Marty Rozmanith
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Name: Marty Rozmanith
Industry: Internet Marketing, Blog Publishing
Website: http://www.rozmanith.org/careers/about/
Product: WordPress Direct
Marty Rozmanith‘s Bio: He’s worked with some of the hottest names in Internet marketing including Frank Kern and Ed Dale. His WordPress Direct service played an integral role in the thirty day challenge in 2008, with 57% of people using WordPressDirect getting ranked on the first page of Google’s search listings for their chosen terms. He’s also a CPA expert launching CPA Ninja to stunning success.
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David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from the SEO method and we’re really excited today because we’ve got Marty Rozmanith on the line. For those of you who don’t know, he’s the guy behind WordPress Direct, which we know is an important part in the SEO method. For me, it felt like Marty was an overnight success. He came out of the gate and propelled himself forward with the WordPress Direct and aligned himself with Ed Dale and the 30-Day Challenge. He has worked with a number of other big name internet marketers. He presented on stage at the Mass Control 2.0 event. He came out with products afterwards, including most notably the CPA Ninja.
He really knows his stuff with marketing online, CPA stuff, driving traffic and I suppose that is all that the SEO method is about, driving traffic. I’d just like to welcome you to the line Marty Rozmanith.
Marty Rozmanith: Thanks Dave, and I will see if I can live up to all that.
David Jenyns: I’m sure you will. I’ll dive straight into it. Usually, one of the first questions I want to find out about is, when you’re setting up a new site, be it a WordPress Direct site or any site for that matter, I’m very keen to find out the process you go through, because I know SEO is a part of your traffic strategy, what steps you go through to try and drive traffic to a new website.
Marty Rozmanith: I guess the question is, what am I using the site for? If I’m using a site, for instance, to test a market, then my traffic source is likely going to be something purchased, whether that is pay per click or banner traffic or some other source. My goal then is to get that paid traffic as cheap as possible. In that case, my method for driving traffic is a WordPress Direct blog so that I get good quality, and I don’t over pay for the traffic, especially if it’s coming from Google where that is a big factor.
If on the other hand what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to build a ring of traffic blogs for, say organic SEO over time, then it’s quite a different process, and one I understand you have quite a lot of structure and experience with yourself.
David Jenyns: Yes. With the actual process you go through for, say, the pay per click stuff, I suppose it all starts with the keyword research. What process are you going through to try and identify what keywords you want to try and start targeting?
Marty Rozmanith: It’s almost the whole base topic, keyword research. The main thing first is trying to figure out what umbrella phrase you’re going after and whether your strategy is a long tail one or whether you’re just going to dive straight in with a budget and try and outbid people. In general, it’s always best to think laterally and go after traffic that might not be obvious to people bidding in the market.
I’ll use various tools, whether it be Market Samurai or WordTracker, to try and figure out lateral angles to come up with phrases that might not be obvious. The classic example that is always used is selling dating services on sites for computer programmers. The keywords don’t have anything to do with the offer, but psychologically you can see the relationship between the two. Luckily I don’t do that, but that is the obvious example of lateral thinking.
That is generally what I will try and do. I will try and think laterally and come up with a set of umbrella phrases that aren’t necessarily in the market I’m targeting, but are adjacent to the markets that I can then come up with some good long tail phrases to either buy or put blogs up on.
David Jenyns: Is the reason for trying to target those keywords, because you mentioned one of the first steps was getting traffic as cheaply as possible. Is the reason you’re going for those lateral keywords to try and get the traffic cheaply or break someone’s pattern because they’re not used to seeing that type of ad displayed on, if it is a programming website?
Marty Rozmanith: Right, I think it is a couple of things. If you’re constantly being displayed along with ads in a market that all say the same thing, you’re blending in. If you’re different than the ads that are being displayed, you’re going to pop out. That’s one reason for going lateral.
I think the other reason is, if what you’re doing is putting up a site that is going to act as a landing page that you’re driving paid traffic to, and the site is going to be out there and you’re going to be providing it some care and feeding over time in addition to driving paid traffic. Eventually if you have any long tail material on that site, it’s going to start naturally rank for those terms.
Part of trying to think laterally is to find as many good longer tail phrases. Effectively what you’re doing when you’re putting up blogs for organic ranking is, you’re putting out a fishing net so that you’re going to catch people who are searching on terms. The bigger the fishing net, the more people you’re going to catch. The longer the fishing net’s out there, the more people it will catch over time because as you build up more content and more keywords in your fishing net, the more pages you’re going to rank in Google and the more chances are you’re going to be coming up in searches.
