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If It’s Not Permission-Based Marketing, You’re Wasting Your Time

Hector Cuevas — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:48:50 +0000

It’s true…

If you’re not asking for permission, you’re wasting your time.

This is something I’m glad I was told when I first got started blogging.

Don’t know where I’d be without it. I’d probably be designing banner ads that flash like crazy, in hopes of getting people to pay attention to me.

Not a good way to do business :/ (especially not in 2012)

What is Permission Marketing?

Let me first cover what it is and then why you should use it.

Permission-Based Marketing is the process in which a business obtains permission to communicate with (or market to) a prospective customer, before taking that prospective customer to the next step of the buying process.

In other words, permission marketing is asking people “if it’s OK” to send them emails or other marketing messages before asking them to buy.

Pretty simple right? Just get them to raise their hands..

The term was popularized by Seth Godin in 1999 and it has been my approach since day 1 of this blog (and the approach of many other successful bloggers).

The idea is that people that give you permission to send them promotional messages are a lot more attentive and receptive to those messages because they expect it.

You can get permission by giving them something for free in exchange for their contact information. This can be done through a simple opt-in form.

I’ll show you how I get permission at the end of the post.

The Evil Twin: Interruption Marketing

The way interruption marketing works is the complete opposite. This way of marketing revolves around numbers and lots of advertising; as oppose to permission based, that revolves around relationships and connections with your audience.

The foundation that interruption marketing is built on is the AIDA principle. Attention. Interest. Desire. Action. (learn more about that here)

Marketers who interrupt their prospective customers have to take them through this process in order for them to make a buying decision.

This makes sense since the traffic they receive are mostly cold visitors who don’t know who they are.

Without it, this approach simply doesn’t work.

Permission marketing, on the other hand, can use AIDA when sending out promotional messages, but only as an extra.

This approach to marketing is more relationship-based and your customers will respond to your messages a lot better without having to take them through the A.I.D.A process.

Don’t Waste Your Time Interrupting People

This is the sort of stuff that doesn’t get you noticed anymore. Instead of trying to be the loudest, trying to talk to as many people as possible, narrow your message and talk to the few that will listen.

Ask your visitors to give you permission to send the more value, (and marketing messages) so that you can start creating an engaged audience.

Create that free report. Create your lead generation process. Use Aweber as your email management service. And get busy building your internet business.

This is by far the best advice i can give you to start the new year. But I’m sure some of you are wondering…

How Do I Ask For Permission?

Really simple.

You see that form right below this article? Yea, THAT form. That’s the form you have to fill out if you want to get access to my free 8-part blog marketing course. It’s a course I created to give you a strong foundation on how to build an audience online using blog/content marketing strategies.

That’s what I’m offering in exchange for permission to send you more cool stuff.

Cool huh? …and also very effective. So do it!

Do You Really Wanna Triple Your Traffic? Consider This Before Trying Another Traffic Tactic…

Hector Cuevas — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:03:37 +0000

Increasing traffic for the sake of getting more visitors is totally meaningless.

Most start-up bloggers are completely obsessed with their traffic stats at the beginning; I know I was.

But experience has taught me that tripling your daily blog visitors from 50 to 150 doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not doing anything with that traffic to begin with.

The Case Of Pointless Traffic

There’s an easy way to get loads of traffic to your site with minimal amounts of work and effort. I’m talking about thousands of hits to your blog just by doing a few things.

Step 1: Be on the lookout for popular topics (celebrity gossip)
Step 2: Write a post about that celebrity (ie.. Justin Bieber)
Step 3: If your site is search engine optimized, all his fans will start flooding your site
Step 4: Watch your traffic spike while your business stays the same

Justin’s fans are not interested in what you have to offer, so those visitors aren’t worth much to your business. (..unless, of course, you sell Justin Bieber action figures)

What’s the point? The point is that focusing on targeted traffic is a must if you want to build an authority blog that gets subscribers and makes money. But targeted traffic is only the first step.

When Targeted Traffic Fails

This is the problem I see when I visit blogs; a lack of strategic steps to get your targeted traffic to convert. The point of building a business blog is to attract the right kind of visitors to you by creating compelling content that demonstrates your value and expertise in your niche.

Once you can successfully attract the visitors with that awesome content you’re creating, you have to convert them into fans, subscribers, and customers. Sounds simple, right?

But are you really doing it? Ask yourself these questions:

What does my prospect/customer really want and/or need?
What part of my site are they drawn to first?
What do I want a first-time visitor to do when they first land on my site?
How do I get them to take that step?

These are the questions you need to be able to answer – they might be obvious to some, but there’s a huge difference between knowing this stuff and actually using it.

The answers to these questions will help you get inside your visitors mind when they get to your blog. They’ll also help you determine what you need to do to get them to take the actions you want; whether you want them to:

Tweet a message
Join your email list
Subscribe to your RSS feed
Contact you for a quote
Buy an information product
Order an hour of consulting

Quick Exercise: Map It Out!

