27 Internet Marketing Rules for Success. Rule #17: Copy Successful Business Models
One of the best parts of Internet marketing is that it is relatively easy to observe other business models. No only can you see what other business owners are doing in your niche, but you can carefully pick it apart by reading their salesletters, signing up for their lists, following their forum discussions, observing their product launches, and back-tracking the sources of their traffic.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s break this down, step-by-step. Let’s examine each of these methods more closely.
Method #1: Salesletter
If your site is selling only one product, there’s a good chance that your marketing efforts amount to crafting a salesletter and then marketing it carefully. If you haven’t done this already, it’s a good idea to find out how competitors have approached this same challenge.
Start by going to Clickbank. If you don’t have an account already, create one. Once you do that, search the directory for affiliate products within your niche. Sort the results by either “gravity” or “% referred.”
These two orderings will give you an idea of how successful affiliates have been pitching these products. If gravity or “% referred” scores are high, this implies that affiliates have had a great deal of success selling the product, which signals that its salespage is probably good.
Once you’ve selected the products you plan to observe, use a multi-tab browser to open up 4-5 of the associated pitch pages simultaneously. In addition to that, open up your own salespage in another tab.
Compare the work in the other salesletters to your own. Think about what you’re missing relative to their salesletters. Is it only traffic? Or is your salesletter missing important features?
For instance, are you missing testimonials? Or are you missing a catchy story that will bring in readers? Or, compared to your competitors, is your headline relatively weak? These are all things you must consider.
Method #2: Sign Up for Email Lists
Another great way to reverse engineer your competitors’ success is to sign up for their email lists. I’ve mentioned this several times earlier, but here, I’ll emphasize the features you should look for when you do this:
i. How frequently do they send out emails? Every two days? Every week? Every two weeks? Irregularly? This is important. The pace of emails will play an important role in determining how interested followers will be; and also whether or not they decide to opt-out.
ii. How frequently do they pitch to their list? This is also an important determinant of success. Pitching too frequently will turn off subscribers and will cause them to lose interest or unsubscribe. Not pitching frequently enough leaves a lot of money on the table.
iii. What methods do they use to monetize their list? Do they directly pitch through advertisements? Do they promote affiliate products? Do they send out reviews of existing products? Do they give away free books and reports that subtly promote their own products?
Once you complete this process, make some revisions to your own email list. Consider changing the spacing between emails, the amount of free content you give away, and the frequency with which you pitch to customers.
Method#3: Follow Forum Discussions
In Internet marketing—as well as many other niches—business owners own forums; and use them to communicate with buyers, prospective buyers, and subscription site members.
This is a great place to find out about the inner workings of a successful business model. Start by identifying relevant businesses. After you’ve done this, sign up for their forums, and a handful of their subscription sites. Follow discussions between members. Find out what it is that is causing these subscribers to come back; to maintain interest in the business; and to buy products. Also, look for what is not working: what are they complaining about? What are they seeking advice about? Where has your competitor left gaps that you can fill?
Method #4: Following Product Launches
If you’ve spent a lot of time as an Internet marketer, you’ve probably learned this important gem of wisdom: if you want to know what successful marketers REALLY do to make money, WATCH them, rather than listening to them.
Why do I say this? They might tell you all the important things you must do; and these might all be true, but there are many intangibles that come with a product launch that you simply cannot discern by reading
Fortunately, product launches happen every day. And these provide the most revealing record of how marketers make money. So, next time you hear that a big name marketer is launching a new product, think about how you can copy her launch process, rather than wondering whether you can afford her $500 ebook.
Important things to look for include the following: 1) the extent to which they use joint venture partnerships; 2) the extent to which they use affiliates; 3) whether or not they (or other people) are promoting them through PPC; 4) how they subtly make an attempt to gain the attention of forum-posters; and 5) what changes they make to their site in order to attract attention for the launch.
Method #5: Back-Tracking Traffic Sources
As with method #4, pay careful attention to how Internet marketers actually generate traffic, rather than how they say you should do it. You’ll probably find the following is true:
1. Successful Internet marketers receive more traffic from word of mouth than from attempts at traffic generation. What do I mean by this? If you look at most successful businesses, people search the business out because they’ve heard good things about it, rather than searching blindly and stumbling over it.
2. Viral marketing campaigns are an excellent tool for quickly inflating the size of a company, but they’re usually either spectacularly successful or spectacularly pathetic. If you plan to use viral videos, viral ebooks, viral reports, or anything thing else like that, then you need to make a concerted effort to do it the right way.
3. An important source of traffic for most websites is direct links from other places. This includes links embedded in website content, links posted on forums in reference to the website, and links posted on blogs.
Of course, you will want to augment this list with the results from your own analysis, but in general, you should find those things to be true of your competitors.
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