Small Business Marketing Consultant

So you’ve got your website up and running and you’ve got your newsletter up and running. You’ve just got one problem – you don’t have anybody subscribing to your newsletter.

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So how do you go about getting your visitors to go from just visiting your site to opting into your newsletter?

Well, it used to be as simple as putting little box on your website that said, sign up for our free newsletter, and if you did that, people would sign up. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. People used to think it was cool to get email, but now we’re all bombarded with so much spam that we’re not going to part with our email address so easily.

So the next logical step after just asking people to opt-in stopped working was to bribe them. Perhaps with a free report, free chapters from your ebook, videos and tutorials, or even podcasts – essentially, you give them something of value in exchange for them giving you their valuable email address.

But are you ready for some more bad news? Yeah – people are so skeptical now that even if you promise to give them something of value for their email address, they’re still reluctant to give it to you. They’ve likely been given crappy reports that were thrown together in a few minutes before from some marketer who was just trying to get their email address and didn’t actually care about providing value.

So since just asking them to opt-in doesn’t work very well, are we just supposed to give up on building an email list?

Heck no – what you need to do is prove yourself first. Give people some valuable content BEFORE you ask them to give you their email address. That can be as simple as writing great articles or blog posts or recording videos that really do provide value to the visitor even if they don’t opt-in.

Essentially, what you’re doing is what famous Internet Marketer, John Reese, calls a reverse squeeze page.

I’ll admit that I’ve been using these for a couple years now even though I didn’t know that they had a name. I just thought it was a good way to get people to opt-in, and as long as you’re providing quality content – it is.

Keep in mind, however, if your site is crap, then people are unlikely to opt-in because they just think you’re going to send them more crap or even worse, spam them. Reverse squeeze pages will not work on sites with crappy content. If you want to see an example of a reverse squeeze page in action, you can visit my snake site, boatips.com and see how I provide content before I ask for the subscriber to opt-in on all my article pages.

One of my favorite methods for implementing reverse squeeze pages is to offer a free report at the bottom of an article or blog post. So yes, they’re getting free content on my site, then they’re getting a free report from me, so there’s a whole lot of free stuff being given away before I ever ask for money.

And you know what, even the first few emails I send them are likely to contain just content, or maybe a very soft sell for a product included with a lot of valuable content, so that even if they don’t buy the product, they got value by reading the newsletter.

If your subscribers know that every email you send them is going to be a promotion for something, they’re going to start deleting your emails before ever reading. On the other hand, if you’re providing valuable content in every email you send, then people will actually look forward to seeing your emails, and won’t mind if you take a few moments to recommend a product to them.

And that covers getting people to opt-in to your site – give reverse squeeze pages a try and see how it works for yourself.

One thing I think that a lot of business owners, especially home based business, need to learn how to do better is improve productivity.

Being productive can mean the difference between working 30 hours a week and making a lot of money or thinking your “working” 70 hours a week and barely getting by.

You see, a lot of business owners spend their time in a state of chronic distraction. They are constantly talking on Instant Messenger, checking their email, talking on the phone, and doing a whole lot of other things that make them feel like they’re working, but are not helping them make any money.

Here are a few tips on how to increase your productivity.

First, you need to plan your day before you start it. As the great motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, said “Don’t start the day until it’s pretty well finished.”

What he means by that is you should have your entire day planned in advance so that you know what you’re going to be doing for that day. I like to plan my day the night before, but you can take it even farther and plan weeks or even months in advance.

Planning your day may sound obvious to some but so many people wake up and sit down at their desk to start working for the day with no plan of what they’re going to do that day. For many people, this bad habit carries over from their days as an employee. And the business owner can’t afford to have this bad habit.

I know that in my own business if I ever have a day where I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write down everything I need to get done that day, I get less than half of what I would have gotten done if I’d have taken the time to plan the day.

The next tip on how to be more productive is simply to plan more work for the day. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you need something done, give it to the busiest person you know.”

This may seem counterintuitive but it’s absolutely true. You see, busy people need to be more self disciplined with their time and will find a way to get something done by carefully planning.

Conversely, a person who isn’t very busy and has a lot of time will tend to procrastinate and do nothing since they think they have all the time in the world and can just do it later. So while they have the time, they don’t have the same work ethic as the busy person.

I know that when I plan a lot of work for a single day, I’m far more productive, sometimes getting done in one day what used to take me a week simply because I have so much to do that I need to keep a little extra “spring in my step” in order to get everything on my list done that day.

Now you can take this too far and plan so much work that you’ll never be able to finish it in one day, and that can be very demotivating. I’d recommend planning what seems like a lot of work, but not so much that you won’t be able to finish it no matter what you do in a day.

