Business models have become the new groundwork for competition, replacing product benefits and features as the playing field from which companies emerge as dominant. But what exactly are they? Quite simple, really: they're methods through which your business creates, captures, and delivers value -- and defining, reinventing, and evolving these models are the core of your strategy work. It takes a bit of research and planning, sure, but with well-defined goals and motivation, business models are easy to communicate and grow. Check out our online courses for more tips on how we've used business models to generate attractive profits and establish growth platforms: http://www.melbourneseoservices.com/seo-products/ ----------------------------------------------- https://www.facebook.com/seomastermind https://www.youtube.com/user/theseomethod https://plus.google.com/+Melbourneseoservices

1. BUSINESS MODELS
Position yourself for success.
David: Hi guys, welcome to the Melbourne SEO Services Workshop, and I’m really excited
today to share with you what I’ve been working on. I’ve been in internet marketing now for
the past ten or eleven years and I’ve been using internet marketing to build up my own
network of sites and for my own business. Now it’s evolved into what’s turned into
Melbourne SEO. I’m not going to hold anything back. I’m going to make sure I share all my
good material today.
I thought I might kick things off by telling
you a little bit of a story. Just recently I
headed over to the States. I had a workshop
that I was going to. So very much like you
guys going to a workshop, I’m constantly
learning. I flew over to the States, went to
Florida to see a guy called Richard Bandler.
For those of you who don’t know, he co-created something called NLP, which is neuro
linguistic programming. There are a whole lot of components to it, lots to do with
language patterns, patterns in your mind, a lot of hypnosis things as well. I found it really
fascinating. It was an event that I was very much looking forward to.
About ten years ago when I first got introduced to his work, I set myself a goal. I said, yes,
at some point I’m going to go over and attend one of his seminars. So I flew over to
Florida. It was a three or four day event. I was really excited for the day and really curious to
find out what he was going to talk about. I just knew he was a master at his craft. I was
really surprised at how much material he crammed into those four days.
There was so much there that I thought at the time, how is all of this going to sink in? I
know all of it will sink in. What I did was, I thought, I’m just going to it all float in and drift
down into my mind and then when it needs to pop up, it will. Now I’m three months later
and I’m still finding that I’m getting these insights. Little things will pop up and I’ll say, oh, I
know how to handle that situation, or, oh, I know what I should do here. So the reason I tell
you that is, I know we’re going to cover a lot of material today. I think what you’ll find is, as
long as you get the broad concepts, we’ll organize to get you the DVDs afterwards, but
afterwards, then you can go back and re-work through it. It is all going to sink in.
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2. I think one of the things I learned most about this seminar that I went to, or one of the key
insights that Richard provided, was the way that people view the world. Everybody views
the world in a different way. Very early on in his career he looked at the difference between
good spellers and bad spellers. This is a good example of the different ways people process
the world. A good speller, he found, what they would do was very different from a bad
speller. A bad speller would sit there and try and sound out the word. They’d sit there and
say c-a-t. That works all well and good for easy words but once it gets a little bit more
difficult, that’s where bad spellers get into trouble.
When they compared that to very good spellers, they had a completely different strategy,
the way that they’d approach it. What they actually did was visualize the word. They’d see
it. He asked these kids because kids don’t have any filter, and he said, explain to me the
experience you’re having when you’re thinking about spelling words. Basically all the kids
who were really good spellers visualized the words in front of their eyes. All that they were
doing was reading out the letters. They could spell the words just as easily forwards as they
could backwards. All that they were doing was reading the letters.
Everybody’s given the same information that they process. But that is two different ways
on how it’s processed and it’s the difference between being good at something and being
bad at something.
Richard took this a step further after he had this insight. He actually started doing some
training for the US military when they discovered how good he was at what he did. He
analyzed what successful shooters, people who were really good at shooting, if they have a
handgun, some people are really accurate and some people weren’t. It wasn’t the gun,
they were all given the same gun and they all had the same training up until that point.
