Getting Started With Persuasive Copywriting: The First 3 Pieces of Content to Give A Makeover

When you’re ready to create some persuasive copywriting, you may be overwhelmed and wonder where to start. There are three places where your copywriting skills really matter and this is where you should start. Once you’ve mastered these three elements of your website, you can go on to tackle other areas of your site. 

 

1. Your ‘About’ Page

 

The ‘about’ page on any website is usually the most visited one. That’s why it should be clearly labeled. Don’t use a cutesy name in the hopes that more people will click on it. You’ll just confuse your website visitors. 

 

Your ‘about’ page should share your journey and cover why you’re qualified to help potential clients. Spin your journey into a story format that readers can relate to. For example, if you’re a business coach, you might share how you struggled to get your own business started for several years before finding success. By sharing your story, you’ll make it easy for your potential clients to relate to you and show them that you’re qualified to help.

 

2. Your ‘Services’ Page 

 

Your ‘services’ page is your chance to stand out from other solopreneurs that offer similar services. But don’t cram every single service you offer on the same page. That will overwhelm visitors and they may leave your website before reading through all of the services you perform. That’s why it’s smart to have each service listed on a separate page of your website.

 

You want your service pages to show that you understand your ideal client and can deliver what they need. Then you should explain how you work and what end result your ideal client can expect. For example, if you’re a social media strategist, don’t tell potential clients that you can handle their Facebook advertisements. That’s vague and doesn’t describe what you can do. Instead, you might tell potential clients that you can increase Facebook ad conversions by 20%. 

 

Now, include an easy next step, like joining your mailing list. Direct your visitors to your freebie sign up page with a helpful link, like this one: 

 

===> Add Your Download Link to Your Free Report <===

 

By doing this, you stay connected to potential clients that are interested in working with you but aren’t ready to hire you quite yet. 

 

3. Your ‘Home’ Page

 

When it comes to your home page, you have less than seven seconds to make your first impression. You want that impression to be a good one. 

 

When someone visits your home page, they should be able to tell immediately if they’re your ideal client or not from your copy. If you’re a social media strategist that works only with small businesses, then your copy shouldn’t be aimed at large corporations. It should be focused on small businesses and how you can help them. 

 

Your home page is also your chance to state why you’re uniquely qualified to help. Don’t use the same wording you did on your about page. Instead, keep your qualifications to one or two sentences on your home page. If a visitor is interested in knowing more, they’ll click on your ‘about’ page for the full story. 

 

Next, offer social proof on your home page. If you’ve guest posted on several popular blogs, share their logos. If you have testimonials from prominent clients, post those on your home page, too. If you’ve been interviewed in a magazine or podcast, be sure to add this information to your home page as well.

 

Before you post your new copy on your website, be sure to have a professional editor or proofreader look at it. An extra set of eyes can help you avoid embarrassing typos and make sure that your copy shines.

 

5 Steps to Reach Your Readers on an Emotional Level

When it comes selling yourself and your brand, it’s essential that you understand that your potential customers want to do business with people that they know, like, and trust. This is even more important if you’re a coach or service provider. Your potential clients may wonder if they’ll enjoy working with you, how you can help them, and if they’ll get their desired results. 

 

This is where persuasive copywriting can help you. Copywriting will allow your ideal client the chance to know, like, and trust you. It also gives you an easy way to answer their questions before they even ask them. But before you start writing your copy, there are a few steps you’ll need to take. 

 

Step #1: Identify Your Client

 

Describe your ideal client as detailed as you can. You need to be specific about their fears, frustrations, and feelings. Use forums and social media groups to see what words your ideal client uses to talk about their situation. Knowing how your potential clients describe what they’re dealing with will allow you to create copy that connects with them. You also need to think about what your potential client’s desired end result would look and feel like. For example, if you help overwhelmed working moms find time to prepare nutritious food to feed their families, then the end result might be less dinner time stress, more family time, and healthier bodies.

