Designing Marketing Creatives

The Process Of Creating A Website For A Client

In this article I am going to outline the process that I use for creating a website for a client.

This is the process that I have used to develop a website for Astles of Nottingham – this is a new florist and greengrocers shop based in Nottingham that also wishes to establish an online shop for both parts of the business.

Choosing the Domain

Rather than base our domain name around keywords, we chose to use the name of the business – Astles of Nottingham.

We decided not to include the ‘of’ to slightly shorten the domain name to make it easier to put into the browser. Also the keywords are ‘Astles’ and ‘Nottingham’ – these are words that customers will put into the search box when the business is established.

We decided to use the ‘co.uk’ suffix because it is a UK based business but we did also buy the ‘.com’ and redirected this to ‘co.uk’ just in case customers put ‘.com’ into the browser (or a competitor decides to buy it and divert the traffic to their site -this actually happened to me in a previous business!).

Hosting

Establish where the website is to be hosted. I own Reseller Hosting so in the majority of cases I set up my clients on my web host but it is important to ask first!

Hosted Emails

It is important for both branding and professional reasons to set up hosted email addresses and to forward these to my customers normal email inbox as appropriate. (This is in addition to their Google Gmail account which is set up when they create their Google account below.) This is important for the Contact Form on the website.

Competitor Research

I asked my customer who the top 3 competitors are to her business and she gave me about 10 names. Most of these businesses have relatively poorly-designed sites although we did pick up some great tips from one or two of the sites!

It is a great idea to scope out the competition and in particular check out what keywords they are targeting so that you can get more ideas for your keyword list – see below.

Choosing The Theme

My customer wants to make alterations to the site i.e. input products and also blog posts. I needed an easy interface and WordPress is ideal for this.

We decided to use the Avada Theme because this is the top-selling theme in Themeforest.net which means that it will be well-maintained and supported, most of the glitches will have been dealt with and it has loads of design options so the site can be created exactly as my customer requires.

I went through some of the demo design options, of which there are many, before we opted for a simple, clean design that is totally different to that of any of their competitors.

The downside of this theme is that, because it is fully-loaded’ set-up is comparatively complex and time-consuming as you need to track down the correct settings – and there are a lot of them.

Logo & Font

I then discussed the required font and logo with my customer. As luck would have it, they had an old photo with a font on it that they wanted to use. This related to a greengrocery business that had been in the family many years ago.

It is quite hard to track down a font from a photograph because there are literally thousands of font variations!

We eventually settled on ‘QTCoronation’ which has been used to created the ‘Astles’ logo. This took quite a bit of time but was well-worth the effort.

With regards to font size, I increased all the default font sizes in the theme to make the site easy for customers to read.

Colour Scheme

We wanted a colour scheme to run throughout the business. The shop is very ‘green’ in colour so we settled on green. However, I recommended a ‘light’ feel to the site so we decided to use white, light grey, and green as our colour palette but use the green as an accent colour.

The important thing is to find a colour palette that is aesthetically pleasing (- there are plenty of colour-palette sites that can help -) and that the colour palette is used consistently throughout the business to reflect the brand.

One of my favourite sites is the Robert Welch cutlery site which simply uses white and black and shades in between!

Graphics & Icons

Websites are a visual medium and graphics are an incredibly important element of website design. I therefore spent an afternoon with my customer trawling through graphics sites to find a home page graphic that reflected their business and my customer approve of. The home page is critical because it is the most used point of entry for visitors.

The best converting websites are those that do not have a lot of distractions and the customer can easily navigate to find what they want.

For this reason, the front of the website is a simple graphic that reflects what the business sells – vegetables, fruit and flowers. The customer can then do very little else other than to find out ‘About’ the business or visit either the ‘Greengrocers’ shop or the ‘Florists’ shop which is the whole point of the site.

From the website developers point of view, a significant amount of time can be spent on selecting and customising graphics. It is important that graphics are optimised for the web i.e. compressed and sized correctly to improve page-loading speeds.

This aspect of web-design is a major time-consumer and possibly not well-understood or valued by the customer.

Pages Required

I discussed the basic page structure for the site with my customer and we came up with a relatively simple starting structure. Also, with the addition of the online shop, many of the pages created relate to the efficient operation of the shop.

Keyword Research

This is the area where most of the competitors fall down and the reason why their websites receive less traffic than they might otherwise do – poor keyword research. As a result, their websites are optimised for relatively few keywords and often for keywords that they can never rank for.

For businesses servicing a local community, selecting keywords can be systematic as follows:

City Keyword
Keyword City
City State Keyword
Keyword City State
City State Abbreviation Keyword
Keyword City State Abbreviation
Keyword in City
Keyword in City State
Keyword in City State Abbreviation
State Keyword
Keyword State
StateAbbreviation Keyword
Keyword State Abbreviation
Keyword in State
Keyword in State Abbreviation

Using this methodology, and selecting the business name and products and services offered, and even suburbs of a city, it is possible to develop a more comprehensive keyword list with which to work with.

When I showed the keyword list that I developed for ‘Astles of Nottingham‘ to my customer, they expressed surprise at the size and scope of the list.

Google, Social Media and Traffic

Each business needs to create a Google account. Why? Because around 85% of the search engine traffic is generated through the use of Google.

Also, I integrate my clients site with Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools to keep a handle on traffic and to optimise the site.

Also, for local businesses, it is important to create a business profile in Google to get page one rankings in Google. Businesses need to verify that they own the business and fully-complete their profile.

The same process of creating a business profile needs to be followed for Bing because there are still many users of Bing as a search engine and it is important to pick up the additional 10% of traffic.

In addition to Google+, my customer has opted to connect her site to a Facebook page and a YouTube channel so that she can drive traffic through these media. She opted not to use Twitter and LinkedIn may be added in future.

It is important to consider a strategy for getting traffic to a clients website – possible options include:

SEO
offline promotions driving visitors to the website
social media
PPC – including Google Adwords and Bing Advertising

In addition to SEO and social media, my customer will be running a monthly draw for a free bouquet or box of vegetables for new subscribers and registrants to her online shop. Once she has their contact details, she can then send them an email to bring them back into her website or store.

Selected Plugins

Plugins add additional functionality to WordPress. Using the Avada theme meant that I needed to download 4 plugins to make it function properly at the basic level – this included 2 slider plugins, Contact Form 7 and the Woocommerce plugin for the online shop.

The Woocommerce plugin is quite complicated and time-consuming to configure as there are a lot of potential settings to consider. For this reason, it is important to run through the settings with my client to ensure that they understand and agree with the settings that I have applied. For example, some products are zero-rated for VAT and others are not.

