(Transcript continued from the Episode 094 show notes and audio podcast)
Mark: I appreciate that, that’s a very kind introduction. Thank you so much.
This is mind-blowing. This is amazing. Michael Stelzner is a good friend of mine, but this is the first time my schedule has permitted my attendance here. As Sherry alluded, I’m actually an electrical engineer by day. I work in research and development in the semiconductor industry. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.
My passion, my hobby, the thing that I do until late at night is internet marketing related stuff. Internet marketing is a very broad topic, but what we’re going to talk about today is a little bit of a high level good framework for you to think about your internet business or the internet piece of your business, whether you’re a brick and mortar company, whether you’re a solopreneur, a consultant, an affiliate marketer, a multilevel marketer, whatever you are this is going to be for you.
Let’s get a show of hands. How many of you are solopreneurs running a small business?
Okay. Do you sell physical products? Do you do consulting?
Are you speakers?
Not yet, but you want to be. Me too. Oh, wait.
Don’t worry, I’ve done this before. If I fall off the stage you’ll know I was lying.
That’s great. There will be a little bit in here for everybody. My goal is that you leave here with at least a couple of things that you can take away that will make your business better and maybe even occasionally will make your life better. That would be great. That would make me personally very happy. It’s the big reason that I do a lot of the things that I do.
If that happens, you can tweet. I set up a couple of these, you’ll notice that there’s short URL. On a couple of slides you’ll see LNIM.co/live. If you go there now on your smartphone or your PC, provided that you can get a decent internet connection in the hotel, you’ll get a pre-populated tweet.
This is using a tool called Click to Tweet. If you’ve never seen this tool before, it’s a super cool tool that you can use with your customers when you’re trying to create buzz. I use it here because it’s helpful to the conference to get that hashtag out there. Like Sherry mentioned, I want to make it easy on you to tweet any tweetable moments that might happen in the next 40 minutes.
We just got to know each other a little bit, but let’s ask a few more questions.
How long have you been online? If you’ve been online less than a year, raise your hand. By online I mean been online trying to do some kind of business online for less than a year.
So everybody is more than a year. How about less than five years?
That’s pretty good. How about more than five years? We have a lot of people that have been online more than five years. That’s great.
The kind of cool thing about that is I’m going to talk to you today about some fundamental concepts in internet marketing that are directly applicable to your business and it’s not going to matter too much what kind of business you have, and it’s not going to matter too much how much time passes because these techniques are timeless. That’s going to be a little bit different than some of the things that you might occasionally see at a conference like this, because a lot of times these conferences are focusing on what’s new – like Meerkat.
We’re going to talk a little bit about what works. I think that’s really cool.
A little bit about my story.
I have these priorities and I do them all. One of the ways that I do them is by automating things as best I can.
I live in Texas. This is a picture from the Texas State Fair in the upper left. I have four kids, they’re awesome, they’re the best four kids in the world, as you might imagine. I play softball, that’s me on third base trying to decide whether or not to run. I also work for a big electronics company in Dallas, a very big $14billion company. Then I have this podcast and internet business at LateNightInternetMarketing.com.
I’m able to do that last thing because of some fundamental principles around setting things up to work even without having to proactively do stuff. We’ll talk about that.
This is a photograph of Barry Larkin that I stole off of Wikipedia. Barry was the shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, he’s widely regarded as one of the best shortstops in baseball in recent history, and that’s including all of them. What he said was, “What people don’t realize is that professionals are sensational because of the fundamentals.” He further says that, “The sensationalism has taken over the professionalism.”
What he means by that is that baseball a lot of times is about getting back to fundamentals.
And so is internet marketing. It’s not about fancy tools and the latest gadgets and the trends, although it’s very helpful to follow those and I don’t begrudge those that do. If there is something that is working today I think you ought to know what that is and if it makes sense you can take advantage of that. Chances are that thing is going to be gone tomorrow.
The question is, for example, should you be out here right now developing a Meerkat strategy for your business? I don’t know. Meerkat has been around for three weeks. What I do know is that there will be some fundamental stuff that you need to be doing in your business. So this presentation is about some fundamental ideas that work.
As I mentioned, we’ll have to apply this to your business model. Some of you are speakers and consultants and are trying to build a platform. Some of you have online physical products that you’re trying to sell. Some of you may be affiliate marketers. Some of you may be in multilevel marketing. Some of you may have brick and mortar businesses. Heck, we’ve talked to people who sell doughnuts and Mexican food in brick and mortar buildings that this works for just great.
