Andrew: This course is going to teach you how to increase you online sales. The course is led by Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur who has launched and owned several websites, including, there it is, HitTail, which guarantees that it's customers will increase their organic search traffic and you can read about his entrepreneurial experiences, I have been, on softwarebyrob.com. I'll help facilitate, my name in Andrew Warner, I'm the founder of Mixergy.com where proven founders, like Rob, where they teach. Rob, you haven't always had this figured out, you've had issues in the past with getting sales, can you talk about one of them? About maybe Chitchat.net? What was that? Rob: Sure, Chitchat.net was a really early product of mine, I actually acquired it from someone for 150 dollars and I remember thinking, wow you pay 150 dollars for an entire software product, like all rights to it, and I was thinking of the loads of money that I was going to make. And then I bought it, I was a software developer and I could handle the software part, but no one ever told me that marketing is really hard, and that you can't just wing it. Andrew: And so as a result, what happened with chitchat? Here's the blog post that I saw, on softwarebyrob. Rob: Yup, yeah, so I spend about somewhere between a year and 18 months just kind of banging my head against the wall, just trying to learn how to market this discussion software. And I learned a ton during that time, but right about the time I decided to sell it was when I had my first, my wife had our first child, and that was really impetus, but in essence it never really made that much money. It made a few hundred bucks a months, and early on my goal was to, you know, turn it into an 8 thousand dollar a month revenue stream and quit my job, and so it was definitely not a success by my definition. Andrew: I see. What was a success? Can you talk about one of them? Rob: Sure, sure. Yeah the first success I've had, I've had a few small ones that I built myself and made a few hundred dollars a month from. And the goal this whole time, the reason I talk about money is because the goal my entire entrepreneurial journey was to quit salary employment and quit consulting. And so I had a certain number, it was between 7 and 8 thousand dollars, and that was the number I needed to make every month, in order to be able to support my family and pay the mortgage. And so the first big success I had was actually a product I had called .netinvoice, and in essence it was invoicing software, and I really was able to turn that into making a few thousand bucks a month, and that was kind of the first thing where it really clicked for me and where I was able to realize that the things that I was doing were starting to work, and that if I reproduced those in other produces that I could hit my goal of leaving the consulting. Andrew: And what was the biggest hit of all of them? Rob: The biggest hit has been, oh that's a good question, it's funny I don't think of things in terms of that. But, you know, HitTail has actually, my most recent acquisition has actually done really well for me already. And it's the one I'm the most excited about because it is the most recent, so I'd say in terms of monetary potential that's definitely the top of the list. Andrew: Can you talk about sales numbers for that or is it too early? Rob: It's, I mean I can talk about them, it's early. When I acquired it, it was doing around 1100, 1200 a month and it should do over three grand, this month. And this is sass, so it's recurring revenue, so it's not, again these are not multimillion dollar businesses but I have, I own 9 or 10 of them. And so, you know, you kind of stack them all together and they make a good income... Andrew: And this is in a matter of months right? You haven't owned this for years, how long has it been? Rob: That's right, well I acquired it basically like the 1st of September so what is that? Like 5 or 6 months ago. Andrew: Wow. Rob: Yeah. Andrew: And the reason I wanted to have you come on here and teach is because I've known you, I've talked to people who've learned from you and have seen results, Ruben Gomez of Bidsketch who's site we're going to show up later, in an interview said you helped him get customers before he even launched, and that's specifically why I wanted you here. And of course, I spoke at your conference where there were dozens of people who came to me and said that they had similar experiences from you. And you're not a slick salesman, you're not the kind of person who I feel like, it comes naturally to you, but you're someone who's got a good analytical mind, and if you could break it down for yourself and repeat it over and over with these different businesses, many of which we'll see throughout this course, then we can pick up on what you've learned and we can implement it. And again, Ruben just used one of your ideas, I'm going to write a note here, I don't know if we have Ruben specifically here, but you told him specifically what to do to help his pre-launch, and let's see if we can get that into this conversation also. Rob: Sure. Andrew: But first, going back to this big board of ideas, these are the ideas that we're going to cover and I put them up on the board because people say they want to see where we're 1going with the session and this is we're starting. We're starting with 'Go for Existing Customers First'. What do you mean by that and how do we do that? Rob: Sure. So, this is one I've learned more recently, especially as you... If you were to acquire a business or if you have a business that runs for a few years and you have basically canceled customers. Most recently, with Hit Tail, I had this slew of cancellations that happened before I bought it from the previous owner, and they loved the service. They said the service was great, but they didn't have... Either there was down time with the service, which is one of the reasons I acquired it, and they also didn't have time to implement the suggestions that the engine is making for them because, basically, it suggests keywords that you should target in SEO. Andrew: I see... And here are the keywords, in fact, I'm going to read what it says right here on the website. It says: if you write about towels for children in this one example, you're going to rank on Page 1 of this of Google.com, and it gives you other suggestions for keywords you can write about. And so people said, 'Great! I have them all written down on a piece of paper. Now, I don't have enough time to write this. That's why I have to cancel my service and stop paying you recurring revenue on HitTail.' And what did you do as a result of that? Rob: Well, so I'm in the process of implementing integration with Text Broker, which is an API that allows... Basically, you send it some keywords and they send you back a finished blog post in a couple days. Andrew: Oh, really? Rob: Yeah. It's pretty cool. There's a couple services like it, but they have 100,000 writers that are hanging around basically waiting for assignments. And so, we're in the final stages of implementing it. But this is exactly... I could see this being a larger impact on my monthly revenue than a lot of other tactics that I'm