Does this replace building relationships with customers? (10)
Going to start my 40 Day Challenge Follow Along on the 4th Jan. But have one thing I'm wrestling with before I do.
The 40 day challenge seems to get into a high volume mindset, testing a mass of offers and actually being very short termist with customers.
The promise seems that by using very high traffic volume in mass markets, and testing enough offers, you can eventually settle find some products that blow up. These will then die quite quickly, so you scale while you have them, and rake in the £000s. You don’t need really to think about building any relationships with your customers, as the internet is colossal and there will always be more prospects along.
I’m really willing to try this, as you guys clearly know what you are doing, but it goes against all my instincts. I only started getting even my small success in my business when I stopped treating the customers as an infinitely renewable and anonymous source, and started understanding them as individuals with individual needs.
So after years of complete failure, I finally got to about £50k pre tax profit/yr by massively profiling a couple of very specific customer segments, and writing copy and building products to serve them in a very specific, very targeted way. Super niching, and delivering what they want to a high quality.
But my niche is tiny, and I’ve tapped it out, so I have to move on - and besides, my goal is to get my pre tax profits to about £250,000 per year so I need to change what I’m doing radically.
Genuine question - which is the smart move?
Should I forget about profiling a set of people and get on with the mass market method of spraying a mass of offers on the wall and constantly looking for new offers and landers?
Or does the 40 Day Challenge actually eventually lead to a place where you do profile a subset of these people, build a mailing list, and a relationship, and start to really serve them repeatedly in a deep long term way?
Thanks,
Phil
Hey Phil-
Fascinating questions 
As someone else who's been involved in various business endeavors over the years before getting into this type of focus, this is something I think about as well...
The idea of just focusing on the 'front-end' and buying traffic and getting an upfront commission when they enter their info or buy the product and then never 'touching' them again is definitely far different from many business models.
However the way I like to think about it is that the internet- or the whole economy for that matter- is so vast that it doesn't really matter WHAT strategy or niche you do, but rather how much value you create WITHIN that niche.
As a media-buyer/lead-gen specialist focused on the front-end only, you aren't concerned with the long-term relationship yourself, however the value you are creating is in more effectively connecting the customer to those other individuals and entities who WILL be doing the long-term 'farming' and long-term relationship.
We are essentially just creating value (and thus income) by mastering that one aspect of the overall trajectory, in between ad and submit, or ad and first sale.
The life insurance companies who get our leads or the Clickbank vendors who get the buyers' email after the sale are the ones who will be building a long-term relationship, so its not like that part of the process is being eschewed or ignored, its just not the area a strict media-buying front-end person is focused on.
In that regard, I think its almost more like we are building a long-term relationship with the traffic sources, and mastering the traffic sources, and that is where we are creating the long-term value. Our strategic advantage is in our perfect understanding of how to effectively use that traffic source to better connect customers to products and entities that will be good for them.
But with that said, the beauty of IM is that there's an infinite number of ways to create value and income, so there's no reason you can't do both or either or something entirely new..
But yeah, fantastic comment/thoughts man I grapple with the same question and couldn't help but want to expound on it!
That is a brilliantly helpful answer Jack.
So, from what you're saying, my first job as this kind of newbie, and to really narrow down the job to a manageable level, is to:
"create value (and thus income) by mastering that one aspect of the overall trajectory, in between ad and submit, or ad and first sale... Our strategic advantage is in our perfect understanding of how to effectively use that traffic source to better connect customers to products and entities that will be good for them. "
This fits beautifully with my vision statement, (which actually you commented on positively - thanks!) which said "To introduce the most suitable affiliate products to the best possible customers".
This helps me understand the correct emphasis at this beginning stage a lot more. Great stuff.
Does anyone else have any more depth on this - or a different opinion?
No need to get much deeper into this, as jack_l pretty much nailed it with these comments :
We are essentially just creating value (and thus income) by mastering that one aspect of the overall trajectory, in between ad and submit, or ad and first sale.
But you can obviously go at it in multiple ways ... be a media buyer, be the advertiser and work with media buyers, manage the whole operation ... and your strategy will vary based on the approach you chose.
By taking the "media buyers" route, everything will be easier in a way, since you only have to worry about the acquisition process, BUT you wouldn't be building an asset ... once the campaign dies, its over and you need to find a new one.
By building a product and handling the whole process yourself, there will be many more things to figure out, but if done properly, you could end up with a valuable asset that you could sell and exit...
The choice is yours
But it's always a good idea to take it one step at a time.
The smart move is to build up a list alongside your media buying efforts, so that inevitably when your campaign or offer dies, you'll still have leads and customers to follow up with, and potentially a real asset you can sell or build out into something more.
That's not always practical or realistic to do depending on what vertical or traffic source you're running on.
I'm mainly looking towards nutra there, but there's plenty of scammy type affiliate offers around that while one one hand are ideally suited for competing with other aggressive media buyers trying to eek out some front-end ROI on as wide an audience as possible, make for poor choices when trying to generate high lifetime value through positive customer experiences.
At least look towards verticals you can ideally use re-targeting with, as that's going to give you a nice edge over others not utilizing it.
The most important points have already been made.
I just want to point out that pop traffic is the worst type of traffic for building customer relationship.
Basically it's interruption marketing where ads pop up out of nowhere, to interrupt whatever it is that the visitor is doing. It's usually not relevant to what the visitor is looking for either.
That, plus the fact that pop traffic targets the broadest audience you can imagine, pretty much limits us to promoting borderline/full-on scammy offers in a misleading/aggressive manner.
So it's a churn-and-burn model basically.
However, just because this is the norm, it doesn't HAVE to be this way. If you take the time and effort to segment this broad audience further into more-niche mailing lists, it can really pay off in the long run. The following threads can offer more insight:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...6-Introduction
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-pops-possible
Amy
Thanks Amy, all clarification is really helpful.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...6-Introduction
This link you posted was very interesting - I've been doing more or less the same thing on a much smaller scale with my mailing list inside ActiveCampaign for the last couple of years and it works amazingly well.
AC has enough automation (send triggers and tagging) capability for a great price that you can achieve a lot of what Nostra was talking about very cheaply. The one thing wrong with it for AM is that, last time i checked anyway, they didn't you to mail out about affiliate offers - you had to be a product owner. However Drip offer the same segmentation / tagging power and will, (again, last time I checked), permit affiliate offers.
Nice celador - thanks for your info on AC - I love its capabilities as well.
Regarding affiliate links: If you use a tracker like Funnelflux, you don't need to use affiliate links or even tracking links - just embed tracker code snippets in the landing page you wish to send visitors to from the email. Then just put the lander page url in the email.
Amy
Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app
Ah so AC is only bothered about direct links to affiliate sales pages? That's helpful if so as then I won't have to migrate to Drip. I have never looked into it deeply before as never needed to (was only linking to my own product).
Originally Posted by celador
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