Michael Wilding

Tag: email marketing

The Mindset Of Growth

If you’ve got a business then you’re going to want it to grow. My business has definitely grown in stages and it seems to move forwards rapidly before hitting a plateau which is difficult to break-through. When it does break through it then moves rapidly to the next plateau.

And so on and so forth.

This has become an easily seen pattern within my business and, from the other companies I’ve worked with, is a common pattern especially in internet marketing.

If you look around the internet we always see people sharing (or selling) tactics and processes to grow your business.

Which is why my first rule is…

Don’t Follow A Growth Tactic

That may sound a bit contrary, but I believe it to be pretty good advice. The reason that I believe this is because… tactics change.

It’s that simple.

There will always be tactics, but they won’t always be the same. Recently there has been a lot of tactical advice on how to use Facebook to generate business.

I can guarantee that in the future Facebook will change the way their systems work which will mean that those tactics you’ve been using will no longer work.

It might not change for a few years, or it might change in the next few months.

There’s no way of knowing, which means there’s no way of knowing when your business is going to have to stop using the tactic.

But if you don’t use tactics then you must have…

The Right Mindset

And if you’ve got the right mindset then you’ll always be able to exploit the opportunities for growth when they arise.

This means you need to think about…

How Your Users Feel

Look into how your product makes your users feel. If you can tap into what they’re feeling and how they want to feel when they use your product then you can focus your development in making that more easily achievable.

How Do Your Users Speak

There are different types of languages for everything. And I don’t mean spoken languages like English, Spanish and French. I’m talking about the language of users.

Think of how users of different platforms talk. Twitter users speak in a different way to Facebook users. Facebook users speak differently to users of certain forums etc…

Listen to how your users speak and what they tell other people about you. This will help you to make sure that you nail the direction that you want to go in.

Always Use Emotional Hooks

Humans are driven by emotions and you can use those emotions to motivate users to perform the tasks you want them to.

Investigate what emotions your users feel at different stages of their journey with you.

Always put your users first and consider how they’re feeling and then use this knowledge to make sure your messages focus on how the user is feeling rather than how you want them to interact with your product.

Never Stop Looking

Growth is the life of a business. If you stop looking for growth then your business will begin to die.

Now more than ever new opportunities to exploit for growth are opening all the time. The digital world is developing and changing quickly which is why we’re seeing this.

But… that also means that past opportunities are closing.

And that’s the reason you must look at your audience and change your mindset to focus on the things above. Once you begin focusing on these things you’ll discover that there are opportunities around every corner.

Of course, most of the ones you choose to exploit won’t work for you. And that’s fine. Because when you hit one that does it will be a home run. But when you do, don’t sit back and rest. That tactic will stop working eventually and by then you’ll want to already be on your next home run.

November 16, 2015
Twitter Growth Hack – Social Media Marketing
About six months ago I wrote a Twitter Growth Plan which outlined my approach for increasing my Twitter following within social media marketing.

At the time I started with 269 Followers and I was Following 340 people.

Today I want to outline how I’ve adapted this strategy over the previous months, the problems I found and how I envisage it going forwards.

Currently I have 2452 Followers and am Following 178 people. Let’s just take a quick look at these stats:

Followers Following

Original 269 340

Current 2452 178

This represents an increase in Followers of 911% and a decrease in Following of 48%.

Over six months I have managed to hugely increase my following whilst reducing those I follow just to the thought leaders that I really want to watch.

So I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Now while it’s possible to put this approach into effect manually, it would take a lot of time. In order to get this done in just a few minutes a day I use a tool called ManageFlitter.

If you want to implement this then I strongly recommend that you use this tool.

The Problems I’ve Faced

During the natural growth of my Twitter account I’ve come across a number of issues that I’ve needed to find a way to resolve. These are:
1. Spam Followers
2. Following Ratios
3. Twitter Feed Content
Spam Followers

These are accounts which are usually automated to build followings and provide very little relevant content. They clog up your feeds, reduce your influence and increase the spam probability of your account.

