It’s geared toward getting you lots of connections and making more money in under 30 days, and it doesn’t require any real “work”.

The only work that is required is contacting people that you don’t know or don’t know well.

Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Pick 50 target prospects that could drastically help your business.

• These can be a mix of people in your industry or in an industry you want to get into.
• You must not only pick the targets, but collect their contact info where you can have a live conversation. This can be in person, on the phone or on a live online chat like Skype. Email doesn’t count because it’s not live.
• Have a mixture of targets that you think will be easy to get a hold of for a live conversation and a mix of people that you think will be harder to get a hold of. Don’t pick all easy or all hard targets.

Step 2: Create a plan.

• What are you going to say to these people if you only have 5 minutes, 2 minutes, 30 seconds, etc to tell them about you?
• Create a plan that will allow you to have something to say even if you are given tight time restrictions with each person.
• Resist the urge to “sell” yourself or your product. Rather tell them something interesting about you and have a genuine conversation.
• Don’t create a pushy plan, the idea is just to get these people to remember you and be intrigued to contact you back.

Step 3: Start contacting them.

• Remember, you need to have a live conversation. Face to face, voice to voice or as a last resort an online chat program. No email, text messages or letters.
• At least 10 must be in person, at least 15 must be over the phone. The more in person and then second best, over the phone that you reach out to the better the results are going to be.
• You have 30 days. GO!

The goal of the whole exercise is to put you outside of your comfort zone and make new business contacts. People will appreciate genuine conversation about business without being pushy. Make sure to give people a chance to talk about themselves and what they have going on, don’t push just your agenda.

I’ll make you a challenge that if you follow through on this and don’t get a single dollar of new business that I’ll personally give you a free consulting session. But, if you do get new business you owe me something good.

If you think about the following, it makes a lot of sense. Why would you want to listen to your customers thoughts on what features they want to see in your product/service and then implement those? Your competitors might be out there inventing the future that you’re customers can’t predict. And, your customers are just going to tell you what features they know of in the existing marketplace, that they want to see. So, at best you’re just going to get a list of better features that they know of from other products. You’re going to be playing a losing game of catch-up.

Tech luminary Alan Kay says “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

You’re either a business or service that is inventing the future or you’re a business that is just playing catch up with things that are already out there. You’re customers are busy in their regular jobs, regular lives, they aren’t going to invent the future for you. You are the entrepreneur, you are the visionary, don’t put your future in your customers hands.

This has been true for me all my life and it wasn’t too long ago that I finally realized it. Almost every venture I’ve been involved in, whenever I would ask my customers about something, I would get good comments and feedback, but they were never there to help me innovate and advance my business. That’s my job. Case in point, I get a lot of great comments on the blog and a lot of great conversations are sparked from it, but I don’t expect readers to write a comment that’s going to show me how to add 8 million in revenue to my bottom line and innovate online marketing.

Accessibility is still a profitable trait.

There’s something else I’ve learned from Mark Cuban that you would think is a contradiction to the above philosophy on not listening to your customers. I learned that staying accessible is a very profitable business practice. A lot of “known” and successful business people are somewhat hard to reach. Mark Cuban and I are relatively easy to reach (brian@dailyconversions.com). I’ve personally exchanged emails with Mark and was surprised to see that he wasn’t very hard to reach. Even though I get dozens of emails per day, I still try to at least respond to each email and every now and then a new business or a new project is sparked from someone that just blind reached out to me. I should point out that I get a lot of crazy emails too with people pretty much just begging me to give them work or train them in something for free. It’s hard to tell people no, so that’s another side to it that you have to be good at saying no.

One thing to point out about accessibility is that you can’t let it consume you. I employ a practice that I learned from Tim Ferriss (the 4 Hour Work Week) and I batch my emailing and listening to voice mails to only a couple set times per day, that’s why I’m not sitting around looking at emails all day or spending too much time on it. I also limit how much time I spend responding to inquiries from people that I don’t know. I’m not going to spend hours and hours responding to someone I don’t know, that has never helped me make a dollar when I have other matters to attend to.

Never “listen” to your customers. Stay accessible.

This scenario is repeated over and over with many companies that I’ve helped over years and years, across many industries and niches and the answer is virtually always the same.

The main key to successfully standing out from your competition is far less complicated than many people make it out to be. The main problem is that we have been taught from years and years how to be competitive in business by the same people and everyone has come to utilize these tactics. And, if everyone is utilizing the same old tactics, how do you stand out? It gets really complicated and really difficult and you’re forced into a scenario to lower your profit margins, fight/beg/steal customers and it can be a very stressful situation.

