New strategies to get more clients to your offer are great, but not when it comes at the expense of time every week updating and maintaining a system that is always fluid – Does this sound a little familiar to you?

Automated webinars are a great solution and are quickly gaining popularity. However there are 4 main keys to their success. What’s the point of spending all the upfront time pulling it together, only to have it fall flat on its butt.

Here are our top 4 keys to a successful automated webinar:

KEY ONE: Drive traffic
Driving traffic to your webinar is the single most important part of the process. In most cases, the lack of traffic driving strategies is the biggest failure amongst webinologists today (*A webinologist being a person that practices the art of webinars).

Need some ways to drive traffic? PPC ads, opt-in on your website, joint venture partners, emails to your list, linked-in promotions, Facebook ads – I could go on, the ways are endless!

KEY TWO: Get people to attend
Once people sign up for your webinar – Who is to say that they will actually show up? Have a strategy that will make them tune in. My recommendation is to give them a few ‘teaser emails’ including all the usual suspects – Benefit driven outcomes, testimonials and a sneak peak of some of the content.

KEY THREE: Provide Massive Value – before, during and after the webinar

There is an art of persuasion that all good webinologists follow. It’s not as easy as just getting on the webinar, talking about something and then flogging your stuff. Here is the way that we recommend you structure your talking using our “WebinarNOW” system (I love a good acronym!):

W – Wild, WOW Headline
Captureyour audience with your headline – For one of our clients who was offering real estate training, the headline was: “How we went from $0 to $750,000 in 18 months with no sales experience”. That made the ears of the real estate agents prick up, from the moment the webinar began.

E – Engaging Introduction
Capture the attention of the audience from the beginning – Make sure they are listening to you instead of writing emails, checking Facebook, shopping on EBay, updating twitter or the multitude of other things they could be doing.

B – Big, Bold Benefits
What will they learn by the end of the webinar? List these as you would in a sales letter: Benefit, benefit, benefit!

I – Irresistible Reasons Why
Why should they stick around to the end? Tell them. In plain English. Again, you want to hit them with benefit, benefit, benefit!

N – Nice To meet You
This is where you get to build rapport with the attendee as if you were one-on-one. Show them how you became an expert in the field and how you know exactly how they feel (depending on the topic area!)

A – A Journey To Remember
This is where you take them on a journey with your content. You teach them exactly what you promised them in the beginning. But…and a big But…you don’t want to entirely scratch their itch. This takes around 70% of the webinar and is very important that what you tell them leads them to the sale. No point in you teaching them everything so they don’t need you! Teach them in a way that naturally makes them want to take the next step with you.

R – Results Desired
This could also be called ‘creating the need for the solution’. This is where you say “There is only so much I can teach you in a 1 hour webinar…” Future pace your attendees to see how they would feel once they have all the benefits that your product or service will give them. Make them see how you could change their lives or their business.

N – Now it’s time for action
Unveil your product – Show them what you have! I usually break down my products into 3 simple components as it makes it easier to understand, but you can choose to do this any way you like. Just keep it benefit driven and tight. No wiffle waffle here.

O – Offer: Inviting Instant Action
Tell them your offer. Very simply tell them how to purchase. Have a buy now button appear and make sure it works (simple problem but it happens more than most people think!)

W – Wrap Up In A Positive Powerful Way
End in a motivating fashion. Wrap up the webinar and congratulate those that have decided to take the next step with you.

KEY FOUR: Follow Up
Following from your webinar, there are a few lists you would have created. There are the people who attended and purchased; attended and didn’t purchase; did not attend. Each of these requires different follow up strategies and communication. Make sure you have this ready to roll before the webinar so it’s all ready to go at a click of the button, or even better, it’s sent automatically so you never have to think about it!

All in all, the importance of an automated marketing strategy is to ensure that you leverage your time and set up your systems properly to ensure it’s on autopilot from day one. Follow these four keys and you’ll be on the road to success in no time.

Entrepreneurs at heart, Dr. Tom Forfa and Mare Jordanoski have created the world’s first ‘Made For You’ Webinar System to create webinars for your website or businesses. This allows you to automate your online marketing and sales. Not sure how to implement webinars into your marketing strategy? Check out their free webinar showing you step by step how to implement it at www.webinarsmadeforyou.com

In theory it’s a more pure system because there are protocols in place so that it can’t just be more and more of it created, but time will tell with that one.

Bitcoin is an online currency without a physical presence. You get Bitcoins by having your computer mine complex algorithms. The whole system is designed so that bitcoins are released slowly into the ecosystem and the value of the currency is not destabilised.

It sounds all very futuristic but its slowly becoming a reality with some influential players like Wiki Leaks and WordPress now accepting Bitcoins as cash.

Watch this 3 minute video above from Mark Fennell and Duncan Elms as they do a great job on explaining this complex new phenomenon.

With a background in SEO in the mid 90’s Gavin went on to learn all parts of the eCommerce trade in the 2000’s through consulting roles in the UK with the search agency Stickyeyes and running major digital news sites at the Guardian Media Group.

Gavin then went on to be the Group Head of eCommerce Strategy for Shop Direct, which is the second biggest online retailer after Amazon in the UK with approximately $1.7 billion in revenue.

Greg: Gavin, when you were with the Stickyeyes Consulting Group in the UK one of the things that really stood out for me was your great wins on the SEO and the traffic front. You took O2’s SEO uniques from 100,000 to 1.2 million in just 12 months, including rankings on the mobile phone type terms. What was your key learnings from that experience?

Gavin: The key learning for me was just proof of the value of making sure SEO was built into the actual fabric of the site itself.

Back then there were still a lot of the big brands who were trying to build SEO around their site instead of thinking about SEO into the heart of the site. So, they’d have their normal site or store and then, around the edges, they’d get an SEO agency to build content and generate links but they wouldn’t actually want to change the homepage or change the layout of their site to have it so it’s search friendly.

Whereas what we were able to do with O2 is that they were going through re-development so they just followed the guidance in terms of the information architecture and the page structure and page titles. And, yes, they reaped the results. I think every major site now pretty much builds SEO into the heart of it. But for back then, it was proof that that was the way we should be doing it.

We really identified like some of the main terms, like mobile phone, making sure that they were in the hierarchy of the site, and that there was enough weight that had gone onto the decent folder structure, and making sure that the keyword frequency was correct on the site.

Also going for the long tail. So, instead of just focusing on the one or two big terms, optimising through the site for some smaller keywords, picking up that long tail traffic really worked well.

Greg: Often that longer tail traffic can be key buying phrases, especially if they’re searching for the exact brand name of something or to the extent of that. So, yes, that really can work well and convert better.

Greg: When I look at all the different things you’ve done in the past, the role of yours that interests me most was when you were working as the head of eCommerce strategy at the Shop Direct Group. There obviously were, under your creative control, some massive eCommerce stores, including Woolworths.co.uk, littlewoods.com, very.com, isme.com and, obviously, the list goes on. Like you said, second only to Amazon as far as sales in the UK. I know you’re very strong in the user experience area. How did you go about engineering a better user experience for these site visitors and shoppers over time so that they enjoyed the site, wanted to stay longer and, ultimately purchased more?

Gavin: We already had a usability team in Shop Direct when I joined but they were constantly battling with creative because creative would want to create something that looked high fashion and impactful, with loads of graphics. And then we were also battling with what the brand teams that wanted. They all shared the same ambitions but didn’t necessarily know the val- ue of the usability or UX.

So the key thing I did really was try and drive through a group wide creation of a digital board, which hadn’t existed before, where you’ve got all of the different people, from the buying and merchandising teams to the strategy teams to the brand teams, to the creative teams, all together so that they then filtered in their requirements through this one group.

They were then prioritised and they would fall into usability testing. So once there were some prototypes created, they’d fall into some usability testing and then results would come back, so the customers were always put into the heart of it.

So instead of it being just usability test, it’s then also conversion testing to see what impact the design has on sales. Ultimately, the customer does decide because the customer will determine which variant they like best and that’s the one which we go with. It really does let the customer decide what we do.

So starting with AB testing, we then move into the multi variant testing after that, to try and refine down and, you know, make sure that all the variables convert nicely together.

It’s funny actually that often the thing that has the biggest difference is something you wouldn’t expect at all, just like a slight difference in buttons or by dropping a little basket symbol onto the button or changing the colour of It. It’s the small things that seem to make the bigger impact. You can never second-guess what’s going to happen.

Greg: Personalisation – It’s not something that we’ve heard a lot about in the past but definitely will hear more and more about in the near future. I know that it can have a massive impact on the conversion of an eCommerce store. Have you had much success with personalisation over time?

Gavin: Yes, definitely. We, at Shop Direct, tried three different personalisation engines. One of them was an in-house version, whereby it was homemade really by some pretty bright mass PHD types, and two other industry offerings. We tested that against two others, one from ATG, which was obviously the eCommerce platform we were using, as well as one from another well known analytics company.

