Day 2 of the London Warrior Gathering kicked off in beautiful sunshine, so like all good internet marketers we headed back down into the basement away from all that nasty brightness. Sometimes I wonder if IM is another name for vampirism – maybe not an analogy I should pursue!

Oz

We started the day in the hands of Oz,  a warrior who is rapidly growing his presence on the forum and who released a really nice WSO the other day on stock option trading. If you missed it, you should check out Ant Handshake – it’s a great intro to the subject and a refreshing look at another stream of income.

I have to say, that yesterday, I thought he seemed a bit out of his depth. His talk was primarily around being an affiliate for a continuity program. Nothing wrong with that, but it felt as if he was just coming into that knowledge himself, so it wasn’t delivered from a position of strength. I came away with the realisation that I really have made some progress over the years, if this subject, delivered by a well-known warrior felt a bit basic. LOL.

From this point on, the sessions went into overdrive.

Peter Garety

Peter Garety was next up and spoke about the way he approaches everyone on his lists(s) in such a way as to deliver them the most value. His primary focus is to take every customer through a 12 month journey, during which they should grown into money-making experts – and so be able to pay him bigger and bigger sums for stuff he does to help them.

This was an excellent overview of a really well-thought out system, implemented to make sure everyone benefits. Summary: Customers first, Money second.

Mark Thompson

Following on from Peter, Mark Thompson gave us a perspective on moving away from the Warrior forum to a sustainable long-term business model. My chief takeaway from this was to sort out a core product for myself. Mark uses this model and points everything he does back to the core, no matter what kind of link or product, there’s always a link back to his core system: WP Goldmine.

Mark was obviously nervous on stage – isn’t it funny how we force folk into different roles, like public speaking, just because they have had success in other areas. Maybe we need an IM expert speaker training course. Despite all that, he spoke with great clarity and real humanity about what he was doing with his system. Impressive enough for me to consider buying into his $19 a month program.

Steve Benn

Changing the focus slightly, Steve Benn talked through the ins and outs of successful copywriting, an area we all know we should know more about. He made it clear that there are times when we treat our prospects in ways that are never going to get them to buy anything and that we should always bear in mind that folks buy stuff to get somewhere. It’s not “the product” that is important, it’s what it does to help you get what you wanted in the first place.

Obviously, his Instant Copywriting Expert (another great course) goes into this in more detail, but he repeated something I’ve heard before, which is to write out examples of good copy by hand (not typed) so that you get the flow and phrases into some kind of copywriting “muscle memory”.

Alex Jeffreys

Our final speaker for the day was Alex Jeffreys, who walked through his own ideas and system for building a funnel of lifetime vale for his customers. It’s difficult to add much here to the kind of reputation Alex already has, but it was a clear breakdown of all that we should all be thinking about as a way to build a business, not just a hobby.

Alex actually made us a WSO for his coaching program, possibly a little steep for a lot of people there, but great value nonetheless. If I hadn’t already been paying for other mentoring, I may have been a customer at that point. I have no idea if he would extend the offer, but £3,000 seemed like a good deal if you were looking for a mentor. Tell him Martin sent ya’ (no affiliate link)

Summary

Overall then, a great 2 day event, with a lot of thought-provoking content and without the constant pitch-fest of most of these affairs. I know that Paul and Justin were recording the whole thing, so expect a WSO release in the near future, which will be worth every penny.

If you’re on my list already, I am thinking of putting all this down in more detail in a quick pdf, so if you want actual content details, grab my outsourcing webinar and that will ensure you see all my updates.

I thought I’d try to dash off a quick summary of what has been a full day at the first London Warrior gathering, but I find (at 1a.m.) that my brain may not be up to the full task I’ll see what I can get done…..

First off, it’s worth noting that this has been a pitch-free zone overall and I’m massively in favour of that, given some of the comments I’ve made on events in the past.

Secondly, I should just make a quick note to thank all the speakers for giving up their time to actually come and deliver this stuff. Some of it has already changed my thinking on what needs to come next in my journey.

Brad Gosse opened the day with a keynote which turned into a Q&A session where he gave out 5 copies of his new book to the best questions – beaten to the last copy by his favouritism for a woman – gutted! This was a very entertaining walk through some of Brad’s life and a pointer to his current thinking on things in IM.

We then heard from Paul Clifford, who took us through software creation, a model I think a lot of people would like to play with if they had the time/money. Paul demystified some of the needs around getting stuff created and knows his stuff well enough for me to point you in his direction if you want to know more about this stuff

We had a couple of panel sessions about offline and WSO creation, but if anything, these were a little short. It felt like they could have gone on longer with the interest being shown. I was heartened by Peter Garety saying that his first WSO only did 8 sales. My first WSO, released on Thursday, has done more than that already. Maybe I’m in good company after all!

Then Mark Lyford took to the stage and gave some great advice about the power of lists and how to get a buyer’s list from the Warrior Forum fairly quickly. I may write more about this session next week. Great content and very motivating.

Finally, Michael Christon, took us through some of the psychology of selling. This was a difficult to describe session, which ranged from NLP to religion and back again. Michael is a man I will be watching as this was the slickest presentation of the day. Key takeaway: Don’t be a “seller”, just help the “buyer” get what they want! So, don’t force your agenda, that  may not be what they want.

The day rounded off with drinks, paid for by Andy Fletcher of Digiresults, and a  hypnosis show from a fellow warrior – Hypnoman.

