Rnordman

In the world of inbound marketing, there is a lot of talk about the need to create “authentic” content. Typically, marketers interpret this to mean content that is accurate and captures the personality of the author or the brand that creates it. With more and more companies and brands jumping on the inbound marketing bandwagon, I would argue that this doesn’t go nearly far enough. In fact, these days, accuracy and personality are more like starting points.

If you want to truly stand out in a crowded digital pack, you’ve got to go further.

Provide your audience with something no one else is providing, and you’ve got to use your content to create trust. A recent blog on Harvard Business Review (see Volkswagon and the End of Corporate Spin) by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones really hit the nail on the head when it comes to defining why this is so important.

In it, they use the example of Volkswagon’s recent cover up of software installed to fool emissions tests and say:

“Organizations and their leaders need what we call radical honesty. This goes deeper than the modern injunction for organizational transparency. We characterize it as follows: it is proactive rather than reactive; it is speedy; it surprises people with its candor; it encourages dissent; and finally, it means engaging with employees and with a wide group of stakeholders – shareholders, customers, suppliers, regulators, and the wider society. We understand well that this can mean significant organizational culture change – it requires hard work, behavioral adjustment, consistent action, as well as free-flowing communication. But there is really no choice. In a transparent world, the truth – and the data – will out, and more than likely already are out.”

Wow.

But while the authors talk about this more in terms of how organizations handle public relations, I think it is just as – if not more – relevant to content marketers.

Think about it.

If radical honesty is proactive, it’s not enough to wait until there is an issue to confront. Instead, organizations need to develop an “open book” culture in which they regularly share information through their website, blog, or other online platform. I’m not talking about the typical marketing content here.

That’s important, but to really achieve radical honesty – and authenticity – you need to go beyond this and share what many companies see as the “third rail” of information:

• Pricing: The vast majority of companies we speak with don’t want to post or discuss pricing on their websites. Usually, they’re afraid their competitors will see this and undercut them. Or, they’re worried that prospective customers will use the information to comparison shop and go with a cheaper alternative. In most cases, both concerns are unwarranted. The number one thing just about every buyer of a good or service wants to know is “what does it cost?” The organization that can answer this question through its content will immediately be positioned as trustworthy and honest. Not only that, your competitors already know what you charge in just about every case, so you lose nothing by putting it out there.When it comes to customers, unless you want to compete on price (which I would argue in most cases is a race to the bottom), you also don’t need to worry about turning them off. When you post your pricing, the only people who will be turned off by it are those who can’t afford it in the first place – and why would you want to have contact with unqualified prospects?
• Problems: Nobody likes to admit they’ve made mistakes, but we also know that no one (and no organization) is perfect. So why are most companies and organizations so reluctant to talk publicly about problems they’ve had or mistakes they’ve made in the past?In today’s digital world, its pretty hard to keep secrets and eventually, your dirty laundry will get aired. As an organization, you’re better off sharing the problems you’ve encountered and the mistakes you’ve made before someone else does, and explaining why they happened, what you’ve learned from them, and what you’re doing to prevent them from occurring again. There is no better way to build trust than this. Period. If you’re willing to share what went wrong, your audience is going to put much more stock in the informaton you share about what you’re good at and what you did right.
• Competition: Lots of companies talk about why they’re better than the competition, but very few are willing to address when competitors are better than them. I’m not talking about telling your prospects that you’re not as good. I’m talking about telling them that you’re not as good in certain circumstances. For example, here at Quintain, we get a lot of inquiries from companies looking for help with PR or advertising. When I get those calls, I tell that person that we’re not as good at that as some of the other firms that specialize in those areas. If they want help with inbound marketing, web design, or sales and marketing alignment, you won’t find anyone better, but if what they really want is PR or advertising, I give them the names of my competitors who are, quite frankly, much better at it than we are.Every single time I’ve done this I’ve gotten a wonderful response and a big “thank you” for my honesty. And in most cases, when that same person finally does decide they need help with inbound marketing, web design, or sales and marketing alignment, we’re the ones they call. Perhaps the most famous example of how to turn your underdog status into an asset is Avis’ “We’re Number 2″ campaign. This radical honesty was the key to a massive increase in revenue for the firm and was so successful that they continued using the slogan for a full 50 years. (Can you imagine an ad campaign in which you publicly admit to being second best?)

I’m sure there are many other examples of topics that are typically considered taboo but could be leveraged to build trust with consumers, if discussed honestly and openly. But the point of this blog isn’t to cover them all – it’s to convey the importance of challenging your assumptions about what should and should not be shared.

“You can create ‘authentic’ content. But if you want to stand out from the pack, you’ve got to go further.”

A great example of how businesses can use radical honesty to generate trust and establish authenticity is McDonald’s Transparency Campaign. Originally launched in Canada and Australia in 2012, the campaign came to the US in 2014 and is all about sharing what might traditionally be considered taboo.

Remember, this is the fast food franchise that is famous for its “Secret Sauce.” Total transparency doesn’t seem to gibe with that concept, but McDonald’s actually made a video featuring its executive chef showing how to make the company’s secret sauce at home.

Talk about honesty.

The reason I like the McDonald’s example is that, not only does it show how corporations can be radically honest about things that they previously considered trade secrets, it also demonstrates that doing so makes good business sense. McDonald’s videos are amongst the most watched food videos on YouTube, and the company’s social reach has expanded dramatically as a result of the campaign. In addition, the company is posting record profits. While we could debate about the degree to which the transparency campaign translated into greater profits, the bottom line is that it certainly hasn’t hurt the business. And in the course of sharing all of this information, the company has won new fans and increased the loyalty of its customer base.

But I digress.

Back to the Harvard Business Review article, where the authors assert that “the default mode should be to share everything –only holding back that which is restricted by law or regulation.” This can be an incredibly scary concept for business leaders or marketers who were trained in more traditional approaches. The article goes on to state:

“One problem for the organizational shift toward radical honesty is that many of the people who populate corporate communications offices – the traditional home of the spin machine – have acquired their skills in an earlier era of public relations, press offices, and government liaison posts. These valuable professionals see it as their duty to protect the organization from damaging information and to brand it as attractive to potential employees, to clients, and to investors. But their often habitual reliance on spin is in tension with the new world, in which the imperative is to tell the whole story, warts and all.”

At the heart of this shift to radical honesty is the need to create cultural change within the organization. And this kind of change needs to start at the top, with leaders who are committed to honesty and transparency and demand no less of their staff. There are many ways to achieve this type of buy-in, but we find that content marketing workshops are a great starting point. The key is to bring everyone together – from the top leaders to the entry level admin staff – and start a conversation about honesty, what it means, what it can do for the organization, and what the risks are. And then, the organizational leadership needs to make transparency a mandate and lead by example. Only then will the rest of the organization feel comfortable following suit.

The reality is that the world we live in has changed. The Internet has made information more accessible, faster. To stay ahead of the competition, organizations needs to grab the digital bull by the horns and take control. Instead of reacting to the story, they need to tell the story. This is what making great content is all about, and when you make great content, you win more business. It’s that simple.

The subscription business model is rather simple: Customers sign up for a monthly (or recurring) payment, and the company provides products, often in the form of a box sent to the house, but sometimes in the form of unlimited media access or even recommendations on how to dress or learn.

Many of these subscription-based ecommerce businesses run into problems, because of things like scaling difficulties, returns, branding and curating packages. That, however, doesn’t mean that it’s not one of the most profitable business models out there – and some companies are proving it with the numbers.

From Birchbox to Craft Coffee, quite a few ecommerce subscription businesses are extremely successful, so keep reading to learn about some of the hottest brands, and how they gained this success.

Birchbox

Birchbox was founded by two Harvard business students who met while in school. The company started as an idea to make the beauty product shopping process a little easier. The company started shipping in 2010, but it gained more than 100,000 subscribers after only to years, and it has a presence in countries such as Spain, the UK and France. The basis behind every box they send out is to provide samples that people can try and see if they like for the future. After that, subscribers can choose the ones they like and only select those for shipping.

Pants by Post

As another monthly box business, Pants by Post takes a different approach than many of the apparel “item of the month” clubs.

The company sends subscribers a pair of women’s underwear every month. It’s that simple. Once again, subscribers can select their preferences and even specify that they enjoy a certain brand or style. Focusing on a single clothing item certainly helps the company stand out, but it also provides free shipping in America, and offerings for men as well.

Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix is not only in the item of the month club business, but they strive to educate subscribers on new styles. The business model works by sending several pieces of clothing that go well with each other.

The subscriber can choose to buy some of it, or none of it. What makes Stitch Fix standout is that discounts are increased when the customer chooses to buy every item in the box.

JewelMint

Jewel Mint is a subscription box company for jewelry, with exclusive giveaways for loyal customers along the way. The key component to the company’s success is that it allows people a chance to try out designer jewelry without the hassle of shopping and spending tons of cash. Not to mention, Jewel Mint sends out advice on styles.

Toys4Tails

Some dogs are picky, while others tear apart every toy you give them. That’s why Toys4Tails is the best way for dog owners to provide happiness to their little friends on a consistent basis. I would argue that the company’s success came with timing (since there was no other business like this,) but it also has a nice selection of toys and rather affordable prices.

Audible

Audible provides audio books for a subscription, letting customers listen to their favorite books while on the train, in the car or while running around. The reason Audible has found such massive success (besides being powered by Amazon) is because it provides free books upon signing up, and the listening app is near flawless.

Trunk Club

Trunk Club is similar to Stitch Fix, except it focuses on catering to men. Subscribers receive premium clothing, without the hassles of going out and shopping, and wonderful advice comes in from real people, who are assigned to each and every customer.

What’s the coolest part of Trunk Club? The company lets you meet your stylist, allowing you to communicate your needs and tell them how many clothes you need in the first place. Maybe your wardrobe is all worn out and communicating with a person would help them better accommodate you?

Citrus Lane

Citrus Lane sends out care packages to parents who don’t always have the time to shop around for their little ones. The company was eventually bought out by Care.com, after its huge success. What makes the Citrus Lane company different from other subscription businesses? It offers free shipping to start. Not to mention, the toys, books and goodies are hand selected and chosen based on awards, popularity and usefulness to children.

Craft Coffee

People drink coffee to keep them motivated to get more done throughout the day. Since coffee drinkers are often busy, why not send them the coffee they love? That’s what Craft Coffee is all about, since it delivers hand-roasted coffees from the best independent roasters in America. subscribers have a chance to try out different coffees every month, or even stick with what they like the best. This model is perfect for giving all the power to the consumers, especially considering coffee drinkers are quite particular about what they drink.

ShoeDazzle

ShoeDazzle is one of the most successful subscription businesses on this list, and they can attribute that to great pricing on designer shoes and the flawless website interface. Subscribers receive wonderful deals when signing up for the service, and loyal customers are rewarded with VIP member credits.

Customers can cancel at anytime, and they can walk through the website within seconds and cancel a monthly order or change around what types of shoes they are willing to receive. The company also offers a cool system for generating a style profile, where the subscribers punch in their preferences, style tendencies and sizes to help ShoeDazzle send out the best options for them.

That’s it for the hottest ecommerce subscription businesses right now. I know there are plenty of other cool businesses to talk about in terms of subscriptions, but I feel this gives you a great idea as to what it takes to become successful in this market. If you have any questions about building your own subscription business, or even about these companies above, feel free to drop a line in the comments section below.

Regardless of how hard you’ve worked to increase your website visits or how complex the campaign was that generated visits to your landing page, when push comes to shove that landing page needs to be great for a visitor to actually convert.

Here are seven essential elements of high-converting B2B landing pages that you should incorporate into your design, copywriting and tactical execution.

7 B2B landing page best practices to adhere to

1. Provide clear and concise header messaging

More often than not, B2B products are complex, which can make explaining them difficult. A clear value proposition with meaningful and direct copy can drastically improve conversion rates.

One of the best ways to do this is by using powerful words or invoking emotions that will resonate with your personas. Just take this example from WhenIWork:

This landing page clearly conveys what the company does (employee-scheduling software) and why it’s valuable (ease of use and time savings) immediately.

2. Provide a valuable tool or offer

There are many different ways to deliver a valuable offer to a site visitor—from a whitepaper, e-book or webinar to a more developed tool. Regardless of the methods, ensure that the content you are providing in exchange for any information from a visitor is an equal exchange for your knowledge or expertise.

One of the best examples of a great offer that has withstood the test of time is HubSpot’s Website Grader, which has been a backbone of its lead generation for the entire life of the company to date:

The additional benefit of an offer like this is that it invokes immediate action from the user, since it gives both a personalized grade on the performance of his or her website and an immediate list of action items that can be improved.

3. Include a video

It’s true, solutions and products within the B2B sphere can be complex. Use visuals and animations to your advantage to help clearly communicate the “aha” features or value proposition. Unbounce released this study that showed that including video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by up to 100 percent. Here’s a great example (from that same study) from Vidyard:

4. Use trust marks

Building trust is one of the most important responsibilities of an inbound marketer, and landing pages are a great medium to do so. Incorporating customer logos, customer testimonials or partner testimonials are all great ways to do this. A great example is how BaseKit was able to increase its pricing page conversions by 25 percent just by including a customer testimonial at the top, seen here:

5. Provide clear calls to action

Wouldn’t it be nice if your site visitors knew exactly what you wanted them to do next? Unfortunately, you can’t expect site visitors to infer what steps you’d like them to take. You need to show them. This is where great design can become an asset in helping create the visual queues that will show a visitor the exact next action preferred.

Look at the use of contrasting colors on the CTA from WorkflowMax that draw attention and provide a clear next step for the page visitor:

(Also commendable for the great use of reviews and testimonials as trust marks!)

6. Remove navigation elements

Now this one is nuanced, but in many situations you will want to remove the additional header and footer navigation from your landing page. There are some use cases, especially when using paid tactics, where this might not always apply. But when linking from a call to action to a gated offer on your website, you don’t want people going elsewhere.

Here’s a great example of a Bizible landing page housing one of its content offers. You can see that all the additional navigation has been removed, leaving the visitor a clear conversion path via the form.

7. Use thank you pages to your advantage

Finally, not using the redirect from your thank you page is a significant lost opportunity. The thank you page allows you to reintroduce the main header and footer navigation and give your prospect some key next steps, such as following through on the expectation and delivery of the promised content and having the opportunity to share your offer.

Here is a great example of an effective thank you page from HubSpot that allows the visitor to:

• Download the offer
• Share it with a colleague or via social media
• Engage further by learning more about the product in a webinar

There you have it: seven great ways you can increase your landing page conversion rates. As with any optimization campaign, these tactics won’t work for everyone, so be sure to carefully test your pages to see what will drive the best results for your business. Additionally, be sure to share your findings in the comments below!

Brussels (AFP) - EU leaders will push their wary African counterparts to help tackle the migration crisis at a summit in Malta this week, offering them billions of euros in aid in exchange for cooperation.

Having recently pressed Turkey to stem the flow of Syrian refugees, Europe is turning its attention to the other main source of an unprecedented number of people fleeing across the Mediterranean.

The gathering of more than 50 leaders from both continents on Tuesday and Wednesday will see an overwhelmed Europe call on Africa to take back more people classed as economic migrants and not refugees from war.

In return, Europe will offer development funds in a fresh thrust by the wealthy EU to tackle the wars and poverty in Africa that are the root cause of nearly a quarter of the nearly 800,00 migrant arrivals in Europe this year.

"It's a new impetus we want to give," a European diplomat told AFP.

The summit was first called months ago when the Mediterranean route from a lawless Libya was still the main springboard for migrants travelling to the EU in battered fishing boats and flimsy dinghies.

Since then the journey from Turkey over the hazardous Aegean Sea to the Greek islands, and then up through the Western Balkans, has become the principal route, but the EU wants to keep a focus on Africa.

Eritreans make up the bulk of nearly 140,000 migrants who arrived in Italy from Africa by sea in 2015, along with 18,000 Nigerians and 8,000 Sudanese, according to International Organization for Migration figures.

"Despite the current focus on Syria, the Valletta summit is very important for European capitals, because it is aimed at tackling a long-term problem," the diplomat said.

- 'Trust fund' for Africa -

He acknowledged the concerns of senior African officials like Khadim Diop, Senegal's minister for African integration. 

"We cannot tolerate double standards," Diop said, adding Europe admits people from the Middle East and central Asia as refugees while turning away Africans as economic migrants.

Invited to the meeting are leaders from more than 30 African countries, including Libya as well as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan, the sources of many people fleeing conflict and repression.

Also due to attend are the leaders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria in the drought-stricken Lake Chad basin, where 2.5 million people have been displaced by abject poverty and the Boko Haram Islamist militant movement.

The 28 EU leaders will hold a second, separate summit on their own immediately after the EU-Africa meeting on Wednesday.

The African nations will be asked to approve an action plan aimed at tackling the root causes of mass migration, according to a draft obtained by AFP.

It calls for stepping up diplomatic efforts to ease or resolve conflicts, such as those in Libya and the regions of Sahel, Lake Chad and the Horn of Africa.