 

Step #2: Focus on your qualifications

 

Next, think about how you’re uniquely qualified to help your potential clients. Describe why you’re qualified as a professional (education) and/or as a person (experience). You’ll want to offer proof of your qualifications in the form of diplomas, testimonials, and endorsements. These qualifications can be placed on the ‘home’ or ‘about’ page or a dedicated ‘testimonials’ page on your website and blog.

 

Step #3: Describe the milestones

 

When you have a clear picture of what results your clients can expect from you, then you’ll want to think about the journey they’ll take. Try to describe the milestones your ideal client typically encounters during their journey. For example, if you’re a weight loss coach, one milestone might be losing the first ten pounds. 

 

Don’t focus on just the good milestones. You’ll also want to consider the setbacks clients may face as well as the emotional aspects of their journey. For example, a setback might be gaining three pounds one week. 

 

Step #4: Think about your clients’ objections

 

Once you’re confident that you understand your potential clients’ journey, you need to take a moment to consider their objections. What hesitations might your client bring up when they’re ready to hire you? What are they afraid of if they take that first step? For example, if you’re a fitness coach that helps obese patients lose weight, you might find that potential clients are worried about visiting a gym for the first time. 

 

When you understand these objections, you can offer solutions. Keep in mind that solutions don’t always have to be complex. You might simply tell clients that the first gym session is all about coming in and getting comfortable with the equipment, no workout required. Now, you’ve subtly eased a potential client’s objections to taking that first step toward fitness.

 

Step #5: Describe the action steps your reader would like to take

 

Now that you know the journey your clients are on, it’s time to guide them to your product or services. You can do this by thinking about the action steps readers need to take when interacting with your content. For example, you might have a call to action at the bottom of your blog posts for joining your email list.

 

When you send emails to potential clients on your list, you might have a call to action at the bottom of each email that invites your subscribers to set up a free consultation with you. You want to continually invite your community to keep taking action. By doing this, you’ll have a list filled with valuable leads.

 

Understanding your client is the first step toward creating more persuasive copy. When you genuinely care about your clients’ journey, it will shine through in your copywriting efforts. 

 

Copywriting Essentials: 4 Myths That Keep You from Writing Compelling Copy

You’re stuck. You’re not seeing the leads you want for your business. You’re offering quality products and great services but only a few people are buying from you. 

 

You might be tempted to believe that the problem is that your platform isn’t big enough or that your website isn’t interactive enough. But for many small business owners and solopreneurs, these problems are usually the result of poor copywriting.

 

The good news is that persuasive copywriting is an essential skill that can be learned. But first, you have to understand that some things you might believe about copywriting are actually myths that are harming your business.

 

Myth #1: Copywriting is all about selling

 

Some small business owners believe that copywriting is the equivalent of going to a cocktail party and screaming “Buy my product!” to every person you meet. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Copywriting is about so much more than selling your product or program.

 

Copywriting is about serving your audience. You can use persuasive copy to address your customers’ concerns, help them make smart buying decisions, and offer solutions to their needs. 

 

Myth #2: Copywriting is all about action

 

Many small business owners and solopreneurs think that every piece of content they create has to have a call to action, but that’s not true. Most of the time, you’ll be creating content to increase your customers’ awareness of your business. This can be called the “know, like, trust” factor.

 

The ‘know, like, trust’ factor is about guiding your potential customers through the buying stages. In the first stage, the know stage, you’ll give potential customers content that informs them. In the second stage, you’ll share content that makes your brand likeable. The third and final stage is known as trust. It’s the point where your customers will decide whether they should purchase your productive or service.

 

Myth #3: Copywriting is all about you and your business

 

Copywriting isn’t focused solely on you or even your customer. The best copywriting strikes a balance between “about you” and “about your reader”. 

 

You want your copy to show your understanding of and compassion for your ideal clients’ situation. Your copy should highlight that your business cares and why your brand is the best one to choose.

 

Myth #4: Copywriting is all about making your brand look perfect

 

Persuasive copywriting isn’t about positioning your brand as perfect. It’s about connecting with your reader on both an intellectual and emotional level. Your potential customers want to know about your expertise, but they also need to know that you understand them. One simple way to do this is to share stories about your brand. Don’t be afraid to include stories about your business’s failures.

