Product Launch Formula Bonus Call:

Gary Ambrose

ProductLaunchFormula.com

Hosted by:

Jeff Walker

With Special Guest:

Gary Ambrose

Version 1.2

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Copyright Notice: This report is Copyright Jeff Walker © 2006. Additional material is copyrighted to its original owners.

You may not distribute this report in any way or any format.

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Interview with Gary Ambrose

Jeff : First of al I would like to welcome everyone to this Product Launch Formula Bonus cal . We have Gary Ambrose on the line.

Even though Gary has been doing business on line for a very long time, he has always stayed under the radar… so I imagine a lot of folks listening to this cal are not familiar with him.

I first met Gary last October when I was launching Product Launch Formula. I was having problems with getting email blacklisted and Gary helped me figure out what was going on.

He wrote a quick little script that aided us in getting around the blackout issue.

So that’s where I first met Gary but he’s been online for a long time. Hopefully he wil give us a brief autobiography.

Then, at the end of January when Mike Filsaime launched his Butterfly Marketing

product, Gary was one of the folks who promoted the course on a Joint Venture basis… along with what seemed like everyone else in the known universe.

And it turns out he was the number one joint venture partner, and that’s what we want to talk about on this call.

I don’t know the exact number but Gary sold somewhere around 200 copies through his affiliate link. This was a thousand dol ar product and within a massive launch with al kinds of competition trying to get people to buy through their link, and Gary sold about $200,000 in product.

That is one of the most stunning marketing feats that I know of. To me it ranks right up there with John Reese selling a mil ion dol ars of his Traffic Secrets course in a day. So, Gary, welcome. I’m glad to have you here. I’m real y looking forward to this cal .

Gary: Well, now I’m hoping I can live up to the hype of the introduction.

Jeff: Well, that was just the beginning of the hype actually. These days I literal y get a new course in the mail, via FedEx, and so on every single day. It takes a while to get through them but I’ve been working through Mike’s Butterfly Marketing course because I’m very interested in it.

Yesterday I listened to the interview Mike did with you. For our listener’s benefit, Mike Filsaime interviewed Gary as a guest interview as part of the Butterfly Marketing course <http://www.butterflylaunch.com>.

It was a very interesting interview. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about Gary but I also picked up a lot of pointers so that primed me for this call and so now I’m doubly excited to have you on the line.

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Gary: Well, Mike and I know each other pretty wel . We hooked up with each other a year ago through somebody else, which is normally the way it goes in the Internet marketing field. You know somebody who knows somebody and you end up meeting.

Mike and I have marathon cal s al the time, but for that interview, we were constrained to one hour and it really threw both of us off because we usually go for two hours. We’ve gone for three and a half hours on a cal before. We just wouldn’t shut up!

I don’t know if this is typical of all marketers but when I listen back on those interviews, there are so many things that I wish I could have been able to squeeze into that time period.

More importantly, and getting to the big thing with this cal is that I was one of the people involved in Mike’s course which gave me a little bit of an advantage in the promotion of it.

Jeff: Before we go there Gary, could you give us a real quick bio and tel us what you’ve done?

Gary: Sure. I don’t know if my voice gives it away but I’m a younger guy. I’m 28 now but that being said, I’ve been on the computer for about 25 years. That puts the computer in my house around the age of three. I’ve been on the computer longer than most people have.

Obviously nobody knew anything about the Internet back then. Computers were nothing like what we have today. I basical y just had one in the house because my father was always working for large pharmaceutical companies and they required him to have one. To be honest, he never ever touched it. It was just me taking things apart and putting things back together as kids do.

I really got lucky in that aspect. It is similar to learning languages. When you are young and you are trying to learn a new language it’s really easy for you to pick it up. When you get older and you try to learn a new language it’s real y difficult.

I got lucky and stumbled into having some computer technical knowledge because I had to. Back then, there was no Windows, there was no point and click. You had to know what you were doing in order to operate a computer.

I didn’t real y know what was going on with that until I went to high school. I went to high school in the Florida Keys, which is a very small place. It’s a vacation place. Most people don’t even know there are houses there.

There is one main road that goes north and south. It goes 127 miles or so from end to end, and there isn’t much on either side. I think there were four or five traffic lights on that entire hundred mile stretch when I was there.

So, as a kid going to high school in the Florida Keys, I wanted, as all young men do, to have a ridiculously loud and annoying car stereo. That seems to be the thing that high school guys like. There was just one guy for 60 miles in either direction who did car stereo instal ation and he went to high school with me so we sort of worked out a deal. His market was pretty limited being down in the Keys. He was hoping to sel a few more products. I was a cheap high school kid who didn’t have a ton of money to spend.

I said, “Alright, let’s see if we can figure something out. I know a little bit about putting web pages together. I wil put up a web site for you and you install my car stereo for me and give me the parts at cost.”

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He wasn’t too sure about it because back in ’96, which was only ten years ago, Internet commerce wasn’t anything like it is today. It was only a year and a half after the browsers the supported pictures came out.

We put the site up on one of those free hosts. It was real y, real y bad. There was no online ordering system; you had to fax in an order form. To say that it was anywhere close to ‘professional’ would be a huge overstatement.

I didn’t know anything at the time about developing anything on my computer… I just developed everything and uploaded it to the site so I could see what I was doing. Before I was even done working on the site, we had generated over $10,000 in sales of car stereo equipment for shipment all over the world. This was just amazing!

Jeff: He instal ed car audio equipment, but al of the sudden you were retailing it too.

Gary: Yes. He got a dealer’s license which enabled him to purchase parts at wholesale. A lot depends on your volume in wholesale businesses, so being down in the Keys he was at a distinct disadvantage.

My high school graduating class was less than 100 so that should give you a pretty good idea of what the population is. It was obviously not a large area.

Jeff: In other words, there were about 50 high school boys to sel retail to. ☺

Gary: Right. Exactly! His market was smal . He instal ed stereos in the cars of 40 of the guys in the high school, but where do you go next?

(laughter)

When he ordered parts, his orders were at the highest wholesale rate. So he didn’t get a huge discount.

He ended up doing that for a while but it turned out that he wasn’t really interested in the retail side of things so we pul ed the web site down. I didn’t real y do much with the Internet for a while. I guess you can chalk that up to being young. I didn’t really see the opportunity like I should have.

I didn’t do too much with it until I moved up to col ege and met my wife who had

graduated from school with a marketing degree in three years and went out into the job force. She real y wasn’t overly keen on going into the job force. She always wanted to be a mom and knew that her career wasn’t going to be a long term thing.

She stil wanted a decent job, as everybody does. She worked for Enterprise Rental Car which a lot of people are familiar with from their tag line which was “We’l pick you up!” – they are the rental car place that wil drive out and get you.

For some reason, they require a marketing degree. Neither of us can real y understand why. Essential y what happened is she went there the first night and she worked from six in the morning and didn’t get home until eight that night. I said, “What are you doing home so late? Isn’t this supposed to be one of those cushy ‘I’ve got a col ege degree jobs?’”

She told me that she had been washing cars at night. We both just looked at each other and thought maybe this was a hazing type thing. You know, you’re the new guy and you’re going to be washing cars for the first night to break you in and make sure that

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you’re not soft or whatever. She was in her new business suit, the nice shoes and al that because it was her first real job.

So she went back the next day and it was the same thing. She was driving all over town picking people up. So there is this blonde driving around town picking people up. She didn’t real y know what part of town she was going to next.

Then she’d get back at night and start washing cars. Obviously that didn’t last long. I was sort of a col ege bum, long hair past my shoulders and she came home and said, “Oh, I just quit my job. We are going to have to figure something out.” That’s when we official y started the Internet stuff. That was in ’98.

Jeff: Wow! So at that point you are the tech guy. She is the marketer. Obviously you picked up some marketing skil s along the way.

Gary: Right, of course. Basical y it started out when she said, “You’ve got to put some of this stuff you know to good use.” Most of my computer time was just spent making personal web sites. Nothing that was profitable.

