So it’s been a minute since I crushed out a blog post like this, but I had some stuff swirling around in my head and I figured it might help some of you if I turned it into a blog post you can learn from.
Now chances are if you’re reading this, you’re either in the Internet Marketing niche, or you’re involved somehow in the Network Marketing space. Or maybe you’re like me… someone who is involved in both.
Regardless of which category you belong to, chances are you’re scouring the Internet looking for ways to get more leads for your business. I know exactly how you feel, I felt the same way about 3.5 years ago when I first got online searching out ways to build my Network Marketing business by leveraging technology.
Luckily for me, I stumbled upon a pretty slick marketing system that provided training on how to get more leads and make sales online. And because of this, I’m certain I cut my learning curve in half at least, maybe more.
But there were also some lessons I learned on my own. Lessons I learned from trial-and-error, testing stuff out, and getting on the phone with big time marketers online to find out what they were doing.
In this post, I want to go into three things I wish I had done sooner inside of my online business. Now pay close attention because not implementing these things sooner has literally cost me tens of thousands of dollars in commissions, and it’s a lot easier to learn from my mistakes than it is to make them on your own.
Mistake #1. Not Leveraging Paid Traffic Much Sooner.
When it comes to online marketing, there are two types of traffic. The free kind that requires you to create and post content like videos, blog posts and articles. And the paid kind that requires you to invest some money into your marketing.
Now I’m not going to turn this into a “this is better than that” debate, because I honestly think each has it’s place and purpose. For example, paid traffic injects leads into your list instantly but you really have to spend the first 4 or 5 emails building value and forging a good relationship. On the other hand, free traffic take some time to build, sometimes weeks or months. But the leads you get are typically much more targeted since they had to watch your video or read your blog post before opting into your email list.
In my personal story, I spent my first two years doing almost all free traffic. Hours upon hours of writing articles and blog posts. I averaged about 30-50 leads per day which was great but it was super slow especially in the beginning. If I recall, it took me about 6 months until I started to average 20+ leads per day.
Again, I don’t want to give you the impression that free marketing is bad. If fact I still create videos and I still create blog posts just like this one. But if I had leveraged paid marketing much earlier, I have no doubt that my list would be 3 or 4 times bigger than it is right now.
And not just because leads would come in faster. Driving paid traffic to an offer allow you to know instantly if it’s a winner or a loser. If it’s a winner, then you can scale up and drive even more traffic to it and your results could be somewhat predictable. If it’s a loser, you can tweak the offer, or simply dump it altogether. Test fast, look at the data, and move accordingly. No fuss.
Paid traffic doesn’t allow you to do that. Sometimes it takes weeks or months of content creation and driving traffic to get enough data to determine if your offer is a profitable one or not. It makes me cringe thinking about how much time I spent early on driving traffic to a losing offer.
Now I know what you’re thinking?
“I don’t have a budget to do any paid traffic.”
Well… you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on traffic like some of the big marketers do.
But… you could take $200 and drive traffic to your offer to see if it’s worth offering or not. Then if you discover that it is, then you can start creating content around it to drive traffic. At least you know you’re not wasting your time.
Mistake #2. Not Using My Own Capture Pages.
For a long time, I simply used capture pages that were provided to me by the affiliate program I was promoting. And chances are, you’re doing the same thing.
The problem with that is that you’re using the very same affiliate website that thousands of others are using. You don’t stand out, and you’re not branding yourself.
Here’s a huge reason why you’re hurting yourself by not using your own self branding capture pages. When leads see your capture page and sales page, and they see other people being branded on them, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to seek out those marketers and join the program under them. It sucks I know… but it is what it is.
Create your own capture pages and even your own sales pages early. Trust me… you’ll make more sales and get more leads.
Mistake #3. Not Writing My Own Email Follow Up Series.
This was another big flub I made early on. Maybe it was because I just didn’t know any better, or maybe because I was lazy. I don’t know. But for a long time, I simply took a pre-written campaign that was offered inside of the affiliate program I joined and used that. The problem was those emails were being used by thousands of others, and some of them branded other people. Sure I still made sales but that’s only because of the volume of traffic and leads I was getting, not because it was a good way of doing things.
Today, I write all my emails. Every single email in my 40-email follow up series inside of my funnel was handwritten by me. Every broadcast email I send out is written by me. The sooner you get this, the better.
It drives me nuts when a new person asks me if I have an email follow series they can simply drop into their autoresponder. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t brand them, dropping a pre-written email series into your autoresponder doesn’t give you control of your list. Heck, who know how long that series was written. You could be sending your list outdated information and damaging the relationship you’re trying to build.
So there you have it. Three flubs I made that cost me big that you can learn from.
Now… it’s important that I backtrack a little bit because before you are even in a position to make these or not make these mistakes, you have to know how to get leads.
Without leads, you can have the best offer, product, service, business opportunity, etc. on the planet and you’ll still struggle to make a dime online. Just like brick-and-mortar businesses need traffic and exposure, so does your online business. Having an online business with no traffic is like having a traditional store or restaurant in the middle of the desert. If no one sees or knows about it, no business will get done. Simple as that.
Learn how to market, brand yourself and put yourself out there. It’s the only way to succeed as an entrepreneur.
Hopefully, you got value from this post and learn what to do (and not to do) so you can fast track your online business.
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