Do You Have LFAQs on Your Website?

I’ve already made an argument for including an “About You” page on your website. The basic idea is that while everyone has an About Us page that describes you and/or your company, customers don’t care. They care about themselves so you should have a page on your site, the About You page, that describes your ideal customer.

Another page that frequents websites is the FAQ page. Businesses use it to list the Frequently Asked Questions they get asked about their business. The problem with FAQs is that they are asked, well, frequently.

Frequent is common.
Frequent is what prospects are asking your competitors.
Frequent focuses on similarities.

What if you were to focus on LEAST Frequently Asked Questions instead?

The questions that are uncommon.
The questions that you wish your customers would ask you, but usually don’t.
The questions that focus on what sets you apart from the competition, not makes you similar.

What questions do prospects not frequently ask you that you could add to your website? How can you use these questions to uniquely position your company to set you apart from the competition? Please post your thoughts in the comments section below.

One Simple Slogan. Two Powerful Lessons.

As I was driving down the street the other day, a red moving truck caught my eye. On the truck was the company’s name and slogan:

Simple Moves – We move what you can’t

As a copywriter, I love the slogan. It serves as a great example for other businesses to emulate.

The lesson is keep it simple. The Simple Moves slogan gets right at the heart of what they do. They didn’t try to get cute. There’s no wordplay to try and show how clever they are. They’re not trying to get you to laugh.

Many companies fall into these traps when coming up with a slogan. But in gloating over how cute, clever and funny they are they don’t realize that their customers don’t care about those things. Customers just want to know what you can do for them. A great slogan (and headline, sales letter, AdWords ad, etc.) does that simply and directly.

And the Simple Moves slogan hits the mark. It lays out exactly what service they provide their customers (and implies what they don’t). It’s not cute. It’s not clever. It’s not funny. It’s just effective.

The second lesson to take away here is to be a niche player. Instead of competing with the big, expensive moving companies, Simple Moves has carved out a niche for themselves. Local, small moves. You want to move your clothes, sliverware, and bottle cap collection yourself, great! You want help with your furniture, large appliances and your piano, Small Moves is your company.

Does your company slogan clearly and simply tell prospects exactly what you do?

Does your company try to be everything to everybody or have you carved out a niche that you can dominate?

I can’t say whether doing these things have helped Simple Moves become a successful company. I do, however, appreciate the way they have positioned themselves and the lessons we can all take away from their example.

Do you have examples of slogans that have captured your attention for better or worse? Post them in the comment section.

Incredible (and Free!) Video Series on How To Use Blogger

Here’s an incredible resource for anyone that is interested in blogging on Blogger.com.

First, if you’re new to blogging, there are a number of free blogging platforms you can use to start and host a blog. The blog you are reading right now happens to be on WordPress. Another popular blogging platform is Blogger.com which I use for some other blogs I have.

Both WordPress.com and Blogger.com have their plusses and minuses, but the general consensus seems to be that Blogger is a bit easier to use than WordPress.com. That’s especially true when you take into account the video series on how to use Blogger put together by Bob and Josh Summers of RecognizedExpert.com.

It’s a comprehensive collection of 118 videos (and growing) that cover everything from setting up a Blogger account to converting your Blogger blog into a website – and everything in between. I’ve used Blogger for a couple of years now and I’ve still learned a lot from this video series.

I’m sure that everyone from the blogging virgin to more experienced users will find this video series to be an amazing resource.

How to Strike Marketing Gold on Amazon

How do you eavesdrop on the conversations your prospects have going on in their heads? How do you really know what it is they want?

Answer those questions correctly and you are well on your way to a successful marketing campaign. This post is going to focus on one of my favorite ways to do that . . . surfing the customer reviews on Amazon.com.

Chances are, whatever your industry/niche, there are books on the topic for sale on Amazon. And if it’s for sale on Amazon, chances are people have voiced their opinions, good and bad, in the customer review section for the book.

These reviews can provide a wealth of information for the savvy marketer.

An important thing to note about this technique is that these are not just people who may be interested in what you offer. These are people who have already demonstrated that they will open their purse strings to get information related to your niche. (As long as you skip the reviews that are most likely posted by the author and their mother!)

