You only need to be good at TWO things

You only need to be good at two things

generating traffic and converting traffic into buying customers

Classic Perry Marshall wisdom….

Thanks I needed that.

short response this time

THANKYOU

Well, now I’ve got to be good at 3 things:

1. One way to drive traffic
2. One way to convert folks into buyers
3. I have to opt-OUT of all the crap I signed up for

Man, alive online crap is hard! I was doing an excellent job of opting IN for everything that came down the pike. Perry, you’re killing me!

I’m going to go to work making my backyard look just like yours. I think THAT is the secret to your success!

LK

I would argue there is one additional thing to be good at.

Capturing prospects.

Even if you can generate traffic to your site AND you can convert those visitors to buyers, you can’t build a list unless you get really good at capturing the contact info of your visitors.

Some people have high traffic sites and good products but they let thousands of people pass through their sites without asking for their email…never to be seen again.

Even if you don’t have a product yet you can get started by driving traffic and building a list in preparation for it.

Thanks as ever, Perry! I prune out my email subs quarterly… but would NEVER consider dropping yours. I save them all to an email folder, and/or forward them to friends.. the ones I think have the brains and moxie to “run faster than the other guy”.

Perry, thanks I needed that!

Maybe the best blog you’ve written!

Perry, Thanks…I just subscribed to a few newsletters because I thought I was missing something….and all I have gotten so far from them is a “pitch”…you pointed out what I was missing….simplicity…keeping it simple…I can handle two things….

You could always start a 12 step recovery program for infoholics….plenty of patients out there… I’ll start deleting TODAY…Thanks

Soo true, I’ve been coming to grips with this concept lately. The sheer amount of traffic sources, conversion options, operations and business models is simply staggering…and i’ve been very unproductive as a result..thanks for bringing it up/reminding all of us Perry! keep up the great work!

Hey Perry, thanks for that one. I think it was one of your best – straight to the point, based on real experience, not pitching anything (except yourself of course) – love it. And damn good advice – Keep ‘em coming. pc

Way to “dummy it down.” Great blog post!

One of your best Perry… in fact, I try to do just that. Keep the relevant, interesting newsletters, and jettison the ones that do nothing but try to sell me something. Selling with content is fine, but selling with no content gets the thumb.

You’re correct about driving traffic to a site is important.Today my stats are up Thanks to Your Advice i learned from your Site.Thanks

Right on! Thanks for the reminder.

Wow Perry, this email couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I have been reading your stuff, and following you for 4 years now and finally It CLICKED! What you are saying is so brilliant and simple. Thank you so much, I can’t wait to delete myself from those “waste of time” groups, and really get good at TWO THINGS! And yes, in my business get paid up to 14k for my time. LOVE IT!
cheers,
Cynthia in Southern California

I hear you on that one. LOL.

Wow, just what I needed at just the right time… what a great way to finally take a concept so simple and effective and create a laser focus.

Perry that is the best advice I have heard in a long time.

Thanks

Perry -

Thanks for the great post. I think we often try to over complicate things.

In working with our clients I have found that focusing on a few strategies at a time works the best.

Thanks again

Hey Perry,

I just wanted to thank you for your great insight. This is a wonderful piece of advice, and refreshing to hear from someone in the internet marketing world. I find myself wasting a lot of time sifting through emails from people that promise the “newest” or “best” technique out there. I needed this clarity that your message gave me. Thanks again!

Sincerely,
Brian Clark

Hi Perry;
Great info! I unsubscribed from a number of lists a couple of weeks ago because I was spending way too much time reading emails and trying different things and not getting anything done.

Focus on what you’re good at and limit it to just two – great advice!

Thanks!

Kathy

Perry,

Great meeting you yesterday in Schaumburg. Just a refresher: I joined your Renaissance Club, asked you a question or two, picked up a ton of valuable info and took a picture with you. Very cool! Best marketing seminar ever. Thanks a mil and looking forward to participation in the membership.

This is a great “Secret”: to focus on the most important.

Thank you. I think I’m not bad at getting traffic, but “flipping prospects into buyers” is more difficult (for me). I even didn’t know, before reading your email, that there were several ways to do so. I’m still wondering what they are.

Gabrielle,

GREAT question. Any of the following things – or combinations of the following – could convert a visitor to a buyer:

-sales letter
-sequence of sales letters
-video
-teleseminar
-webinar
-testimonials
-send them to a distributor, agent or rep
-sending people to an affiliate site that can convert them
-talk to them on the phone
-live chat
-visit them in person
-bring them to a seminar
-30 day free trial
-sales pitch via email
-earn their trust over such a long period of time (ie with autoresponders, or credibility through external endorsements) that eventually they buy, even though the copy isn’t all that great
-hire someone to deliver the pitch for you
-surveys to find out why they’re not buying

Perry Marshall

I sometimes waste a lot of time online trying to figure out how to do something. What i need to do is just turn it all off and do what I already know how. Thanks for the timely wisdom (again)

Absolutely the best advice on marketing especially internet marketing I have ever heard. It’s very easy to chase all of the “new and fantastic massive wealth building secrets” that these self proclaimed gurus pass out every day. Chasing all of that junk keeps you from focusing on what you need to be doing. Your statement is definitely the K.I.S.S. principle at its best. Thank you for hammering that home. I’m sure many of us needed to hear that, I know I did.

