Let’s Avoid Fake Advice

Just like there is fake news, there is also fake advice. Your biggest time waster is advice that pretends to be helpful but, in the final analysis, doesn't move the needle.

Let's see this example that Google currently ranks on the first page for "marketing success":

The most important of which being that there are 5, not 1, keys to success. They are: Determination, Skill, Passion, Discipline And Luck. Determination is necessary but, like each of the 5 keys, not sufficient for success.

The information in the above paragraph certainly contains truth. The problem comes from the fact that it is completely useless, because it doesn't give you a plan of action to reach that success.

This is why a majority of educational material on any subject is a complete waste of your time.

How To Really Reach Success

Let's see how we can do the above differently.

#1. Validated Demand

The first ingredient of success is that you need to be solving a problem that has visibility for a wide range of people.

Let's see the problem of site speed. 

GTMetrix analyzed close to 390k URLs in just 24 hours, which means a lot of people are aware of the problem of website speed.

Conversations in Facebook groups, Quora or forums will give you ideas or verify if the problem you have in mind really has sufficient gravity that you can start a successful business based on it.

If you are inexperienced, stay away from teaching marketing. People are extremely skeptical in that field. They read free information, but it takes a lot more effort to sell an info product. 

This is why I concentrate on promoting marketing tools, like page builders as an affiliate rather than courses.

The market for page builders is easy to verify by looking at the Elementor plugin site: 5+ million downloads of the free version and translated into 56 languages. Another excellent example of a free tier.

Additionally I have my own personal test results—the commissions that my tiny site FunnelXpert has been consistently generating for the past 2 years:

These earnings don't make me a millionaire, the commissions have their ebbs and flows—sometimes it's $1200 a month other times $400. But the sales are consistent and that means there is demand and I am doing something right.  

#2. Pre-sell Instead of Selling

Picture this...

A visitor arrives at your site that is really just one, big sales page. Yes, I know that the product is awesome and the words you wrote are sincere—  But put yourself in these visitors’ shoes for a moment. They don’t see inspiring content. They see a sales effort.

People resist sales efforts, so your conversion rate goes down.

Conclusion? Don’t sell!

Instead, warm your visitor up by PRE-selling them with great content that they value and respect:

• Tutorials
  
• Case studies
  
• Product reviews
  

They’ll read these with great interest and click through to your recommended product's page in an open-to-buy mindset.

Do you realize that these lessons haven't contained a single sales pitch so far?

It’s your PRE-selling effort that will boost your clicks-to-product-page and Conversion Rate, which in turn maximizes your income.

Presell Pages have been used in marketing for much longer than you may think. (At least the idea of them has been.) The concept goes back to the days of print advertising.

Back then they were called advertorials.

Which is an advertisement or sales letter, disguised as an article.

The name comes from combining Advertisement + Editorial Content.

Essentially it was a clever way for the magazine or newspaper to get the advertiser to pay to have their content published in larger blocks, as a new advertisement size for the publication to sell.

Here is a classic example of an advertorial. Typically, these types of headlines are used by copywriters on cold traffic or prospects that don’t yet know the company, and are not aware they have a problem until they read the ad.

There is a modern version of this—if you’ve ever visited news websites like CNN, you’ve seen widgets with content recommendations at the end of the page. This is how your advertorials will be displayed if you run campaigns with a service like Outbrain or Taboola:

The following video excerpt explains the basic structure of an advertorial and how to write one. You can even use this in affiliate marketing.

#3. Engagement

Engagement is the micro-steps an individual takes that moves them closer to you, your world, and your way of thinking.

Examples include consuming content (especially long-form content), visiting a website (or other web presence) multiple times, commenting, asking questions, and yes, of course, opting in to receive emails (deeper levels of engagement).

Engagement is a spectrum of behaviors over time, not a single, all-important event.

If you clicked through from Lesson #1 to this page, that is engagement. 

Sharing content with others or implementing it are also a form of engagement. 

Focusing only on getting an email address is a crazy, counter-productive behavior, like these:    

• You can't continue reading the article, download the PDF, or watch the video until you've handed over your email... or your credit card number.  
• Being bombarded by popups, subscribe to notification when you haven't even had a chance to read 3 words on the page.