Social Media, The Butterfly Effect & my Pal in Racine
A few years ago in the “AdWords Gold Rush,” there was a fierce battle for which Google guru was gonna land on top of the heap. A new Google e-book came out literally every 3 days and it was brutal. My most formidable competition then was Don Crowther of Racine Wisconsin. Razor sharp marketing guy if there ever was one.
The Butterfly Effect is the idea that one flap of a butterfly’s wings can change history. And it’s true. Had the butterfly flapped its wings ever so differently, today Don might be the AdWords guy instead of me. He would certainly be worthy of the title.
In fact he and I did a smoking’ hot teleseminar which we still sell today as the “AdWords Black Belt Course” (adwordsblackbelt.com). Even though it’s 6 years old (that’s like 50 years in Internet time!) and even though a handful of tech details are out of date, it stands as one of the most enduring advanced online strategy courses ever.
It also has one of the lowest refund rates of anything I sell. Again, a lot of its goodness comes from Don and the clarity of his thinking and his ability to teach.
The #1 thing you need to know about Don is, he has absolutely zero tolerance for smoke and mirrors and shell games. Nobody is going to sneak some sci-fi marketing fantasy past Don. He goes by numbers and results and researches everything down to its roots.
Don has mastered the science of Social Media and applied his rigorous thinking to the entire range of Social Media outlets. While most people are telling you to endlessly “like” and “tweet” and “bookmark,” which is a horrendous waste of time, Don has reduced all the complexity to its bare essentials. He’s determined what’s really profitable.
I invite you to watch Don’s new video tutorials on Social Media. I believe you’ll find more meat here than in 1000 tips and tweets from run-of-the-mill “social media experts”:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/doncrowther/
Perry
Why Facebook advertisers are cagey
“Loose lips sink ships.”
Some people are absolutely raking it in with Facebook ads but many are keeping quiet about it. I’ve got a friend named Bill who turned $12,000 of ad spend into $48,000 in 2 months. Another guy from Central America told me he’s turned $1,000 into $200,000. “Mister R” converted $10,000 of ads into $200,000 of business in one year.
Last night on Facebook FastTrack call #3, Bryan told about a guy who had a highly successful, “evergreen” promotion making money hand over fist. Bryan delivered a basic description of what he was doing. Bryan sez, “If I told you exactly who this guy is he’d kill me.”
On Facebook you *cannot* be an anonymous business. You have to be connected to a profile of a real person.
When the Google gold rush was underway, we collected hundreds and hundreds of testimonials from people all over the world. If they were easy to locate online, they probably had a complex business that was hard to knock off. If they ran a simple business, nobody knew what market they were in anyway.
Things are a little different on Facebook. Not quite as many people jumping up & down saying “Hey look how great things are going for me!” but make no mistake, there’s miles and miles of cheap real estate for sale on Facebook. And people making good coin with it.
My apologies to those on our waiting list who were unable to join Facebook FastTrack. After the deadline we only had 11 seats left and they were quickly snatched up. We wanted to deliver a quality experience. And even with attendance capped we had some logistical challenges.
We’re refining our material and formulating a condensed version. *Stay tuned.* Meanwhile, rest assured that small fortunes are getting turned into large ones on Facebook.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, every time you go to Google’s home page you get a persistent “Download Chrome” icon. Yep – Google has popups on its home page! Why???? Cuz they’re afraid of Facebook!
Facebook is the next 900 pound gorilla. If you’re not using Google’s browser while you’re on Facebook, they don’t know what you’re doing. Google wants your D-A-T-A.
Real Jobs, British Pragmatism, and Risk Reversal
The magic of the Most Dangerous Question
A couple of years ago at my Autoresponder Seminar, Glenn Livingston was speaking. He said, “One of the best brainstorm questions you can ever ask is: What is the WORST email subject line I could possibly send to my customer?”
Then he asked the audience to toss out suggestions of the worst possible email they could imagine ever sending to their customers. People started shouting:
“Nothing I told you to do last year actually works.”
“All my testimonials are fake.”
“The only thing I want is your money.”
Then Roundtable member John Fox blurted out a real zinger. He says:
“I really enjoyed having drinks with your wife last night.”
Everybody busted out laughing. I jumped up, grabbed the microphone and ran with it:
SUBJECT LINE: I really enjoyed having drinks with your wife last night
Dear FIRSTNAME,
That’s right. She and I met in a bar at 10pm. We drank martinis ’til the misty dawn. And my friend, your wife is a very unhappy woman. As a person who cares about you, I’m warning you, if you don’t turn things around right away you may very well have a divorce on your hands.
