E-Biz Booster Blog - Top Posts

4 Free Awesome Copywriting Resources

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:57:59 -0700

4 world-class copywriters

When we are talking about email marketing, we need to realize, it's not only about finding a reliable email marketing service provider like Aweber. It's not only about squeeze page or not squeeze page, fancy or not so fancy design of your newsletter, your back-end products and so forth.

“Great, awesome copywriting is the golden key!”

It's the words that sell,… and everything around them. Pictures, the layout, and nowadays multimedia with video and audio increase the effectiveness of your words tremendously. Those elements increase the persuasive power of your words and get the reader, listener, or viewer to take the desired action.

Now after you have learned how important the quality of the copy in your message is, you might ask yourself

What is good copywriting?
How to become better at copywriting?
How to find and hire a first class copywriter?

Well, the simple formula to the second question is:

See what's working for others in your particular market to get a good starting point.
Learn from already great copywriters, they have been being around much longer than the Internet itself.
Always do, and never stop testing your copy. The continuous improvements add up exponentially and make the big difference between struggling and succeeding.

You certainly ought to learn more than this. Here are some recommendations for more in-depth coverage of that very important element: Copywriting.

You might not believe how much valuable information is out there for free. However, the Internet is also populated with tons of misleading and wrong information. My tip

“Always learn from the best!”

The resources below will give you a head start. Stick to them and expand your list of resources from what those guys recommend. From a business standpoint of view it pays off in almost any cases to hire experts or to buy a course that offers specific results.

Here's my trusted list:

Clayton Makepeace's - The Total Package
I have to thank Bob Serling, a World class copywriter himself, for introducing me to Clayton Makepeace, whose email newsletter I am sucking in like a hungry vacuum cleaner since then.

John Carlton’s Big Damn Blog
I started to follow John's Blog quite recently, but fell in love with his natural, like-speaking- style of writing, right away. Hie Blog tag line reads like this: “Insight, tactics, advice and mutterings on copywriting, marketing and living life deep… from the most ripped-off world-class ad writer alive!”

Michel Fortin's Blog
Actually Michel has many other Web site, where he teaches about copywriting issues. You'll find them via this Blog, which has a personal touch, and is a very good starting point.

The Gary Halbert Letter
An unusual style of Web site, with unusually good content. Print out the letters and take it to the porch for studying. You definitely should

Of course there are much more valuable resources out there, but you need to start somewhere. Right? What I don't like about those typical 7, 15, 30, 100 best resource lists! The editors very rarely take the time to filter out the crap. I don't like this and won't give you such either. Why should you do the pick yourself? Your time is very valuable? Follow the best and forget about the rest.

At the top you have 4 quality resources. Start with 1 or 2 and move on from there.

Yours
John W. Furst

Copyright 2008 by John W. Furst. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5. - If you find this content on a site that is violating our copyright, please, report its URL to us. Thanks for fighting copy scrapers.

Take Action: Save The Internet - We Cannot Afford To Lose It

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:27:42 -0700

My blogging friend Matt Harzewski literally woke me up with his post about Net Neutrality. I actually picked the video I show you here from his selection. “Thanks Matt for being on alert with those things!”

Where is the threat?

Would you like your ISP to do the following things to you.

Throttle the speed for Web sites they don't like.
Blocking certain protocols, like streaming video, and only offer their own paid content.
Charging Web site owners extra to get access to you at a decent speed.
etc., …

Watch this video

Please, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page to watch the video here or just go directly to YouTube:

Net neutrality: Why You Need To Act

Network Neutrality or “Net Neutrality” means all Internet traffic is equal. There is absolutely no discrimination. There is no speeding up or speeding down of data packets based on their origin or destination.

The technical network part of the Internet is democratic and that's why you can find a wealth of information from so many little guys next door.

The largest telephone and cable companies in the USA — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want the ultimate control over the Internet. They want to charge extra for access to their clients.

Imagine that, you run a successful Videoblog and all of a sudden you have to pay a fee to get your content delivered to AT&T, Verizon, … customers?

Those large players want to tax all content providers to guarantee delivery of their data at decent speed.

