So what makes a successful student?

All of my successful students (at whatever level of success) have something very simple in common: They simply put one foot in front of the other and implement stuff. For example the second week of coaching I taught everyone how to implement a simple tracking system / split tester on their website (using Hypertracker.net), so that it would be almost as easy to split test web pages as to split test Google Ads.

Nearly everyone who did this made tremendous gains. It’s not that it’s that hard, you just have to put the pieces in place.

 

The most successful students just implement fast. They try stuff. And they look at failures not as failures, but simply as tests that didn’t work out.

The most successful students also understand the market they’re in, by virtue of having lived in it. Ari is successful at marketing to sales people because he’s been a sales person. Gareth is successful selling to gamers because he’s a gamer.

Why Go to the Trouble of a Coaching Program?

One of the reasons I decided to do this is that a lot of the information out there on online marketing is just plain wrong. An ironically, many times you can study very successful online marketers and still pick up a lot of bad habits from them. A lot of guys make their money by hammering their email lists so hard that although they squeeze money out of those lists early on, soon the lists burn out.

That’s a very short-sighted strategy. And a bad habit for you to pick up. I frequently get emails from people who say, “You’re the only ‘guru’ whose emails I always read every time they come, because the content is always good.” One coaching session was devoted to putting real humanity back into email, and building trust and credibility rather than always trying to sell, sell, sell.

A number of people told me their biggest “a-ha” moment was my talks on this human element.

Google AdWords Personal Coaching: Resounding Success

During the last year or two I’ve become known as “The Wizard of Google AdWords,” and in fact if you search the web you’ll find the name “Perry Marshall” is more closely associated with Google AdWords than any other person on the planet – even Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

AdWords is really just a narrow specialty within the vast field of marketing though, and it’s only one of the things I do. People who want to sell online find that mastering AdWords is often not optional – it’s something they have to do to get traffic; but mastery of AdWords is not sufficient for online success. It’s only the first step.

I do AdWords consultations on an almost-daily basis, and I find that 90% of the sites I review are sorely deficient in the area of converting visitors to sales. That first click only takes a millisecond but it might cost a buck or two bucks or five bucks. The value of that click to you depends on what happens next – and next, and next, and next.

Make no mistake, knowing how to get that click at the lowest possible price is crucial. And I find that even my best students are still leaving money on the table, and 50% more can often be gotten back with some help and assistance from me. Still, if all you know how to do is AdWords, then you only know how to spend money – not make money.

Which prompted me to start my AdWords personal coaching program, which launched in January. The whole idea is to improve the whole sales funnel from top to bottom, starting with AdWords (since it’s the most controllable source of traffic, giving you the ability to test things quickly and easily) and working your way through collecting contact information, email follow-ups, copywriting, sales pages, upsells, cross-sells, offline marketing and customer psychology.

Coaching members get intensive group conference calls where I cover all of these things in careful detail, and also get a series of personal, one-on-one, 30 minute coaching sessions. We confidentially discuss all aspects of their sales process.

So how did this go? In a word, awesome. I was extremely proud of the progress our students made, incorporating sophisticated testing strategies (such as the Taguchi method, the subject of my “Slam Factor” teleseminar last August, www.perrymarshall.com/slamfactor) and making massive gains. What follows are reports from some of my top students, with comments on their progress and specific pointers about web strategy:

Sunny Hills is a student in Maui, Hawaii. When first I received Sunny’s application form, I saw red flags in my mind because he’s selling Personal Development, which categorically is a very hard thing to sell. Plus I was rejecting apps from businesses bigger than his. So he had two strikes against him right out of the gate.

But he *really really really* wanted in, sending us several emails to that effect, so I accepted him into the program. And even though he’s in Hawaii, which is five hours behind us, he was on every single call, asking the most questions, contributing the most to conversations, and implementing the homework material like there’s no tomorrow.

What did Sunny do? Let him tell you in his own words – he recorded an immensely entertaining account of his journey through coaching, including a 66X gain in profitability (!). Listen to it here:

http://sunnythoughts.com/assets/audio/perryproject.htm

Other than being a retired business owner (which admittedly is an advantage) Sunny had no particular edge on anybody else, other than an intense desire to learn and implement. As you’ll hear on Sunny’s audio recording, he sells positive affirmation and personal development courses, and has had a considerable struggle selling this on the Internet during the last couple of years.