In addition to these plugins, I am adding the following plugins:

‘Regenerate Thumbnails’ to resize thumbnail graphics (free)
‘SEO By Yoast’ to SEO optimise the site – this is currently the best free SEO plugin available in my opinion but it takes some time to set up properly.(free)
Backup Creator – this is a premium plugin by Robert Plank that enables me to automate the process ofbacking up the site on a regular basis.
WP Sonic Defender – this is a premium plugin that moves the -wp-admin’ page to a new location to defeat brute-force attacks and has a number of addional security features.
WP Legal Pages to create the legal pages for the site (premium)
Google XML Sitemaps (free)

Plugins need to be selected with care as too many plugins can slow down the page load speed. On the other hand, you need the site to do what it needs to do!

Trade Associations

I asked my customer whether she was affiliated to any Trade Associations as adding these to her site will potentially lend more authority and credibility to her business.

There are many online trade directories – adding my customers business details will improve search engine rankings over time

Content Creation

There are a number of options for creating the site content:

I create it
my customer creates it
outsource it
a combination of the above

The ‘About’ page will be written by my customer as she wants to cover her families long history as greengrocers in the Nottingham area. This will include some vintage photographs to illustrate this history.

The ‘Delivery’ page was created by researching competitors sites – it will need refinement in the light of operational experience.

My client wants to be able to add and delete products from the online shop. To enable her to do this, I will create a video showing her how to do this so she can create most of the shop content although I will support her with graphics etc.

Blog posts – I suggest that my client creates these (another training video will be created) to cover the following:

promotions and special offers
new products and services
market news such as ‘in season’ produce and price variations
forthcoming events such as valentines day, mothers day etc that relate to seasonal product sales
winners of the customer monthly draw
the initial shop launch

Some of these articles will be created around the targeted keyword list that I have created for my customer to drive SEO traffic to the site and to notify existing customers by email to drive them back to the site with a view to purchasing more.

The point about ‘Content’ is to agree with the customer who exactly will create it and to agree deadlines for completion – for many customers, this may mean that I end up doing the majority of the work to ensure that it gets done.

Delivery Deadline

My customer is opening her shop on the 5th February, in time to sell flowers for Valentines Day.

Understanding my customers expectations for delivery of the website is important because if the time-scale is tight, it enables me to prioritise my work e.g. in this case create the Valentines products in the online shop before anything else!

Conclusion

As you can appreciate from this article, to set up a business website requires quite a bit of work if your purpose is to build on strong foundations. Unfortunately, many so-called website designers skip some of the necessary steps – particularly those that relate to invisible benefits or are deemed future ‘upsells’ to the customer.

In my opinion, 95% or more of business websites are not for for purpose, receiving little or no targeted traffic and poorly designed. Without traffic, a website is just so much digital dust and almost completely useless to the business owner – web designers know this but do not explain this to the customer. Without results, a lot of websites become stale and out-dated because the website owner has no incentive to invest further time or money.

By covering the rigorous process that I use for creating a website for a client, hopefully this has been helpful for you – this is for a small local greengrocers and florists i.e. a local business rather than an authority blog, sniper site or membership site.

Josh Bartletts 10-Step Process

I’ve just been listening to a podcast by Josh Bartlett in which he revealed his 10-step process for creating his products.

Josh is a very successful internet marketer and has created two highly successful products:

Easy Video Suite (formerly Easy Video Player)
Audello which is podcasting software

He was formerly an Ebay Power Seller but gave up this business model to create software and he has a team of talented software engineers working for him although he says that he does not have a lot of coding experience himself.

This is the 10 step process that he recommends:

Pick a niche about which you are passionate
Research the niche and offer as much value as you can before you begin to sell anything
Make a high-quality free product and then ask your prospects to answer a short survey – incentivise them to complete the survey with a relevant prize – preferably physical as this has higher perceived value
You will see a pattern from the survey – research the answer to the main problem and build a product to solve the problem
Follow up and offer more free value BEFORE you release your product to show that you do things to a higher level
Release your paid product to your list of people who opted into your freebie and listen to their feedback
Recruit them as affiliates for your product and educate them about how they can make money with your product
Use those affiliates to do a full launch
Follow up with great after-sales care
PROFIT

What came though in the podcast is that Josh has a desire to offer genuine value – his podcast is called Beyond The Hype – and his attention to customer service which is beyond what most marketers offer.

So his business model has integrity – he create a limited few products based upon careful market research, listens to feedback to improve his offering and offers exceptional customer care to make them the best in the marketplace.

Speaking personally, I was eager to purchase Audello based upon my buying experience of Easy Video Suite – both of these are high-ticket products but price is never a factor if you receive value and greater customer service – I am sure you agree!

Josh Bartlett’s 10-step process has a lot of integrity built into it and it has been highly profitable for him. You can listen to Josh’s full story here.

New Websites For My Daughter

I have just created two new websites for my daughter who is working from home offering a number of health, weight and fitness products.

My sister has been working in the nutrition industry for a long time now and is an international speaker on all things related to nutrition and health. So when my daughter decided to work from home in order to bring up my young grandchildren (without being hammered by care costs) it was natural that she would partner with my sister in building up her business.

My daughter earns an income by earning a commission from the sale of products and also recruiting members to a network marketing opportunity.

She wanted a minimalist design for her website, so I set up http://emsparry.com for her using a spare theme available to me.

I have also set up a members area on a separate directory of the same site.

Here are some of the features of the sites:

the themes are responsive i.e. they resize for mobile devices
they automatically backup on a weekly basis to Amazon S3
they include the latest page building technology i.e. it is easy to create customised web pages with no coding skills
any font can be deployed on each site
the sites are secured against brute force attacks
the membership area will be secured when content is added in due course
the legal pages have been added using a special plugin
the blog has great SEO capability should my daughter wish to generate organic traffic.

The content on these new websites for my daughter is ‘holding’ content because she has not yet seen my designs at the time of writing this post.

If you would like to hire me to create a website for you, then please contact me with details of what you have in mind and I will give you a quote.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies

This article is about effective affiliate marketing strategies – it is being written because I inadvertently stumbled onto an affiliate marketing strategy that I think may be unethical and it gave me pause for thought about the whole game of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you recommend someone else’s product using your affiliate link to link to the sales page of the product. If someone clicks on this link then you get a commission as a reward for your recommendation.

This raises some ethical issues:

should you reveal that you are getting a commission in return for your recommendation? After all it is hard to be entirely objective if you are being compensated.
should you reveal the shortfalls of the product as well as the good points – to do so may jeopardise the sale!
should you only promote if you own and use the product? i.e. that your recommendation is based upon personal use.
should you only recommend when you can either give a demo or show a result with the product – e.g. in the ‘make money online’ niche, show how you have made money with the product?
should you compare this product with those of competitors products before giving your final recommendation?

Some affiliates do hold themselves to these standards but unfortunately the majority do not and I include myself in that because I only tick some of the boxes above. It is just too easy to make a recommendation via an affiliate link because you like a product without holding yourself to a higher standard.

Some affiliates also offer a bonus in return for clicking on their affiliate link – sometimes the bonus can seem more attractive than the product they are promoting!

