Archive for Marketing
Aweber and Making Sense of Data
Posted by: | CommentsWhich ever auto-responder you use, too much data is a problem common to all of us and is peculiar to the wonderful digital age that we live in.
In the good old days where data had to be hand compiled. it was by the nature of the process personalised into meaningful information as it was being sorted.
In the digital age, there is no such personal touch and reams of data can be generated and presented to you in wonderful looking tables and graphs in seconds, all of this information leaves you fully informed but none the wiser.
My list has grown quickly over the last 2 weeks and as I have been away on holiday for one of those, I have only started to look at the pretty graphs and tables.
I know I need to look at my open and click through rates and I have done this but how to make them better in a controlled manner?
I have found the solution and it is all contained in one graph
When you go into Aweber reports, look for the graph report that is shown, this is called ‘Followup Totals’ and ensure that you open it for the list you want to examine.
The reason that I think that this report is the key to your success is for the following reasons:
As you can see all of my rates fell after the first message, in fact there were some messages that did not even get opened, some were opened but the links were ignored.
You will see a data table below your graph and it is this that holds the key to improving your list response.
Hopefully some of your subject lines were intruiging enough to encourage your subscribers to open the message, but what happened with the next message, did this get opened also? If not, was the subject line on a new topic or did it build on the success of the last message.
My list response followed this pattern, some messages were opened and then the next was completely blanked, perhaps because there was no continuity between messages.
Using this report it is very easy to see where the fail points are in your message series and by using the power of continuity you can turn this failure into a success. Use this continuity to increase your reader engagement by taking them on a journey of discovery that feels like a path rather than a random series of bunny hops from one topic to the next.
Once you have dealt with the subject lines, how does the message link compare to the last one that was followed through?
What was it that encouraged them to take action and follow your link and, of course once at the destination did they actually complete the transaction?
Try using the same inspiring language around your message link and see what happens in a couple of days, as this message will have by this time, been sent to another subscriber, how did they respond, better or worse?
Always build on your success and use this to develop a series of messages that your list likes, if you have one click on either the message or its contents then that is a success that can be improved.
By the very nature of your optin page and the mindset that it creates, you are attracting your own special group of people with their own tastes and expectations, this is why no 2 lists are identical.
Good luck with your list building and I would love to hear about any of the other Aweber reports that you have found really useful.
A Flash Back to Early Days
Posted by: | CommentsYesterday my daughter asked if my PC had a web-cam, funny really as it turns out that the computer that I gave her does not have one. However as they are currently dismantling it as we speak, their next one will have.
Children a team of modern day hyper efficient recyclers.
She had sown the seed of curiosity and I noticed that I do have a web-cam, so I had a play and noticed that there are loads of graphic overlays and viking hats?
Then I spotted it, the overlay that made me think of how I felt when I started out online.
In 2006, when I started. The Intern
et Marketing world was more like a wild west land grab with very few rules and even fewer morals. Every marketer would use any technique to get their list built and double opt-in was for those that were a little strange.
This was also the time of the day hire red Ferrari and the ladies in bikinis, if your sales page did not follow this formula then you obviously were not really interested in success.
Thankfully we have moved on from this, yet this image brought back how I felt at that time.
As I was being marketed to relentlessly by everyone under the sun. I honestly thought that there must be a room somewhere in the world where people are placing bids on me.
‘Who wants igor, he signs up for everything!’
This was unfortunately the truth and there are still 2 to do folders on this PC with Gigabytes of courses, guides, sales offers and whatever else passed my browser during those early days.
The scary thing is that this room did exist!
I was sent an offer where all of the top marketers were present. One of them did a sales pitch to encourage you to upgrade to their full offer, I think it was Andrew fox. Anyway I passed on that offer, as I still had no clue as to what the core offer was at this point. When I finally got into the members area, I realised I had found the theatre where all the top people hung out.
This was no normal theatre there were marble columns everywhere and even the walls were made of marble and this was all offset by a lovely seaside sunset, no wonder they wanted to hang out there!
The first marketer to offer their services was Mike Filsaime.
Then I was told what the offer was all about, he offered to build me a list as long as I used Aweber to do it.
Well I was determined not to use Aweber as I was scared by their price escalator, thus I turned this offer down. I was happy with Trafficwave anyway, thank you very much and I bid you all farewell.
Well mission complete I had found the theatre where the top marketers were lurking and bidding on names.
Thankfully the market has calmed down now, the Ferrari was returned, the ladies all went into motor racing and double optin became the industry standard.
However as a final thought I did switch over to Aweber, primarily because in 2010 I realised I needed a mentor and he was using Aweber.
Trafficwave by the way, is still a great auto-responder, with one of the best tracking systems that I have come across.
Beginners often complain that the system they are studying is rubbish, it does not work. When asked if they are following it correctly, they reveal that they have been mixing it with a couple of other training schemes, I know because that was me!
However this time I was going to do it right and thanks to Alex Jeffreys and Sterling Valentine I have progressed farther in the last 6 months than I did in the last 4 years.
It would be interesting to know what happened to that marble theatre?
Time for a new Format
Posted by: | CommentsThis is the first post on the relaunched WordPress version of this site and it nearly never happened, because thanks to Simon leung I have been focused on building the igor Griffiths brand.
However this was my first domain and it was initially used for ebay promotion, but times moved on and I no longer wanted to stand in the mail queue waiting to deliver parcels, so I found a pursuit that matched my desires.
Information marketing
Avelcomms.co.uk was originally written in Html which was fine, however I begun to hate fiddling with code and missing brackets or slashes, so the update rate fell away
Why did I not kill the domain?
For some reason Google has kept this site at a page rank of 2 even though the content today is much diminished from what it was before.
This site has been up for 4 years and I learnt the hard way about the dangers of moving hosts and the real dangers of losing content.
So what is information marketing and why is it so hard for technicians
As a group, technicians are involved in getting things working, not kind of working, but working fully.
Marketers are however focused on getting things to market as soon as possible and if it has an imperfection, as long as it is not dangerous, that’s fine as it offers an opportunity to market a new and improved version.
So this is the focus of this site, what works for marketing and why I know it works.
No more stupid I make a million dollars in the time it takes you to drive to work articles.
If I have done it, I will tell you and of course if I can convince some of my friends to talk about their proven systems, then they are more than welcome to take the stand.
Information is cheap and powerless
Application of that information may cost time, but it has the power to change lives.
PS Do not tell tell this to your friends.
If a marketer does their job right, the customer will demand they they take their money.
I mentioned this to a friend and we nearly ended up fighting, my friend was insistent that he was in control of his emotions…he owns an Iphone by the way.