He multiplied his profits 66X in two months, and here are some of the ingredients that contributed to these gains:

• As instructed, he immediately set up a split-testing system using www.hypertracker.net and began improving the response rates on his web pages. He used Taguchi too, a multi-variable testing method which, for highly trafficked sites, can do a year’s worth of testing in a month.

• He re-wrote 105 autoresponder messages to be more personal and less commercial – and his sales went up

• He kept a detailed diary of his progress, recording notes, ideas and results of tests

• He made every coaching call and asked more questions than anyone else (not surprising!)

Another top student was Ari Galper, founder of Unlock The Game..

Ari, like Sunny, has been implementing like a banshee, with extraordinary results. Ari’s coaching actually started at the very end of December, when he bought a 1/2 hour consultation from me and started working on the sales conversion rate of his website. When this Personal Coaching program began, he just started implementing faster.

Here are his results:

Dec: $5,000 online

Jan: $10,000 online

Feb: $15,000 online

 

Mar: $21,000 online

April projection: $25,000

“I’ve made so many optimization changes based on your recommendation it’s hard to keep track.

“Each piece of advice, from something as simple as reducing the size of my site masthead and improving the download speed, to dissecting my conversion process in detail and then reconstructing it, made a difference.

“Perry you turned my business around. More importantly, you turned my brain around to finally understand what it takes to build and sustain an automatic selling machine.”

What Ari has accomplished here is he’s hit the ‘tipping point’ where everything else he does reaps massive rewards. He accomplished this growth while adding very little new traffic; the majority of the improvement is from sales conversion! Now his efforts to recruit affiliates and buy advertising from new sources will have multiplied effectiveness.

There’s a real lesson here: Sales conversion is everything. I can’t overstate the value of working on your sales process until it flows like water. Congratulations Ari, you’ve worked VERY hard. I’m very, very proud of ya.

Another top estudiante: Gareth Hatch. I’ll let Gareth tell you his story. It’s a case study in exactly what to do and how to do it when you’re trying to squeeze more value out of those clicks:

“I started the Adwords Coaching Course as a battered and bruised Adwords neophyte, no longer optimistic, a little angry – and very confused as to why I was losing money at an alarming rate using Adwords. I had tried running such campaigns on a couple of occasions prior to the start of the course, and each time had lost money.

I was also wearing the patience of my good lady wife rather thin…

At week 1 of the course, I had a site that was actually losing me around $2,500 / month, because my sales revenues were not matching my Google expenses. What I realized at that point, was that I needed to wait just a little while, to apply the traffic building lessons you were teaching, until AFTER I had worked to improve my dreadful sales conversion rate – otherwise, I’d simply be increasing my losses!

Thankfully, very early in the course, you were talking about how I could do this. The pivotal early moment for me came when you started talking about Taguchi testing. A major light bulb went off in my head. I designed a comprehensive Taguchi experiment for my video games tutorial Web site, and began to run the test. I started tracking all aspects of the testing using hypertracker.net, as you had suggested, and waited patiently. I also started to “peel and stick” the keywords in my Google campaign, in anticipation of the next steps.

What happened next was truly amazing to a skeptical engineering type like me. Over the course of the first month, I was able to DOUBLE the sales conversion of my traffic, once it was arriving at my sales page. I suddenly became profitable! “See honey – this Google Adwords stuff really works!!” Meanwhile, I started to split test like crazy in my Adwords campaign. My average clickthru rate prior to starting was around 1.2%. As I worked on the individual keyword groups, I started nudging that average value up to 1.5%, then 2% and on. I was able to turn the rate for two of my best keywords from an average 1.5% click thru rate, to an astounding 10.5% click thru rate by the end of the 8 week course!! 10.5%!! That’s huge!! I ended up with an average click thru rate of 2.5% for all of my keywords – over 2 X better than when I started!!

Meanwhile, I decided to do another Taguchi test on the sales page, testing variables I hadn’t looked at before. I just finished this testing only a couple of hours before writing this, and I have been able to almost double again my sales conversions. This is stuff is just phenomenal!!