The plan also aims to boost economic and agricultural development.

The European Commission is also expected to announce a 1.8-billion-euro ($2.0-billion) emergency trust fund for Africa to underpin the plan, but member states have been slow to match that amount.

"How can we engage in a serious and responsible dialogue with our African cousins if we ourselves are unable to fulfil the promises we have made them," Commission President Jean-Claude Junker said last month.

The plan involves Europe sending many economic migrants back home while opening legal channels for a limited number of others to enter the EU, where joblessness has fuelled a growing popular backlash against migrants.

African countries are reluctant to take back nationals to avoid losing billions of euros in remittances, which exceed the value of development aid, a European diplomat said. 

The leaders are also asked to crack down on ruthless migrant smugglers with the help of international police agency Interpol.

Join the conversation about this story »

The seven-year regulatory journey of the Keystone XL pipeline is now over. On Nov. 6, the State Department decided, and President Obama agreed, that KXL would not serve the U.S. national interest.

While the symbolism is huge, the effect of this decision on the economy or the environment is not. On this point, the President nailed it:

For years, the Keystone pipeline has occupied … an over-inflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties… This pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy as was promised by some; nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others.

It’s hard to disagree with this assessment, whatever one’s views of Keystone are. The entire episode will no doubt be remembered as one of the least productive public policy debates in recent memory. It wasn’t about jobs or the climate, as Christie Aschwanden of FiveThirtyEight put it, it was politics. On the plus side, it provides a useful teachable moment to clarify some of the common environmental and economic claims one often hears.

Do pipelines export jobs? Where’s the value in exporting raw unprocessed resources? Is opposition to pipelines sensible environmental policy? There are many other pipeline projects in the works – Energy East, Trans-Mountain, and Gateway, to name three – and these questions will frequently arise. Luckily, some basic economics provides some guidance.

The Economy, Pipelines, and “Value Added Jobs”

The first reason President Obama gave for rejecting Keystone was it “would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy.” Of course, he’s right. No single project could cross that hurdle. For perspective, consider a recent research paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics – a top journal – which finds the entire U.S. interstate highway system raises U.S. real GDP by about 1.1 per cent to 1.4 per cent (ungated version here). That’s the contribution of 76,000 km of highways, with annual building and maintenance costs of perhaps $100 billion. The contribution of a single pipeline that is orders of magnitude smaller in scale would essentially be a rounding error. (For a specific number on this, the pipeline may have added 0.02 per cent to U.S. GDP; based on this.) This isn’t an argument against the pipeline, but it is important to keep in mind that for any single project to make a “meaningful long-term contribution” to an entire economy is an unrealistic bar to set.

The President also cited the lack of long-term jobs associated with the pipeline. To an economist, the economic contribution of the pipeline (and indeed of any project) is not the number of workers it requires, but the service it provides: in this case, transporting oil from point A to point B. What matters is whether the value of the oil at point B is sufficiently greater than the value of the oil at point A – sufficient, that is, to cover the costs of operating the pipeline. Done efficiently, there will naturally be few jobs associated with it. If we wanted to maximize the number of jobs required to transport oil then, as University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach points out, we could establish a continental bucket brigade. Hardly sensible policy. Overall, economists do not typically think about the number of jobs, but instead think about the type of jobs. Policies will normally just shift employment from one sector or region to another, rather than sustainably increasing the total number.

Are some types of jobs better than others? During pipeline debates in Canada, one often hears references to “value-added jobs.” Consider the federal NDP position that Keystone will “ship thousands of jobs away” and that “exporting unrefined heavy oil creates no value-added jobs” (from here). No doubt the cancellation of Keystone will lead some to increase the call for domestic refining and upgrading. And it’s not just the NDP; parties across the political spectrum seem put a premium on domestic processing activities over resource extraction and export. Consider the slogan “BC Logs for BC Jobs,” or the billions in subsidies provided by the former Alberta PC government to the Northwest Upgrader. Of course, politicians are just responding to incentives. Polls consistently show broad public support for government support of domestic processing and for finding ways to “add value.”

But, what is a value-added job? A good rule of thumb is that value-added is basically just income. An activity that generates $1 billion in income for the workers and business owners (net of depreciation) is said to have a value-added of $1 billion. A “value-added job” is therefore a job that generates income. To say that something doesn’t add value is to say that it doesn’t generate income. So a job in raw extraction, which pays very well, is as much a value added job as any other.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Value-added per job is something we can measure. The following displays the five highest and lowest sectors by value-added per job, based on Statistics Canada data (source: here).

 

Oil and gas extraction has (by far) more value-added per job than most other sectors. It therefore can’t be said that a pipeline exporting raw oil comes at the expense of value-added jobs elsewhere. Of course, this does not suggest that extraction jobs are somehow “better” for the economy than other jobs. It equally does not suggest that jobs in the Hotel and Restaurant sector – which, as one can see in the figure, has a very small average value-added per job – are “bad”. The point I wish to make is that knowing how much value each sector creates per job is almost completely useless information for policy debates; perhaps even worse than useless, it’s distracting and misleading. (For a more detailed discussion, see here.)

A Distraction from Good Environmental Policy

The other aspect of the Keystone debate is, of course, the environmental implications of shipping oil extracted from Alberta’s oil sands. Many view opposing Keystone as synonymous with combating climate change. Some basic economics suggests there are far better approaches on offer.

Consider putting a price on carbon. British Columbia, for example, is a global leader with perhaps the best example of a broad-based and uniform carbon tax. B.C. charges $30 per tonne and covers approximately 70 per cent of all sources of emissions. Piecemeal regulatory approaches or subsidies for “green jobs” or “green infrastructure” are often costlier ways of achieving environmental objectives than simply putting a uniform price on carbon. For climate change, a tonne is a tonne is a tonne – and we should find the lowest cost sources of abatement. This is basic economics. (For more, see research material from Canada’s EcoFiscal Commission; in particular, this report.) As an added bonus, the revenue from a carbon tax can be used to lower other (worse) forms of taxation, such as personal and corporate income taxes. This was also B.C.’s approach. It doesn’t increase the size of government, or increase the tax burden on the average person, it just changes the composition of taxes we pay.

What does all this have to do with Keystone? For starters, the debate around Keystone distracted us from a sensible discussion about optimal environmental policies. There’s an opportunity cost of lobbying efforts, and we must use our political capital wisely. Time, energy, and money spent lobbying for one policy comes at the direct expense of another. A focus on blocking a single pipeline may actually hurt the environment by distracting attention from more effective and efficient policies. To those who want to see action on greenhouse-gas emissions with the smallest possible effect on the economy: don’t waste time debating one project or another, one sector or another, or one arbitrary emissions target or another; instead, push for a broad and uniform price on carbon and be done with it.

Support for this approach is growing, both here in Canada and around the world. Overall, about 12 per cent of global emissions are currently covered by some form of carbon price. The overwhelming majority of economists view this approach as the best route forward. (For polls of top economists on this point, see here or here.) The policy also makes for easy comparison with others. Instead of comparing emissions targets that may not ever be met, or arguing over this pipeline or that, we can compare prices. The higher the price and the broader the coverage, the more one is doing to combat climate change. Pipelines need not factor into the discussions at all.

The stakes are particularly high for Alberta, though so are the potential benefits. With a broad-based price on carbon, Alberta could confidently declare itself to be among the world’s leaders. Future pipeline projects may then no longer become lightning rods, but could be calmly and rationally evaluated on their own individual merits. Perhaps this is overly optimistic, but with the Paris talks only a few weeks away and with the Alberta government soon announcing its policy intentions, we won’t have to wait long to find out.

 

Trevor Tombe is an assistant professor in the department of economics at the University of Calgary. Follow him on Twitter: @trevortombe

The post What we learned from Keystone XL appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Arxiv - Teleportation of entanglement over 143 km (8 pages)

As a direct consequence of the no-cloning theorem, the deterministic amplification as in classical communication is impossible for quantum states. This calls for more advanced techniques in a future global quantum network, e.g. for cloud quantum computing. A unique solution is the teleportation of an entangled state, i.e. entanglement swapping, representing the central resource to relay entanglement between distant nodes. Together with entanglement purification and a quantum memory it constitutes a so-called quantum repeater. Since the aforementioned building blocks have been individually demonstrated in laboratory setups only, the applicability of the required technology in real-world scenarios remained to be proven. Here we present a free-space entanglement-swapping experiment between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife, verifying the presence of quantum entanglement between two previously independent photons separated by 143 km. We obtained an expectation value for the entanglement-witness operator, more than 6 standard deviations beyond the classical limit. By consecutive generation of the two required photon pairs and space-like separation of the relevant measurement events, we also showed the feasibility of the swapping protocol in a long-distance scenario, where the independence of the nodes is highly demanded. Since our results already allow for efficient implementation of entanglement purification, we anticipate our assay to lay the ground for a fully-fledged quantum repeater over a realistic high-loss and even turbulent quantum channel.


PNAS - Teleportation of entanglement over 143 km

Significance

Teleportation of an entangled state, also known as entanglement swapping, plays a vital role in the vision of a global quantum internet, providing unconditionally secure communication, blind cloud computing, and an exponential speedup in distributed quantum computation. In contrast to the teleportation of a single quantum state from one qubit to another, entanglement swapping generates entanglement between two independent qubits that have never interacted in the past. Therefore this protocol represents a key resource for numerous quantum-information applications that has been implemented in many different systems to date. We experimentally demonstrated entanglement swapping over 143 km between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife, proving the feasibility of this protocol to be implemented in a future global scenario.

PNAS - Twisted photon entanglement through turbulent air across Vienna

Significance - Twisted photon entanglement through turbulent air across Vienna
The spatial structure of photons provides access to a very large state space. It enables the encoding of more information per photon, useful for (quantum) communication with large alphabets and fundamental studies of high-dimensional entanglement. However, the question of the distribution of such photons has not been settled yet, as they are significantly influenced by atmospheric turbulence in free-space transmissions. In the present paper we show that it is possible to distribute quantum entanglement of spatially structured photons over a free-space intracity link. We demonstrate the access to four orthogonal quantum channels in which entanglement can be distributed over large distances. Furthermore, already available technology could provide access to even larger quantum state spaces.

Abstract - Twisted photon entanglement through turbulent air across Vienna

Photons with a twisted phase front can carry a discrete, in principle, unbounded amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM). The large state space allows for complex types of entanglement, interesting both for quantum communication and for fundamental tests of quantum theory. However, the distribution of such entangled states over large distances was thought to be infeasible due to influence of atmospheric turbulence, indicating a serious limitation on their usefulness. Here we show that it is possible to distribute quantum entanglement encoded in OAM over a turbulent intracity link of 3 km. We confirm quantum entanglement of the first two higher-order levels (with OAM=± 1ℏ and ± 2ℏ). They correspond to four additional quantum channels orthogonal to all that have been used in long-distance quantum experiments so far. Therefore, a promising application would be quantum communication with a large alphabet. We also demonstrate that our link allows access to up to 11 quantum channels of OAM. The restrictive factors toward higher numbers are technical limitations that can be circumvented with readily available technologies.

Read more »

A great sales pitch is like your favorite pizza.

No really, it is! Just hear me out.

When it has all of your favorite toppings, it’s perfect. When it has only some of your favorite ingredients, it’s just “okay.”

It’s the same way with a sales pitch. If you have all of the necessary ingredients in your pitch, it will be far more effective than if you leave some out.

There are several ingredients that make a sales pitch great. One of these ingredients is credibility.

Ever feel like your prospects aren’t connecting with your message?

It happens to many an entrepreneur.

They spend time preparing for the conversation…They do their best to build a connection with their prospect. They take the time to understand their prospect’s pain points. They develop a killer solution that will clearly make their prospect’s life better.

They get excited. They’re anxious to get the business.

Then they give their pitch.

And the prospect doesn’t buy. They don’t seem to believe that the entrepreneur’s solution will work.

And it happens over and over again. Until the entrepreneur finally recognizes the problem…

They have no credibility with their prospects. That’s when it changes.

They learn how to establish trust. They figure out how to prove to their prospects that their claims are valid. That’s when they begin to see success.

If you want your prospect to trust what you’re saying, you need to establish credibility. You have to be able to prove that what you’re saying is true.

I’m not saying that discussing the benefits of your offering isn’t important. You still have to explain how your offering will ease your prospect’s pain.

But if you want to maximize the chances that you will get your prospect to say “yes,” you have to back up your claims. It’s important because you want your prospect to trust you.

If you know you’re giving an effective sales pitch, but you’re still having trouble making your prospects feel confident about your offering, you may need to establish more credibility. This post will give you some practical ways to establish more credibility with your prospects.

Don’t Assume That You Automatically Have Credibility

The first thing you must do is realize that you don’t automatically have credibility just because you own a business. Your prospect doesn’t care about who you are until you prove to them that you are valuable.

This is why you have to go into the conversation knowing that you have to build credibility step by step. Fortunately, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

The Art Of Storytelling

Stories are great ways to establish credibility with your prospects. Telling stories about how your offering has helped other clients is a powerful way to get your prospects to trust you.

Stories are persuasive because they give concrete, real-life examples that demonstrate how your company has helped others. It allows you to use an example that closely mirrors your prospect’s situation and show them that you can get a similar result.

Having a few good stories in your pocket can give you an excellent persuasion tool to pull out when you need to establish credibility. It will help your prospect visualize the ways in which you can help them.

Here are the components of a compelling story:

• Characters: Who are the important people in the story? The client? You? Anyone else?
• Emotions: What emotions were people feeling throughout the course of the narrative?
• The problem: What issue was the customer facing? What was the impact of problem?
• Solution: What solution did you come up with? How was this solution implemented?
• Ending: How did everything end? How was the customer’s life better after you implemented the solution.

When telling your stories, try to paint as vivid a picture as possible. You want your prospect to feel the emotions your previous customer felt. You want them to feel like they’re experiencing what your previous customer experienced. Especially when you get to the happy ending!

If you learn how to tell effective stories, you will be able to appeal to your prospect’s heart and mind. It will enable your prospect to visualize the ways in which your offering can make their life easier.

Facts, And Figures, And Stats…Oh My!

As the saying goes: the numbers don’t lie. Along with your stories, you need to have a list of statistics you can use to show your prospect that what you’re saying is true.

There are probably studies that relate to your industry that you can use to further educate your prospect about your offering. They will help you back up your claims.

Here’s one caveat: don’t overdo it. You don’t want to overwhelm your prospects with numbers. It will confuse them and make them less likely to listen further. The key is to use only enough to get your point across.

Showcase Your Expertise

The knowledge you possess can be a great tool that can help you establish credibility and provide additional value to your prospect at the same time. Using your expertise for your prospect’s benefit shows them that you know what you’re talking about and that you want to be a resource for them.

It’s always tempting to want to talk about your offering, but it’s best to also find other ways to give your prospects something valuable. This is where your expertise comes in. If you know something about their industry, give them some advice or insight that will help them out.

Here’s an example. If your company does landscaping, then instead of only pitching your services, you can also give them tips on how to improve their lawn care. It’s a very effective way to benefit them while strengthening your position as a resource. It also helps your prospects feel more comfortable with you.

Conclusion

When you are having your conversations with your prospects, one of the most important things you must do is get your prospects. If they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you.

They have to trust that you have their best interests in mind. They must trust that you have the solutions to their problems.

In order to earn the trust of your prospects, you have to establish credibility. When your prospects trust you, they will feel more comfortable with the idea of becoming your customers.

Do you want to tell better stories? Click here to get your free Storytelling Template!

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

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GUEST:

Companies make acquisitions for many reasons. For a high-growth company, I think the best reason is to grow faster. You can gain access to talent, speed up time-to-market, and snap up innovations that allow you to command a premium price.

But don’t let the dollar signs blind you to reality: Between 70 and 90 percent of acquisitions fail. Why? “Almost nobody understands how to identify targets that could transform a company, how much to pay for them, and how to integrate them,” say business authors Clayton Christensen, Richard Alton, Curtis Rising, and Andrew Waldeck, writing in the Harvard Business Review.

Acquisitions may be complex, but the underlying basics are simple. I made my first acquisition — for $2,000 — when I was 14, and I’ve had the pleasure of leading four more as CEO of Coupa. There were more zeros on the end of the later ones, but I think the key elements of a successful acquisition strategy were captured in that first one.

Bubble gum and baseball cards

The deal was this: My friend and I had a growing business selling baseball cards — the kind you used to get in bubble gum packs. Our strategy was to create pre-built packages of the most collectible cards. For example, we would package a rookie card from each of the three gum companies — Fleer, Topps and Donruss — into a three-card plastic sleeve and sell the set for $5 more than we’d get selling them individually. We were reliably making about $300 a weekend at collector shows doing this.

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From VentureBeat

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One day, at an uninspiring show at a motor lodge on Long Island, we came upon a dealer who wanted to get out of the business. We looked his inventory over and offered him $2,000 for all of it. He agreed; his only negotiating gambit was to keep a few items, including a memorable Dwight Gooden rookie card.

