Choosing a good domain name

Posted by Jim in Creative Ideas 3 comments

Choosing a good domain name isn’t as hard as it’s been made out to be. Here’s a question on that topic that just hit my email inbox along with my reply:

Jim:

Different programs will tell me that in order to find a good domain name I should try to acquire one that’s at least six months old so it doesn’t get passed over by a search engine. I always thought that a domain name was something I had to invent to reflect either my name or the name of a product I wanted to promote. Can you enlighten me here?

Thanks for your time.

Dave Z.

My Answer:

Relax – very little of the overall odds of success rely on your ability to pick a good domain name up front.

Chapter 7 & Chapter 20 from my “101 Free Marketing” book cover this topic in depth, but here are the general guidelines:

Try to get a domain name that is hard to misspell and easy to type correctly when heard verbally spoken. Those aren’t the same thing! (For example, use of the word “to” or “for” can easily be confused with “two” or “four” when typing it out.)

The success of your site has virtually NOTHING to do with the age of the domain name you purchase. Buying an “old name” does nothing for you long term so don’t worry about that detail at all. I’ve never purchased an “old” domain name and I’ve heard of no success stories based on the purchase of a “strategically” dated old domain name.

MORE IMPORTANT: Making sure that the primary domain name you choose to use on marketing material contains a free offer of some sort with an email opt-in option. Check SilentJim.com for example. That’s the site I refer people to when I do interviews etc.

Get a .com name if at all possible. (not .net or .tv etc.). Although there is debate on this point, for reasons I won’t go into here I believe this will have some slight advantages long term.

The biggest factors in your success? Pay attention to the CONTENT, RELATIONSHIPS and LEADERSHIP you show through your site – these are far more important and vital to the success of your site and make the domain name choice barely important at all in comparison.

If you have input to add please leave a comment!

I’m ready for a real online business. Where do I start?

Posted by Jim in Affiliate Marketing, Finding Customers, Great Business Ideas, Offline Biz (IM for Brick-n-mortar), Selling on Amazon, selling on eBay 9 comments

I’ve been helping great people answer that question for over a decade now. Is it working? As evidence we have over a thousand positive comments and success stories to show for our efforts.

Part of my recent approach to teaching online success is to start out telling people what NOT to do because the odds are they’ve already gotten a bunch of bad advice by the time they discover my ideas.

My students are often surprised to hear me say that they definitely should NOT start their online business efforts by:

• learning new technical, design or programming skills
• building a website (or even worse, a bunch of them)
• affiliate marketing to strangers
• buying a brilliantly marketed “big launch” course from a guru
• attending an Internet business seminar (flight + hotel followed by pitch fest)
• subscribing to a bunch of online “experts” to soak up all the “free stuff”

So, where should you start?

I run three distinct and successful online businesses and have been doing so for years. The success rate is high when I teach the models to others. I suggest you start with the model below that best suits you. If you aren’t quite sure, then I suggest you start with number one from the below list.

Here are the three strategies of online success that my coaches and I teach:

1. Sell high profit physical goods through Amazon.com, eBay.com and possibly (eventually) your own website. Optionally, you are continually finding creative ways to automate and grow a huge customer following for future sales and connections. (The membership site MySilentTeam.com supports this concept)

2. Find a profitable niche market, be a leader in that niche and give your followers fantastic content while also selling them related products, services, training, or information that is of interest to them. (MySilentTeam.com also supports this concept). NOTE: This IS NOT the same thing as setting up a bunch of tiny niche websites! That model is DEAD & I’ve not liked it for nearly 5 years.

3. Get paid to help other businesses, experts, authors and organizations apply marketing that works to their business. (OfflineBiz.com supports this concept)

Read more about each of these strategies plus more about where NOT to start in the $5 SilentSalesMachine.com book.

Any questions or comments? Let’s talk about it! I’d love your feedback.

