This Online Lead Generation Cheat Sheet shows the eight step process you can use to generate hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand new e-mail subscribers and highly-qualified sales-leads every month – and automatically drop them in a system that turns them from prospects into paying customers and clients.

RIGHT-CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
(5MB PDF download,)

The cheat sheet covers each of the eight steps involved in a successful online list building, lead generation and client attraction system, which include…

1. Identify your ‘most wanted’ type of client.
2. Determine their ‘pain’
3. “Shrink Wrap Your Brain!”
4. Repurpose your content
5. Launch Lead Pages
6. Design a Lead Nurturing sequence
7. Promote the Lead Page
8. Review & Refine

Even though the cheat sheet’s crammed with information, I realise it’s going to raise a lot of questions, so sometime soon I’ll release a video that explains each of these steps in more detail.

I hope find the cheat sheet useful and I look forward to releasing the video shortly.

All my best,

Ed Rivis

119 people responded to my ‘survey call’ on Monday and I’m staggered by the response (and also a bit humbled.) Thankyou to everyone who took part.

In addition to all the suggestions and awesome feedback there were also more than a handful of people who question how or why landing pages are so important — so I’ve responded to them directly in the following video… (click the image)

Also in the same video I’ve revealed how different types of companies can use landing pages with great effect, which traffic tactics to get people on them (and which to avoid), and I also explain how one business that is getting 2000 visitors a month and yet NO sales has a massive opportunity on their hands.

Warning: None of this was scripted and I have a tendency to ‘umm’ and ‘err’ when the record button’s pressed and I don’t have a script. Hopefully this is good enough for public consumption!

After you watched it please leave a comment if you have any more questions about landing pages. Thanks, and have a great weekend!

-Ed.

How would you like more sales and response without getting a single extra visitor to your site?

I’m asking because most web site owners are desperately clamouring for ‘more traffic’, and yet many are totally overlooking one of the most critical aspects of online sales and enquiry generation… which is to optimise what’s called the ‘Conversion Rate’.

Your website’s conversion rate is the number of people who buy or enquire from your website expressed as a percentage of the total number of people who visit it.

In other words, if you get 100 people on your website, and 10 of them buy or enquire, then your site is said to have a 10% conversion rate.

Now in my experience most small business owners are disappointed and frustrated with the lack of sales their site’s helping them achieve — most sites are getting way less than 10% conversion rate.

In fact most people think the main problem with their site is that they’re not getting enough people to it — when in fact the first thing they need to actually fix is not getting more traffic but improving their conversion rate.

That way you can get more sales from the same volume of traffic — and the money you spend advertising and promoting and getting more traffic to your site is going to produce a higher return on investment.

So the key is to find a way to not only increase traffic to your site, but also to increase it’s conversion rate.

In fact providing your site’s already getting some traffic — I’d recommend you optimise your conversion rate NOW — before worrying about your position on Google or spending time on attracting more traffic to it.

Marketing expert Paul Gorman once advised a room full of people NOT to put their web address on print adverts and in sales letters.

The reason he said that is because most websites are pitiful at converting visitors into customers or clients — so what happens when you display your telephone number, postal address and web address in a print ad or direct mail piece?

Well of course more ‘web savvy’ prospects will choose to respond online. So they ignore the telephone number and postal options and load up the web site… and if it fails to impress, will they then pick up the phone instead?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Personally, if I knew my website had what’s technically called a C.C.R. (“Crap Conversion Rate”) I’d never ever display the web address in an advert… it’d be ‘response suicide’.

So with all that said… the campaign I mentioned the other day (the one that pulled in 1,035 email subscribers, which has since increased to 1,067) — in that advert I only displayed a web address.

Now many marketers will advise adverts give as many contact options as possible — phone, fax, post, email, web site etc.

Not me. On the front-end of my business (acquisition) I’m 100% Internet based. (If you ever tried phoning my office you’ll know that!)

So I only need an email address to start with. (Post and to some extent the telephone is used later in the relationship, but it all starts with email.) I don’t know what your business is, so I’m not suggesting you go 100% web based acquisition, but the model suits me fine.

Anyway, here’s the kicker: watch the following video to peek behind the scenes and see my actual conversion rate for the campaign…

Most web marketers will agree that conversion rate is ‘quite’ good.

And the secret of why the campaign has been so effective? It had a very strong and highly detailed (long copy) advert combined with a simple landing page, which was created using principles that have proven to convert well (strong headline, simple interface, hero shot, etc etc) and tested it.