I called my mom from the pay phone and asked her to bring me a check for $2,000. It was a lot of money for my family at the time, but we were able to pay her back in two and a half months because the acquisition was a success. Here’s why.

Acquisition readiness

First, we were building on a business that was already successful. If you don’t have that, you shouldn’t acquire anything. You need funding and the backing of your board (or parents), and your core business model has to be working. It’s a mistake to think an acquisition can fix something that fundamentally is not working. All it will do is accelerate failure.

More than the sum of its parts

The second element is that the value of the combined business must be worth more than the sum of its parts. One plus one needs to equal more than two. It can’t just equal two; that’s not worth all the other risks that come with acquisitions.

The core competencies of the acquirer and the target company should complement each other, with minimal overlap. So should their strengths and the weaknesses. Can they be more together, not less?

In the baseball card acquisition, what that guy had was a lot of good inventory that was under-leveraged and under-marketed. We were good at leveraging our inventory and marketing it. We could move as much inventory as we could get, but we were busting our tails going from bodega to bodega buying up all the wax packs we could. Adding this much valuable inventory in one fell swoop was a real accelerator for us.

Can it be negotiated?

The third piece of the equation is, can you negotiate a deal? Can you work together to find a zone of potential agreement? If the other party won’t come to the table, there’s no deal.

We were pretty sure from listening to this guy all day that he would be happy to negotiate if we could come up with a plausible offer. It was a pretty easy negotiation because all he wanted was to get out of the business without losing his shirt, while keeping a few favorite cards. But if he had said no, we would have kept trying until we found someone else, because we were ready.

Can you integrate it?

The last and biggest challenge of any acquisition is integration, and it has to be considered from the outset from the perspectives of product and people. You’ll do yourself a big favor by choosing a target where the integration challenges are not too difficult.

The product should enhance your core offering without breaking the existing structure, and it should start to add value relatively quickly. Crocs Inc.’s acquisition of Jibbitz, a maker of decorative snap-ins that let you personalize your Crocs, is a perfect example of that.

People are the bigger challenge. The people at the company you’re acquiring should have a similar culture and set of values to your own. If the people have a strong connection and a common vision of the future, most challenges will be surmountable. We looked at hundreds of potential acquisitions at Coupa and rejected most because of the lack of cultural fit.

The companies we did acquire had cultures similar to ours — innovative, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial.

Then, you need a merger plan that allows you to recognize the value. With our baseball card acquisition, we only had to worry about product integration. There was never any question of acquiring the dealer himself; there was no cultural fit whatsoever. Our plan was to integrate his inventory into our existing inventory of about 100,000 cards and make sets. We spread out our cards all over my parents’ living room, pulled a couple of all-nighters, and got it done.

Stick to the basics

I may be oversimplifying things a bit, but keeping it simple is exactly the point. It seems that key elements of every business are captured in that baseball card business: products, customers, distribution, supply chain, and HR — even though HR was just the two of us arguing over how much we should charge, who was going to go get the cards that week, and who was going to handle the money. We didn’t have a board of directors, but we had our parents looking over our shoulders.

The lesson I learned is simple and timeless: Don’t get lost in the complexity and lose sight of the basics. There is clarity in the basics. Everything is in the basics, and acquisitions don’t seem to be an exception.

Rob Bernshteyn is CEO of Coupa. He has over two decades experience in the business software industry and came to Coupa from SuccessFactors, where he ran Global Product Marketing & Management as the company scaled from an early start up to a successful public company.

As a leader, empowering your Millennial employees will lead to higher productivity, stronger morale, and increased employee retention rates. So how do you go about giving this generation the confidence to succeed and thrive in the workplace? Here are some pointers: 

Go for growth.

Millennials do not want to be a in job where they feel they are not growing both personally and professionally. In fact, one of the top reasons people leave a company is because of the lack of these opportunities for growth. Why take the time to create these opportunities for Millennials? When this generation becomes invested in a company, they will work harder and produce better work because they feel a sense of respect and loyalty. So, set Millennials up with a mentor in the office, let these employees sit with co-workers in other departments to learn about their roles, and frequently ask about their long-term career goals.

Embrace technology.

Everyone knows Millennials are attached to their smartphones at the hip, and this knowledge should help you empower these employees in the workplace. Make communication in the office Millennial-friendly by embracing social tools that promote sharing ideas, informative articles and industry news to other employees in the company.  Salesforce Chatter is designed so employees can create profiles, be grouped in with other members based on departments or long-term assignments, and share thoughts, links and files easily. Millennials will respond well to companies using this type of technology because they are used to being able to share their thoughts easily and instantly.

Let them lead.

Millennials crave responsibility and the opportunity to make an impact in the organization. Empower this generation’s employees by giving them large assignments and letting them take the reigns. Check in with them periodically and push them to succeed, but keep an optimistic tone and make sure they know you have trust that they will pull through on their own.

Foster their creativity.

These employees tend to love coming up with fresh ideas and thinking outside of the box. Create an environment where they feel comfortable doing so, and let their creativity shine. If you have shy Millennials on your team, ask them what their thoughts are regarding a certain situation or task. This team member probably has a lot of ideas but doesn’t feel empowered enough to speak up. Millennials will feel empowered by the fact you value the ideas they bring to the table and will develop a sense of confidence knowing they’re in a position to change the course of how business is done.

Do you have what it takes to empower your Millennial employees? Find out what your strengths and weaknesses are as a leader with this free assessment.

For all the visual nature of modern marketing, words are still powerful. A mesmerizing video or stunning picture gains even greater impact with a few descriptive words, and consumers still rely on language to communicate and share their reactions to everything they see online. Choosing just the right words for your marketing materials can make all the difference in how well they succeed at engaging consumers.

As you craft marketing content, it’s easy to find online lists of marketing words that sell, and just as easy to find lists of words to avoid. Of course, some advice will be more useful than others, and unless you’re a professional wordsmith — few small business owners are — you may find it difficult to assess the value of the tips you read. However, if you understand why certain words are powerful while others are ineffective, you’ll be better able to choose marketing words that hit the mark with your target audience.

What makes words sing?

Professional wordsmiths, whether novelists or ad copywriters, carefully consider virtually every word they choose. They know that word choice drives a reader’s/user’s visceral reaction to the key message the text is intended to deliver. Pick the right words in the right combination, and your prose will entertain and enlighten while conveying your message. Choose poorly or lazily, and your content will bore readers at best, and annoy or repulse them at worst.

When you’re evaluating word choice for any piece of marketing content, keep optimum qualities in mind. Good marketing words are:

Emotionally evocative

Certain words inspire specific emotional responses in people who hear or read them. For example, you might consider using the word “hurry” in an email subject line to entice recipients to take advantage of a limited-time offer. But average Americans are hurried enough in virtually all aspects of their lives; they might perceive the word “hurry” as stressful. A good marketing word will evoke a positive emotional response from your audience. You don’t have to be a professional wordsmith to interpret the emotion associated with a word; go with your gut. If a word gives you a negative feeling, chances are good your audience will react the same way.

Informative

We’ve all seen ads, emails or commercials that are all flash and no substance. They use word gimmicks to attract attention, but fail to tell the consumer anything useful about the product or service they’re supposed to buy. While such words have an initial impact, they can’t hold attention long term, or lead to the level of engagement that results in a purchase. Good marketing words tell the consumer something about your product or service, which is why words like “you,” “now” and “free” resonate.

Personal

Good marketing tells consumers what’s in it for them if they choose your product or service. It helps them understand how what you’re selling relates to their lives. Word choices that create a personal connection for prospects — “you,” “kids,” “pets,” “parents” — help consumers understand the value proposition you’re selling.

Colorful

Certain words just have style or flare. They are colorful, fun, engaging, exciting or humorous, and they can be powerful enough to overcome the innate dullness of a naturally lackluster product or topic. For example, mopping the floor is drudgery, but when you use the words “deluxe,” “deliver” and “sanitize” to describe a floor cleaner, suddenly the task seems more exciting.

Easy on the ‘inner’ ear

Most people subvocalize when they read, meaning they “hear” the words spoken in their head in their own inner voice. While people may try to sublimate subvocalization when reading lengthy materials, most will “hear” your ad slogan, email subject line or web header when they read it. This means words that sound harsh when spoken aloud are likely to evoke the same response when read “silently.” Be aware of how a word sounds and consider if that sound fits with what you’re trying to achieve.

Active

The difference between active and passive can be hard to grasp, even for professional writers. Words that speak to the reader of “doing” rather than “being” are active, and they’re more interesting to read. While you likely think of certain verbs as being active — run, jump, call — nouns and descriptive words can also imply action. For example, “driver” feels more active than “motorist” in describing someone behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Economical

Often in marketing you have mere seconds to grab someone’s attention, whether it’s with the subject line of your marketing email or a 10-second radio spot. It’s important to act quickly using as few words as possible. Good marketing is economical; it packs a lot of meaning into just one or two words. This is why “super-sale” is more effective than “everything on sale at rock-bottom prices.” Mastering word economy makes your writing brilliant. Dubious about the power of word economy? Consider the shortest English “novel” ever penned (attributed to Ernest Hemingway): “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Companionable

Great marketing words are familiar, easy to get along with and don’t require consumers to run to Dictionary.com to figure out what you’re trying to say. Words that create a sense of companionship — “Oh, I know what that means” — make prose more relatable and consumable.

Fresh

Familiarity doesn’t, however, mean you can rely on words that are stale and over-used. Given the sheer volume of content Americans see and hear every day, certain words and phrases can quickly saturate their awareness. Consumers welcome content that’s fresh and engaging. Words and messages they’ve seen too often before quickly lose impact.

Grammatical

Although social media is an important component of your overall marketing strategies, that doesn’t mean you should apply social media “speak” to every piece of marketing you do. It is possible, and imperative, to be grammatically correct, engaging and brief. When consumers see grammatical errors in content, they may not be able to cite the grammar rule it breaks but they can still know it doesn’t “sound right” to them. What’s more, poor grammar implies a lack of care and laziness that no small business owner wants associated with their products or services.

Contextual

Good marketing words make sense in the context in which you’re using them. For example, “gleam” makes perfect sense when you’re talking about toothpaste or car wax, but is less relevant in the context of a fitness club or produce stand. A word can be emotionally evocative, informative and entertaining and still not fit the context of your marketing goal.

Optimized

While people, and not search engines, make purchases, it’s important that you optimize online content for search engines; they’re the gatekeepers between your marketing content and the audience you hope will see it. While SEO should never be the deciding factor in your marketing word choices, whenever possible use words that will earn your content higher ranking by search engines.

What makes words stink?

Words fall into three categories when it comes to marketing: good, indifferent and bad. Poor word choices can undermine the most positive marketing message. One or more wrong words can dilute your brand identity, create a negative connotation for consumers, and even get you into legal trouble.

It’s imperative to avoid words that are counter to your marketing objectives. Here are some guidelines to help you identify words you should never use in marketing:

Is it jargon?

Every industry has its own language, and while jargon may be useful for communicating specific ideas and topics within an organization or industry, it’s almost never helpful in marketing. Jargon makes consumers feel like outsiders. It’s confusing, and average people can’t relate to it.

Is it offensive?

While there may be some validity to the idea of societal backlash against anything that’s overly politically correct, giving offense is the last thing you ever want to do in marketing content. It’s virtually impossible to eliminate all risk of ever offending anyone, but certain words are bound to be offensive. You know what they are — words that have racial, ethnic or biased overtones, that belittle certain groups of people, or would prompt your mother to remind you that if you can’t say anything nice you should say nothing at all. Case in point: outraged consumers leveled the ire on a huge discount chain after the retailer added a “fat girls costume” category to its website for Halloween.

Is it derogatory or insulting?

Yes, this is slightly different from being offensive. It’s possible to say something negative that, while not necessarily offending the consumer, is still off-putting. Positivity drives purchases, and using derogatory words in your marketing can give consumers the impression that your brand identity is inherently negative.

Is it crass or icky?

Some words just lack class. Others are inherently icky. Still others just make people uncomfortable. It’s hard to imagine words like cancer, rancid or puss ever evoking an uplifting feeling. Sometimes, they’re necessary — if you’re talking about a fund-raiser to benefit cancer research, you have to say the word — but often they’re not. Always look for alternatives to words that could cause consumers discomfort.

Is it duller than dirt?

Just as there are words that will always be associated with negative feelings and meanings, some words have no emotive value at all. Or, they’ve become so overused that they are no longer effective in creating a desired response. Still others just aren’t put together well, and they lack that sparkle that makes for compelling content.

Where words should sparkle

Of course, it would be wonderful if every line of your marketing materials sparkled. Certain spots, however, are more important than others when it comes to creating impact with words. Here are the top four places where your word choice must shine:

• Headlines/titles – In our speed-conscious society, many consumers make decisions about what to read and what to buy based solely on a piece of content’s headline or title. A few great words in a headline can ensure customers are interested enough to listen to the rest of the pitch.
• Your slogan – You can probably think of some great slogans – “Just do it.” “Don’t leave home without it.” “Say it with flowers.” A good tagline tells consumers who you are, what you’re selling and why they need it, all in a few choice words.
• Email subject lines – The subject line of your marketing email is the digital equivalent of a newspaper headline. It will either convince the recipient to open it, or hit “delete” without reading further. Subject lines that are long, dull, confusing or misleading won’t perform well.
• The first line of your pitch – If your headline, title, slogan and subject line have all worked to get the prospect this far into your marketing materials, it would be a shame to lose them with a lackluster first line. Packing the beginning of your content, whether it’s an email or print ad, with great words can help ensure customers will stay with you until you close the deal.

Despite the rise of digital marketing, or perhaps because of it, words remain as powerful as ever. When you choose strong words that sell, inform and elicit emotion, you create engaging content that builds your brand, boosts sales and impacts your bottom line.

I used to think becoming a writer was just about writing a lot and waiting for your big break. It’s not.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Entrepreneur decided to run my article about networks and creative work the day I first published this blog post. I don’t believe in coincidences — at least, not when writing is concerned.

If you want to get your writing noticed, if you want the world to hear your message, you can’t just sit in a cabin and write all day. There’s more to mastering your craft than that. You have to put yourself, and your work, out there.

For the past week, I’ve been teaching a free series on how to build an online audience, distilling all the lessons I’ve learned from building an audience and going pro with my writing. It’s been fun, but one thing I’ve noticed when you talk about your successes is that people like to invent myths about you.

“You just came out of nowhere!” is something people occasionally say to me. They mean it as a compliment, but I always have to set the record straight.

I’m not an overnight success

I once heard Steve Pressfield share a lesson about the much sought-after “overnight success” we all dream of, and it immediately resonated. Here’s the story in Steve’s own words:

There’s a story about the Oscar-winning actor Walter Matthau. A younger thespian is bemoaning his own struggle in show biz. “Mr. Matthau, I’m just looking for that one big break!”

In the story Matthau laughs. “Kid,” he says. “It’s not the one big break. It’s the fifty big breaks.”

There are no big breaks, only tiny drips of effort that lead to waves of momentum.

I was able to build an audience of 100,000 people in 18 months because I had spent eight years failing at it. When I learned all the ways to not do it, I finally figured out one way that worked. That’s how you succeed: you fail so many times that you run out of options and the only thing left is success.

But let’s be clear about one thing: Luck is proportionate to your frequency of attempts. It increases with the amount of work you put in.

How I built an audience

In a nutshell, here’s what I did (and what I recommend you do to bring attention to your message):

1. Focus on voice, not subject. People pay attention to you for how you communicate, not just what you say. This is your “one thing” that makes all other efforts inconsequential. When you hone your voice, you’ll have more flexibility as your interests and style change over time.
2. Build a platform. This is essential. To paraphrase my friend Michael Hyatt, who literally wrote the book on the subject, you can’t get heard today in this noisy world without building a platform. And forget what you’ve heard. You actually can do this your way.
3. Be helpful. This is the secret to expanding your reach — focus on others, not yourself. Write a free eBook. Network with people in your field by doing favors for them. Serve your way into influence. It works.
4. Create something so valuable people will want to pay you for it. This is the final step in the process and must be done last if you want it to be successful. For some, this will be the book you’ve dreamed of writing. For others, it’ll be speaking or an online course. But if you do steps 1-3 well, you will have a line of people waiting to pay you. It’s not a matter of making them, but rather letting them. Value gets its reward.

To learn more about how I did this and have helped thousands of others follow the same process, watch today’s free video (only available for a limited time).

Don’t miss the free series

In this free video, I share the four-step process I used to build my audience but also share a case study of how one author used it quit her job and start writing novels full-time. In it, you’ll learn:

• Why waiting for a big break is just about the worst thing you can do.
• How to build a platform that gets you noticed, without having to change who you are.
• The exact plan I used to pro and have helped thousands of other writers used to accomplish their goals.

Ready to go pro with your writing? Watch today’s third and final video to find out. Be sure to leave a comment on that page, sharing what you’ve learned from this free video series so far!

Click here to check it out.

What if we told you that there was one thing that could transform your sales organization from the inside out?