We were flipping through some magazines one day trying to figure out what we were going to do to generate any income. My wife is a big soap opera fan. I picked up one of her Soap Opera Digest magazines on the couch and started flipping through it.

Of course in the back of al those magazines you see all of the business opportunities. At the time it was more prevalent than it is now but we saw the ones that were: “Assemble products and we wil pay you $12 per whatever,” or “Stuff envelopes and we’l pay you for $4 per envelope.”

Of course everybody knows those are not realistic opportunities. We didn’t real y look at it as, “Great! We can assemble stuff! We can stuff envelopes!”

The way we looked at it was somebody was paying to advertise here. This is a large circulation magazine and they’ve got paying advertisers that are targeting a specific

demographic. This was about late ’98 or ’99 when the search engines were real y starting to get big and the dot com boom was real y flowing. At that time we were lucky because search engines were pretty much a piece of cake to get listed in.

We said, “You know what? We are going to go for something real y unique here. We are going to go for the first online classified site specifical y targeting the work-at-home field. If somebody is paying to advertise in these magazines and we can get them some traffic, maybe they will pay us to advertise online as wel .”

It was a brand new field and it expanded those advertiser’s marketing horizon. If anyone got on the computer and typed, "I want to work at home,” they would find us. That was our first real online business site.

Jeff: And I know that from there you just got into al kinds of things.

Gary: Yeah, we’ve been all over the place. That is typical of the Internet field. You know this. It doesn’t sound like all that long ago, ’98, but in terms of what’s happened since ’98 I couldn’t be doing the same thing I was then. I would be doing free-for-all pages and trying to design banner ads.

There real y wasn’t HTML email. Instant messaging real y didn’t work then. There was no video. You couldn’t do streaming audio. If I didn’t evolve I would be in big trouble.

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Jeff: Right. Somewhere along that line you “got religion” in terms of building lists.

Gary: Right. This is embarrassing now because I started on the technical end which is where my strengths were. What we ended up seeing with that classified site was that there were just a few early affiliate programs. They started real y rol ing out in mid ’99 and 2000.

They weren’t anything like the affiliate programs today. They were not wel managed. The scripts weren’t very good. It was just horrible. To be honest, they were all pretty scummy at the time.

But we started noticing that with our advertising site was getting al of the same

advertisers with the same business opportunities over and over. In one day we would get ten or twenty advertisements and we would see that three of these were for “Opportunity A,” four of them were for “Opportunity B” and the next day the same thing would happen. So of course we said, “Maybe we should look into what this opportunity A is and this opportunity B is.”

If people are wil ing to pay us to advertise these things there is a good chance that they are making money on it. We thought it would be a great to make money on the affiliate program and on the advertising of the affiliate program. What could be better?

So we started our first affiliate program. It was really bad. I just hacked a whole bunch of stuff together. Looking back on it now, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing at the time. We just looked at web sites and assumed that we knew what we were doing.

I think we figured that we were making about two dol ars per year per client. Obviously it was a real y big mistake. One good thing happened out of that. Basical y I had heard for what seemed like forever that you need to build a mailing list. You need to have an email list.

I had been involved in what is cal ed the ‘grey area’ of email marketing prior to our official start. I knew that email marketing was effective. I designed a little script for our affiliate program hat would generate a lead for us for everybody who came to the web site. That script is what a lot of people now know as Opt-in Lightning.

Basically, you would come to our web site and a little java script box would pop up on your page. It would say: Would you like the seven reports on deadly email marketing secrets? Click okay or cancel. There was nowhere for you to enter your name or your email address. It was either okay or cancel.

Jeff: I remember when that came out - it was revolutionary.

Gary: Yeah. Most people would see that and they would think, “Wel , sure. I want the seven free whatever.” You didn’t connect it to this is a subscribe box even though it said it in the text. You just said, “Sure, okay. Why not? It’s free stuff. Al I have to do is click a button.”

We were getting a 95% to 96% opt in rate. I really wish that I would have been marketing better at the time. I would have released that script a lot differently. A marketer ran across the site and said, “Are you sel ing this thing? I said, “No, I’m not selling it. We just set it up for our own affiliate program.” He said, “You have to sell this thing. This is amazing!” I said, “Ah, whatever.”

At that point I was still in the programmer’s mindset. I was worried about how everything worked rather than what was going on at the marketing end of things. My main concern was why aren’t these other four percent going for it? Is there a technical problem? I wasn’t thinking, “Oh my gosh, 96% is ridiculous!”

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(laughter)

It’s just a different mindset, you know? The guy marketed it and most people assumed that he was the guy who released the script and didn’t really know too much about it. Looking back on it now, the way we went about it was a big mistake. But I learned a lot. We were getting testimonials left and right based on people saying that this thing was amazing. I was adding thousands of subscribers to my list and making al this money. To be honest, I was stil stuck in my little programmer’s world which was okay that’s great. How can I improve the script and sell more copies of it?

I wasn’t looking at these guys going, “I just made $80,000 because of the new list I generated,” or, “I made this amount of money.” I didn’t see it all. I wasn’t connecting it. I had to unwire a little bit with how my brain worked because I was real y a technical guy.

That got us started because there were just so many testimonials at one point that I simply couldn’t ignore them anymore. There were just too many coming in and they were legitimate unsolicited testimonials. I had instal ed the script on a server for someone and two weeks later I got an email from him saying this thing is the best thing I’ve ever used! So I knew it was for real.

Jeff: It’s funny because no matter how good we are, we al have blind spots like that. It often just takes some outside thing to impact us enough to finally shine the light. I was just talking to Marlon Sanders a week or so ago. He was tel ing me about someone who had an unbelievable niche. He was the world expert in something (I am not going to mention what the niche is).

This is a niche that has rabid participants and this guy is the world expert. But instead of capitalizing on his expertise and celebrity, he is trying to sel some work at home affiliate program instead.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: The guy wasn’t seeing niches. It’s like, “Look at al of the posters on your wall!”

Gary: I know exactly how that is. Everyone has situations that they look back on now and say, “Oh, if I just had known this back then it would have been completely different!”

Looking back on it now I think, “I could have been generating lists in the mil ions or I should have done this as real y one of the first high ticket launches.” Looking back on it now to think about it, let’s say that your opt-in rate was only 50% or 60%. Wel , who wouldn’t like a guaranteed 60% opt-in rate?

The best part of it was that people weren’t using fake email addresses because it tied into a person’s email client.

If I could go back in time I would have that first mil ion day I’m pretty sure. The way it worked was just incredible. I received testimonials from people that are the big name guys now. Most of them didn’t know it was me behind it at the time. I just wasn’t thinking that way.

Jeff: Let’s fast forward and start talking about Mike’s Butterfly Marketing launch.

Gary: Sure.

Jeff: Mike did the full out product launch, with an extensive prelaunch.

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Gary: Sure.

Jeff: Mike and I were talking during that time and there were a lot of things he did that I saw were modeled on my launch. He real y did something far better than I did with his whole JV communication. He did this great JV contest that I didn’t do.

I tried to create some competition. I know I created some competition among my

partners, but I didn’t do it in the same way or as effectively as Mike did. Mike had this very extensive prelaunch. 30 days before launch day he started al owing people to

promote and then launched a month later. I promoted his product, but I didn’t promote it very hard… I just didn’t want to be caught in this beg-a-thon of people that a lot of his JV partners were creating.

There was so much of that going on it was ridiculous. I think there are people out there who thought they were going to do real y wel , but then obviously you came out of

nowhere and stayed above the fray in my opinion and just had remarkable results. It was unreal.

Gary: It’s always nice to see something work the way that you plan it.

Jeff: Tel me about your plan.

Gary: Sure. As I mentioned earlier on the call, Mike and I have known each other for a little while so I sort of had a heads start. I saw the original, original rough draft for Butterfly Marketing when he first came up with the concept a year and a half ago.

Three or four nights after we met, we had one of our marathon phone cal s Mike and I were on the phone recording an interview for a web site I was running at the time. The whole basis behind that web site was these are the up and coming guys to watch out for.

