Tag Archives: money

The Three Key Elements of Irresistible Email Subject Lines

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Email is back. Despite repeated proclamations of its extinction, rumors of the death of email marketing have been greatly exaggerated — especially since email and social media are a powerful combination. You might not reach the average college freshman , but for slightly older types (you know, the ones with the money), email is still the way to go in many lucrative mainstream niches. You must first, of course, get your emails read. And it all starts with the subject line. Email subject lines are a form of headline . They perform the same function as a headline by attracting attention and getting your email content a chance to be read. So, headline fundamentals still apply. But the context is different, with the email space having its own funky little quirks that need to be accounted for. Here’s the good news — email also implies a special relationship with the reader; a relationship that will get more of your messages read, even with subject lines that wouldn’t work in other headline contexts. Let’s take a look back at headline fundamentals, the specifics that apply to subject lines, and the “secret sauce” that makes email your top conversion channel. 1. The Fundamentals: When you’re writing your next email subject line, run it through this checklist, based on the Four “U” Approach to headline writing : Useful : Is the promised message valuable to the reader? Ultra-specific : Does the reader know what’s being promised? Unique : Is the promised message compelling and remarkable? Urgent : Does the reader feel the need to read now? When you’re trying to get someone to take valuable time and invest it in your message, a subject line that properly incorporates all four of these elements can’t miss. And yet, execution in the email context can be tricky, so let’s drill down into subject-line specifics for greater clarity. 2. The Specifics: Beyond headline fundamentals, these are the things to specifically focus on with email subject lines: Identify yourself : Over time, the most compelling thing about an email message should be that it’s from you . Even before then, your recipient needs to know at a glance that you’re a trusted source. Either make it crystal clear by smart use of your “From” field, or start every subject line with the same identifier. For example, with our own Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter , every subject line begins with [Smart People]. Useful and specific first : Of the four “U” fundamentals, focus on useful and ultra-specific, even if you have to ignore unique and urgent. There are plenty of others who work at unique and urgent with every subject line — we call them spammers. Don’t cross the line into subject lines that are perceived as garbage. But do throw in a bit of a tease. Urgent when it’s useful : When every email from you is urgent, none is. Use urgency when it’s actually useful, such as when there’s a real deadline or compelling reason to act now. If you’re running your email marketing based on value and great offers, people don’t want to miss out and need to know how much time they have. Rely on spam checking software : We all know that certain words trigger spam filters, but there’s a lot of confusion out there about which words are the problem. Is it okay to use the word “free” in a subject line? Actually, yes. All reputable email services provide spam checking software as part of the service or as an add-on. Craft your messages with compelling language, let the software do its job, and adjust when you have to. Shorter is better : Subject line real estate is valuable, so the more compact your subject line, the better. Don’t forget useful and ultra-specific, but try to compress the fundamentals into the most powerful promise possible. 3. The Secret Sauce: Getting someone to trust you with their email address is not easy. Twelve years ago when I started in email publishing, people would sign up for anything remotely interesting. No longer. But if you do gain that initial trust, and more importantly, confirm and grow it , you can write pretty lame subject lines and people will still read your emails. Just as with that ditzy friend from high school who nonetheless always has something interesting to say, trust and substance matter most. Don’t get me wrong, writing great subject lines combined with the more intimate relationship email represents is much more effective. And you have to get your initial messages read to establish the relationship in the first place. Regardless, your open rates will improve based on the quality of your subject line. But there’s something special in this jaded digital age about being invited into someone’s email inbox. You just have to over-deliver on the value to ensure you’re a treasured guest who gets invited back. The inbox can be a stressful place. How do you make it brighter? About the Author : Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of the writer-friendly Scribe SEO software . Get more from Brian on Twitter . P.S. Have you checked out Internet Marketing for Smart People , the Copyblogger email newsletter? It features a free 20-step course that builds your business, so click here and subscribe today .