How I mange all that inbound email

Posted by Jim in Great Business Ideas, Grow Your Business 2 comments

I run several businesses online and off.

As you might imagine, my email inbox goes CRAZY daily with hundreds of emails – many of which are very important. Keep in mind that I also limit my daily hours. I don’t let email run my life!

I’ve been forced to develop some good email habits and I thought you might want to read some of them and put them to work yourself.

• I use gmail. Hands down it’s the best option and it’s easy to switch over to from where you are now with only a few minutes learning curve (use email forwarding to transition over)
• I almost never use “email folders” to “organize” my email. It’s a waste of time when the search feature is there to help you quickly find anything you need.
• Use the “read/unread” feature as your ONLY method of keeping track of what’s still waiting on you. Unread means the email still needs attention while a status of “Read” means it’s dealt with already. No other filing needed.
• I like SaneBox as a solid add on for gmail. Intuitive, no learning curve, great filter. I went years without it, and it’s definitely optional, but I do like it.
• Make liberal use of the filters that gmail supplies you. 80% of my inbound email is either forwarded to the correct person, marked as read for me (ignored), or put out of sight entirely because of good filtering.
• Is your biz growing? Hire someone to manage your email! I ONLY answer email that ONLY I can answer. It’s given new life to my business each time I offload part of my role to someone else for a few dollars per hour. Use forwarding and automation to manage it all.

Have any tips to add? Have a question? Leave a comment!

The end of big Internet Marketing product launches?

Posted by Jim in Great Business Ideas, Information Marketing, inspiration, Leadership & Influence, reputation and influence 9 comments

Alternate title 1: Marketing while still being able to look at yourself in the mirror…it’s not too late
Alternate title 2: Why the good guy are winning more often online

Mark my words -

I predict that the era of mega Internet Marketing Launches is coming to a close. They will eventually die an ugly and slow death because WE the consumers will demand it and literally FRY those who go against the wave of angry victims that nearly all big launches create.

What’s an IM Launch? If you don’t know what an IM Launch is I’ll sum it up for you. The same list of 15-20 “gurus” all cooperate to launch high price tag product after product to hopeful online entrepreneurs. The “gurus” take turns propping up each others big launches while giving away massive prizes to each other for the most affiliate sales. Endorsements flow like water from one “guru” to the next for each big launch without even so much as reading a summary of what the product contains. Email sales copy is “copy/pasted” and there’s a BUY NOW before it’s all over edge to each “launch”.

While there will always be suckers willing to pay $X,XXX for each sharply packaged digital course, here’s what’s going to change very soon:

The ever growing list of SMART CONSUMERS in the IM niche (I hope this includes you) are going to start using their ever increasing online influence to tell their ever growing loyal audiences to STAY AWAY from the shiny objects. And the growing trend is that consumers are NAMING NAMES and ending the careers of those deserving of termination.

I’ve developed some standards that I think we need for the entire industry as consumers and as creators of “online business growth” content:

1) If the training is digitally delivered, make it affordable. If it’s SOOO great, you’ll have plenty of people who want one-on-one coaching to grow the biz and that coaching (if it’s good) can be worth more money later to your top students. This is good marketing, good business, and starts things off on the right foot with nervous students.

2) No bright shiny objects allowed (cut the graphics crap, cut the false scarcity, the exotic backgrounds etc.) As buyers we don’t care – or at least we SHOULDN’T! If you DO actually buy into flashy presentation and care what car your “guru” drives shame on you. YOU are the sucker and you will soon be waving good-bye to what little cash you have left.

3) Start small, grow slow, & make sure it’s not going to be saturated before you start sharing it with us. In other words, no more big launches on unproven and unreliable concepts. PROVE it first by rolling it out to people who trust you…we’ll buy later once you have REAL testimonials from real people and can prove that you are onto something worthy of mass attention. I’m blessed that I’ve come up with THREE such concepts in my ten years of doing this business. I don’t trust ANYONE who comes up with a new concept every few months!

