Social media marketing and the mad electrician.

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social media marketerSocial media is not something you just add on to your existing marketing plan.

It won’t work if you say, “Hey, last quarter we tried coupons, this month let’s try social media.” It’s not an advertising medium.

If you want social media to really work, you have to pull apart your whole marketing plan, and your company culture, and rebuild everything with “social” at its heart.

I have worked with a couple of different companies over the last little while, both of them in the B2C space, both of them in their first year of business. But they have had very different levels of success with social media.

The first company built its company and its marketing plan along traditional lines. Old school marketing. And then they decided to give social media a try. They just bolted it on.

It didn’t work.

The second company was more of a “native” web business. Its founders were younger and had grown up with the web. This business had “social” at its core. Everything – from sales, to customer service, and to marketing – revolved around social media. In fact, even the way people communicated within the company took place on a social platform.

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Don’t make money for Facebook. Make it for yourself.

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Mark Zuckerberg has enough moneyHow much time in total have you spent writing posts and updates for your social media accounts? Dozens of hours? Hundreds even?

Do you create updates for Facebook? Posts for Google+? Videos for YouTube? Tweets for Twitter?

If you do, you’re a content creator.

And the content you create is making the owners of these social media sites rich. Massively rich.

Unless you have a particular passion for making other people rich, allow me to suggest an alternative.

Instead of investing your time and passion in writing content for social media sites, invest it in writing content for a website of your own.

No, I’m not suggesting you abandon social media.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is to show you what I do myself.

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The fastest way to master the craft of writing for the web is to create and write your own website.

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My money making website about coffeeIt’s hard to track all the different ways in which I have built up my knowledge and expertise in writing for the web.

I guess it started when I wrote and published my first website back in 1996.

When I began writing for the web full time in 1998, I was soaking up new knowledge from all kinds of different sources. I would read articles, buy books and listen carefully to fellow presenters at industry conferences.

And, of course, I learned a great deal from every new client project I took on.

But nothing compares, or even comes close to the knowledge I have gained from writing and publishing my own hobby website, CoffeeDetective.com.

Yes, it’s a hobby. I work on the site just in the evening and at weekends. Sometimes.

And before I get into the part about learning, let me just mention that the site has also become a significant source of income for me and my family. Since I began writing it in 2007, this hobby-site has earned me over $200,000 in passive income.

Now let’s look at how my coffee site has helped me learn so much about writing for the web.

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The 3rd element that’s missing from your online sales page.

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Online copy structureAn increase of just one or two percent in the conversation rate on a product sales page can translate into a lot of extra cash in a company’s bank account.

So how can you set about adding those extra percentage points?

First, you have to catch your client’s attention – or your boss’s attention if you work in-house – and persuade him or her that it’s worth investing the time in a rewrite or edit.

Next, you have to pay attention to the 3 elements that will contribute the most to a page that converts better. The third of these is, I think, the hardest and the least understood. But the first two are essential too. So let’s go through them one by one.

The 1st Element: Get the structure right

Any successful sales process has a structure. This is true whether you are selling face-to-face or writing a sales letter or an online sales page. Some people might argue about this, and say that you should just hang loose and sell as if you weren’t selling at all. But they are wrong. They are mistaking lack of apparent structure for the lack of an underlying structure.

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It turns out I have been a Growth Hacker since 1979.

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growth hacking

First, what is “growth hacking”?

Growth hacking is a term and practice beloved of Silicon Valley startups. It’s anti-traditional marketing. Some of its advocates go so far as to suggest that marketing ideas should come from the engineers, and not from anyone trained in marketing.

There are numerous definitions out there, but for the sake of brevity, here is how John Elman describes growth hacking, “This concept of “growth hacking” is a recognition that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.”

Wanting to learn more, I have just finished reading an excellent book by Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising.

It’s a reasonably short book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In large part because I am a fan of any smart thinker who beats up on the old school of marketers. Those are the marketers who believe they can succeed by throwing bucket loads of money at campaigns designed to persuade people to buy stuff they probably don’t want anyway.

You should read it. It’s a smart book.

However…

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3 First sentences to avoid when writing a prospecting email. (And 2 that work better.)

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Prospecting emailsIf your freelance copywriting or consulting business has got to the point where all your new work comes in through referrals, good for you.

But most of us need to do some prospecting for new clients, in the form of outbound marketing. And outbound marketing will typically begin with an email or physical letter, sent to your prospects at work.

Some prospecting letters work pretty well, but many of them bomb. And when they fail, the cause can often be found in the first sentence of text below the salutation.

I’m going to share 3 examples of first sentences that really don’t work very well, and tell you why. Followed by a couple of examples that might help you achieve better results.

Example 1: I see that your company has a Facebook page, but that you’re not updating it regularly.

On the face of it, this line seems reasonable. You have gone to the trouble of checking out the prospect’s Facebook page, and you have found a weakness that should be addressed.

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