Disqus - Latest Comments for kencalhoun

Re: etfmastery.com - ETF Trading Explained

kencalhoun — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:04:27 -0000

Trading ETFs has both similarities and differences with regular stock trades. Let's look at them here.

Re: etfmastery.com - ETF Mastery for Active Traders

kencalhoun — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:49:32 -0000

Great to see you could make it; welcome aboard

Re: Is This The End of Affiliate Marketing?

kencalhoun — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:20:04 -0000

Personally I'm thrilled about this because many of my competitors are bs-trader-marketers whose entire business model is heavily dependent on affiliates. And once the FTC starts going after high-profile marketers like they are, they'll be shut down/heavily fined, which is fine with me.

Something many people are surprised to learn is that yes they can subpeona your webhost server/ISP for IP logs to verify whether or not you posted a bunch of phony forum/blog posts to fake-endorse products (which my trading industry competitors do, you can tell many blog posts are phony).

As always, doing things the hard, honest way is the best way, as long as you're honest in how you run your business and aren't just some wannabe trader marketer trying to "monetize everyone's lists with namesqueezes" you're in a much better position.

I built my entire business for 10 years with zero affiliates, which is unheard of in internet marketing, I was just now launching my affiliate program a couple of months ago, I'll likely hold off on it for a bit until case law is established and precedent cases involving my competitors and others are established.

What's more problematic is testimonials, because as you pointed out results by definition will vary for educational type products and there is no data on typical results, so it may mean dramatic changes to testimonials and how they're gathered, used and positioned in salesletters. I agree it's a "game changer", for now the best course of action I'll take is to err on the side of being overly conservative and careful.

-k

Re: People Do Judge Authors By Their Covers

kencalhoun — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:20:28 -0000

Solid points as always -- the most important part of this, which you pointed out, is the message-to-market match -- if a known figure who has credibility with his target market uses a more basic design (or clunky videos, or less appealing graphic site design), it may still sell great since the audience is pre-sold and the credibility is there already.

...so merely copying the work of a top marketer, or their approach, won't work for people with little pre-existing relationship credibility ("juice") with their target market.

Another key point is "how does your particular niche prefer to interact with the web?"... meaning for example if you sell to older people, use 14-point larger easier to read fonts for easier reading, and less gagdets/widgets.

But for a younger web 2.0-crowd, having links to all the social media sites and being a more web 2.0 type design is key. Matching the site design to visitor demographics is important.

Personally it's a big challenge for me to go from oldschool notepad/dreamweaver site coding by hand (which I've done for 10+ years now), to learning wordpress, joomla, social networking and web 2.0 stuff, but since that's what the market expects, I'm working hard to learn all that stuff. And then of course once I master web 2.0 in a couple of years there'll be web 3.0. It's never-ending.

Adaptive, responsive marketing is key -- your points are all well taken, for both copy and site design.

to profits,

-k

Re: Disillusioned Copywriter Demands The Truth

kencalhoun — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:05:01 -0000

Excellent points, Michel - one thing that stood out in your comments is basically you work very very hard and create a lot of value in a lot of different ways, and *that's* the secret to success... not just doing salesletters in isolation, though that too could be lucrative on it's own.

As in trading, a key is diversification... meaning copywriting-for-hire is likely fine as an occupation for those who wish to limit themselves to just doing that... but creating a variety of info-products, getting involved in product launches, speaking at seminars, networking and social media, is all what's needed, a very high "energy"/output level, for success.

I too have a lot of sites, and when you look at the commonalities among virtually all successful seven figure people online, nobody's a "one trick pony" that has just a single product or service; we're all very diversified (part of that is testing, eg creating and seeing what pulls best response, then leveraging that once tested via jvs/affiliates)... which means a lot of very hard work.

Michel's one of the hardest working (and *the* most intelligent marketing/copywriting/business development) people online I know, and it's a remarkably short list, of people who really work very hard to succeed. Look at Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Jeffrey Gitomer, others who are very successful, they all produce a lot of information and help for their targeted markets. Brian Tracy's a role model for me for product development, he's written dozens of books and has tons of DVDs, CDs and other information out there... I keep pushing myself to achieve like all of these folks do... with authenticity and hard work, that's what it takes.

-ken

Re: Social Media Isn’t Dead, But It Can Be Deadly

kencalhoun — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:19:34 -0000

Extremely intelligent and well-thought out analysis of social media sites, content control, and most importantly, some of the hazards involved if the channels get acquired/monetized differently from their current setups. Well said. I'm one of those who are very slow to adopt changes to my business model (for me, it was a bright shiny new idea to finally post preview videos on youtube, for example)... and have stayed clear of posting on other sites, after learning what a "time vacuum" forums can be, which drained hundreds of hours of my time away from valuable content development work.

Since ceasing posting on most forums/blogs 3 years ago, my personal productivity is much higher. Though I need to go back and seed some content/posts to drive traffic, as a next step, along with developing a targeted, high-energy affiliate network.

Your bottom line about being in control of your content is right on target; I think (with few exceptions, like here) it's largely a waste of time and energy to spew photons out into other people's sites and chatter, creating white noise and comments instead of value-added content that can be monetized and resold over and over again (like membership sites, dvds, video sites, books and other products, which is a "do it once, sell it for years" type of model I prefer).

It's amazing to me to see how much time and energy people waste with social media sites; time that could be invested in creating products, seminars, events that add value over time.

For example I don't see Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins or other top-selling information producers wasting time on other public chat sites/twittering/facebook etc, so I don't either. They do maintain a dialogue with their customers via their own blogs/communications, which is a much better controlled and delivered way to communicate, I believe.

To success,

Ken

Re: It’s Not About Facebook, It’s About Integrity

kencalhoun — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:35:34 -0000

Hey Michel, it's great to see you on video, it adds another dimension to your communication, conveys sincerity even more effectively. Agree re not doing things with an entitlement mentality and/or at the expense of others, I really liked that phrase you used, "in the service of others".

I couldn't help but think as you spoke, of the parallels between the political parties here in the USA, there's one party (currently in power) elected here largely by people who support a more socialist entitlement mentality, and taxing the rich to give to the poor (which I'm vehemently against).

It's correct that people shouldn't have an entitlement freebie-mooching mindset, however unfortunately *some of* the "masses" of folks who haven't been successful, seem to feel it's ok to visit filesharing sites, mooch free consulting time (and raise taxes and elect people who want to do that to the successful ones). Without going into politics more than that, the parallel is that there is an unfortunately large percentage of people (the majority, in austere times?) who resent the self-made, the successful, and seek to extract without giving, which is unfortunate.

Thanks for raising the bar as always, and continue to make the very valid points about integrity and work ethic which seem to be scarce among some folks. You set a superb role model, and have for many years.

-k