That by addressing this one thing you could knock out many of your biggest sales issues – the usual suspects, like sales and marketing alignment. Goals and measurement. Productivity.

But, to do it, you would have to stop concentrating all your energy on selling.

It’s not a technology, or a quick fix.

So what is this magical, mysterious answer to all your sales problems?

Focus on the buyer.

(The simplest answer usually is correct.)

From Expectations to Experience

As Gartner analyst and sales transformation expert Tiffani Bova reminds us, “The most disruptive thing in the market is not technology, but rather the customer.” Today’s buyer has tons of information available at their fingertips, literally – through social media, online rating and review sites, Google searches, and connections with other consumers. Forrester research tell us that nowadays buyers do 60-90% of their research and due diligence before engaging a sales rep.

The new buyer mentality has completely shaken up the way business is done, but sales organizations are still struggling to respond. Just as the marketing campaign died, having been replaced by “real-time” contextual marketing, sales processes must also adapt – or die. As it is now in most companies, Bova says, “when a buyer calls in, the sales rep takes them backwards in the journey as they enter them into their CRM system and make sure to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s before they can put them in their system at the correct percentage of where they are actually at on the journey.”

The solution, according to Bova: The triangulation of technology, sales, and marketing. “It has to be that trifecta of the right products, to the right customers, through the right sales model and all three need to be held accountable. Leaders at the top need to come together to strategically respond to these “new” buyers who are finding their information online first and foremost.” Content is key in bringing together your product, sales, and marketing teams.  Take a look at the way information currently flows to and from these functional areas of your organization – to start, perform a company-wide content audit – and then make sure content is not only mapped to each stage of the sales cycle but is easily accessible when and where your sales team needs it. For more tips, check out our blog on a content-driven approach to sales and marketing alignment.

Win Them Over

“The golden rule for every business man is this: ‘Put yourself in your customer’s place.’” – Orison Swett Marsden

Research shows that today’s customers view their interaction with sales as the least valuable interaction during the buyer’s journey (Gartner). The empowered, technologically savvy consumer doesn’t have the time, or patience, to be sold to. By the time a prospect is engaging with a member of your sales team, odds are good that they already have a baseline education or awareness of your product – which is why a “one size fits all” approach no longer works. The more you can personalize your interactions and content – including your pitch deck, any ROI calculations, datasheets, emails – the better your chances will be to break through the noise and close the deal. Since a salesperson’s time is money and productivity is more important than ever, the process by which you create, distribute, and update this customizable sales content is key.

Unfortunately there’s no way to predict what the “new buyer reality” will look like in one, five, ten years – it’s constantly evolving. “At the end of the day the one thing a sales rep does have control over is how they behave in front of the customer, their research and preparation, their integrity and their ability to drive trust,” says Bova. Make sure your team has the tools they need to adapt and succeed, from initial prep to point of sale, with a complete sales performance support system.

The gist of effective targeted marketing is engagement. Aside from undertaking demand generation activities, businesses make use of various strategies to enhance their conversations with potential clients.

There are numerous ways to effectively generate B2B sales leads. But when it comes to engaging specific groups, personalization is but a sacred principle.

Creating content anchored on unique interests goes a long way. B2B buyers are a complicated lot to begin with. They may belong to the same industry, but they differ with respect to the various issues they need to confront.

This is a challenge that many B2B solutions providers need to address, especially that industry players are getting more and more meticulous in their search for much needed products and services. B2B companies should then be able to adapt by optimizing their lead generation and appointment setting programs for personalization.

If you think your marketing infrastructure is insufficient in personalizing company messages, then you might want to check these tips.

Segment your send outs.

Marketing automation systems available in the software market provide for efficient email send outs. Using such software prevents the use of heavy duty email bombardment, which is nowadays an inefficient tactic. Quality leads will be the byword for the succeeding months of 2015, and you wouldn’t be able to produce them without an individualized email campaign.

Tip: Humanize your Marketing Automation

Create compelling content.

Much to the chagrin of some marketers, quality content still assumes a special place. And with multi-channel marketing continuing to gain ground, businesses need to focus on improving content specifically for each channel. Marketing automation software caters to that need, enabling businesses to distribute content based on actions undertaken by certain prospects.

Tip: Create a Customized for Target Audience

Engage your community.

This means spending more time improving your brand’s image as well as audience perception. Company blogs are an excellent avenue through which you can share your own insights regarding specific audience interests. Diversify your content to accommodate various industry issues. Doing just that improves brand likeability and traffic of qualified sales leads.

Tip: Boost Presence and Become a Though Leader in IT

Stay social.

Sure social media isn’t as effective for B2B companies as B2C enterprises, but what’s stopping you? Social media (singling out blogs) are a great way to listen to what the market wants. Networking with potential B2B partners via platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can tip you off on what to add and remove from your marketing campaign.

Tip: Maximize your Effort on Social Media

Personalization plays a vital role in effective B2B lead generation and appointment setting. Regardless of what they say about automation replacing the human side of marketing, nothing can stop a business from leveraging existing technologies to get closer to their public.

Uranium isn’t like other commodities for one very simple reason: It’s impossible to vaporize an entire city with a single petroleum or coal-based weapon that’s smaller than a two-seat car. 

What makes uranium so promising as a source of energy is also what makes it a potential menace to civilization.

Uranium is compact, easy to transport, inexpensive, plentiful, and radioactive. A few hundred pounds of uranium can cleanly and cheaply power a civilian nuclear reactor — or it can be used to create an unimaginably powerful weapon. 

The material’s trade is governed under a unique international regulatory system, as well as through stringent country-level controls.

As Gabrielle Hecht of the University of Michigan explains in her book "Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade," uranium is simultaneously treated as a banal commodity — with its own futures market and supply- and demand-related pricing mechanisms — and as a material with an intrinsically exceptional character. As Hecht recounts, uranium didn’t have anything resembling an agreed-upon market price until the 1960s and '70s.

“For buyers and sellers alike,” she writes, “the biggest roadblock to commodification was nuclear exceptionalism, which made it difficult to separate the politics of uranium from the economics.”

This tension between uranium’s banality and its exceptionality has some important implications for how uranium markets are organized. Uranium is a commodity. But it isn’t bought and sold in the same way that most other commodities are.

The contradictions of this “nuclear exceptionalism” are particularly visible in Niger, where Business Insider traveled in September. The landlocked West African country is nearly last on the UN Human Development Index. It also has the world's fifth-largest recoverable uranium reserves, some 7% of the global total. Niger's two major uranium mines are the country's second-largest employer, aside from the government.

For over half a century, the country has struggled to benefit from its uranium wealth.

The small number of buyers and sellers of uranium has given outsize power to France’s state-owned nuclear services company, which operates the mines in Niger, a former French colony.

At the same time, Niger has to deal with the tangible question of how or even whether to incorporate the material’s exceptionality into its price. The banality versus exceptionality issue isn’t abstract for a country that depends on two remote uranium mines for a third of its exports. 

The uranium market is unlike any other commodities market in the world — in ways that make it hugely complicated for a country like Niger to effectively reap the benefits of its mineral wealth.

Here are some of the factors that set uranium apart. 

It’s under intense safeguards. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversees the mining of uranium. Most of the world’s countries have what’s called an additional protocol (AP) with the IAEA that determines country-specific safeguards and regulations relating to the signatories’ nuclear infrastructure. (Niger signed an AP in 2004). Violating an AP is considered a violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty and can result in international sanctions. Raw uranium is a ways away from being bomb fuel, but the IAEA still has a role in monitoring its extraction. And defying the IAEA is considered a serious breach of international order.

Nuclear regulations are more specific within individual countries, where they also tend to be very strict. Even in the relatively free-wheeling US energy market, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps a special eye on the country’s 99 commercial nuclear reactors. Other countries have multiple levels of state-owned nuclear infrastructure, sometimes consisting of a company that procures uranium, a second company that refines and enriches it, and then government electrical utilities that purchase and utilize the material.

No one really knows what the actual global market price is. In fact, there is no real single market price. There are several semi-official prices for uranium — with an emphasis on the “semi” part.

The uranium market analysis firms UXC and TradeTech both come up with a “spot price” for the material, which is the price for the immediate purchase of a single pound or kilogram of uranium. The companies formulate a longer-term price as well. 

These prices are the result of these two firms’ analyses of various uranium transactions around the world and the general state of the market. The prices aren’t set by market activity the same way that say, the global oil price, might be. Instead, the UXC and Tradetech prices are approximations of some unknowable ideal price that can then be used as a guideline for pricing individual transactions.

In Niger, for instance, the purchase price of uranium is determined partly by averaging out UXC and Tradetech’s long and short-term prices — and partly by negotiations among the uranium mines' owners, namely the Nigerien government and Areva. 

“Negotiators have these two prices as references,” one Niger-based uranium official told Business Insider. “And the rest is really a political issue."

“Between Niger and France, it’s more a matter of politics than a matter of markets,” the source added. Still, with uranium, the line between politics and the market is notably thin. 

The market is opaque. The small number of transactions, and the difficulties of pricing uranium, means the price can be sensitive to factors that are difficult for even very high-level analysts to fully discern. 

This past summer, Business Insider spoke to Joel Crane, an Australia-based vice president of research at Morgan Stanely and an expert in uranium markets. He said the price of uranium remained low because of the shutdown of Japan’s nuclear reactors after the Fukushima incident. But that wasn’t the entire story. Japan’s sales of its stockpile of excess uranium were impacting the market — but the country's actual trading activity was still shrouded in mystery.

“The problem post-Fukushima is that no one knows how much uranium Japan has and how much they’re selling back into the market,” Crane said. 

The price can shift for reasons that no one seems to understand. One uranium industry official Business Insider spoke to in Niamey recalled attending a conference along with some of the world’s top uranium market experts. One night, the spot price jumped over 15%. Nobody at the conference seemed to know why. 

There’s a very small buyer’s pool. The majority of the world's 438 nuclear reactors are in five countries. Only 31 countries even have a nuclear reactor. Relatively few of them have multiple utilities or mining companies that actively compete for uranium. 

"Uranium is a particular product," Abu Tarka, the head of Niger’s High Authority for the Consolidation of Peace, explained to Business Insider. "It’s not like oil. You can’t sell it to just anyone. Uranium depends on people who can buy it and have a nuclear industry."

The “price” is determined through a small number of often-secretive transactions, including long-term deals that sometimes determine price, volume, and production levels for a buyer and seller for years into the future. “Unlike oil which is traded several million times a day, uranium is traded once or twice, or sometimes zero times per day,” Crane told Business Insider. “It’s a very illiquid market.”

The buyer’s pool for raw ore is particularly limited. In the uranium industry, only the owners of a mine can purchase the ore from that mine. 

Here’s what that means in practice: In Niger, the mines are operated by the French state-owned nuclear services giant Areva, one of the industry's leading companies. Ownership-wise, the mines are structured as joint ventures between Areva and the Nigerien government.

Sopamin, the company repsonsible for selling the Nigerien state's portion of the country's uranium, owns an average of 33% of the mines. Areva owns the other 67%. Areva purchases two-thirds of the mines' output from that French-Nigerien joint mining venture, while Sopamin purchases the remaining third. They each pay the same price for the ore, based on a price and a production level that the mines' French and Nigerien governing board sets each year.

Sopamin sells its share of the uranium to a small group of buyers around the world. If a buyer wants to purchase uranium from either of Niger’s mines, it would have to do it through Sopamin or Areva. This is one of the many awkward things about the uranium industry in Niger: Sopamin and Areva are partners in operating Niger’s mines, but they’re sometimes competitors in the broader marketplace.

Uranium follows a very circumscribed supply chain. There’s another wrinkle to the uranium market that warps the buyers’ market even further.

Milled uranium isn’t close to reactor-ready: The uranium has to be refined, enriched, and then loaded into fuel assemblies that can be inserted into nuclear reactors. The milled uranium has to be sent to the small number of companies that can refine it into enrichable form, companies called converters.

Only three large-scale converters exist outside Russia and China: Converdyne in the US, Cameco in Canada, and the Areva-owned COMURHEX facility in France. All of Niger’s uranium goes to COMURHEX. Technically, Sopamin doesn’t actually take ownership of the material until it arrives at the converter in France. When a utility purchases uranium, it pays a negotiated rate direct to the supplier, along with refining costs paid to the conversion company.

So Sopamin and Areva purchase uranium from a French-Nigerien joint venture at a price negotiated between Areva and the Nigerien government. The companies can then sell uranium to utilities based on a second negotiated price once the uranium arrives at the converter in France. 

No one knows where the market is going, or when, or even why. There have been uranium boomlets in the past. In the mid-to-late 2000s, it looked like one of the smartest investments out there. But the price spike was had a lot to do with the fact that Cameco’s Cigar River mine flooded in 2006. Today, the UXC spot price is less than one third of what it was in 2007.

The uranium price (such as it is) is remarkably sensitive to unanticipated freak events. As one industry official scoffed in Niamey, when a chemical plant blows up in China, as one did this past August, killing 144 people, there aren’t calls to ban all chemical plants. The nuclear industry is always one accident away from a crisis. 

Right now, the shutdown of the Japanese reactors, and the discoveries of high-purity ore in Canada and Kazakhstan, have uranium prices stuck in a long-term trough. That will probably change once Japan gets its reactors back online, and after China fires up the dozens of nuclear power plants it’s building. There are plenty of reasons to think that uranium, and nuclear energy in general, has a bright future. But no analyst can predict with certainty when the price will rebound.

All of this puts a country like Niger in a difficult spot. The government of Niger has a single major uranium customer: Areva, the company that operates the country’s two mines and buys a majority of the material those mines produce.

Niger doesn't really have a plausible alternative partner at that level of production or demand — Nigerien uranium is thought to provide a third of all commercial electricity in France. This power imbalance produces some strange dynamics in the Nigerien uranium industry. Because Areva and Sopamin purchase uranium at the same price, a high price for Nigerien uranium arguably hurts the government’s overall bottom line. If Areva pays a high prices, so does Sopamin.

And there’s little political appetite for the government to hoard uranium and wait for prices to increase. That tactic would be hard to justify in a country as poor as Niger and would only convince Areva to scale back its production. After all, Areva is suffering from problems of its own, and doesn't have limitless resources to continue potentially unprofitable mining ventures.

The close partnership between the two becomes especially strained when Areva’s business interests clash with what Nigeriens believe to be their country’s national interests. In early 2014, Areva and the Nigerien government shut down the development of a planned mine at Imouraren, in northern Niger.

This made perfect business sense. Areva could not justify putting thousands of tons of uranium ore on the market when prices were so low. It might even make long-term sense for Niger to wait for the market to shift before it develops additional uranium sites. 

In the near-term, though, the mine’s closure put hundreds of Nigerien workers out of a job, and denied the country’s often resource-strapped government of potential revenue.

Niger has to work within the realities of its business relationship with Areva, which is partially shaped by the unique nature of the broader global uranium industry. And it has to defend its own urgent national interests at the same time. It can’t just treat its ties with Areva as a normal business relationship.

One Nigerien uranium official described the dilemma this way: “If you care about fixing social issues or providing jobs in the north and you still want to make money, it’s very complicated.”

Armin Rosen reported from Niger on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project.

SEE ALSO: One uranium mine in Niger says a lot about China's huge nuclear power ambitions

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows every nuclear-bomb explosion in history

Most product copy is awful. Or worse, non-existent.

Product copy seems like such a minor thing in the grand scheme of conversion optimization, so many brands brush it off. But for companies doing it right, excellent product copy is a great way to sprinkle brand personality in a place that most people don’t expect it.

In fact, some companies do product copy so well that it’s almost a feature of the product itself.

Is Product Page Copy Actually That Important?

Do people really read product page copy? Maybe. While there’s evidence that most people skim, instead of read, online, there’s also good evidence that product descriptions matter. Substantially.

There aren’t many A/B test case studies online about product page descriptions, but that’s fine. Case studies can be misleading and the winnings illusory, anyway.

What we do have is empirical support from an e-commerce study conducted by NNgroup. In it, they found that 20% of overall task failures – when the user failed to successfully complete a purchase when asked to do so – could be attributed to incomplete or unclear product information. Here’s how they explained it:

“Leaving shoppers’ questions unanswered can derail a sale or even worse, make shoppers abandon not just the purchase, but the site as well. One shopper in a recent study could not find the information he needed in the product description, so he left the site to search Google for more product information. In the course of his search, he found another site with the same product, a more complete description, and a lower price.”

So while it’s not as blatant as a hero image or a value proposition, product page copy is an important component of a successful eCommerce site. Especially if you’ve got a large amount of traffic, beefing up your product page copy could produce noticeable lifts.

And of course there are SEO benefits, too…

I’m not going to expound upon this too much (there are tons of other blog posts on the subject), but writing awesome product page copy helps SEO.

Not writing copy – or leaving the manufacturer’s description – is the fast-track to search engine irrelevance. This is pretty intuitive. KISSmetrics gave an example image:

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And as they put it, “For example, these boots. Nothing special, just boots. Of course, the picture speaks a thousand words, but the search engines cannot see images. So make sure to add a description of the product.”

