Archive | February, 2021

Are you entering a niche in which you have ZERO experience? Good. Actually, great! Here’s what you do…

Start a blog. From day 1, explain that you know nothing about (your new topic, such as cooking) but you’re on a quest to learn (a specific outcome or goal, like how to make the world’s best pancakes) and invite the reader to make the journey with you.

Now start reading about your topic. A lot. Buy and use the products in your niche. Write about what you learn, and tell about your experience with the products. Recommend the good ones.

Once you’ve got a dozen or more blog posts, start asking experts in the niche for interviews. If you’re too shy or nervous at first, you can start with email interviews and work your way up to audio interviews. You become the researcher / reporter, and you let the experts handle the heaving lifting.

In 1-5 years? Now YOU’RE the expert. And you never had to lie about knowing stuff you didn’t know when you got started. In fact, you got to be honest, truthful and yourself the entire time. And you’ve built a tremendous rapport with your audience who very much feel you’re just like them.

When you use this formula, your readers will trust you and they’ll act on your advice, whether that’s to buy an affiliate product you recommend, buy your own products or eventually let you coach them.

As far back as 1996, Bill Gates stated that the Internet would evolve into a “marketplace of content”. This prediction has indeed come to pass, as content is now considered to be “king” in the world of CRM and marketing in general.

You are already aware that presentation is the key to success. Whether referring to blogs, white papers or the average product update, client engagement is key. Fully developed strategies to implement, collate and present this content are now critical to the success of any business. WordPress has become one of the cornerstones of this industry. What aspects of this turnkey software allows it to be the choice of countless companies?

The Intuitive Edge

Were you aware that no less than 55 percent of the top million most-visited portals in the world employ WordPress as their CMS provider of choice? This largely arises from the fact that WordPress is highly intuitive. In other words, you need to know very little in regards to coding to create a great online presence. From user-friendly dashboards to preview pages to make certain that your page presents correctly, the user-friendly nature of this system cannot be denied. If you are able to edit text within a standard Word document, you will have little trouble adapting to WordPress.

The Power of the Open-Source Force

Another massive advantage of WordPress is that it is an open source. You will not have to pay one cent in order to utilize all of its tools and benefits. This is in direct contrast to other systems which require monthly installments in order to access benefits. Free products and services are attractive; particularly those which are as effective and easy to work with as WordPress.

Multifaceted Multimedia

In the past, embedding videos, GIFs and other widgets into a website were difficult without having a great deal of experience with coding. This frustration has been done away with thanks to the streamlined presentation that WordPress offers. Importing videos, images and graphics has never been easier. As we all know, embedded visual aids can make all the difference between an interested visitor and a high website bounce rate. The built-in tools provided by self-hosted WordPress have made it very simple to design a high functionality, and visually compelling website without very little technical knowledge or experience.

The Mobile-Responsive Edge

It is no secret that modern websites need to be mobile responsive in order to reach the most users possible. This can be difficult to address with in-house systems and if the mobile demographic is not reached, a great deal of business will naturally be lost. WordPress offers a number of turn-key themes which can be quickly integrated into your existing website architecture. This alone can dramatically boost a website’s natural ranking in the search engines, and thus a site’s daily visitor numbers.

Community Help

The open-source nature of WordPress enables you to find help when you need it the most. While most features are easy to use, there will inevitably be times when questions need to be asked. Thanks to a robust online community, help is never far off. This is in direct contrast to other CMS systems which usually provide a much more limited range of community support and creative solutions. With WordPress, there is a solution for nearly anything that you want to accomplish with your website, and if it doesn’t exist yet, you could easily have a coder create it for you on third-party sites such as Fivver or Upwork.

WordPress is here to stay. As a continuously growing number of websites are building their online presence with WordPress, it only stands to reason that its marketing value for online businesses will continue to grow. It will be very interesting to see how WordPress evolves as the needs of the modern business likewise advance, but rest assured they will meet tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities just as they have been doing since 2003.

Once there was a king who wanted to bathe in a giant swimming pool of milk rather than water… He had heard it was great for your skin, but it was too large a task to do alone.

He first told some of his workers to dig a pond. Once the pond was dug, the king made an announcement to his people saying that one person from each household had to bring a glass of milk during the night and pour it into the pond. So, in his estimations, the pond should be full of milk by the morning.

After receiving the order, everyone went home. One man prepared to take the milk during the night but milk was very rare in this town and he wanted to keep it. He thought that since everyone would bring milk, he could just use a glass of water and pour it inside the pond instead. Surely, because it would be dark at night, no one would even notice. So he quickly went and poured the water in the pond and came back happy.

