JohnHorning.com Launched Today
by John Horning
Here we go again – yet another website “launch”. While I realize no one has been holding their breath about this event, I’m cautiously hopeful that this might one day become at least a respected website.
I tried to get Rivul.com off the ground a couple of weeks ago, but quickly realized that’s easier said than done. Initially, I tried an Adwords campaign, but chickened out before I had blown $100 (I accidentally spent about $60 just trying to set up a fake test campaign!). PPC may have worked but I just didn’t have the nerve.
So I went on to plan B, which was to put my referral cards to work. I mailed off a set to Michele Ross, an energetic woman I met on LDSMingle who lives in Dayton. Also sent some to Jeannine Griffith who is in Arizona – she and her husband David used to live in Ohio. She’s has a very outgoing personality, and likes me, so I thought I would take advantage of that and ask her to pass them out to her friends. I also gave some to Paul McMahon, a fellow member of the Canton Ward (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). He attends networking meetings and figured he wouldn’t mind passing them out.
Then I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. I found out about some forums where the main topics have to do with Internet marketing, MLM, and home-based businesses. I thought to myself, I’m sure there’s someone in this group that would appreciate my new product, and has a sizable following of people on his list or his downline. I just needed to find one person with influence and the rest would be history. Right?
So I posted a message on the board (after making the required 15 posts so I was priviledged enough to begin using HTML code in my messages). The message decribed my VoIP telephone service with it’s great referral program, along with a link to the site. I got a reply almost immediately from a guy who was completely full of himself and very condescending. He ripped my website, saying it was “amateurish” and claimed it would “never convert” (make sales, in other words). He also hated the name (Rivul) and said it was “rivulting” or something rude like that. I pathetically tried to respond explaining that I realized the site needed a little help, but felt the product was good, and I just needed a little help from someone good at marketing.
Well it just went downhill from there. He made another rude comment. At that point I was totally embarrassed and demoralized and tried to figure out to get the whole post deleted. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, and definitely not how they described the process of developing relationships and trust, etc. in the tutorial on forum marketing. I went to bed that night feeling very depressed.
But the next day, I felt better. On Craigslist, I came across a couple of new ways to earn money online – one was from a guy looking for bloggers – turned out he was trying to find a way to get people to click on Adwords just to drive up income. I reluctantly went along with it for a couple days and then he disappeared. I was relieved. Anyways, the other thing I found was a way to earn by surfing – a site called ad-ventures4u. I don’t want to go into detail, but they pay people to view ads, and I found out that, as a member, I could post ads for free for the members to view. That started me thinking about new ways to advertise, but I was convinced that it wouldn’t work to advertise Rivul.com directly – it just didn’t have broad appeal, and it had no brand recognition.
I also thought about some of the things I had learned while studying “attraction marketing” concepts that are effective in marketing mlm products. Slowly an idea came together in my head. What if I had a good “capture page”, where I was myself (maybe people my age could relate) that made it sound like I had a lot of knowledge I wanted to share with people in exchange for their name and email addresses. And after I got that, I’ll direct to, not one, but many affiliate products. This would sure be more effective than just trying to advertise one product, like Rivul.com or even a high-converting affiliate product. And with their contact information, I also had the chance of developing a relationship with the possibility of selling to them later.
So, the idea of an Internet Marketing “Resource and Learning Center” came about. You can see this now at JohnHorning.com/resources. I also decided to name the website after myself – seemed like a good idea after I learned of the power of branding yourself in my reading on attraction marketing. I had previously felt that it might be effective to “tell my story” because maybe people could empathize with a little – you know the guy who’s down on his luck and makes a comeback. I would love to be that guy!
Anyway, I hope you find the site useful – and maybe even occasionally entertaining.
