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Why Marketing Automation Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

By Christian

I had a guy email me at 2AM the other day (this stuff always happens in the middle of the night…don’t ya know). He was frantic about why his website was sending out thousands of emails to his email list. He was getting stacks of complaints and opt outs, and he wanted to know why for obvious reasons.

Well, I personally looked into it, and the explanation was very simple. Here’s what happened:

He was running a real estate website, and he was having all the new real estate listings in his market area automatically published as blog posts on his blog.
From there, he was having those new listings sent out via email to his list. Of course this was automated too.
He was also automatically syndicating all his blog content to his social media profiles. In this case it was just Facebook and Twitter.
In the middle of the night, the service that was pushing new real estate listings out to his site had a server crash, and they had to reboot. This meant their feed got reset.
After the server rebooted, all the real estate listings were pushed out again. His market area has several thousand homes on the market right now.
This means his website auto-published thousands of blog posts again…all at once.
All those new blog posts went out to his social media profiles, automatically.
All the new blog posts also went out to his email list, automatically.

If you signed up for an email list, and you received thousands of emails (literally) over the course of a single day, wouldn’t you complain and opt out too? I know I would.

So WHY did this happen? Unfortunately, the reason it happened is because his website did exactly what he told it to do. Everything was working perfectly. The problem wasn’t his website. It was the fact that he had every damn thing automated to the point that everything happened…THOUSANDS of emails, blog posts, tweets, etc…all without him even knowing what went down.

What’s even crazier is that I’ve been contacted about similar issues more than once.

A caution about marketing automation

Marketing automation can save you some time, but it can also wreak havoc and cause a lot of problems if it’s not done well. Proper implementation and judicious use are crucial. I am absolutely a fan of automation, but it’s a dangerous proposition simply following the “set it and forget it” approach to running a marketing campaign, especially online.

You could never possibly send out 5,000 direct mail pieces to a single prospect on accident, but you definitely CAN do that with email if stuff isn’t set up properly. If someone is talking with you about the benefits of automating your website, listen to them. Automation can be very awesome. But make sure to address safeguards and checkpoints…automation always sounds good, until it goes very, very wrong.

If you want to take advantage of some marketing automation ninjutsu, hit me up. It’s my pleasure to answer any questions you have. Be good 🙂

Thinking Inside The Box

By Christian

Serious guitar players will spend countless hours meticulously practicing scales. Major, Minor, Whole tone, modes, the list goes on and on. It’s some of the most boring work imaginable, and no one listens to music of people playing scales. Playing scales is not something that anyone wants to do, and it’s not a treat for anyone’s ears either. So why the heck to guitar players spend so much time on it?

Because they know the value of thinking inside the box. Not outside the box…inside. There’s a lot of value there.

You’ve grown up thinking the box is something to be transcended. I have a different message for you.

There’s nothing wrong with the box. The box is your friend.

We’ve been trained to “think outside the box”. There’s a lot of value in that too. But it’s become a religion. It’s become virtuous to think outside the box. And that must mean that anything inside the box is something to be avoided. Not true.

The fact is if there were no box at all, we couldn’t think outside it. The entire point of thinking outside the box is to bring more value to the box. It means that thinking outside the box is worthless unless you’re able to take what you learn and APPLY it inside the box.

What is this damn box anyway?

A box is just another name for a system. The way you get leads. The process you use to create content for your blog. The method you use to follow up and convert interested prospects into paying customers. These are all systems. They’re all boxes. And they all need optimized from time to time.

A lot of times, thinking outside the box can help you to come up with creative new solutions. But it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel or come up with some grandiose new plan for conquering the world. A lot of times…dare I say MOST of the time, thinking inside the box is what’s needed.

The value of thinking inside the box

Thinking inside the box actually requires a bit more discipline. It requires working with the tools you already have. It is an exercise in minimalism, and it requires you to take stock of everything you have at your disposal and make sure you’re getting the highest and best use out of everything.

