When you write for yourself, the only limits are legal.
You cannot claim some things in your emails unless you are deliberately making a point about outlandish claims.
You cannot claim that buying this jar of coffee will make the buyer 51.2% smarter or make 37.5% more money because that is obviously ridiculous.
But, within those legal constraints, your ability to write an engaging and informative email is only restricted by you and your imagination.
You can tell stories about what happened today and enhance them to make them a better story, and they don’t have to be factual or based on actual events.
You can write about an idea or a thought or someone else’s email or a website you’ve visited.
World events and your thoughts about them or stick to local events, current or historical, and their impact.
As long as you write reasonably well, your subscribers will read them.
They’ll forgive you for the occasional crappy email, like mine yesterday, as long as you don’t write too many crappy emails in a row.
Some people will tell you that every email must be carefully crafted, like a sales page, to move your reader to take the action you decide they should take.
I think that’s B.S.
I think it’s more important that your subscribers eagerly open and read your emails.
The purpose of an email is to open a line of communication with your subscribers.
You do that by writing to them as you would write to a friend, and you don’t write emails to your friend that you have spent hours crafting, so they’ll take some sort of action.
Other people say you should write 2 – 3 informative, helpful emails, then write a sales email.
Rinse and repeat.
Of course no one wants to get hammered with sales emails every day, but I think that no one minds getting an interesting or entertaining email every day with an offer tacked on the end.
That way, you can make an offer, related or not to the body of the email, in every email, the reader is under no obligation to even look at it.
Provided that the body of the email performs that entertainment or informative function, your subscriber is more likely to open the next one.
Reply to this email if that does or doesn’t make sense.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. This bit is where I put the offer, as you would already know.
That means that they want someone to contact them.
When I first began in sales, I made appointments when people were home, so I was out most nights talking to people.
My sales trainer told me that they wanted people to visit them at night, that’s why they had a light behind the doorbell button so that I could find it.
They often had lights along the path so I wouldn’t fall over trying to find their front door.
Now people want you to email them otherwise they wouldn’t have an email address.
You do have the small problem of getting them to give you permission to email them.
Ten years ago, it was easy.
People handed over their email addresses for any semi-good reason.
Today they have become a lot more cautious.
This caution is not without good reason.
There has been some terribly bad behaviour by those early email marketers.
So, you need to give them something they consider valuable in exchange for their email address.
What that could be will depend on the target market.
It will be easier outside the make money online niche because they are less jaded.
You’ll still need to provide value, but that could be a PDF, a training video, or a checklist.
You can use the same for the MMO crowd, but the value must be higher.
It’s not the type of freebie.
It’s the value of that freebie.
In general, it seems that access to a video where the landing page only has a headline, a short description of what’s in the video works as well or better than most other things.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. If your landing page is not performing as you would like, you can usually find out what would work better by split testing your pages.
A split test is setting up two different pages and sending the same traffic source to both pages.
With your first test, the two pages should be very different, but subsequent tests should only test a single item at a time.
The real test is not the number of email addresses you collect but the number of sales you make from that funnel.
Many ideas and methods get promoted as the best way to make money online.
The people promoting these are making a killing with your hopes and dreams while killing your hopes and dreams.
You feel like you’re a failure.
You don’t want to tell your significant other about the latest “guaranteed way to make 6 figures” that hasn’t made the cost of the training.
You feel sick every time you think about how much you’ve spent on this junk, but you keep grabbing at the next one because the sales page has convinced you that this is the one.
I know how you feel because I felt the same way for way too many years and way too much money.
But I finally found some excellent mentors and discovered the secret that those dung peddling scum wouldn’t ever tell you.
They don’t make their money with those junk programs.
They know they don’t work, but they know that suckers like me will keep buying them as long as the hope remains alive.
The way they make their money is by promoting that crap by email.
Yep, they have massive email lists, and they sell everything with email marketing.
They’ll even tell you that email is dead and you should be doing Facebook ads instead without telling you that Facebook uses email to retain the engagement of their members.
Social media companies, top marketers, and savvy affiliate marketers do their marketing via email.
Doesn’t that mean that email is not dead but very much alive and kicking?
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Some people have email lists that don’t result in sales.
Their subscribers are not engaged with the messages, don’t open them or click on the links.
An email list like this can be frustrating.
What you want to build is a super-responsive list.
One that’ll give you 50% opens or better along with sufficient clicks and sales to make it worth your while.
Fortunately, there is some excellent training on exactly how to do this.
As I have discussed before, the keywords you choose can make or break your site-building efforts.
