Three reasons why a strategy, system or concept is “dead”!

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a strategy, a system or a concept to drive traffic, generate leads, to make more sales or achieve anything else that is important to successfully market our business online.

In my opinion there are three reasons why a strategy or system is claimed to be “dead”: 

1. The system or strategy didn’t work for that specific person who claims the dead of it.
2. The whole claim is part of a sales pitch in order to sell a “new” strategy or system.
3. The system, strategy or concept really doesn’t work any more. Which I would say is just the case in less than 5%. 

What about Google AdWords?

With the “Google-Slap” (where a lot of marketers got banned from Google AdWords) and the rise of Facebook PPC many people where claiming that Google AdWords doesn’t work anymore to promote your business.

Well, that’s not 100% correct.

Quality matters…

First off, I would say it is a question of what you do and how you are using Google AdWords.

If you want to promote an affiliate offer by just sending traffic to your affiliate link, that might also be quite difficult on Facebook these days

Whenever you create an ad on Google or Facebook it has to be approved by an employee before it will go live. If your ad doesn’t meet the advertising guidelines it will be declined. And of course all the advertising guidelines are written in a way that every ad can be declined. When your ad get’s disapproved you will also just receive a message that it got declined but they won’t tell you a specific reason.

Don’t get frustrated because of that. It’s just a part of the process.

Note: As long as your ad and your offer are meeting the quality guidelines of Google, Facebook or any other platform your ad will get approved.

Differences in targeting your audience… 

In order to discuss the differences between Google AdWords and Facebook PPC we need to talk about targeting and demographics. But it’s also very important to only compare Google Search PPC and Facebook PPC. If you don’t know yet, Google also provides a huge content network called the ‘Google Display Network’ (we will discuss that later on in this series). 

Today Facebook PPC has got two major advantages compared to Google Search PPC. 

1. You can specify a lot more different demographics to address your target audience more exactly.
2. Today Facebook PPC is still cheaper than Google AdWords PPC.

The importance of targeting

To get the most out of your online advertising it is absolutely crucial to reduce your spreading losses as good as possible. That means the more exactly you can target your audience with your ads the more people will click on them.

I don’t want to get into to much detail but since both advertising platforms are based on a bidding system (where you bid for the price of one click on an ad), the amount you pay per click will decrease the more people click on your ad.

Therefore Facebook got a first advantage over Google since it allows you to specify your target audience in much greater detail. Google basically only allows you to target specific keywords people are looking for on the search engine. 

Over and above that click prices on Facebook are still much cheaper than on Google Search PPC.

Another fact you need to consider when selecting an advertising platform is whether your target audience (you should already know your perfect customer as good as possible) is using this platform at all.

In my opinion Facebook is a great place for advertisers who are doing B2C business.

If you are in the B2B business, Facebook might not be the ideal place for you to advertise. 

Note: When your target audience consists of end users Facebook is a great way to promote your products and services. If you are targeting businesses you might want to consider another advertising platform.

This was the first post of this traffic-series. If you don’t want to miss the other parts of this series make sure to subscribe to my newsletter right below. I will let you know as soon as the next part is available.

You are also invited to leave a comment below to share your thoughts and experiences. If you’ve liked my post feel free to share it on your favorite social network by just clicking on of the buttons below.

Is AdFly the real deal for instant and huge traffic generation?

AdFly is a service that really allows you to drive huge amounts of visitors to any website within the matter of a few minutes and that’s not only just a lousy claim. I know it almost sounds to be to good to be true, but when I was testing AdFly I drove 50.000 visitors to one of my websites within only 35 minutes!

What is AdFly?

AdFly basically is a URL shortening service like (Bit.ly, tinyURL.com, goo.gl, etc.). The only difference to all the other regular shortening services is that the user will not immediately be forwarded to the original URL when clicking on a link that has been shortened with AdFly. Before the user will get access to the original target he will have to look at a sponsored website for 5 seconds. 

This kind of advertising is also known as interstitial advertising.

How does AdFly work from the users point of view?

To shrink a link with AdFly you only need to enter the URL you like to shorten into the form on the AdFly website.

After clicking the shrink-button the link will change into an AdFly-link:

When you open this link in your browser you won’t be forwarded to the target URL immediately. Instead you will be looking at an interstitial ad for 5 seconds before you can skip the ad.

An interstitial ad on AdFly looks like this:

How does AdFly work from the advertisers point of view?

