Duncan Wierman’s Blog

Using A Marketing System Versus Taking Action

We’d all love to have an automated sales funnel that would deliver money to our doors without our needing to do so much as lift a finger. And there are an awful lot of programs out there promising just that. They claim that they can completely automate your sales chain using websites, autoresponders, videos and other tools. They say that presenting yourself as the expert in your field creates a system of attraction marketing that automatically brings in people who want to buy! But how likely is that, really?

If there were such a thing as a truly automated sales method, don’t you think that major retailers would be using it right now? Why bother building a retail store and putting out lots of advertising, when you could just press “on” and have customers (and their cash) delivered right to you? If the big chains don’t have the secret, and if the heads of major companies aren’t using it, why would it would it work for the average person who doesn’t have a lot of business experience? The real secret is that it just doesn’t. You can’t completely automate a business. There’s no way to make money come to you, without putting in any work at all.

Does that mean that some of these automation tools can’t help? Not at all – anyone who wants to sell a product or service has to have a good website that’s easy for both visitors and search engines to understand. Blogs, social marketing, videos and other Web 2.0 methodology can allow you to reach groups that regular marketing methods wouldn’t even touch. Sure,  autoresponders can be a great tool to help you send out important information to people who’ve volunteered to listen to what you have to say. They handle everything from getting the word out about sales to distributing newsletters. What they don’t do is keep you from having to put some work into your business.

Marketing is and always will be work. If you don’t know what you’re doing and how to do it efficiently, it can even end up being a lot of work without many results. That’s why it’s so tempting to ask a program or script to do it all for you. But relying too heavily on these tools can actually waste more time than doing your marketing incorrectly. After all, if you make a mistake, you waste time and often money, but you learn from it. If you rely on your automation tools, you don’t even learn that. It’s better to do it right the first time, of course, but don’t assume a simple script knows more than you do.

It’s not fun to hear, but it’s true. Marketing is something you have to work on every single day. You don’t have to put a lot of time in, and you certainly don’t need to wear yourself out over. A lot of the effort that goes into it is simply maintenance – helping to get the word out about what you have to offer, and making sure that you reach your target audience. That means being an active participant, no matter which way you decide to do your marketing.

If you’re using articles, you need to think carefully about the content you’re associating yourself with (both in the eyes of the search engines and potential customers) and avoid publishing gibberish or duplicates. If you use a blog, you need to make sure it’s something that others will want to read, and you need to update it regularly and personally. The same goes for marketing on Facebook, using Twitter, and just about every other method out there. If you don’t do the work, you just won’t get the profit. It’s that simple. If someone promises you an option that sounds easier, there’s a pretty good chance it’s too good to be true. Get them to explain, in detail, how their method works, and make them back it up with verifiable facts and figures. If they won’t, it’s probably because they don’t have them!

Marketing systems all sound great. After all, everyone wants to believe that they can buy the answer to a stable income pre-packaged for them. We all want to sit at home and let the money pour in, while we work on things we find more interesting. But the fact of the matter is that there’s no such thing as a foolproof automated marketing system. Whether it’s an article generator, an autoresponder system, or any other tool, it won’t do the work itself. Just like a power tool, it needs the guidance of a real human being with a plan.

There’s no such thing as a brainless business. That simple fact means that if you want to take advantage of all the profit generating opportunities out there, you’ve got to try another strategy. Pay attention to your marketing, generate a solid plan, and put in a little bit of effort every day. Taking action gives you the ability to control your business and steer it into real profits, not empty promises. Don’t let the automated systems drive you to ruin – be a smart business owner and take action.

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There is a lot of buzz today in the computing and IT world about something that is being called “Web 3.0″.  This is supposed to be exactly what the label implies: the next generation of the Internet. The next great quantum leap forward in communications and doing business on the Internet.

We are currently residing online in Web 2.0. If “Web 1.0″ could be considered just getting the Internet up and running and working out the incredible “bugginess” of its original platforms, Web 2.0 was what we first reached at the dawn of the 21st century. Computer programmers are basically the ones who first notice any quantum leap forward in the entire fabric of Internet applications, and when they mutter “Web 2.0″ they mean an Internet with:

* enhanced communications by way of social-networking technology;

* improvements in communications and interactions between separate software applications by way of open Web standard applications for accessing and describing data;

* enhanced Web interfaces which mimic desktop applications’ real-time responsiveness inside of a browser window.

