If you’re offering less than or more than three, you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Let me explain.

The “Good, Better, Best” Pricing Strategy

The “Good, Better, Best” pricing strategy will increase revenue! ?

By offering tiered options, you capture a broader customer base. Some opt for the basic, while others go all in for premium. Result? Increased sales, happier customers, and a boost in the bottom line.

I learned about this pricing strategy over a decade ago in an excellent book, Impact Pricing, by Mark Stiving. It’s my go-to book on pricing. In the book, Mark writes (highlights are mine):

Good, Better, Best is an extension of versioning that takes advantage of your customers’ psychological make-up.

• Given the options of Good, Better, and Best, people who are unsure of what they want buy Better.
• Go back and read that sentence again. It is the crux of the Good, Better, Best tactic.

Customers avoid “Best” because they’re afraid of paying too much. They’re even more afraid of “Good” because they are afraid to purchase a product that might not meet their needs. When uncertain, they buy “Better.” Sears is famous for using this pricing tactic.

Although this might seem funny or strange, there’s rational support for this behavior. Uncertain customers use the options that the sellers make available to them as information to help them make their decision. Without knowing anything else, they can infer that the company selling these products selected them for a reason. The company probably selected the “Good” option for very price-sensitive customers, and the “Best” option for the rich. Most of us are neither of these, so we buy the “Better” option when we are uncertain.

This strategy leverages psychology and human behavior to help customers make the choice.

Psychological Principles At Play

1. Anchoring: This pricing plan strategy presents the middle option (Better) as the most attractive one by positioning it between the lower (Good) and higher (Best) options. The Good option serves as an anchor, making the Better option seem like a reasonable compromise, and the Best option appears more luxurious but still tempting.
2. Decoy Effect: The presence of the Good option is often a decoy, designed to make the Better option look more appealing. This can nudge consumers to choose the Better option, increasing the order value.
3. Perceived Value: With three pricing plans, customers perceive that they have more control and options. They tend to evaluate their needs and budget against these choices, making them more likely to pick one rather than consider alternatives.
4. Simplicity: The simplicity of choosing between three pricing plans reduces decision fatigue, making it easier to make a choice. This can lead to quicker sign-up decisions.
5. Loss Aversion: People avoid losses more than they seek equivalent gains. With the “Good, Better, Best” pricing strategy, customers might choose the Better or Best option because they fear missing out on valuable features or benefits.
6. Social Proof: Seeing three pricing plans suggests that others are making similar choices. When customers see that the Better or Best options are popular, they may be more inclined to select them due to social proof.

Incorporating these psychological principles into pricing strategies can help you guide customers toward higher-value orders, ultimately boosting revenue.

Are Three Pricing Plans For You?

The “Good, Better, Best” pricing strategy is versatile and can be used by various businesses across many industries.

Here are some examples of businesses that can benefit from this pricing strategy:

1. Software and SaaS Companies

Software providers can use this strategy to offer different levels of functionality or support. Customers can choose from basic, standard, or premium software packages based on their needs.

2. Restaurants

Restaurants can implement this strategy by offering different menu options with varying prices and portion sizes. This approach is often seen in prix fixe menus, where customers can choose from a set of courses at different price points.

3. Subscription Services

Subscription-based businesses, such as streaming platforms or gym memberships, can offer pricing plans with different access levels or features. Customers can select the plan that best suits their preferences and budget.

4. Travel and Hospitality

Hotels, airlines, and travel agencies can use this strategy to offer different levels of amenities or services, such as economy, business class, and first-class options.

5. E-commerce

Online retailers can implement “Good, Better, Best” pricing by offering product bundles or variations with different features, warranties, or add-ons.

6. Service Providers

Businesses offering consulting, marketing, or home improvement services can create tiered service packages with varying service levels, support, or deliverables.

7. Automotive Industry

Car manufacturers often offer multiple trim levels for their vehicles, ranging from basic to luxury, which aligns with the “Good, Better, Best” approach.

8. Technology Products

Companies selling electronics and gadgets can offer different versions of their products with varying specifications and features to cater to different customer segments.

9. Online Courses and Education

Educational platforms can provide tiered access to courses, with options for basic content, additional resources, and personalized coaching.

10. Telecommunications

Telecom companies can offer tiered mobile and internet plans with different data limits, speeds, and additional features.

11. Insurance Providers

To meet customer needs, insurance companies can offer tiered coverage options with varying deductibles and coverage limits.

The Takeaway

If you’re not using this pricing strategy, you leave money on the table.

Consider how you can take full advantage of the strategy.

• If you charge only one price, you must find a way to add two more plans. You can consider making your existing price “Good” and adding two more higher-priced plans. Can you think of packaging your services and products into multiple plans?
• If you have two pricing plans already, consider adding a higher-priced “Best” plan. This will make the other two plans appear more affordable.
• If you have more than three pricing plans, consider how to whittle it down to three. You really don’t need that many. Anything past three should be a custom, usage-based Enterprise or Custom plan.

To add a higher-priced tier to a product or service plan, you can include additional features, benefits, or value-added items that justify the increased cost.

These extras should align with the needs and preferences of the target customer segment. Here are a few examples of what can be added to a plan to increase its price:

1. Enhanced Features: Provide advanced or exclusive features unavailable in lower-priced plans. For instance, a premium streaming service might offer 4K Ultra HD streaming, offline downloads, or ad-free content in its higher-priced plan.
2. Increased Limits: Expand usage limits or quotas. For example, a cloud storage service could offer more storage space or a higher number of allowed devices in the premium pricing plan.
3. Priority Support (SLA): Include priority customer support with faster response times. This can be crucial for businesses that rely on a service’s uninterrupted functionality.
4. Personalization: Offer customization options or personalized recommendations. For instance, a premium subscription box service might allow customers to select specific products or preferences.
5. Exclusive Content: Provide access to exclusive content or products unavailable to lower-tier customers. This is common in subscription boxes, premium streaming services, and loyalty programs.
6. Faster Speeds: Higher-priced tiers often come with faster download/upload speeds or lower latency in industries like the internet and telecommunications.
7. Advanced Analytics: For software or SaaS products, you can offer advanced analytics and reporting tools in the premium plan, allowing businesses to gain deeper insights into their data.
8. Extended Warranty: Includes extended warranties or enhanced product support for physical products. For instance, electronics manufacturers might offer longer warranties in their premium pricing plans.
9. Dedicated Account Manager: In B2B services and SaaS, provide a dedicated account manager or consultant to assist customers with their specific needs.
10. Early Access: Give premium plan customers early access to new features, products, or events. This can create a sense of exclusivity and reward.
11. Discounts or Rewards: Offer discounts, cashback rewards, or loyalty points for higher-priced plans, encouraging long-term commitment and spending.
12. Training and Education: Provide access to training materials, courses, or workshops. This is common in software, online learning, and professional services.
13. Physical Goods: Include physical goods or merchandise in the premium package. Subscription boxes often include exclusive physical products.
14. Flexible Terms: Allow premium customers to enjoy flexible billing cycles, such as quarterly or annual payments, which can offer cost savings.
15. Collaborative Tools: In business software, you can offer collaborative tools, integrations, or multi-user licenses in the premium plan.

The key is understanding your target audience’s preferences and pain points to design a higher-priced plan to cater to those needs.

The added value should be perceived as worth the extra cost, encouraging customers to upgrade to the premium plan.

If unsure, start with priority support and a dedicated account manager. These are great benefits that can help you create a higher-priced plan.

Increasing revenue isn’t just about doing more marketing.

A better pricing strategy can help increase the average order value, increasing revenue.

This reference guide will walk you through 10 funding opportunities and real-life examples to help you get funded by the community. The goal is to help you make an informed decision.

In this context, the community is everyone who benefits from the open-source project. That includes, but is not limited to:

• users (customers)
• contributors
• sponsors
• vendors/partners

All these community members can help fund the project.

The following list of 10 funding opportunities is not exhaustive; please let me know if something needs to be added or changed.

1. Financial Contributions (aka donations)

This is the default option for everyone. However, I used the term “financial contributions” because that’s the more appropriate way to describe the nature of the transaction.

Contributors are the lifeline of all open-source projects. When we think of an open-source contributor, we usually think of a programmer contributing code. But open source projects have many contributors – writers, designers, translators, testers, and others.

Everyone contributes their skills and time. When someone makes a donation, they contribute money – a financial contribution. This is an excellent option for non-technical users who can’t contribute code or other relevant skills.

There are many ways to accept financial contributions, including Open Collective, Patreon, LibraPay, GitHub Sponsors, PayPal, and others.

Example: ClassicPress

Some projects generate much more than ClassicPress in individual financial contributions (donations). Still, I’m including this as an example to show you that you don’t need a large community. A small, dedicated community can get you started.

All contributors are volunteers, but ClassicPress is a non-profit and has infrastructure costs. When new directors (myself included) took over in June of 2022, there was no funding. My top priority was getting the community to fund us to cover about $100/mo in infrastructure costs. I set up an independent collective on Open Collective within a day, and we reached our goal within a few weeks. More on this in a future post.

As of this writing in July of 2023, the estimated monthly budget is $212/mo from 38 financial contributors, with $2,900 raised in the last 12 months.

Example: LibreCAD

LibreCAD uses Open Collective to accept financial contributions from their community. As of July 2023, LibreCAD has raised over $7,300 from 577 individual financial contributors.

Example: Pixelfed

Pixelfed uses Patreon and Open Collective to accept financial contributions from their community. As of July 2023, Pixelfed has raised $8,181 from 110 financial contributors on Open Collective. While on Patreon, Pixelfed (Daniel Supernault, the lead maintainer) earns $1,085/mo from 224 members.

2. Crowdfunding

Services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can be used to raise funds for specific development goals, such as a major version, feature, or refactoring. Large campaigns require a lot of planning to ensure you can deliver the product and any additional benefits backers were promised.

However, you can run smaller crowdfunding campaigns that require less planning and no marketing collateral. It depends on the community’s size, how much work you want to do, and how much you wish to raise. Smaller amounts and deliverables mean you can launch it and complete it quickly.

Example: Font Awesome 5

One great example is Font Awesome 5 campaign, which I backed in 2017 and still use. Font Awesome team asked for $30,000 but were able to raise $1,076,960 from 35,550 backers to create a brand new version of Font Awesome icon library.

Example: Modoboa

You don’t have to do an extensive crowdfunding campaign to get the community to fund your project. Modoboa is an excellent example of how you can get your community to fund specific features they want. For instance, Modoboa raised €700 from 18 community members to add two-factor authentication.

3. Sponsorships

Businesses that use the software can be approached for sponsorships.

Sponsorships can come in many forms, from direct financial support to resources such as server space or development tools. This is a popular way to get businesses to fund open-source projects they already use.

If you know of any businesses (large or small) using your open-source project, consider approaching them about sponsorship. It doesn’t hurt to ask. The worst they can say is “No.”

Example: Babel.js

Babel.js (Babel) is a popular JavaScript compiler. The project uses Open Collective (primarily) to collect financial contributions and sponsorships. If you visit collective’s page, you’ll see they have many corporate sponsors.

Babel’s top sponsor is Airbnb, which has contributed over $150,000 since April 2018.

Example: Wagtail

Crowdfunding features from individual financial contributors (such as Modoboa) is one of many ways to get paid to build features. Wagtail is an excellent example of how an open source project can get corporate sponsors to pay for features they need.

Wagtail has a clear roadmap that shows the “Sponsor this” banner on specific features. Sponsors don’t dictate what features will be added, but they can support the open-source project by funding specific features they may need.

For example, Mozilla Foundation sponsored built-in A/B testing to run variants of a page to improve user experiences and conversions. Motley Fool sponsored content workflow to help busy websites. Google sponsored Wegtail’s next-generation page editor.

4. Managed Service or SaaS

Managed service (aka hosted service) or software as a service (SaaS) are two popular ways to run a profitable open-source business.

Many projects later add a managed service or SaaS offering as the project matures. While others build a business from the start with a free self-hosted community edition.

You have to be careful with your license when doing a managed service or SaaS because someone can take your free, open-source edition and sell their own managed service or SaaS. MongoDB and ElasticSearch are two well-known formerly open-source projects and businesses that changed their licenses to source-available licenses (not open source anymore) to prevent competition from larger vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). When Elastic Search changed its license, AWS forked it and created OpenSearch to continue selling search and analytics suite to customers.

I believe in GPL and GPL-compatible licenses. I would choose that, but it’s your project and your decision. Choose what fits your beliefs and needs.

While it’s a popular option (managed or SaaS), it’s only for some. To avoid running a business, consider partnering with a hosting provider. More on partnerships later.

Example: Matomo

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is the most popular open source Google Analytics alternative. You can easily self-host it, which is what many users do. However, Matomo offers a fully managed cloud version starting at $23/mo for 50,000 hits. Matomo didn’t stop there.

The cloud version includes plugins with advanced features without any extra cost. Self-hosted users must pay for these plugins if they want to use them. For example, the activity log plugin is $29/mo, the custom reports plugin is $229/mo, and they have many more.

This is an excellent example of product diversification to increase profitability. Matomo caters its products to the community’s needs. Advanced features encourage users to sign up for the managed cloud product, while self-hosted users can pay a la carte for the advanced features they want. This is a win-win situation.

Example: Baserow

Baserow, an open-source Airtable alternative, sells a SaaS version of their app. While Matomo Cloud is limited to a 21-day free trial, Baserow chose a freemium model.

You can start with a free plan limited to 3000 rows and 2GB of storage per workspace. When you need more, upgrade to the Premium plan for $5/user/mo or the Advanced plan for $20/user/mo.

In addition to the number of rows and storage space, paid plans include additional features the free plan doesn’t include to incentivize upgrades.

5. Paid Support and Services

If you want to sell something other than a managed service, the next popular option is to offer paid support and services.

You’re already offering free support on GitHub, Slack, forum, or any other channel you use to communicate with your community. It’s time to charge for premium support and consider offering services.

Paid support means a dedicated support channel and reasonable response time. You can offer email support using help desk software (it’s better to keep this separate from your regular email) or a dedicated channel/workspace in Slack (or Discord, Matrix, Mattermost, Zulip, etc.).

You also want to specify response times upfront to set proper expectations. 24-48 business hours response time is the gold standard. If you’re including weekends, charge extra for that. Your time is valuable.

The services you choose to offer can be something as simple as an installation, updates, or troubleshooting a problem. These quick, fixed-fee services can generate income with little work.

On the other hand, you can sell software (web or app) development services, customizations, or consulting services. These are longer, more complex projects that you should charge a fair price.

Example: Mongoose.js

While Mongoose.js (Mongoose) has raised close to $300,000 on Open Collective (July 2023), the team offers paid support through GitHub Sponsors.

The paid support starts at $69/mo; it includes priority support on GitHub issues. For $199/mo, you get a dedicated Slack channel, priority support on GitHub issues, 2 job listings on Mongoose’s job board, and some tools.

For Mongoose, small and medium-sized businesses are the right target markets for paid support. “We should try to get support subscriptions with these bigger companies [Cisco, Atlassian, etc.] because they have huge budgets, but that hasn’t proven to work out as well as we would hope,” said Valeri Karpov, Mongoose’s maintainer, in a webinar. “Mostly because small and medium businesses, the CEO or CTO may use Mongoose in their day-to-day, so people who have a budget have the authority to put down corporate cards are using Mongoose on a regular basis. They can actually feel the benefit from this Pro subscription.”

You can watch Karpov’s entire webinar about paid support on Upstream’s website, it’s very informative for anyone looking to offer paid support for their open source project.

Example: Glitchtip

Glitchtip, an open-source Sentry fork, offers paid support and services to self-hosted users while others can take advantage of their hosted version.

The paid support starts at $15/user/mo, which includes email and live chat support, and help updating the Glitchtip instance.

In addition to ongoing support, users can pay $500 for installation service. For anyone needing more help, Glitchtip offers a custom enterprise support.

6. Addons/Plugins

You don’t have to monetize the project itself. You can keep the core free for anyone to use, and instead create add-ons or plugins to add new functionality for a price. It can be a fixed, one-time fee, or recurring fee.

When you build add-ons to sell, you need to look at what your users need that the core is missing. Usually, it’s advanced features such as data export/import; it can be something non-technical user needs such as drag-and-drop form builder; it can be time-saving feature such as pre-built components; it literally can be anything users need.

Don’t be afraid to charge for add-ons and plugins. Users are willing to pay for something they need. Start low, with an early access price to test the water. Increase the price if you’re getting sales, that means people do want it and the price is low. You can always introduce a sale.

Example: Alpine.js

Alpine.js (Alpine), jQuery for the modern web, is an open-source JavaScript framework. The core is free, but Alpine offers pre-built UI components to help you save time, such as modal, dropdown, tabs, notifications, etc.

As of July 2023, there are nine components, 12 third-party integrations, screencasts, and a few other items. The early access price is a $129 one-time fee, with the regular price being $179.

Example: Ninja Forms

WordPress ecosystem is full of premium plugins and themes. The space is very lucrative, with large enterprises and private equity firms acquiring premium plugins. Ninja Forms is a free drag-and-drop form builder plugin.

The core plugin is free; you can create as many forms as needed. Instead, Ninja Forms charges for add-ons. Add-ons are WordPress plugins adding advanced functionality to the free Ninja Forms core plugin. For example, if you want a multi-step form, you can get an add-on plugin for $49/year for a single site or $99/year for up to 20 sites.

In addition to single add-on pricing, Ninja Forms offers membership plans designed for specific use cases. Each plan comes with a pre-determined selection of add-ons.

For example, for $49/year for the first year and $99/year renewal, the Basic plan comes with four add-ons: File Uploads, Conditional Logic, Layout & Styles, and Multi-Step Forms. Plans also include premium support and 10% off single add-ons.

WordPress constantly changes, and plugins must be maintained and improved, allowing Ninja Forms to charge recurring fees. This is why it’s essential to understand your community’s needs.

7. Merchandise

Open source projects can (and should) sell merchandise, like t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc., to their community. Users will buy branded merchandise (t-shirts and stickers are the two most popular items). Your community becomes your walking billboards. It’s a great option to generate some income and increase brand awareness.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money buying an inventory of merchandise. You can start for free using print-on-demand (POD) providers, who will print your stuff as you sell it (on demand). There are two options:

1. Easy: Use a POD provider that allows users to place orders through their platform, so you don’t have to manage an e-commerce website.
   • For example, CafePress has a base price of $17.95 for a white t-shirt with a print. To earn $5, you would need to sell t-shirts for $22.95.
2. Some work: Use a POD provider that provides integrations or API with existing ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.). Or you can roll your own little checkout using Stripe and their API.
   • One popular POD provider is Printful, which I used for my business in the past. The base price is $14.25 for a white t-shirt with a print. To earn $5, you would need to sell t-shirts for $19.95.
   • GNOME Foundation’s merchandise shop uses WooCommerce/Printful combination (as far as I can tell). It’s a good option if you want to control the shopping experience, payment gateway, and sell merchandise at a lower price.

At ClassicPress, we chose the “easy” option (CafePress) as we don’t have time to fiddle with custom integrations. One other option I’ve been looking at is Spreadshirt. They offer promos, discounts, and even free shipping occasionally. That’s a great way to incentivize purchases. People tend to complain about shipping prices and availability a lot.

Example: Merchandise Shops

These are merchandise shops from the image above:

• GNOME Foundation
• Oh My Zsh
• Bootstrap
• Document Foundation
• Manjaro

8. Advertising

Some open-source projects serve ads to their users. You have to be comfortable with the ethical baggage of serving ads. You don’t want to overdo it, but you should also not be afraid to use ads to generate income.

Done right, serving ads can be very helpful in generating income. This is especially true if you can sell advertising placements directly to advertisers (or sponsors). You don’t have to use ad platforms.

Many people use ad-blockers. If you choose to show ads, make sure it’s not the only source of income. Consider implementing other funding opportunities in this guide.

Example: Bootstrap

Bootstrap is one of the most popular front-end frameworks available. If you visit the Bootstrap website and the documentation with your ad-blocker disabled, you will see they use Carbon ads sparingly – one ad above the fold per page.

Carbon Ads, offered through BuySellAds, caters to developers, creators, and designers. If your users fall into one of those categories, that could be a way for you to monetize your project. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use Carbon ads, but BuySellAds might still be able to help you as they cater to many types of audiences.

Example: Read the Docs

Read the Docs is an excellent example of how to do advertising right. It is an open-source project which offers an ad-supported hosted freemium plan with an option to go ad-free.

For example, Django-Allauth uses ad-supported Read the Docs to power its documentation website.

In addition to ad-supported plans, they offer ad-free paid plans for businesses. Many open-source projects use Read the Docs to power their documentation websites for free, while Read the Docs serves ads to fund their business.

However, in addition to their open-source SaaS business, they also started Ethical Ads to allow others to run ads without any tracking. The only caveat, their ads only target developers – our project must cater to developers.

For example, Flask runs Ethical Ads on its website.

9. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing (also known as referrals) is a popular way to earn income online, and open-source maintainers should be open to it. It’s much more ethical than advertising if you recommend good quality products and services. Whatever you recommend should be relevant to the open-source project and/or the community.

You’re already using products and services daily, so you should find out which offers an affiliate or referral program to earn commissions. Personal recommendations are a powerful trust indicator and boost sales.

Affiliate vs. Referral Programs

You must understand the difference between affiliate and referral programs to know what to apply for:

• Affiliate programs are usually open to the general public, although some will limit the program to its customers. These programs might include specific requirements you have to meet to be accepted (e.g., traffic, social media following, etc.). The commissions are usually percentage-based but can be fixed amount.
• Referral programs are for customers, so you can refer people you know. The commission is usually credit to be spent with the business you’re recommending, and it will be a fixed amount. Referral programs will also offer credit for the users that sign up using your referral link, which incentivizes them to sign up.

The programs, eligibility, and commissions vary from business to business. Keep that in mind.

Affiliate/Referral Programs To Consider

• Hosting and infrastructure: Many open-source projects use hosting and infrastructure providers. Some of them offer affiliate or referral programs. This is a great way to recommend a service you use while earning a commission. Hosting providers with affiliate or referral programs include Digital Ocean (affiliate and referral), Vultr (referral), Linode (affiliate or referral), and many others.
• WordPress ecosystem: If you’re part of the WordPress ecosystem, consider promoting plugins and themes you use. Most premium plugins and themes will have an affiliate program. For example, I use and recommend Gravity Forms and Astra theme.
• Affiliate marketplaces: Many businesses will use affiliate marketplaces to manage their affiliate programs. You can sign up, find, and apply to these affiliate programs. Popular affiliate marketplaces include CJ, Impact, and ShareASale, to name a few.

Try it with a business you use daily and love if they have an affiliate or referral program. The decision is yours.

Example: ODK

ODK, a suite of open-source tools that help organizations collect and manage data, promotes their DigitalOcean referral link in the installation instructions for the self-hosted version. This is a relevant placement for this referral link because anyone trying to install a self-hosted ODK is bound to use the referral link to get free credit.

This is a smart, simple way to monetize the free, self-hosted version while selling the cloud version.

Example: CapRover

CapRover, an open-source platform as a service with a dashboard, also promotes the DigitalOcean referral program in their “Getting Started” guide. But they do it differently.

CapRover is an app on DigitalOcean’s Marketplace, which users can deploy to their servers. CapRover mentions a $100 credit at the beginning of the guide, but the referral link is the “Create a Droplet” link to deploy their app using the DigitalOcean server.

This is a smart way to earn referral credit while helping users to deploy your app quickly while getting $100 credit.

10. Partnerships

Partnerships with other businesses, organizations, and maintainers can be formed to support the project’s development.

Many partnerships can be classified as “Sponsorships” discussed earlier. I wanted to keep partnerships separate because it’s possible to have a partnership different from your typical financial sponsorship.

There are many ways to structure a partnership based on the project, audience, and the partner’s business needs to figure out a mutually beneficial relationship.

Example: Tidelift Lifter Program

One example is Tidelift’s Lifter program, which helps open source creators “build a scalable income stream around their open source projects, by co-creating and promoting a product that’s valuable to our enterprise customers. When you partner with Tidelift, you’ll be working with us to provide the same kinds of maintenance and assurance guarantees for your project that enterprise customers have traditionally expected from commercial software.”

When Tidelift’s customers use your open-source project as a dependency, you receive a portion of their subscription fees. It sounds great, but there is a caveat: you have some work to do as “Lifter tasks.”

Tidelift offers a search function that allows you to find your project and see if there is any income potential. Check it out and see if this type of partnership is right for you and your project.

Example: Stackaid

Stackaid is an interesting service. It provides a way for open-source maintainers to help fund their dependencies. The service heavily focuses on npm packages by using the GitHub app to monitor dependencies. However, it is possible to curate a manual list of dependencies using stackaid.json.

If you want to help maintainers of your dependencies, you can subscribe to the Stackaid plan, which will distribute payment to your dependencies.

If you want to get paid, you can claim your project to receive funds from anyone using your project as a dependency.

Example: Nextcloud

Earlier in this guide, I covered hosted service (SaaS), which is an excellent option to monetize your open source project if you want to run a business.

If you want to avoid running a SaaS business, another option is to find a hosting partner. There are different ways of structuring this type of relationship, but when you’re getting started, the best option that carries a low risk for everyone is to get paid when your partner gets paid. You promote them on your website and get paid when they get paid.

If you’re a larger project with an existing user base, you can ask for minimum commitments from your partners. Nextcloud has a partner program, which requires an annual commitment of €6,000.

While they have many partners, they promote IONOS on their Enterprise page. I don’t know the details; I can only assume it comes with a price. You can consider doing it if you have more than one partner.

What To Choose

Now you know your options to get your community to fund you and your project. Only you can decide what’s right for you, your community, and all other stakeholders.

You may disagree with some of the options listed. That’s your right. This reference guide was written to help you understand your options and to help you make an informed decision. The decision is yours.

Figure out what you want to do: run a business or a side hustle.

This will help you choose the right combination of funding opportunities from this guide.

Remember, don’t pick one – diversify to maximize your profits.

Don’t shy away from the word “profit.” You do the work; you deserve to get paid for that work. Profits pay bills.

As of May 25th, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect across the European Union, setting new data protection and privacy standards and affecting companies worldwide, including Google.

Is Google Analytics Illegal?

The Schrems II ruling was issued by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in July 2020, invalidating the EU-US Privacy Shield. This data transfer mechanism allowed companies to transfer data from the European Union to the United States.

Fun fact. The day before the Schrems II ruling, I applied for EU-US Privacy Shield for my business and paid the fees. When news broke, I was lucky to be within the refund window. It was a bit of back and forth, but in the end, I got a full refund for all the associated fees.

The Schrems II ruling has significant implications for companies that process personal data from the European Union, including those that use cloud services or data storage solutions provided by US-based companies.

The ruling means that these companies must carefully consider the legal basis for transferring personal data and ensure they comply with EU data protection standards, including obtaining explicit consent from individuals and offering them appropriate safeguards for their data.

The Schrems II ruling was just the beginning.

The Austrian Data Protection Authority (ADSB) was the first data protection authority to make using Google Analytics illegal under the GDPR.

The ADSB decision stated that Google Analytics violates the GDPR because it does not obtain adequate user consent or provide sufficient information about the data collection and processing practices. The ADSB found that Google Analytics collects unnecessary information about website visitors and does not allow users to opt out of tracking.

Furthermore, the ADSB found that Google does not have a legal basis for processing personal data for analytics purposes under the GDPR. The ADSB stated that Google could not rely on legitimate interest as a legal basis because the interests of website owners and Google are insufficient to outweigh website visitors’ fundamental rights and freedoms.

This decision by the ADSB adds another layer of complexity for companies that use Google Analytics to process data from the European Union. Companies must now comply with the GDPR and the Schrems II ruling and consider the DSB decision when reviewing their data collection practices.

Other regional data protection authorities followed ADSB:

• February 2022: The French Data Protection Authority CNIL made Google Analytics illegal (source).
• June 2022: The Italian Data Protection Authority Garante made Google Analytics illegal (source).
• September 2022: The Danish Data Protection Authority Datatilsynet made Google Analytics illegal (source).
• January 2023: The Finnish Deputy Data Protection Ombudsman made Google Analytics illegal (source).
• March 2023: The Norwegian Data Protection Authority Datatilsynet made Google Analytics illegal (source).

Other data protection authorities will continue following this trend.

If you’re catering to an international audience, which includes European Union, it is in your best interest to stop using Google Analytics. It became too much of a legal hassle.

Compliance with GDPR (and all other privacy laws) is not easy. The majority of non-EU businesses without legal departments are not GDPR compliant. You may think adding a privacy policy and a cookie banner are enough to comply. It’s not. I plan to write about GDPR compliance a bit more soon. So subscribe if that’s something you’re interested in.

Is Google Analytics illegal? Yes, it is illegal in many countries that are part of the European Union. Since GDPR covers all members of the EU, it only stands to reason (err on the side of caution) Google Analytics is illegal in the EU and should not be used there at all.

If your visitors and customers are based in the US or other non-EU countries, you should be safe to use Google Analytics. But more and more countries (and US states) are adopting strict privacy laws, so stay up to date on local privacy regulations.

Fathom Analytics: A Google Analytics Alternative

I loved using Google Analytics and was even certified. I still plan to use Google Analytics with clients who use it for their business. But I will begin recommending privacy-focused alternatives to Google Analytics in the future.

Businesses that can’t afford a legal team to be GDPR compliant are also not in a position to use all the data that Google Analytics collects. It’s bloated, invades privacy, and is not very user-friendly. This is especially true with Google Analytics 4, which is considered complex even by professional Google Analytics users.

Most startups and small businesses need simple analytics that is easy to understand so that the data can drive decision-making.

Fathom Analytics is the one I began using this month, and I will recommend it to my clients.

Here are a few reasons I chose to use Fathom Analytics:

• It doesn’t track individual users but anonymized website visitors.
• It doesn’t use cookies to track visitors, so you wouldn’t need a cookie banner if Fathom Analytics was the only thing you use.
• It’s not an advertising company collecting and selling data. They charge a modest fee for their service.
• It tracks all the key metrics every website should track, including the ability to track events.
• You can track more visitors by avoiding adblockers with a custom domain. You can see it being used on this website with the breezy-thirtyseven.inboundmethod.com sub-domain.
• It tracks UTM parameters.

The only downside is if you need any advanced e-commerce analytics, Fathom Analytics doesn’t offer it. The only thing you can do at this time is to use an event triggered by a completed purchase and specify the amount.

For example, you could add the following code to your “thank you” or “completed” pages when the order is placed:

window.addEventListener('load', (event) => {
        fathom.trackGoal('YOUR-EVENT-ID', 1000);
});

1000 is $10.00, the order total.

If you use WordPress or ClassicPress, a Fathom Analytics plugin makes it easy to install the tracking code.

You can get 10% off your first invoice using my referral link to sign up for Fathom Analytics.

If you have questions, comment below or reply to the Mastodon post.

ChatGPT generated a few parts of this article about GDPR, Schrems II, and ADSP. What did you think? Did it feel AI generated?

While live webinars are unrivaled in generating engagement and leads, they also require real-time, hands-on involvement – meaning you’re trading time for money.

With an automated webinar (also called an evergreen webinar), you create it once. Then your webinar software runs it automatically on a pre-determined schedule (or you can allow instant access for an on-demand experience.) This means your automated evergreen webinars act as a lead-generating machine, driving leads and sales while you focus on other areas of your business.

The best lead-generating webinars are educational, where you teach your audience something they see value in. However, you can use automated webinars for product demos as well.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to plan, prepare, and promote an automated webinar that will generate leads on autopilot.

1. Plan Your Automated Webinars

Don’t jump in and start recording your webinar! Taking the time to plan out your webinar carefully will save you a ton of time and money. Measure twice and cut once. You want to make sure you plan your webinar carefully to deliver value to your leads while allowing them to engage further.