A skilled guitar player can take the most basic scale…one you’ve heard millions of times before…and create sounds you’ve never heard before. The musical tones we’re mostly accustomed to hearing are very few. There’s only twelve notes. When it comes to music, that’s our box. Everyone has the same tools to work with, yet we’ve continued to produce more and more original music, one generation after another.

The box does not hinder you. It provides the essential framework you need to produce anything of recognizable value to others.

The danger of not thinking inside the box

As a marketing consultant, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to being able to see inside a lot of small business operations. I get to see how people make things happen, and I always feel I learn as much as I’m able to teach.

One thing I’ve seen over and over is small business owners with stacks of systems they never use. Their credit card is being charged every month for websites and systems of various types, and they’re not even being used. How does this happen?

They go to a conference and get inspired by someone teaching them to think outside the box. They learn a new idea or come across a new system for something. So they acquire it, but they haven’t first cleaned house with their existing systems.

Until you have your house in order, adding more and more systems to the mix is just a small business equivalent to hoarding.

We collect systems, but we don’t optimize any of them. We don’t truly use anything to it’s maximum potential, because we’re so focused on thinking outside the box that we completely overlook that we ALREADY have everything we need to achieve our goals right in front of us. If we’d just use it.

Advertising Scams

By Christian

The internet makes it easy to share your awesome work with the world. But the principle of “if you build it, they will come” just doesn’t work in reality.

You need to advertise your business.

There are innumerable companies out there that sell advertising and SEO services, and I get asked by clients regularly what I recommend. Importantly, I have nothing bad to say about most companies out there, because I haven’t had a chance to work with most of them. It’s definitely true that a lot of scams are out there however.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advertise. It just means you need to be deliberate in your approach and learn how advertising works on the interwebz 🙂

A healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing.

Here are a few red flags to look for:

Anyone offering you a guaranteed spot on Google. For any price. Google rankings can be earned, but they’re not sold.
Any SEO company that promises you much of anything for a two digit price. Many of the scams know it will take you a few months to catch on, so they get a few months of revenue out of you before you cancel. Any SEO operation worth working with does not promise you first page rankings for $60, $70 or $80 a month. It just doesn’t work that way.
Any company offering to email your ad to thousands or millions of people for a nominal fee. Again, if it sounds too good to be true…

There are many reputable and high quality operations out there. SEO firms, PPC management firms and ad networks that are very worthwhile. I do consulting and give tutorials with clients all the time. If you ever need a recommendation, I’m happy to help. We don’t do advertising campaigns here, but I have friends in the business that will do a fantastic job for you.

Hit me up any time. It’s my pleasure to make sure you get hooked up with an advertising option that suits your goals 🙂

The Almighty First Two Steps Toward Improving Lead Generation

By Christian

So your small business website is up and running. And you want to see some dang leads coming in! Ok let’s get started 🙂

The subject of lead generation is something I write about at length here, but I wanted to point out the FIRST TWO STEPS explicitly, because they often get overlooked. Here ya go:

Identify your primary call to action on every page – Take any page on your website and identify the one MAIN thing you want people to do there. Remember, a call to action absolutely does not have to be buying something. It can be an email sign up. It can be getting them to call you. It can be sharing an article on Facebook. It can be anything you want. Look at the page on your website and decide the primary thing you want your visitors to do there.
Remove distractions – Now that you know exactly what you want your visitors to do after landing on that page, make sure you have your call to action displayed prominently on the page, so your visitors can’t miss it. And remove any distractions. The biggest thing I see affecting conversions on a lot of small business websites is simply a lack of clarity. If you ask visitors to do 27 different things, there’s a really good chance they’re not gonna do anything at all. But if you ask them to do ONE thing…and if you give them a compelling reason to do so, your odds of getting that to happen go up significantly.

It’s little details like this that make all the difference in the world when it comes to getting the conversions you want on your website. Of course it helps to have a website that gives you a lot of control over each and every page on your website. That’s why we build sites that do this. But you can apply these two steps (and everything I discuss on this blog in fact) to any website in the world. It’s not a specific magic type of website that gets results, it’s just marketing. It’s just a matter of learning what works in marketing and how to translate that to the web. If you have any questions about this one…hit me up 🙂

6 Things You Didn’t Expect About Running a High Conversion Website

By Christian

So…you want to be on the first page of Google, huh? You want to triple your traffic and quadruple your conversion rate too? Sounds fun! We can help with that.