If you have never mapped out your ideal customer acquisition process, then you’re not in business. I suggest you take ten minutes and literally map out step-by-step the steps your visitors have to take in order to become a customer.

Don’t forget to include likability and trust building steps, because people will only buy from people they know, like and trust. Very Important!

Just for fun, I drew out this simple diagram for you to give you an idea of what a customer acquisition process looks like. Feel free to model what I’ve done in your own business.

In this process, the visitor comes to your blog to read an article you’ve written. This is the most common case for your blog visitors. It’s unlikely that your homepage gets more traffic than all your individual posts combined.

The next step is to get them to leave a comment and/or retweet the post.
Then they’ll become a subscriber by entering their email address in exchange for more value.
The visitor will then be directed to a thank you page and receive a welcome email.
In the following days/weeks, they’ll get exclusive email content only available to subscribers.
Then when you create a product, you can perform an internal launch.
Finally, if they’re interested and buy, you get paid.

Don’t leave these things to chance. Tripling your traffic may sound like an awesome thing to do, but now you know how pointless that is if those extra visitors don’t turn into anything else.

Subscribe below for more articles just like this one. :0)

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Be sure to check out Kiesha’s “Surviving The Blog” Contest – More details here..

6 Simple Ways Of Growing Your Email List Without Killing Yourself

Hector Cuevas — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:49:56 +0000

I’m not gonna start this post preaching about the “money being in the list” because you’ve heard it, one too many times. I’d rather just get right to the chase and tell you how to grow one.

Cool? – Great.. let’s go.

Most people, when setting out to grow their email list, only focus on one or two ways of growing their list. This is good to start with, but once you see the true power you have by owning an email list, you’re gonna want to get a bigger one.

By “power” I mean:

- The ability to send traffic wherever you want

- The ability to make money by pressing “send”

- The ability to collect market research data by sending a quick survey

- The ability to participate in big time launches with other big players

- The ability to Joint Venture with other online entrepreneurs

There’s a lot that goes into building a good, targeted, and responsive email list – but for the purpose of getting you started, I wanted to give you 5 simple things you can add to what you’re already doing.

If you want to get more information about creating a lead magnet, or designing your lead generation process, check these posts below:

6 Simple Ways Of Growing Your Email List Without Killing Yourself

#1. The Blog Landing Page…

Here’s an example from my own blog: The Blogging Vault

The blog landing page is used by most bloggers. This is where you offer a free lead magnet (a report, video series, audio interview, e-course, etc) in exchange for the visitors email address.

The great things about these pages is that you can create them in as little as 15 minutes. Just head over to your wordpress dashboard, create a new page, add whatever you want it to say, offer them something for free, and finally include your opt-in form.

I use Aweber as my email management service. They’re great!

#2. The Sidebar Offer…

This is an example from SmartPassiveIncome.com

This is another commonly used method of growing an email list. Most bloggers place an opt-in form on their sidebar in order to capture email addresses and grow their list.

The general rule is to place it on the top right hand side, so that it’s visible to every one of your visitors. But some people put them above the post, or next to the blog’s header. Experiment with placement to see what works best for you.

#3. The Pop Up (Light Box)

This is from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

This is by far the easiest ones to add, in my opinion, but it’s not Free. People have their own opinions about popups, all I can say is that they’ve worked for me.

For 77 bucks you can get a hold of this beautifully designed PopUp Light Box called PopUp Domination and increase your opt-ins. You must know, however, that it’s not magic. Your free offer still needs to grab your visitors’ attention, and entice them enough to opt-in.

#4. The Comments Opt-Ins (Subscriber Magnet)

This is an example from CleverMarketer.com

This is also a paid way to get more email subscribers. MaxBlogPress released a really cool wordpress plugin called Subscribers Magnet that allows you to give your commentators the opportunity to join your email list with just one click.

It has other cool little features, but the reason I got my hands on it was because of that comment feature – I’ve gotten decent results.

#5. The Facebook Opt-In

This is an example from Amanda-Marie’s Facebook page

Those who are big on social media strategies are all over this method, but anyone getting into Facebook marketing should know that Facebook allows you to add html code to your page.

Facebook gets alot of traffic, and the viral aspect of it might just mean a lot of leads for you. I’m not a Facebook Expert at all, but I know my way around. :0)

#6. In Post Opt-In Form

Here’s an example from ThinkTraffic.net <– Get his Manifesto

In this example, Corbett is growing his RSS subscribers as oppose to his email list – but the same can be done to grow your email subscribers.

At the end of each post, add the option to become an email subscribers in exchange for a cool free offer. You can see how I do this at the end of this post.

QUESTION: DID I MISS ANYTHING.. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD?

Please, retweet this, share it on facebook, digg it and stumble it if you enjoyed and got some value from it. Leave me your feedback in the comments section below (or just say HI…)

Talk soon..

. . . . . . . . . . . .

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Top 3 Tips To Getting Higher Email Click Through Rates

Hector Cuevas — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:11:09 +0000

O.K – so I gave you some tips for getting your emails opened last Tuesday - now the next step is to get them to click on the darn link to get to wherever you wanna send them.

