Tactical Execution

• Up in Vancouver Canada helping my parents move from the hospital to a nursing home. Getting old sucks. Enjoy every day like it’s your last! #

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• Took a break from the madness and laid out by the pool for 2 hours. Ahhh. Now, it’s back to work! #

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• Just finished a 59-minute audio interview with Michael Levin, successful entrepreneur and business coach specializing in product marketing. #

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• Getting ready to have photos taken for the back cover of my new book: “Make Yourself Useful; Marketing in the 21st Century.” #

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• Finalizing my agenda for tonight’s “content meeting” at the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy. #
• Just booked my flight to Vancouver, Canada. I’ll be leaving 07/15 and hope to return by 08/03. #

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I am the organizer of the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy (a Meetup group) and tonight is our July “content meeting”.  We have one primary meeting each month and it takes place on the first Monday of the month, starting at 7:00 in the evening.  We meet at the New York Life offices located in Emeryville.

As of this morning, we have 596 members and it’s growing all the time.  These people all find our group on the Meetup platform.  I have never done any real marketing for the group.  People ask me why my group is so successful and I usually respond with three primary factors: content, structure and communication.  We have one of the most active meetups in the area and our members keep coming back because they get good information in a predictable format.

Last November, the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy got sponsored by American Express.  They selected the 50 largest entrepreneur clubs across the country and put a program together to support them while building awareness for their OPEN program.  I never solicited their sponsorship.  They found me.  This is just another example of the power of Meetup.

Our members are all entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or established business owners.  We have a great group of people and I truly enjoy the role I play.  It’s been a great experience and has allowed me to meet a ton of people I would’ve never come across in my regular business life.  Today, I have people I can call for almost anything I might need in my business, all from my Meetup group.

When I became the organizer, I was hoping the group would be a source of business for me.  I wanted to use it to promote myself and find new clients.  As it turns out, I have yet to make any money from the group but the benefits are far greater than I ever expected.  The underlying objective behind the group is to allow members to share and benefit from each other’s expertise.  We facilitate that very well and I have learned incredible things from their presentations and contributions.

Meetup is a fantastic platform for creating and building clubs.  With valuable content, a little structure and good regular communication, you can build a successful Meetup group and gain exposure for yourself while meeting tons of new people.  Further, the experience will help you build confidence and improve your leadership skills.  Planning, coordinating, holding effective meetings - all valuable skills for your career.

What’s your passion?  What are you interested in?  What are you good at?  Think about these questions and then consider starting a Meetup group around that topic.  You’ll probably be surprised how many people find your group and if you deliver value to your audience, you’ll see that group grow and grow.  And as Meetup becomes better known, your audience will grow even more.

Last July, my Meetup had about 170 members.  Today, it has almost 600.  I’d bet the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy will have over 2000 members by this time 2009 and I can’t wait.  I want to hold bigger events with more content and more attendees, and I have no doubt it will grow into that naturally.  In the meantime, I have to finalize my agenda for this evening and invite you all to come by and visit.

• Just installed the Twitter plugin for Wordpress. I am writing this tweet from my WP dashboard. Very cool. #
• [utterz] http://www.utterz.com/u/utt/u-NTEwNzg4Mg #

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There’s a lot of talk about how to leverage the internet to grow your business.  Different people have different strategies and they all seem like tricks you have to do just right to see results.  And while some of that may be true, there’s value in understanding the concepts behind Internet Marketing, allowing you to apply the same concepts to dozens of different strategies.  Besides, I always like knowing what it is I’m trying to accomplish rather than just knowing a sequence of steps to follow.

Before jumping into the meat of this post, I also want to address the fact that the internet has changed a lot over the past decade and the concepts behind Internet Marketing have changed as well.  Although the modern realities all have roots in those early years, the dynamic was very different in the mid to late 90s.  Today, the internet is starting to mature with people using it in predictable ways.  And perhaps more importantly, the internet has become more social; hence the new buzz words like social media tools, social networks and social bookmarking.

The driving force behind modern Internet Marketing boils down to one simple phrase: conversations are markets.  If you want to access a particular market, you have to find that conversation and participate in it.  Let me say that again.  If you want to access a market, you have to participate in the conversation.  Simple.  But let’s dig a little deeper and see how we might accomplish this.

MySpace is a huge conversation.  In fact, there are thousands or even millions of individual conversations taking place on MySpace.  Same with Facebook.  The blogosphere is one massive conversation.  Forums are conversations.  Bulletin boards are conversations.  Twitter is a conversation, as is Utterz.  All the social bookmarking platforms like DIGG, delicious and StumbleUpon are all conversations.  People are interacting.  And if you want to sell a product or service to those people, you have to participate in that conversation and establish credibility within those circles.

If you’ve spent any time on the platforms just mentioned, you’ll know that within each certain users stand out as authorities.  Perhaps they have more posts or more friends or more content or more bookmarks.  In general, those who are active are quickly recognized as authorities.  So what does that actually mean?  It means you can be an authority yourself by just selecting the conversation that best matches your business and becoming an active user.