Mike and I were talking for a while on the phone and we ended the official part of the conversation. We turned off the recording and were on the phone for a good hour after that and he told me about Butterfly Marketing. I asked him whether he registered the domain yet? He said, “No.” So he actual y registered the domain for the site after one of our phone cal s.

So I had a year and a half advantage of knowing that the product was coming.

I guess you could cal my entire promotion the “Perfect Storm.” Everything came together on this product that put me in a perfect position to end up generating lots sales on it.

Like you said, you get a lot of products sent your way and I get a lot of products sent my way. You’ve done a good job with this. You and I get a lot more than the average person. A lot of times when somebody gets a product that has a high commission they don’t real y consider if it fits their list. They don’t think, “Does it fit my profile? Does it fit what I do? Is this something that I should really be promoting? “

They just think, “It’s $400 commission per sale. Of course I should promote it. When do I ever get that opportunity?” I had known Mike and I had known what he was doing. And I actual y do many of the same things that Mike does. I just wasn’t smart enough to put a tag line behind it. I guess I’ve stil got some marketing to learn.

(laughter)

Jeff: That wouldn’t be al of the stuff we could learn from Mike.

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Gary: Anyway, back to the “Perfect Storm. “

I had a list of people that was generated primarily through the same type of web sites that are created with Butterfly Marketing. The people on the lists had seen the process for themselves, with my name plastered al over the front of it. This is Gary’s web site that you just joined, so you saw that I do exactly what Mike is talking about in his whole prelaunch campaign.

Let’s be honest. With a lot of these courses and sales in general, people aren’t

necessarily buying a product. Sure, they are getting a physical product in many cases but for example with your product, the Product Launch Formula, what are people real y

buying there?

It’s not that they want the box with the stuff in it. They want you. They want Jeff. Do you know what I mean? That’s what the course real y is. They are buying your knowledge. Everybody was going to be promoting this as: “Mike is a real y smart guy and knows his stuff. “

My main overriding thought on how can I separate myself from al of these other affiliates promoting this was based on people wanting to buy “a person.” Everybody who

purchased the course was going to have access to Mike anyway. That’s a given. They are buying into him.

I looked at it as maybe these people would want access to two people who know this stuff so that they could get two different perspectives. What better way to position it as not only are they getting access to the guy who developed the course, but they also get this other guy out there who is essential y doing the same thing and generating serious numbers himself. So they are buying into two people.

I know that concept helped out because I did a survey to the people who purchased through me and asked what was the reason that you purchased through my link? Many of them replied, “Well, you are somebody who does this. You understand it.”

There are a lot of times when you see a course like this and you know that the person behind the course has the knowledge to be able to do these things, but you wonder if this is something that can real y be duplicated. Can somebody else really take the information in the course and turn it into a profitable business? Is it some other type of advantage that’s just not possible?

I was able to prove to people that yes, you can do this. There are other people who do this stuff. It’s not just Mike… and I’ll share with you how I’ve been able to do it. That obviously worked pretty wel .

Jeff: You just said something that I thought was real y interesting. Obviously you had this long relationship with Mike. You know his stuff. You’ve done it before. It was a no-brainer that you were going to promote this product.

But you didn’t just rush into doing this promotion. You sat back and you looked at this… you analyzed the launch and what would be in the prospect’s mind.

You said, “How can I separate myself from other people in promoting?” That is a key, key concept. I also want to point out something else. This launch was in the Internet

marketing world. The Internet marketing world is a strange beast that I think is unlike any other niche or market in that the marketplace and the buyers are more highly connected.

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Everyone has been trained. Everyone who gets marketed to in this niche gets trained that they can go around and shop different offers. They go on the forums. There are web sites that were nothing but listings of al the different offers from people, the extra bonuses that people were offering.

This is almost an incestuous market, whereas if you were selling to the day trading

market (which is a market I know wel ), that wouldn’t happen. Someone potential y might be on more than one persons’ list but it’s unlikely.

Those who are promoting in those other markets aren’t putting together huge bonus packages to compete with each other, because they know that they general y don’t have to. In one sense the Internet marketing world is very different… and more difficult.

That is a tremendous question that you asked yourself. Even if you are promoting

something outside the Internet marketing world, it’s important to sit back and say, “How can I bring additional focus to this offer? How can I make this a more personal offer? What can I bring to this offer that wil real y bring a strong endorsement?”

If you are promoting a product, hopeful y you know and feel it is a good product if you are endorsing it. So what can you bring to that endorsement that wil help close that sale? That’s the broader picture.

For folks listening who want to promote in the Internet marketing niche, then what Gary said is critical y important. If everyone else is going to promote this thing, then you can just stick your head in the sand and hope the people on your list aren’t on anyone else’s list… but you would be completely wrong.

Gary: Right.

(laughter)

Jeff: They people on your list are on everyone else’s list… so you need to think: “How can I separate myself from these other people?” You did that, Gary, while so many other people were just sitting there.

I like to joke that people put together – “you can have everything on the hard drive of my old computer. I’ve got all of these private label and resale rights that I’ve never done anything with. They are sitting in some forgotten folder on my hard drive. If you buy through my link I’l package this hard drive up and send it to you.”

There are a lot of people that make those kinds of offers. But they can promote al day, and they won’t compete wel against the type of thinking that Gary used. They are adding no value.

That idea of how can you separate yourself and bring some value to the offer is just a real y key place to start.

Gary: Right. The second part of putting together my offer was looking at who my target

audience was going to be and then trying to figure out what I could do to provide

something of value to that target audience.

Since I was pretty familiar with how Butterfly Marketing worked, I could determine where I thought people who purchased the course may have trouble. Where would their sticking points be? Would it be in traffic generation which is always a pretty common thing to look

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at? Many people have trouble with traffic generation. Would it be in the creative aspect of things?

I’ve been in the marketing world for a while now. I’ve real y put a lot of time into learning how to figure out whether something wil be successful. I realize that a lot of people don’t have the system in place to determine whether something wil be a successful product. I’ve been doing this for a while… as you have, Jeff.

I don’t know what the right way to put it is. But there are people who are at a one level of Internet marketing knowledge and there are other people who are at a higher level of Internet marketing knowledge. Nobody is any better than anybody else but let’s be

honest. There are some people who just know a lot more about it. Sometimes what happens is that you forget what the perspective of a newer marketer is because you can’t quite put yourself in their shoes anymore.

If you are reading through a set of instructions and it says, “Okay, put an audio button on the web page and add a name squeeze before it.” You and I, Jeff, look at that and we know what that means. No problem. What can sometimes happen is that you can forget that you had to learn that.

There are a lot of people who don’t have that knowledge. They don’t know how to put an audio button on a web site. They don’t know how to set up an auto responder, let alone how to set up a name squeeze page. I realize that my perspective is not that of a newer marketer. In some cases if I was giving people advice it may be a little bit too advanced. I real y wanted to make sure that everything I put together was going to be complementary to this product.

You said in the Internet marketing niche there are a lot of bonus packages. There were a ton of them on this one.

So what I did was I put together a bonus package so the people who would buy through me would get access to me… but I also made sure that they were getting access to the things that I know are common sticking points along the way. Since I have done these types of sites, I could provide answers.

I could do that because I’ve spoken to newer marketers who just started doing this and I have learned there are the things that could real y derail their progress. I could make sure that I got them through those sticking points.

Jeff: So, that is a key point that you brought up, the idea of a complementary bonus offer. If you are going to put together some type of a bonus to go along with something that you are promoting, don’t make it two tickets to South Beach in Miami.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: Whatever it is it should go along with what people are buying. Your bonus was explicitly tailored to this promotion or product.

Gary: Right. The other thing that you just sort of mentioned there but I don’t even know if you realize it. You said, “Don’t give tickets to South Beach,” but there is another thing that I realized in a lot of bonus packages. It came up actual y in a conversation that Mike and I had.

A while ago Mike went to an event and gave me a cal from the event. He said, “You know, I was really, really interested in this one guy’s package. What he was selling

sounded great. Everything was perfect.

