Personal Challenge: 1 Month To Impossible Success

[Qstyle]

Hey. Sorry. I have not been here or online a whole lot. I have had a bit of news in the family that has required my attention.

So for a very short update see below. I will try to put more information as soon as I can really focus

Minor Update:
Nearing the end and things are not where they should by a long shot. This is in part due to some inattention as I refocused on what is my priority in life; my family.
There have been a few ongoing campaigns with sending emails and building my list. The list looks better than I expected to be honest at this point, but the subscribers are thinning out.
View attachment 16704

Mostly I have been ignoring things and this has led to a drop off. The good news is that I have a decent buyers email list now and a decent subscriber list. My problem is the percent of conversions is lower than I really need and the up sell and down sell opportunities are as a result lower. The net of it is that I am more than halfway in and I am less than halfway there.

I am not providing all the numbers yet, but while I have started with an initial investment lower than I thought, the output is also lower than the target, but it is also not inconsequential. One thing I have learned though is I prefer building software products so far to this type of marketing. It takes a lot more focus and when something takes your focus away from it you see immediate drop in income.

As for my current situation it will resolve soon and I will provide more information as I can really break it down. This is a disservice to the group right now but I wanted to share a little bit as is fair. I am sorry.

There's no need for apologizing. Family is all that matters in the end.

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[Aaron T]

Final Update

As you all know I have been fairly silent on the forum. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which a major life event occurred in my family. All is well now, but it took a lot out of me the last couple weeks. Needless to say for me family first and I am fortunate I could actually do this and be there the entire time. Anyway that is not what you came to read so let's get to it. Just wanted to apologize. As of last night I am back home.

TL;DR
I did not hit my goal. Details below

First I want to make sure as I divulge information that a few things are clear. I will explain as much as I can so this is something that can be learned from but I also want to make sure this is NOT a guru post or a money chasing post. I have had several conversations with a few people around this and I pulled back certainly because it can be taken that way. This is not a simple, fast , easy approach to <insert whatever value amount turns you on> at all! I am not advocating this as a route. I do not need to chase dollars and I want to make sure others realize that this is not for that purpose. As a side note, if people hit me up personally for "the secrets" or whatever I am not sharing that. There are none. I am not selling a course on this to anyone here. I am not even divulging the specifics of the "niche", "technique", or anything. I know this is disappointing for a few, but for this forum and the viewpoint here I feel it is for the best.

Also this is NOT how I made my money in my life and not what I attribute my success too at all.

So Why Did You Do It?
Simple. I had a hard deadline to deal with an IRS payment that was due 10/28. I have the funds for it, but I thought if I made myself a bit of a bet, a challenge, I could try to earn the money to do it. Plus I was seeing many people here struggling to get the internet marketing right and not seeing results so I wondered if some things changed and it was not possible to make it happen. Plus the goal was impossible to hit and therefore a challenge worth accepting.

I am a little sad that it got twisted into a money chasing or guru situation and I got asked for details by people. I know I was going to share the full details including specifics of what I pursued, but that will create a copy cat situation that people will think they can do and make money. I believe MJ referred to this as the Lonny Leaper situation. I don't need people trying to do something like this at a huge costs to themselves without a chance to succeed.

Plus I had some unfair tricks up my sleeve.

Tricks? What Tricks?
Quite frankly I have been doing online and internet marketing in various ways for a long long time. Matter of fact my earlier career I cut my teeth at different marketing techniques and learned the hard way what works and what doesn't and the fact it changes constantly. The net result is that I have a huge network of really good friends that have been doing this along side me a long time too. This gives me an edge in knowledge and in my network that someone might not have. Unfair? Possibly.. but definitely hard earned relationships and knowledge over a long time.

Second I am pretty damn persistent and hard working when I want to do something. This means that I start and gun through things fast and then change/pivot when needed. I had to pivot a few times during this one month challenge. As an example several of people I have become friends with on this forum are still struggling to make a decision and even start during this same time frame. This isn't a trick, but just the way I work. It is why I have failed my way to success.

For those that read Unscripted , this is akin to turning the gumball machine crank faster. I invest and turn that crank so often, so fast, that even though I have relatively few gold gumballs, and lots of white/orange/red ones that I am guaranteed to hit them all. In a sense I try my best to empty my gumball machine out. It is perhaps a flaw of mine that I am a risk taker and not afraid of a few failures. And this means some failures having brought me to negative bank balances, nothing let to show for it, and living in a car I was moving around so it didn't repossessed. I have learned from that point, but I only show it to show that I am not afraid of risks when I believe in something.

How did these tricks help you?
Simply that I knew how to set up a funnel system quickly to get moving and make this work. That I called in on favors with two of my friends that happened to have a marketable list in the niche I was shooting for and followed through. That I also was not afraid to change when I realized I made a few mistakes. My previous golden gumball wins allowed me to use all the value I was getting early on to reinvest in this one.

OK, so where did you end up?
Now for the only part that most of you want to know about.

My friends using their lists of approximately 200k total people interested in what I was doing to mail the offer. I created a bridge page and landing page to capture their emails so I could market them myself. My final subscriber lists ended up here:


Basically I got 26,661 people into my own list to market. These people did not buy anything from me and only received some related free information I provided them. Now using Aweber I created an email marketing campaign in the same niche.

