MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

At the recent Strate­gic Prof­its sem­i­nar I attended in Florida I got intro­duced to Mary Ellen Tribby of EarlyToRise.com.

Ear­ly­ToRise is owned by Agora Pub­lish­ing, which in Tribby’s words is an “Idea Com­pany” and they focus on direct marketing.

I was totally blown away when they shared their met­rics with me. They have a list of 300,000 peo­ple, and they make an aver­age of $40 per person.

Their year-to-year growth is stunning.

Take a peek:

• ‘04 — 3 million
• ‘05 — 5 milliom
• ‘06 — 8 million
• ‘07 — 27 million
• ‘08 — 36 million

Notice the huge spurt from ’06 to ’07?

After the event I had a chance to talk to Tribby and I asked her to explain the main “mind-shifts” or “strate­gic shifts” that lead to that stel­lar growth.

Here was her response:

The Three Things that Causes Dra­matic Growth for EarlyToRise.com

These were the three things she said:

#1 You have to embrace offline marketing

Just because you are an online busi­ness does not mean that you have to ignore offline mar­ket­ing. There is absolutely NO rea­son to elim­i­nate cross chan­nel marketing.

This means phys­i­cal mail­ers, demo CDs and more.

Mary Ellen will actu­ally be releas­ing a book detail­ing this in Octo­ber, and I’m look­ing for­ward to it.

#2 Test, Test, Test

Tribby is fanat­i­cal about test­ing. Email response rates, site tweaks, promo and offers etc.

She said that every employee had to know how to per­form tests.

The most impor­tant things in their vocab­u­lary should be:

• Test­ing
• Anlayz­ing
• Rolling Out
• USP
• ROI
• Lead Gen­er­a­tion
• Response Rate
• Offer
• Acqui­si­tion
• Upsell
• Cross-Sell

Met­rics are impor­tant. Ignore this and you’ll never grow as fast. And the 3 most impor­tant cri­te­ria for these tests should be:

• Imme­di­ate
• Spe­cific
• Measurable

3# A Mind-Shift: Every Employee must think of them­selves as a mar­keter first

Dur­ing Q&A of the sem­i­nar, one lady with an inter­net busi­ness asked Mary, “So, my big ques­tion for you today is, how do I pro­tect my web­site from hack­ers?”. I could tell that every Inter­net Mar­keter on the stage, includ­ing Mary Ellen rolled their eyes at that question.

Mary replied, “Stop wor­ry­ing about things like that. The only thing you focus on is mar­ket­ing. That’s the only thing.”

She went on to add that in her com­pany, every employee is trained to think like a mar­keter FIRST.

I think this is a very key point. Every­body must think like mar­keters. Every­one is a mar­keter first. What­ever else you wanna call your­self comes sec­ond. Unless you absorb this phi­los­o­phy, you are not going to suc­ceed. Mar­ket­ing is not the only thing, but it is the KEY thing that matters.

Now you can’t ignore that kind of advice, not when it comes from some­one that took a com­pany from 8 mil­lion to 27 mil­lion in one year.

Last 5 posts by

• The Enlight­ened Entre­pre­neur Expe­ri­ence: How To Expe­ri­ence The “Turn­ing Point” And Com­plete Free­dom In Your Busi­ness — Jan­u­ary 25th, 2010
• Tribal Mar­ket­ing: Sur­pris­ingly Eth­i­cal Ways to Sig­nif­i­cantly Reduce Your Unsub­scribe Rate And Eas­ily Boost Prof­its — Jan­u­ary 19th, 2010
• Break­ing the Silence — August 7th, 2009
• How Rela­tion­ship Mar­ket­ing Trumps Tra­di­tional Direct Mar­ket­ing (and Why the Social Media Craze Is Mostly Hype) — March 31st, 2009
• MindValley’s Social Media Mar­ket­ing Unveiled — Decem­ber 2nd, 2008

About the Author

Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

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