of

$280, or $113, or even just $102, then those may be acceptable results. However

obvious that logic may seem to you, it’s not a common practice to think that way.

Plenty of marketers are hooked on cheap leads and would never consider paying

several dol ars per lead, not to mention tens of dol ars per lead. I have some lead

sources where I’m delighted to pay over $20 per name. Why? Because I measure my

ultimate results with those names and I know that statistical y those leads wil earn me

wel in excess of $20 each. It’s true that I must be patient and cultivate the leads into

buyers and eventual y into long-term customers. That’s okay because I’m in the business

for the long term and not for a quick hit.

On the other hand, I’ve abandoned certain lead sources with a cost-per-lead of under

$5 because they did not result in a profitable relationship for me.

One of the best lighthouses you can construct to guide your marketing efforts is to

focus on return on investment.

Principle Two: Lead Sources Have a Half-Life Just Like Uranium