The Perry Marshall Marketing Letter

Volume 6, Issue 3

The Yin and The Yang of

Media and Traffic Expertise
The Yin: If your entire business is dependent upon one source of traffic,
one advertising medium, your business is a train wreck waiting to
happen.

The Yang: If you are really, truly proficient at the use of one source of
traffic, one form of advertising media, you can always cherry pick
lucrative advertising opportunities and make money, regardless of what is
going on in the market.
Most direct- and online-marketing success stories I’ve seen over the last ten years have this in
common: The entrepreneur became extremely proficient at the use of ONE sales channel and
used it to develop a firm foothold in a desperately competitive marketplace.

The ones who went on to experience sustained and prolonged success rapidly expanded into
other media, other opportunities, and new dimensions of value so as not to be dependent upon that
one beginning advantage long-term.

During my stint as sales manager at Synergetic (my last Dilbert Cube post) the initial
advantage we had was a steady flow of online leads. It was already in place before I got there and
we worked to strengthen and improve it. It was always there. It was the backbone of the company’s
success the whole time. But we quickly added other things: We had this geeky little Slide Chart that
‘went viral’ at a trade show and generated leads and publicity for us for three more years.

A couple of years after I started, I made it my mission to become proficient at playing the PR
game with magazine and trade journal editors and getting articles published. Within six months I had
mastered that craft and we got well over 100 pages of press exposure in a single year in a tiny niche,
an extraordinary accomplishment. This in turn made it easy to start my present consulting firm.

We also became very effective at using our reps and distributors and working with them to
penetrate target accounts. One such rep – the one in Detroit, which if you’re in manufacturing is the
#1 market by far – generated about 20% of the company’s business from ONE key account.

That backbone of online lead generation was a stone for the stone soup. Everything else
crystallized around it and added synergy to something that was already fundamentally workable.
Each of these media opportunities enhanced the others.

That early advantage of online lead generation was pretty thin and fragile. This was late ’97
after all. The Internet was a rather small place then. Still, it generated excitement and momentum
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and a steady trickle of new sales opportunities for me every single day. That alone was enough to
transform my own personal experience as a sales person. It relieved me of cold calling and liberated
me to work in my strength area, which was the consultative sale.

The power of one opportunity, one crack in the sidewalk where a seed successfully
takes root, cannot be overstated. Roundtable member Julie Brumlik owns the company Dremu
Skin Care. Julie struggled mightily to get Dremu off the ground, selling via Department Stores. She
got her product into the makeup counters of major stores but sales were sabotaged by the gals
behind the counter who are employed not by the stores but by the cosmetics companies. They would
always manage to sell their own wares instead of Dremu and Julie lost a lot of money.

Julie’s first crack in the sidewalk was Google. She started using AdWords and her sales
immediately took off. Julie’s staff is now extremely proficient at the use of Google. But that’s not her
only sales channel. She also gets sales through the purchase of remnant space in large newspapers
with full page ads, a strategy developed by Gary Halbert.

Print advertising of this kind is one of Gary’s areas of great expertise, and Gary carries this out
as a joint venture partner. Julie and team are also constantly experimenting with sources of email
promotion sources; publicity opportunities; cultivation of relationships with their own email list; and
Search Engine Optimization.

If you pay attention (as well you should!) you will notice that my own business – both the parts
that have to do with selling AdWords information and the parts that don’t – is only about 20%
dependent on AdWords. The other 80% of our business comes from:

• Ongoing relationships via e-mail and snail-mail with people who opted in 2, 3, 4, even 5 years
ago
• Affiliates
• Snail-mail follow-up (Just got an order from a guy who received the CD 3 years ago and finally
listened to it… and listened to it again, called to get some questions answered and bought)
• Sales of my bookstore book, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
• Media publicity from articles and interviews with people like USA Today
• Word of mouth and reputation
• Banner ads
• Search Engine Optimization
• Articles in other peoples’ e-zines
• Teleseminars and joint ventures with other marketers
• Radio interviews
• Speaking opportunities at live seminars
• Press releases

It’s a wonderful thing not to be dependent on any one thing. Absolutely wonderful. And it’s
important to realize that each of these things feeds the other. Do you remember my “Expanding
Universe Theory”? The one where you start with AdWords and then do other Pay Per Clicks and
SEO and then Affiliates and then print advertising and so on, step by step until you dominate the
world?

Notice how the Expanding Universe Theory has a built in diversification factor, and its
attendant stability. Eventually people hear about you everywhere they go and if a competitor decides

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to take you on in any one media, they have to go up against the synergies you’ve developed in all the
other media combined. You become a formidable opponent.