Now, say those who believe that Web 3.0 is landing on the White House lawn momentarily, we are about to see implemented a new Internet experience, one in which the Internet “gets smart” at long last and becomes much more like Artificial Intelligence (  A.I. )  This will, in part, be the “Semantic Web” that was prophesied at the close of the 20th century by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web.

The Semantic Web, said Lee, will enhance every piece of data on the Internet with related “metadata” . This would, for instance, enable currently passive computer applications to think about the data you enter and advise you. In the world with the Semantic Web, your Yahoo calendar will suggest other people who might want to come to a certain meeting that you are attending on Thursday afternoon, for instance; it will make these suggestions based upon metadata about you and then linking with other, tightly related metadata of people on the Internet. Another example of this might be Ning, which is a Web service that allows users to design and own their very own mini Facebooks.

For business applications, it’s easy to conceptualize situations where the computer can be set up to automatically cold-contact highly targeted leads–without any need for autoresponders or opt-in e-newsletter lists. Cold contacts would always be niche target and there would be no need to follow up except to close a sale. Even ongoing communications pre-sale and post-sale could be carried out by your Virtual Self.

But are we really there yet?   NO !!! And anyone who tells you otherwise is either full of it or just not all that aware of how things are. We are, at best, approaching or in “Web 2.1″.

Let’s consider trying to use that Virtual Self. Today’s leading “virtual self” software program is known as My Cyber Twin, and owned by Sydney, Australia’s Relevance Now company. With My Cyber Twin, you set up your very own virtual clone. This clone of you is supposed to mimic your personality in every way (as far as holding conversations with other, real people online), and it can be embedded in your website, into your Facebook account, on your blog, and so on. With your virtual clone at the ready, you can be away on vacation for a whole week, not even check your website’s visitors the entire time, but let others learn more about you as a person and perhaps about your professional offerings–all in a personalized, totally interactive way. It won’t be people needing to read your profile or articles or watch your videos. The idea behind MyCyber Twin is that it responds to spontaneous questions from even total strangers, and does so in a way that captures your particular way of phrasing answers as you would do in real life. Maybe your clone could even open and close sales for you–while you are skiing, taking your wife out to dinner, or just catching up on your creative literature reading.

Says Liesl Capper, co-founder and CEO of Relevance Now, “We wanted to build software clones of humans that learn about you and effectively function on your behalf. The problem with creating a chat AI is that it’s very laborious, trying to think of variations on what people will say and then creating responses. Building one has always been a labor of love that takes months, if not years. What we have built is the ability for people to make a cyber twin really quickly.”

Well, unfortunately, this positive outlook may be fact in the future–but that would be the more distant future. Perhaps by 2020. But not today. And tomorrow doesn’t look good, either. Today, it’s a sci-fi version of wishful thinking.

My Cyber Twin could take an entire day to program with pre-scripted answers that you put in your own writing in response to a wide array of possible questions from strangers drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a very widely used personality assessment test. And while it’s definitely impressive as far as it goes, you won’t have created a thoroughly real simulacrum of yourself for all those efforts–although visitors who come to your website while you are inabsentia might very well learn more about you and what you offer and be more intrigued about coming back to tal to the real you than they would if they only had blogs, articles, website content, or videos to inform them about you. But yourCyber Twin won’t be closing any sales for you.

Also, to program your Cyber Twin to be even more advanced and spontaneous-seeming, you can laboriously sift through and answer 425 pretty deep questions across 18 subject areas including family, philosophy, religious views, and sense of humor. But even if you take this trouble, there are already other virtual self software programs in existence that are more realistic but still don’t pass the Turing Test.

This is just one example of current Internet technology that proves that if you run a business, you will need to continue doing your own marketing and continuing your current efforts. There is plenty of technology–including the current version of MyCyber Twin–that can help you out. But for today, and tomorrow, there is no such thing as Web 3.0. Real Estate Investors beware of services that promise you technology that does not exist. Its not ethical to call a service Web 3.0 that is no more than Web 2.0 marketing done for you.

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