She told me: “All my husband ever does is go to these get-rich-in-real-estate seminars and I’m SICK of it. I’m sick of the tenants calling at 2am with clogged toilets. I’m sick of the endless promises that ‘THIS’ is finally the thing that’s gonna make us rich, honey. I’m sick of the high taxes and lawn crews that don’t show up and the tenants that complain.
“I’m tired of that stupid apartment building that loses $1100 per month. I’m tired of dumping our entire 401K into interest payments and I’m tired of my husband not following through on all this supposedly great advice he pays for.”
Buddy, she is NOT a happy camper.
So… here’s where I can help.
I’ve designed a brand new program called “Help, my wife is about to divorce me!” and in this program we re-program your brain to stop sabotaging your success. Because, you see, the real reason that apartment is losing $1100 per month and the reason you keep paying too much for all these properties you buy is because there’s a rogue program in your mind that’s secretly driving you towards failure.
It’s time to fix that program, FIRSTNAME. Right now.
~~~~~
See how easy that was?
It pays to ask dangerous questions.
Robert Serling devised a series of 8 revolutionary business questions. I just hinted at one of them in the story I just told you. He’s got seven others. I love these questions and they’ll empower you to make simple changes with dramatic results. You can get all 8 here:
http://profitalchemy.com/the8questions/
Perry
Is the Internet constantly changing, all the time?
Just got off the phone with a guy who said, “It’s SO hard to keep up with the Internet, there’s new stuff happening every single day.”
It’s true… but it’s really a HALF truth.
If you’re paying attention, this 2 minute article will save you about a year of frustration.
If you completely believe everything’s always changing and you MUST keep up with it, you’ll be in a perpetual state of overwhelm and you’ll hardly ever manage to get anything done. Every time somebody says “jump” you’ll jump. You’ll think that the latest, coolest, bright shiny object is the Secret Of Everything.
The symptom is, 2 months after every single product launch you’re 2 months further behind in having a business that actually works.
Here’s the real truth:
90% of what’s ‘new and different’ is completely irrelevant. A waste of your precious time.
Only 10% of it is ever going to make a difference for you at all.
Case in point: From the standpoint of actually selling something to somebody, there’s only been about a dozen major developments in online marketing since the late 1990’s:
-Autoresponders
-Online Auctions
-Shopping Carts
-Paypal
-Pay Per Click
-Contextual Advertising ie Content Network
-Streaming Audio & Video
-Social Networking ie Facebook and Twitter
-Blog software
-Live Chat
-Crowdsourcing
In other words there’s about one major development per year. Not 100!
Sure, within all these things there are other smaller major developments. But my motto is, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Which is not some kind of cynical statement, it’s a massive time saver.
You may have noticed, I rarely jump up and down and yell at you about how something urgently needs your attention RIGHT NOW. That’s because success comes from mastering the basics, not from widespread panic.
When I do tell you something’s important, it’s well worth your time to sit up and pay attention.
I see the world like this: The surface is always changing but the really important stuff stays roughly the same. As you master the core principles, you quickly see how to apply them when something new comes along.
In other words:
When you can immediately recognize what part of the “brand new whiz-bang thing” is NOT new, that’s when you possess the ability to profit from it.
When Google AdWords was brand new, I immediately knew it was “Scientific Advertising” from 1918 all over again, only 10,000X faster. I knew the money was going to be made by being scientific about it. And by entering the conversation inside the person’s head.
When Facebook advertising was brand new, I immediately knew that it was just like the classified ads in “Black Belt” magazine: If you know somebody is a black belt, there’s a whole list of other things they’ll buy that don’t appear to have anything to do with Martial Arts. That’s Right Angle Marketing. What was old is new again.
I can absolutely promise you, in the next few years new innovations will come that are currently unimagined. Billion dollar empires will emerge from seemingly nowhere.
When they do, massive mobs of people will be yelling and shouting at you, urging you to pile on the bandwagon. But you will find that the hypesters don’t know how to use what’s new because they never understood what worked before.
The Social Media hype is starting to fade now. Which is precisely when real business people start to make real money from it.
One of the “rats” in our Facebook advertising research lab is a guy named Bill. Bill does NOT want me to disclose his full identity, so I have to keep him anonymous. We guided Bill as he built out his Facebook campaigns.
In the last 2 months he’s put $12,000 into Facebook ads and gotten $48,000 out.
Quietly. With no hype or fanfare.
Just skillfully applying the basics and adapting the old to the new.
I invite you to consider that when you learn from the masters . . . when you practice your craft like a master . . . then instead of being the frenetic Red Belt, you can be the serene, utterly confident, unflappable, 4th degree Black Belt.
You can be the champion who calmly and quietly steps onto the mat and demolishes his opponent with three lightning-speed strikes without so much as breaking a sweat.
Master the basics. Become a marketing black belt. Find the old within the new, and discover how to function in an entirely new level of serenity and confidence.
Perry Marshall
