More traffic... more sales... more often

The Marketing Ladder Blueprint

How to put an end to marketing chaos… generate a small
but highly responsive list of paying customers only…
and consistently grow your profits and your business
by actually doing much less marketing

From: Bob Serling

If you're like most business owners, entrepreneurs or marketing managers I talk to in my consulting practice, then you're confronted daily with two critical problems:

1. Your sales have dropped off significantly in the past year to 18 months
2. You're investing significantly more time and money in marketing but regardless of what you do, it doesn't move the needle on your sales

So let me tell you exactly why this is happening. The reason your sales have flat lined is that most of your list is dead weight. It's made up primarily of prospects who have never bought anything. And if you're realistic, they don't have even the slightest intention of ever buying anything.

Why? Because by following the conventional marketing wisdom, you got these prospects to join your list by giving them something for free. Then you continued to give them more and more for free. And when you eventually get to the point of asking them to buy something — even if the price is very reasonable — they run as fast as they can in the other direction in search of more stuff they can get for free.

What I've just described is the model taught by so many marketing experts and commonly referred to as a "marketing funnel". But as you're experiencing in your own business, the marketing funnel is irretrievably broken. And unless you stop using this damaging model and replace it with a more effective model, your sales will continue to be disappointing.

Fortunately, there's a simple solution called The Marketing Ladder Blueprint you can use to reverse this financially damaging situation completely. It shifts the focus of your marketing from constantly giving things away for free to working only with paying customers (which is much easier than you might think). And as counter-intuitive as this may sound at first, this new model results in you making far more sales while dramatically reducing the time and money you invest in marketing.

So let me take you on a quick tour of how this all works. I'll start by showing you how the disastrous model of giving so much away for free got started in the first place, followed by how The Marketing Ladder Blueprint turns that around and actually helps you make far more sales by marketing less.

And here's my promise to you: the eye-opening information you're about to discover on this web page can be applied immediately to increase your sales and profits. And it has the potential to change your business forever.

So let's get started with some quick background on how marketing got to the state it's currently in.

The biggest problem (disguised as a solution) that's harming
your short-term sales and long-term growth

For years, it's been standard operating procedure to entice prospects to join your list by giving something away for free. Since this seemed to work, many marketing experts started recommending giving away even more things for free — and more often.

This process of piling on more and more free goodies became so popular, it's even been given a name of its own — it's called "raising the free line". In my opinion, it should actually be called mass hysteria.

You see, not only are you told to give away more and more free things to your prospects, but you're warned that you must do this for a considerable length of time without ever asking them to buy anything. And supposedly, this type of "relationship building" will eventually result in converting far more visitors to paying customers.

In some cases, this can work. But in most cases, it doesn't work well or doesn't work at all. Yet this process of continually "raising the free line" is still the main method most businesses use to attract prospects and attempt to convert them to paying customers.

However, there's a major flaw in this entire process. And it can all be summed up in one sentence...

You see, people have become so accustomed to receiving things for free, that they will take almost anything for free. Plus, all the raising of the free line has conditioned them to demand more and more for free.

As a result, I'm sure you've noticed that giving away so much for free has actually resulted in you making fewer sales — not more, as the model promises. And as long as this give-away mentality continues, your sales will continue to suffer.

Why? Because the vast majority of people who take you up on your free offer have little or no intention of ever buying anything from you.

And as high quality as your product or service may be, those freebie takers are not enticed by your free materials or free trials to actually buy anything. Instead, the minute you offer them something for sale, they simply move on to the next company giving away their products or services for free.

The game changing strategy that solves this problem

So what can you do to reverse this financially damaging trend? The answer is actually quite simple, possibly even obvious.

Plus, when it comes to selling almost any product or service in today's market conditions, the news gets even better. You see, the foundation of the entire Marketing Ladder Blueprint is this:

And even more important, for the vast majority of businesses, a list of just 1,500 paying customers — that's built with a reasonably small first purchase — is all you need to fuel a highly successful business for decades and enjoy the lifestyle you've always wanted.

Now, I realize that this is contrary to all the advice you've been force fed for years now, so let me give you a couple examples that demonstrate how effective this solution really is.

