Matt's Lifestyle Mission

Creative Offline Marketing

Matthew Savage — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 04:00:11 +0000

I know in my business I’m trying to find even more innovative ways to drive potential customers to my offers. Since I have spent most of my last 5 years online in the PPC arena I one day found myself asking a very important question. I asked myself why I was seeing my bids rise on my PPC campaigns and my profit start to shrink and why I wasn’t trying to expand my advertising venture out there. I’ll get back to what out there means but seriously I have been doing SEO and PPC to drive some good profits to my websites and cost per action offers. But one area I had dropped all together was offline advertising, I used to do some postcard marketing years ago when I had my computer consulting business. I though if I can drive people to my offer through traditional online marketing then I should be able to take my formula and apply it to the outside world. I dusted off a old postcard marketing course I had used years ago and after reading it found that I wanted to see if any new techniques were being applied to this age old advertising medium. I went over to the Warrior Forum and went searching for some postcard marketing courses and I hit pay dirt when I found a course titled Postcard Power Marketing by Matthew Olson. The original course I had was good but Matthew put his own spin on the topic and gave me some great ideas. So here I am testing using postcards to drive customers to my CPS & CPA offers. So far using some of the money saving ideas suggested in the WSO I was able to cut the cost of my postcard mailings by 33%. My first campaign I sent out resulted in a 3% conversion rate and brought me in a whole lot more in profits than I expected. As I type this article I’m working on my next offline campaign and will share with you the results once they come in. If your marketing the same old way try to break things up and try something new, with the results I had with my postcard marketing campaign I’m sure to think of some other ways I can drive traffic.

Fighting Minutiae and People Who Take Massive Action

Matthew Savage — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:12:19 +0000

I know it has been awhile since my last post and there is a very good reason for the delay. One thing I have noticed on the “Information Superhighway” is that there is so much minutiae out there that you have to take steps to filter it from your day or it will consume you. If you’re not careful then the information itself will overload your brain and prevent you from getting things done that you need to be doing to move your business forward. Are you the one that has a little application on your computer or iPhone to monitor every Web 2.0 feed that you have signed up to? You know those little micro blogs on what your friends are eating for dinner or doing that very moment? Are you getting to many emails in your inbox because you keep signing up to get more and more information about the subject you are researching? Do you sit for hours every night reading every article or blog post and felling that there are so many opinions and information out there you never get a solid answer to any of your questions? Well it is time you stopped and started taking action; this is one main reason why I have not updated my blog in a few months.
As I was searching for a way to create a new self sustaining business I let myself get sidetracked. I have some advice for any of you getting ready to go into business with others, stop what you’re doing and perform a gut check. While I was away I was about to start a business with some very talented individuals who unfortunately were headed in a direction not in line with what I truly wanted. In the beginning I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t going to work but I forged on and just ignored it. Eventually after I made a decision to step away, I forced myself to stop thinking about it and allowed myself to do some hard soul searching. When I did this I could clearly feel my gut telling me it was all wrong, to stop and get back on the path I decided to follow on my life’s journey. It was a bit disheartening to finally make the decision to put a stop to it but if can’t be true to my own dreams then why try to force something that wasn’t meant to be. Every get that feeling where something subconsciously holds you back, well in this case I was wondering why I could not force myself to take any action to move the business forward, it was my gut getting in the way.
A formula for success I have always found to be fairly simple but very effective to achieving what you want out of life is this. When in doubt, facing fear, uncertainty or what seems like an insurmountable obstacle just force yourself to move forward and take massive action. But always remain true to yourself, the vision you have set for your future and listen carefully to what your gut is telling you. If you are true to these tenants then you will achieve success in anything that you do. Remember what Thomas Alva Edison said “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” You could easily substitute the word genius for success in that quote. No doubt Thomas was one of the great minds of our time and is considered by many to be a success. I leave you here is one other quote Mr. Edison left us with “I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.”