He asked about the experience of what the good shooters were doing. The good shooters
said they imagined a little laser site shooting out the top of their gun even though there
wasn’t a laser site, they imagined it in their mind’s eye. Then they’d line up the point at
which they wanted to shoot, and they’d shoot and they were really accurate. He taught
this strategy to people who weren’t very good shooters. Almost instantaneously, by just
imagining there was the laser pointer, improved their accuracy tenfold.
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3. The reason I tell you these stories, never tell a story without making a point, the point I’m
trying to make here is that I’ve been doing SEO for a very long time. I’m going to teach you
the strategies I use both for my online marketing and SEO. It’s going to be a bit of a
combination there. I’ll give you the strategies that I use, that I’ve tested over many years
and then you can take them and run with them and hopefully you can have similar
success.
What I know
I’ll jump straight into the presentation. One
of the first things we need to look at is just
to make sure you select the right business
model. I’ll talk you through business model.
I touched on this before but I’ll teach you
everything I know today. I’m not going to
be holding anything back. As you can see, it
is for my staff and we actually take these DVDs and we send them to our virtual assistants
offshore. That way they can watch it and they then get the same training. Basically you ask
me anything and I’ll tell you exactly how I do it. I’ll try and explain as best as I can.
My goal for the day is obviously I want to give you that massive brain dump, let it all sink
in. Over time when the situation arises when you need to call on that information, it will all
pop up because it is all going in there. As you work through this as well, I find a lot of
people when they go through internet marketing seminars, sometimes what they’ll do it is
all about consume, consume. It’s never about application. So throughout this seminar, the
question you need to be asking yourself is, how can I take what David’s talking about now
and apply it to my own business? That’s the way you’ll get the most out of it.
My other goal is, I want to make sure that you guys look back on today, after you guys are
really successful internet marketers and you’re kicking goals and you’re banking the big
bucks, all those sorts of good things, I want you to look back on today and realize, hey, that
was a really key point, one of those leverage points that provided that turning point. That’s
my goal.
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4. Plan of attack
So the first thing, talking about the plan of
attack, you need to define your objectives
and make sure why it is that you’re building.
We’re not building websites just for the sake
of building websites. So many people out
there will build different WordPress sites,
build web 2.0 sites and they don’t have that
objective clearly defined before they start. A lot of those techniques, I just mentioned a few
there, building pages, a lot of those work as sites to funnel traffic back to your website. If
you have that objective as to why you’re doing it, when we talk about business models in a
moment, you’ll say right, I’m looking to generate leads, I’m looking to get views, I’m
looking to get opt ins. Whatever it is, make sure that objective is clear so that way when
you start building, you’re meeting that objective.
Also the importance of running a business, you are running a business, you’re building a
business and I think you should be adding long term value. When I first got started, I was
very much looking for these quick fix, get rich quick and I’ll talk about some of the different
strategies and methods I have implemented over the years. Some were successful, some
weren’t, but when push comes to shove, it is all about adding value. You get rewarded for
the value you bring to the marketplace and that is a Jim Rohn quote for those of you who
know. That’s very true. You want to make sure that you’re really adding value and you’re
building for the long term.
House of cards
I’m not so much about building websites
that are churn and burn. Websites you put
them up and then you do some sneaky
black hat things to try and get them to rank
and then Google finds it out and then ends
up banning them. I used to do a lot of that
sort of thing, but now I’ve discovered you’re
much better off building a good solid system that makes sure you’re adhering to a lot of
Google’s guidelines. I built a little bit of a house of cards early on in my career and this
comes back to the idea of making sure you build a good business model or you build on
sound principles.
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5. One of the early things I did was, I had my AdSense adventure as I call it. That’s when I first
registered a whole lot of domain names and put up websites using public domain works
taken from Yanik Silver’s Public Domain Goldmine, these CDs he brought out. Public
domain works for those who don’t know, are works that, after a certain number of years,
get released, they are copyright free and you can take them and reuse that work.
