I’ve never been mugged before and I didn’t notice it this time until it was over.
I was in a dodgy part of town buying a sandwich on my way to meet a techy about business. I stopped at a petrol station to get some money from the ATM machine. I picked up a sandwich first then went to the machine and put in my card and my number.
As my cash came out a little bloke came approached me from the left and shoulder charged me.
At least I think he shoulder charged me. I’m pretty sure he didn’t trip and fall against me because I saw him change direction and lunge towards me.
He was quite a bit smaller than me though and he bounced off me.
I said ‘what??’
He mumbled something and went back to a waiting car containing two other men. At this point my brain clicked to ‘on’ and I realised what had happened. I got back in my car, locked the doors and drove off.
I think the moral is you can’t afford to be subtle if you’re a mugger.
And true to form, and to tie this post in with Internet Marketing, I’ve been guilty of ‘gentle mugging’ in the past.
I have a minisite in another niche – nothing to do with IM – and it’s basically a content site. I bought some REALLY good PLR and rewrote it and filled the minisite with the content. So I ended up with a very informative site within this particular niche which gets a lot of traffic.
The next step of course was to monetize it which I did with Ads that sort of looked like Google Ads but were ads for related Clickbank products netting me 50-75% of each sale but without the hassle that Adsense sometimes brings (an example of hassle would be that you can’t control which ads show and if the product is crap you get backlash from unhappy customers).
At least with my Clickbank products I could buy them and read them myself so I knew they were of a certain quality.
But I was making few sales.
To cut a long story short it took me AGES to realise that my ads were far too subtle, and I wasn’t telling people to go and buy the products.
So I changed the look of the page and put the affiliate links into the actual content itself, and removed the sidebar ads. I also told people, again in the content of the page, ‘Look – if you’re looking for a definitive guide for *****’ buy this book and gave them the link. I almost shoved it up their noses, I was THAT obvious.
And it worked.
And it still is.
So if you’re struggling to sell, whether it’s in the IM niche or whichever niche is your ‘thing’ then get bold, blunt and brassy.
Tell people to buy.
Don’t be embarrassed about it or ‘fanny about’ as a mate of mine is fond of saying, tell people to buy. Be proud of your products and wave them in front of your customers.
It works.
Unlike the prat who tried to relieve me of my wallet last week.
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