Driving sales growth with a 35-cent purchase

About 20 years ago, before Internet marketing was an accepted practice, I primarily used direct mail to generate leads for my consulting services and information products. One method of direct mail was called "card decks" where your postcard sized promotion would be mailed along with a stack of other postcard sized promotions.

Usually, there were about 100 cards in a deck. The traditional promotion was to offer a free report, white paper, or audio tape and drive the response to a toll-free 800 number.

Now, prior to becoming a consultant, I was a professional copywriter, so I was able to get excellent response with my card deck promotions. In fact, one month when checking the number of responses each card produced, the card deck manager told me that the 3,300 responses I got was higher than anyone else's response for that month — and it was nearly 1,000 responses more than the next best card.

The only problem was that I wasn't making much money from this.

There was a fee to have your card placed in the deck, another fee of about 50 cents per call for the 800 number service, a fee to have the names and addresses keyed into your database, and the costs to mail out the free report I was giving away. When everything was added up, it was costing me about $3 for each response I generated. So my costs to run in the card deck promotion were $9,900 that month.

But cost should never be your main consideration when it comes to marketing or advertising. The real measure of effectiveness is how much did you make to offset those costs — and most importantly — how much profit does that result in?

After tracking everything for a couple months to see how many sales resulted from these people who had taken advantage of my free offer, I was still below break-even. Not a pretty picture at all!

In talking with a number of my friends and business associates who also used direct mail to generate leads, I discovered that their experience was nearly identical to mine. Lots of people taking anything and everything for free, but few actual buyers.

At that point, I started thinking about what could be done to reverse the situation and to actually turn direct mail lead generation into a reliable profit center. That's when I first got the idea to deal only with prospects who paid to get on my list, rather than jumping at yet another offer for something for free.

And here's exactly how I did that…

Now, I still offered a free report as "bait" to get people to join my list. BUT — instead of letting prospects request it with a toll-free number, I made them pay for the call by driving the response to a standard land line.

Back then, the cost of a long-distance call was about 35 cents. So now, instead of getting the call for free, my prospects had to pay a measly 35 cents to take advantage of my free offer.

As a result, my response plummeted! By charging for the phone call instead of giving it away for free, I generated around 850 responses instead of 3,300.

Now, that's a steep drop off. It's a bit mind boggling, but simply by adding a 35-cent cost to the deal, literally thousands of people dropped out! And this had two very powerful results.

First — my marketing costs were still $3 per prospect, but with 850 responses, my total costs dropped from $9,900 to $2,550. So that was $7,350 more that I kept.

Second — after tracking the sales to these prospects over a couple of months, I made nearly double the sales to people who had identified themselves as "buyers" as I did from the freebie seekers. Now my promotion became very profitable, returning nearly $3 in profit for every dollar I invested in marketing.

I passed this information along to my business associates and they produced similar results. So now I knew I was on to something very valuable, which can be summed up as:

Now, let's jump forward 15 years or so and take a look at applying this same principle to marketing online.

Case Study — $212,500 in sales from a small list
of 827 customers who paid to join my list

A few years back, I offered a live, 4-day training program on a rapid method for creating and selling information products. The enrollment fee for the program was $12,500 and space was limited to 16 participants.

However, I ended up selling 17 seats before closing down enrollment, so the gross revenue came to $212,500.

But the most important factor was that these 17 sales were made to a list of just 827 people. That comes to $265.95 for every prospect on the list!

So what was the driving force that resulted in such a high return per prospect? Quite simply, it was the fact that all the people on this list had bought something to get on the list. In this case, it was a low cost report (I believe it sold for $17) that covered the fundamentals of creating and selling information products.

Some of these customers came from my own ezine list and others came through joint ventures to other peoples' lists. But all 827 people on this list joined the list by making a small purchase.

In addition, in a separate test to nearly 30,000 people who had joined another one of my lists by taking advantage of a free offer, just 4 seats were sold. So as you can see, even in the current environment, the concept of "raising the free line" is deeply flawed.

The principle behind this ridiculous concept is that if you give enough stuff away for free, eventually these prospects will recognize all the value you bring them and buy something from you. But just the opposite is true.

Because the more you give and give and give away… the more you condition people to expect to get things from you for free. And without realizing it, you're actually training your prospects not to buy from you!

