I’ve already unveiled a great deal of this stuff at an exclusive, private event. However, some of the basic tricks were already published here in this blog.

In this post, you’ll find a list of those useful tricks compiled for your easy access.

Before we begin though, here’s just some of the feedback I’ve received about my social media marketing presentation at the private event in Napa, California.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yi0tkTO8os

And now for your reading pleasure… the following complied list. Everything from leveraging blogs strategically, to the basics of YouTube and Facebook marketing is included.

1. Succumbing to EVIL Shortcut-ish Temptations and Forgetting the “Social” In Social Media

2. Positioning, “Social Polarity” and Vibrant Blog Communities

3. Facebook Marketing: How Smart Restaurants and Bars are Using “Birthday Marketing” on Facebook

4. 7 Ways to Increase Your Blog Comments

5. Blog Marketing: Monetize The Comments On Your Blog

6. How to Get Traffic from Web 2.0 Sites like Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon

7. How I Made A Dollar From Everyone Who Watched My YouTube Video

Remember, the above posts only cover the basics but they contain tips you can implement today to boost your website’s performance.

Look out for the complete system in early 2009 when it will be launching.

If you liked this post, we’d greatly appreciate a Stumble. Thanks.

I’ve already unveiled a great deal of this stuff at an exclusive, private event. However, some of the basic tricks were already published here in this blog.

In this post, you’ll find a list of those useful tricks compiled for your easy access.

Before we begin though, here’s just some of the feedback I’ve received about my social media marketing presentation at the private event in Napa, California.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yi0tkTO8os

And now for your reading pleasure… the following complied list. Everything from leveraging blogs strategically, to the basics of YouTube and Facebook marketing is included.

1. Succumbing to EVIL Shortcut-ish Temptations and Forgetting the “Social” In Social Media

2. Positioning, “Social Polarity” and Vibrant Blog Communities

3. Facebook Marketing: How Smart Restaurants and Bars are Using “Birthday Marketing” on Facebook

4. 7 Ways to Increase Your Blog Comments

5. Blog Marketing: Monetize The Comments On Your Blog

6. How to Get Traffic from Web 2.0 Sites like Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon

7. How I Made A Dollar From Everyone Who Watched My YouTube Video

Remember, the above posts only cover the basics but they contain tips you can implement today to boost your website’s performance.

Look out for the complete system in early 2009 when it will be launching.

If you liked this post, we’d greatly appreciate a Stumble. Thanks.

WARNING:

Twitter can be evil.

Some less-than-scrupulous people can easily take advantage it and wield frightening influence over poor innocent subjects.

On the other hand, use it with responsibility and you perhaps have the most powerful relation-building medium online today.

Why? That’s because Twitter is currently the closest app on Earth that replicates the actual thought patterns of the human mind. You see, the human mind does not really think in blog and article form. It does not think in huge chunks of information.

Instead, it thinks in a stream of consciousness way, random disjointed thought layered upon random disjointed thought.

That is why when you use Twitter, your mind is “tricked” into further receptivity than it normally should have, because it’s now in its most natural environment.

It’s almost like you are communicating telepathically with other people, because you’re able to uncover a 100 different thoughts that are contained in a 100 different tweets.

After all, what’s more intimate than the whispering voices in your head?

If you know how to take advantage of that state of mind, your microblogging can make you rich.

After a few months of testing and tracking what works, I have discovered 3 ways that Twitter can impact your business unlike any other site on Earth. Once you understand the Twitter user’s borderline hypnotic state of mind, these 3 covert techniques can pre-sell prospects on warp speed.

1) Psychic Market Research

Marketers often talk about the Robert Collier concept of entering the conversations in your prospect’s mind. Information marketing genius Porter Stansberry says that our marketing should start where they are.

In other words, the closer you can align yourself to their top-of-the-mind thoughts, the more receptive to your marketing message they become.

However, the problem is that more often than not, you don’t know what they’re really preoccupied with.

What’s worse, you sometimes make harmful guesses and assumptions. The end result is a bomb in your promotions and a dent in your sales, because your offer is not in tandem with what the prospect is thinking and feeling in the first place.

Good news. The whole interface of Twitter is one big web conversation taking place in a meeting of minds.

You see prospects exchanging rapid-fire thoughts, opinions, and random finds. In just one screen, you can read the hopes, dreams, interests, fears and dominant emotions of your niche.

To do this, just use http://search.twitter.com and Monitter, put in your niche keywords and boom–you’ll instantly be transported to the heart of the conversation.

Start your marketing there and see the difference in your response.

2) Network Like a Viking

Vikings have a brutally effective way of making friends, and meeting potential mates.

They sail to random villagers and within minutes, they kill all the inhabitants, pillage all the houses and capture all the maidens.