“No money → no guarantee → bad delivery”

But that's not all. Maybe they decide, you shouldn't use Google anymore. Maybe you have to use their own search engine, that will find only commercial offers. Who do you think would receive the affiliate commissions?

Have you heard enough?

Then act now and support the “Save the Internet Movement on its way to Washington”, the participating Congress Men, and the Bill that could save your future.

It is important for your future, the future of your kids, the future of your country.

Act now!

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Don't go to bed tonight before you have acted. Act now to protect net neutrality.

List Building - Tons Of Cash From Email Marketing...

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:33:09 -0700

You have heard it before, “The money is in the list”. But not all lists are made equally. Some email lists make their owners millionaires, others don’t do anything. Why is that?

I keep the answers short, through some bullets at you, don’t spell out every little detail, but give you…

…Something To Think About

You need to sell something!

You get paid, when someone from your list buys something. Hopefully your own products and services or at least something you get a high commission for.
People buy when they want or need something.

You better sell respectively recommend something that is already high in demand. Do your market research first!
Is your subscriber list targeted for the kind of offers you make?

Sometimes you can get surprisingly high response rates, when you make off-topic offers, but you still need to serve the desire of those people and give them what they want. But in general it works better, when you mainly serve a narrowly targeted market.
Is your list responsive? You need to keep your list responsive!

New subscribers are usually more responsive than older ones, but you hold the key for keeping them responsive. Build a relationship with them and don’t promote every crap that’s out there. Offer them help and advice for free, and products they really can benefit from.

People, who discuss, “Why you should not buy anything over the Internet”, might never purchase in your online store, but they might come into your brick and mortar outlet to get the latest offer you promoted to your local email list of customers. See, email can work for off line businesses as well.
You need to renew and grow your list on a daily basis!

The more people you have on your list, the more will buy from you, therefore add new members to your list every day. It’s natural that some people will become less responsive and some will dare to unsubscribe. You need to compensate for those, too.

The key factor is not size, but quality! A list that better matches your offer (preferably high value offers), will make you more money than a very big list that you have abused a lot in the past.
Great copywriting works!

Kind of a no brainer! The better the copy of your campaigns, the better the results.
… Add your bullet for us! Leave a comment below.

This was short and sweet as I have promised.

Yours
John W. Furst

Aweber – A Marketing Lesson And Smart Pricing

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:09:14 -0700

Email Marketing Tips

AWeber.com (AWeber Communications, Inc.) is one of the most recommended service providers for email marketing.

For three reasons:

They are devoted to maintain one of the highest email deliverability rates of more than 99% in the industry. That makes sure your messages have the best chance to pass spam filters and block lists on their way to your subscribers inbox.
Essential email marketing features are included without hidden fees.

E.g. Newsletter broadcasting, signup forms, autoresponders, sign up per email, HTML templates, 24/7 easy to use admin interface, unsubscribe and bounce management, various reports, and …
Very competitive and affordable rates.

19.95 $ a month for unlimited email campaigns
with up to 10,000 subscribers.

Well, that one has become history.

Now, AWeber confronts potential buyers with 69.00 $ a month for the same service (unlimited email campaigns for up to 10,000 subscribers).

At first glance that looks like a price increase of a whopping +246 %.

But let me step back for a second and look at this in detail.
(Conclusion: AWeber is still a bargain!)

There is not much rumor on the net about this, because AWeber managed to introduce that price increase rather silently.

Existing customers may remain in the old price plan at their will. AWeber focused on communicating the introduction of two new features and how cool they are.
1. New super fancy tracking and analytics tools and
2. an overall Web site redesign.
Customers will have the choice between upgrading their accounts to include the new features at the new price or sticking with their old plan.

The existence of that choice might be responsible for the silence on the net.
New prospects might not know about the old prices and therefore don't have a reason to complain.

By the way: Even after the price increase AWeber's rates remain competitive. Especially, when you take the quality of service into consideration.

New customers can start with the 500 subscriber plan at 19.00 $ a month. It already comes with all features and no hidden cost. And new customers get a 30 day risk free trial, which means they'll get their money back, if they are not satisfied.

Even a closer look at pricing

A bad taste of this new tiered pricing might come from the fact that 500 seem kind of low, and that 501 subscribers cost as much as 2,500 subscribers. But that's a general feature of that kind of price plan.