The concept of AdFly is very simple. As an advertiser you can sign up with AdFly very easily. Once your account has been created you can purchase traffic from AdFly per 1.000 impressions. (AdFly only offers Cost per Impression (CPM). But it’s really very affordable.) Worldwide traffic starts at $1 per 1.000 Impressions.

As soon as your campaign got approved (there are some minor restrictions) it will start to run and drive visitors to your website.

Up to now AdFly might sound really promising to you. But…

Is AdFly really the holy grail of getting traffic?

Let’s recap the results of my test campaign to answer this question.

I was really able to drive 50.000 visitors to one of my websites within 35 minutes. The site I was promoting was a simple lead capture page with a headline and an opt-in form.

Although you cannot target the AdFly-traffic other than by country, the result was still pretty decent. Within these 35 minutes I was able to generate 311 leads.

So far the results might look pretty amazing even when you consider that I was only paying $50 for these 50.000 impressions and therefore the cost per lead of $0.16 was pretty low!

But unfortunately it turned out that the quality of these leads is pretty bad! My autoresponder was set to send out an email to my contacts right after subscribing. 73 of these 311 emails bounced (23,47%) immediately and only 15 emails (4,8%) were opened. The open-rate on the following days was pretty bad as well (2,4%, 1,6%, 2,9%, 2,5%).

After doing a little bit of research I have found out why the traffic generated with AdFly didn’t convert and why it probably won’t convert for you as well!

The major age group of AdFly users is 18-24 and the majority is browsing the website (and the interstitial campaigns) from home and from school. The major traffic I was generating came from poorer countries.

Further research has also shown that AdFly is majorly famous as a “make money online” system for the age group mentioned above. You can also sign up with AdFly as a “Link Shrinker: Create shorted URLs and earn money”. That means you can shorten links using AdFly and the more often somebody clicks on this link the more money will be paid to your PayPal account.

When entering “AdFly” on Google or YouTube you will also find some resources on how to exploit AdFly to make money. This also includes the Adf.ly Bot that will click these links automatically to generate commissions. 

Conclusion: Interstitial advertising is a great way to drive visitors to your website without having them clicking on an ad. But in my opinion AdFly is not worth your time and money because you won’t be able to reach your target audience and because of it’s very low quality of traffic. Maybe Google AdWords can still be an AdFly-alternative?

If you like this post it would be great if you could share it with your followers on social media. I am also looking forward to hear your thoughts and experiences with AdFly below.

The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule!

Who was Vilfredo Pareto?

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer, economist, and sociologist. He was born in Paris in 1848 under the name of Wilfried Fritz Pareto.

During his analysis of the national wealth of Italy, he made a very interesting discovery. He found out that about 20% of the citizens owned 80% of the country’s assets. From the productivity point of view, that meant it was beneficial for banks to take care of those 20% first. The banks could generate much higher profits when they concentrated on this target audience first.

Since that time, further studies have shown that this statistical phenomenon can be found in a lot of different areas.

What is the Pareto principle all about?

Vilfredo Pareto’s insights can be summed up as follows:

80% of the results can be accomplished by 20% of efforts—also in matter of the time invested.

If you want to become more efficient and productive in your business, I recommend analyzing your work according to the 80-20 rule. Take your time. Put all your emotions aside and try to analyze every area of your life and business.

The following questions might help you to achieve some quick results:

• What 20% of your customers/events cause 80% of your problems?
• What 20% of the actions you take are responsible for 80% of the desired outcome?
• What 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue?
• What 20% of your actions cost you 80% of your time?

By applying the 80/20 rule, you can analyze any area of your life, business or private.

How can you benefit from the Pareto principle?

I am absolutely convinced that, through the application of Vilfredo Pareto’s principle to your daily life, you can eliminate things that consume a lot of time but don’t deliver real results.

Take this opportunity to analyze your whole environment. Include anything in your analysis: friends, customers, business partners, spare-time activities, and any other important part of your life.

The goal of applying the Pareto principle is to identify and eliminate those things that consume a lot of time in relation to the results they deliver.

I hope this post inspired you to find out what the Pareto principle can do for YOU.

Yours in Mastery

Christian

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Why is it so crucial to know your target audience?

The plain and simple answer is best summed up with a quote by Mark Twain:

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.

In our terms, this means that if you don’t know your ideal prospect as well as humanly possible, you won’t be able to optimize your marketing to attract these very same people.

Especially these days, when it comes to online personal branding, Internet marketing, and social media, it is absolutely vital to have an exact picture of your avatar. The less specifically you have defined your target audience, the more time and money you will waste.

