MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

If you remem­ber, some time last week I posted a video of Max Simon from Get Self Cen­tered pre­sent­ing his awe­some method to effec­tively and sig­nif­i­cantly reduce your unsub­scribe rate and totally boost your prof­its.

Yes, there were a few prob­lems with the video, and I totally apol­o­gize for the glitches… but it’s been fixed and if you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here »

For those of you who don’t know who Max Simon is, he’s the man who helped build Deepak Chopra’s prod­ucts divi­sion into a multi-million dol­lar busi­ness. Max strug­gled to build a suc­cess­ful busi­ness and in 2008, he lost some $80,000. He then real­ized a few key ingre­di­ents that helped him ulti­mately turn his busi­ness around. In 2009, Get Self Cen­tered did not only break even, but gen­er­ated $500,000 in revenue.

Now, Max trav­els the world shar­ing these amaz­ing ideas to help con­scious entrepreneurs…

• Cre­ate thriv­ing and authen­tic busi­nesses that are in com­plete align­ment with their per­sonal val­ues and spir­i­tual path
• Expe­ri­ence great wealth and abundance
• Have a pow­er­fully pos­i­tive impact on the world.

Any­way, Max will be con­duct­ing a tele­sem­i­nar with me speak­ing about The Enlight­ened Entre­pre­neur Expe­ri­ence and how you can expe­ri­ence the turn­ing point in your busi­ness journey.

The FREE tele­sem­i­nar will take place on Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 26th  at 5 pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern

You can sign up for it here »

Here’s what we’ll be talk­ing about:

• Why most entre­pre­neurs will never expe­ri­ence “the turn­ing point” and what you can do to guar­an­tee your place amongst those who do.
• The 5 nec­es­sary ingre­di­ents that absolutely must be present for you to expe­ri­ence “the turn­ing point” in your busi­ness (and you wouldn’t expect many of them).
• How you can cre­ate a busi­ness that gives you com­plete free­dom.
• A sim­ple (yet potent) tech­nique to over­come your fears, which has to hap­pen for you to facil­i­tate the shift (and it’s eas­ier than you think).
• 3 sim­ple and easy to do action steps that you can take right now to facil­i­tate the turn­ing point in your busi­ness immediately.
• Mar­ket Sophis­ti­ca­tion Lev­els: The one key idea (iden­ti­fied by mar­keter Eugene Scwartz), that causes count­less peo­ple to fail with their online business.
• And much, much more…

Join us on Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 26th  at 5 pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern

For Those of You Who Want To Dis­cover The 5 Nec­es­sary Ingre­di­ents To Cre­ate A Busi­ness That Gives You Com­plete Free­dom, Click Here »

Update: Hey guys, sorry about the audio ear­lier, but it has now, thank­fully, been fixed thanks to our awe­some video edi­tor, Julian. You can now check out the video below.

I know what you’re think­ing… eth­i­cal?? Will that even work?

YES. And I’m about to tell you why Max Simon’s new con­cept of “Tribal Mar­ket­ing” will actu­ally work far bet­ter than any other short-term, short­cut, flavor-of-the-month mar­ket­ing strat­egy that we often see come and go.

But first, a quick intro of who Max Simon is.

A cou­ple weeks ago, Max Simon from GetSelfCentered.com came all the way over to Malaysia to hang out with me, Mike, and the whole Mind­Val­ley crew.

Let’s just say we had a lot of fun

And not to men­tion a lot of shared learn­ings. The peo­ple at my office loved him.

It was a great expe­ri­ence. You see, Max, who’s a great entre­pre­neur, mar­keter, and per­sonal growth junkie, taught us this awe­some con­cept that he calls “Tribal Mar­ket­ing”.

So I thought I’d share this video of Max’s train­ing to Mind­Val­ley so you can learn EXACTLY what he taught us.

He’s a pretty cool kid, as you’ll see in the video below. It’s 30 min­utes long, but Max shares with us his amaz­ing secrets to Tribal Mar­ket­ing. Be patient, let it load and let me know what you think.

