Our Obsessions

The sad fact is, that even with amazing products, most people really couldn’t care less about what you’re building or doing.

Usually it’s because you’ve failed miserably at answering the “Why should I care?” questions for your potential users. You have to also realize that even with something amazing, only a subset of people are going to qualify to benefit in any way at all.

And of that small segment, even fewer people will give you their strained attention span, and your conversion will be yet another percentage of this group.

Starting to notice a trend? Most people aren’t going to care about you, your product or your service. Start accepting this now.

But this is actually a GREAT thing for your business, you just need to understand why.

Why Targeting Rocks

No one gets deep satisfaction with what they are doing when they try to be all things to all people. Not only will your product/service be subpar but how will anyone know to refer you? (Psst.. your mom doesn’t count here)

The reality is that if you claim to do SEO, PPC, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Web Hosting, Lawn Mowing, Dog Walking….. you’re never going to be the best at ANY of it, so no one is going to love to refer you.

You become an unknown and are no longer a compelling option for anyone, and worst yet is that you probably don’t realize it.

What if, instead you focused on being the BEST dog walker.. OR the best copywriter etc.

Then your clients will know exactly what to refer you for.

Breeding a Word-of-Mouth Engine

Often times, regardless of how good we think we are at finding our customers using paid traffic sources (Ads), or going to the right conferences, there is one extremely great source to finding new customers in a way you’ll never be able to buy: word of mouth referrals.

Sure, you can incentivize people with affiliate/referral programs, and that helps. But if you make an excellent product or provide an amazing service you’re happiest customers will “spread the good word” about what you’re doing.

Once you master your craft, word of mouth is going to get you into the far reaches where even the most targeted ad campaign would never reach.

Not everyone responds or pays attention to ads (in fact, an overwhelming majority of people don’t trust ads at all). But a friend-to-friend referral filled with praise? That’s better than gold and carries weight because it’s much more likely to answer the “why should I care” outside of your direct network.

By focusing on one thing to be excellent at, you’ll get more quality referrals of people who actually want what you’re offering and will stick around longer.

Letting People Out

BUT, this also means that a good portion of your audience just want get any value out of a relationship with you. This is O.K.

When you focus on one thing, you’re going to be creating raving fans if you do a good job. But this also means that 70 other things you never did well (and no longer do at all) will not be even remotely appealing to your previously semi-interested audience.

Most of us know that it’s less expensive to keep a customer than to go find a new one, but there is one big exception to this rule. If someone is really, truly uninterested in being a customer and wants to opt-out of your marketing communication, you need to let them. There are two eventualities of prospects on your list.

1.) They buy something and become a customer
2.) They become uninterested and want out

If they fall into #2, it actually costs you money to expend resources on trying to convert and keep them. Most email list companies charge by the number of subscribers, plus you likely have staffing costs to try and reach out prospects (and dead leads are pretty much the worst for a sales person), and general pains of trying to manage a large audience of leads.

Take Away

2. Make it easy for your current customers to want to refer you business. Being clear in what you do and how you do it differently is the easiest way to make this happen.

3. Let the uninterested prospects leave your funnel, they actually just cost you money and slow you down. Not everyone is going to want what you’re offering and that’s more than okay.

Even if you don’t realize it, you’re probably doing something that’s having a hugely negative impact on your bottom line.

Nearly every business on the planet is forgetting to use at least ONE (or more) of these to grow their business and it’s only a matter of time before their competitors do beat them to it. None of us want that to happen.

Are you making these common mistakes?

#1: Follow-up Failure

Just as we touched on in our last post about “Focusing on What Matters“, too many people seem to be focused on the buzz today and forgetting that everything is about relationship building. Having a good procedure for collecting interested leads and following up with them over time is one of the best ways to have stable sales.

If you aren’t perfecting your follow-up, then you are leaving huge amounts of money on the table and in most cases don’t have a “real business” because your revenue probably depends on you constantly chasing the next deal, client etc instead of curating people who want what you have to offer and simply giving it to them.