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Why Your Blog Doesn’t Make Money

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Darren Rowse doesn’t make his money from Problogger . Brian Clark doesn’t make his money from Copyblogger . Chris Brogan doesn’t make his money from his blog, either. Neither does Sonia Simone . Not a single founding member of Third Tribe earns the bulk of their income from the blogs that are practically (or in Chris’ case, literally) synonymous with their names. Yes, they make some money directly from those blogs. But revenue directly from the blog doesn’t represent the bulk of their income. Not by a long shot. So why do so many bloggers equate blog success with financial success? Many, if not most, of the bloggers I see are hoping that their blogs will make them popular. They are also hoping their blogs will make them money. This isn’t exactly surprising. Fame and riches are supposed to go hand in hand, after all. But when you need a new stream of income tomorrow, you don’t write ten more blog posts. You create a new product. You launch an email campaign . You make a special offer. You network. You find a great new JV partner. You ask for referrals and check in with your current clients. Similarly, when you want to get more subscribers for your blog tomorrow, you don’t launch a product. You write better content. You get more active on social media. You guest post on other people’s blogs. You link to other good articles. You improve your SEO . Building a profitable business and creating a popular blog are two different things Related, yes. But different. The most popular blogs you know do not make most of their money simply by racking up the subscriber numbers. They make their money with products, consulting, services, and advertising. They make their money by running a successful business. The fact that they run a popular blog facilitates that business. If Brian wants to launch a product tomorrow, he has a big, engaged audience to whom he can launch it. Having a huge audience who will listen when you launch a product isn’t the profitable part, though. The profitable part is that Brian will create a product that his audience wants and needs. He’ll run an informative and compelling launch. He’ll have an affiliate program that works and a sales sequence that converts prospects into buyers . Does the large subscriber base help with that product launch? Absolutely. But the blog itself is not the thing that’s making money. If Copyblogger, with its magnificently large platform, were to launch a terrible product with a really weak campaign and only promoted it with a few blog posts to this vast audience of readers, they wouldn’t make enough money to pay my grocery bill. Having a popular blog is not enough. You still have to build the business. No, of course you shouldn’t neglect your blog There are many, many virtues to a popular blog: social proof, credibility, enhanced visibility. They’re good for forging new business contacts and partnerships. They’re good for attracting potential customers for the products you’ll make or services you’ll provide. They’re brilliant for creating relationships. I don’t know my dentist as well as I know some bloggers. And I trust my dentist with my teeth even though he comes at them with a variety of pointy things with hooks on their ends. Blogs help us make those trusting, potentially valuable connections, and for that reason alone, they’re worth pouring time and energy into. But no matter how hard you try, your subscriber numbers are never going to magically transform themselves into your bank balance. When it comes to making money, simply having a blog isn’t enough. Now you have to take all the things the blog has given you — visibility, authority , a reputation for knowing your industry, social proof — and put them to work building you a profitable business. Because it won’t happen on its own. If you want to use your blog as a jumping-off place for that business, though, Third Tribe has got you covered. The seminar you’ll want to listen to is the 4-part series on Building a Business Around a Blog, which features interviews with Sonia Simone, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, and Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. They cover a lot of ground, including: The three factors your blog must have if you want to make serious money with advertising Brogan’s two favorite ways to start bringing in revenue by using a blog The specifics about where the bulk of their income really comes from (you may be surprised) Why “blogging about blogging” isn’t the way to go How Darren uses surveys to build his business (and why Brian doesn’t) A quick creativity technique to develop the next killer idea for your business How to handle pushback if your customers respond negatively to your products I listened to all four of these interviews. And not once, in hours of discussing techniques, business-building ideas, and marketing strategy, did any of these bloggers say that the best way to make money was to get more subscribers. They’ve got a few ideas for how to do that too, though. Because blogs are valuable — just not in the way you think. You can get instant access to all four seminars (and a dozen more), as well as Q&A sessions and the web’s best networking forum for internet businesspeople, by joining the Third Tribe today . About the Author: Taylor Lindstrom is a freelance copywriter and Assistant Editor of Copyblogger . She’s taking lots of notes about how to turn sharp copywriting into a profitable business.

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Why Your Blog Doesn’t Make Money

FAM Drone

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Feature Product Review:Over the past few years, a lot of traders have been trying their luck at Forex trading, but are simply losing their hard-earned income, while others other traders are fleecing off all the money. This mainly happens because there is a huge knowledge and efficiency gap between the makers and the losers. But

