Call phones from Gmail for FREE to the US & Canada. Learn more at gmail.com/call I have already received the call icon in my Gmail account and made several calls. Make Phone Calls From Gmail My gmail phone account automatically syncs with my Google Voice account ANI which shows my name & phone number in Caller ID on calls I place from Gmail. Cool!
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Call Phones From Your Gmail Account
I got a call from a woman in a rural part of my state inquiring about a product she had bought. Since I don’t sell to consumers directly, I knew she had the wrong number but decided to try and help her anyway. After several rounds of questioning, I determined she had reached me because the company she bought from had a similar name as my business. I asked her if the company was located in our state and she said no – it was located in Wisconsin. I asked why she called my number she said because the names were similar and because she thought she might be able to reach a branch of the Wisconsin based company here locally. I then spent several minutes convincing her I had nothing to do with the company and asked her where she bought their product from. She answered – online. I then asked for the web address of the business. She gave me a couple of incorrect domain addresses and then finally produced the correct domain. I won’t publish the domain address here because I don’t want my site to show up for any searches for their similarly named business. Typing in the address brought up the following page and product offer: Mailing Brochures From Home Yep… the stuffing envelopes / mailing brochures business “opportunity” is alive and well – it has just moved online. Unbelievably and in the age of instant access to information – businesses like the one above are still out there plying their wares. Seeing the website confirmed what I had expected throughout the duration of the phone call. I decided I would see if I could find a phone number behind the website and did. I also discovered the same company had over 1,000 domains all apparently selling the same business opportunity. I gave the caller the phone number and suggested she call it. Whether she called it and reached anyone – I don’t know. Whether she learned anything either – I don’t know. However, I did learn something from her call – one of the oldest offline “business opportunities” around apparently is alive and well… online.
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The “Business” Opportunity
Five reasons? There may be seven thousand reasons why your newsletter won’t get the response you’re looking for. Most of those reasons have the same common problem, though: readers just don’t like it. And that’s probably because you’re making one of these five mistakes. Mistake # 1: Your newsletter isn’t helpful This is a big one. My wife signed up for a newsletter on Ayurveda, thinking she would get some helpful articles and ideas on a topic she was very interested in. All she ever got was a whole bunch of promotional stuff. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You know very well that non-stop shameless self-promotion doesn’t exactly endear you to others, and of course you’d never make every single newsletter into a pitch. Because you’re a Copyblogger reader, you know that your content has to be useful or it won’t get read. Yet most folks can’t help themselves. They mean to write something useful, they mean to be helpful, but they end up being self-promotional because it’s easier . It’s easier to say “Yoga class on Friday, 17th December” than it is to write yet another article about yoga. So they wind up being self-promotional by default — and since it was the easier option, they don’t think of it as being unhelpful to their readers. That doesn’t mean the readers don’t see it that way, though. Mistake #2: Your voice isn’t particularly compelling Voice is not everything, but it sure counts for a lot. When you speak to a friend over the phone, they sound excited and vibrant. Ask them to put down their feelings on paper and you often find what they’ve written just doesn’t sound like them. Their voice doesn’t show up in their writing, and that means their writing doesn’t really convey how they feel. Every artist, singer, and yes, writer has a signature voice . This voice needs to be authentic. If you’ve tried and failed to find your voice before, put down the pen and Skype a friend. Get them to ask you questions about the topics you’ll be writing about in your newsletter — recording every word, naturally. Then just blab away, and transcribe what you’ve said. I know this method sounds tedious. But it’s quicker than slaving over a boring newsletter that takes you two days to write, and still winds up completely devoid of voice. Voice matters. And you have one — you just have to get it on paper. But tone alone won’t save the day. Mistake # 3: You’re not telling stories Many people think their newsletter has to be full of perfectly organized and structured articles — and since they don’t know how to create those kinds of articles, they get frustrated and stuck when they’re trying to write. Structure isn’t the way to create a great newsletter. Stories are. As human beings, we’re entranced by stories from an early age. Start with stories about your clients. Write about what you’ve experienced in your industry and your thoughts about it. When you’re trying to elicit response, nothing gets your readers engaged like the color and drama of a good story. And how do you finish? Tell the moral of the story — just like you would in a real story. Explain what you learned or what you should have learned or what someone else could learn from this experience. The moral of the story also does double duty as the springboard for your call to action. Which brings us to Mistake # 4. Mistake # 4: You have a half-hearted call to action This week, you need to fill up your yoga class. In your newsletter, you’re going to ask a customer to write back or comment. You need that customer to respond. You can’t hope they will — you have to ask them to do it. You have to be pretty darned clear what you want them to do, too. Just saying “please respond” is far too vague. Your customers don’t know exactly what you want them to do or how to do it. Do you want them to click on a link? Tell them to click here (and also tell them why). Do you want them to write back and tell you you’re a god/goddess/schmuck? Use the words “just click reply to email me back and tell me I’m a god/goddess/schmuck.” Do you want them to buy? Tell them . Most folks just hope their customers will act on their own. And their customers mostly don’t — because they’re too busy to figure out how you want them to respond. You need to tell them. Just a little nudge will do. Of course, none of this will work if you’re a complete stranger. Mistake# 5: You don’t have a specific frequency Switch on your TV at 6 pm. What do you see? In most countries, it’s the evening news. And every evening it’s the same old news, but hey it’s consistent. Most newsletters aren’t. If you’re going to write a newsletter, then you’ve got to have a publishing schedule. You have to promise your readers that your newsletter will go out once a month, or twice a month or three times a week — whatever it may be. Your newsletters can’t go to Bermuda on vacation. They’re doing all the grunt work for you. Our newsletter has gone out since 2002 and has done so week after week without any stoppage. You want to stop? You are ill? Sorry mate, but that won’t wash well with your readers. Imagine the TV station canceling the news because some newsreader didn’t turn up. One of the big reasons for the lack of response is that your newsletter is a stranger to your readers. You can’t send them a newsletter whenever you feel like it and hope they’ll respond. Response is directly related to frequency. Muck up on frequency and the rest of the four points don’t even matter. So there you have it: Pure self-promotion won’t work — make it useful. Your tone of writing is critical. Record yourself if you have to, but connect with your own unique voice. If you can’t get your head around structure, use customer stories. Don’t be half-hearted about promotion — give a strong call to action. Without consistent frequency, your customers will forget who you are even if you do everything else right. Newsletters are a lot of work. There’s no point in doing them unless you see the response you’re looking for. And avoiding these five big mistakes will perk up your response in a hurry. About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free article on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter . Be sure to check out his blog , too. P.S. Have you checked out Internet Marketing for Smart People , the Copyblogger email newsletter? It features a free 20-step course that will build your business, so you really should click here and subscribe .
