Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » internet

How To Stop Selling, Yet Make More Money

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:19:39 +0000

How To Stop Selling, Yet Make More Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

(part 5 of 5)

Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling. The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort. The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks. The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.

The problem is the internet has matured a bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.

Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition. With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.

Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship. We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself.

If you bumble into internet marketing like I did, made some money and thought “Wow!”, good for you. What usually happens though is most people who do that have a tough time re-creating their early good fortune. The market will go shift on you and then the money you were making isn’t there anymore.

To be a steadily successful marketer you have to get it together on a bunch of different levels. It’s not all easy and you cannot learn it all fast. But if you keep up with your learning, you’ll gradually come to a better understanding of what’s going on with the marketplace and how to exploit opportunities that come along.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:20:48 +0000

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

There are a bunch of lists out there of the best books on writing copy. I’ve read a whole bunch of books on copywriting, many several times. My opinion is that different books may help you at different stages of skill development.

For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it. It is a watershed work.

I recommend starting with the easy stuff. Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.

THE CORE TRIO

The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.

1. “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times. It’s short but very potent. Everybody who writes advertising should internalize Claude Hopkins’s stuff.

2. “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab. Subtitled “A Short Course in Copywriting” it is just that. It walks you through Schwab’s 5-step sequence of what every ad needs to accomplish in the first half, and in the second half are observations about direct mail, ad layout and so forth. If you advertise online only you’ll find the first half valuable, since the second half of the book pertains largely to the problems of print advertising.

3. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John C. Caples. I have the fifth edition, but some folks say the 4th is superior. All I can say is the book is packed with good information and insight, but I find reading it front to back a little dry. The book has examples from catalogs and brands we are familiar with today. Allegedly the 4th and earlier editions are more fun to read, but less contemporary.

Do get these books as soon as possible, and read them. If you just read internet ebooks you are missing-out on the proven fundamentals of advertising. Between the 3 of them, the authors of the above books had over 120 years experience when they wrote their books. That’s a lot of wisdom.

Automated Traffic Review – Is It Worth Your Time and Money?

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:52:09 +0000

Automated Traffic Review – Is It Worth Your Time and Money? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not promoting this product, because I bought it and I did not find it useful to me. That doesn’t mean you won’t like it or shouldn’t buy it. What you get out of any program of this nature has a lot to do with your commitment to taking action and your own experience level. I would classify myself as a “seasoned” online marketer with mastery of many fundamental skills. A less experienced marketer than me might find this product meets their needs very well.

The salesletter and positioning of the product seem to be working awfully hard to convince us that these “scripts” product automated traffic. They don’t. They simplify some minor marketing tasks like adding meta tags to blogger blogs and searching Yahoo answers for keywords.

You might be dazzled by the spit and polish of how this program is promoted. Once you buy the upsell offer alone are dazzling in their quantity and pushiness. You’ll get many offers in your email for other products as well.

I tested the banner rotator on this blog (http://malibumentor.com)… and all I ever saw it display was a banner for the Automated Traffic program. The idea is that it’s supposed to test banners for you from popular ClickBank marketing products and display the ones that get the most clicks – it’s disappointing but hardly surprising that the banner rotator favors the Automated Traffic product so strongly. I smell something a bit fishy.

I got a bunch of bonuses through an affiliate who was running a launch promo for Automated Traffic. I liked the bonuses, but I didn’t like the product and canceled after one month.

I thought the keyword tools were lame. You might not if you’re inexperienced at online. If you’re looking for a serious keyword research I suggest investing in Market Samurai, which is a first rate tool.

The people who created Automated Traffic made an impressive looking membership area. The marketing after the sale is done quite well and the creator’s have clearly recognized that to keep people on a monthly subscription plan you will do well to come up with new, exciting stuff every month.

I wouldn’t say the product is shoddy at all. It’s nicely put together as these things go. I just didn’t personally find it very useful.

Exposing the myth of internet marketing

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:18:24 +0000

Exposing the myth of internet marketing is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes

re: the myth of internet marketing

Bear with me, there’s a little back-story here, and you can skip it if you like – but I recommend you don’t because there is some valuable insight buried in it.

Ok… I am unabashed about calling myself an internet marketer and entrepreneur. I started selling stuff on eBay in 1999. In those days there was no PayPal. I didn’t have a digital camera so I shot my pictures on 35mm film and scanned them to upload to eBay. Digital cameras weren’t even close to film-quality at the time and they were silly-expensive to boot… big-boy toys really.

Even before 1999 I had been involved with the old BBS communities as a teenager. My brother and I ran a BBS on an Apple 2 computer using a phone line we put in. People who used the BBS were very supportive and sent donations, which helped cover costs (we were kids, remember, so we didn’t have much earning power ourselves).

