Would you like to know how to go “James Bond” on your competitors?
If you could be a fly on the wall, and covertly find out WHY your competition is killing it online…wouldn’t you?
You’re gonna be a happy entrepreneur today then…cause this is actually pretty easy.
I made a video going over the 5 Steps I take to spy on the competition for my multi-million dollar celebrity clients. All the resources I chose to use in this video are totally FREE…so you can use them also.
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When I, Chris Cardell, do seminars for business owners who are new to my work, we’ll often have 500 entrepreneurs in the room. When I ask them to raise their hands if they currently advertise (in newspapers, magazines etc) we’ll normally see 450 hands go up.
I then ask the audience to keep their hands up if they’re certain that their advertising is working.
About 100 hands stay in the air.
Unbelievable. But true. Around 80% of business owners have no idea whether or not their advertising is working.
So why do they do it?
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In my last post, Secrets To Structuring Your Direct Mail Marketing Piece, I introduced you to the three things that must be accomplished in the opening of your direct mail piece. By way of review you must:
Now let me explain in more detail exactly what I mean.
An opening that can TELEGRAPH the offer is tricky. It has to convey the offer in a way that heightens desire to learn more rather than lessening the desire to learn more.
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The Shortcut to Generating Millions from Your Business
The constant struggle to produce marketing campaigns and run your business makes it difficult to get everything done. Planning is the only true shortcut to running a business which will generate millions of dollars for you.
Once you have completed your planning, you’ll be better able to stay on task, monitor your results, and implement new ideas during the upcoming year. Without a planning calendar, it’s easy to get distracted by a great new idea and forget about the ideas you had already planned to implement.
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I would like to talk about what is probably the most difficult aspect of direct mail marketing to teach. Of course, this is the actual structure of the mailing piece.
The reason it’s difficult is that direct mail is still not an exact science. There are many things we know about direct mail that have been established through scientific testing and statistical analysis but there is still a large portion of the process that relies on the intuition and knowledge of customers of the person creating the piece.
That’s why professional direct mail copyrighters with good track records can command extraordinary fees because it is impossible to identify and duplicate what they do. And even the top pros applying all their talent and experience have losers too.
So I’ll be the first to admit to you that I cannot teach you how to be certain of putting together a successful direct mail piece. I can however, tell you how to tremendously reduce the likelihood of creating an unsuccessful one.
Each piece – the letter, the brochure and the response device – has a structure and the same structure is appropriate for all three. In fact, not only should the same structure be used but you should repeat your entire sales story in all three pieces. Not word-for-word of course but so that the reader could order after only reading the letter not the brochure, or the brochure not the letter, or the order form without reading either the letter or the brochure.
Now this is a real insider’s secret to making direct mail work so do not overlook the importance of this: You can’t control the customer’s behavior.
You can only prepare for as many different variances in customer behavior as possible. The piece of structure starts with an opening.
That opening might be the headline, the first sentence or two of the letter or what’s called a ‘Johnson Box,’ above the start of the copy.
Whatever the opening is it must at least do one of these three things:
Have you ever wondered why your ranking in Google dropped over night?
You busted your tail to get on page 1 of Google and all the sudden you wake up to find that you’ve slipped to page 2, 3, page 5 (or worse) over night?
I’ll go over 4 possible reasons why your Google ranking may have dropped and how you can prevent this from happening again (or never happening at all).
1. You no longer receive the fresh content bonus with Google.
When you when you update your site with an original piece of content (like the daily blog posts here on DanKenndy.com/blog), you get a boost to your SEO ranking with Google. After a few weeks that point system drops out of your SEO ranking score.
To keep the score high you need to keep adding new content on a regular basis.
2. The internal linking structure changed on your site.
Once you add content to your site, don’t change your page names. Many site owners often save their webpages only to later come back and change the page names…or even the entire page naming convention.
Example:
Changing a page name from “aboutus.html” and “contacts.html” to “about-us.html” and “contact-us.html”
Its critical to decide on the link structure you want before starting your website, and once you create a page name keep it. Don’t make things difficult for Google. Keep it clean and keep your URL’s consistent.
3. The link structure on sites that are linking to you changes.
Let’s say you write a hot piece of content, and as a result several bloggers link mention it in a post. So now you have links from several website’s home pages…very cool.
Now Google will crawl those sites and give you a boost for all those links. The problem becomes when the following month or even days later those bloggers and site owners change their front page and your listing is now deeper in their site or they take it out completely.
The next time the search engines crawl those sites your linking bonus is lowered and the value is not what it was when you started.
The only way to address this is to consistently focus on getting more and more sites linking to your’s.
4. Duplicate content.
Stealing other peoples content can actually make Google lower your ranking. If you use another person’s content you must reference the site you took it from. This will not help or hurt your site.
Here is something really jacked up – if someone steals your content, but does a better job promoting it, GOogle may think that your content is the spam one…not the guy that stole it from you. Sucks…but it can happen.
