Marketing automation is focused on providing your leads and prospects customized information based on their behavior and interactions with your website and company. And it means doing it automatically.

Most of us are familiar with standard list management system features. You put an opt-in form on a web page, the person subscribes to a list, you usually give them a gift for joining, and then you send them your newsletter (if you have one) and sales messages trying to convince them to buy whatever you’re selling. You can also set up automated autoresponder messages that go out to your list on a fixed schedule based on when they joined it.

You can have multiple lists and, depending on your list management system, you might be able to send messages to multiple lists, send to a list minus the people on another list, or unsubscribe someone from one list when they are subscribed to another. All these features are baby steps on the road to true marketing automation.

True marketing automation adjusts the messages going to people based on not only what list they’re on, but what they’ve bought, which pages on your site they’ve visited, what features in your software they’ve used, and what topics they’ve indicated they’re interested in. It allows you to send a personalized stream of messages to each person in your system that will appeal to their interests and lead to more sales. Instead of promoting all products and services to all prospects at the same time, you can only promote those items a particular prospect is most likely to buy at the time they’re most likely to buy it.

Can you see how powerful this is?

How about this scenario? Four hours after a subscriber visited your sales page but didn’t buy, you send an email to her with a discount code she can use to buy the product. That might turn no sale into a sale. Cool!

Many of the highest earning marketers online are using list management systems to do things exactly like this – and that’s what helps them to be the highest earning marketers online.

Marketing Automation Systems

The best known marketing automation system is Infusionsoft. It includes not just email marketing automation, but also Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is useful if you do a lot of one on one selling and want to track that process with prospects. You can read their perspective on marketing automation here:

http://www.infusionsoft.com/features/automated-marketing

The pros for using Infusionsoft are that it’s well-known and widely used. They provide lots of personal training. You will be able to find assistants to help you that are familiar with it.

There are two primary downsides to using Infusionsoft. The price is pretty hefty. You’ll pay $300/month minimum if you want to sell anything on your site, and there’s a $2,000 fee up front for training – although sometimes you can find discounts to bring that down to $1,000-$1,500. Unless your income is quite healthy and you have a list big enough to make the cost of automating it worthwhile – that is, you can expect to make enough additional sales through automation than the system costs – it’s a pretty big bite.

The other challenge with Infusionsoft is that it’s not the easiest system to use. It has lots of features and they’re not always named and organized in ways that make it easy to accomplish what you wish. Having used many list management systems, I find this one the hardest to navigate.

Other systems similar to Infusionsoft in both features and cost include:

• Ontraport starts at $300/month and is used a bunch as well.
• Marketo starts at $900/month. I’m not familiar with this system.
• Pardot starts at $1,000/month and is owned by Salesforce.com.

A relative newcomer to this market is Drip. In its own words, “Drip is lightweight marketing automation that doesn’t suck.” Drip doesn’t include a CRM, so it’s not best for companies using sales forces that want to track prospects through their sales process.

But it does have the ability to trigger an action based on any action a user takes, be it expressing interest in particular topic, downloading a sample chapter of your book, starting a trial of your software, or viewing your upgrade page but not upgrading.

The difference between Drip and other marketing automation platforms is that their mission is to make it easy and cost effective to get started, and to provide the email tools, guidance, content blueprints, and metrics you need.

Drip has a 21 day free trial and then it’s $49/month. I haven’t played with it yet, but I’m intrigued and impressed with what I’ve seen on their site, so I probably will.

They also have a terrific article, Why Marketing Automation Is the Future of Email Marketing, that explains marketing automation and why you might want one solution over another. If you’re at all interested in marketing automation, I highly recommend this article.

So, have I piqued your interest? Maybe you should look into getting more sales from your list with marketing automation.

Should You Build a Membership Site?

“If you’re an expert in something (and you know you are!), and want to go beyond just blogging about it online, creating a membership site can leverage your time significantly—and, if done right, can be a sustainable online business. But is it worth it?” Marla Tabaka asks this question and talks with some membership creators to get the answer.

How to Create a Membership Program that Rocks

Mary Jaksch has set up two successful membership programs and her article suggests a few questions to ask yourself before you launch yours. The best part of her article, though, lays out 5 critical mistakes that can kill your membership program, and they’re all excellent points.

