Internet Marketing Lessons From A Legend

Internet Marketing Lessons

It’s an honor for me to be able to able to interview an Internet Marketing Legend that I’m sure most of you already know of. He is none other than Terry Dean.

Terry has been in this business since 1996, so when it comes to delivering rock-solid internet marketing lessons and advice – who better to ask than the legend himself?

There are 5 questions in this interview, and if you pay careful attention and try to understand DEEPER the answers given by Terry, you’ll definitely learn some new internet marketing lessons.

1. Can you tell us a little about yourself, your background, and how you got started in IM?

I’m glad to share this with your readers Welly.

Let’s go back in time to 1996.  I was a college dropout with a mountain of credit card debt.  I had bounced from one dead end job to another.  Delivering pizzas for Little Caesar’s for $8 an hour was the last job I would ever have.

I heard some people were having success online even way back then.  And I knew this was something I could do.   I had failed at every business opportunity you could imagine up till then: including network marketing, direct mail, door-to-door sales, etc.  Yet, when it came to the internet, I knew I could do this.  And my wife supported me.

So I went out and purchased a computer at Best Buy on credit…and got online to start learning.  The very first products I sold were videos I purchased a resell license to.  This allowed me to sell the videos and keep all the money.  My first ads were basically articles and teasers on sites like CompuServe.

My first big breakthrough was when I discovered list building…creating my own email list of people who had requested information from me.   As my list grew, so did my monthly income.  And with every other change on the internet, that one fact has held true all these years.  Your online income grows as you build your email list and your relationship with your subscribers.

My business kept growing month-after-month once I discovered that one breakthrough.  Build your list.  Grow your relationship with them.  Make them good quality offers.  And protect them.  As the list goes, so does your income.

In 2004 I sold that original business and retired from the internet for over a year.  During that period I traveled and wrote a couple of books, but I grew bored and started my business coaching company in 2006 to help other entrepreneurs earn more, work less, and enjoy life online.

The internet has changed quite a bit in the past decade plus, but business online is still all about developing your audience, treating them well, and offering solid solutions to their problems.

2. You’ve been in this field for more than 10 years. What do you think the biggest problem/hurdle people encounter when trying to build an Internet business? And what would you do to solve this problem/hurdle?

Sadly I think the biggest problem today is the message they hear from business opportunity promoters.

They’re told they can earn a ton of money online quickly without doing virtually any work.  That message destroys their lives!

Are there people who earn passive income online?  Yes.  I have passive income coming in, but that is after years of online work.  It didn’t happen overnight.  In fact, it really felt like a struggle that first year of discovering what worked for me and what did not.  This is a BUSINESS…not a business opportunity.  Treat it with the same care you would buying a franchise or starting a local brick-and-mortar store.  It’s MUCH CHEAPER and less risky to do business online, but you lose out if you don’t take that same bulldog attitude local store owners have to take.  The low investment of an online business is actually a little of a detriment here as people don’t take it seriously enough.

This “business opportunity” attitude will kill you online.  You buy a course about PPC only to discover it isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.   So instead of sticking to it…and working on mastery of this subject you jump to another course.  And the pattern just keeps going.

Nothing is ever as easy or as quick as the business opportunity sellers tell you.

3. What is the ONE important advice you would give to beginners just starting out?

Become a master of one form of traffic and one form of conversion.  You need traffic and you need to convert that traffic into sales either for your own products or affiliate products.

Notice I said MASTER one form.  What most beginners try to do is learn everything.  They want to generate PPC visitors, seo visitors, affiliate traffic, article marketing, social media, etc.  It’s impossible to do all this at once.  Instead become an expert at one form of traffic.

Eventually you want to generate traffic from multiple methods, but you do that after you’ve mastered the first form of traffic.  Then you can expand out either by learning a 2nd skillset OR by hiring outsourced workers to do the other forms of traffic for you.  It’s impossible to learn and use every method.  That is where outsourced workers come into play – using every form of traffic generation that doesn’t fit your skillset.

In fact, this mastery is so important that I tell every beginner to develop at least one sellable skill.