looking at. Andrew: And this is the kind of thing that you're advising both our audience and you've advised other entrepreneurs who come to you and it goes contrary to, it makes sense, but it goes contrary to our expectations for our business. When we're running a business, we're thinking, especially in the early days and you're months into Hit Tail, we think, 'How do we get more customers? How do we get more prospects? How do we get more of those prospects to buy from us?' And you're saying, 'Wait a second. What might be easier, what is easier, is to go after those people who already are your customers.' And sell them more or find ways to keep them longer. Rob: That's right. That's right. I've also done it with a product called DotnetInvoice where it's invoicing software, and we built a QuickBooks integration, and it's just an add-on module. And so, folks pay an extra $99 if they want that, and it's actually been a really big seller and it's increased the lifetime value of our customers because we're able to sell them more. I really do think... You know who does this really well is Internet marketers. Like they have it down where they sell extra, right? They bundle. They up-sell. They cross-sell. These are all tactics that we, in the startup world, I think should learn more from because I don't think enough start-ups, they focus too much on the product end and don't think, 'What else can I offer my...' Andrew: Especially, it seems like software entrepreneurs. By the way, I do have a browser up here. Our connection is really strong, so I can pull up web pages whose screen shots I didn't capture ahead of time, and this is DotNetInvoice? Yep. D-O-T-N-E-T. Yep. There it is. Invoice dot com. Andrew: I must have gone there earlier today. Do you still own DotNetInvoice? I remember you speaking about it. Rob: I do. Andrew: You do. Rob: Yep. Andrew: So this is one of the properties that you own. Rob: That's right. Andrew: Okay. So, let's take a look. The next big idea then is 'Go for Recurring Revenue'. Why recurring revenue? Rob: Yeah. This is one of the... It took me so long to learn this. DotNetInvoice, as an example, is a piece of software that you pay a one time fee for. There's a $300 version and a $99 version. And the problem is that the first day of every month, I start out with zero revenue. Zero revenue. And I have to scramble and hustle to make any money and it's really, really hard to grow a business under those kinds of conditions. Whereas, with something like HitTail or any type of software as a service application, where you have a subscription base, you're starting at the level that you were at the previous month. And so you're always building. We talk about run rate a lot, where you multiply by twelve. That almost doesn't apply with DotNetInvoice because I've had months where sales jump up to $5,000 and I've had months where sales will plummet to $300. And that will never happen with a SaaS app. So, recurring revenue is, perhaps, the number one criteria for myself personally when I'm going to build or buy a new application now. Andrew: I've got to say, I like it, too and I know, sometimes, my revenue takes a hit because people would prefer to pay once than to pay over time, but it allows me to have a consistent revenue stream, which means that I can hire people and pay them consistently. It means that I have the security of almost essentially the security of having a salary with the up side and the creative opportunities of having your own business. Rob: Yep. Yep. That's right. Andrew: All right. And you did this, I've got MicroEntrepreneur here. Can you talk about that? Rob: Yeah, so, Micropreneur.com is actually... Andrew: Excuse me. I can't believe I said that. Micropreneur, of course. Rob: No problem. This is similar to what you do, right? It's teaching. It's providing what we consider valuable content to folks who are trying to launch a software product. And I get requests a lot to basically break it up and say, 'Well, I only need month one.' or 'I only need content about SEO. Can you just give me your AdWords stuff?' And realistically, we've kept it to a recurring revenue model and that has... I mean, it's served us well. It's allowed us to really build the business up, and it's, like you said, it's a much more steady income stream. And it also allows us to focus on things like how do we make people so excited about it that they stick around. And it's not about tricking. It's not about doing anything like that. It's about... If you're just selling someone one month of content, then do you care how good that is? But if you have an ongoing membership, you have to provide really good stuff or people will leave. So I actually think it benefits both the customer and the person providing the content. Andrew: What are you running it on? Rob: This is on WordPress. Andrew: And the membership component? Rob: Wishlist Member. Andrew: Wishlist Member. That's what we use here at Mixergy. For your other businesses, it seems like you built your own recurring revenue software. The charges are coming in not from... Membership isn't coming in from Wishlist. It's something you built yourself. But here, it's Wishlist, just a simple plug-in, costs under $100 to install it on WordPress. You're good to go. Rob: Yeah. And it integrates with PayPal, is how we actually take payments. Andrew: Oh, really? You only do PayPal payments on it? Rob: Yeah. I know. It's surprising. It's pretty infrequent... We do get some complaints now and again and we work with people, but, in general, [??] PayPal handles it. Andrew: Oh, real easy. Why did you decide to go with just PayPal? Rob: Because when I launched it, I was lean. I wanted to get it out the door as quickly as possible. I didn't want to write a bunch of code and I wanted to see if the idea was going to fly, and then there hasn't been a compelling reason since then to go back and spend the 40 hours to write a billing engine. Andrew: What was the original motivation behind that site? Rob: I was getting so many emails through my blog and I would reply to people, but I felt like I couldn't do it justice. So, you get a question about how do I explore an idea, how do I explore a market? And it's like, 'Well, here's a paragraph,' but realistically, I want to record full screen casts and write1,500 words on this and bla-bla-bla, and I started realizing, 'Well, if people are actually willing to pay for this, I can totally justify the time. I would love to do this, but I can't possibly put in this time for free.' And that's what eventually happened. I spent 20-30 hours for almost a year building this. As soon as I got two months in, I sold memberships and people were just two months behind my contact creation the whole time. Andrew: I see. Rob: If that makes sense. So I didn't just build it for a year. Andrew: Right. The reason I wanted to show that side is because it is so easy to impalement recurring revenue. You just plug in with PayPal and Wishlist and you're good to go. What do you do for HitTail? Rob: HitTail was using PayPal subscriptions when I acquired it. We actually did spend the time to create a billing engine and hired a developer to do it, and it took about 30-40 hours and it integrates with Stripe, which is a payment processor. There's a specific reason we did that, though. If you looked at the plans, they're metered, and if you go over 10,000 unique visits per month, you get a warning and then the next month, you get bumped up to the next plan. So that's how... We needed the flexibility that PayPal didn't offer. Andrew: Right. Rob: So that's the only reason. Otherwise, I would have left it on manual PayPal and probably used E-junkie or Amazon or something. Andrew: All right. Let's go on to the next big idea. 