Haters, Self-Promotion, & Lead Generation WPCP: 127
After almost 9 years in this business there are some things I think I’ll never wrap my head around.
One of those things is the ‘haters’ out there.
Those people who get bent out of shape by something that is absolutely NOT worth the energy they expend.
Take a look at the screenshot below, which is what spurred this discussion about haters:
WHOA!
Settle down there tiger…
I’ve been emailing much more frequently than I ever have before (almost daily).
I am a customer of Ben Settle’s email players and without a doubt this strategy has worked wonders for my business. I’ve talked about it a bunch of times on the show so I’m not going to go into detail about it here again, but I will tell you that it works. My engagement rate, sales, affiliate sales, social connections… have ALL improved.
Here’s another response I got to this same method:
I received that email a couple months ago.
I’m glad I took a screenshot of it.
So now I have a choice… I can focus on the first email (whiners or snowflakes, as Ben Settle calls them), or I can focus on the second email. Clearly I’m going to focus on the second email.
We all know the line… “haters gonna hate”…
I simply cannot fathom getting so worked up about something like an email. Delete it, unsubscribe from it, don’t read it… it’s NOT a big deal. What these ‘haters’ don’t realize is their pissy behavior says WAY more about them than it does about me (or you).
I’m sharing this story for two reasons:
The first reason is because it’s kind of funny… and well, if you’re going to get bent out of shape and email me it’s quite possible I’m going to create content with your email. The second reason is to share that this happens to everyone. The more you put yourself out there, the more you share, the more you show up and do your thing the more likely it is that it’s going to rub someone the wrong way.
Regardless of your intention.
Thank them for the content and comic relief, then go about your day.
[divider top=”no” divider_color=”#e05455″ size=”1″ margin=”40″][divider top=”no” size=”2″ margin=”30″][/divider]Self-Promotion
This is probably one of, if not THE hardest thing I’ve had to overcome, work on, deal with… in my business.
Like… ever.
And I’m going to come right out and say that for some reason, unbeknownst to me, this seems to be a common problem for a lot of women. Men don’t seem to have as hard of a time with this concept (I know I’m generalizing, but trust me on this, k?). Take my friend Jon Perez as an example…
Jon has no problem promoting his stuff, blasting it everywhere and screaming from the rooftops that he’s written something, created something, or is selling something. His biggest challenge is having more time to do it all 😉 . Yet somehow with a full-time job, a wife and two small children he manages to grow his business and continue working towards the lifestyle he really wants.
I used to write a post, then share it and be done with it.
Every now and then I might share it again or respond to a comment, but for the most part, I figured I did my thing and didn’t want to ‘spam’ people.
Let’s stop and think about this for a minute.
What is the likelihood that everyone who follows you or is connected to you on your social platforms is going to see the ONE message you share at that exact moment?
Pretty slim to say the least.
I shared this in an email yesterday, but let me go into a little more detail with something I did yesterday and the results I’ve gotten (so far):
- First, I went to a couple landing pages for current lead magnets I have and added featured images as well as a twitter & Pinterest image (for Social Warfare)
- Next I scheduled them to be shared a few times with CoSchedule
- Then I added them to the ‘ReQueue’ feature in CoSchedule under the category WPChick Landing pages (right now I have 3 categories for ReQueue- content, podcasts & landing pages)
Within a couple hours of doing that I had about 7 opt-ins from ONE of the pages (I scheduled the other lead magnet for a later day in the week). Fast forward to the next morning and I’d received about 10 opt-ins from that page alone. This doesn’t include any other opt-ins. This is simply from taking the time to set this up correctly.
I will tell you that I had the landing pages created already (using Thrive Content Builder), but all in all this took me maybe an hour?
The other thing I’ve started to do is go back to older posts (I’m focusing on specific categories, ex: content creation) and adding content upgrades. You can see what I’m talking about in this post on WordPress + Content: The Foundation of Your Business .
I scheduled that to be shared and have already received an opt-in from that post as well (I use the free plugin Leadin by Hubspot, which has some crazy long name now. But if you search Leadin in the WordPress plugin repository you’ll find it. Leadin will show you where your subscribers are opt-ing in as well as the path /history of them on your site).
So in less than 24 hours I’ve added 10 new subscribers to my list simply by re-sharing and a little self-promotion.
Obviously you need to be providing value and doing more than sharing only your own stuff socially (which I’ve always done), but you should make sure you’re sharing your stuff as much, if not more.
You can also email your list older posts… don’t be afraid to send people back to good content, regardless of when you created it.