So at the risk of repeating myself, let me underscore once more:

With this critical understanding in mind, let's take a look at exactly what you need to do to shift from a "raising the free line" approach to marketing only to customers who have made a small purchase from you.

That can easily be achieved by using my Marketing Ladder Blueprint.

6 Steps for creating your Marketing Ladder System
to build a small but highly responsive list of actual buyers
— and make continuing, repeat sales to them

Fortunately, eliminating your ineffective, damaging Marketing Funnel and replacing it with a high-performing Marketing Ladder is reasonably easy.

Once you do this, instead of 98% of your list being made up of freebie grabbing prospects and just 2% being customers, we'll reverse those numbers almost completely. By implementing The Marketing Ladder, your list will be much smaller, but it will consist of 90% paying customers and just 10% prospects who have accepted something for free in exchange for opting into your list. And all it takes to do this are two things:

1. Understanding how to create a Marketing Ladder System and fully capitalize on it
2. Committing to implementing it

I can clearly show and guide you through the reasonably simple steps of building your Marketing Ladder System. What you'll need to bring to the table is the commitment to carry out the implementation. With this in mind, let's take a tour of the 6 steps for creating your Marketing Ladder System.

MLB Step 1: Create an extremely compelling "bait piece"

The core principle that drives the Marketing Ladder is just the opposite of the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of building a massive list of tire kickers (at a tremendous cost of time and money), you build a much smaller list that's primarily paying customers.

However, similar to the old marketing funnel method, in order to attract prospects' attention, you must entice them to opt-in to your list by creating an extremely compelling "bait piece" to be given away for free. What? Didn't I just build a case for not giving things away for free — and charging for them instead?

Absolutely.

But while the goal is to deal only with customers who have bought something from you, because of the current state of the market, you still have to give something away for free in order to reach this goal.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to start with each prospect buying something instead of getting something for free. But I'm not foolish enough to make this such a steep uphill climb that it ends up failing. So because people are so conditioned to join your list by getting something for free, that will still be your starting point.

However, the sources you use to drive traffic and add people to your list are extremely different, which is exactly what you do in the next step.

MLB Step 2: Find only those prospects who are highly likely to make
a small purchase immediately and offer your bait piece to them

In this Step, things begin to get radically different — and radically better. You're still going to use your bait piece as the primary way of attracting prospects to opt-in to your list. And you're still going to offer it for free.

But the critical difference is that you apply much more careful and effective targeting to do the best job possible of identifying only those prospects who are highly likely to make a small purchase immediately. These are the only people who you'll offer your free bait piece to.

This is achieved by eliminating all of the wasteful media and marketing tactics you're currently using and replacing them with just three prospecting sources:

• Rented email lists consisting only of buyers (magazine subscribers, association members and buyers of products or services similar to yours)
• Stand-alone emails to other businesses' lists — preferably their buyers only
• List swaps (having another list owner promote your bait piece to their list in exchange for you promoting theirs)

The key similarity between these sources is that the majority of the time, you can use them to reach people who have already demonstrated a willingness to buy.

With other sources, such as social media, pay-per-click, article marketing, video marketing, banner ads and so on, you don't have any idea whether the prospect has ever bought anything similar to what you offer. So those prospects are far less likely to buy the low-cost item you offer than prospects with a proven buying history.

Just by shifting to this method of prospecting alone, you'll eliminate nearly all the chaos normally associated with marketing. So you'll be able to dramatically reduce the time and money you invest in marketing, freeing up your time to focus on other important aspects of running your business.

What this means is that right from the start, your list will be much smaller. But the quality of your list will run circles around lists that are built by offering more and more free stuff to all takers.

MLB Step 3: Immediately offer your prospects
another extremely compelling, low-cost product or service

This is another significant difference from the old way of doing things and as you can probably already tell, this is a change of the highest magnitude.

Now, instead of following up with endless free give aways, the moment someone has opted into your list, you'll immediately move to convert them to a paying customer. And you'll do this in two different ways immediately, both of which are dignified and non-pressured. Not to mention that they work extremely well when you've targeted the right prospects!

The first place to make an offer of a high quality, low cost product or service is right on the "thank you" page your prospects see when they opt-in. This is done with just a couple sentences of copy that thank your prospects for joining your list, then let them know that you have another resource they'll find very valuable and that they can get it today at a very low price.