Personally I try to recommend only the products that I like and use. The exception would be new product launches where I trust the vendor and the product is being offered at an attractive launch price – it makes sense to bring these to my customers attention so they can get in at the lowest price if they like what they see.

This brings me to the point of this article.

I inadvertently stumbled upon an affiliate marketing strategy that is very effective but I don’t think I can easily adopt.

Following our last product launch, I have been approached by a number of product creators to promote their product with my list. There is nothing unusual about this and normally I would ask for a copy of the product so I could see if this is something that would benefit the people on my list.

However, one of the buyers of our product went further and tried to create a closer relationship by offering a video testimonial for our product, commenting on social media and generally trying to make friends with us.

I subsequently noticed that he was commenting on every WSO thread, was everywhere on social media, handing out testimonials every where, interviewing people, offering positive encouragement, thanking people by video and writing comments like confetti.

His recent WSO has just gone to WSO of the Day and he has made over 1,000 sales.

Now I don’t believe his product or his experience online would necessarily warrant that success at this stage so I can only speculate that he is using the above as a highly effective marketing strategy for gathering affiliate support.

But is it ethical?

If I was to create a WSO product which set out this strategy and everyone jumped on board then the forums and social media would be filled with bull-shit comments, testimonials and spurious recommendations promoting various products. Activity that could easily influence others to make a buying decision that they might later regret.

(Having said this, product quality or value is difficult to quantify. Most products have some sort of value within them although, in my opinion, many are of poor quality overall.)

All I am saying is that if we all pursued such a strategy in order to get other people to promote our product it would get very tiresome and could devalue our recommendations and the integrity of the marketplace because we would cynically just be saying nice things in the expectation of being rewarded by someone else promoting and recommending our product in return.

I noticed the above marketer following this strategy recently and I inadvertently (yes, it was an inadvertent comment that had no premeditation about it) touched upon his strategy, I received a furious response in return which quite took me aback.

I was really asking him whether he put his success down to buying and commenting on multiple WSO threads and in social media. Prior to that I had mentioned that the reason I had not launched any products recently was that I was looking for a traffic source other than affiliates because I was questioning myself about the integrity of affiliate marketing.

I think that he put the two things together and thought I was questioning his integrity.

His subsequent response makes me think that I touched on a raw nerve and the penny dropped that perhaps I had inadvertently revealed his whole strategy and perhaps he had his own doubts about the integrity of what he was doing which is what elicited his furious response. (I don’t know but it just seems that way to me in retrospect.)

Perhaps my subconscious twigged what was really going on because, as I say, I was shocked by the fury of his response to my comments.

Nevertheless, a policy of creating relationships with other people – helping them and getting help from them in return – is a very effective affiliate marketing strategy. I may have misinterpreted this marketers strategy but it was only his unexpected response that gave me pause for thought.

Having stumbled upon this strategy, whilst I like helping other people, I would find it difficult to implement because I would question my reasons for doing so i.e. the expectation that they would reciprocate in return. Once you take action with this expectation then the integrity of what you are doing is a little questionable in my personal opinion. Perhaps I am being too ‘nice’ about this?

I know that several of my coaching colleagues feel the same way that I do about these issues and they are looking to PPC rather than affiliates for their traffic.

What do you feel about the ethics and integrity of these affiliate marketing strategies – I would love to know your opinion.

Easy Banner Graphics

I have created a new product called Easy Banner Graphics over the course of the last 3 days.

This product was created quite by chance when I saw another banner template for sale and thought that I could create something that was more valuable.

I have created 10 Photoshop files covering 10 standard sizes for web advertising banners. Each banner can be created in 103 flat colours with silhouette shapes for any niche or perhaps a logo.

The purpose of this product is to make banner ad creation fast and simple to accomplish.

I decided to use a flat colour palette because these colours appeal to me personally – in truth the colours can easily be changed to whatever is wished and the same is true for the font.

This is the first time that I have tried to sell a graphic template so it will be interesting to see if there are any takers.

I will also be offering Easy Web Page Graphics at a discounted price for those that don’t own Photoshop. I have bought a lot of graphics products and I think the overall package is extremely valuable.

This is the first draft of my sales letter: http://easywebpagegraphics.com/banner-letter/ for Easy Banner Graphics.

How To Target Long Tail Keywords

This is a brief article about how to target long tail keywords when doing keyword research for seo purposes.

Long tail keywords are a good option for getting good search engine rankings for your content because the competition for keywords is very intense.

However, always bear in mind that the most important strategy for ranking your content is to ensure that it is of high quality i.e. that it is well-researched, well written and the on page seo gives the search engines a good steer on how to index your content by using on-page SEO strategies such as:

having the keyword in the title, first and last sentences and used in headings and scattered naturally through your article together with relevant LSI (related) keywords.
that images and video titles etc are titled or tagged with your keyword
that you link to other relevant content both on and off your blog as appropriate to maximise the value of your content to the reader.

So how do you target long tail keywords?

Well here are 3 suggestions – the first two are completely free to use and the third is a paid tool that takes your research to the next level:

use Google Suggest to find related keywords
go to http://keywordtool.io and do a search on you main keyword
use a software tool called Long Tail Pro

In the video below, I demonstrate each of these methods to show you exactly how to target long tail keywords for your website using these tools:

GET LONG TAIL PRO HERE

Early Ranking Results – Proof That Targeting Long Tail Keywords Works…

Let the rankings settle down and I expect these rankings to improve over the next few days.

Taking Stock Of My Product Inventory

In this video I am taking stock of my product inventory and I also include an insight into the future products that I have planned. At the same time, I am going to update and rebrand some of my existing products to bring everything up-to-date prior to relaunching them.

I surprised my self by the number of products that I have created!

Tynt.com – Backlink Attribution

Tynt.com has a free product entitled ‘Copy & Paste’ that is effectively a little snippet of Javascript that you add before the header tag on your website (-if you are not sure how to do that Tynt show you how-) and if anyone then copies and pastes your content then it will automatically add a link back to the web page from which the content was copied so that you get backlink attribution.

Potentially this is a good way to get more backlinks to your website from content curation i.e. other people copying and pasting your content onto their own websites or social media sites.

Did I mention it was FREE!!! Go to Tynt.com and do this now! The video below shows you how:

List Building With Optin Hurricane

I am about to start list building with Optin Hurricane.

I have been exploring if there are better and faster methods for building a list. In the past I have relied upon SEO to drive traffic to my website and then had various optin or buying options on my website.

I have also built lists by launching info products on JVZoo and Warrior Plus where traffic has largely been driven by affiliates.

However, I wanted to find a way of creating a list faster through paid traffic but realised that, if I was going to pay for traffic, I needed a number of things in place:

a good sales funnel
analytics to measure conversions and ROI
split-testing to improve conversions
the means to recover traffic ‘leaks’ using exit popups

I bought a product called ‘Optin Hurricane‘ – The Secret Files’ that sets out a basic funnel for solo-ad traffic as follows:

To facilitate the building of this funnel I am using a plugin called Optin Hurricane which I have purchased and installed on my blog.