4) Recruit your early successful students to present their ideas to the rest of us as their businesses grow. Let the content GROW as new creative ideas and people come on board. Commit long term to things you believe in and produce results.

5) Hire successful students to monitor the MANDATORY INCLUDED discussion forums and let everyone hang out and learn there.

6) With rare exception, there should be no time limits on refunds for online courses. If the course is SOOO great it should still be working six months from now. We should still be seeing new success stories then as well and the content should still be getting updates for relevance.

7) End guru worship. Showing off the stuff you have does not impress the kind of customer that you’ll need if you want to build a real business.

8) Your “expert testimonials” are crap. Show us real people giving their FIRST EVER real testimonial. Those are the ones that matter.

Am I forgetting anything?

How can YOU help make this a reality? STOP BUYING STUFF THAT YOU KNOW IS GARBAGE.

Lesson for my “expert” colleagues: If you aim your marketing at idiots you’ll soon have an audience of the same.

 

I’d love to read your comments on this one! Use the comment button above and add your thoughts.

How to drive traffic to your eBay and Amazon listings

Posted by Jim in Information Marketing, Selling on Amazon, selling on eBay, Traffic Generation 34 comments

One of the questions I get asked occasionally by new eBay and Amazon sellers is this,

“Jim, how do I drive traffic to my eBay and Amazon listings?”

That’s the wrong question.

There’s an inherent problem in that question that I’d like to expose in this blog post. This post is aimed primarily at “newbies” with stars in their eyes and big hopes for fast success.

If that’s you, the next paragraph is important for you to understand and take to heart and could save you a TON of wasted time, energy, effort and cash:

The beauty of Amazon and eBay is that the massive customer base is BUILT IN and all of those people are in a SHOPPING MOOD. There’s no need to ‘drive customers’ to your listings if you’ve picked the right products to sell.

If you picked the WRONG product or are trying to sell your own original unknown product and are left trying to “drive traffic” to it you are playing an entirely different and more difficult game.

While you may hear stories of people promoting their eBay and Amazon listings using SEO tactics, you won’t find me spending (wasting) much time on that type of strategy for newbies b/c it’s such wasted effort for nearly all people who try to do it.

The fact is, even if you start driving traffic to your products on Amazon or eBay from an external source (i.e. your blog for example), the number of competing products that Amazon and eBay display next to your offer will offset any advantage you may have had. You’d have likely been better off just selling the items on your own blog -something I also don’t recommend trying.

If profit is part of your goal, you are better off putting your energy into creating and finding products that have built in demand vs. wasting time trying to drive traffic to your listings.

My best guess is that the concept of “driving traffic to your listings” is something you read on a shiny object sales page somewhere. I can assure you that there’s absolutely NO strategy that exists to make this happen more often than every once in awhile. When it does work, it works for only the rarest of lucky sellers who are also tenacious risk takers and who are also willing to see it all vanish overnight on the whim of a Google algorithm change. (If you don’t understand that last sentence you should DEFINITELY stay away from any “driving traffic” strategies.)

I spend a great deal of time on my blog talking about SEO. My views used to be considered crazy, but now more and more experts are acknowledging that I was ahead of my time on this topic…and that I’m right! Read through the SEO section of this site or my blog for more detail. I promise you’ll never look at “driving traffic” the same way!

And I’ll repeat my foundational advice for this post:

If profit is part of your goal, you are better off putting your energy into creating and finding products that have built in demand vs. wasting time trying to drive traffic to your listings.

Please leave a comment – let’s talk about it…

Want to work with my team? I’m hiring!

Posted by Jim in Leadership & Influence 8 comments

We had an overwhelming outpouring of support and applications for the positions! The slots have all been filled now however. If we need more assistance we will put out an additional announcement in the newsletter and/or here on the blog.

If you aren’t a member of MySilentTeam.com yet you SHOULD BE – we’ve just added 15 new moderators with amazing experience! They are there to help you!

stay tuned-

Jim

 

Due to incredible growth we have a need for additional great people on my team.