For most people, there are two problems.  First, people are fickle.  Second, they have no discipline.  Go to a gym in January and it will be packed.  Go in March and it will be quiet.  Why?  Because everyone had a New Year’s resolution they soon abandoned in favor of other healthy activies like watching TV or drinking beer.  Bottom line; those who stand the test of time will win in the end.

Never before has the formula for success been so clear cut.  It’s a simple formula.  Participate.  Be active.  Establish yourself within a community and you’re almost guaranteed to succeed, or at least make progress.

Let’s move on to fickle.  Every single day, new platforms are launching on the internet and they all allow and even promote interaction within their users.  Every day, there’s a new fad.  The problem is that if you constantly follow these new fads, you never become established anywhere.  At some point, you have to pick a particular conversation and focus on that.  Even if something flashier comes along, there’s value in sticking to your plan.

Now, am I saying that you have to limit yourself to all the old-school platforms that are no longer attracting fresh visitors?  No.  All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be too quick to jump from one to the other.  Put some time into the initial selection process.  Find the conversations that apply to your business.  Find the best forums.  Find the best blogs.  Find the best groups on social networks.  Look at them all and decide which ones you want to focus on.  Then stick to it for a while and see how your efforts pay off.

There’s another level to this discussion.  There’s something even more powerful than participating in conversations and that is facilitating conversations.  This might include becoming an organizer for an online group.  It might include adding a forum to your website.  It might include creating a wiki and then opening it up to your audience.  It might include using Ning to create your own social network around your particular business.

The possibilities are endless but you have to ensure you have an enthusiastic audience before you pull the trigger.  There’s nothing worse than a forum with no posts, a wiki with no contributions or a social network with no members.  But let’s look at an example of someone who has truly capitalized on the axiom: Barack Obama.  Now, I am not referring to his politics at all.  That is not my concern here.  But in terms of participating and facilitating conversations, he’s done more than any other politician in history … by orders of magnitude!

If you go to his website, you can create a profile and accumulate friends just like any other social network.  You can create a neighborhood and stay updated on events or even organize your own events.  You can obviously donate to his campaign or you can offer to match someone else’s donation, and even stay in touch with that other person.  But most interestingly of all, you can create your own blog within his web platform.

As of this writing, the Barack Obama website has over 40,000 active blogs, all written by individual supporters.  All these people are thoroughly engaged in his campaign and are contributing buckets of unique relevant content to his website.  They’re interacting with each other and getting more and more intertwined with the Barack Obama “change” movement every single day.  There’s no question he has capitalized on the “conversations are markets” moniker and I personally expect his dominance in this area will carry him through the November election.

Take some time and think about the conversations taking place in your field, in your business.  Do some searches on Google and Technorati and Big-Boards.  Find the conversations and begin participating in them.  You might be surprised how quickly you become a known quantity and how quickly you can start promoting your own products or services to the people you meet.

Let’s take a look at the power of email in modern internet marketing.  Obviously, the best thing about email is that it costs absolutely nothing to send out.  Back in the good old days, you had to put a marketing piece together, even if it was just a letter, and then spend buckets of money on postage to get it out into the hands of your target market.  And many people continue to take that approach.  But email allows you to get your message out with absolutely no delivery cost.

Now, there are a lot of issues with spam filters but most of them can be avoided by using a sophisticated email platform like Aweber.  Also, there are a lot of tricks to building a massive email list quickly but that’s beyond the scope of this post.  Right now, I just want to identify some of the opportunities email marketing affords you.

As you probably know, I am the organizer of the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy and as of this writing, it has over 570 members.  Once my membership rose above about 400, I started to notice all these people coming out of the woodwork, asking me if I could promote their programs over my email list.  While it’s true that some of those programs weren’t very good quality, others were and their purveyors were willing to pay me a commission on any sales that resulted.

This is a perfect example of how you can grow you business with email.  Not only can you use your list to promote your own programs but you can also use it to promote other people’s programs.  Now, there’s a balance of how many emails you want to send your audience but if you have a good program that delivers great value, you can make some nice commissions promoting other people’s programs.

That opportunity alone opens some interesting doors.  For starters, you don’t have to be an expert in the field where you’re making all your money.  The only thing you really need to be an expert on is building email lists.  If you know how to do that, you can quickly find other people whose products you can promote and earn commissions on.

You also have the power to help others.  When you own an audience, you have what everyone else wants.  The hardest part of any business is marketing.  If you own an audience, it’s a license to print money.  The cast of the popular TV show Friends each got paid $1MM for each episode for the last two seasons.  Why?  Because they owned a huge audience.  And when you own an audience, you create an opportunity for advertisers.