We then studied which performed best in terms of the sales generated from alternative products recommended on product page. We saw a big uplift actually. It was interesting. The analytics one performed worse. The version that was the in-house version actually performed second best with ATG Recommends coming out on top. And that same engine then was used within email campaigns. So we sent personalisation of emails out, which had some huge impact on the sales and uptake that went from those emails.

Greg: So it remembers whether someone’s a male or a female and what sorts of products or services they’re interested in?

Gavin: Yes, exactly, and what products they’ve also bought, some collaborative filtering to look at other people who’ve bought similar products, their buying habits and perhaps even if you’ve got some information about family members.

I think the main thing for me is not so much how much evidence I’ve seen so far that personalisation works. It’s more the potential of it and I think that’s still relatively untapped, even with some of the bigger eCommerce engines. There’s a lot more that can be done and will be done over time.

You very rarely see, for example, that much use of social graph. I know people are trying it now but there’s so much rich information within social media about people’s likes and habits that could potentially be mined.

Product reviews are important also. For some people product reviews might be an absolutely essential part of their decision making process when buying, whereas for other people it might have very little to no impact. It might actually be seeing bigger, better product pictures and bigger product descriptions.

You probably haven’t got quite sophisticated enough solutions but once you start to map in things that monitor mouse position and where people’s focus is going and then you start to do some AB tests that layer that in then I think you get to really interesting sort of personalisation where it’s not just the products and promotions that are personalised. It’s the entire journey that’s personalised.

Greg: You said something there that I hadn’t really thought about before which was the integration with the social graph. For those who are not familiar with what Gavin’s talking about, it’s for example within Facebook where there’s the new timeline and people are basically spelling out their whole life and everything that they’re into and not into and all that sort of stuff. It’s all information that can potentially be used and it looks like, from Facebook’s terms and service and privacy, you can pretty much have applications interact with that stuff without even the user’s permission. Is your understanding that’s the way it works as well?

Gavin: Yes, they connect with you. So we obviously want to encourage, and a big part of our social strategy would be encouraging our customers to connect with us through Facebook. So, once they’ve done that connection, then we request their permission and, depending on how they respond to that, you can access more or less information about those customers and, if they allow you full permission and you find a way of incentivising that for them as well, then you have a lot more information.

So, although someone might not have signed up for our REM or our Lady Gaga or any other artist’s database and we don’t know that they’re interested, we might be able to see that they’re actually a follower on Facebook or, that they’ve Tweeted something about one of those artists. So then we can use that to say, “Great. Okay, we know this person’s a fan, let’s personalise the products and promotions to make them more relevant to them”.

Greg: Yes, which ultimately is going to result in more conversion. But you were talking about ATG before, which is obviously a technology that Oracle bought in the last year or two. The other really big players in the eCommerce space really would be IBM WebSphere and also Magento eCommerce, while not as big at the top end of town, certainly is a more cost effective solution, I would say, for the majority of organisations. Have you got any particular preference as far as platforms that you really like or dislike?

Gavin: No, we used ATG at Shop Direct and it was an absolutely great solution. It did an awful lot but then it comes with a really big price tag and I think the same is probably true with WebSphere, which I’ve never actually used, but I know a fair few friends who use WebSphere and they seem to share the same sort of opinion that I’ve got on ATG. Magento’s interesting, obviously because it’s like WordPress but for eCommerce, being far more open source. And it looks like a very good solution.

Greg: Yes, we definitely like Magento, their Enterprise Edition is $12k a year compared to literally hundreds and thousands of dollars a year for the other solutions. I think if you’re building Amazon then, it might not be the right solution, but if you’ve got a brand name and you’re transforming your site from a normal site to an eCommerce store then it’s a very, very good way to go and it seems quite robust. One thing we’ve found is that laying out the design right from a server point of view is crucial so that you get your site performing well.

Greg: We were talking a little bit before about social media integration and social media definitely has matured and is very much mainstream now, especially following the massive growth of Facebook and, to a lesser extent, I guess, Twitter. For organisations that want to get into the social space and know that strategically they need to do something there but they want to focus on what’s the 80/20 of it. When really thinking about ROI, what are some of the things that can be implemented that can be effective?

Gavin: I guess it really depends on the brand. It’s going to be quite different for some fast moving consumer goods than it will be necessarily for us but I definitely think for retailers. If they’re operating in the space we are then, yes, the focus should be on ‘on site social’ and it’s often overlooked.

I think there’s a tendency to try and build Facebook likes and see Facebook likes as the be-all and the end-all whereas, actually, really, it’s engagement that’s important. It’s when you’ve got your advocates, your fans talking to each other across your Facebook page or across your platform that you’ve really sort of hit the bingo.

Our focus definitely in terms of the 80/20 where you get the most value is building ‘on site social’ and gamification so we can get our customers rating the products and services and talking to other fans of artists – which really helps generate SEO as well and creates a sense of community. It’s not trying to build a social network like Facebook. It’s just trying to build user generated content and some of those tools to create a better shopping experience.

Greg: I notice you do a lot in the mobile space, and when you do designs from a mobile point of view, that you do very much two designs. So one is for the tablet format and one for the Smartphone format. What sorts of technologies or design considerations do you really believe are key when nailing a mobile strategy for a site or a store?

Gavin: I think in terms of the technology, we’re using a rendering engine, which takes a product feed and site structure for the eCommerce engine and creates a nice user experience for each different device.

So for a mobile, obviously, it’s far smaller. You need to design some things like flat forms and just keep it really simple. It’s more important about what you’re taking out than what you’re leaving. It’s about making sure you strip it down as much as possible.

For a tablet, you’ve obviously got far more space… and you’ve also got to think about the times these are likely to be used. For a mobile it’s far more likely to be dead time where someone’s perhaps sitting on a bus and they thinks “I may as well utilise this to buy the CD I was thinking about” whereas, with a tablet, they’re probably more than likely sitting at home watching TV and think, “Okay, actually I want to buy.” You hear a track or something or you want to go and buy some clothes. So it’s you want a more pleasurable sort of shopping experience on a tablet device.

Greg: What can you tell us about the Get Music site and really it’s a platform, isn’t it, because it publishes music to other places, and how you’re going to grow that at Universal because it really is an interesting project that one?

Gavin: Yes, it’s a music store where we sell and stock music from all artists, both digital and physical. It’s really, the whole ethos behind it is ‘it’s by music fans for music fans’ and it’s a place to get exclusive and deluxe products. So we’re not just trying to be JB Hi-Fi.

We’re trying to really appeal to the super fans and allow those super fans to connect with other fans. I think it’s about two years old now but I mean I’ve only just joined about four months ago. So we’re going through what is the brand position on it at the moment and inputting every bit of the strategy for rolling out, which includes all of the things we’ve talked about today – personalisation, social, mobile, making sure we’ve got the right products – and hopefully we’re going to be able to create a really good brand there and a really good site.

Greg: That’s an interesting project. I wish you the best of luck with that one. I see you’re a keynote speaker at the upcoming iMedia Online Retail Summit in May. What will you be covering at that event?

Gavin: I think the core focus of it is going to be on talking about some results and what we’ve seen from our social media marketing and also mobile marketing. So by that point, we hopefully would have launched our iPhone, our android apps, our mobile optimised site and Facebook store. So we’ll have some results to share about what impact that’s had and what return on investment we’re seeing from it.

Also from the Shop Direct experience and what impacts we saw there but then as well as what direct results you can get from social and mobile and how they fit into the broader eCommerce strategy.

Greg: Thank you very much for your time. We really do appreciate it and wish you the best of luck with both the Get Music store that you’re relaunching and your career in the future online.

Gavin: Thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to appear in Internet Marketing magazine.

Greg: I’m very excited to have Jonathan Mizel with us today.

Jonathan: Thank you. I am so incredibly honoured to be part of the magazine and also really just delighted at what you’re doing Greg.

Greg: You’re living in Maui are you?

Jonathan: That’s right. We live in up-country Maui. I moved here back right around 2001; came here and actually I was here on vacation before and my girlfriend at the time said, “Can we move to Maui?”. I think she was joking. And I said, “Sure”. You know, I thought about it and I thought why not? We can live wherever we want, we’re an Internet business and we do like it here – and we’ve been here for now going on 11 years.

Greg: You’ve been successful online for many years and you’re well known, especially the traffic and conversion areas – can you tell us a little bit about your story.

Jonathan: Well, I was an insurance agent for many years and I had a friend who was an information technology guy, back in the early 90’s and he turned me on to bulletin boards.

This was pre-internet and I thought to myself, this looks like an interesting new marketing channel, but at the time there just wasn’t a lot of commerce going on; things were very new.

And then he took me to my very first Internet seminar in 1993 and we got a demonstration of something called an auto responder, which I had never seen before. Of course, we all know what an auto responder is now, but this was so revolutionary. And I said to myself, “Wow! We could put a sales letter on there.”