The three main steps to planning your automated webinar are:

Step 1: Choose your webinar software

There are many great options, but not all are well-suited to small or medium-sized businesses.

Some good options include ClickMeeting, EasyWebinar, and Zoom.

I use and recommend WebinarNinja. Besides the fact that it’s easy to use (not all webinar software is!), WebinarNinja is affordable and offers a free trial to help you test it. Unlike Zoom, WebinarNinja doesn’t require software downloads. Everything happens in your browser. Your leads don’t have to install unnecessary software on their computers. Plus, it offers several different types of webinars your can host: live, automated, hybrid, and series.

Whatever platform you choose, you want to ensure it can handle automated webinars, provides analytics to assess your success, and gives your audience an easy experience to enjoy the automated webinar.

It also integrates beautifully with ActiveCampaign, which will prove important when promoting your webinar (more on this later in the post) and doing a follow-up to convert the lead into an opportunity. ActiveCampaign is also my CRM.

Step 2: Determine your automated webinars format

There are many options when it comes to formatting and producing your webinar. For instance:

• Will you facilitate the webinar independently, or will you have multiple speakers?
• Will you do a slideshow with voiceover or a “talking head” video (i.e., your face on camera the entire time)
• Will you incorporate video clips into your presentation?
• Will you present your topic or use a Q&A or interview format?
• Will your webinar present content on a specific topic, or will you demo a product?

One popular format is using Loom to record your slide presentation with a small circle video of you in the bottom corner. If you can, including your face in the video is helpful as people connect with a face much better than a faceless presentation.

“We are such a sophisticated social species, and face recognition is very important… You need to recognize who it is, is it family, is it a friend or foe? Faces are detected incredibly fast.”
– Professor David Alais.

People recognize faces quickly and engage better. Studies have shown including faces in your ads increases attention and brand recognition. Don’t be afraid to go on camera!

Once you’ve nailed down these elements, you can move to step 3.

Step 3: Determine your objective

Before you create your webinar, know exactly what you want it to accomplish. You’ll generally choose from one of two objectives:

1. Get new leads/email subscribers. When people sign up for your webinar, you’ll capture their email addresses so you can continue to connect with them again and again. This is why connecting marketing automation platform is important. It’s a good idea to have another offer, such as an ebook, a video, a course, a freemium product, a free trial, etc., available for your leads to engage with. Webinar builds momentum, you need to keep it going with another free offer.
2. Get sales. This is good if you can sell your product/service directly on the webinar. You must be careful, as people will have questions, and you might lose sales if no one responds. If you want sales, consider a hybrid webinar. The webinar is automated, but you can still participate in the chat to answer questions.

2. Create your webinar

This is where most of your time will be spent.

1. Create an outline. Structure your webinar like a blog post: with an intro, main points, subpoints, and conclusion. Include time estimates for each section, which will help with the next step.
2. Write your webinar script. Flesh out each of the sections above. Avoid “industry-speak,” write in full sentences, and write like you talk – in a conversational tone. For more on this, Hubspot has created a helpful guide on how to write a webinar script.
3. Write out your offer. Your pitch will usually fall at the end of your webinar, though there are no hard and fast rules. For instance, if you’re using WebinarNinja, you can embed your offer anywhere within your presentation. This is the next step your leads should take. Don’t leave them hanging without anything.
4. Create your slides. Both PowerPoint and Keynote offer free built-in templates you can use. Keep your text short and sweet, including only your key points. Use bullet points liberally and images to add interest to your presentation.
5. Record your presentation. This will involve recording your audio and any talking-head video you want to use. It’s worth investing in a good-quality mic as well as a webcam. Consider using Loom to record it.
6. Upload your video. Once the video is ready, go to your webinar platform and create an automated webinar.

3. Create your webinar funnel

An automated webinar is part of a bigger system or funnel that includes web pages and email automations.

A typical lead generation funnel will consist of the landing/signup page, thank you page, and sometimes an additional landing page for an offer. Even though I can create landing pages in WordPress using a page builder plugin, such as Beaver Builder, I prefer to keep things simple for lead generation and use the landing page builder included with WebinarNinja. It’s robust yet simple and gets the job done!

• For your signup page, the software lets you upload your images (if you like) and customize your webinar headline, host, date, and more.
• The thank you page is the page registrants will be directed to immediately after signing up. You can create this page from within WebinarNinja, or redirect visitors to a custom URL on your site.
• Your offer landing page will need to be hosted elsewhere, such as your WordPress website. However, you don’t need a landing page if you’re offering a downloadable resource. Use your webinar platform. For example, WebinarNinja allows you to share handouts with your audience. These can be anything you want. You can also create an offer CTA and link to a resource hosted elsewhere, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

Finally, you’ll want to create email automations to remind participants to attend your webinar and to nurture your leads to a sale. Remember, leads must be fed value in your nurturing automation, or they will starve to death.

4. Promote your webinar

What good is all this hard work if no one watches your webinar?

Have a solid plan to drive people to your webinar registration page and entice them to sign up. Some of the ways I do this include the following:

• Promoting your webinar on your website. You can do this in your sidebar and/or hello bar, as a popup when people exit your site (use this strategy sparingly, or you could alienate your site visitors), or in a call to action in your blog posts.
• Promoting your webinar in another lead magnet. This is one of my favorite strategies. Create a lead magnet related to the topic of your webinar and include a call to action to sign up for your webinar. For help creating your lead magnet, check out my post Reframing Content: 10X Your Lead Magnet’s Effectiveness.
• Emailing your list. Your subscribers are on your list because they know you can help them solve their problems. Let them know how your webinar will help them solve a specific problem. If you have segmented your list, even better: email subscribers who have expressed an interest in your webinar topic in the past.
• Letting your social media fans and followers know about your webinar. Facebook and Instagram stories are particularly effective for getting timely signups.
• Using ads. If you got a budget, use it to drive traffic to your webinar registration page. Free webinars work great with Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Most importantly, understand where your ideal customers hang out and advertise to reach them.
• Write a blog post on the topic of your webinar. This can be a HIGHLY effective strategy, especially if your blog post ranks high in Search. Make sure your blog post offers enough information to be helpful and show that you know what you’re talking about – and then promise even more usefulness if readers watch your webinar. I like to use my blog post to explain the “whats” and “why’s” of the topic and leave the “hows” for the webinar (i.e., the precise steps for how to solve the problem). If your webinar consists of steps or a number of items (such as strategies or tactics), write a blog post about one of them.

5. Engage post-webinar

If you want good quality leads that turn into opportunities, engage with your audience post-webinar. People will ask questions, but nobody will be there to reply in real time. That’s why it’s important to answer those questions post-webinar.

It’s a good idea to mention this in your webinar. Tell your audience to leave questions any time during the webinar, and you will reply after the webinar by email. This allows you to engage with leads one-on-one without it being a cold email.

Do you have questions about creating or promoting a webinar? Comment below.

If so, chances are you’ve been considering both HubSpot and ActiveCampaign. They’re both widely used and highly rated.

However, there are some differences between the two that may impact your decision. This post about HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign will outline some of these major differences and share my top recommendation for small to medium-sized businesses based on my personal experience.

HubSpot: An Overview

You may feel slightly confused if you’ve spent some time looking into HubSpot. It’s an extremely robust platform that offers many different features, but this can make it difficult even to understand what type of software it is.

Is it CRM (customer relationship management) software? Is it an email marketing tool? Is it content management software?

The short answer is it’s all of the above.

However, first and foremost, HubSpot is a CRM. This means it shines when it comes to tracking your interactions with customers and business partners and helping you nurture these relationships.

The good news is HubSpot’s CRM is free!

If you want to explore other products for your business, HubSpot offers five main “hubs,” which are nicely summarized on this HubSpot product page. These hubs are:

1. Marketing: Email marketing, landing pages, ad management, social media management, built-in SEO, and video hosting.
2. Sales: Live chat, meeting scheduling, sales analytics, sales forecasting. One of the best features is sales automation which lets you send customized emails throughout the sales process.
3. Customer service: Ticketing, feedback surveys, customer portals, help desk automation, customized knowledge base. HubSpot is also beta testing an inbound calling feature that lets your customers call you, and you can track this data right inside the platform.
4. CMS (content management system): Blog, website pages/themes, hosting, split testing (HubSpot will even serve up the best-performing pages from your tests), password-protected pages, memberships.
5. Operations: Everything to do with your data. Sync it, clean it up, store and customize it.

The nice thing about HubSpot is you can pick and choose which hubs you need – and don’t need – and can bundle those hubs together at a discounted price. This means you’re only paying for what you need (more on pricing later in this post).

ActiveCampaign: An Overview

Unlike HubSpot, ActiveCampaign is most widely known for its email marketing features. I remember using a self-hosted ActiveCampaign in the early days to send out newsletters and auto-responders.

However, ActiveCampaign offers a range of different marketing products to meet all your business needs today, including:

1. Email marketing: If you’ve used ActiveCampaign before, you’ve likely used it to build your email list and send email campaigns. Other features include automations, autoresponders, and transactional emails (emails sent to recipients following specific purchases or other actions).
2. Marketing automation: Send a welcome series to new customers, track contact engagement so you can send targeted content, and use machine learning to send emails at the right time for the contact, chat, landing pages, and more.
3. CRM & sales automation: Score leads, monitor and update deals based on behaviors (e.g., “deal stage: interested”), auto-send emails to new leads, and track customer interactions at each stage of the sales process.
4. Sales engagement: Send timely 1:1 messages to follow up on sales/leads, track on-site behaviors so you know what your customers are looking for, and understand which deals are most likely to close so you know where to focus your energy.
5. Service and support: Set up chatbots, offer incentives to past customers, track customer behaviors, and identify when customers are likely to leave a bad review (so you can be proactive and potentially avoid those negative reviews).

With ActiveCampaign, you don’t pick and choose which products you want – instead, you pay based on the number of contacts you have and the “level” of plan you want (i.e., Lite, Plus, Professional, or Enterprise). You can select the plan that fits your needs and the number of contacts. The only thing that comes at an additional cost is the live chat feature Conversations.

HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign: Pricing

Because the pricing structure for the two platforms is so different, it’s difficult to do a direct comparison.

As mentioned previously, HubSpot offers five different hubs you can choose from. For each hub (marketing, sales, customer service, etc.), you can choose from three plans: Starter, Professional, or Enterprise.

Each plan allows you to have a base number of marketing contacts: 1,000 for the Starter plan, 2,000 for the Professional plan, and 10,000 for the Enterprise plan.

Starter plans range from $23/month to $45/month, Professional ranges from $360-$800/month, and Enterprise plans range from $1200-$3200/month.

However, keep in mind that once you reach your max number of marketing contacts, you’ll automatically be upgraded to the next tier, and this can get pricey, fast (e.g., once you reach 2,000 contacts on the Starter plan, the price jumps from $45 to $90/month).

While the cost of the Professional and Enterprise plans may put HubSpot out of reach for many small business owners, a huge bonus is that HubSpot offers a completely free version.

The free version includes features of each hub, meaning you get access to features like:

• CRM
• Email marketing
• Ad management
• Chat capabilities
• Ticketing
• Blog and website pages

You can even add up to 1,000,000 contacts to your CRM for free.

However, while this all sounds great, the free version does come with some serious limitations – not least of which is that you can only add up to 1,000 email subscribers and can only send 5,000 emails each month (meaning if you have 1,000 subscribers, you can only send each subscriber five emails/month).

ActiveCampaign also has a free option, a 14-day free trial. After the 14-day period, you’ll have to upgrade if you want to continue using the tool – but the good news is the plans are much more affordable than those offered by HubSpot.

Like HubSpot, you pay based on the number of contacts you have. For 1,000 contacts, prices start at $37/month (Lite), $63/month (Plus), and $193 (Professional…the price stays the same for up to 2500 contacts).

The Plus version is a great place to start as it comes with a ton of features, including:

• 125+ email templates
• 50+ landing page templates
• CRM with sales automations
• Lead scoring
• Customer success pipelines

My clients love that ActiveCampaign’s pricing remains affordable as they grow. For instance, even once you reach 5,000 email subscribers, the mid-range Plus plan is still less than $200/month; whereas HubSpot’s mid-range Professional plan will run you a whopping $1,025 for 7,000 marketing contacts (this is the next tier once you’re past 2,000 contacts).

HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign: Key Differences

I’ve touched on some important differences above. However, here’s a recap (plus some additional key differences):

• • HubSpot offers a free CRM, whereas the CRM is only included in ActiveCampaign paid plans.
  • HubSpot has a steeper learning curve, whereas ActiveCampaign is easier to use right out of the box.
  • ActiveCampaign shines if email marketing (particularly email segmentation and automation) is your priority.
  • HubSpot shines if your priority is customer service, as its ticketing system integrates with marketing and sales hubs.
  • HubSpot is probably a better choice if you have a large business and need robust sales and customer service features, whereas ActiveCampaign is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses on a budget.
  • ActiveCampaign offers a free migration service, so switching is easy.
  • ActiveCampaign has a 4.6 rating with over 10,000 reviews on G2, while HubSpot has a 4.4 rating with over 8,000 reviews (Sept 2022).

While HubSpot and ActiveCampaign are competing platforms, they are catered to different needs and users. HubSpot might be a better option for you if you have a large team, marketing or sales. While ActiveCampaign is a great option for entrepreneurs and small businesses. I have used ActiveCampaign since 2013 and continue to use it and recommend it to clients whose needs it meets.

ActiveCampaign’s affordable pricing and email marketing features let you grow your business – even on a tight budget – making it my top pick in marketing automation software based on my experience.

Want to find out which other HubSpot alternatives are out there besides ActiveCampaign? Check out my post, 8 HubSpot Alternatives for Marketing Automation, to learn more.

Do you have questions about using ActiveCampaign for your business? Comment below.

Many HubSpot alternatives offer the core functionality a business needs to generate leads successfully and automate marketing.

HubSpot is good at what they do. That’s why they are one of the most well-known marketing automation platforms. Let’s look at the 8 HubSpot alternatives for marketing automation and see how their basic plans compare.

This post was updated in April 2023, and I update it at least once every quarter to stay on top of pricing and feature changes.

HubSpot Alternatives

1. ActiveCampaign
2. Keap
3. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
4. Ontraport
5. EngageBay
6. BenchmarkONE
7. GetResponse
8. Wishpond

In addition to actual platforms, you’ll also learn a bit more about WordPress marketing automation as an added bonus.

When looking at these alternatives to HubSpot, here’s a list of features you should consider to be able to implement an inbound marketing strategy and campaigns for your business:

• Landing Pages and Lead Capture Forms
• Automation, Lead Nurturing, Autoresponders
• Email Marketing and Email Blasts
• Social Media Updates and Monitoring
• SEO Tools and Optimization
• Communication
• CRM and Sales Tools

You will quickly realize that HubSpot is the only all-in-one platform as there are no competitors that would match HubSpot 1-to-1 in features. It’s not a bad thing, it’s actually good. HubSpot has added a service component to their stack, I won’t be getting into that as it’s not relevant for marketing automation discussion here.

Why Businesses Leave HubSpot

All businesses I’ve worked with that left HubSpot have barely used 10% of all the features the platform offers. You pay for everything, yet use 2-3 top features. That’s why you must find a platform that fits your critical needs. Don’t get HubSpot because it has everything. You’ll be wasting money. Here’s what one client and former HubSpot customer said about the experience:

I donated my arm and leg to be able to pay for HubSpot’s coaching in hopes to increase my traffic. As a beginner to the online marketing and web developing world, I had to learn quite a lot, from basics to advanced material. If my responsibilities as a business owner only revolved around website and online marketing, I’d be on cloud nine. But for someone that didn’t have a lot of experience, I couldn’t devote all the time necessary to really take advantage of my investment, unfortunately. And when it was all said and done, I had a good website, but not a GREAT website, and a flat-lined lead-to-customer generator.

You have to be prepared to use HubSpot, and it’s not just about the budget.

Without a dedicated team, you will often be overwhelmed with HubSpot’s platform. You’ll procrastinate, not use it, and waste your precious budget. I’ve seen it happen!

The following alternatives to HubSpot will give you the necessary tools to help you drive traffic, generate and nurture leads, and convert leads to happy customers without giving up an arm and leg for it. Let’s dive in.

1. ActiveCampaign

Marketing Automation That Listens and Learns

ActiveCampaign is a great option for those looking for an affordable HubSpot alternative. They started out years ago as a simple email marketing platform, but over the years they’ve added marketing automation, CRM, machine learning, and live chat to be a proper marketing automation provider for SMBs.

I particularly like their automation campaigns (the heart and soul), which allow you to automate not only marketing activities (emails, SMS, tagging, etc.) but also sales and productivity. In CRM I have different pipelines where I’m able to cater to different sales processes based on the services we offer.

To help automate some backend office stuff (and help increase productivity) I’ve created automation campaigns that are triggered by stuff that either I’m doing or data that changes inside ActiveCampaign. For example, I have campaigns that will move deals to different stages or create tasks based on the stage the deal is in.

One very helpful feature in ActiveCampaign is the ability to share email templates and automation campaigns with others, simply by giving another ActiveCampaign user a unique link to import them into their account.

With higher-end plans, you can add site messages (messages that show up on your website), attribution tracking (see where leads are coming from), machine learning (helps predict the win probability of your deals), predictive sending (emails sent based on contact’s engagement to get the opens you need), and many other features.

If you’re a GSuite or Gmail user, like I am, you’ll find ActiveCampaign’s Gmail extension for Chrome invaluable. That little bitty thing is a lifesaver. It tracks open rates of my emails sent in GSuite, plus I can access and manage contact records in the sidebar when I view email conversations. So I always know who I’m talking to, where we left off, and where we are on the deal!

If you’re an e-commerce business, you can take advantage of the “deep data” integration ActiveCampaign offers for e-commerce platforms to import orders into your account. Right now it’s available for WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Square, and API to build your own integration.

Quick Overview:

• Unlimited emails
• 500 contacts
• Email marketing and newsletters
• Marketing automation
• Up to 3 users

The basic (Lite) plan starts at $15/mo ($9/mo annually). If you want to add landing pages, CRM, sales automation, lead scoring, and SMS marketing you’ll need to go with the “Plus” plan at $70/mo ($49/mo annually) and you get 1000 contacts. If you also want website personalization, site messages, predictive sending, and marketing attribution then you need a Professional plan for $187/mo ($149/mo annually). This is the plan I’m on.

The pricing is incredibly generous compared to HubSpot, keeping in mind how sophisticated ActiveCampaign is. Plus, ActiveCampaign offers free migration and an active Facebook group where you can get help from other ActiveCampaign users.

If you need a live chat and want to integrate it with your automations for a unified experience, ActiveCampaign offers Conversations that costs $19/mo/user.

Ideal For: Small businesses and startups looking to start with marketing automation, but any business (medium and large enterprises) can use ActiveCampaign. It is packed with features, considering how affordable it is. SaaS businesses can leverage ActiveCampaign for user onboarding and customer success, while e-commerce businesses can personalize their email marketing based on purchasing behavior, order data, and recover abandoned shopping carts. It’s also a great tool to sell services and info products, you can create funnels to sell, upsell, and cross-sell your services/products.

If you need transactional (SMTP) emails, you can also integrate Postmark with your automations in ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign acquired Postmark recently. I’ve used Postmark for many years. They offer the best deliverability on the market.

If you’re migrating from another provider (like HubSpot), ActiveCampaign offers a free migration service to migrate contacts, email templates, opt-in forms, and automation workflows. Will save you a ton of time and resources.

Agencies: ActiveCampaign is a great option for agencies, and they offer several different options. You can resell (and white label) it, you can let ActiveCampaign handle payments while you handle the account, they also offer an affiliate program for customers. I’ve used a combination of these with my clients over the years. The reseller option is great if you want to handle everything and include ActiveCampaign cost in your retainer.

Visit ActiveCampaign »

Related: HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign: What’s Right For Your Business?

2. Keap

CRM, Sales, and Marketing Automation

Keap, which you may know by its former name, Infusionsoft, is a great HubSpot alternative, particularly for e-commerce businesses. It’s also one of the most established tools on this list with roots going back to 2001.

All Keap plans give you access to the Keap CRM, marketing automation, sales automation features, and more. Where Keap really shines is when it comes to its e-commerce features. Keap comes with built-in checkout forms and payment processing, meaning you don’t need to use an external shopping cart tool (this alone is a huge money saver!). Keap lets you seamlessly accept payments via PayPal, Stripe, WePay, and other major payment processors. With Keap’s “Max” plan, you can even offer coupon codes and upsells.

Another great feature of Keap is its email marketing capabilities. Unlike some of the tools on this list, Keap offers robust email campaigns, segmentation, and automations. This will ensure your leads receive highly-targeted emails from you, keeping them engaged and nurtured, and always keeping your business top-of-mind. While there’s no denying that HubSpot is an incredible tool, it requires a huge investment of time and money upfront. However, when you sign up with Keap, you not only get access to their migration services, you’re assigned an expert business coach for free. This coach will help you define your top three business-related goals, and then help you execute an action plan. This ensures you’ll actually use the tool, and use it in a way that increases revenue – often right away.

Quick Overview

• The Keap “Pro” plan starts at 1,500 contacts
• All plans come with email marketing, sales & marketing automation, quotes, invoice and
  payments, CRM, a dedicated phone line, and more
• The “Pro” plan lets you add up to 2 users (additional users are $29/month)

Ideal For: Keap is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses, particularly e-commerce businesses (infopreneurs). Their migration service and expert coaching help even new entrepreneurs can make the most of Keap’s rich set of features from day one. Keap is also a great HubSpot alternative for anyone wanting to focus on email marketing.

Keap’s basic plan is called their “Pro” plan starts at $169/month (or $129/month when billed annually.) The “Max” plan lets you add up to 2,500 contacts, and will run you $249/month (or $199/month when billed annually.)

Visit Keap »

3. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Complete Sales and Marketing Toolbox

Brevo is another viable alternative to HubSpot, with an interesting mix of marketing tools to help you get stuff done.

It offers marketing automation that allows you to create automated campaigns to engage and nurture your leads and customers. You’re able to use email, SMS, and live chat to engage with contacts. Plus, it allows you to optimize the send time of your campaigns for each recipient – similar to ActiveCampaign’s predictive sending.

In addition to marketing automation tools that rival HubSpot’s, Brevo includes a fully-featured CRM to help you manage contacts and your sales process. You can have unlimited contacts with Brevo since they charge based on how many emails are sent. So you don’t have to worry about exceeding the limit and deleting old contacts.

The two features that make Brevo stand out from the rest of these alternatives to HubSpot are transactional emails and Facebook ads.

If you have a web app that sends emails (invoices, order notifications, sign-up emails, etc.), you can use Brevo to send these emails just like SendGrid, Mailgun, or Amazon SES. Keeping this inside Brevo gives you the added advantage of having this important data available in your contacts’ records. So not only do you see marketing emails but sales and app usage emails as well.

If you run Facebook ads using Brevo you can create and run ads within the platform while getting the benefits of having reporting data available right there. This way to can compare ads and campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not working. Facebook ads platform can be complex for beginners, so with a simpler UI you’ll be able to create and run ads quickly, and more of them to get better ROI.

Quick Overview

• 300 emails/day
• Unlimited contacts
• Sales CRM
• Forms
• Segmentation
• Marketing automation workflows
• Page tracking
• Reporting

This is Brevo’s free plan. The main limit is 300 emails/day. It’s a nice plan to start but be prepared to upgrade to send more emails. Your emails will also include the Brevo logo/branding. The first paid plan starts at $25/mo with 10,000 emails per month and no daily limit. You can store an unlimited number of contacts.

If you want marketing automation, landing pages, Facebook ads, and other features, you would start at $65/mo with 20,000 emails.

Ideal For: With its free plan, Brevo can provide startups and micro-businesses without a marketing budget a way to get started. If you send transactional emails and want to tie reporting with everything else to get a better insight into what happens Brevo can be a good alternative to SendGrid, Mailgun, etc.

Visit Brevo »

4. Ontraport

Business and Marketing Automation

Ontraport (formerly Office Autopilot) is somewhat unique as it brands itself as business automation, not specifically marketing automation. It’s actually a closer alternative to Infusionsoft, but its marketing automation features make it a perfect candidate for specific businesses as an alternative to HubSpot.

I’ve noticed that many online businesses (coaches, course creators, infopreneurs, etc.) use Ontraport, because it offers ecommerce functionality to sell digital products and even offer subscriptions. It offers everything from order forms, one-click upsells, subscriptions, coupons, lead management, and CRM to power your online business from a “sales” perspective. In addition, you can manage your own affiliate/partner program as well.

Plus, unlike all other platforms, Ontraport gives its customers the ability to create membership websites to create recurring revenue streams. This is a nice feature for non-technical users that don’t want to mess with WordPress plugins.

On the other hand, Ontraport includes all the features of a marketing automation platform to help you get leads and sales. It offers email marketing and leads nurturing, landing pages, forms, and extensive reporting capabilities. Plus, it offers SMS, postcards if you need those, and WordPress integration.

Quick Overview

• 1000 active contacts
• Unlimited emails
• 1 user
• Unlimited landing pages and forms
• Unlimited popups
• Limited if/then rules automation

The basic plan starts at $79/mo billed monthly. Ecommerce, membership sites, referral programs, etc. do require a higher-end plan starting with $147/mo. The basic plan is great for marketing automation alone.

Ideal For: Ontraport is uniquely positioned to help run and automate online businesses. It’s great for anyone selling digital products like courses, ebooks, service subscriptions, and memberships. I see coaches using it to sell their packages and courses and infopreneurs selling ebooks, courses, and other educational resources.

Visit Ontraport »

5. EngageBay

Integrated Marketing, Sales, and Service Software

EngageBay is a comprehensive, fully-featured marketing platform that easily qualifies as an alternative to HubSpot.

It offers marketing automation features to help track, engage, and convert visitors to leads, while enabling email follow-ups and lead nurturing. You get access to email sequences, automation workflows, landing pages, live chat, forms, popups, and social media tools.

What makes EngageBay stand out from the rest of the platforms are the service desk and 360-degree customer view.

This is the only platform on this list that offers service desk features, similar to HubSpot’s service platform. This gives you the ability to manage your support tickets and support department. What makes this unique, you can create automation across all tools in EngageBay. This means that you can automate your support department similarly to how marketing automation works. Moreover, you can combine automation across marketing, sales, and support to improve the efficiency and productivity of your team (or just you).

Plus, with a 360-degree customer view, you can see everything that happens to your customer across marketing, sales, and support. So not only are you able to automate processes for all 3, but you’re able to see all of it for your customers in one place. That’s a good way to gain alignment across the entire organization. At least marketing and sales, since they do like to butt heads with each other.

Quick Overview

• 1000 contacts
• 1000 branded emails/mo
• 2 lists
• 2 Email sequences (marketing automation)
• 5 Autoresponders
• 1 Landing page
• Social media tools
• Live chat
• Sales CRM and tools
• Services management (help desk/tickets)

All this comes with EngageBay’s free plan. It’s a generous plan with a lot of tools included, but those tools are limited. To get the full experience and higher contact and email limit, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan. They start at $14.99/mo for 15,000 contacts and 10,000 branded emails.

One thing to keep in mind, all paid plans come with branded emails. So emails you send out to your contacts will have EngageBay’s logo in them. You will have to purchase unbranded emails to remove their logo.

Unbranded emails will cost you $4/1000 emails if using EngageBay’s server. If you use your own SMTP provider like Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, or custom SMTP then you can buy them for $1/1000 emails. This is not listed on the pricing page, you have to ask.

One thing to note about EngageBay’s pricing, they do offer separate platforms for lower cost in case you need something specific. So you only pay for the tools you use. You can pay for sales tools (Sales Bay), service tools (Service Bay), and even marketing tools (Marketing Bay).

Ideal For: With a robust free plan, EngageBay will be a good option for startups and small businesses looking to get started. Businesses with budgets can leverage EngageBay to unify their marketing, sales, and support departments to get a 360-degree view of their customers. If you need to offer support to customers, you can use help desk features to do so. IT businesses can benefit from EngageBay’s all-in-one suite.

Visit EngageBay »

6. BenchmarkONE

Small Business CRM and Marketing Automation

BenchmarkONE (formerly Hatchbuck) is great for small businesses. It’s an affordable tool that’s easy to use, has a small learning curve, and it has all the necessary tools to automate your marketing and sales. You can start using Hatchbuck almost immediately after signing up. Once you tweak a few settings and integrate them with your website, you’re ready to go. Hatchbuck is simple to use, but that’s due to a limited set of features you would find on other platforms.

Hatchbuck doesn’t have social media management tools, it doesn’t have landing pages, and it doesn’t have CMS to host a website. Visitor tracking (webpage tracking) will only track contacts after they submit a form or click on a link in an email. It does not record visits prior to form submissions, so you’re losing some important data there.

Most small businesses don’t know what to do with it anyway, so it might not be important to you. Looking at what you don’t want can be more helpful than looking for what you want. One of the chief complaints with HubSpot is that you pay for tools you don’t need or use, so it’s good to find a platform that fits your specific needs and pay for that. With its simplicity, Hatchbuck is a good option for beginners and small businesses.

Quick overview:

• Send 1000 emails/mo
• 500 contacts
• Social profiles
• Marketing automation
• Landing pages and popups

That’s the new Free plan offered by BenchmarkONE. It’s a great way to start and you’ll be up and running quickly. The higher-end plans include CRM, deal pipeline, dynamic content, Gmail and Outlook integrations, mobile app, and more.

Ideal For: Small businesses looking to get started with marketing automation and a CRM. BenchmarkONE also offers agency pricing, so you can either let clients pay BechmarkONE directly or you can include the price into your retainer.

Visit BenchmarkONE »

7. GetResponse

Email Marketing and Online Campaign Management Tools

GetResponse has a different approach to marketing, some of the tools it offers are a bit different from everyone else on this list and HubSpot.

Yes, it does offer marketing automation features all platforms offer. That’s why it’s on this list of HubSpot alternatives. You can do complex marketing automation workflows based on conditions, triggers, and filters to generate leads and convert them to customers. For ecommerce businesses, it does offer cart abandonment recovery so you get those missed sales.

Where GetResponse stands out among other alternatives to HubSpot are automated funnels and webinars.

Automated funnels give you pre-built funnel templates you can use to quickly create your own funnels that consist of landing pages, forms, emails, and even payments with integrations to popular payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc. You can sell anything using these funnels – digital and physical products.

“Webinars” is another unique feature that other marketing automation platforms don’t offer. You can actually run webinars using GetResponse while taking advantage of all other tools, including automated funnels. So if you use webinars to generate leads or sell your products/services, you could combine everything in one platform and take advantage of creating funnels quickly. You wouldn’t need a third-party webinar platform like WebinarNinja, which I use.

It also includes sales CRM and landing page builder, with lots of templates.

Quick Overview

• Unlimited emails
• 1000 contacts
• Send newsletters and autoresponders
• Landing pages
• 1 sales funnel
• Unlimited lead funnels
• Facebook and Google ads

The basic plan starts at $15/mo, which is pretty reasonable compared to HubSpot and the features you get to use. Higher-end plans include automated funnels, ecommerce, sales CRM, and many more features.

Ideal For: GetResponse can be used by anyone looking to get started with marketing automation. However, I would recommend it to online businesses selling products and/or services. This also includes businesses that market and sell using webinars. You can even charge for webinars. The combination of automated funnels and the webinar platform alone is worth the investment in GetResponse.

Visit GetResponse »

8. Wishpond

Lead Generation and Growth Platform

Wishpond offers a mix of tools geared at generating leads with social media, although it is not limited to social media. It offers a drag-and-drop landing page builder with many built-in templates that you can start using immediately. Plus, they offer marketing automation features that allow you to nurture leads with personalized emails.

In addition, Wishpond also includes popups to help you capture leads so you wouldn’t need any additional services for popups.