When I saw it had a good conversion rate, only then was I prepared to spend time and money driving traffic on it.

What’s your site’s conversion rate?

Count the number of visitors who arrive on your site over say the last month, and divide that by the number of responses in the same period. (And by ‘responses’ I mean the number of sales, enquiries or subscriptions.. whatever ACTION you want people to take on your site.)

Finally, multiply the result by 100 and voila! That’s your conversion rate…

…and I hope it’s a good one!

No? Don’t worry, you’re not on your own. It’s a well known fact (in online marketing circles) that the average conversion rate for most small business web sites is less than 2%!

Shocking isn’t it. Most small business sites are lucky to get even just two sales or enquires out of every 100 visitors. Worse, the 98 who leave without taking action are being ‘wasted’ — they may never return and yet chances are a percentage of those 98 could have been future customers or clients.

So what’s the answer?

Well there are lots of ways of increasing conversion rate — I explain quite a few of those in my book The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy.

I explain tweaking your site to improve things like headlines, product descriptions, navigation and menu options, graphic design and layout, pricing and so on.

Unfortunately that can take a lot of time (and money, if you use external web developers and graphic designers.)

Luckily there’s a better way, and it’s one you can implement in without changing your site one jot.

1) Capture names and email addresses by advertising and promoting a gift or special offer — and create a simple landing page like mine that people volunteer their name and email address in return for said offer.

2) Capture tonnes of highly targetted names and email addresses (of real prospects, not just suspects).

3) Finally, use email, blogs, surveys and other online communication tools to open dialogue, build a relationship, give you the chance to explain your product or services in more detail and create a profitable ‘lifetime relationship’ with your list.

Change the Model.

Instead of hoping more people visit your site, and instead of assuming your site tells them everything they need to know to make a buying decision (or at least the decision to enquire), give first, sell later.

Do that, and almost by default your site’s conversion rate will increase because the flow of traffic will be more understanding about what you offer, and more trusting of your company (and you if you engage in personal branding like I do.)

-Ed.

P.S. If you’re new to conversion rate concept, and/or don’t know what Google Analytics is (mentioned in the video above) then I strongly recommend you checkout my 2 DVD home-study programme on the subject of using web marketing statistics to increase sales and response.

Watch the video below to see how in just 35 days I welcomed 1,035 highly-targeted and fully-opted-in subscribers on to my email marketing list… all from one print advert and a dead simple webpage!

Remember, the tactic I used can be adapted for just about any industry. The only caveat is that your business has to be practising online relationship (email) marketing.

If you’re not… why not?

Also, where I ran an advert in a magazine — I could (and will) also employ direct mail, letters, postcards, and others like mail-drops, face to face handouts at seminars and conferences… basically promote the landing page anywhere you can identify and cost-effectively contact large crowds of your target audience.

More about this soon.

-Ed.

P.S. This is the first ‘live’ video to appear on my blog here — leave a comment below if you have any problem viewing it and let me know. Thanks.

Here’s a simple, powerful tactic for growing your business, that most online marketers understand and use every day, and yet which very few small businesses have even heard of…

1) Write a book/report/whitepaper/etc.

2) Give it away for free!

Let me explain with an example.

On the 1st of Feb a free PDF copy of my new book will be automatically e-mailed to everyone who is subscribed to my blog.

Giving away a full book priced at £19.97 ($39.69) is no small thing, and you can imagine I’ve had a lot of extra people sign up to my blog as a result. The response and feedback has been staggering.

The great thing is that other than changing the message on my sign up form at the top right of this page, and priming an e-mail to automatically go out to my subscribers on 1st Feb, it didn’t take much effort. (Well OK, 3 years on-and-off to write the book, but that’s another story which I’ll relate soon.)

If you’re not currently e-mail marketing it doesn’t take much to sign up and add the form to your web site. Then within a few minutes after that you could already start building your database of prospects and active sales leads. (I use and recommend AWeber, aff.)

So here’s one of the main reasons I’m simply giving away my book…

One of the key principles I cover in the book is ‘front versus back-end marketing’. I explain how to separate those two activities, and the dramatic impact it has on sales and revenues.

If you’ve not heard of those expressions, you’re really in for a treat when you read the book!

Just briefly — front end marketing is any activity you perform to attract NEW customers or clients through the front door of your business.

Back end marketing is any communication aimed towards your existing list of customers and clients — people who already know your brand and have a relationship with you. The most successful companies in the world have very strong relationships with their customers.

