I’m starting to get emails about the upcoming release of John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0, the next be-all and end-all course that teaches you how to get traffic to your website.

It launches around Noon on Tuesday, July 15th.

Even though I spend 10+ hours a day selling, consulting and driving, my staff and I operate 30+ sites that average over 1,000,000 visitors per month.

Those unique visitors view over 5,000,000 pages, on average.

Some would say that we know a lot about getting traffic.

Some would say we don’t know jack.

I tend to agree with the latter. I’m also smart enough to know that if John Reese is gonna be generous enough to sell a small part of his knowledge about getting traffic, I’m generous enough to pay for that knowledge.

I’m also not silly enough to believe he’s telling us everything he knows, but it won’t really matter if it’s all new to me. Even if I only learn a few things, it’ll be worth the pittance he’s charging.

I don’t charge you anything to read this blog. Because of that, I don’t tell you everything I know about sales. I also wouldn’t tell you everything I know for $397, which is the price of John’s newest offering.

I’m not an affiliate for Traffic Secrets 2.0, nor do I want to be.

But I do want to buy the brain dumpings he’s selling.

I also want to find the most valuable bonus that some affiliate is offering.

Let me know what you’ve seen, bonus wise, by leaving a comment or by using the Contact Form to help me choose the lucky affiliate that’s gonna get my money.

You can’t win if you don’t play, so let the world know right here if you’ve got a great bonus for your buyers.

PS - The best part of this deal is watching John’s campaign. If you’ll watch Video #3, you’ll see him expertly set the expectations of potential buyers. That tactic alone is one of the biggest missing elements of most salespeople today.

To be or not to be … completely satisfied, that is.

If you completely satisfy a customer, you get to keep the money from the sale. If you want more of his money, you have to satisfy him again … and again and again.

You don’t get to take his satisfaction for granted or he’ll take his money and run to the next person that will cater to his every whim.

Having to bow down or beg every time you want to sell something to him will get old … very quickly.

You, as a salesperson, have to also get some satisfaction from the sale. My apologies to the Rolling Stones.

The real trick of sales is to find the mythical “zone” that exists to bridge the gap between his satisfaction and your own. Then the two of you can form a bond of sorts and can co-satisfy each other by selling and buying, buying and selling, selling and buying, etc.

The satisfaction has to run both directions or it won’t last. More apologies to the Stones.

This is what keeps me in the field selling face to face each and every day. The satisfaction I get from satisfying a customer who thought the process was going to be painful. Or expensive. Or elusive.

I love to see the relief on their face when they get what they want and it’s even better when it’s also what I know they really need.

If your customers leave you feeling drained, beaten, cheap and tainted, you’re in the wrong place selling the wrong thing to the wrong people.

If this feels like it fits you and your situation, take Mike’s Career Tip #14 - Get another job as soon as you can. Life’s short, sell hard !

Life’s Been Good

Great song. Fits my story too, but mine ain’t finished yet. Or wasn’t as of the time of this post.

Picture this: It’s August of 1977. A 14 year-old boy who’d been listening to Wolfman Jack on an AM radio gets bussed to another town to finish his high school education.

The boy gets thrown out of a class for fighting on the first day of school and the only class for that period, that has an opening, is Mass Communications.

The school is starting a radio station that has enough power to reach all the way to Highway 41, about 1/8 mile away. The radio station is run by the teacher of this Mass Communications class.

The teacher recruits the boy to his radio team because A) he likes fighters, B) the boy reads Rolling Stone, C) the boy’s dumb enough to say yes.

Simple.

The boy finds The Eagles and yes, I capitalized that on purpose.

They rule. Period.

The boy finds Hotel California. It still rules, too.

The boy hears Joe Walsh play guitar for the first time. He still rules and rocks, as well.

Fast forward to 2008: The boy, now a man, who sells for a living and coaches sales people for fun … and a small profit … gets a message from the Universe that Joe Walsh, Master Guitarist of the First Order, had hidden a sales and marketing lesson in one of his songs.

The man searches for days and days before he comes across it. He then has to decide whether or not to share it with the world. And whether or not to charge for it.

Well, the man figures, life’s been good to me so far, so I’ll just set it free and hope for reciprocity.

So here’s what Joe said that only a select few marketers have ever known:

“I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime …”

Now I guess you want me to decipher that for you, don’t you ?

Well, here’s what corporate marketers messed up a few decades ago. You have to design, test, tweak and deploy a marketing campaign from ground zero, not from the 30,000 feet view.

Before the days when corporate wonks started sitting in high rises, the sales and marketing types were out in the field, they were there talking to the customers and they got immediate feedback that hadn’t been watered down by salespeople fearful of losing their job or hurting the feelings of some marketing manager that knows nothing … but is married to the bosses niece.

Now days, everybody wants to view a situation from the 30,000 feet view and that’s not where the usable intel is. It’s down on the ground. Before it gets passed up thru several levels, before it gets watered down, before it gets altered, before it gets made politically correct and before it becomes almost worthless.

I’m a ex-military guy and we were taught to assess a situation from where the action is. After intel moves thru several hands, it’s not as good as it was when it was fresh.

If you want to stop making mistakes in your marketing, get down in the trenches and get usable info, instead of worthless words.

Ask people for their opinion, without telling them why you are asking them.

Talk to people and bring up your product or service casually.

I give my coaching clients places to go, people to see and things to do that make good intel available to them.

Here’s a hint: It ain’t a google group, it ain’t a forum and it ain’t always online.

The view from 30,000 feet is distorted, out of focus and not the best one, so don’t keep using it now that I’ve let the Genie of Truth out of the the bottle.

Columbo didn’t get his info from 30,000 feet, he went to the scene of the crime.

Rockford didn’t fill his files from 30,000 feet, he went to the scene of the crime.

Mike’s Big Message: Quit looking for ways to think outside of the box. Go to where the box gets used and look for clues there.

EDIT: July 4th at 11:31 am my VERY GOOD friend Steve Marx, who wrote one of my favorite sales books of all time, Close Like The Pros, sent me a copy of the post that was still in his feed reader.

I’ll be reposting it in a few minutes.

Original Post Below:

We just moved all of our sites to a new server and it ate a few in the process.

My last post, about Joe Walsh, was a decent post and I loved it dearly.

It’s gone.

If you have a feed reader that captured the entire post, please copy-n-past and email it to me at mike at this domain name.

Thanks.