(Still not collecting leads? If you’re just getting started AWeber is a great choice.)

#2: Trying to Close Too Fast

“When I first started in business I made the same mistakes everyone else did. I tried to close like a 17 year old boy… I’ll give you a minute to chew on that one.”
- Gary Vaynerchuk, @GaryVee

Your customers are quite good at knowing when you’re trying to sell them something. In fact, they’ve become to sensitive to it that opt-out and spam rates are on the climb even when you aren’t trying to sell anything.

The best way to combat customer skepticism? Actually be a trusted adviser instead of a pitch fest. It seems obvious, but so many people out there will mail an offer to their list every day and never give anything back. Worse yet, they won’t even utilize a “grace period” before pitching a new offer to their brand new customer.

Nothing turns of a fresh customer off like bombarding them with offers the second they show a little interest.

#3: Prioritizing Acquisition Over Retention

This one has been pretty blatant in the mad dash to capture “fresh blood” in terms of list building. It’s an easy mistake to make when you first see the power of a good list.

Many companies forgot that names & emails are more than just that, they are associated to people that start to react to the way you present yourself in aggregate. One of the bigger examples of this was AppSumo, when Noah Kagan issued a public apology to all their customers because they started to not care about what happened after acquisition.

1. Push the send button only when the content is really good/useful or the offer is incredibly relevant
2. Ask your audience how often they want to hear from you using a poll, every market is different
3. When you do sell, try to do it in a story, it helps lower the salesman vibe and actually engages people

#4: Overreacting to Negative Feedback

Just like in grade school, not everyone is going to like you. It’s just the way of life, and that’s actually totally okay.

The first time a small business or startup gets some negative feedback or, ahem “haters”, it’s easy to take it to heart and overreact.

Someone tell you your price is too high, even though you have lots of other happy paying subscribers? Good riddance. They don’t like the ideology behind your business, but you’re proving that it’s plenty viable for a particular kind of person? That’s cool too.

In my experience when these things happen, it usually means one of two things.

1. You’re prices are actually vastly too LOW, because you should be targeting a more premium user
2. The targeting of your user acqusition is too wide, and you should be uncomfortably specific about who your customer REALLY is

When taken in stride, negative feedback is one of the best places to learn about what the identity of your company really is.

“The only time you learn something from customers is right when they sign-up or as they are leaving” http://bit.ly/WbSFtA via @TravisKetchum [Click here to tweet this]

#5: Pretending User Behavior Isn’t Changing

I’m still amazed how many times I hear a company use the excuse of “We’ve made it this long doing it our way, we don’t need to adapt to how people think we should do things”.

The reality is, now more than ever it’s an adapt or die kind of marketplace. Some HUGE companies have completely tanked by taking this attitude.. just take a look at what has happened with Blockbuster, Borders, Kodak etc.

Even 10 years ago it would have been crazy talk to imagine them driving the bus off a cliff, yet that’s exactly what happened.

The moral? Every company should dedicate a portion of their energy on poking their head outside of their own bubble to see what’s happening in the world and take notes about ways they could improve the way they interact with customers, curate great content and earn good will within the marketplace.

You would think everyone would be on the same page by now, after all nearly ever single reputable personality (and a few that aren’t so reputable) have been touting the value of having a big email list.

In fact, even a publication as mainstream as The Verge, who I love by the way, ran an article last year about “Scamworld” that talked about the raw power of email that results in millions of dollars of revenue (even if you don’t agree with the practices to do so).

Also last year a buddy of mine, Derek Halpern from Social Triggers did a test to once and for all put the nail in the coffin about the misconception that social media is even worth your time in comparison to email. He posted a link about a new blog post to his 30,000 Twitter Followers and emailed his 30,000 email subscribers (at the time).