The least successful companies have almost no relationship with their existing customers and clients — they forget about them, and focus (to their detriment and painfully slow, incremental growth) on always trying to find new customers… a very expensive way of doing business.

But the back end is where ALL the money is.

Forming a deep relationship with your existing customers and clients is of paramount important if you want to grow a business quickly and with strong foundations.

And on the Internet there are NO excuses.

Back end marketing is “click-send” easy. And front end marketing is also a cinch when you know how. I go into all that in the book.

In my experience, very few small businesses apply these simple (when you know how) principles online (or even offline for that matter). The day they start, a whole new world opens up.

There’s a lot more in the book, but I wanted to share this with you today, even if you’re not subscribed to my blog and don’t get my book for free the day after tomorrow.

-Ed.

In a few days time (on the 1st Feb 2008) I’m gifting an unabridged PDF version of my new book ‘The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy’ to everyone who is subscribed to this blog.

There have a few minor tweaks in the ‘eleventh hour’, but today the cover design was finalised…

And here’s the back cover…

I’ve been designing web pages for more than a decade, but book cover design and typesetting was new to me. I didn’t realise there are so many aspects to effective cover design.

Anyway, if you’re not already subscribed, sign up to my blog if you want a free PDF copy.

Three years of blood, sweat and tears working on this… and I’m just giving it away!? I’ll explain why after the book has launched, although you may already have guessed why )

-Ed.

Richard Lee’s written a great post on how to create an information product in 1 hour or less.

So what’s an information product and why should you care?

Well anyone who owns my Shrink Wrap Your Brain! will hopefully know the answer to that.

An information product is your knowledge, skills and expertise on a specific subject matter, packaged in a format other people can access.

Books are the ultimate information product, (and they’ve been around for quite a while ).

More recent innovations include audio CDs, DVDs and downloadable files like Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and the ubiquitous PDF.

All information products contain a “How To” element, and are packed with information, tutorial, advisory and education. (In fact the title of many information products are prefixed with the words “How To…” for that reason.)

An information product is not a sales letter for your products and services, although that’s very much a powerful side effect. In fact let’s look at why you need to be creating them for your business.

The Benefits of Creating Information Products.

Service companies especially take note — if you’re not offering an information product (either free or at a price) on your web site, you’re missing a massive opportunity. (I did for about 10 years. Doh!)

First of all, any kind of business can benefit. No one is excluded.

Even larger companies will benefit from creating information products centred on specific product lines or service categories.

When you offer information products to your existing customers and clients, you strengthen loyalty, seed your market position, reposition against competitors (higher!), and so on.

Because as the author of one or more information products, you get the intangible yet powerfulful effect of increasing your posture within your industry. You become perceived as an expert, and everyone likes dealing with an expert.

I’ve helped many of my private clients over the last few years create information products, and then offer those on their web sites. In doing so, they transform an underperforming site into a sales-lead generating powerhouse with very little effort.

Information products can also be used to announce larger products and services — this is a very common tactic on the Internet where a marketer will gift a free ‘Secrets Revealed’ report and on the back of that, offer a more expensive paid product.

You can also make a lot of money selling information products.

Because media like CDs and DVDs are really cheap these days, they’re almost pure profit. (In fact if you sell downloadable information products like online video, they’re 100% profit!)

What type to create?

The most powerful information product you can put out is a proper book, but for most people they take a lot of time to write (I’m talking from experience here!), so you may want to start with a PDF like Richard recommends, or even a DVD video as explained in my Shrink Wrap Your Brain! programme (which of course is itself an information product.)

If you’ve known about information products for a while, but simply haven’t got round to creating one yet, Richard’s advice is a very quick way to get started. If you want a more extensive course specifically with a slant to growing your business, my Shrink Wrap Your Brain! home-study programme reveals all!

Have a great weekend.

-Ed.

Following yesterday’s look at how to track online response AND conversion to print campaigns, including post (direct mail), line ads, flyers, leaflets and inserts, here’s a diagram of how the system works.

This system produces four sets of figures.

a) Number of people saw the landing page
b) Number of people saw the landing page and converted
c) Number of people made an offline enquiry (by telephone)
d) Number of people converted offline

Most companies only bother tracking offline response, but when you track both, you’ll know whether the print campaign was profitable and worth investing more in.

-Ed.

Online advertising and promotion is great, especially when you get free traffic from the search engines.

But you can’t beat offline promotions, especially print campaigns, for growing your business.