In one of my Roundtable groups (Roundtable is my highest level coaching group, an exclusive,

$14,000 per year Mastermind forum that meets three times per year) I have a member who spends
$10,000 a day on Google; another who spends $15,000 a day, and another who spends $25,000 a
day. That’s right, do the math – that’s $3 to $10 million per year of clicks. And in case you’re
wondering, yes, these guys are making a ton of dough. Every day.

In one or two of these cases, the massive ad spend is an outgrowth of a wildly successful
product offering and promotional strategy and fine-tuned sales funnel. But for all three there is also
an extreme proficiency in the art of Google advertising. If any of these guys got shut down today they
could, within a week or two, be up and running in some completely different business and/or market
and already be on their way to success.

When the music stops, will you still have a chair to sit down in?
When you know one media really, really well, you can always make money as a Joint Venture
partner, as an affiliate or as a consultant. Because even if that media has experienced a giant
implosion you’re still in the top 1%.

Notice that whether you do the Yin, the Yang, or embrace both, the secret to long-lived
success is diversity. The greatest thing about all of this is that you can have the best of both worlds.
You can be tremendously adept at the use of a particular kind of media, always knowing how to
leverage it both for yourself and for other people; this can even bring you interesting relationships with
your competitors.

Jaco Bolle is a Personal AdWords Coaching grad from Canada who became so good at using
AdWords and doing testing and tracking that his competitor came to him on bended knee and asked
him if he would consider working something out. Jaco’s sales funnel was literally 20X more effective.

It’s almost certain that Jaco will be able to expand his business even more, incorporating the
competitor’s product line into an even larger sales machine, because of his media expertise.

At the same time there is nothing that stops him from diversifying into other forms of online
and offline media, making his business diverse, stable, immune from outside attacks, and having the
cumulative effect of all those touches in his market. People see his ad in a magazine, they click on
his online ad while they’re surfing, they hear about it through a news release, one of their friends
mentions it … a powerful reinforcement effect begins to occur.

Roundtable Member Jeff Hughes has built an extraordinary business from zero to 40
employees in about 3 years. He quit his day job less than two years ago. He started just with
AdWords, which at the time was a tenuous and slight advantage.

He managed to turn $15,000 a month of losses into $16,000 a month of profit. His advantage
in AdWords was so slight it was downright scary. But in that thin spread of profit and that narrow time
window… before others caught on to what he was doing, he took off running. He added a powerful
telemarketing operation to supplement his company’s sales, both inbound and outbound.

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 Sometimes Google would hassle him about certain things. One time they slashed and burned
thousands of keywords, disabling him for some kind of technicality. Took him a couple of weeks to
straighten it out. You’d better diversify fast, Jeff, because being dependent on that one thing is not a
good thing. I warned him. He didn’t miss the hint. He doesn’t need any more warnings now, he’s very
diverse.

Jeff started experimenting with direct mail. Also started doing online chat to improve his
conversions and as a matter of fact now his company takes its specialty in the medium of inbound
telemarketing and online chat and sells it to other companies. Website for this service is
www.consultsales.com.

But the Secret to Making ANY and ALL of This Work Is…
…a deep sales funnel. Let’s say you want to go into a brutally competitive market. One where
there’s hundreds of advertisers competing for the same keywords; where the clicks or print ads or lists
are expensive; where there’s a ton of money and lots of people fighting for it.

I can tell you how to get right to the top of the heap. It’s really simple. A sales funnel that
goes deep underground.

Don’t just try to make the “easy” one-time sale, which usually isn’t all that easy anyway.
Collect a lead and then follow up. Not just once or twice… write 20 or 30 autoresponder messages.
(So few people do that, this all by itself puts you miles ahead of the competition.) Send a CD or DVD
or software package in the mail. And a follow-up package. (This can be automated.) Do
teleseminars or use video. Call them on the phone. (Imagine that!)

Don’t just sell one item. Sell a string of items. Sell an ongoing membership. Create an entire
underground railroad, such that the home page on your website can barely do justice to the great city
that thrives below the surface. Create a cult experience that engenders a cult following. A world with
its own rituals and hand signals. Nobody can compete with a Secret Society.

As usual this month’s print newsletter is short because it’s a CD Interview month; on even
months I do the full 16 page format. This month’s CD is with Neil Waterhouse of the Waterhouse
Report. Listen as Neil sounds off on:

• The Basics of Making Money Online

• The four kinds of online businesses, pros and cons of each
• The power of testing, and some interesting places where you can go to see what's effective
• The overlooked power of Ebay: What most Google advertisers don't know about generating
cash and high volume, fast
• Entrepreneurial Thinking: The fast track to what really works

Some of us ‘sophisticated’ online marketers could be tempted to turn our noses up at eBay,
but there’s a lot to be learned by studying successful eBay auctions. And for most of us there are
selling opportunities on eBay itself, some of which will prove to be quite lucrative. Enjoy my
conversation with Neil.

Perry Marshall

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