And then the commercial Internet hit right around that time and I packed in my job by giving my notice and I started working with some small desktop publishers and other businesses. I started writing this newsletter for my friends and other people involved in the marketing and technology business, which ended up becoming ‘The Online Marketing Letter’.

From there I went on the road and started training people. With a couple of friends of mine we went off and did almost 170 seminars, all over the United States, getting people involved with the internet, with marketing – with the whole digital universe and the digital advertising space. It was very exciting, but it was so new that of course we were really making up the rules as we went along – which most of them turned out to be OK.

Greg: Many Internet marketers are purely focussed on both AdWords and Facebook, and pretty much everyone’s fishing in that same pond, but as we both know the number of places to buy traffic, especially display traffic, is virtually unlimited. What is your thoughts on other cost-effective traffic sources where smaller ‘up and coming marketers’ can buy traffic, especially on a pay per click basis?

Jonathan: Well, I want to actually start with Google, and at least give them a few props – and that is, if you are in a category that Google does not hate, and you have never been kicked off of Google, and you are not in a restricted type of space, and you are not openly using squeeze pages, or any of the things that they really don’t like, you know their traffic really is some of the best.

The problem occurs when people run up against them and the pricing either becomes ridiculously high and so you can’t make a profit, or pretty much everything that we teach people about getting more traffic and getting more conversion and actually creating a more cohesive experience – Google doesn’t like.

If you can use Google, I think it’s great. But a lot of people discover that it doesn’t quite work for them.

What we’ve seen and especially over the last three or four years, is a huge explosion in display. One of the main reasons that that’s happened is the number of web pages that are available for advertising – it is huge.

You take all the websites out there and all the YouTubes and all the small sites and medium sites and the video sites, and the gossip sites, and the lyric sites, and all the news sites, and you just have tremendous trillions and trillions of impressions every month, and every morning.
When I think about it this way, which is a much better way to think about it than the scarcity approach, every morning Ad reps and Ad Managers have to wake up and decide how they’re going to sell all their space that day. So, what they do is, they become part of networks.

It’s really simple supply and demand, and supply has gone far larger than the demand, at least in the last few years, and I think that the real opportunities are out there in non-Google, and even non-Facebook traffic – especially for people looking to scale up.

Some of the networks that I like to buy display ads on of a pay per click ad unit, are Pulse 360, which is really very open to going on a CPA basis. Although you are competing with a lot of smart advertisers, so in order to get into that realm with them you really have to have a good offer that really does convert.

I really like a network called AdKnowledge.com. They have a tremendous amount of inventory, including non-US inventory, and they are willing to go on a performance basis. Certainly they can work within the CPC realm.

AdBuyer, (which was recently purchased), has access to some of the exchange inventory, which is the excess remnant inventory. Yahoo has a network called, or an exchange called Right Media Exchange, which you can tap into through Ad Buyer and then – even Google has a remnant ‘DoubleClick’ type of remnant inventory that you can tap into there as well.

Greg: If you’re using DoubleClick do the same rules apply as normal ‘Google rules’. I know some people steer away from DoubleClick for that reason, because all of a sudden they’re fishing back in the Google’s pond, and you are thinking ‘are they going to be a big brother to me and tell me what I can and can’t do’ – that sort of thing?

Jonathan: They didn’t at first. In fact, the joke we used to make was, ‘if you get kicked out of Google just go to double-click and there’s some nice Ad Rep who will gladly take your money’. Now the Google culture has definitely gone downstream to the double-click team. If you’re banned from Google you might not get into double-click in terms of – you certainly wouldn’t be able to grow on an unlimited basis. But if you’ve got no issues with Google; you haven’t been banned, then I think that double-click is still a good way to go.

Greg: I know you do a lot of display advertising. Do you have any good design rules that you always make sure that you include when designing banners so that you get a good response?

Jonathan: Well, the universal rule that we follow, which has been the case for many years, is your banners should either fit in, or stand out. And I don’t mean a little bit fit in, I mean absolutely look like part of the web page. And more and more sites are saying, “You cannot have a graphic that looks like a link. You cannot knowingly take the look of our website and design a banner so that it looks like a search box”, or some- thing like that. But you still can on a lot of these B level sites where the sites are still open to this.

And then in terms of things that stand out, I really want to explain what I mean by that. Banner advertising is by and large what we call ‘pattern interrupt based advertising’. In other words nobody voluntarily says “I’m going to go out and click on some banners today” and no one goes on the internet and says, “I wonder what kind of ads I’m going to see”.

Animated ads like the belly fat ad can work well because they stand out.

A weird picture on the banner can work well. The weird picture makes the person look and then they look at the headline and then they say they’re interested, and then they click through, and that’s how you would really use these kind of pattern interrupt based banners to really get attention and get people clicking.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re pretty much on the same page there. We buy a lot of display for our clients and we test a lot of banners. We study the adult industry as far as what they’re doing, because they’re generally ahead of the game with the hand drawn and all that sort of stuff.

Something that we’ve done recently that’s worked well is using Facebook’s colours and their look and feel on banner ads and we’ve found that that really has pulled well, because everyone has had exposure to that site and can associate with it.

One thing we’ve found is it’s not just about getting a click. It’s really about the effectiveness of the offer. And we’ve even tested different traffic sources and tracked and measured, so, not just which traffic sources resulted in the most leads, but then watched it over a three or six month period and which traffic sources resulted in the most sales. Because sometimes we might have a traffic source that pulls insane amounts of leads, but then when we look over the three or six month period and find it didn’t really pay for itself, or it wasn’t really that special, but traffic source B over here, it was just incredible because that’s where the buyers are.

Greg: Now for a little bit of traffic acronym bingo. One thing about traffic and media buys, there certainly is a lot of acronyms. So like many marketers are familiar with CPC, (Cost Per Click), where they only pay on when someone clicks on the ad. Are you able to share with the Internet Marketing Magazine community what CPM, CPA and CPS are and ultimately when you would use these different models?

Jonathan: Here’s a simple way to look at it. On one end of the spectrum we have CPM, which means ‘Cost Per Thousand Impressions’. That’s what the networks want to sell you, because they have a lot of that, and so they are more than happy to sell you impressions. But there’s absolutely no performance basis with CPM at all. It is just – it’s like buying space in a magazine or buying space on a web page, or buying a billboard. It may work, but it may not work. It’s based on the number of impressions and absolutely has no performance matrix.

On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got CPS, or ‘Cost Per Sale’, which is really just a straight affiliate program. On one hand you’re going to – I’m going to pay you for each impression and then on the other hand I’m actually going to give you a percentage of each sale. Maybe we’re selling a hundred dollar product and I might give you fifty or sixty dollars of that.

The next model is CPA (Cost Per Action), and that is a where we pay every time a real person comes to a real website and fills out a form of some sort (the action).

I think that as advertisers generally we want to be focused more on the end where’s there’s more performance. And then if you’re a media seller and you happening to be listening to this, well you want to be more focussed on the CPM. You want to sell what you’ve got. And if you’re an advertiser you want to pay only on performance.

Greg: Re-marketing is something that’s sort of been around for around two to two and a half years now and really is a game changer. For those who don’t know, it’s re-marketing where someone visits your site and effectively you cookie them, and then as they travel around a particular display network your banners show up time and time again. We’ve had great return on investment for re-marketing and we certainly do implement it from a Google side for pretty much across all our clients.

A lot of other display networks, where we talk to them about re-marketing, they want us to buy a display campaign and then they’ll put re-marketing in as part of it. They won’t just sell us a re-marketing campaign. Has that been your experience, or have you found ad networks with large connections that will just sell you effectively a re-marketing cookie that you can then buy traffic on a pay per click basis?

Jonathan: The most important thing is just to have networks that are large enough so that you can get the distribution that you need, because when you’re running a re-marketing campaign you’re only dealing with the people who’ve been cookied, based on having visited your site, or somehow visited one of your properties. And so I like to look at just the very – the biggest networks or the biggest exchanges and sources for getting re-marketing traffic.

And outside of Google another one we have used is advertising.com, which is the AOL network. There’s a tremendous amount of inventory there. And then there are two really decent demand site platforms (DSP’s). The first one is AdBuyer, which I have mentioned before – it can give you access to both Google and also the right media exchange, and also some of the other network traffic.

And another one that we’ve been using recently, very successfully as a matter of fact, is called SiteScout. They’re out of Canada and are a very much DSP with a tremendous amount of inventory available.

Greg: What you’ve shared with us today Jonathan is just gold; your knowledge in this space is amazing. I personally have been a student of yours for roughly two years. I’ve got both your ‘Half Cent Clicks’ course, as well as your ‘Traffic Evolution’ course, and I really got a lot out of that one. How can our readers and our listeners, who really are pretty much all over the globe now – how can they find out more about you, but also your products and services so that they can buy this sort of traffic on these sort of scales at the sort of prices that you and I do?

Jonathan: I think probably the best thing to start with for most people who are interested in getting involved with media buying and non-Google traffic sources is traffic evolution and you can just go to TrafficEvolution.com. We’ve got 30, 40 I think maybe even more resources listed in there and you know, we have updated the course now two, three times. We try to keep it fairly evergreen and in the parts that do change we really do keep those updated.