What really separates Wishpond from all other platforms is its contests and promotions feature. It allows you to run your own photo contests, sweepstakes, referral promotions, coupons, and many more. If these are important to your marketing, it’s nice to integrate them with lead nurturing and management features for a more holistic approach.

They’ve also added a referral suite, which allows you to create viral referral campaigns to increase engagement and brand awareness. It’s nice to have it built-in, so you don’t have to pay for another tool. It’s a great HubSpot alternative if social media is a huge part of your marketing efforts, like B2C businesses.

Quick Overview:

• Unlimited visitors
• 1000 leads/contacts
• Unlimited user accounts
• Landing pages and forms
• Marketing automation
• Website popups
• Contests and promotions
• No API access with the basic plan

The basic paid plan starts at $49/mo billed annually and $75/mo billed monthly. If you need a platform that offers social media engagement tools and coupons/promos, Wishpond is a good choice.

Ideal For: B2C businesses can find a lot of value. If you want to do more social media marketing and viral referral campaigns, Wishpond is a good option, as it offers those features. Plus, if you already have a CRM, you can integrate Wishpond with it since they don’t offer CRM.

Visit Wishpond »

Bonus: WordPress

Lead Generating Machine

You might not consider WordPress to be a marketing automation software and lead-generating machine, but you can do pretty much everything with WordPress now. Out of the box, WordPress is an excellent CMS, and with excellent plugins, it can be extended to do anything your heart desires. This includes marketing automation.

Quick Overview

• Easy-to-use CMS
• Advance SEO with plugins
• Landing pages with custom post types
• Lead capture forms with plugins
• Social media integration with plugins
• CRM integration with plugins
• Email marketing and lead nurturing integration
• Marketing Automation and lead tracking
• Freedom to customize anything you want

A lot of work that I do is either helping businesses get started with marketing automation, get a better website, or help a HubSpot customer migrate to a new setup that usually includes a WordPress website.

Depending on the client’s needs, we determine the best approach. With WordPress, there are a million ways to skin a cat. For my business, I use WordPress for the website, SEO (SEOpress plugin), and landing pages (Beaver Builder plugin). While ActiveCampaign handles marketing automation and CRM. Note, since ActiveCampaign offers landing pages now, I do occasionally use them but still try to have most of my landing pages in WordPress.

I didn’t want to have everything in WordPress. If WordPress goes down, I still have access to my CRM, and my emails go out uninterrupted. Plus, if WordPress is hacked, I don’t have any personal information there, so there’s no need to report breaches under GDPR.

WordPress can be one of the best and most affordable HubSpot alternatives for small businesses on a tight budget if that’s what you want. Don’t expect to have everything in WordPress that HubSpot offers. Frankly, it’s not necessary. Find tools that complement WordPress. A toolbox is better than a Swiss Army knife. You don’t have to replace the whole thing if one tool breaks.

Marketing Automation Plugins for WordPress:

Over the years, there have been several marketing automation plugins for WordPress. At this time, there’s only one that will give you a lot of the features you find in HubSpot inside your WordPress website:

Groundhogg allows you to manage marketing funnels, and send out broadcast emails, has a built-in CRM, and reporting works with all themes and integrates with many popular services and plugins. This all takes place inside your WordPress admin. The pricing starts at $20/mo billed annually. No restrictions on contacts.

If you do plan to have all of this inside WordPress, you will need a dedicated SMTP service to send out emails and not end up in spam. You will also need to pay attention to the security of your website since you will store a lot of private information in the CRM. Your website being hacked would be considered a breach under the GDPR and must be reported.

Ideal For: If you’re using WordPress for your website, you should consider if adding marketing automation plugins makes sense. They add another layer of complexity to managing WordPress (if something breaks). Still, it can be a viable solution if you have skills or dedicated support to manage WordPress, especially if you’re on a budget.

You should also consider a hybrid approach, what I do. Let WordPress power certain parts it’s good at while letting another platform power marketing automation. You’ll need a third-party platform if you have multiple websites that need to be tracked in one place. You can’t use the plugin I mentioned above since it will only track websites they’re installed on.

Concluding Thoughts

Wisdom For The Road

Over the last 14 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses leaving HubSpot. None of them regretted switching to WordPress or another, more suitable alternative. The key to their newfound success was a narrow focus on the tools they needed to get the job done.

Don’t get an all-in-one solution just because you can or want to. Get the tools that will meet your immediate needs to increase revenue quickly. Once you begin generating leads and sales, you can always scale. Remember, you don’t need marketing automation software to generate leads.

Any of these 8 alternatives to HubSpot will offer marketing automation. You need to know exactly what features you need and what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t forget; it’s not really automatic. The system needs an operator to function correctly, which means at least 10-15 hours per week dedicated to inbound marketing to make it work for your business.

None of these systems is set-and-forget. They all require tweaking to get better and generate more leads. If you’re shopping for a marketing automation platform, read this post to help you decide.

If you have any questions or need help, follow me on Mastodon.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate/partner links.

Today, I want to introduce you to sales funnels in WordPress. Sales funnels help increase conversions (decrease abandoned shopping carts) and profits by providing a better, tailored buyer experience controlled by you.

In this post about sales funnels, I’ll cover:

• What a sales funnel is (and why you need one)
• An effective copywriting formula for sales funnels
• How to create and test your sales funnels using my recommended WordPress tools

What Is a Sales Funnel?

Simply put, a sales funnel is the path someone takes towards making a purchase.

An example of a basic sales funnel in e-commerce could look something like this:

Facebook ad › Product page › Cart › Checkout › Purchase

In this example, your prospect would see and click on your ad in their Facebook feed. They would then be taken to a product page to learn more about your product, then a cart page once they’ve added the product to the cart. Finally, they would checkout to complete their purchase.

Of course, sales funnels can get a lot more complex than this. Steps can be added or removed, but the concept is always the same: it moves the buyer from being a prospect to becoming a customer. With the right tools, you can not only increase the number of orders you get but increase the average order value by utilizing upsells, order bumps, upgrades, etc.

Can you make online sales without a sales funnel? Absolutely! Technically, a default e-commerce checkout is a simple sales funnel: unoptimized, barebones, and not tailored to your buyers and business. It’s like trying to win an F1 race with your Toyota Corolla. You’ll go from start to finish, but it won’t be fast, and you’ll undoubtedly be last.

Another benefit is that you can test and tweak your sales funnel based on what’s working and not, ensuring you’re constantly bringing in the maximum revenue using A/B testing. So you can test, learn, and adapt to continue to increase your income.

4 Ingredients Of An Effective Sales Funnel Copy

Sales funnels can be quite flexible, giving you control over the buyer’s journey from the first contact to the purchase. For sales funnels to be effective, you must write compelling copy (text) to help move buyers along the funnel.

An effective model for copywriting sales funnels is the AIDA model. The four steps in the model represent a thought process or motivation your prospects experience during the buying journey. Most copywriting will be done on the product (or sales) page, but keep in mind that you can continue to leverage it throughout the funnel if it has more than one page. This might be the case if you sell high-ticket items, services, or recurring subscriptions.

AIDA stands for:

• Awareness: Get the attention of your prospects and help them become aware of your brand. This initial step can be split (or repeated) between off-site (including ads, email marketing, social media, etc.) and on-site on the product or sales page. Do not discount your off-site collateral, such as ads. They plant a seed that brings visitors to your website. You need to water and fertilize that seed to grow into a sale.
• Interest: Tell your prospects how your product or service solves a problem they’re facing. You must connect with the visitor and show them you understand their needs and issues. Introduce them to your product/service as a solution they need.
• Desire: Desire is about making your solution “desirable.” This is where case studies, examples, testimonials, buyer-focused benefits, etc., become incredibly useful. Stay away from adjectives. They will kill any desire a buyer may have. “Best,” “Leader” – unless there is evidence to back those claims up, don’t use it.
• Action: Get your buyers to take action and purchase your product or service. This is the ultimate goal of your entire sales funnel. In addition to the “add to cart” button, you must consider upsells, cross-sells, order bumps, etc., to increase the average order value.

Good sales funnels are multi-step checkouts. One-page checkouts are not ideal. They can overwhelm buyers with a lot of information and decisions to make. Well-optimized multi-step checkouts are better than one-step checkouts for sales funnels.

How To Create And Test a WordPress Sales Funnel

Let’s move on to the good stuff, creating your sales funnel.

For this article, I assume you have (or want to build) an e-commerce website using WordPress and WooCommerce. It’s one of the best self-hosted e-commerce combinations available. This is what I use and recommend for my clients and personal projects.

Here’s how to create your own sales funnel easily using WordPress.

Step 1: Install WordPress And Choose a Theme

First, you’ll need to install WordPress if you haven’t already.

To be clear, this is the self-hosted version of WordPress, not WordPress.com. WordPress.com can get expensive for the plan that includes WooCommerce.

Most website hosts offer a one-click install of WordPress through Softaculous or Installatron. You may already have WordPress installed if you use managed WordPress hosting.

You’ll then need to choose a WordPress theme.

My top recommendation is the Astra theme. This is the theme I use for all my client and personal projects. The Astra theme offers several free e-commerce templates, each of which will work for building an e-commerce store.

When choosing a template, I highly recommend selecting one that uses Beaver Builder (more on this in step 2). This will make building and managing your pages quick and easy.

To see which templates use Beaver Builder, simply select “Beaver Builder” next to the search box on the Astra template page.

Astra offers a free light version of the theme, but I highly recommend you choose the Pro version to access all the e-commerce templates and additional WooCommerce integrations. Astra theme integrates well with WooCommerce, offering many customization options.

Step 2: Install Plugins

A few plugins will make creating your WordPress sales funnel so much easier. The recommended plugins integrate with Astra theme and WooCommerce so that you can create customized sales funnels without any custom coding.

• CartFlows is a WordPress sales funnel plugin that helps you build your funnel. It enables you to optimize the WooCommerce store to increase sales through a better sales funnel, order bumps, one-click upsells, checkout templates, and more.
  • Keep in mind that I focused this post on e-commerce, but using Cartflows, you can create sales funnels for lead generation with lead magnets, selling services, selling subscriptions, selling courses, and everything else. You also don’t need WooCommerce.
• Beaver Builder lets you quickly build pages on your WordPress website. Because it’s all drag and drop, you don’t need to know any coding to create beautiful, functional pages. This is the main plugin I have used for all my client and personal projects since 2016. It’s by far the best page builder plugin for WordPress.

Note: There is also the Elementor page builder plugin. Many themes come bundled with it. You can use it instead of Beaver Builder, but my choice is always Beaver Builder. Elementor works well with the Astra theme, and they offer templates too.

Once these plugins are installed, activate them from inside the plugins menu. You can then go into the settings for each of these plugins to set them up.

I recommend you build our e-commerce website before you start working on the sales funnels. You still need a fully functional website. Cartflows will give you control over your checkout experience and help you optimize it to get better results.

Step 3: Set Up Your First WordPress Sales Funnel

When your website is ready, you can begin building and optimizing your sales funnel with Cartflows. There are other WordPress sales funnel plugins, but Cartflows is one of the easiest to use, feature-rich, and integrates with tools I already use.

Remember, you need to think about your buyer’s journey. You must consider what you have written or need to write for your product or sales pages. You must work the AIDA formula to write compelling, persuasive copy to help move buyers along the sales funnel.

In your WordPress dashboard, you should see “CartFlows” on the left-hand side of your screen.

From the CartFlows menu, click “Settings.”

In the “Show Ready Templates for” dropdown menu, select Beaver Builder and then “Save Settings.”

Now go to “Flows” in the CartFlows menu, and click “Add New.” You can now choose from any of their prebuilt sales funnel templates.

Each template comes with prebuilt pages for each step of the sales funnel.

For instance, if you click on the “Protein Supplement” template, you’ll get a four-page funnel that looks like this:

You then click on “Import Flow” in the top right corner to start customizing each page on your own site.

It’s that simple!

Note: The free version of CartFlows will let you assign a product to your page. However, if you’d like to add bump offers, upsells, downsells, coupons, or have a more comprehensive selection of templates, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version of CartFlows.

Step 4: Test Your Sales Funnel

If you want to ensure your sales funnel generates as much revenue as possible, you’ll definitely want to do some split-testing.

Fortunately, this is easy to do inside CartFlows.

Go into your flow, and you’ll see each page of your funnel. Click on the three dots next to the page you want to test and select “A/B Test.”

CartFlows will now create an identical page (a clone) that you can edit to create a variation of the original page.

You can now change and test any element you want: your page colors or layout, your bump offer, and your call to action.

Finally, you’ll need to tell CartFlows to direct traffic to your cloned page.

Click the cog on the top right side of your flow next to “Start Split Test.”

You can now decide what percentage of traffic you want to send to each page: adjust this by clicking on the slider next to each page.

Finally, click the “Start Split Test” link, and your A/B split test is now live!

Step 5: Don’t Forget Analytics

When you measure and test, using the right tools is important. Ensure you comply with privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA, and respect user privacy. Google Analytics is the go-to analytics tool. If you can use it legally, use it to measure your sales funnel and e-commerce sales. However, if you can’t use Google Analytics for legal reasons, you should check out privacy-focused Fathom analytics. Please, do not forget the privacy policy and cookie banner. I use and recommend Iubenda. It’s the cheapest, easiest, and most comprehensive privacy tool on the market.

If you want to understand user behavior and see what users do on your website, including your sales funnel, you should consider using session recording tools such as Hotjar. You’ll be able to watch visitors navigate and engage with your website. I find it incredibly useful to help me understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what we need to change to make improvements.

Whatever you choose to track your visitors, ensure you’re keeping it legal and ethical, and learn from it. What’s the point of measuring if you don’t learn from it?

Final Thoughts

Creating your own WordPress sales funnel is easy using the tools and steps recommended in this post. WordPress + WooCommerce + Astra theme + Beaver Builder is a winning e-commerce stack. This is the stack I use for all my projects, including my latest personal (my wife’s business) e-commerce project, boobie.ca. Integrating Cartflows is next on my to-do list for this project to help reduce abandoned shopping carts while increasing average order value with order bumps.

I would love to hear from you: what do you sell? what problem are you trying to solve with a sales funnel? Comment below with any feedback or questions.

Creating and selling digital products can be a great way to turn your knowledge and passion into passive income. But while creating digital products can be a relatively straightforward process, selling them can be a real challenge.

You’ll need to consider how you’re going to accept payments, charge taxes, collect buyer info…and of course, actually deliver your product to your customer.

I’ve sold many different digital products over the years, and have used a variety of payment and delivery strategies. In this post, I’m going to share the tools and strategies I’ve used, and tell you which ones have been most effective for me.

I’ll also show you exactly how I use my two favorite tools to not only sell my products but to add new customers to my email list… and even have them directly enter email automation.

Three Ways To Sell And Deliver Your Digital Products

When I first started selling digital products, I used E-junkie as my payment and delivery tool. In my opinion, the biggest draw to E-Junkie is the price: they charge a flat monthly fee that starts at just $5/month.

Using E-junkie is extremely simple, making it a great option for anyone new to the digital product world. You simply cut and paste a small piece of code onto your product page, and you’re ready to start selling.

For me, it was the perfect tool to help me get started. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize I needed a more advanced, customizable tool. The main issue for me was the inability to properly integrate the tool with Google Analytics – meaning I couldn’t tell where my sales were coming from.

The next tool I used was a free WordPress plugin called Easy Digital Downloads. While it’s pretty easy to install the plugin and start selling, I did end up needing to hire professional several times to help with some customizations.

A major disadvantage of this tool is that it only comes with one payment gateway: PayPal. If you want to accept payments via Stripe, PayPal Pro, or Authorize.net, you’ll pay a hefty $89 per year, per gateway. That’s $267 per year just to accept payments!

There are tons of other extensions that will let you add different functionalities. For instance, there’s an extension that lets you integrate the tool with ActiveCampaign, allowing customers to opt-in to your email list at checkout. However, you’ll pay an annual fee in the range of $49-$89 for each extension…and this adds up fast.

A few years ago, I made the decision to switch to a tool I had heard a lot about: ThriveCart. I have never looked back, and don’t think I’ll ever use another online shopping cart again!

It’s extremely easy to use, and I love that there’s no annual fee: it’s a one-time cost of $495 for the basic version or $690 for the advanced version.

One of my favorite ThriveCart features is the ability to easily add upsells and bump offers. Using bump offers allowed me to recoup the cost of the tool in just a few months!

How I Sell Digital Products Using ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign

Selling products is so easy for me now thanks to these two tools. If you want to know how to use ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign to sell your digital products, here’s the exact process I use.

1. Create your product in ThriveCart

On the main product page in your ThriveCart account, click the “Create Product” button to get started.

You’ll then choose whether you want to sell a digital or physical product. Obviously, you’ll want to choose digital. From here, you can add and customize your product, including:

• Setting the price
• Uploading your digital product file
• Adding a bump offer
• Choosing your payment processors. Some options include Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and Apple Pay.
• Designing and customizing your checkout page

2. Connect your ActiveCampaign account to ThriveCart

In a previous post, I shared how I make an extra $1,000 monthly using ActiveCampaign automations. Read through that post to learn the exact steps I use to sell my digital products using ActiveCampaign automations.

The short explanation, however, is this: the key to selling your digital products is to promote them in your email automation.

Before you can do this, you’ll need to connect your ActiveCampaign account to your ThriveCart account.

To do this, go into ThriveCart and click on the dropdown box next to the blue circular button at the top right-hand side of your screen. Go to “Settings”, and then click “View integrations”.

On the next page, you’ll see all the integrations you can choose from. Under the ActiveCampaign box, click the “Integrate now” button.

You’ll now be asked to enter your API URL and Key. To get this info, you’ll need to go into your ActiveCampaign account. Click “Settings” on the bottom left-hand side of your screen, and then click the “Developer” link. You’ll now be able to see (and copy) your API info.

Go back to your ThriveCart account and paste this info into the corresponding boxes under the ActiveCampaign integration. That’s it! Your Thrivecart account is now connected to your ActiveCampaign account.

3. Add an opt-in box to your shopping cart

While ThriveCart gives you the option to add ALL your customers to your email automation, I strongly recommend adding a checkbox to your shopping cart so your customers can choose to opt into your list.

Go to the “Checkout” tab and select “Launch Editor” to do this. You’ll now be able to customize your checkout page: some options include adding an image or video, including FAQs, and adding or editing your headings or subheadings. You can also customize the colors and layout of your page.

To collect customer emails, click on “Contact Information”, and you should see some additional options in the left-hand column. Scroll down until you see the “Show opt-in checkbox”. Make sure this box is checked.

All your customers need to do is check this box at checkout, and you’ll know they consent to be added to your email list.

4. Add customers to your email automation

Your email automation will be where you promote your other digital product(s). Here’s how to have new customers enter this automation:

In your ThriveCart account, go into your product page and click on the “Behavior” tab. Click “+ Add rule”.

You can now specify multiple rules, including:

• When you want customers added to your list, select “When your custom checkbox is ticked.”
• Which email service do you want to connect to? Choose ActiveCampaign.
• Which list or automation do you want your customers added to? Select “add them to” and “automation.”
• You can now choose which automation you want them added to.

Final Thoughts

Using ActiveCampaign and ThriveCart to promote and sell your digital products is an easy, effective way to earn passive income. Once you understand the basic steps above, you can use them in a variety of ways:

• Create a lead magnet, and when people sign up for your list, have them added to your email automation. Promote your digital products in your automation.
• When customers check the opt-in box on the checkout page, add them to automation that promotes related products. Since they’ve bought from you once, there’s a good chance they’ll buy from you again.
• Include links to your ThriveCart product pages in the weekly emails you send to your list.

There are many ways to sell your products and grow your email list using these two amazing tools. I hope you try them out for yourself!

Have you tried either or both of these tools? How has the experience been for you?

How many project management apps have you used so far? We have worked with five tools in the last four years. It was important for us to find the right tool, because as a marketing agency IF Solutions needs to manage web development, technical SEO, and digital marketing projects while allowing staff and clients to communicate.

Any company which is focused on good customer care and profitability needs to improve its process. To improve the process team felt the need for a better project management solution. The features that we were looking for in a project management app:

• Ability to create a project with milestones, tasks, and task dependencies
• Add as many guests and clients to projects as we need
• Ability to assign it to team members, assign dates, and resources
• Track how much time a staff member spent on a task
• Monitor tasks, milestones, and project progress with reporting

With the Nifty project management app, we had all these features and much more.

Nifty For Marketing Agencies

The following Nifty features fit the needs of our marketing agency and we use them every day:

Account Overview

• The Overview provides the bird’s-eye view for the whole account and projects.
• In the Overview, you can drill down to project milestones to see progress.
• The Workloads shows tasks assigned to staff members and help you manage the team.

Project Discussions

• Each project can have a discussion board, which replaces the chat function. Nifty allows you to add as many guests/clients as you want. However, the team cannot chat with them directly. This is the tool that allows you and the rest of the team to share information with the client. All the important points can be pinned, so everyone can see them.
• Also, it allows you to convert any discussion point to a task. This saves a lot of time.
• When you want to connect with internal team members, Nifty offers a direct message feature. You can chat with one user or multiple users. This can be disabled if you use Slack or Google Chat.
• If you install the Zoom app in your Nifty workspace, you can directly start a Zoom call inside of Nifty.

Milestones

• Project milestones overview allows you to see the entire project in a bird’s-eye view, see where you are.
• The second option is the timeline view, which is what IF Solutions uses. With this view, you can see the dependencies and delays of the project on one screen.
• The third option is the swimlane view.

Tasks

The most important section of Nifty. There are a few ways to see your tasks (views in Nifty):

• Kanban
  • This is the typical agile way of seeing tasks, like Trello. You can create columns to correspond to statuses (or any other way you want to organize your project), such as Todo, Start, Challenged, Review, and completed. At IF Solutions, we use Kanban and it allows us to move tasks among status columns.
• Swim Lane
  • If you’re a fan of viewing your project in the swimlane, Nifty gives you that option.
• Listview
  • This is a vertical representation of the Kanban view. Great way to see all tasks and attributes (due dates, tags, etc.) in a Spreadsheet-like view.

Docs and Files

• Nifty allows you to create either a Google Doc, Microsoft Office doc, or a Nifty doc. A Nifty doc is a simple document/text editor, which is good to jot down notes. However, Google Docs and Microsoft Docs allow you the full features you’d expect from them, embedded inside Nifty. When you create a document in each project you can control who is going to see each document. With this, you can separate internal documents and external documents. The folder feature enables you to categorize and structure your documents as needed.
• The files section allows you to upload your files to Nifty, either to the project or directly inside tasks. All the files uploaded to tasks, discussions, and comments are stored in the project’s Files section. Just like the Docs section, you can organize the files using folders.

These features matched our needs, so IF Solutions signed up for Nifty. Once we signed up, we had to take time to figure out exactly how to set up Nifty.

Standard Operating Procedures

The team decided to create Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for the services and internal operations. If you’re looking to create your own SOPs, here are the steps we followed:

1. List all tasks for each service we offer.
2. Write down who is responsible for each task.
3. How many days or hours are needed to do each action.
4. List any dependencies for each task.
5. Create milestones by grouping the tasks.
6. Finally, all the services were grouped based on the portfolio.

We created the following portfolios (portfolios are groups of projects inside Nifty):

• Website Development
• Digital Marketing
• SaaS and R&D
• Operations

Once you have done the above actions the next step is to use your SOPs to populate Nifty and get to work. I will explain what process I have followed:

1. Create the project and give it a name and an icon to make it look nice. Keep your environment professional.
2. Go to the project’s home tab and add widgets you want to customize the project’s dashboard. This is a great place to see the overall status of the project and show it to clients.
3. The next step is to create milestones for the projects.
4. After adding the milestones, add the related tasks to the milestones. When you are adding tasks make sure to add a description or an explainer video. We record videos using Zoom and upload them to YouTube. Then add the link in the description section or embed them inside tasks. All the resources and assets must be added at this stage. Otherwise later when you or other stakeholders check the tasks, you might not remember exactly what was supposed to be done. Add task deadlines and set up recurring tasks, if you got any.
5. After adding all the tasks, you need to add the dependencies and stages from the tasks section.
6. If you have any assets upload them to the files section and link them to the tasks.
7. The final step is to add the tasks owners and guests/clients, so they can monitor the work.
8. Once you set up your portfolio and projects you can start the actual work. Now you are good to go!

Make sure all the stakeholders are disciplined and use Nifty whenever they deal with the project. Clients might want to use other channels to communicate, like WhatsApp chat, which makes the rest of the team blind to that particular discussion. In these situations, we copy-paste the chat to project discussions and ask the clients to use Nifty to communicate. At the start, it is difficult to keep up. However, when you get going you will get used to it and your productivity and client satisfaction will increase.

There’s a lot of hype these days about marketing funnels, so it can be hard to know what’s working and what’s not.

I’ve spent many years testing different funnels for my business, with varying degrees of success. Some have worked for a while and then seem to stop working; others fail right from day one (I’m not above telling you that most of my initial attempts have failed, at least until I’ve done some serious tweaking).

The problem is that there are so many moving parts when it comes to marketing and sales funnels.

• The landing page: Is your design keeping visitors on the page long enough to read your copy? And if so, is your copy convincing enough that visitors will keep reading (or at least skimming) to the end? (By the way, here’s how to create the perfect landing page.)
• Lead magnet: Is it irresistible enough that people will hand over their email? And if so, is it attracting your ideal customers?
• The email follow-up sequence: Are your emails addressing your audience’s problems? And if so, are you accurately describing those problems? And are you sending the correct number of emails in the optimal order?
• The call to action/conversion: Can you articulate that you have the solution to the problem? And are you getting conversions?

It’s a lot to test, and I admit I don’t naturally have the patience for it. But when all the elements come together and you start seeing positive results, all the tedious testing and tweaking are worth it.

The strategy I’ve developed has been working well for me for about five years now. The secret sauce to my strategy is my email follow-up sequence, so that’s what I’ll focus on in this post.

While my business is coaching parents, you can tailor this strategy to any business, especially those in the lifestyle niche.

Note: This strategy does require that you’re with an email marketing service that allows you to have multiple automations going at once. I’ve tried this strategy with other services and have found ActiveCampaign to be the only one that allows me to offer multiple lead magnets with multiple automations running simultaneously. Having multiple lead magnets is crucial for targeting different segments of your audience.

How to Create a Revenue-Generating ActiveCampaign Automations

Step 1: Create a unique form for your lead magnet

I’ve tested countless lead magnets over the years, and the ones that have worked best for me have been quizzes. But of course, you can use whatever lead magnet is working best for you.

To create an opt-in form for your lead magnet, start by clicking the Site icon (looks like a little globe) in the left sidebar of your dashboard, then Forms, and then Create a Form/.

Give your form a name based on the lead magnet you’re using. Under Action, select Subscribe to a list, and under Options, select the list you want people added to when they submit the form.

From here, you can customize your form as you like, adding and deleting fields, changing the colors, and adding descriptive text.

I won’t walk you through this process, but I will assume you already know – or can figure out how – to do this.

Step 2: Select the 7 Day Drip Series automation

Next, we will set up the email follow-up series, called automation in ActiveCampaign.

You’ll find the Automation tab in the left sidebar of your dashboard. While I’ve always created my automations manually, ActiveCampaign now has a 7-Day Drip Series template that makes the process much easier!

At this point, you may see the 7 Day Drip Series template suggested on your screen. You can click on the corresponding Get started button; if not, click on the Create an automation button.

From there, start typing “7-day” into the search bar until you see the 7 Day Drip Series option. Select it, and then click Continue.

You’ll now see the entire outline of the 7-day series, including your trigger (the action that will start the automation), “wait conditions” (rules that indicate how long to wait before sending each email), and a blank email for each day of the automation.

Step 3: Go through the ActiveCampaign Automations Setup Wizard to customize your automation

On the right side of your screen, you’ll see the Setup Wizard. Click the Get Started button.

The default option here is to start the automation when someone subscribes to a particular list. However, we want to trigger it when someone submits a specific form – it’s okay though; we’re going to change this in a minute. For now, choose any list from the dropdown menu.

You’ll now see the entire automation laid out on your screen. Click the Add a new trigger button.

And then the Submits a form button:

Next, select the name of the form you created in step 1, and then next to Runs, choose Once. Leave the Segment the contacts entering this automation option unchecked. Click the Add Start button.

We can now remove the Contact subscribes to any list trigger by hovering over it and clicking the garbage bin icon.

Step 4: Edit your email content

Because we’re using a template, ActiveCampaign has created blank emails for each of the seven days. To add your content, click on the Edit this action button next to the relevant day, and then either edit the default email or click the Create a New Email link to start your email from scratch:

There are different schools of thought about what you should include in each email. Of course, you’ll have to test this out for yourself. However, if you’re looking for ideas to get you started, Tarzan Kay and Sage Polaris are both excellent resources, offering tons of free email scripts and templates you can try out.

Here’s the sequence that has worked well for me:

Email 1: Lead magnet

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 2: Share a personal story

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 3: Discuss their problem in-depth, showing you understand it

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 4: Explain why the usual solutions may work and how your solution is different. Introduce your product and include a call to action to buy.

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 5: Value-packed email with helpful tips and strategies

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 6: Value-packed email with helpful tips and strategies

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 7: Value-packed email, introduce a new product or give a call to action for the same product as in email 4

‹Wait for 1 day›

Email 8: A thank you for reading the previous emails and a call to connect further (through sending an email, joining a Facebook group, etc.)

And that’s it! At this point, your automation is complete, and your subscribers will receive future emails you send to your list.

A Final Word

It’s important to note that this strategy has only worked for me when promoting a product in the $10-$15 range (not including bump offers, which account for about half my sales).

So while it may not make you rich, it’s an excellent strategy for bringing in a little extra passive income and for building a list of active, qualified buyers who are likely to buy your higher-ticket offers.

Photo credit Alexander Mils/Unsplash

It’s really simple.

If you don’t know yourself – your business – you won’t get customers you truly want.

Not all customers are created equal. Ideal customers are your golden goose, while bad customers are a parasite.

All – and I mean all – small businesses (and sometimes even larger organizations) I talk to and work with don’t really know themselves. They don’t really know who they are, what makes them unique, what separates them from the competition.

If you don’t know what separates you from your competition, neither will your customers. Stop forcing customers to play “Where’s Waldo?” with your marketing, trying to find your value proposition.

If customers are not buying from you, if you keep losing deals to competition, your customers don’t know your value proposition and how it aligns with their pain.

Marketing simply means communicating your value to ideal customers in an effective way so they take an action. How can you communicate your value to customers if you don’t know what value you deliver?

Yes, you are selling a product (or service) that does something your customer needs. That’s not your real value, why? Because the guy next door offers identical products.  When you truly know yourself, you know the competitive advantage that helps you rise above the noise and differentiate you from your competitors.

Every prospect has a question in their mind – If I’m your ideal customer, why should I buy from you and not your competitor?

The answer to that question is your true value, it is your value proposition. That statement must set you apart from all your competitors, it must contain your competitive advantage to tell your ideal customers why you!

I’ve written about value proposition before, and I will be focusing on it even more because it is the foundation of your brand, your messaging, how you talk about your business, what story you need to tell your customers to resonate with them. It’s the sole reason they say yes to you.

When you know your value proposition, it provides alignment across your entire business when you have employees. Everyone should be able to clearly answer that question, without hesitation. When you control your brand perception, you control your profit. Your value proposition is the DNA of your business, unique to your business and your business alone!

What is your value proposition? Are you making your customers look for Waldo? Or, are you taking them on a guided tour to a purchase?

Remember, your value proposition is not:

• Your business description
• Your mission statement
• Slogan or tagline
• Description of your business model

Don’t try to spice it up with adjectives (greatest, best, etc.). Everyone does it, and it doesn’t work. Unless you have proof (maybe you won an award in your industry, or analyst ranked your #1, etc.), don’t make superficial claims using adjectives.