You’ll have to take what I say and apply it to your model. Chances are that at the end of this presentation we’ll be able to take a few questions in case you have questions about how to do that.
In the beginning, back when cavemen ruled the Earth, websites were business cards. That’s how websites started out, they were online business cards and basically what you put on there was your name, your address, and your phone number. What you wanted was in the rare chance that somebody actually looked online they would find you, or if they decided that’s what you made a legitimate businessperson they looked up and found that you had a website. So you had to have one and it was simply an electronic business card.
I give you an example here; this is the website from Toyota. It’s not exactly properly rendered from 1996, but you can see it was a simple header and some terrible icons down at the bottom where you could look at vehicles and so forth.
Things have changed. This is the Toyota website from yesterday and it’s a lot better looking. Not only does it have better design, this is a tool that Toyota – and other businesses like yours – are using for their business to do a bunch of different things way beyond business cards.
It’s being used for discovery. How do people find you? If you’re the guy that wants to be the best speaker in the world on how to run a physical therapy practice, or you’re a consultant and you’re a lady who does lifestyle design, or whatever it is, how do they find you? Your website is one of the ways that people can find you.
Your website also should be handling for you the capturing of those people. I don’t mean like capture them and put them in Guantanamo, I mean get their name and email address so you can develop a relationship with those people.
Your website almost certainly is the place and the hub where your social media comes and goes from. And you’re managing your branding through your website.
Additionally, you’re trying to educate your customers. At least, I hope that you are. One of the things that we’re going to talk about is that even if you’re running a doughnut shop and you have a website you should have content that is of value to your customers on that website. That’s going to be important for a couple of reasons that we’re going to talk about here in a little bit.
Of course, you may be doing online sales, maybe you’re taking appointments, maybe you’re taking money, maybe you have an ecommerce store, and you’re handling the support and service from all of that. Boy, especially if you’re a solopreneur, which a lot of you are, this can get really overwhelming. This website at the center of your business plan becomes a big deal.
It becomes very easy to get distracted because you’re working on content. You have WordPress maybe and you’re dealing with plugins and maybe technology that you don’t completely understand. You’re also probably also worried about how search engines are viewing your content and whether or not someone can hack your website.
Maybe you need to take money and you have to hook up with a payment processor. You have email auto responders and spam coming in on your comments. You have design problems and you probably wish you had a better design. Basically, you’re just overwhelmed and managing a couple of virtual assistants to try to get all of this done and it’s just overwhelming.
That’s why I bring up the baseball thing. It’s really easy to lose sight of the fundamentals because we start getting emails about all of the tools that can solve all these problems, we’ll buy this tool and that tool, this training and that thing, and all this glossy shiny stuff… and we forget about the fundamental pieces of our business that we need to build in order for it to be successful in a reasonable way.
When we talk about fundamentals it always comes down to your offer. If you have a website it’s because you have an offer. Maybe you have a content website and your offer is an ad click. Maybe you’re selling consulting and your offer is a consulting appointment. Maybe you are selling physical products and your offer is that you’re going to dropship something to someone’s house. If you have a website, you have an offer.
Here’s the big idea that you need to always keep in mind when you’re working on your website.
The key activity of your business is – and in fact, I will submit all businesses, the key thing in all businesses is to match offers (specifically your offer) with buyers. That’s the thing you need to keep in mind.
If you’re not working on that, you’re probably not working on the right thing. That’s the most important thing that you have to work on is how to match offers with buyers.
That word match, what does that really mean? It turns out that the engine that does these matches is going to be your website. That’s going to be the core of your business.
I know we’re at a social media conference. I know a lot of you are thinking about how to have conversions around Facebook and how to have conversions around Twitter. That’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit.
At the end of the day I want my business to be built primarily on a foundation that I own. Somebody, I think it was Michael Hyatt, I heard him say earlier that to do otherwise is like building a house on rented land, it makes absolutely no sense.
Whatever your strategy is, you have this website in the center of it and the idea of the website, the fundamental premise is to match some kind of offer – your offer, somebody else’s offer, an ad click, whatever you business model is – with buyers.