The results: Twitter sent 300 clicks while e-mail generated 4,200 clicks. Which would you rather have for your list of 30,000?

Why Social Media is for Your Ego

I STILL get hundred of emails from people saying that their #1 goal is get more Facebook likes, Twitter followers etc. The biggest offender of the social media black hole appears to be people in the hunt for Facebook likes.

Now look, I totally understand that seeing a bunch of “likes” for your brand can make you feel really good. And, I’ll even concede that a well managed Fan Page can generate some decent traffic. But for now at least, it pales in comparison to email marketing.

I’ll even take it a step further and say this:

“Social Media has it’s place, but if it takes precedence over building an email list you’ll be stuck chasing 2nd place” – @TravisKetchum [Click to Tweet]

So you have a decision to make, to want everyone to think you’re a big deal by having a sizable social media presence? Or would you rather actually be a big deal by having a much bigger business by focusing on gathering your audience on an email list?

Why Email is for Your Business

The year 2012 was a banner year for me, because it’s the first year that email became a corner stone of how I operate my business. I had been involved with helping grow everyone else’s list before then, but had neglected my own.

Then, I launched a little WordPress plugin for running Contests because I wanted to focus on generating more leads for each part of my business by running contests people loved to enter with their email and were incentivized to get their friends to do the same.

In short, people absolutely loved it and we scooped up thousands of customers in a very short amount of time. Then we started getting interviewed on other popular blogs and the list kept growing exponentially.

Between the various aspects of what we do, we are collecting many thousands of emails each and every month segmented by interest. We now control the flow of traffic to our content, products and overall success of our business. E-mail marketing was directly responsible for hundreds of thousands in revenue between our own products and products we promoted via email.

To date, email has hands down been the most concrete driver of revenue growth and customer retention for us.

My Biggest Marketing Anxiety

I wish more people fully understood the value they are leaving on the table by ignoring their email list and focusing on building their audience where someone else really controls the relationship. (For example, needing promoted posts on Facebook to actually reach your customers.)

But I guess selfishly, the more people who keep ignoring the data about email marketing the better it is for people like me who do leverage it as it keeps the signal to noise ratio down

The biggest anxiety I have about our current marketing strategy is that I wish we would have started collecting emails WAY sooner (notice the trend here, nearly every successful marketer feels the same way).

I love learning about abstract ideas and thoughts around startups from people I respect who are actually in the trenches doing stuff. Recently, a neat iOS App came out that’s free and packages up some of the best startup videos all in one convenient place.

You can download the free App and get a bonus course by clicking here.

This app includes some of my favorite product launches, college speeches and even some long really interesting video by Steve Jobs that I had actually never seen before. The guy behind it, Matt Smith, even included some training videos on how he had the app made that you might find interesting as well.

My startup, Contest Domination, is a proud sponsor of this app because we believe in things that help the startup community be inspired to build cool things.

A common mistake people make once they finally start building an audience and an email list is simply not knowing what that audience cares about and wants to learn more about.

I’ve made this mistake like everyone else – but fortunately with just a little bit of diligence this can be avoided and makes your existing assets worth a multiple more than they were to start with. If you don’t get this right you’ll be paying for it and end up losing the attention from almost everyone who’s listening right now.

What it means to “know your audience”

While it seems intuitive – the idea of knowing your list still evades almost every marketer I know because the general consensus is that “if (someone) has ever opted-in or purchased from me before then they must be interested in everything I ever have to offer. They must be JUST like me and have the same hurdles I have.”

This couldn’t be further form the truth. In reality you appeal to your audience in many different ways, and most people are only attracted to you for a tiny sliver of what you offer or do and will realistically be “honey badger” about anything else you do.

But guess what? That’s totally OK – in fact this is one of the few times your customers will be focused on something, so once you can figure out who wants what kind of information it’s actually a blessing because it lets you easily figure out what kind of offers and value to give each segment.

