Direct Response Marketing

The Attraction Marketing Associates web site has now been launched. The Attraction Marketing Associates is a global network of like minded independent business coached and marketing coaches. For those looking to build a successful business as a buiness coach or marketing coach will find lots of valuable information on how they can build a successful six figure plus business.

Visit the Attraction Marketing Associates website

Popularity: 2% [?]

So what are all the changes at Profit Minute? What is the next stage of our business growth? Well over the last six months I have been progressively pulling back from working one-on-one coaching small business owners to free up my time. Friday was the last event I will be doing for some time.

For the last three years I have had great success working with small business owners helping them grow their business. I have loved every minute of coaching small business owners to improve their marketing systems. Due to the success of our approach and The Attraction Marketing System, the demands on my time have grown and I have been turning away many who have asked me to work with you direclty.

Our MISSION now is building a global network of Attraction Marketing Associates. Together we will be taking The Attraction Marketing System to small business owners around the world. We have a proven system and coaching methodology that can make a huge impact on small business owners. So the focus from here in is to empower others to become an Attraction Marketing Coach and help them leverage of all of the work we have done in the last few years.

You can find out more about becoming an Attraction Marketing Associate and join our TEAM by reading the information at the Six Figure Marketing Business website.

Popularity: 3% [?]

As a start up or early stage business it can take some time to work out the best strategy for selling your product or service. Even many established businesses struggle with this basic concept.

Those businesses that go on to great success typically have worked out what is known as the ‘Optimal Selling Strategy’. They have usually done this with one lead product or service selling it as a front end product.

So what is an Optimal Selling Strategy?

An Optimal Selling Strategy is simply figuring out the most cost effective strategy for selling your lead product to a new customer. Its all about customer acquisition. You need to develop such a strategy in your business to acquire as many qualified customers as you can and do it fast.

To develop your Optimal Selling Strategy you need to firstly identify what will be your front end product. This is a product that will have maximum appeal to your target market and sell at a low entry price in order to attract the maximum number of new clients.

NOTE: The intention of this Front End product is not necessarily to make money from it. Instead its used as a magnet to attract the maximum number of new customers and clients into your business. Many businesses will happily lose money on this front end product just to establish the customer relationship.

When I looked at my target market of small business owners I quickly discovered that while most of them recognise the need to have a Marketing Plan less than 5% actually do. So I asked them why don’t you have a marketing plan. The response was that the usual approach was too long and complex. That is why I developed the One Page Marketing Plan and have used it as a front end product to great effect. It ATTRACTS lots of new customers.

So you need to look at your target market and ask yourself (and them) what is their one single greatest problem or challenge that they all have that you can provide a solution for?

When you have the answer to this question you then want to develop a product that helps your target market get a solution to their problem. This is going to be your front end product. You want to then develop your Optimal Selling Strategy to sell as much of this front end product as you can.

NOTE: The idea behind selling your front end product is to acquire more customers. Chances are good you will only break even on the front end. This means that the real money you will make in your business is in your back end products and services.

So how do you take your front end product and now develop an Optimal Selling Strategy around it?

There are a number of keys to consider including:

1/ Media – What is the best media to be able to reach your ideal customer or client? There is a range of media that you could market through including print media, radio, TV, direct mail, internet, social media, direct sales. What you need to decide is which of these media your target market are most likely to respond to. For instance if you are selling a hearing aid product to those in the 70 plus age group then chances are good social media is not your first choice of media. In this case you would be better off advertising in a magazine that targets this age group. So do some research to identify which form of media is most likely to reach your target market.

2/ Message – Next you need to decide what form of and style of message will be best received by your target market. What are they likely to respond to? What will get their interest? Are you going to deliver your sales message through the printed word, video or audio? Discovering the best format for delivering your message, and identifying what message will connect best with your target market is the next step for you.

3/ Process – Marketing and selling your front end product should be treated as a multi step process. You need to know what steps you want to lead them through from the moment they receive your message to the point where they say YES to your front end product. Design out the steps in the process.