I recommend pricing the first item you sell between $15 and $20. Remember, your goal here is to identify as many prospects as possible who will convert immediately to buyers. And the willingness to buy is the most important factor in determining who will become repeat buyers in the future of your higher cost products and services — not the amount they pay for their first purchase.

The second way to convert even more prospects to paying customers is to make the same offer you made on your thank-you page within your free bait piece. This should be placed at the end of your bait piece with a message that lets people know that if they enjoyed and benefitted from your free information, you have another low-cost item that will help them even more.

Both of these tactics are easy to implement. And both work extremely well to quickly build a list made up of buyers only.

MLB Step 4: Segregate your list into two distinct lists — buyers and prospects

By re-focusing the majority of your efforts on building a smaller list consisting only of buyers, then selling multiple items to those buyers many times, you'll eliminate all the chaos normally associated with marketing, make more short-term sales (which results in consistent, dependable cash flow), and lock in the long-term growth of your business.

So it only makes sense that you'll want to move your buyers onto a distinct list of their own in order to service them properly. This means that you'll have a special set of marketing pieces that are used exclusively for the purpose of making more sales (and being of more service) to your paying customers.

At the same time, you'll move your prospects onto a separate list so you can use a different set of marketing pieces to graduate as many of them as possible up the ladder to become paying customers.

All mailing list software has this capability built into it. The way you segregate lists differs slightly depending on which software you use, but the "help" included with your software will step you through doing this quickly and easily.

MLB Step 5: Move your buyers up the Marketing Ladder
to purchasing higher ticket products and services

The real money in any business is always in repeat sales to satisfied customers. Those sales are easier to make, cost next to nothing because these folks are already on your list, and produce the majority of the profit and growth for your business. In fact, 90% of all your sales will come from people who have already bought something from you.

So it's critical to devote the majority of your marketing efforts to them. This shift alone will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend marketing and eliminate a lot of the chaos normally associated with marketing. At the same time, if you restructure your marketing to focus on this critical principle, you'll also make a lot more money with a lot less effort.

Once you've made the initial sale to a customer, an entirely different dynamic sets in. As long as you've delivered a quality product or service, you have now established a bond of trust with your customer. And you can leverage this trust to be of even more service to that customer by selling them additional products and services that are of value to them.

Now, the entire process is completely professional and dignified. You're never going to hammer your customers with a hard sell. But if you have something that is of real value to them, it's very easy to make additional sales.

This brings us to a very important point — and it's another key principal of The Marketing Ladder approach. Whenever possible, you want to specifically design your products and services so they can be delivered in a serial manner. By doing this, you lock in multiple sales with each sale you make.

Here are a couple examples of serial products and services. A series of teleseminars all based around one core topic — such as managing employees more effectively — can be offered as an enrollment for the entire series with monthly billings or as "pick 3", "pick 6" or "pick all teleseminars in this series" with different prices. Either way, you're serializing the offer and locking in enrollment to multiple teleseminars instead of one at a time.

Another classic way of serializing sales is to offer a paid monthly newsletter, paid monthly audio or membership sight. And this same model can be used to offer paid monthly coaching or consulting as well.

MLB Step 6: Continue to "drip" your prospects with offers
for your low-cost product or service

Because the real money in any business comes from focusing on selling more to your existing customers, this next step should get much less attention and emphasis than the previous steps. But at the same time, its worth devoting a portion of your marketing efforts — approximately 10% to 15% — to converting more prospects to paying customers.

In my experience, anywhere from 10% to 20% of the prospects who did not respond to your initial offer to buy something will eventually convert to paying customers. And the best way to convert them is a bit counter-intuitive. Instead of offering prospects different products in an effort to find something appealing to convert them, it's actually best to harness the power of repetition by offering the same low-cost product over and over using testimonial-driven emails.

Here's why. By repeating your offer for the same low-priced product to your prospects, varying your message slightly and mixing in different testimonials, your prospects become more familiar with that single product.

Over time, they move from disinterested, to mildly interested, to saying, "What the heck, it's only fifteen bucks and people seem to be raving about it. I guess I'll give it a try." This type of serial marketing of the same introductory level product is what separates highly successful companies from their less successful competitors.

