Andrew: This session is about traffic building. Leading the session is Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers.com on the website you see in front of you, which shows you how to turn traffic into leads and sales.

I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders teach. Derek, give me an example of what our audience will be able to do at the end of the session.

Derek: Yes, so, during the session I want to show you how I took Source Triggers from a brand-new blog to a blog that gives several comments on posts, a lot of social media action, as you can see 446 tweets and 224 likes. And to show you some traffic stats, I took the site from basically new in April with 8,000 uniques to well into over 30,000 uniques in July.

Andrew: So, four months, you built it up this . . . that’s what I love about this session, all these sessions, we get people who have done it, who have proven it on their own sites, and their own businesses to come in and teach how they did it; to teach you how you can do it, too.

Derek: I also want to show it’s not a fluke, either, because I did the same thing on the DIY Themes blog, the diythemes.com/thesis site, where I took this to 19,000 people over the last six months or so. So this took a little bit longer, but this is a larger list, so it took a little bit longer to grow.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s an incredible site, and I see that you’ve grown it with . . . and this is a site that sells. An e-commerce site, they’re selling bits, essentially, to people and they’ve gotten a big audience to sign up and ask for more information. In fact, actually, they’re asking DIY Themes to sell to them. All right, I want to do this for our audience. That’s what they came here to watch in this session. What’s the first step that they need to take?

Derek: All right, so, this whole process is broken down into three simple steps, and there’s a little bit that goes into each step. And we’re just going to start right at Step One.

Andrew: And can you give us an overview? What are the three steps, so people who are following along know where we’re going with this?

Derek: Step One is all about positioning your site. Step Two, that’s all about actually getting the traffic to your site. And Step Three is all about keeping the traffic on your site.

Andrew: All right. Great.

Derek: I just saw on the growth you want, for real traffic growth you want to be able to generate new traffic while keeping your existing traffic, because the more people you keep, the larger your numbers grow over time.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: All right. So, we’re just going to start with Step One. We’re going to talk about positioning your site in the marketplace. This is really the number one step because if you skip this step, everything else you do is pointless. And the reason why that happens is because if you don’t position yourself as a unique person, like a unique source for content, you become forgettable. And if you become forgettable, people don’t have a reason to visit you, and don’t even remember to visit your site. So, you really want to focus on the positioning of your site. This is like the foundation of your blog, or your website. Now, how this works is actually three different types of positioning that matters in this particular case.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: The fourth type of positioning is what I call the content format. And that’s exactly what you think it is–the format of our content. Is it PDF, is it articles, is it audio? What type of content are you producing? Now as an example, I just want to pull up Mixergy, here. You usually create these master classes, as one type of content; and then video interviews as another type of content.

That helps you stand out in this space, because even though there are other people doing text-based interviews or audio interviews, you really decided to go video, and then you have the master class, which is a unique reason to keep coming to your site, right? Now, if I was interested in competing with you, I would probably take a different approach, where I might try audio based interviews, and then instead of doing master classes I might do next action worksheets, or something like that. So, that’s what I mean by content format.

Andrew: You know, by the way, it’s funny; I didn’t even think of that format until I saw the notes that you sent over. PDF actually probably would even do better than video. I’m kind of married to video. I love the format; I’ve gotten in a good groove with it. But if I could do it again, I might, and I knew about this, I might even go PDF. PDF is downloadable. People can read it on lots of different devices; they could share it. They can take it with them. They’d be willing to give their email address for it, where people have been trained not to give their email address for video, you know. So, I didn’t even think of PDF as an approach. So, of course, video, many people don’t think of; PDF is another approach, text we all think about. What else is there?

Derek: There’s audio, and another really great example; I want to pull up the KISSMetrics blog. These guys broke into the marketing space, which is really crowded. What they did was, create a bunch of different info graphics. Info graphics are great for links. It’s great for social media sharing but with KISSmetrics, right now, is the only marketing blog that’s creating these info graphics en masse. They have like a million info graphics here. Like I said, they are the only ones who are doing it. When I think KISSmetrics, I think useful info graphics. They positioned their site in that way.

Say you’re selling time management, if there is no one in your space doing info graphics about time management, maybe that’s an opportunity for you. If no one’s doing video interviews, that might be an opportunity. That’s what I mean by content format.

Andrew: All right. You’ve opened my eyes to a new way of positioning myself. I totally get it. We are so in the mindset of everyone else is doing text, you have to do text and when people watch my interviews they get in mindset of thinking, it’s only got to be video because that’s the only way to do interviews. They’re not. You even said earlier, maybe I do worksheets. Maybe what they do is, they have a conversation with someone like search engine optimization and they create worksheets and publish those. That, I think, actually, would do better than text because everyone else is already doing text.

Derek: Yes, exactly. I think it’s just a way to differentiate. Eventually, you want to do all types of multimedia, but when you are first starting a site and you have very minimal traffic, you really want to be known for one thing. And we’re going to talk about that in a few minutes about what that means.

Andrew: OK. Content format, one approach.

Derek: Yet the next approach is all about content topic and to show you this example I’m going to pull my own site, Social Triggers. I also was breaking into the overcrowded marketing niche. What I did to differentiate was my main topic was marketing and blogging. To differentiate, I decided to pull in the research from psychological studies, real hard-core academic research and then also some conversion testing, and pull in that data too.

Then, I tied it all together to how this research and studies apply to the blogging niche. I’m taking something complex, I’m turning it into easy, actual insights that bloggers can implement on their site. That was a huge success. Everybody thinks that the fact that I niched down into psychology and conversion is the reason why people remember my site and one of the reasons why I grew so quickly. You know what I mean?

Andrew: Yes.

Derek: That is all about content topic. Now, to really hit this topic home, the one thing people really worry about when they are creating a blog and creating some kind of unique topic like this, where they mix maybe two or three different ideas together and talk about the intersection of those two or three ideas, people think they are going to create too small of a niche. That they are not going to really be targeting their overall customer, and they are going to think that they are leaving a lot of sales on the table.

To really combat that, I want to talk about Copyblogger for a second. He started his site in early 2006. His main goal was to bring copyrighting to blogging. And that’s all he really wrote about for about the first year. He built his audience up, he built his credibility up as a copyrighter for blogging and then, he branched out later. When you’re going to niche down, the point of the niche down is to really establish your authority in one particular area and then branch out into other topics that are related to that area at a later date.

Once you have the credibility in one area, it is very easy to have the credibility in another area in the people’s eyes. It’s like the whole celebrity things, where people are willing to trust Oprah rather than their therapist as someone to solve their problems.

Andrew: [laughs]

Derek: Even though she might not be a therapist but she’s a celebrity so they’re more likely to believe her because she has an audience of people who listen to her.

Andrew: I see. You’re saying, for example, if I were going to tackle online sales that would be too broad. Maybe what I want to cover instead is psychology in sales. Maybe instead of that, I want to do landing page conversions and psychology, and I would do content just about the psychology behind landing page conversions. You’re right, if I were to think about that topic, I would think, well, maybe it’s a little too niche-y.

There aren’t that many people who want landing page discussions as it is, and there aren’t that many people who also want psychology with landing pages. Maybe I’m making it a little bit too narrowly targeted for an audience of one, which is me. Actually, as I think about it, if somebody created a blog like that, I would absolutely rip into it everyday because I want that kind of narrowness. I want something that addresses a specific need. OK.

Derek: Exactly. They’re going to rip into it; they’re going to remember you. You’re going to be known for it, and it’s going to help you build that core base of 100 to 1,000 people that read your site regularly. Those 1,000 people are the ones that are going to be sharing your content always, and they’re going to help you branch out to other things. Like I said, you really want to niche-down, branch out later.

Andrew: It seems like what you’re saying is, if we have a big topic, we want to look for another topic to marry it together to, right?

Derek: Yes.

Andrew: If we’re thinking we’re going to do the marketing blog, it’s not enough. Think something like what you did which is psychology in marketing.

Derek: Yeah, exactly. Psychology marketing conversions narrow it down. I started with that, and now if you read my site I delve into a bit more motivational stuff. I also talk about just general blogging stuff, and I was able to branch out. It’s only been three months, and I have been able to branch out already once you build the audience. You can branch out once you have the audience.

Andrew: All right. That’s a second way to differentiate ourselves.

Derek: Yes.

Andrew: What else? What’s the third one?

Derek: The third way is what I call the content design and how people experience your website. When they visit your site, does it look like every other kind of site, or does it feel a little bit different? For example, with Social Triggers, most people in the marketing area are using very complex layouts with a lot of distractions. I just decided to go completely minimalist because it was different from everybody else.

A lot of bloggers are using the color red for their links or blue for their links. I decided to use purple for my links, and I did this just to have a design that was looking significantly different, that way people remember my design.

I also decided to take a big feature box at the top here with an opt-in. The reason why I did that was not only did it convert really well, but it also stands out from the other marketing blogs in the space right now. That’s like designing your site and making it pop out a little more.

To really hit this home, I want to show you Rich Happy and Hot LIVE. This is a conference that is being thrown by Maria Forleo. I’m going to scroll through the site for you right now, and you’re going to see a lot of different things that’s going on here. Instead of having an overloaded site, it’s minimalistic. Instead of having a lot of information, there’s actually very little information. They’ve got one page. [inaudible] as a video, and they really hit home that this is going to be an experience, not just like a learning event.

You can really see that when you see the big picture on these pages, like showing

or there’s another example where there’s an innovation page where you see people really just having fun. When their target audience sees this, they can understand that it’s going to be a fun event whereas I’ve seen other conference sites which I’m not going to name any names because I don’t want to get in any bad will with any of those people. Other conference sites that are really busy, and they don’t do a good job really targeting the emotion of people and showing the emotions whereas this conference, it’s all about emotion, if you can see what I’m talking about?

Andrew: You say that when it comes to design it’s not just a way to separate ourselves, but in order to do it, there are three questions that we can ask ourselves to get the design that differentiates us from the competition.

