Puzzling Marketing Material

There’s a creeping kind of desperation spreading across some corners of the Internet Marketing world, which is resulting in some appallingly bad business writing. And the problem with bad business writing is that it turns off potential customers. I have recently received two stunning examples of poor business writing, both through the post, but both trying to sell me a course about Internet Marketing.

Back in the mists of time, perhaps 10 years ago, when the internet still had some mystique, there were plenty of examples of websites which had simply lifted written material from the printed page, and stuck it up on the net, without realising that we read differently when we are looking at a screen, as opposed to a piece of print.

Gradually people ‘got’ that you need shorter paragraphs for screen-reading, and you need to think about the dreaded ‘fold’ – the place where the screen cuts off the rest of the page below.

Internet Marketers also began to understand that online customers use different contact information. If I find you online and I like what you are selling, I will probably be happy to buy your stuff online, although a phone number is handy in case it all goes wrong, and my question isn’t answered in your FAQs. (On a point of order, how often do find your questions ARE answered in the FAQs?)

If I find you offline, I will probably want to buy in an offline way.

Because the Internet Market has become crowded of late, Internet Marketers are looking for alternatives. Three currently top the list: local area marketing (teaching people how to market to their locality), mobile marketing (getting at people when they are on their phones – a major growth area), and offline marketing. Yup, good ol’ snail mail. That’s why they want you to include your address when you sign up for that nice free webinar.

Unfortunately, people who are used to writing for the web haven’t realised that writing for an offline audience requires some different strategies. Neither of the examples I have mentioned above had a return address on the outside. The first one gave me no phone number, nor a postal address, nor even a contact name (although there was a photo of a guy who – I suppose – was sending me this material). Just a web site. But it’s offline marketing, for heaven’s sake! Give me offline tools.

What they had done was to print out their website copy and send it without editing it first. Including all the web site typos, poor grammar, hectoring tone, assumptions that I am like them and thus frustrated about life, and other  bits of general awfulness which managed to persuade me that there was no way in the world I would want to buy from them.

A couple of weeks later, I received the second example. Here the authors had attempted to do something different, and they had at least included a phone number, and the names of people for me to contact. The problem lay in what they had done. Photocopied handwritten sheets, purporting to be rough notes, advertising some seminar about internet marketing. You can see for yourself.

They Expect me To Buy This?

The handwriting, while very neat, was almost impossible to read, and the first page was too faint. They wanted £849 (that’s about $1100) for me to attend a 3-day seminar about niche marketing using the internet. As prices go, that’s not too bad, but they had done nothing to build trust with me, and their own marketing output was uncovincing. So when they promised ‘no pitch fest’, I didn’t believe them: I expected a lot of hard selling throughout the three days.

Writing good business copy isn’t easy, particularly if writing was never your thing at school. However, with patience, thought and application it’s perfectly possible. Internet Marketing may not be as easy as it used to be, but pushing bad online copy through peoples’ letterboxes isn’t going to generate sales.

If the people producing bad business copy don’t have a passion for it, or find it too time-consuming, then there are plenty of us who are willing either to teach them, or do it for them.

I’ve long been an advocate of  Martins Avis’ Kickstart newsletter. Now Martin has started to offer a brilliant series of PLR products. PLR – Private Label Rights is a way of buying pre-written copy and making it your own. Basically you are buying the rights to use the copy. It’s a technique used by a lot of Internet Marketers to create both site content and saleable products quickly and easily.

The downside of many PLR products is that they can be extremely badly written.  People often outsource the writing of these products to non-native English speakers without testing whether they are capable of stringing two sentences of intelligent English together. Martin – an excellent writer himself, works with his wife, Delia, who is a former English teacher, and also has a way with words.

Even when they do outsource, it will be to someone who is an expert is the topic. The results still get passed to Delia for editing.

Martin also provides software tools to help you ‘spin’ the articles and do keyword research. And there are other resources on the site to help you make money online using PLR.

Current, recent topics Martin and Delia are offering include: camping, Halloween, dating, weight loss and stop-smoking. He is also offering a hypnosis MP3 download you can offer alongside advice on stopping smoking.

To learn more, take a look at Martin’s PLR Membership Site. This link will also tell you how you can buy individual products if you don’t want the full membership service.

Depending on where you are in your online journey, you may or may not know what Google Analytics is. If you have a web site and you don’t know, then I really recommend you find out! GA or Analytics, as it’s affectionately known, is a great free Google tool which helps you understand who is visiting you web site, how often, and many other things besides. You need a gmail account to get at it, but that’s free. And once you have that, there is a whole world of handy little Google tools available which will help you with things like SEO and much more.

Now, if you DO have Analytics installed on your site, then you should definitely read this post from Leslie Samuel, guest blogging for Yaro Starak. In it, he talks about how to use GA to understand what people search for when they visit your site.  As he puts it, how to read the mind of your visitor: how to find out what visitors are interested in.

Mind you, I am still curious as to how s=kidney (and you’ll have to read the post to know what I am talking about!)