'Stop Sucky Copy.' You had this issue at HitTail when you acquired it. Let me bring up that. I went into Archive.org in preparation for our conversation here to see what HitTail looked like before you bought it, and this is it from about, I think, a year ago. What sucks about this? What do we need to learn? Rob: Yeah. It actually looked like this until about 2½ months ago, but... So, what sucks about this is you arrive at this page and you see the big logo and you see a tagline that says 'Real Traffic. Real Time. Real Results.' But what the hell does that mean? It's up at the top, the blue. Yeah. What does that mean? That doesn't actually mean anything. That's a clever brand tagline if you're Proctor & Gamble or someone. But if you're actually coming to a website. You've never heard of it. The first thing you want to see on that website is what is this site going to do for me. You really want to polarize your audience. You want to grab the people who actually have a need for your service and you want to make it super, super clear. And that's done a little... What you're focusing on now, where it says 'Keyword Tool to Drive More Long Tail Traffic to Your Site Actually'. That is actually a decent headline. Although it's not because it describes the tool but it doesn't describe a promise that is being made to the customer. (?) three rules. Andrew: Yes. It does describe . . . Let me see. 'Keyword Tool To Drive More Longtail Traffic to Your Site Naturally.' If I didn't know the product, would I know what it was? I guess I would have a sense of it. Yes. That would explain, actually, what it was, to me. 'Keyword Tool' sounds a lot like Google Keyword Tool. Drive more traffic to your site. Yes. That makes sense. But, what you're doing now is, you're guaranteeing. Rob: Right. I'm making a promise, basically. I'm doing three things in this headline. It's a formula. You can write good headlines without it but this is how I find that I'd write the best headlines. First, I make a promise to the reader and that's where I said 'Guaranteed to' do something. Right? The second thing is I always have a verb, aside from the guarantee. It's, I've guaranteed to do what? Increase or to dramatically increase. There's some type of verb in there and, the third thing is, I always have 'You' or 'Your' in the headline. Sometimes it can be implied. You don't actually need the word 'You'. If you go back to DotNetInvoice Books, the headline doesn't have 'You' in it but it does have all three of those elements. Andrew: To this one? Or no. You're talking about . . . Rob: DotNetInvoice (?). Andrew: Yes. Let me go over to that. That is on the browser. Now, I've got all these tabs open and everything, and images open. So, yes, here. 'Three Minutes to Your First Invoice'. Rob: Yes. So, what does that say? Number one, I'm making you a promise, that it's going to take you three minutes. or less. So the promise doesn't even have to be as explicit as 'Guaranteed'. Andrew: 'Three Minutes.' What's the thing that you're offering me? Rob: In this headline? Andrew: In general. When you're telling us that we need a promise, of verb and the word 'Your ', the promise component of that doesn't have to be a 'Guaranteed', or the word 'Promise'. It just needs to offer them something clear. Rob: Yes. That's right. So, the promise is there, 'Three Minutes'. The 'You' or 'Your' is there. And . . . Oh. Man. I can't believe I forgot my third one. Andrew: No. The verb. Rob: Yes. The verb. Andrew: Actually, there's no verb in that one. Rob: Yes. There isn't. So, I probably need to work on this headline. 'Three Minutes to Your First Invoice.' Yes. That's how I do it nowadays. I wrote this a couple of years ago. Andrew: So here's what we've got. You're saying, have a promise, I know some people learn better by seeing, a verb, 'You' or 'Your' in there. So, if we were to redo that, it might be something like, 'In Three Minutes Print Your First Invoice or Send. . . ' Rob: Yes. 'Create.' I would probably say, 'Create Your First Invoice In Under Three Minutes,' or something like that and that would handle all three of them. There's something about being forceful, well, not forceful, but having that overt verb really ignites the human mind. Andrew: So, I understand the idea of having a promise in there, because 'I Guarantee,' to me, when I was looking at this, when I was just pulling screenshots in preparation for the conversation here today, I saw 'Guaranteed' and I thought, [sic] Whoa, there's nothing to lose; I can't believe he's willing to do that. Now, I feel comforted by it. I really understand the 'Your'. You're really speaking to me but, why the verb? Why do we need to say 'Increase' or, in the case of the invoice example that I came up with, 'Create' or 'Print'? What's the verb for? Rob: Flip back to the old keyword screen (?). Hit (?) one, and look at this headline. Andrew: 'Real Traffic, Real-Time, Real Results.' It doesn't tell me what it does for me to get that. Rob: No. Andrew: I see. Rob: So, the verb helps. If you look down to the black headline word, [it] says, 'Keyword Tool to Drive More Longtail Traffic to Your Site Naturally.' It does have 'Drive' in there, which is a verb but, realistically, having a verb in there helps you not describe your product. A lot of people describe their product. So, if they have invoicing software, they would say, 'The Best Invoicing Software on the Market,' or they would say, 'Invoicing Software Made for Developers,' or they would say, 'Invoicing Software XXX.' Right? That doesn't help you at all. Putting a verb in there, implies what it does and that is more what the buyer is looking to find out. Andrew: I see. All right. Let's bring up that big board again. So, 'Stop Your Sucky Copies' or anything else, by the way, is the most important part of having a sales page that converts, in your mind, is it that headline? Rob: Well, no. Andrew: That clear offer? Rob: I would say, the headline and clear offer go hand-in-hand, but they don't have to be the same thing. I mean, the purpose of headline is to get the person to read the next line below it and the purpose of the next line below it is to get someone to read the next line below that. I mean, that really is what you try to do, and if you look at the (?) tail homepage you'll see that it's headline, then a little more addition with the smaller headline. Then there's the button, the action is right there, so what you said which is having a clear headline and an offer, a call to act, essentially, that to me, that's the architecture of what every . . . whether it's a long form sales page, selling any type of product or it's a short . . . I mean, this is obviously just a very short form sales form, is really what this