The Cornerstone of Your Online Marketing Efforts

It’s said the most important factor in real estate is location, location, location.

When it comes to online marketing, it’s content, content, content.

Providing quality content . . .

on your website
on your blog
in your autoresponder series
in your free reports
in your whitepapers
in your YouTube videos
on your Facebook page
and anywhere else prospects can find you

. . . is the cornerstone of your online marketing efforts.

To drive traffic to your site and have a reasonable chance to convert some of those people into customers, you have to prove your worth. Online, the best way to do this is by providing lots of high quality content that will be of great value to your prospects.

And remember, make it all about them.

Provide content that focuses on helping them. Show you can relate to them and you understand the issues they’re facing that you can help them solve. Show them that you are a trustworthy source of quality information that can help them improve their lives in some way.

Do this on a regular basis and you have the foundation of a very successful online money making machine.

Your Online Business’ Most Valuable Asset

The List.

More specifically, the email list you keep of your prospects and customers is your online business’ most valuable asset. These email addresses are from people who have expressed an interest in what you do or, even better, have already given you money for doing it.

Why is the List so important?

Because it allows you to keep in touch with these VIPs on a regular basis.

This is how you keep yourself on people’s minds.
This is how you build relationships.
This is how you earn their trust.
This is how you make it easier for them to buy from you.

Another reason the list is so powerful is that email will likely be the most effective tool you have to drive traffic to your site and sales to your business. This is because email is very personal form of communication and the traffic you drive from email will generally be much more targeted and productive than traffic from other sources.

Be sure to pay special attention to your customer email list. Many marketers ignore customers, past and present, when marketing. This is a huge mistake. It is FAR easier (and cheaper) to get money from people who have already shown a willingness to do so than going out and try to convince new prospects to spend their money with you.

So how do you build your list?

Simple – use bribes. No, not an unethical kind of bribe. Use a bribe like a newsletter, whitepaper, special report, or some other piece of useful content.

Have a sign up form on your website and/or blog and let people know that you’ll be happy to send them some free awesome content in exchange for their email address. (FYI – I’ve heard the statistic that if your sign up form asks for more than a name and email address your response rate will fall by 50%. So don’t ask for more than those two pieces of information unless you absolutely need it!).

Once you have their email address, send them the content and then keep in touch. The easiest way to do this is to use an auto responder.  An auto responder is a program that will automatically send an email, or a series of emails to people on your list. If you’re not familiar with auto responders, you can learn more about them here.

One last note about your email list. DO NOT SPAM YOUR LIST. If you send spammy, hard-salesy type emails, you will lose the trust of the people on your list and they’ll unsubscribe in droves. It’s okay to mention new products, services, special offers, etc. – just don’t overdo it.

So as you set out marketing online, try to get people to opt-in to your email list. Build your list, respect those on your list, and provide them with quality content and your list will definitely become your business’ most valuable asset.

Which Candidate is Talking About You?

It’s fascinating to watch.

As the presidential campaign comes down the homestretch, the candidates and their surrogates are making their pitches to the electorate. To watch the messaging and positioning of the candidates on TV, in print, and on the web from a marketing perspective is just fascinating to me.

As some of you probably know, I came up with the idea of adding an About You page to your website. It’s a page that talks about your prospects, not your company.

The most effective marketing messages are the ones that focus on the prospects and show how your product or service can improve their lives. Adding an About You page to a website forces companies to do that (on at least one page of their site) as opposed to the egotistical, company-focused marketing that seems to be the norm.

So as I was listening to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other week, you can imagine how this line got my attention:

“But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring.  What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me.  It’s been about you.“

And while John McCain didn’t utter the exact phrase “about you”, he did say this:

“I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

In thinking about the two speeches, I started to wonder which one focused more on the voters (ie. About You) as opposed the candidates themselves. Luckily, there’s a handy tool to help me do just that.