Currently, my little London garden is full of birds. A family of blue-tits is nesting on one side, and a wren family on the other.  The magpies are in full chatter in the early morning, the black birds dig for worms after the rain, and the occasional robin drops by. It’s a constant source of delight for me and for a neighbourhood cat who terrorizes the nester by lurking on a nearby roof and staring at them.

Watching the blue tits, I was reminded of a story from the business guru, Arie de Geus. He was one of the team of hot shots at Shell which brought Scenario Planning (the technique of asking off-the wall, what-if questions to help deal with business risk) to the attention of the business world. He’s also a personal hero of mine.

Some years ago I had the chance to go and listen to him speak at the London Business School. The talk was all about Knowledge management – how businesses can share and spread knowledge and learning across the organisation and beyond. I was beside myself with delight. The talk started slowly, and I found myself dozing, until I heard Arie mention that, in his research on Knowledge Management, one of the sources he had consulted was a specialist in bird behaviour, bird communication and how birds learn.

This sounded sufficiently quirky as to be interesting, so I paid attention.

According to the expert, different types of bird learn from each other in different ways. Before World War II, milk was delivered to homes in the UK in open containers. It was a common sight to see robins and blue-tits having a quick drink from the containers. Back then they didn’t do skimmed, or semi-skimmed. Milk choices were pretty much restricted to full fat, and the birds loved it.

After the war, the UK dairy companies moved over to supplying milk in bottles with a tin foil top. It was more hygienic, particularly as the mild bottles might site around on the door-step for several hours. At first the birds were foiled (excuse the pun), but the more enterprising ones soon figured out how to break through the foil and get back to their old habits.

Within a generation or two, in most areas across the UK, blue-tits could be found treating themselves to doorstep milk from these new bottles. I can remember my mother’s irritation when she went to take the mil in, only to discover the blue-tits had been there before her. But the robins failed to work it out.

The experts asked themselves why this might be. After all, both birds obviously liked milk, individuals in both species had learned how to deal with the new technology, yet only the blue-tits had gone nation-wide on breaking through the bottle tops.

They came to the conclusion that the reason for the differences in behaviour lay in the different social habits of blue-tits and robins. In the autumn, after the breeding season, blue tits flock and come together. New behaviours can be shared, and learning spreads quickly through the blue-tit population.

Robins, on the other hand, are solitary, territorial – even aggressive – little birds.  No flocking for them. The lonesome robin soldiers on, ignorant of how to deal with the new technology, and fiercely defending his right to stay apart from the rest.

I’m sure you know people who are like that too!

So here is the question, when it come to you and your business, are you a robin or a blue-tit? A flocker, or a solitary little bird? How do you develop your knowledge and stay ahead of the challenges and opportunities present by the new technology?

As  a follower of Perry Marshall, I really enjoyed his recent Ezine, ‘Google and your Ex-Wife’. It’s a humorous, racey read, but it makes the point clearly: if you think of Google as anything but a business tool, you are a sucker. Here are a few of Perry’s well-chosen words.

‘If you’re a thin affiliate, you don’t have a business. You have an unpaid market research internship at Google where you take all the risk and they gather all the intelligence. And store it permanently on redundant servers.

If you think Google is your Messiah, you’re just like the guy who thinks they built Vegas so he can make a fast thousand bucks this weekend. He’s gonna get screwed.

If you understand that Google is a TOOL, and only a tool – if you understand that it’s YOUR job to build a business that’s so irresistible that publishers everywhere are going to want to sell you traffic – then you’re going to be just fine.’

Ryan Deiss goes a step further – check out his video proposing that internet marketing as we know it is dead. Ryan reckons that ‘thin guys’ – that’s small advertisers – on Google and Facebook and the like will soon be squeezed out altogether. Google will stop selling direct to us, and we’ll have to go through a middle man. He predicts that the Internet will soon be ruled by 10 or so Walmart-like companies, and he uses some compelling arguments to back this up.

Add to all this the fact that Google have recently changed the rules of their algorithms so that SEO tactics which used to work no longer do, and we start to see see several new trends emerging.

What does all this mean for the business owner wanting to marketing online? If nothing else, it serves to emphasise the importance of having a really robust business model. If your whole online marketing strategy is geared at getting to number 1 on Google, you might want to question whether it’s really a good model.

I recently had an email from Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits, a highly successful entrepreneur turned online marketer and online business guru. Schefren talks a lot of sense about business models, and his argument is that content marketing (where you write loads of articles, and tweets and blogs) has its place, but is not a good strategy for generating leads.

Firstly because its time consuming, even if you use automated tools to propagate your message, which Rich counsels against. Secondly because – in his view- content marketing is best used to create credibility and though leadership, rather than to generate leads. SEO marketing to generate  leads is, in his view, a hugely mistaken application of resources.

It all adds up  – get the business model right and use the Internet to support it, not the other way round. Even if yours is an online business.