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5 Reasons Why No One Is Reading Your Email Newsletter
More subscribers. More traffic. More followers. It’s easy to get caught up in the race for more. More is better, right? We all want our businesses and blogs to grow. But not all growth is ideal or even beneficial. Sometimes blind growth can be harmful. More contacts and more eyeballs doesn’t always mean better eyeballs . Would you rather have 1,000 people’s eyes completely glued to everything you do, or 100,000 with an attention span rivaling a fruit fly on amphetamines? More traffic isn’t always better either. New traffic is great, but if 99% leave without subscribing or taking some kind of desired action, does it really matter? Wouldn’t you rather have a few new followers join you every day as lifelong customers, than a few thousand who window-shop and quickly move on? How big is “big enough?” Have you thought about this? Incredible size easily leads to overwhelm of too many good ideas . I’m sure there are quite a few “big people” out there who wish their businesses were smaller and simpler. It’s not that growth is bad Growth is natural. If your product or service is first-rate, if your content is terrific, if you spend lots of time building quality relationships, and if you learn to effectively promote yourself, you’re going to grow. But we could always do more. We hit one milestone number and immediately we start wishing for the next. We have this idea that in order to be successful we need to be as big as possible. So is that really true? I don’t think so. Charlie Gilkey has a blog of just over 3,000 subscribers. And with this relatively “small” following, he has had no problem carving out a niche for himself helping creative entrepreneurs launch and develop their products. He regularly partners with peers who have five times or more the size of audience he has. Adam Baker runs another profitable, agile business with a few thousand subscribers. He’s managed to stay lean enough to travel the world with his family while he runs his business. Yusuf Clack has built a successful business by targeting a small niche and speaking to them in a way that no one else has. He doesn’t have a huge online following. But he has a passionate one. These are just a few of the many people out there who are doing quite well with a relatively small but highly engaged audience. How exactly do you make this work? Instead of playing for numbers, you play for depth. Think knock-out punches instead of a torrent of annoying fly-swatting jabs. Okay, maybe that’s a bad analogy, you don’t make friends by hitting them in the face. How about if I just tell you a few ways to deepen your reach? Do less, better. It’s much easier to make an impression when you focus on doing a few key things incredibly well. Become known for helping people by doing something amazing. Create high-value products and services. If your product price range is under $20, you’ll have to move a ton of inventory. But if you focus on valuable, higher-priced products (like awesome consulting or private training) you won’t need as many clients. Make more intimate connections. You can create a deeper connection with someone in a five-minute phone call than you can in five months of twitter conversation. The more you can connect on the phone and in person, the better, and the more likely you’ll create relationships that go beyond the surface level. Build a referral based business. When your focus is on people (not just numbers), more people will want to refer you to their friends and peers. This means you need to offer excellent customer service and you need to always exceed expectations. Also, if you have a service or product that complements someone else’s, it will be a natural fit for them to refer their people to you. Make yourself accessible. So many people create unnecessary distance between themselves and the people they help. They have filters, gate keepers, and barriers to communication. One benefit of staying small is it’s much easier to engage with your audience. Show that you’re someone who really cares and wants to help. The more you do that, the greater depth of connections you will build. The more you focus on depth, the more you realize that breadth is only relevant to a point. If you become obsessed with growth for its own sake, it can be hard to keep perspective. Sometimes being small is just fine. Sometimes, in fact, it’s fantastic. About the Author : Jonathan Mead is a martial artist and self development writer. He just released a guide called The Dojo that helps you get amazing things done before most people finish breakfast.
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How to Build a Successful Business With a Small Audience
From comScore: In April 2010, 69.6 million mobile users accessed an application on their phone, an increase of 28 percent from the previous year. Several application categories experienced triple-digit growth in the past year, emphasizing the increasing popularity of this method as a form of mobile content access. Social Networking experienced the strongest growth in app access, increasing 240 percent to 14.5 million users. Accessing News apps followed, growing 124 percent to 9.3 million users, while Sports Information apps experienced a 113-percent surge to nearly 7.7 million users. Bank Accounts apps also more than doubled their audience, growing to nearly 5 million users in April. Social Networking Via App
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Social Networking App Audience More Than Triples in Past Year