I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

Truth be told, there’s a little more to success in internet marketing than what you might have read. In fact, there’s a lot more. The reality of it may sting a little. Be patient, it does get better.

The Dreaded Day Job

If Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth) is accurate in his description of the typical entrepreneur then your aspirations toward success in business may indicate that you are already a highly skilled technician. While Gerber sets his sights on helping you achieve your dream of entrepreneurship, today I’m going to attempt to build a bridge between that dream and the reality of your rent (which is probably due tomorrow and you’re devoting your valuable time to reading my blog…).

What’s the bridge? Well, it’s a Day Job. And they aren’t as easy to come by today as they have been in days past. At least that’s what the media suggests.

I actually think it’s a sellers market, if you know how to sell yourself. What’s that? Did I just drift back into IM land when I’m supposed to be talking about getting a “real” job? Nope. Not exactly. Well, maybe there’s more overlap than you originally thought.

Make Money Today

I’m really excited about your ambition to be wildly successful. I really am. However, if you realize that you just need to fall back to plan B for a while and catch up on some bills, there is ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME in getting a day job to get you there. You might find that it actually propels you forward!

This video of a presentation I did should shed some light on it. Depending on interest I may do an in depth series on each point I cover in this presentation. Please leave comments below telling me what you think.

He understood the universal constant in life that you get what you pay for. In entrepreneurship this is especially true. The harder you work, the more you are likely to accomplish. But it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that aimless busy work is productive work. The fact is that if you don’t have an objective (aka, A GOAL) then you might easily keep yourself busy, but never really make any progress.

I have to confess that for most of my life I HATED Goals. For example, consider a sales goal. If I make a goal to sell X dollars worth of some product, that’s nice, but I really don’t have control over whether I meet my goal or not.

I have no control over whether I reach a goal

Before you head off to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am, hear me out. What I mean is that my ability to reach the goal is dependent on someone else making a decision to give me their money in exchange for my product or service. It’s his decision to buy, regardless of how persuasive I might be. I simply cannot make that decision for him.

So in reality, I don’t have any control over whether someone makes the decision to purchase from me or not. The same is true for getting optins on a website, visitors to a web page, donations for a cause, etc. Most goals worth setting depend on external factors, and those are always out of our hands.

I think that’s why goals always depressed me. I could make any goal in the world, but I felt so powerless to reach it. In my twenties I had an epiphany on the subject of goals that was really empowering. Even though I didn’t find a way to hypnotize my prospects to buy something from me or control those pesky external factors, I did discover a way to reassign my personal accountability away from the goal by splitting the goal setting process into two categories: Goals and Commitments.

How a Commitment is different than a Goal?

The epiphany came when I realized how goals differ from commitments. A commitment is something that I have absolute control over (at least relatively). For example, If I decide to do publish 20 comments on my facebook page, that’s not a goal, it’s a commitment. It’s completely within my power to accomplish it and doesn’t rely on anyone else making a decision. Sure there are external factors, but they aren’t related to human decision. They’re things like internet connectivity or my car starting. If I’ve really made a commitment I can find an internet connection at a starbucks and take the bus if my car breaks down.

The same decision independence is true for creating 20 backlinks, dialing 20 phone numbers, knocking 20 doors, etc. It’s key to understand that following through with these commitments doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll speak with 20 people, since I can’t force someone to pickup the phone or answer the door.

The point is that a commitment is something I can say that I will do and the only person that can prevent me from doing it is myself. I think you’ll see in just a minute why this is so powerful…

More than a semantic argument. It’s empowering

I promise that I’m not trying to make some coy play on a semantic difference between two words (goal and commitment). Quite the opposite is true. I’m trying to provide a separation between two very distinct mental states. Splitting goal setting into two parts, one over which I have complete control and another over which I have very little control, empowers me to make a plan with specific action items that I know I can get done. Have a look at this diagram to see what I mean.

You might have noticed that I actually put a third component as a precursor to a Goal. The Object of Desire is a slippery devil. In many cases it can be hidden, forgotten and even deceptive. Think about it this way: What value is there in Green paper or small metal discs? None really. You see, it’s not the money we value. It’s the stuff that we can get with the money that we value.