If you mess up a few times and find there’s just too much to do, then play around with it until you can get your list done in a day but have very little time to waste in the process.

If you have less time to waste and screw around with during your work day, you’ll see your productivity soaring – just give it a try for a few weeks and watch how much more you get done.

I want to step back from the nuts and bolts side of internet marketing and talk about that that space between your ears again…  Specifically, about focus.

A lack of focus is something I see all the time, and I’ll even admit to having that problem a few years ago.

I’d see a new opportunity, get really excited, spend some money thinking I’d make a ton back, a few weeks later get bored, and find some latest and greatest, best opportunity ever deal.

And the cycle would repeat itself.

And if my goals were to go bankrupt, that would have been an ideal course to follow since I was always spending money but rarely making any back.

I had become a serial entrepreneur jumping from one opportunity to the next, planting little money trees everywhere, but never sticking with one long enough for it to take root and start returning money. You see, money does grow on trees, but just like a tree, they don’t start producing right away. You gotta plant them, water them, tend to them, wait a little, then they just start throwin’ off cash. However, most people take a look at their money tree opportunity and just as it’s about ready to really start producing, they give up and go find something else.

Sometimes it pains me to think how much more I’d have made if I’d have just stuck with building up an awesome little empire of sites when I first got online, But I digress…

What you need to focus on is finding ONE system that you can follow, dedicate yourself to following it for a certain period of time, and then evaluate it. And I would recommend a bare minimum of 3 months to evaluate, 6 months is better, 12 months is best. If you’ve been following something for a year and you still haven’t seen results, then feel free to dump it and move along.

During that evaluation period, put on some blinders so you’re not tempted to go try something new. Really focus on making that one system you’re following work.

The key, of course, is not only focusing, but in finding a good system to work with or you’ll be trying to grow money trees from carrot seeds, and that just won’t work. Don’t be afraid to spend some money to find a good system. Seek the opinions of others who you’re certain are making good money (a lot of people pretend), and ask them what they’d recommend. Then get goin’, stop trying to make money from 10 other ways, and really focus. I think you’ll find that the results are very rewarding.

In this lesson, I cover what to look for in an autoresponder service.

In my last lesson I covered what an autoresponder was – now let’s cover how to choose an autoresponder service.

Here’s a few things to look for in an autoresponder service.

1) The Ability To Run Multiple Campaigns. Having just one autoresponder just isn’t going to cut it even if you have only one website since you’re likely going to have more than one campaign running and you’ll likely want to segment your customers so you can target your offers better.

2) The ability to personalize messages - Its been years since I’ve seen an autoresponder that doesn’t do this, because it’s so important. This feature allows you to address the person on your list by name, provided you’ve collected that info. So rather than addressing the subscriber as Dear Reader, you can address them as Dear John, or whatever their name is. Your messages will be opened more often, and you’ll ultimately make more money because of it.

3) The Ability To Test – This is very important, although it’s a chronically underused feature. But it’s important to be able to test so you can make your message more effective. Good autoresponder services will allow you to split test different messages to see which get better results. You definitely want this feature – and you definitely want to use it. Just remember, testing is your friend.

4) Tracking - You want to make sure that the you can track things like how many people actually opened your message and even how many people clicked on the links in your message. Just like with testing, if you’re not tracking your messages, you’re really just stumbling around in the dark.

5) High Delivery Rates - Many services publish the rate at which their emails are successfully delivered. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re read, but at least they’re getting through. You want to make sure that your autoresponder service can actually get your message to your subscriber or there’s no point in doing business with them. Look for deliverability rates well above 90%.

So what are some good autoresponder services? A few good ones are Aweber, GetResponse and 1ShoppingCart.   At the higher end are solutions like Email Labs and InfusionSoft.  My favorite is Aweber, but that’s just a personal preference, take a look at them all and decide which is best for you.

Autoresponder Basics Video:

In the last lesson, I talked about why you need to build a list. Today, I want to cover one of the tools you’re going to need to build your list.

Let’s start with what an autoresponder is.

In its most basic form, an autoresponder is simply a program that will automatically reply with a prewritten message when you send it an email. For example, if you go on vacation you may setup an autoresponder on your work email letting people know that you’ll be out of the office. So let’s say you set one of these up next time you’re away. Now whenever someone sends you a message they’ll automatically get a reply in their inbox from you saying that you’ll be gone.

Now, when dealing with autoresponders from the view of an email marketer – someone looking to make some money, we’re going to need a system that’s considerably more advanced, but the basic concept remains the same.

