I remember when I first got into the business of internet marketing I was completely focused on entering markets where there was either no or very little competition. Bad idea. Now I love competition. I love competitive markets because that is where you will find the money. In addition, competitive markets are a great place to learn new, leading-edge internet marketing strategies.
Marketers who are succeeding at a high level in competitive markets are great teachers, even if they don’t realize it. A terrific way to learn internet marketing is to simply reverse engineer the marketing campaigns of these successful online business builders.
Look at the Adwords ads and Facebook ads in your market. Who is selling what? What do their sales funnels look like? Are they focusing on generating leads or are they trying to sell directly from the ad? Once they generate the lead, how are they monetizing the lead?
Look at the top ranked sites in your market. Get on their lists and study their email campaigns. How are they list building? What are they offering their subscribers? How are they differing themselves from others in the marketplace? Do they have any recurring income streams in their business models? Are they working the back-end (i.e. are they selling anything after the initial sale)? Are they up-selling and/or down-selling?
Study everything these successful internet markets do. Remember, success leave tracks. Learn from them and model them. Then look for ways to do it better and look for ways where you can add more value to the marketplace.
“I believe that we as marketers can learn more by watching successful marketers work than we can by purchasing the latest “Guru” e-book or $2000 course. The marketplace is a great teacher. But in order to learn you must first become a serious student.”
Many of today’s leading internet marketers owe much of their success to the legends of direct marketing. I’m talking about legends like Claude Hopkins, John Caples, Joe Sugarman, Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbert, Robert Collier, Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and Dr. Robert Cialdini. The modern day gurus have studied these legends and then applied their time-tested direct marketing principles to online marketing.
Here’s an idea: The next time an internet marketing expert has a $2,000 product launch, get on his (or her) list and study every aspect of the launch. Learn how he markets. Believe me, it can be very educational.
Then go to Amazon and invest $20 in a classic from Claude Hopkins, Robert Cialdini, Dan Kennedy or Joe Sugarman. This is the way I look at it: You can either spend $2,000 on an over-hyped internet marketing product or you can invest $20 and learn directly from the master who taught the internet marketing guru. I believe you will find the later to be much more educational and a lot less expensive.
The key is to always be learning. Remember, even the great teachers continue to be great students.
All the best,
Jon
P.S. As I have become more interested in learning SEO I find it very educational to reverse engineer the page one rankings of the top sites in my chosen markets. Again, very educational and it does not cost me a dime.
I will be doing a post in the near future on how I reverse engineer the SEO of top ranked sites in Google. Be sure to subscribe to Web Business Research and this post on “How To Reverse Engineer Top Ranked Sites in Google” will hit your inbox as soon as I publish it to this blog.
Hello,
You say in your article: “A terrific way to learn internet marketing is to simply reverse engineer the marketing campaigns of these successful online business builders.”
A better way is to have one of these successful internet markets become your mentor and follow their teaching.
Michel:
First of all, thank you for responding to the post. I greatly appreciate it.
Yes, you can become successful by finding the “right” mentor and then follow that mentor’s teachings. I agree with you there. But the point of the post is that you can also get a terrific internet marketing education “without spending a dime” simply by watching how these successful marketers market.
Mentors can be expensive — and not everyone who is in this business has the money to purchase a coaching program from someone who knows what they are doing. Then there is the challenge of finding the right mentor.
Michel — I do both. I belong to an excellent marketing forum run by James Schramko and Andy Grand called Super Fast Results. These guys are my mentors along with some other very successful people in that forum. I learn a lot from the people inside Super Fast Results, but I also get a great internet marketing education by watching how other successful marketers market (and this education is free).
For example, Frank Kern is a brilliant marketer who is now selling a $10,000 coaching program on how to build successful businesses by promoting your product with webinars. $10K is a ton of money, especially for someone who is relatively new to internet marketing. But even if you don’t have $10,000 for Frank’s coaching, you can still reverse engineer his marketing campaign and get a great online marketing education simply by “studying” how Frank Kern markets.
I know this to be true: Even the most successful people in this business are always learning, and one of the ways they learn is by watching how other people market. Dan Kennedy has been doing this for more than 30 years.
Mentors can be expensive- Truer words have never been spoken.