Month: May 2016

  • It’s not about ethics… It’s about cash.

    In today’s market, I can’t help but see that people don’t care about a product anymore… They just want a product that converts. 

    How? Don’t care. Why? Don’t care. When? ASAP. X% Commissions? Mucho important!

    But what if the product is bad? What if it does not deliver what is promised? “Well, I made a commission!”.
    Years ago I was working at a call center. I worked a 9 to 5 calling people who had an internet plan with their provider, and it was my job to upsell them to a higher plan… Whether they needed it or not. 

    I found myself calling people at the age of sometimes as high as 80, offering them “double the internet speed and double the internet quality for the same price!” which of course is something no 80-year-old would ever need. They hardly used the internet at all other than to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren, but were not downloading albums, movies, and software. They browsed the web and sent some e-mails… No need for a double-speed internet plan.

    Being me, I asked my floor manager if there was another product to sell. It didn’t feel right.
    When I walked out of the door at work, you know: the point where you are supposed to “leave your work” it didn’t stop. I was thinking to myself why I just sold a high-speed internet plan to an 80-year-old man living in a retirement home, where the most exciting part of the day was what type of meat he’d get during dinner. How could I sell this man high-speed internet…

    That’s the feeling I’m talking about: People don’t care. Let me adjust: Marketers don’t care.

    They think about the conversion rates, the commission they get on a sale, and before promoting a product making an estimate for themselves how much they could earn off their promotions.

    Now don’t get me wrong: we’re here to make money, but shouldn’t the first priority be what the product is? If it’s of good quality? Would it actually suit and benefit the person I’m offering it/selling it to?

    These are all questions that revolve around ethics and in my opinion (and Sharon’s too) should always come before the need and/or desire of making the sale.

    If you’re in this game long enough, you know how to close a sale: perhaps that’s for another blog post, what I’m trying to say here is that your name is more important than making a quick buck. Look into your audience, reach out to them, get to know them, and see what product matches their needs.

    Make sure you know exactly what they want, and understand what they want, and look into your product arsenal and see what you can deliver. Go to JVZoo, look for a product that matches their need (search for a product as an affiliate) and request your affiliate link. Depending on the offer and product you’re looking for, you can rake in up to 100% commissions per sale. 

    You don’t need your own product, you don’t need a website and you sure as hell don’t need to invest in a $1000 course to learn how to do all this… It should “make sense to you”.

    All you have to do is be well informed. Know your products, own the products (if possible), and recommend them with the knowledge that it actually fits the person you are selling it to, not your wallet. 

  • Get Better Results With The Same Campaigns!

    Back in the day when we got started – in 2012/2013 – we had never even heard of e-mail marketing. We started off as a 1 man company (Just Aron) who handled everything: the website, the app, the customer service, seo, blog articles but most importantly: the marketing.


    At Aron & Sharon, we’re self thought like many of you out there, meaning that we learned as our little business grew to adapt to the situation we’d been given and worked our asses off to success. Aron started as a web designer, period. 

    No SEO, no Marketing -although he worked at a call center- Online, no app development, nothing. Just web design. 

    As he started to learn more about all of this, he soon realised the SEO was the way to go. Finding a good domain name and ranking it to appear on the first pages of all search engines, we believe that you set yourself up for the future. We are in a position where we start a project, work on SEO to rank the site and once ranked we simply let it sit. Traffic builds up organically and therefore have the best converting traffic generating leads and eventually sales.

    In a matter of months, we’d built up a little network of domains of which some ranked on the first page. We setup a landing page, added our opt-in form and started to build what we all hear so much about: an e-mail list.

    Within weeks we had a “list” of a whopping 150+ leads and had no clue what to do with them… Ok come on, we knew that we had to email them… Duhhh… But how? Send them all an e-mail at once? 

    Working at a call center, Aron knew that “mentioning the customers name in a conversation works in the benefit of your relationship” but had no clue that this also applied to bulk e-mailing.

    Long story short, we’ve built our business on e-mail marketing. We learned it all: the well known autoresponder systems, copy, highlighting, repeating links in the e-mail so people don’t have to scroll back and forth and all the other little things that you need to think about while writing your e-mails.

    As you can imagine, over the years we’ve sent so many e-amils that we learned what worked and what didn’t. Not by reading a book, not by buying an expensive e-course on “Generate 6 Figures in 4 weeks with e-mail marketing”: we learned it by testing to see what works and what doesn’t and we’ve built up quite a few tips & tricks of our own.

    The one we feel is the most important: Connect 1 on1 with your leads.

    We’re not suggesting that you should call them, meetup and have dinner with them or start a business together but when you e-mail them… ASK for a reply. 

    “Let me know how you’re doing {FIRSTNAME}!?” or“Reply to this e-mail if you need me, ok {FIRSTNAME}?”

