Leverage your expertise and experience into recurring revenue

Meet Your Ideal Client

The first step is to figure out exactly who you are trying to sell your product to. Now wait a minute, that is not as obvious as you might think. And unless you have been selling like hotcakes, at least hear me out on this.

You have to know exactly who it is you’re talking to so you can provide the solution to their problem. You have to know what their problem is.

Imagine yourself trying to persuade people to come into your restaurant in New Orleans. You are standing on the balcony overlooking hordes of people milling around Bourbon Street. Through your megaphone you are shouting “Great food, great beer”. Maybe a few trickle in. The next night you change tactics. You shout “cheap food, cheap beer”. Who do you think comes in? People who aren’t looking to spend much money, that’s who. You need a lot of customers if each individual one is looking to minimize their spending.

The third night you do it my way. You hoist the megaphone and shout “Lousiana’s best Zydeco music, Specialty seasonal ale”. Now who comes in? People who like Zydeco music and appreciate specialty beer, that’s who. Through the noise on Bourbon Street, the word “Zydeco” cut through to them. And… perhaps… others who saw the excitement over “Zydeco” came to see what it was all about. These are your people. They stay all night, spend a lot of money and invite their friends. You don’t need (or want) everybody. You want people who relate to what you are selling and are willing to stick around for the evening and keep ordering beers.

The first step in creating your launch blueprint: you need to know who your prospect is, who are you marketing to? Make no mistake, your launch story is about YOUR PROSPECTS… it’s not about you or your product.

So here is what you need to do: (BTW I’m fairly confident that most of you won’t do this. But I’m even more confident of the 80/20 rule. 80% of the WOW! profits are going to be made by 20% of the on-line marketers. And those 20% are dead certain of who their prospect is.)

Sit down and write a detailed description of your ideal client. Give him (or her) a name. Pretend they are sitting across from you. What do they look like? What are you talking about?

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Marital Status
• Do they have kids?
• What is their education?
• What is their occupation?
• Do they have pets?
• What is their fitness level?
• Physical attributes?

Psychographics

• What magazines do they read?
• What TV shows do they watch?
• What are their top fears and frustrations?
• What gets them mad, gets them
  worried?
• What are their hopes and dreams,
• What are their top wants and desires?
• What are they really after,  and the end goal they THINK
  they want?
• 5 people they most admire

Financial Life

• What kind of house do they live in?
• Car they drive?
• Where did they take their last holiday?
• What credit cards do they have in their wallet?
• Beliefs and attitudes about money
• True financial picture

Daily Living

• Recreational activities
• Health
• What clubs are they a member of?

Give as much detail as you can.  Don’t forget to give your ideal client a name.  My ideal client’s name is Scott.

I’ve had clients tell me they fear this exercise will narrow their scope and leave out prospects.  Actually the exact opposite happens.  Think of your launch story as trying to hit a bulls eye on a dart board. The ideal client is at the center of the bulls eye.  They are worth the most money to you.  The prospects on the outer rings are worth something so even if you miss the bulls eye you still score points.  But.. you make the most money aiming at the bulls eye.

The funny thing is the more specific you are in your descriptions, the more you are in that red bull’s eye, the more the concentric circles pull you in and you still attract the same people. It’s an amazing but true thing that people don’t need to worry about.

Doing the launch without clearly defining your target is like throwing darts blindfolded.

So… describe your ideal client to me.

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Anne Holland – Importance of Testing on your site

StomperNet is hosting several “preview” webinars to showcase the speakers coming to the Live9 event, March 25-29, in Atlanta. The preview calls, as well as the event itself, are  NOT a sales pitch for the event or the speaker. Well ok, technically they are; hopefully you will be intrigued enough by what the person provides to attend the event.  Regardless, the information is valuable. If you couldn’t make the call here are my notes.

Anne’s message is all about testing to see what works. You know what they say in elections – you never know how people are going to vote.  So don’t try to guess with your business dollars either.

