Archive | June, 2021

I’m surfing the internet in an early morning pre-coffee daze when I see an ad for an odd-looking watch that says, “Handmade in Switzerland: 24 hours and only 1 hand…” And I’m thinking, “Ohhhh-kaayyyyy… what fresh overpriced gimmick is this?”

And I click on the ad because, well, why not?

Now I’m on a website called slow-watches.com and it’s asking me,

“Are you ready to be slow?”

Wtf?

I need my coffee for this.

“We created a watch that allows you to experience time in an entirely new way.”
“The slow watch reminds you to stop chasing the minutes and live for the moments.”
“The unique 24 hour one-hand concept fundamentally changed our way to perceive time – yours too?”

Ha! I love how they don’t claim this watch will change your life or how you perceive time, but instead they pose those claims as questions.

•   Will this product earn you a million dollars?
•   Will this diet make you 10 years younger?
•   Will the secrets revealed in these videos make you irresistible to beautiful women?

Maybe not, but these questions fly underneath your skeptic’s radar and get you thinking, don’t they?

“Sit back, relax and watch the video. We would like to tell you about our slow story.”

And I’ll be darned if I didn’t watch their video – twice.

www.youtube.com/embed/3SP_s_UUVfM

A few things to notice:

The first half of the video shows you just how miserable your life is without this watch, while the second half of the video shows how wonderful your life will be with the watch.

And it turns a product fault into a positive. “Yes, our watch doesn’t tell you exactly what time it is, but who cares about exact time anyway? We don’t care about seconds or minutes because those are for losers.” (I’m totally paraphrasing here – watch the video.)

Put on this watch and for the first time in your life you will see, “How time naturally flows.”

“Remember, don’t count every second – make every second count.”

Cliches, anyone?

I thought it hilarious that while the silky-smooth talking announcer is telling you to make every second count while admitting their watch can’t count seconds, they’re showing you two good looking guys staring at an hourglass…

I mean just staring at…

And staring at it some more…

Like they are so bored they’re wishing their miserable lives would just end right then and there.

But wait a minute… (pun intended?)

…why are we talking about this crazy watch and how they’re marketing it?

Because there are some great lessons here.

First, making a 24 hour watch is such a simple idea, I’ve got to wonder why we haven’t seen these before. Or have we seen them but they didn’t catch on? The point is this: Simple ideas like this are everywhere if you are paying attention.

Personally, I would love to have a watch that reminds me every hour to get up from my chair and MOVE. I’d also like the watch the act as a Pomodoro timer throughout the day, with 25 minutes of work and a 10 minute break, or something like that.

Yes, I know my phone can do those things for me, but I leave my phone in other rooms and I’d prefer to have those features on my wrist. Is that a good product idea? I don’t know, but if you decide to create a watch like that, let me know and I’ll likely buy the first one.

Second, the watches cost $300. That’s why they tell you over and over they’re made in Switzerland, because we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that great watches can only be made in Switzerland, so it helps tremendously with price justification.

Third, the watches cost $300 which means it’s going to be all about the marketing and positioning. Most people are never going to impulse purchase a weird-looking unknown-brand watch for 300 bucks. Heck, most people have stopped buying watches altogether because they own smartphones. To sell a watch without a well-known brand for $300, you’re going to have to get slick with your marketing.

Fourth, that is exactly what they’ve done here. When I looked at their website and watched the video the first time, I confess that I WANTED ONE OF THESE WATCHES! Yes, I really did.

Watching the video the second time with my marketing cap on made me totally rethink that impulse. Because hey, I don’t really believe that buying the watch will cause me to move from the city to the country and have absolutely nothing to do but play frisbee and watch an hourglass, two things I don’t want to do anyway. (Watch the video to see what I mean.)

To answer their question: “Can a Watch Change Your Life?”

Potentially.

Regardless, if you can take a simple product like an odd looking watch and use your marketing to make people feel better about themselves, then maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

If you sell a product that teaches people how to make money, for example, then you can certainly paint a picture of their life before and after getting your product. And in fact, you can use this watch video as a template of what that might look like.

A mediocre product with great marketing can sell like gangbusters. That’s what I think they have here. If they get a few celebrities to wear their watches, it could become a viral sensation and they’ll make millions.

