On Black Friday you wont find me standing in any lines, fighting crowds, or wrestling strangers for cheap TVs.

But my distaste for the whole scene only goes so far.

Because I really dig the marketing.

Allow me to explain:

Retailers spend a great portion of the year operating at a loss, i.e. “in the red.”

But the day after Thanksgiving their sales skyrocket, making them profitable, i.e. “in the black.”

Hense the term “Black Friday.”

And they don’t pull themselves from a negative to positive with those cheap TVs, video games, and blu-ray players.

Nope. Those are typically loss-leaders. They’ll actually break even or even lose money on those.

To get crowds in the door.

It’s a scarcity tactic.

They make the big bucks on the upsells.

These corporations have spent billions in market research and real-time testing to squeeze every nickel out of consumers.

What are you learning from their marketing?

How’s your upsell process?

Are you doubling or even tripling your income simply by offering your customers a simple upsell that can take an hour (or less!) to create?

If not, you’re missing out on one of the fundamental components that helps a project turn the corner from “ho-hum” to “HO HO HO!” and insanely profitable.

(yeah that was cheesy, whatever)

Think about it like this:

You’re selling or promoting something and you get $20 a sale.

Make 100 sales in a week and you’ve grossed $2,000.

That’s a tidy little sum.

But let’s say you wanted to grab a little more so you offered those customers a one-time upsell for an additional $40.

A full 25% of your customers took advantage of this offer, meaning 25 people spent $40 more dollars during the checkout process.

That’s an extra $1,000 per week for very little work and no additional traffic.

And it’s very, VERY possible at that conversion rate (mine have gone as high as 80%+).

Now imagine if you were to combine the power of upsells, one-time offers, downsells, and even continuity offers together in all your offerings – including things you promote as an affiliate.

It can be downright easy to double your profits – and completely possible to triple them.

And it only takes a relaxing afternoon to set it all up.

So whether you’re in the US and you’re right in the middle of all this craziness or you’re not in the US and you’re just witnessing the craziness that is the US holiday shopping season, be sure you take away some important lessons in implementing both scarcity and upselling in your own business.

And if you want to learn exactly how to do it, click here to download the DareDevil Upsell course, where I show you exactly how to do everything I talked about above and much, much more.

There’s a reason that I put this question first, even though on the surface, the answer may seem pretty obvious.

Most people believe that they get into marketing online to make money.

And while the seductive allure of “quick internet money” may have been the initial trigger to explore the realm of online marketing, it takes much more than that to keep the momentum going to be successful.

For every success an online marketer will enjoy, there are generally at least a few failures he or she endured and learned from to get there. It takes perseverance, determination, and the knowledge that success is attainable through trial and error and testing to get through those first few projects that don’t quite pan out.

So even though the money can be really good, there simply has to be something that you enjoy about online marketing to keep you going through the rough patches.

Is it helping people? The joy of transforming an idea into a product? The no-nonsense analytics of PPC/SEO/media buy campaign metrics?

Personally, I love taking an idea that springs on me unexpectedly, conducting the research, and developing a product around it that people not only buy, but thoroughly enjoy.

That, to me, is what makes this business fun.

Whatever it is that you enjoy most about this business, when you fully identify it and fully wrap your head around why you enjoy that aspect of it, you’ll truly begin to find your true strengths that will help you excel.

2. What Constitutes a Successful Project?

Keep in mind for this one that when I say “project,” it’s a fairly loose term.

A “project” in my mind is synonymous with describing anything that you’re currently working on, but doesn’t envelop your entire online marketing career. It’s a facet of it. A cog. A phase. A temporary thing.

Examples of projects:

• A PPC campaign for an affiliate offer
• An information product
• A new website
• A joint venture
• A brokering deal

So what constitutes a successful project for you? The obvious answer is, of course, money. But that’s not entirely accurate because money comes in different stages, as we all know when considering the backend.

I’ll often willingly net 0 profits and even go into the red on the front end for the greater good of coming out on top and back into the black on the backend in terms of rebills, upsells, etc.
So if we were to talk about the front end as the project in question – or even just the promotional strategy pushing it – it can still be considered very successful even if it results in a net loss (until the subsequent promotional strategy kicks in, of course).

Now, bear in mind that every project you embark upon will have a different “success” threshold that you’ll want to establish beforehand. But it’s important to identify that threshold before the project starts so that you’ll know not only if you’ve achieved it, but also whether or not you achieved it on schedule.

3. What’s Your Short-Term Plan? Mid-Term Plan? Long-Term Plan?

I think this is far more important than many people realize. It keeps you accountable not only today and this week but also next month and next year.

We’ve all read the advice that we need to write down our goals and visualize them and focus on them and keep plugging away at them.

And yeah, that’s good advice, to be sure.

But there are different kinds of goals.

For example, this month your goal may be a profit of $1,000, increase your buyer’s list by 50, and your subscriber list by 200.

And if you met that goal, then next month you could feasibly double those numbers.

So with that short-term goal in mind, you may say that your mid-term goal – in a year – is a profit of $50,000, a buyer’s list of 3,000 and a subscriber list of 15,000.

Your long-term goals of 3+ years will probably be less tangible. You’d like to pay off your house, be completely debt-free, $200,000+ per year, etc.

And these goals are always changing. Evolving. Becoming more specific and more realistic.

Becoming more REAL.

But how real are they if you don’t acknowledge them by writing them down?

“Yeah, yeah I know all this. I’ve read a million times that I should write my goals down”

Oh yeah? Then why haven’t you?

I, probably more than anyone else, used to scoff at practices like these. That is, until I realized that I had had goals for well over 3 years that I hadn’t met.

And it’s not from lack of the ability to. I had simply forgotten what I was working toward and lost my way along the way.