This is not a “job”, but instead it’s a paid partnership opportunity. Time and time again our most successful students have risen up to leadership roles. It’s a great business model and it’s a testament to the effectiveness of what we teach.

Here’s the opportunity:
If you are a match for our needs, we’ll pay you well to provide the level of support and assistance that you’ve come to expect from anything I put my name to. You’ll also get to work with the STRONGEST and MOST CREATIVE team in online business success training.

Here are the specific partnership positions we are looking to fill:

o Forum Discussion Moderators for MySilentTeam.com
o One-on-one coaches to assist paying students with our core strategies
o Content managers with experience in membergate membership sites

What qualifies you to be a part of the team?

The more of the below qualifications you have, the more likely we are to be interested in bringing you on board. The most important qualifications are on top (you don’t need all qualifications in order to apply):

o You’ve had success online in one or more of the **three niche areas that I teach
o You are willing and able to provide proof of your success in your own business online
o You are available to commit a few hours per week (this isn’t full-time work)
o You are a long time member and frequent user of either membership site MySilentTeam.com or OfflineBiz.com (provide your ID please)
o Long time fan/reader/student of Jim’s

How do you apply?

I don’t need (or want) your resume. I could care less if you went to college or what grades you got. Just send me a few short sentences about your qualifications based on the above list- nothing fancy needed.

To apply, please forward your response to Jim’s email account at JimCockrum*at*gmail.com, or reply to this blog post (it will be kept confident) using the comment feature of this blog post. Either way, we’ll get back to you within a week or so, and I’ll be speaking directly to the candidates that are most qualified.

Have a question or comment? Please use the comment button and we’ll respond.

In case you are wondering, here are the three strategies of online success that we teach:

1. Sell high profit physical goods through Amazon.com, eBay.com and possibly your own website. Optionally, you are continually finding creative ways to automate and grow a huge customer following for future sales and connections. (MySilentTeam.com supports this concept)

2. Find a profitable niche market, be a leader in that niche and give your followers fantastic content while also selling them related products, services, training, or information that is of interest to them. (MySilentTeam.com supports this concept)

3. Help other businesses, experts, authors and organizations apply “what works” and prosper from your efforts helping them. (OfflineBiz.com supports this concept)

Read more about each of these strategies in the SilentSalesMachine.com book.

Join me in Vegas in June? I’m booked as the keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary eBay Radio conference

Posted by Jim in selling on eBay 6 comments

This is quite an honor!

I’ve been invited to be the keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary eBay Radio Conference in Las Vegas in June on the 18-20th 2013.

I hope you can join me there!

Here’s the short audio clip from the eBay Radio show last week where hosts Jim Griff and Lee Mirabal made the announcement (the clip is only about a minute long):

Needless to say – this is a big honor for me…especially on the 10th anniversary! For more details about the event visit ervegas.com or click the logo above.

A few of the other featured speakers you might recognize:

…plus several others! I’m going to be learning & presenting with this all star line up!

A couple of questions for you (respond with a comment):

If you were to attend (or plan to) what topics would you most like to hear me address?

Do you plan to  attend?

I hope to see you there if you can make it! I’d love to have a nice contingent of my blog readers on hand so I can thank you in person for the support!

Special thanks (in no special order) goes to Mike Markuson, Mark Becker, Doug Hark, Thea Woods, Jeff Dean, Theo Ntogiakos, Steven Netsch, & Yves Baggi who all generously assisted or offered to assist with getting the above audio clip from the most recent “ebay Radio” show when I mentioned it on facebook! Thanks all!

Facebook fading while email marketing is still going strong

Posted by Jim in Email Marketing tips, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media 5 comments

If you’ve been reading my advice for very long you’ve heard me say stuff like, “The best use of Facebook is to grow your email list.”

