Marc's Blog

E49: Building A 7-Figure Amazon FBA Empire With Ryan Grant

September 6, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Ryan Grant worked in the accounting field for a little over a year and a half before he decided to quit so he could create his own future. Ryan walked away from a $50K/yr job and now crushes it with Amazon FBA and other platforms. Ryan trains other people how to do the same, and everyone who has been in Ryan’s program for more than one year made at least $100,000 in sales in 2016 with the top client eclipsing $1 million in sales in 2016 for the first time.

Quotes To Remember

“The biggest thing is knowing your numbers.”

“As long as you’re doing the math ahead of time, it should be profitable.”

“If you truly want it to be a business, I suggest you figure out how to systematize things as you go along, and be prepared to bring out additional team members.”

What You’ll Learn

—Hacks for growing and investing in your Amazon FBA business

—How to get your products out of Amazon’s warehouses

—The mentality of an Amazon FBA side hustle versus committing to it full-time

Key Links from the Show:

Ryan’s Site

Scoutify—App used for aiding online arbitrage.

Keepa—Amazon price tracker

Camel Camel Camel—Amazon price tracker

Oaxray—Scouting reports for Online Arbitrage

Tactical Arbitrage—Scouting reports for Online Arbitrage

Recommended books:

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris

Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

E49: Building A 7-Figure Amazon FBA Empire With Ryan Grant

September 6, 2017 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

Quotes To Remember

“The biggest thing is knowing your numbers.”

“As long as you’re doing the math ahead of time, it should be profitable.”

“If you truly want it to be a business, I suggest you figure out how to systematize things as you go along, and be prepared to bring out additional team members.”

What You’ll Learn

—Hacks for growing and investing in your Amazon FBA business

—How to get your products out of Amazon’s warehouses

—The mentality of an Amazon FBA side hustle versus committing to it full-time

Key Links from the Show:

Ryan’s Site

Scoutify—App used for aiding online arbitrage.

Keepa—Amazon price tracker

Camel Camel Camel—Amazon price tracker

Oaxray—Scouting reports for Online Arbitrage

Tactical Arbitrage—Scouting reports for Online Arbitrage

Recommended books:

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris

Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

7 Jackpot Principles For Improving Your Email Outreach

August 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Lesley Vos.

Let’s start with the bad news:

Overwhelmed with email, people don’t always open, read, or respond to them. And with only 4% of all business related emails clicked, 22% opened, and 78% ignored, “overwhelmed” sounds like an understatement.

But the good news is:

Email remains the most effective digital communication channel with an average of $38 in returns for every $1 spent. Plus, email is 40 times more authoritative than Facebook and Twitter combined.

So the problem is not email, but how you use it, especially for your outreach efforts. With an average of $6.85 for every $1 spent, influencer marketing has become an integral part of most campaigns.

In fact, email outreach as the #1 tactic to hit a target. But with 84% of marketers running this strategy, how are you going to stand out and succeed?

Consider these core principles of email outreach when planning your marketing campaign:

1) Personalization

What makes email so efficient?

As ProOpinion states, email is “inherently personal – each person receives a message straight to his or her inbox.”

So forget about writing cold templates, paraphrasing and plagiarizing emails from other bloggers, and try to better personalize every outreach you send.

How?

Use first names
Offer a compliment
Show them you know them
Use a conversational tone
Be honest and sincere
Concentrate on what’s in it for them

Source: Tim Soulo for Ahrefs

Sounds obvious, but so many productive bloggers ignore these principles. They write “Dear Sir” or “Hello, Webmaster,” forgetting about psychology and the natural desire of every person to be treated as a friend and individual.

“Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Studies show that when we hear our names, a reaction in the brain makes us sympathize an interlocutor, allowing the latter to benefit from it.

Just like that!

Lyrical digression: try to guess if senders who email me with “Dear Sir” get a response. Yes, I get such letters. Yes, even in 2017 (and despite dozens of articles from influencers on writing badass outreach emails).

Personalization is about flattering one’s ego. You might want to double the effect, repeating a receiver’s name throughout the email, but be careful not to go too far and risk sounding insincere.