 

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your copywriting is set in stone. Even expert copywriters create several drafts before they find a version that truly connects with their readers. The important thing is to keep testing your copy until you find what works best for your business.

 

Use Low-Ticket Offers to Boost Your Profits

A low-ticket offer, as a general guideline, is a product with a price tag of $50 or less. These low-cost items are usually digital products, like an eBook, video course, or resource guide. A low-ticket offer, if chosen wisely, is a powerful way to qualify leads and drive sales. 

 

As your prospects progress through your sales funnel, various offers direct them towards the ultimate destination: your core offer, a higher-priced item at the end of the funnel. 

 

By presenting prospects with a low-ticket item up top, you can gauge whether they have true customer potential or if they’re just freebie seekers. If they purchase your inexpensive offer, you can start building a relationship with them and priming them for purchase. 

 

Why Use Low-Ticket Offers?

 

There are several benefits to pitching low-ticket offers. 

 

Low-ticket offers provide you with another way to earn income. They are usually digital products, so they cost very little to produce and have no delivery or storage fees. It’s just an electronic file, so your margin is high, even if you’re only charging few dollars. Although the primary focus is your core offer, these small products can generate some money and offset any expenses associated with your higher-ticket items. 

 

The reason low-ticket offers work well near the beginning of a sales funnel is that they help to qualify leads. Many people who sign up for your lead magnet are only after the freebies. They’ll consume your content in exchange for their email address, but they have no intention of paying even a few dollars for a premium product. A low-ticket offer helps you identify these people right away. 

 

Low-ticket offers also help build relationships with new leads. By providing your target audience with an instant solution at a reasonable price, you establish trust and these customers will want to learn more. 

 

This inexpensive offer also provides an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise. Use your low-ticket offer to showcase your knowledge and the results you can deliver, and your customers will be more likely to purchase future offers with higher price tags. 

 

Low-ticket offers move prospects closer to your core offer and weed out those who won’t buy. It’s a low-risk and valuable lead qualification tool that costs very little to produce and distribute. 

 

The Key to Success: Know Your Audience

 

How do you maximize the effectiveness of your low-ticket offer? Get to know your audience. If you understand the issues they face, you can develop a low-ticket offer that will solve a particular problem for them and increase the likelihood of future purchases.

 

The best way to get a clear picture of your audience is to create an ideal customer profile. This process involves imagining your target audience as an individual – the one person who would most benefit from your core offer. Get to know their likes and dislikes, problems, and passions. This description will be a valuable tool when developing all of the offers in your funnel. 

 

One low-ticket offer isn’t going to completely transform the customer’s life, but it should offer a “quick win” and a concrete improvement, no matter how small. 

 

Creating Your Low-Ticket Offer Content

 

It’s not necessary to invest a lot of money into the production of a low-ticket offer. But what it can cost you is time and energy. Content creation can easily become a burden and a drain on your resources. 

 

Since the key to generating income with a low-priced product is to cut overhead, look for shortcuts to content creation. A few ideas include:

 

• Creating a smaller version of a bigger product. Extract a section of your core offer and transform it into a low-ticket item. 

• Offering a bundle of products. You can take several small pieces of existing content and put them together into a high-value bundle.

• Providing more content to help with your lead magnet. Make a resource guide, template, or tool that the customer can use to get more out of the free lead magnet they received from you.

• Repurposing existing content. Take content you’ve already created and alter it in some way, so it offers unique value.

 

The Right Timing for Your Low-Ticket Offer

 

The standard practice is to present prospects with a low-ticket offer at the beginning of the sales funnel, so you can start qualifying leads right away. But sometimes, it may be beneficial to engage with the prospect a bit more before pitching paid products. Think about your ideal customer and what they would prefer. For some people, and particular types of products, a low-ticket offer may be more appropriate later in the funnel. 

 

Or, conversely, you can offer a low-ticket item as a lead magnet, at the front of your funnel. To do this, you would create a dedicated landing page and drive traffic to it. Once they purchase it, customers are added to your email list, where you can then start communicating with them. 

 

There is no perfect place or time to present your low-ticket offer. Map out the customer journey through your sales funnel and experiment to see what works best for your target audience. 