If it does happen to you, document everything with screen shots and keep the original content with the dates created. Try and content the offending site and the company hosting their website, send a seize and desist letter to both, and if that doesn’t work…contact Google’s legal and spam departments.
In yesterday’s post, I covered the direct mail ’sneak-up’ attack where you position your envelope to look as if someone you know is sending you mail.
I also mentioned that this approach is not full proof and can work against you if the offer inside is relatively ordinary.
That’s one of the reasons that many marketing experts prefer the billboard option for most small business to consumer offers and for most to consumer mail order offers.
A billboard envelope is usually filled with teaser copy about what’s inside. There is no attempt to disguise the purpose or nature of the mail. Billboard style envelopes we’re all familiar with are the Reader’s Digest and Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes mailings.
If you’re mailing to consumers on behalf of a locally based retail or service business the billboard type envelope maybe more appropriate for you also.
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I’d like to talk about my preferred form of direct mail which is the envelope mailing.
If you decide to use an envelope mailing you now have two other basic choices to make: the use what I call the billboard or the sneak up approach.
Many marketers favor the sneak up approach. In this approach there’s nothing on the outside of the envelope that identifies it as business mail. There is no company name in the return address.
There is either a person’s name or no name at all, just the address. There is no teaser copy, no headlines, words or phrases indicative of what’s inside.
Sometimes an odd size envelope rather than a standard number ten business envelope is used.
To carry this sneak attack to the ultimate extreme there are no labels used. The addressing is either done by hand or individually typed and postage stamps are used not postage meter impressions.
The theory behind this is sometimes called ‘A’ Pile, ‘B’ Pile; that most people sort their mail near a waste basket. A lot of so called junk mail obvious as ‘B’ Pile Mail gets thrown out unopened or after only a glance. The mail that gets ‘A Pile’ treatment often opened immediately and read looks like personal mail. It comes in envelopes. There’s a letter inside when you open it.
The object of the sneak attack is to insure ‘A Pile’ treatment. I’ve used versions of this sneak up approach many times with significant success. I believe in the validity of the theory. This approach is especially applicable to mailings to high level executives or business owners, mailings to doctors and lawyers, political fund-raising direct mail or charitable fund-raising direct mail.
An added twist to this technique is the use of a famous person’s name or an important person’s title as part of the return address on the envelope. I happen to be a contributor to several Republican and conservative political organizations so I wound up on every Republican fund-raising mailing list there is.
As a result, not only do I get envelopes return addressed from the Republican Senatorial Club but also from other Republican political figures. Even knowing that it is fund-raising mail I kind of feel compelled to open it.
I’ve received sneak up mail from an insurance firm return addressed from Art Linkletter at a street address. No company name, no clue that it was from an insurance company. Titles can also work. Not long ago I got an envelope return addressed from, “The Chairman of the Board, The Golden Nugget Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.”
Much more likely to be opened than an envelope just from The Golden Nugget and the envelope was typewriter addressed no stick on label. It had a postage stamp not a meter impression and the letter inside was on the chairman’s personal stationary individually addressed to me. I read it. Had it just been from The Golden Nugget and had a brochure inside instead of a letter I would have probably thrown it out unread.
Direct mail marketing formats can first be basically divided into two categories, envelope or self-mailer. A self-mailer can be anything from a post card to an 8 ½ x 11″ sheet tri-folded, stapled and mailed as is all the way up to a catalog.
These types of mailings are what most people are thinking of when they talk about junk mail. And that is one of the big disadvantages of using these types of mailings. Many people throw them out almost immediately with just a glance.
The biggest advantage of self-mailer formats, of course, is their low cost. An envelope mailing is anything sent in a sealed envelope.
You should or at least can use the lower cost self-mailers when…..
#1: You are mailing to a list of your own established, loyal customers who will certainly be interested in your message and will read it just because it came from you. A clothing store might use a post card, for example, to inform regular customers that the new autumn fashions have arrived or that a special sale is going to take place.
Or…
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In my last post I shared with you one of the biggest secrets in marketing that I know in order to increase response to your offers which of course is….multiple exposures.
The example I gave you was following up with the same list of prospects or customers several times using the same media. For example, instead of mailing once to the list, you mail three to six times.
Some other small business marketing strategies to get multiple exposures is through combination of media. If at the same time the prospect is receiving mail from you he also sees your ad in the newspaper, sees your billboards, gets a coupon in a Val-Pak, pretty soon he feels he knows you. There’s instant recognition of your name and business and again there will be results developed disproportionate to the amount of exposure.
Some small business direct marketers use other forms of media as reinforcement advertising. They really do not expect any response from billboards or radio commercials. That advertising is being used only to build recognition so that when a prospect gets some type of direct contact he mentally says, “Oh yes. I know you.” It is therefore, much more receptive to the offer.
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