However, for those who don’t take the time to segment their audience and their offers will end up with a bunch of non-responsive leads and a fraction of the revenue they could have otherwise generated from their audience.

How to data mine and categorize by interest

The first part of segmenting your audience/list is defining what areas of your market have a high likelihood of being in your existing pool of users.

I usually start this process by writing down 7-10 more niche interests that I think exist within a list and then try to lump similar interests into 2 or 3 “pillar categories” that I plan on addressing more regularly. In my experience, unless you have a HUGE list (like 100k+) you likely won’t have big enough segments to make it worth your time to curate 10 relevant niche marketing strategies that provide value and offers.

An example of this for someone with an “Internet Marketing” list might be broken down into three main categories: social media, search engine optimization, and list building.

Each of those 3 different types of people think they have vastly different needs and so you’ll need to tailor your content differently to each one accordingly.

Step 1: Create 2+ pieces of “value”

While you’ll be able to associate segments and tags for future product launches and future opt-ins, the biggest pain point is understanding who’s already on your list. To do that, a great way to siphon your existing leads into new segments is by sending niche specific content to your entire list, at least 2 pieces focused on each pillar you want to address.

This will get your hottest and most engaged leads into categorized segments immediately so you can preserve their attention with a tailored experience.

Step 2: Segment or tag your clickers

Depending on what software you are using to manage your email list, this process will look a little different. A lot of services like AWeber manage your leads in terms of different “lists” even if the same contact is on multiple lists. A great way to siphon the clickers on platforms like AWeber is to use some easy to use but advanced scripts like Ninja Opt-in. The name and pitch may look and sound goofy but the power is actually pretty startling and allows you to move leads to new lists as soon as they click links to your content – it’s awesome.

For those of you on platforms like Infusionsoft (which I recently migrated too, but I still use AWeber for a few purposes too), your leads are differentiated by the idea of “tags”. This makes identifying interests even easier because all you have to do is associate a category tag with users who click your categorized content links.

Step 3: Drill down your list over time

As you send out more relevant value specific to your core topics, you’ll be able to do exclude rules for anyone who you know has clicked other categories (so if it was to SEO you’d send to your SEO segment and general list but exclude anyone on the Social Media and List Building). Using this practice will give you a much more specific reach for each piece of content and each offer you send out to your prospects.

Leveraging segments for greater engagement

When you do this kind of segmentation you will greatly reduce the noise each of your leads has in their inbox and help avoid the dreaded GMail folder – where engagement goes to die.

This means more people will actually open your emails and ultimately click through to your content and promoted offers. This will be a boon to your bottom line and keep people happy/engaged with what you are doing, after all you are paying through the nose for these email services why not make sure you are getting the most from each lead?

Keeping a segmented list and marketing approach not only makes you a nicer person (trust me, your audience will thank you) but it will mean you have much higher profits from each promotion you do because it will be targeted to people who have been trained to listen to what you have to say.

Andrew Warner, the Founder of Mixergy has interviewed some big name entrepreneurs that would even make the most seasoned startup green with envy.

He’s scored interviews with people like Andrew Mason, Founder and CEO of Groupon Gary Vaynerchuk and more.

When he approached me to do an interview I was (obviously) flattered and immediately obliged. He’s straight to the point interview style has helped me by drawing out the more subtle and lesser known details of why certain people have found what at first glance looked like overnight success.

The reality as you probably know is that every success is a grind and you can easily count 10 failures for each single win.

Andrew wanted to dive in and ask me how I launched Contest Domination, what worked and how I stumbled in the beginning. I don’t hold back, so check out the interview and if you like it let him know in the comments on his website by click the link below.

Interview Source: http://mixergy.com/travis-ketchum-contest-domination-interview/

We were lucky enough to get Hiten Shah, the Co-Founder of KISSmetrics to get on the line with us for about an hour and do a brain dump on how KISSmetrics kills it with content marketing.

He covered all kinds of things about how to avoid vanity metrics, what type of content draws in the most customers and not just pageviews etc.