Attitude – Setting Yourself Up For Success

Matthew Savage — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:09:58 +0000

I started listening to an excellent book by John Maxwell’s book titled Today Matters. After listening to the first part of the book I wanted to bring up the topic of attitude. John has this listed as the first step he mentions that is one of the foundations of success. I truly believe that if your not aware of your attitude and are unable to control it then your success will be limited. I know based on interactions with others that I tend to like to be around other people with positive attitudes, what about you?

Everyday you are constantly drawn in different directions, sometimes your not even aware of those little factors that effect your attitude. Ever walk by a group of people and notice how one person can start to influence all the others? One person in the group has a negative attitude and starts a conversation say talking bad about someone, next thing you know the entire group is joining in and adding their own opinions. This conversation leads to the next and eventually without even knowing it everyone is griping and bitching about what they don’t like.

Over the years I have paid special attention of my own attitude and am always trying to improve how I approach anything I do. I think one of the keys to my personal success over the years is that I try very hard to keep a positive attitude in anything that I do. You always have a choice you can either dwell on factors out of your control or simply choose to change you attitude and concentrate on what you do have control over. Your own mind, your thoughts and how you feel about yourself, your accomplishments and everything around you.

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Dreams Suffer When There Is No Business Plan

Matthew Savage — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:16:08 +0000

When getting started in any new business venture you can’t help but to get all worked up, your emotions are at an all time high. Heck I know sometimes it can feel like your back in touch with your primordial self, you can feel those endorphins flowing. However when you settle down and start to lay out the business your about to start you need to balance yourself out. This initial high is part of the vision mindset, it is the core of most innovations, new business and art that we see around us. If we didn’t get all worked up about a new idea then nothing new would ever happen and life would be boring.

However the opposite of the vision mindset is the process mindset, this is the planning, the systems you put into place to ensure you achieve your ultimate business goals. Did you know all successful business are systematized or process driven? You have to start developing simple processes that can be repeated by anyone in order to make any real momentum. What is the difference between a job and a business? Well in a business leaders know that they need to put processes and systems into place in order to ensure the business gets to where the CEO and President lead them toward. Yes a very well run company is not dependant on any one person to do a task, most jobs are setup in a way that anyone including someone overseas can do the same work you do. How come whenever you go to any McDonald’s anywhere in the world you get the same consistent product and service? Because these highly successful companies utilize well oiled processes to get the job done.

Case in point when a good friend of mine Phil and I were talking about an exciting new business venture we wanted to start. We started out in the vision mindset but quickly started to transition to the proccess mindset or nothing would ever get done. But as we came back down to planet earth we realized that we had to get to work creating our little processes so we can continually move to the next step to propel our business forward. Everyday we try to balance out that scale that keep the excitement of the vision in line with the processes that have to be done in order to build the business.

Remember keep the fire lit behind your business idea but don’t forget that when you wake up tomorrow you need to start working on the processes.

Voice message by cell phone to just about anywhere

Matthew Savage — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:08:13 +0000

Hey there, just wanted to post a quick note to my blog. Your probably thinking to yourself so what, what is the big deal about posting a note to your blog? That is not ground breaking information anyone can do it. I know its no big deal in the traditional sense, how ever the way I am posting this message is through a unique little service named Jott.com that converts your audio messages into text. You just call a toll free number, tell them where you want to post to (Twitter, Blog, To Do list, email contact etc.). Then you just dictate into to your phone like leaving a voice message with someone. It will then take my voice message transcribe it by computer to text and then will send it off for review before being posted. The review process is just an added step to ensure the computer doesn’t botch up the voice to text translation. They have a very strict privacy policy in place and treat your transcription as they do medial or legal transcribing services. So your sappy message to your girl might be reviewed by someone but they don’t know its you. You can read more about this protection on their site.

Another great way to use the service is for maintaining a grocery list, you can dictate via Jott over to a service like rememberthemilk.com. You just call a toll free number, say that you need milk, sugar and laundry detergent. It then will place the items in your grocery list so when your ready to head over to the store you know exactly what you need to buy. Neat?

