Direct Response

If you’re running a continuity campaign, and one of your clients cards comes back declined, I highly recommend you place them in a email chain with a daily reminder to update their card.  Here’s some good copy that is sure to get their attention (I wouldn’t worry too much about pissing them off, they owe you money):

Subject:  ACTION REQUIRED – Client Name

Body:

Client Name -

This email is automated and will be sent to you daily until the issue directly below is resolved.

Notes: Month Day, Year payment has failed for Client Name or Company Name. Please update your credit card within 48 business hours. We appreciate your immediate attention.

To update your credit card information, please fill out this form: www.FormToUpdateCard”

Thank you,

Accounting
Your Company Name
555-555-5555

The real trick in this payment failure notice is to make sure there’s no unsubscribe button.  The daily reminders will surely cause a reaction, which more often than not is a payment update

We use Stormpost to send out these emails.  This will not work well with programs like iContact of Constant Contact, you really need to own your own IPs

It also helps considerably to have a collections agent calling the client daily!!!

The Only Verticals I Enter Are Those In Which A Ceiling Does Not Exist – Rich Gorman

One of the most profitable industries in the world is health & beauty.  Given a bad rap online by unscrupulous pushers of Acai & Skin, this multibillion industry is not only here to stay, it’s actually growing!!!

Indeed, we witnessed the rise and fall of many CPA networks, which were primarly powered by overly agressive marketers of nutra.  i.e.  Industry gians such as Epic Direct, who were HUGE players in the nutra space 2 years ago, are now DEAD IN THE WATER.  Now that the dust has settled, and these CPA networks are dying off, where are health & beauty advertisers getting their traffic from?

The answer is simple:  the same places they’ve always bought traffic from.

Tier-1 Health & Beauty brands have direct access to the best traffic sources in the world.  These groups have vertically integrated media buyers that spend their days placing ads and watching stats.  While some of these groups work with a few high-volume affiliates, they’ve almost all pulled the plugs on the networks.  Examples of such advertisers are:

Intelligent Beauty

Guthy | Renker

ACMG

Beach Body

Hungry Fish Media

It’s no secret that I am a HUGE fan of health and beauty offers.  Working directly with the most prolific marketers of health and beauty, I can tell you that these guys are exceptionally gifted….  i.e.  When I took Zac Johnson through ACMGs 480 seat call-center, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Hudson River, even Zac was floored.  If you are an ingenious marketer and are looking to build a business from your garage that you can scale into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, then health and beauty is the way to go.

In this post I’m going to provide you with direct advice on how some of the largest advertisers in the world build nutra offers.  These steps are expensive and take a lot of time to complete.  But if you follow my advice, and are willing to invest a lot of time and money in a successful offer, then you’ll not only position yourself to make millions of dollars, BUT ALSO KEEP IT

9 Steps To Creating A Compliant Nutra Offer – THAT CONVERTS!

1.  Many of the advertisers I listed above work directly with Venable.  The main FDA contact at Venable is Todd Harrison, who is a master at creating formulas with clinically-proven ingredients for his clients.  Todd will get you hooked up with a solid formula – he’s one of the few attorneys who actually gets it!  Here’s his info:

Todd Harrison
202-279-1514
202-344-4000
TAHarrison @ Venable.com.

2.  Once you have your formula in hand, place an order at wholesale costs via At Cost Fulfillment.  Also have ACF set you up with a fulfillment account that will provide you with postal rates.  Big savings!  Here’s ACF’s info:

At Cost Fulfillment
800-277-6096

3.  Run a controlled test via ITG.  ITG is an INDEPENDANT group of doctors that will recruit human guinea pigs that have no material connection to your offer – sorry, using your mom and best friend’s testimonial won’t hold up too well in Federal Court   ITG will get you some awesome testimonials, videos, before & afters, and other REAL marketing material for your offer.  These guys rock!!!

To reach out to ITG, contact:

Ed Gaut
714-850-9777
egaut @ detauginc.com

4.  Once you have a few dozen testimonials w/ videos & pics, have DRA buildout THE ABSOLUTELY BEST lander / presale page (w/copy) / banners.  NOTE: design is usually 3-4 weeks backed up due to existing projects.  Ron Gamble runs the show, and if you don’t already know, he’s the designer of the new top mast on DirectResponse.net + Avatars + hundreds of sick direct response pages that you’ve seen around.

Direct Response Agency
Ron Gamble
Ron @ DirectResponse.net

5.  Run a full FTC / Visa compliance review via Tom Cohn.

For those of you don’t know Tom, he is the former regional director of the FTC and has successfully represented a number direct marketers who got in trouble with the FTC.  Tom will run a full scan of your sites and recommend changes.  I strongly encourage you to make all of the changes he suggest.  If you have a superior product (Todd will set you in the right direction) then it is easy to procure awesome testimonials.