Most people choose high-traffic keywords with strong competition or low-traffic keywords that don’t get any visitors.
Others choose better than that but select keywords that don’t bring buyers.
None of these situations is of any use to you.
All of us who build websites know that it takes time to build up traffic, and you can build for months with little to show for your work.
This means that it’s even more critical to ensure that the keywords you choose have a good chance of ranking and bringing targeted visitors.
And that’s where the golden ratio comes in.
The golden ratio is the calculation done between the traffic volume for that keyword and the number of sites ranked in Google with that keyword in the title.
The traffic volume must not exceed 250 searches a month, and the number of websites with the keyword in the title must not exceed 63.
You can use whichever keyword tool you like to get the search volume, but you have to use Google for the ranked sites.
The way you find how many sites have the keyword in the title is this.
In the search field, type allintitle:your keyword.
For example, this search allintitle:make money online for beginners in Australia turned up 39 results.
Ubersuggest tells me that no one searches for this keyword, but it came up in the Google suggestions, so someone must have typed it in.
What it does tell me is that I could rank this keyword on the first page of Google with minimal effort.
Let’s try one with more traffic.
The keyword phrase the best way to make money while you sleep has between 10 – 100 searches per month but only five pages with the words in the title.
You could have a page on the first page of the search results within 24 hours.
I dug this one out in the Google Adwords tool, which is free, but not particularly helpful as far as search volume goes.
I hope this explanation is helpful for you.
Let me know if you use this and what results you get.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Spending the time to dig these out can be tedious but worth every minute.
No, I don’t have a tool to help with this – yet.
As far as I know, there is no tool to automate this, which is excellent because it means that most people will not be bothered to put in the work required.
Once you have 20 pages bringing in 100 visitors a month, you will have a website with more traffic than 80% of the Internet.
Over a year, you could have 200 pages ranking for these golden keywords and be in the top 10% of all websites for traffic.
Do you think you could make an income from 20,000 visitors per month?
No one asks permission to fall in love, they may seek permission to marry but not fall in love.
Hardly anyone asks permission to get a job, they just get one — if they can, but they rarely ask for permission to apply.
So why do so many people come online and ask in forums, via email and many other places if they have permission to start an online business?
They seem to need someone in a position of authority to tell them, “Yes, your ideas are good enough, you are smart enough, you deserve the chance to try this out and reap whatever rewards there are to gain from it.”
Pay attention because I am talking to you and only you.
Permission granted.
There are a million jerk bag idiots out there with stunted brains or sociopathic tendencies that don’t have a healthy, humble soul.
And they’re making money hand over fist while churning out weak work that ranges from mediocre to terrible.
Why let them have it?
Give them some competition – they only succeed over you because better people aren’t fighting them for those visitors and sales.
That’s you.
Better people.
Nail them to the wall, your work is better, your values are higher.
Time to believe in yourself and do it.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Any new website needs approximately 20 pieces of content to begin ranking in 2022.
It used to be that you could rank a single page, but Google got tired of all those one-page websites and cracked down on them.
That seems strange because Google only ranks pages, not websites, so why bother about shutting out a single page site?
The bottom line, though, is that when you give Google what it wants, they’ll sometimes give you what you want, traffic.
When you combine the A.I. in Frase and the questions from answerthepublic.com, you’ll have no trouble generating 20 good quality posts for your site.
Once they are in place, you can expect to get visitors within the first week, and the volume will gradually ramp up.
Get your trial of Frase here, https://go.wm-tips.com/frase because you’ll need this tool to speed up the content creation.
Most of us have been using Google, Ubersuggest or Hrefs for our keyword research, and the results are not as expected.
The reason for that is two-fold.
One, the keyword tools give lousy and inaccurate results.
Two, you’re targeting the wrong type of keyword for buyers.
Google knows what people search for, but they won’t tell you because you don’t pay them enough.
Ubersuggest, Hrefs and most of the others use Google data for their reporting, so it’s no better than Google’s.
But that’s only the start of the problem.
Google reports that something like 80% of all search terms haven’t been used before, so how can you target those?
The wrong type of keywords can get you ranked and bring a good volume of visitors but only a low percentage of buyers.
What we all want is more buyers, right?
Let me explain with an example.
Let’s imagine someone is looking for information about learning about martial arts.
Imagine they are trying to decide which martial arts is best for them.
So they type in:
martial arts – and don’t find what they are looking for.
Then:
martial arts types – they find lists of different kinds of martial arts, they start searching each of these:
karate
aikido
kung fu
kendo
judo
Still, they haven’t found what they are looking for, which is best for them.
