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Going into advertising blind is a worse mistake than waving a stack of $100 bills around in a strip club.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, advertising is basically gambling.  If you get lucky, you might make some money.

Since advertising has been around for a few hundred years, there is plenty of information out there to help you get the kind of results you need.

The single best thing you can do as a marketer is build up a “swipe file” of ads that caught your attention.

While great sales copy is worth adding to a swipe file, what we’re looking for here are specifically advertisements.  The more great ads you have access to, the easier it will be to find inspiration for your own.

Tools Of The Swipe File Master

A word processor – If your ad is text based, you can simply copy and paste it into a document.

A scree capture tool – Again, what you use doesn’t matter as long as it captures what you have on your screen.  Jing is free and easy to use, but feel free to use any tool you have.

The right interests – If you aren’t already doing it, find a few pages on Facebook, Tweeters on Twitter, Pinners on Pinterest, and Insta users on Instagram that are in your market.  This tells that social network that you’re interested in your topic and should have them showing you ads that you can swipe.

Last but not least, the camera on your phone can be useful, too.

What To Watch For

While you’re going to want to watch your market, you should pay attention to any ads that catch your eye, make you want to buy something, or steps outside of what you might normally see.

• What makes you want to buy?
• What grabs your attention and refuses to let go?
• What do you think your audience will respond to?

Don’t be picky, grab it!  If you see something that may help you in the future, use whatever you’ve got and save it.

If you’re at your computer, either copy and paste it into a document or use Jing to take a screen grab of it.

If you’re on your phone, do a screen capture to save it.  Email it to yourself.

If you’re out and about, use the camera on your phone to save it.  Email it to yourself.

Even if you don’t end up using it later, it’s better to grab too many ads than to let a good one pass you by.

You’re a marketer and the more weapons you have in your arsenal, the better you’re going to market your products and services.

How To Organize It All

Obviously you’re going to want to cater to the way you organize things.  Whether you do this in folders or organize your swipes in a single document is up to you.

Here is how I separate my swipe file:

Headlines – Generally, I’ll just copy and paste headlines into the same document.  It’s called Headlines…

Banners – For this one, I’ll either save the image or do a screen grab.  They all go into their own folder.

Ads – I almost always do a screen capture of ads.  Usually, there are multiple pieces (headline, picture, body, etc…).  I have them in their own folder.

Emails – These are kept in a single document.  I copy and paste the email and the subject line.  Then, I post the date that I grabbed them.  Something that worked 5 years ago may not work today, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worth testing.

Sales Letters – Yes, entire sales letters.  For this, I try to save the entire page.  Your browser should have a “save page as” option under your file menu.  If not, you can screen grab individual screens.  It’s a pain in the butt, but a great sales letter is worth the trouble.

How it’s organized doesn’t really matter as long as you can navigate the file and get to what you need quickly.

How To Put It To Work

Once you have some files together, you’re going to want to use them.

Every shortcut that works is worth using, right?

The key with a swipe file is not to steal.  It’s to model.

Pay attention to the structure of an ad, email or sales letter.  Name the pieces and use those names to help you figure out what to put in their place to sell your own stuff.

The alternative way to use it is to “fill in the blanks”.

Remove key terms that relayed what their product is and replace it with one that accurately describes yours.

The Ultimate Shortcut?

You should have a swipe file if you want to sell more of what you sell.

Yet, there is an easy way to get the traffic you need.

To order traffic from us at TrafficForMe, all you have to do is select your market and give us your landing page.  We make it really easy.

The holy grail of internet business is free traffic, yet it’s also an elusive, secret thing that most people can’t find.

Let’s take a dive in and take a good look at what each one is and how to get it.  Then, we’ll go over why you want to aim for both.

Free Traffic.

Free traffic is usually based around content.  Video content.  Audio content.  Written content.

The best place to start when figuring out what content your audience wants is to look at places they talk about the topics related to what you sell.

If you sold cloth diapers, you’d want to find parents that have “hippie” tendencies.  This Facebook page would be a great source of content ideas.

What you’re looking for are places where people will talk to each other.  As of right now, you’d be focused on a Facebook page or group.  Certain Instagram accounts would be worth following, too.  It all depends on the problems your products or services solve.

Now, that you have an idea of what to talk about, you want to make sure you’re targeting properly.  To do this, you’ll want to do some keyword research.  How you decide to do that is completely up to you, but the Google Keyword Planner works as well as many paid tools and it’s free to use for anyone with an Adwords account.

The secret to finding the right keywords is to start at the easiest place you can.  You’re going to want to focus on keyword phrases with little competition.  Once you rank for those, you can start targeting more competitive ones.  Be patient because it can take quite awhile before your website generates enough authority to rank well.

The single biggest benefit with free traffic is that it comes no matter what you do as long as you set it up properly.

There are non-content related ways to generate free traffic, but they’re generally going to be even harder than simply producing content on a site you own.

Infiltrating an existing community is harder than crushing a diamond with your fingers.  There is an existing group of authority figures in any community and they will do everything in their power to prevent you from gaining authority in their group.

An alternative is to record your content as a YouTube video and build a channel there.  Just keep in mind that you’re already going to have competition there.  If you follow the basic idea of targeting less competitive phrases, you can still gain traffic in most markets.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is amazing when done right.  You post an ad and hope that you make more than you spend.  If you make more than you spend, you spend more to make more.

It’s a glorious moment the first time it happens and there is no greater win when it comes to your business.

Yet, there’s a catch.  The sales only come if you’re still paying for the ads.

Even then, some ads have a half-life.  They’ll only work for awhile.

Others can stop working when the audience changes or evolves.

When it comes to advertising, you’re starting in a gambler’s position.

“If I spend this $200 and make X amount of sales, I’ll make X amount of money.

Then, I just have to take a portion of the sales and spend that on more traffic.

Rinse, wash, and repeat.  I win.”

Keep in mind that it doesn’t always work out that way.

The key to advertising is to understand all of the involved variables.

When you run solo ads, you have to consider the list, the email, the subject line, and the landing page.

With Facebook ads, you have to think about the interests, the headline, the ad copy, and the landing page.

One ad or email my perform really well to one list or interest and get zero response with another.

This is why any advertiser checks their data a few times per day.  They watch weekly results to see if there are times when their ads shouldn’t run.  The look for new traffic sources to keep sales inbound if one advertising platform dries up or shuts down.

When it comes to advertising, if you’re not optimizing, you’re waiting for failure.

Watch.  Measure.  Test.

Make adjustments based upon the results you get.

The reason you need both.

Advertising results stop when you stop paying while free content based traffic will continue for as long as the content is relevant.

What this means to us is that we should advertise for instant traffic, leads, and sales while we build up our content to drive continued traffic.

What do you do when the content starts driving in sales?  Keep advertising.

No matter how good your content is, you’ll never reach 100% of your audience with search engine rankings.  Advertising gives you the power to reach more of your audience.

