Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It!

©2009 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, that’s my new mantra for going forward with our Internet marketing for 2010 – Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It! Harsh maybe, but it fits the times…

I’m not any sort of licensed financial adviser, accountant or lawyer, so this isn’t a professional take on the economy. But after being in business for over 35 years, I feel I’ve learned to spot trends and many of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ plays in the economy. And it’s lead me to a nasty conclusion…

I’m starting to think that what we’re seeing at the moment ISN’T merely a recession – it’s the new reality. Think about it for a moment…

The Dow is back above 10k, the TSE is back over 11k; in many cases corporate profits are back where they were, and big financial companies now have their ownership in fewer hands – in short, the rich and the poor are back where they were, and power & money are concentrated in fewer hands now.

That leaves the middle class – leaves them in tatters. Companies have shed over 1 million jobs in North America – so their costs dropped more than their sales, leaving them in profit and a million people out of work. In January or February a Macleans Magazine poll showed 80% of Canadian respondents expected to be with the same company until retirement – don’t think this is what they meant though…

I don’t want to dwell on the negatives, though, so let’s just sum it all up – what we’ve really seen is the biggest transfer of wealth in recorded history, with over $750 BILLION in taxpayers’ money being shifted to the pockets of rich shareholders. And to my mind, that’s just too big a drain on the middle class for the economy to rebound in the near future, if at all.

And worse yet, the public spirit has been broken by it all, as evidenced by the legislation and taxes Canada & the US have pushed through with almost nary a peep out of the public…

But I digress… Whether you believe what I do or think it’s a recession we’ll bounce magically back from through brilliant government maneuvering or corporate generosity, no one can deny that the playing field has changed – and that some changes are warranted in the way we do business online. While I don’t think we’ve yet to hit the ‘Golden Age of Internet Marketing‘, I do think work-at-home professionals need to kick it up a few notches to get back to what they were earning a year ago, and even more if they want to achieve their dream lifestyle.

And that’s what lead me to decide it was time for me to ‘Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It!’ Does this mean more time and effort is now required to make it online? In some cases, yes – Internet marketers who have been coasting for the last few years on their achievements 5 years ago will now be left behind if they don’t take action. Those who made their name just on one or two big JV launches might actually have to work now too…

Not all will be able to adjust quickly enough – and many who already made a fortune online will decide it’s time to retire or look for profits offline instead. Witness the number of ‘Gurus’ that have recently told their lists they’re now going to be pursuing other avenues – or have suddenly just disappeared. Or those you hadn’t heard from in months who now suddenly bombard you every time there’s a new launch.

But all is not bleak – the leaderboards are populated with a lot of new names these days, alongside a few of us who have already begun changing our style. They’ve come up through the ranks quickly this year, and what separates them most from the old guard is their focus on list-building. Yes, everyone talks list-building, but most have let it slip a lot in the last few years as their increased income made it less necessary to keep hustling so crazily. Not these new leaders – these guys & gals are ad swapping and pushing giveaways like mad to build their lists.

And therein lies one of the keys to protecting our income online – all things being equal, doubling the number of targeted prospects on your opt-in lists should double your sales. You may need more than double or less to maintain and build your income from your Internet marketing business, but you won’t find out unless you start building it full-speed again, like you were when you first started online.

So that’s one way to protect your income and grow your online business without needing to put in more hours and effort – do an audit on your current time usage, and switch the time you’re already using on less profitable efforts to using it to find creative ways to get more targeted prospects onto your lists and into your profit funnel… It takes no more effort to broadcast your e-zine to 20,000 than to 10,000 – and if you’re using a service like the autoresponders at Hosting4Marketers.com it doesn’t even cost any more.

A second way to put that under-productive time to better use is to test and tweak your salespages a la Marlon Sanders – test out 2 or 3 different headlines for a bit, then stick with the one that converts best, and use it with 2 or 3 different body styles – graphics vs no graphics, paragraphs vs bullet points, video vs no video, etc. Again, stick with the winner. Upping your conversion rate from .5% to 1% or from 2% to 4% may not sound like a big deal, but it doubles your sales and profits without any additional ongoing efforts!

A third way to boost your Internet marketing profits is to use that time to get more targeted traffic to your sites, salespages, blogs and affiliate links. If you are converting 1% of 500 visitors a day, your profits double when you convert 1% of 1,000 visitors a day, right? All that changed was how many targeted prospects landed on the page you wanted them to…

Sure, everyone claims to be great at driving traffic – right up til I ask them what SEO tweaks they’ve done in the last month, when they last wrote and submitted an article, how many podcasts they have in the iTunes directory or how many video hosting sites they have videos on… ;-)

Without even giving up all of our secrets, Willie Crawford and I spent over 3 hours teaching people 15 different ways to drive more targeted traffic for free – how many of them are YOU currently using? Think you’ve covered all the bases for driving traffic? Then when was the last time you did keyword research before writing your next blog post to be sure it would pull all it could?

There are a lot more ways you can double your results, but those three are the simplest and most likely the ones you already know but have slacked off on… Me? I intend to do all 3 and a lot more – but focus on one til it’s accomplished, then the next, then the next. The multiplier effect to doing all 3 will be more than enough to make it all worthwhile and keep our online business growing… The biggest accomplishment will be in automating the tasks so they continue to pull results while I go on to the next technique.

One final tip – get all the free education you can on every aspect of the business, use free resources marketers like Jeff Dedrick, Mike Filsaime and Lee McIntyre are offering, and get to every live Internet marketing event you can, both for the content and for the networking, which is often more immediately profitable than the sessions!

And if you want more direct help from me personally, introduce yourself to Teri & me at Mark Hendricks’ Internet Super Stars Conference in Orlando, Florida in January 2010… I’m both speaking and running a hands-on workshop at that event – my topic? PowerStart 2010! Think that fits? ;-)

Even if you can’t make the event, grab a free membership at Mark’s site and listen to the recorded interviews Mark did with each of the speakers – it’s like getting a mini-version of the event for free!

And please, re-tweet this post and leave your comments below – Thanks!

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