So now they type in the phrase:
benefits of karate
then:
benefits of Aikido
benefits of kung fu
benefits of kendo
benefits of judo
Now we are getting closer to what they are really looking for.
But not quite there yet.
Next maybe they type in:
Is Aikido right for me?
Is Kung Fu right for me?
And so on.
Now we are really getting hot, and this is probably a buying keyword phrase.
But it might go even deeper, to something like “What is the best way to learn kung fu?”
NOW we have a buying keyword phrase.
Note how many keywords we have chewed through to get to the buying keyword phrase.
And this buying keyword phrase will NOT show up in a keyword tool!
But it might show up on the answer the public website — hint, wink, wink.
If you want a thriving business that attracts buyers rather than researchers, you might consider how you do your keyword research.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Once you have your buyer keyword phrases, you’ll need to create posts that use them so you can rank for those phrases.
The tool I use to help me write that content faster is Frase.
Frase has an excellent A.I. component that you can use to develop an outline for your articles and posts or write the whole thing for you.
The quality of the A.I. in Frase has been improving in leaps and bounds to where it rarely makes mistakes, but when it does, they are easily corrected.
Some of you got an email from me with an odd subject line.
You know who you are, and I’m sorry for fouling that up.
I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t foul something else up.
It kind of fits with today’s email but definitely didn’t with the last email.
** Note to Self **
Proofread the emails before sending them.
** End Note to self **
Today I wanted to talk about getting stuff done, completed and published.
You know what it’s like when you know you should contact someone over an apology, a death in their family, a birth in their family, good news or bad, but you put it off because you’re busy or “it’s not the right time“?
You also know that it becomes harder and harder to make that contact after putting it off for a variable period.
It’s the same with product ideas or post ideas.
Sometimes you even get started in a rush of enthusiasm, but something causes you not to finish it.
It might be an interruption, you second guess the content, you run short of motivation of ideas to complete it, and it ends up sitting on your hard drive.
Unloved, incomplete, and gathering virtual dust.
Just publish it.
If it’s not complete, publish anyway and mark it as part one.
Go back tomorrow and either complete it or not, but publish regularly.
Your readers will forgive you for sloppy work sometimes, but they’ll never forgive you for intermittent work.
They’ll drift off to other people who feed their interests more regularly.
Keep them onboard by giving them something to chew on and comment on.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. When people consider what type of online business they want for themselves, very few say they want something that’ll take up all their time and barely break even.
Most people want the type of business that they can do from anywhere, makes a good amount of money, and only takes a few hours a day to run without any special skills.
That’s the type of Internet business that Tony has operated for a decade, and it still works every day for him.
The unique thing about Tony is that he is totally open about what he does and how he does it.
He even shares what he does each month and how it worked out, but that is only for a select few subscribers.
One of the major problems with working from home and online is the constant distractions presented to you.
It can be challenging to work efficiently every day.
I know what I need to get done each day, and I get more than enough interruptions from family and mobile phone to make that harder than it needs to be.
This is what I’m doing to attempt to improve my work flow.
In the Opera web browser there are things called Workspaces.
I can have multiple of these, and I can put any tabs I like in each workspace.
So, I have split the tabs I usually have open into different categories and named the workspaces accordingly.
Because I can have only one workspace open at a time and I have fewer tabs available in them, there is less to distract me.
The workspaces I have are for research, emailing, writing and traffic.
The other browsers I use don’t seem to have that functionality, and I don’t know if it will improve things, but I’m hopeful.
I’m implementing another thing, turning off my mobile phone and putting it in a different room until I’ve completed my daily tasks.
Apparently, even having your mobile phone alongside you is distracting, so it has to go.
What do you do to keep yourself on track?
Regards, Brent.
P.S. The distractions mean that some days the only thing I get done is this email.
While getting the email done is important, it’s not the only thing I need to accomplish daily.
One marketer I know works very efficiently and makes a good living from what he does.
He regularly shares what he does and how he does it with his email subscribers.
None of what he shares is pie-in-the-sky stuff that may or may not have ever worked.
No, he only shares what is currently working for him, making the information valuable and actionable today.
This is the extra training for the Starting online for free membership which you’ll find here. For subscribers your link to get this at no cost is below…
, isn’t as highly polished as others you’ll see on YouTube or many sales pages.
The whole course, link on that page, is based on you creating products and sales using only free tools.
I chose to make the videos for the course as low-key as possible to demonstrate that anyone could do this.
No super skills are required to start.
I’m confident that you could do a much better job of creating your product and making your videos look far better than I did, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to make my videos all flashy and professional-looking.