When it comes to advertising, the more variables you have the higher chance you have of failure.

At TrafficForMe, we take most of the variables away.  Give us your landing page URL and choose a market.  As long as what you have suits the market, you’ll get new leads.

The autoresponder is the single greatest software you’ve got for producing relationships with your customers and produce sales.  The idea of being able to create a series of messages and have them go out at intervals you choose is simply awesome.

Yet, it’s very easy to do it wrong.  

If you include the emails described here, you’ll see an increase in sales.  More importantly, you’ll have an increased level of trust between you and your customer.

Increased trust = Increased sales.

You don’t necessarily have to include very single one of the email styles described below, but you should include as many as you can.  If it makes sense, throw in one or two of the options below if you’re not already using them.

Introduction

The introduction email serves a dual purpose:  you get to introduce yourself to your prospect and deliver on whatever you promised to get them to join your list.

If they bought a product, you tell them how to get it in this email.

If they opted into your list to get some free content, you deliver it in this email.

The structure for this email should start with the introduction and finish with the delivery.

Know that the reader is going to want to get to the point, so don’t go telling your entire life story before delivering what you’ve promised.

Keep it short and sweet.

Why do they want to listen to what you have to say?  What makes you trustworthy?

Whatever you say that’s going to achieve those 2 things can’t be longer than 2 paragraphs.  If you talk too much, they’re not going to read what you send.

“I’ve been ravenously studying _______ for 25 years and have figured out some things that are going to have you ________ in far less time with way less effort.

Make sure you watch out for the emails I’ll be sending.  You’ll love how much easier it is to _______.”

Make sure you do this in the first email you send.  You want to convince the reader to pay attention.

Consumption

Even if it’s completely free, you want to remind your reader that you’ve sent them something special.  If it’s something they’ve purchased, it’s even more important that they use what they’ve bought from you.

I use 3 different strategies to get them to go through what I’ve sent:

The time stamp:  With a video, you reference a specific moment and tell them when they can see it.  For text, you can give a page number or position (half way down the post).  The key with this is to be create curiosity:  :At 2:32 I expose the ______(best way, shortcut, smart way) to do _______(thing you show) far _______ (faster, easier, simpler).”

The end benefit:  Whatever you’ve sold or given away to them has benefits.  Find the biggest one and send an email that talks about how amazing it is to have that benefit in place:  “Think about how amazing it’s going to be to double your sales while spending less time _______ (thing you’re teaching).

The snippet:  This one is by far the easiest.  Just pull out a blurb of text from whatever you’ve given them.  Example:  On page 6 you’ll find this:  “_______________”  No matter what you put here, curiosity will have them wanting to see what comes before and after.

You can either throw all 3 of these into one message or spread it out between a few emails.  How you deliver the consumption sequence is up to you, but this one is almost mandatory for any autoresponder sequence.

Connect With Me

This one is simple.  If you want to connect with your customers (which will make you more money), you want as many “touch points” as possible.  You can send them anywhere:

1. Personal profile
2. Fan Page
3. Group
4. etc…

Where you send them doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that a percentage of the people that get this message will follow through on it.  If they do, you now gain another way to reach them and get them to buy more of what you sell.

Case Study/Testimonial

One of the coolest things you can do for your customers or your prospects is to show them how someone else is effectively using your stuff.

Even if it’s a pretty obvious testimonial, you should always call it a case study.  Outside of a sales message, people don’t read testimonials for fun or amusement.

The key with this is to focus on the benefit the viewer will get:  “Come discover how Mike used our ________ (product) to ________ (benefit) ________ (faster, easier, more profitably, etc…).

When you send something like this, keep the email short and sweet.  There is no need to write a page worth of text when you simply want them to click a link.  A few sentences describing what they get is enough.

Curiosity

These are my favorite because they’re very under-used.  These are super short emails where the only goal is to get someone to click.

Generally, these emails won’t work unless you have an existing relationship with a prospect.

Example:

Subject:  “You won’t believe this, NAME…”

Body:  “You know how tough it can be to ______ (thing they want to do)

This makes it so much easier (LINK)

NAME”

If you don’t over-use this, you’ll see clickthrough rates 2 or 3 times what you normally get.

Story

Once Upon A Time…

Those words almost force you to stop and pay attention.  They draw you in and suck you into a vortex eagerly anticipating the beginning, the climax, and the conclusion.

We’ve been trained to enjoy stories from a really young age starting with Disney movies and cartoons.  We want to get away for a moment and follow the story to the end.  It’s our nature.

As a marketer, we get to use this to our advantage by telling stories that lead prospects to buying our products and lead our customers to buying more.

Where your story comes from depends on you, your experiences, and the products you sell.  If you don’t immediately have something come to mind, use someone else’s story.

If you’d like to tell a unique story of your own, but don’t know where to start, these tips will help.

If you’d like to swipe a story that’s already been told, this post will help you.

Pitch

Sometimes you just have to sell.  There are dozens of different ways to do it.

My preference is to sell the click instead of the product in an email.  In other words, let the sales copy on the sales page do it’s job.  You need to get them to that page.

Many of the things we’ve already discussed will work at this point, but here’s an example of selling the click:

Subject:

sometimes you’ve just gotta…

Body:

Every now and then, you have to get a little freaky.

Before you go running away, I’m not talking about anything naughty.

How far outside of the box are you willing to step?

What would you do to ______? (What the product does)

To what extreme would you be willing to go to do it twice as fast with half the effort?

That’s what this does (LINK)

Thank me later.

NAME

Throw in a little curiosity and you’d be amazed at the kind of results you can produce with a single email.

For a true promotion, you’ll want to mail at least 3 times over a period of a few days.  If there is scarcity involved (a price increase, limited amount of products, etc…), you may want to mail more than once a day.

Test it all and keep doing what works best.

Hacks

What you want here are quick and simple things that your prospect can implement to produce whatever result they are seeking.

Generally, you want to provide a simple solution to an aspect of the big problem they’re facing.

Example:

Subject:  Cloth Diaper Hack

Body:  In the video I’m sharing with you today, you’ll see a very unique way to fold cloth diapers that almost forces them to stick to your little one’s behind like super glue.

No matter how much they wiggle, they won’t be able to sneak their way out of it.

LINK

NAME

Wherever you send the reader, be sure to have a solid call to action at the end.  Tell them where to go to get more of what you just gave them.

Reply Request

This may be my favorite email to send because I almost always make money from it.

We’re reaching a point online where if it can be said, it has.  If it’s all already been said, the easiest way to stand out is to make yourself accessible to your customers.

The dream is to have a business that runs on autopilot, but the reality is that most of us want to interact with people.  We want to know that there’s a human being on the other side of the interwebs.

Send a simple email asking “How can I help you?”

In the body of your email, remind your reader that you’re a person and you genuinely care about their well-being.  Ask if you’ve helped them with the emails you send or the products they bought.

Most importantly, ask if there is any question you could answer for them or any other way you can lend them a hand.