But first, here are a few things you probably don’t know about running a high conversion website. There are two sides to every coin. Consider that running a high conversion website means:

Crazy spam town – When you first start, you’ll probably find it annoying when you get spam comments on your blog and spam email through your contact forms. But just a heads up…after your search rankings go up and you start getting more traffic, the spam only increases 🙂 Yes, there are effective ways to mitigate this, but it never ceases to amaze me how much spam I get. Thousands per day at times. Get ready and make sure your blog is set up properly to defend against this. To be clear, spam can be dealt with properly so it’s not an issue, but if you’re not configured to handle the onslaught, be prepared for your inbox to get snowed in with offers for Cialis and Dr Dre’s latest headphones. Also stuff from Russia. For some reason Russians love to send me spam 😉
Hate mail – When you have thousands of people on your email list, you’re bound to rope in some crazies. It’s just gonna happen. And they’re not shy about letting you know just how much crazy they gots to share with you! So when someone sends you a 4 page email (in all caps of course) about that typo in your last blog post (yes, I’ve actually had it happen), just click delete or reply to them saying “Thanks!” And make sure to feel bad for them for a second. They must really be having a bad day. But that doesn’t mean you need to have a bad day too.
Cheap hosting won’t cut it – When you start to get more traffic, you need better web hosting or your site is just not gonna keep up. Just a general announcement to the small business community as a whole…if your website is an important part of your marketing strategy, make sure you’re on business-class hosting. It costs more, but it’s still super cheap and will save you loads of tech headaches over time. I know business owners who will happily spend thousands per month on marketing for their website (smart) but refuse to spend more than $10/mo on hosting (not so smart). And then they constantly complain about why their website isn’t performing well. I’ve never quite been able to figure this one out.
Language barriers – More and more, I’m working with clients and affiliates from all over the world. Talking with a VA or a customer in India is very different than talking with someone in the US for example. It’s not always just the language but also different customs and expectations. Working through language barriers, learning to listen and solve problems creatively gets a lot more important in situations like this. It also causes you to constantly get better at communicating with others and explaining yourself. Not every business owner will expand their local business and reach out globally, but the opportunity is there and available to you. There are countless ways that any small business owner can reach out to the global market. It’ll stretch your brain though. In a good way 🙂
You’ll have to start being more selective – It sounds great to have more leads than you can deal with. But when you see that actually starting to happen, the dynamic of your business changes. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been in a situation where you’re happy to work with any new client or customer. You just want the business so you can pay your bills. But after a short time building a blog and your email list effectively, you find that you have more opportunities than you could possibly take on. You have to pick and choose who to work with, who to refer out to other vendors, who to not work with at all, etc. It forces you to get really clear on who your ideal customer is. If also forces you to get really good at qualifying people to make sure you’re creating work opportunities that are fun and mutually beneficial. It’s SO great having the choice of who to work with, but it takes some practice learning how to make that choice.
No time for analytics drama – When I first started blogging and employing the lead gen principles I now teach to clients, I would check my analytics every day. Usually more than once per day. I’d pay attention to how many followers I had on Twitter. I’d be upset if I lost some followers or if my traffic took a dip. Please rest assured that it’s not gonna make or break your business if your bounce rate is 60% instead of 50%. It’s not gonna make one bit of difference at all if 50 people unfollow you on Twitter because you said something about how awesome Katy Perry is, and some people disagreed with you. Trust the systems. After you run a high conversion website for a short period of time, you won’t even have time or the inclination to check your numbers every day like a little freak (like I used to do). The people who unsubscribe or unfollow you SHOULD unsubscribe or unfollow you. You’re refining your list. It’s totally natural and unavoidable for your traffic to go up and down, especially while you’re still getting the ball rolling. My general recommendation is to install analytics on your site but don’t even check analytics for the first 3 months. Publish content, market the hell out of your website. Start with that. We’ll even show you how. Then check your stats quarterly. Quarterly. That’s every three months, not every three minutes! Check your stats, yes. But it should take you a total of 20-30 minutes per year.