What we’ll talk a little bit about today is how to find these buyers. Where do they come from? How do we stay in touch with them? How do we build trust with them? That’s the second most important thing.
Do you know what the most important thing with buyers is? To give them value, because that’s what they’re going to exchange money for is value.
I’ll also touch a little bit on offers and some key points on how to explain them so that it fits up well with these ideas on the buyer’s side. Because after all we only have 45 minutes, we’ll focus on the ways to do that that will live on. Sherry was being facetious when she said make sales when you sleep, but the truth of the matter is even though I don’t choose to couch it that way that’s really the truth. You want something that is going to run even if you’re not out promoting, tweeting, and making ad buys on Facebook. You want something that is just going to run.
First let’s talk about the offers.
I will tell you offers should be rich with detail. You’ll see this again later; my rule of thumb, for reasons that we’ll discuss in a little bit, is that your offer should be at least 1,000 words long. If you have an ecommerce website you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, I need a 1,000 word product description for every product in my catalog?” Absolutely.
One of the things that Google cares about a great deal, and to some extent Facebook as they start to consider quality of landing pages, is the amount of content on the page. Your offers need to be rich in detail and there are lots of reasons for that we can talk about.
You should think about the kinds of details that you can add to your offers. If it’s a consulting offer, tell me about the clients that you’ve had, tell me about what I can expect to get when I work with you, tell me what it’s like to work with you, tell me about your experience, expand that conversation. If I’m thinking about spending hundreds or thousands of dollars with you, an extra 500 or 600 words is going to go a long way. You want your offers to be rich.
If you’re running a doughnut shop, tell me how the business got started, tell me it’s your family business and that you moved here from another country to pursue the American dream. Whatever it is, let me know about that. Make your offers rich.
If you have a special way that you make the doughnuts and you take special care and you only use free range wheat or whatever, let me know all that. I want to know all of it. That’s very important.
Don’t just tell me about those features. This is a mistake we see all the time in internet marketing. You have to tell me about the benefits. Don’t tell me about the 17 point antilock breaking system. Tell me about the fact that it’s going to keep my kids alive. That’s what I care about. I don’t care about the engineering in the breaking system or 75 point airbags. Yeah, I need to know that because your claim of the benefits has to be credible so you have to tell me about the features, but sell me the benefits. Make sure your offers are clear about benefits.
Of course, give me testimonials. When I’m making a decision I want to know I’m not the only one. Even if you’re selling doughnuts, make sure you tell me about how all of my neighbors love your doughnuts, because I need to know that in order to make the decision to get in the car and come see what kind of doughnuts you have.
If you can find a way to construct your offers so that they’re a bit scarce, do that. If that means that you run a sale and that the price is going to legitimately go up at the end of the month, do that. Scarcity and urgency will make a big difference in how your offers convert.
When you’re thinking about how you set up your business having a recurring promotion there’s nothing wrong with that, having your products go on sale. There’s a big clothing store in the United States called The Men’s Warehouse, they have a sale once a year, or at least that’s the way it used to be. At the end of every year they have a massive sale 50% off. Their clothes are pretty nice and they’re pretty expensive, at the end of the year they create this giant scarcity demand where they flood their stores with people with this once a year sale. That’s how they pitch it, “This is it, the once a year sale.” Think about that kind of scarcity.
Once you have these offers, and I think a lot of times for us small business people it’s easy to come up with an offer because that’s what you do, the question is how do you find the buyers. That’s what I want to spend some time on.
There are three fundamental ways that you can find these buyers. Maybe you can argue there are more, but I’ll argue there are three main ways in the online space.
One is advertising.
You can advertise on Facebook, you can advertise in Google search, you can advertise in the newspaper, you can run TV commercials, there’s advertising.
There’s organic search, which means that you have a website that is well constructed that people are discovering you through Google, Bing, and these other things. When they search for fantastic doughnut consultant, your name comes up. Wouldn’t that be great, to be a guy who consulted with doughnut stores? I would be even heavier than I am.
Then there’s social media. Of course that’s what this conference is about. I hope a lot of you got to see Mari and some of the other people that have been talking about how to do conversion on Facebook. That’s a great thing, but you don’t own Facebook, you own your website. That’s something you always need to keep in mind.
Once they find you, where do they go? I think they need to go to two places. They need to go to your website and go to your list.
