Marketing tips, marketing help and advice

Sorry to disturb you

Image: Nick Morrison.

I received a marketing email earlier, which contained a dangerous error. This error will have dramatically reduced its open rate. Here’s what happened, so you can avoid it from happening to you.

It started with the following 4 words: “Sorry to disturb you”.

There’s a lot of information packed into those 4 words. Enough for the vast majority of those who received it, to form an opinion on the sender.

The sender knew what they were doing was wrong, which is why they opened with an apology.
The sender also knew that their email was a disturbance. An unrequested interruption from someone I’ve never heard of.
Knowing all this, they still decided to send it anyway.

Like others who received that email, I stopped reading after the opening sentence. After all, a stranger had interrupted us, without our consent, to tell us that what we were about to read is just spam. It’s an instant delete.

What if the email had been valuable?

That email may have contained a useful message. It might have offered an outstanding deal. It could have provided details of a wonderful opportunity. But their email let them down. So no one will know. The list they used. The copy they used and the tone of their opening line destroyed their email campaign.

Oblivious to this, the sender will be wondering why they received no positive response. Especially if they genuinely had something valuable to share. They’ll perhaps be pondering whether they need to lower their prices, or if email marketing is a waste of time, or if their great offer isn’t actually great.

If we consider this to be merely an example of ineffective email marketing, we totally miss the point!

It’s way, way bigger than that.

This example provides us with a powerful insight of how easy it is, for a business owner to offer an amazing product or service, only for ineffective marketing to let them down. It’s the difference between being inundated with enquiries from eager prospective clients, or being greeted by crickets.

Google’s thin content problem

Written by Jim Connolly

google thin content, thin content seo

Image: Yannick Pulver.

Business owners and marketing professionals have lots of things in common.

Here’s one of them.

Your time and your focus are of great importance. So you need access to accurate, valuable, to-the-point information.

Google is determined to ensure you don’t find it.

How?

By making to-the-point information, invisible.

It’s a problem Google has created, by not indexing something they call thin content. According to Google’s guidelines, a key element of thin content is anything that doesn’t use enough words. SEO experts think it’s a minimum of around 500 words. But a few thousand words is much better. In short, Google rewards and strongly encourages over-long content.

Even that 500 word minimum excludes about 90% of my posts from Google search. That’s okay. I optimize for people first, not Google / Alphabet.This post is under 250 words, including the title.

Here’s how many of my fellow professionals locate the best answers, fast.

Think of the experts whose work you know and trust. Find their sites. Then bookmark them. Ensure they share information there, as some expert sites are just stores. And like me, you already own their products.

Then, whenever you need trusted information, which isn’t diluted with the anti thin content fluff that Google requires, use the search function on your expert sites to get your answers.

By bookmarking the leading experts, two things happen.

1. You get information you can trust.

2. You get that information, without the confusion caused by rambling content.

Win, win.

Content marketing: It’s all about pressing the publish button

Written by Jim Connolly

Image: Danielle MacInnes.

Hannah just emailed me with a question. She wants to know what’s the secret to publishing content marketing more frequently. Here’s my reply.

There are lots of reasons for not publishing more of our ideas, to more people, more often.

I just can’t think of anything useful to say right now.
Maybe no one will bother reading it.
I know what I want to say, but I can’t figure out how I want to say it.
This needs to be really, really good and I’m not sure I can write something of that quality today.
I don’t have enough time.

Those are totally valid reasons. I know because I’ve experienced all of them more than once over the years. However, I don’t think they address the primary reason why so few people, regularly create and publish their own content marketing.

In my experience, as someone who has mentored hundreds of people on content creation and delivery, the main barrier is pressing the publish button. Moreover, their concern regarding the response they might face, after publication. The fallout, criticism and possible confrontation.

It’s certainly true that if we choose to publish nothing, we don’t need to worry about unleashing a wall of potentially hostile responses.

It’s also true that we miss out on all the opportunities that could come our way, if we were to press publish and share our ideas or observations.

But tragically, by failing to press the publish button regularly, we never learn how other people manage to publish regularly.

Here’s the thing. By repeatedly pressing the publish button, we become perfectly, totally comfortable, publishing our original content whenever we have something useful to share.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

My first blog post took several days to write, edit, re-edit, format, re-edit… then publish.
This post was written on my phone and published on WordPress in around 15-20 minutes.

What was the difference between the two posts?

The experience I gained, from pressing the publish button several thousand times.

Exposed: The most expensive mistake in marketing

Written by Jim Connolly

Image: Charles Deluvio.

The road ahead is closed. Soon, a line of traffic gathers…

One driver does a U-turn, and confidently heads off at speed in the opposite direction, before turning down an adjacent street. Seeing how assured this driver looks, other drivers follow him, then other drivers follow them. The initial driver has no idea where they’re going. And now they’re all lost, wasting their time and running out of fuel!

Here’s why I’m telling you this. Following the marketing tactics of your competitors has the exact same effect.

The most expensive mistake in marketing

You’ve no idea if the marketing your competitors use is working or if they’re running out of time and money. Following them is a very risky bet. And the odds are massively against you.

Allow me to explain.

Here’s just one extremely common example of how the odds are stacked against you. It comes from the world of advertising.

Advertising providers give ads away to companies, knowing that when a company’s competitors see their advertisement, they’re also likely to advertise. These ads are simply bait, to hook others in your industry.

Google and Facebook offer free advertising coupons all the time, knowing as soon as you use them, they win. They’ve done the numbers. They know a hefty subset of competitors will assume, the ads MUST work, if (whoever) is advertising there.

And yes, this follow-the-follower approach applies to every area of marketing, not just advertising.

