Over the years, I’ve made some truly boneheaded marketing mistakes.
Many of which have cost me a lot of money.
So for your entertainment…
I’m gonna take you on a little trip down memory lane to relive these major flubs with me…
1. Back when I launched my first fitness offer in 2009, we made the appeal of the offer all about “functional fitness”.
So instead of the appeal being about looking good, and your friends being jealous of your muscles…
It was all about why shoulder pressing is helpful if you need to put a heavy box on a shelf in your garage.
I thought this was a brilliant idea.
Turns out, no one actually cares about that.
When we promoted the offer to our list, we made a grand total of 4 sales in an entire week.
Major flop.
2. Back when I had a poker website in 2004, I noticed that other websites had these cool banners on them that linked to PartyPoker and PokerStars (two big sites you could play poker on for real money).
Being the newb that I was, I thought the banners looked cool, so I simply copied them and put them on my own website.
No affiliate link…
No nothing…
I just pasted the banners in my header and sidebar to make the site look nice.
It wasn’t until about 3 months later that I learned that these sites would pay you $200 for every new player you sent them.
Talk about stupidity at the highest level…
3. Back in 2011, I decided to mess around with paid email drops for the first time.
I remember one morning I had an $8,000 email drop going out (a HUGE amount of money to me at the time) so I was quite nervous.
The email drop hit my inbox and I immediately began checking my stats for sales.
From my analytics I noticed that people were landing on the page, but no sales were coming in.
I figured I was just too early though…
So I waited an hour and checked again…
Still no sales.
Two hours, same thing.
At the three hour mark, it finally dawned on me that something was probably wrong.
So I went through my whole funnel to make sure everything was working.
Everything looked good on first glance.
But when I got to the end of the VSL, my heart sank.
Right as the voiceover guy said “simply click on the Add to cart button below to secure your order” I noticed that there was no Add To Cart button to click on.
I forgot to put an Add To Cart button on the page!
So the thousands of people watching the video who were ready to buy had no way to buy the product.
That was $8000 down the drain.
And a tough lesson to learn.
And as funny as some of these mistakes are to look back on, there’s a lesson I want you to take away…
(Especially if you’re just getting started creating your own offers)…
And that’s the fact that even really smart marketers like myself, didn’t start out as smart marketers.
As you can see, I’ve made plenty of dumb mistakes.
But that’s just part of the game.
It’s how you learn.
Growth comes from trying new things…
And making mistakes.
So if you’re still new to creating your own offers…
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
You’ll survive…
And come out better on the other side.
Keep that in mind,
– Justin
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