There is a TON of content and value in this presentation so you may have to watch it twice to catch everything, I know a few of you in the chat were saying how difficult it was to keep up because so much of this was new to you

What did you think? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, feel free to ask any additional questions that weren’t answered in the webinar.

P.S. You can download the PDF of Hiten’s Slides by (Clicking Here)

There is a mythical balance between “value” and simply appeasing the “shiny syndrome” that every one of us seems to have (myself included sometimes).

Recently, through both my own experience and talking to several very successful entrepreneurs who sell products online I have found a recurring theme that can be very frustrating for people that care about the success of their audience.

People generally don’t seem to want things that are actually good for them.

Let me explain, because if you can digest this it will save and/or make you thousands of dollars (in my experience, but of course yours may vary).

What People Think They Want

When it comes to marketing and products, people want that “silver bullet” that is going to solve all their problems over night with basically no work.

They want the shortcut or the “secret system” that gives them all the financial wealth, social status and more that they desire without putting in the hard earned hours to get there.

I wish this was just the gross generalization that it sounds like, but all I have to work with is the data from my multi-thousands of subscribers and customers.

Are there people who understand what it takes to achieve real, sustainable success? Of course, but that’s not going to be the majority of who you are marketing to.

Things That Help People (what we really want to sell)

If you talk to most product creators online, we would love absolutely nothing more than to help our customers attain real, sustainable success.

Want to know what we do? We dump everything we have at our audience that we KNOW is helpful and two things happen as a result.

• People get overwhelmed and stop paying attention, or even opt-out
• The real solution sounds like too much work and they go to the guy willing to sell that silver bullet

So this means that by giving people the real, complete solution on what works in the market today we end up with flat sales and a shrinking list.

It’s safe to say that the majority of this user fatigue comes from product creators trying to pack too much value into a single offer.

However, there is something you can do to fight this affliction in the industry and walk the line between “dead simple silver bullet” and “actually creates value” but it takes some time to hone in.

Staying Relentlessly Focused

The number one way to avoid marketing failure with products that actually help people is to limit the sense of overwhelm.

Most useful offerings are overwhelming because they present the whole picture in one take and only a small percentage of your audience might be ready for such an intense overview.

Imagine if you were obese and decided to take on a personal trainer, and on day one your trainer told you that the only way to lose weight would be to run 20 miles right off the bat.

Most people would say hell no and leave immediately, I know I would if I was told that’s the only way.

BUT, what if instead of being told you had to run 20 miles right away you were only asked to walk 5 blocks and back?

Then next week it’s 7 blocks, so on and so forth.

If you can find a way to give people milestones that actually feel attainable, and focus on key low impact areas of their business that can still produce a few results then you’ve nailed it.

Your customers will be much more receptive, more willing to try your method of attaining results and everyone wins.

However this ONLY attainable if you cut out everything that is not the minimally required set of actions to achieve first tier results.

SPECIAL BONUS: Download my personal checklist

I feel so strongly about the viability of focus based marketing compared to the false shiny silver bullet that I made a checklist PDF to use while bringing your own product to market.

This is the same checklist/thought process I use when bringing my products to market that have easily reached six figures in revenue.

Click here to download my 10 step “Anti-Feature Bloat & Market Viability” guide now

I’ve talked about the shift in the American dream before, but it’s probably more true now than ever.

June 30th, 2012 marks exactly 12 months since I worked my last day in a cubicle in exchange for a paycheck and I’ve learned so much it’s hard to believe it’s the new “normal”.

It’s no longer having the house with a white picket fence, a Mercedes and 2.5 kids. In fact, today most people don’t have any desire to own a car at all.

Today, the dream is to own your own business and have the kind of personal liberty that almost nothing else can provide.

It’s not a cake walk, in fact you’ll never work harder than you will as an entrepreneur but it gives you the latitude to spend your time on work that you actually love.