is, and so, yeah, the compelling text that gets you to read the next line and then a call to action where you want it. Andrew: Really nice is [on] on that page too. Rob: Thanks. Andrew: All right, so on to the next big idea. Don't let them leave without signing up. Rob: Yeah, so the idea is here is that [??] reduce sign up friction. There's a bunch of different ways to do this, but it's pretty common to come upon a website, as an example, you go to the old HitTail website and you notice that you come there and there's a bunch of links all over the place, and you don't really know where to click. There's no clear path of where you want to go. As a result, people just wonder off. I was looking at the Google [analysts] for this page and there are links across the top. There is the sign up for free trial on the left, but when I brought this there were even more links on this page. To limit the path it can take is actually quite helpful in terms of guiding them through to the place you want them to get. In terms of reducing sign up friction, specifically, if someone goes to this sign up page, where they actually have to register, a huge mistake I see is having a sign up form with 15 or 20 fields in it, and HitTail actually had that as well. It's down to . . . I shrunk it down to three fields in the new version and then I added credit card up front [before] the trial, so I had to add three more fields. So, it's actually . . . Andrew: It's three fields and then another three fields after? Rob: That's right. Andrew: But it was the first . . . What are the first three fields? Rob: The first three fields . . . so, this is kind of a big deal. I see this happen a lot in common mistakes where people ask for a username and then and email and then a password and then a confirm password, then a time zone. I've seen this all the time. OK, here's what you can do. You get rid of username and use email. There's no reason not to. Andrew: Get rid of username and use email as the username. Rob: As the username . . . Andrew Right. Rob: . . . that's correct. Then you combine two to one. Then you have password and confirm password. There's no reason to have a confirm. If they mistype it, they will reset it; they will email you. It's going to be 1 in 50 people, so don't reduce your conversion rate cuz you want [??] password. The next thing [??] I've seen a lot of time zone. You can detect that with Javascript. People also ask for company, first name, last name, unless you absolutely need that info, you should leave it off the form. Andrew: Let's take a look. Let's go over there. I don't want to keep hitting HitTail because then people think that we're just promoting HitTail, but . . . Rob: . . . [??] that's right. Andrew: . . . it'll be a good example to go for, so I'm going to go with HitTail. Rob: Yeah, definitely. Andrew: [??] Wishlist earlier, when we talked about Wishlist, they do that too. They ask for . . . I mean it's an out-of-the-box solution, so you kind of are forced to use their forms, so they ask for username, then first name, then last name, then email. I think they might ask you to confirm the email, but I know for sure that they ask you for the password once and then again. We got rid of that by actually having a developer build a solution that gets rid of that. I hired two different developers to do that. One that would allow me to just collect email address and another one that said, don't even collect email, if they're paying you through PayPal or whatever, they've got . . . . We got their email address and name, just use that. Rob: Yeah. Yeah, that's great advice. Every form element you eliminate from a form is absolutely going to increase your conversion rate by . . . . [SS] . . . Andrew: That's a pretty easy thing too, from what I've seen, to hire someone on Elance to do for under 100 bucks. Just say, look, the solution that I have has all these forms; I need a quick solution to see if I could increase conversions by removing all these fields from the form, solve it for, and this is how I want you to solve it. I give them a logic and they come up with it like, take the username . . . take the email address they give us and make it their username and their email address. Rob: Yeah. Andrew: I was asking you earlier about what you have here. You say, give me the email address, and of course, you need that to keep talking with them. You want their password so they can log back in, in the URL that you're going to base everything on. Rob: Yeah, and realistically, I could get rid of password and just auto generate one and email it to them, but I'm OK with this approach. Andrew: You're what? Rob: I'm OK with this approach. I mean I do think it might increase my conversion rate a little bit, but it would be more of a headache for the customer, if you went that far. Andrew: We do that. We actually just generate a password and email it to them and let them change it, but I know what you mean. Some people like to use their own password. Rob: It's a trade off. Yeah. Andrew: I on the other hand always use a password generator, so whether you generate a password for me or I generate it, I want a secure one. Then you ask, of course, for a credit card. Why do you ask for a credit card before you get their email and close of sale? Rob: Yeah, because it dramatically increases the number of people who wind up sticking around. It's reducing friction for when their trial is done. I've seen a number of test of this. In generally, collecting credit card upfront is the way to go. It will reduce your upfront conversion rate to trials, but it will . . . you'll convert a lot of folks to paid accounts later. Andrew: What do you do to watch your conversions? Rob: I use costmetrics[sp]. I also have one customer port that I hired a developer on Odesk to build using classic ASP against our data base. Andrew: I've got a screen shot that I collected earlier based on our notes, based on your notes with Jeremy [sp] about Ambassador . . . . Rob: Yes. Andrew: You want to show that here? Rob: Sure, sure, yeah, I mean this is a good example of a pretty slim form. He asks for a company name; he asks for email and username and password. I've informed him to combine email and username. Company name is actually quite important here because this is an affiliate. It's turning people into affiliate, so they actually do need the company name upfront. Realistically, then all he's asking for is a little bit of plan information and then he asks for credit card down below. He doesn't have any optional fields, that's a big thing. If it's optional, it should not be on this form. You should get it later. I just like the sleek look of this one. I think he's done a good job of narrowing it down. Andrew: All right. Actually, aboard. You don't want to let them leave without signing up; you want to reduce the fields and . . . [??] . . . Rob: . . . [??] . . . Andrew: Next is have a call to action on every page. Rob: Yep. This is perhaps the biggest mistake I see when I review websites. I do a lot of website reviews just for entrepreneurs and the home page, specifically, should definitely have one or multiple cause to action to the same thing if the page is long. Every other page on your site, the customer when they, or the visitor when they get to the bottom of that page they should know what to do next. If they read through a bunch of FAQs or if they read through a bunch of testimonials when they get to the bottom that page, it shouldn't just be empty, and it shouldn't just have a return to the top of the page length. What it should have is a button; where do you want to them to go next. DotNetInvoice is an example of that. HitTail is obviously, but I know we don't want to keep going back to that. Andrew: Here, let me do this. I got DotNetInvoice. Here's a clear . . . Now, I noticed that you have three different calls to action on the right side there, view demo . . . Rob: Yeah. Andrew: . . . take tour, buy now. Rob: Yeah. I think if I were to re- . . . so, this site was designed about two, a little over two years ago, and if I were to do it today, I would remove that buy now. I would just have view demo or take tour. The reason is because if people are going to buy then they're going to figure out a way to buy, if they're that motivated . . . Andrew: Oh, really? Rob: . . . and [??]