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FAM Drone

7 Strategies for Escaping “Me Too” Product Launches

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Are you noticing an awful lot of launches nowadays? Well, it’s not just you. As many bloggers jump off the Adsense bandwagon, they’re getting into the launch game, with a neverending stream of premium eBooks, white papers, audio interview series, video courses, membership sites, networking events, webinars, conferences, consultation packages, private coaching groups, print books, physical items, and anything else that could be wrangled together into a marketable asset. And because bloggers are good at creating content, they don’t just release these products without any buildup. They’re conducting multi-stage launches with tons of strong content. So if you’ve got something to bring to market, is there any point? Is there any way to cut through all this noise? Believe it or not, there is a way to break out from the pack. You truly can back up your unique product with an equally remarkable launch — a launch that, in and of itself, will be talked about. You probably already know that selling is about eliciting emotional triggers , not about making a logical case. So why leave those triggers to the sales page, when you can expand them to encompass your entire launch? Don’t just create a launch. Create a remarkable launch, using these seven core elements of psychological attachment: 1. Limited time frame I’m not talking here about using scarcity and imposing deadlines for purchase. That technique brings out a strong emotional response (fear of loss), and it’s already a defining characteristic of launches. Not enough marketers, though, use scarcity in their pre-launch buzz-building period. Release valuable free content that has a small window for consumption. Create the “want” for people to devour it, absorb it, embrace it before it goes away forever. Live events or webinars definitely fit the mold more so than anything else — if you make sure it’s “must see TV.” If your content is as remarkable as you make it out to be, people will be clamoring with anticipation. They’ll mark the date on their calendars and even start asking around if others are as eager to get their hands on it as they are. This is real buzz. Here’s the important kicker — you have to be fully committed to this ploy. If you’re holding a webinar, don’t post a recording afterwards. Let people know that if they miss out, it’s gone. Network television relied on this concept for decades to boost ratings, until the VCR (followed by the DVR) was developed and “must-see TV” turned into “will-probably-see-it-when-I’m-in-the-mood TV.” Use scarcity to your advantage and significantly improve your conversion rates on the pre-launch content you create. 2. A unique movement Think of your pre-launch material not so much as a series of independent events and more as a story with a single compelling theme. Beginning, middle, end, and everything in-between, take your readers on an emotional roller coaster. Make them feel as if they’re getting a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece. Let them construct the final picture by the completion of your launch cycle. Cult culture doesn’t just appear overnight. But a compelling story that unfolds over time is one of the most effective techniques there is to turn your audience into radical brand evangelists. 3. The joy of sharing Bloggers are often perplexed at what actually makes a piece of content “go viral.” It’s more than a powerful headline . It’s more than offering a high-quality pillar resource. And it’s definitely not pure luck. Content goes viral simply because it’s as fun (or even more fun) to share than it was to originally consume. Humor often fulfills this requirement better than any other type of content. A joke is one of the few constructs in which the person delivering it gets as much satisfaction making others laugh as the one receiving this pleasure. Any semblance or perception of “insider” information also does the trick. How hard do you find it to keep a juicy nugget of a secret? If you’re like most of us, you just can’t resist the temptation to pass it along. Releasing highly informative pre-launch material isn’t, by itself, “worth talking about.” It’s often the case that a light-hearted video of virtual “fluff” gets spread much, much more than anything else. How else could you explain this YouTube video getting nearly 47 million views? 4. Audience participation Improvisational comedy groups form the basis of their art on this single concept. By focusing solely on the input of their audience, they’re creating a once-in-a-lifetime unique moment . The performance is not about them. It’s about us. The quality of our experience rests upon our shoulders. We directly affect the outcome — and we know it. Creating this effect in your launch has to go beyond comments or contests. Find creative ways to shape your pre-launch content based on prospective customer input. Invite a small segment of your audience as guests on a webinar. Interview a random reader on your blog. Find any way you can to showcase other people in your own product’s launch cycle. Let your audience be creators as much as customers. 5. Extreme consistency Let’s conduct a simple test. Answer these two questions: What is the exact date of Christmas next year? What is the exact date of Easter next year? I’m figuring you easily responded “December 25th, silly” to the first one. But were you able to state the second one without checking a calendar? The date for Christmas is memorable because it’s consistent. Product launches often build anticipation by drilling a set date into a prospect’s head. That specific time and place become part of the prospect’s future plans, a mark on their calendar. Why not use this technique for your pre-launch content as well? Create a routine — a release schedule that can be relied on like clockwork. Instead of just one specific date and time to place in people’s minds, let people anticipate high-quality content on a predictable schedule. Make your pre-launch content into an addictive habit that ends with the purchase of your product. 6. The bandwagon effect Everyone wants to hang out at the hippest nightclub, even if the wait is two hours to get through the door. If there’s something everyone is clamoring about, it hard to fight the urge to experience for yourself — even if it’s just so you can be part of the conversation. The flip side of that coin is that no one wants to be the only person who signs up. Most of us are afraid of the potential ridicule in making a poor decision or supporting an unpopular position. Build the sense of popularity in your target audience by strategically stacking your content. A themed series of posts is a great way to accomplish this. Leverage your audience from the first piece to create buzz for the second, and so forth. As more and more prospective customers climb on board, it increases your “buzz” exponentially, day after day, as the appearance of a hot new trend comes heavily to the forefront. Nothing attracts more people than … more people! 7. Lasting addiction Why don’t people quit their bad habits? Usually, it’s because withdrawal is extremely uncomfortable. They don’t call it “buzz” marketing for nothing. You’re creating a nice little high for your audience, by deploying innovative, participatory content on a consistent schedule. That develops you as an addictive habit. At some point, this ends abruptly. The whole point of a launch is that the valuable pre-launch goodies come to an end and you offer a product for sale. Your product becomes the after-hours speakeasy when all the bars have closed for the night. It’s the only solution to cure those painful withdrawal effects. Nefarious? Maybe a little. But creating this irresistible urge for more is at the core of good viral marketing. The inoculation for launch fatigue Yes, more bloggers are coming out with really great new products and services. Yes, the market clutter and noise are becoming hard to cut through. But don’t let that be an excuse for why your own launch doesn’t live up to expectations. The responsibility lies squarely on your shoulders. Who says your launch has to be a me-too clone? Interrupt the pattern in your niche. Embrace and implement the psychological ploys of viral marketing to make not only your product, but your launch process itself, be something worth talking about. (And I’ll put my money where my mouth is. Check out the current Beyond Blogging Project launch . Can you point out examples of all the seven tactics I discussed in this post?) I’ll see you in the comments. About the Author: Jordan Cooper is professional stand-up comedian who rants about blogging, social media, and marketing at Not A Pro Blog . He is currently the community manager at the Beyond Blogging Project .

