£10k In 90 Days Challenge | Day 1 | Champagne
by NicolaCairncross on October 19, 2009
in Money Gym | Business, Money Gym | Competition
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:07 — 5.1MB)
The Money Gym has just launched The Boardroom, a way for your business to access a crack business team, 18 of your very own non-executive directors, plus Judith Morgan and Nicola Cairncross. As well as making a very special launch offer of a third off your first year’s membership, Nicola & Judith are hosting a daily radio show, where they help each caller create an extra £10,000 in just 90 days from their existing business.
Today’s caller on The Money Gym “£10k In 90 Days” Challenge on our BlogTalkRadio show was Yvonne Halling with her champagne related business http://www.MadAboutBubbly.com
Quick bit of background: Yvonne’s husband Jiles is an expert on Champagne and among other parts of the business, like corporate champagne tastings, they own a beautiful house in the Champagne region of France which is available for holidays, sleeps 12 and rents for £1500 a week or £125 pp if you have 12, or £250 for the week if you only have 6 of you. Very reasonable and it IS lovely, having been Yvonne & Jiles’ home previously.
Their website is currently being overhauled by Marion Ryan, Money Gym coach and blog/web expert so that’s coming along and looks great. This will give them the flexibility to add / change the site whenever they like and will be very search engined friendly (search engines love blog sites!)
Jiles has written an ebook which is garnering rave reviews, and they are working on a follow up DVD right now. They already have a number of videos on YouTube which I found by searching “mad about bubbly” although their channel is called http://www.youtube.com/user/jileshalling (see below for my comments on improving their branding).
We established on the 15 minute radio show that their fastest route to making “£10k In 90 Days” was to get let their house in Champagne for 7 weeks out of the 12 of the challenge period, and we came up with the idea of an virally marketed, online competition, using Social Networking via Twitter, a Facebook page and ideally joint venture mailings, where people can win a week in the house as a prize.
I also worked out that, if they sold 5-10 ebooks a day, they would make an extra “£10k In 90 Days” especially if they pre-sold the DVD bundled with the ebook, and that I would be looking at a Google Adwords campaign to drive extra traffic to the ebook sales page…….more on this below.
As time was extremely limited on the radio show, we have decided to take the follow up onto the blog here, where I will outline our suggestions, and my proposed plan of action, Judith can contribute, Yvonnne can add her thoughts, and get coached over the next 90 days to make the challenge actually happen!
What fun!
Before we get stuck into the competition, Yvonne & Jiles shouldn’t overlook the obvious marketing for their property like listing it for free on Google Local (Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter) and perhaps getting it onto www.holiday-rentals.co.uk, which has an excellent reputation and only costs about £100 per year.
The Online Competition Idea:
1. Set up a page on the website to outline the competition – what do participants have to do to win a week in the MadAboutBubbly house? The ideal scenario is that whateve you do, should drive traffic to the MadAboutBubbly website so that as many people as possible are exposed to the ebook / house rental options. However, when I look at the site, I see that there are way too many options around the sides to distract the visitor. This is a common challenge for blog websites which are SEO for sure, but have way too much going on for a sales message of any kind.
My suggestion then would be to set up a standalone page (known as a squeeze page) using a simple HTML editor like FrontPage or NVU (which can be downloaded for free) which just has a bit of info about the competition on it, with a box so that entrants put their name and email in to get the details of how to enter. This would be uploaded to a subdirectory of the site, called something like www.MadAboutBubbly.com/winaweekinchampagne (includes the main keyword)
2. When we did The Money Gym “Gold For Christmas” competition, to win a year’s wealth coaching, I set up a competition where entrants had to outline – in writing on the blog or by making a short video which they then uploaded to YouTube – what they would use a year’s wealth coaching to work on and why they should win.
Every video upload had to include our full URL in the first line of the description, along with certain key words in the tags (which I provided) and this, and all the activity on the blog, drove a lot of traffic to our site.
3. Yvonne & Jiles should also set up a Facebook page for their house in Champagne, if they haven’t done so yet and you can watch a free video on how to do that here http://www.themoneygym.com/video/facebookpage and encourage all previous visitors and their contacts on Facebook to become fans of the page. The page can be linked to the blog and their twitter account, and everytime anything new happens, it will be networked between the social media sites and broadcast across the web.
** NOW, THIS IS IMPORTANT SO PAY ATTENTION **
Before doing any of this, Yvonne and Jiles need to decide whether they are branding the business, or Jiles as the expert, because the blog is called MadAboutBubbly.com – which is a strong, memorable brand, but the YouTube channel is called Jiles Halling.
Unless you want to duplicate your work (not advised) you need to decide, is it the business that is the brand or Jiles? Either is good but not both.
One of the most successful internet marketers in the online wine space is Gary Vaynerchuk, who has taken his parents wine business in New Jersey to tremendous heights, using social media to build a huge brand with WineLibrary.tv. Yvonne & Jiles can learn a lot from his example. Gary has over 749 wine tasting videos on YouTube, and the most viewed video, has been seen over 129,000 times!
Instant improvements to the YouTube videos that exist are to make the URL in the first line of each video a live link by adding the http:// before the www. Also, I’ve done some searching on “champagne tasting” and made a note of the top two or three videos (do the search then click “sort by” viewings)
If you click on the “more info” on the most viewed RELEVENT videos, you can add the key words or tags used on those videos to yours, then your video has a good chance of being shown as a related video, after the high view count videos are shown.
They include: Chloe Sevingy Reserve Chicago wine library TV gary vaynerchuk
The tags for Gary’s video that has been viewed 129,000 plus times are, by the way, Central Coast Chilean New Zealand Video chardonnay review sauvignon blanc white wine wines winelibrarytv
Any of those relevent to champagne? white wine, video, review and wines certainly are!