This is the single fastest way to creating raving, fanatic customers that will buy anything you suggest they buy.

FAQ

If someone is asking the same question over and over again, it means it’s a major objection.  The more objections you counter, the more sales you’ll get.

When it comes to a product being sold, you’ll want to do some looking around to see if there is any public conversation around a product name.  My favorite way to do that is via SocialMention.  It’s free to use, so try putting a product name through their search to see what you come up with.

If you don’t find anything there, look around for competing products and see what people’s questions are.  See what they complain about (and if your product addresses the complaint).

Put together a list of questions and answer them.  Format it like this to make it easy to read and understand:

Question:  How does _______ do ________

Answer:  Insert answer here.

Keep it simple and address every objection you can come up with.  This specific email is best at the end of a sequence.

How To Build That List Faster

Now that you’ve got the ingredients to build a killer autoresponder sequence, you need to get more people onto your list to see it.  We make it easy here at TrafficForMe.  When you go to buy the traffic you need to build your list, we’ll be happy to help you out.

Video is everywhere.  It’s not going to go away either.

Instead of burying you in data and statistics that prove it, I’m going to politely suggest you take my word for it.  For each of the hacks you see here, I’m going to tell you a story that proves my point and give you some pointed guidance to apply it for yourself.

The truth is, you are already seeing videos all over the place.  Video ads, YouTube videos, Facebook Live videos, etc…

Let’s dive into the hacks:

You Don’t Need Fancy Equipment Anymore

I see people with these extensive video recording areas in their houses or offices with a green screen, expensive lighting and cameras that look like they’re designed to film movies.

For 90% of us, that’s not necessary at all.

If you want to walk around outside in an area with a lot of wind, a mic is helpful.  If not, you may not need one.

Unless you’re planning on making movies, you don’t need an expensive camera.  Your phone should be capable of recording in high definition.  If I’m in my house, I’ll use the web cam attached to my Mac Book Pro.

Roughly 5 years ago, I recorded a video training product with a good friend of mine.  We recorded every live video on our phones.  We used basic video editing software.

Both my friend and I had expensive cameras, microphones, and expensive editing software.

Since we were recording a training program designed to help people record their videos faster, we decided to use inexpensive things we already had to make the product.

The videos looked great and the customers loved the product.

When recording videos there are two important things to consider:

1. Background noise
2. Stability of your camera

If you’re stuck in a noisy area with no microphone for your recording device, you should probably hold off on making your video.

Instead of holding your camera in your hand, get an inexpensive tripod (or monopod) on Amazon.  Your video will look far more professional and produce better results.

While The Length Matters, It’s Not As Important As You Think

While it does matter in certain situations, content and sales videos can be as long as you need them to be.

Depending on who you choose to listen to, you’ll hear that most content videos should be around 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Many years ago, I had a video that ended up ranking #1 in Google for the term affiliate marketing.  That video was 9 minutes and 46 seconds.  Obviously, this was a long time ago.  Still the point I’m about to make still applies today:

The length of your video doesn’t matter as long as people watch it until the end.

In other words, you need to have a reason for your video to run longer than a few minutes if you want people to watch it.

If people watch it, YouTube will see your video as valuable to people that watch it.  If they see it as valuable, they’ll make sure more people see it.

When it comes to ads or sales videos, you want to limit the length of your video to exactly as long as it takes to get your point across.  Most videos I see are between 15 and 30 seconds, but I’ve seen video ads that ran as long as 5 minutes and they were really well done.

Why Mass Video Uploading Died A Painful Death

Nearly a decade ago, there was a software that came out that pushed a single video out to every imaginable video hosting service on the web.

In fact, I had a less automated software that was capable of doing the same thing.

At the time, they worked.  They worked really well.

Then, the video sites started to catch on and changed they way they do business.

If you think about it, there are only a few video sharing websites (like YouTube) that still let you create an account and upload videos whenever you want.

Now, many of them charge for the ability to use their sites.

This is because outside of video ads, it’s been really tough for video sharing websites to make enough money to offset the cost of bandwidth.  Videos eat up data like a fat kid in a candy store.

The days of ranking multiple times in Google for a single search are over.

However, there is still value in posting your content on more than one video sharing site.

They key is that the content has to be good and valuable.

While only one version of your video will get attention from Google, every site has it’s own internal search feature.  If someone uses it wanting to see something on the topic that your video covers, it is better to be there than to let a competitor get noticed.

Closed Captions Are Your Friend (Sometimes)

Just a year or two ago, putting closed captions into a video you uploaded online was a nightmare.  It was a complex process that included having a special file created and uploading it.

Now you can add captions pretty easily in both YouTube and Facebook (for ads).

So, when should you use closed captions?

Only use captions when you’re posting a video of a person speaking into a camera.  If you are using slides or already have words on the screen, leave them out.

The first time I used Facebook’s caption creation tool for an ad, it had text written on the video.  It looked great until the very end of the video where it placed the caption directly above the final sentence I wanted the viewer to see.

 

Selling is a process.  There are multiple steps and there can be as many as you need to sell your products.  However, there are at least 3 steps in every process you put a prospect through to become a customer.

While the steps aren’t complicated, it may be difficult to understand exactly how to “sell the next step”, so we’re going to go as deep as possible into each one.  At TrafficForMe, it’s important to us that you can take the traffic you order and transform it into revenue.

While this selling the next step isn’t the only way to generate sales, it’s a way that you should test because it works.

Sell The Click

One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make is to try and sell the product at the beginning of a conversation with a prospect.

The honest truth is that you don’t need to sell the product that soon.  In fact, you don’t need to mention the product at all.

You have to convince the prospect that it’s worth their time to take a closer look.

You need to get them to decide to click the link to see what you’re talking about.

The easiest way to get someone to click a link is to promise to solve a promise they’re facing.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Click Here To Discover 3 Easy Steps To Stop Bladder Leakage

See Exactly How To Make The Switch To Cloth Diapers Today

Find Out How To Help Your Kid With ADHD Focus In 15 Minutes

To sell the click, you have to make a promise.  The promise should be framed in a way that creates curiosity and helps your prospect solve a real problem they know they’re facing.

When selling the click, you could be trying to get someone to open an email, click on an ad, or click a link.  In fact, you may have to do it more than once.  

If you’re sending an email, you need the prospect to open the email, read it, then click the link in the email.  In this case, you’d have to sell the click twice.  You’ll also have to:

Sell The Benefits

After you sell the click, you have to continue and sell the next step.  In this case, you want to present them with the benefits of either clicking the next link or of the final product.

You have to sell them on continuing through the process you’ve built.  This is done by fulfilling the promise you made when selling the click.  

Let’s continue with an email using one of the examples from above:

Find Out How To Help Your Kid With ADHD Focus Issues In 3 Minutes

Having a kid with ADHD, I’ve had to learn tricks to help him focus.  

One of the things I discovered was a total fluke,

But it works really well for my son.