We don’t really want $1,000, or even $1,000,000. What we want is the car, or the house or the freedom from debt or the once in a lifetime vacation… I think you get the idea. So when you set a goal to make X dollars in sales, it’s important to allow your mind to travel in two directions at once. You want to make sure that you know why you want to reach that goal (your object of desire) and what steps are most likely to help you reach it (the commitments you make).

Example: get 200 unique visits per day for keyword “xyz”

Let’s say you wanted to get 200 unique visitors per day from organic search results to a page on your website each day. There are some things over which you have complete control. These include getting a specific number of backlinks to your website every day, choosing a keyword that gives you a plausible chance of success, creating optimized content for the target page, etc.

There are also many things you can’t control, such as whether those backlinks stick, whether the search engines find and index those links, whether the search engines give you improved SERP results for those keywords. While you can increase your chances of getting clickthroughs by writing a good page title and including appropriate meta description details, you really don’t even have control over whether people click on your site even if you get the search engines to put it in the top spot.

So to reach the goal of getting 200 unique visitors a day to a web page, you make commitments to create backlinks and produce the best optimized content you can on the target page.

Now, going back upstream, it’s just as important to make sure you understand what your Object of Desire is. For example, you might be stroking your ego (think “coolest guy on the planet” wars) or you might be interested in saving someone’s life (think “donate children’s hospital”). The better you understand and the more you can shape your Object of Desire, the better prioritized your Goals will be and the more motivated you’ll be to follow through with your commitments!

Your game plan and the Feedback Loop

The strategy then is to identify a goal, followed immediately by creating a specific list of commitments that you have power to act on independently. The commitments you make should have a direct correlation to your goal. Now hold yourself accountable for completing your commitments, which you have power over, not whether you reach your goal, which you don’t have power over.

As time passes you end up with data that will either confirm or invalidate the usefulness of the tasks you’ve committed to do in terms of how they relate to your goal. If the data is positive, then you stay the course and continue on with your daily commitments. If the data is negative, you don’t have to change your goal, but you can instead change your commitments to see if another approach will work. There’s a chance that you’ll end up changing your goal, but it will be based on data, not whim.

This is called a feedback loop. As you change the input (your commitments), you observe the output (realization (or not) of your goal). Depending on the output, you may change the input. You might also adjust the desired output if a set of inputs is unable to help you achieve the desired output.

Throughout all of this, try your hardest to be honest with yourself about your real object of desire and let that understanding guide you to set the goals most consistent with what you want most. You might snicker when I say “be honest with yourself”, but the deeper you look to figure out what your real object of desire is, the more likely you are to be surprised by it.

Free Yourself!

Stop living as a hostage to Goals that you don’t have any power over. Instead get scientific and separate your goal setting process into two parts: Goals and Commitments. Then follow through with your commitments to reach your goals! Best of luck.

If you pay close attention to what some of the more public copywriters of our era have to say about high quality sales copy, you’ll hear phrases like ‘mint your own money‘ and ‘grab them by the throat and force them to buy‘ or ‘2013% increase in conversions‘.

Of course those phrases are typically part of their sales pitch for a copy writing course and they’re practicing what they preach. For someone interested in writing better copy, those phrases are so tantilizing that they’re hard to pass by.

Books, methods and formulas

I’ve actually read a number of books on the subject of writing sales copy and most of them are really good. Some of them outline methods that you can follow. Others provide formulas. The best books (in my opinion) are those that give more far reaching perspective on life and the human experience. After all, it’s the human experience that really helps us connect with other people and talk to them about benefits.

One of those ‘human experience’ constants seems to be a play on our own weakness. That might be why the elevator pitch works so well. It boils down to this basic format:

Elevator Pitch

I help Name your ideal prospect
… do Some benefit to them/their business
… even if Play on their biggest weakness

An example elevator pitch would go something like this:

“I help entrepreneurs and start ups build profit generating websites with instant ROI even if they have a small budget and are clueless about where to start.”

This won’t get the attention of big businesses and it plays on the almost universal feelings of budget constraint and “where do I start” that most entrepreneurs feel.

Product Launches (or the sideways sales letter as Jeff Walker calls it) can be another effective method for selling to prospects because it incorporates relationship and authority into the sales process in a way that’s natural to many people.

One of the most helpful revelations about writing good sales copy came as I learned to differentiate Benefits from Features. This is especially true for technical products where the proprietor of the product tends to be excited about all the little features he’s built in and forgets to tell the consumer what emotional benefits those features bring.