And then there’s Half Cent Clicks, which is really more of a junky traffic, but we’ve found that you can make pretty good money out of junky traffic, especially if you’re selling business opportunities or things that normal networks won’t take. And then you can go to cyberwavemedia.com, which is our agency site and just see what we’ve got there. Like I said we don’t really take on new clients; we haven’t for a while, but you never know.

Greg: Welcome to the call Justin and Lex.

Justin and Lex: Thanks Greg!

Greg: It’s great to have you here. I’m sure that our readers and our listeners will be very interested to see what you’ve achieved in such a short period of time.

For those who are not familiar with SurfStitch can you tell us a bit about your brand and what makes you unique online?

Justin/Lex: We started our business in 2008, which at the time focused primarily in the surf fashion space and then transitioned into more of an unlimited sport, surf, fashion type model. We broadly market to the fashion conscious 15 to 35 year olds within Australia, and now into Europe. We have a pretty board spectrum of customer base now which we are trying to grow as quickly as we can.

Greg: Have you always been mates or did you get together more just on the business front?

Lex: We were real mates prior to this, we spent a lot of time surfing. But professionally I came from a surf retail background and Justin has more of a finance background.

Greg: A good mix of complementary skills there. The rate that your business has grown and continues to grow is phenomenal. What do you think have been the main keys to growing from the backyard to dominant Online Retailer in such a short period of time?

Justin/Lex: The key has been to ensure that we have recruited, retained and focused on the key management skills of all our staff, and at the same time we have focused on a technology platform that will allow us to grow quickly to scale and execute on high volumes that we’ve been inundated with over the last 36-48 months as our business has grown from 0 to a $30 million + business.

Greg: The strategic relationship you did with Billabong I believe is a masterstroke, and not something that I would have thought of before now. How did that come about?

Justin/Lex: Initially, we struggled with getting supply from major suppliers and Billabong being the larger industry supplier, we need to really look in a way to lock them in as a supplier.

Initially we entered more of a standard supplier relationship with them, but within about 12 months they approached us about taking a strategic position within our business. And it makes sense in the perspective of locking in a key supplier and also removing them a competitor. That is, in our view a play, which has resulted in us now managing all their brand globally, both individually and on a multi channel retail platform format. So it allowed us to grow and scale much faster than we could without this agreement in place.

Greg: In terms of vision, goals and mindset, did you go into this right back at the eBay days knowing where you wanted to take it and how you were going to get there? Or did it just sort of evolve over time?

Justin/Lex: I don’t really think we had a vision that we would have a $30m business and a European office in the time period that we have. We had an ambition that we’ll try out something on Ebay and at the same time rolling out a retail bricks and mortar footprint on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

We look at it like this – you take a lot of chances and a lot of risks. We have made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. The key strength that we think we have now that gives us a competitive advantage is our inventory management systems that we have invested a lot of time and money in, as well as our platform which provides, from our perspective and even Billabong’s, a key Intellectual Property advantage to the market place.

You know I’ve said, a lot of risks were won, we took a lot of chances and we made a lot of mistakes but now we’ve developed a system that will take it to the $100m and $200m model.

There is also now the opportunity to partner with other retailers to leverage our platform and our IP as strategic joint ventures.

Greg: I think what you guys have done really is the future of Internet Marketing with major retail ecommerce stores.

Many entrepreneurs step up to the plate and have a few swings and misses before smacking it out of the park. Have you guys had similar ‘learning experiences’ ? or were you able to be successful on your first attempt?

Justin/Lex: I don’t know about that, but we have been lucky because sometimes timing is everything. We were the first in the market and we capitalized on that first market opportunity and I think what we have done is that we continue to reinvest aggressively. We continue to push hard and leverage our business as much as possible because at the end of the day we see the key to our business is scale.

What we’re trying to achieve is that we want this business within 5 years to be a $100m business and the only way to achieve that is to push harder and aggressively. We will continue to learn along the way, but hopefully now we have a platform in place that will allow us to get there without too many major hurdles or competitors.

Greg: With 20,000 unique visitors a day to your site, your traffic strategy is phenomenal with dominant SEO, aggressive Adwords campaign in certain areas and also PR with main stream media exposure. What have been your big ‘take aways’ about which forms of traffic have been great ROI for you and your business?

Justin/Lex: Google is obviously an aggressive spending platform that we initially utilized as more of a CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) spend. We saw it as an investment in our business. The return on investment initially was pretty poor as we just tried to drive traffic to the website, but now we have developed a model where we manage ROI daily and we have, I think a solution where we focus on the combination of SEO and SEM. The Christmas period as of today, we have 60,000 visitors to the website, the volumes have pushed so quickly now that we are getting to a stage where managing SEO and SEM as a combination is extremely important. At the start, like a lot of new businesses, you have to experiment and we experimented but we made sure that we had a big budget and we pushed hard on SEO and then we developed SEM thereafter.

We focussed on getting our website right from an SEO structure perspective so that we would not need to keep writing big checks to Google over time.

Greg: When consulting to online commerce stores, your site and also Zappos are the two that I refer to most. The customer experience on Surfstitch is very well engineered with the online chat, the excellent drilldown of categories and slick buying process with steps 1 through to 3. Do you spend a lot of time on analytics, video tracking tools or data mining to figure out what’s really working and how to enhance that user experience?

Justin/Lex: We do a lot of A/B testing, some heat mapping, we got quite a large of user experience committee here. Any changes that are made or enhancements are not done lightly. We spend a lot of time analysing not just the visual components of it but also the results that it drive. We still think there are a lot of improvements to be made. We have got a new check out process coming in the New Year. We have just reworked the navigation. From early indications of measurements that’s performing well.

We’ve got the feedback functionality on the page and we read that daily as gospel. We get several hundred valuable comments every day and we use that more than any thing else to steer our user experience development.

It’s an unbiased form of communication. Our site visitors will really tell us what they think. We get plenty of praise, which we enjoy but we look at the constructive criticism for ways to improve.

Greg: I see you’ve gone down the Oracle ATG path for your digital platform. What was it that swayed you to use this technology over other comparable platforms like Magento?

Justin/Lex: We experimented like a lot of Internet companies do during their initial stages and went with a platform which was custom built. We found that a lot of custom built site, where you enter or you encounter capacity constraint issues particularly given that we were growing so quickly. So we have to look for a solution, which we thought that would take us to $100 million opportunity.

I think we are unfortunately or fortunately went with the process of over-capitalizing, where with the ATG platform which is really for businesses of $50m plus or $100m plus. It’s an expensive solution but it has huge benefits in relation to peak capacity constraints, flexibility and more importantly the opportunity to customize all aspects of the platform from shopping cart personalization to a myriad of different things which increase conversion rates.

Today, I was looking at our conversion rates at 6.5% percent, which was unheard of when we started our business 3 years ago. And the ATG platform has given us a process and a platform to improve our conversion rates. I think we’re now at a place where we can do a lot of scenario driven options as well.

We did look into the Magento solution. There are pros and cons, but it’s out of the equation now. Obviously at the moment, we’re an ATG operator but we would never tie ourselves to one platform. We always maintain flexibility in our business model to allow us to move to a solution that makes sense for us economically and from a commercial perspective around IT.

Greg: Thanks a lot guys, I really do appreciate your time. I know that the Internet Marketing Magazine readers can certainly learn a lot from what you have achieved in a relatively short period of time. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone who has grown at the same speed and also that has as professional online store as the SurfStitch presence that you built there. My thorough congratulations, and well done on that.

Justin/Lex: Thanks Greg, good talking to you.

Visit surfstitch.com and have a shop around the site. Go through the checkout process to see how slick and effective it really is.

Today he’s known more for his internet marketing businesses and his ability to teach internet marketing in an easy-to-understand way. Brett has many simple Internet businesses that generate over $750,000 a year from home.

GREG: Today I’m very honored to have with me expert Internet marketer, copywriter and also event promoter Brett McFall. Welcome to the call, Brett.

BRETT: It’s my pleasure to be here Greg. I’ve been interested in what you’ve been doing and I really want to be able to see if I can help you give the viewer, the listener, the reader get awesome value from this interview.

GREG: Bret, you’ve been successful online for many years, and are also very well known in the Copywriting area. Can you tell us a bit about your story and how you ended up where you are now?

BRETT: It’s not a path I’ve ever envisioned. I never thought I would actually end up like this but as I was working at an advertising agency on the 90’s, I knew I wanted something else and that’s when the internet happens to come in. I was daydreaming during lunch time seeking out what this internet thing was and I saw some genius there and I thought “Wow if I could pop my own website up, I wonder if I could have my own business online.” The ideas began to dwell while I was working for another agency and I could see other people in America who were actually offering Copywriting and I then realized you can actually hire someone from here in Australia directly from America over the Internet directly.