Procure documents from Tom Cohn for traffic vendors so you can PROVE that your offer is compliant.

Tom Cohn
917-701-1960
Thomas.Cohn @ LeClairRyan.com

6.  Setup a LL account.  If you need integration help DRA will assist.

7.  Utilize Rick Del Rio’s exclusive rolodex of merchant processors.  This list is reserved for LL clients only.  Very useful contacts.

8.  Take your compliance documentation to the direct traffic sources.  We recommend the following:

-  EngageBDRs First Impression

- EngageBDRs managed buys (you better be an experienced advertiser of you will lose your a$$)

- Ads Direct

- Jumble Berry

- WamMedia

- Facebook: get legal involved and stay persistent to get on this channel.  Do not shortcut by cloaking.

- Google

- Advertising.com

- Mazzel Media

9.  Monetize Your Data.

It is best to monetizer your own data:

Email Monetization – Stormpost

Direct Mail – Build It Internally

Call Center – Build It Internally

If you can’t monetize your own data, use King Monetizer.

Remember the old saying:  any fool can make a million dollars, but it takes a wise man to keep it.  Get your offers compliant and sleep with both eyes closed

P.S.  There’s a lot of advertisers that are still pushing hard Acai that do not run into troubles with the law.  Here’s 2 business models that are extremely successful and have been around for a long time:

http://www.aprovenproduct.com/acailand.php?t=gae2acai&gclid=CKjYgemI_68CFUZN4AodayxoGg

http://www.markethealth.com/banner.php?sid=602

Disclaimer: I have included some companies in this post that we have a stake in.  We provide services to several of the largest advertisers in the world and truly believe that our services are far superior to that of our competition.  While we are by far the most expensive on design and copy out there, our pages convert.  RE fulfillment & contract manufacturing, the savings passed over to the client combined with the efficiency of the operation, make us the preferred vendor amongst the highest volume merchants.

Thank you to all of my family, business partners, dear friends, and colleagues that hosted the best birthday party in the world.   You are all so great and I am eternally thankful.

Life is an amazing journey.  When you reject mediocrity by seeking true excellence, you are sure to have anything but a normal life.  Cheers to defying the odds, risk taking, following our hearts, and unwavering faith in our dreams!!!

P.S.  Cheers to Mark, Erica, and Emily from our Savannah team.  Shoot over pics ASAP so we can add to this post!!!

Google just loves to keep SEOs on their toes!!!  A few weeks ago Google rolled out the Penguin Update, which essentially targeted aggressive anchor-text link building and the relevancy of where links are coming from.  If you have too many anchor texts for 1 keyword OR there’s too many links from non-relevant sites, there’s a good chance your site will get penalized.

Negative SEO is essentially “search engine optimization” that hurts websites.  A little counterintuitive, as SEO is supposed to increase the rankings of your website!   In fact, Negative SEO is usually an effect that inexperienced SEOs experience after buying links from bad neighborhoods or utilizing software programs such as SENuke to build links.

It is also a tactic used by unscrupulous competitors to harm the rankings of competing sites.  Historically Negative SEO involved hacking sites or sending fake DMCA takedown request.   With the recent Penguin update, though, Negative SEO has taken on a new meaning: competitors can roll-out negative SEO campaigns designed to have your site penalized.

If you’re enjoying high rankings for competitive keywords, then it’s time to start watching out for the following Negative SEO attacks:

1.  Thousands of Exact Match Anchor Text Links From Forum Spam

Keep a close eye on the links that are pointing to your website.   With the Penguin update, you could lose your rankings if a competitor started building thousands of anchor-text links to your site via forum & comment spam.

The best way to counter this is to focus your link-building efforts on sites with strong domain authority.  Quality over quantity.

2.  Review Attacks

Competitors can easily add fake reviews to your business listings, making it look like you are trying to manipulate the listing.

If you are receiving false reviews, make sure you report this to Google ASAP via the “report a problem” section.

3.  Fake Legal Shots

This Negative SEO tactic has been around for years.    After running a link report on your site, a competitor can identify your strongest links.   From there a “fake” legal notice will go out to the website linking back to you requesting that the link go down or else legal action will ensue.  These legal takedowns usually come in the form of C&D or DMCA requests.

4.  Ripping Content Prior To Indexing

Another common Negative SEO tactic is to rip your content the moment it goes live and add it to a site that is crawled sooner than your site is.   This makes your site look like it’s duplicating content.

A great way to combat this is by keeping an updated sitemap & consistently resubmitting new content when published.

5.  Malicious Crawlers

Bots will send out crawlers to cause latency issues for users on a website.