It’s just a function of combining the two strategies of buying traffic but also making the sites that you’re pushing that paid traffic to quality enough that they’ll rank organically for certainly the long tail phrases and over time, some of the more competitive phrases.
David Jenyns: Because you said you start off on, obviously it depends on your outcome and what it is you’re trying to achieve, but sometimes you start with that pay per click and that banner traffic to try and get that initial traffic through, does that help you identify what you’re going to do for your SEO campaign as well?:
Marty Rozmanith: Well, yes, absolutely. If you’re tracking offers, and you are seeing in your stats what keywords are converting, that gives you a good idea, especially if you’ve got a lot of lateral keywords in there, what angles to go after and flush out with more targeted keywords. So that will definitely influence. You can definitely use paid traffic to figure out what keywords convert best to figure how to then SEO optimize whatever blogs you have targeted across lateral phrases. That’s a really valid strategy.
David Jenyns: When you’re personally doing it, let’s say, I almost feel if we grab an example and run with it, because it really does depend on what it is you’re trying to do and the outcome, be it CPA offer or a product. We can use CPA Ninja as an example.
You’re coming out with CPA Ninja and you’ve got a new physical course that you want to launch. Putting aside any JVs and that sort of thing, how would you go through the process of promoting that physical product that you want to sell online, including whether it’s pay per click or search, or just step me through the process.
Marty Rozmanith: That’s a tough example because CPA Ninja was almost entirely a Joint Venture driven launch. If I was going to bring a product to market, and I was going to use an advertising traffic driven strategy, I don’t get into a lot of this because I don’t put products out on CPA networks. I mostly promote products coming from CPA networks.
There are plenty of people who, for instance Matt, the person who did that CPA Ninja course, who does publish on CPA networks and in that case you have a completely different strategy; then it’s all about understanding your conversion metrics so that you can get approved by a network and have advertisers drive lots and lots of traffic to your offer.
The funny thing is, all of the same steps that you do for trying to promote somebody else’s offer apply, because what you have to do is, you have to come up with your own offer, test it, figure out what all the metrics are so that you can eventually tell the network what the EPC is going to be and then, of course, by publishing out on the network, you’re going to allow for lots of traffic, by just buying leads through a CPA network.
If I was going to pay for a launch, that would be what I would do.
David Jenyns: I know the CPA networks are one of these things, especially with all the new terminology and things like that, some people think, that’s probably not where they want to start. I know especially the way you pitch the WordPress Direct and through the Thirty Day Challenge, it’s really taking a product, be it your own or an affiliate product, and then building a blog around that, building some traffic to it and trying to sell the offer from those blogs. Perhaps that might even be a good example.
Do you follow the Thirty Day Challenge process for promoting a blog? How do you go through promoting a feeder site or a WordPress Direct type site to help push some other offers that you’ve got.
Marty Rozmanith: Yes, I absolutely follow that process. The main difference between the Thirty Day Challenge process and what I might do in everyday business promoting an offer is, the Thirty Day Challenge is very specific around testing a low competition market so that you’re not paying for the traffic. So it is an excellent teaching model. It is definitely one you use in low competition spaces, so that’s why I stress lateral thinking. I’m trying to find phrases where, given a reasonable amount of time and back links and other things that I can do promoting organically, that I’ll get some good traffic out of it.
Obviously in that situation, keyword research is the key. But as you said, the paid strategy for finding things that convert the offer also help you build out what keywords you should put sites around.
I start with the Thirty Day Challenge strategy in that I like to build something that is human readable starting with an article that is unique and let it bake for a couple of weeks so that it gets indexed, and then turn on content posting to the site on the keywords for the site so that it continues to accumulate content over time.
The first recipe is to get the site built, get the unique content out there. I’ll typically take WordPress Direct and I’ll use the Post Now feature of, say, something like the YouTube to WordPress poster and Answers poster, and I’ll just put a couple of pieces of content on each keyword out on the site. I will do a minimal amount of promotion so that there is a link going to it so it will get indexed.