 

Monitor Your Results and Make It Perfect

 

Track your results, check conversions, and then make the necessary adjustments. It will take some trial and error to perfect your low-ticket offer strategy, but once you do, it will be worth the effort. 

 

Are you ready to learn, step-by-step, how to create a low-ticket offer that will earn you more and qualify prospects for your core offer?

 

Shopping Cart Protection

Like what the title states: the protection of shopping carts is forever a mainstream issue, it was before, it is today, and it will forever be. If you’re a little business attempting to break into a fairly big and competitive market, shopping cart applications merged with your site would be a good investment. However numerous issues need to be addressed and likely among the more important one is the problem of security. 

 

A shopping cart commonly runs with having a check out, returns the total purchase, computes for the shipping costs, and records the required personal data. The security aspect of the shopping cart relies on the Secured Socket Layer certificate or the SSL which essentially manages the security of the personal data entered by buyers up till the time the data reaches the payment gateway. The SSSL is the responsible for making “https”. If you see this on the URL bar, it signifies the transaction is a secure environment. Meanwhile, the payment gateway or credit cart gateway is the one that corroborates and charges the buy on the charge card. 

 

There are choices now where the shopping cart suppliers no more needs SSL but rather directly sends the data to a payment gateway. The personal data entered by the buyers will then be the obligation of the gateway. This does away with the need for you to maintain any SSL. 

 

It's crucial that you let your buyers know most importantly the possible security risks of net dealings. But likewise make certain that your customers know that in spite of the risks, you've done your part to make the site secure and hack-free. Do not underestimate your buyers. Frequently, if they feel that something’s not proper with a site’s shopping cart, they'll most likely bail out of their transactions. 

 

Likewise, be accurate and clear about your shopping cart’s policy rules of thumb. I know it may be enticing to utilize assorted legal and marketing jargons. But, you have to remember that your users are not authorities and confronting them with a policy guideline that's highly complicated and hard to comprehend will reflect on your business’ report. 

 

We may only stress the importance of protection in these sorts of web applications. I've heard tales of identity thefts before and your buyers will certainly go with a shopping cart that may protect them from potential theft of charge card and personal data. 

 

Among the simplest ways to bear a secure network is to avail of the services of well esteemed and secure service supplier. That naturally is a sure way to bear a secure network for your shopping cart. Banking on the credible services of 3rd party providers isn't a bad course to take. You just require some time checking on these shopping cart providers to get to know them. 

 

The bottom-line is to buy and maintain a secure shopping cart for your customers. You've several choices at your disposal and not bearing a secure one is altogether unforgivable.

 

How To Engineer Explosive Growth By Stacking Your Efforts

We’re coming to the end of our seven-day challenge to use business planning to create explosive growth in traffic, customers, and most importantly income. Much of what we’ve discussed so far has been actionable steps like writing down your goals as well as mindset pieces like the one about stepping out of your comfort zone. Today is all about putting everything we’ve discussed so far and combining it into something that can give you that explosive growth you want. 

 

You see when you use the basic concept of exponential growth to your advantage, it doesn’t take very much progress in any one area to see big results. We briefly touched on this idea back on day three when we talked about increasing traffic, subscribers, and customers to add to our bottom line. Today we expand on this whole idea in a few different ways and tie it all back into setting goals and business planning in general. 

 

The idea is to make progress on your goals and stack them in a way that gives you leverage. Here’s an example. Let’s say your first goal is to grow your current part time income by $500 a month so you can quit your day job. Following the example in the previous blog post, you come up with a way to get that done by growing your traffic, subscribers, and customers. Since you were able to then quit your day job, you have more time and energy to put into growing your business. You set more ambitious goals and add another $2,000 to your bottom line. Instead of taking everything out in profit, you decide to continue to work on this whole leverage idea. 

 

You set aside $100 a month to play around with Facebook ads to see if you can turn that into a profitable income stream. You take another $200 to start outsourcing some of the ongoing tasks that hold you back. You hire your first VA and now you’re really making progress. This in turn gets the attention of a fellow online entrepreneur in a related niche who wants to work on a project together. Do you see how this works? 