7 Tips for Creating and Running Your First Membership Site

Ali Luke runs her own membership program and through that experience, has some practical tips for succeeding with your own program.

How to Create a Membership Site

This e-book from the iThemes team is a comprehensive look at creating a membership program. While they do suggest using their own products at times, this is still a good primer on memberships.

We’ve talked about ongoing monthly and fixed term membership structures.

While it’s rarely the only component of a paid membership, the community of members can be a significant portion of a membership if it’s set up to be easy to access and participate, and if it’s nurtured properly and consistently.

This is a tricky thing to pull off well. I’ve seen many memberships where the community aspect is rather anemic without much participation at all. I think there are several reasons why a community doesn’t form.

First, it’s important to have a private area for a membership that’s easy for members to access. One of the most popular ways to implement this these days is with a private Facebook group. Here, you’re piggybacking on a very popular social media site that your members may well be visiting on a regular basis already.

When your community is created in a forum or another specialized membership site, you’re asking your members to make a point of going to this site or forum and logging in to participate. In other words, you’re asking them to create a new habit of visiting your site regularly. Unless they perceive the value of developing this new habit as quite high, this is a tough thing for you to accomplish with the majority of your members. And if not enough members participate, the community never gets off the ground.

And that leads to the second reason communities can fail: not enough critical mass for the group to get going. It’s important for you to initiate conversations within your community and encourage others to share as well. You may want to personally invite a dozen or so early members to participate in the community to kick it off and attract others to also participate. And you as the creator of the membership will need to continue to participate. Otherwise, members will see that’s it’s not important to you and decide it’s not important to them, either.

Next, the conversations in this community must provide value to the members who participate. Depending on the nature of your membership, this could be ongoing marketing direction, technical support, emotional support, suggestions for how to accomplish something, etc. But if your members don’t find value in the conversations, they’ll stop engaging in them.

I have a client with a membership that includes several components, and a major piece is the private Facebook group. Her members are women and the community does offer practical help to each other, whether it’s about aging parents or a tough work situation, but the primary function of the group is to provide emotional support to each other. Sometimes it’s “good job” and sometimes it’s “hang in there”, but it’s a safe, positive place for these women to go where they know others will understand and support them.

It’s very well-managed and my client is on the site everyday posting, commenting, and liking. It’s no mistake that this warm, nurturing women has created such a mutually supportive community. And her participation doesn’t feel like it’s something she “has to do” to maintain the membership. It feels sincere and authentic. That’s what you want to strive for if you start your own community. (Can you tell she’s one of my favorite clients?! But it’s true that she’s doing the community thing very well.)

Pro: some of the membership value is provided by members themselves
Con: it can fail miserably if you don’t achieve critical mass and nurture it

If you’re a “people” person and enjoy building a thriving group of like-minded people, a membership where community is a significant benefit may be just right for you!

Here are some of the possibilities:

Ongoing, monthly

In this model, members pay per month “forever”. This sounds terrific! Sell once and earn money every month until you sell your business for seven figures, right? Not so fast.

First, this model requires that you create new content every month “forever”. There are a number of possible components of a membership and some aren’t as hard to generate month after month than others. Still, it’s a big and fairly permanent commitment, so be sure you’re up for it before you choose this model. And if you do choose it, carefully decide on what you’ll deliver each month so you know you’ll be able to consistently produce it.

Second, the dirty little secret of ongoing memberships is that the average time a member pays until they leave the membership is 3 months. I’ve seen memberships designed and supported in a such a way that members stay engaged much longer. But you need to realize that if you have a goal of X members per month, you won’t be able to rest on your laurels once you reach that level since you will have attrition and will always need to be attracting new members.

Pro: ongoing recurring income, although average length is 3 months
Con: must create new content every month “forever”

Fixed term

A fixed term membership lasts for 30 weeks or six months, or any set amount of time. They tend to be between 3 months and 12 months’ duration and content is usually delivered weekly. The content in the membership, whatever it is or however it’s delivered, is also fixed. The topic of a fixed term membership tends to be quite focused on a topic. Members can pay monthly or in one payment.