In a word you don’t want them, and getting rid of them is one of the first steps.

Following Ratios

When you start following people on Twitter you are only allowed to follow a certain amount per day. To start with this should be around 150 otherwise Twitter will start rejecting your follows.

As your account gains more traction you can, very slowly, start to increase this. How Twitter work out how many your account can follow is unknown, but over the last six months I have seen that it is linked to the number of people following you, the ratio of Followers to people you are Following, Influence and Spam Probability.

Twitter Feed Content

You want your Followers to be able to check out your Twitter Wall and see awesome content. Of course you’re going to be Tweeting awesome content, but the more people you follow then the more content that’s going to appear on your wall.

And the problem is…

A lot of the content from people you’re going to follow is automated and/or crap. Which means you really don’t want to be sharing it with your Followers.

What we can take from these three issues that need solving is that we want to remove any spam followers, only follow those people who we really want to follow and keep the content on our feed clean.

The Twitter Growth Hack Solution

There is only one quick way to grow your following on Twitter… Follow other people. There’s a reciprocity on the platform that when you follow someone they follow you back, and we can use that to grow.

Of course there are other ways, your content will hopefully be shared and this will bring people to you and you can link from your blog, email your mailing list etc…

However while your content may be shared, you won’t be getting enough shares to make a difference until you’ve got a high number of followers. I’m only just starting to see our tweets getting retweeted and favorited on a regular basis and we’re still talking low numbers.

From talking to others it seems that critical mass seems to be about 5000 followers. After this point you should start to see significantly more retweets and favorites. However as I haven’t reached that number of followers yet I can’t tell you for sure but I will update you when I do.

Login to ManageFlitter and connect your Twitter account. I recommend that you get the credits which means that the ManageFlitter team will manually process your actions for you.

Click on Manage > Unfollow and you will come to the Unfollow page.

Click on the Everyone You Follow link and you will see a list of everybody that you Follow. If you can’t see anybody make sure that the Display settings at the top of the page aren’t hiding anybody.

Make sure that Batch Select is turned on:

Go through the list of everyone you Follow and click the Checkbox next to the names of the people who you actually want to read the content from. These should be the thought leaders in your niche and the people whose content you enjoy reading.

When you’ve done this press the Never Unfollow Selected button:

This will add all of these people to a list and will Never Unfollow them. In the future when you Follow someone whose content you really want to follow, make sure that you add them to this Never Unfollow list.

Next you want to go to the Fake (Spam) > Fake Followers page:

When you’re on this page you should change your Display Settings to:

Then press the Select All button, this will check every account on the page, and then press the Never Follow button. Once you’ve done this press Select All again and press the Block button.

That will remove all the Fake Followers you have and make sure that you never follow them in the future.

Next you want to go back to the Everyone You Follow list, but this time change the Display Settings to:

Now Select All again and then choose the Never Follow button, press the Select All button again and choose the Unfollow button:

This will start to Unfollow everyone who isn’t in your Unfollow list. Now change your Display Settings to the same as below:

We need to prevent those we’ve saved to process later from being filtered out for the next step. Once you’ve done this press Select All again and then press the Mute button:

This will mean that everyone whose content you don’t actually want to follow and share with your Followers will be prevented from displaying on your feed. This keeps your feed clean and relevant to your audience rather than being filled with junk from Followers who are just auto-posting or posting non-relevant content for your audience to their account.

Although you shouldn’t follow these people again as you’ve added them to your Never Follow list, if you do they will be muted and their content won’t display on your feed.

Now that you’ve finished Unfollowing people you can go to the Manage > Follow page from the top menu bar.

Choose Copy Following and then enter the name of one of the people in your Never Unfollow lists. Select Up to 1000 (ordering – fast) and press Show Following like below.