Lots more resources on the SEO implications, but we won’t waste time on that. Suffice to say it’s important for more than just conversion optimization, and is a pretty low-hanging fruit on your eCommerce site.

How Much Product Page Copy Do You Need To Write?

The short answer: as much as necessary, and no more. Like my high school English teacher used to say, “Like a woman’s dress: long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.”

That’s not very helpful advice, though. How do you know how much is necessary?

Get To The Point

As the NNGroup found, users usually only skim text while reading online, and they usually read more at the start of a sentence and at the start of a paragraph than at the end. Therefore, we can extrapolate two strategies from this:

1. Don’t waste space with superfluous or irrelevant words.
2. Give important information first (or write in an inverted pyramid).

NNGroup explained this principle using Fannie May chocolates as an example. Fannie May starts their description of assorted creams with, “Sweet dreams are made of these creamy centers and each one is its own pleasing reward.”

According to NNGroup, this isn’t a strong way to start a description because it doesn’t teach us anything that we didn’t already know. Creams have creamy centers? Of course!

Similarly, the last sentence that says, “If our rich buttercreams are your heart’s desire, this is the treat for you,” doesn’t give any pertinent information either. And they mention the one sentence that provides informational value (where they list the types of chocolates) still leaves unanswered questions. What is a Trinidad? What does “more” mean?

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Then NNGroup gives the following heuristic to follow for writing product page copy:

“Don’t waste the first few lines of product descriptions on text that doesn’t help the user understand the product. Even a single line of text that answers no product questions can deter or distract a user”

Short Words, Short Sentences, Short Paragraphs

In 1982, advertising legend David Ogilvy sent an internal menu to all of his agency employees titled, “How To Write.” Four of his 10 rules directly dealt with simplicity, especially rule #3:

“Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.”

This echoes writing advice from other greats. Mark Twain advised that you, “Employ a simple, straightforward style,” and Hemingway lived by “short sentences,” and “short first paragraphs.” And of course, Mark Twain offered the famous advice:

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

That’s all to say, don’t waste the reader’s (the customer’s) time. Get to the point. You have such a short space to tell a full enough story to quell doubts and inspire motivation. So don’t waste that with wordiness, marketing jargon, or any other unnecessary language. Here’s a good example of that terseness (with a little humor) from Firebox:

Talk How Your Customer Talks (Or ‘Everyone’ Is Not Your Customer)

Qualitative Research

Copy research is at the core of good copy, no matter where you’re writing it.

Here’s how Jen Havice put it in a previous blog post:

Jen Havice:

“Knowing what your customers want, when they want it, and how they’d like it served up to them is not just at the heart of game-changing television shows. It’s also the core of developing winning test hypotheses. It’s the why behind the quantitative data – Behind the ‘what’ of quantitative data there is a ‘why’ that informs your copy and gives your visitors an easily navigable path to becoming a customer.

When you understand the motivations driving your prospects and customers, you can reflect their feelings back to them (in their own words, I might add). That way, you’re way more likely to convince them buying from you is the right call.”

Though Jen was talking about Voice of Customer research, there are many ways of doing copy research. In an article titled Quick Course of Effective Copywriting, Peep laid out a few common ways:

• Gauge the competition. You need to be aware of your direct competition, how they present their product, and what claims they seem to be making. If you are not selling something unique, you are selling as much for your competition as you are selling for yourself. Being “like” others or choosing to be “one of the leading providers of” is a losing strategy.
• Get out of the office. The answers are not in your office and you won’t have eureka moments at brainstorming meetings. You have to interview people.

In addition, there are multiple data collection methods you can use for copy research. You can read about them in detail in our Advanced Guide to Qualitative Research.

Buyer Personas

Qualitative analysis feeds into developing accurate buyer personas, for whom you can write well-aligned copy. Buyer personas are essentially fictional representations of segments of buyers based on real data reflecting their behaviors. Their purpose is to put the people behind company decision making in the shoes of the customer.

When you understand your target audience really well, you can write copy like Chubbies’ Shorts:

This type of hyperbolic and ridiculous copy helps Chubbies sell short shorts to bros, but this style probably wouldn’t push high-definition televisions. So the lesson you should extrapolate here isn’t that witty copy sells, but rather witty copy sells to a very specific audience of Chubbies’ fans.

Everyone is not your customer, and developing accurate buyer personas helps you write for your specific fans.

There are many ways that you can structure buyer personas, and tons of blogs have written about their ways of doing it. If you’d like to read more on this, we have our own guide to creating customer personas you can check out.

Get Copy From Your Customers

One more thing regarding copy research: if you’re clever, you can pull copy from directly from your fans. The goal is to write copy in the exact same language your prospects use. As Peep said in a previous article, “If you talk about “scribing devices” and he needs a pen, there’s a mismatch.” [Tweet It!]

You can do this by analyzing your qualitative and voice of customer research. You can also do it, As Joanna Wiebe suggested, by scouring authentic customer reviews. In her KISSMetrics article, she explained how she pulled direct quotes from app reviews, like:

• “It was like having my own personal coach while I ran.”
• “I knew i needed to get off my lazy butt and start doing something.”
• “I can’t stand the music on [competitor products]. I can pick whatever playlist I like from my own music.”

Then she incorporated these phrases into the following product copy:

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So with that, know that copy research is the heaviest lifting you’ll be doing. It’s how you come up with specific copy that motivates your own prospects into putting in their credit card information. After that, it’s a combination of creativity, strategy, and expertise that will result in good product page copy. What follows are some general principles and strategies of companies that do product page copy well.

Tell Stories With Your Product Page Copy

There was a project a while back that you may have heard about called ‘The Significant Objects’ project.

If you’re not familiar, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn embarked on an anthropological experiment to see if they could resell cheap stuff on eBay and make a profit, all by adding personal stories to the item descriptions.

They hired a bunch of professional writers and let them go to town. They figured that emotionally charged stories would increase the perceived value of the products.

The results?

Each item sold at a similar profit margin, and overall the project brought in nearly $8,000 combined. The power of storytelling is real.

In one stunning example, they resold a ceramic horse head for $62.95 – A 6258.58% increase.

BigCommerce wrote a an article on product page copy a while back where they discussed the power of storytelling:

“As the shopper browses, they instinctively imagine having each product in hand, using it and enjoying it. The more powerful the shopper’s fantasy of owning the product, the more likely they are to buy it. Therefore, I like to think of product descriptions as storytelling, incorporating the elements of both prose writing and journalism.”

Inject Some Fantasy Into Your Copy

Okay, but what the hell does storytelling look like when you’ve got such a short space to tell one? Here’s a good example from DrunkMall:

Now, DrunkMall simply curates funny products from different websites, and then they write their own amusing product descriptions. This squirrel costume originally came from Amazon, where you can see that the copy is not nearly as engaging:

When Frank Luntz wrote about the most persuasive word in the English language, he gave the crown to the word “imagine.” That’s the strategy DrunkMall used with the squirrel costume, telling a story with the reader as the protagonist. Not only that, but the copy also addressed the reader’s probable doubts of buying a ridiculous squirrel costume after Halloween.

Answer Questions And Doubts

Fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Answer them in your product page copy.

Whenever you ask for money, there is a level of friction. While you can never remove this friction entirely, you can minimize it. And the best way to overcome objections is to prevent them from happening.

Remember that qualitative research you did? Analyze that again and find all the possible reasons someone might not want to buy your product. Identify trends, and figure out which ones are fears, uncertainties and doubts are most common. Then, write an answer to those.

Your analysis might bring you results that look like this:

• “What if it’s not what I’m looking for?” -> We offer a full 30-day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you don’t like it, you get all your money back.
• “I don’t think it will work in my case.” -> Show or link to testimonials / case studies where people like X have used it successfully.

…and so on. Now just work on finding a place to include that information. Even though it’s not traditional ‘copy,’ ThinkGeek does this well with the combination of fan submitted photos and lively comments/review section:

Provide Sufficient Information

According to NNGroup, most users that failed to make a purchase simply didn’t have enough information to do so.

Of course, it’s impossible to preempt every worry every single consumer could possibly have. But with the above research, and constant iteration, you can eliminate a good portion of objections on the spot. At the very least, you can be ahead of 90% of ecommerce sites with a little bit of preparation.

Often, but not always, the price (or complexity) of a product positively correlates with the amount of information necessary. Bar of soap? Maybe don’t need many details. Car? You’ll want to insure there’s sufficient information to make an important decision like that. Here’s an example from ThinkGeek giving all the info necessary for a bar of novelty soap:

Oh, and they actually give you more via a “read more” button:

There’s really not much else that I, personally, could ask about a bar of soap.

Help With Comparison

Another common complaint NNGroup found with product copy is that sites don’t often offer adequate information for comparison.

Comparison is one of the most important steps for the user. As NNGroup put it:

“You can’t assume that people will know which of multiple products is the best for them without having to compare the options. You can reduce the need for comparisons by simplifying your product line: as always it’s easier to make a simple user interface if the underlying concepts are simple. But few companies can make their product line so simple that there’s only one choice for any given customer. E-commerce sites that carry multiple vendors definitely can’t do this. Thus, we need to help users compare.”

Of course, there are comparison tools that do this, but NNGroup suggests that one of the most helpful ways to allow comparison is to give comparable information, presented in a similar way, about similar products. This helps users find the perfect product for their needs. They give the example of Pottery Barn, as you can compare all the essentials between the products:

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Use Specific And Active Language

Instead of using vague superlatives, in most cases it’s better to use specific and descriptive words. Research backs this up. A 2001 study found that descriptive menu labels at restaurants “increased sales by 27% and improved attitudes towards the food, attitudes toward the restaurant, and intentions toward repatronage.”

And in general, we trust specific language more than vague superlatives. Which of the following do you find more believable?

• “Fastest delivery in town” vs “We deliver your pizza in under 10 minutes.”
• “Best Indian food in Austin” vs “Our restaurant has won 6 Golden Spoon awards in the Indian Food category.
• “Cheapest web hosting plans” vs “Our monthly plans start from $1.99.”
• “World’s best cup of coffee” vs “Major competitions have voted Ruta Maya the consistent winner five years in a row.”

In most cases, I’d wager the specific language will win the customer’s trust.

Write Benefits AND Features

This benefits instead of features trope has been repeated so much that it has lost its meaning. It’s also simplified.

Features aren’t all bad. Hell, I grew up ski racing and we were all technical specification nerds. You didn’t even need to speak to us in full sentences, really. For certain classes of products (expensive skis), features remain an invaluable part of a product description. Here’s an example of a simple bullet point list of features:

But, what if we projected the features AND the benefits? We get super-powered copy like this:

“Everyone’s gonna hear you.” That’s an example of a user benefit.

Of course, because this is on DrunkMall, I’m sure the benefits are a little different than they would be for a military supply buyer.

Readability Matters

In an older ConversionXL article, Peep wrote that “if you want people to read your text, make it readable. Even the most interesting copy in the world is not read if the readability is poor.”

The research backs this. As NNGroup found when testing different wording styles for a website, “concise, scannable and objective copywriting resulted in 124% better usability.”

In practice, think about restaurant menus. In 2009, the New York Times chronicled an Indian fusion restaurant, Tabla, that experimented with menu design to increase sales. As the article said, they were hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors, and placement on the page could persuade diners to spend a little more.

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Among their tactics were removing the dollar signs from item prices (9 instead of $9), the use of price decoys, experimentation with several different fonts and colors, and good old visual hierarchy. And though the restaurants in the article employed different styles and lengths of copy, they all agreed that presentation and readability were important.

So what does that mean for product page copy?

Ann Handley offered the following bullet points in Everybody Writes:

• Use bulleted or numbered lists
• Highlight key points (like this one, either in bold or italic, or as a pull quote.
• Use subheadings to break up text.
• Add visual elements, such as graphics, photos, slide shows, and so on.
• Use lots of white space to give your text room to breathe.

Part of readability is using simple language, as well. That includes what I mentioned above, with the short words and short sentences. But it also means avoiding unnecessary jargon and complex language. Famed copywriter Joseph Sugarman once wrote:

Joe Sugarman:
“The use of big words to impress is one example of writing up to somebody. You’re trying to impress with your use of words while somebody else who might not be familiar with your fancy words will be lost. Use simple, easy-to-understand words…Using words that everybody can understand has a greater impact than words that most people have difficulty with.”

Here’s a self-test you can perform: Go over the texts on your website and read them out loud. Imagine it’s a conversation with a friend. If there’s a sentence you wouldn’t say to a friend, re-word it.

Conclusion

Bottom line: It’s all contextual.

It’s tough to write an article about writing product page copy, because it’s all based on the fundamental implication that you know your audience. No amount of copywriting tips can push you past that.

That said, there are certain principles that will inject a bit more power into your prose, like accentuating the product’s benefits, writing clearly and concisely, telling compelling stories, and addressing questions and uncertainties.

You have a limited amount of time and space to push your prospect to interested to purchasing. Don’t waste that space.

For the longest time, sales was built on the idea that a rep would reach out to a prospect about a product they might (or might not) be interested in, and attempt to close a deal through cold calling and high-pressure tactics.

It was a process that was built on the buyer having no information.Now, prospects are on a different playing field. Through conducting independent research, modern buyers are well-informed about a product or service before they ever speak to a sales rep. Today, effective sales processes are built on reps reaching out to prospects who have already expressed interest in a product, and helping guide them along their decision journey.

The best reps now focus on developing and maintaining relationships versus pushing a product, and this helps them sell more. A study from Ferrazzi Greenlight found that relationship-focused sales teams significantly outperformed transaction-focused teams.  

On the flip side, when a customer finds a rep boring, everything can change. A study by social psychologist Mark Leary found that when a person finds an acquaintance boring, they also determine that the person is less popular, likable, enthusiastic, and secure in themselves. Basically all the judgments a rep wants to avoid when they’re trying to create a relationship with a buyer.

So how can salespeople build strong relationships? In order to get a prospect to invest time in them, they must spark that prospect’s interest. And in the era of inbound sales, bragging about how amazing your product or service is and all the things it does isn’t going to cut it.

According to sales experts, the trick to becoming fascinating to buyers is to demonstrate your fascination with their situation. In other words, to be interesting, be interested. Here are three tips to help you kick off this feedback loop.

1) Ask questions.

Any good relationship starts with asking questions. But not just any old query will suffice. In order to really get to know a prospect, you have to ask the right questions.

To show your interest in a prospect, ask questions that are open-ended and personal. Here are some great questions to ask your buyer that demonstrate your interest in their situation:

• Tell me about your goals for this business and how you plan to achieve those goals?
• What do you think we can achieve together?
• Walk me through how success in this business enables you to reach personal goals.
• If you had to describe yourself in one sentence, what would that sentence be and why?
• Where do you see your business over the next few years?
• What do you want this relationship to look like?
• Why did you decide to kick off this project now?
• Is this a problem you’re facing across all parts of your business?
• What’s the end goal of this project?

Equally as important as the questions themselves is the way in which you present them. To signify interest, use your buyer’s name throughout the conversation. Research has proven that a person’s name is an incredibly compelling word that can spark and sustain attention. In addition, watch your tone. The goal is to come off as friendly and helpful. Keep your tone positive to signal interest and your ability to help this person.

Finally, focus on your body language. Avoid actions like crossing your arms, or slouching. Instead, lean in to show focus, smile, and maintain good eye contact. All of these are small cues that can make your pitch dramatically more effective.

2) Listen to the prospect’s answers.

Equally as important as asking questions is actively listening to the prospect’s answers. According to Graham Brodie, active listeners are perceived to be highly emotionally aware, and make the people they speak to feel better about themselves. Asking astute follow-up questions that build on prospects’ answers enables reps to more deeply connect with their buyers.

But this is easier said than done. According to Brodie, humans tend to be naturally bad listeners.

To become a better active listener you have to practice. Here are a couple ways to do so.

Ask several open-ended questions next time you get lunch with a coworker, and then follow up on each of their answers. Also practice letting them finish their thoughts before you interject into the conversation. Interrupting can deter the flow of a conversation. By letting a person finish, you demonstrate your curiosity in what they have to say and your desire to hear their thoughts.

Here are some follow-up questions to use in your next sales call:

• Wow, that situation sounds intense. How are you dealing with it today?
• After all that, at what point did you decide that you needed to make a switch, and how did you present this to your team?
• I’ve heard several problems -- I’m curious to find out how do you think we can help?
• What would you have done differently with the perspective you have now?
• Could you tell me more about that?
• Can you be more specific about X?

3) Follow their story.

Most companies now maintain websites, blogs, and/or social media accounts, and interested sales reps keep tabs on these channels. Again, sales is built on relationships. If you know your prospect’s story, you can actively show your interest in them by dropping strategic bits of research and kicking off a conversation that makes them interested in you.

Here are a few ways to follow along.

Follow them on social media.

This is as simple as it gets. By following your buyer and their company on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll automatically get all the content they’re putting out into the world without ever having to look for it. Checking up on their story will simply become part of your day-to-day.