But this article isn’t really about how to write good sales copy, is it? There’s one crucial component that even the best copy writing books just miss. I think it might be due to the fact that a seasoned copywriter just does it without thinking. Maybe they imagine that it’s a common sense part of the research phase. Maybe they have said it and I missed it for sooooo long. Whatever the case, it’s a real learning experience when the light finally turns on. What am I talking about?

Here’s the embarrasing part

I’m talking about writing the best sales copy in the world for a non-market and wondering what went wrong. It might be more accurate to say writing sales copy, videos and other materials over and over and over for a market that just won’t buy or doesn’t exist.

About 10 years ago I created a website for my running: Maintain Fit Exercise Log. The more time (and money)I invested in the site, the more convinced I was that it was going to be the next big thing. I spent hours of my life (days, weeks and months really) on that “product” confident that the next change would excite the masses and bring in the traffic (and the revenue).

When I finally realized that it was a non-market, I felt both cheated and liberated at the same time. At last I was free to let this beast die and divert my time and attention to new markets for testing. But I’m sure some will ask me to clarify what I mean by a non-market.

Or more specifically, how can you know if you’ve got a non-market? My introduction to this idea of a non-market came when I watched The Magnificent Symphony of Four Parts in 2008. Ed Dale effectively convinced me that I had taken the wrong approach on just about every business I had ever started. Here are two summary points that serve as a good indicator that you’ve got a non-market.

• No competition
• No mature companies/no commercial options

Unfortunately, most people skip this initial research phase when they have a new idea. Instead of figuring out whether there’s a market, whether they can get traffic and whether that traffic will convert, they hole themselves up in the basement and frantically work on developing a product. That’s what I did with Maintain Fit.

The sales copy surprise

When I finally stopped working on any project for which there wasn’t a definite market, I started to see some really worthwhile progress. The traffic was easier to get. The relationships I was forming were more meaningful. The deal flow increased.

What surprised me most of all is that Even Bad Copy Will Sell, if there’s a market. As I tested more and more things, I became exhausted trying to follow the sales copy methods, formulas and models. I finally stopped trying to write sales copy and instead I just wrote what came to me. Was it good sales copy. No, not particularly. But to my surprise it resonated with people and I made sales!

Hopefully, if I’ve motivated you to do anything, it is to Stop tweaking your sales copy for non-markets! If you’ve got a project/business/idea that just isn’t getting traction and you’ve “tried everything”, maybe your idea isn’t really that good after all. Go back to Ed Dale’s advice from 2008 (he covers this every year in The Challenge) and reverse your process.

Research -> Traffic -> Conversions -> Product!

That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

I’ve built a lot of membership websites in WordPress, and perhaps the most frustrating part is getting the video right. Video is one of the key components to communicating with your members. In fact, video should be used throughout the membership process, including:

• Landing page for optin conversion
• Sales page to increase sales conversions
• As member content to increase retention and effectiveness

With the advent of mobile devices, like Apple’s products, more and more people want to consume their content on the go. That can mean that many of the more traditional ways to deliver video content just don’t work. There are already many services that will offer to get your video up and running in HTML5, but none of them are easy, so I created two plugins for WordPress that accommodate two spcific uses of HTML5 Video. Here’s a video that shows you how they work.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video, is how my HTML5 landing pages ROCK THE WORLD in terms of optin rate. I created special landing pages for two JVs that wanted to offer the optincrusher to their subscribers and clients. When I got around to checking what the optin rate was, I almost couldn’t believe it. Especially because some of those unique impressions are me checking the page occasionally. Here’s a snapshot from my aweber account:

That’s 42.6% optin rate for one site and 81.0% for the other. How does that compare to your optin rate? You can even see my blog optin rate sitting at 5.9%, which still isn’t that bad for general traffic.

Here are the takeaway points (as I see them). I want to make sure targeted traffic sent to a landing page has the following experience:

• They can see the video (yes, especially on mobile devices)
• There’s a clear call to action
• There aren’t any distractions

It turns out that my HTML5 landing page does all three very well! At the moment I don’t have a timeline to publicly release my HTML5 video plugins for WordPress, but if you think you’ve got a site that would really benefit from them, leave a comment below or shoot me an email. I would love to hear what you think and where you would use them.

