Andy Duncan has established himself as a solution provider, specializing in showing others how to earn cash quickly and easily through multiple means by standing on the shoulders of Internet marketing giants.
As an in-demand Online Business Building Coach, his clients' successes are what drives him to create more pathways to financial freedom through affiliate marketing, joint-venturing and collaborating. Ultimately, Andy wants to impact communities by creating cash flow within families so they can go from survival to contributors in their communities, making a greater impact.
RIC THOMPSON: The strategy and theme behind this series has been Very Important Profit Strategies. Some systems and strategies come into play when folks have a little experience under their belts. Some others are what we're going to talk about today; like getting started from scratch, just like you were a few years ago. There are a lot of folks on the phone who want to know what to do right now because they have to have results fast.
It's not 'get rich quick', but let's face it; money's tight and we need results right now. I'm looking forward to jumping into this. Let's go ahead and jump right into the deep end. Let me throw this out to you, Andy. With all the information, everything going on, all these different systems, and even disinformation-and that's another theme we're trying to get through in this series to cut right down to the basics-let me just ask you: where does somebody start?
ANDY DUNCAN: That's a really great question, actually. First, congratulations. You have a really great lineup of people in this series. I'm honored to be among them. That's where it all began for me. I had the same question: how does this stuff work? Going from making my first movie as a producer, then having a modest success, and then having nothing at all coming in financially speaking, you have a little bit of a hit.
You make some money and then it stops. You realize, "I need to do something else." A project for a movie could take anywhere from six months to five or 10 years, depending on how it goes. Unless you have a constant stream of income or you really hit it big, you have to find a way to make money. I found myself in a position where I needed to make $22,000 in three days, or else.
That was because I had a TV development, which was about to be produced, that fell through. Money was borrowed against it unbeknownst to me. I had to come up with the money in three days, I was told. I said, "What? What am I going to do?" The first thing that you need to start any business online, or to make any money whatsoever, is simply an offer. You need to sell something.
You need to do something in that way. It sounds simplistic, but with all this information out there as to how you can make money from Google, how you can make money as an affiliate, and how you can make money from other software and ideas-they're all great ideas-but people seem to miss the boat sometimes. What are you going to sell? What are you going to offer? What is it that you have to offer?
That could mean a lot of different things. That could mean something as simple as being in business for a long time, whether you've been an employee or you have your own company, but you're selling something. The idea of selling-I've come across a lot of people who have not sold anything or have not been in business for themselves-is like a scary word or a dirty word, 'selling'.
They say, "I don't want to be a salesperson, like a salesman or a saleswoman." You're not. Whether you realize it or not, you are always selling something almost every day of your life. If you go to get a job, 9:00 to 5:00 or whatever it's going to be, you have to get a job interview lined up. What are you doing in the job interview? You are selling yourself so that you can be paid for the time and effort you will put in if you get the job.
You're selling. I want people to understand that selling is not a bad thing. Selling is just part of what we do constantly. You want to sell an idea. You want to sell a bicycle. You want to sell the idea of having healthy food for your children to eat. You're selling. Another way to say it is that you are persuading someone or a group of people, or you're simply just influencing them to do something to make their lives better in some way.
That's what you're doing. You're selling. Selling is one thing, but you're offering something. Ultimately, you want to offer not just any offer, but something that's irresistible. That's what separates having a good offer from an outstanding offer or an irresistible offer. It's what makes an offer irresistible. In fact, Mark Joyner, who you had as a guest, wrote an entire book about that one topic, The Irresistible Offer, because it's that critical.
When you search online for anything, whether somebody pointed you to something to look at online, or whether you went into the search engines and searched for information, you came across an offer. You came across something on the website. It's going to instantly speak to you because you have about three seconds. It's actually been measured.
You have three seconds to make an impression and speak to somebody when they come across your website, and to say, "This is what you're looking for. This is going to help you. This is going to save your life. This is going to make your life better. This is going to improve your life in some way if you take action now." That famous red headline that a lot of us marketers use is what works because it stops people in their tracks for a moment just to take a look at, "This is what I'm offering you."
That's what it is. When it comes to an offer, probably the biggest mistake I see people make when they get online for the first time is that they have no experience. They've been in a business completely unrelated to what they're selling or what they want to sell or offer, and they end up selling or offering "How to Make Money Online," but they've never made any money online.
They think, "Everybody seems to be doing it, so why don't I offer that?" The problem is that you have no experience making money online, you don't know what you're doing yet because you're new to marketing, and you're competing with some of the best of the best people who are actually making money online. It's not a smart move. I would ask, "What can you offer? What are you passionate about?
"What are you excited about? What do you know something about?" Then you can see if there is a market for it. That's just a little bit of research. You go to Google and type in a few keywords. I was talking to a client on the phone just the other day. He's retired. He's on Social Security, or the equivalent of that in the UK. He started a blog. multi-level marketing, and he has something to offer.
