Text excerpt: What you can learn from direct marketers
#1 They ensure success before they even start
This is what great online business marketers do when they have an idea, when they’re just thinking about it. They don’t rush out and go spend three, six, twelve months building a product.
What they do is sit down and say, “You know what? I want to know more about this market, and I want to find out about it in about an hour”. They turn on a Google Adwords campaign. They build a series of a few landing pages that are directly targeted to that market, or that product.
Then they find three or four, maybe even it’s just one, related affiliate product that they can sell. So that they can get a window into what that business is.
So, now if you think about this, that’s a simple process; most of know how to do that. We know how to get a web site up. We know how to create a landing page, even if it’s not a great converting one. And we know how to link to an affiliate program. Well, so then what’s the value? Why is it so significant, if so many of us can do it?
Well, the value is in understanding and recognizing the importance of the numbers that you get out of this. You can learn that you have a great market, and start to test and optimize against that, with that traffic that’s coming, and you can learn exactly what words, and language, and hooks, and frames, and positioning of your product people will respond to, or don’t.
You do that before you even have to figure out exactly what your product is, or how to market it.
#2 They read their customers’ minds
Understanding how human beings like to be communicated with, this is the ultimate arena.
Evan Pagan, one of my mentors, talks about this as the ultimate area of leverage in a business there’s nothing else you can do that can almost instantly take your business and from the existing amount of visitors, traffic, attention that you have create 2 times, 3 times the amount of results that you get from that.
Focus and make sure even if you don’t see yourself as this person take it as your own mission to become the person in your business that understands your customer best and that means spending time in their world and being very observant to what their real frustrations are.
#3 They make TEST a good first impression
So what I’ll say first is kind of an over-arcing approach or a philosophy about landing pages and testing in general. Which is creating a great landing page is a function of your testing approach more than it is a function of your ability to write great copy. I’ll say that again, because it’s really important. Creating a great landing page is more a function of your testing approach than it is about your ability to write great copy. And that’s the most true initially when you’re getting started. As you become a better copywriter, that’s less true.
So what I mean by that, is if you’re getting started and you think, “Well, I’m just going small and I don’t need to test”, that’s absolutely failure to begin with. What you need to recognize is no one’s smart enough — you’re not smart enough — to know what you need to know while you’re getting started. So take the time to set yourself up with two things. One, the technology to test. And more importantly, and I can’t over-emphasize this enough how many people make this mistake, even in really big successful businesses, make sure to measure and report on those every single day. And then pay attention to them and then draw interpretations and use them iteratively in your process of development.
It sounds so silly but if you have a simple piece — an Excel spreadsheet. And you have a daily column that just says “date” and then it says “page” and “results” and “number of visitors” and then “number of subscribers” or whatever your conversion mechanism is. Start looking at that every day and start looking at each ad in that exact same way. And you will start to understand how to write the best copy. Because, guess what? No one else knows, especially if you’re in a very specific niche, no one else knows what the best copy is. So even if you tried a great copy writer, even if you pay someone a thousand or ten thousand dollars to write all your copy, this is the process they would go through in order to learn your market. So, that’s getting started. Set yourself up to test and measure. That’s the fallacy that most people have about great marketing.
#4 They know people are anxious online
You need to understand that just being online and leaving Google — or leaving a trusted site or leaving Amazon, wherever you are — is a risky behavior. And in fact, clicking on a link is a very risky behavior because I don’t know where I’m going. And I’ll argue that there’s a mild level of unconscious anxiety that every Internet user is suffering, each time they click on a link because they don’t know what to anticipate. And human beings really, really, really like certainty and knowing where they’re going. So with that said, what you want to do and address is remove that risk as much as possible. And you can remove that risk by building trust.
Now, what are the best ways to build trust? Well, there’s a few elements to include in your page that help you build trust. Some of the most important ones are actual real knowledge and value. This is something that gets away from some people when they just approach a business as an Internet marketing or business opportunity. They’re just thinking, “How do I create a landing page to convert people?” If you’re in that game and you’re sitting with your cursor on your landing page and you haven’t done your homework. And you haven’t sat around and thought about who people really are and what they’re doing out in the world, and what’s happening for them tomorrow. And what they want to have happen in a week after they interact with you, you’re not going to write great copy. Why? Because you’re not going to be able to build trust and deliver the value you need to deliver to them in order to have them comfortable to stay and convert with you.
So that’s your first goal, is to remove risk and to build trust.
Update: Get detailed answers from Chance
We didn’t get to all the viewer questions in the live program, so Chance very generously offered to write up a detailed answer to 2 or 3 of your questions.
He started with this response to an issue that kept coming up in the live show comments: Landing Pages That Convert.
Ask your questions in the comments here and we’ll pick the ones that he can answer. We’ll give priority to people who watched live.
Full program includes
- Why most entrepreneurs make the same multi-million dollar mistake before they ever build their product or service
- The one thing that can literally double or triple your sales and revenue from the same amount of effort
- How to understand the “risk†that people feel when confronted with a sign up form or buy now button — and the way to remove this risk
- The actual experience and dialog inside people’s head when they come to your company/website/information — and how to literally force them to pay attention
- How to setup a simple test in 1 hour that tells you more about your business viability and your audience than any consultant, marketer or your perfect finished product ever could
- How to avoid building a business with your time and hard earned money that no one subscribes to or buys from