In the morning, the king came to visit the pond and to his anger, the pond was only filled with pure water! What happened was that everyone was thinking the same thoughts as the other man that “I don’t have to put the milk, someone else will do it.”

When it comes to business help, do not think that others will take care of it all for you. I’m not saying not to accept help where you can get it. Help is important, but remember that it starts with you. If you don’t do things for yourself or at least oversee them, no one else will do it and if they do, you can’t complain that they did it wrong because you used something or someone outside of yourself to make it work.

There are only so many experts, workers, software, systems etc. that you can use to get ahead, all that will come later when you are rolling in your fortune. Meanwhile, if you want quality, get your hands dirty, do the learning, do the work and feel genuinely rewarded from it. This will avoid mistakes caused by others, it will encourage you to take responsibility and it will give you a sense of achievement.

If you have many automatic processes working for you and they are performing well, that’s great. But if there is anywhere in your life that you can step in and say – “Can I do more here? What can I do today that I didn’t bother with yesterday? What extra mile of work can I put in just for now?” Then every day will have purpose and every moment will feel in your control.

Life and business is all about what YOU put into it, so be sure you are doing everything you can every single day to actualize your full potential. Yes, leverage the help of others along the way when needed to improve efficiency, but never fully rely on others. Your life is what you make it, so make it ALL that it can be!

Many people think that they need to have all the answers to be successful in any capacity; business wise or in life. While we all require some knowledge, there are some people in the world that have made it without.

That is, without qualifications, studying, school or even full expert knowledge of the field they want to be in. In fact, the majority of the world’s richest people know that they don’t need to have all the answers in order to gain success, and what’s more, they use that to their advantage.

They may have a certain specialism in their field, but using Henry Ford as an example, having a solid team of people who fill out your knowledge gaps is far more important than having all the answers for yourself. Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Cars and was a very wealthy man in his time.

A Chicago paper published some articles after the First World War, claiming that Henry Ford was an “ignorant pacifist”. Mr. Ford rejected the idea that he was ignorant and retaliated by bringing a libel suit against the paper, even taking the not-so-common approach of putting himself on the witness stand to prove that he was in fact, a very clever man with nothing to hide.

The court lawyers asked Mr. Ford a series of pointless general knowledge questions and accused him of being a man who runs a car company with no real knowledge or experience with cars, the industry, academics or mechanics. The answer he gave silenced the court and became a very famous statement…

“If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me, WHY I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I require?”

This retort was genius. The fact was – Ford didn’t have all the answers and that was OK. He had instead kept his mind free from clutter and employed experts in their fields to answer his questions while he focused on keeping his company running smoothly. If he needed to know about brakes, he would push the button for that expert, if he needed someone to explain engines to him, he had another. He used the specialized knowledge of others as an external brain to store extra information in and it made him the success he was.

You Too Can Be Like Henry Ford

We now live in the greatest information age of our time. You can Google any question you may have, so without qualifications – we are becoming experts just by searching.

The point is this – do not avoid a certain field or reject a job opportunity or investment because you feel you are not up to scratch, use other experts and research to find out as much as you can about your industry. Knowledge is power. If you think you don’t have it and that’s stopping you from moving forward, find someone who does and get up to speed.

Getting traffic to your squeeze page, website and sales pages is terrific. But if that traffic doesn’t convert, what good is it doing you? Here are 22 proven strategies to get your visitors to do what you want – whether that’s giving you their email address, sharing your content on social media or buying your products.

Before you read the following, allow me to offer 3 words of caution: Empty your cup. Just as a full tea cup can hold no more, a closed mind can’t increase conversions.

Imagine 3 people read this article. The first person says, “I’ve heard some of these before,” and dismisses the entire list. But is he doing these things? No. Are his conversions increasing? No. The second person reads this list and says, “These won’t work.” Again, her cup is full and her conversions never improve. The third person? Is you. You read through these and say, “That’s a good idea, yeah, I’ve been meaning to do that. I’m glad for the reminder.”

And then you get busy. Think your conversions will improve? Absolutely.

Let’s get started…

→ Use testimonials and case studies. A lot. Don’t just have a section for testimonials – work them into your copy, into your videos, everywhere.

→ If you don’t have testimonials and case studies, get some. Even if it means giving your product or service away or at a steep discount.

→ Use a guarantee. Or two. Or three. What sounds better, “If you’re not happy, you get your money back” or “You are 100% covered by our TRIPLE guarantee.”