I could see a lot of genius in this and that’s when I really got a lot of interest and launched my own website.

But before I even launched my own website, I’ve been writing a newsletter. I’ve been giving away tips to business owners on how to improve their marketing. And it came to a point where they would just say “You seem to be so good at what you’re doing, can you just write the advertising for us?” and that’s when I started my income on the side. These dudes were putting their $5,000 to $10,000 in my account because I was really producing amazing results for them. I was the first copywriter to actually have a money back guarantee in Australia and that was ground breaking at the time. So it wasn’t a hard transition to go from working for a company to working on my own in the copywriting field, I’d always had the idea, but it took for at least 5 years to have the guts to do it.

So I was just there watching the internet while doing my stuff writing for clients, I got my own website up and people started to subscribe to my newsletter, I was getting top 10 rankings on Google, it was easy as anything to get rankings back then. In Yahoo, I was number one with everything and then Google, I went to number one. It was so easy basically cause there was no competition. As I started to get good results people start to say, “Well how are you doing it, can you show us?” and that’s how I developed. Until I met an American who was running seminars about Internet Marketing and I said, “We should bring that concept to Australia,” and we liked it and it just went nuts. We were the first people to bring internet marketing seminars to Australia. It was simply a revolution that happened early 2000 that changed the industry forever.

Then I started to sell online and people started to buy my DVDs & manuals.

GREG: Bret, you have a good reputation in the Copywriting and Ad Writing space. What were some of the real gems of knowledge that if you could start over again in this space you wished you’d known earlier?

BRETT: I have really one core answer to that cause it covers absolutely everything. It is this one principle; it is the reason why I am here now. Give away your best secrets.

If you go to business school, they will teach you to compete, and they teach you to give your customers a little upfront and then give them everything else only when they’re paid, it’s the general lesson you’ll get taught by conventional schools and systems. But I say, do the total opposite of what others are doing, and you’ll do better, because what most people are doing is wrong.

Whatever gives your customer the best value, give it away. If you truly do give away your information, your answers, your solutions, suddenly now you have a relationship with your customers. It is one thing to tell your customer how to do something or give them more than everybody else, but tell them how to apply it and for them to want to know all the other things that you know as well. It’s really creating that relationship. No matter what field you’re in, give your answers away that help your customers.

Your customer suddenly feels, “Wow this is someone I actually like dealing with cause there’s no pressure here.” There’s no pressure to buy in order to get what they really need, now they wanted to do business with you even more now that they can relax. Instead of you having to sell yourself to them, they now want to become your customer. It’s a completely different way of doing things.

The marketing of any business can be so much easier if the people follow that one simple rule.

GREG: I’ve seen you teach a concept before about 4 MMO’s. Or in other words the 4 fundamental ways to ‘Make Money Online’. Can you explain what you mean by that for our readers and listeners?

BRETT: The first way to make money online is to remember, your website is just like a traditional business. Your shop front is simply a website, that’s it. So the first thing you can sell is physical products. And so they don’t have to be anything special, just cameras, books, you name it, anything that people want. Physical products can all be sold from a website. They can be your products or somebody else’s.

Secondly, you can sell digital products. They are products you can download, like software, e-books, audio files, and videos. Digital product is just anotherway for you to get information or solution. It can be your own digital products as you create them yourself, or you can buy somebody else’s digital products and sell those from your site. Either way, you have options. And people often said, “How can I possibly sell products online, I don’t have and I don’t have any product idea?” That’s okay, you can find other products which have licenses that are allowable and you can buy the licenses and you can sell the product at your site, it’s a great way to start.

GREG: The good thing about digital products is the margins can be great, as you have got very low costs. It can be a great way of getting ahead.

BRETT: Awesome, Greg. The thing is there are so many tools nowadays to enjoy digital product; we have iPads, iPhones etc. Therefore it’s a fabulous area to
get into.

The third way to get yourself online is to sell your services. Solicitors, dentists, hair dressers, all wonder, “How can I do it online? Do I really need a website?” 48% businesses in Australia still don’t have a website. It’s crazy, they need a website.

How do you do that? Simply educate your market. Give away your best secrets. Create a website and that allows you then to contact people if they join your database and give you their name and email. You can contact them with special offers or about coming in to your store. If you don’t want to sell things from yourself, you can sell other people’s stuff. You can recommend other people’s stuff and take a commission. So selling your services is totally doable online and very very cool.

The last way is simply to recommend other people’s products. You simply make a business by recommending other people’s products. You don’t have a business; you don’t really have anything other than good recommendation. You can recommend someone else’s software, like I have software and if you recommend someone to buy that software, you get 50 cents for every dollar I make. There’s no reason you can’t set up a deal where you send people along to their site and if they turn to a customer they give you 10-25% of the sale which can be a grand at least. It’s called Affiliate Marketing; you may have heard of it, it’s really awesome :)

GREG: What traffic strategies do you find yourself implementing on a new site when testing if it’s going to be successful and then when rolling it out on a
big scale?

BRETT: I’ll give you two ways that will bring you this. If I’m going to start a brand new product or someone else’s product to go to an affiliate marketing arrangement, it’s still a brand new site. The first question I ask is, “Can I get it ranked? Can I get that website ranked on its’ own?” I’ve got a way of doing that. I’ve got one technique right here. That if I can do this technique it means, that site is self-sufficient and then I’ll tell you where I can take it after that. I’ll give you a strategy to get you something ranked.

There’s this technique called, Expired Domain Names. I can actually buy expired domain names which previously were a website but for whatever reason, that website has gone down, the person doesn’t run the website from it anymore so the domain name which used to be that website is now available for sale. So if you go along buy some expired domain names, often these domain names have back links, sometimes hundreds of back links, which means they can still get ranked, even if there’s nothing there on the website. These backlinks are brilliant for Google because as soon as you put a webpage back underneath these domain names, the web pages are instantly getting ranked on Google and Yahoo, so in a matter of days, you can start getting traffic. That’s one method I use for getting instant free traffic.

And here’s one little tip here. You have got to start now offering fresh content on the site – that is the absolute principle of the Internet; you have to have fresh content. Buy the domain name, put a page, start adding content, particularly fresh content. That is how you respect Google and Yahoo because that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

The second question I ask is, “Can I get people to stay?” I have contact with hundreds of really good Internet marketers but I don’t find many who actually pay attention to getting focused on getting them to stay on the site. They get so excited on how much traffic they can run and bring to the website. But how can we get people to stay, if they don’t stay, you basically have a lame duck, and it’s not going to work long term. I have techniques where I can keep people on the website maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes and in the end, they are still on it spending money. So the sales process can be another subject of a whole another interview. Now if you can’t answer those two questions, then there’s no point in actually getting traffic to your site. You got to be able to get them to stay, and when they stay, have them take an action of some sort: either they give you their name or email, or buy. Otherwise, you’re not going to get a business long term or you won’t be able to get it off to the ground.

GREG: What advice would you have for those of our readers and listeners who have bought every course and implemented a heap of stuff and are just not making money online?

BRETT: Buying courses, doesn’t make successful, it just gives you extra knowledge. It all comes down to implementation. I often demonstrate this on stage, I actually call somebody up on stage and I’ll have a tennis ball and ask them, “Can you catch a tennis ball?”, and they will say, “Absolutely, I can!” then I will tossed them the tennis ball on stage, and they catch it. But then I’ll say, “Hold on a second, let me do this. I have 12 tennis ball here in a jar,” and now I toss those all at once at the person who agreed to catch the tennis ball, and they do their best to catch the 12 tennis balls. The most that anybody has caught is 4 out of the 12, it’s because it’s an extremely hard thing to do.

What it really shows is the limit of our brains. It’s physically not impossible to catch the 12 balls, if you were a super genius, super quick it could be done. But the point is our brain just can’t deal with too many thingsat once.

What I’m trying to teach is to do things step by step, one at a time. If you’re going to buy a course, buy one course, hold on to it, implement it then don’t bother on the next course until you’ve actually exhausted the first course. What’s happening is, people have what they shelved at home which are at least 2-3 courses, maybe more. They are all good, they are perfectly round furry tennis balls but if somebody in that course offered you webinars, seminars, DVDs, CDs, teleconferences, personal coaching, more live seminars, that’s like 12 tennis balls being thrown at you. There’s not a chance you’ll be able to implement them thoroughly. You have to dedicate yourself to mastery. Implementing is really where it’s at.

If you’re not making money and you’re implementing all these strategies, there’s one of two things wrong, either the strategy simply doesn’t work or you haven’t implemented it properly- and that’s where I find a lot of people messing up. It’s hard to get an average person go to a website, download the software they have just purchased and install that software on their computer. That’s a three step process, and it’s extremely hard to have an average person to complete all these steps. They don’t read all the instructions, they think they know what they are doing and it complicates the process. If the average person struggles with this downloading some software to their computer, how can we possibly think they are not going to struggle when they to go and implement a pretty cool internet marketing strategy or a social media strategy or a traffic strategy that usually has a lot more steps to it than that and involves a bit more brainwork than that.