So you could say I’ve grown-up with the internet. At 37 I remember having a rotary phone in the house… and black-and-white TVs, so I don’t take the instant gratification of today’s downloadable culture for granted, but I did learn and adapt as changes came along.

It may surprise you to know I’m not a computer-geek. I’m a marketing geek. Computers are just tools, like the saws and planes I used when I was a cabinet-maker before I went full-time into marketing. The machines are a means to accomplish the end.

I was starting with my own business-ventures in the early 1990s – before the internet became a viable marketing medium for anything I wanted to do, so I used old-school marketing methods first, then adapted to the internet as it became bigger and more interesting. More importantly, it became a way to reach more people.

As I became aware of this I started to think differently about who my customers could be. As a woodworker I was dealing with a local market only. As an internet marketer it was a different situation entirely, though when I got started my customers were almost exclusively in the US and Canada.

These days the internet is a worldwide marketplace. I’ve sold stuff to people in dozens of countries.

As the world transforms into a global marketplace with very little barrier to entry, you or me or anyone with a computer and a connection can start a business and have an opportunity to flourish.

BUT – there’s a big myth out there…. and if you aren’t careful you could spend a lot of time floundering around, chasing money-makers instead of building a real sustainable business. I can tell you from experience, because I, myself, invested a lot of energy in chasing money-makers instead of making a real plan for a sustainable, long-term business.

A lot of other marketers made the same error. They chased the quick money – selling whatever people would pay money for, even if it was no good… and consumers, burned too many times, started to become very skeptical.

And NOW, as a reward for all our short-sighted behavior, all marketers are now confronted with a skeptical and cagey customer.

This customer, well, he turns to the internet and researches our products and services in depth before we even become aware of his presence. He doesn’t need a salesperson to get educated… in fact he won’t even agree or request a phone conversation unless, in general, he’s pretty sure he is open to buying.

What this means is that there is a silent majority of prospects for your business you aren’t even aware of because they choose to remain invisible to you, observing your marketing but remaining anonymous. This is not the same as in a brick-and-mortar store where people will come in and look around and not buy; because in that situation you can at least observe them, the way they dress and so forth and talk to them about what they are looking for.

With the internet media the conversation is most often one-way, and while your prospects listen and absorb your marketing message, they seldom give you meaningful feedback as to why they don’t buy. You only usually get feedback when they do – because at that point they invest in entering a dialog and relationship with you. Up to the point where the customer opens that relationship with you, the vendor, you are usually flying blind, relying on a generalized impression of what your average customer might want rather than the sort of valuable, specific feedback you could get if you could only engage your prospects in a dialog.

The solution is, as with all real-world solutions to growing your income, not, as they say, “easy-peasy”.

In fact, it is hard.

And because it IS hard almost nobody you compete with directly will go the distance to implement the solution… and thus if YOU strike forth with indomitable will to succeed you will have an advantage your competition will gnash his teeth over, fretting “that sucker’s no better than I am at this business, why is he kicking my ass at marketing and sales results?”

See, the MYTH of internet marketing is that it is easy because there are large aspects of it which present opportunities for leverage, economy, and automation. But this does not make marketing easy; it merely gives it the potential for efficiency and big profits.

Business, my friend, is often anything but easy – but the rewards of overcoming challenges of business can be enormous, both in terms of who YOU become and the amount of money you earn.

So, it’s worth it to do the hard stuff, because the willingness and ability to do the hard stuff is what separates the ordinary achievers from the people who get incredible results.

And which group would you rather be in?

###

Let me go back to my earlier business experiences; I had a small cabinetry business. If you’ve been reading my stuff for awhile you know that woodworking was close to my heart but making a living at it was tough. Not only did I have to be good at doing the craft and doing the work on schedule, I also had to market and manage my business.

At some point I realized that I was more interested in marketing than woodworking and I began to make a career shift. This is relevant to YOU perhaps because if you are like a lot of Americans your previous career skills may no longer be in demand. I found an article on CNN.com that cited a study showing in the next ten years employers are going to shift from about 29% dependence on outside consultants to about 41% – which means 12% of the jobs that pay benefits and steady salaries are going to vanish.

What this means for YOU, is that if you want to get ahead in the next few years you either need to have some sort of in-demand skill like specialized computer programming, or you need to be able to market YOURSELF, either as a free-agent independent consultant like me or just to land a steady salaried job until that employer decides to eliminate it and put YOU back out in the job market again.

Either way you slice-it, we are entering or already are in an era when your ability to market your special skills are what determines your earning power.

You can either look on marketing yourself as a dreadful burden, unfamiliar and scary – or you can see it as an opportunity to create the lifestyle and livelihood your parents never imagined, tied-down as they were to employers and by geographical obligations to stay close to where the work was.