These are the people you need to know, and know intimately. And at Amazon they’re bearing their souls about what’s going through their minds.

As you’re reading the reviews, look for the answers to the following questions:

• What are the common themes that emerge from the reviews?
• What are the ideas and concepts that get the most positive comments?
• What are the ideas and concepts that get the most negative comments?
  • Do these present an opportunity for you?
• What problems does the information in the book help readers solve?
• More importantly, what are the ultimate benefits they get from solving their problems (ie. make more money, avoid pain, get peace of mind, enjoy good health, get more respect)?
• What problems are they still left with after reading the book?
• Are there particularly clear, vivid words or phrases used by reviewers that you can incorporate into a headline, sales letter, website, etc. to help you better describe what you do and how it helps your customers?
• Can you identify any potential gaping holes in the market that you can turn into a new product or service?

It’s been said that understanding your target audience – really getting inside their heads and knowing what conversations they have going on in there – is the key to successful marketing.

Those conversations are available to the public, for free, on Amazon.com. Use them to your advantage!

How To Send Email While You Sleep

A prospect comes to your website and expresses interest in your offer. Maybe they download a free report, a whitepaper, or fill out a form requesting more information.

You capture their email address (you are capturing their email address, right?) and now you have to follow up. If you just have a request or two trickle in here or there it’s no big deal to handle manually. But what if you have hundreds or, hopefully, thousands of requests coming in? How do you manage emailing your prospects?

Enter the auto responder.

An auto responder is basically an email that automatically gets sent to someone who requests information from you. It can be configured so the email, with the requested information attached, is sent as soon as a prospect submits their request. And that email will go out even if you’re sleeping or nowhere near a computer. This ensures the requested information is delivered while it’s still hot on the mind of your prospect.

Even better, you can build relationships with prospects by setting up a series of emails that starts when they submit a request to you. For example, an email with a free report is sent immediately after the prospect fills out the request form on your website. Then you schedule a follow up email to go out a few days later asking the prospect if they found the report helpful and informative. A week later an email with an additional tip or piece of useful information automatically goes out. Then another week or two later an email promoting a special offer shows up in the prospects inbox.

And all that happens without any work from you (after the initial setup, that is).

There’s no limit to how many auto responder emails you set up. I’ve been in some auto responder sequences for over a year now.

Many web hosting packages will include some sort of auto responder. However, my preference is to use a third party auto responder. My favorite is AWeber.

There are a few big advantages to using a service like AWeber:

1. Get your emails delivered. Reputable companies like AWeber have very strong relationships with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). These relationships help ensure that your emails get through spam filters and reach your intended recipients. This is a big issue when you are sending out emails to a list. If even a small percentage of your emails don’t get delivered due to spam filters it can adversely affect your bottom line. Undelievered emails have no chance of resulting in business no matter how good the offer is.

2. Easy integration with your website. AWeber lets you easily create forms you add to your website to capture information (name, email address, etc.) from prospects. You can customize the text and layout of the form using a drag and drop editor on the AWeber site. Then you just add the HTML code for the form to your website and that’s it. Once the prospect clicks the submit button, AWeber takes over. It adds the prospect’s name and email to your database and initiates the auto responder email sequence you’ve set up.

3. Test the effectiveness of your emails and forms. AWeber provides statistics on the performance of your email marketing campaigns. It also lets you split test the emails and web forms you create so you can determine which ones get the best response. Split testing is critical to the success of your marketing campaign and the importance of this feature shouldn’t be underestimated.

Those are the big three benefits to using AWeber as far as I’m concerned. It does have some other nice features for users though including the ability to:

• choose from over 50+ email templates
• send newsletters
• manage multiple email campaigns,
• integrate AWeber with a variety of online shopping carts.

When building a business, online or off, you need to develop and nurture relationships with your prospects and customers. Using an auto responder like AWeber to send emails while you sleep goes a long way toward helping you do that so you can make money while you sleep.

Business Lessons From a Toddler: You Can’t Walk Before You Crawl

Babies don’t come out of the womb wearing their Nikes ready to run. It takes a good year or so before they are able to take their first steps.