You may have noticed that all my blog posts close with a button directing you to my free 1-year e-course.  I run this 52-email program through Aweber and it’s all automated.  But the content is excellent.  In fact, given the sequencing of topics as well as the content itself, I think it’s some of the juiciest material I have.  If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe.  You’ll like the content.  I promise.

This free e-course is obviously my way of building an email list.  And over time, the rate at which people sign up increases, perhaps because early subscribers tell their friends or because the traffic on my site has been growing for other reasons.  Either way, it always puts a smile on my face when I get a notification email that someone new has joined my list.  It benefits them.  It benefits me.

Email marketing is a very powerful tool and I highly recommend you start accumulating email addresses if you haven’t already done so.  Use an autoresponder like Aweber and set up a program people will want to sign up for.  You might be surprised how quickly you build up a sizable list.  And once you have it, it will probably change your business forever.

If you’ve spent any time in internet marketing circles, you know the importance of killer sales copy.  You’ve received the emails describing some incredible product and telling you how much better your life will be once you’ve purchased it.  On a few occasions, you’ve probably clicked through to the website where the process starts all over again, explaining the superiority of the product, listing all the valuable features and offering dozens of glowing testimonials.

The objective, of course, is to sell the product and the art of writing killer sales copy has become a science.  In fact, every aspect of this process has been tested and optimized by seasoned internet marketers and a clear process has emerged as the leader.  It’s a motivating sales sequence that has consistently tested higher than other approaches.  And the best part is that even if you’re not a great writer, you can follow the sequence and see real results just by following the sequence.  Let’s take a look.

Step 1: Get their attention.

The beginning of your copy needs to capture the attention of your audience.  There are a variety of ways you can do this but here are a few ideas.  You could ask a provocative question.  You could make a shocking statement that appears unbelievable at first glance.  Or you could simply make a very specific statement.  People love specifics.  Quite often, including a specific number (like a percentage of statistic of some kind) will dramatically improve the conversion.

Step 2: Identify the problem or need.

Now, don’t just talk about the problem in isolation.  Talk about it as it relates to the person.  Always address the prospect, not your product.  Describe the problem and how it affects a person’s life.  If your readers experience those problems themselves, they’ll keep reading.  They’ll identify with what you’re writing.  The more detail, the better.  Present the problem front and center, so you can almost touch it.  You might even magnify the problem by describing what might happen if the problem isn’t corrected.

Step 3: Position your product as the solution.

This is where the selling begins.  Explain how your product solves the problem.  Specifically.  Tell them exactly what your product does to alleviate their pain.  Stress the benefits they receive by having your product at hand.  Don’t focus on your product’s features.  No.  Focus on the benefits.  Even go a step further and describe the emotions your readers will feel when they have your product and have a way to eliminate the problem from their lives.

Step 4: Differentiate yourself from the competition.

What makes you better?  What makes you different?  This is where you need to present your unique selling proposition (USP) and explain the importance of your differentiating features.  Don’t be shy - about your product OR your competitors.  Address them by name.  Be specific.  Tell your readers exactly who your competitors are and why your product is a better choice.  A lot of people don’t want to name their competitors by name.  Don’t worry about it.  Your readers are thinking about them anyway so you might as well step up and address the issue head-on.

Step 5: Establish credibility and build value.

This is where you justify yourself.  Tell them about your experience and describe all your guarantees.  Build value into your product by describing other products that do the same thing but are priced higher.  Talk about the financial impact of the product; how much money it could save the reader.  If a product could save your thousands but only costs $149, that’s a good deal.  If you offer a no-questions-asked 100% guarantee, that lowers the risk for the buyer.  And if you’ve been doing this for 16 years, you must know what you’re doing.

Step 6: Provide proof (statistics & testimonials).

Bring out the big guns!  Tell them about the awards you’ve won.  Give them statistics of how your product has preformed.  Get as specific as possible, describing your product’s advantages in tested mathematical terms.  That all represents factual proof.  But human proof is often even more powerful.  List a bunch of testimonials.  Include photos of the people if possible.  Photos dramatically increase the trust factor for readers.  Even include links to the websites of those same people.  For many, it’s the testimonials that end up closing the sale.

Step 7: Close with a call-to-action.

Tell them what to do.  Your readers are in the submissive position.  They are receiving your information.  That’s not an empowering place to be.  Give them direction.  Tell them how to take action.  They will rarely do so on their own.  They’re looking for direction.  That’s why they’ve read through your entire sales sequence.  They’re still reading.  That means they’re interested.  So step up and tell them what to do next.  You’re doing them a favor.  If they’re interested, that means they have the problem your product solves.  So give them the direction they need to take that last step.  Without those final instructions, all your efforts are wasted.

Effective sales copy is at the center of internet marketing.  In most cases, your readers are by themselves when they receive your email or visit your website.  That means they’re making the purchase decision all by themselves.  Your sales copy has to lead them through that process.  It has to give them the information they need to justify the purchase.  And if you’re truly confident in your product, your customers will be thrilled once they receive it.