AWeber Pricing: Old versus new

A simple example might put your mind at ease. Assume you have a targeted list of 2,501 subscribers that incur a cost of 49.00 $.

What could you do to make some profits?

Would you do anything differently only because your cost has risen to 49.00 $ a month? If you are freaking out now, chances are good that you didn't do anything profitable with your email subscribers anyway. How much revenue are you planning to generate? What is your dream number?

30.00 $ or 40.00 $ a month?

If you see the Internet as a business opportunity and tool, you will have those “dream numbers” in the thousands anyway. So what ?

There are many different flavors of email promotions. It depends on your positioning and your relationship to your email subscribers and your market how you will be able to monetize your list. I give you some examples with the 2,501 subscriber base from above.

2,501 subscribers; 29.00 $ product; 57 buy; 1,653.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 7.00 $ product; 125 buy;
875.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 47.00 $ product; 46 buy;
2,162.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 97.00 $ product; 33 buy;
3,201.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 497.00 $ product; 11 buy;
5,467.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 997.00 $ product; 3 buy;
2,991.00 $ revenue

2,501 subscribers; 4,997.00 $ product; 1 buys;
4,997.00 $ revenue

Those examples are picked arbitrarily. What matters is

the quality and responsiveness of the list subscribers
the relationship you have with them
the appealing and value of your offer

If you are great in those aspects, your conversion rates will be much higher than in those examples above.

You can send those subscribers email, after email for no additional cost at Aweber. And Aweber give the tracking capabilities that help you to better manage your campaigns. Sounds like a no brainer. The new tracking features include:

Click Tracking With Your Domain (no aweber.com links in your email again)
New Reports: Track Campaign Activity Over Time, and
Track and Target Subscribers Based On Activity

I hope you are inspired.

Follow proven email marketing strategies. People fail and complain, because they are not following those proven strategies in detail.

Target a market that is proven to be responsive and a market that buys. Check: Are there many advertisers and products for that market?
Turn your Web visitors into email subscribers or you will pay pay-per-click forever.

This is an investment. You need to put in time or money to get people to your Web site at first place. Then, you'll need to give them something of value. … and you need to keep them happy over time.
Sell them your own (preferably) products or services or affiliate products.

Yes, it's true. Money is made by selling something. Many people seem to have trouble understanding this principle.

The marketing lesson learned is: Value first.

AWeber Communications has built its reputation as professional email marketing service provider, and now they moving by introducing the next level of email tracking features.

They are also moving on by finally charging an amount that is a bit closer to what their service is actually worth, and they started to better define their customers. Obviously Aweber wants to deal with business minded customers, who appreciate the value they are providing (Something every business should do, define and select your customers, don't try to appeal to everyone).

You can check out all the features and new prices directly at AWeber Email Marketing Tools (affiliate link)

AWeber remains the service of my choice, and I feel perfectly okay with promoting it that way.

You can start out with professional email marketing tools for just 19.00 $ a month, take full advantage of cutting edge email tracking technology, enjoy the outstanding deliverability of AWeber, and still have a 30 day money back guarantee. They call it “risk free trial”

Check out the new features and pricing AWeber Email Marketing Tools (affiliate link).

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: As I am organizing the Carnival of Email Marketing Tips, you certainly can expect more related blog posts from me.

Fix Bad Habits Become More Productive

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:39:39 -0700

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.

Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.

Managers,
Team Members,
Entrepreneurial CEOs,
For Money Bloggers,
etc.

And it can be applied to business- , job-, and personal-life equally well.

“The goal of that exercise is to get into the habit of focusing on the important tasks.”

1. Determine what kind of repetitive, atomic tasks drive your output respectively bring you closer to your goal on a daily basis.

With atomic task I mean something that cannot be broken down any further.

E.g. a cold call to a potential prospect could be such a task, or the collection of a single email address from a shopper in your store, … But not something like opening a new store, because that requires many tasks performed by many people to make it happen.

This exercise is about your life, your responsibilities, and dreams.

For example:

The more cold calls, the more appointments.
The more comment on other Blogs, the more traffic, which drives your advertising revenue.
The more submissions to more Blog Carnivals, the more back links, etc.
(no spam as a result of this exercise, please. you need to remain relevant to the carnival)
The more social bookmarking, the more traffic, etc.
The more articles, the more traffic to your web site.
The more you start conversations, the easier it becomes for you to talk to strangers.
etc.

