Automation

By Norio De Sousa

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Have you automated your business yet?

Think back to when you started down this “business” road. What did you envision for yourself?

Was it a) working 14 hours days or was it b) having more time for yourself and your family?

Was it a) having to work for every dollar you earn or was it b) having systems in place that earned you money whether you came to work or not?

Was it a) eating lunch at your computer because you have so much to do or was it b) going out for lunch and golf half way through the day because your business runs itself?

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Development

By Norio De Sousa

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Andre Chaperon (creator of the “Soap Opera Sequence” course, “Autoresponder Madness” & internet marketing course, “Tiny Little Businesses”), one of my personal marketing “heroes”, says:

“Norio is a ninja, I can vouch for that.”

Jason Henderson (email marketing juggernaut for the last 18+ years and creator of the “Email Response Warrior” course) said in an email referring one of his clients to me:

“He’s the best programmer I’ve ever worked with and use him currently.”

Hector Yague (project admin of WebinarJam) replied to a post on Facebook, talking about my involvement in the integration between InfusionSoft and WebinarJam:

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Conversion

By Norio De Sousa

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Best way to track which of your paid campaigns is making you the most money?

Google Analytics plus UTM tags all the way! Here’s how…

• Set up Google Analytics.
• Enable e-Commerce tracking in the settings.
• Set up Google Analytics e-Commerce tracking in your shopping cart. This will give you detailed reporting about what sources, pages, etc are making you money.
• Set up a Facebook Ad.
• Add in UTM tags. (see below for examples)

Here’s an example for an ad on Facebook where the ad has a picture of a lady in a red shirt and is promoting a blog-post series you might internally call “Weight Loss Series Xmas” and is targeting the FB interest “Health & Weight Loss”

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Conversion

By Norio De Sousa

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Here’s a way to encourage more of your clients to commit to your business, long-term, with “decoy” pricing. It’s something I learned about a while ago but I just saw an example of it in action and it was really sweet. Made me think of you.

Adobe has monthly and annual pricing for their apps. You can pay $29.99 a month or $19.99 a month. Only difference is that for $29.99 a month, there’s no contract. They can cancel at any time. And at $19.99 a month, there’s a contract. They have to stick with you for a year.

So it’s kinda like “rewarding” clients for committing to working with you for a year. Those that don’t commit have to pay a whopping 50% more per month. That’s quite an incentive to commit.

“No contracts” is often a selling point (that your competition might be using) for monthly payment options but what Adobe have done here is made their contract option WAY more appealing by comparing it side-by-side with a more expensive “no contract” version.

The key lesson is that you don’t have to “cave in” to pressure from your competitors who offer “no contracts” as a benefit. You can still give your customers a “no contracts” options but in such a way that they actually change their minds about what they want and take the option that serves you and them better.

The “no contracts” price becomes a sort of “decoy” price here. Sure you’ll get some folks who will still take it. But I’ll bet they’re the minority by a mile.

You can achieve 2 things by starting to do this today:

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Development

By Norio De Sousa

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WebinarJam is powerful webinar hosting software used by Internet Marketing Legends like…

• Jeff Walker
• Frank Kern
• Andy Jenkins (co-founder)
• Mike Filsaime (co-founder)
• Russell Brunson
• Eben Pagan
• Rich Schefren
• Ed Dale
• etc

But they had an InfusionSoft problem…

They wanted to fix it so that when someone registered for a client’s webinar, they (WebinarJam) could add the contact to InfusionSoft, along with some tags. Same thing when that contact entered the live webinar room, or watched the replay video, etc.

They had a programmer working on the InfusionSoft integration but they were having problems getting it to work. It had been weeks and they had a launch coming up.

Time was running out.

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Conversion

By Norio De Sousa

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“Mr R” was in trouble. His top converting lander beat his next-best pages 9 to 1. Until Chrome stopped autoplaying his Flash video of a Doctor endorsing his product. You know the type: transparent background, pretty lady, white lab-coat. Those things work like gangbusters.

9 to 1! It’s a huge kick in the nuts to lose that kind of performance. Chrome owns around 30% of the market.

So “Mr R” emailed me in a panic:

“So you recall in our checkout page we had the Doctor flash vid that showed? Well, then Chrome doesn’t autoplay flash any longer and it just shows a grey box. Probably only a matter of time before the other browsers follow suit.”