Derek: Exactly. The three questions are as follows. The first one is: how can you use images to make things stand out? Here, as you can see, they are using images to show examples, to show the fun. For Social Triggers, I always use images that are very similar with 200 pixels wide and frames aligned right. You can see that in online posts not many people have it aligned right. People do align left. I have it aligned right. There’s actually another reason for that which I can talk about later, but just images designed in such a way.

The second question you want to ask yourself is: how can you make your color scheme different?

Andrew: Actually, you know what? Derek, I can’t wait for later. I’m just now sitting here thinking, what’s the benefit of having it on the right? I’m trying to figure out the psychology behind it. Why do you do it?

Derek: All right. There’s some research that shows that people prefer to reader shorter line lengths. More specifically, they like to read a line length between 40 and 65 characters long which is equivalent to about 3-350 to 380 pixels. I have an image to the right here to shorten my line lengths to the left.

Andrew: I see. So, roughly six words wide, if we had to come up with a word width.

Derek: Between about six to eight words wide.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: That shortens the line length, and I only do that for the first few sentences. The reason why I do that for the first few sentences is because copywriters have long known that if you get people to read the first four lines of your copy, they’re more likely to read the entire thing. I shorten the first four sentences with this image trick, make the line length shorter, and then it broadens out to longer line lengths.

The reason why I wanted to broaden it out to longer line lengths is that even though people prefer the short lines, they actually read long lines faster. I start off with the short lines, get them hooked, get them reading, broaden out to long lines and keep them reading to the end.

Andrew: Gotcha. OK. The first thing they see is short lines which are more welcoming, and then they get longer lines which keeps them reading.

Derek: Exactly.

Andrew: All right, cool. I’m glad I asked. All right. So the first question you’re saying is, “How can we use images to make our design stand out?” What’s the second question?

Derek: The second question was how you could make your color scheme different, or just color design different. With Social Triggers, as I said, I did minimalistic and purple links. Now the third question is all about design, and this is all about how people experience your site. And as you can see here, Rich Happy & Hot LIVE, this is like a one-column layout with very little distractions. If you look at my site, it’s a two-column layout with very little distractions.

If you look at a site like problogger.net though, they have my similar audience. They have two columns, three columns of feature box. It’s a little bit busier. So instead of going to a three-column layout with a big footer, I decided to go with a two-column layout with no featured post to the top, if you know what I’m saying. So it’s all about the look and feel of your site. If people are primarily using two- or three-column layouts, maybe you want to use a one-column layout and figure out how to make that work so it converts to results that you want.

Never just make a design decision because you want to be different. In the end, you always want results from your site, so you want to test these new ways, but never compromise conversions for standing out with design.

Andrew: OK

Derek: OK.

Andrew: All right. And the final question that we can ask ourselves when it comes to using design standout is . . .

Derek: The final question was, “How can your design be different?” So the three questions were, “How can you use images to stand out?” The second question is, “How can your color scheme be different?” The third question is, “How can your overall design be different?”

Andrew: OK, the layout.

Derek: The layout.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Derek: All right. So that’s Step One.

Andrew: First thing we do, differentiate ourselves, make sure for many reasons we stand out and people remember us. I don’t think anyone’s going to forget what your site is about. It’s about marketing and psychology. Copyblogger started out with the idea that they were going to be about copyrighting for blogging. Rich Happy & Hot LIVE is an event that’s standing out with beautiful images and without a lot of text on their site. All right, I see how we’re standing out. And of course one of my favorites is KISSmetrics, which stands out with content.

Derek: With the info graphing. I mean, this is great. Exactly.

Andrew: I think, by the way, that format is really underestimated. The value of picking a different content delivery method is just much bigger than most of us recognize.

Derek: It’s huge, it’s huge. Like, if I were to go into the interview space, I would not even consider doing video interviews. You’ve already got that on lock. If I do an interview blog, I just look like a knockoff of Mixergy. If I do a video interview blog, I’m a knockoff of Mixergy, as opposed to my own thing. You know what I’m saying?

Andrew: Yeah. I’m kicking myself for not doing PDFs right off the bat. Do audio plus a PDF, people value PDF. You give it away for free, they share it, as I said. They would even pay for PDF, because they’re so used to it, especially if you start calling it something else, like a Kindle book or something.

Derek: Or imagine if you had an interview and you had a PDF with some next action tips from the interview, and they could only get that in exchange for an email.

Andrew: Right.

Derek: Now you’ve got custom regeneration for every one of your interviews.

Andrew: Right, right. Checklist, too, is another great idea. If you just give people checklists either as a big image or give them a checklist as a PDF that they download, or even a Word doc, I could see valuing that. And, man, creating these different formats is dead simple. Creating a PDF, of course. Creating a EPUB format is just an export from a Word doc. So it’s really easy for people to create those different formats and stand out. All right. So now we’ve stood out. What’s the next step? It’s position your blog for the marketplace?

Derek: So, no, the first step was all about positioning.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: The second step, here’s the real meat here, this is how you get traffic to your site. So this is the part where everyone needs to be paying attention. Get ready to take some notes. You position your site, here’s how you’re going to get traffic, and there are a few different methods I have for you, merge right into the first method. I call this creating content-rich resource pages. Now what is a content-rich resource page? It’s simply a page on your site that has a little bit of content, as you see here with WordPress SEO for everybody, little bit of content. Then you have a link, links to some of your articles about that content, and then an opt-in form. These content-rich resource pages are huge, and let me tell you why they’re so beneficial.

If you already have a blog on your site, what you can do is take some of your content that you have already written and some of your content that is like evergreen content, create a page that puts that content together into a nice little, neat little package, like WordPress SEO for everybody. Then what you do is you announce this nice little package to your audience, and they go crazy! As you can see, only 32 retweets but 51 Facebook shares, 16 + 1’s: this page is a major traffic generator, all from social media. And all I did was put together articles I already had in my archives, you know what I mean?

Andrew: Yep.

Derek: I just pulled articles together. Now there’s another benefit – once this starts getting some social media action, it’ll naturally start attracting links and as it starts attracting links, you might start ranking for the topic that you’re trying to rank for. Here we’re trying to rank for WordPress SEO; we haven’t taken that yet, but that’s a very competitive term, we’re trying to rank for a very competitive term.

But something like I have on Social Triggers, which is all about how to sell more at higher prices, keep customers coming back. It’s all about increasing online sales. And this page is just the same thing. It’s some introductory content, some more content, links to five articles, then an opt-in form. This page is already ranking pretty decently in the search engines for me.

Andrew: So how is this different from most WordPress sites and other blogging software will enable us to do, which is to create a single page with links to all the articles on a topic that we’ve written? How is this different from that?

Derek: A category page is nice for archiving all your content and everything, but the problem with blogs is that it’s great for highlighting your new content, but it’s horrible for highlighting some of your best content. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s the best. You might have stuff that, you know, you might have an interview that you did two years ago that’s better than any other interview than you’ve ever done. And if you’re just using the regular built-in category system or tagging system, it’s going to be really hard to hand-select your best stuff.

Andrew: Right. It shows every single post on a topic, and you’re saying, “Select just the best stuff – don’t overwhelm people. More is not better.”

Derek: Exactly. Don’t overwhelm people; give them just the – and target each thing to a specific topic. I know Ramit Sethi does a really good job here, where he says, “Earn more money, buying a house, credit card perks.” Each particular section, he has some intro content and links to some articles. And guess what happens at the bottom? An opt-in form.

Andrew: Let’s take a look at that top section, because that’s where most people link to it, and we just don’t even notice what they’re doing, I don’t think.

Derek: Yeah, same [inaudible]. Earn more money.

Andrew: It’s kind of a small set of links so it’s a little hard for people to see at the top of the page. One sec while the page loads up; they’ll see it. There it is. So right underneath his logo he has those links on Earn More Money, Buying a House, Credit Card (what is that called, poker?).

Derek: Credit Card Perks.

Andrew: Credit Card Perks – I’m really not seeing it because it’s small on my screen, too. So the idea is he has these category pages, a little bit of text, and then links to hand-selected posts that he’s highlighting, and then the email box on the bottom.

Derek: Yep, exactly.

Andrew: Are you getting a lot of action on the email box? Or are people mostly clicking on those links and avoiding giving you the email address?

Derek: So you want to hear something really funny? On this page here I whipped together a Building an Email List 101 page.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Derek: And I announced it to my email list. It got shared by 95 people; 28 likes. And even though people were clicking the links, a lot of, if you show five or six links they might think, you know, all right, I don’t have time to read six articles, I’ll just give him my email instead. And it is converting. When I announced this page, this page generated a few hundred leads that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, if I didn’t announce this page.

Andrew: Can I see the text that you’re using to get people to sign up to the list? Yeah, right at the bottom. It says: To learn more about building your list and other great tips, sign up for the exclusive Social Triggers Newsletter. I see; so you’re tying it to the topic that you’re covering.

Derek: Exactly. And now the one thing I would like to test; I haven’t done it yet because the more aggressive you are with the opt-in, the less social media play you’ll get. So I left the opt-in at the bottom. But what I might end up testing is including a small opt-in below this box here.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: Put it a little bit higher; that’ll probably convert better, and then have the articles below. But right now it’s at the bottom. I’m being a little bit less aggressive because as I said, I’m trying to really get the social media count on this a little bit higher.

Andrew: That drives me crazy too that you have 95 tweets on a set of old posts, when many of my posts (my newer ones) don’t even get 95 tweets. But I can see how if it’s a resource page, then people tweet it out, because now they’re giving a lot of useful information. It’s like giving a guide to email marketing directly from Derek. I could see why they would tweet it out versus a single post.