One of my consulting clients is working on an ebook to attract more qualified leads for the new platform they’re launching.

The ebook will educate and provide advice on specific business activities. It’s already shaping up to be an effective lead magnet. Last week on our coaching call I introduced my client to a technique that will 10x the effectiveness of the ebook with minimal additional effort.

When it comes to content marketing, relevancy is key. The more relevant the content to your ideal customers, the easier it is to convert them.

74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (ex: offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests. HubSpot

The most common way to get the most out of your content is repurposing. Basically, you take one form of content and turn it into another form. For example, you can take a blog post and turn it into a PDF ebook, or a video, or an infographic, or all of them.

People have different learning styles. Some prefer blog posts, some love ebooks, others love watching videos. Repurposing content is a great way to maximize your investment, and get more leads!

Repurposing is a great way to reach a wider audience. But it doesn’t make the content more relevant to specific segments of your target market.

Reframing Content

Before you repurpose your content, consider reframing it first.

Reframing Content – personalizing existing content to specific needs of a target market segment to increase relevancy and perceived value.

It’s a simple process, yet few businesses do it.

Let’s say you’re a business coach. The 3 segments of your ideal customers are doctors, restaurant owners, and ecommerce entrepreneurs. These are the clients you actively pursue because you do your best work with them.

To attract more business owners, you wrote a free PDF ebook called: “10 Steps to Create Your First Business System.”

If you went with that one ebook, without reframing it, that’s all you would have. And most likely, results wouldn’t be that great.

But you decided to reframe your ebook into 3 ebooks:

• 10 Steps to Create Back-Office Systems for Your Medical Practice
• 10 Steps to Create Back-Office Systems for Your Restaurant
• 10 Steps to Create Back-Office Systems for Your Ecommerce Business

Now, instead of one general ebook, you got a highly relevant ebook for each one of your segments. You can change titles as you wish, that’s up to you.

The content of the ebook requires minimal changes. It helps personalize it to the specific needs of each segment. A business is a business, creating systems usually follows the same process. It doesn’t vary from business to business. So the 10 steps in the ebook are the same.

Here’s what I recommend you change and/or add inside:

• Jargon: Different industries use a different language for certain things. The 2 important things to change are how business refers to itself and its customers. For example, doctors refer to customers as patients and the business as practice. So you want to change any mentions of “customers” to “patients” and “your business” to “your practice.” This is the most basic example.
• Introduction: Include personalized 2-3 paragraphs introduction. Just touch on some pain points and challenges that might be specific to that segment. This helps set the stage.

Those two are critical, to help personalize the content. The rest of the content should remain the same. You’re not rewriting the whole thing. You’re making light edits.

If you want it to be even more personalized, the other 2 things you can do are custom images (visuals) and custom examples.

The extent of reframing depends on the content and how you divide your segments.

For example, if you cater to parents you might not need to edit it as much. You might be able to get away with something as simple as “As a mother, you will…” or “As a father, you will…”.

If you’re in the B2B space and your segments are internal functions (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.), you might need to edit it a bit more. This depends on what the content is because they have different priorities, pain points, and language. CEO might focus on ROI, CTO might focus on details and how it will be accomplished, and CFO might focus on the cost.

Reframing Gives You More Opportunities

The personalized nature of each reframed piece makes it relevant to a specific segment. They feel as if you wrote it for them specifically. Even if the content is relevant to everyone who has a need for your product or service, the relevancy will help you establish credibility as an expert in their industry, niche, job function, etc.

99% of the people will not read content that’s not relevant to them. If a video is for store managers, the CEO will not waste her time watching it. You don’t have to worry about your customers consuming duplicate content. They won’t even know it exists.

Keep in mind, this is for gated content. Don’t do it for SEO. People might not know, but Google will know. Since the bulk of the content is the same.

This gives you a lot more opportunities to convert and nurture qualified leads. For example:

• If you have blog posts specific to those segments, you can add relevant calls to action to each blog post. Using a business coach example, a blog post aimed at doctors would have a call to action to download an ebook reframed for doctors.
• You can have lead nurturing campaigns specific to those segments, delivering highly relevant content. Doctors get emails relevant to doctors.
• In sales, when you engage with prospects you can share highly relevant content. CEO gets relevant content to a CEO.
• In pay-per-click advertising, you can target specific keywords and audiences to deliver relevant content. This will increase your conversion rates and the quality of leads.
• You can share links to landing pages dedicated to each piece of content on social media, tagging with relevant hashtags and keywords.

When you reframe your content, you 10x your opportunities to get more leads and more sales.

Plus, you can always repurpose your reframed content. So now you can have an ebook, a video, an infographic for doctors, CEOs, etc.

You just have to do it. It’s guaranteed to get you more targeted and qualified leads if you do it right.

This is a quick way to leverage personalization without expensive apps, software, and integrations. Anyone can do it.

Your marketing is wasteful. I’m 99% sure. The majority of businesses engage in busywork, a charade that we use to make ourselves feel good about it. We do things that clearly don’t drive any results, why? Because we ought to do something, right?

Direct mail campaigns with zero return on investment, and we keep going and wasting money. Expensive trade shows with no leads or customers, and we keep attending. Blog posts and other lead magnets not generating leads, and we keep writing them.

Einstein said it best, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

There has to be a better way, a way that gives you results. There is.

The Customer Is the Hero

You might’ve heard Shakespeare’s famous “All the world’s a stage” phrase. It’s a perfect way to look at the world, more specifically with a business lens to understand how customers think.

Every human on this planet is a hero, a protagonist in their own play – life. It’s a first-person experience, an autobiography of sorts. We play a role, with an unwritten script.

It’s important you understand this concept because I’m an actor in your life’s play. My role is small, I might not even have any lines in your play. I was invited to perform in your play, when you found me on Google, when you received an email from me because you’re on my list, when someone referred you to me. I became part of your play without solicitation, without an audition. The conversation I was invited to is related to your marketing, to the business, something specific. I’m not part of the conversation about your kids, or your health, etc. I’m only part of the conversation  I was invited to. My conversation became part of your conversation about marketing. I did not impose my own conversation on you, to dictate my own narrative and re-write your story.

No, I’m just a supporting actor. My role is to support you, to be part of your story, to bring my knowledge and expertise to help you achieve your goals.

Every customer is a hero in their own play. They invite businesses and business representatives into their play to a specific conversation or conversations. When you’re invited, you’re joining the conversation that’s already happening. If you’re selling IT services, your customer’s conversation about IT needs is already happening. You were invited to be part of that conversation.

Businesses, although not human, do have their own play with employees as players. The problem is, majority of businesses try to impose their own narrative on their customers’ stories. This causes conflict, and instead of being invited to join a supporting role in your customer’s play – you become one of the villains, the antagonist.

This problem, in many cases, stems from a lack of knowledge. You simply don’t know enough about your customers to know what conversation is about. You need to know what it’s about to be able to join it.

If your marketing isn’t working, you don’t know your customers well enough.

It doesn’t matter what tools you use (even if you pay for HubSpot), it doesn’t matter who you hire, it doesn’t matter what you do or how much of it you do, your marketing will not work if you don’t know your customers well enough.

I’ve worked with too many businesses that were “doing” marketing, but in reality, they were doing busy work. They weren’t getting any results, even though they did pay for HubSpot, they blogged, they emailed, they did it all. No results.

Know Thy Customer

You need to know what conversation is happening in your customer’s mind. Conversations are not always the same, they change as goals change, priorities change, the environment changes, etc.

When you know what the conversation is, you can figure out a way to align your own conversation to your customer’s conversation. You will be invited to play a supporting role in their play, helping them defeat whatever monster is standing in front of them.

If you’re a fan of the comics, or at least the Marvel movies. Think about easily stories blend together between the members of the Avengers. Main heroes have their own stories (Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, etc.). Then, Avengers’ story blends their stories together. Sometimes they show up in their friends’ stories, like Iron Man in the Spider-Man movie; or Hulk in the upcoming Thor movie.

When you research your customers, you need to understand what drives them, what their goals are, what they are struggling with, what obstacles are in their way, who are the players in their story. You need this information to understand the underlying narrative, so you know what conversation you need to be a part of.

This is especially true in sales when you already have their attention and you need to figure out how to close the deal. Price isn’t always a factor (think Rolex watches), quality isn’t always a factor (think $1 store merchandise), reputation isn’t always a factor (think of DaVita, the dialysis provider). What you think is important, might not be what your customers think is important.

If your marketing and sales are based on assumptions, or anecdotal evidence, or just general knowledge, you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for. You will interrupt your customers’ stories, and end up as a villain they need to avoid or fight against.

This is why I love inbound and content marketing. It allows customers to find you when they are seeking someone to fill a supporting role in their play. Someone who can join a specific conversation to help them. The better you know your customers, the easier it is to bring them in with high precision. Knowing your customer is a critical part of an inbound marketing strategy. It is the foundation of everything.

The people who say that inbound marketing doesn’t work, even when they “did” inbound marketing are the ones who did not know their customers well enough (assuming they actually know how to do inbound marketing). You can’t go hunting deer with a fishing rod, you can’t go shark fishing with a worm, you can’t generate leads with a free PDF just because it’s free and you assumed your customers might want it. Millions of landing pages go unvisited, millions of PDFs go unread, millions of webinars are not attended, millions of videos are not watched. There’s a reason for that. You can’t feed beef steak to a vegan. Period.

Customers are heroes in their own stories. Figure out what it is, and join their quest to help them defeat the “monster.”

Don’t go around trying to stuff your shit down customers’ throats. You don’t like it when someone else is doing it to you, why would you subject your customers to the same thing? I hope you don’t hate your customers.

Photo by Johannes Dietschi / Theater der Künste (CC BY 2.0)

Over the years, I’ve done a ton of consulting work. Advising and working with businesses of all sizes across all industries. Giving them more clarity and helpful advice to improve marketing, generate more leads to fill the pipeline, and close more sales.

Everyone understands the importance of marketing. It fills your pipeline, it fills your cash register, and it fills your wallet.

What 99.9% of businesses don’t understand is the role marketing plays in the life of their customers. The reason for this is simple.

Marketing is considered an internal activity, just like accounting. You don’t charge clients when you create a P&L statement, or when you file your own taxes. That’s how marketing is treated, you do it internally for your business.

That’s the problem. You don’t do it for your business.

You’re not doing marketing for your business, you’re doing marketing TO your customers.

You must re-frame how you view marketing from an internal activity to an external service customer’s experience.

What does that actually mean?

Marketing Is a Service

Just like “car wash,” “deep tissue massage,” “tax preparation,” or “help desk software.” Even if you sell products, you still offer marketing as a service to your customers.

Customer experience does not begin at the moment of a sale, or at the moment of window shopping. Customer experience begins at the moment your brand becomes part of the conversation.

If you’re not familiar with customer experience (Wikipedia):

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction includes a customer’s attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy and purchase and use of a service.

It encompasses the entire journey, for as long as they or you are alive.

This brings me back to my original point. Marketing is an experience that enters customers’ lives. Sometimes it’s forced on them (advertising), and sometimes it’s given to them (inbound).

The question is: Is your marketing as good as your service?

You pride yourself on the quality of your services, why would you let your customer’s initial interaction with your brand be shitty?

Your customers deserve the best. That’s why you stand by your services and products. Can you, in all honesty, stand by the quality of your marketing in the same way?

Consider this. If you ask your customers to rate your marketing, just like your business, what rating would it get?

Let me make this point clear!

If you know your services and products are of top-notch quality. If it is better than your competitor’s. Yet, you’re still not able to get the leads and sales you desire. The quality of your marketing is to blame.

Marketing is the first service your customers experience. This makes their first purchase repeat business.

Business owners will spend an incredible amount of time fulfilling services and perfecting their products. Yet, they won’t spend the same amount of time, effort, and budget on their marketing. Something that more people will experience than the service or product itself.

Think about it. If 1,000 people see your TV commercial, 100 will check out your business, and only 5 will buy. A typical business will spend most of its resources on an experience for 5 people. The rest get a terrible experience because you don’t value marketing as much as your services. So you end up getting 5, instead of 1,000 customers.

You must do marketing your customers deserve, not what you can afford. It doesn’t mean you must spend a million dollars on your marketing budget. You don’t have that.

What you do have is elbow grease that you can put to good use on meaningful marketing activities. Meaningful marketing goes 2 inches wide and 2 miles deep. When you chase shiny objects, or what I call Hail Mary marketing, you go 2 miles wide and 2 inches deep.

Quality marketing doesn’t require quantity.

It did not surprise me when I saw the final results of our poll. We ran a Hotjar poll on our website for the past few weeks, asking a simple question “Do you have an inbound marketing strategy you’re following right now?” Thanks to all 172 respondents, we have our answer – 75% don’t.

That sounds about right based on my experience. Many businesses simply don’t have an inbound marketing strategy. There are many different reasons for that, but usually, it comes down to not knowing how to create a strategy and then how to execute it.

Although there has been a huge amount of educational resources about inbound marketing – from books to ebooks, from blog posts to videos – nothing so far was able to offer a clear framework that one could follow to create their own strategy. Everything out there has been about the tactics, yet everyone forgot about the strategy to align tactical activities in a single direction to reach business objectives.

This is why inbound marketing didn’t yield any results for you and your business. You simply engage in random acts of marketing. This is one of the reasons why I’m not fond of the “growth hacking” term, and I know that growth hackers will get a bit uptight about this. Instead of looking for that “hack” to go viral, businesses need to focus on long-term strategy and success. And frankly, the best growth hacking strategies are always aligned with the overall business and marketing strategies.

Instead of wasting time trying to find your magic bullet to get leads, that growth hack that will propel your sales into the stratosphere, why not simply do the uncomfortable work that’s necessary? 

An Hour vs a Lifetime

5 Hour Energy Shots will give you energy for about 5 hours ( or none if you’re like me). But eating a proper diet, exercising, and getting enough sleep will give you energy for a lifetime. Yet, these overwhelming and uncomfortable things are always done last if done at all.

Marketing plays by those rules too. Everything in life plays by those rules.

If you put a solid inbound marketing strategy in place, it gives you a foundation for all your tactical activities – even growth hacking. But instead of a 5-hour window, it gives you sustainable and predictable results over a longer period of time.

Did You Get That Light Bulb?

When you read that statistic, 75% of respondents don’t have an inbound marketing strategy to follow. Did a light bulb go off? No? Alright, pay attention.

It’s an opportunity for you. You can dominate 75% of your competitors by creating and executing an inbound marketing strategy.

Is it that simple? Yes! Consider this.

You have 5 cars, 5 gallons of gas and each car consumes 1 gallon/mile. If you put 1 gallon in each car, the furthest you can go is only one mile. But what if you put all 5 gallons in one car? You would drive for 5 miles!

Your limited budget (time + money + resources) is your gas. When you have no strategy, you spread that gas in different cars trying to get somewhere – those random acts of marketing. In many cases, you don’t even know where you need to go (no goals and/or objectives). But the moment you put all your gas into that one strategic car, you’ll know where to go and be able to get there with the gas you have! Clarity drives action.

You Hold Yourself Back

It is very simple, but it’s not easy. One of my clients recently told me that when she looked at my 45+ page workbook she got overwhelmed and ended up doing nothing.

If the work doesn’t overwhelm you, if it doesn’t make your gut turn a bit, you might not be doing meaningful work that will get you the outcomes you desire. I’m terrible at this too.

That project we’re procrastinating to start… Man, that’s a lot of work. You know what, I really don’t feel like doing it right now. Let me take 5 minutes to check my email and respond, and then I’m on it! A few hours later, still that feeling, you just don’t feel like doing it – it’s so overwhelming. We always follow the current of comfort, we must swim against that current to get meaningful work done.

That overwhelming feeling is just that, a feeling. Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson put it nicely in an HBR article on getting things done that really did resonate with me:

Somewhere along the way, we’ve all bought into the idea – without consciously realizing it – that to be motivated and effective we need to feel like we want to take action.  We need to be eager to do so.  I really don’t know why we believe this, because it is 100% nonsense. Yes, on some level you need to be committed to what you are doing – you need to want to see the project finished, or get healthier, or get an earlier start to your day. But you don’t need to feel like doing it.

Your Choice

Frankly, I can’t do anything to make you do the hard work that’s necessary. If you choose to swim with the current of comfort, that’s your choice. That current will NEVER get you to where you want and need to go. It’s always in the opposite direction.

It is simple, but it’s not easy. The choice is yours. Do you give up control over your life and let the current of comfort take you further and further from where you want to go? Or, do you commit to your own success and begin an overwhelming, uncomfortable journey against the current to your desired outcome?

I get asked this question a lot, so I thought this might be a good time to finally write a post about this and help you decide for yourself.

Let’s dive in.

Marketing Automation Software Is a Pair Of Shoes

At this point, there are dozens of marketing automation software catering to businesses of all sizes, from small mom and pop shops to large enterprises. One of my clients called it “marketing automation jungle.” It’s difficult to do research, as everyone looks like it can be a good option depending on the budget. It’s overwhelming, especially for a non-marketing professional.

The questions you ask determine the answers that you get. So when you ask yourself “what’s the best marketing automation software for my business?” you’re already setting yourself up to be overwhelmed and stressed out.

The real question that you need to ask yourself is “what are my business/marketing needs?”

You won’t go blindly buying a pair of shoes, there’s a need in your life that dictates what shoes you need. If I ever decide to begin training for a marathon (a need), I will need proper running shoes. When you need running shoes that’s a very different need than dress shoes for a wedding or flip flops to hit the beach.

When you need shoes, you won’t ask “what’s the best shoes for me?” but instead you’ll ask yourself “why do I need shoes?” or even a bit more specific and external “what are the best shoes for marathon training?”

You will look at different shoes, try some on, walk around to see how they feel on YOUR feet, and maybe try a pair that’s a size bigger because it feels a bit too tight. Once you find that perfect fit, you buy them.

Everyone’s feet are different, so you must find a pair of shoes that fits YOUR feet.

You don’t buy shoes first and try to squeeze your feet into them, you buy shoes that fit your feet.

You don’t buy marketing automation software first and try to squeeze your business into it, you buy marketing automation software that fits your business needs.

Do you see the difference? When you flip it, you go from ambiguous to clarity in a split second. Clarity drives action, and when you know what your business needs you’ll be able to quickly reconcile a list of your needs with features/benefits of marketing automation software to see which one fits your needs the best.

Your Business, Your Needs

Every business is different. Their target market might be different, their internal operations are different, their sales process is different, their size is different, it’s a completely different beast.

That’s why you need to figure out what your needs are, so you don’t get enchanted by the Sirens call (aka marketing and sales) to shipwreck on their rocky coast. HubSpot’s Siren call is one of the strongest out there, yet many small businesses end up shipwrecked.

HubSpot is a great platform, but it’s not right for everyone. You will crash and burn if you buy HubSpot without ensuring proper fit first. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with dozens of small businesses that shipwrecked on HubSpot’s rocky coast not because HubSpot was bad but because it was not the right fit for them. They were wearing size 14 on their size 8 feet.

Create a list of requirements that will meet your business needs. For example:

• If you’re an ecommerce business, you will need integration with your ecommerce platform. Moreover, you will need a platform that will help you recover abandoned shopping carts.
• If you already use a CRM like Salesforce, then you can’t buy CRM-based marketing automation software. And, your platform must integrate with your CRM.
• If you already have a website and a blog, then you don’t need a platform that offers CMS/blogging.
• If you’re using Unbounce, LeadPages, or some other landing page builder then you don’t need a platform that offers a landing page builder.
• If you’re using Hootsuite or some other social media management platform, then you don’t need a platform that offers social media management features.
• Some marketing automation platforms charge additional fees for API access and/or third-party integration, can you handle that? Do you need it?
• If you’re a medical professional and must comply with HIPAA, you need to take that into consideration if your leads submit personally identifiable information and ensure you find HIPAA compliant platform to put the Business Associate agreement in place. I bet you never thought of that.

The True Cost of Marketing Automation

Depending on where you are in your business, it is possible that you might not even need marketing automation yet. You simply need something to get your leads now!

The majority of clients I’ve worked with that left HubSpot, for example, focused too much on the direct cost without considering the real cost.

Marketing automation does not improve the quality of your marketing, it improves the efficiency of your marketing. The direct cost is simply the fee you’re paying your marketing automation vendor every month or annually simply to have access to it. They don’t care if you use it or not. You can buy it, let it sit there for a year, and they won’t lift a finger to do your job for you.

In many cases, that’s what happens, and the story I hear “I thought they will generate leads for me.”

Some time ago I got an email from an anonymous user about marketing automation, and the last question was:

I’ll write, but I won’t spend time thinking about marketing task steps: Can I get a platform that tells me WHAT to write about, WHO to email, and WHICH tweets to write?

It would be nice if someone did our thinking for us, but unless you pay a marketing agency to do all marketing work for you nobody will think about your business but you. Frankly, nobody gives a shit about your business but you. When your budget is tight, elbow grease is the only option if you’re trying to build and run a profitable business.

There are no shortcuts. You either pay or get your hands dirty!

That’s the real cost. Everything else you have to do to make your marketing automation software pay for itself. You need to produce content, it’s your marketing automation’s lifeline.

If you can’t handle the real cost, the direct cost will become a burden and you will blame marketing automation software for not doing its job when it was your fault really.

When you fit your business into a marketing automation platform, you’ll end up with the biggest line item for real cost: picking the wrong platform. One of my clients summed it up nicely:

I donated my arm and leg to be able to pay for HubSpot’s coaching in hopes to increase my traffic. As a beginner in the online marketing and web developing world, I had to learn quite a lot, from basics to advanced material. If my responsibilities as a business owner only revolved around website and online marketing, I’d be on cloud nine. But for someone that didn’t have a lot of experience, I couldn’t devote all the time necessary to really take advantage of my investment, unfortunately. And when it was all said and done, I had a good website, but not a GREAT website, and a flat-lined lead to customer generator.

I don’t want to scare you away from marketing automation, I want to scare you into the right decision for your business.

Marketing automation will make your life easier, improve your marketing efficiency, and give you the tools necessary to grow your lead generation.

To Sum It Up

Start your marketing automation search with your business needs. Don’t window shop and pick the prettiest and shiniest of them all. Pick one that gets the job done for your business!

Make sure you understand that besides the direct cost of marketing automation (vendor fees), there’s the real cost of spending your time getting work done, paying someone to do work for you, paying for additional stuff, etc. If you’re on a tight budget, put more elbow grease into your marketing. If you’re not willing to make sacrifices to grow your business, well your business failure is on you, my friend.

So the question was, what’s the best marketing automation software for my business? Well, you tell me.

When I saw a tweet with the post “Every Page is a Landing Page,” I knew I’ll have to put in my 2 cents.

The post by Nicholas Scalice at EarnWorth is a good post about effective landing pages, but I strongly disagree with the main premise of his post.

When you have a hammer mindset, everything looks like a nail. When in actuality, visitors to your website are best described as a box of random screws. You got to put some elbow grease to screw them in.

A landing page, in marketing, isn’t an entry page where visitors land on your website. According to Unbound, “When discussing landing pages within the realm of marketing and advertising, it’s more common to refer to a landing page as being a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective.”

That single focused objective is exactly why it is detrimental to your marketing to treat every page as a landing page.  Let me break this down.

Your Homepage Is Not a Landing Page

When you offer more than one thing (products or services), your homepage should direct visitors to the information they are looking for quickly. You don’t know what the visitor is looking for, you know there’s an IP address on your homepage. That’s why you need to help them get to the right information they need quickly. Your homepage is your “virtual receptionist” that sends visitors to the relevant information.

You don’t want to give them too many options, 3-5 primary options at most. When people have too many options, they get confused and end up choosing none. Research backs this up.

When customers at a gourmet store were shown a selection of 24 jams, 60% were drawn to the selection but only 3% bought actual jam. On the other hand, customers who were only exposed to a selection of 6 jams were less drawn to it (40%) but 30% bought jam.

The point is, you don’t know who’s visiting your homepage so don’t overwhelm them with too many options but also don’t give them one option either as if it’s a landing page. When you present a few options to your visitors on the homepage what you’re doing is allowing visitors to segment themselves when they pick an option.

There are different ways to segment your visitors using your homepage:

• Demographics (men, women, parents, etc.)
• By pain (if you’re a plumber – clogged toilet, emergency plumbing, etc.)
• By function (CEO, CTO, etc.)
• By product/service
• By whatever makes sense to your customers and your business

Every segment has very unique needs, a CEO shopping for a mobile SaaS platform will not care about all the technicalities that a CTO will care about.

The job of a homepage is to get your visitor to the appropriate landing page. As Flint McGlaughlin at MECLABS says, “Clarity trumps persuasion.” When things are clear, action is clear. I’ll go a step further – clarity drives action.

Here’s what MECLABS says about homepages:

If you have more than one offer (even if it’s one product, but one with options), your homepage cannot look like a “sell” landing page; its job is to direct the visitor to the right product as quickly and efficiently as possible…and then let the subsequent page(s) do the selling.

When you allow visitors to do segmenting, to pick their journey, you increasing the quality of traffic that ends up on the landing page. This increases your conversion rates.

People Are Selfish

People do things for their reasons, not your reasons. I hate to break it to you, nobody gives a shit about your business but you. If you pick your most loyal customer, most vocal brand advocate, and see what they do when you shut your business down. Nothing. They’ll move on.

Unfortunately, this is not how the world works (source):

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell your customers “We really need sales, buy from us” and that actually worked?

Landing pages work really well because they do narrow the path to a single action, but they will only convert if the offer is relevant to them. When you have multiple offers on one page, multiple calls to action on one page, when it is not clear what I need to do – by definition – it is not a landing page.

There is a big difference between conversion rate optimization (CRO) and user experience (UX), both are needed and should be balanced. Here’s how I like to think of CRO and UX.

• CRO: What do we want users to do?
• UX: What do users want to do?

That distinction is critical, yet not exclusive. You need to consider both when designing a website or creating a landing page. You need to figure out how to get a user to do what you want them to do by understanding what they want to do. With a landing page, we say “we know what you need and this is the only thing you need.” That’s why it’s critical that you do not treat your visitors like nails. Some visitors need a Philips head screwdriver, some flat head, and some hexagonal screwdriver.

Not Everyone Is Ready to Convert

This falls back on the previous point. People do things for their reasons, not your reasons. Not everyone is ready to convert, and if they are ready to convert, what type of conversion are they ready for?

The ultimate conversion is a sale, and 96% of visitors are not ready to buy. If 96% of visitors are not ready to buy, you bet your ass a huge portion of visitors is not ready to convert either. I’m not saying you should not include ways to capture those leads, you should and must, but you can’t be simpleminded and try to drag visitors down the conversion abyss.

Josh Bernoff’s rant about popups actually speaks the truth about all marketing activities:

Marketers must use these [popups] intrusive approaches because they’re working. But if they piss off ten people for everyone they suck in, maybe you’re not measuring what “working” means properly. If you sucker a visitor into asking for something they don’t want, are they really a lead?

It’s More Than Just the Homepage

It’s not just the homepage, it’s just the easiest example to show you why treating every page like a landing page will backfire.

• Category pages can’t be treated like landing pages, they direct visitors to appropriate pages and landing pages.
• Blog posts can be treated like landing pages but the problem is you don’t know who’s reading it and you need to present them with options – sidebar CTAs, below the post subscription, social media follow buttons, content upgrades, etc. – and by definition that’s not a landing page with multiple conversion goals, distracting elements, etc.

Visitors on your website have different needs and pains, they are in different buying stages. You can’t treat them the same. Landing pages are effective because they follow a very specific formula, a formula that will destroy a good user experience if applied to all pages on the website.

Part of why landing pages work well is the segmented nature of traffic you send to them. When you send traffic to a landing page using a PPC ad, social media update, email, banner ad, etc., you allow users to pre-qualify themselves. When they click on the link to go to the landing page they raise their hand and say I’m interested in the value you’re promising me. There are a lot of different elements that will prevent them from converting, but when they do initially come to a landing page you piqued their curiosity with your value proposition.

To Summarize

• Not every page is a landing page.
• Your homepage is your virtual receptionist.
• People do things for their reasons, not your reasons.
• Not everyone is ready to convert, give them options.
• Clarity drives action.

That’s my 2 cents. Agree? Disagree? I won’t know unless you leave a comment.

Not all content is created equal.

If you’re creating content yet it’s not really working for you, either you’re still not getting leads or sales not where they need to be, you might not be creating actionable content. You’re simply being busy, and that’s wasteful.

Actionable content allows users to take an action. Note the word “allows,” I did not say “persuades” for a reason. Sales copy needs to be persuasive, but when it comes to inbound content it needs to be clear and to educate your prospect to allow them to take an action. It’s a natural progression if you’re doing it right and at the end, there’s an action you want them to take.

The problem is most content isn’t actionable. It’s just there, or worse, it was written with purely SEO goals in mind. Most content is created for the sake of being created, so you can say that you’re doing marketing. When content isn’t actionable, you’re wasting your time and money. That’s why you’re not getting any results, that’s why it’s hard to measure content marketing ROI.

Creating Actionable Content

Technically, when you add a call to action to your content (for example, request for a demo), it becomes actionable. The problem is, most people will not act on it. Here’s why.

To act, they must trust you. If the content you’ve created, like a blog post, does not establish trust they will not act and convert. Simply having a call to action is like giving someone a car without keys and gas, you know it can go forward but you have no resources necessary to make it go forward.

Here’s how I create actionable content that earns trust and converts:

It’s really simple. Your entire case rests on fixing your prospect’s pain with your piece of content. People are selfish, “Me, me, me!” You, on the other hand, need to stop being selfish, focus on “Them, them, them!”

It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post, article, video, ebook, etc. It must fix the prospect’s pain first and foremost. If it doesn’t fix pain for them, it’s worthless as an actionable piece of content. There are other types of content where you don’t need an action (thought leadership, for example), that’s where you don’t need to fix a specific pain – but to get them to act you must fix the pain.

Your ideal customer’s pain is your ultimate gain.

Let me walk you through this:

1. Fix pain for your prospect, for them to engage and care (they’re selfish).
2. When you fix the pain, you provide a solution and it creates value for the prospect.
3. When you create value, you begin building a relationship with them.
4. When you build a relationship with someone, you begin to earn their trust.
5. When you earn trust, the walls come down and they will act on your call.

Over the years, I came to a realization that you can’t build trust. You must earn it. What you build instead are relationships. Relationships bridge the gap between your ideal customer’s pain and your solutions, making it inevitable that they will purchase from you.

It’s a critical point, let me say it again:

Relationships bridge the gap between your ideal customers’ pain and your solution, making it inevitable that they will purchase from you.

Building relationships is what I do with my business. I value relationships with our clients more than a simple transaction, and I tell my clients “no” often even though I could make a buck on fulfilling their request.

Consultants get hired for a reason, but most lack the backbone to say no and hold their ground because cash flow makes decisions.

In the B2B world, build relationships with people. Earlier this year a marketing executive left a company I was working with, not only did I continue working with this company because of relationships with other contacts but the executive that left extended our relationship to the new job and the new company. Build relationships, they earn you trust. A nice side effect of great relationships is those transactions that pay your bills.

Figuring out your ideal customer’s pain points is part of creating your overall inbound marketing strategy. Once you know what pain your ideal customers have, you can create actionable content that attracts and converts them. If you think you’re creating actionable content because you are fixing your customer’s pain, then it is very likely that either you don’t really know your customers (and their pain) or you’re attracting the wrong kind of customers who will never convert.

Just because someone fits within your criteria of a target market, does not automatically make them your ideal customer. Keep that in mind.

You may also think that marketing automation is the autopilot you’ve always dreamed of until you pay for it and get a rude awakening that it also requires enormous time and effort.

The problem is today’s instant relief mindset, fueled by marketers trying to get visitors to their websites with promises of oceans of leads and mountains of customers.