Converting them to a Facebook group is fine and you can get great engagement on a Facebook group. I argue that that’s a secondary thing. I’ll get you on my list and then I’ll tell you about the Facebook group. Because guess what? Tomorrow Mark Zuckerberg might be arrested for some heinous crime and Facebook might shut down. I don’t know Mark, he’s probably a good guy.
I don’t really know what is going to happen to Facebook, but I know what’s going to happen with my website tomorrow. So I would argue that when you get these things they should in general be directed to someplace on your website and eventually onto your list.
Because we’re talking about things that happen automatically without effort, advertising is a lot of work. For those of you that have placed keyword ads in Facebook, that’s a very difficult thing. It’s a bidding situation, so you have to be very careful. Facebook and Google try by design to take the elasticity out of the pricing in that so they want to charge as much as you can afford to pay, and that’s how the pricing is determined. That takes a lot of work.
So does work through social media. That’s also well covered here.
What we’ll focus on for the next 20 minutes or so is this idea of organic search. You have this great website, what are you going to do to get people from that website onto your list?
I guess before we do that we ought to talk about who are these people. Let’s talk about Jill.
This is one of these things that I recommend you do. I don’t actually know Jill, she’s iStock photo Jill. If you have a business and you haven’t done this, I strongly recommend this as an action item that you take away from this. You should have at least one avatar of your ideal customer. I would write it down and I would go to iStock photo and get a picture of someone to put in there and say, “This is my ideal customer.”
I’m a doughnut shop owner and my ideal customer is a 45 year old overweight guy who likes doughnuts on Saturday morning, his name is Mark and he’s an engineer, he has four kids and they come in and eat the doughnuts and they like chocolate milk.
I would get into some detail about your Jill. In this case we’ll talk about our Jill. In this case she is a 27 year old young medical professional from Texas. She’s in medical sales. She’s tech savvy. She has an iPhone6, the white one with the gold back and a clear case so you can see the Apple. She’s also a fitness enthusiast and, like me, she’s planning to stand in line for the Apple Watch. She’s dating a guy named Jim, but he’s not nearly good enough for her. He’s kind of a loser, and we don’t know why exactly she is settling for Jim when she could do a lot better.
She has a new interest. For some reason, she wants to start collecting silver coins. I don’t know why. Maybe her great-grandfather handed her down some silver coins and she has decided she wants to become a silver coin collector.
But, she’s not really talking about it with her friends. This isn’t a thing where she goes on Facebook and says to all her girlfriends that she normally goes to nightclubs with, “Hey, I’m going to collect silver coins,” because 1) they don’t care about silver coins, and 2) they would think she was kind of weird. So she has this secret thing. Or maybe she needs help with a business problem that she doesn’t want to talk about and she needs a consultant. Somehow she has a problem.
She goes to Google and she types in “starting a silver coin collection.”
What do you see when you look at this Google thing? As a marketer we look at this and what do we see? The first thing that we see as a marketer is good news, people are paying money to show ads for starting a silver coin collection.
This is a fundamental keyword research idea. I don’t have it here, but if I type in “starting a dirt worm farm” there will not be any ads here. No one is selling dirt worm farm stuff (at least I don’t think so), but they are selling silver coin collecting stuff. That means there is money to be made, because I guarantee you no marketer would be paying for ads that aren’t returning on that investment. So that’s really good.
If I zoom in on this a little bit, these are ads across the top, these are ads down the side, but this part of the listing, that’s the organic part of the listing. That’s the part that nobody paid for, Google is searching the internet trying to figure out how in the world to respond to this query for starting a silver coin collection. You can see that Google has decided that there are approximately 700,000 pages that meet that test of starting a silver coin collection.
When you look at this, you don’t realize it as the marketer maybe, but this is your first conversion for Jill. This is your first opportunity to convert Jill. By convert I mean get her to take an action that you want her to take. The first conversion in organic is that click in the search results.
What do we see? Jill typed in “start a silver coin collection” and you can see Google has done a pretty good of these titles. I’ve got “Start Collecting Silver Coins,” I’ve got “Collecting Silver Coins on a Shoestring Budget,” that might really appeal to Jill depending on where she is with her finances, or “Starting Your First Collection.” All of these have a good match to the search, so that’s really good.