Tribal Mar­ket­ing by Max Simon

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9DFB27D7C5AF1E32

BTW, It’s a YouTube playlist and should run seam­lessly. How­ever, if you run into any prob­lems, you can also click next to view videos 2, 3 and 4. Alter­na­tively if the playlist does not work at all for you — check below. I’ve posted indi­vid­ual videos

What to look out for in this video:

• Why mass mar­ket­ing is dead and how tribes have formed in its place
• Top 5 out­dated fears that still con­trol many mar­keters (and how these mis­takes actu­ally hold them back from hav­ing a LOYAL and RESPONSIVE following)
• 7 qual­i­ties you should (and CAN) attract so you won’t ever again worry about squeez­ing dimes out of your fol­low­ing cause they’ll be more than happy to throw dol­lars at you

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey guys

Recently, MindValley’s inno­va­tion team has been try­ing out some­thing new. We’re already amaz­ingly suc­cess­ful online so we thought of apply­ing what we know about Inter­net mar­ket­ing to the offline world. So we’re get­ting our hands dirty with the good old direct response mar­ket­ing. Yes, I’m talk­ing about mail­ers, mag­a­zines, cat­a­logs and post­cards. We’re talk­ing Hybrid Mar­ket­ing — mix­ing direct response mar­ket­ing (DRM), and the Internet.

We’re now look­ing to launch direct mail cam­paigns for some of our busi­nesses. Some ini­tial ideas that we’re test­ing out are “Thank you for pur­chas­ing” post­cards and “Happy Hol­i­day” mail­ers for spe­cial promotions.

Why are we going back to a decade-old tech­nique when the Inter­net is the place to be?

1. Cov­er­ing all bases
   We’re not rely­ing on DRM to gen­er­ate sales, we’re using it to strengthen and ener­gize our Inter­net mar­ket­ing and sales. Depend­ing on your tar­get clien­tele, using DRM in addi­tion to the Inter­net can help you expand your cus­tomer base beyond the tech­no­log­i­cally savvy.
2. Rela­tion­ship Build­ing
   DRM can help you build REAL-lationships. When a cus­tomer con­ducts an online pur­chase, send­ing a sim­ple thank you let­ter or post­card to your buyer is a pleas­ant sur­prise. They think, “Wow, these peo­ple go the extra mile and seem to really care!”
3. Increas­ing deliv­er­abil­ity
   Email­ing and send­ing them direct mail might seem like overkill. But it really is not. Instead, what you’re doing is increas­ing the chances of them receiv­ing your offer. The post office is no Google. “Taboo” words such as “FREE!”, “SALE!”, “$$$” and “ACT FAST” won’t be black­listed as spam. As such, there is a 98% chance of your offer land­ing in someone’s hands!
4. 100% prof­its
   The won­ders of the offline world is that it’s all Do-It-Yourself. While you may have to invest a bit of time in study­ing and struc­tur­ing your action plan ini­tially, the prof­its are 100% yours because you don’t have offline affil­i­ates wait­ing for you to pay them.

There are prob­a­bly even more awe­some things that we’ll dis­cover about hybrid mar­ket­ing once it’s com­pletely up and run­ning. Many busi­nesses have been amaz­ingly suc­cess­ful using either online mar­ket­ing, or direct-response mar­ket­ing alone. So it will be really excit­ing to see what hap­pens when you inte­grate the two.

Hey guys,

Yes, I know. It’s been months since we last posted some­thing on this blog, and over 6 months since we last sent out any­thing to the thou­sands of you who sub­scribed to our “7 FREE Chain Reac­tion Mar­ket­ing” les­son series.

Let’s just say that Mind­Val­ley as a com­pany has grown so rapidly dur­ing this time that things became pretty over­whelm­ing… in a very good way.

We’ve had a com­pletely spec­tac­u­lar time and I can’t wait to share it with you. Here’s what Mind­Val­ley has been up to.

That’s me with Mike and Sir
Richard Bran­son on Necker Island

This one was taken after I got invited to speak at the Tony Rob­bins Ulti­mate Busi­ness Mas­tery Sum­mit in Las Vegas in April

This one is with Robin Sharma, author of the best-selling book “The Monk
Who Sold His Ferrari”

And that’s just really the tip of the ice­berg, plus we’re super excited to be back, and look for­ward to shar­ing with you lots of cool things we learned.

Seri­ously though, it’s crazy what can hap­pen in just a few months.

And in many ways it wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for all the love, tears and sweat we invested into research­ing the best in inter­net mar­ket­ing, con­duct­ing rig­or­ous split test­ing, and a bunch of many other stuff we’ve been shar­ing with you here for over 3 years now.

Lastly, this would also not have been pos­si­ble with­out your sup­port guys, so thank you all.

Stay tuned for the return of our famous posts on split test results and inter­net mar­ket­ing voodoo.

Should be fun.

Jack Can­field asked to inter­view me recently on the topic of social media. I did the inter­view but stressed that I really DISLIKE being asked to talk about social media mar­ket­ing. I con­sider the whole social media mar­ket­ing indus­try over-hyped.