Derek: Imagine, for example, you could just find seven interviews you did about how to get funded, and you could have a how to get funded interview series. You could be a little bit more aggressive because you’ve got a really good brand. Instead of making the interviews all lengths, you could say here’s a series of how to get funded, when you sign up you’re going to get over the next 21 days you’ll get one interview each three days, and set up a custom auto-responder sequence where they get one interview per three days. At the end of that you say, if you really like this how to get funded series, sign up for Mixergy Pro, and you can get this other series about growing your business from $0 to $100,000 a year in revenue, or something like that.

Andrew: You know what? We’ll get back on top again a second here, but I got to tell you that David Saint, our course producer here, as he was going through with you to put this session together, he kept stopping to set up the Go To Meetings for us to record and put together some of the documents. He kept saying, “Andrew, I want to put together these pages that we’re going over with Derek, and we have to really force him, and force ourselves together to say no, let’s focus on the things that we need to get done here and we’ll put those lists together”, and now actually I’m really glad that we didn’t, because I like the way you’re describing it here. Maybe, even better then putting together just a single page. I’d like to put together an email series, and as you said, at the end of it offer people an upsell. I like email.

Derek: Me, too.

Andrew: We’re going to talk later about why email is better. You are going to explain from a business point of view why email is better, but I’ll say just a quick reason why I love it. For me I find that people who are signed up to email are a much better connection for me. They help more with the site, they care more about the product, they guide me in a better way, they give me feedback, they’re more supportive, they offer to fix things when they’re broken. In contrast where people who just are hits on the site, just don’t have nearly the level of connection.

There’s one more thing, and I promise I won’t keep getting excited about each step of what you’re doing here, but can you show Copyblogger again? Because I’m realizing now that when I first started blogging, right at the top they have copyrighting, content marketing, landing pages, etc. When I started, I started going back to those pages to learn about topics like, I think they used to have one on headlines, and I kept going back to then to figure out how to create headlines. And all he was doing, I realize now, was linking to his past post.

Derek: Yes, so here’s what is funny about that. When you create these topics, you can go two routes. You can create the route of what you want to rank for, but what he did with that headline series, that was one of his classics, it was called Magnetic Headlines.

Andrew: Right.

Derek: And what ended up happening was this particular page got a ton of incoming links, and almost everyone in the blogosphere started saying, you have got to read magnetic headlines by Copyblogger as if it was a product that he created. And they referenced this stuff all the time, so on the one spot, you want to have keywords that you could rank for, but on the other you want to make sure it’s brandable. Like for instance, if you had a how to get funded series, potential start-up entrepreneurs might say you have got to watch this series by Mixergy of how to get funded. It gave me so many ideas that I can use to get my own my business funded. So you want to create something that people can easily remember and reference, and as you said, you would reference this all the time, I referenced it back in 2005.

Andrew: I did when my wife started blogging, I said go check that out too, and I gave her a link, and all it is past articles. So you are saying, that if he hadn’t of called it how to write magnetic headlines, and if he had of called it something like headline writing for bloggers; if he would have said what keywords are people in my audience looking for and branded it with that, he would of gotten more search engine traffic for it.

Derek: Maybe he would have gotten more search engine traffic, but I don’t think he would have gotten as much natural, organic traffic, where Magnetic Headlines sounds kind of cool.

Andrew: Yeah, it is catchy.

Derek: So, that’s one of the reasons why I think that did so well.

Andrew: And of course what I’m seeing is, he’s got the email box on the bottom. And here’s another thing that I notice, none of these guys have margins on the side. They kill the margins when they bring you to this page. They want to keep you just flowing down to the content, and then hopefully to the email box at the bottom.

Derek: Yes, so I actually take that a whole step further on Social Triggers where I kill everything, I don’t even have navigation on my pages. The only thing I have here is links to the articles you can read and an opt-in form. Some people are against that, but I think it works for me, because if someone is clicking to read about this they obviously want to read about it, they don’t want to read about anything else. They’re clicking on Billion Email List 101, anything else that I try to make them click on is a distraction, so that’s why I get rid of all distractions.

Andrew: Cool. You can see I get excited about this stuff because I’ve been in this a little bit and I see when their ideas that are clearly going to work. I get excited about implementing them. All right, what else do we need to know? Oh wait, actually I’m looking at my notes. I keep going back and forth between our video, your screen, and my notes. You’re saying that there’s a way for us to think about how to create these content rich resource pages?

Derek: There’s actually a formal for creating these pages, and I want to share that with you. First part of the formula is write a persuasive headline. By persuasive headline I mean, give people a promise. When they hit this page, promise them something. When you hit my page, it’s how to grow your email list and actually make money from it. That’s a promise that I’m giving people. If you need help writing headlines, you can refer to the Magnetic Headlines at Copy Blogger.

So, write a persuasive headline. The next part is write great introductory content. With me, I tend to keep it short as you can see because of the line links. I keep it very short sentences to get people to read the first four or five sentences, so they can keep reading. Write great introductory content. Try to take advantage of short line links in your introductory content.

Then, next step you want to link to your articles. Five to ten, I only have three here because I only have three really good articles that I want to highlight. I say five to ten because that’s enough options that people can really choose and find an article they like. That’s not a hard and fast rule. You can use as many articles there as you feel necessary. Do not use more than ten though. I think more than ten would be a distraction. There was a study done by Sheena Iyengar called The Draeger Jam Experiment where, have you heard of this study?

The Draeger Jam Experiment was, she had two different jam displays. One jam display would show 24 jams; another jam display had 6 jams. She found that the jam display with 24 jams attracted more people to stop by the jam display, but the jam display with 6 jams attracted less people, but did something like a 1000% more in sales. They found that the magic number really is like about six different options. If you give people 24 options, they might not take any because they’re overwhelmed. They get the analysis-paralysis. She found that six options performed better than 24, and you can actually see this.

This is a little off topic, but I know people are going to love this, but you can actually see this on zappos.com where this whole option thing, where you click on this, you click on some shoes and look at how it’s laid out. Like there’s only four, only a row of four different items and even though this is only four, because this is the overall shoe page, if you go to the individual pages themselves, take a look here at the — oh my god, they must of just changed this.

Andrew: What did they do? What did they have before?

Derek: They used to have five different, between four and five different options of shoes that were related to the products we’re currently looking at.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: But it looks like they must have just changed that.

Andrew: You know what, they may not have even changed it. What I’m finding often, as I’m doing these sessions is that there is so much B testing that sometimes the option just isn’t available to you at that moment.

Derek: Yeah. So take a look, you got one, two, three, four, five different shoes on the right and then four on the left. So, I tend to say, six worked for that jam display, I think between four and six will probably work on the Internet.

Andrew: So, for creating resource pages, stick with five to ten and no more than ten.

Derek: Yeah. Exactly.

Andrew: What else do we need to have on the forms?

Derek: The next thing you want to have, as we saw here, you need to have the opt-in form. Got to have the opt-in form. That’s the whole point of these pages to get some emails, because that’s how you keep your traffic. Now the last part of this resource page, is less about how to structure it, but more about how to get, how to actually get these pages ranking. I know that a lot of people have heard that if you want to grow a blog, you want to guest post or you want to get some links to pages and instead of linking to your home page all the time, which is what a lot of bloggers do, you can link to your resource page and that’s a little bit more persuasive because visit me at mixergy.com is not nearly as cool as come over and read my, listen to my how to get funded series.

That’s a more specific call to action, and a specific call to action always convert more clicks than vague calls to action. So, instead of linking to your home page you can link to your resource pages as they start building links those pages could potentially start ranking in search engines and bring in new traffic.

Andrew: The other thing I like about that is when I read a guest post, on say CopyBlog or say any website, and I click over to the person’s home page. Sometimes I end up on a home page with the latest post that’s just meaningless to me. It just doesn’t have anything to do with the topic that I was getting excited about reading. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything that a new person on the site would get excited about. It’s just whatever happened to be the latest post. Or, maybe it’s a sell page, whatever it is that they’re trying to sell me on, and I’m not ready to buy.

I just really liked your article, and I wanted to read more like it. I like this idea because it means I read about a topic on someone’s website, like maybe landing page conversions, I don’t end up on his home page where I can end up with any old article. I end up on a single page. Do I read more articles like the one that I just got excited about on the guest post, and then I get to give them the email address where I really excited about joining them before I get distracted by other junk. Well, look at this. There’s a phone call coming in, right on the screen, as we’re doing this session.

Derek: All right.

Andrew: You know what that is, VISA, for some reason. This is all like screen casting here, and VISA just popped up on my screen saying, ‘Did you really use your phone, your credit card in New York this weekend?’ I’ll have to call them up later, and say, ‘Yes, I did.’ OK. So, what’s the next thing that we need to do? We talked about examples. We got that. Next item is . . .

Derek: That’s all there is for the content-rich pages.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: And that’s really one of the best things you can implement. You can use the content you already have. You don’t have to go on a content-creation spree. If you’ve got some content together on a resource page, you’re set. So that’s one of your first quick hits. If you’re going to do anything from this master class, make sure you do that. It’s awesome.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: The next step is, and I’ve taken advantage of this for a very long time, but you always want to piggy-back on hot news items that are related to your niche. And what I mean by that is, let’s take a look at this interview. It’s not currently available, but when Jason Fried sold Sortfolio, you obviously wanted an interview to see the behind the scenes, because you knew that was going to be a hot topic, right?

Andrew: Yep.

Derek: And I can see you have 311 tweets on this, and this probably generated a decent amount of traffic for you.

Andrew: Yeah, it was wonderful. It was terrific because everyone heard that he was selling Sortfolio, and they all wanted to find out why he was selling Sortfolio. And they figured that I would get him to talk about whether it was a failure, or whether something else was going on, but either way, it was hot and it was in the news.

Derek: Exactly.

Andrew: Yeah, and it got me a lot of traffic.

Derek: And you know, you really tied it together with what you were doing. You never want to just write about hot news and not tie it together with what you do. And to show you another example, before we get . . .