Why are they so successful?

It’s because they catch people by surprise, and there’s little in the way of resistance.

And in the nearly spam-free waters of Twitter-ville, prospects are more often than not caught by surprise, and there’s really very little resistance and a whole lot of receptivity.

For one, Twitter requires very little investment in expanding the social circle, because you can securely follow and unfollow people at will. As a result, it’s easier to access the market leaders on Twitter because well, other than the investment of clicking a button, they won’t really lose their privacy by accepting you as a friend–unlike email or mobile.

Furthermore, since you’re confined to only 140 characters for your Twitter message, the effort for them to reply back to you is only a sentence and a click away. No relatively complex email writing process.

And because one-liners are lot less threatening than blocks of text, so people instinctively resist the messages less.

Plus, if they do get annoyed, the BLOCK button is only a push away.

Making connections has never been easier, and as long as you’re not blatant with your promotions, you can make friends and influence people literally at the click of a mouse.

So do the Vikings and plunder prospect’s wallets away.

3) Establish Your Place on the Mountain

Gary Vaynerchuk said this in his most recent keynote address for Web 2.0 Expo, “If you give good shit, people will follow”.

This rings true especially for Twitter, because if you can share good stuff on a regular rate, you’ll be perceived as a guru in record speed.

It’s because the Twitter user’s frame of mind is a very conducive one for making yourself larger than life.

Prospects get on Twitter to find out the latest gossip, to chat with their friends, and more importantly–to seek out important summarized information and short inspiration and revelation quotes.

Once you do that, it’s like you are setting off flares in the middle of the night, and your prospects will notice.

As you know, getting prospects through the sales funnel is always a numbers game. The more good content you get out there attached with your name, the more chances you have at converting prospects to customers.

Because Twitter’s push-button easy way of delivering messages instantly with a low investment of 140 characters, you can keep sending out quality stuff over and over again. Indeed, there’s unprecedented opportunities for something to snag or hook the consumer and keep them for life.

And with that newfound authority, you can use it to sell more stuff and make more money from your now pre-sold audience.

So the conclusion?

Twitter is subversive territory.

When you understand how a prospect uses Twitter, getting your marketing message across has never been this unfairly simple.

It is software built on the base of NLP programming. So even if you have not gone for a day of training in your life, Twitter makes the mind easy pickings because it leaves the mind in a vulnerable state.

So use these 3 secrets and profit from them. In fact, let me know if you’ve used them and seen results.

Because I have. Amazing breakthroughs have been happening since I hopped on to the micro-blogging bandwagon.

To see these controversial techniques and other secrets I will not reveal here in action, feel free to follow me on Twitter: Email Copywriter

Watch me closely, emulate me, and apply them to boost response rates in your marketing.

Again, here’s the link to follow me on twitter:Â email copywriting

He works with Bill Harris, and after listening to both these guys, this is the first of a series of posts in which I’m going to share some key points and interesting things these guys are doing with Centerpointe.

Our partner, Larry Benet "The Connector", was nice enough to introduce me, so I had several conversations with Brad Antin.

Allow me to share Centerpointe’s statistics again. Though you’ve likely heard them before, it’s worth repeating before dissecting some of their numbers with you.

In 2007, their total sales were over $17M, and that is just from the main products they sell. There’s much to learn from them because $17M is VERY good. Throughout our discourse, some very powerful data points came to light.

50% of Centerpointe’s sales come from referrals. I will bet you that today, on any of our websites, I suspect, from gut instinct, that our figures are far below where these guys are.

A referral sale is a sale that’s generated from a friend’s referral, via word of mouth. It means someone picked up a phone and told their friend, "I’ve been trying out this new Holosync® stuff, it’s amazing! You have to give it a shot because it’s helping me have a stress free life, I’m enjoying myself more… I’ve found a Miracle cure, you have to give it a try." 

That’s what a referral is. And Centerpointe is getting half of their business from people passing it on.

When you break it down, that means they generate $8.5M worth of sales because of word of mouth marketing (WOMM). That’s a tremendous amount, by any standard.

If your remember, they sell their front end product for $180. Their average lifetime value per customer (CLV) is $800. This means that they are getting $620 on the back end. That’s another large figure.

They do a promotion twice a year, where they send a letter to their back end –their existing customers – almost like a mini launch to their own list. Their back end promotions bring in between $4M to $-5M per year.

In addition to that, they have set up a specific follow-up sequence for every customer. This sequence includes upsells that they get in the mail, based on which of Centerpointe’s 12 custom made levels the customer is at… (You can buy from them 12 times…that is cool)!

When you dissect this picture and do the math, you start to see that if you take away the back end and the referrals, you end up with $1.5M.

Ask yourself, how can you improve your business in order to get these kinds of results? Do you have enough back end products to increase your customer life-time value?