Then again, there have been plenty of products that were supposed to be “the next big thing” but failed terribly.

https://digg.com/2021/next-big-thing-fails

Back to you and your business… Take a look at your products and ask yourself, what simple change can you make to totally stand out from the crowd? In other words, what’s your version of going from 12 hours to 24 hours?

Next, look at your marketing like you’re seeing it for the first time. Does it sweep you up in the moment and make you think, “Wow! I want this!” If not, you might want to rethink how you’re presenting your product to the world.

Here’s a neat little trick you can try: Every time you see an ad or commercial, imagine it’s for your product. Look for the elements you can borrow to use in your own marketing campaigns to make them fresh and grab the viewers’ attention.

Can your product change people’s lives (unlike this watch)?

Then just imagine what you might achieve with a fresh marketing campaign that lets people feel what that change will be like when they have your product.

Can you devise a fresh marketing campaign that sells a million copies of your product? I think you can…

Facebook “jail” is when users are blocked or banned by Facebook from posting on the site or accessing their account. This is supposed to happen because of violations or spammy behavior, and it can lead to a Facebook account being deleted permanently.

But here’s the thing…

Facebook can’t accurately police content, which is why Facebook makes 300,000 content moderation mistakes…

… every single DAY.

Here’s what happens:

Facebook content moderators review posts, pictures and videos that have been flagged by users or artificial intelligence about 3 million times per day. To do this, Facebook employs about 15,000 content moderators.

With 3 million posts to moderate each day, each moderator looks at 200 posts per day. That’s 25 posts per hour if they work 8 hours, which works out to 150 seconds per post to decide if it meets or violates community standards.

It gets worse…

Imagine if even a handful of those 200 posts are 10-minute videos. Now the moderator will only have seconds for some of the other posts. That’s mere seconds to make a determination that can affect your account, your business and your bottom line.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that moderators “make the wrong call in more than one out of every 10 cases.” That means 300,000 times a day, a mistake is made. This means that no matter how careful you are, you can still lose your Facebook Page or Group and it won’t even be your fault.

For example, Sherry Loucks runs a Facebook page on breastfeeding. She shares only credible content from fact-based sources, yet Facebook blocks every page she runs and routinely blocks her Page for ‘spam’.

Rectifying an unfair ban from Facebook can be nearly impossible. Remember, Facebook users are not considered Facebook customers. If you contact Facebook, you likely won’t receive an answer. If you do receive an answer, it will likely be, “We are looking into this and will get back to you,” which they never will.

Facebook is providing their online community free of charge to users, which means users are not paying customers and cannot expect customer service from them. When you sign up with Facebook, you agree with their terms and conditions which essentially say (I’m paraphrasing here) that Facebook is God and you are not.

And since there are no laws which require Facebook to allow you to participate… Getting yourself out of Facebook jail can be next to impossible.

How can you reduce your chances of being banned on Facebook?

1: Show nothing that can be considered adult nudity and sexual activity. Yes, this includes anything to do with just about anything related to the human body, including breastfeeding. Just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean an underpaid and overworked moderator won’t ban you for something that is perfectly moral in any circle except a religious order from the dark ages.

2: Display nothing that could under any circumstances be considered violent or graphic content.

3: Do not refer to dangerous organizations, terrorism or organized hate, even if you are 100% against it. People have been banned for simply using the names of hate groups.

4: Don’t use hate speech. Like everything else, this is open to interpretation. If you’re not sure if it’s hate speech, it probably is to someone so don’t use it.

5: Don’t post about ‘drugs’ and ‘firearms’. To be safe, assume there are no exceptions to these two terms.

6: Don’t post child nudity or any kind or sexual exploitation of children.

7: Don’t post anything that can be interpreted as bullying and harassment. Someone posted something terrible and you want to fight back? Don’t engage – just report them and leave it alone.

8: Don’t talk about suicide and self-injury. This one makes me angry, but you need to be aware that even saying something along the lines of, “If you are feeling suicidal, call this number for help,” can potentially get you banned if the wrong moderator gets a hold of it. Yes, I know that’s bull@#$%, but sadly it’s true.

After everything I’ve said here, you might think I hate Facebook. I don’t.