I’ve been perfecting my tactics for years now and these suggestions that I normally give to my clients comes from 10+ years of experience in everything from affiliate and internet marketing to offline businesses.

I’m going to set this up for you in such a way that it’s applicable to you whether you’re an affiliate marketer, affiliate network, ad network, entrepreneur or otherwise.

Most business clients will come to me giving me their big problem, usually it’s something extremely confusing that ultimately breaks down to a simple “make more money”. My first step is to break this down and figure out what it is that they actually need to achieve that. Is it more sales, is it less expense, is it fixing price points, is it industry contacts, whatever I determine that they need. Often times it’s extremely simple to me but for them it’s extremely complicated. My job becomes making it extremely simple for them too and actually getting them to take action on it.

Here’s where standing out from your competition comes into play.

Once I determine what they actually need, it usually comes back to making more sales (getting more affiliates and then getting those affiliates to generate conversions for affiliate network clients) by standing out from their competition. Standing out from competition is something that 90% of companies get wrong in most industry, affiliate marketing being no exception.

Here’s what usually happens next. I’ll start talking to the client about what they think makes them unique. Using affiliate marketing as an example, here’s what the average client would say: “We are different because we have more exclusive offers, higher payouts, better training, better affiliate managers, better offers with higher conversions, yada yada yada” aka the same sales message 90% of your competition has, and none of your prospects believe.

At this point I usually shake my head. Believe it or not this is the same in most industries, everyone copies everyone else, and is playing follow the leader with whatever sales message the “big dog” in that industry has. And, thinking of it like a sales message might be part of the problem, especially in these super competitive niches. (hint hint)

Remember when you were single (maybe you still are?) and that annoying girl/guy came up to you at the bar/club/wherever and the whole time this person was annoying you, you just wanted the attention of the girl/guy in the back of the room that was paying no attention to you?

Is your company “trying too hard” to get people to work with you? Is your company that annoying girl/guy that just won’t leave you alone and spitting out the same pick up lines as everyone else?

I’ve worked with a number of clients that have implemented a “no sales”, sales strategy. Prospects are literally coming to them because of their perception. They are positioning themselves “right” by not being forceful and seeming needy.

Does your company seem needy? Think about this over the holidays and contact us if this sounds all too familiar with the issues your company is facing. I can’t make any promises right now as I’m only picking up 1 new and I know a lot of the smarter companies out there are going to reach out when they hear that I’m offering services again. However, I do encourage you to start a dialogue with us to get things back in order for your company.

Context is critically important. One of the first lessons we learn is the importance of context – there is a time and place for every message.  Anyone caught passing a note to the cute girl in the front row in first grade and facing the embarrassment of having the note read aloud by your teacher can relate.  Mitt forgot that he was not only in front of millions of potential voters, but an army of social media pundits eager to pounce on any mistake.

For those of us who live on the internet, realize anything we post becomes part of the permanent record.  When running a promotion or committing anything to writing, think about the impact of your words in various contexts – from the front page of the New York Times to being rebroadcast by your least favorite political talk show host.  You can never assume a sentence will always be placed in context.

Consumers interpret moments in unexpected ways.  After the bet comment, the debate hall had moved on to the next question.  If you read the wire service or newspaper coverage that evening, the bet was not even mentioned.  But by Sunday morning it was the most talked about moment of the debate.

Again, when you make your living with words in public places, you have to think beyond your perspective before you post.  One of the most important lessons I am learning these days is the impact of culture on perception.  Take two people from different regions with different backgrounds, and they can see a message two totally different ways.  You know your audience, but you must also continually educate yourself on cultural impact on marketing.  Know your dominant culture, and experiment with writing in the voice of other cultures.  Work at reducing your risk of misinterpretation.

Don’t over commit.  (Or is it co-Mitt?).  Mitt was convinced he was right and Perry was wrong.  The bet proved he stood behind his opinion.  Naming any amount of money was unnecessary. Mitt is working to build a reputation as the trustworthy candidate, the non-fire bomb thrower.  He is working hard to make his word means something.  So he should have just offered Perry a bet.  Extend his hand to show he’s putting his word behind it.  Naming an amount of money, no matter the amount, was not required.