. Andrew: Is that people . . .it seems now that a lot sites don't even have the buy now button, it just says take a tour. Rob: I design sites these days for first time visitors because the majority of people who hit your site are coming for the first time, and so you really don't want to think what's a returning customer who wants to log, what are they saying, or what's someone who's coming back to buy it what do they want to see. It's really, how do I get someone introduced as quickly as possible with as little visual noise as possible. Andrew: By the way, who do you get to design your sites? Rob: This site was designed by a firm, an offshore firm I use in Bangladesh. These guys are pretty good. They're about 15 bucks an hour and they . . . Andrew: 15 bucks an hour to get you a design like this? Rob: Yeah, yeah, they did the whole thing, man. It was 10 pages. They did the custom design . . . Andrew: Wow. Rob: . . . and then sliced it, [??] out for 1200 bucks. Andrew: That's incre-, that's impressive. Rob: Yeah, they're good. Yeah, they're . . . [??] Andrew: You also wanted to show Bidsketch. I'm going to also bring up a web page in a moment for us to look at. I see on Bidsketch Reuben, on his site, has a call to action on the left, see plans and pricing. Then on the right he also says, see what your clients see. It seems like it's a second call to action. I know the guy test everything. Rob: Yah. Andrew: He's obsessive about testing. Why do you think in this case two calls to action help? Rob: Well, because I think not everyone is going to give you their name and email, and so he wants to have kind of a fallback, which is that see plans and pricing. That's the secondary. What he really wants people to do is send it to me. That's why it has the sample thing in red in the upper right to draw your eye. That's why it looks . . . it's got that depth of like it's multiple pieces of paper. I mean, your eye is naturally drawn to that big white space. Only if someone says, [??], I don't really want to give these guys my email yet, then they [??] wonder over to the left and click plans and pricing. Andrew: You want a call to action on every page. I know that he's got that. He's a student of yours which is why [??], you benefited . . . Rob: Yeah. Andrew: . . . him a lot. I pulled his site. There's Bidsketch, a Blog post, on the right I noticed right there it says show me how. Rob: Yep, that's awesome. Andrew: There's always a call to action on his. Who has it underneath a blog post, who is doing that in a way we could show? Rob: Good question. [inaudible] Andrew: Sorry, I was bringing up pages, here's what I was doing. Maybe I could help out by looking at KISSmetrics, does KISSmetrics do that, they do. Underneath their blog post it says...they do. It says: Start here, free trial. It is on their blog post. And you're saying that Software By Rob, on your site, you also do that? Rob: Yep. It's a newsletter sign up, but it converts quite well. Andrew: So, always a call to action after whatever it is that the person's supposed to be doing. Let's click on your latest post...And you can see that, as I scroll, right? Rob: Yes. Andrew: There's always some kind of call to action, whether it's this, or a button like these guys have. Rob: Joel On Software does it as well. Andrew: Let's take a look at Joel On Software, and see how the bandwidth holds up as I pull that up. Joel On Software. The reason I want to bring up Joel is because I don't think of him as a marketer, I think of him as the ultimate management and software guy. Rob: It's that "Do you want to know more" [inaudible] Andrew: And you know what, I've got an ad blocker on right now...Do you want to know more? You're reading Joel On Software. No, wait. He used to have more, there's something that's missing. Rob: Yes, he did. Maybe it's in older posts? I'm not sure. Andrew: Or maybe I have my ad-blocker on, and that's interrupting? But you're right, he used to link over to his other stuff. Rob: To FogBugz. Andrew: All right. Let's see, any other notes on getting a call to action on every page? Rob: No, I think that's it. Andrew: Then let's go on to the next one. Do not do things at scale. I remember going to NYU and studying business which I loved. A lot of NYU is just sitting around reading Plato, and thinking about the future of the world, and about how unjust the unliberal people outside of Greenwich Village in New York are, and the little business classes that I was able to take there all seemed to say: Scale. Do things at scale. Businesses need to think about scale. You're not the first entrepreneur to say the opposite, don't do things at scale. Why? Rob: Because in an early stage business, it is critical that you focus on some things that just aren't going to scale. This includes things like going on a podcast, or writing a blog post, or even social media, it doesn't scale that well. And I think we get hung up on thinking, well, if we're not going to be the next Facebook, or if want to be some massive company eventually, then from day one, everything has to scale. The problem is, when you're trying to pick up your first 100 to 500 customers, that entire time is going to be all hustle and all legwork, and it's going to be things that will only work in the short-term. I think more than the headline there, I think of this more as like: Do things that don't scale to get your initial customers. Andrew: Do things that don't scale. Rob: Yes. Do things that do not scale. Andrew: As opposed to do not do things that scale. Rob: Yes. You have to think of things that scale eventually, if you want to grow, it's just in the early days, you'll have to do things that don't scale at all. Andrew: So, you're on Hacker News in the early days. I pulled up the latest screenshot from Hacker News. How does this relate to what you're doing? Rob: I wrote a book a couple of years ago, and I blogged about the book, I blogged about the process, and it's very time consuming to do this. And I actually [inaudible] on Hacker News [inaudible] Andrew: I'm sorry, you're saying you were picked up by Hacker News? Rob: Yes, and that started selling some books. But that's