We registered over five hundred domain names, put all of these up. I was trying to be
really careful. I made sure I had them on different hosting accounts, I made sure I spread
out the IP addresses for the different hosts so it didn’t look like it was all interlinked
together. Silly me, not thinking you link sites together just by having AdSense on them
because they’re all using the same AdSense account. So I went down this path making sure
I had different names registered, tried to segregate different markets. I did AdSense and I
also did Yahoo’s Publisher Network as well. I started to build up a significant income.
Google has this thing with their AdSense program, their terms of service, they don’t like
you to have multiple accounts, but with a little bit of creative thinking using your mother’s
maiden name and a few other things like that, you can open multiple accounts. So we had
a few multiple accounts and segregated all these five hundred sites into a different
network. Then we went about the process of driving as much traffic as we could. We did
some on page optimization to make sure those keywords were the highest paying ones
being displayed on the website and then we were getting paid out.
I built that ‘business’ up, and I call it ‘business’. We had three accounts and each one got up
to about $3000 a month in recurring revenue. Then Google came knocking and the first
thing they said was, on one of your accounts we’ve detected invalid clicks. I had an
assistant in the Philippines who was also logging into my accounts who thought he was
helping me out by clicking one of the ads. Google didn’t like it and he’d been doing it
quite a lot. So they banned that account. There’s not too much you can do. Sadly AdSense,
Google is the judge, jury and executioner when it comes to that business, there’s not really
much leeway there.
That was like the calm before the storm. The second AdSense account I get an email from
Google saying, hey we’ve found one of your sites is offending, it’s not adhering to our
terms of service, could you please rectify it? I emailed them back, ok fine, I’ve got a very
large network, I want to make sure I stay on the right side of you guys. Can you please tell
me what is wrong with it and I’ll fix it straight away? No, sorry, we can’t do that, just read
the terms of service and you’ll have to fix it up.
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6. Day two, we’ve found another site that is offending. Please, I just emailed you yesterday,
can you help me out? I don’t want to lose this account, it’s a significant part of my business
and I want to make sure that this doesn’t happen. No, sorry, make sure you go and read
the terms of service and you need to fix it really quickly otherwise we will be banning your
account. Day number three, sorry we’ve found another one of your sites offending and
then they canned the whole account.
I think I learned very quickly after that, is you don’t want to build a business that relies on
someone else. Google effectively could very quickly pull the rug from out beneath me and
I was up the creek without a paddle. The next thing we did was we converted them over to
selling public domain works, they were all public domain works anyway. We started selling
the books for $17. I built up a good business that way. The only thing is it was so diverse, I
don’t know if that is a really diverse model and I don’t know how much value I was adding
to people’s lives.
These books were out of print, written in the sixties and I’m dressing them up, putting a
nice e book cover on them to make sure they look pretty so that someone is going to buy
them on ClickBank or through PayPal. Meagan can probably tell you, we had a few sites
that were written back in the sixties that were probably politically incorrect as well. We
decided that’s probably not a direction that we want to head down.
The reason I tell you these is hopefully to get the point across that you need to be adding
value and making sure that your end user is getting something out of it and you’re
building a business based around you, not that is reliant on someone else.
Finally we had Mr. Hemorrhoids. This wasn’t so much my situation, but rather a client’s. A
client contacted me when we launched Melbourne SEO Services and said, look, I want your
help. Can you do some work on the website? I took a look at it. Basically it was an affiliate
site. He was selling a hemorrhoid book and he was selling it as an affiliate. I think the book
sold for $60 and he was getting a $30 affiliate commission. I said, let’s do some basic maths
here. Even at our entry level price for our Melbourne SEO Services package, we’re talking
about $3000 as the entry price. If he’s making $30 per sale, he needed to sell 100 copies.
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7. Of those 100 copies, let’s just say traffic that he sent to the website selling the book was
really well written and he was converting at 5%. Five percent is pretty high for a website.
Let’s just conservatively say even if it converted at 5%, he’d need to send 2000 unique
visitors to that website before he’d get enough copies sold to make it worthwhile. The site
that he’d shown me was a WordPress blog that had different articles on it and he was
trying to drive links to it. It had lots of pages and then he wanted to funnel that traffic over.
