In this episode, Ellen Violette shares her experience with Internet Marketing over the 15+ years that she’s been in business, and the surprising truths she’s learned that can help you to stop chasing shiny objects, simplify your marketing and focus on what really works!
Resources mentioned
Funnels using a Free + Shipping Offer Podcast
Books Business Abundance Facebook Group
3 Key Points
Marketing principles don’t change.
Human psychology doesn’t change.
When you market based on human psychology and solid marketing principles, you will succeed regardless of which tactics you employ.
Transcript
In this episode, Ellen Violette shares her experience with Internet Marketing over the 15+ years that she’s been in business, and the surprising truths she’s learned that can help you to stop chasing shiny objects, simplify your marketing and focus on what really works!
[00:01]: Hi, I’m Ellen Violette and this is Training #10. Today I want to talk about how the more things change and internet marketing, the more they stay the same. First, I want to share how I came to this. So, one of the cool things about the pandemic is that there’ve been a lot of really great opportunities to learn and grow your business both for free and courses that have been for sale. And I’ve done a lot of listening the last few months to amazing people that I follow and have bought courses from, including Russell Brunson, Suzanne Evans, Jeff Walker, and Eric Lofholm. And I recently had an epiphany.
I had heard many times that marketing principles don’t change; human psychology behavior don’t change. What changes is the tactics. And I finally understood at a gut level what they meant. The truth is that I had been following them in the early years of my online business, but then the Internet changed and social media blogs and video came in and I thought I didn’t know what to do.
[1:04]: I thought that it had passed me by. But then I realized that what I had done that made me successful in the early years actually still worked and that I had been following basic principles. I just didn’t realize that I had. So when I started, what I did would today be considered a funnel.
I gave away a free ebook and this was 2004 and people were actually saying at that time that the ebooks were dead and Kindle didn’t even exist yet. I had about 200 people on my list from networking offline and writing brochures, press releases, and web copy for people, but I got into a huge bonus giveaway and got 1600 people on my list in two weeks, and then I gave them what today would be called a “masterclass.” Back then, I called it a two-part teleseminar. As I said, remember there was no video.
[1:59]: This allowed me to share my knowledge and let people get that I really knew what I was talking about, and then upsell them to my first book-writing workshop. And that workshop sold for $197 on the early bird and $297 regular price. And today that is what Jeff Walker calls a seed launch where you have a new product and you put it out at a low price, and you get feedback, and you start, improving it, which is exactly what I did over time. And I learned what I was doing was right and what I was doing wrong. And I started to refine it after giving it that first time. And then, I started raising the price to reflect the value as I got incredible testimonials. And each time I gave it, I refined it, and I did that until I stopped getting requests for more changes. I then upsold people into my first book-marketing workshop. Today. This entire process, as I said, would be called a funnel.
[3:02]: I enlisted affiliates and I worked with joint-venture partners. This still works today. I continued to share great content through teleseminars on a regular basis. And as I said, we didn’t have blogs, we didn’t have social media, so teleseminars really well were my vehicle for sharing content. But as I said, the principles were the same, and I’d been doing it right all along.
[3:27] But when blogs came in and social media and video, what happened was that there were new ways of connecting, and I didn’t understand that even though there were new ways of connecting, guess what? Relationships are relationships, it doesn’t change. The old way still works too. I still did webinars. I still did email marketing. I still reached out to people. I still talk to people on the phone, and all these things work to this day. But I used a platform that wasn’t compatible with YouTube, so they needed to be redone and I still have some redoing to do on those.
[4:03]: But I still engage with my community and just in more and different ways. And I think what’s happened is people get overwhelmed because there are so many ways that you can do it now. But again, nothing’s changed in the sense that you’ve got third-party sites, you’ve got your email list, and even though a lot of people think that email is not that great, the truth is is that it’s the people who are on your email list who are the warmest audience and who tend to be most of your buyers.
[4:34] Plus, if all of a sudden a third party site goes down or they change their algorithms, you’re out of luck. So, you always want to have that email list so that you’re in control, and you always want to be list-building. And that doesn’t change either.
[4:50] And just to share how powerful and important this point is, I was listening to Russell Brunson actually yesterday in the One Funnel Away Challenge replays, which I’ve taken that a few times and it was talking about how all these guys got on the internet and found a quick way to make a lot of money in the early two-thousands, and then Google changed their algorithms, and they went from making millions to going out of business literally overnight.
[05:15]: And the reason was because Google ads went from like 25 cents a click to $3 a click. So it wasn’t cost-effective anymore for them to run ads. But Russell was able to stay in the business because he learned the principles of marketing from the greats, like Dan Kennedy and David Ogilvy. Principles that existed before the Internet. And again, they don’t change because human behavior doesn’t change. And it’s only the tactics that change.
And that’s why Russell now has a multimillion-dollar company and why funnels works because you can create offers that pay you to market instead of you paying to market. And that’s what he did while the other guys were not using those principles and were playing the game that Google wanted to play. And if you want to learn more about, uh, how, how the funnels work, I actually talked about this on the podcast with Alex Branning in Episode 8, so you can listen to that at http://ellenlikes.com/book-funnel. And that’s all lower case http://ellenlikes.com/book-funnel.
[6:29] So, don’t get caught up in the jargon, and the latest tactics, and the shiny objects. Figure out what you like to do and what you can be consistently doing. Pick a strategy and stick to it, because the basics never change, the principles never change, and those who stick with them succeed.
So, that’s it for today. Until next time, bye-bye.
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