→ Don’t make your guarantee contingent on anything but their satisfaction. Don’t say, “When you do every step in the program exactly as outlined, we guarantee you will get x results.” Instead, tell them if they so much as don’t like the font, they are fully covered. This takes all the fear away. Yes, refunds may increase slightly. But sales will increase even more.

→ Give them an ongoing bonus. Refunds do affect your true conversion rate, so reduce refunds by offering a terrific bonus that they get only if they don’t refund. For example, a valuable year-long membership can work well.

→ Use action verbs. Instead of, “Get yours today,” say, “Grab yours” “Reserve yours” or “Claim yours today.”

→ Reaffirm the sale repeatedly. Write an autoresponder sequence that kicks in after the sale. Each email should reaffirm how smart they were to buy the product, provide testimonials and show them something about the product they may have missed. “Did you see the trick in video 4 on how to get your mother-in-law to stop harping on you? Sally Smith used this exact technique and here’s what happened…”

→ On opt-in forms, use as few fields as possible. If you can just ask for their email address and first name, do it. If you need more info, consider asking for it later.

→ Use a two part opt-in. The first page announces the bonus and has a button to grab their copy. They click the button and it takes them to the second page where they put in their email address. These almost always out-perform one page opt-ins.

→ Pay a graphic designer to create a professional looking cover. Whether you’re giving away a book or selling a course, your cover should look as good as a New York Times Best Seller. If it does, your conversions will increase – sometimes dramatically.

→ Test and retest possible headlines. Sure, you’ve heard it before. But how many headlines have you tested on your squeeze page? Your sales page? It’s possible there is a headline that will literally double or even triple your conversions – you just need to find it.

→ Use video. On landing pages and sales pages, have a short, simple video showing that there is indeed a real live person behind the brand.

→ Create dedicated landing page for… everything. You’re doing a guest blog post? Create a page that says, “Welcome readers of ABC blog.” You’re running a PPC ad? Create a dedicated page that perfectly matches what the ad said.

→ Include subscriber or social media follower counts. Anytime you can provide positive social proof, you’ll increase conversions. That said, if you have 5 followers or 10 subscribers, wait until your numbers are more impressive to share them with the world.

→ Use strong, clear calls to action. Never assume they’ll fill out the form if you don’t tell them to.

→ Lose the hype and “get real.” Customers can spot hype a mile away. So instead of “BUY THIS NOW,” try, “If you want (benefit) then I’ve found ABC product works well.” Then tell them why it’s not for everyone.

→ Prevent them from comparison shopping. Let them know that your product has no competition because you do things or offer things no one else does. (Do this only if it’s true. If it’s not true, make it true.)

→ Get visitors excited. Use emotionally charged language, tell stories and create desire. Get visitors eager to have your product or service.

→ Don’t use boring generic images. You know the ones – a stick figure at a computer, 4 people in suits sitting around a table, a lightbulb, etc. Use interesting images that capture attention and make the visitor look twice.

→ Test a single column layout. MECLabs tested having a sidebar versus not having a sidebar. The version with only one column won – and generated an astonishing 681% increase in conversions. But further tests showed this is not always the case – thus the need for testing it on your own pages.

→ Include headshots on your webpages. Again you want to show there is a real person behind the brand.

→ Spend serious time crafting your “about me” page. Include your bio, come across as a real person, include plenty of contact info, and talk about what you want to help the reader accomplish. Done right, your “about me” page can be your greatest selling tool.

Pick out exactly 3 and write them down. Do one of them today, one tomorrow and the third on the following day.

Then pat yourself on the back, because you’ve just done more to increase your conversions than 95% of marketers out there.

Sometimes the shortest path to your next great internet marketing idea can be found in the annals of public relations history. I’ve sorted through 100 different PR stunts to bring you the most inspiring and entertaining exploits to stimulate your thinking and give you that one great idea you’re searching for.

1929 – Torch of Freedom anyone?

There was a time when it was not socially acceptable for women to smoke cigarettes in public, because it wasn’t considered ‘lady-like.’

So in 1929 Edward Bernay, one of the fathers of PR, got good looking women to light up cigarettes in New York’s Easter Parade, and he hired photographers to send the photos to news outlets around the world. He also renamed cigarettes “Torches of Freedom” for the women’s liberation movement. Sales of cigarettes to women skyrocketed.

How can we use this? First, if it appears that your product is being used by others, then prospects are more likely to buy it. It’s social proof, and it can be highly effective. Second, take great care when naming your product. Would you smoke a cancer stick, coffin nail or lung buster? Of course not. But if you were a woman in 1929, or even 1990 when they revived the ‘torches of freedom’ name, you might very well smoke it.