    This doubled, if not tripled our results. Why? Because the people that respond took the time to:

    1. Opt-In to your list
    2. Put in valid details so they actually get your e-mail (don’t take this for granted!)
    3. Open the e-mail you’ve sent them
    4. ACTUALLY REPLYING BACK TO YOU!!!

    You asked if you could be of help – in this case – so you should expect some response. By applying this simple thing into your e-mails, you actually get the chance to “filter” out the people that are actually interested to work with you.

    Apply this to your e-mails, and let us know how it works for you!!!

  • When I was 6…

    I was 6 when I first saw the internet. It was 1996, I came home to my Dad and he showed me a big white screen with an even taller big white box next to it:

    “Aron, this is a computer. It gives us access to the internet!”

    He connected to the internet via a dial-up modem and he fired up the Netscape internet browser:

    “Type in anything you’d like to know!?”

    Being 6, I couldn’t come up with anything better then what would be on tv, which back then was unheard of (if I’d had only seen the potential then, hahaha!) so he showed me some results he came up with, making me realise immediatly that this was going to be big.

    At 7, I was introduced to a friend of my Dad, still remember: Fred Philippo.

    I have no clue what he did at the time, but I remember him as my Dasd’s cool friend who had a ton of games and software, computers galore, and an entire room dedicated to it all.

    Fred was awesome enough to introduce me to CoffeeCup, one of the first HTML editors online. He attempted to teach me basic HTML and showed me how to make a web page.

    No WordPress. No Themes. No Plugins.

    I had 0: a blank notepad file with some weird scribbling in it which at the time… Didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
    Fast forwarding: gaming (Wolfenstein 3D, Tomb Raider I and Max Payne), my Dad passing away (I was 14), making ny own websites since 8 years old…

    I picked up the art of magic, and was able to get in touch with a magician in the USA. He was one of the many magicians creating his own effects and selling them on his website.

    I bluffed myself into making him a site, to become friends with him and work together. 
    Thats when I learned determitation: I had just bluffed myself into a job and the client accepted!

    I had to learn HTML, learn Photoshop, and create a full blown website that would actually be a complete site, blog, webshop system and e-mail system in one installation. It’s one of my specialties by the way but anyhow…. I did learn it all doing it with little bits of PHP, HTML, CSS, and some tables xD

    He thought me magic for free, he got a cool website! He was selling via PayPal at the time, and all was running smoothly.
    He teamed up with other magicians:

    “Need a website? Aron’s your guy!”

    Since then, and still I work with a group of magicians and cardistry artists ( click that link, you’ll like it. Promise 😉 ) and maintain their sites, and sometimes even host them through our hosting company. 

    I got into internet marketing around 2010, being introduced by a vague (dutch) video that promised something along the lines of: work 4 hours a day and get $2500 a week… An impossible promise that simply couldn’t be lived unto, unless they have a magic machine that generates a product, website, converting sales copy and of course, please don’t forget: The traffic, that needs to be of such quality that it actually converts with the offer… In just four hours a day? And btw that’s just the beginning of starting your own product and services.

    I had my own physical phone repair company with a friend, which we ran out of my home.

    All said and done, we ran it for a year and a half and decided it was best to part ways. Had a lot of fun, but for some reason it just wasn’t profitable -> Should write a story about this xD

    From there I started to figure out how to work online from home, and came to the conclusion that it was best to run SAAS services: Products that require such software that fills a gap, something someone might need for their business, and a product that you can charge monthly for. 

    Each customer you rake in, you can bill monthly as your product offers a service which needs high maintenance for example.
    Servers, domains, support, interaction, finances and so much more that comes around the corner when you have your own business.

    So when I started out, I got with a shared hosting package for all my sites. They where good, cheap, and charged me per year at a fair price. Had a bunch here and there, and built up a product the published at a social network.

    I charged monthly for it, and offered a free version to test out.

    Doing all this at being 22, I considered this  “easy”. I setup PayPal recurring billing, created a nice big clear buy button ($1 Trials!) and did some SEO work – If you want my exact methods, hit the contact method above – and landed on the first page of Google. 

    Traffic came in organically, people where LOOKING FOR MY PRODUCT……………………. which was of course the best situation to be in as a seller.

    I even got word around town, and I guy came up to me asking me if I could create a poker website for him. He was paying too much renting a script then if he’d let one be made. I offered him to partner up and together we started pokersitesnamehere.nl 🙂

    Thinking about the site I had made a few weeks later, I considered the fact… What if I sold this site… I could create unlimited duplicates of it, license them and charge them X amount to run the script.

    So back to the hosting 🙂 I met Sharon after creating my initial product, and together we started looking at ideas, domain names and so much more an registered them with various hosting and domain registration companies.

    We’ve done a lot of things together already, and we’re now proud to introduce you to Cloudustries, our hosting and domain registration company!