The pre-requisite is knowing which publications your prospects are reading. For vertical industries it’s easy. Consumer and mass markets not so.

This is the number one way I’m growing my business in 2008 — every other front-end marketing activity is secondary, simply because of the speed and low cost of customer acquisition that’s possible with direct response adverts. I thought I’d share this with you — there are so many business types and even 100% Internet businesses that can grow through offline customer acquisition.

The key is to implement a system that tells you which of your print campaigns are working (profitable) and which are losing money.

Here’s the system I use to track online response to print campaigns like inserts, line ads and larger advertisements and even direct mail.

The most important poart of this tactic to is register campaign specific domain names that are totally separate from your main site. This features in your promotion, not your main company web address.

Companies that advertise their main web address in print are unable to calculate exactly how many online responses the ad generated. And thus are unable to optimise their adverts or determine the cost of customer acquisition. If you do that at the moment, embrace this tactic — it can transform how you integrate online marketing into your business.

On that new web site, you just want a single page that has a ‘campaign tracker’ install, a small piece ofcode that automatically forwards (redirects) visitors back to your main web site (or even better, landing page).

That special code also automatically increments a counter, so you will know exactly how many people typed that campaign specific web address after viewing the print piece.

In the UK I use UKReg.com for domain names and Zen.co.uk for hosting. For the special tracking code I’m referring to, check out Hypertracker.com or similar services.

On your main web site (or landing page): If any of those redirected prospects take action and fill in a form to volunteer their name and email address for example, or if they buy something, they should of course see a thank you page.

In that thank you page is some more special code, which sends a signal back to the ‘campaign tracker’ mentioned above to let it know one of the prospects has now converted, (and become either an active sales-lead or paying customer.)

This system allows you to confidently run prints ads — because you can see for every pound spent exactly how much revenues are generated on the back-end of your business.

If your adverts also provide phone numbers and/or postal response forms (coupons etc.), then those will need to be coded, or if prospects make a phone call you need to ask them for the advert code (we’ve all seen “Please quote Dept. AB123 when you call”).

When you enter the personal data captured by the front-end marketing into your database, make sure you also enter the campaign code. That allows you to then analyse revenues and ROI of print campaigns and publication, regardless of whether customers were acquired by phone, post, fax… or even through your web site.

-Ed.

PS. I’ll post a diagram tomorrow that shows this tactic more clearly.

Terry Dean is a very well known and respected US based Internet Marketer, the author of two great books on the subject of Internet Marketing, and runs an excellent and very popular blog.

So a while ago I was delighted to see my blog briefly mentioned in his post about the different ways bloggers make money, (where he reveals how mine and similar blogs make money.)

So I knew Terry had been to my blog. What I didn’t know was what he thought of my blog, until Friday, when I had a rather nice surprise.

Check this out:
http://www.terrydean.org/which-rss-feeds-do-i-actually-read

I’m not mentioning this to be egotistical.. (Hopefully if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know that’s not my style.)

First I want to publicly thank Terry for the honour. (Obviously I know he’ll get this thank you because he reads every post I make!)

Secondly, I think this highlights a very important point about commitment.

When I started this blog, I didn’t really bother with it. My first posts were rushed and admittedly not very good. And because I didn’t make money from the activity, I gradually stopped blogging altogether for a while.

What I didn’t realise is that I had created a self fulfilling prophecy.

To be profitable, blogs need traffic (readers.) But to be worth reading a blog needs frequent and quality content first –so in the early days you need to keep blogging even when you have only very low (or non-existent) traffic.

About the middle of last year I decided to restart things — and made a commitment to put a lot more effort into each post and really try and impart value.

That’s taken a lot of discipline and time, but like anything, persistence pays.

When someone high up in your industry (or a closely related industry) recognises you on their blog, the warm glow is also accompanied by lots of traffic — people who have never heard about me clicked Terry’s link and ended up on my blog.

In addition to Terry, other blogs are noticing the information and effort going on here and linking to me.

As a result my blog is growing in readership, and I’m having dialogue with some great people — fellow Internet Marketers, some of whom I think will become great and highly valued strategic alliance partners as the year progresses.

But none of this would happen without the prerequisites of discipline and commitment.

I wish I’d committed a lot sooner. My advice to you is don’t start blogging unless you’re prepared to invest time and effort — certainly in the early stages when you need to start growing readership.

There aren’t any short cuts. Building a successful blog takes time and effort — but make a commitment and it will pay off.

-Ed.