He hadn’t really done a very good way of driving the traffic over either. He didn’t have that
objective in mind, so it wasn’t very clear to someone visiting the site what their action
should be. Let’s say if he could get 10% of all the traffic that arrived at his site, he’d need
20,000 people if they converted at 10% to head over there and then 5% to buy, and then
he’d sell 100 copies. We needed to drive 20,000 people to his website just to break even.
The reason I tell you this is, I suppose I come from a little bit of a financial background as
well for those of you who don’t know and you need to know that your numbers stack up as
well. You want to make sure that you do your maths and we’ll talk about building a funnel
and all of that and making sure that you’ve got the appropriate `back end to make sure it is
worthwhile. For him, he wasn’t even doing name capture, so it just wasn’t a worthwhile
endeavour.
Skinning a cat
I’m going to talk about a few of the ways
that I’ve been successful online. There are
plenty of different ways to be successful
online. There really are. There are plenty of
ways you can skin a cat. You just need to
pick one. Make sure that you add value and
then you can master that.
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8. Information products
I’ll just talk you through three of the models
that I have successfully done. The first one
that I’ll talk about is information products.
The
good
things
about
information
products are they are high profit, there’s a
lot of profit margin in them. When I
launched my Triple Your Trading Profits DVDs, they sell for $297 and it costs us $50 if that
to film it. Some of our other products are higher priced, we’ve got a lot more margins built
in.
There are two ways you can go about it. You can either find an expert or become an
expert. I worked with Stuart McPhee who actually generated a lot of the content. I also
created some content in the stock market area as well. If you guys don’t have a business
model, I know a lot of you already have businesses so I will scoot through some of this. It’s
only applicable more so if you don’t know what your business model is yet.
Once you find an expert or decide that
you’re going to create the content, the next
thing that you want to do is build a little bit
of a funnel. This comes to the idea I was
talking about, making sure when you do
build a business, you make sure that you
think
through
how
you’re
going
to
monetize it and you’re not just selling a $30 e book. The way I worked it is, I had a front
end lead generator which is my Ultimate Trading Systems which is a book I sold at a very
low dollar value. It was about $7, I still sell it for $7. It introduces people to all of my other
products. It’s excellent quality material that you can take and run with, just what I give
them in the e book. I also say, hey, if you want a little bit more, then go ahead and
purchase all of these other products. That’s where I introduce them to all my other
products.
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9. We’ve got different things like the Metastock Programming Study Guide. This is usually a
cheap front end, then you have your mid tier, so we’ve got the Trading Secrets Revealed,
STOT and any number of things where they are priced anywhere from $97 up to the $500
mark. These are mainly home study courses. They don’t really require much of my time
other than we just organized for them to be fulfilled out. We use Speaker Fulfillment
Services so we don’t have to send anything out anyway. That’s the first stage.
The next stage is they all trickle down into our online Trading Mastermind which is a little
bit more of the back end, so it is recurring revenue. We’ve actually just recently made some
changes there. The idea then is you want to have a recurring revenue stream or something
like that where that is going to continue to build your business over time. Further down
the funnel, this is where you have high end products. You might have personal coaching
where you give some time away or seminars, workshops, that type of thing.
Ecommerce
This comes back to the idea of making sure
you build a very good business model.
Some of these sites we’ll be looking at
today as well. Another method that has
been very successful for me has been the e
commerce. Those of you who don’t know as
well, I have another business, it is a rock ’n roll clothing store, still spruiking the wares. So if
you need triple stud belt you can approach me during the break, I’ve got some in the car.
We’ve got a store and we do a little bit of online business as well. The good thing about
online business when you’re doing for e commerce is, it’s a lot higher turnover. The good
thing about e commerce is you can build lots of product pages and all of them will be very
highly targeted for the product name.