Andrew: Actually, what do you mean by that? Because I’m not sure that I’m doing that. I do know to go and look for whatever is in the news and write a post about it, or do an interview about it, because that gets a lot of traffic while people are still hot for it. But what did I miss. Once I get him to do it, what should I be tying it to?

Derek: Yeah, so you already did tie. You’re interviewing an entrepreneur who sold their business is directly related to your audience. You would never hear, like you know, if Brittany Spears had naked pictures on the Internet you’re not going to interview her for her naked pictures because that doesn’t fit your niche. Never go after hot news that is going to generate useless traffic. You want to generate traffic that might make more sense to your audience, like interviewing a founder who sold one of their companies. That’s a perfect fit, whereas interviewing Brittany Spears about her latest escapades, that might not be a perfect fit.

Andrew: You know, by the way, what I found is that there’s often a tie that you may not pick up on right away. Like, I remember when Paris Hilton had her phone hacked and everyone was talking about it. That’s the kind of topic that I would think off the bat probably doesn’t fit with Mixergy because I interview entrepreneurs.

But it turns out, the website that her information was on was owned by a Mixergy fan. And I could have had him on to talk about how he builds a community where people get this kind of information, and how he feels about having illegal information on his site. Is it illegal in the first place? What his lawyers had to say about it. How he built up a community. There are so many questions right now that are popping in my head that would have done it at the time. I think it’s often easier to fit than we imagine, but it’s not always an easy fit. So, you’re saying, make sure it fits in with the topic overall.

Derek: Exactly. And just to show you another example, when Google Plus released their Plus One button, I decided, well we worked together too on how to add Google Plus One share button to WordPress and Thesis, and this got 70 shares, 199 plus the 77 Facebooks, and generated thousands of people to the site, a lot of opt-ins, a lot of Facebook ‘likes’, a lot of emails, and a lot of sales. Just by piggy-backing on something new and make sure we were able to get some information out about it.

Andrew: I love that. I love it because it’s not that hard, and I can see it’s not that hard for you to put it together. It’s your product. You guys create Thesis, the Theme, you know how to add buttons to it. You could do it in your sleep, I bet. And most people would just not recognize the possibility there. But I can see the thought process in there, and saying, hey, anything to do with Google Plus right now is really hot. This is probably something our audience could be excited about. Let’s put it together. Yeah, that’s cool, I love that.

Derek: One more example, when GoDaddy was off slaughtering elephants name [??] decided to do a save the elephants transfer campaign. Transfer your domains from GoDaddy to us for $4.99, which was a discount or something like that.

Andrew: Yes. Right when GoDaddy, had the founder of GoDaddy, I guess he shot an elephant, he was on some kind of safari trying to kill an elephant, everyone was talking about how it was nonsensical, you shouldn’t of done it or maybe some people were saying it and elephant you should do it, it was a big debate about it. That’s clever, competitors say, hey we’re going to use that news story to write a post and get some customers from it. Perfect, I love it.

Derek: Yeah.

Andrew: And look, look what you get for basically, an ad that didn’t take that much work. I see they got 297 comments?

Derek: Yeah. 20,000 retweets, I don’t know what the business was, I’m sure it did well.

Andrew: 23,000 retweets from it and like you said a lot of new customers I’m sure that came from it.

Derek: Just to show you another example, this is on one of my private sites. I won’t release the domain here, but this is, you know, the opportunities endless. When I went after a hot news item, look at my traffic, you know 228, 000 and 400,000 people, 180,000 and then it tailored back off to my usual 70,000 people a day or something like that.

Andrew: Just by jumping on a hot news topic?

Derek: Jumped on a hot news topic, got more than a million page users in a single day, and you know, I don’t remember the exact value of this traffic, but it was an ad based business so, the more traffic you get, the more money I made and I basically, quintupled my traffic over night just by going after a hot news item.

Andrew: I don’t think people recognize the significance of this enough. It is so powerful to do this, it’s so powerful. We’re taking a break from doing it at Mixergy, just ’cause I got to focus on getting these courses up and running, but anytime I want traffic for this site, anytime to this day, I want traffic for the site I know what I do, I go to textme.com. I see what the hot news story of the day, I find the person behind that story and I get them to come on and do an interview, and bam it gets me traffic. If I post it right away, which I can do pretty quickly now, and I’ve done that with just writing posts about what happens to be in the news and people talk about it.

Derek: Yeah. So we’re going to talk about how to find some hot news items, but I want to make one more thing clear. A lot of people will see this and think well, I don’t need loads of traffic that might necessarily convert and those people are right, to an extent. But here’s the deal when you get a massive influx of traffic to your site, when you’re getting 400,000 people there’s going to be a few thousand people in there who are going to love what you’re doing and stick around first off. Second off, when you get a massive influx of traffic, you’re going to get a lot of links to that particular article and even though those links might not be 100% targeted to your overall mix, more links never hurt search engine rankings, you know what I mean.

Andrew: Yeah.

Derek: So, there’s really even, you’re going to get unqualified traffic. This traffic might not convert the highest, but it’s just about getting some influx. It’s about getting your brand in front of more eyeballs and in those eyeballs you might have the editor of Wall Street Journal, you never know who’s in those eye balls. So, that’s why it’s so beneficial.

Let’s talk about how to find some hot news you already mentioned Text Me which is great for . . . I tend to use things like Google Trends, that’s where you can see the hot searches today with Warren Jeffs, Federal Reserve. You can go to More Hot Searches to see what else is being searched for the day of August 9th.

Andrew: I almost want to have somebody on staff look at these stories and write a post about whatever is in the news. Like, if it’s the Federal Reserve, if it’s changing interest rates, or the stock market went down we could do a whole post about, it doesn’t matter if the stock market goes down you got to focus on your own work and tie it in to what we’re doing at Mixergy and I bet that would start getting traffic. It would almost pay for themselves. I’d have to think about how I can do it more systematically, but even the little bit that I’ve done, I can see it works really well.

Derek: I mean, what do you think all these people, I don’t want to bash any of these content companies that are just creating loads of low quality content, but how do you think some of these sites were created that have an article about every specific topic on earth, even though it’s unrelated to the overall topic. They just go here and try to find out what’s getting traffic and they try to rank for it.

Andrew: You want to know something, it’s even high quality, well funded companies that are doing it. I had a guy on here who was just a friend of mine, started talking about what was going on in his company. He got yelled at by his boss because he revealed stuff like this. He talked about how they just find what’s going on that’s hot, they write the posts about them, and then they get traffic that ends up sticking around and converts to, in their case, it was for advertising.

Derek: Let me give you a quick tip actually before we go to the next section. With this searching thing, I’ve never really revealed this before, but this is something that I know everyone at Mixergy is going to love, when you start seeing things like this popping up, just do a Google search and see who ranks for those topics. Some of those people who rank might be blogs, and some of them might have flat-rate advertising rates. So what I would do is, if I knew a hot news item was going to generate tons of traffic, I’ll find, you know, the top ten rankings. All right, there are three blogs ranking here. Let me see if I can find an ad there. And in one particular case, I bought an ad for like $1,000, and they sent me over a million people to my site.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: $1,000; by buying an ad. They currently had their ad inventory was a little undervalued. They sold me a flat-rate ad for $1,000, and then I got one million hits to my site, because they didn’t change their ad rates, not realizing they were going to get a massive influx of traffic over the next, maybe, 30 days.

Andrew: I see. That makes a lot of sense. Right.

Derek: Now let’s talk about how we can find some more hot hots.

Andrew: Yes, tell us what you have. Google.com/trends.

Derek: And now, Alexa.com, what’s hot. I hate Alexa. I hate their fast tracking, it’s very inaccurate. But, the hot topics, you know, it might give some ideas you could write about. Here we have Diana Nyad. It’s usually different than what is shown on Google, as you can see. Like, here’s the hot topics, say Stop Market, Diana Nyad. On Google I don’t even think I saw any of those particular topics. So it’s all about finding new, different ways to see what’s hot. You could do Text Me, for example, which you mentioned. And there might be more industry-related hot topics type pages that you could also come up with ideas from.

Andrew: OK.

Derek: All right, now, that really concludes the piggyback on the hot news, and I just want to leave on one point. Even though you’re going to get a burst of traffic, and it might be low converting traffic, more eyeballs never hurts, and you never know who’s in that burst of traffic that could really potential make your business, or break your business.

Let’s go to the next step. You want to create content with a target audience in mind. This is Step Three, getting more traffic. And a lot of people tend to create content, press publish, sent out a Twitter update, maybe do a Facebook update, and that’s it. That’s the extent of their marketing whereas if you create content with a target audience in mind, you could then promote that content to that audience.

And to show you how this works, I just want to show a quick example. I wrote an article called The Content is King Myth Debunked. This was all about some research that I found that mentioned that design caused people to distrust websites within a few seconds of people visiting the site. So I took that particular article that said content is king myth debunked, said that content is king is horrible advice, it’s really design that is king. I then proceeded to reach out to designers and say, “Hey, I stumbled on some research that I think you’re going to like. Why don’t you check it out?” Let me show you the exact email that I sent out. I wrote this article, and I . . .

Andrew: And you wrote this article with designers in mind.

Derek: Yeah, I wrote it with designers in mind and writers in mind. I knew designers were going to love it. I knew writers and bloggers were going to hate it. That’s controversy.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: Controversy’s great. So, here’s the exact email I sent to someone. You know, it was like: ‘Hey name. I know you write about creative design, and while this may be slightly off topic, I know you’ll find it interesting, especially as a web designer and someone who writes about web design. Research has shown that people object to websites and instantly distrust websites because of their web design. I wrote about this research here–would love to know what you think.’ Let me break this down for a second. Approaching them with a cold email, I never knew this person before. I’m being very personable, I’m just saying, Hey, I know you write about this. Well, I have some research that you might be interested in. I didn’t even say the specific research, because I wanted them to click the link. I was trying to get their curiosity playing there, where I said there was research. But I didn’t say what it was, to get them to click the link. Then I ended with, ‘Would love to know what you think.’ I didn’t ask for a tweet–nothing. I asked for an opinion. People love to give their opinions. So I ended with the opinion. He fired back at me a message, ‘Hey, man, great research. I just tweeted it.’ You know? So, it works great. That’s the exact email I used, and I pitched that to designers.