 

One goal builds on the next and they all work together to generate exponential growth. Of course, this is just one little example. This can work in a myriad of different ways and will of course differ from one business to the next. My point is this… 

 

If you start to think strategically and keep one eye on your next few moves, you can start to stack your efforts and engineer that explosive growth in a lot less time than you may think. Try it! 

Real Growth Requires You To Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Can you think back on a time of real growth, be it in business, in your personal life, or anywhere else? More than likely, you had to step out of your comfort zone for that growth to happen. Yes, we can make progress by doing what we’ve always done. But it will be slow and more importantly, by staying within your comfort zone, you are limiting your potential growth. It’s when we step out of that zone, try something new, take a bit of a risk, and allow for personal and professional growth that we start to see big changes for the better. 

 

Let’s say you goal is to grow your reach and get out in front of a larger audience. What you’ve done so far, and what feels comfortable is writing a blog post a week and then sharing it on social media. Yes, some readers will find you. Yes, if you double or triple your efforts, publishing more posts per week and sharing more often across all your social media accounts, you will see some growth and engagement. But you’re staying in your comfort zone. 

 

What if instead, you used the time you would have spent writing another blog post or two per week and promoting it on Facebook, you took the time to write a guest blog post for someone else’s blog with a bigger reach. What if you sat down and recorded a fun and informational video that you can then share on YouTube, imbed in a blog post, and of course share via your favorite social media outlets. What if you used the time to set up and tested a Facebook ad that continually sends new leads into your funnel. If those things are new to you, that may seem like a pretty scary proposition. But getting uncomfortable and doing it anyway can have some huge rewards. 

 

Writing and submitting the guest blog post can give you a lot of added exposure by allowing you to get in front of an established audience. It also gives you the change to start a relationship with a follow blogger that may lead to all sorts of other opportunities and collaborations. 

 

Recording a series of videos gives you the opportunity to reach a completely different subset of your target audience. There are plenty of people who prefer video content to written posts and articles. There are people who spend hours each day watching YouTube videos who would never stumble across you and your blog otherwise. 

 

Spending money on paid ads can sound like a scary proposition, but once you crack it and find something that converts well for you, you will get a steady stream of new leads in front of you without any added work. 

 

There’s something else I want to mention, just in case I don’t have you convinced yet that getting out of your comfort zone is something you should be doing regularly. You won’t stay uncomfortable for very long. After recording those first few videos, submitting a couple of blog posts, and spending those first few dollars on ads, you start to get comfortable with the processes. Before you know it, they become second nature and yet another tool in your virtual tool belt. Once that happens, you know it’s time to explore some other marketing strategies and ideas. 

Why You Have To Write Your Business Goals Down

Throughout this short little series on setting business goals, I’ve mentioned the importance of writing said goals down. That isn’t just because it’s easy to forget. There’s a lot more to it and there are some very important reasons why you have to write them down. I though in today’s blog post, I’d share my thoughts on this and hopefully inspire you to write down your own goals going forward. By the way, this works for any type of goal, not just the business ones. 

 

The simple act of setting a goal, even if it’s just in your mind, doubles your chances of success. That’s a pretty big deal in itself, isn’t it? If you take it a step further, and actually write those goals down, you’re 10 times as likely to succeed. Read that last line again please. That’s right…you can increase your chances of making it by 1,000%. That’s mind-blowing. 

 

There are a few different mental and psychological processes going on here that start to give us a glimpse into why it is so important and effective to write our goals down. The first is that it’s a lot easier to remember something that we’ve written down. You’ve experienced this first hand with your grocery list. When you make a mental list of 10 or 15 things, you’re likely to forget about half of them when you get to the store. If you write out the list on the other hand, and then end up forgetting it on the counter, you will remember the vast majority of the items you needed. This is explained through the fact that information has to be moved from one area of the brain to another to turn it from thoughts into written words on a page. A process called encoding is also involved. All of this helps you retain and store the information better. It’s the reason we’re asked to take notes during lectures in college. 