Anne Holland, founder of marketingsherpa.com, was the featured speaker last night. MarketingSherpa is a research firm specializing in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing (and what does not).They test and they track and they test and they track and then you can buy their reports on what works and what didn’t.

Anne founded MarketingSherpa and built it into one of the premier research institutions on the planet. I bought a few of their reports and was a member of the site for a while. At the time it was a bit over my head and I guess I see why now. Anne told us that her background was in corporate America, so when she started MarketingSherpa, she provided services to corporate America. ( and my business wasn’t “corporate America”.) After she “retired”, she’s been doing a number of really interesting projects and has become a StomperNet faculty member.

She has two sites (services ?) now: whichtestwon.com and subscriptionsiteinsider.com.

whichtestwon.com was what she talked about last night.

In her experience, most sites are designed by:

• owner’s gut feel of what will sell,
• using a pre-formatted template,
• copying what a competitor is doing,
• following “best practices”.

But they are NOT TESTING. They don’t know for sure what their market will respond to.

Can you guess which test won?

Look at this test on their site: whichtestwon.com.  (at the time of this writing, the test was for imvu.com.) This is a membership site for a company that sells to the virtual reality market. See if you can guess whether page A or page B won the test. BTW, the “winner” of the test was the design that brought in the most money. That was the yardstick: which design resulted in the most sales.

Did you go look? Page B won. This is a membership site. Notice the difference in the membership login in page A and page B. Apparently prospects weren’t yet ready to see the login page and the member login was suppressing opt-ins. As they were using multi-variant testing, they were able to determine that made the difference rather than the difference in the hero shot picture. Are you using space on your page for member login? Could this be suppressing opt-ins?

Which of your pages should you test first?

Which page on your site should you put your resources into testing? One that is already your highest converting page or one that doesn’t do so well. Most would try to bring their underperformers up to speed. Anne says to ask yourself on which page would a 10% increase in sales bring in more actual dollars? Optimize the page that is already doing well first.

This is a mistake sales managers often make in the “off-line” world.  Managers will spend time trying to bring the under-performers up to speed when they would generate more overall sales by increasing the sales of their top performers.

Testimonials and Customer Reviews

We know that reviews help boost sales but many owners of e-commerce sites are reluctant to put reviews up in case they get a bad one. Anne says research shows most customers leave positive reviews. It’s much safer to ask for reviews than people thought it was. What happens is that if you get a negative review you get 3 positive reviews from folks saying “hey I don’t know what that guy is talking about”. People who write reviews tend to be evangelical about the product. She mentioned one e-commerce site that includes a postcard inside their packages to solicit online reviews. They also give a 10% off coupon inthe package as a “thank you” for leaving a review.

Your Sales Funnel

Her next topic was your sales funnel. For most sites you have your entry or landing page, your shopping cart or lead conversion form and then your thank you page.

The receipt / thank you page is the first thing you should be optimizing. The people MOST likely to buy are those who have just bought from you. How about saying on the thank you page “here are 2 more things you might be interested in”. It sounded like Anne was not a big fan of the cross sell.  Why confuse or slow down your customer right before they buy?  After they have entered their credit card information, THEN present an upsell.

On your shopping cart do you have a telephone number? Restate your guarantee on the shopping cart. If your shopping cart doesn’t let you make modifications, but does let you upload a logo, can you create a specialized logo with the guarantee and/or phone number on it?

Video

Anne talked briefly about why video sells. How popular it is now. I flinch every time I hear this as video turns me off. I can read much faster than you can talk and I leave a page if I don’t see the answer written down. But apparently I am in the minority.

I’ve been watching Andy Jenkins new video training (it’s a freebie) and learning quite a bit.  I know I need to get on board with the video.

How about having a product of the week that you showcase in a video. Hold it up, talk about it. You don’t even have to be in the video if you don’t want to. Tell why is it popular… On the page have a picture of the product with the video under it and text as well for those like me who don’t have the patience for the video.