Then, what ended up happening is, since he shared with his designer-based audience, I started getting a bunch of comments agreeing with me. I can’t find one right now, but great article because of the importance of design. And a lot of people were saying, design was great. I then didn’t stop there. I then emailed writers and people who I knew would disagree with this article, and here’s the article that I sent them, the exact email that I emailed: ‘Hey, name, Look some designers are slamming the importance of good writing and content, because of this research I found. Check it out. Would love to know what you think.’ Again, just the same thing, you know, getting them curiously interested, talking about research, which is specific, getting them to click the link, asking for an opinion. Did this, as you can see, 365 tweets, 76 comments, 26 likes, and I think 158 blog comments.

Andrew: You know, it’s so frustrating for me. I’ve been doing these interviews for years, I’ve been posting daily for years, and then you come around and within a few weeks, you end up getting hundreds of hits, not hundreds of hits, excuse me, hundreds of tweets on this post, and I’m sitting on the sideline going, what is Derek doing over at Social Triggers? What’s going on here? And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on here is just to figure out, what are you doing exactly? How are you getting all this stuff? In the back of your mind, it’s very easy watching from the sidelines to say, Derek might have bought this for social proof, or even might just be, I don’t know what he’s doing, but this can’t be right. When I see what you’re doing, now it makes perfect sense.

Derek: Yeah, it’s all basic stuff. People forget this and actually, just to show you one more example before we move onto how to find these people, this is another article that I did that was doing real well, it’s about how images and [??] conversion rates. But again, I always quote [??] love to learn about research. I break it down into actual steps as I mentioned earlier. But, this I emailed to my list, and this was an instant success. I didn’t really have to do much promotion. But what I did do, is I didn’t rest on my laurels. And even though I was getting a ton of traffic, a ton of tweets, here you go. I sent another email out to people I never heard of. Hey, I wrote this article that received more than 300 retweets and 200 Facebook likes. It’s all about how to improve or destroy conversion rates. I think your audience will love it, will love to know what you think.

Here’s the link. So even though I had a bunch of traffic going to it, once you get traffic going to a site and you have an article going viral, you know what? That’s the selling point. Hey, this has 300 Tweets, 200 Facebook likes, the guy must be thinking, this is really important. It’s all about this and this. That sounds interesting. Let me click it. You know? So, once you get the traffic, you don’t want to rest on your laurels. You want to keep on promoting it. Now the one thing is, a lot of people hear this and all of a sudden they’ll go overboard and promote everything. You can’t do this all the time. You can’t just keep sending people a million emails every 2 minutes. You want to do it, on Social Triggers, I write 1 or 2 articles a month, and I reach out to different people all the time to promote stuff. I never overstay my welcome. I try to build up relationships by sharing good articles.

Andrew: This is fantastic. 446 Tweets. There are people who’ve been in business, who’ve published a website for years, and don’t get that many hits on a single post, let alone that many retweets. Let me say this, too. I know at this point many people are picking up, many people who are watching us are saying, boy, this is something I can use. I’m going to implement it right away. But there are a handful of [??] who are going to email me afterwards, and I don’t mean to put you guys down, but come on, you’ve got to pay attention to the big point here.

But here’s what they’re going to say. He’s talking about his own website too much. I didn’t come here to hear him talk about his own website. Guys, this is by design. I don’t want a person to come in here and talk about what other sites are doing that he has no idea about. I want people who are doing incredible things to come on here and say, guys, I’m going to show you how I do this. I know not the whole world is going to know how I do it, so I’m fine talking personally and talking openly, this is how I did it. You don’t have to wonder from the sidelines anymore. You can go and do this too if you have the patience to do it. A lot of the stuff takes patience and time.

Derek: The one thing I also want to tell you about is I’m talking about Social Triggers very fairly here, but I’ve had websites in every niche you can imagine. I had websites about celebrity gossip, I had websites about women’s fashion, I had websites about makeup, I actually wrote makeup reviews for women’s makeup. I don’t even wear makeup but I was writing makeup. And I did these makeup reviews. I wrote software based websites, marketing based websites, and I have not found a niche where these strategies haven’t worked. This is what I’ve used all the time and I showed you before, and I had one site that was getting over a million pages in a day by using these exact same strategies that we’re talking about. So even though I’m talking about my own sites here, I’ve used this exact strategy on loads of niches and it’s always worked for me.

Andrew: And we agreed before the interview that there are certain sites that you work on and have worked on that you didn’t want to talk about. You didn’t want to show them that’s cool. We just want to talk about what you’re comfortably talk about openly.

Derek: Exactly. Now let’s talk about how to implement this strategy. If you’re going to come up with an idea for some content, you’re going to note who your target audience is. How do you find who to promote this to? There’s this great thing by [??] called Alltop. They have a blog directly, basically for every type of blog topic you can imagine. Just go click one, like let’s say I’m writing about marketing, I could go to the marketing topic, which I can’t seemingly find because I don’t know my alphabet. Oh, there we go. Go to the marketing topic, and I can see other marketing blogs that I could potentially email about articles that I’m writing. There’s over 100 blogs here. You can do this same thing for whatever topic you’re in, if you’re in fashion for example, I’m sure you could go here and see other fashion blogs. It’s like every topic you could imagine, and they’re here, it’s here. There’s other…

Andrew: I see. If I write a post that’s controversial or exciting for designers, I come in here, I do a search for design blogs, I’d see all the top design blogs and I do what you did. You just cold called them? You didn’t have all these guys who were friends of yours who were waiting for your post?

Derek: No, no. I just, like I said, it was: Hi, ‘name’. It was a template. I left out that. I shouldn’t have done that. Usually, it will be like: Hi, ‘name’. I know you write about this and then, maybe I’ll reference one of their latest articles or something like that.

Andrew: Yes.

Derek: For example, if I wanted you to link my article about my images and proofing conversion, I might reference that. I know you interviewed Sean Ellis, did a Sean Ellis conversion review.

Andrew: Yes.

Derek: So I know you like the conversion stuff. I think your Mixergy audience might like this if you share it on Twitter. That’s what I would have said to you if I got this.

Andrew: That would have worked, just like that. There are so many people who don’t understand, when you’re sitting there working to put stuff out there every day, if someone comes out and tells you what to do, you feel like, “Get off my back!”

Derek: Yes.

Andrew: If they say, “Hey, thought you might like this.” I understand that sometimes they want a tweet. I understand they sometimes want an article written it or talk about it, whatever it is. I understand they have some motive beyond just reaching me out of the blue to say, “Hey, check this out.”

Derek: Exactly.

Andrew: I still feel … I want to help, I just don’t want to feel threatened or bothered or told what to do.

Derek: Then, you connect it directly to what you’re doing. It makes it easier on you. At the end of the day, you can’t make garbage content and expect people to promote that.

Andrew: Yes.

Derek: You’ve got to really bust your ass creating that content and then once you do it, it will be a little bit easier to convince people to Tweet it.

Andrew: You and I were talking earlier about how most people, they just spend 100% of their time creating content. When they’re in the content business or when they’re creating content for their e-commerce sites, they think content is 100% typing at a keyboard, maybe a little bit of research. How do you approach it?

Derek: I tend to spend 50% of my time on content and 50% of my time on promoting my content. As I said, I only write one or two blog posts a month, maybe three on Social Triggers. My traffic is going crazy because I’m writing very sporadically but when I write, I make sure the content is top notch. That’s why I’m saying 50% on content creation, 50% on content promotion and I would even go as far as saying 20% on content creation and 80% on content promotion.

Especially, when you’re just starting a blog. It’s easy to create content, it’s hard to get readers. The only way to get readers is by promoting the content that you already have. If you create those resource pages, it’s really easy to promote that stuff to people. Again, if I had a resource page about conversion rate optimization and how to improve conversions and I came to you and said, “Look, I know the Mixergy people like conversions, maybe the Mixergy Twitter audience would like it too. Check out this resource, I think you’ll actually like it also.”

That’s a very cool pitch. It shows that I’ve been reading your site, it shows that I’m thinking about your audience. In return, I’m getting some traffic.

Andrew: All right. What’s another tactic for getting traffic?

Derek: Next tactic. And I have to say, I love this tactic. It’s all about webinars. Now, webinars are hot stuff, right now. Let me tell you why. Webinars are basically tailor made for turning traffic into leads, right? They are also very good at generating new traffic. I actually learned all of this from Louis House [sp], he’s a good friend of mine. He showed me all this stuff, so I’m going to kind of rephrase him a little bit and I’ve been doing it myself.

Webinars are live trainings, where people have the chance to have Q&A and all these different interactions. Webinars are also by default, if you’re using something like ‘Go ToWebinar’, which is what I prefer to use, has seat limits on their webinars. If you have the low package; 100 seats, medium package; 500 seats, maximum package; 1,000 seats. These seat limits are really beneficial because you can really play up scarcity without being an ass. It’s not like you’re creating these limits, it’s the software’s fault, no mine. When they see these limits, people like to share webinars on Twitter. People like to share all this stuff because they want to be the guy who gives people good stuff. They want to share a webinar with people they want to watch a webinar with and it generates new traffic that automatically turns into names and email.

Again, this guy isn’t asking for a name and email just because he wants my name and email, he’s asking for a name and email because that’s how webinar software works. It’s not his fault, it’s the webinar’s software’s fault. That is why that converts so high right now.

Andrew: Let’s take a moment here and just talk again. I said why I get excited about getting people to actually sign-up, give me their email address, that they end up forming a tighter bond with me. That they help me out, that they tell me more about what they need so I can create better content, better products for them. But what else is it about email? Tell me about emails and sales for the person who’s sitting back, saying, “I care more about sales than I care about just emails or hits.”