Now commit yourself to a plan and decide how many of those activities you need to perform every single day. Excuses are not allowed. This little list has to become your bible for the next 2 weeks. Or you can make such a bible for your contractors and employees to show them what you expect.

2. Completing the tasks on that list should become your highest priority.

As I said this is not sophisticated time management here. This is a simple exercise that helps you getting into the habit of focusing on the important things.

It also will show you something else. If you are getting tired of writing 25 comments on other Blogs and would rather like to do market research instead and work on a new product. (I just take the Internet business example here). Then it's the perfect time for outsourcing such repetitive an activity.

If you stick to it, you'll be happier and more relaxed very soon, because you are pushing your business drivers forward and you certainly feel satisfaction by sticking to your plan and accomplishing your little, but important mini goals.

You'll also see that you don't miss the activities that used to become excuses in the past.

If you like this post, please, do some social bookmarking for it.
I wish you a very nice weekend.

Yours
John W. Furst

10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:00:15 -0700

While waking up this morning I suddenly found myself having a pen in my hand and scribbling 2 ideas for a new blog post on a piece of paper. Here is the first one.

Probably you can help me out and post as a comment, who had said the following originally.

“If your business doesn't grow it dies.”,

It is certainly true.

As the population grows, as markets grow, someone else will takeover your niche soon. If not, you are in the wrong market and hopefully close to retirement with enough retirement funds saved.

What are the drivers:

Number of sales
Average sales price

So why would you like the product of those variables to grow continuously, strictly monotonically?

This is not supposed to be a scientific article. No. I only want to get you engaged thinking about those issues in your own business. So I really only give you a short list and not much more.

Let's start out with a solo entrepreneur, because it's real easy to start thinking from this point on and the rest applies for big corporations as well.

Here is my Top-10 list, why your business needs to grow:

1. Limited personal capacity: You simply cannot work more than 24/7, which is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 366 days (Yes, 2008 is a leap year. You probably noticed on Friday.) Believe me, you cannot do even that. I would know.

The heaviest working week I ever had was, I believe 1987 or 1988, when I put in some 105 hours! I was assistant manager to a very successful restaurant and discotheque owner at this time. We opened up 2 new bars in that week. I remember that figure that well, because I had to fight for getting compensated fairly for this heavy duty overtime.

Back to the point: Once you start outsourcing, you increase your cost that has to be compensated for. Right? Means you need to grow.
2. Inflation: Ever wondered why you cannot buy bread for 5 cents anymore?
3. Investments: By it's very nature investments help you to increase profits, but there are 2 types of investments. You can decrease costs or you can increase revenue. Ideally you should do both types. Then your business will grow.
4. Markets Grow As Economies Grow (normally): If a market grows and you stand still, you are actually shrinking.
5. Competition: If you stand still, you cannot gain or defend leadership in your market. There is a huge competitive advantage for market or industry leaders. Don't miss that.
6. Increasing Financial Needs: Isn't it natural that anybody wants to earn more over time and actually deserves it (if the work attitude is right). You as an owner, your employees, your contractors, and the Tax-man. How to do it? Grow.
7. Enjoying Your Seeds: The more freedom you want to have from your business, the more it has to perform without you. How? Grow
8. Stability: A bigger, stronger business is more likely to fight any economic, environmental (or even political) threats successfully. How to get there? Grow.
9. Compelling Offers: The more you can rely on the overall fact that your business is growing, the more compelling offers you can make your prospects and clients.
10. Using Full Potential: If your business is not growing you simply don't utilize its full potential. It means that you don't leverage its own momentum. If you are using all your business assets the right way, it's natural that your business will grow continuously.

Well, as I said this is not a scientific essay, just a couple of thought. Tell me what you think. Leave a comment below.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: I won't forget the 2^nd blog post idea that I mentioned. Don't worry, I wrote it down as I said.

Ranking #1 on Google - Are The Profits Rolling In?