Generally if I use a WordPress Direct blog, just with the ping list inside WordPress Direct’s sites, it will get indexed very quickly. So there is not a whole lot of promotion you have to do once you’ve initially build the blog just to get it indexed. Once it’s been indexed and it’s sat on the shelf for a week or two, then I would come back and I would start posting content periodically to it, using the software inside WordPress Direct. That is so that we build up more pages in the site, the site has more related keywords on it and I’m building up more pages that are indexed over time because there are all those pages on the blog linked together.
After that, mainly the strategy is how am I going to get back links? Is it going to be article marketing, is it going to be a service, am I going to promote to directories? There are all sorts of back linking strategies that you can employ. The two that I like are article marketing and then, in certain cases, internal tools we have for getting links from our own set of blogs that we have in house.
David Jenyns: A lot of those, are they WordPress Direct type blogs? Do you have a set all based around the same theme or how are you doing that sort of linking?
Marty Rozmanith: Yes, absolutely. You want to basically build up a number of blogs that are all on related keywords within a certain market. Then of course, those are going to be your least cost way of getting back links to whatever page you’re trying to get to rank.
David Jenyns: I think that process that you went through there, that was really quite clear as far as finding out what your keywords were through pay per click, making a couple of posts so it gets indexed, doing a really small amount of promotion and then building up regular posts. Obviously the internal linking structure is going to help with that, and then doing your off page article marketing and then also leveraging off your own network.
When we talk about leveraging off your own network, and setting up these blogs, does take a little bit of work to get a blog set up. I know because you have fifty million things going on, is this something that you put down into a systemized process and you’ve got outsourcers? What is the process? How do you actually take this from, ok, we’ve got a plan to actual implementation?
Marty Rozmanith: It’s tough. Our business has evolved to the point where we were using these tools ourselves for our own sites to the point where now we’re supporting lots of other people using those tools. It’s almost like we do it when we can get to it.
We do employ outsourcers and it is mainly a question of we try and do a certain amount of care and feeding every quarter, so that the idea is, we build up an asset over time and we want to make sure we don’t mess that asset up and have sites get de listed or lose page rank because we weren’t paying attention.
We just try and keep up with it because our current business, WordPress Direct is a software service and is a huge part of our business. Other things that we do are a huge part of our business. The affiliate marketing side has become the step child right now. One of my focuses for this coming year is not to have it as the step child anymore and focus a lot more on it. What we’re really looking at doing is adding more outsourcers and going after different sources of traffic that aren’t the typical pay per click or just organic SEO.
We’re trying to get into a lot more banner traffic, a lot more content network traffic, a lot of other sources that we haven’t used in the past, mainly because we just haven’t had the attention span to devote to it. So that’s part of what I’m looking to do in the first half of the coming year.
David Jenyns: I think once you know what it is you’ve got to offer and you know those metrics and you talked about the importance of that especially when you were talking about the CPA stuff. That’s really the perfect time for stepping in and buying significant amount of traffic. Google isn’t the be all and end all and the search engines definitely aren’t, when you want to take it to that next level.
People who are just still going through the process and trying to get that free traffic and going through that process that you talked about there, once they’re done a few of those stages for getting those off site linkings back to the site, you mentioned article marketing and the internal network. If you had to pick one, and I know it’s important obviously to get a diverse range of inbound links, but if you had to pick just one method, what would it be? I always like to see what people think is the best bang for their buck on getting links? Which would you say?
Marty Rozmanith: I think the best bang for your buck right now is still article marketing. It’s just simply a matter of keeping at it. It’s one of these things where you just have to keep on it. There are lots of great services out there that will spin an article, get it out there and get you nine, ten back links a day, publishing and syndicating an article out to either directories, or say a private network of sites. So that’s certainly the best value for money.
Once you have a mature site, by mature, maybe a month old, that’s a good strategy. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is they’ll put up a site, they’ll put a gob of keywords on it and they will turn on automatic content posting from day one. That is the biggest mistake. You want to let Google discover the site, see it, register the fact that it’s there and not see way too much activity right away, once it indexes a site. If it sees all kinds of crazy activity, it’s going to realize that’s not natural. There’s something weird going on and you’re going to get put in the sandbox.
That first thirty days of establishing a site is absolutely critical for making sure that that site is going to remain indexed and be valuable as an asset to you. Once you get past that first thirty days, then you can start using all sorts of strategies, whether it be the content posting or article marketing or other back link getting strategies to really start building the traffic worthiness and authority getting of that site. Did that make sense?