After you follow them, strike up a conversation. Send them a Facebook message or retweet something they posted on Twitter. This is an easy way for your name to become familiar to the people in the company, so when you reach out, they already know who you are and are primed to respond.

Subscribe to their newsletters.

By subscribing to the company’s newsletters, you’re getting an inside look at how the business is operating. What do you notice about the newsletter in terms of content, language, images, etc.? What news does it advertise? How often are they sending updates out? All of these details can inform your approach when you send your initial message.

Comment, like, share, engage.

Finally, once you’ve consumed the available content, start engaging. Comment on a blog post and ask a question. Offer counterpoints to what they’re saying and spark a debate. After all, the point of gathering information about your buyer is to prepare to start a relationship. And that relationship won’t begin until you reach out and start a discussion.

To be interesting, reps need to be interested in their prospects. The old sales playbook dictates that sales reps should increase their appeal by bragging, inflating their self-importance, and sometimes, bending the truth. The new playbook holds that sales reps should demonstrate interest in their buyers to truly connect with them, and eventually convert them into a customer.

What salespeople say and how they say it has a lot of bearing on whether the prospect ultimately buys. With this in mind, reps often try to embellish their speech with long, spelling bee-style words, or industry acronyms and buzzwords sure to impress buyers.

But sometimes, the most impactful words are the shortest. The following SlideShare from Steve Hoffacker lists seven two-letter words that, if used correctly, can seal a deal.

Little did you know that "ah" and "so" -- among other two-letter words -- carried such weight. They might not be permissible in Scrabble, but they're essential to the sales process.   

In this slidecast, Andrew Jones from NAG discusses the lessons learned from over 40 supercomputing procurements. NAG has announced plans to launch an impartial HPC technology intelligence and analysis subscription service at SC15. "Developed in partnership with Red Oak Consulting, the NAG HPC Technology Intelligence Service will deliver technology insight and risk-reduction to help HPC buyers and users make better decisions and optimize their HPC investments."

The post Slidecast: How to Buy a Supercomputer – Lessons Learned from NAG appeared first on insideHPC.

For me, the beauty of online business is that you can 1) make a living anywhere with an internet connection and 2) there’s no cap to your income.

Still, many people struggle to make money online and earn a living wage from it.

So Jerry put together an excellent guide on how to make money blogging, including how to start a blog, choose a niche, and drive traffic to it.

To complement Jerry’s guide, this article will teach you 23 ways to monetize that traffic. Just as it’s important to diversify your investments, it’s important to diversify your revenue.

This is so if any income streams go south, you will have others to fall back on.

Plus, who couldn’t use a little (or a LOT) more money?

Let’s get started:

1. Write an Ebook

Selling an ebook is a classic blog monetization technique.

Ebooks offer a ton of benefits:

• To create them, all you need is the knowledge you already have
• Paid ebooks build your authority as an expert
• You can sell them on multiple platforms (like Amazon and Payhip)
• They can become great sources of passive income
• They can make effective additions to your sales funnel as lower-value offers

Many experts started making a name for themselves with an ebook. Remit Sethi, founder of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and one of the foremost experts in online business, sold his first ebook for $4.95.

It was titled “Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass.”

That ebook led to a New York Times Best Seller and 14 different premium products that made him into a very rich person — all completely online and primarily sold through his blog.

Here’s the process I follow for writing ebooks:

1. Choose a topic. Write about something your audience wants to learn, but can’t be taught in a single blog post. Many are willing to pay for a one-stop-shop of this information.
2. Create an outline. This will help organize your ideas as you write.
3. Block out time each day to write. Don’t be the person who starts an ebook and never finishes it. Block out an hour each day, two hours, 15 minutes — it doesn’t matter how long. Just write it.
4. Transfer it to a good looking ebook template. Here are a few from HubSpot.
5. Design a cover (I use Canva) or pay someone to do it (Fiverr).
6. Photoshop your cover onto a 3D ebook image. Pat Flynn put together a great video on how to do this.

You’re done! Now promote it to your heart’s content.

2. Create a Course

The next logical step for most bloggers is to create a course.

While you probably offer a ton of free value on your blog, a course can take your revenue to a whole new level.

Don’t think people will pay for this knowledge? Think again.

Here are 5 reasons why people would buy your course:

1. They want the results your blog teaches, but faster.
2. They want bonus information you don’t offer on the blog.
3. They want to be held by the hand through the process.
4. They want more access to you, either through email, phone conversations, or exclusive webinars.
5. They trust you enough (through the free value you provide on your blog) to buy your course and know they’ll probably get their money’s worth.

Here’s a quick guideline on creating courses:

Make sure the information you’re packaging together stands out above your blog content. This is the ultimate reason they’ll buy a course from you. They’re getting even more value than they can get through your blog.

Map out logical steps for them to achieve their objectives. These are usually broken up into “modules.” Each module contains a short intro, the core information, and some way to help your students take action.

To get them to take action, create downloadable action sheets that describe exactly what they should do to complete that module.

Incorporate video. Most online courses involve the instructor talking in front of a camera. If you’re not comfortable doing this, record your voice and use slides to display the information.

Your students will get the information two ways: orally and visually. This will help them retain the information, get better results from your course, and refer more people to it.

Try out these services to host your course:

• Fedora
• Udemy

3. Promote Affiliate Products in Your Posts

If you’re already discussing and recommending products and services to your audience, why not make some money from the people you refer?

It doesn’t cost your readers anything, and you earn a commission whenever one of them buys the product.

Affiliate marketing can be a great source of income for little additional work. Check out these ideas for incorporating affiliate sales into your revenue:

Idea #1: Find Opportunities in Your Current Content

First, go through the articles you already published and look for products or services you’ve mentioned. Once you find them, simply go to each website and look for an “Affiliates” page.

Then follow the instructions to become an affiliate. Once you become one, you will usually get a unique tracking ID to place at the end of each URL.

When a visitor clicks on that URL with your ID and buys the product, you will earn money.

Idea #2: Find Opportunities in the Products/Services You Use

Make a list of every product and service you use. I use a lot of online software that relates to my business. These can be great opportunities for affiliate revenue.

Go to each product’s website and see if they have an affiliate page. If they do, sign up for the program.

Since you don’t have content for these yet, you will need to create some. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Jot down how you use the product or service. Does it help streamline your work? Does it help you with SEO? Does it help you reach out to influential bloggers?
2. Create a blog post tutorial that teaches your audience how to achieve the same results using that product or service.
3. Link to the product or service and add your unique tracking ID.
4. Promote that post to your audience, on social media, and any online hubs filled with people who might want those same results.

You’re teaching people useful free information and getting money in return.

Idea #3: Find Opportunities in the Product/Services You Want to Use

Want to use a certain product but can’t afford it? What if you could make your money back in a relatively short amount of time?

If the product has an affiliate program, this is a real possibility.

First, make a list of the products/services you want to use. Then go to their websites and see if they have an affiliate program.

If they do, buy the product and sign up. Then use it, create a case study/tutorial, and promote the post to your audience like you did before.

These posts can stay active for a long time, bringing you passive income for the life of each article.

4. Promote Affiliate Products in an Email Autoresponder

Email is a powerful marketing tool. It’s one of the few channels that people check every day and are willing to be sold to in.

An email autoresponder is an automated sequence of emails that gets sent to people when they subscribe to your email list.

Here are my two favorite services:

1. AWeber
2. MailChimp

Both of them allow you to set up an autoresponder.

Just like promoting affiliate products on your blog, promoting these products in an email autoresponder can generate passive income for you.

You can either promote them directly in the emails or create blog post tutorials and promote those. Either way, there’s opportunity to cash in.

Here’s what I suggest with your autoresponder:

• Start off your first few emails with useful content that doesn’t sell anything. This will help you establish trust with new subscribers.
• Sprinkle in relationship building emails, like asking your subscribers if you can help them with anything. This will also build trust and reduce unsubscribes.
• When promoting the product, focus on the results they can get and not on the product itself. If you’ve gotten results using it, make sure to explain those in detail. This will do the selling for you.

5. Sell Email Promotions

If you’ve got a sizable email list, that’s traffic you can tap into whenever you want. It’s also totally under your control.

You can offer to promote other people’s content to your email list in exchange for a fee. This requires little extra effort on your part, and you can filter the content you’re promoting to make sure it’s top notch.

Here’s a similar promotion that Matthew Woodward offers:

Let your subscribers know you might be promoting other people’s posts to them. Keep a policy of transparency.

If you decide to move forward with this one, create a page on your blog explaining the service, how much it costs, and the traffic they can expect.

People who visit your blog will know this is an option when they need some quick traffic.

6. Start an Online Coaching Service

Coaching of any kind can be extremely lucrative.

Jon Morrow, one of the top bloggers out there, says that even a newbie blogger can charge $90/hour for a phone coaching service. And he has helped thousands of bloggers!

Phone coaching offers a bunch of benefits:

• You get to create an intimate bond with your students. This can last a lifetime and attract consistent new business for you.
• It helps you build a reputation as an authority.
• You begin to understand your audience’s deepest, most profound needs and frustrations. This information is marketing gold for other products you create and sell.
• You can stop offering or continue offering the service whenever you want.
• As you get better and better known, you can increase your rates while offering the same exact service.

To offer phone coaching, simply say that you’ll hop on the phone with them for an hour and help them with any issues they’re having.

If they’re interested, send your potential students a questionnaire. This questionnaire should tease out their biggest pain points. After they return it to you, set up a time to talk.

In the time between then and the phone call, research their pain points and figure out exactly how to help your new students solve them. The worst thing you can do is waste their time and money on the call.

When you hop on the call, simply walk through everything they should do to overcome their issues. Then give them action steps to take. You can even send them a separate document afterwards.

Finally, ask if they’d like to set up another call to catch up on how they’re doing and move them to the next stage, if they wish.

Then invoice them.

7. Offer a Done-for-You Consulting Service

A done-for-you service is similar to a coaching service. You personally help your clients solve an issue (or multiple issues).

Except, instead of them taking the actions you prescribe, you take those actions for them.

This doesn’t work in some industries, like personal training. But it can certainly work in online marketing, web design, and any other niche where it doesn’t matter who does the work.

Since you’re doing the work, you can charge much more for a done-for-you service than phone coaching. You will also most likely work with them for a longer period of time, so monthly retainers (payments) are common.

Done-for-you services can range from $100/month to over $10,000/month. It depends on how valuable your service is and how much authority you have in the space. And also how big your client’s budget is.

Needless to say, this can ramp up your revenue quickly and keep it sustainable.

8. Install a Membership Area

Membership areas can be great sources of passive income.

All you need to do is lock premium content behind a membership barrier and you’re set. Then you decide whether to have people pay a one-time fee or a monthly recurring fee.

Here are a few services you can use:

• OptimizePress
• s2Member
• MemberPress

One of the downfalls of membership areas is they usually need to be maintained and updated to keep people engaged (and paying).

If you don’t have time to do this yourself, you can use some of your revenue to hire someone to do it for you.

9. Start a Private Forum

A private forum is similar to a membership area.

It’s just a paid community that’s only available to exclusive members.

For example, StackThatMoney is a popular premium affiliate marketing forum. They charge $99/month.

Usually, a forum is less valuable than a membership area, because it’s mostly based on user-generated content. And most membership areas contain forums as well.

You usually have to charge less to run a paid forum, but you also perform less maintenance than a membership area.

10. Host Surveys from Other Companies/Sites

Some companies will pay you to host surveys on your website.

They get valuable marketing information, and you get some spare cash.

Simply do a Google search for companies in your niche and see if they offer a paid survey affiliate program.

11. Install an Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce stores are exactly like Amazon. They congregate a massive amount of products that people can purchase online.

If you’ve got a blog, specifically a WordPress one, you can install an ecommerce store directly onto your existing site.

These stores can either sell your own products, where you receive the full revenue, or they can be made up of affiliate products (or both).

The following plugins can help you install an ecommerce store on your WordPress website:

• WP eCommerce
• WooCommerce
• Jigoshop

12. Create and Sell Your Own Physical Product

Most bloggers don’t consider creating and selling their own physical product, but it is an option.

Ever wanted to become an inventor? Here’s your chance.

The power lies in the audience you possess. If you have an audience that listens to you, you can sell almost anything because they trust your judgment and expertise.

Let’s say you’re a food blogger and you invented a new kitchen item that makes slicing apples a two-step process. You can get it designed, manufactured, and patented. Then you can use your existing audience to jump start sales, prove that there is demand for the product, and get it in stores.

It’s not a conventional route, but it might be the right one for you.

13. Attract Affiliates for Your Products/Services

Do you have an ebook? A course? A coaching service?

Well, you can attract new business passively by setting up your own affiliate program and attracting other people to promote your product.

Once you have your own product, this an effective way to ramp up sales and sustain them. Here is one way to do it:

First, upload your product to Clickbank or Udemy (if it’s a course). Then do a Google search for these search strings:

• “Your Niche” + “blog”
• “Your Niche” + “site”

Find as many sites as you can and reach out to each one asking if they’d like to make commission off your product.

Then go to Alltop.com, do a search for your niche, and again find as many sites as you can.

Then, reach out to them like you did before.

You can even create a marketing kit to give to each one. This kit would teach them the best ways to promote your product and make money. It becomes a win-win for both of you.

14. Start an In-Person Coaching Service

Just like online coaching, in-person coaching can earn you a solid hourly rate.

This type of coaching can also be more effective for your students, as you’re working together in a more intimate environment. If your students get results from your coaching, they will spread your services and help grow your business for you.

Simply offer the service on your website, promote it to your audience, and promote it in your local area. Your will blog act as evidence of your expertise.

15. Set up a Sales Funnel and Drive Paid Traffic

Once you have a product or service in place, all you need to do to increase revenue is make sure your traffic converts and ramp up that traffic.

One of the best ways to convert traffic is through a sales funnel. A sales funnel walks potential buyers through the buying process and ends with the final sale.

Each phase is a logical step toward your paid product or service.

One of the best sales funnels I know of is from Ryan Deiss at Digital Marketer.

Here are the 4 main steps:

1. Offer a lead magnet
2. Offer a tripwire
3. Offer your core product
4. Offer a profit maximizer

The sales funnel for most bloggers is an email autoresponder.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet entices visitors to opt in to your sales funnel.

It’s free resource that you give away in exchange for a prospect’s email address and permission to contact them.

Some of the best lead magnets are:

• Free ebooks
• Webinars
• Checklists
• Mindmaps
• Free mini-courses

You then deliver the free resource automatically after someone opts in to your list, usually in the welcome email.

Tripwire

After the lead magnet, you offer a tripwire.

A tripwire is a low-cost offer that’s almost a no-brainer. This product can be extremely cheap ($1-$3). The goal is to turn your subscribers from prospects to buyers.

This changes the fundamental relationship between the two of you, and gets your readers used to seeing you as a retailer.

Core Product

After the tripwire, you sell your core product. This is the product that most people have — usually an ebook, a course, a coaching service, a done-for-you service, etc.

Profit Maximizer

Lastly, you offer the profit maximizer. This is an upsell to your core product.

If your core product is an ebook, your profit maximizer could be a phone coaching service. For a phone coaching service, it could be a done-for-you service — and so on.

The point of the sales funnel is to start at a very low-cost but valuable offer, and lead to higher-cost/higher-value items that naturally follow one another.

If you’re using an email autoresponder, I also suggest sending them useful free content from your blog to help build a relationship with your prospects and build your authority.

Finally, you need traffic to enter your sales funnel. If you already have a lot of traffic coming to your site, you should be good to go.

If you don’t, one of the best ways to test out your funnel is to send paid traffic. My favorite source is Facebook ads, because they’re easy to get started with.

16. Sell Advertising Space

Selling ad space is a classic way to monetize almost any type of website.

Have you been to big news sites lately, like the New York Times or Business Week? They are PACKED with ads and they get a ton of revenue from them.

Some people find ads, especially on blogs, to be tacky. They see them a spam.

Whether or not this is the general sentiment, they’re worth trying out to see if:

1. Revenue from your other products/services decreases
2. Your conversion rates decrease

If your revenue doesn’t go down and your conversion rates stay the same, then you’ve just increased revenue without sacrificing your other crucial metrics. Booyah!

And, usually, you get to pick the ads that are displayed on your site. You can choose ones that might actually provide value to your audience.

You can sell ad space many ways, but two of the easiest are Google Adsense and the Simple Ads Manager plugin for WordPress.

17. Offer a Freelance Writing Service

This is a service bloggers in almost any niche can offer.

Your blog content shows people 4 things:

1. You understand online publishing
2. You can write well
3. You’re used to following a writing process
4. You have knowledge in your field

These are qualities that every freelance writer needs. Your blog content automatically tells potential clients that you have these traits.

Businesses crave content. It’s almost a necessity in the online world, but companies always complain that they can’t find good writers who will stick around.

There’s a need, and you can fill it.

Simply create a “Hire Me” page on your website, explain that you can write articles similar to what’s on your blog, name your price, and tell people how to contact you.

18. Host a Paid Webinar

Webinars are great ways to convey a large amount of information in an hour or less.