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:17:12 -0700

E-Biz Booster Blog Is Number #1 On Google
(Click to enlarge)

Are you heading for #1 rankings on Google, MSN, and Yahoo? You should, because it definitely helps your business. However, it is only one part of the equation for a successful Internet presence. In the following I'll tell you how I got it, but probably more important I'll tell you about the other factors needed as well. A #1 ranking on any search engine is meaningless unless those other factors are in place, too.

You might have “heard” the recent stories about quick rankings from online videos. I thought I have to test it and it was a happy coincidence that Rich Schefren's 66 second video contest came along at the same time. What a great opportunity to get started.

At first look at the search results page “Number 1 on Google” for the broad matching phrase attention ebiz (Enlarge the thumbnail in the upper left corner of this post). I made this screen shot yesterday. Today, I am on position #2.

You also will notice the ^2nd, indented search result. That mainly comes from having a good internal linking strategy on this blog and the fact that the key word “attention” appears on every singe page of this blog. That's how I have setup the promotion for the Attention Age Doctrine. I'll talk more about this later.

But first let's examine the #1 listening for attention ebiz. You will notice that you won't find my blog by using the phrases separately. Look for attention, which is a very general phrase and you don't even find Rich Schefren on page #1 (I'll tell you why later). Search for ebiz and all you find are results with the term ebiz somewhere in the URL. My Blog does not have ebiz in the URL, only in the title by the way.

But combine those words and you'll find me in a top position. The secret to this are definitely the video submissions I did for the contest. I heavily used the keyword or tag attention with each submission as required by the contest rules. What a smart guy this Rich Schefren is. He let's others work to improve his rankings. So basically all participants are ranking better now for the term attention. It seems like Google in particular loves fresh multimedia content and rewards you for it with better positions on the search results page. However, it happens that obviously none of the participants target the keyword ebiz as I do, too. That's how I reached #1 in this experiment. It is in the combination.

In the opening I said a #1 listening might be meaningless. Why?

It really depends what you want to achieve with your Web site, but since this is an E-Biz Blog, I just assume my readers want to increase their monetary profits. Being #1, means just what it says. You are #1 for a particular search term on a particular search engine at a specific point of time. As I have told you before, I am already knocked down to position #2 as I am writing this.

In order to benefit from a #1 listening and increase your profits, you need to make a sales somehow. Be it a product of yours, be it advertising, etc. somebody has to swipe a credit card at some point. Easy to understand, isn't it.

So what's missing in my experiment here

The search term must be something many people are searching for (high volume).
It must be indeed related to a subject that you can monetize with products of your own, selling traffic, affiliate products, sign up for an ezine, etc.
Your Web site must persuade as many visitors as possible to buy. In other terms convert that traffic.

My example lacks point 1 already.

Anyway I wanted to test, how videos can affect your position in the search engines. I certainly was positively impressed. Now I have to go for the “real thing”.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Why is Rich Schefren not #1 for attention? Would it make sense to target it? Probably not, because it is such a general phrase.

P.P.S.: I am also sharing 2 additional tips with my newsletter subscribers. One of them is about the 2^nd indented listening. I feel sorry for you, if you have missed it. But it is not too late!

Sign up now and I'll tell you anyway via email.
Use the sign up form at the upper left of this page.

Turn More Visitors Into Buyers - 6 Tips

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:00:22 -0700

Shake Hands With Your Prospect

Getting visitors to your Web site is one ingredient for a successful Internet presence. It does not matter, if you are a “brick and mortar” type of business that wants to expand into the virtual world and reach customers far away from their geographic location or if the Internet is your only sales channel.

However, an Internet only business can profit from off-line promotion as well. Many entrepreneurs forget about this part, but that is actually not the topic of this post.

We are talking about how to turn the visitors into buyers once they have arrived at your Web site. By doing that you simply increase your profits without any additional money spent. Yes, that will increase your return on investment. Think about it and turn on your calculator.

Typical conversion rates vary depending on industry, but it is quite safe to assume an average conversion rate between 1% and 3%. E.g. you had 2182 unique visitors in November 2007 and made 24 sales. Your conversion rate will be

24 * 100 / 2182 = 1.1%

By doubling the conversion rate, by changing the page you suddenly get 48 sales from the same traffic. Improving the conversion rate is a one time investment that pays off permanently.