2) Power Subject Lines

The first thing people read is the email subject line, which helps them decide whether or not to open it.

So make this line appealing enough to spark recipients’ interest and encourage them to check your offer.

How?

Personalize it (personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened)

Source: Lesley Vos for SEMrush

Create intrigue (make the subject just clear enough to pique interest)
Consider length (subject lines of 51-60 characters or 6-10 words have the highest read rate)

3) Power Words

Words are a weapon in email outreach because they can make people feel a certain way and influence them to take action. Use power words to sound trustworthy.

How?

Make your message readable: use short sentences and paragraphs, don’t ignore bolded words and bullet lists.
Give your email a power information scent: what is the “meat” of your message?
Add surplus value: what makes you different from others? Why should readers choose and trust you?
Use power words: active verbs, no cliches, no jargon or plague words.

Visual and informational clues help recipients see the value of your outreach just by scanning it. Also, when writing for business, language patterns appeal to basic human instincts.

In his article for Mention, Mike Hanski recommends five power words to use in your emails:

You – appeals to selfishness
Easy – appeals to laziness
Save – appeals to greed
Results – appeals to pragmatism
Guarantee – appeals to skepticism

4) Credibility

Be honest. How many of you continue getting emails from lucio123@hotmail.com or lisa1991@gmail.com?

To enhance the chances your emails will be opened, tend to your credibility:

Use a professional email address or, at least, your real name for Gmail
Take advantage of the email signature

An appropriately named email address will help keep it out of the spam box and lets readers form an opinion of you as a reliable and competent person. Your signature tells influencers who you are and helps them remember you.

Source: Lesley’s outreach letter (not a template to use all over the place!)

When outreaching influencers, give them a reason to care. They don’t want mediocre work, so you might want to introduce yourself with a brief mention of your past publications, if you have any.

You can share publications on top blogs, shareable content, or simply well-researched articles that demonstrate your professionalism and ability to do awesome things.

Also, make it easier for recipients to research whether you are a good fit by including your name, website URL, and social media links in your email signature.

5) Objectiveness

Never contact influencers with vague sentences or ambiguous statements. Keep your message simple and to the point with the one-ask-per-email formula.

Write clearly and objectively, but don’t sound demanding. That’s a core principle of not conflating clarity with pushiness. Decide on a single offer or request:

Do you want them to read an article?
Are you asking for an expert opinion?
Would you like them to review a product?
Want them to share a link with their followers?
Are you pitching a guest post idea?

Keep it short and be sure they’ll never have to ask, “What do you want from me?”

Also, be humble.

6) Brevity

Consider the 3-5-7 rule of email copywriting when writing your outreach emails:

3 seconds to get their attention
5 seconds to draw them in
7 seconds to compel them to act

The perfect length is 150 words or up to 5 sentences/short paragraphs. Use lots of line breaks and white space so your email easy to scan.

As much as 56% of emails are opened on mobile devices now, so your outreach risks deletion if not displayed correctly.

Source: Dave Schneider for HubSpot

7) Time

Time matters for sending emails. Succesful marketing campaigns prove it:

The best days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
The optimal times are 6 a.m., 10 a.m, and 2 p.m.

But since there is conflicting data on the topic, it’s best to A/B test your email list and learn the exact time to outreach them. As we all know, what works for one marketer won’t necessarily work for another.

Follow up on your pitch.

This is a bit controversial because no one likes a pain in the neck. After all, if you pitch a valuable proposition you should get a positive response without any follow-ups, right?

Wrong.

Out of all of my outreach emails, 60% get a response only after I follow-up. And that’s not because influencers don’t want to work with me, but because they’re busy.

Follow-ups act as reminders. But that doesn’t mean you should write them every other day and ask recipients if they’ve read your email. Give them at least 72 hours minimum to reply.

For example, I followed up with Marc a week after sending him the outline of the post you are reading right now:

Yes, I wanted to be persistent but understood that following up too frequently would look like a nuisance.

How many follow-ups are enough?