People start receiving the content from the beginning no matter when they join the membership. So at any given time, you will have members of a year-long program on week 1 and week 7 and week 35 and so on. A key aspect of most memberships of this type is that if a member cancels his membership and wants to restart it, he will start back at the beginning. This encourages members to just stick with it.

This model is attractive to both you as the creator as well as to your potential members. For your part, you know exactly how much content you’ll need ahead of time. You can plan it out. Heck, you can even have it all created before even launching the membership! This might be good for you if you’re worried about creating new content under time pressure.

On the other hand, you can create the first few bits of content, launch your membership to start bringing in money, and then create the remainder before they need to be disseminated to members.

This membership model can be more attractive to potential members since the topic and breadth of the material is clear upfront, as is the total cost.

While you won’t have an ongoing, “forever” stream of income from each member, you may find that members do stay longer since they’ve committed to a certain length of membership in the beginning. Of course, your content needs to be valuable enough that they don’t walk away before the end.

And as long as your membership material is evergreen, you can continuously market your membership and be bringing on new members without needing to create any new content. That sounds pretty good!

So if you’re considering a fixed term membership model, do try to pick a topic that will continue to be of interest and where the relevant material won’t go out of date too quickly.

Pros: clear benefit, know investment, all content can be created ahead of time
Con: must consistently attract new members, should pick a topic and material that will remain evergreen

There are more membership models to consider, but these are two of the most popular.

What makes a membership so great?

1. It provides a recurring income stream. That is, you make a sale one time to a customer and they continue to pay you. Recurring income is every business owner’s dream! It’s the biggest benefit of offering a membership.
2. You can leverage your time. This is particularly true if you’re a service provider. Regardless of what components you include in your membership, you’ll be producing them once for all your members. So even if it takes you 10 hours to create a month’s membership content, if you have 100 members paying $30 per month, you’ve made $300/hour, which is pretty good. And if you have 500 members, hooray for you! You’re earning $1,500/hour!
3. Members may buy more from you. We all know that having a list is valuable so you can market to your subscribers. Having a membership can be even more valuable since these people aren’t only subscribers, they’re already customers who value what you offer enough to keep paying for it. Of course, you don’t want to market to them so much that you shoot yourself in the foot by losing members.
4. You can get referrals from members. If you do a terrific job with your membership, you create raving fans who attract people they know to become members and/or buy your other products or services. In other words, if you really impress your members, they will often help market you to their circles of influence.
5. Creating a successful membership can position you as an expert in your field. As your membership grows and becomes more known, you will be seen as an important player in your area of expertise since you must have good content to attract a large group of people willing to pay for it consistently.
6. A membership “forces” you to create content. Sometimes we find it difficult to carve out the time to create new content. Other times, we just can’t quite get it completed. When you must produce new content regularly for your membership, you’ll quickly learn to be more consistent and disciplined about it or you’ll find your members disappearing! As long as the constant need to deliver new content doesn’t make you totally crazy, this deadline pressure might be a good thing for your business.
7. A membership can become a community of people who support each other – and you. If you want to create a true community with your members, provide a safe and convenient environment, both physical (in person and/or online) and emotional, and encourage members to share and help each other. If you succeed, you will find yourself with a community that your members may find as valuable as the content you provide. In fact, you’re likely to find this community’s support valuable as well.

There are also a few downsides to creating membership. One that has popped up in listing the benefits of a membership, is that you usually need to be creating something new every month. That can be stressful and even too much for some people to manage.

An often hidden issue is attrition. Just because you have 100 members this month doesn’t mean you’ll have those same 100 members next month. You’ll likely see some number of people cancel their membership every month, so to have consistent income, you need to be continuously attracting new members. Of course, the more valuable your membership components are and the closer you get to having your ideal audience signing up to your membership, the longer they’ll stay members and long-time members is definitely what you’re shooting for.

If you don’t already have a membership in your portfolio of products, perhaps you should consider offering one. While offering a membership does involve effort and discipline, the benefits are significant.

When I was younger, I never wanted a routine. In fact, I rebelled against routine. In retrospect, I think I had enough routine imposed on me first by schools and then by a corporate career that I resisted adding any more scheduling to my life.