4/ Numbers – Next you need to know the numbers involved in selling your front end product. So you will want to track the average cost to acquire a lead, and the cost to acquire each new customer. The key in developing your Optimal Selling Strategy is to be able to acquire a new customer and fulfill the product at a price point that enables you to break even. If you can do this then you continue to market your front end product. So you want to keep score of the numbers in marketing your front end product.

5/ Test & Measure – As you develop your Optimal Selling Strategy for your front end product you will want to test and measure every step of the process. You need to continue to refine your approach. This means you will need to keep tweaking different aspects of your Optimal Selling Strategy in order to optimise its overall performance.

Once you have developed your Optimal Selling Strategy you will want to focus all of your efforts and resources to making as many sales of your front end product as you possibly can. By doing so you will be acquiring a large database of customer and clients who will be more willing to invest in your highed dollar value products and services.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Do you have a Marketing Plan for your business?

Less than 5% of Small Business owners I talk to have a marketing plan. Generally the process of creating a marketing plan is time consuming and confusing … and it quickly become outdated.

Thats why I developed the One Page Marketing Plan.

On this DVD I go through the One Page Marketing Plan and how you can use it to grow your business in 2010. I also give you access to my template.

Right now to kick start 2010 I am giving away 50 copies of the DVD (Valued at $47). To get your copy go to …

Give Me My FREE DVD ‘One Page Marketing Plan’

Popularity: 13% [?]

5 Keys To Direct Mail Success

I am going back to some good old fashioned marketing … namely Direct Mail and I suggest you should to. In recent years with the rise of the Internet, email, and Social Media many Small Business owners have turned their back on Direct Mail which has been a proven marketing methodology for a hundred plus years.

So while all of your competitors are busy sending their tenth Twitter update for the day letting all their friends know they are about to walk the dog, or they are busy inviting all of their Facebook friends to their Fan Page, there is a huge opportunity to BE DIFFERENT!

One of the most challenging things in marketing your business today is gaining and holding the ATTENTION of your target market. The key is to differentiate yourself from the rest. In order to do this it makes sense to gain visibility amongst your target market through different channels than your competitors.

That’s the reason I am making a major shift back to Direct Mail and I am recommending it to my coaching and consulting clients. (Note: I do believe there is some value in online marketing such as Facebook etc … however it is very easy to get lost amongst the many).

Direct Mail has a proven track record of success. Unlike email marketing it has close to 95% open rate. Email open rates continue to plumit as more and more people suffer from Inbox overwhelm.

Now here is the exciting news of the day … where once there was a lot of Small Business owners using Direct Mail … today there are hardly any! Large corporates still use Direct Mail but at the Small to Micro end of the business spectrum there are very few people effectively using Direct Mail.

This spells OPPORTUNITY to me. An opportunity to reach your target market in a way that your competitors are not even attempting to do.

Lets look at 5 keys to making Direct Mail work for you:

1/ Quality List – This is where a lot of Direct Mail campaigns fall down. You must have a quality list of your target market. My preference is to build my own list. Now I do this online with the FREE CD giveaway that we offer. This helps capture their postal address so we can then use this for Direct Mail campaigns. So focus first on developing the right strategies to build your own quality mailing list of your target market.

2/ Attention Grabber – You have about 30 seconds to grab their ATTENTION when they open your direct mail letter. So the key here is to use powerful compelling headlines focused on them. There are also other devices you can use to attach to the letter to get their attention such as attaching a $2 coin in the top right hand side with the headline … ‘Why Am I Sending You $2?’. This is a curiosity builder which draws them into the letter.

You want to give careful consideration to the headline and opening paragraph of your letter. Is it focused totally on the reader and their particular desires, wants and needs? If it is not the letter goes straight in the bin.