Brad Fallon told us about a test he ran that tested whether the words “add to cart” or “buy now” converted better. At first “add to cart” ran away with it but then “buy now” did. They eventually figured out that “buy now” won during the week and “add to cart” won on the weekends. Maybe during the week when people were at work they preferred to BUY NOW but on the weekends when they were more relaxed they were happy to keep adding to cart.

TEST people you have to TEST.

PS if you want to know more about StomperNet Live9 you can find out more here: www.stompernetlive.com

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Product Launches and Bikinis

Whether it be for books, information products, art, brick and mortar businesses or just about anything that requires getting the word out to your market the rules have changed and continue to do so every day.

Product Launch Formula founder Jeff Walker came up with an interesting way of describing the new approach. His friendly, conversational email sequences became a “sideways sales letter.”

You have a much better chance at turning strangers into prospects, prospects into customers and customers into raving fans if you gently rope them in with a net of high-quality, relationship-building content, rather than trying to harpoon the sale in a single shot.

Your sales message is delivered over time, and in a friendly, relaxed tone of voice. It doesn’t seem desperate. And it doesn’t burn out the prospect. Even if the prospect doesn’t buy this time, he’s in a great mood to buy something else down the line.

I heard it described as the ‘bikini principle‘. Give away 90% of your best content because you’ll create a market of people who want to pay for that final 10%!! Love it!

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Product Launches and Horror Movies

Like Jeff Walker, I am not a fan of horror movies.  Recently we sat down to watch a movie and about 10 minutes into it, the penny dropped.  This was a vampire movie.  I had run 18 miles that morning for my marathon training and didn’t have the strength to argue, nor the energy to read a book.  And yes, that night I dreamed about creatures chasing me.

Even though I don’t much like the horror movie genre, I very much get the analogy between Product Launch Formula and horror movies.   You want your prospects sitting on the edge of their seat wondering what you are going to do next.

Are you starting to see how Product Launch Marketing will skyrocket your sales?  Leave a comment below and we can see if Product Launch Marketing will work in your market.

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Get a 15% Increase in Leads for your Business in 3 Weeks

A bold goal: if you implement these ideas, you can increase your business 15% over the next 3 weeks.

This series of blog posts outlines a strategic approach to getting more leads  into your business. More leads results in more customers which results in more revenue.  (At least theoretically- if you are not converting those leads, then all bets are off. A topic for another day.)

Our goal is to gain a 15% increase in leads for your business within the next several weeks. This is an excerpt from a longer course in lead generation strategy and tactics- strategies for quickly increasing your business opportunities.

If you are online – we are increasing traffic to your website(s).  If you’re offline we are bringing more customers into your store or office.

What we are going to do is show you how to package a series of tactics – online and offline – into a more effective, more strategic marketing program that quickly ramps up your revenue.  More strategic because you will know exactly how much to invest in each marketing channel to produce your target revenue.

Increase your lead generating channels

Often businesses are built on just one lead source or channel.  It might be search engine traffic, pay-per-click, or email marketing, but whatever it is, if you business is built on only one lead source, perhaps even two, you are vulnerable.  That’s because markets and technologies change and what worked yesterday might not tomorrow.

I am going to show you how to work with multiple streams of business opportunities.  Just one new lead stream can improve your business overnight, and by strategically adding complimentary lead programs, as well as strengthening existing programs, your business can have more sustainable profits in record time.

In this series of blog posts, I hope to persuade you to amplify and diversify your lead generating efforts so that you have multiple marketing channels working on your behalf. You might be tempted to skip over this first section since it probably looks like too much work. Don’t. Don’t skip these setup steps.

Lead Generation = Marketing = Attracting Customers to your Business

Where do you put marketing on your P&L? Quit looking at marketing as a sunk cost.  I want you to finally start looking at marketing as a part of your cost of sales, rather than as an expense to be reduced.

