World Internet Summit Wrap-up + Revisiting Marketing 101

It’s a couple of weeks since the World Internet Summit in Melbourne, and as is fairly common when you attend an event like this, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks implementing some new ideas and strategies for myself and for clients. While the World Internet Summit is aimed primarily at the home business / small business market, there is no denying that many of the speakers and delegates are turning over some pretty impressive results - many are making 7-figure incomes online which is something that I certainly can’t claim to be doing.

So it’s “Watch. Learn. Implement.”…

Report on Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Test

In my previous post I mentioned Mike Filsaime’s test/demo of Butterfly Marketing. Suffice to say that I was suitably impressed by the elegance and efficacy of this viral-marketing-system-in-a-box.

Attendees were asked to send an email to friends, colleagues, lists etc about The Resource Report, Mike’s new compendium outlining many of the tools he uses to run his internet businesses.

About 200 people did so, triggering a “viral cascade” of people telling others about the report. 72 hours later, Mike had recorded around 11,800 signups and $12,000 in sales, purely utilising the viral effect created from those initial emails.

In my previous post I wrote that the target was 20,000 signups, but heck, 12,000 ain’t bad either.

I’ve now bought my own copy of Butterfly Marketing and have a project that I’m in the process of plugging in to the system.

Other Insights, Lessons and Reminders

A few people have asked me what I got out of the event. As is the case with many of these things, the presentations contained a few nuggets of really great information, leading into a sales pitch for bigger backend programs. Some of the insights that I found valuable were…

• ALL of the successful internet marketers who presented give a lot away for FREE. Not just newsletters and reports but also audio programs, podcasts, teleseminars, mindmaps, videos and so on. This is “Internet Marketing 101″ but you can never be reminded of the fundamentals too many times.
• Many make a relatively small percentage of their total income from front end product sales. One presenter had a $27 book that she “repackaged” in different ways (going right up to a $900 seminar-in-a-box). Of the $300,000 in sales that she made in a given time period, only around 20% came from the book - the other 80% was from upsells.
• Waste not, want not. Most marketers (and this applies to the offline world as well as the online world) are incredibly profligate when it comes to wasting the leads and customers they’ve worked so hard to attract. For example, an ad generates 50 leads. 5 buy now and the other 45 are forgotten about. Successful marketers look for areas of waste and under-utilisation, then work out a system to eliminate or reduce that waste (though lead nurturing programs, recycling leads etc.)
• The best time to sell is when a customer has just bought. Whether it be through Butterfly Marketing or another system, many of the presenters use systems to upsell (”would you like to upgrade your package from Bronze to Gold?”) cross-sell (”would you like a video card to go with that monitor?”) and bump (”instead of one widget for $30, would you like 2 widgets for $50?”) from thankyou pages and optin pages. In fact, just like a property developer, wherever there’s vacant real estate on the page, they fill it!

There’s really nothing new here, but I find it extremely instructive to look behind the scenes at the actual figures being generated to provide “proof of concept”. It’s also vital to remember the difference between those who DO the basics and get the RESULTS versus those who “know” all this but don’t DO and don’t have the RESULTS to show for it.

I’ve revisited these principles in some of my current projects - for example, I get a lot of enquiries for web development and other services that I don’t have the capacity to service. Until recently I was saying, “sorry, can’t help you”. Now I’m referring these enquiries to a network of partners in exchange for a referral fee.

It’s too early to see the results but I estimate this strategy will produce an additional one to two thousand dollars in income per month for around 1 to 2 hours work. This process also adds value to clients because I ensure they get a quality service from web developers who understand how to make websites sell, not just look pretty.

OK - better get back to it.

Will

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