I think you should seize the opportunity. That’s my style and it’s my pleasure and self-appointed duty to inspire and lead you, according to my own talents and gifts, towards a life of more self-sufficiency than you’ve perhaps ever realistically imagined for yourself.

It all starts with your commitment however – your solemn, heartfelt commitment to bring great value to the marketplace. This is the part of it that is easy to miss because, for the last ten years or so, there has been so much CRAP sold on the internet, get-rich-quick schemes and such, that consumers are justifiably resistant to marketing messages which do not come from a source of complete and verifiable congruency.

… which is another way of saying you better be a real good con-artist or you better be real good at your chosen specialty – and passionate and committed to marketing yourself as the BEST solution to the problems your clients face.

…which is another way of saying you must believe wholeheartedly in the goodness of your mission in the business of earning your livelihood.

###

Lots more coming.

I’ll either be doing an audio-podcast, perhaps weekly – or maybe video. I’m leaning in the direction of audio because video takes a lot more time and energy to produce and honestly I don’t think most people like watching talking heads on the internet, at least not for very long.

What’s your opinion or preference?

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com/blog

Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:57:25 +0000

Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.

I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.

Did someone call me a fool?

Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, especially if your business involves working with clients AND physical labor.

Call me stupid. Somehow I thought that despite the hard work, cabinetmaking was somehow an honorable profession and a desirable career because OTHER people told me how much they envied what I was doing… people who made WAY more money than I did and lived in big, beautiful homes told me how grand it was for me to be an artisan, how they wished they could do such a thing themselves.

Hogwash.

Being in business for yourself is way too much work to do it without the intention of creating wealth for yourself. In this day and age, if you have the capacity, desire and mental focus to run a business you can get rich doing it.

Why not aim high?

Don’t get me wrong: I value my experiences and skills as an artisan. I just found out it wasn’t a BUSINESS I wanted to be in anymore – even though I still have a soft-spot for helping artists market and sell their work more effectively.

The one overwhelming benefit of having transformative sales copy working for your business is the way it works for you like a 1000 little salesmen – each person who reads your copy is getting a one-on-one sales presentation. This is an awesome advantage because once you have the right copy figured-out to sell a particular product you can “scale-up” your advertising and rake in the cash until you’ve exhausted the market for the time being or taken on as much business as you want according to your capacity to serve your customers.

However, unlike a lot of self-styled copywriting pundits out there I won’t tell you that the ability to write persuasive copy is a license to print money. It is only as powerful as your ability to make the kind of offers people want in the REAL marketplace, and back-up those offers with real value.

That is… if you want a real business with long-term customers and not a lot of trouble with the law. Copywriting skill CAN be used to mislead and bamboozle people. The roll it plays in a legitimate direct-marketing business is powerful and essential, but it is NOT, I believe, essential unless you are in the business of actually writing copy for clients yourself – ie. The copywriting is both the method and the product AND the customer service your provide.

Now if you are, or want to be, a freelance copywriter this is good news because it means that pretty much the whole show resides inside your head. No bulky equipment, warehouses, shuffling materials around, all the stuff that goes with the hard-goods industry.

Currently a lot of copywriting material in the current “make money in your bathrobe” frenzy goes awry telling you it’s all about writing to sell ebooks and information products.

Nothing could be further from the truth; because unless you are an information-product junkie the majority of the purchases you and most people make are for hard-goods and sales copy is actually a persuasive force which is working on you, often subconsciously, on a daily basis to affect your preference for one brand of stuff over another.

Internet marketers are supremely guilty of navel-gazing myopia – because there is a huge world of opportunity to adapt whatever marketing and copywriting skills you have into selling all sorts of hard-goods – by which I mean stuff people can hold, enjoy, touch or put stuff in without any requirement of literacy, like purebred cats, dressers, automobiles, pianos… you get the idea.

In fact, by making a study of the way all these sorts of things are sold with copy, every day, you open-up a whole new world of awareness for yourself… and writing persuasively is all about awareness – seeing and drawing attention to things most people don’t notice or think about.

If you’ve been writing copy for information products, especially in the “make money” niche, you are up against the twin forces of skepticism and very, very real competition to sell people stuff they might WANT but do not in fact believe they NEED.

In reality we don’t “need” a lot, but in a skeptical marketplace you will find it takes considerably more persuasive skill to sell “wants” like another ebook than it is to sell tangible goods. Selling intangibles can be extremely lucrative – as information products are… just don’t overlook your own opportunities to turn, for example, that old junk in your garage into hard cash by applying your writing skills to something as mundane as writing a Craigslist ad to sell your old lawnmower – you might be surprised at how writing to sell tangible stuff gets the juices flowing.

Give it a try.