I’m one of the most-in-demand speak­ers in this space (as I write this I’ll be in Vegas on stage in a few days with Tony Rob­bins to talk about social media mar­ket­ing). But I want to empha­size the PSYCHOLOGY over the TECHNOLOGY.

Too many peo­ple fall into the trap of get­ting overly enam­ored with Face­book, Twit­ter and the rest of the social media to-do list, that they end up neglect­ing the impor­tance of apply­ing per­sua­sion psy­chol­ogy to actu­ally make the traf­fic deliver. I’m inter­ested in response rates first — traf­fic second.

So, in this inter­view I reveal how I apply spe­cific pat­terns of influ­ence (psy­chol­ogy) within a frame­work of social media like blogs, Face­book and YouTube, (tech­nol­ogy), to help many of the celebri­ties and best-selling authors I work with build a closer rela­tion­ship with their audi­ence and get far bet­ter responses.

Lis­ten on!

WARNING: This post is not for the “good enough” minded. Why stop at good enough when you can push for great, lever­aged, or bet­ter yet, inte­grated?

I started toy­ing around with social media early back in 2005. I didn’t real­ize it at the time, but I was just hav­ing fun throw­ing aim­less punches blindly in the dark, in mis­guided hopes of hit­ting the jackpot.

Stu­pid me, it never hap­pened. I lacked direc­tion and had no sys­tem in place.

But I per­sisted, and learned from my many mis­takes. Even­tu­ally, one thing led to another and I ended up work­ing with Mind­Val­ley. Not to men­tion, along the way, I also got invited to new media related con­fer­ences, includ­ing ones co-organized by Har­vard University.

Long story short, I gained a good amount of expe­ri­ence and insights into the world of social media. And now, yours truly, the Social Media DJ, is about to reveal to you a few of his key learn­ings, so please… pay close attention.

What I’ve Learned from 4 YEARS of Stu­pid Painful Screw Ups

1. Base Your Efforts on the Triple B Formula

Social media mar­ket­ing is mainly a long term affair. It won’t bring you sales overnight like PPC-driven affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing for exam­ple (although there are some excep­tions). It takes time and per­sis­tence. Hence, the need for passion.

Burn, baby burn.

Pas­sion is your fuel, your sense of direc­tion, and ulti­mately your vision. Plus, it will help you deter­mine how you’re going to use social media, bet­ter shape your mar­ket­ing mes­sage, and pick the rel­e­vant allies to net­work with who share sim­i­lar passions.

More impor­tantly, when you’re pas­sion­ate and gen­uine, it shows in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­ers. You’re like­able. You’re fun, and that my friend helps your mes­sage spread fur­ther and makes it more well-received.

That’s pre­cisely one of the crit­i­cal rea­sons why deeply pas­sion­ate guys like Gary Vayner Chuck do well with social media.

Keep it real. Keep it human.

Now, if you don’t know what your pas­sion is yet and need to know, that’s ok. My friend, Chris Attwood explains how you can dis­cover it and start liv­ing it in his NY Times best-seller, The Pas­sion Test. Check it out if you want to.

Alrighty then, next.

2. Don’t Sprawl the Mall

Social media is a broad game. You’ve got Twit­ter, Blogs, YouTube, Face­book Pro­files, Face­book Groups, Face­book Fan Pages, Stum­ble­Upon, MySpace, Ning, Digg, LinkedIn and the list goes on.

All have their weak­nesses and strengths. Which will you pick?

See, you won’t know accu­rately until you clearly spec­ify your intended busi­ness goals. Oth­er­wise, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to select the appro­pri­ate social media chan­nels for your unique needs and mea­sure the ROI of your efforts.

Here’s what you can you use social media in busi­ness for:

1. branding
2. com­mu­nity building
3. attract­ing new prospects
4. net­work­ing with poten­tial JV partners
5. gen­er­at­ing buzz and unleash­ing the viral monster
6. involv­ing your cus­tomers in the prod­uct cre­ation process
7. lis­ten­ing in on cur­rent con­ver­sa­tions about your offer­ings to gain valu­able feedback
8. boost­ing rela­tion­ships with your cus­tomers to increase reten­tion and life-time value

Select­ing from the above what you desire in a pri­or­i­tized fash­ion will deter­mine which social media chan­nels you should pick, focus on more, and inte­grate together.

Mov­ing on.

3. Prove. Improve.

Try not to rein­vent the wheel. Go for proven strate­gies, and once you’ve imple­mented them suc­cess­fully, improve upon them.

Hence, prove, and then improve.

The fol­low­ing are three sim­ple exam­ples of proven social media mar­ket­ing strategies.