Customer Relationship Marketing – Key To Long Term Business Growth

Matthew Savage — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 19:57:00 +0000

I know when I stared my online marketing career I didn’t know anything about relationship marketing. Tell you the truth I wasn’t ready to learn since I was already knee keep in all basics. In the beginning when you are starting your online business you have a few choices one is simply going for the quick sale and the other is thinking about how you can build a relationship with that customer and build long term customer value. I know you say when your still a newbie and learning the ropes you don’t want to be bothered with building relationships. I agree that when setting up your first website or starting up a new PPC campaign that you need to really nail down the basics first. But as you start to get more seasoned start asking how you can can get inside your customers head, know what they really want and then custom tailor your marketing message to that match.

It isn’t as hard as you think, instead of driving that precious traffic you acquired straight to the advertisers product or service sales page where you will lose them forever once they click away. Why not entice them to start building a relationship with you by giving them an irresistible offer. Offer a free white paper, ebook or product that matches what your prospect is looking for. For this to be very effective it has to be of value, something they could not get anywhere else. They have to feel that if I don’t act now and sign up for this offer that they will truly be missing out on something good. When you do this you will see the conversions for your opt-in list sky rocket and most people visiting your site won’t even give it a second thought and gladly give you their contact info.

The seeds of relationship marketing have been planted, you have started off this relationship by giving away yourself, your time creating this product, this is something of immense value. This harbors reciprocity and builds trust, your customer begins to feel indebted to you and on a subconscious level wants to give back. Think about the opposite of this when you just go for the sale how does your customer feel? Yes if they have a burning need to solve a problem right now then you just have helped them find the relief they were looking for. But think about this, you just let a customer go, on top of that one that has a burning need to solve a problem and you just let him/her go? Yeah you just made that quick $20 commission but lost out on a customer that might have bought 3-4 other products off of you. Think about how much money or time you just spent trying to acquire that customer and you just tossed them off to someone else and allowed them to build the relationship. As you go forward keep this in the back of your mind, I know this might not work in other markets and you might need to get a little creative with this but at least make it part of your core business plan. Trust me there will be more on this subject in the months to come and I will share with you some techniques you can use in this relationship building process.

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How Direct Deposit Can Accelerate Your Marketing

Matthew Savage — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:17:04 +0000

When I find out I can enable direct deposit on some of the affiliate networks I promote, I jump at the chance to enable this option. When I learned that recently Clickbank decided to offer this option to their affiliates and that they also would allow you to select weekly payouts I thought that was a smart business move. I have been promoting Clickbank products for a few years now and have become a custom to receiving those plain looking blue colored checks in the mail like clockwork. Even before this option was made available I thought Clickbank had a very good earned commissions payout schedule. You could typically advertise their vendors products and get paid before the credit card bill came due to cover the cost of the advertising. Now this weekly payout option will allow me to begin testing more campaigns sooner then I would have did before. But this option really helps the little guy starting out on a shoestring budget. Note you have to receive 3 normal paper checks in the mail in a 90 day period before you can enroll for this option. This gives you enough time to put a system into place to quickly abandon the losers and allows you to market the daylights out of the winners.

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The Sticky Video Bomb – Let Your Visitors Control the Timer

Matthew Savage — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:57:14 +0000

When a visitor arrives at your site you need to entertain, inform or empower them so when they navigate away you they will still be thinking about you and will be sure to come back. When working on your website always think about what does your visitor want, ask yourself “what can I do to over-deliver on the information I provide” to them. If you concentrate on the visitor experience and you do this well you have a formul for success, if you nail this down to the point where you get your following to talk to their friends about you then you will experience explosive growth. Well what about SEO? How do I optimize my site for both the visitor and the search engines at the same time? I will tell you right now when you spend time working on your website start out by concentrating on the content, the value you give your visitor. Want to know a way to do this and also optimize your site for the search engines?