Well, my experience says two, though some experts recommend three or even four. But I remember those epic screenshots from Tim Soulo’s post with his reaction to bothersome follow-ups. There’s a limit to everything, after all.

Wrapping Up

Core principles for improving your email outreach are as follow:

Make it personal.
Use power words and create compelling subject lines.
Keep it short and to the point.
Consider your credibility.
Send it in right time.
Be yourself.
Show what’s in there for influencers.
Always follow up.

Getting influencers to respond and compel them to action is not that difficult, provided you are competent and persistent. Start giving a value, and you’ll succeed.

About the author:

Lesley Vos is a professional web writer and guest blogger contributing to publications on content marketing, social media, and self-development. Feel free to ask Lesley to write for you (an attentive reader, you might see her email address in the above article) or drop her a line on Twitter.

6 Indispensable Factors For Attractive And Strong Content Marketing In 2017

August 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

This is a guest contribution from Junaid Ali Qureshi

As digital marketing and new social media platforms take over the internet, the need for establishing a strong and attractive content marketing arises. The content posted by a business brand offers an insight of the brand to the audience. It conveys the personal message of the brand and gives away information regarding the latest products and services.

If your content marketing is attractive and strong, it means it is able to direct a large number of people to the online brand stores. It also helps in increasing the sales of your product. The effectiveness and success rate of the content marketing shows how important it is for a business to succeed. Thus, to make your content marketing strategy strong, here are few factors that you need to keep in mind.

#1: Increased dependence on visual content

Image source: http://www.jeffbullas.com

Since the content plays such an important role in increasing the return on investment of a brand, it is necessary that you consider the type of content that is achieving great success in the recent times. In this regard, the social media company Dubai managed to share its statistics with us. They suggest that short videos are taking over the written content marketing strategy.

Visual content has become a necessity and every content marketer must consider this fact and give it its due importance. After inquiring more from the media company, we came to know that the infographics, high-quality images, videos, comics, graphics and slideshows are the types of visual content that are doing well on the internet. As far as the videos are concerned, here are few tips that you need to consider to generate unique videos:

Invest in interactive and informative videos
Make high-quality videos with good audio and understanding
Use latest tricks like 360-degree view and live streaming videos
Explain what you are doing in the videos.
Give a view of the behind the stage scenes to the viewers
Make sure the video target the right audience

#2: Is your content interactive?

Image source: https://www.slideshare.net/

When we double check the content, we need to make sure that the content showcase an interactive platform. Including interactive stages in the content has now become an essential factor of content marketing.

The consumers now like to play a major part in the industry by contributing their opinions and sharing their ideas. Presently, the interactive content is used less but it is expected to become dominant soon. As this style of content is not common yet, it gives you the edge of doing something different and unique.

Make use of this opportunity, make your content interactive and engage as many people as you can. Moreover, also ensure the looming presence of your interactive content. Whether it is a quiz, an image or a contest which engage the audience, it must be easily visible to the viewers. The viewer/ potential customer-to-be, by all means, must be able to clearly view and understand your content.

#3: Quality of the existing and new content

Image source: https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/

Whatever you do, compromising the quality of the content is out of the question. A poorly written content leads a business to nowhere. It fails to attract the traffic flow and reflects a bad impression of the brand on the audience. This is why, while making your content strategy, you need to ensure that the content that you post is high-quality content.

You need to use a unique style, whether it is a story telling style or a simple documentation style, the content must be great. It must engage the viewers so that the content is able to generate leads. This leads to increase in the sales and the return on investment.

Thus, make sure your content is grammar mistake and spelling-error free. It must be readable, easy to understand and well-written. The new content creation and blogging have become an essential part of inbound marketing as well. Presently, according to HubSpot research, 53% of the marketers consider content creation their top priority in inbound marketing. (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/)

Another thing that you can do is repurpose your present content as well. The content curation and syndication regulations allow you to republish the interesting content that brings benefits to the business. Producing new, original, evergreen and attractive content is outstanding but if you are facing problem in doing so, why not repurpose the already present content for a while?