Today’s autoresponders will not only automatically reply to emails sent to them, but are capable of addressing you by name when they send you an email. So instead of just a subject line of “Here’s the report your requested” – an autoresponder can use the subject line of John, Here’s the report you requested” – or whatever the person’s first name is. They can even be setup to collect phone numbers, mailing addresses, even birthdays, and the number of children a person has.

Not only that, but today’s autoresponders can be set to contact a person multiple times over a period of days, weeks, months or even years – and it will email these people automatically without you needing to do anything once you’ve setup your messages. Are you starting to see why having an autoresponder is so important? It not only allows you to send a person a free report they requested automatically, but can also continue to followup with that person and make sales for you all on autopilot.

In my next lesson, I’ll cover the process of choosing an autoresponder and cover some of the details you need to be aware of. And I’ll even give you a few recommendations on who to go with.

Lesson #4 covers why it’s important to build an opt-in email list. Having your own responsive list is like being able to legally print money on demand so don’t be lazy and skip this step. If you want to be successful long term in this business, you need a list.

Today I’m going to cover why you need to build a list. I was initially planning to just jump right into how to build a list, but I figured I should explain why it’s so important first because otherwise you might not see the point of going through all the extra work.

Here’s the best way I can explain it – having a responsive list is like being able to legally print money. You need to make some quick cash, you send a promotion to your list. Want to buy a Lexus but don’t have the cash? Just send the bill to your list.

Do I have your attention yet?

When you have a list, whether that be past customers, people who’ve subscribed to your free newsletter, or people who’ve requested a free report from you, you have a captive audience that you can market to.

I know that most people prefer to just put up a salesletter on their website to sell a product. And then they go about driving traffic. Well, on a site a good salesletter will sell 1 or 2 people for every 100 visitors. The other 98 people go away and don’t make you any money.

If, on the other hand, you built your site to do nothing but get the visitors contact info, you could get 20 or 30 people out of every 100 to give you their information. Then they’re yours.

Still not convinced – consider this. It takes a person seeing your advertisement seven times before they buy. That means you can either try to attract the same person to your site seven times to get the sale, or collect their contact info once, and then you can market to them as much as you want. And if you’re using email, you can market to them as much as you want for free.

Whenever someone visits your website, you should be doing everything you can to get them to get their information. The more of it the better. Name and email is okay. Getting their mailing address, name and email is much better. So rather than salesletter, try to make getting the email address the focus of your sales pages.

When it comes to the actual setting up of your website, you have a lot of choices. You could write a book about it. In fact volumes of books have been written on this subject. So rather than giving my own version of what’s already been written, I’ll point you in the right direction and let you decide what works best for you.

Not when it comes to setting up a web page, it helps to learn a little bit of HTML. Even if you don’t on building the site yourself, it’s helpful to know a little in case you need to make a simple change and can’t get ahold of your designer right away. If you type in HTML tutorial into google you’ll get a lot of good options where you can learn html for free. One that I think is particularily good is davesite.com/webstation/html You’ll learn all you need to know there.

Alright, now that we’ve got learning a little HTML out of the way, it’s time to design your site. And you have a lot of different choices of software, templates and services. First, let’s cover the software. Now there are a lot of choices, and I wouldn’t call this an all inclusive list – just some of the better programs out there. As far as webpage editors, Dreamweaver and Frontpage are two of the most popular. A lot of designers say Dreamweaver is far superior to Frontpage, but I’ve used both, and for my purposes, they both work fine. I tend to use Frontpage just because that’s what I learned with. Another piece of software you make want to consider is Xsitepro – it’s designed specifically for Internet marketers and has some extra features that Dreamweaver and Frontpage don’t. All of these programs have a bit of a learning curve, but if you plan on building the sites yourself, they’re worth learning. Pick one for now and stick with it instead of trying to learn them all.

There’s also some online software that your host may provide that will help you build a website. Honestly, I find that these programs tend to be a bit limiting, and most are flexible enough if you’re trying to build money making website. So if you run across one, you may just want to pass.

Now if you don’t want to go through all the work of designing everything from scratch, there’s a lot of options out there for you to buy website templates. Now, if you’ve never worked with a template before, try to stick to simpler designer, as the more complex ones can be very difficult for a beginner to work with. Also, avoid any design that includes Flash animation. Unless you have a flash editor, you won’t be able to customize it, and it just makes working with the template more difficult, and rarely makes your site sell any better anyway.

And if this all sounds like too much work, then there’s the easiest method. Hire a designer. And if you hire a college student or outsource the design rather than calling up your local design firm, this can usually be done pretty cost effectively.

So that covers your options for designing and setting up your website. You have a lot of choices, and you should be able to find one that fits your comfort level and budget.