Discover how you can partner direct response marketing with e-commerce for fantastic results.

In the episode:

01:18 - Combining direct response and e-commerce

02:44 - What is a direct response campaign?

06:22 - Elements of a good landing page

08:50 - Top traffic sources

11:09 - Using conservative news sites

11:39 - What ad network should you use?

13:08 - Where Facebook comes in

15:50 - Let’s talk conversions

17:45 - One genius way of selling back end

20:17 - Looking at the affiliate element

23:10 - How many emails to send?

26:36 - Drop shipping or in-house?

30:28 - Methods of payment

34:07 - A quick recap

37:18 - An app you might like to try

38:12 - The episode wrap-up

Optimize your marketing strategies with help from SuperFastBusiness membership

Download the PDF transcription and E-Commerce Preparation Guide

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, we are talking about how to combine direct response marketing with e-commerce. And for that, I've brought along Byron Walker from SurvivalFrog.com. Welcome to the call.

Byron: Thanks James, glad to be here.

James: Byron, I love that you have this great website called Survival Frog, and what we can learn from e-commerce businesses is immense because of the amount of traffic and of course all of the transactions that are going on. We get a high-revenue business that we can learn a lot from if our business isn't quite at that level yet. And even if it is at that level, there's always one or two things that we're not implementing that we could take away from a podcast like this.

Now, you're currently around the $5 million revenue mark. Is that right?

Byron: Yeah.

Direct response and e-commerce combined

James: And what makes your website/business interesting to our audience is that you've combined a lot of the elements of traditional direct response marketing with traditional e-commerce. So I know that our audience here often has a foot in both of those things, maybe they're doing one or the other. But as Jay Abraham talks about, taking ideas from one industry and putting it into another, often you'll get low-hanging fruit. It seems like you've found a nice combination of the two elements.

Byron: Yeah, we really have, and we started with info-publishing. My company's seven years old, and we initially were doing info-products, and that’s obviously a very direct response marketing model. And along the way, we've made a few pivots in the business model, and one was to move to physical products. But we were still doing direct response, so solo sales pages, where that's the only thing to buy and you put them through one-click upsells.

So we're doing physical products just direct response, and then about two years ago, we made another pivot. Well, not so much a pivot, I guess, as much as adding a new element to our business model, and that was the e-commerce site. And we did that because we have hundreds of different products on that site, and that's kind of our long-tail profit with all the people we bring through our direct response funnel.

The direct response side

James: Right. So just to make this clear, what we're actually talking about here, when we talk about direct response, we're talking about targeted traffic to a specific landing page, generally promoting one call to action that will tradit...

12 steps and tips for better communication.

Podcast highlights:

01:46 - Two sides of the connection ladder

03:57 - Have one or two of THESE to be a better communicator

05:13 - Why reach out ahead of time

07:07 - DO rather than SAY

10:58 - The impact of a good intro

14:54 - Why it’s better to be introduced

20:23 - What happens at the bar

22:40 - Less interesting, more interested

24:25 - A framework for good conversation

29:59 - The other side of the ladder

31:45 - A recap

Enhance how you work and live with SuperFastBusiness membership

Download the PDF transcription and 12 Steps For Enhancing Your Communication Skills guide

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today we're talking about communication, and for that, I've brought special guest Michael O'Neal from Solohour.com. Welcome, Michael.

Michael: James, thanks for having me, man. I'm very honored to be here.

James: Well, it's great to catch up, and you've been carving a path with your own podcast. You've had over eight million downloads now, and you've been going for about three years. And I know a lot of our audience are podcasters. So if you are running a podcast, or you attend live events, say you're coming to SuperFastBusiness Live for example, or you're going to one of the many events that are on around multiple countries, which I highly recommend, in fact, that's how I met Michael, then this podcast episode is going to help you enhance your communication skills. So I'm looking forward to this, Michael.

Michael: Me too. I don't know how many of your audience are podcasters, but I'm sort of a curmudgeon, I think most people are doing it wrong, so I'm excited to share some of the stuff that I've come up with. I'm just fresh out of going to a conference this weekend in Vegas, and while I was there, I was sort of taking mental notes about how people connect, and I've been on both sides of that.

Which side are you on?

It depends on where you are on the ladder, but sometimes you really want to connect with an influencer, and sometimes people are connecting with you, and you've got to know what to do with that and how to get the most out of an event. So those are two things I'm very passionate about talking about these days.