Let me tell you why. Less specified target audience means less targeted advertising, which will lead to bad conversion rates and less success. To fully understand that equation, take a look at the following chart:

The first contact with your prospects might be through an ad. If, for example, you are selling bicycles and show your ad to people who are primarily interested in baseball, your efforts will not pay off.

If your ad fits the need of your target audience but the offer on your website does not, you will have visitors on your website but no sales. Your visitors won’t take the action you want them to take, which is to buy or opt in to your auto responder.

As you can see, defining your target audience as well as possible is the foundation for a congruent sales and marketing funnel. Once you know the person who is purchasing your products or services, you can tailor your marketing efforts very specifically to this person’s needs.

How can you define your target audience the best way possible?

To draw a very specific picture of your target audience, you should take your time. Please remember that this is a very important step, so give yourself enough time to do it right. Get rid of everything that could be disturbing you. Turn off your email-client, Skype, phone, and anything else that could interrupt you.

Then just take a pen and a paper and describe that person. Draw a picture of your average buyer. This will be your avatar. The following questions might help you a little bit. Think about your avatar’s:

• Name—who is this person?
• Age
• Gender
• Employment level—employee, freelancer, or entrepreneur
• Current life situation
• Monthly income
• Likes—what is more exciting than anything on earth? What is his fantasy?
• Dislikes—what bothers him about life right now?
• Fears—what keeps her up at night?
• Reading preferences—what books does he read?
• Religious beliefs?
• Current thoughts on body image, money, lifestyle, and family?
• Business concerns—what is the #1 problem in her business?
• Business experience?

The more such questions you ask yourself about your buyer, the more specific the avatar of your target group will be. Of course, this list cannot be 100% complete, and the questions will also depend on your exact product or service. But from this example, you can see how to specify your target audience as much as possible.

What to do with your specifically defined target audience

Once you have specified the avatar of your target audience as exactly as possible, I guarantee that you will have a huge, almost unfair, advantage over 99% of your competitors. And it is a really valuable and powerful advantage.

From now on, whenever you write an ad, an article on your website, sales copy for a sales page, an email to your list, or anything else in your marketing, you will always do that for your specific avatar—your exact target audience.

In practice, that means that you don’t write this ad, email, etc. to an anonymous list with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but to your avatar. And your avatar is somebody you really know very well.

When you follow this strategy, I promise that your marketing efforts will be in sync and your conversions will explode. This will also reduce your marketing costs, because knowing your target audience will allow you to reduce your spreading loss concerning your marketing expenses.

Yours in Mastery

Christian

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What is attraction marketing?

Attraction marketing is a marketing approach that is the exact opposite of traditional marketing. Traditional marketing is basically a hunting concept: It’s about chasing down prospects and then selling them on your products or services.

Attraction marketing is about – surprise! – attracting people to you; drawing to yourself people who are already interested in what you are doing and what you have to offer. How to accomplish this magnetic effect? The key component of attraction marketing is sharing valuable content with your target group to position yourself as an expert, leader, and trusted authority in your marketplace.

Attraction marketing can be boiled down to a five-stage process:

1. Define your target group.
2. Attract people from your target group.
3. Share valuable content with these people.
4. Become a well-respected expert in your marketplace.
5. Watch the business roll in! Once you became a trusted authority, people can’t wait to buy from you.

Where does attraction marketing come from?

Attraction marketing was invented in the network marketing industry, where the Internet has dramatically changed the way people are doing business.

The traditional concept of Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) is based on referring products or services to friends and family, which worked pretty well in the early days of that industry. In the beginning of MLM there were only a few companies active on the market.

Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of network marketing companies out there. Because of the Internet, the marketplace has become more and more transparent, and people are getting more skeptical about network marketing. Because of these and other reasons, it’s getting increasingly difficult these days to build a successful MLM business the traditional way.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of people on the Internet who are interested in this industry. And it was with this thought in mind that clever network marketers invented attraction marketing

They assumed that there must be thousands, if not millions, of people out there on the Internet who are already interested in what they are doing and what they have to offer.

Then they started to promote themselves as experts by sharing valuable content on their websites, for free. They gave tips on how to promote a business, how to generate leads, and much more.

Thus the network marketers made themselves attractive, and visitors to their sites trusted them and became their fans. It was just a matter of time before these visitors joined them in their business opportunities, wanting to stick with these leaders, to learn from them and to apply these strategies to their own business.

Knowing this background of attraction marketing brings us to another important question.

Can attraction marketing be applied to any business?

YES. Without a doubt, you can apply attraction marketing to any business.

Just remember the five stages that I described above. Follow these steps and you will magnetically attract more prospects and customers.