The secret lies in testing continuously!

But let's start out with the ingredients of a good sales latter first. Here are the “bullets”

1. An Attention-grabbing Headline

The biggest benefit of your product or service goes here. How does it help your customers. You must show the visitors, why they should continue to read your sales letter.

2. Sell the Benefits Not the Features

When describing your product focus on, “How does a buyer benefit?”, instead of the features. We started with benefits in the headline, but we continue with this approach throughout the text. Loosen the text up with high quality graphics and images. Show some happy faces!

3. Show Trustworthiness and Credibility

Answer the customers objection, why they should buy from you? Who are you, why are you an “expert” in your field. Why do you know about the customers problems that your products and services help to solve?

Third party statements like customer testimonials are essential to break the ice. Show statements from real people that already benefit from your products.

4. Transfer Ownership

Transferring ownership means you make your prospects already think about, what they would do, how they would feel, when they already owned your product.

Use phrases like, “you will learn”, “you will receive”, “you will enjoy”, “you will be pleased to hear”. Your sales letter as a hole piece should have at least twice as high a count for “you”, “yours” than for “we”, “I”, and “me”.

5. Risk Reversal

Make it a deal the customer cannot loose anything by giving a courteous guarantee. People are very skeptical, when buying on the Internet. Don't forget, they cannot touch or feel the product like if they were in a store. Jay Abraham — top Marketing Guru with 25+ years of experience and well sought after public speaker — has identified and teaches 6 levels of risk reversal. (That alone would be content for more than one post).

Give the prospect the feeling that he cannot loose and you will win, unless you are trying to sell “crap”, but then you are lost anyway.

6. Build Value Before Stating Your Price

Throughout the sales letter you need to show the prospect the value they will receive in terms of money. What are the potential savings, perceived benefits from buying your product. Before seeing the price the prospect already should be willing to pay more.

Sounds like you need some powerful copy and techniques of persuasion. Yes, that's true. Now, look at your sales copy and check, if you are missing out something and start improving.

They only way to improve your letter over time is to come up with new variations of headlines, pictures, guarantees, … and test it with conventional A/B split test or even better with a multivariate testing tool like Google Web Site Optimizer. If you are not testing yet, check it out, it's free without running costs. You only need an Adwords account, which you can open for US$ 5.00 I believe.

Happy Testing
Yours
John W. Furst

Why Should You Write A White Paper?

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:46:37 -0700

Because it works [period].

That's kind of too short an answer. So let's start from scratch and define what a White Paper is and what it can do for your business. By the way it does not matter if it is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) marketing what you are doing. A White Paper works in any situation. However, the tonality, the voice, the look and feel will be different.

A White Paper offers your prospect solutions to their problems.
It makes the reader curious about what you have to offer.
It features a strong call to action to “talk” to you.
It shows your expertise, but it's not a sales pitch, not a disguised product brochure, it does not “talk” about how great you or your company is.
Most importantly: A White Paper must not be boring. It is not a dry technical document, nor thesis.

Offering free White Papers is part of a strategic education based marketing approach that sets you apart from many competitors. By offering information that focuses on the problem of the prospects, you gain trust, credibility, expert status (if the White Paper is written properly).

For example, if you sell some sort of Time Management Software Tools, you should advertise a White Paper on Time Management. That way you get a shot in setting the buying criterion for Time Management Software. I am assuming that you are selling a high quality software product.

Teach the prospect about Time Management, teach what kind of tools could be helpful with Time Management, and write about what features such good software should have and how to use it. However, don't forget the White Paper must not be too long. It's one piece in your marketing effort.

Buy setting the buying criterion properly you can make your product stand out.

Usually you get terrific response, when advertising problem-solving information and you also build your credibility as a quality source of information, instead of “just another peddler.”

If you want to learn more about White Papers, check out what my colleague Perry Marshall does. He is an expert in his field of Guerrilla - White Paper - and AdWords Marketing (↑).

This article has been featured in the first edition of the new Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship (↑) at Bootstrapper (↑)
Thanks

This article has been featured in the Virtual Assistant - Internet Marketing Carnival (↑) at Business Services, ETC (↑)
Thanks

Have A Nice Weekend
Yours
John W. Furst

Avoid The Top 20 Traffic Disasters

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:33:11 -0700

There is absolutely too much bad information on the Internet about “How to Get A Lot of Targeted Traffic To Your Website”. It is too easy for a newcomer to do it the wrong way and end up without any serious traffic.

