Is The Big Picture Finally Coming Into Focus?

Marketers have found ways to sell products and services to fill their own pockets and live the high life (at least the good, successful ones!)

They seem to effortlessly write down some words and put them in strategic places to get others to give them lots of money.

When they promise to let you in on the secret… and explain it to you… it always seems like they just took your money and left you with a bigger debt and more questions…

Have you ever seen those courses that give you EVERYTHING you need to make a killing online, landing page, high value ebook and an email campaign that subscribers can’t resist so you have only 2 choices – Succeed and make money or Succeed any make TONS of cash!

You think to yourself, “This sounds like a great, no-brainer deal I had better not pass up!”

You get the course all eager to put the landing page up loaded with all your info ready to be rich by tomorrow…

Then it says you just need to read these 300-pages of top notch sales training. Then you have to test your landing page and your offer and you price…

It ends up that they used their one successful campaign to show the results of and make it seem like all their results are guaranteed to make you money like their one successful campaign!

In reality, you have to do the work to get good at what you are doing. If you are lucky and you are able to see the big picture from the get go and you have a good product and a good plan plus a good sales message then you should do ok.

The magic words work in conjunction with each other when you can guide your prospect from becoming aware of you and your product or service to believing your message that they should buy from you.

It is rare that you send out a solo ad as an unknown author and get people to just trust you and buy on the spot, especially if it is a high priced product or coaching program.

They say, be yourself, write like you speak, talk about the benefits of your “stuff”, know your customer…

You do all that and no one ever reads more than your landing page and probably only opted in because they are also part of some traffic exchange that only clicked on your page because they earn traffic to their shitty offer that they were also bamboozled into creating by following directions that aren’t really effective.

Long ago I learned about PLR products and was shown a plan to sell PLR products as a business… It didn’t work.

Now, some 5 – 7 years later here I am again looking at this business plan with renewed hope!

I kept getting emails and reading articles talking about taking these products and “rebranding” them and making them mine. That sounded like a lot of work. Didn’t really seem like it was going to make me rich overnight!

Instead of following their instructions and doing the work I thought I knew better so I went about it my way, spent years and lots of money to figure out that I should have just done the “hard” work up front and I’d be that much further ahead.

The other thing I failed to realize because it seemed like too much work is that I could have done that work in a couple of days, a month or 2 at the most, and been on the right path but instead I bought the hype that it was going to be easy and fast.

That brings me to now, where I have options, all of which take time to implement. I’ve realized that I have to continue down the path and see what is going wrong and implement some fixes. I must be patient and I must be persistent.

I have to test, get results, optimize and test more.

I also must learn that sacrifice is a must. I have to get over the fact that I can’t see everything and I must use what I have and optimize to the best of my ability and move forward in a calculated manner.

Right now, I have to decide to promote my own products (PLR) or affiliate products.

They both have their plusses and minuses.

It is less work up front to promote affiliate products but you have to keep up with it. When you stop promoting or the products change and your marketing doesn’t work anymore you have to find something new. Your subscribers are not really yours, they move on to the product that you promoted to them for a commission but they don’t need you anymore and you can’t track what they are doing on someone else’s website!

It takes more planning and time to set up your own product or service but now you can promote to and see what your subscribers like and do.

I always like the idea of saying some “Magical” words and out of nothing your desire manifests. The closest thing to that I’ve found is copywriting.

Similar to stories of magicians conjuring up special spell that require limited, rare ingredients be collected, ancient texts in archaic languages must be studied relentlessly, and then, if you are prepared and have the right energy inside, the proper belief system and all the parts exactly where they need to be then “Magic” happens.

Sales letters skip the study and work part and sell you the magic effects only. They give you a fish and then sell you the course on how to fish!

That doesn’t mean that all sales people are bad and are trying to trick you out of your money. That doesn’t sound like something I’d want to do or someone I’d want to be!

That’s the dilemma, you need to sell your products and services to earn a living but you don’t want to sell garbage because once the people realize what you are doing they will expose you and your income will all go away, but you have to sell to have an income…

That means, in order to build a business and earn a healthy living in sales it is in your best interest to be genuine and always be adding value so people will want your products or services even more.

How do you do that?

That’s what I’m figuring out and sharing through the products I’m selling and the service I’m developing.

Back to the choice between affiliate products or my own:

I am talking specifically about the information market. I am working on getting traffic from solo ads to promote a program that teaches about the whole process of using Solo Ads to promote a product or service.

A useful and necessary tool, in the solo ad angle of driving traffic, is the ability to “sell” with your written copy.

So, in addition to my course on how to buy solo ads that sell effectively I also sell a course on how to write effective sales copy.

Knowing about the pains of struggling to understand how to make all this work profitably I am aware that a coaching program or a done for you service is needed or will be very beneficial to my customers.

Since I don’t have a clear understanding about how I can best help my customers, without overwhelming myself, I am struggling with an offer to benefit customers and myself.

While I figure that out I can spread the knowledge and experience I do have to help my customers get started now and earn a profit from that, get feedback and find out what my customers want and need so I can develop my product.

One last report on something I found out last night…

I have used Udimi.com for buying and selling Solo Ads. One of the vendors I used is one of the vendors I am asking the questions from Video 2 in the Solo Ad Professor course.

In the video the narrator describes a “dodgy” solo ad vendor who doesn’t want to answer your questions and gets defensive about them.

When I asked those tough questions the vendor answered quickly and eagerly asked how else he could be of assistance. That made me both happy and confident. I know more about this vendor than I did before, know more about his list and have a better plan of action to market to his audience.

I haven’t come up with a campaign yet but the wheels are turning.

Yesterday, all this studying of copywriting, all this focus on solo ads and vendors has made some progress. First of all, my open rates for my emails has gone up more than double what I was getting prior to this knowledge. The other part really got me excited and that is the fact that I got 3 clicks to my offer.

It could be a fluke and it just happened that 3 of my subscribers suddenly became interested at the same time or the work and study is paying off with greater response rates and more site visitors.

In my mind, all this work is finally paying off. The turning point… it came when I realized that just going ahead and doing the work starting now will be better than trying to figure out a shortcut before I even know where I’m going!

I hope my little successes will be felt through my future communications to help my subscribers understand and implement so they can have success faster than me.

Peace,

Gilbert