Marketing Life Cycle Secrets: Why DigitalMarketer.com Demanded I Share These 5 Secrets

This phenomenon that we're talking about 150 to 200 million thousands and thousands of clients. The greatest opportunity is generally early on. You're a home run king.

Hey everyone. It's rich from strategic profits. Before the boom of digital marketing, before everyone had a smartphone or a laptop, I was already setting the groundwork for what digital marketing would become. When I began coaching online back in the early 2000s, I had the privilege of coaching some promising talents. One of them was Ryan Deiss. Now he went on to establish digitalmarketer.com and if you're not aware, it's the world's biggest digital marketing training center. The term digital marketer that's used everywhere today, that was Ryan's creation. And now he's turning to me to talk about the nuances of marketing life cycles that every marketer must know to succeed, and consequently, how timely innovation and vigilance in marketing can set you apart. Let me share some of my personal highlights from my recent interview with DigitalMarketer.com, the best digital marketing training company in the world. I had a stark realization during my business journey, which was proven time and time again. The strategies that change the course of a business all have one thing in common, which is the time in which they are adapted.

When I started coaching online, like early 2000s, right, I coached a lot of people. Like we had studied Dan Kennedy, we had studied Jay Abraham, we had studied Gary Halpert. This phenomenon that we're talking about as far as life cycles of marketing strategies and tactics, actually it also exists offline as well. I was first kind of made aware of it, I guess you could say, when the Magalog, which is, you know, just another format to put a sales letter in that kind of looks like a magazine. When that was first invented in like the 80s, there was a huge breakthrough in response rates like they doubled, tripled, quadrupled. That really allowed the advertiser, you could say, or the marketer to get a few extra seconds of attention. And that made all the difference, right? And you know, all these different types of formats had their heyday and if you got on early, you thrive.

I witnessed firsthand the significance of leveraging new marketing tactics. The success of the Internet Business Manifesto Report was one of the defining moments of my career and it confirmed my belief early on when I was online.

For a few years, I was coaching and I was doing well for my clients. And at that time, I wasn't doing anything different than really anybody else. I had this three month window and I didn't have Any coaching clients. And I was hoping to get maybe like a dozen clients that could kind of bridge the gap of the three months. So I wrote a report, free PDF. I'd say it was like one of the first lead magnets. It ended up going viral and I ended up getting thousands and thousands of clients. That was the first time I personally experienced, you know, trying something new, having it far eclipse my expectations. And I think that, you know, almost every marketer I know has had the experience of having a strategy or tactic far exceed what they hoped for or were expecting and that that's a good kind of signal that you're actually leveraging a strategy or tactic. Early in its inception, the first time was with the report. The first report was called the Internet Business Manifesto. And it worked so well that for the next 18 months that's all I did was just write free reports. During that time we were the first to also live stream from a live event. We had two years where like my business was on fire because of it. That doesn't mean that we don't have free reports today. In my business we do. Right. We just don't expect it anymore to be anything that will actually, actually drive the business forward. It's more like filling a hole. And so most online businesses like you don't need very many cutting edge early in its inception strategies or tactics, but you need a few.

So reports are no longer the major revenue driver. What comes next? Take a moment and think back to 2007. At that time, my friend John Benson came up with one brilliant idea that single handedly skyrocketed a company from a multimillion dollar giant to over a billion dollars.

John Benson invented the video sales letter VSL in 2006. He shared it with me in 2007 and I brought it to Agora and the VSL, which at that time was just black type on a white slide. Right?

That's it.

And so very quickly Agora grew from, you know, 150 to 200 million to well past a billion that year, insanely enough. And in 2017, that style of VSL no longer brought any increase in response. Didn't decrease it either. But it was now just even with sales letters, right? So even when I brought it to Agora, if you think about it, Agora was one of the big giants even back then, right? They had the best of the best and lots of roles. But it actually took this like marketing strategy or tactic that was invented by some guy to share it with some other guy to then share it with like them. Like 5x the business practically overnight. And you know, with the VSL, right.

I can't talk about game changers without mentioning this new form of webinars. Back in 2008, I introduced this concept and the response was overwhelming. We weren't just getting more sales. We were setting a new industry standard.

We invented the automated webinar in 2008. And back then it was new, right? The registration rates were like 75, 80%. The show up rates were 80%, which, you know, now you're like, you're a home run king if you can get 50%. And the conversion rate was really high. I'd say for about four years. It gave us a huge advantage. We went from selling a couple backends a month to a couple a day and then even more per day. You know, after the success of actually the automated webinar, we actually launched this product. Steal our winners.

What if we asked our audience a simple question? Do you trust me? What started as a playful conversation with Jay Abraham turned into an innovative marketing tactic. It was unconventional, yet the response was beyond our wildest imaginations.

One of the strategies that I came up with based on that was Jay and I used to talk about like, I wonder what kind of response we'd get if we sent an email to our list saying, with the subject line, do you trust me? And we asked them to send us money and how many would send us money? And it was the first upsell and we called it the mystery box. And it was just me standing in front of the video with a box with a question mark asking people if they trusted me. And that in this box I had something easily worth $1,000, but that I wanted to charge them $30. And that the whole purpose of this was to get people who trust me to be richly rewarded and those that don't trust me to regret not trusting me. And that when you get the box, you have 90 days to decide if I was telling you the truth and if it wasn't worth 1000 dol and just call and you'll get your money back. That converted 78% on a $30 product, right? We've used that and I've seen a lot of my clients use that in all different formats. So that's like kind of something that's like most people haven't seen. It actually kind of a stupid question to ask people, which is why it's so effective because they've already bought something.

So of course they trust me.

So of course it works. But that's not going to necessarily blow up a business. It is something that will work really well until it doesn't. It's kind of like hybrid in the sense that, yeah, it's not powerful enough to drive a whole business. Right. And so these kind of strategies work on a global level and on a small level.

There's one business lesson I always emphasize, especially to young entrepreneurs, which I'll talk about in the next clip.

Not about necessarily running out and being like an opportunity seeker, like trying like a million different things. Right. There's certainly a balance to it, and the principles of marketing never change. But the field of marketing online is there's just a lot, you know, a lot, a lot. Right. And the idea is, is that I think most people kind of look at things a little bit in a skewed way from the standpoint that they don't recognize that the greatest opportunity is generally early on.

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