 

What does this mean in monetary terms? Well, I started with 2,000 clicks / day, giving me a LOSS of $2,500 / month on the site. I managed to increase my sales conversion rate by 3.8 X my original. I increased my traffic to around 4,000 clicks / day. I am now on target for a PROFIT of over $9K / month for this sales page – and MORE, once I start branching out beyond Google to other forms of advertising!!!

I haven’t even begun to fully exploit all the OTHER stuff you shared with us, including the setting up of a free report / name squeeze pages, and adding further products to the portfolio, to further build on this profit generation. With very little effort, I have managed to double the number of signups to my newsletter for the video game stuff, and will shortly be adding a name squeeze page in front of the sales letter to kick that up several notches!!

The Adwords Coaching course has given me the confidence to go out there, kick some butt and take some names. I have already initiated two new projects, working with a health and fitness expert, and also a petsrelated project, to set up two additional businesses that will contain several different informational products, numerous sub-lists and so on, all fully automated using the autoresponder tips and tricks you shared with us. I can’t wait to make this happen! I read the “EMyth” book that Jonathan Mizel recommended and the eye opening content in that book, plus the tools you’ve given, have given me the drive to make this happen, for me and for my family, in 2005. I can’t wait to become one of the best examples of what the AWCC can do for Anyone who has a mind to work at it! I can’t thank you enough.”

Gareth Hatch

Make no mistake my beloved subscribers, I’m in this business to make money. But getting reports like this and hearing success stories from my students gives me a bigger head rush than just getting a nice big check in the mail.

From Insourcing, to Outsourcing, to Sub-Outsourced Insourcing

Back to my friend Jon who’s losing his programming job at Underwriter’s Laboratories: He hasn’t asked, but if he does I’ll tell him to start a Micro-National programming company – hire programmers in Poland and Bulgaria and Ukraine and manage the projects from the US. He can pay them $20 per hour and sell project work at $75 per hour. The challenge with this international talent is harnessing it properly and weeding out the morons. If he does that, he’ll be standing in high cotton.

Here’s my prediction: His company is going to overextend themselves with this outsourcing.

(Don’t they always? There’s a yin to every yang, after all.) The CFO is going to get too greedy, the CIO will throw too many in-house people overboard and all their tribal knowledge will evaporate, just like that. Then the liaison for all the India people is going to throw up his hands in frustration and quit.

And about six months from now, Mr. CIO is going to find himself naked in a bathtub full of live lobsters – when all the spinning plates come down and start shattering into pieces on the board room floor. So then Mr. CIO is going to call my friend Jon in a panic, and hire him back as a consultant at an hourly fee that’s double his former salary.

For the difference in pay, Jon can hire three offshore programmers and get four times the work done – and nurse at the corporate breast until a bigger, higher paying client comes along. And then it’s Sayonara, baby. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Yahoo Stores and Ebay Sellers: From Micro-National to Micro-WALMART

There’s a new trend afoot in the “hard goods” side of the Internet world: the Micro Wal-Mart.

Just this month my friend Brad Fallon took a troop of Yahoo and Ebay sellers to Canton Fair, huge trade show in Guangzhou China, teaching them throughout the trip the process of negotiating and buying partial container loads of product, factory direct.

With hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, Ebay is a vast market. If you want to sell briefcases on Ebay, consider how much more margin you make by going direct to China and bypassing a US wholesaler:

Quality briefcases like these could sell for well over $200 in the U.S.

But direct from the Chinese factory they’re only $8.00!

Now THAT’S the kind of product you can sell on eBay all day long — and make a killing!

Or…you could sell the products on your own ecommerce web site (and build your own loyal customer base) while you use eBay to advertise your best, lowcost deals and build your customer list.

As you know, it’s not just margins that go up with lower product costs. Your volume increases too, because you can sell for less even though you’re making more on every sale.

In fact, you could even wholesale your products to all the other online retailers and let them do the work while you ship the orders and count your money.

What’s not to like about that? Brad is planning another trip in October; could be a big opportunity for ya. You even get your own personal interpreter to help you talk to all your new vendors. Learn more about what Brad’s China outsourcing tour at www.bradfallon.com/china.

Caveat Emptor: Unreliable Freelancers

If you do very many projects like this, you find that some of these freelancers are very unreliable. Like the guy who didn’t finished the writing project – glad I anticipated the problem and hired two! One of the keys to using services like this is anticipating the unreliability of people, finding the good ones, and hanging on to them.