Most marketers who produce content to educate others have good intentions, the problem is these are out-of-context how-tos and training resources. They are random acts of marketing.

HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Kit Example

This kit is not new, I’ve seen it before but it popped up in my email inbox this morning so I’m using it as an example.

HubSpot’s kit includes:

• An introductory guide to internet marketing
• Blog post templates
• A search engine optimization (SEO) guide
• A social media publishing calendar template
• A landing page optimization guide
• “Science of Email’ report
• Annual “State of Inbound” report

These are good resources and you should download them and check them out.

The problem is, this type of content saturates the web. The instant relief mindset makes people look for quick fixes to their immediate problems and resources like these appear to be what they look for. Yet when they download it and read it, they realize they don’t know what to do with it.

For example, blog post templates included in the kit. What in the world are you supposed to be blogging about in the first place to use these templates with?

These are building blocks, without proper context they are nothing. NOTHING.

Let me be clear. Resources like HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Kit are necessary, but they don’t work if they are not part of the overall inbound marketing strategy.

Everything you read, watch or listen to online to learn how to do something simply will not be effective, you will be disappointed.

HubSpot’s kit, webinars you participate in, ebooks you download, blog posts you read, all of this, and everything else is building blocks that require a strategy to set the context for your business.

Your Business, Your Context

The building blocks are always the same, but the context in which they are used is always different. HubSpot’s kit does not say “for Joe’s Coffee Shop” because it’s applicable to all businesses. Yet Joe’s Coffee Shop provides its own context (its own strategy) to put these building blocks together to attract and convert Joe’s ideal customers – Strategy A from the diagram.

On the other hand, Mary’s Hair Salon wants to attract their own ideal customers, so they set their own context with their own strategy  – Strategy B.

Yet, on the other hand, HubSpot has its own customers to attract and convert. They set their own context and strategy – Strategy C.

Inbound marketing isn’t hard if your efforts are focused in one direction.

You need to switch from an instant relief mindset to long-term care to provides predictable and lasting relief for your pain.

Instead of spreading yourself thin going a mile wide and an inch deep, go an inch wide and a mile deep!

Before You Read Another Marketing How-To

Ask yourself, what’s my strategy? Or rather, where’s my strategy? I’m pretty sure you don’t have one, most businesses don’t have one because they either don’t know how to create one or are afraid of creating one. It’s really not your fault, for the most part, there’s no solid framework for creating an inbound marketing strategy out there. That’s why all marketing how-to content does not mention creating a strategy and how to create it. There are blog posts I’ve read that skim the surface – barely. They cause more harm than good because they do not emphasize the critical – CRITICAL – importance of a solid strategy.

If you’re a marketing agency and you engage in random acts of marketing on behalf of your clients, shame on you. That’s why your churn is high and you can’t retain your clients. I’ve written about this on the Local Search Association’s blog a while back. When 11% of marketing SMBs find internet marketing to be “not effective” and 2% claimed they didn’t do any at all, according to BrightLocal report, that really says something about the industry. At least we know that 13% of marketing SMBs are honest, not sure about the rest though (sarcasm, but it’s true).

What’s your context?

In my LinkedIn post, I discussed 3 reasons why your inbound marketing is failing.

The most common reason why inbound marketing (or online marketing) fails among SMBs is the lack of an inbound marketing strategy, or in many cases lack of strategy period (but that’s a different story). In 6 years I have yet to talk to a business that has an inbound marketing strategy. If they do inbound marketing, they do it sporadically and without any thought as to why.

The problem is a combination of what I call “hearsay marketing” and “Hail Mary marketing.”

Hearsay marketing is simply engaging in marketing activities because someone told you to do it. In many cases, looking for quick fixes, you read blogs and watch videos that cover something specific, something that might fix your immediate pain (big might). Next you do it. It doesn’t work, you blame it on inbound marketing being ineffective.

Hail Mary marketing is something similar to hearsay marketing, but it doesn’t have to be hearsay marketing. It doesn’t have to be something new you’ve learned. You engage in a marketing activity that has almost zero chance of success simply because you have no other options, you just need to get some sales. Like a random email blast, or direct marketing campaign, or spending $100 on Adwords.

The problem with both is that they are in a vacuum, out of context, and are simply random acts of marketing.

Having no inbound marketing strategy is like trying to operate a locomotive without having any tracks.

Inbound Marketing Strategy Sets Tracks

When your train has no tracks, it’s not going anywhere. That’s exactly what happens when you have no strategy in place, you shoot right, you shoot left, up, down, but never on target. Let me be clear, knowing what topic to blog about or sending a monthly newsletter is not a strategy. That’s random acts of marketing.

When you take the time to create your minimum viable strategy, it gives you clarity and clarity drives action. You set your goals to achieve, so you know your success destination. And when you know your destination, you begin laying tracks in order to get there. At certain points, you know you need to review your progress and adjust your course to make sure you always keep heading towards your final destination. Monthly and quarterly reviews to analyze your progress are crucial to catch issues early and to correct your course as needed.

Having your strategy in place eliminates the agony of sitting in front of your computer screen with Word open, staring at a blank page. You are prepared, you’ve done your work, all you have to do is look at your strategy and begin researching and typing away. Writer’s block be damned!

When it comes to content marketing, as being part of the inbound marketing strategy, having tracks in place for your locomotive ensures that you create relevant content for your buyers. Each stage of the buyer’s journey has specific needs and challenges, that’s why creating relevant content for those stages is critical to helping buyers reach their decision and also the bottom of your sales funnel.

IDG Connect surveyed technology buyers in 2014, what they found was not a surprise. For 79% of buyers, the level of relevant content affects how they feel about vendors and their likelihood to make the shortlist. That’s almost 8 out of 10 buyers that judge a business by the content they produce. The more relevant the content to their stage and needs, the better your chances of being on their shortlist to contact. On the other hand, 66% of buyers feel that digital content needs to be more aligned with organizational objectives and relevant to the decision-making process. What that tells me is that 66% of buyers think your content isn’t relevant to them.

Don’t heave a sigh of relief because those were technology buyers in the survey. This applies and happens in all B2B and B2C marketing and sales. Just last month I talked to 2 prospects that were with HubSpot for 2 years (trying to leave it), one in B2B space where inbound marketing is really effective and the other one in B2C space where they failed to understand their ideal customers. The problem they had was the same, 2 years with HubSpot and barely any ROI to show for it.

It was not HubSpot’s fault, it’s just a tool. Both did not produce content that was relevant to their buyers, they thought it was relevant but after reviewing their stuff I could clearly see that they’ve been very busy for 2 years writing blog posts, creating lead nurturing emails, and lead magnets, but that’s all they did – stayed busy. They were not effective, they did not have a strategy in place. They were spinning their wheels for 2 years. B2C prospect did not realize that their niche was one of the few where inbound marketing is actually not very effective yet. For B2B prospects, their content was not relevant – it was simply on topic. These are very common stories I hear on consulting calls.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is something I do a lot of, be it consulting to choose the right platform or help get things set up. One of the most common questions I get asked is what to automate. For example, couple of weeks ago one of you requested to watch my marketing automation mistakes webinar. One of the form fields is a question about the biggest challenge, here’s what the answer was:

Having a hard time understanding the usefulness and the return on the investment when choosing one.

The perception (or misconception) of marketing automation is that it will do marketing for you. So businesses buy into marketing automation before having a strategy or any sort of processes in place to automate, which they later realize was a mistake. Unfortunately, marketing automation doesn’t improve the quality of your marketing, it improves the efficiency of your marketing.

When you have an inbound marketing strategy in place you’ll know exactly what activities are subject to possible automation. Keep in mind, not everything that can be automated should be automated. You might end up with a PR nightmare.

It becomes very easy to understand the usefulness of marketing automation if you can look at your strategy document and say “Let’s automate these lead nurturing emails for our ebook campaign next quarter.”

Focus on Strategy

It all starts with your strategy, the thing that most of you don’t have. An inbound marketing strategy provides clarity – a clear and tangible plan of action that you need to follow to reach your goals. When you have that clarity taking action is easy, just follow the tracks to your success destination. That’s why I decided to write an ebook (practical handbook you can use) on how to create an effective strategy, and I know how hard it is to create one. To ease your (and mine) pain I’ve created a visual framework to help brainstorm, research, and layout your strategy.

One of my favorite tools to use is the Business Model Canvas, that’s why I’ve created (or rather it was inspired by) my framework that uses the same visual elements to help create a model of your inbound marketing strategy.

Strategy is your secret ingredient to successfully use inbound marketing to attract and convert ideal customers.

Not sure why, but many people I talk to and clients I work with equate marketing automation with lead generation. They think that to generate leads they MUST have marketing automation.

Marketing automation will improve the efficiency of your marketing, but if you have nothing to automate or resources to invest it will slowly and painfully kill your business.

Let’s get this straight:

To generate leads you do not need marketing automation.

In order to start generating leads, you need 3 things:

1. A website with a blogging capability
2. Content strategy
3. A landing page (or a few)

Frankly, that’s all you need.

Marketing Automation Paradox

Marketing automation is a blessing and curse. If you have money and resources, it can be the best thing that ever happened to your marketing and business. But, if you’re a small business with limited resources and struggling to generate leads, it can be a nightmare.

When I talk to HubSpot clients who are considering leaving HubSpot, the reason for leaving is usually the same: I’m using 10% of all the features and I’m not getting any results.

When you are struggling to generate leads and have limited resources, you shouldn’t be thinking about marketing automation but instead, focus on lead generation. You can’t drive a car without any fuel.

Lead Generation First

In my experience, there are 3 main issues that prevent businesses from generating leads – and having no marketing automation is not one of them.

1. Poorly designed website. It might be the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s terrible at converting visitors to leads.
2. There’s no content strategy to drive traffic of qualified leads.
3. There are no landing pages, or if there are a few they are terrible.

Let’s break them down into strategies that you can use.

1. The Website

Most websites are created to aesthetically please your eye. If you have enough resources, you will hire an agency or a team that includes experts in conversion optimization. Many designers do not have enough experience to create a conversion-optimized website. It’s not a required skill set for designers, it’s not their fault. It will look good, but it will not convert.

When I help overhaul clients’ websites, I spend the time to understand the business and the target market to understand how to correctly position services, how to present information, navigation, layout for the homepage and internal pages, and landing pages.

If the client’s existing website was generating traffic but not leads, they can start seeing new leads sometimes within a day of the launch of the new website. That’s the power of a conversion-optimized website.

2. The Content Strategy

Once your website is conversion-optimized, you need to generate traffic of qualified leads. Blogging about yourself or haphazard blogging will yield no results.

When you can’t dedicate a few hours a week to generate content for your blog, YOU WILL NOT HAVE TIME to effectively use marketing automation tools. Period.

The content strategy encompasses not only your blogging, but it will help you define your email content, your white papers or ebooks, your videos, images, social media updates, etc.

Having a strategy in place (WRITTEN DOWN, NOT IN YOUR HEAD) allows you to be prepared to create content without dreading the blank screen because you know what you need to write about. And because you do know who you’re writing this for, you will create content that attracts qualified leads.

3. The Landing Pages

This, my dear friend, is where conversion happens. No landing pages? No conversions. This is why I force my clients to create at least one landing page when I build them a website because I know it will be useless if they have no landing pages to convert that traffic into leads.

Having a contact form on your website is not enough. Lead conversion is a barter exchange process: the visitor gives you his/her information in exchange for a valuable reward (ebook, video, free consultation, etc.). If they do not see the value (perceived value) in what you’re offering them on that landing page, they will leave (don’t do this on your landing page).

In Summary

Lead generation does not require marketing automation. When your budget is tight and you’re limited on how much time you can dedicate to your marketing, please DO NOT buy a marketing automation platform. It will eat your budget quickly, and you will not get any results.

Focus on fixing up your website to improve conversions, create your first landing page, and focus on content to generate traffic. Don’t be afraid to write. You’re an expert in your field, share your knowledge!

Photo courtesy of NiederlandeNet/cc

Dissecting SmartFocus’s ebook download campaign on LinkedIn.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a goldmine for the advertising platforms like AdWords because they make money on ignorance. Many marketers and business owners who are disappointed with PPC results simply failed to run an effective, well-planned, and optimized campaign. It’s not that PPC does not work. It does. Skilled marketers know how to set up a PPC campaign to deliver results, unfortunately not many are skilled.

In this post, I will address several points that relate to PPC and lead generation using the SmartFocus campaign as an example. I’m not affiliated with SmartFocus, I stumbled upon their campaign on LinkedIn and saw how wasteful they are with their PPC budget.

Takeaway: You will learn how to avoid common mistakes when running a PPC campaign, including landing page optimization tips to ensure you’re converting visitors to leads.

SmartFocus Campaign

SmartFocus is some sort of a marketing platform, similar to HubSpot and other marketing platforms. They even have a landing page feature to allow marketers to easily create landing pages. I only wish they spent a bit more time on their own landing page for this campaign as you’ll see in a minute.

Based on the information I saw, SmartFocus is running a sponsored update on LinkedIn that promotes their ebook “Creating Truly Personal Omni-Channel Customer Experiences”. They did a decent job at creating the actual update, I was interested enough to click on it to get more details and download the ebook. In the update (see screenshot), they mentioned that it includes exclusive video insights from Brian Solis. Good hook, I clicked.

Once I clicked the link and landed on the landing page, I was greeted with nothing more than a sentence and a form that was asking for my life’s story.

Now you know the basics of the campaign SmartFocus is running, now let’s dig into it and see how you can learn on their mistakes and prevent your PPC budget from being destroying without any ROI.

How SmartFocus is Destroying Their Budget

You can waste your PPC budget in a heartbeat, let’s see how you can avoid that.

Sponsored update image should be an image of the ebook

The first mistake they made is the image used in the sponsored update. It’s a car. LinkedIn allows you to upload a custom image when you create a company update. In this case, they should have created an image of the ebook. Even a screenshot of the cover page would be better than some car.

• First, providing a visual representation of the ebook makes it a bit more tangible, which gives it a bit more perceived value in the mind of the lead. They’re actually getting something, in a way.
• Second, the visual representation of the ebook initiates a mental bridge that you take a person on from one side to another side successfully converting the lead.

The landing page is a complete disaster

This is not a landing page. It is an abomination. There are so many things wrong that I don’t even know where to start. Let’s start from the top.

1. Landing pages come in all forms, and it is not required to remove your main menu. This really depends on how aggressive you’re trying to be. If you remove the menu, the landing page now becomes a squeeze page. There’s nowhere to go but to fill out a form or close the page. In this case, I would remove the menu. It’s too distracting, especially their demo request button in the corner.
   • Tip: Remove distracting main menu.
2. The content of the landing page is the heart of the landing page. It is designed to “sell” the value of your downloadable asset (or whatever it is you’re offering) in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. It’s a barter exchange, value for contact information. If you fail to deliver value, visitors bounce. This landing page completely fails to deliver any value other than that one sentence. If there was an entry point that promised value (the PPC ad), you MUST continue to emphasize that value on the landing page.
   • Tip: This landing page should re-emphasize that this ebook contains exclusive video insight from Brian Solis. Ideally, you would want to include his picture on the landing page to tap into his reputation. You’re increasing your perceived credibility by using an influencer’s status and reputation.
3. The form used to allow users to download this ebook is asking for too much information, including a message. It seems to me they simply used a default form without any thought behind it. The button “Send enquiry” is disconnected from what the visitor needs to do – download an ebook. In its current state, this form quickly turns on visitor’s flight response and they bounce. The form is not designed to allow visitors to download an ebook, even though it is the end result.
   • Tip: If you’re offering an ebook for download, be very careful what form fields you decide to include in the form. Go with as few fields as possible. Keep in mind, adding more specific form fields can lower your conversion rate but increase the quality of leads. If you’re trying to generate leads (top of the funnel), go with name and email. Make sure the action (button) communicates value and the outcome: Download Ebook Now.
4. Everything in the footer on this page is useless, and the newsletter sign-up box distracts visitors from the intended action (download).
   • Tip: Remove everything from the footer. Fewer distractions will improve your conversion rate and user experience.

 What Happened?

As you can see, SmartFocus failed to create a fluid experience taking a person from a click on the ad to the landing page to the download page. In a webinar I did last year on marketing automation mistakes, I talked about taking a lead on a broken bridge.

Lead generation is a journey across a bridge. You take a person on a walk across a bridge and when they cross they become your lead.

You must maintain message continuity across the entire lead conversion process, otherwise, you will lose that lead. Your PPC ad must offer a value proposition that closely relates to the value proposition on the landing page. In this case, the sponsored update offered exclusive video insights from Brian Solis but failed to even mention him on the landing page. That’s a broken bridge, your leads fell off. Here’s a conversion bridge diagram to help you understand the process.

When you communicate the same value proposition from the first contact (ad) along the conversion funnel (or using my analogy, bridge) it acts like a supporting pillar maintaining a clear path to the destination. When you fail to communicate it at any given point, landing page for example, the mental bridge is broken and your lead falls off.

The bridge to conversion analogy applies to other conversion funnels, not just PPC. Few other examples:

• Social media updates, emails, calls to action that lead to landing pages
• Product page and the checkout
• Sign up process

How Does This Destroy Your PPC Campaign?

The goal is results: leads or sales. When your leads click (you pay) but do not convert, you will not get the ROI you’re looking for. This is why many brush off PPC and lead generation as useless or not working. They work, you’re just don’t know how to do it effectively. In this case, ignorance is far from bliss.

Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas and tips to take away to improve your current campaign, landing page, and forms. I also hope SmartFocus will get their shit together. As a marketing platform and (hopefully) expert, they’re making amateur mistakes with their landing pages and forms.

Marketing automation is not rocket science, but it is not third-grade arithmetic either. Many businesses get sold on the idea of marketing automation, yet fail to either implement it or take full advantage of it.

When I was offering my free lead generation and marketing automation consultation to business owners as well as mid-level marketers that were shopping for a marketing automation platform I noticed they all had somewhat similar misconceptions about marketing automation. This is why many small businesses I worked with migrating them from HubSpot to WordPress were leaving HubSpot. The expectations did not match the reality. That’s why I wanted to get a few things straight to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

Marketing Automation Is Not Marketing Autopilot

Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot do not get you leads. It is a tool that facilitates the lead generation and nurturing, but you must do the work. It is really like a car: it will get you from point A to point B quicker than walking but you must drive it and you must put gas into it. It’s a tool!

This means that yes, you do have to blog, create emails, create other content, talk to people on social media, and other marketing activities. There’s a reason why 93% of companies using inbound marketing increased their lead generation (source). They did the work that’s necessary!

If you were given HubSpot for free, without spending a minimum of 10 – 15 hours every week (or paying someone to do it for you) on producing content, promoting it, analyzing data, engaging in social media, and other marketing-related activities – it will be a waste of money and you will not get leads!

This is true regardless if you’re using a marketing automation platform or not. You must do the hard, necessary work if you want leads.

Many of the clients that I switched from HubSpot to WordPress were primarily using HubSpot as a CMS to have a website. Some were lucky to create a few landing pages, and maybe (huge maybe!) they had a few lead nurturing emails setup. They did not blog, they did not engage in social media, they did not use data HubSpot collected to help generate more leads. It wasn’t HubSpot’s fault, it’s a tool.

Don’t think that going with a cheaper alternative like WordPress for marketing automation will solve your lead generation problems. You will get all the necessary tools to generate more leads, but you have to do the work!

Marketing and Automation

Here’s what I tell everyone I talk to about marketing automation:

Marketing automation does not improve the quality of your marketing, it improves the efficiency of your marketing.

The “automation” facilitates activities and processes that you should have in place.

For example, everyone struggles with lead nurturing emails because they don’t know what emails to write or how to schedule them. They’re lost. The reason is, you can’t automate nothing. And when you try to automate nothing, you wonder where’s the ROI?

In this example, you need to have a sales process (or sales cycle) in place first. Lead nurturing is designed to warm up leads, to move them from one stage to another – closer to sale. If you don’t know what your sales process is you won’t know how to effectively nurture your leads. Sending out time-based autoresponders is not lead nurturing. You need to understand where the lead is in your sales process, hence cater a lead nurturing campaign to help move the lead to the next stage.

The point is this: you have nothing to automate.

Your lead generation problem is not automation, it’s marketing. If you can’t generate leads without marketing automation, you will not be able to generate leads with marketing automation.

Just because WordPress marketing automation is cheaper than HubSpot or other platforms, doesn’t mean it will help you get leads.

Elbow grease is not included.

This has been on my mind for years. Working with small businesses, many of whom found me through this blog, I realized how screwed they were.

They would throw money away on things that did not really matter: things that promised quick lead generation fixes, things that were “urgent” on sale that will “never” happen again, things from “gurus” promising results with the obligatory disclaimer “your results may vary”, things that were new and shiny that you just got to have, things that a competitor’s website had, things you would see on another website and like, things that were too good to be true yet priced low enough to get you to buy it.

Sounds familiar? It should. Unless you’ve been running a business under a rock, you’ve dealt with at least one of those things. And, of course, successfully wasting money.

This video, I recorded for the ProjectArmy’s blog (includes transcript), answers specifically how you’re wasting money (on the above) and how to begin putting your money to a good, “ROIable” use (making up words as we go :).

The simple truth is (honestly, it’s simple), you’re not making decisions driven by your marketing. I call it hearsay marketing.

Hearsay is inadmissible in court. Why is it admissible in your business?

Let me clarify what I mean, and I’m using hearsay broadly in this context.

Jim is a business owner and has a WordPress website for his plumbing business. Jim wants more leads. He goes on to his competitor’s website to see what they’re doing. He sees they have a blog and social media sharing icons. Jim’s blog does not have social media sharing icons. Jim has to have it now since his competitor has it. So he spends $200 on a developer to add social media sharing buttons. A month goes by, no leads or shares. Few months go by, no leads or shares. But the competitor had those buttons? What gives?

Hearsay marketing gives, that’s what. Jim did not let his marketing help him make a decision, he saw and copied. He didn’t consider that he should be blogging to have something to share, he didn’t consider that his blog needs to be optimized for social media sharing (Open Graph), he didn’t consider anything other than “they have it.”

Any marketing advice you get (including this) should be taken with a grain of salt. It should never be blindly copied just because “they did it” or “they have it” or “he/she said it”.

“They” do not know your marketing and business objectives. “They” do not know how much money you have to spend on your marketing. “They” do not know anything about your business.

Hearsay marketing is an out-of-business and impulsive decision making based on what you saw, heard, and read disguised as data-driven and objective-driven marketing your business needs.

I really like the word “out-of-business”, which follows legal “out-of-court” usage. Out-of-business means that you’re applying general marketing advice without regard for your business (your specific situation). Wanting more leads and sales does not qualify as marketing and/or business objectives. That’s a given, you’re a business.

There’s a reason palm trees do not grow in Canada. Just because you got a palm tree, does not mean it will grow in your backyard in Montreal. That’s why I think all marketing advice should have a disclaimer: “Your results WILL vary, don’t blame online marketing for being ineffective.”

Tying this back to the video. Don’t make changes to your website because you saw something “nice” or some marketing consultant said you should do it. Make changes to your website because they will help you reach your business and marketing objectives, and are catered to YOUR business.

Remember, just because you’re hungry and the food looks delicious – does not mean you should eat it. It may have something you’re allergic to or worst case poison. You wouldn’t eat a burger offered by a stranger on street, why would you eat up marketing advice from a stranger without thinking how it may affect your business?

Disguised as a blogging opportunity, BlogDash pitched me (and many other bloggers in their database) for the third time to “produce 1 unique post on what you like best and what will excite your readers.”

The First Time

Back in October, I received my first pitch on BlogDash to write a blog post based on the 30 topics they provided. Just pick one topic, write about it (200-300 words), and receive $15. The pitch sounded not too bad, quick $15 for a short sponsored post. Here’s what the pitch was:

It doesn’t sound bad, right? Well, it’s not until you open their attachment that you find out the REAL requirement for the $15. Unfortunately, it appears October’s attachment is no longer available. Fortunately, my journalism professor taught me well, and I saved a copy. I’m not out to get anyone, thus I’ve hidden the actual mentions of participating websites in this link buying opportunity. It’ll be nice.

Well, I thought I will let them know that Google frowns upon link buying – so I replied to the opportunity to let them know they’re engaging in link buying and will hurt their “partners” more than benefit them. Here’s how it went down:

And the reply was:

This is how I replied and was the last message since I never heard back.

In my response, I included a link to a screenshot of Google’s support page which highlighted the exact part that BlogDash’s blogging opportunity violated.

To BlogDash’s credit, they did not directly ask for a DoFollow link in this first opportunity. But I have a feeling a NoFollow anchor text link wouldn’t sit well with their partners.

The Second Time

It appears they do this at least once a month because I received a second opportunity the following month in November. This included 60 opportunities, pretty much the same as the first one.

The Third Time

As I expected, I received another blogging opportunity from BlogDash and this one was very different from the first two.

It appears that the first two opportunities did not go as well as they would like, since the third opportunity had a few requirements you had to follow. Judge for yourself.

It’s funny how the message says “low requirements just need your high-quality writing style.” Yet, the requirements are not that low. My guess is, the first two opportunities since they began doing it yielded not-so-favorable results and low-quality links.

1. The Blog site must have a page rank of 3 or better.
2. Articles must follow the Topic and not be a product review.
3. The blog site can’t be a subdomain like .blogspot or .wordpress etc.
4. Please don’t mention blogdash in the article.
5. Make sure that the anchor text works in with the natural text of the article.
6. If you feel the need to put a reference to the article being a sponsored post please place it at the bottom of the article and make it less noticeable. Alternatively, you can replace it with, “The information in this post was provided by blahblahblah.com”.

At least they increased the price to $25, right?

The links in this latest round lead to some crappy, low-quality SEO content pages.

Plus, BlogDash is walking a thin line with FTC regulations regarding disclosure of material connection between advertiser and endorser. The key is an endorser. Link buying is not against FTC rules unless the link implies an endorsement by the blogger, and with anchor text links you’re trying to stuff a keyword and not so much getting the endorsement.

A Bit Misleading

It was disappointing to receive these “blogging opportunities” from BlogDash since they claim to be a “blogger outreach network” – not a link buying network. Especially thinking that they can buy PR3+ DoFollow links and a blog post for $25. Spammy, low quality, black hat SEO I would not expect from BlogDash.

Nowhere does it say they will buy links, I guess that’s part of their “Reap the incalculable PR and SEO benefits” promise as part of their Campaign Complete service.

Being a marketer, I might be biased. But from a good service, allowing businesses to connect with bloggers, link buying is not what I would expect.

On the other hand, if you need to buy DoFollow links BlogDash can help.

What do you think? Is BlogDash engages in high-quality blogger outreach in these campaigns, or is this a simple link buying scheme?

Most businesses send a lot of traffic to their homepages, but most homepages are not effective. This was the case with LastPass, a password manager. I started researching password managers that offer additional functionality for businesses and teams, and LastPass was one of the search results Google turned up.

Immediately after visiting their homepage, I noticed their mistake, something they’ve done with their calls to action right above the fold. It’s something I see happen over and over again, usually because aesthetics of the website trump conversions – be it intentional or not.

Call to Action Mistake:
Too many calls to action of the same color

If you look at the screenshot above, I’ve added three blue boxes to help you see it. At first look for the uninitiated, there’s nothing wrong with how it’s laid out and the colors. But, if you spent countless hours and hours studying lead conversion principles and landing page optimization – you would immediately notice the orange color dominating calls to action.

The actual color is not the problem, the problem is that there are four different orange elements tightly packed above the fold on the right side ALL competing against each other for visitors’ attention, increasing friction, and decreasing conversions. What in the world do you want me to click on?

LastPass did not take advantage of a simple contrasting principle by emphasizing one specific and most important call to action to help visitors convert by reducing mental friction. Reduce mental work people have to do to take action on your website by helping them navigate to where YOU want them to navigate based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Otherwise, you’re letting visitors aimlessly wander around your website.

Improving LastPass Conversions on the Homepage

How would I fix this specific instance to improve conversions?

This would depend on what exactly LastPass really wants. I will assume they would want more premium sign-ups since that’s the money maker.

1. Make Enterprise Button Less Prominent

You really do have to understand visitor intent to understand how you should layout your navigation and website. There’s no reason the Enterprise menu option should be as prominent as the main calls to action. Yes, you can help it stand out from all other menu options – but do not make it compete with your ONE main call to action. Make it a light grey color, so it stands out against the black navigation menu.

People do look at the main navigation, so they will notice it there. The ones that are interested in Enterprise services are more engaged than a regular visitor shopping for or researching password managers. When someone is looking for Enterprise-level services for whatever it is, we have been conditioned to look for such things in the main navigation as well as footer links. This is usually a secondary service/product that is offered to businesses.

These are the folks who will be searching for a password manager for their business needs. It is unlikely that someone searching for a password manager for their personal use will see the Enterprise link and sign up. These users are looking for a password manager for their business, that’s the reason they ended up on the website. Their intent is to get it for their business, so they will seek those options out on the website. You just have to make it easily available, it doesn’t have to scream at your visitors.

2. Supporting Elements Should Not Compete With Calls to Action

Towards the bottom of the screenshot, you’ll see an orange bar with icons from various operating systems and browsers that LastPass can be installed on. This is a supporting element, to help users convert by clicking on the main call to action. It SHOULD NOT compete with the main call to action. It should be de-emphasized, a more subtle color used to add to the conversation but not take the conversation over.

I would try something like a transparent white background to help the supporting elements stand out, but not compete. The opacity would be very low, just enough to help it stand out from the red background, but whisper to the visitor and not yell their ear off.

3. Emphasize Your Main Call to Action

My main call to action would be the premium sign-up since that’s the moneymaker – unless they have data that shows free downloads/sign-ups convert to premium plans at a much better rate. Then I would focus on improving free download conversions. For now, I’ll focus on premium sign-ups. And you can always run an A/B test to see which one converts better.

So I would move the premium button up and the free download button down. Now, you have many options with colors here. You need to de-emphasize the free download button and emphasize the premium sign-up button.

One option is to keep the premium sign-up button orange and make the free download button light grey color, or even make it a smaller button and more subtle color. But, the only way to know what really works is to test it. Call to action colors vary in their effectiveness based on the context they’re in.

Bonus

I would change the wording of their premium sign-up button too. Of course, testing to see what works, but I think I would focus on that $1 and leave $12 until the next page, or less prominent as fine print below the button. Something like “Get LastPass Premium for $1 a month”. $1 will help reduce friction compared to $12, even though they are small amounts it’s all about the better, more clear offer that has almost no risk to sign up.

What about your homepage?  Do you have calls to action and supporting elements that compete for attention and reduce your conversion rates? Tweet me.

The contact form is probably one of the most important elements in your lead generation toolkit, yet it is one of the most overlooked and undervalued assets.

Most businesses and marketers simply opt for a form that captures the entire life of their lead – figuratively speaking. But, your convenience of having more information offered to you on a silver platter by the lead should not outweigh lead’s convenience.

When you optimize contact forms for conversion, you really throwing away fields that you can live without.

Neil Patel, at QuickSprout, put together very good infographic about optimizing your forms for conversions.

Action Step:

Review infographic to see what helped improve conversions for other businesses, then review your forms on your website. See what fields can be eliminated to help you improve your conversions. Remember, you can always ask for more information during a call. You don’t need everything upfront.

If you participate in the action step and remove fields from your forms, please do comment  below and tell me what fields you decided to remove.

For the past few years, consultants from all over the world have been pushing inbound marketing (online marketing) down business owners’ and executives’ throats, preaching the Gospel of Google as written in the Sacred Scrolls of Valuable Content. And rightfully so, it’s effective. BUT, many businesses completely waste money – not only on inbound marketing, but the consultant recommending it too.

Here’s a quick way to find out if you’re wasting your money on inbound marketing, or any marketing for that matter.

