‘Top 10 Things That Worked For Me In 2009 and 3 That Didn’t’ by Marlon Sanders

Marlon Sanders’ latest article is titled “Top 10 Things That Worked For Me In 2009 and 3 That Didn’t”. [Article]

Marlon Sanders’ latest article:

I just read a blog post by Terry Dean where he analyzed what did and didn’t work for him in 2009.

I thought I’d cover the top 10 things that worked for me in 2009 and a few that didn’t.

1. Ockham’s Razor promoted in February of 2009 ended up selling well.

The concept was a bit unusual to my list so it took some promoting for it to take off.

What’s weird is it didn’t convert well to a few of my JV partners lists. I don’t understand that.

2. Deadlined offers

As always, offers to my email list with a deadline work well.What’s unusual is that offers without a deadline have declined in response. People seem to be more short-term in their buying focus.

If you were on my Ateam call Thursday, you know how I’m using the T-20 script to take this to another level.

3. Live chat

We did research on our live chat for customer support that Tim does. There’s an extremely high correlation between live chats and sales.

I forget that exact number but it was 90% or something like that. By the same token, offering live chat is a substantial commitment and expense. Having someone like Tim who is bright and conversant and excels at customer support isn’t cheap.

What I don’t know is how many of the people we chat with would have gone ahead and bought anyway.

4. SEO traffic

We get a lot of seo traffic from search engines to some off my sites.

The conversions aren’t that great. I believe I need to find a way to get these visitors on our list WITHOUT messing up the page and ruining our Google rankings!

I plan on trying a large fly in ad.

5. Webinars

I did several webinars like Overwhelm Cure and Produce and Promote.

These did OK as far as sales but commensurate to the effort they take on my part, I’d just as soon write an ebook or create a product.

I always measure my time invested vs. dollar return.

6. Dashboards

Our Dashboards continue to sell well. I would have liked to got out a Dashboard here at year end but we’ve been working on revamping Ateam for 2010 and updating the look of our sites.

7. Checkbox upsells

In the past I did checkbox upsells on our order forms (where you check something off to add it to your order) for 25% of the main product price.

I’ve increased this amount and the conversions are still good.

I do better at this point on checkbox upsells than I do post order upsells. But our post ordering upsell process is a little clunky since we use Amember.

I’m planning on changing our back-end software this next year.

8. Dollar trials

One thing I tried that worked well is $1 three-day trials.However, we haven’t rolled these out because it’s a hassle to try to track affiliate commissions on them with my current affiliate software.

I may only do these dollar trials via affiliates who promote a special page via another affiliate software.

I was initially concerned about the refund rate on these trials. But our Dashboard product line is so content-rich and vastly under-priced that refunds aren’t an issue.It helps when people love the products.

9. Go To Webinar for Ateam

While I don’t know if I’ll be doing many more paid webinars,I DO like them for Ateam calls. I plan on rolling these out in the Ateam 2010 launch. There will be a commensurate price alteration for the increased value and service.

10. PPC (early results)

Joel Peterson helped me set up a content network campaign using Keyword Rockstar. This is bringing in cheap clicks for our Design Dashboard.

Our conversions aren’t where I want them to be for this traffic source, so I plan to invest some time in tweaking them.

11. Systems documentation

We invested a lot of time documenting systems based on the incredible inspiration of my friend Sam Carpenter from the Work The System book and workthesystem.com

Sam is an amazing, wonderful person and a real inspiration.

12. Staffing

I have a Filipina who is just a wonderful person and has assisted us a lot in handling details.

Lisa is back and I couldn’t be happier. Her talents were missed very much. Along with that Danny, Sean and Santos moved on to their next opportunity.

They’re all neat, talented people and will go far in life.My team now is 3 people and I’m content with that, although I plan to add several more filipinas using the outsourceplan.com system over the next year.

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Now, a few things that didn’t work:
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1. My Warriors WSO

I ran only one WSO on Warriors Forum for a 1/2 price special on Push Button Letters. This didn’t work. And I think the reason is that even at 1/2 off, it’s still a pretty high price compared to almost all the other WSO’s.

This wasn’t a big deal. I think I made a sale or two which was still a positive roi on my whopping $20 ad fee.

WSO’s are great. I plan to find some time to focus on a few good ones.

2. Lack of communication with my resellers

Due to the same issue in #2, I haven’t sent many emails to my affiliates. We had a major problem with the vendor I send my affiliate emails through. The fault was NOT theres.
It was an employee who didn’t follow directions and caused us a lot of grief!

In fairness, it probably wasn’t the employees fault. Sam Carpenter would say my system was at fault. And he’d probably be right.

We’re in the process of fixing this right now. If you’re a reseller, check your email box. You JUST got the first promotion of a new breed from us.

3. 1 click upsells with Amember

Doesn’t work. Well, there are a few solutions but really,Amember just isn’t very ideal for 1 click upsells.

Automateyourwebite.com or Infusion are much better choices.

The biggest thing for us is you can’t do them with a normal Paypal account and that sucks. You can use Paypal Pro which is basically your own merchant account.

Merchant accounts are dicey. You have to watch chargebacks like a hawk. Some people think that if they charge back vs. refunding because they perceive it as easier, it won’t hurt the merchant. That’s not true.

Marlon Sanders

Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy.” If you’d like to get on his mailing list and receive tips, articles and information about online marketing, visit: http://www.marlonsnews.com.

*IMNewsWatch would like to thank Marlon Sanders for granting permission to reprint this article.