When you’re writing content for your website once thing that you need to be absolutely sure that you do is make sure that you understand this title. It’s funny, but with Adwords and on Facebook ads people will spend hours, days sometimes, picking the exact wording for their ad, the exact picture, they’ll tweak it and split test it, but they’ll throw stuff up on their website and never give any consideration to what this title says.
Also, when we look at this, Jill is going to be looking at all of this and she can see these URLs sort of make sense and this one looks like junk. So another thing that you want to make sure is that we know from testing that a lot of internet searchers that aren’t super sophisticated will see this bottom one and they will distrust it because of all these weird database looking things here.
The other thing that you’ll notice is that a couple of these descriptions – this description meta tag – speak directly to the searcher in a way that gives them a call to action that they can convert. “The key is starting small,” that might appeal to Jill. What you need to realize is this is sales copy and the sale you’re trying to make here is to convert to your website.
When you’re thinking about organic search, you want lots of rich content. I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but this is related to Google’s Panda algorithm. Your website needs to be content rich. If you’re a consultant and you have five pages that talk about the things that you offer and nothing else, that’s a problem and you need to expand that website to include content that your audience wants to see.
You should also avoid anything that sounds like get rankings quick. Stay away from that. I will tell you that I’ve tried them all and almost all of them don’t work. They will get you in trouble. That’s related to the Penguin algorithm. These are two algorithms that you read about in the media.
Guest blogging still works. If you want to get traffic back to your website it’s okay to do guest blogging as long as you avoid automated schemes for guest blogging.
Web 2.0 are still very effective for getting traffic to your website and passing link juice to your website. Go ahead and release those press releases, release those YouTube videos, release that stuff to these other big web 2.0 sites and link back to your site. That’s perfectly fine as long as you’re creating legitimate content.
At all costs, avoid duplicate content on your website.
These are just some quick SEO tips. This last one is very important. If Google sees stuff that is repeated over and over again, they will de-rate your website.
For example, if you have a local business and you’re working in a large metro area and you’re trying to rank for plumbing Dallas, plumbing suburb one, plumbing suburb two, plumbing suburb three, but the content on all of the pages is the same and all you’ve changed is the title, you’re doomed. You need to have unique content on every page of your website. Do not have duplicated content on your website.
Remember this, even though I’m telling you that it’s really smart to go after this organic traffic, you are not Google’s customer. Do you know who is? The people who paid for those ads around there. Just always remember that.
Even though I recommend that you go after this free search traffic because it runs 24 hours a day and it doesn’t cost you a dime, and you should be building a good website anyway, make sure that you always remember that Google can wake up tomorrow and say they’re not going to rank anymore consultant websites, or they could start a war on doughnuts and all doughnut sites are wiped out from Google. Weird stuff like this has happened. We’ve seen Google do all kinds of crazy things over the last several years.
Same thing for Facebook. You have Facebook fans, but you’re not Facebook’s customer unless you’re buying ads. And even if you are, I have friends that have perfectly reasonable Facebook ads that have run and been yanked. I’m not saying Facebook advertising is not a great idea, but you’re at Facebook’s mercy. If you have all your clients cleverly captured in a Google Group and they ban your account tomorrow, you’re done. We’ve seen Twitter accounts banned as well. They just go away forever. That is why it’s very important to have this stuff focused on your website. Same thing with Twitter, you’re not Twitter’s customer.
I say this to tell you because your list may be one of the few assets that you actually own in your online business, that’s a real asset that you actually own. If you keep that list, there are countless stories – in fact, my buddy Jason Van Orden who is an internet marketer currently living in New York, he has the Internet Business Mastery podcast, he has a story about a friend of his who had a business and the friends got crossways and he lost control of the business. The only thing that he was able to walk out the door with was the mailing list. He was able to rebuild that business essentially the next day. He emailed all of his clients and said, “I’ve changed. If you want to keep doing business with me, I’m now over here.”
That is a true asset and that’s big idea number two.
In order to get that email address you need some an opt-in box. You can get this from providers like Aweber and MailChimp and Infusionsoft. There are many, pick the one that you like. I personally use Aweber, I’ve been using them since 2007. I think there are better solutions than Aweber now. MailChimp is coming on super strong and Infusionsoft is the most sophisticated and most complicated tool out there. I’ve used them all and I still like Aweber. I don’t think it’s the best one, I don’t know that I’d pick that now.