Do You Have a Positive or Negative Reputation Online?

It’s a simple question, but most businesses either don’t know or don’t care. BIG mistake!

A polished, shiny turd is still a TURD.

It’s like getting a present for Christmas, it’s wrapped in a creative and beautiful gift wrap with a bow on top (your marketing). You open it and what do you see? It’s a turd.

Let’s demystify the word turd:

• Bad customer service
• A broken, faulty, or defective product
• Bad service
• Bad business culture
• Employees don’t care

Your online business reputation relies on positive reviews left by your customers. But if you’re a turd, let’s face it. You won’t be getting any positive reviews and testimonials. Hopefully, you won’t piss off your customer to the point of them leaving a Ripoff Report, which is a business suicide as it NEVER goes away.

Reputation

There are 2 ways of looking at online reputation:

1. Online reviews (Google, Yelp, TrustPilot, TripAdvisor, etc.)
2. Online mentions (articles, blog posts, videos, reports, etc.)

For the most part, online reviews apply to businesses that have physical locations. Local businesses cover the bulk of this segment.

The second one covers everything – including online businesses.

The Real Problem

The biggest problem many business owners make is focusing too much on attracting new customers, while completely neglecting their online reputation. Bad, bad idea.

Let me show you why it’s a bad idea.

• 70% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (source)
• 50% of consumers say they will only deal with local businesses with a positive reputation (source)

When your business smells and looks like a turd, it doesn’t matter what marketing you do –  you will lose customers, sales, and profits.

Managing online reputation is often overlooked by most marketing consultants and agencies. A negative reputation will drive customers away, even with great marketing campaigns. Why?

Because what’s the first thing people do when they begin shopping for products and services? They begin looking at reviews and testimonials about various businesses, which helps them determine what business they will choose to do business with.

You better pray to the gods of the Internet that this is not what they will see when they Google your business name:

If you don’t fix negative reviews like this, you’ll never be able to grow your business and profits. It’s like a python, with every bad review your business exhales the python tightens its grip suffocating you to death.

The same concept applies to negative articles and blog posts, you need to deal with them and work to remove them off of the 1st page of Google. Most consumers are lazy and will rarely look past the 2nd or 3rd search results page.

Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a real problem with your customer service and products that warrant negative reviews you have to fix these problems, otherwise negative reviews will keep showing up. But the key is, you need to know what’s been said about your business online to know what needs fixing.

The Results

Once you fix your online reputation all marketing you do, including inbound marketing, will return higher ROI because customers will not be turned off by your 1-star reviews. They will see positive 4 and 5-star reviews and decide to do business with you, instead of your competitor who’s still ignorant about online reputation.

Please, stop wasting your money on marketing and invest some of that budget into your online reputation. I guarantee it will pay off more than any marketing you’ll ever do.

Hubspot is a great lead generation and marketing automation platform. They are very good at marketing and very good a selling their software. That’s why they’re the most popular and known software out there, with other platforms trailing behind it.

But today, I was a bit disappointed when I stumbled on a Hubspot FAQ page while doing research on Google.

The page is about WordPress, how Hubspot is better than WordPress and how it can be integrated with WordPress. But there are two common misconceptions many people have, including HubSpot.

WordPress Misconception #1:
“WordPress is just that, a blogging tool”

This is one of the most common misconceptions I hear. Usually, when I get a free consultation request and we talk about WordPress, I get to hear them say either “I thought WordPress was for blogs” or “I don’t want my website to look like a blog.”

Yes, WordPress is not an integrated marketing platform like Hubspot, especially in its native state without plugins. BUT, even without plugins WordPress can give you the tools necessary to create a business website that does not look like a blog at all.

Consider this, if Hubspot was truly a complete solution they would not have an App Marketplace for users to add more functionality to their Hubspot. WordPress plugins are the same thing, they add functionality that the original platform does not have.

Look at it this way.

When you start with Hubspot from scratch, it’s like being born as an 18-year-old. You have the benefits of many things that an underage child does not have, you’re ready for the world.

When you start with WordPress from scratch, it’s more like a 10-year-old. It’s not a blank slate, you have the foundation but you need to put in a bit more work and grow up to adulthood. This gives you greater control over what lead generation platform you create for yourself.

WordPress started out as a blogging platform early on, but today it is a platform limited only by the user’s imagination. If you can think of it, you can create it in WordPress – ecommerce, forums, social networks, business websites, lead generation, membership, etc.

WordPress Misconception #2:
“Unless you hire a consultant to work with you, you are on your own”

If a community of millions is considered to be “on your own,” then yes, you are on your own.

It is true that you have to do the work to get WordPress to function the way you want it. There is a learning curve, but don’t be mistaken, there’s a learning curve for Hubspot too.

“The technically savvy can cobble a few tools together to get about a third of the capability of HubSpot – but business owners and marketers should be spending time on marketing not tooling,” Hubspot writes on that page.

What’s interesting is, they don’t mention anything about the learning curve or complexity of their platform. Sure they offer everything under one roof, but it is not as easy as they make it sound. You HAVE to put in the time tooling around Hubspot to make it look and work the way you want it, you have to put in at least 5 hours a week on Hubspot to make it pay for itself. It does not generate leads on autopilot, somebody has to produce content.

They also don’t mention that Hubspot-hosted websites are very limited in design and layout, and without professional help from one of their certified partners (be prepared to give up an arm and a leg) your website will look like crap.

If you don’t want to tool around with Hubspot, you do need to hire their certified partner or another consultant/developer to get the work done so you can “be spending time on marketing not tooling.”

The beauty of WordPress is its enormous community. Since I began using WordPress over 6 years ago, I’ve never felt “on my own” – far from it.

If you want to get something done on WordPress, most likely someone has already done it and has a tutorial somewhere on the web on how to do it. Google it.

Have a question? The WordPress community forum has the answers. Plus, a ton of other WordPress forums across the web can help.

Because WordPress is so popular and commonly used, hiring help is a lot more cost-effective than paying for the proprietary platform and/or hiring their certified partners, so that money can be invested into producing content instead.

Plus, with WordPress, you have the luxury of thousands of free and premium themes designed to help you get the look you want with free support in most cases from their creators.

To Conclude

WordPress is not just a blogging tool. You are not on your own with WordPress, help is always available. You just have to know where to look for it and simply ask. That’s the truth.

If you’re considering purchasing Hubspot, it is a great platform to help you automate your lead generation and marketing but you do have to work on it to make it pay for itself.

The stage is yours.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Richard Franzi on his radio show in Orange County, Critical Mass Coast to Coast about inbound marketing and WordPress.

This was my first radio interview, and I quite enjoyed it. A few people told me they found the information very helpful that I covered in the interview, which included everything from content marketing to using WordPress as a lead generation platform for businesses.

Now, the interview is available for you to download and/or listen to online. If you don’t know where to start online to take your business to the next level, this interview might shed some light on what you can do. In addition to a personal story of where I started.

Take some time to listen to the interview, and if you have any questions about anything I talked about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me. Most of you already know how responsive and generous I am with my time, I do love helping you guys out. So do take advantage of it.

You can download it by going to this link, or you can use audio player below to start listening right now.

The best way to find out what works on a landing page and what doesn’t work is to run different variations to test them. But, it does help you get started on the right foot if you follow some standard guidelines when designing landing pages, then use data gathered to tweak and adjust them to increase conversions even more.

KISSmetrics put together a really nice and visually descriptive infographic The Blueprint for a Perfectly Testable Landing Page, which you can follow to create effective landing pages right from the beginning.

Make sure you’re using some sort of tracking service, like Google Analytics, to measure the traffic and conversions that come to your landing pages.

A good way to start is to create two identical landing pages, then change only 1 element on one of them. It can be anything you want to test. For example, an image, headline text, call to action button color, call to action text, even something as simple as a text font. Whatever you change, make sure it is only one thing.

The reason for that is to make sure that whatever the results are you know exactly what caused it. This is called A/B split testing.

You can have more than two pages in your split test, keeping changes to one element. But the more pages you have, the more traffic you need to be certain of your results. There’s no magic number, but the bigger the better.

Check out the infographic below and start creating your landing pages in WordPress, or using some other service that allows you to create landing pages.

In a blog post, Negative SEO  Victim  Strikes Back, John Williams goes on to explain how his website was “Google Bowled,” which means that someone paid to create low-quality backlinks for logogarden.com in order to spam it and push it back in search results.

That’s one opinion as to what brought their website down on Google, and it might be absolutely correct. BUT, I do have an opinion of my own on how LogoGarden’s misdirected marketing budget led to their SEO demise.

UPDATE: John Williams left an excellent reply comment with additional information on this situation and my remarks. See comments for the reply, and don’t forget to add your 2 cents to the conversation.

Misdirected Online Marketing Budget

In a comment on that post, Williams explained what marketing expenses were:

So, they were paying SlingShotSEO (their SEO firm) $10,000/mo to build backlinks. White hat only, no link buying.

Next, $1500/day went on AdWords. This would be an excellent investment, but it was poorly executed. See Mistake #6.

Lastly, they spent $50k on “optimizing our site.” Honestly, a well-developed free WordPress theme has better on-page optimization than the LogoGarden website.

After I reviewed their website and did some searching around – I couldn’t believe that what I found was worth $100k. That’s why I wanted to touch upon their mistakes, I’m certain, led to their SEO demise in whole or in part.

Mistake #1: Very Poor On-page Optimization

LogoGarden’s pages and blog posts lack H2 and H3 tags. Not all pages, but all blog posts lack at least an H2 tag. The blog post title is H1, they did get this one right. But the sub-headings use <strong> rather than H2 or H3, and lack keywords.

Sub-headings should definitely be either H2 or H3, and the keywords in the text body should get emphasis with bold,  italicized, or underlined styling.

Blog posts do not have any images, just blocks of text. File names and alt tags provide additional opportunities to add a keyword, plus they do add a visual cue to help make reading less daunting and engage readers.

Mistake #2: Lack of Quality Fresh Content

45 undated posts about logo design are not quality content. It’s pretty clear they were written with SEO, not customers in mind.

If LogoGarden spent even a fraction of what they spent on SEO and Adwords on producing valuable content they would be better off, and I’m certain they would not be in this predicament.

Not only do you use content to rank for your keywords and get Google love, but you also become a thought leader in your industry – attracting more visitors and converting them to loyal customers.

Backlinks and AdWords campaigns come and go, suck up way too much of your marketing budget, and do not provide value to your customers. If you focus on producing valuable content, SEO takes care of itself – and you build relationships with your customers before they even know they are your customer.

If only businesses realized how important content marketing strategy is, we’d live in a better world.

In addition, Google likes fresh content. Removing the date from the blog post doesn’t make it fresh. Google knows, don’t mess with the big G. In their eyes, LogoGarden has no value.

Mistake #3: Working With a Secretive SEO Firm

I did request a list of links that SlingShot secured for LogoGarden. They would not supply the links because they said it was against their policy. I was not happy with this.

SlingshotSEO did not want to disclose what backlinks they got for LogoGarden, clearly, they have something to hide. What’s so important about those links?

When your client goes from SEO hero to a zero on your watch, you better be doing everything in your power to either show the client that you had no control over what happened or taking full responsibility for it.

If SlingshotSEO had nothing to do with LogoGarden’s demise, why not make the client happy by overlooking your so-called policy and show him every single link you’ve built? After all, it is your reputation that is at stake.

NOTE: SlingshotSEO does good work for their clients, but their secretive policy makes me question their practices, especially in this case.

Mistake #4: Tracking SEO Firm’s Progress

Here’s what I see, tell me what you see:

I see 37 results of backlinks that Google sees.

Is that what $10,000/mo gets you these days?

Alexa has a different number, but really, who cares about Alexa?

What do you see here?

One result? Are you kidding me? That’s how many pages Bing indexed.

Bing just increased their market share in the US to 18.3% in April of 2012, according to Compete data. It’s not as big as Google, but it is still a very sizable portion. Plus, Bing’s major benefit is its social search integrated with Facebook. You really should be there!

My point is this, what in the world are you paying for?

Yes, they did help you get to #6 for your keyword, but with what methods? They didn’t expect a Panda update, it took them by surprise while annihilating your website.

If you’re paying someone to deliver results, do ask for progress and methods used to deliver those results. It is your business’ reputation that is at stake here, protect it.

Mistake #5: Hidden Text In Source Code

This might be a mistake on their part, as it seemed to be a popup of some sort. But I’ve looked, and looked, and looked, but could not find any links that activate it. So, in my humble opinion, it’s the hidden text that Google will frown upon.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was a mistake in removing a package they were offering some time ago. But it is in source code on all pages, hidden, with no way for people to see. You just don’t know what the next Google update might bring.

Mistake #6: PPC Investment Down The Drain

They spent $1,500/day on AdWords advertising. That’s $45k/mo. It’s a hefty investment, but I wonder if they are able to recover that investment every month with new orders. My guess? Not.

Honestly, I would like to slap whoever is doing their PPC campaigns and wasting thousands of dollars. What are they doing wrong?

I checked different ads, and they ALL go to the homepage. Really? Why don’t you just start throwing money out of the window like that Russian millionaire? That’s really what you’re doing when your PPC ads are going to general site pages instead of highly targeted and optimized landing pages.

Mistake #7: Not Having Comprehensive Online Marketing Plan

Based on the post and what they were paying for, LogoGarden was trying to game the system by building links and using some mediocre content targeted for the keywords, and heavily relying on Adwords (with an incompetent campaign manager).

An effective and comprehensive online marketing plan addresses all 5 activities.

1. Content marketing – writing valuable content in a form of blog posts, content pages, landing pages, multimedia, and downloadables (ebooks, white papers, etc.).
2. SEO – on-page and off-page, complementing content marketing strategy.
3. Email Marketing – lead nurturing campaigns/autoresponders and timely newsletters or email blasts.
4. Social media – monitoring, engaging, curating, and customer service.
5. PPC – if budget allows, Adwords, Facebook ads, Linkedin ads, etc.

The most successful businesses are the ones that are able to combine all 5 elements to align them with business goals and begin attracting customers and clients consistently. These businesses do not worry about Google updates, because their valuable content is read and seen by thousands of people, linked to by thousands of websites, and they are a true thought leader in their industry.

That’s my opinion on the matter. Even if LogoGarden did get spammed with backlinks, it doesn’t make up for these mistakes, especially the grotesque PPC mistake.

What do you think? Tweet me.

Many of you constantly complain about frequent Google changes. The changes, small and big, affect billions of websites and can kill a business within a month.

Those who complain are the ones that produce low-quality content to generate ad revenue, to simply waste people’s time and money, trying to use a shortcut.

Rather than trying to paint Google as a scapegoat for your rocky search rankings, you should look no further than a mirror in the bathroom.

You are the one producing crap, low-quality, keyword-optimized content that serves no valuable purpose to the reader but to your selfish agenda of making money without putting hard work into it.

If you start writing a blog post because of a keyword then you’re more likely to get hurt by Google changes. Begin writing blog posts with a value to your customers and readers in mind, the keyword should only help your content be found, it should never be the main focus of your content.

Are you one of those people, or do you produce valuable quality content that your visitors LOVE?

If you do, you have nothing to worry about, Google will reward you.

That is all.

Many businesses lose dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of leads every month due to a myth that keeps on killing profits one lead at a time.

The myth stems from the success of pay-per-click advertising, especially in the early days where it was easy to make a fortune with a simple website plastered with Adsense ads.

But the times are changing, quality is becoming more important than ever. Yet, many businesses are focusing on quantity rather than quality when it comes to leads. They lose money, and they wonder why.

So what is that one deadly lead generation myth killing your business right now?

More traffic means more leads

Ah, no. Let’s kill the myth once and for all. Just because you generate more traffic does not mean that you will automatically get more leads. You would think that, but you can’t bake an apple pie with just apples, no sir. You have a whole slew of ingredients that require mixing and cutting to become that wonderful piece of an apple pie that graces the inside of my stomach with its presence.

Throwing more apples at a pan will give you a pan with more apples, not an apple pie.

Throwing more unqualified traffic at your website will result in wasted time and resources, with no leads to show for.

For some reason, this myth is not going away. Partly because businesses are focusing on the wrong metrics, vanity metrics, that have nothing to do with their business.

More traffic is good for businesses that rely on advertising and sponsorships, like blogs and other online media websites. But businesses that rely on the sale of goods and services should not focus primarily on website traffic.

Sure, you might get 10k visitors per month to your website. But who gives a rats ass if you’re converting 100 visitors to leads, and 10 leads to paying customers. Really?

That’s a 1% website conversion rate (100/10k*100), and a 0.1% sales conversion rate (10/10k*100).

Try to sustain a profitable business on 0.1% conversion. That’s just plain wrong.

Now imagine, you throw more traffic and hit 30k visitors, and double your leads to 200, and miraculously double your sales to 20. We’re looking at a 0.67% lead conversion and a 0.067% sales conversion rate. You actually dropped your sales conversion rate, which is really what is important since leads don’t pay you, customers pay you.

What if your traffic dropped but the quality of your traffic increased? The visitors would be more qualified and ready to buy from you. What would that scenario look like?

5k visitors a month, 750 leads, and 500 sales. Do the math.

15% lead conversion rate. 10% sales conversion. OMG. But the traffic dropped?

It sure did. If you get quality traffic, instead of aiming for quantity, you will increase the quality and quantity of leads, successfully giving your sales team leads that are hanging down the sales cliff, no bulldozing necessary.

It’s VERY possible to increase lead quality.

Don’t waste money on increasing traffic, instead invest that money into valuable content relevant to YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMERS.

It comes back to the basics.

1. Know your target market.
2. Focus on quality, valuable content – blog posts and ebooks/white papers.

When you know your customer, you’ll know what content to create. This targeted, quality content is your filter for wasteful visitors and targeted leads. When a visitor follows a link to read your blog post or download an ebook, they pre-qualify themselves without doing much work for you. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll get waste here and there, but quality leads will outweigh occasional waste.

Here’s what you should do. Stop watching Google Analytics, or whatever analytics you use. Instead, begin creating customer profiles with likes and dislikes, what they are looking for, what their hobbies might be, what their jobs are, what their income is, what is the size of their family, do they have a secretary or do they have a dog or cat.

It’s like developing a character for a movie or a novel. Create several different characters to play in your business development and sales sitcom. Use those characters to begin crafting content that they need and want, content that helps them understand something, content that helps facilitate buying decisions, content that inspires them to become your brand ambassador, content that you’re proud to associate with your brand.

Don’t try to pass a turd for a chocolate cake, not that many people are that stupid. Make your mother proud and bake a real Dutch chocolate cake that customers will keep coming back for more.

Let’s see how many will come back for a turd.

You might disagree with me, but that’s your choice – I do ask you to leave a comment and initiate a dialog below, so we can talk about how you’re right and I’m wrong.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy on January 19, 2012.

Everyone has heard the news. Kodak is bankrupt. It’s circulating the news in one way or another, be it a patent issue or the latest issue with Kodak Theater in LA. The news media and blogosphere are there to report and comment on it.

Well, being a nice guy that I am (and being in downtown Rochester shooting violin maker), I decided to stop by the Kodak’s headquarters and get some photos taken to release them for free under Creative Commons Attribution license on Flickr.

I know many bloggers and small publishers rely on free photos from Flickr, and other sources. In the past, I’ve released my photos of rallies and few other things on Flickr under the same license, and it seems to be heavily used by bloggers when they are writing about the issues.

So, there you are. Free photos of Kodak’s building, just as long as you attribute the photos to me. That’s all I’m asking for. The photos are 72 ppi for screen viewing, BUT if you need it for print all you have to do is email me and ask for 300 dpi high resolution version for a mere byline. I’m a nice guy.

Get FREE Images on Flickr

Retail stores are dying out store by store. It’s that simple.

Honestly, I never really cared about both stores. But the news about store closings and a recent visit to Sears made me think: why are they failing?

Being a curious entrepreneur, with several ventures in the works, I think about failures more than I used to. Careful analysis of failures helps me understand what not to do, or even better, how to do it right. I’ve written about several brands that I really like, but they are failing – Hewlitt-Packard (HP) and Kodak.

It’s funny because back in September at a local event I said that HP will be going through re-organization in the near future. The next day Wall Street Journal reported that HP began looking for bankruptcy lawyers. Funny how it worked out. Anyways.

A Visit

On January 1st, my girlfriend and I decided to take a stroll through our local mall and just enjoy window shopping. We will be moving to a new place soon and we just wanted to see things that we might want to have in our new home. So we ended up stopping by Sears. This visit made me realize why Sears, and Kmart, are failing.

Blah

That’s really the only word that I can use to describe Sears and Kmart. A zombie has more personality than both stores combined.

When it comes to a brick and mortal store, personality includes 5 elements:

• Visual element -Everything you see when the store is completely empty
• Layout element – the layout of the store
• Human element – how your staff behaves
• Atmosphere element – smell, audio, and lighting
• Brand element – who you are

It’s like your hand. You need 5 fingers for your hand to function properly, so does your store. Having air-tight control of each element is easy, but most places fail to have a functioning hand.

I think this really follows what Steve Jobs thought about design, and why Apple stores are so successful. He said it best about iMac:

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Let’s look at each one of them closer.

Visual Element

We are visual creatures. I listed this element first because it is VERY important. That’s why websites have pictures of products, that’s why real estate websites have pictures, and that’s why Steve Jobs cared so much about the visual aesthetics of each Apple device not only outside but inside as well. So why the hell don’t they use it to their advantage?

Every department store looks the same. Every grocery store looks the same. Every movie theater looks the same. It’s so boring…

Use the walls to your advantage, accent colors and photos are great ways to create a visual element. Personally, I think Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) stores and merchandise are overrated. Nothing special, but there’s a reason why they are so popular among teens and young adults. They have a personality with a strong visual element. They use large photos, dim lighting, with monotonous design to place focus on the clothing and the life style it offers. Their sales associates are there target market, so they can speak with their peers and drive the sales.

The visual element also includes displays and signage that the store might have. It all has to be coherent and represent your brand personality(element). Pulling stuff out of thin air just because you like it doesn’t work. Every element needs careful planning, thinking, and execution.

Layout Element

The way you layout your store, where the cashier goes, where each section goes (men’s, women’s, fruits, vegetables, etc.), is as important as the stuff you sell. But not many stores actually pay attention to the layout.

You need to tell a story with the way you lay out your store. The entrance is the beginning of the story and, possibly, the end. So think carefully how to lay out a story that goes a full circle and comes back to the beginning. It’s a device writers love to use, so why wouldn’t you use it?

Figure out what you want to tell your customers when they shop through your store, and then begin planning everything out. Remember, a good story needs a protagonist and a conflict. The protagonist is easy, that’s your customer. When it comes to conflict, you need to figure out (you most likely don’t know) what your ultimate competitive advantage is, why customers should shop at your store. Example.

Walmart’s conflict is “everyday products at an affordable price”. My previous example, A&F’s conflict is how to be cool and hip, a lifestyle conflict. Apple store’s conflict is simplicity through sophistication.

What is one key problem you are solving for your customers? That’s your conflict.

The resolution to your conflict is the reason why customers should shop at your specific store. Buying your products at the store resolves the conflict, and sets you up for an ending.

Human Element

This one is hard because you rely on other people, and that’s unpredictable. You train them, you pay them, and you implement policies to ensure high level of customer service. But all it takes one rotten apple to spoil the whole thing, and it can be as simple as a good employee having a bad day.

One of my small business clients likes to compare a good employee to Roomba vacuum, because it goes around obstacles on its own, learns, and delivers great results at the end no matter what.

That’s what you should look for when hiring employees, especially those dealing with your customers. You can’t control their behavior, but you can hire people with good behavior and outlook on life.

Just remember this when you hire people “Even if you polish a turd, it’s still a piece of shit.”

So instead, get yourself something worth polishing, something that will appreciate in value as you polish it, like a diamond.

Being a sales associate, customer rep, or cashier is not a career for most people. Usually, it’s a way to earn money to make a living. Most people want to move on, so keep it in mind. Those are temporary employees in most cases, instead of wasting your valuable resources on training them and seeing them leave, spend additional resources on hiring excellent candidates that will contribute to your business.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t hire entry-level. What I’m saying is to look at their personality more than their skill set. A great personality is priceless, it is a doorway to any and all possibilities. A skill set is a doorway to a limited set of possibilities. A great personality is responsive to learning, it can be taught to be a good employee, it can be taught virtually any skill set.

Atmosphere Element

This includes all your senses, hearing, smell, touch, sight, and even taste. Controlling all senses is the key to ultimate satisfaction and spending.

Hearing – what music do you play in your store? Does it add to your overall personality or does it ruin it? If no music is played, what is the ambient sound? Minimize distracting, useless sounds (ringing when a customer walks in,  squeaky  floor, loud staff conversations, and even phone ringing.) Find an ambient sound that adds to the atmosphere and your layout story. Just like in a movie, music helps invoke emotions: fear, sadness, humor, silliness, etc. Use it wisely!

Smell – what does your store smell like? If you’re dealing with fresh food, make sure it smells like fresh food, not rotten food. If you’re dealing with cooked food, make sure it smells like it and not greasy oil. In other stores, select fragrances that (yes) add to the story you’re telling. Smelling plastic, cardboard, or worse your sales associate, does not add to your story, it ruins it – like a hammer to a screw.

Touch – how does it feel to come in contact with your store? Any open surfaces that customers come in contact with need to be vetted. Counters, fitting rooms, waiting areas, chairs, sofas, etc. Make sure you don’t just select it, but you select it because it feels right. A leather sofa feels A LOT different than a microfiber sofa, which one is right for you?

Sight – this plays off of visual element, but the addition to that element is luminosity (aka brightness). Restaurants are good at it, they have dim lights at each table to create a sense of  intimacy, make everyone look good and reduce visible flaws, so the customer can focus on the food and their company – be comfortable there. How bright or dim is your store? What about fitting rooms? There’s no innovation in fitting rooms anymore. Wouldn’t it be cool to see yourself in the situation lighting when you try on that party dress or beach attire? Press “Party” and you got yourself colorful lights with some music, try on a bikini and hit “Beach”, get some bright sunlight and an ocean breeze.

Taste – ever tasted someone’s perfumes? Well, that’s not what I’m talking about. Control this sense by offering small treats to your customers throughout the store (candies, gum, cookies, etc.). Whatever is appropriate to your atmosphere, whatever adds to the other senses. It’s a small investment that will help you stand out, be unique, and offer that small gesture of “I care about you”.

Brand Element

Even though this is the last one on the list, I came around in a circle to the beginning to finish with another strong element that you, most likely, are failing to have or create.

Brand element (personality) will help create the blueprint for your other 4 elements, it’s like your thumb. It closes the fist, yet it’s the first finger you usually think of. It’s one of those key features that separates humans from the rest of the animals, an ability to hold your coffee mug without dropping it. Woohoo.

The brand element makes your brand alive, it makes it human, it makes customers want to do business with you, it makes it memorable.

The colors you choose to represent it, the way employees behave, the way you interact with your customers, it’s all in the personality. Remember what I said earlier? Personality is priceless… It doesn’t matter if it’s a human or not, personality makes everything warm and fuzzy, something you can engage with, something you can love, something you can talk to, something you can hug, something you can trust!

Well, Sears and Kmart have none of these. They are all over the place, with no direction, no personality, no customers, and no future. After all, being dead isn’t profitable. That’s why they are failing, that’s why thousands of people are losing their jobs due to store closings, that’s why they need to wake up and smell the roses.

Now that’s my retail manifesto. It’s your right to disagree with me, but if you do, share the reason why by tweeting me.

Then, to add more salt to the wound, HP will miss its financial estimates for FY11, “HP estimates full-year FY11 revenue will be approximately $127.2 billion to $127.6 billion, down from its previous estimate of $129 billion to $130 billion.”

It’s really not a surprise that HP slowly losing business. They are one of the biggest technology companies in the world, but I think the C-suite is taking their business size for granted. Just because you might have the biggest market share right now does not mean you will have it in the future. After all, it’s business; companies compete to win customers over.

Once you start taking your market share for granted your profits will begin to dwindle down, you will begin losing customers to your competitors. The simple answer is lack of innovation.

When you have two giants, iOS and Android, dominating the mobile market of operating systems, you can’t just come up with your own, copycat, version of the mobile operating system and think that it will cut it. Absolutely not!

WebOS did not have any competitive advantages over iOS or Android, and such an early termination clearly shows that. Microsoft’s Kin phones are yet another example that HP should’ve looked at and realized WebOS is just like Kin – yet another ordinary product.

As I said before, HP needs visionary leadership, not another manager. It has such an amazing potential and resources to beat their competitors, yet (like our brains) they are barely using any of it.

On the other hand, HP should hire artists, not engineers or product managers. The difference? Engineers and product managers are good at following rules and guidelines; artists are good at following ideas. Rules will never promote change, they are designed to keep you on a straight path, according to specifications. Ideas are designed to… Well, anything really.

Why is it so hard for the majority of businesses to innovate? Others do it, why can’t you? Don’t just create a product or offer a service, figure out your brand positioning and competitive advantage. Figure out how you can overcome your competitors’ competitive advantages.

What do you think? What’s HP’s problem?

“You have to be passionate about it to be successful.”

How many times have you heard this? It’s everywhere, everyone is saying it, and everyone believes it. The problem with this statement is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg. It is really a  disservice to tell someone that passion breeds success. You can’t make an apple pie if you only have apples. Success has many ingredients, and passion is only one of them.

Patience

Patience is an enormous part of success. It takes time to build success. Sometimes it happens quickly, but the majority of the time overnight successes took several years to happen. In these instances, people see the concert but fail to grasp the magnitude of labor put in to plan and execute that concert.

Passion will help you be patient, but it wears off from time to time. Especially when you fail, fail, and then fail some more. It becomes tedious. You begin watching the clock or the calendar. The time slows down and you begin to lose passion as your patience begins to disappear. This is when you need to be determined to get through the tough times.

Determination

Without determination, passion would be nothing but a word. Pursuing your passion, professionally or personally, takes time and effort. Most likely you will fail the first time around, even the second or the third. But the determination to be successful will help you keep going, it is your little engine that keeps pounding away. It is the will to defy the odds that fuel that passion.

Commitment

You got your engine to drive you forward and you’re willing to wait, but the road trip is not complete without the commitment to stay on track. This is where most dreams and ideas fail to be executed. You are not committed to the success, not the dream or the idea, but to the success itself. Maybe you’re even afraid of commitment, that happens too. Just like a relationship, passion won’t fix lack or fear of commitment. It is up to you to commit to success and stay on track.

Flipping The Coin

On the other side, I came to realize, that success can breed passion. My personal example is event planning. Not once did I consider an event planning to be part of my future. When I got involved with event planning, helping organize an annual convention for a non-profit I never thought that it will grow on me and I will develop a passion for it. But I did.

Planning and executing successful conventions for the organization spurred an emotional appeal and desire for event planning. I was good at it and I really enjoyed it. This brings me to my last point, knowing when you stop.

Acceptance

Entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go of something they are passionate about. If it’s not making you money, it’s not a business it’s a hobby. We know it. But we fail to accept it. Most of us can’t afford to pursue a passion without a return on that investment. We’re not millionaires, and if we were, we’d know better than to pursue something that is not profitable. To make hobbies profitable, you have to be good at it. That’s where we paint a really nice picture for others, full of false hopes. This is why people can’t accept it. We fail to mention that you have to be good at it to make it work and be profitable.

This is especially true when you’re trying to turn a hobby into a profession. You have to be good at it. If you’re bad or mediocre, business won’t be that good. Plus, if you’re like me, you would hate producing anything below good. Even good makes me shiver and pushes me to GREAT!

If you’re patient, determined, committed, and passionate about something you’re doing you have to realize that there will be a point in the near future where you will have to decide: go or no-go.