I just wanted to thank you for your email. You are right – I am going in to any directions at once. So many marketers and people screaming in my ear. I’m letting go of them today – in fact I have been unsubscribing in the last week – they’re burdensome.

Your emails do make a difference. And this email in particular made a big difference – Thank you so much!!

My photographs are finding their way into homes all over the place now from my physical gallery – but my online gallery still needs help – this article gave me some insight – Video may be the thing now – like you mentioned I love to talk to people, so video may be just right. So much of what I have learned was from you ..

Again, thanks so much for your clear vision .. it really helps!

John

Perry,

Fact is for your newsletter and one other, of the dozen or so to which I subscribe, I will stop in the middle of my day just to sink my teeth into it. Always meaty and actionable, AND thought-provoking. In this instance you grabbed me with the story and suddenly spoke directly to ME (of course I know the one-two combo, but nevertheless I was hooked). How true this message and honest. That’s the reason you have such a vital and loyal following.

Thanks for every single one of your newsletters.

Jen Rotman

Will it hurt your feelings any if I comment that I had to wade thru 99% of your crap to get this marvelous gem?
I think that if you focused your blog/emails/marketing advice a little better, I would get a lot more out of it.

Two things:
1. It’s great advice
2. It will actually simplify the way we do things, not complicate it.

Hi Perry,

Your email today moved me to write a comment for you. I started online part time in December 26, 2006 and still doing it part time as of today. When I just started, I subscribed to most of the top earners mailing list. Most of their emails contain only sales pitch and not much of good advice, as a result I unsubscribed from 90% from them.

In the closing of 2008, I unsubscribed from the remaining 10% only retaining 3 regular emails that has got value for me. I’ve been wasting time and money on online business opportunities. So, in March 31 2009, I decided it is time to start my own website and focus on it.

So, Perry, I’ve done that, thanks for asking.

Thanks for the advice,I spend more time reading
every tip like you said,and don’t get anything
done to promote a niche to make me some sort of
income for myself.

This was a really well written and thought-provoking article. You hit
it all on the nailhead. Very well done!! Thank you for sharing this
information.

Brilliant Email!

The more I play the this internet marketing game the more realize the one constant is always going to be change. There will always be the next big “thing” to do. Do you do it or not?

Better question I’ve always found to ask myself is “What’s a good reason I should divert my $1000+/hour focus from doing what’s making the $1000+/hour.

With that perspective it’s a lot easy not to to get swept up in the romance of what’s next.

To the top,

Daegan

Perry,

Thanks for this guidance. This tells me that I am on the right track now.

I have reduced the quantity of information influx considerably the last few months and increased the quality in terms of relevance. E.g., stopped some payed newsletters. ( a temporary slowdown in sales due to “the crisis” actually helped me to finally steer in that direction. Reminds me that crisis and opportunity are closely linked. )

What I am good at:

Traffic and lead generation:
* Generating leads with Google Adwords ( and from the amount of free search traffic which comes as a side-effect of playing the Adwords game properly )
* Optimizing landing pages and lead-capture pages with splittesting.

Conversion:
* product optimization feedback loop:
- Getting to know customers want by getting them to tell me what they want.
- Modifying my product according to these wants.

* Service:
- Providing quality support by email for users of my product.
( about 50% of my sales are triggered by good support for the trial version of my product… )

* Optimizing sales-copy with splittesting.

Actually, the current bottleneck in my business is the work on my product which is kinda ironic because that’s my original profession which I learned in the public education system.

And due to this bottleneck, conversion is not yet at the level where I want it to be.
( I have a huge semi-prioritized list of customer wishes and implement them step by step… Conversion is often positively affected by those improvements of the product. Currently playing catchup, so sales remain at the same level, but there is light at the end of the tunnel…)

The marketing and lead-generation part seems pretty easy now, especially after several years on Planet Perry, and runs more or less on autopilot.

So, thanks a lot for opening the doors to the marketing aspects of my business,

Chris

I’ve committed all the classic mistakes that keep me from bring successful at internet markleting. Yet I’m successful in my offline actions and activities – Thank God or I wouldn’t be here!!

The clarity Perry gave me in this message is the best peice of advice I’ve recieved on the game ever. Thanks Perry.