It is my intention that the front of my website will be this funnel and access to the content on my site will only be granted once someone has gone through my squeeze page.

The plugin knows when someone has already opted in or visited before and previous visitors can therefore be redirected to my blog.

There are a number of other features that make this plugin highly attractive:

Multiple Squeeze Page Styles
Multiple Backgrounds – images, videos or colours
Vertical & Horizontal Squeeze Page Formats
Built in Call To Action Buttons (but you can customise as well)
Diverse Engagement Effects – animated options
One Click Countdown Timers
Exit Pop Up Technology
Universal Auto-responder Integration
Mobile Optimized Squeeze Pages
FB Comment Functionality
Import/Export feature for pages
Add Footers, Menus & Disclaimers
GEO Targeting & Visitor Segmentation to allow only specific countries to visit pages to segment your list
Generate Free Traffic through viral features
Accurate Tracking – find out your squeeze page conversions, premium stats redirects, past visits and build multiple campaigns (- link tracking is built into the software too!)
Redirect Past Sign Ups
Redirect Past Visitors

These extensive features mean that I do not need to add other plugins and software to achieve my goals. It even has an inbuilt meta refresh page that is illustrated in the above diagram as ‘Confirm & Redirect’. This page is also integral to the conversion tracking system.

Now that I have the sales funnel plan and the software to implement the plan, product offers now need to be added, the pages created and then traffic applied to the front of the funnel to test conversions and ROI.

‘Squeeze page 1’ will have an offer that covers a basic plan for how to make money online whilst ‘Squeeze page 2’ will probably cover how to generate traffic which is a major problem to internet marketers. After that, visitors will be sent to my e-book offer wall that is already on my blog – http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .

I then need to write the email follow-up sequence which is the semi-automated part of the system.

This means that when my list building system is set-up anyone coming to my site at http://mark-salmon.com they will visit my primary squeeze page and either optin or try to leave which will trigger a second squeeze page where they will either optin or try to leave which will trigger a redirect to my ebook offer wall http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .

If anyone who has already opted in comes back to http://mark-salmon.com then they will be redirected to my blog at http://mark-salmon.com/news .

When on my blog or if someone comes into my site via a post then there is a pop-over offer to join The Sky Inside (my product) for free and there are other offers bothin the sidebar and on posts and pages throughout my website.

All this is in a effort to maximise the my traffic to my blog by ensuring that visitors have multiple opportunities to join my list which is my primary goal.

Once on my list, my prospect will be redirected to an initial paid offer and will also receive 7 days of follow-up emails with further information and offers. Thereafter, they will join my master list and will receive broadcast emails.

Purchasing Optin Hurricane will make your task of building a relatively sophisticated list building sales funnel relatively easy and I therefore recommend it.

Is Lack Of Focus A Problem For You?

Internet Marketing Snake Oil

Internet marketing often feels a bit like dealing in ‘snake oil’.

It’s often sold as the cure all remedy for those that want to work from home and make a lot of money at the push of a button.

Whilst you can make money by simply sending emails, getting people onto your list in the first place requires a well-executed strategy.

In an interview between my friend, Matthew Houghton, and John Cornetta, this is what John had to say:

In internet marketing, in the make money online niche, the best way to make money online is to sell training on how to make money online!

But it’s a little bit like ‘chicken & egg’ – how can you sell training on how to make money until you have made some money online?

The way around this is to leverage other people’s results by interviewing other people who have had success (-this is exactly what Matthew is doing in this video.) When you sell that product, you can then prove that you have had a positive result and you can leverage that result by showing other people how you did it and you then leverage that result and so on.

Alternatively, you can sell the internet marketing ‘tools’ – plugins and software, skills training and so on – you’ve heard the gold rush story where some people selling the spades made more money than the miners digging for gold!

Internet marketing only begins to make a lot more sense when you move the skills and strategies that you learn from the make money online niche into other niches where you are selling other products and services. Many of these niches are easy to penetrate once you have acquired the cutting edge skills that you have honed in the make money online niche.

So whilst internet marketing in the make money online niche can seem a little bit like selling snake oil, you will learn skills and strategies that can be applied to almost any business.

Lead Generation Using Warrior Special Offers

Warrior Special Offers are a great method for lead generation. You pay $20 for a WSO sales thread and you can put your special offer in front of the traffic on the Forum.

I have noticed that a number of Warriors create free WSO’s – these convert at around 50% or better. If you were then to add a low-priced upsell after the free offer, it would not take much to recoup the expense of your thread and you would have a list of prospects and buyers to market to.

The only problem with these leads is that these prospects would be comparatively low value because it is likely that they are being bombarded by offer after offer and some of them will be freebie seekers. Also, most people do not value that which they get for free so they may not even consume your product!

I was doing some research in Warrior Plus and I noticed that some marketers are using this method frequently and here are their results:

Product /	Launch Date	Sales	Visitor	Visitor	Avg.	Comm	Refund	Niche
Vendor	Launch Date	Sales	Conv.	Value	Price	Rate	Rate

	22/11/2014	250+	59%	$0.18	$0.30	0%
FREE WSO: Fiverr Informer							Fiverr
barbling

FREE WSO: The Basics of Internet Marketing	13/11/2014	100+	47%	$0.00	$0.00	0%	IM Basics
Reed Floren

	11/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: 9 Surefire Traffic Strategies
Reed Floren

Done for you sales and list building funnel Version II	11/11/2014	1000+	51%	$0.61	$1.19	0%
net66

FREE WSO: The 7 Internet Businesses You Can Start Today	10/11/2014	250+	56%	$0.00	$0.00	100%	0%
Reed Floren

	04/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: How to Make Money as an Affiliate Marketer in 48 Hours							Affiliate Marketing
Reed Floren

	31/10/2014	100+	50%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: The 3 Pillars Your Internet Business Needs							IM Basics
Reed Floren

Easy Online Profits	12/10/2014	1000+	8%	$0.00	$0.05	0%
webmarke

As you can see from these stats, some of these WSO’s are getting a 1,000 plus leads.

I notice that Barb Ling tends to create products around breaking news whilst Reed Floren is attracting newbies with products that cover the basics of internet marketing. Both these experienced marketers will be montetising these leads on the back-end like crazy.

It may be worth moving the squeeze page offer on your blog onto the Warrior Forum to get the benefit of the Forum traffic – it’s just an idea!

You can keep bumping the thread as long as you keep getting some good leads and can monitor your return from the leads that you generate.

Perhaps this research will give you the motivation to use Warrior Special Offers for lead generation purposes – if so, join my list if you want to keep informed about more strategies for making money online or indeed for list building.

3 Excellent SEO Tips

Here are 3 excellent SEO tips that you may wish to adopt for your websites in order to generate more search engine traffic.

1 Keyword Research & Site Structure

Prior to setting up your website do some keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner to ensure that the keywords that you are optimising for have a reasonable amount of searches.

