Helmsley Media

When I first got into studying online marketing the name of the game was traffic, indiscriminate traffic.  The idea in my mind was that if I was capable of driving large numbers of people to my websites, then I would be able to make money.  I believe this attitude came from the impression that most people get of online marketing which likely comes from the dot com era companies that focused exclusively on building large audiences with little consideration of what their business model would be.  I think we know what happened there.

Eventually I discovered Google Adwords, and the idea of PPC marketing.  For as little as $0.15 per click, I could drive visitors who were interested in “badminton dvds” to my website where I was selling badminton dvds.  This sort of worked, and we succeeded in making a bit of money, but it was never anything to make the trip to the post office worthwhile (I’ll go into automation of this process another time perhaps).  What we were missing out on was in spite of the fact that we were making a few one off sales, we were doing nothing to establish a long term relationship with our customers.  We could have gone through our PayPal history to review contact information that way, but it wasn’t automated, and we weren’t doing anything to keep in contact with them on a regular basis.

Shortly after this we started up our blog.  It was a way to talk about badminton tournament results, and to post up the promotional trailers we made for the videos.  We had an audience, but they were faceless, and the communication was completely one way besides the occasional comment here and there.  We tried a forum, but it was spammed to hell and never really got any traction.  This probably had more to do with our lack of experience with running a forum, but nonetheless it didn’t work for us.  We didn’t have a way of capturing our prospects information.  We didn’t even know what the concept of a prospect was.

After experimenting with blogging and online marketing for quite a while we stopped and focused on our offline business.  Looking back it’s unfortunate to see just how close we were, and how many great ideas we had that we just didn’t execute properly because we didn’t understand some of the important underlying concepts.  This lack of understanding applied to the marketing of our offline business as well.  We were offering video production services in a blue collar city that had little appreciation for what we provided, and our marketing strategy seemed to be one of hope for a phone call or email.  We had some good SEO for our region and as a result got some contact that way, but we were probably losing a lot of the prospects that visited our website because once they were there we did nothing with them.

After leaving my old business I started to get back into blogging again.  At this point I really started to learn the importance of building an RSS readership.  Well known bloggers John Chow and Shoemoney were in the midst of an RSS contest, where the winner was the one who could add the most RSS readers during the course of the contest.  Shoemoney even had a post where you could determine the value of each new RSS reader to budget how much you would spend to get new readers.  I know that Shoemoney has since changed his blogging strategy to be more email focused now after spending time with John Reese I believe.  Whether it is RSS readers or Email subscribers the concept is the same, lead acquisition.  Each person who subscribes to your RSS feed or Email newsletter, are potential customers.  Perhaps they will by something that you are selling down the road, perhaps not, but if you don’t have some method of capturing them as a prospect or lead, you’re wasting your traffic.  You need to design your website in such a way that you are actively trying to get subscribers of some kind.  I’m not going to go into detail on how to do this other than to say look at how other websites are doing this already.  How many newsletters are you subscribed to without realizing it?  You might think it’s spam, but you probably signed up your email address at some point in time.  They were likely very effective in capturing their prospects email addresses.

What I was hearing from so many online marketers was that I was wasting my time and my traffic if I wasn’t building an email list.  These are prospects you can try and market to down the road.  The email list is your business.  The more targeted this list is, the more profitable it can potentially be.  My newsletter is targeted towards people who want badminton coaching advice, subscribe and I’ll help you to become better at badminton.  As I’m writing this post we have over 250 prospects signed up to our newsletter, 100 or so were added in the last month mostly through advertising on Facebook for people who were interested in badminton.  The idea is that I ask someone for their permission to market to them.  They want to know more about how to improve their badminton game, and I’ll help them with that if they provide me their email address.  I then proceed to give them some free tips, and eventually tell them about the products that I sell that will help them even more.  It’s a win-win situation for both sides.  You email list is your business.

It doesn’t end there though.  You can’t just try and sell people something, you need to build a relationship with them.  By building rapport, and credibility with your audience you are increasing the value of your list even further.  The more honest you are with your subscribers, the more weight your recommendations carry.  This idea applies to all businesses, not just my badminton business.  Were I still in the video production business I would likely start a newsletter educating people on how to use video to help them market their business.  That was in fact the greatest challenge for us, to convince prospects of the value, and to provide them with some ideas as to how they could actually use video to market their business.  If someone remains subscribed to your newsletter you have an ongoing opportunity which you can build up trust between you and the subscriber, then when you do present them with an offer of some sort they are much more likely to be receptive.