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“He got to the close and I was al ready to buy. I had my credit card out and then he started listing his bonuses. One of his bonuses was access to an off line event. He gave the dates and he gave the value and I don’t know why it was that I happened to open up my organizer and realized that I had something conflicting on my schedule.

“I wasn’t going to be able to take part in that bonus so I didn’t end up buying this $5,000 package, not because the package wasn’t appealing to me but because I didn’t feel I was going to get my ful money out of everything that was being offered.” So when you are putting together bonuses make sure it’s not only something that is tailored to the product but make sure it isn’t something that potential y someone may not feel that they can use.

If that happens, you may have somebody talk themselves out of a sale. For example, think of buying a CD compilation. If there are say 15 total songs on a CD and you already have three of them, I know a lot of people who won’t buy that CD. I know this is strange but I know plenty of people who think this way.

They think, “Since I already have three songs, I’m only getting 11 songs.” Or it could be a bonus package with a piece of software. Someone will look at it and say, “I’ve got a Mac and that software won’t run on my computer.”

Gary: Exactly. Even if it’s a bonus and maybe you have sold them on the whole concept of what it is, you’ve got to make sure that your bonuses are something that wil not exclude anyone.

Even though you may consider it a bonus the person buying the product or the person who is the affiliate, wil think that it is part of what they are buying. If they can’t use it, they are going to be less likely to go through with the purchase.

Jeff: Yes.

So… moving along, as you walk through the Butterfly Marketing, Mike had various

promotions throughout and you actual y mirrored that each step of the way.

Gary: Can I ask real quick how public or private is this cal ?

Jeff: It’s basical y just for Product Launch Formula owners.

Gary: Okay, so the higher end of the market. This isn’t a public call that will be played for everybody type thing.

Jeff: No.

Gary: Alright, here is the truth of the matter then.

(laughter)

Come on. Sometimes you hold things back depending on the audience. Here is the truth of the matter. That’s why I asked how big the audience wil be because if I eventual y do a big launch of my own, I don’t want this information out there.

Jeff: Well, if I had my druthers I would sel 10,000 copies of my course in the next month. ☺

Gary: Basically, a lot of times in a big product launch of course you want people to generate buzz. That’s how this thing works.

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For example, Jeff, most people didn’t know you before your course. There were people “in the know” who knew you… but the average Joe Internet marketer guy didn’t know who you were.

You want all of your affiliates sending traffic to your page creating buzz. I’ve never been a big fan of that during the whole launch phase because I’m quite protective of my list. I realize that you are a good marketer. I realize that the guys behind these thousand dollar packages are good marketers. This isn’t the case al the time but a lot of less reputable marketers wil end up using these lists for other promotions later on.

I don’t want my list going to somebody else just to drop a cookie that I know is going to be overwritten at some later date. When I mirrored a lot of what Mike was doing I wasn’t mirroring it for the sake of sending people to Mike’s page to register with him. I was mirroring it to see how I can achieve something similar to what he’s doing that gets people interested in Butterfly Marketing but that ties it directly to me.

Jeff: Not necessarily putting people on his list?

Gary: Right and it’s not that I think he’s going to do anything bad. I know Mike, but let’s be honest. I’m the guy that wants to generate the sale and future sales from these people.

As you mentioned, the Internet marketing niche is a little bit strange. I had an advantage because I knew that in the Internet marketing field there are a lot of people who are on multiple lists. I knew a good percentage of the people on my list were going to be getting al of the prelaunch buzz from other people. So that meant that I didn’t have to do it as wel .

I’ve never been a big fan of doing that on my own. I mirrored it to something that fit with what I was seeing on the forums, I knew that people were already interested in the course and interested in buying from Mike. What I had to do was get people interested in buying the course from me.

Jeff: That’s very, very interesting.

Gary: In your Product Launch Formula course, part of it is “let’s get the affiliates to drive people to the main page.” I understand the reasoning for that. But you put yourself in the position of somebody who doesn’t necessarily want to lose their best buyers. I know that there are a lot of people who have smal er lists or may not understand this or there are a lot of people who are the typical big names who aren’t necessarily overly concerned with losing a few people here and there.

My list isn’t 500,000 prospects big. Every time I send out a promotion I try to keep it personal. I always write everything myself. There is nothing prewritten that goes out. I want people to know it’s me.

I’m not real y looking to say, “Mike is great. Mike is great. Mike is great. Join his list.” These people would want to purchase from Mike in the future after I just told them how great he is.

Jeff: Right, right. So you use this very tactically. You let the buzz build but you figure the people on your list are going to get that buzz from other lists. Meanwhile you are

marketing to them about the basic Butterfly stuff but it’s coming from you and it’s your story.

You are letting the ancil ary buzz come from everyone else. Then at the last second you come out and you personal y send people to a pre-sales page.

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Gary: Right.

Jeff: One thing that I thought was interesting in Mike’s launch was that coming up to the launch Mike would give updates about who his partners were and how they were doing. He had a score card. Initial y before the launch the scorecard was who had the most opt- ins. The people who were al the top ten in terms of driving opt-ins before the launch were not found in the top ten of the people who made sales.

Gary: It makes you think.

Jeff: It does.

(laughter)

It didn’t particularly surprise me but I thought it was interesting. For my launch that didn’t necessarily hold. Mike Filsaime was actually the number one person in terms of driving opt-ins for mine. He ended up being two in sales. He and Yanik were basical y tied for second place.

It didn’t carry through with my launch, but in Mike’s situation, it was a little different. None of the people who were driving opt-ins really did cause much commotion in terms of actual sales.

Gary: Right. I looked at it as if I were promoting this as closely as I could as if it were my own product. I wasn’t trying to position myself as an affiliate. I was trying to position myself as an expert. It was pretty much al of my knowledge anyway but I squeezed a little bit of extra stuff in that they wouldn’t get from Mike.

I think that is one of the things that made a big difference here. I didn’t look at this as a typical affiliate. I looked at it as my own product launch.

Jeff: Wow, that’s very, very tactical and also strategic too. That is amazing. I didn’t realize that’s what you did.

Gary: One of the things Mike did was he had his video. Basical y in the Internet marketing field, as well as in a lot of fields many people get very skeptical when somebody throws an income claim out there. “I‘ve made X amount of dol ars online…” or with day trading, or real estate. Whatever it is, people become skeptical.

They think, “Yeah, right. You made X amount of dollars. Okay, buddy.” Mike did a video showing screen shots of his Paypal account and showing monthly revenue for a lot of his web sites.

I actually thought it was a little bit risky when he did it but it ended up working out pretty wel . I didn’t know if people were going to see that as bragging and turn off a decent amount of the potential audience or if people were going to see it as, “Oh my God. This real y does work.” I waited a couple of days to see what the reaction was. A lot of the reaction to Mike’s video was positive.

But I didn’t real y want to drive people to Mike’s video. What I did was create my own video showing my progress in my own Paypal accounts for some of my own launches for these types of products. I didn’t go into as much depth as Mike did but what I did do was show a couple of launch bases and a couple of short periods.

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I kept the numbers intentionally smal because I know that even though people saw that the numbers were realistic on Mike’s end, that he had done that volume, a lot of people aren’t mental y ready for going to that income level. I know that sort of sounds strange but there is a mindset change that when you hit let’s say $30,000 a year and you get to 6 figures. There’s a big mindset change.

A lot of people just mental y don’t get there because they are mental y not ready to get there. It’s not that the knowledge is not there. It’s not that they are not intelligent. It’s not that they don’t know how to do it. They are just mental y not ready to get there.

J eff: I do the same thing in reducing the amounts with Product Launch Formula. When you go to my sales letter you’l see there is no mention of John Reese and his mil ion dol ar day. John publicly came out and said, “Thanks Jeff. I owe you a million dol ars because of your techniques.”

He publicly put that comment in a PDF he published. But it’s nowhere to be found on my sales letter because it is hard for some people to make that economic mind jump.

Gary: I’ve talked to a few other successful Internet marketing guys …at an event for example… and I’ll be baffled with some of the information that they give me. I sometimes wonder why these guys aren’t making more.