not something that necessarily scales, infinitely. It's something that required a lot of time to put together, I put together a series of blog posts about it, and, what I realized is that that's often enough to get started, to get that fly wheel going, to start getting things in motion so that down the line sales pick up, they get more and more, and you don't have to put in as much effort. So, it's like doing things that don't scale early on is what gets that snowball going. Andrew: I see that actually. Lots of people will write a blog post and get on a site like Hacker News or Reddit, I have a screenshot of Reddit, I'll show that too, and they'll get there and they'll go, All right, now how do I find 50 other Reddits so I can keep this going, and how do I get on Reddit every single day, and how do I find 50 other hacker news sites so I can do that. And then I realized there aren't any, it's pretty much these two. In any other community it's not as big, or it's not as targeted and what was I doing here? And you're saying it got things started for you, what did it get started and how were you able to keep that going if you couldn't find 50 other hacker news' and 50 other Reddits? Rob: Yeah so that's actually a really good question, it's a really good point, because I hear that as well, it's like entrepreneurs want to, they want to just reproduce what they've already done, especially early entrepreneurs, they just want to, you know, like you said find 50 more hacker news'. And what doing, the advice I would have for people is that Hacker News or Reddit or any of these things are just a way to kick start it, and if you're building an interesting product, that people talk about, like the book I wrote, then that gets word of mouth going, that also gets some links back to you so you can get started looking at SEO. SEO is really undervalued in the startup community but that is a huge source for a lot of successful startups. They don't talk about it, but that stuff takes initial links that you get from sources like hacker news and from people blogging about it. So yeah, so I think the mistake people make is to think of that hacker news or tech crunch is an ongoing source of customers and it's not, it has a very short half life. And so you start with the hacker news and the podcasts and the guest posts, and these things that are very time intensive that don't scale, and you use them, you leverage them into those things that do scale and that do have long term value, and those are things like SEO, incoming referral traffic, and that kind of stuff. Andrew: OK. All right, lets again go back to the big board that we promised people we would go through and that's, "see the key words they're typing". I tried to change what you've written in your notes with Jeremy in the production call, to something that will fit up on the screen. Rob: OK. Andrew: And also maybe sound a little mysterious. You know... Rob: Sure. Andrew: What I'm talking about there with "see the keywords people are typing"? Rob: I do. Andrew: All right. Rob: I do, so the thought here is to get, to know, to understand how your customer's are searching for your product. The idea is that every customer does not search the same way, even for the same product. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Rob: And it's often overlooked, especially by basically anyone that doesn't know about the Google AdWords keyword tool, that if you, the example I used here is guidekit.com. Andrew: Let's go over to that site, I actually didn't load that up before, so let's bring it up right now. There it is. Rob: There it is. Andrew: Nice looking website, also. Rob: So this is a colleague/mentee of mine, and he has just launched. Oh, am I coming through OK? Andrew: Oh yeah, yeah you are. Rob: OK, so, he came to me and he said hey I'm going to build my site and I'm going to target the keyword, it was something like helpdocs. Andrew: Yeah help... Rob: Help documents. Andrew: But people would search for helpdocs. And help documentation, uh-huh. Rob: That's right, and so we sat down and said well how do you know this? And he said well because I think people might, and I've asked a few people. And the first step, I said let's go to the Google AdWords keyword tool, and lets see how many people search for this. And so we did, and we looked for helpdocs, we looked for user documentation, we looked for a bunch of other, you know, combinations of that kind of thing. And we found out that actually user documentation has a lot more searches than all these other phrases, and what that allows him to do is, A allows him to talk to his customers in a way that they understand, in a way that they're looking for. And B, it does allow him to focus on some search engine optimization, which can definitely bring valuable traffic to him for months and years to come. Andrew: So that's the big difference, instead of helpdocs or help documentation, go for user documentation. Rob: Yep. Andrew: And that small change makes all the difference, and the way that you found it was just going to this site, the Google AdWords search tool, and right up here, this is where you were doing it? Rob: Yep, that's right. Andrew: All right. Rob: That's right, it's a bigger difference than people realize, to speak to your customers in a language that they're using. Andrew: All right, let's go on to this last one. I've been really curious about this one. How to get cheap clicks. How do you get cheap clicks? Rob: So, there's one particular tactic that I've used. Andrew: Uh-huh. Rob: And a friend of mine named J.D. Connolly actually told me about this, and it works pretty darn well. And I don't know how long it's going to be around but it works on Facebook right now, and you can get clicks down to between 10 and 20 cents. And I've had it work multiple times. And so what you do is you go to Facebook.com/advertising, and you set up your Facebook ads account, and then you set up, probably around 4 parallel campaigns that are basically the same thing, right, they are very similar ads. But you are basically trying to split test, you just change the headline, you change the image a little bit, and you maybe can change the call to action in the body text but there's not very much body text in there so you don't have a ton of room there. So, it's mostly the headline and the image, and you set up four or five of them and you let them all run, and what will typically happen is that one of them will have a really high click through rate. Just for some reason, it'll just work with the audience you've selected, and the other four will have lower click through rates, and what Facebook does is their algorithm, if you have a high click through rate, it just drops the cost per click for you, because they want it to get clicked a lot more, because their audience is into it. And so I will have, typically if I do four of them, I'd have three of them that go up to between 80 cents and a buck twenty per click, and I'll have one that will drop down to like ten or fifteen cents a click. And then you just crank up the ad spend on that one, you shut the other four down and you take that 10 to 20 cent one and put as much money as you can into it, and you burn it out, you put a hundred