The risk to marketing people is over commitment.  To confuse truth with spin.  To go from selling the sizzle on your steak, to selling the sizzle on someone else’s steak.  And every time you cross that line, you run a risk.  In my career, I’ve learned to work hard to promote my product or service, squeeze every benefit and advantage out of the copy, but don’t overreach.  It seems to always cost more than $10,000.

This was a post by Rj.

The professor had very good information for the time and I can’t knock them for teaching what has traditionally worked, however he was almost entirely wrong. What we know as modern marketing tactics, was highly feared and laughed at even not that many years ago when I was in college. I guess that puts me in the early adopter category, not to toot my own horn too much because I passed up on many opportunities that I thought would have never been possible.

I’ve been putting in a lot of thought lately, on what I’ve been most successful in my life and on different projects, businesses, etc and what separates the successful from the not successful.

Does luck play a role? Yes, I think it does but I also think that “luck” is something we can all control. When the fighter knocks out the other fighter, you could say “he got him with a lucky punch”, but in reality the people that know the fighter know that he’s trained that move or combo 10,000 times and “luck” is only a minimal part of the reason he knocked the opponent out.

Does education dictate success? I guess this is the age old question, and I don’t want to get into a debate here on education vs street smarts/alternate education. I think it’s really a combination of the two, that makes a particular business or project successful. You have to have the general background education needed for that industry and all the components that make people successful in that particular business. And, you also have to have those street smarts and learn the small stuff that you can’t pick up from a book or teacher, the things you have to learn on your own.

The biggest thing in my mind this Thanksgiving morning is limitations.

I think the death of a marketer is setting a limitation on themselves. Every project that I’ve had massive success with, I wasn’t thinking “Ok, I want to make a modest $X with”, on the complete contrary I was looking to turn that into the next Facebook (or bigger) in terms of success. When you aim THAT high, and if you fall short, usually you’re going to be one of the most successful in your industry at minimum.

I don’t want you all to go out and set unrealistic goals. That’s not my point here. I think small incremental goals are a great thing. Make sure you don’t limit yourself, that’s all I’m saying. There’s virtually no scale to a lot of the businesses we get into and I don’t want to see any of you settling for mediocre.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A while back ran into a celebrity in Los Angeles, whom I won’t name, whom attributed almost all of his success due to the fact that he wasn’t selfish and was constantly loyal to his crew, even though that crew was largely successful because of him… he was largely success because of that crew.

This chance encounter put things into an interesting perspective for me.

It’s not necessarily about individual business partners, because people tend to have different partners in different ventures and it’s not always 100% possible to include all partners in every venture, but to me it is more about your “crew”. This goes down to individual members of the team, like the programmer, the designer, the outsourced help, etc etc.

This really got me thinking and I have a few friends who are relatively successful that constantly “upgrade” their crews and every other project just completely tanks because they are running with a new team that is untested in terms of compatibility.

I’ve noticed in things like the movie business, that really successful actors, directors, products, etc always have a “crew” that they use and they very rarely make any changes to their crew or entourage. They work with people that they work well with, and that’s all there is to it. No reason to change. It’s more of an unnecessary risk to make the change, yet so many entrepreneurs (and others) constantly change their crew because they feel like they need a higher skill or experience level. I would totally disagree with that notion in most circumstances, and would much rather be using my crew that’s loyal to me and I know I work well with.

Are you making unnecessary changes to your crew? Ask yourself if the “upgrade” in your crew that you think you need is really worth the risk of having compatibility and other issues.

Let’s start from the very beginning of the process of working with a new client.

This is actually one of the most important parts of the whole future relationship. The reason is that it dictates how they perceive you and how much weight they give your input.

Here’s a case study on a situation I ran into

Several years ago I was consulting a company, for now we will call them Company X. This was one of my very first “big” consulting gigs and I was so excited to work with that company at the time, that I agreed to provide consulting for them at a discounted rate (that they knew was a highly discounted rate).

I agreed to it because I wanted them on my “resume” of consulting clients. Company X happened to be a giant in their industry, and they were in the same industry as a company I had consulted a little over a year earlier, whom I helped make a lot of money (Company Y).

Consulting begins. Now, I started to realize right away that Company X was making the same mistakes that the previous client was making, and I started to tell them exactly how to fix that problem, what needed to be changed, etc. It was very clear and obvious to me what had to be changed, and I conveyed that to their higher ups. However, this time around they didn’t want to take any of my advice as the previous company (Company Y) had taken (whom ran with and made a TON of money off of, by direct result.) Instead they wanted to do endless meetings and unnecessary paperwork and focus on literally everything except fixing their problems/increasing their profit. Essentially utilizing me for the complete wrong reasons.