I won’t mention who it is, but I had a conversation with someone about a week and a half ago about the mental barriers that you need to get over to get to a certain income level.

You think you are ready. Of course if someone said, “Would you like to make a mil ion dollars?” Everybody would raise their hand and say, “Yes.”

Jeff: In their heart of hearts do they believe they can?

Gary: Right, not only do they believe they can but also do they believe it’s attainable? I real y believe that making a million dol ars once isn’t necessarily the most difficult thing in the world to do, but let’s be honest. When you start bringing in more money, your lifestyle changes. With your income growth, your bills tend to grow also for some reason.

(laughter)

Jeff: Yes.

Gary: Is that sustainable? You are pressuring yourself into consistent hard work or consistent success, and a lot of people aren’t ready for the thought of, “Wow, I real y can’t afford to have any major screw ups because if I do that’s a serious drop in income. I could be in some big trouble.”

Jeff: I could lose the jet.

Gary: (laughter) Yeah, I could lose the jet.

Jeff: Absolutely. It’s funny how you really have to take that into account. I was very tactical about that in terms of my launch. I presented a lot of people that made smaller

amounts… that didn’t do $1,000,000 or $600,000.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: But, in any case, you did the video and Mike did a video. I can’t remember how far out that was from the launch.

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Gary: To be honest, I don’t remember right now either. It wasn’t part of my initial plan. I had a plan, of course, but a lot of the plan has to be somewhat on the fly, at least with me. Like with Mike, I had to see what people were reacting to.

A lot of the things you do have been tested over time but a lot of the things you do are based on what you would cal a best guess. You’ve got to put in a lot of knowledge and you assume that something is going to work but there is always the chance that

something isn’t quite going to work as wel as you hoped it would.

Jeff: Right. That’s a great point. I’m glad that you brought that up. I’ve done so many of these launches, and I never have an exact plan.

I know that at some point I know I’m going to do a Camtasia video. At some point I’m going to do an audio. At some point I’m going to do an email just after the launch. I know the pieces but I don’t know exactly where they are going to fit in.

Gary: Exactly.

Jeff: So what you are doing is you are trying to take the pulse of the marketplace, looking at the email that is coming into your inbox, study the voice mail that is coming in, the blog comments, and the forum posts. You are using al of those to get a feel for the market and what message it needs at what point.

Gary: Of course, because everybody’s thought process is different, you may have to put

together something completely different.

In thinking about Mike’s income videos, one of Mike’s videos there was a screen shot of a few refunds. I’m assuming that one of his support staff had gone in and processed a few refunds so there was one of the pages that showed six or seven refunds in a row.

I had a number of comments to me, “Gee, look at al of those refunds!” They didn’t focus on the $800,000. They focused on the page of refunds. I wouldn’t even think of that, to focus on the refunds, because I know that is a normal part of doing business but when I did my own video I was very conscious to make sure that I had taken the pulse of the market to see what they were focusing on.

I don’t know if this was a skeptic who wasn’t going to buy anyway but I looked through and tried to figure out what I real y needed to show.

A lot of people were blown away by the numbers. I specifical y picked one of my launches that didn’t quite make $10,000. It was a single day time period. I know $10,000 in a single day isn’t exactly smal money, but it didn’t quite get there. It was like $9,000 in 24 hours which I think is a lot more believable.

I was able to document it and then I did a second one from that same type of web site that generated just over $10,000. These are very small bursts of traffic one day type promotions. I was able to show people that in that case the numbers were smal but they were also repeatable. That was one of the things in the video that made a big difference.

I also did a teleseminar on launch day with Mike and you know how busy launch day is for most people, Jeff, because you’ve been there.

Launch day is just insane no matter how much time you have put into a project. You are always checking and double checking and the server is crashing and you’ve got your

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support people over there. There are eight phones on your desk and you are going crazy. I knew this because I’ve had my own product launches.

Since I know Mike pretty well I cal ed him really early on, I think two months out before the official date was even set. I said, “Mike, I want to do a teleseminar with you on launch day.” I added, “But wait! Wait! Don’t say no yet. I know you are going to say no but let me finish. I know you are going to say no to doing it on launch day because I want to do it an hour before launch and countdown to the launch. But wait! Please let me keep going.”

That’s just an insane idea because the last hour before launch you are pulling your hair out because everything is going crazy. I said, “Here is how we wil do it. We wil record the cal as though it’s live and I wil be incredibly careful in my email to everybody to make sure that I don’t ever say that it’s a live cal .”

I really took my time on the wording and it was promoted as: Join us live for the

countdown to Butterfly Marketing’s launch. We couldn’t record this a month and a half out because we didn’t know what was going to happen with the prelaunch campaign or

anything. So, a few days before launch, at three or four in the morning Mike and I got on the line and we said, “Okay, ready, set, go. Hello everybody. This is Gary. I’ve got Mike on the line with me. We are 60 minutes away from the launch of Butterfly Marketing,” basically pretending that the launch was happening in one hour.

When it got to be 15 or so minutes out we said, “Oh, we’ve only got 15 minutes Mike. What’s going on over there? Is everything going okay?” That’s why this isn’t something that everybody needs to know but I wanted to generate some serious buzz and I wanted buyers to be on my cal .

I was real y surprised with that teleseminar because I think I had about 2,400 or 2,500 people register for the cal , which was a decent number but not anything crazy. But I only had 220 who actually cal ed in, which is very surprising to me. I was very disappointed because I had booked 1,000 lines for this cal .

I was figuring that with al of the buzz and al the launch and al of these people registered that my lines were going to have a higher than normal call in rate. What ended up

happening was I had 220 or 221 people on the line. However, I had no drop off during the entire cal . I had 221 to start and 219 at the end.

Jeff: That’s unbelievable.

Gary: Yeah, crazy. First I am not the best tester but I was writing down the numbers checking every five minutes how many were on the line. A lot of teleconferences wil let you push a couple of buttons and it wil tel you. I just kept writing it down, 221, 221, 221. It was insane.

I was thinking that maybe these are al buyers on the cal . This real y wasn’t a content cal . It was real y just “the launch is coming.” Here is what’s included in the package. Here is what’s included in my package. Now go and buy it.

I knew that Mike wouldn’t do the cal live. I didn’t want to even ask him to do the cal live because I know how that last hour of launch goes.

Jeff: It’s funny. I saw the promotion for the cal come out. I don’t have the email saved but it definitely left you feeling that it would be a live cal . When I saw that I thought Mike was absolutely insane. I couldn’t believe he would do a call right at launch hour.

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You’ve got to remember at that point I’m only three months removed from my launch of Product Launch Formula. I don’t think that I had slept for 72 hours before I launched. I was up straight for three days. I got my sales letter done with about three minutes to spare, just hoping that I could FTP it before the launch.

Gary: I realized all of this of course. I knew that this is how it goes.

Jeff: Right.

Gary: But also, this was new! Nobody had ever done a cal on launch day, counting down the launch and there is a good reason for that. Usual y it’s crazy but I knew that was going to be a potential help. It actually sort of back-fired on me because Mark Joiner did the official, if you want to call it that, teleseminar and all of these people that were registered for my call were extremely confused.

Well, is it at 10:00 p.m. or is it 11:00 a.m.? What’s the dial in number? I don’t real y understand. Maybe that had part of it to do with why my numbers weren’t as high on the cal as I was hoping for. Nevertheless you know how it goes. Teleseminars are usual y effective sales tools.

I don’t think that this is a surprise to anyone listening in to this type of call and I realize that. The whole part of a prelaunch campaign and especial y the affiliate part of it is you are pushing for a specific date and time and hour. You real y want to get people ramped up at that one specific time and hour to just crash the web site. Hopefully you wil not real y crash it but just get them to go buy as fast as they can.

I thought this teleseminar was going to be great. We were real y going to be able to ratchet up the pressure. “Oh, there are only four more minutes left. Get ready. Go to your browsers and push the refresh button" or whatever. We had it timed real y wel . We knew what was going to happen on the cal .