If you are a trainer, a coach, a consultant, a speaker, a freelancer, or a networker, then start by generating valuable content from your expertise. Publish this content on your website on a regular basis and in no time you will be looked upon as an expert.

You can apply the same concept even when selling physical products like lawn mowers. Now, you might wonder what content you could share about lawn mowers.

For just one example, you could start a website where you give maintenance tips for lawns and gardens, attracting house owners who do have a backyard and love to garden.

I would definitely want to buy my lawn mower from somebody who has already built a relationship with me and provides useful and applicable tips on my topic of interest.

As you can see, it’s easy to apply attraction marketing to any business. It’s just a matter of creativity. Furthermore, attraction marketing is a vital step on your way to building a personal brand.

Yours in Mastery

Christian

P.S.: I hope this post was useful for you. If you enjoyed my thoughts or if you have any questions, please leave me a comment down below. You are also invited to share this post with your network on Facebook and Twitter by using the social media buttons.

Personal branding makes the difference!

To understand why personal branding is so important to any business, let’s take a look at consumer behavior today.

The Internet has definitely changed our whole lives in many ways during the past few years. And, of course, these changes have also affected the behavior of consumers. The Internet enables anybody to find more offers, more solutions to problems, than ever before. In almost every marketplace or niche, the consumer can choose among a whole variety of competitors. Since the Internet has also brought more transparency to the marketplace, consumers can find the cheapest price for whatever they are looking for with just a few mouse clicks.  

The challenge for business owners like you and me is to not fall into a negative price-dumping spiral.

But how can we do that? How can we brand ourselves and become trusted authorities within our marketplace?

To understand these branding mechanics, let’s first take a look at how the major players are doing it. Why, for example, should anybody want to buy an Apple iPhone instead of another smartphone that works almost the same and is much cheaper?

One reason, of course, is that it’s cool to have an iPhone. Anyone who purchases one becomes a part of the trendy community of iPhone users. Another possible reason is that iPhone users already have a Mac, an iPod or an iPad and are pretty satisfied with the performance of these products.

People who already own another Apple device TRUST that brand; they behave like fans of the company and its products, and they would buy almost anything from them as long as it has an apple logo and an “i” in front of the product name.

Apple definitely managed to build a very strong brand, one of the most valuable brands on the planet.

Of course, Apple is just one example of many successful brands out there. Just take a look at other companies like Nike, BMW, or Coca Cola.

All these big names have managed to build a very strong brand, to build a relationship to their customers and to gain their confidence.

The Personal Branding Formula

To apply the model of success of these big guys to your own business, it is important to understand the strategy behind their branding efforts.

The good news is that personal branding is not a science. It’s actually pretty simple, and it all boils down to the following formula:

You have to build your own brand, become an authority within your marketplace, build a relationship with your prospects, and turn your prospects into customers and your customers into loyal fans.

This is the only way to differentiate yourself from your competitors in the long run without having to compete on the price. You are giving your prospects a reason to buy from you instead of from somebody else. And this “reason to buy” will be so strong that the price of your products and services becomes less and less important in the buying decision.

And here’s more good news: The Internet is the perfect place to apply this formula. Internet marketing and social media offer the perfect tools to set up a marketing machine for your business. You can set up a system that allows you to build your very own, very strong personal brand; become a trusted authority within your marketplace almost overnight; and make contacts within your specifically defined target group on Autopilot, build a relationship with them by the push of a button, and gain their confidence as easy as can be.

It’s really not difficult to quickly dominate your niche by using this strategy.

What is personal branding really about?

Just to make things a little bit clearer, I’d like to close this post with a few thoughts on what personal branding is really about.

• Personal branding is a long-term marketing strategy that allows you to quickly set yourself far apart from your competitors
• Knowing your target audience as good as possible is also a very important part of personal branding.

• One key component of personal branding is to establish YOU as an expert in your niche and marketplace.

• Another crucial component of personal branding combined with Internet marketing strategies is to build a list. You want a consistently growing list of contacts from your specifically defined target group.

• Using personal branding strategies and the power of the Internet, you will  extend your sphere of influence almost overnight. As I write this post, there are 2 billion (2,000,000,000!!!) people on the Internet. Just think about how many of them might already be interested in your products or services. We are talking about many more targeted prospects than you would ever be able to handle in your business.

Now is the time to contact these prospects, build a relationship with them, and gain their confidence by using your very own personal branding strategy. For further reference I also would like to recommend this resource on personal branding. 

Yours in Mastery,

Christian

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