We mentioned on the show the possibility of setting up a Joint Venture somehow with said Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv, who has a new book out called “Crush It!” on branding your business online (a “must read” for Yvonne & Jiles btw) and Marcus, from Vayner Media is looking for joint venture partners to promote his book, so there may be some cross over / tie up there.
Nicola is going to introduce Yvonne to Marcus via email and you just never know what might come of it (just ONE of the benefits of joining The Money Gym Boardroom will be tapping into the contact base of 20 business professionals).
THE EBOOK / DVD
OK, so how to make “£10k In 90 Days” from the ebook / DVD?
The ebook sells for £19.97 I think, and you would have to sell 6 ebooks a day, for 90 days to make £10k. 540 books in total.
That would take a minimum of 54,000 highly targeted unique visitors which is totally possible with a tight, carefully monitored Google Adwords campaign. Assuming a cost of 10p per click, that would cost you £5400 but that could be funded by sales as they come in.
So you are looking at spending £5400 to make £10k, so to make “£10k In 90 Days” profit you would need double the sales roughly.
If you are thinking of using Google Adwords, and want to learn how to do it properly, you need to invest in Perry Marshall’s great book “The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords”
OR if you are in a hurry and want to just find out how I do it, join The Money Gym Silver Level and there is a video in the Internet Marketing Home Study system that shows you my simple system for setting up a Google Adwords campaign.
** FINANCIAL HEALTH WARNING ** Don’t forget to set a daily budget or your adwords campaign may run away with you. If you want to spend £100 a month, divide that by 30 days and set a daily budget of £3.33, then you won’t get any nasty surprises.
We talked a bit about driving all cold traffic to a squeeze page, with the thank you page being the sales page for the book, and Yvonne said they had tried that and it didn’t work. When I quizzed her about what she meant, she said they only sold about 3 so they changed it.
When you are talking about whether a website or sales page is “working” it’s meaningless to give sales figures without talking about it in terms of percentage conversion.
So a website that gets 1000 unique visitors a month that sells 100 ebooks is definately working, you just need more traffic. That’s a 10% unique visitor to sale conversion (the industry average is about 1%)
A website that gets 10,000 unique visitors a month but sells 10 ebooks a month, converting at 0.1% needs some attention.
This is where you get into using Google’s free Website Optimiser tool. You put a bit of code on your main page, then set up two other versions of the page (testing different headlines for example), then another bit of code on the thank you page, and Google Optimiser will tell you which headline is converting best.
You then set up another experiment to test, for example, the sub-headline or the picture you are using, or the price of the ebook.
Yvonne & Jiles may find that their ebook is too cheap for example, and they would sell more at £37.50 or even £79.50.
Ok, that’s enough from me, over to Judith and Yvonne for their comments / questions and then we will get the Money Gym google group to have a look too and give Yvonne some ideas.
(For more info about how you can get us to help your business make an extra “£10k in 90 days” have a look at http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/boardroom
and………
** Share your thoughts, comments or questions about this particular challenge by using the “Share Your Thoughts” link at the top of this post, by the Title **
Just a further thought, I think that the “lead product” for Yvonne & Jiles site should be the ebook, so the whole call to action on the squeeze page is to sign up for the mailing list and the thank you page is the sales page.
That way, you can follow up the mailing list signups with cool info and the call to action being to return to the sales page to buy the ebook.
When they click to buy the ebook, you offer them a “one time only” offer of the ebook, plus the DVD for a knockdown price on what the two will cost seperately. This can be a pre-sell even it’s not ready yet, as long as you let folks know when they can expect their DVD.
They can then buy the two, or just the ebook, but we find that nearly 50% of the people who click to buy the Money Gym ebook, go on to buy the upsell, which is the audio version, plus the paperback version from Amazon.
Jeff Walker of Product Launch Formula always says that things need to be event/time based, so I would be setting up the competition to win the week in Champagne, with a prize draw date of about 2-3 weeks time, with a special offer on so that folks can book the house at a big discount up until the prize draw date and if they win, they get a refund. So for the three weeks duration of the prize promotion, you can book a week for 12 for £1000 instead of £1500. That gives a sense of urgency and a deadline to get folks focused!
My further thoughts are to play down the “sleeps 12 people” element in your marketing – I would struggle to find 12 people to go on holiday at once and I’d perhaps feel that any house, unless it’s a mansion, would be a bit too crowded with 12 people in it. So the competition should be to just win the week and you choose how many people you can take! Go back to Decanter and offer their readers the chance to win the week too, make a nice follow up, but they have to come to the squeeze page and put their name and email in to get the details of how to enter.
Thank you Nicola and Judith for the opportunity to make an extra £10k in 90 days. I have taken all your comments, emails etc and am off to create a web page now for the competition. Will report back with questions/sharings soon.
Thanks again
Here it is, she’s only gone and done it! Enter the competition to win £2000 of holiday in France here – http://halling.typepad.com/mad_about_bubbly_competit/
Yvonne
Thanks for being our ideal client and so bravely going first today. I had so many entries to be one of the 10 and I deliberately picked you for 9 a.m. today because I know you are an “up for it Bird”, my very favourite sort.
I also learned something from the call which is just as it should be and just beat you to Marion to ask her about squeeze pages on Typepad.
Boy did we de-rail Marion’s day between us but she responded fabulously, like the original Up For It Bird!
I am so looking forward to seeing this competition roll out, to see Mr & Mrs Lucky Winner and see you grab that prize – an extra £10k in 90 days.
Love
Judith