I’ve found that giving him 2 or 3 extra input signals

Will help him get things done far faster.

If he’s working on homework, I turn on the TV and

Have him listen to his iPod through headphones.

While this works, a friend of mine discovered a far bigger secret that works even better.

Click here to see it for yourself.  [LINK]

You’re not going to believe how easy it can be to

Help your ADHD kid get more done.

To your success,

NAME

I’ve written this the way I’d write an email to my list, but this can be done on Facebook, a blog post, in a forum, or any other place where you’re trying to gain attention from your prospects and get them to the point of purchase.

Finally, Sell The Product

Selling a product is not usually based upon the features of the product.  It’s based upon the benefits the product provides with its features.  Make sense?

There are dozens upon dozens of “sales copy formulas” and they can all work, but what I want to do is present a formula that’s easy to understand and implement:

1. Make a gigantic promise to solve an ugly problem.
2. Tell a story that exposes the absolute worst aspects of the problem.
3. At the close of the story, reveal the discover of the ultimate solution.
4. Show testimonials and prove raving about how well the product solves the problem.
5. Create an “unbelievable” offer for the product.
6. Add in a guarantee that makes the prospect comfortable.
7. Close by throwing in a bonus or something special that adds additional value.
8. Throw in a little “fear of loss” into any post script you add.

Closing the deal becomes easier if you understand customer objections and address them throughout your sales process.  Address objections as often as possible.

That’s about as simple as I can make it.

Connecting Everything To Boost Sales

Creating a sales process this way should lure prospects in and convert more of them into sales.

With anything related to sales online, you have to test, test, and test some more.

In closing, here are some final thoughts about selling the next step:

• When selling the next step, work backwards and connect everything together.
• Start with the headline in the sales copy of the product.  You don’t want to make that same promise anywhere else in the process you build.
• Every time you make a promise, make sure you keep it.  The fastest way to lose the sale is to mislead your prospects.  If you promise a solution, provide it.
• The solutions in the beginning of your process should not be as strong as the ones closer to the sale.  Start small and build.

When you’re ready to start testing a new process, TrafficForMe is here for you with the traffic you need.  Discover why we’re the smarter choice here.

We do our best to cater to our advanced clients and still be helpful to those new to internet business, but this post is specifically for those at the beginning.

In this case, we’re specifically focused on abbreviations and phrases often used in advertising.

There’s no way to make this sexy, but it’s imperative that you understand these terms if you have any interest in advertising your business online.

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” is when someone visits your website and leaves after viewing a single page.  Visitors that fully browse your website have obviously found what they’re looking for and you’ve delivered for them.  The ones that leave without looking around aren’t happy with what they’ve found on your site.

A high bounce rate will have a negative effect on your profit, but it can also have an impact on any search engine rankings you’ve earned.  If people are leaving without spending a few minutes on your website, search engines assume that they should recommend someone else’s website instead of yours.

For more info on decreasing your bounce rate, take a look at this post (opens in a new window).

CPC

CPC stands for Cost Per Click.  Depending on how you’re advertising, most of the time you’ll be paying per click for the traffic you buy.

With TrafficForMe, all you do is select how many clicks you want, pay, then provide us with your landing page URL.  If you’re buying from other companies, you may have to provide your own email copy, subject line, or an entire ad.  We do our best to make it easy.

CTR

CTR stands for Click-Through Rate.  If you’re buying from us, this isn’t something you need to worry about because we use proven ads we’ve developed in-house.  If you’re buying a solo ad or using an ad network, CTR is a measurement of the effectiveness of your ad or email copy.

Where the number should be will vary by delivery method.  For instance, a 5% CTR for a Facebook ad is amazing.  If you got a 5% CTR on an email, that’s not very good.  In other words, you should check the results your competitors have gotten to get an idea of what to expect from any given advertising you buy.

EPC

EPC stands for Earnings Per Click.  The EPC formula is Sales/Clicks.

What you don’t normally hear when this is explained is the timeline you have to use to define the success of an advertising campaign.  It all depends on where you’re sending your traffic.

If you’re sending traffic directly to an offer, you would measure your EPC immediately.  In other words, you don’t have to worry about time between when they see your offer and when they buy.  The only exception to this would be if you have a retargeting campaign in place.  You would still want to measure your EPC for immediate sales, but you’d also measure it for your retargeting campaign separately.

If you’re sending traffic to a landing page designed to capture an email address, that’s when you have to be careful about how you measure your EPC.  Instead of worrying about immediate sales, you’d want to wait until your new prospect has seen your offer.  Preferably, you’d wait until they’d gone through your entire promotion of the product you’re selling.  If you have 3 emails promoting your product that are delivered between days 5 and 9, you’d want to wait roughly 2 weeks before trying to figure out what you’re earning per click.  Doing this will give you a clear picture about the success of your advertising.

If you’re using multiple advertising methods in your business, you should be tracking each one separately.  This can be done via using link tracking software.  While there are dozens of different services for this sort of thing, the current industry favorites are:  ClickMagick and Quality Click Control. (YES, these are affiliate links. T4Me will be paid a commission if you sign up through either of these links.)

Referrer

The term Referrer is referencing the place your traffic is coming from.  Depending on where you’re advertising, the referrer will vary.  If you’re buying solo ads, most of your traffic will come from whatever email service your prospect was using when they got your email.

If you’re buying traffic on Facebook, you’ll see a lot of referral traffic from them.

Referral traffic will also usually tell you what operating system your traffic is using.  This can behelpful to see how much of your traffic is coming from mobile phones.  Generally, you’ll want to have any landing page you use be mobile optimized.

Uniques

Uniques are the amount of times a unique visitor has come to your site.  Anytime you buy traffic, you’ll have people that visit, leave, then come back.  This measurement will count that process as a single visitor.

What makes this useful is you can compare it to the number of Visits (which we’ll go over next) to see what percentage of your traffic is coming back.  It’s a good indication of good targeting if you’re receiving a lot of repeat visitors.

Visits

Visits is a measurement of how many times someone has visited your website.  If someone visited, left, then returned, they would count as 2 visits.  While the measurement itself doesn’t do much for you, it is very helpful to compare it to Uniques.

I’ve personally been doing this internet thing for over a decade and didn’t have an accurate definition of some of these.  Now that you know what the words mean, we’d be happy to me the traffic buying process easy for you.

Whether you’re at the beginning of the process of establishing your business or you’re a decade in, getting to the next level is important for us over-achieving entrepreneurs.

We always want more.

To have more, you don’t necessarily have to become a slave to your business.  Instead, take the right steps to ensure you’re always in a position of growth.

Here are a few of the steps you should be take to get there:

Invest Steadily

You’ll hear from any business expert that you should be continually investing in your business.

How much should you invest?

Where should you invest it?

If you can pull it off, taking half of your profits and pushing them back into your business should help you reach a stage of steady growth.  As profits increase, your goal should be to continue to put half of it back into your business.

