The Online Sunshine Plan

As I write this, I have to turn over the entirety of what I’ve studied and swallowed for the past several years.

It came to me as I was reviewing some videos I’d downloaded from a scammer company and found a similar pattern. They all told you to promote someone else’s products which you get the sale for and that company delivers. These people either told you to do “affiliate sales” or use “drop-ship companies”. In both cases, you are selling products someone else has made.

What they didn’t ever do is ask you what you really, really would love to be doing with your life. They never considered to figure out if what you are offering for sale is really going to improve the quality of life of that individual.

Again, these guys are working on a numbers game. Get a hundred people to view your sales page and 2 or 3 of them will click-through to buy it. Get a thousand people, you’ll get 20-30 sales. 10,000? 200 or 300. The game was how to herd people to your site.  Herd as in cattle, not as individuals.

What they were telling you to do is to pick out stuff that people were buying and then get into that sales cycle with your own created sales pages. You don’t have to know what the quality of that product was, you just had to get people over to that seller and then collect the commission. Same with drop-shipping – in this case, you are also doing the sales, while the warehouse was doing the shipping.

The trick is that they also told you to spend money on advertising in order to get these sales. Advertising, again, works on numbers and percentages. There are some points about copywriting quality – but mostly it’s getting that keyword phrase in front of enough people in areas where they are looking for it. Then 2-3% would click-through and buy. Of course, that adds to your overhead and cuts down your profits.

The other method they mentioned was to game the social media in order to get top rankings on Google. This again is a percentage game. Most people don’t look at more than the first two pages of the search engines (and by the way, also carefully avoid looking at advertisements) – but search engines favor social media for finding fresh content and relevancy.

Let’s look over their false strategy and replace it with what actually works.

False Strategy:
“Look for a niche, find a niche product, promote that product, get the sale/get the commission.”

But what about your passion, what  you really need and want to do in and with your life?

What I found out early on was that I was not going to “make money” selling other people’s stuff unless I was willing to spend the 60 – 70 hours needed weekly to constantly research and test-market new product lines and then shipping or getting them shipped.  Problem was that I had 20 hours to work on this outside my 40 – hour day job. It simply wasn’t going to scale. (And that’s when I found out I was scammed.)

This was my earliest approach at marketing from my own passion. Sure, the warnings out there are to not be passionate about your product, but to be dispassionate and able to shift to other products as you need to, since sales ebb and flow during the year.

In other words, if I were to become extremely left-brained, I’d be able to “make money” by simply crunching numbers to find the right combination of products and the right prices. According to these self-styled “guru’s”, it didn’t matter what I liked to do or wanted to do with my life, or what I was devotedly interested in. It only mattered how good I was at crunching numbers – and treating people like crunched numbers.

Of course, that only works for a very small handful of people who are wired that way. Most of the rest of us aren’t. And the scammers knew this – and also knew that most people would simply give up and pay off their card. (Of course they didn’t know me…) But operating in partial-truths (shadows) was their operating business – how they considered business was done. “Just business” they told themselves. People were just numbers.

Not.

So the approach here is, “How do you take your passion and help people with it?”

Again, the false approach is that you get a lot of people to look at or listen to your sales pitch and you’ll get a certain percentage which will buy.

The true approach is that you have to contact people who are looking for the solution you have to offer, then give that solution to them. Once they trust you, they’ll want to support you. So you keep giving away valuable data and samples until they want to give something back in return.

This of course can make your brain swim if you’ve done any marketing training or study at all.

However, if you go back to the classic bazaar or even the modern Farmers’ Markets, this is exactly how it works. You set out a display of your goods and people can come up and check the quality for themselves. If you are nice to them and answer their questions, they’ll trust you enough to buy your goods.

Television, Radio, and Government-sponsored studies into Human Psychology took us into a very wrong direction with this (and now California ships their products to New York at great expense, with old fruit and eggs which are tough enough to take the shipping, but such low quality that any farmer would turn up his nose at it.)  Meanwhile, the farms in upstate New York could be supplying a healthier diet for that city to the south. Lower cholesterol, better taste, cheaper. Failed model.

The correct strategy is: find the people who are looking for a solution similar to yours (or problem you have a solution for) and give away enough valuable information and samples until they want to give something back to you.

How does this fit your passion?  What ever you are fascinated with, you can produce endless content and conversations about. You are constantly looking for better ways to produce or improve the solutions for the problems in that area. So you are an endless, bottomless supply of great, valuable information you can give away.

People are looking for the solutions you’ve already figured out for a long time. It saves them the work. They will spend money to save time. You are exchanging your time for money. Except on the Internet, you are working for yourself, not someone else. You love what you do and you do it very well – and people would rather buy something from someone who is both an expert authority in that area and also has a great product that saves them time and solves their problem.

So the bulk of Internet Marketing Research is finding your niche public – that group of people who are already looking for the solution you already have.

(And  you can see from the above that a shortcut version of this is why some people can earn a good living with just promoting other people’s products. You’ll see more as we continue on how they can use some very simple tools to set up their sales lines.)