Derek: Look at it like this. If you meet a girl for the first date, do you buy her one drink and then ask to sleep with her? No. You’ve got to buy her a drink, go to dinner. You can’t just ask for the sale right off the bat. You want to court the people a little bit. You want to get the email, send them some good content, build up the good will, then ask for the sale.

That’s why I focus on emails. Like I said, I started doing this in March. I’ve already built up a decent sized list; not massive, but about 10,000 people.

For example, I ran this webinar to my list, and not only did the webinar get my existing subscribers to sign up, it also got about 200 extra people into my funnel, because people were sharing this.

I’m going to show you how to make people share your webinar page in a second. But I actually got more people into my sign-up funnel, because people shared the webinar page. And then, at the end of this webinar, I did something like, I don’t know the exact number, but it was like $8,000 in sales, after a 60 minute webinar where we pitched a $97 product.

All I did was email my list. “Hey guys, I’ve got this cool webinar.” Sent them to a cool webinar, gave them 60 minutes of awesome content, did a small sales pitch at the webinar for a $97 information product, did something like $8000 in sales. From a brand new site, that just started; that was just one webinar that I did.

Andrew: All right. I want to see how that works. I walked into this session knowing that you were building a list as a result of webinars; I didn’t realize you were getting sales from it. Take me through the process; help me understand what’s going on here.

Derek: As I said, you don’t want to just ask for a sale right off the bat. When you create a webinar, and then give some good content for an hour, you have a captive audience. You’ve got people on the webinar listening to your voice, bonding with you, enjoying your content, learning from you, taking some notes.

At the end of the webinar, when you ask for a pitch, some people will get annoyed. But most people at the end are like, “Man, this guy just spent an hour and 20 minutes giving me such awesome content. I can only imagine what the paid content is like.” It’s a goodwill thing. You build up goodwill for an hour, then you ask for a pitch.

I’m not selling anything on this particular class, with you, but if I were to have a sales pitch at the end of this webinar, I bet your Mixergy people would buy it.

Andrew: I would buy it. You know what? You can see when somebody brings it to a session, and you can see when somebody just sits back and hopes that the greatness will come to him somehow, magically, just by showing up. You’re bringing it here. This is awesome. I love this.

Derek: Let me talk about the setup for the webinar now. There’s a three step process for the webinar setup; I’m going to run through two different ways to do it.

First, obviously, you need a GoToWebinar account. I don’t recommend anything else. I prefer GoToWebinar, it’s a very reliable service, 2/47 customer support. I’m not paid to say that.

Andrew: I paid for the higher priced option because I said, “You know what? I’m going to spend money to get the good stuff.” I can’t stand them; they burn me, it costs so much money, and they weren’t nearly as good as GoToWebinar.

We’re recording this using to GoToWebinar. Again, I’m not being paid for this either. Every time you move your screen, I’m seeing it here on my side, and I’m recording your screen remotely, because GoToWebinar is just so responsive, so quick.

Derek: Exactly. GoToWebinar is great.

Second, you want to create an opt-in page. Now, a lot of people send people directly to the GoToWebinar signup page. I don’t recommend doing that, because the name and the email goes into GoToWebinar, and unless you’re using something that allows you to import email addresses, you won’t be able to get those emails into your autoresponder. I happen to use AWeber because they’re known for really good deliverability. It requires double opt-in.

What you can do is, you create a webinar sign-up page like this, name, email, get the name and email, send them a confirmation link to AWeber, they confirm their email, then you follow up with the GoToWebinar link. That way you get the email in your list first.

All you’ve got to do is say, right at the bottom, “Private notice: we hate spam as much as you do. We’ll use your contact information to communicate with you about this webinar, other webinars, and other cool stuff you should check out.” It’s all above board. You’re not making it too crazy, or whatever.

The other option is to have one page that does everything, like in this page. If you put your name here and your email here–this is an old webinar, so I would do that–but it would actually go to my AWeber account, and when you press “Confirm,” you’d auto sign up to the webinar. I created some software called Webinar Bridge that, basically, made it so it’s a one-step process, instead of a two-step process.

Andrew: I see. When we click, it automatically registers them for the webinar.

Derek: Exactly. You don’t need to do that. I created it because less steps convert higher, but you don’t need to do that. I’m not trying to sell my product.

Andrew: Can I take a look at that? Can you open it up in a new tab just so that we can see what the product is?

Derek: Yeah.

Andrew: Otherwise, what we would have to do is we would have to send people to a page on go to webinar where they register directly there.

Derek: Exactly. [?] If you use GoToWebinar, either AWeber or a [?] problem, I’ll explain. You risk losing out on emails. I talk about the [?] registration page is boring and the other problem is do you really want to mess around with a multiple step process? And multiple steps convert less.
I actually talked to go to webinar and they love this idea, so this is all above board. I’m not doing anything that was pissing anyone off, and it was just a great idea and it worked. I’ve been using this really well and I did this my first month in March. We’re going to talk about how to use joint venture webinars in the last part of this, so when we get there, listen to how joint venture webinars are great for building email lists and generate traffic.

But first let’s get back to the regular webinar. So you sign up for the webinar, you get the name and email, they confirm their email, they get automatically signed up for the webinar. Then you send a welcome email. For people who don’t know what a welcome email is, the welcome email is just the first email people get after going on your email list.

Let me show you the exact email I use: Hey first name, Two more things. Thanks for signing up for this awesome webinar. That shows you the power of linked in. We have a lot of great content prepared for you, so you’ll be glad that you’ve signed up. But first I have two things to tell you.
Thing one: There are limited seats on this Webinar. That’s how webinar software works unfortunately. If you have any friends that might enjoy this live train [?], be sure they don’t mess out. So let them know all about it by sending them to the webinar sign up page or share it on Twitter by clicking here.

Then I go into some more stuff about the webinar. Now, this is not a link right here, but clicking here I create a custom link that goes to their email that pre-populates their stuff. Like, “I just signed up for the webinar with @derrickhalpern and @louishowes” and then I’ll have a link to the webinar sign up page. You can generate a link. Now you’ve got a custom link that people can click on where if they click on that link, bam.

Andrew: Auto-tweets it.

Derek: Not auto-tweets it. They get taken right to a page –

Andrew: Auto-populates it.

Derek: Press tweet. And I build that right into the welcome email. That gets them viral action on the webinar.

Andrew: Can I see the email that does that? I’m sorry, you were saying that gets them viral action on the webinar and what else?

Derek: It gets them new people into your funnel. So here’s the email that does that.

Andrew: So say, If you have any friends that might enjoy this live training, be sure they don’t miss out. So let them know all about it by sending them the webinar sign up page or sharing it on Twitter by clicking. I love that.

Derek: Yeah, so, I say, “Don’t miss out,” because conversion people know and copywriters know that losses loom larger than gains. People are risk averse. They don’t like to lose out on stuff. They don’t like when their friends lose out on stuff. So I’m really hitting down “lose out on” because I know that converts better.

Andrew: What about, one of the things that stood out for me when I got your emails directly in my inbox is you say, “Thing one and thing two.” Tell me about the way that you write? It’s something about the casualness of it that makes me feel connected.

Derek: Yeah, so I try to write exactly how I talk, and you’ll never see me using words like “pedantic” or “didactic” or things I can’t even pronounce. I tend to write for a third or fourth grade reading level all the time, and the reason why I do that is because people connect with that a little bit more. Most people don’t use obnoxious words in speech so don’t use obnoxious words in writing.
And I really get a double dose of this, because as you know, I write about psychology research. Where do I get that research? I read academic journals all day. Do you know how boring academic journals are because of the words they use?

Andrew: I see, so you want to lighten it up and be more personal in the emails that you send out.

Derek: Exactly, and I always talk like I’m talking to my best friend. It’s really great. You’ve seen it. I don’t have the copy for this here, but when you sign up to my email, if you go to socialtriggers.com, sign up to my email newsletter, you’ll notice my first welcome email is like, “Hey! Thanks for signing up! Now you’re going to learn how to turn traffic into leads and sales. If you’re not getting traffic, you’re going to learn how to get that too. But before we start with all that, I’ve got two things to tell you. Thing one: Why don’t you reply to this email and tell me what you’re struggling with right now? And even if it’s just something small, don’t hesitate. Send me an email, I will respond.” That’s my call to action in my welcome email. I get 30% of the people sending me emails saying, “Oh man, this is the best welcome email I’ve ever seen!”

Andrew: It really is. I keep it up. I have it copy and pasted into Evernote and I just keep it there for inspiration, because the way that you write, I want to be grounded by that. The way that you wrote your intro email to your email newsletter, I was going to ask you if we can copy and paste that and put it in with the course. Let people sign up for it. You have to sign up for it, I’m telling you that. First welcome email with thing one and thing two is going to inspire you to write in a much more conversational way. Let him grab you and then you’re going to want to grab other people’s attention that way too. I’m not selling it, I’m not promoting it, I don’t get anything extra for it, they guys got thousands of people, he doesn’t need your extra one, you need that extra email though, I’m telling you it’s that good. I keep it in my Evernote.