STRATEGY #1 — Use Blogs to Increase Interaction

Old news. Noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary here. Blogs are lovely flex­i­ble pub­lish­ing plat­forms that cre­ate inter­ac­tion. For more on using them effec­tively, read this:

• Posi­tion­ing, “Social Polar­ity” and Vibrant Blog Communities
• 7 Ways to Increase Your Blog Comments
• Blog Mar­ket­ing: Mon­e­tize The Com­ments On Your Blog

STRATEGY #2 — Use YouTube to Attract Traffic

Being one of the top 5 most vis­ited web­sites on the planet, YouTube is a seri­ous source of traf­fic, so if you’re not mar­ket­ing your­self there, you’re miss­ing out on sig­nif­i­cant eye­balls. To use YouTube in cool prof­itable ways, read this:

• How I Made A Dol­lar From Every­one Who Watched My YouTube Video

STRATEGY #3 — Use Face­book to Build a Community

There are count­less ways Face­book can be used for effec­tive mar­ket­ing, if you do it right. Here’s one that’s bound to spark some cre­ative ideas in your head:

• Face­book Mar­ket­ing: How Smart Restau­rants and Bars are Using “Birth­day Mar­ket­ing” on Facebook

Okay, so now that I’ve quickly demon­strated three strate­gies, let’s go to the fourth step.

4. Inte­gra­tion — The “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect

Aha, now here comes the fun part. This is where many experts have short-comings, because they’re too focused on a few social media web­sites and miss the big picture.

Thing is, the three afore­men­tioned strate­gies are good. In fact, for many experts or so-called experts, they’re “good enough.”

Not for me.

Yours truly, the Social Media DJ, doesn’t want to stop there and doesn’t want you to either. Throw in some “Pop­eye Spinach” and watch the magic unrav­el­ing before your eyes.

Inte­grate the three indi­vid­ual tac­tics strate­gi­cally. There are obvi­ously a num­ber of ways to do that. Here’s a sim­ple one you can use if you’re an inter­net mar­keter with an email list.

1. pub­lish a blog post that includes:

• some use­ful text-based content
• your own opti­mized YouTube video
• your Face­book pro­file badge

2. blast the blog post to your list
3. sit back and enjoy!

Your blog post should look some­thing like this. The exam­ple below is from a MindValley-owned web­site with Burt Gold­man aka The Amer­i­can Monk. It lever­ages a lot of inte­grated social media marketing.

Here are the ben­e­fits of inte­gra­tion and the “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect.

1. You inter­act with your email list via the com­ments in your blog post.

2. You instantly cre­ate thou­sands of views and momen­tum for your opti­mized YouTube video. This pushes the video higher in rank­ings, mean­ing it will con­tinue to attract many more views for months, if not, years to come, which nicely trans­lates into more tar­geted vis­i­tors to your web­site via your YouTube links.

3. Con­vert­ing more of your list sub­scribers into Face­book friends, so you can bet­ter inter­act with them and have a closer relationship.

It all works. Here’s proof. Have a look at the num­ber of blog com­ments (42), YouTube video views (22,575), and Face­book friends (1,294) in the screen­shots below:

Are you begin­ning to see the power of inte­grated social media mar­ket­ing? The “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect is yours for exploita­tion. Use it, my friend. Use it!

5. ROI. Tweak, Tweak. ROI.

Your ROI is a crit­i­cal impor­tant num­ber. It doesn’t really mat­ter if you have 5,000 “friends” on your Face­book pro­file, unless you can mea­sure the ROI of your social media mar­ket­ing efforts. How do those true friends or so-called friends impact your business?

Come up with your suit­able stan­dards. Mea­sure. Tweak to improve, and then mea­sure again. That way, you won’t be aimless.

Now go, and have some fun.

Aim for max­i­mum impact through the strate­gic inte­gra­tion of your social media mar­ket­ing efforts. Are we clear, my dear friends? If not, drop your ques­tions, and the Social Media DJ will answer them.

If you enjoyed danc­ing to my beats, I urge you to stick around. You’ve only just seen the tip of the ice­berg. And for those of you on Twit­ter, the Social Media DJ has just joined the party there. Add me @passionomics for more prof­itable meat.

See you at the Land of Tweets.

Lately, we’ve been pretty busy behind the scenes work­ing on putting together some­thing new and revolutionary.

I’ve already unveiled a great deal of this stuff at an exclu­sive, pri­vate event. How­ever, some of the basic tricks were already pub­lished here in this blog.

In this post, you’ll find a list of those use­ful tricks com­piled for your easy access.