You only have 2-4 weeks to actually take an action before you lose the whole momentum. In the first week, if something doesn’t work, you need to realize is it me, or is the strategy? You have to be honest with yourself. If it’s you, get someone else to make it happen. If it’s not you, then you take it up with that person who teaches you and get them to do whatever they can to make sure that they show you or you get your money back. So don’t sweat things, just get your money back or make it work.

GREG: I found at certain times you might have everything in place, but if you don’t give it enough energy, then it’s not going to get there. If you don’t give it enough focus, enough love and attention, what I call ‘Energy Units’ then it’s not going to work.

BRETT: …and it’s not a hobby Greg. It’s not a hobby. A business online is not a hobby, which means this has got to fit in. It has to fit in with the rest of your life, which probably have to do with your family, children, maybe outside, maybe do sport, maybe just do whatever, but it has to have priority. And if doesn’t have priority then it is just a hobby to you and don’t expect it to be a business in terms of results.

GREG: That’s an important point you’re raising. It’s a business not just a hobby. It has to have the same business fundamentals that apply in the offline world as well, as far as supply and demand. I could really love green triangles and I’m going to do everything possible about promoting green triangles online but if you’re not really interested in buying green triangles or even reading about green triangles and no one else is, then it doesn’t really matter, does it?

BRETT: Agreed, great point. Here’s another question to ask is, “Who is actually is offering green triangles and how much time are they investing in the business compared to you?” If it’s more than you, then they’re going to kick your butt.

GREG: If you had to start all over again is there anything that you would do differently? How would you make a go of it from scratch if you didn’t have a reputation or big list?

BRETT: The rules now have completely changed from how I started. What I would do these days, the smarter way to do things is not to try and reinvent the wheel. What I mean to that is, we already know that if you are starting today and you wanted to start to make some money, for you to find the niche and test the niche, create a product, test the product, improve the product, that can be done, should be done and should give you a process to you will follow for the next 10 years anyway. That is a good business. But if you’re actually getting started really quickly and make money now, where can you go piggy back on somebody else’s success where there’s already a market, already money being spent or already a trend?

For example, Facebook is a massive trend right now; it is one of the number 1 places on the Internet. Everybody seems to have their own Facebook account, if they don’t they at least have heard of Facebook and know what it’s all about. So what can I do that could piggyback on Facebook’s success? What tools do users need that are currently not available? What can I possibly do to make Facebook easier, quicker or more profitable, more resourceful, more whatever and I would do that.

Let me push the example even further, that could mean you could just go and interview 10 people who are experts in Facebook. They’ve got more ‘likes’ than anybody else, more friends than anybody else, How do you get it? What did you do then? How did you do this? Just interview them and just come up with a product which then you can sell to who wants to get online and have a business using Facebook. Suddenly you got a product which knows a trend. You’re talking about thousands of people who would love to have a product like that.

So for your average person, that’s what I would do if I have to start all over again. It’s one way, but it’s not the only way.

There are hundreds of ways to make money on the internet. So no matter who you are, if you want to start a business or be good at business on the Internet, you’ve got to be able to do have a gamble. You have to be able to gamble at some stage, but you need to calculate your gambles. That’s the difference between an entrepreneur and someone with an ordinary job. Prepare to gamble, prepare to risk them, prepare yourself that it might just not work.

Here’s the last thing I want to say, that the internet is the cheapest place to fail. You cannot lose your house by starting an internet business. You can start a business for a few hundred bucks and that’s a worthwhile investment. If you can devote 100% of your time to your business, it works.

GREG: How best can the Internet Marketing Magazine community find you online and find out more info about your events?

BRETT: They can simply go to BrettMcFall.com. When they go there, there’s a free newsletter. Of course, if they don’t want to sign up, there’s free information in there. Like reports that I’ve done, insights that I’ve done, interviews that I’ve done and all the stuff that I’ve said, that in this place they’re going to have for free. It’s all there in the site. There’s also stuff you can learn from courses and programs, whatever that suits you, it’s all there. You’re all welcome to go there and just enjoy it and I wish you all the best.

I hear it from almost 90% of my clients… “Ali, I’m working 10-to-12-hour days to run my business. My husband and kids hardly see me, and I’m starting to burn out. What am I doing wrong?”

When I dig a little further, I usually find that the sense of overwhelm is coming from the same source: These people haven’t identified their most profitable projects, and placed those tasks ABOVE everything else in their business priority list.

In other words, they haven’t created a profit calendar.

A profit calendar helps you establish what your most profitable projects are for the months ahead—so you can focus your time and energy into ONLY those tasks that will generate maximum income. By creating a profit calendar, you get clear on the tasks that are worth your time, and those that aren’t. It’s a powerful tool to help you stay focused and energized. And it WORKS.

In my Elevate online business training program, we show our members how to plan for profits in these 5 easy steps. Here’s a quick peek at what we recommend. Enjoy!

STEP 1: Plan to re-launch past offerings, if any.
If you’re an established business owner, you’re likely already sitting on a hidden profit center—and that’s your existing inventory. Think of a service or product that sold well for you in the past that you can reintroduce to your market. If you offered VIP coaching days on the road, it might be something worth launching again. If there’s an old product that you want to get off your shelves, host a closeout sale. The idea is to put something out that will bring you income with minimal effort. It’s about leveraging what you’ve already done—not reinventing the wheel.

Now obviously, re-launching an offering is going to take a bit of prep. But all you want to do for now is simply PLUG this launch date into your calendar.

STEP 2: Plan to clear away the dead wood.
Here, you want to take a look at anything that’s not propelling your business forward and set a date to end it. This could be ANYTHING you feel is draining your energy, money, time, etc. Maybe it’s a problem client you dread working with, a team member who isn’t pulling their weight, or that office space you rent but never use. It could even be as simple as cancelling your extra phone line and fax if you’re mostly scanning and emailing docs to clients.

The point is to schedule in a day when you’ll take decisive action on these drains. Otherwise, it’s too easy to let them get lost in your daily shuffle.

STEP 3: Plan to improve on what you’ve already got.
Go down the list of what you currently offer with a fine comb. What small improvement could you make to this one offering to improve your profits by just 5%? I’m not talking about big, sweeping improvements here—just minor tweaks that take very little time to implement. Here are a few examples:

• Send an email to announce that you’re raising your rates, and why.
• Start running new ads on your website or e-newsletter.
• Add an upsell to your order page, or start bundling your products together.
• Call three of your top referral sources and reconnect with them.
• Add a Facebook share button to your sales pages

The above examples could be implemented within a week. Make a list of what you’ll take action on

on within the next 7 days and plug this into your calendar.

STEP 4: Plan to launch new offerings.
If your creative juices are flowing and you have a brilliant idea for a new product, video series, live workshop, coaching program, etc. set the ideal launch dates into your calendar.

Remember, you don’t have to look very far to launch something that is NEW to your list. You can always repackage something you already created to give it a fresh spin. If you hosted a live retreat (and recorded it), make it available as a home-study program. If you hosted a 4-part teleseminar, turn it into an e-book or a series of free reports.

STEP 5: Plan for regular business-building activities.
Don’t overlook the important recurring activities that you must do every week to keep your business growing. Your weekly e-newsletter, blog posts, networking events—these should all be plugged into your calendar.

Once you have a profit calendar in place, it will help you prioritize your daily and weekly tasks. You’ll see what MUST get done from week to week, and what can wait ‘til the next week or be delegated. You can plan launches around your vacations, kid’s activities—you can even plan for big expenditures. And that’s when you’ll hit that sweet spot as an entrepreneur: turning your time into money, and your off-time into fun!

Ali Brown is the voice for women’s entrepreneurial success. As founder and CEO of Ali International LLC, she has created a dynamic enterprise that is devoted to empowering women entrepreneurs around the world, and currently has over 50,000 members in her online and offline programs.

BarkBox founders Henrik Werdelin, Carly Strife, and Matt Meeker.

In a city populated by purse dogs, Matt Meeker found New York’s pet stores to be lacking in products for Hugo, his energetic, 100-lb. Great Dane puppy. “I was very obsessed with spoiling him,” Meeker says, but finding toys and treats for a dog of Hugo’s size wasn’t easy.

Starting BarkBox–a subscription-based service that delivers boxes of goodies to dogs and their owners once a month–was Meeker’s solution. He let other dog-lovers in on it too–thousands of others, in fact. Meeker co-founded BarkBox with Henrik Werdelin and Carly Strife, both veterans of the startup scene, and the service launched in early 2012.

“We just wanted to help dog parents who are obsessed with their dogs discover the newest toys and treats and bones for their dogs and provide it to them on a monthly basis,” Meeker says.

In a little under a year, the company has amassed more than 20,000 customers, Meeker says. And, event better, Meeker says the company has managed to retain them at a steady rate of 93 to 95 percent for the first year.