So from an SEO point of view, it’s very easy to pick up these long tail phrases that will
convert really highly because you’re going for these buying phrases. We drive over 1000
unique visitors a day to Planet 13 online. I think there are over 2000 products, so there are
more than 2000 pages on there, there are different category pages and so on.
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10. That business is 100% free traffic, we don’t have any paid traffic or anything like that and it
outdoes one of the old stores that we used to have. That is online and we have one person
who works part time and the overheads, when you compare it to a retail store and you’re
spending $7000 a month just to rent out a place in Greensborough Plaza, it’s worlds apart.
So we’re really shifting towards that. There is a lot of opportunity for on page and internal
linking as well because of the size of the website and we can talk a little bit more about
that.
Selling services
Then we’ve got selling services. For selling services,
just be mindful, I’ve never been a big advocate of
this because you’re selling your time for dollars. If
you’re going to do that, just make sure you’re selling
at a really high price. If you’re going to be selling
your time for $20, that’s time you’re never going to
get back. We all know it is the most important asset
we’ve got, so you want to be careful there.
That said though, it is a very easy opportunity, there are a lot of people who just don’t do
things well. I think the vast majority of people don’t execute very well. You want to make
sure that you can add value and you want to make it better. You have a look at what other
people are doing and then you just make it that little bit better. I know doing some
coaching with Ben and some of the other team as well where we mapped out a little bit of
a strategy for his business and we talked about creating the menu and creating what is our
offering going to be and trying to separate and make ourselves different from the
competition out there. It is actually quite easy to do.
For selling services I suggest what you do is give away a free report and collect optins and
add videos. If you do those things, it will put you head and shoulders above everybody
else. The free report which we can talk about in a little bit more detail, you can see on
Melbourne SEO Services. The dentist, who is a client of ours, the example is there. We don’t
actually do it there, or not yet because we have only just started working with him. The
idea is, you want to build up that data base so that you can continue to market them.
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11. Also the use of video which Ben has had a big part in, making sure our videos look really
good and you’ll see on Melbourne SEO Services, we’re not marketing to internet marketers
there, but it is a really crisp, clean website and we’ve had numerous people, clients who’ve
contacted us who say the reason I went to work with you guys is because after I had a look
at it, I felt like I knew you and I connected with you.
The never fail system
If you’re still not sure after those, those are
the three that I’ve proven. I’ve told you the
ones that didn’t work, I’ve told you the ones
that I’ve tried that have worked. I’ll give you
the never fail system. The never fail system
is that you need to just pick a niche. Start
building a list, ask the list what they want
and then go and grab an affiliate product. There are different ways you can market other
people’s affiliate products. Make sure that it sells, that they’re going to buy whatever
avenue you’re going to go down.
Once you’ve proven that, then you create your own product and you do it that little bit
better. That is the perfect system. Frank Kern talked about this recently, for those of you
who saw, he had a video out, that is the never fail system.
Create the machine
I’ll just talk about this briefly to do with
creating a machine as well. Is there money
in the back end? I did an interview recently
with a guy called Jim Fleck. He’s one of
those old school direct response people.
He’s been around back with Dan Kennedy,
Jeff Paul and all of those guys. He’s been
around for a million years.
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12. We were having a discussion the other day and he said that most people say the money is
in the back end. I alluded to the idea that you need to make sure that your numbers are
right. But the insight that he gave me was that you need to be focusing on your front end.
You create an automated back end system so you generate your products and create that
funnel and then you shift your attention across. You find out what the value of your client
is and by doing that, you figure out how much did we sell over a certain period of time and
how many clients did we have.
That way you can figure out the value of that client. Then you can say, right, if that is how
much they’re worth, how much money am I happy to spend to acquire that client? Then
you should just shift all of your focus onto lead generation. Make sure that back end is
there,, so for you guys who’ve got the marriage ceremonies and the paint protection, you
guys who already have the business, you know what your back end is. Now you just need
to focus on that front end lead generation and we’ll go through all those things and come
up with creative ways to do that.