“Well, that damn thing converts at 9 to 1 so I need to find a solution. Figure you were the man to talk to. I need a clever quick solution.”, he wrote.

Bleeding money every hour of every day isn’t fun.

But trying to copy what he had going with Flash wasn’t going to be easy. Doing it right would cost $4k and take some time. “Mr R” didn’t have time.

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WordPress

By Norio De Sousa

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These plugins make life easier. There are other critical plugins for SEO and performance that I’ve left off this list because they’re boring. That doesn’t mean you don’t need them. Just that I don’t care to write about them today 😉

1. Thrive Visual Editor. Even a “design idiot” like me can make pretty landing pages with this thing. You just pick a template and edit. It even comes with nifty things like lead forms and complete webinar registration funnels. I always feel like a marketing idiot, except when I’m using Thrive.
2. Gravity Forms. From simple contact forms to complete survey funnels, this is my weapon of choice when it comes to asking people to fill out a form. It’s easy to use for the simple stuff but still powerful enough for the advanced stuff. And if you can program a little or you know a programmer (like me, hint hint) then you can do some bat-shit crazy-cool stuff with it. For example, you can show just 1 question at a time and make it so that clicking one of the multiple-choice options in your survey makes it go to the next question automagically which means a lower abandonment rate.
3. Pretty Links Lite. I use this for all my affiliate links so that they’re short and, well, “pretty”. It’s super-easy to use but it’s also pretty damn powerful. For example you can turn on URL parameter forwarding and your single affiliate link can now be used with a bunch of subids for advanced tracking without the mess. Much cleaner than creating a billion different redirect links – one for each subid.
4. Custom Page Labels. If you create funnels or do split-testing of any kind, you need this plugin. It lets you give each page or post a “Custom Label” which is different than the title. So if you’re split-testing 5 pages and they all have the same title, you can still tell them apart.
5. Disqus Comments Plugin. This is just a great way to increase your chances of getting comments because folks don’t have to fill in their name and email with each comment. They can just reply and hit “Save”. Done.

Maybe, if you ask real nice, I’ll tell you all about the “critical but boring” plugins you should be using.

Conversion

By Norio De Sousa

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Akamai and Gomez.com surveyed web users and found that:

• 47% expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 40% will ditch a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
• 79% who have trouble with a site say they won’t come back.
• And around 44% of them will tell friends about their crappy shopping experiences.

Each second counts towards your bottom line. So yeah. Speed kills.

And here are 3 (kinda surprising) essential things that are slowing your website down.

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Outsourcing

By Norio De Sousa

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If you’ve read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, then you know that you need to be working on your strengths, NOT your weaknesses. Because if you work on your weaknesses, you’ll improve a smidge. But if you work on your strengths, you could easily multiply your results 2x – 10x.

Tim’s not the first person to suggest that way of working. It’s an old idea. But we quickly forget it.

Recently, I found myself a “victim” of trying to work outside my natural skills. You see, I’m a programmer and I’m great at solving problems with code.

But sometimes I get asked to do things in a non-programmer way. And sometimes I oblige. Because I’m an idiot, I guess.

So I go ahead and bang my head against the wall, trying to fix things using tools I don’t have and, of course, I get nowhere.

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Conversion

By Norio De Sousa

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Imagine a mouth-watering steak, with baked potatoes on the side and a rich, brown gravy poured over it. Got the picture in your head? Feeling hungry? Good… read on.

To get to that steak, there are some steps you have to take. You can’t just wish it into existence. The steps you need to take are called a recipe. You are the cook. And it takes TIME before you can go from deciding you want a steak to eating the damn thing.

Your website works a bit like that. Each page has a “recipe” or a set of steps that the cook (the server) has to perform in order to make and present the meal (your web page). And every time you look at a page on your website, it takes some TIME for all this to happen.

But you’re hungry. So you wanna eat faster. So to make sure you can eat sooner, you might pre-cook the meal and just re-heat it when you’re hungry, right?

That’s kinda how file-caching works on your website. The steps to make the page have all been done and the page is ready to be served from a file. No need to wait for “cooking”.

But the meal is stored in the kitchen and you’re in the lounge, so it still takes time for you to get up and go get it. And you’re dying of hunger. You don’t wanna walk to the kitchen. You need to eat NOW!

What if I told you there was a faster way to get your meal? What if I said you could just “imagine” the food and it would be there, in front of you, ready to enjoy?

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