In fact, one of their biggest problems has been underestimating growth. “We had a stretch goal and we raised the money in June of this year,” Meeker says. “The story we were telling the investors was that our goal for the year was to end with 8,000 customers, and the stretch goal was 10,000. And we really thought 10,000 was not possible.” But they’ve doubled that, and now they’re concentrating on building a fun, edgy, irreverent and sometimes inappropriate brand, he says.

“We don’t call anything marketing,” Meeker says. “We call it customer acquisition or brand building, so we’ve put a lot of emphasis on both. We’ve taken a lot of time to be thoughtful about our brand and create a narrative around it.”

At the heart of BarkBox is the idea that a dog is a member of the family. “We talk a lot about how our customers are dog parents,” Meeker says. “We see that everywhere. We see that with the people we interact with on Facebook, commenting on everything we post, and people who write in or call in to support with questions. They all fall into this profile for sure.”

Because BarkBox knows its customer base–women with disposable incomes, they tend to be 25-to 35-year-old professionals with no children, or 45- to 55-year old empty nesters–its founders have been able to tailor the business to their audience’s wants and needs, and interact with them in as many ways as possible.

“Our approach there over 2012 has been to try as many things as we can as fast as we can and see what works,” Meeker says. “And when we find channels that work, we go very heavy on those.”

For example, deal sites like Groupon and Fab have proved to be effective for bringing in big groups of customers to BarkBox over a short period of time, and the company’s referral program is popular too. Customers earn a free box for every new subscriber they refer. “We actually have one woman who has now earned over 24 years of free BarkBox,” he says. “She’ll be with us for awhile.”

Sometimes they’re surprised at what works. “One thing we kinda stumbled into is people love to do these unboxings and put it on YouTube,” Meeker says. The Internet is filled with home videos of happy customers gleefully describing the contents of this month’s BarkBox while their dogs nose through the toys and treats. “They actually translate really well into new people discovering it and purchasing, and so now we’re a little more systematic about identifying people who do that.”

The team recently launched a BarkBox mobile app, which allows customers to review and reorder products, as well as check the status of their boxes. “But you really can’t do much with it unless you’re a subscriber,” Meeker says. “So it’s to add more value there, to give people one more way of discovering the brand and interacting with it.”

On the other hand, they focus their energy where it matters. When their retargeting service wasn’t bringing them the results they wanted (“We were spending hundreds of dollars per customer,” Meeker says), they opted to switch to Perfect Audience’s services, which has been “super, super successful,” he says.

That includes focusing their energy on certain groups of subscribers too. Customers can purchase monthly, quarterly or half-year subscriptions, with the half-year plan being the best value. Only three percent of customers purchase the monthly package, which is the most expensive, and if they don’t renew, they aren’t chased down. “We actually don’t put a lot of emphasis on reaching out to them and trying to move them into a different plan because it’s such a small group,” Meeker says. Because retention rates for other packages are so high, it’s not worth the time for a small team.

In the future, Meeker and the BarkBox team plan on expanding the products and services they offer. Currently three varieties of boxes go out each month: Ones for small, medium and large dogs. Meeker said he hopes to address dogs’ needs not just based on size, but in categories like age, geography and behavior. Next year, six varieties of boxes will be sent out in January, 12 will go out in February, and in March they’ll expand to 18. Year-long subscriptions are on their way too.

But behind everything, BarkBox’s commitment is to its subscribers, and–especially–to dogs. Ten percent of every subscription goes to a shelter or rescue.

“It’s really not a technology company,” Meeker says. “We think of it as a brand company, where it’s a brand serving a particular audience of people and doing that every which way possible into the future.”

Perfect Audience is the widest-used Facebook retargeting platform. It’s the fastest and easiest way to retarget lost web site visitors on Facebook and bring them back to convert. Follow PerfectAudience in Twitter.

Looks like my headline has grabbed your attention and you’ve started reading. There’s a powerful teaching point in that which I’ll get to in just a sec.

For now let me get to the point, if you are distributing email newsletters stop doing them right now. Why? Well there is not just one reason why there are five and I’ve listed them below.

1. Attention Span
First of all, I want you to think of the state people are in when they are checking and clearing there emails. You have micro seconds to grab there attention because all they are thinking in their heads is, how fast can I delete you. So what they would normally do is open, scroll how much there is to read and if it looks too much they’ll hit delete and move on.

However if you can grab their attention with a short piece of inciting copy and have an attractive reason to click on a link, then get magically transported out of email mode (how fast can I delete you), to now I’m surfing the web. Once this happens people attentions spans goes from just a few seconds to a few minutes, which is now enough time to draw them into your message and offer.

To prove my point have you ever been on email, clicked on a link and then two hours later saying to yourself, “What was I doing? Oh yeah that’s right I was clearing emails.”

2. Training Your Customers
If you want to start selling more of your products and services online (and you should), you need to start training your customers to go to your website. Because a person can’t buy directly from a HTML form inside an email, as it’s not a secure environment.

So in the same way as Pavlov’s dogs if you want to sell products and services online you need to condition your customers to go to your website, because that is where all of the cool stuff and action happens. Plus, once there, it’s only one click away for your shopping cart and dollars in your bank.

3. Content for Google
Next, lets talk about Google and this wonderful thing called the Google Algorithm, which is the process they use to rank your website compared to all of the other websites on the internet. Clearly your job is to get in favour with Google because the better your ranking, the more free traffic you get.

Now when people produce email newsletters, all of this wonderful content gets traps in email – and Google of course doesn’t see or index any of this content. So in the same way that, ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’, once you create an email newsletter it benefits people on that day, but does nothing to serve you long term.

What you should do instead is take all of that wonderful content that you have produced and add it to something called a ‘blog’ which sits on your website. Then you take each of those blog entries and optimise them for certain keywords that people are searching for. Google will then index these pages and they will become like spreading breadcrumbs spread across the web, which leads new people to your website.

4. Boosts Your Rankings
To further expand on the point above, commonly known factors which affect Google’s Algorithm are having a keyword rich title tag, an effective meta description and back links coming from high Page Rank websites. However other factors include the number of pages on your website, the length of time people stay on your site and amount of return visitors.

By moving your content out of emails and onto you website; you’re creating more pages on your website; you’re increasing the time that people stay on your site; and you’re ensuring that you have a lot of people are coming back to your site on a regular basis.

The net affect of these factors means the value and importance of your website increases and this will be reflected in better rankings, more traffic, more enquiries and ultimately more profits.

5. No Multi-Media Restrictions
In email you are restricted to what you can say and do. If you use certain words like; ‘earn extra cash’, ‘compare rates’, ‘incredible deal’ or ‘lowest price’ – you might unintentionally trigger spam filters and your emails won’t get through.

In addition, you can’t reliably embed videos or audio messages into massive broadcast emails. This is a major issue because videos are an excellent way to connect with an engage your customers. One way you can harness this medium is to start producing videos once a month covering the ‘latest news’ in your industry. Or start producing videos called ‘your questions answered’ where you take questions frequently asked by your customers and answer them.

Another medium which is gaining significant momentum now is podcasting. This is where people can subscribe to receive audio messages from you. The benefit of this is your customers can access your content during times when their bodies are preoccupied but their minds are free. This could be driving in the car, working out in the gym or cleaning the house.

In Summary…
So to sum things up email newsletters are like a flash in the pan. They give you some immediate benefits but they do nothing for you longer term. So what should you do instead?

My advice is to write your emails like a postcard. This means keep them short and unintimidating. As for the content your job should be to ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’. In other words, write copy that is intriguing and enticing, but don’t give all your secrets away. Share enough to get them interested then include a link that takes them out of their email and onto your website.

There you can proudly present your content, without restrictions and you are creating content that will earn you points with Google and provide you benefits for many years to come.

Dale Beaumont is a 16 times best-selling author, Business Owner and Entrepreneur. Dale runs Australia’s leading business education and mastermind program called Business Blueprint. See Dale live at NewRulesOfBusiness.com.au

Welcome Perry, to the call.

PERRY: Hey, it’s great to be here, thank you for having me, and congratulations on your magazine!

GREG: Thanks, Perry! So Perry, most of our audience and members will have heard of you before but not everyone.

Could you please start of by telling us a little bit about your story and how you ended in a position where you are now?

PERRY: A lot of people in the Internet Marketing space know me for Adwords. I have a very popular E-book called the “The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords” and also a book in the bookstores. We also have some things that we’ve been introducing for Facebook, which is quite a different animal than Google.

But prior to that when I first hang out my shingle, I was really a Business to Business and Technology Marketing Consultant and I have come from being a Sales Manager at a software company. Prior to that, I was an engineer and I actually designed speakers on the Jeep Cherokee and some different automobiles in the 90’s. I’ve done a lot of different weird things and I am always interested in more weird things so I have my fingers in a lot of pies. I live in Chicago and I got a family and it’s been really fascinating to be evolving along with the world.

GREG: When you really first come across Google Adwords, did you get it straight away? Or understand what sort of game changer it was?

