Me and Alex Jeffreys - my Mentor - London 2011.

Yep I said at the very beginning of this blog that I would have a product in 6 weeks or so. That was almost 8 weeks ago! But don’t worry it IS happening and I WILL BE RELEASING IT ON THE WORLD soon! So watch out world! You’re going to wanna read all of this post because in it I share with you what I have been paying money to learn direct from the expert!

Why the delay?? As you probably know I’m being personally mentored by Alex Jefferys and one of his successful students Dean Holland, and one of Alex’s key premises of doing business is to under promise and over deliver. Have I actually told you what it is we are doing??

Basically, there is a closed group of 10 of us that made it into his course. It was to be a 6week intensive course (where we would have a product to release at the end – free and paid) and then follow on into a 6mth coaching program into his inner circle. I say “was” because already the 6week intensive has turned into a 9 week intensive which is really good since it gives me a bit more time to prepare for the product release. This is a classic example of under promising and over delivering!

There are heaps of behind the scenes work to do (which is also why I haven’t posted earlier) so this extra time for me is a plus.

So as this site promises I will share with you what I’ve been paying to learn direct from the expert. Obviously I can’t go into as much detail as we do because each weekly webinar lasts for at least 2 hours and it would be info overload!! But I will give you an overview, tips and build on this over time so keep checking back for blog updates!

Mentorship Overview:
* A 6 week intensive designed to get your very own product to market + website built by Alex’s people with professional graphics, traffic and email marketing script established.
* Launch of the product including promotion from Alex and Dean
* A 2 day weekend workshop in London following the launch (I’m probably not going to be able to make that 🙁 for obvious reasons).
* Entry in to the 6mth inner circle program to build on the skills learned and develop the business further
* Access to all of Alex’s training packages to date

Additional things needed but not included: An auto-responder (see below), Web hosting and domain name registration.
* Skype recording software optional.

As you can see it’s a very comprehensive package and great for someone like me who really wants to learn about marketing online. You develop a product WITH 2 experts and then you LEARN TO MARKET IT WITH THE EXPERTS.

“Most people don’t succeed because they try and do it alone – it’s not like you can’t find the info you need on your own, but you need someone to turn to for advice, someone that keeps motivating you to put in the effort. When you put in the effort you see the result.”  Alex Jeffreys.

So what happens in the 6 week intensive?

Week 1:
* We looked at product creation, research and finding a niche. We talked about being passionate about your niche/topic (it’s always easier to sell and stay motivate when you are passionate about something), how to pick a hot topic – by working out who your audience is, finding where they hang out and asking them what it is they want or have trouble with, and we looked at how to find your competition.  All good business sense.

We then looked specifically about product creation including precreation work, Tools you would need and how it would be made and then we talked some more about researching the market and product.

Week 2:
* Was about Squeeze pages. If you’re anything like me 8wks ago you’re probably wondering what a squeeze page is? 

Wikipedia defines it as “Squeeze pages are landing pages created to solicit opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers”. I could do a whole post on squeeze pages and maybe I will another time but basically they are a webpage that tells the visitor the benefit of opt-in into your email list.

As Alex says the money is in the list. Think about emails you get – from travel companies, discount coupon companies or even smartphone apps that send you offers. It’s all the same thing really. You subscribe to a list and they send you offers that will hopefully be of value to you. This is the purpose of a squeeze page and people like Alex have really leveraged them to grow their business.

So we talked about types of squeeze pages, squeeze page copy tips, how to get traffic. One thing that really stuck with me on this webinar was to capture the least amount of fields as possible. Alex noted that he and Dean definitely see higher sign up rates to their lists if they only ask for the email address or first name and email address. Anything more and sign up rates start to drop off because people just don’t want to give over all their information to someone they don’t yet know very well. Don’t you feel the same? Lesson here… Keep the sign up capture fields to a minimum. Golden advice!

Fortunately we won’t be having to build or write the squeeze page as that will be done by Alex but he wanted us to know how to do it for the future (and says he will put out a training pack for us to know how to get this done on our own later).

Week 3:
* Was about OTO pages. OTO?? what is that… OTO stands for One Time Offer. You would see this all the time. Sales at shops are basically One Time Offers – buy at this price now or pay full price later. Sometimes OTO’s have bonuses included. But at this price now and we’ll throw in this bonus. Buy later and you miss the bonus AND pay more.