#4: Promotion of the content to the right audience

Image source: http://bootcampdigital.com

The next factor that largely affects the strength of a content marketing strategy is the targeted promotion of the content. Generating high-quality and authentic content is not enough. The marketers need to make sure that it is directed to the right audience as well.

You can pick the right audience by collecting data on the geographic, demographics and on the behavior of the audience. And once you have collected the data, find out the most common issue and the problem that are prevailing among the audience. This data is sufficient to find out about the type of audience you are dealing with. You can then tally the feature of your product that benefits them the most and market accordingly.

Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute stated that there has been a shift between the content creation and promotion. Five years ago, 80% of efforts were focused on creation and 20% were focused on the promotion. But with the passage of time, and as the internet has become dense with content, the percentages flip-flopped.

This means that the present year and those that are yet to come are all going to be about promotion of the content. And every content marketer must look forward to new ideas to do so.

#5: Influencer Marketing

Image source: http://visual.ly

An influencer marketer is a person who is popular in different social circles and has a list of fans and followers. This individual can help a lot in content marketing. As people like to accept what the third-party recommends, using influencer marketing techniques will greatly enhance the business advertisement.

Data collected from different agencies that offer social media services Dubai shows that social media platforms are presently flooding with influencer marketers. This marketing trend is among the latest ones but it must be considered by the content marketers if they will to succeed in the competition.

Elephantation, a renowned digital marketing company, considers influencer marketing an essential factor and today they are succeeding at a great pace.

Do you want to slip some great tips regarding running the influencer marketing campaign down your sleeves? Here is your chance to do so:

Build good relations with the influencer so that you know he is on your side. This helps in ensuring the good quality of the content
The content must have an engaging and interactive story
Don’t forget to add a call to action in between
Make sure you are achieving your goals through the content
Do show empathy to the influencer’s schedule

Follow these tips and you’ll do great with the influencer marketing strategy.

#6: Consistency in delivering the content

Image source: http://blogpros.com

The stats from content marketing institute suggest that 85% of the top performers deliver content consistently. But it is because of the consistency in the job that the respective brand is able to make its position in the global market. The audience reviews one article and soon afterward they forget it.

Consistency in posting content, whether written or visual, keeps the brand in front of their eyes until they actually know it by name, product variety, and quality. Thus, on whichever platform you are posting your content, make sure you do it regularly.

Now, when we say regularly, how often should you post content on the website or the social media platforms? Well, the content posting schedule depends on the marketing team of the brand. But if you ask us, if you are running an active marketing strategy and your brand is a new one, you should post new content weekly. If in case you have a popular business brand at hand, monthly content posting would do.

Also, don’t forget to take feedback from your viewers. This helps in finding out whether your content is good enough and doing its respected job of attracting the viewers or not. You can also find this by conducting an analytic program. It gives you the data regarding the performance of your website/ social media and how well the content is doing there.

Taking these 6 factors into account for a successful content marketing strategy is enough. Even a startup can succeed by making sure they have focused on these factors. The content marketing institute shares the base points of a good content marketing strategy. It includes having one content type, one main platform, consistent delivery and a long period of time to make sure it flourishes. So make sure you do everything in your power to make your strategy succeed and give it enough time to flourish.

About The Author:

Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and others.

How To Play More Offense For Your Business

August 8, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The more offense you play for your business, the more successful you will become. All of the top entrepreneurs dedicate a portion of their time each day to play offense.

Playing offense does not mean writing the next blog post. It doesn’t mean engaging with your audience, creating videos, or doing anything else associated with being in your business.

Playing more offense involves you taking an aerial view of your entire business and asking yourself important questions. Is this working? What should I be focusing on? What small changes can I make that would yield dramatic results? How do I grow this?

This offense results in more directed action with a clearer path to victory. Instead of constantly creating content and marketing yourself, you now have more specific aims that you believe will create the most impact.

You may feel like you’re already on the right path, but taking 30 minutes to conduct that aerial view every day will open the door to old opportunities and platforms that can still lead to great results.

