So you go out and buy $1,000 worth of advertising on Google Adwords, making sure that you are bidding on the most relevant keywords for your target market.

All the traffic comes flying in and you get dismal conversions resulting in a painful loss.

What do you do?

You blame the traffic source.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If you are buying premium traffic from reputable sources like Google, Bing or Facebook, it is not the traffic that is the problem.

You see, buying traffic is pretty much a mechanical process. You zero in on your targeted keywords or interests to reach your intended market.

So if it’s not the traffic source, then what is it then?

It’s your marketing funnel.

I feel that this is the most misunderstood aspect of creating on online business.

I know this because I get dozens of emails from readers telling me they spent X dollars on traffic source X and made absolutely no money.

This can happen if you are buying traffic from second tier traffic sources (these are usually called traffic aggregators who pool multiple traffic sources), but if it is rock-solid traffic from a place like Google, the traffic source is not the issue.

Now there are a lot of great spy tools like SpyFu, iSpionage and Adbeat that allow you to find winning text ads and banners, but that is really just the first step in the marketing funnel.

You need to study and analyze the entire marketing funnels of your competitors if you want to understand the entire process of what really is working.

You need to know the:

* Ads
* Landing Pages
* Sales Letters
* Upsells
* Downsells
* Email Followups

If you enter any market with this knowledge in hand, you can dominate that market and your competitors within a short amount of time.

I know this because we do this same exercise with our competitors in particular markets and simply improve the marketing funnel.

Trust me, it is much cheaper to go through your competitors’ entire marketing funnels, buying all their upsells and downsells, and staying on their email follow up sequence to see what else they market.

The alternative is to spend a lot more money through trial and error, struggling to develop your own winning marketing funnel.

This can get very expensive.

Once you have an optimized marketing funnel that is profitable, this will allow you to buy more traffic from more sources.

The business with the largest life-time customer value will always win because they will always be able to buy more traffic then their competitors.

Study the funnels of your competitors.

Swipe, clone and deploy with your own sales hook and watch your online sales skyrocket.

Comments?

Cheers
Gauher Chaudhry

With 2015 in full swing, I made a personal promise to myself that I would make this the most productive year of my Internet Marketing career. Ok, ok.. I know that I think that every year.

But this year I made a commitment that I would see this goal to the end.

Here are my top 10 productivity hacks that I have used to better use my time in my online business.

1. Priority List

Every day I have a new “to-do” list. In fact, I have been using a daily to-do list for the last few years.

But I am a MASSIVE to-do list cheater.

I like to list the easiest and quickest tasks first. Even though they used to give me a sense of accomplishment when I completed them, who am I really kidding?

The quickest and easiest tasks generally have very little effect on the progress of my business and was just an excuse for me to avoid doing the harder stuff that would lead to bigger gains in my business.

I now have a priority list, where the tasks are listed in order of importance. Even if I only get one task on the list done for that day, at least I will have the satisfaction knowing that it will have the biggest impact.

2. Skype-aholics Anonymous

I now shut off my Skype on purpose for one hour in the mornings. It was routine for my Skype to sound like an alarm clock around the 9:00 am mark when all of my connections are coming online to chat and worse, waste my time.

3. Email Overload

When the year started, I made it a goal to unsubscribe from one marketers list every single day for the first two weeks.

I now get much less email and have gotten over the “did I miss something happening in the IM world” syndrome.

4. Delegate

I’m a control freak. Their is a high chance that you are too. Get over it. Delegate or you will find yourself stuck in a job rather than having fun building your business.

5. Exercise

I also have started exercising more regularly and find that it is a perfect escape from the computer. I no longer deal with a sore back or look in the mirror thinking, “wow, that is the body of an IM marketer.”

6. Outsource

You got to love FIverr and Elance.

7. Multi-Tasking

I now download a vast majority of audio trainings onto my iPhone and listen to them while I’m exercising.

This way, I’m killing two birds with one stone.

8. Enounce

Enounce.com is a major time saver. If you are listening to training MP3s or watching training videos online, you can speed them up with this software tool.

Imagine being able to go through 6 hours of Facebook training in just 3. 🙂

9. Cleaner Desk

I make sure that my desk is cleared off before I hit the sack each night. I find myself more motivated to work in the morning when there is no clutter sitting in front of me.

10. Get Up Earlier

I now get up about 30 minutes earlier each day. This extra 30 minutes make a huge difference because I find I am more productive in the mornings.

Now, I can’t say for sure if getting up earlier has made a big difference. Namely because my wife and I are into Prison Break series now, so I have been going to bed a little later. 😉

So these are the top ten changes I have made at the start of 2015 and have already seen progress.

What about you? What items would you add to this list that has worked for you?

Comment below.

Gauher Chaudhry

Seems my last post generated a lot of feedback, so I figured I would shoot this short video to address some of the comments.

I just deleted a little over 8,000 subscribers to just one of my email lists.

Why?

Because according to my Aweber stats, they hadn’t opened up an email from me in the last two years.

To me, it became pointless to have these subscribers on my list if they were not opening my emails anymore.

I have a aggressive goal of trying to get a 20% open rate on the emails I send out and if I can’t hit that number, I start looking to clean up that list by removing dead emails.

In fact, I am getting ready to delete another 5,000 subscribers who have not opened up an email from for a long time.

I don’t need to rub my ego by having a massive email list because it is pointless if people are not reading my emails.

There are generally three (3) key metrics that impact your email marketing campaigns.

1. The “From” field
2. The “Subject Line”
3. The “Body” copy

The name in the “from” field will dictate whether a reader will see your email of value or importance.

The “subject line” will dictate your open rate.

The “body” copy will dictate whether the reader clicks through any links in your email.

If certain readers are not opening my emails over a two year period, there can only be two reasons.

1. My emails are going to their junk/spam folder and they are never seeing it.

2. As soon as they see my name in the from field, this disengage because I have lost that relationship.

The reality is, if you build email lists for marketing purposes, a subscriber (lead) has a certain life span.

It is “dog eat dog world” and with people suffering from information overload every single day, it is tough to stay on everyone’s radar.

I made a last ditch effort by emailing these subscribers and asking them to resubscribe.

The results from those 8,000+ emails sent:

64 opens
12 clicks
3 resubscribes

Enough said.

This validated my conclusion that this part of this list was indeed “dead.”

Not only will this increase the open rate on this list (which I am certain that sophisticated email providers like Gmail monitor), it will save me money at Aweber.

In fact, I will now make it a priority to clean up each of my lists at the beginning of each new year.

How often do you clean up your email lists?

Comment below.

Sometime back I had the pleasure of recording an interview with marketing legend Marlon Sanders who runs a very successful affiliate program.

Marlon is one of the early Internet marketing trainers and I have been following him since the mid 1990’s.

I brought Marlon onto the interview to share his experience with running a successful affiliate program for any product or service.

Take some time to listen to Marlon’s words of wisdom as they can make the different between you building an army of dedicated affiliates that can bring you millions of dollars in sales or building an affiliate program that goes nowhere. Don’t discount the power of an affiliate program as I know of a certain company that generated $29 million in sales in the last 15 months just from affiliate driven sales. Click the play button below to start listening.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This is just some of the type of interviews I do in my IMStealth membership program.

You can learn more about Marlon by clicking here.

I look forward to your comments.

Cheers
Gauher