Running a high conversion website has definitely been what made it possible for me to run my business from home. It’s also made it possible for me to do work I love doing, working with great people who appreciate what I do. I’m infinitely grateful for the opportunity to do that, and it’s why I’m so passionate about sharing what I’ve learned with you. There is always a bit of drama behind the curtain, and I felt compelled to share a bit with you today so it doesn’t take you by surprise when it happens to you too 🙂

The Reverse Causation Issue

By Christian

When you’re new to blogging, it’s easy to see other successful blogs out there and feel intimidated. I’ve heard from clients many times about how difficult it is to write a blog. Yes, you see others doing it and getting great results, but you feel your writing isn’t nearly good enough. Besides, you’re not a professional writer anyway. Surely blogging isn’t for you.

This mentality is understandable, but it also implies that blogging is mostly for talented writers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Blogging is not for writers

You live and breathe your small business. You’re an expert in your field. That is the prerequisite for successful blogging, not a talent for writing. Yes, there are professional writers who blog. Of course professional writers blog…every small business owner should, particularly writers. But this doesn’t mean the blogging world is meant exclusively for writers and talented journalists. Absolutely not.

If you’re an expert in your field, that means you have a lot of knowledge about your industry that your customers don’t necessarily have. Remember you’re not writing for the New York Times here, and you’re likely not writing a blog for millions of people in the general public. You’re writing for your customers. That’s who you need to impress.

And guess what. When you’re actively publishing content and sharing your ideas, your customers notice. When you’re blogging and your competition isn’t, guess who wins. You do. Every time.

The reverse causation issue

A lot of times we see someone with a very successful blog, and we think we need to be like them in order to succeed. This is backwards. The truth is the reason they’re successful is because they’re simply sharing their expertise in their own way. You can’t be them. You don’t have the same skills. You don’t have the same experiences. But the good news is that you have your OWN skills and your OWN experiences to draw from. You have your OWN insights to share with your customers. You have your own style.

The successful bloggers out there are not successful because they have a certain formula or way of doing things. They’re successful because they do things their own way, in their own style. This is what attracts their ideal customers.

The reverse causation issue is what happens when we think someone is a successful blogger because they’re a good writer. The truth is they’ve become a good writer from creating a successful blog. It’s totally opposite of what most people think. It’s the act of blogging that makes you good at it, and there is no required education or training to get started.

Getting started

Getting started is often the hardest part. I’ve seen it over and over again. After you get over that initial hump of not wanting to do it, blogging gets easier and easier. In fact it’s very much like going to the gym. It feels like such a horrible idea when you first get started. But after you’ve worked out for even a short time, it quickly starts to feel weird when you DON’T do it. Blogging works that way too. You start to see and feel the benefits, and it quickly becomes one of your most lucrative marketing efforts.

These days, I can send a single email to my list and get new business. It gets easier, and you start to experience more and more leverage after you’ve been blogging for a while. The trick is just getting started.

You have the expertise. You have the experience. You have all the insights to share with your customers. You know more about what you do than anyone else. The only trick is to get the ball rolling, and forget the idea that blogging is just for people who are talented at such things. No one is a natural born blogger. You simply learn how to do it.

If you’ve followed the blog for any length of time, you’ve heard me say that blogging is the new smart phone. We never needed one before, but it’s foolish to ignore how much marketing has changed over the last several years. Many of us cannot imagine operating our business without a cell phone these days. But we never had one before. We simply learned how to use a smart phone, because it gives us a leveraged way to stay in contact with a large number of people. Blogging plays that exact role in small business. It’s quick and inexpensive, and it enables you to market your business in a very targeted, effective way. When it comes to ROI, blogging is the smartest thing you can add to your marketing. Hands down.

If you have any questions about how to get started or about blogging in general, hit me up. At your service 🙂