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:

Day 2 of Adeel’s Internet Millionaire Academy followed on pretty well from the Friday session and since I can’t get to day 3 on Sunday, I’d encourage you to head down there if you have time.

We started the day a little more promptly, which I think was as much due to the presenting team knowing how to get there as the attendees. More thoughts on that at the end, but suffice it to say that the attendance hasn’t been stellar up to now.

First up on the stage was Larry Loik. Larry has obviously had a lot of success in loads of different ventures over the last few years and has branched into IM more recently. His presentation reflected that – slick, full of NLP techniques and a monster offer at the end that just kept piling on bonus course after course to feed the buying frenzy. I have to say, despite all that, that it didn’t make my blood race! There was a brief flicker when he promised a crack at being one of the presenters at an event they will be running this year. My intention is to get back onto stage again at some point soon, so that sounded good, but the rest of it just looked a bit too much like filler.

That brings up a valid point about all these conferences. If you go, don’t expect every presenter to be perfect for you. It won’t ever happen, and you’ll only split your focus in too many directions if you sign up for everything anyway! If you have the chance to decide what you’re most interested in before you even arrive, than all the better. At least you can save your cash till that subject comes up.

Anyway, back to the show.

Second up was Adam Ginsberg – a man whose Ebay achievements are second to none. I have to take my hat off to Adeel again at this point; it was great to get so many genuinely high-powered speakers in one place. Real people with real results.

Adam obviously pitched ebay as a way to make good money and made an offer that very nearly took my cash, but going back to my comment above I’d already committed myself to working with Lee McIntyre and I felt that this would just distract me. Adam was surprisingly candid about some of the other things he sees going on in our industry – so much so, that he got the camera switched off at one point so he could speak “off the record”. If you’re looking for one solid way to make money, I reckon it would be a lot of fun working with Adam and just to give him even more kudos, he even went to bat for the attendees and got us an hour lunch break. Adam, for that alone, you were a standout speaker

After that lunch break, we had Andrew X up on stage. The sheer volume of his Clickbank accounts is staggering…just insane amounts of cash flowing through around 200 separate accounts. Andrew’s big message was to look at low gravity items on Clickbank (rather than high) as the competition is so much lower, and some of them do turn out to be money spinners. He talked though affiliate sales, becoming a product creator and then also running a membership site as three different ways to make $1M in 6 months.

Now, at this point, I got distracted by a few folk turning up that I recognised, so I can’t claim to say that I know who the next speaker was. Sorry whoever you were (blame it on Chris Freville!). In principle I guess this slot could have been set up for Anik Singal, but a colleague of his was speaking about Lurn Inc. What was most interesting was that he immediately talked about going with high gravity Clickbank products…..it really is possible to go in both directions and you need to find what works for you.

I confess that I got “conference chair fatigue” at that point and ran away. One of my blessings is that I live near to all these London/Heathrow events, but that’s also a curse in that I never get to hang around in the hotel bar at the events as I can’t justify staying away (so close to home). I’d still say that this would have been a great addition to the day, but I just couldn’t justify it.

So, what can I conclude for the event so far (as I won’t be there on Sunday)?

I think I’d have to give Adeel a big thumbs-up for the line-up and the way in which they presented (in general). The venue was pretty good in terms of facilities – the usual Heathrow prices taken into account!

I hope it was worth it for him, the attendance was pretty poor on both days, so I imagine the speakers will have been a bit disgruntled at their sales. There just isn’t enough cash sloshing around in a group of 50 to support so many good offers. On that front, I quite liked the £997 cap on the sales – I may be wrong, but they all came out with the same price, so there weren’t any outrageous numbers being quoted.

Will I attend another event laid on by Adeel. Yes I will. That’s getting to be an increasingly rare thing for me to say, so check it out on Sunday and watch out for anything else he lays on. Adeel, well done! Oh, and get the same admin staff next time too

I spent some time last year going into details about conferences that I had attended in the hope that we can all help each other make these events more enjoyable for all concerned and I think I was a little harsh on my last victims.

It’s nice to be able to swing the pendulum the other way with this review for the first day of Adeel Chowdhry’s Internet Millionaire Academy. I’ll even go as far as saying that you should get down to the Renaissance at Heathrow for the next 2 days if you are near enough to do so – tell ‘em Martin sent you

We kicked off with Adeel setting the scene for the rest of the day with a summary of his earnings and some ideas on how to get started, but he passed the baton fairly quickly to a colleague of his called Biku (truly sorry here, I don’t think I ever heard your whole name).

Now, it may be that we had a fairly small audience as a result of it being a Friday, but Biku immediately jumped to a more workshop-style session and got the crowd intimately involved in answering his questions and working through the particular points of his presentation with a few individuals….and yes, yours truly was one of them! This was one of the most impressive, confident and useful presentations I’ve seen in all the conferences I’ve been to -  an echo of Biku’s corporate background, I suspect. This got a big thumbs up from me.

Simon Poulson followed on, with a session mainly focussed on marketing to local businesses…..just another great, solid piece of content with a real list of action items to follow to get started in this space.

After lunch Scott Rewick wowed the crowd with his life as a media buyer and builder of monster companies (in super fast times). I’ve seen Scott a couple of times now and his offer is one of the most compelling and “real” that I’ve seen. Another great speaker.

Finally (for my day anyway), Lee McIntyre took to the stage. If you trawl back almost to the start of this blog, you’ll se how impressed I was with Lee when I first saw him. He’s gone on to grow his business from 110K a month to something which is now around 220K – all in the space of just over a year. I’m still hugely impressed by his integrity as a marketer and the way he goes about selling. His main focus today was on Membership sites and a lot of folk I spoke to afterwards were inspired by the way he broke down the numbers needed to make some decent money with one of these sites.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this was still a selling opportunity for all the speakers….it’s just that they concentrated on the content first and their pitches were both relevant and concise. I can handle that so much better than some of the pitch-fests that I have visited. The usual 90 minute talks with 30 minutes taken up by the pitch are just getting old as far as I’m concerned!

All in all, the day was a big success as far as I’m concerned, kudos to Adeel and the team….including the stunning admin helpers Just one niggle….quite a late start led to lunch being only 30 minutes….the liquid lunch I had worked quite well though!