Dave's hot tips
Some hot tips from me: competition is good. A lot of
people get scared off by competition. Don’t try and
find a niche that nobody is in. If nobody’s in it, there
is no money to be made. I don’t think you’re going
to stumble across something that someone hasn’t
seen before. I went after a very competitive niche,
the stock market, and I’ve done very well out of it.
Go for competition, that is where the money is.
High ticket is just as easy to sell as low ticket, sometimes easier. Going for that $17 e book
idea that I was talking about before, there really is not much difference between us selling
an $8,000 SEO package and a $17 e book. In fact, typically, it can be a lot easier because
the clients you’re going to be dealing with are higher quality clients and they’re not going
to quibble over $17 or $30 or whatever it is. So if you can sell higher ticket things, do it.
If you are looking for a niche, don’t go into internet marketing. I did just try it for a little bit
with the SEO method. Internet marketing crowd, I’m not such a fan of. I know you can
build a business there, a lot of people do. It is very competitive, refund rates are high,
especially if you’re selling things on ClickBank. Meagan and I know, we get amazing
feedback on our SEO method.
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13. Everybody watches it, they say, that’s gold, I’ve never seen it presented in a way like that,
yet our refunds are at about 50% on ClickBank. People can just sit there and ask for a
refund and not have to think about it and they didn’t even have to come to us to ask for a
refund. So internet marketing crowd is probably not the best business to go into. That’s
why we moved over to SEO which is more to do with local businesses.
Focus, focus, focus
It is important to make sure you focus. I
started off with fifty million things going on
at once. At any one time, like any serial
entrepreneur, you feel like you have ten
things on the go. The key where you’ll get
the biggest breakthroughs is, if you can push
everything aside and say, here is the one
business I’m focusing on and then build that
one business.
We’ve gone through a big process over the last twelve months of trying to cull all these
little side projects so we can make one channeled focus into something. You’ll have the
biggest breakthroughs when you do that. The example that I like to use is AAABBBCCC,
AAABBBCCC. Let’s say each one of those series of As, Bs and Cs is a project. Each project
will take one month to get to completion. For us to finish project A it will take us one
month.
If you’re going to start three projects in month one, and you get a little bit done of each
one, you’re not going to see any results until three months down the track. This is just on
the three month scale. We know we’re already a quarter of the way into this year and
you’re probably wondering, what just happened to the first part of the year? I had all these
exciting plans to get things done and we’re already a quarter in. Time moves really quickly.
This three months, blow that out to six months, twelve months. If you’re starting multiple
projects, you won’t get them through to completion.
The best thing you can do is start project 1, go through to completion, and get paid for it.
At the end of each of the projects you will get paid. It will help fund the next stage. Focus
is key and I’ve been guilty of that one.
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14. Just pick one
The final thing is I talked about some
information products, they are definitely a
good way to go. E commerce I’ve made
work, selling services. Like I said, there are
plenty of ways to skin a cat. You choose one
that is going to work for you. Just pick one.
80/20 rule
The 80:20 rule, just to sum up for this
section here. Quit looking for the Holy Grail.
Build something of value which I talked a
little bit about. Know your business model’s
numbers. You need to make sure you map it
out. There are a couple of worksheets at the
end of the slides through each of these sections. You need to be asking, how am I going to
apply this to what it is that I’m doing? You should start to model what is your funnel. Draw
a picture of it at the back of your workbook when you get a chance, saying, here are the
products and services I’m selling. Here are the back end services I’m selling.
See here if I can build in some sort of continuity or high end. If you have a high end, some
people just like to spend more with you because they like to get closer to what it is that
you’re doing. Give them that option. If you don’t give them that option, they’re not going
to buy your $10,000 package or whatever it may be.
Work on your best ideas as well. I had this thing where I’d put off my best ideas thinking I’ll
get to those, I’ll just get this base right. The best thing you can do is just start working on
your best ideas now. That needs to be your focus. That AA should be whatever your
biggest thing is that you think, yes, I’m going to make the biggest thing and I’m going to
start on that. Focus is the key to success.
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