bucks a day if you can afford it. And it will typically burn through the audience, and the click through rate will plummet after three to five days, because the audience, you know, they get blind to the same ad. And so you'll get a big chunk of clicks really quick and you try to get them to either sign up for an email list or sign up for a trial. So this is again, this is not a flywheel approach that will last forever, but it's a great initial way to get some cheap clicks and get some initial customers. Andrew: You know, before we go on to the last site that you have, and the second one in this topic, I'm wondering, how do you find out about these things? How do you find out that this is the way to do Facebook? How do you find out that there's some other new thing that's going to come out after this and you've got to be on top of it? Who do you talk to or what website do you go to, and how can we do the same? Rob: Sure, honestly yeah, I have friends who are entrepreneurs that I listen to, this particular tip was a colleague. But I get most of my information from sites like Mixer G and podcasts, and reading books, and just consuming different media. I think, for me, I'm a big audio consumer, and so I do podcasts, and I double speed them, so I can still hear them but I consume a lot more. And I bet within the last 30 days this exact tactic that I just mentioned has been mentioned on podcasts, you know... Andrew: And that's how you got it? So you're just constantly looking for what's the new tactic, who's got something that you can use, and maybe you can put your own little spin on it. Rob: That's exactly right, and the benefit, that's right, and the benefit is I have multiple products so I find that if this works on one, I'll run it across all nine of them, you know and see what sticks. So yeah, I think consuming media of any kinds, you know books and blogs and stuff, does have value if you're able to take notes and apply it to your product. Andrew: Yeah I'm big on note taking, I do find that I get so much more out of that. Rob: Yeah me, too. Andrew: The last big site that I've got here to show is this one, buysellads. Rob: Yeah, so I'm a big fan. I haven't used buysellads maybe in the last yeah but I did have a couple businesses that really got some good cheap clicks. I don't have a particular tactic like I did with Facebook. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Rob: But in general if buysellads has a website in the mix that you're targeting, you're going to get some pretty good clicks out of here. And the nice part is they have such a high level of ad inventory that you can change from month to month from one site to another to keep your click through rate high. That's the big thing is putting an ad on a website for like a year, people become blind to that banner. So you have to kind of move it around, and I would often have a three site rotation on bysellads, so I'd have the same exact banner and I'd run it for 30 day's on one and I'd move it to number 3 and number 3, and after, you know, another month I'd move it back to number 1. Andrew: All right, I've got a note here. I was about to end and then I remembered, I took notes. It's a good thing I am an obsessive note taker. Rob: Yeah. Andrew: I took a note to come back and talk about what you taught Ruben. Do you remember what you told him about how to launch properly? Rob: I do, this has been... Andrew: This is a sticky idea on our board but I think we should include it. Rob: Yeah, so the biggest mistake that I see done over and over is, one, people that are launching a product don't create, they don't gather emails before they launch the product. You should start marketing the day you start coding, or even before. Get a landing page up, get some folks getting there, I mean people are just going to ask you about it all the time, hey what are you doing? What are you up to? And you send them to that page. Twitter, if you have a blog, there's so many ways to get people there even not through paid acquisition, you know, just through mentioning it. And so, if you can build up a list of 100 to 500 people, or a thousand for that matter, then as it approaches launch you email them and you say hey, you let them know, like my product's launching I know you're probably excited about it, if you don't want to hear about it unsubscribe now, but I'm going to send you a couple emails kind of describing what's going to happen. What you don't do, and I see done the time, is product launches and you email that 500 person list and you say hey we're live, come sign up. And with that your conversion rate is like 1%. Andrew: Why? Why is that such a bad, before you show me what you're supposed to do, that's what I would instinctively want to do. I've finally built up my list, it's time for me to launch, and ta-DA everyone come. Why is that bad? Rob: Because it doesn't build interest. It doesn't build anticipation. It doesn't get people engaged in your story. It doesn't allow you to really tell them what your app. does. How it serves them. How it's going to benefit them. The longer you're able to, the more time you're able to spend, kind of telling someone about your app. the more likely they are to be interested in it. And so if you can, you know how a sales letter, there's long form sales letters that are really long, if you can take that sales letter and kind of turn it sideways and break it out over 3 or 4 different emails. That is actually the biggest, the best way to do it. It's to kind of take an email and say, hey, you know, we're coming up. Here's an intro if you recall the product does x. It's user documentation for developers. And it'll be live in like 2 weeks. And I'm so excited, you know, about it. And you kind of, you build energy. And you say, I'll be in touch in a couple of days with a little more info. Andrew: So you just keep telling them, this is what I've added to it or this is what's going on with it. Just updates on what you're building into the product. Will people care about it? Rob: Well. You do this as you approach the launch. Let's say you have 6 months from that time you gather emails until you launch. You only do this for maybe the past, the last 3 to 4 weeks. Andrew: OK. Rob: And you basically say, hey it's almost done here's a sneak preview screen shot of the product. No one else sees this, you get this because you're on the list. There's a bit of exclusivity. Andrew: Got it. Rob: This isn't genuine either. Like I do this and I know a bunch of people on my list. It's not something that [inaudible] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Rob: You're really like building anticipation. Andrew: I have a bad example because it's so old. But it's so effective that I've got to include it. When I first heard about the trio, the first trio phone. I signed up for a newsletter saying when is this thing going to come out. Because, you know, I'm , I was into the palm operating system. I love having smart phones. And they would send me an email saying, look at how our keyboard has these bubbles up. It's not flat. And the reason we did that is because, and then they explained why that helps typing. And then, they sent me another email showing me another aspect. And I remember