Add video to your site, it keeps your visitor entertained, informed and sticking around on your website for longer than 3 seconds. Remember internet visitors are impatient and will leave your site if they don’t see anything of value there, videos enhance that value. Google are masters at watching the search habits of their visitors, they watch how your visitor finds you and also monitors how long they remain on your site. If they are there for a long time then Google notes this in the back of their computer databases that your site must have something that the customer likes.

Next tip I will talk about how you can give “G” even more of a reason to come back when using videos…

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Experiment in creating a life of my dreams

Matthew Savage — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:59:44 +0000

Have you ever felt like standing up in the middle of a meeting at work just scream at the top of your lungs “ENOUGH”? Do you sit there in your cubicle and feel like one of those little lab rats where your reward is that little piece of cheese (salary) you get twice a month. You know your valuable to your organization, your not a underachiever in the workplace yet in the back of your mind you know your company can easily shift your job overseas and they wouldn’t even think twice. That brings me to this junction point in my life, it hasn’t been boring since the path did lead down a very rewarding yet stressful career working for a company that is listed #15 on the Fortune 500 list.

However as I sit here writing this post I can’t put out the fire I have this burning feeling inside me, I find myself having difficulty concentrating anymore. It’s like I am so impatient right now, dying to kick off this expirement in creating a life you swear could only be shown in the movies or in your dreams. Why do I feel this way ? Well I realized that life is too short, maybe I’m having a mid life crisis or just realize that you only get one chance at this game called life. I know I have the same responsibilities as everyone else, I have a mortgage, family responsibilities and need a steady income to get by from month to month. But this journey I am about to take is one that I will face fear, my own personal comfort zone and mediocrity to take another fork in the road. My time will be worth something, not just trading it for what someone else thinks it is worth or says it worth based on national averages. I will be making more money in a day then I make all week or month and I will be doing something that is in align with my true passions.

How will I accomplish this lofty goal of changing my life, well sort of like how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, I will probably blow up a few things but I will persevere and not give up. Remember genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Your going to see me perspire, tear down the walls around me and reinvent my life, my body and my soal from the ground up. I hope you stick around or drop back in from time to time. I would like to share with you my journey and also to hear your own stories, dreams and struggles.

Matthew
Taking that first step..

The Man Who Almost Lost Faith In Dreaming Big…

Matthew Savage — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:44:54 +0000

We all come to a point in our lives where we have to force ourselves to leave our own comfort zone, toss bad habits and abandon fear in order to choose to take another path at the fork in the road we call life. Now I am not talking about just adjusting your path to get around that bump in life, were talking a major shift, even having to go backwards if we have to change our lives. Most of the time your not even aware of these junction points in your life and you just continue to get tossed about by the frantic pace of life and time just passes you by. For a long time I didn’t question my lot in life, I just kept allowing external factors and circumstance to control me. No matter what company I worked for or business I started I never felt satisfied, like I was going against the grain of my creative spirit.

If you had a good childhood or just have sat and watched children play you can’t help but get caught up in their little world, where time doesn’t matter, when you let your senses lead you and life was wonderful and exciting. They control their life experience by doing what is passionate to them, if they want to draw they just put crayon to paper and create whatever their little minds can imagine. Who do we as adults allow ourselves to be controlled by circumstance, society and jobs we dislike? Why can’t we still be responsible adults but also be able to create lives that are in line with our true calling, our passions?

Are you at a point in your life where you just spend more time with family, friends and enjoying activities you have always wanted to do if only you had more time? You have to look at your time as the most precious commodity you have, don’t just give it away for a small fraction of what it worth. In my up and coming posts I will share with you how you can steer your life towards one that is radiant and full of excitement just like those little children you see in the park near your house. Don’t stop dreaming and while your at it why not dream big?

Matthew Savage
Partner
Four Hour Lifestyle