Most marketers will tell you that this is all about copywriting, and about persuading your subscribers to click on the link with the words you use in your email – AND THEY’RE RIGHT! …but

There are other things you can do to get the click if you’re not a master copywriter and need people clicking TODAY!

You Can Call Me A Liar If This Doesn’t Work

What I’m about to show you are ‘out-of-the-box‘ tips and tricks that you can implement right away and see an increase – guarantee! If you try it and you DON’T see an increase in click through rates, please feel free to call me a BIG FAT LIAR right on my blog.. (..yea, I’m that confident..) ;0)

You really have to try it on your list though – don’t be mean..

Agreed?

GREAT!!

Here Are The Top 3 Tips For Higher Email CTR

Tip #1 – Make Them Wonder - Whenever I send out an email broadcast telling my subscribers about a new blog post I don’t write an entire summary of the post (..some marketers do this..) and it’s just NOT as effective as sparking curiosity.(..for me at least)

Action Step – Give Them A Snippet, and provide a link to get the full article.

Tip #2 – Video Images – This one is really cool!! If you joined my Blogging Blueprint Video Course, you noticed the emails have an image of what appears to be a video, with a PLAY button. That’s simply a screen shot of the video and used as a direct link to the page where the video is actually at.

Here’s how that looks:

Tip #3 – The Call To Action - Don’t assume that your subscriber knows what you want them to do next. It’s always best to simply TELL THEM the action you want them to take. Examples of call to actions would be:

Click Here Now..
Check this out, click the link to go to the full article..
Here’s the link: [LINK]

Simple.. but very powerful!!

Care To Share Any Useful Email Tips With The Community?

Please share with us what’s working for you as far as getting your emails opened – getting a bunch of ideas from different people will definitely help us grow as a community.

As always, if you enjoyed the post, Tweet it, Share it, Digg it, Stumble it.. I’d really appreciate it – and leave me your feedback below..

Talk soon
Hector The Alexa Director

Quick Email Marketing Tips To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Hector Cuevas — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:55:32 +0000

OK.. so you’re getting traffic, the leads are coming in, you’re sending emails with valuable content to build rapport and EVERYONE is opening your emails..

WHAT!?.. they’re NOT?!?

Relax.. obviously I’m joking – that’s how it’s suppose to be, but how can we increase the amount of people opening our emails? That’s the question I’m gonna try to answer in this post with these quick tips..

Bur First… What’s A Good Open Rate?

I thought about this for a very long time and I finally got an answer – and like most answers to a VAGUE question… it wasn’t really sexy, cool or precise. Basically what I found out is that open rates will vary from business to business and from market to market.

Added to that, the way YOU measure open rates may not be the same way I measure open rates, and the size of the list matters a lot too, because of the fact that the list owner is not able to cater to everyone’s needs.

Now, with all of that said – if you’re still anxiously waiting for a REAL number, and threatened to kill cute little kittens if I didn’t give it to you… here it is: From my research the average open rate for Direct Response Campaigns are 25-30%.. –

..why so low?

Well, because they’re direct response campaigns. There’s no brand building, no content shared, no relationship or rapport established before the email being generated. This kinda makes me feel really good that I’m taking a different approach to building an online business (..as you should too).

You see, because we’re building our personal brand, sharing value with our market, and creating relationships, we’re generating much more quality leads and our open rates will be (..or should be) significantly higher.I know mine are, but if you need some help…

Here Are Three Tips To Getting Higher Open Rates

Tip #1 – The Subject Line - This is the most important aspect of getting your emails opened, this is what they see (..and hopefully read) before deciding to open your email. Make sure you spark some interest in your subject line. Make them curious of what’s on the other side. It’s worked for me, I’m sure it’ll work for you..

Tip #2 – Timing - Second most important aspect is timing. The best advice I can give you is to test sending email at different times a day to see which time gives you the best response. Try these times:

7am – People check their email before they get to work
12pm – Some people check their email while at lunch
3pm – I don’t know why I put 3.. umm, some people take lunch late?
6pm – People are getting home from work
9pm – People check their email before going to bed..

Tip #3 – Your Content – Make sure your content doesn’t suck (…and I know it doesn’t because my readers have the best stuff out there) But what I’m getting at is that your overall message needs to speak to them, it needs to solve a problem that their having, or it needs to help them in some way.

When they come to expect that, because your content is always so good – open your emails will be easy.

Any Other Tips You’d Like To Add To The Community?

I’ve personally visited every single one of my readers blogs so I know you’re all building your lists ;0) …so if there’s something that’s working for you to get higher open rates, please share it with the rest of us in the comment section so we can all benefit from it.

As always, if you enjoyed it please tweet it, digg it, stumble it, and facebook share it – I’d really appreciate it.

All the best,
Hector The Alexa Director

P.S – June 10th, 2010 – Exactly 2 months ago I got my first 6 visits… I’m now getting thousands every week. From 17 million Alexa ranking to the top 134,000 sites.. Woohoo!!