This opt-in box is a pretty good opt-in box. I clicked on one of those silver links and as you can see I’ve got some nice content, some links into the website, and an option to get a report and some weekly expert analysis. Guess what the weekly analysis is going to lead to? Sales. They’re going to come out and say, “You really ought to buy this, this, and that. By the way, we sell this, this, and that, so you can buy it from us. Since you’re such a valued customer I’m going to give you an offer that’s going to expire at the end of the week,” before next week’s offer comes back.
This opt-in box is great because it looks great, it offers something of value, it sets an expectation for email frequency so that people know that the emails are coming, and it’s simple to use, it just requires an email.
What it doesn’t have is those benefits that I talked about. It tells me that I’ll get weekly expert analysis, but it doesn’t tell me that that will allow me to do better than the rest of the market or whatever I can do with that analysis.
Before you tell me that that only works if I have an electronic download, here is On the Border. How many of you guys have heard that? Did you know you can free queso from On the Border by giving them your email address? Even if you’re running a doughnut shop, there’s just no excuse for not capturing people’s email addresses.
You can do it no matter what you’re doing. If you’re a consultant, you can give a free report, a whitepaper, a free 15 minute consultation, which is an awesome lead gen tool. If you’re selling physical products you could give buying tips.
My neighbor was going to buy carpet for his house, the quote was $14,000. Big house, but $14,000. He bought a report online about carpet, because carpet is confusing as hell, there’s all kinds of backing, is it wool, what kind of pad is there, do I need to level the floor, there’s all this stuff. So he bought this online report for $19.95. By the time he understood carpet and knew more about carpet than the carpet salesman by reading this report, he bought the same carpet for $10,000. So don’t tell me that there’s a business model that you can’t have a lead magnet before, because I will come up with one every time.
Some thoughts about lists.
You have to deliver value. You cannot be one of these people that gets someone on their list and just sends them offer after offer and just burns them out, that will not work. When you get someone on your list you need to give them information that helps them do whatever it is they need to do in life. If that’s your primary concern, the money will follow, I guarantee it. If your primary concern is helping your customers with your website, money will follow. Unless you’re a knucklehead. If you do sensible things and put your customer first, that’s going to work for you.
Use automation. One of the things that you can do that I recommend to everybody is you have this new auto responder, you just signed up at Aweber and you’re capturing leads, you’re an expert in something (whatever your website is), what are the 20 things that you think people ought to know that’s interesting about what you have to say. Write those down. If you went to a coffee shop with your best friend and you were talking to them about your business, what are the 20 things that you would want them to know about your scuba diving business or your doughnut shop? Send those out.
You’re thinking, “I have a doughnut shop, I don’t know what to send.” You can send interesting facts about the history of doughnuts with some doughnut coupons to get them in the store. There’s all kinds of things you can do here. Set those 20 up in Aweber or MailChimp and have those come out once a week or once every two weeks completely automatically, and never touch it again.
Now every time someone finds your website from Google, which was free, even if it’s 3:00 in the morning while you’re asleep, they’ll get on your email list and then they will get valuable content, which will do two things. It will build trust and it will keep you top of mind. When they’re at the park with their friend and they say, “I wish I had some doughnuts,” they’ll say, “I have this coupon from down the street.” Or when Jill is at lunch with her friends and says, “I’ve been messing around with this silver thing and I have a great website,” you’ll be top of mind.
You’ll get those referrals on social media and you’ll get the referrals verbally, and they will come from the value that you created. Not from the automated tweeting gadget that you’re paying $97 a month for. That’s not where that value is coming from. It’s coming from the stuff you created to help your customers.
Another thing you can do with an auto responder that few people do is start a conversation. Especially if you’re a small business and your list is less than 1,000 or less than 10,000 people, ask them a question. Guess what’s going to happen between 1 and 10% of the time? They’re going to hit the reply button and you’re going to be able to start a conversation. That’s going to build trust. My comment to you is to end every one of those conversations with a subsequent question, and do it until you have so much email that you have to hire a VA to help you answer the questions.
Do you know what else you’ll get out of those conversations? Content that should be on your website, because the answers to those customer questions should be on your website. When you put that content on your website you’re going to get more results in Google. The more you engage with people and take that engagement and turn it into content on your website the better off you’re going to be.