The "Big Aha" — Put these six steps into a simple,
highly automated system that repeats the process over and over

The final piece of the puzzle is what makes the entire process work with as little intervention as possible. But it's also the piece that an overwhelming majority of business owners, entrepreneurs and marketing executives will never do.

Why? Because even though it doesn't take much time, it's mundane, boring work.

So what is this final piece? It's creating written documentation for exactly how and when to execute each of the six steps of The Marketing Ladder Blueprint for your business.

Now, the truth is that for the most part, this will be very similar for every business. But there will always be some details that are specific to your business. So I can easily guide you in doing this, but you have to commit an hour or two to the actual effort.

Here's why this documentation is so important. Each step of the system is run at different times of the year or different times of each month. It seems fresh while you're in the midst of doing it, but when you come back to it a couple months later, things can get murky.

By documenting exactly how to execute each of the six steps of the system and when to implement them, you always have a complete roadmap to guide you every time you need it. And this means you'll always be executing each step the same correct way every time you use them.

Another advantage of this type of system documentation is that it makes it easy to train your staff members. This documentation becomes both your training and operations manual for your marketing — a manual that any employee can use to properly run your marketing system like clockwork.

How to build your complete Marketing Ladder System

That's a quick tour of what's required to shift from the unproductive, conventional way of marketing to an entirely new approach that helps you make substantially more sales while marketing much less. And it restores your sanity — and a load of free time — by eliminating all the chaos that's a natural byproduct of the conventional marketing funnel.

Using just what I've shown you here, you could immediately begin to apply it to your marketing and you'd gain a powerful advantage over all your competitors. However, as you can imagine, there are many nuances to all 6 steps of the system that I can't possibly cover here. So if you'd like to get even better results and achieve this more quickly, you can do that with my complete program The Marketing Ladder Blueprint.

In this program, I personally guide you step-by-step to quickly build your own Marketing Ladder System. This program is unique in that not only do I show you exactly what to do to build your system, but I further illustrate each step by walking you through a real Marketing Ladder System I'm building at the same time for my own business.

So not only do you get comprehensive training and all the marketing documents you need to build your system, but you also get to see the real-world application of all 6 of the system steps as my own system is built. To my knowledge, there is no other program that trains you in this innovative way. And I can assure you that the benefit you get from seeing every step implemented down to the last detail will be an invaluable source of help and inspiration in building your own system.

Here's how the program is delivered

With this in mind, let me show you how the program is delivered. There are three major components to the program, all designed to make sure you're successful in building your Marketing Ladder System and ramping up your sales as quickly as possible. Here's what you get:

Component #1 — Comprehensive training materials on a password protected training site. This site has all the materials you'll need for learning and implementing all 6 steps of the system. Plus it includes an easy-to-use directory that steps you through everything in the proper order. Members of my previous programs have absolutely raved about how beneficial this site structure is, how simple it is to navigate, and most importantly, how easy it makes it to learn everything as quickly as possible.

In addition to a wealth of modules covering every step and every nuance you need to quickly create and implement your Marketing Ladder System, each lesson is accompanied by a separate Action Steps document that lays out exactly what to do to implement the material from that lesson is the shortest time possible. This "roadmap" of each lesson ties everything together in an easy to follow recipe for maximum success.

Component #2 — The MLB Marketing Toolkit. This consists of every marketing document you'll need for launching and running your Marketing Ladder System for years to come. One of the core principles of the system is that everything must be simple, highly effective and completely reusable. This gives you the leverage to create a marketing piece once, then use it in multiple ways and for years to come.

By doing this, you get off the hamster wheel of constantly trying to keep up with the dozens (or hundreds) of potential ways you could be marketing. Instead, you have a finely tuned system that runs like clockwork with minimal intervention and maintenance.

The majority of these marketing pieces have clearly numbered blocks with corresponding explanations of the strategy behind each block and instructions on how to modify them for use in your business. In addition, you get both the block-by-block versions and separate Word versions of these documents, so when you're ready to use them, you can just cut, paste, make a few simple modifications and they're ready to go.

Component #3 — The complete "ride along" tour of how I'm building a new Marketing Ladder System for my own business. As I mentioned above, I'm building a completely new system for my own business using the Marketing Ladder Blueprint. It's designed to sell a completely new set of products and services I recently started offering.