Most of them are given away for free, but if you have some premium quality info to share, you can charge people to listen to you (much like a paid live seminar).

Try out these services to host your webinar:

• GoToWebinar
• AnyMeeting

19. Host a Job Board

Job boards match job seekers with employers. They can offer full time gigs, part time, or contractual work.

For example, ProBlogger’s job board matches bloggers with companies looking to hire someone to create content for them.

If you’ve got authority in your space and you can match job seekers with employers, you can host a job board and make money each time an employer wants to post a job opening.

You can also charge job seekers for access to the board.

20. Sell a Piece of Software

This takes significant upfront capital and/or technical know-how, but many of the top bloggers out there transitioned into selling their own software.

This software pairs naturally with their blog content. It helps their readers achieve what they’re teaching faster and more efficiently.

Copyblogger has done this with multiple products:

• Scribe
• Synthesis
• Rainmaker

21. Accept Donations

People appreciate the amount of time and effort bloggers put into each article.

It isn’t easy to be a blogger, and readers can see that.

Many of them will be willing to donate to you, even if it’s a small amount, to help you run the site and keep producing content.

You can create a simple Paypal “Donate” button and add it to your blog by following this guide by Vishnu.

22. Offer Speaking Engagements

As your reach and authority grows, you will probably be asked to speak at events.

These events can be in your local area or even across the World. People will pay you to be there and address their audience.

To make sure people know you’re open for speaking engagements, create a page on your blog that details exactly how to contact you for a speaking engagement and what talks you give.

23. Facebook Retargeting

Finally, all of these blog monetization tips are nothing without traffic and conversions.

Often, your highest converting traffic will be the people who have already visited your site and are familiar with you. If you can market directly to them, bring them back to your site, and convert them, you can increase your revenue substantially.

One of the best ways to do this is through Facebook Retargeting Ads. These ads are sent to a pool of people have visited your site in the last 30-180 days.

These people know you and are primed to buy from you.

Here’s how to set up a Facebook Retargeting Ad:

First, go to your Facebook Ads Manager, which is usually at www.facebook.com/ads/manager/. Then click on Tools –> Pixels:

You’re going to create a Custom Audience. It’s the group of people you can target in your Facebook ads.

Click on the button that says “Create a Custom Audience.” This window will pop up:

For Website Traffic, set it to anyone who visits your website.

Change the range to 180 days. This will make sure your custom audience is as big as possible. Then check “Include past website traffic.”

Finally, name it whatever you like, include a description if you want to, and click “Create Audience.”

Then click Actions –> View Pixel Code:

This will bring up the code (pixel) that you will need to embed into your website. This code will track all visitors who come to your website and then relay that data back to Facebook.

If you’ve got a WordPress site, embedding it is simple. First, install the Tracking Code Manager plugin.

Once installed, go into the plugin and click “Add new Tracking Code.” Then paste in your code like so:

And choose these options:

Then click “Save.”

It might take a few days for your custom audience to populate, but when it does, you can create ads targeted directly to these people.

When creating your ads, simply change the “Audience” to the custom audience you created earlier:

You can now market your content, products, services — anything you want — to people who are more likely to buy than random visitors.

It’s also some of the cheapest traffic you can buy.

Grow Your Revenue

These are some of the most powerful blog monetization techniques out there. I hope they will help you start making money online, grow your revenue, and live an amazing location-indpendent lifestyle.

Remember, don’t forget to diversify your revenue. Once you’ve got one stream coming in, start working on the next one. When that one is set up, work on the next one.

This will help your income grow exponentially and hedge your bets in case one fails.

And if you enjoyed the post, don’t forget to share it with your followers :)

Right now we are in the midst of a huge change in consumer and business behavior. Companies really need to get onboard and look at ways they can make a difference. These items represent just a few areas that need to be looked at

Experience

I have talked numerous times on focusing on a better experience for clients. This topic is way too relevant and I continue to work at creating a better experience. Whether it be online, in person, client service staff, physical buildings, improved processes and client perception. The “Experience” needs to be a welcoming experience for everyone to buy-in at many different levels.

Disruption

Today, with technology and a few startup dollars, it is easy for a few people to completely change the way an industry operates. Look no further than Amazon, Uber or Airbnb. Companies are trying to change their positions through acquisition of technology companies. (Google buying YouTube, Facebook buying Instagram)

Service

What does great service look like? How can the process be simple and easy for people to come and participate?

What do all of these things mean with respect to the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is becoming a quick-decision process. Consumers are on their mobile devices and want good, solid information at their disposal when they need it. Not only do they want information, they also want to initiate the transaction process.

This last item, “transaction process” is what I am working on. I am currently working on ways to accomplish this task. It isn’t about leading a person on a journey across a website. It is about giving people the information they need to initiate a transaction or have a discussion about. Consumers, today want to buy products and services. Companies need to recognize that clients value not only their money, but also their time. If we, as company executives can bring a time-savings value along with service and appropriate pricing, we will quickly see results.

The buyers journey is going from a circular track of collecting knowledge to a straight-line sprint. In a 5K race, the runners may quickly grab a cup of water on the race path, but they are typically not leaving the road to find an alternative route. Consumers are acting in a similar manner. Consumers know what product or service they want and they want people to be there when they have a few quick questions. Their objective is to make that transaction with the best information possible.

Are you working from a buyer’s journey model or are you getting your company ready for the buyer’s sprint?

There is a difference!

Picture Source: Pixabay

There’s no shortage of sales advice for rookies. We can all talk about how to make a cold call or write the perfect prospecting email until we’re blue in the face. But we can do better than that. Sales Engine seeks to help salespeople sell more efficiently and effectively at all levels so we decided to launch a blog series that provides an insightful resource for salespeople early on in their career. The “My Start In Sales” series “tells it like it is” (namely, that we’ve all been there and done that — and that’s a good thing!). We will feature one veteran salesperson in a standard Q & A format every few weeks. We’re excited about sharing these successes and failures with you.

Current location: Miami Beach, Florida

Current gig: Sales expert and founder at Engage Selling

One word that best describes how you work: Acceleration

Current mobile device: iPhone

Favorite to-do list manager: Infusion CRM for client work. Moleskin for my life!

Tell us a little bit about what you do now & whether or not you currently work as part of a sales function at your company.

I am the President and Founder and only sales person at Engage Selling. For the last 15 years, I have dedicated my work to helping accelerate sales performance for organizations and individuals worldwide. Our client routinely see gains of 25-40% per year for revenue and productivity growth. As president of the company I do all the selling. It’s the one job function I will never give up!

What was your first sales role?

Selling candy door to door in my neighborhood to raise money for band trips and soccer tournaments! My dad refused to take the chocolate to work and sell it for me. I worked in sales roles all through university and then took a job full time after graduation as a financial planner.

How did you get the job?

By referral! Isn’t that the way all the best leads are found in sales?

Did you picture yourself working as a salesperson before you started?

My dad was in sales while I was growing up so I guess you could say it runs in the family

What are you currently reading?

• The Girl on the Train. (I always have a fiction book on the go.)
• Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin

Are you an introvert, extrovert, or ambivert?

I am an extroverted extrovert

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

• You are not your customer.
• The answers are not inside your office.
• Be Nice. Stay focused. Get to work.

What do you wish you had known before you started selling?

I wish I had realized how a powerful network could create accelerated results. I was scared to leverage relationships and referrals and as such didn’t use my network effectively when I started. I’m convinced this is why I struggled terrible in the first year of sales.

Do you have a story to share about a mistake you’ve made as a salesperson? What did you learn from this situation?

We make mistakes every time we lose a deal in sales. For most sellers this is 50%-67% of the time! We have to accept that. The key is recognizing what went wrong and correcting the mistake so it only happens once. Accept that mistakes will happen. Address them an move on. I think the biggest mistake we can make in sales is dwelling on the past rather than learning from it.

Have you ever encountered the “sleazy salesperson stereotype”? How do you respond to this?

I had a car dealer tell me that a specific model I wanted was not being made, when I had just test driven one in another dealership. I had a telephone company tell me they had access to a product when I knew full well their competitor had been given an exclusive and I’ve had a sales associates refuse to address me directly, choosing to defer all his comments to my husband. There are just three of many examples. In all cases I respond the same way: walk away and not given them the business. It’s not worth my energy to fight against or try and correct their behaviour. Walking away so they don’t get the sale is a more powerful message.

What is one tool or resource without which you would not be able to do your job?

My smart phone! I’m on the road so much that it’s my lifeline to customers, family, data, and projects.

Without the right planning you could find yourself just guessing with your message in the hope that it may resonate with certain readers. The problem with this method is you end up irritating the masses with emails they don’t want, leading to high drop outs. So what to do?

Almost any lifecycle can be broken down in to these three basic stages:

• Engaged prospects
• Lapsed customers/clients
• Engaged customers/clients

Once grouped you can use these stages to create three automation streams. These streams allow you to send relevant messages to each group, keeping them engaged and ensuring you deliver results.

Here’s what you do what you can do with each group:

Engaged prospects

They have shown interest in your company but are not yet customers/clients

Your aim with this group is to draw these prospects in, get them further down the sales funnel and ultimately turn them in to customers.

Email campaigns in this stream should:

• Drive engagement through welcome program
• Educate about your brand/product
• Build trust
• Drive conversion with ‘added value’ offering
• Build a relationship

Lapsed customers/clients

These are customers/clients who may not be buying/engaging with your company

To get them spending again these customers need bringing back to the fold.

Emails campaigns in this stream should:

• Re-engage
• Offer incentives: “Come back, we miss you”
• Use surveys to uncover why they lost interest
• Remind them what they’re missing

Engaged customers/clients

They’re engaging with your company/buying your products

This group requires a different angle. Your aim here is to get them to spend more and do more.

Emails campaigns in this stream should:

• Build loyalty with ‘added value’ offers
• Tempt with exclusive offers and promotions
• Cross-sell/up-sell product recommendations
• Provide user generated content/events
• Offer refer-a-friend programs
• Offer renewal programs

Mapping out this route is an essential success factor when you’re planning your marketing automation program. As you are mapping out your customer lifecycle and all the key points during that cycle, you can use marketing automation to help influence behavior.

Take a look at an example from dotmailer of a simple customer journey mapping we undertook, following a sign up to our 30 day trial. We’ve mapped out all possible outcomes with each node as a touchpoint.

You can see how each path and action or decision, leads to an opportunity to send an important marketing message that helps nurture trialists.

Creating a map like this will help you form a plan for your own email marketing automation program. Doing this will in turn drive your data and content plan.

Mapping content

Using the decision tree above we can easily plan out the email marketing messages we need to write and the emails we need to produce for each event.

I hope you found these tips helpful, mapping your customer journey like this will be invaluable when you come to automate your emails.

For a full guide on getting to grips with automation, download our Marketing Automation Planning and roll-out guide.

According to theEMPLOYEEapp, 55 percent of US workers indicate they travel for business, which means they are often out on the road making important face-to-face connections. As a small business owner, you and your employees are almost certainly part of this crowd as you make the effort to get face time with current and prospective clients to show them how much you value their business and what you can do for them. Using mobile devices allows these in-person meetings to become exponentially more valuable. If the technology is used effectively it will allow your business to convert sales at an improved rate. How can your employees benefit from using mobile while they are on their way to—or right in the middle of—meetings with clients and customers? Here are a few ways mobility can help your small business convert sales and improve your bottom line.

Consider this scenario—your business development manager just stepped out of the office for a day of client meetings. However, they forgot when they last met with the client and what was discussed. Don’t worry! It happens to the best of us, so instead of having them panicking trying to obtain the information they need, give them access to a contact and lead management system right on their phone. A recorded 51 percent of employees feel more productive when they have access to work-related materials on their phone.

Let’s tweak the situation now. You’re meeting with a prospective customer and you can remember every interaction and every item you’ve discussed with them. You’re fully prepared and confident as you sit down at lunch and begin final discussions to formalize your contract. The customer casually inquires about where you are with a specific customization you told them you’d make to your product for their specific needs. Now, this you don’t know because it was handed off to your product manager to work directly with the customer. No worries—with the right mobile technology you should be able to use your phone to access this customer’s file and see where everything stands. Your product manager will be logging all of their interactions as well so you can see what they’ve discussed, what was promised, what has been delivered, and what still needs to be done.

Allowing employees to have full access to your business through mobile applications will help them answer any questions that come up. Each member of your team represents your business and its goals, so empower them by giving them product and service knowledge in the palm of their hand. Giving your team the benefit of flexibility will pay dividends in the way they are able to interact with customers and convert sales.

Mobile technology has become central to maximizing sales conversion for small businesses as these capabilities allow for a more even playing field with larger competitors. Technology that was once only available to the multi-million dollar corporations to convert sales is now neutralized with mobile technology. Giving you everything you need to keep your small business competitive, strengthen relationships with your customers, build loyalty and grow your business—because happy customers means steady sales.

Think about it, if your team is able to pull up data from a customer’s history while they are meeting with them, won’t that give them a better view on how to treat the interaction? If your sales team approached a customer about a specific product or service in the past but it’s been a while, you could benefit from a refresher on where you left off before meeting with them again. Review the history and adjust the next meeting’s focus while en route if you determine previous attempts to sell a certain product or to sell at a particular price point has been unsuccessful. This will help your sales team answer the client’s needs because they will have the most comprehensive picture of the client and your interactions with them to date as they attempt to convert the sale.

The world has gone mobile and your sales team should, too, because the chance to create more meaningful interactions and relationships with clients is essential to your success. Over 60 percent of employees feel more satisfied with their jobs when they are given easy access to company info. Making important information pertaining to opportunities contacts and leads accessible to the sales team on-the-go empowers your business to convert sales at a higher rate. Show them your small business is ready for whatever comes their way with the tools they need to get results.

According to founder Jay Gibb (@circuitfive), CloudSponge is a SaaS business responsible for “connecting the world’s address books and creating a single point of integration.”

Ever been on a content-sharing site and had to manually input all your friends’ email addresses? Yeah, it sucks. CloudSponge does away with this process by seamlessly integrating your contact lists through a widget like the one below.

In a sentence, they connect the world's address books through a single point of integration.

With an impressive spread of customers including Yelp!, Airbnb, and ESPN, CloudSponge has already established themselves as an authority in database integration. They’ve reached escape velocity and don't rely on investor funding. As they continue to grow and evolve, Jay found himself with questions about how to transition into enterprise sales.

Market mastery, the CloudSponge way

There was a time when contact integration software was a highly competitive marketplace. Today, as Jay explains, the competitor they face most often isn’t another vendor, but programmers who think they can build their own in-house integration software for free.

So how did CloudSponge thrive while companies like Plaxo threw in the towel?

While there’s not one answer to this question, one thing stands out above all else: CloudSponge is committed to the continuous evolution of their product.

CloudSponge began without a marketing team and were purely focused on product. In the beginning, they relied solely on self-service bots for sales. When Plaxo went out of business, CloudSponge partnered with them and, as a result, saw a large influx of customers.

Although word-of-mouth and organic search results were incredibly effective for them in the past, Jay says that he means to grow CloudSponge's customer base by ramping up both their sales and marketing.

For this coaching session, they focused on expanding into the enterprise market and charging more money.

Is it okay to change your SaaS pricing?

“The mistake we made with pricing was that we stuck with pricing that was working for too long without making any experiments”, Jay explains of their current pricing model. CloudSponge’s initial subscription plan was $25/month.

One day they decided to double the price and measure the response. Imagine their surprise when the metrics didn’t change! The only difference was that they were now making twice as much money each month.

So they doubled it again and they divided the features up between subscription tiers. Again, the metrics didn’t suffer.

Their current pricing model is divided based on organizational complexity. Although many users will find all they need within the Free plan, more sophisticated and profit-focused use cases will need to invest in the standard plan. Their Pro plan is differentiated from Standard only by the ability to rebrand the product.

“What you’re looking at right now is pricing experiment number seven,” Jay said of their current subscription model (seen above), “We’ve gone through six before it and there will be seven more after it.”

Today’s assignment: Lose customers over pricing

One of the key reasons Jay and his team continue to experiment with pricing is because they want to attract and sell to enterprise customers. They're learning more about all that's involved in selling to large organizations and the requirements that come with it: web signatures, SLAs, security audits, etc. As Jay explained, they’ve been trying to hone in on the perfect price by slowly and incrementally raising it over time. This strategy has seemed to work for them, but I challenged him to try a different approach.

If you want to find your subscription ceiling, start high. Start really high.

Why ask for $2,000 when you could ask for $20,000? As we’ve stated before: If you never lose customers over pricing, your product is too cheap.

Find a number that makes you feel something; a number that excites you! This is especially true if you’re not a “natural” salesperson.

You need to find a number that motivates you to pick up the phone every day. A number that makes dialing up prospects and facing rejection not just worthwhile, but even a little fun.

Sacrifice deals for insights

Take that number, that number so absurdly high that you’re certain your customers will never pay it, and subtract ten percent. Now, start calling up leads.

If that sounds like a terrible idea, that’s okay; asking for a lot of money can be scary.

