Dan Morris – Page 32 – Audience Industries

Three Must Read Books. Period.

I couldn’t so long ago I joined a site called GoBrevity that offered up biz book review videos. The videos would tell you the main / key concepts in the book then expound on them telling you how to incorporate those into your business. That site has since died. So that being the case I decided to do that for our BC Prime Members. As part of your BC Prime membership I send you those same kinds of videos with the call to action “Read it or Not?”

Sometimes the synopsis is all you need, other times you’ll know it’s a book for you.

Three books I’m not providing that service on are below. I really want you to read these three books. The insights in these will change your business thoughts forever, for the better.

1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

One of the stories I’ve heard Robert talk about is a small restaurant he helped cure of a nagging problem they had. During the week the restaurant would take dinner reservations but more than 60% of the time the diners would not show up or call to cancel. Having the tables sit idle was cutting into his profits.

Robert was called in to solve the problem. After listening to the staff taking calls and writing down the reservations he pinpointed the problem. It was a language problem – not a communication problem.

The host would take the name and size of the party and would direct the diners to call if they couldn’t make it. Simple enough, right?

Well. . . he solved the problem with two small words . . . “Will you”. The restaurant staff was told to start ending the conversation with a question not a statement “Will you call if you can’t make it?”. This one question and subsequent “yes” by the diner virtually eliminated the no shows. Now when people couldn’t make it they called to cancel.

Why? Because when people make an actual commitment by saying “Yes I will call” they are almost compelled by force to call if they have to cancel. Without saying “Yes, I will call”, the diner hadn’t yet made that tiny commitment. No one likes to lie or let people, so they called to cancel.

This story is just one of the many lessons you’ll learn in this fabulous book.

2. Using People by Aileen Bennett

Talk behind someone’s back. Judge a book by its cover. Lie to yourself. Give up on your dreams. You may be surprised by what happens. The witty and insightful instructions in speaker Aileen Bennett’s new book Using People may catch you off guard. After all, does she really want you to give up on your dreams? Well, sort of. Using People challenges us all to live a life deeper than the catch phrases. Burned in our psyche since childhood, these phrases have flaws … and Bennett brings them out in a way that makes you think (and rethink) your own possibilities. Steeped in Bennett’s unique blend of English wit and Southern charm, Using People is sure to shock – then inspire.

3. PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life by Greg Stielstra

The era of mass marketing is ending—replaced by the power of customer evangelists unleashed through a systematic approach to word-of-mouth called PyroMarketing. Learn how the system that sparked a revolution in the Christian marketplace can fuel the success of your business.

Word-of-mouth is the biggest influence on consumer purchases and its influence is growing. How do you tap its power?

The key is not some new technology or advertising fad. The best way to understand the marketing process, the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of fire. PyroMarketing simplifies word-of-mouth to a four-step system that optimizes your advertising dollars by targeting the right customers and then converting them into unpaid sales and marketing evangelists.

Tapping the latest research into the brain and human behavior, Greg Stielstra demonstrates how traditional marketing techniques are expensive, obsolete, and doomed to failure—while PyroMarketing principles deliver powerful results over the long-term and for less money. Illustrated with case studies including The Purpose-Driven Life, one of the bestselling books of all time, and the breakaway phenomenon The Passion of the Christ, PyroMarketing is a comprehensive strategy that can help any business reach and retain new markets.

Hey

I was told this week that “Hey” was the most successful subject line used in the Obama campaign.

The one that always gets me to open is “Got time for dinner this week?” As long as the guy is seriously saying let’s go to dinner, I’m totally fine opening those. I’d be upset if a marketer used that to get me to open an email about autoresponders.

Are you testing your subject lines? Did you know that in most email clients you can send a second email to the people who didn’t open the first? That means you could test your subject line.

I know in MyEmma (an email service like Constant Contact), they rolled our subject line testing this week. I love that!
Continue reading “Hey”

Your Three Favorite Webinars

First of all I have no idea if these are actually your favorite webinars. . . but I can tell you they get the most views and spawn the most thank you’s and follow-up emails.

I too think they are the 3 of the best webinars from our Wednesday FreeWeeklyMastermind.com webinar series.

What makes them great?

1. Getting Sponsored to Attend Events (even if they’re your own events). I think this was the most exciting. Shannon gets paid to go to events. Sometimes she makes $8,000 to $9,000 to attend one event. She event got Sponsors to help pay for her recent home flooding! Crazy stuff! Continue reading “Your Three Favorite Webinars”

The Symphony Strategy

I’m not sure if you know this but I interviewed some cool companies for our Marketing Calendar Product. One of those companies was the Nashville Symphony.