Derek: Now let’s read the last part of our webinars, you know want to create the webinar sign-up page, create the opt-in page, you can either do the two-step process or the one-step process that we talked about, then with the two-step process and you send the welcome email where you give them the click-to -tweet link and ask them to share it by really showing off that they don’t want their friends to miss out. No one wants their friends to miss out. Then click it here, you get some viral action on your webinar, that’s a way to get your current leads to promote your site to newbies. Let’s go to the last section, and this is really the best section. I saved the best for last and let me tell you why this is so awesome. This section won’t generate a ton of traffic for you, but the traffic it does generate will be buyers, and I want to walk through how this works right now. I want to show you two different examples of how you can create content that creates buyers and customers. As an example I’m going to pull up Lifehacker. They’ve got an article called ‘The Cleverest Ways to Use Dropbox That You’re Not Using.’ Just show how to store your files, or you shared folders and make dropbox your actual ‘my documents’ folder. Just different ways to use the dropbox product. Now, if you’re doing a software product or software service product you want to think about the types of problems that your software solves. Your main thing might be sinking files through all your computers which is what dropbox is trying to do. But there might be some other benefits of your product that might not be front and center, but might be a great idea for a guest post on another blog like Lifehacker for example where you can show people clever ways to use your product maybe not as how you intended to use your product.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Derek: I don’t think dropbox wrote this article for Lifehacker. I think Dropbox is a very popular product so I don’t think they were doing this but you could replicate this strategy by showing people how to use what ever it is that your making. I don’t think drop box actually wrote this article for Life Hacker. I think that Drop Box probably has millions of people using their product and their just doing this by default. It would be clever for a start company to think of ways that your product might solve problems that you did not intend for it to solve. When you figure out how to solve those problems you could go to Alltop and figure out, for example, I got time tracking software that shows me how to manage my time. Ancillary, that could also be a great way to manage my employees’ time or something like that. You could then go to employee management blogs, go to Alltop, see if you could find some similar blogs then try to submit some guest posts showing some unique ways to use this tool to accomplish a specific goal that that blog might want to do, you know what I mean?

Andrew: I see. Yes. So maybe you’ve got time tracking software that’s meant just for time tracking at work but you realize this could also be used to track runs or other exercise, and then you go to fitness blogs and you talk to them about how it can be used.

Derek: Exactly. So that’s one example. Think of clever ways to use your product and write content showing people how to use it. A lot of times you might think people know how to use your product but the more tutorials you give showing people how to use your product the better. We do that at DYI Themes where we’re always showing unique ways to use products and people are always surprised by the unique ways you can use the product.

Andrew: I see. What are some ways beyond using it for a standard blog? What do you mean? What other ways can DYI Theme be used?

Derek: Actually the DYI Theme is the thesis theme that they’re selling.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Derek: So for example, we have hooks which people are mainly using for let’s say web design, to put things in different areas of the site. But you could also use hooks to hook in unique content on category pages, or you could use that hook for something other than design, but maybe to get content in unique areas, that way you can bolster a page app for search engine writings, for example.

Andrew: I see, OK.

Derek: It’s all about showing people how to use the product because if you don’t do that, chances area they won’t figure it out.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Derek: That’s the first way of generating content that makes customers. The second way is more of a class on, not necessarily copy writing, but it’s all about writing content that will get traffic and actually convert buyers. I want to show you an example that we sent to the DYI Themes email list. I think everyone is going to love this. You’re not seeing the headline here, but the headline of this.email was, “Is your website killing your search engine ranking?” If that got into your email box, that’s like, “Wait, I don’t know. Is it killing my search engine rankings?” Start off real quick, you know?

First name, the other day, someone emailed me and said, “I’m struggling with SEO right now. What can I do?” I was feeling generous, so I clicked over to his website and promptly fell out of my chair. He was doing a lot of things right. He had good content, great keyword targeting, and a decent amount of links, and an active blog. But he still wasn’t ranking as high in search engine as he deserved. So as you can see, I’m keeping the conversational approach here with my writing.
I then clicked “view source” on his homepage and that was disaster too. His sidebars loaded before the content in SEO sin [?]. There were several H1 tags on a single page. Google recommends one per page. The category page heading structure was not optimized. Category titles should be in H1. And I go on to talk about some code stuff.

I close this up with this guy had a beautiful house, but the foundation was falling apart, and what’s funny is that’s often the case for a lot of people who run websites. So what did this email do?
I started off by saying, look, so-and-so asked me advice about SEO. First things first, if someone’s asking you for advice, you must know what you’re talking about. Kill the credibility instantly. Then I go into how this person was doing a lot of things right but they weren’t getting the right rankings they deserve. Now everyone’s thinking, “Oh man, I do a lot of things right. I don’t get the rankings.” So now I’m connecting with the customer.

I then go into a little bit further then to start teaching about what was wrong. Like if you look at the sidebars load before the content in SEO sin. People don’t know what that means, but that’s actually an SEO sin. Now people are starting to think, “Huh, does my sidebar load first?”
There are several H1 tags, which is a little bit more specific, and Google only recommends one per page. So now they’re going to go load up their site and see if there’s one per page. The category page’s heading structure was wrong.

Andrew: I got to tell you, when you said the H1 tag issue, I just was thinking, “Wait a minute. We just created a page design that has two H1 tags. What was I thinking?” We have to now understand to either use one or the other in this design. We can’t do it in both places.

Derek: Exactly. So we’ll go through and break down some stuff and if you notice, I say what the problem is and a lot of people will view their source, but they don’t know how to fix it. They don’t know how to fix it. So then I get into the pitch. I can’t blame them, though, for not knowing how to fix it, because who has the time to run a website and learn all the nuances of a HTML, CSS, and PHP? And that’s everybody, they’re like, “I just want to run a website, I don’t want to mess with code.”

Well, I do and Chris Pearson does because that’s our business, but not everyone does, and that’s why theme frameworks are perfect for serious website owners. Now everyone starts thinking, “Am I a serious website owner?” So now I’m creating content, I’m educating people about SEO errors, and then tying that in directly to a pitch, where I start pitching hard.

You can spend time working on what you love, creating content, interacting with fans, and forming valuable relationships and the framework can do all the heavy lifting; rock solid codes, semantic markup, and on page SEO. Now people are sitting there thinking, “Oh man, I need this.”

Then I go into the sales pitch where I tell you to buy [?], it’s a 30 day money back guarantee and whatever. But to break this down for the Mixergy audience, you might have a software product or a software as a service product or a hosting produce or you’re selling a service. Whatever it is you’re selling. You can actually teach people about what you’re selling and the types of things you bring to the table and not show them exactly how to fix the problems that you’re raising.
So don’t show them seven tips for increasing conversion rates, show them seven conversion killers that are found on most websites, and then they’re going to see if they have it. Then if they don’t know how to fix it, they want to hire you for conversion rate optimization, because they don’t know how to fix the problems that you just brought to their attention.

Andrew: I see, I see. I love that. Show them a problem and let them know that you can solve it for them. I’ve got to tell you, too, because if you were to tell me you don’t need more than one H1 tag, the sidebar shouldn’t load before the content and all that, and then you were to say, “I’m going to show you how to fix it,” I go, “I don’t want to know how to fix it. Show me where I can hire someone to fix it. I don’t want to do it myself.” So it’s even more useful to just say, “These are the problems. We can fix it for you.”

Derek: Exactly, and it works great. This email worked really well. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it did a lot of sales. So I was happy with it.

Andrew: We’re going to include all of this. In fact, people who are watching this are going to get all this text. So if it’s too small on your screen to see, don’t worry about, you’re going to have it, and you can download it on your computer and you can read it yourself.

Derek: Cool. Now let me break this down into a formula of how this works. The formula for this type of content is, you want to start off with a story. I started off with this story. Someone asked me a question, that’s my story. I then work into mentioning a problem, is step two. Step three is the products that provide a solution to the problem that I just mentioned. Start with the story, build-up a connection, try to get people to say, “Hey, maybe he’s talking about me.” Show them the problems, then say the product that is the solution.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: That’s the type of content that not only gets traffic but also converts people into sales.

Andrew: I see. Can you repeat that one more time? I should have had it here in my notes but maybe if you say it, David, we can include it in the notes and guys if you don’t get it let me know and we’ll make sure to get it to you. What’s the format for this?

Derek: You want to start off with a story.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Derek: So you can build connection with your readers or with potential customers. Mention problems, don’t solve the problems just mention the problems. Then the third part is to show them the product or the service that solves the problems you just mentioned. There are other things, like putting a risk reversal in there or putting a 30-day money back guarantee or just other things to make people convert [snaps fingers] like that. The overall format is to start off with a story, mention a problem, show the product or service that solves that problem

Andrew: I’m looking here at the email that just showed up on your screen a moment ago, where I can see it. You’re doing it exactly like that for them. You’re saying, “Hey, the other day somebody emailed me and said, “I’m struggling with SEO right now. What can I do?’ I was feeling generous and you tell them the story, then you breakdown the problems, sidebar loaded before the content and SEO [??] in there. There are several H1 tags on a single page and then, of course, you talk about how a thesis theme solves these problems.

Out of curiosity, we’ll get to email next but do you drip campaign this so it’s set to got to people at a certain time and everyone gets to see it a certain place in your campaign or do you just send this our as a newsletter.

Derek: This was sent out as a newsletter. We are working on drip campaigns, where we are going to have people opt-in, they’ll get some content. Then, on maybe the eighth or ninth day, they’ll get a sales pitch.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: You want to build your credibility first. There’s all different ways to make offers through emails. I could probably teach a class for four days about that but we’ll have to save that for another day. But yes, we will be using this as an auto-responder type email eventually.

Andrew: All right. Finally, we were talking about email lists. Tell me about that.

Derek: Yes. This is the last section. We talked about how to position your site so people will know what you’re all about and why they want to visit you. We talked about how to actually get some traffic to your site. Now, we’re going to talk about what you want to do with the traffic. That traffic needs to turn into emails.

As we have been saying throughout this whole thing here, emails are the most communication medium. It’s the only communication medium that’s been around since the beginning of the internet almost. If I would have bet on anything, Facebook is great, Google+ is great, Twitter’s great but everyone looks at their email inbox. They’re saying that younger kids don’t check emails and maybe that’s true but once they start working all the time they’re going to start checking their emails because that’s how business is done in this world.

Andrew: Frankly, Facebook uses email all the time. My inbox is flooded with Facebook messages. Every time a friend tags me, every time a friend sends me a message or writes about me on their wall or, I don’t know what, I end up with email.