UPDATE [9/1/2011]: This plugin is now available for download. Get details and training at http://mobilevideoforwordpress.com/

After completing that integration, I thought it would be useful to offer some background on why it’s so important, and how you can approach list segmentation in your business.

Segmentation defined

My first encounter with segmentation came as I marketed a product to owners of SUVs back in the mid 1990s. I discovered that there are companies whose entire business model is to maintain large lists of individuals, addresses, phone numbers and so on along with a type of meta information, such as where they shop and what car they drive. They even claimed to tell me that I could target owners of a specific model SUV within a zip code region. Wow.

In internet marketing, segmentation takes many forms, including targeted search traffic, strategic joint ventures and, quite importantly, segmenting your own email lists. The most successful marketers manage their email lists in such a way that they can send different messaging to each lead, prospect and customer.

Desired benefits of segmentation

Profit should be the focus behind segmenting your email list. When done properly, segmentation can allow you to craft messages and offers that are most likely to be accepted by a group of people.

Many of the best sales people will tell you that every pitch is individual. While that’s not possible (strictly speaking) in direct marketing where an offer is being presented to thousands or even millions of people, the aim is to get ever closer to a customized pitch for each prospect.

Technology

Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated in its ability to deliver unique, personalized messages to each person on your list, which gets you closer and closer to the individual pitch that sales professionals know closes more sales.

At the same time, you run the risk that you’re messaging becomes unnatural and contrived. Just because technology allows you to insert customized variables, such as name, email address, dates and so on, doesn’t mean that it will enhance your message.

Always run your messaging through your ‘real person’ filter. By that I mean that technology should enable communication, not define it. Don’t do something just because you can, make sure that it ends up looking like something that one real person would actually send to another person.

Two extremes

As we look at the spectrum of uses of technology, there are extreme cases. Some marketers put everyone that ever showed interest in their product on a single list. Whether they buy one offer or another, they stay put on that one single list. Other marketers create labyrinthine frameworks that infer interest based on every click in an email, thereby changing the future messaging for that individual.

Neither extreme strikes me as being effective. In the simplistic single list case there are many missed opportunities where individualized messaging might better resonate with a group. In the second case there is an assumed intimacy that rarely exists between a marketer and a group. In other words, it’s difficult to verify that what you assume an individual is thinking when he clicks one thing and not another is accurate.

Problems with multivariate testing

Which brings me to the vagaries of multivariate testing. In it’s simplest form, testing takes on an A/B question. Two options are presented to large populations and whichever form, A or B, produces the highest response is considered the winner. Typically an A/B test will involve the change of a subject line or an image with all other elements remaining fixed.

On the other hand, if you attempt to test a simple combination of Headline and image, assuming you have two of each, you now have four possible combinations. With four possibilities, the number of people that see each one shrinks. Smaller groups make the results statistically more difficult to distinguish. As a result, the more intricate your triage process the more opportunity for error.

Autoresponders

The good news is that most autoresponder services provide built in mechanisms for sorting through your lists and communicating in both broad and specific ways. When you’re evaluating email services, make sure that the type of segmentation you want is easily accommodated with the solution you choose.

Conclusions

Email list segmentation is an integral part of effective marketing. Finding the proper balance of segmentation and ensuring that your criteria for sorting an individual into one group as opposed to another are effective will require finesse and careful attention. In every case, the outcome is almost certain to be market dependent and so for each new market approached you should expect a settling time to find an effective groove.

Membership websites

As I mentioned, my reason for writing this article is that I just finished extending one of the better membership frameworks available for WordPress to accommodate segmentation. Segmenting visitors, from free members from premium members is a key component to building an effective sales funnel and retention strategy for any membership website.

I recently developed a tool to increase the optin rate on my websites (and for my clients). During development I got to work with nearly all of the major email service providers. While many of them are very strong and offer some clever tools to make marketers more successful, iContact stood out with a special 2-for-1 offering of a combined email and survey service. Let me explain why this is such a powerful combination and then I’ll show you a tool that can make it even better.

Utility

Email services are what I like to call a utility service for marketers. It’s like gas and electricity for a home. You can’t go without them and really have a decent quality of life, and when they flake out, the pain is felt almost immediately. The good news is that nearly all the email services have a rock solid platform that’s fast and reliable.

