Internet Marketer, Graduate Student, Radical Dude.
Posts tagged entrepreneurship
Old Products Don’t Have To Die
Jun 29th
Have you ever created a product, watched it sell, then watched as it slowly faded away?Over time, a product can lose relevance and sales can dwindle. This is especially true in techy niches, which is where I will be revamping an old product in the next few days. Never fear – your sales don’t have to disappear. You can continue to renew your domain and breathe new life into a product. I’ll talk about that for a few minutes here today.
Around 2 years ago, I created a very popular product in a tech niche. It sold like fire, I made some money, and I ignored it for a while. Affiliates were driving tons of traffic to the page, and they still are today. But the product itself has lost some glitter and glory. It’s a bit outdated. And I was considering ditching the site so I could clean up my portfolio of sites. Terrible idea! Instead, I’ve researched and found everything I need to update the product and give it a brand new face. More >
LaunchMemphis 2009 BootCamp
Jan 16th
Just got an email this morning that caught my interest for a moment. LaunchMemphis.com is hosting a bootcamp for local entrepreneurs to help with planning, building, marketing, and funding a business. Normally, I would ignore the invite and continue on my way. But today was different.
I’ve been down on my luck with PPC for a couple weeks, trying to figure out which turn was the wrong turn on a few campaigns. More >
Reality Check – Guy Kawasaki Is Rad
Dec 29th
Although I try to keep my ear to the ground at all times, I’ve somehow missed hearing about Guy Kawasaki until now. While perusing a friend’s blog, I ran across the name and it stuck in my head – but I was too busy to look him up at the moment. Then my wife handed me one last Christmas present the other day (one she forgot until after the gift opening frenzy). More >
10 Years Til Expertise…
Dec 3rd
I was sitting in a graduate class tonight when the professor said something interesting…naturally, I logged on to share it with my readers. Here’s what he said:
Research suggests that becoming an expert at chess takes about 10 years. What’s more, other research has shown that this 10 year time period applies to other domains. For instance, it takes about ten years to finish undergraduate, graduate, and a post-doc. After all that schooling, you’re finally an expert! More >
Content Sites – Admitting My Weakness
Nov 26th
I feel like complete honesty is necessary – after all, if you can’t trust me to be honest then how can you trust me?
When I’m writing a sales letter, this would be the “damaging admission” section. The moment when you let down your guard and reveal yourself as human. You tell your lead, “Hey, I’m not perfect.” This psychological tactic lets your reader connect with you on a deeper level, and can win you a lot of business! But that’s not the lesson for today. You can learn more about damaging admissions later…
Today I’m here to admit my own weakness in this whole Internet business. When you get into Internet marketing, the first thing you realize is: wow, there’s a lot of ways to make money online. This realization either becomes your trap or your gateway to making real profits.
- If you see all those opportunities and start flailing your arms, swatting at them, trying to grab up as many money-making methods as possible – you will fail! You will spread yourself too thin trying to learn it all. And in the end, you won’t be good at any of the methods. Chances are you’ll end up that guy that knows a lot about marketing, but doesn’t have any results to show for it.
- If you see the variety of methods and settle on one (maybe two), you stand an excellent chance of becoming the master in that area. You can learn everything about your business model, dominate it, and apply it over and over again to different niches.
I found my method, and I’ve been dominating for a couple years now. But it’s time to expand. It’s time to look outside the box, and find ways to boost my existing income streams. Sure, I could always just create more products in more niches. But that gets old after a while. I know my strength is in ONE LITTLE TINY NICHE. And I make a killing there. So now I want to increase my market share in that niche.
My biggest weakness is content sites!
So what, you say? Who needs content sites when you can just put up a sales letter and forget it? Well, if you want to own your market, you need to provide value-add to your clients or customers. You gotta give them more than they ask for. And sometimes, providing that value to potential customers can win you new business.
Well I suck at creating and maintaining this kind of content. And that’s gotta change. For 2009, my plan is to put together a small network of content sites around my niche. These sites will act as a resource for existing customers, a place to gather opt-ins and build my list, and a portal for expanding the scope of my entire business.
There’s my early New Year’s resolution, and my damaging admission for the day. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in my comments. Any encouragement is welcome, too.
And maybe you can learn something from this post – what’s your biggest weakness? What’s stopping you from maximizing your profits? Identify and eliminate it. If you put down a road map, you will have an easier time getting from Point A to Point B.
Good luck, and happy early Thanksgiving!