Write Down Everything That Constitutes Your Business

This is a one-time, time extensive task. You’ll occasionally go through this list as your business continues to grow. However, you need to take this step before you can truly play offense. Here are just some of the parts of my business:

Virtual Summits
Blog Posts
Guest Posts
Training Courses
Free Videos
Books
Public Speaking
Breakthrough Success Podcast
Coaching
Redistribution

Sometimes I focus so much of my time, attention, and energy on my virtual summits that I forget about other areas. When I took the aerial view, I rediscovered that I needed to pump out more content for my readers (plus, I LOVE writing content, and realized that I’d separated myself from my biggest passion for too long).

I also rediscovered my podcast outros need major updates. I didn’t see any traction from my previous outros because I mainly promoted my Udemy courses, but now I’m promoting more stuff on my site and a few tools which I use and am an affiliate for.

I also rediscovered that I could get more exposure by writing more guest posts and getting interviewed on more podcasts.

Discovering and doing are two different things, and if your schedule is constantly filled with in-business work, you never find the time to take that aerial view and ask yourself, “What should I really be doing?”

Then you need to rediscover and start implementing instead of letting these important tasks continue to remain unattended.

Writing down all of this information is so important because with tens of thousands of thoughts running through out minds every day, it’s easy to forget.

Start Delegating More Of Your Tasks

Delegating your tasks to others will open up hours of extra time. My freelancers are critical to my success because they subtract various tasks from my day. Over the long-term, I can easily see having a team of hundreds of freelancers, but I’m not there yet.

Some people may be interested in delegation but haven’t started yet. If that’s you, my friend Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation has some great advice for you.

The two main ingredients you need to get started delegating are a log of where you’re spending your time and a well-documented process.

The time log will tell you where the biggest opportunities for outsourcing lie. What’s sucking up the most of your day? Is that something you HAVE to do, or could someone else reasonably handle it with a little training?

Next, you’ll want to have clear process documentation and instructions. This is like your recipe for completing the task, and the more detailed the better. Don’t leave anything to chance here, even though you probably take for granted some of the steps, especially if you’ve been doing the task yourself for any length of time.

How I normally create the process documentation is I take a screen capture video of myself doing the job and talking through the steps. Then I write out the steps in a Google Doc so I can share both a visual and written version with my assistant.

Delegating more of your tasks will also give you more time to play offense. Take some time to think about some of the important parts of your business, how you can take action, and then just do it.

Checking on your freelancers is part of playing offense because you want to make sure they have work, and more importantly, that your freelancers are effectively getting their jobs done. You should have more 10-15 minute meetings fill up your schedule to ensure that you and your freelancers are both on the same page. These meetings do take up some time, but they work like a charm for keeping everyone on track.

In Conclusion

I thought of ways that I could extend this blog post beyond my usual 1,000 word marker, but I decided against it. Playing offense for your business simply comes down to…

Taking the aerial view of your brand
Discovering/rediscovering what you need to do for the optimal impact
Start taking action

I could have said it in several different ways, but that’s the premise to working on offense. Taking action just comes down to putting the tasks on your schedule. If a task isn’t on the schedule, it doesn’t get done. If it’s on the schedule, it has a much higher probability of getting done.

What are your thoughts on playing offense for your business? Do you have any tips for us? Have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Choose The Best Blog Post Topics

August 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

blog post topics

Every blog post you write involves a time investment. And as you continue along the blogging journey, the time investment you put towards each post will most likely grow.

But to make your time worthwhile, you must choose the best blog post topics. That way, your visitors will love your blog and you will love writing the content.

The best way to discover your blog post topics is to start with the basics and expand from there.

The Basics

First and foremost, choosing the best topics for your blog posts comes down to asking yourself one question:“What do I enjoy?”

I have a strong passion for digital marketing, which is why I can effortlessly write about the topic. Once I allocated 15 minutes to write about digital marketing for the day but quickly became frustrated because I wanted to spend more than 15 minutes writing about digital marketing.

I was like the child who didn’t want recess to come to an end. That’s the mentality you must have when you’re writing your content and know that you’re running out of time.

Obviously, we have a range of answers to the question “What do I enjoy?” But we need to narrow our focus on the few things that we can write about for many years to come and that will continue to provide value.