Depending on your business and how you want to run it, you have a few options of where to put the money:

Outsourcing

The less you personally have to do in your business, the more you can focus on what you’re best at.  It’s a wise move to hire people to menial tasks that would be a waste of time if you had to do them yourself.

Most online entrepreneurs will hire virtual assistants from countries like India or the Philippines due to the low wages they’re willing to be paid.

While it’s smart to hire people that can do the things you aren’t good at, you have to be careful to avoid over-hiring.  Make sure there is plenty of profit before you go hiring a bunch of assistants.

Infrastructure

Are you using shared hosting for your website?  Is your video editing software the free version that came with your computer?  Is there software out there that would help you get more done in less time?

If so, buy it and make it a priority.

However, it’s a delicate balance between building the righty infrastructure and wasting money on tools you’ll never use.

Avoid shiny objects and the launch of the day/week/hour.  If it’s not something you can use immediately, don’t buy it.

Legal

I’m no legal expert, but I did do something smart with one of my businesses a few years ago.  It may be wise for you to do what I did.

I don’t believe most of us need legal counsel on retainer, but it can be helpful to have someone to ask if something bad happens.

What you should consider doing is trademarking any major brands you’re planning on using in your business.

If you’re promoting someone else’s business, this doesn’t apply to you.

The only time I’d suggest getting a trademark is if you’re an information marketer or an e-commerce seller with your own brands.

Why?  It allows you to control how others use your brand name.  If someone buys a domain with your brand in it, you can take it from them.  If someone uses your brand to market their own, you can generally have their content removed.

To see whether you should trademark your brand, reach out to a lawyer and ask.  If they suggest doing it, you can use a service like Legalzoom and it should cost you around $500.

Advertising

This is where at least half of your budget should go.  Advertising with the current state of the internet is almost mandatory.

Where you advertise is going to depend on who you’re trying to reach, but Facebook and Google aren’t your only options.

Look around at where your perfect prospect is spending their time.  In nearly every market I’ve looked at, I’ve found private advertising networks that most competitors didn’t know about.

You’ll need to test numerous ads, targets, media, and networks to find a good fit for what you sell and who you’re trying to reach.

If you want to avoid the testing part, you can always buy traffic from us at T4ME, we make it a lot easier.  Pick how many clicks you want and the market you want to target.  Pay and you’re done.

Keep Expenses As Low As Possible

While you’re trying to increase the scale of your business, it’s easy to fall into the trap of throwing money at everything you can think of.  That’s bad business.

At one point, I was paying over $400 per month for varying internet business tools.  My web hosting was $300 per month.  It was ridiculous and mostly unnecessary.

Follow these steps to prevent yourself from wasting money:

1. Always look to see if there is a free or less expensive version of something before you buy.
2. Understand your technology needs.  I was wasting over $100 per month on a high end server where a VPS (virtual private server) would have been more than enough.
3. If your business is mostly online, do you really need a fax machine?  Probably not.  Evaluate purchases on whether you need them or simply want to grab a new toy.  There are far better toys than fax machines.
4. Outsource smarter.  If you’re going to pay someone to do something for you, you don’t necessarily have to hire them full time.  Most times, part time is more than enough.  Even more often, you can hire out for a simple task and just pay for that task.

None of these are set in stone, so know your needs and understand your business.  If you can do that, keeping expenses as low as possible is easy.

Increase Opportunities To Buy

It’s far more difficult to find new customers than it is to convince current customers to buy something they need.

The key with this is to make sure that whatever you’re offering is connected to whatever your customers have already purchased from you.  It should be a logical “next step”.

Bundles

If you have a decent sized product library, creating a bundle of related products is a no-brainer.  Apply a slight discount and send it as a “special offer” for your customers.

Subscriptions

If you sell any info products, software, or consumable e-commerce products, a subscription is the single best way to create recurring income for your business and an easier way for your customers to guarantee access to them.

Increased Access

If you’re a coach, trainer, or service provider, people will pay for extra access to your awesomeness.  You can charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand to provide small group or 1-to-1 help.

Give your customers more chances to buy and they will.

Track Everything

Data is an internet entrepreneur’s most powerful weapon.  By analyzing our marketing, sales, and expenses we can see what’s working and improve whatever isn’t.

How you track is up to you, but you should be tracking your visitors to see where they’re spending their time on your website.

A former client of mine (my father) was getting a ton of traffic and very few sales.  We discovered that he had a guide that was getting nearly 80% of his traffic.  Adding a really simple call-to-action to that page instantly doubled his sales.  If we hadn’t checked analytics, we never would have known what was going on.

You should be keeping a spreadsheet of monthly expenses, so it’s easy to see where your money is going.  Every single expense should be listed and tracked in a way that is easy for you to understand at a glance.

The more you track and measure, the easier it is to improve the things you’re tracking.

Anytime you use advertising to drive traffic, you’re risking your money.  One bad part of your process can destroy any shot at transforming a click into a sale.  Yet, the buzz from taking someone who doesn’t know you and convincing them to buy is one of the greatest parts of doing business online.

The effectiveness of any advertising is based on a specific process, no matter where you’re spending your budget.  Banners, email or solo ads, even PPC.  It’s exactly the same.

In this post, we’re going to go over how to reduce the feeling of “gambling” with your budget and boost the performance of your ads with less risk.

Test Smarter

It only makes sense to test your media (banners, emails, headlines, and ad text).

Yet, most don’t know how to test properly.

Either you aren’t testing at all (huge mistake) or you’re testing too much.

The secret is to test one thing at a time.  Only one thing.  That includes everything in the sales process you’ve developed from your ad all the way through to the thank you page.

That means that you shouldn’t be testing different ad variations if you’re testing out the headline on your landing page.

Test.  One.  Thing.  At.  A. Time.

Unless you’re using software for multivariate testing (Odds are 99% that you’re not), you can’t effectively test more than one thing.

If you’re testing different audiences or keywords for an ad and testing the landing page at the same time, it’s impossible to know which part of your sequence isn’t working properly.

Do some basic testing of your landing page and any additional offers with a reliable traffic source.  Your best bet is going to be email traffic from a source you’ve used successfully in the past.  When someone opts into an email list, that’s a solid indicator of them wanting to know more about a topic.

Once you have refined your sales process enough to get the numbers where they need to be, then you can begin testing your media.

Always test only one thing at a time to ensure any steps you take to optimize your advertising actually improve your results.

Adjust Targets

Whether you’ve pulled the info from your customer database or setup an avatar based upon your competition, you have to have an avatar to advertise to before you can comfortably spend money advertising to them.

Yet, what if a variation on that avatar would perform better?

It’s possible to do this with ease on most advertising platforms.

All you do is clone your entire campaign and adjust the targeting.  Try some new keywords or use a different customer avatar and see how it goes.

If it’s a winner, raise the budget.

If it’s a loser, try a new variation.

Even better, you can test as many variations as you want as long as the avatar is completely different from the one you’ve been using.