If you’re not attracting enough new clients or making enough sales, stop following the followers. In short, quit dabbling. With so much uncertainty about the future, your prospective customers are thinking longer and thinking harder about spending their budgets than ever before. They require a lot more motivating than they used to. As I mentioned yesterday, they’re not going to make a decision unless your marketing fully reassures them.

In today’s economy, your marketing needs to be meaningfully different. And it can’t be meaningfully different if it’s just like your competitors.

Google indexing scraped content from my blog: Part 2

Written by Jim Connolly

Image: Mitchell Luo

My recent problem with stolen content seems, for now, to have stopped. No, Google hasn’t stopped the crooks from scraping my blog, or the dozens of other sites these people attack daily. Google hasn’t even responded to my request for help. And the scraper’s sites are still packed with freshly stolen work.

Just not mine. For now, at least.

In case you missed the previous post, the reason these particular scrapers are such a problem, is they’re able to steal my work, AND get it submitted for indexing by Google in seconds.

Their scraped copy of my work was then selected by Google as canonical (the original version). My original work was regarded as a copy and wasn’t indexed. This means it can’t appear in Google Search Results.

Scraping my content by RSS feed

It’s a bit drastic, but I’ve had to remove my RSS feed, which the criminals use to steal my copyright protected posts, publish them on their sites and stuff them with ads (yes, Google Ads).

There’s a big downside though. Without an RSS feed, there’s no easy way for people to subscribe to this blog via feed reading services like Flipboard or Apple News.

I tried several less severe alternatives, but these people use very sophisticated software, which bypassed all the solutions the various experts I spoke with were able to suggest.

Google indexing scraped content is a huge issue, which very few victims (original content producers) are even aware of. They certainly see that they get way less organic search traffic from Google.

But most will have no idea why. They won’t know that none of the content they’ve written (since they were scraped using this ultra effective scraping software) can appear on Google Search.

Content scraping is easy money

Google pretty much owns search. So there’s little or no motivation on their part to finally start taking content scraping seriously. The problem has been here for over a decade.

Yes, Google asks people not to scrape sites. But Google do very, very little to proactively stop ranking the stolen work. The processes involved in reporting stolen / scraped content is, at best, arduous; especially when there’s a lot of content to report. And even if successful, Google will not ban the scraping site. You have to keep on filling in forms… which is why many victims simply give up.

Whilst there’s little motivation for content producers to keep on reporting the criminals, the content thieves have huge motivation to carry on. They can set up a site, pack it with scraped content and Google Ads, and literally make money automatically. They don’t have to do anything once it’s set up, other than watch the advertising revenue flow into their bank accounts. Easy money is an understatement.

Make switching to you easy and attract new clients like a magnet

Written by Jim Connolly

Image: Austin Distel.

I’m going to share a powerful marketing tip with you today. It’s something the vast majority of your competitors either won’t be doing correctly… or won’t be doing at all.

It starts with this fundamental truth.

People, including your prospective clients, almost universally HATE the hassle associated with switching providers.

Think about it.

I’m willing to guess that you and I probably have at least one current provider, who isn’t ideal. Their charges may have increased, with no meaningful increase in the value we get from them. Maybe they’re slow to respond when we contact them. Perhaps they’re not as interested in dealing with our problems, as they used to be. And we’re pretty darn sure that there are better providers out there.

So, why do we stay with an under performing provider?

We stay, for the same reason your prospective clients have stayed with their current provider.

It’s simply this.

Switching providers is risky

People are hardwired to intentionally avoid risk. So, because switching to a new provider feels risky, we tend to avoid it.

Yes, YOU know there’s no risk whatsoever in switching to you from their current provider. You know that you’ll look after them better than they could dream of, because you’re capable, reliable, trustworthy and honest.

But THEY don’t know that!

What they do know, is that their previous provider let them down. Sometimes badly. It’s no wonder that having endured months, maybe years of a poor quality service, they’re now really cautious.

What’s the answer?

Make switching stress free and easy

The proven solution to this problem, is to make it as easy as possible for them to switch to you. This requires a two pronged approach.

1. Showcase your trust assets.
Make it as easy as possible for prospective clients to see for themselves, why they should trust you. You do this using what I call your trust assets; things that help establish you as a safe, low-risk option for them.

Your trust assets might include providing them with a track record of your success and achievements (here’s an example from my own list that may help you). You can also highlight the promises and guarantees you offer. And also share some testimonials from extremely happy clients, as well as any relevant awards you have. If you’ve been in your current line of business for a long time, don’t keep it a secret… include that, too.

2. Make switching to you as simple as possible.
This is extremely important. Even after trust has been established, the stress and challenges involved in switching providers can be enough to put people off.

Some providers use a version of the lock in effect / vendor lock in, where they deliberately make moving from them as hard as they can, for their clients. This is a huge problem in some industries, but less of a problem in others.

Regardless, you need to make the switch to you as frictionless, uncomplicated and stress-free as possible.

The best providers have client transition people in place, who manage the whole process. They stay in close contact with the new client to answer questions, overcome issues with the former provider and offer all the help they can. I very strongly advise you to do the same.

Show them how easy it is to switch to you

Once you’ve addressed those two parts of the switching process, it’s really important to let your prospective clients know. It needs to feature very prominently in your marketing, especially if you’re in an industry that’s known for making it hard to switch. It needs to be a key point in your conversations with prospective clients, and with introducers (people who recommend your services to their contacts and clients).

Equipped with visible trust assets and an equally visible strategy to make switching to you an absolute breeze, you become a much more attractive choice for prospective clients.

You become the natural choice. The easy choice. And for many, you become the only choice.