This is not giving up or quitting! Not at all. You’ve done it and it didn’t work out. You’ve failed. Congratulations! Now you can learn what worked and didn’t work, ACCEPT IT, and redirect your efforts to something new. Take that knowledge, experience, and connections to a whole new level; to the whole new project.

My ordeal

Photography was my life and it was supposed to be my future. But mediocre results don’t really agree with me. I’ve been photographing since 2006; and even quit U.S. Navy to pursue a career in photography (photojournalism, to be specific). That’s what I’m doing right now, finishing up my BA in Photojournalism. 20 (or so) credits away from being done!

I’m passionate about photography, I love it and always will. But, I think I’m at the point where I finally realized that photography is my hobby and will never be a profession. I’m at the point of “no-go.”

When you put in time, effort, and try to do your best – and yet, you still produce mediocre results you have to ask yourself “Is this really what I should be doing?”

In my case, it turns out that I’m more successful as an event planner, businessman, and marketer. As much as I love photography, it seems to be something that I’ll never be able to produce GREAT results constantly. Occasionally it does happen, but occasionally won’t pay the bills and put food on the table.

It seems like all the elements are there to be successful, now I just got to keep driving forward with my current business endeavors, which one of them is viktorix.com (now eventstant.com).

Using my knowledge and experience in photography will give me a far better creative edge than what my competition might have. Combining verticals drives innovation!

To recap. Yes, you do need passion to be successful but passion alone won’t do it. You need patience, determination, commitment, acceptance, and worthy results to be successful. The crap doesn’t cut it anymore. Cutting your unsuccessful passion loss can be one of the greatest moments in your life, far greater than the one when you decided to pursue it.

Do you think I’m missing something? What do you think helps people succeed? Tweet me.

We all do it even if we don’t realize it: kill our own dreams.

Seth Godin calls it “the resistance”, other people might call it fear. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s still there, it still kills your dreams. Like it or not.

Our own thoughts are our worst enemy when it comes to ideas and dreams. They will kill that awesome idea you just had in a split second. You won’t find a better assassin of dreams than your own damn thoughts. No outside naysayer will hurt you more than your internal naysayer, your internal “I will fail” voice. It kills billions of dreams and ideas every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

I’ll be frank with you, I have that naysayer in me. I’m a human, aren’t I? I’ve had that nagging voice in my head “You will fail, you will fail, you will fail” for as long as I can remember. It killed many dreams and ideas I’ve had. It’s genocide in my head!

Past Naysaying

My current business venture, viktorix.com (now eventstant.com), almost didn’t survive. It was conceived last summer (2010) and I jumped on the wagon to get it going but the naysayer in me began to voice its unneeded opinion, “You can’t do this. You’ll fail just like you’ve failed with this or that. Why are you even trying? Come on, it’s so much easier not to do it.” It won the battle, viktorix.com was put to rest for several months. I honestly thought that it was dead, but to my surprise, it was just in a coma waiting for something or someone to give it a new life. With my girlfriend’s support (thanks Britney), which I didn’t have in the beginning, I brought it back from the dead and put a fresh, new life into it. Her support was so loud I couldn’t hear the naysayer inside me. Today, the positive feedback from the readers keeps that voice away from viktorix.com.

Today’s Naysaying

The reason I began writing this post is I had that voice start nagging me to quit, to give up on another dream and idea I have. Working on a business plan for a major venture that would complement viktorix.com is a tremendous amount of work. It’s not easy in the first place, but it’s even harder when your own mind is trying to prevent you from doing it because “it thinks” you will fail. Even if I do fail, so what? I will use that failure as a building block for my future success. I will learn from it.

Who are you kidding? The competition will eat you alive. How can you compete and win over your market share from the competition? You can’t do it. You’re nothing. Stop before you embarrass yourself.

Almost verbatim from my head this morning when I was checking out some information about our possible competition. It almost got to me, it had its grip on me. But I remembered something that every entrepreneur knows, or at least should know, “Your competition doesn’t have your greatest asset. YOU!”

That thought was the “fuck you!” to the naysayer inside me (excuse the language). The competition can have the latest technology, bigger budget, bigger everything. But what they will never have is me. That’s the greatest asset I need to leverage to succeed.

It Will Never Stop

The naysayer inside you will try really hard to kill your dreams and ideas as soon as they pop up in your head. It will never go away. It will always be there. But you can’t stop it from realizing those dreams and ideas. It’s such a wonderful feeling accomplishing them, reaching them.

Getting support from your friends, family, and even your online friends that you have never met in real life will give you the power to overcome your destructive thoughts and help you realize those dreams and grand ideas!

Even the simple gesture of looking at yourself in the mirror and saying “Fuck you! I’m doing it” will make you feel better and help you minimize that nagging voice. Don’t let it get the better of you and destroy an awesome idea or a dream that puts a smile on your face one thought at a time.

What was your last dream or idea killed by the naysaying voice inside you? If you overcome it, how did you do it? What or who helped you? Tweet me.

Objectives are at the heart of everything we do. We use them to determine how successful our activities are. Yet many marketers fail in setting effective marketing objectives when they write a marketing plan.

Marketing objectives are goals, in a sense, telling us what needs to be accomplished by our activities in implementing the marketing plan. They help us determine how successful we are. However, bad objectives will get you nowhere at best, and sometimes they might create a wrong sense of accomplishment where there is none.

Keep this in mind, how can you plan a vacation to France if you don’t know where France is, how to get there, how long it will take you, and what to expect? Imagine doing it with incorrect information and end up in Minnesota, though you thought you were on your way to France.

TIP 1: Keep It real

It’s very important to be realistic when you set your marketing objectives. Don’t try to bite off more than you can handle. Under-promise and over-deliver work great in this concept.

This is a big point to take home for entrepreneurs who are getting started. Entering a market with huge competitors gives you an easy excuse to bite off way more than you can handle. You’re a baby in this situation, so take baby steps. Chip away small segments of the market from your competition. A constant drip of water will mold a rock.

TIP 2: Make It Measurable

Objectives help us determine the degree of success of our marketing activities. For this reason, they have to be measurable. If you can’t be clear about your progress and success you won’t be able to communicate with your client or boss. This ties in with Return on Investment (ROI). Being able to have solid numbers to support your success will make you look good. Having numbers, instead of proverbial “increased sales”, will make it easier to create visuals for presentations and communicate your success with others.

Using percent in this situation is not advisable, you need to be even more basic and to the point. Don’t be ambiguous, is a good way to put it. “Increase sales of CRM software from $100 million to $150 million” Bam! Clear,  concise, and “spreadsheet” measurable.

TIP 3: Set a Time Limit

This ties in with the previous tip directly. You need to set a time limit upon which to gauge the success of the marketing efforts. Not only does it offer a specific measurement, but it also sets a deadline for these objectives.  Once you reach the deadline you look back and use it as a measurement to see how successful your marketing efforts went.

You need to be specific in this case as well. You need a start and end date. Don’t use general business time frames such as quarters. Set regular dates to eliminate confusion. For example, from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2011.

TIP 4: Set a Reference Point

A reference point, or a benchmark, is past data upon which you measure your current success. In a nutshell, it puts your objective into context. For example, you can use last year’s sales, last quarter, or any other data that you might have. In our previous CRM software example, $100 million in sales was last year’s number. So, this year we need to reach that number and then keep going until we hit our new target – $150 million.

In Summary

A good and effective marketing objective is realistic, measurable, has a set time limit, and uses a reference point (benchmark).

Increase sales of CRM software from $100 million in 2010 to $150 million between January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011.

Are your marketing objectives effective? Do you have any tips on writing good and effective marketing objectives? Tweet me.

Social media and social networks are in their infancy. They began gaining ground only a few years ago. We haven’t been around it long enough to know what the life expectancy is. As we gain more data as time goes on, and social media platforms fall and rise, we will begin to understand how they truly work. What makes them tick. We don’t know much, though we claim we do. The only thing we do know is how people use it, how often, and basic demographics.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Facebook. It’s a great way to stay connected with friends and family while getting more customer engagement for your business. I’m just thinking out loud.

Facebook’s growth keeps adding more mass, there will be a point in time when Facebook will reach the climax. It will be massive. What will it be? I don’t know, but my guess and bet go on privacy breach. Any spammer would love to get their hands on such a massive treasure chest of private information. It’s just a matter of time until a hacker will find a weakness and hack Facebook, dealing a deathly blow to the giant.

Just think of the Heartland Data Systems data breach or the recent PlayStation Network breach.

Who knows, I’m just thinking out loud. You can’t be as massive as Facebook for a long time, someone will find a way to break it. My estimate, within the next 5 years someone will hack Facebook.

My bet, also, goes out for niche social networks that are gaining popularity. Instead of being massively packed into one can like sardines, join niche networks that really do matter to what you’re doing. My feeling is that niche networks will rip Facebook apart piece by piece, but it will take time.

And if you disagree with me, that’s good. Do share your thoughts on Facebook in the comments section. I will reply to all of them.

You’ve heard it: time, patience, determination,  perseverance, education, support from others, creativity, _______. You fill in the blank with a quality that your parents, friends, colleagues, and strangers on Twitter told you. They are absolutely right, but not quiet.

Yes, these qualities are paramount to be successful. But my question to you is, how do you know what success is? How do you know when you’re there? There’s only one way to know where you are. It is to have a reference point. It’s very simple, but many people do not realize it. Without it your locomotive of hard work would have no destination, it would aimlessly wander through time and space.

What it REALLY takes to be successful is that reference point, which tells you what success is! Simple. You might have an idea of success, but that idea has no basis. It cannot be verified without referencing it to something else.

The reference point is… (drum roll please) FAILURE. If you don’t fail, you don’t know what real success is. Period. Fail, and fail often. The more you fail, the more information will you have on why you failed. The bigger your reference point is, the easier it is to identify success.

Think about it. If there was no cold, what would hot feel like; without hate, what would love to feel like; without day, what would the night be like? We live off of reference points in our daily lives, we just don’t realize it.

Fail as if you’ve never failed before to succeed as you’ve never succeeded before.

Have you failed today, this week, this month? Do it! I dare you.

Hundreds of products to do this, hundreds of products to do that, thousands of service providers to help you with everything.

It’s next to impossible to make a choice in this generic culture.

So how do you sell in the age of generic culture? You have to stand out or be a linchpin as Seth Godin calls it.

Sometimes the best way to stand out is not to have an all-in-one product or service, but to go back to the basics and simplicity. Think Basecamp from 37signals.

Simplicity and elegance always work. Being simple is not bad. Being simple works. Being simple sells. Look at Apple products, simple design… It sells.

Is your product simple? Is your service simple? What’s stopping you from making it simple?

Being an HP customer for a while now, I do have few things to say. Hopefully, someone at HP will read this. HP is suffering from two major issues: 1. lack of brand personality, and 2. lack of innovation. I’ll tackle each separately and at the end bring them back together.

1. Lack of Brand Personality

When was the last time you associated HP with a feeling? Besides frustration with their customer support. When I bought my last laptop two weeks ago I felt nothing. I thought to myself, “Great price!” If your brand is solely judged around your low pricing, then you won’t last long. Look at Apple, its laptops are way overpriced. But people wait in lines and buy them. Look at HP, heading for another tough quarter.

Leo Apotheker, HP’s CEO, is probably a good manager; but a great leader? Not so much. Just like 99% of other CEOs, he manages HP without leading it. Why does it take a negative news article for me to hear about him since he took office? Really, CEOs need to come out of their cocoon. Come on, you’re humans not just some robots without any feelings or emotions. News flash: you have a personality.

Apotheker might be funny, he might be adventurous, he might be a health freak, or he might be a World of Warcraft geek. Why doesn’t his personality reflect in HP’s brand? I don’t think he’s dead inside, is he?

People love connecting with people. They don’t like connecting with companies, companies are dead. But, if you infuse your personality into your company you will give it life. It’s not that hard, you just need to quit letting the marketing and PR departments dictate your brand personality. Did you see that HP video about WiFi mouse? It’s horrible. Where’s human touch? Where’s personality in that?

HP needs a leader, not a manager. A leader would go straight to his investors and tell them that the next quarter will be tough, but reassure them that upcoming projects will pop the company back in its financial spot. It’s hard to do though with HP, there’s a lack of innovation.

2. Lack of innovation

OK, HP just reinvented the mouse by implementing WiFi connectivity, hence increasing battery life to nine months. Awesome! Can my laptop battery do that? I’m lucky to get 3 hours out of it, and I hate extended batteries. So bulky.

HP is not an innovation leader in the industry, it’s a follower. Not a very good one at that either. When was the last time HP introduced a laptop (or PC) so revolutionary that people lined up outside BestBuy to get it? It makes laptops, whoop ti doo. There’s nothing original about them, there’s nothing interesting about them, there’s this sleek shiny casing they think is really cool. It looks like it was shoe-shined. Disgusting.

HP tries really hard to innovate in the design department, but it fails due to one concept: simplicity. If HP went back to the basics: simplicity and minimalism, it would rock! My new laptop, G series, was chosen (other than price and features) for its clean, simple look.

I looked over HP’s upcoming tablet with WebOS. You might as well call it iPad with iOS. Where’s the innovation? It’s not that hard to innovate, just stop reverse engineering your competition and think!

HP has some good printers, that’s one product line they were able to be successful in. But one product won’t keep a giant company afloat.

Tips For The Road

Lack of brand personality and innovation are two major issues keeping HP down. I really don’t want to get into HP’s lack of inbound marketing strategy here. That’s for another post. In the meantime, few tips that will help HP come back up (but it really applies to anyone).

1. CEO (and the rest of C-suite) should start blogging and get on social media. Get your hands dirty, you get paid enough to do that.
2. C-suite spends one day a month in their call center, talking and helping customers.
3. Twitter account needs to be less narcissistic. Every other tweet has HP in it, come on!
4. Crowdsource a laptop/PC design, or whatever product you might offer.
5. Go back to your drawing board on tablet design. Don’t stop until it looks nothing like an iPad (or other tablets). Make your product unique, not a disposable copy. Unless you’re selling your products at the dollar store. Unique + useful = higher value!
6. If you’re afraid of doing something, do it!
7. Why not do town hall meetings with your customers? Face to face, not a pop-up survey that we will most certainly close.
8. Make your website simple, friendly to navigate, and you don’t need to put everything on one page.
9. Ask a 4-year-old what makes him or her happy. Then build your product around it. No limitations, it’s up to you to interpret it.
10. Actually, do it! Don’t just read it. Commit to at least one tip and go through with it.

Though I focused on HP in this post, it really does apply to any business. Maybe someone at HP will read it and a light bulb will go off in their head. Probably not. But, hopefully, you will benefit from these tips. Just remember, be yourself and let it be part of how you do business.

What do you like about HP? What do you hate about HP? Tweet me.

Fire is usually associated with such feelings as love, hate, desire, and determination. But on the other hand, fire is a symbol of destruction too.

The question is, what does your brand symbolize? Love? Hate? Desire? Determination? or Destruction?

Society, including parents and everyone else, has an uncanny ability to impose limits on us that hinder us in the long run. They put horse blinders on us. We can’t question authority, we have to get a college education, we have to follow the rules, we can’t rebel, we have to get 9 to 5 job, don’t try you will fail, be afraid to fail, and thousands of other BS ideas we’re taught. You have to look straight ahead, that’s the norm.

Well, screw them! Conformity gets you fired, it gets you laid off, it makes you disposable.

You’re living in an era where 100% will get you fired. You have to go beyond ordinary; beyond average; beyond your horse blinders. Let’s take those blinders off, let’s see the world for what it is.

Our dreams are never directly in front of us, they’re always somewhere else hidden from our sight by the horse blinders. Dreams are elusive. You will never find them by trying to stare at them directly. You have to use your peripheral vision, but you can’t if you conform within those blinders.

Do you still have your horse blinders on?

Brand Personality

Brand identity is lifeless. I don’t want to identify you, I want to deal with you, let you be part of my life, be my friend, let you help me make decisions. I need you to have a personality, that’s what matters the most. That’s life, that’s unique, and that is what people respond to.

Brand personality is an excellent way to consolidate personal brand and business brand terms while eliminating “brand identity” (graphic designers can use it to talk about your logo, period).

It is the personality that matters; what really DRIVES your business and you! It’s like driving two cars with one wheel, and this is the sole item your competition can never duplicate. Personality. They can try, but they WILL fail. They don’t know what it’s like to be you.

Corporate Hypocrisy

Yes, a corporation is a person in legal terms. They get the same benefits as a real human. But when it comes to their brand, they are so far away from being “human” that even Frankenstein would not be able to give them life. Some are getting better at it, but in general, they all suck at being human.

If you want to “be human” be human! Have a personality. Have a voice. Don’t be afraid to upset people. That’s what humans do. You CAN’T make everyone happy. Someone will always be upset, deal with it. If 100% of your customers are happy, then you’re either not pushing creativity and innovation forward or your feedback communication channel is broken.

Wrong Engine

Can a car engine make an airplane fly?

Here’s my pet peeve with brands these days. The brand is driven by the marketing/PR department with a pretty face to show off. Who makes the business decisions? Marketing/PR department? The pretty spokesperson? Or the CEO/owner? You get the point.

That’s why I love Richard Branson, his personality is the company’s brand personality. Also, President Obama is another great example. He’s been criticized for doing a lot of appearances on TV, but he’s doing what most leaders (business and political) don’t do: be the face that drives their organization (or country in this case).

Personality

We don’t like dealing with brands, we like to deal with people. A personal brand is a business brand, the business brand is a personal brand. They are synonyms, that’s all they are. A better, deeper, term is the brand personality. That’s what differentiates you from the rest of the white noise; on a personal level and business level. Personality definition does not change, it remains the same.

From now on, I won’t use personal and business brand terms; you should stop too. It’s the brand personality that fascinates people. You might disagree with me, but that’s the beauty of personalities. They’re all different! They all are entitled to their own opinion.

What is your brand personality?

Social media tip #15:  Use ping.fm to synchronize all of your social media platforms!

It sounds like a pretty good tip, doesn’t it? Saves you time from updating individual accounts by syncing them.

Let me make a point with an analogy. What if you replaced oil, power steering fluid, washer fluid, and other fluids in your car with gas by syncing all the lines. How far would your car go?

Do you see what I’m getting at? Every social media platform is a unique communications channel with a unique audience and tools. Yes, they overlap like a Venn diagram but should that small portion of the overlapping audience be treated the same as the ones who do not fall within this category? Absolutely not.

Authenticity is not optional in social media. Dumping information without regard for the communications channel and the audience is like dumping trash at a landfill. Nobody cares and if they do, it’s not a positive sentiment. Is that what you really want for your brand? Don’t let your brand become that car, it will suffer.

Frankly, I’ve done it myself. It’s easy to do with tools like Hootsuite. So hashtags end up in Facebook updates, Twitter updates get cut off, etc. Authenticity is very important to me, that’s why I’ve taken the time to put a better filter on my social media activities. I suggest you do too. Stop being part of the white noise, stand out.

But Viktor, I have way too many social media accounts to update them individually.

Here we go, social media pile up. This means you haven’t done your research, you don’t know what social media channels your specific audience (customers/clients) prefer to use.

Everywhere is NOT an answer. Social media groupthink is the worst decision you can ever do. Just because someone else does it, doesn’t mean it will work for you.

The question you should ask yourself is this, which social media channels are better for your business objectives (e.i. leads, sales, or whatever your objectives are)?

Social media promiscuity wastes time and resources, focus and tightens up your communication channels to maximize their success. Don’t dump generic content through all your channels, personalize them for individual channels.

Remember what you were taught as a child, squares don’t fit in triangular holes.

I was recently traveling to NYC with Amtrak. It’s not a bad deal, for what you pay. Plus, I don’t have to drive myself; which is the biggest selling point for me. Not a fan of driving for many hours. But this last trip on Amtrak was different. I learned something new about Amtrak that pissed me off. Lost your ticket? Buy a new one!

The representative was calm in explaining why they charge for new tickets, even if you lost them. Apparently, back in the day, people would say they lost it so they could get a refund later. So, Amtrak decided to screw everyone else and start charging for lost tickets.

OK, I see why they would do it. They want to make sure they won’t lose money. But it’s 2011! If we can track an individual’s location with GPS in real-time, don’t you think we can track if they got on a train or not? This is a simple case of being cheap and extremely lazy on Amtrak’s part.

Remember in the old movies on a train the conductor would walk around punching holes in the paper tickets? Well, if you’ve been on an Amtrak train lately you don’t have to think too hard about it. They still punch holes in paper tickets. People were smarter than Amtrak and ripped them off.

UPS and FedEx have scanners to update the system about delivery status. Why can’t Amtrak use a simple scanner to track passengers? Stop screwing passengers. If I lost my ticket, issue me a new one and let your system know that Viktor Nagornyy has a new ticket issued and void my lost ticket. How hard is that? Really?

Amtrak is really dragging about 10 years behind current technology. No WiFi on the trains. Come on, my local buses have WiFi on them. Freaking planes have WiFi on them. If a Greyhound bus can have WiFi on it then any moving machine can have WiFi. But Amtrak? Nope, no WiFi. Amtrak’s new motto should be: Never late to bore you. There’s really no excuse for not having WiFi on the trains anymore. This is not 2005. We’ve grown you know, we need WiFi to stay connected.

So don’t be Amtrak. Stay current on the technology that will make your customers happy. Making their lives easier by providing easy-to-use service, friendly service, and quality service with those fringe extras is an awesome way to retain them. If you screw your customers over and over again, you will be screwed by your customers in return.

Don’t be the caveman of your industry. Stay current on innovations in your industry. But don’t forget to talk to your customers. Simply ask, what makes you happy? Once you do ask, LISTEN. Clearly, Amtrak doesn’t like to listen to its customers. Otherwise, they would have WiFi on their trains and not rip off their customers when they simply lost their ticket.

One happy customer is better than a $2,000,000 ad in Times Square.

Yes, it’s finally happening. The internet world is buzzing with news about NY Times’ (NYT) paid subscription access to their online content. On March 28th you will no longer have full access to their online articles. They are offering 20 articles per month at no cost. It’s really nothing. Avid followers of the news know that sometimes you go through 20 articles a day to stay connected to the world. TechCrunch did a nice write up about the pricing and other details about NYT’s move to paywall model, so I defer you to that article for more information.

Do I like paying for news? Absolutely not. Will I pay for news? Absolutely yes, but for quality news; not some random website rewriting news.

Let’s get something straight. Nobody wants to pay to read the news. People are used to free stuff; maybe a little too much. We take free content for granted. We go as far as comparing quality journalism content (NYT, WSJ, etc.) to lower-end content farms (Examiner, AC, etc.).

The “news” you read on blogs and content farms isn’t really news. They are rewrites of news articles and video reportage. They DO NOT have people on the ground reporting from the locations, they do not always have proper training, and they lack editor’s oversight. They simply read/watch/listen to the news and write up their own version of the stories.

The NYT (I use NYT as an example, but this applies to all legitimate news organizations) has a huge overhead. As print subscriptions decline and more advertisers use social media to reach their customers, NYT’s profits are declining. They reported 26 percent decline in their profits in the fourth quarter of last year.

You’ve heard the news about their staffers in Libya. Their journalists risk their own lives to report news from around the world, from locations that you would never dare to go to. Yet, we want free news. No, we demand free news. How will they pay expenses associated with having journalists around the world report the news if they keep losing money? Every business person knows that you can’t do business if you can’t pay the expenses. The debt increases and you go bankrupt. In the case of news media, they can’t go bankrupt and stop reporting news. Millions, if not billions, of people, rely on their reportage. Millions of people rely on it to be able to write about it for other services and their own blogs. For some, it’s a full-time income.

I wonder why they didn’t implement a paywall earlier. The content farms that rely on rewrites of news stories are profiting at an expense of legitimate, high-quality journalism while diluting the quality and integrity of journalism. No more freebies for content farms, pay!

It’s sickening to my stomach to hear people compare Examiner.com, Demand Media websites, and other content farms to legitimate news sources such as NYT. They are not the same, not even in the same zip code.

Paying for quality news is supporting journalism. Advertising revenue, in the social media age, is not enough to do their job right. People complain about unemployment. Well, paying for the news is keeping all those employees working. They need a job just like everyone else, and to do their job takes quite a bit of money. Especially when they risk their lives to report the news while you’re drinking coffee in the morning at home.

It’s not that expansive. I’m a student and I already have a subscription to NYT, which gives me access to their online content once it moves behind the pay wall on the 28th.

Stop being cheap. Maybe a few fewer coffees, beers, and less eating out will free up your budget to pay a nominal fee to get quality news.

Sorry for a rant. But I had to say it. What do you think? What’s your excuse for not paying? Will you pay?

Have you ever considered the effectiveness of your business cards? Do people actually use them to follow up?

Well, I thought about it. How do I know if they work? I can’t be asking everyone who emails me, “Where did you get my email?” I needed a way to track emails coming from my business cards without complicating things. So the solution was really easy: use a unique, simple email address for my business cards.

So I’ve created an easy email address with one of my primary domains and that’s what I use now on my personal cards, and for my business cards, I do the same trick with the business domain. So every time someone follows up with me using my email address from my business card I know my business cards are not useless – they actually work.

Thanks to Google Workspaces, I was able to set up a filter and a label for those incoming emails. Now, those emails are color-coded, never hit my spam box, and are marked as important.

When you reply and begin dialog the transition is seamless and people don’t notice the difference in the email as I reply with my regular email address.

Bonus tip: Your business card holder is not a magazine for an AK-47. So don’t just spray the crowd with your business cards. Be selective. Ask for a business card before offering your own.

After months of work, I’ve finally released my new project to the public last week. Viktorix is an online guide to professional event planning. The idea is to leverage the experience and knowledge of event professionals to help other event professionals plan and execute their events successfully. I strongly believe that events should never fail.

As I was getting into event planning a few years ago to help a non-profit organization plan their annual convention, I’ve found a lack of resources specifically targeting event planning. There were few good resources, but they lacked depth and they were tied to a print publication.

So, I had a niche and I had a problem. The solution hit me this past summer while I was visiting family in Ukraine. It hit me so hard that the last 2 weeks of my vacation I began researching things and working on a website. The fire was there, I was doing great.

It didn’t last. I’m not sure what exactly it was, but I think I got scared of the responsibility; maybe even of success. After spending few weeks of my time working on it and at least $500 of investment in various things I stopped. I thought it was dead.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, something hit me again. I began contemplating the plausibility of getting it off the ground, again. I needed an editor to ensure articles would be edited to maintain a high degree of quality. Plus, I needed writers. I didn’t know if any event professionals would be interested in writing about it for free. The only thing I could offer them, in the beginning, is exposure/PR and an ability to build a professional writing portfolio.

The solution to my first problem was pretty easy to get. It was as easy as sending an email to my friend Tom Melchiorre, who’s been working in publishing as an editor for many years now. He was happy to come on board as an executive editor (editor-in-chief). It was exciting, I was a step closer. However, now the big question was: will anyone write?

I was pleasantly surprised after posting in a forum on Eventpeeps.com. Several event planners were interested in writing. I had what I needed to get thing project started. It’s true what they say, you won’t know until you ask.

Luckily, I was connected with a great WordPress developer through Freelancer.com. We have a great relationship going and I plan on using his services to maintain and upgrade the website. I highly recommend him, feel free to contact me for a referral.

All in all, I’m really happy and excited about this venture. Fears are always present, we just need to learn how to manage them. A small dose of fear is a good reality check, but don’t overdose on it. If you have a fear, research alternatives, and solutions. Ask others for advice and suggestions. Most people are eager to help others.

Don’t stop, you’ll be extremely happy once you reach your dreams and goals.

She’s trying to protect her commercial interests, monetize the brand she has built. Photograph by Therealbs2002, Wikimedia Commons.

Apparently, Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol Palin, are trying to trademark their names. Yes, you heard me right.

This is the ultimate way to make your brand, personal or business, more profitable. I’m not surprised this news hit the fan right before the big weekend in football. The “S” word in football, is a registered trademark of the major football organization. They own it, among few other names. This enables them to charge businesses for using their registered trademark.

You better not try to use the “S” word, the lawyers are vicious and you will have a lawsuit on your hands. A hefty one, too. You have to pay a considerable amount of licensing fees to be able to use it. That’s capitalism at its best. Charge a ridiculous amount of money to be able to use one word. This is why radio stations, local bars, and businesses use “ambush marketing,” which basically uses a different term instead of the trademarked one. Such as “The Big Game,” “The Super Championship,” and the like. Most people know what they mean, so it does the job of using some of the event’s brand equity to promote their products and services. It’s legal.

How Does It Relate To Palin?

If the trademark will be granted to Sarah Palin and her daughter, they will be able to do what the major football organization does with their brand: charge licensing fees for use.

Is It a Smart Move By Palin?

Absolutely! Being able to have so much control over the use of your brand will increase your profits and offer some control over the commercial use of the name. She’s trying to protect her commercial interests, monetize the brand she has built.

“A trademark is simply a formal means to claim a brand that you have developed. Ultimately its power is that it gives you the ability to argue infringement if someone uses the brand you’ve developed,” Daria Giron writes in Palin Trademarking Her Name; Smart Business Decision or Narcissism? article on Technorati.

We will have to see if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will grant her the Certificate of Registration.

We need to take it back, reel it back in. It’s an easy concept. I really hope that once you’re done reading this you will leave with a full understanding of what a personal brand is.

The easiest way to explain personal branding is to use just one word: YOU.

It might sound banal, but that’s exactly what a personal brand is. Everything you are is your brand. Everything you do is your brand. As simple as that.

Your brand extends into both worlds, online and offline. They are Siamese twins, which should be cared for at the same time, with the same amount of care, love, and nurturing.

This is one of the biggest mistakes people make. They create an online persona, yet offline they are completely different. You have to be homogeneous wherever you are, whatever you do. Establishing strong, coherent personal brand increases credibility and builds rapport.

What does your personal brand encompass?

Offline:

• the way you speak, public and private
• the way you carry yourself/confidence
• the way you greet people
• first impressions
• the way you respond to good and bad news, as well as criticism
• the way you follow and lead
• the way you treat people above and below you
• personal hygiene (yes, some people still do suck at it)
• clothes you wear
• the firmness of your handshake
• the warmth of your hug
• your ice breakers (and even pickup lines)
• your accent, dialect, and language used
• introvert or extrovert (personality type)
• your outlook on life (optimism, pessimism, cynicism, etc.)
• your bad and good habits
• your timeliness
• the way you act if you get drunk

Online:

• the way you write you articles and posts
• do you offer any other helpful resources
• are you helping people or exploiting them?
• the way you comment on other sites
• do you reply to comments on your blog
• do you engage people in dialog, or do you routinely practice monologue?
• the way you tweet
• what you tweet
• who you tweet with
• what are you hiding with a private Twitter account?
• your Facebook (and other social networks) status updates
• do you help others (answer questions, provide resources, etc.)
• what Google has to say about you
• the way you post on forums
• your music selection on Pandora or Last.fm
• is your website appealing
• what kind of ads you allow to be displayed on your site

This is just to give you an example of what I mean when I say everything. Am I missing things from this list? You bet. This is just to get you thinking.

The brand is not an extension of you. It is you. Your brand’s failure is your failure.

Comments. Yes, you’ve heard it before, “Comment on other blogs.” But really, how often do you actually do it? Or, a better question is, how often do your comments contribute to the conversation started by the blogger?

When I comment on other blogs I treat my comments as “micro-posts.” There are two reasons for that.

The first reason is to maintain my personal brand. As I pointed out during #blogchat on branding  – “Everything you are and do, is your brand. Way u talk, way u write, way u reply to tweets. Offline & Online.” Commenting is a virtual way of opening your mouth to talk. Frankly, the written version is much more important than the verbal; verbal goes away, written is permanent. So how would I maintain my brand by commenting, “Great post!” Compliments are nice and dandy, but they lack the authenticity of your brand. Plus, you can always compliment in a more constructive way: showing blogger you put some thought in your comment is a reward in itself.