ManageFlitter will go out and pull back 1000 people that are following the person you entered. We choose these people because we know that anybody following this person are going to be interested in the content you are sharing as well.

Press Select All and then click the Follow button.

Now that we’ve added everyone to be Blocked, Unfollowed, Muted and Followed we need to start ManageFlitter processing them.

To do this go back to Manage > Process on the main menu.

Press the button which says Send Waiting Actions To Remote Management. And… that’s it!

You should do this a few times each week and you will start to see large growth on your Twitter following.

Of course, it doesn’t finish there because now you’ve got to generate high quality content for your Followers. But if you start creating that content you will very quickly soon to see your Twitter community thrive!
November 9, 2015
A Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is the future of online businesses. It not only establishes you as a thought leader in your market, but it also can generate large volumes of traffic. While I have helped other companies achieve large traffic and revenue through their content marketing strategies, I’ve always been quite poor at implementing it on my own sites.

Why?

Because, too be frank, doing it well is very time consuming.

There’s no two ways about it. If you want to be successful at it then it’s going to be all or nothing.

Don’t bother playing around at doing bits and pieces, it won’t work. I know because I’ve tried.

But when you do take the plunge then you’re going to be very pleased that you did.

Which is the whole point of today’s post. I’ve put together a content marketing strategy that we’re going to start implementing on one of our sites. There will be somebody managing it and while we will outsource the majority of the work, you don’t have to.

By writing this post I am forcing us to implement the processes in-house and I will update you on the results in a few months.

And… I’d like you to join me!

You can implement the exact same strategy as we are and let me know how you get on. This is a strategy that people pay thousands of dollars to find out, and even more to have done for them.

Let’s start by taking a screenshot of where we are at for this site:

The impressions fluctuate between 50,000 and 100,000 per month and users is between 7,000 and 10,000 per month.

You can see that the average number of pages per session is 4, which is good and the bounce rate is very low.

Avg. Session Duration is just under 3 minutes, which isn’t bad but I feel could be longer.

The traffic channels show us that Direct traffic is the primary source, with Organic Search a poor second.

38% of the traffic to the site are new users but only 24% of organic search traffic are new users.

The average sessions duration is pretty similar across all channels except for social where users spend an average of 16 minutes on the site.

The goal for our content marketing strategy is to increase the Organic Search and Social Traffic to become equal or greater than Direct.

We want the majority of these two channels to be new users and to have longer average session durations.

The site is heavily optimised for generating leads and has a very strong email sales funnel in on it’s backend.

Currently there is an average of two pieces of content being published each day. These are relatively short pieces of content with a long piece being published between once and twice per week.

There is also a huge archive of content on the site containing nearly 1.5 million words. This can be used to help increase the initial speed of the content marketing strategy.

And this is how we’re going to do it…

1. Create Social Media Snippets

Each piece of content published we are going to take between five and twenty short snippets from to publish on social media. These will then be scheduled to be pushed across all social media platforms using Hootsuite at the rate of two per day.

The longer this process is continued the more snippets being shared each day.

2. Turn the content into a video

We want to appeal to a different audience by using video, and build our video channels. Each piece of content will be turned into a simple video and shared on YouTube. The description will link back to the post on the blog.

If we see this starting to have an impact, we may expand the platforms we are publishing the videos on.

3. Turn the content into a slide deck for Slide Share

SlideShare is in the top 150 sites worldwide according to Alexa. We want to grab some of that traffic by turning our content into a slide deck to share there.

Descriptions will link back to blog post, with link showing above the fold.

4. Turn the content into a PDF

We will turn the content into a PDF file and share this on DocStoc, Scribd and DocDroid.

5. Share content on Tumblr

Share the content on Tumblr using a snippet of the content and then a link to the rest of the post.

6. Use digital magazine platforms

Each piece of content will be added to a Flipboard digital magazine, linking back to the original post on the blog.

7. Use StumbleUpon Ads

Create a budget for each piece of content and use StumbleUpon ads to drive traffic to them.