3/ Irresistible Offer – Your sales letter then must have some sort of offer that is Irresistible combined with a call to action. What I mean by this is you should offer them what is known as a FRONT END low dollar value product. This reduces the risk of responding and lowers the barrier to entry for them becoming a client. Make it a totally irresistible offer and tell them specifically how to take up your offer. You want to build into your offer scarcity and urgency to prompt them to act.

4/ Sequenced Mailing – One of the little known keys to improving the overall success of your Direct Mail campaign is to use a sequenced campaign. This means you send to the same list a sequence of three letters spaced appx 3 weeks apart. The first letter outlines your offer, the second letter is sent as a reminder that the deadline for the offer is coming and we haven’t heard from you. The third letter is a final notice letter. Note that letters two and three must reference the previous lettes. Using a sequenced mailing campaign like this can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your campaign as opposed to a one off try it and hope for the best approach.

5/ Tracking & Measuring – Finally you need to track and measure the results of your Direct Mail campaigns. How well have they worked? What was the response rate? What happens when you send the same letter with a different headline.

In all marketing it is the tracking & measuring of results and then fine tuning your apprach that makes the greatest leaps forward toward success.

One of the reasons that I think Direct Mail is so important to put into your marketing mix is that if you combine it with your online marketing what happens over time is your target market start to hear your name all over the place. They may not remember exactly where they keep hearing about you but they know that you keep popping up in lots of different locations. This familiarity makes you highly attractive to your target market.

In a world where most small business owners have lost the art of effective Direct Mail campaigns I highly recommend it to reach your target market in a way that your competitors will probably not even think of.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Here are the links to all of the 2009 issues of the Attraction Marketing Newsletter:

• Setting Your 2009 Business Goals
• Growing Your Business In 3 Easy Steps
• Increase Your Revenue By 107% Through Incremental Improvements
• Moving The Free Line …
• The Secret To Using Direct Mail In Small Business …
• The Power Of Saying Thanks …
• Are You Networking For Sales or Raving Fans?
• Is Your Sales Presentation Costing You Money?
• Is Your Target Market Tweeting?
• The Two Economies And How To Take Advantage
• Five Tips For More Effective Networking
• Empowering Your Customers To Sell For You
• The Power Of Press Releases
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Niche Marketing Fears
• Overcome Your Prospects Scepticism
• Mastering The Marketing Of Your Business
• Four Key Areas To Differentiate Yourself
• Developing An Effective Marketing Plan
• How To Handle Objections Without Being Pushy
• Reaching Agreement When Selling

Popularity: 23% [?]

Looking to improve your marketing?

In 2009 let me show you how to ATTRACT more clients to your business than you can handle. For a limited time only we are giving away a FREE Marketing CD titled ‘The Ultimate Secret To Marketing Success’ (Valued at $77).

Learn about the biggest marketing mistakes most small business owners make and what to do to fix them. You will also learn the 7 keys to ATTRACTING more clients.

Grab a copy at:

http://www.AttractionMarketingRevealed.com

Popularity: 28% [?]

If you are in Small Business or are an Entrepreneur then you will want to join us for the worlds first ever “Mega Networking & Referral Event”. There has never been an event quite like this one.

At the event we are giving you 10 different opportunities for you to promote your business. You will have the chance to:

* Meet New Business Contacts
* Generate Referrals
* Identify & Establish New Joint Venture Partnerships
* Attract New Clients
* Plus … You will hear from leading Australian Business Growth Specialists

To place yourself on the Priority Notification List and be the first to hear all of the details when we officially launch head over to:

http://www.MegaNetworkingEvent.com

Popularity: 93% [?]

Well there were so many lessons learnt at the recent InfoMarketing Summit put on by Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer. So many in fact it will take me a week to go through all of my notes and compile the results …

For now though let me share with you three key lessons that really resonated with me:

1/ Stop Selling and Start Giving – This is a lesson that I learnt from many of the speakers at the event. The first key speaker to bring this up was the legendary underground Internet marketer Eben Pagan. Eben is a young guy doing $20 million a year in sales on the Internet with all of his staff being 100% virtual. In other words … he has no office full of staff!