James: It's interesting how you said the ladder as an understanding of group dynamics. I know of the first phases is the forming, and then the second stage is storming, so people come together as a group, like in that conference foyer, they're doing the registrations and mingling around. Then they go through the storming phase, which is where people work out where they are in the pecking order. And then they go into the norming phase, where everyone knows their place. Then they go into the performing phase, where they can get the most done.

But let's talk about that ladder for a minute.

Michael: I love that.

James: It's not mine, but it's a great concept to understand if you're building any kind of tribe. And as a podcaster, or running events, or attending events, you're intermingling with all these different online tribes, and Facebook groups, and cliques. Where I met you as part of someone else's tribe, so we all figure out where we are in the position.

Now, let's talk about both sides of the ladder. Firstly, on one side of the ladder,

Boom’s winning products In this episode: 03:12 – The added pressure of a bigger business 05:16 – Something unique about Ezra’s products 07:01 – From dollar in to dollar out 10:21 – Dial in THESE two things 12:21 – The power of conversion assets 13:42 – Winning them back 15:53 – The incredible ‘More of the Same’ phenomenon 18:16 – Essential sequence “bought X but not Y” 22:16 – The plateau before 10x growth 26:43 – Engage and re-engage 30:51 – An example of increasing relevance 35:16 – Ezra’s retargeting techniques 41:45 – The unbelievable impact of the search box 44:14 – Takeaways for the e-commerce starter 45:56 – Price and costing benchmarks 47:18 – What to expect from adding a cart abandonment sequence 48:12 – Case study, what would you do? 48:44 – Are all customers equal? 52:04 – Wrapping it up Want to achieve fast growth in your own business? Click HERE Download the PDF transcription and 12 Tips For HyperFast E-Commerce Business Growth guide Transcription: James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com where I’m bringing information to you. I especially love this podcast medium. One of my other podcasts is called ThinkActGet, and my co-host there is Ezra Firestone. Today, we were going to record an episode of ThinkActGet, except we decided that what Ezra told me before that was far more compelling and we should make a podcast for this show for you because what we’re going to talk about is phenomenal, nothing short of phenomenal. Welcome to this podcast Ezra Firestone. Ezra: Wooh! Ezra in the house. I just wanted to say that about myself. So thanks man, I appreciate it. James: Alright. So we have Ezra in the house. This is going to be weird for some of our regular listeners from the other show because they’re going to hear us having a more concentrated business chat today. Ezra: Sure, sure. James: A few less groundhogs. Ezra: Yeah. If you’re a ThinkActGet listener, then you know we get out there. This will be a little more tactical. James: We do. Less bananas, less groundhogs, more businessy stuff. Now Ezra, I’m about to fly over to see you at your event in San Diego where you have assembled on a little bit of a brains trust on topics that are of interest to your audience, and I appreciate that you’ve asked me to present on a topic of team building. You’ve certainly been needing to build your team, because the core of this episode is about hypergrowth, and in particular, you’ve shared with me some information that you’ve got three main businesses that are on your focus, and two of them in the last year doubled, which is fantastic in itself. But one of them, I think it was nine or 10x, and it wasn’t a small business to start with. In fact the figures, I don’t know if you mind me sharing this Ezra, but you’ve gone from somewhere in the region of $4 million revenue to $25 million dollars revenue...

Discover the secrets behind the 21 million dollar growth of an e-commerce and info marketing business.

Get to know the person behind the powerful Ask methodology.

Podcast highlights:

02:52 - If you give away what you know for free…

04:07 - Changes prompted by Ryan’s material

06:21 - What’s the big deal?

08:17 - How Ryan set out for his “thing”

13:11 - A life ruled by fear

17:39 - Lessons from Andrew Cavanagh

22:18 - The power of surveys

25:10 - Copywriting and confidence

26:49 - The antidote to overconfidence

30:15 - Have genuine empathy

32:08 - Tapping into old memories

40:01 - The change from a 6 to 7-figure business

42:43 - Are you slow at hiring?

46:25 - Ryan’s productivity secret

51:28 - The company as the product

53:39 - What James knows about Ryan

55:24 - How do you know you’re having an impact?

James will help you grow your business GET YOUR ASK BONUS HERE

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I'm doing another story-based podcast, which is going behind the scenes with a successful and somewhat popular entrepreneur as of late. I want to welcome onto the call Ryan Levesque.

Ryan: James, thanks so much for having me here. I'm thrilled to be here, man.