You’ll drive traffic back to your blog with your list. I generally recommend that you get people used to clicking. You tell them something useful and you say, “For more information about this, check it out on the website.” Get them used to making that click. Call them to action in every email. Even if that’s not going to be a sales action, get them to click back over to your website.
By the way, when you do have someone opt-in to your email list at 3:00 in the morning while you’re asleep and making money, make sure that you do something with your thank you pages. One of the things I hate most to see is I opt into a list and I get the automatic Aweber thank you page that says nothing. Do something. Give me a video.
Here’s one from Wistia, which is a great video hosting site, where they say, “Hey, thanks for signing up. If you want to know more about Wistia you can go to our website. Here’s some of the cool stuff you can do. Aren’t you excited? We’re excited to have you. Here’s some value,” value, value, value.
Put some links back into your website to get that traffic back on your site. Say, “If you’re new to my list then you probably are interested in this, this, and this. Don’t forget, I’ll be sending you email tomorrow.” That kind of thing.
All of that builds trust. You’re building this trust automatically. This trust that you’re building with these auto responders and by automatically capturing leads is going to result in people visiting your website, and that will result in revenue if you ask for the sale.
Don’t forget to ask for the sale.
One of my favorite people in the whole world is a guy named Zig Ziglar, he’s left us now but some of you have probably heard of him. He’s from Dallas. I got to meet him one time. He’s as awesome as you think he might have been. He says, “Be enthusiastic, ask for the sale. For every one that you miss because you were afraid to ask for the sale because they felt like you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss 100 because you didn’t.”
Just because you’re adding value and not pushing, doesn’t mean you can’t ask for the sale. You have to do that. You’re a marketer, you have to ask for the sale. Don’t forget to do that.
You can do that in your auto responder. Some mornings you’ll wake up and there will be payment receipts in your inbox if you do that.
Jill’s experience, to sum this up, she had an idea about collecting silver coins, or maybe in other cases she might have a pain or some desire if she wants to learn how to play golf. She did a search. She did a website discovery, she found you. She read your compelling content. Then she joined your email list and instantly got value, she’s thrilled and her trust in you has gone up. You kept sending her stuff, she’s learning about silver coins and every week she learns something new from you and she’s thinking, “This is really cool. Silver coins are awesome.” She’s learning all this stuff that she might have had to pay for a course to learn otherwise.
Now every time Jill buys a coin for her collection, she comes to your website first. Sometimes she buys just because you recommended that she buy it. It’s a good deal. You told her, “We got these 1897 Morgans in and just for our list subscribers we’re selling them for 20% off. They’re collectible, here’s what they are. Do you want them?” and she buys them.
Most of this stuff happens because you set it up two years ago, it’s automated and it’s just a machine that churns. Instead of working in your business to do this stuff manually and chase all these leads down, you can work on your business to build the machine and crank it up.
The bottom line; the primary purpose of business is to match offers with buyers. Don’t ever forget that. If that’s the one thing you take away from Social Media Marketing World 2015, cut through all that other stuff and remember that your job is to match offers with buyers. I don’t care if you call it building brand awareness or creating buzz, or whatever it is that all these media types want to call this stuff. At the end of the day, somebody has to make money to pay all these bills and that means matching offers with buyers.
Don’t forget that some buyers can be found through search and that’s free. With a little work, that can be your buyers.
Once you find buyers you should capture them on your website in your list so that they’re your asset and not Mark Zuckerberg’s. Then you can use that list to create value and build trust, which is the most important element of creating future conversions, which you can automate.
Thank you very much.
Wrapping Things Up….
I really hope you enjoyed that. That brought back some memories listening to that, it’s been a few months now since I gave that talk.
Just one more time, a shout out to the awesome guys over at SocialMediaExaminer.com. Social Media Marketing World is coming up soon in the Spring, you’re definitely going to want to be there. Go check it out at LateNightIM.com/smmw. It’s super awesome and you really should give consideration to going out there. It’s super cool. Just a hint, the earlier you buy your tickets the cheaper they are, they go up and up until the conference starts. Consider it and let me know if you’re going to be out there.
If you have any questions about anything that was mentioned in the audio, please feel free to leave me a comment at LateNightIM.com/094, I’d be happy to help you out with that.
Also, as I promised, you can download the slides from the presentation. It might be even more fun for you to listen to this again with those slides in front of you. [click here to download]
Until next time, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic week. Talk to you soon.