Perry, its midnight in Oz as I read your email and it felt as if you wrote it just for me. Thanks for making it clearer and simple, yes going to unsubscribe to several unhelpful email lists.

Great advice but in order to become great at generating traffic and converting that traffic, it is a real challenge to get useful information.

BoJo goes too far I think in calling 99% of your stuff crap. But I can see his point. I was thinking of getting off your mailing list because 90% of what I received was not helping me with my main objective, which I think was one of the two simple goals you write about here.

I signed up to get the Definitive Guide to Adwords. Long term goal would be to become great at generating traffic and conversions through Adwords. Short term goal was trying to understand why, after 1 impression, Google gave me a 1/10 quality score and stopped displaying my ads. Three landing page revisions did not change anything.

I think I finally found the answers I needed in one of the printed newsletters that was a bonus for sign-up. I didn’t feel I got the answers from the Definite Guide. To me, that guide should be called the Definitive Guide to Direct Marketing. To me, it is more about marketing than it is about Google Adwords.

To me, to be a definitive guide on adwords it needs to do more than tell you the right way to it. It has to tell you how to fix things if you’ve already done it the wrong way. Maybe this is a case that I just haven’t been able to absorb enough. It is 200+ pages. It seemed that less than half it dealt directly with Adwords.

You have helped me but I just wanted to give you some feedback and point out the irony that I think your advice in this blog post is right but it is not so easy to get the answers you need to be successful with those two simple priorities of generating traffic and converting it, even from you.

I couldn’t agree more and love how succinctly you put it. But the problem comes in when you are good at more than one thing and you reach different groups of people by writing and doing video and teleseminars. I do think it needs to be sequentional though.

I would say get really good at one thing, then you can add something else if you want to and find it enjoyable and become good at it. Don’t you think that also would work?

Great article Perry. I’m fairly new to Internet marketing with blogging and there are so many ways of doing things it is mind numbing.

Looks like the key is to master one or two things and not be a “jack of all trades but master of none”.

Thanks Perry, for those words of wisdom. They bring a sense of relief. At least in the short term, I’ll feel free to concentrate on just TWO things.

Perry, your words are so reassuring. From the beginning I determined doing AdWords & Yahoo were what I really am good at… but from time to time get to wondering if I should be learning more, and get lost in the sea of confusion that you describe.

Recently turned down a request from a AdWords client to do FaceBook PPC for him….I really am not interested, nor do I have the time to diversify,.

That’s good stuff Perry!

In line with your advice here, I want to share something I heard a while back regarding focus. Each day identify the ONE thing you absolutely MUST do that day for your business, and work it. Then if there’s time left over you can tackle other things, wade through email, etc.

Hi Perry and other readers here. As the others are saying – this really hit the nail on the head for me.

Simplifying to just focus on two major things to get going and stay great at.

I do not like PPC. But I LOVE NUMBERS. I do. I wish I could understand it, because I know the money is so much better there.

I am VERY good at bringing in organic traffic. I read the Adwords Guide also, and it got me nowhere, but in more frustration.

So I’m glad to know that I can stick to organic traffic pulling methods.

I was going to ask Gabrielle’s question, I know that you have to be able to convert – which I can’t – even with 50,000 monthly visitors to one of my sites.

Perry, thank you for that golden list you jotted down for Gabrielle, I’ve already printed it and am really raring to go.

I always hear that Conversion is the most important ‘trigger’, but I can rarely find out HOW to truly convert. So I thank you again for that list you provided above.

I also cut down on newsletters, I used to get HUNDREDS of them, but over the past years have cut them down considerably.

I’m down to about 5 or so newsletters. ONE I want to get OFF of because they send me e-mails almost everyday – sometimes TWICE a day – ALL PITCHES.

But, they say that if I unsubscribe that I will not be able to know if they update their software that I bought from them. I feel stuck on that one.

I open Perry’s e-mails more than any others. Years ago, I used to gloss over them just like the others, but these past 5 months; now that I’m starting to understand Conversion, I have been opening Perry’s e-mails about 99% of the time.

I’m glad I clicked through FROM the e-mail today, though, as I thought the article was just that on the e-mail, and when I clicked to this POST, I learned SO MUCH MORE.

Perhaps you could let us know, Perry, that the links to your posts contain much more juicy info (than what is in the e-mail). I just happened to keep clicking through, but already thinking I had read it all via the e-mail.

I read your Renaissance, am in your MasterMind Club, and boy am I paying attention.

Thank you for such a caring attitude, Perry! I really appreciate your time.

With Peace,
MJ

Thanks Perry!

Really cool article. I have been attempting to focus on too many things as you suggest. Having said that, could SEO and PPC be bumdled into the same bucket at all ?

I dont want to be a jack of all traits and a master of none.

Well, I’m good at more than two things. I think I’m viable for the title “jack of all trades, master of none.” LOL