We started on the hour. We looked at the clock and just kept going. With about three minutes left I said, “Alright Mike. I know you’ve got to go. You’ve got to upload the site. I know you are going to have to be getting this done. I hope that everything goes wel .”

He chimed out and that was sort of a protection for me as I couldn’t exactly have Mike listening in on the cal and uploading the web site in real time so we had to give ourselves a little bit of time in the background so that Mike could actual y upload the thing. It didn’t have to match exactly with what was going on during the cal .

What was funny was that Mike told me he cal ed in and listened for part of the cal just to make sure that it was working. He said that for the last couple of minutes he dialed back in to hear when I said, “We are going to be uploading the page now.” In the background he was thinking, “Okay, I’m going to upload the page now,” just so the timing would work.

Jeff: That’s wild!

I guess you can’t real y track who was on that cal and who bought can you?

Gary: No, but I will say that within a couple of minutes and for the next hour or so I was answering emails. It’s what you’ve got to do as an affiliate on the launch with these types of things. You’re going to be getting a ton of email even as an affiliate.

I learned that the hard way with Frank Kern’s promotion last year, in early January. I was out of town that day or maybe I went to Disney World with one of my daughters. I don’t remember. I wasn’t at home but I sent the promotion before I left and when I got back

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home I must have had 50 or 60 emails that said, “I want to buy through your link but I want to make sure that the bonus is stil there.”

Of course you can’t count on al of those as being sales but I only ended up generating nine or ten total sales on that. Let’s just say one out of five of those emails was

legitimate. I could have doubled my take if I would have been home answering emails. I learned that I’ve got to be here for this.

About two hours out I stopped and got lunch. When I came back Russel Brunson was on Yahoo Messenger. He was one of the other affiliates for Mike’s launch. Russel and I know each other pretty wel . He is the guy that introduced me to Mike in the first place. We got on the instant messenger and there was the affiliate contest that you mentioned.

Russel asked, “How many sales have you done?” I went back and we figured that we were going to be fighting with each other for the affiliate contest. I said, “How many sales have you done?” He wrote back, “About 83,” and I said, “Oh, me too!”

Nothing happened there for a second. There was no response. Then I said, “Did you get that? Do you real y have that? Are you counting up to see how many you have?” He said, “Did you real y sel 82?” I wrote back and said, “Yeah, 82 or 83, somewhere around there.” He says, “Oh, wel I real y only have 8. I was just joking.”

(laughter)

I think the teleseminar did make a big difference in at least the initial sales spike because I was in the lead from two minutes out through the entire promotion. No one came close to generating the same number of sales.

Jeff: I talked to Mike about two or three hours after he launched. He cal ed me and just wanted to check in since we had been working together on the launch. At that point I thought I was doing pretty well. I was more around Russel ’s number but I had no idea what was going on. I just wanted to hear about the overal launch.

Mike was saying, “We’ve got 500 or 600 already in sales.” I was like, “Oh, that is

incredible. What’s going on with the affiliates?” He said, “Gary is just crushing it. It’s like every other order is from Gary. He’s already got almost a hundred.”

When he told me that I just about fel over.

Gary: You were thinking, “Gary who? Is your affiliate software working right?”

(laughter)

Jeff: To be utterly frank, I knew that John Reese wasn’t going to promote and I knew that Yanik Silver wasn’t going to promote. I knew that they had other things going on. I knew what those two had just done during launch three months before.

John was my number one affiliate by a big chunk. My number two and three, like I said, were Mike and Yanik who were real y close to each other.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: I was thinking “Okay, those three aren’t in on this contest. This might be sort of wide open and I might have a chance of getting that Rolex.”

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(The first prize for the JV contest was a Rolex watch. You know, I’ve got a Timex watch. I just can’t bring myself to go spend thousands of dol ars on a watch.

Gary: Right.

(laughter)

Jeff: But I wouldn’t mind having one so I’m looking at it thinking, this might be one of those spots where I can just slip in and do okay. When he told me what you did I was just like, “Oh, my. That is unreal!”

I couldn’t believe it.

Gary: It’s one of those things. Here is the other part of that. For the launch I’l admit I had high goals. I wasn’t shooting for 20 sales. I was shooting for at least 100. I positioned it that way.

I thought to myself, “If I can do 100 sales, and I’m earning around $400 or $450 per sale that’s $45,000. I can put some serious time and effort into an offer, into a bonus, into my marketing for this because $45,000 is a significant amount of money. That played a pretty big part in making sure that I actually put in the time. I knew what the return was going to be.

I could afford to put some time into making those numbers happen. When they an affiliate promotion, a lot of people think, “I hope that I do X amount.” They think of the specific bottom line number that they are going to make.

Jeff: They throw it out there.

Gary: Exactly, but I thought, “Okay, I’m going to do close to $50,000. I can put some time into this.”

Jeff: Yes, that’s a fantastic example of being strategic in your thinking and being wil ing to al ocate resources based on the expected return. I don’t know anyone who does that frankly and I know a lot of the top people out there.

Sometimes they will do it on a one on one basis. They wil say, “Okay, for each sale I can afford to spend this amount and I’m going to do it on a per sale basis. I’l give someone this thing that cost me whatever amount. But to look at this in an aggregate sense, this is my goal, this is my expectation. This is the effort that I’m wil ing to put into it to reach these expectations.”

Gary: Yeah, because it’s no different than your own product. When you create your own

product for your own launch you al ocate your resources and your time based at least somewhat on your expected result. I’m sure when you created your course or when anybody else created their course, they’ve got at least some type of sales goal in mind.

You don’t just put $100,000 into the creation of something if you think you’re going to generate $50,000 in sales. So, you’ve got to look at that as an affiliate as well. Honestly I haven’t seen that pushed very much in the prelaunch buzz for any of these things.

Usual y there is a public prelaunch buzz and there is the JV partner prelaunch buzz where all of the affiliates hear about what is coming up and find out where the promotions need to be. I’ve never really seen a push that you could real y make this amount of money. You need to look at this as though it’s your own $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 launch and al ocate your time accordingly.

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I honestly think that’s the reason a lot of people put together those lousy bonus offers that we talked about. The old, “Here’s my old hard drive,” bonus offer. In that case let’s just say that they don’t do very wel on sales. But, at least they are not out a lot of time. At least they didn’t put a lot of effort behind it. There is nothing to worry about.

I looked at it completely differently. I said, “This is going to be worth my time. I am going to make a lot of money on this so I’m going to al ocate my resources accordingly.”

Jeff: So, what I want our listeners to take from this is that Gary went about this in a strategic fashion. He looked at his launch. Through this whole talk we’ve been talking about

strategy.

Here you used a strategic mental process. It’s one that very few people use. I just want to point out that Gary used this process and the end result was approximately $100,000 in affiliate income.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: It seems to me it’s a good one to take to the bank.

Gary: Right. I just want to mention that about a month before, I was also the number one affiliate for another product using a similar but shorter term strategy. It was a lower price point product. I’m looking to see if I’ve got my numbers anywhere here. Anyway, it was a lower price point product and I knew what my expected return was going to be on that product.

I planned my launch accordingly and once again I put in the time thinking about how I could position this as something related to me and there is a benefit for you if you buy the product from me. It ended up working out incredibly well.

Obviously, I don’t do this on every single product launch that comes out. I just can’t and not every product is a fit but when there is a fit on that promotion I think I made around $15,000 or so for what essential y amounted to a one-hour teleseminar. There wasn’t a huge amount of prelaunch buzz.

This was for a product that had launched about a year and a half ago. It wasn’t anything new. It was just a JV broker that had approached me about doing a promotion for it. I turned him down for the longest time because it didn’t fit in with what I was doing. But the JV broker was persistent. He said, “You keep tel ing me that you may be able to do it later. Is this the time?”

The timing just happened to be right where I was easily able to work it into my schedule. I looked at the course again. I figured out that I in fact did have an angle here. I had something I could use. I real y did have a unique bonus.