Before we begin though, here’s just some of the feed­back I’ve received about my social media mar­ket­ing pre­sen­ta­tion at the pri­vate event in Napa, California.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yi0tkTO8os

And now for your read­ing plea­sure… the fol­low­ing com­plied list. Every­thing from lever­ag­ing blogs strate­gi­cally, to the basics of YouTube and Face­book mar­ket­ing is included.

1. Suc­cumb­ing to EVIL Shortcut-ish Temp­ta­tions and For­get­ting the “Social” In Social Media

2. Posi­tion­ing, “Social Polar­ity” and Vibrant Blog Communities

3. Face­book Mar­ket­ing: How Smart Restau­rants and Bars are Using “Birth­day Mar­ket­ing” on Facebook

4. 7 Ways to Increase Your Blog Comments

5. Blog Mar­ket­ing: Mon­e­tize The Com­ments On Your Blog

6. How to Get Traf­fic from Web 2.0 Sites like Digg, Red­dit & StumbleUpon

7. How I Made A Dol­lar From Every­one Who Watched My YouTube Video

Remem­ber, the above posts only cover the basics but they con­tain tips you can imple­ment today to boost your website’s performance.

Look out for the com­plete sys­tem in early 2009 when it will be launching.

If you liked this post, we’d greatly appre­ci­ate a Stum­ble. Thanks.

If you’re run­ning an online busi­ness, then you prob­a­bly know the impor­tance of pro­duc­tiv­ity when you’re work­ing in front of your screen. In this talk I share ideas that will help you become more effi­cient through task prioritization.

Size Doesn’t Matter?

It does. Here’s why.

A few weeks ago we started help­ing one of our part­ners set up a suc­cess­ful pres­ence on Face­book. His name is Burt Gold­man, The Amer­i­can Monk.

I’m guess­ing he’s prob­a­bly the ONLY 81 year old monk with more than 1,000 true friends on the social net­work, which brings me to my story.

Owen Thomas, a blog­ger at Val­ley­wag (the Sil­i­con Val­ley ver­sion of Perez Hilton), a tech gos­sip blog, pub­lished an amus­ing post about The Amer­i­can Monk which cracked us up over here at Mind­Val­ley Labs.

He did this after I quickly pitched him — and other tech blog­gers — our unique Face­book story. We’ll take his post as a com­pli­ment. You can read it here.

The funny thing is (besides all the exag­ger­a­tions of course), is that they’re imply­ing Burt Gold­man may not exist. After all, this is what you’d expect from an amus­ing tabloid-like blog. Well, I’ve got news for Val­ley­wag. He’s real, and here’s a video of him cel­e­brat­ing his 81st birth­day.

All in all, Owen’s post was a good read with amus­ing com­ments. Do check out Val­ley­wag if you’d like to keep up with tech gos­sip and be enter­tained. It’s fun.

PS — Thanks for the expo­sure Owen. We appre­ci­ate it. Already, just from your post, we have peo­ple approach­ing us for advice on social media mar­ket­ing.

Who knew that such a tiny, lit­tle addi­tion — a small image to be pre­cise — can have such a sig­nif­i­cant impact on sales?

Well, we cer­tainly didn’t expect it, and that just goes to show the impor­tance of split test­ing even the small­est tweaks.

Here is what we did.

One of our biggest web­sites is www.SilvaLifeSystem.com and below is how the top ban­ner of the web­site looked BEFORE imple­ment­ing the tweak.

This is it AFTER the tweak.

Spot the difference?

Adding the “McAfee Secure” seal boosted sales by an aver­age of 15%.

The seal and the infor­ma­tion it leads to when clicked seem to make a group of sus­pi­cious prospects more com­fort­able at mak­ing a pur­chase online.

Con­sid­er­ing the pos­i­tive impact it had, it’s clearly obvi­ous that our $2,000 invest­ment for the seal was very worthy.

If you’re mak­ing big rev­enues with your online busi­ness, a 15% boost in sales, or even just a small 5% boost will eas­ily cover your costs and you can enjoy the ROI for months to come.

I do believe that boosts in con­ver­sion rates will vary depend­ing on your tar­get mar­ket though.

To cer­tify your online busi­ness, all you need to do is make an appli­ca­tion at the McAfee Secure site:

McAfee Secure web sites are cer­ti­fied as pro­vid­ing the high­est level of pro­tec­tion for their shoppers.

Are you going to give it a try? What are you doing now to boost the con­fi­dence of those who are sus­pi­cious and still uncom­fort­able with buy­ing from you?

Please share your insights with us.