Eben attributed much of his success to the the philosophy of giving first. His belief is that the more you are prepared to give away of information the more you will attract potential clients to you. Now here was the real kicker … Eben says give away your best and most valuable information (or expertise, advice, coaching or consulting) if you want to grow a massive business. Why? When people see how much you are prepared to give away the more they want to find out what else is there.

Its worked for Eban … hes doing $20 million a year in online sales.

The second person to really bring this message home to me was Fabienne Fredrickson. Fabienne took her business from around $200,000 a year to over a million in one year by applying effective marketing strategies.

What was the key for her?

Giving away great valuable information. Instead of giving away digital downloadable information she switched to giving away a FREE Audio CD posted in the mail. This one simple shift of giving more grew her database from 5,000 to 12,000. There is definite truth that the size of the database that you have a relationship with is directly proportional to your income.

Now many people will resist this idea. Giving away a free CD is going to cost you at least $2 or $3 per CD. So there are some keys to how you monetise this strategy which I will be sharing with our Inner Circle members.

Interestingly … one of the speakers at the even just tried the old sell sell sell model. She gave very little content and what she did give was gimmicky at best … and guess what? Her back of room sales were terrible. On the other hand Eben Pagan gave huge amounts of value in his talk and created a flood of sales after.

2/ Frequency & Consistency Of Contact – In marketing the InfoMarketing Summit Dan Kennedy made mention of the fact that they had built in 101 marketing touches about the event. They started the campaign more than 6 months out and frequently and consistently touched their database in a variety of ways about the event.

He also revealed that there are more than 700 email messages preloaded into his autoresponder system. So if you get onto one of their databases you will hear from them virtually every day until you buy and become a customer or you die, or unsubscribe.

The contact from Dan Kennedy’s company is defintiely frequent and consistent. As a result they are always at the front of your mind. As a Gold + member of Dan’s coaching group I am constantly reminded of the value he brings to the relationship. He is frequent in contact and prolific in his marketing … hhhmmm I wonder if that is why he gets about in his private company jet.

Now many people who are busy building a database fail to consistently and frequently keep in touch and market to them. This is a mistake … when you do get around to contacting them they will have either forgotten you, forgotten your message, or simply lost interest. You should never let this happen.

Ok … so you are probably thinking that you don’t want to market to your database to much in case you offend them and they leave, or unsubscribe or even worse … complain, right? Well if you are thinking that then you are correct. Some will leave, unsubscribe and call you bad names. Its a small percentage and truth is these people will probably never become clients anyway. So focus on the other 98%.

The other 98% will start to feel more closely bonded to you and will start to percieve you as the answer to their problems.

So increase the frequency and consistency of contact with your database.

3/ 100 leads or 100 ways – Again I was reminded of the importance of having multiple lead generation sources. Most people rely on just one or two ways to generate leads. This is okay BUT you are probably missing out on many more leads you could have got.

Dan often explains that most people he comes across are looking for one way to generate 100 new customers. He explains to them that he doesn’t know one way to generate 100 customers but he probably knows 100 ways to generate one new customer.

The point is … you need to implement many more lead generation sources into your business. You need to have multiple ways to attract clients. Do not rely on the one or two you currently have. Exand them and keep adding new approaches to lead generation.

Well this is just a small sample of what we will be covering in our Inner Circle members webinar on the 17th October. If you want to learn more then please take up your last real chance to get a $1 30 day trial.

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Get your copy of The Attraction Marketing System for just $497 by going here www.TheAttractionMarketingSystem.com

Popularity: 10% [?]

Are you a small business owner looking to ATTRACT more REFERRALS?

If so then you will be interested in this …

For a short time only we are giving away a FREE CD by Referral Marketing expert David Frey titled ‘How To Get All The REFERRALS You Can Handle’.

This CD is a must for every business owner.

Request your copy before they are all gone here:

http://www.AttractReferralsCD.com

Popularity: 19% [?]