I prefer to use a silo structure for keywords i.e.

– choose a primary keyword and 4 secondary keywords for each website and each web page on the site

– these are chosen using the Google Keyword Planner to ensure relevance i.e. input your primary keyword and choose your secondary keywords from the relevant keyword ideas listed

– the website landing page is optimised for the primary keyword of the website and then create articles for the 4 secondary keywords i.e. they become the primary keyword for the article with another 4 secondary keywords chosen using the Google Keyword Planner

– this creates a pyramid structure of relevant articles all linking back to the primary keyword at the top of the pyramid.

– hypertext link between the articles

– ideally you also need to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and add an XML Site Map.

– ideally your chosen domain name should include the primary keyword for the website

If you are looking for website ideas Digital Trends is a great way for coming up with ideas for trending topics that you can rank for.

2 Install the ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin

Install the above plugin into your WordPress site and configure this plugin as per this article: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

3 Install the Transposh translation plugin

Install the free Transposh plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/transposh-translation-filter-for-wordpress/) and configure as follows (- you will need to tick the upgrade box on the xyz settings page and then update the plugin to enable you to select all languages -):

Then add the Transposh Widget to your sidebar

Summary

Now let’s summarise what we have achieved.

We have chosen keywords that get a respectable amount of traffic (because it is pointless ranking for keywords that don’t get much traffic.)

We have structured our content so that it is relevant to the primary keyword and, if we then create high value articles, we should get lots of relevant keyword rankings. (If you would like a tool and training to help you with your keyword structure and creating silo websites then Peter Garety’s P1 Traffic Machine is an excellent tool for this purpose.)

We have added the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin and followed the instructions so that our site content is correctly configured for the search engines.

We have added the Transposh translation plugin so that our website appeals to searches from almost any source on the planet – Google will like this!

These 3 excellent SEO tips will put you a long way ahead of your competition.

SEO Resources

Here are some more SEO Resources to help you:

How to Write an SEO Article – Part 1
How to Write an SEO Article – Part 2
SEO Copywriters: Don’t Let Awkward Keywords Defeat You

Lead Generation Funnels For Local Businesses

How do you create lead generation funnels for local businesses?

If you are a local business looking to generate leads from the internet or a consultant to local businesses, then you may wish to follow the system that I outline below.

These are the components that you will need to assemble in order to get leads:

a free report or a free gift to give away in return for the contact details of your prospect – the more enticing that this is the better.
an ecover graphic of your free give away to make it more enticing
a server to store your give away so that it can be downloaded
a video to sell the idea of downloading your free give away
a series of automated email messages to follow up with your prospect after download to increase the chances of them contacting you by ‘educating’ them about why it would be a good idea to do so.
an autoresponder to enable you to operate the above system
a website or web page to offer your give away
a method for driving targeted traffic to your offer.

To give you an example of some of these components – in this case a Handyman – here is a video, the free report, the ecover graphic and the email messages.

You can probably produce something even better but at least it gives you a good steer on what you need to put together.

Most of this can easily be outsourced if you are thinking that this is a technical challenge:

Ecover:

Download example Report:

Download example Autoresponder Messages:

I do not pretend that this is a sophisticated sales funnel or that the example is something that you should necessarily follow but it is a lot more than the majority of local businesses currently have in place.

In case you are wondering why you need a system like this, then let me explain. Most visitors to your website will never return. Only a very small percentage of visitors will be ready to buy on their first visit. Without a method for capturing their contact details and following up with them, most of your website traffic will be wasted.

By capturing their contact details and keeping your business in their mind through follow up communications, you increase the chances of converting them into a sale and thereby reducing the risks inherent in online marketing.

There are many strategies for increasing conversions – squeeze pages, exit popups to offer an alternative product, split-testing, increasing traffic, improving the offer, improving your copy, increasing the length of your sales funnel etc etc.

Lead generation funnels are an essential component of online marketing for local businesses and also for any other business – hopefully this gives you some ideas for your own business.

Audello Podcasting Software

One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing

‘One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing’ is a short report on the process that I use to create squeeze pages that convert exceedingly well.

This is a system that was taught to me by Mike de Vincent in Squeeze Page Laboratory where he was getting 50%+ optin rates.

I’ve adapted his system slightly, which I felt was a little over-complicated in the way he taught it, and created a short report about it.

Whilst the squeeze pages that are created through this core system are somewhat ugly, they load fast and convert exceedingly well.

My report includes information on:

squeeze page components
squeeze page creation
target audience demographics
thank you pages

If you would like a free copy of my One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing (it is literally 2 pages of content including a link to a video and example squeeze pages!) – then please optin here

Marketing Scams Revealed

In this article I want to talk a little bit about marketing scams.

Having run an offline manufacturing business myself for 12 months, I know what it is like to have to find someone trustworthy to outsource marketing jobs to because there are plenty of untrustworthy agencies in the marketplace – these are the pirates of commerce! They are out to ‘steal’ your marketing budget i.e. deliver a lot less value than you could otherwise get if you had some insider knowledge.

I have recently been reminded of this fact by my son, who has started a marketing job with a company that sells higher-end accounting software. They have put out for two marketing quotes:

to restyle and vectorise their logo – they were quoted and paid £285
to create a survey of their customers – they have been quoted £6,000

These are jobs that I could gave got done for $19 within one hour for the logo restyling with unlimited revisions and in the latter case I could have either set this up for free using Google Forms or, if they wanted a more sophisticated job, for around £200 plus a couple of hours of my time bearing in mind that the survey questions will be created by my son’s firm anyway!

These are just two examples of marketing agencies leveraging the ignorance of their customer to quote outrageous fees. My son is learning fast that he needs to be very careful in shark infested waters!

I would say that 90% of websites created for offline businesses are marketing scams – most of them receive next to no visitors and even if they did would not convert prospects into customers and certainly they could not measure a return on investment.

This terrible scam has undermined the trust and confidence that many businesses have in online marketing which is a great pity.

I have had to bootstrap my business and, as a consequence, have uncovered many fast and cheap ways to get things done – I could make a very good business out of arbitrage i.e. being the middleman and taking a commission out of outsourcing marketing jobs but at rates that would severely undercut these agency sharks.

There is even software available that enables you to identify people seeking marketing help on Craigslist and then matching these request with gigs on Fiverr.com so that you can quote a competitive fee to the customer.

In the info-marketing world, the scammers are characterised by people using false income claims and lying or telling half-truths about how to earn an income online. There are more of these than you would suspect. In fact any small achievement or success is often blown out all proportion by the marketer in an effort to sell his/her product.

You can only implement what you are taught and then get the experience and data you get from taking action – until you have tested it for yourself you must not believe anything you are told!

However, if you have a little marketing knowledge, it can certainly be turned into a good income if you can help businesses to find cheaper and faster solutions than those being offered by outright marketing scammers who are the pirates of our trade.