David Jenyns: Yes, one hundred percent. I know you’ve got tons of WordPress Direct members. A lot of them obviously came over from the Thirty Day Challenge. I can’t remember exactly, but something like 30,000 people participated in the Thirty Day Challenge, some huge number like that. You can obviously see which sites and which people are really making it work.
Are there any other things that the people who are really doing well and getting these rankings, are there any other characteristics you see? Obviously the automatic posting, and making sure that only happens after a certain amount of time, you let the page age a little bit, so that the search engines know you’re not some fly-by-night spammer out there trying to game the search engines. Are there any other common elements you see?
Marty Rozmanith: It’s a tricky question. I actually don’t look into the accounts of the users. The ones that I know are successful are because they contact me and generally I also know they’re successful because they have gold or platinum accounts and so they’re running a hundred sites.
In general, I would say that the people who are most successful are the ones who are the most organized. They approach a market specifically by trying to figure out what their keyword strategy is going to be, what their laterals are, testing it both by getting some organic and paying for traffic and then just figuring out over time where they’re going to invest their energies, so that over time they just keep increasing the value of the site network that they’ve built up in a market. Those are the most successful people.
The other way to do it as I described, is to rather than try and get organic traffic like that, is to, for instance, put an offer out on a CPA network and get others promoting it to get you the traffic. What I’ll say for that strategy is that that is an art form in and of itself. Personally I’m not taking the energy to try and get good at that because I know people who are good at that. In general what I’m doing this year, for that strategy, is to try and partner with those people to get products launched using that method where I don’t have to go and invest the work.
If you have a product developed and you can go and approach somebody like that, that’s possibly another good alternative strategy to building up your own traffic network. What I would do if I was just starting out and I wanted to go down that avenue at some point, there are a lot of guys out there who are well known names in the CPA world. I would just follow one of them for a while. Many often will start looking for partnerships that they can promote because that is their strength and you can end up becoming their partner and combine forces with some of those folks. You almost have to grow into that strategy.
If you’re just starting out, the best thing to do is what you’re describing. Start with just attacking a market, being organized, figuring out your keyword strategy, getting some content written, hiring some outsourcers so you don’t have to do it all yourself. Of course these outsourcers don’t have to be expensive. You can find these things, we’re talking in the hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands of dollars. You can off load a bunch of this rather repetitive work so that you don’t have to do all of it because, really, you don’t want to do all of it.
Once you’ve got a base of traffic generation and you understand how to do that, the next thing to do is to move into the most typical advertising venues so that you understand those, the banner ads, the AdWords, the pay per click stuff and then that is when you would move from that into the CPA, getting published on a network and really ramping up traffic. Once you’re at that level, you’re talking a thousand leads a day kind of traffic.
David Jenyns: It’s a different ballpark for some people.
Marty Rozmanith: It’s a different world. It’s also a risky game. It takes money to be in that world. You want to get your feet under you and be good at driving your own traffic and be good at paying for advertised traffic before you move into the CPA world and try to ramp your traffic up to that level. You have to be fairly confidant in your offer and your product before you take it down that road.
David Jenyns: You talked about one of the mistakes people make, especially when they’re starting out with at least WordPress related blogs. The idea of pumping out this automatic posting and then trying to use almost scraped content and not making it unique. I know WordPress has tried to steer away from that as well and talk about customizing the individual posts and making them a little bit unique and use it more as a way to pull the data in and then add your own elements to make it unique.
That is, I suppose, very WordPress Direct specific. If we think in terms of, you see a lot of new people starting online, where do you see people going wrong as far as getting online, and where it is that people are getting stuck?
Marty Rozmanith: That’s a tough one. There are as many ways to get stuck as there are things that you could learn on the internet. I think in general, it is a lack of focus. You get caught up in getting emails from lots of people and getting a lot of offers made to you. Really, it is a matter of sitting down and focusing on what it is you’re trying to achieve.
Certainly one of the reasons I love the Thirty Day Challenge and was happy to be associated with it, is it focuses you on testing a market so that you can figure out what the market wants, as opposed to just making some random idea of what you want as a product.
I think the number one mistake would be not starting by testing a market. Many people start by buying a product that promises to make them money without understanding that there is work involved. I would say the biggest mistake is not understanding you have to let the market tell you what it is it wants, and then figuring out how to provide it.