However, he's not that excited about it. He wants to find a way to make money. All he needs is an extra $2,000 a month, and he and his wife would be more than happy to have that as a supplement to his security income. I asked him a question: "What do you do when you're not working? What is one of your hobbies that you're excited about?" He said, "Fly fishing."
I said, "Is there a market for fly fishing? Let's go find out." We went to Google and saw there were 19 million searches for fly fishing. We looked to see if there were any products or ads. Yes, there were. There were a bunch of ads on the right column of Google. Those are sponsored listings, which means people are paying to sell their stuff. "Let's go to ClickBank. Do they have any products there?"
Yes, there were a few of them, but he wanted to create his own product, which is also great. You can do that, as well. It is something that he is so excited about that he actually can't wait to get more involved in it and offer something. The next logical step is, "What can I offer?" Once you identify the area, category, topic or theme-if it's going to be fly fishing-what are you going to offer?
You can either create it yourself or you can offer something that's already out there. The beautiful part about having an irresistible offer is that it doesn't even have to be your own. It can be somebody else's. You can be an affiliate for them. You can get commission and get paid for something that somebody else already did for you, and just have the re-sell rights to it or just sell it outright and get paid a commission for it.
Information marketing, which I highly endorse, is just 'how-to' information, something instructional, or something that's going to benefit somebody. Whether it's in the form of an ebook, an audio, a video, or any combination thereof, it's all digital, which means it's downloadable and you can make a lot more money from it. What is it that you're actually selling?
You're selling information, and it doesn't cost you anything to deliver information online. It's just a few cents, really. What can you make? You can make a nice profit from that. Fifty percent of $100 is $50. It doesn't cost you much more than that as far as marketing it. It depends on how you do it, and you have choices there. That's what we're going to talk more about as we go along.
Number one, you need an offer, but you need an irresistible offer. An irresistible offer comes in the form of, "This is going to change my life." It speaks to the right group, the right audience, and the right market. You're targeting your market very specifically. It's not just any market, but a market that wants what you have to offer. It's been called a starving, hungry crowd.
They really want something. They want it badly. You have a solution to their complaints, to their murmuring, and to their problem. If you have that offer dangling in front of them, of what they really want and they're hungry for, you're guaranteed, virtually, to make cash instantly. That's really it.
RIC THOMPSON: There are a bunch of things we went over. Let me recap. There are a couple of questions that come to mind, Andy. The first thing is that I got the definite impression from your examples that people need to have an idea of what they have to make. In your situation you knew you had to make $22,000 in three days, or else. The client in the example you mentioned knew that he wanted $2,000 a month, probably as passively as he could make it.
That was his goal. It sounds to me that the first step is to get an idea of what you want to make through a quick-cash strategy. The second step would be to play to your strengths. Don't be dabbling in a market you know nothing about. Work in a market that you know a lot about. You'll totally short-cut that learning curve there. Am I on track so far?
ANDY DUNCAN: You're actually right on target. In fact, that would be one of the first things that you would want to do as far as setting a target. In my case, my target was done for me. I needed to make $22,000 in three days. That wasn't my choice, but I didn't have a choice. It became a goal. It became a target, whether it was real or made up. It didn't matter.
I had a very specific target in mind of what I needed to do. The client I was talking about wanted to make $2,000 extra every month. I said, "You can start doing that in the next month. You can start doing it now and make it happen within 30 days. That's something to work at. Now you know what your target is. Now you have a direction to go in." Yes, the next question is, "What do you know something about? What's something you have a passion about, something that you're excited about?"
It comes across in your communication. It comes across in the audio. It comes across in the sales page, on the copywriting, and the ways you make an offer irresistible. Whether using a video sales page, a text or audio, or all of the above, it comes across in your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is contagious. That's a true statement. Those would be the two very important ingredients in creating that irresistible offer to get online.
RIC THOMPSON: There are a couple of other quick things you threw in there that I want to make people step back and take a look at. You mentioned, of course, your love for digital products. I love them, too. A lot of marketers do, of course, for information markets and information products. It sounds to me that common sense dictates that if you need money fast, you don't want to produce your own product.
That's an option, maybe, down the road, but at least from my personal experience, you're definitely adding to the time of getting things rolling if you have to stop and say, "What can I create for myself?" Am I on target there, or am I way off?
ANDY DUNCAN: Yes. Actually, that's very smart. One of my early mentors was Tellman Knudson. I don't know if you've had him on yet.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes.
ANDY DUNCAN: What I know about him personally is that he made his first $800,000-plus within his first 12 months of being seriously online. He did that with none of his own products. He did it completely as an affiliate marketer with none of his own products. He simply found other people who already had products that were selling and doing well, and got them involved and sold their products through a series.
That was the launch of his entire career. Until later on, after building a list, he was able to find out, "What do they want from me? What more do they want?" Then he created that. The faster way to do quick cash is to find an offer that is already out there and start promoting it right now.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. You mentioned places like ClickBank to look for those offers. Are there other places that people should check out? Let's say I have my target. I have my goal. Let's say I make $5,000 in the next 30 days. I've thought about what my strengths are, what my passions are, and what I'm interested in so I know what markets to play in. Now you go find that offer. You mentioned ClickBank. Are there other places you'd recommend, Andy, where I can tap into the market?