In the meantime, every business needs to proceed with caution because there are plenty of marketing scams to catch out the unwary. If you are aware of any, please post it in the comments below and share it with your fellow entrepreneurs because we need to expose these marketing scams!

What Is Retargeting?

If you are asking yourself ‘what is retargeting?’ then this article will hopefully help you.

You may have heard about retargeting from other marketers or you may even have noticed those annoying adverts following you around following your visit to a particular website.

Traditionally ‘retargeting’ was (and still is) carried out via email marketing i.e. you opted to someone’s list and they followed up with you via email to persuade you to buy the next product in their sales funnel.

The business case for doing this is that only a small proportion of visitors to your website will buy on your first visit but if you follow up with your visitors you will substantially increase the number of buyers once they get to know, like and trust you.

Nowadays retargeting is much more sophisticated.

When you visit a web page that has a retargeting pixel on it (a small snippet of code), it drops an anonymous browser cookie so that when the cookied browser searches the web it lets the retargeting ad provider know and they will then serve your ads to people who previously visited your website or specific web pages.

This means that you can build ‘custom audiences’ either for people who visit your website as a whole or you can create separate audiences for each page they visit or category of page they visit. This means that you can create extremely targeted audiences.

For example, if your visitor visited a page about video marketing and left without purchasing you can follow up with them via retargeting by serving your video product advert.

How will your retargeting provider know if someone purchased your offer or not i.e. only serve your ad to people who didn’t buy? Well you can set this up in your retargeting by excluding people who who landed on your thank you page or whatever page you identify.

You can also select how long the retargeting ad is served for – you may only want to serve up your retargeting ads for say 3 days after their initial visit but you can opt for up to 180 days if it is cost-effective for you to do so!

The technology is extremely simple and logical to set up – as I said, you just need to paste a piece of tracking code in your website page header and then select your settings when you set up the retargeting ad.

If you are setting up retargeting ads to push your website visitors through a sales funnel, then this post by Ryan Deiss’s team may help you to understand the process.

If you are not using Facebook then you can set up banner ads in SiteScout.com for visitors that come to your site from places like Google – it is free to set up an account on Sitescout – presumably they are rewarded through your advertising spend via their site (- when you have tested their site you need to deposit a minimum of $500 with them for your initial advertising campaigns so they are effectively deterring the minnow marketers!)

Of course, you really need to test how cost-effective paid retargeting ads are by tracking your retargeting advertising costs versus the additional revenue generated and then perhaps to seek to increase your returns by split-testing for better conversions.

You may say to yourself that it is more cost effective to use email marketing but with low open rates and dummy email accounts, this may not be the case any more – you need to find out by testing this for yourself.

Hopefully this article helps you to answer the question ‘what is retargeting?’ If so, please optin to my list in the sidebar to keep yourself ‘in the loop’!

Click Management – Solo Ads & How To Manage Clicks

In this article I’m going to briefly discuss click management and how to manage clicks – why, because clicks are currency!

This is a concept that I read about from Solo Ad Black Book by Matt Bacak, who currently purchases $250k of solo ads per month. He is therefore buying and managing many thousands of clicks per month.

He has also developed a system that enables him to delegate and even outsource part of the job, leaving him to manage his business based upon the data that is flowing back to him.

I learnt a number of key concepts from reading Solo Ad Black Book, which is basically a recording and transcript of a live seminar with a pdf of recommended solo ad vendors based on Matt’s scoring system. The transcript was not easy to read because Matt has a breathless type of delivery that leaves sentences incomplete as he starts off on a different strand of thought to explain what he is thinking.

Nevertheless there was a lot of good stuff in this product that confirmed a number of my own conclusions about internet marketing.

A Lead Often Has A Short Shelf Life (i.e. Watch Your Attrition Rate)

Matt operates in the Business Opportunity / Internet Marketing niche and he separates the market into opportunity seekers (90%) and the more serious players (10%) and his promotions reflect the type of traffic he purchases. However, overall the vast majority of leads are ‘on heat’ (his words) for just 30 days. This means that he aims to turn a profit from each lead within 30 days of optin… but of course he tries to do this much quicker – even instantly from his front-end sales funnel.

(TIP: This is something I noticed from our recent launch of Hangout Cash Code. We really over-delivered on this product but the drop-off of email opens and clicks surprised me after the initial month – we were seeking to create a long-term relationship but, for the vast majority of customers in the make money online niche, this is not easy to achieve, so aiming to be profitable within 30 days in our niche is an important goal!)

His Sales Funnel

His sales funnel has a range of products priced at different price-points up to very high prices to maximise his initial EPC. After free optin, the prospect is sent to a 3 second meta-refresh page which says that the free report will be delivered by email and then the prospect is sent to the front-end product which is priced at $47 (which is relatively high in my opinion but he has clearly tested this price point.) Suffice it to say that he has a sophisticated sales funnel to squeeze out as much income from the visitor as possible. From the $47 offer they go to a $197 offer with a downsell of $97 and then to a $497 offer

His Approach To Split Testing

When split-testing he initially takes a quite radical approach. He will offer either a complete ‘Make Money Online’ product or a ‘Traffic’ product and exit pop to whichever product he is not offering on the front-end. Only once he has determined the ‘radical’ test does he start trying to ‘optimize’ the sales page through further tests. So effectively the initial split-tests are radically different offers before he settles into optimizing the sales pages through further split-tests.

A Data-Driven Business

Matt believes nothing that anyone tells him. He believes in HIS numbers only and he gets those from running his own tests and monitoring the results i.e. his business is driven by data. This is a very sensible approach because there are many half-truths and lies in our marketplace. If you only get one thing from this article it is that should run your business by the numbers i.e. that you measure your performance by the key performance indicators on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Tracking

He uses Hypertracker to monitor unique clicks (in preference to AdTrackz Gold which has a small deficiency in the way it counts clicks.) Each link has an ID which includes the date, name of the solo ad provider and price e.g. Nov14Bailey100for30 (- this means that in Nov 2014 he bought 100 clicks for $30 from someone called Bailey. (I thought this was a really clever way to track his links and will be adopting this myself!)

Paid Traffic -Why Solo Ads?

Because Matt believes in managing clicks he is a great advocate of paying for his clicks. He does not like Google Adwords because of their restrictions, changes in policy and his lack of control i.e. they can shut down your Adwords account overnight. Organic traffic is just too unreliable and time-consuming to pursue and difficult to scale. He has therefore turned to buying solo ads – this is where you pay someone who has a list to send an email to their list driving traffic or clicks to your chosen squeeze page.

The Email Swipe

He insists on providing the email swipe copy so that he can say in the email copy something like ‘Click here to optin in’. This warns the email recipient that if they click on the link they will be asked to optin and this increases the quality of the clicks and conversions and makes the solo ad vendor work harder to fulfil their side of the contract.