Derek: Exactly. Email really is the most important mechanism right now. The one thing I want to leave you with for the importance of email is this: When you rely on people to visit your site and to remember to keep visiting your site, they’re communicating with you on their terms. When they visit your site, give you their email, you could then communicate with them on your terms. Mind you, you can’t take advantage of that communication power but you have the power to communicate with them when you want to communicate with them.

If you piss them off, they’ll unsubscribe but the general things is you are getting the power to communicate with your fans whenever you want to communicate with them.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: That’s the power of email. Let’s talk about how to actually get this email list that I’ve been talking up about this whole thing. You’ve been talking about it too. The first steps, just add email sign-up forms on your site. Most people do not have enough email sign-up forms and they always think, “Oh, it’s going to look yucky” or something along those lines. That might be the case but if you integrate it in like how I’m going to show you right now, it’s not going to feel overwhelming. It’s going to look pretty OK, and people aren’t going to be pissed off by it. I’ve never gotten one complaint about my email sign-up pages.

There are three different places to add email forms. First thing is the feature box, right at the top of the page. The reason why you want to do that, is even though you’re homepage is great, most people are not going to visit your homepage first. Your most popular pages on your site will be your content pages. Your content pages will be your most popular page on your site. When they read your content page, they usually click over to your Home page next to see what you’re all about. So, you can be more aggressive on your Home page with such a big opt-in box, because you’re not really converting cold traffic, they’re someone who has already clicked over to another page of your site and they’re actually a little bit warmer than cold traffic. They already read an article of yours, they go to your Home page, ask for the opt-in, you want to get them while they’re hot.

Andrew: On your home, if I were to click the ‘He Beat Me and I let Him Do It Again,’ would I still see that top box, the feature box or is that just for the Home page?

Derek: No. This is only on the Home page.

Andrew: OK. They come to the Home page, you get their email address or you ask for it.

Derek: The reason I don’t have it on the single post page is because that would be obnoxious. If people came here trying to read an article they don’t want a big feature box distracting their view, know what I mean?

Andrew: I see.

Derek: They came here for the article. I wait till they go Home to get it. That’s the first place to put it is right there on the Home page. Second place to put it is at the top of your sidebar. I see so many people putting email signup forms at the bottom of their sidebar. They put their search bar at the top and all this other nonsense. Put the email signup form in the top, right portion of your sidebar, no matter what.

Andrew: I see.

Derek: If you’re not putting it there, you’re losing emails. So, that’s the other place to put an email signup form. The last place I think you should put an email signup form is at the bottom of your articles. Let me explain this, people say, ‘Well, Derrick, that particular signup form does not convert that high,’ and you’re right. The reason it doesn’t convert that high is because most people don’t read your article to the end. But if they do read your article to the end, and they see, if they did read your article in its entirety obviously, they like what you’re offering. People don’t just read bad content.

They read your article. They finish it. They love what you’re all about. They’re looking for what they can do next. Most people show related posts. I don’t show related posts because I don’t want them to read another article. I want them to give me their email address. I’m asking for that email address when they’re hot for me. They already read an article. They like my content. Now I’m going to ask them, when they’re at their peak of their desire, peak of their likelihood to probably ask me, or give an email to me.

Andrew: I see. I see. I’ve seen that used so powerfully and we still don’t have it up on our site. I’ve got to get it up on the site.

Derek: Exactly. So, those are the three places. The feature box, top of the sidebar, and at the bottom of the post. Those are three places, there are some other places that you can do it on, but these are the three key places that all blogs should have it probably, no matter what.

Andrew: We talked about content rich resource pages you need to have that at the bottom also, and showed us how you did it.

Derek: Exactly. Now, I mentioned the content rich resource pages earlier, but I want to develop that a little bit more because I showed you one type of content rich resource page. There’s actually a few different types of content rich resource pages. I want to go through them right now. The first type we showed you is just introductory type content, and then some links to articles, and an opt-in form. Another example of content rich resource page is a page that has an introductory content, some links to articles, and then a sales pitch for a product, and then an opt-in form.

Here’s a basic good two tutorials here, then a pitch for their promise product, which is landing page software, and then here. So, this is now content rich resource page that might rank well in search engines, but it’s also a sales pitch also.

Andrew: I see. So they have the links, then they have an offer for a product that solves the problems that those links are referring to, and then the email address request at the bottom of it.

Derek: Exactly. So, that’s another type of content rich resource page. The last type is a squeeze pic page. We do this all the time. You never want to overdo any of this, but what you want to do is have different content rich resource pages sprinkled throughout your site. You want to have some sales content, some regular content, and some squeeze pages. Here’s an example of a squeeze page where some content, some bullet, and just an email to download the eBook.

Andrew: I see, yes.

Derek: OK. So, those are the three types of content rich resource pages that I recommend. You want to have a few of each of them.

Andrew: Let’s take a look at the links on this page, by the way it looks like the DIY themes com site also has a template page that has very little information, no distraction. You either go back to, you either read the article, give your email address, share it, you go Home, hit pricing, showcase of basically who are using the theme, but all those navigation elements are gone from this page. I’ve created pages like this on our site, it’s just so helpful. It gives people focus.

Derek: It’s true and I this is what the Hello Bar is for. I’ve sent people directly to this page that way if anyone visits the site they get hit the Hello Bar, download your free 33 page book about online conversions, click here, they click here and you can see 264 tweets, 79 share and people just give their email here all the time.

Andrew: So that Hello Bar is right at the very top of this page, it’s that line that people can click on. And you just go to Hellobar.com to get that.

Derek: Exactly, I mean that’s free. The guys there are great Chuck Logan and, I’m not sure if I have his name right. They are really working hard to do that. And we show that on every page here.

Download your free 33 page eBook, you go to the single post page, here you are download your free 33 page eBook etc.

So that’s three types of content rich resource pages.

Andrew: You’re saying that the best way to get emails is to join venture earlier. What is to join venture, what do you mean by that?

Derek: All right, so here is real interesting stuff. When you have a blog that you’ve just started, you need some traffic, right? You got to get the ball rolling.

And we talk about content format, and how you want to position your content format.

One of the content formats is webinars.

Right now webinars are hot.

Most people aren’t doing them because the cost of going to a webinar account is pretty expensive, pretty, pretty expensive.

Andrew: It’s a hundred buck. I think people are just scared of spending any money online, and that’s wrong.

Derek: Yeah, so it’s a hundred bucks, it can be up to five hundred bucks.

Andrew: It’s worth it.

Derek: Totally worth it.

But there are some people who aren’t doing this.

So what you want to do is, you want to go to all top five latest blogs in your niche, see who’s not running webinars, reach out to them, cold email. ‘Hey, what’s up, look I got a webinar account, I want to go through and teach XYZ on this webinar, and at the end of this webinar we can pitch your product, which doesn’t compete with my, I’ll pitch the product you can keep the sales. I keep the email addresses’ or something like that.

And that’s not how you structure every joint venture webinar deal, that’s just an example. But I did the join venture webinar earlier this year with my friend Clay Collins. We had a webinar sign up page. During this webinar you’re going to learn XYZ. He promoted it, I promoted it, we sole the product at the end. Got some sales. I got some emails. I got some sales too.

So you want to work out join ventures and that’s the way to get your name or audience or your face or your blog in front of new people that you might not necessarily know.

Andrew: I love this. I see it.

So it makes me actually, I’m kicking myself for not having promoted this, this way. This session.

When you and I are using go to webinar, in order to see each other. Actually to see each other we use Skype. But to talk and see each other, to see your screen.

I could’ve just send this out to people in the email space. I could’ve send this out to online marketers, I could’ve send this out to other people who are interested in watching you got your much bigger audience here for the live session, and then still made this available, exclusively to Mixergy premium audience.

Derek: If we did a live session like this. We could implement that webinar strategy that we talked about, use webinar bridge, click to twit, then get some viral op into give live training.

People are going to love it. Because it’s live training they’re going to have a chance to ask questions and they will get answer to their questions.

Then we would’ve like, sell Mixergy at the end of this, people will probably buy it.

Andrew: I love this.

Derek: It’s great stuff and then they want to reciprocate, when you’re selling something.

Andrew: And you’re right. It’s got that urgency, because there is date and time on it. Right now the page you’re showing is already expired.

So it’s got that urgency. It’s got a clear call to action, that requires an email address naturally. And it also has limited space naturally. Right? Because there isn’t infinite number of space available for webinars. Even if you pay for the top of the line model, I think it can only has a thousand people that it can accommodate.

Derek: Exactly, exactly.

So, that’s really the best way.

I love webinars, webinars are hot right now. A lot people running automatic webinars, which is kind of debasing webinars a little bit. But here’s bottom line, when people are doing stuff like that. That’s your chance to do it live. That’s your chance to stand out. That’s your chance to do something different.

And if you’re going to do it live, people are more likely to share it in their email and twitter and with their friends. And you’re going to get all these extra people into the funnel, that you night not have otherwise.

Andrew: This is an incredible session.

Let’s take a look again at your website.

Derek: Social Triggers?

Andrew: Yeah. Let’s see Socialtriggers.com. You got to sign up for the email and just see, if nothing else, you know, his using Aweber, so if you sign up and leave, Aweber is going to make sure you don’t any other email.

Sign up for that first email. You’re going to print it out, or you’re going to put it in your effort note, or put it in whatever document you have and just be inspired by the way that he writes.

Derek, this been, I don’t want to say the best session, because I don’t want to insult anyone. But you know it’s the best.

Maybe I shouldn’t say the best. This has been fantastic; you could hear it in my voice. I’m getting this information I can actually use, I’m picturing the audience that’s watching this, is how much they’re going to benefit from this.

I want to hear about it.

Back to Mixergy website, go to socialtriggers.com, and let Derek know what you thought.

Derek, thanks for doing this session with us.

Derek: OK. Thanks for having me, Andrew. It’s a lot of fun.