“I want to be en entrepreneur for the personal satisfaction instead of just cashing the easy paycheck for “today” money.” [Click To Tweet]

Getting What You Want

Make no mistake about it, doing well as an entrepreneur is no easy feat. When you work for someone else it’s common to slip into the clock-in/clock-out mentality where you can honestly afford to ignore those 1am customer requests.

I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve had to stop whatever I was doing and dig into a customer’s WordPress backend to help them solve some obscure problem they had that wasn’t even caused by my products.

Doing this though brings me immense satisfaction because people are genuinely thankful for the extra effort, and I’m in this to help people and create lifetime customers.

If you are lucky enough to build something that helps a lot of people that you actually enjoy, covet that and do your best to multiply the experience.

You will be rewarded exponentially for your efforts.

Creating Real Value

Entrepreneurs like to throw around the word “value” a lot. To be honest I don’t think many know what real tangible value is.

We all like to think that things we create have value, but in reality most of what gets created is pretty useless.

It’s for this reason that I have avoided “info products” like the plague, even though there is a ton of money in them.

Since most people don’t do anything with what they are given (and even less when it’s just information), I knew that building software with a specific use case was going to be infinitely more valuable than anything else I could bring to the marketplace.

As they say, I kept it simple stupid. And it has worked like a charm.

Building Long Term Assets

In the past 12 months I have traveled more than ever, been in the best financial position in years and enjoyed the highest level of personal satisfaction to date (but I still have a long way to go for all the above).

I’ve been able to travel to Texas, Cabo San Lucas (pictured above), Portland, Kodiak Island, Vegas and more.

Those locations were for pleasure because I could continue to create value while traveling, I had many more trips for work.

The key here was the added flexibility of being in control of when my efforts produce dividends to match the lifestyle I desired.

So you might be wondering, what kind of work supports this lifestyle and can continue to grow?

It’s been about 50% software and 50% client work, but let me elaborate…

Working With Interesting Clients

I dabbled for years with Internet Marketing, and had actually fallen into a form of it when I was 18 with my first computer company.

What was intended to be something small, turned into a large scale eBay drop shipping setup that had me pushing 200-300 laptops per day.

I’m not a developer, hacker or otherwise but at the time I had figured out how to circumvent my High School’s filtering system to access my eBay business.

I also grabbed some half done scripts to compile an automated way to post 1k+ eBay listings each day to keep up with demand.

Once I found a few offers that scaled, and worked with the likes of “Shoemoney” to launch a few projects I had enough experience to start working with interesting clients.

These range from best-selling authors, speakers, to local franchise owners.

The same is true of all clients I work with now though, they are decent people who are trying to do big things.

Building Simple Software That Works

While I love my clients, this part of my business has me much more excited.

I recently successfully completed the launch of my first self-branded product called “Contest Domination“, which has done over $100k in sales since it launched in April.

This puts our total volume in roughly the 4,000 copy range and we aren’t just sitting on our thumbs.

I’ve partnered with a “SaaS” (software as a service) pro whose helping me bring something really special to the market.

Driving a SaaS to compliment the distributed software model should put me in the position to help a variety of different people in a variety of different ways.

But the most important thing is that I *am* helping people, earning a stellar living, working my tail off and loving every minute of it.

A recent customer of mine who is used to using contests to boost their marketing campaigns took some of my advice and got explosive growth with just a simple change. It yielded thousands of fresh Twitter followers, Facebook likes and more importantly.. new email opt-ins that had never been on their list before.

I don’t want to spoil all the fun for you, I’ve prepared the entire case study as a free no-gimmick PDF download.

Click here to download this awesome case study.

The method is something radically easy to do, and you can follow in their footsteps with just a few minutes of setup.

P.S. It might surprise you that this customer has both brick and mortar locations as well as an online membership program.

If you loved this freebie, think you could share it with a few friends?

Click here to Tweet this case study