David Jenyns: You see so many people getting caught up with that. I think when you draw it back to SEO, we always try and say with SEO you have to first know what it is. You even said it right from the outset, it depends what your objective is. You need to have that objective very clearly defined and then it is much easier to design that strategy.
You’ve had a lot of experience in various areas of online marketing and had quite a few years online as well. If you looked back over your career and tried to identify, that classic question, if you knew what you know now, where would you identify the really big leverage points, the points where you made some massive steps forward? That is so that people can target those and try to get those things in place.
Marty Rozmanith: First up, before I ever got into internet marketing, I spent about ten years in corporate marketing, so I knew the basics of marketing to start with. That is quite a bit different to you coming in to marketing online and you don’t know anything about marketing to start with. I would say, first thing, know something about marketing. There are just basic concepts. You have to understand just how important elements of the offer are. You have to understand just how important price is to making something successful.
You really need to understand something about basic marketing, basic salesmanship, before you really are going to be comfortable doing stuff on the internet. The internet is almost like corporate marketing taken to the wild west. It changes very fast. For somebody new who knows nothing about marketing, it can seem to be completely chaotic. Getting an underlying grounding in marketing first is a pretty good thing to do. I would say that is one big leverage point at least for me.
The second piece was just trying to figure out how to take that stuff and adapt it to be online. So a lot of stuff I was doing in 2004, 2005 was just trying to figure out, right are these blogs worth anything? People weren’t using blogs back in 2004, 2005. To me, the leverage point is again, focus, trying to figure out what to pay attention to versus what not to pay attention to. The way that I find that easiest to do that online is, find somebody who is a well known name who you identify with and trust.
If you can identify with an Ed, follow an Ed. If you can identify with a John Reese, then follow a John Reese. Don’t try and follow too many people. Try and figure out who you identify with, in that you can understand their point of view, and allow them to steer you to the things that appear to be important at this time in the market. As I said, it can be really chaotic if you lack focus.
The other thing is just getting up out of my chair and doing it. At one point I just made the decision that I was going to pick a product and promote it as much as I could until it sold. I did. The first thing I tried didn’t work, the second thing I tried didn’t work, the third thing I tried worked a little bit, the fourth thing I tried worked better, and by the fifth thing I tried, it sold. So it’s simply a matter of put in your head, I’m going to do this, no matter what obstacle I hit. That’s the biggest leverage point, is just persistence.
The three things I would say are, get a little bit of grounding in basic marketing, focus by picking one or two names that you trust and following them and letting them advise you, whether it be through Twitter or their emails or whatever, and then the third is, just decide one day that you’re going to pick something and market it until it makes money.
The whole goal of the Thirty Day Challenge is for you to make your first dollar. It wasn’t for you to retire. That’s the whole point. You have to understand the process here so that you can make that first dollar. Once you understand the process, then you can scale it.
On the internet it’s just as easy for to sell a hundred of something as it is to sell one of something. You have to get past all of those hurdle points of just figuring out how to get that first thing sold by marketing it. Once you do that, it’ll click in your head. All of a sudden, it will be clear and then you will have a lot greater understanding of what will be my next step after this.
David Jenyns: One thing is, you mentioned a few steps along the way, like with the CPA Ninja and even WordPress Direct, aligning with EdDale. Looking at your career as well, there seems to be you aligning yourself with the right people and then doing the JVs. I’m just interested to find out how you approach that and how you see that as a leverage point.
Marty Rozmanith: Well, the relationship with Ed was interesting. WordPress Direct was an interesting endeavour, because I actually met Ed through StomperNet years ago. Ed was on the faculty of StomperNet, I was a StomperNet member. It was back in 2006, the very end of 2006, whenever they first launched. I got to meet Ed a couple of times at those meetings and had a chance to talk to him. I can’t stress this enough. In the online world, everybody’s sitting by themselves at their computer. It is so important to go to an event and meet people. There’s nothing like it for actually talking to somebody face to face and forming a connection with them.
You can follow up with them on Twitter for the next six months, but it’s such a difference when you actually meet them and you can exchange some real communication with people. So I have always made a habit of going to a couple of events a year, just so I can run into people in the market, other marketers and connect with them and talk to them. It’s changed now, where lots of people come up to me at these events because they’ve seen my videos and they want to talk to me.