As I integrated each of these services, there were some features that started to jump out to me as being extremely useful. One of the services that I think did the best job with this was iContact, and to understand why I say that, it’s important to review the advice I got as a beginner to email marketing.

I heard from Jeff Walker, Ed Dale, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and just about everyone else that you have to do these two things with your list:

• Ask them what they want
• Build a relationship

That’s why most of these marketers use surveys in various ways to accomplish both of these tasks. But they use a combination of two separate services to get it done. That means their email list and communication are in a database independent from survey results and respondents. As it turns out, that can present a big challenge when processing survey results and conducting follow up.

2-for-1 email and surveys

The first thing I noticed about iContact is that they put those two services in one integrated package. I can only imagine how much easier it becomes for new marketers to survey and interact with their lists, not to mention the efficiency gains that more experienced marketers get. I should know since I’ve spent time working through the details of not having an integrated email and survey service.

The integration is great and opens many possibilities, however it’s also important to know that each service can be used independently. That means you can publish a survey and link to it from your website without an email, or include it in an email broadcast or an autoresponder sequence. It’s very flexible.

Leverage the combination

Since this was the only truly integrated provider I found (some parent companies offer both as separate labels so they can charge more, but they don’t integrate like iContact) I decided to publish a customized version of the optincrusher software. I called it ioptinboost.

The reason I decided to create a separate piece of software is that I could integrate the survey function in directly. So with ioptinboost you can run a survey on your site, the same way you would an optin form. It will get your visitors attention and tell you loads about the traffic you’re getting to your site.

If you structure your survey correctly, you can even provide an incentive and get them onto an autoresponder. If you’ve followed Eben Pagan for a while, that’s very similar to what he did with the Psychic Sales Letter. There’s some very powerful psychology at play here, and as a smart marketer, you can leverage it like never before.

Free Softare

Just like the optincrusher, I’m releasing ioptinboost for free (as of right now anyway). That won’t last forever, but today you can download it here:

.

If this article has piqued your interest, you can try the icontact service for free. They have great live support, so it’s very easy to get your first survey or campaign up and running quick. Of course I created HD videos showing you how to do everything you need to do on http://ioptinboost.com/

Leave a comment about your experience with iContact and how you use their service to improve your marketing.

How to determine the award amount

Go and look at several other logo design contests that have taken place recently. As you look do this, take a minute to notice the relationship between the quality of the submissions and the award amount. Your gut will tell you which logos are high quality and which aren’t. That will help you judge how much money to put into the logo design.

How to make a designer take interest in your contest

Most logos (or identities Framing or Branding) are designed to convey a specific message. That’s the point after all. But in some cases, there isn’t a message as much as an identity or personality. In those cases I’ve observed that instead of a logo it’s more common to see stylized text (many designers call this type treatment). Stylized text is a big deal and some companies have paid thousands of dollars to have a font made just for them.

One problem with novice designers is that they tend to use symbols and marks that don’t actually mean anything or add any relevant value to the logo (swoosh abuse and differentiation). There’s really no reason to put a symbol of some sort into a logo unless it communicates something.

So if you think about other feminine brands, you’ll see that there’s a tendency to choose a type treatment as a logo or trademark. Think: Martha Stewart, Lane Bryant, Macy’s

One thing to notice is that in each case they’ve used a sans serif font. They also use the same color rather than multiple colors. They also mix bold and regular size fonts to accentuate the font. Many of them use either all caps or all lowercase. Colors are nondescript and don’t call attention to themselves. They’re typically very simple (not busy).

If it’s hard for to identify what your message is, or if you don’t have a single message to convey then you might be best to go with a type treatment.

Another thing I would point out is that the websites for some of the brand names that I suggested are very simple and match the logo. If the logo (or type treatment) really will become your identity, then you want to think about how it will affect the theme on your site. They need to compliment one another.

What if nothing grabs you

Go here: http://99designs.com/contests. On the right (and down a bit) you’ll see a panel with Recent Winning Designers. Click on these and look at their recent wins (like this http://99designs.com/users/376750 and this http://99designs.com/people/oxy). When you find one that looks attractive to you, ask that specific designer to take part in your contest.