This also allows you to refine your ongoing customer avatar by giving you the ability to see how your ads perform with different audiences.

Remove Some Variables

The more variables you have in your processes, the more opportunities you have to screw up.

The more steps you have in your funnel, the easier it is to turn off a prospect or new customer.  Obviously, turning them off will keep them from buying from you.

The more pieces you have in an ad (images or graphics, headline, descriptive text, more descriptive text, etc…), the easier it is to make a mistake that will cost you the click, the lead, and the sales.

How do you remove some variables without screwing up your ads?

The easy answer is to buy traffic from us.  Give us a landing page URL, the amount of clicks and the market.  Pay the fee and we take care of the rest.

Depending on the advertising network, many times you can leave out some of the options.  On Facebook, you don’t need to use a second text description.  Use the primary one and leave the other one empty.

Review your funnels and your ads and get rid of any extra stuff that can be pulling attention away from your primary message.

 

Everything we’ve gone over up to this point mattered.  This matters more.

If you get the other pieces right, you’ll do OK.  If you get this piece right, you’d have to try to lose.

You’re running a business and in business there is one thing that matters more than any other detail:  Profit.

Increasing profit doesn’t usually happen with lower end products.  If you’re selling a $39 program or product, that’s got to be the beginning.  It can’t be the end.

The EPC That Matters Most

We’re about to get into some math, so I’ll apologize in advance if that’s not something you find fun.

As stated in the first article of this sequence:

The EPC formula is Sales/visitors = EPC

That formula can be used for any frame of time as long as the data you’re using is the same time frame.  If you want to figure out a monthly EPC for a sales funnel, you would gather the sales and the amount of visitors for that month.  Then, divide the sales by the visitors to get your EPC.

Yet, that formula also applies to your entire business.  

You can do the EPC formula for each month or go as far as to do it for an entire year.  You would want to include every sale that brought in money to your business.

Affiliate sales count.

Back end sales count.

If you made a profit by selling it, add it to your sales volume.

However, you could also use a more advanced formula to find your profit.

All you have to do is subtract your expenses from your sales number before dividing by your visitors.

The more advanced formulas give you a better look at how your business is really doing.

The best possible EPC formula for your business is:  (All Sales – Expenses)/Visitors.  Use it, it will give you a very clear vision of your business and it’s performance.

Are you making a profit?  If not, you’ve got a problem that you need to fix as soon as possible.  

The following processes are designed to help you boost your sales and profits.

Focus On Life-Time Value

We’re about to start talking about profits here, but there is one major facet of this that you can’t forget or ignore.  You have to make sure you’re creating happy customers.

An old friend of mine once told me that if I have a solution to a problem my customers are dealing with, I should sell it as hard as humanly possible because they need what I provide.

While I believe that to be true, there’s a line and you have to figure out where that line is for your customers and your values.

If you don’t sell hard enough, nobody buys.

If you sell too hard, people don’t feel good about buying.

You have to figure out where you can straddle the line between those two.

When you find that line, you’ll create customers that love you and want to buy what you sell.  By making people feel good about buying from you, they will buy more often.

Outside of rare exceptions, the days of hiding behind an autoresponder and building a huge following are gone.

By delivering superior service, you can create a better group of customers that want to buy from you.

Follow these rules and you’ll outperform your competition every time:

1. When possible, help the customer where they are.  If they contact you on social media, try to help them without forwarding them to another location.  Not only will they be happy, it’s also public and other potential customers will see you help and want to work with you, too.
2. Respond to support requests as fast as possible.  If it’s you, use apps on your phone or notifications to let you know someone is having a problem and solve it.  Immediately.  If it’s someone you pay, make sure they understand that their priority is to handle support first.  Think about the last time you waited 3 days to hear back from a company.  It makes you feel bad, right?  It makes your customers feel bad, too.
3. When possible, concede (this is the biggest mistake I made during my first 10 years in business).  If you get a refund request, always provide it.  If they tell you you’re a terrible person, apologize.  Admit you were wrong even if you weren’t.  It will make them feel better and create the possibility of them buying again in the future.  It’s OK to love what you sell, but show love to your customers and they’ll come back again and a again.
4. Create loyalty by creating stories that show your values (not a service thing, but important).  When customers see your values match theirs, they will throw money at you.  Tell your stories and tell them in a way that creates a bond with your customers.

Be willing to go above and beyond for your customers and they will love you.  They’ll show you how much with their credit cards

Freedom Via Sequences

What do you do after someone buys?  If you don’t have an email sequence in place to support the sale and help the new customer, you’re missing out on money.

Anytime someone buys something from you, the next step in your journey with that customer is ensuring they consume what you sold them.

Why?

If they use what you sold them, they’ll come back and buy the next product.

Always send a consumption sequence “selling” a new customer on how awesome the product they bought is and how much it will help them.

I’ll generally send 3 emails.  One to highlight the overall goal of the product and how it will help the customer:  “It’s fair to expect to get ________ in half the time if you apply everything I show you.

The next email is the curiosity focus:  “On page 38 you’ll find my dark and dirty secret to achieve ______ twice as fast”.

Finally, the last email is an interaction focus.  “Assuming you’ve gone through at least a few of the modules, drop me a reply and let me know what you’ve enjoyed most”.

Not everyone replies, but it’s a nice personal added touch.  If I can have a conversation (either on the phone or via email) with a customer, they usually go on to buy whatever I suggest (whether it’s my product or someone else’s).

Once you complete a consumption sequence, push them onto your next sequence.  Promote the next product.

If you don’t have any other products of your own, feel free to add in products that belong to someone else.

In any market, there are dozens of affiliate programs, so look around for others with products parallel to yours (something different, but closely related).

The Right Way To Be An Affiliate

You can’t be everything to everyone.  In business that can relate to money and it should.

Your customers have many needs and the ones you can’t fill are pretty easily monetized.

In case you don’t already know, affiliate marketing is a process where you use a special link coded to you to refer business to someone else.  If someone clicks that link, then buys, you get paid a percentage of the sale.

The challenge with affiliate marketing is finding products that will help your audience AND are different from what you do.

You have to decide where your values lie in your business.  Are you going to slam your list with an offer every single day?  Would you prefer to balance content with offers?  Maybe include content inside of your pitches?

You can do whatever you want.

Whatever standard you choose, try to stick to it unless you have special circumstances.  It will upset your audience if you go too far out of what they normally see from you.  The other option is to surprise your customers every now and then because it may increase response.  Again, choose.

The first step is to choose your affiliate networks.

For digital products, your best bets are JVZoo and Clickbank.

For physical products, you’ll want to take a look at Shareasale, Commission Junction and Amazon

For each promotion, you’re going to want to create a sequence of 2 – 5 emails that go over what the product is going to do for them and why they need it.

Include things like guides on how to get the most out of the product you’re recommending, bonuses, and emotional reasons to buy.

Then, move onto the next one.