When I started working for myself over a decade ago, though, that all changed. Now I had NO routine! Sure, with a young daughter at home, her school schedule (and wanting regular meals!) imposed some routine in my life. But how I managed my time for my business was wide open. And now that my daughter has moved away, I don’t even have her schedule to deal with.

While I don’t feel as though I’ve ever gotten my work schedule arranged ideally, I’m guessing having all my time wide open is the reason I’ve been reexamining my daily routine. And I think I’m making progress toward having a daily schedule that really works for me and that I don’t have to fight my way through every day. At the very least, I welcome the idea of a schedule now, which is a big step forward!

Here are some articles that might help you if you don’t have – or adhere to – a daily routine that makes you happy and productive.

How To Fit 20 Hours Into A 10 Hour Workday

Julie Neidlinger’s article discusses how to best think about planning your time so that the work time is productive and you make sure to allow time to not be at work. While I didn’t find anything here that was totally new to me, I appreciate the way she approaches the subject and she did give me a slightly new slant on how to think about it.

Improve Your Life: What 10 Things Should You Do Every Day To Improve Your Life?

This short article by Eric Barker really doesn’t have anything new. These are the basics that we all know, but few of us actually do all of these every day. So here’s a reminder. And there are many links to articles that go deeper into each area, if you’re interested.

The 24-Minute Morning Routine That Will Make You an Entrepreneurial Rock Star

I’m finding that having a good morning routine really does improve my whole day. I’ve been tweaking it for the last couple of months and think I’ve found what really works for me. Matthew Toren’s post on Entrepreneur.com suggests a specific recipe for starting your day. You may like his just as is, or it might be a good starting point for developing what works best for you.

How To Build Habits That Could Make You Rich

Thomas Corley’s article is a little different. When I first clicked through to this page, I expected to see a list of habits that could help “make me rich”. Instead, I learned about habits: how they’re created, why they’re hard to change, and how to create a new one more easily. Neat article!

So do you have a daily routine that works well for you? I’d love to hear about it, so leave a comment and share!

Wouldn’t you like to be able to copy multiple items – including rich items like images – and paste them somewhere? How about saving a set of snippets in a file for later? Or having all your copied bits available in your clipboard after you reboot your system?

A clipboard manager lets you do all this and more. Some managers will let you paste your snippets in a series using hotkeys.

I use a clipboard manager all day, every day. For example, when I generate my ezine, I’ll cut and paste the title, article body, and blog post URL from WordPress into Aweber. By being able to copy them all at the same time from WordPress and them paste them all at once in Aweber, it saves me from having to jump back and forth from one browser window to the other.

Other uses include:

• Storing and pasting boiler plate text
• Maintaining standardized answers for common support questions
• Storing common code snippets
• Noting thoughts
• Remembering text
• Filling in on-line forms
• Organizing information
• Notes
• Storing often used text
• Manage “to do” lists
• Storing messages to refer back to (blogging, e-mail)
• Drafting messages or emails

Clipboard Magic

The manager I use is Clipboard Magic, a lightweight, free clipboard manager and archiving utility for Windows. It can save anything from a single character to pages of text and save as many snippets as you wish. You can edit snippets, too.

I keep a small Clipboard Magic window open on my desktop, over at the side. It lets me see what I’ve saved there and lets me select the item I wish to paste. I can remove duplicates as well as save any set of snippets to a file to pull up and use later. I can even manually add text snippets rather than copying to get them into the list.

Read more about Clipboard Magic.

Clippy Portable

Another free Windows clipboard manager is Clippy Portable. Its list of items copied pops up from the system tray in a semi-transparent window.

Clippy Portable is not so lightweight, but has some neat options, like saving images, taking screenshots, and doing a quick Google search of any text in its clipboard. Also, the “portable” part of its name means you can copy it on any USB flash drive or other devices, and take it with you whenever you need to view the clipboard content on the fly.

However, I’ve seen some reports of Clippy being buggy which is why I don’t use it. If you try it, let me know how you like it.

Read more about Clippy Portable. 

Mac Clipboard Managers

I don’t use a Mac, so I don’t know a lot about the options available, but I did a little research and found these fairly recent roundups of clipboard utilities on a Mac:

Copy, Paste, Repeat: Finding the best clipboard manager for Mac

Clipboard Managers 

If you spend a good amount of time on your computer, it will definitely enhance your productivity to start using a clipboard manager. Once you do, you’ll never go back!