PERRY: I did. I fully understood what it was capable of and I wouldn’t say I knew how big it was going to get, because I didn’t. But I totally got it and the reason I got it was because I had been a really serious obsessive Direct Marketing Junkie for the previous five years. And I just read and learned everything that I can possibly get my hands on.

GREG: With Adwords, there are so many facets to it such as search traffic placement targeting, remarketing and the list goes on. What components of Adwords do you really love and do you always use in your main toolset of arsenal?

PERRY: Well I really like the Display Network. I naturally gravitate towards things that are less straightforward, and less obvious and Google’s display network is definitely like that. I think search is pretty obvious and there’s a finite set of tools that you can use and once you have exhausted them, now it’s all about conversion. But with the Display Network, you’re dealing with something that’s much more squishy that the average online marketer is less comfortable with and you’ve got like a million options. You can just be more artistic there so I’ve always liked that. I like Banner Ads, there’s endless capacity for creativity there. You know the thing I like about this Online Advertising is competitive as it is; it’s impossible to run out of new ideas. It’s only as limited as your imagination, you can always find another way through.

GREG: What other traffic strategies do you find yourself implementing on a site once you’ve implemented Adwords. Do you then go to Facebook next or what would you compliment it with from a traffic point of view?

PERRY: Well it depends entirely on what kind of business you have. Some businesses for example, are very Facebook friendly – we have this little quiz we put a little scorer thing, www.isfbforme.com, and you can go describe your business in about a minute and click on different things and click submit. It’ll give you a score from 1 to 10 on how Facebook friendly your business is. If you get like an 8 or more, then Facebook is probably a major traffic source and it may even rival Google in terms of how much traffic it could give you. Now if it’s less than a 5 then it’s probably much lower down on your list.

I find that a lot of people get really good traction with just a basic email marketing. And sometimes in a more commercial or Business-to-Business kind of a setting, it’s paid advertising and eZines and stuff like that. For other contexts’, it’s more affiliate marketing and the person sending the mails is taking the risk. So it just depends on what kind of market you are in.

GREG: You said something really cool when I was at your Maui Adwords Master’s Conference last year. You spoke about how Google is like the “yellow pages” and Facebook is more like the “coffee shop” and that was really like a big “aha” moment for me because they are different traffic source. They do convert differently and people are there for different reasons.

PERRY: Yes, I totally stand by that: Google is the Yellow Pages and Facebook is the Coffee Shop. It tells you both how to sell and what you can sell. Do people sell things in coffee shops? Absolutely. There are some things that people are never going to go looking for. There are some things that sell neither in the Yellow Pages nor the coffee shop. There’s no single kind of traffic that’s best for everything. But Facebook is good for anything that’s cultural, artistic, religious, political, identity driven, anything that is highly emotional or kind of squishy. Google is much more geared for logical, transactional, and informational, so as the Internet matures, you have more and more shifting and sorting and people are finding out where they like to hang out. You know Twitter is useful for certain kinds of things. But I wouldn’t count on it to save your butt next time you need some traffic.

GREG: What tools and techniques do you really use and love when you are increasing the conversion rate of landing pages and also sales pages?

PERRY: Slightly off topic, but I am a total believer in email and auto responders. Frankly it’s hard to think of a business that wouldn’t have at least a modest improvement by adding an auto responder. It’s a good use of copy-writing, good story telling, and you make people want to read what you write even if you’re hiring a copy writer do it, I think that’s essential.

With landing pages, depending on what you’re doing, video is more and more important. The web is becoming more and more like TV and also I’m really seeing a merger or collision if you will, of online and offline with bricks and mortar, especially with the last year and so. It was abundantly obvious to me than that there was always a big opportunity for anybody who is marketing online to go offline and get more money. If you are willing to also do direct mail especially to existing customers, if you are willing to do live events or have wine and cheese parties or whatever, there was a lot more money to be picked up. What I also noticed was online marketers didn’t want to go offline and offline marketers didn’t want to go online. I have seen all of that change with the recession. Now I am seeing people happily and willingly go both directions on this.

GREG: What advice would you have for those of our readers or listeners who are info marketers who bought every course and implemented a heap of stuff and they’re just not making money online?

PERRY: I’ve got of a lot of things to say, the first thing is, you know the internet is not your savior and your real mission in life isn’t necessarily to “build the online automated money machine” or you know, fill in the blank, whatever definition you’ve put on it. I think your real mission is to really understand where your unique ability intersects with hungers people have out there in the world, whatever they are. All of the successful people I know, they find a combination of two to three things that they are good at and they do them. And I think a lot of people out there are struggling because they are really trying to copy somebody or they are trying to imitate a formula and that’s not really how you succeed.

I think when people get frustrated and especially if they get desperate, what they do is they start to look at everything they’ve done and all their experiences and everything as being kind of useless. And they are like often in search of a new thing and they kind of throw everything to the wind and they almost mentally start over. Well, you need to be very selective of what you’re starting over about or starting over with because if you work for the insurance industry for 13 years, you might think it’s the most boring thing in the world but I promise you, you know things about that business that is worth money. So I just want to encourage you, you’re walking around with assets that you might not appreciate. Don’t under value that. It really is worth something.

GREG: At the moment Perry, you have a very good reputation online and you’ve got a big list and you’re very well known. Not all of our readers and listeners are in that situation so if you put yourself back in that situation where you have to start all over again, is there anything you’d do differently or how would you make a go of it from scratch if starting 2011?

PERRY: Well first of all you need to know that I’ve done a lot of things where I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. With the Adwords thing, I was at the right place at the right time and I had done all of my practice sessions and sweating all summer and the when it was the fall season, it was time to catch the touchdown pass and the ball showed up and I caught it.

I remember learning when I was in my twenties. Find a trend and position yourself in front of it, and then success will be easy… like, “okay”. You can always find things that are on the rise, you can just about always find things that you know are eventually going to go big and they are not big now. However, the timing of when it will get big and how much pain and suffering and everything else is going to happen before these things kick in is really unpredictable.

I have this little theory I call, “One long shot and three fish in a barrel” which is doing things where making the money is easy, not hard. It’s like do something that earns you a steady income and pays your bills so you’re not stressed out all the time and put your 3/4 effort in that and then reserve ¼ of your effort in the long shot that may or may not pan out. I think a lot of people, they spend ¼ of their effort on something solid and dependable and ¾ of their effort on something outlandish or 3 outlandish things at a time and they can never get any of them to work because there’s not enough focus plus they’re starving at the same time. You know that’s a recipe for a lot of major frustrations. So like Greg, I don’t know what all you’re into but let me make a guess. You have clients that pay the bills and you’re feeding your family and stuff and you have this little side projects that you work on and you’re like, “Hey when these things take up, these could be really good!” right?

GREG: That was exactly how I quit my day job. And then over time the speculative things have now risen to the point where they are just about matching the whole consulting biz, and it’s about to overtake it.

PERRY: Exactly, and I think there’s a huge attitude that people tend to have in the internet marketing space that it’s this weird escapism like, “Okay, I got my day job and I hate my day job and I want to stop this and I’m tired of working at this lame company. So I am going to do this internet marketing thing which is a completely different universe and I’m not going to trade hours for dollars anymore. I’m going to build machines and I’m going to go build systems.” You know, I can hardly think of anybody that has built a machine that didn’t start out by getting their ass in gear and helping another human being and rolling up their sleeves first. You have to get your hands in it and get dirty and make something work.

GREG: We met in Maui last year, as we mentioned earlier, your Maui’s Elite Master’s Summit. For those who haven’t heard about it or never been, how would you describe that event cause I won’t consider it just another seminar you know, I came away sort of pretty blown away by the brain’s trust that was there or that sort of thing, what’s your thoughts?

PERRY: A lot of times, you go to seminars, it’s sort of kind of “rah rah” or maybe it’s really a big “rah rah” session. You know our audience is different. Maui is kind of the summit of that and in order to go to Maui you have be pending 5 thousand bucks a month on advertising and people come from all over the world and generally, it’s total pay per click ninjas who most of them have one or two major skills aside from pay per click. It might be seminars, or it might be video or it might be copy writing or whatever but you get these really smart people and I go out of my way to get the very smartest pay per click experts as speakers in the world cause I’ll just be really frank, there’s no way Perry Marshall can stay on top of all the stuff that goes on a Pay Per Click. And the level of intelligence in the room is very high standard.

We had Richard Stokes come and speak and after being there for an hour he goes, “Crap, I got to totally rewrite my presentation. This crowd is way more sophisticated than I thought.” There’s a certain type of people, they want stimulation with really sharp minds that really understands the stuff and really see way ahead of where this is going. I would say that the Maui audience is one to two years ahead of everybody else in terms of what we’re doing. The idea of Maui is you go there, have this enormously stimulating environment and you’ll go home, take the DVDs and go really deep with one or two of the presentations, whichever one resonates with you and you will be easily 12 to 18 months out ahead of everybody else. The next one is the February 27-29.