I want to keep the story short, so I am simply offering you the free report

“How To Avoid The Top 20 Traffic Disasters”

This is not some dry report that you will fall asleep over, while reading it. The report I am giving you is written by one of the most prominent traffic experts on the Internet, Michael Cheney. This 37 page report in PDF format draws easy to understand analogies to real World examples.

Success on the Internet can be achieved quite simply. All you need to know is:

How to get thousands of the right kind of visitors to your Web site
How to convert that traffic into cash
Most important: Consistent effort in applying and improving the above steps over and over again.

Most folks make the big mistake to try out one method after the other half ways. You cannot get results from that.

Lets's start with bringing targeted traffic to your Web site the not the wrong way. This could hurt your long term success.

Start now:

Get the report: “How To Avoid The Top 20 Traffic Disasters”

The Chapters of this free report
1. Forgetting To Put Your Fuel Cap Back On
2. Not Using Your Mirrors
3. Trying To Use The Same One Road To Get Everywhere
4. Trying To Fool The Police
5. Stalling
6. Buying A Deal Of The Century Ferrari For $100
7. Taking Long Routes Just Because Some Roads Have Tolls
8. Getting Stuck Under The Hood Of Your Car
9. Inventing A Flying Swimming-Hover-Car
10. Polishing Your Car But Never Using It
11. …
20 chapters in total plus a powerful conclusion.
Read it
Put it into action
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I also give you my special free report “Usability recommendations for SEO” about onpage search engine optimization (SEO) and Usability, which helps you to build better pages for your readers as well as for search engines. “Better pages” will turn into more sales, affiliate commisions, advertising revenue, however you have decided to monetize your Web site.

Don't hesitate, sign up now in the upper left corner. And I'll see you on the other side.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you are already a subscriber of my email newsletter, you will get an email with download instructions shortly.

Key Success Factor: Listen To Your Customers

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:33:51 -0700

Ask Your Customers

Two days ago I wrote about the Key Success Factor Number 1: Speed Of Implementation. Today I give you another “Gold Nugget”. Here it is:

“Listen to your individual customers and even to prospects”

Many business owners fail to do so properly. This could be one of your competitive advantages.

Do you believe to know what your customers and prospects want?
Few admit that they don't know. But if you believe to know, you simply don't know.
Do you know, who your customers are?

This article has been featured on
“More Than We Know (↑)”
in the Carnival Of Small Business Issues.

This morning I talked to Michael, who runs an online shop as part of his business, and he told me,

“I was totally surprised when I got the results of my recent customer survey. We thought our buyers are much younger then they actually are. And many of them are buying our product for a different reason than we made it for …”

Only three weeks ago Michael had emailed a customer survey to his about 6000 subscribers and got 550 completely filled out forms back. That's quite a lot. Michael achieved this good return rate by combining the survey with a random draw for a US$ 700 prize, some additional smaller prizes, and due to the fact that his email subscriber list is quite targeted.

Since than Michael could increase his sales by 15% just by using this kind of information. What did he do? Not much just the following.

Modified the copywriting of two of his sales pages and created new experiments in Google's Web Site Optimizer to integrated it smoothly.
Added a few new pages to the info section of his Web site
Created additional AdWords Ads for his campaigns and split tested them.
Sent an "answer" newsletter to his customers.

The total input of labor for the survey, the analysis, and the implementation of the recommendations of the results was 4 person-work-days, altogether. Next time Michael will conduct a customer survey, it won't be even as much work anymore.

A customer survey via email is one choice to get more customer feedback. What are you planning to do or what have you done already?

Email Survey?
Feedback Form on your Web site?
Question Time on your Blog
Squeeze Page with attached questionnaire
Exit Question
Entry Question
Give-Away upon questionnaire
…

Are you listening carefully to your customers? As explained above, listening might not be enough, when you ask them, your listening will be more worthwhile. Otherwise you might not hear much of a feedback.

Yours
John

P.S.: Watch out for my next blog post, because I want to listen to you.