And this doesn’t limit itself to Miss Hilton’s social antics, there’s a million things out there that a lot of people are interested in. That’s why word-of-mouth is such a powerful tool.

Internet history is filled with stories of great products that conquered the world solely on word-of-mouth. Think Hotmail – the free email service that spread like wildfire and was eventually acquired by Microsoft for $300 million. Or Google…the dominant search engine that grew into a company with a market value of $100 billion without ever having to buy an ad on TV.

These ideas spread through a process called viral marketing. You use a service you like – discover to your delight that it’s free and tell your friends about it. Your friends tell their friends and soon the idea or product gains publicity like wildfire as its user base spreads like a virus.

You don’t even have to come up with a brilliant idea to take advantage of viral marketing.

It’s amazing how simple concepts can conquer the net. Take a look at the example of GoGratitude.com.

End 2005, Stacy Robyn launched a site called gogratitude.com. The idea behind the site was that by expressing gratitude, people would enhance their spiritual lives.

Stacey quickly designed a very basic site build upon her idea of gratitude. She included an amateuristic flash video, ‘the gratitude master key’.

You can view the Flash video here http://www.gogratitude.com/masterkey/

Despite being really basic and amateurish, the video resonated with people. In fact, maybe it resonated so well precisely because it was basic, amatuerish, honest and so non-corporate.

After viewing the video the visitor would see a simple page congratulating them for taking in the mssage of the video and asking them to forward it to their friends.

Here’s a screenshot of that page

Stacy urges people to expres their gratitude by forwarding the video to their friends. This was the forward email she used:

She also asked visitors to subscribe to her free 42-day experiment, a type of newsletter from which each email urges people to share the concept of gratitude.

Somehow Stacy’s honest and open idea resonated with people. Results of her experiment were amazing. After only 3 months 433,000 people had viewed her flash video and over a third of those had subscribed to her free newsletter.

This is pretty darn impressive. I know that other websites in her field of self-improvement typically pay up to $1 per subscriber and it takes years to get a mailing list of 100,000+ names. Stacy accomplished this in 4 months for absolutely nothing.

So if you’re looking to increase traffic, it might not be a bad idea to look into viral marketing.

Why did Stacy’s viral marketing idea work?

A Formula For Viral Marketing

Seth Godin, one of the Internet’s top marketers, developed a simple formula for viral marketing. Here’s Seth’s formula, in his own words:

“For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.”

According to Seth

No one ‘sends’ an idea unless:

1. They understand it
2. They want it to spread
3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
4. The effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

No one ‘gets’ an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation
2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

This explains why online ideas spread so fast but why they’re often shallow. Nietzsche is hard to understand and risky to spread, so it moves slowly among people willing to invest the time. Numa Numa, (a video of a teenage kid doing a funny song and dance routine that was downloaded over 1 million times in 2005) on the other hand, spread like a toxic waste spill because it was so transparent, reasonably funny and easy to share.

Simple and elegant isn’t it?

Stacey’s GoGratitude.com presentation spread because she made it easy to understand. It was a simple idea zen-like idea – be thankful for what you have and you’ll be happier!

Second, she was successful in motivating people to spread this message. The principal of gratitude is a folksy, spiritual idea that resonated with many people. It also made people feel good sharing it.

And finally – with the forward form she developed, she made it easy to spread (to quote Seth, the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits).

Seth’s formula can be applied to many ideas and products. How can it be applied to your site?

The easiest way to use viral marketing is through a simple forward form. If you have something worth forwarding like a free course or newsletter just include a forward form on your site and in the messages to your subscribers. A forward form could be as plain as this:

Implementing A Forward Form On Your Website

Here’s the code you’ll need. If you are not familiar with basic PHP, you can simply pass this code on to your web designer for implementation.

You can see a simple working copy here.

The code consists of just 3 files.

1. First, you’ll need a sign-up form. Here’s a sample form you can copy and modify. This form will forward the recipient’s email addresses to a PHP script that will process the addresses and send out the emails. The form also checks for common email errors such as forgetting the ‘@’ symbol.
2. The second part is the actual code that sends out the email. This is in a file called forward.php.
3. The last file is called forwardmail.htm in the same folder. This is the actual email that gets forwarded on.

These 3 files, when used together, will allow you to have your web designer quickly implement a forwarding form on your site. You have full permission to further modify these files to suit your site.

To get started you can download the 3 files above as a zipped file.

This might be an hour of work with a huge payoff. For our sites, forward forms like these have boosted sign-ups with up to 13%.

Ok, so I guess the forward rate of a controversial story about La Hilton would make this 13% look rather insignificant. Well, I challenge you, if you have any creative ideas, use them! I’m confident you can do a lot better than us.