Since the target market for these products and services is different than the market I've been working in, a completely new system is required. So I'm documenting in complete detail exactly how I implement all 6 steps of the system in real time.

You'll see the entire system unfold as I build it — the strategy, the tactics, the hits, the misses and everything in between. So you'll be able to learn from my experience, get a real-world example of how to ideally implement the process to build your system, and see the results it produces.

HINT: I already have great confidence that this will be a booming success. The first couple steps are already underway and so far the results of using The Marketing Ladder — and by this, I mean real sales — are exceeding our projections. So you get this powerful "look over my shoulder" that you can use to model your own system every step of the way.

Plus, you get these three valuable bonuses

To make sure you have every tool possible to create a highly effective Marketing Ladder System that lets you sell more while marketing less, I'm adding three powerful bonuses. Each bonus is designed to give you that extra edge you need to attract only the highest quality prospects and then convert as many of them as possible to paying customers. Here's what you get:

• Bonus #1: The "concentric circle" method for expanding into other highly profitable markets. Once you've created your Marketing Ladder System, you'll have more free time to devote to expanding into other markets. I'll show you an accurate, highly effective way to identify the best markets to expand into and leverage your track record to quickly gain significant market share.
• Bonus #2: The "reproducibility trigger" to build into almost every product or service that you offer. By applying this properly, each product sale turns into multiple sales or each consulting or coaching project can quickly be turned into multiple projects. Includes a case study of how the "reproducibility trigger" was used with one of my clients to turn a single sale into combined sales of 18 products and services.
• Bonus #3: The "drip upgrade" method for rapidly moving non-paying prospects to buyers of mid to high-priced products and services. Normally, you want to start prospects off with a low priced product or service — but there are also times when you can go directly to offering them a high-priced item. This technique is to be used sparingly, but at the right times it can add substantial sales to your bottom line.

If you'd like to start building a simple, powerful marketing system
you can rely on for years to come, here's what to do next

The fee for the Marketing Ladder Blueprint is $497. You can make a single payment or split the fee over 3 monthly payments of $197 each (for a total of $591).

Whichever payment method you choose, keep in mind what I mentioned above: The entire focus of this program is on building your system, generating your list of paying customers as quickly as possible, then leveraging that list to make more money while working fewer hours. So in a very short time, you'll have a complete marketing system you can benefit from right from the start.

And because one of the driving principles of The Marketing Ladder Blueprint is to create a system once, then be able to use it for years with minimal intervention, your system will continue to grow your business for years to come.

What does this mean in practical terms for your business?

For companies that sell services, if your average client project is worth $10,000 and you add just one new client every other month — and I'd certainly expect you to do more — that would be an additional $60,000 in revenue. So your return on investment would be massive.

For companies that sell products, by increasing both the number of sales you make — and most importantly, the number of repeat sales to the same customers that you've been missing out on — you should experience exponential gains as well.

Ready to get started? You can enroll now and get instant access to the entire program by clicking here:

www.ProfitAlchemy.com/mlb-enroll

Plus your results are completely guaranteed

While this program does require an investment of time and money on your part, I'm as committed to your success as you are. And I will completely put myself on the line to guarantee your results.

Here's how this works. I want you to take 60 days to prove to yourself how effective and how easy to implement The Marketing Ladder Blueprint really is. If you don't feel that it will substantially multiply your sales — and dramatically reduce the amount of time you devote to marketing — just drop me an email and you'll receive a full refund.

I'm happy to offer you this no-risk guarantee because I know the power of the Blueprint and I'm confident you'll fully get it the first day you dig into the material. With this guarantee, all the risk is on me and you simply can't lose.

So if you're serious about shifting from the unproductive marketing funnel to a streamlined system that actually produces far more sales with far less marketing, then The Marketing Ladder Blueprint is the answer you've been looking for. I know that if you give it even a decent try, you'll never need to buy any other marketing course again.

Just click here to place your order:

www.ProfitAlchemy.com/mlb-enroll

Regards,

Have a question about The Marketing Ladder Blueprint program?
We'll be happy to answer it. Just send an email to:

mlb@ProfitAlchemy.com

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