As a final punctuation point on that last comment, I was talking to some women in another conference, in a hotel being used by some of our group across the road. There were 350 women (exclusively) learning how to blog with an organisation called” cyp her”, I think. Nice people, apart from the usual “all girls together” sniping – I left them to it, but couldn’t help think that we were all missing a trick in our separate events. I may head back over tomorrow to check the organisation name, has anyone come across it already?

Edit: Ok, cracked it! The name of the organisation is Cybher (I just mis-heard through the haze of drinks and loud conversation ). It took a little while to come up with the right search terms to find them, but if you’re in the UK and female – since it seems to be exclusive – you can check them out here. Maybe I should be cheeky and suggest they look at internet marketing as a key element next year. Say hello to Claire (sp?) if you talk to them, she was trying to explain it all to me on the night.

It’s very easy when you start out in Internet Marketing to think that this is a career that won’t require you to interact – with your customers, with your competitors and with other marketers. Everything is so neatly handled by being online.

Well, in practice, that’s probably the most damaging idea you could have. Removing personal interaction from your business (no matter how shy you are) can only end up hurting your prospects, no matter what personal comfort you gain from it.

I try to make a habit of going to at least 3 or 4 big events every year and if I get the chance, I’ll also attend a lot of smaller get togethers. Both have their place in my business.

The big events often turn into pitch-fests, where every hour you get a new call to action along with a price tag to make your wallet bleed. If you can find ones where this is not the case, then the opportunity to meet a lot of new people in one place is a huge benefit. Take lots of business cards and a notebook for names and numbers where others have no card of their own.

As an example of the latter, I just spent a weekend at Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom bash in London this weekend. Mark has arranged many conferences over the last few years (often multi-speaker wallet-bleeders!) but has moved more recently to running the show himself. The new format gets a huge thumbs-up from me, I always liked Mark’s speaking style and getting more of that and less of some other unpredictable speaker is a real plus. If he runs more shows like this, I’d recommend you check them out.

The smaller events work on a different level for me. It’s much easier to grab more time with one or maybe two people and really get to know them…this is where the real joint ventures are made. You’ll often hear more about what is really working (along with some smal but tasty tips) at this kind of meeting and you will also get a chance to be an answer to someone else’s questions. Don;t underestimate what you’ve already picked up…everyone starts somewhere.

One of the things that makes it harder to do this regularly is actually finding out what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere that regularly announces events, so watch out for an announcements about a new site that I’m going to set up just for this purpose.

So what did I learn over the weekend? Well, apart from being hammered by the “build a product” message, the big wake-up call for me was to build my list properly. If you’ve just started reading this blog, you’ll have seen my pop-up by now – did you grab it?   It was there because I think I’ve always known that a list of folk I can help is actually the same as a list of people who can help me, but when it comes down to it, I’ve never pushed that side of my business.

So, my commitment for the next 30 days (let’s see, that takes me up to something like the 11th of November) is that I will post my list-building efforts and results on here daily for all to read. As is always the case, I will probably end up doing too many other things as well, but that is the target.

In that capacity, I am going to set aside 2 sums of cash; the first will be just $100 to see what is possible with a small investment. The second will be more, I haven’t decided how much more yet, definitely less than $1000 but maybe not much less. This will be the real all out effort to build a substantial seed list.

As you can guess, I intend to buy traffic, but I’m also hoping to use other techniques like giveaways to boost my efforts. I will be tracking how successful everything is. Not only that, but I will probably also be following along with Valerie Duvall’s List Ignition WSO which you can guess is also about list-building!

Consider this Day Zero, I’ll update later in the day about the progress so far but just so we are all on the same wavelength, here is my rather small list on Aweber for reference:

Another quick video review for you of a program that I like a lot. This is a full Lump Sump Profits review, looking inside at all the stuff you get after signing up, with a peek at some of the other etycoon extras.

I’ve been absent too long and it feels like the blog needs a bit of revitalization….just as I’m coming up to two weeks in Spain with pretty much zero chance of internet connectivity!

So in the interests of starting the ball rolling, I’ve recorded a short Unstoppable Affiliate review. This is Andrew Hansen’s latest release and builds on some of the work he put into Elite Niche Research and takes it up to the site building level.

I’m going to say right now, that I like Andrew’s stuff a lot. He spends a lot of time looking for affiliate programs that are off the beaten track and so are likely to be less competitive and maybe pay better too.

When it comes down to it, however, this is very much a beginners’ course. If you’ve never seen anything on niche selection and affiliate marketing before, then you could much worse than to pick up this course. If, on the other hand, you have a ton of stuff on all these subjects – READ THEM! I had a revealing chat with one of the guys on my list the other night. We decided this was exactly the route he needed, not to spend any more, but to just get down to reading and implementing what he already had…..and it was plenty.

If that’s tempted you to actually check out Andrew’s sales page, you can get to it here.

The lesson I’ve learned – and it’s one that I should have really thought about before, is that using YouTube to post these videos is a double-edged sword.

The video above is just a bit too anonymous, it’s too easily used on other sites (and of course YT encourages that behaviour). So, what do I find, some guy with my review on his site (ranking high for the search term), with no attribution and probably doing very nicely off my work, thankyou very much!

Here’s a big video hint…..put an unalterable link on the screen throughout the video. Camtasia, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere will all do this for you quite happily and I just plain forgot! So, that’s today’s big take-away.