The best way to combat this is to discover the IP addresses that Google, Yahoo, and Bing are using to crawl your website.  Then you can start blocking crawlers in IP ranges that outside of the major search engines.

All-in-all, it looks like Google is placing a larger onus on website owners to practice White-Hat SEO & monitor their websites.  It should be exciting to see how the Penguin update pans out, as it opened up a whole new world to Black-Hat SEOs to start going after sites that follow Google’s best practices.

This is one of those posts that I’m hesitant to put live.  My gut instinct says it will come back to haunt me somewhere down the road, nevertheless I JUST HAVE to give this to you.  Enjoy:

You are about to learn a few simple tactics that you can utilize to demolish your competition.  I strongly suggest that you consult with a seasoned anti-trust attorney prior to putting anything you learn in this post into play.

When Competition Is Weak, Create More Competition (that you own)

CASE STUDY:  Lapel Pins & Badges Online

Any time people Google custom pins, badges, key-chains, or medallions, there’s a 99.99% chance that they’ll find one of my associate’s websites.  Each URL is setup as an exclusive entity, with a different template, address, number, price structure, and customer service rep fielding calls.  The only similarity is that all sites run from 2 separate call centers that are partitioned into different sections/businesses – hence each site has dedicated reps in order to avoid intermingling calls.

These sites are all owned by 1 operator:

www.LapelPinsRus.com
www.PinsRUs.com
www.WholeSalePins.com
www.PinMart.com
www.LapelPins.com
www.PinSource.com
www.StockPins.com

NOTE:  There’s around 20 other iterations that are ranked organically & running media.

When my associate launched these sites there were 1 or 2 soon-to-be fossil competitors lingering in the space.  After a pilot test of 1 lander he quickly realized this was a vertical that he could completely dominate.  Game on!

Over the next few years he built out site after site, launching them THE MOMENT they were completed.  His competitors DID NOTHING in response.  Perhaps they had gotten fat, lazy, and happy after years of auto-piloting their pin sites while cruising around the world or doing whatever it was they they were doing.  It’s all good until real competition enters your industry.  Just ask Ace Hardware about Home Depot or Circuit City about Best Buy

Big Things Happen While People Sleep

Indeed, the silence was deafening.  Over a period of 36 months the historic leaders in the lapel pin vertical COMPLETELY LOST their yield.  With no market yield, their entire business soon rested on repeat customers.  The historic customer base slowly dwindled away as the educated consumers “discovered” new, cost-effective alternatives to their historic supplier.

In the end my associate ended up buying out his top competitor while the rest of the competition went out of business/became irrelevant.  The Weak Are Killed and The Injured Are Eaten.

3 KEY TACTICS to monopolizing your vertical:

1.  Build Out 20-30 Unique Landers/E-Commerce Stores/Lead Gens

In order to capture the entire market, it’s important to create multiple roads back to your business.  There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all to marketing.

Some consumers like to buy off of simple landers with a telephone number, others prefer elaborate e-commerce sites.  Create dozens URLs, each with different color schemes, variations, feels, etc.   Utilize the entire spectrum of motifs, from austere to comical.  Take your time and build-out each site to perfection – don’t shortcut quality for quantity.

2.  Buy Up All Media

Take your top 4-10 sites (depending on your budget) and start buying all the media placements.  Auto-bid as high as possible, even if you are initially losing money.  It’s not anti-competitive, it’s ULTRA COMPETITIVE.  Your raising the bar in the industry that you’re about to own, right?

Make sure you setup each account from a separate IP address (ESPECIALLY on Google, Yahoo, and Bing) and use a separate name/credit card number. Do NOT use a proxy, sophisticated traffic sources will catch you.  You actually need to do it from mutually exclusive geographic locations.

If possible use a different computer to setup each account (digital fingerprinting), but if not possible, make sure you clear the cache on yours – there’s still a risk that you’ll get flagged.

VERY IMPORTANT:  Stay disciplined to NEVER open up your advertising account outside of the geographic location in which you opened it.  If you happen to slip up and open the account from a location where you are running another account, then you will likely get flagged and have your account shutdown.

3.  Create Price Differentials

Bait-the-hook to suit-the-fish.  Pricing psychology is key in markets.  Remember that there’s consumers who ALWAYS look to purchase the highest dollar items, while others are bargain shoppers.

I suggest setting up as many pricing models as possible: continuity, non-continuity, shopping carts, call-in orders only, long-term contracts, high-end, and low-end pricing.  Then test out multiple variations of each model and optimize to gain FULL MARKET YIELD!!!

In most niches it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sued for what some deem as “anti-competitive” behavior unless you’re a behemoth like Microsoft.   Enjoy market dominance!

P.S.  There’s a lot more that I didn’t reveal, but the above is a good start.