I know I mentioned this before and I really think you’re CRAZY if you don’t do it. You should send an email to your entire list telling them about the competition and give them a link right to it. Let them vote. Let them vent. Give them a post where they can leave comments. Let them submit designs and win the award money. If you don’t leverage the interest of the people that have given you their email then you’re really passing up a gold mine. Who else in all the world is going to know your brand better than them?

When the project has only a couple days left, go and raise the winning bid amount. I’m not sure how much to raise it, but add another $40 on there, and (THIS IS IMPORTANT) provide new direction in the form of “after seeing all these designs we realized that we really want XYZ, so we increased the price and would love fresh new submissions”. I think that people that submitted before will be notified of the new higher price and come read why. At this point you should send out another email to your entire list telling them the same thing. Make another post where they can comment on the new logos that have been submitted.

If you don’t include your list in the process then you’re passing up a HUGE opportunity to bond with your list. How often do you get to shape the way a company or service looks, let alone one that you love? This might be the biggest opportunity you’ve ever had. You could even use this to build your list by encouraging them to send the contest and site to their creative friends and family.

Don’t miss the chance to include your list in this. The quality so far isn’t all that good, but it’s being submitted by people in other countries who don’t know and love your site (it might not even be a cultural fit where they live). How could they possibly hit the nail on the head.

One more thing. Be sure to personally invite designers that you know. They know you, your ‘brand’ and they’re creative. They also probably wouldn’t mind winning the prize money.

What should the email sound like

This email was very specific to the target audience and the personality of the site owner. You should definitely work hard to match the voice and content of an email that you might send to the audience that you’re approaching. In other words, you might not want to just copy and paste this, but you can decide.

By the way, there are some really crucial mental triggers (and emotional triggers) in this copy that are designed to increase the bond with the list and help them feel important. See if you can feel where they are.

[begin email]
SUBJECT: We need your help!

Hi,

This might sound a bit rushed, but we’re in over our heads (again). We could just slog through this one on our own, but we think you might be uniquely qualified to help us solve our problem. Could you do us a small favor?

You see, while we’ve been working hard to make great content for [sitename], the site ‘logo’ (if you even call it that) has gone a bit, ummm, stale. We thought it looked great when we started the site, but sooooo much has happened.

We’ve spent hours (days, weeks and months really) on projects and tutorials and dozens of our readers have contributed wonderful articles too. We’ve been through site crashes and technology foibles. We’ve changed things a few times and just can’t seem to find the right look.

But then we realized that you are our ‘look’. That’s why we think you’re the best person to help us right now.

What we want to find is some type of ‘logo’, for lack of a better word. Something that would represent the lives of the women behind our blog and the values we all represent.

The bad news is that our attempts so far just haven’t produced the results we hoped for. In fact, you can see them here:

[linktodesigncontest]

So how can you help? There are a few ways (and you don’t even have to be a designer).

The most simple way to help us out would be to [reply to this email/post a comment at link] telling us what you think [sitename] has become and what it means to you. Just open up and let us know why you follow our blog and what it has done for you.

If you feel like you have an eye for design you could go to our design contest above and vote on the submissions or even submit your own. Be as creative as you like, since we really are all about you. If you have the best design you’ll win the prize money too!

The last way that you can help us would be to forward this email to your family and friends that you think might have a good design idea for us.

[sitename] is really all about you. Thank you. We really can’t wait to hear what you think and incorporate that into who we become.

Sincerely,
[end email]

What to do if the comments go south?

I think the comments are great. I would keep feeding into them and draw attention to it. People are much more likely to comment and contribute if you do.

As it turns out, even bad comments are good (in many cases). The negative things people would say about your company, logo or overall identity are a big deal when it comes to your own internal evolution. Controversy is also one of the most effective ways to encourage conversation.

Bear in mind that you’ve gotten so many more submissions than I’ve seen in any other contest. For example, [otherprominentimguru] just did a re-branded logo for [hissitename] and he only got 72 entries (and he sent an email out to tens of thousands of people). You’ve gotten 482. That shows that you’ve successfully engaged your audience.

By the way, I can see several elements of different logos that I really like. You can point these out to each designer and see which one combines them best.

Take away

A logo or brand is something that grows, just like a tree or a person. It changes over time. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, your brand only exists in the mind of the consumer. No matter how much money you spend, how well matched your colors are or any other combination of clever marketing tactics, your brand is determined by what your consumers think of you. You may as well include them in the decoration of your site.

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.