I can put a little bit of time into laying out a prelaunch plan. I can put a little time into figuring out what I’m going to do on the cal with the product owner. So, like I said with Mike’s thing, I was thinking, “I’m in the course. This is what I do. I’ve got lists that were built doing that. This is just the one hit wonder that is never going to happen again.”

That’s not the case. This is something that applies to most affiliate promotions if you are wil ing to put in the time to do it. Yes, I was somewhat lucky on this one. I was shooting for 100 and did 200.

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I guess that’s a good problem to have and on that other promotion my goal was $10,000 and I ended up closer to $15,000. The system does work. You just have to be wil ing to put in the time to think about it.

Jeff: Yes, and think about the positioning.

Gary, we are wel over the hour that I promised.

Gary: It’s difficult to hold it to an hour.

(laughter)

Jeff: I want to ask you one more question. It’s actual y two questions sort of wrapped together but before I do that I don’t want to forget to ask you for a URL. What’s the best URL for people to go to?

Gary: This is going to be almost embarrassing but my main URL is of course like most

marketers. They have their name. They can go to http://www.GaryAmbrose.com .

As a matter of fact, there is actually no opt-in form on that page right now which is horrible for a guy that runs Autoresponder Company.

(laughter)

Jeff: Here is the last question. It’s two questions that are related. How do you decide what to promote? Since, just like me, you just have this Fed Ex guy coming to your house nearly every single day. Every day they drop off another box of ten or twenty CDs or DVDs.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: I’m being serious folks. It might not be everyday but it’s at least three days a week I get a new box dropped off. Someone else sent me their new course to review.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: I’ll give you the other question. The first one is how you decide what you are going to promote. The second one is how should people go about romancing potential JV

partners? It’s really two sides of the same coin.

If you are real y looking to promote something, how do you pick and choose what you are going to promote? When you look to have other people promote how do you go about getting other people to promote?

Gary: Personal y, when I am deciding what to promote, number one I make sure that it’s going to be worth my time. I have promoted a lot of smaller products that don’t necessarily make me a lot of money, but I want to make sure that it’s something that is worth my time.

Also, if it is a higher end thing I want to make sure that I have some type of angle that I can use to reach my list that isn’t going to come out of left field. What I mean by that is my list pretty much knows that a lot of my emails are I guess you could cal them

advertorials.

I usual y have a little bit of a story in there for something ties in to my products. I’m recommending you go get it. They learn a little bit about me in each of my promotions.

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I’ve always said I’m not a big search engine guy. I haven’t actively looked at anything with search engines since about 2000. I couldn’t even tel you if any of my pages are listed. I haven’t done anything with Adsense. I’m a marketer. I’m a programmer.

Programmers are usual y horrible with writing so I do have an angle with copy writing courses. I don’t have an angle with search engine stuff because most of my list knows that I’ve said I don’t do anything with search engine stuff.

I can’t all of a sudden come along and say, “Here is the best search engine item in the world. This guy has been tel ing me al of these great things and I’ve been doing it.” I have pretty much said that I hate search engines. I know that a lot of people make a lot of money on the search engines. It’s just not my deal.

For me, a lot of it is figuring out if there is an angle that I can use that is realistic, that’s honest, and that is going to seem within character for me.

As I said early on in this call, I really believe that people buy into a person rather than specifically buying a product. They are buying from a person either because they trust that person or they seem believable or whatever the case might be. It’s been this way forever.

People buy from people they like. I want to make sure that I can maintain that. Also, a lot of times in choosing courses and promotions it boils down to what else do I have coming up?

Like you said Jeff, you get a lot of these courses and your promotions aren’t going out day after day.

Jeff: Plus you have your own products.

Gary: Yeah, you’ve got your own things to work on. There are a lot of things going on. John Reese didn’t promote Mike’s thing. It’s not that John doesn’t like him. He came out two weeks later and met Mike and me here in Orlando for dinner.

Jeff: Absolutely. John was the person that I first heard about Mike from. John said good things about him.

Gary: Yeah, it’s not that John doesn’t like the guy. It was because there was a conflict.

Something else was coming up. The promotion timing just didn’t work out. That’s a large part of it as well. There was a product …I think you were consulting with Liz on her product launch for the Ad Gold Rush.

Jeff: Yes.

Gary: I was trying to work in a few calls earlier in the week with Joel Comm on beginning Adsense.

Again, I didn’t position that cal as: I’m an Adsense guru making a mil ion dol ars. It was a more truthful way of positioning that cal as: I haven’t done much with Adsense. I’ve tried it a couple of times.

You would think that as the technical geek I would be an Adsense mil ionaire but I just can’t seem to figure this stuff out or I’m too frustrated with it and not making the money that I’m used to. The truth is, I gave up on it. In the Internet marketing niche with these big product launches, a lot of times I’m used to seeing $40,000, $60,000, $100,000 days.

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With Adsense it’s backwards. Your first day is like fourteen cents. You are supposed to jump up and down and go, “Wow, I’m making money with Adsense!” It was a real y honest way to put it. That’s a big part of it for me.

Is it useful? Is it believable? Does it fit with what I’m saying? Does it fit into my schedule and do I have my angle? I have to have my angle.

Promotions are nice but the reason behind most of these promotions is to generate

money. Every now and then you do it for a friend without an affiliate link but 99% of the time you are looking to make some cash on it. I’ve got to have my angle.

Jeff: Right and it also has to fit your list.

Gary: Right, of course.

A lot of people I know believe that you have to have huge ridiculously large lists with people that have been with you forever. That’s not necessarily the case. I have a lot of smal er sub lists as most marketers do.

What I found was that I did two promotions, one in November and one in December that were these little $10,000 promotions that I talked about earlier in the cal . They were primarily list builders. I actual y released a resel rights type of product in mid-January. These are people that found me in November, December or January.

My best guess is that between 30 and 40 of my sales came from people who had joined my list within the past 3 months. Some of them were sales that had been added to my list no more than three weeks before Mike’s course launched. I can’t say exactly how many because people subscribe with different email addresses and so on.

One guy specifical y wrote me so I know for sure with him. He said, “I only knew about you from two weeks ago. It was this product cal ed Impact Pop-Up. I found you through this and I got on your list. You made a lot of sense and I saw your little video and ended up purchasing the course through you.”

You don’t necessarily have to have somebody who has been on your list forever.

Between those lists there are maybe 16,000 or 17,000 prospects and many of them are the freebie seeker variety but they were al built very short term. Another guy that I know of just had a great angle on this course. I guess you would cal him one of Mike’s

apprentices. I believe his list was around 2,000 and he was in the top 20 for the affiliates.

So, you don’t need to have a ridiculously large list of very specifical y tailored people for a certain course. Your job in promotion as the marketer is to make the people on your list see the value in the item based on who you are. I realistical y think that most of my list is still there because they like who I am and how I present information. They trust and respect what I have to say.

When I do a promotion for whatever it happens to be, the reason they go for it is because they believe me. They believe in what I have to say. Don’t necessarily think that the list has to be generated for a specific purpose to sel a specific product in the Internet

marketing field.

Now, some other niches are probably a bit more difficult. You’ve got a list of tennis pros and you try to spin them into a body building course, I don’t necessarily think that is going to work.

Jeff: Right.

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Gary: But in the marketing field when there is at least some type of related product, basical y that’s what most of my lists are. They are somewhat related products and maybe with the tennis pros you may be able to sell them on a different type of tennis product or maybe even racquetball if there was real y a push.

Jeff: Yeah, or maybe diet supplements.

Gary: Right. At least there is a tie in. I don’t remember what your second question was.

Jeff: It was how to go about romancing JV partners so they promote for you.

Gary: That’s tough because with me, a lot of it depends not necessarily on that they are

romancing me so much but it’s that I have a feeling that I can trust the person behind the product. In many cases I’ve seen the actual information that they have done.

For me, a lot of that comes from meeting people at off-line events. I real y believe this to be true: if you sit down with a person and you actually look them in the face and have a conversation, in most cases you get a pretty good idea of whether you think they are going to be successful or not or whether you think they are ful of crap or not. You can usual y determine that pretty quickly.