I’ve always been fascinated by business, and I’ve been advising business owners for most of my working life, so I enjoy TV reality shows with a business slant, like ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Restaurant Inspector’ (where an expert restauranteur turns round failing restaurants). But it was a recent episode of ‘The Hotel Insepector’ that really got me thinking.

On this show, the Hotel Inspector was helping a hotel owner who saw his hotel as being upmarket with a ’boutique flavour’. One of the questions Alex, the ‘inspector’, asked him was what his costs were. He had no idea, and could soon be seen phoning a supplier to find out the cost of bacon, saying ‘there’s a resident tyrant who says I should know what everything costs’. His approach to pricing was to decide what he thought the market would bear, and charge accordingly. Grumbling bitterly he made a half hearted attempt to gather the information needed, but soon got bored.

After giving him various tasks, the hotel inspector left him to it for a while. It quickly became obvious that the most important thing she had asked him to do – get his head round his accounts – was the last thing he had in mind.  He could be seen on his hands and knees polishing the floors, servicing the rooms, hoovering, doing the garden.  Anything except go near the accounts. ‘I don’t have time for that – I’m too busy, I do everything myself, and there are more important, urgent things to get on with.’

The sad thing is, his attitude is typical of many entrepreneurs and business owners. Back when I used to advise garages and gas station owners, I found that several of my customers simply stuck all their paperwork in a large box, unfiled, unsorted and unread, and handed the box to the accountants at the end of the year.

These tended to be the customers whose businesses lurched from crisis to crisis, and had to pay cash in advance for their tanker deliveries because the oil company couldn’t trust them.  The people who couldn’t understand that if you want to run a business, you need to understand basic business management principles, as boring as that may seem.  Either that or hire in someone who does have this knowledge.

And it’s just as important for business success in an online business as an offline, bricks and mortar enterprise.

Do you know what you should be measuring in your business? What do you measure? And how often? Do you know if you are making a profit or a loss, and by how much? How well do you understand concepts like working capital, cash flow, assets, liabilities and debtors? Do you know what a balance sheet is and why it is important?

If this all sounds likes gobbledygook to you, then do yourself a favour and get some basic training or coaching around business finance.  There’s plenty of good information to be found just by googling ‘free business finance information’. According to an article in USA Today, around 85% of businesses fail within the first year of existence. Some statistics suggest that it’s nearer to 60%, but even so, that is an awful lot of failure, and pain. So what’s the main reason small businesses fail? Because their owners don’t spend enough time understanding what they need to do to manage the businesses.

I’ve just installed FeedWordPress on the site to enable me to syndicate (fancy word for publish/copy) my blog from ecademy, rather than having to copy it over.  The theory is, I can publish in more than one plae at the same time, which gives me more ‘profile’.

So far, so good.

And to some extent it works. If you look at recent blogs, you will indeed see that the author of some of them is Jane Lewis’s blog at ecademy.  Take a closer look and you will see that the blogs seem strangely inconclusive.  This is because the feed is only bringing the first two paragraphs across!

So, I will be investigating further. Potentially FeedWordPress is a little gem, especially if, like me, you have more than one blog. But I’m not at all sure I want to publish half-blogs.

Watch this space.

A friend of mine, who lives in Bangkok, told me a good few years ago how the mobile phone was changing the nature of protest over there. It made protest possible, because people could organise without the authorities being wise to what was going on before it happened.

With the advent of Smart phones, people have access to a lot more information to assist them in organising a protest, particularly with Twitter and SMS, but that hasn’t stopped the successful use of techniques like kettling on the part of the police. A recent article in the Guardian dedicated quite a few column inches to a new innovation which is likely to change the face of protest altogether.

Yesterday I had to go to the Post Office. Our local Post Office is fabulously inefficient, so I always expect to spend a long time in the queue/line. But yesterday I was delightfully entertained and intrigued by a bizarre event.

When I arrived the line stretched back to the entrance, and a woman was seated on one of the chairs there holding an extremely loud conversation on her mobile phone about whether taking time off work to attend to your sick mother counted as holiday or compassionate leave.

Suddenly I noticed that the guy 3 or 4 places in front of me was also on the phone. When she spoke, he was quiet, and vice-versa. As I tuned into his conversation, I realised they were talking to each other. They were no more than 10 feet apart (that’s about 3 metres), and within ear and eye shot of one another. In fact they were gesticulating at one another as they were talking.

At one point she even put him on hold to receive another incoming call.

I’ve been a fan and follower of Frank Kern for some years now. The Man talks a lot of sense about internet marketing, and business in general. He’s made a fortune out of the internet, and even survived the dreaded Google Slap.  So when he has something to say it’s worth listening.

His latest State Of The Internet Address is 30 minutes of straight talking. His theme is optimism in business, via the value of offline marketing, the importance of levels of service and faster answers, and the three principles of building a business.  Attract quality leads, turn those leads into happy customers, and turn the happy cusotmers into repeat business.  He doesn’t tell you how, but he will tickel your brain cells.

Recommended New Year viewing!