But you’re not just asking for more money because of the dollar amount. You’re asking for more money because you want to discover how much value your solution can create for an enterprise customer.

CloudSponge charges their top-customers $500 a month. 90% of the customers on this plan might not be willing to pay any more. But 8% of customers might be willing to pay them 10 times that amount and 2% of customers might pay 100 times that amount.

CloudSponge will never learn this if they charge $500 from the get-go. The only way to learn how much value they’re really able to create for an organization is by starting with a high price.

Plus, you’ll probably find the the ceiling is a little higher when you start from the top and work down, rather than starting from the bottom and trying to work up. It is always easier to ask customers to pay less than it is to convince them to pay more.

In closing

CloudSponge became the market leader they are today by delivering a superior experience to their customers. But they might have grown even faster had they experimented more aggressively with their pricing at an earlier stage. What pricing experiments have you run in your company? What have you learned? Share in the comments below!

Are You Making the Most of Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile?

LinkedIn: It’s the working professional’s best social media ally, and yet a large number of people and businesses are not making the most of its serious networking and sales potential.

Why is this?

We reckon it might be because people don’t actually know how to optimize their pages. This is especially true for businesses and company pages. Like any other social media platform, LinkedIn has its own set of purposes and audience members, and when done correctly, it can open up a world of opportunity for growing your customer base and influence within your industry.

So how do you ensure your LinkedIn page is optimized?

Establish Guidelines

First, create a LinkedIn guidelines document. If you haven’t already established a guidelines document for all the social media platforms your company exists on, do it now. This is especially crucial for LinkedIn, where audience members and reach can be much more niche and tailored to your specifications.

Guidelines help establish the tone, voice, and content matter that goes into each social media account, and guides your social media strategy. While you will definitely want consistency amongst all your social profiles, each platform can serve a different purpose and can take on a different role.

Consider for example, while you may utilize Twitter for real-time customer service, or show a behind-the-scenes aspect of your company on Instagram, you may want to use a more professional face on LinkedIn that really displays the quality of your brand.

Complete Your Profile

It can’t be said enough that an incomplete profile is simply a waste of time – yours and your customers’. In the past, the fine people at LinkedIn have reported that completed profiles receive 40 times more opportunities (and therefore leads, business, or work) than those with incomplete profiles.

Complete profiles include:

1. A thorough bio. Use descriptive language that includes themes from your company’s value proposition to show readers what you do and why you do it best, or what sets you apart from competition. LinkedIn Company pages are also very Google friendly, so you’ll want to use keyword optimized copy, especially in the first lines of your page content. Users of LinkedIn can also search within the site itself for keywords, so be sure to include words that mean something to your business, industry, and product or service focus.
2. An avatar with your logo or identifiable image. Make it high quality and be sure it is the correct size so that the image is not stretched or condensed. Consider using the same image from your Twitter or Facebook, so you are quickly recognized across platforms. Easy enough.
3. Location and contact information. Make it easy for people to find your business or contact you. If it’s too difficult for people to reach you, they won’t. You can also create separate pages for each location of your business. This makes it so customers with specific geographical locations find the branch of your business that is most useful or relevant to them.
4. Employee profiles connected to it. Customers and potential customers want to see the faces behind the company. This also makes for a very easy way to grow your organic network. Naturally your employees are connected to many other people and businesses, which brings a large circle of people closer to you, and others more easily able to find you through these connections. Having your employees connected to your company page can also prove advantageous when looking to hire new recruits.
5. Links to important pages on your website. Linking to pages such as the services you provide, can also help you to track the efficacy of your LinkedIn efforts in driving potential customers to convert. Even better, is if you can create a tailored landing page on which LinkedIn connections can navigate to. Landing pages are especially crucial for social media. People who travel to your website through social media have already taken a step further in their interaction with your brand than the average person, so it’s ok, or better even, to send them to a specialized page with added information or a form, rather than your homepage.

12 sneaky seo tips for your linked in page from Inbound Marketing Agents

Join Groups

One key aspect to finding leads and influence within your industry, particularly if you’re a B2B company, is to join targeted groups on LinkedIn. Do a search in groups for your chosen keywords that you typically try to rank for. These include the industry you are in, products or services you provide, or general interest categories based on your audience.

LinkedIn Groups can also be based on location, so be sure to target those within your regional scope if need be. Decide what types of groups you want to become a part of, and categorize them. You’ll want to join groups who are your ideal customer profile, and also who can be partners in business, or influencers for your company and mission.

For example, if your service caters to small businesses, there are a plethora of groups on LinkedIn meant for small business owners that you can join. You do need to be selective with the groups you try to join, however.

LinkedIn’s newest update makes all groups closed, so you must be approved to join. If it appears you’re just trying to join any group to get your name out there, chances are you won’t be let in in the first place.

Groups are great for companies because not only are you able to interact through the group directly with potential customers, but you can also gain insight into their wants and needs. Groups also create a niche platform for you to publish content in, but remember, you really want to utilize groups as a way to listen to the problems that others have. Engage by providing meaningful information, or answer questions where you can.

Publish Additional Content

Now comes the important stuff, publishing. LinkedIn has a few different ways of getting your content out onto its platform, so make sure you know how to differentiate between them:

1. Company Page Updates: These are ‘status’ like updates where you can include a short news brief, announcement, or include a link or content. You can choose to include any number of things in your updates: curated content that you find relevant to the professional nature of your company, a link to a page on your website or specific product, a link to a post on your blog, a job posting, or just straight up relevant and useful original content.

What’s great about these company updates is that they can be completely tailored by audience. Share with all your followers, share publicly, or customize what you share for specific professional interests. Target a specific audience based on geography, job function, industry, company size, or seniority. In being able to target specific audience members completely, it’s possible to increase engagement with more relevant connections.

2. Second is publishing within groups. As discussed above, groups are great soundboards for listening to and connecting with others within your industry, or with customers, or potential customers.

Be warned though: LinkedIn is particularly protective of its groups. If you publish too much, without contributing to discussion or engaging with others through likes and comments, you can be marked as spam and get blocked.

Take groups as an opportunity to respond to thoughts and answer questions through your areas of expertise. If someone is looking for help with a particular issue, and you can provide a solution, do it!

Posting original content is a great way to increase your brand’s credibility as being an authority in your industry, but know that in large groups, you may not always get the level of engagement that you want. Try to identify the types of published posts within groups that people find the most compelling, and see where you and your message fits in. With time and patience, it’s a surreptitious way of social selling that can lead to others being impressed by your helpfulness, thus turn to you in the future, or recommend you to others.

3. Have your employees and executives publish on their personal LinkedIn pages. When your employees post relevant original content, or establish themselves as industry thought leaders, this can enhance your image as a company and brand. If they include links to your company page, their connections can more easily be led to you. If they include links to your website, then you’ve created backlinks to your site which can help with traffic and your page rank.

4. Finally, there is LinkedIn Pulse. LinkedIn Pulse should be used in combination with your company’s blog, but again, can take a more professional tone. Keep your content focused and succinct, but still take to a purpose of providing valuable information, not self-promotion. Consistently publishing in LinkedIn Pulse ups your credibility stock, and allows other professionals to find your influence.

Get Started!

Now that we’ve gone over the four essential parts of having your company on LinkedIn, you have no excuse not to be utilizing this powerful professional platform for business. Encourage your employees to become involved and set a plan for action, and your company can be opened up to a whole new world of prospects.

Green thumb?

Do you have a green thumb when it comes to marketing? Do you just barely touch something and it springs to life?

The idea of lead nurturing is a common topic in marketing chats and a frequent point of discussion whenever marketers and sales people get together. I used the term “green thumb” because that’s a very common gardening term that usually refers to someone who is naturally gifted (or at least appears to be) when it comes to nurturing plants or flowers in their gardens. They seem to be able to make something grow out of nothing and they can keep plants alive for a long time. That last point is especially tricky for me. For some reason keeping plants alive and growing is insanely difficult for me. Just ask anyone in the office and they’ll tell you – the ideal plant for me is a cactus.

I think just as with gardening there are some people who are just naturally gifted at nurturing and growing leads in business as well. And just as with having a green thumb in gardening I believe everyone can learn this ability and talent. What is lead nurturing you ask? Well, quite simply put lead nurturing is the process of growing and keeping alive a potential customer for your business until they become a customer. This process involves paying attention to their needs, watering them, and providing optimal conditions for their growth. It really is quite similar to gardening. Nurturing in its simplest form is simply the act of encouraging growth and life.

3 Steps to Amazing Lead Nurturing

If we can identify what lead nurturing is and how the lead generation process funnels directly into a lead nurturing process then we can begin to identify how to do lead nurturing right. The process shouldn’t be tricky or confusing. Don’t let the unknown words trick you into not doing amazing lead nurturing. Let’s get started.

1. Lead Nurturing Starts Early

When you’re growing a plant or a flower many times you will start with a seed. There’s not flower, there’s no root system, there’s really nothing more than a tiny seed. It doesn’t look anything like the beautiful flower you believe it will be in the future.

Now I want you to imagine with me that you’re in a garden with your friend. The two of you have gotten up on a cool spring morning and met in the flower bed behind your house to plant some beautiful tulips you’ve just gotten in. Now as you kneel in the dirt next to your friend you begin the process of digging the holes to place the flowers into. But your friend is not helping! In fact, he’s sitting there with a tulip bulb in his hand. As you watch him he turns it over slowly in his hand and then carelessly tosses it over his shoulder before selecting another from the bag. He does this again and again, until finally you stop him and ask what he’s doing throwing these great tulip bulbs away! What would you say if his response was that these weren’t tulips at all because they didn’t look anything like a tulip. They weren’t even green!

Obviously you’d be shocked and a bit confused that your friend didn’t understand the potential these tulip bulbs held to become stunningly beautiful tulips…when they bloomed. You would have to explain to him that these seeds would turn into beautiful flowers, over time and with the proper care. They might not look like something beautiful now, but with the right care and love they would eventually grow to become a beautiful tulip. Lead nurturing should be done the same way. Lead nurturing must start early, well before your lead actually even looks like a lead. You have to nurture them with attention, love, and care. You have to understand the potential each lead has to become a beautiful customer.

2. Lead Nurturing Is Consistent

Continuing with our story in the garden, the tulips you planted are continually in need of care. You will need to water them regularly, ensure they get proper sunlight, and maintain ideal temperatures. In short, you have to care for their survival with constant and consistent attention. The same happens when you are nurturing leads in your marketing. You have to consistently water (sending timely information), you have to make sure they get proper sunlight (providing relevant information), and maintain ideal temperatures (offer easy ways to respond). Did you get those? Let me highlight them again and provide a sentence or two more detail on each.

Send Timely Information: Don’t flood new leads with information immediately upon the first time you make contact with them. Just like when watering a plant, you want to send information consistently over time. Nurture leads daily, weekly, or monthly as appropriate for your particular market or industry.

Provide Relevant Information: Don’t spam your leads with information that’s not relevant. You want to shed light on questions they have and provide answers to problems. You want to be sunshine and warmth for them in the sense of being an environment that encourages their growth and development. Continually.

Make Responses Easy: You want to be listening to your leads as you nurture them. You need to consistently provide ways for leads to become customers. This is the ideal temperature aspect of nurturing. If you provide a consistent way for leads to respond you give them an optimal “warm and fuzzy” feeling for growth and development.

3. Lead Nurturing Takes Time

The last thing to remember when nurturing leads is the important aspect that everything takes time. If you’ve ever planted anything before you know the results are not instant. You have to follow the process. You have to trust that the things you do day in and day out without seeing any immediate results are serving a purpose and doing something greater. You’ll see the results if you are consistent in following your processes. Your ongoing watering, providing relevant information, and making feedback easy should begin very early and must be consistent. You’ll see results over time. Now, some leads may be much faster to grow and bloom but most will take time.

Lead nurturing requires patient and persistent marketing.

I know one of my own biggest weaknesses is patience. I work all the time on being more patient and letting things unfold but it’s still a struggle I must face every day. Nurturing leads takes time. But let me be clear on this point about one thing. Just because this takes time does not mean passively waiting; instead we must do active waiting.

Lead Nurturing Software

Lead nurturing software helps you accomplish these steps. No longer stress about being consistent or contacting each lead at the optimal time. With a strong lead nurturing platform you can automate the lead process and still personalize each point of contact with your potential customer. A lead management software system helps nurture leads by making you consistent in your approach. This is one of the greatest benefits to using a marketing automation and lead nurturing platforms.

We must stay actively engaged in nurturing and growing a lead using the steps mentioned above. So don’t lose heart, don’t give up easy. Be consistent and be patient. And understand that nurturing your leads takes time. Water those leads and watch them bloom into an awesome customer!

Interested in learning how any why marketing automation is will accelerate your lead nurturing? click here to request your private marketing automation demo.

There is no shortage of email these days. And if you are a marketer, the chances are very high that your emails are in danger of landing in your recipient’s spam or junk folder. There are steps that you can take to minimize your emails ending up as junk, or just as bad, being deleted on sight.

Here are a few tips on how to make sure the emails you write will get opened AND read.

Subject lines

Of course, your entire email matters, but if your subject line fails to attract attention — or attracts the wrong kind of attention — your email will never get read. Think about how you read a newspaper. You skim the headlines and read only the stories that interest you, right? It works the same way when you have an overflowing inbox that you have to sort through. When crafting your headlines, consider the things that people are looking for in an email and the things that turn them off.

What people want to see in their inbox:

• Useful information on a subject they are interested in
• Critical information related to things they are involved in
• Personal email from friends and acquaintances
• Rewards and benefits from companies they do business with
• News and timely information could be helpful

What causes people to delete your email without opening it:

• All caps and exclamation points
• Donation requests
• Pleas for help
• The words “special offer” or “FREE”
• Statements that are too good to be true

Frequency

At the outset, you want to establish how often you plan to send out email. Make sure your subscribers know what to expect when they sign up to your list. Then be consistent and stick to your schedule. As long as your subscribers know to expect your email and they get used to seeing them on a regular basis, they aren’t likely to hit the spam button on you.

Content

If you want people to actually look forward to getting your emails and then reading them word for word, you have to create interesting content that entertains people while giving them information they can use. Think of it as feeding your audience broccoli that tastes like pizza. Boring and irrelevant is the kiss of death.

From: You

Send your emails from an email address that has your name in it. It doesn’t have to be your personal email address, but vague, generic no-reply addresses are a dead giveaway that you are a marketer with no interest in building a personal relationship with your audience.

Conversational

Write your emails in a conversational tone if you want people to actually read them. Emails written in corporate-speak, using jargon and formal language that would be more appropriate for company documents and legal or academic papers should be avoided at all costs. Formal language and jargon throw up barriers between you and the reader and create a cold, distant atmosphere. Treat your reader like a friend and talk to them like one.

Emotional

In order to be persuasive, your emails should appeal to your readers on an emotional level. Use plenty of sensory words. Sensory words are like power words — they can make even mundane topics come alive.

Curiosity

Studies have shown that the most powerful way to get people to read your emails is to pique their curiosity. Create an itch with your subject line that can only be scratched when the person opens and reads your email. Of course, you can go too far with this. Click-baiters use this method in the most annoying way possible. They often create strong curiosity and then fail to follow through and satisfy it or their headlines are so misleading that it ends up creating frustration in the reader.

Writing an email for an upcoming tradeshow? Refresh your exhibition plan with this free ebook.

With all the focus on digital marketing these days, you’d be forgiven for assuming that snail mail has gone the way of the dodo. But don’t throw out your stamp collection just yet. This infographic from United Mail has some facts about the ongoing value of direct mail that may surprise you!

The fact is, more people open all of their mail than all of their email. Think about it – how much junk mail do you tend to get in a day? 70-80% of consumers say that they open all of the direct mail, and 79% of them will act on direct mail immediately, versus 45% for emails. 51% of people say that they prefer to get direct mail from local shops, and 48% say the same of banks. In one study, out of a collection of 5000 prospects, there was a 3.4% response rate for direct mail – far higher than the .12% typical of email campaigns.

Omnichannel marketing is the best way to cover all of your bases as a business – and your peers agree. 80% of marketers plan to run cross-channel marketing campaigns in 2014, with 38% planning to use 3 channels and 29% raising the stakes to 4. They’re not wrong – research shows that customers spend 25% more when businesses combine direct and email marketing, with prospects 10-20% more likely to convert on direct mail. Using both approaches boosts brand awareness and recall, and creates a user-friendly customer experience. Many older customers don’t even use email, while many younger ones are savvy enough to block sales messages with inbox filters.

Make your direct mail more appealing:

• Customize and personalize your content, both inside the envelope and outside
• 70% of customers are more likely to open mail with graphics and colours on the front
• Reinforce your message with inserts
• Vary your mailings while still reinforcing your brand image
• Let customers respond to direct mail used web-based services

Make sure your targets are bulls-eyes:

• Use databases that filter results based on your specific needs
• Develop in-house databases
• Purchase mailing lists to build up your database numbers

Does this infographic get you thinking about snail mail in a new light? Are you already benefiting from omnichannel marketing? Let us know in the comments.