But a Site Builder Sounds So Great…

The pitch for using a site builder like Wix or Weebly sounds so appealing. After all, they’ll host the site so you don’t need to worry about buying a domain or hosting yourself. They have a neat little building block system where you can create your pages easily and add your content. You don’t need to mess around with any nasty code and they provide a bunch of pretty templates to choose from. You only pay one company a monthly or annual fee for your domain, hosting, and the builder.

Sounds Amazing! So What’s the Problem?

As a web designer, you may think my objection is self-serving – after all, if everyone builds their own site, I won’t have any work! Or professional conceit – no untrained solopreneur could possibly build a site as nice as a professional web designer.

While there is some truth to these points, they aren’t why I believe you should make a different decision. Here are my issues with site builders:

1. You can only use one of their supplied templates. While they allow a certain amount of customization, you generally can’t create a fully customized look and feel. The sites I’ve seen built using builders look either blandly cookie-cutter or amateurish.
2. They lack functional flexibility. You can add the elements they allow to your site and nothing else. And you can only add them where and how the builder allows. I’ve had several clients ask me to move their sites from a site builder environment into WordPress because they found their current sites were not flexible enough for their needs.
3. They own where your site lives. That is, your site is on their property. It’s like building a house on land owned by someone else. If they want to raise the cost you pay to have your house on their land, you have few choices – pay or leave your house behind. And if the land is sold to someone else, all bets are off. It’s like building your business entirely on Facebook or Twitter. They can change the rules or boot you off entirely whenever they wish and you have little recourse. And with a site builder company hosting your site, you can’t move it anywhere else since the builder software is proprietary and only works on their servers.

Well Then, What’s the Best Way to Build a Site?

I’m a huge fan or WordPress. Not wordpress.com – that’s pretty similar to the site builder companies we’ve been talking about. I mean the WordPress software you get from wordpress.org and install on your own web hosting. Let’s look at it with regard to the builder issues I listed.

1. There are many, many WordPress themes available, both free and paid. And they can all be fully customized. Whether you want a clean and professional look, a whimsical and creative look, or an upscale and classy look, they’re all readily possible with WordPress.
2. WordPress itself includes a lot of functionality and adds more all the time. Additionally, there are literally thousands of plugins that provide pretty much any functionality you could imagine. Every type of business is represented in the WordPress universe.
3. When WordPress is installed on your own hosting, you have control over it. Yes, you are paying someone else for the hosting, but it’s like leasing the land your house is built on. It’s a legal agreement and the hosting company can’t change the cost or rules on you until renewal time. And even then, you can easily move your site to another host if you don’t like your current company.

But What About the Good Aspects of a Site Builder?

I thought you’d get around to asking that! Well, we already talked about why you really want to have your own hosting for your site. You also want to buy and control your own domain names.

Now to the biggest benefit of a site builder: you can create your website yourself. Chances are if you want a site for your business that looks professional and has an opt-in form, allows customers to buy from you, has an events calendar, or a membership, you will want to hire a professional web designer to create it. S/he can create the look and feel you’re looking for. S/he can also sift through the many plugins available to find the functionality you need in plugins that work, are updated appropriately, and are supported by their creators.

Not only do I think your site will be better looking and functioning if you outsource its creation, I also believe it’s better for your business. Taking the time to learn what you need to in order to have a good looking and functioning site is just not a good use of your time. Even if you’re on a limited budget, your time is better spent attracting and serving clients or customers.

The good news is that WordPress is designed to make is very easy to add and update content. So while I recommend hiring out for your site creation, I have no problem with you learning how to make changes to the content. Then you’ll only need your web designer when you want to update the design or functionality on your site, not when you want to update a page or publish a blog post.

So invest your time and energy in what you do best and earn the money to hire a pro to create your site. Then learn how to update the content on your site and you’re good to go!

I feel safe in saying that for anyone over the age of 20, that’s no longer the case. We often feel like we’re drowning in email. Not only does the “ding” make us feel dread rather than excitement, many of us have turned off the “ding” to maintain our sanity.