This isn’t a big secret of product launches but sometimes you haven’t read through the entire course before a promotion because you just don’t have the time. You put your faith in the fact that the person behind the course is knowledgeable, that they are not going to lead you wrong, that they have a friendship with you and that this isn’t just a one time short term goal.

Romancing the JV partners is nice and it sometimes can help but for me, I realize that a lot of it was me and my relationships. This isn’t any secret in the Internet marketing field. There are a lot of groups of people where you very clearly see promotions between smal er groups of people.

It’s not necessarily that the outside JV partners have had a very successful job

romancing these affiliates to promote their products. It’s usual y some other outside

relationship or tie between these people that hasn’t been seen, whether it be meeting at an off-line event or a dinner or in our case we sort of bumped into each other through an odd set of circumstances. For me, that’s where it usual y comes from.

Honestly, if somebody tries too hard as a JV broker, if they try too hard to romance me into something, I usual y assume that they are having a hard time convincing people. At least on my end I like to know that every time I do a promotion for a product that the person behind the product is actual y going to live up to what they are doing.

I was burned once early on with a product promotion where I didn’t get a chance to look at everything as careful y as I should have. The person behind the product had some problems with their duplication center which seems to be pretty common for some reason or another.

Anyway, they had problems with the duplication center and half of the DVDs weren’t working for the product. What ended up happening was this guy didn’t replace the DVDs. I really don’t understand that.

Basically the whole situation was that he just started issuing refunds. He told people just to keep whatever they got. I’m just going to issue you a refund. I don’t want to deal with this garbage anymore.

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Me promoting that product was a mistake. That was because I didn’t know the person wel enough. I didn’t know their character.

Obviously I have not promoted anything else for them since that time. Now, on this recent promotion there were some problems with duplication but I knew that Mike Filsaime was a stand up guy and he was going to be looking out for us. I know that he paid multiple thousands of dol ars to have a 500 pound printing machine over-nighted to the duplication center just to speed up the process a day and a half.

That’s what it’s about on my end. It’s knowing the character of the person who is asking you to promote, and you don’t get that from an email or from a JV broker trying to

romance you. You get that from meeting somebody in person, from a relationship, not from just a week of emails back and forth saying, “Hey, I can make you a couple of thousand dollars.”

I don’t know exactly how to explain it but there are just certain people you click with. When you know, you know.

Jeff: That term romance maybe wasn’t the best one choice of words for me to use. It’s about relationships and relationship building.

You’re right - I tel people that if I had 1,200 bucks to start my business and there was a seminar for 1,000 bucks I would go to the seminar.

Gary: I know somebody who actual y did that. He was struggling for two years. He was one of Mike’s success stories on his website. He posted one of those typical “Internet marketing is crap” posts on Mike’s blog. It was worded a lot more harshly than what I’l say on this cal .

Mike basical y cal ed him on it and said, “Have you been to an off-line event?” The guy was basical y surprised that Mike responded to him in the first place. He said, “No.” Mike said, “Wel , look. It’s put up or shut up time.

“You come out to this event and if you are not making money after getting out to this event okay fine. You can give up. Maybe you are just not cut out for this type of business but don’t claim that you know al of this stuff and that you are this great marketer when you haven’t taken the time to meet anybody. You wonder why you are not getting deals. It’s because nobody knows who you are and you are afraid to come out from behind the computer.”

So he came to the event and by the time he left he had ten of the eleven speakers at the event working on a product with him. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t gone to the event.

Jeff: Right.

Gary: Since then he has continued relationships with a lot of these people including Mike and myself. Now I know the guy. Had he asked me to promote something before, forget about it. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know what he was all about but now that I know the guy and that he is serious about it he’s got a story. He’s got a family. He’s working hard. He’s okay. It’s a different story.

Jeff: I know that when I launched Product Launch Formula I initial y had somewhere in the range of 20, 23, 24 partners. I wanted to keep it real y smal … but in fact that ended up growing to be about 40.

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I was having so many people wanting to promote for me, they were giving me sales pitches.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: That is a whole other discussion but of those 23, I would say 22 of them were people I had already met. In fact, not just met but probably had gone out to dinner or something. I think Mike Filsaime was the only person on that list that I hadn’t met.

In my launch process I would be sending out broadcast emails to al of my partners saying, “This is what we are going to do now. This is what we are going to do now.” And I would also send them individual emails. I would say, “Hey, have you thought about this angle? Remember when we were out to dinner and we were talking about this?” I

wouldn’t write the pitch for them but I would send them a one or two liner saying, “Hey, if I were you, this is how I would promote it.”

I was able to do that with nearly every single one of them. I talked to them on the phone and when I did broadcast I would say, “Hey, let me know if any of you want me to write an individual email for you guys to send. I understand that most of you are sending your own emails and you want to write your own copy… but if you want, I’l write individual ones for you… because I’ve got a relationship with every single one of you.”

I could tel stories about every one of them.

It’s about relationships. Look at what Liz did with her launch. She had a spectacularly successful launch. Her story is she had been a minister for eight years. Her life was the ministry but she just had a baby and that’s why she wanted to stay home.

She’s creating an Internet business. It’s not like she has a ton of experience. She finagled a meeting with Yanik. She finagled a couple of phone conversations with me and al of a sudden she’s got relationships with us. Yanik and I promoted too because she’s got a great product and I know her now because I’ve talked to her and traded emails.

She is promoting a very expensive product that is based around Adsense. There are a lot of products out that are really cheap. When she first told me she was going to do an Adsense product and that it was going to be $300 a month I just about choked.

(laughter)

Also, since I knew her a little bit I felt bad. I thought that she was just going to fal flat on her face. She was walking into the lion’s den, the most competitive market in the world and trying to sel something for $300 when everyone else was sel ing for $27 or $9 or $6. Then she showed me the product and I was like, “Wow! This is a good product.”

Al of a sudden I’m interested in helping her out. So, it’s the relationship but it’s also getting the bal rol ing and finding that first contact, finding that first person that is going to be in your corner. It’s an interesting process.

But absolutely, I suggest getting out to the live events. It’s the thing I keep tel ing people, especial y if you want to sel into this market place. I know that I went to events for years when I wasn’t sel ing Internet marketing. I was sel ing trading materials but every single time I would go, I would meet people that were in that niche. I would stil find people to promote.

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That’s how it was with Stephen Pierce. We initial y met at an internet marketing seminar but we were both sel ing trading stuff so I promoted for him and we both made a bunch of money. It’s actual y a joke between us.

When I first met Stephen he said, “I’ve been sending you emails for two years at your trading site and you haven’t responded to any of them.” It was the truth because you know you get hit so many people who want you to promote.

Gary: Right.

Jeff: Most of the times you never answer them.

But then after I met Stephen and we went out to dinner and I got to know him it was like, “Okay, I’ll promote for you.” That is a typical example.

So, anyway, I failed miserably bringing this cal in around an hour. It is an hour and forty minutes.

Gary: Yeah, you wil owe me when we meet up in D.C.

Jeff: Are you going to be there? I know we talked about that but I just talked to so many people that are going to D.C.

Gary: Yeah, I’l be up there.

Jeff: Excel ent. That’s like less than a week or something.

Gary: Yeah, it is something like that. I guess I’ve got to get a laptop before then.

Jeff: You better. You wouldn’t be much of a techie if you didn’t show up and have a computer with you.

Yeah, I know. Thank you very much. I encourage everyone to go check out Gary at http://www.GaryAmbrose.com . You’ve got all kinds of stuff there that we haven’t covered before on any cal s on the course. I really appreciate it. I look forward to meeting up with you next week.

Gary: No problem. I hope that the people on the call got something out of it.

Jeff: Let’s open it up and let them say good bye. Is anyone stil out there?

Callers: Absolutely. Great call!

Jeff: I think we’ve got a few of them out there. Thank you very much. Gary thanks again and we’ll see you next week.

Gary: Alright, thanks guys.

Callers: Bye. Bye-bye.

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