8. Create weekly roundup posts

Create a targeted list of sites that are influencers in your niche. Each week create a post that links to the five or ten most popular articles of the week. Also include the top five or ten most shared social media comments and links.

9. Turn content into an Infographic

Turning the content into a daily infographic and posting to your site and sharing on Pinterest can be a great way to build up a visual following.

10. Sponsored Tweets/Facebook Posts

Allocate a budget to sponsor at least one Tweet and Facebook post each day.

11. Create a Podcast

Turn one piece of content each day into a podcast and publish on site and iTunes.

If you’re thinking that looks like a ton of work. It’s because it is. But doing this has generated large volumes of SEO traffic and conversion for my clients.

The next stage is to plan how this can all be done each day for the minimum cost possible. This is both monetary cost and time cost.

I will write a new post when we have our strategy for implementation so that you can copy it should you want to.
If you’re going to follow along with me while we do this, then please leave me a comment to let me know how you’re getting on.

November 2, 2015
Get Leads Without Marketing

There’s one thing that every business needs… leads.

And there’s a ton of ways of going about getting them.

But in this post I want to focus on just one of them.

It’s a technique that not many people use, and it’s one that can get crazy conversions.

The reason that not many people use it is because they think that there is too much work.

However… I’ve seen optin rates of over 90% using this technique with sales conversion rates of 10% and 20%.

The bottom line is that anything worthwhile is going to take some time. But it’s about focusing on doing that things that generate the strongest result for the time spent.

To use this approach you want to start in your Google Analytics account. Login and go to the Behaviour and then Overview buttons.

Next click on Site Content and choose All Pages.

What you will see now is a list of pages and the amount of visitors they’ve received over the timeframe set at the top of your analytics page.

Start by taking the top five posts from the last three months.

These are the posts that have been generating the most amount of traffic for you and it’s this traffic that we want to convert into leads.

Start with the first post in your list and look at what that post is all about. Ask yourself this question:

What problem am I solving for people in this post?

When you’ve found the problem that you’re solving in the post you now need to ask yourself:

What difficulties would my readers face implementing this solution or what problems will they still have?

Spend some time thinking about the best answer to this question and keep writing it down until you can put your answer into a single short sentence. About the length of a Twitter status update.

You now have the knowledge of the exact product that the people reading this page are going to want to have access to.

There are two ways that you can progress from here depending on how long it would take you to build that product.

Route 1

This is my preferred route as it has a built in method of immediately monetizing your leads. However it may take you longer to implement. If you don’t have a lot of time to create a product and nobody to do it for you, then I recommend you take Route 2.

Create the product that you outlined above.

Once that product has been built take from it the element that allows the fastest implementation and shows the strongest results.

It’s important to get a balance between implementation time and speed. Most people are pretty lazy, which means they want something that is quick and simple to do. However you also want them to buy your products, which means that whatever you’re showing them to do must also yield results.

When you’ve chosen this element that has the best balance of speed to implement and results, take it out of the main product and turn it into it’s own product.

This is going to be your lead magnet. It’s going to be what you use to get people onto your mailing list.

Go back to your post and in the middle (if your post is 1500 words or longer) and at the bottom create an optin box for readers to get your lead magnet.

I personally use Thrive Leads as my WordPress plugin of choice as it’s quick and simple to create these optin boxes in your posts and it will allow you to split test not only the design but also to try different locations in the post to find which one converts the best.

You already know that everybody landing on your post is interested in the problem you’ve solved in it, which means that this traffic is hyper-targeted to your lead magnet.

After a reader subscribes to get your lead magnet, deliver it via email and then take them straight to a sales page to upgrade to the full product.

If they don’t upgrade immediately then send them into a 4 part email sequence selling them the product.

If they still haven’t purchased it, offer them a free trial or a payment plan.

Using this process you will not only find you are able to convert 75% and more of the visitors to this web page into subscribers, but you can also monetize the majority of them almost instantly.