There’s a natural progression that most babies go through to get there – picking their heads up, rolling over, playing while on their tummmies, sitting up, crawling, standing up, and then walking. During each one of those stages, a baby develops, practices, and refines the skills – such as hand-eye coordination, depth perception, and the muscles – they need to start walking. If a baby skips any step along the way, the ultimate goal, walking, becomes much more difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

Business owners often fall into that trap of skipping steps in trying to grow their business. This often leads to disastrous results. Just look to Boston Market and Krispy Kreme as two well-known examples of businesses who paid the price for trying to run before they could crawl.

You can’t open your doors for business one day and expect to have the next Microsoft, Amazon.com, or eBay. There’s a natural progression needed to develop all the parts of a business. Each successful step along the way builds on the previous ones. Go too quickly or skip some steps along the way and the business will fall flat on its face.

This lesson is especially important for individuals that want to start an online business and develop a stream of SWISS Money. There is a tendency to want to rush things. You get bombarded with emails from internet gurus who have supposedly built huge fortunes and tell you that you can too if you just follow a few easy steps.

It just doesn’t work that way. The internet gurus who have built huge fortunes haven’t done so overnight. It took time for them to learn the skills they needed to start that huge flow of SWISS Money their way. They developed, practiced and refined their copywriting, sales, technology, direct response, and AdWords skills.

They built huge mailing lists.
They researched their target audiences.
They tested their marketing messages.

At each step along they way they developed the skills needed to successfully get to the next level. Those that did this have the SWISS Money flowing in. Those who went to fast and skipped steps in the development of their business – don’t.

As you grow your online or offline business(es), never take your eyes off your ultimate goal. Just don’t push things so that you try to get there before you, and the business, are ready. Because you will fall flat on your face.

Make sure you have the necessary skills and support structure in place so you can confidently and successfully take each step along the way to reaching your goals.

Because when building a successful business, as with babies learning to walk, you can’t walk before you crawl.

Ultimate Writing Tip That Will Blow Your Mind and Boost Your Response

Want people to read your blog posts, promotional emails, articles, advertisements, press releases, or web site? More often than not, it’s going to come down to the headline.

You have precious few seconds to entice a reader. If your headline fails to do that, odds are the rest of what you’ve written will not get read – no matter how good it may be.

Perhaps no one knows this better than those in the magazine industry. This industry pays headline writers big bucks to come up with catchy headlines that instantly grabs the reader’s attention and gets them to add the magazine to their cart.

So why not put their expertise to use for your business?

One of my favorite copywriting tricks is to browse magazine covers at Magazines.com. At this website, you can view the latest covers for just about any magazine in print. From Cosmo to Maxim to Men’s Health to many more, it’s a crash course in writing headlines that command attention.

Here are a few suggestions on how to make the most of using Magazines.com for marketing your business:

1. Don’t obsess over the words so much as the structure of the headlines. For instance, you’re probably never going to write a headline for your business “When Your Boobs Act Weird.” However, if you’re in IT, you could use the headline “When Your Server Acts Weird.”

2. Pay particular attention to the headlines from magazines that target the audience you’re writing for. If you’re writing for small business owners, check out headlines from Entrepreneur, Inc., or Fast Company.

3. Use the headlines as a cure for writer’s block. Don’t know what to write about for your next blog post or newsletter? Start browsing those magazine covers and the headlines are sure to trigger an avalanche of ideas.

4. Magazine headlines can also make for great Google AdWords ads. You have very limited space when writing text ads to promote your business on Google. Adapt some particularly catchy headlines into your AdWords campaign and see if they give your clickthrough rate a big boost.

5. Start a headline swipe file. Spend an hour each month browsing the most popular magazine covers at Magazines.com. Add all the headlines that capture your attention to a Word document on your computer. Before long, you’ll have 100s of possible ideas for headlines, blog posts, AdWords ads, etc.

Some copywriters say the headline is so important they spend 80% of their time on it and only 20% writing the body copy. Using Magazines.com can be a shortcut for generating that attention grabbing headline that will boost the response to your next blog post, email marketing campaign, sales letter, AdWords ad, etc.

And, by the way, the title for this blog post was adapted from the magazine headline in my swipe file, “Ultimate Health Check Up That Will Blow Your Mind and Change Your Life.”