Posted by:
Daniel Levis
August 20, 2008
Issue #485
Dear Web Business-Builder,
Maybe I’m just pissed that I logged on to Frank Kern’s site about a half hour after his launch last week and whatever he was selling was sold out.
Did you watch the videos? Cool stuff.
I didn’t know Frank was such an amazing lap steel guitar player. He’s obviously got a keen ear because the intonation was flawless. And the production values of his videos are truly amazing.
But here’s what I’m struggling with …
In one of the videos, Frank talks about “the rubber neck effect.” He asks you which you’d be more likely to gawk at, a field of daisies or a grisly car wreck. If you’re like most … it’s the car wreck. That’s why newspapers are filled with bad news.
Misery loves company … and reporters who bring back good news have skinny kids. So yeah, bad news grabs people’s attention in an e-mail subject line, no question. But will the rubberneck effect double your sales like Frank says?
If so, just about every online marketer in my in-box doubled their sales the very next day.
It was like Arma-freakin-geddon!
In fact, for the next several days my in-box was pure misery … filled with terrible … horrible … awful … morbid bad news.
But what was really depressing was the fact that so many of these e-mails, far from doubling sales, I’m sure tanked for the marketers who sent them.
See, plenty of marketers are out there swiping ideas here, there, and everywhere without understanding the context in which those ideas should be applied … kind of like going into hand-to-hand combat with a howitzer strapped to your back … or flailing away at an oncoming torpedo with a Swiss Army knife.
Perfectly good tools applied to the wrong purpose.
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
August 13, 2008
Issue #480
Dear Web Business-Builder,
Have you ever experienced a time when the words just seemed to flow from your fingertips like water onto the page?
Bombs could have been going off outside and you scarcely would have noticed. In what seemed like no more than a few minutes, an hour of pure joy passed and you’d written pages of copy.
If you’ve ever experienced that … then you’ve probably had the opposite experience as well — a day when getting just a few words out onto the page was sheer agony and you hated every minute of it.
What’s the difference?
You’re the same person, with the same talents. You should have the same resources available to you.
As strange as it may sound, the simple fact is, you were actually operating from different levels of intelligence.
People who achieve excellence in any creative field — copywriting included — are masters at consistently tapping into the most resourceful parts of their brain.
It’s what allows them to repeatedly slip into that “flow state” that leads to super-achievement. And it can give you bigger winners, more often.
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
August 6, 2008
Issue #475
Dear Web Business-Builder,
Despite all the doom and gloom we’re hearing these days about corporate bankruptcies … recession … collapsing currencies … skyrocketing fuel costs and inflation … and the wholesale slashing and burning of thousands of jobs in America today … not everyone is feeling the crunch.
More kitchen-table millionaires are emerging from the carnage than at any other period in history …
For those who understand the true nature of the gut-wrenching change our world is struggling through … there has never been a better time to enter the entrepreneurial fray with both guns blazing.
A whole new, Internet-enabled way of doing business is emerging … while the old-guard, industrial-age way of doing business is cracking at the seams.
You see it happening all around you. And nowhere is it more apparent than at the customer touch points of commerce … where consumers are rebelling against the old guard in ever increasing numbers.
Sales and profits at such companies will be pummeled into oblivion. Many will simply cease to exist as their customers go running to a whole new breed of business that beats to an entirely different drummer.
One of the driving forces behind this consumer revolt is the fact that the world has become astonishingly more competitive.
Rapid advancements in communications and computing technology are making vertical integration unnecessary, thereby toppling barriers to business entry.
The trend is toward smaller, nimbler, horizontally-integrated businesses.
Where in the past, transactional fiction meant a company sought to control as many of the elements of production and distribution as it possibly could … centralizing command … standardizing products … concentrating resources … and gobbling up capital to acquire other companies in an eternal quest for “economies of scale” … these things are in many cases no longer an advantage.
Now a guy in his basement can create a virtual corporation based almost entirely on outsourcing, often with little or no outside funding.
Invariably these small, horizontally-integrated businesses find it much easier to stay focused on what really matters — finding and keeping customers. While the large, vertically-integrated dinosaurs worry about such things as shareholder value, mergers and acquisitions, and frantically struggle to rescue the bottom line.
Is it just me, or have you noticed the flagrant disregard for customers displayed by these old guard companies lately?
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
July 30, 2008
Issue #470
- How to jostle your way into hotly competitive, seemingly impenetrable traffic sources …
- How tackling a market “in detail” explodes your traffic and fattens your bottom line …
- Some fun examples to inspire your thinking …
- Plus more!
Dear Web Business-Builder,
Civilization is the result of abject terror.
Imagine our primordial forefathers and foremothers cowering in the shadows of the hostile environment of our early world.
Without the advantages of fangs, claws, fur, and sheer brute strength enjoyed by the saber-toothed tigers, mastodon and woolly mammoths who shared the planet, we must have felt utterly defenseless, exposed, and alone.
Doubtless we would have perished from the face of this Earth as a species had it not been for our remarkable ability to form groups and unite against the common enemies that surrounded us on all sides.
Only by banding together were we able to successfully defend against attack … hunt successfully … and leverage the great human invention — the division of labor.
Eventually, organized groupings of human beings came to dominate the world. And God said it was good.
There was just one problem …
Having become such a dominant force in the world, our natural enemies became scarce. And since humans need a steady supply, rival groups formed and began to rape and pillage one another.
Funny thing is, it wasn’t always the largest group who did the lion’s share of the raping and pillaging.
Very early in the history of warfare, shrewd military and political strategists understood the power of “divide et impera” — divide and conquer.
They discovered that by forcing the enemy to divide its forces and then dealing with those forces “in detail,” a small highly organized group could defeat a much larger one.
And so it is today, on the battlefield of traffic and conversion …
Yet few online marketers understand or appreciate this.
They send a single, solitary campaign out in to the marketing melee — attacking the tidal wave of traffic head on — full frontal. And then they wonder why it’s so darn hard to make a buck.
What should they be doing?
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
July 23, 2008
Issue #465
Dear Web Business-Builder,
There are three things that will slaughter response rates on your Web pages.
If you could recognize them, and banish them from all of your Web pages, your response rates would instantly soar.
What are they?
Savage response rate killer #1 — Boredom
If your website visitors can’t get excited about what they find on your website, your response rate will suck.
Remember, there are only two reasons people visit your website: To obtain pleasure or avoid pain. If what they find there fails to promise one or both, it is by definition, boring.
You’d think this would be obvious, but it’s not.
Most of the websites I visit online are like the actor who said, “Enough of me talking about myself. What do you think about me?”
Your website is NOT about your company or your product. It’s about your prospect. Keep him at the center of the dialog. Appeal to his self-interest. And you’ll have his attention.
Once you’ve got it. Keep it. How? By continually foreshadowing what comes next, slowly lifting the veil on all of the juicy secrets your prospect needs in order to obtain the object of his desire.
Self-interest and curiosity are critical to maintaining your reader’s interest. But there’s more to the boredom banishing formula …
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