Let's review this part just to make sure it is understood. I created a small info product and reached out using my friends segmented lists to people that might be interested in a particular niche. If they were interested in the product then they would enter their email information on the bridge page and get emailed the free product I created. I disclose on that bridge page that I would be reaching out of the next few days in email, but that I would not sell their email address anywhere. This is true. I also didn't even bother taking their first/last name. I probably should have asked, but the response would be lower.

Why would my friends email out this much for me? I didn't pay them at all. I offered to sell an initial product and get them a 100% affiliate payment on it for the initial product and only make money on an upgraded sell but they actually refused. This is the nice thing about good friends that were interested in my experiment. Also this niche I was working on is slightly off and was testing my own personal knowledge. It was not a common niche and therefore it was risky and not likely to return enough for them anyway, but I did promise to share with them back free the segmented information I learned from it and that is only fair. They agreed. So this was a freebie.

Continuing on I then started an email campaign where I was going to offer a course for $99 but instead created a detailed information packet and also linked to a physical product for less money. Essentially they got immediate gratification if they purchased with a lot of really good, useful, valuable information + a nice physical product mailed to them for later. The mailing information allowed me to collect really good detailed buyer information.

What I am trying to do here is create a "buyers" email list. This is a recent list of known buyers that are valuable. Since I am not likely to market to them ever again and I refuse to sell this information it is essentially wasted, but this was a part of the experiment and quite frankly I don't want to do this kind of thing again. It isn't my cup of tea.

So I hit up the 26661 people on my list with rounds of emails, about 1 a day to every other day for a total of 2 weeks of emails (some still going out now.) Many of these people have unsubscribed, but I only received 1 complaint which I think is good. The whole idea was to convert these people into buyers.

In the end I got ~7.71% conversion from this list into buyers. This is pretty huge to be honest, but in keeping with my ~8% I used to see when marketing to interested crowds. This means that yes, there is still money to be made online. So what that ended up being is about 2,056 buyers total of my product. So out of 200,000 people I was about to get about 1% of them to buy.

Sounds great so what did you make?
Well. My final product as mentioned had a physical and digital component. I created the digital component so that value was all mine. The physical component is created on demand and shipped out through a service. The costs there is slightly more than $20.00 US dollars for the product + shipping. I sold the total package for $49.97 which means I would Net from the sale only $29.97. Net sales where $61,618.32 at the time of this update. Not great at all.

That doesn't sound bad really.
Perhaps, but it is far short of my goal. While I am still out on marketing for a bunch of the people on my list so it will grow, I am still more than 50% of the way through it so I don't expect much more. I won't double what is there and even that is not my goal.

Also let's think about costs. Aweber will charge me. I am not sure of the charge but it is over $149 per month once you have more than 25,000 subscribers in a list so I am waiting to get that final total after the end of this month. Plus my hosting, my funnels.. All in all I am still around my $1000 dollar mark this month as I did not run any advertising or have to pay for my friends to email out. This is HUGE and why it is a trick.

If I had to pay my marketing and emailing it is quite possible I would not have broken even. I might have lost on this. I don't know yet, but using techniques for traffic I know of and the kinds of results I get I suspect my NET profit would have been closer to ~$14,000. Yes that is still wonderful but even further from my goal.

Also bear in mind I need to actually save a large part of this for the IRS still. So it is even less than that left. Not a bad problem to have though.

Where does that leave us?
I am trying to find out now how to share out information in a manner that makes sense without creating copy cats that will blame me for when they lose money as they leap without the advantages I have. But I have learned a few things.

• It is still possible to make money online even in odd ball niches if one researches and tries hard enough
• People want to know the "secret" without earning it all the time... yes I am looking at you creative folks that reached out to me various ways to find out details
• Life events happen that derail everything and you never know when that is and quite frankly I was ill prepared for what happened to my family the last few weeks
• This was NOT easy and without my friends help it probably wouldn't have happened
• I personally find this a hard way to make money as even if I extrapolate this out over years it does not come close to my prior business building and selling in the software world. Personally this is where I would focus if I were to give 100% in the future. Software Development is still my thing.
• I definitely respect Internet Marketers for what they do and it is a good living but it feels greasy to me in a lot of ways. I am sorry friends.

I guess that is it for this journey. It was not as informative as I would like, but I need to spend a part of my time on my father now and dealing with the family and hence the details are not all here. I will try to get more out as I can and share some screenshots in a manner that doesn't illicit money chaser responses. I want to respect what MJ has created and the people here that do good things. To be honest this wasn't a good thing and it smacked of a lot of what I don't believe in. My apologies to many out there that are offended.

 

[MortimerFox]

Thanks for sharing this process Aaron. I didn't see the thread when you were still working on this project, but I was excited to discover it because your intro post said you made your fortune from writing and selling software. As this is what I'm currently doing, I though maybe I'd learn something useful, however having read the whole thread, you're just talking about marketing. A little disappointed.

 

[mo3]

Thanks Aaron. This was extremely insightful as an exercise. And I think it reinforces my decision to stay away from info products and marketing in this way (which for a while I was convinced was the only way people actually made money online!)


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[lowtek]

Any updates @Aaron T ? Enjoyed this thread