The other day I told my AdWords personal coaching members that these days I have less and less sympathy for people who are “struggling,” because all us entrepreneurs know that when we’ve got a good, reliable person who does what they say they’ll do, we’ll keep them and take good care of them, thank you very much. I’ve got no time for sob stories from folks who can’t keep their promises.

How to Outsource Almost Any Service, Fast and Cheap

I frequently farm out projects on www.RentACoder.com. Rent-A-Coder is a reverse auction site for services. (By the way www.Elance.com is very similar, and larger.) It works like Ebay except in reverse – if you have a project you want done (writing a piece of software, having something transcribed, getting a document written or edited, getting graphics done, products designed or websites built) – you specify the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay and then people bid on it. They can bid at that price or lower. They post their bid and add comments or questions.

RentACoder has a rating system, just like Ebay, where previous buyers rank the bidder on a scale of 1 to 10 and offer comments. You pick a winner, escrow the money, and the project begins. They get paid when you agree that the project has been finished to your specs.

In the last two months I’ve had RentACoder people from Indiana, Pennsylvania and Bulgaria do projects for me. One project was a writing project, and figuring I had only a 50% chance of getting the quality of writing I needed, I just hired two guys and had them both do the same project. Sure enough, one did a great job, one did a lousy job. I only paid the lousy guy a fraction of his bid price (he only finished part of the work) and everything still got done on time.

We live in a rent-a-coder, rent-a-writer, rent-an-editor, rent-a-graphic-designer, rent-a-projectmanager world. You can bid out almost any service you want and, literally in a matter of days, assemble a lean, mean international project team and execute. The demand for new products and services is infinite, if you’re asking people what they want before you make it, so there is an unlimited spectrum of alchemy opportunities for you.

The Perry Marshall Micro-National Empire: A Case Study in Globalization

For several years I employed a full-time webmaster, a guy named Vivek who lives in India.

Instead of paying an American $1500 to $3000 per month, I paid Vivek $500 per month. (That’s right, you can hire a full time programmer with an engineering degree in India for that kind of money – and that’s nearly double what he was making at his previous job.)

Some might accuse me of taking jobs away from an American, but the reality is this: If I can pay someone $500 instead of $2000, then I can invest in growing the business other ways. I can hire more people to work on other projects. I can advertise more aggressively. I can develop more products. I can buy more equipment for the office. Remember, I’m an entrepreneur, which means I’m an alchemist. We entrepreneurs take useless things and make them useful. We find under-used resources and put them to work.

The Vivek story takes an interesting twist: Last year he quit and started his own company.

The other day he sent me this email:

 

You will be happy to note that your *disciple* is doing indeed good (at least, as per my standards) Right now, i am providing webhosting reselling ENTIRE servers and associated services (that go along with them) to people in India (in Calcutta, India doing major offshore work for UK insurance companies), some direct customers in the UK. Right now, i have 24 Dedicated servers of my own, which i have co-located/rented in datacentres in the US All those servers are costing me $60 to $110 EACH, my expenses (from my own pocket) are roughly $1600 per month.

And since December 2004, i have managed to make a *profit* of around 3500 US$ PER MONTH “AVERAGE”. and also, i have job offers here for salaries on 300 to 375 US$ per month, but haven’t joined them.

In India, $3500 a month is a bloody fortune, folks. It’s 10X what the average professional there earns, not to mention the average peasant. Vivek has now joined the Ruling Class of Asia, no doubt thanks in part to some inspiration and confidence developed by hanging out with guerillas like myself.

Honestly it was a big pain in the butt to lose Vivek, but I’m proud that he, too, is now an alchemist. You wanna solve poverty in the third world? Dropping food out of airplanes won’t solve any problems. People like Vivek, running international companies from their spare bedroom – that will help more than just about anything else. Now Vivek needs to hire himself a cook and a maid and a gardener and spread a little of that prosperity around.