Money/Traffic Leaks

Matt studies his numbers to see where there are ‘money leaks’ in his sales funnel and back-end marketing system i.e. where visitors are not doing what he wants them to do. By studying these areas closely, he tries to close down these leaks as far as possible to improve his numbers. He is not concerned with numbers on his list or open rates – he is purely monitoring clicks and revenue i.e. EPC. He is looking to increase his ‘click line’ i.e. the number of clicks he can send to an offer.

For example anyone not opting in on his squeeze page will trigger an exit pop with another offer and if they optin be recycled back to the front-end offer – he has two exit popups in an attempt to plug the leak on his squeeze page .

Buying Solo Ads

He initially buys 100 clicks to test the vendor and then grades them – see ‘Scoring Solo Ad Vendors’ below. If they meet his criteria of prompt deliver and 30% or more optins then he will wait one month for the vendor to refresh their list and in month two buy the maximum number of clicks that he can from the vendor. If they continue to meet his criteria, in month 3 he puts them onto a monthly order system handled by his assistant. He buys through his credit card rather than a Paypal balance because he then has recourse through his credit card company for non-delivery of clicks as he doesn’t want the hassle of going through Paypals process. He also likes his traffic to come mainly from the top 5 countries – USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (although Singapore is also acceptable.) He expects to pay between 30-90 cents per unique click.

Where To Buy Solo Ads?

If you buy Solo Ad Black Book you will get a list of recommended solo ad providers but I also recommend that you take a look at http://solochecker.com . (Here is another site where you can buy solo ads – http://www.soloadmarketplace.com/). You can also find solo ad vendors on the Warrior Forum.

Scoring Solo Ad Vendors

Matt scores solo ad vendors based on speed of delivery, under/over-delivery of clicks and % optins. The vendors score determines whether he purchases again or not.

Systems

Of necessity, because of the amount of solos he is buying, he is very systematic about running his business – he first sets up and tests the system, then delegates to his own office staff and when they can run the system, outsources parts of the system to staff in the Philippines who are managed by his office staff who have already proved that they can run the system. This allows him to scale his business safely because he gets comprehensive management information that allows him to step in and fix the system when the numbers dictate.

Affiliates

Despite holding the gravity record on Clickbank for a launch, this is what Matt Bacak has to say about affiliates: – he regards them as ‘bonus’ traffic because he wants to always be self-sufficient and be in a position to make things happen for himself. (Once again I find myself in sympathy with his thinking because I believe that affiliate traffic has the unhealthy expectation that you will promote in return whether you like a product or not – there is a sort of unspoken expectation of reciprocity which clutches at my integrity – I really want to have the freedom of deciding whether a product is worthy of promotion without that ‘I mail/you mail’ obligation!)

This is a brief recap of what I learnt by listening to Matt Bacak’s Solo Ad Black Book yesterday and I think that it provides a good framework for buying solo ad traffic – it’s all about click management and how to manage clicks.

Tips For Optimizing Warrior Plus To Increase WSO Sales

Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results

My new ebook is entitled Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results.

Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results will be your guide to taking your static webpage and making it a dynamic business portal.

These seven steps range in complexity, but some are incredibly simple and can be incorporated into your business website in a matter of minutes! This means that after reading this manual, you will be well on your way to being at the top of a Google search.

Of course, you need a URL (your website address) and access to the design. If you have hired a web developer to create your website for you, hopefully he or she has already incorporated some of these strategies. Otherwise, you will want to work with your developer to make sure that you are setting up your site for success on Google.

If you can get to the top of their charts, everything else will be smooth sailing and Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results is a blue-print to do just that and it will shortly be made available as a free download for my subscribers.

Three Attractive Internet Marketing Business Models

Landing Page Templates

I have been experimenting with landing page templates to try to uncover a page design that I really like.

In reality, it’s not what I like that really matters – it’s all about how the page converts when I put traffic through it. But first you have to create a page so that’s what I have done.

There is a lot to be said for creating your lead generation page on Aweber like this – very plain and simple, blazingly fast page loading speed, no distractions and these types of pages will convert at 50% plus.

However, most would advocate more sexy designs like these:

One of the highest converting sales pages is Google Adwords sales page so I also created a kind of replica page like this. The colours really need to be a little more subtle to match those of Google but the layout is similar. Also, in the tabbed content, whilst Google Adwords have a call-to-action in each tab, theirs is more subtle. I don’t really like the confusion on this page of having two calls to action – one to the right of the main image to sign up and then the multiple calls to action in the tabs. So I would probably just go with one main call to action or a small call to action at the bottom of each tab (-as per the ‘Success Stories’ tab).

As far as possible, it’s best to keep your landing page above the fold if you can – that’s why the Google Adwords design is so clever with the tabbed content.

I create all these pages within about an hour and then saved these pages as templates so I can redeploy them with actual offers to test them.

If I’m honest, I really like the simple designs best – less is more so I really prefer the minimal designs personally.

Which one of these landing pages templates do you prefer? – let me know in the comment box below and don’t forget to optin to my list in my sidebar if you want to find out at some point in the future how these landing pages actually convert!

Explaindio Video Creator Review

Explaindio Video Creator is a low cost software that will enable buyers to produce both animated and sketch videos and a lot more.

The software is being launched at 11 a.m. EST on 11th November 2014 and there will be an initial launch discount.

We have received a pre-release copy of the software to test it for ourselves prior to release as we already own Video Make FX software (animated video creator) and Easy Sketch Pro software (sketch videos) which compete in the same space.

Explaindio Video Creator combines some of the features of both and may therefore be a cost-effective and efficient substitute for both these pieces of software.

This video explains how to create animated videos with Explaindio Video Creator:

Get Explaindio Video Creator

This video explains how to create sketch videos with Explaindio Video Creator:

Get Explaindio Video Creator here.

As video creation software is currently a hot seller in the internet marketing space, this launch is expected to be yet another best-selling launch on JVZoo.

The software has been created by 3 respected marketers in the internet marketing video space and the quality of the software interface reflects their experience.

It can be relatively expensive to outsource animated and sketch video creation, so this is for those people and businesses who want to create their own animated and sketch videos.

It will be interesting to see how the marketplace receives this new software on the 11th November, but we fully expect it to be another blockbuster based on our experience to date.

We have made our prediction in advance and will report back with the actual results!

For more information on Explaindio Video Creator click this link after the launch date

7 Online Marketing Hacks

PPC & Banner Ad Advertising

The Only Source of Knowledge

The only source of knowledge is experience. Albert Einstein.

If you are stuck in perpetual learning mode, like I was for a long time when I started internet marketing, then you might like to read that quotation again to realise the fundamental truth of that statement.

This means that you cannot gain ‘knowledge’ by reading a book, listening to an audio or watching a video. To gain true knowledge you need to translate what you learn into action to garner the knowledge.

Yes, we can learn from other people’s experience but true ‘knowledge’ is always found when you take action. This is when you find the real truth – often it was not what we thought it would be.