When you think of marketing as part of your cost of sales, the relationship between marketing and revenue becomes clearer. You realize there is a multiplier effect on your marketing budget so that for each dollar you spend on marketing you can expect a return of 5-10 times that amount in revenue, sometimes more. Once you realise that you can plan your marketing investment as a way to reach your revenue goals.

Without this understanding you will tend to hold back, trying to keep your marketing expense “in line,” and it is shocking how much this holding back on marketing can hurt your business.

This connection may not be evident if most of your marketing is “hope marketing”.  That is you print up a brochure, put an ad in the paper and hope somebody sees it.    The marketing I want to move you toward is much more granular; you will be able to make a connection, a direct connection between the dollar you spend on marketing and the $10 you receive in revenue.

Takeaway: if you are thinking of  marketing as pretty brochures and radio ads and sharp logos, think again. This ain’t your mother’s marketing strategy.

Define Your Revenue Goals

If you have studied goal setting at all, you realise that the first step to achieving a target is to define it.  Surprisingly, not every business has defined revenue targets. Your plan may be to simply get as much business as possible and you’ll just keep spending some portion of your cash flow on lead generation. That is certainly a viable way to run your business, but it doesn’t give you any insight into managing for particular results now or in the future.   Defining your revenue goals is the first step to knowing how much you need to invest in marketing to increase your revenue by a desired factor.

So Step #1 – Define Your Revenue Goals – How much money do you want to make in the next 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? Go ahead, write it down, I’ll wait for you to find your notebook.

Metrics

The second action is to connect your lead generation activities to your revenue results.  Marketing produces leads which convert to customers.  Those customers produce both short and long-term revenues and profits.  Have you worked backwards from: desired revenue – mix of customers – number and type of leads – to determine your marketing requirements?  Remember what I said about goals.  Many of us are probably shooting in the dark, hoping to just grab as much revenue as possible.

For example if you sell a $500 coaching program, as well as a $47 e-book, how many of each will you sell this year in order to hit your goal revenue? Do both types of customers come from the same marketing channel? You need to know these numbers in order to decide how much you are willing to spend per marketing channel. Getting these numbers and making these decisions is a topic for an entirely different course.

But here is what you need to know: Knowing how many leads you need and what it will cost you to produce them, allows you to know exactly what will be necessary to reach your goals.

Quality of Leads

Another aspect you want to consider is the quality of the leads that come in.  Many online businesses don’t think about things like this especially for the traffic that comes to them through natural search.  Many business owners see an increase in traffic – where ever it comes from – as desirable. But all businesses -particularly service-oriented business es and many off-line businesses -need to qualify leads because you as the business owner will spend energy -time and money -working to close the sale.

If your business is on-line and your traffic is not targeted, you will have a high bounce rate.  (It’s beyond the scope of this discussion to fully explain why this hurts you but here is a short explanation.) So we want to help you qualify leads and minimize the problem of  leads that do not go anywhere.

Before we go into the strategic stuff, before you learn all the strategy,  I want to show you an easy first step.  The first step is the easiest way to generate more leads for your business.

First Strategy: Do more of what you are already doing

If you are already doing something that is working reasonably well can you simply do more of it? This surprised me when I first heard of this tactic. My first reaction was “that’s not much of a strategic idea.” It’s surprising how many people don’t consider this but simply putting more resources into your business will often bring in more leads.

1. For an online business, do you have affiliates? If you have affiliates bringing in sales for you, add more affiliates.
2. Do you have joint venture partners? If you have one joint venture relationship that is bringing in sales for you, go out today and find a second one. For many businesses all their other marketing activities pale compared to what comes to them through their joint venture relationships.
3. Write out 5 things that worked for you last year.  Share these with all of your affiliates and joint venture partners.
4. If AdWords pay per click is working for you and is profitable, but you are minimizing your budget, a bigger Adwords budget could dramatically increase your leads. How many keyword sets do you have in AdWords? Can you create a new set of keywords targetted to a new landing page?
5. Do you send postcards once a month? You could increase that to two times a month. Adding another wave of postcards, e-mails, phone calls or whatever else it is that you are doing could make the difference between okay and great. Figure out what is working and find out how to do more of it.