saying, I can't wait to just go into the AT&T store and try this thing just to see if the bubble letters actually help me type faster or if the, whatever it was. What else they said was, you could do everything with one hand. I wanted to see, can I really do it or is that for amateurs. And they really got me going. So, that's what you told Reuben and you tell other entrepreneurs to do before launch. What happens when it's finally time to sell? Rob: When it's finally time to sell, you let them know, kind of a day before you're going to do like an internal launch or private launch for them. Andrew: Just for them. Rob: Just for them. Andrew: Uh-huh. Rob: This is not going to go live. And you're going to be able, since you've been on my list. Like, I really appreciate it. And you're going to be able to buy at a discount. You've got to make that pretty sizable, 25 to 50 percent. And they get that for life. As long as they're a customer. And typically this works well for SaaS apps because the price is going to go up. So it's obvious if you're going to charge like 20 bucks a month, and you're like, if you buy in the next couple of days, you're going to get if for 12 bucks a month forever. Then it's a big impetus. There's a bit of a time pressure there you're building. Andrew: I see. Rob: And so it's a [?] thing. Andrew: Yeah. The [?] influence. Rob: That's right. And then, there's exclusivity as well that you're building. And so then you say, hey tomorrow at noon, this thing, you're going to receive this and you're going to have a couple of days to decide. And then the price is going to go up. So, if you're interested, you should definitely buy now. That's what you're doing. And then you send them the email at noon. And then you'll get a lot of questions probably. And then two days later right before the dead line, you know an at 8 hours before you send them a final follow up and say, hey, I really appreciate it, this is the last email you're going to receive. But I just want to let you know it's closing out. You know, that you're not going to have the discount anymore. So that sequence of maybe four or five emails and everyone especially their influence. And say, look if you don't want to hear about this then please unsubscribe. You're not trying to bother people, you're only trying to talk to people who genuinely are interested in the idea. Andrew: Yeah. And I can see the exact same product marketed in two different ways. One is the conventional way, hey, the how we launch or we're going to launch tomorrow. The other is this more gradual system where you tell people what to expect. I could see how the same product could be either a winner or a loser based on that. Rob: Absolutely. Andrew: And the poor guy who built up this app. Who spent his time building, whatever the business is, and launches and sees that no one buys or he gets a trickle of purchases. And thinks what did I do wrong with the business? Did I go in the wrong business? Did I go in the wrong direction with this product? Do people not love me? Is there a tech issue? No. Just he didn't know how gradually to ease people into buying. Rob: That's right. Yeah. The first approach, of just sending a single email, will get between one and maybe five percent. Five percent is a very high conversion rate to sales. Whereas the second approach, I've used it and seen it used easily with between 15 and 30% conversion rates on a total list number. So it's a substantial difference. Andrew: Yeah. It's huge when you're just getting started. Rob: Yep. Andrew: Again, Reuben of Bidsketch said that it made a huge difference for him. Rob: Yeah. It did. Andrew: All right. So, just like you said in the course, that we need to have a call to action at the end, let me give a quick call to action on my own, and then I'll ask you for a call to action. What do people do now that they've come to the end of this program? And what I'm going to ask is, think about how you can use this. If you can use, of course, just one of these ideas from the board, the time you've invested, and the money you've invested, and the energy you've invested into absorbing what we've talked about here is going to be worthwhile, if you can just find one. I'm going to challenge you to think, before you even use it. Just think about, "How can I use one of these ideas?" I'm going to keep it up on the board for a second because what I've noticed is that a lot of the people that I interview who are high performers, when I ask them how they learn, they say things like when they read books, they read a little different than I do. They go in to every chapter, and they think, "How do I apply it? How can I use it? How do I use this with a problem that I'm facing right now?" And I've been doing that ever since hearing it in the interviews, and I've been actually using more of what I'm learning. And if you do it, I know you're going to get the same results, so how can you use the Facebook tactic to get clicks. How can you think about keywords in a different way when you're targeting by using the AdWords tool? How do you do things that don't scale today so that you can get customers, and then later on, once that flywheel is set in motion, can you build on it? And the same for all of these. Think about one or two of them, and let us know what you're going to do in the comments. All right, what about you. What can we ask people to do at the end, now that they've gotten to know you? Rob: In terms of, with this course, or in terms of... [??]? Andrew: How about for you? I've told them what they could do with the course. I think now, if they want to take your relationship to the next level, and I should actually include this with when we do the pre-interview conversation, maybe we need to talk to every course leader about what can the audience do if they want to follow up? Rob: Got it. Andrew: So I'm going to put you on the spot with any prep, but... Rob: Oh, yeah. Andrew: What can people do if they want to follow up or get to know you better? Rob: Sure, yeah, probably the best way is on my blog, SoftwareByRob.com. Folks can obviously see what I've been working on, realizing that if you sign up for that email newsletter, you get a 175 e-book which is my best of the past six years blog posts. So you get this PDF and e-pub, and that to me is... It's free. You can unsubscribe from the list if you want. I'm not trying to get people to subscribe, but it's... That will show you if whether or not what I'm saying applies to you, and that's kind of a good primer. And then taking it to the next level after that, I wrote a book called Start Small, Stay Small. That's 19 bucks, and people can ... Andrew: SoftwareByRob, and let's see what happens when I go to Start Small, Stay... Rob: StartupBook.net. Andrew: Ah, thank you. Rob: Yeah, sorry. Andrew: Oh, there it is. StartupBook.net, and where is this? There you go. All right Rob, thank you for doing this session with us, thanks for teaching us. I've got a page full of notes, and I hope everyone in the audience has the same. And I'm looking forward to using these ideas, and to hearing from the audience how they have. Come back and let me know how you've used these ideas, and I'm looking forward to hearing your stories. Bye everyone.