String a few of these products together with the goal of providing an end result to your customer when all of the recommendations are combined.

In the end, remind them of why they need each piece and provide a final link to get each one.

Building a Better Back End

No matter what you sell, you can create a deeper level of service and experience for your customers.  The best part is that you’ll get paid for it.

Developing a back end for physical products is harder than it is for digital ones, yet it is possible.

Focus on what your products do for people and what they’re looking for when they buy from you.

If you can improve some facet of their lives, a percentage of your customers will be willing to pay for your guidance.

Step 1:  What kind of result can you provide to someone you work with?  You have to define that first.  Then, take a look around and see what others are charging for that sort of thing.  I’ll give you general guidelines below, but the market you’re targeting will already have people offering what you want to offer.  It will be worth a few minutes of your time to see what they’re charging.

Step 2:  Break down the process you’re going to help people with into steps you can teach.  You’re looking for somewhere between 6 and 12 that you can transform into modules of a training program.

Step 3:  Decide how you want to work with your customers.  Do you prefer less 1-to-1 interaction or more?  The more you’ll be interacting with your customers, the more you can charge:

1. Group Coaching – You’re going to sell this for between $200 and $1,000 depending on the result you’ll be giving to your customers.  Smaller impact = lower selling price.  Next, decide on how you want to interact with your people.  A facebook group works, but I personally prefer a Slack group due to being able to control things better (plus, Slack doesn’t shut accounts down).  You can provide the training either in the group or in a private member’s area.
2. 1-to-1 Work – This is generally referred to as coaching or mentoring and sells for between $500 and $10,000 per month (or more) depending on what you do with your clients.  You’ll be giving your cell number or working with someone via some digital software.  Skype or Zoom are the ones I see used most often.  Start at the beginning and take them through your process.  You can either provide training modules or go through the process with them.  The key with this kind of thing working is getting your customer to focus on one piece at a time.
3. Workshops and Events – What kind of transformation could you give to someone if they spent a few days with you?  If you can come up with a clear answer to that question, you should do a Workshop for a small group of people.  You can sell this sort of thing for $1,000 to $10,000 (or more).  If you can do this part well, you should offer an upgrade into a 1-to-1 offer.

Do them all or just do one, but if you can add something like this into your product selection, a certain percentage of your customers will buy them.  It’s just that simple.

Without These Things You Have No Business

Maximizing profit should be the primary focus for any business.  If you’re comfortable selling a $25 T-shirt with no back end or upsell process, you’re not building a business.  You’re selling stuff as a hobby.

Even if you’re selling a few thousand of a single product, you need to expand and add to your revenue sources to really build a business.

Build an email list and create automated sales systems that take your customers from where they are when you find them to where they want to be.

Create experiences that not only help people, but make them feel good.

Find things that add value to the lives of your customers and profit by recommending it to them in a way that shows them why it will help them.

Maximize sales, reduce expenses, and above all, value your customers.  They ARE your business.

Here Is How You’re Going To Start

If you go back to the first post in this series, you’ll see that all of this relies on having a reliable traffic source.  Thankfully, you’re in the right place to get it.

We have traffic in the Biz Op, I.M., Personal Development, Health, Diet, Forex, Survival markets.

Click here to discover why we’re the cleaner, easier source of traffic for your business.

We’ve talked a lot about testing, but without the lifeblood of any internet business, you’re going to have trouble getting that done.  You need traffic.  Daily traffic.  Every. Single. Day.

In any market, the best way to get traffic is to combine content, advertising, and a social presence.  When you have all 3, you can leverage each one to amplify the others.

Instead of writing a 1,000 page post going over every imaginable strategy you can use to get traffic, we’re going to cover the most important parts with enough detail to get you moving in the right direction.

The key to your success is going to be to zig and zag based upon your perfect prospect.  If you know who that is, you really can’t lose.

Easy Targeting

One of the biggest secrets in internet business is that the more focused your target prospect, the easier it’s going to be to find them, influence them, and transform them into a group of raving lunatics that buy everything you put out.

If your targeting is too loose, it’s going to be very difficult to convince a prospect to take any action.

There are two ways to discover who you should be targeting.

The first is to compile your current best customers into a single avatar that speaks to their exact situation, dreams, goals, needs, and (most importantly) wants.

The second strategy is more involved, but produces the exact same result.  Follow this simple process to get a very clear vision of who your target is:

1. Search Google for the most basic keyword term that applies to what you sell.  
2. Pick one of the first few websites listed and copy their web address.
3. Run the site through Alexa.com
4. Run the site through Quantcast.com
5. If you don’t get any data, try with a different competitor.
6. If you do get data, give your customer avatar a name, age range, religion, education level, income, marital status, dreams, goals, and other status indicators to create a complete vision of who you’re “talking to” in your marketing, copy, and emails.

That’s it.  Keep it simple and develop a real customer avatar and you’ll sell more of your products and services.

Now that you know who your perfect customer is, you need to identify the best ways to reach them.

Keywords

Things have changed in recent years, but online advertising used to be mostly keyword based (with the exception of email).  

There are dozens of tools out there that will promise they’ll show you “profitable keywords” for any market, select your keywords for you, and make you a millionaire, but the truth is that Google’s keyword finder usually gives enough data to make decisions and it’s free to use to anyone with an Adwords account.

What you’re looking for are keyword phrases that people are willing to pay a lot for.  What “a lot” is in your market will vary, but anywhere from $1 to $5 is the range I’ll generally look for.

The more words in a keyword phrase, the less work it will generally take to rank for in Google (which is the primary goal of our content).  

If you’re selecting keywords for advertising, you’ve got to keep your budget in mind.  Budgetary limitations dictate how much you can spend per day, so the cost-per-click has to be within the range you’re capable of paying.

Sentiment And Interests

While sentiment and interests are mostly a thing with Facebook, most of the social advertising platforms allow this type of targeting.  If you have done well in developing your customer avatar, this should be pretty easy to find.

Try this FB interest finder tool – http://emarky.net/fb-keyword-tool/

Throw in a vague keyword and see what comes up.  I’ve found that not all interests the software recommends will be available for ads, but it will definitely help you get ideas.

Even better, throw in the name of a page that caters to your avatar.  It will provide a selection of similar pages and interests you can target with your ads.

Getting Daily Traffic

We’ve finally arrived at the point of talking about the 3 categories of traffic you have to focus your energy on to see a reasonable volume of daily traffic.  

Advertising

We’ve already talked quite a bit about advertising, in our previous post about testing traffic.  So, what we’re going to focus on here is how to get the ball rolling.

How To Start Advertising

The first step to advertising your business is to understand your budget.  If you’ve identified your EPC (earnings per click), you know what you can afford to pay to generate a profit.

You must also know going in that you may lose money when you start.

This is a necessary evil.  You can’t test without traffic and the easiest way to get it is to pay for it.  

The catch is that once you stop paying, the traffic dries up.  Completely.  This is why we have to focus on all 3 areas to ensure we’re covered.