Internet marketing optimization firm FutureNow also understands the importance of focusing on the prospect. To help companies figure out if their web copy focuses more on the company or the prospect, they put a handy little tool on their website called the “We We Calculator.” To use the calculator, simply enter the URL of a webpage and the calculator will look for certain words on that page to determine whether the copy focuses more on customers or the company.

I decided to use this tool to evaluate the text of both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s acceptance speeches. I copied the text of each speech onto their own page on my website to strip away any advertising, commentary, comments, etc. that could impact the results. Then I entered the URL for each page into the We We Calculator.

Here are the results:

John McCain’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 12.14%
Barack Obama’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 19.29%

MCain’s Self Focus Rate: 87.86%
Obama’s Self Focus Rate: 80.71%

According to the calculator, McCain had 51 instances of voter-focused words and 369 instances of self-focused words in an acceptance speech that had a total word count of 3912.

Obama had 65 instance of voter-focused words and 272 instances of self-focused words in his acceptance speech which totaled 4610.

By focusing on the voters about twice as much as Senator McCain as well as focusing on himself much less, Senator Obama seems to get the About You concept more than Senator McCain (at least as far as acceptance speeches are concerned).

What does all this mean?

First, it’s probably no surprise that in evaluating the speeches of politicians, both spent the vast majority of the time talking about themselves (I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing in politics, just not surprising).

Second, I’d make no assumptions about the outcome of this presidential campaign based on the voter-focused vs. self-focused language in just one speech from each candidate.

However, I would make the assumption that if you applied this calculator to the pages of your website and got results similar to either candidate’s speech, your marketing needs some help. If your copy focuses on your customers less than 20% of the time and on yourself over 80% of the time, it’s time to get some new copy!

To see how your copy scores on the We We Calculator, put it to the test here.

And one last thing, please keep any comments focused on marketing – not the virtues of the candidate you support or the lack of virtues of the candidate you don’t!

An Internet Marketing Fundamentals 2-For-1

We’ve been exploring concepts that are important to understand before jumping on the online marketing bandwagon. We’ve looked at two already – why the secret to online marketing is offline and why you should focus on just one thing. We’ll add two more today.

The first is “Do It Wrong Quickly.”

This is the title of a good online marketing book written by Mike Moran (although it’s written more for those in large companies than small business owners).

It’s also is a great phrase that quickly and clearly describes this important concept.

The web allows you to test, sometimes in a matter of hours, how well your marketing strategy is working. Faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before you can see exactly what’s getting the desired response and what isn’t.

The key is to start small and don’t sink most of your marketing budget into a surefire, slam dunk marketing plan that you and/or some marketing consultant came up with. Because it doesn’t matter how great you think the plan is, it only matters what your prospects think. And it’s amazing how frequently what you think and what they think don’t mesh.

So the get it wrong quickly concept is this: start small, see what works, quickly get rid of what doesn’t work, quickly build on what does.

And that leads nicely to the second concept in our 2-for-1 special.

It’s the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule. This rule basically states the 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

To give an example from the world of online marketing – in AdWords you’ll see that 80% (or likely much more) of your results come from 20% of your keywords.

Another example is that you’ll find 80% (again, probably much more) of your video traffic comes from YouTube. The 80/20 rule dictates that it’s not worth posting your videos on every other little video sharing site because the additional traffic you’ll generate won’t be worth the investment of your time.

Let’s put these two concepts together now.

As you “do it wrong quickly” you’ll start finding that some of the things your try work very well – whether they be keywords, Google ads, SEO, article marketing, video marketing, etc.

As you find the ones that work, focus your attention on them.

Optimize them. Refine them. Test them.

You’ll be much more efficient and productive by focusing your attention on the 20% (or 10% or even 1%) of the things that are producing 80% (or 90% or 99%) of the results instead wasting your time on the 80% of things that will only drive 20% of your results.

There are 1000s of ways you can drive traffic to your website and build your online business. You can’t possibly use them all (at least not without a large staff anyway).

So throw some spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Then quickly focus 80% or more of your efforts on the ones that do and build your internet empire from there!