[divider top=”no” divider_color=”#e05455″ size=”1″ margin=”40″][divider top=”no” size=”2″ margin=”30″][/divider]Lead Generation
When I did my recent survey to my list I was truly surprised that lead generation was the #1 item that people wanted help with.
Mainly because I have way more people on my list that have a WordPress type of business (are designers, do WordPress sites, etc.) than I expected. I don’t know why this surprised me… I talk about marketing and WordPress. Business owners get that they need to market their business. I think because traditional direct response marketing terminology has seemed ‘taboo’ in the WordPress space I simply assumed people with WordPress businesses didn’t want that information.
Turns out it was more a case of the ‘squeaky wheel’…
The ‘anti-marketers’ (it’s dumb name, but I can’t think of anything else right now) who poo-pooed the typical marketing jargon or strategies were doing so because they didn’t like it. And in my armchair-psychologist opinion people tend to dislike things they don’t understand. When you really understand how something works you may have an opinion about it but the pissiness and negativity shift. Take it a step further and see what happens whey they actually apply these strategies (consistently and with a real desire to master the strategy)…they might even make MORE money and HELP more customers.
Novel idea, huh?
I can’t decide if I’m feeling feisty or just taking a stronger stance on this…
Every single business on the planet needs customers (notice I didn’t just say ‘subscribers’).
I don’t care if you’re a moving company, dentist, web designer or online marketer.
You need customers in order to stay in business.
Most customers start out as a lead.
Here’s where I think this space has gone a little sideways with lead generation (I’m referring to the internet marketing, blogging, social media, WordPress space overall).
Too many options.
Here me out on this… because you know I’m hardly one to complain about new tools, apps or plugins.
The problem is you have to have a foundation working FIRST before you can jump into more complex strategies.
Take the entire model /concept of a funnel (love it or hate it, the word ‘funnel’ is here to stay).
Funnels WORK. They increase sales, drive more leads, and automate a TON of work.
But a funnel isn’t going to work if you can’t get your basic opt-in converting on your site.
If you’re not building an audience, connecting with people and providing value, you better have a boat load of money to spend on paid traffic in order to get a funnel to work.
Here’s what I would do if I wasn’t converting subscribers and was struggling with lead generation (and by the way, if you’re just reading this, listen to the episode because I go into more detail on each of these elements):
- Talk to my audience (email, social, skype, phone… just start talking to people)
- Change my lead magnet
- Set up a couple landing pages
- Send traffic to these landing pages
- Measure which page is converting
- Tweak and test again (try a different headline, name for the lead magnet, etc.)
Site Audit:
- Where is your primary opt-in offer on your site?
- Homepage? Posts? Sidebar? Exit pop-up?
- Content upgrades: where can you add a content upgrade with your primary opt-in offer?
- Do you have posts that you can convert to lead magnets for content upgrades?
- Are you split testing headlines? I use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to create headlines & the Thrive Headline Optimizer to split test headlines
Do ALL of this FIRST before you even think of spending a penny on paid traffic. I only run Facebook ads (I don’t have the time, energy or desire to learn anything else right now) but I can guarantee you I wouldn’t do any paid lead generation until I knew that people wanted the lead magnet I had created and it was converting well on my site.
Make sense?
Which brings me to what I forgot to share with you guys last week.
LeadSurveys.io
This is the web app I’m working on with Gordan Orlic that I forgot to mention a couple weeks ago (I swear I write these posts out before I record them).
I am BEYOND excited about this.
I absolutely LOVE the idea of a web app (in general, not as opposed to a WP plugin). Being the nut I am about tools, apps and plugins this idea was born from something I wanted and tried pretty diligently to find.
If you want to hear what the app will do you’re going to have to listen to the episode (although I’ll be writing quite a bit more about this), but it will be a a beautiful way to collect leads through a simple survey (that doesn’t require you to be some crazy, ninja funnel master) while segmenting your new subscribers.
You don’t need to come up with an involved quiz, which, as fun as they are, can be a road block.
We’re hoping to have the first version available for testing in mid-January. We’ll be doing a lifetime offer for founders (one price for life) for 100 people. The plans for this app are pretty phenomenal (although I will tell you that Gordon has had to reign me in a bit for version 0… all of this is pretty new to me in terms of a minimum viable product, but it’s still going to rock).
Sign up for notification of LeadSurveys by clicking the button below:
[button url=”https://leadsurveys.io” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#2f90a1″ size=”10″ radius=”5″]LeadSurveys Notification[/button] [divider top=”no” divider_color=”#e05455″ size=”1″ margin=”40″][divider top=”no” size=”2″ margin=”30″][/divider]Links from this episode
CoSchedule
Thrive Leads
Leadin by Hubspot