ANDY DUNCAN: You're actually talking about being an affiliate now. ClickBank is a major market place and I'd highly recommend ClickBank. Another place you can go to is www.AssociatePrograms.com. Let me double check if that URL is correct. Yes it is. The www.AssociatePrograms.com is a place that houses all of the other affiliate programs that are not ClickBank.
There are a lot of websites that have offers and products that they want to sell and that they are selling, and they have their own private affiliate program. The only way to find them is to search for them. If you had an idea for a topic like fly fishing, for example, then you can simply go to Google or any search engine and type in 'fly fishing+affiliate program'. Or 'fly fishing+PLR' or 'resale rights'. PLR is private label rights.
You're getting products with the topic and you get to see where they might be offering something that you can sell or re-sell. The www.AssociatePrograms.com just makes it easier by typing in the topic, like fly fishing. Then you can search their entire database where they've collected a lot of affiliate programs and associate programs that are already out there. That's a great resource as well, and it's not hard. Finding products is very easy, just by doing that.
RIC THOMPSON: What else do we need to do? What's the next step?
ANDY DUNCAN: Once you identify what you want to sell, now you have to go sell it. The other ingredient would be what a lot of people talk about, too. It's traffic. Just to be clear, the traffic we're talking about is people. It was a funny thing the other day that I heard. Somebody said, "You keep talking about traffic and all the ways to get traffic, traffic, traffic. Isn't traffic people?"
I said, "Yes, it is." Traffic is like having a physical store and people are walking in. You have foot traffic coming into your store. Hopefully, what you have to offer in the store people will want and they'll buy it. It's the same thing online. I remember the experience when I had my first website online a few years ago. It took me four months to build my first website. I'm talking about 14 hours a day, six days a week for four months.
It was a do-it-yourself. I did my first website. I built it. I was thinking, "I'm done finally. I have my first website up." I had an offer, and I waited and waited and waited. Weeks went by and nothing was happening. I thought, "Why is no one taking me up on my offer? No one's doing anything. No one's coming to my website." It was because I needed traffic.
The old saying is, "If a tree in the forest falls, does anybody hear it?" Nobody knows you're there. Even though you're out there, nobody knows you're there until somebody points you to it, somebody tells you about it, people refer you to it, or people find you some way, somehow. Traffic becomes the Number Two ingredient. Once you have an offer, where are you going to put it?
If you identify that there is a hungry, starving crowd of people, a market, who want what you have to offer, how do they get your offer? How do they find you? You have a lot of options. If you want to do it quickly, you can buy a pay-per-click ad and have people find you through Google or any other pay-per-click advertising campaign just by keywords. They find you that way.
For search engine traffic, people go to Google or any other search engine and type in some keywords. If you are really good at what you do, and you're one of the top 10 or 20 or 50, you'll show up naturally in the search engines, and you'll have traffic that way. Doing a joint venture, you get people promoting for you, and very targeted, specific traffic coming to your site.
Blogging is another way to get traffic. There are lots of ways to get traffic. In fact, I did a graphic on it because people kept asking me that same question, "How do you get traffic?" I've identified about 21 ways you can get traffic: everything from Facebook and Twitter to doing radio interviews, buying traffic or borrowing traffic or working for it. Those are the three categories to break it up into. Working for it is like using the blog.
You can use Twitter. You can use all the social media that's out there. There are different things like that; even public speaking and things like that. There are all these ways to get traffic, but there is a shortcut. The shortcut to get traffic is to go where the traffic already is. If you've identified a hot market and you have an irresistible offer, now it's just putting it in front of that traffic source.
An example of a highly trafficked marketplace is like Yahoo! Stores, like Amazon, like PayPal Shops, and even like the iTunes Store. LuLu is another marketplace. eBay is a marketplace. These are places where millions and millions of people get together. They go there. They're looking to buy stuff. They want to do something. They have money. They're shoppers. They are people who are ready to buy.
Those are the kinds of people you're looking for: people who are ready to spend money. It's really that simple. If you go to them, then you don't have to find traffic or find a way to get traffic. It's already built in. You're going to the places that already have it. It's like going to a shopping mall. That's why the shopping malls are the way they are. Lots of people go to the shopping malls because they want to buy something.
You're putting up a kiosk, an area, any kind of station, or any kind of boutique for whatever it is you're selling. You're putting something up there in front of the traffic and saying, "If this is what you're looking for, I'm here." You're attracting people as opposed to finding traffic. That's the shortcut.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. Let me put you on the spot, Andy. Let's say you're back in the situation you were in a few years ago. You have to raise a good chunk of money in the next 30 days. Maybe it's not $22,000. Maybe it's $2,000 or $3,000 in the next 30 days. What traffic sources would you use?
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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