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It’s the Simplicity, Stupid

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I’m a cartoonist. This is my tenth year blogging. My work has been mentioned in big media including Wall St. Journal , Financial Times , New York Times , and The Guardian . It’s been mentioned in bestselling books like Groundswell and Tribes . And it’s been mentioned on thousands of blogs, including many of the big, A-Lister ones. That’s all well and good, I suppose. We artist types can use all the PR we can get. But looking back, it occurs to me that none of that “hot PR media action” has moved my business forward nearly as quickly or effectively as this one simple thing: My newsletter subscribers telling their friends about my newsletter, and suggesting that they sign up. No, really, that’s it. That is the money shot. When that happens, my business grows, end of story. More traditional media PR … well, that can work, sometimes. You never know. The results are always foggy at best, and it’s always a lot of voraciously time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass work to make something happen. And even then, it may not actually increase sales . I know getting mentioned in huge media outlets is sexy and all, but seriously, hear me out. I’ve been at this for a while. Traditional PR works, when it works. Most of the time though, it doesn’t. Same with traditional advertising. But my list telling their friends — that never fails. Ever. Make it easy Another thing I’ve learned the hard way is: I cannot make my subscriber list tell their friends about the newsletter, no matter how hard I try to apply my Jedi mind tricks. All I can do is make it easy for them to share . All I can do is make it as friction-free as possible. So this is what I did to achieve that: I created a simple link on the bottom of the newsletter. Hello from Hugh: Please share this link with your friends. If their friends get the link and click on it, the page has a personal message from me. Hello! One of your friends sent you the link to this page, and so here you are. Welcome! My name is Hugh. I’m a cartoonist. I have a newsletter, “ Hugh’s Daily Cartoon ,” which I send out five mornings a week. A wee chuckle in your inbox, to start your day off on the right foot (so to speak). I hope you will subscribe. That’s it. Nothing fancy. Nothing complicated. Just a short and sincere message from me. I also threw in a few cartoons, just to give them something fun to read, other than my sales pitch. A recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a hundred media recommendations. It’s the simplicity, stupid If my subscribers aren’t telling their friends, I’m doing something wrong, end of story. If I’m not making it as easy and friction-free as possible to get my list to tell their friends, I’m doing something wrong. You read Copyblogger, you’re a member of The Third Tribe , and you probably read a bunch of other savvy marketing folks. Great! They have a lot of killer stuff worth knowing about. Tons of it. But just for a minute, forget all that and let me ask you two simple questions: Is your list telling their friends about you? I mean, really telling them? Have you made it as easy and friction-free as humanly possible for your list to tell their friends? Until you can honestly say “Yes” to both questions, you have a severe marketing problem that no cutting-edge marketing theory — Copyblogger’s or anyone else’s — will ever solve. About the Author: Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist who blogs over at gapingvoid.com. He makes his living by selling fine art prints , doing Cube Grenade commissioned art work and sending out daily cartoons on Hugh’s Daily Frickin’ Newsletter.

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It’s the Simplicity, Stupid