Perhaps when you initially started internet marketing you thought that you could simply sit on your computer, push a few buttons and the passive income would flow in. As consequence of this lie you were told, you went on a prolonged search for the perfect system.

The reality can only be found by taking action with the information you learn along the way. What works for one person does not always work for another – there may be some nuance that you are missing or some factor that changes an expected outcome. Knowledge can only be obtained by taking action and monitoring the result.

The only source of knowledge is experience – everything else is hearsay and conjecture.

The Issue of Scope Creep in Consulting

‘Scope creep’ is a common issue in consulting and one of the big downsides of consulting. So what exactly is scope creep?

This is where you agree to do a job for someone else for a fixed fee and they try to expand the scope of the original project or change their minds about the details of what they want done AFTER the job is done. Both scenarios mean that they expect you to commit more time and resources than you originally quoted for.

The reason I mention this is that today I had just such an issue with a job that I finished last Sunday. It was a job that I took on for some online friends and often these can be the worst type of jobs – I didn’t really want to do it but I relented in order to help them. I did what I thought was a great job very quickly for them and now they are returning to quibble about minor issues where they have clearly had a change of heart.

The core of the job was quite tricky and technical, whereas the details they want changing are really elementary stuff that they could easily amend themselves – things like page names and page order.

The only way to combat this is to ensure that the consulting brief is clearly set out from the outset so that you can refer the client back to it and negotiate an additional fee for any extra work. It is important to be quite firm about this because the client will keep pushing for more if you allow them to push you around.

In consulting, you are effectively selling your time and expertise and so it is important for your client to respect the fact that your time has a value – a high value that reflects your expertise!

If you do not communicate that your time has a high value to you, how can you expect your client to respect your time? This is an educational process and also positions you correctly as an expert whose time is in high demand and that they need to optimise the time they have available with you.

Usually it is important to set out the brief in detail, in writing, upfront so you can refer back to it if necessary when a dispute arises. You may also wish to build in some leeway to your project time and price for these kinds of issues so that you do not end up out-of-pocket because ‘time is money’ to a consultant.

Of course, when I took on this job, I quoted a low price, because they were friends, and didn’t put it clearly in writing because I was under pressure with other work. After 13 years in consulting, I’m still learning the lessons that consulting will inevitably pitch at you when you can least afford the time to deal with them.

Thankfully, this was a relatively small job and so not a lot of harm will be done but it would be very different if this were a large project and the scope creep was substantial.

In the meantime, hopefully you can learn from my mistake and be more careful than I have been about the issue of ‘scope creep’ in your consulting jobs!

How To Write Powerful Email Copy

I have been learning more about how to write powerful email copy from three top products:

The Tao of Email Copywriting by Matt Furey
Kickass Copywriting Secrets by John Carlton
Autoresponder Madness by Andre Chaperon

Last night I finished going through the Matt Furey product (which retails at $197). He is reputed to be one of the best email writers on the planet.

It all started out a bit slowly, with Matt talking about how to get yourself into the correct mindset to write email copy. This consists of some deep breathing exercises designed to get you into the moment and to energise your mind – this energy to be reflected in your subsequent writing.

As I lay on my office sofa listening to Matt in CD one, when he was talking about the fact that he was a world class copywriter, I was beginning to think it was all a lot of guru bullsit. You know the sort of thing – they spend a lot of time telling you about what a wonderful person they are and all the incredible things they have done!

I don’t really like this much – it’s a technique that Brendan Burchard uses to excess in my opinion to establish his credentials – too much hot air and not enough content!

Any ways, after not really being fully engaged by CD1 I decided to put on CD2 and see if I could manage to focus on what was being said (because I found CD1 hard to digest!)

I have to say that CD2 turned out to be simply the best explanation of copywriting that I have heard in all my 13 years as a business and marketing consultant.

What really electrified my mind was that Matt simply stood up and delivered an example of an email in front of his audience – it was made up ‘off the cuff’ so to speak. He said it was important to write your copy exactly as you speak (tidied up a little of course). This makes his writing very natural and he delivers his copy based on STORIES and his own life experience.

He starts his stories based on TIME & PLACE e.g. ‘when I was 5 years old growing up in XYZ this happened to me’ and eventually he transitions his story into his promotion. He said that this was a technique that Ronald Reagan used very effectively.

As soon as you begin your story with time and place you draw your audience into what happened at that time and place. Sometimes stories weave in and out of each other.

This is a very powerful technique and I believe that Andre Chaperon’s technique is similar – he basically creates a ‘Soap Opera’ in his emails that draws you into the story.

Matt talked about the fact that there are at least two stories in every email – what you want your reader to understand and your product or service promotion and how it relates to your positioning storyline.

The power of this story technique is further emphasised later in CD 2 and CD3 when Matt gets his audience to write emails based on this technique and then picks on members of the audience at random to read out their emails. Through the use of powerful personal stories I have to say that in every case these examples are quite riveting.

I think that if you can tell a story based on your own personal experience it seems more authentic and real – particularly if you can outline your failure and personal problems.

I have to say from a personal perspective, my own email copywriting should be a great deal more powerful as a result of listening to ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ because the lesson of writing from your own personal experiences has really hit home hard this time.

When I was at school I excelled in English Literature and English Language but through many years of business report writing and business writing, I lost touch with the creative muse that really enables me to write powerfully and authentically.

Just as I have recently rediscovered a love of creating art from photographs, I think I will now have a great deal of enjoyment writing powerful and creative email story-lines.

(I live in Shakespeare’s home town, so I really ought to take a leaf out of his book and dig deeper into my creativity. How did a home boy from Stratford-upon-Avon begin to write that stuff – it still baffles scholars today?)

Matt made the point that you do need to be FEARLESS in your writing – this will offend some people but this is also good because it means that you are having some impact on other people in a sea of grey and mediocre rubbish. It also means that you need to reveal your frailties as well as your strengths.

Whilst Matt isn’t the greatest speaker, it was really when he started to give examples of his work that the ‘penny dropped’.

It is also very evident that he is not afraid to SELL his products and services hard – he says that it is important to send emails daily and even twice or three times daily. He always makes more money if he does this and he makes millions from his email marketing.

You can read examples of Matts emails here.

And this leads me onto the purpose of this article. At some time in the near future I am creating my own email marketing product entitled – ‘Email-ATM’ – which will be based on my own experiences and what I learn from these top copywriting products – each of the products listed above costs quite a bit of money if you were to buy them yourself.

Copywriting is one of the most prized and also lucrative skills that you can possess in online marketing. I have paid a heavy price my not outsourcing my own sales letters to professional copywriters. I write all my own copy because this is a skill that I really want to master and Matt’s ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ has moved me a big step closer to that goal.

So why not join my list at the top of the sidebar and I will inform you when I launch my email copywriting product based on the distilled wisdom of these gurus, and others that I have studied, like Gary Halbert and Gary Bencivenga.

If you get Email ATM you will definitely learn a lot more about how to write powerful email copy – so make sure you join my list now to get what will be an awesome product.