This happens more than you would think in the consulting business. Someone hires you, you have the answer to their problem but for one reason or another they don’t act on that advice. We’ll get to my belief on what makes company not take advice well (ego can be part of it too).

A few more weeks went by with Company X and when the first months renewal came up, I had some other offers and projects on the horizon that would net me much more money (since I was consulting at a discounted price) and because I didn’t want to take money from them and have no results on their company (even though it was due to their inaction) – I was looking for great case studies and to build up my brand, and this wasn’t helping in that cause since they were extremely slow and inactive to my advice. I gave up on the consulting deal with this company and moved on.

Less than a week later I received a frantic call from a friend at Company X who had just been given a hard deadline of when they needed to increase profits by or their would be some major restructuring at the company. He seemed in fear of his job, etc. I explained to him that I was already working on 3 other projects at the time and that they would have to pay me much more money this time to get even a fraction of my time, and that I wasn’t happy with how things ended having had the answer to their problem over a month ago and they took basically no action and didn’t regard anything I had to say to help them.

So I reluctantly agreed to do this, for the much higher premium since I was busy and had to outsource one of my other projects now. I was kind of irritated at the whole thing, so I told them I wouldn’t be doing any unnecessary meetings, and it would be a 1 month trial pending they take my advice. I wasn’t looking for a paycheck to do nothing, I was looking for a case study of how I increased profits massively for big companies.

However, contrary to what I thought was going to happen, things were much different this time. All of a sudden (because I charged what I should have charged from the beginning, and laid down the new rules) they regarded my opinion much more and actually listened to (almost) all of my advice. They went on to not only hit their profit goal, but they beat it by more than double.

Later down the road, I had talked with the company and basically came to the conclusion that because I gave such a discounted rate, they didn’t take my advice seriously and didn’t act on anything and saw me as the low man on the totem pole that they could just use for advice on their marketing tactics (that weren’t working). Later when I was charging more, and they knew I could easily leave if they didn’t listen, AND they had a profit deadline – all of a sudden I was like a rock star in the company and everyone was taking action on my input and utilizing the consulting how they should have from the beginning.

The moral of the story for me is that you can never discount yourself. I mean that more than just in terms of a consulting salary too. When you lower your perception by accepting something that’s not an ideal scenario, it never seems to work out. I think this applies to all marketing and business in general. People like to assign a value and perception on you and your product, and if you help them to lower that perception and value it’s probably not going to work out.

Why do you drive the kind of car you drive?  Why did you select a particular type of computer?  Something in your experience, even if it was as simple as reading a recommendation, prompted you to make one choice over another.

Apple is one of the all time great brands, built around excellent design and an “it just works” brand promise.  I am always amazed when I walk into one of their retail stores – how many places are you told to “stand over there and wait” until we can take your money?  And the funny thing is, I do it!

The reason is its brand has great value.  I am willing to pay extra for a Mac, when HP makes good windows laptops at two-thirds the price. Starbucks and McDonalds both make good coffee, but where would you be more likely to invite a new client or a first date to join you?  Again, the value of the brand is worth more than the simple product delivered.

And that is the value experience you want to create with your brand.  With all of the sites on the web, you want to have a brand that communicates value and quality.  You want the reader to trust you, You want to become a “must see” site in a world of me-too.  Brand value doesn’t happen by accident – it takes work, but the reward is usually more – traffic, value, ad revenue, or whatever goal you are looking to achieve.

In establishing a brand, first you need to define what makes you unique.  Here at www.dailyconversions.com, Brian has built a great brand based on clear advice and information on affiliate and internet marketing.  He does not try to sell you anything, rather he seeks to improve your business through solid information and partnerships with quality affiliate networks.  What do you want to stand for?  Why will readers visit your site?  Start by trying to write a brief brand statement – think about how you explain what you do to someone on an elevator in 30 seconds or less.  Then review the statement and ask what makes it unique.

Think about the brands that are important to you.  Honda. American Express. Disney. Google. Each brand defines not only the company but also an experience, which is what you want to deliver.  Keep honing your written statement until it is clear and focused on who and what you aspire to be.  It doesn’t have to be who you are today, but must be something that you can become in a reasonable period of time. Then use that vision as a filter on all of your interactions – posts, advertising, and offers to your readers.  Give them brand consistency and they will continually return to benefit from its value.