Route 2

Product creation can take some time, and if you don’t have it then you may want to choose route two.

This route skips out the part of creating the product and jumps immediately to the lead magnet creation stage.

Look at what the product would be in detail and, like above, take out of it the single element that can be implemented fastest and would show the best results.

Make your lead magnet and create your optin.

You can deliver the lead magnet either via email or on a thank you page after a visitor subscribes and then implement the sales funnel later on when you’ve had time to build the full product.

In Summary

There is no doubt that this approach can take some time to put together. But it can yield some of the best results both in optin rates and sales conversions that I have ever seen.

You are choosing a post that is popular and gets high levels of traffic. This post is already acting as a very high quality landing page.

What you are now going to do is use that landing page to feed people into your mailing list by offering the something you already know they’re interested in and you have already warmed them into wanting during your post.

One they’ve opted into your mailing list you are now going to offer them an even better solution to the one that they thought they were getting.
It’s one of the strongest funnels that you can have, and I guarantee that you won’t be sorry when you begin to implement it.

October 26, 2015
How To 100% Know If You’re Product Is Going To Make Your Money
Wouldn’t it be great if you could know with a 100% certainty if there was a market for your product before you even had it made?

Imagine, you’re having your morning coffee when you come up with the idea for what you’re sure is going to be the next top selling product. You phone around and get some quotes for how much it will cost to produce but…

…you’re now in a position where you have to buy stock.

That means you have to outlay money but you’re not sure if there’s really a market for it or if they’ll pay the price you need to be able to make a profit.

Traditionally you would now spend a lot of time and money doing market research and predicting the level of demand and the price point.

But not only does that take money, it’s also very slow and often wrong.

What you need is a crystal ball that’s going to tell you that information with a 100% certainty.

Well, with the advent of the internet that crystal ball is available if you know how to use it.

It’s otherwise called:

Paid Traffic

What I’m about to share with you can be used for both real products and digital products, but it’s going to be easier with real products due to a lot of paid traffic sources not being so keen on digital products.

I am going to describe a process using AdWords but any high quality paid traffic source will do.

It’s also worth noting that although everywhere says you can’t use AdWords with internet marketing products anymore in my experience that’s not strictly true.

Because… we do.

You will need an account in good standing and you need to be careful with how you promote and what your sales page looks like. But it’s certainly possible and, because nobody else is doing it, the traffic is plentiful 😉

Anyway, I’ve moved away from the main point.

How do we check with 100% certainty whether your product is going to make a profit.

First of all you make your sales page. If you are making a real world product then you should get a sample made up so you can take photographs of it.

Once you’ve made your sales page then you make a two stage order form. The first stage is entering the name and email address. The second would be the payment details but…

…the second part doesn’t exist.

Because at this stage we want to find out how many people will go through to the order form.

Instead after they optin to your mailing list you send them to a page which says there are currently no items left in stock and say that you will be in touch as soon as you have more stock.

Assume that 25% of the people who complete the optin will purchase your product (this is the average across all markets).

Now you only need to spend between $100 and $200 to get enough data to determine:
- How much a sale will cost you
- How big the market is
- If it’s profitable
If your product isn’t going to make a profit, don’t despair. Maybe you can reduce your profit margin slightly or call the manufacturer and ask them if they can reduce the cost to the level you require for it to be profitable.

What using this process will do is tell you for just $200 whether your product is going to work before you’ve had to spend any money creating your product!

This means that you never need to make a product that doesn’t have a market or won’t be profitable for you again.

In summary:
- Decide on your product
- Determine how much it will cost to make and ship
- If a real product get a sample made and photograph it
- Create a sales page with a two-step order form
- Send paid traffic to the sales page
- Assume 25% of people who optin will purchase
- Determine if your product will be profitable
Oh, and I forgot to mention… you’re also building a mailing list of people who are interested in your product at the same time!
August 11, 2014