Maybe there is something that is already on your list you were going to do, but it just did not get done. For example I considered postcard mailings for many, many months before I finally broke down and got a postcard campaign started.  I hesitated as the project just seemed like too much trouble.  I finally decided to use Send Out Cards to get it done easily and economically.  (I am not a rep for them but I can hook you up with one if you are interested in this lead source.)

Rather than spend your time reading blogs like this, go get that thing done. I’m serious. If you have an idea that you think will knock business out of the park for the next six months, why are you not doing it right now?

Magic Bullet

Don’t be disappointed if you came looking for a magic bullet.  The next strategy is another no-brainer that you are probably not doing or doing haphazardly  but don’t overlook this very simple first idea: do more of what is already working.

P.S.

On my weekly mastermind call yesterday I was asking the group about a strategy I was considering implementing.  And…. the collective answer was: why don’t you do more of the other strategy that is already working? Not in an “all your eggs in one basket” approach but a “get what you can out of a working strategy” approach. Practice what you preach.

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Will Smith on Having Your Ideal Life

Many of you may be surprised by how much this will resonate with you.

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Why should I care about Google bounce rate?

When a visitor to your website bounces, it means that the visitor came to the site, looked at one page and then left without looking at any other pages on your site.  Clearly this is not the behavior you want.  You want site visitors to arrive at your  site, find compelling content, see something on your site that interests them and then click on to a second page.

A high bounce rate generally indicates that the page the visitors are landing on isn’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

I have heard that this metric is a bit misleading on blogs, because often visitors to a blog will read the post that interested them and then move on.  While this might be true of regular readers on your blog you will certainly want new readers to look around a bit and learn more about what you do.

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• 5 Ways to Improve your SEO Landing Pages (seomoz.org)
• Where They Go and Why They Leave (gleep.org)

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How To Create PDFs on the fly

Building a swipe file of site designs you like or copy that moves you is a smart move.  Every mentor / coach / teacher will tell you to start a swipe file. But one problem I have is printing the websites.  I never seem to be able to get the site formatted correctly to print.  Here is the solution.

PDFMYURL.com converts web pages into full PDFs. For a simple, no-software-required solution, PDFmyURL creates PDF files on the fly when you plug in a web address. And there’s a bookmarklet so  you can access the service anywhere you browse.

If you just want a PDF of a given URL at a certain time, PDFmyURL gets the job done with no fuss, no muss.

Click the “Advanced Options” on the right, though, and you’ll learn how to pull off PDF production without even visiting the site, embed advanced options, and even run PDFmyURL from your own server. Neat, free stuff, and a great public service.

I used this on one of my favourite sites, Optimal Nutrition For Life. The pdf wasn’t exact on all the background images but was far better than when I tried to print the site from the browser.

Access the application here: PDFmyURL.com – Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free

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Cloud Computing You Will Use

Adobe gets into the crowded web document field

Adobe has recently released a web application allowing you to create and manage documents,  share the documents with others as well as access them anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can find their offering at Acrobat.com.

Acrobat.com provides a file manager, which allows you to upload Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files and share them with others; a word processor, presentation and tables application; and online meeting.  To share documents, you simply e-mail the recipient a copy of the document and specify whether they have edit access or only read access.  This process seems easier to me than the Google docs sharing process.

Naturally, if you are sharing documents and sharing editing responsibilities, you will need to manage revisions. The document history timeline shows the different versions of the document and allows you to jump back and forth between them.

Of course this being Acrobat you can convert your files into PDFs. With the free account you can convert five files a month while with a premium account you can convert an unlimited number of files.

You can read a more in-depth review about Acrobat.com here.   The author concludes that while there is a place for web applications, Acrobat.com is not quite ready to replace your desktop applications. Check it out for yourself.

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How to explain computer concepts to non-techies?

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