 

Last but not least, when you write down your goals, you have something you can review regularly. This adds another layer of cognitive processing and increases your chances of success even further. Sadly, only a very small percentage of people make the time to regularly review and evaluate their goals. The ones that do are some of the most successful and highest achieving people out there. In other words, it’s something we should do as well. 

 

To recap, start by setting smart goals. Write them down in as much detail as possible. Set aside some time to review them regularly. This could be weekly, or even daily. Give it a try for this coming quarter. Set yourself a goal. Be specific. This could be something like finally creating that first paid product or adding an extra $500 to your bottom line. Decide by when you’ll reach your goal and how you plan to get there. Write it all down and look at it every morning. This will help you stay on track and make time in your busy day to work on making progress towards your goal. 

How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals

Today I want to share my thinking process for setting smart business goals with you. I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, I need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and I am seeing that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new car. 

 

Once I know how much money I have to make, I can start to think about different ways to do just that. I could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if I have a $10 eBook, I would have to make an extra 60 sales per month. From there I can work backwards. If I know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, I need to add 600 new subscribers to my list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to my site. If that’s my plan, I know that my daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month. 

 

Of course that’s not my only option. I could also create another information product or eBook each month and sell it to both my existing and new subscribers. I could create a higher priced item so I need to make a lot fewer monthly sales to reach my $600 goal. For example, if I create a nice $100 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car. 

 

Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be my own membership, or I could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote. For me, one option could be to create some content around content marketing and promote a PLR Membership like this one form [affiliate link to either biz or self-help membership]. It’s a $67 per month subscription with a 50% commission. That means I can expect over $30 in commissions each month. Let’s say it’s 30 to keep the math simple. I only need 20 members to pay for my car. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover that. 

 

Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 20 people to sign up for the membership. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the PLR membership, a short report about using PLR to build a targeted sub lists of people interested in using PLR in general. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the PLR membership. I may even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel. 

 

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could approach other writers to see if they would be interested in writing some guest blog posts, answering some questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would of course promote the membership. By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take me long to get those 20 signups that pay for my new car payment. Because I really want that new car, I’m going to be motivated to get it done and grow my business by those extra $600 per month. In fact, chances are great that I’ll overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars and it’s something I can continue to grow month after month. 

Increasing Traffic, Subscribers & Customers To Boost Your Bottom Line

To grow your income, you need more customers. That in turn means you need more people to sign up for your list. Where do these new subscribers come from? You get them by increasing the traffic to your site. Some of the things you want to do and track then are: 

 

• Get more traffic from various different sources. This should always be a priority and something you work on regularly. Track your growth as you move along and keep an eye out for fresh new ideas to boost your traffic. 

• Your next focus should be getting more subscribers. As you start to get more traffic, your list will start to grow, but don’t stop there. Tweak your opt in-forms to increase conversion. Create a new lead magnet to get the attention of a different sub-group of your target audience. Set up a few dedicated opt-in pages and start driving traffic to them. Do what you can to continually grow your list and pick up speed in the process. 

• The third piece of the puzzle and where things get really interesting is turning those subscribers into customers. You want them to spend money with you either by buying your products and services, or through your affiliate links. Offer more products. Raise your prices. Find more attractive offers you can promote as an affiliate. Work on your funnels. There’s a lot you can do to grow your bottom line once you have traffic and subscribers figured out. 

 

The real power of this approach becomes apparent when you start to look at how these three things work in synergy. By getting more and higher quality traffic, while improving your opt-in rates, and creating higher prices products with sales funnels that convert well, you can quickly make a huge difference in your bottom line. Each of these elements alone will help, but by combining them, you will start to see exponential growth. 

 

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you start out with 100 new visitors per day. 10 percent of them sign up for your mailing list, which comes out to 10 new subscribers each day. One of these people buys one of your products at $10. 

 

Now let’s see you double your traffic. With nothing else changing, you go from making $10 per day to $20. But what if you can also improve your opt-in forms and get to a 20% conversion. You also create a few more products and each of your customers ends up spending 3 times as much as before. When we add all that up you go from making $10 per day to 40 new subscribers each day which means 4 new customers. If each of them spends $30 shopping around in your shop, you end up making $120. That’s a pretty big bump from $10 while still only requiring you to double your traffic. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? 