Next time by RJ – Sustaining Brand Trust.

A lot of Internet and Affiliate Marketers, don’t use batching at all and it’s a total productivity killer. This means you are making 1 cookie at a time rather than 20 or 30 cookies at once. Case in point, sending emails. Every time you login to your email program/site and open up emails, you are probably taking several extra seconds to minutes each time you do that, rather than if you did all of your emails 1, 2 or 3 times per day instead of constantly. Essentially, by responding to emails dozens of times per day you are going to be wasting time, same as you would if you made 1 cookie at a time all day rather than 1 or 2 big batches at once.

Here’s another example. Do you use an online chat program? You are probably wasting minutes to HOURS per day. And, no I’m not saying that online chats are a waste of time, in fact they are very beneficial, but you need to know how to batch properly. Let’s look at an example…

Let’s say that I’m using Skype or AIM and having an online chat with someone. Chances are I’m also waiting for them to respond after I write what I want to write. That means I’m wasting a lot of time by waiting for responses, minutes to hours per day. Instead, a better technique would be to respond every 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes instead of just constantly responding. It might not make the people you’re talking with as happy to have to wait between what they write, but if you use this even 50% of the time you’re probably going to notice minutes to hours per day of extra time if you have a lot of online chat conversations. If you don’t want to make anyone wait, another technique is to set aside X amount of time for all conversations and batch all of your conversations and multi-task the conversations.

Batching is not new either, huge corporations like VistaPrint have based their entire business model around a batching process to be able to sell printed paper goods really inexpensively. Without batching, they would probably be out of business!

I challenge you to find ways that you can batch similar tasks and see at the end of the week if you gained extra time to do something more beneficial than waiting around for responses or wasting time opening closing and reopening email programs and things of that nature.

The concept is simple yet very specific. It works like this: if someone uses your product or service, their image is going to improve. That’s what you want to portray in your marketing. That can be in many forms, the simplest way to understand is to think of a social hierarchy, and if your customers use your service they are going to raise in that social hierarchy. That’s what you want them to take away from your ad, landing page, website, commercial, whatever.

American Express is a perfect example of a company that uses this technique in their marketing. Especially in their commercials it becomes obvious that they use this. Watch just about any American Express commercial from the last several years, and ultimately it’s about increasing your image if you have this card. They are basically saying, use our card and you’ll be like the guy/girl in the commercial, who’s usually a well put together business person, a celebrity or a person that looks like they have something really good going for them. They want to portray that if you use this card, you too will be like this person that you probably admire or think is very successful. Make sense?

It may or may not make sense just yet, and the reason I’m making this post is because this is also a commonly overlooked marketing tactic that people don’t really understand, but need to.

One thing that I want to point out is that there’s quite a bit of difference in this tactic and the show off tactic, showing off cars and a wealthy lifestyle. This technique is NOT about showing off expensive cars and bragging. I’m not saying its bad to show off and use that technique, it certainly has it’s place, but that is a different technique and I’m not trying to teach that right now.

Here’s a video that portrays this perfectly. It’s not on the surface level, you have to do some analysis of what they want you to take from the commercial to get The Image Uplifter messaging from it. They execute brilliantly and plant the marketing message deep so that you don’t even realize what they just planted in your brain.

Did you see that? I’ll give you some hints if you didn’t:

• It starts by showing DeNiro’s background, where he came from, where his home is. Almost to the point of how hard (and good) life can be.
• It ends by showing where he is now, Tribeca Film Festival, and a very accomplished well put together actor.
• Classic Image Uplifter. I hope you see it.
• This commercial also has a combo with another tactic that they are also using for a double wammy. Do you see it? It usually doesn’t work when combo’d like this, but they do it brilliantly. I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with New York, DeNiro and the word HOME. But why do they point it out so much? What do they want you to feel that helps ‘sell’ their credit cards, beyond The Image Uplifter?

There are BILLIONS of dollars spent per year on Image Uplifter commercials and ads across the world. It’s one of the core marketing concepts that universally work across languages and across continents. This is most likely one of the 10 most powerful marketing concepts on earth.

One trap to avoid is trying to spell it out too much for the audience. You wouldn’t necessarily want to literally say “we’re going to increase your image!” then it would just be cheesy.

What message do you use in your marketing?