Nevertheless, email’s not going anywhere, so we might as well make friends with it. This week’s articles aim to help us do just that.

10 Ways to Write Better Emails (and Just Maybe Change the World)

This article by Alexandra Franzen will help you “commit to writing better, simpler, clearer emails – the kinds of emails that people actually look forward to reading.” Her tips will show you how to simplify and humanize the email you write. I wish all the email I received followed these guildelines!

Templates And Hints For The Perfect Email For Almost Every Situation

Kevan Lee’s article gets down to the nitty gritty of how to handle common types of email with many templates for specific situations, including:

• An email template for shaving 20 hours off your work week
• How Michael Hyatt says no to guest bloggers
• Email snippets for saying no
• 7 simple sentences to set better boundaries
• How to send the best emails to your customers
• What to say instead of “Let me know if you have any questions”
• Out with the “buts,” in with the exclamations

Fabulous!

How To Make Your Life Better By Sending Five Simple Emails

What about using email to actually improve your life? Eric has five emails for you to send everyday that will do just that. And I think they’ll make you feel good, too!

His suggestions fall into the areas of Happiness, Job, Growth, Friendship, and Career. Try them out maybe your life will go up a notch.

Yay to making email work for us! Do you have any other tips for making email more user-friendly? Leave a comment and share!

What is it? Developing relationships with partners that support each other’s businesses.

Notice I didn’t say “recruiting affiliates”. This isn’t about getting email addresses on a list and hoping they’ll promote your programs, products, and services. This is about finding individuals who market to the same audience as you do – but not with the same products and services – and are open to a mutually beneficial marketing relationship.

Again, notice that I said “mutually beneficial”. These will be relationships. They need to provide value to both people.

These are people who you will be thrilled to support and promote to your list when they have something going on. And you’ll feel comfortable asking them to share what you’re doing with their lists.

You’ll eagerly promote your partners with an enthusiastic tone on the schedule they give you. And for your part, you need to be as helpful as possible when asking them to promote for you. You’ll want to provide promotional emails and social media posts as well as a schedule of when to release them. Include each individual’s affiliate link in their materials. And do pay your partner affiliates promptly!

So what holds people back from developing this circle of partners? Business owners often feel they aren’t successful enough yet – they don’t have a big enough list – to ask people to partner with them. What they don’t realize is that there are plenty of other business owners that would be happy to work with them. Granted, a small business probably won’t be able to partner with a leader in the industry, but there are many other businesses available to work with. And the way your business can become more successful is by starting to create this circle of people who will put you forward to their lists.

How Do You Do It?

Now that you want to build these relationships, how do you start, especially is you have a smaller business?

Begin by researching and making a list of people who serve the same audience as you do, but are not competitors. Go ahead and add everyone you can find and think of to the list.

Divide this list into three groups. The first group is people with businesses and lists about the same size as yours. The second is people with businesses and lists a little bigger than yours. And the third is people with much bigger businesses and lists.

For now, you’re going to just hold onto the third list of much bigger businesses and not do anything with it.

The first list of people will have smaller lists and so, each will smaller possible marketing returns. But there will still be value.

The second list has some people on it who will consider you too small to partner with, but others who see the potential and will agree.

Now, write personal emails to the people on the first and second lists asking them if they’re interested in forming a partnership. Don’t ask them to promote anything for you at this point. You’re just trying to start a relationship, not proposing marriage! Make sure your initial email stresses that this would be a mutual arrangement – that you’re interested in promoting them to your list as well as having them share your business with their people. You could also propose guest posting on each other’s blogs as a way of getting started and introducing each other to your peopler

You may want to share the size of your list in this email. Yes, if it’s small, it may cause some to say no to your offer. But that’s OK. As long as you aren’t aiming too high to start with, enough will say yes.

This will get you started. It may seem like a lot of effort to get small-ish partners. What you’ll find though is that as your list grows, you can start approaching some of the larger businesses on your list – maybe even ones from the third list. Also, as time goes by, some of the other smaller businesses you initially partner with will also grow their lists and become even more valuable partners.

Having a good circle of enthusiastic partners with lists full of your ideal clients will help your business explode. Just ask any highly successful person in your industry. So don’t wait until you’re “successful enough” to start building these relationships because they’re what will make you successful!