At one point, I enjoyed writing about LEGO Sets. I haven’t written about LEGOs for a very long time because I prefer writing about digital marketing and embracing that topic.

It’s also a niche in which I can provide massive value given my experience (years of experience means nothing to me. Results determine the quality of those years and if I should care. But this is just a teen’s rant 🙂 ).

To determine if your content will thrive, you must also ask the question, “Is this something people want?” I know people want this blog post because several of my subscribers asked me to specifically write a blog post on this topic.

I like coming up with my own ideas, but if my audience suggests ideas, I’m more than happy to write about those topics as well, especially because I can be fairly sure they will resonate with my readers.

Pay Attention To Your Audience

As your content attracts more visitors, your visitors will suggest more ideas. Some of them will be direct…“Write about THIS.” These visitors are rare.

The majority of your visitors will indirectly suggest new content ideas. Here are some of the signs you should pay attention to:

What questions do they ask you in the comments? I always invite my visitors to ask questions in the comments. That way, I can answer these questions and write out future blog posts (sometimes I copy and paste comments together to form the skeleton of a new blog post).

If I see a lot of questions about, let’s say Pinterest, I know my audience wants a blog post about Pinterest.

What’s getting the most engagement. When I first started this blog, I wrote as many Twitter related blog posts as I could. These blog posts by far got the most engagement and each Twitter blog post worked like magic.

Now I’ve slowed down on Twitter related blog posts due to the immense library of them on this blog and the over-saturation of “10 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers” type of blog posts.

Engagement is like votes, and engagement can take the form of social signals, traffic, clicks, comments, and any other indicator.

Which of your posts are the top performers. Keep providing these types of posts and internally link them together so they each become top performers. You never know how long a post will retain its popularity, so you want to take action as quickly as possible.

For instance, one of my most popular blog posts was about getting Vine followers. Now it’s not doing so well since Vine isn’t a social network anymore. When you’re content is popular, ride that wave. Hope to never see the shore but write as if that shore is coming and you want to capitalize on all of the growth you can get from the final part of the wave.

See What Your Audience Says Off Your Blog

Your visitors spread their time across multiple blogs and social networks. This is valuable knowledge for discovering what your audience wants. During this stage, we observe others and chime in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

One of the policies I adopted is that I will respond to the comments I get from my blog. I knew it would be a tedious process, but I do so anyway. In these comments, my visitors ask questions, share suggestions, and weigh in on the blog post.

I got inspired to respond to every comment because Neil Patel does it. It’s commonplace for Neil to get dozens or even hundreds of comments for each blog post he publishes. He goes through all of those comments to gather more content ideas and discover what his readers want.

If you’re a digital marketer, especially if SEO is your speciality, then why aren’t YOU going through the comments Neil gets? After you leave a comment (yes, you definitely should), look at all of the Qs and suggestions Neil gets. Each of his blog posts (comments alone) offers a treasure trove of ideas, but you’ll only access that treasure trove if you read each one.

I know. It’s tedious, and I don’t read all of the comments for each of his blog posts. However, when I do, I get many ideas.

You can take a similar approach via Quora, a social networking site which allows users to ask and answer questions. When people ask questions about social media and blogging, I make it a point to be one of the first people to answer the question.

Not only does the first answer tend to get the most views, but I can also use my answers as the starting points for future blog posts. Quora’s additional advantage is that as a big social network, it’s commonplace for me to find dozens of questions that I could answer in the form of high-demand blog posts.

Sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Wiki Answers are great for discovering more topics that your visitors want. I prefer Quora because I believe it’s the easiest to use, but the decision is up to you.

In Conclusion

When you choose a blog post topic and start writing, it involves a considerable amount of your time. Not only do you write the blog post from start to finish, but you also need to promote it so that blog post gains traction.

With so much of your time hinging on each idea, it’s important to choose the blog post topics that will resonate the most with your audience.

You can discover which topics work by observing your audience on and off your blog.

What are your thoughts on choosing the best blog post topic? Do you have any suggestions for discovering the best content ideas? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.