I like to think of OTO’s as “Discount Sales”. Everyone likes to get a bargain and it also helps you offer excellent value to your customers. Unfortunately there are some unscrupulous marketers out there who offer an OTO but then it is not really a sale at all. You can buy the same offer later for the same price.

Alex and Dean do not recommend this if you are trying to build a long term sustainable business because TRUST between you and your customer is very important. If you say it’s a OTO and then it isn’t then they will never believe your future offers. On the other hand if you build trust and deliver on what you say then you’re customers will understand when you deliver them value in the future with other special offers and they will know that they really are getting a special offer and not just being sold to.

In the offline world these kind of deceptive practices are illegal so I don’t think it should be any different online.

Week 4:
Affiliate tools
* This is where it really started to get exciting for me and we talked about how affiliates can really drive the success of your product and sales.

An affiliate is someone who will promote a product for a cut of the sale. E.g.: Real life – When I bought my car the car dealer said to me that if I knew anyone else who wanted a car tell them about the deal I got and if they buy a car they would give me $100.  A friend wanted the same car and bought one… only the dealer didn’t want to give me the $100. Let’s just say I told everyone to NOT buy from them after that!!  Don’t be a car salesman!

But the point is, if you can get an army of people promoting your products for you (and give them a cut) it’s a win win situation for all. You get more sales and spend a lot less time trying to market the product, they make money and the customer finds out about a good valued product.

Again affiliates could be a whole other blog post. If you have a good blog or website that people like to read and visit then it is easy to offer a few related products for sale and start making money from your blog that easily.

Alex talked about when he launched a product he had webpages and programs dedicated to affiliates so that he could make it easy for them to promote his product. That product went on to make him over a million dollars.

Week 5:
Email marketing.
* Again this week was very exciting and energising. We looked at different tools, resources and programs for email marketing (see my page RESOURCES for the auto-responder I use) and the benefits of email marketing. I touched on this earlier. Alex always says “the money is in the list”. What this means is that once you have a list of subscribers you can send them offers.

What’s an Auto-Responder? Well this is the program that people use to send out emails and automatically reply to emails. This is how people “make money while they sleep”. Basically when people opt-in to your list on your squeeze page you can have the program send a pre-written thank you email and even have an unlimited number of follow up emails. You could automatically email them a pre-written email every day if you wanted – telling them about sales or just info in general. You can also do “on the fly” emails out to your whole list whenever you want using the program. Most auto-responder programs will show you percentage of emails opened, percentage of links clicked and more.

We talked about how to write kick ass emails for success, about not just pitching crappy products all the time to an email list. Alex gave us some of his scripts that he had used so we could adapt or “steal” them for our own needs and encouraged us to sign up to other lists to see what captures your attention and think about how we could do similar. If you do this just make sure you don’t get sucked in to their offers!! Some people are very good marketers!

The potential of email marketing is huge! But you probably already knew that!

Week 6:
Was another exciting week about Traffic and Affiliates.

* We had an awesome live sessions where Alex showed us on screen how to find affiliates, how to build an affiliate network, how to find and build traffic and a few “what not to do” when contacting affiliates. I recon the moral of this webinar was to teach us to try and create value for whoever we interact with… be it customers, affiliates, of joint venture partners. So we talked about relationship building, promotion with social media, hidden traffic loop holes and heaps more.

It was a freaking exciting sessions and gave me heaps of ideas!

Week 7:
was an opportunity to talk about all the stuff we had learnt and ask more questions – particularly questions that only came up after we had been doing all the stuff I spoke of above.

Week 8 and 9 will be a product launch session and access to a live seminar with Alex that he will turn into a paid product. Alex said we may even get access to his 6 figure launch which is coming up too.

So as you can see I’ve had HEAPS to learn and do over these last few weeks and it’s not a walk in the park but it’s definitely easier with someone guiding you through the minefield of information and laying out step by step instructions and taking care of the technical side so I can focus on the things that will grow the business.

Basically I’ve been coming home after work every day and most weekends and working on the behind the scenes stuff. I keep thinking of my motto “short term pain for long term gain”. I’m dedicated to make this work one way or another!

So stay tuned, watch it all unfold, and please tell me about what you’ve been getting up to with your business in the comments below!!

Nick

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Posted in My personal journey Reviews by Nick 11 Comments