E-Biz Booster Blog

It has become hard to listen to and concentrate on a specific message which is buried in ever intensifying noise.


You as a marketer cannot blame people for being ignorant.


You only can blame yourself for being ignorant.

When was the last time you listened to the response you stimulated? Did you adjust your message, your timing, the channel, …?

It’s easy to be the pink elephant in the room — and I mean the opposite of a Purple Cow. If that’s what you wanna be, fine with me, but don’t drop your shit in front of my feet.


I just picked that up from the universe with my telepathic senses.

Something to think about.

LISTEN!

You probably don’t care about what I have to say. But don’t worry, I might give a damn about your message as well.

Do you have a clue what I am interested in right now?

Yours
John W. Furst

(*) Image credit: ©2007 by myklroventine/flickr. - Some rights reserved. - CC-BY 2.0

Marketing guru and genius Frank Kern admits a costly mistake.

He had produced at first 2,000 and then another 1,000 sets of his best marketing material containing 9 DVDs, a book, a 150 page special report, and a newsletter. Mid August 2008 he gave it all away for shipping cost only. Actually less than that, because it was a heavy box and Frank sponsored the cost out of his own pocket. This was not called a product launch, but a marketing experiment. A first time try for him and he, therefore, was not sure about the outcome at all.

The goal was to get as many new paying subscribers for his monthly printed newsletter as possible.

As everybody had expected the first offer of 2,000 sets was sold out in less than 1 hour (the kind of usual scenario with Frank's launches/experiments) and the feedback from his “new customers” was excellent. They loved the stuff.

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When we are talking about email marketing, we need to realize, it's not only about finding a reliable email marketing service provider like Aweber. It's not only about squeeze page or not squeeze page, fancy or not so fancy design of your newsletter, your back-end products and so forth.

“Great, awesome copywriting is the golden key!”

It's the words that sell,… and everything around them. Pictures, the layout, and nowadays multimedia with video and audio increase the effectiveness of your words tremendously. Those elements increase the persuasive power of your words and get the reader, listener, or viewer to take the desired action.

Now after you have learned how important the quality of the copy in your message is, you might ask yourself

• What is good copywriting?
  
  
• How to become better at copywriting?
  
  
• How to find and hire a first class copywriter?

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How many times have you watched an Internet marketing video online that promised “great, special info”, but did not deliver? That's really a big turn off.

“A bad video steals you up to 20 times more time than a bad PDF document”

Unfortunately you cannot always tell in advance, if a video will deliver on its promises or not.

• I have seen poorly produced, short and long videos that contained more than expected and
  
  
• I have seen studio production quality kind of videos that didn't tell you anything, except that it must have been expensive to produce.

Too many videos just waste so much time with introductions and typical “Let me tell you my / his / her / their story …” phrases. Too many videos show just faces or other static information. Could be an MP3 audio, and just a piece of written text instead.

I am absolutely tired of this and simply prefer written material, since I can quickly scan through it. Most people also can read faster than those video guys and gals do speak. It's just a waste of time and not to forget a waste of bandwidth.

Of course, there is room for video. The visual aspects can add tremendous value, but not everything needs to be in video. Shooting a video from lame content does not make the content better, it just gets thrown into a different package.

Some folks claim that it takes less time to make a great video than it takes to provide good quality written material. Well, that's true. But only for the producers, who actually have the ability to write good quality content at first place.

All others are just showing their stupid faces into the camera and that is definitely not worthwhile watching. And furthermore they are showing that it is not even worth their own time to create quality content for others. “To hell with them.”

Now, let's talk about some absolutely positive aspects of online videos.

Good reasons for use of video

• Showing onscreen actions that would be hard to describe otherwise. Videos are great for tutorials, but should be accompanied with a written add-on, like a cheat sheet.
  
  
• Showing animated graphics that tell more than words. I have shown an excellent piece of descriptive statistics here on this Blog.
  
  Another excellent example are the recent StomperNet Going Natural 2.0 Videos (↑) about SEO, conversion, … facts that help you increase your sales. For my personal taste the intros are too long. However the content is very valuable.
  
  
• Adding artistic, humorous, graphic, … value
  
  
• or just adding a moving pictures to otherwise great content

Since not everybody is following quality gidelines, how can you protect yourself from wasting time with bad, empty, or hype only videos?

Tips for saving your time

• Watch only videos that have been referred to you by a trusted person.
• Build a list of trusted, good quality sources.
• Watch a video only one time and take notes (if it is worthwhile).
• If the video doesn't capture your full attention during the first 30 seconds. Click away.
• Prefer material that will give you transcripts of the video content as well. Especially, if you have to pay for a course or something similar.
• …

What additional tips do you have to share?
Leave a comment, let me know.

Yours
John W. Furst

Are you heading for #1 rankings on Google, MSN, and Yahoo? You should, because it definitely helps your business. However, it is only one part of the equation for a successful Internet presence. In the following I'll tell you how I got it, but probably more important I'll tell you about the other factors needed as well. A #1 ranking on any search engine is meaningless unless those other factors are in place, too.

You might have “heard” the recent stories about quick rankings from online videos. I thought I have to test it and it was a happy coincidence that Rich Schefren's 66 second video contest came along at the same time. What a great opportunity to get started.

At first look at the search results page “Number 1 on Google” for the broad matching phrase attention ebiz (Enlarge the thumbnail in the upper left corner of this post). I made this screen shot yesterday. Today, I am on position #2.

You also will notice the ^2nd, indented search result. That mainly comes from having a good internal linking strategy on this blog and the fact that the key word “attention” appears on every singe page of this blog. That's how I have setup the promotion for the Attention Age Doctrine. I'll talk more about this later.

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In Part 1 of this posting we have focused on Usability aspects. Let's continue.

Persuasive Design

A more than — just the technical facts — product description with detailed photos, audio, and video showing how the user will benefit from taking action seems to be state of the art. Also show the user the benefit on the emotional level.

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