James: Thank you for coming on. I know that it's a busy time for you right now. We catch up regularly. So over the last few years, we've come from complete strangers to close contacts and I dare say I would consider you a friend now.

Ryan: Totally.

James: I've done the hamburger experience in the Tesla. I know you wouldn't trust someone to hold on to their hamburger while you're driving your Tesla. Just anybody. I feel I've made it to the right sort of situation where I’m comfortable to call you a friend.

Ryan: It's a rite of passage, yeah.

James: Yeah. Very impressive. iPhone on wheels. Thank you for the experience. Now of course, I did that in Texas because you kindly invited me over there to find out more about what you're doing and to get more context because of the projects that we work on together. The more we know about each other, the easier it is to synchronize in.

I thought, I'm in this privileged position where I can ask you some questions behind the scenes if you want to share some of it publicly that maybe people aren't aware of and that might help someone else who's on their journey to finding their thing and becoming a household name in the online space. So would you be willing to share a couple of behind-the-scene insights?

Ryan: For you James, I'd be happy to do that.

James: Fantastic. Alright now, just for context, if you're listening to this and you don't know who Ryan Levesque is, I encourage you to go and listen to the previous episode that we've done on SuperFastBusiness called Ask Your Way to Profit with Ryan Levesque.

That talks about Ryan's thing, which is all about asking, and surveys, and you'll find out about quizzes, and segmentation, and micro commitments, and buckets, and all that. That's not what we're talking about on this episode.

In fact right now, because Ryan, at the time of recording, there's a launch going on for your home study course, and I'm sure everyone's getting all sorts of videos, and emails, and education about this. The material you've been sending out is very high caliber. I applaud you. I went through your PDF last night actually. You pretty much give away the entire system to people who are just interested in finding out about what it is. That's quite an interesting strategy. Do you find that’s effective?

Reaching out to people who are interested

Ryan: Yeah.

Make your Google AdWords campaign more effective by avoiding these mistakes.

Podcast topics:

02:43 - How structured is your account?

04:04 - Go for more granular detail

06:02 - What’s driving your conversions?

09:22 - Install THIS on your site

11:37 - Create separate lists

14:41 - You need restrictions

17:27 - Do you have negative keywords?

20:29 - Beyond broad match

24:27 - Ad extensions and why you need them

27:05 - Split testing is where it’s at

32:17 - Is mobile working for you?

Want to grow your online business faster? Click HERE

Download the PDF transcription

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, we are talking Google AdWords. In particular, we're going to be talking about 10 classic mistakes that people make when they're doing Adwords. So if you're doing AdWords, or you're thinking about doing AdWords, you absolutely must tune in to this episode, because you are going to save a fortune in the Google tax. And today, I have brought an expert along because I'm no longer an expert on this subject, so welcome to this episode Ilana Wechsler.

Ilana: Thank you, James, it's awesome to be here.

James: Thank you for coming over here. You are normally found at greenarrowdigital.com. You are an expert in paid advertising. In particular, you've been doing quite a lot of work with Google AdWords, and I hear you also do some Facebook stuff.

Ilana: It's true, yeah. I'm a specialist in paid traffic, and obviously AdWords and Facebook are very much my bread and butter.

James: Right. And I've been referring clients to you, because they've been getting great results. And as part of my coaching group at SilverCircle there, I get to work closely with you and I see what you're doing, and I like what you're doing for the clients. So I've said hey, we should talk about this stuff on an episode, and here we are.

Let's just get into the mind of our potential trainee here - someone who's got an AdWords account, possibly running some campaigns, or about to embark on the difficult trial of setting it up. And it's not that hard from the Google perspective - you're putting in your payment method and start a campaign. But there are quite a lot of options for you to choose, and many wrong turns you could take that are going to cost you big time.

Does your account have structure?

So what we're going to be looking at in this episode is what sort of things do you expect to find when you're logging into someone's Google AdWords account? What do you already know they're going to have made a mistake with, and importantly, what can we do to fix that? We're going to cover a few of these, up to 10 I think, so let's start with the number one top mistake that people are making with their AdWords campaign.

Ilana: Alright, so I have the privilege of getting access to hundreds of AdWords accounts, and the classic mistake I see everyone make is they don't have structure in their account. And what I mean by that is they just have one campaign, one ad group, and literally hundreds of keywords in that one ad group. And it's a classic mistake because there's no relevance for the keyword to match the ad. So you have to structure your account properly, such that they're all separated into appropriate keyword themes.

James: Right,