As an online marketer, I realize that Facebook is just one marketing tool of many that we can choose to ignore or use. If we choose to use it, we need to realize the limitations and risks involved.

Above all else, it’s imperative that when using Facebook for marketing, you move your prospects off of Facebook and onto your own website and email list as quickly as possible. Because sooner or later, the day may come when you get that dreaded notice from Facebook letting you know that as far as they are concerned, you are no longer welcome on their site. It’s good to be ready, just in case.

CTA stands for Call to Action. When you’re talking about an email you’re sending to your list, the call to action is when you say, “Hey Reader, click this link to get a once in a lifetime deal” or some such.

The more you can get your readers to click the links you put in your emails, the more traffic you send to your offers. The more traffic you send to your offers, the more sales you can make. Usually.

Okay, there is an exception to this rule, and it’s if you don’t set up your email and your offer to be congruent. Like if you say in your email, “Click here to discover the best fertilizer for roses” and then you send them to a page that is advertising a cleaning solution for rubber duckies… you’re not going to make sales.

But let’s assume that your email sets up your reader to know exactly what to expect when they click the link. The more people who click the link, the more people you have who can potentially purchase the product and the more money you can make.

Thus the question becomes, how do you get more of your email subscribers to click the links without holding a gun to their head?

By using the CBS method:

•   Command
•   Bolden
•   Soften

First, you’re going to COMMAND them on what to do. Don’t be subtle here. Don’t slip your link in there and assume they will click it just because it’s there – they won’t.

You’ve got to TELL them to click it.

•   “CLICK HERE NOW”
•   “Go HERE now for full details”
•   “This is the link to click NOW”

Next, you’re going to BOLD keywords. People tend to scan emails just like they scan sales letters. By bolding the keywords, you can stop a scanner in their tracks and get them to do your bidding.

“The price will double at midnight so to get the discount go here now and check this out before it’s too late”

Read just the bold words above and you’ll realize it’s everything the subscriber needs to know they should click the link NOW.

Finally, you might want to sometimes SOFTEN the language you use.

If you only say, “CLICK HERE NOW” it seems kind of pushy or bossy.

But if you say, “CLICK HERE NOW and see if this is for you” then you’ve softened the language and made it more friendly.

“Click HERE now and see if this can double your income”

“Click THIS LINK now and find out why 2,926 reviewers give it 4.8 stars”

“Go HERE NOW and discover for yourself why grown men blush when they see this”.

Remember CBS to increase your email calls to action: Command, Bold and Soften.

I received an email the other day promoting contests, telling me how I can become a big winner if I know contesting secrets and so forth. Which is true, there really are methods to winning a lot of stuff through contests.

But here’s the weird part… the email was written by a guy in his early to mid-20’s and judging by the language he used, it was also targeted to that same demographic – 20 something males.

What guy in his 20’s is interested in spending hours a day entering contests to win appliances and gift certificates and what not?

I suspect the target audience for something like this is people over 40, most likely female, who have some time on their hands. You could write about how they can enter these contests while they’re standing in line, while on their commute (assuming they’re not driving) while they’re watching television and so forth. And I’d talk about the vacations they can win, the cash prizes, and yes, the gift certificates and appliances, too.

This 20 something marketer will start making more sales when he starts choosing products to promote that appeal to the type of audience he is attracting to his mailing list – 20 something males.

A marketer has to know his or her audience and know what they want, what fits into their lifestyle, and what will bring them the benefits they seek. Keep this top of mind when you are choosing products to promote, and how to promote them.

I’ll bet there is something that is holding you back from greatness in your online business… And if you eliminated this one thing, you’d get more accomplished in a week than you’re currently getting done in a month. And not only would you get more done, but you’d make more money, too. Maybe exponentially more…

I know, because I’ve experienced this myself. There was something holding me back, and at first I didn’t even realize what it was or why it was stopping me from earning as much as I wanted to make.

This thing is in your business, and while almost every online marketer has this same problem, the issue itself differs from one market to another. Goodness, that’s about as clear as mud, isn’t it?

Let me try to illustrate…

Imagine you have a giant hourglass filled with gold nuggets. Any nugget that falls to the bottom of the hourglass is yours to keep, and there is an unlimited supply of gold nuggets at the top.