I caught a lot of negative feedback when I first said that a few years ago!

The fact is though, I’ve been saying the same stuff for years now, and the list of experts who are calling me “nuts” is slowly shrinking.

Here’s my latest supporting evidence from a $500 report recently published by Forrester Research (Forrester.com). The title of the report is “The Purchase Path Of Online Buyers In 2012″. This research study followed 77,000+ online purchase transactions and concluded (among many other findings) that:

• Social media is not a significant driver of online purchases. Not even 1% of the 77,000 transactions could be traced back to social advertising or content links.
• The two biggest drivers for online purchases overall are clearly search engines* and email marketing with 30% of the transactions starting with a click on an email marketing campaign. The report also states that “Email is the most important channel for repeat customers“.

And what about my claim that Facebook never has been a tool for driving sales and is now fading?

In this recent article Facebook admits that it is losing appeal and sees rough waters ahead. A little research could produce many more such articles.

My conclusions:

If you want to be in the game long term you’d better be growing your email list and providing that list quality content that they can’t wait to read. If you want to be found on the search engines IGNORE SEO and just create quality content that’s “shareable”.

Resources:

Check out my comprehensive $7 video course that shows you all I know about email marketing.

*To read more of my thoughts about getting found on Search Engines check out the other blog posts in the “SEO” section of my blog, or read my SilentSalesMachine.com book for more info.

Start cashing in on the “big secret”

Posted by Jim in Finding Customers, Leadership & Influence, reputation and influence 19 comments

There’s a secret that a few of us have figured out and you need to know the big secret as well. Some who read this post will think I’m nuts, but I’m O.K. with that.

I’m making a great living selling a bunch of products and services every week and helping thousands of people around the world succeed as well. The odds are, anyone who calls me crazy is also stuck scratching their heads in amazement at my success while they endure a job they hate.

I’ll take my life over the “haters” any day – thank you very much.

The “Big Secret”

My 13 year old came home from a youth event recently and he had a long verbal list of complaints about the evening. It was typical stuff for a teenage brain, but it helped me connect some business dots in my own head as I let him rattle off his list of reasons why things hadn’t gone well that night.

After he was done and just before I went into “consoling dad mode”, I asked one simple question that I think annoyed him a bit, but it made my point.

I asked, “If you think back through the entire story you just told me what did nearly every sentence have in common?“

Without even hearing his story I’ll bet you can figure it out right?

If not, you’ll figure it out in a minute.

First, let’s make a list of all the stuff that virtually none of your customers, prospects, readers, fans, clients, video viewers, Facebook and twitter friends or online followers actually care about:

99.9% of them don’t truly care…

how successful you are

how exciting or happy you are

how great you think you are

if you can write great sales copy

what problems you have

what results you are getting with your big ideas

how great/hard your life is

what car you drive or where you live

…get the point?

So what do they care about?

They are actually asking themselves some simple questions that read something like this:

“Can this person/product/service HELP ME get from where I am now to where I want to be, and how painful will the journey be?”

“Can I learn to trust this person/product/service? …because I don’t yet.”

“What is the cost of skipping all this for now and coming back to it later?”

“Exactly how will my life be better if I do this? Worse if I don’t?”

“What can I expect if I do/don’t ‘pull the trigger’?”

“Does this person/product/service actually CARE or are they just trying to get my money?”

“What is the unbiased reputation of this person/product/service?”

To be a success online means leading. To LEAD an online audience means helping your readers/followers/prospects answer the above questions in your favor.

That’s the big secret.

Stated more plainly – success doesn’t come to those who place themselves at the center of the situation. It’s NOT about you – and if you make it about YOU, you will almost certainly fail.

Further evidence of this simple yet powerful “secret” can be found in two best sellers: The Holy Bible, & “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie <-affiliate link

The rest of the story:
The next week when dropping my son off at the same weekly event I reminded him, “It’s not about you – remember our talk.”

He had a FANTASTIC evening.