Recently I got a chance to sit down with them and learn more about their social media strategy; they’re one of the few symphonies in the world that has a social media staff.

The most interesting thing about their role is that is has nothing to do with sales. (You probably read more about that in my interview with Nissan and how they do their social media).

Their only goal is community engagement and involvement. And their metrics are all about comments, likes, questions, emails, discussions, followers and stuff like that. They truly want to be a community partner.

But that’s not why I wrote you today. I thought you’d be interested in seeing their “micro-social media” strategy. This is what they try to do every day. I thought it was fascinating:

Facebook: No less than 1 post per day, no more than 3. They respond within one hour. They use Hyperalerts.no to manage their Facebook comments

Twitter: No more than 22 tweets per day, no less than 3. Respond within 15 minutes. They use Hootsuite to manage their tweets.

YouTube: A new :90 second video 2 times per week.

Tumblr: One post per department, per day (that’s amazing to me)

Instagram: Share Photos & Likes to Twitter

Email: No more than 2 emails per week to one address

That’s real strategy and thinking eh? Are you being that “on purpose” about your efforts? And was that cool or what? Come over to http://FreeWeeklyMastermind.com and chat it up!

How to Review Your Website

I’ve been doing $499 website reviews for a while now and thought I’d share with you how we do those.

I break them down into 7 sections right off the bat. I look at SEO, List Building, Monetization, Internal link structure, Voice, Funnel and Social Media integration.

Let’s start with SEO. First I got to Google and type in:

site:http://yourwebsitename.com

Don’t Start That

Have you met my folks? They run http://front-porch-ideas-and-more.com and they’re not even Geeks. My dad didn’t have any real internet or marketing expertise before starting it. And my mom, well we call her “smartest +1”. . .

Anyway, they built this great business that generates revenue from organic traffic clicking online Adsense ads. They also have a couple ebooks, some direct advertisers and some list building.

What they don’t have are dates or ties that really bind them to their site. They don’t have clients, deadlines, membership programs, forums, speaking engagements or really anything that ties them down every week. Continue reading “Don’t Start That”

How to sell an ebook without a shopping cart

This is a quick tutorial on how to sell an ebook without a Shopping Cart.

Other than some edits I’m doing now, while the above video is finishing the processing, this is the page we created in the video. The ebook we looked at, of the marketing matrix, is a fantastic read. We really go into depth in helping you understand how to focus on the parts of your business that will move you along the quickest. I highly recommend getting it.

Don’t Rely on Google

I spent a good period of time this week talking about traffic. Not only did one of my sites take a traffic hit from Google Penguin, but a few of our Mastermind Group members got hit and one lost almost all his traffic.

I’d like to contrast that with a new client we started working with this week. He’s only been online for 5 months now and is making more than $12,000/month. And almost none of his traffic is from Google.

Yep, it seems a bit crazy but it’s 100% true. And everything he’s doing is a little bit by accident. I don’t want to diminish what they’ve done because they’ve gone on instinct and their natural smarts. But as far as “scientific” approaches to list building and online income creation – nada.

So he got his start in forums. He started talking about what he knows best in forums where that subject was being discussed and the people in those forums liked what he had to say so much, they started coming to his site and populating his forum.

And then they followed him to Facebook and started interacting with him there as well.

AND he did this in more than one forum.

So his traffic is a really good mix of forums, other sites that his forum members are on, Facebook, and people Googling his name (which is somewhat unique). But to this point, he is completely insulated from Google algorithm changes.

So I would urge you to take a look at your traffic. If it’s all coming from one source, then you need to make diversification a top priority for the next six months.

That means work. SEO might seem like work to some people but I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as driving traffic other ways.

So get out there and start spreading the word about your niche. That’s Slideshare, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, niche forums, guest blog posts, blog commenting, LinkedIn groups, Flickr groups. . . and that’s just the start.

And vice-versa if you don’t have much Google traffic at all, then you’re missing some folks. The great thing about SEO is you end up standing in front of people who are looking for you at that exact moment. That’s pretty powerful.

If you don’t know how to do that, I’d be happy to help you put together a keyword theme map. We do them all the time for our clients. Just let me know. Otherwise, get out there and diversify!

For more on niche internet marketing.