But it wasn’t always like that. I would get to walk up to people and introduce myself and talk to them. That is the other thing about just persistence. If you want to start getting yourself to the point where you’re going to be able to propose a Joint Venture to somebody, the first step is you have to meet them. Going to events, meeting people, getting your name out there is the first step.
Honestly, WordPress Direct started as internal project that I was doing because I knew software development and I had programmers to build my own internal blog network. It wasn’t actually expected to be sold as a service. It was just through my discussions with Ed, where he realized that one of the things as the Thirty Day Challenge evolved, was a tool that they needed that would build sites that was really easy to use and fast, that would get people ranked.
There were a couple of different methods that they explored doing that, whether it be through social sites or whether it be through blogs. They decided on doing it through blogs and because Ed was speaking to me about the things that I was doing internally with this tool, one thing led to another to the point where the tool got put into the Thirty Day Challenge. These things never happen just because a bolt of lightening hits you and all of a sudden somebody calls you up and says let’s do a deal. Deals evolve over time.
The first step to doing a deal is, you have to at least be present. Showing up is half the battle. Go to an event and meet people. Once you’ve met people at a few events, then you’ll start corresponding with them and over time, you get to a point where you can actually provide something of value. The only reason WordPress Direct ever got put into the Thirty Day Challenge was it solved a problem for the Thirty Day Challenge. Ed was looking to do something, he needed a tool that did a certain thing and we ended up we were developing that tool.
Happy accidents happen to those who are prepared. They say there’s no such thing as luck, it is just planning. Well it is a bit of both.
David Jenyns: You mentioned a few things going along to these seminars, picking on or two of those ‘gurus’ so to speak that you follow and learn from. In the world of SEO and online marketing, I’m interested to find out who you keep an eye on and listen to.
Marty Rozmanith: It’s weird calling people gurus. There are people who are pretty well known in the market and they’re what Ed would call the market leaders. You want to pick one or two market leaders to follow, because they talk to a lot of people, they generally know everything that’s happening in that market and so it’s just a lot easier for you to follow a market by following one of them than it is trying to figure out what’s going on all on your own.
For me, I follow different ‘gurus’ depending on what it is I’m trying to find. If you’re going after SEO, one of the gurus is Guru Bob Somerville, I’m always on the phone to him. Early on, Jeff Johnson actually was somebody I followed for SEO strategies as well. I’ve been following Jeff Johnson since 2005.
I’m not telling you to do anything I wouldn’t have done. This is exactly what I did. I decided to pick someone who knew SEO and then follow them for a while. That led to a certain place. If you’re looking to follow somebody who’s doing off line marketing, you would pick a different guru who knew something about off line marketing. You can pick whoever that is. For me, for SEO, it’s obviously guru bob and then Jeff Johnson was another one and of course I’ve grown accustomed to have at SEO Dan Rayness.
David Jenyns: Yes, he knows his stuff. How about just in internet marketing stuff, not SEO specific?
Marty Rozmanith: Internet marketing is really all about salesmanship. At the end of the day it all comes down to the offer. Ed will always talk about Gary Halbert, who isn’t with us anymore, but he was a big force in Ed becoming versed in internet marketing. For me, the number one guy for salesmanship is Frank Kern. Frank can teach you all there is to know about salesmanship and conversion. As far as I’m concerned he is the best out there.
David Jenyns: Yes, and does so in his own unique style.
Marty Rozmanith: Yes, his own inimitable style.
David Jenyns: If people want to find out more about you and what you do over at WordPress Direct. If they want to find out about WordPress Direct they can go through theseomethod,com/wordpressdirect. But if they want to find out more about you, do have like a blog or something where they can get in touch with you?
Marty Rozmanith: I generally treat the WordPress Direct site as my blog. I’ll be putting out videos on the WordPress Direct site that I’ll then send people on the WordPress Direct list. The best way people can find me typically, is through the Thirty Day Challenge, just by going to the WordPress Direct home page and just signing up for a free account. That’s typically the best way to start following me. If you do that, you’ll end up eventually getting to a thank you page that says follow me on Twitter. So if you follow me on Twitter, that’s probably another good way.
Getting in contact with me, I have lots of people who actually @reply my Twitter account and, every once in a while, I’ll just see that pop up and I’ll answer people. Twitter’s a very democratic way of just asking someone a question even though they might not know who you are. So I’m not one of those people who is constantly burying my nose in Twitter every day. Every few days I’ll go look at it and see if somebody has asked me a question. If you do pop in there and ask me something, be patient, but I generally do get back to everybody.