1986 – Human chain for charity

More than 7 million people across 16 states made a human chain to raise money for the hungry and homeless. Even President Reagan joined in, with everyone paying $10 for their spot in the chain. (Do the math!)

How can we use this? With social media, it would be easier than ever to organize something like this to raise money. Your website would of course be the sponsor. Imagine the free publicity! Tie it to a current event, such as relief for a natural disaster.

1996 – Taco Bell buys Liberty Bell

Taco Bell took out a New York Times ad that stated, “Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell.” The ad explained that they were renaming the historic landmark the, “Taco Liberty Bell.” The publicity was enormous as people rushed to complain. By noon Taco Bell admitted it was an April Fool’s joke. Over a thousand media outlets covered the story, and millions of dollars in additional sales were generated over the next two days.

How can we use this? The possibilities are endless. You can spread your ‘news’ on the internet or actually take out an ad like Taco Bell did, or both. You might announce that your website has just purchased a historic landmark, or is going to do something at a landmark (leap the Grand Canyon on your brand of vacuums?) or declare national naked day or whatever your imagination inspires you do to. The trick is to tie it to your brand like Taco Bell did.

1998 – Burger King announces left handed Sandwich

How people fell for this one I don’t know. Burger King announced they’d redesigned the Whopper to make a version better suited to the needs of left handed people. It was of course an April Fool’s joke, but that didn’t stop 32 million Americans from going to Burger King that day.

How we can use this – a website for left handed people? Tall people? Red-headed people? How about your products – maybe you can modify them to suit a special group of people. For example (and I’m being serious for a moment) you could take your marketing course and tailor it just to chiropractors, just to dentists, just to plumbers, etc.

And in a humorous April 1st mode of thinking, you might claim to alter your books for dyslexics, swapping the words around so when they’re read by dyslexics they come out right. Make sure you’re on the correct side of political correctness if you try something like this.

1999 – Half.com buys town for $100,000, sells company for $300 million

Half.com paid a small town in Oregon, called Halfway, to change its name to Half for one year. They gave the town of Half $100,000 and a package of other financial subsidiaries. The publicity on this exploded, and shortly thereafter Ebay bought the company for $300 million.

How we can use this – obviously most of us can’t afford $100,000 to buy a town for a year, although if we could, the return on investment could be mind boggling if Half.com’s experience is any indication.

You might pick out a very, very small town – Ideally one that isn’t even incorporated – and offer some kind of package (perhaps a marketing package to tourists?) If they will change their name to your website url. The key here is of course the free publicity, not only for your site but also for the town itself. And you can always offer a piece of the pie to the town should you sell your site for big bucks due to the free coverage you receive.

2000 – BA Can’t Get It Up

British Airways sponsored the London Eye (the ferris wheel) but they had an issue getting the wheel up. After several attempts while the press was watching, BA had a plane fly over with a banner that read, “BA can’t get it up,” turning a PR nightmare into a good laugh.

How we can use this – when everything is going wrong, find a way to laugh at yourself and others won’t mind. And more specifically, next time your site is down, go ahead and email your list and tell them you can’t get it up. They’ll enjoy a good laugh and they won’t soon forget you or your site.

2008 – Shreddies Goes from Squares to Diamonds

Shreddies – a 70 year old breakfast cereal – got people talking about their product again when they turned their square cereal 45 degrees. This was the “new and improved Shreddies,” and tons of positive feedback poured in. Customers even reported the diamonds tasted better than the squares.

How we can use this – rename your products, rename features on your products, put a new spin on something old… seriously this one should set your brain on fire with possibilities.

If tongue-in-cheek claiming that a cereal has changed shape by rotating it 45 degrees can create an influx of free PR and boost sales, imagine what you can do.

2012 – Pretending to Get Publicity

Ryan Holiday tried to get free press simply as a joke. He used Help a Reporter Out to find reporters needing experts for their stories. Then he made up whatever the reporters wanted to know, resulting in his being featured in numerous articles and news stories. His goal? Simply to get his name out there.

How we can use this – if Holiday could get publicity for fake purposes, imagine what you can do with your legitimate expertise. Get registered on HARO and then look for reporters who need exactly the kind of information you can supply them with. And if you can add in a little humor into your interviews, all the better.

There you have it – 8 crazy PR stunts that worked like a charm. Start small, think out of the box, and don’t be afraid to try something new, silly or charming. The worst that could happen is nobody notices. But you might just get free publicity for your business, an influx of new subscribers and customers and a day in the spotlight.