For example, I’m a good enough copywriter I could easily sell my skills to those who want to improve their website conversion.  In addition I’m highly focused on blogging and could easily work as a search engine optimization specialist.  To show I have a 2nd traffic skill now, I’m also an Adwords Qualified Individual which means I’ve passed their test for managing other people’s Adwords accounts.

Even if you never take on a client, you’ve developed your skill to a level where you easily could.

Decide on a skill you would like to master…and do it.

4. The key to online sales is traffic and conversion. What advice would you give to people who are looking to get lots of traffic to their site?

Choose one of the 3 core traffic skills:

- PPC and paid advertising
- SEO and blogging
- Affiliate Marketing

You’ll notice I didn’t include social media because I consider that a supporter of the other skills instead of a traffic generation strategy on its own (social media is used heavily in blogging for example).  Master the traffic skill you have chosen.

If you’re having trouble choosing which of these skills to focus on, keep these requirements in mind:

1. PPC and Paid Advertising – Obviously requires money to start and keep moving.  And MOST advertisers lose money at first.  Do you have the budget if you lose $500 to $5,000 in the first month until you get your system flowing and earning back some profits?

2. SEO and Blogging – This one takes time to get good rankings for your site.  And it means you’ll be producing a lot of content (or paying for others to create it).  Are you willing to basically write your own regular “column” of content about your subject and willing to spend the time it takes to rank?

3. Affiliate marketing – This means you will continually work on the conversion of your website and you’ll be contacting potential partners to promote for you.  You have to be willing to be ignored and to take regular rejection.  In addition you’ll need to promote other people’s products in return.

Choose one of the above, and then drill down into it.  Make the commitment and only buy products relating to your subject.  Focus heavily on doing what it takes to succeed.  Then as profits come in you can expand through outsourced workers into the other traffic formats.

5. What should they do to get high conversions so that more people buy their products/services?

I’ve  focused heavily on my copywriting skills since the first year I started in business.  The mistake most beginners here make is they focus too much on the actual writing itself.

There are 3 factors to good persuasion.  Here they are in order of importance:

- Audience: How pre-qualified is the audience to buy and how do they feel about the subject?
- Offer: How is your offer unique and worth way more than the price you charge?
- Copy: Do your words line up with how they already believe…and then move them to the purchase?

The audience is the most important aspect in selling.  Are they desperate for what you’re offering?  That’s why everyone talks about a “hungry crowd.”  Next comes the offer you’re making them.  If you were to find a very hungry crowd and make them an irresistible offer, your copy then drops dramatically in overall importance.  If they knew they already needed your product, they might purchase from your headline and a few bullets with a way to order.

Or perhaps you’ve so prequalified them with your emails that they purchase from a short video commercial only without any sales text on your site.

Once you understand these 3 keys, all the conversion strategies you see online make a ton more sense.

This means your goal is understand your audience.  One of the best things you can do to get great conversions is to spend more time understanding your audience.  Go over to Amazon and read all the reviews for books similar to your topic (what do people say good and bad about the books).  Go through the Clickbank marketplace and study all the top selling products in your market.  What benefits and angles do they focus on?  Go to Twitter search tools and see what people are saying about products in your market.

Get to know your customer mindset, what problems they desperately want to solve, and how they feel about current products in the market.  Then come up with a unique offer that stands out from the competition.  Then you’ll find your copy much easier to write for the audience.

Discover practical methods for living the Internet Lifestyle without all the hype. Register for your free special report by clicking here.  Earn More, Work Less, and Enjoy Life with Internet Marketing Coach Terry Dean.

I hope you find the above internet marketing lessons useful. Go take action and get Terry’s FREE report NOW.

Disclaimer: the above are my affiliate links, so I do get credited if you buy any of Terry’s products.

I’ve bought some of his products and can testify HAND IN MY HEART that this guy SERIOUSLY know what he’s talking about.

(if you’ve been on my list for some time, you know that I VERY SELDOM recommend other marketers…)

So when I actually do recommend one, you can be sure that I’m doing it from the bottom of my heart.