Lead Funnels: Lessons in Leverage – Week 2

Focus and Leverage

My keywords for last week were Focus and Leverage. This week the focus was lead funnels

I was reminded of focus and leverage in two ways over the last couple of days. Firstly was this quote from my friend Michael Devlin from Glasgow who runs an Internet Marketing business focused on branded physical products. Hard to believe that it is over a year since we had lunch together on the shores of Loch Lomond.

One of the biggest misconceptions about success online is that unless you are suffering, unless you are grinding, unless you are working every hour of every day and posting about it on Instagram or Facebook then you’re either not working hard enough or not that successful at what you do.

I can categorically confirm that this ideology is utter bullshit and is an unhealthy misunderstanding for our young business minds of tomorrow.

Successful people don’t work flat out, they work smart and the secret to success online is nothing more than discovering precisely what that definition of working smart actually is.

As I look back at what I have been doing in Internet Marketing over the last 5 years since I began I can safely say I am in neither of the camps

• I have not been grinding or working every hour of every day
• I have not been working smart

Grinding is really easy to do. There are so many things that have to come together to get started, to build traction and to keep building. There is so much innovation in all three areas of the Internet Marketing Engine that there is always a new shiny object to bring in and to grind away on. It is never ending. Add in a lack of FOCUS and one has the perfect ingredients for a life of misery working every hour of the day and every day of the week.

The hard part of the Internet marketing industry is that there are very few people teaching one how to be smart and how to work smart. This all starts with a lack of strategic frameworks and a focus on which button to press. It continues with a lack of teaching on what things to place priority on – they all tell your their version of what is the right thing to do. Don’t get me wrong there are tons of things that have to be right. But what the working smart camp is all about is working out what has to be right and when it has to be right.

I chatted over lunch with a friend yesterday. He is building a new blog. He saw a blog with a font he really liked which looked like one he had stumbled across a few days earlier. He went looking for the font and blew half a day. Working smart assigns a priority and a slice of time – maybe 15 minutes worth of time to find a good enough font. In half a day, working smart would have written next week’s follow up emails or written one or two blog posts or crafted some solo ads.

This brings me back to the 2nd way I said I had been reminded of focus and leverage. I got an email from a person whose list I have unsubscribed from – an Instagram guru now turned into a lead funnels guru. Maybe I got added back to a new list or he bought a solo ad and I am on that list. This quote caught my eye

I’ve got some important advice for you. Stop asking for advice.. Stop buying WSO’s and shiny object info products.
The reason you haven’t seen success is because you keep giving up and buying the next thing
Truth is – most information products and WSO’s are full of crap outdated information that does nothing to help you see success…

Now I know all of this – I did write my own post on how to conquer shiny object syndrome a few weeks ago.

Now the email did have some SOLID advice

1. Stop buying stuff
2. Find one person to listen to you can trust
3. Take action and follow their advice. FOCUS on one thing that makes money.

I wrote last week about FOCUS and LEVERAGE – the email does not use that word and does not really explore that idea any further than these words. There are some clues – it is promoting a funnel that sells physical product.

Working SMART

These two messages reinforced the messages that have been hammered home by Dean Holland in the Quick Start Challenge and in the modules of Internet Profits I have worked through. FOCUS on one thing – one product to promote. Apply LEVERAGE by making sure that product is sufficiently layered with a range of price points and recurring income – i.e., a properly optimised funnel. Good to know I am working on one thing that works and has good leverage. Michael Devlin has added another dimension to my thinking – WORK SMART.

My week has had less progress than last week. I did take a few days off at the weekend to go cycling and orchid spotting. Rested and fit is part of WORK SMART. I did have another bicycle accident – 2nd in a month and that set me back a few days dealing with some pain. I did spend time working around the US Elections – an important time for my investing activity, which currently is the way I pay my bills.

I did stay focused but I have to say the effort was not a lot of working smart

• I completed days 12 to 18 of the 30 day challenge (which means I am ahead of schedule)
• I decided to learn Convertri as the page builder, rather than the one Internet Profits uses. That means that I will be able to promote it later as one of the resources I understand and use. I used a template as a starting point and had great difficulty getting it to work the way I wanted. Working smarter tells one to work the way the software works. The tool is not intuitive to me. That choice cost me a lot of time BUT I did get something up
• I chose to stick with Getresponse as my autoresponder rather than start a new account at Aweber, which Internet Profits uses. That will cost me time as I cannot autoload the preloaded 30 day email sequence. I have to do that manually. I then discover that the new version of Getresponse has a new learning curve too. I did load up the first few days of emails – I will set aside a slot each day to get that job complete. However, it does mean that I can integrate with my existing list easily
• Once I got my new funnel up and going, I set up a LeadsLeap ad to direct traffic to the new landing page. It got some traffic but no opt-ins yet
•  Next leverage task was to dig out an existing solo ad account and send a new solo ad. That took some time reacquainting myself with the way the platform works and the wide range of tools it provides. I discover that I am entitled to send 8 solo ads a month and have not sent one for 2 years. I did focus and take action in the first weeks BUT I did not follow up then – now is the time. What I found also was that I have a small army of referrals in my solo ads platform all of whom have come from LeadsLeap ads that just plug away in the background = Leverage = Nice Work setting that up to work unattended
• Of course, there were plenty of things to distract me. Example: Russian hacker attack on my yoga blog had to be dealt with. That took an hour – change user IDs, change passwords, change login access panels, change security settings. Working Smart would have that set up ages ago as a job an outsourcer could do (if one is happy to outsource that aspect of security). It did distract.

I chose to focus on LeadsLeap and Solo Ads as paid channels because they can be leveraged with more cash rather than spending time this week on free leads from Twitter or Facebook. That will come in due course. My focus for the coming week is to finish the training modules, streamline the solo ads process and progress the autoresponder series and do one more lead funnel. Sounds like a lot

Resources

Domains: I have used 1and1.com for years. They recently merged with IONOS.com and are now a large European provider. I like the pricing especially renewal pricing. New customers can get $1 domains and private registration for free. Get your domains at IONOS.com

Solo Ads: Guaranteed Solo Mails offers Pro members 8 mailings a month for free with 200 unique viewers guaranteed for each mailing. It also offers range of advertising models which you can buy with cash or credits from viewing mails or ads. Easy to use and cost effective and can be started for free – just watch ads to get credits and learn to identify good copy. Sign up for free

Banner Ads: LeadsLeap works unattended to deliver ads to its members. One can build credits for free ads by reading ads or just pay for a Pro account. It works well for me and delivers a steady trickle of leads unattended. Sign up for free

Credits:

Leverage image embedded in my featured image photograph is by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Loch Lomond image from Michael Devlin