Whatever your budget is, you have to break it down to a daily ad spend cap.  How much can you comfortably invest per day?

Once you know that, it’s time to start advertising.

Email drops are easiest if you’re getting traffic from us at TrafficForMe.  All you need to do is pay for your clicks and give us your landing page URL.  

If you’re doing solo ads in the standard sense, you’re going to need to develop an email that converts.  What that’s going to look like is going to vary by who your target is.  

I can’t give you generic email copy that will work, but I can tell you a secret.

Sell the next step.

Instead of trying to convince a prospect that your product is amazing via email, try to sell them on clicking the link.  After all, clicking a link doesn’t cost anything.

If you’re using an ad network, my favorite trick is to use images nobody else is using in my market and wrap my ad around the image.

For example, we recently tested a “Matrix™” themed ad that led to a “Matrix™” themed page.  Clicks on Facebook were roughly $ 0.12 and conversion was quite high for the market we tested it in. 

Be different and make sure your ad text leads back to the image and the page you’re going to lead someone to.

When you get to the point where your advertising is making you money, raise your budget by as much as you can.  Scale slowly.  You want to see what an increased budget will do to your CPA (cost per acquisition).

Content Marketing

Content serves three purposes for us:

1. It establishes our validity in our marketplace.
2. It shows our prospects that we care and are attempting to help people.
3. We want free traffic from Google.

Whether you’re great at putting together content and writing or have never done it before, this process will work for you and help you establish yourself as an authority in your market.

Where To Start With Content Marketing

When putting together your content, keep your targeted keyword phrases in mind.  Any sentiment you’ve identified that applies to your avatar will come into play here, too.

You want to include your keyword phrases in your titles, headlines, subheadlines, and use it naturally throughout any content you put together.  However, your primary focus is to put together something fun to read and ensure it makes sense.  If it makes sense, people will read it.  If it makes a lot of sense, they may share it with their friends on social media (another goal for any content you put out).

Use any sentiment you’ve assigned to your avatar inside of the content you create.  Allow it to steer the words you use and the attitude your written voice has.

Killer Headlines

Clickworthy headlines are imperative.  Without them, nobody is going to read what you post.

The easiest way to come up with those is to swipe them from sites that are known to use them.

These 3 are my favorite:

1. Cracked
2. Upworthy
3. TheChive

One of the main reasons I like these three is that they test all of their headlines.  With that being the case, you’re going to want to go at least a few days into their archives.  They’re probably still testing their most recent posts.

Write as many headlines as you can and test them all.  No matter how well we know our audience as content creators, they’re going to choose their favorite headline for you.  That’s what testing does.

How do you test?  If you’re posting on a blog, you can use this plugin.  It’s free and it works.

Creating The Right Content

It doesn’t matter what format you’re using to deliver your words (video, audio, written, or telegram), what matters is what you’re giving to those that have to watch, read, or listen to it.

You have to either know what your customers need to hear or cheat your way to helping them.  This strategy will work for you either way:

1. The first step is to gather data.  A lot of it.  Search Google for any “how to” terms that relate to the products you sell.  Copy and paste any good information you find into a document.
2. Feel free to dig as deep as you want into the Google results you find.  It doesn’t matter if you go 10 pages deep if you’re finding content you know will help your audience.
3. Next, go into the News search, Video search, Document search, and any others that can help you figure out good things to share.
4. Finally, create a new document and organize some of the content you found.  Rewrite every single word to format the things you want to say in your voice.  If you rewrite it, it’s research.  If you just post someone else’s ideas, it’s plagiarism (which is bad for business).

The Best Call To Action

At the end of any content you produce, you have to tell the prospect how to get more.  Tell them they can get more good stuff from you at a specific location and suggest that they go there now to get it.

Don’t be too pushy, if you’re helping people they’re going to want more.  All you need to do is tell them where they can get it.

What To Do Next

Once you have a great piece of content, you have to post it.  

The first place you want to post your ideas is on a website you control, which is why having a wordpress blog on a domain of your own is important to any business.

You should also be posting content on websites that want it.  YouTube, Ezinearticles.com, Medium, Linkedin, Facebook, etc…

If you don’t know where you should be posting your content, check Google to see if any of the sites that rank already are looking for content.  Offer them something unique and helpful and they may just let you post it on their website.  

Your goal is to get content wherever your audience is going.  The more of them you get in front of, the more sales you’ll make.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has completely changed how the internet works.  The internet used to be like a newspaper, but now it’s a constantly evolving network of people and ideas.

Social media is now the primary driver of news, trends, and ideas.  If you can go viral, you can get tons of traffic.

Before you go viral, you have to start.

Start Here With Social Media Marketing

With any network, association is the most important place to begin.

You need to connect yourself with other authority figures in your marketplace.

This starts with connection and finishes with conversation.

If you can get existing authority figures in your market to talk to you, you can start siphoning off their audience.

If you don’t know who the existing authorities are, throw your keywords into SocialMention to see who is talking about the types of products and services you sell.

You could start following these people, but the ultimate goal is a real connection.  Spend a moment looking through what they’re talking about.  If it’s something you’re comfortable discussing, do it.  Talk to them.  Establish an actual connection.  

It’s a lot easier to work with friends than it is to convince someone who doesn’t know you to work with or connect with you.

Hashtagging Your Way To Discovery

Hashtags are a way for you to identify what you’re talking about and making it easier for people to find.  Yes, this is where you use those keywords.

Every social network has an internal search feature.  If you’re looking to connect with your audience, using the right hashtags is the best way to ensure they find you.

Your best bet is to use 3 to 5 hashtags that apply to your audience and make sure your profile is publicly viewable.  If you do it right, you’ll connect with more of the right people.

Just Don’t…

Don’t spam random groups or assets your competition has built.  Spam is a money repellant.

Don’t be the guy that “yells” “Look at what I do!!!!!”.  Nobody listens or responds to that garbage.

Don’t add 1,000 people just to post “I made 9 bazillion dollars today while wiping my behind, comment below to discover how”.  It makes you look silly and pushes away the customers you would actually want.

Be cool.  Talk to people about the problems your prospects are currently facing.  Most importantly, talk about the problems you know you can solve.

Bringing It All Together

There are dozens of other strategies that you could use, but these 3 matter because they all stack on top of each other.

Advertising is great, but if you have very little presence on major social networks or on Google, you lose all validity in the eyes of your prospect.  If you want to gain their trust, the single best thing you can do is leverage content and a social presence based upon helping people.

Once you have great content, it will get a lot more attention if you have an audience you can tell about it.  Even better, you can advertise your content to your audience.  As long as you have systems in place to transform content readers into happy customers, you can win with that.

A social presence will amplify all of the content you produce and will help your advertising convert better.  Make sure you’re easy to find and your audience will come looking for you.

In the next post, we’ll be discussing how to maximize the lifetime value of your customers without becoming a jerk.