But here’s the problem: Because an hourglass is skinny in the middle, the nuggets have a hard time falling to the bottom. In fact, those nuggets are continuously getting jammed in the middle, and when that happens, you’re not getting any gold nuggets at all.

The solution is obvious – eliminate the area that is slowing down the flow of gold nuggets. In the case of your business, identify and eliminate the bottleneck.

Let’s say you’re a whiz at creating content, making products and doing social media. But building landing pages, sales pages, websites and all of that is hard work for you. It can take you days or weeks to build a funnel.

There’s your bottleneck! Get a program such as Leadpages or ClickFunnels to allow you to quickly and easily build those pages and you’ve just eliminated your bottleneck.

Or maybe you’re an expert at building pages but you’re terrible at writing content. Hire someone to write content for you or find another way to get content such as curation or maybe recording your own videos.

Perhaps the only thing you do well is social media. Then the answer might be to do social media for other marketers, teaming up with them and even taking a percentage of profits.

The idea here is to determine what you’re good at, what you’re NOT good at, and then find a way to eliminate, outsource or expedite the thing(s) you’re not good at – your bottleneck.

In my case, I was great at creating content, getting product ideas, setting up JV’s and a host of other things, but I didn’t like the technical aspect of building websites, pages and so forth. When I found a way to make it easy for myself, I freed up an amazing amount of time and energy which I then used to focus on my strengths. And when I did that, I literally tripled my income, had more fun in my business and for the first time found the entire experience to be thoroughly enjoyable.

I’d removed the bottleneck, removed a lot of stress and frustration, and replaced it with many more opportunities to build my list, gain new JV partners and make more money.

Find your bottleneck and eliminate it so that you can concentrate on your strengths, and that hourglass of gold nuggets will be replaced by a firehose of income.

I want to clear something up right now. Too many aspiring online marketers have bought into this fairy tale that says all you need is ONE BIG hit and you’ll magically go from broke to six-figures. 95% of the time it just doesn’t work like that. Nor is your online income going to magically grow like “clockwork” on “auto-pilot” with “zero effort” or investments.

Have you heard the expression, “Two steps forward, one step back?” That’s how almost every business grows, including any and all forms of online marketing.

Building an online business isn’t like winning the lottery, nor is it a movie. You don’t get struck by lightning and fall into a pot of gold. Instead, you do an affiliate promotion that costs you $500 in advertising and makes you $400 in commissions.

This is where most people quit. “SEE?! ONLINE MARKETING DOESN’T WORK!”

Baloney.

You earned $400 in commission AND you learned something, too.

You use that new knowledge on your next promotion where you spend $500 again, but now you make $900. You repeat that for awhile and you’re making pretty good money, all because you didn’t quit when you lost that initial $100.

Then you’re feeling pretty confident so you decide to expand your list with a solo ad that costs you $300, but you only earn $50.

Nuts!

But now you’ve got a bigger list, and you nurture that list and eventually over the course of weeks or months you earn an additional $2,000 from it.

Yeah!

Then you hire someone to create a product for you, and it’s a terrific product but no one wants it, and you lose $700.

Darn!

But you still have the product, so you break it up into pieces and use those as posts and free reports and combining that with social media you further build your list while promoting a related affiliate product and now you’re earning a cool $300 a week just from that while also watching your list grow.

Wow!

But you need to invest in a better website or software or whatever and there are expenses and so you’ve got to pay those and…

Do you see how this works?

Two steps forward and one step back.

The trick, therefore, is to simply keep moving forward no matter how many steps you take backwards.

If you graph out the growth of online businesses, you’ll find that 95% of the time the line goes up, dips down, goes up, dips down and so forth. But the downward dips don’t mean a thing as long as the overall trend is up.

And if you’re prepared for this and expecting that it won’t be all smooth sailing and that you will have setbacks small and large, then you’ll know enough to weather those setbacks and keep plugging away.

You’ll be far less afraid, too, knowing that it’s normal to have these setbacks. And in my experience, it’s much easier to work when you’re not terrified that your income will suddenly dry up if you make one wrong move.

The vast majority of online marketers experience a series of small successes and small failures, too. They go hand in hand, and that’s okay. Just make sure you either have more successes than failures, or that your successes are bigger than your failures and you keep moving forward.

Really, that’s the only ‘trick’ to online marketing.