Now I keep three lists at all times that are constantly being updated: my short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals.

Without these lists, I can honestly say that I’d be lost. I hope you consider doing the same.

Did I miss anything? Let me know your most important questions in the comments below.

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• Unique features of WikiPay, including an in-depth discussion on WikiBlast
• WikiPay’s ongoing outreach to accommodate online merchants and their customers.
• A comprehensive breakdown of WikiPay’s fee structure, both for merchants and customers.
• WikiPay’s future developments and what how they can affect your customer reach and, effectively, your bottom line.
• WikiPay Signup

• What the HELL is DareDevil Marketing?!?
• New marketer nets 6 figures in less than a year and then tells us how
• What do you do when Paypal freezes your cash?
• Russ Ruffino’s Black Tie Traffic

Cutting through the cereal aisle, I stopped in my tracks at what I saw and even had to stop and snap a picture of it with my phone.

A single balloon had been tied to the shelf and, as you can see, a Publix employee had demonstrated (whether intentionally or not) a stroke of marketing genius.

There were no other balloons on the rest of the aisle and so after grabbing my coffee I scanned all the other aisles looking for balloons as well. None to be found.

So why the balloon for the Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes? Was it THAT GOOD of a sale? Even though these days a box of name-brand cereal for less than $2 is certainly a bargain (some are like $6!!!) I honestly think that they may have simply run out of the Publix-themed sales tags for this item and one quick-thinking employee or manager stepped up to the plate with the balloon.

But that’s not the point.

In fact, the balloon isn’t even the point. Balloons have been used in promotions for decades. All you have to do is look at just about any car dealership on a Saturday if you want to see a ton of balloons.

The point is that it was unexpected, effective, and unobtrusive marketing. Those are three key points that made people flock to those Frosted Flakes even more than lovable ol’ Tony the Tiger in this particular instance.

Unexpected – Nobody expects a balloon to be hanging from the supermarket shelf so it definitely grabbed the attention. There was not one person that didn’t stop to read what was written on it. This is the same psychological trigger that beckons us to strain our eyes to read the banners being pulled behind airplanes while at the beach.

Effective – Like I said before, $2 for a box of name-brand cereal is nothing to sneer at these days. That’s a pretty good deal if you’re one of those parents that like to hop your kids up on processed sugar first thing in the morning. My point: no matter how good every other variable is, no marketing is effective if its not somehow a good deal for the customer, whether that good deal is price, convenience, content, or otherwise.

Unobtrusive – If I had a great deal and I hired some call center to randomly call your cell phone about it, your knee-jerk reaction is to tell that telemarketer to get bent. Somehow, telemarketing still works to at least some degree or I wouldn’t be getting offers for extended car warranties on my mobile phone each week. However, the vast majority of people abhor telemarketing with all of their soul.

Why?

It’s obtrusive. But there’s nothing obtrusive about a balloon hanging onto a shelf in a grocery store. In fact, it’s downright pleasant and cheerful. This makes me ask myself the question, “How obtrusive is my marketing and what can I do to make it more pleasant?”

Take a few minutes every now and then to step back and give your marketing a truly objective observation to gauge, among everything else important, just how unexpected, effective, and unobtrusive it is. By adding a dash or so of each of those three elements, how much more effective can your marketing become?

These are honest marketers that have done their best to abide by Paypal’s terms of service.

Now, Paypal seemingly indiscriminately dissolving its relationship with people out of the blue is nothing new. In fact, a simple Google search will turn up thousands – if not tens of thousands – of results.

But this time it’s different.

In the inaugural episode of the DareDevil Marketing Podcast, we’re going to discuss exactly what some top marketers are hearing from Paypal representatives (and not just low-level CSRs) about this and what they’re doing about it.

And why everyone that runs a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) on the Warrior Forum should take special note.

This and a whole lot more on Wednesday.

Grease the wheels of inspiration by checking out the site KillerStartups.com.

Any Idea you’ve ever had – no matter how crazy, ineffective, or downright bad – is guaranteed to be better than at least a few of these startups and/or “virtual real estate holdings” or whatever people with too much money and not enough sense are calling websites these days.

In spite of some of the more laughable offerings, there are some real gems there too. You’ll come across quite a few “Why didn’t I think of that?!?.” ideas for websites that are listed. There are even some “I don’t care if they thought of it first, I’m going to release the exact damn thing a week later and make it unique by sticking an ‘e’ or ‘i’ in front of the name” ideas as well.

Whatever your opinion of the listings, they are bound to get your creative juices flowing no matter what you specialize in:

• product development
• marketing
• design
• mobile applications

And if you’re like me – a Jack-of-All-Those-Trades (as well as whatever other trades my business may find a need for), your mind will be swimming with new ideas in no time.

Open up a clean notepad *(or better yet, Notepad++, which is free) file and check out KillerStartups.com the next time you find yourself short on ideas and long on…well, no ideas…

No, this isn’t a paid-for-post, review, or anything like that. I don’t do those and I don’t even know who owns/operates the site. It’s just a site that I discovered by accident.*

*(known as “search” and “linking” nowadays)

Oh, and while it lasts, you can even submit your own new startups, projects, ventures, idea gardens, web communities, and other frazzledazzles to KillerStartups.com via their submit form.

I can’t imagine their rules for inclusion can be all that strict. After all, just how nit-picky about submissions can a website be when its only real content is submitted content?

Oh, wait..we live in the time of Web2.0. You know the times…the times when portals such as Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, as well as the hundreds (thousands?) of copycats and wanna-be’s all promoted themselves during their infancy by networking on and generating traffic from sites that were already authoritative and established hubs of surfers. Now those same sites call sites that use them for that very purpose “Spam.”

But that’s a rant for another time…?