Much of this I learned from observing a number of “make money online” bloggers including Shoemoney, Yaro Starak, John Chow, Darren Rowse, and many others, but I read a book (listened to the audiobook actually) called Permission Marketing by Seth Godin.  Permission Marketing gives some great insights into this practice, as well as some great examples of companies that are using “permission marketing” tactics.  I can whole heartedly recommend this book.

As for service providers, I currently use Aweber.  Aweber seems to be the market leader (at least from where I’m sitting), and it works great for my purposes thus far.  I have no experience with the other providers of email marketing software, however I have been playing with OneShoppingCart for my membership website’s shopping cart.  I may have to switch to Clickbank however as there are some limitations it would appear for using OneShoppingCart with PayPal and their recurring billing option.  Something to do with the way that PayPal captures CV2 numbers from the back of users’ credit cards.  I can certainly recommened Aweber as I have had good experiences with it so far.

Looking back on all of the tactics I have learned over the last 4-5 years I am reminded of a famous Bruce Lee quote that goes a little something like this:

Before I learned martial arts, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. When I studied martial arts, a punch was no longer just a punch and a kick was no longer just a kick. Now I understand martial arts, and a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

5 years ago online marketing seemed simple, like there was really nothing to it.  You just did it.  Now after years of learning I’ve discovered that it really is quite complicated, you need to have a clear strategy, to build up a list of prospects, to test your methods, and so much more.  However, what I’m hoping is that after a little bit more time and a launch or two, that online marketing will seem pretty simple to me again, it sure seems that way to the big guys of the industry.

Enter Action With Boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

The above is an excerpt from the table of contents of Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power“, one of my all time favourite books.  The book is full of valuable lessons that can apply to numerous areas of one’s life, not just to business.  This particular law is one of my favourites, not because I am very adept at following it, rather because it is the one law which I most likely break most repeatedly.

I am a very analytical person by nature.  I enjoy breaking things down, and visualizing how all the pieces of something should work to achieve a desired result.  In building my business I have spent countless hours brainstorming, researching, and studying how best to achieve my goals.  It’s likely that I spend over 90% of my time planning, less than 10% of my time executing  my plans, and probably no time at all on monitoring my results.  A shame to say the least.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think that my plans are quite good, and that were I too execute them as I envision them, I would achieve some great things.  Sadly this has not been the case.

In writing this I’m not attempting to elicit sympathy, rather I’m hoping to provide a venue through which to hold myself accountable, and to provide you some insight into something that perhaps you yourself could use some work on.  The one thing that I need to become better at more than anything else, is to begin allocating more of my time and attention to the executing of my plans.  This goes into the 80/20 law, or Pareto Principle.  If you’re not familiar with this, it basically says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, and therefore by isolating what those most productive actions are, and doing more of that, you will achieve greater results with less overall effort.  I won’t go too much further into that, but you can find a more in depth explanation of the Pareto Principle on Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey.  Another great place to read about similar concepts is in Timothy Ferris’ book “The Four Hour Work Week“.

If you spend too much time analyzing the variables that go into your situation, you have too little time to execute whatever strategy you develop.  Accoutants have a catch phrase for this too, “Relevance vs Reliabilty”.  This basically states that as you spend more and more time analyzing a company’s financial situation, the less relevant the information you find will be to that business.

So what is the point of this article?  Well hopefully you gain something from it, but primarily I wrote it as a reminder to myself that the fastest way to get to where you want to go, is to stop thinking about it, and start walking.

Over the last few years I’ve been studying internet marketing, but only recently have I started to look seriously at it. I’m in the process of setting up a couple of different subscription based membership websites, and the first steps in building these websites is to develop a sales funnel to start collecting leads. For those of you who are totally green, a lead is basically someone who you have determined to be a potential customer. How do you do this? You find people who are willing to provide you with their contact details (phone number, email, address etc.) in return for something of interest to them. You could be providing them with some information that they want, a training video of some kind, or in an offline example it could be a free product sample.

