Saturday was an intense day of injecting information directly into my brain. While Patsi was at the Mega Speaking Empire event, coincidentally in the same hotel, I spent the day with 25 others in a room with The System creator, Ken McCarthy at the System Intensive.
I started the day with a 7:30 breakfast with Patsi and our colleague Kathleen Gage of Street Smarts Marketing whom I had never met in person. We jammed a lot of potential joint venture ideas in to an hour before we all moved on to our workshops.
The System Intensive was approximately 8 hours of Ken McCarthy giving the bird's eye view of marketing online and off. McCarthy comes from a lineage of direct marketers and then transferred that knowledge to online marketing. The day started with an introduction to the direct marketing giants like Maxwell Sackheim, Eugene Schwartz, John Caples, David Ogilvy, and Gary Halbert.
This was not a how-to seminar but more like a "why and what you must do" in order to have a successful business. And that was a big point...don't be an Internet marketer... be a business owner. Yeah, you can hop on a fad, if you're fast enough, exploit it and make a lot of money. But if you really want to be around for the long haul, you must be serious about having a business.
There's way too much to summarize in one post since we covered some big chunks: identifying the right markets, conversion, traffic, info marketing, copywriting, and the real secrets to winning the game.
A couple of BIG points to keep in mind...
- Customers are the source of ALL your money, past, present and future. Without customers you don't have a business.
- The most valuable currency on the Internet is Credibility.
- Marketing is not about scamming people. It's about providing value first.
- Back to the first point...it's all about your customers...what to they value?
- TAKE ACTION. Tweak, tighten up your processes, continually find new sources of traffic
For me, the section on conversion was the most valuable. I know we have holes in our pipe and could tighten up our sales process. I'm going to have to spend some time examining the flow of our pages and communications to see where we can make some changes.
After the seminar, I met up with Patsi and Kathleen again for dinner and we brainstormed some ideas for joint venture projects. Stay tuned for more info about a teleclass on Internet marketing mistakes and for something much bigger, planned for next year!
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