The other obvious way too, if you’re a WordPress Direct member, you can just file a support ticket and sometimes, if you ask directly to get to me, then they’ll send it to me as well.
David Jenyns: I know, depending on when people are listening to this, you’ve got your own seminar coming up, the WordPress Direct University. If people want to find out more about that they can go to theseomethod.com/wdu (that is, WordPress Direct University). Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about what you’ve got planned for that.
Marty Rozmanith: WordPress Direct University is something that we’re planning for March. It’s going to be in San Diego, California. It was basically my attempt to put a face to all the people that are users in WordPress Direct. So get a lot of our users together, allow them to meet each other, again, make that connection and then bring experienced marketers to present on topics that are of special interest to anybody who’s gone through the Thirty Day Challenge or just using WordPress Direct to do marketing of anything.
Generally we’re covering a whole range of topics that are important to WordPress Direct users, including market research. It’s a two day event and we’re going to be doing about eight hours of sessions both days, which in my book is a lot more effective than just buying a product and trying to sit down with a shelf full of DVDs.
I actually find when I go to an event, I not only make the personal connections by meeting people, but I am basically locked in a room and I’m going through the material. I’m able to digest so much more of it, being taught by somebody in front of me and being able to ask questions, than I am by just sitting down with a bunch of DVDs.
I find if I have to learn a course through DVDs, it’s for me, more difficult. Everybody has their own learning style. It’s not to say other people can’t do it that way. I just find that for me, it’s easier if I’m actually at an event and I’m being actually taught the material.
As far as the two day WordPress Direct University, what we’re covering in the first day, is going to be market research. I actually sat through the Market Samurai guys’ presentation at the Over the Edge conference, because I was speaking at that back in 2008. I found it really helpful actually to go from start to finish with those guys in front of me, as opposed to trying to do it through ten minute videos on the Thirty Day Challenge site. So you might be covering some of the same topics, but you end up understanding it so much better because of the format.
Market research is going to be a big one on the first day. Basic salesmanship and writing copy. A lot of basic salesmanship on the internet is the ability to tell stories, and there are some tricks to that. Of course Frank is the master at that, but there are some basic tricks that pretty much everybody ought to know. Web design, creating a funnel for testing your traffic, and understanding how to get it to convert are going to be big on the first day. Video marketing and of course SEO are also going to be big on the first day. So we’re looking at the first day as a foundational day, where we just make sure everybody has a common level of knowledge.
Then we’re going to go into more advanced stuff on the second day. We’re going to be talking about internet business models. I did some of this in my Mass Control presentation where I talked about all the different business models that you could apply to a product or service, depending on how you structure them, whether they’ll make money or not. It’s so amazing to me that people don’t, before they launch a product or service, think about whether their business model’s actually going to work.
So I’m going to do a session on that, and take people through that exact, entire process to understand that, so you don’t waste your time on a business that’s not going to make any money. It’s just not a wise thing to do. Part of that involves the ability to make offers, tracking how those offers perform and figuring out your return on investment, how to generate traffic in higher quantities than you would through just a low competition organic traffic strategy. So we’re going to talk about traffic generation and a new hot topic called traffic brokering. We’ll get into off line marketing and how that complements online marketing.
I’m going to do a session on project management which is something I find almost never covered at these seminars. I’ve been doing project management for a long time and we have our own internally coded project management system. I almost have a religion about project management; it will either make or break you as far as whether you can efficiently execute something that you’re trying to do.
I’m actually going to take everyone at the seminar through the way we do project management, the way we manage our staff and our outsourcers and show that to everybody at the seminar. There are other ways other than affiliate marketing to make money online. We have people who are combining affiliate marketing with web consulting and actually doing web development work, building sites for people as a web consultant, and getting paid on a fee basis as opposed to just making affiliate commissions. So we’ll teach people about that as well.
So the foundational day, the advanced topics day, I think a great amount of material to take people well past where they are probably in their journey in online marketing or affiliate marketing.
David Jenyns: It sounds like there is going to be some good material covered there, so they can check out theseomethod.com/wdu (that’s for the WordPress Direct University, or theseomethod.com/wordpressdirect if you want to find out about that. So I just want to wrap up Marty. I really do appreciate your time. I know you’re very busy and you’re very generous with your time, so thanks again.
Marty Rozmanith: My pleasure.
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