So the next question is, why is it useful to know the contact details of someone that wanted a free sample of acai berries, or a free training video that shows them how to improve their golf swing? Well because it is much more likely that this person is will to buy more acai berries, or to buy an extended golf training DVD than someone who didn’t even want to enter their contact information. However, just because someone wants a free sample of what you’re offering doesn’t mean that they are going to buy from you, in fact it’s quite likely that only a small percentage of the leads you collect will ever end up buying from you. Anyway, that’s enough about leads to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll go into more depth on this whole process another time.

The first part of my sales funnel was to build what is often referred to as a landing page, or email squeeze page where I try to entice people to provide me with their email address in return for more information on the product that I am developing. Now here’s the thing, I haven’t completed any free offering yet. I don’t have a free sample, a related product I can give away, nothing. All I have is the promise that I will give them more information on my website once it is complete. This is not very enticing, which means that my opt in rate (percentage of people who come to the page who actually provide their details) won’t be as high as it could be, actually much lower. Nonetheless I can begin testing to see what I can do to improve my opt in rate.

How do I test? Testing is basically a statistical process where you drive a certain amount of traffic to your landing page (in my case via pay per click advertising), and track how many people opt in. Then you make changes to your landing page, and once again you track how many people opt in. If you send 1000 people to each version of your landing page, and version A has an opt in rate of 3% while version B has an opt in rate of 4.5%, then you can say that version B is a better page, you have proof of it. It is best to test with as much volume as possible, to insure the most statistical accuracy, anything below 1000 people and you might have a difficult time determining if it’s a true trend, or just an anomaly.

I’m using Google Adwords to drive traffic to my landing page, and while I haven’t seen anywhere near 1000 visitors yet I have tweaked a couple things based on the recommendation of some people in forums. Now that I have implemented some fundamental lessons that I learned, I plan to allow a decent amount of traffic to go through to the site in order to see how well it performs. After 1000 or so visitors I will make some changes and see what difference it makes.

When I talk about the changes I will make to the site I am referring to the sales copy. I’m sure a lot of you have read some cheesy looking sales pages on the internet and thought to yourself that nobody would ever buy from this page, but you’d be wrong. These marketers are generally testing their sales copy in the same way that I described above, and they can show you statistical proof that these pages DO WORK, not to mention the money they are making.

By determining what your opt in rate is you are finding a piece of the puzzle that will help you to determine how much you will have to spend on customer acquisition. To give you a little more information, by determining for example that 4.5% of all visitors to your landing page provide your with their contact details, and 10% of those people end up buying your product (based on your follow up marketing efforts) which has a margin of $50.00 per unit, you now know that if you sent 10,000 people to your landing page that 45 of them would end up buying from you, providing you with a margin of $2250. That means that you need to spend less than $2250 in order to drive 10,000 visitors to your landing page, or to go even further than that each visitor to your website is worth no more than $0.225 ($2250/10,000=$0.225 but we’ll round down to $0.22), and each lead is worth $5.00 ($50*10% purchase rate=$5.00 per lead)

I apologize if I haven’t done the greatest job of illustrating all of this to you, I have a long ways to go before I master all of these concepts. I understand them in theory, but I have yet to fully execute a lot of them at this point in time. I’ll chronicle my progress as best I can without revealing too many specifics about my individual projects.

I am a pretty big Gary Vaynerchuk fan, as you may have noticed from the frequency of my quoting him/re-posting his videos. He has a great video he just put out talking about how the value of each viewer/user/customer is not the same. This can be attributed to the 80/20 rule quite clearly, and Gary does a good job of getting the point across.

(Update: Here is a link to David’s website where he posted the video)

Last night I came across an excellent video of a presentation David Armano did at the Chicago Convergence New Media Summit.  David’s presentation focused on building a personal brand, and focused largely on building your personal brand online.  With the surge in individuals starting their own mini publishing empires online, I’m sure that many people will find this video particularly interesting.

The gist of the video is that your brand is the gut feeling that you give others.  It’s not who you are, or who you think you are, but rather it is who people perceive you to be.  It’s an important thing to be able to see, I doubt many of us see ourselves as others do, and most of us probably don’t want to.  This of course is also relevant to larger corporations, but they have been dealing with brand management for years now.  Although the internet and social media has certainly changed the way in which they need to be playing the game.

I’ll spare you an the in depth summary and let you watch the video (it’s about 20 minutes)

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