The second reason is contributing to the conversation. I’ll be honest with you. I could care less about traffic to my blog. It’s not about money, look around. This blog does not have that many ads around, just enough to ensure my content takes precedence. I blog to engage people in conversations. I love participating in Twitter chats and I recommend #blogchat, #blogtech, #entrepchat, that’s 3 hours of my life on Sunday evening spent talking to people, creating relationships, and not higher CTR.

Putting thought into almost every comment I leave makes me happy. I said “almost every” because I can’t really say more than a thank you when someone leaves “Great post!” There’s nothing for me to comment on; it’s a dead end.

Alli’s article is a perfect example of my commenting style of “micro-posts,” see comments for that post to see my comment.

I discovered by accident that leaving comments early (the first 5 comments) on a blog post will give you some good quality visitors. If I comment early and put some thought into my comments on ProBlogger, I usually average 10 visitors that day, and occasional residual visitors.

“Micro posting” comments don’t have to be long. Just say what you want that’s relevant to the topic discussed in the post. Do not comment just to comment. You might as well not comment at all. Be authentic, think for yourself. Add something to the conversation, otherwise, you’ll appear to have the commenting Tourette’s. Nobody likes that!

What’s your commenting style?

Internet search is still above the water. You can only see the tip of the iceberg. It seems tech that was developed in the early days of internet search is still very prevalent today. At some point search engines need to realize that improvement is not enough, they need to evolve.

The new Google search (Caffeine) offered real-time results and faster searches, yet the quality of results is still the same. Microsoft Bing, the decision engine, created a lot of hype, yet the complexity and plethora of features it offered didn’t really matter. Google is still number one with simplicity as its main feature. Yahoo search offered’¦ I don’t know what it offers, I don’t use it.

Frankly, all search engine results look the same and offer very similar results. I searched for ‘hello’ on all three engines and Hello Magazine ranked number one on all three. Eh, I checked Ask.com too, the same result.

They focus so much on how they deliver results that the quality of results suffers greatly.

Search Engine Optimization

I’ll be frank with you, search engine optimization (SEO) should not matter. Why do content creators need so much control? Too many of them abuse it, which leads to search results being saturated with garbage and malicious content. (At least Google scans for malicious content now, good job).

Content creators need to focus on content. So many of them focus on marketing to increase traffic and profits that their content suffers horribly and adds to trashy search results. Quality of content should matter, not how well it is optimized for search engines.

The question is – how can search engines evolve?

Creating a New PageRank Algorithm

Does it really matter how many sites link to a site these days? So many people sell links, create link farms, and try to game the system that it really does not matter anymore. There are so many new variables available, that importance of linking should be reduced if not taken out completely. Creating a new PageRank algorithm would build upon old results, each time a search engine (Google) would crawl through a website it would rank content based on social media variables gathered from across the web. The current PageRank algorithm is obsolete, move on. Learn to let go of the past, you will innovate faster.

Semantic Search

Everything is heading towards a semantic web. Search engines should be at the front of this movement. They need to bring all variables available on the web to offer the most accurate results; crawlers should be aware of the web, not only index it. Look at research surveys, the bigger the sample the more accurate the results are. Including more variables would increase the relevancy and accuracy of the content.

Social Media Influence

Content should not be the only variable used to determine relevancy. Content creators are an important aspect of content’s relevancy. This comes down to credibility, and a good way to judge someone’s credibility online is to look at their social media presence.

Twitter followers, Facebook likes/fans, LinkedIn connections, etc. should be the new variables used to determine PageRank. I would go as far as recommending using Klout score instead, which offers a great look at someone’s social media influence. High social media influence is a direct result of quality content and the creator’s engagement in the community, which is a good source of credibility. People wouldn’t engage if it was crap.

Social Media Engagement

This is different from the previous point. This is directly related to the content. How many times was this retweeted, liked or shared on Facebook, Digg, Stumbled Upon? Counting unique engagements (ex: one retweet per user) would help determine popularity of content. Popular content would appear higher in the search results than less popular content.

Giving control to the people, instead of content creators (SEO), would force them to become more engaged with their visitors and focus on quality. This would not only improve search results, but it would improve the quality of content across the web.

Real-time Indexing

I really don’t care about real-time search results. I can wait for a second or two for search results to show up. What I do care about is the frequency at which search engines index content. Search engines should index content as it’s created or updated, not few days or weeks later. If the news content shows up in search results immediately, why can’t all content show up in search results the minute it was created? Offer everything in real-time; now that’s real real-time.

Social media sharing never sleeps. People share content 24/7, search engines should keep up with real-time sharing. This would ensure accuracy and relevancy of new content as well as old.

Nonlinear Search Results

It’s hilarious, search engine results look the same across search engines. They use the same navigation, colors, and layout. So generic, it makes me want to e-puke.

But really, linear results? That’s so not 2011. Our thought process is not linear, so why confine us to linear results? Google has a cool tool, Wonder Wheel. But WTF? Why didn’t they take it a step further and include search results, not just search queries, in the wheel? The wheel is a great example of how we think. We jump from one thought to another, it’s not a linear process.

Imagine moving through search results as if you think. Now that’s an experience. You jump to see the first result, but that’s not what you want. You move out and look at others, you see something interesting and you move in closer to get details. It’s not what you wanted either, but wait, there are a bunch of results floating around that are based on what you’re looking at right now. Hey, that result to the top left is what I want ‘“ you grab it and it opens in a new tab. There is no wrong direction. Now that’s thinking!

Plus, search results should include real-time social media conversations about a search query (or a topic). Twitter feed, comments, statuses – as long as they are relevant to what someone is searching for include it.

In Summary

These are just a few ideas on how search engines can offer us a better experience and better results. Create a new PageRank algorithm to focus on the social media presence of the content creator, social media engagement of the audience, and get rid of linking (or reduce its value) variable.

This would take control of search rankings from content creators (SEO) and place it into the hands of people who search for it, democracy at its best. Let people consider what is relevant and what is crap, content creators are biased.

Indexing should be real-time. No wait time, I’m not at DMV. I wonder if search engines would appreciate if we didn’t click on their ads as they show up ‘“ come back in two weeks, then I’ll click it. Real-time is the key, whichever search engine will begin indexing as content is created that search engine will be light speed ahead of others.

Lastly, get rid of linear search results. Make it more thought-oriented. No ‘Next’, ‘Back’, ‘1,2,3,4.’ Last time I checked, I don’t have navigation buttons in my head and it’s really easy to use it that way.

What would you like to see search engines do in the future? Tweet me.

Everyone knows that print publications are shrinking. More and more people turn to the Internet to get news and read articles.

As the print media began its decline, blogging began to ascend to a strong position in the age of information sharing. Some blogs became the ‘mega’ sources of information, from news to op-eds. Huffington Post comes to mind right away.

It seems like people began to stray away from the mainstream media to blogs to get information as they began to see the strong influence of corporations on the news offered to the public. If it wasn’t grand or didn’t align with the corporate agenda, it wouldn’t be part of news coverage; or skew the news coverage by taking things out of context and looking at the issues from a biased perspective. Fox News comes to mind, but everyone is guilty; it’s just to what extent.

Why Print Edition

“I am presented with an organized collection of opinions, perspectives, information, and facts that are the construct of someone else’s mind, or a collection of minds. I am offered the chance to ‘discover’ news and information about everything from events to products, something that foraging for information on my own does not afford me,” Meskauskas writes about reading print magazines.

Some of those things might not be to your liking. But your world will be bigger as a result. And maybe something will not only be to your liking but also inspire passion.

Instead of searching for information across the web take a break from a daily routine. Pick up a newspaper or magazine and read it. It will offer you a broader understanding of the world, issues, cultures, and many other topics. Things you wouldn’t find because it was buried on the 15th page of search results or because the headline didn’t appeal to you. But having a physical copy in your hands, as part of your linear reading act, forces you to read it.

Making a detour on your information superhighway will show you something different, maybe from a different perspective, or maybe surrounded by different facts. But it will be different, even the simple act of feeling the paper it is written on might invoke a thought, a thought that a keyboard and/or a mouse would never invoke.

The act of reading printed publications binds you to someone else’s train of thought, which might inspire ideas you can write about. It will offer you some fresh ideas for blog posts, creative ideas for ebooks, or it might inspire you to create a new blog for a different topic you never thought you were interested in until you felt it in your hands.

Try It

I subscribe to several magazines as I enjoy reading them on paper, laid out for me in a specific manner. Also, I started a subscription to The New York Times last week. It was an interesting and new feeling having a paper at the door waiting on me in the morning.

Break out from your ordinary routine; pick up a magazine or a newspaper. Maybe go as far as getting a subscription to a magazine that you enjoy reading online. Try to feel it for the first time, see if your perception of the content changes.

Do you subscribe to any printed publications right now? Tweet me.

Do you really know why you get stuck blogging from time to time? Many people refer to it as blogger’s block, you don’t know what to write about. Hence, you begin to post on your blog less frequently, and then you just stop. It’s a frequent occurrence and a good way to filter those who REALLY want to blog and those who think “If they can blog, I can blog.”

I think it’s BS. There’s no such thing as “I don’t know what to blog about.” Look around you, you’re living in the information age. The keyword is information. It’s everywhere, there’s plenty of it. So it’s a lousy excuse, it doesn’t hold up.

You read news online (or somewhere else), you watch TV, movies, videos, you read blogs, leave comments, read tweets, play games, walk outside, drive, see things happen, and the list goes on. And it’s all in one day. So how can you say you don’t know what to write about?

Hell, Google your blog topic and write about the first result that pops up. It’s not hard, you just have to think. Information about your blog topic is everywhere, write about it. Stop overthinking it.

Secret Identity Revealed

Yes, I was a bit harsh in the above statement, but you’re in luck Mr. Nice guy is back. Not knowing what to write about is not the reason why people stop blogging. There has to be an underlying problem that shuts down the creative part of your brain after you begin blogging.

In my experience, for many people it’s fear. There, the blogger’s block has been exposed, it’s fear. Any way you look it, fear finds a way to impede your progress in any tasks you undertake, including blogging.

I’m Not Afraid of Blogging

You’re right, fear of blogging is not the fear that causes blogger’s block. This fear, or even fears, is one of the most common fears we face on a daily basis. It’s different for everyone.

What you need to do is look at what’s going on in your life and try to pinpoint your fear. I know it’s there. We’re humans, we have fears. Take a closer look at your life and you’ll see what causes trouble.

Recently, I had to deal with one of the fears (that I thought I didn’t have) that hindered my photography. I admitted I had a problem, and now I’m working on resolving it. Once you fix the underlying problem, you won’t have any issues blogging. There will always be something to blog about, no walls to your creative side.

Identifying Fear

Here’s a quick list I’ve seen others have, including me. Try to see what you’re facing right now and which fear might be hindering your blogging

Fear of:

• rejection (lack of comments, visits, in the beginning, might do that to you)
• success (some people are afraid of success, I had those problems before)
• failure (pretty much everyone is afraid to fail and ties in with rejection)
• criticism (performance anxiety is a good term for this)
• change (yes, a lot of people afraid of change blogs might bring)
• commitment (blogging requires commitment, people don’t realize it until they begin blogging)
• unemployment (maybe you’re afraid your employer might not like your blog)
• publicity (it ties in with success, some people want privacy)
• list goes on

These are some of the most common fears that you might be dealing with. It might be a bouquet of fears. I’ll be the first one to admit that I dealt with all of these fears one way or another, not only blogging but any block: photography, blogging, relationships, you name it. I’m first to admit I had them and still have some of them. But I’m working on fixing them.

The Road to Recovery

I’m not a shrink, but exercising some common sense goes a long way. Once you know what your fear (or fears) is you can figure out a way to begin working on it and taking it out of your life’s equation. That’s one variable you don’t need.

Figure out the best way to approach your fear. There are plenty of books and resources online that will help you guide through dealing with your fear. Once you accept it, you will feel lighter – a weight off your shoulders has fallen.

I’m still dealing with some fears, but I’ve accepted them and feel that I’m a new person. It has given me the strength to do what I love, photography and writing, without futile blocks.

If you don’t figure out what you’re afraid of, blocks will keep showing up and you will suffer from it in the long run. Uproot the problem from the source, that’s the only way to do it. Here’s some wisdom from Mark Twain on fear to close:

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

Are you suffering from blogger’s block? What is your fear? Tweet me.

This post was inspired by a post on ProBlogger, How Cancer Changed My Life, by Karl Staib. I highly recommend reading it, a great inspirational story.

Do you know which way is up? It sounds like a trick question, and it is.

It seems like an easy question, but the answer seems to puzzle many people. They find themselves suspended in the middle of nowhere, where directions become meaningless: right is left, left is down, down is up, up is right, and it goes on. It’s kind of like being an astronaut in space, you lose a sense of direction.

I’ve been overwhelmed with projects lately, business, and school. I don’t really know when to stop. My high school psychology teacher was right one morning as we walked to school, “Viktor, you need to learn how to turn your brain off from time to time.” Six years later and I still don’t know how to do it, but this is not about that.

The Problem

Recently, I have come to a realization why I had issues with photographing people. In the fall of 2010, I began photographing people primarily as I switched to a photojournalism major. There was a clear change in my photographs: they weren’t as good as I can do. The problem was, I didn’t know why.

Sometimes it takes a miserable failure to realize what your fears are; or, rather, accept them.

Two weeks ago, I failed miserably on a shooting assignment for my photojournalism class. I hit the bottom, finally. It was an eye-opener to what was the underlying problem for quite some time, I think as far back as high school. Yet, I never paid attention to it. The problem? I’m afraid to talk to strangers.

That’s the last thing people who know me would ever expect from me. I’m very outgoing and social, but not when it comes to strangers.

Sometimes you have to hit the bottom to know which way is up.

This is my personal wisdom on failure. Clearly, I lived up to it. I know which way is up, I know what I have to work on now.

Admit It

The hardest thing was admitting I had a problem. I sat, shaking, in front of my professor’s door; waiting for him to show up. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire life. It was harder than the four years I served in the US Navy, which was a breeze compared to admitting weakness. This was the only way to start working on it, really working on it.

If you do have a fear of something, it doesn’t matter how small or ridiculous (so you might think) it is, admit it to someone other than yourself. A friend or family member is great. If your fear affects your work somehow, admit it to your boss. He or she should understand that we’re all humans with fears. It takes so much weight off your shoulders you will feel like a different person.

The Solution

I don’t have an answer, yet. The advice is to “just do it.” Yes, easy to say not so easy to do. I clearly can’t “just do it.” I think the best way is to take baby steps. The hardest part for me is to engage a stranger, not keeping the conversation going. So, my “up” direction is to start conversations with strangers I have to engage regularly as part of my daily life. Cashiers would be the perfect example. I have to engage them, so why not have some small talk instead of silence?

One thing my professor recommended is to engage people on the bus in small talk. The first step, he said, is to sit next to people you perceive to be more open to small talk and try to engage them. The second step is to sit in the front row of the bus where you don’t have any control of who sits next to you and engage them. Got my bus pass, just need to find time to do it. Great advice.

Hitting the bottom helped me figure out which way is up. Sometimes that’s the only way to be able to propel yourself up.

What’s your fear? What are you struggling with right now? Tweet me.

In one of my photojournalism classes, we keep hearing one thing over and over again: Just putting things together does not make a good picture.

Why not replace “a good picture” with “social media strategy”?  Just putting things together does not make social media strategy.

It’s just a pile of things. Nothing more.

I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but people don’t understand it. You create a Twitter account, Facebook page, and then put links on your website. You smile, sit back, and wait for followers and fans rushing in. Yea, you will be waiting for a long time.

That’s not social media strategy, that’s called social media pile or social media piling, which is what you’re doing without a clear strategy. You spend time and resources creating profiles and putting some content on them, but what’s the point if nobody sees it?

Creating a bunch of profiles, posting on them and tweeting, trying to “engage” your audience, and throwing a fit because it’s not working, is not a good strategy. It is one if your goal is to fail.

So think about it. What exactly is the purpose of your presence on social media websites? Just because everyone is on it, is not a good reason.

Here’s a way I like to think about strategy, some personal wisdom.

You need to know your final destination in order to know how to get there. Going East is not a destination, it’s a direction. But going to New York City is a destination. So think about the destination, not a direction. Destination = Goal.

This is important if you want to measure your results. You know where you need to be and when, so it gives you an easy way to track your results. I hope you noticed “when”, because without a time limit you can’t measure anything. Set a specific time limit for your social media strategy, see how it goes. Then keep revising and updating it to keep it effective. It’s not a state, it’s a continuous process.

So remember, you need a final destination to know what tools you need to use to get there. Don’t just throw things in a pile and expect them to work. That’s all it is, a pile of things.

If you don’t know what social media strategy is I recommend reading Social Media Examiner’s article 7 Steps For a Successful Social Media Strategy, good information there.

What’s your personal wisdom on social media strategy? Do share, please.

Social networking is just a stepping stone as the web became more popular. Cavemen gathered in groups and tried to communicate with each other, with time it evolved. There will be no “after” social networking. It will always be part of our lives, evolving and adapting to changing times and technology.

However, the next frontier is social awareness.

Gone the time of “following” people and “friending” them on social networks. Everything will be connected through a smart filter that delivers information that you want and need. The web will be aware of one user as much as it will be aware of the entire population, and it will connect people based on their immediate needs and wants.

The increased and widespread wireless capabilities will help social awareness be part of everything and everywhere, much more in sync with what we do than just an app on a smartphone.

Imagine talking on the phone with someone and tell them you’re hungry and feel like eating Chinese. The first thing you grab, phone or computer, and turn on has a list of Chinese restaurants with phone numbers and locations already available to you. Or you get in your car and your car’s GPS system already has planned a route to your favorite Chinese restaurant on your way home from work.

Social awareness is not only about people being aware of people, but the information is aware of the information.

Hmm, the time when real-time will be too slow.

Do you agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts on Quora.

Robin Sharma is the best leadership expert out there, and he has written an amazing book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny.

I discovered him and his work in 2009 while transitioning from US Navy life to civilian life. He helped me be a better version of myself. I’ve been following his work since then. Since I’ve talked about being authentic in social media recently I wanted to share this short video by Robin on authentic vs plastic. It’s short, to the point, and definitely drives an important message across. Pay attention and absorb, don’t just “hear” him say things. Listen!

No, it’s not about reading online or visiting it once. The point is to visit it few times a week to see different things, meet different people. This way you’re always in the know, you know what’s going on to find great ideas for stories.

Isn’t this what social media and networking are all about?

Why not narrow your market down to a niche market? Become a specialist in your niche market. Narrowing down your market to a specific audience, whatever the criteria you use to pick it, increases your knowledge and expertise. Specialists get paid more for that extra knowledge. Why don’t social media professionals do it?

Do you really think you can approach different markets and audiences with the same social media strategy? If you do, you shouldn’t call yourself a professional. You’re just another Facebook and Twitter user. Period.

Adopt a market. Learn everything there is about it. Are there any people that stand out, what are some popular blogs, forums, podcasts, and anything else you can find? Get to know the people, read those blogs, contribute on forums, and be an authentic member of this community.

But you said to adopt a market, why are you talking about the community? You might be thinking that. Well, the market is not a bowl of salad. It’s much more than that. Everything is connected, people talk. It’s a two-way street where all parties involved don’t just benefit but give back to the community. It becomes a homogeneous substance.

Narrow your expertise down to a niche market. Adopt it. Become a well-known contributor in the community, you shall be rewarded greatly by the community.

Have you adopted any markets yet? Share your stories, please.

Photojournalism is all about connecting with people to be able to tell their story authentically. This becomes even more important when photojournalists are working on photo stories. You have to get to know the people on a personal level, they have to be comfortable with you to let you into their lives. You can’t photograph honestly if you don’t have full access to things that might be important to your story.

Doesn’t it sound a lot like social media? People have to TRUST you to let you into their lives whatever that is you’re doing with social media.

I noticed this core commonality between social media and photojournalism after finishing Trust Agents, a book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. What really resonated with me was this. Trust agent’s job is to

Make people feel comfortable, all the way, building deep relationships before ever asking something of others.

Photojournalists build deep relationships with people they photograph to be able to create emotional and compelling stories.

So, what can social media marketers learn from photojournalists? These are things that my photojournalism professor keeps telling us over and over again to make good photo stories that people care about.

You couldn’t run a marathon after buying your first pair of shoes

This is just another metaphor for learning to crawl before you can run. You have to prepare, just like a marathon runner prepares for the marathon. It doesn’t happen overnight. Spend the time learning the craft, the ins, and outs of social media. Just because you know how to use Facebook and Twitter does not qualify you as a social media expert or guru.

You’re betraying the trust if you don’t produce good work

You might be asking, whose trust? Everyones. Your clients trust you to create and lead their social media strategy, their customers and clients trust you to be honest with them. You begin creating authentic relationships with people all around you, business and personal. So creating a successful social media strategy and executing it effectively is your responsibility to everyone.

Always assume it’s been done before

This doesn’t mean you have to copy what everyone else is doing. Just take a look at what others are doing, what’s working, what’s not working. Once you know what has been done you can learn from that and build upon that. Innovation rewards those who know what has been done before. Plus, once you know what has been done, you will know how you can be different.

Know the destination, so you can drive there without wandering around and getting lost

This really comes down to your social media strategy. You have to know what it is you’re trying to do. Driving around for the sake of driving around is not useful. You will waste money and time with no results. Your social media strategy is like a GPS in your car, once you enter an address it gives you a clear direction on how to get there. It needs to be concrete with achievable and measurable results. Selling more books is not a destination but a direction, but selling 125 books by the end of the month is a destination that can be easily entered into your GPS.

So what? Why should anyone care?

Why should anyone care about what you’re doing? Just because you want to make money for yourself and your clients is not a reason people will trust you. You have to be genuinely interested in people and in what they have to say. Authenticity is very rare these days because people get into social media to make money not to connect with people. Big mistake. Work on establishing relationships first, money will come to you organically without forcing it (mistake many get-rich schemes to make and people fall for it).

Your social media strategy should be about people, not things. There’s a reason it says “social” media and not “material” media. So get to it, talk to people. No social media software will replace genuine communication between people.

• does things because he is passionate about them, not because someone asks/expects him to do it
• risks everything to follow his dreams
• never stops learning
• sees value in failure
• uses failures as building blocks of success
• builds friendships, not contacts.
• goes from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm (Winston Churchill coined that phrase)
• helps others without asking for anything in return
• values people more than he values his assets
• has a pen and paper on his nightstand to write down ideas in the middle of the night or a phone with an app to do that
• carries pen and paper (or phone with an app) to write down thoughts and ideas
• actually looks back on his notes and evaluates ideas/thoughts and acts on them
• realizes his fear of failure, yet doesn’t stop because of it
• is humble, arrogance breeds nothing but resentment from others
• does things, not just talk about them all-day
• doesn’t dismiss any ideas as failures without testing them and getting feedback from others
• takes cliche and turns it into the new trend
• is not a copycat but an innovator
• smiles in the face of adversity, positivity breed positivity
• treats obstacles and challenges as gas stops on his way to success
• follows someone on Twitter because he wants to, not because he wants them to follow him back

Just some thoughts. What is your list? Tweet me.

Did someone die? No.

Did someone get hurt? No.

Hmm maybe the breaking news is not the downtime of Facebook but productivity level going up during this time.

I’m really getting tired of seeing breaking news that shouldn’t even be labeled as news. It gets old trying to keep my mouth open wide enough for news media to shove their “breaking” news down my throat.

This reminds me of  The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but in the end people will stop watching news instead of getting eaten by the wolf.

News media, stop labeling everything breaking news. Unless it’s time sensitive and people need to know it NOW as it is imperative to their well being… DON’T CALL IT BREAKING NEWS.

Over 6,000 copyright infringement lawsuits were filed in 2008, according to  U.S. Courts Director’s Annual Report.

It is something that public education and a lot of higher education institutions in the U.S. do not take the time to teach. Maybe a rogue educator takes the time to mention it in his or her class, but the copyright law is too complex for an elevator conversation.

“They [photographers] want me to teach it [copyright law] to them in 2 hours, and it is just not possible to cover all of the important information,” says Alicia Wagner Calzada, Advocacy Chairperson for the  National Press Photographers Association.

People begin to realize that there’s this thing called copyright law when either their work gets stolen or they are sued for copyright infringement. This is not the time to begin learning about the copyright, it should’ve been done earlier and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. But in a society where access to information has never been greater, the ignorance level has only gone up – the paradox of the Digital Age.

Copyright Law Basics

The copyright law “provides protection to the authors of ‘original works of authorship,’ including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works,” according to the US Copyright Office. The protection lasts during an author’s lifetime and an additional 70 years after death.

“Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner… is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author,” according to Section 501, Title 17 of the US Code.

In a nutshell, when you create something you own the copyright to that creation. If anyone uses it without your permission they violate your rights and federal law. The law, however, does allow free use in certain situations. This is called “fair use.”

“Fair use” is a very vague concept, which gives a lot of people room to claim it even though they are violating copyright law. Section 107, Title 17 of the US Code says that “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

Many people believe that as long as they don’t use it commercially, they are covered by the “fair use” policy for personal use.

“A good rule of thumb for everyone is that if you are going to use photos that you did not take yourself, you should get permission from the photographer first. Whether or not you might have a legal right to use the image under fair use laws is not something you want to think about for the first time after you are staring down a lawsuit,” Wagner Calzada says.

Technology

“Because contemporary technology allows us to more easily produce as well as consume media, we are able to cut and paste, remix and mash-up. Those skills can be learned anywhere – and usually nowhere near a class curriculum that includes courses on ethics or on copyright law. Those were staples of journalism and business law classes. It is taking the rest of society a while to catch up with these ethical and legal concepts – which can, to them, seem authoritarian and restrictive,” Jill Geisler says, senior faculty of leadership and management at  The Poynter Institute. “For proof of that, think of the numbers of people who engaged in file-sharing of music, believing it was a right that was being denied them by the greed of the music industry. The industry was Goliath. The illegal downloaders saw themselves as David. Taking the work product of others was, to David’s, defensible.”

Technology plays an important part, especially now. Information sharing is at the core of the Digital Age. People share text, photos, audio, video, code, and much more; rarely do they consider the ramifications of their illegal activities on their life and the life of the copyright owner. It became second nature.

The radical price of free infected all other prices. Now, everyone wants everything for free. It is not their concern that to create something, content creators need funding. Nothing is created for free. Yet the detachment of the public from the rational world has never been greater. Everything is about the satisfaction of their ego, the cheaper the better.

“People violate copyright for any number of reasons, including they are too lazy to track down the photographer and ask permission; they are too cheap to pay for photography, but want to use the photo anyway; they have a sense of entitlement; for some reason, they are under the false impression that they don’t have to get a license to use an image; and as it becomes easier and easier to become a ‘publisher,’ there are a lot of people publishing without any knowledge of relevant laws,” Wagner Calzada says. “Getting people educated about when it is required to get permission to use a photo is a challenge because many would rather not know and plead ignorance.”

AFP v. Morel

The tragedy of the Haiti earthquake will never leave our memories. The work of photojournalists and journalists covering it the day of the disaster brought the world to pause, take a deep breath and contemplate the fragility of life.

David Morel was in Haiti at that time, photographing. When the earthquake happened he was one of the first photographers on the scene. He decided to transmit photographs through Twitter and Twitpic out to the world; he wanted people to see what was happening.

When he posted his photographs on Twitter another user, by the name of Lisandro Suero, downloaded Morel’s photographs and reposted them on his own account. Agence Frence Presse (AFP) distributed photographs giving credit to the wrong photographer even though one of their editors knew photographs were Morel’s, according to PDN Online.

A few years ago, Getty Images, signed a distribution agreement with AFP to allow Getty clients to use AFP photographs. Many newspapers around the world began circulating the photographs. When Morel found out about his photographs being improperly credited he sent out a cease-and-desist letter to AFP, Getty, and its clients.

They were furious, so furious that they have decided to sue Morel for “antagonistic” assertion of rights and commercial defamation. AFP claimed that when Morel posted his photographs on Twitter he allowed third parties to “use, copy, publish, display, and distribute” his own photographs.

The case is still pending. However, it’s been almost a year since this calamity began. A quick search turned up a photo slideshow on Newsweek’s blog with David Morel’s photographs still being attributed to Suero.

Morel’s case was a clear and intentional violation of his rights by AFP as they knew what the law is and who the photographer was. This is not always the case. Sometimes people think they know what the law is, but lack of continuing education and self-improvement leads to unintentional ignorance. Cooks Source Magazine Fiasco

A blogger, Monica Gaudio, recently became aware of one of her articles being printed in a magazine called Cooks Source. It was lifted from her blog and reprinted without her permission. Gaudio contacted the magazine’s editor to request fees for reprint and donate those fees to a university. The reply from the editor did not only surprise Gaudio, but it angered internet users worldwide.

“I have been doing this for 3 decades… the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it,” the editor writes.

Internet is not a public domain. Everything created on the internet, just like the physical world, has a creator, who owns the copyright. This reply prompted an internet-wide investigation of other articles in Cooks Source magazine and website, according to  NPR Monkey See blog. It became apparent that many articles might’ve been copied from Martha Stewart, Food Network, Weight Watchers, and NPR.

With so much information out there about copyright and copyright infringement lawsuits you still get people who are completely oblivious to the facts. How could one go 30 years of publishing with a lack of copyright law knowledge? This is a perfect example of how copyright law is seen by the public. It is a minutia to them. Nothing more than some fancy legal talk on paper.

Education

Ignorance is never an option. The copyright law awareness needs to spread not only throughout the professional circles but to college and public schools as well. It is as important as knowing how to write an essay in English class because you have to know what rights you have as an author of that essay and what you can do if someone plagiarizes it.

Creating a curriculum of success should be the top priority of any educational institution, and copyright law is an inalienable part of a successful career.

Before the pro-Muslim rally, I spent the morning around WTC. The 9th Commemoration ceremony was underway, but it was limited to families and friends. So, I roamed around the streets surrounding WTC to see what people were up to.

Also, I’ve uploaded a lot of photos from the pro-Muslim rally, so you have access to images for your stories. Feel free to contact me if you need anything, like higher resolution and better quality images.

Don’t forget, the photos are licensed under Creative Commons Attributions, which means you’re free to use them for whatever you like. HOWEVER, there are NO model releases. This means you cannot use it commercially, for ads or stuff like that. This set is primarily for bloggers and indy media sites that would benefit from images in their stories. Don’t forget to include photo credit, I would really appreciate it =)

This is the WTC photo set.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/viktor-nagornyy/albums/72157624824612319

This is the pro-Muslim rally photoset.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/viktor-nagornyy/albums/72157624818058037

If you are at a dead-end, be it life or business, the best way to overcome it is by going back to the beginning. From there you’ll know what happened, what went wrong that brought you to the dead end. It’s almost like going back in time, without actually defying the laws of physics. Also, it puts things into perspective: are you following your original goals?

This is especially true for reassessing your life. Today, I visited a small village in western Ukraine where my grandmother, father, and aunt were born. I have never visited it before in my life; it was an interesting experience seeing the old house where they were born. It helps you put things into perspective when you go back to the beginning, even before your own time. Following family roots to find out more about your family and where they came from will help you deal with your own issues.

Few days prior to visiting my father’s birthplace, I’ve visited another small village. This is where my other grandfather, mother’s side, was born. Unfortunately, the old house is no longer standing. There was nothing, just some bushes and tall grass growing. But, the apple trees that my grandfather planted were still standing, growing tall. Apples were delicious, not yet sweet but the sour taste reminded me of life.

While we were visiting my father’s village light rain passed by with some yelling thunder. I got lucky on the way back when I noticed sun rays piercing through dark skies. The Carpathians are very beautiful. I hope you’ll enjoy the photograph. I’ve included dirt road as an invitation for you to come to Ukraine and enjoy the beauty for yourself.