The Outsourcing of All Things

My friend Richard Mandel, editor of DesignFax, tells this story: “I breakfasted with one fellow who is employed with a firm that designs and manufactures auto parts. I asked if his company was second or third tier, to which he replied, “First and second.” His company builds everything except the bodies, and elaborated how, within the foreseeable future, the major manufacturers will be outsourcing every step of automobile manufacturing all the way through final assembly. This viewpoint was reminiscent of the comment made years ago by a manager I worked for at Lockheed, who pointed out that we manufactured nothing — we simply assembled airplanes.

“Another fellow described, rather ruefully, his work as a designer for a consumer products subcontractor. The drawings sent by engineers within the primary companies, he noted, are little more than rough sketches that still need to be translated into designs capable of being manufactured. The subcontractor is also obliged to cost concerns, as well as source the components, manufacture and assemble — and do it in the shortest time possible, or else the primary company finds another subcontractor to handle the demands.

“Conversations inevitably turned towards outsourcing to China and India, and the fundamental differences in how people in societies outside the US handle tasks. Ultimately, after several trips to the Indian office to describe, in person, what the US customer required and why, my neighbor finally had to hand pick a new team, establish them in an office, and train them to the point where they could build the product without making shortcuts or introducing their own interpretations of the specs.”

“OK… So is this bad, or is it good?”

To put it succinctly, this is bad if you’re a wage slave laboring in a bureaucratic regime under buzzing fluorescent lights. But it’s great if you’re an entrepreneur. And being that you, as a reader of this newsletter, are a way-above-average marketer, you can only benefit from this. Here’s why:

 

No matter how cheap Asian labor is, your customers’ appetite for more stuff is insatiable. No matter how much stuff people have, they still crave “the next thing.” Don’t worry, the US isn’t going to run out of money – as long as entrepreneurs are selling people stuff they want. The only thing that could keep this from happening is if all our kids ever learn growing up is how to flip burgers and play video games.

Jim Pinto explains it like this: All the complaints about outsourcing – exporting US jobs – are mistaken, according to a recent WIRED magazine article (April 2005). US companies actually import jobs worth $20 billion more than they export. Americans earn more money from foreign companies “outsourcing” their service jobs in America than they lose to jobs being sent overseas.

WIRED provides numbers: In 2003, US businesses took in $61.4 billion by “insourcing” (providing labor for foreign firms), while $43.5 billion worth of American jobs were lost to outsourcing.

Business efficiency comes through automation to increase productivity, as well as reducing the costs of goods and services through whatever means available. Like the old British Luddites (who went around destroying cloth mills) labor unions opposed automation because assembly-line workers would be left jobless. Now, politicians make the same argument against outsourcing. As I have pointed out before, more US jobs have been lost to automation than outsourcing.

Critics focus on the perceived decline of US manufacturing, although this is a natural and necessary process. While the US workforce employed in manufacturing has decreased from 28.4% 1960 to 11.7% in 2002, productivity has increased by 103% since just 1980. Management and professional specialty jobs have increased from 23.4% of total employment to 31.1%, adding almost one million jobs a year since 1983.

Interestingly, although some information-tech jobs have been exported, total IT employment remains 74% higher than in 1994 – just 2% below the peak during the Y2K scare. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer-related jobs will account for seven of the 30 fastest-growing fields through 2012.

The New Flat Earth, and Scarcity vs. Abundance

I’ve had multiple careers in manufacturing, a sector that is gripped with paranoia of globalization and outsourcing. When US workers make $30 per hour and Asian workers make $3 a day – and when Wal-Mart is filled with items stamped Made In China, the concern is understandable.

Thomas Friedman has a new book out called The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentyfirst Century. His coverage of global politics, terrorism and Islamo-Fascism had distracted him from another development that’s changing the world: The Internet and cheap international travel has created a flat global playing field that allows you to slice up a project and farm it out anywhere on the planet. But then he saw this new trend and wrote a book on it.

My friend Jim Pinto put it this way: “The explosion of e-mail, search engines like Google and software that can chop up any piece of work and send the individual pieces to Boston, Bangalore and Beijing, makes it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together, intellectual capital could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again. This brought whole new degrees of freedom to the way work is done – especially work that needs brains, not physical interaction.”

I’ve got a friend Jon who’s losing his software programming job at Underwriter’s Laboratories because of this, after working there for many years. It’s all being outsourced to India. The bulk of the OEM loudspeaker manufacturing industry has now moved entirely to China, and jobs that existed in the US 10 years ago do not exist now.