You Have To Know Where You’re At Right Now To Measure Growth & Figure Out What You Should Be Working On

Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great. Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now. 

 

Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now. 

 

Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information.  You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture. 

 

Traffic – To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from. 

 

List / Subscribers – Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers. 

 

Customers – Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates. 

 

Income & Expenses – Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis. 

 

Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. 

 

Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years. 

Give Them What They Want - And How To Find Out What That Is

Effective marketing boils down to this: Find an audience, figure out what they need or want and then deliver it. Email is one of the best mediums to help you do just that. And it isn’t always about selling them on a product. In fact, that isn’t at all where you want to start. 

 

First you want to build a relationship with your readers. You want them to get to know you. You want to help them out so they start to like you and trust you. Only then will you be able to make an offer and have them pull out their wallet and buy it. 

 

Pay attention to your website stats. Programs like Google Analytics can give you a lot of information of where you’re readers came from, what page the landed on and where they were on your site when they joined your list. That data along with demographical information will tell you a lot about your audience. 

 

As you start to email your readers, they will reply and get back in touch with you. Pay attention to what they’re saying. And don’t forget to read between the lines. Let’s say you’re in the parenting niche and you noticed that some of your readers are asking for suggestions on being a more patient parent. They complain about being short temperate and freaking out about little things. The real issue may be lack of sleep because the baby or toddler isn’t sleeping through the night. 

 

Dig deep and see what you can learn about your market. Sometimes what they tell you they want isn’t the real issue. On the flip side, it can be helpful to ask them for suggestions. Keep the questions open ended if you want a lot to work with. 

 

Or consider having your readers fill out a simple little survey. It’s quick and easy to do with Google forms. You get some good data and you get your readers to interact. Having them contribute builds a sense of community even via email. 

 

Last but not least go back and look at the past emails you’ve sent. Pay attention to open rates, click through rates and unsubscribes. If a large percentage of readers opened the email, that’s a good indication they were interested in the topic. If they clicked link to additional content, that’s even better. If on the other hand you got a lot of unsubscribes, that might be an indication that either the topic was wrong or your language and overall message didn’t click with your audience. 

 

Use all the data and information you get back to learn more about your target audience and connect with them on a deeper level. The more you know about your subscribers, the more effective your email marketing will be.  

Keep Them Waiting For More - Using Foreshadowing to Create Anticipation

There’s a pretty neat strategy called foreshadowing that you can use in your email marketing to improve open rates. You may have seen this used on news programs and talk shows. Right before the commercial break, the host announces what’s coming up next. The idea is that you’re intrigued enough to sit through the commercial to see the next segment. 

 

Another good example of foreshadowing is when magazines show images and headlines or short bullets of what’s coming in next month’s issue. Again, the point is to pique your interest and get you to either buy the next issue, or even better, get a subscription. 

 

We can easily adapt this for email marketing and it works like a charm. Toward the end of your email transition from what you’re talking about today to what’s coming in the next email. Be vague on purpose, but grab their attention. 

 

For example, if you’re talking about why email marketing is important and the next email will be about crafting subject lines to get a higher open rate, you may write something like this: “Keep an eye out for Friday’s email. We’ll talk about THE most important thing when it comes to email marketing. If you don’t get this right, nothing else matters.” 

 

To mix it up, mention what they can find in the next email in the P.S. of your message. If you publish a weekly newsletter, try adding a section on what’s coming in the next issue similar to what you see in a magazine. Keep it simple and use images for best results. 

 

You can even take it a step further and get your subscribers to open a previously sent email. This works particularly well if you’re writing a series of emails on a related topic. Toward the beginning of your email, you mention something you covered in the last email, then move into today’s topic and then wrap it up with a little hint about what’s coming next. 

 

You don’t have to use foreshadowing in every single email. Sprinkle it in here and there where it makes sense. It also gives you a chance to pick up on in the subject line of your next email. Try using something like “As promised…” Even readers who missed your last email might be curious enough to open this one. 

 

Give it a try and see if you start to see higher open rates and more importantly get your subscribers more engaged.